You touched a nerve. The Champaign, IL school of choice system is broken beyond repair. I googled the Milwaukee one. It looks like they may have a better system. Maybe I will do more research and try to lobby for change... In Champaign, parents submit 3 schools in order of preference and then a weighted lottery determines which school your child goes to. You have a better chance of getting into neighborhood schools. They also ensure that each school has at least a certain percentage of African American students (a stipulation of a lawsuit resulting in what is known as the "Consent Decree"). And you get sibling preference (no guarantee) if your childs sibling is going to a particular school.
Lots of middle class people have moved to (or moved into) the suburbs to avoid the whole situation which has actually lowered the quality of the schools (or at least the test scores).
My problem is the monopolistic use of the term Christianity. Your argument is based on the fact that modern day Christians and modern day Jews have a different belief in God. Mormon doctrine is that Christ was the God of the Old Testament, that He created the world, and therefore is the author of Judaism (which had fallen into apostasy by the time He lived) and Christianity (or true Judaism under the Christian belief). Mormons believe that modern Christianity has lost truth (including true nature of God). The belief is not that Joseph Smith "tossed" out a truth but that he restored a truth that was lost. So what authority do they have to decide who is or is not Christian? One can debate the validity Joseph Smith's claim but they have yet to be disproven and therefore, Mormons should be classified as Christians. If you want to make a distinction, which I agree you should, you can call them restorationists (as done by wikipedia). But you can't offer any legitimate academic argument to exclude them from the umbrella of Christianity. Modern mainstream Christians do that because their umbrella isn't wide enough to handle the fact that some truths might have been lost or misinterpreted shortly after the deaths of the apostles.
No, it is a fundamental break from post New Testament Christian doctrine. There is nothing that Mormons teach that is not in perfect harmony with the Old and New Testaments.
Minor correction. Mormon doctrine is that God is an exalted and perfected man. That is true. Jesus was both. He had a divine father and a human mother giving him characteristics of both (ie. he could die but he had power over death). Even Christ "increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man". He suffered temptations and pain. But he had a divine ability to overcome all of it.
As for our destiny, He commanded his disciples "be ye therefore perfect even as I and your Father in Heaven are perfect". Why would Christ tell them (or us) to be perfect if it was not possible for us to achieve perfection? He made it possible.
Regardless of who is right and who is wrong (I don't really want to argue) both doctrines claim Christ to be the chief cornerstone of faith so why can't they be classified under the same umbrella? I am happy to include your Christ in my umbrella (because when all is said and done, I think we are worshipping the same God).
Islam defines Christ as a prophet from what I understand. Mormonism (like orthodox Christianity) defines Him as the Saviour of mankind. There is a fundamental difference in belief. Without Christ, there is no Mormonism. Without Christ, Islam (arguably) would still exist. Yes there are differences and if you define Christianity as how the various councils defined it starting in the 4th century then they are certainly incompatible in some doctrines.
Since Christ is at the root of the word Christian and the fact that the term (or at least the idea in another language) predates Nicea, I would consider them Christian. The fundamental difference between mainstream Christianity and Mormonisn is the belief of what happened between the time of Christ and the councils. However, those differences aside (and they do create some fundamental doctrinal differences), it still goes back to Christ under both beliefs. So whether you say they are mainstream Christian or orthodox Christian or not, they are Christians.
Most non-Mormon Christians, as well (I believe) as most religious scholars consider Mormonism non-Christian in the same way that Christians are non-Jewish, or Muslims are not Christian.
I think they trouble most Mormons have with this statement is that the root of the word Christian is Christ and since Christ is central to the Mormon religion, it bothers Mormons that they are not considered Christian by the Christian world at large (much more than it would bother a Christian to not be considered a Jew or a Muslim to not be considered a Christian).
It is not like it is a bad thing -- it is just a category to make useful notational distinctions. Any time you classify items you run into problems between people who want to lump anything with common elements together or split by the smallest difference. See Lumpers and Splitters. It doesn't affect what you believe or what your life means. A rose by any other name and all that.
I agree it isn't a bad thing to have distinctions for classification purposes and such and I agree that Mormon doctrine has many differences from conventional Christianity. But when Paul refers to Christians in the New Testament, I feel like he is talking to Mormons just as much as any other person who professes to be a Christian. I suppose it is the monopolization of that particular term that I don't like.
It really depends on your definition of Christianity. I agree that the majority of Christians (and under your definition, all Christians) would define it that way. But coming from somebody who professes to be a Mormon, the idea that Mormons are not Christian is preposterous. I think one of the leaders of the Mormon church said it best when he said that we are "not 4th century Christians". It is fairly obvious from reading the Bible that the term Christian (obviously not the English word) was used long before 325 AD. Why can't we all just get along...we have a lot more in common than not.
First of all, if automobile accidents aren't a big deal, why do we continually improve the safety of our cars? Why do we have seat belt laws? Why do we have organizations like MADD? There are lots of things people do to try to make our cars safer. We know there is a risk when getting into a car and we accept that risk. Also, if we stopped making safety improvements right now and continued with our existing laws and practices, the number of automobile accidents would probably not increase (at least per capita) so the risk stays pretty much the same.
If we ignore terrorists, do we have the same guarantee? I don't think so. If we don't stay on top of our game, they will find ways to get through and the risk of dying by way of a terrorist attack will increase.
Just curious...what is the greater risk in Israel (during times when Hamas and other organizations have been actively blowing up busses)?
I don't know. Why don't you ask familes of victims of previous terrorist attacks why we should worry about terrorists? A person that is willing to sacrifice themselves to blow up a jet, bus, or train full of innocent people is a little scary to me.
Another thing that scares me is how easy it would be to do something like that anywhere in the world. I say let the government keep on eye on people that are suspected to do these things.
I apparently don't have to worry about this anyway because I never make international calls to Afghanistan.
Applications are most likely not to be blamed for the decreased performance.
What? The kernel can't possibly deal optimally with all circumstances. It simply doesn't know what a given application will be doing. Only the programmer knows how data will be accessed. A multithreaded application will always perform better if the programmer takes into account the underlying hardware. Every level from the programmer all the way down to the hardware is extremely important to obtain optimal performance.
Hyperthreading can help if it is used how it is intended to be used. Unfortunately, the programmer or the compiler has to know what they are doing. It is doubtful to me that the OS can accurately predict what schedule will be best. That is why OS's export the ability to attach threads to processors and other scheduling primitives.
What price do the OEM's get and how does that translate to end users? Honestly, how many people outside of those that read slashdot actually by processors and build computers from scratch? Just wondering if the sites always use the suggested retail price or if they take into consideration the average selling price of full systems from OEMs.
if the software you want to use isn't fully supported and you've got a little bit of spaire time you can become an advocate for that application and help get it working by filing bug reports and regression testing.
Therein lies the problem. Most consumers are not interested in being beta testers. I will have to give Linux another try though. It sounds like it may have evolved a lot since I last tried it at home.
You bring up interesting points that I didn't think about in my original post. My daughter likes to play the Dora, Blues Clues, etc games on Nickjr.com. Do these all work under Linux? I guess I will have to try a dual boot again for a while to see if there are any major problems.
Thanks for the information. Maybe I will venture again into the world of consumer Linux....just to try the various money apps that people have suggested. I have tried Wine in the past without much luck but perhaps that has improved somewhat in the last 4 years too.
I would generally be happy to deal with a few quirks in Open Source software on Linux in exchange for the many benefits that the community provides. The major reason I haven't switched is because of the lack (that I know of) of budgeting and tax software for Linux. I love Quickens ability to download my transactions from my financial institutions automatically and I love doing my taxes electronically. Are there Open Source equivalents to these products?
I think this brings up a general problem in that Windows is generally supported first by software and a lot of hardware where Linux is either an afterthought or it is supported soley by the community and therefore there is a lag time for getting the functionality I want.
Maybe it has been a while since I used Linux for "consumer" activities. Maybe it has improved enough to use. The fact is that most customers don't want to write device drivers or software for the problem that isn't yet solved.
This is/. No pro-Microsoft or pro-Intel posts are allowed here.
I am always very skeptical of all benchmarking. I did work in neural networks. One of the things that you can't do is overtrain a network to a sample data set. It kills the ability of the network to accurately predict values on real data. The same can be said of benchmarking. If you spend too much time tuning to the benchmarks, you will hurt general performance....not to mention the other factors involved that are unrelated to the processor (like the chipset, cards, etc).
Does anyone have a link to more server benchmarks. I don't have money to blow on a really expensive gaming machine anyway.
Whether it is a coorporation taking our money or the government, there is no free ride. Personally, I would rather get reamed by a coorporation since they generally have to run much more efficiently than a government so ultimately it probably costs less that way.
You might as well call them stupid or willfully ignorant for not knowing what machine screws are used to hold their washing machine together.
Good analogy. This is absolutely the truth. I don't think that the fact that people don't understand computers is willful ignorance. I think it is most likely a matter of time. Other people outside of the open source community (or technology related fields) simply don't have the time to RTFM. Especially given that the manual for a computer and all of its hardware and software would be about a million pages long if it were comprehensive. People just don't care how it works because all they want to do is write a book, keep track of their finances, browse the web, and write emails.
I would prefer a hybrid approach. You can monitor my television viewing habits but I would like to give additional feedback on what ads I do and do not want to see. I can't watch football with my children anymore without changing the channel during commercials.
Please show me only "G or PG rated" commercials (at least while my kids are watching) regardless of the program that I am watching).
It is erroneous to assume that because somebody likes sports, that automatically means they would, as Jeff Foxworthy puts it, "like a beer and to see something naked".
It is my opinion that letting a 12 year old play pornographic video games IS abusive (or at least extremely neglectful).
Without government censorship, what is to stop people from throwing up pornographic billboards in my neighborhood. Your argument is understood but it just is not practical nor responsible to just say no to any kind of censorship.
Yes, some people take it too far but thank goodness there are some standards for what is acceptible or we would have nothing but pornography to watch on TV. Of course that might not be considered a bad thing by most of the people that read slashdot.
The problem is with the parents of the kids that play these video games. However, it isn't the iresponsible parents that are trying to stop this stuff. Most of them probably do not care enough to put a stop to it. It is people concerned about the overall health of our society and concerned about other peoples children that want these controls. To blanketly say that there should not be any government censorship is to say that a messed up parent has every right to mess up their 12 year old child. That frightens me.
keyboard, game station, universal remote control, alternate languages, music?, education, larger letters my grandma (who can't type and doesn't see really well), etc.
How can anyone prove if code is intentionally buggy? I imagine that Intel doesn't do a whole lot of correctness testing on AMD machines. Things like this could easily fall through the cracks.
From Intel's site describing the Intel C++ compiler
"Create high-performance software for desktops and servers that is optimized for Intel® processors with Intel® Compilers for Linux*."
So what is the big deal? I bet that legally speaking statements like that are enough for them to avoid any liability on this issue. They are a chip company. They have a compiler to help sell chips. If you don't use Intel processors or you want your stuff to be fully optimized on AMD, then maybe you should consider using a different compiler.
Apparently I stand corrected. The filesystem explorer shown on Jurassic Park is a real filesystem.
Ok, it isn't quite as bogus as I thought. But would a 10-year old girl, even one familiar with UNIX, have looked at that screen and immediately recognized it (in the early 90's)? Was it common hacker knowledge? I picture hackers as using far less glamorous interfaces (let's say the command line). I will have to watch the movie again...I don't remember seeing any directory names...
Slashdot Mirror
Lots of middle class people have moved to (or moved into) the suburbs to avoid the whole situation which has actually lowered the quality of the schools (or at least the test scores).
My problem is the monopolistic use of the term Christianity. Your argument is based on the fact that modern day Christians and modern day Jews have a different belief in God. Mormon doctrine is that Christ was the God of the Old Testament, that He created the world, and therefore is the author of Judaism (which had fallen into apostasy by the time He lived) and Christianity (or true Judaism under the Christian belief). Mormons believe that modern Christianity has lost truth (including true nature of God). The belief is not that Joseph Smith "tossed" out a truth but that he restored a truth that was lost. So what authority do they have to decide who is or is not Christian? One can debate the validity Joseph Smith's claim but they have yet to be disproven and therefore, Mormons should be classified as Christians. If you want to make a distinction, which I agree you should, you can call them restorationists (as done by wikipedia). But you can't offer any legitimate academic argument to exclude them from the umbrella of Christianity. Modern mainstream Christians do that because their umbrella isn't wide enough to handle the fact that some truths might have been lost or misinterpreted shortly after the deaths of the apostles.
Minor correction. Mormon doctrine is that God is an exalted and perfected man. That is true. Jesus was both. He had a divine father and a human mother giving him characteristics of both (ie. he could die but he had power over death). Even Christ "increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man". He suffered temptations and pain. But he had a divine ability to overcome all of it.
As for our destiny, He commanded his disciples "be ye therefore perfect even as I and your Father in Heaven are perfect". Why would Christ tell them (or us) to be perfect if it was not possible for us to achieve perfection? He made it possible.
Regardless of who is right and who is wrong (I don't really want to argue) both doctrines claim Christ to be the chief cornerstone of faith so why can't they be classified under the same umbrella? I am happy to include your Christ in my umbrella (because when all is said and done, I think we are worshipping the same God).
Since Christ is at the root of the word Christian and the fact that the term (or at least the idea in another language) predates Nicea, I would consider them Christian. The fundamental difference between mainstream Christianity and Mormonisn is the belief of what happened between the time of Christ and the councils. However, those differences aside (and they do create some fundamental doctrinal differences), it still goes back to Christ under both beliefs. So whether you say they are mainstream Christian or orthodox Christian or not, they are Christians.
I think they trouble most Mormons have with this statement is that the root of the word Christian is Christ and since Christ is central to the Mormon religion, it bothers Mormons that they are not considered Christian by the Christian world at large (much more than it would bother a Christian to not be considered a Jew or a Muslim to not be considered a Christian).
It is not like it is a bad thing -- it is just a category to make useful notational distinctions. Any time you classify items you run into problems between people who want to lump anything with common elements together or split by the smallest difference. See Lumpers and Splitters. It doesn't affect what you believe or what your life means. A rose by any other name and all that.
I agree it isn't a bad thing to have distinctions for classification purposes and such and I agree that Mormon doctrine has many differences from conventional Christianity. But when Paul refers to Christians in the New Testament, I feel like he is talking to Mormons just as much as any other person who professes to be a Christian. I suppose it is the monopolization of that particular term that I don't like.
It really depends on your definition of Christianity. I agree that the majority of Christians (and under your definition, all Christians) would define it that way. But coming from somebody who professes to be a Mormon, the idea that Mormons are not Christian is preposterous. I think one of the leaders of the Mormon church said it best when he said that we are "not 4th century Christians". It is fairly obvious from reading the Bible that the term Christian (obviously not the English word) was used long before 325 AD. Why can't we all just get along...we have a lot more in common than not.
If we ignore terrorists, do we have the same guarantee? I don't think so. If we don't stay on top of our game, they will find ways to get through and the risk of dying by way of a terrorist attack will increase.
Just curious...what is the greater risk in Israel (during times when Hamas and other organizations have been actively blowing up busses)?
I don't know. Why don't you ask familes of victims of previous terrorist attacks why we should worry about terrorists? A person that is willing to sacrifice themselves to blow up a jet, bus, or train full of innocent people is a little scary to me.
Another thing that scares me is how easy it would be to do something like that anywhere in the world. I say let the government keep on eye on people that are suspected to do these things.
I apparently don't have to worry about this anyway because I never make international calls to Afghanistan.
Honestly, if you are not doing anything illegal, what part of "liberty" is being taken away by wiretaps?
What? The kernel can't possibly deal optimally with all circumstances. It simply doesn't know what a given application will be doing. Only the programmer knows how data will be accessed. A multithreaded application will always perform better if the programmer takes into account the underlying hardware. Every level from the programmer all the way down to the hardware is extremely important to obtain optimal performance.
Hyperthreading can help if it is used how it is intended to be used. Unfortunately, the programmer or the compiler has to know what they are doing. It is doubtful to me that the OS can accurately predict what schedule will be best. That is why OS's export the ability to attach threads to processors and other scheduling primitives.
What price do the OEM's get and how does that translate to end users? Honestly, how many people outside of those that read slashdot actually by processors and build computers from scratch? Just wondering if the sites always use the suggested retail price or if they take into consideration the average selling price of full systems from OEMs.
Therein lies the problem. Most consumers are not interested in being beta testers. I will have to give Linux another try though. It sounds like it may have evolved a lot since I last tried it at home.
You bring up interesting points that I didn't think about in my original post. My daughter likes to play the Dora, Blues Clues, etc games on Nickjr.com. Do these all work under Linux? I guess I will have to try a dual boot again for a while to see if there are any major problems.
Thanks for the information. Maybe I will venture again into the world of consumer Linux....just to try the various money apps that people have suggested. I have tried Wine in the past without much luck but perhaps that has improved somewhat in the last 4 years too.
I think this brings up a general problem in that Windows is generally supported first by software and a lot of hardware where Linux is either an afterthought or it is supported soley by the community and therefore there is a lag time for getting the functionality I want.
Maybe it has been a while since I used Linux for "consumer" activities. Maybe it has improved enough to use. The fact is that most customers don't want to write device drivers or software for the problem that isn't yet solved.
I am always very skeptical of all benchmarking. I did work in neural networks. One of the things that you can't do is overtrain a network to a sample data set. It kills the ability of the network to accurately predict values on real data. The same can be said of benchmarking. If you spend too much time tuning to the benchmarks, you will hurt general performance....not to mention the other factors involved that are unrelated to the processor (like the chipset, cards, etc).
Does anyone have a link to more server benchmarks. I don't have money to blow on a really expensive gaming machine anyway.
Whether it is a coorporation taking our money or the government, there is no free ride. Personally, I would rather get reamed by a coorporation since they generally have to run much more efficiently than a government so ultimately it probably costs less that way.
Good analogy. This is absolutely the truth. I don't think that the fact that people don't understand computers is willful ignorance. I think it is most likely a matter of time. Other people outside of the open source community (or technology related fields) simply don't have the time to RTFM. Especially given that the manual for a computer and all of its hardware and software would be about a million pages long if it were comprehensive. People just don't care how it works because all they want to do is write a book, keep track of their finances, browse the web, and write emails.
Please show me only "G or PG rated" commercials (at least while my kids are watching) regardless of the program that I am watching).
It is erroneous to assume that because somebody likes sports, that automatically means they would, as Jeff Foxworthy puts it, "like a beer and to see something naked".
Without government censorship, what is to stop people from throwing up pornographic billboards in my neighborhood. Your argument is understood but it just is not practical nor responsible to just say no to any kind of censorship.
Yes, some people take it too far but thank goodness there are some standards for what is acceptible or we would have nothing but pornography to watch on TV. Of course that might not be considered a bad thing by most of the people that read slashdot.
The problem is with the parents of the kids that play these video games. However, it isn't the iresponsible parents that are trying to stop this stuff. Most of them probably do not care enough to put a stop to it. It is people concerned about the overall health of our society and concerned about other peoples children that want these controls. To blanketly say that there should not be any government censorship is to say that a messed up parent has every right to mess up their 12 year old child. That frightens me.
keyboard, game station, universal remote control, alternate languages, music?, education, larger letters my grandma (who can't type and doesn't see really well), etc.
Do they have an ergonomic model?
How can anyone prove if code is intentionally buggy? I imagine that Intel doesn't do a whole lot of correctness testing on AMD machines. Things like this could easily fall through the cracks.
"Create high-performance software for desktops and servers that is optimized for Intel® processors with Intel® Compilers for Linux*."
So what is the big deal? I bet that legally speaking statements like that are enough for them to avoid any liability on this issue. They are a chip company. They have a compiler to help sell chips. If you don't use Intel processors or you want your stuff to be fully optimized on AMD, then maybe you should consider using a different compiler.
Ok, it isn't quite as bogus as I thought. But would a 10-year old girl, even one familiar with UNIX, have looked at that screen and immediately recognized it (in the early 90's)? Was it common hacker knowledge? I picture hackers as using far less glamorous interfaces (let's say the command line). I will have to watch the movie again...I don't remember seeing any directory names...