Yeah, this is a clear management/stockholder conflict. The stockholders are definitely going to want to be bought out for that kind of money. There's no way current management can generate that much stockholder value to make rejecting the buyout be better. As a shareholder in Yahoo! (well, giving my S&P 500 index fund holdings, I effectively own $84 of yahoo stock, since yahoo makes up.31% of the S&P), I have to condemn this choice.
Wait, since I also own $527 of microsoft stock through the index, maybe that's not such a good idea...
I think the point you responded to is stronger than you give it credit for. My reasons are below.
Theists do better in society, so that's what he should remind people of, "survival of the fittest". Dawkins should promote theism, as those who embrace God are the fittest to survive in our society, due to social stigmatism on atheists. You are using the classic "religion is useful" argument. But just because it may be useful, doesn't mean it is true. What Dawkins is interested (as he has stated repeatedly) in is truth, not potentially locally convenient psychology. But isn't scientific truth equivalent to that which is useful in making predictions (or more rigorously, constraining our probability curve for anticipating observations)?
Let's say group A claims to genuinely understand evolutionary biology, and has applied rational methods in finding these truths. They have unraveled almost all of the mysteries, know exactly what makes everything tick.
Let's say group B espouses very bizarre beliefs, obtains through demonstrably non-rational methods.
Let's further say that group B's gene frequency increases much faster than A's.
Hasn't group B demonstrated a better theory, given that adhering to the implied life rules of their belief set, exploits the rules of natural world much better (and therefore better predicts the natural world) than group A's?
Once you know your answer, let me say that this actually is the case: group A is evolutionary biologists, and group B is Christian fundamentalists.
If beliefs are judged by their *practical implications*, it looks like the fundies have the scientists beat. The best you can say is, "Well, you don't really need to posit all that 6,000 year-old-earth crap." (but then, would they go out and be fruitful and multiply...?)
At risk of sounding like a troll, the only "impact" I see films like The Ten Commandments having is making America that much more Christian fundamentalist and rejecting the culture of science that generates good sci-fi.
bankers: "You better use a secure OS, or you'll be liable for any fraudulent transactions with your account." customers: "Okay. What if we use Firefox on Linux?" bankers: "That'll work." customers: "Hey, we can't access your site using Firefox!" bankers: [British equivalent of "hah! Sucks to be you!"]
Sorry, as libertarian as I mean, stuff like this just sounds like rationalizing. Cheap credit made people overspend on homes?
"Hey, the home's listed at $450,000, but it's okay to buy it at $500,000 and strain our budget. Because house prices will KEEP GOING UP!!!!!" "Wait, they'll only give us a mortgage at 5.6% instead of 5.4%." "Oh, well forget that."
Agree 100%. I would add that: The problem is not shaving or talking or tending to kids or holding a cell phone. The problem is people who just don't give a damn about proper safety, and no prohibition of any list of "unsafe activities while driving" is going to change that. If someone is using a cell phone in such a way that leads to them crashing into somebody, it's because they don't give proper care to their driving, NOT that they were talking on a phone, which was incidental. If they weren't talking on a phone, they would be irresponsibly diverting their attention in some other way.
If you're adequately providing attention to the road, you can properly discern when is and isn't an okay time to talk to someone with you or over a cell phone or tell the kids to shut up. To claim that talking on a cell phone while on an empty, straight road with no intersections for miles, is somehow as unsafe to others as drunk driving, is ridiculous.
Overstate? I think it's a bit harsh and premature to claim that he's *over*stating the link between piracy and terrorism. I mean, Mukasey's a good guy, really does his homework. You think he's overstating what his evidence can justify? Really? Okay then, see if you can "explain away" the time they caught an IRA (Irish Republican Army) guy selling disks loaded with illegal copies of Windows at a flea market in Belfast in '86?
Yeah. I think it's time to "think different" about trivializing the connection between software piracy and 9/11.
The role of the government and the military is to serve and protect us as the people who pay for them both. The role of these bodies is not to try and manipulate my judgement in their favour.
Just like how my role is to walk through a forest, not to repeatedly fall and catch myself with alternating feet while I gradually move through an area with a concentration of trees?
Propoganda may indeed help them to serve and protect the people who pay for them. If the military can do the job better and cheaper with propoganda than with a pocket full of shells, why not?
For the sake of all native English speakers, and anyone trying to learn English, could we PLEASE all agree to abandon the adjective/adverb distinction? I'm usually a stickler for using them correctly, but I'd much rather we all shift to declaring adjectives "equally usable as adverbs". Er, I mean, "equal usable as adverbs".
Another thing that might be revolutionary about it is how it could shed light on how Spider-man's webs don't tear out chunks from his wrists because of the high, concentrated load:-/ Density gradient there too?
Finally, of course there is nothing stopping the development of additional nuclear plants in America today. Conservative proposals to spend billions in assisting the construction of these plants or putting the federal government on the hook for insuring these plants seems a poor investment of our money that would be better served exploring renewable alternatives.
Looks like rationalizing, to be honest. The government is "on the hook" for insuring (that's with an i, as in "providing funds in the case of failure) accidents that just won't happen, and even if they did happen, no court would rationally and proportionally assess damages. You can insure "$1 trillion". You cannot insure "how much you got?", which is what nuclear accident lawsuit damage awards amount to.
In buying a car, you don't expect people to insure unlimited damage, why a nuclear plant? And why would I buy an insurance policy that covers $300,000 if simply getting it, causes me to be $300,000 *more* liable?
Nuclear power obviates most of environmentalists claimed justifications, so they have to work overtime to say why we can't do it. In fact, as I've noted before, a federal lab has the details worked for "nuclear powered octane". That is, take water, atomspheric CO2, and energy from nuclear reactions, and store the energy in gasoline (basically equivalent to reversing combustion, though not necessarily through that process). THen, with no infrastructrual changes, cars are carbon-neutral.
Great solution!
But it doesn't get us what we want, which is SUVs "off the road" (er, or not emitting net CO2...) so they have to find another way to bury social policy in environmental reasons.
Okay, first of all, I made many significant contributions to discussions beyond criticizing Ubuntu. Let's not forget I had excellent karma for almost two straight years, and recovered it to excellent from terrible twice, even with the mod-stalking.
Nevertheless, I will apologize for everything wrong I committed, even though there's no guarantee people will go along with the lift on mod-stalking.
Oh, you're great at English. English *speakers* are just really bad at avoiding idioms and metaphors that require you to know a lot of related knowledge.
I run into the same problems often, despite being a native speaker! For example, the first time I saw the expression "arm's length transaction", I didn't know if it was metaphorically referring to transactions "up to" or "at least" arm's length apart ("at least" is correct).
So... yeah, I hate constructions like that, and try to avoid them in writing. You shouldn't have to spend ten years in my country to understand my posts!
Ah, so you're one of the immature brats who use the moderation system to satisfy your petty vendettas.
I owe an apology for only one thing: telling a harsh truth (that the design was poor enough to lock someone out of a computer despite major precautions) a little too harshly. That's it. And I'd even *give* that apology, on the Ubuntu forums... if, you know, they didn't ban and censor people who criticize Ubuntu.
You are apparently still too dense to see that I could not possibly have caused my troubles. You claim I didn't take precautions? Um, hello? I CONFINED UBUNTU TO A THIRD HARD DRIVE SO THAT I COULD STILL ACCESS THE COMPUTER in the inevitable event of an install failure. If that's not a precaution, I don't know what is. Hell, if that's not an above and beyond precaution, I don't know what is.
I also had a separate laptop from whence I could ask for advice, and set aside a large block of time when I could be without my computer. I followed the install instructions to the letter. I had a Live CD (remember, the current consensus is that the Install CD *is* the Live CD, even though no one can actually, you know, tell me how to get my computer working... why don't you go ahead and stay with the consensus;-) )THOSE ARE PRECAUTIONS.
To this date, the only people who attempt to give technical explanations for my situation *in which I'm at fault*, are all obviously impossible, like how I must have edited some file that I didn't know existed and while not knowing how to edit files from the command line. Or how my download (which was verified, as was the burn) erred in just *precisely* the right way to make EVERYTHING go right except grub stage 1.5 and throw an error 25, which is well-documented but no one is capable of fixing until it's too late.
I am the one who deserves a gold-plated apology:
-For HIGHLY RECOMMENDING that I REMOVE THE PRECAUTION THAT I USED to isolate ubuntu failures to a third hard drive. (Remind me how I was supposed to know not to take HIGHLY RECOMMENDED advice?) -For not throwing a flag when it saw my HD was too big (which, it turned out was what caused the problem, remember? Er, that and the shitty design that can't handle it). -For ignoring things I said in my post. -For not following up on the times that I actually *could* follow your advice. -For repeatedly recommending infeasible advice after I said I couldn't do it. -For pretending not to understand how it's possible to download a CD yet not be able to burn CDs when you can't get into that computer. -And so on and so forth.
If any of my advice about Ubuntu has actually been taken... well, then I *definitely* deserve a gold-plated apology.
Stop demonstrating why Linux will never catch on for the desktop. Use your mod points for good, not to shoot messengers whose messages you don't like.
Actually, an even BETTER idea would be to tax bads for the bad they cause and apply the taxes to undoing the bad, thus making all environmental externalities show up on a balance sheet somewhere, and also thus ensuring that people will only do things where the economic gain exceeds *and is applied to canceling* the environmental cost, AND giving people the maximum flexibility in responding to and counteracting environmental problems.
But who wants to do that when we can do feel-good product bans?
After all, the tax solution would allow people to still drive SUVs and use incandescents! OMG!!!!!!
Oddly enough, I was thinking about just this topic (communicating science to fundies) and I came up with a solution. No one will see it, but I'm going to put it out there in hopes that you and others can talk to the people like who you just described. With luck, it will become mainstream approach. Here is what you tell people:
"Science is a rigorous methodology for predicting what we will observe in the future. All scientific knowledge is simply a way to compactly express what we believe we will observe, and so should be read only that way. When I tell you that 'the earth is 4 billion years old, and humans are decended from ape-like creatures', I'm not saying your Bible is wrong. What I'm saying is that if you work on the assumption that the earth is 4 billion years old, etc. you will more accurately predict biological and geological findings than if you made any other assumption. We may very well be wrong in those predictions, and your Bible may very well be right -- but if so, it would still be unreasonable to expect it to make good predictions, given what we have gathered so far, just as it would be unreasonable to expect to win the lottery, even if your ticket turns out to be the winner.
"Accepting scientific knowledge as a framework for better predicting what you will observe in the future, is NOT the same thing as believing it to be literal truth -- it is a set of tools to help you within a certain context."
Would that moving speech make fundies less hateful toward science? You tell me.
No, that's not what's being claimed. What's being claimed is that they make a delayed order to sell, then when they get *inside information* revealing that selling would be a bad idea, they cancel the order, achieving the same effect as insider trading, thus circumventing insider trading rules. That is NOT something you or I can do, because we, er, don't have insider information.
Go back to commenting on matters for which you have expertise, EmagGeek. Where you say stuff like, "Wanna know how to get dates with hot women? I know!!! Just accept one of your existing trillions of invitations to exclusive events where there are hot women who will view you has having been pre-screened! Or, better yet... date hot women!!!! That will convince other hot women that they should date you! Duh!"
First, here is where a wingman (wingperson, really) helps incredibly. If you and one of your closer friends join a group together, that is 100x better than joining one alone. It demonstrates that at least one person has accepted you, and that you have at least some degree of social skill. Even better is if your friend is your opposite sex, and the platinum prize is if your opposite-sex friend is attractive. A guy who shows up to a group with an attractive woman with whom he is just friends will generate respectful envy among the men and curiosity among the women. Oh wait, that advice was pretty shitty too...
So can the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" part of the movie version.
If I made a movie sequence that makes absolutely no sense and told you to come up with your interpretation own, you'd roll your eyes and ignore me[1]. Don't let the director's fame change that.
[1] In fairness, most of you don't wait for my moviemaking to do that.
Dry spell; spank ~.6x/day, last year running average.
~$26,000 in S&P index fund, $1,500 in high-grade bonds, $300 in company stock in 401k ~$5,000 in international index, $3,000 in small-cap index in Roth IRA (I could go on, you get the point.)
No guilty pleasure reading activities. Reading female-oriented (cosmo, chick lit) works is guilty, but not a pleasure; reading about AI and the human brain is a pleasure but not guilty.
Frequent constipation resulting from medication regimen.
Now do I have the right not to give a shit about the Patriot Act?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, this is a clear management/stockholder conflict. The stockholders are definitely going to want to be bought out for that kind of money. There's no way current management can generate that much stockholder value to make rejecting the buyout be better. As a shareholder in Yahoo! (well, giving my S&P 500 index fund holdings, I effectively own $84 of yahoo stock, since yahoo makes up .31% of the S&P), I have to condemn this choice.
Wait, since I also own $527 of microsoft stock through the index, maybe that's not such a good idea...
Let's say group A claims to genuinely understand evolutionary biology, and has applied rational methods in finding these truths. They have unraveled almost all of the mysteries, know exactly what makes everything tick.
Let's say group B espouses very bizarre beliefs, obtains through demonstrably non-rational methods.
Let's further say that group B's gene frequency increases much faster than A's.
Hasn't group B demonstrated a better theory, given that adhering to the implied life rules of their belief set, exploits the rules of natural world much better (and therefore better predicts the natural world) than group A's?
Once you know your answer, let me say that this actually is the case: group A is evolutionary biologists, and group B is Christian fundamentalists.
If beliefs are judged by their *practical implications*, it looks like the fundies have the scientists beat. The best you can say is, "Well, you don't really need to posit all that 6,000 year-old-earth crap." (but then, would they go out and be fruitful and multiply...?)
At risk of sounding like a troll, the only "impact" I see films like The Ten Commandments having is making America that much more Christian fundamentalist and rejecting the culture of science that generates good sci-fi.
...
Oh, and cures for diseases and
So, to summarize:
bankers: "You better use a secure OS, or you'll be liable for any fraudulent transactions with your account."
customers: "Okay. What if we use Firefox on Linux?"
bankers: "That'll work."
customers: "Hey, we can't access your site using Firefox!"
bankers: [British equivalent of "hah! Sucks to be you!"]
Sorry, as libertarian as I mean, stuff like this just sounds like rationalizing. Cheap credit made people overspend on homes?
"Hey, the home's listed at $450,000, but it's okay to buy it at $500,000 and strain our budget. Because house prices will KEEP GOING UP!!!!!"
"Wait, they'll only give us a mortgage at 5.6% instead of 5.4%."
"Oh, well forget that."
Agree 100%. I would add that: The problem is not shaving or talking or tending to kids or holding a cell phone. The problem is people who just don't give a damn about proper safety, and no prohibition of any list of "unsafe activities while driving" is going to change that. If someone is using a cell phone in such a way that leads to them crashing into somebody, it's because they don't give proper care to their driving, NOT that they were talking on a phone, which was incidental. If they weren't talking on a phone, they would be irresponsibly diverting their attention in some other way.
If you're adequately providing attention to the road, you can properly discern when is and isn't an okay time to talk to someone with you or over a cell phone or tell the kids to shut up. To claim that talking on a cell phone while on an empty, straight road with no intersections for miles, is somehow as unsafe to others as drunk driving, is ridiculous.
Why should anyone have to pay anything for a copy of an album? I mean, I just torrent all my stuff now.
Overstate? I think it's a bit harsh and premature to claim that he's *over*stating the link between piracy and terrorism. I mean, Mukasey's a good guy, really does his homework. You think he's overstating what his evidence can justify? Really? Okay then, see if you can "explain away" the time they caught an IRA (Irish Republican Army) guy selling disks loaded with illegal copies of Windows at a flea market in Belfast in '86?
Yeah. I think it's time to "think different" about trivializing the connection between software piracy and 9/11.
What's disturbing is, advertising tampons like that on female-devoid slashdot is actually better demographic targeting than most ads on TV...
The role of the government and the military is to serve and protect us as the people who pay for them both. The role of these bodies is not to try and manipulate my judgement in their favour.
Just like how my role is to walk through a forest, not to repeatedly fall and catch myself with alternating feet while I gradually move through an area with a concentration of trees?
Propoganda may indeed help them to serve and protect the people who pay for them. If the military can do the job better and cheaper with propoganda than with a pocket full of shells, why not?
You mean, you discounted the possibility that all those organizations, including media, worked together to make this April Fool's Day joke happen.
Devious, devious...
This theory is all well and good, but shouldn't students also be exposed to alternate explanations, such as those involving the thunder god, Thor?
For the sake of all native English speakers, and anyone trying to learn English, could we PLEASE all agree to abandon the adjective/adverb distinction? I'm usually a stickler for using them correctly, but I'd much rather we all shift to declaring adjectives "equally usable as adverbs". Er, I mean, "equal usable as adverbs".
Oh dear...
Another thing that might be revolutionary about it is how it could shed light on how Spider-man's webs don't tear out chunks from his wrists because of the high, concentrated load :-/ Density gradient there too?
You think some names would be handy at this point?
Oh wait...
Finally, of course there is nothing stopping the development of additional nuclear plants in America today. Conservative proposals to spend billions in assisting the construction of these plants or putting the federal government on the hook for insuring these plants seems a poor investment of our money that would be better served exploring renewable alternatives.
...) so they have to find another way to bury social policy in environmental reasons.
Looks like rationalizing, to be honest. The government is "on the hook" for insuring (that's with an i, as in "providing funds in the case of failure) accidents that just won't happen, and even if they did happen, no court would rationally and proportionally assess damages. You can insure "$1 trillion". You cannot insure "how much you got?", which is what nuclear accident lawsuit damage awards amount to.
In buying a car, you don't expect people to insure unlimited damage, why a nuclear plant? And why would I buy an insurance policy that covers $300,000 if simply getting it, causes me to be $300,000 *more* liable?
Nuclear power obviates most of environmentalists claimed justifications, so they have to work overtime to say why we can't do it. In fact, as I've noted before, a federal lab has the details worked for "nuclear powered octane". That is, take water, atomspheric CO2, and energy from nuclear reactions, and store the energy in gasoline (basically equivalent to reversing combustion, though not necessarily through that process). THen, with no infrastructrual changes, cars are carbon-neutral.
Great solution!
But it doesn't get us what we want, which is SUVs "off the road" (er, or not emitting net CO2
So, that would make the Frenchman more like Microsoft?
Okay, first of all, I made many significant contributions to discussions beyond criticizing Ubuntu. Let's not forget I had excellent karma for almost two straight years, and recovered it to excellent from terrible twice, even with the mod-stalking.
Nevertheless, I will apologize for everything wrong I committed, even though there's no guarantee people will go along with the lift on mod-stalking.
Oh, you're great at English. English *speakers* are just really bad at avoiding idioms and metaphors that require you to know a lot of related knowledge.
... yeah, I hate constructions like that, and try to avoid them in writing. You shouldn't have to spend ten years in my country to understand my posts!
I run into the same problems often, despite being a native speaker! For example, the first time I saw the expression "arm's length transaction", I didn't know if it was metaphorically referring to transactions "up to" or "at least" arm's length apart ("at least" is correct).
So
Ah, so you're one of the immature brats who use the moderation system to satisfy your petty vendettas.
... if, you know, they didn't ban and censor people who criticize Ubuntu.
... why don't you go ahead and stay with the consensus ;-) )THOSE ARE PRECAUTIONS.
... well, then I *definitely* deserve a gold-plated apology.
I owe an apology for only one thing: telling a harsh truth (that the design was poor enough to lock someone out of a computer despite major precautions) a little too harshly. That's it. And I'd even *give* that apology, on the Ubuntu forums
You are apparently still too dense to see that I could not possibly have caused my troubles. You claim I didn't take precautions? Um, hello? I CONFINED UBUNTU TO A THIRD HARD DRIVE SO THAT I COULD STILL ACCESS THE COMPUTER in the inevitable event of an install failure. If that's not a precaution, I don't know what is. Hell, if that's not an above and beyond precaution, I don't know what is.
I also had a separate laptop from whence I could ask for advice, and set aside a large block of time when I could be without my computer. I followed the install instructions to the letter. I had a Live CD (remember, the current consensus is that the Install CD *is* the Live CD, even though no one can actually, you know, tell me how to get my computer working
To this date, the only people who attempt to give technical explanations for my situation *in which I'm at fault*, are all obviously impossible, like how I must have edited some file that I didn't know existed and while not knowing how to edit files from the command line. Or how my download (which was verified, as was the burn) erred in just *precisely* the right way to make EVERYTHING go right except grub stage 1.5 and throw an error 25, which is well-documented but no one is capable of fixing until it's too late.
I am the one who deserves a gold-plated apology:
-For HIGHLY RECOMMENDING that I REMOVE THE PRECAUTION THAT I USED to isolate ubuntu failures to a third hard drive. (Remind me how I was supposed to know not to take HIGHLY RECOMMENDED advice?)
-For not throwing a flag when it saw my HD was too big (which, it turned out was what caused the problem, remember? Er, that and the shitty design that can't handle it).
-For ignoring things I said in my post.
-For not following up on the times that I actually *could* follow your advice.
-For repeatedly recommending infeasible advice after I said I couldn't do it.
-For pretending not to understand how it's possible to download a CD yet not be able to burn CDs when you can't get into that computer.
-And so on and so forth.
If any of my advice about Ubuntu has actually been taken
Stop demonstrating why Linux will never catch on for the desktop. Use your mod points for good, not to shoot messengers whose messages you don't like.
In two words: grow up.
Actually, an even BETTER idea would be to tax bads for the bad they cause and apply the taxes to undoing the bad, thus making all environmental externalities show up on a balance sheet somewhere, and also thus ensuring that people will only do things where the economic gain exceeds *and is applied to canceling* the environmental cost, AND giving people the maximum flexibility in responding to and counteracting environmental problems.
But who wants to do that when we can do feel-good product bans?
After all, the tax solution would allow people to still drive SUVs and use incandescents! OMG!!!!!!
Oddly enough, I was thinking about just this topic (communicating science to fundies) and I came up with a solution. No one will see it, but I'm going to put it out there in hopes that you and others can talk to the people like who you just described. With luck, it will become mainstream approach. Here is what you tell people:
"Science is a rigorous methodology for predicting what we will observe in the future. All scientific knowledge is simply a way to compactly express what we believe we will observe, and so should be read only that way. When I tell you that 'the earth is 4 billion years old, and humans are decended from ape-like creatures', I'm not saying your Bible is wrong. What I'm saying is that if you work on the assumption that the earth is 4 billion years old, etc. you will more accurately predict biological and geological findings than if you made any other assumption. We may very well be wrong in those predictions, and your Bible may very well be right -- but if so, it would still be unreasonable to expect it to make good predictions, given what we have gathered so far, just as it would be unreasonable to expect to win the lottery, even if your ticket turns out to be the winner.
"Accepting scientific knowledge as a framework for better predicting what you will observe in the future, is NOT the same thing as believing it to be literal truth -- it is a set of tools to help you within a certain context."
Would that moving speech make fundies less hateful toward science? You tell me.
Go back to commenting on matters for which you have expertise, EmagGeek. Where you say stuff like, "Wanna know how to get dates with hot women? I know!!! Just accept one of your existing trillions of invitations to exclusive events where there are hot women who will view you has having been pre-screened! Or, better yet
So can the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" part of the movie version.
If I made a movie sequence that makes absolutely no sense and told you to come up with your interpretation own, you'd roll your eyes and ignore me[1]. Don't let the director's fame change that.
[1] In fairness, most of you don't wait for my moviemaking to do that.
Dry spell; spank ~.6x/day, last year running average.
~$26,000 in S&P index fund, $1,500 in high-grade bonds, $300 in company stock in 401k
~$5,000 in international index, $3,000 in small-cap index in Roth IRA
(I could go on, you get the point.)
No guilty pleasure reading activities. Reading female-oriented (cosmo, chick lit) works is guilty, but not a pleasure; reading about AI and the human brain is a pleasure but not guilty.
Frequent constipation resulting from medication regimen.
Now do I have the right not to give a shit about the Patriot Act?