Ah, the perfect way to respond to a stupid posting - with an even dumber posting. Well done, sir!
To correct the grandparent posting: the law refers to genotype, not phenotype or other expressions of genotype. This has as much to do with socialized medicine as search algorithms have to do with lacrosse.
To correct the parent posting: don't worry, the system we have now in the US has all the disadvantages of socialized medicine (unbelievable bureaucracy, arbitrary decisions, ridiculous waits, incredible inefficiencies) without any of the advantages. Enjoy your smug superiority in complete comfort.
Humans are also very bad at remembering random strings, so no, don't use the shell script posted in the parent, as it will lead to a password you'll have to write down, or will use for everything and never change. Use combinations of words and special characters, like "&URA*2me" or some such thing.
Melinda French was the product unit manager for Bob, Publisher, Encarta, and other "user-friendly" products. The project leader for Bob was apparently Karen Fries, and a quick search indicates a lot of research into things like "anthropomorphic" software, so it most likely was Karen Fries' idea.
That's what the math proves. It's not circular reasoning - the reason we can say "you can't accelerate to the speed of light" is because so many equations throw divide-by-zero errors when the velocity is c.
Ok, do you understand that if you're killing more and more al-Qaeda every day, and the numbers never drop, that means that you're not reducing an exhaustible supply - that you're making more of them by the very measures you claim to be using to eliminate them?.
The Iranians don't actually have nuclear weapons though, do they? Unlike N Korea, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, China, UK, France, USA and India.
The Iranians don't actually have any nuclear weapons yet. They clearly have a program (unlike Iraq, which seems to have tried to develop a program, failed, but left just enough detritus around to give the chicken hawks material for their misinformation campaign). Ukraine and I believe Kazakhstan both disarmed willingly.
Founts is more obviously etymologically related to foundry (a place that cuts fonts - from lead). That leads me to believe it is the original spelling. Fonts is a later spelling, though I believe it is the standard now on both sides of the Atlantic.
E-ink isn't backlit, it uses ambient light. It's also higher res than most LCDs. The problem is, it's slow and usually monochrome (color is very expensive), and the only devices that are widely available which use it are saddled with mediocre software (the Sony Reader is especially handicapped by the Connect software and bookstore).
Windows can do it in some applications. Actually, the one thing you can't fault Microsoft on is their work on fonts, typesetting, and encoding. Security? They're idiots. Usability? They're at best semicompetent. But in the NT/2K/XP/Vista line, they've done as much with OpenType, Uncode compability, and readability as any other OS vendor/group.
To distill this (as a Euro-American guy who started in a field dominated by women and has moved to CS), I'd say that women are simply discouraged from doing math in the US because there's a prevailing assumption that they're not as good at math. Maybe, statistically, all other things being equal, the average guy might be marginally better at math than the average woman, and the average woman better at visual and verbal skills than the average guy: but that margin is slim enough that it should only show up as a slight difference in the field, not as a 2:1 or worse ratio. Now, in other countries (especially Asian countries), math is emphasized so much that when folks educated in those countries (or the children of parents educated in those countries) choose their fields in school, the US math-is-for-guys bias that discourages US women from entering math and engineering fields is all but neutralized.
This guy really doesn't strike me as the type who planned out a route, but I'll grant you that you have a point there (that a sufficiently motivated shooter could avoid most patrols, though a reasonably responsive police force would one would hope change its tactics the moment the first shooting was reported).
I still do not see this as an argument in favor of concealed carry laws. When was the last time a nutcase firing a weapon randomly in a state with concealed carry laws was stopped in this way? And don't tell me this kind of shooting doesn't happen in concealed carry states - it does. Take a look at the crime news in Missouri.
My own feeling is that the intention of the Second Amendment - leaving enough force in the hands of the populace to serve as a brake on potential governmental tyranny - is served well enough without concealed carry laws, and that the existence of concealed weapons in the general population is very unlikely to deter a potential spree killer: the best you can hope for is to stop the spree before the maximum number of victims is killed, and most often, I think that will simply happen because law enforcement has arrived or the nutjob has finally toppled over the edge and offed himself (as in this case). And I think that trying to use this case as an argument for concealed carry laws, when there is no statistical evidence and no unassailable logic behind the argument, before the bodies are even cold, is no better than using the case as an argument for gun control. (I happen to favor a great deal of regulation of guns, but won't be so opportunistic as to try to construct an argument in favor of gun control on the basis of this incident.)
But the odds weren't 0% - there were the odds he would run into a cop, which are somewhat higher than 0% - say there's 1 cop for every 1000 students: that's 0.1% x 50 = 5% odds he would run into a cop.
So, what percentage of VTech students do you think would have been carrying if VTech permitted the carrying of concealed weapons on campus? I'd guess 1% at most. That wouldn't give you much of a chance to stop the shooter, would it? By the way, claiming that something is an axiom and then claiming that it is "utterly true" is petitio principii.
It looks to me like all the knee-jerk reactions around here are coming from people who think that complete gun deregulation would have stopped this. Even with complete gun deregulation, the odds are that the concentration of students carrying guns wouldn't have been enough to get to this guy any faster than the campus police did. So you're hijacking this tragedy for your political agenda, too, and with very little evidence to back you up.
3) Can anyone list a single doomsday environmental prediction that has come true? Just one. That's all I ask. One single doomsday prediction that has come true. (I guess THIS time they're right)
Well, doomsayers predicted for a couple of decades that one really bad hurricane would flood New Orleans out, and the politicians in Louisiana and in Washington sat on their asses saying "oh, that will never happen."
The US blows hot and cold on practically all treaties, depending on who is in the White House. That doesn't excuse India from it's behavior regarding proliferation. The problem here isn't whether foreign scientists should be excluded from certain kinds of work - they *should*, and they *are*, under the terms of ITAR, unless they have made the commitment of obtaining permanent residence status. The problem is the assumption that all of these folks are "foreigners." Just because someone has non-Anglo-Saxon name, or even an accent, does not mean that person is not an American citizen: and there is nothing in this article or in the websites I could find mentioning the students that suggests that they are not American citizens, and if the technology is sensitive military use technology, they wouldn't be allowed to work on it unless they were at least permanent residents (a status which it is rather difficult for a student to obtain).
By the way, some idiot decided to slander me in a response to my other posting in this thread by claiming that I'm a racist (I will charitably assume that it was not "reporter"). I'm not quite sure how explaining that a bunch of kids with Indian, Chinese, and Russian names could very well be Americans makes a white Anglo-Saxon American a racist, but I suppose I'd be an idiot to expect any kind of consistency on the part of such a poster.
Dear god, please, please stop using the word "incredulous" as though it were a synonym to "incredible." A person who has a hard time believing something is "incredulous"; the thing they have a hard time believing is "incredible."
There's nothing in this article to suggest that the student with the Indian name (Uday K. Chettiar) is not an American citizen, nor that Wenshan Cai or Alexander V. Kildishev are not American citizens, or that Vladimir Shalaev himself is not a US citizen (the fact that he was educated in Russia isn't an impediment: my grandparents were educated in England, and became citizens as adults); a cursory Google search finds nothing to suggest that they are not US citizens, either. However, I do know that Title 22 of the US code includes International Traffic in Arms Regulations (http://www.epic.org/crypto/export_controls/itar.h tml), and that universities and private companies in the US are required to stick to these regulations pretty closely, for fear of losing all federal funding: technologies that are covered under these regulations can only be worked on by US Citizens and those with "permanent resident" (green card) status. The fact that there have been a number of prosecutions of companies for technology transfers to China is proof that these regulations are taken seriously (though one does wonder about equality of enforcement with this particular administration).
So, apparently you assume that anyone without a European name is not a citizen - or, at least, anyone with an Indian name is not a citizen: you didn't question Prof. Shalaev, Mr. Cai, or Mr. Kildishev. Looking at your website (http://www.geocities.com/deskofreporter/), I see that you do raise some interesting points about Taiwan's relationship with China, but that the tone you use in doing so has an aroma of xenophobia. I'd suggest that you look into the history of great American immigrant patriots, beginning with Alexander Hamilton and continuing on through Albert Einstein (he became an American citizen in 1940 and remained one until his death).
Don't you think this would be somewhat funnier (not quite funny, mind you, just less "unfunny") if you had said "get a cool XBox 360 like the rest of us"?
I don't see how subscription-based business models can survive with DRM-free music. Think about it: what drives the subscription renewals is the fact that you need to keep your subscription current to enable the DRM on the music you've downloaded. Why bother with that if the music is DRM free?
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, the perfect way to respond to a stupid posting - with an even dumber posting. Well done, sir!
To correct the grandparent posting: the law refers to genotype, not phenotype or other expressions of genotype. This has as much to do with socialized medicine as search algorithms have to do with lacrosse.
To correct the parent posting: don't worry, the system we have now in the US has all the disadvantages of socialized medicine (unbelievable bureaucracy, arbitrary decisions, ridiculous waits, incredible inefficiencies) without any of the advantages. Enjoy your smug superiority in complete comfort.
Humans are also very bad at remembering random strings, so no, don't use the shell script posted in the parent, as it will lead to a password you'll have to write down, or will use for everything and never change. Use combinations of words and special characters, like "&URA*2me" or some such thing.
Let me guess - that's the dumbest f***ing icon you've seen in all your time on Slashdot?
Melinda French was the product unit manager for Bob, Publisher, Encarta, and other "user-friendly" products. The project leader for Bob was apparently Karen Fries, and a quick search indicates a lot of research into things like "anthropomorphic" software, so it most likely was Karen Fries' idea.
In other words, just like the Metaverse with no swords?
You do of course realize that anything divided by zero is infinity?
That's what the math proves. It's not circular reasoning - the reason we can say "you can't accelerate to the speed of light" is because so many equations throw divide-by-zero errors when the velocity is c.
Ok, do you understand that if you're killing more and more al-Qaeda every day, and the numbers never drop, that means that you're not reducing an exhaustible supply - that you're making more of them by the very measures you claim to be using to eliminate them?.
Thank you, I had forgotten about that air strike.
The Iranians don't actually have nuclear weapons though, do they? Unlike N Korea, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, China, UK, France, USA and India.
The Iranians don't actually have any nuclear weapons yet. They clearly have a program (unlike Iraq, which seems to have tried to develop a program, failed, but left just enough detritus around to give the chicken hawks material for their misinformation campaign). Ukraine and I believe Kazakhstan both disarmed willingly.
Founts is more obviously etymologically related to foundry (a place that cuts fonts - from lead). That leads me to believe it is the original spelling. Fonts is a later spelling, though I believe it is the standard now on both sides of the Atlantic.
E-ink isn't backlit, it uses ambient light. It's also higher res than most LCDs. The problem is, it's slow and usually monochrome (color is very expensive), and the only devices that are widely available which use it are saddled with mediocre software (the Sony Reader is especially handicapped by the Connect software and bookstore).
Windows can do it in some applications. Actually, the one thing you can't fault Microsoft on is their work on fonts, typesetting, and encoding. Security? They're idiots. Usability? They're at best semicompetent. But in the NT/2K/XP/Vista line, they've done as much with OpenType, Uncode compability, and readability as any other OS vendor/group.
To distill this (as a Euro-American guy who started in a field dominated by women and has moved to CS), I'd say that women are simply discouraged from doing math in the US because there's a prevailing assumption that they're not as good at math. Maybe, statistically, all other things being equal, the average guy might be marginally better at math than the average woman, and the average woman better at visual and verbal skills than the average guy: but that margin is slim enough that it should only show up as a slight difference in the field, not as a 2:1 or worse ratio. Now, in other countries (especially Asian countries), math is emphasized so much that when folks educated in those countries (or the children of parents educated in those countries) choose their fields in school, the US math-is-for-guys bias that discourages US women from entering math and engineering fields is all but neutralized.
This guy really doesn't strike me as the type who planned out a route, but I'll grant you that you have a point there (that a sufficiently motivated shooter could avoid most patrols, though a reasonably responsive police force would one would hope change its tactics the moment the first shooting was reported).
I still do not see this as an argument in favor of concealed carry laws. When was the last time a nutcase firing a weapon randomly in a state with concealed carry laws was stopped in this way? And don't tell me this kind of shooting doesn't happen in concealed carry states - it does. Take a look at the crime news in Missouri.
My own feeling is that the intention of the Second Amendment - leaving enough force in the hands of the populace to serve as a brake on potential governmental tyranny - is served well enough without concealed carry laws, and that the existence of concealed weapons in the general population is very unlikely to deter a potential spree killer: the best you can hope for is to stop the spree before the maximum number of victims is killed, and most often, I think that will simply happen because law enforcement has arrived or the nutjob has finally toppled over the edge and offed himself (as in this case). And I think that trying to use this case as an argument for concealed carry laws, when there is no statistical evidence and no unassailable logic behind the argument, before the bodies are even cold, is no better than using the case as an argument for gun control. (I happen to favor a great deal of regulation of guns, but won't be so opportunistic as to try to construct an argument in favor of gun control on the basis of this incident.)
But the odds weren't 0% - there were the odds he would run into a cop, which are somewhat higher than 0% - say there's 1 cop for every 1000 students: that's 0.1% x 50 = 5% odds he would run into a cop.
So, what percentage of VTech students do you think would have been carrying if VTech permitted the carrying of concealed weapons on campus? I'd guess 1% at most. That wouldn't give you much of a chance to stop the shooter, would it? By the way, claiming that something is an axiom and then claiming that it is "utterly true" is petitio principii.
It looks to me like all the knee-jerk reactions around here are coming from people who think that complete gun deregulation would have stopped this. Even with complete gun deregulation, the odds are that the concentration of students carrying guns wouldn't have been enough to get to this guy any faster than the campus police did. So you're hijacking this tragedy for your political agenda, too, and with very little evidence to back you up.
3) Can anyone list a single doomsday environmental prediction that has come true? Just one. That's all I ask. One single doomsday prediction that has come true. (I guess THIS time they're right)
Well, doomsayers predicted for a couple of decades that one really bad hurricane would flood New Orleans out, and the politicians in Louisiana and in Washington sat on their asses saying "oh, that will never happen."
The US blows hot and cold on practically all treaties, depending on who is in the White House. That doesn't excuse India from it's behavior regarding proliferation. The problem here isn't whether foreign scientists should be excluded from certain kinds of work - they *should*, and they *are*, under the terms of ITAR, unless they have made the commitment of obtaining permanent residence status. The problem is the assumption that all of these folks are "foreigners." Just because someone has non-Anglo-Saxon name, or even an accent, does not mean that person is not an American citizen: and there is nothing in this article or in the websites I could find mentioning the students that suggests that they are not American citizens, and if the technology is sensitive military use technology, they wouldn't be allowed to work on it unless they were at least permanent residents (a status which it is rather difficult for a student to obtain).
By the way, some idiot decided to slander me in a response to my other posting in this thread by claiming that I'm a racist (I will charitably assume that it was not "reporter"). I'm not quite sure how explaining that a bunch of kids with Indian, Chinese, and Russian names could very well be Americans makes a white Anglo-Saxon American a racist, but I suppose I'd be an idiot to expect any kind of consistency on the part of such a poster.
Of course, if you weren't an anonymous coward, I'd have you for slander.
Dear god, please, please stop using the word "incredulous" as though it were a synonym to "incredible." A person who has a hard time believing something is "incredulous"; the thing they have a hard time believing is "incredible."
There's nothing in this article to suggest that the student with the Indian name (Uday K. Chettiar) is not an American citizen, nor that Wenshan Cai or Alexander V. Kildishev are not American citizens, or that Vladimir Shalaev himself is not a US citizen (the fact that he was educated in Russia isn't an impediment: my grandparents were educated in England, and became citizens as adults); a cursory Google search finds nothing to suggest that they are not US citizens, either. However, I do know that Title 22 of the US code includes International Traffic in Arms Regulations (http://www.epic.org/crypto/export_controls/itar.h tml), and that universities and private companies in the US are required to stick to these regulations pretty closely, for fear of losing all federal funding: technologies that are covered under these regulations can only be worked on by US Citizens and those with "permanent resident" (green card) status. The fact that there have been a number of prosecutions of companies for technology transfers to China is proof that these regulations are taken seriously (though one does wonder about equality of enforcement with this particular administration).
So, apparently you assume that anyone without a European name is not a citizen - or, at least, anyone with an Indian name is not a citizen: you didn't question Prof. Shalaev, Mr. Cai, or Mr. Kildishev. Looking at your website (http://www.geocities.com/deskofreporter/), I see that you do raise some interesting points about Taiwan's relationship with China, but that the tone you use in doing so has an aroma of xenophobia. I'd suggest that you look into the history of great American immigrant patriots, beginning with Alexander Hamilton and continuing on through Albert Einstein (he became an American citizen in 1940 and remained one until his death).
Don't you think this would be somewhat funnier (not quite funny, mind you, just less "unfunny") if you had said "get a cool XBox 360 like the rest of us"?
I don't see how subscription-based business models can survive with DRM-free music. Think about it: what drives the subscription renewals is the fact that you need to keep your subscription current to enable the DRM on the music you've downloaded. Why bother with that if the music is DRM free?