I hate these kind of reports because it'll likely just force teachers to "teach the test" and not the material/reasoning/importance/usage beyond what the test requires...
It's difficult to measure and compare the performance of teachers without a standardized test. You could simply pay them well and trust them to take pride in their work, but that'll inevitably means that a few slackers will get a free ride. So either accept some people getting something better than they deserve, or accept an inferior overall performance.
The USSR 'paid' for its military production by sacrificing investment in it's people, education and consumer goods in order to maintain expenditures in it's military. Where the resources are allocated matters. It also did so using a very inefficient (though theoretically nonprofit) model. The corrupt officials didn't need profits to move most of the remaining production into their pockets.
To have any impact on the rest of production, there would have to be insufficient number of people in civilian industry (everything is nonprofit, so only people actually matter). That was clearly not the case.
This clearly was the case, since the people in the Soviet Union were (in)famously short of pretty much of everything. And while the Soviet civilian sector failed to deliver, the military sector delivered the Tsar Bomba and a pretty nice space program.
Uh huh...you DO know we spend upwards of 100 million on a triple A rated game and are damned lucky if the "AI" doesn't run into walls or parks its moronic ass right in the middle of a field with zero cover to get picked off while it stands there with a thumb up its ass, yes?
The 100 million don't go towards the AI, it goes towards the graphics and sounds. And the part that does go towards the AI isn't trying to make the AI win, it's trying to make the AI lose so the players get the satisfaction of beating the game.
If you store your photo's on facebook and don't have backups if it elsewhere, then you deserve what you get, if Facebook closes down.
And if there was something of value in those photos, then plenty of people who don't deserve to suffer from your stupidity - such as future historians - will. And even if you do have backups of the actual photos, do you also have the backups of all the metadata - such as who's who - in such a format that it would be painless to re-upload somewhere else?
But yet the grandparent poster is at +5 Insightful for failing to google.
It is customary for the accuser to provide both details and evidence. It is not a failure for the audience to not do his job for him.
Proves out my decade-long tagline every time.
No, it doesn't. The issue has nothing to do with pleasing anyone, but of giving details which can be fact-checked. After all, it is impossible to disprove a claim that "a scientist said" unless you know what every scientist has ever said, which is an unreasonable demand.
People are fucking idiots, and any pretension of the posters on this site having higher than average intelligence is laughable.
This, from someone who speaks of "unwashed masses" yet fails to comprehend the simple concepts detailed above?
They'll obey all speed limits, keep distance to those in front, always change lanes cleanly, always signal, always yield, always drive defensively
And by "always" you mean "until a manufacturer realizes that you can get ahead by trusting other automated cars to err on the side of caution", right? And pretty soon we're having automated cars trying to drive as agressively as possible as yet another demonstration of the tragedy of the commons.
At the most-recent Warming Conference a scientist proposed labeling climate-deniers as "mentally ill" and sending them to hospitals to be cured of this deficiency.
Who (name) said what (quote) where (place) when (date)?
But at least the people who modded you "+5 Informative") demonstrated what passes as facts in climate deniers camp. And since advanced enough self-deception is indistinguishable from genuine mental illness, perhaps we should forgive any real of imaginary person who confuses the two.
The right wing in the U.S. these days mostly wants to reduce the power of federal government and leave you the hell alone.
Just as long as you don't consume any substance they don't want you to, don't have sex in ways they don't want you to, don't associate with other people to get better pay through collective bargaining (unless you're a corporation, in which case it's okay), don't seek education (taking student loans is apparently irresponsible), and are happy to breath a poisonous fume since enviromental standards are communism.
But beyond controlling what you eat, fuck, associate with, learn, and breath, they want to leave you alone, yes. Well, beyond wanting you to pay for random wars, of course. And follow their religious standards. And...
Really to use the term right/left anymore is meaningless, you should be looking for "statists" - those that think the state should be your master instead of yourself. The modern left is wholly bought into this idea, the U.S. right only half way, the EU/UK nearly irredeemably lost down that road now.
I think it's safe to assume that anyone seeking a position of power is happy to wield that power. The main difference between left and right is that the left wish to wield power through state bureaucracy and the right through money.
A truly free market would stop that kind of discrimination faster than all the civil rights legislation ever proposed.
It didn't, which is why said legislation was enacted in the first place. The reason is that human beings aren't mainly economic actors; or, to put it another way, things like conforming to community standards - good or bad - has value to humans. No one will make decisions based solely on what makes most or uses least money.
I don't agree either with Paul (slavery is too strong a word) or Obama (there are only 50 states), but I do think universal healthcare is theft. I don't have the right to visit a doctor, get handed a bill, and then go-round taking money from my neighbors' wallets to Force them to pay my bill. Neither does the government.
So what happens the next time a serious epidemic breaks out? Even if you don't care about the poor, you're also putting your own life at far greater risk through a large amount of untreated people both spreading the disease and giving it chances to mutate. Not to mention the lost productivity will hurt the entire economy, including your precious wallet.
So all in all, I'd say that universal healthcare is a very good example of a government doing its job: preventing a tragedy of the commons by forcing everyone to pay their share.
It's impossible to write anything in the social sciences field without some level of plagiarism. Since it's near impossible to make hard arguments you need to cite other works.
Of course this also means that the whole field has very little connection to external reality, and should perhaps not be called science.
The hydrogen on the outer layers of this sun would still have more or less the same orbital velocity as the rest of the sun. There has to be something disrupting the orbit.
First, tidal forces will tear the star apart, then the resulting ring of gas will heat up due to friction (since layers closes to the hole will move faster), which causes the gas to radiate away its potential energy and spiral into the hole.
In fact one of the reasons why I am a dissenter is because water vapor is so much more absorbing of the infre red spectrum than CO2. Yet we don't call on our industry to condense steam back into water rather than directly vent it to the atmosphere.
We don't do this because with 3/4 of world's surface being open water it would be utterly pointless. Water will evaporate into air when it's warm and get out when it cools down. With the exception of deserts airs water content will depend mainly on temperature; thus releasing water vapour will simply mean that less evaporates from other sources. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, stays in the air and accumulates year after year after year.
Not that any of this matters. At this point it's obvious we're not going to be able to stop releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, no matter what the consequences may be. Renewables are a joke and would require hundreds of billions of dollars of investment to switch to even if they weren't, and nuclear power can't be used because of anti-nuclear hysteria (congratulations, Greenpeace!), so that leaves coal.
The next century or so will really, really, really suck.
I think you demonstrated a very important thing here: no matter what you say, someone else can always claim that you are wrong by purposefully misinterpreting what is meant (in this case the context, which was obviously natural numbers rather than GF(2)). This is, in fact, one of the defining differences between scepticism and denialism: a sceptic does a best-effort attempt to understand what you meant, while a denialist will play dumb or, in extreme cases, a jackass genie.
Climate change denialists are not sceptics; they aren't arguing because they honestly disagree with the research, they are arguing because they have personal interests at stake.
Turns out that was just the inane mutterings of an old man. It was actually an internal form of the Venom suit, and there was a blood test for "the force" the whole time. No explanation was given for how we go from measurable, verifiable phenomena to crazy religion in the span of a generation in a galactic civilization....
Who you're gonna believe? A 900-year old warrior monk who rises car-sized objects into air with the power of his mind, trains an apprentice in a few days well enough to actually survive a fight against Vader, and treats death as a minor annoyance, or an outcast who says it was all done by bacteria and then dies (and never shows up again)?
She is entirely incapable of rational and intelligent thought, but thanks to medicine and excessive warning labels, her line will perpetuate. Don't get me wrong, I love my sister, but I am a realist in this regard.
No, you are not being a realist. You are engaging in absurd hyperbole. Unless, of course, you're implying that your sister managed to continue her line while institutionalized.
Though I have little more than a strong feeling and some broken logic to back up that comment.
Yet you still made it. It's not that you lack the intelligence to understand that your logic is faulty, you simply let a "strong feeling" override it. A genuinely stupid person might still understand an issue if it was explained to him, but with you all hope is lost because you understand perfectly well but just don't care. And that's worse than stupidity, because if a stupid person acts out his stupidity he's going to be pretty ineffective about it because, after all, he's stupid; but if you act out your faux stupidity, you could still potentially use your intelligence to plan an effective course of action.
So no, stupid people are not a significant burden on society, but people playing dumb are.
Natural selection will shape us forever unless we conquer death itself.
Death isn't strictly necessary for natural selection to occur. Breeding faster than your fellow immortal would still result in different relative amounts of your descendants. And of course a human's legacy is memetic as well as genetic, so even if nobody breeds or dies humanity will still evolve - which in turn means that you can be evolutionarily succesful right now even if you do not pass your genes on, if you manage to do something culturally significant.
As the story goes the A/C was originally designed on the assumption that the room would contain a few dozen computers, which it did, and an equal number of CRTs, which it did not. I suppose it's because the new building took so long going up that they missed the big switch to LCDs.
By "market reality" I meant things such as the fact that China exists, or that Widgets cost 3x as much to make in country A than in country B.
Do the Widgets really cost 1/3rd to make in country B? Or does country B simply lack enviromental and worker safety laws, thus allowing the manufacturer to shift parts of the cost to the rest of the society? Perhaps it even lacks minimum wage laws and forbids unions, thus giving the manufacturer access to slave labour, again shifting costs to other people.
It would in the best interests of country A to protect itself through the use of toll barriers, and convince as many other countries as possible to do likewise. Otherwise the Red Queen's Race it'll run is a tailspin to the bottom. We're already seeing signs of this, with both people and countries getting more and mroe in debt in a hopeless attempt to maintain a qualit of life their parents could without problems with decades-older technology.
Facts that affect markets.
Facts which are usually half-truths at best, and only affect anything because they're allowed to. In China's case their "market advantage" is not that they're efficient, but that they're ruled by Mao "nuclear war is winnable because only half of chinese will die in it" Zedong's heirs who'll do things like paint children's toys with lead paint. That any country allows Chinese children's toys - or any Chinese products for that matter - to be imported is due to free trade ideology, not any "market fact".
There are disadvantages to that. I'm specifically thinking of the flexibility of the job market: In the course of being edged out by competitors or a changing market, an employer might hold on to their workforce longer than they should out of fear of being sued for wrongful dismissal. That makes the entire economy less capable of adjusting to disruptive technologies and global market realities.
That's a feature, not a bug. Entrepreneurs are precisely the people who should bear the risks of the market, since they also get the profits. This way employees have more job security and employers have a motivation to train their employees rather than fire them and hire new ones. Both of these help stabilize the economy.
Also, there is no such thing as "market reality". The "market" is a purely social construct and as such can be altered at will. Just look at the financial industry if you don't believe me: trillions of dollars can vanish overnight, yet nothing in the physical reality changes.
With Windows 8, the software platform will be unified, and porting a Win 8 Metro app to Windows Phone will be super easy, with only the UI layer needing tweaks.
And every other layer needs to be sized for a smartphone rather than a desktop. That's a rather big limitation, even if we assume that the UI for a non-trivial desktop program can be fit into a smartphone screen with just "tweaks".
If the application hasn't been designed to work on a smartphone from the beginning, it's going to be pretty much useless there, even if it'll start there.
Nokia going it alone would've faced much bigger challenges.
Perhaps. But it would have faced them without being tied to a notoriously treacherous partner. Nor would there be reason to question the captain's loyalties - Elop moving from Microsoft to Nokia and then making decisions that benefited the former is suspect, at the very least. And of course Nokia could had simply jumped on the Android bandwagon, so it's not like the choice was between Microsoft and nothing.
Most importantly, had Nokia not thrown its lot in with Microsoft it would have lived or died on its own merits, while now its fate depends on Microsoft - and Microsoft is moving to the 98/ME/Vista phase of its product cycle.
The world needs more sandbox games. One makes the story with freedom and imagination. Create a simulation and let it run, tweak the fun/boring/grinding elements.
Most sandbox games are really just a lot of scripted missions in an otherwise static world. But suppose you would, say, take a Fallout- or Elder Scrolls-style game first-person 3D sandbox game and combine it with a Civilization-type strategy engine? The computer fractions would find new cities, fought over them, and sometimes raze them. The cities themselves would be governed through a Settlers/Simcity-style engine. They would also randomly generate missions; for example, a city that's building a military unit would generate "join the army" -mission, and a city under siege would generate missions for helping the city or the invaders. And of course if you manage to rise high enough in a power structure you could control your own city or cities and armies.
Slashdot Mirror
And the best part is that your now mindless body can make a wonderful career in either politics or the financial industry!
It's difficult to measure and compare the performance of teachers without a standardized test. You could simply pay them well and trust them to take pride in their work, but that'll inevitably means that a few slackers will get a free ride. So either accept some people getting something better than they deserve, or accept an inferior overall performance.
That's true for society in general, BTW.
The 100 million don't go towards the AI, it goes towards the graphics and sounds. And the part that does go towards the AI isn't trying to make the AI win, it's trying to make the AI lose so the players get the satisfaction of beating the game.
And if there was something of value in those photos, then plenty of people who don't deserve to suffer from your stupidity - such as future historians - will. And even if you do have backups of the actual photos, do you also have the backups of all the metadata - such as who's who - in such a format that it would be painless to re-upload somewhere else?
It is customary for the accuser to provide both details and evidence. It is not a failure for the audience to not do his job for him.
No, it doesn't. The issue has nothing to do with pleasing anyone, but of giving details which can be fact-checked. After all, it is impossible to disprove a claim that "a scientist said" unless you know what every scientist has ever said, which is an unreasonable demand.
This, from someone who speaks of "unwashed masses" yet fails to comprehend the simple concepts detailed above?
And by "always" you mean "until a manufacturer realizes that you can get ahead by trusting other automated cars to err on the side of caution", right? And pretty soon we're having automated cars trying to drive as agressively as possible as yet another demonstration of the tragedy of the commons.
Who (name) said what (quote) where (place) when (date)?
But at least the people who modded you "+5 Informative") demonstrated what passes as facts in climate deniers camp. And since advanced enough self-deception is indistinguishable from genuine mental illness, perhaps we should forgive any real of imaginary person who confuses the two.
Just as long as you don't consume any substance they don't want you to, don't have sex in ways they don't want you to, don't associate with other people to get better pay through collective bargaining (unless you're a corporation, in which case it's okay), don't seek education (taking student loans is apparently irresponsible), and are happy to breath a poisonous fume since enviromental standards are communism.
But beyond controlling what you eat, fuck, associate with, learn, and breath, they want to leave you alone, yes. Well, beyond wanting you to pay for random wars, of course. And follow their religious standards. And...
I think it's safe to assume that anyone seeking a position of power is happy to wield that power. The main difference between left and right is that the left wish to wield power through state bureaucracy and the right through money.
It didn't, which is why said legislation was enacted in the first place. The reason is that human beings aren't mainly economic actors; or, to put it another way, things like conforming to community standards - good or bad - has value to humans. No one will make decisions based solely on what makes most or uses least money.
So what happens the next time a serious epidemic breaks out? Even if you don't care about the poor, you're also putting your own life at far greater risk through a large amount of untreated people both spreading the disease and giving it chances to mutate. Not to mention the lost productivity will hurt the entire economy, including your precious wallet.
So all in all, I'd say that universal healthcare is a very good example of a government doing its job: preventing a tragedy of the commons by forcing everyone to pay their share.
What effect? Making it safer for millionaires to move to corrupt tax havens?
Of course this also means that the whole field has very little connection to external reality, and should perhaps not be called science.
First, tidal forces will tear the star apart, then the resulting ring of gas will heat up due to friction (since layers closes to the hole will move faster), which causes the gas to radiate away its potential energy and spiral into the hole.
We don't do this because with 3/4 of world's surface being open water it would be utterly pointless. Water will evaporate into air when it's warm and get out when it cools down. With the exception of deserts airs water content will depend mainly on temperature; thus releasing water vapour will simply mean that less evaporates from other sources. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, stays in the air and accumulates year after year after year.
Not that any of this matters. At this point it's obvious we're not going to be able to stop releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, no matter what the consequences may be. Renewables are a joke and would require hundreds of billions of dollars of investment to switch to even if they weren't, and nuclear power can't be used because of anti-nuclear hysteria (congratulations, Greenpeace!), so that leaves coal.
The next century or so will really, really, really suck.
I think you demonstrated a very important thing here: no matter what you say, someone else can always claim that you are wrong by purposefully misinterpreting what is meant (in this case the context, which was obviously natural numbers rather than GF(2)). This is, in fact, one of the defining differences between scepticism and denialism: a sceptic does a best-effort attempt to understand what you meant, while a denialist will play dumb or, in extreme cases, a jackass genie.
Climate change denialists are not sceptics; they aren't arguing because they honestly disagree with the research, they are arguing because they have personal interests at stake.
Not days. Thirteen minutes.
At least the oil companies are getting their money's worth.
Who you're gonna believe? A 900-year old warrior monk who rises car-sized objects into air with the power of his mind, trains an apprentice in a few days well enough to actually survive a fight against Vader, and treats death as a minor annoyance, or an outcast who says it was all done by bacteria and then dies (and never shows up again)?
No, you are not being a realist. You are engaging in absurd hyperbole. Unless, of course, you're implying that your sister managed to continue her line while institutionalized.
Yet you still made it. It's not that you lack the intelligence to understand that your logic is faulty, you simply let a "strong feeling" override it. A genuinely stupid person might still understand an issue if it was explained to him, but with you all hope is lost because you understand perfectly well but just don't care. And that's worse than stupidity, because if a stupid person acts out his stupidity he's going to be pretty ineffective about it because, after all, he's stupid; but if you act out your faux stupidity, you could still potentially use your intelligence to plan an effective course of action.
So no, stupid people are not a significant burden on society, but people playing dumb are.
Death isn't strictly necessary for natural selection to occur. Breeding faster than your fellow immortal would still result in different relative amounts of your descendants. And of course a human's legacy is memetic as well as genetic, so even if nobody breeds or dies humanity will still evolve - which in turn means that you can be evolutionarily succesful right now even if you do not pass your genes on, if you manage to do something culturally significant.
Not to mention the invention of the thermostat.
Do the Widgets really cost 1/3rd to make in country B? Or does country B simply lack enviromental and worker safety laws, thus allowing the manufacturer to shift parts of the cost to the rest of the society? Perhaps it even lacks minimum wage laws and forbids unions, thus giving the manufacturer access to slave labour, again shifting costs to other people.
It would in the best interests of country A to protect itself through the use of toll barriers, and convince as many other countries as possible to do likewise. Otherwise the Red Queen's Race it'll run is a tailspin to the bottom. We're already seeing signs of this, with both people and countries getting more and mroe in debt in a hopeless attempt to maintain a qualit of life their parents could without problems with decades-older technology.
Facts which are usually half-truths at best, and only affect anything because they're allowed to. In China's case their "market advantage" is not that they're efficient, but that they're ruled by Mao "nuclear war is winnable because only half of chinese will die in it" Zedong's heirs who'll do things like paint children's toys with lead paint. That any country allows Chinese children's toys - or any Chinese products for that matter - to be imported is due to free trade ideology, not any "market fact".
That's a feature, not a bug. Entrepreneurs are precisely the people who should bear the risks of the market, since they also get the profits. This way employees have more job security and employers have a motivation to train their employees rather than fire them and hire new ones. Both of these help stabilize the economy.
Also, there is no such thing as "market reality". The "market" is a purely social construct and as such can be altered at will. Just look at the financial industry if you don't believe me: trillions of dollars can vanish overnight, yet nothing in the physical reality changes.
And every other layer needs to be sized for a smartphone rather than a desktop. That's a rather big limitation, even if we assume that the UI for a non-trivial desktop program can be fit into a smartphone screen with just "tweaks".
If the application hasn't been designed to work on a smartphone from the beginning, it's going to be pretty much useless there, even if it'll start there.
Perhaps. But it would have faced them without being tied to a notoriously treacherous partner. Nor would there be reason to question the captain's loyalties - Elop moving from Microsoft to Nokia and then making decisions that benefited the former is suspect, at the very least. And of course Nokia could had simply jumped on the Android bandwagon, so it's not like the choice was between Microsoft and nothing.
Most importantly, had Nokia not thrown its lot in with Microsoft it would have lived or died on its own merits, while now its fate depends on Microsoft - and Microsoft is moving to the 98/ME/Vista phase of its product cycle.
Most sandbox games are really just a lot of scripted missions in an otherwise static world. But suppose you would, say, take a Fallout- or Elder Scrolls-style game first-person 3D sandbox game and combine it with a Civilization-type strategy engine? The computer fractions would find new cities, fought over them, and sometimes raze them. The cities themselves would be governed through a Settlers/Simcity-style engine. They would also randomly generate missions; for example, a city that's building a military unit would generate "join the army" -mission, and a city under siege would generate missions for helping the city or the invaders. And of course if you manage to rise high enough in a power structure you could control your own city or cities and armies.
It would be pretty awesome.