Seriously, why can't I get a Slashdot or Google subscription for $50 a year to read all these articles without ads and with the ability to retrieve them infinitely?
You know, Slashdot allows you to do exactly that. That option has been available here since 2002, though it's closer to $20/year.
(And what kind of moron puts passenger spaces in the fo'c'sle anyhow? Other than a bunk slung between the mains, that's the worst part of the ship.)
Someone who has to take his mother in law to sea.
Oh yeah, because the only thing more fun than being stuck at sea with your mother-in-law is being stuck at sea with your seasick and unhappy mother-in-law! That sounds like a treat!
As Flynn demonstrates, a typical IQ test question on the abstract reasoning “Similarities” subtest might ask “How are dogs and rabbits alike?” While our grandparents were more likely to say something along the lines of “Dogs are used to hunt rabbits,” today we are more likely to say the “correct” answer, “Dogs and rabbits are both mammals.” Our grandparents were more likely to see the world in concrete, utilitarian terms (dogs hunt rabbits), but today we are more likely to think in abstractions (the category of “mammal”).
This is claimed to be evidence for Flynn's argument that we have shifted to more abstract thinking. A simpler explanation would be that more people today have been taught that dogs and rabbits are both mammals, and are simply recalling that fact, which doesn't call for abstract thinking.
I do not know if this is a poor example for making Flynn's case, or an indication of its weakness.
I think it's a great example of how ridiculous the tests are. Even before being taught that dogs and rabbits were both mammals, everybody would know that they were both animals. Yet, they chose to answer that dogs are used to hunt rabbits because it is a more interesting answer. To know that dogs hunt rabbits requires knowing that rabbits are prey and dogs are predators and making that connection, which is a deeper understanding than that they are just alive and mobile (animals) or warm-blooded and earthbound (mammals). If answering that they are both animals seems unintelligent, why would answering that they are both mammals seem intelligent?
I would argue that the "incorrect" answer is much more intelligent because it involves thinking and pattern recognition instead of just memory recall.
It sounds like the real failure was instructing the villagers about the expectations of the test. Instead of saying "match the shapes", they could have asked which clay pieces were the most similar in shape. Unfortunately, this is one of the hardest parts of any testing.
In my classes, I'm finding that asking questions that have a clear unambiguous answer but don't give away that answer is challenging. This gets much more difficult as the subject of the test gets more abstract.
Your comment on the spelliing of Shakespeare's name is invalid, as the orthography wasn't standardized yet. There wasn't a right way to spell anything.
Well, consistency would be a start. He appears to have spelled his name differently every time he signed it, and the handwriting itself was atrocious.
You mean, not even the difference in average income plays a role ? People in countries with a high average income should be able to buy from countries with a low average income ?
Why not? That's the way it works with the labor market. Products are made in China where the labor costs less and then shipped overseas.
Charging a uniform price makes more sense anyway. If it costs $X to make a widget, why should it sell for $X+1 in low income countries and $X+100 in high income countries? The extra $99 in high income countries is just unearned profit. The excuse that the high income countries are subsidizing the availability of the product in low income countries is bunk, too. If the company wasn't making an acceptable profit in the low income countries, they wouldn't sell their product there. They're not a charity.
Now, if the product is actually produced in the local economy, then it makes sense for the sale price to be adjusted to the local economy. But if the product is manufactured in China, what sense does it make to charge US prices? They're not incurring US costs (on the manufacturing labor end, anyway).
Side rant: while for much of the time I ran a mail server I had business class Internet with a static IP, but lately I've been running it on a residential IP, and it's retarded that some servers bounce mail because it's from a dynamic IP. Worse, though, are those servers that silently drop mail from a dynamic IP. I understand why they do it—because it's less CPU-intensive than, say, Bayesian analysis.
As irritating as it is to have to do this, you can usually relay your outgoing mail through the ISP's server. It will then appear to come from a "legitimate" source and won't get bounced.
Even so, with Zimmerman's involvement I tend more to a "trust" relationship than an "untrusted" one. Zimmerman is on my whitelist.
That's funny, because I almost feel the complete opposite way. I really want to trust Zimmerman, but I can't make myself do it. Part of it is keeping his work closed source, which is extra scary when talking about cryptography. Being asked to trust a security solution that you can't examine is insane.
But part of it also comes from his past. He went against the wishes of the US government and won. In my experience, that just doesn't happen... ever. The fact that he's still working in cryptography and not in some hole somewhere makes me think he's playing ball with the government. It at least raises doubts, which cannot be alleviated by reviewing the source code.
Or maybe I'm just paranoid. But cryptography is the plaything of the paranoid, and relying on the paranoid to just trust you seems a little off.
just because "the people" want something doesn't mean the government will listen.
I may be a bit cynical here, but I generally think people respond to hype and fall for shite, an example but by no means a good one is just looking at the amount of people who fall for fake fb stories and get all riled up about it when it's not even true. This actually annoys the hell out of me. But I digress...
The point I was trying to make is just because the people want it doesn't mean it's right...Almost everyone in the US I meet tells me how they get taxed too much when in reality out of the OECD countries they are 4th lowest out of 33 countries OECD Tax rates..just ahead of Mexico, Chile and Turkey..they want to pay less taxes but is that really the right thing for the country? NYT-why US People are wrong on tax rates
I could go on with examples...my daughter wants to eat nothing but cheesecake and coke...doesn't mean it's the right thing for her(or the people)...
Links are example only to back up my argument that many people really don't know what's good for them, feel free to add counter links as why people know best and I'd be happy to discuss:)
People think they're taxed too much because they feel an economic squeeze and can point to taxes as a point where their money gets taken away from them. In addition to seeing a big chunk of money go away, they feel they have unmet needs. This generates that, "What the hell are we paying for?" feeling and animosity towards taxes.
And ultimately, why aren't the people right? Why can't we have cheesecake and coke at every meal? This is our society, and it's hard to believe that the optimal outcome is the system we have now. If people see our tax money as enriching a select few privileged people, is it unreasonable to complain?
If we want to have a meaningful impact on policy in this country the place to do it is in the primary.
The problem, though, is that in many cases you need to be a registered member of a particular party to vote in their primary elections. This means that you have to be able to classify your views firmly as (putatively) socially and fiscally liberal or socially and fiscally conservative, which doesn't nearly cover the views of everybody. Narrowing everything down to two choices and forcing you to commit to a party in order to have any meaningful impact on the system is what led to this situation in the first place.
For example, my views are pretty moderate and I couldn't easily say which of D or R are closer to my views. Both of their entire platforms are wildly different from my views. Which party would I join to transform to my wishes and how would that be better than just forming a third party that exactly fits my views? If third parties weren't frozen out, their mere existence and popularity would influence the two established parties (eg Ross Perot).
If corporations were not people, then when a corporation broke the law/got sued for a bigillion dollars, the stockholders would be held liable... this includes YOU with money invested indirectly via your 401K. Wanna loose your house/savings?
No they wouldn't. Incorporation introduces limited liability for shareholders. That aspect doesn't depend on corporate personhood at all. That's the whole point of incorporation (as it predates corporate personhood).
As a shareholder, even a voting shareholder, you'd not be personally liable for damages done by the corporation if you had no knowledge of them or means to influence them. Piercing the veil would show that you had done nothing inappropriate and nothing but your shares would be on the line (because your shares are the company). None of this has anything whatsoever to do with corporate personhood.
I find this attitude to be unsettling. The fact that abortion and 'gay rights' happen to be polarizing issues is one of the problems with the American political system.... it angers me to see a homosexual who believes in a more libertarian form of distributive justice vote Democrat because he prioritizes gay marriage over economic issues.
Perhaps if you were that gay man, you would understand. Were economic issues also more important than civil rights for blacks?
It makes sense in the context of civil rights for blacks, because that movement actually went somewhere. Mysteriously, though, the polarizing issues of gay rights, abortion, and gun regulation (I feel like I'm forgetting another one) never seem to get anywhere... ever. It's almost as though they're always left on the table to be used as polarizing issues.
Shielding is heavy and expensive to launch (and to land softly). Then, for every extra mm of lead shielding you add, there's a more energetic photon just waiting to flip a bit. It ends being up cheaper to make radiation hardened electronics than to accommodate for the extra shielding.
All the equations of motion work if we negative mass, but that alone isn't any reason to think that negative mass exists. Was that a better example?
Though, isn't the fact that all the equations worked out behind successfully predicting the positron?
The positron has positive mass. Antimatter has the same mass as normal matter, but opposite charge. And positrons and other forms of antimatter are regularly observed. PET scanners, for example, (positron emission tomography) use matter-antimatter (positron-electron) annihilation reactions for medical imaging.
Let's just talk about the surviving insects who are developing immunity to the chemicals and becoming super-bugs. Will Monsanto be held liable for this creation of theirs?
Roundup is a broadleaf herbicide, not an insecticide. Also, the allegedly infringing GMO plants don't produce Roundup or any other pesticide, they only allow Roundup to be applied to them without killing the plants. In order for them to behave differently than his other plants, the farmer would have to douse his crops in Roundup (which he did).
Can we try to at least get the facts straight before we start going off into left field with our interpretations?
Finland has roughly 5.4 million people, total. The top nine metropolitan areas in the US have 5.4 million people or more and each occupy less land area than Finland. If Finland's population can support ISPs that offer fast service without subsidy, why can't each of these major metropolitan areas do the same.
It makes sense that East Bumfuck doesn't have gigabit internet access, but I live in one of these major metropolitan areas (right fucking downtown) and can't get anything better than 15 Mbps for $80. Why is that?
Actually, glyphosate is dangerous for plants only. However, the molecule has to find its way across the cell walls of the plant. So Monsanto added surfactant agents to break into the cells, so that the glyphosate could enter the plant. And those are *really* dangerous.
Huh? Surfactant agents, like soaps? Nothing in your linked page is even remotely dangerous except for the 1,4-dioxane, which is not added deliberately but is a contaminant (granted, they should work that out). It's not even that bad for you in trace amounts, though it should be avoided.
By no means am I even remotely sympathetic to Monsanto, but making stupid claims just hurts the cause.
Call me crazy, but wouldn't a metal scanner and the cockpit doors being locked be more than good enough to prevent a new 9/11 type scenario?
To add an extra dose of stupid, they send the passengers through the scanner instead of the metal detector as opposed to sending them though both of them. So all you have to do is hide your weapon from the scanner, which has been shown to be generally ineffective. Their current policy actually reduces the security at airports.
this is fine advice if you plan to stop NOWHERE. however, if you do stop 90% of countries will demand you surrender your guns. you will have to check them in, then return to the SAME port on your boat in order to retrieve them. and then exit immediately. failure to report or surrender firearms usually results in the confiscation of your boat and almost always with jail time. no. don't carry firearms
That doesn't sound unreasonable. Why not just do that instead of not carrying any at all? He's talking about crossing oceans, which is where he's want the firearms. He wouldn't miss them during a leisurely cruise along the coast.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, why can't I get a Slashdot or Google subscription for $50 a year to read all these articles without ads and with the ability to retrieve them infinitely?
You know, Slashdot allows you to do exactly that. That option has been available here since 2002, though it's closer to $20/year.
(And what kind of moron puts passenger spaces in the fo'c'sle anyhow? Other than a bunk slung between the mains, that's the worst part of the ship.)
Someone who has to take his mother in law to sea.
Oh yeah, because the only thing more fun than being stuck at sea with your mother-in-law is being stuck at sea with your seasick and unhappy mother-in-law! That sounds like a treat!
The one example in the article is as follows:
As Flynn demonstrates, a typical IQ test question on the abstract reasoning “Similarities” subtest might ask “How are dogs and rabbits alike?” While our grandparents were more likely to say something along the lines of “Dogs are used to hunt rabbits,” today we are more likely to say the “correct” answer, “Dogs and rabbits are both mammals.” Our grandparents were more likely to see the world in concrete, utilitarian terms (dogs hunt rabbits), but today we are more likely to think in abstractions (the category of “mammal”).
This is claimed to be evidence for Flynn's argument that we have shifted to more abstract thinking. A simpler explanation would be that more people today have been taught that dogs and rabbits are both mammals, and are simply recalling that fact, which doesn't call for abstract thinking.
I do not know if this is a poor example for making Flynn's case, or an indication of its weakness.
I think it's a great example of how ridiculous the tests are. Even before being taught that dogs and rabbits were both mammals, everybody would know that they were both animals. Yet, they chose to answer that dogs are used to hunt rabbits because it is a more interesting answer. To know that dogs hunt rabbits requires knowing that rabbits are prey and dogs are predators and making that connection, which is a deeper understanding than that they are just alive and mobile (animals) or warm-blooded and earthbound (mammals). If answering that they are both animals seems unintelligent, why would answering that they are both mammals seem intelligent?
I would argue that the "incorrect" answer is much more intelligent because it involves thinking and pattern recognition instead of just memory recall.
It sounds like the real failure was instructing the villagers about the expectations of the test. Instead of saying "match the shapes", they could have asked which clay pieces were the most similar in shape. Unfortunately, this is one of the hardest parts of any testing.
In my classes, I'm finding that asking questions that have a clear unambiguous answer but don't give away that answer is challenging. This gets much more difficult as the subject of the test gets more abstract.
Your comment on the spelliing of Shakespeare's name is invalid, as the orthography wasn't standardized yet. There wasn't a right way to spell anything.
Well, consistency would be a start. He appears to have spelled his name differently every time he signed it, and the handwriting itself was atrocious.
You mean, not even the difference in average income plays a role ? People in countries with a high average income should be able to buy from countries with a low average income ?
Why not? That's the way it works with the labor market. Products are made in China where the labor costs less and then shipped overseas.
Charging a uniform price makes more sense anyway. If it costs $X to make a widget, why should it sell for $X+1 in low income countries and $X+100 in high income countries? The extra $99 in high income countries is just unearned profit. The excuse that the high income countries are subsidizing the availability of the product in low income countries is bunk, too. If the company wasn't making an acceptable profit in the low income countries, they wouldn't sell their product there. They're not a charity.
Now, if the product is actually produced in the local economy, then it makes sense for the sale price to be adjusted to the local economy. But if the product is manufactured in China, what sense does it make to charge US prices? They're not incurring US costs (on the manufacturing labor end, anyway).
It's been a while since I read it, but I remember Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture being an enjoyable read.
It's a swedish fish!
Side rant: while for much of the time I ran a mail server I had business class Internet with a static IP, but lately I've been running it on a residential IP, and it's retarded that some servers bounce mail because it's from a dynamic IP. Worse, though, are those servers that silently drop mail from a dynamic IP. I understand why they do it—because it's less CPU-intensive than, say, Bayesian analysis.
As irritating as it is to have to do this, you can usually relay your outgoing mail through the ISP's server. It will then appear to come from a "legitimate" source and won't get bounced.
Even so, with Zimmerman's involvement I tend more to a "trust" relationship than an "untrusted" one. Zimmerman is on my whitelist.
That's funny, because I almost feel the complete opposite way. I really want to trust Zimmerman, but I can't make myself do it. Part of it is keeping his work closed source, which is extra scary when talking about cryptography. Being asked to trust a security solution that you can't examine is insane.
But part of it also comes from his past. He went against the wishes of the US government and won. In my experience, that just doesn't happen... ever. The fact that he's still working in cryptography and not in some hole somewhere makes me think he's playing ball with the government. It at least raises doubts, which cannot be alleviated by reviewing the source code.
Or maybe I'm just paranoid. But cryptography is the plaything of the paranoid, and relying on the paranoid to just trust you seems a little off.
just because "the people" want something doesn't mean the government will listen.
I may be a bit cynical here, but I generally think people respond to hype and fall for shite, an example but by no means a good one is just looking at the amount of people who fall for fake fb stories and get all riled up about it when it's not even true. This actually annoys the hell out of me. But I digress...
The point I was trying to make is just because the people want it doesn't mean it's right...Almost everyone in the US I meet tells me how they get taxed too much when in reality out of the OECD countries they are 4th lowest out of 33 countries OECD Tax rates ..just ahead of Mexico, Chile and Turkey..they want to pay less taxes but is that really the right thing for the country? NYT-why US People are wrong on tax rates
I could go on with examples...my daughter wants to eat nothing but cheesecake and coke...doesn't mean it's the right thing for her(or the people)...
Links are example only to back up my argument that many people really don't know what's good for them, feel free to add counter links as why people know best and I'd be happy to discuss :)
People think they're taxed too much because they feel an economic squeeze and can point to taxes as a point where their money gets taken away from them. In addition to seeing a big chunk of money go away, they feel they have unmet needs. This generates that, "What the hell are we paying for?" feeling and animosity towards taxes.
And ultimately, why aren't the people right? Why can't we have cheesecake and coke at every meal? This is our society, and it's hard to believe that the optimal outcome is the system we have now. If people see our tax money as enriching a select few privileged people, is it unreasonable to complain?
This is the second Scientific American article I've seen today glorifying psychopaths. I wonder what the deal is?
They put it on horses and go rampaging round most of Asia?
Pretty much. Most corporate expansion is into Asia. And of course, you need the horses for that.
If we want to have a meaningful impact on policy in this country the place to do it is in the primary.
The problem, though, is that in many cases you need to be a registered member of a particular party to vote in their primary elections. This means that you have to be able to classify your views firmly as (putatively) socially and fiscally liberal or socially and fiscally conservative, which doesn't nearly cover the views of everybody. Narrowing everything down to two choices and forcing you to commit to a party in order to have any meaningful impact on the system is what led to this situation in the first place.
For example, my views are pretty moderate and I couldn't easily say which of D or R are closer to my views. Both of their entire platforms are wildly different from my views. Which party would I join to transform to my wishes and how would that be better than just forming a third party that exactly fits my views? If third parties weren't frozen out, their mere existence and popularity would influence the two established parties (eg Ross Perot).
If corporations were not people, then when a corporation broke the law/got sued for a bigillion dollars, the stockholders would be held liable... this includes YOU with money invested indirectly via your 401K. Wanna loose your house/savings?
No they wouldn't. Incorporation introduces limited liability for shareholders. That aspect doesn't depend on corporate personhood at all. That's the whole point of incorporation (as it predates corporate personhood).
As a shareholder, even a voting shareholder, you'd not be personally liable for damages done by the corporation if you had no knowledge of them or means to influence them. Piercing the veil would show that you had done nothing inappropriate and nothing but your shares would be on the line (because your shares are the company). None of this has anything whatsoever to do with corporate personhood.
I find this attitude to be unsettling. The fact that abortion and 'gay rights' happen to be polarizing issues is one of the problems with the American political system. ... it angers me to see a homosexual who believes in a more libertarian form of distributive justice vote Democrat because he prioritizes gay marriage over economic issues.
Perhaps if you were that gay man, you would understand. Were economic issues also more important than civil rights for blacks?
It makes sense in the context of civil rights for blacks, because that movement actually went somewhere. Mysteriously, though, the polarizing issues of gay rights, abortion, and gun regulation (I feel like I'm forgetting another one) never seem to get anywhere... ever. It's almost as though they're always left on the table to be used as polarizing issues.
it was implied that one would remedy the malfunctioning or non-existent keyboard and then press the any key
This was in the AT and PS/2 days, when keyboards couldn't reliably be hotplugged.
Shielding is heavy and expensive to launch (and to land softly). Then, for every extra mm of lead shielding you add, there's a more energetic photon just waiting to flip a bit. It ends being up cheaper to make radiation hardened electronics than to accommodate for the extra shielding.
All the equations of motion work if we negative mass, but that alone isn't any reason to think that negative mass exists. Was that a better example?
Though, isn't the fact that all the equations worked out behind successfully predicting the positron?
The positron has positive mass. Antimatter has the same mass as normal matter, but opposite charge. And positrons and other forms of antimatter are regularly observed. PET scanners, for example, (positron emission tomography) use matter-antimatter (positron-electron) annihilation reactions for medical imaging.
OK, I understand the appeal of becoming a musician but seriously, how is you calculator going to help you?
He's the operator with his pocket calculator.
Let's just talk about the surviving insects who are developing immunity to the chemicals and becoming super-bugs. Will Monsanto be held liable for this creation of theirs?
Roundup is a broadleaf herbicide, not an insecticide. Also, the allegedly infringing GMO plants don't produce Roundup or any other pesticide, they only allow Roundup to be applied to them without killing the plants. In order for them to behave differently than his other plants, the farmer would have to douse his crops in Roundup (which he did).
Can we try to at least get the facts straight before we start going off into left field with our interpretations?
Finland has roughly 5.4 million people, total. The top nine metropolitan areas in the US have 5.4 million people or more and each occupy less land area than Finland. If Finland's population can support ISPs that offer fast service without subsidy, why can't each of these major metropolitan areas do the same.
It makes sense that East Bumfuck doesn't have gigabit internet access, but I live in one of these major metropolitan areas (right fucking downtown) and can't get anything better than 15 Mbps for $80. Why is that?
Actually, glyphosate is dangerous for plants only. However, the molecule has to find its way across the cell walls of the plant.
So Monsanto added surfactant agents to break into the cells, so that the glyphosate could enter the plant. And those are *really* dangerous.
Huh? Surfactant agents, like soaps? Nothing in your linked page is even remotely dangerous except for the 1,4-dioxane, which is not added deliberately but is a contaminant (granted, they should work that out). It's not even that bad for you in trace amounts, though it should be avoided.
By no means am I even remotely sympathetic to Monsanto, but making stupid claims just hurts the cause.
Call me crazy, but wouldn't a metal scanner and the cockpit doors being locked be more than good enough to prevent a new 9/11 type scenario?
To add an extra dose of stupid, they send the passengers through the scanner instead of the metal detector as opposed to sending them though both of them. So all you have to do is hide your weapon from the scanner, which has been shown to be generally ineffective. Their current policy actually reduces the security at airports.
this is fine advice if you plan to stop NOWHERE. however, if you do stop 90% of countries will demand you surrender your guns. you will have to check them in, then return to the SAME port on your boat in order to retrieve them. and then exit immediately. failure to report or surrender firearms usually results in the confiscation of your boat and almost always with jail time. no. don't carry firearms
That doesn't sound unreasonable. Why not just do that instead of not carrying any at all? He's talking about crossing oceans, which is where he's want the firearms. He wouldn't miss them during a leisurely cruise along the coast.