if you set lp to null, you cannot take the next element to it
That was the point. This GP's macro solution would have worked for the code given in GP's post, because FREE(lp) would set lp to null, and then trying to access the next element would have caused the program to crash from dereferencing a null pointer. Upon debugging, the author would have found the problem and fixed it.
That depends on who you talk to. Orthodox and (to a lesser extent) conservative Jews follow the "law of matrilineal descent", which means you can only be considered Jewish if your mother is considered Jewish. That's not entirely true for conservative Jews, but it's close. So there *is* a strong common heritage for Orthodox and conservative Jews, if you trace things back far enough. http://judaism.about.com/od/whoisajew/a/amijewish. htm
And of course, Judaism was originally centered on the Hebrew people, so I think you'll find a strong correlation between people who follow Judaism and people who have Hebrew heritage.
With all that said though, you're correct that I probably should have said "Israeli", since that was how the topic started; however, the post I was replying to said "Jews and Arabs", so I was merely continuing the mistake.
As for the difference between Jews and Arabs, there aren't many. As in none, genetically you can't tell them apart.
Can you back that up?
A peer poster mentioned this but didn't really put much force into it: if you remove the restriction of looking at a single gene only, then it becomes much easier to commit bio-genocide.
You need to sort them out based on a rather non-existent grouping... that is something only racists can do, not viruses. [...] There are certain genes which exist in varied frequency but none that are that isolated.
Imagine 80% of the population of a particular "non-existent grouping" has a particular gene, while 20% of the population outside of that population has the gene (I think that's being generous -- much more effectively discriminating genes could likely be found). Now imagine there are 10 of those. It would not be hard to believe that 1 in 3 of that "non-existent grouping" has at least 3 of the genes (assuming the "non-existent grouping" is not based purely on appearance, but also evidence of ancestry that ties the group together), while less than 1% of people outside the group has 3 or more of the genes. This is assuming the genes have independent distributions when considered either within the group or outside it; this would almost positively not be the case, but I'll assume that it probably doesn't hurt my case too much (though it may in the Jews/Arabs example, I admit).
So, can 10 genes like that be found, and can the virus be made to kill someone with several particular genes? If you could make a virus that targets the combination of 3 particular genes (again, assuming the genes have independent distribution within the group), then one virus like that could kill off a third of your group, while killing less than 1% of people outside the group. Make a second virus with a different 3, you kill off ~1% of the remaining outside population while killing of a third of what remains of the group. Do that with 2 more viruses and you've cut the group down to less than 20% of its original size, at the cost of 4% of the outside population.
Does anything in that scenario sound so implausible? Do those sound like numbers a hard-core racist would go for?
I think you, as most people, miss the biggest part of the that expression. It is not supposed to be an insult to teachers. It is saying that in order to teach someone else how to do something, you have to understand the difficulties in doing it. Could Mozart have taught someone how to play the piano? Perhaps, but if the student isn't a musical genius, I bet someone who had to struggle to learn to play would have an easier time teaching them. When something comes naturally to you, how do you understand what is going on when someone else is struggling to pick up the basics? Even if you can figure out how to communicate it to them, how do you know what sort of practice to recommend, if you never had to do it yourself? For an example many slashdotters can probably relate to, take someone with a natural talent for math -- how easily is someone who never needed a quarter the explanation given by most teachers going to sit down and go step-by-step through the reasoning with the one student who needs twice as much explanation as the rest of the class?
have never had a job where they were required to be productive and / or competitive
Maybe if teachers were offered a better salary, there would be more competition for the jobs. As it is, many very capable people avoid teaching because it's common knowledge that it pays crap. And maybe if teaching didn't involve working mostly with students who are motivated only to get a certain grade (as opposed to learning and exploring new ideas), it would be a more desirable job to have, regardless of salary. As someone who got through grad school working as a TA, I can tell you from experience that it is very discouraging to be faced with students who don't care what they learn, and don't even care if the class could be interesting, as long as they get their required credit without hurting their GPA too much. When 95% of the class has that attitude, it's very hard to stay motivated and productive as a teacher.
Or, taking the other responder's idea a little further, set it at some higher amount than $50k (maybe $100k) but instead of taxing 100% past that, you tax at 80% and prohibit tax credits or deductions from reducing your tax liability below 80% of your post $100k income? In other words, you add a new, fairly simple tax rule that tells you to calculate your income + social security + whatever taxes as you do now, and also calculate 80% of your income minus $100k. Your tax liability is the larger number.
Think $100k is too low? Fine, make it $500k. Both the percent and the starting point could be tweaked so that there is still some incentive to work more if you want to earn more, but overall yes we discourage people from making tons of money. You will be hard-pressed to convince me anyone "needs" to make more than $500k a year, and I do think that sort of thing should be deterred. Taxing it at 80% would have the twin advantages of deterring ridiculous incomes to a large extent and increasing government income where it's not deterred.
Just in case you are wondering, I think that such high incomes should be deterred for multiple reasons, but one of which is the opportunity benefit -- anyone or any company deterred from giving $2M of income to someone since they would only make $380k off it (using the $100k/80% rule) is still going to have that money to spend. Maybe they only give $1M to the person, and then $100k to 10 other people. Voila, we're not just cutting down the largest incomes, we're also encouraging many lower incomes to increase.
I've never heard of a grandmother, aunt, uncle, child, or otherwise require training to use the basic software that comes with windows.
I have. I've taught a "CS 101: Introduction to Computing" course a few times, and that's what that class is largely about. It's mostly populated with Business students, but generally has a scattering of others as well.
I had a student one semester -- a middle-aged woman -- who struggled with even the simplest tasks. A lot of it was UI issues. She often knew what she needed to do, and even more-or-less how to do it, but she just couldn't figure out the sequence of mouse clicks and drags necessary. She worked hard, practiced and studied like no one else in the class, and did decently well on the written tests -- but the lab exams gave her a ton of trouble (the lab exams were open-note, open-reference, even open-Google exams). She wrote down detailed notes for herself, and asked me for help during every lab, but invariably if there were any detail she failed to write down, she would have to struggle for 5-10 minutes during the exam to figure it out. She wasn't taking the class because she needed it, she was taking it *because* she had so much trouble with computers, and wanted to get better. She was motivated, but the UI just wasn't intuitive to her. She seemed to be of average intelligence, and her husband actually worked at IBM (which was part of her motivation to improve, actually).
Granted, I've never seen anyone else struggle with the Windows UI like she did, but I had others who lost points due to UI issues as often as from ignorance about what to do. Of course, I'm also not trying to say that I think she would have done significantly better with another UI -- I just don't know.
It's a bit awkward, but it's fine as far as I can tell. The only part about which I'm unsure is the way "as in" is used -- it is definitely understood informally, but it's possible it isn't strictly correct. Beyond that, I think it is correct.
I'm not sure if it was the +- notation you didn't understand, or whether you just didn't know that -3i is also a solution, but either way GP *was* correct.
Who are you to speak about "logical contortions" when you state that the two examples of successfully crashed jets have a "combined" age of 65 years ago. Um, and the four jets taken down in 9/11 were a "combined" 20 years ago. That's the most ridiculous twisting of math I've heard since someone showed me a "proof" of how 1 == 2.
It would have been more convincing if you'd given the average age, but this is laughable, especially when you mention "logical contortions".
I think you're missing the point. I agree that they didn't win (most of their votes) by offering anything (most swing voters saw as) constructive, but I don't think they won by attacking Republicans either. In fact, I think it is almost deceptive to say that the Democrats "won" their elections -- for the most part, Republicans lost those elections. In many cases, it wouldn't have mattered who was running against them or for the most part what they said -- the people didn't vote for the Democrats, they voted for "not the Republicans".
Of course, I'm sure this wasn't true in all the races. But I think the heavy Democratic gains in Congress can be mostly laid at the feet of the Republicans. It's like the difference between winning a game by playing well versus winning game because, mediocre though you played, the other team made repeated mistakes. With only two parties, a loss for the Republicans usually means a win for the Democrats, but looking at the political situation and recent news and events with a little common sense can tell you whether the Republicans lost because they were unpopular or the Democrats won because they built popularity. (In other words, although the election is zero-sum, the overall popularity of various politicians is not; therein lies the distinction I'm trying to make.)
How can you call trying to patch a critical OS vulnerability ASAP a poor plan? Similarly, how can you call waiting 2 months to do it "perfectly" a great plan?
I understand your point ("A poor plan aggressively executed is better than a great plan poorly executed."), but to claim that it is always true is ridiculous -- as is claiming that it is always false. There are times when being decisive and taking action with confidence (even if that chosen action is merely a mediocre plan) is more important than being wishy-washy and second-guessing everything you do, resulting in little or no action. But there are also times when the situation is delicate and complicated enough that the most obvious solutions would fail to achieve any of their goals, and forging ahead with anything but a very thoroughly considered plan will result in disaster. Perhaps you merely lack the requisite experience to realize there are times when subtlety is important?
So, you want CPUs designed to do many things in parallel, much the way modern GPUs do? Why does it need to be a GPU then (optimized for graphics functions)? We could have Serial Processing Units (SPUs) that are like today's CPUs, Parallel Processing Units (PPUs) that are like today's GPUs but more general-purpose, GPUs, and things in-between (like the AMD Fusion, which would presumably be somewhere in between all three of those). Then I would agree with you in a heartbeat; depending on the system needs, you could set up any combination of SPUs, PPUs, and/or GPUs -- that would be really cool.
I dunno, I kinda expected them to forcibly remove him. (And probably arrest him, but that still means they need to forcibly remove him.) They could try to carry him, or if he managed to keep that from working through active resistance (not just by going limp), if necessary maybe they could drag him out.
But regardless of what they were trying to accomplish, I don't see why using a taser would be expected to help the situation in any way, at least not after it didn't motivate him the first time. Did they really think the second time might convince him when the first didn't? What about the fifth time when the previous four didn't? It seems pretty clear to me from the number of repetitions that it was violent retaliation on the part of the officers. He was being passive aggressive toward them, sure, but as "peace officers" I think they have responsibility not to allow themselves to be provoked. After it became clear that shocking him wasn't going to get him to do what they said, they were only doing it because they were pissed off.
I'm sure most people understand the feeling -- you feel like you are doing your best to be reasonable, but the other person is doing everything they can to be uncooperative, belligerent, and downright aggravating. You get so frustrated that you really truly feel the urge to punch them, or tackle them, or somehow just do something violent to them, even though violence isn't called for in the situation. I know I've been there. I can imagine it would be very difficult in such circumstances to use non-violent force rather than violent force. Very, very difficult. But that doesn't make it acceptable. If anything, it is because that line can be so difficult not to cross that we should very strongly discipline any officer who uses violent force when there is evidence that non-violent force would have been reasonable.
It does not appear to have the capacity to tell the difference between an unarmed intruder and a heavily armed one, so defeating it is not hard: Approach it with some kind of heavier firepower, and while it talks, you blow it away.
I really doubt it is as simple as that. You just need multiple heuristics to trigger it to fire. As long as it has decent accuracy at a pretty good range, heavy armor, and short reaction time, what do you think about these rules?
When something that might be a threat (including any human) approaches to within X meters, initiate audible warnings.
If a possible threat remains within X meters for N seconds, begin firing.
If a possible threat approaches to within Y meters, begin firing immediately.
If necessary, you could also throw in another rule:
If something approaches to within X meters while traveling faster than Z km/hr, begin firing immediately.
This set of rules makes it unnecessary for it to distinguish between heavily armed and unarmed intruders, as long as the values of the variables are appropriate. There might be some holes in my logic, but even so I doubt it would be hard to add a couple rules that would make trying to walk up to it and "blow it away" a quick recipe for death.
With a small homogenous population that has a decent work ethic, socialism works fine. The problem is that there are immigrants who don't share the same values
It's not that those populations inherently have a decent work ethic and are thus able to make socialism work, nor does it have anything to do with the size or homogeneity of the population. It's just that societies without a system that stifles a sense of internal motivation produce people with a decent work ethic by default. On the other hand, immigrants who grew up with capitalism have learned to need outside motivation to be productive (read the link above) -- as you essentially state, they're the ones who lack the decent work ethic, not the ones native to socialism.
In other words, the problem is not that socialism doesn't give much outside motivation -- the problem is that capitalists tend to be lazy without outside motivation.
Imagine an analogous situation, where a parent gives their child candy whenever they finish their homework before supper, but of course doesn't allow their child candy under normal circumstances. As the research summarized in the above link suggests, the child becomes focussed on doing the homework as a means to an end -- a way to get candy. Then parent has to go on a business trip for a couple days, and asks a friend to watch the child, but forgets to mention the candy-homework deal. The first day, the child tests the boundaries, and asks for some candy; the friend gives the candy. So, the child doesn't do their homework, and merely pretends to work on it. Is the existence of this situation the fault of the friend for having given the candy without asking something in return, or is it the fault of the parent for teaching the child only to do homework for candy? Your post blames the friend, I blame the values taught by the parent.
it is statistically IMPOSSIBLE to have a 100% accurate vote, 100% of the time.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Seriously, if there is a greater-than-zero chance of having an accurate vote any given election, and we're discussing a finite number of elections, then you're just plain incorrect -- there will be a greater-than-zero chance of them all being accurate. On the other hand, if we're discussing an infinite number of elections, then the chance that any given particular percentage will correspond to the proportion of accurate votes is zero no matter what percentage you choose -- that's basic integral calculus at work; in this latter case, your statement would be vacuously true (in other words, it is a meaningless truth).
If the errors are random then it doesn't matter how many votes there are, the expected error is the same. Statistical variance affects the actual error.
But the more votes there are, the greater the chance that random errors would cancel themselves out, especially in a situation where the actual votes are evenly split. The situation partly depends on what kind of errors you're talking about (deleting a vote vs. recording a vote incorrectly), but I think GP is correct for most reasonable definitions of of random errors. The terminology may or may not be correct, but the idea is.
Do you mean to say that Cuba is only economically depressed because Americans can't buy Cuban cigars directly?
Do you mean to say that an economic blockade by the US has no economic effect on Cuba? Guess what, it's not one extreme or the other, but somewhere in the middle. Welcome to reality.
What do you think would happen to the economy of the United States if China stopped trading with us? What about if they refused to trade with any country that traded with the US? What if there weren't many politically/economically/militarily powerful countries willing to stand up for us and tell China to fsck off? You can't discount the effect of international trade (or the lack thereof) on a modern economy.
Sounds like you didn't do the math.;) Given the choice, if you could save 300,000+ soldiers by dropping two bombs, would you do it?
Not if I could do it by dropping one bomb, especially if I thought I could always drop the second later if it proved necessary.
Let me point out that in my previous comment, I never questioned whether dropping nukes was better than an invasion of Japan. I did the math, and I never questioned it -- there is no need to debate that point with me. I questioned whether dropping two nukes is justifiable compared to the option of dropping one.
You and another poster gave some good reasons for dropping two. However, I must say I am not yet convinced that one nuke could not have done the job, or more accurately that one nuke would have been so significantly less likely to succeed (as you did convince me that it would have been less likely to at least some extent) that dropping two was clearly justified. I do understand cost-benefit analysis (I say this because you seem to assume I don't). You and the other poster have given some justification for dropping two, but not enough to convince me that the difference in benefit between destroying one city and destroying two cities was worth the difference in cost between destroying one city and destroying two cities. Besides, would it not have been possible to drop one, and then drop the second if they did not surrender within a certain timeframe? Yes, I'm sure it would have been much harder to get the second nuke through, and maybe required the sacrifice of several escort planes, but (if we could have done it and if it would have worked to force a surrender) that hardly balances out against the possibility of only having to destroy one city instead of two.
Maybe you can convince me that the reduction in probability of getting a surrender from only one nuke would have been so great that it was not worth consideration. Maybe you can also convince me that the second attack could not have gotten through if we waited for their response before dropping the second. But, if it is reasonable to assume that one nuke would have worked, or that we could have dropped the second one later and that that would have worked to get a surrender, then I think the loss of a few escort planes (or for that matter, even the lost of 10, 15, or hell even 20 escorts if necessary) do not balance out against the destruction of an additional city. That's what I meant what I asked "So the end justifies *any* means?" -- we avoided invasion, and that's good, but could we have done so with less cost of Japanese lives (i.e. could we have done so by destroying only one city)?
Furthermore, the first point I brought up in my previous comment was intended to question the validity of the "ends" that supposedly justify the "means" dropping of both nukes. Specifically, you said (and even stressed) that part of the point was so we could achieve unconditional surrender. I questioned whether unconditional surrender was a necessary end, and you seem to have conceded that it was not. So, with that in mind, we can re-evaluate all the questions I asked above. Even if one nuke would not have been enough to get unconditional surrender, isn't it possible it would it have been enough for us to get an acceptable conditional surrender? There is historical evidence which suggests that the Japanese might have been willing to surrender even before we dropped the nukes if we had conceded as conditions of their surrender that we would have allowed them to keep their emperor and that we would not have tried him as a war criminal. (Furthermore, there is evidence the US knew this.) Even if this turned out not to be true, I think consideration of conditional surrender would have greatly increased the probability that a single nuke would have sufficed. At the very least we could have made those concessions part of our original offer, rather than demanding an uncondi
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if you set lp to null, you cannot take the next element to it
That was the point. This GP's macro solution would have worked for the code given in GP's post, because FREE(lp) would set lp to null, and then trying to access the next element would have caused the program to crash from dereferencing a null pointer. Upon debugging, the author would have found the problem and fixed it.
That depends on who you talk to. Orthodox and (to a lesser extent) conservative Jews follow the "law of matrilineal descent", which means you can only be considered Jewish if your mother is considered Jewish. That's not entirely true for conservative Jews, but it's close. So there *is* a strong common heritage for Orthodox and conservative Jews, if you trace things back far enough. http://judaism.about.com/od/whoisajew/a/amijewish. htm
And of course, Judaism was originally centered on the Hebrew people, so I think you'll find a strong correlation between people who follow Judaism and people who have Hebrew heritage.
With all that said though, you're correct that I probably should have said "Israeli", since that was how the topic started; however, the post I was replying to said "Jews and Arabs", so I was merely continuing the mistake.
As for the difference between Jews and Arabs, there aren't many. As in none, genetically you can't tell them apart.
Can you back that up?
A peer poster mentioned this but didn't really put much force into it: if you remove the restriction of looking at a single gene only, then it becomes much easier to commit bio-genocide.
You need to sort them out based on a rather non-existent grouping... that is something only racists can do, not viruses. [...] There are certain genes which exist in varied frequency but none that are that isolated.
Imagine 80% of the population of a particular "non-existent grouping" has a particular gene, while 20% of the population outside of that population has the gene (I think that's being generous -- much more effectively discriminating genes could likely be found). Now imagine there are 10 of those. It would not be hard to believe that 1 in 3 of that "non-existent grouping" has at least 3 of the genes (assuming the "non-existent grouping" is not based purely on appearance, but also evidence of ancestry that ties the group together), while less than 1% of people outside the group has 3 or more of the genes. This is assuming the genes have independent distributions when considered either within the group or outside it; this would almost positively not be the case, but I'll assume that it probably doesn't hurt my case too much (though it may in the Jews/Arabs example, I admit).
So, can 10 genes like that be found, and can the virus be made to kill someone with several particular genes? If you could make a virus that targets the combination of 3 particular genes (again, assuming the genes have independent distribution within the group), then one virus like that could kill off a third of your group, while killing less than 1% of people outside the group. Make a second virus with a different 3, you kill off ~1% of the remaining outside population while killing of a third of what remains of the group. Do that with 2 more viruses and you've cut the group down to less than 20% of its original size, at the cost of 4% of the outside population.
Does anything in that scenario sound so implausible? Do those sound like numbers a hard-core racist would go for?
Those who can, do, those who can't, teach.
I think you, as most people, miss the biggest part of the that expression. It is not supposed to be an insult to teachers. It is saying that in order to teach someone else how to do something, you have to understand the difficulties in doing it. Could Mozart have taught someone how to play the piano? Perhaps, but if the student isn't a musical genius, I bet someone who had to struggle to learn to play would have an easier time teaching them. When something comes naturally to you, how do you understand what is going on when someone else is struggling to pick up the basics? Even if you can figure out how to communicate it to them, how do you know what sort of practice to recommend, if you never had to do it yourself? For an example many slashdotters can probably relate to, take someone with a natural talent for math -- how easily is someone who never needed a quarter the explanation given by most teachers going to sit down and go step-by-step through the reasoning with the one student who needs twice as much explanation as the rest of the class?
have never had a job where they were required to be productive and / or competitive
Maybe if teachers were offered a better salary, there would be more competition for the jobs. As it is, many very capable people avoid teaching because it's common knowledge that it pays crap. And maybe if teaching didn't involve working mostly with students who are motivated only to get a certain grade (as opposed to learning and exploring new ideas), it would be a more desirable job to have, regardless of salary. As someone who got through grad school working as a TA, I can tell you from experience that it is very discouraging to be faced with students who don't care what they learn, and don't even care if the class could be interesting, as long as they get their required credit without hurting their GPA too much. When 95% of the class has that attitude, it's very hard to stay motivated and productive as a teacher.
Or, taking the other responder's idea a little further, set it at some higher amount than $50k (maybe $100k) but instead of taxing 100% past that, you tax at 80% and prohibit tax credits or deductions from reducing your tax liability below 80% of your post $100k income? In other words, you add a new, fairly simple tax rule that tells you to calculate your income + social security + whatever taxes as you do now, and also calculate 80% of your income minus $100k. Your tax liability is the larger number.
Think $100k is too low? Fine, make it $500k. Both the percent and the starting point could be tweaked so that there is still some incentive to work more if you want to earn more, but overall yes we discourage people from making tons of money. You will be hard-pressed to convince me anyone "needs" to make more than $500k a year, and I do think that sort of thing should be deterred. Taxing it at 80% would have the twin advantages of deterring ridiculous incomes to a large extent and increasing government income where it's not deterred.
Just in case you are wondering, I think that such high incomes should be deterred for multiple reasons, but one of which is the opportunity benefit -- anyone or any company deterred from giving $2M of income to someone since they would only make $380k off it (using the $100k/80% rule) is still going to have that money to spend. Maybe they only give $1M to the person, and then $100k to 10 other people. Voila, we're not just cutting down the largest incomes, we're also encouraging many lower incomes to increase.
I had a student one semester -- a middle-aged woman -- who struggled with even the simplest tasks. A lot of it was UI issues. She often knew what she needed to do, and even more-or-less how to do it, but she just couldn't figure out the sequence of mouse clicks and drags necessary. She worked hard, practiced and studied like no one else in the class, and did decently well on the written tests -- but the lab exams gave her a ton of trouble (the lab exams were open-note, open-reference, even open-Google exams). She wrote down detailed notes for herself, and asked me for help during every lab, but invariably if there were any detail she failed to write down, she would have to struggle for 5-10 minutes during the exam to figure it out. She wasn't taking the class because she needed it, she was taking it *because* she had so much trouble with computers, and wanted to get better. She was motivated, but the UI just wasn't intuitive to her. She seemed to be of average intelligence, and her husband actually worked at IBM (which was part of her motivation to improve, actually).
Granted, I've never seen anyone else struggle with the Windows UI like she did, but I had others who lost points due to UI issues as often as from ignorance about what to do. Of course, I'm also not trying to say that I think she would have done significantly better with another UI -- I just don't know.
It's a bit awkward, but it's fine as far as I can tell. The only part about which I'm unsure is the way "as in" is used -- it is definitely understood informally, but it's possible it isn't strictly correct. Beyond that, I think it is correct.
No, GP was right. (-9)^(1/2) == +-3i. In other words, both 3i and -3i are solutions. If you don't believe me, it's easy to check:
(3i)^2 == 3*3*i*i == -9
(-3i)^2 == (-3)*(-3)*i*i == -9
I'm not sure if it was the +- notation you didn't understand, or whether you just didn't know that -3i is also a solution, but either way GP *was* correct.
Who are you to speak about "logical contortions" when you state that the two examples of successfully crashed jets have a "combined" age of 65 years ago. Um, and the four jets taken down in 9/11 were a "combined" 20 years ago. That's the most ridiculous twisting of math I've heard since someone showed me a "proof" of how 1 == 2.
It would have been more convincing if you'd given the average age, but this is laughable, especially when you mention "logical contortions".
You don't have what it takes to be a good troll.
I think you're missing the point. I agree that they didn't win (most of their votes) by offering anything (most swing voters saw as) constructive, but I don't think they won by attacking Republicans either. In fact, I think it is almost deceptive to say that the Democrats "won" their elections -- for the most part, Republicans lost those elections. In many cases, it wouldn't have mattered who was running against them or for the most part what they said -- the people didn't vote for the Democrats, they voted for "not the Republicans".
Of course, I'm sure this wasn't true in all the races. But I think the heavy Democratic gains in Congress can be mostly laid at the feet of the Republicans. It's like the difference between winning a game by playing well versus winning game because, mediocre though you played, the other team made repeated mistakes. With only two parties, a loss for the Republicans usually means a win for the Democrats, but looking at the political situation and recent news and events with a little common sense can tell you whether the Republicans lost because they were unpopular or the Democrats won because they built popularity. (In other words, although the election is zero-sum, the overall popularity of various politicians is not; therein lies the distinction I'm trying to make.)
BadAnalogyGuy, is that you?
How can you call trying to patch a critical OS vulnerability ASAP a poor plan? Similarly, how can you call waiting 2 months to do it "perfectly" a great plan?
I understand your point ("A poor plan aggressively executed is better than a great plan poorly executed."), but to claim that it is always true is ridiculous -- as is claiming that it is always false. There are times when being decisive and taking action with confidence (even if that chosen action is merely a mediocre plan) is more important than being wishy-washy and second-guessing everything you do, resulting in little or no action. But there are also times when the situation is delicate and complicated enough that the most obvious solutions would fail to achieve any of their goals, and forging ahead with anything but a very thoroughly considered plan will result in disaster. Perhaps you merely lack the requisite experience to realize there are times when subtlety is important?
So, you want CPUs designed to do many things in parallel, much the way modern GPUs do? Why does it need to be a GPU then (optimized for graphics functions)? We could have Serial Processing Units (SPUs) that are like today's CPUs, Parallel Processing Units (PPUs) that are like today's GPUs but more general-purpose, GPUs, and things in-between (like the AMD Fusion, which would presumably be somewhere in between all three of those). Then I would agree with you in a heartbeat; depending on the system needs, you could set up any combination of SPUs, PPUs, and/or GPUs -- that would be really cool.
I dunno, I kinda expected them to forcibly remove him. (And probably arrest him, but that still means they need to forcibly remove him.) They could try to carry him, or if he managed to keep that from working through active resistance (not just by going limp), if necessary maybe they could drag him out.
But regardless of what they were trying to accomplish, I don't see why using a taser would be expected to help the situation in any way, at least not after it didn't motivate him the first time. Did they really think the second time might convince him when the first didn't? What about the fifth time when the previous four didn't? It seems pretty clear to me from the number of repetitions that it was violent retaliation on the part of the officers. He was being passive aggressive toward them, sure, but as "peace officers" I think they have responsibility not to allow themselves to be provoked. After it became clear that shocking him wasn't going to get him to do what they said, they were only doing it because they were pissed off.
I'm sure most people understand the feeling -- you feel like you are doing your best to be reasonable, but the other person is doing everything they can to be uncooperative, belligerent, and downright aggravating. You get so frustrated that you really truly feel the urge to punch them, or tackle them, or somehow just do something violent to them, even though violence isn't called for in the situation. I know I've been there. I can imagine it would be very difficult in such circumstances to use non-violent force rather than violent force. Very, very difficult. But that doesn't make it acceptable. If anything, it is because that line can be so difficult not to cross that we should very strongly discipline any officer who uses violent force when there is evidence that non-violent force would have been reasonable.
Oops, never mind -- the threading confused me. I was looking at a different post.
FYI, GP didn't use any acronyms.
Write on! Eye yous FF2 all so, sew Eye no Eye will knot get my spelling wrong!
I, for one, welcome our new nova-surviving overlords.
I really doubt it is as simple as that. You just need multiple heuristics to trigger it to fire. As long as it has decent accuracy at a pretty good range, heavy armor, and short reaction time, what do you think about these rules?
- When something that might be a threat (including any human) approaches to within X meters, initiate audible warnings.
- If a possible threat remains within X meters for N seconds, begin firing.
- If a possible threat approaches to within Y meters, begin firing immediately.
If necessary, you could also throw in another rule:- If something approaches to within X meters while traveling faster than Z km/hr, begin firing immediately.
This set of rules makes it unnecessary for it to distinguish between heavily armed and unarmed intruders, as long as the values of the variables are appropriate. There might be some holes in my logic, but even so I doubt it would be hard to add a couple rules that would make trying to walk up to it and "blow it away" a quick recipe for death.the fact that socialism encourages laziness because there is little outside motivation.
Really? I was under the distinct impression that outside motivation often leads to laziness, corner-cutting, and generally reduced performance. You actually hit on a couple very important points in those few sentences, but you got your interpretation backwards.
With a small homogenous population that has a decent work ethic, socialism works fine. The problem is that there are immigrants who don't share the same values
It's not that those populations inherently have a decent work ethic and are thus able to make socialism work, nor does it have anything to do with the size or homogeneity of the population. It's just that societies without a system that stifles a sense of internal motivation produce people with a decent work ethic by default. On the other hand, immigrants who grew up with capitalism have learned to need outside motivation to be productive (read the link above) -- as you essentially state, they're the ones who lack the decent work ethic, not the ones native to socialism.
In other words, the problem is not that socialism doesn't give much outside motivation -- the problem is that capitalists tend to be lazy without outside motivation.
Imagine an analogous situation, where a parent gives their child candy whenever they finish their homework before supper, but of course doesn't allow their child candy under normal circumstances. As the research summarized in the above link suggests, the child becomes focussed on doing the homework as a means to an end -- a way to get candy. Then parent has to go on a business trip for a couple days, and asks a friend to watch the child, but forgets to mention the candy-homework deal. The first day, the child tests the boundaries, and asks for some candy; the friend gives the candy. So, the child doesn't do their homework, and merely pretends to work on it. Is the existence of this situation the fault of the friend for having given the candy without asking something in return, or is it the fault of the parent for teaching the child only to do homework for candy? Your post blames the friend, I blame the values taught by the parent.
it is statistically IMPOSSIBLE to have a 100% accurate vote, 100% of the time.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Seriously, if there is a greater-than-zero chance of having an accurate vote any given election, and we're discussing a finite number of elections, then you're just plain incorrect -- there will be a greater-than-zero chance of them all being accurate. On the other hand, if we're discussing an infinite number of elections, then the chance that any given particular percentage will correspond to the proportion of accurate votes is zero no matter what percentage you choose -- that's basic integral calculus at work; in this latter case, your statement would be vacuously true (in other words, it is a meaningless truth).
If the errors are random then it doesn't matter how many votes there are, the expected error is the same. Statistical variance affects the actual error.
But the more votes there are, the greater the chance that random errors would cancel themselves out, especially in a situation where the actual votes are evenly split. The situation partly depends on what kind of errors you're talking about (deleting a vote vs. recording a vote incorrectly), but I think GP is correct for most reasonable definitions of of random errors. The terminology may or may not be correct, but the idea is.
Nice troll. I'll feed it.
Do you mean to say that Cuba is only economically depressed because Americans can't buy Cuban cigars directly?
Do you mean to say that an economic blockade by the US has no economic effect on Cuba? Guess what, it's not one extreme or the other, but somewhere in the middle. Welcome to reality.
What do you think would happen to the economy of the United States if China stopped trading with us? What about if they refused to trade with any country that traded with the US? What if there weren't many politically/economically/militarily powerful countries willing to stand up for us and tell China to fsck off? You can't discount the effect of international trade (or the lack thereof) on a modern economy.
Ever heard of a sewer trap? ;-)
if you don't adapt to the market you have no chance to survive.
Make your time.
So the end justifies *any* means?
;) Given the choice, if you could save 300,000+ soldiers by dropping two bombs, would you do it?
Sounds like you didn't do the math.
Not if I could do it by dropping one bomb, especially if I thought I could always drop the second later if it proved necessary.
Let me point out that in my previous comment, I never questioned whether dropping nukes was better than an invasion of Japan. I did the math, and I never questioned it -- there is no need to debate that point with me. I questioned whether dropping two nukes is justifiable compared to the option of dropping one.
You and another poster gave some good reasons for dropping two. However, I must say I am not yet convinced that one nuke could not have done the job, or more accurately that one nuke would have been so significantly less likely to succeed (as you did convince me that it would have been less likely to at least some extent) that dropping two was clearly justified. I do understand cost-benefit analysis (I say this because you seem to assume I don't). You and the other poster have given some justification for dropping two, but not enough to convince me that the difference in benefit between destroying one city and destroying two cities was worth the difference in cost between destroying one city and destroying two cities. Besides, would it not have been possible to drop one, and then drop the second if they did not surrender within a certain timeframe? Yes, I'm sure it would have been much harder to get the second nuke through, and maybe required the sacrifice of several escort planes, but (if we could have done it and if it would have worked to force a surrender) that hardly balances out against the possibility of only having to destroy one city instead of two.
Maybe you can convince me that the reduction in probability of getting a surrender from only one nuke would have been so great that it was not worth consideration. Maybe you can also convince me that the second attack could not have gotten through if we waited for their response before dropping the second. But, if it is reasonable to assume that one nuke would have worked, or that we could have dropped the second one later and that that would have worked to get a surrender, then I think the loss of a few escort planes (or for that matter, even the lost of 10, 15, or hell even 20 escorts if necessary) do not balance out against the destruction of an additional city. That's what I meant what I asked "So the end justifies *any* means?" -- we avoided invasion, and that's good, but could we have done so with less cost of Japanese lives (i.e. could we have done so by destroying only one city)?
Furthermore, the first point I brought up in my previous comment was intended to question the validity of the "ends" that supposedly justify the "means" dropping of both nukes. Specifically, you said (and even stressed) that part of the point was so we could achieve unconditional surrender. I questioned whether unconditional surrender was a necessary end, and you seem to have conceded that it was not. So, with that in mind, we can re-evaluate all the questions I asked above. Even if one nuke would not have been enough to get unconditional surrender, isn't it possible it would it have been enough for us to get an acceptable conditional surrender? There is historical evidence which suggests that the Japanese might have been willing to surrender even before we dropped the nukes if we had conceded as conditions of their surrender that we would have allowed them to keep their emperor and that we would not have tried him as a war criminal. (Furthermore, there is evidence the US knew this.) Even if this turned out not to be true, I think consideration of conditional surrender would have greatly increased the probability that a single nuke would have sufficed. At the very least we could have made those concessions part of our original offer, rather than demanding an uncondi