I would even go so far as to say that the two [science and religion] really have nothing to do with each other.
Science and religion are both belief systems
Science investigates how we evolved, when the universe began, and how it's developed since (post big-bang). Religion "explains" why we're here, how the universe did begin (pre big-bang), and how we should treat each other.
Science can never prove god doesn't exist (since he/she/it could always be one level "above" our present conception of "the universe"). In turn, religion generally concerns itself with how one should live one's life, and how one should interact with other people.
There is no conflict there.
True, some tiny minority fundamentalists of various religious affiliations do try to push "religious" explanations for physical phenomena, but these are just as bogus and contrary-to-the-spirit-of-the-system as scientists that (highly unprofessionally) claim that they know God doesn't exist.
Logic ensures scientists can never claim anything stronger than they "don't know", "personally doubt" or "don't require god to adequately explain X". In turn, science ensures religious people can't claim to have explanations for physical phenomena, except where science gives the same explanation.
When either side oversteps their bounds and impinges on the other side's territory, you know junk science or bigoted religious fuckwittery is imminent.
But science, if anyone's noticed, doesn't try to intrude on religion.
That's not true. Some people like to point out clear evidence that some religious beliefs are false.
And some religious people blow up abortion clinics. Does this mean "Religion" is inherently violent? Should we then ban it?
Don't be obtuse - what people do in the name of an entity != what the entity does. Or else religion would have been banned long ago and God would be universally acknowledged as the nastiest motherfucker in the universe.
The fact is science (proper science) sticks to its own brief and plods along investigating the universe. Science doesn't impinge on religion, apart from where religion oversteps its bounds.
The whole evolution debate is one such example.
This is so obtuse it's just not even funny.
Religion is taught in religious education/comparative religion classes. Science is taught in science classes.
The conflict arises because religious groups try to get a religious fairy-story taught in science classes, and Science is the one overstepping its boundaries?
I suppose Poland invaded Germany in WWII, Iraq invaded the US and Evander Holyfield's ear assulted Mike Tyson's mouth, right?
The public school system is funded by the tax payers. Many tax payers have religious beliefs and feel they should have some say in what is taught there.
Except that the majority of people don't want a minority-interpretation-of-one-single-religion's explanations taught to their kids. The majority want nice, verifiable science taught in science classes and religious explanations taught in religion classes, and that isn't going to change no matter how many well-funded PR campaigns politically-connected funadmentalist idiots organise.
Science. Religion. Science classes. Religious Studies classes. What's so hard to understand?
Her defense of this method is that these particular games in question (where the ratings ring obviously false) are rated E and that children below a certain age are incapable of discerning the difference between violence abstracted to the level of Pac Man and reality.
I love this - they're too young to understand the difference between fantasy and reality, but they're old enough to empathise and identify with pac-man on-screen, identify the current activity as "violence" and thereby be desensitised to it?
Computer games can't affect kids that much. I mean, if Pacman had affected us as kids we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music.
Any game that involves shooting a simalcrum of an actual creature must perforce be similiar in violence levels to Pac-Man (where the monsters eat the protagonist) and Dig Dug (where the protagonist inflates the monsters until they explode).
Technically it's any action which involves injury or destruction to any object.
In this case, pac-man is almost completely non-violent, since the only time any destruction happens is the 1% of the time (max) when you are actually actually getting caught by a ghost, or the brief period when you're power-pilled-up and are actually eating one. Being chased is neither destructive nor injurous. Sure, being caught is, but if we're measuring it by the second how long (in the average game of pac-man) do you spend actually in the process of dying or eating a ghost? Fractions of a percent, if that.
Or, you spend the entire time "destroying" pills, so it's almost 100% violent.
Either way, the study reports a different percentage than these, so it's choosing some arbitrary definition of "violence" that clearly doesn't map to the dictionary definition of the term.
By this guideline calling Centipede 97% "violent" is laughable, so the study clearly isn't using the everyday definition of "violence" either.
The definition of violence used in this study is ludicrously out of whack with both the dictionary definition and everyday usage, but this is a distinction that people (and the media) don't realise and aren't making. The researcher is quite happy to intentionally confuse her bizarre definition with the common one too, only drawing the distinction when convenient (when she's called out on it in public).
I don't know how to categorise the property they are measuring, but it's not violence by any commonly-acceptable definition - I'd term it something more like "tension and/or conflict". Funnily enough, if the researcher had used this term there wouldn't be any of the current brouhaha.
The fact remains that the researcher has used an emotive, politically-charged word and given it an arbitrary and misleading redefinition. Special-interest groups have then used this emotive word in a different sens to claim the work validates their position, and far from correcting the confusion the researcher has actively aided them in their attempts.
This calls into question the motives for the study, and the character of the researcher.
And on a less serious note, do you seriously not consider beating the dead blood-soaked body of a hooker with a baseball bat "more violent" than being chased by a cartoon ghost? Would you be equally happy for your kid to do either?
However, in this case, the evidence destruction was taken as prima facie evidence of guilt.
No it wasn't. As other posters have explained, the plaintiff employed a computer engineer as an expert witness, who examined the machine and testified that iMesh and Bearshare (and presumably MP3s) had recently been wiped off the machine. The defendant employed their own EW who admitted that this was the case, but suggested that "maybe" it had been accidental.
True, the linked article is light on detail, but "absence of detail" != "detail of absence" (as it were). Just because the article doesn't mention supporting evidence, it doesn't mean for one second that none was considered by the court.
I have to disagree here, if only about the way you express this. It's not that you don't know what you want it's just that you don't know how to express it in a way that a developer will understand.
I disagree. Sometimes this is the case, but any sufficiently talented developer would be able to compensate for that.
I'm not talking about places where they leave out explanation - these are often technical details, and it's up to the developer to work out these issues. If the customer could do this he'd be a developer, and wouldn't need to hire one.
I'm not talking about when a customer presents a problem and a sensible proposed solution, but is open to advice.
I'm talking about the places where a customer wants something that's actually impossible, or has a very obvious edge case or failure mode that they (equally obviously) haven't bothered to think through.
Case in point: As a previous job (writing financials software, shudder) the marketing department had agreat idea to produce referral trade - if a customer suggested our product to another company which subsequently bought it within a year, the referrer would get a case of wine and a free module for the software (worth as much as tens of thousands of pounds).
The referrals were to be automatically generated by filling in a form on a web page. An intranet page (this is where Dev got involved) was requested to check (given a company name or trading #) if that company had been referred, and to return the details of the referrer if so.
No thought had been given to the possibilities:
1. What if more than one company had referred a new user? The board didn't want to give out two free modules, costing thousands of pounds each. 2. What proof did we have that a company had actually referred a new user? (As opposed to merely claiming they had). 3. There was to be no limit to how many referrals a customer could generate - what stopped a customer from entering the names and numbers of every one of their competitors, or a few tens/hundreds of local companies' details? The region was small and the software was expensive, so it could have easily been more cost-effective than buying a module. 4. What stopped companies who were thinking of buying the product arranging for an existing customer to "refer" them in exchange for a kickback? 5. There was no recording in the system of what date a customer referred another, and so no way to work out when the one-year referral window was up.
As a programmer, these failure modes occur to you instantly. They can (generally) also be fixed with a few small changes to the rules. The entire system had been proposed, passed up the chain of command, debated at board level, modified, polished and passed all the way back down to marketing/development by non-developers before anyone (a developer) stood up and said "hang on a second...".
Tell them what is and isn't feasible and find solutions. Don't just dismiss what you have been asked to as impossible or unreasonable because you are the 'expert'. You may be the expert coder but you aren't the expert in someone else's business or in their idea.
Thanks for the customer-relations pep-talk, but (again) that's not what I'm actually talking about.
I'm talking about requesting you use one bit to store a trinary value. I'm talking about fixed-length 11-digit phone number fields on a web form designed to get international business. I'm talking about the cases where the customer is simply wrong or stupid.
Sure, you should always sugar-coat it and tackle it delicately when talking to them, but I wasn't talking to devs in this position - I was talking to the customer. The fact remains that the customer is frequently wrong, and frequently doesn't bother to think through their requirements - that was all I was ranting about.
And if you regularly interact with non-technical people, who have no experience
I don't believe I said anywhere that someone who can code necessarily knows what other people want, just what they do.
The fact remains that unless you've had experience and/or training in an intellectually rigorous field like programming, you're almost certain not to consider all the edge cases, caveats, assumptions and potential failure modes of any idea you do have... especially when you're talking about programming something.
Since plans often have to be scrapped or changed as a result of these kinds of unconsidered aspects, I'd argue that someone who hasn't got that kind of anal-retentive attention to edge-cases is unlikely to have a plan that doesn't need either significant adjustment or complete re-engineering.
Since pretty much everyone's ideal program wouldn't crash, get things wrong or give unexpected or unreliable results, I'd argue that their "requirements" plan as presented is not, in fact, what they'd ultimately like produced.
I think the phrase is "spinning in his grave", not screaming. And he's actually been doing it for quite a number of years now.
Discovered early this century, in January 2001 we experimented with attaching a small flywheel to him to generate electricity. Shortly after September 11th we had to swap it out for a much, much larger one, made of depleted uranium.
As of 2006 he's currently powering the entire eastern seaboard, and if Jeb Bush or Condi Rice get in in 2008 we may have to set up a permanent heated base on Pluto just to keep using up the power.
Administered chiefly by incessant American Idol and Fox "news" for the proles, and an institutionally-corrupt political system that makes it abundantly clear that voting is an increasingly pointless action for the intellectuals (who are in any case outvoted by the mindless hordes of Fox-news-watching proles).
I'm in the UK, where the same thing is starting to happen. Tony Blair is slowly removing power from traditional sources and investing it in himself and his cabinet, while removing judicial and parliamentary oversight.
The name for the tactic is the boiling frog syndrome.
In these cases, it starts off as a weakening of the link between "voting" and "assigning power", and then progresses by weakening independant oversight of the government. Initially the changes are small and they fly under people's radar... slowly increasing the degree makes people grumble a bit but they gradually get used to it... doing this gradually enough and long enough means people will accept things that would have caused bloody rioting in the streets only a few years before.
US culture is now so decadent (sorry, but there's no other word for it) that the president can commit treason or war crimes, corporations can buy representatives' votes outright and people can stand up and testify that representatives of the incumbent political party employed them to fix elections, and all people do is grumble a bit and change the channel.
When you've got a solid political system and one corrupt politician you can effect change. When the entire system's corrupt there's no point in even trying.
I think that's why there's no huge public protest - when things have got bad enough that people accept "free speech zones" with nary a mutter, you know the only thing to do is move country or stage a revolution (and good luck finding popular support for the latter).
it's transparent, verifiable, and relatively fool proof.
I think you answered your own question.
(c.f. the 2000 election, the 2004 election, Diebold, political kickbacks, corporate interference in politics, representatives (purchasing of), etc, etc, etc...).
So is that part of the "Look, look, 3rd-world banana republic X does it, so why take the piss out of us for it?" meme that seems to prevalent in the US these days?
It works for government-sponsored torture, rampant corporate fraud, political corruption, a biased and partisan media and a whole host of other social ills that the USA as a country is too lazy or too apathetic to address.
Speaking of which, given scientific research and medical advances are of benefit to society, and Bush believes that abortion is murder...
Why did he find it abhorrent to "murder" for profit, but decide that it's ok to profit from "murder" that's already happened?
If you're taking the amoral pragmatic view, this makes perfect sense. If you're trying to make it an issue of morality and principles, I don't see a significant difference between the two actions.
Anyone could hire some teenage VB6 script kiddie out of school to bodge up something similar to what they were thinking for dollars an hour, max. The trick is in finding someone who'll take on your vague idea[1] and develop it into something beautiful, functional and usable that you can take credit for.
That is neither easy nor cheap to outsource.
Footnotes:
[1] I'm sorry, but if long experience developing has taught me anything, it's this: If you don't know how to code, and have no experience of coding, you have no idea what you want.
You might have the vaguest inkling of what you desire, but you won't have considered 90% of the edge cases, it'll be wrong in at least three ways and the whole requirement will need re-writing by the developer once he understands what you actually do want.
Maybe everyone's english education causes them to develop language-parsing filters instead?;-p
It's technically phrased incorrectly, but the meaning is still clear from what they wrote. Your interpretation would mean traffic actually decreased, which is flatly contradicted by the statement.
TBH, the real problem I have is the idea that every additional inbound link could increase traffic by a constant factor. Isn't it saying that if I've got 100 inbound links and 100 users/day, getting one more link would get me an extra 80 users/day?
I think they meant that "the increase in traffic from each link was only 80% of what they expected from a linear relationship", not that "each inbound link increases traffic by 80%".
So congrats on being great and finding fault but said fault was irrelevant. You do earn an A+ for arrogance and being an ass (I would call it trolling) with your "Why do I even bother with Games postings..." comment, however. Thanks!
Nice. Except that by jumping straight in and posting an unsubstantiated opinion, helpfully providing supporting evidence that completely negated your point, taking the time to dig up a web link but not even bothering with the simple mental maths required to realise that 12.5% of the population of a country might not actually be "fairly small", and your sarky and offensive response to a mildly-dismissive posting... well, I'd say you've more or less proved his point for him.
Not that this is necessarily wrong, either - patent ligitators are taking advantage of an existing law as it was meant to be used (even if it's a frequently-stupid law). LETs are just gaming the legal system and using their (usually greater) resources to gain an unfair advantage, rather than letting the issue complete the arbitration process and be done with.
One's using the system for an often-stupid but designed-in purpose, the other's gumming up the whole system for everyone. Makes sense to me.
This story reminds me of the recent "predictions" of a potentially devastating hurricane season with greater than average frequency hurricanes and more of these hurricanes being Category 5 (the strongest hurricane defined). On what basis?
Well, how about historical trends, climate modelling, the NOAA... need I go on?
On the buzz around global warming and its effect on hurricanes among other things, and the recent "example" season of a record-breaking number of hurricanes. So, naturally the prediction for this season was "lots of big hurricanes". I'm not sure, but so far I don't recall any hurricanes well into the season
Right, because the one thing we all know about the weather is that it's famously predictable and regular.
Like, if they predict rain for the coming week, it means it's going to rain every single day, every single hour, everywhere, doesn't it?
Or, just perhaps, the trend is that hurricanes are increasing in frequency and violence... and a single point of anecdotal data is, y'know, completely irrelevant?
And sure enough, the trend isn't regular as clockwork - in fact, 1997 has one of the lowest frequencies for years.
We know more than ever about the sun, but the more we know the less we know how to predict what it's going to do... "Satellite operators and NASA mission planners are bracing for this next solar cycle because it is expected to be exceptionally stormy, perhaps the stormiest in decades".... That is purely conjecture -- no more likely to be correct than not.
I don't know if you've ever heard of an estimate? It's different to a guess. That means while an estimate may turn out to be wrong, it's based on some evidence at least. A guess can be pulled out of your arse at a moment's notice (and should be taken as such), but an estimate (by definition) implies some calculation and reasoning, even if from incomplete information.
Normally, I'd agree with your sentiment - the news media is far too eager to find things for us to be scared of, and people tend to just lap it up without any critical thought or further research.
However, you've just done the opposite - because of your pre-existing prejudice you've blithely assumed there's nothing to the prediction without even taking the few seconds' Googling it took to show you were wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
It is British english - it's colloquial British english.
It might not be grammatically correct, but it is a common colloquialism in many areas of Britain.
It's certainly not US english, right?
Science investigates how we evolved, when the universe began, and how it's developed since (post big-bang). Religion "explains" why we're here, how the universe did begin (pre big-bang), and how we should treat each other.
Science can never prove god doesn't exist (since he/she/it could always be one level "above" our present conception of "the universe"). In turn, religion generally concerns itself with how one should live one's life, and how one should interact with other people.
There is no conflict there.
True, some tiny minority fundamentalists of various religious affiliations do try to push "religious" explanations for physical phenomena, but these are just as bogus and contrary-to-the-spirit-of-the-system as scientists that (highly unprofessionally) claim that they know God doesn't exist.
Logic ensures scientists can never claim anything stronger than they "don't know", "personally doubt" or "don't require god to adequately explain X". In turn, science ensures religious people can't claim to have explanations for physical phenomena, except where science gives the same explanation.
When either side oversteps their bounds and impinges on the other side's territory, you know junk science or bigoted religious fuckwittery is imminent.
And some religious people blow up abortion clinics. Does this mean "Religion" is inherently violent? Should we then ban it?
Don't be obtuse - what people do in the name of an entity != what the entity does. Or else religion would have been banned long ago and God would be universally acknowledged as the nastiest motherfucker in the universe.
The fact is science (proper science) sticks to its own brief and plods along investigating the universe. Science doesn't impinge on religion, apart from where religion oversteps its bounds.
This is so obtuse it's just not even funny.
Religion is taught in religious education/comparative religion classes. Science is taught in science classes.
The conflict arises because religious groups try to get a religious fairy-story taught in science classes, and Science is the one overstepping its boundaries?
I suppose Poland invaded Germany in WWII, Iraq invaded the US and Evander Holyfield's ear assulted Mike Tyson's mouth, right?
Except that the majority of people don't want a minority-interpretation-of-one-single-religion's explanations taught to their kids. The majority want nice, verifiable science taught in science classes and religious explanations taught in religion classes, and that isn't going to change no matter how many well-funded PR campaigns politically-connected funadmentalist idiots organise.
Science. Religion. Science classes. Religious Studies classes. What's so hard to understand?
I love this - they're too young to understand the difference between fantasy and reality, but they're old enough to empathise and identify with pac-man on-screen, identify the current activity as "violence" and thereby be desensitised to it?
Bullshit.
And combos.
After all, how much time do you spend actually getting eaten or actually eating ghosts in Pac-Man?
It's got to be under 1% of the time - probably way under.
Seriously - who can take a study seriously that defines "being chased" as a violent activity?
Define "violence".
Technically it's any action which involves injury or destruction to any object.
In this case, pac-man is almost completely non-violent, since the only time any destruction happens is the 1% of the time (max) when you are actually actually getting caught by a ghost, or the brief period when you're power-pilled-up and are actually eating one. Being chased is neither destructive nor injurous. Sure, being caught is, but if we're measuring it by the second how long (in the average game of pac-man) do you spend actually in the process of dying or eating a ghost? Fractions of a percent, if that.
Or, you spend the entire time "destroying" pills, so it's almost 100% violent.
Either way, the study reports a different percentage than these, so it's choosing some arbitrary definition of "violence" that clearly doesn't map to the dictionary definition of the term.
When people talk about "violence" in everyday life (and especially in gaming politics), they're talking about beating up hookers with a crowbar in full bloody 3d, not about having a few blocks quietly disappear ("get destroyed") when you complete a line in Tetris.
By this guideline calling Centipede 97% "violent" is laughable, so the study clearly isn't using the everyday definition of "violence" either.
The definition of violence used in this study is ludicrously out of whack with both the dictionary definition and everyday usage, but this is a distinction that people (and the media) don't realise and aren't making. The researcher is quite happy to intentionally confuse her bizarre definition with the common one too, only drawing the distinction when convenient (when she's called out on it in public).
I don't know how to categorise the property they are measuring, but it's not violence by any commonly-acceptable definition - I'd term it something more like "tension and/or conflict". Funnily enough, if the researcher had used this term there wouldn't be any of the current brouhaha.
The fact remains that the researcher has used an emotive, politically-charged word and given it an arbitrary and misleading redefinition. Special-interest groups have then used this emotive word in a different sens to claim the work validates their position, and far from correcting the confusion the researcher has actively aided them in their attempts.
This calls into question the motives for the study, and the character of the researcher.
And on a less serious note, do you seriously not consider beating the dead blood-soaked body of a hooker with a baseball bat "more violent" than being chased by a cartoon ghost? Would you be equally happy for your kid to do either?
No it wasn't. As other posters have explained, the plaintiff employed a computer engineer as an expert witness, who examined the machine and testified that iMesh and Bearshare (and presumably MP3s) had recently been wiped off the machine. The defendant employed their own EW who admitted that this was the case, but suggested that "maybe" it had been accidental.
True, the linked article is light on detail, but "absence of detail" != "detail of absence" (as it were). Just because the article doesn't mention supporting evidence, it doesn't mean for one second that none was considered by the court.
I disagree. Sometimes this is the case, but any sufficiently talented developer would be able to compensate for that.
I'm not talking about places where they leave out explanation - these are often technical details, and it's up to the developer to work out these issues. If the customer could do this he'd be a developer, and wouldn't need to hire one.
I'm not talking about when a customer presents a problem and a sensible proposed solution, but is open to advice.
I'm talking about the places where a customer wants something that's actually impossible, or has a very obvious edge case or failure mode that they (equally obviously) haven't bothered to think through.
Case in point: As a previous job (writing financials software, shudder) the marketing department had agreat idea to produce referral trade - if a customer suggested our product to another company which subsequently bought it within a year, the referrer would get a case of wine and a free module for the software (worth as much as tens of thousands of pounds).
The referrals were to be automatically generated by filling in a form on a web page. An intranet page (this is where Dev got involved) was requested to check (given a company name or trading #) if that company had been referred, and to return the details of the referrer if so.
No thought had been given to the possibilities:
1. What if more than one company had referred a new user? The board didn't want to give out two free modules, costing thousands of pounds each.
2. What proof did we have that a company had actually referred a new user? (As opposed to merely claiming they had).
3. There was to be no limit to how many referrals a customer could generate - what stopped a customer from entering the names and numbers of every one of their competitors, or a few tens/hundreds of local companies' details? The region was small and the software was expensive, so it could have easily been more cost-effective than buying a module.
4. What stopped companies who were thinking of buying the product arranging for an existing customer to "refer" them in exchange for a kickback?
5. There was no recording in the system of what date a customer referred another, and so no way to work out when the one-year referral window was up.
As a programmer, these failure modes occur to you instantly. They can (generally) also be fixed with a few small changes to the rules. The entire system had been proposed, passed up the chain of command, debated at board level, modified, polished and passed all the way back down to marketing/development by non-developers before anyone (a developer) stood up and said "hang on a second...".
Thanks for the customer-relations pep-talk, but (again) that's not what I'm actually talking about.
I'm talking about requesting you use one bit to store a trinary value. I'm talking about fixed-length 11-digit phone number fields on a web form designed to get international business. I'm talking about the cases where the customer is simply wrong or stupid.
Sure, you should always sugar-coat it and tackle it delicately when talking to them, but I wasn't talking to devs in this position - I was talking to the customer. The fact remains that the customer is frequently wrong, and frequently doesn't bother to think through their requirements - that was all I was ranting about.
And if you regularly interact with non-technical people, who have no experience
I don't believe I said anywhere that someone who can code necessarily knows what other people want, just what they do.
The fact remains that unless you've had experience and/or training in an intellectually rigorous field like programming, you're almost certain not to consider all the edge cases, caveats, assumptions and potential failure modes of any idea you do have... especially when you're talking about programming something.
Since plans often have to be scrapped or changed as a result of these kinds of unconsidered aspects, I'd argue that someone who hasn't got that kind of anal-retentive attention to edge-cases is unlikely to have a plan that doesn't need either significant adjustment or complete re-engineering.
Since pretty much everyone's ideal program wouldn't crash, get things wrong or give unexpected or unreliable results, I'd argue that their "requirements" plan as presented is not, in fact, what they'd ultimately like produced.
Hence, they don't actually know what they want.
I think the phrase is "spinning in his grave", not screaming. And he's actually been doing it for quite a number of years now.
Discovered early this century, in January 2001 we experimented with attaching a small flywheel to him to generate electricity. Shortly after September 11th we had to swap it out for a much, much larger one, made of depleted uranium.
As of 2006 he's currently powering the entire eastern seaboard, and if Jeb Bush or Condi Rice get in in 2008 we may have to set up a permanent heated base on Pluto just to keep using up the power.
Apathy. In crushingly large amounts.
Administered chiefly by incessant American Idol and Fox "news" for the proles, and an institutionally-corrupt political system that makes it abundantly clear that voting is an increasingly pointless action for the intellectuals (who are in any case outvoted by the mindless hordes of Fox-news-watching proles).
I'm in the UK, where the same thing is starting to happen. Tony Blair is slowly removing power from traditional sources and investing it in himself and his cabinet, while removing judicial and parliamentary oversight.
The name for the tactic is the boiling frog syndrome.
In these cases, it starts off as a weakening of the link between "voting" and "assigning power", and then progresses by weakening independant oversight of the government. Initially the changes are small and they fly under people's radar... slowly increasing the degree makes people grumble a bit but they gradually get used to it... doing this gradually enough and long enough means people will accept things that would have caused bloody rioting in the streets only a few years before.
US culture is now so decadent (sorry, but there's no other word for it) that the president can commit treason or war crimes, corporations can buy representatives' votes outright and people can stand up and testify that representatives of the incumbent political party employed them to fix elections, and all people do is grumble a bit and change the channel.
When you've got a solid political system and one corrupt politician you can effect change. When the entire system's corrupt there's no point in even trying.
I think that's why there's no huge public protest - when things have got bad enough that people accept "free speech zones" with nary a mutter, you know the only thing to do is move country or stage a revolution (and good luck finding popular support for the latter).
I think you answered your own question.
(c.f. the 2000 election, the 2004 election, Diebold, political kickbacks, corporate interference in politics, representatives (purchasing of), etc, etc, etc...).
So is that part of the "Look, look, 3rd-world banana republic X does it, so why take the piss out of us for it?" meme that seems to prevalent in the US these days?
It works for government-sponsored torture, rampant corporate fraud, political corruption, a biased and partisan media and a whole host of other social ills that the USA as a country is too lazy or too apathetic to address.
(Sorry - I appear to be in a trolling mood)
See, this is why we need precedence brackets in the English language:
"(complete picture from wikipedia) instead of half-truths", or
"complete picture instead of (half-truths from wikipedia)"
Of course, the beauty of it is they're both true.
Well said.
Speaking of which, given scientific research and medical advances are of benefit to society, and Bush believes that abortion is murder...
Why did he find it abhorrent to "murder" for profit, but decide that it's ok to profit from "murder" that's already happened?
If you're taking the amoral pragmatic view, this makes perfect sense. If you're trying to make it an issue of morality and principles, I don't see a significant difference between the two actions.
And yet, somehow, still modded +4 Informative.
Score!
Bad programmers are a dime a dozen, which is why so are bad programs.
Good programmers are worth their weight in gold, or at least 10-28 times their weight in bad programmers.
Anyone could hire some teenage VB6 script kiddie out of school to bodge up something similar to what they were thinking for dollars an hour, max. The trick is in finding someone who'll take on your vague idea[1] and develop it into something beautiful, functional and usable that you can take credit for.
That is neither easy nor cheap to outsource.
Footnotes:
[1] I'm sorry, but if long experience developing has taught me anything, it's this: If you don't know how to code, and have no experience of coding, you have no idea what you want.
You might have the vaguest inkling of what you desire, but you won't have considered 90% of the edge cases, it'll be wrong in at least three ways and the whole requirement will need re-writing by the developer once he understands what you actually do want.
Maybe everyone's english education causes them to develop language-parsing filters instead?
It's technically phrased incorrectly, but the meaning is still clear from what they wrote. Your interpretation would mean traffic actually decreased, which is flatly contradicted by the statement.
TBH, the real problem I have is the idea that every additional inbound link could increase traffic by a constant factor. Isn't it saying that if I've got 100 inbound links and 100 users/day, getting one more link would get me an extra 80 users/day?
I think they meant that "the increase in traffic from each link was only 80% of what they expected from a linear relationship", not that "each inbound link increases traffic by 80%".
Doctors.
You are right - exercise and usage can keep fingers (and limbs) limber for longer. However, it can also bring on RSI and hasten a loss of dexterity.
However, I think that "as people get older they lose dexterity" is pretty much unimpeachable as a general guideline.
According to to US population clock and some basic maths, that means around 37437999 people are gamers of 50+ years old.
Which part of 37-and-a-half million implies "older folks don't play games"? Is it the part that's larger than the population of Canada, or the part that's seven times the population of Finland?
Nice. Except that by jumping straight in and posting an unsubstantiated opinion, helpfully providing supporting evidence that completely negated your point, taking the time to dig up a web link but not even bothering with the simple mental maths required to realise that 12.5% of the population of a country might not actually be "fairly small", and your sarky and offensive response to a mildly-dismissive posting... well, I'd say you've more or less proved his point for him.
Good work.
[1] 25% of 50%
Indeed. Interestingly, apparently:
Litigation-elongating timewasters < Patent litigators < Inventors
in the general opinion.
Not that this is necessarily wrong, either - patent ligitators are taking advantage of an existing law as it was meant to be used (even if it's a frequently-stupid law). LETs are just gaming the legal system and using their (usually greater) resources to gain an unfair advantage, rather than letting the issue complete the arbitration process and be done with.
One's using the system for an often-stupid but designed-in purpose, the other's gumming up the whole system for everyone. Makes sense to me.
Well, how about historical trends, climate modelling, the NOAA... need I go on?
Right, because the one thing we all know about the weather is that it's famously predictable and regular.
Like, if they predict rain for the coming week, it means it's going to rain every single day, every single hour, everywhere, doesn't it?
Or, just perhaps, the trend is that hurricanes are increasing in frequency and violence... and a single point of anecdotal data is, y'know, completely irrelevant?
Sure enough, looking at the recent trends in hurricane frequency and violence for the North Atlantic/Caribbean alone, we see a fairly sharp upswing since about 1996.
And sure enough, the trend isn't regular as clockwork - in fact, 1997 has one of the lowest frequencies for years.
I don't know if you've ever heard of an estimate? It's different to a guess. That means while an estimate may turn out to be wrong, it's based on some evidence at least. A guess can be pulled out of your arse at a moment's notice (and should be taken as such), but an estimate (by definition) implies some calculation and reasoning, even if from incomplete information.
Normally, I'd agree with your sentiment - the news media is far too eager to find things for us to be scared of, and people tend to just lap it up without any critical thought or further research.
However, you've just done the opposite - because of your pre-existing prejudice you've blithely assumed there's nothing to the prediction without even taking the few seconds' Googling it took to show you were wrong.
Fair play - I retract my comment about cocaine-stuffed Mac Minis.
;-)
Does the same hold true for the clueless-user entry-level machines though? I'm at work, so I lack the time to do the comparisons myself.
Man, you would have thought the fact it was poopy was enough, drugs test notwithstanding... ;-p