This is a crime, and should result in a much larger scandal than cigars in the Oval office... HOWEVER, it's also not new.
In the mid-90s a Solar Astrophysicist friend of mine worked for an observatory that was labeled an "enemy of the planet" and consequently was unable to get federal funding because they published data that suggested significant influence on global warming from the sun. Researchers at the time who were coming up with data that suggested otherwise (or simply ignored causes, and supported the fact that the Earth is warming) were able to get funding.
The fact that the offense is being committed in the opposite direction now is neither a better nor worse situation.
"This leaves Apple with a choice. Either continue to remain the sole supplier of hardware for MacOS/X and loose a large chunk of the desktop market share..."
First off, Apple has made the choice you describe several times. Every time, they chose to keep running the show. Their proprietary hardware and software (which now runs on an open source middle-layer, which is kind of funny) are very much a part of the corporate mindset at Apple for good or ill.
That said, I think Apple has grander plans than you give them credit for.
The iPod is exactly what Apple needed (and has tried to do several times before) to kick-start the Mac's market-share. Eventually, the entertainment desktop of choice will be a Mac with various Apple peripherals. Don't be shocked to see an Apple prosumer-grade digital camera for around $500, and Apple solid-state camcorder, and Apple PVR and any number of other entertainment peripherals for which the best software will reside on the Mac (with merely adequate versions for Windows, and perhaps even for Linux).
Apple is beginning to eye the space that Microsoft thinks they're going to own with the X-Box, but there's a gigantic difference between the two: one is percieved as a game box and the other as "that computer the really smart people use." That's some pretty serious branding mojo if Apple uses it right.
quoth zolaar, "Your ideas intrigue us. Please forward us a copy of your resume as soon as possible so we may discuss your possible hiring as our Vice President in charge of New Programming."
Eh, being in charge of programming sadly has little to do with being creative. Of course, it does involve recognizing creativity when it falls in your lap, but it also involves recognizing dependability, which is a quality sorely lacking in many show-runners.
But in case some TV exec is listening, here's my idea for how to pick a lineup:
Go around to your writers and ask them all who they admire most as a teleplay writer and who they admire most as a show-runner. Go to the top three guys on the show-runner list and the top-10 guys on the writer list. Ask them to get together and come up with a pitch that they would all be happy working on together. Make it happen, and shield them from notes. Let them hire whoever they like and no matter how crazy they sound, just keep telling yourself that these guys have the confidence of the people who know enough to know they deserve it.
Once that show gets off the ground, the next season, you ask one of the show-runners and 3 of the writers to help form the next group, and you repeat the whole process, choosing 2 and 7 of the most respected people out there to fill out the group. Just keep letting them do whatever they want, and advertising the holy crap out of it. Keep that ball rolling until you're president of the studio.
With a formula like that you clearly don't watch any of the major US networks during primetime!
I do watch one major network show: Lost.
I *used to* watch The West Wing, when Sorkin was writing it, but have stopped since he left and it stopped being able to present politics as a phenomennon rather than a point of view (not to mention the fact that the writing just can't hold a candle to Sorkin).
Other than that, I watch Good Eats (which falls down on point 3, but makes up for it in spades on point 2); Full Metal Alchemist (which is right up there with Cowboy Beebop for quality Anime); Veronica Mars (probably the weakest of the lot, but still a great show); and The Daily Show.
If someone who is as generally fussy as me can find 5 shows on at any given time that measure up, I'd say that's pretty good. Originality and quality are rare in any field, and TV has never been an exception to that rule.
Using their calculations, a sitcom that starred an elvis impersonator who thinks he's God, and features absolutely nothing him trying to stand up on a moving ship for 1/2 hour every episode would be the world's most successful sitcom...
Yeah, I don't think you meant to factor in Wit as an additive feature....
This is usually the problem with such a formula. It isn't the discovery of any kind of fundamental feature of the sitcom, it's just an attempt at an explanation of why the CURRENT set of sitcoms are good or bad.
My formula looks like this:
Originality * Quality * Acting
The real problem is that humor is FAR harder to write than drama (ask anyone who has written both successfully), and so getting good writers is far more important for a sitcom than it is for a drama. Not that it's not hugely important for a drama, just moreso for a sitcom.
quoth Frymaster, "procedural is a valid way to structure your apps... especially for web-based ones where that have, by nature, a page-based model"
This is my basic gripe with PHP. It leads the unfortunate user down a path that suggests that each page is its own island, and any attempt to modularize or componentize that is, by PHP's nature, a secondary affair.
Take, as a counterpoint, something like TTK. Here, you are presented with a programming langauge in which you write your code, and a templating system in which you write pages for display and a set of tools for connecting the two.
It's not that a good programmer can't produce a workable system in PHP alone or PHP + other langauges (PHP backed by Perl or Java or C# is quite powerful, in fact), it's just that it seems that the majority of people writing PHP are hobbled by this unfortunate presentation of the language as a "page generator", and thus most of the code written in PHP is rewrite-fodder from day one.
As a templating system, PHP is quite nice, and I'd use it where appropriate.
Looks more like a cross between BASH and Perl to me. It has more math available directly (rather than through a special syntax ala expr) than BASH, but has more command-execution features than Perl.
A nice shell, it looks like. Of course, people who hate Perl are going to see the "$_" and freak out, but oh well;-)
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but I've been Greylisting for about six months, and I've never had any of my friends or business associates report any problems. Anyone who sends me mail form such archaic systems must use a mailing list.
I white-list mailing list servers specifically because it's a pain in the butt to deal with otherwise. This is the only reason that it's not practical for a large organization, though it might work out just fine for such an organization as a fall-back (e.g. if you have some other reason for suspecting the mail is spam such as previous spam).
"Remember that signature on that thick paper you've signed prior getting that high paid tech job?"
Yep. I also recall that you can't waive your rights in a contract. Sadly, privacy isn't an actual right in the US.:-(
Unless your company blocks outgoing ports, you can always just run your own mail server at home, and communicate with it via SMTP/TLS. I do this and I also don't use my ISP's relays except for those few destinations that refuse to talk to a "residential" mail server. That way, any destination systems that speak SMTP/TLS will get my mail without anyone who would archive or read my mail getting an unencrypted copy other than the target system.
Not just that, but the Slashdot story is a raw cut-and-paste of the CSM article! Slashdot editors: please take down this story or re-word it. Fair use does not include grabbing the first several paragraphs of an article and re-posting as your own, even when it's submitted by a volunteer stringer.
"Just like a fanboy but with even more "parent's basementness" about it."
And you would use this word while posting to Slashdot, because you're a...;-)
Seriously, I don't think that kind of name-calling puts you on any kind of elevated rhetorical plateau in this conversation, and some of the people bitching have had some valid points. Most of those have been along the lind of, "either use the changes or don't, but don't blame your choice on Apple." To accuse people of being "fanbois" just because they happen to take Apple's side in a debate seems a bit parent's basementish to me.
Specifics aside, if you've been around Usenet, and it's mutant cousin the World Wide Web long enough, you'll have come to realize that there are "people" who will yell horrible curses at you for everything that you do, and often in direct proportion to how beneficial what you're doing is.
Getting upset about that is as pointless as getting upset about bad weather.
"Enviromentalists can't sort out the real problem. Every single person on the planet has to take responsibility for it. But we won't. And we'll vote out any government that tries to make us change."
Bravo! I'd really like to see some responsibility in this whole mess, but it's not going to happen. Too many people feel too strongly, and at best you'll get tin-foil-hat responses like lowering CO2 emmissions (when we know darned well that CO2 is one of the least effective greenhouse gasses, and most plans to combat it release far more effective gasses, such as water vapor).
That's right, if you're planning on switching to hydrogen cells as soon as they're available, you're going to be HARMING the environment (though probably not by much, as the likelihood that you'll put a dent in solar-induced warming is about as serious as the likelihood that you'll reverse the last 10,000 years of glacial melting).
"Webcore at this point is a khtml fork that is about two years old. The khtml devs might as well be asked to merge Gecko code for all of the similarity they have at this point."
I'm really not certain I comprehend this. Apple wrote code which they contributed to KHTML, and this is bad. What's more, Apple wrote code which BURNED OUT KHTML DEVELOPERS!
Strangely, I feel no sympathy for a developer who gets burned out when a big company writes code for them...
"Meanwhile, Apple got the code to a rendering engine for free and gave back little to nothing."
This is an obscene bit of rhetorical hopscotch. Apple did exactly what companies SHOULD be doing. They took advantage of open source software and made their changes public. Compare and contrast this with Microsoft and BSD... BSD got exactly no code out of Microsoft. KHTML got all of the changes made to KHTML, some of which were calls into proprietary code, and thus not terribly useful.
What's burning out the KHTML developers is their insistence on trying to treat anyone who works on their code as active members of their development team. Sure, it would be all keen an cool if KHTML and Safari were to merge and tightly couple if not merge their code-bases, but Apple has a proprietary UI, and that makes it hard to do. Now, if you're in the "proprietary code makes you evil" camp, then you're going to feel that way about Apple no matter what they do, but modifying KHTML and contributing the changes back didn't make them any more or less evil by that metric.
What's more, complaining about the current state of affairs is akin to complaining that someone who just ported your application to Windows didn't make the.Net Framework open source. What kind of drugs do you have to be on for that to make sense? Sure, I want free stuff and world peace too, but I don't stamp my feet when someone helps me out, just because I didn't get everything I wanted.
In the long-run, it's looking like Apple would have been better off selecting a more mature code(r) base to work from.
"I could see a PPC doing a decent job at x86 emulation, but for the reverse there's a problem: registers."
Not an issue. Well, let me re-phrase: not a significant issue for almost all code.
The translation is almost certainly going to work by creating a virtual machine into which your native code is translated, and then JITing or pre-compiling the VM instructions down into the new target. To do this, you'll probably allocate an infinite amount of virtual registers in your virtual machine, and perform register allocation all over again for the target platform.
This means that the code should be as close to optimal for the target platform in terms of registers as it would be if it had been compiled for that platform in the first place, so for JUST REGISTERS, you should be able to tell how well the translation will perform by looking at standard benchmarks with the proviso that pathalogical cases always exist for any register allocation strategy and any number of registers.
Ok, that said, your real hit is going to come from the fact that you're translating RISC to CISC. You will see several problems from this, but the big two are:
* The generated code will be larger than natively compiled x86 code.
* The generated code won't always be able to figure out the ideal CISC operations to perform (solving for that is NP)
These issues can be mitigated by very smart translators that solve for the most common cases by studying how popular compilers generate code. I suspsect that this is what's being done, and that would make for a very powerful tool (it's the way I approached reverse compilation of C code, back in the day).
In that sample, you can easily see that 1/2 of the "traditional" families have a good outcome, and 1/4 of the single-parent families have a good outcome. This is perfectly acceptable analysis, however, when you go to extrapolate to homosexual households, you are going to be tempted to say that "non m=1,d=1 families aren't going to work", and ignoring the fact that that's a poor extrapolation, you're also dead wrong because of a hidden variable. Let's add in "f (father was abusive; 0=no abouse, 1=abuse)":
Now, it becomes obvious that the last two cases are single BECAUSE they WERE a traditional family which failed. In reality, it would make more sense to include them as a traditional family rather than as single-parents (after all, it was the abusive father who distrupted the family in the first place). Now we see that the statistics are exactly reversed.
Of course, this is a heavily biased sample, and in the real-world, you would not have such a large swing, but it would still be pronounced.
All of this ignores the results of the Latchkey study (this is where we get the term "dork", which is short for "door-key kid") which revealed that having a parent at home is a significant benefit to the kids, so if roughly the same fraction of homosexual couples can afford to stay home and take care of their kids as with straight couples, they should have better end-results than single-parent families.
Yeah, you've mostly got the description of the public tour, but if you step off the boat and go searching around, you'll find a room with this 3-story-tall slug, spewing out search results from it's back-side! It's a disturbing site, but I still can't get myself to stop using Google!
Well, you're glossing over a few things there, as did I in the grandparent post.
The problem is that you have an equation that includes the mass of the car (body+engine), ammount of maximum torque that can be delivered, total range of the veheicle, etc.
You have to balance all of those. What I was saying is that if a car is practical in all other respects, AND manages to deliver as much power as, say, a Ferrari, then the electric car will dominate the market fairly quickly. I assume that you can deliver as much torque from an electric motor as you do from a Ferrari engine now (decades ago, in fact), so this is only news if they've managed to balance the WHOLE equation.
I think it's safe to say that when we say, "fast" here, we're talking about the torque that allows for rapid acceleration, not top speed. In car teminology, we're talking about the zero-to-sixty time. In drive experience terms, we're talking about the force of acceleration pinning you to the driver's seat; that sense that you get of "speed" from the rate of acceleration, not velocity.
If electric cars really can deliver that in a way that surpasses (or even on-par with) internal combustion engines, then I think we'll be seeing the end of the IC engine in the next 20 years... that's a big "if" though.
This is getting way out of hand. I'm trying to say something simple here and you keep missing it. Let me drop down a level and be more explicit.
When you say, "single-parent families are much more likely to [X]" for any value of X, you may not be saying what you think you are about two-parent families. This is because the overwhelming majority of children are concieved by two parents who are in some sort of romantic or at least ongoing sexual relationship, if not married. When you look at single-parent families you have to break them down into those that are single-parent simply becuase the father and/or mother prefered it that way vs. those that are single-parent because the father or mother (usually father) was abusive.
In the latter case, you can draw no conclusion about the value of two-parent families vs. single-parent families on the basis of the results unless you are ONLY using the data to compare against abusive situations.
So... when we then look at homosexual couples raising children, we have to account for the fact that these are not "non-traditional 2-parent families" because of divorce or abuse, but because of the nature of the family unit. That comparison needs to be done against other non-traditional family units that are created by choice.
And, so in my original posting, I was saying that divorced single parents are probably skewing the odds toward less favorable outcomes that are not consistent with the original comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a crime, and should result in a much larger scandal than cigars in the Oval office... HOWEVER, it's also not new.
In the mid-90s a Solar Astrophysicist friend of mine worked for an observatory that was labeled an "enemy of the planet" and consequently was unable to get federal funding because they published data that suggested significant influence on global warming from the sun. Researchers at the time who were coming up with data that suggested otherwise (or simply ignored causes, and supported the fact that the Earth is warming) were able to get funding.
The fact that the offense is being committed in the opposite direction now is neither a better nor worse situation.
"This leaves Apple with a choice. Either continue to remain the sole supplier of hardware for MacOS/X and loose a large chunk of the desktop market share ..."
First off, Apple has made the choice you describe several times. Every time, they chose to keep running the show. Their proprietary hardware and software (which now runs on an open source middle-layer, which is kind of funny) are very much a part of the corporate mindset at Apple for good or ill.
That said, I think Apple has grander plans than you give them credit for.
The iPod is exactly what Apple needed (and has tried to do several times before) to kick-start the Mac's market-share. Eventually, the entertainment desktop of choice will be a Mac with various Apple peripherals. Don't be shocked to see an Apple prosumer-grade digital camera for around $500, and Apple solid-state camcorder, and Apple PVR and any number of other entertainment peripherals for which the best software will reside on the Mac (with merely adequate versions for Windows, and perhaps even for Linux).
Apple is beginning to eye the space that Microsoft thinks they're going to own with the X-Box, but there's a gigantic difference between the two: one is percieved as a game box and the other as "that computer the really smart people use." That's some pretty serious branding mojo if Apple uses it right.
quoth zolaar, "Your ideas intrigue us. Please forward us a copy of your resume as soon as possible so we may discuss your possible hiring as our Vice President in charge of New Programming."
Eh, being in charge of programming sadly has little to do with being creative. Of course, it does involve recognizing creativity when it falls in your lap, but it also involves recognizing dependability, which is a quality sorely lacking in many show-runners.
But in case some TV exec is listening, here's my idea for how to pick a lineup:
Go around to your writers and ask them all who they admire most as a teleplay writer and who they admire most as a show-runner. Go to the top three guys on the show-runner list and the top-10 guys on the writer list. Ask them to get together and come up with a pitch that they would all be happy working on together. Make it happen, and shield them from notes. Let them hire whoever they like and no matter how crazy they sound, just keep telling yourself that these guys have the confidence of the people who know enough to know they deserve it.
Once that show gets off the ground, the next season, you ask one of the show-runners and 3 of the writers to help form the next group, and you repeat the whole process, choosing 2 and 7 of the most respected people out there to fill out the group. Just keep letting them do whatever they want, and advertising the holy crap out of it. Keep that ball rolling until you're president of the studio.
"Originality * Quality * Acting"
With a formula like that you clearly don't watch any of the major US networks during primetime!
I do watch one major network show: Lost.
I *used to* watch The West Wing, when Sorkin was writing it, but have stopped since he left and it stopped being able to present politics as a phenomennon rather than a point of view (not to mention the fact that the writing just can't hold a candle to Sorkin).
Other than that, I watch Good Eats (which falls down on point 3, but makes up for it in spades on point 2); Full Metal Alchemist (which is right up there with Cowboy Beebop for quality Anime); Veronica Mars (probably the weakest of the lot, but still a great show); and The Daily Show.
If someone who is as generally fussy as me can find 5 shows on at any given time that measure up, I'd say that's pretty good. Originality and quality are rare in any field, and TV has never been an exception to that rule.
quoth jez9999, "Any particular reason why PHP is better than Perl with HTML::Mason?"
I'm really perplexed at how you extracted my saying that PHP was better than anything from what I posted.
I'm not a fan of PHP in case you had a hard time guessing, though I'd still use it if I had a simple templating task that was single-page oriented.
Yeah, I don't think you meant to factor in Wit as an additive feature....
This is usually the problem with such a formula. It isn't the discovery of any kind of fundamental feature of the sitcom, it's just an attempt at an explanation of why the CURRENT set of sitcoms are good or bad.
My formula looks like this:The real problem is that humor is FAR harder to write than drama (ask anyone who has written both successfully), and so getting good writers is far more important for a sitcom than it is for a drama. Not that it's not hugely important for a drama, just moreso for a sitcom.
quoth Frymaster, "procedural is a valid way to structure your apps... especially for web-based ones where that have, by nature, a page-based model"
This is my basic gripe with PHP. It leads the unfortunate user down a path that suggests that each page is its own island, and any attempt to modularize or componentize that is, by PHP's nature, a secondary affair.
Take, as a counterpoint, something like TTK. Here, you are presented with a programming langauge in which you write your code, and a templating system in which you write pages for display and a set of tools for connecting the two.
It's not that a good programmer can't produce a workable system in PHP alone or PHP + other langauges (PHP backed by Perl or Java or C# is quite powerful, in fact), it's just that it seems that the majority of people writing PHP are hobbled by this unfortunate presentation of the language as a "page generator", and thus most of the code written in PHP is rewrite-fodder from day one.
As a templating system, PHP is quite nice, and I'd use it where appropriate.
Looks more like a cross between BASH and Perl to me. It has more math available directly (rather than through a special syntax ala expr) than BASH, but has more command-execution features than Perl.
;-)
A nice shell, it looks like. Of course, people who hate Perl are going to see the "$_" and freak out, but oh well
Poetic justice?! Hardly!
The only good that could come of this would be the remote chance that it could convince MS that software patents are a terrible idea and prod them into backing Red Hat and Oracle's push to reform patents in the US and Europe.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but I've been Greylisting for about six months, and I've never had any of my friends or business associates report any problems. Anyone who sends me mail form such archaic systems must use a mailing list.
I white-list mailing list servers specifically because it's a pain in the butt to deal with otherwise. This is the only reason that it's not practical for a large organization, though it might work out just fine for such an organization as a fall-back (e.g. if you have some other reason for suspecting the mail is spam such as previous spam).
"Remember that signature on that thick paper you've signed prior getting that high paid tech job?"
:-(
Yep. I also recall that you can't waive your rights in a contract. Sadly, privacy isn't an actual right in the US.
Unless your company blocks outgoing ports, you can always just run your own mail server at home, and communicate with it via SMTP/TLS. I do this and I also don't use my ISP's relays except for those few destinations that refuse to talk to a "residential" mail server. That way, any destination systems that speak SMTP/TLS will get my mail without anyone who would archive or read my mail getting an unencrypted copy other than the target system.
"the main system and its backup were swamped with error messages, Reuters reports"
Which is kinda funny, since it was *probably* a reuters feed that was spewing the errors in the first place....
Not just that, but the Slashdot story is a raw cut-and-paste of the CSM article! Slashdot editors: please take down this story or re-word it. Fair use does not include grabbing the first several paragraphs of an article and re-posting as your own, even when it's submitted by a volunteer stringer.
If you have mod points, and were wondering what that "informative" label was for, see parent posting....
"Just like a fanboy but with even more "parent's basementness" about it."
;-)
And you would use this word while posting to Slashdot, because you're a...
Seriously, I don't think that kind of name-calling puts you on any kind of elevated rhetorical plateau in this conversation, and some of the people bitching have had some valid points. Most of those have been along the lind of, "either use the changes or don't, but don't blame your choice on Apple." To accuse people of being "fanbois" just because they happen to take Apple's side in a debate seems a bit parent's basementish to me.
So, what's a fanbois? I'm assuming that's french?
Specifics aside, if you've been around Usenet, and it's mutant cousin the World Wide Web long enough, you'll have come to realize that there are "people" who will yell horrible curses at you for everything that you do, and often in direct proportion to how beneficial what you're doing is.
Getting upset about that is as pointless as getting upset about bad weather.
"Enviromentalists can't sort out the real problem. Every single person on the planet has to take responsibility for it. But we won't. And we'll vote out any government that tries to make us change."
Bravo! I'd really like to see some responsibility in this whole mess, but it's not going to happen. Too many people feel too strongly, and at best you'll get tin-foil-hat responses like lowering CO2 emmissions (when we know darned well that CO2 is one of the least effective greenhouse gasses, and most plans to combat it release far more effective gasses, such as water vapor).
That's right, if you're planning on switching to hydrogen cells as soon as they're available, you're going to be HARMING the environment (though probably not by much, as the likelihood that you'll put a dent in solar-induced warming is about as serious as the likelihood that you'll reverse the last 10,000 years of glacial melting).
"Webcore at this point is a khtml fork that is about two years old. The khtml devs might as well be asked to merge Gecko code for all of the similarity they have at this point."
And the problem with forking is.... what exactly?
I'm really not certain I comprehend this. Apple wrote code which they contributed to KHTML, and this is bad. What's more, Apple wrote code which BURNED OUT KHTML DEVELOPERS!
.Net Framework open source. What kind of drugs do you have to be on for that to make sense? Sure, I want free stuff and world peace too, but I don't stamp my feet when someone helps me out, just because I didn't get everything I wanted.
Strangely, I feel no sympathy for a developer who gets burned out when a big company writes code for them...
"Meanwhile, Apple got the code to a rendering engine for free and gave back little to nothing."
This is an obscene bit of rhetorical hopscotch. Apple did exactly what companies SHOULD be doing. They took advantage of open source software and made their changes public. Compare and contrast this with Microsoft and BSD... BSD got exactly no code out of Microsoft. KHTML got all of the changes made to KHTML, some of which were calls into proprietary code, and thus not terribly useful.
What's burning out the KHTML developers is their insistence on trying to treat anyone who works on their code as active members of their development team. Sure, it would be all keen an cool if KHTML and Safari were to merge and tightly couple if not merge their code-bases, but Apple has a proprietary UI, and that makes it hard to do. Now, if you're in the "proprietary code makes you evil" camp, then you're going to feel that way about Apple no matter what they do, but modifying KHTML and contributing the changes back didn't make them any more or less evil by that metric.
What's more, complaining about the current state of affairs is akin to complaining that someone who just ported your application to Windows didn't make the
In the long-run, it's looking like Apple would have been better off selecting a more mature code(r) base to work from.
"I could see a PPC doing a decent job at x86 emulation, but for the reverse there's a problem: registers."
Not an issue. Well, let me re-phrase: not a significant issue for almost all code.
The translation is almost certainly going to work by creating a virtual machine into which your native code is translated, and then JITing or pre-compiling the VM instructions down into the new target. To do this, you'll probably allocate an infinite amount of virtual registers in your virtual machine, and perform register allocation all over again for the target platform.
This means that the code should be as close to optimal for the target platform in terms of registers as it would be if it had been compiled for that platform in the first place, so for JUST REGISTERS, you should be able to tell how well the translation will perform by looking at standard benchmarks with the proviso that pathalogical cases always exist for any register allocation strategy and any number of registers.
Ok, that said, your real hit is going to come from the fact that you're translating RISC to CISC. You will see several problems from this, but the big two are:
* The generated code will be larger than natively compiled x86 code.
* The generated code won't always be able to figure out the ideal CISC operations to perform (solving for that is NP)
These issues can be mitigated by very smart translators that solve for the most common cases by studying how popular compilers generate code. I suspsect that this is what's being done, and that would make for a very powerful tool (it's the way I approached reverse compilation of C code, back in the day).
"I originally thought I was agreeing with you and you just weren't noticing that fact. Now, I'm not really sure what you're saying at all."
o =0
= 0f =1
Ok, one more time just to see if it helps:
Let's say you have six families, and we have variables m (# of moms), d (# of dads), and o (outcome, 1=good, 0=bad):
m=1,d=1,o=1
m=1,d=1,o=0
m=1,d=0,o=1
m=1,d=0,
m=1,d=0,o=0
m=1,d=0,o=0
In that sample, you can easily see that 1/2 of the "traditional" families have a good outcome, and 1/4 of the single-parent families have a good outcome. This is perfectly acceptable analysis, however, when you go to extrapolate to homosexual households, you are going to be tempted to say that "non m=1,d=1 families aren't going to work", and ignoring the fact that that's a poor extrapolation, you're also dead wrong because of a hidden variable. Let's add in "f (father was abusive; 0=no abouse, 1=abuse)":
m=1,d=1,o=1,f=0
m=1,d=1,o=0,f=1
m=1,d=0,o=1,f
m=1,d=0,o=0,f=0
m=1,d=0,o=0,f=1
m=1,d=0,o=0,
Now, it becomes obvious that the last two cases are single BECAUSE they WERE a traditional family which failed. In reality, it would make more sense to include them as a traditional family rather than as single-parents (after all, it was the abusive father who distrupted the family in the first place). Now we see that the statistics are exactly reversed.
Of course, this is a heavily biased sample, and in the real-world, you would not have such a large swing, but it would still be pronounced.
All of this ignores the results of the Latchkey study (this is where we get the term "dork", which is short for "door-key kid") which revealed that having a parent at home is a significant benefit to the kids, so if roughly the same fraction of homosexual couples can afford to stay home and take care of their kids as with straight couples, they should have better end-results than single-parent families.
Yeah, you've mostly got the description of the public tour, but if you step off the boat and go searching around, you'll find a room with this 3-story-tall slug, spewing out search results from it's back-side! It's a disturbing site, but I still can't get myself to stop using Google!
Well, you're glossing over a few things there, as did I in the grandparent post.
The problem is that you have an equation that includes the mass of the car (body+engine), ammount of maximum torque that can be delivered, total range of the veheicle, etc.
You have to balance all of those. What I was saying is that if a car is practical in all other respects, AND manages to deliver as much power as, say, a Ferrari, then the electric car will dominate the market fairly quickly. I assume that you can deliver as much torque from an electric motor as you do from a Ferrari engine now (decades ago, in fact), so this is only news if they've managed to balance the WHOLE equation.
I think it's safe to say that when we say, "fast" here, we're talking about the torque that allows for rapid acceleration, not top speed. In car teminology, we're talking about the zero-to-sixty time. In drive experience terms, we're talking about the force of acceleration pinning you to the driver's seat; that sense that you get of "speed" from the rate of acceleration, not velocity.
If electric cars really can deliver that in a way that surpasses (or even on-par with) internal combustion engines, then I think we'll be seeing the end of the IC engine in the next 20 years... that's a big "if" though.
This is getting way out of hand. I'm trying to say something simple here and you keep missing it. Let me drop down a level and be more explicit.
When you say, "single-parent families are much more likely to [X]" for any value of X, you may not be saying what you think you are about two-parent families. This is because the overwhelming majority of children are concieved by two parents who are in some sort of romantic or at least ongoing sexual relationship, if not married. When you look at single-parent families you have to break them down into those that are single-parent simply becuase the father and/or mother prefered it that way vs. those that are single-parent because the father or mother (usually father) was abusive.
In the latter case, you can draw no conclusion about the value of two-parent families vs. single-parent families on the basis of the results unless you are ONLY using the data to compare against abusive situations.
So... when we then look at homosexual couples raising children, we have to account for the fact that these are not "non-traditional 2-parent families" because of divorce or abuse, but because of the nature of the family unit. That comparison needs to be done against other non-traditional family units that are created by choice.
And, so in my original posting, I was saying that divorced single parents are probably skewing the odds toward less favorable outcomes that are not consistent with the original comparison.
Does that make more sense?