The math, section all looks like it is all secondary school standard
Which is not surprising, since this is set at a level suitable for talented secondary school leavers.
The history is all pretty much highlights of roman/greek wars so a bit of swatting with the right 2 books would get you up to speed pretty quickly on those.
Also the proofs and methods to a first year Cambridge mathematics tripos paper are trivial to memorise if you know in advance which proofs and methods are going to come up. There'll be no special tests of your talent at this level.
The difficulty is that you don't know in advance.
If "ancient wargames/history" has been your special interest for the past few decades then I'd expect you to do better than average on the history paper - wouldn't you? But did you find you actually knew the answers for the factoids and could write a good essay for the essay-type questions? Consider yourself as challenging the elite of the country, not just being able to offer some semblance of an answer.
I think your argument is that Europe and its babies are too Eurocentric;-). This is possibly true and was inevitable before globalisation, although a degree of Eurocentricity is not necessarily inappropriate: if you grow up in Spain, say, you'll get a lot more understanding of your surroundings (physical, political, cultural, etc.) through knowledge of Greece and Rome than you will from learning Japanese language and history. There is only so much time to learn in sufficient depth and there are strong arguments for putting an emphasis on understanding where you are now before you understand somewhere half way across the world. As for some ideal of equal understanding of "all" known cultures by some point in one's adult life:
(i) it won't actually be "all" but inevitably be a subset comprising whatever's considered fashionable/popular/ideologically sound/rich - for example, so many geeks are interested in Japan, Arab culture has suddenly become popular at the expense of Russia since US imperialism^Wpolitical interest has shifted, and still everyone pays way too little attention to African culture;
(ii) the majority of people don't plan to bounce around the world and there's not much evidence that creation of a pan-cultural individual is possible.
As for the "Japanese for anime fans", I was distinguishing between the sort of education one gets in a good Latin class - a combination of language, literature and history - and the sort one tends to get in a modern language class. One could certainly study "classical Japan and Japanese" analogously to Latin or ancient Greek studies, but this is rarely what people have actually done when they talk of doing something "instead of" Latin or ancient Greek.
But there's nothing whatever wrong with learning more modern foreign languages in addition to learning the basis for one's own or another culture. My oddball choice at school happened to be Russian. It is no coincidence that I have always found Russian history and culture interesting, but learning the language did less to explain for me where I am now than did learning about Rome or Greece.
Sometimes you don't need to be a doctor to diagnose someone's condition. You're a fucking psychopath.
Only if the majority of cultures throughout history have been comprised mainly of psychopaths. Acceptance of a degree of infant mortality and understanding the value of elders have been the norm in most societies.
Today, for whatever reason, we draw a great thick line at birth or conception (depending on your religion) and then another great thick line around the teenage years, with people between those two lines being revered. Anything outside is regarded as either mate, competition, tool for exploitation, or garbage.
If no one in the world were prepared to accept responsibility for new life, the human race would be dead in less than a hundred years, genius.
You may need to re-read my post. I stated that society has a responsibility for the health of every life at all ages. My concern is that we are currently heavily skewed toward assisting the infant.
I recall a few of your posts, tehcyder. You're just not very bright. I feel I have to say this because people such as yourself can still be productive if they just take the extra time to listen and learn. Maybe someone just needs to tell you that.
While we're at it, let's rename "copy right" to "copy censorship". After all, the effect of copyright is actually to stop you expressing yourself in a substantially similar manner to someone else.
And before anyone at all responds with "people won't create if you take away the incentive!" - bullshit. The world has enough people who will create out of love for their art. If you don't come under this category, step aside for those who do - we don't need you, thanks!
The privileged group of more than 300 companies under CERT Australia's wing is expanding, but it does not plan to offer the secretive information more broadly.
This is corporate welfare at its finest: make the people pay to give a competitive advantage to particular companies.
When will this primitive targets-based, public-private-partnership experiment born somewhere in the '80s finally collapse? When will parties and their representation in government reflect the people again? Whether left or right, authoritarian or socially liberal, your view is no longer represented unless you've paid for it.
If you really want to make a difference, collect funds and lobby.
Then, for once, you'll be on the initiating side of laws in your favour, rather than defending against laws which are aimed only for corporate interests. Because the people always lose when a system is designed, Wikipedia-style, such that the representatives of interests with the most influence and most time/money to waste get the lasting say.
Either that or reform the system of democracy (or lack of democracy) in the EU so it is either more direct or more representative. In particular, no new laws without a democratic drafting process - so unless the people want an extension of copyright length, the idea is not even entertained.
"Writing to your MEP" = closing barn door too late: the guy already has his constituents' support, and letters from even a significant minority of whingers won't change that.
Actually, the people who annoyed me the most were the ones who'd go "oh, it was really difficult, I think I might have barely passed" and ended up getting 100% anyway. Humble motherfuckers.
My Latin teacher, a dour Scot, used to call this "English modesty": you put yourself down in order to elicit praise (at your humility) and support (because someone who says they're bad must need uplifting, right?). I'm not sure it's completely accurate: it's possible that people who do well can be geniunely very anxious and obsess over small errors on an otherwise very good performance, distorting their self-perception. But it's still an inconsiderate defence mechanism designed to draw attention to your own abilities. And the effect is the same as running around saying you found a test really easy: if others take your words at face value, it can create a wrong impression in their minds and may harm their confidence.
Predictably, half the comments here reply, "Oh, wow, this test is easy except the Latin/Greek because that's not important!"
Well, bullshit on all counts.
(1) The purpose of learning Latin and ancient Greek is not to enable you to speak Latin and ancient Greek. They've already been dead languages for millennia and they were arguably even more dead then (Greece being even less relevant). It's an exercise in the study of language and of foundations of European culture and literature. You don't get the same experience by learning "Japanese for anime fans".
Anyway, I "aced" Latin at school - that sort of thing was something I enjoyed and came reasonably naturally. Many years later, I have forgotten enough of it that I could not do a good job of these questions. The translations into Latin would today leave me hopeless without a dictionary. What is more, these aren't trivial Latin beginner questions.
(2) History/geography - at least some people are admitting that they don't know some of these, though I see a lot of "oh about half". Really? Did you actually sit down with that sheet and no references and write detailed geographical and historical answers? Did you then go one by one checking at the end that they were all correct? Or did you just think "oh yeah I've heard of that before" and sneak in a "check" to Wikipedia, confirming knowledge you didn't really have to mind?
The subject of my masters thesis was the history of an area of mathematics; background reading required me to be familiar with specific areas of classical Greek and Roman history. I enjoyed History at high school, though none of it was classical. Latin class included a certain amount of Roman history surrounding Pliny the Younger and Virgil, with an earlier school covering the historical context of the Odyssey and the Iliad. And yet I don't think I could do justice to any of the essay-type questions. "Pericles - the Man and his Policy" - really? Are even a significant minority claiming they even know more than a sentence or two about Pericles?
(3) The maths section. Oh, what a surprise, everyone is claiming that the maths section is trivial. Well, bullshit again. I have a postgrad mathematical education and, yes, I can probably answer these questions. But I would have to think about the plane geometry proofs (which, it is likely, the candidate would be expected to have simply memorised for this test) - I can't recite all of them off the top of my head and I bet I'd stumble on some details for some of them if I were to actually write the answers all out rather than just wave my hand over the paper dismissively and say "this is easy".
What is more, you annoying geeks, there were no electronic calculators in the mid-19th century. You know what this means? It means that half the challenge is doing the arithmetic quickly and without mistakes. And, whether by reading original Leibniz or the speling errors on/., there is one reassuring thing I have come to know (I am reassured because I do it myself and thought I was the only one): numerate geeky types make lots of trivial mistakes. A good mathematician - perhaps the sort who is intuitively familiar with geometry - might make a bad doctor or accountant, i.e. may fail in a profession where speed and accuracy with numbers is important.
Whenever I visit Slashdot and there's a topic where people have the chance to put their knowledge to the test, I always see a huge number of people claiming that they did wonderfully at the test. And yet, in real life, hardly anyone ever performs at such superheroic levels, whether dumb, average or intelligent. This isn't because/. isn't full of super-geniuses - even though it isn't - it's because the sheer amount of information accessible in the world today means that everyone necessarily specialises a great deal. No particular random test which has not been prepared for is likely to fit the knowledge of a random sample of even fairly bright individuals.
You DO realize that infants are, technically, human beings, right?
Only by arbitrary line-drawing is a Homo sapiens 10 months after conception more "human being" than the same 8 months after conception. And each will die without the support of a responsible older human. So, while you may respond with a religious argument that life is supremely important at conception and then gradually becomes less so as innocence is lost, recognise that there are different ways of identifying the needs of man.
Seems to me that "ignoring infant death" or "putting less [...] value" on them would sort of be at odds with the goal of developing "more love for man in general," then, wouldn't it?
The context "[...]" you conveniently initially read "emotionally charged". This means we don't get overtaken by think-of-the-sweet-baby mentality, ploughing inordinate effort into the welfare of the infant as if it is more deserving than existing humans.
Reducing infant mortality is often low-hanging fruit - proper nutrition, proper immunizations, proper sanitation, etc make for dramatic reductions in mortality rates.
Indeed. These policies aren't emotionally charged pandering to infant needs - they're rational constituents of a developed society, helping everyone and pretty much mastered in developed countries. (Though we're reversing the trend of good nutrition thanks to once again pandering to emotionally charged notions of freedom for the child - which comes down to freedom of the businessman to exploit the child and feed him crap.)
Curing cancer? Curing heart disease? Curing strokes? Pretty fucking complex, unless you've got a miracle cure in your back pocket that you haven't told us about.
Well, no - or straw man, rather. Preventing many cancers or detecting+treating them in early stages is technically fairly easy but requires channeling of resources. Similarly, the risk factors for early heart disease are well-known and, again, education and promoting a fit society will go a long way. To a more limited extent, same for strokes.
But we don't do this because, again, bullshit about "freedom" and "personal responsibility" prevails, weasel words in this context for the right for others to exploit your weaknesses in the short term at the expense of the welfare of man in the long term. It's not society's job to help you keep healthy, is it? Yes. Yes it is. Not from conception to the end of childhood (with an emphasis on infancy), but from conception to the grave.
Stop telling other people how to feel. I, for example, feel very little for infants. And I'm more bothered when I've forgotten to back up some piece of code I was working on for a month than the dozens of infants who die needlessly every minute.
"Oh, but its not your infant!" I hear you cry. Correct. I would never have a child. I would never want a child. I would decide to give up an infant/foetus/whatever in the same moment that, for whatever reason, I became somehow responsible for one.
If you ignore infant death, the so called remarkable progress of technology/capitalism/welfare (delete as inappropriate) has actually improved life expectancy not nearly as much as touted over the past couple of millennia. If we began, as a society, to put less emotionally charged value on the the sweet, innocent infant, and developed more love for man in general, perhaps we'd become far more productive, progressive, kind, etc.
1. Wozniak is a damn smart guy and knows what Jobs is about;
2. Wozniak also knew this when he worked for Jobs;
3. Wozniak continued and continues knowing this as his Apple wages/shares provide him a tidy sum.
It's easy to play the respected but impotent preacher. Especially useful when you are gain from what you preach against. Sorta like reading one of the tabloids go on a rant about exploitation of young girls and foreigners while the owner of the newspaper group publishes porn and employs lots of low wage immigrants.
It's great to control one side of the argument. It's better to control both.
according to the bible, he can not. In timoohy it is stated the god will not deceive people.
A test is not a deception any more than a maze incorporating at least one dead end or overly long route is a deception - even if those who choose the wrong routes want to claim it so. In God terms: reveal the truth to those who seek it; deceive those who seek deception. There are discussions on the topic of your claim all over the interweb - here's an example.
Lots of things on the earth are deceptive: for a straight scientific example, look at Newtonian mechanics. It's such an alluring simplification of what actually seems to happen on comparatively hard-to-analyse large and small scales. Surely God was deceiving Newton and his ilk, right? No, but it's sure good that we didn't engage in hubris and assume we had a full understanding - otherwise we may not have discovered that our understanding was approximate and incomplete. Another test, if you like.
I love how believer don't even know their own theology.
"Believer"? Nope, don't believe I claimed such. The only thing I believe is that most anti-religious dilettantes (i) make an extremely shallow and out-of-context interpretation of some passage in some text; (ii) make sweeping conclusions based on their interpretation.
Do you know why I can cite Euclid? because what he said and showed is provable, and experiments have shown his claims to be correct.
No. Study has shown that Euclid is full of missing assumptions and some bullshit circular definitions right from the start of Book I. But it doesn't matter - we can use our further understanding of the work's context and discovery of geometry in general to fill in the gaps and see in which situations and under which interpretations his theorems and demonstrations do and do not apply (and remain consistent). The same is true for a great deal of religious writing.
I chose Euclid deliberately because, if you're not already raising your arms and crying "no, that doesn't necessarily follow" by the first half dozen theorems, you're not following closely enough. Yet it took around two millennia to create a foundation which does a good job of both explaining and filling in the gaps, and a good thousand years [as far as extant evidence reveals] before people even started noticing some problem.
The believers in the Bible on the other hand change the rules every time someone show something that does not hold up to any testing or experimentation.
The religious side never tests God, so within a sentence of your assertion otherwise you've illustrated that each side does not play by the same rules.
The problem is people who are still prepared to travel to the USA. You are the ones making this acceptable. You are the ones happy to bring your productivity and your coin into a country which should be ostracised until it stops treating visitors as criminals and returns to something resembling reasonable.
I gave up my business interests in the US following their slow bastardisation of the notion of rights after 2001. I made a personal loss, but I feel all the more human for it. And it serves its purpose. After all, no empire and no regime lasts forever - it will only be a matter of time before things become unbearable and people start standing up en masse. We must start making our stand one by one.
No part of a story about the world being created some 6 thousand years ago by a magical sky wizard adds up to dinosaurs that were around millions and billions of years ago.
Genesis does not say that the world was created 6 thousand years ago - this is just one interpretation. Even if it was a universally accepted interpretation, rather than one refuted by most Christian denominations but erected frequently as a straw man against Christianity, it does not counter the argument that God could plant anything anywhere to test you. Annoying, isn't it? Don't fight it. Neither shall win because each side is playing by different rules.
Let's get to actual factual debate, where people stop citing a thousands of year old book as fact,
Must stop citing Euclid;-).
and use it as an excuse to not follow law.
Erm, I don't get this one...? Are you implying that law is something we should universally follow unless we have a good excuse (aside from "because we don't want to get caught")? That's a very dogmatic view.
Theology is about study of religion, that doesn't mean its' accepted.
Absolutely correct.
Usually studying it enough shows you that religion is almost entirely bullshit.
I haven't found this. Established religions are remarkably self-consistent and some very clever people over the millennia have explored and added to them. But that just shows the skill of man. Of course, by "bullshit" you probably mean "doesn't satisfy my simplistic understanding" - people love finding contradictions in religious tracts which betray nothing but their own misreading, mistranslating or decontextualising.
I could pick up any two scientific texts and look at them sentence by sentence, pointing out "it said A there but it says B here!" I recall writing a thesis on the history of geometry which involved a lot of this - with the aim of understanding that we weren't seeing contradictions at all, rather different contexts employing different levels of abstraction or assumption.
Geeks so much enjoy pointing out errors which aren't really errors, except by a literalist interpretation in which every statement is wrong because every statement involves some level of assumption and simplification.
You don't see any part of the bible covering the part where christians were murdering those who refused to convert, now do ya? Considering it's happened what, 2, 3 times in history?
You see a lot of the OT covering that sort of ground. What about it?
spends the entire day showing how the fossil record contradicts the silly Genesis story in the Bible
The fossil record does no such thing, and pseudo-scientists waste a lot of time tilting at windmills.
The Genesis story is a lot of things, but scientific theory it is not. It is of no merit to try to disprove it by scientific method.
Let it have its place in the discipline of Theology. I went to a religious school and this is where it was studied. This, or in a more general cultural historical discipline, is where it belongs.
There are so many important things in the world which are being sidelined by astroturfed spats. Once bread and circuses were sufficient. Now the population is moderately educated, so we need bread, circuses and engineered pointless debate (see also: abortion, tea party, gun control).
I don't know about your internet, but mine involves alternative routes to a particular physical location. Not just because that's how the Internet works, but because there are competing providers. And there are all sorts of things which delay, from WiFi to pipe congestion to intentional prioritisation to the OS having something more interesting to do.
Although I should have stopped reading at "time it takes to send a data packet to the target" - really? How does one measure precisely this?
Which is arguably still irrational because an organisation's mission rarely aligns with the short term profit goals of employees/management. Optimum behaviour would be to strip the company and sell off its assets, or as close as possible to that as constraints will allow.
(Hence, again, many recent examples of corporate and public sector plundering.)
Bonus culture has completely ruined service provision in local and national government in England over the past decade. Unfortunately, we are severely lacking an ideology which recognises what you state.
Most people think they get better deals from friends. Sometimes they are right, often they're the same and sometimes they're worse. In most cases, though, people feel better going to someone they know. That is not a nefarious scheme, it's human nature.
It's understandable if a Google employee himself chooses to use Google's social networking crap because he believes that he'll get more money for doing so. But ultimately the success must depend on persuading others outside the company - and it's absolutely nefarious if your "friend" is this Google employee who is taking advantage of your trust and who stands to benefit financially when you follow his advice/example. The ethics of this sort of behaviour has been debated so much in terms of the harm of MLM and cult membership that, if you genuinely are ignorant,... well, you know how to use Google.
I don't know that this is what Page expects employees to do, but this sort of geek-grass-roots-marketing thing works approximately once - with an "innocent" start-up when the competition is wanting and people are yearning for an alternative, as with the original and still fairly good Google search engine proper. After that you just look like Microsoft with its, "Wow, it was Vista all along - and there was me thinking Vista was a failure!" ads.
Car analogy effort notwithstanding, this is nothing whatever to do with choosing Peugeot because you're on good terms with a Peugeot dealer. A good business relationship which may come from a good underlying personal relationship, while often risky, is not proselytism.
As far as I can tell, this is tying the bonuses of everyone at Google to the efforts of the few people at Google involved in social media crap - in turn coming down to the efforts of the few managers who actually want to push the social media crap. It's the ultimate PHB power trip: you are so insistent that a repeatedly-failing idea is good, while at the same time wanting to acknowledge none of evidence or the responsibility that it isn't, so you declare that everyone else has a stake in it. Then it's everyone's fault: after all, they had financial incentive to succeed - which, as everyone knows, is the reason everyone wants to do anything - so the only reason the plan failed must be because all 24k employees just weren't trying hard enough.
Page (Gates) is an intelligent egomaniac who happened to be in the right place at the right time, carried to success by Schmidt (Ballmer) and a few venture capitalist titans. Now add cowardly to his list of properties.
Slashdot Mirror
The math, section all looks like it is all secondary school standard
Which is not surprising, since this is set at a level suitable for talented secondary school leavers.
The history is all pretty much highlights of roman/greek wars so a bit of swatting with the right 2 books would get you up to speed pretty quickly on those.
Also the proofs and methods to a first year Cambridge mathematics tripos paper are trivial to memorise if you know in advance which proofs and methods are going to come up. There'll be no special tests of your talent at this level.
The difficulty is that you don't know in advance.
If "ancient wargames/history" has been your special interest for the past few decades then I'd expect you to do better than average on the history paper - wouldn't you? But did you find you actually knew the answers for the factoids and could write a good essay for the essay-type questions? Consider yourself as challenging the elite of the country, not just being able to offer some semblance of an answer.
I think your argument is that Europe and its babies are too Eurocentric ;-). This is possibly true and was inevitable before globalisation, although a degree of Eurocentricity is not necessarily inappropriate: if you grow up in Spain, say, you'll get a lot more understanding of your surroundings (physical, political, cultural, etc.) through knowledge of Greece and Rome than you will from learning Japanese language and history. There is only so much time to learn in sufficient depth and there are strong arguments for putting an emphasis on understanding where you are now before you understand somewhere half way across the world. As for some ideal of equal understanding of "all" known cultures by some point in one's adult life:
(i) it won't actually be "all" but inevitably be a subset comprising whatever's considered fashionable/popular/ideologically sound/rich - for example, so many geeks are interested in Japan, Arab culture has suddenly become popular at the expense of Russia since US imperialism^Wpolitical interest has shifted, and still everyone pays way too little attention to African culture;
(ii) the majority of people don't plan to bounce around the world and there's not much evidence that creation of a pan-cultural individual is possible.
As for the "Japanese for anime fans", I was distinguishing between the sort of education one gets in a good Latin class - a combination of language, literature and history - and the sort one tends to get in a modern language class. One could certainly study "classical Japan and Japanese" analogously to Latin or ancient Greek studies, but this is rarely what people have actually done when they talk of doing something "instead of" Latin or ancient Greek.
But there's nothing whatever wrong with learning more modern foreign languages in addition to learning the basis for one's own or another culture. My oddball choice at school happened to be Russian. It is no coincidence that I have always found Russian history and culture interesting, but learning the language did less to explain for me where I am now than did learning about Rome or Greece.
And here's a post which may or may not receive a takedown notice from Apple. Remove the extra spaces inserted to evade the lameness filter.
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Sometimes you don't need to be a doctor to diagnose someone's condition. You're a fucking psychopath.
Only if the majority of cultures throughout history have been comprised mainly of psychopaths. Acceptance of a degree of infant mortality and understanding the value of elders have been the norm in most societies.
Today, for whatever reason, we draw a great thick line at birth or conception (depending on your religion) and then another great thick line around the teenage years, with people between those two lines being revered. Anything outside is regarded as either mate, competition, tool for exploitation, or garbage.
If no one in the world were prepared to accept responsibility for new life, the human race would be dead in less than a hundred years, genius.
You may need to re-read my post. I stated that society has a responsibility for the health of every life at all ages. My concern is that we are currently heavily skewed toward assisting the infant.
I recall a few of your posts, tehcyder. You're just not very bright. I feel I have to say this because people such as yourself can still be productive if they just take the extra time to listen and learn. Maybe someone just needs to tell you that.
While we're at it, let's rename "copy right" to "copy censorship". After all, the effect of copyright is actually to stop you expressing yourself in a substantially similar manner to someone else.
And before anyone at all responds with "people won't create if you take away the incentive!" - bullshit. The world has enough people who will create out of love for their art. If you don't come under this category, step aside for those who do - we don't need you, thanks!
TFA:
The privileged group of more than 300 companies under CERT Australia's wing is expanding, but it does not plan to offer the secretive information more broadly.
This is corporate welfare at its finest: make the people pay to give a competitive advantage to particular companies.
When will this primitive targets-based, public-private-partnership experiment born somewhere in the '80s finally collapse? When will parties and their representation in government reflect the people again? Whether left or right, authoritarian or socially liberal, your view is no longer represented unless you've paid for it.
If you really want to make a difference, collect funds and lobby.
Then, for once, you'll be on the initiating side of laws in your favour, rather than defending against laws which are aimed only for corporate interests. Because the people always lose when a system is designed, Wikipedia-style, such that the representatives of interests with the most influence and most time/money to waste get the lasting say.
Either that or reform the system of democracy (or lack of democracy) in the EU so it is either more direct or more representative. In particular, no new laws without a democratic drafting process - so unless the people want an extension of copyright length, the idea is not even entertained.
"Writing to your MEP" = closing barn door too late: the guy already has his constituents' support, and letters from even a significant minority of whingers won't change that.
Actually, the people who annoyed me the most were the ones who'd go "oh, it was really difficult, I think I might have barely passed" and ended up getting 100% anyway. Humble motherfuckers.
My Latin teacher, a dour Scot, used to call this "English modesty": you put yourself down in order to elicit praise (at your humility) and support (because someone who says they're bad must need uplifting, right?). I'm not sure it's completely accurate: it's possible that people who do well can be geniunely very anxious and obsess over small errors on an otherwise very good performance, distorting their self-perception. But it's still an inconsiderate defence mechanism designed to draw attention to your own abilities. And the effect is the same as running around saying you found a test really easy: if others take your words at face value, it can create a wrong impression in their minds and may harm their confidence.
Predictably, half the comments here reply, "Oh, wow, this test is easy except the Latin/Greek because that's not important!"
Well, bullshit on all counts.
(1) The purpose of learning Latin and ancient Greek is not to enable you to speak Latin and ancient Greek. They've already been dead languages for millennia and they were arguably even more dead then (Greece being even less relevant). It's an exercise in the study of language and of foundations of European culture and literature. You don't get the same experience by learning "Japanese for anime fans".
Anyway, I "aced" Latin at school - that sort of thing was something I enjoyed and came reasonably naturally. Many years later, I have forgotten enough of it that I could not do a good job of these questions. The translations into Latin would today leave me hopeless without a dictionary. What is more, these aren't trivial Latin beginner questions.
(2) History/geography - at least some people are admitting that they don't know some of these, though I see a lot of "oh about half". Really? Did you actually sit down with that sheet and no references and write detailed geographical and historical answers? Did you then go one by one checking at the end that they were all correct? Or did you just think "oh yeah I've heard of that before" and sneak in a "check" to Wikipedia, confirming knowledge you didn't really have to mind?
The subject of my masters thesis was the history of an area of mathematics; background reading required me to be familiar with specific areas of classical Greek and Roman history. I enjoyed History at high school, though none of it was classical. Latin class included a certain amount of Roman history surrounding Pliny the Younger and Virgil, with an earlier school covering the historical context of the Odyssey and the Iliad. And yet I don't think I could do justice to any of the essay-type questions. "Pericles - the Man and his Policy" - really? Are even a significant minority claiming they even know more than a sentence or two about Pericles?
(3) The maths section. Oh, what a surprise, everyone is claiming that the maths section is trivial. Well, bullshit again. I have a postgrad mathematical education and, yes, I can probably answer these questions. But I would have to think about the plane geometry proofs (which, it is likely, the candidate would be expected to have simply memorised for this test) - I can't recite all of them off the top of my head and I bet I'd stumble on some details for some of them if I were to actually write the answers all out rather than just wave my hand over the paper dismissively and say "this is easy".
What is more, you annoying geeks, there were no electronic calculators in the mid-19th century. You know what this means? It means that half the challenge is doing the arithmetic quickly and without mistakes. And, whether by reading original Leibniz or the speling errors on /., there is one reassuring thing I have come to know (I am reassured because I do it myself and thought I was the only one): numerate geeky types make lots of trivial mistakes. A good mathematician - perhaps the sort who is intuitively familiar with geometry - might make a bad doctor or accountant, i.e. may fail in a profession where speed and accuracy with numbers is important.
Whenever I visit Slashdot and there's a topic where people have the chance to put their knowledge to the test, I always see a huge number of people claiming that they did wonderfully at the test. And yet, in real life, hardly anyone ever performs at such superheroic levels, whether dumb, average or intelligent. This isn't because /. isn't full of super-geniuses - even though it isn't - it's because the sheer amount of information accessible in the world today means that everyone necessarily specialises a great deal. No particular random test which has not been prepared for is likely to fit the knowledge of a random sample of even fairly bright individuals.
I guess it's just a predictabl
You DO realize that infants are, technically, human beings, right?
Only by arbitrary line-drawing is a Homo sapiens 10 months after conception more "human being" than the same 8 months after conception. And each will die without the support of a responsible older human. So, while you may respond with a religious argument that life is supremely important at conception and then gradually becomes less so as innocence is lost, recognise that there are different ways of identifying the needs of man.
Seems to me that "ignoring infant death" or "putting less [...] value" on them would sort of be at odds with the goal of developing "more love for man in general," then, wouldn't it?
The context "[...]" you conveniently initially read "emotionally charged". This means we don't get overtaken by think-of-the-sweet-baby mentality, ploughing inordinate effort into the welfare of the infant as if it is more deserving than existing humans.
Reducing infant mortality is often low-hanging fruit - proper nutrition, proper immunizations, proper sanitation, etc make for dramatic reductions in mortality rates.
Indeed. These policies aren't emotionally charged pandering to infant needs - they're rational constituents of a developed society, helping everyone and pretty much mastered in developed countries. (Though we're reversing the trend of good nutrition thanks to once again pandering to emotionally charged notions of freedom for the child - which comes down to freedom of the businessman to exploit the child and feed him crap.)
Curing cancer? Curing heart disease? Curing strokes? Pretty fucking complex, unless you've got a miracle cure in your back pocket that you haven't told us about.
Well, no - or straw man, rather. Preventing many cancers or detecting+treating them in early stages is technically fairly easy but requires channeling of resources. Similarly, the risk factors for early heart disease are well-known and, again, education and promoting a fit society will go a long way. To a more limited extent, same for strokes.
But we don't do this because, again, bullshit about "freedom" and "personal responsibility" prevails, weasel words in this context for the right for others to exploit your weaknesses in the short term at the expense of the welfare of man in the long term. It's not society's job to help you keep healthy, is it? Yes. Yes it is. Not from conception to the end of childhood (with an emphasis on infancy), but from conception to the grave.
Stop telling other people how to feel. I, for example, feel very little for infants. And I'm more bothered when I've forgotten to back up some piece of code I was working on for a month than the dozens of infants who die needlessly every minute.
"Oh, but its not your infant!" I hear you cry. Correct. I would never have a child. I would never want a child. I would decide to give up an infant/foetus/whatever in the same moment that, for whatever reason, I became somehow responsible for one.
If you ignore infant death, the so called remarkable progress of technology/capitalism/welfare (delete as inappropriate) has actually improved life expectancy not nearly as much as touted over the past couple of millennia. If we began, as a society, to put less emotionally charged value on the the sweet, innocent infant, and developed more love for man in general, perhaps we'd become far more productive, progressive, kind, etc.
1. Wozniak is a damn smart guy and knows what Jobs is about;
2. Wozniak also knew this when he worked for Jobs;
3. Wozniak continued and continues knowing this as his Apple wages/shares provide him a tidy sum.
It's easy to play the respected but impotent preacher. Especially useful when you are gain from what you preach against. Sorta like reading one of the tabloids go on a rant about exploitation of young girls and foreigners while the owner of the newspaper group publishes porn and employs lots of low wage immigrants.
It's great to control one side of the argument. It's better to control both.
according to the bible, he can not. In timoohy it is stated the god will not deceive people.
A test is not a deception any more than a maze incorporating at least one dead end or overly long route is a deception - even if those who choose the wrong routes want to claim it so. In God terms: reveal the truth to those who seek it; deceive those who seek deception. There are discussions on the topic of your claim all over the interweb - here's an example.
Lots of things on the earth are deceptive: for a straight scientific example, look at Newtonian mechanics. It's such an alluring simplification of what actually seems to happen on comparatively hard-to-analyse large and small scales. Surely God was deceiving Newton and his ilk, right? No, but it's sure good that we didn't engage in hubris and assume we had a full understanding - otherwise we may not have discovered that our understanding was approximate and incomplete. Another test, if you like.
I love how believer don't even know their own theology.
"Believer"? Nope, don't believe I claimed such. The only thing I believe is that most anti-religious dilettantes (i) make an extremely shallow and out-of-context interpretation of some passage in some text; (ii) make sweeping conclusions based on their interpretation.
Do you know why I can cite Euclid? because what he said and showed is provable, and experiments have shown his claims to be correct.
No. Study has shown that Euclid is full of missing assumptions and some bullshit circular definitions right from the start of Book I. But it doesn't matter - we can use our further understanding of the work's context and discovery of geometry in general to fill in the gaps and see in which situations and under which interpretations his theorems and demonstrations do and do not apply (and remain consistent). The same is true for a great deal of religious writing.
I chose Euclid deliberately because, if you're not already raising your arms and crying "no, that doesn't necessarily follow" by the first half dozen theorems, you're not following closely enough. Yet it took around two millennia to create a foundation which does a good job of both explaining and filling in the gaps, and a good thousand years [as far as extant evidence reveals] before people even started noticing some problem.
The believers in the Bible on the other hand change the rules every time someone show something that does not hold up to any testing or experimentation.
The religious side never tests God, so within a sentence of your assertion otherwise you've illustrated that each side does not play by the same rules.
The problem is people who are still prepared to travel to the USA. You are the ones making this acceptable. You are the ones happy to bring your productivity and your coin into a country which should be ostracised until it stops treating visitors as criminals and returns to something resembling reasonable.
I gave up my business interests in the US following their slow bastardisation of the notion of rights after 2001. I made a personal loss, but I feel all the more human for it. And it serves its purpose. After all, no empire and no regime lasts forever - it will only be a matter of time before things become unbearable and people start standing up en masse. We must start making our stand one by one.
Why aren't you doing the same?
Theology is the study of the nature of God, or alternatively what God says about God.
And how do we know "what God says about God"?
Religion studied in class is anthropology-- the study of man, or what man says about God.
Whence "general cultural historical discipline" - there is much more than anthropology which would rightly involve a serious study of religion.
No part of a story about the world being created some 6 thousand years ago by a magical sky wizard adds up to dinosaurs that were around millions and billions of years ago.
Genesis does not say that the world was created 6 thousand years ago - this is just one interpretation. Even if it was a universally accepted interpretation, rather than one refuted by most Christian denominations but erected frequently as a straw man against Christianity, it does not counter the argument that God could plant anything anywhere to test you. Annoying, isn't it? Don't fight it. Neither shall win because each side is playing by different rules.
Let's get to actual factual debate, where people stop citing a thousands of year old book as fact,
Must stop citing Euclid ;-).
and use it as an excuse to not follow law.
Erm, I don't get this one...? Are you implying that law is something we should universally follow unless we have a good excuse (aside from "because we don't want to get caught")? That's a very dogmatic view.
Theology is about study of religion, that doesn't mean its' accepted.
Absolutely correct.
Usually studying it enough shows you that religion is almost entirely bullshit.
I haven't found this. Established religions are remarkably self-consistent and some very clever people over the millennia have explored and added to them. But that just shows the skill of man. Of course, by "bullshit" you probably mean "doesn't satisfy my simplistic understanding" - people love finding contradictions in religious tracts which betray nothing but their own misreading, mistranslating or decontextualising.
I could pick up any two scientific texts and look at them sentence by sentence, pointing out "it said A there but it says B here!" I recall writing a thesis on the history of geometry which involved a lot of this - with the aim of understanding that we weren't seeing contradictions at all, rather different contexts employing different levels of abstraction or assumption.
Geeks so much enjoy pointing out errors which aren't really errors, except by a literalist interpretation in which every statement is wrong because every statement involves some level of assumption and simplification.
You don't see any part of the bible covering the part where christians were murdering those who refused to convert, now do ya? Considering it's happened what, 2, 3 times in history?
You see a lot of the OT covering that sort of ground. What about it?
spends the entire day showing how the fossil record contradicts the silly Genesis story in the Bible
The fossil record does no such thing, and pseudo-scientists waste a lot of time tilting at windmills.
The Genesis story is a lot of things, but scientific theory it is not. It is of no merit to try to disprove it by scientific method.
Let it have its place in the discipline of Theology. I went to a religious school and this is where it was studied. This, or in a more general cultural historical discipline, is where it belongs.
There are so many important things in the world which are being sidelined by astroturfed spats. Once bread and circuses were sufficient. Now the population is moderately educated, so we need bread, circuses and engineered pointless debate (see also: abortion, tea party, gun control).
No. What does ping actually measure?
I don't know about your internet, but mine involves alternative routes to a particular physical location. Not just because that's how the Internet works, but because there are competing providers. And there are all sorts of things which delay, from WiFi to pipe congestion to intentional prioritisation to the OS having something more interesting to do.
Although I should have stopped reading at "time it takes to send a data packet to the target" - really? How does one measure precisely this?
Which is arguably still irrational because an organisation's mission rarely aligns with the short term profit goals of employees/management. Optimum behaviour would be to strip the company and sell off its assets, or as close as possible to that as constraints will allow.
(Hence, again, many recent examples of corporate and public sector plundering.)
Bonus culture has completely ruined service provision in local and national government in England over the past decade. Unfortunately, we are severely lacking an ideology which recognises what you state.
Most people think they get better deals from friends. Sometimes they are right, often they're the same and sometimes they're worse. In most cases, though, people feel better going to someone they know. That is not a nefarious scheme, it's human nature.
It's understandable if a Google employee himself chooses to use Google's social networking crap because he believes that he'll get more money for doing so. But ultimately the success must depend on persuading others outside the company - and it's absolutely nefarious if your "friend" is this Google employee who is taking advantage of your trust and who stands to benefit financially when you follow his advice/example. The ethics of this sort of behaviour has been debated so much in terms of the harm of MLM and cult membership that, if you genuinely are ignorant, ... well, you know how to use Google.
I don't know that this is what Page expects employees to do, but this sort of geek-grass-roots-marketing thing works approximately once - with an "innocent" start-up when the competition is wanting and people are yearning for an alternative, as with the original and still fairly good Google search engine proper. After that you just look like Microsoft with its, "Wow, it was Vista all along - and there was me thinking Vista was a failure!" ads.
Car analogy effort notwithstanding, this is nothing whatever to do with choosing Peugeot because you're on good terms with a Peugeot dealer. A good business relationship which may come from a good underlying personal relationship, while often risky, is not proselytism.
If each one of them can just make one other person aware of the new feature and of those half tell someone else, you've just kickstarted...
...turning your friends into business opportunities, the same socially damaging outcome to hit every pyramid marketing scheme and cult member.
Sounds like a pathological reimplementation of Apple's "steer your cadre of elite engineers to one thing" approach.
As far as I can tell, this is tying the bonuses of everyone at Google to the efforts of the few people at Google involved in social media crap - in turn coming down to the efforts of the few managers who actually want to push the social media crap. It's the ultimate PHB power trip: you are so insistent that a repeatedly-failing idea is good, while at the same time wanting to acknowledge none of evidence or the responsibility that it isn't, so you declare that everyone else has a stake in it. Then it's everyone's fault: after all, they had financial incentive to succeed - which, as everyone knows, is the reason everyone wants to do anything - so the only reason the plan failed must be because all 24k employees just weren't trying hard enough.
Page (Gates) is an intelligent egomaniac who happened to be in the right place at the right time, carried to success by Schmidt (Ballmer) and a few venture capitalist titans. Now add cowardly to his list of properties.