Thank you! This idiocy has been happening in San Francisco (where I live) for some time now. Near me is a neighborhood called Noe Valley that's a favorite of young families. Picture double-wide baby carriages pushing up and down the lane, past all the coffee shops, brunch joints, boutique clothing shops, and used bookstores. A while back, Noe Valley successfully lobbied to prevent any expansion of cell tower capacity in the neighborhood, to protect their precious offspring from all that terrible radiation. Of course, every last one of these fretful mommies has a BlackBerry or an iPhone in here purse, but they aren't the problem. It's the evil, evil corporations that -- god dammit, I'm only getting one bar! I'm going to call AT&T and give them a piece of my mind...
It's just the ignorant, self-righteous and scared leading the ignorant, self-righteous and scared, nothing less.
the arrogance of introspective existence or something. or maybe just a lack of empathy.
Or maybe just the lack of science education. I took a college-level chemistry class recently. It kicked my ass, but it was worth it. When you can sit down with a piece of paper and a pencil and predict the results of some experiment mathematically, then go into a lab, perform the experiment, and see your results proven correct, you really get a feeling for, "Hey, maybe they really aren't just making all this shit up."
Unfortunately, not many people today are given this experience/forced to have this experience.
The NYT isn't going anywhere. It may have to evolve to stay afloat, but it'll outlast Twitter for sure. Even if it didn't, it will be better archived for future generations than Twitter will ever be.
Slang terms are unprofessional. You might as well allow NYT editors to write articles like "Popo caps a bitch after she tried to jack a 7-11" instead of "police shoot a woman after she attempted to rob a convenience store".
I think the problem there has less to do with professionalism than with the fact that the slang version is simply hard to understand. News writers favor plain, direct, comprehensible English. There is no benefit gained by obscuring your story with pointless colloquialisms.
Logitech drivers for Windows provide lots of features, particularly being able to configure the meaning of multiple buttons -- something Mac OS X has never been too keen on. And, believe it or not, they allow you to configure the speed of the scroll wheel and the mouse acceleration. But that's just crazy, right? Because nobody ever had a need to configure their mouse acce... oh, wait.
Essentially, albeit with much of L. Ron's venal cynicism replaced with actual batshittery. Wikipedia has information on the so-called Raëlian Movement, described as "the world's largest UFO religion."
Either that or he insists on using a third-party mouse with inadequate driver support for Mac OS X, so what he thinks is helping him is really causing his problem.
The only problem is that the US is trying to get him to pay a fortune for damages, as if he created the vulnerability as opposed to exposing it.
If you walk into a china shop and kick over all the shelves, smashing all the china, then turn around and tell the shop owner, "These shelves should have been secured better," I'm willing to bet a jury would find you liable for damages.
Gary McKinnon's treatment at the hands of the bloodthirsty, subhuman U.S. government officials will be savage, just SAVAGE. Who will save this kind, generous, upstanding man of peace from the vicious fate he faces if this extradition is allowed to go through? See him quiver and tremble as he suffers the throes of Aspergers Syndrome! Can you not see how depressed and anxious the threat of prosecution is making him? What kind of monster would will such evil upon this defenseless man, who surly is guilty of nothing but a deep and heartfelt thirst for knowledge about our Grey brothers from the beyond?
For those who don't recognize the song reference, it's Radio Ga-Ga by Queen, one of the two 1980s tributes to the death of quality radio as Clearchannel began its deathmarch that would eventually lay waste to a segment of our collective culture.
A little revisionist history there. In the 1980s Clear Channel owned six AM stations and six FM stations, plus some TV. Queen wasn't singing about Clear Channel, they were singing about how radio is overlooked in the age of television.
At this school, CS102 was pointers, arrays, and data types. "Solving problems in an object-oriented way" didn't come until CS103. Which I'd argue is a waste of students' time -- instead of teaching them how to do something the wrong way and then teaching them something else later, just teach them to write objects the first time. For the first couple of classes they're just going to be copying code from the book anyway. They don't need to know the whole history and theory of object orientation to structure basic exercises as proper object-oriented code.
MS: stuck with C++ no real innovation in a decade.
Other than that whole C#/.Net Framework thing, you mean. But I guess we can ignore that.
Google: Love some of their stuff, but they haven't really standardized on one language. A lot of Google's stuff is 1/2 finished as a result.
Right, because Google projects get slowed down because developers keep switching programming languages midstream. Last I heard they were rewriting GMail in a combination of Oberon, Scala, and Z-80 assembly language.
A "moderate muslim" living in Fremont, California is hardly going to make a difference in the policies of the nation of Iran. A "moderate Muslim" living in Kuala Lumpur is hardly going to have any impact on what the warlords of Afghanistan choose to preach. You're talking as if every Muslim is supposed to be his brother's keeper just because he self-identifies as a Muslim. That's like grabbing an Asian guy in the street and demanding to know why he isn't doing more to change the policies of the People's Republic of China. Basically, you're a racist.
Like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which stipulates the use of Windows computers in all the efforts to which it contributes?
I looked it up, and actually they allow Mac OS X, too. But I found it interesting that such a stipulation exists at all. (Note, however, they do not specify Windows 7, so something tells me this is more of a guideline than a hard-and-fast rule.)
Actually, it may be. On a very philosophical level. Basically on the question whether or not the people writing those old stories had some insight that we only rediscover.
I don't dispute your assertion, but since I started out quibbling with the submitter's specific wording, I'll quibble with yours. The question is whether religious issues are "particularly relevant to the discipline" of science. They are not. Philosophers produce insight. Scientists produce data. A scientific study can be valid or invalid, conclusive or inconclusive. You very rarely hear one scientist describe another scientist's work as "insightful." Interesting, yes. Important, potentially. But scientists are not typically in the insight business.
Could these topics be particularly relevant to someone else's discipline? Of course. Just not a scientist's.
So maybe Genesis is a bad example. It's just the first one I thought of. My point was not to argue with religion; it was more that they call sciences "disciplines" for a reason. Merriam-Webster defines a "discipline" as "a rule or system of rules governing conduct or activity." For science, one of those rules is that you don't just throw stuff into the pot because it's there. A scientist who describes himself as a devout believer is still not going to conduct experiments "in a Christian way," because there is no such thing.
Are there scientific issues that affect religion? Mmmm, some people seem to get plenty bothered about stuff like evolution, but in the long run, if scientists discover that the Earth revolves around the Sun, religion ultimately finds a way to work around that. The Catholic Church isn't bothered by evolution, either. These things have a way of working themselves out (though sometimes only after much debate).
Are there religious issues that affect science? Mmmmm, sure, in the sense of scientific ethics, I suppose. But you can talk about ethics without introducing explicit religion into the conversation.
So it's no surprise to me that science and religion can exist in the same brain. Neither must negate the other; they are simply orthogonal.
So what? If they were doing these charitable works for purely altruistic reasons I would be inclined to agree with you and overlook the eccentricity of their beliefs. After all, a good work is a good work. But the problem is that religious institutions have a long track record of being unable to divorce their charitable acts from their efforts to proselytize and a good work with an ulterior motive is not nearly so noble.
OK, so you have an organization which believes that it's good to help other people, and to that end it pools the resources of its constituents to perform charitable works in the community and encourages other people to join in its way of thinking. And that's bad... why, exactly?
Seriously, you may hate religion, but a lot of people don't. Some people might include encouraging other people to act as "good Christians" to be in keeping with the definition of a "purely altruistic motive." It bothers you, fine.
The fact is that the ability to perform compassionate charitable works does not and never will require a belief in a spiritual entity of any kind.
I didn't hear anybody saying it did. But the fact of the matter is that religious organizations do contribute a lot to communities in America and worldwide in the form of charitable works -- perhaps a lot more than you seem willing to recognize -- and their belief systems are a large part of why they do that. It's not like anybody who has spent their life as a member of a church wakes up one morning and says, "God dammit, I've been so blind! The only reason this church fed me when I was hungry all those years ago was because they wanted to sucker me into joining this stupid church!"
I think he really meant the UNDP, not the UNHCR. But no, the UN does not take an active role in getting people off the streets in your local community. Churches do tend to take that role.
How many atheists are known to have started religious wars and tried convert entire countries or kill them if they wouldn't convert?
This is such a bullshit straw man argument that you demean yourself to repeat it. Let's just set aside the obvious circular argument that an atheist is incapable of starting a religious war. If you look at the history of warfare and genocide in the world -- modern or otherwise -- you'll find it has much more to do with money than belief, whether or not religion is cited as a motive.
'To remove the perceived stigma, we would need to have more scientists talking openly about issues of religion, where such issues are particularly relevant to their discipline.'"
Which is where, exactly? Just because a scientist is studying the Big Bang theory, which has implications for the creation of the universe, doesn't make a nice, frank discussion about the Book of Genesis over tea "particularly relevant to the discipline."
OK, either you're purposefully being dense here or you just don't get it. What was stopping the Times Square Bomber from using two-way radios to communicate with someone coordinating from a nearby hotel? What was stopping him from using Skype to talk to a man on the moon? What does detonating a bomb have to do with talking on the phone really? This is like the IRS claiming that if we have to show ID to buy the stamps we use to send in our tax returns there will be no more tax fraud.
For that matter, if you're a fucking suicide bomber what do you care if you have to show ID or not?
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Thank you! This idiocy has been happening in San Francisco (where I live) for some time now. Near me is a neighborhood called Noe Valley that's a favorite of young families. Picture double-wide baby carriages pushing up and down the lane, past all the coffee shops, brunch joints, boutique clothing shops, and used bookstores. A while back, Noe Valley successfully lobbied to prevent any expansion of cell tower capacity in the neighborhood, to protect their precious offspring from all that terrible radiation. Of course, every last one of these fretful mommies has a BlackBerry or an iPhone in here purse, but they aren't the problem. It's the evil, evil corporations that -- god dammit, I'm only getting one bar! I'm going to call AT&T and give them a piece of my mind...
It's just the ignorant, self-righteous and scared leading the ignorant, self-righteous and scared, nothing less.
the arrogance of introspective existence or something. or maybe just a lack of empathy.
Or maybe just the lack of science education. I took a college-level chemistry class recently. It kicked my ass, but it was worth it. When you can sit down with a piece of paper and a pencil and predict the results of some experiment mathematically, then go into a lab, perform the experiment, and see your results proven correct, you really get a feeling for, "Hey, maybe they really aren't just making all this shit up."
Unfortunately, not many people today are given this experience/forced to have this experience.
You're calling the Sun a newspaper?
The NYT isn't going anywhere. It may have to evolve to stay afloat, but it'll outlast Twitter for sure. Even if it didn't, it will be better archived for future generations than Twitter will ever be.
Are you sure about that?
Slang terms are unprofessional. You might as well allow NYT editors to write articles like "Popo caps a bitch after she tried to jack a 7-11" instead of "police shoot a woman after she attempted to rob a convenience store".
I think the problem there has less to do with professionalism than with the fact that the slang version is simply hard to understand. News writers favor plain, direct, comprehensible English. There is no benefit gained by obscuring your story with pointless colloquialisms.
Logitech drivers for Windows provide lots of features, particularly being able to configure the meaning of multiple buttons -- something Mac OS X has never been too keen on. And, believe it or not, they allow you to configure the speed of the scroll wheel and the mouse acceleration. But that's just crazy, right? Because nobody ever had a need to configure their mouse acce... oh, wait.
L. Ron, is that you?
Essentially, albeit with much of L. Ron's venal cynicism replaced with actual batshittery. Wikipedia has information on the so-called Raëlian Movement, described as "the world's largest UFO religion."
Plus, they come in a rainbow of colors. Fuckin' rainbows!!!
Either that or he insists on using a third-party mouse with inadequate driver support for Mac OS X, so what he thinks is helping him is really causing his problem.
The only problem is that the US is trying to get him to pay a fortune for damages, as if he created the vulnerability as opposed to exposing it.
If you walk into a china shop and kick over all the shelves, smashing all the china, then turn around and tell the shop owner, "These shelves should have been secured better," I'm willing to bet a jury would find you liable for damages.
Gary McKinnon's treatment at the hands of the bloodthirsty, subhuman U.S. government officials will be savage, just SAVAGE. Who will save this kind, generous, upstanding man of peace from the vicious fate he faces if this extradition is allowed to go through? See him quiver and tremble as he suffers the throes of Aspergers Syndrome! Can you not see how depressed and anxious the threat of prosecution is making him? What kind of monster would will such evil upon this defenseless man, who surly is guilty of nothing but a deep and heartfelt thirst for knowledge about our Grey brothers from the beyond?
Give me a break.
For those who don't recognize the song reference, it's Radio Ga-Ga by Queen, one of the two 1980s tributes to the death of quality radio as Clearchannel began its deathmarch that would eventually lay waste to a segment of our collective culture.
A little revisionist history there. In the 1980s Clear Channel owned six AM stations and six FM stations, plus some TV. Queen wasn't singing about Clear Channel, they were singing about how radio is overlooked in the age of television.
According to Merriam-Webster, "insight" suggests depth of discernment coupled with understanding sympathy ... which, while laudable, doesn't sound scientific in the slightest.
If you look at the first link in TFA (not the Gizmodo one), you'll see it's by an architect who takes a very skeptical view of this story.
At this school, CS102 was pointers, arrays, and data types. "Solving problems in an object-oriented way" didn't come until CS103. Which I'd argue is a waste of students' time -- instead of teaching them how to do something the wrong way and then teaching them something else later, just teach them to write objects the first time. For the first couple of classes they're just going to be copying code from the book anyway. They don't need to know the whole history and theory of object orientation to structure basic exercises as proper object-oriented code.
MS: stuck with C++ no real innovation in a decade.
Other than that whole C#/.Net Framework thing, you mean. But I guess we can ignore that.
Google: Love some of their stuff, but they haven't really standardized on one language. A lot of Google's stuff is 1/2 finished as a result.
Right, because Google projects get slowed down because developers keep switching programming languages midstream. Last I heard they were rewriting GMail in a combination of Oberon, Scala, and Z-80 assembly language.
A "moderate muslim" living in Fremont, California is hardly going to make a difference in the policies of the nation of Iran. A "moderate Muslim" living in Kuala Lumpur is hardly going to have any impact on what the warlords of Afghanistan choose to preach. You're talking as if every Muslim is supposed to be his brother's keeper just because he self-identifies as a Muslim. That's like grabbing an Asian guy in the street and demanding to know why he isn't doing more to change the policies of the People's Republic of China. Basically, you're a racist.
Like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which stipulates the use of Windows computers in all the efforts to which it contributes?
I looked it up, and actually they allow Mac OS X, too. But I found it interesting that such a stipulation exists at all. (Note, however, they do not specify Windows 7, so something tells me this is more of a guideline than a hard-and-fast rule.)
Actually, it may be. On a very philosophical level. Basically on the question whether or not the people writing those old stories had some insight that we only rediscover.
I don't dispute your assertion, but since I started out quibbling with the submitter's specific wording, I'll quibble with yours. The question is whether religious issues are "particularly relevant to the discipline" of science. They are not. Philosophers produce insight. Scientists produce data. A scientific study can be valid or invalid, conclusive or inconclusive. You very rarely hear one scientist describe another scientist's work as "insightful." Interesting, yes. Important, potentially. But scientists are not typically in the insight business.
Could these topics be particularly relevant to someone else's discipline? Of course. Just not a scientist's.
So maybe Genesis is a bad example. It's just the first one I thought of. My point was not to argue with religion; it was more that they call sciences "disciplines" for a reason. Merriam-Webster defines a "discipline" as "a rule or system of rules governing conduct or activity." For science, one of those rules is that you don't just throw stuff into the pot because it's there. A scientist who describes himself as a devout believer is still not going to conduct experiments "in a Christian way," because there is no such thing.
Are there scientific issues that affect religion? Mmmm, some people seem to get plenty bothered about stuff like evolution, but in the long run, if scientists discover that the Earth revolves around the Sun, religion ultimately finds a way to work around that. The Catholic Church isn't bothered by evolution, either. These things have a way of working themselves out (though sometimes only after much debate).
Are there religious issues that affect science? Mmmmm, sure, in the sense of scientific ethics, I suppose. But you can talk about ethics without introducing explicit religion into the conversation.
So it's no surprise to me that science and religion can exist in the same brain. Neither must negate the other; they are simply orthogonal.
So what? If they were doing these charitable works for purely altruistic reasons I would be inclined to agree with you and overlook the eccentricity of their beliefs. After all, a good work is a good work. But the problem is that religious institutions have a long track record of being unable to divorce their charitable acts from their efforts to proselytize and a good work with an ulterior motive is not nearly so noble.
OK, so you have an organization which believes that it's good to help other people, and to that end it pools the resources of its constituents to perform charitable works in the community and encourages other people to join in its way of thinking. And that's bad... why, exactly?
Seriously, you may hate religion, but a lot of people don't. Some people might include encouraging other people to act as "good Christians" to be in keeping with the definition of a "purely altruistic motive." It bothers you, fine.
The fact is that the ability to perform compassionate charitable works does not and never will require a belief in a spiritual entity of any kind.
I didn't hear anybody saying it did. But the fact of the matter is that religious organizations do contribute a lot to communities in America and worldwide in the form of charitable works -- perhaps a lot more than you seem willing to recognize -- and their belief systems are a large part of why they do that. It's not like anybody who has spent their life as a member of a church wakes up one morning and says, "God dammit, I've been so blind! The only reason this church fed me when I was hungry all those years ago was because they wanted to sucker me into joining this stupid church!"
I think he really meant the UNDP, not the UNHCR. But no, the UN does not take an active role in getting people off the streets in your local community. Churches do tend to take that role.
How many atheists are known to have started religious wars and tried convert entire countries or kill them if they wouldn't convert?
This is such a bullshit straw man argument that you demean yourself to repeat it. Let's just set aside the obvious circular argument that an atheist is incapable of starting a religious war. If you look at the history of warfare and genocide in the world -- modern or otherwise -- you'll find it has much more to do with money than belief, whether or not religion is cited as a motive.
'To remove the perceived stigma, we would need to have more scientists talking openly about issues of religion, where such issues are particularly relevant to their discipline.'"
Which is where, exactly? Just because a scientist is studying the Big Bang theory, which has implications for the creation of the universe, doesn't make a nice, frank discussion about the Book of Genesis over tea "particularly relevant to the discipline."
OK, either you're purposefully being dense here or you just don't get it. What was stopping the Times Square Bomber from using two-way radios to communicate with someone coordinating from a nearby hotel? What was stopping him from using Skype to talk to a man on the moon? What does detonating a bomb have to do with talking on the phone really? This is like the IRS claiming that if we have to show ID to buy the stamps we use to send in our tax returns there will be no more tax fraud.
For that matter, if you're a fucking suicide bomber what do you care if you have to show ID or not?