I abandoned trying to edit Wikipedia years ago when I read a Wikipedia article dealing with the ethnicity of ancient Egyptians. It made aberrant claims about all Pharaohs being black, citing afrocentrist "historians" as sole sources, without a single instance of the word Copt.
Turns out however that despite the ridiculousness of the claims in the article and the obvious bias, this couldn't be challenged, as it was the pet article of an afrocentrist but otherwise reputable contributor. See, while the person in question was a valuable contributor, they used Wikipedia as a platform to push their agenda. That gave them a sort of immunity, it's like a reward, you contribute a lot, so you get to have some propaganda real estate. I'm sure that most contributors don't actually use it to push their agenda, but every once in a while you can catch one doing just that, and it's hard to challenge them because their reputation outweighs the qualities of their work.
Replace "P2P" with "shotguns", "music sharing" with "illegal hunting" and "ID theft" with "homicide" and you get yourself a good firearms analogy showing how it's different.
Samuel Johnson: Ah, I see you've underlined a few (takes dictionary, reads): `bloomers';
`bottom'; `burp'; (turns a page) `fart'; `fiddle'; `fornicate'?
George IV: Well...
Samuel Johnson: Sir! I hope you're not using the first English dictionary to look up
rude words!
Edmund Blackadder: I wouldn't be too hopeful; that's what all the other ones will be
used for.
I don't know about all states but I looked at the legislation for California (where it's 18) and along with the legislation it was very candidly explained that they found out that most teenage pregnancies were caused by men in their 20s, so that in an effort to curb teenage pregnancies they made it punishable of imprisonment to have sex with someone under 18. Source.
So basically to solve their teenage pregnancy problem which is caused by a lack of education (mostly in the poorer communities which California is full of) they just throw the fathers in jail. It's a simple solution to an unrelated problem. Throwing people in jail is the legislator's duct tape, there's not a problem it cannot fix. Then you wonder why you have so many more people in jail in the USA per capita than in the rest of the world.
Yeah, well, the main tenet (whatever that is) of writing scientific articles should be that to be more than baseless sensationalist speculation, something must be shown to be a minimum likely.
Wow, you're a serious moron. No one in 1809 believed that the Earth was flat, and no one in 1909 believed that shit about lightning (which what I assume you mean by "lighting").
And that's a bullshit point anyways, basically what you're saying is "hey what do you know, maybe one day in the distant future it will be possible, so let's fap furiously while imagining having robot girlfriends with a strong AI".
Well, while I think that quantum physics show that the universe isn't fully deterministic, I also am not sure how determinism has anything to do with free will. I think the problem is the unidimensionality (or linearity) of time as we think of it, which means you don't get to go back and make a different choice, time as we think of it is too "written", and from that point of view it's hard to tell if things could have been different or if they were bound to be like this. So I think the problem with "free will" entirely lies in how we think of time. The problem is that it's an entirely unfalsifiable problem, you can't test it, it's like saying "whatever will happen will happen". That's why it's philosophy and not science, cause it's a bullshit question.
This being said, I agree with you, free will is one of those philosophical question that fall in the "pure intellectual masturbation" category, like questions pertaining to reality. The answer to these question doesn't change a thing to anything, the nature of our "free will" isn't relevant to anything, and neither is the nature of what we call reality. People only keep bringing those up cause chicks dig dudes that sound "deep".
a) Showing that the defendant is a psychopath does little to prove he killed anyone
b) Why always see the bad side of things? It could be used to back up pleading insanity.
Either way, having a way to diagnose a psychopath from a physical trait is something great, but of course Slashdotters wouldn't let that get in the way of their usual doomsaying.
The above comment summed up into a sentence : "Based on a series of unverified assumptions I choose not to believe in free will and to believe we live in a deterministic universe and make a point out of it + more assumptions"
The problem is, IMHO, that reviewers don't get what netbooks are for. Or rather, they don't need a netbook, they're given a few netbooks to review at work on a table and so in these conditions all they see is how big and nice the screen is, or how fast the machine is.
They prefer the bigger ones because size isn't an issue to them, they're not going to carry them around, they're just going to test them on a desk so there's nothing inconvenient about the thing being huge. Or to use a car analogy, that's if you're given to review a bunch of very cheap low end cars, you don't care about the price cause you're not broke and you're not paying for it anyways, so of all the el cheapo cars your favourite one is more likely to be the more expensive one. In other words the reviewers can't appreciate what's good about what they're reviewing, because they're reviewing them like another class of products.
Well, look at any new market that Apple has entered since the dawn of this decade, see if they had as much success as with the iPhone in doing so (hint : they did), then infer whether entering the netbook/tablet market will be crowned with success for them.
Of the one monstrous detector, only one needs to work. You don't need to make sure that almost all coming out of factories will work, you just need one to get to work, and if it doesn't work you can fix it till it works.
Slashdot Mirror
I abandoned trying to edit Wikipedia years ago when I read a Wikipedia article dealing with the ethnicity of ancient Egyptians. It made aberrant claims about all Pharaohs being black, citing afrocentrist "historians" as sole sources, without a single instance of the word Copt.
Turns out however that despite the ridiculousness of the claims in the article and the obvious bias, this couldn't be challenged, as it was the pet article of an afrocentrist but otherwise reputable contributor. See, while the person in question was a valuable contributor, they used Wikipedia as a platform to push their agenda. That gave them a sort of immunity, it's like a reward, you contribute a lot, so you get to have some propaganda real estate. I'm sure that most contributors don't actually use it to push their agenda, but every once in a while you can catch one doing just that, and it's hard to challenge them because their reputation outweighs the qualities of their work.
Replace "P2P" with "shotguns", "music sharing" with "illegal hunting" and "ID theft" with "homicide" and you get yourself a good firearms analogy showing how it's different.
Is China handling this delicate issue appropriately or are the news reports of justice and monitoring treatments merely a facade?
I'd think that the 6 sentences this preceded that question would answer to that.
Dogs go on Slashdot, and cats go on 4chan. What, you didn't really think that LOLcats were the work of actual people?
This is the nerd equivalent of football
FYP.
GO FIREFOX!!!! WHOOOOO!!!
Keeping dictionaries away from children is always a good idea. Nothing good ever came out of letting children use dictionaries.
Blackadder said it best :
Samuel Johnson: Ah, I see you've underlined a few (takes dictionary, reads): `bloomers'; `bottom'; `burp'; (turns a page) `fart'; `fiddle'; `fornicate'?
George IV: Well...
Samuel Johnson: Sir! I hope you're not using the first English dictionary to look up rude words!
Edmund Blackadder: I wouldn't be too hopeful; that's what all the other ones will be used for.
I don't know about all states but I looked at the legislation for California (where it's 18) and along with the legislation it was very candidly explained that they found out that most teenage pregnancies were caused by men in their 20s, so that in an effort to curb teenage pregnancies they made it punishable of imprisonment to have sex with someone under 18. Source.
So basically to solve their teenage pregnancy problem which is caused by a lack of education (mostly in the poorer communities which California is full of) they just throw the fathers in jail. It's a simple solution to an unrelated problem. Throwing people in jail is the legislator's duct tape, there's not a problem it cannot fix. Then you wonder why you have so many more people in jail in the USA per capita than in the rest of the world.
Yeah, well, the main tenet (whatever that is) of writing scientific articles should be that to be more than baseless sensationalist speculation, something must be shown to be a minimum likely.
Wow, you're a serious moron. No one in 1809 believed that the Earth was flat, and no one in 1909 believed that shit about lightning (which what I assume you mean by "lighting").
And that's a bullshit point anyways, basically what you're saying is "hey what do you know, maybe one day in the distant future it will be possible, so let's fap furiously while imagining having robot girlfriends with a strong AI".
The only question is when.
And the answer is never.
Prove me wrong suckers (and saying "everything might eventually be possible" doesn't work).
Stop crushing our scifi nerd pipe dreams, you bastard!
First Plant!
Well, while I think that quantum physics show that the universe isn't fully deterministic, I also am not sure how determinism has anything to do with free will. I think the problem is the unidimensionality (or linearity) of time as we think of it, which means you don't get to go back and make a different choice, time as we think of it is too "written", and from that point of view it's hard to tell if things could have been different or if they were bound to be like this. So I think the problem with "free will" entirely lies in how we think of time. The problem is that it's an entirely unfalsifiable problem, you can't test it, it's like saying "whatever will happen will happen". That's why it's philosophy and not science, cause it's a bullshit question.
This being said, I agree with you, free will is one of those philosophical question that fall in the "pure intellectual masturbation" category, like questions pertaining to reality. The answer to these question doesn't change a thing to anything, the nature of our "free will" isn't relevant to anything, and neither is the nature of what we call reality. People only keep bringing those up cause chicks dig dudes that sound "deep".
If you find that scary then don't turn around, there's your shadow standing right behind you.
a) Showing that the defendant is a psychopath does little to prove he killed anyone
b) Why always see the bad side of things? It could be used to back up pleading insanity.
Either way, having a way to diagnose a psychopath from a physical trait is something great, but of course Slashdotters wouldn't let that get in the way of their usual doomsaying.
The above comment summed up into a sentence : "Based on a series of unverified assumptions I choose not to believe in free will and to believe we live in a deterministic universe and make a point out of it + more assumptions"
The problem is, IMHO, that reviewers don't get what netbooks are for. Or rather, they don't need a netbook, they're given a few netbooks to review at work on a table and so in these conditions all they see is how big and nice the screen is, or how fast the machine is.
They prefer the bigger ones because size isn't an issue to them, they're not going to carry them around, they're just going to test them on a desk so there's nothing inconvenient about the thing being huge. Or to use a car analogy, that's if you're given to review a bunch of very cheap low end cars, you don't care about the price cause you're not broke and you're not paying for it anyways, so of all the el cheapo cars your favourite one is more likely to be the more expensive one. In other words the reviewers can't appreciate what's good about what they're reviewing, because they're reviewing them like another class of products.
Well, look at any new market that Apple has entered since the dawn of this decade, see if they had as much success as with the iPhone in doing so (hint : they did), then infer whether entering the netbook/tablet market will be crowned with success for them.
No, they're just irrelevant.
Of the one monstrous detector, only one needs to work. You don't need to make sure that almost all coming out of factories will work, you just need one to get to work, and if it doesn't work you can fix it till it works.
The KISS principal? You mean like, the main guy, Paul Stanley?
Besides RTFA, the topic is all about "mafia gangs". Nothing about "gangstas". Not only was I not being pedantic but you're nitpicking and wrong.
Troll please, read this Wikipedia entry for gangster, tell me whether you see the likes of Bugsy Siegel or of 50 Cent, then STFU.
Oder ich hatte, wenn es nicht fur die Zeit, die zu ubersetzen.