The last time I checked, the US was still a democracy. Currently, 47% of the country (including me) would prefer to not raise the debt ceiling, while 42% (presumably including you) are all in a panic that not raising it would be a catastrophe. I am tired of the government borrowing money on my behalf, while you would like your debt to be even more than the $46,137.29 it is now. When do you plan on paying this debt back? Ours are therefore opposite and irreconcilable positions, perfectly reflecting the opposite and irreconcilable positions held by the two parties in Congress. What you are proposing that your view must be imposed on everybody in the country, ignoring the views of the other 47% of americans. That's not how democracy works. That's how a dictatorship works. If you like that system, try moving to China or something. In America we try to not allow a minority dictate the majority what to do (even though, unfortunately, it does happen).
One reason is that Bazaar and Mercurial are both written in interpreted languages rather than C. Python is fine for an occasional one-off script, but a frequently used application written in it is not acceptable. The overhead adds up and becomes too annoying to ignore.
If you use Adblock and Noscript, it is nearly impossible to get infected. Why that functionality is not in every browser and enabled by default I simply don't understand.
Let's keep going with this great idea. At a few thousand adults, you can pay a few adults in the community to teach the kids full-time.
As soon as your grandiose schemes let you not spend any time teaching your own kids, it stops being a great idea. Full time teachers are not parents. If they are good (which is rare), they might succeed in giving your kids knowledge, but only you can give them parental love and guidance, which they need to grow up into well-functioning individuals. Shove them into an institution and all you'll get is criminals.
It is indeed time to ditch the whole idea of schools. It is parents who should be educating their children, not some poorly trained teacher in charge of 50 kids. All parents do instead is obssess over not having time to do it because they work all day, and send kids to school as if it were a daycare center. How about taking some personal responsibility for your kids upbringing? Your kids want to spend time with you (and if they don't it's because you kept pushing them into institutions) because they love you. So put your kids first, before your job. Rearrange your off days so there is always someone home with them. You work 5 days a week and have 2 days off. A couple will have 4 days to thus distribute.
That of course is not enough, but most people are not alone in the world. You have two sets of parents, who would be delighted to spend time with grandkids. You may have friends and neighbors who also have kids and may be interested in pooling into a "school" together. With 4 adults you have 8 days off every week, which is enough to always have someone watching and educating the kids. Isn't it better to have them spend the day with their family and friends than to languish in a windowless prison where they walk through metal detectors, are forbidden to eat with real forks, are in danger of being prescribed antipsychotics for being playful, are constantly yelled at by overworked teachers and told to sit quietly like robots and do nothing they are not explicitly permitted to do. The choice is yours.
Rating agencies, eh? I'm sure the drug companies won't try to bribe them, or get their employees into those agencies, or just plain buy the agencies (as they will be commercial entities). You really think this is better than the FDA?
I think this is at least as good as the FDA. The FDA is bribed all the time, as evidenced by the amount of dangerous crap they let through.
The difference is not that a rating agency would be better than the FDA, but that you would be able to make your own definition of "better" (and yours is clearly very very different from mine), and that this definition would not be imposed upon you at the point of a gun.
I keep repeating this, but you left wingers just don't seem to get the point: everything the government does, it does at the point of a gun. The entire debate is exclusively about coercion. You believe you have the right to decide what's good for me and then to enforce it with violence. You think this is all right and proper. I, on the other hand, see little difference between you and the terrorists who blow up planes trying to impose their values upon us. My point of view is that coercion and violence are never acceptable except to stop coercion and violence by others. All other arguments naturally flow from this.
And you expect me to know what treatment I'm taking. How? You have no idea at all of the complexity of treating a serious cancer.
I expect you to take responsibility for your decisions. Of course you can't become a medical expert. Of course you have to defer to someone knowledgeable in the field. I do not expect you to always be your own doctor (even though usually that is a good idea). I merely expect you to be allowed to make whatever decision you believe to be the right one.
The argument is not about forbidding you anything. You can still have your own little FDA as long as its opinion is not forced on me. It is about coercion vs freedom. You have no right to force on me your opinion of safety or efficacy, or anybody elses opinion on the same. Trust your own FDA, but don't make me do so, because I don't. Don't tell me what drugs I can or can not take to treat my problems. Don't tell me what doctors I can or can not consult. Don't tell me how to live, dammit! You have no right to do so.
The days of long-lived software are pretty much gone. There are a handful of companies that still maintain the programs they've written a long time ago, but most programs written today are written quickly and dirtily, to spring up one day and fall into oblivion the next. "Apps" are little more than short fads that come and go, easy to implement due to having little functionality, and just as easy to discard for the next one.
First of all, without the FDA, he doesn't have to say it's his urine. He'll claim it's "insert some scientific description". When MY life is on the line, and I'm not in a position to tell what's going to help and what's snake-oil.
That's exactly right. Only, if you are not in a position to tell what the treatment is, why are you taking it? There is a simple solution to this problem that does not require the FDA: don't take it! If instead of trusting the government to decide what's good for you, you only decided it yourself or with the help of someone you personally trust, you wouldn't fall for snake oil because your default response when faced with a miracle treatment about which there is no research should be to reject it. Those who do not label their "treatments" would get no customers if people thought before they bought into quackery. Those who are quacks would not get very far if they had to prove they are not quacks to people for whom that is the assumption until proven otherwise.
You call me stupid to rely on a doctor. All medicine is empirical. We are a long way from understanding the physiology of the human body. Deal with it.
That's right. Deal with it. Every doctor should be treated like a quack until proven otherwise. Proven to you, not the government, because what business is it of the government to dictate what your standards of "not quack" ought to be?
But be aware he is relying on medical research also, and without the FDA he wouldn't have any real data about the drugs he's about to pump into you.
If he pumps drugs which he has no real data about into you, he's no doctor - he's a quack. If there is not data about a drug, don't take it!. If the FDA disappears we will not have to take any drugs that are unsafe or ineffective. The difference is that the verification of these facts would fall onto somebody else. There would be rating agencies, in the same line of business as Consumer Reports, that would test the drugs like any other product and publish reports about it. You would have a choice of whose opinion to trust, or even to make your own opinion if you believe yourself sufficiently qualified. Bad drugs will disappear just as easily this way, by the free choice of the consumer instead of at the point of the government gun.
Here's a question for you: why should the government protect the stupid? If somebody believes that his cancer can be cured by drinking this doctor's urine (which is, hilariously, what the treatment basically is), why in the world would I want to prevent him from trying? It's people like you who try to make everybody "safe" from any possible harm that are part of the reason people have been getting stupider and stupider. Natural selection always works, whether you try to deny it or not, and by helping idiots survive you merely succeed in breeding more idiots. Think of the children! The children who are protected from everything and who trust every quack's most outrageous statements simply because they have this unwavering faith that the government would not allow anything bad to happen. They grow up into adults who still believe in the government's omnipotence and think that doctors are good for them. The real truth is that all doctors are quacks. Doctors are the third leading cause of death in this country (google it). Anybody who believes otherwise deserves exactly what he gets.
Parents often feed junk food to their children because they eat junk food themselves. And they eat junk food because they can't cook. They can't cook because they have been brainwashed to think that cooking is hard and that you either are a master chef or you can't cook. The profit margins are much higher on junk food, tv dinners, and other "ready-to-eat" packages, so they are the ones most advertised. Cooking is something the country does not want you to do; it's hard, it requires expensive equipment, it must be done in a $50000 kitchen with granite countertops, and oh yes, it's very DANGEROUS! Hence the junk food consumption and obesity.
I predict that as soon as Google+ is opened to the public, Facebook will implode like a wet paper bag. Heck, with the rate people have been sneaking in by asking everyone they know for invites, it might happen even before the official launch.
Of course it is not news. It is merely an additional opportunity for us all to beg for invites. me@gmail.com pretty please? Oh, shucks! They are on to us...
There will never be any interstellar trade. The distances and velocities involved require energy expenditures vastly higher than the cost of any valuables you may wish to transport. You might say the costs will be "astronomical". The only movement between stars will be radio signals and initial colony ships.
True, true. I'll add some advice for those people:
Ayn Rand offered that exact same "advice" in "The Fountainhead" in the character of Peter Keating, who can be seen doing exactly these things to climb to the top. It worked in 1939, and it works even better today.
Another unfortunate thing about Russia is that the men die young, leaving a lot of single women around. There are 875 men to 1000 women. Due to the economy there isn't much to be excited about. The future looks bad. Really bad. And the present is not so great either. So a lot of men take to drinking, and I don't mean socially. These are guys who get really wasted, every friggin day. That's one reason they die young. The ones that are still alive often treat women like dirt. Consequently, if you're a decent guy who doesn't drink and behaves like a gentleman, you should have a much easier time getting married here than in the US.
The lecture just presents a formula and plugs in numbers. There is almost no intellectual content there, just some calculations being cranked out using a formula that pops up mysteriously out of nowhere.
Here's an important disconnect between academics and the rest of us. Academics are primarily researchers - they spend their days trying to produce new knowledge about things (at least, in theory). The rest of us just want to learn this knowledge in order to know how things work so we could do something better. Even if you are a scientist and are learning about something outside your field of research, your primary goal is to learn how something works, not how to do further research on it.
Take the PP's complaint about gravitation. The student does not want to be a gravity researcher - he wants to understand what gravity is. Even if he wants to be one, he still has to understand what it is first. The author of the textbook, on the other hand, is likely the expert on the subject - a researcher in the field. A researcher is primarily concerned with communicating how he find this stuff out. Hence the emphasis on sourcing the formulas, providing proofs, describing experimental methods, and noting what is known and what is not known and to what exact degree.
The student doesn't care about any of that, at least not at first. He wants to know how the damn thing works so he can make use of it. He does not care about your clever proofs and experiments, because only their existence is important - not their nature. To a student, or heck, to anybody who is not going to be doing research on the subject, the only important aspect is the practical result. The theory and proofs of correctness are of no use to him. It is important that those exist, of course, so he knows that the results are correct, but he is not going to do his own experiments to verify them. He just wants to use the results: to be an engineer, not a scientist.
Take the gravity complaint for example. The PP scientist complains that the student will not get to see how the central force problem was solved through history, how all the fancy mathematics can derive these equations from a handful of first principles, or how to do experiments to demonstrate that gravity does indeed follow the inverse square law. The student does not care. An spacecraft engineer needs to know that gravity exists and how to calculate its effects. He does not need to know how to derive the formulas or how to prove them correct. Those tasks are not his job. Those tasks are the scientist's job.
Academics being in charge of higher education are primarily interested in producing more academics - more scientists, rather than more engineers. Hence the emphasis on theory, experiments, proofs, etc., because those are the things that scientists do. Engineers take the results and actually do useful stuff with them. Engineers do not stage controlled experiments or rigorously prove that their equations work. They only need to calculate what practical designs these equations dictate.
What we need is to have more teachers who are engineers, not scientists, and who concentrate on how to use science instead of just how to create more of it. Most people do not want to be scientists, and are bored by abstract results. Teach practical applications first - that will show people that science can be useful. Then, if some of them want to be scientists, they can research the methods and proofs and whatever on their own time.
Afraid of patent lawsuits comrade? Come to Russia! In our new not-so-soviet country there are no stinking software patents. There also are a lot fewer lawyers. Income tax is only 13%. Being a self-employed app developer you will not have to worry about the unemployment, and as a hopeless nerd you will not have to worry about the weather (or, you could move to a southern region like Krasnodar). Come soon, there's plenty of vodka to go around!
Slashdot Mirror
The last time I checked, the US was still a democracy. Currently, 47% of the country (including me) would prefer to not raise the debt ceiling, while 42% (presumably including you) are all in a panic that not raising it would be a catastrophe. I am tired of the government borrowing money on my behalf, while you would like your debt to be even more than the $46,137.29 it is now. When do you plan on paying this debt back? Ours are therefore opposite and irreconcilable positions, perfectly reflecting the opposite and irreconcilable positions held by the two parties in Congress. What you are proposing that your view must be imposed on everybody in the country, ignoring the views of the other 47% of americans. That's not how democracy works. That's how a dictatorship works. If you like that system, try moving to China or something. In America we try to not allow a minority dictate the majority what to do (even though, unfortunately, it does happen).
One reason is that Bazaar and Mercurial are both written in interpreted languages rather than C. Python is fine for an occasional one-off script, but a frequently used application written in it is not acceptable. The overhead adds up and becomes too annoying to ignore.
Which brings up an even more interesting question: were humans designed by God or malware hackers? Or are we God's malware?
If you use Adblock and Noscript, it is nearly impossible to get infected. Why that functionality is not in every browser and enabled by default I simply don't understand.
As soon as your grandiose schemes let you not spend any time teaching your own kids, it stops being a great idea. Full time teachers are not parents. If they are good (which is rare), they might succeed in giving your kids knowledge, but only you can give them parental love and guidance, which they need to grow up into well-functioning individuals. Shove them into an institution and all you'll get is criminals.
It is indeed time to ditch the whole idea of schools. It is parents who should be educating their children, not some poorly trained teacher in charge of 50 kids. All parents do instead is obssess over not having time to do it because they work all day, and send kids to school as if it were a daycare center. How about taking some personal responsibility for your kids upbringing? Your kids want to spend time with you (and if they don't it's because you kept pushing them into institutions) because they love you. So put your kids first, before your job. Rearrange your off days so there is always someone home with them. You work 5 days a week and have 2 days off. A couple will have 4 days to thus distribute.
That of course is not enough, but most people are not alone in the world. You have two sets of parents, who would be delighted to spend time with grandkids. You may have friends and neighbors who also have kids and may be interested in pooling into a "school" together. With 4 adults you have 8 days off every week, which is enough to always have someone watching and educating the kids. Isn't it better to have them spend the day with their family and friends than to languish in a windowless prison where they walk through metal detectors, are forbidden to eat with real forks, are in danger of being prescribed antipsychotics for being playful, are constantly yelled at by overworked teachers and told to sit quietly like robots and do nothing they are not explicitly permitted to do. The choice is yours.
Unfortunately for their teeth, in this case the cake is not a lie.
I think this is at least as good as the FDA. The FDA is bribed all the time, as evidenced by the amount of dangerous crap they let through.
The difference is not that a rating agency would be better than the FDA, but that you would be able to make your own definition of "better" (and yours is clearly very very different from mine), and that this definition would not be imposed upon you at the point of a gun.
I keep repeating this, but you left wingers just don't seem to get the point: everything the government does, it does at the point of a gun. The entire debate is exclusively about coercion. You believe you have the right to decide what's good for me and then to enforce it with violence. You think this is all right and proper. I, on the other hand, see little difference between you and the terrorists who blow up planes trying to impose their values upon us. My point of view is that coercion and violence are never acceptable except to stop coercion and violence by others. All other arguments naturally flow from this.
I expect you to take responsibility for your decisions. Of course you can't become a medical expert. Of course you have to defer to someone knowledgeable in the field. I do not expect you to always be your own doctor (even though usually that is a good idea). I merely expect you to be allowed to make whatever decision you believe to be the right one.
The argument is not about forbidding you anything. You can still have your own little FDA as long as its opinion is not forced on me. It is about coercion vs freedom. You have no right to force on me your opinion of safety or efficacy, or anybody elses opinion on the same. Trust your own FDA, but don't make me do so, because I don't. Don't tell me what drugs I can or can not take to treat my problems. Don't tell me what doctors I can or can not consult. Don't tell me how to live, dammit! You have no right to do so.
The days of long-lived software are pretty much gone. There are a handful of companies that still maintain the programs they've written a long time ago, but most programs written today are written quickly and dirtily, to spring up one day and fall into oblivion the next. "Apps" are little more than short fads that come and go, easy to implement due to having little functionality, and just as easy to discard for the next one.
That's exactly right. Only, if you are not in a position to tell what the treatment is, why are you taking it? There is a simple solution to this problem that does not require the FDA: don't take it! If instead of trusting the government to decide what's good for you, you only decided it yourself or with the help of someone you personally trust, you wouldn't fall for snake oil because your default response when faced with a miracle treatment about which there is no research should be to reject it. Those who do not label their "treatments" would get no customers if people thought before they bought into quackery. Those who are quacks would not get very far if they had to prove they are not quacks to people for whom that is the assumption until proven otherwise.
That's right. Deal with it. Every doctor should be treated like a quack until proven otherwise. Proven to you, not the government, because what business is it of the government to dictate what your standards of "not quack" ought to be?
If he pumps drugs which he has no real data about into you, he's no doctor - he's a quack. If there is not data about a drug, don't take it!. If the FDA disappears we will not have to take any drugs that are unsafe or ineffective. The difference is that the verification of these facts would fall onto somebody else. There would be rating agencies, in the same line of business as Consumer Reports, that would test the drugs like any other product and publish reports about it. You would have a choice of whose opinion to trust, or even to make your own opinion if you believe yourself sufficiently qualified. Bad drugs will disappear just as easily this way, by the free choice of the consumer instead of at the point of the government gun.
Here's a question for you: why should the government protect the stupid? If somebody believes that his cancer can be cured by drinking this doctor's urine (which is, hilariously, what the treatment basically is), why in the world would I want to prevent him from trying? It's people like you who try to make everybody "safe" from any possible harm that are part of the reason people have been getting stupider and stupider. Natural selection always works, whether you try to deny it or not, and by helping idiots survive you merely succeed in breeding more idiots. Think of the children! The children who are protected from everything and who trust every quack's most outrageous statements simply because they have this unwavering faith that the government would not allow anything bad to happen. They grow up into adults who still believe in the government's omnipotence and think that doctors are good for them. The real truth is that all doctors are quacks. Doctors are the third leading cause of death in this country (google it). Anybody who believes otherwise deserves exactly what he gets.
Vee respectfully disagree. Vee say it should be Kaos Panel.
Define "down"
Parents often feed junk food to their children because they eat junk food themselves. And they eat junk food because they can't cook. They can't cook because they have been brainwashed to think that cooking is hard and that you either are a master chef or you can't cook. The profit margins are much higher on junk food, tv dinners, and other "ready-to-eat" packages, so they are the ones most advertised. Cooking is something the country does not want you to do; it's hard, it requires expensive equipment, it must be done in a $50000 kitchen with granite countertops, and oh yes, it's very DANGEROUS! Hence the junk food consumption and obesity.
I predict that as soon as Google+ is opened to the public, Facebook will implode like a wet paper bag. Heck, with the rate people have been sneaking in by asking everyone they know for invites, it might happen even before the official launch.
> It has length, width and depth, not height.
It may also have a significant value of the seldom mentioned dimension of debt.
Of course it is not news. It is merely an additional opportunity for us all to beg for invites. me@gmail.com pretty please? Oh, shucks! They are on to us...
There's pwgen that generate memorable random passwords. Generate a screenful and usually something pretty simple to remember will pop out at you.
Mistakes, in general, grievous are.
There will never be any interstellar trade. The distances and velocities involved require energy expenditures vastly higher than the cost of any valuables you may wish to transport. You might say the costs will be "astronomical". The only movement between stars will be radio signals and initial colony ships.
These days nobody cares what the Queen does. They do, however, notice when Kate is wearing a new dress.
Ayn Rand offered that exact same "advice" in "The Fountainhead" in the character of Peter Keating, who can be seen doing exactly these things to climb to the top. It worked in 1939, and it works even better today.
Another unfortunate thing about Russia is that the men die young, leaving a lot of single women around. There are 875 men to 1000 women. Due to the economy there isn't much to be excited about. The future looks bad. Really bad. And the present is not so great either. So a lot of men take to drinking, and I don't mean socially. These are guys who get really wasted, every friggin day. That's one reason they die young. The ones that are still alive often treat women like dirt. Consequently, if you're a decent guy who doesn't drink and behaves like a gentleman, you should have a much easier time getting married here than in the US.
Here's an important disconnect between academics and the rest of us. Academics are primarily researchers - they spend their days trying to produce new knowledge about things (at least, in theory). The rest of us just want to learn this knowledge in order to know how things work so we could do something better. Even if you are a scientist and are learning about something outside your field of research, your primary goal is to learn how something works, not how to do further research on it.
Take the PP's complaint about gravitation. The student does not want to be a gravity researcher - he wants to understand what gravity is. Even if he wants to be one, he still has to understand what it is first. The author of the textbook, on the other hand, is likely the expert on the subject - a researcher in the field. A researcher is primarily concerned with communicating how he find this stuff out. Hence the emphasis on sourcing the formulas, providing proofs, describing experimental methods, and noting what is known and what is not known and to what exact degree.
The student doesn't care about any of that, at least not at first. He wants to know how the damn thing works so he can make use of it. He does not care about your clever proofs and experiments, because only their existence is important - not their nature. To a student, or heck, to anybody who is not going to be doing research on the subject, the only important aspect is the practical result. The theory and proofs of correctness are of no use to him. It is important that those exist, of course, so he knows that the results are correct, but he is not going to do his own experiments to verify them. He just wants to use the results: to be an engineer, not a scientist.
Take the gravity complaint for example. The PP scientist complains that the student will not get to see how the central force problem was solved through history, how all the fancy mathematics can derive these equations from a handful of first principles, or how to do experiments to demonstrate that gravity does indeed follow the inverse square law. The student does not care. An spacecraft engineer needs to know that gravity exists and how to calculate its effects. He does not need to know how to derive the formulas or how to prove them correct. Those tasks are not his job. Those tasks are the scientist's job.
Academics being in charge of higher education are primarily interested in producing more academics - more scientists, rather than more engineers. Hence the emphasis on theory, experiments, proofs, etc., because those are the things that scientists do. Engineers take the results and actually do useful stuff with them. Engineers do not stage controlled experiments or rigorously prove that their equations work. They only need to calculate what practical designs these equations dictate.
What we need is to have more teachers who are engineers, not scientists, and who concentrate on how to use science instead of just how to create more of it. Most people do not want to be scientists, and are bored by abstract results. Teach practical applications first - that will show people that science can be useful. Then, if some of them want to be scientists, they can research the methods and proofs and whatever on their own time.
Afraid of patent lawsuits comrade? Come to Russia! In our new not-so-soviet country there are no stinking software patents. There also are a lot fewer lawyers. Income tax is only 13%. Being a self-employed app developer you will not have to worry about the unemployment, and as a hopeless nerd you will not have to worry about the weather (or, you could move to a southern region like Krasnodar). Come soon, there's plenty of vodka to go around!