Bill's charitable work is actually quite awesome. Among other things, his foundation is very good at making sure that their funding goes to projects that actually work (surprisingly unusual in the non-profit world).
Are you sure?
In November 2008, Bill and Melinda gathered about one hundred prominent figures in education at their home outside Seattle to announce that the small schools project hadn’t produced strong results. They didn’t mention that, instead, it had produced many gut-wrenching sagas of school disruption, conflict, students and teachers jumping ship en masse, and plummeting attendance, test scores, and graduation rates. No matter, the power couple had a new plan...
From a good article about how the Gates foundation, as well as other billionaire-led philanthropy organisations, effectively controls school policy in the US and is dangerously directing private and government funding towards programs that research is proving do not work.
The Gates have the right idea regarding vaccines, and it's easy to support their international medical work (although there are some signs that having such a large single philanthropist supporting that is having some negative effects on the programs and research too). But they certainly don't have a perfect track record.
Well, I'll put aside the various arguments already made by other repliers about how easy or not it is to get a degree if your parents can't help you pay.
Because that really doesn't even matter. Children from poor families are dramatically less likely to finish secondary school with decent grades and literacy/numeracy skills—or at all.
On Slashdot we don't like to talk about class. We'd rather just pretend it doesn't exist, it makes ineffectually complaining about the government while continuing to support the status quo easier.
Something like 30% of all US rape accusations turn out to be false.
Only for very small values of "like". The rate of falsely reported rapes is around 2%, similar to that of other serious crimes. Many rape allegations are unproven in court, which is not the same thing as "false" or unfounded, and many many cases go completely unreported.
Missing these kinds of little details is why I have very little respect of philosophers. As far as I can tell, most of them chose their field because it doesn't punish sloppy work. And then there's idiocy like the Chinese Room, which assumes that a system cannot have properties its components don't have, yet hasn't been laughed out like it should had been.
There's plenty of philosophy-types who think that Searle is an idiot, too, for the Chinese Room and other things. Guy loves to position himself as a defender of rationality and realism because it lets him belittle poststructuralists with oversimplifications and straw men while acting like a hero of a scientific worldview that he clearly doesn't know that much about.
In some ways his antagonistic materialsm is quite similar to your dismissal of philosophy in general, actually.
The charge in question is "sexual molestation". However, he is accused of this in addition to rape, not instead of. He is alleged to have had sex with a sleeping woman and to have lain forcefully on top of a woman to prevent her from ending it.
The free market system in this regard is failing, it's making people make bad decisions due to their own greed.
No, the _government_ failed. Government !== the free market. It was the government that failed to pay attention to it's own research, and allowed this compound to be sold the same as any other insecticides that have been *properly* tested & approved.
The government failed....to protect against the failures of the free market. There's blame enough to go around here.
But given your suggestion that this case of the government being too small is actually caused by the government being to big it seems as likely that you are consciously seeking to deceive as simply mistaken. Or perhaps just trying to fit facts into a worldview that is designed specifically not to leave room for them.
The main example is that of "Inception" which the author cries trended for an extended period. However the example is almost totally wrong.
[Inception] managed to trend essentially uninterrupted from August 8 to August 26. During this stretch, the popularity of the phrase generally fell except for a significant spike around August 17th. It seems strange that Twitter’s algorithm would identify something to be trending in the midst of the sustained fall.
However, the data in fact shows Inception Trending almost uninterrupted from July 13 into early August. By August 8th, when he thinks it is constant, it is becoming less and less regular and by the end of his "essentially uninterrupted" period it is trending less than 50% of the time. On August 26th it was only on the list for a half hour!
The author then points out that #wikileaks hasn't trended, giving the figures to show that it hasn't showed up since July and August. Then of course, he mentions that #cablegate has in fact been trending since then, but avoids mentioning the full details. Given that Twitter tries to consolidate similar tags it seems pretty reasonable that #cablegate was just selected either automatically or manually as the "face" of the leaks on twitter. It trended on the days when news was exploding and discussion was increasing, rather than decreasing (although the author doesn't say how long these trends lasted and given his total misreading of the previous figures it's easy to suspect that it actually trended longer). That's how it's meant to work.
There's something wrong when politicians don't even have to pass or debate controversial legislation or regulations to censor private business or public museums. All they have to do is call them up.
Thomas Macaulay Millar, who's the post author and a big name in feminist circles, insists that if you're uncomfortable with summarily executing any man who is accused of rape and cannot prove his innocence to the satisfaction of a jury of rape victims, you're really just defending your male privilege.
Really? Are you sure that he didn't actually write:
I’ve quoted Twisty Faster’s suggestion that rape carry a presumption of guilt before, because I think it is thought provoking to analyze how het men would deal with their sexuality if they were the ones who had to live with fear.
Because to read that as you do above makes pretty much no sense whatsoever and the only conclusion that I can draw is that you are intentionally misrepresenting your links to fool people who are too lazy to read them themselves.
I can see you've made the accident of not really reading my post and replied all offended with something that my post is not.
I replied to the parent post separately, first. It doesn't get you a pass: if you didn't agree with it, why did you accept its unsupported premise and expand upon it as the base for other statements?
But I ain't offended, I'm right. It's tough to see that I guess when you can't tell "privilege exists" from "people don't have a right not to be blackmailed over nonsense."
If you had asked "well, do feminists actually not respect the rights of men" any feminist would tell you that that is not the case—actually, more likely they would ignore you because it's a pretty stupid question, tell you to read something before wading into a subject matter that you clearly have very little understanding of, or if you were really really lucky and they had nothing better to do they would explain the nuance between men's rights and men's privileges.
There are men's rights to consider too...If feminists can not agree to that...
Well, phew, I was worried there for a minute. But then I realised that feminists in fact do agree to that and you're just begging the question so that you can write a paragraph of unjustified nonsense.
You know what feminists really do hate, though? When other people, especially men, assume that they can speak on the feminists' behalf even though they have no fucking idea what they are talking about.
Because the first few are about making sure you're not already logged in with another account or another country. Several steps are simply "click continue."
The actual process looks like this:
1. Go to the free app you want and click to get it.
Especially now: our western militaries are supporting the current governments in places like Afghanistan. Doesn't that imply that those militaries support those governments' rule of law? If we don't trust them to try criminals then why they heck did we install them?
Is there some magical power that "terrorists" have that somehow rises above the western justice tradition's capabilities?
Read up on the Geneva Conventions to which the US is a signatory. This is legal. Maybe China would give civilian trials (military tribunals are a different matter) to its prisoners of war too, but that would be illegal by the conditions of the Conventions.
If a US citizen is actively fighting against the US in support of a foreign power, then no trial is needed. If the power is abused, the President still has to answer for it
What foreign power are these people allegedly fighting for then? I'm sorry, but my understanding is that the US presences in Iraq and Afghanistan are intended to support the current governments—not to make war on them.
Unless maybe you're talking about how the US is conducting raids into Pakistan? Even then, I don't think I missed a declaration of war from either party.
Well, before 1978 Afghanistan was a monarchy slowly moving towards emancipation in spurts and stops, with world powers rewarding its growth and neutrality by helping the nation to experience some of the modern conveniences of the West. In 1978 a flawed revolution seized power that was nonetheless very committed to equal rights for women, continued policies of available education, etc. Of course, the revolution was tied up in international Cold War politics but without those influences and the decade of strife that they inflicted on the country it might have been described as a place that was clumsily moving in a positive direction. Had the US and USSR encouraged that sort of development instead of helping Afghans to kill each other, things might have looked considerably different by 2001.
Iraq has a very different history, being established by the British colonial machine following WWI, a previous generation of international nationalist conflict.
HTML5 won't be officially finished until it has a working complete implementation somewhere. It's just getting to the point where things are pretty much nailed down, but this has been built into the process so that if bugs or unexpected issues in the drafts crop up during implementation they can be fixed.
This browser competition is part of the standardisation process.
node 3 probably didn't feel a need to cite the figures because they are given in the article.
“Last week, Eric Schmidt reiterated that they are activating around 200,000 Android devices per day,” Jobs said. “For comparison, Apple has activated around 275,000 iOS devices per day on average for the last 30 days, with a peak of almost 300,000 iOS devices per day on a few of those days.”
The box has at least a few gigabytes for caching content from iTunes and the network, not to mention running the OS. Although Apple doesn't say how much flash memory is in there, people on the internet seem to think it's 16 GB.
I don't like how moving files in OSX via UI requires two finder views open.
Look up spring-loaded folders or use the tiered folder view (I don't remember what it's called). They did, in fact, think this one through at least somewhat.
But it's a pretty lousy superpower. I understand that he can now guess anyone's weight just by talking to them on the phone. That's my worst nightmare: I get a superpower, but it's something completely lame and useless, even for picking up chicks.
This would actually be worth a lot of money in the gossip-magazine industry. Currently they have people guessing from random photographs.
Slashdot Mirror
That's only somewhat true. Up until the last version, iOS upgrades were $9.99.
Not on the iPhone. Upgrades were only charged on the iPod Touch.
Bill's charitable work is actually quite awesome. Among other things, his foundation is very good at making sure that their funding goes to projects that actually work (surprisingly unusual in the non-profit world).
Are you sure?
From a good article about how the Gates foundation, as well as other billionaire-led philanthropy organisations, effectively controls school policy in the US and is dangerously directing private and government funding towards programs that research is proving do not work.
http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781
The Gates have the right idea regarding vaccines, and it's easy to support their international medical work (although there are some signs that having such a large single philanthropist supporting that is having some negative effects on the programs and research too). But they certainly don't have a perfect track record.
Well, I'll put aside the various arguments already made by other repliers about how easy or not it is to get a degree if your parents can't help you pay.
Because that really doesn't even matter. Children from poor families are dramatically less likely to finish secondary school with decent grades and literacy/numeracy skills—or at all.
On Slashdot we don't like to talk about class. We'd rather just pretend it doesn't exist, it makes ineffectually complaining about the government while continuing to support the status quo easier.
Srsly though, not a troll. Come on guys.
Something like 30% of all US rape accusations turn out to be false.
Only for very small values of "like". The rate of falsely reported rapes is around 2%, similar to that of other serious crimes. Many rape allegations are unproven in court, which is not the same thing as "false" or unfounded, and many many cases go completely unreported.
Missing these kinds of little details is why I have very little respect of philosophers. As far as I can tell, most of them chose their field because it doesn't punish sloppy work. And then there's idiocy like the Chinese Room, which assumes that a system cannot have properties its components don't have, yet hasn't been laughed out like it should had been.
There's plenty of philosophy-types who think that Searle is an idiot, too, for the Chinese Room and other things. Guy loves to position himself as a defender of rationality and realism because it lets him belittle poststructuralists with oversimplifications and straw men while acting like a hero of a scientific worldview that he clearly doesn't know that much about.
In some ways his antagonistic materialsm is quite similar to your dismissal of philosophy in general, actually.
The charge in question is "sexual molestation". However, he is accused of this in addition to rape, not instead of. He is alleged to have had sex with a sleeping woman and to have lain forcefully on top of a woman to prevent her from ending it.
The free market system in this regard is failing, it's making people make bad decisions due to their own greed.
No, the _government_ failed. Government !== the free market. It was the government that failed to pay attention to it's own research, and allowed this compound to be sold the same as any other insecticides that have been *properly* tested & approved.
The government failed....to protect against the failures of the free market. There's blame enough to go around here.
But given your suggestion that this case of the government being too small is actually caused by the government being to big it seems as likely that you are consciously seeking to deceive as simply mistaken. Or perhaps just trying to fit facts into a worldview that is designed specifically not to leave room for them.
The comparisons on the blog are flawed.
The main example is that of "Inception" which the author cries trended for an extended period. However the example is almost totally wrong.
[Inception] managed to trend essentially uninterrupted from August 8 to August 26. During this stretch, the popularity of the phrase generally fell except for a significant spike around August 17th. It seems strange that Twitter’s algorithm would identify something to be trending in the midst of the sustained fall.
However, the data in fact shows Inception Trending almost uninterrupted from July 13 into early August. By August 8th, when he thinks it is constant, it is becoming less and less regular and by the end of his "essentially uninterrupted" period it is trending less than 50% of the time. On August 26th it was only on the list for a half hour!
The author then points out that #wikileaks hasn't trended, giving the figures to show that it hasn't showed up since July and August. Then of course, he mentions that #cablegate has in fact been trending since then, but avoids mentioning the full details. Given that Twitter tries to consolidate similar tags it seems pretty reasonable that #cablegate was just selected either automatically or manually as the "face" of the leaks on twitter. It trended on the days when news was exploding and discussion was increasing, rather than decreasing (although the author doesn't say how long these trends lasted and given his total misreading of the previous figures it's easy to suspect that it actually trended longer). That's how it's meant to work.
This was done because of pure and simple political pressure.
It's not even the first incident of its kind this week: the Smithsonian removed a piece of artwork selected by historians for its significance because they were pressured by several Republican representatives with increased meddling from the new, more conservative house.
There's something wrong when politicians don't even have to pass or debate controversial legislation or regulations to censor private business or public museums. All they have to do is call them up.
Thomas Macaulay Millar, who's the post author and a big name in feminist circles, insists that if you're uncomfortable with summarily executing any man who is accused of rape and cannot prove his innocence to the satisfaction of a jury of rape victims, you're really just defending your male privilege.
Really? Are you sure that he didn't actually write:
I’ve quoted Twisty Faster’s suggestion that rape carry a presumption of guilt before, because I think it is thought provoking to analyze how het men would deal with their sexuality if they were the ones who had to live with fear.
Because to read that as you do above makes pretty much no sense whatsoever and the only conclusion that I can draw is that you are intentionally misrepresenting your links to fool people who are too lazy to read them themselves.
I can see you've made the accident of not really reading my post and replied all offended with something that my post is not.
I replied to the parent post separately, first. It doesn't get you a pass: if you didn't agree with it, why did you accept its unsupported premise and expand upon it as the base for other statements?
But I ain't offended, I'm right. It's tough to see that I guess when you can't tell "privilege exists" from "people don't have a right not to be blackmailed over nonsense."
I didn't raise any question.
Exactly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
If you had asked "well, do feminists actually not respect the rights of men" any feminist would tell you that that is not the case—actually, more likely they would ignore you because it's a pretty stupid question, tell you to read something before wading into a subject matter that you clearly have very little understanding of, or if you were really really lucky and they had nothing better to do they would explain the nuance between men's rights and men's privileges.
There are men's rights to consider too...If feminists can not agree to that...
Well, phew, I was worried there for a minute. But then I realised that feminists in fact do agree to that and you're just begging the question so that you can write a paragraph of unjustified nonsense.
You know what feminists really do hate, though? When other people, especially men, assume that they can speak on the feminists' behalf even though they have no fucking idea what they are talking about.
Did you read the 15 steps?
Because the first few are about making sure you're not already logged in with another account or another country. Several steps are simply "click continue."
The actual process looks like this:
1. Go to the free app you want and click to get it.
2. Select that you need to create an account.
3. Fill in a form and activate your account.
It's not very complicated.
Why not?
Especially now: our western militaries are supporting the current governments in places like Afghanistan. Doesn't that imply that those militaries support those governments' rule of law? If we don't trust them to try criminals then why they heck did we install them?
Is there some magical power that "terrorists" have that somehow rises above the western justice tradition's capabilities?
Read up on the Geneva Conventions to which the US is a signatory. This is legal. Maybe China would give civilian trials (military tribunals are a different matter) to its prisoners of war too, but that would be illegal by the conditions of the Conventions.
If a US citizen is actively fighting against the US in support of a foreign power, then no trial is needed. If the power is abused, the President still has to answer for it
What foreign power are these people allegedly fighting for then? I'm sorry, but my understanding is that the US presences in Iraq and Afghanistan are intended to support the current governments—not to make war on them.
Unless maybe you're talking about how the US is conducting raids into Pakistan? Even then, I don't think I missed a declaration of war from either party.
"Terrorism" is not "a foreign power."
Well, before 1978 Afghanistan was a monarchy slowly moving towards emancipation in spurts and stops, with world powers rewarding its growth and neutrality by helping the nation to experience some of the modern conveniences of the West. In 1978 a flawed revolution seized power that was nonetheless very committed to equal rights for women, continued policies of available education, etc. Of course, the revolution was tied up in international Cold War politics but without those influences and the decade of strife that they inflicted on the country it might have been described as a place that was clumsily moving in a positive direction. Had the US and USSR encouraged that sort of development instead of helping Afghans to kill each other, things might have looked considerably different by 2001.
Iraq has a very different history, being established by the British colonial machine following WWI, a previous generation of international nationalist conflict.
HTML5 won't be officially finished until it has a working complete implementation somewhere. It's just getting to the point where things are pretty much nailed down, but this has been built into the process so that if bugs or unexpected issues in the drafts crop up during implementation they can be fixed.
This browser competition is part of the standardisation process.
node 3 probably didn't feel a need to cite the figures because they are given in the article.
“Last week, Eric Schmidt reiterated that they are activating around 200,000 Android devices per day,” Jobs said. “For comparison, Apple has activated around 275,000 iOS devices per day on average for the last 30 days, with a peak of almost 300,000 iOS devices per day on a few of those days.”
iFixIt confirmed 8GB today.
The box has at least a few gigabytes for caching content from iTunes and the network, not to mention running the OS. Although Apple doesn't say how much flash memory is in there, people on the internet seem to think it's 16 GB.
I don't like how moving files in OSX via UI requires two finder views open.
Look up spring-loaded folders or use the tiered folder view (I don't remember what it's called). They did, in fact, think this one through at least somewhat.
But it's a pretty lousy superpower. I understand that he can now guess anyone's weight just by talking to them on the phone. That's my worst nightmare: I get a superpower, but it's something completely lame and useless, even for picking up chicks.
This would actually be worth a lot of money in the gossip-magazine industry. Currently they have people guessing from random photographs.