Ask dried-up, tired questions, and you'll probably get dried-up, tired term papers.
But the main point of education, up until the very end of graduate school, is almost entirely to bring students up to speed on what humans already know, and help them form opinions on what millions of people already have opinions on. Just because I have formed an opinion on Galileo's trial by the Catholic Church, or on the future of Social Security, does that mean that no other students need to form an opinions on these?
That said, I think that there's a similarity between teachers defending the term paper by searching Google and TurnItIn.com, and the movie and music industries trying to defend old business models by DRM. There are probably a number of other ways to accomplish the same ends, or ways to tweak the term paper thing to discourage cheating. Some that come to mind:
After each term paper, set up a 10-minute interview for each student. Ask the student about the paper, the argument, and the sources. Students who did a cut-and-paste job without learning anything will show up clearly enough.
Randomly group students into groups of four, and have them read and discuss each others' term papers. (Still haven't thought this one through, entirely)
This is easy to say, but not necessarily so easy to do -- especially for large companies. It really takes a start-up to risk a totally new business model.
Here's the thing: everyone complains about "the big studios", but the basic problem here is one of distribution -- i.e., once the movie is made, marketing and selling the movie. Distributors buy movies from the people who made them, and try to sell them. They take on all the risk that a movie won't make a dime. In that sense, they're like venture capitalists -- they expect to lose on 4 out of 5 movies*, and so want a much bigger return on movies that are "hits".
So here's an idea: why don't you come up with a new business model for a distribution company. Find out what it will take to make it happen, put together a team, raise some venture capital, buy some movies, distribute them, and make some money. There are plenty of movies out there not locked into the whole system that you could buy.
If your business model works better than the big distributors then besides making a boatload of cash, you'll:
Change the entire industry
Save the film industry from piracy
Save the masses from DRM
Heck, if VC's don't like your idea, you could probably get slashdotters to invest $10 apiece and raise $10 mil in no time -- provided your business model makes sense.
* Don't forget that 87% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. -Jesus
Look here, you rich people. Weep and groan with anguish because of all the terrible troubles ahead of you... Your gold and silver have become worthless. The very wealth you were counting on will eat away your flesh like fire. This treasure you have accumulated will stand as evidence against you on the day of judgment. For listen! Hear the cries of the field workers whom you have cheated of their pay. The wages you held back cry out against you. The cries of those who harvest your fields have reached the ears of the Lord of Heaven's Armies. - The Apostle James
How did conservative Christianity get in the same party as Big Business?
The answer is that there are not two viewpoints, but about 1000 different viewpoints in the US. But because of the way the voting system in the US is set up, there can be at most two parties. This guarantees that there will be 500 viewpoints in one party, and 500 in another, with everyone choosing the lesser of two evils -- or, being bamboozled into thinking that they really do agree with the 500 other viewpoints in their party.
To illustrate the point: In the 2000 election, how could I vote both pro-life and anti-Microsoft? Gore would certainly have continued the Clinton administration's policy of seeking to break the company up, something I would have loved to see after reading the judge's findings of fact. But what am I supposed to do, vote for someone who is openly committed to a practice I consider a barbaric assault on the most helpless of our society (i.e., abortion)?
In the US we do pay as we earn (with some exceptions). So at the end of the year, your company sends you a little form that tells you how much you earned and how much they actually payed. Then you figure out how much you should have paid in taxes. If you paid more than you should have, they give you money back (a 'tax return'), or you have to send them money.
The tax system is an easy centralized place for the US to do things like "incentives". Have children? You get an exemption. Lose money from your farm? Donate money? Put money in a retirement account? Doing activity X, Y, or Z that we want to encourage? Take x, y, or z from the money you should have paid us. All of these things reduce the end amount that you "should" have paid.
I don't know how other countries do it, so I can't really contrast it.
My huge question about this, though, is why if the technology is so good, it hasn't been implemented to help people with neurological abnormalities better control the world around them.
There may be a couple of reasons. First, the computer gaming market is a lot bigger than the quadriplegic market. Would you rather try to sell sell a $100 product to a million geeked-out gamers, or a $100K product to a thousand quadriplegics? If it makes a hit with the first million, you can bet that market's going to grow. Let's hope the quadriplegic market isn't going to grow anytime soon.
It may be easier to get into as well -- the "geek factor" will sell a lot of these, even if they only work sort-of well to begin with. There's no medical standards to pass, there's no HMOs to convince that the technology is worthwhile, there's no liability unless the product actually zaps you.
If gamers are willing to be "guinea pigs" to test out and hone the technology, you can bet someone will go after the medical market when it makes economic sense to do so.
It's been a long time since I've studied evolution, but last time I heard, your explanation doesn't match up wit the fossil record. There's an effect called "punctuated equilibrium", whereby the fossil record sees long periods of very minor changes, and then sudden seismic shifts.
To take your example, suppose that you were monitoring someone's daily routine. He lives in a small village in middle-America, and pretty much stays within 10 miles of his house. This, you'd call "walking". No problem.
But occasinally, he just suddenly jumps thousands of miles; say, to Sidney Australia, spends a month or so "walking" there, then suddenly appears in Moscow. Do you call this "walking" too?
It's clearly a different phenomena. To say "going from home to the grocery store and going from home to Sidney is the same thing; it's all jut walking" is calling the facts what you want to for your own reasons, not confronting reality.
The analogy was probably come up with by the PR department at the university. I had a similar experience with a project I did for my PhD work. We were using execution replay to efficiently do a forensic post-mortem analysis. The PR department called my advisor, and after a long discussion, came up with the analogy of a "security camera". This was in the University's press release, which got copied to all the major news outlets. It was even used in an interview the BBC did with my advisor.
The analogy was always annoying to me, as I've rarely had trouble explaining the gist of what we were doing in an accurate way to laypersons. In fact, if people had read the article and asked be based on that, the "security camera" analogy made it take longer to explain what was actually going on, because the underlying technology is so different. But the PR people wanted something extraordinarily simple that everyone already knew about, and didn't care so much if it wasn't that accurate.
This sounds like exactly the same thing:
"So, what's your research?"
"Well, we use different phases of rockets for more efficient blah blah blah..."
"Hmm, start-up is different than long-term... kind of like a gears in a car?"
"Well, sort of, but not really. You use different configurations in different phases; but really, it's misleading, because car gears work by blah blah blah blah."
"We don't care how it works so much, but the effects. Different configurations for different speeds to increase efficency."
"OK, well... I guess we can go with that...."
If the supernatural can be measured and tested, then it is no longer supernatural.
Measured? Perhaps, and perhaps not... Tested? It depends. The main thing is that with God, you're not dealing with a natural process that always does the same thing; you're dealing with a Person, who doesn't really like to be analyzed.
Consider what would happen if someone decided to perform an experiment on you at the dinner table; he wanted to know the correlation between asking you to do something and you doing it. So he asks you to pass the salt 15 times. You might give it to him the first couple of times, but by the 4th time, you'd be sick of him messing with you. And if you knew he was messing with you from the beginning, you'd probably just ignore him entirely.
But God doesn't mind being tested when you really need it. In the link I posted, there's the story of Gideon. An angel had appeared to Gideon, told him that Yahweh (God) wanted him to go to the local town & tear down the altar to Baal (a god). Gideon hadn't had much experience with Yahweh, but he knew the local town people would be pretty pissed if he did that. So he performed a simple test, to make sure he wasn't going crazy; using, essentially, the scientific method.
One evening, he put out a thing of wool, prayed to Yahweh and said, "If you're the real deal, make the wool wet and the ground around it dry tomorrow morning." The next morning, the wool was wet, and the ground dry.
The next evening, he put out the wool again and prayed, "If you're the real deal, make the ground wet and the wool dry." The next morning, the ground was wet, and the wool dry.
I don't understand why such a large portion of the Church is opposed to science and evolution.
Well, speaking as someone who goes to church, there are a couple of issues here.
First of all, there are the following two tendencies:
The tendency of people to associate "science" with "proven to be true".
The tendency of scientifically minded people to associate "science" with "naturalism" -- i.e., that science looks only for naturalistic explanations for all phenomena.
Combine these, and you get the idea that "truth" == "naturalism"; or that science has somehow proven that there is no supernatural. I'm sure if you look at posts here on slashdot, you will find this attitude quite widespread. What's more, children are going to school and basically being taught that "science" and "logic" go hand in hand, but that "religion" is some other random thing that people just make up. Naturally, religious parents object to their children being taught this.
The fact is that either #1 is true, or #2 is true, but they cannot both be 100% true unless there really is no such thing as the supernatural. I think religious people would be happy if one of two things happened:
Scientists were more humble with their claims; i.e., they said up front, "Scientific theories are based on the assumption that the supernatural never interferes with human events. If there is a supernatural world that interferes with the natural world, some of our theories may be totally wrong."
Scientists were willing to use the scientific method to entertain supernatural explanations.
In fact, it looks from the excise of "natural" from the definition of science, the Kansas board was trying to do do just that. (For an example of someone using the scientific method to test supernatural explanations, see the story of Gideon.)
The second factor has to do with people who prefer a simple, literal interpretation of the Bible. Genesis says, simply, "God did x... the morning and the evening were the first day. God did y.... the morning and the evening were the second day." It sounds to them like the evolutionary description, or anything that implies that the universe is more than 10,000 years old, is contradicts that. They feel like they have to chose either the Bible or science. Science doesn't give them a sense of purpose, or explain the meaning of life or why it's so hard; science never helped their marriage or saved them from self-destructive behaviors; science doesn't satisfy their religious longings. The Bible does. So, they chose the Bible.
Or to make your argument stronger: Would you buy a Unix-like OS without a shell? Without a text editor? Without perl or a compiler? These are required to use the basic functionality of the system; it's part of what you expect a computer to be able to do. Well, modern GUIs you expect to be able to use windows, surf the web, and play your MP3s. I'd argue that antivirus and anti-spyware capabilities comes under that too.
You're absolutely right, but people don't always think that way.
I'd been contracting for a company for a while, and they asked me to come on full-time. I thought it would be a great opportunty to do some cool stuff, and get some experience inside the company, before I went on to do other things, so I decided I'd work for them for a year and then move on.
Well, I made the mistake of thinking it would be considerate to tell them that I only wanted to work for a year; that seriously screwed up the negotiations for a few weeks.
The thing is, if I'd just come and worked for them, and then after a year decided to leave, nobody would have batted an eyelash. In fact, while I had been contracting for them, they had had a new CEO come on and then leave after 6 months. But because I told them up front, it was a big deal.
The manager I was talking told me about how they'd be afraid to give me important projects to work on if they knew I'd be leaving, because it would be harder for someone else to maintain or fix when I was gone. Well, I'm sorry dude, but that's the situation with every employee in your company. They may leave at any time, and if they do, you'll have to deal with someone else taking over his code.
Anyway, they've lost their right to that kind of consideration from me. Two weeks is all they're going to get.
You seem to be under the mistaken illusion that "Republicans" are a homogenous group of people. In reality, there a thousand political viewpoints in this country, but because of the way the voting system is set up, there can really be at most two parties. That means that any group that is going to have any say in the government has to choose one or the other; which means five hundred in one party and five hundred in the other. There's a lot of variety in there.
Take me. In the 2000 election, there was no way that I could vote both Pro-life and Anti-Microsoft. It really pissed me off that Bush gave MS a slap on the wrist. I'm pretty sure Gore would have been tougher. But ya gotta choose the lesser of two evils.
Or, take the averge Catholic pro-life stance: anti-abortion, anti-death-penalty. Guess what? "Conservatives" are anti-abortion (on average) and "Liberals" are anti-death-penalty (on average). Where do you vote?
Or take the average blue-collar union worker. How many do you think really care about righs for homosexuals, or even pro-women's rights? But what are they supposed to do, vote for "trickle-down economics" and pro-big-business interests?
Over Christmas, my mother and grandmother bought a new computer and finally upgraded to DSL. My young cousin, who lives next door to them, has been coming over and using the computer, including MySpace. My mother, who watches a lot of CSI (now there's an alarmist show), asked me if we could put some kind of password or filter or something on the computer.
My initial reaction was that technological limitations like passwords and filtering are an arms race -- and a race that my mother and grandmother are bound to lose. If a 14-year old really wants to look at pr0n, he's going to be able to work around whatever limitations you have on him. It's best to counsel him on the best way to act, and trust him.
On the other hand, even if he wants to do what's right, there will always be a temptation there. Sex is a very powerful force, and has caused many men to destroy their career and their lives. Accountability can be helpful. If he knows that Aunt K. or Grandma will be occasionally browsing through the pictures he's downloaded, it will help him to do what he knows is right in moments of weakness; and it will help his family to help him if he does start doing stuff he shouldn't.
In any case, my grandmother certainly has a right to say how her computer and her internet connection are used.
There have been plenty of studies, but apparently most people aren't really aware of them.
Two big factors:
Our culture stereotypes women as poor at math and technical subjects. This actually causes many women to perform more poorly than men in math and technical subjects.
For those who are confident of their abilities, many find aspects of the male-dominated tech culture distasteful, especially on OSS projects.
For number one, see Stereotype threat, and regarding women, specifically Stereotype Threat and Women's Math Performance. In that paper, they took a standard engineering aptitude exam and randomly chose some questions. Then they took sample populations of men and women, and told them different things about the test. One group they told that the test was an aptitude predictor; another they told that they were just helping to test the test itself; another were told specifically that the test had been designed to be gender-neutral. What they found was that women did significantly worse than men when they thought it was an aptitude test; and they did best when they were told that it was gender-neutural, even though the questions were exactly the same.
For number two, see some of the findings from the FLOSS Gender Integrated Report of Findings. One of the findings was that in many OSS projects, reputation is built by "flaming". This is off-putting to a lot of people, but especially to women. One of the stories in the report is from a woman developer on the Debian project, who after rebuking a younger person for making a joke about rape, was told "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." Obviously there are some women willing to put up with this crap, but there are probably a ton of women who could excel in OSS, but never get involved or leave because of the culture.
The solution? To number one, probably just more widespread information.
Number two is harder -- it involves, in part, men changing their culture. Men and women are different, and that difference is valuable; so if men want more women in tech, they're going to have to change the way they operate.
That's an interesting idea, but I don't quite buy it. What percentage of the recording industry's revenue in the 90's was really due to people buying replacement for their vinyl or tapes? I'd be shocked if it was even close to (to pick a number out of a hat) 10%. If everything were going according to the status quo, a 10% loss should be no big deal. Then again, I'm not a business executive.
One of the problems, it seems to me, is that the record companies even think in terms of "intellecutal property". In real-world, property is something you invest to buy, and then it can make money for you. You can rent it, farm it, etc. and all you need to do is maintain it or "work" it. They want to treat their songs like that -- something that can just magically keep creating money for them if they maintain or work it right.
The problem, of course, is that the analogy of "property" breaks down for "intellectual" things:
You can't make more real property, but you can make more intellectual property.
You can't copy real property infinitely at little or not cost, but you can copy intellectual property at little or no cost.
Of course, making more of it is harder than just farming what they have, so they're trying to make a farming system so they don't have to work as hard.
But you haven't completed the social engineering scenario. Here's the problem -- after they put their card in & type in their pin to the fake machine, the money won't be paid to the store. Because the system is really just a mock-up designed to/look/ like a chip-and-pin system, it won't actually talk to the bank to get the store its money.
So to collect anybody's pin, the store basically needs to eat the money they would have gotten for the transaction. Not a cheap thing to do.
I suppose they could pull some thing like, "Oh, this new chip-and-pin thing is acting flaky... let me try the old one". But if they do that for every single customer, or if they pull out a new one just for certain customers, it looks mighty suspicious. They won't get very far that way. Some suspicious old lady will be calling the authorities within a day or two.
I haven't looked at research about song birds or whales, but let's take what you say to be true. Do we know what the "taste" of birds is based on? Is it based on how aesthetically pleasing it is? Is it based on how well it expresses an emotion or soul of something? Is there any evidence that whale song or bird song are intended to express their emotions?
About self-sacrificing behavior: there are plenty of animals that have altrusitic instincts (including humans). But is this behavior done out of a sense of moral duty? I have a cat, and she certainly has emotions and affections. She knows there are rules in the house and will generally obey them, but I never get the idea that she obeys the rules out of moral obligation; rather, she knows the consequences and wants to avoid them. I certainly do a lot of "right" things out of instinct or self-interest, but that doesn't negate the fact that I do have a sense of moral duty that occasionally pops up and tells me to do something entirely opposed to my strongest instincts or desires.
Again, I haven't seen the data on the chickens, but that sounds a lot like superstition, not religion -- and there is a difference. I've seen a lot of people approach religion like a superstition -- trying to see "signs" in everything and figure out the "trick" to what God wants them to do, or wearing crosses and other religious paraphenalia like good luck charms. ("My Jesus decal does quite a trick / Right up on my dashboard I stick it / A good luck charm / It keeps me from harm / And saves me from speeding tickets" -- Smash Hit by All Star United) I've also seen real religion -- a lot of genuine Christianity, some genuine Islam as well. There is a clear difference.
Most people in the world see things as they already believe them to be.
That's true. However, I should point out, that in general it's appropriate for someone to fit a new piece of data into their existing intellectual framework before reworking or discarding bits of it. If someone completely changed their entire belief system every time someone presented them with a new argument, we wouldn't call that "open-minded", we'd call it "flaky" and "unreliable".
Except for the religious fools who won't accept the obvious, you mean?
When was the last time you saw an animal create art? Or music? Or contemplate quantum physics? Or do something out of moral duty? Or exhibit any signs of any sort of religion at all? If your dog, or any other animal on the planet did any of these things that humans do on a regular basis, it would make world-wide news.
Yes, there are certainly some similarities between the biology of humans and animals. But to ignore the differences is just as willfully blind as those who ignore the similarities.
If you want to read even more amazing examples of anti-competitive behavior, go back to the "Findings of Fact" from the anti-trust ruling, back in 1999, I believe. It's 300 pages of in-depth analysis of Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior from the 90's, which they totally got away with. They've had to tone it down a bit since then, but the basic problem is still there.
The most recent example is the allegation that Linux is violating MS patents, and the implication that if businesses use Linux, they open themselves up to IP lawsuits. If they really cared about Linux infringing their IP, they would point to the patent and the code, and the Linux kernel maintainers would find a work-around (assuming a valid patent). As it is, it's much more useful as a scare tactic -- and according to Novell, it's been effective at scaring away big customers. Hence the Novell-Microsoft deal.
In my experience in the military, the "buy your own supplemental equipment" policy was effectively a way to beta-test products before investing in them.
For example, the Camelback. Ten years ago, only canteens were issued. Then, someone in the military bought a personal Camelback; pretty soon, half of the soldiers had them, and the other half wanted them. A couple of years later, Camelbacks became standard issue.
I suspect other fun things like glow-sticks were similar.
It's quite possible that at this moment, military tacticians are discussing the usefulness of such devices, and that in the near future they may be contacting the makers of SillyString to investigate a deal.
Someone else pointed out potential problems with cans exploding when punctured or under heat. Another reason for the military to move slowly is that if an individual buys something like that, it's at his own risk. Silly String wasn't designed to be used in combat conditions. If the military provides it, they will be held responsible for it being used in combat conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
But the main point of education, up until the very end of graduate school, is almost entirely to bring students up to speed on what humans already know, and help them form opinions on what millions of people already have opinions on. Just because I have formed an opinion on Galileo's trial by the Catholic Church, or on the future of Social Security, does that mean that no other students need to form an opinions on these?
That said, I think that there's a similarity between teachers defending the term paper by searching Google and TurnItIn.com, and the movie and music industries trying to defend old business models by DRM. There are probably a number of other ways to accomplish the same ends, or ways to tweak the term paper thing to discourage cheating. Some that come to mind:
This is easy to say, but not necessarily so easy to do -- especially for large companies. It really takes a start-up to risk a totally new business model.
Here's the thing: everyone complains about "the big studios", but the basic problem here is one of distribution -- i.e., once the movie is made, marketing and selling the movie. Distributors buy movies from the people who made them, and try to sell them. They take on all the risk that a movie won't make a dime. In that sense, they're like venture capitalists -- they expect to lose on 4 out of 5 movies*, and so want a much bigger return on movies that are "hits".
So here's an idea: why don't you come up with a new business model for a distribution company. Find out what it will take to make it happen, put together a team, raise some venture capital, buy some movies, distribute them, and make some money. There are plenty of movies out there not locked into the whole system that you could buy.
If your business model works better than the big distributors then besides making a boatload of cash, you'll:
Heck, if VC's don't like your idea, you could probably get slashdotters to invest $10 apiece and raise $10 mil in no time -- provided your business model makes sense.
* Don't forget that 87% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Actually, although a "tertiary pointer" is mentioned in the structure, only the initial and secondary pointers are mentioned in the further points.
So it seems he's patenting, "Using a triply-linked list as a doubly-linked list".
Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. -Jesus
Look here, you rich people. Weep and groan with anguish because of all the terrible troubles ahead of you... Your gold and silver have become worthless. The very wealth you were counting on will eat away your flesh like fire. This treasure you have accumulated will stand as evidence against you on the day of judgment. For listen! Hear the cries of the field workers whom you have cheated of their pay. The wages you held back cry out against you. The cries of those who harvest your fields have reached the ears of the Lord of Heaven's Armies. - The Apostle James
How did conservative Christianity get in the same party as Big Business?
The answer is that there are not two viewpoints, but about 1000 different viewpoints in the US. But because of the way the voting system in the US is set up, there can be at most two parties. This guarantees that there will be 500 viewpoints in one party, and 500 in another, with everyone choosing the lesser of two evils -- or, being bamboozled into thinking that they really do agree with the 500 other viewpoints in their party.
To illustrate the point: In the 2000 election, how could I vote both pro-life and anti-Microsoft? Gore would certainly have continued the Clinton administration's policy of seeking to break the company up, something I would have loved to see after reading the judge's findings of fact. But what am I supposed to do, vote for someone who is openly committed to a practice I consider a barbaric assault on the most helpless of our society (i.e., abortion)?
In the US we do pay as we earn (with some exceptions). So at the end of the year, your company sends you a little form that tells you how much you earned and how much they actually payed. Then you figure out how much you should have paid in taxes. If you paid more than you should have, they give you money back (a 'tax return'), or you have to send them money.
The tax system is an easy centralized place for the US to do things like "incentives". Have children? You get an exemption. Lose money from your farm? Donate money? Put money in a retirement account? Doing activity X, Y, or Z that we want to encourage? Take x, y, or z from the money you should have paid us. All of these things reduce the end amount that you "should" have paid.
I don't know how other countries do it, so I can't really contrast it.
There may be a couple of reasons. First, the computer gaming market is a lot bigger than the quadriplegic market. Would you rather try to sell sell a $100 product to a million geeked-out gamers, or a $100K product to a thousand quadriplegics? If it makes a hit with the first million, you can bet that market's going to grow. Let's hope the quadriplegic market isn't going to grow anytime soon.
It may be easier to get into as well -- the "geek factor" will sell a lot of these, even if they only work sort-of well to begin with. There's no medical standards to pass, there's no HMOs to convince that the technology is worthwhile, there's no liability unless the product actually zaps you.
If gamers are willing to be "guinea pigs" to test out and hone the technology, you can bet someone will go after the medical market when it makes economic sense to do so.
It's been a long time since I've studied evolution, but last time I heard, your explanation doesn't match up wit the fossil record. There's an effect called "punctuated equilibrium", whereby the fossil record sees long periods of very minor changes, and then sudden seismic shifts.
To take your example, suppose that you were monitoring someone's daily routine. He lives in a small village in middle-America, and pretty much stays within 10 miles of his house. This, you'd call "walking". No problem.
But occasinally, he just suddenly jumps thousands of miles; say, to Sidney Australia, spends a month or so "walking" there, then suddenly appears in Moscow. Do you call this "walking" too?
It's clearly a different phenomena. To say "going from home to the grocery store and going from home to Sidney is the same thing; it's all jut walking" is calling the facts what you want to for your own reasons, not confronting reality.
When I was young, our family ophtamolagist was named Ivan Doctor.
That's right -- Dr. I. Doctor, the eye doctor.
The analogy was probably come up with by the PR department at the university. I had a similar experience with a project I did for my PhD work. We were using execution replay to efficiently do a forensic post-mortem analysis. The PR department called my advisor, and after a long discussion, came up with the analogy of a "security camera". This was in the University's press release, which got copied to all the major news outlets. It was even used in an interview the BBC did with my advisor.
The analogy was always annoying to me, as I've rarely had trouble explaining the gist of what we were doing in an accurate way to laypersons. In fact, if people had read the article and asked be based on that, the "security camera" analogy made it take longer to explain what was actually going on, because the underlying technology is so different. But the PR people wanted something extraordinarily simple that everyone already knew about, and didn't care so much if it wasn't that accurate.
This sounds like exactly the same thing:
"So, what's your research?"
"Well, we use different phases of rockets for more efficient blah blah blah..."
"Hmm, start-up is different than long-term... kind of like a gears in a car?"
"Well, sort of, but not really. You use different configurations in different phases; but really, it's misleading, because car gears work by blah blah blah blah."
"We don't care how it works so much, but the effects. Different configurations for different speeds to increase efficency."
"OK, well... I guess we can go with that...."
Measured? Perhaps, and perhaps not... Tested? It depends. The main thing is that with God, you're not dealing with a natural process that always does the same thing; you're dealing with a Person, who doesn't really like to be analyzed.
Consider what would happen if someone decided to perform an experiment on you at the dinner table; he wanted to know the correlation between asking you to do something and you doing it. So he asks you to pass the salt 15 times. You might give it to him the first couple of times, but by the 4th time, you'd be sick of him messing with you. And if you knew he was messing with you from the beginning, you'd probably just ignore him entirely.
But God doesn't mind being tested when you really need it. In the link I posted, there's the story of Gideon. An angel had appeared to Gideon, told him that Yahweh (God) wanted him to go to the local town & tear down the altar to Baal (a god). Gideon hadn't had much experience with Yahweh, but he knew the local town people would be pretty pissed if he did that. So he performed a simple test, to make sure he wasn't going crazy; using, essentially, the scientific method.
One evening, he put out a thing of wool, prayed to Yahweh and said, "If you're the real deal, make the wool wet and the ground around it dry tomorrow morning." The next morning, the wool was wet, and the ground dry.
The next evening, he put out the wool again and prayed, "If you're the real deal, make the ground wet and the wool dry." The next morning, the ground was wet, and the wool dry.
So, he went and tore down the altar.
Well, speaking as someone who goes to church, there are a couple of issues here.
First of all, there are the following two tendencies:
Combine these, and you get the idea that "truth" == "naturalism"; or that science has somehow proven that there is no supernatural. I'm sure if you look at posts here on slashdot, you will find this attitude quite widespread. What's more, children are going to school and basically being taught that "science" and "logic" go hand in hand, but that "religion" is some other random thing that people just make up. Naturally, religious parents object to their children being taught this.
The fact is that either #1 is true, or #2 is true, but they cannot both be 100% true unless there really is no such thing as the supernatural. I think religious people would be happy if one of two things happened:
In fact, it looks from the excise of "natural" from the definition of science, the Kansas board was trying to do do just that. (For an example of someone using the scientific method to test supernatural explanations, see the story of Gideon.)
The second factor has to do with people who prefer a simple, literal interpretation of the Bible. Genesis says, simply, "God did x... the morning and the evening were the first day. God did y.... the morning and the evening were the second day." It sounds to them like the evolutionary description, or anything that implies that the universe is more than 10,000 years old, is contradicts that. They feel like they have to chose either the Bible or science. Science doesn't give them a sense of purpose, or explain the meaning of life or why it's so hard; science never helped their marriage or saved them from self-destructive behaviors; science doesn't satisfy their religious longings. The Bible does. So, they chose the Bible.
Or to make your argument stronger: Would you buy a Unix-like OS without a shell? Without a text editor? Without perl or a compiler? These are required to use the basic functionality of the system; it's part of what you expect a computer to be able to do. Well, modern GUIs you expect to be able to use windows, surf the web, and play your MP3s. I'd argue that antivirus and anti-spyware capabilities comes under that too.
Only if your employees are vampires.
You're absolutely right, but people don't always think that way.
I'd been contracting for a company for a while, and they asked me to come on full-time. I thought it would be a great opportunty to do some cool stuff, and get some experience inside the company, before I went on to do other things, so I decided I'd work for them for a year and then move on.
Well, I made the mistake of thinking it would be considerate to tell them that I only wanted to work for a year; that seriously screwed up the negotiations for a few weeks.
The thing is, if I'd just come and worked for them, and then after a year decided to leave, nobody would have batted an eyelash. In fact, while I had been contracting for them, they had had a new CEO come on and then leave after 6 months. But because I told them up front, it was a big deal.
The manager I was talking told me about how they'd be afraid to give me important projects to work on if they knew I'd be leaving, because it would be harder for someone else to maintain or fix when I was gone. Well, I'm sorry dude, but that's the situation with every employee in your company. They may leave at any time, and if they do, you'll have to deal with someone else taking over his code.
Anyway, they've lost their right to that kind of consideration from me. Two weeks is all they're going to get.
You seem to be under the mistaken illusion that "Republicans" are a homogenous group of people. In reality, there a thousand political viewpoints in this country, but because of the way the voting system is set up, there can really be at most two parties. That means that any group that is going to have any say in the government has to choose one or the other; which means five hundred in one party and five hundred in the other. There's a lot of variety in there.
Take me. In the 2000 election, there was no way that I could vote both Pro-life and Anti-Microsoft. It really pissed me off that Bush gave MS a slap on the wrist. I'm pretty sure Gore would have been tougher. But ya gotta choose the lesser of two evils.
Or, take the averge Catholic pro-life stance: anti-abortion, anti-death-penalty. Guess what? "Conservatives" are anti-abortion (on average) and "Liberals" are anti-death-penalty (on average). Where do you vote?
Or take the average blue-collar union worker. How many do you think really care about righs for homosexuals, or even pro-women's rights? But what are they supposed to do, vote for "trickle-down economics" and pro-big-business interests?
Over Christmas, my mother and grandmother bought a new computer and finally upgraded to DSL. My young cousin, who lives next door to them, has been coming over and using the computer, including MySpace. My mother, who watches a lot of CSI (now there's an alarmist show), asked me if we could put some kind of password or filter or something on the computer.
My initial reaction was that technological limitations like passwords and filtering are an arms race -- and a race that my mother and grandmother are bound to lose. If a 14-year old really wants to look at pr0n, he's going to be able to work around whatever limitations you have on him. It's best to counsel him on the best way to act, and trust him.
On the other hand, even if he wants to do what's right, there will always be a temptation there. Sex is a very powerful force, and has caused many men to destroy their career and their lives. Accountability can be helpful. If he knows that Aunt K. or Grandma will be occasionally browsing through the pictures he's downloaded, it will help him to do what he knows is right in moments of weakness; and it will help his family to help him if he does start doing stuff he shouldn't.
In any case, my grandmother certainly has a right to say how her computer and her internet connection are used.
There have been plenty of studies, but apparently most people aren't really aware of them.
Two big factors:
For number one, see Stereotype threat, and regarding women, specifically Stereotype Threat and Women's Math Performance. In that paper, they took a standard engineering aptitude exam and randomly chose some questions. Then they took sample populations of men and women, and told them different things about the test. One group they told that the test was an aptitude predictor; another they told that they were just helping to test the test itself; another were told specifically that the test had been designed to be gender-neutral. What they found was that women did significantly worse than men when they thought it was an aptitude test; and they did best when they were told that it was gender-neutural, even though the questions were exactly the same.
For number two, see some of the findings from the FLOSS Gender Integrated Report of Findings. One of the findings was that in many OSS projects, reputation is built by "flaming". This is off-putting to a lot of people, but especially to women. One of the stories in the report is from a woman developer on the Debian project, who after rebuking a younger person for making a joke about rape, was told "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." Obviously there are some women willing to put up with this crap, but there are probably a ton of women who could excel in OSS, but never get involved or leave because of the culture.
The solution? To number one, probably just more widespread information.
Number two is harder -- it involves, in part, men changing their culture. Men and women are different, and that difference is valuable; so if men want more women in tech, they're going to have to change the way they operate.
So, who uses FPGAs in a big way? Whom is this likely to affect?
That's an interesting idea, but I don't quite buy it. What percentage of the recording industry's revenue in the 90's was really due to people buying replacement for their vinyl or tapes? I'd be shocked if it was even close to (to pick a number out of a hat) 10%. If everything were going according to the status quo, a 10% loss should be no big deal. Then again, I'm not a business executive.
One of the problems, it seems to me, is that the record companies even think in terms of "intellecutal property". In real-world, property is something you invest to buy, and then it can make money for you. You can rent it, farm it, etc. and all you need to do is maintain it or "work" it. They want to treat their songs like that -- something that can just magically keep creating money for them if they maintain or work it right.
The problem, of course, is that the analogy of "property" breaks down for "intellectual" things:
Of course, making more of it is harder than just farming what they have, so they're trying to make a farming system so they don't have to work as hard.
But you haven't completed the social engineering scenario. Here's the problem -- after they put their card in & type in their pin to the fake machine, the money won't be paid to the store. Because the system is really just a mock-up designed to /look/ like a chip-and-pin system, it won't actually talk to the bank to get the store its money.
So to collect anybody's pin, the store basically needs to eat the money they would have gotten for the transaction. Not a cheap thing to do.
I suppose they could pull some thing like, "Oh, this new chip-and-pin thing is acting flaky... let me try the old one". But if they do that for every single customer, or if they pull out a new one just for certain customers, it looks mighty suspicious. They won't get very far that way. Some suspicious old lady will be calling the authorities within a day or two.
Those are good points, so let me talk about them.
I haven't looked at research about song birds or whales, but let's take what you say to be true. Do we know what the "taste" of birds is based on? Is it based on how aesthetically pleasing it is? Is it based on how well it expresses an emotion or soul of something? Is there any evidence that whale song or bird song are intended to express their emotions?
About self-sacrificing behavior: there are plenty of animals that have altrusitic instincts (including humans). But is this behavior done out of a sense of moral duty? I have a cat, and she certainly has emotions and affections. She knows there are rules in the house and will generally obey them, but I never get the idea that she obeys the rules out of moral obligation; rather, she knows the consequences and wants to avoid them. I certainly do a lot of "right" things out of instinct or self-interest, but that doesn't negate the fact that I do have a sense of moral duty that occasionally pops up and tells me to do something entirely opposed to my strongest instincts or desires.
Again, I haven't seen the data on the chickens, but that sounds a lot like superstition, not religion -- and there is a difference. I've seen a lot of people approach religion like a superstition -- trying to see "signs" in everything and figure out the "trick" to what God wants them to do, or wearing crosses and other religious paraphenalia like good luck charms. ("My Jesus decal does quite a trick / Right up on my dashboard I stick it / A good luck charm / It keeps me from harm / And saves me from speeding tickets" -- Smash Hit by All Star United) I've also seen real religion -- a lot of genuine Christianity, some genuine Islam as well. There is a clear difference.
That's true. However, I should point out, that in general it's appropriate for someone to fit a new piece of data into their existing intellectual framework before reworking or discarding bits of it. If someone completely changed their entire belief system every time someone presented them with a new argument, we wouldn't call that "open-minded", we'd call it "flaky" and "unreliable".
When was the last time you saw an animal create art? Or music? Or contemplate quantum physics? Or do something out of moral duty? Or exhibit any signs of any sort of religion at all? If your dog, or any other animal on the planet did any of these things that humans do on a regular basis, it would make world-wide news.
Yes, there are certainly some similarities between the biology of humans and animals. But to ignore the differences is just as willfully blind as those who ignore the similarities.
If you want to read even more amazing examples of anti-competitive behavior, go back to the "Findings of Fact" from the anti-trust ruling, back in 1999, I believe. It's 300 pages of in-depth analysis of Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior from the 90's, which they totally got away with. They've had to tone it down a bit since then, but the basic problem is still there.
The most recent example is the allegation that Linux is violating MS patents, and the implication that if businesses use Linux, they open themselves up to IP lawsuits. If they really cared about Linux infringing their IP, they would point to the patent and the code, and the Linux kernel maintainers would find a work-around (assuming a valid patent). As it is, it's much more useful as a scare tactic -- and according to Novell, it's been effective at scaring away big customers. Hence the Novell-Microsoft deal.
Um, no, assembly uses mnemonics like, "mov %eax,(var+$10)".
When I code in machine code, I generally use hex.
For example, the Camelback. Ten years ago, only canteens were issued. Then, someone in the military bought a personal Camelback; pretty soon, half of the soldiers had them, and the other half wanted them. A couple of years later, Camelbacks became standard issue.
I suspect other fun things like glow-sticks were similar.
It's quite possible that at this moment, military tacticians are discussing the usefulness of such devices, and that in the near future they may be contacting the makers of SillyString to investigate a deal.
Someone else pointed out potential problems with cans exploding when punctured or under heat. Another reason for the military to move slowly is that if an individual buys something like that, it's at his own risk. Silly String wasn't designed to be used in combat conditions. If the military provides it, they will be held responsible for it being used in combat conditions.