Why don't you try surveying a bio class and a EE course and compare? Last year I took a 3000 course in each. The results? bio class:65% female, class size ~90 EE class:1 female out of 24 students... she has since changed majors. I know that this is only one isolated instance, but I've heard many, many similar one's and no contradictory ones. But if any of you have been in any EE clases with over 50% females, by all means let me know... I'm curious.
Well, you should consider that over 95% of our DNA is the same as that of a rat (and about 98% for a chimp). If intelligence doesn't come from our brains, then what do you propose? Our spirit presence?
If a government abandons all commitments to personal freedoms, the people must have a means of forming a malitia. It's true that guns are nothing compared to the firepower any modern military has, but they are enough to keep the government from suppressing it's people if say... 75% of them are unhappy. No sane military man would be willing to carpet bomb their home town (and hopefully not any town filled with civilian countrymen).
Every successful dictator in Europe has had to first disarm his people. I for one don't want that. Also, as a side note: many, many studies show that restrictive gun laws increase the proportion of criminal to civilian gun holders, and increase violent crime rates. At least that ratio has held very true in the U.S. (though I know we're more violent than quite of few others). But I guess what I'm getting at is that no vandal would ever want to intrude in a Swiss home, knowing that the owner would have a gun and possibly blow him away. You Brit's on the other hand would be easy pickings...;-)
So how does this work when Net Nanny or whatever blocks the source code to free software? I for one have seen several linux and GNU comments that any of those filtering programs would pounce all over. Are GNU, linux, and apache all illegal in Ausie, now?
I'm glad they could do it in four minutes... I've been struggleing for about 4 days with my Mandrake6.0 install. The damned thing won't recognize my video card (it's an apollo 7400 8MB, with the intel740 chipset, but Linux treats it like a standard VGA). If I pick an SVGA server I get 320*204 resolution! That's not even enough to read the help files in GNOME! AAARrrrrrrrrrrgh!
Would any of you kindly *nix-ubber-geeks know where to direct me to find help for this? The I'd love to be able to get the rest of my 'linux' stuff working in 4 minutes!
P.S. the manufacturer of the video card left no contact info.
Mathematics has the interesting distinction of being both purely abstract, and one of the few entirely provable pursuits out there. Pi cannot be seen, but it's existence can be proven. Actually starting from basic axioms all of mathematics can be proven. If you pick different axioms, sometimes you can arrive at another, but consistent and sometimes usefull number space. Once the axioms are accepted, all else can be proven.
Science is unfortunately different. Proof is impossible. Even gravity cannot be proven; sure you can observe that every time you throw a ball into the air it falls back to the earth, but you cannot prove that it will the next time! However, what you can do with science, is gather a mountain of evidence. Then you have a very strong theory. Sometimes these strong theories aren't quite right(i.e. Newtownian Mechanics was replaced by Relativity), but they are still the most supported available theory. That's what makes it science, we grudgingly assume whatever has the most evidence is true... until there is new evidence to consider. Evolution does have a veritable mountain of evidence behind it. We have done tests on populations with various allele characteristics, and the results consistantly match the predictions derived from assuming evolution to be true.
Well, one could start by comparing the population growth rates of 1st world countries (especially western Europe) with those of African 3rd world countries...
Evolution simply stipulates that the alleles in a population will change over time towards other alleles which will give a life form a competitive advantage. It's the same process whether speciation is invloved or not. Usually what determines whether speciation occurs is whether a population is separated into different segments for an extended period of time. Read nobel lauriate, Christian DeLuve's book Vital Dust, or for a quick explaination, check out this link .
Even the foremost scientists in evolution are now pointing to a meteor that came down to Earth and brought life with it. Why? because they concluded the Earth is too small to possibly have enough reactions to create a protein molecule in a billion-billion years.
I'm afraid that you are sorely misinformed. The formost biologist in the world is Christian DeLuve, nobel lauriate. He wrote a book called Vital Dust that explains how the emergence of life and evolution not only could have happened, but that it is inevitable on any planet with similar conditions. Modern science does not hold that the first cell appeared in 'the instant the oceans stopped boiling'. It is a long chemical process, but a downhill one(as far as enthalpy is concerned) at every step. Oh, and by the way, there have significant changes since the 'Cambrian explosion'. Mammals are one such change...
Say what!? I sure don't see how it's logical to think that a mage would be unable to figure out how to swing a sword. Maybe if said mage spends all his time studying, he wouldn't be very skilled with a sword. Maybe he wouldn't be very conditioned, and he would tire quickly... but as a fencing enthusiast I can tell you he'd damned well be able to at least use it. In fact I think it would be tough to imagine a time when a mage (or any half way healthy and moble person) would be better off in an open fight with a dagger than a light saber or rapier. Sure no studious guy with 10' biceps is going to be swining a no-dachi or a claymore... but whoever decided that being a mage precludes using anything but a dagger, staff, or sling is smoking ass.
What would make the classes different, you ask? They would be good at different things. But I don't see the need to have classes at all. It's sort of a restrictive crutch. Sure a person could have a proffesion, but I don't think it should be anything more inflexible than that. Let's try to get a GURPS game out there, eh?
Yes, it does no good to just call people whiners. I used to be one of those whiners who was beat up continually. The admin's were no help either. I had no one to turn to... except a really good kung fu teacher. The school wanted nothing to do with it, until I started winning that is. Once I was attacked by three jock assholes, and the administrators tried got pissed at me for beating the shit out of them. They actually started to argue that I had been the aggressor! It took about five minutes for the dumbasses to figure out how ludicrous it would have been for me to run down 3 big, strong, burly jocks into a locker room and attack them!
Would high school have been hell if I'd been both a geek and unable to defend myself? You bet. I have absolutely no respect for those of you who just say, "it's not my problem". It is your problem if you let this sort of thing continue. Somebody might mow down your kids if he gets pissed on enough. Then how would you feel if administrators and police told you that, "it's not their problem?"
They have the ability to make judgements... but they are less inundated with what their particular society expects those decisions to be. I think you are an arrogant and foolish person indeed, to think that you should be able to decide who can and cannot think for himself/herself.
One thing that you don't really focus on is that people gain all of these rights at the age of 18. But actually that is more of a reason for the legal system to apply high scrutiny.
Historically, high scrutiny has been applied only for groups which have demonstrated very little ability to change the system legally. For example, women who had limited success in bettering their political situation earned medium scrutiny. Racism, which took a war to deal with garnered high scrutiny, as do immigrants. Children, like racial minorities or immigrants once were, have very, very little legal power to change things. Even worse is that they have very limited incentive! Why go to all of the trouble when you will turn 18 by the time any progress is made anyways?
This is very definately an issue of power. Those with it usually (people such as Katz excepted) fight to maintain it. This is exactly why James Madison opposed a direct democracy, as a tyranny of the masses is difficult to avoid. Fortunately Americans heeded him, and we have power distributed enough to at least check this sort of behaviour. Our judicial system has been effective (though painfully slow) in initiating changes when such tyrannies occur.
The difficulty with children is that they are clearly dependant (at least at very young ages), and so they cannot have all of the freedoms an adult might typically garner. However, some rights, such as protected speech, freedom to choose a religion, due process, and the right to peacfully gather are vital for any thinking person who is past the age of physical and sexual maturity.
Interestingly enough, there is no constitutional mention of decreased rights (in the bill of rights) for minors, except for voting. I'm pretty sure that the control to restrict these rights is not something many parents would willingly give up. Perhaps the internet has pushed this issue to the forfront today, much as television was a catalyst for bringing attention to the rights of racial minorities 40 years ago?
What the fuck does the Holocaust have to do with children not being allowed into a movie unless accompanied by their parents?
Or are you insinuating that Jews wouldn't have been killed if they had been accompanied by their parents? Or maybe if we had let the Nazis use derogatory statements regarding other races/religions? Or if we had desensitized the German people to violence through movies?
Actually, all I was getting at is that most people don't worry too much about a freedom being infringed upon, unless it is their own... even when the situation is much uglier than any in this country.
Modern physics would be nothing yet for the tireless work of last century's physicists. Does this mean I have to refer to Newtonian/Einsteinian physics? My computer would be nothing without it's motherboard, so do I have to refer to it as my FEC/AMD?
No, it's fine to refer to reletivity as Einseinian, but you should still refer to F=MA as Newtonian. Likewise, GNU is still Free Software, and the biggest component of a "Linux" distro is GNU.
It's just that last time I posted a similar view, without mentioning the income or house, I recieved a flood of 'helpful' emails. Everybody was giving me advice about how to find a job, how moving out into my own appartment would help, etc...
I'm not sure I prefere your attacks on my maturity and intelligence, but I guess it's the price I pay for posting an unpopular view. My other reply addressed the bit about getting legal separation. As for my intelligence... I learned calculus at the age of 13, was accepted into a university the same semester, scored 35 on my ACT at 14, and have now learned French and Mandarin. To what use have you put your intelligence to? The writing of caustic insults? Judging people's maturity based upon a single view that differs from your own?
Maybe you can explain why the majority of persons incarcerated come from single parent or no parent
homes?
You might want to observe that in my earlier post I said that I felt parents were very important as teachers, role-models, confidants, and as dispensers of discipline.
I'm not trying to piss you off here, I'm just saying to go easy on the flames. You disagree with my view... that's fine. In fact I like to see salient attacks against my arguments; after all discourse itself is a great tool for learning. Just don't attack me.
I didn't know that. United Artists, AMC, and MANN all seem to. What chains don't? I'm very curious about that. If there are a fair number that don't, then this whole discussion and series of articles has been a bit of a waste. Consumer choice could easily drive a change.
By censoring minors, you diminish their ability to learn to think for themselves. They might even grow up to discard some of their parents' religious and political views!
I don't really feel that the second ammendment is appropriate, as it was intended to be a protection from an oppressive government. It's doubtful that a militia of children would have the economic or logistic ability to defend themselves without support from any adult citizens. I hope you can see the difference.
What! You judge my genes based on one political view you can't stomach!? That doesn't seem to rational to me. As for pesky kids(or more likely teenagers), yeah, I'd deserve it.:)
But it's not as easy as you think. Getting legally separated for 'intellectual freedom' reasons is a very, very difficult process.
As for 'handling advanced material', I feel experience is a better determinant than age. Learning is impeded when material is censored from the would be reader/viewer.
Who are you to judge my maturity based on one post you disagree with? I don't think it's that mature to make such an extemporanious judgement.
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The war started in 1937, unless you define the second world war's span only in terms of German involvement.
Such implicit mental math can lead to unhealthy mental short-circuts. Lots of asian people died between 1937-1939.
Why don't you try surveying a bio class and a EE course and compare? Last year I took a 3000 course in each. The results? bio class:65% female, class size ~90 EE class:1 female out of 24 students... she has since changed majors. I know that this is only one isolated instance, but I've heard many, many similar one's and no contradictory ones. But if any of you have been in any EE clases with over 50% females, by all means let me know... I'm curious.
Well, you should consider that over 95% of our DNA is the same as that of a rat (and about 98% for a chimp). If intelligence doesn't come from our brains, then what do you propose? Our spirit presence?
If a government abandons all commitments to personal freedoms, the people must have a means of forming a malitia. It's true that guns are nothing compared to the firepower any modern military has, but they are enough to keep the government from suppressing it's people if say... 75% of them are unhappy. No sane military man would be willing to carpet bomb their home town (and hopefully not any town filled with civilian countrymen).
;-)
Every successful dictator in Europe has had to first disarm his people. I for one don't want that. Also, as a side note: many, many studies show that restrictive gun laws increase the proportion of criminal to civilian gun holders, and increase violent crime rates. At least that ratio has held very true in the U.S. (though I know we're more violent than quite of few others). But I guess what I'm getting at is that no vandal would ever want to intrude in a Swiss home, knowing that the owner would have a gun and possibly blow him away. You Brit's on the other hand would be easy pickings...
So how does this work when Net Nanny or whatever blocks the source code to free software? I for one have seen several linux and GNU comments that any of those filtering programs would pounce all over. Are GNU, linux, and apache all illegal in Ausie, now?
That idea concerns me no small amount...
I've seen it, but I'm not hip with that brand o' jive. Translators?
I sure wouldn't want to run W2K without a P3, or a K7 (or at all for that matter...) :)
I'm glad they could do it in four minutes... I've been struggleing for about 4 days with my Mandrake6.0 install. The damned thing won't recognize my video card (it's an apollo 7400 8MB, with the intel740 chipset, but Linux treats it like a standard VGA). If I pick an SVGA server I get 320*204 resolution! That's not even enough to read the help files in GNOME! AAARrrrrrrrrrrgh!
Would any of you kindly *nix-ubber-geeks know where to direct me to find help for this? The I'd love to be able to get the rest of my 'linux' stuff working in 4 minutes!
P.S. the manufacturer of the video card left no contact info.
Mathematics has the interesting distinction of being both purely abstract, and one of the few entirely provable pursuits out there. Pi cannot be seen, but it's existence can be proven. Actually starting from basic axioms all of mathematics can be proven. If you pick different axioms, sometimes you can arrive at another, but consistent and sometimes usefull number space. Once the axioms are accepted, all else can be proven.
Science is unfortunately different. Proof is impossible. Even gravity cannot be proven; sure you can observe that every time you throw a ball into the air it falls back to the earth, but you cannot prove that it will the next time! However, what you can do with science, is gather a mountain of evidence. Then you have a very strong theory. Sometimes these strong theories aren't quite right(i.e. Newtownian Mechanics was replaced by Relativity), but they are still the most supported available theory. That's what makes it science, we grudgingly assume whatever has the most evidence is true... until there is new evidence to consider. Evolution does have a veritable mountain of evidence behind it. We have done tests on populations with various allele characteristics, and the results consistantly match the predictions derived from assuming evolution to be true.
Well, one could start by comparing the population growth rates of 1st world countries (especially western Europe) with those of African 3rd world countries...
Evolution simply stipulates that the alleles in a population will change over time towards other alleles which will give a life form a competitive advantage. It's the same process whether speciation is invloved or not. Usually what determines whether speciation occurs is whether a population is separated into different segments for an extended period of time. Read nobel lauriate, Christian DeLuve's book Vital Dust, or for a quick explaination, check out this link .
I'm afraid that you are sorely misinformed. The formost biologist in the world is Christian DeLuve, nobel lauriate. He wrote a book called Vital Dust that explains how the emergence of life and evolution not only could have happened, but that it is inevitable on any planet with similar conditions. Modern science does not hold that the first cell appeared in 'the instant the oceans stopped boiling'. It is a long chemical process, but a downhill one(as far as enthalpy is concerned) at every step. Oh, and by the way, there have significant changes since the 'Cambrian explosion'. Mammals are one such change...
Could you post the right one? I'd really like to check out those new rules.
Say what!? I sure don't see how it's logical to think that a mage would be unable to figure out how to swing a sword. Maybe if said mage spends all his time studying, he wouldn't be very skilled with a sword. Maybe he wouldn't be very conditioned, and he would tire quickly... but as a fencing enthusiast I can tell you he'd damned well be able to at least use it. In fact I think it would be tough to imagine a time when a mage (or any half way healthy and moble person) would be better off in an open fight with a dagger than a light saber or rapier. Sure no studious guy with 10' biceps is going to be swining a no-dachi or a claymore... but whoever decided that being a mage precludes using anything but a dagger, staff, or sling is smoking ass.
What would make the classes different, you ask? They would be good at different things. But I don't see the need to have classes at all. It's sort of a restrictive crutch. Sure a person could have a proffesion, but I don't think it should be anything more inflexible than that. Let's try to get a GURPS game out there, eh?
Yes, it does no good to just call people whiners. I used to be one of those whiners who was beat up continually. The admin's were no help either. I had no one to turn to... except a really good kung fu teacher. The school wanted nothing to do with it, until I started winning that is. Once I was attacked by three jock assholes, and the administrators tried got pissed at me for beating the shit out of them. They actually started to argue that I had been the aggressor! It took about five minutes for the dumbasses to figure out how ludicrous it would have been for me to run down 3 big, strong, burly jocks into a locker room and attack them!
Would high school have been hell if I'd been both a geek and unable to defend myself? You bet. I have absolutely no respect for those of you who just say, "it's not my problem". It is your problem if you let this sort of thing continue. Somebody might mow down your kids if he gets pissed on enough. Then how would you feel if administrators and police told you that, "it's not their problem?"
They're nearly all anonymous cowards. Appropriate, hmm?
He's one of the few people out there who truly supports freedom. I'm sorry it's so hard for some of you to stomach.
They have the ability to make judgements... but they are less inundated with what their particular society expects those decisions to be. I think you are an arrogant and foolish person indeed, to think that you should be able to decide who can and cannot think for himself/herself.
One thing that you don't really focus on is that people gain all of these rights at the age of 18. But actually that is more of a reason for the legal system to apply high scrutiny.
Historically, high scrutiny has been applied only for groups which have demonstrated very little ability to change the system legally. For example, women who had limited success in bettering their political situation earned medium scrutiny. Racism, which took a war to deal with garnered high scrutiny, as do immigrants. Children, like racial minorities or immigrants once were, have very, very little legal power to change things. Even worse is that they have very limited incentive! Why go to all of the trouble when you will turn 18 by the time any progress is made anyways?
This is very definately an issue of power. Those with it usually (people such as Katz excepted) fight to maintain it. This is exactly why James Madison opposed a direct democracy, as a tyranny of the masses is difficult to avoid. Fortunately Americans heeded him, and we have power distributed enough to at least check this sort of behaviour. Our judicial system has been effective (though painfully slow) in initiating changes when such tyrannies occur.
The difficulty with children is that they are clearly dependant (at least at very young ages), and so they cannot have all of the freedoms an adult might typically garner. However, some rights, such as protected speech, freedom to choose a religion, due process, and the right to peacfully gather are vital for any thinking person who is past the age of physical and sexual maturity.
Interestingly enough, there is no constitutional mention of decreased rights (in the bill of rights) for minors, except for voting. I'm pretty sure that the control to restrict these rights is not something many parents would willingly give up. Perhaps the internet has pushed this issue to the forfront today, much as television was a catalyst for bringing attention to the rights of racial minorities 40 years ago?
Actually, all I was getting at is that most people don't worry too much about a freedom being infringed upon, unless it is their own... even when the situation is much uglier than any in this country.
No, it's fine to refer to reletivity as Einseinian, but you should still refer to F=MA as Newtonian. Likewise, GNU is still Free Software, and the biggest component of a "Linux" distro is GNU.
I'm not sure I prefere your attacks on my maturity and intelligence, but I guess it's the price I pay for posting an unpopular view. My other reply addressed the bit about getting legal separation. As for my intelligence... I learned calculus at the age of 13, was accepted into a university the same semester, scored 35 on my ACT at 14, and have now learned French and Mandarin. To what use have you put your intelligence to? The writing of caustic insults? Judging people's maturity based upon a single view that differs from your own?
You might want to observe that in my earlier post I said that I felt parents were very important as teachers, role-models, confidants, and as dispensers of discipline.
I'm not trying to piss you off here, I'm just saying to go easy on the flames. You disagree with my view... that's fine. In fact I like to see salient attacks against my arguments; after all discourse itself is a great tool for learning. Just don't attack me.
I didn't know that. United Artists, AMC, and MANN all seem to. What chains don't? I'm very curious about that. If there are a fair number that don't, then this whole discussion and series of articles has been a bit of a waste. Consumer choice could easily drive a change.
By censoring minors, you diminish their ability to learn to think for themselves. They might even grow up to discard some of their parents' religious and political views!
:)
I don't really feel that the second ammendment is appropriate, as it was intended to be a protection from an oppressive government. It's doubtful that a militia of children would have the economic or logistic ability to defend themselves without support from any adult citizens. I hope you can see the difference.
What! You judge my genes based on one political view you can't stomach!? That doesn't seem to rational to me. As for pesky kids(or more likely teenagers), yeah, I'd deserve it.
But it's not as easy as you think. Getting legally separated for 'intellectual freedom' reasons is a very, very difficult process.
As for 'handling advanced material', I feel experience is a better determinant than age. Learning is impeded when material is censored from the would be reader/viewer.
Who are you to judge my maturity based on one post you disagree with? I don't think it's that mature to make such an extemporanious judgement.