The same people that I lambast for putting basic security precautions as an extreme low priority, due to their attitude of "security has no ROI."
To be fair, on the normal USA business timescale (that is, the next two or three quarters), it really doesn't. Security only matters if you're still heading the company when something bad happens, which to most of these people is pretty much unthinkable - because they know they'll be gone in a few years.
Our preacher touched on this just this last Sunday. He said, "I trust science. I believe the Bible." He also said at a time earlier, "Faith can heal, but take your kids to the doctor when they get sick and give them their medicine." Or as a sign I read in front of a church one day, "Trust in God, but lock your car."
To an external observer, who is not privy to what goes on in your thoughts, how are you at all different from someone who does not believe in God?
Basically, if it looks like an atheist, talks like an atheist, and goes to the doctor like an atheist - isn't it an atheist? At this point, how can you objectively differentiate yourself from one?
Hell, my wife's department has occasionally hosted "Bad Science Movie Nights", where PhDs and grad students get together to make fun of movies like 2012. It's one of the weird constants I've seen in academia - they all seem to love those movies, probably because it's even more fun when the movie itself isn't really in on the joke.
We home school our kids, we believe in the Bible, and yet we view the whole "2012" thing as absurd, that the rapture is equally absurd, and that science does explain a LOT, but that there's also a lot it doesn't explain.
Fun exercise for you and your kids:
Starting, oh I don't know, circa AD 1000 make four lists for every hundred years:
List 1: things science (or an historical equivalent) explains
Windows 7 "just works" in a way that XP never did. It took an HOUR to install a recent HP all-in-one photo printer on XP. Same install on Win7 took a minute or so.
That.... has literally nothing to do with XP vs 7, except inasmuch as HP drivers are a giant piece of shit and Microsoft might be bribing them to increase the quality of the Windows 7 drivers (e.g, send it to the slightly less retarded driver development department).
Anyway, I have to admit that I don't know what the hell you're talking about. I've used all of XP, Vista and 7 on my computers these last few years (work computer was XP, laptop is Vista until I put Linux on it, personal desktop is 7), and there's only one feature Windows 7 has that I find myself missing on XP (and Vista as well) - the positional window resizing stuff. It's really nice to be able to fullscreen a window just by tossing it at the top of the screen and window it again by dragging it off, but that's literally the only gesture I use. Other than that, I might as well be using Windows XP. Maybe if you provided some concrete examples, we could get an actual discussion going?
Really, all of these sorts of problems can be solved. This is what contract negotiation is for.
The grandparent post is just too accustomed to being a person; from that point of view, all contracts are written in stone and no negotiation is ever possible. I mean, just try to do a "contract negotiation" with Verizon over your cellphone contract, or with Comcast about your Internet connection - that shit just isn't going to fly, unless your net income is at least several million a year.
Contract negotiation is a right that only entities with significant amounts of money have.
How did he respond in 2002? He asked Congress to DOUBLE science spending.
Seriously, your source for that is the State of the Union address in 2002 - which, honestly, is essentially just a nationally broadcast stump speech and has essentially no bearing on policy. Hell, even the article you linked to is written as if Bush doesn't care enough about science to actually work with Congress to do what he called for.
My wife showed me a great graph during the last election that tracked science spending from administration to administration and showed that historically Republicans have spent more on science than Democrats.
I was hoping for (oh I don't know) a graph. Instead you posted a link to Neil deGrasse Tyson talking. His main data points were that during the Bush administration funding for the NIH tripled, funding for NASA increased by 20%, and funding for the NSF went up by 40% - whereas during the Clinton administration, NASA's budget went down by 25%. The thing is, these are worthless numbers! If you look at NASA's actual budget figures, all Clinton did was not increase NASA's funding - it was held at a pretty much constant nominal amount throughout his presidency. Inflation took care of the "budget goes down" bit. Yes, Bush did increase NASA's budget - he also told them to go to Mars.
The one impressive thing Neil mentions that happened under Bush was that the NIH's funding tripled. Unfortunately, it tripled for partially bullshit reasons - in 1998, the NIH's "Office of Alternative Medicine" was elevated to the status of a National Center, and its funding increased tremendously during Bush's presidency. The thing is, though, that even though money is going in to the NCCAM, science is generally not being done there.
It's only lying if you do it intentionally. If ten labs independently and without knowing of each other perform essentially the same experiment, and one of them has a statistically significant result, is that lying? The other nine won't get published because, unfortunately, people only rarely (and for large or controversial experiments) publish negative results, but the one anomalous study will.
The vast majority of science is performed with all the good will in the world, but it's simply impossible for scientists to not be human. That's why we do replicate experiments - hell, my wife just published a paper where she tried to replicate someone else's results and got entirely different ones, and analyzed why the first guy got it wrong.
This article has already been taken apart by P.Z. Myers in a blog post on Pharyngula. Here's his conclusion:
But those last few sentences, where Lehrer dribbles off into a delusion of subjectivity and essentially throws up his hands and surrenders himself to ignorance, is unjustifiable. Early in any scientific career, one should learn a couple of general rules: science is never about absolute certainty, and the absence of black & white binary results is not evidence against it; you don't get to choose what you want to believe, but instead only accept provisionally a result; and when you've got a positive result, the proper response is not to claim that you've proved something, but instead to focus more tightly, scrutinize more strictly, and test, test, test ever more deeply. It's unfortunate that Lehrer has tainted his story with all that unwarranted breast-beating, because as a summary of why science can be hard to do, and of the institutional flaws in doing science, it's quite good.
Basically, it's not like anyone's surprised at this.
I don't understand how people can manage to play first person shooters on consoles. Whenever I try it's like taking a brisk jog through molasses.
It's almost like the FPS devs decided that grace and speed are something to be shunned, and instead all a player really needs to do is move forward in a straight line.
The topic of the meeting was the sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by a collection of western countries, including the U.S. and E.U. Tsvangirai told the western officials that, while there had been some progress in the last year, Mugabe and his supporters were dragging their feet on delivering political reforms. To overcome this, he said that the sanctions on Zimbabwe "must be kept in place" to induce Mugabe into giving up some political power. The prime minister openly admitted the incongruity between his private support for the sanctions and his public statements in opposition. If his political adversaries knew Tsvangirai secretly supported the sanctions, deeply unpopular with Zimbabweans, they would have a powerful weapon to attack and discredit the democratic reformer.
In private, he says "Keep these sanctions up". In public, he says "Down with sanctions you evil western foreigners etc".
When the cables were released, surprise surprise, his opponent capitalizes on the fact that he says one thing in private and the exact opposite in public - and arguably, the things he says in private are detrimental to his country (he was basically saying "USA, it's totally okay for you to keep on penalizing our entire country because one political party refuses to play ball"). The citizenry, now that they know this guy is not necessarily acting in their best interests, turn against him. It's not really their fault that his opposite number is a complete asshole.
Maybe he shouldn't have been a two-faced liar? That would have kept this from happening. Pity integrity is apparently something that happens to other people.
Hmm... I don't think you ended the story quite properly.
The waters continued to rise with alarming speed, and the man soon found himself on the roof of his house. A helicopter came by and hovered overhead as the pilot broadcasted, "Let me drop a line and get you out of there."
"No, thank you," the man called back. "I have faith in the Lord, and He will save me."
I find that I don't type very fast at all when I'm writing code; after all, the limiting factor there is how quickly I can think through what I want to do, not how quickly I can twiddle my fingers. I suppose if you're working from a very detailed design document you would need to be able to type quickly, but if it's that detailed why isn't it already a program?
On the other hand, I do find that I only rarely have to go back and re-write large sections of code; usually the worst that happens is that I need to run a regular expression over it.
The facts are that billions have been pumped into alternative energy (solar, wind, geo) and they are ALL promising technologies. Some day they'll be able to pull their own weight.
Umm... oil gets subsidies to the tune of a billion dollars or so per week when compared to natural energy, and it will do so until we go to war with Africa for the Sahara desert or Russia for the windswept steppes.
Or do you think the price of gas would be what it is right now if oil companies were funding the US Military's operations in the Middle East?
Seriously, sounds like pork. Figure out what ties the company that makes the scanners has with your local representatives, and bring it up at whatever passes for local government. Be sure to include something like "We pay the average teacher $x per year, which works out to $y per minute. This system makes teachers wait z minutes every months, which means that, along with the horrific cost, the ridiculous inefficiency is costing us z * $y."
In three words, the reason why no console manufacturer has embraced an AO game.
if you want this to happen, develop and market a PC game that introduces mature violent content in a way that is not adolescently sophomoric or pornographic.
When you've shown that you have moved beyond Custer's Revenge, Duke Nukem and GTA: Hot Coffee, maybe then someone will listen.
But not before.
That explains why God of War, Call of Duty, Modern Warfare, Gears of War etcetera never had sequels right? Right?
Oh wait sorry, it's only wrong when it's sophomoric or pornographic sex, not when it's sophomoric or pornographic violence. Porn = bad, gorn = good, right. I forgot we're so fucked that a perfectly normal part of life is supposed to be shunned, while a gruesome, unhealthy, and frequently mentally scarring part of life is warmly embraced and welcomed into our homes. Whoops.
PUFAs are unstable, oxidize spontaneously when introduced to a human body, and generally wreck havoc in a warm-blooded mammalian systems (fish need these thin oils because they live in cold water). No amount of anti-oxidants is enough to counter the damage done by rancid oils.
[citation needed]
Seriously, you can't just spout something like that and expect us to take your word for it. Is even a single link too much work?
The thing about Zuckerberg is, well - what has he done besides Facebook? I mean yeah Bill Gates dropped out of college too, but at least Microsoft has a bunch of different product divisions - Office is not Windows OS is not Internet Explorer, and although Bill Gates probably didn't actually write any of them he was the CEO who oversaw their production, and presumably either came up with the idea or approved it (or approved its purchase). Google has Maps, News, Images, Code, all sorts of things that, although centered around search, are interesting expressions of it (searching in an area for maps, searching relatively well structured human generated content for news, etc).
Facebook is basically just that one thing, Facebook. The company doesn't seem to do anything else besides Facebook. It basically just looks like Zuckerberg had the right idea at the right time, and it took off almost without him.
Seriously? For DADT, there's a very very easy solution - the President is Commander in Chief of the army, he can literally say "this is bullshit guys, you must treat people of all sexual orientations equally". Quick and easy - after all, that's what the commander does, he commands. I mean, how do you think Bill Clinton got DADT started in the first place? He just said "allright people, you just can't talk about this", and then Congress fought about it for a while.
The problem Obama has, of course, is that the other side of the aisle is the Party of No. If he actually does use his power as Commander in Chief to order equality, they would shriek "teh gay is destroying our military even harder now! from behind! oh god teh hard gay from behind!" on every news channel, in contravention of the experiences of pretty much every other modern military. While it would be quick and easy, there would be political repercussions that can be avoided by having Congress do it.
Of course, I really wish he would grow some balls and actually do that - the people he would lose are already lost, and actually getting something done would, I think, energize his base and maybe sway some moderates. Unfortunately, he's just fobbing this off on Congress so there's less risk to his political image.
I couldn't find a single question where giving the right answer wasn't something that would look bad for a Republican and/or good for a Democrat or at the very least create some cognitive dissonance among Republican beliefs.
Which question were you referring to? The (factual) one about President Obama's place of birth, or the (similarly factual) one about whether or not global warming is happening?
A lot of those questions were pure matters of fact, and Fox News' audience was factually wrong. This is not a matter of looking bad, this is a matter of things which are actually true.
Not due to development related fragmentation issues, but rather OS fragmentation that makes security updates and vulnerabilities much more difficult to track and to resolve via updates. With vendors still pushing out 1.5, our corporate security was hesitant to endorse an OS with known vulnerabilities and no timely updates from the handset vendors.
I bet you use Windows and Internet Explorer, though - maybe even Windows XP and IE 6. If so, isn't that kind of a double standard?
Slashdot Mirror
That's just some rather lengthy output from the Dada Engine - the "brag.pb" script to be precise.
Man, those were good times...
To be fair, on the normal USA business timescale (that is, the next two or three quarters), it really doesn't. Security only matters if you're still heading the company when something bad happens, which to most of these people is pretty much unthinkable - because they know they'll be gone in a few years.
To an external observer, who is not privy to what goes on in your thoughts, how are you at all different from someone who does not believe in God?
Basically, if it looks like an atheist, talks like an atheist, and goes to the doctor like an atheist - isn't it an atheist? At this point, how can you objectively differentiate yourself from one?
When religion can answer "Why?" with something that's not "Because", let me know.
Hell, my wife's department has occasionally hosted "Bad Science Movie Nights", where PhDs and grad students get together to make fun of movies like 2012. It's one of the weird constants I've seen in academia - they all seem to love those movies, probably because it's even more fun when the movie itself isn't really in on the joke.
Fun exercise for you and your kids:
Starting, oh I don't know, circa AD 1000 make four lists for every hundred years:
List 1: things science (or an historical equivalent) explains
List 2: things science doesn't explain
List 3: things religion explains
List 4: things religion doesn't explain
See if you notice any trends.
Yes.
Take an array of directional antennas, figure out where the target signal is coming from, and throw a missile at it.
Signal jammed.
Repeat until there are no more signals to jam.
That.... has literally nothing to do with XP vs 7, except inasmuch as HP drivers are a giant piece of shit and Microsoft might be bribing them to increase the quality of the Windows 7 drivers (e.g, send it to the slightly less retarded driver development department).
Anyway, I have to admit that I don't know what the hell you're talking about. I've used all of XP, Vista and 7 on my computers these last few years (work computer was XP, laptop is Vista until I put Linux on it, personal desktop is 7), and there's only one feature Windows 7 has that I find myself missing on XP (and Vista as well) - the positional window resizing stuff. It's really nice to be able to fullscreen a window just by tossing it at the top of the screen and window it again by dragging it off, but that's literally the only gesture I use. Other than that, I might as well be using Windows XP. Maybe if you provided some concrete examples, we could get an actual discussion going?
The grandparent post is just too accustomed to being a person; from that point of view, all contracts are written in stone and no negotiation is ever possible. I mean, just try to do a "contract negotiation" with Verizon over your cellphone contract, or with Comcast about your Internet connection - that shit just isn't going to fly, unless your net income is at least several million a year.
Contract negotiation is a right that only entities with significant amounts of money have.
You were guilty of the worst crime of all - being poor.
Seriously, your source for that is the State of the Union address in 2002 - which, honestly, is essentially just a nationally broadcast stump speech and has essentially no bearing on policy. Hell, even the article you linked to is written as if Bush doesn't care enough about science to actually work with Congress to do what he called for.
I was hoping for (oh I don't know) a graph. Instead you posted a link to Neil deGrasse Tyson talking. His main data points were that during the Bush administration funding for the NIH tripled, funding for NASA increased by 20%, and funding for the NSF went up by 40% - whereas during the Clinton administration, NASA's budget went down by 25%. The thing is, these are worthless numbers! If you look at NASA's actual budget figures, all Clinton did was not increase NASA's funding - it was held at a pretty much constant nominal amount throughout his presidency. Inflation took care of the "budget goes down" bit. Yes, Bush did increase NASA's budget - he also told them to go to Mars.
The one impressive thing Neil mentions that happened under Bush was that the NIH's funding tripled. Unfortunately, it tripled for partially bullshit reasons - in 1998, the NIH's "Office of Alternative Medicine" was elevated to the status of a National Center, and its funding increased tremendously during Bush's presidency. The thing is, though, that even though money is going in to the NCCAM, science is generally not being done there.
It's only lying if you do it intentionally. If ten labs independently and without knowing of each other perform essentially the same experiment, and one of them has a statistically significant result, is that lying? The other nine won't get published because, unfortunately, people only rarely (and for large or controversial experiments) publish negative results, but the one anomalous study will.
The vast majority of science is performed with all the good will in the world, but it's simply impossible for scientists to not be human. That's why we do replicate experiments - hell, my wife just published a paper where she tried to replicate someone else's results and got entirely different ones, and analyzed why the first guy got it wrong.
This article has already been taken apart by P.Z. Myers in a blog post on Pharyngula. Here's his conclusion:
Basically, it's not like anyone's surprised at this.
I don't understand how people can manage to play first person shooters on consoles. Whenever I try it's like taking a brisk jog through molasses.
It's almost like the FPS devs decided that grace and speed are something to be shunned, and instead all a player really needs to do is move forward in a straight line.
Here's the money quote from the article:
In private, he says "Keep these sanctions up". In public, he says "Down with sanctions you evil western foreigners etc".
When the cables were released, surprise surprise, his opponent capitalizes on the fact that he says one thing in private and the exact opposite in public - and arguably, the things he says in private are detrimental to his country (he was basically saying "USA, it's totally okay for you to keep on penalizing our entire country because one political party refuses to play ball"). The citizenry, now that they know this guy is not necessarily acting in their best interests, turn against him. It's not really their fault that his opposite number is a complete asshole.
Maybe he shouldn't have been a two-faced liar? That would have kept this from happening. Pity integrity is apparently something that happens to other people.
Hmm... I don't think you ended the story quite properly.
There, fixed it for you.
I find that I don't type very fast at all when I'm writing code; after all, the limiting factor there is how quickly I can think through what I want to do, not how quickly I can twiddle my fingers. I suppose if you're working from a very detailed design document you would need to be able to type quickly, but if it's that detailed why isn't it already a program?
On the other hand, I do find that I only rarely have to go back and re-write large sections of code; usually the worst that happens is that I need to run a regular expression over it.
Umm... oil gets subsidies to the tune of a billion dollars or so per week when compared to natural energy, and it will do so until we go to war with Africa for the Sahara desert or Russia for the windswept steppes.
Or do you think the price of gas would be what it is right now if oil companies were funding the US Military's operations in the Middle East?
Seriously, sounds like pork. Figure out what ties the company that makes the scanners has with your local representatives, and bring it up at whatever passes for local government. Be sure to include something like "We pay the average teacher $x per year, which works out to $y per minute. This system makes teachers wait z minutes every months, which means that, along with the horrific cost, the ridiculous inefficiency is costing us z * $y."
That explains why God of War, Call of Duty, Modern Warfare, Gears of War etcetera never had sequels right? Right?
Oh wait sorry, it's only wrong when it's sophomoric or pornographic sex, not when it's sophomoric or pornographic violence. Porn = bad, gorn = good, right. I forgot we're so fucked that a perfectly normal part of life is supposed to be shunned, while a gruesome, unhealthy, and frequently mentally scarring part of life is warmly embraced and welcomed into our homes. Whoops.
[citation needed]
Seriously, you can't just spout something like that and expect us to take your word for it. Is even a single link too much work?
The thing about Zuckerberg is, well - what has he done besides Facebook? I mean yeah Bill Gates dropped out of college too, but at least Microsoft has a bunch of different product divisions - Office is not Windows OS is not Internet Explorer, and although Bill Gates probably didn't actually write any of them he was the CEO who oversaw their production, and presumably either came up with the idea or approved it (or approved its purchase). Google has Maps, News, Images, Code, all sorts of things that, although centered around search, are interesting expressions of it (searching in an area for maps, searching relatively well structured human generated content for news, etc).
Facebook is basically just that one thing, Facebook. The company doesn't seem to do anything else besides Facebook. It basically just looks like Zuckerberg had the right idea at the right time, and it took off almost without him.
Seriously? For DADT, there's a very very easy solution - the President is Commander in Chief of the army, he can literally say "this is bullshit guys, you must treat people of all sexual orientations equally". Quick and easy - after all, that's what the commander does, he commands. I mean, how do you think Bill Clinton got DADT started in the first place? He just said "allright people, you just can't talk about this", and then Congress fought about it for a while.
The problem Obama has, of course, is that the other side of the aisle is the Party of No. If he actually does use his power as Commander in Chief to order equality, they would shriek "teh gay is destroying our military even harder now! from behind! oh god teh hard gay from behind!" on every news channel, in contravention of the experiences of pretty much every other modern military. While it would be quick and easy, there would be political repercussions that can be avoided by having Congress do it.
Of course, I really wish he would grow some balls and actually do that - the people he would lose are already lost, and actually getting something done would, I think, energize his base and maybe sway some moderates. Unfortunately, he's just fobbing this off on Congress so there's less risk to his political image.
Which question were you referring to? The (factual) one about President Obama's place of birth, or the (similarly factual) one about whether or not global warming is happening?
A lot of those questions were pure matters of fact, and Fox News' audience was factually wrong. This is not a matter of looking bad, this is a matter of things which are actually true.
I bet you use Windows and Internet Explorer, though - maybe even Windows XP and IE 6. If so, isn't that kind of a double standard?