Google tests are (way) better than IQ, but guess what Google found out: the best performers are the ones who have the lowest scores on their interviews.
I'll quote the original source of that claim, Peter Norvig, and his refuting of that interpretation:
What do you know? Valleywag got everything wrong. Google is hiring, not laying off. Also, our interview scores actually correlate very well with on-the-job performance. Peter Seibel asked me if there was anything counterintuitive about the process and I said that people who got one low score but were hired anyway did well on-the-job. To me, that means the interview process is doing very well, not that it is broken. It means that we don't let one bad interview blackball a candidate. We'll keep interviewing, keep hiring, and keep analyzing the results to improve the process. And I guess Valleywag will keep doing what they do...
You don't block or try counter adblockers. It's my computer, my bandwidth.
You're asking their computer to do work to transfer over their bandwidth, accessing information that they spent money on preparing, where the payment they ask for is displaying ads along the content.
It is certainly possible to sincerely argue that pirating this material is morally acceptable, using similar arguments as with other forms of piracy where the requested payment is different. However, when you're making their computer do stuff using their bandwidth in violation of their wishes, it is disingenuous to use the argument "it is my computer and bandwidth and it should be used after my wishes".
There are a lot of talented, professional people working for free: Linux programmers, Debian developers, Gnome developers.... And don't say they get paid lots of money for it: they certainly didn't get any money when they started.
Are you saying there is less free talent available in the AV arts than in programming?
Yes. There's lots more programmers than there are AV people. I don't think this is the main thing, though.
I've both made amateur movies and done open source programming. My experience is that movie making requires much more people, and much larger chunks of time: For shooting a movie conveniently, I need to work in chunks of days, and I need people to set up lights, run the camera, do makeup, act, direct, etc.
For making software conveniently, I can work alone most of the time, occasionally having somebody review my code or discuss some design options. I can also effectively get work done in chunks of an hour.
Until we get ways to change the necessary time allocation from chunks of days to chunks of hours, making software as volunteer effort will be much more effective than making movies.
A possible path out of this:
I suspect what will drop the price of movie making to volunteer levels is computer graphics, and that it will come from machinima. The ability to create a reasonable looking movie on the computer in a reasonable timeframe will let amateurs create movies in chunks of hours and will let single amateurs get enough experience with making movies that they can reasonably attempt larger projects.
A possible reasonable path seems to be:
Some people get more experience creating machinima movies
This starts being made with open source games
These games get adapted to be better for creating machinima, creating "machinima tools"
The ability to animate character's emotions gets added to the "machinima tool", using theory from Paul Ekman to do face animation and other body language theory to get the rest of movements to match
Tools get the ability to go from footage to model, so amateur acting can be used to create a basis for "machinima", which is then re-rendered with improved emotions etc
This would, however, be a long term thing. It's not something that is going to happen in just a few years; there's a ton of technology development that would have to happen, and right now open source don't even seem to have a professional quality non-linear editor (though I have the impression that KDEnlive is getting there.)
Another possible path to more "volunteer" movies:
Production equipment and software becomes much cheaper (it has).
People do more amateur productions, because they can better compete with professional levels.
Amateurs gather more experience.
Amateurs create better ways of making movies on the cheap.
More people get into amateur film making because it's less of a geeky hobby.
More people do stuff (like e.g. impro) to get better at doing amateur movies.
It gets easier to gather enough of a crew to make a quality amateur movie.
Line between amateurs and professional blur, because amateurs can make money from product placement and donations.
But overall, I personally believe there will be a place for professional movie making for the foreseeable future.
I'd say the opposite: Capitalism requires a fair amount of regulation to be possible, because without regulation you end up with a lot of natural monopolies and their abuse.
For instance, take telecom: Laying down lines is expensive, while offering service once you've laid down the lines is cheap. A company that has laid lines will naturally put prices just below where it would make sense for a competitor to establish competing service, and if the competitor doesn't fill the whole space where they've wired, they'll lower prices in the areas where there is a competitor while price-gouging the rest.
And to get a competitor, you have to be able to connect to the rest of the network - if somebody has wired telephony to all the city, and you have wired two houses, it's not at all attractive to connect to your "new" network instead of the old one, even if your new one is cheaper.
This is all solved by regulation. In my ideal world (which to a degree is practiced in some of the "socialistic" countries in Scandinavia) there's regulation forcing equal access to this network. The regulation there is done by letting the incumbent keep their network and regulating what price they have to sell access at, and forcing access to be accounted at the same price internally as sold to external competitors.
Up until I started writing this post I thought it would be better to have the network ownership split off into a separate company with forced equal pricing schemes to all comers; however, I don't see how that could work out, as it would just give a monopoly that wanted to price-gouge all comers.
I think there might be some possibility in some form of forced spreads associated with the offers; that the customer of the line owner (ie, the ISP buying access to endusers) should also get some kind of offer of buying out the line and selling service back. However, I've not been able to think up something that seems reasonable yet.
I think what looks like a "goddamn asshole" is different from the inside and outside.
Looking at it from my point of view, your two previous comments are filled with slurs, implied attacks, and go into the "asshole" category of behavior; but I expect they don't feel that way from the inside (for you).
I hope the way I help/helped people feel reasonable to them (over the years, I've had quite a bit of thanks and very occasionally had people send me stuff as thanks), but it's hard to say from the inside - I know what intent I have behind each thing I write, so it naturally has a particular "inflection", while people can read it totally differently.
If the above is obvious to you, you could try following your own advice (showing respect and don't treating people as idiots) - because showing respect and not treating people as idiots is obvious to me, but it's also obvious to me that a lot of people start out with a wrong idea and that's why the need help.
If you've been part of a group of geeks that gets asked for advice, you've also noticed that half the time people are asking for the wrong thing - they don't understand the tools available, and are trying to follow the first solution they thought of (a solution that is hard, while there exists easy ways to solve the same problem.)
And in general it's a question of the people that ask having less experience than the people answering, at least in my experience.
Though there's some that insist on keeping to their initial solution without giving the contextual information that's necessary to give a good solution to the problem - while harsher than I would have formulated it, I agree with your characterization of them as "idiots". And they're usually so arrogant that they think they just have to have "thought the problem through". (There's occasionally people asking how to do things the hard way for a good reason, too, but they're much less common.)
Terry Childs refused to divulge the passwords to anybody he didn't know were entitled to get the passwords. That's the appropriate security procedure: You do not give passwords to people that claim that they should get them, you give them to somebody you know should have access to them. If I had called you after you had quit somewhere, you shouldn't give me the passwords - because you have no idea who I am.
Your "is too hard" idea is the opposite of what I see - I see very good programmers changing languages early, and mediocre programmers coming along later (or sticking with whatever they learned).
According to how I read TFA, this would be in violation of the Berne convention.
I also think that it in general would be a challenge for people that create stuff; a more appropriate limit might be say that you have to do this for every published work you want to keep copyright on.
the latter. the former would require, amongst other things, access to the source code (as required by the original critterdings license)
That's the first link on the page. I don't know where you managed to get a binary; I can't see a link to one.
and a lot of noise coming from the biological disciplines re: computationally tractable, useful models for the various signaling pathways involved in hallucinogen use.
I think that an experiment can be interesting even if it doesn't exactly follow an existing model for something - it's interesting to see what we get when we set up the model under test. In this case, I'm not sure we'll get anything interesting, but it is a fun experiment anyway. Increased communication could lead to interesting results, and an extra parameter for self-regulation could also be interesting. (I suspect the drugs are too simplistic, though.)
If you compare humans, there is no correlation between brain size and intelligence.
That's a common myth. A quick Google for "Human brain size vs intelligence" gives the following two results as number 3 and 4 (and the first two that seem relevant):
Within human population, studies have been conducted to determine whether there is a relationship between brain size and a number of cognitive measures. Studies have reported correlations that range from 0 to 0.6.[2]...
The newest relevant scientific review article seems to be "Whole Brain Size and General Mental Ability: A Review", J. Philippe Rushton and C. Davison Ankney, International Journal of Neuroscience vol 119 issue 5 pages 692-732 (2009), available from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2668913/
Abstract:
We review the literature on the relation between whole brain size and general mental ability (GMA) both within and between species. Among humans, in 28 samples using brain imaging techniques, the mean brain size/GMA correlation is 0.40 (N = 1,389; p < 1010); in 59 samples using external head size measures it is 0.20 (N = 63,405; p < 1010). In 6 samples using the method of correlated vectors to distill g, the general factor of mental ability, the mean r is 0.63. We also describe the brain size/GMA correlations with age, socioeconomic position, sex, and ancestral population groups, which also provide information about brain–behavior relationships. Finally, we examine brain size and mental ability from an evolutionary and behavior genetic perspective.
After advice from a professor of dermatology, I have switched from using soap to just washing thoroughly with water, and I have less body odor than I did before I switched. I still use deodorant under my arms - there was a while where it worked well to drop it, but for some reason that changed and I had to re-introduce it.
I was always under the impression that taking paracetamol and other similar drugs along with alcohol was rather unhealthy to the liver and whatnot...
If you're at a level where you're hung over, Paracetamol will damage your liver.[1] However, the liver regenerate quickly, so if you only do this occasionally and have nothing that blocks liver regeneration generally, this should be relatively safe. My wife is an MD; her toxicology teacher recommended use of Paracetamol against hangover rather than Ibuprofen or other NSAIDs, as the increased risk of stomach damage from the alcohol/NSAID combination was more of a problem than the liver damage.
Eivind.
[1] Alcohol is converted to acetaldehyde as a part of the breakdown process; cystein is consumed by the process that handle acetaldehyde safely (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cysteine) and the poisonous effects of breakdown products of acetaldehyde when you lack cystein seems to be a large part of being "properly hung over". Paracetamol poisoning comes from lack of glutathione in the handling of paracetamol breakdown products; glutathione is made from cystein in the body, so having a hangover (lacking cystein) implies that paracetamol will rapidly deplete glutathione and the breakdown will be poisonous.
Here's something I have been thinking about recently, which relates to cryogenic freezing:
First, let's assume the brain stores memories in some form of physical structures (it sounds a stretch, but it's been theorised by some). Whether that is in RNA, or in some unknown physical property. Speaking in favour of this is certain inherited behaviour in animals - and even humans, like fear of spiders, and the ability of babies to see whether a dog is snarling or not. From the 'physical storage' perspective, producing computer networks similar to brains is theoretically very plausible - it's like cutting an unfathomably complex car in slices, gradually understanding how it works, and then building one yourself.
The problem with "physical storage" is: Some people have photographic memory of their entire lives.
If your costs to do business as a carbon producer go up, with some relation at all to how much you pollute,
And there's the fallacy driving the system. Carbon producers are not by any sane definition "polluters". Once you see the assumption in the system, you can learn to fight it.
This is an honest argument. I disagree with it, but it's an honest argument. However, you've been dishonest: You've been arguing a bunch of other things instead, badly.
So let's try to address your dishonest argument first, and then do the honest argument afterward.
Here's the assumption/argument line leading to carbon trading improving the situation. Each assumption is backed by science as far as we know today; some of that science may possibly be shaky (the climate scientists are bad at releasing data:-(, but it's as good as we have at the moment.
Assumption: Releasing CO2 (carbon dioxide) leads to increased temperatures.
Assumption: Increased temperature leads to damage, ie costs. These are not primarily born by the polluter.
Assumption: Carbon dioxide release is global in nature - it doesn't matter where the CO2 is released.
From the above assumptions, we can conclude that CO2 emissions is an externalized cost: Each ton of CO2 released leads to a cost, and that cost is not borne by the emitter.
From economics, we know that externalized costs leads to overuse of a resource: Private benefit is realized at the cost of the public, and the net amount of wealth end up lower than it would if everything was appropriately priced.
The ways we can price CO2 emissions are to somehow tax them, to make the public recover the cost of the emission.
If we directly tax the CO2 emissions without trading ability, this leads to businesses that have expensive to reduce CO2 emissions and high margins to stay in the business, while businesses that have cheap to reduce CO2 emissions and low margings going out of business.
If we directly tax the CO2 emissions *with* trading ability, this leads to businesses that have expense to reduce CO2 emissions and high margins to buy CO2 reductions from businesses that have cheap to reduce CO2 emissions and low margins selling CO2 reduction. This means we have less bankruptcies and thereby less disruption to society.
Low margin can actually be negative margin - you can pay for having somebody capture and deal with CO2 for you. Under the assumption that CO2 is negative, it is clearly
If we introduce a per company cap system, that's basically a tax system with a bottom subsidy - I believe the arguments for trading will be the same.
Now, for the "CO2 cannot reasonably be considered pollution" argument.
I'll do two things: First, let's handle the "Exists in nature and is produced by every animal on the planet and is required for plant life". Most things exist in nature - e.g, methane, iron oxide. And a poison (or pollutant) is only a question of the dosage and location.
Second, let's deal directly with the question of "What is pollution?" I'd argue that the term pollution is itself a bad place to start - the question is an economic one, of externalized costs. Does your actions create a cost for somebody else? In the CO2 emissions case, it seems to do so, as per the above argument sequence. Having your release of X create cost for - damage - others would seem to make X a pollutant. You can argue different definitions, but I don't see that they ethically matter - the ethical question is whether you give costs to others, and if so, how to deal with this cost.
But isn't it possible that the contributors that are "disappearing in record numbers" are largely "casual" editors and vandals who can no longer edit articles as easily as they used to?
Casual editors have contributed most of the text on Wikipedia. Non-causual editors do a useful job of reverting vandalism and doing structuring tasks, but they do not contribute most of the text. (There were statistics posted about this some time back; I'm not going to bother digging them up.)
If I assume that watching ads is the payment for content, making ads less valuable means that what you are paying has less value. I think that's a bad thing.
But just for the record - based on advertising rates, TV and print advertising is (apparently) much more valuable than web advertising. And yet, they don't do per-user tracking at all. It would seem to me that getting rid of per-user tracking would make it more valuable, not less.
I assume this is tounge in cheek and I don't have to go into the problems with the premise?
They're not going to take kindly to anything that could challenge their certainty.
Thank you for proving my point;) </cheeky>
I don't think you lying could challenge my present conclusions. And I don't take kindly to badly formed lies, repeated by people that haven't bothered to look for anything that goes against their pre-formed conclusions. I don't think you have the guts to actually look at arguments carefully or read up and try to understand what biologists actually believe - it's to scary for your faith, so you read creationist websites and parrot what they say.
And if you're going to try to turn that on it's head against me: I've read McGrath's first book and some of Behe and a smattering of Answers in Genesis and other websites. I've not yet found anything that contains a coherent argument if you understand what today's evolution theory is. Behe does a good try, though, you need to know quite a bit to see the holes in it.
But, if you have anything that could challenge my conclusions - any alternate explanation that don't assume the kind of complexity that it tries to explain, really - I'm all ears. I'd like to read it. I read this material in the hope of finding something that can expand my mind. But so far, all there's been has been "that looks hard - how could NATURE have done it?" - and often about things that it is fairly easy to find ways that nature could have done it.
So, are you up for it, and will try to answer the challenges in the previous mail and give me some challenge, or are you going to go to your congregation the next time and say "I lied about darwininsts in public recently, and then said 'Bah, I knew you would protest, that proves my point' when I got called on my lies"?
Slashdot Mirror
IQ is highly overrated
In practice, it's almost useless...
Google tests are (way) better than IQ, but guess what Google found out: the best performers are the ones who have the lowest scores on their interviews.
I'll quote the original source of that claim, Peter Norvig, and his refuting of that interpretation:
What do you know? Valleywag got everything wrong. Google is hiring, not laying off. Also, our interview scores actually correlate very well with on-the-job performance. Peter Seibel asked me if there was anything counterintuitive about the process and I said that people who got one low score but were hired anyway did well on-the-job. To me, that means the interview process is doing very well, not that it is broken. It means that we don't let one bad interview blackball a candidate. We'll keep interviewing, keep hiring, and keep analyzing the results to improve the process. And I guess Valleywag will keep doing what they do...
(emphasis mine)
Eivind.
It's about other people giving them your data.
As far as I understood from the article, the main thing was about emails taken from previous contact attempts (address books) and used for spamming.
You don't block or try counter adblockers. It's my computer, my bandwidth.
You're asking their computer to do work to transfer over their bandwidth, accessing information that they spent money on preparing, where the payment they ask for is displaying ads along the content.
It is certainly possible to sincerely argue that pirating this material is morally acceptable, using similar arguments as with other forms of piracy where the requested payment is different. However, when you're making their computer do stuff using their bandwidth in violation of their wishes, it is disingenuous to use the argument "it is my computer and bandwidth and it should be used after my wishes".
Eivind.
There are a lot of talented, professional people working for free: Linux programmers, Debian developers, Gnome developers....
And don't say they get paid lots of money for it: they certainly didn't get any money when they started.
Are you saying there is less free talent available in the AV arts than in programming?
Yes. There's lots more programmers than there are AV people. I don't think this is the main thing, though.
I've both made amateur movies and done open source programming. My experience is that movie making requires much more people, and much larger chunks of time: For shooting a movie conveniently, I need to work in chunks of days, and I need people to set up lights, run the camera, do makeup, act, direct, etc.
For making software conveniently, I can work alone most of the time, occasionally having somebody review my code or discuss some design options. I can also effectively get work done in chunks of an hour.
Until we get ways to change the necessary time allocation from chunks of days to chunks of hours, making software as volunteer effort will be much more effective than making movies.
A possible path out of this:
I suspect what will drop the price of movie making to volunteer levels is computer graphics, and that it will come from machinima. The ability to create a reasonable looking movie on the computer in a reasonable timeframe will let amateurs create movies in chunks of hours and will let single amateurs get enough experience with making movies that they can reasonably attempt larger projects.
A possible reasonable path seems to be:
This would, however, be a long term thing. It's not something that is going to happen in just a few years; there's a ton of technology development that would have to happen, and right now open source don't even seem to have a professional quality non-linear editor (though I have the impression that KDEnlive is getting there.)
Another possible path to more "volunteer" movies:
But overall, I personally believe there will be a place for professional movie making for the foreseeable future.
Eivind.
You're forgetting using the *length* of the fingers to increase counting range. The grandparent is a real man and has a knife.
I'd say the opposite: Capitalism requires a fair amount of regulation to be possible, because without regulation you end up with a lot of natural monopolies and their abuse.
For instance, take telecom: Laying down lines is expensive, while offering service once you've laid down the lines is cheap. A company that has laid lines will naturally put prices just below where it would make sense for a competitor to establish competing service, and if the competitor doesn't fill the whole space where they've wired, they'll lower prices in the areas where there is a competitor while price-gouging the rest.
And to get a competitor, you have to be able to connect to the rest of the network - if somebody has wired telephony to all the city, and you have wired two houses, it's not at all attractive to connect to your "new" network instead of the old one, even if your new one is cheaper.
This is all solved by regulation. In my ideal world (which to a degree is practiced in some of the "socialistic" countries in Scandinavia) there's regulation forcing equal access to this network. The regulation there is done by letting the incumbent keep their network and regulating what price they have to sell access at, and forcing access to be accounted at the same price internally as sold to external competitors.
Up until I started writing this post I thought it would be better to have the network ownership split off into a separate company with forced equal pricing schemes to all comers; however, I don't see how that could work out, as it would just give a monopoly that wanted to price-gouge all comers.
I think there might be some possibility in some form of forced spreads associated with the offers; that the customer of the line owner (ie, the ISP buying access to endusers) should also get some kind of offer of buying out the line and selling service back. However, I've not been able to think up something that seems reasonable yet.
Eivind.
I think what looks like a "goddamn asshole" is different from the inside and outside.
Looking at it from my point of view, your two previous comments are filled with slurs, implied attacks, and go into the "asshole" category of behavior; but I expect they don't feel that way from the inside (for you).
I hope the way I help/helped people feel reasonable to them (over the years, I've had quite a bit of thanks and very occasionally had people send me stuff as thanks), but it's hard to say from the inside - I know what intent I have behind each thing I write, so it naturally has a particular "inflection", while people can read it totally differently.
If the above is obvious to you, you could try following your own advice (showing respect and don't treating people as idiots) - because showing respect and not treating people as idiots is obvious to me, but it's also obvious to me that a lot of people start out with a wrong idea and that's why the need help.
Eivind.
If you've been part of a group of geeks that gets asked for advice, you've also noticed that half the time people are asking for the wrong thing - they don't understand the tools available, and are trying to follow the first solution they thought of (a solution that is hard, while there exists easy ways to solve the same problem.)
And in general it's a question of the people that ask having less experience than the people answering, at least in my experience.
Though there's some that insist on keeping to their initial solution without giving the contextual information that's necessary to give a good solution to the problem - while harsher than I would have formulated it, I agree with your characterization of them as "idiots". And they're usually so arrogant that they think they just have to have "thought the problem through". (There's occasionally people asking how to do things the hard way for a good reason, too, but they're much less common.)
Eivind.
Terry Childs refused to divulge the passwords to anybody he didn't know were entitled to get the passwords. That's the appropriate security procedure: You do not give passwords to people that claim that they should get them, you give them to somebody you know should have access to them. If I had called you after you had quit somewhere, you shouldn't give me the passwords - because you have no idea who I am.
Eivind.
Intent isn't always clear, no matter what perspective you get at this from - even from the inside.
I like Daniel Dennet's discussions of this (in Freedom Evolves); what is best for you probably depends on where you're starting from.
Eivind.
Your "is too hard" idea is the opposite of what I see - I see very good programmers changing languages early, and mediocre programmers coming along later (or sticking with whatever they learned).
Eivind.
According to how I read TFA, this would be in violation of the Berne convention.
I also think that it in general would be a challenge for people that create stuff; a more appropriate limit might be say that you have to do this for every published work you want to keep copyright on.
Eivind.
It would surprise me if there aren't more deaths per sea-mile than there is per air-mile. Boat burns, a thousand people die.
the latter. the former would require, amongst other things, access to the source code (as required by the original critterdings license)
That's the first link on the page. I don't know where you managed to get a binary; I can't see a link to one.
and a lot of noise coming from the biological disciplines re: computationally tractable, useful models for the various signaling pathways involved in hallucinogen use.
I think that an experiment can be interesting even if it doesn't exactly follow an existing model for something - it's interesting to see what we get when we set up the model under test. In this case, I'm not sure we'll get anything interesting, but it is a fun experiment anyway. Increased communication could lead to interesting results, and an extra parameter for self-regulation could also be interesting. (I suspect the drugs are too simplistic, though.)
If you compare humans, there is no correlation between brain size and intelligence.
That's a common myth. A quick Google for "Human brain size vs intelligence" gives the following two results as number 3 and 4 (and the first two that seem relevant):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_and_intelligence#Brain_size
http://www.sciencenetlinks.com/sci_update.php?DocID=166
Both indicate a correlation.
Quoting from Wikipedia (which is least definite):
Within human population, studies have been conducted to determine whether there is a relationship between brain size and a number of cognitive measures. Studies have reported correlations that range from 0 to 0.6.[2] ...
[2] http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/129/2/386
The newest relevant scientific review article seems to be "Whole Brain Size and General Mental Ability: A Review",
J. Philippe Rushton and C. Davison Ankney, International Journal of Neuroscience vol 119 issue 5 pages 692-732 (2009), available from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2668913/
Abstract:
We review the literature on the relation between whole brain size and general mental ability (GMA) both within and between species. Among humans, in 28 samples using brain imaging techniques, the mean brain size/GMA correlation is 0.40 (N = 1,389; p < 1010); in 59 samples using external head size measures it is 0.20 (N = 63,405; p < 1010). In 6 samples using the method of correlated vectors to distill g, the general factor of mental ability, the mean r is 0.63. We also describe the brain size/GMA correlations with age, socioeconomic position, sex, and ancestral population groups, which also provide information about brain–behavior relationships. Finally, we examine brain size and mental ability from an evolutionary and behavior genetic perspective.
Eivind.
After advice from a professor of dermatology, I have switched from using soap to just washing thoroughly with water, and I have less body odor than I did before I switched. I still use deodorant under my arms - there was a while where it worked well to drop it, but for some reason that changed and I had to re-introduce it.
Eivind.
I was always under the impression that taking paracetamol and other similar drugs along with alcohol was rather unhealthy to the liver and whatnot...
If you're at a level where you're hung over, Paracetamol will damage your liver.[1] However, the liver regenerate quickly, so if you only do this occasionally and have nothing that blocks liver regeneration generally, this should be relatively safe. My wife is an MD; her toxicology teacher recommended use of Paracetamol against hangover rather than Ibuprofen or other NSAIDs, as the increased risk of stomach damage from the alcohol/NSAID combination was more of a problem than the liver damage.
Eivind.
[1] Alcohol is converted to acetaldehyde as a part of the breakdown process; cystein is consumed by the process that handle acetaldehyde safely (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cysteine) and the poisonous effects of breakdown products of acetaldehyde when you lack cystein seems to be a large part of being "properly hung over". Paracetamol poisoning comes from lack of glutathione in the handling of paracetamol breakdown products; glutathione is made from cystein in the body, so having a hangover (lacking cystein) implies that paracetamol will rapidly deplete glutathione and the breakdown will be poisonous.
Here's something I have been thinking about recently, which relates to cryogenic freezing:
First, let's assume the brain stores memories in some form of physical structures (it sounds a stretch, but it's been theorised by some). Whether that is in RNA, or in some unknown physical property. Speaking in favour of this is certain inherited behaviour in animals - and even humans, like fear of spiders, and the ability of babies to see whether a dog is snarling or not. From the 'physical storage' perspective, producing computer networks similar to brains is theoretically very plausible - it's like cutting an unfathomably complex car in slices, gradually understanding how it works, and then building one yourself.
The problem with "physical storage" is: Some people have photographic memory of their entire lives.
This seems to be incorrect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory
Eivind.
I mean, the iPod touch is $199
With no camera and no GSM/UMTS radio.
and you can get a cheap throw away phone for $20
TracFone and Virgin Mobile phones are subsidized and provider-locked in the hope that you'll buy more minutes.
Yeah, $20 is too low - but you can get them around $30, retail.
Samsung classic at 19.89 British pounds
19.89 British pounds = 32.058702 U.S. dollars
Nokia 1208 at 22.50 British pounds (look through to the "Used & New", cheapest new).
22.50 British pounds = 36.2655 U.S. dollars
Eivind.
If your costs to do business as a carbon producer go up, with some relation at all to how much you pollute,
And there's the fallacy driving the system. Carbon producers are not by any sane definition "polluters". Once you see the assumption in the system, you can learn to fight it.
This is an honest argument. I disagree with it, but it's an honest argument. However, you've been dishonest: You've been arguing a bunch of other things instead, badly.
So let's try to address your dishonest argument first, and then do the honest argument afterward.
Here's the assumption/argument line leading to carbon trading improving the situation. Each assumption is backed by science as far as we know today; some of that science may possibly be shaky (the climate scientists are bad at releasing data :-(, but it's as good as we have at the moment.
Now, for the "CO2 cannot reasonably be considered pollution" argument.
I'll do two things: First, let's handle the "Exists in nature and is produced by every animal on the planet and is required for plant life". Most things exist in nature - e.g, methane, iron oxide. And a poison (or pollutant) is only a question of the dosage and location.
Second, let's deal directly with the question of "What is pollution?" I'd argue that the term pollution is itself a bad place to start - the question is an economic one, of externalized costs. Does your actions create a cost for somebody else? In the CO2 emissions case, it seems to do so, as per the above argument sequence. Having your release of X create cost for - damage - others would seem to make X a pollutant. You can argue different definitions, but I don't see that they ethically matter - the ethical question is whether you give costs to others, and if so, how to deal with this cost.
Eivind.
Attitudes follow behavior, somebody that does lots of car driving must have mod points in this story...
But isn't it possible that the contributors that are "disappearing in record numbers" are largely "casual" editors and vandals who can no longer edit articles as easily as they used to?
Casual editors have contributed most of the text on Wikipedia. Non-causual editors do a useful job of reverting vandalism and doing structuring tasks, but they do not contribute most of the text. (There were statistics posted about this some time back; I'm not going to bother digging them up.)
Eivind.
What's wrong with being an outcast?
It makes the kid lose out on learning social skills, which again makes things harder as an adult.
it will make the ads just a little less valuable.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
If I assume that watching ads is the payment for content, making ads less valuable means that what you are paying has less value. I think that's a bad thing.
But just for the record - based on advertising rates, TV and print advertising is (apparently) much more valuable than web advertising. And yet, they don't do per-user tracking at all. It would seem to me that getting rid of per-user tracking would make it more valuable, not less.
I assume this is tounge in cheek and I don't have to go into the problems with the premise?
Eivind.
They're not going to take kindly to anything that could challenge their certainty.
Thank you for proving my point ;) </cheeky>
I don't think you lying could challenge my present conclusions. And I don't take kindly to badly formed lies, repeated by people that haven't bothered to look for anything that goes against their pre-formed conclusions. I don't think you have the guts to actually look at arguments carefully or read up and try to understand what biologists actually believe - it's to scary for your faith, so you read creationist websites and parrot what they say.
And if you're going to try to turn that on it's head against me: I've read McGrath's first book and some of Behe and a smattering of Answers in Genesis and other websites. I've not yet found anything that contains a coherent argument if you understand what today's evolution theory is. Behe does a good try, though, you need to know quite a bit to see the holes in it.
But, if you have anything that could challenge my conclusions - any alternate explanation that don't assume the kind of complexity that it tries to explain, really - I'm all ears. I'd like to read it. I read this material in the hope of finding something that can expand my mind. But so far, all there's been has been "that looks hard - how could NATURE have done it?" - and often about things that it is fairly easy to find ways that nature could have done it.
So, are you up for it, and will try to answer the challenges in the previous mail and give me some challenge, or are you going to go to your congregation the next time and say "I lied about darwininsts in public recently, and then said 'Bah, I knew you would protest, that proves my point' when I got called on my lies"?