There is definitely value in encouraging both skepticism and research. But spouting off inane B.S. simply because you don't know the answer and want your kid to think you're smart (which is the Calvin's Dad effect, a different thing entirely than teaching your children not to trust everything they are told) is not the way to go.
Of course, you have to teach your children to recognize B.S., as a meter for it doesn't necessarily come as standard equipment. The good news is that you can teach that by the Socratic method combined with a lifetime of sample B.S.
If my cow is raised in a grassy meadow and killed painlessly while your fish died gasping for water and flopping around on the deck of a boat, does that change the calculus for you? Let's not talk generalities - let's talk about one specific fish and one specific cow. Not all cows come from factory farms and not all commercial fish comes from the open sea.
Also, you make reference to sentience. While I don't believe your claim to be that cows are sentient, there is a hint of sentience-as-a-continuum to your argument. Assuming for the sake of argument that cows are a higher form of life than fish, exactly where do you draw the line?
On a related topic, I have actually heard a vegetarian literally make the argument that you shouldn't eat meat because it makes your shit stink. It's hard to take a person seriously who honestly believes that his own doesn't.
I know plenty of "ethical pescatarians," so my accusation is founded as to the people I directed it at. You'll note that I was careful to direct it specifically to those to whom it applies. I also never claimed that a majority of beef cows in America are raised on ranches. That's also a red herring, since my point about cows experiencing pain is equally cogent in the factory farming context.
That said, I am not a big fan of factory farming. Most of the beef that I eat does come from ranches. I cheat, though, by living in a farming and ranching region where you don't have to look any farther than the local butcher shop to find steaks from a cow that spent its life in the same county as you live in. I wish everyone could and would do that.
Most kids won't really question their parents the way that Calvin, who is portrayed at every turn as an incorrigible, authority-bucking youth, does. It's good to teach your children to question authority and not trust everything they hear. Doing it by spouting off ridiculous B.S. as if it were true is not the way to do it. The Socratic method works much better (except for teaching chainsaw-juggling).
I don't know if you were home-schooled or not. He didn't say that home-schooled students are necessarily lacking in those areas. He only said that you must not be lacking in those areas, regardless of your background, if you want to go on to higher learning. The implication is that this "unschooling" (itself not a word, so you're off to a bad start right there) concept is likely to fail to teach those areas as effectively as a structured classroom can.
...taught a pretty specific thing, and disciplined if you fouled it up. If the only teacher a kid ever has is the same coddling parent who praises his drawing of a purple, fuzzy potato labeled "Kow," he's basically fucked for life. You can't succeed in life if nobody has ever taught you the difference between success and failure in any context.
Not only do you get the Calvin's Dad effect, but your children also lose out on learning to deal with structure. It doesn't matter how academically advanced you are if you have never had any real authority to deal with (not necessarily to obey, but at least to learn how to manipulate) or discipline in your life. And let's face it, parents who think they are the best combined teachers and child psychologists their children will have an opportunity to learn from tend not to be the greatest at being authority figures or disciplining their children. This is a Bad Idea(TM).
Not just that, but a cow who can't feel pain also won't moo when there is a pain-causing stimulus that is harming the animal. Whether it's a disease, a broken bone, a pregnancy gone wrong, or anything else, the rancher won't have cause to suspect his cow is in trouble and you will end up with diseased, bruised meat, deadly miscarriages, and other problems. It's crueler than pain.
Disclaimer: I do not believe cows suffer unduly as a general rule, and I do not believe that refusing to eat beef on ethical grounds is anything short of dumb. Add a willingness to eat fish despite the ethical objection to beef, and you're a complete hypocrite (fish are suffocated to death, while livestock are usually killed fairly painlessly). Bring on the surf and turf!
Agreed. Shatner is a perfect parody of himself and he improves everything he is in. Even if he's self-absorbed, he has a very good sense of humor about himself.
Soon I shall have a single media server with every episode of "General Hospital" ever made stored at a high bitrate. WHO'S LAUGHING NOW, ALL YOU WHO DOUBTED ME!!!!
And how big is a petabyte you ask? There have been about 12,000 episodes of General Hospital aired since 1963. If you encoded 45 minute episodes at DVD quality mpeg2 bitrate, you could fit over 550,000 episodes of America's finest television show on a 1 petabyte server, enough to archive every episode of this remarkable show from its auspicious debut in 1963 until the year 4078.
Of all the computer systems out there, yours is the one for which becoming self-aware terrifies me the most.
The article refers to the first registered domain name. Whether the SRI-NIC hosts file counts as domain registration is arguable, but symbolics.com is definitely the oldest domain name in the current registration system. It's something akin to being the first book printed on the Gutenberg style of press - not the first book, but still very cool.
I'd say that there were some directories, bridging the gap between word of mouth knowledge of domain names and search engines capable of indexing the entire WWW. Yahoo, for instance, was more useful when it was more useful in its early days than the search engines of the time, because it included a hierarchical directory of websites. I'm sure you had something different in mind, but similar nonetheless. It was the explosion in websites that made it untenable to maintain such a directory, though, and that's why Google was so perfectly timed.
Yes, the 3600 was part of the Symbolics line. You might even still be able to get one. It was earlier in Symbolics' history. Hardware type-tagging of pointers and hardware garbage collection are the more interesting of the features. That, plus the GUI and thorough online documentation. Very cool stuff, regardless of your preferred programming syntax. It's not hard to imagine using the same technology to support fast execution and easier compilation for other dynamically-typed languages.
I agree. The article was stupid and, as I did point out in my original comment, misleading. It just wasn't stupid to the point of literally saying that this was an implementation of RFC 1149. Then, for pointing that simple fact out, I got a number of sophomoric insults from AC's who can't read.
Carrier pigeons are in fact very cool animals. A family member of mine experimented with them extensively while she was in high school and I, in elementary school at the time, was fascinated. Using them to carry thumb drives from a whitewater rafting tour back to the base camp for photo processing is a cool use of them that has precious little to do with RFC 1149. The references to that protocol are appropriate on Slashdot because 90% of Slashdotters are going to have more knowledge of it than they are of actual use of carrier pigeons. They just should have been made in a clearer way.
The fact that the article summary was poorly written, however, should be no surprise. This is Slashdot, after all.
You really still think I said that sneakers are mandatory for a sneakernet, based on the phrase you quoted from my comment? I don't think I can help you.
The summary does no such thing. Read it again, this time for comprehension. Try my comment again, too. I didn't say that sneakers were required for a sneakernet. Good luck out there.
Wow. Did you even read the entire first sentence or did you stop at the first link?
Since David Waitzman wrote his tongue-in-cheek Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers, there have been occasional attempts to actually transmit information via pigeon.
Right there, at the end of that first sentence, it explains that there have been attempts to transmit information via pigeon. Not by IP over Avian Carriers. Nowhere in the summary does it actually claim that this is an implementation of RFC 1149. Try again, smartypants.
I'm not finding any claim that it is IP over Avian Carrier as prescribed by RFC 1149. It is, perhaps, misleading to call it a "pigeon protocol," but nobody claimed it was IP. It is definitely more of a protocol than a sneakernet, though, unless the pigeons are walking the whole way.
I'm actually in Bismarck, and we are advertised as having AT&T service. However, you can put in my ZIP code on AT&T's "select a plan" wizard and get the "sorry, that's one of the few areas we don't serve yet" message. I don't know about roaming because I don't know anyone in my entire state who actually has a GSM phone to try.
Slashdot Mirror
There is definitely value in encouraging both skepticism and research. But spouting off inane B.S. simply because you don't know the answer and want your kid to think you're smart (which is the Calvin's Dad effect, a different thing entirely than teaching your children not to trust everything they are told) is not the way to go.
Of course, you have to teach your children to recognize B.S., as a meter for it doesn't necessarily come as standard equipment. The good news is that you can teach that by the Socratic method combined with a lifetime of sample B.S.
If my cow is raised in a grassy meadow and killed painlessly while your fish died gasping for water and flopping around on the deck of a boat, does that change the calculus for you? Let's not talk generalities - let's talk about one specific fish and one specific cow. Not all cows come from factory farms and not all commercial fish comes from the open sea.
Also, you make reference to sentience. While I don't believe your claim to be that cows are sentient, there is a hint of sentience-as-a-continuum to your argument. Assuming for the sake of argument that cows are a higher form of life than fish, exactly where do you draw the line?
On a related topic, I have actually heard a vegetarian literally make the argument that you shouldn't eat meat because it makes your shit stink. It's hard to take a person seriously who honestly believes that his own doesn't.
I know plenty of "ethical pescatarians," so my accusation is founded as to the people I directed it at. You'll note that I was careful to direct it specifically to those to whom it applies. I also never claimed that a majority of beef cows in America are raised on ranches. That's also a red herring, since my point about cows experiencing pain is equally cogent in the factory farming context.
That said, I am not a big fan of factory farming. Most of the beef that I eat does come from ranches. I cheat, though, by living in a farming and ranching region where you don't have to look any farther than the local butcher shop to find steaks from a cow that spent its life in the same county as you live in. I wish everyone could and would do that.
Most kids won't really question their parents the way that Calvin, who is portrayed at every turn as an incorrigible, authority-bucking youth, does. It's good to teach your children to question authority and not trust everything they hear. Doing it by spouting off ridiculous B.S. as if it were true is not the way to do it. The Socratic method works much better (except for teaching chainsaw-juggling).
I don't know if you were home-schooled or not. He didn't say that home-schooled students are necessarily lacking in those areas. He only said that you must not be lacking in those areas, regardless of your background, if you want to go on to higher learning. The implication is that this "unschooling" (itself not a word, so you're off to a bad start right there) concept is likely to fail to teach those areas as effectively as a structured classroom can.
...taught a pretty specific thing, and disciplined if you fouled it up. If the only teacher a kid ever has is the same coddling parent who praises his drawing of a purple, fuzzy potato labeled "Kow," he's basically fucked for life. You can't succeed in life if nobody has ever taught you the difference between success and failure in any context.
Not only do you get the Calvin's Dad effect, but your children also lose out on learning to deal with structure. It doesn't matter how academically advanced you are if you have never had any real authority to deal with (not necessarily to obey, but at least to learn how to manipulate) or discipline in your life. And let's face it, parents who think they are the best combined teachers and child psychologists their children will have an opportunity to learn from tend not to be the greatest at being authority figures or disciplining their children. This is a Bad Idea(TM).
Was it Megatherian Cow? I'm tagging the article "megatherian" for good measure.
Not just that, but a cow who can't feel pain also won't moo when there is a pain-causing stimulus that is harming the animal. Whether it's a disease, a broken bone, a pregnancy gone wrong, or anything else, the rancher won't have cause to suspect his cow is in trouble and you will end up with diseased, bruised meat, deadly miscarriages, and other problems. It's crueler than pain.
Disclaimer: I do not believe cows suffer unduly as a general rule, and I do not believe that refusing to eat beef on ethical grounds is anything short of dumb. Add a willingness to eat fish despite the ethical objection to beef, and you're a complete hypocrite (fish are suffocated to death, while livestock are usually killed fairly painlessly). Bring on the surf and turf!
Or the death of literature and fall of civilization. You'll have documentation of all these things, and more!
Agreed. Shatner is a perfect parody of himself and he improves everything he is in. Even if he's self-absorbed, he has a very good sense of humor about himself.
Soon I shall have a single media server with every episode of "General Hospital" ever made stored at a high bitrate. WHO'S LAUGHING NOW, ALL YOU WHO DOUBTED ME!!!!
And how big is a petabyte you ask? There have been about 12,000 episodes of General Hospital aired since 1963. If you encoded 45 minute episodes at DVD quality mpeg2 bitrate, you could fit over 550,000 episodes of America's finest television show on a 1 petabyte server, enough to archive every episode of this remarkable show from its auspicious debut in 1963 until the year 4078.
Of all the computer systems out there, yours is the one for which becoming self-aware terrifies me the most.
Ugh. Learn to proofread, ari_j! I am more useful when I am more useful with my eyes fully open and my gullet fully caffeinated. =)
The article refers to the first registered domain name. Whether the SRI-NIC hosts file counts as domain registration is arguable, but symbolics.com is definitely the oldest domain name in the current registration system. It's something akin to being the first book printed on the Gutenberg style of press - not the first book, but still very cool.
I'd say that there were some directories, bridging the gap between word of mouth knowledge of domain names and search engines capable of indexing the entire WWW. Yahoo, for instance, was more useful when it was more useful in its early days than the search engines of the time, because it included a hierarchical directory of websites. I'm sure you had something different in mind, but similar nonetheless. It was the explosion in websites that made it untenable to maintain such a directory, though, and that's why Google was so perfectly timed.
Yes, the 3600 was part of the Symbolics line. You might even still be able to get one. It was earlier in Symbolics' history. Hardware type-tagging of pointers and hardware garbage collection are the more interesting of the features. That, plus the GUI and thorough online documentation. Very cool stuff, regardless of your preferred programming syntax. It's not hard to imagine using the same technology to support fast execution and easier compilation for other dynamically-typed languages.
Citation needed regarding the etymology you claim.
I agree. The article was stupid and, as I did point out in my original comment, misleading. It just wasn't stupid to the point of literally saying that this was an implementation of RFC 1149. Then, for pointing that simple fact out, I got a number of sophomoric insults from AC's who can't read.
Carrier pigeons are in fact very cool animals. A family member of mine experimented with them extensively while she was in high school and I, in elementary school at the time, was fascinated. Using them to carry thumb drives from a whitewater rafting tour back to the base camp for photo processing is a cool use of them that has precious little to do with RFC 1149. The references to that protocol are appropriate on Slashdot because 90% of Slashdotters are going to have more knowledge of it than they are of actual use of carrier pigeons. They just should have been made in a clearer way.
The fact that the article summary was poorly written, however, should be no surprise. This is Slashdot, after all.
You really still think I said that sneakers are mandatory for a sneakernet, based on the phrase you quoted from my comment? I don't think I can help you.
The summary does no such thing. Read it again, this time for comprehension. Try my comment again, too. I didn't say that sneakers were required for a sneakernet. Good luck out there.
Right there, at the end of that first sentence, it explains that there have been attempts to transmit information via pigeon. Not by IP over Avian Carriers. Nowhere in the summary does it actually claim that this is an implementation of RFC 1149. Try again, smartypants.
I'm not finding any claim that it is IP over Avian Carrier as prescribed by RFC 1149. It is, perhaps, misleading to call it a "pigeon protocol," but nobody claimed it was IP. It is definitely more of a protocol than a sneakernet, though, unless the pigeons are walking the whole way.
I'm actually in Bismarck, and we are advertised as having AT&T service. However, you can put in my ZIP code on AT&T's "select a plan" wizard and get the "sorry, that's one of the few areas we don't serve yet" message. I don't know about roaming because I don't know anyone in my entire state who actually has a GSM phone to try.
Yo momma so fat, the government uses her as a counterweight for the 2 megabits of memory in their new computer.
R.I.P., Obsolete Yo Momma Joke of the Past.