On the face of it I agree, but I'm still waiting for proponents of the "It's open, obviously I'm meant to use it" theory to suggest how much use of an open AP is "fair." In principle, what's the difference between you taking up 1 byte per second and 1 meg per second of my connection? I think it's only a matter of extent and not principle.
Were I to extend the analogy (and I hate arguing analogically), say I have a FLEET of cars. Your bogarting of my driver didn't keep me from getting to where I had to go, but I wasn't getting what I was paying for (availability of x cars).
Summary: Reactionary and generally stupid people mate more, and thus have more offspring. This is a system with a positive feedback loop since the next generation of K-Feds and Britneys will also likely get pregnant and work shitty jobs (moreso than make it to Harvard). Whereas, progressive and generally smart people may fuck as much (or more) but do not mate as much. This system also has a feedback loop.
Note that it is the PROGRESSIVE attitude towards sex (whatever, whenever) coupled (heh) with STUPIDITY that leads to the dumb outbreeding the smart.
If I'm paying for a certain amount of bandwidth and you're mooching it, then you're harming my pocketbook, sonny.
The punishment is not commeansurate with the crime because it's supposed to be a deterrent. Whether or not deterrents work is a matter for another thread.
But you're already trespassing before you have been told to leave. It might be based upon data you don't have--the intentions of the owner of the building--but this is why you should err on the side of caution.
Let's assume for a moment that there is absolutely no way for you to know. Assume you always decide that it's meant to be open.
Now, as in the sciences, you have a certain probability of making an alpha (false positive) or beta (false negative) error:
You assume it's supposed to be open, and it is in fact meant to be open: You enjoy free wireless You assume it's supposed to be open, but it's not: You are guilty of theft of services. (alpha error) You assume it's not open and it is: You miss out on the chance to surf for free. (beta error) You assume it's not open, and it actually isn't: You respect the owner's wishes.
The question is, if you don't get to choose whether or not you make an error, but you do get a choice in which error to commit, what is your preference?
Most people in this thread so far would prefer to accidentally steal than to miss out on something free. I find this very interesting, if not particularly surprising.
A more appropriate one might be--I am a wealthy man and like most wealthy men I have a driver. But all of our drivers are rather dim and they will accept orders from anybody.
So, I hire this guy, and because I'm wealthy and self-important I don't bother to instruct him that he's only supposed to drive me around, because I assume "I'm the one paying him, why should he take orders from anyone else?"
Then he goes missing for a week because you asked him to drive you to Alaska--knowing full well, unlike myself, how stupid the guy is. The whole way, you use my credit card to buy gas and stay at hotels.
Obviously I'm going to be irate once the bill arrives.
Where this analogy fails is that most people should not have to tell their drivers not to drive people to Alaska. How many people know they have to do anything to their wrouter to restrict access to it?
In a few years, yours may be a valid line of reasoning if we can assume that enough "new" users should know to secure their access point. Until then, I believe you've not got a leg to stand on.
This whole line of reasoning has always struck me as a rather disingenuous argument, because proponents of the "Well, the SSID was broadcast and there was no key required, so obviously it's free for anyone to use" theory never offer any criteria for exactly how much the owner of a wireless access point needs to do before random clients can "assume" it's not intended for public use.
There are lots of analogies being thrown around already, I'm sure, so let's just dispense with those for the time being and get down to brass tacks.
My neighbor's access point is a crappy linksys wrouter that he got several years ago. He uses WEP but I can crack that quicker than he can type in the key. Does the fact that he is using a known-to-be-weak encryption scheme mean that I have the right to be on? My other neighbor does not advertise his SSID, but I can get on his AP just the same simply by grabbing enough packets out of the air. Does that mean that I have the right to use the service he's paying for?
Simple deduction tells me that I should not assume that, simply because I can access a resource, the owner does not mind if I access the resource. You cannot validly assume that the average home user of 802.11 technology knows enough to secure it.
Frankly, at this point, I do not care whether or not people want to lay blame for this at the feet of the vendors or of the end users. The simple fact is that unless you have an explicit reason to believe that you are meant to access someone's wireless, you should not; and to access it anyway is unethical.
I might carry around a(nother) key fob to do PKI. I already have a little thumb drive and an RSA SecurID thingy.
The convenience of SSNs is that A) every citizen gets one (usually at birth or naturalization) and B) they are centrally managed by a disinterested party (the government). I think to go with PKI you'd need something similar to that.
If I may wax science-finctional (which is apparently really popular this morning) maybe some kind of fob you carry around that you need to know a passphrase to use. Some kind of voice print ID or something. Then you could use it for all your transactions.
I thought school was supposed to be about the education of students, for their benefit, that of their parents, of other citizens, and of society and democracy at large.
You do realize that someone eventually has to finance this, right?
I remember when I was in high school, in drafting class, they had connected the computers running AutoCAD to the internet. So people would spend all this time surfing instead of actually doing their work. The school had to lay out money to do this and the students were wasting the resource. The argument is the same for blocking sites at school that do not somehow relate to the students being educated.
What you don't seem to get is that if the money given to the school by "taxpayers" is not used "efficiently" then it probably is to the detriment of some other school program that is underfunded. "Sorry, there's no orchestra trip to Europe this year, because IT got the budget."
First off, there's the whole Sun Tzu thing. I find quoting Sun Tzu and the applications of "The Art of War" to network security tiresome but in this case he's right.
Second, there are so many newfangled correlation engines on the horizon that can make Security's job a lot easier, but which require tons of metadata. You have to tell it which IP is your webserver so it will adjust its weightings. Of course before that you need to know where and what the webserver is.
Third, simply keeping an accurate inventory has such a monumental impact on security. In six years I went to ONE site that had this. Everywhere else, it took days (and usually required hand-over-handing dusty cat5 cables) to find where the infected box was.
I don't know if "IT guys" (meaning, availability, not security) simply don't know this, don't care, or are crippled by management. I've encountered all three in the past seven years. I am not surprised at all that.gov/.mil networks are coming up short in this regard.
I will NEVER, EVER document what I did to a computer in any way more extended than "I had to buy this part. Here is a receipt for accounting and warranty." I will always keep each and every computer running and tweaked Just Right though.
Just out of curiosity...you don't work in a very large enterprise, do you?
Asset state management is important to both business and security. Guys who don't comply with those policies actually do get fired when there are many millions of dollars on the line.
Personally, I'm willing to pay for content, but generally speaking most of the ads I see are not anything I'm interested in, which annoys me. I hate going to a tech news website and seeing ads for mortgages. I hate going to cooks.com and seeing ads for a site on looking and feeling "younger" (realage.com).
For sites like this, it rapidly becomes apparent that the purpose of the site is to generate ad revenue, for which the content is a draw, rather than a site that presents good content and is supported by ads. When I perceive this then the site is not one to which I will return in any case, ads or no.
Remember how the web used to be in the early 90s? You had some "THIS IS MY PAGE BLINKING TEXT DANCING HAMSTERS LOL!one" pages and then you had some black text/grey background sites with 500k of text on how to beat some game or cook a souffle. The latter is what I want to see (and incidentally I think that sites like myspace are wonderful for putting all the crap in one place). A site like Jarod Wilson's guide to MythTV has pertinent ads and a VERY high content/ad ratio. TFA has links to HP forensics solutions in an article about Firefox. No thanks!
Oh, I will give you Portland and Seattle. I have always thought that northern cities featured less sprawl (compare Philly to Miami) and were better organized.
As for your experiences--you know, your neighbors obviously don't care about the people around them--so your subdivision is the exact opposite of the "tribal ghetto" I described. But, let's just say you're in the wrong one, since such an environment is defined by a group of like people. Apartment living sucks but there are houses in cities and neighborhoods that are not condos. Just sayin'.
I think you conflate "ghetto" with "urban blight" or somesuch. And I'm not trying to be pedantic about the definition, either. Cities don't lead to ghettos--tribalism does, and it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Right now I live in a "ghetto" where people walk around instead of driving everywhere, where most of the retail is independent small (micro) business, and where I know most of my neighbors. There are block parties just about every week in the summer. We're all sort of a loose "tribe" and there are advantages to this.
I think that people fleeing crime (which happens whenever there is a concentration of wealth--"prey"--in an area: you attract predators) inadvertently left this behind. In the suburbs, sprawl means you have to drive everywhere. Most retail is in strip malls and is from national chains. People do not invest in their community and they do not know their neighbors--they are isolated and into themselves.
I think that the reason a lot of people don't move back to the city is because they just don't know any better. They don't understand why, in economic terms, Mom & Pop's Ice Cream Shop around the corner is better than Cold Stone 5 miles away, and as consumers they are not very well-informed. Despite this, there is a trend of people moving back to the cities: Chicago is a good example.
Incidentally, I do not think West Coast cities are a good example of "bucking the trend." LA is full of ghettos AND as a sprawling suburanesque environment it has few of the advantages of a "city" and all the disadvantages of the suburbs. On the East Coast, Philly definately has crime, but in some ways I prefer its "ghettos" to, say, Tyson's Corner outside of Metro DC.
Yah, the term for this is the "structure-function paradox" and you will see it more and more when you compare disciplines like physics and biology.
Trying to take a ton of very granular heterogenous data (structure) and trying to figure out the function (how the system "works" or what it "does," or the understanding of the system as a gestalt) gets harder the more data you pick up. This is the problem biologists face and most of the new techniques in bioinformatics are specifically geared to solving it.
As an empiricist you can't assume that there is any ghost-in-the-machine gestalt aspect to New York, but you can figure that there are emergent aspects that you can't predict based on the structural data alone (but which become obvious when you see them). Like with ants--cooperative ant behavior is somehow "in" the ant but you can't really guess it even if you have total knowledge of it on a low (atomic) level. A good scientist keeps this in mind during investigation.
For more info look into the differences between bottom-up and top-down analysis--wikipedia has some good articles on same.
Oh yah, it's absurd. But the way advertising works, no matter if you like a product or not, so long as when you think "car insurance" you think "Geico," and you're NOT thinking "State Farm." It doesn't matter if you hate the ads and you're never going to buy their product. If you hate it then it's still taking up cycles that could be spent thinking about a competitor.
And, I'm sure the guy who thought up the caveman ads has a tidy pile of his own 100 dollar bills and doesn't need yours:)
I'm sorry, but this needs to be said: somewhere, the dude that came up with that ad campaign is lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills, and he's the idiot?
Ok. How's that DeVry education serving you, sonny jim?
Just a quick question, since you seem to have a ready answer--
When you say that these events are "not true," do you mean that it's not true in the sense that the literalists think it IS true? Ie, you think it is a story or a myth or something, but definately not literally true?
Or, do you take a more extreme position that absolutely nothing in the stories is true? I'm thinking of Aesop's fables, where the story is almost certainly made up (as I do not know any talking foxes who desire grapes) and yet describes a truism of some kind.
As a Catholic I was taught that, so far as Genesis goes, the argument over whether or not events ocurred exactly as described was a waste of time. Rather, the "takeaway" from Genesis is that the earth (the universe, I suppose) is a made thing, with a specific purpose, and that it was generally considered "very good" although people have an innate tendency to fuck it up. Noah's flood is a story about obedience and God's propensity to pull a Joe Pesci from time to time, moreso than a literal account of the fate of this or that species.
Do you believe that these things are also "not true," and if so, in what meaning of the phrase?
I dunno, I think it's still pretty cool. Organisms do all kinds of things that are really neat when we implement them with computers--genetic algorithms for instance. I don't think it detracts at all from the discovery to say "Pfft, my cells have been using GA since before I was born!"
Just out of curiosity, what does "Perfect" mean in this case? "Most likely to buy?"
Do you have any idea why gender and need ("by this Friday") are such important factors, or are these simply the results of your data collection?
Do you have enough data to tell how much of an influence each variable is on demand? Can you say, for example, that a female with all of those attributes is twice as likely to buy as a male with the same attributes, or a 50-year-old teacher is 1/10th as likely to buy as a 25-year-old teacher?
Really? There's nothing then that the average person can do to conserve power? My electric bill says otherwise--after taking steps to reduce my usage and to be more efficient, I noticed a distinct savings (bill was reduced by about 1/3).
Is that trivial?
Or were you referring to power applications besides the home?
I'm wondering if you know what empiricism means (What do the classics, philosophy have to do with flight? Unless it is flight theory which he should know) or perhaps you mean this in a way that I'm not thinking of at the moment. The educational system has plenty of liberal arts stuff. Too much if it is still like it was when I went to college. Generally it isn't useful to the research itself. It may be useful in the presentation of his work, however. His manager may be a pointy-haired boss in which case he will have to know that stuff in order to get around him. With any luck the people he deals with know what they are doing and can talk the talk.
Sorry, I think you misunderstood what I was getting at. I'm merely stating that I think it's entirely plausible to have researchers in physics or mathematics at the age of 18. However, I do not think that an 18-year-old has the social context to conduct social research. I also do not think that the educational system stresses learning that could go towards that--you know, classic literature about the human condition, philosophy, stuff like that.
I bring up empiricism because the person I mentioned is a radical reductionist, having fallen into one of many thought-traps that may tempt you if you have never studied the topic. As an empiricist, he believes that all knowledge comes from sensory observations--so you ask him, ok, what sensory observations support that claim? How can it be disproved? He cannot answer, not because he's not intelligent, but because he doesn't understand that these are criteria for a scientific theory--because he thought philosophy courses were liberal arts fluff (he also never took a statistical analysis course--"You have truth data, and that's all there is to it")! I think he would be a much better researcher if he knew what he was talking about when these topics came up. A short course in epistemology would probably do him a lot of good, as well as these high school kids.
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On the face of it I agree, but I'm still waiting for proponents of the "It's open, obviously I'm meant to use it" theory to suggest how much use of an open AP is "fair." In principle, what's the difference between you taking up 1 byte per second and 1 meg per second of my connection? I think it's only a matter of extent and not principle.
Were I to extend the analogy (and I hate arguing analogically), say I have a FLEET of cars. Your bogarting of my driver didn't keep me from getting to where I had to go, but I wasn't getting what I was paying for (availability of x cars).
I think they're spot-on, if a bit verbose.
Summary:
Reactionary and generally stupid people mate more, and thus have more offspring. This is a system with a positive feedback loop since the next generation of K-Feds and Britneys will also likely get pregnant and work shitty jobs (moreso than make it to Harvard).
Whereas, progressive and generally smart people may fuck as much (or more) but do not mate as much. This system also has a feedback loop.
Note that it is the PROGRESSIVE attitude towards sex (whatever, whenever) coupled (heh) with STUPIDITY that leads to the dumb outbreeding the smart.
If I'm paying for a certain amount of bandwidth and you're mooching it, then you're harming my pocketbook, sonny.
The punishment is not commeansurate with the crime because it's supposed to be a deterrent.
Whether or not deterrents work is a matter for another thread.
But you're already trespassing before you have been told to leave.
It might be based upon data you don't have--the intentions of the owner of the building--but this is why you should err on the side of caution.
Hold on.
Your argument is:
"My computer's default setup connects - it's not my fault"
and
"Their wrouter's default setup allows me to connect - it's their fault"
Did I miss something?
Otherwise: bzzt!
Let's assume for a moment that there is absolutely no way for you to know. Assume you always decide that it's meant to be open.
Now, as in the sciences, you have a certain probability of making an alpha (false positive) or beta (false negative) error:
You assume it's supposed to be open, and it is in fact meant to be open: You enjoy free wireless
You assume it's supposed to be open, but it's not: You are guilty of theft of services. (alpha error)
You assume it's not open and it is: You miss out on the chance to surf for free. (beta error)
You assume it's not open, and it actually isn't: You respect the owner's wishes.
The question is, if you don't get to choose whether or not you make an error, but you do get a choice in which error to commit, what is your preference?
Most people in this thread so far would prefer to accidentally steal than to miss out on something free. I find this very interesting, if not particularly surprising.
This is not a great analogy.
A more appropriate one might be--I am a wealthy man and like most wealthy men I have a driver. But all of our drivers are rather dim and they will accept orders from anybody.
So, I hire this guy, and because I'm wealthy and self-important I don't bother to instruct him that he's only supposed to drive me around, because I assume "I'm the one paying him, why should he take orders from anyone else?"
Then he goes missing for a week because you asked him to drive you to Alaska--knowing full well, unlike myself, how stupid the guy is. The whole way, you use my credit card to buy gas and stay at hotels.
Obviously I'm going to be irate once the bill arrives.
Where this analogy fails is that most people should not have to tell their drivers not to drive people to Alaska. How many people know they have to do anything to their wrouter to restrict access to it?
In a few years, yours may be a valid line of reasoning if we can assume that enough "new" users should know to secure their access point. Until then, I believe you've not got a leg to stand on.
This whole line of reasoning has always struck me as a rather disingenuous argument, because proponents of the "Well, the SSID was broadcast and there was no key required, so obviously it's free for anyone to use" theory never offer any criteria for exactly how much the owner of a wireless access point needs to do before random clients can "assume" it's not intended for public use.
There are lots of analogies being thrown around already, I'm sure, so let's just dispense with those for the time being and get down to brass tacks.
My neighbor's access point is a crappy linksys wrouter that he got several years ago. He uses WEP but I can crack that quicker than he can type in the key. Does the fact that he is using a known-to-be-weak encryption scheme mean that I have the right to be on? My other neighbor does not advertise his SSID, but I can get on his AP just the same simply by grabbing enough packets out of the air. Does that mean that I have the right to use the service he's paying for?
Simple deduction tells me that I should not assume that, simply because I can access a resource, the owner does not mind if I access the resource. You cannot validly assume that the average home user of 802.11 technology knows enough to secure it.
Frankly, at this point, I do not care whether or not people want to lay blame for this at the feet of the vendors or of the end users. The simple fact is that unless you have an explicit reason to believe that you are meant to access someone's wireless, you should not; and to access it anyway is unethical.
I might carry around a(nother) key fob to do PKI. I already have a little thumb drive and an RSA SecurID thingy.
The convenience of SSNs is that A) every citizen gets one (usually at birth or naturalization) and B) they are centrally managed by a disinterested party (the government). I think to go with PKI you'd need something similar to that.
If I may wax science-finctional (which is apparently really popular this morning) maybe some kind of fob you carry around that you need to know a passphrase to use. Some kind of voice print ID or something. Then you could use it for all your transactions.
On the other hand, I generally prefer cash.
What the hell do TAXPAYERS have to do with it?
I thought school was supposed to be about the education of students, for their benefit, that of their parents, of other citizens, and of society and democracy at large.
You do realize that someone eventually has to finance this, right?
I remember when I was in high school, in drafting class, they had connected the computers running AutoCAD to the internet. So people would spend all this time surfing instead of actually doing their work. The school had to lay out money to do this and the students were wasting the resource. The argument is the same for blocking sites at school that do not somehow relate to the students being educated.
What you don't seem to get is that if the money given to the school by "taxpayers" is not used "efficiently" then it probably is to the detriment of some other school program that is underfunded. "Sorry, there's no orchestra trip to Europe this year, because IT got the budget."
Mod parent up! This is true on so many levels.
.gov/.mil networks are coming up short in this regard.
First off, there's the whole Sun Tzu thing. I find quoting Sun Tzu and the applications of "The Art of War" to network security tiresome but in this case he's right.
Second, there are so many newfangled correlation engines on the horizon that can make Security's job a lot easier, but which require tons of metadata. You have to tell it which IP is your webserver so it will adjust its weightings. Of course before that you need to know where and what the webserver is.
Third, simply keeping an accurate inventory has such a monumental impact on security. In six years I went to ONE site that had this. Everywhere else, it took days (and usually required hand-over-handing dusty cat5 cables) to find where the infected box was.
I don't know if "IT guys" (meaning, availability, not security) simply don't know this, don't care, or are crippled by management. I've encountered all three in the past seven years. I am not surprised at all that
I will NEVER, EVER document what I did to a computer in any way more extended than "I had to buy this part. Here is a receipt for accounting and warranty." I will always keep each and every computer running and tweaked Just Right though.
Just out of curiosity...you don't work in a very large enterprise, do you?
Asset state management is important to both business and security. Guys who don't comply with those policies actually do get fired when there are many millions of dollars on the line.
Personally, I'm willing to pay for content, but generally speaking most of the ads I see are not anything I'm interested in, which annoys me. I hate going to a tech news website and seeing ads for mortgages. I hate going to cooks.com and seeing ads for a site on looking and feeling "younger" (realage.com).
For sites like this, it rapidly becomes apparent that the purpose of the site is to generate ad revenue, for which the content is a draw, rather than a site that presents good content and is supported by ads. When I perceive this then the site is not one to which I will return in any case, ads or no.
Remember how the web used to be in the early 90s? You had some "THIS IS MY PAGE BLINKING TEXT DANCING HAMSTERS LOL!one" pages and then you had some black text/grey background sites with 500k of text on how to beat some game or cook a souffle. The latter is what I want to see (and incidentally I think that sites like myspace are wonderful for putting all the crap in one place). A site like Jarod Wilson's guide to MythTV has pertinent ads and a VERY high content/ad ratio. TFA has links to HP forensics solutions in an article about Firefox. No thanks!
Oh, I will give you Portland and Seattle. I have always thought that northern cities featured less sprawl (compare Philly to Miami) and were better organized.
As for your experiences--you know, your neighbors obviously don't care about the people around them--so your subdivision is the exact opposite of the "tribal ghetto" I described. But, let's just say you're in the wrong one, since such an environment is defined by a group of like people. Apartment living sucks but there are houses in cities and neighborhoods that are not condos. Just sayin'.
I think you conflate "ghetto" with "urban blight" or somesuch. And I'm not trying to be pedantic about the definition, either. Cities don't lead to ghettos--tribalism does, and it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Right now I live in a "ghetto" where people walk around instead of driving everywhere, where most of the retail is independent small (micro) business, and where I know most of my neighbors. There are block parties just about every week in the summer. We're all sort of a loose "tribe" and there are advantages to this.
I think that people fleeing crime (which happens whenever there is a concentration of wealth--"prey"--in an area: you attract predators) inadvertently left this behind. In the suburbs, sprawl means you have to drive everywhere. Most retail is in strip malls and is from national chains. People do not invest in their community and they do not know their neighbors--they are isolated and into themselves.
I think that the reason a lot of people don't move back to the city is because they just don't know any better. They don't understand why, in economic terms, Mom & Pop's Ice Cream Shop around the corner is better than Cold Stone 5 miles away, and as consumers they are not very well-informed. Despite this, there is a trend of people moving back to the cities: Chicago is a good example.
Incidentally, I do not think West Coast cities are a good example of "bucking the trend." LA is full of ghettos AND as a sprawling suburanesque environment it has few of the advantages of a "city" and all the disadvantages of the suburbs. On the East Coast, Philly definately has crime, but in some ways I prefer its "ghettos" to, say, Tyson's Corner outside of Metro DC.
Yah, the term for this is the "structure-function paradox" and you will see it more and more when you compare disciplines like physics and biology.
Trying to take a ton of very granular heterogenous data (structure) and trying to figure out the function (how the system "works" or what it "does," or the understanding of the system as a gestalt) gets harder the more data you pick up. This is the problem biologists face and most of the new techniques in bioinformatics are specifically geared to solving it.
As an empiricist you can't assume that there is any ghost-in-the-machine gestalt aspect to New York, but you can figure that there are emergent aspects that you can't predict based on the structural data alone (but which become obvious when you see them). Like with ants--cooperative ant behavior is somehow "in" the ant but you can't really guess it even if you have total knowledge of it on a low (atomic) level. A good scientist keeps this in mind during investigation.
For more info look into the differences between bottom-up and top-down analysis--wikipedia has some good articles on same.
Oh yah, it's absurd. But the way advertising works, no matter if you like a product or not, so long as when you think "car insurance" you think "Geico," and you're NOT thinking "State Farm." It doesn't matter if you hate the ads and you're never going to buy their product. If you hate it then it's still taking up cycles that could be spent thinking about a competitor.
:)
And, I'm sure the guy who thought up the caveman ads has a tidy pile of his own 100 dollar bills and doesn't need yours
I'm sorry, but this needs to be said: somewhere, the dude that came up with that ad campaign is lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills, and he's the idiot?
Ok. How's that DeVry education serving you, sonny jim?
Just a quick question, since you seem to have a ready answer--
When you say that these events are "not true," do you mean that it's not true in the sense that the literalists think it IS true? Ie, you think it is a story or a myth or something, but definately not literally true?
Or, do you take a more extreme position that absolutely nothing in the stories is true?
I'm thinking of Aesop's fables, where the story is almost certainly made up (as I do not know any talking foxes who desire grapes) and yet describes a truism of some kind.
As a Catholic I was taught that, so far as Genesis goes, the argument over whether or not events ocurred exactly as described was a waste of time. Rather, the "takeaway" from Genesis is that the earth (the universe, I suppose) is a made thing, with a specific purpose, and that it was generally considered "very good" although people have an innate tendency to fuck it up. Noah's flood is a story about obedience and God's propensity to pull a Joe Pesci from time to time, moreso than a literal account of the fate of this or that species.
Do you believe that these things are also "not true," and if so, in what meaning of the phrase?
I dunno, I think it's still pretty cool. Organisms do all kinds of things that are really neat when we implement them with computers--genetic algorithms for instance. I don't think it detracts at all from the discovery to say "Pfft, my cells have been using GA since before I was born!"
...One Laptop Per Country.
Just out of curiosity, what does "Perfect" mean in this case? "Most likely to buy?"
Do you have any idea why gender and need ("by this Friday") are such important factors, or are these simply the results of your data collection?
Do you have enough data to tell how much of an influence each variable is on demand? Can you say, for example, that a female with all of those attributes is twice as likely to buy as a male with the same attributes, or a 50-year-old teacher is 1/10th as likely to buy as a 25-year-old teacher?
Just wonderin'.
Really? There's nothing then that the average person can do to conserve power?
My electric bill says otherwise--after taking steps to reduce my usage and to be more efficient, I noticed a distinct savings (bill was reduced by about 1/3).
Is that trivial?
Or were you referring to power applications besides the home?
I'm wondering if you know what empiricism means (What do the classics, philosophy have to do with flight? Unless it is flight theory which he should know) or perhaps you mean this in a way that I'm not thinking of at the moment. The educational system has plenty of liberal arts stuff. Too much if it is still like it was when I went to college. Generally it isn't useful to the research itself. It may be useful in the presentation of his work, however. His manager may be a pointy-haired boss in which case he will have to know that stuff in order to get around him. With any luck the people he deals with know what they are doing and can talk the talk.
Sorry, I think you misunderstood what I was getting at. I'm merely stating that I think it's entirely plausible to have researchers in physics or mathematics at the age of 18. However, I do not think that an 18-year-old has the social context to conduct social research. I also do not think that the educational system stresses learning that could go towards that--you know, classic literature about the human condition, philosophy, stuff like that.
I bring up empiricism because the person I mentioned is a radical reductionist, having fallen into one of many thought-traps that may tempt you if you have never studied the topic. As an empiricist, he believes that all knowledge comes from sensory observations--so you ask him, ok, what sensory observations support that claim? How can it be disproved? He cannot answer, not because he's not intelligent, but because he doesn't understand that these are criteria for a scientific theory--because he thought philosophy courses were liberal arts fluff (he also never took a statistical analysis course--"You have truth data, and that's all there is to it")! I think he would be a much better researcher if he knew what he was talking about when these topics came up. A short course in epistemology would probably do him a lot of good, as well as these high school kids.
...Congress then creates the position of "Handicapper General..." and we know how the rest goes :)