Take a look at (random selection from a large pool) Uganda, where the kids watch no movies at all, yet 10,000 young (5-12) killers roam the north.
That's _not_ a random selection. You deliberately picked a country engaged in a brutal civil war where children are kidnapped and forced to fight.
Re:Implications for Phonics vs. Whole-word Debate?
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
·
· Score: 1
If you want a fun comparison, think about chinese. People can read chinese _really_ fast, and entire groups of words (usually 4) can be comprehended at the same time. On the other hand, the average reading vocab is only 5000 or so..
Let me clarify. Unlike trivial questions like "what is matter made of" and "why does day turn into night", asking "what happened before the big bang" is impossible because there is no information about it. I'll let an actual scientist say that:
Modern physics enables astrophysicists to calculate the size and density of the universe at any time in its 15-billion year history--right back to the big bang.
Scientists are very proud of this accomplishment. "Only the first 10-43 seconds remain obscure," notes a self-confident UW Astronomy Professor Bruce Margon.
But what happened before the big bang?
That stops Astronomy Chair Craig Hogan dead in his tracks.
"What, you're not greedy or anything, are you?," he asks with incredulity that anyone would not be satisfied to know what happened over 15 billion years after the big bang.
And then he pauses, thoughtfully:
"What happened before?," he muses. "No one could really know. All memory of that time is lost, everything from then is forgotten. That was a period of such catastrophic instability that it just doesn't remember what came before it. We probably could never find out, either. There just isn't any information left over from it."
Margon has addressed this question, too. As he told the Washington Post last year, "One would think that if someone has trouble reconciling religion with physics, they would like the big bang. It has beautiful elements of ultimate mystery
Current physics does not attempt to explain what caused the big bang--there is no information available prior to it, nor do current laws of physics apply. It is generally believed to be a deep mystery, and likely to always remain so.
I would say that while not directly refuted, the ant. priciple becomes more valid the more "possible universes" or possible worlds exist.
Given an infinate number of _existing_ universes, it should be no suprise that we're in this one.
Given an infinate number of _possible_ universes, but only one existing one, it would be very suprising that we exist.
Here, I'll forgo violence and use a sex analogy. I'm me because of one of a million unique sperm merged with an egg. That I have the genetic code of sperm 0999999 rather than sperm 0 - 0999998 is not remarkable.
But if it was known that only one sperm--the very one that made me--could form a viable embryo (the rest would have caused an abortion).. well, my birth would be by all counts a genuine miracle.
So we need to find out what's the case: the one universe we can see? or a google that we cannot?
There, I said it. Sure linux marches on and the company will be pounded by big blue--but they, by which I mean the owners, get the cash for the FUD and run off. Legal liability is borne by SCO, which files for bankruptcy protection.
There's a lot of gloating here today, but I think that the SCO execs got what they wanted, the lawyers got rich, and everyone else would have benifited from this never happening in the first place.
The important part is the transition phase-- where the technology to live centuries is available, but only to the rich.
Suddenly, you have substantially turnover in wealth and power--the rich get richer and the rich live longer. A corporation can become a cult of personality (dave thomas, bill gates writ large) and a dictorial president will never succumb to health.
The social questions are similar to those guiding organ transplants, but much greater in intensity. Who gets life? The rich? the lucky? the powerful? the brilliant? Those whose lives are considered more imporant than others--welcome to a two-tier society. If (as seems likely) we have universal health care at that point, this would probably break it.
A change in paradigms: When old age is considered a disease, how much are we willing to pay for the cure? Imagine as an analogy, a disease causes a 50% reduction in global lifespans. A treatment is available, but immensely expensive. How could that change the way we live or the goals we have in life?
Here's the troll! More or less, I've described the situation in some parts of africa. A drastic reduction in life expectancy due to the AIDS virus that infects 30-50% of the population; a few rich individuals and a few rich countries that can afford a daily drug cocktail that turns a fatal illness into a lifetime disease. And since this is slashdot, let's not forget the patent laws that prevent the selling of cheap equivlents overseas.
Personally, I learned about computers by long-term exposure to them.
Personally, many more people are injured every year by ladders. Ladder licenses for everyone!
I'm about to graduate college, and my limited experience with offices and "networking" have convinced me it's something I really dislike. Is it better in small companies? non-profits? Or am I just being naive about human nature.
Thanks.
So this is a automatous GPS-guided long-range flying vehicle? Isn't that a cruise missle?
Admittedly, there would be some scaling up before poeple could fit a 2000lb warhead on it. But for bio/chemical WMDs, here's your cheap unstoppable delivery device.
More importantly, it could be used to verify some convictions and set the innocent free. The Innocence Project could certainly use this--to date, most freed people by DNA were accused rapists. Too bad there's no funding for post-conviction checking..
It's a scary thought, but slavery is not quite dead yet.
It's still open practice in many parts of Sudan, some other parts of the world (google it).
In asia, girls are often sold into brothels to pay parental debts.
It also happens that in the united states, there are a few prosecuted cases everyy year where an illegal immigrant is forced to work as a domestic servant without wages and without the ability to leave or contact other people. Normally, they can't speak english and are too scared to go out.
I've often suspected that the reason none of the major US battery companies psuh rechargables is simply to capitalize on an entrenched, profitable market to the detriment of the consumer.
Look at AA sized NiMHs--at one point virtually unknown and available only in specialty battery stores, the explosion of high-voltage devices such as digital cameras have forced people to use them. The voltage curve of a Alkaline AA won't last 5 shots on a lot of newer cameras.
This was a new, underexploited market; it should have been exploited by duracell, etc. instead, they spent a couple years creating the most useless invention ever: the high voltage alkaline. (E2, "titanium" batteries, etc.) A giant ad campaign was launched to convince people that these were the batteries you used in electronic devices, despite being non-reusable and just as expensive as the reusable cells...
Considering screws have 'threads' on them, they don't fasten well if you rotate them the wrong direction(if you can get them in at all)
Unclear example, sorry. I meant that there would be a certain order to put in the individual screws (screw A, screw B, screw C and then screw D..), rather than creative screwing technique.
As for creativity.. I'm not talking about major modifications to the design (though there are times when workers come up with innovations to the process), but smaller optimizations. A left handed worker may do things different than a right handed one, and generally speaking, anyone who does the same thing 10,000 times will find some way to speed up the process.
Note that you could implement a clever hack job that would make all the employees fabricate say.. a giant lexus-branded steel penis. Since they've been reduced to following step by step operating codes, this taking over of worker directives would probably not be noticed until the very end.
Likewise, corporate espionage could in the future consist of stealing the proper meme-program (obligatory ref: snow crash) to whatever missle tech is currently trendy.
This is a consequence of further removing the worker from the means of production.
That's... horrible. Efficent, economical and innovative. But horrible--you remove every bit of skill, creativity, and inititive ( I know, I know, not much to begin with ) and make people into meat robots.
The real problem is, people will start expecting workers to *be* like robots. No training, no intro, just stick a pair of glasses on them and tell them what bolts to turn. If they slack a little, well the glasses will probably beep at them and alert payroll. You're naive if you don't believe that isn't one of the advertised benifits.
I can see a day when people will be fired for putting in four screws in counter-clockwise when the labled instructions told them to do it clockwise.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look at (random selection from a large pool) Uganda, where the kids watch no movies at all, yet 10,000 young (5-12) killers roam the north. That's _not_ a random selection. You deliberately picked a country engaged in a brutal civil war where children are kidnapped and forced to fight.
If you want a fun comparison, think about chinese. People can read chinese _really_ fast, and entire groups of words (usually 4) can be comprehended at the same time. On the other hand, the average reading vocab is only 5000 or so..
Oops. forgot my html. Linkified.
My implementation wasn't as elegant, but I have an web based version of the scrambler here: http://www.jonhuang.com/cgi-bin/txet.pl
From here
Modern physics enables astrophysicists to calculate the size and density of the universe at any time in its 15-billion year history--right back to the big bang.
Scientists are very proud of this accomplishment. "Only the first 10-43 seconds remain obscure," notes a self-confident UW Astronomy Professor Bruce Margon.
But what happened before the big bang?
That stops Astronomy Chair Craig Hogan dead in his tracks.
"What, you're not greedy or anything, are you?," he asks with incredulity that anyone would not be satisfied to know what happened over 15 billion years after the big bang.
And then he pauses, thoughtfully:
"What happened before?," he muses. "No one could really know. All memory of that time is lost, everything from then is forgotten. That was a period of such catastrophic instability that it just doesn't remember what came before it. We probably could never find out, either. There just isn't any information left over from it."
Margon has addressed this question, too. As he told the Washington Post last year, "One would think that if someone has trouble reconciling religion with physics, they would like the big bang. It has beautiful elements of ultimate mystery
IANAS. hah.
Current physics does not attempt to explain what caused the big bang--there is no information available prior to it, nor do current laws of physics apply. It is generally believed to be a deep mystery, and likely to always remain so.
sorry.
I would say that while not directly refuted, the ant. priciple becomes more valid the more "possible universes" or possible worlds exist.
Given an infinate number of _existing_ universes, it should be no suprise that we're in this one.
Given an infinate number of _possible_ universes, but only one existing one, it would be very suprising that we exist.
Here, I'll forgo violence and use a sex analogy. I'm me because of one of a million unique sperm merged with an egg. That I have the genetic code of sperm 0999999 rather than sperm 0 - 0999998 is not remarkable.
But if it was known that only one sperm--the very one that made me--could form a viable embryo (the rest would have caused an abortion).. well, my birth would be by all counts a genuine miracle.
So we need to find out what's the case: the one universe we can see? or a google that we cannot?
-jon
And unlike the original post, this one doesn't have a referral link!
Through dark turtle energy, of course.
There, I said it. Sure linux marches on and the company will be pounded by big blue--but they, by which I mean the owners, get the cash for the FUD and run off. Legal liability is borne by SCO, which files for bankruptcy protection.
There's a lot of gloating here today, but I think that the SCO execs got what they wanted, the lawyers got rich, and everyone else would have benifited from this never happening in the first place.
gg.
The important part is the transition phase-- where the technology to live centuries is available, but only to the rich.
Suddenly, you have substantially turnover in wealth and power--the rich get richer and the rich live longer. A corporation can become a cult of personality (dave thomas, bill gates writ large) and a dictorial president will never succumb to health.
The social questions are similar to those guiding organ transplants, but much greater in intensity. Who gets life? The rich? the lucky? the powerful? the brilliant? Those whose lives are considered more imporant than others--welcome to a two-tier society. If (as seems likely) we have universal health care at that point, this would probably break it.
A change in paradigms: When old age is considered a disease, how much are we willing to pay for the cure? Imagine as an analogy, a disease causes a 50% reduction in global lifespans. A treatment is available, but immensely expensive. How could that change the way we live or the goals we have in life?
Here's the troll! More or less, I've described the situation in some parts of africa. A drastic reduction in life expectancy due to the AIDS virus that infects 30-50% of the population; a few rich individuals and a few rich countries that can afford a daily drug cocktail that turns a fatal illness into a lifetime disease. And since this is slashdot, let's not forget the patent laws that prevent the selling of cheap equivlents overseas.
-jon
Personally, I learned about computers by long-term exposure to them. Personally, many more people are injured every year by ladders. Ladder licenses for everyone!
"That which happened in the past will repeat itself in the future." How do we know this? Because it has always been true in the past.
I'm about to graduate college, and my limited experience with offices and "networking" have convinced me it's something I really dislike. Is it better in small companies? non-profits? Or am I just being naive about human nature. Thanks.
So this is a automatous GPS-guided long-range flying vehicle? Isn't that a cruise missle?
Admittedly, there would be some scaling up before poeple could fit a 2000lb warhead on it. But for bio/chemical WMDs, here's your cheap unstoppable delivery device.
I wish them luck, regardless.
Doesn't the ammonia in windex strip off the anti-reflective coating on monitors?
A little off topic, but IBM still supports OS/2. Make what you will of that.
More importantly, it could be used to verify some convictions and set the innocent free. The Innocence Project could certainly use this--to date, most freed people by DNA were accused rapists. Too bad there's no funding for post-conviction checking..
What it says. looks like a fairly small camera, flash, plastic, "Dakota" brand?
It's a scary thought, but slavery is not quite dead yet.
It's still open practice in many parts of Sudan, some other parts of the world (google it).
In asia, girls are often sold into brothels to pay parental debts.
It also happens that in the united states, there are a few prosecuted cases everyy year where an illegal immigrant is forced to work as a domestic servant without wages and without the ability to leave or contact other people. Normally, they can't speak english and are too scared to go out.
That is slavery too.
I've often suspected that the reason none of the major US battery companies psuh rechargables is simply to capitalize on an entrenched, profitable market to the detriment of the consumer.
Look at AA sized NiMHs--at one point virtually unknown and available only in specialty battery stores, the explosion of high-voltage devices such as digital cameras have forced people to use them. The voltage curve of a Alkaline AA won't last 5 shots on a lot of newer cameras.
This was a new, underexploited market; it should have been exploited by duracell, etc. instead, they spent a couple years creating the most useless invention ever: the high voltage alkaline. (E2, "titanium" batteries, etc.) A giant ad campaign was launched to convince people that these were the batteries you used in electronic devices, despite being non-reusable and just as expensive as the reusable cells...
ridiculous.
Unclear example, sorry. I meant that there would be a certain order to put in the individual screws (screw A, screw B, screw C and then screw D..), rather than creative screwing technique.
As for creativity.. I'm not talking about major modifications to the design (though there are times when workers come up with innovations to the process), but smaller optimizations. A left handed worker may do things different than a right handed one, and generally speaking, anyone who does the same thing 10,000 times will find some way to speed up the process.
Note that you could implement a clever hack job that would make all the employees fabricate say.. a giant lexus-branded steel penis. Since they've been reduced to following step by step operating codes, this taking over of worker directives would probably not be noticed until the very end. Likewise, corporate espionage could in the future consist of stealing the proper meme-program (obligatory ref: snow crash) to whatever missle tech is currently trendy. This is a consequence of further removing the worker from the means of production.
That's... horrible. Efficent, economical and innovative. But horrible--you remove every bit of skill, creativity, and inititive ( I know, I know, not much to begin with ) and make people into meat robots. The real problem is, people will start expecting workers to *be* like robots. No training, no intro, just stick a pair of glasses on them and tell them what bolts to turn. If they slack a little, well the glasses will probably beep at them and alert payroll. You're naive if you don't believe that isn't one of the advertised benifits. I can see a day when people will be fired for putting in four screws in counter-clockwise when the labled instructions told them to do it clockwise.
These surplus concordes you talk about.. where can I get one?