Who modded this up? A single base change in DNA is almost never fatal. For a start, considerably more than 90% of the human genome is junk that has no expressive effect anyway (according to some theories it helps protect the rest of the genome.) Even point mutations in coding sections of the DNA often do not significantly alter the shape of the protein it codes for, and many proteins are coded for in several locations in the genome.
True, single base changes can have dramatic effects, but this is rare. As an example, the human genetic equipment is so fault-tolerant that humans can be even born with 3 copies of a chromosome and still survive (Down's Syndrome).
Kids pick up a lot of things faster than adults - in particular, language. Their brains are just wired for it. I would guess that learning a UI has several aspects in common with learning a language, with vocab (different icons, menus, toolbars, dialogs etc.) and grammar (common ways of using the mouse, keys/buttons working in different ways according to context, occasional deviations from the standard.)
I suppose you could argue that a GUI is a sort of visual language. Or does that sound stupid?
in the US, 50% of the population pays 98% of the taxes.
I've heard this before, but it seems to have stayed oddly unchanging since I heard it first, which I think was several years ago. Do you have a source? Also, is it 50% of the absolute population or 50% of the working population, or 50% of the eligible working population? If it's the first then saying that only the wealthier than the mean pay taxes is rather misleading.
Not that it isn't interesting to think about, but I believe the problems with your thought experiment (if I understand it correctly) are that you are assuming that people are motivated entirely by greed and have no concept of the long-term. If the people in general were indeed like that it might well be a good idea to discard democracy and aim for some sort of benevolent dictatorship as an ideal.
If both are using it for commercial purposes, then the entity that has more to gain from it is more entitled to it
I assume you're not serious. Surely whoever registers it first is entitled to it?
Government: "Clearly Nissan (motors) will make more cash from that domain, so hand it over!"
Seems a bit totalitarian, to say the least. What happens if Mr. Nissan builds up a company that is bigger than Nissan? Does the domain switch back and forth?
Regardless of the pedantry, it was the cinema that printed 'AM'. If they're going to use ambiguous terms then they're going to have to accept the most logical way to interpret them, which is with "12 AM" being midnight; it wouldn't make sense to assume midnight as "12 PM", because "12.01" is clearly "AM".
Besides, using AM for midnight is a universally accepted standard. The poster is trolling for an argument.
And another point occurs: even if with formal logic "12 PM" midday was incorrect (which it isn't: midday acutally occurs instantaneously between 1159 and 1200), midnight, being defined as the beginning of the day, is indeed ante-meridian.
The study seemed to be checking for typos in citations. Just because a scientist has copied the text of a (wrongly typed) citation does not mean s/he has not read the paper. There is no law that says someone writing a paper has to type up every citation they make from scratch.
Okay, I'm going to try to respond to both your posts in this thread:
Therefore, we shouldn't jump on the stop-global-warming-bandwagon blindly. Instead, we should instead give it careful study, and weigh out future consequences of our actions.
Fair enough. But that wasn't what the orginal poster was suggesting. S/He said until we know for certian[sic] we shouldn't do anything about the situation.
I'll let that analogy speak for itself.
Well I'm happy for it to. I was quite pleased with it: it shows the relative costs of a false positive and a false negative.
conclusions haven't been reached...recommend better models for future testing
Granted, but that will always be the case. The evidence so far supports the theory.
Your post shows that you have a good understanding of political debates, but a terrible understanding of the current state of science
Thanks for the compliment (a new one for me!) but I have to say I do understand the scientific process. I take part in it even. Admittedly I don't have any specialist knowledge about chemistry/climatology but I'm not the one contradicting the people who do.
Personally, I'm a watchful fence-sitter on the global warming debate
If I don't know enough about a subject, I'll go along with the experts - particularly when there is such a strong consensus. I'm not arrogant enough to think I know better than the people who are studying it. A little skepticism is good, of course, but when the evidence is there it makes sense to moderate our actions accordingly; however, the original poster called this the policy of extremists or fanatics.
Who's right in the global warming mess? We can't tell
So is Relativity, or Darwinian evolution. This does not help your argument, you imbecile.
It has some amount of scientific evidence behind it, but some against as well
As does almost any area of study in science, from cold fusion to ESP. But the great majority of evidence is behind it.
until we know for certian that we are the problem, we should assume we are
An analogy: you are trapped in a bank vault with ten other people. You don't know whether the vault is airtight or not. The other ten people think it may well be, on the balance of probability, so decide to conserve air. You, on the other hand, want this to be proved for "certian" before you change your behaviour so you light up a great big cigar.
These people are called extremists or fanatics
I assume this statement means you are a troll - the vast majority of the world's scientists accept that global warming is a serious problem and to a significant extent caused by human activity. Well, you have to laugh...
Normal people round off to multiples of 10 or 5 in estimates in my experience.
But the argument is ridiculous. There must be many measurements across body parts that correspond well to round measurements in one, both, or neither system, and besides, there is a great deal of physical variation between people.
Is your next post going to be: penis length one inch...
because the standard deviation for height is under one tenth of a meter
Source?
I'm sorry to be rude, but your argument is ludicrous. Height doesn't vary by more than 1/2 inch per day? What happens if the extra height loss would push the person being measured into the "lower inch" measurement (i.e. 5'11" rather than 6")? Why can't you measure in cm with an accuracy of (+-)1cm?
A units system based on the amount of compression of the spine over a day seems to me to be silly.
Both the imperial and metric systems are arbitrary; some measurements are likely to be more easily made under one system. But unlike its competitor, the metric system is self-consistent, logical and easy to use, and the effort used to convert between them is non-trivial.
Integers are simple. Small integer fractions, simple. 1.8 meters is over an inch (2.54 cm) short of six feet. On the other hand, 6.56 feet is too many significant figures for most measures involving a couple of meters or few feet. You've made my point.
I have not made your point. 1.8 metres is over an inch short of six feet? So? It's unlikely anyone would ever want to measure a length of exactly six feet if the imperial system did not exist.
Why is 6 feet easier to comprehend than 2.4 metres? (actually ~1.8m). I find that perfectly easy to comprehend. If you mean it has a decimal point in it, some of us can do maths. Besides, 2 metres is ~6.56 feet; it depends on the lengths you are measuring.
You may be a little stupid, but I find it easy to measure 1/4 cm.
You're completely wrong and here's why. Pick up any magazine off the rack that has a fan-art or letters section. Find the address to give submissions to. Nearby I guarantee there will be fine print. The fine print will say approximately this. Any and all letters sent to this address become property of "insert magazine name here". "magzine" reserves the right to edit, reuse, publish, etc. etc. We wont return anything you send to us.
That's just extra legal protection. Consider: would anyone have a hope in hell of winning in court against a newspaper who published a letter which they sent to the paper's letters address? Clue: no.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't this be under the 'America' topic so us non-Yanks can skip this sort of thing?
Who modded this up? A single base change in DNA is almost never fatal. For a start, considerably more than 90% of the human genome is junk that has no expressive effect anyway (according to some theories it helps protect the rest of the genome.) Even point mutations in coding sections of the DNA often do not significantly alter the shape of the protein it codes for, and many proteins are coded for in several locations in the genome.
True, single base changes can have dramatic effects, but this is rare. As an example, the human genetic equipment is so fault-tolerant that humans can be even born with 3 copies of a chromosome and still survive (Down's Syndrome).
Kids pick up a lot of things faster than adults - in particular, language. Their brains are just wired for it. I would guess that learning a UI has several aspects in common with learning a language, with vocab (different icons, menus, toolbars, dialogs etc.) and grammar (common ways of using the mouse, keys/buttons working in different ways according to context, occasional deviations from the standard.)
I suppose you could argue that a GUI is a sort of visual language. Or does that sound stupid?
Maybe he's a big fan of whitespace?
in the US, 50% of the population pays 98% of the taxes.
I've heard this before, but it seems to have stayed oddly unchanging since I heard it first, which I think was several years ago. Do you have a source? Also, is it 50% of the absolute population or 50% of the working population, or 50% of the eligible working population? If it's the first then saying that only the wealthier than the mean pay taxes is rather misleading.
If the rich are just getting richer and the poor are getting so much poorer,
Are you denying that that is not the essential basis of capitalism, both in theory and in practice?
Not that it isn't interesting to think about, but I believe the problems with your thought experiment (if I understand it correctly) are that you are assuming that people are motivated entirely by greed and have no concept of the long-term. If the people in general were indeed like that it might well be a good idea to discard democracy and aim for some sort of benevolent dictatorship as an ideal.
Your vote of the dollar (mark, frank whatever) is much more powerful than any other vote
Clearly not, or we wouldn't be having this discussion. The "votes" by cash have been overruled.
You had the choice to buy a more expensive printer with cheaper/generic capable cartridges
Er, no I didn't. Which line of printers were you thinking of? Or were you making facts up to suit your philosophy?
Why should a few politicians outvoice the masses
They're not outvoicing me. I support it, and the masses, or at least the masses that I know, agree.
If both are using it for commercial purposes, then the entity that has more to gain from it is more entitled to it
I assume you're not serious. Surely whoever registers it first is entitled to it?
Government: "Clearly Nissan (motors) will make more cash from that domain, so hand it over!"
Seems a bit totalitarian, to say the least. What happens if Mr. Nissan builds up a company that is bigger than Nissan? Does the domain switch back and forth?
Actually I'm from Wales.
Please give me one example where midnight is considered 12pm. Even in the cinema in this story it was considered a glitch.
Regardless of the pedantry, it was the cinema that printed 'AM'. If they're going to use ambiguous terms then they're going to have to accept the most logical way to interpret them, which is with "12 AM" being midnight; it wouldn't make sense to assume midnight as "12 PM", because "12.01" is clearly "AM".
Besides, using AM for midnight is a universally accepted standard. The poster is trolling for an argument.
And another point occurs: even if with formal logic "12 PM" midday was incorrect (which it isn't: midday acutally occurs instantaneously between 1159 and 1200), midnight, being defined as the beginning of the day, is indeed ante-meridian.
Um, only ironic if that was actually true. Are you drunk? The study, or at least the report of it, did indeed look for misprints in references.
The study seemed to be checking for typos in citations. Just because a scientist has copied the text of a (wrongly typed) citation does not mean s/he has not read the paper. There is no law that says someone writing a paper has to type up every citation they make from scratch.
Why not make your own kaleidoscope? Get an empty toilet roll tube, tape up one end, fill it with pieces of coloured broken glass. Job done.
Make sure your kid looks down into it though rather than holding it up to the light.
Quicksort is slow if the data it is sorting are already almost sorted, a situation which (IIRC) shellshort is particularly efficient at dealing with.
Okay, I'm going to try to respond to both your posts in this thread:
Therefore, we shouldn't jump on the stop-global-warming-bandwagon blindly. Instead, we should instead give it careful study, and weigh out future consequences of our actions.
Fair enough. But that wasn't what the orginal poster was suggesting. S/He said until we know for certian[sic] we shouldn't do anything about the situation.
I'll let that analogy speak for itself.
Well I'm happy for it to. I was quite pleased with it: it shows the relative costs of a false positive and a false negative.
conclusions haven't been reached...recommend better models for future testing
Granted, but that will always be the case. The evidence so far supports the theory.
Your post shows that you have a good understanding of political debates, but a terrible understanding of the current state of science
Thanks for the compliment (a new one for me!) but I have to say I do understand the scientific process. I take part in it even. Admittedly I don't have any specialist knowledge about chemistry/climatology but I'm not the one contradicting the people who do.
Personally, I'm a watchful fence-sitter on the global warming debate
If I don't know enough about a subject, I'll go along with the experts - particularly when there is such a strong consensus. I'm not arrogant enough to think I know better than the people who are studying it. A little skepticism is good, of course, but when the evidence is there it makes sense to moderate our actions accordingly; however, the original poster called this the policy of extremists or fanatics.
Who's right in the global warming mess? We can't tell
Balance of evidence.
Global warming itself is still theory
So is Relativity, or Darwinian evolution. This does not help your argument, you imbecile.
It has some amount of scientific evidence behind it, but some against as well
As does almost any area of study in science, from cold fusion to ESP. But the great majority of evidence is behind it.
until we know for certian that we are the problem, we should assume we are
An analogy: you are trapped in a bank vault with ten other people. You don't know whether the vault is airtight or not. The other ten people think it may well be, on the balance of probability, so decide to conserve air. You, on the other hand, want this to be proved for "certian" before you change your behaviour so you light up a great big cigar.
These people are called extremists or fanatics
I assume this statement means you are a troll - the vast majority of the world's scientists accept that global warming is a serious problem and to a significant extent caused by human activity. Well, you have to laugh...
Cheers for that. That will save me the trouble of actually reading the book.
Normal people round off to multiples of 10 or 5 in estimates in my experience.
But the argument is ridiculous. There must be many measurements across body parts that correspond well to round measurements in one, both, or neither system, and besides, there is a great deal of physical variation between people.
Is your next post going to be: penis length one inch...
Good for you. However, my arm-span is closer to 1.5m than 1.8m/6 feet.
My thumb->pinky measurement is also ~6 inches, or, even closer, 15cm. Oh wait, that's a more round number.
My palm-width is also similar to about 4 inches, but 4 inches is almost the same as 10cm. Oh, another round number.
I'll spare you the rest of my measurements because I think your argument has been shredded.
because the standard deviation for height is under one tenth of a meter
Source?
I'm sorry to be rude, but your argument is ludicrous. Height doesn't vary by more than 1/2 inch per day? What happens if the extra height loss would push the person being measured into the "lower inch" measurement (i.e. 5'11" rather than 6")? Why can't you measure in cm with an accuracy of (+-)1cm?
A units system based on the amount of compression of the spine over a day seems to me to be silly.
Both the imperial and metric systems are arbitrary; some measurements are likely to be more easily made under one system. But unlike its competitor, the metric system is self-consistent, logical and easy to use, and the effort used to convert between them is non-trivial.
Integers are simple. Small integer fractions, simple. 1.8 meters is over an inch (2.54 cm) short of six feet. On the other hand, 6.56 feet is too many significant figures for most measures involving a couple of meters or few feet. You've made my point.
I have not made your point. 1.8 metres is over an inch short of six feet? So? It's unlikely anyone would ever want to measure a length of exactly six feet if the imperial system did not exist.
I'm still trying to see what your argument is.
Why is 6 feet easier to comprehend than 2.4 metres? (actually ~1.8m). I find that perfectly easy to comprehend. If you mean it has a decimal point in it, some of us can do maths. Besides, 2 metres is ~6.56 feet; it depends on the lengths you are measuring.
You may be a little stupid, but I find it easy to measure 1/4 cm.
You're completely wrong and here's why. Pick up any magazine off the rack that has a fan-art or letters section. Find the address to give submissions to. Nearby I guarantee there will be fine print. The fine print will say approximately this. Any and all letters sent to this address become property of "insert magazine name here". "magzine" reserves the right to edit, reuse, publish, etc. etc. We wont return anything you send to us.
That's just extra legal protection. Consider: would anyone have a hope in hell of winning in court against a newspaper who published a letter which they sent to the paper's letters address? Clue: no.