Generally people are psychologically unattracted to other people that they were raised with, this works as a safeguard against inbreeding in human populations and helps to counter the natural impulse to mate with people who are similar to you. Studies actually report strong attractions between brothers and sisters (or half-brothers and sisters) who never met each other previously and only came together by chance later in life without knowing their blood relationship. A pop culture example of this can be seen in the TV Series "Sons of Anarchy" where one character experiences intense physical attraction to the half-sister he never knew about.
At any rate, congenital defects are significantly higher in sibling breeding, only roughly double with first cousins, and negligible relative to complete strangers in 2nd cousins and beyond. There's a strong argument for society to ban sibling unions, a fairly weak but plausible argument for denying first-cousins, and no scientific basis for banning 2nd cousins or beyond.
Hell, we have enough problems keeping two people together in a stable configuration. Adding a third person to the mixes triples the number of relationships to maintain and keep stable.
Locke and Demontheses were full of intellectual irony.
This is why they cut out Locke and Demosthenes from the movie. The alt-text says it all:
Dear Peter Wiggin: This letter is to inform you that you have received enough upvotes on your reddit comments to become president of the world. Please be at the UN tomorrow at 8:00 sharp.
Not that I blame Card for it in the book. In 1984/85 it would've been next to impossible to foresee exactly how the net would shake out. His scenario seemed vaguely plausible at the time.
Why did you write "killing U.S. citizens"? Why not "killing humans"?
If you believe that US citizens are worth more than any other human beings and should have rights others shouldn't have because of the circumstance of their birth, you're part of the problem.
It's not that U.S. citizens are worth more, and it is indeed troubling when there's non-military action, extrajudicial killing of any human being, but somehow it feels even more egregious when a government is doing that to it's own people. Not from a value perspective, but from a "hey you're supposed to be on our side" angle.
From the way I read it he didn't have duties to mess with the backup, but because they made the sa password blank for the programmer's convenience he had full access to the backup jobs. Since in his mind the backup wasn't nearly as important as the program he was writing, he turned off the backup jobs to "save cycles" for his own program to run better/faster/whatever. And none of this was the DBA's fault since he protested it, but management shoved it through anyway.
There is a big difference between "I think I'll shoot up a school" and "I think I'll shoot up XYZ school because they treated me like crap when I went there". And even the second statement, absent actual tangible steps having been taken toward that end, should not even have charges brought against the young man. I hope there's more to this story than is presented, because otherwise every authority figure involved is a moron.
The new task manager is bad ass actually. It even breaks down percent utilization of disk I/O capacity. I wish it was available in 7, but it's not enough to get me to move and put up with Win8's other "quirks".
That's great, I still want the option to use a start menu. You know, the familiar interface that everyone has been using since ~1995? Let people transition on their own. Don't make pronouncements from on high about how this is better and trust me you'll like it eventually.
The problem is that Microsoft took functionality away and replaced it with something that, at best, requires retraining. It would have been very simple to include the start screen but have an option where users could switch it off and use the start menu instead. Rather than let users choose, Microsoft flipped the bird to all of its users (especially those in enterprise environments) and dictated that their new interface be used. Of course all this did was cause a cottage industry to spring up of vendors offering start-menu replacements that shouldn't have been needed in the first place.
I'm offended by the fact that Microsoft basically is saying "fuck you use our new interface". I'm not offended by the start screen as an option as such, I'm offended by the fact that it's forced on us and there's no way within the base OS (no third party add-ons) to get the original functionality back that I'm used to having.
That's great for you. I don't use Windows like that and the lack of a start menu is a major annoyance for my workflow. Judging by market penetration I would estimate that I'm a part of at least a large minority of users. I suppose I would be singing a different tune if it was replaced with something more functional, but it wasn't. At best I'm back to a Windows 3.1 Program Manager and well, there's a reason I stopped using Win3.1.
Bigamist relationships are either inherently unstable or stable only due to the utter subjugation of the majority of the participants.
If you have four people in an equal arrangement then you have 6 relationships to maintain (K4 graph, 6 connections), whereas with a couple you only have 1 (K2 graph, one connection). Now if you subjugate the other three partners you have a hub and spoke model, which makes it a tree with 4 nodes and there's exactly three relationships to maintain. This would ordinarily imply a linear increase in maintenance difficulty, but since we're assuming subjugation (i.e. only the man matters and the wives are subservient to him) you only have to worry about the center holding and it approximates the difficulty in a single relationship.
Now either one of these models is not conducive to the stable environment desired for the raising of children. Either the construct is extremely likely to break up (equal treatment) or the kids are taught that women are to be treated like shit (subjugation model).
To examine the problem with the equal treatment model we turn to statistics: if the divorce rate is 50% and we can assume that holds for every relationship in the equality model then we have a 50% chance of divorce with two people, but with three there are three relationships to maintain (AB, AC, BC) so the odds of divorce are (1.0 - (0.5^3)) = 87.5%. With 4 people there are 6 relationships so the odds are (1.0 - (0.5^6)) = 98.44% and with 5 people there are 10 relationships so the odds increase to 99.90% that someone will leave. You quickly approach a virtual certainty of instability. And let's not even get started on how custody would be managed.
Oh and one last one: if you do somehow attain a meta-stability you end up turning marriage into a corporation with an indefinite lifespan. There is no inheritance or passing on of possessions because the marriage never ends. And because personal property laws are all predicated on the theory that the marriage union ends at some point, you have another massive legal headache with inheritance and perpetual ownership.
This is a bit of a tangent because it doesn't really concern the immediate issue of gay marriage, but if we keep on with the redefining this is most likely the next debate to be had. And this one has some solid fact-based arguments against it.
Any minister of any church must be recognized by the state as having a legitimate claim to ordination before any action they take towards performing a marriage ceremony (which is all it is, a meaningless ceremony) and then signing the legal document (the actual thing that makes a marriage legal).
You will find that the bar for that is extraordinarily low. First amendment and all that. And marriage is one of those things that are generally recognized across national boundaries. If you get married in say, Russia, and then one partner comes to the United States, the U.S. recognizes the marriage as valid and legal.
Harm to society does trump freedom though. Otherwise you would be free to drink and drive, stab random strangers, throw rocks off of bridges, steal from other people, and any one of a number of other crimes that you may think up. We join and form societies for the protections they afford. We come up with rules that we can generally agree on and everyone is on the whole better off for it. For the most part when something only hurts society indirectly because it hurts or may hurt you personally and only you then we allow it (HFCS, drinking without driving, & reality TV as you mentioned). But when those behaviors hurt other people - drinking AND driving, harmful food additives that you lie about the harm they cause, or reality TV that ends up killing one out of ten contestants, then we say no that's not okay and put a stop to it. Society can only exist because freedom is not absolute. And mistakes will be made - it's people who are running things so they will err to one side or the other. On the balance though the pressure coming from both sides keeps things on a pretty even keel.
As I understand it that's how Mexico handles it. You register your marriage license with the state and they don't give a flying all-frig about who you're being joined to (limit two in a marriage though), but if you want to get married by the Catholic church in accordance with your religious beliefs, well you have to follow the Catholic rules on that. It always made more sense to me for that to be the way it was handled in the U.S. - fix the label, call everything a civil union and if you want it stamped as a marriage then let the church do that. Though I guess "will you civil union me" doesn't have the same ring to it though.
The Bible says your wife's servant should sire you an heir if your wife can't.
No it doesn't and the consequences for Abraham doing that were pretty damaging to the Jewish people down through history. Modern day Arabs trace their lineage back to Ishmael and the debate over who are the "true sons" of Abraham has been one of the most fracturing ideological dichotomies in the present day. This split, you will note, is an actual fact regardless of whether or not you acknowledge the underlying story as true or not. In either case I don't think any of the Abrahamic religions would claim that "your wife's servant should sire you an heir if your wife can't" is the moral to be taken from that story.
I rather liked the sci-fi "Fermi Answer" given in Ian Douglas's Heritage/Legacy/Inheritance trilogies: a xenophobic race with a massive Darwinian survival complex decimates every other species that gets close to star travel technology and literally bombards them back into the stone age.
Or perhaps even more likely there's just nothing to detect out there because their "indistinguishable from magic" technology doesn't operate in ways we can detect and all of their EMF shells from bygone eras passed us long ago. And they just have nothing to say to a bunch of primitives like us.
Optimizing CUDA is almost, but not quite, as arcane as optimizing assembly code by hand. It requires a deep knowledge of the underlying architecture. The addressing, the memory read patterns, and the role of each of the tiers of memory and the cost of moving between tiers, the size restrictions on each buffer, and how to coalesce the whole mess into a coherent answer. I once got a 30% performance increase by offsetting the addressing on my memory buffers so that they didn't all start on 16-byte boundaries. It allowed the data to be read in parallel and avoided collisions from the different processes trying to access the same block at the same time. The problem is most programmers aren't particularly hardware oriented, so CUDA comes with a steep learning curve if you want to do it well.
That is a fact. I was willing to put up with Sprint's craptacular 2g network where I live, since I was mostly using it for voice at the time, but a handful of issues with my wife's phone and we packed up and went to Verizon. Lo and behold! Friendly service, no dropped calls, no weird echo-feedback on the line, competent 3g speeds, and once their share-everything plan came down the pipe, reasonable pricing! I will never go back to Sprint. What good is unlimited data anyway when your "4g" connection only lets you maybe download at 3g speeds anyway.
More to the point with a detention like that where you are not free to go but not under arrest they also typically cannot transport you. However the second you get the "you are not free to go" then your immediate response needs to be "then I am invoking my right to remain silent" (you may be required to identify yourself, depends on jurisdiction). If they then proceed to Mirandize you, then the only other thing out of your mouth will then be "I want a lawyer".
Certain predators get triggered when you try to flee. Its better to say in a very soft voice "Am I free to go now officer" while backing away.
No, no, no. Do not take a step away until you have been informed that you are free to go. One step after they tell you to stop and you can easily find yourself in trouble. If you are in fact under arrest then you have just resisted. If you are being detained then there's usually other laws you're running afoul of. Otherwise you are right about speaking in a soft voice and not being confrontational.
It wouldn't take much to cross-contaminate it and make it utterly worthless though. It's hard enough to filter out one reference sample (victim) from the perp's DNA to get a clean read. And labs have to take some pretty extraordinary measures to make sure none of the suspect's reference sample mixes with the crime scene sample to avoid a false positive. Throw a random mix of a bunch of other people's DNA in there and you would probably mess it up enough to make the sample worthless. Granted, I wouldn't want to bet 20-30 years of my life on it, but I guess if you were going to commit a crime anyway it wouldn't hurt in trying to cover up your tracks.
Harsh penalties for possessing DNA avoidance systems in 3...2...
Slashdot Mirror
Not anymore. Now BB10 uses ActiveSync with standard SSL-based encryption for its emails.
Generally people are psychologically unattracted to other people that they were raised with, this works as a safeguard against inbreeding in human populations and helps to counter the natural impulse to mate with people who are similar to you. Studies actually report strong attractions between brothers and sisters (or half-brothers and sisters) who never met each other previously and only came together by chance later in life without knowing their blood relationship. A pop culture example of this can be seen in the TV Series "Sons of Anarchy" where one character experiences intense physical attraction to the half-sister he never knew about.
At any rate, congenital defects are significantly higher in sibling breeding, only roughly double with first cousins, and negligible relative to complete strangers in 2nd cousins and beyond. There's a strong argument for society to ban sibling unions, a fairly weak but plausible argument for denying first-cousins, and no scientific basis for banning 2nd cousins or beyond.
Hell, we have enough problems keeping two people together in a stable configuration. Adding a third person to the mixes triples the number of relationships to maintain and keep stable.
Locke and Demontheses were full of intellectual irony.
This is why they cut out Locke and Demosthenes from the movie. The alt-text says it all:
Dear Peter Wiggin: This letter is to inform you that you have received enough upvotes on your reddit comments to become president of the world. Please be at the UN tomorrow at 8:00 sharp.
Not that I blame Card for it in the book. In 1984/85 it would've been next to impossible to foresee exactly how the net would shake out. His scenario seemed vaguely plausible at the time.
Followed by William Gibson for Neuromancer - which basically invented the cyberpunk genre.
All well and good, but how are you going to get exports out of the country in the first place when the U.S. Navy decides to blockade your ports?
Why did you write "killing U.S. citizens"? Why not "killing humans"?
If you believe that US citizens are worth more than any other human beings and should have rights others shouldn't have because of the circumstance of their birth, you're part of the problem.
It's not that U.S. citizens are worth more, and it is indeed troubling when there's non-military action, extrajudicial killing of any human being, but somehow it feels even more egregious when a government is doing that to it's own people. Not from a value perspective, but from a "hey you're supposed to be on our side" angle.
From the way I read it he didn't have duties to mess with the backup, but because they made the sa password blank for the programmer's convenience he had full access to the backup jobs. Since in his mind the backup wasn't nearly as important as the program he was writing, he turned off the backup jobs to "save cycles" for his own program to run better/faster/whatever. And none of this was the DBA's fault since he protested it, but management shoved it through anyway.
There is a big difference between "I think I'll shoot up a school" and "I think I'll shoot up XYZ school because they treated me like crap when I went there". And even the second statement, absent actual tangible steps having been taken toward that end, should not even have charges brought against the young man. I hope there's more to this story than is presented, because otherwise every authority figure involved is a moron.
The new task manager is bad ass actually. It even breaks down percent utilization of disk I/O capacity. I wish it was available in 7, but it's not enough to get me to move and put up with Win8's other "quirks".
That's great, I still want the option to use a start menu. You know, the familiar interface that everyone has been using since ~1995? Let people transition on their own. Don't make pronouncements from on high about how this is better and trust me you'll like it eventually.
The problem is that Microsoft took functionality away and replaced it with something that, at best, requires retraining. It would have been very simple to include the start screen but have an option where users could switch it off and use the start menu instead. Rather than let users choose, Microsoft flipped the bird to all of its users (especially those in enterprise environments) and dictated that their new interface be used. Of course all this did was cause a cottage industry to spring up of vendors offering start-menu replacements that shouldn't have been needed in the first place .
I'm offended by the fact that Microsoft basically is saying "fuck you use our new interface". I'm not offended by the start screen as an option as such, I'm offended by the fact that it's forced on us and there's no way within the base OS (no third party add-ons) to get the original functionality back that I'm used to having.
That's great for you. I don't use Windows like that and the lack of a start menu is a major annoyance for my workflow. Judging by market penetration I would estimate that I'm a part of at least a large minority of users. I suppose I would be singing a different tune if it was replaced with something more functional, but it wasn't. At best I'm back to a Windows 3.1 Program Manager and well, there's a reason I stopped using Win3.1.
Bigamist relationships are either inherently unstable or stable only due to the utter subjugation of the majority of the participants.
If you have four people in an equal arrangement then you have 6 relationships to maintain (K4 graph, 6 connections), whereas with a couple you only have 1 (K2 graph, one connection). Now if you subjugate the other three partners you have a hub and spoke model, which makes it a tree with 4 nodes and there's exactly three relationships to maintain. This would ordinarily imply a linear increase in maintenance difficulty, but since we're assuming subjugation (i.e. only the man matters and the wives are subservient to him) you only have to worry about the center holding and it approximates the difficulty in a single relationship.
Now either one of these models is not conducive to the stable environment desired for the raising of children. Either the construct is extremely likely to break up (equal treatment) or the kids are taught that women are to be treated like shit (subjugation model).
To examine the problem with the equal treatment model we turn to statistics: if the divorce rate is 50% and we can assume that holds for every relationship in the equality model then we have a 50% chance of divorce with two people, but with three there are three relationships to maintain (AB, AC, BC) so the odds of divorce are (1.0 - (0.5^3)) = 87.5%. With 4 people there are 6 relationships so the odds are (1.0 - (0.5^6)) = 98.44% and with 5 people there are 10 relationships so the odds increase to 99.90% that someone will leave. You quickly approach a virtual certainty of instability. And let's not even get started on how custody would be managed.
Oh and one last one: if you do somehow attain a meta-stability you end up turning marriage into a corporation with an indefinite lifespan. There is no inheritance or passing on of possessions because the marriage never ends. And because personal property laws are all predicated on the theory that the marriage union ends at some point, you have another massive legal headache with inheritance and perpetual ownership.
This is a bit of a tangent because it doesn't really concern the immediate issue of gay marriage, but if we keep on with the redefining this is most likely the next debate to be had. And this one has some solid fact-based arguments against it.
Any minister of any church must be recognized by the state as having a legitimate claim to ordination before any action they take towards performing a marriage ceremony (which is all it is, a meaningless ceremony) and then signing the legal document (the actual thing that makes a marriage legal).
You will find that the bar for that is extraordinarily low. First amendment and all that. And marriage is one of those things that are generally recognized across national boundaries. If you get married in say, Russia, and then one partner comes to the United States, the U.S. recognizes the marriage as valid and legal.
Harm to society does trump freedom though. Otherwise you would be free to drink and drive, stab random strangers, throw rocks off of bridges, steal from other people, and any one of a number of other crimes that you may think up. We join and form societies for the protections they afford. We come up with rules that we can generally agree on and everyone is on the whole better off for it. For the most part when something only hurts society indirectly because it hurts or may hurt you personally and only you then we allow it (HFCS, drinking without driving, & reality TV as you mentioned). But when those behaviors hurt other people - drinking AND driving, harmful food additives that you lie about the harm they cause, or reality TV that ends up killing one out of ten contestants, then we say no that's not okay and put a stop to it. Society can only exist because freedom is not absolute. And mistakes will be made - it's people who are running things so they will err to one side or the other. On the balance though the pressure coming from both sides keeps things on a pretty even keel.
As I understand it that's how Mexico handles it. You register your marriage license with the state and they don't give a flying all-frig about who you're being joined to (limit two in a marriage though), but if you want to get married by the Catholic church in accordance with your religious beliefs, well you have to follow the Catholic rules on that. It always made more sense to me for that to be the way it was handled in the U.S. - fix the label, call everything a civil union and if you want it stamped as a marriage then let the church do that. Though I guess "will you civil union me" doesn't have the same ring to it though.
The Bible says your wife's servant should sire you an heir if your wife can't.
No it doesn't and the consequences for Abraham doing that were pretty damaging to the Jewish people down through history. Modern day Arabs trace their lineage back to Ishmael and the debate over who are the "true sons" of Abraham has been one of the most fracturing ideological dichotomies in the present day. This split, you will note, is an actual fact regardless of whether or not you acknowledge the underlying story as true or not. In either case I don't think any of the Abrahamic religions would claim that "your wife's servant should sire you an heir if your wife can't" is the moral to be taken from that story.
I rather liked the sci-fi "Fermi Answer" given in Ian Douglas's Heritage/Legacy/Inheritance trilogies: a xenophobic race with a massive Darwinian survival complex decimates every other species that gets close to star travel technology and literally bombards them back into the stone age.
Or perhaps even more likely there's just nothing to detect out there because their "indistinguishable from magic" technology doesn't operate in ways we can detect and all of their EMF shells from bygone eras passed us long ago. And they just have nothing to say to a bunch of primitives like us.
Optimizing CUDA is almost, but not quite, as arcane as optimizing assembly code by hand. It requires a deep knowledge of the underlying architecture. The addressing, the memory read patterns, and the role of each of the tiers of memory and the cost of moving between tiers, the size restrictions on each buffer, and how to coalesce the whole mess into a coherent answer. I once got a 30% performance increase by offsetting the addressing on my memory buffers so that they didn't all start on 16-byte boundaries. It allowed the data to be read in parallel and avoided collisions from the different processes trying to access the same block at the same time. The problem is most programmers aren't particularly hardware oriented, so CUDA comes with a steep learning curve if you want to do it well.
That is a fact. I was willing to put up with Sprint's craptacular 2g network where I live, since I was mostly using it for voice at the time, but a handful of issues with my wife's phone and we packed up and went to Verizon. Lo and behold! Friendly service, no dropped calls, no weird echo-feedback on the line, competent 3g speeds, and once their share-everything plan came down the pipe, reasonable pricing! I will never go back to Sprint. What good is unlimited data anyway when your "4g" connection only lets you maybe download at 3g speeds anyway.
More to the point with a detention like that where you are not free to go but not under arrest they also typically cannot transport you. However the second you get the "you are not free to go" then your immediate response needs to be "then I am invoking my right to remain silent" (you may be required to identify yourself, depends on jurisdiction). If they then proceed to Mirandize you, then the only other thing out of your mouth will then be "I want a lawyer".
Certain predators get triggered when you try to flee. Its better to say in a very soft voice "Am I free to go now officer" while backing away.
No, no, no. Do not take a step away until you have been informed that you are free to go. One step after they tell you to stop and you can easily find yourself in trouble. If you are in fact under arrest then you have just resisted. If you are being detained then there's usually other laws you're running afoul of. Otherwise you are right about speaking in a soft voice and not being confrontational.
It wouldn't take much to cross-contaminate it and make it utterly worthless though. It's hard enough to filter out one reference sample (victim) from the perp's DNA to get a clean read. And labs have to take some pretty extraordinary measures to make sure none of the suspect's reference sample mixes with the crime scene sample to avoid a false positive. Throw a random mix of a bunch of other people's DNA in there and you would probably mess it up enough to make the sample worthless. Granted, I wouldn't want to bet 20-30 years of my life on it, but I guess if you were going to commit a crime anyway it wouldn't hurt in trying to cover up your tracks.
Harsh penalties for possessing DNA avoidance systems in 3...2...