Sigh. Relative morality is not really any morality at all. All situations can be 'better understood' as the superior enlightened like to say. Others may sometimes call the same 'understanding' things like enabling, guilt-avoidance, unethical, @$@, and other fine insults with real character trashing qualities.
Huh? I have no idea what your point is. I understand that you're disputing what makes something "unconscionable", but answer this: should people do things that they think are unconscionable? Maybe you could enlighten those of us who don't have access to your copy of What's Right and What's Wrong: A Complete Reference.
Next time, don't bother wasting the electricity used to store the bits used to express your opinion. Trolling and flaming are sort of stupid...especially in a topic as over-posted as this one. Reading the letters and the words and not understanding the truth and principles behind them are obviously a problem you have. Try working on those critical thinking skills and take a few morality and ethics classes at your local community college.
Lessee . . . you rambled incomprehensibly and said some really dumb things. I pointed this out. Therefore, I'm a troll who can't think critically. Did I get that right? If I agree with you and say that everything you write is correct and insightful, will that mean that I've learned to think critically?
As for ethics and morality courses: are you serious? Really? Can you even take a course in "morality" at a community college? I know colleges offer ethics courses -- I had to take one as an undergrad -- but morality?
Skull and Bones is a tiny fraternity full of powerful and wealthy people, with a bent for secrecy and power. Bush and Kerry ARE both members. What ARE the odds that two Bonesmen would end up running against each other for President of the United States, like 1 in a 100,000,000.
It's even worse than that: the last two presidents were state governors when they were elected. What are the odds of that? There are at least 100,000,000 Americans who are old enough to run for President, and only 50 of them are currently serving as a state governor. So the odds are about 1 in 20,000,000 that a governor would be elected in a given election. And the odds of two being elected in a row: at least 1 in 400,000,000,000,000. This is unbelievable! You've uncovered a conspiracy!
Usually when you "buy" a phone (in the US at least) you are getting a discount in exchange for a lengthy contract. If you don't want the contract you buy the phone outright and can do anything you want with it.
We're talking about the iPhone, here. The iPhone is not subsidized by AT&T, but the 2-year contract is still mandatory.
Furthermore, even if it did have an effect, it wouldn't matter for Gentoo because GCC's default build mode actually compiles it twice; the first time with the existing compiler, and the second time with itself, the result of the first compilation.
Three times, actually, at least if you use 'make bootstrap'. GCC is built with the system compiler (stage 1), then it uses the resulting compiler to build itself (stage 2), then it uses the stage 2 compiler to build itself again (stage 3), and finally it compares the stage 2 and stage 3 compilers.
Did you first compile your compiler for your specific hardware?
Not sure if this actually makes a difference, but I've heard third hand that it does.
Tuning your compiler for specific hardware might make the compiler run faster, but it absolutely should not affect the output. If a program's output differs as a result of its compile-time optimizations, then something is probably wrong.
Sorry if I'm being blunt, but if you can't figure out what CPUTYPE your system has from this list, then you have no business compiling an application on it.
This "you have no business compiling..." nonsense is just baseless elitism. Your list has a lot of subtle variants, and the differences between some of them are inconsequential for most users. I've got a couple of compile jobs running at the moment (regression testing patches before I commit them to a subversion repository), and I don't know the CPUTYPE on all of the machines. The finest distinction I usually make is x86-compatible vs. PPC vs. MIPS/SPARC/Alpha/etc. and 32 vs. 64-bits. If I were compiling a high-performance numerical app, it might be worth tracking down more information (e.g. what sort of vector-processing unit is available), but it usually doesn't matter. In a given day, I might be testing my code on Linux on an x86, Opteron, or Itanium processor; on Darwin on a G4, G5, x86-compatible, or x86_64 compatible processor; on AIX/Power5, or perhaps something more obscure. I'm certainly not going to waste a lot brain cycles figuring out the difference between the itanium or itanium2 CPUTYPEs when I've got real work to do.
A resounding and absolute "Yes!" on this. No question about it. Eloquently summarized by your final sentence on the underlying goal of all education, "...to learn to think" . On all this we agree, but where we begin to diverge is at the idea that math is a proper and necessary tool to accomplish this for everyone. I simply don't agree with that statement.
I agree that there are other places to learn the skills I mentioned, though I believe that studying math is the best way to learn to think logically and abstractly. I readily concede that this is just an opinion, though.
I, like many others, slogged through four difficult, agonizing years of math education in high school. Those classes, at least as they were taught at my school and when I was being taught there, did no more to teach me "rigorous logical analysis and problem solving skills" than any other classes. I was simply memorizing and regurgitating equations and formulas--and very poorly I might add. I believe the highest grade I ever received in one of my math classes was a merciful C-.
Yeah, that sounds pretty typical. Math classes sometimes do more harm than good. The students in my college math courses often have to overcome misconceptions and phobias instilled by lousy math classes. There's no point in forcing students to memorize algorithms without any understanding. The value of studying math is not just learning how to solve a problem, but also discovering why a solution works, and how to generalize that information to solve other problems.
His lectures weren't just about learning what we needed to make the school look good on tests, he constantly reaffirmed that it was the process of discovery that was important. He wanted to teach students how to be good scientists, not good test takers.
Sounds like a good teacher. I suspect your high school math experience would have been different if you'd had a math teacher like this guy.
See, the reason I don't like your analogy is because, unlike math, English (or whatever your native language may be) is something you are constantly exposed to, and you will use it every single day of your life, regardless of your profession, interests, social status, etc. And because of that, it is useful to everyone, from every walk of life, in every professional or personal communication they have with anybody. Ensuring that people are better at this is a good thing for everyone, and moreover, it doesn't take much, because everyone is exposed to it all the time.
You cannot make the same argument for math. It is rarely used by anyone; only a small subset of people use it for their professions, and another small percentage find it of personal interest. But the majority of people never encounter math beyond arithmetic outside the classroom -- and because of that, they forget what they allegedly learned.
The value of the math content in a curriculum is more than just "useful math", in the same way that composition, literature, art, science, and history courses have value far beyond the explicit content. It's true that the specific mathematical skills that are taught in high school and college math are not necessary for most people. However, the rigorous logical analysis and problem solving skills necessary in mathematics are absolutely essential to an educated person.
I've forgotten most of the specific content of my literature courses, but they were part of how I learned how to read critically. I don't remember much from my college chemistry courses, but they helped me to think scientifically. I've forgotten many of the details from my history, art, and social science courses, but along the way I learned to analyze and appreciate the world around me.
The purpose of an education is to learn to think, and mathematics is a crucial part of that process.
Religions are all the same?! Here's my quick guide to how retarded religions are:
5. peaceful, mostly harmless: buddhism, pagans, some mainline churches. 4. wtf!? At least they keep to theirselves. Amish, Quakers, Mennonites 3. Stop messing with others. Please. Fundies of many stripes that seek to impose their beliefs on others. 2. Kill theirselves. Heaven's gate. Jonestown. Yikes. 1. Kills others. Antiabortionists, religious warriors, fag draggers, black killers, al quaida, etc. If only they realized that god kills those who kill theirselves. Or something.
For what it's worth, Quakers are nothing like the Amish or Mennonites. The common stereotypes of Quakers seem to be based almost entirely on a depiction found on oatmeal boxes made by a company that has no affiliation with the Religious Society of Friends.
Male Computer Scientists and System Analysts made an average of $56,955 in a year. Women on the other hand made $47,797, which is almost $10,000 less. As you can see we do make less.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but those figures are just the median earnings in a profession, and they don't take into account experience/seniority and hours worked. Again, I'm not claiming that women aren't paid less when everything else is held constant, but the difference is much more subtle and difficult to quantify than is often claimed.
"As long as you get payed less, for doing less work, I don't see a problem, either." I think you and I have reached an agreement. My flexible 8 hour day of 4 hours at home and 4 hours at work does seem like a fair deal suddenly, doesn't it.
You're replying to the wrong person. That quote isn't mine.
Well since women get paid less in general anyway, I don't see a problem.
Do you have a reference for this? The oft-cited statistic about this (72% something-or-other) isn't relevant, since looks at salaries across all professions, rather than comparing the salaries within a given profession. It wouldn't surprise me if women earned less than men on average for doing the same job; however, the "common knowledge" about this issue is very misleading.
Seriously, this type of watered down, glamorized, "math can be fun" books just reinforce the idea that school-level mathematics is something only a few nerds can master.
You might be right. Overall, I agree with you; rather than encouraging people to study math, we should make sure that people aren't being discouraged for studying math.
I would agree with you, but the change has to come from those doing the discouraging, because encouraging one group more than another is the same as discouraging another group. In other words, promoting women can (and has) led to boys falling behind academically. Fixing the gap isn't the responsibility of those who aren't perpetuating it, especially when it comes at the cost of another group.
My concern is that some segments of the population are, in some way or another, being discouraged from studying math and science. Aside from that, I'm not interested in making the demographic makeup of the math and science community match that of the population as a whole.
You're absolutely right about boys falling behind girls academically. That's certainly something to be concerned about. However, math and the physical sciences are still male-dominated. I don't care that math and science are male-dominated, per se: if it were the case that men are just inherently more interested in science, then there would be no point trying to artificially change this, but if girls and young women are somehow being discouraged from studying math and science, then that's something that we should work to change.
What is the point of forcing (or "encouraging") people to learn mathematics at all? Those who want to learn it, can use regular textbooks because the subject is interesting by itself, without horoscopic bastardizations. And those who don't want to learn -- well, there are some 3 billion people in Asia whose children do learn;)
The concern is that some segments of the American population (women and some ethnic groups) might be discouraged from doing math. I've seen this first-hand. Several years ago, I spent a year working in high school math classes as part of an NSF graduate teaching fellowship, and I saw that remedial classes had a disproportionate number of black students. The troubling part was that many of these students were capable of much more, and really didn't belong in remedial classes. Now, I have no idea why this was the case; it could be part "institutionalized racism", it could be due to socioeconomic factors, or it could have been something else entirely. But on more than one occasion, I had students make comments along the lines of: "we're black; we don't do math." Seriously. Now, maybe these students were just trying to get out of doing their homework, but I got the impression that they really saw academic achievement (particularly in math) as a "white thing."
I'm not one to advocate diversity in an academic field solely for the sake of diversity. Math doesn't depend on the race or gender of the mathematician. However, if there are students who are being discouraged from studying math in some way or another because of their gender, or race, or socioeconomic status, then that troubles me greatly, and it's something that we should work to change.
What, are you suggesting that monkeys (who are probably cousins or something) learn SIGNIFICANTLY DIFFERENTLY from the next monkey in the line of cages?
Yes, perhaps.
Learning that is pretty much built in and hard wired and generally not a variable in most critters.
That's a bold assumption. Where is the science to back it up?
On the other hand, I am a pedant. I pay close attention to fonts. I notice when a single character has been substituted because the specified font didn't have a glyph for a particular codepoint.
That reminds me of this message on Donald Knuth's webpage. As much as I appreciate both the fonts and the typesetting provided by TeX, I doubt I would ever notice the difference between the deltas.
Even if the rest of the methodology is sound (and based on the description in TFA, I'm skeptical), an experiment two subjects is not sufficient for their conclusions. With only two subjects, any conclusion is suspect.
It simply shouldn't be a crime to record something. Period!!
Out of curiosity, do you think it should be legal to record any conversation that you can hear, regardless of whether the other participants know or consent to the recording?
It would be a crime also if the person *remembered* what they saw and wrote down word for word the script in the movie, no? This is also unreasonable. People are telling you what you can and cannot do or say.
That's really not the same. You can't reconstruct the complete audio-visual experience of a movie from memory and put it up on a BitTorrent site.
his is no different than Google Documents & Spreadsheets. It's just ad-supported office applications.
A large part of Google's success has been that they deliver targeted and relatively non-obtrusive ads. I often click on Google's ads, because they're relevant. When they aren't useful, they don't bother me, since they aren't animated or loud or otherwise distracting.
Incidentally, I've never noticed an ad while using Google Docs & Spreadsheets, so I'm not sure how they are working advertising into the service. When I'm searching the web, Google's "Sponsored Links" are often exactly what I'm looking for. However, when I'm editing a document, it's very unlikely that I'll click through an advertisement, and my tolerance for distractions is much lower.
What kind of idiot takes a camcorder into a theater? Unless she spent the last 15 years or so in a cave, she should know that they go out of their way to bust people for this.
I don't recall seeing many stories on these crackdowns outside of geek-oriented media. At a movie recently, I explained to some friends about how some theaters detect illegal taping, and they were surprised. In fact, they didn't know that new releases are often pirated via camcorder.
Then again, I'm well over 19, so I don't claim to be in touch with a typical 19-year-old knows about piracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's what happens if you wear a "Suspected Terrorist" button:
http://freetotravel.org/terrorist.html
Huh? I have no idea what your point is. I understand that you're disputing what makes something "unconscionable", but answer this: should people do things that they think are unconscionable? Maybe you could enlighten those of us who don't have access to your copy of What's Right and What's Wrong: A Complete Reference.
Lessee . . . you rambled incomprehensibly and said some really dumb things. I pointed this out. Therefore, I'm a troll who can't think critically. Did I get that right? If I agree with you and say that everything you write is correct and insightful, will that mean that I've learned to think critically?
As for ethics and morality courses: are you serious? Really? Can you even take a course in "morality" at a community college? I know colleges offer ethics courses -- I had to take one as an undergrad -- but morality?
Thanks for the advice, though.
Things I've learned from your post:
1) Vegetarians lack the self-control necessary to eat meat.
2) It's wrong to avoid doing unconscionable things.
Are there any other deep thoughts you'd like to share?
We're talking about the iPhone, here. The iPhone is not subsidized by AT&T, but the 2-year contract is still mandatory.
Three times, actually, at least if you use 'make bootstrap'. GCC is built with the system compiler (stage 1), then it uses the resulting compiler to build itself (stage 2), then it uses the stage 2 compiler to build itself again (stage 3), and finally it compares the stage 2 and stage 3 compilers.
Tuning your compiler for specific hardware might make the compiler run faster, but it absolutely should not affect the output. If a program's output differs as a result of its compile-time optimizations, then something is probably wrong.
This "you have no business compiling..." nonsense is just baseless elitism. Your list has a lot of subtle variants, and the differences between some of them are inconsequential for most users. I've got a couple of compile jobs running at the moment (regression testing patches before I commit them to a subversion repository), and I don't know the CPUTYPE on all of the machines. The finest distinction I usually make is x86-compatible vs. PPC vs. MIPS/SPARC/Alpha/etc. and 32 vs. 64-bits. If I were compiling a high-performance numerical app, it might be worth tracking down more information (e.g. what sort of vector-processing unit is available), but it usually doesn't matter. In a given day, I might be testing my code on Linux on an x86, Opteron, or Itanium processor; on Darwin on a G4, G5, x86-compatible, or x86_64 compatible processor; on AIX/Power5, or perhaps something more obscure. I'm certainly not going to waste a lot brain cycles figuring out the difference between the itanium or itanium2 CPUTYPEs when I've got real work to do.
I agree that there are other places to learn the skills I mentioned, though I believe that studying math is the best way to learn to think logically and abstractly. I readily concede that this is just an opinion, though.
Yeah, that sounds pretty typical. Math classes sometimes do more harm than good. The students in my college math courses often have to overcome misconceptions and phobias instilled by lousy math classes. There's no point in forcing students to memorize algorithms without any understanding. The value of studying math is not just learning how to solve a problem, but also discovering why a solution works, and how to generalize that information to solve other problems.
Sounds like a good teacher. I suspect your high school math experience would have been different if you'd had a math teacher like this guy.
The value of the math content in a curriculum is more than just "useful math", in the same way that composition, literature, art, science, and history courses have value far beyond the explicit content. It's true that the specific mathematical skills that are taught in high school and college math are not necessary for most people. However, the rigorous logical analysis and problem solving skills necessary in mathematics are absolutely essential to an educated person.
I've forgotten most of the specific content of my literature courses, but they were part of how I learned how to read critically. I don't remember much from my college chemistry courses, but they helped me to think scientifically. I've forgotten many of the details from my history, art, and social science courses, but along the way I learned to analyze and appreciate the world around me.
The purpose of an education is to learn to think, and mathematics is a crucial part of that process.
For what it's worth, Quakers are nothing like the Amish or Mennonites. The common stereotypes of Quakers seem to be based almost entirely on a depiction found on oatmeal boxes made by a company that has no affiliation with the Religious Society of Friends.
No, you're guilty when a jury determines that you were impaired.
Uh, you do realize that the people concerned with this have actually studied the subject, right? For your reference, here are some slides from an interesting talk on the subject:
http://www.cnrt.scsu.edu/content/faculty/2005/dea
Correct me if I'm wrong, but those figures are just the median earnings in a profession, and they don't take into account experience/seniority and hours worked. Again, I'm not claiming that women aren't paid less when everything else is held constant, but the difference is much more subtle and difficult to quantify than is often claimed.
You're replying to the wrong person. That quote isn't mine.
Do you have a reference for this? The oft-cited statistic about this (72% something-or-other) isn't relevant, since looks at salaries across all professions, rather than comparing the salaries within a given profession. It wouldn't surprise me if women earned less than men on average for doing the same job; however, the "common knowledge" about this issue is very misleading.
You might be right. Overall, I agree with you; rather than encouraging people to study math, we should make sure that people aren't being discouraged for studying math.
My concern is that some segments of the population are, in some way or another, being discouraged from studying math and science. Aside from that, I'm not interested in making the demographic makeup of the math and science community match that of the population as a whole.
You're absolutely right about boys falling behind girls academically. That's certainly something to be concerned about. However, math and the physical sciences are still male-dominated. I don't care that math and science are male-dominated, per se: if it were the case that men are just inherently more interested in science, then there would be no point trying to artificially change this, but if girls and young women are somehow being discouraged from studying math and science, then that's something that we should work to change.
The concern is that some segments of the American population (women and some ethnic groups) might be discouraged from doing math. I've seen this first-hand. Several years ago, I spent a year working in high school math classes as part of an NSF graduate teaching fellowship, and I saw that remedial classes had a disproportionate number of black students. The troubling part was that many of these students were capable of much more, and really didn't belong in remedial classes. Now, I have no idea why this was the case; it could be part "institutionalized racism", it could be due to socioeconomic factors, or it could have been something else entirely. But on more than one occasion, I had students make comments along the lines of: "we're black; we don't do math." Seriously. Now, maybe these students were just trying to get out of doing their homework, but I got the impression that they really saw academic achievement (particularly in math) as a "white thing."
I'm not one to advocate diversity in an academic field solely for the sake of diversity. Math doesn't depend on the race or gender of the mathematician. However, if there are students who are being discouraged from studying math in some way or another because of their gender, or race, or socioeconomic status, then that troubles me greatly, and it's something that we should work to change.
Yes, perhaps.
That's a bold assumption. Where is the science to back it up?
That reminds me of this message on Donald Knuth's webpage. As much as I appreciate both the fonts and the typesetting provided by TeX, I doubt I would ever notice the difference between the deltas.
Oops, that should be: "an experiment with two subjects
Even if the rest of the methodology is sound (and based on the description in TFA, I'm skeptical), an experiment two subjects is not sufficient for their conclusions. With only two subjects, any conclusion is suspect.
Out of curiosity, do you think it should be legal to record any conversation that you can hear, regardless of whether the other participants know or consent to the recording?
That's really not the same. You can't reconstruct the complete audio-visual experience of a movie from memory and put it up on a BitTorrent site.
A large part of Google's success has been that they deliver targeted and relatively non-obtrusive ads. I often click on Google's ads, because they're relevant. When they aren't useful, they don't bother me, since they aren't animated or loud or otherwise distracting.
Incidentally, I've never noticed an ad while using Google Docs & Spreadsheets, so I'm not sure how they are working advertising into the service. When I'm searching the web, Google's "Sponsored Links" are often exactly what I'm looking for. However, when I'm editing a document, it's very unlikely that I'll click through an advertisement, and my tolerance for distractions is much lower.
I don't recall seeing many stories on these crackdowns outside of geek-oriented media. At a movie recently, I explained to some friends about how some theaters detect illegal taping, and they were surprised. In fact, they didn't know that new releases are often pirated via camcorder.
Then again, I'm well over 19, so I don't claim to be in touch with a typical 19-year-old knows about piracy.