Except that's not what net neutrality is. Net neutrality isn't about charging everyone the same price regardless of how much bandwidth they use, or requiring that everyone has unlimited network capacity. That's silly. It's not even about saying that certain types of traffic can't be prioritized over others -- net neutrality wouldn't prevent ISPs from throttling bit torrent, for example (though there is overlap in the people who support net neutrality and the people who oppose such throttling).
Net neutrality means that Microsoft can't pay your ISP to improve your bandwidth to MSN search while throttling the bandwidth to Google. Net neutrality means that your ISP is not allowed to charge you for bandwidth and then also charge websites to actually connect you to them. (Google is already being charged quite a lot for bandwidth.) Traffic of different types (web vs. bittorrent vs. whatever) can behave differently, but traffic from different sources should be treated the same, to avoid protection-racket style abuses (nice site you got there, it sure would be a shame if my 50 million subscribers were no longer able to reliably access it...)
So, no, net neutrality is not at all about all users paying the same amount regardless of their level of usage. But some of the ISP monopolies have managed to frame it that way by implying that the rules that would apply to destination sites (Yahoo vs. Google) are actually rules about individual subscribers (large versus small bandwidth demand from a single individual). The intent of net neutrality is that ISPs should only be charging for throughput at the network endpoints they control, not at both endpoints of all connections, so we don't end up quadruple-charging for every transmission (as opposed to the current double-charging, which is reasonable since it allows the two parties to the connection to share the cost of the bandwidth they both use).
Just because you were born in the USA, you have the not only the right, but the ENTITLEMENT to be rich, successful, and pampered!
So in your mind, weighting failing grades so that it's still possible to recover through hard work and studying is the same as guaranteeing one is "rich, successful, and pampered"? It's not like they're giving passing grades for nothing. It's also not like this is being done in the final year of med school or something, by which time it's reasonable for people to have worked out the effort / reward equation. We want highschoolers to learn that hard work is rewarded. And it's not like this policy will give sudden magic As to someone who hasn't worked hard -- by definition, the policy can't really kick in unless someone is already earning far less than an A. If a highschooler really bombs the first half of a class, and then decides they really want to turn things around, and are going to work 16 hours a day to learn all they need to so they can pass the class, the default policy would be to say "Sorry, it's impossible no matter now hard you try. You might as well not even be attending the class anymore." That's a really stupid situation.
This is not giving everyone the entitlement to be rich and successful, but the hope is to give everyone the chance to be successful predicated upon their hard work. That seems like a fairly American goal (note: said slightly tongue-in-cheek. But this is the sort of thing that America tends to claim to believe in), and I'm not sure why so many of the comments here are talking about it as though this is a policy of giving good grades for no effort, when in fact it's still a policy of giving failing grades for no effort, just weighting them such that, through hard work, recovery is still possible.
Most students who get less than a 50% don't deserve a passing grade. A for effort is bullshit - if you don't know the material, you shouldn't pass the class.
Okay, but you won't get an A for effort. You still won't pass the class without knowing the material. The particular pathology this is meant to address is that if you did very poorly for the first half of the year, but then put in a lot of effort in the second half, you would still fail, even though you did know the material. This way, if you genuinely work hard to learn the material, there's still a chance to pass. But this is only going to help people who actually do put in that effort and actually do learn what they need to. It's not like you'll pass without doing anything.
Maybe it'll help a few people who got a rough start. It'll also allow anyone of even moderate intelligence to coast right through every class.
Since the very concept of the policy is that it will make no change to your grades unless you score less than 50% -- and since in that case, it will still only be adjusted to 50%, which is still a failing grade -- I'm curious how you think this will help people "coast right through every class." Guaranteeing that your grade won't drop lower than a "high F" is not enough to keep you from failing unless at some point you really do put in the work to earn a grade that is significantly better than failing.
That's not it at all, the fact is games, once produced, are NOT SCARCE. According to supply and demand, such industries should be unprofitable, but yet are some of the most profitable.
Okay, this is a shell-game type of argument that doesn't actually work in reality. "supply and demand" does not say that certain industries "should" be unprofitable. The whole point of the supply/demand graph is that any industry should reach an equilibrium point where it is "profitable" (that is, makes a profit, which to an economist means that, what with utility cost, its net profit is zero, but... whatever.)
Supply/demand curves are themselves gross oversimplifications, but in this case the reasoning works fine: the initial cost to produce a game is large, the marginal cost is near zero. This doesn't mean that once the initial costs have been invested, you say "Okay, now we start over, the cost from here on out is zero!" It means that when planning a game, you balance the initial investment against the probable post-release sales. You seem to be extrapolating to assume an infinite number of possible customers, in which case yes, the marginal cost would dominate regardless of initial investment. But so far there are only a finite number of humans, so in reality the publisher needs to find a price at which the expected profit (from the number of people willing to buy it at that price, i.e. the demand curve) at least meets the total investment required to produce and distribute the game (i.e. the supply curve at that level of production).
Now, I do suspect a lot of industries are bad at estimating the supply/demand tradeoffs, and could probably make a lot more net profit if they lowered the price of their marginally-free goods. But even there, it has to be a tradeoff between expected profit and production costs -- the production costs don't just disappear as soon as marginal costs approach zero.
You could also claim that a squig of nutmeg around your neck will prevent alien abductions.
That's not really how the math works out. The problem with nutmeg vs. aliens is that there is no observed correlation, that is, the observed frequency of abductions is the same with or without the nutmeg (I'll approximate this frequency as zero). Same with a tiger-repelling rock, etc.
With the weather example, the observation is that the weather was as desired, i.e., a 0% chance of bad weather over a very small sample size. Nevertheless, 0% is a lot lower than the average chance of bad weather when no weather-control attempts were made, so there is an observed correlation, albeit with a rather large margin of error. But from a statistics/uncertainty point of view, this still conveys positive information (i.e. all else being equal, it increases the expected probability that the claim is true), whereas the nutmeg example conveys no additional information at all.
Real confirmation would require additional tests using the same method, to achieve a satisfactory degree of certainty. But it's actually very easy to prove a negative: just do the same thing 10 times in a row, and see if it always works. Or, if you're skeptical, 20 times. Or however many times a statistician tells you to. This is the same method that is used in practically any medical research, so unless you think it's very hard to prove that vaccines prevent polio, this situation is no different.
Also, as another reply pointed out, this isn't a "rain-making" program, and the theory behind keeping existing rain clouds out of a particular area is very different (and possibly on sounder footing) than making clouds appear when they weren't already there.
One of the problems is that the MBTA is losing money like crazy, in spite of vastly increased ridership because of gasoline prices. They can't afford to do basic mechanical maintenance and now they have to redo their smart card system too!?
They were somehow able to "afford" the many, many millions of dollars required to install this slow, unreliable, and annoying smart card system. That expense was how they were able to justify the fare increase. I would be fine with an increased fare if it was used to improve service, but instead the service is now significantly worse than before, the smart card machines are terrible (every month I have to wrestle with it to get it to recognize my credit card to buy a pass, and I know others who have the same problem), and they haven't even accomplished the original goal.
And, of course, they voluntarily installed this terrible smart card system even after New York tried installing the same system, and it ended up so terrible that they voluntarily ate the lost money and went with another contractor. I never quite heard the rationale for failing to learn from their mistake...
So, yes, they are losing money like crazy, but my sympathy is limited. They've consistently shown that they don't really know what they're doing.
As for the card vulnerability: it's another demonstration of how worthless the system is, but it hardly matters. Part of the justification for the system was to make sure people paid their fares. It has been a dreadful failure at that, but whatever. The number of people who will go to all the trouble of counterfeiting their MBTA passes is dwarfed by the number that will simply trail someone else through the gates or hop on the green line without paying. This has always been the case. It's not a new or surprising point that secure cryptography cannot prevent social engineering. The fact that it turns out to be insecure cryptography just makes the whole thing more pathetic...
But that isn't the real story, because every significant match ever has been a solid win for the human, regardless of processing power. The fact that computers can do this at all is new and surprising.
Or, to come at it from another direction: in the 90s, the news was that a specially designed supercomputer beat the chess world champion. Then Moore's Law happened, and these days, standard desktop PCs routinely beat top grandmasters.
It has been widely speculated that no computer would ever be able to play top-level Go, because it is so many orders of magnitude more complex than chess. But this story suggests that, within a decade or two, that will no longer be the case, even with more modest CPU demands. The story isn't "Professional Go player is pretty good at Go," because we've known that for a very long time...
Of course, the context in the story is that your quote portrays a judge who is deliberately biasing the jury in favor of conviction... so maybe that isn't the best explanation to use...
Clue for fuckwit managers- if your staff are interested in music and are truly listening to the Brandenburg concertoes, then they are not paying much attention to the screen in front of them. For God's sake keep your voice down!! Do you really want them to have a clue about that?!
But what does a positive correlation between suicide and gun ownership really mean? Do guns cause people to commit suicide? Or do suicidal people actively seek guns? Furthermore, if suicidal people were unable to obtain guns, does such a correlation imply that they would then NOT commit suicide? Or is it possible that these people would simply find another method?
The correlation is actually with successful suicides. The proportion of suicide attempts isn't significantly correlated with gun ownership, but the proportion of successful attempts goes up dramatically, for obvious reasons.
You can state your opinion that "these people would simply find another method," but empirically, while those who attempt suicide are statistically fairly likely to try again, the number of successful suicides even given repeated attempts is still lower when guns aren't accessible.
You might not think this is a compelling reason to oppose gun ownership, but GP's claim was substantially correct.
But the real issue isn't lack of volunteers, its that volunteers are just as likely to turn in bad proofs as they are to turn in bad code.
Not if you're using the right formal methods... the whole point behind most code verification approaches is that it can be verified automatically. If a human had to review the proof, then sure, this will never work, but if you're using proof-carrying code in a relatively formal language, the verification can be an automatic part of the process.
The point about having programmers who are capable of writing those kinds of code is still valid -- there are lots of them, but it's definitely a smaller set than the people who can usefully contribute to an OSS project today -- but verification is more a question of building good technical infrastructure rather than finding infallible coders...
If you're gaming time comes in 30 minute blocks, consoles are just as useless to you as a gaming PC would be. You'll do just fine with any old computer by navigating your web browser to crappyjavagames.com or whatever - that's pretty much all you have time for.
As someone whose gaming time comes in 30 minute blocks, I'd have to disagree. With some types of console games you may be right, but generally they're the ones I'm not interested in playing anyway. The Wii and, especially, the DS (I love the auto-suspend feature), work quite well for my time constraints. (I even beat Twilight Princess... it only took a year:-P)
Computer games are a terrible substitute. Except for, like you say, crappyjavagames.com (which I have no interest in), computer games almost uniformly take far longer even to get up and running, and the learning curve once they're installed and working may be worth it for some people, but I much prefer games that I can pick up rather quickly -- an hour or two is okay, I often start a new game when I have some extra time, but more than that and it's just not worth it anymore...
I'm sure I'm missing out on some fantastic PC games, but your claim that consoles are a useless solution doesn't really hold up...
Actually, although Pipes recognizes pretty clearly the distinction between, on one side, the moderate religious Muslims, and on the other the radical authoritarian pseudo-religious political nuts we all despise...
Of course, that there was an immediate rash of posts joking about having sex with her, many of which are highly rated, is problematic even on top of the stupid premise.
And I see you have a highly-rated response telling you it's okay because the article makes it clear that she's actually a smart person (even though she's a girl!) Sigh...
Err... what you're saying isn't what was originally claimed. What was originally claimed is that if a computer can effectively distinguish between computer and human generated speech, the computer can also generate human-sounding speech. You interpret "human sounding" to mean "human sounding to that particular distinguishing algorithm", which is certainly a possibility depending on the structure of the algorithm, but the original claim -- that the speech would sound human (as far as a human is concerned) -- is far from clear and, as GP says, probably false. In your analogy, this would be the claim that by distinguishing Chinese (that's a language now?:-P) from Spanish, you would be able to imitate them well enoughto fool a native speaker. There it becomes trivially false. In human vs. machine speech, I think it is less trivial, but still unlikely.
Recycling fails the same way public highways do. If there is nothing directly in it for the participating individual then any effort is too much.
Fixed that for you.
Recycling fails the same way police and fire departments do. If there is nothing directly in it for the participating individual then any effort is too much.
Fixed it again.
Recycling fails the same way universal education does. If there is nothing directly in it for the participating individual then any effort is too much.
I could go on..... invoking "socialism" (which, by the way, is not the same thing as communism, nor is it obvious that "socialism fails," since all governments including the US have socialist elements [see above]) is not a good argument against something. You still have to weigh the actual costs / benefits of the case. The situation you describe is extremely common. Conflicts where common action would significantly improve everyone's situation, while personal inaction would marginally improve the individual's situation, are almost the canonical argument for the existence of government.
I'm not advocating any specific government action here (though there are some that I think would be beneficial with almost zero inconvenience) -- but your statement as it stands is an argument for government intervention to support recycling, not an argument against recycling. Recycling itself still stands or falls on its actual benefits.
No one has ever seriously advocated the earth is flat? There's some papal writing you might want to check for that one.
Citation? Seriously, no one has used the Bible to argue a flat Earth. People in the middle ages were perfectly aware the Earth was round. [Disclaimer: there are of course the crazy "flat earth" people even now, so I don't mean literally no one, but it was never a teaching of the church / the pope / anyone particularly "important"]. They had even figured out the correct-in-spirit correlation that the climate is hotter around the equator because that part of the spher[e | oid] is closer to the sun. They had all kinds of ideas about what life was like on other parts of the globe, and while there was a lot of controversy and theological significance ascribed to the details of these ideas, the fundamental premise that the earth was round was pretty universal. MWIIMS (My Wife Is In Medieval Studies:-P)
Now, the things you say about the heliocentric model are completely correct, and that is a much better example: because the "literal" meaning of some passages would imply the sun revolved around the earth, heliocentrism was controversial for some time. These days Christians are okay with it. Which should be a lesson that interpretations of holy writings still have to go through the reality-based filter of what is in front of our eyes, and not taken a priori.
The flat earth stuff is a total myth, though. I disagree with GP in that I think the PI=3 is an effective parody: it gives an instance where it is, and always has been, completely obvious to everyone that it is not meant literally in a precise numerical sense (I mean, even the unit of measurement for the passage is a "cubit," which is defined as "the length from your elbow to the tip of your fingers," which is hardly a unit in the sense of modern engineering... modern literalism is highly anachronistic in this context). The existence of such a passage points out that "now we're just haggling over price" -- there are obviously non-literal "scientific" claims, and the question is where do we draw the boundaries.
On the other hand, GP is right that no one (to a close approximation, i.e. for large values of zero:-P) has ever used the bible to prove a flat earth. It's best to be aware of that if only to avoid an inadvertent straw man.
What are we going to require next? Special keyboards at public internet stations for those who are prone to hangnails?
Err... I'm not sure how the analogy is supposed to work between "prone to hangnails" and "blind." I don't think anyone faced career disaster and possible permanent unemployment because of hangnails. But in a lot of fields, inability to use the Internet could do that.
However, we do require, for example, blind-accessible ATMs. This doesn't seem like something that has been excessively ruined by government intervention.
Considering the Internet is rapidly becoming indispensable for managing finances (it's still possible to do without it, but it gets harder every year), I don't see why you think the idea of actually creating and adhering to standards, at least in some cases, is so ridiculous.
Most of the arguments here, including yours, basically imply that this isn't a problem because self-interested business will already be making sure their pages are accessible. There are two problems with this. One is that it's empirically false, that is, we observe presumably self-interested businesses doing the opposite. The other is that it is quite conceivable, in some cases, that the cost and effort required to accommodate the blind would be more than would be earned by having their business. In that case, rational self-interested businesses will purposely not make accessible pages. The market only works when actors are rational, and even then, it only effectively measures (usually short-term) efficiency, not ethics. So the answer to the ethical question "should more pages be made accessible to the blind?" is not the economic "if that was advantageous, people would do it anyway."
No, they haven't. Tax evasion is what happens when you fail to pay your taxes
Of course. I was using "evading" in the English, rather than legal, sense. I wasn't trying to imply retailers were doing anything illegal, but that they were avoiding a tax that pre-Internet applied almost universally to retailers.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that's not what net neutrality is. Net neutrality isn't about charging everyone the same price regardless of how much bandwidth they use, or requiring that everyone has unlimited network capacity. That's silly. It's not even about saying that certain types of traffic can't be prioritized over others -- net neutrality wouldn't prevent ISPs from throttling bit torrent, for example (though there is overlap in the people who support net neutrality and the people who oppose such throttling).
Net neutrality means that Microsoft can't pay your ISP to improve your bandwidth to MSN search while throttling the bandwidth to Google. Net neutrality means that your ISP is not allowed to charge you for bandwidth and then also charge websites to actually connect you to them. (Google is already being charged quite a lot for bandwidth.) Traffic of different types (web vs. bittorrent vs. whatever) can behave differently, but traffic from different sources should be treated the same, to avoid protection-racket style abuses (nice site you got there, it sure would be a shame if my 50 million subscribers were no longer able to reliably access it...)
So, no, net neutrality is not at all about all users paying the same amount regardless of their level of usage. But some of the ISP monopolies have managed to frame it that way by implying that the rules that would apply to destination sites (Yahoo vs. Google) are actually rules about individual subscribers (large versus small bandwidth demand from a single individual). The intent of net neutrality is that ISPs should only be charging for throughput at the network endpoints they control, not at both endpoints of all connections, so we don't end up quadruple-charging for every transmission (as opposed to the current double-charging, which is reasonable since it allows the two parties to the connection to share the cost of the bandwidth they both use).
Yes -- I figured it was a slip, but I wasn't strong enough to pass it up. I am but a man.
Or improve the quality of education in countries like the US...
It sure is -- it's not like the US had scripted dialogue prepared before the moon landing! That would just be over the top.
Although, knowing us and our study habits, even if we had bothered to prepare lines, the astronaut would probably have just flubbed them.
So in your mind, weighting failing grades so that it's still possible to recover through hard work and studying is the same as guaranteeing one is "rich, successful, and pampered"? It's not like they're giving passing grades for nothing. It's also not like this is being done in the final year of med school or something, by which time it's reasonable for people to have worked out the effort / reward equation. We want highschoolers to learn that hard work is rewarded. And it's not like this policy will give sudden magic As to someone who hasn't worked hard -- by definition, the policy can't really kick in unless someone is already earning far less than an A. If a highschooler really bombs the first half of a class, and then decides they really want to turn things around, and are going to work 16 hours a day to learn all they need to so they can pass the class, the default policy would be to say "Sorry, it's impossible no matter now hard you try. You might as well not even be attending the class anymore." That's a really stupid situation.
This is not giving everyone the entitlement to be rich and successful, but the hope is to give everyone the chance to be successful predicated upon their hard work. That seems like a fairly American goal (note: said slightly tongue-in-cheek. But this is the sort of thing that America tends to claim to believe in), and I'm not sure why so many of the comments here are talking about it as though this is a policy of giving good grades for no effort, when in fact it's still a policy of giving failing grades for no effort, just weighting them such that, through hard work, recovery is still possible.
Okay, but you won't get an A for effort. You still won't pass the class without knowing the material. The particular pathology this is meant to address is that if you did very poorly for the first half of the year, but then put in a lot of effort in the second half, you would still fail, even though you did know the material. This way, if you genuinely work hard to learn the material, there's still a chance to pass. But this is only going to help people who actually do put in that effort and actually do learn what they need to. It's not like you'll pass without doing anything.
Since the very concept of the policy is that it will make no change to your grades unless you score less than 50% -- and since in that case, it will still only be adjusted to 50%, which is still a failing grade -- I'm curious how you think this will help people "coast right through every class." Guaranteeing that your grade won't drop lower than a "high F" is not enough to keep you from failing unless at some point you really do put in the work to earn a grade that is significantly better than failing.
...even!
Well, I guess you've got a 50% chance...
And lowest gun crime in the nation. But do go on.
That's not it at all, the fact is games, once produced, are NOT SCARCE. According to supply and demand, such industries should be unprofitable, but yet are some of the most profitable.
Okay, this is a shell-game type of argument that doesn't actually work in reality. "supply and demand" does not say that certain industries "should" be unprofitable. The whole point of the supply/demand graph is that any industry should reach an equilibrium point where it is "profitable" (that is, makes a profit, which to an economist means that, what with utility cost, its net profit is zero, but... whatever.)
Supply/demand curves are themselves gross oversimplifications, but in this case the reasoning works fine: the initial cost to produce a game is large, the marginal cost is near zero. This doesn't mean that once the initial costs have been invested, you say "Okay, now we start over, the cost from here on out is zero!" It means that when planning a game, you balance the initial investment against the probable post-release sales. You seem to be extrapolating to assume an infinite number of possible customers, in which case yes, the marginal cost would dominate regardless of initial investment. But so far there are only a finite number of humans, so in reality the publisher needs to find a price at which the expected profit (from the number of people willing to buy it at that price, i.e. the demand curve) at least meets the total investment required to produce and distribute the game (i.e. the supply curve at that level of production).
Now, I do suspect a lot of industries are bad at estimating the supply/demand tradeoffs, and could probably make a lot more net profit if they lowered the price of their marginally-free goods. But even there, it has to be a tradeoff between expected profit and production costs -- the production costs don't just disappear as soon as marginal costs approach zero.
You could also claim that a squig of nutmeg around your neck will prevent alien abductions.
That's not really how the math works out. The problem with nutmeg vs. aliens is that there is no observed correlation, that is, the observed frequency of abductions is the same with or without the nutmeg (I'll approximate this frequency as zero). Same with a tiger-repelling rock, etc.
With the weather example, the observation is that the weather was as desired, i.e., a 0% chance of bad weather over a very small sample size. Nevertheless, 0% is a lot lower than the average chance of bad weather when no weather-control attempts were made, so there is an observed correlation, albeit with a rather large margin of error. But from a statistics/uncertainty point of view, this still conveys positive information (i.e. all else being equal, it increases the expected probability that the claim is true), whereas the nutmeg example conveys no additional information at all.
Real confirmation would require additional tests using the same method, to achieve a satisfactory degree of certainty. But it's actually very easy to prove a negative: just do the same thing 10 times in a row, and see if it always works. Or, if you're skeptical, 20 times. Or however many times a statistician tells you to. This is the same method that is used in practically any medical research, so unless you think it's very hard to prove that vaccines prevent polio, this situation is no different.
Also, as another reply pointed out, this isn't a "rain-making" program, and the theory behind keeping existing rain clouds out of a particular area is very different (and possibly on sounder footing) than making clouds appear when they weren't already there.
One of the problems is that the MBTA is losing money like crazy, in spite of vastly increased ridership because of gasoline prices. They can't afford to do basic mechanical maintenance and now they have to redo their smart card system too!?
They were somehow able to "afford" the many, many millions of dollars required to install this slow, unreliable, and annoying smart card system. That expense was how they were able to justify the fare increase. I would be fine with an increased fare if it was used to improve service, but instead the service is now significantly worse than before, the smart card machines are terrible (every month I have to wrestle with it to get it to recognize my credit card to buy a pass, and I know others who have the same problem), and they haven't even accomplished the original goal.
And, of course, they voluntarily installed this terrible smart card system even after New York tried installing the same system, and it ended up so terrible that they voluntarily ate the lost money and went with another contractor. I never quite heard the rationale for failing to learn from their mistake...
So, yes, they are losing money like crazy, but my sympathy is limited. They've consistently shown that they don't really know what they're doing.
As for the card vulnerability: it's another demonstration of how worthless the system is, but it hardly matters. Part of the justification for the system was to make sure people paid their fares. It has been a dreadful failure at that, but whatever. The number of people who will go to all the trouble of counterfeiting their MBTA passes is dwarfed by the number that will simply trail someone else through the gates or hop on the green line without paying. This has always been the case. It's not a new or surprising point that secure cryptography cannot prevent social engineering. The fact that it turns out to be insecure cryptography just makes the whole thing more pathetic...
But that isn't the real story, because every significant match ever has been a solid win for the human, regardless of processing power. The fact that computers can do this at all is new and surprising.
Or, to come at it from another direction: in the 90s, the news was that a specially designed supercomputer beat the chess world champion. Then Moore's Law happened, and these days, standard desktop PCs routinely beat top grandmasters.
It has been widely speculated that no computer would ever be able to play top-level Go, because it is so many orders of magnitude more complex than chess. But this story suggests that, within a decade or two, that will no longer be the case, even with more modest CPU demands. The story isn't "Professional Go player is pretty good at Go," because we've known that for a very long time...
Of course, the context in the story is that your quote portrays a judge who is deliberately biasing the jury in favor of conviction... so maybe that isn't the best explanation to use...
I agree with GP, however.
The correlation is actually with successful suicides. The proportion of suicide attempts isn't significantly correlated with gun ownership, but the proportion of successful attempts goes up dramatically, for obvious reasons.
You can state your opinion that "these people would simply find another method," but empirically, while those who attempt suicide are statistically fairly likely to try again, the number of successful suicides even given repeated attempts is still lower when guns aren't accessible.
You might not think this is a compelling reason to oppose gun ownership, but GP's claim was substantially correct.
I believe the saying is "fool ma can't get fooled again."
At least, that's how they say it in Texas...
Not if you're using the right formal methods... the whole point behind most code verification approaches is that it can be verified automatically. If a human had to review the proof, then sure, this will never work, but if you're using proof-carrying code in a relatively formal language, the verification can be an automatic part of the process.
The point about having programmers who are capable of writing those kinds of code is still valid -- there are lots of them, but it's definitely a smaller set than the people who can usefully contribute to an OSS project today -- but verification is more a question of building good technical infrastructure rather than finding infallible coders...
If you're gaming time comes in 30 minute blocks, consoles are just as useless to you as a gaming PC would be. You'll do just fine with any old computer by navigating your web browser to crappyjavagames.com or whatever - that's pretty much all you have time for.
As someone whose gaming time comes in 30 minute blocks, I'd have to disagree. With some types of console games you may be right, but generally they're the ones I'm not interested in playing anyway. The Wii and, especially, the DS (I love the auto-suspend feature), work quite well for my time constraints. (I even beat Twilight Princess... it only took a year :-P)
Computer games are a terrible substitute. Except for, like you say, crappyjavagames.com (which I have no interest in), computer games almost uniformly take far longer even to get up and running, and the learning curve once they're installed and working may be worth it for some people, but I much prefer games that I can pick up rather quickly -- an hour or two is okay, I often start a new game when I have some extra time, but more than that and it's just not worth it anymore...
I'm sure I'm missing out on some fantastic PC games, but your claim that consoles are a useless solution doesn't really hold up...
Actually, although Pipes recognizes pretty clearly the distinction between, on one side, the moderate religious Muslims, and on the other the radical authoritarian pseudo-religious political nuts we all despise...
...you mean Neocons?
Thanks, folks, I'll be here all night.
Thank you.
Of course, that there was an immediate rash of posts joking about having sex with her, many of which are highly rated, is problematic even on top of the stupid premise.
And I see you have a highly-rated response telling you it's okay because the article makes it clear that she's actually a smart person (even though she's a girl!) Sigh...
Err... what you're saying isn't what was originally claimed. What was originally claimed is that if a computer can effectively distinguish between computer and human generated speech, the computer can also generate human-sounding speech. You interpret "human sounding" to mean "human sounding to that particular distinguishing algorithm", which is certainly a possibility depending on the structure of the algorithm, but the original claim -- that the speech would sound human (as far as a human is concerned) -- is far from clear and, as GP says, probably false. In your analogy, this would be the claim that by distinguishing Chinese (that's a language now? :-P) from Spanish, you would be able to imitate them well enoughto fool a native speaker. There it becomes trivially false. In human vs. machine speech, I think it is less trivial, but still unlikely.
Recycling fails the same way public highways do. If there is nothing directly in it for the participating individual then any effort is too much.
Fixed that for you.
Recycling fails the same way police and fire departments do. If there is nothing directly in it for the participating individual then any effort is too much.
Fixed it again.
Recycling fails the same way universal education does. If there is nothing directly in it for the participating individual then any effort is too much.
I could go on..... invoking "socialism" (which, by the way, is not the same thing as communism, nor is it obvious that "socialism fails," since all governments including the US have socialist elements [see above]) is not a good argument against something. You still have to weigh the actual costs / benefits of the case. The situation you describe is extremely common. Conflicts where common action would significantly improve everyone's situation, while personal inaction would marginally improve the individual's situation, are almost the canonical argument for the existence of government.
I'm not advocating any specific government action here (though there are some that I think would be beneficial with almost zero inconvenience) -- but your statement as it stands is an argument for government intervention to support recycling, not an argument against recycling. Recycling itself still stands or falls on its actual benefits.
No one has ever seriously advocated the earth is flat? There's some papal writing you might want to check for that one.
:-P)
:-P) has ever used the bible to prove a flat earth. It's best to be aware of that if only to avoid an inadvertent straw man.
Citation? Seriously, no one has used the Bible to argue a flat Earth. People in the middle ages were perfectly aware the Earth was round. [Disclaimer: there are of course the crazy "flat earth" people even now, so I don't mean literally no one, but it was never a teaching of the church / the pope / anyone particularly "important"]. They had even figured out the correct-in-spirit correlation that the climate is hotter around the equator because that part of the spher[e | oid] is closer to the sun. They had all kinds of ideas about what life was like on other parts of the globe, and while there was a lot of controversy and theological significance ascribed to the details of these ideas, the fundamental premise that the earth was round was pretty universal. MWIIMS (My Wife Is In Medieval Studies
Now, the things you say about the heliocentric model are completely correct, and that is a much better example: because the "literal" meaning of some passages would imply the sun revolved around the earth, heliocentrism was controversial for some time. These days Christians are okay with it. Which should be a lesson that interpretations of holy writings still have to go through the reality-based filter of what is in front of our eyes, and not taken a priori.
The flat earth stuff is a total myth, though. I disagree with GP in that I think the PI=3 is an effective parody: it gives an instance where it is, and always has been, completely obvious to everyone that it is not meant literally in a precise numerical sense (I mean, even the unit of measurement for the passage is a "cubit," which is defined as "the length from your elbow to the tip of your fingers," which is hardly a unit in the sense of modern engineering... modern literalism is highly anachronistic in this context). The existence of such a passage points out that "now we're just haggling over price" -- there are obviously non-literal "scientific" claims, and the question is where do we draw the boundaries.
On the other hand, GP is right that no one (to a close approximation, i.e. for large values of zero
What are we going to require next? Special keyboards at public internet stations for those who are prone to hangnails?
Err... I'm not sure how the analogy is supposed to work between "prone to hangnails" and "blind." I don't think anyone faced career disaster and possible permanent unemployment because of hangnails. But in a lot of fields, inability to use the Internet could do that.
However, we do require, for example, blind-accessible ATMs. This doesn't seem like something that has been excessively ruined by government intervention.
Considering the Internet is rapidly becoming indispensable for managing finances (it's still possible to do without it, but it gets harder every year), I don't see why you think the idea of actually creating and adhering to standards, at least in some cases, is so ridiculous.
Most of the arguments here, including yours, basically imply that this isn't a problem because self-interested business will already be making sure their pages are accessible. There are two problems with this. One is that it's empirically false, that is, we observe presumably self-interested businesses doing the opposite. The other is that it is quite conceivable, in some cases, that the cost and effort required to accommodate the blind would be more than would be earned by having their business. In that case, rational self-interested businesses will purposely not make accessible pages. The market only works when actors are rational, and even then, it only effectively measures (usually short-term) efficiency, not ethics. So the answer to the ethical question "should more pages be made accessible to the blind?" is not the economic "if that was advantageous, people would do it anyway."
No, they haven't. Tax evasion is what happens when you fail to pay your taxes
Of course. I was using "evading" in the English, rather than legal, sense. I wasn't trying to imply retailers were doing anything illegal, but that they were avoiding a tax that pre-Internet applied almost universally to retailers.