That's very similar to Farfegnugen's Law of Inverse Transients relating the comb structure of the polymassive decay groupings to the unthorped resident pressures:
S_{pD0^(42e)}pi=23^ln(volume)
Oh, crap, why don't you admit that we both just made this stuff up to sound intelligent on Slashdot?
Sure. First, I'm a conservative, for reasons too numerous and lengthy to splatter all over a deeply-nested Slashdot reply. With that in mind:
I don't like John Kerry at all. I disagree with him on many issues, and don't find him to be an acceptable choice for office. I absolutely despise John Edwards' line of work and refuse to vote for a malpractice lawyer.
Ralph Nader is right out.
I disagree with some of George Bush's actions - please don't believe that I'm a blind supporter. However, the aggregate of his decisions and actions is closer to how I would like things to be done than I think John Kerry's corresponding decisions and actions would have been. In other words, I don't think he's perfect, but I believe that he's substantially better than the other realistic candidate for President.
Michael Badnarik is an interesting candidate. I see him much like I described Bush: although I don't agree with him completely, I could probably vote for him in good conscience. However, I won't be doing so this year. Since we don't use Condorcet or approval voting, I have to vote for the candidate I like that I think has the most realistic chance of winning. Regardless of how else I may feel about him, Badnarik isn't that guy. I wish him well, though.
Does that answer your question or are you still curious about something in particular?
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you're honestly asking. The following is a point-by-point list of why conservatives would disagree with your conclusions. You can and should make up your own mind about whether these reasons are correct, but I think they're fairly representative of how conservatives see the issues.
The ACLU is as conservative an organization as you can find. All they want to do is maintain the freedoms put forth in the consititution.
We believe that the constitutional right to bear arms is primarily a collective one, intended mainly to protect the right of the states to maintain militias to assure their own freedom and security against the central government. In today's world, that idea is somewhat anachronistic [...]
Yes, the ACLU defends freedoms - but only the ones that they think are important. So does the NRA, for that matter, but I don't hear them claim otherwise.
Reproductive choice? Since when did deciding if you want to have children or not become liberal?
The word "choice", in the context of "reproduction", almost always refers to abortion. Do you think those "Right To Choose" bumper stickers refer to a woman's right to take birth control pills? Almost noone is anti-contraceptive, but "choice" rarely refers to that. Abortion rights are pretty much the sole province of liberals. Conservatives tend to be against abortion.
Planned Parenthood? Not Liberal. %98 of their work involves women's health, STD prevention and education, and reproductive education.
I suspect that 98% is a bit high. At any rate, much of the rest goes toward performing abortions or lobbying for the right to do so.
Feminism? When did sexual equality become a "liberal" agenda item. I thought it was an ammendment to the constitution.
Most conservatives (all that I personally know, anyway) believe in equality between the sexes. To many conservatives, feminism goes beyond "women are equal" and into "women are inherently superior". To them, this is as blatantly wrong as the idea that men are inherently superior. No, sexual equality is not an amendment, although an attempt to make it so failed in the late 70s / early 80s.
So... I guess your saying conservatism means giving up your rights and freedoms, losing control over your reproductive organs, and keeping females locked barefoot and pregant in the kitchen?
That is an utterly bizarre take on conservative beliefs. If many non-conservatives share your misunderstanding, then I fear we'll never be able to work together.
Do you live so far out in the boonies that there are no stations?
I do. My listening choices are:
Country music x 5
Classic rock
NPR
Clearchannel local
Clearchannel Sioux City
Clearchannel Omaha
AM talk
AM sports
AM country music x 23
I listen to a fair amount of talk (AM and NPR), but there's nothing else here for me. I keep getting this close (hold thumb and index finger close together) to getting a Sirius receiver, but I keep backing down and buying more random stuff from CD Baby.
Ironically, I have more (and cheaper!) Internet connectivity options than when I lived in a much larger city. Other than the dearth of music I'm interested in, I've very happy with my environment. I'd much rather subscribe to an alternative music source than move to someplace with decent stations (that haven't (yet) been bought by Clearchannel).
So what you're saying is that you go to church and are willing to take a leap of faith that your religion is the right one above all others.
Yes.
Show me a Mensa member willing to admit that it indicates this and nothing more and I will show you a socially more intelligent person.
So you're framing your definition of "social intelligent" in terms of a person's agreement with your own opinion. Interesting.
At any rate, the usual answer you'll hear from Mensans is that IQ tests are not strongly correlated with a person's perceived intelligence, but that they're better than nothing at predicting a person's ability to solve intellectual challenges. Anything above that is the opinion of specific individuals.
You've read Feynman and Hawking. Great. What exactly does that add to your social/political knowledge?
Profane Mo-Fo said, "Kerry supporters have got more going on in the brain-use department than Bush supporters." He didn't restrict the problem domain in that statement; he explicitly stated that Kerry fans are smarter than those who favor Bush.
And based on all the information you've given above, it has made you smarter than 99.8% of the people voting for Kerry or Bush?
Yes, if you're willing to accept that there's at least some correlation between IQ and intellect. In terms of probability distributions, my IQ ranks in the top.1-something percent. If you can think of a more quantifiable measurement of intelligence, then I'll be happy to discuss it with you.
In this case, it's absolutely more correct that Kerry supporters have got more going on in the brain-use department than Bush supporters. You can complain all you want, hypothesize all sorts of things, but you can't argue with facts.
Must... not... respond... to... troll...
Ah, hell with it.
I'm a church-going Republican who is also a member of Mensa, scored a near-perfect on my ACT, has a compsci degree with a physics minor, and is currently employed as a Senior Software Engineer. My most recent reading material has been Feynman's "Six Easy Pieces" and "Six Not-So Easy Pieces", Joyce's "Ulysses", and Hawking's "A Brief History Of Time".
Statistically speaking, I'm smarter than 99.8% of Kerry supporters (or Bush supporters, or apolitical couch potatoes), and I still plan to vote for Bush. Guess that blows your theory out of the water, huh?
Yes, you can point to idiot conservatives. I can also point to idiot liberals. There are plenty of stupid (and smart!) people on either end of the spectrum, and we'd all be well served to remember that.
If I were write an article that Bob Jones University published a report that conservatives are more in tune with the events and world attitudes surrounding the war in Iraq, then I could probably get it published at freerepublic.com.
The notion that liberals and conservatives perceive the world differently seems fairly obvious. The rest just seems like flamebait.
Seriously, given either political viewpoint, I'm sure I can find plenty of facts and "world attitudes" that would give strong support to that position. If the President announced that the facts on Iraq agree with his points and that polls show that a worldwide majority agree with him, would you accept his word? If not, why should the reverse be true?
virtually assuring that schools turn out a mass of BS's who are monolingual in whatever language industry just quit using.
What crap schools have you been hanging around? I graduated from the small CompSci college of a large state university and had to be fluent in C++, ML, 68k and x86 assembler, Mathematica, and a couple of invented languages to get through the core curriculum (plus Java for an optional class). Granted, it was a very highly rated small-college-of-large-state-U., but it's not like we're talking about Caltech or MIT.
If your school graduates students who only know one or two languages (and those being the industry favorites du jour), then your school sucked. Sorry 'bout that. I hope the diploma at least got your foot in a door or two.
One of the mid-semester programming assignments in my freshman compsci course was writing a templated doubly-linked list class in C++. I completely, utterly understood the concept, and I could probably have written it in no time in 68k or x86 assembler, but that homework kicked my butt.
The hardest part was trying to figure out when to use '.' versus '->', and the always-fun '*' versus '&'. I knew what I was trying to say, but trying to figure out how to express it in valid C++ syntax was an absolute killer at a time when I was still very new to the language. I wish our department head had discovered Python at that point.
On the other hand, it did significantly thin out the herd of would-be compsci students. I suppose that was a good thing, maybe.
Well, there's a lot of difference between general correlation and direct causation.:)
If it makes you feel any better, I'm a 6'0" male wearing jeans, warm socks, heavy shoes, a t-shirt, and a long-sleeve flannel shirt and I'm freezing my tail off in my 68 degree office. Being cold at work isn't strictly a woman's plight.
There's another strong physical reason: women tend to be shorter than men.
Consider that body mass is roughly proportional to the cube of height, while skin area is proportional to the square of height ("If you'll assume that a person is a sphere to make the math easier..."). Therefore, the taller a person is, the higher their mass-to-surface area ratio is likely to be. In other words, the smaller you are, the more efficiently you radiate heat.
In short, it's not surprising that a smaller (on average) woman will tend to feel colder than a larger (on average) man. I'd expect a 6'0" woman to be roughly as comfortable as an equivalently sized man at a given temperature.
Some page out there has a really nice list of things that MySQL will do with bad data. Besides trunucating values, it has some interesting ways of handling bad numeric values.
You were thinking of this page. It convinced me to avoid MySQL completely.
Here's the deal: you have to put the "integrity layer" somewhere, unless you're OK with every other page load returning a 500 error. So, the real question is whether you want to put that layer close to the data (eg with foreign keys and other restrictions inside the database) or close to the user (eg with a lot of code in PHP or other languages not ideally suited to such things).
For example, say that you're running a shopping cart and want to guarantee that each available item has a unique identifier. Is it more efficient to make the "itemid" field a unique key, or to fire off two queries every time you want to add an item: the first to attempt to fetch a row with the newly-generated itemid and the second to insert the new data? Even more importantly, how thread-safe is your website code? Can you prove that it's impossible for someone to insert an itemid the instant after you've tried to verify that the exact same itemid hasn't already been used?
Again, you must and will put some sort of integrity checking into your system, unless you're really curious how well unemployment insurance pays in your city. Do you want to hand-roll your own half-assed solution, or would it be easier to say "here's a list of constraints, Mr. Database! Make sure I don't accidentally break them, would you?"
Whoever creates a small consumer-oriented cell phone signal jammer should win the Nobel Prize.
That would be wonderful! And when the patient my wife did surgery on early that day develops complications, and spends an inordinate amount of time trying to reach her cell phone, and eventually goes to the ER where other doctors discover a rare but life-threatening condition, I have to ask: do you want to be a co-defendant, or is your lawyer good enough that the patient and my wife can both sue you directly?
Or how 'bout this: your unlicensed RF transmitter just nailed a guy's pacemaker. Fortunately, in most states you'll only get manslaughter so you should be out of prison within a decade or so.
Man, do people around here ever think through the consequences of their actions beyond "OMGLOL! THAT IS TEH 1EE7!!1!!!1"?
While your little toy was scanning through the codes for Panaphonic and Sorny, it hit the code for my satellite receiver's "One-Touch(tm) Pay-Per-View Ordering". This turned the channel on the TV in my family restaurant to "Hot Latex Vixens In Heat", billed me $39.95, and caused my clientele to sue me for sexual harassment (because hey, this is America, and there's bound to be a trial lawyer or two around at any given moment).
How long did it take the doctor to extract your remote control from your ass, where I implanted it with a work boot four hours ago? Do they expect a complete recovery? Did they find your teeth?
Seriously, this seems like a hideously bad idea. If you knew that it would only enrage people by shutting off their electronics, then that would be one thing. However, being responsible for a whole range of unexpected results because you thought it'd be funny to make a TGI Friday's slightly quieter is a whole different animal.
I did a lot of my group assignments with a friend, Aaron, who tended to solve problems in pretty much the same way as I did. We even worked through some of our individual assignments together by using each other as a sounding board (but doing the actual work ourselves).
On one particular assignment, Aaron and I turned in exactly the same code. I mean, down to the indenting and variable names ("numberOfCallers", "totalWaitTime", things like that). What probably saved us was the fact that we turned in our hardcopy program listings at about the same time, compared homework to see how we'd each approached the problem, and got completely shocked and flustered when we realized that we were probably getting ready to fail the course for plagiarism.
Fortunately, our teacher knew us well enough to believe our hasty and obviously on-the-spot explanation and let it slide. If we'd been freshmen who didn't know our professors, or if we hadn't caught the problem ourselves before the teacher found it, I'd probably be posting this to Fark from my Assistant Manager's cubicle instead of Slashdot from my Senior Programmer's office.
It's because you really can't copy Python from the browser and paste it into a text editor!
That's absolutely ludicrous. You should be using <pre> tags around your code anyway, and those preserve Python indenting every bit as well as Perl, PHP, and Ruby formatting.
If you haven't found Python on the web, then you're simply not looking in the right places.
It also means you cannot take advantage of the auto-indenting feature of editors.
That's a very legitimate concern - if you're using Notepad. If you use something more reasonable like Vim, Emacs, Kate, Eclipse, or any other modern programming editor, then you need to spend two minutes learning how to enable Python indenting rules.
For example, in Kate you can highlight the block and hit <tab> to indent the block or <shift-tab> to unindent. If your editor doesn't offer similar facilities, then it's time to upgrade.
The magic 10 appears in GNUstep's current 1.10.x release
I'm skeptical, but I guess that's possible.
and in Apple's Mac OS X 'Cocoa' release.
Um, sure. Last year I opened an app that ran in MacOS 9, named in homage to OpenStep's ninth birthday and the fact that OS X would finish making it completely obsolete. Apple must've been smoking crack when they released System 7 to honor OpenStep's minus-third birthday.
Slashdot Mirror
Except for things like USB and Firewire that were supported first by BSD and Linux later (sometimes by directly porting the BSD drivers).
I agree with you in general, but neither system is the clear leader at supporting new technologies.
S_{pD0^(42e)}pi=23^ln(volume)
Oh, crap, why don't you admit that we both just made this stuff up to sound intelligent on Slashdot?
I don't like John Kerry at all. I disagree with him on many issues, and don't find him to be an acceptable choice for office. I absolutely despise John Edwards' line of work and refuse to vote for a malpractice lawyer.
Ralph Nader is right out.
I disagree with some of George Bush's actions - please don't believe that I'm a blind supporter. However, the aggregate of his decisions and actions is closer to how I would like things to be done than I think John Kerry's corresponding decisions and actions would have been. In other words, I don't think he's perfect, but I believe that he's substantially better than the other realistic candidate for President.
Michael Badnarik is an interesting candidate. I see him much like I described Bush: although I don't agree with him completely, I could probably vote for him in good conscience. However, I won't be doing so this year. Since we don't use Condorcet or approval voting, I have to vote for the candidate I like that I think has the most realistic chance of winning. Regardless of how else I may feel about him, Badnarik isn't that guy. I wish him well, though.
Does that answer your question or are you still curious about something in particular?
In their own words (editing to cut unrelated material):
Yes, the ACLU defends freedoms - but only the ones that they think are important. So does the NRA, for that matter, but I don't hear them claim otherwise.
Reproductive choice? Since when did deciding if you want to have children or not become liberal?
The word "choice", in the context of "reproduction", almost always refers to abortion. Do you think those "Right To Choose" bumper stickers refer to a woman's right to take birth control pills? Almost noone is anti-contraceptive, but "choice" rarely refers to that. Abortion rights are pretty much the sole province of liberals. Conservatives tend to be against abortion.
Planned Parenthood? Not Liberal. %98 of their work involves women's health, STD prevention and education, and reproductive education.
I suspect that 98% is a bit high. At any rate, much of the rest goes toward performing abortions or lobbying for the right to do so.
Feminism? When did sexual equality become a "liberal" agenda item. I thought it was an ammendment to the constitution.
Most conservatives (all that I personally know, anyway) believe in equality between the sexes. To many conservatives, feminism goes beyond "women are equal" and into "women are inherently superior". To them, this is as blatantly wrong as the idea that men are inherently superior. No, sexual equality is not an amendment, although an attempt to make it so failed in the late 70s / early 80s.
So... I guess your saying conservatism means giving up your rights and freedoms, losing control over your reproductive organs, and keeping females locked barefoot and pregant in the kitchen?
That is an utterly bizarre take on conservative beliefs. If many non-conservatives share your misunderstanding, then I fear we'll never be able to work together.
I do. My listening choices are:
I listen to a fair amount of talk (AM and NPR), but there's nothing else here for me. I keep getting this close (hold thumb and index finger close together) to getting a Sirius receiver, but I keep backing down and buying more random stuff from CD Baby.
Ironically, I have more (and cheaper!) Internet connectivity options than when I lived in a much larger city. Other than the dearth of music I'm interested in, I've very happy with my environment. I'd much rather subscribe to an alternative music source than move to someplace with decent stations (that haven't (yet) been bought by Clearchannel).
I was not responding to the article. I was replying to PMF's statement:
You do realize that, in essence, your post supports the results!
Ironically, you're criticizing me for a perceived non-sequitur, when the reality is that you mis-read what I was replying to. Absolutely hilarious.
Indeed. :)
Yes.
Show me a Mensa member willing to admit that it indicates this and nothing more and I will show you a socially more intelligent person.
So you're framing your definition of "social intelligent" in terms of a person's agreement with your own opinion. Interesting.
At any rate, the usual answer you'll hear from Mensans is that IQ tests are not strongly correlated with a person's perceived intelligence, but that they're better than nothing at predicting a person's ability to solve intellectual challenges. Anything above that is the opinion of specific individuals.
You've read Feynman and Hawking. Great. What exactly does that add to your social/political knowledge?
Profane Mo-Fo said, "Kerry supporters have got more going on in the brain-use department than Bush supporters." He didn't restrict the problem domain in that statement; he explicitly stated that Kerry fans are smarter than those who favor Bush.
And based on all the information you've given above, it has made you smarter than 99.8% of the people voting for Kerry or Bush?
Yes, if you're willing to accept that there's at least some correlation between IQ and intellect. In terms of probability distributions, my IQ ranks in the top .1-something percent. If you can think of a more quantifiable measurement of intelligence, then I'll be happy to discuss it with you.
Must... not... respond... to... troll...
Ah, hell with it.
I'm a church-going Republican who is also a member of Mensa, scored a near-perfect on my ACT, has a compsci degree with a physics minor, and is currently employed as a Senior Software Engineer. My most recent reading material has been Feynman's "Six Easy Pieces" and "Six Not-So Easy Pieces", Joyce's "Ulysses", and Hawking's "A Brief History Of Time".
Statistically speaking, I'm smarter than 99.8% of Kerry supporters (or Bush supporters, or apolitical couch potatoes), and I still plan to vote for Bush. Guess that blows your theory out of the water, huh?
Yes, you can point to idiot conservatives. I can also point to idiot liberals. There are plenty of stupid (and smart!) people on either end of the spectrum, and we'd all be well served to remember that.
Good grief! If the Ford Foundation isn't liberal in your opinion, then what is?
According to the recent grants list on their website, they've recently donated to:
Regardless of your opinions of those groups, you have to agree that no conservative foundation would ever be likely to donate money to them.
The notion that liberals and conservatives perceive the world differently seems fairly obvious. The rest just seems like flamebait.
Seriously, given either political viewpoint, I'm sure I can find plenty of facts and "world attitudes" that would give strong support to that position. If the President announced that the facts on Iraq agree with his points and that polls show that a worldwide majority agree with him, would you accept his word? If not, why should the reverse be true?
What crap schools have you been hanging around? I graduated from the small CompSci college of a large state university and had to be fluent in C++, ML, 68k and x86 assembler, Mathematica, and a couple of invented languages to get through the core curriculum (plus Java for an optional class). Granted, it was a very highly rated small-college-of-large-state-U., but it's not like we're talking about Caltech or MIT.
If your school graduates students who only know one or two languages (and those being the industry favorites du jour), then your school sucked. Sorry 'bout that. I hope the diploma at least got your foot in a door or two.
Ouch! I bow to your superior horror!
The hardest part was trying to figure out when to use '.' versus '->', and the always-fun '*' versus '&'. I knew what I was trying to say, but trying to figure out how to express it in valid C++ syntax was an absolute killer at a time when I was still very new to the language. I wish our department head had discovered Python at that point.
On the other hand, it did significantly thin out the herd of would-be compsci students. I suppose that was a good thing, maybe.
If it makes you feel any better, I'm a 6'0" male wearing jeans, warm socks, heavy shoes, a t-shirt, and a long-sleeve flannel shirt and I'm freezing my tail off in my 68 degree office. Being cold at work isn't strictly a woman's plight.
Consider that body mass is roughly proportional to the cube of height, while skin area is proportional to the square of height ("If you'll assume that a person is a sphere to make the math easier..."). Therefore, the taller a person is, the higher their mass-to-surface area ratio is likely to be. In other words, the smaller you are, the more efficiently you radiate heat.
In short, it's not surprising that a smaller (on average) woman will tend to feel colder than a larger (on average) man. I'd expect a 6'0" woman to be roughly as comfortable as an equivalently sized man at a given temperature.
If that were true, then why isn't there a corresponding set of industrially advanced countries in the cool south?
You were thinking of this page. It convinced me to avoid MySQL completely.
For example, say that you're running a shopping cart and want to guarantee that each available item has a unique identifier. Is it more efficient to make the "itemid" field a unique key, or to fire off two queries every time you want to add an item: the first to attempt to fetch a row with the newly-generated itemid and the second to insert the new data? Even more importantly, how thread-safe is your website code? Can you prove that it's impossible for someone to insert an itemid the instant after you've tried to verify that the exact same itemid hasn't already been used?
Again, you must and will put some sort of integrity checking into your system, unless you're really curious how well unemployment insurance pays in your city. Do you want to hand-roll your own half-assed solution, or would it be easier to say "here's a list of constraints, Mr. Database! Make sure I don't accidentally break them, would you?"
That would be wonderful! And when the patient my wife did surgery on early that day develops complications, and spends an inordinate amount of time trying to reach her cell phone, and eventually goes to the ER where other doctors discover a rare but life-threatening condition, I have to ask: do you want to be a co-defendant, or is your lawyer good enough that the patient and my wife can both sue you directly?
Or how 'bout this: your unlicensed RF transmitter just nailed a guy's pacemaker. Fortunately, in most states you'll only get manslaughter so you should be out of prison within a decade or so.
Man, do people around here ever think through the consequences of their actions beyond "OMGLOL! THAT IS TEH 1EE7!!1!!!1"?
How long did it take the doctor to extract your remote control from your ass, where I implanted it with a work boot four hours ago? Do they expect a complete recovery? Did they find your teeth?
Seriously, this seems like a hideously bad idea. If you knew that it would only enrage people by shutting off their electronics, then that would be one thing. However, being responsible for a whole range of unexpected results because you thought it'd be funny to make a TGI Friday's slightly quieter is a whole different animal.
On one particular assignment, Aaron and I turned in exactly the same code. I mean, down to the indenting and variable names ("numberOfCallers", "totalWaitTime", things like that). What probably saved us was the fact that we turned in our hardcopy program listings at about the same time, compared homework to see how we'd each approached the problem, and got completely shocked and flustered when we realized that we were probably getting ready to fail the course for plagiarism.
Fortunately, our teacher knew us well enough to believe our hasty and obviously on-the-spot explanation and let it slide. If we'd been freshmen who didn't know our professors, or if we hadn't caught the problem ourselves before the teacher found it, I'd probably be posting this to Fark from my Assistant Manager's cubicle instead of Slashdot from my Senior Programmer's office.
That's absolutely ludicrous. You should be using <pre> tags around your code anyway, and those preserve Python indenting every bit as well as Perl, PHP, and Ruby formatting.
If you haven't found Python on the web, then you're simply not looking in the right places.
That's a very legitimate concern - if you're using Notepad. If you use something more reasonable like Vim, Emacs, Kate, Eclipse, or any other modern programming editor, then you need to spend two minutes learning how to enable Python indenting rules.
For example, in Kate you can highlight the block and hit <tab> to indent the block or <shift-tab> to unindent. If your editor doesn't offer similar facilities, then it's time to upgrade.
I'm skeptical, but I guess that's possible.
and in Apple's Mac OS X 'Cocoa' release.
Um, sure. Last year I opened an app that ran in MacOS 9, named in homage to OpenStep's ninth birthday and the fact that OS X would finish making it completely obsolete. Apple must've been smoking crack when they released System 7 to honor OpenStep's minus-third birthday.
Do I count as an Honorable Ancient One, or at least a Mildly Inoffensive Old Guy?