Don't blame the journalists. Often they have a pretty good idea of what they're talking about (talking print journalism here). Remember, it's their job to talk to people who DO have advanced degrees, and tons of experience.
The problem is editors who look at a complicated story, full of scientific detail, and say, "Since our average reader has an IQ of 4, we need to replace all these big words with something like 'Science voodoo stuff', and then tell them that its bad." It's just one more example of pandering to the lowest common denominator.
Another issue is this whole "Balanced Story" crap that's been going on for the last ten years or so. You have to have two sides, see, so that means that fringe moron groups get dragged in on stories where there really is only one side. That's why the lunatic fringe gets so damn much press. If a million scientists agree on something, you'll still have to go find the one moron who thinks somethign else, so it's balanced.
Complete crap of course, because you're giving the one moron's opinion more weight than the opinions of hundred of others. Talk about unbalanced.
And then lets talk about corporate journalism. Corporations are in it for money. Saying things that people disagree with has traditionally provoked lawsuits against news organizations, even if those things were true. In the old days, they'd go to court and often win. These days, corporate views that as a big money sink, so they fold on stories where they're in the right, but the topic is controversial, e.g global warming. There was a paper in Texas a few years ago that was forced to retract an article in which a "scientist" who maintained that abortion causes cancer was protrayed, correctly, as fringe thinker that no one agreed with, whose theories were based on no data.
It's a hell of a lot more complicated than you seem to think.
God's omnibenevolence rests on humanities paramount importance, because if the good of other things weighed as highly as our personal good, god would not be omnibenevolent from our perspective.
Adding a little rational thought to the religious aspect...always a bad idea...the concept of an omnibenevolent deity rests on the idea that humans are the only important thing in the world.
Observational data would suggest that the world does not find this to be the case. Assuming the world bows to the will of god (which is a given, vis a vis Omnipotence) this would seem to suggest that either we are not the most important thing in the world, or god is not omnibenevolent.
Natural disasters and other such "Acts of God" definitely add a new dimension to the traditional problem of evil. Can't really blame that one on free will.
Don't be too quick to dismiss this. The "Deathstar" nickname is widespread...I bought one a few years ago that lasted for about 13 months.
We support a lot of Macs at work (deskstar is the standard harddrive for the mac), and we've had seven failed deskstars since february, and only one of another brand...The deskstars were pretty new as well...all the macs are under 2 years old.
I used to love that brand...I have a 26.5gb deskstar from when they were still made by IBM, and it still runs fine, and it's almost 5. But the hitachi deskstars? I'll never buy another one.
Yea, that flies two years ago, but they've got a democraticly elected government now, or so we keep saying.
What possible reason can we have that justifies holding out control of something like that? If they can't handle a TLD, then they've got serious problems.
How can a country be too unstable to use a TLD? Is the TLD going to run amok, strap some viruses around itself and nuke some other unsuspecting nearby TLD like.kw or.ae?
Sounds idiotic to me. Or, more likely, like some country doesn't want Iraquis to be able to express their opinions attached to the official domain of the country.
If your code is REMOTELY standards compliant then it'll pretty much work on every browser. You have to really lock yourself into Active X and.Net before you run into true incompatibility, which means you have to decide from the start to use a platform that you know is imprefectly supported.
If this was a business, fine, who cares. But this is a disaster relief agency funded by taxpayer dollars, and they goddamn well better have a site that can be viewed by all citizens who need to view it.
Just part and parcel with the rest of their collossal incompetence during the current distaster.
And don't tell me they have better things to do; I haven't seen 'em do hardly anything yet. They could have used the week after the hurricane, when they were sitting around with their thumbs up their asses while everyone else was doing their job for them to at least make a webpage that could at least be viewed by the people who're still using older versions of IE!
Yea, 1 kilo of hydrogen is comperable to a gallon of gas, in terms of energy.
I was just pointing out the most obvious and glaring error. It's going to take people some time to wrap their minds around gas as GAS rather than gas as LIQUID.
Reason 1: All cars have gas tanks that are big enough to take them 400 miles. It's a requirement. This one doesn't.
Reason 2: 50L and 500km is 1L per 10km...this is obviously low. If you've ever put gas in your car a ratio of 1 unit of volume to 6 units of distance should leap out at you.
23 miles per gallon is better than an suv, but it doesn't come close to a hybrid. And it's sure as hell not 60 mpg. Hell it's only 37km per gallon. Where the hell did you get that number?
And apparently moderators are on crack, as usual. Come on guys, if you drive a car EVER that number should look suspicious.
There are actually a large number of those pumps lying...or I should say floating around. Freighters carry extremely weighty pumps for use in shifting ballast water, and they are in a better than usual position for getting close to the city.
Military ships have extra pumping capacity to deal with combat damage, and there are no doubt a few ships in mothballs that could be very useful to reactivate for this purpose.
I know for a fact the core has a number of large pump tankers, because they use them for "Beach Revitilization" which involves pumping water and sand up from the ocean floor and onto existing beach.
So the pumps exist. Still, at this point it is point-less. We need to restore the levies before any of that can begin, and god knows when that will be possible.
So who administers the tests? Sounds like you're saying we need Free-As-In-Beer tests, but if there's no central reputable authority doing the testing, then the tests are worthless, and if the tests are free(as in beer), then how would that central authority be funded?
Oooo, yea, replace one 500 dollar test with MANY 500 dollar tests! Easy profit for the testing companies, but does it benefit anyone else? No.
Anyway, that's pretty much how they do it anyway, except you'll find that there are many levels of certification, so you can get 4 or 5 different.Net or Linux certifications.
The whole idea of certifications is flawed, because the testing companies have a stake in putting as many people through their classes as possible. Theoretically they get paid the same if someone bombs the test, but that person goes back and tells all his friends that he just dropped 3000 on a whole lotta nothing, and they all cancel their classes with that company.
I had a guy ask me once if I was A+ certified, and I replied, "No, but I've taught A+ certification classes." It blew his mind. How could I ever have learned enough to teach such a mind-stretching class without actually getting certified? Whereas I was still reeling from the fact that someone would ask that question to an applicant for a mid-level solaris administration job.
The bottom line is, HR loves because it gives them an easy metric to measure candidates. And the testing companies love it because its a big business. And IT professionals buy into it because its a hell of a lot easier than trying to convey a complex skillset to someone who doesn't understand, doesn't want to understand, and couldn't really give a damn on top of it all.
I just had a training class on the whole.Net thing, and most of the people in there were old VB types, and they were mostly horrified by the realization that they were going to have to do this whole "Object Oriented" thing, and completely intimidated by C#.
Whereas I was very comfortable with C#, mainly because it's just like java. The syntax is like most other major languages, the OO is pretty standard, funtion calls, object references, no problem.
If you train people in idosyncratic languages like VB, you end up with people who can't adapt to more normal programming languages. Which would be fine if you could trust MS not to get bored and utterly change the language, but they did it once already, so that's really not a safe choice.
Where I went to school, about the same time, they were teaching Java pretty much exclusively, though there was a decent amount of C as well. I've never really regretted that...java is so picky that when you move to a new language, it always seems easier, and if you're a little comfortable with C as well, then you're in pretty good shape.
They didn't provide GUI tools either; so you could go out and try and find one (I used Forte for fat client work, but that was it), or you could use emacs like everyone else.
Shrug. Where I went to school we only had practical applications in lab assignments. The only class I had that dealt specifically with programming languages was "Principles of Programming Languages" and likewise the only class I had that dealt specifically with operating systems was "OS Design".
Even so we were expected to be Unix savvy, and even though it was never taught in any class, if you graduated with a CS degree, you probably WERE Unix savvy, and even better, you'd learned how to pick up a technical skillset in response to related work pressures, something I have used over and over in my life.
Schools like ITT are really meant to turn out MCSEs and the like. But a degree from a decent 4 year program should still prepare you to move out into the tech world.
During the period when I was abusing my body to the limit, I could go three or four days with about 8 hours of sleep. And then I'd crash and LOSE A DAY...i.e. pass out around 3pm on friday and wake up sunday morning at 4:00am. I remember falling asleep in my car, right in front of my apartment, because I was too tired to walk up the stairs.
Passed out once, and my roomate had 5 guys over working on a CS project and it didn't wake me up until 10:30 at night. They'd been there since about 11:00 and I'd been there, asleep, since the night before. And when I say "roommate" I mean we shared a ROOM. I scared the hell out of him when I woke up because they'd thought the big bump in my bed was just a continuation of all the crap piled on top of it. I got up, ate dinner, went right back to sleep.
I'm still paying for that crap, ten years later. It's totally not worth it.
Well first of all, they're completely unrelated moral issues.
Embryonic Stem cell research is opposed by groups who believe (wrongly) that this is morally equivalent to using small children as basic building and construction materials (eg, as shingles, drywall, paving material, grout, etc), as well as the general luddite group for whom all attempt to meddle with anything more complex than, for example, the wheel, is a scary development that can only lead to the downfall of the human race.
On the other hand, this is worrying to the/. crowd because it is a profound invasion of personal privacy, tatamount to putting a camera in your shower or hidden microphones in your bedroom to catch your pillow talk. In a nutshell, they believe that, as long as they're doing their job, its none of their employers effing business what their genetic predispositions are.
Of the two, utterly separate, arguments the second one is compelling because its far-reaching concerns realistic and easy to comprehend. If you have a genetic predisposition to cancer you could be denied employment because cancer treatment is extremely expensive, and the cost of which would be borne by the corporation itself.
The first argument is not compelling due to the attempt to define life so far back as to make all kitten-killing/.'ers mass murders every morning in the shower.
Now, do you see why it is not hypocritical to believe one and not the other?
Filed in 1996? Are they out of their freaking minds? There is so much prior art, it's hard to even quantify it.
I think there should be a special type of punishment for people who apply for patents like this, long after the technology has gone into use, and it should go double for any moron who approves it. Perferably something with ants, fire, or boards studded with nails.
Quite right, you are. Most irrationality has less to do with pot than with some of the other topics of this thread.
Guess I pushed my own buttons there. As an analytic type, it sets my teeth on edge when people decide all of philosophy is the fluffy subjective stuff.
I started off in cognitive science, which is equal parts, philosophy, computer science, and neuroanatomy. Dropped the neuroanatomy, and ended up philosophy/comp sci, and people to this day see that as some kind of inherent contradiction.
I've got my BA in Philosophy, actually, so I've taken quite a few courses that had nothing to do with logic. Phenomenology LEAPS to mind. As does Existentialism. Certain branches of Ethics. All the bits that overlap religion.
The common thread there is the lack of anything I would term "Wisdom".
If you don't bother to subject your arguments to reasoned rational analysis, then clearly you don't give a damn about wisdom, and thus fall into the fuzzy headed crap that is more appropriate to a coffeehouse in Amsterdam than a course of study or discourse.
Though many math types here will disagree with you, I do not. you're right. Induction is not a valid logical inference.
That being said, what's your point?
Induction is a powerful predictive tool. We can't know for sure the sun will rise tomorrow. We can't know that water will be wet, rocks will be hard, or anything really. There is not one jot of knowledge that we posess about the physical world that does not come to us through induction.
To put Evolution and Creationism on a platform together, we would need an equal weight of evidence behind each one. But the amount of evidence available behind Creationism is laughably small...in fact non-existent would be a perfectly adequate description. Whereas the amount of evidence regarding Evolution is both plentiful, and extremely persuasive.
That being the case, we, as supposedly intelligent creatures, would be as utterly foolish to give ID anything near the weight Evolution desrves, just as we would be to jump into a raging fire, just because it hasn't been deductively proven that we'll get burned.
The Cogito is a logical outgrowth of any attempt to doubt your own existence. If you can doubt your own existence, then there is a thing that doubts its own existence, and that thing must, in some form, exist, or it wouldn't be able to do that.
It is a pure and simple truth.
Now, mind you, it's logically worthless because you can't reason anywhere from a solitary premise. But it is true.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't blame the journalists. Often they have a pretty good idea of what they're talking about (talking print journalism here). Remember, it's their job to talk to people who DO have advanced degrees, and tons of experience.
The problem is editors who look at a complicated story, full of scientific detail, and say, "Since our average reader has an IQ of 4, we need to replace all these big words with something like 'Science voodoo stuff', and then tell them that its bad." It's just one more example of pandering to the lowest common denominator.
Another issue is this whole "Balanced Story" crap that's been going on for the last ten years or so. You have to have two sides, see, so that means that fringe moron groups get dragged in on stories where there really is only one side. That's why the lunatic fringe gets so damn much press. If a million scientists agree on something, you'll still have to go find the one moron who thinks somethign else, so it's balanced.
Complete crap of course, because you're giving the one moron's opinion more weight than the opinions of hundred of others. Talk about unbalanced.
And then lets talk about corporate journalism. Corporations are in it for money. Saying things that people disagree with has traditionally provoked lawsuits against news organizations, even if those things were true. In the old days, they'd go to court and often win. These days, corporate views that as a big money sink, so they fold on stories where they're in the right, but the topic is controversial, e.g global warming. There was a paper in Texas a few years ago that was forced to retract an article in which a "scientist" who maintained that abortion causes cancer was protrayed, correctly, as fringe thinker that no one agreed with, whose theories were based on no data.
It's a hell of a lot more complicated than you seem to think.
Looks like I didn't fully explain premise 1:
God's omnibenevolence rests on humanities paramount importance, because if the good of other things weighed as highly as our personal good, god would not be omnibenevolent from our perspective.
'Cause Baptists can't handle the truth?
Adding a little rational thought to the religious aspect...always a bad idea...the concept of an omnibenevolent deity rests on the idea that humans are the only important thing in the world.
Observational data would suggest that the world does not find this to be the case. Assuming the world bows to the will of god (which is a given, vis a vis Omnipotence) this would seem to suggest that either we are not the most important thing in the world, or god is not omnibenevolent.
Natural disasters and other such "Acts of God" definitely add a new dimension to the traditional problem of evil. Can't really blame that one on free will.
Don't be too quick to dismiss this. The "Deathstar" nickname is widespread...I bought one a few years ago that lasted for about 13 months.
We support a lot of Macs at work (deskstar is the standard harddrive for the mac), and we've had seven failed deskstars since february, and only one of another brand...The deskstars were pretty new as well...all the macs are under 2 years old.
I used to love that brand...I have a 26.5gb deskstar from when they were still made by IBM, and it still runs fine, and it's almost 5. But the hitachi deskstars? I'll never buy another one.
Yea, that flies two years ago, but they've got a democraticly elected government now, or so we keep saying.
What possible reason can we have that justifies holding out control of something like that? If they can't handle a TLD, then they've got serious problems.
How can a country be too unstable to use a TLD? Is the TLD going to run amok, strap some viruses around itself and nuke some other unsuspecting nearby TLD like .kw or .ae?
Sounds idiotic to me. Or, more likely, like some country doesn't want Iraquis to be able to express their opinions attached to the official domain of the country.
If your code is REMOTELY standards compliant then it'll pretty much work on every browser. You have to really lock yourself into Active X and .Net before you run into true incompatibility, which means you have to decide from the start to use a platform that you know is imprefectly supported.
If this was a business, fine, who cares. But this is a disaster relief agency funded by taxpayer dollars, and they goddamn well better have a site that can be viewed by all citizens who need to view it.
Just part and parcel with the rest of their collossal incompetence during the current distaster.
And don't tell me they have better things to do; I haven't seen 'em do hardly anything yet. They could have used the week after the hurricane, when they were sitting around with their thumbs up their asses while everyone else was doing their job for them to at least make a webpage that could at least be viewed by the people who're still using older versions of IE!
*Sound of brains asploding*
We better just tell them they're "Magic Pellets"
Yea, 1 kilo of hydrogen is comperable to a gallon of gas, in terms of energy.
I was just pointing out the most obvious and glaring error. It's going to take people some time to wrap their minds around gas as GAS rather than gas as LIQUID.
Reason 1: All cars have gas tanks that are big enough to take them 400 miles. It's a requirement. This one doesn't.
Reason 2: 50L and 500km is 1L per 10km...this is obviously low. If you've ever put gas in your car a ratio of 1 unit of volume to 6 units of distance should leap out at you.
Reason 3: 60mpg is a round number.
Need I go on? Jeez just do the basic math.
Hmmmm...500 k = 312.5 miles. 50 liters = 13.5 gallons. 312.5/13.5 = 23.14mpg
23 miles per gallon is better than an suv, but it doesn't come close to a hybrid. And it's sure as hell not 60 mpg. Hell it's only 37km per gallon. Where the hell did you get that number?
And apparently moderators are on crack, as usual. Come on guys, if you drive a car EVER that number should look suspicious.
There are actually a large number of those pumps lying...or I should say floating around. Freighters carry extremely weighty pumps for use in shifting ballast water, and they are in a better than usual position for getting close to the city.
Military ships have extra pumping capacity to deal with combat damage, and there are no doubt a few ships in mothballs that could be very useful to reactivate for this purpose.
I know for a fact the core has a number of large pump tankers, because they use them for "Beach Revitilization" which involves pumping water and sand up from the ocean floor and onto existing beach.
So the pumps exist. Still, at this point it is point-less. We need to restore the levies before any of that can begin, and god knows when that will be possible.
"Life, in a state of nature, is nasty, brutish, and short."
Thomas Hobbes said that, not Adam Smith. It's from Leviathan
So who administers the tests? Sounds like you're saying we need Free-As-In-Beer tests, but if there's no central reputable authority doing the testing, then the tests are worthless, and if the tests are free(as in beer), then how would that central authority be funded?
Oooo, yea, replace one 500 dollar test with MANY 500 dollar tests! Easy profit for the testing companies, but does it benefit anyone else? No.
.Net or Linux certifications.
Anyway, that's pretty much how they do it anyway, except you'll find that there are many levels of certification, so you can get 4 or 5 different
The whole idea of certifications is flawed, because the testing companies have a stake in putting as many people through their classes as possible. Theoretically they get paid the same if someone bombs the test, but that person goes back and tells all his friends that he just dropped 3000 on a whole lotta nothing, and they all cancel their classes with that company.
I had a guy ask me once if I was A+ certified, and I replied, "No, but I've taught A+ certification classes." It blew his mind. How could I ever have learned enough to teach such a mind-stretching class without actually getting certified? Whereas I was still reeling from the fact that someone would ask that question to an applicant for a mid-level solaris administration job.
The bottom line is, HR loves because it gives them an easy metric to measure candidates. And the testing companies love it because its a big business. And IT professionals buy into it because its a hell of a lot easier than trying to convey a complex skillset to someone who doesn't understand, doesn't want to understand, and couldn't really give a damn on top of it all.
Bad metric. How many Slashdotters can walk a mile at all?
I just had a training class on the whole .Net thing, and most of the people in there were old VB types, and they were mostly horrified by the realization that they were going to have to do this whole "Object Oriented" thing, and completely intimidated by C#.
Whereas I was very comfortable with C#, mainly because it's just like java. The syntax is like most other major languages, the OO is pretty standard, funtion calls, object references, no problem.
If you train people in idosyncratic languages like VB, you end up with people who can't adapt to more normal programming languages. Which would be fine if you could trust MS not to get bored and utterly change the language, but they did it once already, so that's really not a safe choice.
Where I went to school, about the same time, they were teaching Java pretty much exclusively, though there was a decent amount of C as well. I've never really regretted that...java is so picky that when you move to a new language, it always seems easier, and if you're a little comfortable with C as well, then you're in pretty good shape.
They didn't provide GUI tools either; so you could go out and try and find one (I used Forte for fat client work, but that was it), or you could use emacs like everyone else.
Shrug. Where I went to school we only had practical applications in lab assignments. The only class I had that dealt specifically with programming languages was "Principles of Programming Languages" and likewise the only class I had that dealt specifically with operating systems was "OS Design".
Even so we were expected to be Unix savvy, and even though it was never taught in any class, if you graduated with a CS degree, you probably WERE Unix savvy, and even better, you'd learned how to pick up a technical skillset in response to related work pressures, something I have used over and over in my life.
Schools like ITT are really meant to turn out MCSEs and the like. But a degree from a decent 4 year program should still prepare you to move out into the tech world.
During the period when I was abusing my body to the limit, I could go three or four days with about 8 hours of sleep. And then I'd crash and LOSE A DAY...i.e. pass out around 3pm on friday and wake up sunday morning at 4:00am. I remember falling asleep in my car, right in front of my apartment, because I was too tired to walk up the stairs.
Passed out once, and my roomate had 5 guys over working on a CS project and it didn't wake me up until 10:30 at night. They'd been there since about 11:00 and I'd been there, asleep, since the night before. And when I say "roommate" I mean we shared a ROOM. I scared the hell out of him when I woke up because they'd thought the big bump in my bed was just a continuation of all the crap piled on top of it. I got up, ate dinner, went right back to sleep.
I'm still paying for that crap, ten years later. It's totally not worth it.
Well first of all, they're completely unrelated moral issues.
/. crowd because it is a profound invasion of personal privacy, tatamount to putting a camera in your shower or hidden microphones in your bedroom to catch your pillow talk. In a nutshell, they believe that, as long as they're doing their job, its none of their employers effing business what their genetic predispositions are.
/.'ers mass murders every morning in the shower.
Embryonic Stem cell research is opposed by groups who believe (wrongly) that this is morally equivalent to using small children as basic building and construction materials (eg, as shingles, drywall, paving material, grout, etc), as well as the general luddite group for whom all attempt to meddle with anything more complex than, for example, the wheel, is a scary development that can only lead to the downfall of the human race.
On the other hand, this is worrying to the
Of the two, utterly separate, arguments the second one is compelling because its far-reaching concerns realistic and easy to comprehend. If you have a genetic predisposition to cancer you could be denied employment because cancer treatment is extremely expensive, and the cost of which would be borne by the corporation itself.
The first argument is not compelling due to the attempt to define life so far back as to make all kitten-killing
Now, do you see why it is not hypocritical to believe one and not the other?
Filed in 1996? Are they out of their freaking minds? There is so much prior art, it's hard to even quantify it.
I think there should be a special type of punishment for people who apply for patents like this, long after the technology has gone into use, and it should go double for any moron who approves it. Perferably something with ants, fire, or boards studded with nails.
Quite right, you are. Most irrationality has less to do with pot than with some of the other topics of this thread.
Guess I pushed my own buttons there. As an analytic type, it sets my teeth on edge when people decide all of philosophy is the fluffy subjective stuff.
I started off in cognitive science, which is equal parts, philosophy, computer science, and neuroanatomy. Dropped the neuroanatomy, and ended up philosophy/comp sci, and people to this day see that as some kind of inherent contradiction.
I've got my BA in Philosophy, actually, so I've taken quite a few courses that had nothing to do with logic. Phenomenology LEAPS to mind. As does Existentialism. Certain branches of Ethics. All the bits that overlap religion.
The common thread there is the lack of anything I would term "Wisdom".
If you don't bother to subject your arguments to reasoned rational analysis, then clearly you don't give a damn about wisdom, and thus fall into the fuzzy headed crap that is more appropriate to a coffeehouse in Amsterdam than a course of study or discourse.
I assume you're a theist from your argument.
Though many math types here will disagree with you, I do not. you're right. Induction is not a valid logical inference.
That being said, what's your point?
Induction is a powerful predictive tool. We can't know for sure the sun will rise tomorrow. We can't know that water will be wet, rocks will be hard, or anything really. There is not one jot of knowledge that we posess about the physical world that does not come to us through induction.
To put Evolution and Creationism on a platform together, we would need an equal weight of evidence behind each one. But the amount of evidence available behind Creationism is laughably small...in fact non-existent would be a perfectly adequate description. Whereas the amount of evidence regarding Evolution is both plentiful, and extremely persuasive.
That being the case, we, as supposedly intelligent creatures, would be as utterly foolish to give ID anything near the weight Evolution desrves, just as we would be to jump into a raging fire, just because it hasn't been deductively proven that we'll get burned.
It's not an assumption.
The Cogito is a logical outgrowth of any attempt to doubt your own existence. If you can doubt your own existence, then there is a thing that doubts its own existence, and that thing must, in some form, exist, or it wouldn't be able to do that.
It is a pure and simple truth.
Now, mind you, it's logically worthless because you can't reason anywhere from a solitary premise. But it is true.