(I can't remember where I saw it (and if anyone can find it, that would be great) - but one of these military voting surveys had 75% of the military who had been to Iraq approving of Bush's handling of it.)
But don't let the facts stand in the way of a good argument. By all means, trot out the dead marines if it makes you feel good about your position.
They believe in what they're doing over there. Why don't you?
If there was no literal first man and woman, then there was no talking snake to tempt them into eating an apple. If that didn't happen, there was no literal fall (the fall had to be by CHOICE, protestants don't accept that God just made humans imperfect from the start). If there was no literal fall, then mankind is not in need of redemption. If there is no need for redemption, there is no need for Christ. This would basically invalidate protestant Christianity.
You've left out one important point: your #2 argument hinges on this paragraph, but this paragraph depends necessarily on #1 (the Word of God in the Bible is inerrant and literal). It's not actually a stronger argument, because it depends on the first, weaker one.
Here's the problem. Fundamentalist Christianity rejects the idea of continuing revelation from God through any single source. Prophets - as they were understood in the Bible - don't come around anymore, as a matter of doctrine. The only thing left they have to base their faith in is the Bible. It's their only witness of Christ. If parts of it can be allegorical, Christ himself doesn't really have to have existed, and there goes the religion.
So #1 actually exists out of necessity. That's where the circular arguments come from ("the Bible is literally true because the Bible says so [in our interpretation]", etc., etc.) - it's because they haven't actually got anything better.
I'm LDS, and I go to BYU. In this school - which is run basically by my church - we actually don't have a problem with evolution at all. We even (gasp) teach it. Why? We believe that God still speaks through a single source, and we have more than one witness of Christ. The idea that parts of the Bible might be allegorical or severely watered-down for the people of the time doesn't bother us at all.
My point is that as long as we keep the clones somewhat small - say less than 1024 cells, I have no moral problem with disposing them - that I'm not killing anything. Yes this has a HUGE grey area, but I think that a reasonable compromise can be reached.
Tell the pro-life and pro-choice extremists that there's a reasonable compromise. One side thinks life begins at conception, so your 1024-cell limit isn't going to wash with them. The other thinks there's no life unless the child is out and breathing, so they'll want to push your limit as far as they can. There's no compromise in the US on abortion, so why should there be on this? The issues are largely the same.
I'm all for testing those limits, personally. Maybe some of the pro-choice-at-any-cost wackos will change their minds after they hear about experiments being carried out on the unborn - maybe rethink what they believe deserves protection.
It won't, because a great number of Catholics, Mormons, and Born-again Christians (at least) are absolutely immune from it. (Barring tainted blood transfusions, but those are statistically insignificant.)
AIDS advocacy group: YOU COULD BE NEXT!
Us: Nope, never.
Go ahead, liberal pinko commie moderators. Call this flamebait. You know it's true.
...more people didn't wanted the other guy to be president.
Prove it.
(2000 election numbers don't count. I know plenty of people in Utah who stayed home because Bush was going to win the state anyway. Plenty of people in Democratic states stayed home for the same reason.)
Can't do it, can you? Maybe you should stop saying it?
Aside from that - good point about the "real world." I'm not sure anyone could honestly state that they live in it and other "kinds" of people don't.
But this:
The difference between the educated, urbane populations and the faith-based folk in the rural areas are so great that they require two seperate systems of governance.
That's just bigotry, and I wish you would stop. Just imagine what else you could justify with such reasoning.
Then why doesn't the USGOV release unedited video of all the good things that are happening in Iraq?
Take a minute and imagine what the mainstream media would say about something like that, and then tell us again that it's a good idea.
No, the Bush administration doesn't play as well with the MSM as previous administrations did, but they do understand that the MSM has a lot of control over public opinion.
Generics also let the compiler enforce valid typecasting. It's great to have the compiler catch problems at compile time rather than have the JVM catch them at run time.
Template meta-programming is also a very important part of the modern C++ libraries and is also something that generics cannot do.
Template meta-programming is confusing to most people, and generally an absolute nightmare in a business setting. Since Java is aimed at business development (the new COBOL, and all that), it makes sense that it would be somewhat restricted.
C) Battle for Endor. Oh, yeah. Cindel returns, and aids the Ewoks in a battle against the evil Marauders. I just can't get enough of Ewoks battling evil Marauders. And...TEEK! We need TEEK!
Like, old Teek. Crippled. But he hobbles faster than beans through a Texan with the flu.
Actually, conservatives are being very careful not to question anybody's patriotism, simply because the Democrats keep accusing them of it.
I'm conservative. I've never questioned anybody's patriotism. I have questioned their judgment and sanity, though.
I mean, come on. Allawi accused of being a US puppet by a guy who wants the office of President, where he'd likely work with him in rebuilding his country? HELLO? Alienating important allies in the Middle East before he even gets in office? What's John Kerry smoking?
That one's as rich as authorizing use of force in Iraq, but voting against funding for the guys on the ground. Freaking insane. Support our troops! I'd send more if I were President, but I'd send them naked and without guns or ammo! Whee!
He's referring to the "respected in the world" part of the Democratic platform. It's pretty nebulous, but given recent events, it can only mean giving in to France and Germany when they say "stop."
It also means giving up the long-term strategy for getting rid of terrorism, bringing back appeasement tactics, and again treating terrorism as a criminal act.
Right-wing conspiracy theorists (which the parent poster may or may not be - it could have been hyperbole) can also throw in Kerry's ties to France - including his hairdresser. I'd say those might be a small factor in his decision-making. But my first two paragraphs are pretty much fact, and IMNSHO they're horrible ideas.
Sure! I've considered it for the name recognition value.:) I'd want to get permission from my graduate advisor, of course. If there's a problem, it would be the possibility of patenting it and selling it. If that happened, I'd definitely fight for making it royalty-free for free software use or something...
I've still got to speed it up considerably before it'll be good for that, though. I believe I can at least get it faster than most of the other stuff that's out there.
/me goes back to slaving over hot second-order derivatives
It's true that digital zoom can't replace information that was lost due to scaling and sampling. It's possible to get something reasonably close, though. There are a bunch of algorithms available for photographs, but their biggest problem seems to be execution time. It's not pretty.
I've gotten better-looking results since I put that together but I haven't had time to put them up yet. The slowest part of my algorithm requires solving a nonlinear system of nine equations for the least sum squared error per pixel. That's orders of magnitude slower than bicubic interpolation (which is standard).
I don't know which interpolation algorithms are used for so-called digital zoom. Is there someone in the industry here that knows?
Does that make it harder to oust the incumbent? It seems like it would: people who are otherwise not involved in politics are usually more likely to at least know the name of the incumbent.
If the challenger were someone like Ahnold, though, it would be a different story...so I predict that Greece's politics is full of career politicians and movie stars.:)
Sure, there are other issues that need to be addressed, and of course power-users will turn it off, but for folks like me that spend a lot of time in IDLE or Kate writing python code, I can spare the CPU cycles on my Athlon 64 3000+ for transparency. And hey, I like the look. =)
The shadows behind applications have actual utility. I noticed this when looking at the projection of one of my professor's OSX laptop desktops. It's much, much easier to discern the z-order of the applications, and which pixels belong to which.
Try carrying an anti-Bush sign outside of an "approved free-speech zone" during the Republican National Convention and see how long it takes you to get arrested.
Wasn't that the Democratic National Convention, with the fenced-off "free-speech zone?"
More likely you've been misled by reports of what Bush has said.
US presidents don't write their own speeches, they approve them. The speech writers are very, very careful. Heck, Reagan's didn't want him to demand that Gorby tear down the Berlin wall. He had to fight for that line.
You've been duped by the mainstream media in whatever country you're from, which has decided that Bush is a dunce because anybody that religious can't possibly be smart. (Is anybody here old enough to remember that happening to Reagan?)
Remember that poll that showed 1/5 of all Slashdotters live with mummy and daddy? Most responsible adult Slashdotters I know in real life never take time to moderate, because it takes more time than they've got. So what you've got is a fairly young, still-thinking-with-their-amygdala liberal types moderating most discussions. Conservative viewpoints (and defenses) don't get much consideration.
Just a few days ago, I detailed, pretty accurately, reasons for a marriage amendment. The "funny" guy talking about worrying about which holes people put their tools in was modded up, the guy accusing me of suggesting that the civil rights movement ought to be nullified got +5 (using a logical fallacy, no less), and I was modded down as "overrated" and "flamebait." For politely and accurately detailing a position? Hello?
Fair discussion has no place on Slashdot, and that's the last time I'll try it. It's all about groupthink here.
That being said, Java has no way of hinting to the compiler "this is going to be constant for a long while now", or "I'm going to run this loop a couple of million times in a bit, you might want to JIT it real good". Without those, the compiler doesn't really have a hope.
You're right, but that's not a problem with one certain method of JIT compiling: HotSpot's. HotSpot profiles the code as it runs, and decides the best way to compile something. It knows how often a test-and-branch will branch, and can arrange the native code accordingly.
There's an additional execution time hit at the beginning, but 1) it compiles faster code; and 2) it doesn't have to compile code that isn't executed.
You also failed to mention that a standard JIT compiler can make processor-specific optimizations that a normal compiler has no hope of making.
Then again, I've seen Java out-paced by many of these languages (most of which compile the program to byte-code at start-up faster than Java loads), which suggests to me that Java is just a poor interpreted language.
Most out-pacing from other interpreted languages is due to operation-specific optimizations that have nothing to do with the fact that either language is interpreted or JIT-compiled. (Or were you suggesting that these other languages are faster in everything?) I can't speak to Python or Perl, but I can give a Java vs. C++ example. Java's collection and string operations are much faster in the general case than the STL's, because of Java's choice of reference semantics and immutable strings. (Ironically - for people who accuse garbage collection of being a performance hog, anyway - it's the garbage collector that makes it possible.)
That some operations in other interpreted languages are faster than the same operation in Java doesn't really surprise me. I'd be much more surprised if any language were better at doing everything.
Slashdot Mirror
...who overwhelmingly support Bush.
(I can't remember where I saw it (and if anyone can find it, that would be great) - but one of these military voting surveys had 75% of the military who had been to Iraq approving of Bush's handling of it.)
But don't let the facts stand in the way of a good argument. By all means, trot out the dead marines if it makes you feel good about your position.
They believe in what they're doing over there. Why don't you?
Your details are correct.
If there was no literal first man and woman, then there was no talking snake to tempt them into eating an apple. If that didn't happen, there was no literal fall (the fall had to be by CHOICE, protestants don't accept that God just made humans imperfect from the start). If there was no literal fall, then mankind is not in need of redemption. If there is no need for redemption, there is no need for Christ. This would basically invalidate protestant Christianity.
You've left out one important point: your #2 argument hinges on this paragraph, but this paragraph depends necessarily on #1 (the Word of God in the Bible is inerrant and literal). It's not actually a stronger argument, because it depends on the first, weaker one.
Here's the problem. Fundamentalist Christianity rejects the idea of continuing revelation from God through any single source. Prophets - as they were understood in the Bible - don't come around anymore, as a matter of doctrine. The only thing left they have to base their faith in is the Bible. It's their only witness of Christ. If parts of it can be allegorical, Christ himself doesn't really have to have existed, and there goes the religion.
So #1 actually exists out of necessity. That's where the circular arguments come from ("the Bible is literally true because the Bible says so [in our interpretation]", etc., etc.) - it's because they haven't actually got anything better.
I'm LDS, and I go to BYU. In this school - which is run basically by my church - we actually don't have a problem with evolution at all. We even (gasp) teach it. Why? We believe that God still speaks through a single source, and we have more than one witness of Christ. The idea that parts of the Bible might be allegorical or severely watered-down for the people of the time doesn't bother us at all.
Though to be fair, I have to agree--the McWhatsit family of breakfast products are pretty gross....
I dunno. I kinda like the McGuessBurger and the Mystery Meat Salad.
By the way, I'd like to thank the moderator who modded me down because he didn't agree with me.
Disagree? POST SOMETHING.
Tell the pro-life and pro-choice extremists that there's a reasonable compromise. One side thinks life begins at conception, so your 1024-cell limit isn't going to wash with them. The other thinks there's no life unless the child is out and breathing, so they'll want to push your limit as far as they can. There's no compromise in the US on abortion, so why should there be on this? The issues are largely the same.
I'm all for testing those limits, personally. Maybe some of the pro-choice-at-any-cost wackos will change their minds after they hear about experiments being carried out on the unborn - maybe rethink what they believe deserves protection.
It won't, because a great number of Catholics, Mormons, and Born-again Christians (at least) are absolutely immune from it. (Barring tainted blood transfusions, but those are statistically insignificant.)
AIDS advocacy group: YOU COULD BE NEXT!
Us: Nope, never.
Go ahead, liberal pinko commie moderators. Call this flamebait. You know it's true.
That said, it's great that they may have a lead.
That's just...unpleasant. But it does lead to the obvious follow-up: what are blue darts like in space? How well do they work when powered by 7-Up?
...more people didn't wanted the other guy to be president.
Prove it.
(2000 election numbers don't count. I know plenty of people in Utah who stayed home because Bush was going to win the state anyway. Plenty of people in Democratic states stayed home for the same reason.)
Can't do it, can you? Maybe you should stop saying it?
Aside from that - good point about the "real world." I'm not sure anyone could honestly state that they live in it and other "kinds" of people don't.
But this:
The difference between the educated, urbane populations and the faith-based folk in the rural areas are so great that they require two seperate systems of governance.
That's just bigotry, and I wish you would stop. Just imagine what else you could justify with such reasoning.
Now, isn't it interesting that the US regards those areas least in favour of the US as the "most hostile"?
For anyone who was going to take this joker seriously: This is a pretty egregious example of confusing cause and effect.
Then why doesn't the USGOV release unedited video of all the good things that are happening in Iraq?
Take a minute and imagine what the mainstream media would say about something like that, and then tell us again that it's a good idea.
No, the Bush administration doesn't play as well with the MSM as previous administrations did, but they do understand that the MSM has a lot of control over public opinion.
Generics only make the code look cleaner.
Generics also let the compiler enforce valid typecasting. It's great to have the compiler catch problems at compile time rather than have the JVM catch them at run time.
Template meta-programming is also a very important part of the modern C++ libraries and is also something that generics cannot do.
Template meta-programming is confusing to most people, and generally an absolute nightmare in a business setting. Since Java is aimed at business development (the new COBOL, and all that), it makes sense that it would be somewhat restricted.
Yeah, but...free as in beer, or free as in speech?
I WANT EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD ON MY TERMS!
/me ducks
C) Battle for Endor. Oh, yeah. Cindel returns, and aids the Ewoks in a battle against the evil Marauders. I just can't get enough of Ewoks battling evil Marauders. And...TEEK! We need TEEK!
Like, old Teek. Crippled. But he hobbles faster than beans through a Texan with the flu.
CINDEL SHOOTS FIRST!
Can some pinko communist moderator come out of hiding and explain to us all why the parent is moderated as a Troll?
Awww...did some insecure socialist mod get his panties in a knot about a reasonable response? Didn't like what he read? Didn't agree?
Then REPLY.
Actually, conservatives are being very careful not to question anybody's patriotism, simply because the Democrats keep accusing them of it.
I'm conservative. I've never questioned anybody's patriotism. I have questioned their judgment and sanity, though.
I mean, come on. Allawi accused of being a US puppet by a guy who wants the office of President, where he'd likely work with him in rebuilding his country? HELLO? Alienating important allies in the Middle East before he even gets in office? What's John Kerry smoking?
That one's as rich as authorizing use of force in Iraq, but voting against funding for the guys on the ground. Freaking insane. Support our troops! I'd send more if I were President, but I'd send them naked and without guns or ammo! Whee!
There's only room for a few news outlets like that. In the United States, we have CBS News doing that job.
*ducks*
He's referring to the "respected in the world" part of the Democratic platform. It's pretty nebulous, but given recent events, it can only mean giving in to France and Germany when they say "stop."
It also means giving up the long-term strategy for getting rid of terrorism, bringing back appeasement tactics, and again treating terrorism as a criminal act.
Right-wing conspiracy theorists (which the parent poster may or may not be - it could have been hyperbole) can also throw in Kerry's ties to France - including his hairdresser. I'd say those might be a small factor in his decision-making. But my first two paragraphs are pretty much fact, and IMNSHO they're horrible ideas.
Sure! I've considered it for the name recognition value. :) I'd want to get permission from my graduate advisor, of course. If there's a problem, it would be the possibility of patenting it and selling it. If that happened, I'd definitely fight for making it royalty-free for free software use or something...
I've still got to speed it up considerably before it'll be good for that, though. I believe I can at least get it faster than most of the other stuff that's out there.
/me goes back to slaving over hot second-order derivatives
I figured I'd post my own results here.
It's true that digital zoom can't replace information that was lost due to scaling and sampling. It's possible to get something reasonably close, though. There are a bunch of algorithms available for photographs, but their biggest problem seems to be execution time. It's not pretty.
Here's mine. Please be kind to the server...
I've gotten better-looking results since I put that together but I haven't had time to put them up yet. The slowest part of my algorithm requires solving a nonlinear system of nine equations for the least sum squared error per pixel. That's orders of magnitude slower than bicubic interpolation (which is standard).
I don't know which interpolation algorithms are used for so-called digital zoom. Is there someone in the industry here that knows?
Does that make it harder to oust the incumbent? It seems like it would: people who are otherwise not involved in politics are usually more likely to at least know the name of the incumbent.
:)
If the challenger were someone like Ahnold, though, it would be a different story...so I predict that Greece's politics is full of career politicians and movie stars.
Sure, there are other issues that need to be addressed, and of course power-users will turn it off, but for folks like me that spend a lot of time in IDLE or Kate writing python code, I can spare the CPU cycles on my Athlon 64 3000+ for transparency. And hey, I like the look. =)
:)
The shadows behind applications have actual utility. I noticed this when looking at the projection of one of my professor's OSX laptop desktops. It's much, much easier to discern the z-order of the applications, and which pixels belong to which.
I can't say as much for the transparency...
Try carrying an anti-Bush sign outside of an "approved free-speech zone" during the Republican National Convention and see how long it takes you to get arrested.
Wasn't that the Democratic National Convention, with the fenced-off "free-speech zone?"
More likely you've been misled by reports of what Bush has said.
US presidents don't write their own speeches, they approve them. The speech writers are very, very careful. Heck, Reagan's didn't want him to demand that Gorby tear down the Berlin wall. He had to fight for that line.
You've been duped by the mainstream media in whatever country you're from, which has decided that Bush is a dunce because anybody that religious can't possibly be smart. (Is anybody here old enough to remember that happening to Reagan?)
Is a fair discussion really too much to ask for?
Yep.
Remember that poll that showed 1/5 of all Slashdotters live with mummy and daddy? Most responsible adult Slashdotters I know in real life never take time to moderate, because it takes more time than they've got. So what you've got is a fairly young, still-thinking-with-their-amygdala liberal types moderating most discussions. Conservative viewpoints (and defenses) don't get much consideration.
Just a few days ago, I detailed, pretty accurately, reasons for a marriage amendment. The "funny" guy talking about worrying about which holes people put their tools in was modded up, the guy accusing me of suggesting that the civil rights movement ought to be nullified got +5 (using a logical fallacy, no less), and I was modded down as "overrated" and "flamebait." For politely and accurately detailing a position? Hello?
Fair discussion has no place on Slashdot, and that's the last time I'll try it. It's all about groupthink here.
That being said, Java has no way of hinting to the compiler "this is going to be constant for a long while now", or "I'm going to run this loop a couple of million times in a bit, you might want to JIT it real good". Without those, the compiler doesn't really have a hope.
You're right, but that's not a problem with one certain method of JIT compiling: HotSpot's. HotSpot profiles the code as it runs, and decides the best way to compile something. It knows how often a test-and-branch will branch, and can arrange the native code accordingly.
There's an additional execution time hit at the beginning, but 1) it compiles faster code; and 2) it doesn't have to compile code that isn't executed.
You also failed to mention that a standard JIT compiler can make processor-specific optimizations that a normal compiler has no hope of making.
Then again, I've seen Java out-paced by many of these languages (most of which compile the program to byte-code at start-up faster than Java loads), which suggests to me that Java is just a poor interpreted language.
Most out-pacing from other interpreted languages is due to operation-specific optimizations that have nothing to do with the fact that either language is interpreted or JIT-compiled. (Or were you suggesting that these other languages are faster in everything?) I can't speak to Python or Perl, but I can give a Java vs. C++ example. Java's collection and string operations are much faster in the general case than the STL's, because of Java's choice of reference semantics and immutable strings. (Ironically - for people who accuse garbage collection of being a performance hog, anyway - it's the garbage collector that makes it possible.)
That some operations in other interpreted languages are faster than the same operation in Java doesn't really surprise me. I'd be much more surprised if any language were better at doing everything.