You know, the last minute where they reveal Bush tied to a chair, take a good grip on his nose, and pull off the human mask to reveal a reptilian overlord beneath.
I can at least trust them to try and keep Canadians in power and keeping an eye out for a surge of Pakistanis moving in, taking up Law degrees, and taking over the judicial state of Canada.
Of course, because Pakistanis can never be Canadians, right?
That may sound Racist
Sounds right, except for the "may" portion.
Now give me figures: What percentage of Pakistanis who immigrated to Canada claimed refugee status, and/or got welfare benefits compared to the real Canadians? If you can't back what you say, then yeah, I'll call you a racist.
And let's face it, no one goes to india, china or brazil.
Don't know about China, but quite a few do go to India/Brazil - cheaper alternative to the US, and not everyone can get to the US.
One place many people also end up going: Singapore. They've invested heavily on recruiting top faculty (a bunch from my highly ranked alumnus abandoned the US and moved there).
Yet, when I look at universities in the US, they play a similar game. In the last university I was in (top 5 in engineering), the faculty were consistently pressured to produce patents, and many of the faculty agreed it was the right path to go on.
And heck, even quantity of publications is a dubious measure...
He's a baby killer, and anyone that voted for him supports a baby killer.
Assuming, purely for the sake of argument, that what you say is true.
So anyone who voted for Bush is in 2004 supports a people killer, as well as favors the Patriot Act.
Anyone who voted for Obama in 2008 favors the Patriot Act, and supports a people killer (he continually voted to fund the war).
Boy, if I think long enough, I could make a huge list.
You remind me of a friend who in 2008 announced that he didn't like McCain or Obama, and was in search for a viable independent candidate. He went through each one, and found something in them that he didn't like, and ended up voting for Obama. I asked him: "What? You didn't find anything in Obama you didn't like either?" The complaints he had against the independent guys were petty ("Too feminist"). The original complaints he had against against McCain and Obama were much more serious.
Why are independent candidates held to a higher standard?
And that's how we got a second term for GWB instead of Al Gore - all you folks who voted for Ralph Nader and so on handed the White House to the Republicans.
Yeah, I mean - it's not like the guys who voted for GWB are to blame...
The scorn heaped on Nader's voters by the Democrats that I've seen in person is several orders of magnitude greater than that heaped on the Bush voters. The guy who votes for Nader is lampooned and criticized to death, but the office colleague who voted for Bush gets a free pass, usually.
How typical of Democrats: Can't take on the guys in power, so they pile it on to a weaker crowd.
Heh, well, I suppose I could have written more, but I thought linking to his Wikipedia page should be sufficient. Although reading it again, I should have at least mentioned that he coined the word "fractal", in case there's a/. reader out there who does not know of Mandelbrot.
And it was a 5.25" floppy disk, although I copied it to my 20 MB HD.
Better yet, how does he know that 0.1111.... x 9 = 0.9999.... ?
All these simple proofs leave something to be desired, and take certain assumptions into account that everyone is taught, but they often don't know the justification. For example, one proof had:
10 x 0.999.... = 9.999....
Again, why? Shifting the decimal point is a trick we're all taught, but they never proved it to us in the general case.
Ultimately, the proof is that any non-terminating decimal is defined to equal to the limit of the partial sums. So:
0.9999.... = 0.9 + 0.09 + 0.009 +...
To evaluate the RHS, let S_n be the sum up to the first n terms. Take the limit as n goes to infinity.
In a sense, this isn't a proof - it's a definition.
Every time, I inquire politely what these features might be.
Adjustment Layers. Any average Photoshop user will, at first glance, think of Gimp as crap because it lacks these. Life's a pain without them.
The one thing that is invariably mentioned is that Photoshop somehow allows you to work in a cmyk space. Which is of course the mark of the UNprofessional hack, since real professionals worry about light. Composition. Art.
Well, no. Real professionals get everything right in the camera, and don't use software.
There have been "vertical search engines" that only search within particular fields for a very long time now -- everything from cars to plumbing. Not sure how newsworthy it is that there are also ones for Christian and Muslim theology.
Did you read the article? This isn't about searching theology. This is a "general" search engine that filters out material not acceptable to their religion(s).
Seriously, if you are able to explain the difference between why one is free speech and the other is not, I'm willing to listen.
Again, your whole premise is flawed. If Rackspace wants to shut down a site that has the Koran on it because they feel it is offensive and inflammatory, then that's quite OK. What's important is what they think is inflammatory, not what you think. Legally and ethically, there's more to it since as a contract, they are obligated to make their terms clear, though. Also, it would be nice if they provide warnings in advance, but it's not obligated (ethically).
And as the person already pointed out, this is a strawman argument. I don't think the poster suggested it's OK to keep a copy of the Koran on the site and not this.
Seriously, there are providers out there who take this kind of stuff quite seriously. If you're going to sign up with a service and intend to put inflammatory material on it, you have no excuse not to do your damn research on picking the proper provider.
That's very different to businesses refusing to serve part of the market based solely on the segment's religious beliefs.
Indeed. It's also off topic, as that is not what is happening here. As I pointed out earlier, what you're describing is definitely illegal. What they're doing is not.
That's very different to businesses refusing to serve part of the market based solely on the segment's religious beliefs.
Except that it's not obvious there is discrimination going on - except discrimination against one organization, which is fine. As a business owner, I think it's my absolute right to deny you business if I don't like you. I don't see that as at all being problematic - unless I'm providing a service that is one of your needs (and I mean real needs, like food, water, housing, etc).
If your argument is that private ownership allows one to excuse oneself from any restrictions on discrimination, then you've just struck a major blow against fighting discrimination.
Even assuming I accept your premises, I still disagree. I'm a firm believer in not fixing a broken thing by breaking other things. If the private enterprise has too much power, fix that instead.
If your argument is that these particular people don't fall under restraints against discrimination because their beliefs are bad beliefs that it is okay to discriminate against whilst other religious beliefs are not, then I'd consider that a double standard.
Never suggested it.
Let me state clearly my point. As a private business/person, I believe it is quite OK (legally and ethically) not to do business with someone if they refuse to abide by the terms clearly set. I also believe that they are not obligated to exercise their terms on all infractions committed by their clients. That's where judgment and discretion play a role.
I also believe that a private enterprise has no ethical obligation to uphold free speech via their property, and is perfectly allowed to censor what happens on their property. If I run a blog and moderate comments, my actions are clearly censorship, and completely ethical.
More accurate analogy - you are a megaphone rental company and one day someone walks in of a political / religious / ethnic / sexual persuasion that you don't like. You continue to hand out megaphones to everyone else, but tell this person they're not allowed to rent one from you.
More accurate, but still a poor analogy, because what you describe is illegal. As a business, you cannot discriminate on religious, racial or (now) sexual grounds.
Take it from someone who was part of an organization that successfully sued a billboard company, because they were clearly discriminating on one of these grounds.
What Rackspace is doing is not illegal, so it's a poor idea to compare it to your scenario.
A more accurate scenario would be for a megaphone company to refuse to rent out to someone who will use it to espouse views they consider inflammatory, or just plain don't like. As long as they have a clear policy on this, it's perfectly legal. They can, for example, refuse to rent out megaphones for the use of promoting soccer. Silly, perhaps, but frankly, it is simply not our business if they act that way.
Yes, freedom of speech is cool, but my property rights trounce your freedom of speech. I know you have something to say, but if you intend to use my property (megaphone, private server, etc) to do it, you're obligated to do it on my terms.
1. Do you have a citation that they were charging large amounts? I'm not doubting it, but I need evidence.
2. Frankly, even if he charged $1 million for each license for each school, I don't sympathize with the school. There have always been cheaper alternatives - unless you can show me that MS somehow forced them to buy MS products.
He gives money away that he has no use for anyway. Result: He can steer the direction of research that 'his' money goes to, he gets to decide which charities get money. With being an criminal in how he did business in Microsoft, he's effectively stolen money from hundreds of millions of people, driven other business into the ground, and taken away the choice to give to charity to other people. Whether that would have been done is another matter, he's still taken away the choice. Oh and as to giving away 'his' money, from what I've read he has not actually done so but in effect set up another business (the business of providing money to his selected charities) which is based on 'his' money but mainly giving other people's money, those people who have given their money to his foundation, away to his selected charities.
You make it sound as if he made most of his money by charging the Windows tax for every computer sold, because that's the only really troublesome thing he did.
Since you're talking about "choice", almost always people had the choice not to buy MS software. Almost always there was a viable alternative. If they paid for an overpriced product, almost none was forced to.
And suggesting he's not giving his own money is just plain ignorant. Look it up - he gave $3.5 billion of his own money just in the last few years. And it's estimated that over his whole life, he's given $28 billion of his own assets away.
It would be nice if Microsoft hadn't been overcharging education establishments for their software for years.
Citation?
Plenty of criticism here:
Sorry - those criticisms are not "The Foundation is causing harm", but "If I had the money, I'd spend it on something else". Had the Foundation not existed, nothing in the body of those criticisms would be better in the world.
The criticisms presented there seem to essentially be criticisms that could be thrown at any charity.
This. Essentially, the criticisms are saying that the money could be better utilized, and not saying that it is doing any damage as it is. Put another way, had Bill Gates never provided the money in the first place (which is his right), nothing would be better. The Foundation isn't making anything in the world worse.
To say what "went wrong" is like asking what went wrong in New Orleans when Katrina happened. Certainly with hindsight you can point out all the mistakes. Certainly you could say: "if we'd known..."
Except, of course, they did know.
10 months before Katrina, I was part of a geography competition (multiple choice). One question was: "Which of the following disasters which, if occurred, would be considered so damaging that the Red Cross refuses to have a permanent branch prepared for it?" The answer was a hurricane hitting St Louis (the other options were either really unlikely, or ones where the Red Cross did have a permanent branch associated with it.
When I went home that day, 10 months before Katrina, I looked up why that was. And so I knew. The Red Cross knew. They knew because many other people knew, including local officials. People had been warning about the scenario for years.
Suppose you're hired to teach first-semester calculus for fall 2010, and you have complete freedom to choose any book you like. Would you choose a free book? If so, which one?
Off hand, I don't know which free books are good. Of course, if I had to teach, I'd spend the time evaluating. More likely, though, I'd assign a cheap book - why limit to free ones?
Do you know of an intro calc book that you think is really a good candidate?
Do you think the world uses Stewart? Look around to see what other countries use.
I'll have to look around - people have recommended some in the past.
BTW, the free vs Stewart dichotomy is a false one. I'd suspect that there are good calculus books that cost, say, $30-60. Stewart's costs $160+
They're not going to give extra brownie points for the fact that the book is free. They want something professionally laid out, with lots of exercises, and good ancillary materials.
As for "lots of exercises", there are no shortage of books simply dedicated to practice problems. Getting a cheap textbook with little problems and requiring an additional book that is just for problems is likely cheaper.
As for "professionally laid out", what does that even mean? I'm not talking about handwritten notes, you know. And photographs rarely help in learning calculus. The book should be laid out well (typography, margins, etc). The figures should be good, it should be easy to quickly identify theorems, and there should be an index.
If people who take calculus need silly gimmicks like cool photos and nice paper quality to learn calculus, I'd fear for the future. Thankfully, they don't.
It's not a bad calculus book. However, it is overpriced. In my day a new one cost $100. The latest edition runs at over $160. There are definitely much cheaper alternatives that are as good.
Also, it's nice that your college weren't fussy about the version. Not so in other universities (at least when it came to assigning HW).
Slashdot Mirror
Written 3 years ago, I present The Future of Reading.
You know, the last minute where they reveal Bush tied to a chair, take a good grip on his nose, and pull off the human mask to reveal a reptilian overlord beneath.
So I guess waterboarding would be pointless?
I can at least trust them to try and keep Canadians in power and keeping an eye out for a surge of Pakistanis moving in, taking up Law degrees, and taking over the judicial state of Canada.
Of course, because Pakistanis can never be Canadians, right?
That may sound Racist
Sounds right, except for the "may" portion.
Now give me figures: What percentage of Pakistanis who immigrated to Canada claimed refugee status, and/or got welfare benefits compared to the real Canadians? If you can't back what you say, then yeah, I'll call you a racist.
Engineering, biostuff, etc.
And let's face it, no one goes to india, china or brazil.
Don't know about China, but quite a few do go to India/Brazil - cheaper alternative to the US, and not everyone can get to the US.
One place many people also end up going: Singapore. They've invested heavily on recruiting top faculty (a bunch from my highly ranked alumnus abandoned the US and moved there).
I completely agree with your comment.
Yet, when I look at universities in the US, they play a similar game. In the last university I was in (top 5 in engineering), the faculty were consistently pressured to produce patents, and many of the faculty agreed it was the right path to go on.
And heck, even quantity of publications is a dubious measure...
He's a baby killer, and anyone that voted for him supports a baby killer.
Assuming, purely for the sake of argument, that what you say is true.
So anyone who voted for Bush is in 2004 supports a people killer, as well as favors the Patriot Act.
Anyone who voted for Obama in 2008 favors the Patriot Act, and supports a people killer (he continually voted to fund the war).
Boy, if I think long enough, I could make a huge list.
You remind me of a friend who in 2008 announced that he didn't like McCain or Obama, and was in search for a viable independent candidate. He went through each one, and found something in them that he didn't like, and ended up voting for Obama. I asked him: "What? You didn't find anything in Obama you didn't like either?" The complaints he had against the independent guys were petty ("Too feminist"). The original complaints he had against against McCain and Obama were much more serious.
Why are independent candidates held to a higher standard?
And that's how we got a second term for GWB instead of Al Gore - all you folks who voted for Ralph Nader and so on handed the White House to the Republicans.
Yeah, I mean - it's not like the guys who voted for GWB are to blame...
The scorn heaped on Nader's voters by the Democrats that I've seen in person is several orders of magnitude greater than that heaped on the Bush voters. The guy who votes for Nader is lampooned and criticized to death, but the office colleague who voted for Bush gets a free pass, usually.
How typical of Democrats: Can't take on the guys in power, so they pile it on to a weaker crowd.
Heh, well, I suppose I could have written more, but I thought linking to his Wikipedia page should be sufficient. Although reading it again, I should have at least mentioned that he coined the word "fractal", in case there's a /. reader out there who does not know of Mandelbrot.
And it was a 5.25" floppy disk, although I copied it to my 20 MB HD.
Better yet, how does he know that 0.1111.... x 9 = 0.9999.... ?
All these simple proofs leave something to be desired, and take certain assumptions into account that everyone is taught, but they often don't know the justification. For example, one proof had:
10 x 0.999.... = 9.999....
Again, why? Shifting the decimal point is a trick we're all taught, but they never proved it to us in the general case.
Ultimately, the proof is that any non-terminating decimal is defined to equal to the limit of the partial sums. So:
0.9999.... = 0.9 + 0.09 + 0.009 + ...
To evaluate the RHS, let S_n be the sum up to the first n terms. Take the limit as n goes to infinity.
In a sense, this isn't a proof - it's a definition.
Every time, I inquire politely what these features might be.
Adjustment Layers. Any average Photoshop user will, at first glance, think of Gimp as crap because it lacks these. Life's a pain without them.
The one thing that is invariably mentioned is that Photoshop somehow allows you to work in a cmyk space. Which is of course the mark of the UNprofessional hack, since real professionals worry about light. Composition. Art.
Well, no. Real professionals get everything right in the camera, and don't use software.
Moron.
Interesting - I stand corrected. I tried all three mentioned in the article, and only the Muslim one is a "general" search engine.
There have been "vertical search engines" that only search within particular fields for a very long time now -- everything from cars to plumbing. Not sure how newsworthy it is that there are also ones for Christian and Muslim theology.
Did you read the article? This isn't about searching theology. This is a "general" search engine that filters out material not acceptable to their religion(s).
Seriously, if you are able to explain the difference between why one is free speech and the other is not, I'm willing to listen.
Again, your whole premise is flawed. If Rackspace wants to shut down a site that has the Koran on it because they feel it is offensive and inflammatory, then that's quite OK. What's important is what they think is inflammatory, not what you think. Legally and ethically, there's more to it since as a contract, they are obligated to make their terms clear, though. Also, it would be nice if they provide warnings in advance, but it's not obligated (ethically).
And as the person already pointed out, this is a strawman argument. I don't think the poster suggested it's OK to keep a copy of the Koran on the site and not this.
Seriously, there are providers out there who take this kind of stuff quite seriously. If you're going to sign up with a service and intend to put inflammatory material on it, you have no excuse not to do your damn research on picking the proper provider.
That's very different to businesses refusing to serve part of the market based solely on the segment's religious beliefs.
Indeed. It's also off topic, as that is not what is happening here. As I pointed out earlier, what you're describing is definitely illegal. What they're doing is not.
That's very different to businesses refusing to serve part of the market based solely on the segment's religious beliefs.
Except that it's not obvious there is discrimination going on - except discrimination against one organization, which is fine. As a business owner, I think it's my absolute right to deny you business if I don't like you. I don't see that as at all being problematic - unless I'm providing a service that is one of your needs (and I mean real needs, like food, water, housing, etc).
If your argument is that private ownership allows one to excuse oneself from any restrictions on discrimination, then you've just struck a major blow against fighting discrimination.
Even assuming I accept your premises, I still disagree. I'm a firm believer in not fixing a broken thing by breaking other things. If the private enterprise has too much power, fix that instead.
If your argument is that these particular people don't fall under restraints against discrimination because their beliefs are bad beliefs that it is okay to discriminate against whilst other religious beliefs are not, then I'd consider that a double standard.
Never suggested it.
Let me state clearly my point. As a private business/person, I believe it is quite OK (legally and ethically) not to do business with someone if they refuse to abide by the terms clearly set. I also believe that they are not obligated to exercise their terms on all infractions committed by their clients. That's where judgment and discretion play a role.
I also believe that a private enterprise has no ethical obligation to uphold free speech via their property, and is perfectly allowed to censor what happens on their property. If I run a blog and moderate comments, my actions are clearly censorship, and completely ethical.
More accurate analogy - you are a megaphone rental company and one day someone walks in of a political / religious / ethnic / sexual persuasion that you don't like. You continue to hand out megaphones to everyone else, but tell this person they're not allowed to rent one from you.
More accurate, but still a poor analogy, because what you describe is illegal. As a business, you cannot discriminate on religious, racial or (now) sexual grounds.
Take it from someone who was part of an organization that successfully sued a billboard company, because they were clearly discriminating on one of these grounds.
What Rackspace is doing is not illegal, so it's a poor idea to compare it to your scenario.
A more accurate scenario would be for a megaphone company to refuse to rent out to someone who will use it to espouse views they consider inflammatory, or just plain don't like. As long as they have a clear policy on this, it's perfectly legal. They can, for example, refuse to rent out megaphones for the use of promoting soccer. Silly, perhaps, but frankly, it is simply not our business if they act that way.
Yes, freedom of speech is cool, but my property rights trounce your freedom of speech. I know you have something to say, but if you intend to use my property (megaphone, private server, etc) to do it, you're obligated to do it on my terms.
1. Do you have a citation that they were charging large amounts? I'm not doubting it, but I need evidence.
2. Frankly, even if he charged $1 million for each license for each school, I don't sympathize with the school. There have always been cheaper alternatives - unless you can show me that MS somehow forced them to buy MS products.
He gives money away that he has no use for anyway. Result: He can steer the direction of research that 'his' money goes to, he gets to decide which charities get money. With being an criminal in how he did business in Microsoft, he's effectively stolen money from hundreds of millions of people, driven other business into the ground, and taken away the choice to give to charity to other people. Whether that would have been done is another matter, he's still taken away the choice. Oh and as to giving away 'his' money, from what I've read he has not actually done so but in effect set up another business (the business of providing money to his selected charities) which is based on 'his' money but mainly giving other people's money, those people who have given their money to his foundation, away to his selected charities.
You make it sound as if he made most of his money by charging the Windows tax for every computer sold, because that's the only really troublesome thing he did.
Since you're talking about "choice", almost always people had the choice not to buy MS software. Almost always there was a viable alternative. If they paid for an overpriced product, almost none was forced to.
And suggesting he's not giving his own money is just plain ignorant. Look it up - he gave $3.5 billion of his own money just in the last few years. And it's estimated that over his whole life, he's given $28 billion of his own assets away.
It would be nice if Microsoft hadn't been overcharging education establishments for their software for years.
Citation?
Plenty of criticism here:
Sorry - those criticisms are not "The Foundation is causing harm", but "If I had the money, I'd spend it on something else". Had the Foundation not existed, nothing in the body of those criticisms would be better in the world.
The criticisms presented there seem to essentially be criticisms that could be thrown at any charity.
This. Essentially, the criticisms are saying that the money could be better utilized, and not saying that it is doing any damage as it is. Put another way, had Bill Gates never provided the money in the first place (which is his right), nothing would be better. The Foundation isn't making anything in the world worse.
To say what "went wrong" is like asking what went wrong in New Orleans when Katrina happened. Certainly with hindsight you can point out all the mistakes. Certainly you could say: "if we'd known..."
Except, of course, they did know.
10 months before Katrina, I was part of a geography competition (multiple choice). One question was: "Which of the following disasters which, if occurred, would be considered so damaging that the Red Cross refuses to have a permanent branch prepared for it?" The answer was a hurricane hitting St Louis (the other options were either really unlikely, or ones where the Red Cross did have a permanent branch associated with it.
When I went home that day, 10 months before Katrina, I looked up why that was. And so I knew. The Red Cross knew. They knew because many other people knew, including local officials. People had been warning about the scenario for years.
the lectures were online, the readings were good, but without physical interaction an entire dimension was missing.
That's trivially true. Lectures and notes are in 2-D. Physical interaction is in 3-D.
Suppose you're hired to teach first-semester calculus for fall 2010, and you have complete freedom to choose any book you like. Would you choose a free book? If so, which one?
Off hand, I don't know which free books are good. Of course, if I had to teach, I'd spend the time evaluating. More likely, though, I'd assign a cheap book - why limit to free ones?
Do you know of an intro calc book that you think is really a good candidate?
Do you think the world uses Stewart? Look around to see what other countries use.
I'll have to look around - people have recommended some in the past.
BTW, the free vs Stewart dichotomy is a false one. I'd suspect that there are good calculus books that cost, say, $30-60. Stewart's costs $160+
They're not going to give extra brownie points for the fact that the book is free. They want something professionally laid out, with lots of exercises, and good ancillary materials.
As for "lots of exercises", there are no shortage of books simply dedicated to practice problems. Getting a cheap textbook with little problems and requiring an additional book that is just for problems is likely cheaper.
As for "professionally laid out", what does that even mean? I'm not talking about handwritten notes, you know. And photographs rarely help in learning calculus. The book should be laid out well (typography, margins, etc). The figures should be good, it should be easy to quickly identify theorems, and there should be an index.
If people who take calculus need silly gimmicks like cool photos and nice paper quality to learn calculus, I'd fear for the future. Thankfully, they don't.
It's not a bad calculus book. However, it is overpriced. In my day a new one cost $100. The latest edition runs at over $160. There are definitely much cheaper alternatives that are as good.
Also, it's nice that your college weren't fussy about the version. Not so in other universities (at least when it came to assigning HW).