The majority of the population here is all in favor of education and healthcare, we just don't believe that a state income tax is the way to fund them.
Or that we should fund them at all, given how politics in Washington seem to go. This PDF illustrates some of the recent declines in state funding for the University of Washington, but I think the declines have been going on for longer than that.
It's hard to reconcile the legislature's funding for colleges and universities with the idea that we "are all in favor of education."
Please stay away from Arizona. I like the law here a lot, why do you want to protect the intruder?
snip
Also look at gun control stats and you will find that anywhere in the US that has increased gun control there is an increase in criminal behavior and places with less gun control usually have much lower rates of crime
snip
(Phoenix is number 2 in the WORLD for kidnappings, Mexico City is the only other city in the world with more)
I don't understand: if the law is so great in Arizona, why are there so many kidnappings there?
There are just 3 good reasons for comments in code: (a) to refer to a published paper describing an (obscure) algorithm, eg '[fast graph traversal algorithm, M. M. Balakrishnarajan and P. Venuvanalingam,Computers & Chemistry, Volume 19, Issue 2, June 1995, Pages 101-106] , (b) to indicate an arcane, obscure usage, which would be better eliminated, but sometimes cannot be eg in device drivers, when merely addressing a device register has side effects, (c) to very briefly document major parts of program flow-meaning, if this isn't otherwise obvious.
A fourth reason: if you use something like Sphinx to autogenerate documentation from your code, then you should probably include at least a one-liner saying what each function or method does, and maybe you want to describe the parameters and the return values. (If you're using a language like Python, then of course you don't have the types of the parameters or the return values in the function definition, so you should document them.)
One thing I have never been able to figure out is how you can repeat experiments on origins (of matter, of forces, etc).
You form a hypothesis about the big bang happening, and you deduce that if it had happened, then you would be able to observe certain phenomena now, if only your measurements could be made precisely enough. (I'm not a physicist or an astronomer, but maybe the phenomena would involve the residual energy in the vacuum of deep space, or the distribution of certain elements in stars, or something about general relativity, or I don't know what.) When technology has improved enough, or when you have designed a careful enough experiment, you carry out your experiments and see if you observe those phenomena. If you don't see what you should, then you have to say that your hypothesized account of the big bang must be wrong.
Re:Landsberg's last book annoyed me enough
on
The Big Questions
·
· Score: 1
As an example, the heart of his "more sex is safer sex" argument used in the title is that overall risk is reduced if *certain* *people*, those with lower odds of having disease, have more sex. Then the people they have sex with are having safer sex than if with someone else. Alas, it rests on the contention that if the "safer" people have more sex, every act *displaces* another sexual interaction - the possibility that simply more sex will occur, the added interactions being safer, but *not* displacing a less-safe one, is not allowed for.
I haven't read this book, but if you start with n sexual interactions, k of which are unsafe, and then you add m more, all of which are safe, then the fraction of unsafe sexual interactions has decreased: it's gone from k/n to k/(n+m). Therefore the risk in any particular interaction is less.
(A similar computation works even if the new interactions aren't all safe, but just more likely to be safe than the old ones.)
The same fallacy applies to your post about what RIAA is doing. While what the RIAA curriculum is teaching might be counter to your moral beliefs (i.e. you may believe that all information should be free and copyright laws are an abomination), unless it is factually inaccurate it doesn't matter.
Of course it matters. Schools don't have an infinite amount of time: even if they follow your "fact-based" approach (whatever that means when it comes to writing or indeed any sort of art), they still need to make decisions about which facts to include. If the facts are wrong, it's easy to discount them. But if the RIAA (for example) comes up with lesson plans based on (let's assume) an accurate description of copyright law, then I would say that it's still not worth the time. Work on math, science, history, writing, music, any number of things before spending time on this.
Re:I go on geek vacations
on
The Geek Atlas
·
· Score: 4, Funny
the Socorro large radio telecope array (the staple of almost many scifi movies)
Actually, it's only been in nearly some scifi movies.
I believe the ability to check your work is crucial.
So learn how to check your work. First, look at your answer and try to determine whether it makes sense, and then see if you made any silly algebra mistakes. Then if you're learning integration, for example, take the derivative and see if you get the original function back again. If you're learning differential equations, plug your purported solution in and see if it is actually a solution. In many situations, you have more than one method available to solve a problem, so try both and see if they produce the same thing.
In the real world you don't have a solution manual, so it's a valuable skill to be able to check your work without one. Furthermore, some students use solution manuals badly: if they don't get the right answer, they tinker with their work until their answer matches the right one, with no understanding of what they did wrong or what they did to correct it. It's a good idea to not have all of the answers available; for calculus, half seems about the right proportion.
This, of course, is precisely backwards of how math is taught. They try to teach the mathematic principles, and then from that you are supposed to deduce how to do the problems. This has never worked for me.
I'm not sure what you're talking about -- mathematics is taught lots of different ways: there is no single, monolithic, method for "how math is taught."
People that post comments designed to get more karma, for example mirroring a linked article or presenting a banal groupthink opinion or lame joke, are often referred to as karma whores.
By trying to pick and choose winners and losers in the marketplace, the government distorts the market and creates inefficiencies.
I'm curious: do you feel the same way about the minimum wage? Child labor laws? Requirements that new cars have seat belts and airbags? Do all of these create inefficiencies in the marketplace?
I don't understand the summary: it keeps using this word "its", which I don't think I've ever seen on Slashdot before, or really anywhere on the internet. The poster must have meant "it's"...
A while ago there were rumors that a new version of the Kindle was coming out in October. Maybe there is something to the rumors and the discount is to help clear out old inventory?
All of these kind of things are answered to encourage whatever somebody wants to believe. (BIG SNIP) (reagan ran up monster deficit in CA, and then got out of trouble because JFK started NASA).
(Of course, I guess it's very telling that I'm writing a post on/. during class, but then again, it keeps me awake for when he gets around to the important stuff and stops just repeating 'F=ma'.)
If it's a physics class, then repeating 'F=ma' is the important stuff.
I teach math, not writing, so that affects my point of view. I don't know how to naturally incorporate math or science into a writing class, but you can incorporate writing into a math course. After all, one of the skills students are supposed to develop in such a course is problem-solving, and a key aspect to successfully solving a problem is communicating your solution (or else the solution isn't much use). So here's what you can do: take an interesting problem (it doesn't have to be hard, but the solution shouldn't be too short). Once the students have solved it, treat their solution like a rough draft and have them go through the whole multiple draft/revision/peer critique thing that writing teachers like so much.
This gives them practice at rewriting/revising, which is important in any kind of writing. It helps them to focus on what makes a solution better or worse. In order to explain something well, you need to understand it well, so it reinforces the mathematics. Plus there is the collaborative thing, which a number of people on slashdot will sneer at, but is actually useful in the real world, at least some of the time. Plus it gives other perspectives on solutions, the students may see multiple ways of approaching a problem, and they will see multiple ways of expressing the solution.
I've also heard the critique that arbitrators may not be completely impartial. I think they are not randomly assigned, like judges can be, but instead are hired by the parties. Now consider: big companies try to use arbitrators a lot, while any given individual will rarely if ever use one. If you're an arbitrator who rules against a big company, how much business is that company going to give to you in the future? If you rule against an individual, how much does that hurt you?
Therefore in the arbitration system, there is an incentive for arbitrators to rule against individuals and in favor of big corporations.
The best part of the essay is at the end when he provides a key to all of the sources he stole his ideas from.
It isn't that he stole his ideas — he stole the actual words and sentences. The whole thing is, as he puts it, a collage assembled from other peoples' writing.
My point in my original question ("So who does that leave, exactly?") was that you did not recognize a difference between what countries say and what countries actually do. The US (in which I was born and have lived all of my life) does a fair amount of critizing other countries for human rights abuses, but has some serious failures of its own; these failures tend to be underreported in the media and its citizens tend to be unaware of them or apathetic about them. This ignorance and apathy pisses me off, and I tend to respond to anything that hints at it, as your post did.
If you had said, "I only respect cultures that *try hard* to give equal rights and protections to people regardless of their sex, race, and age," I wouldn't have responded at all.
I think you're being a bit naive. In the US, for instance, we are supposed to provide equal rights regardless of race, but there is still plenty of discrimination out there, and some of it is "state-sponsored". (Equal rights regardless of sex sounds good, and similarly for age, within limits — in my view two-year olds shouldn't have all of the same rights, like voting, as adults — but are those actually part of the law? I think religion and sexual orientation are also things with respect to which we should not discriminate.) Race-based profiling is one example, gays in the military another (and are there still restrictions on what jobs women can have in the military?), and don't even get me started on the treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay or of Jose Padilla, or the refusal of the government to sign UN statements on women's rights and such things.
The original poster said
I have a simple rule - I don't respect any culture that does not give equal rights and protections to people irregardless of their sex, race, and age.
My point is, there is a difference between saying that you give equal rights and protections, and actually doing it. Lots of countries do the former, but the latter is harder. It's what we should all strive for, but I don't think any country perfectly endorses human rights yet.
What is wrong with reading a book, sitting quietly, meditating, sleeping, quiet conversation, or plain old doing nothing?
Have you done much traveling with, say, a three-year old? Try it and see how far your list of activities gets you.
What a sad state of state of affairs in which we find ourselves!
Part of the reason for this sad state of affairs is that we're stuffed into an airplane seat with the back of another seat about a foot in front of our face. For children, it can be even more claustrophobic, because the seats in front of them are so high. It's not a matter of ADHD — it's hard for a typical kid to sit in one place for hours at a time. They are used to being able to get up and run around, or sit on the floor to play instead of in a chair, or have a snack every now and then, or lie down to take a nap, or watch TV. Note also that the original poster said "no kids toys", not just "no electronic kids toys"...
And before anyone calls me culturally insensitive, I have a simple rule - I don't respect any culture that does not give equal rights and protections to people irregardless of their sex, race, and age.
Slashdot Mirror
The majority of the population here is all in favor of education and healthcare, we just don't believe that a state income tax is the way to fund them.
Or that we should fund them at all, given how politics in Washington seem to go. This PDF illustrates some of the recent declines in state funding for the University of Washington, but I think the declines have been going on for longer than that.
It's hard to reconcile the legislature's funding for colleges and universities with the idea that we "are all in favor of education."
From TFA: "He’s also barred from opening a Facebook account."
Please stay away from Arizona. I like the law here a lot, why do you want to protect the intruder?
snip
Also look at gun control stats and you will find that anywhere in the US that has increased gun control there is an increase in criminal behavior and places with less gun control usually have much lower rates of crime
snip
(Phoenix is number 2 in the WORLD for kidnappings, Mexico City is the only other city in the world with more)
I don't understand: if the law is so great in Arizona, why are there so many kidnappings there?
There are just 3 good reasons for comments in code: (a) to refer to a published paper describing an (obscure) algorithm, eg '[fast graph traversal algorithm, M. M. Balakrishnarajan and P. Venuvanalingam ,Computers & Chemistry, Volume 19, Issue 2, June 1995, Pages 101-106] , (b) to indicate an arcane, obscure usage, which would be better eliminated, but sometimes cannot be eg in device drivers, when merely addressing a device register has side effects, (c) to very briefly document major parts of program flow-meaning, if this isn't otherwise obvious.
A fourth reason: if you use something like Sphinx to autogenerate documentation from your code, then you should probably include at least a one-liner saying what each function or method does, and maybe you want to describe the parameters and the return values. (If you're using a language like Python, then of course you don't have the types of the parameters or the return values in the function definition, so you should document them.)
One thing I have never been able to figure out is how you can repeat experiments on origins (of matter, of forces, etc).
You form a hypothesis about the big bang happening, and you deduce that if it had happened, then you would be able to observe certain phenomena now, if only your measurements could be made precisely enough. (I'm not a physicist or an astronomer, but maybe the phenomena would involve the residual energy in the vacuum of deep space, or the distribution of certain elements in stars, or something about general relativity, or I don't know what.) When technology has improved enough, or when you have designed a careful enough experiment, you carry out your experiments and see if you observe those phenomena. If you don't see what you should, then you have to say that your hypothesized account of the big bang must be wrong.
As an example, the heart of his "more sex is safer sex" argument used in the title is that overall risk is reduced if *certain* *people*, those with lower odds of having disease, have more sex. Then the people they have sex with are having safer sex than if with someone else. Alas, it rests on the contention that if the "safer" people have more sex, every act *displaces* another sexual interaction - the possibility that simply more sex will occur, the added interactions being safer, but *not* displacing a less-safe one, is not allowed for.
I haven't read this book, but if you start with n sexual interactions, k of which are unsafe, and then you add m more, all of which are safe, then the fraction of unsafe sexual interactions has decreased: it's gone from k/n to k/(n+m). Therefore the risk in any particular interaction is less.
(A similar computation works even if the new interactions aren't all safe, but just more likely to be safe than the old ones.)
The same fallacy applies to your post about what RIAA is doing. While what the RIAA curriculum is teaching might be counter to your moral beliefs (i.e. you may believe that all information should be free and copyright laws are an abomination), unless it is factually inaccurate it doesn't matter.
Of course it matters. Schools don't have an infinite amount of time: even if they follow your "fact-based" approach (whatever that means when it comes to writing or indeed any sort of art), they still need to make decisions about which facts to include. If the facts are wrong, it's easy to discount them. But if the RIAA (for example) comes up with lesson plans based on (let's assume) an accurate description of copyright law, then I would say that it's still not worth the time. Work on math, science, history, writing, music, any number of things before spending time on this.
the Socorro large radio telecope array (the staple of almost many scifi movies)
Actually, it's only been in nearly some scifi movies.
I believe the ability to check your work is crucial.
So learn how to check your work. First, look at your answer and try to determine whether it makes sense, and then see if you made any silly algebra mistakes. Then if you're learning integration, for example, take the derivative and see if you get the original function back again. If you're learning differential equations, plug your purported solution in and see if it is actually a solution. In many situations, you have more than one method available to solve a problem, so try both and see if they produce the same thing.
In the real world you don't have a solution manual, so it's a valuable skill to be able to check your work without one. Furthermore, some students use solution manuals badly: if they don't get the right answer, they tinker with their work until their answer matches the right one, with no understanding of what they did wrong or what they did to correct it. It's a good idea to not have all of the answers available; for calculus, half seems about the right proportion.
This, of course, is precisely backwards of how math is taught. They try to teach the mathematic principles, and then from that you are supposed to deduce how to do the problems. This has never worked for me.
I'm not sure what you're talking about -- mathematics is taught lots of different ways: there is no single, monolithic, method for "how math is taught."
You left out the relevant part:
Slashdot
On another note, I think this is where Amazon really missed the market for the Kindle. If it had wifi, and had a web browser,
The Kindle has a web browser, albeit a primitive one.
Devil's advocate here. Of course they create inefficiencies.
Right, I understand this. I'm just trying to figure out where (if at all) jcr draws the line.
By trying to pick and choose winners and losers in the marketplace, the government distorts the market and creates inefficiencies.
I'm curious: do you feel the same way about the minimum wage? Child labor laws? Requirements that new cars have seat belts and airbags? Do all of these create inefficiencies in the marketplace?
I don't understand the summary: it keeps using this word "its", which I don't think I've ever seen on Slashdot before, or really anywhere on the internet. The poster must have meant "it's"...
A while ago there were rumors that a new version of the Kindle was coming out in October. Maybe there is something to the rumors and the discount is to help clear out old inventory?
Well, what do you expect in DC?
All of these kind of things are answered to encourage whatever somebody wants to believe. (BIG SNIP) (reagan ran up monster deficit in CA, and then got out of trouble because JFK started NASA).
JFK started NASA? Really? I find that somewhat surprising given the dates involved.
Maybe WindBourne meant the Apollo program, not NASA.
I teach math, not writing, so that affects my point of view. I don't know how to naturally incorporate math or science into a writing class, but you can incorporate writing into a math course. After all, one of the skills students are supposed to develop in such a course is problem-solving, and a key aspect to successfully solving a problem is communicating your solution (or else the solution isn't much use). So here's what you can do: take an interesting problem (it doesn't have to be hard, but the solution shouldn't be too short). Once the students have solved it, treat their solution like a rough draft and have them go through the whole multiple draft/revision/peer critique thing that writing teachers like so much.
This gives them practice at rewriting/revising, which is important in any kind of writing. It helps them to focus on what makes a solution better or worse. In order to explain something well, you need to understand it well, so it reinforces the mathematics. Plus there is the collaborative thing, which a number of people on slashdot will sneer at, but is actually useful in the real world, at least some of the time. Plus it gives other perspectives on solutions, the students may see multiple ways of approaching a problem, and they will see multiple ways of expressing the solution.
I've also heard the critique that arbitrators may not be completely impartial. I think they are not randomly assigned, like judges can be, but instead are hired by the parties. Now consider: big companies try to use arbitrators a lot, while any given individual will rarely if ever use one. If you're an arbitrator who rules against a big company, how much business is that company going to give to you in the future? If you rule against an individual, how much does that hurt you?
Therefore in the arbitration system, there is an incentive for arbitrators to rule against individuals and in favor of big corporations.
My point in my original question ("So who does that leave, exactly?") was that you did not recognize a difference between what countries say and what countries actually do. The US (in which I was born and have lived all of my life) does a fair amount of critizing other countries for human rights abuses, but has some serious failures of its own; these failures tend to be underreported in the media and its citizens tend to be unaware of them or apathetic about them. This ignorance and apathy pisses me off, and I tend to respond to anything that hints at it, as your post did.
If you had said, "I only respect cultures that *try hard* to give equal rights and protections to people regardless of their sex, race, and age," I wouldn't have responded at all.
I think you're being a bit naive. In the US, for instance, we are supposed to provide equal rights regardless of race, but there is still plenty of discrimination out there, and some of it is "state-sponsored". (Equal rights regardless of sex sounds good, and similarly for age, within limits — in my view two-year olds shouldn't have all of the same rights, like voting, as adults — but are those actually part of the law? I think religion and sexual orientation are also things with respect to which we should not discriminate.) Race-based profiling is one example, gays in the military another (and are there still restrictions on what jobs women can have in the military?), and don't even get me started on the treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay or of Jose Padilla, or the refusal of the government to sign UN statements on women's rights and such things.
The original poster said
My point is, there is a difference between saying that you give equal rights and protections, and actually doing it. Lots of countries do the former, but the latter is harder. It's what we should all strive for, but I don't think any country perfectly endorses human rights yet.What is wrong with reading a book, sitting quietly, meditating, sleeping, quiet conversation, or plain old doing nothing?
Have you done much traveling with, say, a three-year old? Try it and see how far your list of activities gets you.
What a sad state of state of affairs in which we find ourselves!
Part of the reason for this sad state of affairs is that we're stuffed into an airplane seat with the back of another seat about a foot in front of our face. For children, it can be even more claustrophobic, because the seats in front of them are so high. It's not a matter of ADHD — it's hard for a typical kid to sit in one place for hours at a time. They are used to being able to get up and run around, or sit on the floor to play instead of in a chair, or have a snack every now and then, or lie down to take a nap, or watch TV. Note also that the original poster said "no kids toys", not just "no electronic kids toys"...
And before anyone calls me culturally insensitive, I have a simple rule - I don't respect any culture that does not give equal rights and protections to people irregardless of their sex, race, and age.
So who does that leave, exactly?