Which was kinda his point. Especially in today's world, there are many children who will hear 'incorrect' examples while they're learning. Young children of recent immigrants, for instance. Children with poorly educated parents, as well.
It's statistics that let the child learn to distinguish the contexts in which "He be running" and "He is running" are each "correct".
First, this thread started because someone told Science teachers to teach ID as an alternative to evolution. Only scientists are qualified to determine what's acceptable scientific theory. It doesn't matter that millions of superstitious people believe in ID - it's what scientists think that matters. It's a science class. Teach your superstitions in religion class.
Second, the drivel about the bible being "right" about archaeology is pure wishful thinking. The thing starts out saying the world was created in six days. There's almost nothing in the first couple of chapters of Genesis (or Beresith, if that's your version) that can be described as "right".
"No truth ever discovered and actually measured and understood as a FACT... has evern been at odds with any statement in the Bible" - you really think that's true? Fact: snakes don't talk - at odds with Gen 3:1. Fact: many animals eat meat - at odds with Gen 1:30. Fact: ten thousand new species of animals are discovered and named each year - at odds with Gen 2:18-22. Fact: many animals exhibit no evidence that they fear humans - at odds with Gen 9:2. Fact: the coloring of goats is determined by genetic inheritance from their parents - at odds with Gen 30:37-39. Fact: carbon decays at a fixed rate and fossils must be millions of years old to account for their carbon content - at odds with the geneology offered for Jesus' descent from Adam. Fact: biological decay processes make it astronomically unlikely that an unmodified human can live more than, say, 150 years - so unlikely that in all of (accurately) recorded history there is no one who's ever approached that age - at odds with Gen 5:21-27 and 11:10-32.
I'm just picking on Genesis because it's up front. Fact: hares do not chew their cud - Deu 14:7-8. Fact: bats are unrelated to birds - Deu 14:11,18. Fact: the earth's revolving around the sun cannot be stopped and restarted - Jos 10:12-13. Fact: the earth hangs unsupported in space - 1 Sam 2:8, Job 9:6.
How about some archaeology/history, instead of general science? Fact: In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim (606 BCE), Nebuchadnezzar wasn't yet king of Babylon, when he was, Jehoiakim was dead and his son, Jehoaichin ruled Jerusalem - Dan 1:1. Fact: "three days travel" (on foot) is about sixty miles, Ninevah was never that large - Jon 3:3.
Some new testament nonsense? Fact: Josephus, avid chronicler of Herod's life makes no mention of the massacre of the firstborn, surely he would have if it happened - Matt 2:16. Fact: many seeds are smaller than mustard seeds, and mustard seeds do not grow into trees - Matt 13:32, Mark 4:31 Fact: epilepsy is caused by improper development of the brain - Luke 9:39. Fact: prayer does not cure disease - Jam 5:14-15.
Those are just a few examples off the top of my head and from some simple searches. Before you go spouting any nonsense about the bible not having been demonstrated to be wrong, you might actually try reading it, rather than taking your priest's word about what's in there.
To me, the real question is how stupidity like this keeps getting past school boards. There must have been at least one rational person at the meeting where they voted in the new policy who explained they were wrong.
I suspect the problem is more that School Boards aren't really in a position to weigh one side's arguments against the other, so they pretty much just count noses - a priest, a minister and a rabbi over there, a physicist and a molecular biologist over there - looks pretty close to me.
The problem is that we can't seem to make clear to them that there are virtually no reputable scientists who would accept ID as a legitimate scientific theory.
OTOH, to a certain extent, that's nearly the definition of "reputable scientist". There's some circularity to the argument.
DNS is part of it, it's the closest thing to the "mainframe" hypothesized by the grandparent, but the actual vehicle for the control is that they publish documents.
The DNS really only holds the mappings betweens IP addresses and host names. There are a few other things in there, but not all of the assigned numbers, by any means.
The IANA has responsibility for a lot of other things. Basically they get tasked in documents published by the IETF, called RFC's, to maintain registries of various assignments. For instance, the thing before the colon in a URL, called a "scheme" (http:, ftp:, mailto:, etc.) are registered with IANA, that maintains a registry pointing to protocol details. The fact that TCP's port 80 is where HTTP servers are normally listening is assigned by IANA.
Used to be that every couple of hundred RFC's IANA would publish one called "Assigned Numbers", that pretty much listed all of the well known ports, protocol numbers, URL schemas, and so on. Way back in the beginning, that even included IP address block assignments, but (obviously) it got to where that data changed too frequently, and the publication was out of date before it even came out. So, to solve the problem, the IETF came up with the DNS, and the IAB identified it as a necessary part of the Internet's architecture, so it got widespread adoption.
Now, the rest of the information from the Assigned Numbers documents is starting to get too unweildy, too, so they've set up a web site that has the information (http://www.iana.org/).
I have to agree with the comment that "once beginners understand... C, it gets much easier", and furthermore, to declare the parent bogus.
Yes... code is supposed to be readable. However, that doesn't mean "readable to any knucklehead that picks it up", or even "readable to COBOL wonks". It means, "readable to other C programmers".
Common idioms like !ptr, and iterating a pointer through an array instead of using array indexing are meant to be read idiomatically by real C programmers. If a COBOL guy doesn't get it and can't figure out how "if (!ptr)" can work, tough. He needs a C class, it's not a "readability problem" with the code.
Other kinds of idioms: loops go from 0 to N-1 instead of 1 to N; Strings are represented by null-terminated arrays; multiplication and division happen before addition and subtraction, and so don't require parenthesis.
Learn the language, don't ask the writer to compensate for the reader's shortcomings.
Are you daft? All legislation takes away rights. Almost by definition. Legislation identifies things you can't do. The only way a bill can create rights, is to modify a previous one that took them away.
There's more to it than that. You have to be ruthless in applying this rule to yourself. Have you ever spent money as a result of receiving an unsolicited email? Then you're part of the problem.
It's not good enough to say "Well, there was just that one time". That's what they want. If you respond to one in a million unsolicited ads, then the system works, for them, and won't stop.
Ignoring them won't make them go away - because "ignoring" them really means that a very large number of people have to be disciplined enough to refuse to buy something - no matter how much they want it - if they received spam on it.
While it's true that "... that the reader has no means to resolve [the discrepancies]", the reader does have the means to improve the article -- simply edit it and insert notes regarding the inconsistencies. Then someone who does know the answers can come along and fix the article.
I haven't really played with Wikipedia's editing facilities, much, but (if not already done) they could certainly enhance their editing software to allow an editor to make a not as to the "type" of edit (new content, editorial notes, cleanup, etc.) and some of the more eager volunteers can search for editorial notes and make a real effort to get corresponding cleanups made.
There's probably also some value in using some sort of statistical analysis or collaborative review process to recognize when articles are getting somewhere near their "ideal" state and limit edits by unknown editors to footnote/sidebar status, to be incorporated into the base article by a more trusted editor.
There are certainly things that Wikipedia could do to improve the quality of their articles - especially now that they've gotten enough critical mass to have a project at all.
Currently if a passenger disappears between checkin and departure, the plane cannot leave with their luggage on board. This proceedure predates recent security improvements.
If only this were true. I've already had connections that were so close that my bags made it, but I didn't.
Lots of industry folks (MSFT, Dell, etc) have been reporting lately that a significant portion of their service calls come from either spam or spyware.
Cutting service costs will definitely help the bottom line.
Actually, I had the same thought, but from the other angle...
Is there really a law somewhere that says "thou shalt not boost anything into sub-orbital flight without a license"? And who enforces it? And what's the penalty for sub-orbital flight without a license?
Except that we got into this thread because of general_re's suggestion that the value of diamonds results from exchanges.
My point is that there *is* no exchange for diamonds. The cartel sells diamonds, essentially no one else does (or can, they've been reported to use some pretty strongarm tactics). To talk about "market value" in diamonds is a ridiculous notion - the concept doesn't apply.
Your car, clothes, textbooks, stereo, and computer aren't considered "investments". Diamonds are routinely pitched as investment items akin to gold.
In fact, in response to the discovery, in the 70s, of significant new source of diamonds in the Soviet Union, DeBeers made some noteworthy changes to their advertising to create a market for "investment diamonds".
These diamonds are sold as investments for typical wholesale prices. If you even open the packages in which they're delivered, it violates the investment terms and they're back to being ordinary diamonds. This for the hardest substance known to man - it's not like you'd scuff them or anything.
Also, your car, clothes, and textbooks wear out. When you go to resell them, they're not the same items they were when you bought them. The diamond in my mother's engagement ring from 40-odd years ago is no different today than back then.
Your stereo and computer aren't the same items, either - when you bought them they were new tech, cutting edge stuff. Today, there are lots of better ones available. Diamonds don't change, yet they somehow depreciate in value.
The reasons the items you listed lose value is because they don't compare well with new items of the same type. Diamonds do - other than stylistic factors, the diamonds from 100 years ago are indistinguishable from diamonds today. Today's diamonds tend to be smaller and the popular styles in which they're cut are a little different - and those differences in demand were carefully engineered by DeBeers to match the output of those new Soviet diamond mines, mind you - but they're still the same diamond. There's no reason for them to have lost value. If you took a 100-year old diamond and dropped it into a box with 20 brand new ones, no one could tell the difference.
Uh, "whatever you can get in exchange for it", so diamonds have a "real value" of about half the price they go for at diamond wholesalers.
Just try to sell that diamond engagement ring. If you can even find someone outside of a pawn shop who'll take the thing, you won't get more than half what you spent, and probably far less.
The DeBeers cartel controls virtually all of the sales channels for diamonds, and they don't buy 'em back.
Re:Like the UN would be any faster...
on
ICANN Meets Annan
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Um, it's not ICANN that decides which countries get domains. They already abdicated. Their policy is "if ISO says it's a country, that's good enough for us."
I can't imagine that college students, most of whom already carry laptops (even when they're not required by the school) wouldn't prefer to get electronic copies of their books over the monster tomes most colleges seem to use.
I mean, if you could get an e-copy of the textbook (even node-locked to your laptop with DRM or whatever), who'd want to carry the 5-pounder? Ok - so there might be a few who habitually ruin their books' resale values by making notes or highlighting or whatever, but you can even do that with a lot of ebook readers, now.
Or, the ebook could be at least available to those who buy the wood pulp.
This, to me, is what makes it most glaringly obvious that it's the publishing industry, not the marketplace that doesn't want the e-books.
Ya know, I also think it's pretty silly when people complain about the Post Office - especially when they complain about prices.
Think about it. For less than 50 cents, they'll come to your house, pick up a letter, and deliver it to any address in the country. You don't have to go to them to send or receive. Compare that to a restaurant charging a $5 delivery fee to go a half a mile. Seems like a pretty good deal, to me.
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Which was kinda his point. Especially in today's world, there are many children who will hear 'incorrect' examples while they're learning. Young children of recent immigrants, for instance. Children with poorly educated parents, as well.
It's statistics that let the child learn to distinguish the contexts in which "He be running" and "He is running" are each "correct".
You're wrong on so many levels...
First, this thread started because someone told Science teachers to teach ID as an alternative to evolution. Only scientists are qualified to determine what's acceptable scientific theory. It doesn't matter that millions of superstitious people believe in ID - it's what scientists think that matters. It's a science class. Teach your superstitions in religion class.
Second, the drivel about the bible being "right" about archaeology is pure wishful thinking. The thing starts out saying the world was created in six days. There's almost nothing in the first couple of chapters of Genesis (or Beresith, if that's your version) that can be described as "right".
"No truth ever discovered and actually measured and understood as a FACT ... has evern been at odds with any statement in the Bible" - you really think that's true? Fact: snakes don't talk - at odds with Gen 3:1. Fact: many animals eat meat - at odds with Gen 1:30. Fact: ten thousand new species of animals are discovered and named each year - at odds with Gen 2:18-22. Fact: many animals exhibit no evidence that they fear humans - at odds with Gen 9:2. Fact: the coloring of goats is determined by genetic inheritance from their parents - at odds with Gen 30:37-39. Fact: carbon decays at a fixed rate and fossils must be millions of years old to account for their carbon content - at odds with the geneology offered for Jesus' descent from Adam. Fact: biological decay processes make it astronomically unlikely that an unmodified human can live more than, say, 150 years - so unlikely that in all of (accurately) recorded history there is no one who's ever approached that age - at odds with Gen 5:21-27 and 11:10-32.
I'm just picking on Genesis because it's up front. Fact: hares do not chew their cud - Deu 14:7-8. Fact: bats are unrelated to birds - Deu 14:11,18. Fact: the earth's revolving around the sun cannot be stopped and restarted - Jos 10:12-13. Fact: the earth hangs unsupported in space - 1 Sam 2:8, Job 9:6.
How about some archaeology/history, instead of general science? Fact: In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim (606 BCE), Nebuchadnezzar wasn't yet king of Babylon, when he was, Jehoiakim was dead and his son, Jehoaichin ruled Jerusalem - Dan 1:1. Fact: "three days travel" (on foot) is about sixty miles, Ninevah was never that large - Jon 3:3.
Some new testament nonsense? Fact: Josephus, avid chronicler of Herod's life makes no mention of the massacre of the firstborn, surely he would have if it happened - Matt 2:16. Fact: many seeds are smaller than mustard seeds, and mustard seeds do not grow into trees - Matt 13:32, Mark 4:31 Fact: epilepsy is caused by improper development of the brain - Luke 9:39. Fact: prayer does not cure disease - Jam 5:14-15.
Those are just a few examples off the top of my head and from some simple searches. Before you go spouting any nonsense about the bible not having been demonstrated to be wrong, you might actually try reading it, rather than taking your priest's word about what's in there.
To me, the real question is how stupidity like this keeps getting past school boards. There must have been at least one rational person at the meeting where they voted in the new policy who explained they were wrong.
I suspect the problem is more that School Boards aren't really in a position to weigh one side's arguments against the other, so they pretty much just count noses - a priest, a minister and a rabbi over there, a physicist and a molecular biologist over there - looks pretty close to me.
The problem is that we can't seem to make clear to them that there are virtually no reputable scientists who would accept ID as a legitimate scientific theory.
OTOH, to a certain extent, that's nearly the definition of "reputable scientist". There's some circularity to the argument.
DNS is part of it, it's the closest thing to the "mainframe" hypothesized by the grandparent, but the actual vehicle for the control is that they publish documents.
The DNS really only holds the mappings betweens IP addresses and host names. There are a few other things in there, but not all of the assigned numbers, by any means.
The IANA has responsibility for a lot of other things. Basically they get tasked in documents published by the IETF, called RFC's, to maintain registries of various assignments. For instance, the thing before the colon in a URL, called a "scheme" (http:, ftp:, mailto:, etc.) are registered with IANA, that maintains a registry pointing to protocol details. The fact that TCP's port 80 is where HTTP servers are normally listening is assigned by IANA.
Used to be that every couple of hundred RFC's IANA would publish one called "Assigned Numbers", that pretty much listed all of the well known ports, protocol numbers, URL schemas, and so on. Way back in the beginning, that even included IP address block assignments, but (obviously) it got to where that data changed too frequently, and the publication was out of date before it even came out. So, to solve the problem, the IETF came up with the DNS, and the IAB identified it as a necessary part of the Internet's architecture, so it got widespread adoption.
Now, the rest of the information from the Assigned Numbers documents is starting to get too unweildy, too, so they've set up a web site that has the information (http://www.iana.org/).
I have to agree with the comment that "once beginners understand ... C, it gets much easier", and furthermore, to declare the parent bogus.
Yes... code is supposed to be readable. However, that doesn't mean "readable to any knucklehead that picks it up", or even "readable to COBOL wonks". It means, "readable to other C programmers".
Common idioms like !ptr, and iterating a pointer through an array instead of using array indexing are meant to be read idiomatically by real C programmers. If a COBOL guy doesn't get it and can't figure out how "if (!ptr)" can work, tough. He needs a C class, it's not a "readability problem" with the code.
Other kinds of idioms: loops go from 0 to N-1 instead of 1 to N; Strings are represented by null-terminated arrays; multiplication and division happen before addition and subtraction, and so don't require parenthesis.
Learn the language, don't ask the writer to compensate for the reader's shortcomings.
Are you daft? All legislation takes away rights. Almost by definition. Legislation identifies things you can't do. The only way a bill can create rights, is to modify a previous one that took them away.
It's not good enough to say "Well, there was just that one time". That's what they want. If you respond to one in a million unsolicited ads, then the system works, for them, and won't stop.
Ignoring them won't make them go away - because "ignoring" them really means that a very large number of people have to be disciplined enough to refuse to buy something - no matter how much they want it - if they received spam on it.
While it's true that "... that the reader has no means to resolve [the discrepancies]", the reader does have the means to improve the article -- simply edit it and insert notes regarding the inconsistencies. Then someone who does know the answers can come along and fix the article. I haven't really played with Wikipedia's editing facilities, much, but (if not already done) they could certainly enhance their editing software to allow an editor to make a not as to the "type" of edit (new content, editorial notes, cleanup, etc.) and some of the more eager volunteers can search for editorial notes and make a real effort to get corresponding cleanups made. There's probably also some value in using some sort of statistical analysis or collaborative review process to recognize when articles are getting somewhere near their "ideal" state and limit edits by unknown editors to footnote/sidebar status, to be incorporated into the base article by a more trusted editor. There are certainly things that Wikipedia could do to improve the quality of their articles - especially now that they've gotten enough critical mass to have a project at all.
Lots of industry folks (MSFT, Dell, etc) have been reporting lately that a significant portion of their service calls come from either spam or spyware.
Cutting service costs will definitely help the bottom line.
Actually, I had the same thought, but from the other angle...
Is there really a law somewhere that says "thou shalt not boost anything into sub-orbital flight without a license"? And who enforces it? And what's the penalty for sub-orbital flight without a license?
Except that we got into this thread because of general_re's suggestion that the value of diamonds results from exchanges.
My point is that there *is* no exchange for diamonds. The cartel sells diamonds, essentially no one else does (or can, they've been reported to use some pretty strongarm tactics). To talk about "market value" in diamonds is a ridiculous notion - the concept doesn't apply.
Your car, clothes, textbooks, stereo, and computer aren't considered "investments". Diamonds are routinely pitched as investment items akin to gold.
In fact, in response to the discovery, in the 70s, of significant new source of diamonds in the Soviet Union, DeBeers made some noteworthy changes to their advertising to create a market for "investment diamonds".
These diamonds are sold as investments for typical wholesale prices. If you even open the packages in which they're delivered, it violates the investment terms and they're back to being ordinary diamonds. This for the hardest substance known to man - it's not like you'd scuff them or anything.
Also, your car, clothes, and textbooks wear out. When you go to resell them, they're not the same items they were when you bought them. The diamond in my mother's engagement ring from 40-odd years ago is no different today than back then.
Your stereo and computer aren't the same items, either - when you bought them they were new tech, cutting edge stuff. Today, there are lots of better ones available. Diamonds don't change, yet they somehow depreciate in value.
The reasons the items you listed lose value is because they don't compare well with new items of the same type. Diamonds do - other than stylistic factors, the diamonds from 100 years ago are indistinguishable from diamonds today. Today's diamonds tend to be smaller and the popular styles in which they're cut are a little different - and those differences in demand were carefully engineered by DeBeers to match the output of those new Soviet diamond mines, mind you - but they're still the same diamond. There's no reason for them to have lost value. If you took a 100-year old diamond and dropped it into a box with 20 brand new ones, no one could tell the difference.
Uh, "whatever you can get in exchange for it", so diamonds have a "real value" of about half the price they go for at diamond wholesalers. Just try to sell that diamond engagement ring. If you can even find someone outside of a pawn shop who'll take the thing, you won't get more than half what you spent, and probably far less. The DeBeers cartel controls virtually all of the sales channels for diamonds, and they don't buy 'em back.
Um, it's not ICANN that decides which countries get domains. They already abdicated. Their policy is "if ISO says it's a country, that's good enough for us."
I can't imagine that college students, most of whom already carry laptops (even when they're not required by the school) wouldn't prefer to get electronic copies of their books over the monster tomes most colleges seem to use.
I mean, if you could get an e-copy of the textbook (even node-locked to your laptop with DRM or whatever), who'd want to carry the 5-pounder? Ok - so there might be a few who habitually ruin their books' resale values by making notes or highlighting or whatever, but you can even do that with a lot of ebook readers, now.
Or, the ebook could be at least available to those who buy the wood pulp.
This, to me, is what makes it most glaringly obvious that it's the publishing industry, not the marketplace that doesn't want the e-books.
And, of course, it'll only take about a week to format the thing, and just forget about backups...
Ya know, I also think it's pretty silly when people complain about the Post Office - especially when they complain about prices.
Think about it. For less than 50 cents, they'll come to your house, pick up a letter, and deliver it to any address in the country. You don't have to go to them to send or receive. Compare that to a restaurant charging a $5 delivery fee to go a half a mile. Seems like a pretty good deal, to me.
Not to blow my own horn (well, maybe a little), but someone has.
Check out www.flashtalk.com. Audio quality is very good, it gets past any firewall that permits outbound connections, and uses only one port.
There's a 14 day free trial, and the annual license is $29.95. And if you buy one annual license, you get another one free to give away.