Ok, so that's one data point. The fact that you have not had issues with Flash does not mean that no one else does, or that those who do "just don't know how to setup and maintain a stable system"; to generalize from your experience and draw conclusions about everyone else who claims to have had a problem with Flash is quite the logical fallacy. In fact, I'll counter your anecdote with one of my own -- if you will tell me what I could do to better set up or maintain my system such that this problem goes away, I will gladly buy you a beer.
I use Firefox 3.6.8 on a MacBook as part of my job. I tend to have FF open with several tabs (gmail, reverence pages, test pages for the code I'm working on, etc). I don't close Firefox at the end of the day, as I'm going to open all those same tabs the next day, and although I have the SessionManager add-on installed, it is often unreliable; Firefox will usually run this way for days or weeks. Eventually, however, it will start hogging the CPU (running at ~60% or higher, sometimes all the way to 99.9%), regardless of what tabs are open. Or, it will start spiking up to complete UI lock (even showing the spinning rainbow ball cursor) on a very regular basis -- it may start at once per 5 minutes and last a quarter of a second, but it will eventually worsen to the point that FF is spending more time locked than running. In either case, the only thing that seems to work is to restart the browser. It took a while to determine, but the only correlation I can find with the speed at which these problems show up (and worsen) is the amount of time I let the browser sit on pages containing Flash. Now, unlike GGP, I don't necessarily blame Adobe -- it seems equally likely to me that Mozilla is at fault here. However, the fact remains that my browser gets less stable/functional the more it runs Flash.
So, would you please explain to me how the problem I've described is my fault, rather than Mozilla's or Adobe's? Blocking Flash is not an option, and telling me I should just restart the browser frequently is like a Windows 95 user saying their system is perfectly stable as long as they reboot once or twice a day -- my usage pattern is not the problem, it merely reveals a problem in FF and/or the Flash add-on.
If "non-deterministic polynomial time" is an actual "algorithmic complexity class' [...]
Was that tongue-in-cheek? Those terms are pretty standard for the topic, at least in American English. Either you don't know much about complexity theory, they used different terms in the language/region/era you learned about it and you weren't able to see the connection to these phrases, or that was a superb troll. Here's a link to the Millennium Prize description of the problem (pdf link). The first sentence of that document (emphasis mine) is:
The P versus NP problem is to determine whether every language accepted by some nondeterministic algorithm in polynomial time is also accepted by some (deterministic) algorithm in polynomial time.
The "reason" here may amount simply to the fact that the `suspect' had the city involved in the attack on his mind for whatever reason.
Are you responding to the scenario I gave? How would saying "The man in this picture helped commit a terrorist act." while showing a picture of the one apprehended man be vulnerable to anything like what you are describing?
Once a witch-hunt is under way, we can't expect evidence to be evaluated rationally.
Sure -- I was talking about how it could be used (clarifying what was meant by "knew in advance", since so many people seem to be misinterpreting that phrase), while you're talking about how you expect it would be (ab)used. They are two totally different beasts.
It sure seems that if they knew the specifics in advance, they could eschew the whole mindreading thing and just get on with stopping the attack. But maybe that's just me.
In cases where they know the specifics in advance, they mean in advance of the questioning, not in advance of the crime. (This isn't the Minority Report sort of situation so many are making it out to be.) In such a case, it would be about confirming that a suspect knows something the public doesn't -- not confirming the info. Consider this scenario:
A terrorist attack is carried out, and one of those responsible is caught (we'll call this person "John Doe"). John's name and picture are withheld from the media. The FBI determines there were 3 to 4 more involved in carrying out the attack, based on witness reports. John proves unwilling to rat them out for anything. The FBI comes up with a list of 20 possible suspects, based on conflicting witness descriptions and people John is known to meet with regularly -- certainly not enough to convict anyone, or even hold them longer than 24 hours without further evidence. If, during that 24 hours, no further evidence comes up, they'll have to let those people go, and anyone guilty is likely to try to flee the country or go into hiding. The FBI knows John was involved in the attack, but the public doesn't. If they can hook the suspects up to the machine and determine who already knew that John was involved (i.e. use the machine to find who has "guilty knowledge" of specifics the FBI already knew in advance), they'll at least have reason to keep those people detained for longer than 24 hours while they search for evidence -- and it also lets them narrow their search for evidence from 20 people to i.e. 3 people to check extremely thoroughly and 17 people to check more casually.
You're the second to whom I will now reply Apple doesn't sell a product with a built in ADSL2 modem, which incidentally makes your lovely product recommendation completely off topic.
In all fairness, for those of us not familiar with the Aussie broadband market, there was virtually no way to know that only ADSL modem-routers are under discussion, at least from reading the summary. It asks:
Ever wondered why you can't find the perfect 802.11n router?
It then lists off a handful of features, conspicuously missing the "is also an ADSL modem" feature. My assumption based on the summary was that previously, knowing the Aussie ISP(s?) would subsidize large numbers of modem-routers provided a virtually guaranteed market, and so it was less risky for router manufacturers to invest in R&D for modem-routers (which would then allow them to cheaply cross over into the normal router market simply by removing the ADSL modem functionality). Nothing in the summary contradicts this; in fact, except for the parenthetical, it is a paraphrase of the 3rd sentence of the summary, the only one which mentions ADSL modem-routers.
In short, these comments are not off-topic to the summary. The fact that they are presumably off-topic to the article is largely the fault of the summary, not the comment poster, unless you want to blame them for not RTFA (good luck with that, by the way!).
Thats a myth. There can only be one leader in a team and most kids just want to play and have fun anyway, they're not interested in having an outdoors team building workshop with balls despite what some team coaches seem to think. When I was at school there was nothing worse than having some teacher take the sports too seriously as it just spoiled the fun. In the end I got sick of team sports altogether because of the borderline psychotic behaviour of some of the sports staff.
You are half right. The link between sports participation and leadership skills has been shown generally to be a myth, however there have been links between sports participation and teamwork. For a citation, look at page 224 of this pdf from the Journal of Leadership Education.
Additionally, I call [citation needed] on your reasoning for why sports do not build leadership. Maybe there can only be one leader in a team for most sports, but I would argue this is not a universal truth -- you could easily play a modified game of capture the flag where there are still 2 teams, but participants are broken up into "squads" of 3, with each squad having its own leader. Furthermore, if you choose sports with relatively small teams and then rotate leaders, everyone will get a decent exposure to being in the leadership role. You create a false dichotomy between "just playing and having fun" on the one side versus "having an outdoors team building workshop with balls" on the other. The study I linked provides some interesting conjectures about the disconnect between the perception that sports builds leadership and the reality, and mostly what I got from it actually agrees with your last couple statements -- the problem could well be that sports staff don't know how to properly make the sports environment a valuable leadership- and teamwork- promoting experience, and thus focus on promoting athletics to the detriment of possible leadership and teamwork promotion.
I don't deny there might be a problem. But I do deny that you, GGP, and GGGGP have given anything stronger than (weak) circumstantial evidence of such. I already quoted:
But the numbers don't tell the full story. PETA says it doesn't have puppies and kittens for adoption because it is not an adoptive agency but a "shelter of last resort," taking in animals that other shelters reject because they are unadoptable and euthanizing those that are suffering. They refer adoptable animals to the nearby Virginia Beach Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
That means there is a strong bias that the animals taken to PETA are ones that are more likely to be unsuitable for adoption and more likely to be euthanized by any shelter that takes them. I grew up in West Virgina, where they routinely have extended deer hunting seasons because the deer are overpopulating (due to the fact that we've killed off almost all their natural predators in the area) to the point that they find themselves starving for lack of available food, and the common wisdom is that it's better to kill off some additional does than to have them stick around and keep breeding. Would it be more humane to let them (or their fawns, next year) starve to death? Some people might say it is, but many others would say it is not.
What is the solution you propose? That PETA start taking in over 2,000 animals a year and housing them for the rest of their (possibly suffering) lives because no one will adopt them? If they adopt that policy, I'll be PETA would wind up with more and more animals every year, reaching a steady population of at least 10,000 pets they'd be housing and caring for -- and that number is just at the PETA headquarters. Do you have any idea how expensive that would be, especially if you're trying to be "humane" about it and not keep them cooped up in cages 20 hours a day? Or do you advocate releasing them back out into the streets? I can't remember what you suggested... Oh, that's right, you didn't actually suggest what PETA should do instead, you just made an emotional appeal by comparing them to the Nazis.
You know they saying about "Lies, damn lies, and statistics"...
[...] the kernel of the accusation about euthanizing pets seems to be true.
That depends on what you mean by the kernel -- I think the claim that they seek out opportunities to euthanize animals is the important part of his claim, and that is presumably false. You make the point that PETA euthanizes a lot of animals, and honestly I don't have a problem with that, nor do I think it is hypocritical. From your link:
But the numbers don't tell the full story. PETA says it doesn't have puppies and kittens for adoption because it is not an adoptive agency but a "shelter of last resort," taking in animals that other shelters reject because they are unadoptable and euthanizing those that are suffering. They refer adoptable animals to the nearby Virginia Beach Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Furthermore, although this claim is not made in the article, my understanding is that the supply of animals needing adoption greatly exceeds the demand for adoptable animals. Additionally, without evidence, I am not going to assume that a marketing campaign geared to increase adoptions would do much in the long haul -- it may redirect potential adopters from another shelter to PETA's, or it may convince someone to adopt now who wouldn't have adopted until later if left on their own, but in neither case are you significantly increasing the number of adoptions that take place within a long-term window. Taken a step further, if PETA were to have managed to adopt out an additional 100 of those cats and dogs that were brought in, I'm guessing that would have resulted in 100 less adoptions elsewhere. Maybe that's not entirely true -- perhaps it would have been 99 or 98. The real problem is not going to be fixed by promoting adoption, just like 99.9% of the time, giving a starving person a single meal doesn't significantly help them get themselves into a position where they won't be starving again a couple days later. I think PETA (or at least the person working for PETA who makes the decisions about which animals to euthanize) probably realized that 3 days into the job, if they didn't know it already.
So, until I'm presented convincing evidence otherwise, I'm going to assume that they're actually taking a practical, rather than ignorantly idealistic, perspective. You expect me to criticize that? PETA's biggest problem is being too blindly idealistic. And they're nothing like the animal-hating monsters GGP makes them out to be.
They also recommend that people mutilate their cats by ripping off the top joint of their toes (declawing) [...]
Wow, you're either trolling, or REALLY REALLY wrong. The bit about declawing seemed the easiest to fact-check, and sure enough I found the opposite is true. Since your credibility is blown, I'm going to assume the rest of your claims aren't worth the time to fact-check.
What's with the incredible FUD campaign against PETA? This isn't the first time I've seen false and/or willfully misleading info spread about PETA here on slashdot. Is it just a rare specimen of troll, or do people really believe this stuff? Or have people just taken to a "fight fire with fire" attitude in response to PETA's own misleading advertising?
I don't agree with them, but I never agree with intellectual dishonesty. If this is a fight fire with fire situation, shame on you. Sinking to their level will just discredit the anti-PETA movement, much like PETA's intellectual dishonesty discredits them. If you really did believe it, shame on you for being so stupidly gullible. If that post was a troll... bravo, well-played.
Noise on load? For me, you have to click the "Insert Coin" button before it makes any noise. Maybe you saw it earlier today and it's already been fixed.
Unless you're due to retired today and your pension just got blown out of the water.
Put it all under the mattress. Seriously.
Generally, it is recommended that as you approach retirement age, you start moving more and more of your retirement savings out of stocks and into bonds. (Bonds are much less volatile.)
Now [Obama]'s trying to piss-off our ally Israel by demanding they stop building in the Palestinian zone, else they'll lose American military assistance
The consensus view of the international community is that the building of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.[1][2][3][4] This view is largely based on UN Security council resolutions, including resolutions 446, 452, 465, 471 and 476 which find the settlements to be illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention.[5] The legal arm of the UN, the International Court of Justice, has found the settlements to be illegal under international law.[6]
So another perspective on the situation is that Obama is saying to Israel "Stop violating international law, or we'll stop giving you the free military equipment you're using to support your violations of said law." How do you manage to interpret that as "trying to piss-off our ally", and then use that to support the statement that Obama is hawkish? It would be just as accurate to say that telling Iran not to build nukes is merely trying to piss off our enemy, and that anyone who does so is a hawk.
In case it wasn't clear, my main point is not to say what is or is not a good course of action, it's to point out that your perspective is so far from objective that it borders on intellectual dishonesty.
I see it as a little like the idea of an uncanny valley for games. If it's fictional enough, we don't care about whether it accurately matches reality -- it's more of an abstract game with a veneer of reality over it (i.e. we don't care that a mushroom really shouldn't make someone double in height, because underneath we know the mushroom is just an arbitrary visual label for a certain abstract powerup). On the other hand, once it passes a certain threshold of realism such that the mechanics seem to be intended to resemble reality rather than being abstract and arbitrary, then the fact that it isn't totally realistic bothers us -- it's a game that resembles reality in many important ways, but which falls short of what we expect reality to allow in many other important ways.
Being able to move forward but not back doesn't really bother us in Super Mario Brothers, but not being able to retreat in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 seems like an extremely artificial restriction in the context of a (somewhat) realistic game. (Disclaimer, I've never played CoD:MW2, I'm just inferring from the summary.)
I'm unsure, but I'd be willing to wager that there is value in the exercise, though. I think part of the education process isn't just about learning material, but learning how to LEARN and good study habits.
While I agree with you to a certain extent, I think it can also be extremely counter-productive to force children to learn things for which they're not ready mentally. What proportion of children have acquired at least a strong distaste for math by the end of 6th grade? What proportion of children have already decided by then that they "just aren't good at math"? The parents can feed into this or even initiate that mindset -- what proportion of children will have been consoled by their parents that they need not worry about it, because "not everyone is good at math"?
I never experienced any of this -- I have always enjoyed math. On the other hand, I also saw students less gifted than myself become so discouraged by math that they loathed anything having too much to do with math. And can you blame them? Being forced to do something for years when you find it extremely frustrating can have many negative consequences; I'd be willing to wager that one year of such frustration, if it yielded the same resulting skill level at math, wouldn't have nearly the same level of deterrence.
So, to bring this back around to your statements -- if it turns out this researcher is correct, then isn't there something *else* we could find for them to study which would allow them to learn how to learn and how to study? Maybe something that their brains are prepared for, and thus which won't have the same level of inherent frustration for 90% of the students? We can teach them the math when they're ready for it, and when it is much more efficient to teach it to them.
"For example, if you get less nutrients growing up you likely aren't going to be as smart as someone else who does get enough nutrients."
Whoooo boy let me show you my medical history, then let me show you what I do for a living, and you'll be retracting that statement pretty rapidly, I will guarantee it.
So according to you, a single anecdote (which you claimed you could -- but didn't actually -- provide) disproves a general statement that includes the word "likely"? Granted, I wouldn't have phrased it as GP did, but I generally agree with what GP was trying to say.
How about this: "All else being equal, someone who gets less nutrients growing up almost certainly isn't going to be as smart as that same person would have been if they had had enough nutrients at crucial points in their development." If you think you're smart now with very poor nutrition when you were young, I simply posit that it is highly likely you would have been smarter had your nutrition been significantly better.
Eh, maybe a bare few, but I honestly don't buy that crap that "they hate us for our freedom". (There's some serious propaganda.) Even assuming there are some who hate us for our e.g. religious freedom, they won't exactly thinks those new oppressive/stupid laws are progress towards their goal.
Imagine if they can convince the United States government that part of its defense budget should go to increasing cyber security!
I believe they already did: Security-Enhanced Linux was developed primarily by the NSA (which is part of the DoD), and is now part of the mainline kernel.
I think that this explains why some of these same people confuse things like fantasy gaming with real devil worship.
What's wrong with "real" devil worship, anyway?
GP never said anything at all about his opinion of real devil worship -- GP simply stated that some people think that fantasy gaming is a form of real devil worship, and in the process implied that such a perspective is incorrect.
Do you think they're the same? (See what I did there?)
If you can think of a way to assert correlation such that causation is not a natural inference for most people, and without sounding awkward or explicitly denying the causation you expect people to infer, I would sincerely love to hear it.
Researchers have found a correlation between levels of depression and amount of time surfing the Internet. Their studies show that both depression and Internet usage increase and decrease proportionate to each other.
For one thing, you are pushing the bounds of sounding awkward, if you ask me.;-) But more importantly, you are incorrect about what their studies showed. From TFA: "They ['internet addicts'] also had a higher incidence of moderate to severe depression than normal users." This does not say that those who were the most "internet addicted" were especially likely to be severely depressed, which is what your statement asserts. But even aside from that, it indicates very specifically what information they examined -- the population was "internet addicts", not "people who exhibit signs of depression". This is suggested by the original statement ("People who spend a lot of time surfing the internet are more likely to show signs of depression."), but was lost in your translation as you tried to make it sound more causation-neutral, and was actually reversed by bonniot's alternate phrasing. That's really the key here -- the difference between reporting what you have directly observed in your study, versus reporting the things you believe to be statistically true based on what you observed in your study. I already went into this in another comment in this thread, so I won't go into it again.
This whole discussion does a great job of illustrating how difficult it really is for scientists to publish what they observed in their studies without other people inferring incorrect things about how the study was performed, what it means, etc.
You could indeed conclude that -- but it would not be what you observed in your study. It is my opinion that as scientists, it is our job first to tell others what we have observed directly, and only secondarily to assert "therefore we can conclude X and Y due to Z". If you are not very careful to keep in mind what you have actually observed and what you have not, it becomes very easy to make an incorrect assumption without even realizing. It is a slippery slope when you start skipping over the details -- just like your elementary school math teacher told you, "you have to show your work".;-)
You make a good point, however note that you lose some information in this third version of the statement compared with the original or your 2nd example. In fact, I just realized that you were incorrect when you said that those 2 versions of the statement were formally equivalent. Let's look at the 2:
People who spend a lot of time surfing the internet are more likely to show signs of depression
People showing signs of depression are more likely to spend a lot of time surfing the internet
In statement 1, you are asserting that within the population of people who spend a lot of time surfing the internet there are proportionally more people who exhibit signs of depression than within the population of people who do not spend a lot of time surfing the internet.
In statement 2, you are asserting that within the population of people who show signs of depression there are proportionally more people who spend a lot of time surfing the internet than within the population of people who do not show signs of depression.
Statistically these two statements may be equivalent (I think they are -- they both assert that the two conditions are correlated, and so each statement implies the other), but they are different in that they suggest what kind of data was used to justify the assertion. Merely saying "spending a lot of time on the internet and showing signs of depression are correlated" doesn't give any indication whether you were examining the population of people who spend a lot of time on the internet or the population of people who show signs of depression (or both), while other two statements do.
Slashdot Mirror
Problem Solved!
I tend to have FF open with several tabs (gmail, reverence pages, [...]
Um, I mean "reference pages", not "reverence pages", heh. There's a joke in that typo, I'm sure of it...
Ok, so that's one data point. The fact that you have not had issues with Flash does not mean that no one else does, or that those who do "just don't know how to setup and maintain a stable system"; to generalize from your experience and draw conclusions about everyone else who claims to have had a problem with Flash is quite the logical fallacy. In fact, I'll counter your anecdote with one of my own -- if you will tell me what I could do to better set up or maintain my system such that this problem goes away, I will gladly buy you a beer.
I use Firefox 3.6.8 on a MacBook as part of my job. I tend to have FF open with several tabs (gmail, reverence pages, test pages for the code I'm working on, etc). I don't close Firefox at the end of the day, as I'm going to open all those same tabs the next day, and although I have the SessionManager add-on installed, it is often unreliable; Firefox will usually run this way for days or weeks. Eventually, however, it will start hogging the CPU (running at ~60% or higher, sometimes all the way to 99.9%), regardless of what tabs are open. Or, it will start spiking up to complete UI lock (even showing the spinning rainbow ball cursor) on a very regular basis -- it may start at once per 5 minutes and last a quarter of a second, but it will eventually worsen to the point that FF is spending more time locked than running. In either case, the only thing that seems to work is to restart the browser. It took a while to determine, but the only correlation I can find with the speed at which these problems show up (and worsen) is the amount of time I let the browser sit on pages containing Flash. Now, unlike GGP, I don't necessarily blame Adobe -- it seems equally likely to me that Mozilla is at fault here. However, the fact remains that my browser gets less stable/functional the more it runs Flash.
So, would you please explain to me how the problem I've described is my fault, rather than Mozilla's or Adobe's? Blocking Flash is not an option, and telling me I should just restart the browser frequently is like a Windows 95 user saying their system is perfectly stable as long as they reboot once or twice a day -- my usage pattern is not the problem, it merely reveals a problem in FF and/or the Flash add-on.
I haven't tried them out yet, but some of the games on this page look rather nice: http://springrts.com/wiki/Games
If "non-deterministic polynomial time" is an actual "algorithmic complexity class' [...]
Was that tongue-in-cheek? Those terms are pretty standard for the topic, at least in American English. Either you don't know much about complexity theory, they used different terms in the language/region/era you learned about it and you weren't able to see the connection to these phrases, or that was a superb troll. Here's a link to the Millennium Prize description of the problem (pdf link). The first sentence of that document (emphasis mine) is:
The P versus NP problem is to determine whether every language accepted by some nondeterministic algorithm in polynomial time is also accepted by some (deterministic) algorithm in polynomial time.
The "reason" here may amount simply to the fact that the `suspect' had the city involved in the attack on his mind for whatever reason.
Are you responding to the scenario I gave? How would saying "The man in this picture helped commit a terrorist act." while showing a picture of the one apprehended man be vulnerable to anything like what you are describing?
Once a witch-hunt is under way, we can't expect evidence to be evaluated rationally.
Sure -- I was talking about how it could be used (clarifying what was meant by "knew in advance", since so many people seem to be misinterpreting that phrase), while you're talking about how you expect it would be (ab)used. They are two totally different beasts.
It sure seems that if they knew the specifics in advance, they could eschew the whole mindreading thing and just get on with stopping the attack. But maybe that's just me.
In cases where they know the specifics in advance, they mean in advance of the questioning, not in advance of the crime. (This isn't the Minority Report sort of situation so many are making it out to be.) In such a case, it would be about confirming that a suspect knows something the public doesn't -- not confirming the info. Consider this scenario:
A terrorist attack is carried out, and one of those responsible is caught (we'll call this person "John Doe"). John's name and picture are withheld from the media. The FBI determines there were 3 to 4 more involved in carrying out the attack, based on witness reports. John proves unwilling to rat them out for anything. The FBI comes up with a list of 20 possible suspects, based on conflicting witness descriptions and people John is known to meet with regularly -- certainly not enough to convict anyone, or even hold them longer than 24 hours without further evidence. If, during that 24 hours, no further evidence comes up, they'll have to let those people go, and anyone guilty is likely to try to flee the country or go into hiding. The FBI knows John was involved in the attack, but the public doesn't. If they can hook the suspects up to the machine and determine who already knew that John was involved (i.e. use the machine to find who has "guilty knowledge" of specifics the FBI already knew in advance), they'll at least have reason to keep those people detained for longer than 24 hours while they search for evidence -- and it also lets them narrow their search for evidence from 20 people to i.e. 3 people to check extremely thoroughly and 17 people to check more casually.
You're the second to whom I will now reply Apple doesn't sell a product with a built in ADSL2 modem, which incidentally makes your lovely product recommendation completely off topic.
In all fairness, for those of us not familiar with the Aussie broadband market, there was virtually no way to know that only ADSL modem-routers are under discussion, at least from reading the summary. It asks:
Ever wondered why you can't find the perfect 802.11n router?
It then lists off a handful of features, conspicuously missing the "is also an ADSL modem" feature. My assumption based on the summary was that previously, knowing the Aussie ISP(s?) would subsidize large numbers of modem-routers provided a virtually guaranteed market, and so it was less risky for router manufacturers to invest in R&D for modem-routers (which would then allow them to cheaply cross over into the normal router market simply by removing the ADSL modem functionality). Nothing in the summary contradicts this; in fact, except for the parenthetical, it is a paraphrase of the 3rd sentence of the summary, the only one which mentions ADSL modem-routers.
In short, these comments are not off-topic to the summary. The fact that they are presumably off-topic to the article is largely the fault of the summary, not the comment poster, unless you want to blame them for not RTFA (good luck with that, by the way!).
"Sports teach leadership and teamwork,"
Thats a myth. There can only be one leader in a team and most kids just want to play and have fun anyway, they're not interested in having an outdoors team building workshop with balls despite what some team coaches seem to think. When I was at school there was nothing worse than having some teacher take the sports too seriously as it just spoiled the fun. In the end I got sick of team sports altogether because of the borderline psychotic behaviour of some of the sports staff.
You are half right. The link between sports participation and leadership skills has been shown generally to be a myth, however there have been links between sports participation and teamwork. For a citation, look at page 224 of this pdf from the Journal of Leadership Education.
Additionally, I call [citation needed] on your reasoning for why sports do not build leadership. Maybe there can only be one leader in a team for most sports, but I would argue this is not a universal truth -- you could easily play a modified game of capture the flag where there are still 2 teams, but participants are broken up into "squads" of 3, with each squad having its own leader. Furthermore, if you choose sports with relatively small teams and then rotate leaders, everyone will get a decent exposure to being in the leadership role. You create a false dichotomy between "just playing and having fun" on the one side versus "having an outdoors team building workshop with balls" on the other. The study I linked provides some interesting conjectures about the disconnect between the perception that sports builds leadership and the reality, and mostly what I got from it actually agrees with your last couple statements -- the problem could well be that sports staff don't know how to properly make the sports environment a valuable leadership- and teamwork- promoting experience, and thus focus on promoting athletics to the detriment of possible leadership and teamwork promotion.
But the numbers don't tell the full story. PETA says it doesn't have puppies and kittens for adoption because it is not an adoptive agency but a "shelter of last resort," taking in animals that other shelters reject because they are unadoptable and euthanizing those that are suffering. They refer adoptable animals to the nearby Virginia Beach Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
That means there is a strong bias that the animals taken to PETA are ones that are more likely to be unsuitable for adoption and more likely to be euthanized by any shelter that takes them. I grew up in West Virgina, where they routinely have extended deer hunting seasons because the deer are overpopulating (due to the fact that we've killed off almost all their natural predators in the area) to the point that they find themselves starving for lack of available food, and the common wisdom is that it's better to kill off some additional does than to have them stick around and keep breeding. Would it be more humane to let them (or their fawns, next year) starve to death? Some people might say it is, but many others would say it is not.
What is the solution you propose? That PETA start taking in over 2,000 animals a year and housing them for the rest of their (possibly suffering) lives because no one will adopt them? If they adopt that policy, I'll be PETA would wind up with more and more animals every year, reaching a steady population of at least 10,000 pets they'd be housing and caring for -- and that number is just at the PETA headquarters. Do you have any idea how expensive that would be, especially if you're trying to be "humane" about it and not keep them cooped up in cages 20 hours a day? Or do you advocate releasing them back out into the streets? I can't remember what you suggested... Oh, that's right, you didn't actually suggest what PETA should do instead, you just made an emotional appeal by comparing them to the Nazis.
[...] the kernel of the accusation about euthanizing pets seems to be true.
That depends on what you mean by the kernel -- I think the claim that they seek out opportunities to euthanize animals is the important part of his claim, and that is presumably false. You make the point that PETA euthanizes a lot of animals, and honestly I don't have a problem with that, nor do I think it is hypocritical. From your link:
But the numbers don't tell the full story. PETA says it doesn't have puppies and kittens for adoption because it is not an adoptive agency but a "shelter of last resort," taking in animals that other shelters reject because they are unadoptable and euthanizing those that are suffering. They refer adoptable animals to the nearby Virginia Beach Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Furthermore, although this claim is not made in the article, my understanding is that the supply of animals needing adoption greatly exceeds the demand for adoptable animals. Additionally, without evidence, I am not going to assume that a marketing campaign geared to increase adoptions would do much in the long haul -- it may redirect potential adopters from another shelter to PETA's, or it may convince someone to adopt now who wouldn't have adopted until later if left on their own, but in neither case are you significantly increasing the number of adoptions that take place within a long-term window. Taken a step further, if PETA were to have managed to adopt out an additional 100 of those cats and dogs that were brought in, I'm guessing that would have resulted in 100 less adoptions elsewhere. Maybe that's not entirely true -- perhaps it would have been 99 or 98. The real problem is not going to be fixed by promoting adoption, just like 99.9% of the time, giving a starving person a single meal doesn't significantly help them get themselves into a position where they won't be starving again a couple days later. I think PETA (or at least the person working for PETA who makes the decisions about which animals to euthanize) probably realized that 3 days into the job, if they didn't know it already.
So, until I'm presented convincing evidence otherwise, I'm going to assume that they're actually taking a practical, rather than ignorantly idealistic, perspective. You expect me to criticize that? PETA's biggest problem is being too blindly idealistic. And they're nothing like the animal-hating monsters GGP makes them out to be.
They also recommend that people mutilate their cats by ripping off the top joint of their toes (declawing) [...]
Wow, you're either trolling, or REALLY REALLY wrong. The bit about declawing seemed the easiest to fact-check, and sure enough I found the opposite is true. Since your credibility is blown, I'm going to assume the rest of your claims aren't worth the time to fact-check.
What's with the incredible FUD campaign against PETA? This isn't the first time I've seen false and/or willfully misleading info spread about PETA here on slashdot. Is it just a rare specimen of troll, or do people really believe this stuff? Or have people just taken to a "fight fire with fire" attitude in response to PETA's own misleading advertising?
I don't agree with them, but I never agree with intellectual dishonesty. If this is a fight fire with fire situation, shame on you. Sinking to their level will just discredit the anti-PETA movement, much like PETA's intellectual dishonesty discredits them. If you really did believe it, shame on you for being so stupidly gullible. If that post was a troll... bravo, well-played.
Noise on load? For me, you have to click the "Insert Coin" button before it makes any noise. Maybe you saw it earlier today and it's already been fixed.
"You should have seen their faces when they saw us in ninja gear coming towards them"
If they see you coming towards them, you've failed.
From the article:
They also failed to notice a ninja, Nathan Smith, standing in the shadows outside the dojo. Mr Smith immediately alerted his sensei, or teacher.
Ninja WIN.
Unless you're due to retired today and your pension just got blown out of the water.
Put it all under the mattress. Seriously.
Generally, it is recommended that as you approach retirement age, you start moving more and more of your retirement savings out of stocks and into bonds. (Bonds are much less volatile.)
Now [Obama]'s trying to piss-off our ally Israel by demanding they stop building in the Palestinian zone, else they'll lose American military assistance
Not trying to start an Israel/Palestine debate here, but you've got a blatantly one-sided perspective. The first 3 sentences of the wikipedia article on "International law and Israeli settlements":
The consensus view of the international community is that the building of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.[1][2][3][4] This view is largely based on UN Security council resolutions, including resolutions 446, 452, 465, 471 and 476 which find the settlements to be illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention.[5] The legal arm of the UN, the International Court of Justice, has found the settlements to be illegal under international law.[6]
So another perspective on the situation is that Obama is saying to Israel "Stop violating international law, or we'll stop giving you the free military equipment you're using to support your violations of said law." How do you manage to interpret that as "trying to piss-off our ally", and then use that to support the statement that Obama is hawkish? It would be just as accurate to say that telling Iran not to build nukes is merely trying to piss off our enemy, and that anyone who does so is a hawk.
In case it wasn't clear, my main point is not to say what is or is not a good course of action, it's to point out that your perspective is so far from objective that it borders on intellectual dishonesty.
I see it as a little like the idea of an uncanny valley for games. If it's fictional enough, we don't care about whether it accurately matches reality -- it's more of an abstract game with a veneer of reality over it (i.e. we don't care that a mushroom really shouldn't make someone double in height, because underneath we know the mushroom is just an arbitrary visual label for a certain abstract powerup). On the other hand, once it passes a certain threshold of realism such that the mechanics seem to be intended to resemble reality rather than being abstract and arbitrary, then the fact that it isn't totally realistic bothers us -- it's a game that resembles reality in many important ways, but which falls short of what we expect reality to allow in many other important ways.
Being able to move forward but not back doesn't really bother us in Super Mario Brothers, but not being able to retreat in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 seems like an extremely artificial restriction in the context of a (somewhat) realistic game. (Disclaimer, I've never played CoD:MW2, I'm just inferring from the summary.)
I'm unsure, but I'd be willing to wager that there is value in the exercise, though. I think part of the education process isn't just about learning material, but learning how to LEARN and good study habits.
While I agree with you to a certain extent, I think it can also be extremely counter-productive to force children to learn things for which they're not ready mentally. What proportion of children have acquired at least a strong distaste for math by the end of 6th grade? What proportion of children have already decided by then that they "just aren't good at math"? The parents can feed into this or even initiate that mindset -- what proportion of children will have been consoled by their parents that they need not worry about it, because "not everyone is good at math"?
I never experienced any of this -- I have always enjoyed math. On the other hand, I also saw students less gifted than myself become so discouraged by math that they loathed anything having too much to do with math. And can you blame them? Being forced to do something for years when you find it extremely frustrating can have many negative consequences; I'd be willing to wager that one year of such frustration, if it yielded the same resulting skill level at math, wouldn't have nearly the same level of deterrence.
So, to bring this back around to your statements -- if it turns out this researcher is correct, then isn't there something *else* we could find for them to study which would allow them to learn how to learn and how to study? Maybe something that their brains are prepared for, and thus which won't have the same level of inherent frustration for 90% of the students? We can teach them the math when they're ready for it, and when it is much more efficient to teach it to them.
"For example, if you get less nutrients growing up you likely aren't going to be as smart as someone else who does get enough nutrients."
Whoooo boy let me show you my medical history, then let me show you what I do for a living, and you'll be retracting that statement pretty rapidly, I will guarantee it.
So according to you, a single anecdote (which you claimed you could -- but didn't actually -- provide) disproves a general statement that includes the word "likely"? Granted, I wouldn't have phrased it as GP did, but I generally agree with what GP was trying to say.
How about this: "All else being equal, someone who gets less nutrients growing up almost certainly isn't going to be as smart as that same person would have been if they had had enough nutrients at crucial points in their development." If you think you're smart now with very poor nutrition when you were young, I simply posit that it is highly likely you would have been smarter had your nutrition been significantly better.
Eh, maybe a bare few, but I honestly don't buy that crap that "they hate us for our freedom". (There's some serious propaganda.) Even assuming there are some who hate us for our e.g. religious freedom, they won't exactly thinks those new oppressive/stupid laws are progress towards their goal.
Imagine if they can convince the United States government that part of its defense budget should go to increasing cyber security!
I believe they already did: Security-Enhanced Linux was developed primarily by the NSA (which is part of the DoD), and is now part of the mainline kernel.
I think that this explains why some of these same people confuse things like fantasy gaming with real devil worship.
What's wrong with "real" devil worship, anyway?
GP never said anything at all about his opinion of real devil worship -- GP simply stated that some people think that fantasy gaming is a form of real devil worship, and in the process implied that such a perspective is incorrect.
Do you think they're the same? (See what I did there?)
If you can think of a way to assert correlation such that causation is not a natural inference for most people, and without sounding awkward or explicitly denying the causation you expect people to infer, I would sincerely love to hear it.
Researchers have found a correlation between levels of depression and amount of time surfing the Internet. Their studies show that both depression and Internet usage increase and decrease proportionate to each other.
For one thing, you are pushing the bounds of sounding awkward, if you ask me. ;-) But more importantly, you are incorrect about what their studies showed. From TFA: "They ['internet addicts'] also had a higher incidence of moderate to severe depression than normal users." This does not say that those who were the most "internet addicted" were especially likely to be severely depressed, which is what your statement asserts. But even aside from that, it indicates very specifically what information they examined -- the population was "internet addicts", not "people who exhibit signs of depression". This is suggested by the original statement ("People who spend a lot of time surfing the internet are more likely to show signs of depression."), but was lost in your translation as you tried to make it sound more causation-neutral, and was actually reversed by bonniot's alternate phrasing. That's really the key here -- the difference between reporting what you have directly observed in your study, versus reporting the things you believe to be statistically true based on what you observed in your study. I already went into this in another comment in this thread, so I won't go into it again.
This whole discussion does a great job of illustrating how difficult it really is for scientists to publish what they observed in their studies without other people inferring incorrect things about how the study was performed, what it means, etc.
You could indeed conclude that -- but it would not be what you observed in your study. It is my opinion that as scientists, it is our job first to tell others what we have observed directly, and only secondarily to assert "therefore we can conclude X and Y due to Z". If you are not very careful to keep in mind what you have actually observed and what you have not, it becomes very easy to make an incorrect assumption without even realizing. It is a slippery slope when you start skipping over the details -- just like your elementary school math teacher told you, "you have to show your work". ;-)
In statement 1, you are asserting that within the population of people who spend a lot of time surfing the internet there are proportionally more people who exhibit signs of depression than within the population of people who do not spend a lot of time surfing the internet.
In statement 2, you are asserting that within the population of people who show signs of depression there are proportionally more people who spend a lot of time surfing the internet than within the population of people who do not show signs of depression.
Statistically these two statements may be equivalent (I think they are -- they both assert that the two conditions are correlated, and so each statement implies the other), but they are different in that they suggest what kind of data was used to justify the assertion. Merely saying "spending a lot of time on the internet and showing signs of depression are correlated" doesn't give any indication whether you were examining the population of people who spend a lot of time on the internet or the population of people who show signs of depression (or both), while other two statements do.