Some people aren't learning.... They simply take whatever their political party happens to push and parrot it. Take intelligent design or global warming for instance.
I like it how the submitter has gone from a report on a reasonably speculative theory about human development, based on possibilities which require further research (according to the researchers quoted in the article), to
"... (I) find it fascinating that somewhere in our lineage ancient humans and neanderthals decided to make love and not war on the ancient plains of Eurasia."
Nice poetry and all that, but you're getting way ahead of yourself. Jumping to conclusions like that doesn't do anybody any favours.
If you actually bothered to read the article, you'd see that he covers what you've said in your last paragraph. In the end, he concludes that the perception of shuffle being non-random is nothing to do with the iPod.
Huh? Of course everyone knows that every new movie gets pirated. The article is just to highlight the sheer cheek of the so-called "sales assistant", and (perhaps as an aside) how that might unwittingly be an interesting reflection on society's attitude to pirated goods. Really, it's just supposed to be funny. Remember that? Humour? That thing that makes your tummy wobble up and down with mirth?
What's more, the submitter's quote "for me [it] was one of the worst operating system experiences that I've ever encountered" is misleading anyway. The sentence straight FTA is "Installing Vista Beta 2, for me was one of the worst operating system experiences that I've ever encountered."
I know what you're saying, and I'm not saying that I like music to be mega-processed or anything. Indeed, take many of today's starlets out of the studio, and all you're left with is a bag of artificial body appendages. It's certainly good to hear things sounding natural and raw, but there's a difference between that and atonal whining. Of course, all this is imho, as with pretty much everything in music. YMMV, etc.
Did you LISTEN to that monstrosity, or just watch it with the volume muted? Surely Eddie V could have invested in an auto-tune plugin for his sequencer, at least...
Seeing as it was his (keyword there) friend I'd strongly take his view point before a total stranger's (keyword here too) opinion.
My point wasn't that you should necessarily take my alternative explanation of what the OP's friend's motivations might have been over his. My point was simply that he seemed to be offering us an explanation of his friend's behaviour that made assumptions that might not have been true. Maybe they were... but that wasn't the point. A challenge was required, so I gave one, and he clarified.
Now I don't want to go off on a rant here.../snip rant
I don't really have much to say in reply to that, other than you're wasting your effort by setting up straw men and knocking them down. I'm a Christian, and I don't have a problem with Harry Potter. I think the crusades were largely deplorable. Killing abortion advocates/surgeons is as bad as abortion itself. Any Christian with a biblically-sound and sincere faith will agree with me on all those points (with the possible exception of Harry Potter, but even then I'd say that any reasonable people among them would keep it as a private view for their own family, and not enforce it on others). You get the idea... you're not attacking Christianity in any useful sense, only a hackneyed caricature of it.
Understood... I suppose I was just testing to see how rigorously you'd thought out what you were saying. Your use of the word "eliding" told me everything I had to know.:-) To be honest, I had to look it up!
For mine, I was also raised in a conservative Christian setting (in a capital city in Australia). Not mega-fundie or anything like that, but I didn't know much of sex, drugs, alcohol etc. until I started seeing it at school as I grew up - certainly I was sheltered from it all by my parents, to a degree. If I'm ever going to be a parent (I'm married now so it's a biological possibility!), I wouldn't do things quite the same as my parents did. I suppose I would like to think that I can put my faith in Christ into practice and advise my kids on what is right/wrong without feeling that I need to coerce them into feeling any particular way. If God is who he says he is, then after I've passed on what I know I should be able to trust him to enable my kids to make the right choices for the right reasons, as I see it. ie. From my perspective as someone with a Christian worldview, I think decisions about morality etc. need to ultimately stem from an understanding of who God is, and what our plight is given our (sinful) position before him. Blackmailing someone, by whatever means (be they emotional, psychological etc.) into behaving a certain way only suppresses the truth, and strips morals of their true context. The result may very well be behaviour like the examples you described, where people scramble to satiate their lust for desires that have always been forbidden them for no apparent reason.
Interesting what you say about there being no need to have "legislation of morality", etc. I do think that whatever ones background might be, that is a very reductionistic argument at best. (Sorry for my overuse of the word "reductionistic" or "reductionism"... I've been reading a lot of DA Carson!) Unless you're trying to advocate anarchy (and I'm sure that you aren't), it seems to me that many of our rules and regulations that may at the surface seem to be amoral, (speed limits, or tax rules for example), actually have an ultimate philosophical grounding in some set of values that has, for some reason, been deemed to be absolute (or at least superior to others). That sounds like morality to me - in at least some vague sense of the word. The other thing to note is that it's very unlikely that the pioneers of what has become today's democracy (the Founding Fathers, for example) would ever have envisioned a democracy that was completely divorced from any supreme, transcendent values. Sure, they recognised that absolute power corrupts even when it is in the hands of those with the best intentions, so they put in place a system of checks and balances to make sure that no one could stay in power indefinitely. But still, the framework was set up with the inherent assumption that it was a system that was derived from a consideration of absolute, transcendent values. Contrast that with today's climate in which the only arbiter of what might be "right" is My Personal Preference.
One of my best friends is a hardcore Christian who is against drugs, homosexuality, and sex before marriage. Know why? Because when we were in college together she was spending every weekend drunk and coked out of her skull, screwing other girls.
You seem to assume there that your reasoning for your friend's change of course is exhaustive. Perhaps the reason for her repentance might be more to do with the fact that she has had a real encounter with the living God? Of course, not everyone believes in God, and hence would not accept that conclusion, but why should I give your diagnosis any more weight than an alternative one? Unless your friend wants to post otherwise, I can't let your reductionism slide "insightfully" by.
"The cadmium atom that has lost an electron becomes a negatively charged ion, which can then be controlled with an electrical field," said Daniel Stick, a doctoral student in the University of Michigan's physics department who participated in the work.
I haven't done physics since first year university, so I could well be speaking from ignorance, but can someone explain to me how an atom that loses an electron becomes negatively charged?
If you're worried about cumulative rounding error buildup, then don't round until after you've accumulated.
As the article infers, time contraints on a system will often mean that you can't "afford" to do math as precisely as your architecture might theoretically allow you to. This is a common hurdle to overcome when you're working on embedded real-time systems: ie. the need to find a compromise between speed and accuracy. Just because you can do an operation on two floats in a loop 1000 times doesn't mean that you can afford the time to do it.
Sheesh!! Mod the parent down, moronaters. His link directly contradicts his "informative" argument! Just because you link in your post doesn't mean that you're saying anything relevant!
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that they didn't tell anyone though shows that the S is NSA is bullshit.
Wouldn't that be the NBA? Interesting mashup there.
LeBron James: athlete, sycophant, spy.
A more reputable confirmation of the March release date.
Who shot first?
Or Slashdot, for instance.
It's definitely a troll, dude. Turn up your sarcasmeter. ;)
They do that already... it's called 'knife-edge diffraction'.
eg http://www.smeter.net/propagation/diffrac1.php
Where are the pedants decrying the spelling of the word "innstead"? Shame on you all!
Hang on a second... I think I just poured mockery on myself.What the hey does this have to do with Your Rights Online?
under hardware?
If you actually bothered to read the article, you'd see that he covers what you've said in your last paragraph. In the end, he concludes that the perception of shuffle being non-random is nothing to do with the iPod.
IMHO, the best thing about the tagging system is that you can turn it off!
One thing with the comments - I don't like it how the moderation score is way over to the right. Would be better right next to the comment title.
Huh? Of course everyone knows that every new movie gets pirated. The article is just to highlight the sheer cheek of the so-called "sales assistant", and (perhaps as an aside) how that might unwittingly be an interesting reflection on society's attitude to pirated goods. Really, it's just supposed to be funny. Remember that? Humour? That thing that makes your tummy wobble up and down with mirth?
What's more, the submitter's quote "for me [it] was one of the worst operating system experiences that I've ever encountered" is misleading anyway. The sentence straight FTA is "Installing Vista Beta 2, for me was one of the worst operating system experiences that I've ever encountered."
I know what you're saying, and I'm not saying that I like music to be mega-processed or anything. Indeed, take many of today's starlets out of the studio, and all you're left with is a bag of artificial body appendages. It's certainly good to hear things sounding natural and raw, but there's a difference between that and atonal whining. Of course, all this is imho, as with pretty much everything in music. YMMV, etc.
Did you LISTEN to that monstrosity, or just watch it with the volume muted? Surely Eddie V could have invested in an auto-tune plugin for his sequencer, at least...
My point wasn't that you should necessarily take my alternative explanation of what the OP's friend's motivations might have been over his. My point was simply that he seemed to be offering us an explanation of his friend's behaviour that made assumptions that might not have been true. Maybe they were... but that wasn't the point. A challenge was required, so I gave one, and he clarified.
Now I don't want to go off on a rant here...I don't really have much to say in reply to that, other than you're wasting your effort by setting up straw men and knocking them down. I'm a Christian, and I don't have a problem with Harry Potter. I think the crusades were largely deplorable. Killing abortion advocates/surgeons is as bad as abortion itself. Any Christian with a biblically-sound and sincere faith will agree with me on all those points (with the possible exception of Harry Potter, but even then I'd say that any reasonable people among them would keep it as a private view for their own family, and not enforce it on others). You get the idea... you're not attacking Christianity in any useful sense, only a hackneyed caricature of it.
Understood... I suppose I was just testing to see how rigorously you'd thought out what you were saying. Your use of the word "eliding" told me everything I had to know. :-) To be honest, I had to look it up!
For mine, I was also raised in a conservative Christian setting (in a capital city in Australia). Not mega-fundie or anything like that, but I didn't know much of sex, drugs, alcohol etc. until I started seeing it at school as I grew up - certainly I was sheltered from it all by my parents, to a degree. If I'm ever going to be a parent (I'm married now so it's a biological possibility!), I wouldn't do things quite the same as my parents did. I suppose I would like to think that I can put my faith in Christ into practice and advise my kids on what is right/wrong without feeling that I need to coerce them into feeling any particular way. If God is who he says he is, then after I've passed on what I know I should be able to trust him to enable my kids to make the right choices for the right reasons, as I see it. ie. From my perspective as someone with a Christian worldview, I think decisions about morality etc. need to ultimately stem from an understanding of who God is, and what our plight is given our (sinful) position before him. Blackmailing someone, by whatever means (be they emotional, psychological etc.) into behaving a certain way only suppresses the truth, and strips morals of their true context. The result may very well be behaviour like the examples you described, where people scramble to satiate their lust for desires that have always been forbidden them for no apparent reason.
Interesting what you say about there being no need to have "legislation of morality", etc. I do think that whatever ones background might be, that is a very reductionistic argument at best. (Sorry for my overuse of the word "reductionistic" or "reductionism"... I've been reading a lot of DA Carson!) Unless you're trying to advocate anarchy (and I'm sure that you aren't), it seems to me that many of our rules and regulations that may at the surface seem to be amoral, (speed limits, or tax rules for example), actually have an ultimate philosophical grounding in some set of values that has, for some reason, been deemed to be absolute (or at least superior to others). That sounds like morality to me - in at least some vague sense of the word. The other thing to note is that it's very unlikely that the pioneers of what has become today's democracy (the Founding Fathers, for example) would ever have envisioned a democracy that was completely divorced from any supreme, transcendent values. Sure, they recognised that absolute power corrupts even when it is in the hands of those with the best intentions, so they put in place a system of checks and balances to make sure that no one could stay in power indefinitely. But still, the framework was set up with the inherent assumption that it was a system that was derived from a consideration of absolute, transcendent values. Contrast that with today's climate in which the only arbiter of what might be "right" is My Personal Preference.
You seem to assume there that your reasoning for your friend's change of course is exhaustive. Perhaps the reason for her repentance might be more to do with the fact that she has had a real encounter with the living God? Of course, not everyone believes in God, and hence would not accept that conclusion, but why should I give your diagnosis any more weight than an alternative one? Unless your friend wants to post otherwise, I can't let your reductionism slide "insightfully" by.
FYI, if you also have a PC you can get that version of DX1 for a couple of bucks these days. Best... game... ever!
I haven't done physics since first year university, so I could well be speaking from ignorance, but can someone explain to me how an atom that loses an electron becomes negatively charged?
Sheesh!! Mod the parent down, moronaters. His link directly contradicts his "informative" argument! Just because you link in your post doesn't mean that you're saying anything relevant!
Clearly, this man has been using Windows for too long!