Another consequence of that greed : just about every poor person in America gets meat daily, which is vastly healthier than not eating meat . Just look to your southern neighbor, Mexico, where the poor get beans on a tortilla with maybe a piece of chicken leg on sunday. The further south, the worse it gets.
Think about this for a second. How are these seeds grown ? Sterile ? How are the genes developed ? When are they rendered sterile ?
Needless to say, evolution is used in these plants. They introduce a few million random mutations while getting the plants infected with DNA rewriting viruses containing interesting genes (just like in the real world, incidentally, except they are the ones picking the genes instead of random chance). From the results, the extremely large majority is substandard. Then they select the best ones, grow massive quantities of them, and repeat the process (does this process perchance remind you of something ?).
Then repeat this entire shit 500 times, and then finally render the final batch of the plants second generation sterile, which is then sent out. In reality GM "manipulation of plants" is not that different from accelerating normal evolution under specifically chosen circumstances (ie. what humans have been doing to farm plants for 20k years, just better and faster).
Farmers used to do that. Net result : about 1% crop yield per square meter compared to what we have today. Do you seriously think a 100x reduction (oh wait, technology advanced... say 25x) in food supply would be survivable ?
As for using it on humans to prevent disease, that method was in use during the plagues. Fat lot of good it did them.
Yeah, antibiotics will stop working in the future ! OMG ! Let's redo the plague infections from the middle ages today while we can avoid it !
Do tell, what is your suggestion ? (and please, before you go there, the quantity of antibiotics consumed doesn't really matter, as long as we prevent large-scale infections with antibiotics resistence will grow. So the only way we could stop resistence is to protect only 1% (preferably less) of the population, and let plagues regularly destroy their breeding pool (that would be 10-20% of humanity dying if history is any indication). The difference between doing the minimum necessary to protect lives and massive overuse of antibiotics is at best a few years).
Oh and let's not forget that we also must stop any long distance travel, unless you want to be blamed again for wiping out indigenous populations with our resistant genes.
Actually this is mostly the result of insects becoming resistant to all forms of insecticides. It's not just GM crops that suffer from this, it's all crops. So don't act so smug, unless you like famines (or buy in the fantasy that sustainable farming can actually feed >1% of the world), this is really bad news. All crops are hit by insect's insecticide resistance. GM crops were simply near absolutely immune until 2-3 years ago (and they still are much better than natural crops).
I hope this also destroys any fantasy anyone has about this effect limiting GM crops, it'll have the opposite effect : it'll push more GM on our plate, with more mutations. Since we can't actually feed the world without GM, any sane person hopes against hope that someone, preferably not Monsanto but nobody should be picky, succeeds in fixing this problem. There's 7 billion humans, meaning that if any species adapts to become parasitic on humans or some part of the human cycle of life (ie. exploits what we eat and/or shit), the reward is huge. Is there really any doubt what those adaptations hope to accomplish ?
Opponents of GM, answer me this simple question : what exactly do you think Gaia is planning for us ? Don't you think it might be a global famine with death tolls that'd make all wars combined look like the devil's nap time ?
Just so some accuracy can be in here. Life, as in DNA replication, exists for about 3 billion years. The solar system for about 4.5 billion years (our sun is third generation, in other words, 2 solar systems were destroyed before ours was created in roughly the same place), and earth somewhere near 4.4 billion years, although it could have been much smaller than today until about 4.2 billion years.
That "island species" (technically races, not species) die out when reunited with their long lost mainland brethren is not exactly news. It's what's happening to the human species right now. In general, without natural borders, different races are impossible within a species. The fact that we have both global travel and different races is an exceptional situation, and a temporary one (in ~500 years, maybe less, there will only be 1 human race left, unless global travel ends before that time). It is not known which race that will be, but if other island species evolution patterns are any indications, whatever race survives will look a lot like the original human race. It would be interesting to see whether the remaining race would be black or not (if not, that would be a strong indication that the original humans in Africa were not actually black before the races split up. My money's on that they weren't black (cause primates have white skin), but it could very well depend on the exact timing of the split).
My biggest complaint about food crops, rather than their GM-ness (success or failure) is that once we get a "good" strain, we keep cloning it instead of continuing the process via selective breeding. So while each generation of insect improves against the crop, the crop defends damn-near exactly the same way; I suspect that may have reduced the time needed for adaptation as well.
No offence, but this is a trivial, trivial complaint. Don't you think that GM researchers *also* stimulate evolution in those plants ? Also, for extremely obvious reasons predatory species cannot totally wipe out the species they seem to be destroying. Predatory species are fundamentally limited to about 1/500th of the biomass of their victim species (or -usually- much less), except in the extreme short term.
I like your attitude, really, but... your ideas about science are very strange indeed...
Science - the development of theories based on testing, evidence and logic - is not compatible with arguments such as 'believe this book because authoritative people claim that it has an authoritative author'.
This doesn't apply to mathematics at all. We believe in the axioms because... well they're useful (an argument that can be made equally well, maybe even better, about the bible).
It isn't actually possible to -correctly- define natural numbers using the Peano axioms... so it's not just that we believe in things for good reasons, we believe in all sorts of things *known to be wrong* because we don't know a more useful solution (Actually there is a simple known way to fix natural numbers, you basically pick some n, arbitrary large but finite and work in Zn. Know anyone who actually uses that over N ?). Godel proved that it is not possible to provide a finite extension to the peano axioms that is internally consistent and solves the problem. Whoops.
So we know we have run down a dead end... yet nobody's seriously considering anything else. Why do we believe it anyway ? We've done it for 2000 years... and it isn't all that "in your face".
This is where your argument runs stuck. And in case you find this way to theoretical, rest assured that there are plenty of known holes in just about any theory. Physics was last thought to be correct until 1850 or so. Then they discovered quantum theory, which created dozens of new problems, most of which are unsolved (e.g. the famous gravity conundrum : it is actually impossible for quantum theory to exist in relativistic space... whoops. But that's not the only problem by far).
Once you get into things like chemistry or further up the chain, the amount of direct contradictions piles up so high it isn't even funny anymore.
Why do we believe in science ? Because it's "mostly useful". There is no better answer. It mostly works.
Note that these problems are internal inconsistencies. They are, by themselves, proof that the theories are wrong. These problems are more than direct counterexamples, they are large classes of theoretical counterexamples. It's not just that we know that certain phenomena don't fit in the theory, we can give classes of formulas that describe simple situations that e.g. make the universe blow up in any simulation. Or you can trivially prove that according to quantum theory, large masses should not attract eachother (never mind trying to find stuff like relativistic slowdowns).
Likewise, there are trivial experiments, mathematical and physical, that you can do yourself and verify that they don't match up to the theory at all. A simplified example is : describe the collection of collections that don't contain themselves, call it A. Now answer the question A elem A ? (this is the kiddy version and you can get yourself out of the mud here, using a not-quite-allowed-in-this-case-but-who-cares detour via fractions, but there is an adult version that refuses to get fixed up like that).
I agree that a claim of divine intervention can always be used to counter an argument that a claimed historical or current factual account is physically implausible. I disagree that it's the most credible explanation in any case I've encountered
You need to read more. I think I could come up with 10 things that are physically impossible from the last year alone.
Because humans have evolved to have a set of morally charged emotions and those emotions influence our behaviour. They cause us to feel anger when others steal and shame when we steal ourselves, for example. Those emotions lead us to help the infirm. I also postulate that, just as religions contain explanations for floods, disease and earthquakes, they al
Any AI book will tell you this. Mathematical proofs can be found in any introductory combinatorics book. Trust me they will mention the problem of state explosion, and a good book will have a proof that state explosion is utterly intractible in any system that contains any chaotic component (Basic idea of the proof : at some point you get into the chaotic component (usually very quickly), in this part of the decision tree you can never eliminate anything due to the chaos property, and you have an infinite tree, ergo you can never correcly evaluate it. It doesn't even matter what the complexity of your evaluation function is, it would be unsolveable even if it wasn't the case that most optimization algorithms are at least NP-complete. In practice you would have to solve the halting problem for every branch of the tree).
But, an example:
THE LIMITS OF RATIONALITY
Operations research tools have also underscored dramatically the limits of SEU theory in dealing with complexity. For example, present and prospective computers are not even powerful enough to provide exact solutions for the problems of optimal scheduling and routing of jobs through a typical factory that manufactures a variety of products using many different tools and machines. And the mere thought of using these computational techniques to determine an optimal national policy for energy production or an optimal economic policy reveals their limits.
Note how simple the problem is where a rational decision is attempted. Compared to deciding how to optimally live a human life... well, what do you think ?
But there's an entire library on the subject, this was extensively studied in the 1950's and essentially scientists gave up.
No you don't. Walk into a hardware store once. You use the imperial system. Seriously. Go and check.
For pipes too, and cables (steel cables for construction). You're a bit less likely to see this in a hardware store, but a sufficiently large one should still have these kinds of things.
The point being that there are far more stupid democrats than stupid republicans. And frankly, I take offence at your implication that dumb suburbs are necessarily filled with blacks. Yes there's a little more blacks on the East Coast in these kinds of places, but finding one filled with white Europeans is not that big a problem even there. At the West coast, well, there's the whole menu : you want masses of illiterate blacks, whites, latinos ? All are available, often with a side of chinese in there somewhere. I'm sure I've hardly covered all the glorious variation these subsidized deathtraps the democrats built in our cities have.
These places are universally democrat (because republicans get beaten up as soon as this become common knowledge), by al reasonable measures are stupid, and they've got huge numbers.
So the initial assertion is perfectly true : dumb democrats far outnumber dumb republicans. And whilst I'm not making the claim that trailer parks are much better, those people can actually read. A significant part of the people in there have held engineering and other jobs for years on end, if not decades. Yes we all know you do not approve of them. They're not nearly as stupid as you imply though.
I have no clue about averages, but I have not failed to notice that there never are people from these urban deserts present in the polls democrats use for their "average intelligence" counts (putting aside the obvious conflict of interest these polls have in the first place). All the polls I've seen only prove that "college students actually score -slightly*- higher than the general public on academic tests"
* slightly ? Yes, in fact it's quite shameful how low the difference is imho.
I'm curious... since it has been proven a few decades ago that the human mind is in fact incapable of rational thinking. In fact computers aren't either, since rational reasoning can only take place with full information, which simply isn't available. But even rational reasoning "in tanks" (massively simplified simulated worlds) is horrendously difficult and not at all optimal (especially if thinking is not -entirely- free and determining a rational course of action is often an NP-hard problem. E.g. the minimax algorithm in the case of a non-universal heuristic). But it gets worse. In a system that has the property of chaos (like the real world) it is utterly impossible to find the rational course of action, even with infinite time, infinite processing capacity and full information (none of which are available).
So here's a thought: the only way atheists get convinced of atheism is exactly the same way people get convinced of religions. It is a numbers game.
I know that atheists pride themselves on their supposed superiority because of compatibility with science. But while this is a good argument against quite a few religions, it doesn't actually apply to them all, as any good philosophy class should point out (google "philosophy miracles" and read up a bit on it). Science is perfectly compatible with religions that do not assume constant divine intervention and postulate a rule-based universe with local divine intervention, like Judaism, Buddhism or Christianity, and only contradicts religions that propose god interferes in every action no matter how small (e.g. islam, hinduism).
Besides I think atheists are often hypocritical. Plenty of ideologies have been proven to be wrong, yet plenty of atheists uphold them : e.g. socialist atheists (given the assumption of self-interest on an individual basis, you can mathematically prove socialism will fail). This is not considered a problem at all. How do you deal with that ?
Another thing I wonder about how atheists deal with it is the implications of evolution. And specifically what happens if you save "the weak". As we all know saving and protecting the weak is pretty much the cornerstone of the Christian faith, and it makes appearances in other faiths with less emphasis too. But evolution theory is diametrically opposite this : if you assume that there is some way to express fitness, interfering to remove the disadvantages of low fitness leads to exponentially lowering fitness in a population over time. Needless to say, that's pretty fucking bad. (I actually had a big fight with my parents over this, of course I had the impression at the time atheists actually did not feel the necessity of "fixing" low fitness. I was wrong) It means that protecting the weak will fail catastrophically after a given amount of time. Surprisingly short amount of time too, we're talking only 3-4 generations before you cross into the steep section of the graph.
So how can an atheist, without denying his "faith", advocate helping infirm people ? Why isn't an atheist opposed to, oh let's take something small, like wheelchairs. To put it more cool, why don't atheists think like the Spartans of old ?
And if you don't think like this, what is your justification. Atheists pride themselves on following what science says, like for example not trying impossible things, or preparing for the inevitable. Yet atheists are not in favor of abolishing healthcare, despite the obvious consequences that can be trivially predicted... I wish I could say I don't understand, but I've done this discussion a few times.
And I've yet to find the first group that actually really follows science. If I had to name the thing that came closest, I'd probably name something like the accounting department of a large international firm. When it isn't about management compensation, they follow the numbers, and receive no end of scorn from atheists for doing that. I'm not saying I like what these people do on a moral level, but they're certai
What people here neglect to mention is that for a lot of things, like bolts or screws and a million other things, there really aren't good conversions available at all.
Take an example 1/4" = 0.635 cm, it's a hell of a lot easier (and cheaper) to make something 1/4th of the length of something else, versus 127/200th of some standard length.
Even in Europe, ostensibly metric, they haven't really made this transition at all.
That's what people don't realize. There's literature written for 2 reasons : a) for money, which means that whatever is written must serve the reader in some measure b) for propaganda. Whether we're talking advertising, ideological or just plain old state propaganda
Any kind of patronage system (and all proposals other than customer pays are necessarily a form of patronage) eliminates category a. I think socialists know this perfectly well, after all it will directly result in some form of bureaucrats deciding what is acceptable and what is not. And they know they will win that game. "Census usage" sounds good but since doing that is impractical, shortcuts will have to be used by bureaucrats deciding payments... and any shortcut can be gamed.
That everybody else essentially loses the right to read what they want... well, that's just icing on the cake. Pushing their ideology over everyone else's has always been how "progressives" operate, with immediate rabid attacks on anything they perceive to be less than 100% compliant. Since the Obama election it has sadly become perfectly acceptable to attack people personally and financially for their political opinions. And while I hate SOPA as much as the next person, and Godaddy indeed sucks, I don't think attacking companies for their political opinions is acceptable at all.
The difference between python and languages like perl is that perl is utter rubbish for calculations yet python's syntax is kinda handy. But then it makes absolutely zero progress on your real dataset and you've got to rewrite the whole thing. This keeps happening to me and it's frustrating.
Pypy sadly is only fast when compared to normal python. It's a nice improvement, true, but it's far from sufficient.
There's a few ways to communicate with drones that don't set off alarm signals. You'd be amazed how good cell reception is at 50-100 meters altitude for example. Much better than ground level. Of course that doesn't help you on the ocean.
Alternatively, you can use these things as kamikazes : only give away your position when there is no more hope of a useful reaction by the other side : radiosilence until you've found a ship... Easy enough.
Or just fly by GPS entirely. GPS reception is an entirely passive process, so it doesn't allow for tracking receivers easily. If you add a circuit to cut the actual antenna into pieces (electrically) when not in use, it's entirely impossible.
I seriously doubt these drones have anything more than a camera onboard.
As to how far such a camera can see. Well if it's large ships you're looking for, the limiting factor (in good weather) is going to be the curvature of the earth. Since the ship itself will register on camera from huge distances.
You used the right -but currently unpopular- tool for the job.
Like any large site, slashdot's opinion has more to do with fashion-du-jour than actual tool quality. There's lots of things most of these new languages are hardly useful for. And quick development is certainly not the strong suit of android's default language, java.
Slashdot Mirror
Another consequence of that greed : just about every poor person in America gets meat daily, which is vastly healthier than not eating meat . Just look to your southern neighbor, Mexico, where the poor get beans on a tortilla with maybe a piece of chicken leg on sunday. The further south, the worse it gets.
Think about this for a second. How are these seeds grown ? Sterile ? How are the genes developed ? When are they rendered sterile ?
Needless to say, evolution is used in these plants. They introduce a few million random mutations while getting the plants infected with DNA rewriting viruses containing interesting genes (just like in the real world, incidentally, except they are the ones picking the genes instead of random chance). From the results, the extremely large majority is substandard. Then they select the best ones, grow massive quantities of them, and repeat the process (does this process perchance remind you of something ?).
Then repeat this entire shit 500 times, and then finally render the final batch of the plants second generation sterile, which is then sent out. In reality GM "manipulation of plants" is not that different from accelerating normal evolution under specifically chosen circumstances (ie. what humans have been doing to farm plants for 20k years, just better and faster).
Farmers used to do that. Net result : about 1% crop yield per square meter compared to what we have today. Do you seriously think a 100x reduction (oh wait, technology advanced ... say 25x) in food supply would be survivable ?
As for using it on humans to prevent disease, that method was in use during the plagues. Fat lot of good it did them.
Yeah, antibiotics will stop working in the future ! OMG ! Let's redo the plague infections from the middle ages today while we can avoid it !
Do tell, what is your suggestion ? (and please, before you go there, the quantity of antibiotics consumed doesn't really matter, as long as we prevent large-scale infections with antibiotics resistence will grow. So the only way we could stop resistence is to protect only 1% (preferably less) of the population, and let plagues regularly destroy their breeding pool (that would be 10-20% of humanity dying if history is any indication). The difference between doing the minimum necessary to protect lives and massive overuse of antibiotics is at best a few years).
Oh and let's not forget that we also must stop any long distance travel, unless you want to be blamed again for wiping out indigenous populations with our resistant genes.
Actually this is mostly the result of insects becoming resistant to all forms of insecticides. It's not just GM crops that suffer from this, it's all crops. So don't act so smug, unless you like famines (or buy in the fantasy that sustainable farming can actually feed >1% of the world), this is really bad news. All crops are hit by insect's insecticide resistance. GM crops were simply near absolutely immune until 2-3 years ago (and they still are much better than natural crops).
I hope this also destroys any fantasy anyone has about this effect limiting GM crops, it'll have the opposite effect : it'll push more GM on our plate, with more mutations. Since we can't actually feed the world without GM, any sane person hopes against hope that someone, preferably not Monsanto but nobody should be picky, succeeds in fixing this problem. There's 7 billion humans, meaning that if any species adapts to become parasitic on humans or some part of the human cycle of life (ie. exploits what we eat and/or shit), the reward is huge. Is there really any doubt what those adaptations hope to accomplish ?
Opponents of GM, answer me this simple question : what exactly do you think Gaia is planning for us ? Don't you think it might be a global famine with death tolls that'd make all wars combined look like the devil's nap time ?
It's not at all abandoned. Google "socialist science" (I'm not joking, nor am I trying to insult anyone) It's still practiced.
Just so some accuracy can be in here. Life, as in DNA replication, exists for about 3 billion years. The solar system for about 4.5 billion years (our sun is third generation, in other words, 2 solar systems were destroyed before ours was created in roughly the same place), and earth somewhere near 4.4 billion years, although it could have been much smaller than today until about 4.2 billion years.
That "island species" (technically races, not species) die out when reunited with their long lost mainland brethren is not exactly news. It's what's happening to the human species right now. In general, without natural borders, different races are impossible within a species. The fact that we have both global travel and different races is an exceptional situation, and a temporary one (in ~500 years, maybe less, there will only be 1 human race left, unless global travel ends before that time). It is not known which race that will be, but if other island species evolution patterns are any indications, whatever race survives will look a lot like the original human race. It would be interesting to see whether the remaining race would be black or not (if not, that would be a strong indication that the original humans in Africa were not actually black before the races split up. My money's on that they weren't black (cause primates have white skin), but it could very well depend on the exact timing of the split).
My biggest complaint about food crops, rather than their GM-ness (success or failure) is that once we get a "good" strain, we keep cloning it instead of continuing the process via selective breeding. So while each generation of insect improves against the crop, the crop defends damn-near exactly the same way; I suspect that may have reduced the time needed for adaptation as well.
No offence, but this is a trivial, trivial complaint. Don't you think that GM researchers *also* stimulate evolution in those plants ? Also, for extremely obvious reasons predatory species cannot totally wipe out the species they seem to be destroying. Predatory species are fundamentally limited to about 1/500th of the biomass of their victim species (or -usually- much less), except in the extreme short term.
In theory jitting VMs should be able to beat direct machine code because they can apply optimizations that are impossible for static compilers.
Example :
int8 fib(int8 n) {
if (n == 0) return 1
if (n == 1) return 1
try {
return fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)
} catch (OverFlowError) {
jump _recompile_this_function_with_int16;
}
}
I like your attitude, really, but ... your ideas about science are very strange indeed ...
Science - the development of theories based on testing, evidence and logic - is not compatible with arguments such as 'believe this book because authoritative people claim that it has an authoritative author'.
This doesn't apply to mathematics at all. We believe in the axioms because ... well they're useful (an argument that can be made equally well, maybe even better, about the bible).
It isn't actually possible to -correctly- define natural numbers using the Peano axioms ... so it's not just that we believe in things for good reasons, we believe in all sorts of things *known to be wrong* because we don't know a more useful solution (Actually there is a simple known way to fix natural numbers, you basically pick some n, arbitrary large but finite and work in Zn. Know anyone who actually uses that over N ?). Godel proved that it is not possible to provide a finite extension to the peano axioms that is internally consistent and solves the problem. Whoops.
So we know we have run down a dead end ... yet nobody's seriously considering anything else. Why do we believe it anyway ? We've done it for 2000 years ... and it isn't all that "in your face".
This is where your argument runs stuck. And in case you find this way to theoretical, rest assured that there are plenty of known holes in just about any theory. Physics was last thought to be correct until 1850 or so. Then they discovered quantum theory, which created dozens of new problems, most of which are unsolved (e.g. the famous gravity conundrum : it is actually impossible for quantum theory to exist in relativistic space ... whoops. But that's not the only problem by far).
Once you get into things like chemistry or further up the chain, the amount of direct contradictions piles up so high it isn't even funny anymore.
Why do we believe in science ? Because it's "mostly useful". There is no better answer. It mostly works.
Note that these problems are internal inconsistencies. They are, by themselves, proof that the theories are wrong. These problems are more than direct counterexamples, they are large classes of theoretical counterexamples. It's not just that we know that certain phenomena don't fit in the theory, we can give classes of formulas that describe simple situations that e.g. make the universe blow up in any simulation. Or you can trivially prove that according to quantum theory, large masses should not attract eachother (never mind trying to find stuff like relativistic slowdowns).
Likewise, there are trivial experiments, mathematical and physical, that you can do yourself and verify that they don't match up to the theory at all. A simplified example is : describe the collection of collections that don't contain themselves, call it A. Now answer the question A elem A ? (this is the kiddy version and you can get yourself out of the mud here, using a not-quite-allowed-in-this-case-but-who-cares detour via fractions, but there is an adult version that refuses to get fixed up like that).
I agree that a claim of divine intervention can always be used to counter an argument that a claimed historical or current factual account is physically implausible. I disagree that it's the most credible explanation in any case I've encountered
You need to read more. I think I could come up with 10 things that are physically impossible from the last year alone.
Because humans have evolved to have a set of morally charged emotions and those emotions influence our behaviour. They cause us to feel anger when others steal and shame when we steal ourselves, for example. Those emotions lead us to help the infirm. I also postulate that, just as religions contain explanations for floods, disease and earthquakes, they al
Any AI book will tell you this. Mathematical proofs can be found in any introductory combinatorics book. Trust me they will mention the problem of state explosion, and a good book will have a proof that state explosion is utterly intractible in any system that contains any chaotic component (Basic idea of the proof : at some point you get into the chaotic component (usually very quickly), in this part of the decision tree you can never eliminate anything due to the chaos property, and you have an infinite tree, ergo you can never correcly evaluate it. It doesn't even matter what the complexity of your evaluation function is, it would be unsolveable even if it wasn't the case that most optimization algorithms are at least NP-complete. In practice you would have to solve the halting problem for every branch of the tree).
But, an example :
THE LIMITS OF RATIONALITY
Operations research tools have also underscored dramatically the limits of SEU theory in dealing with complexity. For example, present and prospective computers are not even powerful enough to provide exact solutions for the problems of optimal scheduling and routing of jobs through a typical factory that manufactures a variety of products using many different tools and machines. And the mere thought of using these computational techniques to determine an optimal national policy for energy production or an optimal economic policy reveals their limits.
From here
Note how simple the problem is where a rational decision is attempted. Compared to deciding how to optimally live a human life ... well, what do you think ?
But there's an entire library on the subject, this was extensively studied in the 1950's and essentially scientists gave up.
No you don't. Walk into a hardware store once. You use the imperial system. Seriously. Go and check.
For pipes too, and cables (steel cables for construction). You're a bit less likely to see this in a hardware store, but a sufficiently large one should still have these kinds of things.
0.04cm/inch ? That error margin would make screws and bolts completely unusable. They just wouldn't fit with 1/10th of that error.
The point being that there are far more stupid democrats than stupid republicans. And frankly, I take offence at your implication that dumb suburbs are necessarily filled with blacks. Yes there's a little more blacks on the East Coast in these kinds of places, but finding one filled with white Europeans is not that big a problem even there. At the West coast, well, there's the whole menu : you want masses of illiterate blacks, whites, latinos ? All are available, often with a side of chinese in there somewhere. I'm sure I've hardly covered all the glorious variation these subsidized deathtraps the democrats built in our cities have.
These places are universally democrat (because republicans get beaten up as soon as this become common knowledge), by al reasonable measures are stupid, and they've got huge numbers.
So the initial assertion is perfectly true : dumb democrats far outnumber dumb republicans. And whilst I'm not making the claim that trailer parks are much better, those people can actually read. A significant part of the people in there have held engineering and other jobs for years on end, if not decades. Yes we all know you do not approve of them. They're not nearly as stupid as you imply though.
I have no clue about averages, but I have not failed to notice that there never are people from these urban deserts present in the polls democrats use for their "average intelligence" counts (putting aside the obvious conflict of interest these polls have in the first place). All the polls I've seen only prove that "college students actually score -slightly*- higher than the general public on academic tests"
* slightly ? Yes, in fact it's quite shameful how low the difference is imho.
Would result in a near-total destruction of the current scientific establishment.
"Surprisingly" the scientific establishment almost universally agrees it's a bad idea.
I'm curious ... since it has been proven a few decades ago that the human mind is in fact incapable of rational thinking. In fact computers aren't either, since rational reasoning can only take place with full information, which simply isn't available. But even rational reasoning "in tanks" (massively simplified simulated worlds) is horrendously difficult and not at all optimal (especially if thinking is not -entirely- free and determining a rational course of action is often an NP-hard problem. E.g. the minimax algorithm in the case of a non-universal heuristic). But it gets worse. In a system that has the property of chaos (like the real world) it is utterly impossible to find the rational course of action, even with infinite time, infinite processing capacity and full information (none of which are available).
So here's a thought :
the only way atheists get convinced of atheism is exactly the same way people get convinced of religions. It is a numbers game.
I know that atheists pride themselves on their supposed superiority because of compatibility with science. But while this is a good argument against quite a few religions, it doesn't actually apply to them all, as any good philosophy class should point out (google "philosophy miracles" and read up a bit on it). Science is perfectly compatible with religions that do not assume constant divine intervention and postulate a rule-based universe with local divine intervention, like Judaism, Buddhism or Christianity, and only contradicts religions that propose god interferes in every action no matter how small (e.g. islam, hinduism).
Besides I think atheists are often hypocritical. Plenty of ideologies have been proven to be wrong, yet plenty of atheists uphold them : e.g. socialist atheists (given the assumption of self-interest on an individual basis, you can mathematically prove socialism will fail). This is not considered a problem at all. How do you deal with that ?
Another thing I wonder about how atheists deal with it is the implications of evolution. And specifically what happens if you save "the weak". As we all know saving and protecting the weak is pretty much the cornerstone of the Christian faith, and it makes appearances in other faiths with less emphasis too. But evolution theory is diametrically opposite this : if you assume that there is some way to express fitness, interfering to remove the disadvantages of low fitness leads to exponentially lowering fitness in a population over time. Needless to say, that's pretty fucking bad. (I actually had a big fight with my parents over this, of course I had the impression at the time atheists actually did not feel the necessity of "fixing" low fitness. I was wrong) It means that protecting the weak will fail catastrophically after a given amount of time. Surprisingly short amount of time too, we're talking only 3-4 generations before you cross into the steep section of the graph.
So how can an atheist, without denying his "faith", advocate helping infirm people ? Why isn't an atheist opposed to, oh let's take something small, like wheelchairs. To put it more cool, why don't atheists think like the Spartans of old ?
And if you don't think like this, what is your justification. Atheists pride themselves on following what science says, like for example not trying impossible things, or preparing for the inevitable. Yet atheists are not in favor of abolishing healthcare, despite the obvious consequences that can be trivially predicted ... I wish I could say I don't understand, but I've done this discussion a few times.
And I've yet to find the first group that actually really follows science. If I had to name the thing that came closest, I'd probably name something like the accounting department of a large international firm. When it isn't about management compensation, they follow the numbers, and receive no end of scorn from atheists for doing that. I'm not saying I like what these people do on a moral level, but they're certai
What people here neglect to mention is that for a lot of things, like bolts or screws and a million other things, there really aren't good conversions available at all.
Take an example 1/4" = 0.635 cm, it's a hell of a lot easier (and cheaper) to make something 1/4th of the length of something else, versus 127/200th of some standard length.
Even in Europe, ostensibly metric, they haven't really made this transition at all.
What a little world you must live in to think that.
Go into a suburb that has high illiteracy ... and census the number of republicans.
That's what people don't realize. There's literature written for 2 reasons :
a) for money, which means that whatever is written must serve the reader in some measure
b) for propaganda. Whether we're talking advertising, ideological or just plain old state propaganda
Any kind of patronage system (and all proposals other than customer pays are necessarily a form of patronage) eliminates category a. I think socialists know this perfectly well, after all it will directly result in some form of bureaucrats deciding what is acceptable and what is not. And they know they will win that game. "Census usage" sounds good but since doing that is impractical, shortcuts will have to be used by bureaucrats deciding payments ... and any shortcut can be gamed.
That everybody else essentially loses the right to read what they want ... well, that's just icing on the cake. Pushing their ideology over everyone else's has always been how "progressives" operate, with immediate rabid attacks on anything they perceive to be less than 100% compliant. Since the Obama election it has sadly become perfectly acceptable to attack people personally and financially for their political opinions. And while I hate SOPA as much as the next person, and Godaddy indeed sucks, I don't think attacking companies for their political opinions is acceptable at all.
Thanks I didn't know about shed skin.
The difference between python and languages like perl is that perl is utter rubbish for calculations yet python's syntax is kinda handy. But then it makes absolutely zero progress on your real dataset and you've got to rewrite the whole thing. This keeps happening to me and it's frustrating.
Pypy sadly is only fast when compared to normal python. It's a nice improvement, true, but it's far from sufficient.
There's a few ways to communicate with drones that don't set off alarm signals. You'd be amazed how good cell reception is at 50-100 meters altitude for example. Much better than ground level. Of course that doesn't help you on the ocean.
Alternatively, you can use these things as kamikazes : only give away your position when there is no more hope of a useful reaction by the other side : radiosilence until you've found a ship ... Easy enough.
Or just fly by GPS entirely. GPS reception is an entirely passive process, so it doesn't allow for tracking receivers easily. If you add a circuit to cut the actual antenna into pieces (electrically) when not in use, it's entirely impossible.
I seriously doubt these drones have anything more than a camera onboard.
As to how far such a camera can see. Well if it's large ships you're looking for, the limiting factor (in good weather) is going to be the curvature of the earth. Since the ship itself will register on camera from huge distances.
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ShipSailingOverTheHorizon/
(btw you should add the ceiling of the drone to the height of the ship)
Seven: each time you mention the speed issue, which obviously exists and thoroughly limits python, the only response consists of ad-hominems.
I almost forgot about that one.
Exactly. Python is completely unusable both in embedded systems, and in anything where performance matters the least little bit.
Since android phone apps have a good chance of being in both categories ...
Even if python doesn't make an application unusable it will make it 10x the battery drain it has to be.
You used the right -but currently unpopular- tool for the job.
Like any large site, slashdot's opinion has more to do with fashion-du-jour than actual tool quality. There's lots of things most of these new languages are hardly useful for. And quick development is certainly not the strong suit of android's default language, java.
I seriously doubt slashdot has an average IQ significantly above the mean. Not even half a sigma. No site with more than 10-15 members has.