Sure, but that "random" environment is not entirely unknown, right? If we know enough about the environment is which humans evolved, we should be able to make some educated guesses about the selection criteria that favored, say, big brains. It's an interesting question to ask why one branch of primate developed this hypercephaly while others didn't.
The Creationists are being disingenuous to ask it, however, because they don't really care if you come up with an answer. You can always ask more questions.
How big a bomb does it take to blow up a line of 500 people? (Note: they aren't "densely-packed" - they're arranged in a long line, maybe two lines.)
Now, how big a bomb does it take to cause a plane to crash?
This is an easy one, especially for us geeks, because we know how to read a URL. But those URLs look like three completely different sites to the average user. In some cases, they actually ARE different sites, such as when a bank uses a separate company to provide some service.
I recognize that Bank of America is using the onlineeast2 subdomain instead of www in order to do load balancing, but aren't there other ways? Or, if not, couldn't they use www-1, www-2, etc., so the URL at least looks like www.bankofamerica.com?
The trouble with a system like this is clear when you think how it would work in practice.
Suppose that you buy a plane ticket from Travelocity. You probably buy many tickets from them, so you've put travelocity.com in your white list, which means that any email from that domain gets through without a token. But then you're doing Christmas shopping and you decide to buy a set of specialty jams from East Jabip Specialty Foods, Inc. Their domain name isn't on your white list and, worse, they outsource their e-commerce so your confirmation email won't even be from that domain, but rather from greater-jabip-internet-services.net, which also isn't in your white list.
So the confirmation email requires a token. Regardless of the amount, what is the likelihood that they're going to send the message through? I'd say approximately zero - why should they risk you making them pay even a penny when YOU are ordering a product from THEM? So you don't get the confirmation email which contains your order number. Madness, of course, ensues.
Of course, greater-jabip-internet-services.net has put a reminder on its confirmation web page (which you didn't print out or even read carefully) telling you to add them to your white list. But who's going to read that? Some Slashdot readers, maybe, but not my mother and certainly not my grandmother who can barely figure out where to click on a page to get the order done. Besides, even if you DID read it, would you add some unknown like greater-jabip-internet-services.net to your white list? What if they end up being a spammer?!
Theoretically, this is a fantastic idea. It solves the fundamental problem of spam, which is that it's very inexpensive. Practically, though, I don't see it working on a wide scale.
I didn't know that a CEO could be sued for that. That explains a *lot* about America these days. It's really stupid; if all states had law more like Vermont, America would be a much nicer place.
Poorer, too.
Although in the end, it really shouldn't matter. As long as CEO behavior doesn't change unexpectedly or is not hidden, shareholders should be able to base their stock-buying decisions on correct expectations. The reason to have shareholder lawsuits is to introduce predictability and accountability.
Historically, Islam is a far less violent religion than Christianity. For example, consider Moorish Spain.
OK, then, consider the Ottoman Empire. Christian churches and monasteries were regularly attacked, Christians forced to change their names to Turkish names, Christian children taken from their families as infants and converted into fanatic Muslim soldiers, Christians and Jews treated as second-class citizens. It was hardly a golden age for the Balkans.
True, but keep in mind that the number of Muslims who feel that way about Israel is small relative to the Muslim population.
I assume you have some sort of proof of this? I hear a consistent refrain from Arab Muslim news outlets that they won't rest until Israel and its inhabitants are no more. How are they, and I, expected to take this - as a practical joke?
Note that I'm not a Christian (I'm a fence-sitting agnostic). However, when I compare the number of mainstream Christian bigwigs calling for the blood of Muslims (or Jews, or for that matter anybody) to the number of mainstream Muslim imams making the same calls, I can't help but notice that the data is pretty much entirely one-sided. How do you explain this?
How the fsck did this get rated "Insightful?" It's complete and obvious blather. For starters, the Israelis aren't rounding up random Palestinians and gasing them to death. For another, the European Jews weren't constantly threatening to destroy the German nation and kill all the Germans, as the Arabs are doing and have done for decades.
I suppose my comment will now get rated "Flamebait."
It is absolutely true that math is a "gateway" subject. I've been tutoring math on the high school and college level for a number of years, and algebra is the single biggest problem area. As you might expect, the majority of my students are taking calculus, and this is often the first time they've had to apply their algebra knowledge intensively to another subject. They generally fail miserably.
However, there are a number of other skills that are also lacking. Basic arithmetic. Estimation. Problem-solving. I can't tell you how many students get confused doing (-5)(-6) = 30. If a car is traveling 58 mph for 3 hours and 2 minutes, how far has it traveled? Quick! If you don't get "about 180 miles", you haven't learned to estimate. Estimation is extremely useful in checking the validity of your answers, and in guiding you where you want to go.
Lots of kids don't even know how to use a calculator, and that's a shame. I have no problem with giving kids calculators if it's going to help them. As long as they don't become a crutch, that is. (Common line to my students: "Don't use your calculator to figure 6 times 5, dammit! You're wasting its time!") The real shame is when kids are using them for the right reasons, say to reduce a complex numerical expression with radicals to a single number... and then they forget the order of operations rules and get the wrong answer because they computed 2/(sqrt(3)+sqrt(5)) by typing 2 / 3 sqrt + 5 sqrt =.
Even many of my smarter students, who had no problem learning the rules of calculus, used to stumble on the algebra. We don't have enough rote learning of these subjects, not enough practice, and not enough incentive to make it interesting. Meanwhile, my artist wife, who's from Bulgaria, doesn't know a lick of calculus but can wipe the floor with most of my students in algebra. It's a real problem for a future generation of engineers and scientists.
For the entertainment of Pave Low and anyone still reading this:
if people were paid by the cost of living we'd have communism
I wasn't suggesting that we pay people based on cost of living; I was responding to your claim that it's discriminatory if wages for people who live in countries where a hot meal costs 50 cents isn't the same as in the U.S. It's not "the same", get it? You said it was "the same."
People should get paid what they are worth, period.
I agree. How will establishing a minimum wage bring this about?
Do you really want programmers and computer experts in third world countries working for less, thus you are out of a job because they are cheaper?
I don't want to work for more money than I'm worth. Are you suggesting that we establish a minimum wage so that I can do so, thereby preventing others from working for what they are worth?
This will happen to us with no minimum wage, the wage will be a penny an hour, and people from china will have all the programmer jobs.
Why has this not happened in the U.S., then? I'm truly puzzled. Here we have a minimum wage which almost no one actually makes - among heads of households, the percentage of workers who make minimum wage is like 0.5% or something like that. So it's effectively nonexistent. And yet, I'm still making a lot more than minimum wage: Billy Bob down at the local garage is not taking my job for half my pay. How do you explain this phenomenon?
or do you want to lose your job to a chinese perosn who will work 7 days a week for 14 hours a day for a penny an hour?
We just hired a Chinese person here as a DBA. She was unwilling to work 98 hours a week for a penny an hour. In fact, she was also unwilling to work for the U.S. minimum wage, which is currently $5.15 an hour. Perhaps she was atypical of Chinese, though; obviously, we should have looked harder. We apparently could have saved a lot of money.
If we cant have a fair wage, if everyone cant start off on a fair ground.
If both buyer and seller agree on a price, how is that price "unfair"?
its no diffrent than say minorities in the US getting paid less than whites
Actually, it is different, since the cost of living in these countries is not as high as in the U.S. Getting paid $5 an hour in Bulgaria would make you rich, and Bulgaria is a lot better off that some of the countries we're talking about.
If they are truely less efficient why would big businesses be hiring them. eh?
Because they can make them less. If you force businesses to pay more, then they won't hire them. I guess you prefer global unemployment, eh?
This idea is just breathtakingly bad on so many levels it's not even funny.
The company even dropped one climber in a 20-foot crevasse and buried him in snow until he started shaking, then had him flip on the jacket.
"Soon afterwards he stopped shaking, and we realized this was a pretty cool project," said Thomas Laakso, advanced project manager at The North Face, the San Leandro, California-based unit of VF Corp.
Also, don't ever, ever forget this fact: Hitler was ELECTED chancellor.
I really, really do suggest you read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, or some other history of Nazi Germany. Hitler was never elected chancellor. He was appointed chancellor, basically to prevent him from continuing to terrorize the German population with his Brownshirt thugs. The Nazi party managed to consistently poll a plurality of votes, but never got a majority, and in fact their power was waning when his appointment took place in January, 1933.
Slashdot Mirror
# add 1 to EAX
MOV $hampster,EAX
FEED $hampster
PROD $hampster
STO EAX,$hampster
Rock and roll did corrupt the youth in the '50s - ever hear of the '60s?
That said, the ESRB seems sufficient to me.
A regulatory agency advocating more regulation. Shocking!
...and don't buy it at all!
Shouldn't your sig be: Binary: the system where 10^10 = 100?
Does this mean Microsoft is about to reel me in?
Sure, but that "random" environment is not entirely unknown, right? If we know enough about the environment is which humans evolved, we should be able to make some educated guesses about the selection criteria that favored, say, big brains. It's an interesting question to ask why one branch of primate developed this hypercephaly while others didn't.
The Creationists are being disingenuous to ask it, however, because they don't really care if you come up with an answer. You can always ask more questions.
How big a bomb does it take to blow up a line of 500 people? (Note: they aren't "densely-packed" - they're arranged in a long line, maybe two lines.) Now, how big a bomb does it take to cause a plane to crash?
In digits, of course... :)
The banks are somewhat complicit in this, I think, by using needlessly complicated URLs. I use Bank of America, for example, which I can access online at http://www.bankofamerica.com./ I click on Sign In, which redirects me to https://sitekey.bankofamerica.com/sas/signonSetup. do. After signing in, I'm redirected to https://onlineeast2.bankofamerica.com/gobbledygook /.
This is an easy one, especially for us geeks, because we know how to read a URL. But those URLs look like three completely different sites to the average user. In some cases, they actually ARE different sites, such as when a bank uses a separate company to provide some service.
I recognize that Bank of America is using the onlineeast2 subdomain instead of www in order to do load balancing, but aren't there other ways? Or, if not, couldn't they use www-1, www-2, etc., so the URL at least looks like www.bankofamerica.com?
Try dropping your eBook from quite a height and see if it keeps your place.
The trouble with a system like this is clear when you think how it would work in practice.
Suppose that you buy a plane ticket from Travelocity. You probably buy many tickets from them, so you've put travelocity.com in your white list, which means that any email from that domain gets through without a token. But then you're doing Christmas shopping and you decide to buy a set of specialty jams from East Jabip Specialty Foods, Inc. Their domain name isn't on your white list and, worse, they outsource their e-commerce so your confirmation email won't even be from that domain, but rather from greater-jabip-internet-services.net, which also isn't in your white list.
So the confirmation email requires a token. Regardless of the amount, what is the likelihood that they're going to send the message through? I'd say approximately zero - why should they risk you making them pay even a penny when YOU are ordering a product from THEM? So you don't get the confirmation email which contains your order number. Madness, of course, ensues.
Of course, greater-jabip-internet-services.net has put a reminder on its confirmation web page (which you didn't print out or even read carefully) telling you to add them to your white list. But who's going to read that? Some Slashdot readers, maybe, but not my mother and certainly not my grandmother who can barely figure out where to click on a page to get the order done. Besides, even if you DID read it, would you add some unknown like greater-jabip-internet-services.net to your white list? What if they end up being a spammer?!
Theoretically, this is a fantastic idea. It solves the fundamental problem of spam, which is that it's very inexpensive. Practically, though, I don't see it working on a wide scale.
Poorer, too.
Although in the end, it really shouldn't matter. As long as CEO behavior doesn't change unexpectedly or is not hidden, shareholders should be able to base their stock-buying decisions on correct expectations. The reason to have shareholder lawsuits is to introduce predictability and accountability.
Historically, Islam is a far less violent religion than Christianity. For example, consider Moorish Spain.
OK, then, consider the Ottoman Empire. Christian churches and monasteries were regularly attacked, Christians forced to change their names to Turkish names, Christian children taken from their families as infants and converted into fanatic Muslim soldiers, Christians and Jews treated as second-class citizens. It was hardly a golden age for the Balkans.
True, but keep in mind that the number of Muslims who feel that way about Israel is small relative to the Muslim population.
I assume you have some sort of proof of this? I hear a consistent refrain from Arab Muslim news outlets that they won't rest until Israel and its inhabitants are no more. How are they, and I, expected to take this - as a practical joke?
Note that I'm not a Christian (I'm a fence-sitting agnostic). However, when I compare the number of mainstream Christian bigwigs calling for the blood of Muslims (or Jews, or for that matter anybody) to the number of mainstream Muslim imams making the same calls, I can't help but notice that the data is pretty much entirely one-sided. How do you explain this?
How the fsck did this get rated "Insightful?" It's complete and obvious blather. For starters, the Israelis aren't rounding up random Palestinians and gasing them to death. For another, the European Jews weren't constantly threatening to destroy the German nation and kill all the Germans, as the Arabs are doing and have done for decades.
I suppose my comment will now get rated "Flamebait."
You really ought to consider a while "in bed" do "sleep" routine. goto statements make for sloppy life.
And how is your while-do loop expected to terminate, eh?
It is absolutely true that math is a "gateway" subject. I've been tutoring math on the high school and college level for a number of years, and algebra is the single biggest problem area. As you might expect, the majority of my students are taking calculus, and this is often the first time they've had to apply their algebra knowledge intensively to another subject. They generally fail miserably.
However, there are a number of other skills that are also lacking. Basic arithmetic. Estimation. Problem-solving. I can't tell you how many students get confused doing (-5)(-6) = 30. If a car is traveling 58 mph for 3 hours and 2 minutes, how far has it traveled? Quick! If you don't get "about 180 miles", you haven't learned to estimate. Estimation is extremely useful in checking the validity of your answers, and in guiding you where you want to go.
Lots of kids don't even know how to use a calculator, and that's a shame. I have no problem with giving kids calculators if it's going to help them. As long as they don't become a crutch, that is. (Common line to my students: "Don't use your calculator to figure 6 times 5, dammit! You're wasting its time!") The real shame is when kids are using them for the right reasons, say to reduce a complex numerical expression with radicals to a single number... and then they forget the order of operations rules and get the wrong answer because they computed 2/(sqrt(3)+sqrt(5)) by typing 2 / 3 sqrt + 5 sqrt =.
Even many of my smarter students, who had no problem learning the rules of calculus, used to stumble on the algebra. We don't have enough rote learning of these subjects, not enough practice, and not enough incentive to make it interesting. Meanwhile, my artist wife, who's from Bulgaria, doesn't know a lick of calculus but can wipe the floor with most of my students in algebra. It's a real problem for a future generation of engineers and scientists.
For the entertainment of Pave Low and anyone still reading this:
if people were paid by the cost of living we'd have communism
I wasn't suggesting that we pay people based on cost of living; I was responding to your claim that it's discriminatory if wages for people who live in countries where a hot meal costs 50 cents isn't the same as in the U.S. It's not "the same", get it? You said it was "the same."
People should get paid what they are worth, period.
I agree. How will establishing a minimum wage bring this about?
Do you really want programmers and computer experts in third world countries working for less, thus you are out of a job because they are cheaper?
I don't want to work for more money than I'm worth. Are you suggesting that we establish a minimum wage so that I can do so, thereby preventing others from working for what they are worth?
This will happen to us with no minimum wage, the wage will be a penny an hour, and people from china will have all the programmer jobs.
Why has this not happened in the U.S., then? I'm truly puzzled. Here we have a minimum wage which almost no one actually makes - among heads of households, the percentage of workers who make minimum wage is like 0.5% or something like that. So it's effectively nonexistent. And yet, I'm still making a lot more than minimum wage: Billy Bob down at the local garage is not taking my job for half my pay. How do you explain this phenomenon?
or do you want to lose your job to a chinese perosn who will work 7 days a week for 14 hours a day for a penny an hour?
We just hired a Chinese person here as a DBA. She was unwilling to work 98 hours a week for a penny an hour. In fact, she was also unwilling to work for the U.S. minimum wage, which is currently $5.15 an hour. Perhaps she was atypical of Chinese, though; obviously, we should have looked harder. We apparently could have saved a lot of money.
If we cant have a fair wage, if everyone cant start off on a fair ground.
If both buyer and seller agree on a price, how is that price "unfair"?
its no diffrent than say minorities in the US getting paid less than whites
Actually, it is different, since the cost of living in these countries is not as high as in the U.S. Getting paid $5 an hour in Bulgaria would make you rich, and Bulgaria is a lot better off that some of the countries we're talking about.
If they are truely less efficient why would big businesses be hiring them. eh?
Because they can make them less. If you force businesses to pay more, then they won't hire them. I guess you prefer global unemployment, eh?
This idea is just breathtakingly bad on so many levels it's not even funny.
From the article:
The company even dropped one climber in a 20-foot crevasse and buried him in snow until he started shaking, then had him flip on the jacket.
"Soon afterwards he stopped shaking, and we realized this was a pretty cool project," said Thomas Laakso, advanced project manager at The North Face, the San Leandro, California-based unit of VF Corp.
Does anyone else see something ominous here?
Also, don't ever, ever forget this fact: Hitler was ELECTED chancellor.
I really, really do suggest you read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, or some other history of Nazi Germany. Hitler was never elected chancellor. He was appointed chancellor, basically to prevent him from continuing to terrorize the German population with his Brownshirt thugs. The Nazi party managed to consistently poll a plurality of votes, but never got a majority, and in fact their power was waning when his appointment took place in January, 1933.
Not that this has anything to do with Heisenberg.