Hmm, if I were you I'd find someone more reputable than right wing fruitcakes like Phyllis Schafly and Eagle Forum. Academic research of some kind would be more palatable.
Its not that I don't worry about the schools: I have a tale from 6th grade in my own public school back in 1972. We were studying Columbus and the book we had talked about how Columbus discovered that that the world was round by watching flies crawl around an orange and was blocked by the church leaders in Spain who believed that the world was flat.
The truth of the matter is that the Greeks knew that the world was round (Eratosthenes and Ptolemy measured it). Moreover, the church leaders were actually among the most educated men of the day and knew all this. So they called bullshit on Columbus for losing about 6 thousand miles out of the circumference of the earth by starting with Ptolemy's lower figure and cutting some more.
The fact that Columbus had balls of steel and boatloads of sheer good luck is certainly admirable and a great story, but making him into the first prophet of manifest destiny does no one any good.
How does this apply to people who have been blind since birth and suddenly (through some miracle surgery) have their sight restored?
The short answer is that it often doesn't work, and the condition is called "visual agnosia". I believe this was first discovered about 1800 but I can't find a reference. Oliver Sacks wrote an essay about a patient of his that had this problem, and another poster in this subthread has a reference to a current day patient's blog, but the most interesting case is in the Gospel of Mark. Jesus heals a man born blind and it doesn't work! At least not until He heals his visual cortex as well. A rather striking story IMO.
Anyone who needs to point out someone elses political leanings in order to denigrate them generally has a soft spot for Chairman Mao.
Amusingly enough, this can be applied to Rush Limbaugh and most of the other right wing fruitcakes in the US. As it is written, "Choose your enemies wisely, for you will end up resembling them."
They were based upon the ancient Greek idea of mankind having "sparks" of the god(s) inside their very being; that everything the god(s) created had a piece of themselves inside as well.
This sounds like the notion of qualia used in discussions of the philosophy of consciousness. In fact, Hammerhoff and Penrose seem to be pointing in a direction that leads to a Force-like view of reality.
You would probably be surprised at how much testing actually happens at Microsoft.
I'm not sure I'm surprised (I've been over there). I think the problems that Microsoft has are more at the design phase of a project. They generally try to give people what they want (or at least what MS thinks they want) and in my experience people often want conflicting things (e.g. security and ease of use).
I see intelligence (and sentience/conciousness) as a form of computation
This is the "Strong AI Hypothesis". For a list of objections to this hypothesis and an extensive online seminar on a (scientific) alternative, have a look here (summary at the bottom).
more jobs in other sectors will be created to satisfy the increased revenue IBM has available.
This assumes that the increased revenue will go to consumption. More likely, it will go to investment in an economy that has far too much capacity already.
I would think that OS projects could greatly benefit from automated regressions testing, probably even more so than commercial projects. OS projects can have problems with both the quantity and quality (meaning no disrespect - I'm referring to the level of familiarity with the code base) of personnel available at any given time. So for example, if a submitted patch can be run against an automated test suite by the submitter, it can take some validation load off the core development team. Likewise, if the core developers must run similar tests before checkin, it takes some load off the QA team (as The Pragmatic Programmer put it, "A human should find a bugs only once.").
It even has benefits for the longevity of the project as such tests are part of the doucmentation of the project and would assist a new development team that took over a project that had been abandonded.
Don't worry - in a few years the judicial branch will have been subverted by the corporate machine as well. At that point we can go back to solving problems like this the old fashioned way;-)
I have seen this a number of times running IE on a Mac (both classic and OSX). Its pretty funny that they are too lazy to use a platform-specific graphic - its not like it's that hard...
Even the media organizations that you could once count on being neutral and just reporting the facts are lost to us now.
WTF does this mean? The simple act of choosing what (and what not) to report is bias! Lets look at the offending sentence:
But the Bush administration has threatened to veto the funding because they support ever-larger corporations owning ever-bigger chunks of the spectrum that theoretically belongs to the public.
This is a series of facts. Have the Bushies have threatened to veto it? Yes! Do they support media ownership consolidation? Yes! Does the spectrum belong to the public? Yes!
So what you are really complaining about here is selective reporting of facts. But it is impossible to report all facts (even if you could agree on the definition of "fact") because there is no space, and the act of editing for space is itself a bias. And if you feel that facts that you believe are important have been omitted from a particular presentation, what about other people who may feel that their facts are important too? Not to mention the people who feel that your facts are unimportant.
Face it - all news media is inherently biased. The real problem is cynical organizations like Fox News that prey on people who believe in the myth of unbiased reporting, not media outlets with obvious editorial slants that are up front about it.
And if it really bugs you, go start your own media service. I believe that SlashCode is GPL...
He was the fictional equivalent of Alvin Toffler, (i.e. Future Shock), and Desmond Morris, (i.e. The Naked Ape).
I'm not sure this is a compliment. As I recall, The Naked Ape is generally laughed at by anthopologists, and my memory of Future Shock is that parts of it read like the rantings of Dr. Stangelove.
But the 12 aircraft carriers are fucking awesome to have when it comes time to destroy some country for allowing the a terrorist mastermind to operate there in freedom.
You mean like Afganistan? Those carrier sure were helpful in capturing Osama Bin Laden. And it also looks like they are a great help tracking down Saddam Hussein.
How come so many things are being named after this guy when he's not even dead yet? It used to be that you had to be dead to get public objects named after you. But for some odd reason, RWR is getting airports, federal buildings and warships named after him without the traditional respectful pause. This pause was there to prevent overly partisan hysteria from hijacking the public name space. And of course, Conservatives (who ought to know better) are the principal forces behind this flushing of tradition.
In Reagan's case, he is not really a factor, but his partisans (and detractors) are still pretty rabid. If he is really a great as his adherents say he is, why not wait a bit longer until a consensus emerges?
This morning I noticed an odd thing in my Spamfire inbox - most of the low scoring spam (the stuff I actually cast an eye over) had ***SPAM*** in the Subject: line. So it looks like somebody is running scared.
Without some absolute standards, life can become nasty, brutal, and short.
That would be Thomas Hobbes' "nasty, brutish and short", which was part of his argument for a strong central authority (government) in Leviathan. And can also be dead wrong if you have ever studied any anthropology.
The problem becomes: Where do these standards come from? You reject an ethical argument (because you believe in freedom of religion) so all you are left with is the consensus of your neighbors or what you can grab by force. And the latter is just Hobbes' "War of all against all". So it looks like you have to get to know your neighbors so that you can stomach trusting their whims.
We can call medical care or internet access a right till the cows come home, but without cash it doesn't happen. This is not true of more traditional rights.
But this is true of "more traditional rights". It has been observed that if you don't have a place to live, the right to vote is a bad joke. If basic human needs are not met (food, clothing, shelter) then the ability to enjoy these more esotetic rights is simply not possible. And meeting those needs requires (as you so delicately put it) cash.
Slashdot Mirror
That is good for a first pass. But just trusting him is malfeasance, pure and simple.
Hmm, if I were you I'd find someone more reputable than right wing fruitcakes like Phyllis Schafly and Eagle Forum. Academic research of some kind would be more palatable.
Its not that I don't worry about the schools: I have a tale from 6th grade in my own public school back in 1972. We were studying Columbus and the book we had talked about how Columbus discovered that that the world was round by watching flies crawl around an orange and was blocked by the church leaders in Spain who believed that the world was flat.
The truth of the matter is that the Greeks knew that the world was round (Eratosthenes and Ptolemy measured it). Moreover, the church leaders were actually among the most educated men of the day and knew all this. So they called bullshit on Columbus for losing about 6 thousand miles out of the circumference of the earth by starting with Ptolemy's lower figure and cutting some more.
The fact that Columbus had balls of steel and boatloads of sheer good luck is certainly admirable and a great story, but making him into the first prophet of manifest destiny does no one any good.
This sounds like the notion of qualia used in discussions of the philosophy of consciousness. In fact, Hammerhoff and Penrose seem to be pointing in a direction that leads to a Force-like view of reality.
(summary at the bottom).
I would think that OS projects could greatly benefit from automated regressions testing, probably even more so than commercial projects. OS projects can have problems with both the quantity and quality (meaning no disrespect - I'm referring to the level of familiarity with the code base) of personnel available at any given time. So for example, if a submitted patch can be run against an automated test suite by the submitter, it can take some validation load off the core development team. Likewise, if the core developers must run similar tests before checkin, it takes some load off the QA team (as The Pragmatic Programmer put it, "A human should find a bugs only once.").
It even has benefits for the longevity of the project as such tests are part of the doucmentation of the project and would assist a new development team that took over a project that had been abandonded.
I have seen this a number of times running IE on a Mac (both classic and OSX). Its pretty funny that they are too lazy to use a platform-specific graphic - its not like it's that hard...
So what you are really complaining about here is selective reporting of facts. But it is impossible to report all facts (even if you could agree on the definition of "fact") because there is no space, and the act of editing for space is itself a bias. And if you feel that facts that you believe are important have been omitted from a particular presentation, what about other people who may feel that their facts are important too? Not to mention the people who feel that your facts are unimportant.
Face it - all news media is inherently biased. The real problem is cynical organizations like Fox News that prey on people who believe in the myth of unbiased reporting, not media outlets with obvious editorial slants that are up front about it.
And if it really bugs you, go start your own media service. I believe that SlashCode is GPL...
Mod parent up please. It is far more insightful than most of the +5 drivel on this story.
How come so many things are being named after this guy when he's not even dead yet? It used to be that you had to be dead to get public objects named after you. But for some odd reason, RWR is getting airports, federal buildings and warships named after him without the traditional respectful pause. This pause was there to prevent overly partisan hysteria from hijacking the public name space. And of course, Conservatives (who ought to know better) are the principal forces behind this flushing of tradition.
In Reagan's case, he is not really a factor, but his partisans (and detractors) are still pretty rabid. If he is really a great as his adherents say he is, why not wait a bit longer until a consensus emerges?
You need to go read The Princess Bride . I mean, maybe the terrorists will figure this out and use the phones anyway...
..and these pages can be accessed from your web phone. Which sort of asks the question: Why bother?
Never mind - our sysadmin just did something without telling anyone...
Anyone know what is up with this?
The problem becomes: Where do these standards come from? You reject an ethical argument (because you believe in freedom of religion) so all you are left with is the consensus of your neighbors or what you can grab by force. And the latter is just Hobbes' "War of all against all". So it looks like you have to get to know your neighbors so that you can stomach trusting their whims.