You're assuming someone reliable has actually done even a tiny bit of research into it and is not merely repeating the shocking news headlines they keep reading.
I checked in to it, that statistic tends to be reached by comparing the earnings of all college graduates.
And even if you look in to similar fields, the choices people make, OMG!.. affect how much they make. Let's look at education. I had a lot of female teachers back in school, but by far the majority of the elementary school teachers were women -- I've heard that tends to be the rule rather than the exception. More women want to teach little kids than men. Elementary school teachers tend to not make as much as high school teachers. There you go. The same field, but women make less in that field than men. NOT as a result of any sexism, but because of the choices those women made as to what type of work they enjoyed!
I have never personally encountered a woman making less than a man for the same job. Ever. 20 years ago? Sure. Today? No, no you won't find that -- it's bad business practice, as the second she says "Lawyer" she wins the case and reaps massive rewards. It's only talked about today to make men feel bad for having penises.
Which is a load of bullshit -- I can not recall a single instance during school where a female was ever discouraged from any math or science pursuits, but many where they were encouraged just as much as any boy would've been. My sister was pretty good with math and science -- growing up I was in advanced math classes the whole time and would teach her things 3 years before she'd actually get to them in school. Guess what, she got to college and got a Biology degree.
Ever notice how that fact is generally never mentioned when that old tired statistic about women grads making less than their male counterparts is thrown about?
I just love all this bullshit. "Women grads are only making 80% of what their male counterparts make! CLEARLY SEXISM, not differences in the fields they enter!"
Some day maybe people will realize this is a horrendous misuse of statistics... but I won't hold my breath.
Why should we ASSUME that life was magically poofed into existence, or that anything at all was? The only reasonable thing to do is to trudge along and explore as far as we possibly can without resorting to "AND THEN MAGIC HAPPENS" -- which is what creationism, ID et al, all resort to. If there is a way it could have happened naturally, we should do our best to discover all bits of knowledge we can. It may not have happened that way, but if that is the way the world can / does operate we're better off knowing that.
Oh, so far as "religion started science!" -- somewhat true. In Europe, the only people who could *read* for a good hunk of its history were nobility and clergy. scientific inquiry began really as an attempt to better understand this magnificent world god gave us. the problems started when they began to understand that things weren't exactly how the church and the bible said they were -- and OF COURSE the church and bible are infallible in all things, so science must be evil.
And this is where it's taken us. To a pre-Enlightenment sort of place where science is only a Faustian deal -- you can learn, certainly, but it will cost you your soul.
We outgrew that shit a long time ago, for fuck's sake the bible contains TWO CREATION STORIES. HOW CAN YOU FUCKING TAKE IT LITERALLY WHEN IT CONTAINS TWO CONTRADICTORY STORIES! OBVIOUSLY IT'S NOT MEANT TO BE TAKEN LITERALLY, OR IT WOULDN'T CONTRADICT ITSELF.
Evolution is a theory -- with strong evidence backing it -- formed through the observation of life, both fossil and living (and more recently we've thrown DNA into the mix and blah blah blah).
Creationism, ID, whatever -- these are BELIEFS based not on evidence but instead on a book. A very old book, and you know what, if we assume it was divinely inspired.. what makes you think it was supposed to be taken as a statement of fact in the first place?
And if we are to give credence to a book simply because a lot of people believe in it, shouldn't we also teach creation stories of other faiths? Give a good reason why not -- both have the same amount of proof (that is, a story passed down through many generations). Which to pick! There is absolutely no way to discern which creation stories are more or less likely to be true aside from which one comes from the faith you yourself believe.
Here's the difference in a nutshell.
With evolution, we start with a bunch of things. We look at those things, we figure out how they're related, what may have happened over time to them. We form a belief that this is what happens to living things over time by observation. That belief is not static and always open to reinterpretation if new evidence is discovered.
With creationism, we start with a belief. We look at this belief, and we figure out how we can write off anything that contridicts it as false. That belief is static and unchanging.
What sort of thinking would YOU want your children to hold -- would you want them to be inquisitive and adaptive, or entrenched and inflexible?
To observe something, and not understand it -- that is human. To observe something, and not understand it, and make attempts through observation and experimentation to gain understanding of it -- that is scientific. To observe something, and not understand it, and attribute it to a supernatural diety and go back to mucking around in the dirt -- that is what the Creationists are supporting.
The second you bring in "AND THEN MAGIC HAPPENS!" and end the discussion there, you kill scientific inquisitiveness and progress.
Not one single bit of science disproved the EXISTENCE of god; much science does prove that many things can occur without "AND THEN MAGIC HAPPENS!" godly intervention. Or would we be better off looking at evidence of evolution, laughing and writing it off as a trick of the devil? Perhaps we should do the same with the floods and the winds, or global warming, or those spooky charlatan's tricks we call computers?
This is essentially just a rehashing of the old Earth-centered Universe argument. It wasn't true. Religious folk wanted it to be true. I mean, heck if it wasn't true -- what sort of god would do that? This madman is saying WE orbit the SUN?
Unfortunately, what you want to be true doesn't change what is actually true.
I don't think anybody today would make the mistake of thinking that knowing the earth orbits the sun is a grievous blow to faith, and it is strictly black and white -- either you are a dirty atheist and the sun is the center of the universe and shame on you for looking, or you are a true believer who KNOWS the truth and why should I even bother to investigate what I already know?
Again, one leads to the progress and advancement of knowledge of the human race... the other leads to utter stagnation.
Because if we just threw our hands up in the air any time we did not understand something and proclaimed loudly "GOD DID IT!" simply because we did not yet understand it, we'd never make any advancements in knowledge.
Maybe god DID do it, but to simply arrive at such a conclusion without any investigation into the details or any attempt to explain it via understood processes is.. well it's terribly primitive and you may as well go back to worshipping the gods of the flood and the wind to ensure they treat you kindly.
What, you say? "But kreigaffe, we KNOW that flood is caused by this and that, and wind is caused by that and this!"
Well, I'm just making a guess here, but at some point I think someone sat up and said "You know, what if all this flooding and wind isn't created out of nothingness by some being that we cannot experience? What if there's a perfectly reasonable way this could be happening that doesn't depend on supernatural powers?"
Lo and behold, he was right -- natural phenomena cause floods and wind. Of course, this meant it was no longer necessary to appease the gods of the flood and the winds; perhaps you're not wrong to feel regret for the loss of tradition.
However, that's how humanity progresses into the future. And it never would have happened if someone told that guy to sit down and shut up because EVERYONE KNOWS that only gods could cause flooding and wind. DUH STUPIDHEAD!
I'd mod you up had I not already posted, because you're right.
Maybe.
That is, everybody thought you were right for a good... 15 years? How old is the commercial, public internet these days?
Then ISPs began blocking sites from competitors, people they don't like, traffic from programs they don't like, all for some clever reason that doesn't sound like "LOL BECAUSE WE CAN". They're really just testing the waters with all of that, that's why a net neutrality law would be pretty nice and settle the whole thing once and for all -- and tell the ISPs that they are just there to send 1's and 0's back and forth across their lines and to get the hell out of the business of deciding which 1's and which 0's they want to allow.
I'm half with you on that, and half with the government.
they'd never have established some bullshit "free speech zone" had protesters not made it a habit to intentionally create great disturbances in the travel and commerce of others.
Stop physically blocking people from doing what they want to do. That's fucking annoying. That gets you thrown into fenced-in areas where you can cry about Cause X all you want and nobody has to worry about you interfering with people trying to get from Point A to Point B, or you blocking the legal movement of goods.
In other words? Free speech zones were created because protesters had no clue what "free speech" means and thought it meant "Free (to be as obnoxious as it takes to make people notice me, up to and including violating their rights and disrupting lawful commerce)"
PS: If you're going to throw out the whole "fascist" label, I feel it necessary to point out that large mobs of people assembling in public and disrupting lawful travel of people and goods is, in fact, a page straight from the fascist playbook. Some of them wore blue shirts, some of them wore brown shirts. Google it!
Zimbabwe's a particularly good example; they once had a fairly decent country. Grew enough food for themselves and enough to export to other starving African countries.
Let's solve that, seize all the farms, hand them to people who don't know a damned thing about farming or owning a business, let them rip up the irrigation and sell it as scrap metal and boom! you've got a few people making a lot of money, one time, rather than a good bit year by year, and instead of a fed populous exporting food you've got a starving populous begging to import food.
I'd wager that Zimbabwe ALONE is more responsible for increased demand on global food supplies than biofuels.. so stop cryin about *that*.
I was being generous -- I'd hate to throw 4 of the worst wars of the 20th/21st century ALL at the feet of the Democrats, after all!
No, Iraq doesn't figure in to that. We still had more men MIA in Korea than we have dead in Iraq, and hopefully Iraq isn't going to wind up giving us a new North Korea to deal with for the decades to come (nope, we're dealing with Iran *right now*... ohboy)
But yes.. Democrat Presidents have a knack at getting us in to wars. Hell, Clinton got us into a lot of limited action / policing activities all over the globe, and he threw hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cruise missiles into Iraq all the damned time with practically no effect whatsoever (remember when he shot something like 150 tomahawks at a powdered milk factory because they were making biological weapons there? LOL AMIRITE?)
You won't be seeing any DX10-only games for a few years.
Expect them to say "Win7" somewhere on the box, in other words.
Lots of people didn't upgrade to Vista. I didn't. It's one of the strange things about gamers -- they tend to be quick to adopt new hardware, but new SOFTWARE? Some are.. many aren't. Good lord, were you playing any Valve games when they upgraded to Steam? MONTHS went by and servers remained on the old VAC system -- people didn't want to fiddle with what worked. Same goes for Vista. It launched and all the reports had awesome phrases like... driver issues, massive slowdown, not working, and oh can't play. Probably only 1/4 of the guys I know who play games often, have Vista.... and some of them work for Microsoft, so that almost doesn't count.
There's also the fact that DX10 requires TWO upgrades -- a new video card AND a new OS. And not just any video card.. in order to really get any use out of DX10 for anything more than taking pretty static screenshots, it's gotta be a GOOD video card. Very expensive. Game companies realize this and have and will continue offering support for WinXP / DX9 until the market is saturated with DX10-able computers and video cards. It'll be a while. Good rule of thumb? Assume someone bought a new computer 6 months before Vista was released. When that computer plus a mid-to-top range DX9 card will need to be upgraded to play new video games, THAT is when games will start transitioning to DX10 -- though at that point they would still want DX9 support. Rather than DX9 games with DX10 support.
Game designers love new technology, sure -- but they like having an audience large enough to actually make money, too.
I've not bought a handle for maybe 6 years now, forgot it was a liter and a fifth and not two fifths (though that would make sense, two fifths isn't a half)
Either way, a handle isn't actually a half gallon, which would be about 1.89L
Dodge Dart? Camaro? Those are dick-substitute cars, they themselves do not look like a giant phallus.
Go click that link. I'll drive a Dart or a Camaro happily -- but that car in the GGP's post is a thin vertical grill away from being the physical manifestation of the Ambiguously Gay Duo's car.
What the hell crazy world are you living in that you need to reference Eminem when talking about a fifth of liquor.
Eminem sucks, and anyone who's ever been near anyone drinking knows a fifth is not really an honest fifth of liquid, it's 750mL. And a handle's not really a half gallon, it's 1.5L. And a pint isn't really a pint, it's 375mL, which is the most wrong of them all since it's about 100mL shy of an actual US pint.
Slashdot Mirror
You're assuming someone reliable has actually done even a tiny bit of research into it and is not merely repeating the shocking news headlines they keep reading.
I checked in to it, that statistic tends to be reached by comparing the earnings of all college graduates.
And even if you look in to similar fields, the choices people make, OMG!.. affect how much they make. Let's look at education. I had a lot of female teachers back in school, but by far the majority of the elementary school teachers were women -- I've heard that tends to be the rule rather than the exception. More women want to teach little kids than men. Elementary school teachers tend to not make as much as high school teachers. There you go. The same field, but women make less in that field than men. NOT as a result of any sexism, but because of the choices those women made as to what type of work they enjoyed!
I have never personally encountered a woman making less than a man for the same job. Ever. 20 years ago? Sure. Today? No, no you won't find that -- it's bad business practice, as the second she says "Lawyer" she wins the case and reaps massive rewards. It's only talked about today to make men feel bad for having penises.
Which is a load of bullshit -- I can not recall a single instance during school where a female was ever discouraged from any math or science pursuits, but many where they were encouraged just as much as any boy would've been.
My sister was pretty good with math and science -- growing up I was in advanced math classes the whole time and would teach her things 3 years before she'd actually get to them in school. Guess what, she got to college and got a Biology degree.
Ever notice how that fact is generally never mentioned when that old tired statistic about women grads making less than their male counterparts is thrown about?
I just love all this bullshit. "Women grads are only making 80% of what their male counterparts make! CLEARLY SEXISM, not differences in the fields they enter!"
Some day maybe people will realize this is a horrendous misuse of statistics... but I won't hold my breath.
It's not about what trouble you could cause by seeing it --
it's just to remind you that we are, in fact, better than you.
That's just how we roll.
Ha. Ha. Nice slip-in with the Heston there, but I'm afraid Moses himself was not gay.
I believe he merely swallowed a worm with the proper credentials.
Prince Of The Universe, *Sucka*.
Don't forget, it also offers flying cocks.
Except the problem isn't trying to prove you're worth more than an Indian worker.
It's trying to prove you're worth more than FIVE Indian workers.
Why should we ASSUME that life was magically poofed into existence, or that anything at all was? The only reasonable thing to do is to trudge along and explore as far as we possibly can without resorting to "AND THEN MAGIC HAPPENS" -- which is what creationism, ID et al, all resort to.
If there is a way it could have happened naturally, we should do our best to discover all bits of knowledge we can.
It may not have happened that way, but if that is the way the world can / does operate we're better off knowing that.
Oh, so far as "religion started science!" -- somewhat true. In Europe, the only people who could *read* for a good hunk of its history were nobility and clergy. scientific inquiry began really as an attempt to better understand this magnificent world god gave us. the problems started when they began to understand that things weren't exactly how the church and the bible said they were -- and OF COURSE the church and bible are infallible in all things, so science must be evil.
And this is where it's taken us. To a pre-Enlightenment sort of place where science is only a Faustian deal -- you can learn, certainly, but it will cost you your soul.
We outgrew that shit a long time ago, for fuck's sake the bible contains TWO CREATION STORIES. HOW CAN YOU FUCKING TAKE IT LITERALLY WHEN IT CONTAINS TWO CONTRADICTORY STORIES! OBVIOUSLY IT'S NOT MEANT TO BE TAKEN LITERALLY, OR IT WOULDN'T CONTRADICT ITSELF.
Here's the difference.
Evolution is a theory -- with strong evidence backing it -- formed through the observation of life, both fossil and living (and more recently we've thrown DNA into the mix and blah blah blah).
Creationism, ID, whatever -- these are BELIEFS based not on evidence but instead on a book. A very old book, and you know what, if we assume it was divinely inspired.. what makes you think it was supposed to be taken as a statement of fact in the first place?
And if we are to give credence to a book simply because a lot of people believe in it, shouldn't we also teach creation stories of other faiths? Give a good reason why not -- both have the same amount of proof (that is, a story passed down through many generations). Which to pick! There is absolutely no way to discern which creation stories are more or less likely to be true aside from which one comes from the faith you yourself believe.
Here's the difference in a nutshell.
With evolution, we start with a bunch of things. We look at those things, we figure out how they're related, what may have happened over time to them. We form a belief that this is what happens to living things over time by observation. That belief is not static and always open to reinterpretation if new evidence is discovered.
With creationism, we start with a belief. We look at this belief, and we figure out how we can write off anything that contridicts it as false. That belief is static and unchanging.
What sort of thinking would YOU want your children to hold -- would you want them to be inquisitive and adaptive, or entrenched and inflexible?
You missed my point.
To observe something, and not understand it -- that is human.
To observe something, and not understand it, and make attempts through observation and experimentation to gain understanding of it -- that is scientific.
To observe something, and not understand it, and attribute it to a supernatural diety and go back to mucking around in the dirt -- that is what the Creationists are supporting.
The second you bring in "AND THEN MAGIC HAPPENS!" and end the discussion there, you kill scientific inquisitiveness and progress.
Not one single bit of science disproved the EXISTENCE of god; much science does prove that many things can occur without "AND THEN MAGIC HAPPENS!" godly intervention. Or would we be better off looking at evidence of evolution, laughing and writing it off as a trick of the devil? Perhaps we should do the same with the floods and the winds, or global warming, or those spooky charlatan's tricks we call computers?
This is essentially just a rehashing of the old Earth-centered Universe argument.
It wasn't true. Religious folk wanted it to be true. I mean, heck if it wasn't true -- what sort of god would do that? This madman is saying WE orbit the SUN?
Unfortunately, what you want to be true doesn't change what is actually true.
I don't think anybody today would make the mistake of thinking that knowing the earth orbits the sun is a grievous blow to faith, and it is strictly black and white -- either you are a dirty atheist and the sun is the center of the universe and shame on you for looking, or you are a true believer who KNOWS the truth and why should I even bother to investigate what I already know?
Again, one leads to the progress and advancement of knowledge of the human race... the other leads to utter stagnation.
Because if we just threw our hands up in the air any time we did not understand something and proclaimed loudly "GOD DID IT!" simply because we did not yet understand it, we'd never make any advancements in knowledge.
Maybe god DID do it, but to simply arrive at such a conclusion without any investigation into the details or any attempt to explain it via understood processes is.. well it's terribly primitive and you may as well go back to worshipping the gods of the flood and the wind to ensure they treat you kindly.
What, you say? "But kreigaffe, we KNOW that flood is caused by this and that, and wind is caused by that and this!"
Well, I'm just making a guess here, but at some point I think someone sat up and said "You know, what if all this flooding and wind isn't created out of nothingness by some being that we cannot experience? What if there's a perfectly reasonable way this could be happening that doesn't depend on supernatural powers?"
Lo and behold, he was right -- natural phenomena cause floods and wind. Of course, this meant it was no longer necessary to appease the gods of the flood and the winds; perhaps you're not wrong to feel regret for the loss of tradition.
However, that's how humanity progresses into the future. And it never would have happened if someone told that guy to sit down and shut up because EVERYONE KNOWS that only gods could cause flooding and wind. DUH STUPIDHEAD!
At a later trial when they once again need to be laymen, not experts, I assume they will claim to have respecced since this trial.
If you're very quiet, you might be able to hear the WOOSH leaving earth's atmosphere
I'd mod you up had I not already posted, because you're right.
Maybe.
That is, everybody thought you were right for a good... 15 years? How old is the commercial, public internet these days?
Then ISPs began blocking sites from competitors, people they don't like, traffic from programs they don't like, all for some clever reason that doesn't sound like "LOL BECAUSE WE CAN". They're really just testing the waters with all of that, that's why a net neutrality law would be pretty nice and settle the whole thing once and for all -- and tell the ISPs that they are just there to send 1's and 0's back and forth across their lines and to get the hell out of the business of deciding which 1's and which 0's they want to allow.
I'm half with you on that, and half with the government.
they'd never have established some bullshit "free speech zone" had protesters not made it a habit to intentionally create great disturbances in the travel and commerce of others.
Stop physically blocking people from doing what they want to do. That's fucking annoying. That gets you thrown into fenced-in areas where you can cry about Cause X all you want and nobody has to worry about you interfering with people trying to get from Point A to Point B, or you blocking the legal movement of goods.
In other words? Free speech zones were created because protesters had no clue what "free speech" means and thought it meant "Free (to be as obnoxious as it takes to make people notice me, up to and including violating their rights and disrupting lawful commerce)"
PS: If you're going to throw out the whole "fascist" label, I feel it necessary to point out that large mobs of people assembling in public and disrupting lawful travel of people and goods is, in fact, a page straight from the fascist playbook. Some of them wore blue shirts, some of them wore brown shirts. Google it!
Zimbabwe's a particularly good example; they once had a fairly decent country. Grew enough food for themselves and enough to export to other starving African countries.
Let's solve that, seize all the farms, hand them to people who don't know a damned thing about farming or owning a business, let them rip up the irrigation and sell it as scrap metal and boom! you've got a few people making a lot of money, one time, rather than a good bit year by year, and instead of a fed populous exporting food you've got a starving populous begging to import food.
I'd wager that Zimbabwe ALONE is more responsible for increased demand on global food supplies than biofuels.. so stop cryin about *that*.
I was being generous -- I'd hate to throw 4 of the worst wars of the 20th/21st century ALL at the feet of the Democrats, after all!
No, Iraq doesn't figure in to that. We still had more men MIA in Korea than we have dead in Iraq, and hopefully Iraq isn't going to wind up giving us a new North Korea to deal with for the decades to come (nope, we're dealing with Iran *right now*... ohboy)
But yes.. Democrat Presidents have a knack at getting us in to wars. Hell, Clinton got us into a lot of limited action / policing activities all over the globe, and he threw hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cruise missiles into Iraq all the damned time with practically no effect whatsoever (remember when he shot something like 150 tomahawks at a powdered milk factory because they were making biological weapons there? LOL AMIRITE?)
Yes, because we know democrats never start wars.
Except for the Korean War. ... aaannd Vietnam.
I won't count WWII or WWI because our shit done got blown up.
You won't be seeing any DX10-only games for a few years.
Expect them to say "Win7" somewhere on the box, in other words.
Lots of people didn't upgrade to Vista. I didn't. It's one of the strange things about gamers -- they tend to be quick to adopt new hardware, but new SOFTWARE? Some are.. many aren't. Good lord, were you playing any Valve games when they upgraded to Steam? MONTHS went by and servers remained on the old VAC system -- people didn't want to fiddle with what worked.
Same goes for Vista. It launched and all the reports had awesome phrases like... driver issues, massive slowdown, not working, and oh can't play.
Probably only 1/4 of the guys I know who play games often, have Vista.... and some of them work for Microsoft, so that almost doesn't count.
There's also the fact that DX10 requires TWO upgrades -- a new video card AND a new OS. And not just any video card.. in order to really get any use out of DX10 for anything more than taking pretty static screenshots, it's gotta be a GOOD video card.
Very expensive.
Game companies realize this and have and will continue offering support for WinXP / DX9 until the market is saturated with DX10-able computers and video cards. It'll be a while.
Good rule of thumb? Assume someone bought a new computer 6 months before Vista was released.
When that computer plus a mid-to-top range DX9 card will need to be upgraded to play new video games, THAT is when games will start transitioning to DX10 -- though at that point they would still want DX9 support. Rather than DX9 games with DX10 support.
Game designers love new technology, sure -- but they like having an audience large enough to actually make money, too.
Touché
I've not bought a handle for maybe 6 years now, forgot it was a liter and a fifth and not two fifths (though that would make sense, two fifths isn't a half)
Either way, a handle isn't actually a half gallon, which would be about 1.89L
Nono.
Did you click the link in the (now) GGP post?
THAT looks like a giant dick with wheels.
Dodge Dart? Camaro? Those are dick-substitute cars, they themselves do not look like a giant phallus.
Go click that link. I'll drive a Dart or a Camaro happily -- but that car in the GGP's post is a thin vertical grill away from being the physical manifestation of the Ambiguously Gay Duo's car.
What the hell crazy world are you living in that you need to reference Eminem when talking about a fifth of liquor.
Eminem sucks, and anyone who's ever been near anyone drinking knows a fifth is not really an honest fifth of liquid, it's 750mL. And a handle's not really a half gallon, it's 1.5L. And a pint isn't really a pint, it's 375mL, which is the most wrong of them all since it's about 100mL shy of an actual US pint.
I for one am not ever driving a car that looks like a big dildo.