What are these factors? How important are they relative to problem solving? Does IQ testing have any relevance to these other factors, or correct for them in any way? Do IQ tests really evaluate the ability to solve problems in general or merely the ability to solve a small subset of problems which may or may not be terribly valuable to solve?
If IQ tests address only one factor of intelligence, and the value of that particular factor is is itself questionable, then how can they be construed as accurately representing intelligence in the first place?
(Full disclosure: I scored 107.31 on this particular test)
So if somebody will die without shelter or food, we refuse to give them either, and they die, did we kill them arbitrarily?
What if the reason that they don't have shelter or food is that individuals with considerably greater resources than they have made the cost of those things higher than they can afford, and refuse to pay them enough to make up the difference?
Just saying "I didn't do it, and I couldn't have fixed it" doesn't relieve you from responsibility for human death and suffering in the name of corporate profit because you DID do it when you agreed that it is okay to place the right to property above all others.
Capitalism was designed to achieve the greatest amount and fairest distribution of goods to everyone. As it turns out, there are some serious oversights to it, and that the greatest amount actually comes at the cost of the fairest distribution. Perhaps communism isn't the answer, but that doesn't mean their isn't a problem. Personally, I'm afraid that if we don't fix what's clearly broken soon that we may have to face the Revolution that Marx spoke of, the one where the underclass (by the way, we really do have one of those) rises up and simply kills their oppressors, and I'm pretty sure I'm not on the underclass side of that equation. I doubt that Utopia will follow from that, but I don't doubt that bloodshed will. This needs to change, and if you oppose that, know that you're only hastening the likelihood of your own violent demise.
To the very best of my knowledge, you are the only person on earth who draws that particular distinction.
Our government includes both an executive branch and a legislative branch, and a judicial branch to boot. They are all part of the government, not just the executive.
Long story short, you're completely wrong. Like, not even a little bit right, just wrong.
It's okay, I too wonder what the hell people's problem with twitter actually is.
He has multiple accounts? So fucking what? His posts aren't that great? Again, so fucking what?
Is twitter some sort of child molester and I missed the memo, or is it really just that some number of ACs really have nothing better to do than search out all of his posts and whine about him because... um... just because?
Not that I believe the given example actually is censorship, but governments are not the only ones who can engage in censorship.
For example, the film industry is notorious for censoring ideas and images that the people who run it find distasteful or contrary. The Hollywood blacklisting of communists was inspired by the government, but created and enforced by the studios.
If the major news networks refuse to carry stories that would be damaging to their corporate interests (including political movements or actions), they are engaging in censorship, even though the government does not (theoretically) and cannot (legally) force them to.
If what you saw was cool, I'm guessing it had people dressed up as the characters acting it out in front of the screen. I do that.
As for the sequel... it's called Shock Treatment, and it will make you insane. Seriously. The music and costumes are equally awesome, but it just doesn't make any sense, and it's the New Wave to RHPS' punk. It also doesn't have Susan Sarandon or Tim Curry (or even Barry Bostwick), so it doesn't have the inadvertantly all-star cast. It's also a bitch to find because there just aren't that many copies in existence.
I sure hope you didn't sit through that shitfest 30 Days of Night. I made it through about 30-45 minutes, and then I just couldn't take it any more; it was like being kicked in the nuts repeatedly, only in the brain.
"Making vampires scary again" my ass, it was just empty slasher fare that wasn't scary and added nothing to the genre... unless you call a bunch of shitty actors wearing ratty clothes and smeared in fake blood who had "lines" that were all in the "vampire language" but was really what happens when English speakers who don't know any Russian try to make noises that might convince other non-Russian speakers.
I don't think of myself as a quitter so much as a survivor... if I hadn't stopped watching, my frontal lobes may have killed themselves in protest.
And that's coming from a guy who's watched the sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show multiple times and sees the original at least once a week.
My girlfriend, both of my parents, and the majority of my extended family are all teachers, so I think I have it on good authority that the correlation ratio between well-funded schools and highly achieving students is approaching one. There are some definite confounding variables in there, such as good administrators (which are easier to get with a higher budget, by the way) and parental involvement (incidentally, the most involved parents also tend to be the most educated and wealthiest, and make sure that their children are in better funded schools through both donations and municipal property taxes), but that doesn't mean funding has any less of an effect.
For example, my girlfriend is finishing her student teaching this semester and is looking for a job teaching art in the fall. She's taught at 2 different schools, one was in a small semi-rural town with fairly high family incomes and property taxes that is surrounded by colleges (including 2 of the Seven Sister schools), the other in a medium-sized city (4th largest in the state, but we don't have many large cities) with very low family incomes and junk-bond status. The former was "underfunded" and they could only run two ceramics classes each term for a student population of about 500 7th-12th graders, the latter wouldn't reimburse my girlfriend $2 for Styrofoam trays we bought from a grocery store so she could do an improvised printmaking unit because the students were getting sick of drawing on newsprint every day and those were the only supplies readily available in a school of a bit under 2000 7th and 8th graders. Guess which school has higher achieving students? Guess which spends more per student?
Yeah... but we really don't need any more "talented" guitarists who can only play power chords. Green Day has pretty much milked that cow dry.
Having tried (unsuccessfully) a couple of times to learn guitar, and having recently picked up a copy of GH for the first time (I've got a Wii now, but my last console was a Playstation... note the lack of a "2"), the big diffrence that I've noticed is that after three hours of trying to actually play, I couldn't operate my fingers anymore and I still sounded like I'd never even seen a guitar, whereas after three hours with GH3 I was making Slash my bitch for an encore of Welcome to the Jungle. As it turns out, I don't really have any passion for music and I'm completely tone deaf, neither of which matters even a little to my ability to have fun playing a video game, but does mean that I'm unlikely to invest much time/money/pain in the real thing.
"OLPC should be philosophically pure about its own machines. Being a non-profit that leverages goodwill from a tremendous number of community volunteers for its success and whose core mission is one of social betterment, it has a great deal of social responsibility. It should not become a vehicle for creating economic incentives for a particular vendor. It should not believe the nonsense about Windows being a requirement for business after the children grow up. Windows is a requirement because enough people grew up with it, not the other way around. If OLPC made a billion people grow up with Linux, Linux would be just dandy for business. And OLPC shouldn't make its sole OS one that cripples the very hardware that supposedly set the project's laptops apart: released versions of Windows can neither make good use of the XO power management, nor its full mesh or advanced display capabilities."
(bold added by me)
I hope MS pays you by the quantity of your shilling rather than the quality.
Again, different realities for different people. Where you live, the UN inspectors were concerned that he had been less than cooperative and that he might have had things he shouldn't, and where I live the UN was saying the exact opposite of that (though they frequently mentioned that he had, in the past, been a bit of a pain about such things).
Of course it's all moot now, since The Decider sent in US troops to take him out and then... um... ya 'know, do stuff. Back to the multiple truths, I and many others were about 99% sure that the intelligence which was used to justify the whole thing was flawed and likely inaccurate, and that there were simply ulterior motives being fulfilled. Apparently in other locales, such things were impossible to determine and nobody doubted the official line.
Uh, no, SOP is that they instead use the top secret prototype battle cruiser upon which all other battle cruisers are based, claerly indicating that it is the greatest fighting ship of all time, because by the nth time around design and manufacturing mistakes are always made which compromise the integrity of the original.
The only other thing you need is an awkward, sexually frustrated adolescent boy genius to pilot it and you're golden.
I seem to recall him saying a lot of things to the effect of "I am cooperating with the weapons inspectors, and there are no weapons of mass destruction" prior to the invasion... that sounds not at all like bluffing to me.
But whatever, I'm pretty much used to the idea that reality is just altogether different for certain people. maybe in your reality, he actually said something more like "I will nuke your cities, gas your soldiers, then rape your women, children and livestock with my massive arsenal of weapons I'm hiding from the pathetic UN pig-dogs!"
My point is that if the enforcement of the social contract is not the responsibility of the state, which in the case of copyright it is not, and that if the rules are being set by people with the most money and the longest lives (publishers are wealthy and immortal), and that our democracy has failed to give the other side a voice at the bargaining table due to widespread corruption, then the social contract is substantially violated. Part of the social contract theory is that, as with a legal contract, once broken by one party it no longer needs to be regarded by the other, and in such an asymmetric system it can be easily argued that the contract is simply null and void in this respect.
I'm not actually saying you're wrong, per se, just that this whole thing isn't so open and shut as you seem to think it is, even by your own philosophy.
Exclusive right!= monopoly unless you wish to water down the meaning of the word "monopoly" so far as to make it meaningless.
Monopolies must dominate an entire market such that they are the only de facto choice: Microsoft is a monopoly because the _average consumer_ is faced with the choice of buying their products or not using personal computers, Apple is not a monopoly because the average consumer can easily purchase an mp3 player that is not an iPod (and should, the prices are way better, I spend a lot of time looking at them). This in spite of the fact that only Apple may manufacture and distribute iPods.
Microsoft wasn't deemed a monopoly because only they can sell Windows, they were deemed a monopoly because everybody has to buy Windows (some exceptions may apply, but generally do not) AND they are the only one who can sell it. If OSX(+) and/or Linux and/or whatever the heck else gathers enough of a user base to change that underlying fact (hint: the tipping point is where software that won't run on something else is an exception, not an assumption) Microsoft will, in fact, cease to be a monopoly (provided that MSOffixce doesn't keep them there, but that seems doubtful in context), though they will retain the exclusive right to publish and distribute Windows.
"Just because you can create an opinion doesn't make it so. Property is a social contract in ANY sense of the word. You don't believe in it. So what. Doesn't matter. You belong to a society that has enacted rules and regulations that say it is property, thus it is. Again, it is a social contract. As a part of society, you can disagree with a rule, but that doesn't make it any less of a rule unless that rule is changed."
Pet peeve of mine that 'social contract" theory... see, contracts have to be voluntarily entered by all parties, and last I checked, we're all held to social contracts whether we want to or not. Even for those of us happy to "sign", the social contract is being changed unilaterally, which with normal contracts is something that is almost never permitted. Point being, I doubt Hobbes, Locke, or any of the social contract canon philosophers would actually support your assertion that current copyright law is valid within that frame.
i think you mean "kook"... cooks are the guys in the white coats and the silly hats who work in restaurants and blow coke, kooks are the fat guys in cheap suits who work in radio and pop pills.
"Reverend Jeremiah Wright is not an "honest man," and makes money selling lies..."
Yeah, how dare he say that people hate us in the Middle East because we took a dangerous and selfish angle in our diplomatic relations to the region's influential states! We're perfect and there can be no repercussions for our actions! He's just racist against real Americans...
So because all of the millionaire executives are American, that means I don't need to care if the factories that build the parts are here or somewhere else? What happens when the local government in wherever decides to nationalize that Colt weapons plant? What happens when the targeting devices for smart bombs are only made in China (the sole supplier recently closed their, already smaller, Indiana plant because the Chinese ones are cheaper to run)? Should I still care what country the fat cat on top lives in?
So long as Boeing's/Lockheed's/Colt's/whoever's bulk manufacturing happens overseas, I couldn't care any less where the top shareholders live.
"Ok, ok, you probably think that's an unfair question. How 'bout this: how many American-made weapons has Al-Qaeda purchased?"
Moot question, we've outsourced nearly 100% of weapons manufacturing to foreign nations anyway. That said, Al Quaeda was formed and trained by the CIA, and their initial cache of weapons consisted largely of American arms. since then they've purchased far cheaper Soviet designs not because they couldn't have bought pricier American ones, but because they wanted more bang for their limited bucks (all puns intended) and went for the bargain stuff. If Al Quaeda could actually afford American weapons in any significant quantity, I'm sure they'd be happy to buy them from any number of people who would just love to sell them.
"Ok, last question: how much US technology was sold to ANY communist nation during the cold war?"
How many Western technologies wwere the KGB able to acquire through espionage? That number would be a solid start.
Slashdot Mirror
"amongst other factors"
What are these factors? How important are they relative to problem solving? Does IQ testing have any relevance to these other factors, or correct for them in any way? Do IQ tests really evaluate the ability to solve problems in general or merely the ability to solve a small subset of problems which may or may not be terribly valuable to solve?
If IQ tests address only one factor of intelligence, and the value of that particular factor is is itself questionable, then how can they be construed as accurately representing intelligence in the first place?
(Full disclosure: I scored 107.31 on this particular test)
So if somebody will die without shelter or food, we refuse to give them either, and they die, did we kill them arbitrarily?
What if the reason that they don't have shelter or food is that individuals with considerably greater resources than they have made the cost of those things higher than they can afford, and refuse to pay them enough to make up the difference?
Just saying "I didn't do it, and I couldn't have fixed it" doesn't relieve you from responsibility for human death and suffering in the name of corporate profit because you DID do it when you agreed that it is okay to place the right to property above all others.
Capitalism was designed to achieve the greatest amount and fairest distribution of goods to everyone. As it turns out, there are some serious oversights to it, and that the greatest amount actually comes at the cost of the fairest distribution. Perhaps communism isn't the answer, but that doesn't mean their isn't a problem. Personally, I'm afraid that if we don't fix what's clearly broken soon that we may have to face the Revolution that Marx spoke of, the one where the underclass (by the way, we really do have one of those) rises up and simply kills their oppressors, and I'm pretty sure I'm not on the underclass side of that equation. I doubt that Utopia will follow from that, but I don't doubt that bloodshed will. This needs to change, and if you oppose that, know that you're only hastening the likelihood of your own violent demise.
OH GOD THE ASCII, IT'S BURNING MY EYES!!!!!!!!!1111111111
Actually, come to think of it, it's not. In fact, it's not even particularly offensive, outside of being so mindless and cliched.
Congratulations on not even grossing anybody out with your shitty ascii art. Now go drink bleach.
To the very best of my knowledge, you are the only person on earth who draws that particular distinction.
Our government includes both an executive branch and a legislative branch, and a judicial branch to boot. They are all part of the government, not just the executive.
Long story short, you're completely wrong. Like, not even a little bit right, just wrong.
It's okay, I too wonder what the hell people's problem with twitter actually is.
He has multiple accounts? So fucking what? His posts aren't that great? Again, so fucking what?
Is twitter some sort of child molester and I missed the memo, or is it really just that some number of ACs really have nothing better to do than search out all of his posts and whine about him because... um... just because?
Yeah I pay about $6.50 which, for all you math majors who've long ago forgotten how to do basic arithmetic, is a whole dollar less.
I'm going out on a limb and guessing that your prices are higher, since $7.50 is on the low end of the national average for movie tickets.
Not that I believe the given example actually is censorship, but governments are not the only ones who can engage in censorship.
For example, the film industry is notorious for censoring ideas and images that the people who run it find distasteful or contrary. The Hollywood blacklisting of communists was inspired by the government, but created and enforced by the studios.
If the major news networks refuse to carry stories that would be damaging to their corporate interests (including political movements or actions), they are engaging in censorship, even though the government does not (theoretically) and cannot (legally) force them to.
If what you saw was cool, I'm guessing it had people dressed up as the characters acting it out in front of the screen. I do that.
As for the sequel... it's called Shock Treatment, and it will make you insane. Seriously. The music and costumes are equally awesome, but it just doesn't make any sense, and it's the New Wave to RHPS' punk. It also doesn't have Susan Sarandon or Tim Curry (or even Barry Bostwick), so it doesn't have the inadvertantly all-star cast. It's also a bitch to find because there just aren't that many copies in existence.
I sure hope you didn't sit through that shitfest 30 Days of Night. I made it through about 30-45 minutes, and then I just couldn't take it any more; it was like being kicked in the nuts repeatedly, only in the brain.
"Making vampires scary again" my ass, it was just empty slasher fare that wasn't scary and added nothing to the genre... unless you call a bunch of shitty actors wearing ratty clothes and smeared in fake blood who had "lines" that were all in the "vampire language" but was really what happens when English speakers who don't know any Russian try to make noises that might convince other non-Russian speakers.
I don't think of myself as a quitter so much as a survivor... if I hadn't stopped watching, my frontal lobes may have killed themselves in protest.
And that's coming from a guy who's watched the sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show multiple times and sees the original at least once a week.
You're kidding, right?
My girlfriend, both of my parents, and the majority of my extended family are all teachers, so I think I have it on good authority that the correlation ratio between well-funded schools and highly achieving students is approaching one. There are some definite confounding variables in there, such as good administrators (which are easier to get with a higher budget, by the way) and parental involvement (incidentally, the most involved parents also tend to be the most educated and wealthiest, and make sure that their children are in better funded schools through both donations and municipal property taxes), but that doesn't mean funding has any less of an effect.
For example, my girlfriend is finishing her student teaching this semester and is looking for a job teaching art in the fall. She's taught at 2 different schools, one was in a small semi-rural town with fairly high family incomes and property taxes that is surrounded by colleges (including 2 of the Seven Sister schools), the other in a medium-sized city (4th largest in the state, but we don't have many large cities) with very low family incomes and junk-bond status. The former was "underfunded" and they could only run two ceramics classes each term for a student population of about 500 7th-12th graders, the latter wouldn't reimburse my girlfriend $2 for Styrofoam trays we bought from a grocery store so she could do an improvised printmaking unit because the students were getting sick of drawing on newsprint every day and those were the only supplies readily available in a school of a bit under 2000 7th and 8th graders. Guess which school has higher achieving students? Guess which spends more per student?
Yeah... but we really don't need any more "talented" guitarists who can only play power chords. Green Day has pretty much milked that cow dry.
Having tried (unsuccessfully) a couple of times to learn guitar, and having recently picked up a copy of GH for the first time (I've got a Wii now, but my last console was a Playstation... note the lack of a "2"), the big diffrence that I've noticed is that after three hours of trying to actually play, I couldn't operate my fingers anymore and I still sounded like I'd never even seen a guitar, whereas after three hours with GH3 I was making Slash my bitch for an encore of Welcome to the Jungle. As it turns out, I don't really have any passion for music and I'm completely tone deaf, neither of which matters even a little to my ability to have fun playing a video game, but does mean that I'm unlikely to invest much time/money/pain in the real thing.
From your own link:
"OLPC should be philosophically pure about its own machines. Being a non-profit that leverages goodwill from a tremendous number of community volunteers for its success and whose core mission is one of social betterment, it has a great deal of social responsibility. It should not become a vehicle for creating economic incentives for a particular vendor. It should not believe the nonsense about Windows being a requirement for business after the children grow up. Windows is a requirement because enough people grew up with it, not the other way around. If OLPC made a billion people grow up with Linux, Linux would be just dandy for business. And OLPC shouldn't make its sole OS one that cripples the very hardware that supposedly set the project's laptops apart: released versions of Windows can neither make good use of the XO power management, nor its full mesh or advanced display capabilities."
(bold added by me)
I hope MS pays you by the quantity of your shilling rather than the quality.
Again, different realities for different people. Where you live, the UN inspectors were concerned that he had been less than cooperative and that he might have had things he shouldn't, and where I live the UN was saying the exact opposite of that (though they frequently mentioned that he had, in the past, been a bit of a pain about such things).
Of course it's all moot now, since The Decider sent in US troops to take him out and then... um... ya 'know, do stuff. Back to the multiple truths, I and many others were about 99% sure that the intelligence which was used to justify the whole thing was flawed and likely inaccurate, and that there were simply ulterior motives being fulfilled. Apparently in other locales, such things were impossible to determine and nobody doubted the official line.
Uh, no, SOP is that they instead use the top secret prototype battle cruiser upon which all other battle cruisers are based, claerly indicating that it is the greatest fighting ship of all time, because by the nth time around design and manufacturing mistakes are always made which compromise the integrity of the original.
The only other thing you need is an awkward, sexually frustrated adolescent boy genius to pilot it and you're golden.
I seem to recall him saying a lot of things to the effect of "I am cooperating with the weapons inspectors, and there are no weapons of mass destruction" prior to the invasion... that sounds not at all like bluffing to me.
But whatever, I'm pretty much used to the idea that reality is just altogether different for certain people. maybe in your reality, he actually said something more like "I will nuke your cities, gas your soldiers, then rape your women, children and livestock with my massive arsenal of weapons I'm hiding from the pathetic UN pig-dogs!"
My point is that if the enforcement of the social contract is not the responsibility of the state, which in the case of copyright it is not, and that if the rules are being set by people with the most money and the longest lives (publishers are wealthy and immortal), and that our democracy has failed to give the other side a voice at the bargaining table due to widespread corruption, then the social contract is substantially violated. Part of the social contract theory is that, as with a legal contract, once broken by one party it no longer needs to be regarded by the other, and in such an asymmetric system it can be easily argued that the contract is simply null and void in this respect.
I'm not actually saying you're wrong, per se, just that this whole thing isn't so open and shut as you seem to think it is, even by your own philosophy.
Exclusive right!= monopoly unless you wish to water down the meaning of the word "monopoly" so far as to make it meaningless.
Monopolies must dominate an entire market such that they are the only de facto choice: Microsoft is a monopoly because the _average consumer_ is faced with the choice of buying their products or not using personal computers, Apple is not a monopoly because the average consumer can easily purchase an mp3 player that is not an iPod (and should, the prices are way better, I spend a lot of time looking at them). This in spite of the fact that only Apple may manufacture and distribute iPods.
Microsoft wasn't deemed a monopoly because only they can sell Windows, they were deemed a monopoly because everybody has to buy Windows (some exceptions may apply, but generally do not) AND they are the only one who can sell it. If OSX(+) and/or Linux and/or whatever the heck else gathers enough of a user base to change that underlying fact (hint: the tipping point is where software that won't run on something else is an exception, not an assumption) Microsoft will, in fact, cease to be a monopoly (provided that MSOffixce doesn't keep them there, but that seems doubtful in context), though they will retain the exclusive right to publish and distribute Windows.
"Just because you can create an opinion doesn't make it so. Property is a social contract in ANY sense of the word. You don't believe in it. So what. Doesn't matter. You belong to a society that has enacted rules and regulations that say it is property, thus it is. Again, it is a social contract. As a part of society, you can disagree with a rule, but that doesn't make it any less of a rule unless that rule is changed."
Pet peeve of mine that 'social contract" theory... see, contracts have to be voluntarily entered by all parties, and last I checked, we're all held to social contracts whether we want to or not. Even for those of us happy to "sign", the social contract is being changed unilaterally, which with normal contracts is something that is almost never permitted. Point being, I doubt Hobbes, Locke, or any of the social contract canon philosophers would actually support your assertion that current copyright law is valid within that frame.
Much like corporate purchasers, actually.
"Rush is a cook"
i think you mean "kook"... cooks are the guys in the white coats and the silly hats who work in restaurants and blow coke, kooks are the fat guys in cheap suits who work in radio and pop pills.
"Reverend Jeremiah Wright is not an "honest man," and makes money selling lies..."
Yeah, how dare he say that people hate us in the Middle East because we took a dangerous and selfish angle in our diplomatic relations to the region's influential states! We're perfect and there can be no repercussions for our actions! He's just racist against real Americans...
So because all of the millionaire executives are American, that means I don't need to care if the factories that build the parts are here or somewhere else? What happens when the local government in wherever decides to nationalize that Colt weapons plant? What happens when the targeting devices for smart bombs are only made in China (the sole supplier recently closed their, already smaller, Indiana plant because the Chinese ones are cheaper to run)? Should I still care what country the fat cat on top lives in?
So long as Boeing's/Lockheed's/Colt's/whoever's bulk manufacturing happens overseas, I couldn't care any less where the top shareholders live.
They were bought from someone. Legal or otherwise, money changed hands in exchange for tech.
Indeed, thank goodness we have a thuggish, militant Republican youth movement to replace America's culture with it's own... hey, wait a minute...
"Ok, ok, you probably think that's an unfair question. How 'bout this: how many American-made weapons has Al-Qaeda purchased?"
Moot question, we've outsourced nearly 100% of weapons manufacturing to foreign nations anyway. That said, Al Quaeda was formed and trained by the CIA, and their initial cache of weapons consisted largely of American arms. since then they've purchased far cheaper Soviet designs not because they couldn't have bought pricier American ones, but because they wanted more bang for their limited bucks (all puns intended) and went for the bargain stuff. If Al Quaeda could actually afford American weapons in any significant quantity, I'm sure they'd be happy to buy them from any number of people who would just love to sell them.
"Ok, last question: how much US technology was sold to ANY communist nation during the cold war?"
How many Western technologies wwere the KGB able to acquire through espionage? That number would be a solid start.