Why is France and Canada not required to give in one year what the USA gives in one month? If you've ever looked at where tax dollars really disappear to, in economic terms, you'll discover that foreign aid is actually quite a hunk of it.
Uh, I call bullshit on this.
America ranks last among all developed western nations in the amount of aid it provides foreign nations expressed as a percentage of its gross domestic product (GDP) about 0.08 percent, according to a recent report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). http://www.oneworld.org/ips2/jul98/23_13_097.html
U.S. foreign aid in 1997 -- at less than one-tenth of one percent of gross domestic product -- has not only reached its lowest level ever, but is also the lowest in relation to GDP of any developed nation
This is a tragically popular misconception, especially amongst that part of the nerd herd that hasn't studied enough philosophy
I think I've studied nearly enough philosophy. To be specific, I'm sure I haven't studied too much philosophy.
Science+technology has been a great success, sure, but it has in no way demonstrated that "what you can measure is all that there is". On the contrary: what you can measure is all that science can deal with.
Something is amenable to scientific inquiry if it can be directly sensed and measured with our sensory apparatus, or indirectly sensed and measured with sensitive enough or well-placed enough equipment, or if its existence and behaviour can be inferred logically from its antecedents or consequents that can be sensed and measured directly or indirectly.
This includes, for example, the everyday world (direct), the surface of Mars (indirect via remote probes), the neutrino (logically deduced from antecedents) and human interior psychological states such as love, hate, etc (logically deduced from their consequents).
Now if you are arguing that there are things, perhaps you had "god" or "soul" in mind, that cannot (I do not mean have not, I mean can not by any means) be sensed in any way also and have no cause nor effect that can be said to exist in any meaningful sense of the word, yet these things can be said to exist, then I must disagree.
To go further we would split semantic hairs about the meaning of the words are and exist, and that's only for people who have too read too much philosophy.
If anything cannot (even in principle) be sensed or infered in any way, then it is a nonsense. If it can be aprehended, then it is amenable to rational inquiry.
Fair enough, though if you don't understand memory management in C you will know it, because you'll have massive memory leaks or serious, noticeable bugs.
Wewell, you might not know. The program I'm currently working on had moderate memory leaks, because most of the engineeers working on it mostly understood how to use a non-GC OO language. Everybody suspected, nobody knew, nobody was quite sure of the impact, until I used a tool to locate the memory leaks and fix them.
there are a lot of Java coders who don't think at *all* about memory management, because they think it's all handled for them. Mix that in with an over-excitement about OO, and you get some impressively slow and non-scaleable code.
While you are entirely right, this is no differnt from previous generations of programming languages. You always do better if you have a bit of understanding of the wiring behind the board.
I'm sure that there were objections to high-level languages by assembler coders who objected that "there are a lot of C coders who don't think at *all* about the assember generated" and "there are a lot of C++ coders who don't think at *all* about the pointers behind those object refs"
"When one of the station's devices failed and I set to dissembling it, I found there a yellow worm more than a meter long& I have not seen anything of the kind on the Earth," Serebrov said.
Dude, a yellow worm more than a meter long? You believe that?
Quartz is silicon dioxide - it has no energy value or mineral nutrients in it. Quartz-eating bacteria? Come on - extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.
Igor Popov... other interests comprise fortean issues, weird phenomena and hidden historical events
"Is life merely a convenient arrangement of cells or is it necessary to have a "spark of life" or the "soul" to bring bring the cells to "life"?"
I'd say that the last 100 years of science makes it abundantly clear that what you can measure is all there is - there's no mystery to it that cannot be apprehended, no soul-in-scare-quotes to bring about life-in-scare-quotes. Nothing mysterious, but plenty that we don't understand. Yet.
As a pollworker in Georgia, which was the first state to use electronic voting equipment statewide, I can say unequivocally that electronic voting machines have made our precinct's elections run more smoothly.
Smooth != accurate.
Not only that, but electronic voting is actually more tamper-proof then paper voting, since you can't stuff a wad of pre-punched paper cards into an electronic voting machine.
Which is easier and less detectable to insert: pre-punched paper cards or pre-punched database records?
In addition, the voting machines are tightly controlled on election day, and the only way to gain "supervisor," or root, access to these machines is to use a special access card that isn't even taken out of its container until after the polls have been closed,
Only one way to get root, eh? How do you know that? Have you seen the source? Has anyone who doesn't work for Diebold seen the source?
Why? The details of how and where life that-currently-resides-on-Earth evolved in no way damage the evolutionary account or supports the creationist one. Quite the reverse.
While I am inclined to reply "you're still wrong" we are not general purpose learners, we have a language facility so it comes naturally to us.
I shall instead focus on the "a lot of parallels" bit and turn it around: the part of math that are hard might be the parts where math is unlike natural language.
Such as 1) Math deals in certainties and precision - a mathematical statement is either true or not. Leaving out a symbol can make a statement nonsensical, whereas natural language deliberately has vague words ("nice", "get") and redundancy in the verbage.
2) Math, as I said, is cumulative. You can learn new words for your natural language vocabulary, but not doings so won't hinder you from learning the next batch. In math, if you miss calculus, you can go no further.
Ever played catch? If the ability to handle higher math wasn't hardwired into you somewhere, how would you be able to play it?
Balistics is wired into us, because in our recent evolutionary history we had a need for good balistics. Balistics, like many things, is mathematical in nature.
However even you realise that being able to play catch well does not translate into being better at solving differential equations with pencil and paper. These are different skills.
this does not mean our brains are not fully capable of learning math instinctively
But it does. Math is fundamentally unlike language in this respect. Children are hardwired to acquire language (see for instance, The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker), and they can do so from a very young age with minimal profesional help. This is not the case with algebra. We have no math instinct in the way that we have a language instinct.
Steven Pinker had some interesting things to say about learning math in one of is books (probably The Blank Slate, but maybe How the Mind Works). I'll try to regurgitate what I remember.
Mathematics is not natural. Children are natural learners of language - they pick it up as easily as breathing. Mathematics is not like that - we didn't evolve an innate facility with complex math like we did with complex language. We have to work at it. (Well, 99% of us do). Teching math the same way as teaching English is not likely to work well. With math, you need repetition and lots of examples until the students feel comfortable with each concept.
Math is relentlessly cumulative. If you don't master arithmetic, you will struggle with algebra. If you didn't grasp algebra, you're going to be lost with calculus. And so on.
In fact, UI is not hard anymore... we have simple UIs and simple object -event models like KDE's components
I think you're missing the point entirely. Dragging and dropping a button onto a form is dead easy, and has been for years - it's been around a decade since VB, Delphi and powerbuilder came out.
But that's like saying "painting is easy, paintbrushes have never been so cheap".
Knowing where to put it is the hard part, and is what seperates a good-looking, consistent, learnable, intuituve UI from the usual junk.
Repeat after me: just because the study proved that filesharing does not have a noticeable impact on CD sales does not make it legal
And the converse - if filesharing does adversely impact CD sales, or even lead to the demise of the RIAA, then that, in itself, does not make it illegal. It's the filesharing of copyrighted material thus infringing the bought-and-paid-for laws that does that.
I will feel no pain if all boy bands suffer the same fate as buggywhip makers.
You just contradicted yourself. It is about the travel, of military grade 'passengers', on one-way tickets to oblivion...
the word "travel" is usually used in the context of tourism, commuting, business trips, or other voluntary movements of people. It a stretch it covers dropping bombs.
You are talking about transportation, delivery of certain military goods.
And you didn't say he's wrong. Because he isn't. Mach 7 is not about tourism, it's about bombs.
It's like saying "all software will be written in high-level, garbage-collected languages like Java, C#, python, perl, et al".
Rebutals that "yeah, but what is the Java runtime written in?" or "the OS kernel has to be written in C" are true, but miss the point - these activities are niches, so the original statement is over-general but mostly true. Most application software will be written at a higher level.
... but visual design? You can only do so much by aranging controls on forms with drag and drop.
James Lovelock found differently.
on
Methane on Mars?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Several Decades ago, Dr. James Lovelock wrote:
"we examined atmospheric evidence from the infrared astronomy of Mars. We compared this evidence with that available about the sources and sinks of the gases in the atmosphere of the one planet we knew bore life, Earth. We found an astonishing difference between the two atmospheres. Mars was close to chemical equilibrium and dominated by carbon dioxide, but the Earth was in a state of deep chemical disequilibrium. In our atmosphere carbon dioxide is a mere trace gas. The coexistence of abundant oxygen with methane and other reactive gases, is a condition that would be impossible on a lifeless planet. Even the abundant nitrogen and water are difficult to explain by geochemistry. No such anomalies are present in the atmospheres of Mars or Venus; their existence in the Earth's atmosphere signals the presence of living organisms at the surface. Sadly, we concluded, Mars was probably lifeless."
So what's changed? Is the methane a trace that Lovelock's instruments couldn't pick up? Did he discount it as too small to be significant? Or did he discount it because there was no free oxygen?
Or did the bacteria arrive since then on one of our probes?
Re:NASA's plan for if they DID find life
on
Methane on Mars?
·
· Score: 1
What are the odds that NASA had some time of plan (at least on paper) on how to handle seeing an ET with the rovers?
The only kind of ET there is any posibility of seeing on Mars would be the kind that you see through a microscope. I don't think you need much of plan to deal with that situation beyond a press conference.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, I call bullshit on this.
http://www.wri.org/wri/media/schmidheiny.html
Was that a right-wing troll, or just plain ignorant?
This is a tragically popular misconception, especially amongst that part of the nerd herd that hasn't studied enough philosophy
I think I've studied nearly enough philosophy. To be specific, I'm sure I haven't studied too much philosophy.
Science+technology has been a great success, sure, but it has in no way demonstrated that "what you can measure is all that there is". On the contrary: what you can measure is all that science can deal with.
Something is amenable to scientific inquiry if it can be directly sensed and measured with our sensory apparatus, or indirectly sensed and measured with sensitive enough or well-placed enough equipment, or if its existence and behaviour can be inferred logically from its antecedents or consequents that can be sensed and measured directly or indirectly.
This includes, for example, the everyday world (direct), the surface of Mars (indirect via remote probes), the neutrino (logically deduced from antecedents) and human interior psychological states such as love, hate, etc (logically deduced from their consequents).
Now if you are arguing that there are things, perhaps you had "god" or "soul" in mind, that cannot (I do not mean have not, I mean can not by any means) be sensed in any way also and have no cause nor effect that can be said to exist in any meaningful sense of the word, yet these things can be said to exist, then I must disagree.
To go further we would split semantic hairs about the meaning of the words are and exist, and that's only for people who have too read too much philosophy.
If anything cannot (even in principle) be sensed or infered in any way, then it is a nonsense. If it can be aprehended, then it is amenable to rational inquiry.
Fair enough, though if you don't understand memory management in C you will know it, because you'll have massive memory leaks or serious, noticeable bugs.
Wewell, you might not know. The program I'm currently working on had moderate memory leaks, because most of the engineeers working on it mostly understood how to use a non-GC OO language. Everybody suspected, nobody knew, nobody was quite sure of the impact, until I used a tool to locate the memory leaks and fix them.
there are a lot of Java coders who don't think at *all* about memory management, because they think it's all handled for them. Mix that in with an over-excitement about OO, and you get some impressively slow and non-scaleable code.
While you are entirely right, this is no differnt from previous generations of programming languages. You always do better if you have a bit of understanding of the wiring behind the board.
I'm sure that there were objections to high-level languages by assembler coders who objected that "there are a lot of C coders who don't think at *all* about the assember generated" and "there are a lot of C++ coders who don't think at *all* about the pointers behind those object refs"
"When one of the station's devices failed and I set to dissembling it, I found there a yellow worm more than a meter long& I have not seen anything of the kind on the Earth," Serebrov said.
... other interests comprise fortean issues, weird phenomena and hidden historical events
Dude, a yellow worm more than a meter long? You believe that?
Quartz is silicon dioxide - it has no energy value or mineral nutrients in it. Quartz-eating bacteria? Come on - extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.
Igor Popov
So what you're saying is he's basically a loony.
"Is life merely a convenient arrangement of cells or is it necessary to have a "spark of life" or the "soul" to bring bring the cells to "life"?"
I'd say that the last 100 years of science makes it abundantly clear that what you can measure is all there is - there's no mystery to it that cannot be apprehended, no soul-in-scare-quotes to bring about life-in-scare-quotes. Nothing mysterious, but plenty that we don't understand. Yet.
As a pollworker in Georgia, which was the first state to use electronic voting equipment statewide, I can say unequivocally that electronic voting machines have made our precinct's elections run more smoothly.
Smooth != accurate.
Not only that, but electronic voting is actually more tamper-proof then paper voting, since you can't stuff a wad of pre-punched paper cards into an electronic voting machine.
Which is easier and less detectable to insert: pre-punched paper cards or pre-punched database records?
In addition, the voting machines are tightly controlled on election day, and the only way to gain "supervisor," or root, access to these machines is to use a special access card that isn't even taken out of its container until after the polls have been closed,
Only one way to get root, eh? How do you know that? Have you seen the source? Has anyone who doesn't work for Diebold seen the source?
Freedom has a price. With out a strong military, you cannot ensure its protection
The same with tyrany.
Why? The details of how and where life that-currently-resides-on-Earth evolved in no way damage the evolutionary account or supports the creationist one. Quite the reverse.
While I am inclined to reply "you're still wrong" we are not general purpose learners, we have a language facility so it comes naturally to us.
I shall instead focus on the "a lot of parallels" bit and turn it around: the part of math that are hard might be the parts where math is unlike natural language.
Such as
1) Math deals in certainties and precision - a mathematical statement is either true or not. Leaving out a symbol can make a statement nonsensical, whereas natural language deliberately has vague words ("nice", "get") and redundancy in the verbage.
2) Math, as I said, is cumulative. You can learn new words for your natural language vocabulary, but not doings so won't hinder you from learning the next batch. In math, if you miss calculus, you can go no further.
Ever played catch? If the ability to handle higher math wasn't hardwired into you somewhere, how would you be able to play it?
Balistics is wired into us, because in our recent evolutionary history we had a need for good balistics. Balistics, like many things, is mathematical in nature.
However even you realise that being able to play catch well does not translate into being better at solving differential equations with pencil and paper. These are different skills.
this does not mean our brains are not fully capable of learning math instinctively
But it does. Math is fundamentally unlike language in this respect. Children are hardwired to acquire language (see for instance, The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker), and they can do so from a very young age with minimal profesional help. This is not the case with algebra. We have no math instinct in the way that we have a language instinct.
Steven Pinker had some interesting things to say about learning math in one of is books (probably The Blank Slate, but maybe How the Mind Works). I'll try to regurgitate what I remember.
Mathematics is not natural. Children are natural learners of language - they pick it up as easily as breathing. Mathematics is not like that - we didn't evolve an innate facility with complex math like we did with complex language. We have to work at it. (Well, 99% of us do). Teching math the same way as teaching English is not likely to work well. With math, you need repetition and lots of examples until the students feel comfortable with each concept.
Math is relentlessly cumulative. If you don't master arithmetic, you will struggle with algebra. If you didn't grasp algebra, you're going to be lost with calculus. And so on.
I know a nubmer of people who have been injured on a bicycle, some severely. I don't know anyone who has been injured while running.
My USB memory dongle survived a high-speed trip up the vaccum cleaner hose with no damage or loss of data.
A device sending you to a park? at night? sounds right for a flashmugging
In fact, UI is not hard anymore ... we have simple UIs and simple object -event models like KDE's components
I think you're missing the point entirely. Dragging and dropping a button onto a form is dead easy, and has been for years - it's been around a decade since VB, Delphi and powerbuilder came out.
But that's like saying "painting is easy, paintbrushes have never been so cheap".
Knowing where to put it is the hard part, and is what seperates a good-looking, consistent, learnable, intuituve UI from the usual junk.
Sigh
I have a mod point to burn, and it's *all* offtopic in here. And that's on topic in a 1-April kinda way. Nothing for me to do here.
Repeat after me: just because the study proved that filesharing does not have a noticeable impact on CD sales does not make it legal
And the converse - if filesharing does adversely impact CD sales, or even lead to the demise of the RIAA, then that, in itself, does not make it illegal. It's the filesharing of copyrighted material thus infringing the bought-and-paid-for laws that does that.
I will feel no pain if all boy bands suffer the same fate as buggywhip makers.
You just contradicted yourself. It is about the travel, of military grade 'passengers', on one-way tickets to oblivion...
the word "travel" is usually used in the context of tourism, commuting, business trips, or other voluntary movements of people. It a stretch it covers dropping bombs.
You are talking about transportation, delivery of certain military goods.
And you didn't say he's wrong. Because he isn't. Mach 7 is not about tourism, it's about bombs.
In TV economics, you are not the customer, you are the product. Corporate advertisers are the customers, and they pay big bucks for your eyeballs
This is also exactly why MS internet explorer is free and doesn't block popup ads.
Its more like saying all software will be written in Visual Basic.
.NET, Visual Basic is a language suprisingly like C#, and thus is not far from Java either.
In soviet
It's like saying "all software will be written in high-level, garbage-collected languages like Java, C#, python, perl, et al".
Rebutals that "yeah, but what is the Java runtime written in?" or "the OS kernel has to be written in C" are true, but miss the point - these activities are niches, so the original statement is over-general but mostly true. Most application software will be written at a higher level.
So what's changed? Is the methane a trace that Lovelock's instruments couldn't pick up? Did he discount it as too small to be significant? Or did he discount it because there was no free oxygen?
Or did the bacteria arrive since then on one of our probes?
What are the odds that NASA had some time of plan (at least on paper) on how to handle seeing an ET with the rovers?
The only kind of ET there is any posibility of seeing on Mars would be the kind that you see through a microscope. I don't think you need much of plan to deal with that situation beyond a press conference.