I've heard the correlation between crime decline and X argued, where X was:
The funny thing is that you didn't mention any of the four reasons (values of X) I have heard:
Wars (forget where I heard this one). The theory being that the population group that does most of the crime (poor young males) are busy carrying rifles overseas.
Low unemployment (The consensus reason I hear from "experts" on the radio and TV).
Roe v. Wade (Steven Levitt's Freakonomics). The somewhat ugly idea being that the 90's is when we would have seen the first kids who were aborted after Roe reach the age where such people start committing crimes.
More police on the streets (Levitt again, although in this case he didn't present any backup so I'm suspicious)
The last I heard (early 90's) the linguists studying New World languages were postulating 3 major migrations.
I'd put "major" in quotes myself. The straight itself really isn't that much of a barrier to humans. The native people currently living on both sides ("Aleuts") are very closely related, and take their boats back and forth across the date line (or US/Russia border, if you prefer) all the time.
If hollywood can screw up game movies with single paragraph plots, what the hell will they do with a game that HAS NO PLOT?
Simple: You go with the old standard "human gets trapped inside virtual/alternate/fictional reality universe, and must find a way out". For examples, see Tron, Chronicles of Narnia, Spy Kids, Pleasentville (particularly this one), Remote Control, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and many many more.
1. Appeasement would never deter a bully. 2. A 'dork' or 'loser', or apparent dork or loser, standing up to a bully, enjoys the element of surprise. 3. Courage is a measure of internal fortitude and heart, not a measure of physical prowess. 4. Throughout history, there have been many instances in which courage carried the day against physically superior force.
Ask the Sioux how that philosophy ended up working out for them.
Painful childbirth was eve's punishment for eating the apple, I love pointing this out to pregnant Christians when they discuss epidurals.
Can I, as a practicing Christian, make a further suggestion? Matthew 6:4-5 is a great reference whenever school prayer comes up. Read literally it is a direct order (from Jesus no less) to not pray in public.
And when ye pray, you shall not be as the hypocrites, that love to stand and pray in the synagogues and corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men: Amen I say to you, they have received their reward. But thou when thou shalt pray, enter into thy chamber, and having shut the door, pray to thy Father in secret, and thy father who seeth in secret will repay thee.
I'd ask for the original CD and they'd tell me "Don't you have a copy?"
According to TFA, original media doesn't matter to the BSA. What they want is your original reciept. If you don't still have that you just as out of compliance. Meanwhile, if your media-less wonders have their reciepts, they are just peachy.
I've often pondered the idea of a series following a Star Trek group of sergeants. Like an away team, following orders.
I really like this idea. An added bonus is that they'd never have trouble with contract negotiations, as it would be a new set of red-shirted actors every episode!
Imagine an outbound firewall that poses a series of questions to anyone who tries to use it.
Hmmm. Its been nearly 20 years since I had any reason to solve a quadratic, so I'm not sure I could still do it. I don't know that I count, but surely there are loads of quite reasonable and intelligent people who would be filtered out this way.
On the other hand, both Theodore Kaczynski and Bobby Fischer would probably pass your tests with flying colors. Wouldn't getting rid of all us idiots and allowing in only geniuses like them make Slashdot more interesting!
There was an easy way that they could have avoided this problem: have the translator check its own translation by feeding in the translation and having it translated back into the original language. It would have become immediately obvious that the automatic translator doesn't work and that they should hire a real person to do it. Incidentally, a radio show used to run a music contest where they translated English lyrics to some other language and then back into English. The goal was to figure out what the original song was. And it could be quite hard unless you know the song by heart.
That will never give you coherent results, as information is lost in both steps.
For reference, I sent your post through Babelfish to Dutch and back, and here's the result:
There was an easy manner that they this problem could have avoided: the translator control has to its own feeding translation in the translation and has translated it in the original language. It immediately clear become would be that the automatic translator does not work and that they a real person would have engage to do it. Moreover, a radio show which is used to state where a music game in functioning they English lyric poems to one or other other language and then in English translated. The aim was proposal from what the original song was. And it rather hard is able be unless you know the song by heart.
Everyone we don't like but have no excuse to bully is called nuts. Kim Jong-il is craaazy cause he's... wait, why again? Cause he's short and wears sunglasses? Man, that guy's nuts!
You are so blinded by your hatred for America that you completely ignore the fact that N. Korea's population is starving in the dark while their army eats well.
I'm really really sick of people accusing anyone who wants to improve America as "hating" it. Politics aside, its a crappy way to carry out a discussion. Where does this silly logic end? Does the GP get to postulate that you in fact hate cute kittens, and thus your opinions should be ignored (thereby re-enabling his)?
That being said, the GP did pick a horrible example in North Korea. The examples are legion, but a good one is their long history of kidnapping people just for the heck of it. My personal favorite is the film director and his wife who were kidnapped and forced to make movies for Fearless Leader for several years. I mean really, who would risk an international incident like that just to get a particular director to make films for them? I'd almost believe it from a Bond villain, but not from a real-life world leader.
Why can't Pittsburgh, the host of the winners of the DARPA competition, get some antique PC lovin'? All we got is washing machine engines.
That doesn't put you out of antique PC lovin'. How do you think antique hard drives rotated their platters?:-)
As a bonus, you could use specific patterns of I/O's to physically move the units around the machine room. If you have two of them, and two programmers, you have a race!
When trying to convince people of the dangers of government control, hyperbole like this doesn't help. A US citizen still has considerably more rights than a Chinese citizen.
Are you serious? The best you can do is compare us to the People's Republic of China and say we aren't less free than them yet?
I'm actually more depressed about this than I was before I read your post. Thanks a lot.:-(
Ok, what am I missing? The states want different (stricter) regulations regarding the greenhouse gas producers (autos and power plants). Why does the EPA have an issue with that
The EPA, like all federal agencies, is run by Presidental appointees. Let's take a look at who those appointees have been...
We started with Christine Todd Whittman, republican governor from (relatively liberal) New Jersy. She resigned in protest when the VP's office insisted on allowing power plants to be built w/o pollution controls, in violation of US law that he and the President swore on their bibles to uphold.
She was replaced with Mike Leavitt, a far-right wing governor of deep-red Utah. His main qualification for the job was making his state the country's second largest producer of toxic waste (while being 37th in population), and of course a demonstrated antipathy towards federal environmental regulation.
When Mr. Leavitt was promoted to HHS, the next (and current) appointee was Steve Johnson, a longtime EPA employee known chiefly for his warm relationship with the pesticide industry. He had a pet study advocating, I shit you not, testing pesticides on toddlers. In a rare show of its elusive backbone, congress held his nomination until he killed it. He did so only when it became clear he wouldn't get the job otherwise. They should have spiked his nomination anyway though. He pushed through a similar pro-pesticide study, over objections of his own staffers, as soon as he got the job.
So, I ask you, who does this EPA really serve? Given a choice of carrying out an environmental law or helping out a bunch of power companies, which do you think they are going to pick?
So before convincing me it is true, tell me how it can be falsified
It can be falsified easily. Show that there seems to be no relation (or perhaps an inverse relation) between mutations that become ubiquitous in a species in a given environment and said mutation's fitness for that environment. For instance, if an individual fish has a mutation that makes it slow in an environment where it has lots of fast predators, are we just as likely to see that gene slowly taking over the gene pool for all fish in that environment as not? There are lots of other experiments you could come up with. Go ahead try one.
I will warn you that lots of others have already done this though. The weight of such gathered evidence in favor of natural selection is frankly crushing. Good luck.
If Darwin's theory of evolution was correct, which says that meaningful information emerges from randomness, we would turn on our computers, fill the memory with random bytes, and watch programs emerge by changing bytes at random
We do. Its called Genetic Programming. Its not the typical way to program, but it can be useful in situations where you have an optimization problem that you'd like solved without needing to involve the program's designer in the annoying grut work of manually tuning the program to do it.
Does this mean you just proved evolution correct to your own satisfaction? Good job! Go tell the others.:-)
is it possible that a world containing religious people is actually a "better" society than a world full of atheists?
Yes. Its also possible that it is worse. Perhaps we should investigate before throwing guesses on the matter around no?
Back in the 70's I heard about a study on moral behavior (bankrolled by several churches) that found almost no difference between church attendees and non. What little difference they did find was in favor of the non-churchgoers (but supposedly down in the noise). However, I'd believe it. I go every week myself, and like to flatter myself that I'm a moral person. However, I have quite a few relatives who go to evangelical Calvinist churches. This means they believe that post-baptisim (when they are born again), they are literally destined for Heaven (see http://www.allaboutgod.com/once-saved-always-saved.htm for a defense of this idea). Nothing they can do will change this. Everything they ever will do has already been forgiven. Couple this with the belief that the rest of us are destined for Hell (no matter what we do, short of taking their brand baptisim, and you do not exactly have a formula for social responsibility. For example, playing any kind of game with them is a total drag, as they have no problem whatsoever with stealing extra money from the bank, moving pieces while you aren't looking, etc.
The Earth's people evolved into a world of mixed beliefs (some religious, some not), which could be argued to be the survival of the fittest idea or world. The mixed-belief world appears to be the "fittest" world,
OK. Here's a classic misunderstanding of evolution. It has nothing to do with making a "fittest world". It is only concerned with the individual. Any larger entities only come into the picture in as much as cooperating with them helps the individual to get his or her genetic material passed on. It is all about encouraging better competition on some level, not cooperation.
One could look at religion if it truly "evolved" in humans, as a really good way to organize unrelated people to fight other cultures, when otherwise their self-interest would be as much in fighting each other as in fighting that other culture.
also, if you're careful enough, Outlook and Outlook Express are perfectly usable on Windows, especially the newer versions
Outlook has been pretty safe since the XP release (Outlook 2002), and even the 2000 release with a patch.
I'm using the 2002 version on XP at work (no choice). I would not recommend anyone use this version, due to two show-stopper problems.
The first issue is reply quoting. Outlook still insists on its own insane quoting mechanisim, where the full text of the original message, with a large bulky summary of its header, is placed at the bottom of the message, with just a horizontal line on top to indicate "quoting". You can get it to do standard ">" quoting with a large amount of hunting through menus, but you still have to hack that header block down to reasonable size, and I found I can't trust it unless I view all email as plain text. The worst part of this is that almost no Outlook users do this, so you end up with the entire contents of the email thread tacked onto *every* email sent through your system. There are add-ins that claim to fix this, but of course they only work with certain versions of outlook, and I couldn't get any of them to work on mine.
The second issue is threading. Apparently Outlook refuses to use the email header entry that allows every other mail client in the world uses to properly thread messages. (Why would it bother, when the entire thread is inside every message?:-( ). This will make you persona-non-grata in any technical email list you subscribe to. Did they *ever* bother to fix this?
Anyway, as a technical user I consider either one of these issues show-stoppers. Outlook 2002 is *not* acceptable as a MUA.
Given that the software was free to begin with, I am not sure that its a good idea to pursue additional penalties (especially monetarily)
This is a wholly untrue statement. The "free" in Free Software has nothing to do with money. It is quite common (perhaps even more common) for the development of free software to be underwritten by a company who simply needs that software (or a feature in that software) for their own business needs. Pretty much the entirity of Apache has always been and continues to be built that way. A better example is ACT, a company whose entire business revolves around supporting the GNU Ada compiler, which they have spent more than a decade developing and improving. More commonly known are Red Hat (nee Cygnus), which have the same relationship with Cygwin, the Win32 Unix compatability layer.
If someone were to take that work, tack on a few improvements, and then start selling it to the developer's customers without even giving those improvements back so that developer can still compete with their own work, would that not cause financial harm? Even for a user, if there's an improvement that I should have had, but didn't because of the license violation, how much productivity has that lost me? How much did that cost me or my employer? How many other users besides me have been similarly put out? I could see damages getting quite high this way.
As a fellow Okie, I think I can make some further educated guesses:
You grew up in Oklahoma before the Regan era.
You quit reading and watching local news sometime around then.
You didn't read the summary either
There was a time when everything you said would have been true. Sadly, Will Rodgers and Woody Guthrie are dead, buried, and forgotten, as are their values.
For instance, if you'd read the summary carefully you would have seen that our popular governor and our elected legislature voted got the law passed, and it was a single judge (hereafter to be known as a "Judicial Activist") who struck it down.
Not that I suggest you start paying attention to local news, or read the summary more closely. It will just tick you off.
Just pointing out that Blizzard software has been around for some time - the Diablo (I and II), and the original "Warcraft" games (I, II, and III) illustrate the fact that "content" has always been "king"
Its a shame I already posted, so I can't mod this up. Blizzard's success is at least as much of an anomoly in the gaming industry as WoW's. Every game Blizz has released after their first has been a huge hit. Nobody else in the industry has a track record like that. Heck, nobody in the entertainment industry has a record like that. A couple of hits in a row could be luck, but not six! Why not look at what they are doing differently than everybody else?
Slashdot Mirror
I agree entirely. As a matter of fact, the following is all the vi that every newbie needs to know:
Those three keystrokes will get you out of any vi session you may have inadvertantly wandered into.
The funny thing is that you didn't mention any of the four reasons (values of X) I have heard:
The last I heard (early 90's) the linguists studying New World languages were postulating 3 major migrations.
I'd put "major" in quotes myself. The straight itself really isn't that much of a barrier to humans. The native people currently living on both sides ("Aleuts") are very closely related, and take their boats back and forth across the date line (or US/Russia border, if you prefer) all the time.
Simple: You go with the old standard "human gets trapped inside virtual/alternate/fictional reality universe, and must find a way out". For examples, see Tron, Chronicles of Narnia, Spy Kids, Pleasentville (particularly this one), Remote Control, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and many many more.
Ask the Sioux how that philosophy ended up working out for them.
Can I, as a practicing Christian, make a further suggestion? Matthew 6:4-5 is a great reference whenever school prayer comes up. Read literally it is a direct order (from Jesus no less) to not pray in public.
And when ye pray, you shall not be as the hypocrites, that love to stand and pray in the synagogues and corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men: Amen I say to you, they have received their reward.
But thou when thou shalt pray, enter into thy chamber, and having shut the door, pray to thy Father in secret, and thy father who seeth in secret will repay thee.
I really like this idea. An added bonus is that they'd never have trouble with contract negotiations, as it would be a new set of red-shirted actors every episode!
How about we call it "Star Trek: Faces of Death".
Hmmm. Its been nearly 20 years since I had any reason to solve a quadratic, so I'm not sure I could still do it. I don't know that I count, but surely there are loads of quite reasonable and intelligent people who would be filtered out this way.
On the other hand, both Theodore Kaczynski and Bobby Fischer would probably pass your tests with flying colors. Wouldn't getting rid of all us idiots and allowing in only geniuses like them make Slashdot more interesting!
That will never give you coherent results, as information is lost in both steps.
For reference, I sent your post through Babelfish to Dutch and back, and here's the result:
Just think of the magnitude of the incident that could have been sparked if Babelfish had translated the journalists' questions correctly.
I am 40 years old and still playing, you insensitive clod!
I'm really really sick of people accusing anyone who wants to improve America as "hating" it. Politics aside, its a crappy way to carry out a discussion. Where does this silly logic end? Does the GP get to postulate that you in fact hate cute kittens, and thus your opinions should be ignored (thereby re-enabling his)?
That being said, the GP did pick a horrible example in North Korea. The examples are legion, but a good one is their long history of kidnapping people just for the heck of it. My personal favorite is the film director and his wife who were kidnapped and forced to make movies for Fearless Leader for several years. I mean really, who would risk an international incident like that just to get a particular director to make films for them? I'd almost believe it from a Bond villain, but not from a real-life world leader.
That doesn't put you out of antique PC lovin'. How do you think antique hard drives rotated their platters?
As a bonus, you could use specific patterns of I/O's to physically move the units around the machine room. If you have two of them, and two programmers, you have a race!
Are you serious? The best you can do is compare us to the People's Republic of China and say we aren't less free than them yet?
I'm actually more depressed about this than I was before I read your post. Thanks a lot.
The EPA, like all federal agencies, is run by Presidental appointees. Let's take a look at who those appointees have been...
We started with Christine Todd Whittman, republican governor from (relatively liberal) New Jersy. She resigned in protest when the VP's office insisted on allowing power plants to be built w/o pollution controls, in violation of US law that he and the President swore on their bibles to uphold.
She was replaced with Mike Leavitt, a far-right wing governor of deep-red Utah. His main qualification for the job was making his state the country's second largest producer of toxic waste (while being 37th in population), and of course a demonstrated antipathy towards federal environmental regulation.
When Mr. Leavitt was promoted to HHS, the next (and current) appointee was Steve Johnson, a longtime EPA employee known chiefly for his warm relationship with the pesticide industry. He had a pet study advocating, I shit you not, testing pesticides on toddlers. In a rare show of its elusive backbone, congress held his nomination until he killed it. He did so only when it became clear he wouldn't get the job otherwise. They should have spiked his nomination anyway though. He pushed through a similar pro-pesticide study, over objections of his own staffers, as soon as he got the job.
So, I ask you, who does this EPA really serve? Given a choice of carrying out an environmental law or helping out a bunch of power companies, which do you think they are going to pick?
Don't try Suicide
It can be falsified easily. Show that there seems to be no relation (or perhaps an inverse relation) between mutations that become ubiquitous in a species in a given environment and said mutation's fitness for that environment. For instance, if an individual fish has a mutation that makes it slow in an environment where it has lots of fast predators, are we just as likely to see that gene slowly taking over the gene pool for all fish in that environment as not? There are lots of other experiments you could come up with. Go ahead try one.
I will warn you that lots of others have already done this though. The weight of such gathered evidence in favor of natural selection is frankly crushing. Good luck.
We do. Its called Genetic Programming. Its not the typical way to program, but it can be useful in situations where you have an optimization problem that you'd like solved without needing to involve the program's designer in the annoying grut work of manually tuning the program to do it.
Does this mean you just proved evolution correct to your own satisfaction? Good job! Go tell the others.
Yes. Its also possible that it is worse. Perhaps we should investigate before throwing guesses on the matter around no?
Back in the 70's I heard about a study on moral behavior (bankrolled by several churches) that found almost no difference between church attendees and non. What little difference they did find was in favor of the non-churchgoers (but supposedly down in the noise). However, I'd believe it. I go every week myself, and like to flatter myself that I'm a moral person. However, I have quite a few relatives who go to evangelical Calvinist churches. This means they believe that post-baptisim (when they are born again), they are literally destined for Heaven (see http://www.allaboutgod.com/once-saved-always-saved.htm for a defense of this idea). Nothing they can do will change this. Everything they ever will do has already been forgiven. Couple this with the belief that the rest of us are destined for Hell (no matter what we do, short of taking their brand baptisim, and you do not exactly have a formula for social responsibility. For example, playing any kind of game with them is a total drag, as they have no problem whatsoever with stealing extra money from the bank, moving pieces while you aren't looking, etc.
OK. Here's a classic misunderstanding of evolution. It has nothing to do with making a "fittest world". It is only concerned with the individual. Any larger entities only come into the picture in as much as cooperating with them helps the individual to get his or her genetic material passed on. It is all about encouraging better competition on some level, not cooperation.
One could look at religion if it truly "evolved" in humans, as a really good way to organize unrelated people to fight other cultures, when otherwise their self-interest would be as much in fighting each other as in fighting that other culture.
I'm using the 2002 version on XP at work (no choice). I would not recommend anyone use this version, due to two show-stopper problems.
The first issue is reply quoting. Outlook still insists on its own insane quoting mechanisim, where the full text of the original message, with a large bulky summary of its header, is placed at the bottom of the message, with just a horizontal line on top to indicate "quoting". You can get it to do standard ">" quoting with a large amount of hunting through menus, but you still have to hack that header block down to reasonable size, and I found I can't trust it unless I view all email as plain text. The worst part of this is that almost no Outlook users do this, so you end up with the entire contents of the email thread tacked onto *every* email sent through your system. There are add-ins that claim to fix this, but of course they only work with certain versions of outlook, and I couldn't get any of them to work on mine.
The second issue is threading. Apparently Outlook refuses to use the email header entry that allows every other mail client in the world uses to properly thread messages. (Why would it bother, when the entire thread is inside every message?
Anyway, as a technical user I consider either one of these issues show-stoppers. Outlook 2002 is *not* acceptable as a MUA.
This is a wholly untrue statement. The "free" in Free Software has nothing to do with money. It is quite common (perhaps even more common) for the development of free software to be underwritten by a company who simply needs that software (or a feature in that software) for their own business needs. Pretty much the entirity of Apache has always been and continues to be built that way. A better example is ACT, a company whose entire business revolves around supporting the GNU Ada compiler, which they have spent more than a decade developing and improving. More commonly known are Red Hat (nee Cygnus), which have the same relationship with Cygwin, the Win32 Unix compatability layer.
If someone were to take that work, tack on a few improvements, and then start selling it to the developer's customers without even giving those improvements back so that developer can still compete with their own work, would that not cause financial harm? Even for a user, if there's an improvement that I should have had, but didn't because of the license violation, how much productivity has that lost me? How much did that cost me or my employer? How many other users besides me have been similarly put out? I could see damages getting quite high this way.
There was a time when everything you said would have been true. Sadly, Will Rodgers and Woody Guthrie are dead, buried, and forgotten, as are their values.
For instance, if you'd read the summary carefully you would have seen that our popular governor and our elected legislature voted got the law passed, and it was a single judge (hereafter to be known as a "Judicial Activist") who struck it down.
Not that I suggest you start paying attention to local news, or read the summary more closely. It will just tick you off.
Its a shame I already posted, so I can't mod this up. Blizzard's success is at least as much of an anomoly in the gaming industry as WoW's. Every game Blizz has released after their first has been a huge hit. Nobody else in the industry has a track record like that. Heck, nobody in the entertainment industry has a record like that. A couple of hits in a row could be luck, but not six! Why not look at what they are doing differently than everybody else?