Idiot he may be, but only because he's so busy trying to explain the right answer to people like you. I initially misread the question as specifying the first coin was heads. If you read the question closely, his answer is obviously and intuitively correct. If you can't see it, try it yourself. It's easy enough to do so and then come back and apologize when you've found him correct.
You're confusing cause and effect. People who tend to ask the kinds of questions you're talking about don't generally choose their degrees based on that. I'm an engineer and I happen to like history, philosophy (certain kinds, anyway), and psychology, and I'm pretty knowledgeable about politics, too. My point is that people who want to know these things don't need a useless degree to tell them about it, and people with useless degrees don't necessarily know very much about them, either. Critical thinking is barely touched in school and rational thought not at all.
Liberal arts degrees should be cut. They're generally useless and a waste of money. Get training for a useful career in some field or just go directly to Wal-Mart or customer service without the expensive poster. If you like history, read a book or take a class in your spare time.
Re:a game that tells the truth about religion
on
Religion in Video Games
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Oh, please. Every single Christian argument I've ever read (and trust me, I've read a few), boils down to some variation on the following:
1. We don't know there isn't a god, so there must be one (of course, that may be true, but why must it be a Christian god?).
2. We can't explain everything yet, so there must be a god to explain the unknown (same problem as the last one).
3. Jesus seems like a pretty good guy. Why would he lie (too easy)?
4. My piece of toast looks like the face of Jesus.
None of these claims constitute evidence. I also see several websites out there dedicated to debunking the book you quote, including this one which seems to suggest that the book you reference is drivel on the same order as Lewis' Mere Christianity. If your champion's best work is claiming that psychic's predicted Jesus, then perhaps you should try reading up on the James Randy foundation before making claims about reliable evidence.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply, but I believe you misunderstood me. I don't have a problem with christianity being taught in schools. Rather, I have a problem with christianity being taught as true in school. If it is taught, it should be taught like we teach other mythologies, like Greek mythology or Tolkien. There are certainly parts of the bible that are worth reading. I, for example, greatly enjoyed the book of Job, and many of the stories should be taught as a proper education. We'd be doing a disservice to our children if they didn't know the story of Daniel in lion's den or David slaying Goliath, but schools should not teach these as if they were truths.
Re:a game that tells the truth about religion
on
Religion in Video Games
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
How many people have Christians persecuted since, say, 1800?
Women, gays, and blacks, to name the first three that pop into my head. That's >50% of the world's population right there. They may not be into killing and burning anymore, but they have definitely persecuted them.
How many Christians have atheists killed for their Christianity?
But I'm sure it makes you feel better that atheists did it because they didn't want to "spread their religion". Even though I'm rather quite sure the USSR persecuted Christians in order to, you know, spread atheism.
No, they did it to spread communism. But the sister post here explains things better than I can. But let me leave you with one more thought. There's not a shred of evidence to support the superstitious belief that there's a god or almighty power or to support the various religions. We have no way to say whether Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Mormonism, or various others have it right. So why do people kill each other over these things? In light of this, the skeptical viewpoint is the only sensible one, and if we so far haven't been able to deal with that truth without killing people, then we need to figure out how. Trying to make everyone believe in the same superstition doesn't seem like a very workable solution here and religion has never been very good at tolerance. It's right there in the holy book that they're not supposed to be tolerant.
And there are clear connections between atheism and politics. There's the classic quote:
"Religion... is the opiate of the masses." -- Karl Marx
Or if you prefer a more modern version...
"Religion is a crutch for the weak." -- Jesse Ventura
There's not a big difference, despite what you say.
That demonstrates a link between religion and politics. However, religion in itself does not represent a political view. The religious right tend to hold a particular set of political views in the US, but there are plenty of christians on the left. Likewise, there are right-wing atheists (libertarians, for example) and left-wing atheists. The soviets tried to exploit atheism to encourage political upheaval much like the republicans exploit christians. That does not make christianity or atheism political (although there are certainly cases where religion can inform politics, such as abortion, but, not having a doctrine in the traditional sense, atheism is pretty immune to this), but rather politicians appeal to certain religious beliefs to gain support.
Put another way, most religions don't encourage any particular kind of form of politics, be it democracy, communism, socialism, or whatever. They may dictate a stance on some political issues and politicians use those issues to promote a larger set of policies, such as lowering tax in the US or promoting communism in Soviet Russia, but that doesn't make the religions inherently political.
The bible in many places says to kill others, despite the so-called ten commandments, and encourages various forms of capital punishment, too, for violation of various laws. The new testament claims to do away with these laws, but one wonders why god made a book that was so important so ambiguous on the topic.
Perhaps you should try reading the book before commenting on it. I have. If the bible didn't tell people not to kill, then why have so many people been killed, say, for being witches because of the passage about not suffering a witch to live? Again, you can say Jesus did away with it, but as part of Christian doctrine, it's very definitely the bible that is to blame for that one.
Religion shouldn't be in video games not only because it's not needed, but because it's harmful. Religion is bad for you and those around you. The less of it in our children's education (except that taught as mythology), the better. We already have enough ignorance in the world without spreading it in video games.
Re:a game that tells the truth about religion
on
Religion in Video Games
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· Score: 0, Troll
There's an obvious difference here. The Christians persecute others to spread their religion. Atheists persecute others for other reasons. In this case, it was to spread political ideas rather than religious ones. Religion is a direct cause of many murders while atheism cannot be blamed for it because there's nothing in the ideology about committing murder in the name of any superstition.
What makes you think the contract lawyers were so incompetent so as not to notice something like this? My bet is they knew what was up, told the execs and they continued, anyway. It's possible what you say is true, but if I were to bet on who was dumber - an exec-turned-politician, or a random contract lawyer, well, I know which one my money's on.
If you want to write a pretentious response to a pretentious article, try reading the source you're linking to. SSL v2 hasn't been secure for a while, but SSL v3 is fine.
I was thinking just a few days ago that having a buganizer for congress would be an interesting idea. Not very politically likely because you'd never be able to mark a bug "Will not fix - Working as intended" when it was clear that the only reason for a law was because the politicians were bribed enough.
They've said that the series was originally intended to be a trilogy. There have been only 11 books so far. This book will be the twelfth.
I don't know Jordan's reasons for extending the series. You are probably right that they were not honorable and everything after the 5th book was garbage, with the exception of Winter's Heart and Knife of Dreams, which were still only shadows of the first few books.
Overall, I wish I hadn't started the series, but now that I have, I'm kind of looking forward to it again for the first time in years.
You're close. The correct action would have been for the copyright holder to sue the seller. Amazon just provided a venue for the sale, on good faith that the seller was allowed to sell the good. They probably have language in the marketplace agreement to state that the seller must indemnify Amazon against all such damages, so they would have almost certainly been on solid legal ground to simply stop selling the book and then allow the publisher to pursue the seller in court.
I specifically said unwilling, not unable. I have some compassion for folks who find themselves in a ditch, just not forever, like every welfare program is designed to do. But see, welfare = votes, so those "elected" create programs to keep the votes coming, and the easiest way to do that is offer free shit.
Right. And I'm sure you have statistics and studies to back this up. Has it occurred to you that a lot of people out there who don't have jobs don't have them because they can't get one? How many homeless people are on the street because they are alcoholics, mentally ill, or in some other way unfit to work? Take a look at this article and that might change your perspective a little.
The idea of the welfare mom who keeps having kids to get more welfare money is more of a myth than anything else. It's simply invented to keep people from talking about the real issues - that most of the people who don't have jobs are either looking for one or have enough money not to need one.
Gods no. I'll use my savings, and credit, and not feel one bit sorry for myself if I have to take a rotten job to support my family. There is almost zero chance I will be lose my job because I worked to put myself in this position.
So what? There's almost zero change I'll lose mine but frankly that's because I'm really good at my job and it would be hard to find someone else to do it. But that won't matter if I become sick enough not to be able to do it anymore. You can go on COBRA, but you'd better not be even a day late on the payments because they'll cancel your policy for any reason at all because you're costing the insurance company money. And then nobody will have you anymore because you've got a "preexisting condition".
Get a clue. This legislation has NOTHING to do with health care. It has EVERYTHING to do with CONTROL
Right. And the war was about terrorism. Don't believe everything you see on Fox news.
I come from Canada. Guess what? I feel a lot safer there. People who come here are *scared*. Why should that be? I'm a legal immigrant to the US and I'm terrified of what might happen here if I get sick, and I've got health insurance. Good health insurance. So did many other people who got cancer, lost their jobs, and then lost their health insurance.
This is about giving to everyone what the elderly have in medicaid. You don't have to use it and you can keep your private insurance. There's no government control at all. If they end up undercutting the private insurers, what's the problem? It just means they're doing things better. If they aren't, they won't beat the private industry, so what's the problem?
Really, what this debate is about is that the right is arguing that a) everyone is so happy with this that they don't want it, and b) it's going to cost a fortune. Please explain how both of those things can be true. If only a small number of people need this, why will it cost a lot of money?
I also don't get the whole American thing about saying politicians are totally incompetent and inefficient. It's idiotic. How is it that you elect people who say they are bad at their jobs? It makes no sense at all. And it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. People say, "We can't do anything to help you so elect us and we won't."
The Canadian government doesn't seem to have this deep-seated, self-defeating belief. We have working public health care, we have lots of social protections for people on welfare, better financial regulation, and in general, a better minimum standard of living. The Canadian financial system didn't collapse because banks weren't allowed to do the crazy things they did in the US because the laws in Canada make sense. And Canadians pay only slightly more tax than the people in the US.
So, the real issue here is that the US has been brainwashed into thinking that the government is out to get them. Yes, the government does stupid things sometimes, and they often act in the interest of the people who bribe them rather than the people who voted for them. But claiming the government simply can't do anything right and therefore voting for the person who's going to try to do the least possible for you is an idiotic strategy to fix it.
Regardless of the $real_number, its not my job to support the $people unwilling to support themselves. If you want to pay for it, I'm sure you can find a way to do so without my assistance.
You're already paying for that. Or should we stop treating people who show up in the emergency room and those people on medicaid?
Thankfully, the people elected to deal with this are a little more compassionate than you. Because the bit that you conveniently and purposefully left out is that there are plenty of people unable to support themselves. Or have you been paying attention this last year or so? Should people really be condemned to die bankrupt because they got laid off? Maybe tomorrow, you'll lose your job. What would you do, then? Move to Canada?
I can't believe this crap gets modded insightful. Try reading just a little bit of the article:
They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors.
Yep. It's all Obama's doing.
3% == Americans who *want* health insurance but are not covered. 86% == Number happy with what they've got (TIME Aug 10)
Right, considering 16% don't even have health insurance. I guess 2% are happy they don't have it?
To some extent, but I had a decent GPA. I just don't care about them. I know really smart people who got a bad GPA and really dumb people who got a good GPA. All a GPA indicates is that you are good at sucking up to teachers and giving them what they expect. I happened to be pretty good at that, but I have no illusions that it means you're qualified to do any real world job.
Probably, if there was nothing else to go on. However, (being in CS) I'd first look at things like open source contributions, job experience, other self-motivated projects, and really just about anything that indicated this person had done some real work at some point and was interested in the field.
If the person had nothing along these lines, I'd use school and GPA together as a filtering criteria for the resumes, but once the interview starts, you've got one hour to answer all the technical questions I can throw at you. If you can answer them intelligently, then you have a chance at getting a job.
There is an unfortunate side to this. A lot of teens and their parents are still duped into believing that a degree will still lead to a guaranteed "good" job. There's plenty of material out there to counter-act this view and show that in many (possibly even now a majority) of cases, it's a waste of time and money. Unfortunately, this usually gets dismissed as right wing ranting
Don't be silly. Right wing ranting? I'm as left wing as they come, barring communists, and I think that makes perfect sense. Get a degree in something useful if you want a job. It's really as simple as that.
That said, I do take issue with the "2.7 GPA" part of this. GPAs are overrated. Anyone who interviews with me (I do interviews, I don't own the place) is going to get no brownie points for "perfect attendance", but I don't give a damn what her GPA is. If she can answer my questions well, she'll get a job. If she can't, she won't.
Slashdot Mirror
Idiot he may be, but only because he's so busy trying to explain the right answer to people like you. I initially misread the question as specifying the first coin was heads. If you read the question closely, his answer is obviously and intuitively correct. If you can't see it, try it yourself. It's easy enough to do so and then come back and apologize when you've found him correct.
You're confusing cause and effect. People who tend to ask the kinds of questions you're talking about don't generally choose their degrees based on that. I'm an engineer and I happen to like history, philosophy (certain kinds, anyway), and psychology, and I'm pretty knowledgeable about politics, too. My point is that people who want to know these things don't need a useless degree to tell them about it, and people with useless degrees don't necessarily know very much about them, either. Critical thinking is barely touched in school and rational thought not at all.
Liberal arts degrees should be cut. They're generally useless and a waste of money. Get training for a useful career in some field or just go directly to Wal-Mart or customer service without the expensive poster. If you like history, read a book or take a class in your spare time.
Oh, please. Every single Christian argument I've ever read (and trust me, I've read a few), boils down to some variation on the following:
1. We don't know there isn't a god, so there must be one (of course, that may be true, but why must it be a Christian god?).
2. We can't explain everything yet, so there must be a god to explain the unknown (same problem as the last one).
3. Jesus seems like a pretty good guy. Why would he lie (too easy)?
4. My piece of toast looks like the face of Jesus.
None of these claims constitute evidence. I also see several websites out there dedicated to debunking the book you quote, including this one which seems to suggest that the book you reference is drivel on the same order as Lewis' Mere Christianity. If your champion's best work is claiming that psychic's predicted Jesus, then perhaps you should try reading up on the James Randy foundation before making claims about reliable evidence.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply, but I believe you misunderstood me. I don't have a problem with christianity being taught in schools. Rather, I have a problem with christianity being taught as true in school. If it is taught, it should be taught like we teach other mythologies, like Greek mythology or Tolkien. There are certainly parts of the bible that are worth reading. I, for example, greatly enjoyed the book of Job, and many of the stories should be taught as a proper education. We'd be doing a disservice to our children if they didn't know the story of Daniel in lion's den or David slaying Goliath, but schools should not teach these as if they were truths.
Women, gays, and blacks, to name the first three that pop into my head. That's >50% of the world's population right there. They may not be into killing and burning anymore, but they have definitely persecuted them.
No, they did it to spread communism. But the sister post here explains things better than I can. But let me leave you with one more thought. There's not a shred of evidence to support the superstitious belief that there's a god or almighty power or to support the various religions. We have no way to say whether Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Mormonism, or various others have it right. So why do people kill each other over these things? In light of this, the skeptical viewpoint is the only sensible one, and if we so far haven't been able to deal with that truth without killing people, then we need to figure out how. Trying to make everyone believe in the same superstition doesn't seem like a very workable solution here and religion has never been very good at tolerance. It's right there in the holy book that they're not supposed to be tolerant.
That demonstrates a link between religion and politics. However, religion in itself does not represent a political view. The religious right tend to hold a particular set of political views in the US, but there are plenty of christians on the left. Likewise, there are right-wing atheists (libertarians, for example) and left-wing atheists. The soviets tried to exploit atheism to encourage political upheaval much like the republicans exploit christians. That does not make christianity or atheism political (although there are certainly cases where religion can inform politics, such as abortion, but, not having a doctrine in the traditional sense, atheism is pretty immune to this), but rather politicians appeal to certain religious beliefs to gain support.
Put another way, most religions don't encourage any particular kind of form of politics, be it democracy, communism, socialism, or whatever. They may dictate a stance on some political issues and politicians use those issues to promote a larger set of policies, such as lowering tax in the US or promoting communism in Soviet Russia, but that doesn't make the religions inherently political.
The bible in many places says to kill others, despite the so-called ten commandments, and encourages various forms of capital punishment, too, for violation of various laws. The new testament claims to do away with these laws, but one wonders why god made a book that was so important so ambiguous on the topic.
Perhaps you should try reading the book before commenting on it. I have. If the bible didn't tell people not to kill, then why have so many people been killed, say, for being witches because of the passage about not suffering a witch to live? Again, you can say Jesus did away with it, but as part of Christian doctrine, it's very definitely the bible that is to blame for that one.
Religion shouldn't be in video games not only because it's not needed, but because it's harmful. Religion is bad for you and those around you. The less of it in our children's education (except that taught as mythology), the better. We already have enough ignorance in the world without spreading it in video games.
There's an obvious difference here. The Christians persecute others to spread their religion. Atheists persecute others for other reasons. In this case, it was to spread political ideas rather than religious ones. Religion is a direct cause of many murders while atheism cannot be blamed for it because there's nothing in the ideology about committing murder in the name of any superstition.
Huh?
Ah.
What makes you think the contract lawyers were so incompetent so as not to notice something like this? My bet is they knew what was up, told the execs and they continued, anyway. It's possible what you say is true, but if I were to bet on who was dumber - an exec-turned-politician, or a random contract lawyer, well, I know which one my money's on.
If you want to write a pretentious response to a pretentious article, try reading the source you're linking to. SSL v2 hasn't been secure for a while, but SSL v3 is fine.
I was thinking just a few days ago that having a buganizer for congress would be an interesting idea. Not very politically likely because you'd never be able to mark a bug "Will not fix - Working as intended" when it was clear that the only reason for a law was because the politicians were bribed enough.
This is just wrong.
They've said that the series was originally intended to be a trilogy. There have been only 11 books so far. This book will be the twelfth.
I don't know Jordan's reasons for extending the series. You are probably right that they were not honorable and everything after the 5th book was garbage, with the exception of Winter's Heart and Knife of Dreams, which were still only shadows of the first few books.
Overall, I wish I hadn't started the series, but now that I have, I'm kind of looking forward to it again for the first time in years.
You're close. The correct action would have been for the copyright holder to sue the seller. Amazon just provided a venue for the sale, on good faith that the seller was allowed to sell the good. They probably have language in the marketplace agreement to state that the seller must indemnify Amazon against all such damages, so they would have almost certainly been on solid legal ground to simply stop selling the book and then allow the publisher to pursue the seller in court.
Yeah, I've got a program for the author that fits in a tweet:
#include
int main() {
puts("You're a moron and a braggart.");
}
Right. And I'm sure you have statistics and studies to back this up. Has it occurred to you that a lot of people out there who don't have jobs don't have them because they can't get one? How many homeless people are on the street because they are alcoholics, mentally ill, or in some other way unfit to work? Take a look at this article and that might change your perspective a little.
The idea of the welfare mom who keeps having kids to get more welfare money is more of a myth than anything else. It's simply invented to keep people from talking about the real issues - that most of the people who don't have jobs are either looking for one or have enough money not to need one.
So what? There's almost zero change I'll lose mine but frankly that's because I'm really good at my job and it would be hard to find someone else to do it. But that won't matter if I become sick enough not to be able to do it anymore. You can go on COBRA, but you'd better not be even a day late on the payments because they'll cancel your policy for any reason at all because you're costing the insurance company money. And then nobody will have you anymore because you've got a "preexisting condition".
Sounds cheap to fix, then.
Right. And the war was about terrorism. Don't believe everything you see on Fox news.
I come from Canada. Guess what? I feel a lot safer there. People who come here are *scared*. Why should that be? I'm a legal immigrant to the US and I'm terrified of what might happen here if I get sick, and I've got health insurance. Good health insurance. So did many other people who got cancer, lost their jobs, and then lost their health insurance.
This is about giving to everyone what the elderly have in medicaid. You don't have to use it and you can keep your private insurance. There's no government control at all. If they end up undercutting the private insurers, what's the problem? It just means they're doing things better. If they aren't, they won't beat the private industry, so what's the problem?
Really, what this debate is about is that the right is arguing that a) everyone is so happy with this that they don't want it, and b) it's going to cost a fortune. Please explain how both of those things can be true. If only a small number of people need this, why will it cost a lot of money?
I also don't get the whole American thing about saying politicians are totally incompetent and inefficient. It's idiotic. How is it that you elect people who say they are bad at their jobs? It makes no sense at all. And it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. People say, "We can't do anything to help you so elect us and we won't."
The Canadian government doesn't seem to have this deep-seated, self-defeating belief. We have working public health care, we have lots of social protections for people on welfare, better financial regulation, and in general, a better minimum standard of living. The Canadian financial system didn't collapse because banks weren't allowed to do the crazy things they did in the US because the laws in Canada make sense. And Canadians pay only slightly more tax than the people in the US.
So, the real issue here is that the US has been brainwashed into thinking that the government is out to get them. Yes, the government does stupid things sometimes, and they often act in the interest of the people who bribe them rather than the people who voted for them. But claiming the government simply can't do anything right and therefore voting for the person who's going to try to do the least possible for you is an idiotic strategy to fix it.
You're already paying for that. Or should we stop treating people who show up in the emergency room and those people on medicaid?
Thankfully, the people elected to deal with this are a little more compassionate than you. Because the bit that you conveniently and purposefully left out is that there are plenty of people unable to support themselves. Or have you been paying attention this last year or so? Should people really be condemned to die bankrupt because they got laid off? Maybe tomorrow, you'll lose your job. What would you do, then? Move to Canada?
They already have.
(Hint: our weapons are not our guns; try reading the PATRIOT act sometime)
I can't believe this crap gets modded insightful. Try reading just a little bit of the article:
Yep. It's all Obama's doing.
Right, considering 16% don't even have health insurance. I guess 2% are happy they don't have it?
To some extent, but I had a decent GPA. I just don't care about them. I know really smart people who got a bad GPA and really dumb people who got a good GPA. All a GPA indicates is that you are good at sucking up to teachers and giving them what they expect. I happened to be pretty good at that, but I have no illusions that it means you're qualified to do any real world job.
Probably, if there was nothing else to go on. However, (being in CS) I'd first look at things like open source contributions, job experience, other self-motivated projects, and really just about anything that indicated this person had done some real work at some point and was interested in the field.
If the person had nothing along these lines, I'd use school and GPA together as a filtering criteria for the resumes, but once the interview starts, you've got one hour to answer all the technical questions I can throw at you. If you can answer them intelligently, then you have a chance at getting a job.
Don't be silly. Right wing ranting? I'm as left wing as they come, barring communists, and I think that makes perfect sense. Get a degree in something useful if you want a job. It's really as simple as that.
That said, I do take issue with the "2.7 GPA" part of this. GPAs are overrated. Anyone who interviews with me (I do interviews, I don't own the place) is going to get no brownie points for "perfect attendance", but I don't give a damn what her GPA is. If she can answer my questions well, she'll get a job. If she can't, she won't.