Lamarck and Darwin proposed hypotheses, some of which they were pretty sure of, which turned out to be mistaken.
The issue here is errors that the authors ought to know are errors---basing a biological theory on a poor understanding of chemistry, or a lack of statistics knowledge, for example.
Nobody is arguing that these cases don't exist, or that degrees or certifications prove anything. However, on average, a person with a degree in CS and a decent GP is more likely to be at least somewhat knowledgeable about the field than someone with no previous experience and no degrees who simply claims that they are good at CS. There are plenty of self-taught people who are good at CS, but there are also plenty of people who style themselves "computer experts" because they were known among their parents' friends as the local "computer guy" who knew how to install RAM in their computer.
I don't disagree that there should be less of a rigid weight on degrees, especially if we're talking about people who have previous experience in the field. But, for the most part, degrees are a pretty good predictor when we're talking about people with no previous experience.
Since, in true Slashdotter fashion, I don't read anything before posting a comment, I'm going to be +1, informative and point out that the gap filler is to keep the tiles from banging together on lift-off, and isn't needed for reentry. I'm sure the other four replies to your comment I haven't read don't say the same thing.
When I lived in the Chicago suburbs, thunderstorms that resulted in downed trees would regularly knock out both power and phone for a few hours. This is because the phone lines ran on, as you might expect, telephone poles.
I live in an apartment complex of fairly high density. There isn't really a need for every single apartment to have its own 911 system. In fact, it'd be sufficient if they just installed a few call boxes out in the hallways.
911 historically was piggybacked on voice telephone because it happened to be a wire that nearly everyone had, so was convenient. There's no reason every single phone or phone-like service has to double as a 911 provider though; the two are perfectly separatable. If you have both VOIP and a cell phone, for example, there's no need to have 911 service on the VOIP, since you can always dial it on the cell phone.
Back when I had a landline, it worked much less than that. Anything that resulted in downed trees hitting lines would knock out both phone and power for hours, since telephone lines are strung on, you know, telephone poles (at least in older areas, like most of Chicago).
Just because phones were the most convenient service to piggyback emergency services onto doesn't mean that'll perpetually be the case. Especially in cities, in makes no sense for everyone to have their own emergency contact service; if there were just some call boxes in my apartment complex, enough so that it wouldn't take more than a minute to get to one, that'd be perfectly fine.
that's true of a lot of legal things
on
Revamping Freenet
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· Score: 1
The person who encrypts his email, refuses to submit to warrantless searches, or keeps his blinds closed is also more suspicious than a person who uses a computer.
Indeed, one of the very points of liberty is to protect citizens from an oppressive government: It is a requirement of a free society that the government not be omnipotent and omnipresent when it comes to enforcing its laws, or else it would be impossible to subvert or overthrow a tyrranical one.
Lowtax is not exactly struggling to pay bandwidth bills.
You can find numbers from 2002, when he was registered as Something Awful LLC in Washington state, with monthly revenue of around $60,000, of which only about half went to pay for server colocation and bandwidth. I'll let you do the math on what that leaves in profit.
In fact, he makes enough profit that the front page writers are also paid for their content, in addition to it being his full-time sole source of income.
If the elitism is a meritocracy, sure. But much of academia is not a meritocracy, based instead of networking. There are certain portions of major conferences that accept and reject papers largely based on long-running personal feuds, where an important person (and usually his/her disciples) exerts substantial sway. Often competing for grant money is involved as well.
That's the sort of elitism Wikipedia doesn't have time for.
Local calling plans in the US by default have unlimited local calling, so using it for the internet has no additional cost besides the ISP's monthly fee. In most countries, if unlimited local calling plans exist at all, they're not default/standard, so you'd have to pay extra for them.
Basically, Americans who have a phone line already have unlimited local calling, whether they want it or not, so the incremental cost of getting dialup internet is much lower.
In a lot of countries, people pretty much have to buy broadband internet, because there is no alternative. The US has unlimited local calling and unlimited-use dialup internet, which is "good enough" for many people. Most other countries charge you per minute even for local phone calls.
It depends on what you're eating I suppose... I find that I often prefer to wash my hands after eating before going back to the computer, so as to avoid getting grease or jelly or whatever on the keyboard.
I certainly welcome more open-source drivers, but the reason there aren't as many isn't just because companies think they're in the business of producing software drivers for Microsoft. They also fear that opening up their drivers will give information to their competitors in the hardware market.
With graphics cards in particular, there's actually quite a lot going on on the driver level, and some of the "trade secrets" are even how to write optimal drivers themselves---if nVidia's drivers are 10% more efficient than ATI's in utilizing the card, it makes their card look 10% more efficient, and they sell more of them. You can also glean a lot of details about the hardware if you have the driver source code, especially the original un-obfuscated source code that lets you infer what the programmers were thinking when they wrote it.
They'll both be better than no WiFi, but even people who don't need the extra speed will consider the newer/faster one better. I already hear people complain at universities and airports that only have b rather than geven people who don't need the speed or know what an 801.11 is notice in their connection properties that the speed it's connected at is lower than they're used to seeing.
I didn't go to either of them, although I briefly considered both. I ended up going to a school that really does have a bit of an inferiority complex, Harvey Mudd College, although it too is so different as to be hard to compare (undergrad-only; humanities-heavy curriculum; part of a consortium with 4 other undergrad liberal arts colleges).
They're both good schools, and it's pretty difficult to assign a ranking. Sure, they do largely compete for the same students, but most of the difference between them people use to decide isn't whether one is objectively "better" than the other, but which sort of environment they prefer. For one, they are vastly different in size, have rather different cultures (both among students and especially faculty), and quite different location (suburban LA versus urban Boston).
Although I think you will find that the count is substantially higher than two if you count people who tried to use it and gave up, so perhaps some people (such as myself) will find this funny after all.
France and Germany, for example, will never extradite their own citizens for any crime. They do offer to prosecute them locally on behalf of a foreign country upon request, but won't ever extradite anyone except for non-citizens.
Many other countries specify that they will only extradite people for violent crimes, or for crimes carrying a potential sentence of over 2 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Lamarck and Darwin proposed hypotheses, some of which they were pretty sure of, which turned out to be mistaken.
The issue here is errors that the authors ought to know are errors---basing a biological theory on a poor understanding of chemistry, or a lack of statistics knowledge, for example.
Nobody is arguing that these cases don't exist, or that degrees or certifications prove anything. However, on average, a person with a degree in CS and a decent GP is more likely to be at least somewhat knowledgeable about the field than someone with no previous experience and no degrees who simply claims that they are good at CS. There are plenty of self-taught people who are good at CS, but there are also plenty of people who style themselves "computer experts" because they were known among their parents' friends as the local "computer guy" who knew how to install RAM in their computer.
I don't disagree that there should be less of a rigid weight on degrees, especially if we're talking about people who have previous experience in the field. But, for the most part, degrees are a pretty good predictor when we're talking about people with no previous experience.
Since, in true Slashdotter fashion, I don't read anything before posting a comment, I'm going to be +1, informative and point out that the gap filler is to keep the tiles from banging together on lift-off, and isn't needed for reentry. I'm sure the other four replies to your comment I haven't read don't say the same thing.
sounds like an argument against "gun-free havens".
When I lived in the Chicago suburbs, thunderstorms that resulted in downed trees would regularly knock out both power and phone for a few hours. This is because the phone lines ran on, as you might expect, telephone poles.
I live in an apartment complex of fairly high density. There isn't really a need for every single apartment to have its own 911 system. In fact, it'd be sufficient if they just installed a few call boxes out in the hallways.
911 historically was piggybacked on voice telephone because it happened to be a wire that nearly everyone had, so was convenient. There's no reason every single phone or phone-like service has to double as a 911 provider though; the two are perfectly separatable. If you have both VOIP and a cell phone, for example, there's no need to have 911 service on the VOIP, since you can always dial it on the cell phone.
Back when I had a landline, it worked much less than that. Anything that resulted in downed trees hitting lines would knock out both phone and power for hours, since telephone lines are strung on, you know, telephone poles (at least in older areas, like most of Chicago).
And then blame you for not taking responsibility for your actions. Shouldn't have given it to me, sucker!
Just because phones were the most convenient service to piggyback emergency services onto doesn't mean that'll perpetually be the case. Especially in cities, in makes no sense for everyone to have their own emergency contact service; if there were just some call boxes in my apartment complex, enough so that it wouldn't take more than a minute to get to one, that'd be perfectly fine.
The person who encrypts his email, refuses to submit to warrantless searches, or keeps his blinds closed is also more suspicious than a person who uses a computer.
Indeed, one of the very points of liberty is to protect citizens from an oppressive government: It is a requirement of a free society that the government not be omnipotent and omnipresent when it comes to enforcing its laws, or else it would be impossible to subvert or overthrow a tyrranical one.
Lowtax is not exactly struggling to pay bandwidth bills.
You can find numbers from 2002, when he was registered as Something Awful LLC in Washington state, with monthly revenue of around $60,000, of which only about half went to pay for server colocation and bandwidth. I'll let you do the math on what that leaves in profit.
In fact, he makes enough profit that the front page writers are also paid for their content, in addition to it being his full-time sole source of income.
see: Michael Jackson
Shouldn't it just be illegal to discriminate against anyone in hiring practices unless it's some criterion relevant to job performance?
If the elitism is a meritocracy, sure. But much of academia is not a meritocracy, based instead of networking. There are certain portions of major conferences that accept and reject papers largely based on long-running personal feuds, where an important person (and usually his/her disciples) exerts substantial sway. Often competing for grant money is involved as well.
That's the sort of elitism Wikipedia doesn't have time for.
Local calling plans in the US by default have unlimited local calling, so using it for the internet has no additional cost besides the ISP's monthly fee. In most countries, if unlimited local calling plans exist at all, they're not default/standard, so you'd have to pay extra for them.
Basically, Americans who have a phone line already have unlimited local calling, whether they want it or not, so the incremental cost of getting dialup internet is much lower.
In a lot of countries, people pretty much have to buy broadband internet, because there is no alternative. The US has unlimited local calling and unlimited-use dialup internet, which is "good enough" for many people. Most other countries charge you per minute even for local phone calls.
It depends on what you're eating I suppose... I find that I often prefer to wash my hands after eating before going back to the computer, so as to avoid getting grease or jelly or whatever on the keyboard.
Sure, you can browse the internet while eating breakfast, but that's a good way to get your keyboard and/or computer ruined.
Then how did a bullshit essay on the postmodernist interpretation of quantum mechanics get published in Social Text?
I certainly welcome more open-source drivers, but the reason there aren't as many isn't just because companies think they're in the business of producing software drivers for Microsoft. They also fear that opening up their drivers will give information to their competitors in the hardware market.
With graphics cards in particular, there's actually quite a lot going on on the driver level, and some of the "trade secrets" are even how to write optimal drivers themselves---if nVidia's drivers are 10% more efficient than ATI's in utilizing the card, it makes their card look 10% more efficient, and they sell more of them. You can also glean a lot of details about the hardware if you have the driver source code, especially the original un-obfuscated source code that lets you infer what the programmers were thinking when they wrote it.
They'll both be better than no WiFi, but even people who don't need the extra speed will consider the newer/faster one better. I already hear people complain at universities and airports that only have b rather than geven people who don't need the speed or know what an 801.11 is notice in their connection properties that the speed it's connected at is lower than they're used to seeing.
I didn't go to either of them, although I briefly considered both. I ended up going to a school that really does have a bit of an inferiority complex, Harvey Mudd College, although it too is so different as to be hard to compare (undergrad-only; humanities-heavy curriculum; part of a consortium with 4 other undergrad liberal arts colleges).
They're both good schools, and it's pretty difficult to assign a ranking. Sure, they do largely compete for the same students, but most of the difference between them people use to decide isn't whether one is objectively "better" than the other, but which sort of environment they prefer. For one, they are vastly different in size, have rather different cultures (both among students and especially faculty), and quite different location (suburban LA versus urban Boston).
Although I think you will find that the count is substantially higher than two if you count people who tried to use it and gave up, so perhaps some people (such as myself) will find this funny after all.
France and Germany, for example, will never extradite their own citizens for any crime. They do offer to prosecute them locally on behalf of a foreign country upon request, but won't ever extradite anyone except for non-citizens.
Many other countries specify that they will only extradite people for violent crimes, or for crimes carrying a potential sentence of over 2 years.