Re:The English Class Ruined the Essay
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The Age of the Essay
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That's largely because the essay in English class was to exercise grammar and vocabulary (which includes spelling btw). It is nice to read essays with good content, but if the grammar, use of terms and spelling are horribly incorrect then it's completely useless to most readers.
"High-level languages are great, but learning them will never teach you about computers."
Sense when is computer science supposed to teach you about computers? It's supposed to teach you about computer science (algorithms, language theory (not languages), etc). Teaching people in assembly may help them learn more about a computer they might use, but that doesn't mean you're teaching them computer science.
Of course I'm probably one of the few people who thought CS 1 using pseudocode was a (potentially) good thing (the graders were a bit to anal, "you forgot the '.', 0"). Pseudocode allowed for students to learn CS Theory without having to get stuck in syntactic hell. Follow that up w/ some high-level languages, and they can apply what they've learned. Let assembly be where it belongs, in a course on, oh say, computer architecture? Not as a beginning language.
That's right, every one has to get hooked on some drug that screws them up (either by losing their money, friends, dying, etc.) to learn that some drugs (or more specifically, some drug habits) are bad for them. Yes, this makes lot's of sense. Oh, wait, I've never used drugs, never felt a need to. I saw plenty of people in high school fail out, get sent to jail or some alternative school, or something equally unappealing to realize that I didn't want any part of that. Hmm, let's see. I know people who are currently serving time in a federal prison for making and trying to use conterfeit money, so now I'm not going to try that. I'm trying to think of other examples, I know I've got some, but at the moment my minds a little occupied with the work I'm supposed to be doing.
"I just thought I'd note that there are indeed sites that have "nasa" included in their URL identifier (NASA Watch and NASA Tech Briefs for example) which aren't a part of NASA. I was also able to find several websites that include the name "walmart" as another high-profile example (such as Wal-Mart Watch)."
Ok, I'm just going to say that you should read the sites you reference. The NASA Watch site has a disclaimer explaining that it isn't an official or NASA authorized site. NASA Tech Briefs on the other hand, from the site: "NASA Tech Briefs is...
An official publication of NASA A unique, powerful tool for engineers, managers, and scientists the largest U.S.-circulation engineering magazine"
The walmart one I haven't found anything on it like a disclaimer yet, but I was just looking for something from the front page (I'm lazy, not as lazy as you though). So in conclusion, you need to read the sites you cite as support for your argument, and the difference between the UCSDUncensored site and these is that the UCSDUncensored site was simply providing a service to students and others affiliated w/ the university, and to my knowledge did not say they weren't official (granted I can't really see their usual site).
No. Interstates were necessary, the old highway systems were inadequate for the load the had. Withholding money was an abuse of the White House's power after the interstate system had already been created and established.
"We would never tolerate our highway system being held hostage by a single company. Why on earth would we tolerate such a thing with our public information?"
Because the highway system is essential to interstate commerce, which the federal government is responsible for. The government is not responsible for information. In fact, that's a good thing. If it was then we wouldn't be much different than the former Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, North Korea, Cuba, should I continue?
They remind me of the Bene Tlielax from Dune. The babytron being the same as the tanks they used, the idea of downloading minds. This guy's read the series a few times too many I think.
Actually they've been working on "vaccines" for narcotics for quite sometime. I need to find the article I was reading, it was in some news magazine can't remember which one. I think they have one for cocaine, but it's difficult to test. However, to the limit of their testing capabilities it does work. US News I think had the article, sometime in the last few weeks.
"The probability of catching radio waves from intelligent life forms in a 4 year window is crazy."
It's my understanding that the data they're crunching isn't just from the last 4 years. It's data that's been collected since about the time seti began. It's just that seti@home has only existed for about the last 4 years.
Also, you should consider that they don't mention how long he'd been attacking the networks. He could've done it slowly over a longer period of time. Many of the break-ins may've only been connected to him after they noticed a pattern somewhere down the line.
"What I meant was evolution is supposed to take MILLIONS- not thousands- of years."
My understanding of evolution, is that it is simply a change in the frequency of particular traits within a species (or subset of the species), carried of course in the dna of the creature. These traits could be created by random mutation or have existed for quite some time, but never necessary (or useful) for survival before. An example of this is in bacteria. Penicilin (sp?) was great, it got rid of many bacterial infections very well. That is until some bacteria that happened to be unaffected by it became more common. In this case the evolution of anti-biotic resistant bacteria was forced, however it can be seen occuring over similar short periods of time in virii (sp?) such as the flu, which generally changes every year so that previous vaccinations are no longer effective.
"But creationism says the world (and universe) began at, I think, 4004 B.C. Evolution says the universe began a few years earlier IIRC."
Evolution does not state when the universe began, that's physics. Evolution describes how species evolve. It's 2 very different things. And yes, creationism (being part of a literal interpretation of the Bible) says that the world was created some 5-10 thousand years ago, depending on who you ask. Personally I don't know what it was created, nor do I care, I believe in God though, so whenever He felt like making it was when it was made.
"What does evolution have to do with any of that? The truth of evolution doesn't preclude the existence of God."
"Yeah, but if you're a Christian and believe in the Old Testament it does."
Um, creationism (to my knowledge) does not say that evolution doesn't occur. All it describes is the state of the universe at its beginning, it does not say that that state cannot change over time.
In case you didn't know, the government is actually the only group barred from stopping speech in the US. If someone is saying something to me that I don't like I can have him stop. Depending on what he's saying punching him might just be an appropriate response.
Religionists, including christians, believe they have a monopoly on morality! this is ignorant and insulting, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
So if someone believes in something they shouldn't believe that it is an absolute truth? Aren't you actually making the statement that the absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth? This statement contradicts itself very clearly, yet you still believe in it?
Analyze your reply and make sure it makes logical sense before posting.
As far as the rest of my reply:
If someone believes that their religion is true, but they don't believe that it is true for everyone else, then they in fact do not believe in their own religion. So the fact that he believes his morality is true for all people actually helps to show how strong his faith is.
I think I've arrived here a little late, but here's my contribution: It seems to me that a lot of people who've posted hold the opinion that documentation and coding can (or should) be done at the same time. I think that what is most important in a programming project (as in any other engineering project*) is the design. Documentation != Design. The design is an essential part to most projects bigger than "Hello World!" Without properly designing your project before beginning the coding/documentation phases you will end up with a mess of code and only an idea of how it all ties back together in your head.
* Yes, programming is a form of engineering, no you're not designing a building or a processor, but when you're talking about a large scale application or operating system it might as well be a physical structure. Without using proper techniques most projects will end in failure.
Actually, the article says that it is not roofing tar. Or at least according to the field test, when they actually take more time they may find that the test was inaccurate.
I agree with you, but... Where I work we're in the middle of a rather large re-org, so many people are being moved around the building right now. We aren't able to keep up with all the moves, and our network closet has become rather jumbled because of the need to connect knew users coming in faster than we can clean up the closet (I just started here, the thing hasn't been reorganized in nearly 2 years). In response to one of the comments about keys, anyone that uses keys to access secure areas needs help, some other system like combination locks should be used. Also, no janitor should be given to secure areas. If companies are too dumb to use simple precautions to secure an area they almost deserve to be hit.
You can get digital over airwaves here too, but it hasn't really taken off in most places, and usually on there really aren't that many broadcast channels (fox, nbc, abc, cbs, upn and the wb) but where I live we only get 2 broadcast channels, 3 if you pray hard enough. That'd be the local upn station, abc (maybe it's cbs) out of Talahasee and nbc out of Albany.
Why shouldn't corporations be allowed to hide stuff from the public? so long as what they're hiding are not illegal activities they should be allowed to hide whatever they feel like hiding. Open and freely available information is great, and I like it. But the right to privacy should not be destroyed to make way for free information sharing.
My argument isn't simply that I should be allowed to view dvd's on linux, and I agree that goverment mandated censorship isn't necessarily a good thing, but it isn't all bad either. Review of filtering software is necessary, but according to other posts may already be allowed. But saying schools shouldn't filter is also wrong. Schools don't allow students to bring printed pornography into the classroom, and you can't buy it unless you're over 18, so why shouldn't schools with internet access filter porn sites? Granted other sites do get filtered as well, but the concept isn't bad, the technology just needs a little more time to mature.
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That's largely because the essay in English class was to exercise grammar and vocabulary (which includes spelling btw). It is nice to read essays with good content, but if the grammar, use of terms and spelling are horribly incorrect then it's completely useless to most readers.
"High-level languages are great, but learning them will never teach you about computers."
Sense when is computer science supposed to teach you about computers? It's supposed to teach you about computer science (algorithms, language theory (not languages), etc). Teaching people in assembly may help them learn more about a computer they might use, but that doesn't mean you're teaching them computer science.
Of course I'm probably one of the few people who thought CS 1 using pseudocode was a (potentially) good thing (the graders were a bit to anal, "you forgot the '.', 0"). Pseudocode allowed for students to learn CS Theory without having to get stuck in syntactic hell. Follow that up w/ some high-level languages, and they can apply what they've learned. Let assembly be where it belongs, in a course on, oh say, computer architecture? Not as a beginning language.
I really need to learn how to not ramble.
Heh, kind of funny considering I just got done writing a paper which included a discussion of reincarnation.
That's right, every one has to get hooked on some drug that screws them up (either by losing their money, friends, dying, etc.) to learn that some drugs (or more specifically, some drug habits) are bad for them. Yes, this makes lot's of sense. Oh, wait, I've never used drugs, never felt a need to. I saw plenty of people in high school fail out, get sent to jail or some alternative school, or something equally unappealing to realize that I didn't want any part of that.
Hmm, let's see. I know people who are currently serving time in a federal prison for making and trying to use conterfeit money, so now I'm not going to try that.
I'm trying to think of other examples, I know I've got some, but at the moment my minds a little occupied with the work I'm supposed to be doing.
"I just thought I'd note that there are indeed sites that have "nasa" included in their URL identifier (NASA Watch and NASA Tech Briefs for example) which aren't a part of NASA. I was also able to find several websites that include the name "walmart" as another high-profile example (such as Wal-Mart Watch)."
Ok, I'm just going to say that you should read the sites you reference. The NASA Watch site has a disclaimer explaining that it isn't an official or NASA authorized site. NASA Tech Briefs on the other hand, from the site:
"NASA Tech Briefs is...
An official publication of NASA
A unique, powerful tool for engineers, managers, and scientists
the largest U.S.-circulation engineering magazine"
The walmart one I haven't found anything on it like a disclaimer yet, but I was just looking for something from the front page (I'm lazy, not as lazy as you though). So in conclusion, you need to read the sites you cite as support for your argument, and the difference between the UCSDUncensored site and these is that the UCSDUncensored site was simply providing a service to students and others affiliated w/ the university, and to my knowledge did not say they weren't official (granted I can't really see their usual site).
No. Interstates were necessary, the old highway systems were inadequate for the load the had. Withholding money was an abuse of the White House's power after the interstate system had already been created and established.
"We would never tolerate our highway system being held hostage by a single company. Why on earth would we tolerate such a thing with our public information?"
Because the highway system is essential to interstate commerce, which the federal government is responsible for. The government is not responsible for information. In fact, that's a good thing. If it was then we wouldn't be much different than the former Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, North Korea, Cuba, should I continue?
They remind me of the Bene Tlielax from Dune. The babytron being the same as the tanks they used, the idea of downloading minds. This guy's read the series a few times too many I think.
Actually they've been working on "vaccines" for narcotics for quite sometime. I need to find the article I was reading, it was in some news magazine can't remember which one. I think they have one for cocaine, but it's difficult to test. However, to the limit of their testing capabilities it does work. US News I think had the article, sometime in the last few weeks.
"The probability of catching radio waves from intelligent life forms in a 4 year window is crazy."
It's my understanding that the data they're crunching isn't just from the last 4 years. It's data that's been collected since about the time seti began. It's just that seti@home has only existed for about the last 4 years.
It does say christmas 2003, but it doesn't say october 2004. just opening 2004
Also, you should consider that they don't mention how long he'd been attacking the networks. He could've done it slowly over a longer period of time. Many of the break-ins may've only been connected to him after they noticed a pattern somewhere down the line.
"Here's a link to the "poem" in question: Eureka [eapoe.org]. It's appears to me to be simply nine pages of unreadable drivel."
I think you mean 9 sections, it's over 140 pages.
"What I meant was evolution is supposed to take MILLIONS- not thousands- of years."
My understanding of evolution, is that it is simply a change in the frequency of particular traits within a species (or subset of the species), carried of course in the dna of the creature. These traits could be created by random mutation or have existed for quite some time, but never necessary (or useful) for survival before. An example of this is in bacteria. Penicilin (sp?) was great, it got rid of many bacterial infections very well. That is until some bacteria that happened to be unaffected by it became more common. In this case the evolution of anti-biotic resistant bacteria was forced, however it can be seen occuring over similar short periods of time in virii (sp?) such as the flu, which generally changes every year so that previous vaccinations are no longer effective.
"But creationism says the world (and universe) began at, I think, 4004 B.C. Evolution says the universe began a few years earlier IIRC."
Evolution does not state when the universe began, that's physics. Evolution describes how species evolve. It's 2 very different things.
And yes, creationism (being part of a literal interpretation of the Bible) says that the world was created some 5-10 thousand years ago, depending on who you ask. Personally I don't know what it was created, nor do I care, I believe in God though, so whenever He felt like making it was when it was made.
"What does evolution have to do with any of that? The truth of evolution doesn't preclude the existence of God."
"Yeah, but if you're a Christian and believe in the Old Testament it does."
Um, creationism (to my knowledge) does not say that evolution doesn't occur. All it describes is the state of the universe at its beginning, it does not say that that state cannot change over time.
In case you didn't know, the government is actually the only group barred from stopping speech in the US. If someone is saying something to me that I don't like I can have him stop. Depending on what he's saying punching him might just be an appropriate response.
This glass was announced at least a year ago. I'll try to find the source, I'll post it if I run across it.
Religionists, including christians, believe they have a monopoly on morality! this is ignorant and insulting, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
So if someone believes in something they shouldn't believe that it is an absolute truth? Aren't you actually making the statement that the absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth? This statement contradicts itself very clearly, yet you still believe in it?
Analyze your reply and make sure it makes logical sense before posting.
As far as the rest of my reply:
If someone believes that their religion is true, but they don't believe that it is true for everyone else, then they in fact do not believe in their own religion. So the fact that he believes his morality is true for all people actually helps to show how strong his faith is.
I think I've arrived here a little late, but here's my contribution:
It seems to me that a lot of people who've posted hold the opinion that documentation and coding can (or should) be done at the same time. I think that what is most important in a programming project (as in any other engineering project*) is the design. Documentation != Design. The design is an essential part to most projects bigger than "Hello World!" Without properly designing your project before beginning the coding/documentation phases you will end up with a mess of code and only an idea of how it all ties back together in your head.
* Yes, programming is a form of engineering, no you're not designing a building or a processor, but when you're talking about a large scale application or operating system it might as well be a physical structure. Without using proper techniques most projects will end in failure.
Actually, the article says that it is not roofing tar. Or at least according to the field test, when they actually take more time they may find that the test was inaccurate.
I agree with you, but...
Where I work we're in the middle of a rather large re-org, so many people are being moved around the building right now. We aren't able to keep up with all the moves, and our network closet has become rather jumbled because of the need to connect knew users coming in faster than we can clean up the closet (I just started here, the thing hasn't been reorganized in nearly 2 years).
In response to one of the comments about keys, anyone that uses keys to access secure areas needs help, some other system like combination locks should be used. Also, no janitor should be given to secure areas. If companies are too dumb to use simple precautions to secure an area they almost deserve to be hit.
You can get digital over airwaves here too, but it hasn't really taken off in most places, and usually on there really aren't that many broadcast channels (fox, nbc, abc, cbs, upn and the wb) but where I live we only get 2 broadcast channels, 3 if you pray hard enough. That'd be the local upn station, abc (maybe it's cbs) out of Talahasee and nbc out of Albany.
Why shouldn't corporations be allowed to hide stuff from the public? so long as what they're hiding are not illegal activities they should be allowed to hide whatever they feel like hiding.
Open and freely available information is great, and I like it. But the right to privacy should not be destroyed to make way for free information sharing.
My argument isn't simply that I should be allowed to view dvd's on linux, and I agree that goverment mandated censorship isn't necessarily a good thing, but it isn't all bad either. Review of filtering software is necessary, but according to other posts may already be allowed. But saying schools shouldn't filter is also wrong. Schools don't allow students to bring printed pornography into the classroom, and you can't buy it unless you're over 18, so why shouldn't schools with internet access filter porn sites? Granted other sites do get filtered as well, but the concept isn't bad, the technology just needs a little more time to mature.