Indeed. Most Jews accept evolution. The Roman Catholic Church accepts evolution. Most Protestant denominations accept evolution. Buddhists accept evolution. Baha'is accept evolution. The three groups adamantly opposed to evolution are fundamentalist Christians, "fundamentalist" Muslims, and "fundamentalist" Hindus. It isn't an accident that these are also
the groups that create the most hatred, cause the most violence, and try the hardest to impose themselves on others.
Really? My impression is that a rather large part of the world's population, quite probably a majority, accept evolution. Let's start with the Chinese, who comprise about a quarter. Add most Europeans and a large percentage of Americans and most Canadians. The only groups that I know of that are generally opposed to evolution are fundamentalist
Protestants (Catholics and non-fundamentalist protestants accept evolution - I'm not sure about the Orthodox and monophysite churches) conservative Muslims, and some Hindus. And those Hindus who do not accept evolution have quite a different version of creationism from the Christians and Muslims.
Re:Wish is dead, long live Perl::Tk
on
Wish Cancelled
·
· Score: 1
I had the same thought. I was going to express surprise that anybody would write a game in Tcl/Tk.
It has its uses for scripting and prototyping,
but it isn't exactly the fastest way of doing computation and graphics. Personally I prefer
Python/TkInter to Perl::Tk, but for a commercial
game Perl may be the better choice. After all, you don't want anybody outside the company to understand the source.:)
It's true that most people won't muck around with an article on something they are ignorant of, but some people will. In fact, they'll even originate an article. This is one source of error in Wikipedia
that is dangerous because it is hard to detect.
When people with violent bias write or edit an article, its usually pretty easy to detect. Even the staunchest Republican will probably think twice if the article on Bush calls him the "greatest thinker of the age". The problem caused by such bias is comparable to what you get with a traditional encyclopedia if the page has graffiti scrawled on it or is torn out. It's irritating, but it doesn't mislead anyone.
I see two situations in which people can be misled. One is the one mentioned by a previous poster in which people edit an article on a topic they know little about for language and don't realize that their attempts to improve the language have changed the meaning in ways that render the article inaccurate. If you aren't yourself an expert on the topic, you won't detect this unless you carefully read the edit history, and even then you'll just detect inconsistencies.
You won't necessarily be able to figure out who is right.
The other situation in which people can be misled is when people write about things they know little about but about which they are enthusiastic and think they are knowledgable. Such people aren't vandals and what they write won't necessarily seem outrageous to someone not expert on the topic.
I'm not sure how prevalent this is, in part because it is hard to detect except in areas where one is an expert. If an article on some obscure area of chemistry, say, was wrong, I probably wouldn't be able to tell. Another reason is that I don't know how many areas there are in which one gets ignorant enthusiasts.Some are presumably more prone to this than others.
A specific example can be found in the article on the linguist Joseph Greenberg. Greenberg's work in historical linguistics is generally considered by professionals to be garbage. He's widely considered a crank. He's not your typical crank, though, since he was a professional linguist and did other work that was perfectly respectable.
The main reason that Greenberg's historical work is considered nonsense is that the method he used is considered unreliable. He would make lists of words that sort of sound the same and have similar meanings in various languages. He would display these lists and say "Behold! Such similarities in sound and meaning could not be due to chance, so these languages must be related." (By "related" here we're talking specifically about descent from a common ancestor, not about other sorts of similarity.) There are two main problems with this approach. One is that this method doesn't adequately address the question of whether the similarities observed are due to chance, especially given his evidently very loose criteria for similarity. The other is that, even if you have similarities whose probability of chance occurrence is low, all that tells you is that there is some sort of relationship among the languages. It doesn't tell you whether that relationship is due to common parentage or to borrowing. Furthermore, this technique doesn't give you any tools for detecting loans, unlike the standard technique.
Okay, so the Wikipedia article as of some time ago mentioned that his methodology was controversial but said nothing about the other major issue with his work, namely the extremely high rate of erroneous data. He was, to put it charitably, extremely sloppy. So I edited the article and added mention of the data quality issue. If you'll look at the subsequent discussion, you'll see that some of the people who had written the previous material took the position that the errors in the data didn't matter much because they could just be corrected and "the analysis run again" (and presumably, if the critics had done this and found that the conclusions changed, they would have done this, suggesting that Greenberg's conclusions sur
If fear of lawsuits is a real issue, there's an easy solution: pass state laws forbidding such suits. States can determine what is grounds for suit and what isn't (subject to constitutional requirements).
Basically, a state can only be sued (on non-federal grounds) with its permission, and a state can legislate that neither it, municipalities and other lower-level government entities, nor their employees may be considered liable for providing GIS information.
I write all my HTML by hand too (except for a little stuff generated from databases), but I don't have to deal with lots and lots of pages. The article's point, I think, is that if you do have to deal with a lot of pages, a template-based system is a lot easier to use than includes because it allows you to make changes in one place even if you need to change something that can't be done just by changing the content of the includes, such as inserting something into the middle when you've previously just had a header and a footer.
On the other hand, if you're not using templates, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to edit all those pages by hand. An alternative is to use a script to edit all the files. I've done that a few times, when I wanted to change something in a few dozen pages.
The closest analogue in modern armies to the centurion is probably a sergeant, in terms of the number of ranks and in that centurions, like sergeants, were usually in for life. On the other hand, in terms of the number of soldiers commanded, a centurion was more like a captain, since a Roman
century was roughly the size of a modern US company, which is normally commanded by a captain.
I wonder how sound the methodology of this study is. The data consist of the opinions of MIS managers. Now I don't mean to claim that MIS managers don't know anything about the success and failure of projects in their organization, but they do have a certain perspective and certain interests and so may have a biased view of things. I'd feel a lot more confident of the conclusions if the study were based on a set of case studies in which they had interviewed not only MIS managers but other people involved, including the actual programmers. I wouldn't be surprised, for example, to learn that programmers think that changing requirements are more of a problem than MIS managers do.
Since the information is being processed by a computer anyhow, can't they prevent fraud by encrypting the information represented by the barcode? That would prevent people from simply printing up their own tags. Of course, they could look around the store for something with the price they want and copy that tag, but at least that would cost them an extra trip to the store. And this tactic could be dealt with by combining the price and product code information before encryption so that even if someone copied a tag with the right price it wouldn't have the right product code.
This is obviously a training problem. Nobody showed them how to run the food synthesizer. They've been standard in Federation starships since the 1960s.
The difference is that the major railroads (in the US) were built in the 19th century primarily on public land. The railroads were rewarded for building the track by grants of land adjacent to the rail lines. It's possible that eminent domain was used to some extent within the big cities, but for the most part the land along the tracks only came to be privately owned as a result of the construction of the railroads. It wasn't taken by eminent domain.
Why build more roads for long-haul transportation?
on
The Super Superhighway
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Trucking is much less efficient than rail transportation for long distances. This proposal does at least include freight lines, but it still assumes that a large part of the trade is going to be carried on highways. Shouldn't we be building up the railway system and trying to shift long-distance freight away from trucks to the railways?
There's something really weird in the FAQ. In the
part that tells copyright owners what to do if material that they own is being traded and they want the post removed, they say:
Note that, by reading this FAQ, you have already agreed to our terms and conditions and sneding DMCA letters to our hosting providers is in direct violation of those terms and will only result in your requests being ignored.
I sympathize with their desire to get people to talk to them first, in a civil tone, before sending take-down notices to their ISPs, but
this is perfect nonsense. Reading the FAQ doesn't bind anybody to anything. This is the kind of garbage we expect from Microsoft. What is it doing on a torrent site?
Once you've learned the basics, a good way to acquire specialized vocabulary is to read materials in the language for which English translations are available so that you can easily find out what terms mean and check your understanding. Manuals, for example, may be available both in English and in Spanish.
This isn't a trivial concern. People with dual citizenship are at risk in some countries. If you're a citizen of country X leaving country X, you may not want the security people to know that you're carrying a US passport. You may have no choice but to carry it, but making it metallic practically guarantees that you'll have to show it to security.
Of course the same thing applies if other countries use RFID tags with metallic shielding.
Most New York Times articles are available without registration. There's a service that provides links that bypass it. Just go here,
submit the original URL, and you get back a URL that bypasses registration.
This is good news, but it won't necessarily eliminate some of the obnoxious terms found in EULAs. I wonder if another approach might help there. One principle of contract law (at least in the Anglo-American
system) is that provisions contrary to law orto the public interest are invalid. (See also 17A Am. Jur. 2d Contracts 257 (1991).) For example, here's a discussion of a
case
in which a couple had signed a contract requiring
that they be faithful to each other and providing damages if one or the other was unfaithful. The man was unfaithful again, his wife divorced him, and then sued to enforce the contract. The California courts refused to enforce the contract on the grounds that it conflicted with the public policy underlying California's no-fault divorce law. The crucial thing here is that the contract was not specifically prohibited by any statute; the court's ruling was based on its inference of public policy.
The courts are careful about taking too broad a view of the public interest for this purpose because if they did they'd effectively be legislating after the fact. For example, they will not interpret a life insurance policy as a health insurance policy even though one might argue that it is in the public interest for death to be prevented rather than the survivors compensated.
My question is, are some of the provisions of EULAs sufficiently obnoxious that the courts can be persuaded that they should be invalidated as contrary to public policy? It seems to me, for example, that provisions forbidding the user from monitoring his own network traffic should be considered contrary to public policy since they adversely affect both the individual user and the general public.
I think its really important to check out the controls of a vehicle you're not familiar with. It bothers me that rentals never have the manual. You don't want to be driving in bad weather and have to mess around trying to get the defroster or the windshield wipers working.
When I was 19 I had an experience that taught me not to start driving an unfamiliar vehicle without checking it out. I was working for a guy whose business was in Dijon (France) but who lived way out in the country, over an hour away. One he rented a car and I had to drive it from Dijon to his country place. I was supposed to follow his
brother-in-law, who drove like a bat out of hell on narrow, winding, country roads. It was all I could do to keep up with him. After a while, it began to get dark. I tried to turn on the headlights, but couldn't figure out how. Finally
I just leaned on the horn until I got the other guy's attention and then gradually slowed down and got him to show me how to turn on the headlights.
Ever since then, I've made a point of making sure I know how the important controls work before I head out.
The weirdest thing I've ever encountered is the gearshift on the Deux Chevaux. (For Americans, this
is the French equivalent of the Volkswagen, a small, low-powered, cheap car that just about anybody could afford. I think that it has never been legal to import them into the US because their light construction didn't meet US safety standards.) The shift lever goes in and out
of the dashboard. You rotate it to get additional
positions.
Well, in my experience geeks like Chinese food,
so I suggest The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters by the late James McCawley, a linguist and connaisseur of Chinese food. It teaches you to read Chinese menus. Long out of print, it was reprinted last year. You can get it from the publisher (link above) or Barnes and Noble.
I'm disappointed that California didn't pursue criminal charges. A civil suit may be sufficient to deal with honest mistakes, but if, as seems to be the case, Diebold repeatedly made changes to software after certification, that's a deliberate malfeasance. These people need to learn that elections are serious business. These aren't candy machines.
You've been misled by the phrase "targets Linux".
According to the article, they're ready for Linux,
MS Windows, and Mac OS. That's pretty much the whole market.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. Most Jews accept evolution. The Roman Catholic Church accepts evolution. Most Protestant denominations accept evolution. Buddhists accept evolution. Baha'is accept evolution. The three groups adamantly opposed to evolution are fundamentalist Christians, "fundamentalist" Muslims, and "fundamentalist" Hindus. It isn't an accident that these are also the groups that create the most hatred, cause the most violence, and try the hardest to impose themselves on others.
Really? My impression is that a rather large part of the world's population, quite probably a majority, accept evolution. Let's start with the Chinese, who comprise about a quarter. Add most Europeans and a large percentage of Americans and most Canadians. The only groups that I know of that are generally opposed to evolution are fundamentalist Protestants (Catholics and non-fundamentalist protestants accept evolution - I'm not sure about the Orthodox and monophysite churches) conservative Muslims, and some Hindus. And those Hindus who do not accept evolution have quite a different version of creationism from the Christians and Muslims.
I had the same thought. I was going to express surprise that anybody would write a game in Tcl/Tk. It has its uses for scripting and prototyping, but it isn't exactly the fastest way of doing computation and graphics. Personally I prefer Python/TkInter to Perl::Tk, but for a commercial game Perl may be the better choice. After all, you don't want anybody outside the company to understand the source. :)
Yes, I imagine that's true. I didn't dispute parent's main point.
It's true that most people won't muck around with an article on something they are ignorant of, but some people will. In fact, they'll even originate an article. This is one source of error in Wikipedia that is dangerous because it is hard to detect.
When people with violent bias write or edit an article, its usually pretty easy to detect. Even the staunchest Republican will probably think twice if the article on Bush calls him the "greatest thinker of the age". The problem caused by such bias is comparable to what you get with a traditional encyclopedia if the page has graffiti scrawled on it or is torn out. It's irritating, but it doesn't mislead anyone.
I see two situations in which people can be misled. One is the one mentioned by a previous poster in which people edit an article on a topic they know little about for language and don't realize that their attempts to improve the language have changed the meaning in ways that render the article inaccurate. If you aren't yourself an expert on the topic, you won't detect this unless you carefully read the edit history, and even then you'll just detect inconsistencies. You won't necessarily be able to figure out who is right.
The other situation in which people can be misled is when people write about things they know little about but about which they are enthusiastic and think they are knowledgable. Such people aren't vandals and what they write won't necessarily seem outrageous to someone not expert on the topic. I'm not sure how prevalent this is, in part because it is hard to detect except in areas where one is an expert. If an article on some obscure area of chemistry, say, was wrong, I probably wouldn't be able to tell. Another reason is that I don't know how many areas there are in which one gets ignorant enthusiasts.Some are presumably more prone to this than others.
A specific example can be found in the article on the linguist Joseph Greenberg. Greenberg's work in historical linguistics is generally considered by professionals to be garbage. He's widely considered a crank. He's not your typical crank, though, since he was a professional linguist and did other work that was perfectly respectable.
The main reason that Greenberg's historical work is considered nonsense is that the method he used is considered unreliable. He would make lists of words that sort of sound the same and have similar meanings in various languages. He would display these lists and say "Behold! Such similarities in sound and meaning could not be due to chance, so these languages must be related." (By "related" here we're talking specifically about descent from a common ancestor, not about other sorts of similarity.) There are two main problems with this approach. One is that this method doesn't adequately address the question of whether the similarities observed are due to chance, especially given his evidently very loose criteria for similarity. The other is that, even if you have similarities whose probability of chance occurrence is low, all that tells you is that there is some sort of relationship among the languages. It doesn't tell you whether that relationship is due to common parentage or to borrowing. Furthermore, this technique doesn't give you any tools for detecting loans, unlike the standard technique.
Okay, so the Wikipedia article as of some time ago mentioned that his methodology was controversial but said nothing about the other major issue with his work, namely the extremely high rate of erroneous data. He was, to put it charitably, extremely sloppy. So I edited the article and added mention of the data quality issue. If you'll look at the subsequent discussion, you'll see that some of the people who had written the previous material took the position that the errors in the data didn't matter much because they could just be corrected and "the analysis run again" (and presumably, if the critics had done this and found that the conclusions changed, they would have done this, suggesting that Greenberg's conclusions sur
If fear of lawsuits is a real issue, there's an easy solution: pass state laws forbidding such suits. States can determine what is grounds for suit and what isn't (subject to constitutional requirements). Basically, a state can only be sued (on non-federal grounds) with its permission, and a state can legislate that neither it, municipalities and other lower-level government entities, nor their employees may be considered liable for providing GIS information.
I write all my HTML by hand too (except for a little stuff generated from databases), but I don't have to deal with lots and lots of pages. The article's point, I think, is that if you do have to deal with a lot of pages, a template-based system is a lot easier to use than includes because it allows you to make changes in one place even if you need to change something that can't be done just by changing the content of the includes, such as inserting something into the middle when you've previously just had a header and a footer.
On the other hand, if you're not using templates, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to edit all those pages by hand. An alternative is to use a script to edit all the files. I've done that a few times, when I wanted to change something in a few dozen pages.
The author discussed includes and why he thinks that they aren't a good solution. He's already considered and dismissed your "invention".
The closest analogue in modern armies to the centurion is probably a sergeant, in terms of the number of ranks and in that centurions, like sergeants, were usually in for life. On the other hand, in terms of the number of soldiers commanded, a centurion was more like a captain, since a Roman century was roughly the size of a modern US company, which is normally commanded by a captain.
I wonder how sound the methodology of this study is. The data consist of the opinions of MIS managers. Now I don't mean to claim that MIS managers don't know anything about the success and failure of projects in their organization, but they do have a certain perspective and certain interests and so may have a biased view of things. I'd feel a lot more confident of the conclusions if the study were based on a set of case studies in which they had interviewed not only MIS managers but other people involved, including the actual programmers. I wouldn't be surprised, for example, to learn that programmers think that changing requirements are more of a problem than MIS managers do.
Since the information is being processed by a computer anyhow, can't they prevent fraud by encrypting the information represented by the barcode? That would prevent people from simply printing up their own tags. Of course, they could look around the store for something with the price they want and copy that tag, but at least that would cost them an extra trip to the store. And this tactic could be dealt with by combining the price and product code information before encryption so that even if someone copied a tag with the right price it wouldn't have the right product code.
This is obviously a training problem. Nobody showed them how to run the food synthesizer. They've been standard in Federation starships since the 1960s.
The difference is that the major railroads (in the US) were built in the 19th century primarily on public land. The railroads were rewarded for building the track by grants of land adjacent to the rail lines. It's possible that eminent domain was used to some extent within the big cities, but for the most part the land along the tracks only came to be privately owned as a result of the construction of the railroads. It wasn't taken by eminent domain.
Trucking is much less efficient than rail transportation for long distances. This proposal does at least include freight lines, but it still assumes that a large part of the trade is going to be carried on highways. Shouldn't we be building up the railway system and trying to shift long-distance freight away from trucks to the railways?
There's something really weird in the FAQ. In the part that tells copyright owners what to do if material that they own is being traded and they want the post removed, they say:
I sympathize with their desire to get people to talk to them first, in a civil tone, before sending take-down notices to their ISPs, but this is perfect nonsense. Reading the FAQ doesn't bind anybody to anything. This is the kind of garbage we expect from Microsoft. What is it doing on a torrent site?For the geekier MS Windows user, how about emacs and yudit?
Once you've learned the basics, a good way to acquire specialized vocabulary is to read materials in the language for which English translations are available so that you can easily find out what terms mean and check your understanding. Manuals, for example, may be available both in English and in Spanish.
Agreed. A closer analogy to publishing food ingredients is probably publishing APIs and interface specifications.
This isn't a trivial concern. People with dual citizenship are at risk in some countries. If you're a citizen of country X leaving country X, you may not want the security people to know that you're carrying a US passport. You may have no choice but to carry it, but making it metallic practically guarantees that you'll have to show it to security. Of course the same thing applies if other countries use RFID tags with metallic shielding.
Most New York Times articles are available without registration. There's a service that provides links that bypass it. Just go here, submit the original URL, and you get back a URL that bypasses registration.
This is good news, but it won't necessarily eliminate some of the obnoxious terms found in EULAs. I wonder if another approach might help there. One principle of contract law (at least in the Anglo-American system) is that provisions contrary to law or to the public interest are invalid. (See also 17A Am. Jur. 2d Contracts 257 (1991).) For example, here's a discussion of a case in which a couple had signed a contract requiring that they be faithful to each other and providing damages if one or the other was unfaithful. The man was unfaithful again, his wife divorced him, and then sued to enforce the contract. The California courts refused to enforce the contract on the grounds that it conflicted with the public policy underlying California's no-fault divorce law. The crucial thing here is that the contract was not specifically prohibited by any statute; the court's ruling was based on its inference of public policy.
The courts are careful about taking too broad a view of the public interest for this purpose because if they did they'd effectively be legislating after the fact. For example, they will not interpret a life insurance policy as a health insurance policy even though one might argue that it is in the public interest for death to be prevented rather than the survivors compensated. My question is, are some of the provisions of EULAs sufficiently obnoxious that the courts can be persuaded that they should be invalidated as contrary to public policy? It seems to me, for example, that provisions forbidding the user from monitoring his own network traffic should be considered contrary to public policy since they adversely affect both the individual user and the general public.
I think its really important to check out the controls of a vehicle you're not familiar with. It bothers me that rentals never have the manual. You don't want to be driving in bad weather and have to mess around trying to get the defroster or the windshield wipers working.
When I was 19 I had an experience that taught me not to start driving an unfamiliar vehicle without checking it out. I was working for a guy whose business was in Dijon (France) but who lived way out in the country, over an hour away. One he rented a car and I had to drive it from Dijon to his country place. I was supposed to follow his brother-in-law, who drove like a bat out of hell on narrow, winding, country roads. It was all I could do to keep up with him. After a while, it began to get dark. I tried to turn on the headlights, but couldn't figure out how. Finally I just leaned on the horn until I got the other guy's attention and then gradually slowed down and got him to show me how to turn on the headlights. Ever since then, I've made a point of making sure I know how the important controls work before I head out.
The weirdest thing I've ever encountered is the gearshift on the Deux Chevaux. (For Americans, this is the French equivalent of the Volkswagen, a small, low-powered, cheap car that just about anybody could afford. I think that it has never been legal to import them into the US because their light construction didn't meet US safety standards.) The shift lever goes in and out of the dashboard. You rotate it to get additional positions.
Well, in my experience geeks like Chinese food, so I suggest The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters by the late James McCawley, a linguist and connaisseur of Chinese food. It teaches you to read Chinese menus. Long out of print, it was reprinted last year. You can get it from the publisher (link above) or Barnes and Noble.
I'm disappointed that California didn't pursue criminal charges. A civil suit may be sufficient to deal with honest mistakes, but if, as seems to be the case, Diebold repeatedly made changes to software after certification, that's a deliberate malfeasance. These people need to learn that elections are serious business. These aren't candy machines.
You've been misled by the phrase "targets Linux". According to the article, they're ready for Linux, MS Windows, and Mac OS. That's pretty much the whole market.