Actually, it's far simpler than "private school parents care more" - private schools get to pick who they accept. Not only that, but they can kick kids out. I'm sure some public schools have those two abilities, but the vast majority do not; they have to take all comers, and except in very rare cases they can't expel children (and if they do expel a kid, the kid still has to go to some other public school).
I bet you that if public schools were allowed to pick which children they taught and to expel children as easily as private schools can, their performance would be equivalent to that of private schools - even without increased parental involvement.
Of course, that would also lead to at least half our population growing up uneducated because they either didn't make the public school cut or were kicked out, but I think you could really work with that - just ensure that school is always freely available to all people who qualify, and do some social engineering so that there's not much stigma to going back and finishing high school when you're 30 and know better.
The thing is, in the modern educational system we are literally cramming several hundred years of human development and experience into the course of twelve to sixteen years. There are always going to be people who just aren't mature enough to do it, so why not let them grow up a bit more in order to actually have a positive educational experience? Why force a cookie-cutter K-12 educational system on everyone, when we could almost certainly be more efficient by letting people learn at their own rate?
Re:List geek cooking instructions here
on
Cooking For Geeks
·
· Score: 1
Every Unix shell script starts out with hashbrowns (even though it's apparently pronounced "shabang") - I guess someone was hungry when they decided that the magical byte sequence was going to be #!
And this is why American workers get shafted so hard. Income is even more off-limits for discussion than religion (and that's saying a lot!), so you never realize that the guy working in the office next to your cubical makes ten times your salary, despite only providing maybe one or two times your value to the company (if that).
Social mores like "never discuss your income" strictly benefit the rich.
Here's a question we (as IT workers) should maybe be asking the legal department: are we in full compliance with all EULAs presented by all vendors? Are all people who use all software using it in a manner consistent and compliant with the EULA agreement for that specific piece of software? Are we aware of unilateral changes to the EULA, so that Legal can go over them again?
This new software package we're looking at - has Legal gone through each and every end user license agreement in the software package and to ensure that it is acceptable to the company? Are we in full compliance with them?
I mean, look: if EULAs are binding, then Legal must look over every single one - if an end user agrees to one that contains language we don't like on behalf of the company, then that's a real problem.
I bet you the length of EULAs would go down if we start treating them as if they were enforceable contracts between the vendor and the company.
We can prove that the universe could have happened without God but we can't prove he doesn't exist.
See, people say this a lot but it's just not true. Both the Christian Bible and common Christian belief make significant claims about their God, and none of them have been demonstrated in reality. For instance, a great many Christians believe in the power of intercessory prayer - that is, if someone is (e.g.) undergoing surgery, praying for them will help their health outcomes.
The Roman Catholic tradition holds that, due to the miracle of substantiation, when you eat a specific cracker and drink some specific wine at a specific time during their ritual, it is literally and in reality transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. This is blatantly false. In fact, my wife, who went to Catholic school from kindergarten on up, didn't realize until high school that she was supposed to literally believe in the miracle of transubstantiation - it just doesn't make any sense, even to children.
The Bible itself has a passage from Jesus saying "Again, I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything you ask for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them." (Matthew 18:19-20). This is, again, blatantly false in both aspects - we cannot do "anything" just by having two people ask for it. And as for the second part - conference rooms full of Christians are no different than conference rooms full of atheists, so that's clearly false for all detectable meanings of "there am I with them".
So while we cannot prove that vague, toothless, non-interventionist Deist gods do not exist (much in the same way that you cannot prove that the invisible intangible dragon in your garage that doesn't leave footprints doesn't exist), we can very much prove that the specific claims made by religion about God do not apply to any real thing that exists. In fact, so far, in terms of specific claims about reality, absolutely zero of the religious claims made about God have turned out to be true. This is, in fact, the most likely reason why apophatic theology has become more popular recently - if you don't make any positive, specific, testable claims about God, those mean and nasty scientists can't disprove them.
Because the previous post got upmodded and I'm not very clear: the fire that comes from pouring some rubbing alcohol on your hand and lighting it is relatively low-temperature (in fact, you can put a bit on a piece of paper and light it - the paper won't burn immediately, it'll actually wick the surrounding rubbing alcohol up for a little while before the paper catches fire). Keep in mind that it's still fire and it will hurt in a second, especially if you have hairy hands.
The fire that comes lighting a mist of rubbing alcohol, on the other hand (and preferably the hand you didn't just set on fire), can be very hot indeed. I wouldn't put my hand (or someone else's face) in it.
And if you put it in a spray bottle (99 cents) and mix it with a lighter (another 99 cents) you've got hours and hours of entertainment! The fire is relatively low-temperature, so you can do stupid shit like put some on your hand and light it. Burns really cleanly too, so it doesn't set off most fire alarms.
And if you put some rubbing alcohol into one of those 5 gallon drums, shake it up to disperse the stuff well, then drop a match into the throat you'll get a pretty awesome gout of flame. Just, you know, make sure you're not aiming it at anything you care about.
Basically, pyromania knows no bounds with rubbing alcohol.
Pretty much all Christians? So the Quakers and the Salvation Army don't count as Christians?
Seriously, ask pretty much any Christian what happens if a child dies before they can be baptized. I think the answers will surprise you. Dogma is one thing, human compassion is another entirely.
But anyway, this doesn't really change the thrust of the argument; you just have to wait until they've been baptized, or you baptize them yourself depending on how you think that works.
Here's the process as a slashdot meme:
Ensure child will go to heaven, or at least will not go to hell (may be baptism or whatever your beliefs say)
Kill child
Prophet!
Basically, as long as there's a way to ensure that the child does not go to hell, then the logic works.
This is true; however, that idea is so unpalatable that most Christians have come up with ways around it. See, for instance, baptism and Dante's idea of limbo.
As other people have pointed out, that's Pascal's Wager.
However, if you actually think about it, the logic used in Pascal's Wager inevitably leads to the idea that you have to kill as many children as you can.
Consider:
Children are innocent and will go to heaven, receiving an eternal reward - or, at the very least, will not go to hell (and if you can find someone who actually believes that children go to hell by default, then they're basically a lost cause).
Children may, in the future, perform some actions that will cause them to spend an eternity in hell.
Pascal's Anti-Wager: if you kill a child now, they will receive an infinite reward (or a null outcome). If you let them live, there is a small chance that they will eventually receive an infinite punishment.
A small chance of an infinite punishment outweighs all other considerations, as the expected result is still infinite punishment
Therefore, it is your duty to kill as many children as you can, in order to either guarantee them entry into heaven or to guarantee that they do not go to hell.
And hey, if you do that, you'll become a martyr! Just imagine all the children you'll usher into heaven, even if you're going to hell.
Your post was at least one if not two orders of magnitude more informative than TFA. I am now actually interested in Mahara, as opposed to merely being curious and vaguely apathetic.
No no no, you don't understand. Most atheists are totally for TV shows like Jon and Kate - I mean, where else are we going to get a steady supply of fresh babies?
Next you're going to tell me that I should be barbecuing some cute cows or something. Disgusting.
On the other hand, if you're dealing with an atheist vegan, that's when you have problems.
Why didn't you wait for the 2nd generation of the iPad if you think it's that terrible? That's what I'm doing - but then, I never buy the first hardware revision anyway.
Science fiction sales must be really plummeting, since all the authors want to leave the genre as soon as possible. They write a few scifi novels and then switch to fantasy, or, in Stephenson's case, historical fiction.
I'm guessing you're unacquainted with Alastair Reynolds, then, or pretty much any other author who writes "hard" science fiction.
And the thing is, really, most "science fiction" authors aren't really writing science fiction. William Gibson, for instance, wrote the original Neuromancer manuscripts on a typewriter - he's about as technical as any other English major, and it really shows even in Neuromancer. Neil Stephenson, despite having written a couple of pretty good sciencey fiction novels, isn't really into it - he's much more of a nerd who does a bunch of research into something and then writes a story about it, as can be seen even in Snow Crash (ancient Sumeria), Cryptonomicon (the history of cryptography), Anathem (the history of logic and philosophy) and Diamond Age (the fundamentals of computation). Of course he's going to go off and write something else - he's not really interested in writing about science fiction, he seems to be far more interested in doing historical research and writing a story about it. It was basically a coincidence that he became known as a science fiction writer.
If you look at the actual hard SF authors, on the other hand, they've been quietly pumping novels out since the genre was invented. Greg Egan's been consistently publishing hard SF, as have Stephen Baxter, Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear and Charles Stross. Heck, Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon novels and Iain M. Banks's books (when he publishes like that) probably count too, though they're not really so much science fiction as they are fantasy in a sciencey setting.
Look: if you can't find authors who consistently publish good science fiction novels, you're just not looking in the right places.
That's a nice connection you've got to our customers, Google. Sure be a shame if anything happened to it. Oh whoops, would you look at that, Jones accidentally hit the button that blocks the residents of Nowhere, TN from getting to your servers! Just look at all the little red lights! Each one is a person trying to Google something and getting a timeout. Oh the huge manatee!
It sure would be terrible if that happened to, say, the entire eastern seaboard, now wouldn't it?
But here's another way of looking at it: if AT&T were a road construction company and tried to pull the same shit with the public roads they'd built, Congress would hand them their asses.
Yes, but I'd like to see a human brain run the Sieve of Eratosthenes, or accurately simulate a 3-body orbit, or run a given large-scale cellular automata for more than a couple thousand steps.
There's times when parallel computing is useful, but there's also times when pure "how fast can you add 1 + 1" type calculations are incredibly useful. You can't just abandon linear computation completely.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's far simpler than "private school parents care more" - private schools get to pick who they accept. Not only that, but they can kick kids out. I'm sure some public schools have those two abilities, but the vast majority do not; they have to take all comers, and except in very rare cases they can't expel children (and if they do expel a kid, the kid still has to go to some other public school).
I bet you that if public schools were allowed to pick which children they taught and to expel children as easily as private schools can, their performance would be equivalent to that of private schools - even without increased parental involvement.
Of course, that would also lead to at least half our population growing up uneducated because they either didn't make the public school cut or were kicked out, but I think you could really work with that - just ensure that school is always freely available to all people who qualify, and do some social engineering so that there's not much stigma to going back and finishing high school when you're 30 and know better.
The thing is, in the modern educational system we are literally cramming several hundred years of human development and experience into the course of twelve to sixteen years. There are always going to be people who just aren't mature enough to do it, so why not let them grow up a bit more in order to actually have a positive educational experience? Why force a cookie-cutter K-12 educational system on everyone, when we could almost certainly be more efficient by letting people learn at their own rate?
Every Unix shell script starts out with hashbrowns (even though it's apparently pronounced "shabang") - I guess someone was hungry when they decided that the magical byte sequence was going to be #!
No, he just follows the fundamental theorem of Republican economics:
You are always in the right half of the Laffer curve. Always
And this is why American workers get shafted so hard. Income is even more off-limits for discussion than religion (and that's saying a lot!), so you never realize that the guy working in the office next to your cubical makes ten times your salary, despite only providing maybe one or two times your value to the company (if that).
Social mores like "never discuss your income" strictly benefit the rich.
Clearly, this is why you need comments! Haystacks aren't lists - they're heaps.
Here's a question we (as IT workers) should maybe be asking the legal department: are we in full compliance with all EULAs presented by all vendors? Are all people who use all software using it in a manner consistent and compliant with the EULA agreement for that specific piece of software? Are we aware of unilateral changes to the EULA, so that Legal can go over them again?
This new software package we're looking at - has Legal gone through each and every end user license agreement in the software package and to ensure that it is acceptable to the company? Are we in full compliance with them?
I mean, look: if EULAs are binding, then Legal must look over every single one - if an end user agrees to one that contains language we don't like on behalf of the company, then that's a real problem.
I bet you the length of EULAs would go down if we start treating them as if they were enforceable contracts between the vendor and the company.
In the USA, you port game; in Soviet Russia, game deports you!
See, people say this a lot but it's just not true. Both the Christian Bible and common Christian belief make significant claims about their God, and none of them have been demonstrated in reality. For instance, a great many Christians believe in the power of intercessory prayer - that is, if someone is (e.g.) undergoing surgery, praying for them will help their health outcomes.
This has been tested and found to be not true.
The Roman Catholic tradition holds that, due to the miracle of substantiation, when you eat a specific cracker and drink some specific wine at a specific time during their ritual, it is literally and in reality transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. This is blatantly false. In fact, my wife, who went to Catholic school from kindergarten on up, didn't realize until high school that she was supposed to literally believe in the miracle of transubstantiation - it just doesn't make any sense, even to children.
The Bible itself has a passage from Jesus saying "Again, I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything you ask for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them." (Matthew 18:19-20). This is, again, blatantly false in both aspects - we cannot do "anything" just by having two people ask for it. And as for the second part - conference rooms full of Christians are no different than conference rooms full of atheists, so that's clearly false for all detectable meanings of "there am I with them".
So while we cannot prove that vague, toothless, non-interventionist Deist gods do not exist (much in the same way that you cannot prove that the invisible intangible dragon in your garage that doesn't leave footprints doesn't exist), we can very much prove that the specific claims made by religion about God do not apply to any real thing that exists. In fact, so far, in terms of specific claims about reality, absolutely zero of the religious claims made about God have turned out to be true. This is, in fact, the most likely reason why apophatic theology has become more popular recently - if you don't make any positive, specific, testable claims about God, those mean and nasty scientists can't disprove them.
It looks like someone forgot to close an <i> tag. Good thing it was near the end of TFS, or it would have been less readable than usual.
Of course not! Try it in someone else's home, your shit is flammable.
Because the previous post got upmodded and I'm not very clear: the fire that comes from pouring some rubbing alcohol on your hand and lighting it is relatively low-temperature (in fact, you can put a bit on a piece of paper and light it - the paper won't burn immediately, it'll actually wick the surrounding rubbing alcohol up for a little while before the paper catches fire). Keep in mind that it's still fire and it will hurt in a second, especially if you have hairy hands.
The fire that comes lighting a mist of rubbing alcohol, on the other hand (and preferably the hand you didn't just set on fire), can be very hot indeed. I wouldn't put my hand (or someone else's face) in it.
And if you put it in a spray bottle (99 cents) and mix it with a lighter (another 99 cents) you've got hours and hours of entertainment! The fire is relatively low-temperature, so you can do stupid shit like put some on your hand and light it. Burns really cleanly too, so it doesn't set off most fire alarms.
And if you put some rubbing alcohol into one of those 5 gallon drums, shake it up to disperse the stuff well, then drop a match into the throat you'll get a pretty awesome gout of flame. Just, you know, make sure you're not aiming it at anything you care about.
Basically, pyromania knows no bounds with rubbing alcohol.
Pretty much all Christians? So the Quakers and the Salvation Army don't count as Christians?
Seriously, ask pretty much any Christian what happens if a child dies before they can be baptized. I think the answers will surprise you. Dogma is one thing, human compassion is another entirely.
But anyway, this doesn't really change the thrust of the argument; you just have to wait until they've been baptized, or you baptize them yourself depending on how you think that works.
Here's the process as a slashdot meme:
Basically, as long as there's a way to ensure that the child does not go to hell, then the logic works.
This is true; however, that idea is so unpalatable that most Christians have come up with ways around it. See, for instance, baptism and Dante's idea of limbo.
As other people have pointed out, that's Pascal's Wager.
However, if you actually think about it, the logic used in Pascal's Wager inevitably leads to the idea that you have to kill as many children as you can.
Consider:
And hey, if you do that, you'll become a martyr! Just imagine all the children you'll usher into heaven, even if you're going to hell.
You can't really have barbecue for breakfast, it takes too much prep time. Atheists prefer to have children for lunch or dinner.
Your post was at least one if not two orders of magnitude more informative than TFA. I am now actually interested in Mahara, as opposed to merely being curious and vaguely apathetic.
No no no, you don't understand. Most atheists are totally for TV shows like Jon and Kate - I mean, where else are we going to get a steady supply of fresh babies?
Next you're going to tell me that I should be barbecuing some cute cows or something. Disgusting.
On the other hand, if you're dealing with an atheist vegan, that's when you have problems.
Why didn't you wait for the 2nd generation of the iPad if you think it's that terrible? That's what I'm doing - but then, I never buy the first hardware revision anyway.
Wow, that's kind of a stupid place to put it - it looks like the link doesn't actually do anything. Thanks!
What! This cannot be! Surely the country's most handsome politicians wouldn't fail so thoroughly at a test of practical skill?
I'm guessing you're unacquainted with Alastair Reynolds, then, or pretty much any other author who writes "hard" science fiction.
And the thing is, really, most "science fiction" authors aren't really writing science fiction. William Gibson, for instance, wrote the original Neuromancer manuscripts on a typewriter - he's about as technical as any other English major, and it really shows even in Neuromancer. Neil Stephenson, despite having written a couple of pretty good sciencey fiction novels, isn't really into it - he's much more of a nerd who does a bunch of research into something and then writes a story about it, as can be seen even in Snow Crash (ancient Sumeria), Cryptonomicon (the history of cryptography), Anathem (the history of logic and philosophy) and Diamond Age (the fundamentals of computation). Of course he's going to go off and write something else - he's not really interested in writing about science fiction, he seems to be far more interested in doing historical research and writing a story about it. It was basically a coincidence that he became known as a science fiction writer.
If you look at the actual hard SF authors, on the other hand, they've been quietly pumping novels out since the genre was invented. Greg Egan's been consistently publishing hard SF, as have Stephen Baxter, Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear and Charles Stross. Heck, Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon novels and Iain M. Banks's books (when he publishes like that) probably count too, though they're not really so much science fiction as they are fantasy in a sciencey setting.
Look: if you can't find authors who consistently publish good science fiction novels, you're just not looking in the right places.
How do you see the moderation percentages? I used to be able to see them, but for some reason it stopped showing a while ago.
That's a nice connection you've got to our customers, Google. Sure be a shame if anything happened to it. Oh whoops, would you look at that, Jones accidentally hit the button that blocks the residents of Nowhere, TN from getting to your servers! Just look at all the little red lights! Each one is a person trying to Google something and getting a timeout. Oh the huge manatee!
It sure would be terrible if that happened to, say, the entire eastern seaboard, now wouldn't it?
But here's another way of looking at it: if AT&T were a road construction company and tried to pull the same shit with the public roads they'd built, Congress would hand them their asses.
Yes, but I'd like to see a human brain run the Sieve of Eratosthenes, or accurately simulate a 3-body orbit, or run a given large-scale cellular automata for more than a couple thousand steps.
There's times when parallel computing is useful, but there's also times when pure "how fast can you add 1 + 1" type calculations are incredibly useful. You can't just abandon linear computation completely.