Talk to the idiot Republicans in congress, that shit is a throw back to that retarded cowboy that came before Obama NOT Obama! It is amazing how quick the public forgets and blames everything on the current administration.
Uh.. You know democrats voted overwhelmingly for patriot and its renewals (under obama as well), right? Patriot was a 'reaching across the aisle' moment.
Based on the same lies regarding WMDs in Iraq by the previous administration. I'm not saying the Dems aren't at fault for not doing due diligence, but there was a lot of screaming from the previous administration's side that pushed a lot of unhealthy decisions for the country.
People keep dredging up that so-and-so voted in favour of the patriot act or some other covert operations bill and it is certainly true that giving the security services such extensive powers was a mistake. On the other hand, if you guys had been a congress critter in the days after 9/11, would you have had the brass balls to make the career ending move of not voting the patriot act? On the other hand it's been close to 15 years now and it says a lot about the US political class that they still haven't grown the spine to let the patriot act expire and repeal the parts of it that didn't have sunset provisions.
I find it troubling that Google wants to dictate what we can and cannot install on our own portable computers. Yes, I realize we can in install things from outside their app store, but, it puts those outside apps at a huge disadvantage. Google has also, many times, showed us it will delete apps for sketchy reasons. Their more open market is the main reason I use android over apples bullshit.
I don't get what you are complaining about. Having read TFA I did not sounds to me as if Google was planning to foist this down the throat of third party app stores. They just want to reduce the vast piles of what is quite frankly digital refuse that's cluttering up the Play Store. So even if Google turns the Play Store into 'Walled Garden Light (TM)' you can still side-load malware laden apps from questionable sources and if that doesn't float your boat any Tom, Dick and Harry can still set up an app store of their own with no walls and no quality checking (but hopefully at least a basic attempt at filtering out malware). Isn't that the great advantage of Android? Even with a fence around the Play Store it's still an open market, you can always go somewhere else.
Regardless of who's answer you believe, they would never drop it on Israel, and the reason why is simple. It is against Islamic law for a Muslim to cause harm to kill another Muslim.
Israel is surrounded by water and muslim countries. If anyone dropped a nuke on them, the follout is guaranteed to be blown over at least one muslim country regardless of wind direction (there's the simple answer), if not five or more. This would cause harm to or kill thousands of muslims, and any muslim country who did that would face an uprising that would make the Arab Spring look like a game of hackeysack.
The amount of radiation depends on the size of the blast and the type of warhead used. The bombs that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki produced residual radiation, but it didn't last very long. Many of the radionuclides had brief half-lives that in some cases were measured in minutes. The bomb sites were highly radioactive for a few hours after the detonations, but the residual radiation decreased rapidly. Also, and contrary to popular belief, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki detonations did not cause genetic mutatinos. American military specialist who surveyed Hiroshima with Geiger counters weeks after the explosions found little residual radioactivity. So while there would probably be some radiation fallout in surrounding muslim countries and definitely a lot of people who die or become sick due to radiation in the target zones it would not be anything like what you imagine which seems to be wide stretches of land irradiated for tens of thousands of years and littered with the bodies of collateral muslim casualties so radioactive that they glow in the dark and don't decay because no micro organisms could survive in the intense radiation. Whenever somebody says nuclear strike people automatically default to thinking about cold war monster ICBMs carrying warheads in the 1 to 10 megaton range but you don't need to go that way. In fact Iran probably won't be able to because any warheads Iran is likely to create would be nowhere near the one megaton range. Realistic estimates I have seen for Iranian nuclear weapons top out at about 50 kilotons (as a reference the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons were in the 15-20 kiloton range). The fallout from a properly planned nuclear attack on Israel involving say half a dozen warheads in the sub 50 kiloton range would cause less fallout than that from US atmospheric nuclear tests in the 60s (the Yanks were setting off firecrackers way bigger than 50 kilotons). None of the fallout from those tests caused a civil insurrection in the USA that made the US civli war pale by comparison and this even after people became aware of what radiation can do to the human body. Personally I don't know which scares me more, Iranian Ayatollahs with nuclear weapons or right wing maniacs like Benjamin 'Bibi' Netanyahu and Avigdor 'Avi' Lieberman with their fingers on the nuclear trigger. At least the Americans and the Soviets during the cold war were open to reason and logic but these Middle Eastern fanatics, jewish or muslim, are completely blinded by hate, religious fanaticism and race-political ideology.
So can we now expect the Republicans declare to a crusade to promote the creation of botnets?...or have I misunderstood how American democracy works these days?
He created the work while employed by someone. That someone provided him with all the equipment and capabilities to do the research why the hell should he be awarded the patent?
If you are part of a team who gets the patent? It seems to me only logical that the entity that commissioned the work, invested the resources and made it happen ie the company should own the patent.
As for the education system. Correct me if I am wrong but this guy who is now holder of a nobel prize is the product of that education system.... There seems to be a serious axe to grind there with a feeling that he didn't get his due and I think he is drawing a very long bow.
I dunno... because he was the source of innovation? If you have a valuable employee whose abilities are responsible is generating a substantial portion of your company's revenues you might want to keep him happy and employed with you. Treating him/her like shit, paying him/her worse than shit while you go off buying yachts, villas, luxury cars and renting top range hookers with all the money you earned through your hard work will probably result in that employee leaving your company and going somewhere else to another company who offers superior compensation and a share in the profits. Now there are two ways to pervent this, you can:
(1) Not treat your valued employee like shit and outbid your competitors to keep the employee from leaving (that's the theoreticalcapitalist way) or
(2) you could do what many companies in the western world to, you could lobby for legislation that restricts worker's rights, seek to get government to ban empoyees from organizing, and try to force your employees to sign contracts with 'anti competition clauses' in them that are usually found to be unconstutional though fortunately (from the managers point of view) this normally only happens after a prolonged legal battle that employees as a rule can't afford.
If you are part of a team that is awarded a patent pretty much the same applies. Employees should award teams that generate alot of revenue for the company with a share in the profits. Otherwise the employees should be free to leave.
Who amongst us is the biggest bible thumper?
That would be Ted Cruz..
Good, he has the job.. Now we can blame all of the stuff Nasa doesn't do on Obama in the next election and cut Nasa funding at the same time!
But wait, you say, This is Obamas last term, he can't run again..
But you also forget, Jeb Bush is going to try to run for president so the republican mandate is to screw up as many things as they can while Obama still is president so the right wing can do what it has been doing since 2008, which is to blame anything and everything on Obama.
It does not matter that anything remotely scientific is so far out of Cruz's wheelhouse to be ridiculous.
I want out of this idiotic country!
Now that Ted Cruz is effectively in charge of NASA can't you guys just stick him on top of a rocket and fire him into space on a mission to find God?
And so did the Catholic church. Between the two of them Muslim scholars and Catholic monks are pretty much single handedly responsible for salvaging much of the collective knowledge of the classical world.
Somebody here commented a while ago that in Texas they don't flush their toilets, they collect what's left in the bowl into big bags and elect them to congress. I must say the result looks quite a bit better than I expected, it must be the odour that gives them away.
I did go to college, it was one of the best in the country, but I never wasted the time trying to be the tops of the class. When I'd be the top of the class it was only because the class was of more general utility. But, you think I'm going to waste time getting 4.0 grades because that's what "smart people" do? Fuck no, and I'm all the smarter for not having wasted the time on such pointless bullshit.
I don't usually bother with intellectual pissing contests either. This one time I bothered with it mainly because if you reached a certain grade level and got picked by the school board for their top three students list they repaid you the admission fees for your final year. To me that was a powerful motivation to make the list since by the time they handed me my CS masters degree I was so shit broke I lived off cheese toast and tap water for a couple of months until I got my first paycheque. I didn't make it though, there was another guy with the same grade average and he was going for a PhD so they put him fist. I still don't think it was a waste of time. Firstly, I learned a whole bunch of stuff trying to make the list and secondly, you don't get the reward if you give up before the race starts. You have to at least make an effort and try for it.
LMOL...
That's not what the authors are arguing. They are arguing either or. Grit or intelligence. Your example does not validate the authors premise. Actually it has little to do with grit. It's about focusing one's efforts. FYI without Hawking's intelligence he would have never have developed any of his theories, regardless of how much grit he might have had. More importantly it was his intelligence, his creativity that allowed him to develop some pretty amazing theories. Something grit does not provide.
I wasn't trying to validate the author's premise. Wikipedia defines grit as: Grit in psychology is a positive, non-cognitive trait based on an individual's passion for a particular long-term goal or endstate, coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their respective objective, which sounds to me like a combination of persistence and focus. I was simply claiming that neither intelligence nor grit on their own are a guarantee for success and you can't treat them as separate and unrelated, to succeed you need both. Hawking has lots of intelligence but by his own admission he does not have a powerful motivation to achieve a single objective, and the only reason he achieved so much in one field is because his condition limited his selection of objectives.
Grit in psychology is a positive, non-cognitive trait based on an individual's passion for a particular long-term goal or endstate, coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their respective objective.
Which sounds about right to me. I've never scored in the upper two percentiles on IQ tests (quite frankly I always found them rather stupid) but I still finished at the top of my class at Uni. I put that down to compensating for any lacking intelligence with an awful lot of work and persistence. Whenever this topic comes up I am reminded of Stephen Hawking, who is undoubtedly very intelligent. I remember him claiming in a documentary I watched years ago that if he hadn't been struck by this disability would probably not have amounted to much because he would have been drifting from one interesting project to the other like a butterfly without ever making much impact but since his disability severely limited his options he was in effect forced to stay/persist within a relatively narrow field where he has made a huge contribution. Intelligence on it's own is not enough. Upbringing also has a lot to do with whether you can make anything of it. If your parents raised you without any attempts to boost your self esteem and help you get over any timidity you suffer from, no amount of intelligence is going to make up for that.
Even today, I use Google, because every time I experiment with another search engine, the results simply aren't as good. With Google search, I nearly always find what I'm looking for right at the top of my search. It's unbelievably rare that I have to traverse to a second page.
BTW, in case you haven't noticed, Google search actually does a lot more than simply search now.
I have been using Bing for a over a year now and as long as I am searching in english the results aren't really that different from Googles. My chief complaints about Bing are that it sucks to varying degrees for searching in many languages other than english and that it does not offer the ability to time limit searches like Google does. Bing's image search also contains less noise than Google's and is IMHO it's a bit better. The trivia matches you mentioned are also a minor plus for Google, Bing also enables me to find how many calories there are in an apple pretty efficiently, but even so trivia results are hardly something that would cause me to rule out using Bing.
Yeah, the AK-47 is a communist gun and it yet has become one of the most popular firearms of the American right wing.
Guns don't have economic philosophies. AK-47s will kill liberal-communist-muslims just as well as imperial-capitalist-fascists. More importantly, the AK is a well designed weapon as well as a piece of history, that any gun enthusiast would like to have.
It's also one of the most enduring icons of communist/marxist resistance struggles and revolutions around the world.
Yeah, because everyone with a fucking grievance grabs an AK-47 and shoots up a magazine don't they love?
Just what the hell does it take to knock some common sense into these bloody liberals??
Irony: right-wingers complaining about left-wingers painting them as violent lunatics and then threatening them with violence.
Of course, in the interest of literal correctness, you didn't threaten to shoot them up with an AK-47. So it's grazing irony, not center-of-mass double-tap irony.
Yeah, the AK-47 is a communist gun and it yet has become one of the most popular firearms of the American right wing. At the last count 2nd. amendment loving American civilians were buying as many AK47s as the Russian military and police combined. Irony abounds....
Queue up people bringing up the Holy Crusades and other things that took place a good 300 years ago
You have selective memory, why bring up the crusades when all one has to do is bring up the Bosnian war and the Kosovo wars. There were a whole lot of people involved in the Pogroms against the Bosnian moslems who claimed they were doing it among other things to defend Christianity.
what's wrong with streaming? Why should a user using 1GB visiting web pages should get more priority than another user streaming a 1GB video?
There is nothing wrong with streaming, but is there something wrong with bandwidth rationing to ensure that all the customers on your plane have the same same share of a a limited resource? The guy using web pages trying to plan activities at his destination is never going to download 1Gb of data during a flight just browsing websites, while a dozen streaming users might hog all the bandwidth over a limited connection ruining the experience for everybody else on the plane. Gogo claims they are doing this in order to be able to prevent bandwidth hogs from using encrypted connections to bypass their bandwidth rationing mechanism but I don't really get why that is necessary. Surely you can bandwidth limit an encrypted connection without having to know what is being transmitted over that connection, so if somebody is streaming a video on full HD over SHTTP they'd simply get a poor frame-rate without GoGo ever needing to know what they were viewing.
Can somebody who knows more about antibiotics and bacterial evolution please explain something to me. If we keep taking natural antibiotics from nature, mass manufacture them, won't we just train the world's bacterial populations to be immune to practically anything we can throw at them? I know if used wisely this would not happen but we all know that profit (or stupidity) driven people will sooner or later use this stuff in ways that will ruin these drugs, doctors will hand them out to anybody who has a mild cold or just prescribe them to any hysterical parent with a new born to get rid of them and sooner or later the Chinese, or the Americans (the practice is banned in the EU) will make these drugs by the barrel and mix them into animal feed or otherwise administer them in huge quantities to livestock like they did with Tamiflu and which ruined that drug.
yeah.. maybe, somehow, it happened in 1 galaxy out of billions.
but really, such a creature would more likely be what's commonly called a "civilization".
there's quite a few hurdles between starting as a single cell life and evolving into something that eats stars. - big, BIG jumps necessary - more likely such that they're much more likely to be done by groups of intelligent beings - or such a being would have to have been created on purpose.
like, the creature would first need to eat up the place it evolved in - but before that think/find/somehow have a way to get the next star, no small feat on it's own.
giving them public money would be a total waste. especially when if such existed, detecting it would come for free from the observing we're doing currently.
I was once told by a biologist while discussing giant sauropods that if he hadn't seen a giraffe and somebody described the animal to him he'd probably have classified the account as a gross exaggeration at best because the creature just sounded so improbable and sauropods he would probably have dismissed as anatomically impossible unless he saw the remains. The world is full of lifeforms who evolved traits that knocked the socks off the scientsts who discovered them. I'm not going to say that 'starivores' are a terribly likely lifeform and the evolutionary hurdles would be orders of magnitude greater than you get with a average giraffe and greater than sauropods, but is it really impossible? It's probably at the very fringe where the possibly plausible ends and science fiction takes over. Personally I would not necessarily give this guy money just based on the odds against a 'starivore' existing. However I'd definitely finance investigations into interstellar life which I think is much more plausibe, call it scientific venture capitalism.
Maybe ASN.1 and SMI are so little known as a programming language because... they're not a programming language? Don't get me wrong, it's good to know if you're reading/writing RFC's or dealing with network protocols (especially in the telco space), but they're not programming languages.
ASN.1 is exactly what the name says, an abstract notation that describes the way encoding and decoding of data is done. Once you have written your description you feed it to an ASN.1 code generator that will generate an encoder/decoder and the classes/structures you defined in any supported language. The closest thing to ASN.1 I can think of off the top of my head is the Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) except with ASN.1 you can serialise data into highly space efficient binary packages.
This story is a dupe from my grandfather's generation, who cried about the same thing.
That's because it has gotten worse. My grandparents used to fix everything and keep using it until it was thoroughly broken. I still have a bunch of my grandfather's tools some of which came from my great grandfather and predate WWI. My parents's generation started to get used to the idea of disposability that came with the Americans after WWII and I have experienced how disposability became the norm. It does not even seem to occur to most people these days that things can be fixed. I have seen people dispose of perfectly usable smartphones because of an easily fixable software issue and bin laptops that they could have gotten several more years of use out of by installing an SSD and some extra RAM for a fraction of what a new laptop wold have cost (and keep in mind that the most demanding work most of these laptops ever do is run MS Word). The list goes on, and on, and on,.... And don't even get me started on plastic packaging, it's absolutely revolting. I will never understand why every single one of the cookies in a bag of American cookies has to come in a plastic bag of it's own and I don't remember Bounty bars tasting any worse when they came wrapped in paper.
Look at Angela Merkel now . . . she has Ph.D. in Physics, and a bad bowl-head haircut to boot! A German TV camera team caught her last year buying a jar of mustard in a supermarket in Berlin. The team was filming an advertisement, until one of the crew said. Hey, isn't that the Channcellor or something?"
When was the last time you saw President Obama anywhere, without a half Marine Brigade protecting him . . . ?
On a trip to Iceland years ago I once shared a hot tub with a bunch of locals (which seems to be a favourite Icelandic activity) one of whom turned out to be the president of the country. He was unaccompanied, no aides, no staff, no body guards, no snipers on rooftops no drones packing hellfire missiles hovering above. His driver just dropped him off at the local bathing facility and then used the down time to have the presidential Mercedes changed to summer tires. We had a pleasant conversation about geothermal energy and fisheries management. It was quite surreal because I have experienced a number of state visits including one by the Queen of Denmark, the president of France, the Chancellor of Germany, a Soviet general secretary, a Saudi Arab crown prince, the prime minister of the UK and the President of the USA to name a few. They all had some level of security but it was never really overbearing although the Saudis were pretty paranoid but even the Brits were relatively diplomatic. The only time I felt like I was living under martial law imposed by a foreign invader was during the visit by the US president.
False. Many countries are social democrat, but no country outside of a tiny number of failed states like Cuba are socialist.
I don't think that most US Americans are capable of understanding the very substantial difference between the two. To to about half the US population anything to the left of the Republican/Tea party is communism. It cracks me up whenever somebody on Fox News calls Obama or the Clintons 'socialists' or even 'communists' which is even funnier than the 'socialist' label. Both the Clintons and Obama are pretty much in the pocket of Wall Street which is anathema to any real socialist. It is however entirely thinkable in the case of social democrats. A good example is Tony Blair, he led a social democrat party but still had no compunctions about crawling into the wallet of Ruper Murdoch and the City bankers.
Slashdot Mirror
Talk to the idiot Republicans in congress, that shit is a throw back to that retarded cowboy that came before Obama NOT Obama! It is amazing how quick the public forgets and blames everything on the current administration.
Uh.. You know democrats voted overwhelmingly for patriot and its renewals (under obama as well), right? Patriot was a 'reaching across the aisle' moment.
Based on the same lies regarding WMDs in Iraq by the previous administration. I'm not saying the Dems aren't at fault for not doing due diligence, but there was a lot of screaming from the previous administration's side that pushed a lot of unhealthy decisions for the country.
People keep dredging up that so-and-so voted in favour of the patriot act or some other covert operations bill and it is certainly true that giving the security services such extensive powers was a mistake. On the other hand, if you guys had been a congress critter in the days after 9/11, would you have had the brass balls to make the career ending move of not voting the patriot act? On the other hand it's been close to 15 years now and it says a lot about the US political class that they still haven't grown the spine to let the patriot act expire and repeal the parts of it that didn't have sunset provisions.
I find it troubling that Google wants to dictate what we can and cannot install on our own portable computers. Yes, I realize we can in install things from outside their app store, but, it puts those outside apps at a huge disadvantage. Google has also, many times, showed us it will delete apps for sketchy reasons. Their more open market is the main reason I use android over apples bullshit.
I don't get what you are complaining about. Having read TFA I did not sounds to me as if Google was planning to foist this down the throat of third party app stores. They just want to reduce the vast piles of what is quite frankly digital refuse that's cluttering up the Play Store. So even if Google turns the Play Store into 'Walled Garden Light (TM)' you can still side-load malware laden apps from questionable sources and if that doesn't float your boat any Tom, Dick and Harry can still set up an app store of their own with no walls and no quality checking (but hopefully at least a basic attempt at filtering out malware). Isn't that the great advantage of Android? Even with a fence around the Play Store it's still an open market, you can always go somewhere else.
Regardless of who's answer you believe, they would never drop it on Israel, and the reason why is simple. It is against Islamic law for a Muslim to cause harm to kill another Muslim.
Israel is surrounded by water and muslim countries. If anyone dropped a nuke on them, the follout is guaranteed to be blown over at least one muslim country regardless of wind direction (there's the simple answer), if not five or more. This would cause harm to or kill thousands of muslims, and any muslim country who did that would face an uprising that would make the Arab Spring look like a game of hackeysack.
The amount of radiation depends on the size of the blast and the type of warhead used. The bombs that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki produced residual radiation, but it didn't last very long. Many of the radionuclides had brief half-lives that in some cases were measured in minutes. The bomb sites were highly radioactive for a few hours after the detonations, but the residual radiation decreased rapidly. Also, and contrary to popular belief, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki detonations did not cause genetic mutatinos. American military specialist who surveyed Hiroshima with Geiger counters weeks after the explosions found little residual radioactivity. So while there would probably be some radiation fallout in surrounding muslim countries and definitely a lot of people who die or become sick due to radiation in the target zones it would not be anything like what you imagine which seems to be wide stretches of land irradiated for tens of thousands of years and littered with the bodies of collateral muslim casualties so radioactive that they glow in the dark and don't decay because no micro organisms could survive in the intense radiation. Whenever somebody says nuclear strike people automatically default to thinking about cold war monster ICBMs carrying warheads in the 1 to 10 megaton range but you don't need to go that way. In fact Iran probably won't be able to because any warheads Iran is likely to create would be nowhere near the one megaton range. Realistic estimates I have seen for Iranian nuclear weapons top out at about 50 kilotons (as a reference the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons were in the 15-20 kiloton range). The fallout from a properly planned nuclear attack on Israel involving say half a dozen warheads in the sub 50 kiloton range would cause less fallout than that from US atmospheric nuclear tests in the 60s (the Yanks were setting off firecrackers way bigger than 50 kilotons). None of the fallout from those tests caused a civil insurrection in the USA that made the US civli war pale by comparison and this even after people became aware of what radiation can do to the human body. Personally I don't know which scares me more, Iranian Ayatollahs with nuclear weapons or right wing maniacs like Benjamin 'Bibi' Netanyahu and Avigdor 'Avi' Lieberman with their fingers on the nuclear trigger. At least the Americans and the Soviets during the cold war were open to reason and logic but these Middle Eastern fanatics, jewish or muslim, are completely blinded by hate, religious fanaticism and race-political ideology.
So can we now expect the Republicans declare to a crusade to promote the creation of botnets? ...or have I misunderstood how American democracy works these days?
So, does this mean that Russia is finally catching up with the US in terms of monitoring its citizens?
The mind reels.
Papers please, comrade.
In Putin's Russia the traffic watches YOU!
He created the work while employed by someone. That someone provided him with all the equipment and capabilities to do the research why the hell should he be awarded the patent?
If you are part of a team who gets the patent? It seems to me only logical that the entity that commissioned the work, invested the resources and made it happen ie the company should own the patent.
As for the education system. Correct me if I am wrong but this guy who is now holder of a nobel prize is the product of that education system.... There seems to be a serious axe to grind there with a feeling that he didn't get his due and I think he is drawing a very long bow.
I dunno... because he was the source of innovation? If you have a valuable employee whose abilities are responsible is generating a substantial portion of your company's revenues you might want to keep him happy and employed with you. Treating him/her like shit, paying him/her worse than shit while you go off buying yachts, villas, luxury cars and renting top range hookers with all the money you earned through your hard work will probably result in that employee leaving your company and going somewhere else to another company who offers superior compensation and a share in the profits. Now there are two ways to pervent this, you can:
(1) Not treat your valued employee like shit and outbid your competitors to keep the employee from leaving (that's the theoreticalcapitalist way) or
(2) you could do what many companies in the western world to, you could lobby for legislation that restricts worker's rights, seek to get government to ban empoyees from organizing, and try to force your employees to sign contracts with 'anti competition clauses' in them that are usually found to be unconstutional though fortunately (from the managers point of view) this normally only happens after a prolonged legal battle that employees as a rule can't afford.
If you are part of a team that is awarded a patent pretty much the same applies. Employees should award teams that generate alot of revenue for the company with a share in the profits. Otherwise the employees should be free to leave.
... nuff said.
Who amongst us is the biggest bible thumper? That would be Ted Cruz..
Good, he has the job.. Now we can blame all of the stuff Nasa doesn't do on Obama in the next election and cut Nasa funding at the same time!
But wait, you say, This is Obamas last term, he can't run again..
But you also forget, Jeb Bush is going to try to run for president so the republican mandate is to screw up as many things as they can while Obama still is president so the right wing can do what it has been doing since 2008, which is to blame anything and everything on Obama.
It does not matter that anything remotely scientific is so far out of Cruz's wheelhouse to be ridiculous.
I want out of this idiotic country!
Now that Ted Cruz is effectively in charge of NASA can't you guys just stick him on top of a rocket and fire him into space on a mission to find God?
As most people don't realize that Muslims have contributed extensively to the sciences during the medieval age.
And so did the Catholic church. Between the two of them Muslim scholars and Catholic monks are pretty much single handedly responsible for salvaging much of the collective knowledge of the classical world.
This is what democracy is all about.
Somebody here commented a while ago that in Texas they don't flush their toilets, they collect what's left in the bowl into big bags and elect them to congress. I must say the result looks quite a bit better than I expected, it must be the odour that gives them away.
I did go to college, it was one of the best in the country, but I never wasted the time trying to be the tops of the class. When I'd be the top of the class it was only because the class was of more general utility. But, you think I'm going to waste time getting 4.0 grades because that's what "smart people" do? Fuck no, and I'm all the smarter for not having wasted the time on such pointless bullshit.
I don't usually bother with intellectual pissing contests either. This one time I bothered with it mainly because if you reached a certain grade level and got picked by the school board for their top three students list they repaid you the admission fees for your final year. To me that was a powerful motivation to make the list since by the time they handed me my CS masters degree I was so shit broke I lived off cheese toast and tap water for a couple of months until I got my first paycheque. I didn't make it though, there was another guy with the same grade average and he was going for a PhD so they put him fist. I still don't think it was a waste of time. Firstly, I learned a whole bunch of stuff trying to make the list and secondly, you don't get the reward if you give up before the race starts. You have to at least make an effort and try for it.
LMOL... That's not what the authors are arguing. They are arguing either or. Grit or intelligence. Your example does not validate the authors premise. Actually it has little to do with grit. It's about focusing one's efforts. FYI without Hawking's intelligence he would have never have developed any of his theories, regardless of how much grit he might have had. More importantly it was his intelligence, his creativity that allowed him to develop some pretty amazing theories. Something grit does not provide.
I wasn't trying to validate the author's premise. Wikipedia defines grit as: Grit in psychology is a positive, non-cognitive trait based on an individual's passion for a particular long-term goal or endstate, coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their respective objective, which sounds to me like a combination of persistence and focus. I was simply claiming that neither intelligence nor grit on their own are a guarantee for success and you can't treat them as separate and unrelated, to succeed you need both. Hawking has lots of intelligence but by his own admission he does not have a powerful motivation to achieve a single objective, and the only reason he achieved so much in one field is because his condition limited his selection of objectives.
Grit in psychology is a positive, non-cognitive trait based on an individual's passion for a particular long-term goal or endstate, coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their respective objective.
Which sounds about right to me. I've never scored in the upper two percentiles on IQ tests (quite frankly I always found them rather stupid) but I still finished at the top of my class at Uni. I put that down to compensating for any lacking intelligence with an awful lot of work and persistence. Whenever this topic comes up I am reminded of Stephen Hawking, who is undoubtedly very intelligent. I remember him claiming in a documentary I watched years ago that if he hadn't been struck by this disability would probably not have amounted to much because he would have been drifting from one interesting project to the other like a butterfly without ever making much impact but since his disability severely limited his options he was in effect forced to stay/persist within a relatively narrow field where he has made a huge contribution. Intelligence on it's own is not enough. Upbringing also has a lot to do with whether you can make anything of it. If your parents raised you without any attempts to boost your self esteem and help you get over any timidity you suffer from, no amount of intelligence is going to make up for that.
Even today, I use Google, because every time I experiment with another search engine, the results simply aren't as good. With Google search, I nearly always find what I'm looking for right at the top of my search. It's unbelievably rare that I have to traverse to a second page.
BTW, in case you haven't noticed, Google search actually does a lot more than simply search now.
I have been using Bing for a over a year now and as long as I am searching in english the results aren't really that different from Googles. My chief complaints about Bing are that it sucks to varying degrees for searching in many languages other than english and that it does not offer the ability to time limit searches like Google does. Bing's image search also contains less noise than Google's and is IMHO it's a bit better. The trivia matches you mentioned are also a minor plus for Google, Bing also enables me to find how many calories there are in an apple pretty efficiently, but even so trivia results are hardly something that would cause me to rule out using Bing.
Yeah, the AK-47 is a communist gun and it yet has become one of the most popular firearms of the American right wing.
Guns don't have economic philosophies. AK-47s will kill liberal-communist-muslims just as well as imperial-capitalist-fascists. More importantly, the AK is a well designed weapon as well as a piece of history, that any gun enthusiast would like to have.
It's also one of the most enduring icons of communist/marxist resistance struggles and revolutions around the world.
Yeah, because everyone with a fucking grievance grabs an AK-47 and shoots up a magazine don't they love?
Just what the hell does it take to knock some common sense into these bloody liberals??
Irony: right-wingers complaining about left-wingers painting them as violent lunatics and then threatening them with violence.
Of course, in the interest of literal correctness, you didn't threaten to shoot them up with an AK-47. So it's grazing irony, not center-of-mass double-tap irony.
Yeah, the AK-47 is a communist gun and it yet has become one of the most popular firearms of the American right wing. At the last count 2nd. amendment loving American civilians were buying as many AK47s as the Russian military and police combined. Irony abounds....
More from the religion of peace and tolerance.
Queue up people bringing up the Holy Crusades and other things that took place a good 300 years ago
You have selective memory, why bring up the crusades when all one has to do is bring up the Bosnian war and the Kosovo wars. There were a whole lot of people involved in the Pogroms against the Bosnian moslems who claimed they were doing it among other things to defend Christianity.
This will certainly make marksmanship training instruction easier.
And it will make anybody who uses this thing unable to hit the broad side of a barn the moment the batteries run out.
what's wrong with streaming? Why should a user using 1GB visiting web pages should get more priority than another user streaming a 1GB video?
There is nothing wrong with streaming, but is there something wrong with bandwidth rationing to ensure that all the customers on your plane have the same same share of a a limited resource? The guy using web pages trying to plan activities at his destination is never going to download 1Gb of data during a flight just browsing websites, while a dozen streaming users might hog all the bandwidth over a limited connection ruining the experience for everybody else on the plane. Gogo claims they are doing this in order to be able to prevent bandwidth hogs from using encrypted connections to bypass their bandwidth rationing mechanism but I don't really get why that is necessary. Surely you can bandwidth limit an encrypted connection without having to know what is being transmitted over that connection, so if somebody is streaming a video on full HD over SHTTP they'd simply get a poor frame-rate without GoGo ever needing to know what they were viewing.
Can somebody who knows more about antibiotics and bacterial evolution please explain something to me. If we keep taking natural antibiotics from nature, mass manufacture them, won't we just train the world's bacterial populations to be immune to practically anything we can throw at them? I know if used wisely this would not happen but we all know that profit (or stupidity) driven people will sooner or later use this stuff in ways that will ruin these drugs, doctors will hand them out to anybody who has a mild cold or just prescribe them to any hysterical parent with a new born to get rid of them and sooner or later the Chinese, or the Americans (the practice is banned in the EU) will make these drugs by the barrel and mix them into animal feed or otherwise administer them in huge quantities to livestock like they did with Tamiflu and which ruined that drug.
yeah.. maybe, somehow, it happened in 1 galaxy out of billions.
but really, such a creature would more likely be what's commonly called a "civilization".
there's quite a few hurdles between starting as a single cell life and evolving into something that eats stars. - big, BIG jumps necessary - more likely such that they're much more likely to be done by groups of intelligent beings - or such a being would have to have been created on purpose.
like, the creature would first need to eat up the place it evolved in - but before that think/find/somehow have a way to get the next star, no small feat on it's own.
giving them public money would be a total waste. especially when if such existed, detecting it would come for free from the observing we're doing currently.
I was once told by a biologist while discussing giant sauropods that if he hadn't seen a giraffe and somebody described the animal to him he'd probably have classified the account as a gross exaggeration at best because the creature just sounded so improbable and sauropods he would probably have dismissed as anatomically impossible unless he saw the remains. The world is full of lifeforms who evolved traits that knocked the socks off the scientsts who discovered them. I'm not going to say that 'starivores' are a terribly likely lifeform and the evolutionary hurdles would be orders of magnitude greater than you get with a average giraffe and greater than sauropods, but is it really impossible? It's probably at the very fringe where the possibly plausible ends and science fiction takes over. Personally I would not necessarily give this guy money just based on the odds against a 'starivore' existing. However I'd definitely finance investigations into interstellar life which I think is much more plausibe, call it scientific venture capitalism.
Maybe ASN.1 and SMI are so little known as a programming language because... they're not a programming language? Don't get me wrong, it's good to know if you're reading/writing RFC's or dealing with network protocols (especially in the telco space), but they're not programming languages.
ASN.1 is exactly what the name says, an abstract notation that describes the way encoding and decoding of data is done. Once you have written your description you feed it to an ASN.1 code generator that will generate an encoder/decoder and the classes/structures you defined in any supported language. The closest thing to ASN.1 I can think of off the top of my head is the Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) except with ASN.1 you can serialise data into highly space efficient binary packages.
This story is a dupe from my grandfather's generation, who cried about the same thing.
That's because it has gotten worse. My grandparents used to fix everything and keep using it until it was thoroughly broken. I still have a bunch of my grandfather's tools some of which came from my great grandfather and predate WWI. My parents's generation started to get used to the idea of disposability that came with the Americans after WWII and I have experienced how disposability became the norm. It does not even seem to occur to most people these days that things can be fixed. I have seen people dispose of perfectly usable smartphones because of an easily fixable software issue and bin laptops that they could have gotten several more years of use out of by installing an SSD and some extra RAM for a fraction of what a new laptop wold have cost (and keep in mind that the most demanding work most of these laptops ever do is run MS Word). The list goes on, and on, and on,.... And don't even get me started on plastic packaging, it's absolutely revolting. I will never understand why every single one of the cookies in a bag of American cookies has to come in a plastic bag of it's own and I don't remember Bounty bars tasting any worse when they came wrapped in paper.
Look it now. Merkel pretty much controls Europe -
Look at Angela Merkel now . . . she has Ph.D. in Physics, and a bad bowl-head haircut to boot! A German TV camera team caught her last year buying a jar of mustard in a supermarket in Berlin. The team was filming an advertisement, until one of the crew said. Hey, isn't that the Channcellor or something?"
When was the last time you saw President Obama anywhere, without a half Marine Brigade protecting him . . . ?
On a trip to Iceland years ago I once shared a hot tub with a bunch of locals (which seems to be a favourite Icelandic activity) one of whom turned out to be the president of the country. He was unaccompanied, no aides, no staff, no body guards, no snipers on rooftops no drones packing hellfire missiles hovering above. His driver just dropped him off at the local bathing facility and then used the down time to have the presidential Mercedes changed to summer tires. We had a pleasant conversation about geothermal energy and fisheries management. It was quite surreal because I have experienced a number of state visits including one by the Queen of Denmark, the president of France, the Chancellor of Germany, a Soviet general secretary, a Saudi Arab crown prince, the prime minister of the UK and the President of the USA to name a few. They all had some level of security but it was never really overbearing although the Saudis were pretty paranoid but even the Brits were relatively diplomatic. The only time I felt like I was living under martial law imposed by a foreign invader was during the visit by the US president.
many countries are socialist.
False. Many countries are social democrat, but no country outside of a tiny number of failed states like Cuba are socialist.
I don't think that most US Americans are capable of understanding the very substantial difference between the two. To to about half the US population anything to the left of the Republican/Tea party is communism. It cracks me up whenever somebody on Fox News calls Obama or the Clintons 'socialists' or even 'communists' which is even funnier than the 'socialist' label. Both the Clintons and Obama are pretty much in the pocket of Wall Street which is anathema to any real socialist. It is however entirely thinkable in the case of social democrats. A good example is Tony Blair, he led a social democrat party but still had no compunctions about crawling into the wallet of Ruper Murdoch and the City bankers.