If I don't have a right to obtain their media on any terms they don't agree to, then I can't by a used copy of the physical media after it comes out on DVD, or wait until it enters the public domain, because the producers of this product have claimed, through the MPAA, that those rights are not granted by their choice. Since when does copyright, even if it was totally legitimate law as it stands, extend beyond copying itself to mean my other rights are only whatever they choose? And isn't the unilateral extension of copyright term a theft of that right to the public domain? How about actually pulling once released material back out of the public domain and writing a retroactive law to place it back under copyright? Isn't that one huge theft? Isn't an ex-post-facto law something the constitution prohibits for damned good reason? Are you just another one of those people who love to call relatively powerless people thieves, but are too chicken to apply your own logic to the powerful and call them thieves as well?
I don't pirate. I actually endorse the legitimate protection of content creators through resaonable copyright. But since the content creators have stopped endorsing my right to public domain access, my right of first sale, and other such rights they find possibly inconvenient, where's the people who write them letters calling them what they have become? Since they have subverted the laws of this once great nation in an arrogant abouse of monetary power, who's even ready to compare them to the old robber barons? Oh yeah, those people are like you, picking on just one side in what has become a struggle, the side that can't or won't give them any trouble back for taking their 'fine, upstanding moral position'. That gives them a cheap feeling of superiority.
Count me as one of those who feels a "deep seated need to be offended". I have an autistic nephew who has been called a gimp by various ignorant fools in the past, and hell yes, I'm offended. You have offended me, by being a total jerk. You should be ashamed of yourself, but on slashdot, vile and abusive speech evidently gets you modded plus five.
Silly me, I thought abusing people who cannot help their disability was the sign of a person with a crushing inferiority complex, desperately trying to elevate themselves by attacking those they percieve as even weaker, and doomed to eventually fail. But Slashdot calls that insightful.
You have a problem, a personality problem as large as alchoholism or heroin abuse, and the four people who gave you mod points are enabling that problem, encouraging you to go farther down a road that leads eventually to your own distruction. You can realize that it is the very worst aspect of your own nature that attempts to justify abusing some of the most helpless of our society, or not, but you probably consider those who modded you up as friends so you will have less incentive to grow up and learn to give a damn about other people. That's a pity.
They really ought to consider renaming it because the word 'Gimp' is about as insulting as the words 'nigger', 'dago' or 'kike' in many parts of the US. In many locations, 'gimp' is just another synonym for 'spaz', or 'retard'. Would you use 'Bitches ain't nuttin but hoes and tricks' Linux? Would you recommend it to your boss for an enterprise environment? Hey, maybe Linux could get wider adoption with Hitler Linux? That's the real problem. Ubuntu, at least, claims to be based on ideas of unity and tolerance. Most open source claims to support forms of equality and mutual respect between the participants. Bundling a program called 'the Gimp' with them is spitting in the faces of those ideals, and it makes everybody involved a hypocrite. .
But how could anyone prove what you ask? You know where your info is while it's on your box. You don't know where it is once somebody else has a copy, by definition. How can anyone prove or disprove that something is or isn't being done by some other party who has surruptitiously gained a copy of the information without knowledge of the original owner? I can't prove what somebody who stole my car did with it afterwards, just as I can't prove what somebody who legally bought my car did with it afterwards.
The question of how the property was obtained is still relevant. If Microsoft is sneaky about gathering the information, then it seems likelier that they are also using that information in various ways that don't respect my privacy. If Microsoft doesn't respect some parts of the social compact, then the odds increase that they don't repect others, and not serving as an agent of the police without abiding by the same rules as the real police are supposed to is one of those parts.
I can't logically prove that Person X molests children, just because Person X has been found guilty of treason, bank robbery, beating his wife, and mopery with intent to gawk. Not being able to prove something, there, does it mean much at all in terms of what I should do?
German has 26 'regular' letters of latin style, and the "Sharp S", . Often even native speakers will only count the 26. German also commonly uses umlauts over three vowels, but these are nearly never counted as seperate letters. So, there are actually an average of 26.5 letters in the 2 alphabets - the parent poster has subtracted when he should have added and then set an arbitrarily low threshold for precision and relied on a rule of thumb for rounding, ergo he's an engineer.
Only four states exempt prepared foods from sales tax, and the definition of prepared varies so that for some of them, anything in a grocery store more complex than raw flour, eggs, and milk, such as frozen waffles, counts as prepared. The 4 states with the highest overall sales tax don't exempt prepared foods and two of them don't exempt non-prepared foods either. 13 states have a higher sales tax rate for prepared food than their general sales tax rate.
18 states tax perscription drugs, and 37 of them tax non-perscription drugs. 41 states tax clothing, but 2 of them admittedly have a set threshold deliberately designed not to tax cheap clothing (either below $100 or $175).
The reason there is no sales tax on rent is that real estate is by definition taxed by property taxes, not sales taxes. Every one of the states has property taxes paid by renters. Including rent in the your necessities list is thus disingenious at best.
By standard Evolutionary theory, bacteria should actually have much less chance per unit of having a beneficial mutation than for more 'advanced' organisms. It's just they have a lot of both sheer numbers and fast reproductive cycles to make the individually unlikely collectively more likely.
Details: any organism, from bacteria to blue whales, can be assumed to be pretty well adapted to its environment - wildly ill-adapted means dead. So small tweaks in genes are more likely to be beneficial than big changes. Big changes overshoot the beneficial range. (Imagine a giraffe that might be a bit better adapted if it was six inches taller, but it has only one gene controlling height, and so any mutation in that gene produces either a 3 foot tall or 45 foot tall giraffe in the next generation). Bacteria have so few genes that just about all mutations are drastically negative, like the one height gene giraffe. Instead of maybe 1 in 1000 being beneficial, it's 1 in 10,000,000 or worse odds, but have hundreds of offspring in a generation and a new generation every five hours, and ten million to one odds are something it can and will overcome.
Overall, I agree, but "knowledge of what errors people usually make and why they make them", sounds like one of those things a good manager has. It sounds like just the sort of skill people complain too many MBAs don't learn, and should before they go around mismanaging companies. I bet you could find a very similar phrase in one of Deming's managment books. So is it any wonder that some posters are claiming programmers either stagnate or move up into management? If some advanced, "big picture" programming skills are actually damned useful in management, then it's not just money that attracts programmers who move, it's a chance to use a rare skill where it will probably have more positive impact than in their original job.
The US federal government had a supreme court ruling that broadened the government's ability to forclose under imminent domain. It allowed local governments to tak for such purposes as building a sports complex or industrial park, simply on the idea that such thing would always improve the local economy if some planning commission said they would. My state is one of eight that amended their state laws to prohibit this extension of imminent domain principles.
That's the sort of role I envision state governments playing in general. Within broad limits, the ability of a particular state to choose various laws lets the US experiment. States can adopt, for example "right to work laws", but people can compare the economic results with states that don't, and decide whether they are really good for the people as a whole, and even move to a state that agrees more with them.
One size doesn't fit nearly all. A 55 MPH speed limit may be imposing a serious difficulty in a state such as Texas, where keeping to the speed limit turns some trips in state into 12 hour + drives, and maybe increases the accident rate rather than reducing it. Letting states have some room to individualize such decisions is a way to avoid negative consequences. The risk of a very powerful federal system is shown by the medical mariajuana situation today in much the same way.
There's lots of political pressure to cut education and health care as well. What isn't being cut is the department of defnese, or the 17 different civilian agencies with people who carry weapons as part of their agent status. The same people who worry that someone from the health Education and Welfare will abuse their vast federal powers and take their home schooled kids away, don't worry about what happens when a BATF or DEA agent, who may be armed with a 30 caliber machine gun, abuses his powers to the same extent Just look at your own post. Yes, you didn't mention the defense budget, but then you didn't mention the bank bailouts either. You mention the Tea Party that seems to be stagnating at present, or becoming a special sub-brand of the Republican party, but you don't mention any of the Occupy movements. It's like your whole post buys into a Right Wing only model, even though you don't particularly seem to agree with the Right.
It does make a difference. The original poster claimed in essence that what Google did was 'over the line' into clearly evil practices, not still in some gray area. You're the idiot trying to turn that into some sort of "Oooohhh, he said Google is teh Hitler - Godwin!!!!!" bit. You're the one insisting on a 7th grade level of comprehension as the standard (Literally, it's in 7th grade in the U.S. that a standardised test is expected to show the student has grasped how a modifier such as clearly is used, before they are reading at the eigth grade level, using example sentences quite similar to the one the anon coward is failing to parse.).
So, what we have here is a post from "Wrong sized glass" which immediately got modded +5 for (incorrectly) picking on someone's grammer, and two AC posts to back it up. Can you say "sock puppets"? Can you say "reportable abuse of the moderation system"? Pathetic.
If the size of the eggs themselves has a limit, then all dinos start out small, regardless of how big they end up
There are risks in being a growing animal: Until the creature settles down to its adult size, it has to adapt to different food sources, learn over and over again how to move efficiently at each new size, and expose itself to predators foraging for food. Growing animals are awkward at some stages, and need more food, more often than when they finish growing.
Triple your size in a year and get it over with, those risks are proportionately small. Double over and over again every six weeks, and those risks are much larger.
So, there needs to be some advantages once you get big, to offset the disadvantages of the growing years. If a species has more disadvantages than competitors, and doesn't have advantages, it dies out from the competition. But the advantages of growing bigger than a competitor species accumulate with very large sizes:
For example, there's not much advantage to being just a little larger than a pack hunter such as Deinonychus, but if, like Apatosaurus, you're so large your hide is thicker than the packs 6" killing claws and so tall the pack can't even reach your vital spots, the advantage is your adult species members are practically totally immune to Deinonychus attacks. To eat you, Deinonychus doesn't just have to evolve to be a little taller, it has to evolve in the direction of T-Rex.
There are other trends in dino evolution: By the time smaller, early fast predators actually get to T-Rex size descendants, all the Apatosaurus like dinos are gone, and horned and armored herbivores take their places. Bulk can only do so much, and it's hard to see how anything could simply get big enough to ignore a pair of T-Rexes attacking it. But these biologists aren't saying that the trend towards bigness overwhelmed all other factors, just that it was a more major cause of more effects than is immediately obvious.
You can call all this circular reasoning. The biologists are in effect arguing that the advantages and disadvantages must have pretty well balanced in each stage of evolutionary history, because natural selection must work as the theory. But there are other, non-circular, lines of thought which support this. Reducing Darwin to "Survival of the Fittest" is tautological, but when you use actual math on the actual fossils, and look at how many different species in different size groups there were, over the millions of years leading up to the extinction event, you get non-circular predictions as well, like that number of different species would taper off for the last few million years before the extinction, and that it would be lower by far than for most typical dinosaur eras.
Short form: If we move some polar bears to the south pole, they will have plenty of food to survive. The Penguins WILL be affected. If we put the penguins in cute little Purina Polar Bear Chow red and white checked tee-shirts they will be affected more rapidly.
Now you've got me wondering what the maximum resolution of a shoggoth's eye complex is, if it puts every bit of pseudo-protoplasm it can into forming eyes. What's the maximum light gathering area for a 40 cubic meter volume typical shoggoth, and does it compare favorably with the Hubble, the Keck telescopes or the very long baseline array? Can a shoggoth count the satellites in orbit? And does it want to eat them? Can a satellite fail a 1D20 sanity roll? And how could we tell?
The so called war between science and religion makes me chuckle when I remember Mendel, Lemaitre, Dirac, and Godel. I won't count von Neumann, since he may have just been a Pascal's wager fan, and I'll drop Einstein, since any real religion he had probably was probably a side effect of taking regular walks with Godel. (I'm not saying Einstein didn't have a spiritual side of his own in his later years, just that he probably didn't see much value in formalizing it even then).
The so called war between science and religion usually makes me wince when I read threads such as this one on Slashdot. Posts such as yours make it enjoyable enough to tolerate some of the others.
I suspect that the biggest reason we have talk of abstinence only sex ed and other such concepts is asexual people. Gay people mostly know they are gay, and that they number only about 5 to 10 % of the populace. Straight people mostly know they are straight. A good chunk of Bi people think they are straight, but that's mostly harmless. But Asexuals are a minority, probably under 5% for young to middle aged adults, that mostly thinks they are the norm, that the vast majority feels about sex about like they do, and that ther'e nothing either wrong or unusual about their position. Yes, it's not absolutely correlated with religion, but it's easy to join a church that tells you sex is bad when you don't particularly care for sex anyway, and to think that all decent people have as easy a time resisting 'temptation' as you do. Get a church that constantly preaches about sin like it was just a synonym for sex and never throws down on sins such as tossing widows and orphans out on the street, and it's easy to attract people who don't like sex in the first place, and even easier to select for the ones who are glad nobody is mentioning those other, non-sex things which they feel guilty about.
Think about those people who wanted to add sex to the list of drugs kids should "just say no" to back in the Reagan years. The ones who gave people a blank look when theose people pointed out that if everybody followed that rule, it would make the species extinct. Wanna bet that most of the anti-sex league there had fairly normal sex drives? I'd just about assume they were stuck in biological park, wondering why everyone else seemed to be driving some direction or other. Now look at the doctors who prescribe anti-psychotics to the mentally ill, and don't seem to have any clue why some patients complain about lack of sex drive as side effects. Are they probably in the normal range? Or, more likely, are they statistically at the far end of a bell curve?
Now for the 64 dollar question: Is it worth trying to convince the asexuals that they are a tiny minority, that, for example, most people would consider loss of all sex drive as a serious symptom of illness if it happened to them? Or does it matter?
People who think being "rational" equals reasoning correctly are believers in an old superstition of Greek origin, one which holds that anything that can't be expressed as a ratio is somehow wrong or inferior to things which can. Using 'rational' and 'irrational' to denote good or bad thinking is itself a superstitious, magical belief system. Despite this, many people, even ones who have been educated to know what irrational numbers are, still cling to it. in fact, I have seen people who have a theroetical grasp of not just the irrationals, but the imaginary numbers, the infintesimals and even the transfinites and still cling to this particular form of magical thinking.
Anyone who uses the sentence "It is raining.", when asked about the weather is accepting the existence of some nebulous magical "it" that creates the rain. If somebody was really, consistently avoiding all magical thinking acts, they would carefully correct themselves and say "There is rain." instead. On learning that the days of the week or months are named after supernatural beings, they would consistantly attempt to correct that fact. People who really rejected all magical thinking would take a copy of Carl Sagan's Cosmos and throw it across the room when they got to the part that mentioned the metaphor of the milky way as the "backbone of night". Probably the only books they could read with approval would be an actuarial chart or set of log tables. I'd expect that any person attempting to openly correct all magical thinking while dealing with the general public for an entire day would end up in a mental institution, forcibly committed by all the people who tthought they were obviously, dangerously schizophrenic. Or just dead, stoned by a crowd, shot by a cop, etc. Despite this, I also expect several persons to chime in with 'Not Me!'s to your post.
The Urey-Miller experiment and its many variants were widely misinterpreted, and your "What If" is precisely where everyone who abused the results went off the tracks. You've thrown out what looks like an innocent rhetorical question and is actually an ontological boobytrap on a par with "Can God make a rock so big He can't lift it" or "Which Springfield do the Simpsons live in?".
To explain: When Urey-Miller was first announced, thousands of people confidently announced what they thought would happen if you expanded the experiment and let it run. Time-Life predicted we would produce true living organisms from scratch within a year. The Government of the USSR claimed it would prove there was no God within six months and that U-M would lead to the overthrow of the entire west and be historically seen as the final nail in the coffin of capitalism within a decade. IBM gave a million dollar grant to some students just to develop the one shot specialty computer they thought would be needed to run the experiment on a life producing level (and this was when a million was real money). Practically every living PHD certified Biologist of the time went out on a limb and asked your what if, and then made a prediction that was totally wrong, in cold print, in reputable magazines such as the New Yorker, National Geographic, Science, and Smithsonian. People who liked the "God of the Gaps" argument siezed on the claim that U-M was its prime example, and that Urey and Miller had proved scientifically there was no God. in doing this they insisted the argument be phrased to include that science was constantly creating true progress and the gaps were getting smaller. When it was pointed out that overall, U-M had not made the gaps smaller*, the American Athiests association tried to get a number of educators fired for saying that, suffered three suicides, and refused to rephrase a word of its articles on the subject for the next 25 years. Are you sure you want to ask that, of all questions? It seems sort of like innocently asking what's in that pert, little, gift wrapped box, with the yards long, slimy green tentacle sticking out of it.
*Urey himself pointed out that they had shown it was far easier to get from a primordial soup to amino acids than anyone expected, but that the experiment also showed it was much, much harder to get from those amino acids to proteins than was thought at the same time. That's basically saying that Urey-Miller had not made any 'gaps' any smaller on average, so if your God of the Gaps argument includes that the gaps are shrinking so there is less and less that needs God as an explanation, the U-M experiment is a lousy argument for your position.
If you're going to be precise, we're not talking a move back to dumb terminals with Chrome, but a less restrictive move to more specialized computing devices instead of a general purpose computer. We are discussing putting limits on users, and limits that many here on slashdot would chafe under, but they aren't as drastic as the terms you chose.
For one thing, an OS such as Windows already has some of the same limits. Using the box for art may mean either a lot of expense for a legitimate copy of Photoshop or running pirated copies, or using something like the Gimp that may not be compatable with the next service pack and may never have good support. High prices for lots of business, math or music software similarly mean a lot of users can't afford to legally build the tool that can focus on some of those "General Purpose" uses. Keeping system hooks and APIs and such secret is a separate cause of making machines into non-general purpose computers, or specialty boxes, or whatever you want to call them. Apple's walled garden approach is effectively a vector pointed away from "General Purpose" computers in similar ways. Even Linux has some of this problem when you look at the whole package, i.e. what people mean by saying designers are 'dumbing down' the Gnome interface is precisely the same as saying they think less variety of purposes are suitable under it.
However, if you call those limited boxes terminals, I suspect the people pushing Chrome OS, Cloud Computing, and other things will both point out the differences from those old 'green on black texty thingees' until the similarities are obscured, and keep treating the base Windows or OS X type system as though it were a totally pure "General Computing" environment and the browser based systems were just a small step down from that purity. We do better to stress that even the baseline OSes have many, many points where they veer away from the idea of supporting a box that can do anything the user wants, (at least if it has the raw computing power to handle that task). Most users have run into the problem of not being able to do some task or other any better, even on a much more powerful machine than they once used. Or they remember being able to do something on an older machine that they can't do at all anymore. Warning them that these browser focused 'solutions' will have more of that sort of problem is something many of them will understand.
The whole Jesus = Zombie bit is an example of profoundly immoral argument. Name anything you believe in, absolutely anything, and somebody can oversimplify and reduce it to an absurdity or a profound insult. Marxist? Then you believe the state will wither away by getting larger so you're obviously an idiot! Capitalist? Then you worship a giant invisible hand that requires occasional human sacrefices - what a maroon! Pick a side, and then describe a strawman version of the other side and declare yourself winner, that's all you're doing.
The sugar tariffs result from Cuba being a major sugar cane producer. The same right wing that wants no trade at all with Castro wants Cuban sugar that passes through other Carribean nations to be so expensive nobody in the US wants to import any, just to prevent those other Carribean states from even possibly serving as pass throughs for any funds getting through to Cuba.
So in the US we have a right wing that will oppose any science finding that colony collapse has anything to do with ADM, Monsanto, or other Megacorps. Now you point out that the root causes include other right wing policies. That's not going to cause them to rethink their position. THEY can't be the ones responsible for anything bad, so they'll have to double down on blaiming "acts of God", or the Gay Liberal Bees, or something.
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If I don't have a right to obtain their media on any terms they don't agree to, then I can't by a used copy of the physical media after it comes out on DVD, or wait until it enters the public domain, because the producers of this product have claimed, through the MPAA, that those rights are not granted by their choice. Since when does copyright, even if it was totally legitimate law as it stands, extend beyond copying itself to mean my other rights are only whatever they choose? And isn't the unilateral extension of copyright term a theft of that right to the public domain? How about actually pulling once released material back out of the public domain and writing a retroactive law to place it back under copyright? Isn't that one huge theft? Isn't an ex-post-facto law something the constitution prohibits for damned good reason? Are you just another one of those people who love to call relatively powerless people thieves, but are too chicken to apply your own logic to the powerful and call them thieves as well?
I don't pirate. I actually endorse the legitimate protection of content creators through resaonable copyright. But since the content creators have stopped endorsing my right to public domain access, my right of first sale, and other such rights they find possibly inconvenient, where's the people who write them letters calling them what they have become? Since they have subverted the laws of this once great nation in an arrogant abouse of monetary power, who's even ready to compare them to the old robber barons? Oh yeah, those people are like you, picking on just one side in what has become a struggle, the side that can't or won't give them any trouble back for taking their 'fine, upstanding moral position'. That gives them a cheap feeling of superiority.
Count me as one of those who feels a "deep seated need to be offended". I have an autistic nephew who has been called a gimp by various ignorant fools in the past, and hell yes, I'm offended. You have offended me, by being a total jerk. You should be ashamed of yourself, but on slashdot, vile and abusive speech evidently gets you modded plus five.
Silly me, I thought abusing people who cannot help their disability was the sign of a person with a crushing inferiority complex, desperately trying to elevate themselves by attacking those they percieve as even weaker, and doomed to eventually fail. But Slashdot calls that insightful.
You have a problem, a personality problem as large as alchoholism or heroin abuse, and the four people who gave you mod points are enabling that problem, encouraging you to go farther down a road that leads eventually to your own distruction. You can realize that it is the very worst aspect of your own nature that attempts to justify abusing some of the most helpless of our society, or not, but you probably consider those who modded you up as friends so you will have less incentive to grow up and learn to give a damn about other people. That's a pity.
They really ought to consider renaming it because the word 'Gimp' is about as insulting as the words 'nigger', 'dago' or 'kike' in many parts of the US. In many locations, 'gimp' is just another synonym for 'spaz', or 'retard'. Would you use 'Bitches ain't nuttin but hoes and tricks' Linux? Would you recommend it to your boss for an enterprise environment? Hey, maybe Linux could get wider adoption with Hitler Linux? That's the real problem.
Ubuntu, at least, claims to be based on ideas of unity and tolerance. Most open source claims to support forms of equality and mutual respect between the participants. Bundling a program called 'the Gimp' with them is spitting in the faces of those ideals, and it makes everybody involved a hypocrite. .
But how could anyone prove what you ask? You know where your info is while it's on your box. You don't know where it is once somebody else has a copy, by definition. How can anyone prove or disprove that something is or isn't being done by some other party who has surruptitiously gained a copy of the information without knowledge of the original owner? I can't prove what somebody who stole my car did with it afterwards, just as I can't prove what somebody who legally bought my car did with it afterwards.
The question of how the property was obtained is still relevant. If Microsoft is sneaky about gathering the information, then it seems likelier that they are also using that information in various ways that don't respect my privacy. If Microsoft doesn't respect some parts of the social compact, then the odds increase that they don't repect others, and not serving as an agent of the police without abiding by the same rules as the real police are supposed to is one of those parts.
I can't logically prove that Person X molests children, just because Person X has been found guilty of treason, bank robbery, beating his wife, and mopery with intent to gawk. Not being able to prove something, there, does it mean much at all in terms of what I should do?
German has 26 'regular' letters of latin style, and the "Sharp S", . Often even native speakers will only count the 26. German also commonly uses umlauts over three vowels, but these are nearly never counted as seperate letters.
So, there are actually an average of 26.5 letters in the 2 alphabets - the parent poster has subtracted when he should have added and then set an arbitrarily low threshold for precision and relied on a rule of thumb for rounding, ergo he's an engineer.
Only four states exempt prepared foods from sales tax, and the definition of prepared varies so that for some of them, anything in a grocery store more complex than raw flour, eggs, and milk, such as frozen waffles, counts as prepared. The 4 states with the highest overall sales tax don't exempt prepared foods and two of them don't exempt non-prepared foods either. 13 states have a higher sales tax rate for prepared food than their general sales tax rate.
18 states tax perscription drugs, and 37 of them tax non-perscription drugs. 41 states tax clothing, but 2 of them admittedly have a set threshold deliberately designed not to tax cheap clothing (either below $100 or $175).
The reason there is no sales tax on rent is that real estate is by definition taxed by property taxes, not sales taxes. Every one of the states has property taxes paid by renters. Including rent in the your necessities list is thus disingenious at best.
Sounds like the anti-R slam is totally accurate.
By standard Evolutionary theory, bacteria should actually have much less chance per unit of having a beneficial mutation than for more 'advanced' organisms. It's just they have a lot of both sheer numbers and fast reproductive cycles to make the individually unlikely collectively more likely.
Details: any organism, from bacteria to blue whales, can be assumed to be pretty well adapted to its environment - wildly ill-adapted means dead. So small tweaks in genes are more likely to be beneficial than big changes. Big changes overshoot the beneficial range. (Imagine a giraffe that might be a bit better adapted if it was six inches taller, but it has only one gene controlling height, and so any mutation in that gene produces either a 3 foot tall or 45 foot tall giraffe in the next generation). Bacteria have so few genes that just about all mutations are drastically negative, like the one height gene giraffe. Instead of maybe 1 in 1000 being beneficial, it's 1 in 10,000,000 or worse odds, but have hundreds of offspring in a generation and a new generation every five hours, and ten million to one odds are something it can and will overcome.
Overall, I agree, but "knowledge of what errors people usually make and why they make them", sounds like one of those things a good manager has. It sounds like just the sort of skill people complain too many MBAs don't learn, and should before they go around mismanaging companies. I bet you could find a very similar phrase in one of Deming's managment books. So is it any wonder that some posters are claiming programmers either stagnate or move up into management? If some advanced, "big picture" programming skills are actually damned useful in management, then it's not just money that attracts programmers who move, it's a chance to use a rare skill where it will probably have more positive impact than in their original job.
And a hearty Nyarlathotep! to you too (I just love these colourful local greetings).
The US federal government had a supreme court ruling that broadened the government's ability to forclose under imminent domain. It allowed local governments to tak for such purposes as building a sports complex or industrial park, simply on the idea that such thing would always improve the local economy if some planning commission said they would. My state is one of eight that amended their state laws to prohibit this extension of imminent domain principles.
That's the sort of role I envision state governments playing in general. Within broad limits, the ability of a particular state to choose various laws lets the US experiment. States can adopt, for example "right to work laws", but people can compare the economic results with states that don't, and decide whether they are really good for the people as a whole, and even move to a state that agrees more with them.
One size doesn't fit nearly all. A 55 MPH speed limit may be imposing a serious difficulty in a state such as Texas, where keeping to the speed limit turns some trips in state into 12 hour + drives, and maybe increases the accident rate rather than reducing it. Letting states have some room to individualize such decisions is a way to avoid negative consequences. The risk of a very powerful federal system is shown by the medical mariajuana situation today in much the same way.
There's lots of political pressure to cut education and health care as well. What isn't being cut is the department of defnese, or the 17 different civilian agencies with people who carry weapons as part of their agent status. The same people who worry that someone from the health Education and Welfare will abuse their vast federal powers and take their home schooled kids away, don't worry about what happens when a BATF or DEA agent, who may be armed with a 30 caliber machine gun, abuses his powers to the same extent
Just look at your own post. Yes, you didn't mention the defense budget, but then you didn't mention the bank bailouts either. You mention the Tea Party that seems to be stagnating at present, or becoming a special sub-brand of the Republican party, but you don't mention any of the Occupy movements. It's like your whole post buys into a Right Wing only model, even though you don't particularly seem to agree with the Right.
It does make a difference. The original poster claimed in essence that what Google did was 'over the line' into clearly evil practices, not still in some gray area. You're the idiot trying to turn that into some sort of "Oooohhh, he said Google is teh Hitler - Godwin!!!!!" bit. You're the one insisting on a 7th grade level of comprehension as the standard (Literally, it's in 7th grade in the U.S. that a standardised test is expected to show the student has grasped how a modifier such as clearly is used, before they are reading at the eigth grade level, using example sentences quite similar to the one the anon coward is failing to parse.).
So, what we have here is a post from "Wrong sized glass" which immediately got modded +5 for (incorrectly) picking on someone's grammer, and two AC posts to back it up. Can you say "sock puppets"? Can you say "reportable abuse of the moderation system"? Pathetic.
If the size of the eggs themselves has a limit, then all dinos start out small, regardless of how big they end up
There are risks in being a growing animal: Until the creature settles down to its adult size, it has to adapt to different food sources, learn over and over again how to move efficiently at each new size, and expose itself to predators foraging for food. Growing animals are awkward at some stages, and need more food, more often than when they finish growing.
Triple your size in a year and get it over with, those risks are proportionately small. Double over and over again every six weeks, and those risks are much larger.
So, there needs to be some advantages once you get big, to offset the disadvantages of the growing years. If a species has more disadvantages than competitors, and doesn't have advantages, it dies out from the competition. But the advantages of growing bigger than a competitor species accumulate with very large sizes:
For example, there's not much advantage to being just a little larger than a pack hunter such as Deinonychus, but if, like Apatosaurus, you're so large your hide is thicker than the packs 6" killing claws and so tall the pack can't even reach your vital spots, the advantage is your adult species members are practically totally immune to Deinonychus attacks. To eat you, Deinonychus doesn't just have to evolve to be a little taller, it has to evolve in the direction of T-Rex.
There are other trends in dino evolution: By the time smaller, early fast predators actually get to T-Rex size descendants, all the Apatosaurus like dinos are gone, and horned and armored herbivores take their places. Bulk can only do so much, and it's hard to see how anything could simply get big enough to ignore a pair of T-Rexes attacking it. But these biologists aren't saying that the trend towards bigness overwhelmed all other factors, just that it was a more major cause of more effects than is immediately obvious.
You can call all this circular reasoning. The biologists are in effect arguing that the advantages and disadvantages must have pretty well balanced in each stage of evolutionary history, because natural selection must work as the theory. But there are other, non-circular, lines of thought which support this. Reducing Darwin to "Survival of the Fittest" is tautological, but when you use actual math on the actual fossils, and look at how many different species in different size groups there were, over the millions of years leading up to the extinction event, you get non-circular predictions as well, like that number of different species would taper off for the last few million years before the extinction, and that it would be lower by far than for most typical dinosaur eras.
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Short form: If we move some polar bears to the south pole, they will have plenty of food to survive. The Penguins WILL be affected. If we put the penguins in cute little Purina Polar Bear Chow red and white checked tee-shirts they will be affected more rapidly.
Now you've got me wondering what the maximum resolution of a shoggoth's eye complex is, if it puts every bit of pseudo-protoplasm it can into forming eyes. What's the maximum light gathering area for a 40 cubic meter volume typical shoggoth, and does it compare favorably with the Hubble, the Keck telescopes or the very long baseline array? Can a shoggoth count the satellites in orbit? And does it want to eat them? Can a satellite fail a 1D20 sanity roll? And how could we tell?
Really, all of it's north of the middle spot. Every last bit. Odd thing that.
The so called war between science and religion makes me chuckle when I remember Mendel, Lemaitre, Dirac, and Godel. I won't count von Neumann, since he may have just been a Pascal's wager fan, and I'll drop Einstein, since any real religion he had probably was probably a side effect of taking regular walks with Godel. (I'm not saying Einstein didn't have a spiritual side of his own in his later years, just that he probably didn't see much value in formalizing it even then).
The so called war between science and religion usually makes me wince when I read threads such as this one on Slashdot. Posts such as yours make it enjoyable enough to tolerate some of the others.
I suspect that the biggest reason we have talk of abstinence only sex ed and other such concepts is asexual people. Gay people mostly know they are gay, and that they number only about 5 to 10 % of the populace. Straight people mostly know they are straight. A good chunk of Bi people think they are straight, but that's mostly harmless. But Asexuals are a minority, probably under 5% for young to middle aged adults, that mostly thinks they are the norm, that the vast majority feels about sex about like they do, and that ther'e nothing either wrong or unusual about their position. Yes, it's not absolutely correlated with religion, but it's easy to join a church that tells you sex is bad when you don't particularly care for sex anyway, and to think that all decent people have as easy a time resisting 'temptation' as you do. Get a church that constantly preaches about sin like it was just a synonym for sex and never throws down on sins such as tossing widows and orphans out on the street, and it's easy to attract people who don't like sex in the first place, and even easier to select for the ones who are glad nobody is mentioning those other, non-sex things which they feel guilty about.
Think about those people who wanted to add sex to the list of drugs kids should "just say no" to back in the Reagan years. The ones who gave people a blank look when theose people pointed out that if everybody followed that rule, it would make the species extinct. Wanna bet that most of the anti-sex league there had fairly normal sex drives? I'd just about assume they were stuck in biological park, wondering why everyone else seemed to be driving some direction or other. Now look at the doctors who prescribe anti-psychotics to the mentally ill, and don't seem to have any clue why some patients complain about lack of sex drive as side effects. Are they probably in the normal range? Or, more likely, are they statistically at the far end of a bell curve?
Now for the 64 dollar question: Is it worth trying to convince the asexuals that they are a tiny minority, that, for example, most people would consider loss of all sex drive as a serious symptom of illness if it happened to them? Or does it matter?
People who think being "rational" equals reasoning correctly are believers in an old superstition of Greek origin, one which holds that anything that can't be expressed as a ratio is somehow wrong or inferior to things which can. Using 'rational' and 'irrational' to denote good or bad thinking is itself a superstitious, magical belief system. Despite this, many people, even ones who have been educated to know what irrational numbers are, still cling to it. in fact, I have seen people who have a theroetical grasp of not just the irrationals, but the imaginary numbers, the infintesimals and even the transfinites and still cling to this particular form of magical thinking.
Anyone who uses the sentence "It is raining.", when asked about the weather is accepting the existence of some nebulous magical "it" that creates the rain. If somebody was really, consistently avoiding all magical thinking acts, they would carefully correct themselves and say "There is rain." instead. On learning that the days of the week or months are named after supernatural beings, they would consistantly attempt to correct that fact. People who really rejected all magical thinking would take a copy of Carl Sagan's Cosmos and throw it across the room when they got to the part that mentioned the metaphor of the milky way as the "backbone of night". Probably the only books they could read with approval would be an actuarial chart or set of log tables. I'd expect that any person attempting to openly correct all magical thinking while dealing with the general public for an entire day would end up in a mental institution, forcibly committed by all the people who tthought they were obviously, dangerously schizophrenic. Or just dead, stoned by a crowd, shot by a cop, etc. Despite this, I also expect several persons to chime in with 'Not Me!'s to your post.
The Urey-Miller experiment and its many variants were widely misinterpreted, and your "What If" is precisely where everyone who abused the results went off the tracks. You've thrown out what looks like an innocent rhetorical question and is actually an ontological boobytrap on a par with "Can God make a rock so big He can't lift it" or "Which Springfield do the Simpsons live in?".
To explain: When Urey-Miller was first announced, thousands of people confidently announced what they thought would happen if you expanded the experiment and let it run. Time-Life predicted we would produce true living organisms from scratch within a year. The Government of the USSR claimed it would prove there was no God within six months and that U-M would lead to the overthrow of the entire west and be historically seen as the final nail in the coffin of capitalism within a decade. IBM gave a million dollar grant to some students just to develop the one shot specialty computer they thought would be needed to run the experiment on a life producing level (and this was when a million was real money). Practically every living PHD certified Biologist of the time went out on a limb and asked your what if, and then made a prediction that was totally wrong, in cold print, in reputable magazines such as the New Yorker, National Geographic, Science, and Smithsonian. People who liked the "God of the Gaps" argument siezed on the claim that U-M was its prime example, and that Urey and Miller had proved scientifically there was no God. in doing this they insisted the argument be phrased to include that science was constantly creating true progress and the gaps were getting smaller. When it was pointed out that overall, U-M had not made the gaps smaller*, the American Athiests association tried to get a number of educators fired for saying that, suffered three suicides, and refused to rephrase a word of its articles on the subject for the next 25 years. Are you sure you want to ask that, of all questions? It seems sort of like innocently asking what's in that pert, little, gift wrapped box, with the yards long, slimy green tentacle sticking out of it.
*Urey himself pointed out that they had shown it was far easier to get from a primordial soup to amino acids than anyone expected, but that the experiment also showed it was much, much harder to get from those amino acids to proteins than was thought at the same time. That's basically saying that Urey-Miller had not made any 'gaps' any smaller on average, so if your God of the Gaps argument includes that the gaps are shrinking so there is less and less that needs God as an explanation, the U-M experiment is a lousy argument for your position.
If you're going to be precise, we're not talking a move back to dumb terminals with Chrome, but a less restrictive move to more specialized computing devices instead of a general purpose computer. We are discussing putting limits on users, and limits that many here on slashdot would chafe under, but they aren't as drastic as the terms you chose.
For one thing, an OS such as Windows already has some of the same limits. Using the box for art may mean either a lot of expense for a legitimate copy of Photoshop or running pirated copies, or using something like the Gimp that may not be compatable with the next service pack and may never have good support. High prices for lots of business, math or music software similarly mean a lot of users can't afford to legally build the tool that can focus on some of those "General Purpose" uses. Keeping system hooks and APIs and such secret is a separate cause of making machines into non-general purpose computers, or specialty boxes, or whatever you want to call them. Apple's walled garden approach is effectively a vector pointed away from "General Purpose" computers in similar ways. Even Linux has some of this problem when you look at the whole package, i.e. what people mean by saying designers are 'dumbing down' the Gnome interface is precisely the same as saying they think less variety of purposes are suitable under it.
However, if you call those limited boxes terminals, I suspect the people pushing Chrome OS, Cloud Computing, and other things will both point out the differences from those old 'green on black texty thingees' until the similarities are obscured, and keep treating the base Windows or OS X type system as though it were a totally pure "General Computing" environment and the browser based systems were just a small step down from that purity. We do better to stress that even the baseline OSes have many, many points where they veer away from the idea of supporting a box that can do anything the user wants, (at least if it has the raw computing power to handle that task). Most users have run into the problem of not being able to do some task or other any better, even on a much more powerful machine than they once used. Or they remember being able to do something on an older machine that they can't do at all anymore. Warning them that these browser focused 'solutions' will have more of that sort of problem is something many of them will understand.
The logical way to measure the pyramids is in toilet paper wrapped Smoots.
The whole Jesus = Zombie bit is an example of profoundly immoral argument. Name anything you believe in, absolutely anything, and somebody can oversimplify and reduce it to an absurdity or a profound insult. Marxist? Then you believe the state will wither away by getting larger so you're obviously an idiot! Capitalist? Then you worship a giant invisible hand that requires occasional human sacrefices - what a maroon! Pick a side, and then describe a strawman version of the other side and declare yourself winner, that's all you're doing.
The sugar tariffs result from Cuba being a major sugar cane producer. The same right wing that wants no trade at all with Castro wants Cuban sugar that passes through other Carribean nations to be so expensive nobody in the US wants to import any, just to prevent those other Carribean states from even possibly serving as pass throughs for any funds getting through to Cuba.
So in the US we have a right wing that will oppose any science finding that colony collapse has anything to do with ADM, Monsanto, or other Megacorps. Now you point out that the root causes include other right wing policies. That's not going to cause them to rethink their position. THEY can't be the ones responsible for anything bad, so they'll have to double down on blaiming "acts of God", or the Gay Liberal Bees, or something.