I use macs and linux, and while the interface is "macish", I wouldn't say it's that close -- it's very busy looking and OSX is quite a bit cleaner (as is Gnome). What struck me is how much the icons for many things look like KDE's (users for example). But what I noticed the most is how much text there is on the screen -- like the bastard child of a gui and an ncurses interface.
Anyway, it was neat and all, but I never use it. It's quicker to just use the menubar switcher. It's a good way to impress your friends though. I imagine MS's deal is similar -- looks neato but doesn't really help you out.
Law is taught quite a bit differently than subjects in college. Of course I did the assigned reading, briefed the cases, and came prepared. Legal texts are often quite different than for exampl, an Organic Chem text with its points, description, summary, and practice questions. In law school, much to the consternation of many students, a lot of teachers won't simply state points A, B, C and expect you to memorize them. The idea is to teach by asking questions which guide the students to stumble upon points A, B, and C without the teacher sppon feeding them points. Unquestionably, in something as ever changing as the law, and where at times there are no "definitively right" answers, it would be a disservice to teach by bullet points -- what needs to be taught is the process of arriving at an answer through analysis. The Socratic Method isn't friendly or easy, but it is an effective means of teaching the process of learning. That's why it was so important for me to be able summarize the logical flow of a discussion -- that information existed only in the class discussion and if missed, there was no book I could review to fill in the gaps.
Furthermore, in this country, it's traditional to take the stance of "innocent until proven guilty", for the sake of erring on the side of favoring life. So can you prove that the fetus is not the equivalent of a person?
You're using language in a sloppy fashion: "Life". I have living skin on my fingertips. Am I murdering if I take a razor and slice off a little bit of it? You are saying that living cells should be afforded the rights of an actual entire human. This is an extraordinary claim. As such, you need to go first and prove that all living cells in a human body should be protected from harm. This has implications that extend into sports, war, surgery, habits, sun exposure, and almost any fact of daily life (risk taking is pervasive in everything we do and all risks can damage human cells, e.g., chopping carrots puts your fingers at risk, shall we outlaw that activity?).
Next time I get the chance, I'll give you a teaspoon of goo and you guys can attempt to communicate. "What is a person" is not merely subjective. There are qualities of personhood that are identifiable. Some are harder and some are easier to define, but they are real. For example, communicative behavior is one characteristic people have. If you cut a bit of live skin from your finger, would you try to discuss politics with it? Of course not. As human as it is, skin won't communicate. Skin is not a person.
Stating that it's impossible to define a person with some reasonable level of certainty is silly. If we can't define what makes a person a person, then we better stop cutting grass, trees, chickens necks, etc. etc. because it would be impossible to distinguish between living organisms... maybe even non-living things too. No rock crushers, rocks might be persons as personhood is completely subjective and objectively indescribable.
If you think that rock crusher idea is stupid, welcome to the club. Now you can start evaluating what objective characteristics make up personhood.
I'd be more inclined to let you take a laptop to an exam than a lecture. At least with an exam (particularly where extensive case studies or essays need to be composed the utility of a word processor would come in handy; even *my* hand cramped pretty badly in 3+ hour written exams that often felt more like endurance tests at speed writing...
One reason I didn't mention earlier, was that using my laptop forced me to perfect touch typing beyond Mavis Beacon's help. The bar exam was 2.5 days long -- all essay. Takers had the option of typing or hand writing. Typers had to use a typewriter w/o spell check and memory capable of only a single line for erasure purposes - word processors were definitely out. Statistically, typers have a much higher bar pass rate (causation/correlation: could simply be that those who decide to type are more likely to be passers, or it could be that typing produces better results -- either way, I wasn't taking risks). I decide before going to law school I would type all my exams -- and I did for all my classes during school as well as the bar.
Explain how it is that slowly a thought you have about a lecture down on paper, and in the process missing much information, is superior to writing that though down in a fraction of the time on a laptop. Secondly, you're analogy doesn't hold up if that large monitor isn't going to help you do the work. Laptops can definitely help a person take good class notes -- the only difference is how your fingers move your thoughts to media. Of course, I can see that certain classes lend themselves well to laptop notes and others don't. As others have mentioned, where math or diagrams are involved, pen and paper is better. But in classes that are mostly about verbal thought/analysis, a laptop is far superior.
Others have mentioned direct transcribing. Even excellent typists can't do that -- it's only possible with shorthand and after seeing lots of court reporters work, even that has limitations (court reporters often tell people they need to slow down -- when people are nervous or angry, they tend to talk very quickly).
I don't see how you'd call her a free thinker. She believes she knows the "one true way" for people to absorb and learn information. It requires pen and paper and excludes laptops. A free thinker would say "use what works for you".
I went to law school in the mid 90s. I was one of the first people at the school to be using a laptop (486sx20, grayscale monitor) to take notes -- by the end of my stay (1997), many people were using them. My laptop helped me considerably: I have horrible penmanship and I can't stop from death-gripping a pen (makes my hand hurt).
But more to the point, outlining a lecture on the fly actually helped me understand much more than pen and paper would have. I still had to analyze and paraphrase, but typing is so much faster, I was able to catch, process, and record at a speed much closer to my mental process. With a pen and paper, I would have gotten a point, and then missed the next three as I slowly and painfully scratched out an illegible note.
So yeah, teacher is a luddite and worse, one who thinks she knows best AND has the power to do something about it. Scarry.
[your analogy: slaves = fetus was criticized] How is comparing the plight of a class of people who aren't considered people by the law to the plight of a class of people who weren't considered people by the law an invalid or unlawful comparison?
You're analogy was worse than the usual slashdot car analogy. If there are unborn children, the world is currently overrun by undead corpses, murders who have not killed, and impoverished millionaires. Potential to become something is not that thing at all. Shall we execute you because you might become a murderer in the future? Or sell you a brand new Ferarri because you have the potential to win the lottery next week? Shall we grant human status to a lump of cells utterly lacking in the qualities that make a "person"?
You assume a fetus is the social equivalent of a person. You need to prove that fact before your anaology works. And do note that potential and acutality are quite different - status based on these qualities will naturally also be different.
Yes, yes, yes (sigh)... the cells are "human" but that doesn't really mean anything. A skin cell is "human" but isn't a "person", even if it potentially could be cloned into one. Where are the regulations against exfolliation?? Actual status, not potential, should be the metric. Anything else is just emotional claptrap.
OK, if you want to get bitchy, here's the calculations if I used a tracfone: I would pay at minimum, $130/month (400 minutes at 32.5 cents/minute) to $227.50/month (700 minutes @ same rate). Tracfone is 2.6 - 4.55 times more expensive for me than my current plan. The break even point between Tracfone and my service is 153 minutes. That's ten 15 minute calls a month, or 31 five minute calls per month. Tracfone is fine if you barely use it. As a case in point, my provider offers 200 minute/month service for $30. The same service with Tracfone costs $65/month. They also offer a 60 minute plan for $19.99 -- Tracfone comes in at $19.50, so finally, Tracfone is a better deal. Again though, only for people who don't use their phones (in which case, perhaps going without makes more sense).
Secondly, you completely fail to consider that a plan with a decent amount of minutes negates the need for wired service. I have a friend who hasn't had a wired phone in years and I'm seriously considering it myself. If I did that, I could essentially subtract my monthly wired payment ($30) from my cell cost (if you have a tracfone, you better have either no reason to call anyone ever, or wired service -- otherwise you're gonna get reamed).
Tracfone has to be the biggest rip-off out there at a best rate of $0.325/minute ($129.99 for a 400 minute card). Virgin Mobile is a little better, but it's complicated: $0.25/minute for the first 10 minutes and then $0.10/minute thereafter in a single day.
I like my plan even though it is $50/month -- I get a 1000 minutes though I typically only use about 4-500, some months up to 6-700, so I get anywhere from 0.125 to 0.07 per minute. I bought the phone 4 years ago so it's just a phone, nice and solid, big enough to not slip through my fingers and it has speakerphone that actually works well. Forget lousy low-res cameras and simple boring games -- a speakerphone is actually useful.
I haven't read the 144 page research report, but I think it is worth noting that the person who summarized this report, states at the end of his summary that he has been claiming for a long time that p2p downloading doesn't affect sales that much. In other words, he has a perspective on the issue. Somehow, I find it hard to believe that the recording industry is going to look at the stat which shows that a 1/3 of music on computers is from (presumably copyright-violation style) downloading (this is for the most-frequently-purchasing demographic (teenie-boppers)), and say "oh yeah, p2p doesn't harm our bottom line. The recording industry has a different perspective... they'll say they're losing 33% of their sales and have a freak fit.
Anyway, I wonder if people were asked this questions: "of music you have downloaded (as in copyright violation style), how much of that music is good enough to keep for a 1x/decade listen, but not worth buying?" Maybe I should RTF 144pg report... naaa.
The bug only affects a system at install-time, and it will continue to affect new installs so long as the broken installer is floating around. Patching it today is hardly more effective than patching it on April 6.
It's been a while since I installed an Ubuntu system, but I believe that during the install you have the option of instaling updates. If you refuse, once you're logged in you'll see the red icon saying updates are available. At that point, it's the user's fault if the file with the PW is still in the system. If you don't have internet access then of course you can't get the updates -- this would then only be an issue if you had a multiuser system without internet access that stored sensitive data in which case you're probably not using a bleeding edge linux distro anyway. So in reality, it doesn't really matter how many broken installers there are. Except for the negative publicity of course.
I already own the boxed set. I have issues w/ Serenity (series was definitely better) but I still went three times each time bringing people with me (and I also bought the DVD).
Don't think you have carte blanche to delete or destroy anything. For example, in civil cases, even before the case is filed, if a party has reason to believe that a particular bit of evidence would be harmful to his case and that it would be discoverable (in the legal sense), and that person then destroys the data, his oposition has a decent chance of having the jury instructed that they ought to presume the information would have harmed the case of the person who destroyed it. As a completely made up example, let's say Firestone knows that X tire will blowout unreasonably often if the ambient temperature is above 90 degrees F. It knows this because it comissioned a study of the tires. It decides to sell the tires anyway and that summer some people in AZ die in wrecks. Some executive has an "Oh Shit!" moment, and destroys all the reports. Some months later the lawsuits start coming in and during discovery, it is discovered that there are these destroyed studies. If Firestone can't cough up the studies, chances are good that plaintiffs will get an instruction that the jury should presume the worst about the contents of those documents (there are caveats to this). Anyway, it could be quite important when the jury gets to questions about how much Firestone knew and when the knew it (think punitive damages).
I read somewhere I think that the problem with BM is that it is a romance movie, and a lot of people won't go watch romances of any kind. I know I'm that way... and your (excellent) characterization (forbidden love) makes me even more bored with the thought of seeing it.
I want good and thoughtful sci-fi. Not sci-fear (scientist's experiment gone awry / aliens taking over) - Not paranormal BS -- but Hard Science Fiction in film. Where is it??
Forget Uhaul. Moving really sucks what with all the packing and unpacking and lifting. I suggest arson. That way, you just move the insurance check to your new bank. Much easier on your back and neck.
Four years ago I made the mistake of signing up w/ AT&T. I cancled and paid off my bill (something like $14). Now, every four months I start getting bills, then the calls. I ignore them till they catch me. Then I ask for immediate acceleration. If I don't get it I curse a little (I've been doing this 3x/yr for 4 years now -- I'm not normally an asshole). Eventually someone says they see the problem and correct it. Every time I'm told this. And inevitably, the bills come back. Last time, when the person was through "fixing" it (I've since started getting bills again), she asked if I was interested in signing up for service. I laughed.
Slashdot Mirror
I use macs and linux, and while the interface is "macish", I wouldn't say it's that close -- it's very busy looking and OSX is quite a bit cleaner (as is Gnome). What struck me is how much the icons for many things look like KDE's (users for example). But what I noticed the most is how much text there is on the screen -- like the bastard child of a gui and an ncurses interface.
I played around with "3ddesk" for an evening or two. http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php (It's very smooth in real life, unlike the animation)
Anyway, it was neat and all, but I never use it. It's quicker to just use the menubar switcher. It's a good way to impress your friends though. I imagine MS's deal is similar -- looks neato but doesn't really help you out.
Law is taught quite a bit differently than subjects in college. Of course I did the assigned reading, briefed the cases, and came prepared. Legal texts are often quite different than for exampl, an Organic Chem text with its points, description, summary, and practice questions. In law school, much to the consternation of many students, a lot of teachers won't simply state points A, B, C and expect you to memorize them. The idea is to teach by asking questions which guide the students to stumble upon points A, B, and C without the teacher sppon feeding them points. Unquestionably, in something as ever changing as the law, and where at times there are no "definitively right" answers, it would be a disservice to teach by bullet points -- what needs to be taught is the process of arriving at an answer through analysis. The Socratic Method isn't friendly or easy, but it is an effective means of teaching the process of learning. That's why it was so important for me to be able summarize the logical flow of a discussion -- that information existed only in the class discussion and if missed, there was no book I could review to fill in the gaps.
s chool
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method#Law_
Probably not "cheap" by any stretch of the imagination. http://www.sgi.com/products/visualization/prism/st reaming_video.html
Scroll down to the GeoProbe movie -- they mention a system with 512 GB of "shared memory". And mention linux.
Next time I get the chance, I'll give you a teaspoon of goo and you guys can attempt to communicate. "What is a person" is not merely subjective. There are qualities of personhood that are identifiable. Some are harder and some are easier to define, but they are real. For example, communicative behavior is one characteristic people have. If you cut a bit of live skin from your finger, would you try to discuss politics with it? Of course not. As human as it is, skin won't communicate. Skin is not a person.
... maybe even non-living things too. No rock crushers, rocks might be persons as personhood is completely subjective and objectively indescribable.
Stating that it's impossible to define a person with some reasonable level of certainty is silly. If we can't define what makes a person a person, then we better stop cutting grass, trees, chickens necks, etc. etc. because it would be impossible to distinguish between living organisms
If you think that rock crusher idea is stupid, welcome to the club. Now you can start evaluating what objective characteristics make up personhood.
Explain how it is that slowly a thought you have about a lecture down on paper, and in the process missing much information, is superior to writing that though down in a fraction of the time on a laptop. Secondly, you're analogy doesn't hold up if that large monitor isn't going to help you do the work. Laptops can definitely help a person take good class notes -- the only difference is how your fingers move your thoughts to media. Of course, I can see that certain classes lend themselves well to laptop notes and others don't. As others have mentioned, where math or diagrams are involved, pen and paper is better. But in classes that are mostly about verbal thought/analysis, a laptop is far superior.
Others have mentioned direct transcribing. Even excellent typists can't do that -- it's only possible with shorthand and after seeing lots of court reporters work, even that has limitations (court reporters often tell people they need to slow down -- when people are nervous or angry, they tend to talk very quickly).
I don't see how you'd call her a free thinker. She believes she knows the "one true way" for people to absorb and learn information. It requires pen and paper and excludes laptops. A free thinker would say "use what works for you".
I went to law school in the mid 90s. I was one of the first people at the school to be using a laptop (486sx20, grayscale monitor) to take notes -- by the end of my stay (1997), many people were using them. My laptop helped me considerably: I have horrible penmanship and I can't stop from death-gripping a pen (makes my hand hurt).
But more to the point, outlining a lecture on the fly actually helped me understand much more than pen and paper would have. I still had to analyze and paraphrase, but typing is so much faster, I was able to catch, process, and record at a speed much closer to my mental process. With a pen and paper, I would have gotten a point, and then missed the next three as I slowly and painfully scratched out an illegible note.
So yeah, teacher is a luddite and worse, one who thinks she knows best AND has the power to do something about it. Scarry.
You assume a fetus is the social equivalent of a person. You need to prove that fact before your anaology works. And do note that potential and acutality are quite different - status based on these qualities will naturally also be different.
Yes, yes, yes (sigh)
OK, if you want to get bitchy, here's the calculations if I used a tracfone: I would pay at minimum, $130/month (400 minutes at 32.5 cents/minute) to $227.50/month (700 minutes @ same rate). Tracfone is 2.6 - 4.55 times more expensive for me than my current plan. The break even point between Tracfone and my service is 153 minutes. That's ten 15 minute calls a month, or 31 five minute calls per month. Tracfone is fine if you barely use it. As a case in point, my provider offers 200 minute/month service for $30. The same service with Tracfone costs $65/month. They also offer a 60 minute plan for $19.99 -- Tracfone comes in at $19.50, so finally, Tracfone is a better deal. Again though, only for people who don't use their phones (in which case, perhaps going without makes more sense).
Secondly, you completely fail to consider that a plan with a decent amount of minutes negates the need for wired service. I have a friend who hasn't had a wired phone in years and I'm seriously considering it myself. If I did that, I could essentially subtract my monthly wired payment ($30) from my cell cost (if you have a tracfone, you better have either no reason to call anyone ever, or wired service -- otherwise you're gonna get reamed).
Tracfone has to be the biggest rip-off out there at a best rate of $0.325/minute ($129.99 for a 400 minute card). Virgin Mobile is a little better, but it's complicated: $0.25/minute for the first 10 minutes and then $0.10/minute thereafter in a single day.
I like my plan even though it is $50/month -- I get a 1000 minutes though I typically only use about 4-500, some months up to 6-700, so I get anywhere from 0.125 to 0.07 per minute. I bought the phone 4 years ago so it's just a phone, nice and solid, big enough to not slip through my fingers and it has speakerphone that actually works well. Forget lousy low-res cameras and simple boring games -- a speakerphone is actually useful.
I haven't read the 144 page research report, but I think it is worth noting that the person who summarized this report, states at the end of his summary that he has been claiming for a long time that p2p downloading doesn't affect sales that much. In other words, he has a perspective on the issue. Somehow, I find it hard to believe that the recording industry is going to look at the stat which shows that a 1/3 of music on computers is from (presumably copyright-violation style) downloading (this is for the most-frequently-purchasing demographic (teenie-boppers)), and say "oh yeah, p2p doesn't harm our bottom line. The recording industry has a different perspective ... they'll say they're losing 33% of their sales and have a freak fit.
... naaa.
Anyway, I wonder if people were asked this questions: "of music you have downloaded (as in copyright violation style), how much of that music is good enough to keep for a 1x/decade listen, but not worth buying?" Maybe I should RTF 144pg report
In Soviet America, the news watches you. ...or...
Information wants to be jailed. ...hmmm not so good .. others?
Absolutely -- that's one of the caveats I alluded to.
I already own the boxed set. I have issues w/ Serenity (series was definitely better) but I still went three times each time bringing people with me (and I also bought the DVD).
Don't think you have carte blanche to delete or destroy anything. For example, in civil cases, even before the case is filed, if a party has reason to believe that a particular bit of evidence would be harmful to his case and that it would be discoverable (in the legal sense), and that person then destroys the data, his oposition has a decent chance of having the jury instructed that they ought to presume the information would have harmed the case of the person who destroyed it. As a completely made up example, let's say Firestone knows that X tire will blowout unreasonably often if the ambient temperature is above 90 degrees F. It knows this because it comissioned a study of the tires. It decides to sell the tires anyway and that summer some people in AZ die in wrecks. Some executive has an "Oh Shit!" moment, and destroys all the reports. Some months later the lawsuits start coming in and during discovery, it is discovered that there are these destroyed studies. If Firestone can't cough up the studies, chances are good that plaintiffs will get an instruction that the jury should presume the worst about the contents of those documents (there are caveats to this). Anyway, it could be quite important when the jury gets to questions about how much Firestone knew and when the knew it (think punitive damages).
Let me second that. And to the GP, thanks for reminding me I have reason to pay off my library fine. Think I'll go today.
I read somewhere I think that the problem with BM is that it is a romance movie, and a lot of people won't go watch romances of any kind. I know I'm that way ... and your (excellent) characterization (forbidden love) makes me even more bored with the thought of seeing it.
I want good and thoughtful sci-fi. Not sci-fear (scientist's experiment gone awry / aliens taking over) - Not paranormal BS -- but Hard Science Fiction in film. Where is it??
Forget Uhaul. Moving really sucks what with all the packing and unpacking and lifting. I suggest arson. That way, you just move the insurance check to your new bank. Much easier on your back and neck.
Both AT&T and Qwest offer local service in my area. Qwest is the lesser evil.
Four years ago I made the mistake of signing up w/ AT&T. I cancled and paid off my bill (something like $14). Now, every four months I start getting bills, then the calls. I ignore them till they catch me. Then I ask for immediate acceleration. If I don't get it I curse a little (I've been doing this 3x/yr for 4 years now -- I'm not normally an asshole). Eventually someone says they see the problem and correct it. Every time I'm told this. And inevitably, the bills come back. Last time, when the person was through "fixing" it (I've since started getting bills again), she asked if I was interested in signing up for service. I laughed.
Troll? Brilliant.