Unfortunately grade inflation is a double-edged sword. You get higher grades for mediocre work, but now A is the new C. And any school that grades by the curve as you described will have fewer graduates get the job or college placement they deserve.
1) the definition of "charity" is much too loose and includes things of personal benefit 2) things that should not be considered charity allow for tax breaks
I understand and agree that issue #1 is wrong. It needs to be fixed. And if it is fixed, issue #2 also gets solved.
But if I make $50K/year and use $20K of that for my own food, clothing, and shelter, and give the remaining $30K to selflessly help others be fed, clothed, and sheltered.... no, the government should not take any of that money. For me, I might as well have never seen a dime of it, and it is counterproductive to tax what is directly helping those in need.
Because taxes. If it costs $20 million to mint $10 million of coins, then tax revenue is in the negative $10 million and the government has to tax more to make up for it.
The replacement would likely be to round all transaction totals the nearest nickel. If the penny is changed hands millions of times, then replacing it with the nickel will result in similar usage. It's not like people just suddenly stop paying for things.
The penny typically doesn't change hands that often anyway.[citation needed]
The definition of graphical editing you are using was not my intention (I would call that "text editing in a graphical environment"). I meant editing graphical objects, closer to what you are talking about with graphical programming.
Good parenting means doing what it takes to make your child succeed in spite of teachers, government, corporations, or any other environmental circumstances.
So stop blaming everyone other than parents for shitty parenting. Parenting is life... teaching is just a job.
Why do some feel that charitable contributions should be taxed? Say someone makes a billion dollars this year and gives away that billion dollars to feed the hungry or buy clothes for the poor... that should be it. If the government takes half a billion off the top, that is half a billion less for those hungry and poor.
It's the same as giving someone a welfare check and then taxing half of it. Suggesting that would be considered preposterous by the same people who want to tax the hell out of the charitable contributions.
Yep, thank you. In some initial Ph.D. research, I read through papers related to Intentional Programming and was very close to building my dissertation research around the subject.
I think the day may come, but only after graphical editing becomes more ubiquitous. For now it seems easier to drop into a text editor than to find, download, and learn software for working with graphical languages. And of course, many graphical languages are essentially DSLs, meaning Google and StackOverflow are of little help.
Plus how do you even search for a graphical concept without translating it to text?
I'm just not sure if these kind of problems will be solved anytime soon, which is quite unfortunate.
Regular expressions describe constraints on text, so writing them in text makes sense. So I'd say regular expressions as a declarative language are more the exception than the rule.
But you certainly could use a graphical language to describe regular expressions. Here's an example of using a state machine. But regular expression syntax is more constrained and therefore generally serves its specific purpose better than a state machine.
I once wrote a text-based tablature parser for a CS class. Like most text languages, its main upside is in tooling. You could use any text editor to describe music in that language. But it has several downsides compared to modern staff notation. Without using a specialized IDE, keeping measures and notes aligned when inserting other notes is a time-consuming process... this sort of negates the tooling upside. There is a tradeoff between number of lines used in a tab staff and the expressiveness of each line. And it is more difficult to read for many instruments (although the nature of guitars make them an obvious exception).
Going back to your example of web presentation, I would say that a graphical editor (if done right) is a much more natural way to describe graphical objects being displayed to the user than either HTML or CSS. I said "if done right"; most graphical IDEs I've worked with are mediocre at best, unfortunately.
Even though there are natural exceptions, I tend to stand behind my original thought that imperative languages are more naturally text-based and declarative languages are more naturally graphical. But text will win for some time unless and until someone very smart figures out a way to make graphical editing just as natural and universal as text editing.
For describing structure and organization, a graphical language is often better suited for the job. Take a state machine for instance. Describing it using a graph is very natural but nothing like native machine code. Describing it in XML is less natural, and perhaps a tad closer to machine code. Describing it using conditional statements, loops, and gotos is definitely closer to the native language but makes it more difficult to understand the original structure. Assembly and machine language tend to lose the original meaning entirely.
For describing imperative and mathematical operations, graphs aren't very well suited. A state transition diagram is the "language" of a turing machine, but it is much more natural to use text to describe an algorithm than to use a turing machine.
Like I mentioned before, we tend to use these concepts together and thus a hybrid approach may be ideal.
Textual syntax does have its limitations. Many language designers strive to make their languages at most context-sensitive, but that can only take you so far. The semantics of variable naming and lookup require another layer on top of syntax to complete the description.
Another way of looking at it: even columnar flat file formats have Turing complete descriptions.
Graphical languages, for all the bad rap they get, make it easier to describe many structures like graphs, tables, etc. without the need for an additional layer of semantics on top of their "syntax", e.g. you may not need a concept of symbol lookup. Probably a hybrid approach is better, where you can describe imperative operations in text and declarative concepts in a graphical language... I don't know.
Well, one problem is that you've moved out of the US and have no idea what real day-to-day life is here anymore. I suppose you watch the news and, based on a couple of anecdotal cases, think you know everything that happens. I guess you assume everyone in Texas leads a cult too? I'll report some news... last time I was in Texas, I'm pretty sure I saw a couple of Asian-decent people there... based on that evidence, I guess you think everyone there is Asian too, right?
But I can't blame you. The media knows killing a gay person because he or she is gay is a big deal. And they're right, it is a big deal and people should know about it. But the media doesn't talk to all the good and normal things that happen in the US daily. For instance, I'm sure you think in Alabama (where I live) everyone is a racist and we're all trying to bring back slavery. But I know very few people that would qualify as "racist" at any level, and those people are mostly senior citizens who are completely fine with African-Americans but grew up used to using terms we don't use today. The media doesn't tell you how many people aren't racist, and how well people all over our state get along with each other daily.
So stop with the BS that the US is dominated by people who hate gays. That's so far from the truth. Sure we have a few crazies, but they come in all varieties. There's a lady in Florida who shook her baby for interrupting Farmville. A man killed his mother over concert tickets in Illinois. A guy stabbed another one over Cheetos in Missouri. If you seriously think that most of the US is gay-hating, and if you think most of us kill over video games, concert tickets, and snacks... well, I don't have much more to say to you other than, "Get your head out of the TV every once in a while."
Infertility cover would be a poor insurance to offer. It's not like a 5 year old would want or care about it, nor a 70 year old. The only people who would consider buying it are people who are trying to conceive. That would make it a very tiny pool to spread risk around. Someone should have offered it to you, then denied you for a prior condition. You can't wait until you are burgled to buy insurance. Nor would it work if people waited until it was confirmed they were infertile before seeking coverage.
The exact same argument could be made for coverage of prenatal care. Studies have shown that spreading the risk (you know, the point of insurance) would increase premiums by around $0.26 per month. That's to cover something that otherwise costs the individual tens of thousands of dollars.
But a gay person, can't marry who they want, can't necessarily live where they want, and have a risk to health and life from anti-gay zealots. You have complete freedom, even if not as many advantages as some other groups.
You can get married even if the state doesn't recognize it. There are plenty of options to fix the above problem. You can move, which is what my brother-in-law did before getting married to his partner. He would rather live there anyway because the people are more liberal and open to his marriage.
Tell me, which areas in the US are "risk to health and life"? Please, that was my whole point... the hard conservatives in the United States might disagree with you (and even hate groups like Westboro only resort to calling names), but there are other places in this world that will kill or torture gay people.
Birth control was often not covered because it's Satanic to allow women to have choice, so states stepped in to force the choice to be allowed.
Big insurers don't care about that. If it would have saved them money, they would have added it to their plans and maybe even passed the savings to the customer (or kept it for more profit). The fact that this didn't happen tells me birth control costs insurers more, not less.
The state tells them what they must cover, and if the state doesn't mandate it, they won't cover it. With universal health care, you would likely have been covered (it's covered in some of the "socialist" countries I've looked at). But the private system in the US has bizarre laws because there are 52+ sets of rules (one for each state, federal, and territories) regulating insurance. The answer likely comes back to your state's rules, not the insurance company's free will.
Exactly. It sucks. I've spent a lot of money. I could move to another state and have infertility covered by law. But I haven't, and I'm not willing to make the move. So that's life, and that's my point... we make our choices where to live, and even though the precise location I am presently isn't everything I could ever hope for, it's much, MUCH better than some countries.
It's not always about how the law treats you. (Even though there have been several cases involving surrogacy and adoption where the infertile couple got screwed over.)
My employer offers a good insurance plan, except it doesn't provide much coverage for infertility. I couldn't find infertility coverage on the private market in my state. We paid over $30,000 this past year out of pocket... and most of that money didn't count toward our deductible nor out-of-pocket maximum (not to mention that the tiny amount we did get covered was like pulling teeth).
Yet part of our insurance premiums go to pay for no-cost birth control. How is that fair to us?
Like I said, I get it. But life is unfair and everyone can probably point to some issue that has affected them personally. At the end of the day, we're alive and our lives aren't directly being threatened. Many Christians that the AC derides so quickly are responsible for great charity that helps people whose lives and livelihoods are truly being threatened daily by hunger, lack of clothing, lack of shelter, etc.
(And before someone says that birth control actually reduce what insurance needs to pay out, tell me, why did we need the law to force insurance companies to cover it? If it were cost effective, it would have been covered enthusiastically by all insurance plans.)
In that case, go to an Islamic country and let me know how that works out for you.
I get it... it's not perfect, it's not fair. You can complain all day about that, just like I can complain all day that the law of our country doesn't treat infertile couples fairly (hey, at least your group has a strong voice with your 3.8% of people, mine is around 10.9% and nobody cares that we work hard and spend our life savings on a small chance at having what many 16 year olds want to abort).
But at least both of us can work, eat, and sleep with practically no issue whatsoever. And generally we have zero problems telling our tale. Some Islamic countries consider being gay punishable by death, and others by fine up to life imprisonment. We have the good life... it doesn't mean we have to stop fighting to make it better... but it could be much worse.
I don't know about you, but I can tell a vast difference between the quality of games that came out earlier vs. later, particularly in the same series (e.g. Halo 3 vs. Halo Reach vs. Halo 4).
And at the end of the day, it's always... ALWAYS... about those in power vs. those who are not.
Those in power love those who aren't to be fighting internally over conservative vs. liberal issues. Those in power know it's important to appear to be hostile towards each other, but when the TV cameras are off you'll find them sleeping in the same bed.
Microsoft pushed the personal computer OS for the good part of 30 years. Let me have my tablet OS for a couple of years and then maybe they can get back to making you happy.
I never meant to imply that Bitcoin's only option is to fallback to our current banking system.
It would be a choice: transaction speed, or the benefits of crypto-currency. I might choose to directly pay with Bitcoin when purchasing large items like a car or electronics or when making regular bill payments. But I might go with a payment processor when I'm just buying a bottle of soda.
And as was pointed out in other comments, that only applies if you require a large number of confirmations. Small transactions at the grocery store wouldn't need so many. And in the case that you are buying $1000 worth of items at the grocery store, perhaps the store would have you go to the customer service desk to wait for enough confirmations.
If I swipe my debit card today, the payment processor doesn't transmit actual dollar bills and coins on the spot. Over simplifying, the transaction is logged and my bank will guarantee to pay the seller at some point in the future.
For many transactions, I expect that Bitcoin will be used the same way. You deposit Bitcoins at your bank. When you use a debit card, you aren't transmitting actual Bitcoins, but rather setting up a transaction that will be settled later by the bank and the seller... just like cash today.
When you deposit your Bitcoin, that will be a true Bitcoin transaction in which your bank will probably merge that value in with other Bitcoins it has obtained. Your account will contain a record of the deposit so the bank can keep track of how much of its total Bitcoin allotment is yours. When you withdraw or debit your account, the bank will perform the Bitcoin transaction and record it on your account. In all of the above, substitute "Bitcoin" for "cash" and it is, for most practical purposes, the same as it is today.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately grade inflation is a double-edged sword. You get higher grades for mediocre work, but now A is the new C. And any school that grades by the curve as you described will have fewer graduates get the job or college placement they deserve.
You described two separate issues:
1) the definition of "charity" is much too loose and includes things of personal benefit
2) things that should not be considered charity allow for tax breaks
I understand and agree that issue #1 is wrong. It needs to be fixed. And if it is fixed, issue #2 also gets solved.
But if I make $50K/year and use $20K of that for my own food, clothing, and shelter, and give the remaining $30K to selflessly help others be fed, clothed, and sheltered.... no, the government should not take any of that money. For me, I might as well have never seen a dime of it, and it is counterproductive to tax what is directly helping those in need.
Because taxes. If it costs $20 million to mint $10 million of coins, then tax revenue is in the negative $10 million and the government has to tax more to make up for it.
The replacement would likely be to round all transaction totals the nearest nickel. If the penny is changed hands millions of times, then replacing it with the nickel will result in similar usage. It's not like people just suddenly stop paying for things.
The penny typically doesn't change hands that often anyway.[citation needed]
The definition of graphical editing you are using was not my intention (I would call that "text editing in a graphical environment"). I meant editing graphical objects, closer to what you are talking about with graphical programming.
It would be difficult for a cop to wear Google Glass while getting away with forcing others not to use it.
Good parenting means doing what it takes to make your child succeed in spite of teachers, government, corporations, or any other environmental circumstances.
So stop blaming everyone other than parents for shitty parenting. Parenting is life... teaching is just a job.
"tax-free kindness of wealthy strangers"
Why do some feel that charitable contributions should be taxed? Say someone makes a billion dollars this year and gives away that billion dollars to feed the hungry or buy clothes for the poor... that should be it. If the government takes half a billion off the top, that is half a billion less for those hungry and poor.
It's the same as giving someone a welfare check and then taxing half of it. Suggesting that would be considered preposterous by the same people who want to tax the hell out of the charitable contributions.
Yep, thank you. In some initial Ph.D. research, I read through papers related to Intentional Programming and was very close to building my dissertation research around the subject.
I think the day may come, but only after graphical editing becomes more ubiquitous. For now it seems easier to drop into a text editor than to find, download, and learn software for working with graphical languages. And of course, many graphical languages are essentially DSLs, meaning Google and StackOverflow are of little help.
Plus how do you even search for a graphical concept without translating it to text?
I'm just not sure if these kind of problems will be solved anytime soon, which is quite unfortunate.
Regular expressions describe constraints on text, so writing them in text makes sense. So I'd say regular expressions as a declarative language are more the exception than the rule.
But you certainly could use a graphical language to describe regular expressions. Here's an example of using a state machine. But regular expression syntax is more constrained and therefore generally serves its specific purpose better than a state machine.
I once wrote a text-based tablature parser for a CS class. Like most text languages, its main upside is in tooling. You could use any text editor to describe music in that language. But it has several downsides compared to modern staff notation. Without using a specialized IDE, keeping measures and notes aligned when inserting other notes is a time-consuming process... this sort of negates the tooling upside. There is a tradeoff between number of lines used in a tab staff and the expressiveness of each line. And it is more difficult to read for many instruments (although the nature of guitars make them an obvious exception).
Going back to your example of web presentation, I would say that a graphical editor (if done right) is a much more natural way to describe graphical objects being displayed to the user than either HTML or CSS. I said "if done right"; most graphical IDEs I've worked with are mediocre at best, unfortunately.
Even though there are natural exceptions, I tend to stand behind my original thought that imperative languages are more naturally text-based and declarative languages are more naturally graphical. But text will win for some time unless and until someone very smart figures out a way to make graphical editing just as natural and universal as text editing.
For describing structure and organization, a graphical language is often better suited for the job. Take a state machine for instance. Describing it using a graph is very natural but nothing like native machine code. Describing it in XML is less natural, and perhaps a tad closer to machine code. Describing it using conditional statements, loops, and gotos is definitely closer to the native language but makes it more difficult to understand the original structure. Assembly and machine language tend to lose the original meaning entirely.
For describing imperative and mathematical operations, graphs aren't very well suited. A state transition diagram is the "language" of a turing machine, but it is much more natural to use text to describe an algorithm than to use a turing machine.
Like I mentioned before, we tend to use these concepts together and thus a hybrid approach may be ideal.
Textual syntax does have its limitations. Many language designers strive to make their languages at most context-sensitive, but that can only take you so far. The semantics of variable naming and lookup require another layer on top of syntax to complete the description.
Another way of looking at it: even columnar flat file formats have Turing complete descriptions.
Graphical languages, for all the bad rap they get, make it easier to describe many structures like graphs, tables, etc. without the need for an additional layer of semantics on top of their "syntax", e.g. you may not need a concept of symbol lookup. Probably a hybrid approach is better, where you can describe imperative operations in text and declarative concepts in a graphical language... I don't know.
Well, one problem is that you've moved out of the US and have no idea what real day-to-day life is here anymore. I suppose you watch the news and, based on a couple of anecdotal cases, think you know everything that happens. I guess you assume everyone in Texas leads a cult too? I'll report some news... last time I was in Texas, I'm pretty sure I saw a couple of Asian-decent people there... based on that evidence, I guess you think everyone there is Asian too, right?
But I can't blame you. The media knows killing a gay person because he or she is gay is a big deal. And they're right, it is a big deal and people should know about it. But the media doesn't talk to all the good and normal things that happen in the US daily. For instance, I'm sure you think in Alabama (where I live) everyone is a racist and we're all trying to bring back slavery. But I know very few people that would qualify as "racist" at any level, and those people are mostly senior citizens who are completely fine with African-Americans but grew up used to using terms we don't use today. The media doesn't tell you how many people aren't racist, and how well people all over our state get along with each other daily.
So stop with the BS that the US is dominated by people who hate gays. That's so far from the truth. Sure we have a few crazies, but they come in all varieties. There's a lady in Florida who shook her baby for interrupting Farmville. A man killed his mother over concert tickets in Illinois. A guy stabbed another one over Cheetos in Missouri. If you seriously think that most of the US is gay-hating, and if you think most of us kill over video games, concert tickets, and snacks... well, I don't have much more to say to you other than, "Get your head out of the TV every once in a while."
Infertility cover would be a poor insurance to offer. It's not like a 5 year old would want or care about it, nor a 70 year old. The only people who would consider buying it are people who are trying to conceive. That would make it a very tiny pool to spread risk around. Someone should have offered it to you, then denied you for a prior condition. You can't wait until you are burgled to buy insurance. Nor would it work if people waited until it was confirmed they were infertile before seeking coverage.
The exact same argument could be made for coverage of prenatal care. Studies have shown that spreading the risk (you know, the point of insurance) would increase premiums by around $0.26 per month. That's to cover something that otherwise costs the individual tens of thousands of dollars.
But a gay person, can't marry who they want, can't necessarily live where they want, and have a risk to health and life from anti-gay zealots. You have complete freedom, even if not as many advantages as some other groups.
You can get married even if the state doesn't recognize it. There are plenty of options to fix the above problem. You can move, which is what my brother-in-law did before getting married to his partner. He would rather live there anyway because the people are more liberal and open to his marriage.
Tell me, which areas in the US are "risk to health and life"? Please, that was my whole point... the hard conservatives in the United States might disagree with you (and even hate groups like Westboro only resort to calling names), but there are other places in this world that will kill or torture gay people.
Birth control was often not covered because it's Satanic to allow women to have choice, so states stepped in to force the choice to be allowed.
Big insurers don't care about that. If it would have saved them money, they would have added it to their plans and maybe even passed the savings to the customer (or kept it for more profit). The fact that this didn't happen tells me birth control costs insurers more, not less.
The state tells them what they must cover, and if the state doesn't mandate it, they won't cover it. With universal health care, you would likely have been covered (it's covered in some of the "socialist" countries I've looked at). But the private system in the US has bizarre laws because there are 52+ sets of rules (one for each state, federal, and territories) regulating insurance. The answer likely comes back to your state's rules, not the insurance company's free will.
Exactly. It sucks. I've spent a lot of money. I could move to another state and have infertility covered by law. But I haven't, and I'm not willing to make the move. So that's life, and that's my point... we make our choices where to live, and even though the precise location I am presently isn't everything I could ever hope for, it's much, MUCH better than some countries.
There's nothing a well-placed nuke won't fix?
It's not always about how the law treats you. (Even though there have been several cases involving surrogacy and adoption where the infertile couple got screwed over.)
My employer offers a good insurance plan, except it doesn't provide much coverage for infertility. I couldn't find infertility coverage on the private market in my state. We paid over $30,000 this past year out of pocket... and most of that money didn't count toward our deductible nor out-of-pocket maximum (not to mention that the tiny amount we did get covered was like pulling teeth).
Yet part of our insurance premiums go to pay for no-cost birth control. How is that fair to us?
Like I said, I get it. But life is unfair and everyone can probably point to some issue that has affected them personally. At the end of the day, we're alive and our lives aren't directly being threatened. Many Christians that the AC derides so quickly are responsible for great charity that helps people whose lives and livelihoods are truly being threatened daily by hunger, lack of clothing, lack of shelter, etc.
(And before someone says that birth control actually reduce what insurance needs to pay out, tell me, why did we need the law to force insurance companies to cover it? If it were cost effective, it would have been covered enthusiastically by all insurance plans.)
Microsoft did have a dog named Rover, originally in Microsoft Bob but later used in Windows XP's search.
That's what they all say, until they reach TwoBillion-OneHundredFortySevenMillion-FourHundredEightyThreeThousand-SixHundredFortyEightDrive.
In that case, go to an Islamic country and let me know how that works out for you.
I get it... it's not perfect, it's not fair. You can complain all day about that, just like I can complain all day that the law of our country doesn't treat infertile couples fairly (hey, at least your group has a strong voice with your 3.8% of people, mine is around 10.9% and nobody cares that we work hard and spend our life savings on a small chance at having what many 16 year olds want to abort).
But at least both of us can work, eat, and sleep with practically no issue whatsoever. And generally we have zero problems telling our tale. Some Islamic countries consider being gay punishable by death, and others by fine up to life imprisonment. We have the good life... it doesn't mean we have to stop fighting to make it better... but it could be much worse.
I don't know about you, but I can tell a vast difference between the quality of games that came out earlier vs. later, particularly in the same series (e.g. Halo 3 vs. Halo Reach vs. Halo 4).
And at the end of the day, it's always... ALWAYS... about those in power vs. those who are not.
Those in power love those who aren't to be fighting internally over conservative vs. liberal issues. Those in power know it's important to appear to be hostile towards each other, but when the TV cameras are off you'll find them sleeping in the same bed.
Microsoft pushed the personal computer OS for the good part of 30 years. Let me have my tablet OS for a couple of years and then maybe they can get back to making you happy.
Did you not read that I specifically didn't quote the part about fraud? Perhaps because that's not what my argument was focused on?
99.99% of hackers are not able to break into Target's databases. It would be good to keep it that way
It would be better to add a few more 9s to that percentage, or even make it 100%.
I never meant to imply that Bitcoin's only option is to fallback to our current banking system.
It would be a choice: transaction speed, or the benefits of crypto-currency. I might choose to directly pay with Bitcoin when purchasing large items like a car or electronics or when making regular bill payments. But I might go with a payment processor when I'm just buying a bottle of soda.
And as was pointed out in other comments, that only applies if you require a large number of confirmations. Small transactions at the grocery store wouldn't need so many. And in the case that you are buying $1000 worth of items at the grocery store, perhaps the store would have you go to the customer service desk to wait for enough confirmations.
If I swipe my debit card today, the payment processor doesn't transmit actual dollar bills and coins on the spot. Over simplifying, the transaction is logged and my bank will guarantee to pay the seller at some point in the future.
For many transactions, I expect that Bitcoin will be used the same way. You deposit Bitcoins at your bank. When you use a debit card, you aren't transmitting actual Bitcoins, but rather setting up a transaction that will be settled later by the bank and the seller... just like cash today.
When you deposit your Bitcoin, that will be a true Bitcoin transaction in which your bank will probably merge that value in with other Bitcoins it has obtained. Your account will contain a record of the deposit so the bank can keep track of how much of its total Bitcoin allotment is yours. When you withdraw or debit your account, the bank will perform the Bitcoin transaction and record it on your account. In all of the above, substitute "Bitcoin" for "cash" and it is, for most practical purposes, the same as it is today.