If a person doesn't take an interest in politics and inform himself about what the issues are that distinguish between the candidates, his opinion is of no value.
You might as well give him a coin to flip when he goes in the voting booth.
It's not the whole Earth that's getting warmer. The interior is cooling. The lower layers of the troposphere are warming, and maybe the top Copley feet of the land and oceans.
The average user NEVER installs an operating system at all nor should he want to or have to.
The user needs to run applications. He doesn't care what's under the hood.
But if you tell him that Linux suffers fewer virus attacks than Windows -- total yawnfest. He's not interested. That's something that should be taken care of behind the scenes without his involvement.
If you want to sell him on that advantage, you have to show him how obtrusive the virus scanning software really is and how it impedes him from getting to the tasks he wants to do with his computer. Displaying Powerpoints or sending email or browsing the web or fetching documents on the corporate server or designing airplane parts. Show him the things that he cares about work better and he's SOLD.
Don't brag about how easy it is to learn Linux. He doesn't WANT to learn Linux any more than he wants to learn Windows or MacOS.
No, Science is applied philosophy, aka the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method. It is _one_ way to acquire Truth. And like any process, it works well with certain types of inputs, and completely fails at others.
But it is NOT the _only_ process; however it happens to work well, and handle many inputs.
Many people ignore the fact that it is an _incomplete_ process. Ignoring the weaknesses of any system is the height of arrogance.
I have observed that the use of a captital T in Truth is anti-correlated to concern for standards of proof. It usually means that "I think I know things for which I have no evidence that I can show you."
Yes, there are certain categories of question that are not well-addressed by science. For example, "Is it a good idea to club baby seals to death so we can wear their fur?" or "Should I wear the pink socks or the blue ones with this blouse?" However, questions such as "Does drug candidate A reduce the symptoms of diabetes without killing the patient?" or "How to sea turtles navigate?" it works just fine.
If you're concerned with baby-seal or pink/blue class questions, you are going to have to resort to other methods and that's fine. Science is designed to make decisions based on facts.
For those of you who think the baby-seal question has a clear answer based on facts, I want to introduce some data of which you may not be aware:
1. My wife REALLY wants that fur coat. 2. I don't like seals much.
Ray Kurzweil likes to pop out his prediction that if the current rate of increase in life expectancy holds, then in 15 years time, human life expectancy will increase by more than 1 year per year.
So if you can hold out for another 15 years, maybe you will live forever.
Even if Kurzweil's claim were true, it wouldn't imply what he says it does. It would mean that people born in 2027 are likely to live a few years longer than people born in 2012.
But the basis of the claim is total BS. The rate of change of life expectancy is only about 4 years in the last 30, and the rate is decelerating.
It would be impressive just to keep us keep us on a almost one year improvement per 10 years track for more than a couple more decades.
That said, it's interesting to think about. Should we ever really come up with a technology to stop aging and age-related deaths, it would create a crisis. If people don't die, what do we do with babies?
I'd have done it myself if my mod points didn't vanish yesterday. I've certainly been the sort of geek who hasn't done well in communicating with others when it comes to technical matters. Despite years of bugging friends and family members to "just get a Mac" every time I had to give out free tech support, no one ever did because I didn't/couldn't articulate the reasons why this would be a good idea. I think I've learnt my lesson, and have been able to get people to at least start playing with *nix by actually *showing* how it's not so scary to use and how easy it is to run plenty of Windows software through WINE.
But showing users that it's (almost) as easy to use as Windows isn't good enough. You have to convince them that it's enough *better* for *their particular use case* than Windows and MacOS.
For most users, the fact that a whole bunch of stuff works right out of the box with little or no effort to bring it up is a huge selling point. The ability to buy almost any software title and have it work on Windows is a huge selling point. What's a few hours of lost work (or play) time worth to you? To the average user, it's worth more than the price of a commercial OS.
So I'll use my phone to search for the product by name. Do they really think we're dumb enough to think the fact that a search by SKU only turn up target stores means they're the only stores selling a known brand and model?
It seems obvious to me. They didn't have to use NBC's content to make their point, and Mitt Romney can certainly afford to license this or similar content that would make the same point. They WANT to be sued. That makes controversy you can't get any other way and makes BIG MEDIAâ the enemy of the Romney campaign.
That's red meat to the Republican base. Also, later when negative stories about Romney inevitably hit the press, the campaign will have poisoned the well.
Agreed. The problem, to the extent that schools can fix it, is with teachers. Fix or fire the bad ones, improve and hire better ones. But somebody has to make an assessment of how effective the teachers are and there need to be tools for that.
Excessive focus on individual students, ironically, detracts from the ability of states, districts and administrations to run schools that do the best possible job for students.
That's an awfully high price to pay for that capability, besides the fact that you can get a nuke there faster and orders of magnitude cheaper and pollution of enemy territory is generally the least of your concerns when wiping cities off the map.
I think that it has everything to do with the fact that most people will whore out their privacy and dignity in exchange for attention.
My irony meter just pegged.
I got into an online argument with a cheerleader instructor about how cheerleading was not a thinking person's sport, and she responded that my point was nullified because she was a cheerleader and has two master's degrees.
There are thinking person's sports?
Yeah, that was a class move, insulting the woman's job. Did anybody tell you cheereleading, like most sports and games, is for fun?
Ok, just so I am clear - day-to-day weather changes don't tell me anything about global anthropogenic climate, unless it seems warmer than usual? And when it's *cooler* than normal, that means either nothing (if it published in a "right wing" source), or it's ALSO proof that there is global anthropogenic climate change (if it's in a left wing echo chamber), right?
Sorry if I seem a little confused, I just want to understand the scientific method a little better.
Nothing can be done about your willfull ignorance and dishonesty. You have to fix that yourself.
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That's a typo. I meant to type "widely". The distance between the virtual keys on my phone is about a third the width of my finger.
A contextual spellchecker would flag the words "Windows wisely" as a probable typo.
If a person doesn't take an interest in politics and inform himself about what the issues are that distinguish between the candidates, his opinion is of no value.
You might as well give him a coin to flip when he goes in the voting booth.
It's not the whole Earth that's getting warmer. The interior is cooling. The lower layers of the troposphere are warming, and maybe the top Copley feet of the land and oceans.
Macs aren't immune. Getting users to install malware is easy, but why bother. Windows is easier and more wisely deployed.
Have they considered following the money trail and targetting the operators and clients for arrest or assassination?
Are we forgetting that Google is a for profit company and not a publicly owned system with a mission to overthrow oppression?
So you follow the money trail back one or two steps further to the guy that accepted money to send the spam and the operators of the botnet.
It's not that hard. The government knows how to do this. It's just not a high priority.
Am I the only guy that remembers the tech bubble bursting and taking all the dotcoms and the dumb money with it?
Got any recipes?
The average user NEVER installs an operating system at all nor should he want to or have to.
The user needs to run applications. He doesn't care what's under the hood.
But if you tell him that Linux suffers fewer virus attacks than Windows -- total yawnfest. He's not interested. That's something that should be taken care of behind the scenes without his involvement.
If you want to sell him on that advantage, you have to show him how obtrusive the virus scanning software really is and how it impedes him from getting to the tasks he wants to do with his computer. Displaying Powerpoints or sending email or browsing the web or fetching documents on the corporate server or designing airplane parts. Show him the things that he cares about work better and he's SOLD.
Don't brag about how easy it is to learn Linux. He doesn't WANT to learn Linux any more than he wants to learn Windows or MacOS.
No, Science is applied philosophy, aka the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method. It is _one_ way to acquire Truth. And like any process, it works well with certain types of inputs, and completely fails at others.
But it is NOT the _only_ process; however it happens to work well, and handle many inputs.
Many people ignore the fact that it is an _incomplete_ process. Ignoring the weaknesses of any system is the height of arrogance.
I have observed that the use of a captital T in Truth is anti-correlated to concern for standards of proof. It usually means that "I think I know things for which I have no evidence that I can show you."
Yes, there are certain categories of question that are not well-addressed by science. For example, "Is it a good idea to club baby seals to death so we can wear their fur?" or "Should I wear the pink socks or the blue ones with this blouse?" However, questions such as "Does drug candidate A reduce the symptoms of diabetes without killing the patient?" or "How to sea turtles navigate?" it works just fine.
If you're concerned with baby-seal or pink/blue class questions, you are going to have to resort to other methods and that's fine. Science is designed to make decisions based on facts.
For those of you who think the baby-seal question has a clear answer based on facts, I want to introduce some data of which you may not be aware:
1. My wife REALLY wants that fur coat.
2. I don't like seals much.
Ray Kurzweil likes to pop out his prediction that if the current rate of increase in life expectancy holds, then in 15 years time, human life expectancy will increase by more than 1 year per year.
So if you can hold out for another 15 years, maybe you will live forever.
Even if Kurzweil's claim were true, it wouldn't imply what he says it does. It would mean that people born in 2027 are likely to live a few years longer than people born in 2012.
But the basis of the claim is total BS. The rate of change of life expectancy is only about 4 years in the last 30, and the rate is decelerating.
It would be impressive just to keep us keep us on a almost one year improvement per 10 years track for more than a couple more decades.
That said, it's interesting to think about. Should we ever really come up with a technology to stop aging and age-related deaths, it would create a crisis. If people don't die, what do we do with babies?
I'd have done it myself if my mod points didn't vanish yesterday. I've certainly been the sort of geek who hasn't done well in communicating with others when it comes to technical matters. Despite years of bugging friends and family members to "just get a Mac" every time I had to give out free tech support, no one ever did because I didn't/couldn't articulate the reasons why this would be a good idea. I think I've learnt my lesson, and have been able to get people to at least start playing with *nix by actually *showing* how it's not so scary to use and how easy it is to run plenty of Windows software through WINE.
But showing users that it's (almost) as easy to use as Windows isn't good enough. You have to convince them that it's enough *better* for *their particular use case* than Windows and MacOS.
For most users, the fact that a whole bunch of stuff works right out of the box with little or no effort to bring it up is a huge selling point. The ability to buy almost any software title and have it work on Windows is a huge selling point. What's a few hours of lost work (or play) time worth to you? To the average user, it's worth more than the price of a commercial OS.
No, iPads and iPhones are being accepted in IT because of IT people who want their own iPads to work on the corporate network.
Since when have IT pros made policy based on user desires?
I'm betting the could do it for less than $25 miliion.
blame "a contractor".
Especially when the contractor WAS negligent.
So I'll use my phone to search for the product by name. Do they really think we're dumb enough to think the fact that a search by SKU only turn up target stores means they're the only stores selling a known brand and model?
It seems obvious to me. They didn't have to use NBC's content to make their point, and Mitt Romney can certainly afford to license this or similar content that would make the same point. They WANT to be sued. That makes controversy you can't get any other way and makes BIG MEDIAâ the enemy of the Romney campaign.
That's red meat to the Republican base. Also, later when negative stories about Romney inevitably hit the press, the campaign will have poisoned the well.
Agreed. The problem, to the extent that schools can fix it, is with teachers. Fix or fire the bad ones, improve and hire better ones. But somebody has to make an assessment of how effective the teachers are and there need to be tools for that.
Excessive focus on individual students, ironically, detracts from the ability of states, districts and administrations to run schools that do the best possible job for students.
Through a bug it will track their physical location, everything they say, and what websites they visit. And their parents while at it.
That's what Facebook is for.
Because the schemes the are cooking up would be paid for by somebody else.
That's an awfully high price to pay for that capability, besides the fact that you can get a nuke there faster and orders of magnitude cheaper and pollution of enemy territory is generally the least of your concerns when wiping cities off the map.
Probably not, but they might find 10000 people interesting enough to listen to.
I think that it has everything to do with the fact that most people will whore out their privacy and dignity in exchange for attention.
My irony meter just pegged.
I got into an online argument with a cheerleader instructor about how cheerleading was not a thinking person's sport, and she responded that my point was nullified because she was a cheerleader and has two master's degrees.
There are thinking person's sports?
Yeah, that was a class move, insulting the woman's job. Did anybody tell you cheereleading, like most sports and games, is for fun?
Ok, just so I am clear - day-to-day weather changes don't tell me anything about global anthropogenic climate, unless it seems warmer than usual? And when it's *cooler* than normal, that means either nothing (if it published in a "right wing" source), or it's ALSO proof that there is global anthropogenic climate change (if it's in a left wing echo chamber), right?
Sorry if I seem a little confused, I just want to understand the scientific method a little better.
Nothing can be done about your willfull ignorance and dishonesty.
You have to fix that yourself.