"This is an astonishingly ignorant thing to write."
If you hadn't noticed, Slashdot is dominated by IT types who may be excellent sysadmins or even good software engineers, but have very little idea what computer science is.
Oracle may be quite justified in objecting to Google a) not properly implementing Java AND b) implementing it in such a way that it's close enough to real Java to conflict.
The Ruby license specifically requires that if you change the interpreter you rename things so they don't conflict with the original.
Python and Ruby are both open source. You automatically have a license to use the API, or any other part of the code. C is a standard, and probably explicitly states that the writers desire it to be implemented by others. Mono has always been on interesting legal ground. Not sure what the situation with Javascript is.
So basically even the sky is falling submitter is having trouble coming up with examples.
Selection doesn't work like that. The ones who are breeding, regardless of what you think of them, are the fittest. Evolution doesn't care about your personal value assessments.
"Name another genetic disease [wired.com] that occasionally provides benefits."
Sickle cell anemia. Obesity. Wisdom teeth. The CCR5 d25 mutation. High melanin production in the skin.
The mutation for sickle cell anemia also conveys resistance to malaria. Various genes linked to obesity helped our ancestors survive variable food supplies. Wisdom teeth used to be able to kill, but once upon a time would have helped us eat. The CCR5 d25 mutation conveys resistance to bubonic plague and HIV, but susceptibility to West Nile. High melanin production in the skin protects you from sunburn and skin cancer, but, especially if you live at high latitudes, decreases vitamin D production which is associated with a variety of diseases from cancer to multiple sclerosis.
Nobody is really sure. A lot of kids' fathers aren't who they think they are. Rich men could well have lots of illegitimate kids. They certainly did in the past.
"Why would anyone who knows anything about evolution think that it stops with all the variability?"
Depending on what you mean by variability, it does. Evolution requires both variability in traits and variability in reproductive success. If you get rid of both of those, whether naturally or artificially, evolution stops.
If you severely reduce both of those, evolution slows down. In many places we've greatly reduced (but not eliminated) the variability in reproductive success, so we have very likely slowed down the evolution of our species.
No question it was a stressful environment, but that's what pilots are (supposed to be) trained for. They should not have ignored the stall warning, and, as the flight instructor in the article said, they should have been surveying all their instruments to determine which were giving consistent results. The GPS would have given them speed and confirmed the altimeter was working.
The fly by wire thing is a weak attempt to find something to blame about the plane. Under instrument conditions you can't fly a plane by monitoring your control inputs. You must use instruments. Regardless of Bonin's control input, the pilot in command should have established they were climbing and slowing and corrected their attitude.
Two inexperienced pilots were left in charge in poor conditions in an aircraft they apparently weren't adequately trained to fly.
It sounds like the problem here was that the plane was NOT in it's full fly-by-wire mode. The flight computer had given some control back to the pilots when it lost the pitots, and the pilots screwed it up.
"why don't we just adopt some of that 'free trade' stuff"
Canada has had free trade with the US for more than a decade. There's a picture in one of our history books of my grandfather protesting against it. It only applies to corporations. Individuals still get to pay duty, and the corporations aren't likely to pass on any of the savings.
You're not alone. Americans can't figure out how to ship things anywhere outside the country. Half an hour from the border in Canada might as well be the moon as far as most American companies are concerned. Of course, they might have a point - last time a friend in the US tried to send me something via the US postal service it got returned, address unknown. The address was correct, it just had "Canada" in it.
The passage you quoted addresses an issue that might crop up as if it were a flaw in the study. It's not. Therefore, the passage is misleading. It's basically a straw man argument. The actual study found that engaging in critical thinking could "[increase] disbelief." Your passage basically says "well, since I can't conceive of Thomas Aquinas abandoning his faith if he engaged in more critical thinking, the study clearly can't apply to religion as I choose to define it." The author is attacking the conclusions of the study by showing (actually assuming) that something the study did not claim is not the case.
I'm not sure why you object to my comment about Aquinas. Perhaps if you'd spent less time digging up an intellectual sounding insult ("sophomoric") and more time stating your case.... Anyway, Aquinas' five proofs of God's existence are clearly logically flawed. In fact, all of Aquinas's thinking effectively rests on his statement: "in itself the proposition 'God exists' is necessarily true, for in it subject and predicate are the same" which of course is blatant begging the question. If Aquinas was more in the habit of "analytically overrid[ing] initially flawed intuitions in reasoning" it's not actually hard to believe that he might have been a bit more skeptical about some of the things that were going on in the name of God.
Double talk that has nothing to do with the findings of the study.
Although, if Thomas Aquinas and company engaged in a little more critical thinking, maybe they wouldn't have come up with and perpetuated such stupid "proofs."
Slashdot Mirror
"This is an astonishingly ignorant thing to write."
If you hadn't noticed, Slashdot is dominated by IT types who may be excellent sysadmins or even good software engineers, but have very little idea what computer science is.
You can't judge the whole country by Quebec. Quebec is very, very special.
"(for those who don't get it: in music, generally speaking, the sharps and flats overlap. C sharp = D flat)"
Unless you're a music theorist.
Oracle may be quite justified in objecting to Google a) not properly implementing Java AND b) implementing it in such a way that it's close enough to real Java to conflict.
The Ruby license specifically requires that if you change the interpreter you rename things so they don't conflict with the original.
Python is not GPL. It's PSF. Ruby is also distributed under it's own, considerably more permissive than the GPL license.
Python and Ruby are both open source. You automatically have a license to use the API, or any other part of the code. C is a standard, and probably explicitly states that the writers desire it to be implemented by others. Mono has always been on interesting legal ground. Not sure what the situation with Javascript is.
So basically even the sky is falling submitter is having trouble coming up with examples.
Selection doesn't work like that. The ones who are breeding, regardless of what you think of them, are the fittest. Evolution doesn't care about your personal value assessments.
"Name another genetic disease [wired.com] that occasionally provides benefits."
Sickle cell anemia. Obesity. Wisdom teeth. The CCR5 d25 mutation. High melanin production in the skin.
The mutation for sickle cell anemia also conveys resistance to malaria. Various genes linked to obesity helped our ancestors survive variable food supplies. Wisdom teeth used to be able to kill, but once upon a time would have helped us eat. The CCR5 d25 mutation conveys resistance to bubonic plague and HIV, but susceptibility to West Nile. High melanin production in the skin protects you from sunburn and skin cancer, but, especially if you live at high latitudes, decreases vitamin D production which is associated with a variety of diseases from cancer to multiple sclerosis.
Intelligence is (usually) an excellent survival trait. Female education, it seems, may be detrimental to reproductive fitness.
Nobody is really sure. A lot of kids' fathers aren't who they think they are. Rich men could well have lots of illegitimate kids. They certainly did in the past.
"Why would anyone who knows anything about evolution think that it stops with all the variability?"
Depending on what you mean by variability, it does. Evolution requires both variability in traits and variability in reproductive success. If you get rid of both of those, whether naturally or artificially, evolution stops.
If you severely reduce both of those, evolution slows down. In many places we've greatly reduced (but not eliminated) the variability in reproductive success, so we have very likely slowed down the evolution of our species.
It's not a "reversal of evolution." It's the species evolving in response to changes in its environment.
Trees don't turn wind energy into structural integrity. They might turn solar energy into structural integrity in response to wind.
Trees turn wind energy into heat.
Perhaps he was experiencing increased disbelief.
You can't count both tidal forces and angular momentum in the solar system. Tidal forces are due to that angular momentum.
It's one ship, and probably slower than the speedboats the drug runners use. A conventional ship with a helicopter is much more useful.
No question it was a stressful environment, but that's what pilots are (supposed to be) trained for. They should not have ignored the stall warning, and, as the flight instructor in the article said, they should have been surveying all their instruments to determine which were giving consistent results. The GPS would have given them speed and confirmed the altimeter was working.
The fly by wire thing is a weak attempt to find something to blame about the plane. Under instrument conditions you can't fly a plane by monitoring your control inputs. You must use instruments. Regardless of Bonin's control input, the pilot in command should have established they were climbing and slowing and corrected their attitude.
Two inexperienced pilots were left in charge in poor conditions in an aircraft they apparently weren't adequately trained to fly.
Or somebody could have looked at the artificial horizon at any point, at the GPS ground speed indicator and/or the altimeter during the climb phase.
Only the airspeed indicators were out, and not even for the whole time. Were the pilots not looking at ANY of their instruments?
It sounds like the problem here was that the plane was NOT in it's full fly-by-wire mode. The flight computer had given some control back to the pilots when it lost the pitots, and the pilots screwed it up.
"why don't we just adopt some of that 'free trade' stuff"
Canada has had free trade with the US for more than a decade. There's a picture in one of our history books of my grandfather protesting against it. It only applies to corporations. Individuals still get to pay duty, and the corporations aren't likely to pass on any of the savings.
You're not alone. Americans can't figure out how to ship things anywhere outside the country. Half an hour from the border in Canada might as well be the moon as far as most American companies are concerned. Of course, they might have a point - last time a friend in the US tried to send me something via the US postal service it got returned, address unknown. The address was correct, it just had "Canada" in it.
The passage you quoted addresses an issue that might crop up as if it were a flaw in the study. It's not. Therefore, the passage is misleading. It's basically a straw man argument. The actual study found that engaging in critical thinking could "[increase] disbelief." Your passage basically says "well, since I can't conceive of Thomas Aquinas abandoning his faith if he engaged in more critical thinking, the study clearly can't apply to religion as I choose to define it." The author is attacking the conclusions of the study by showing (actually assuming) that something the study did not claim is not the case.
I'm not sure why you object to my comment about Aquinas. Perhaps if you'd spent less time digging up an intellectual sounding insult ("sophomoric") and more time stating your case.... Anyway, Aquinas' five proofs of God's existence are clearly logically flawed. In fact, all of Aquinas's thinking effectively rests on his statement: "in itself the proposition 'God exists' is necessarily true, for in it subject and predicate are the same" which of course is blatant begging the question. If Aquinas was more in the habit of "analytically overrid[ing] initially flawed intuitions in reasoning" it's not actually hard to believe that he might have been a bit more skeptical about some of the things that were going on in the name of God.
Double talk that has nothing to do with the findings of the study.
Although, if Thomas Aquinas and company engaged in a little more critical thinking, maybe they wouldn't have come up with and perpetuated such stupid "proofs."
If you take the respective universes to the same point in their development, you've got six days on one side and thirteen billion years on the other.
If you want to talk about a few minutes, we can create a roiling ball of energy in a lot less than a few minutes ourselves, albeit on a smaller scale.
"you should believe what it says in this book because it's true!" is pretty weak.
"you should believe the bits in this book that I say because those parts are true!" is even weaker.