Perfect condom use includes oral; other than that, it isn't perfect. You're looking at the results of perfect abstinence, so it's only fair to compare it to the results of perfect condom use. Just like condom use, abstinence doesn't work as well if it's only used for penis-vagina sex.
In practice, teaching people good computer security practices doesn't work, and just like with abstinence-only education relying on it will result in a lot of infections.
Abstinence is not going to work for many, many people. You're asking for something even more unreasonable than having people use different strong passwords. We should spend most of our time discussing things that actually work for human beings in general.
Sex education up to a point is very useful. It's not necessary to get into kinky stuff and beyond, kids can learn about that on the Internet by themselves. Unfortunately, parents are very spotty in teaching children what they need to know, and a lack of sex education can be fatal.
Not necessarily. Older programmers have often gone through a process of learning and forgetting, because lots that they learned during a CS degree wasn't relevant for their first umpteen years as a code monkey coding up other people's specs.
There's also been changes in the field. My old algorithms books didn't cover anything parallel (which is why I got a newer one).
I find him perfectly believable. I'm the same way. I communicate well, but I'm not suited to the sort of networking you're talking about.
You're talking about maintaining a network of casual connections. That's not how my mind works. I'm an introvert. I have some very good friends, and get along well with my colleagues, I don't do at all well on the sort of connections where I communicate with someone every few months.
This means that I'd have to think about maintaining a network. It would be work, and something I'd have to keep track of. It would sap some of my energy. You may find this sort of thing natural, like many other people, but it isn't natural for a lot of us. It's likely to get dropped when something else comes up, like a child, or a major health problem, and I don't have time and energy for everything.
You're counting things that could not be foreseen as near-future applications, which means that near-future applications are useless as a method of funding research projects.
Quantum mechanics: Roentgen developed the X-ray tube as a practical outgrowth of his work with vacuum tubes, and the theory followed considerably later. Better understanding of the atom had no practical effects at the time. Chemical reactions were still worked out in chemistry labs for a long time thereafter.
Relativity has nothing to do with radio communications, no direct applications to making fission and fusion bombs, and before that nobody cared if something traveled faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. The photoelectric effect was explained by Einstein in the same year he explained Special Relativity and Brownian Motion, but those three things are not the same. It's still rather short on practical effects.
Newtonian gravitation: The more accurate cannon fire didn't matter until the Twentieth Century and the arrival of guns of sufficiently long range that the difference between an ellipse and a parabola mattered. We already had good means of predicting the motion of the planets, although not of accounting for orbital variation which few or no people cared about then. Time keeping depended on astronomical observations, not the theory of gravitation.
If research criteria were the likely consequences of discoveries, none of these would have been funded.
Ideology is everything, without ideology there is only populism and expedience.
Huh? There's love, and happiness, and health, and all sorts of other things. Ideologies are very tricky things. You can completely believe in your ideology, but it might be (I'd say will be) wrong to some extent. They lead to things like the Holocaust and the deliberate Ukrainian famine that happened somewhat earlier, killing millions of people, because Nazis and Communists were convinced their ideologies were correct, and weren't willing to bend them for any sort of compassion. At least recognize that your ideology can wind up hurting people and try to avoid that.
a company makes X dollars from its sales and that is everything it can spend.
X is variable here. It depends on the economy. If poor people have more money, they tend to spend it and the economy usually picks up. (This is true when the economy isn't going full-steam, but if it is there's usually a strong demand for workers and the minimum wage stops mattering.) From what I've seen, raising the minimum wage to something reasonable (and we can have all sorts of arguments about what is "reasonable" here), improves the economy and keeps unemployment pretty level.
Also, how do you expect people who are earning less than the minimum wage to keep up their skills? They're either going to be working too much for self-improvement, or they won't be covering basic needs and will have great difficulty picking up new skills. Best to support them financially and teach them new skills.
Precisely. This causes a race to the bottom, since you don't know that if you pay the higher prices of the quality manufacturer you will get the quality goods. If this keeps up, Amazon will become a crap reseller, and lots of places that make good stuff will lose a convenient portal to their customers.
In at least several countries I'm aware of, you can get your health care the way you want by paying for it. Providing a service that has restrictions is in no way totalitarian if there's alternatives.
The natural tendency of wealth seems to be to concentrate, although there are resets every so often, and wealth translates pretty easily to political power. Providing access to good jobs, medical care, etc., does some wealth equalization. As far as homelessness and starvation go, read what Adam Smith has to say about workers' pay, and some history on times with high wealth concentrations.
In fact, if you look at actual totalitarian governments (fascists, communists, etc.), positive rights were very high on their political programs.
Which illustrates my point very nicely, thank you. We see that large numbers of people were willing to trade their liberty for positive rights, because without them the system wasn't working for them. Otto von Bismarck introduced social programs into Germany in order to keep people from going Socialist. Read the Communist Manifesto: among some really stupid demands there's some, like public education, that are considered standard nowadays. Give people access to decent jobs at decent pay (whatever that may be at the time), the basics of life (whatever they're considered to be at the time), and opportunity for their children to do better, and they're not going to turn out for Sanders and Trump like that.
I tried to think of societies as you describe, and the Roman Republic came to mind, featuring increasing economic disparity, massive increases in poverty, and big-time social unrest.
An adequate basic income would eliminate the need for minimum wage laws. There would be no economic coercion to take any job, no matter how bad, and so employers would have to pay enough to attract workers, and workers would frequently work for less because that's what people do with secondary sources of income.
A basic income would need some sort of floor, adjusted for inflation, and I'm not going to get into specifics here. It needs to be something people can rely on. How it varies, and why, I'll leave for later, when I see something not entirely vague.
This is why people like me tend to argue against adding extra tax costs, environmental costs, legal costs, licensing and permit costs, benefit costs, union costs, and regulatory and compliance costs to everything people buy.
In other words, in order to afford to live in the future, we'll need to have massive pollution, corporations pretty much immune from lawsuits when they harm someone, incompetents doing dangerous jobs, and no health care.
"Positive rights" doesn't make a state totalitarian. In most developed and developing countries, health care is a right, and nobody is forced to do anything except pay taxes. A state can collect taxes without being totalitarian, for any reasonable definition of "totalitarian".
The lack of "positive rights" can be disastrous. With increasing concentration of wealth, people are being given the right to be homeless and the right to starve. This is neither desirable nor stable, since having too many desperate people around would lead to a lot of social unrest and likely a totalitarian government.
So speaks the collectivist, the man who can think of no way of fixing things that doesn't involve government.
Who's going to deal with this? It's unlikely to be business, since it's good business to automate when it's cheaper than paying the workers, and many or most businesses are not interested in training people to do new jobs. There's also the distinct possibility that we'll run out of jobs that can be efficiently done by unskilled labor.
You take a very different view of government and society than I do. I believe is that the government is there to serve society, and that includes setting the business environment to help the people, rather than enforce libertarian ideology. The balance between capital and labor is changing, and that's going to screw over hundreds of millions of people in this country. Worker productivity has been going up while worker pay has been staying fairly flat. We're seeing downward pressure on wages. I don't think an ideology that does that is worth enforcing.
Minimum wage laws ensure that someone who works full-time has (at least theoretically) enough money to live on decently. There's already businesses like Wal-mart that rely on the government to subsidize their labor force. Jobs that pay less than minimum wage will be a greater drain on government resources - assuming, of course, that we don't want to make millions and millions of people homeless and begging for food. That's not going to end well for anybody.
There's limited numbers of openings for people to do house cleaning and yard work, and they generally require efficient workers. Just because you can vacuum and scrub doesn't mean you can do it fast enough to make a living, and you're asking the homeowners to trust you inside their houses. Businesses frequently have specialized equipment, not brooms and scrub brushes. There's a large number of people you don't want in child care, and just as there are limited numbers of businesses and houses that require cleaning whose occupants have enough money to hire it out, there's limited numbers of children of people who can pay for day care. As income becomes more concentrated among the well-off, which is happening now, there will be fewer opportunities to do stuff for those people.
In twenty years, there will be a lot of people in jobs that are currently rare or nonexistent. Not everyone will be able to do those jobs. People who are not very skilled and are hard workers will have serious problems. What do we want to do about that?
In Normandy, Allied close-support aircraft were mostly unable to destroy German tanks. Many more tanks were lost by the crews feeling horribly exposed and jumping out of the tank than were actually destroyed. The air forces were very good at chewing up the soft vehicles the Panzer and Panzergrenadier divisions depended on.
Before WWII, available engines were generally not powerful enough for a fighter to carry a decent bombload. The German close-support aircraft was the Ju-87 - an excellent dive bomber, and dead meat if enemy fighters were around. Given bigger engines, fighters could carry good-sized bombloads and then rockets, so we got aircraft like the P-47 and Fw-190. The Typhoon was designed as a fighter but used for ground attack since it had the payload and wasn't a good fighter at altitude.
Relevant in what way? We've spent all this, so we're [going to keep going, because we're not wasting all that money]/[going to quit, because there's no way the project will break even]? Sunk cost does not tell you what the best use of your money is going forward. It is very relevant to the overall success, and needs to be considered in retrospectives.
Low-quality goods may look bad, they may fall apart fast, etc., but they aren't supposed to be positively dangerous. There are a few requirements on quality: it must be able to perform its stated purpose (not necessarily for long), and it must not be dangerous.
The Austrians expected the Germans to defend their eastern border while they invaded Serbia.
In 1913, the heads of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies discussed strategy. It was made perfectly clear that the Austro-Hungarians would make their main effort against Russia and Germany's main effort would be against France. (That was set in stone. Because of German General Staff planning, the German strategy in case of war with Russia was to invade Belgium and try to knock France out of the war.) I figure the Germans were legitimately surprised when the A-H army massed against Serbia, but the A-H commander should have known that the German effort would have been in France.
Slashdot Mirror
Which STDs completely ignore condoms?
Perfect condom use includes oral; other than that, it isn't perfect. You're looking at the results of perfect abstinence, so it's only fair to compare it to the results of perfect condom use. Just like condom use, abstinence doesn't work as well if it's only used for penis-vagina sex.
In practice, teaching people good computer security practices doesn't work, and just like with abstinence-only education relying on it will result in a lot of infections.
Abstinence is not going to work for many, many people. You're asking for something even more unreasonable than having people use different strong passwords. We should spend most of our time discussing things that actually work for human beings in general.
Sex education up to a point is very useful. It's not necessary to get into kinky stuff and beyond, kids can learn about that on the Internet by themselves. Unfortunately, parents are very spotty in teaching children what they need to know, and a lack of sex education can be fatal.
There's also been changes in the field. My old algorithms books didn't cover anything parallel (which is why I got a newer one).
Guess how I know you don't work on the same stuff that I do.
I find him perfectly believable. I'm the same way. I communicate well, but I'm not suited to the sort of networking you're talking about.
You're talking about maintaining a network of casual connections. That's not how my mind works. I'm an introvert. I have some very good friends, and get along well with my colleagues, I don't do at all well on the sort of connections where I communicate with someone every few months.
This means that I'd have to think about maintaining a network. It would be work, and something I'd have to keep track of. It would sap some of my energy. You may find this sort of thing natural, like many other people, but it isn't natural for a lot of us. It's likely to get dropped when something else comes up, like a child, or a major health problem, and I don't have time and energy for everything.
You're counting things that could not be foreseen as near-future applications, which means that near-future applications are useless as a method of funding research projects.
Quantum mechanics: Roentgen developed the X-ray tube as a practical outgrowth of his work with vacuum tubes, and the theory followed considerably later. Better understanding of the atom had no practical effects at the time. Chemical reactions were still worked out in chemistry labs for a long time thereafter.
Relativity has nothing to do with radio communications, no direct applications to making fission and fusion bombs, and before that nobody cared if something traveled faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. The photoelectric effect was explained by Einstein in the same year he explained Special Relativity and Brownian Motion, but those three things are not the same. It's still rather short on practical effects.
Newtonian gravitation: The more accurate cannon fire didn't matter until the Twentieth Century and the arrival of guns of sufficiently long range that the difference between an ellipse and a parabola mattered. We already had good means of predicting the motion of the planets, although not of accounting for orbital variation which few or no people cared about then. Time keeping depended on astronomical observations, not the theory of gravitation.
If research criteria were the likely consequences of discoveries, none of these would have been funded.
Huh? There's love, and happiness, and health, and all sorts of other things. Ideologies are very tricky things. You can completely believe in your ideology, but it might be (I'd say will be) wrong to some extent. They lead to things like the Holocaust and the deliberate Ukrainian famine that happened somewhat earlier, killing millions of people, because Nazis and Communists were convinced their ideologies were correct, and weren't willing to bend them for any sort of compassion. At least recognize that your ideology can wind up hurting people and try to avoid that.
X is variable here. It depends on the economy. If poor people have more money, they tend to spend it and the economy usually picks up. (This is true when the economy isn't going full-steam, but if it is there's usually a strong demand for workers and the minimum wage stops mattering.) From what I've seen, raising the minimum wage to something reasonable (and we can have all sorts of arguments about what is "reasonable" here), improves the economy and keeps unemployment pretty level.
Also, how do you expect people who are earning less than the minimum wage to keep up their skills? They're either going to be working too much for self-improvement, or they won't be covering basic needs and will have great difficulty picking up new skills. Best to support them financially and teach them new skills.
Precisely. This causes a race to the bottom, since you don't know that if you pay the higher prices of the quality manufacturer you will get the quality goods. If this keeps up, Amazon will become a crap reseller, and lots of places that make good stuff will lose a convenient portal to their customers.
In at least several countries I'm aware of, you can get your health care the way you want by paying for it. Providing a service that has restrictions is in no way totalitarian if there's alternatives.
The natural tendency of wealth seems to be to concentrate, although there are resets every so often, and wealth translates pretty easily to political power. Providing access to good jobs, medical care, etc., does some wealth equalization. As far as homelessness and starvation go, read what Adam Smith has to say about workers' pay, and some history on times with high wealth concentrations.
Which illustrates my point very nicely, thank you. We see that large numbers of people were willing to trade their liberty for positive rights, because without them the system wasn't working for them. Otto von Bismarck introduced social programs into Germany in order to keep people from going Socialist. Read the Communist Manifesto: among some really stupid demands there's some, like public education, that are considered standard nowadays. Give people access to decent jobs at decent pay (whatever that may be at the time), the basics of life (whatever they're considered to be at the time), and opportunity for their children to do better, and they're not going to turn out for Sanders and Trump like that.
I tried to think of societies as you describe, and the Roman Republic came to mind, featuring increasing economic disparity, massive increases in poverty, and big-time social unrest.
An adequate basic income would eliminate the need for minimum wage laws. There would be no economic coercion to take any job, no matter how bad, and so employers would have to pay enough to attract workers, and workers would frequently work for less because that's what people do with secondary sources of income.
A basic income would need some sort of floor, adjusted for inflation, and I'm not going to get into specifics here. It needs to be something people can rely on. How it varies, and why, I'll leave for later, when I see something not entirely vague.
In other words, in order to afford to live in the future, we'll need to have massive pollution, corporations pretty much immune from lawsuits when they harm someone, incompetents doing dangerous jobs, and no health care.
Long term, that trick simply doesn't work.
"Positive rights" doesn't make a state totalitarian. In most developed and developing countries, health care is a right, and nobody is forced to do anything except pay taxes. A state can collect taxes without being totalitarian, for any reasonable definition of "totalitarian".
The lack of "positive rights" can be disastrous. With increasing concentration of wealth, people are being given the right to be homeless and the right to starve. This is neither desirable nor stable, since having too many desperate people around would lead to a lot of social unrest and likely a totalitarian government.
Who's going to deal with this? It's unlikely to be business, since it's good business to automate when it's cheaper than paying the workers, and many or most businesses are not interested in training people to do new jobs. There's also the distinct possibility that we'll run out of jobs that can be efficiently done by unskilled labor.
You take a very different view of government and society than I do. I believe is that the government is there to serve society, and that includes setting the business environment to help the people, rather than enforce libertarian ideology. The balance between capital and labor is changing, and that's going to screw over hundreds of millions of people in this country. Worker productivity has been going up while worker pay has been staying fairly flat. We're seeing downward pressure on wages. I don't think an ideology that does that is worth enforcing.
Minimum wage laws ensure that someone who works full-time has (at least theoretically) enough money to live on decently. There's already businesses like Wal-mart that rely on the government to subsidize their labor force. Jobs that pay less than minimum wage will be a greater drain on government resources - assuming, of course, that we don't want to make millions and millions of people homeless and begging for food. That's not going to end well for anybody.
There's limited numbers of openings for people to do house cleaning and yard work, and they generally require efficient workers. Just because you can vacuum and scrub doesn't mean you can do it fast enough to make a living, and you're asking the homeowners to trust you inside their houses. Businesses frequently have specialized equipment, not brooms and scrub brushes. There's a large number of people you don't want in child care, and just as there are limited numbers of businesses and houses that require cleaning whose occupants have enough money to hire it out, there's limited numbers of children of people who can pay for day care. As income becomes more concentrated among the well-off, which is happening now, there will be fewer opportunities to do stuff for those people.
In twenty years, there will be a lot of people in jobs that are currently rare or nonexistent. Not everyone will be able to do those jobs. People who are not very skilled and are hard workers will have serious problems. What do we want to do about that?
In Normandy, Allied close-support aircraft were mostly unable to destroy German tanks. Many more tanks were lost by the crews feeling horribly exposed and jumping out of the tank than were actually destroyed. The air forces were very good at chewing up the soft vehicles the Panzer and Panzergrenadier divisions depended on.
Before WWII, available engines were generally not powerful enough for a fighter to carry a decent bombload. The German close-support aircraft was the Ju-87 - an excellent dive bomber, and dead meat if enemy fighters were around. Given bigger engines, fighters could carry good-sized bombloads and then rockets, so we got aircraft like the P-47 and Fw-190. The Typhoon was designed as a fighter but used for ground attack since it had the payload and wasn't a good fighter at altitude.
Good chance, actually, if the F-35 driver is stupid enough to get slow and close.
Relevant in what way? We've spent all this, so we're [going to keep going, because we're not wasting all that money]/[going to quit, because there's no way the project will break even]? Sunk cost does not tell you what the best use of your money is going forward. It is very relevant to the overall success, and needs to be considered in retrospectives.
Low-quality goods may look bad, they may fall apart fast, etc., but they aren't supposed to be positively dangerous. There are a few requirements on quality: it must be able to perform its stated purpose (not necessarily for long), and it must not be dangerous.
TFS says that, in that state, the seller is liable if the manufacturer can't be found.
I wouldn't think it was criminal, but it could mean Amazon was on the hook for damages.
They didn't even upgrade to Kerbal Space Program.
Heck, in some places in the US you can substitute evolution.
And some people apparently think Hillary Clinton is Satan. How's that for religious leadership?
In 1913, the heads of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies discussed strategy. It was made perfectly clear that the Austro-Hungarians would make their main effort against Russia and Germany's main effort would be against France. (That was set in stone. Because of German General Staff planning, the German strategy in case of war with Russia was to invade Belgium and try to knock France out of the war.) I figure the Germans were legitimately surprised when the A-H army massed against Serbia, but the A-H commander should have known that the German effort would have been in France.