When I was an undergraduate, final examinations were generally worth 25-40% of the final grade. The rest would depend mostly on tests during the semester, or on minor research papers turned in.
I've seen estimates, don't remember where, that 1/4 of male chimpanzees die of murder. Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel, relates stories told by New Guinea highlanders that "my first husband was killed by my second husband, my second husband was killed by first husband's brother in retaliation...". Anecdotal, yes, but it's not rare.
If your 3GS is worthwhile (at a minimum of what, $70/mo?) to you, and yet not a single one of the apps is worth even the cost of a single day's phone+data service, you have a very strange calculus of worth.
Android has the notification bar. It has Swype. It has functional multitasking. It's not for everyone - the UI is not as polished as iPhone's - but you're being purposefully dense if you pretend it has no advantages.
iTunes may be slow - I've waited for it many a time - but it's incredibly easy. You want the Cars' first album? Put it in the search bar, grab the files, drag to iPod. Every cover you have of a specific song? Search, click, drag. Try doing that with your directory-based file system and manual drag-and-drop.
While it's interesting just how much people will accept you expressing sociopathic viewpoints
Well, they should.
My wife is a true-crime fanatic. She will watch almost anything on TV about crime, regardless of its quality - sort of her guilty pleasure, if you will. And since I, by extension, have seen so much crappy true-crime stuff, I've gotten to see the narrative pretty clearly. It is much the fashion in American society to pretend that murder is JUST! SO! EVIL! that NOBODY! COULD! DO IT! unless they were crazy, or profoundly disturbed, or some other such thing. Yet, if you look at primitive tribes around the world, or at chimpanzees, it becomes clear that murder is incredibly common amongst higher primates. We've made it a rare thing not by virtue of being better than our ancestors, but by punishing it very harshly and having very effective police forces.
If you get past the idea that "sociopath" = "rapist/torturer/murderer" and view it correctly as "does not really care about other people or what happens to them" then you realize that sociopathy is in fact incredibly common. Most sociopaths aren't especially violent, and they're constrained by fear of The Law in any case, but they are out there and they usually do very, very well in life.
No, we don't pay for courses. In fact in Bremen you don't even sign up for them until halfway through the semester.
I think you need to find another word in English to express what you mean here. A "course" is a class, a series of lectures - i.e., what specific things you'll study in a semester. Are you saying that students at Bremen go through half of a semester without even committing to what they will be studying? How on earth can they actually learn anything if they've skipped half the semester?
Example: when in my second year of university, I took four classes in the fall: a required health course, introductory physics with lab, organic chemistry with lab, and quantitative analytical chemistry with lab. In the spring, it was organic chemistry with lab, introductory physics with lab, and two other less-demanding courses (I think anthropology and an etymology course, but I can't really remember).
He's not talking about drilling closer in in the GOM. He's talking about California and the East Coast, where there are deposits close to shore that have been NIMBY'd out of accessibility.
required to demonstrate contingencies for all outcomes
You can't do that. If you think you can, you're not being imaginative enough. Reasonably foreseeable risks? Sure. No problem. But I can construct a chain of events that leads from drawing a blood sample from you to your death by sepsis, or from you getting into a car to go to the grocery store to said car mowing down a herd of schoolchildren. Neither of those is even terribly far-fetched.
Maybe BP really did skimp on safety - I know very little about the drilling industry and couldn't possibly offer an opinion that means anything - but "bad things happened" is not prima facie proof of "they fucked up".
Someone please mod this up. He's right; it's ten times as interesting as the original list, although I think it's possible that a really high density of smart people enables things that a lower density never would, even if it's just because there are more people there.
The technological improvements that we didn't spend on hauling extra weight around (which is why we can't have those 50+ MPG Geo Metros from the early 90s back), we spent on massively increased performance. I was reading a comment the other day that you could greatly improve the performance of an early 80s Ferrari 308 by dropping the engine from a modern Toyota Avalon in it. I'd believe it, too.
You could have gone for Hillary. I'm a Republican, but if you get me good and drunk I'll admit that she was the best major candidate in the last election.
Democratic caucus and primary voters: I BLAME YOU!
I'm not foolish enough to post something that's actually embarrassing on Facebook - the Internet never forgets, etc. - but there's stuff on there that I'll happily share with friends but don't want the world to know, like my cell phone number. If you can't keep that category of information private from every Tom, Dick, and Harry, then what's the use of the site?
Actually, I guess that is the whole point - I don't use the site at all anymore except as a self-updating Rolodex. And I treat it like I treat Google - if I need to use it, I log in, do what I need to do, and log back out before I start wandering the Web.
Why is this modded funny? It's painfully true. Some friends and I have used Wave for a LOST discussion group every week, and it's pretty bad by the end of each episode.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was an undergraduate, final examinations were generally worth 25-40% of the final grade. The rest would depend mostly on tests during the semester, or on minor research papers turned in.
Ano Domini
Heh.
As for the Alabamans, I imagine most would just say, "What a jackass."
Aha. In American universities you usually have two weeks, maximum, to decide to drop a course without any penalty.
If that's the case, I can't say I'd be too fond of it. Everything rides on a single end-of-semester exam? Wow.
I've seen estimates, don't remember where, that 1/4 of male chimpanzees die of murder. Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel, relates stories told by New Guinea highlanders that "my first husband was killed by my second husband, my second husband was killed by first husband's brother in retaliation...". Anecdotal, yes, but it's not rare.
If your tags are wrong, you're stealing from the wrong places.
If your 3GS is worthwhile (at a minimum of what, $70/mo?) to you, and yet not a single one of the apps is worth even the cost of a single day's phone+data service, you have a very strange calculus of worth.
Android has the notification bar. It has Swype. It has functional multitasking. It's not for everyone - the UI is not as polished as iPhone's - but you're being purposefully dense if you pretend it has no advantages.
iTunes may be slow - I've waited for it many a time - but it's incredibly easy. You want the Cars' first album? Put it in the search bar, grab the files, drag to iPod. Every cover you have of a specific song? Search, click, drag. Try doing that with your directory-based file system and manual drag-and-drop.
While it's interesting just how much people will accept you expressing sociopathic viewpoints
Well, they should.
My wife is a true-crime fanatic. She will watch almost anything on TV about crime, regardless of its quality - sort of her guilty pleasure, if you will. And since I, by extension, have seen so much crappy true-crime stuff, I've gotten to see the narrative pretty clearly. It is much the fashion in American society to pretend that murder is JUST! SO! EVIL! that NOBODY! COULD! DO IT! unless they were crazy, or profoundly disturbed, or some other such thing. Yet, if you look at primitive tribes around the world, or at chimpanzees, it becomes clear that murder is incredibly common amongst higher primates. We've made it a rare thing not by virtue of being better than our ancestors, but by punishing it very harshly and having very effective police forces.
If you get past the idea that "sociopath" = "rapist/torturer/murderer" and view it correctly as "does not really care about other people or what happens to them" then you realize that sociopathy is in fact incredibly common. Most sociopaths aren't especially violent, and they're constrained by fear of The Law in any case, but they are out there and they usually do very, very well in life.
No, we don't pay for courses. In fact in Bremen you don't even sign up for them until halfway through the semester.
I think you need to find another word in English to express what you mean here. A "course" is a class, a series of lectures - i.e., what specific things you'll study in a semester. Are you saying that students at Bremen go through half of a semester without even committing to what they will be studying? How on earth can they actually learn anything if they've skipped half the semester?
Example: when in my second year of university, I took four classes in the fall: a required health course, introductory physics with lab, organic chemistry with lab, and quantitative analytical chemistry with lab. In the spring, it was organic chemistry with lab, introductory physics with lab, and two other less-demanding courses (I think anthropology and an etymology course, but I can't really remember).
If you routinely drive those kinds of distances, you're an idiot if you rely on a single standard fuel tank.
He's not talking about drilling closer in in the GOM. He's talking about California and the East Coast, where there are deposits close to shore that have been NIMBY'd out of accessibility.
required to demonstrate contingencies for all outcomes
You can't do that. If you think you can, you're not being imaginative enough. Reasonably foreseeable risks? Sure. No problem. But I can construct a chain of events that leads from drawing a blood sample from you to your death by sepsis, or from you getting into a car to go to the grocery store to said car mowing down a herd of schoolchildren. Neither of those is even terribly far-fetched.
Maybe BP really did skimp on safety - I know very little about the drilling industry and couldn't possibly offer an opinion that means anything - but "bad things happened" is not prima facie proof of "they fucked up".
Good call, please ignore my reply to parent. Clean browsers do not do this.
Whoa. Mod parent up now.
Someone please mod this up. He's right; it's ten times as interesting as the original list, although I think it's possible that a really high density of smart people enables things that a lower density never would, even if it's just because there are more people there.
The technological improvements that we didn't spend on hauling extra weight around (which is why we can't have those 50+ MPG Geo Metros from the early 90s back), we spent on massively increased performance. I was reading a comment the other day that you could greatly improve the performance of an early 80s Ferrari 308 by dropping the engine from a modern Toyota Avalon in it. I'd believe it, too.
Which, conveniently, was prohibited by a constitutional amendment, not a simple majority of Congress.
Harder to prove.
Barack Obama has been president for nearly a year and a half. At some point, he's got to own it.
You could have gone for Hillary. I'm a Republican, but if you get me good and drunk I'll admit that she was the best major candidate in the last election.
Democratic caucus and primary voters: I BLAME YOU!
I'm not foolish enough to post something that's actually embarrassing on Facebook - the Internet never forgets, etc. - but there's stuff on there that I'll happily share with friends but don't want the world to know, like my cell phone number. If you can't keep that category of information private from every Tom, Dick, and Harry, then what's the use of the site?
Actually, I guess that is the whole point - I don't use the site at all anymore except as a self-updating Rolodex. And I treat it like I treat Google - if I need to use it, I log in, do what I need to do, and log back out before I start wandering the Web.
He's exaggerating a bit, but try this to see what can be done with a modern PC.
Why is this modded funny? It's painfully true. Some friends and I have used Wave for a LOST discussion group every week, and it's pretty bad by the end of each episode.