So this data doesn't provide any support for your idea that strict gun control laws might somehow result in higher crime rates.
I'm not claiming that it shows that gun control laws reduce crime rates (I believe that the situation is much more complicated than that and should take account of a broad range of socio-economic and historic conditions), but judging by the crime rates it certainly doesn't seem to hurt.
(1) What exactly do you mean by "harrassing"? As far as I read, that drone was over a public road, not over private property. That those hunters dislike being filmed shooting birds doesn't mean they are being "harassed".
(2),(3) As noted by previous posts, the issue of flying that drone over a public road (something I definitely don't endorse; I fully agree with you there) is an issue between the authorities and those activists. Those hunters have no part in that.
All that they are entitled to do is report this incident to the sheriff (who was standing right next to those activists as it seems from the article) and complain of harassment and possible of endangering traffic by flying a drone over the road. After that it's up to the authorities to prosecute. Not those hunters.
(4) Those hunters shot at something that wasn't on or over the tract of land on which they were licensed to hunt on, and it wasn't the stuff they were licensed to hunt either.
And about the right to bear arms: that is not at issue here. People in the US do have the right to bear arms, but with that right comes responsibility. It cannot be otherwise. If you abuse your rights, then there are consequences. For example: forfeiting your rights.
I believe that someone who is so easily goaded into turning a gun from its legitimate purpose should not be allowed to carry it.
According to the article the drone was hovering over the U.S. 601 (a public road) when it was shot down. It was filming events on private property, but it was not out of bounds in itself .
That ought to address both your question and the snarky remark of the parent post.
I'm afraid this shows that those "hunters" with guns abused their privilege of toting rifles when they felt annoyed. It also illustrates the aggression these people display (as in: "they see something they don't like, so they shoot at it").
As a consequence I believe they cannot be trusted with firearms and therefore ought to lose that privilege (i.e. their gun license).
I agree. Matlab is very suitable for building the kind of quick-and-dirty GUI's you'd want to inspect scientific data.
You are facing a classical trade-off between quality and effort. If you are looking to just get something that works, I'd recommend Matlab. If you positively want to craft new GUI's, look to more low-level tools.
Matlab does have a workable IDE built-in, and being an interpreted language the development cycle is short. The code that you develop can be licensed under GPL, but any recipient will need Matlab to run it (Octave won't do the full GUI stuff).
It easily does 2-D and 3-D visualisations and it has things like sliders, knobs, selection-lists, and buttons that allow you to fiddle with you data.
However, it does not support (or at least I don't know how to do that) custom-built widgets, which is what you will be looking for if you are considering radical GUI innovations. You can easily cobble together existing widgets though.
I'm not a visualisation specialist, but I have a lot of experience pooring at data and I rarely ever found the pressing need for any "radically new" GUIs.
I could always "make do" with customising existing ones. For me quick adaptation and sensible customisation of standard elements was sufficient 60% of the time. In 30% of the cases I was better off with one of the graphics packages provided by R. The remaining 10% I just exported the data to another, domain-specific, package.
This may or may not not be an option for you since you sound as the programmer being tasked with providing graphics.
First of all, I'm not against nuclear power plants. I'm in favour. However, it matters not one whit whether "Nuke haters" do or do not hate nuclear power.
The only thing that matters is whether they are *right* in opposing a specific proposed plant or not.
In case a series of proposals run into opposition because they all have one significant (and often unnecessary) flaw or another, it isn't immediately obvious how that is the fault of those that oppose the plants in question.
As noted in other posts, water-based cooling is unnecessary if one builds cooling towers. So why propose a design that impacts this water supply *unnecessarily* ?
Attitudes like that go a long way towards eroding trust in anyone proposing a nuclear reactor. That's not a technical problem, it's an attitude problem.
I'm glad to see a sensible attitude here. As in: don't get angry (as this won't solve anything), just take adequate measures to solve the problem.
Oh, and about the Slashdot-standard post titled "pot and kettle". Their problems are no concern of us, Ok? We're trying to solve *our* problem here, not theirs.
I personally trust them to be completely up to the task of concealing whatever useful IP they might have when they come here.
I always get a bit antsy when people bandy the word 'evil' about whenever the federal government imposes some new (and admittedly intrusive) regulations in the name of state security and public safety.
Annoying it is, but evil it isn't. At least, not always.
It's an unfortunate fact of life that individual freedom works best when the consequences of being stupid also (mostly) fall unto the individual responsible. As long as that's the case, I'm in favour of giving people lots and lots of freedom. It's amusing, instructive, and probably very advantageous too for me to see how they get on. It's like receiving free experimental data.
Alas, in our complex society some parts have become so tightly coupled that safety and security of large swathes of society can be put in acute jeopardy by the mistakes, stupidity, or plain laxness of individuals (or companies). In other words: the consequences of poorly judged actions are no longer limited to the individual (or private enterprise) committing them. And that's where things can suddenly become different.
Allowing the situation to continue unabated and self-regulated simply means that things will go bang a few times before those in charge clean up their act. Simply because that's what people are like. Lazy, stupid, and always on the lookout for ways to cut corners (which by the way has fueled progress and development for centuries).
The only question here is whether you want to pay the price that letting the responsible individuals crawl up learning curve entails, or whether you want to pay up-front the price regulation entails. Nothing 'evil' or 'not evil' about it, just the search for a least-cost solution.
I respectfully submit that there are areas (like in this instance) where you do not want to give people (or private enterprise) the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. Instead you want them to either do things in a certain way or quit their business and go away. That's when you regulate, and I think that's what we're seeing here.
The parent post entirely misses the picture calling this "awesome" and doesn't merit the moniker "insightful" at all.
The two ISP's that did block the Pirate Bay did so on the strength of a court order addressed to them specifically. The second two ISPs were not mentioned on that order. Therefore said court order is simply not enforceable on them .
Were they to block the Pirate Bay without a court order, they would (1) invite a whole series of similar requests and (2) block their users' access to a site without any legal justification for doing so, thereby exposing themselves to legally in case *anyone* claims being wrongfully blocked from some demonstrably legal torrent. That would land them in even more trouble.
So they told the claimant to go away and get a warrant with their names on it.
In short: don't kid yourself that these ISPs are somehow standing on the barricades against "Big Content". They are not.They acted, in true corporate fashion, purely for selfish legal reasons.
Of course it's hugely detrimental to the Malaysian tech industry as a whole and people working in it, but it's no skin off our nose or anyone else's, except Malaysians.
As other posts noted, the background is probably fundamentalist Islamists trying to get a grip on the Internet in Malaysia (which irritates them a lot).
Of course it won't impact the Internet (to any significant degree). On the contrary: I think it will serve to illustrate (once again) the effective limits of legislative powers versus a lot of people wanting to make up their own mind. Stupid and bigoted people need constant and visible reminders of what works and what doesn't, and this is likely to give it to them.
Somehow I can't imagine the Chinese, the Indians, the Koreans, the Singaporeans, the Indonesians, the Thai, or the Vietnamese shedding any tears over this little gem of proposed legislation (from a business point of view).
It happens to be just as easy to offshore IT manufacturing out of Malaysia as it is to offshore it to Malaysia. And when that happens, countries that already have adequate infrastructure and a competent workforce in place (China, Korea, Japan, US, Europe etc.) will be at an advantage. As a matter of fact, if fundamentalist Islamism in Malaysia hadn't already existed, China ought to have invented it. For commercial reasons if nothing else.
Of course it's deleterious to the idea of a free-for-all Internet, and there are enough attempts to stifle it already. In the China, the US, Europe, etc. Fumble-fingered attempts like this aimed at controlling people and suppressing of technologies that are key to free speech, will (in my opinion) only serve to strengthen our own case here at home to keep everyone's hands off the Internet.
So let's look at the silver lining here: yet another costly experiment in the area of social engineering that we don't have to pay for but whose data we can use.
I stand corrected as regards the general attitude of the Catholic church with respect to the permissibility of independent Bible reading. I based this on what I had read on the subject, which turns out to be quite untrue.
As I understand now the situation was rather more complicated, in that even before Luther it was not uncommon for lay people to read the Bible, either by themselves or in groups. The Catholic church did not particularly mind, provided the conclusions reached and promulgated were in line with orthodox thinking.
So there most certainly is this proviso, and people were not at liberty to interpret the Bible if that led to deviation from orthodox doctrine, let alone open contradiction of the authority of the Catholic church. That would (as is amply described in popular literature) lead to attention from the authorities, with the Inquisition as the final authority.
So in that (rather more limited) respect my negative comments on the Catholic church stand.
I mean there is a little more to fervent religionists not wishing to be exposed to any thoughts that may clash with their dogma.
As I see it, the reason is fear of "being led into temptation" (spiritual this time, not carnal), and fear of getting it wrong (so that they are due for a severe, and quite possibly eternal, ticking-off by their vengeful deity in afterlife).
This is a theme that has pervaded religion as provided by the Catholic Church throughout the (Middle) Ages.
Why-ever do you think that Catholics are (and have been for as long as the Catholic Church exists) discouraged from reading the Bible on their own instead of the officially approved Catechisms?
Because the flock cannot be relied upon not to err when reading of and thinking about theological matters, and for very good reason: theological reasoning can be err... complex and subtle... to phrase it politely. And erring is dangerous for the soul. That's why The Flock needs a shepherd (the Latin word for that is: Pastor) as provided by the Catholic Church, in order to guide them along the True Path through the thickets of thought.
We're seeing the very same thing with Fundamentalist Christians in the good old US of A, now enthusiastically mirrored by a resurgent Muslim Fundamentalism.
The most surprising thing to me is that people are actually surprised. Religion, after all, is (as I see it) first and foremost a desire for an inviolate frame of reference (spiritual and intellectual) that provides an answer to all vexing questions ("the Lord is my shepherd") and solace ("pillar of strength"), and solace ("thy grace... etc").
Can you not understand how awfully threatening it is when someone in a white coat starts uprooting the emotional and intellectual certainties this provides? Especially if he makes a convincing case that large parts of "the Gospel" simply have no relation to actual reality? If "God's Word" is shown to be wrong in any respect, be it ever so minute, then what of all the rest of it? The whole edifice of trust comes crumbling down. Believers will certainly not thank you for that.
In times past a popular way of dealing with such heretics was to burn them at the stake. Nowadays the preferred method seems to be to use IED's.
Well, in a strictly logical sense I agree with you, but in a practical sense I'm struggling to see why this would be fair or reasonable statement to put on a bottle of water.
Simply because anyone with normal cognitive powers knows that drinking water is good against thirst, and that thirst means you're getting a bit dehydrated. So the message is totally superfluous, and therein lies a danger. Namely that stating the blindingly obvious in this way suggests that there is something more, something *extra*-ordinary about this bottle of water (e..g. compared to tap water). As if there were any added medical benefits to it. Which of course there aren't.
On another (but related) subject I also object to your line of reasoning that just because something is technically true you should be allowed to put it on foodstuffs or use it to make claims to medical effect.
Because you can then legitimately make the claim that wearing high heels "can reduce the risk of development of dehydration". It ought to be true because people wearing high heels aren't as likely to go for long walks in the mid-day sun (if only because the darn things are so uncomfortable).
A slightly less contrived example would be that eating a super-sized portion of fries every afternoon "can reduce the risk of development of dehydration". That too ought to be true, if only because the added salt will make you feel thirsty and will encourage you to drink something. Again: a tenuous (but true) connection with the claim under consideration, and that offers many more disadvantages than advantages.
So either you drop the word "can" (in my opinion a typical example of a weasel word in this context) for being gratuitously suggestive, or you take the position that you ought to be able to claim the same anti-dehydration benefits for high heels and french fries as you do for a bottle of water.
Prof Brian Ratcliffe, spokesman for the Nutrition Society, said dehydration was usually caused by a clinical condition and that one could remain adequately hydrated without drinking water.
He said: âoeThe EU is saying that this does not reduce the risk of dehydration and that is correct.
âoeThis claim is trying to imply that there is something special about bottled water which is not a reasonable claim.â
Of course drinking water (from the tap of from bottles) prevents you from getting dehydrated... if you are an otherwise healthy person. No doubt about it.
If, on the other hand you are suffering from a clinical condition that puts you at risk of dehydration, you shouldn't rely on bottled water as a form of self-medication, but you should consult your GP. Unfortunately, allowing manufacturers to put the claim reduces the risk of dehydration on bottles of water blurs the line between a normal person drinking water simply to keep from becoming dehydrated and someone with a medical condition refraining from seeing his GP and instead relying on bottled water.
For that reason: why allow bottled-water manufacturers to make some half-witted medical claim with which to praise their wares? Bottled water has always sold well enough without ascribing quasi-medical claims to it.
The fact of the matter is indeed that models of complex (economic) systems are often wrong, but not disastrously so. That is: unless people use them as an excuse to refrain from using their brains and/or common sense (as is very popular in the US as a whole (just think of the way the TSA operates), and which was very much the case with the financial models).
Where the article contends that this is because of "calibration" issues, it manages to really confuse the issue.
The fact is that model calibration is usually not a sinecure that can be (blindly) entrusted to a software package (as so many practitioners are fond of doing).
There is a large grain of truth in the suggestion that model calibration fails because various sets of parameters can fit the data on which models are calibrated equally well. In order to reliably calibrate such models, one must calibrate submodels (that describe observable phenomena) in isolation. Next those parameters should be kept constant and the other parameters calibrated. That's how university researchers would (usually) do it.
Practitioners (consultants) are usually under constraints of time and budget and will typically face clients who (a) know absolutely nothing about the models they commission and use, (b) know less than nothing about how models ought to be calibrated (c) believe that any calibration that fits the data is OK and (d) will simply pick the very lowest proposal to calibrate their model because they cannot distinguish between a methodologically sound calibration proposal and a trashy one.
As a result, consultants cannot sell a ' proper' calibration when someone else is offering a quick-and-dirty calibration, and give up trying after a few failed proposals. This in turn ensures that models are often calibrated in zero-knowledge mode (i.e. just fit the data and don't think), and hence are open to large errors in cases where such simplistic approaches are inappropriate.
As so often, the market mechanism will ensure optimum (read minimum) pricing for specified objectives and measurable deliverables at the expense of unspecified or unmeasurable ones (such as methodological soundness of model calibration).
And that has little to do with any inherent weakness of models, but a lot with the inherent flaws in the way models are calibrated and used.
learn to use tools (like Doxygen) to gain an overview first.
If your codebase does stuff like modifying operators you'll find out that way. If, on the other hand, it's is heavily template-based, my best advice is to either learn a lot about those particular templates (e.g. the Qt library) or stay away for now.
Code monkeys try to read their way straight through the codebase. In order to succeed that way takes a lot of time and raw talent (among other things superb concentration, a memory like a bear trap, and a good feeling for C++ syntax). You can waste a lot of time before discovering you don't really have the talent to do things the hard way.
Software engineers on the other hand use tools like Doxygen and first try to understand the overall structure of the code and then selectively zoom in on something they want to change or improve.
My suggestion is to train yourself first to use tools (perhaps on a codebase you already know) and then find yourself a smallish but new project you can apply those tools to.
(1) the majority of business *cannot* survive a month without their credit lines, many of them cannot survive a week.
(2) most consumers cannot go without their bank account: that's where their credit card is anchored, their mortgage is serviced from, where their paycheck is paid into, and where their bills are paid from.
Doing without banks is only marginally easier than doing without money and going back to a barter economy. It's not impossible (e.g. the Afghans manage) but it's not possible to run a big complicated economy that way. And either move causes so much friction in day-to-day commerce that it's sufficient to cause the entire economy to go into a tailspin. If you thought that the 'virtual' money in banking accounts doesn't impact the real bricks-and-mortar economy, read up on the banking crisis of 2008 and the resultant depression.
Bottom-line: you *need* banks, even if you' don't like it.
Unfortunately, banks tend to be intertwined (each and every bank is tied to most others through *massive* borrowing and lending. Topple one and you hurts lots of others. In other words: there is a really stiff penalty if you let one topple. Lehman brothers was comparatively small, so the impact could be absorbed. Try that with e.g. Citibank, and you're in real trouble.
Now how do you ensure that banks don't take undue risks, without micro-managing them and wrapping them up in red tape?
I don't know. Fact is: the more risk you take, the more higher the yield is you can ask when you lend money. As long as people pay up, you will be competed out of the market unless you take as much risk as your colleagues.
Therefore banks (and especially their management) haven't got much of an incentive to observe higher safety margins than those required by regulation (which is a poke in the eye for libertarians of all stripes).
Complicated eh? All the snappy, easy solutions have been tried already... and rejected.
Good drivers have no problems with roundabouts. Since, according to almost every survey on the subject, 100% of all drivers feel they fall into this category, we have it on good evidence that there should be no problem whatsoever with roundabouts, Ok?
Roundabouts are much safer than un-signalised intersections (because they force people to slow down, unlike intersections), and much more reliable (there are no lights or controls that can break down). And because they never let people wait unless there is a need for it, they have higher capacity than signalised intersections with non-adaptive control (which includes about 95% of all US intersections). And they are a lot cheaper than adaptive-control intersections.
I won't mention any names, but my guess is that the same politicians who are currently insisting so loudly that the budget deficit be addressed instantly already have a specific solution in mind for solving the problem of ailing and failing weather satellites too. Prayer.
After all, the Man Up There ought to have a good view of the weather, right? So why not send a daily Prayer his way for a weather forecast? Ought to be a snap.
Slashdot Mirror
Like the violent crime rates and the incidences of murder.
If the data here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_cities_by_crime_rate give any indication, then crime rates for violent crime and murder in New York (581.7 and 6.4) are lower than in e.g. Mobile, Alabama (667.0 and 9.8) and Boston, Massachusetts (903.5 and 11.3).
So this data doesn't provide any support for your idea that strict gun control laws might somehow result in higher crime rates.
I'm not claiming that it shows that gun control laws reduce crime rates (I believe that the situation is much more complicated than that and should take account of a broad range of socio-economic and historic conditions), but judging by the crime rates it certainly doesn't seem to hurt.
I was referring to the kind of license this webpage talks about: http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/permits/gun_licensing_faq.shtml#CanITargetShootOutsideNYC
In NYC you need a permit to buy, own, and carry a gun. Of course other laws may be in force where the incident happened.
(2),(3) As noted by previous posts, the issue of flying that drone over a public road (something I definitely don't endorse; I fully agree with you there) is an issue between the authorities and those activists. Those hunters have no part in that.
All that they are entitled to do is report this incident to the sheriff (who was standing right next to those activists as it seems from the article) and complain of harassment and possible of endangering traffic by flying a drone over the road. After that it's up to the authorities to prosecute. Not those hunters.
(4) Those hunters shot at something that wasn't on or over the tract of land on which they were licensed to hunt on, and it wasn't the stuff they were licensed to hunt either.
And about the right to bear arms: that is not at issue here. People in the US do have the right to bear arms, but with that right comes responsibility. It cannot be otherwise. If you abuse your rights, then there are consequences. For example: forfeiting your rights.
I believe that someone who is so easily goaded into turning a gun from its legitimate purpose should not be allowed to carry it.
http://thetandd.com/animal-rights-group-says-drone-shot-down/article_017a720a-56ce-11e1-afc4-001871e3ce6c.html
According to the article the drone was hovering over the U.S. 601 (a public road) when it was shot down. It was filming events on private property, but it was not out of bounds in itself .
That ought to address both your question and the snarky remark of the parent post.
I'm afraid this shows that those "hunters" with guns abused their privilege of toting rifles when they felt annoyed. It also illustrates the aggression these people display (as in: "they see something they don't like, so they shoot at it").
As a consequence I believe they cannot be trusted with firearms and therefore ought to lose that privilege (i.e. their gun license).
You are facing a classical trade-off between quality and effort. If you are looking to just get something that works, I'd recommend Matlab. If you positively want to craft new GUI's, look to more low-level tools.
Matlab does have a workable IDE built-in, and being an interpreted language the development cycle is short. The code that you develop can be licensed under GPL, but any recipient will need Matlab to run it (Octave won't do the full GUI stuff).
It easily does 2-D and 3-D visualisations and it has things like sliders, knobs, selection-lists, and buttons that allow you to fiddle with you data.
However, it does not support (or at least I don't know how to do that) custom-built widgets, which is what you will be looking for if you are considering radical GUI innovations. You can easily cobble together existing widgets though.
I'm not a visualisation specialist, but I have a lot of experience pooring at data and I rarely ever found the pressing need for any "radically new" GUIs.
I could always "make do" with customising existing ones. For me quick adaptation and sensible customisation of standard elements was sufficient 60% of the time. In 30% of the cases I was better off with one of the graphics packages provided by R. The remaining 10% I just exported the data to another, domain-specific, package.
This may or may not not be an option for you since you sound as the programmer being tasked with providing graphics.
Same thing happens with paintings: when the artist dies the supply dries up and the price goes up.
The only thing that matters is whether they are *right* in opposing a specific proposed plant or not.
In case a series of proposals run into opposition because they all have one significant (and often unnecessary) flaw or another, it isn't immediately obvious how that is the fault of those that oppose the plants in question.
As noted in other posts, water-based cooling is unnecessary if one builds cooling towers. So why propose a design that impacts this water supply *unnecessarily* ?
Attitudes like that go a long way towards eroding trust in anyone proposing a nuclear reactor. That's not a technical problem, it's an attitude problem.
Oh, and about the Slashdot-standard post titled "pot and kettle". Their problems are no concern of us, Ok? We're trying to solve *our* problem here, not theirs.
I personally trust them to be completely up to the task of concealing whatever useful IP they might have when they come here.
Annoying it is, but evil it isn't. At least, not always.
It's an unfortunate fact of life that individual freedom works best when the consequences of being stupid also (mostly) fall unto the individual responsible. As long as that's the case, I'm in favour of giving people lots and lots of freedom. It's amusing, instructive, and probably very advantageous too for me to see how they get on. It's like receiving free experimental data.
Alas, in our complex society some parts have become so tightly coupled that safety and security of large swathes of society can be put in acute jeopardy by the mistakes, stupidity, or plain laxness of individuals (or companies). In other words: the consequences of poorly judged actions are no longer limited to the individual (or private enterprise) committing them. And that's where things can suddenly become different.
Allowing the situation to continue unabated and self-regulated simply means that things will go bang a few times before those in charge clean up their act. Simply because that's what people are like. Lazy, stupid, and always on the lookout for ways to cut corners (which by the way has fueled progress and development for centuries).
The only question here is whether you want to pay the price that letting the responsible individuals crawl up learning curve entails, or whether you want to pay up-front the price regulation entails. Nothing 'evil' or 'not evil' about it, just the search for a least-cost solution.
I respectfully submit that there are areas (like in this instance) where you do not want to give people (or private enterprise) the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. Instead you want them to either do things in a certain way or quit their business and go away. That's when you regulate, and I think that's what we're seeing here.
The two ISP's that did block the Pirate Bay did so on the strength of a court order addressed to them specifically. The second two ISPs were not mentioned on that order. Therefore said court order is simply not enforceable on them .
Were they to block the Pirate Bay without a court order, they would (1) invite a whole series of similar requests and (2) block their users' access to a site without any legal justification for doing so, thereby exposing themselves to legally in case *anyone* claims being wrongfully blocked from some demonstrably legal torrent. That would land them in even more trouble.
So they told the claimant to go away and get a warrant with their names on it.
In short: don't kid yourself that these ISPs are somehow standing on the barricades against "Big Content". They are not.They acted, in true corporate fashion, purely for selfish legal reasons.
As other posts noted, the background is probably fundamentalist Islamists trying to get a grip on the Internet in Malaysia (which irritates them a lot).
Of course it won't impact the Internet (to any significant degree). On the contrary: I think it will serve to illustrate (once again) the effective limits of legislative powers versus a lot of people wanting to make up their own mind. Stupid and bigoted people need constant and visible reminders of what works and what doesn't, and this is likely to give it to them.
Somehow I can't imagine the Chinese, the Indians, the Koreans, the Singaporeans, the Indonesians, the Thai, or the Vietnamese shedding any tears over this little gem of proposed legislation (from a business point of view).
It happens to be just as easy to offshore IT manufacturing out of Malaysia as it is to offshore it to Malaysia. And when that happens, countries that already have adequate infrastructure and a competent workforce in place (China, Korea, Japan, US, Europe etc.) will be at an advantage. As a matter of fact, if fundamentalist Islamism in Malaysia hadn't already existed, China ought to have invented it. For commercial reasons if nothing else.
Of course it's deleterious to the idea of a free-for-all Internet, and there are enough attempts to stifle it already. In the China, the US, Europe, etc. Fumble-fingered attempts like this aimed at controlling people and suppressing of technologies that are key to free speech, will (in my opinion) only serve to strengthen our own case here at home to keep everyone's hands off the Internet.
So let's look at the silver lining here: yet another costly experiment in the area of social engineering that we don't have to pay for but whose data we can use.
Perhaps he needed to reach a minimum pagecount?
As I understand now the situation was rather more complicated, in that even before Luther it was not uncommon for lay people to read the Bible, either by themselves or in groups. The Catholic church did not particularly mind, provided the conclusions reached and promulgated were in line with orthodox thinking.
So there most certainly is this proviso, and people were not at liberty to interpret the Bible if that led to deviation from orthodox doctrine, let alone open contradiction of the authority of the Catholic church. That would (as is amply described in popular literature) lead to attention from the authorities, with the Inquisition as the final authority.
So in that (rather more limited) respect my negative comments on the Catholic church stand.
As I see it, the reason is fear of "being led into temptation" (spiritual this time, not carnal), and fear of getting it wrong (so that they are due for a severe, and quite possibly eternal, ticking-off by their vengeful deity in afterlife).
This is a theme that has pervaded religion as provided by the Catholic Church throughout the (Middle) Ages.
Why-ever do you think that Catholics are (and have been for as long as the Catholic Church exists) discouraged from reading the Bible on their own instead of the officially approved Catechisms?
Because the flock cannot be relied upon not to err when reading of and thinking about theological matters, and for very good reason: theological reasoning can be err ... complex and subtle ... to phrase it politely. And erring is dangerous for the soul. That's why The Flock needs a shepherd (the Latin word for that is: Pastor) as provided by the Catholic Church, in order to guide them along the True Path through the thickets of thought.
We're seeing the very same thing with Fundamentalist Christians in the good old US of A, now enthusiastically mirrored by a resurgent Muslim Fundamentalism.
The most surprising thing to me is that people are actually surprised. Religion, after all, is (as I see it) first and foremost a desire for an inviolate frame of reference (spiritual and intellectual) that provides an answer to all vexing questions ("the Lord is my shepherd") and solace ("pillar of strength"), and solace ("thy grace ... etc").
Can you not understand how awfully threatening it is when someone in a white coat starts uprooting the emotional and intellectual certainties this provides? Especially if he makes a convincing case that large parts of "the Gospel" simply have no relation to actual reality? If "God's Word" is shown to be wrong in any respect, be it ever so minute, then what of all the rest of it? The whole edifice of trust comes crumbling down. Believers will certainly not thank you for that.
In times past a popular way of dealing with such heretics was to burn them at the stake. Nowadays the preferred method seems to be to use IED's.
See especially the sections "How equipment fails" and "Operating Context and Functions"
Simply because anyone with normal cognitive powers knows that drinking water is good against thirst, and that thirst means you're getting a bit dehydrated. So the message is totally superfluous, and therein lies a danger. Namely that stating the blindingly obvious in this way suggests that there is something more, something *extra*-ordinary about this bottle of water (e..g. compared to tap water). As if there were any added medical benefits to it. Which of course there aren't.
On another (but related) subject I also object to your line of reasoning that just because something is technically true you should be allowed to put it on foodstuffs or use it to make claims to medical effect.
Because you can then legitimately make the claim that wearing high heels "can reduce the risk of development of dehydration". It ought to be true because people wearing high heels aren't as likely to go for long walks in the mid-day sun (if only because the darn things are so uncomfortable).
A slightly less contrived example would be that eating a super-sized portion of fries every afternoon "can reduce the risk of development of dehydration". That too ought to be true, if only because the added salt will make you feel thirsty and will encourage you to drink something. Again: a tenuous (but true) connection with the claim under consideration, and that offers many more disadvantages than advantages.
So either you drop the word "can" (in my opinion a typical example of a weasel word in this context) for being gratuitously suggestive, or you take the position that you ought to be able to claim the same anti-dehydration benefits for high heels and french fries as you do for a bottle of water.
Of course drinking water (from the tap of from bottles) prevents you from getting dehydrated ... if you are an otherwise healthy person. No doubt about it.
If, on the other hand you are suffering from a clinical condition that puts you at risk of dehydration, you shouldn't rely on bottled water as a form of self-medication, but you should consult your GP. Unfortunately, allowing manufacturers to put the claim reduces the risk of dehydration on bottles of water blurs the line between a normal person drinking water simply to keep from becoming dehydrated and someone with a medical condition refraining from seeing his GP and instead relying on bottled water.
For that reason: why allow bottled-water manufacturers to make some half-witted medical claim with which to praise their wares? Bottled water has always sold well enough without ascribing quasi-medical claims to it.
Where the article contends that this is because of "calibration" issues, it manages to really confuse the issue.
The fact is that model calibration is usually not a sinecure that can be (blindly) entrusted to a software package (as so many practitioners are fond of doing).
There is a large grain of truth in the suggestion that model calibration fails because various sets of parameters can fit the data on which models are calibrated equally well. In order to reliably calibrate such models, one must calibrate submodels (that describe observable phenomena) in isolation. Next those parameters should be kept constant and the other parameters calibrated. That's how university researchers would (usually) do it.
Practitioners (consultants) are usually under constraints of time and budget and will typically face clients who (a) know absolutely nothing about the models they commission and use, (b) know less than nothing about how models ought to be calibrated (c) believe that any calibration that fits the data is OK and (d) will simply pick the very lowest proposal to calibrate their model because they cannot distinguish between a methodologically sound calibration proposal and a trashy one.
As a result, consultants cannot sell a ' proper' calibration when someone else is offering a quick-and-dirty calibration, and give up trying after a few failed proposals. This in turn ensures that models are often calibrated in zero-knowledge mode (i.e. just fit the data and don't think), and hence are open to large errors in cases where such simplistic approaches are inappropriate.
As so often, the market mechanism will ensure optimum (read minimum) pricing for specified objectives and measurable deliverables at the expense of unspecified or unmeasurable ones (such as methodological soundness of model calibration).
And that has little to do with any inherent weakness of models, but a lot with the inherent flaws in the way models are calibrated and used.
If your codebase does stuff like modifying operators you'll find out that way. If, on the other hand, it's is heavily template-based, my best advice is to either learn a lot about those particular templates (e.g. the Qt library) or stay away for now.
Code monkeys try to read their way straight through the codebase. In order to succeed that way takes a lot of time and raw talent (among other things superb concentration, a memory like a bear trap, and a good feeling for C++ syntax). You can waste a lot of time before discovering you don't really have the talent to do things the hard way.
Software engineers on the other hand use tools like Doxygen and first try to understand the overall structure of the code and then selectively zoom in on something they want to change or improve.
My suggestion is to train yourself first to use tools (perhaps on a codebase you already know) and then find yourself a smallish but new project you can apply those tools to.
Moreover, I can only ascribe the suggestion that his account be suspended merely on grounds of him being deceased to the most blatant vitalism.
I hear that Verizon at least acts as an equal-opportunity provider in this respect. Especially if the account is on direct-debit.
(1) the majority of business *cannot* survive a month without their credit lines, many of them cannot survive a week.
(2) most consumers cannot go without their bank account: that's where their credit card is anchored, their mortgage is serviced from, where their paycheck is paid into, and where their bills are paid from.
Doing without banks is only marginally easier than doing without money and going back to a barter economy. It's not impossible (e.g. the Afghans manage) but it's not possible to run a big complicated economy that way. And either move causes so much friction in day-to-day commerce that it's sufficient to cause the entire economy to go into a tailspin. If you thought that the 'virtual' money in banking accounts doesn't impact the real bricks-and-mortar economy, read up on the banking crisis of 2008 and the resultant depression.
Bottom-line: you *need* banks, even if you' don't like it.
Unfortunately, banks tend to be intertwined (each and every bank is tied to most others through *massive* borrowing and lending. Topple one and you hurts lots of others. In other words: there is a really stiff penalty if you let one topple. Lehman brothers was comparatively small, so the impact could be absorbed. Try that with e.g. Citibank, and you're in real trouble.
Now how do you ensure that banks don't take undue risks, without micro-managing them and wrapping them up in red tape?
I don't know. Fact is: the more risk you take, the more higher the yield is you can ask when you lend money. As long as people pay up, you will be competed out of the market unless you take as much risk as your colleagues.
Therefore banks (and especially their management) haven't got much of an incentive to observe higher safety margins than those required by regulation (which is a poke in the eye for libertarians of all stripes).
Complicated eh? All the snappy, easy solutions have been tried already ... and rejected.
A nice caricature can be found here: http://www.jsquared.co.uk/jennyl/verity.htm
Don't believe that his sort of response during code reviews is all that uncommon.
Roundabouts are much safer than un-signalised intersections (because they force people to slow down, unlike intersections), and much more reliable (there are no lights or controls that can break down). And because they never let people wait unless there is a need for it, they have higher capacity than signalised intersections with non-adaptive control (which includes about 95% of all US intersections). And they are a lot cheaper than adaptive-control intersections.
Therefore: Long Live Roundabouts !
After all, the Man Up There ought to have a good view of the weather, right? So why not send a daily Prayer his way for a weather forecast? Ought to be a snap.
Aw shucks!