Except categories in sports are defined by sex not gender so what they believe to be does not matter when it comes to decide in which category they can compete.
Not sure what distinction you are trying to draw between sex and gender. It can be confusing because "gender" now means what we used to call "sex". You have likely read books written before 1950 in which characters use expressions such as "a member of my sex", "the battle of the sexes". The statement "I want to talk about sex." would likely have been understood to mean "I want to talk about the social implications of being male and female."
I have here a dictionary written in 1955 which under "sex" gives the meaning of maleness or femaleness and "the attraction of one sex to the other". It doesn't even meantion that it could mean the sex act. This meaning appears to have become popular in the 1960's. With sex now being a word that made small boys titter, those who wanted to talk about the social implications of sex (maleness or famaleness) borrowed the term from grammar. It would be too embarrasing to say that one was taking "Sex Studies" in college, so they called it "Gender Studies".
Having thought about the above, you think you are saying that the problem is deciding who is female biologically as opposed to who can function as a female in society. The problem is that a small but significant part of the population displays testable physical characterisics of both sexes. For example, there are persons who are genetically male, but have female bodies. The IOC is thrashing around trying to find a definition of a female body.
I think the reason they have dropped testing of all athelets who claim to be female is that once you select women with strong, athletic bodies, you increase the likelihood that some measure of their bodies will be closer to that of male bodies. If you then disqualify them as "technically male", you create a scandal and humiliate them. If, when her picture appears in news stories, the public perceives her as being a member of the female sex, you then look ridiculous as well.
On the other hand, if you test no one, soon the women's division of sports requiring strength will be filled with men without beards and underdeveloped genitals.
You think a backdoor couldn't be installed on Linux?
Read what I said. I said that using the term root kit was inappropriate terminology when you are talking about Windows.
I don't see anything wrong with calling a Windows rootkit a rootkit. There is little to be gained by calling it an Administratorkit. But that is beside the point. The malware described does not seem to be a rootkit. True, it creates a backdoor which allows the intruder access at a later date. But, nowhere does the article suggest that it does that which distinguishes rootkits from other malware: rootkits subvert the system so that neither they nor the malacious programs which they detect can be detected using ordinary system tools.
He received £252,500 in compensation for three years and four months and paid £12,500 for room and board. So they charged him about £10 per day. I suppose the room and board _might_ be worth that. However, charging for it is in terrificly bad taste.
I don't know how the £252,500 in compensation was computed, but if we figure that he should be treated as a state employee working 16 hours a day (24 hours minus eight hours sleep) without weekends or holidays and we pay him twice the UK minimum wage, then we arrive at a similiar figure.
I think a newspaper or TV channel could write some interesting stories about this. They could contact the board of prisons and tell them that they want to send resturant and hotel critics to their facilities. They could then go out and try to find room and board of similiar quality in a neighbourhood with similiar levels of violence with a similiar level of friendly service and find out how much it costs. Who knows, the burocrats might decide that the ensuing mockery is not worth the tiny (from a government's perspective) amount they get out of this.
The rules about compensation generally are designed so as to give them as little as possible. They even charge you board and lodging if you were in prison and are subsequently cleared and given compensation.
Interesting. How much exactly is lodging in a prison cell and board in a prison cafeteria worth on the open market? I would think the figure is close to zero.
That makes no sense. Even the example given, "party A dialed party B" *is* content. If they have to get information from you, that is content, isn't it?
Baloroth is distinguishing between a request for data about a communication and the content of the communication itself. The law distringuishes between to two. For example, a warant might authorize the police to attach a "pen recorder" to someone's phone line to see what numbers he dials but not authorize the police to listen in on the conversations.
This is a very good explanation. Among other things it explains why much of this information is not in existing GIS.
I wonder though whether the poster might be able to accomplish his goal in some other way. He doesn't necessarily need a highly detailed, highly accurate map of the precise borders of all easements on all property. In fact, such a map might not even meet his needs since it would not indicate whether these potential routes actually were being used for anything of significant commercial value (which is necessary for the argument he wants to make).
It might be good enough to create a map showing the aproximate routes of modern cables which the companies seem to value. This would be much easier because the routes of such cables are cleared for access and have warning signs all along them. A viable plan might be to get some friends together, go out and look for these maintained rights of way, add then to Openstreetmap, and then export the data and create a custom rendering to make his political point.
It won't help, when the exact thing they are complaining about is what businesses *in other countries* are doing.
I was wondering about that too. It turns out the summary overemphasizes a few minor points of the article which the poster found interesting while ignoring the main point of the proposal. The meat of the proposal is to prohibit the common practice of charging Australian purchasers of digital goods delivered over the Internet about 50% more for no appearent reason.
If this were about foreign companies refusing to serve Australian customers, then I agree, there would be little they could do about it. But since these companies are already selling in the Australian market and would like to continue to do so, the Australian goverment has much more leverage.
Saying that "Tasmanian police decline" to do something implies that they are actually empowered to do so as a matter of course.
Actually, there is precedent for using the phrase "decline to do" to describe a polite refusal to engage in conduct which one views as unreasonable or inappropriate. That is the sense meant here. The police have politely refused to get involved.
Could also mean that you're reading an older work (Dickens, Poe, etc), or perhaps trying to make something look as if it's from the period.
Yes, I deliberately chose a once-accepted spelling as one of my examples. The point I was trying to make is that the concept of "correct" in spelling is largely arbitrary. If I spell words phonetically (rather than using the spellings currently regarded as correct) I will seem to be illiterate. If I use bad grammar (by which I mean sentences which do not make sense when read out loud, not the occasional error in spelling or punctuation) I will actually be illiterate.
Authorities say rescue crews responded to a 911 call about the electrocution Monday evening when they found the three on the ground not breathing.
Here the grammatical error has altered the semantics to the point where the sentence no longer makes sense. (The order of events has been reversed.) I think it will be a very long time before we have a grammar checker which can catch errors such as this.
And yet this still makes the front page of Slashdot - with a spin-laden misleading title.
MojoKid - you are an ass, and so is the moderator.
What is misleading about the title? The investigation report stated: "The energy source responsible for generating the heat has been determined as external to the device". Looks to me like the title accurately describes what was reported.
Strictly speaking the title is accurate. It even uses some of the report's words. However, the title as a whole makes it sound like Samsung is attempting to pass the blame onto a mysterious energy source.
You may be one of the rare few that can truly tax Word's grammar checker but the overwhelming majority of people who believe that it's useless are flat wrong. I see this at work basically every day. I work with people who have degrees and should be able to write fairly well (at least well enough to not lose a grade on grammar) but neither properly capitalize nor know the common homonyms. There is also the unnecessary capitalization of words because people think they're acronyms: I see "WEB" and "FOB" (access tokens) all the time. That the lose/loose problem is spilling into the workplace is an even bigger sign of the problem.
When I think of gramatical errors, I do not usually think of such minor, almost mechanical problems. I would call a tool which pointed them out a context-aware spelling checker. Perhaps this explains the disappointment with grammar checkers. The detection of context inappropriate spelling and violation of typographic conventions works, but they fail to help the writer to use the power of grammar.
I think effective grammar checkers will not be available for many years. Because incorrect grammar tends to create misleading or absurd meaning ("He was embedded with an RFID chip." Really? In what were they embedded together?) I would think a grammar checker cannot be really effective unless it performs semantic analysis.
Grammar used to be something that you learned in school. Using correct grammar means that you can express your thoughts clearly, which means that you can think clearly. You can use tools to catch typing mistakes, but if you need them to correct grammar, the problem lies with you.
I agree. I think far to many confuse the reasons for writing gramatically with the reasons for spelling correctly. The primary reason for spelling correctly is to appear educated. (Writing "connexion" instead of "connection" or "det" instead of "debt" does not alter meaning.)
In contrast, the primary reason for using good, strong grammer is to convey more meaning. An example of weak grammar: "The trigger is the gun fireer." Strong grammer: "The shooter fires the gun by drawing back the trigger."
Unfortunately, an entire generation grew up thinking that those who insist on good grammer do so because they are snobs.
Whether grammar matters or not depends on the recipient of the message, not the originator. As anyone who has designed a compiler will tell you, it's an error-prone PITA to have to pre-process input before it is in a useable form. If the recipient can do this, no harm is done, except that the recipient is aware that the sender gave him more work to do than was necessary -- something usually not considered a compliment.
Well said. I have noticed that technical manuals are often far more difficult to read than they need to be because of the writers' poor or weak grammar. They seem to expect the reader to figure out what they meant.
By definition grammar is the tool we use to indicate how things and ideas are related to one another. Writers who make gramatical mistakes confuse these relationships, often saying the opposite of what they mean. Others sense that they do not have a command of the necessary gramatical constructs and so avoid them. The result is prose which fails to say much of anything.
I once saw a technical book in draft form which was loaded with serious gramatical errors including numerous fragmentary sentences. I later saw it in a bookstore. All of the errors had been corrected, presumably by a professional copy editor. But the copy editor had been able to restore the meaning which the bad grammar had destroyed. The final text was so vague as to be nearly useless.
So, no I do not think grammar checking software is of any use. If a professional copy editor cannot really fix the problem, a machine never will. What we really need is to teach strong grammar to technical workers. This would not only improve documentation. It would also improve their technical work. I have noticed a direct relationship between the quality of opensource projects' code and the level of literacy of the lead developers as reflected in their communications and the documentation which they write.
"Consider that home schooling, when successful, typically takes only a couple of hours per day instead of six or eight - dramatically better efficiency." No one schooling for only 2 hours a day is actually learning what they should. under 4 is a red flag. What is happening is they are doing the bare min,. easy stuff and not being challenged.
To evaluate this claim we need to ask ourselves how much time children in public school actually spend learning. We have to subtract the time they spend at lunch, moving between classrooms, waiting for the teacher's attention, listening to the teacher telling war stories. We must also subtract all activities which if done at home would not be considered schooling. This includes gym class and lunch. Oh, and we must subtract all the time spent sitting through lessons that the student already absorbed the first, second or third time.
In my experience as a student, there was never four hours of education in a six hour school day. At a good school it will be more like three. At a poor school it will be two or fewer.
As a child I found this extremely frustrating. I complained about it constantly. I can easily believe that an average six-hour school day can be replaced by two hours with a competent tutor.
My thought is that the only reason they're not finding anything is because the aliens are using gigahertz and terahertz frequencies to communicate on. And it's only now that we have some inkling that it's even possible.
I believe you have been misinformed. We have had consumer electronics operating at single-digit gigahertz frequencies since at least the early 80's. (Microwave ovens and wifi routers operate at about 2.4 gigahertz.) Short-range radars often operate at frequencies betwee 24 and 40 gigahertz.
Radiation in the terahertz range is infrared and visible light.
[Citation needed] If everybody didn't pay taxes, do you have evidence that his lifestyle would be worse? Or is that just the assumption you have in your world-view? I like to think that the lifestyle of Americans improved after they won independence from the king (and his taxes).
I am confused by your questions. What does your, um... world view say would happend if Americans all just stopped paying taxes? Is my "assumption" that at least some of our tax money pays for things we need and would have a hard time aquiring privately (such as roads, courts, police protection) incorrect?
Remember, I was replying to an AC who seemed to think that the money that is taken out of our paychecks for taxes just disappears, that if we could somehow stop the government from doing that, then we would all be rich. He didn't seem to be aware that our tax dollars pay for services that we receive.
As for your last point, I believe the slogan of the revolution was "no taxation without representation". So they didn't get out of paying taxes. They got to decide (collectively) how their tax monies would be spent.
How does his life improve when nobody pays the police, fire department, army, navy, air force, marines, and border patrol? How does life improve when there are no federal highways or public schools or courts or prisons or international airports?
That is precisely my point. His life would improve only if others still had to pay taxes.
Dreaming about what what one could do with "that missing 1/3 from your paycheck" shows a lack of awareness of why we pay taxes.
Also, it's spelled "further" and not "furthur".
I know. I can never remember which spelling is correct.
Holy cripes, man! "...money you never had?!?" It was money that was forcibly removed from you before you ever saw it!
Like the man said, it is money he never had.
Add up that missing 1/3 from your paycheck. What could you do with that?
If he could somehow evade paying taxes, his lifestyle would improve. If everybody else could do it too, his lifestyle would get much worse. Any furthur questions?
Of course Romney's human. You might not like him, but that does not change reality.
You do understand that they are joking, don't you?
Also, Obama's true citizenship matters a great deal. It's a matter of law. You might not like that either, but unfortunately your personal opinions don't change reality.
Court challenges to his eligibility have (so far) failed. That is the present reality.
Everyone who gets an implantable cardiac device is by definition trying to die, and likely will from the problem that indicated an implant in the first place.
They are taking a calculated risk in the hope of dying later than they would otherwise. Or am I missing something?
The open source zealots love these types of comments. It's not a valid solution, and if you allowed yourself to think outside the open source box you're in you might see it too.
Allowing anyone to view the code means anyone can then modify it.
As far as I am concerned, "anyone" can modify it all he wants just as long as he doesn't install it in an in-service medical device without proper approval. If we don't yet have legal, organization, and technical means to prevent this from happening, we should.
We are not talking about opensource software here. We are talking about allowing anyone who wants to to audit a piece of proprietary software.
I do though think that we should restrict access to the text of our laws. Think what would happen if somebody got a copy and modified the law.
To get good (choosing the word good, not decent intentionally, I will call at least some of the supported cards decent in the FOSS version) performance, and hardware decoding (this is not the open driver's fault, but lack of documentation), I use the closed driver for my AMD card. AMD still has to maintain their closed one, and give out the info, and if I'm not mistaken additionally helps on the open version. The open community appears to not be able to make full-speed full-featured video drivers, therefore the companies do not get a time/cost savings throwing it to the community.
You raise an interesting point which surprises me somewhat. Frankly I have been impressed by the progress made since ATI/AMD started releasing documention in 2007. Before they did, I had to buy Radeon 9200 cards (from 2003) if I wanted hardware accelaration. New cards didn't work at all with opensource drivers. But now it seems that I can take a new computer with a recent ATI card, install Debian or Ubuntu on it, and it just works with full resolution, hardware accelaration, and OpenGL with a high frame rate. It also smoothly runs multiple monitors. I don't know what more I could ask for.
In my ignorance I have recently concluded that the best solution to problems with the ATI binary driver is to remove it. Other than that the problems go away, nothing changes. I know that the ATI binary driver has higher benchmark numbers, but I know of no real-world scenario in which the opensource driver produces less than 60 frames per second.
It seems to me that the last 4 1/2 years have been spent getting documentation written and released, implementing drivers, getting those drivers stable, and getting them intergrated into Linux installers. As a developer myself, I know that is a lot of work. I would not expect to have performance parity with the binary drivers by now. I would expect it soon though.
So, I am very interested and surprised by the idea that there is a long-term need to maintain the binary driver. I think I am a typical user, and as far as I am concerned, they can drop it today. I gather that I am also wrong.
I'd bet that nvidia is hogtied by nondisclosure agreements with other companies.
Possiblly, but I tend to doubt it. First of all, they presumably would have said so if they were. Second, what they are asked to disclose is not potentially secret internal details but basically an API: the commands which must be sent across the PCI bus in order to make their card do things. In my experience, such documentation does not reveal that is not already available from other sources such as: the published higher-level API, product data sheets provided to buyers, and advertising copy.
Slashdot Mirror
Except categories in sports are defined by sex not gender so what they believe to be does not matter when it comes to decide in which category they can compete.
Not sure what distinction you are trying to draw between sex and gender. It can be confusing because "gender" now means what we used to call "sex". You have likely read books written before 1950 in which characters use expressions such as "a member of my sex", "the battle of the sexes". The statement "I want to talk about sex." would likely have been understood to mean "I want to talk about the social implications of being male and female."
I have here a dictionary written in 1955 which under "sex" gives the meaning of maleness or femaleness and "the attraction of one sex to the other". It doesn't even meantion that it could mean the sex act. This meaning appears to have become popular in the 1960's. With sex now being a word that made small boys titter, those who wanted to talk about the social implications of sex (maleness or famaleness) borrowed the term from grammar. It would be too embarrasing to say that one was taking "Sex Studies" in college, so they called it "Gender Studies".
Having thought about the above, you think you are saying that the problem is deciding who is female biologically as opposed to who can function as a female in society. The problem is that a small but significant part of the population displays testable physical characterisics of both sexes. For example, there are persons who are genetically male, but have female bodies. The IOC is thrashing around trying to find a definition of a female body.
I think the reason they have dropped testing of all athelets who claim to be female is that once you select women with strong, athletic bodies, you increase the likelihood that some measure of their bodies will be closer to that of male bodies. If you then disqualify them as "technically male", you create a scandal and humiliate them. If, when her picture appears in news stories, the public perceives her as being a member of the female sex, you then look ridiculous as well.
On the other hand, if you test no one, soon the women's division of sports requiring strength will be filled with men without beards and underdeveloped genitals.
You think a backdoor couldn't be installed on Linux?
Read what I said. I said that using the term root kit was inappropriate terminology when you are talking about Windows.
I don't see anything wrong with calling a Windows rootkit a rootkit. There is little to be gained by calling it an Administratorkit. But that is beside the point. The malware described does not seem to be a rootkit. True, it creates a backdoor which allows the intruder access at a later date. But, nowhere does the article suggest that it does that which distinguishes rootkits from other malware: rootkits subvert the system so that neither they nor the malacious programs which they detect can be detected using ordinary system tools.
Couldn't give you exact figures, but I've seen values of around £45k to £50k for 18 months in prison.
That is probably the costs paid by the state to keep someone in prison. Here is a news story about someone who was forced to pay the room-and-board fee: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-505428/Victim-false-rape-claim-pay-12-500-bed-board-jail.html
He received £252,500 in compensation for three years and four months and paid £12,500 for room and board. So they charged him about £10 per day. I suppose the room and board _might_ be worth that. However, charging for it is in terrificly bad taste.
I don't know how the £252,500 in compensation was computed, but if we figure that he should be treated as a state employee working 16 hours a day (24 hours minus eight hours sleep) without weekends or holidays and we pay him twice the UK minimum wage, then we arrive at a similiar figure.
I think a newspaper or TV channel could write some interesting stories about this. They could contact the board of prisons and tell them that they want to send resturant and hotel critics to their facilities. They could then go out and try to find room and board of similiar quality in a neighbourhood with similiar levels of violence with a similiar level of friendly service and find out how much it costs. Who knows, the burocrats might decide that the ensuing mockery is not worth the tiny (from a government's perspective) amount they get out of this.
The rules about compensation generally are designed so as to give them as little as possible. They even charge you board and lodging if you were in prison and are subsequently cleared and given compensation.
Interesting. How much exactly is lodging in a prison cell and board in a prison cafeteria worth on the open market? I would think the figure is close to zero.
That makes no sense. Even the example given, "party A dialed party B" *is* content. If they have to get information from you, that is content, isn't it?
Baloroth is distinguishing between a request for data about a communication and the content of the communication itself. The law distringuishes between to two. For example, a warant might authorize the police to attach a "pen recorder" to someone's phone line to see what numbers he dials but not authorize the police to listen in on the conversations.
This is a very good explanation. Among other things it explains why much of this information is not in existing GIS.
I wonder though whether the poster might be able to accomplish his goal in some other way. He doesn't necessarily need a highly detailed, highly accurate map of the precise borders of all easements on all property. In fact, such a map might not even meet his needs since it would not indicate whether these potential routes actually were being used for anything of significant commercial value (which is necessary for the argument he wants to make).
It might be good enough to create a map showing the aproximate routes of modern cables which the companies seem to value. This would be much easier because the routes of such cables are cleared for access and have warning signs all along them. A viable plan might be to get some friends together, go out and look for these maintained rights of way, add then to Openstreetmap, and then export the data and create a custom rendering to make his political point.
It won't help, when the exact thing they are complaining about is what businesses *in other countries* are doing.
I was wondering about that too. It turns out the summary overemphasizes a few minor points of the article which the poster found interesting while ignoring the main point of the proposal. The meat of the proposal is to prohibit the common practice of charging Australian purchasers of digital goods delivered over the Internet about 50% more for no appearent reason.
If this were about foreign companies refusing to serve Australian customers, then I agree, there would be little they could do about it. But since these companies are already selling in the Australian market and would like to continue to do so, the Australian goverment has much more leverage.
Saying that "Tasmanian police decline" to do something implies that they are actually empowered to do so as a matter of course.
Actually, there is precedent for using the phrase "decline to do" to describe a polite refusal to engage in conduct which one views as unreasonable or inappropriate. That is the sense meant here. The police have politely refused to get involved.
Writing "connexion" instead of "connection" ...
Could also mean that you're reading an older work (Dickens, Poe, etc), or perhaps trying to make something look as if it's from the period.
Yes, I deliberately chose a once-accepted spelling as one of my examples. The point I was trying to make is that the concept of "correct" in spelling is largely arbitrary. If I spell words phonetically (rather than using the spellings currently regarded as correct) I will seem to be illiterate. If I use bad grammar (by which I mean sentences which do not make sense when read out loud, not the occasional error in spelling or punctuation) I will actually be illiterate.
Just saw this example in a news article:
Authorities say rescue crews responded to a 911 call about the electrocution Monday evening when they found the three on the ground not breathing.
Here the grammatical error has altered the semantics to the point where the sentence no longer makes sense. (The order of events has been reversed.) I think it will be a very long time before we have a grammar checker which can catch errors such as this.
And yet this still makes the front page of Slashdot - with a spin-laden misleading title.
MojoKid - you are an ass, and so is the moderator.
What is misleading about the title? The investigation report stated: "The energy source responsible for generating the heat has been determined as external to the device". Looks to me like the title accurately describes what was reported.
Strictly speaking the title is accurate. It even uses some of the report's words. However, the title as a whole makes it sound like Samsung is attempting to pass the blame onto a mysterious energy source.
You may be one of the rare few that can truly tax Word's grammar checker but the overwhelming majority of people who believe that it's useless are flat wrong. I see this at work basically every day. I work with people who have degrees and should be able to write fairly well (at least well enough to not lose a grade on grammar) but neither properly capitalize nor know the common homonyms. There is also the unnecessary capitalization of words because people think they're acronyms: I see "WEB" and "FOB" (access tokens) all the time. That the lose/loose problem is spilling into the workplace is an even bigger sign of the problem.
When I think of gramatical errors, I do not usually think of such minor, almost mechanical problems. I would call a tool which pointed them out a context-aware spelling checker. Perhaps this explains the disappointment with grammar checkers. The detection of context inappropriate spelling and violation of typographic conventions works, but they fail to help the writer to use the power of grammar.
I think effective grammar checkers will not be available for many years. Because incorrect grammar tends to create misleading or absurd meaning ("He was embedded with an RFID chip." Really? In what were they embedded together?) I would think a grammar checker cannot be really effective unless it performs semantic analysis.
Grammar used to be something that you learned in school. Using correct grammar means that you can express your thoughts clearly, which means that you can think clearly. You can use tools to catch typing mistakes, but if you need them to correct grammar, the problem lies with you.
I agree. I think far to many confuse the reasons for writing gramatically with the reasons for spelling correctly. The primary reason for spelling correctly is to appear educated. (Writing "connexion" instead of "connection" or "det" instead of "debt" does not alter meaning.)
In contrast, the primary reason for using good, strong grammer is to convey more meaning. An example of weak grammar: "The trigger is the gun fireer." Strong grammer: "The shooter fires the gun by drawing back the trigger."
Unfortunately, an entire generation grew up thinking that those who insist on good grammer do so because they are snobs.
Whether grammar matters or not depends on the recipient of the message, not the originator. As anyone who has designed a compiler will tell you, it's an error-prone PITA to have to pre-process input before it is in a useable form. If the recipient can do this, no harm is done, except that the recipient is aware that the sender gave him more work to do than was necessary -- something usually not considered a compliment.
Well said. I have noticed that technical manuals are often far more difficult to read than they need to be because of the writers' poor or weak grammar. They seem to expect the reader to figure out what they meant.
By definition grammar is the tool we use to indicate how things and ideas are related to one another. Writers who make gramatical mistakes confuse these relationships, often saying the opposite of what they mean. Others sense that they do not have a command of the necessary gramatical constructs and so avoid them. The result is prose which fails to say much of anything.
I once saw a technical book in draft form which was loaded with serious gramatical errors including numerous fragmentary sentences. I later saw it in a bookstore. All of the errors had been corrected, presumably by a professional copy editor. But the copy editor had been able to restore the meaning which the bad grammar had destroyed. The final text was so vague as to be nearly useless.
So, no I do not think grammar checking software is of any use. If a professional copy editor cannot really fix the problem, a machine never will. What we really need is to teach strong grammar to technical workers. This would not only improve documentation. It would also improve their technical work. I have noticed a direct relationship between the quality of opensource projects' code and the level of literacy of the lead developers as reflected in their communications and the documentation which they write.
"Consider that home schooling, when successful, typically takes only a couple of hours per day instead of six or eight - dramatically better efficiency."
No one schooling for only 2 hours a day is actually learning what they should. under 4 is a red flag. What is happening is they are doing the bare min,. easy stuff and not being challenged.
To evaluate this claim we need to ask ourselves how much time children in public school actually spend learning. We have to subtract the time they spend at lunch, moving between classrooms, waiting for the teacher's attention, listening to the teacher telling war stories. We must also subtract all activities which if done at home would not be considered schooling. This includes gym class and lunch. Oh, and we must subtract all the time spent sitting through lessons that the student already absorbed the first, second or third time.
In my experience as a student, there was never four hours of education in a six hour school day. At a good school it will be more like three. At a poor school it will be two or fewer.
As a child I found this extremely frustrating. I complained about it constantly. I can easily believe that an average six-hour school day can be replaced by two hours with a competent tutor.
My thought is that the only reason they're not finding anything is because the aliens are using gigahertz and terahertz frequencies to communicate on. And it's only now that we have some inkling that it's even possible.
I believe you have been misinformed. We have had consumer electronics operating at single-digit gigahertz frequencies since at least the early 80's. (Microwave ovens and wifi routers operate at about 2.4 gigahertz.) Short-range radars often operate at frequencies betwee 24 and 40 gigahertz.
Radiation in the terahertz range is infrared and visible light.
[Citation needed] If everybody didn't pay taxes, do you have evidence that his lifestyle would be worse? Or is that just the assumption you have in your world-view? I like to think that the lifestyle of Americans improved after they won independence from the king (and his taxes).
I am confused by your questions. What does your, um... world view say would happend if Americans all just stopped paying taxes? Is my "assumption" that at least some of our tax money pays for things we need and would have a hard time aquiring privately (such as roads, courts, police protection) incorrect?
Remember, I was replying to an AC who seemed to think that the money that is taken out of our paychecks for taxes just disappears, that if we could somehow stop the government from doing that, then we would all be rich. He didn't seem to be aware that our tax dollars pay for services that we receive.
As for your last point, I believe the slogan of the revolution was "no taxation without representation". So they didn't get out of paying taxes. They got to decide (collectively) how their tax monies would be spent.
How does his life improve when nobody pays the police, fire department, army, navy, air force, marines, and border patrol? How does life improve when there are no federal highways or public schools or courts or prisons or international airports?
That is precisely my point. His life would improve only if others still had to pay taxes.
Dreaming about what what one could do with "that missing 1/3 from your paycheck" shows a lack of awareness of why we pay taxes.
Also, it's spelled "further" and not "furthur".
I know. I can never remember which spelling is correct.
Holy cripes, man! "...money you never had?!?" It was money that was forcibly removed from you before you ever saw it!
Like the man said, it is money he never had.
Add up that missing 1/3 from your paycheck. What could you do with that?
If he could somehow evade paying taxes, his lifestyle would improve. If everybody else could do it too, his lifestyle would get much worse. Any furthur questions?
Of course Romney's human. You might not like him, but that does not change reality.
You do understand that they are joking, don't you?
Also, Obama's true citizenship matters a great deal. It's a matter of law. You might not like that either, but unfortunately your personal opinions don't change reality.
Court challenges to his eligibility have (so far) failed. That is the present reality.
Power without intelligence is like a rocket engine without a nozzle.
I'm having trouble picturing a rocket engine without a nozzle.
Everyone who gets an implantable cardiac device is by definition trying to die, and likely will from the problem that indicated an implant in the first place.
They are taking a calculated risk in the hope of dying later than they would otherwise. Or am I missing something?
The open source zealots love these types of comments. It's not a valid solution, and if you allowed yourself to think outside the open source box you're in you might see it too.
Allowing anyone to view the code means anyone can then modify it.
As far as I am concerned, "anyone" can modify it all he wants just as long as he doesn't install it in an in-service medical device without proper approval. If we don't yet have legal, organization, and technical means to prevent this from happening, we should.
We are not talking about opensource software here. We are talking about allowing anyone who wants to to audit a piece of proprietary software.
I do though think that we should restrict access to the text of our laws. Think what would happen if somebody got a copy and modified the law.
How's that worked for ATI/AMD?
To get good (choosing the word good, not decent intentionally, I will call at least some of the supported cards decent in the FOSS version) performance, and hardware decoding (this is not the open driver's fault, but lack of documentation), I use the closed driver for my AMD card. AMD still has to maintain their closed one, and give out the info, and if I'm not mistaken additionally helps on the open version. The open community appears to not be able to make full-speed full-featured video drivers, therefore the companies do not get a time/cost savings throwing it to the community.
You raise an interesting point which surprises me somewhat. Frankly I have been impressed by the progress made since ATI/AMD started releasing documention in 2007. Before they did, I had to buy Radeon 9200 cards (from 2003) if I wanted hardware accelaration. New cards didn't work at all with opensource drivers. But now it seems that I can take a new computer with a recent ATI card, install Debian or Ubuntu on it, and it just works with full resolution, hardware accelaration, and OpenGL with a high frame rate. It also smoothly runs multiple monitors. I don't know what more I could ask for.
In my ignorance I have recently concluded that the best solution to problems with the ATI binary driver is to remove it. Other than that the problems go away, nothing changes. I know that the ATI binary driver has higher benchmark numbers, but I know of no real-world scenario in which the opensource driver produces less than 60 frames per second.
It seems to me that the last 4 1/2 years have been spent getting documentation written and released, implementing drivers, getting those drivers stable, and getting them intergrated into Linux installers. As a developer myself, I know that is a lot of work. I would not expect to have performance parity with the binary drivers by now. I would expect it soon though.
So, I am very interested and surprised by the idea that there is a long-term need to maintain the binary driver. I think I am a typical user, and as far as I am concerned, they can drop it today. I gather that I am also wrong.
I'd bet that nvidia is hogtied by nondisclosure agreements with other companies.
Possiblly, but I tend to doubt it. First of all, they presumably would have said so if they were. Second, what they are asked to disclose is not potentially secret internal details but basically an API: the commands which must be sent across the PCI bus in order to make their card do things. In my experience, such documentation does not reveal that is not already available from other sources such as: the published higher-level API, product data sheets provided to buyers, and advertising copy.