Posts by Shakje 653 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Nov 2007
I've had a look through their T&Cs and can't find anything about marketing firms. I also can't find anything in my account settings to do with marketing (I'm pretty sure you have to provide an easy way to remove yourself from it if you don't untick the box when you join [something I always do anyway]), so isn't passing my details on to a marketing company kind of, well, illegal?
for the really big things (like wars n ting) you can't blame the ideals of religion, but I think it's undeniable that religion enables such actions to be more devastating. For instance, the Crusades were clearly an effort by the Pope to not only make a bit of money but also to unite the warring factions in Europe. The way it was done was sickening, but at its core it was more a power and money thing. The problem I have is this, if it wasn't for the religious reasoning behind it would anywhere near as many people died? Or would the people encountered have been treated anywhere as badly?
Personally my problems with religion lie with its more insidious actions. The indoctrination of children, the criminal negligence of preaching against protection to a country ravaged by AIDS, its ability to influence country politics, or the suppression of women, or how about just the plain violence that's ok because it was done in the name of some beardy? Bashing babies' heads out on rocks, ethnic cleansing, and the treatment of women in captured towns. Sorry, no thanks, I'm not in the business of accepting that something is all right because it's 'religious'.
Every day that I make any effort to find out something new about religion (it still interests me, even though I am more than happy and secure in my 'beliefs') I get more saddened by how easily it pervades everyday life. I really don't bear a grudge against anyone that wants to be religious, but that doesn't mean I'll accept hatred just because it's 'what they believe'.
Apologies for rambling shouty thing.
was a bit dismayed I missed the comments boat on the other piece you did, but good job.
I think everyone has to remember that while radioactive material is inherently dangerous, so is being a few thousand feet in the air. Planes make that risk tiny, and good engineering at nuclear plants make the risk of radioactive material being dangerous to the general public tiny.
It's ok to be scared of high dose radiation, but that doesn't automatically mean you should be scared of nuclear power, in the same way that I'm scared of coming face to face with a tiger, but not too worried about running into one in my back garden or the local park.
I wish more people would read informed articles (like this one) and lookup a little of the science behind it before spouting the usual bullshit that just scares other people. This applies to many things.
so I can't necessarily talk about this, but I think that in some ways you're right.
1) Making classes fun isn't a bad thing, but it's a misrepresentation of what's important, i.e. making classes engaging. The fact that some teachers/school boards think that in order to do that they have to do things in a 'fun' way just shows naivety. While I wouldn't say I'm a big 'reality TV' fan, Jamie's Dream School is actually quite an interesting look at how to get children engaged.
2) While I admire your preciseness in attacking the teaching of something, if the kids are ungrateful and uninterested, can you really blame those kids? I'd guess that either they've had incompetent teachers in the past or present, the classes just aren't good enough to keep them interested, or their parents just don't give enough of a shit about education to help them.
3) There are some stupid qualifications at school-level now, but some of those have arisen because of people like you complaining that kids don't respect society any more. Maybe I'm pigeon-holing you a bit, but you sound like that sort of angry person.
do college students actually read newspapers in general? Most of their reading intake isn't going to be of that sort. How about doing the study on a group of graduates who are more used to analysing information critically? Or professionals? With this study (having only taken information from the article of course) it seems that I could just as easily conclude that the American education system doesn't prepare children for critical analysis as much as it should, so that when they have to analyse something for themselves they panic. If I wanted to be a dick about it I could probably go further and say it's a natural consequence of the high religiosity in America and the idea that believing things based on what so-and-so in authority says is better than actually looking at the facts themselves and making an informed decision. Maybe I should read the study.
The chicks made little or no noise when they were being puffed. That means that the hen was working out some other way that the puffs were a bad thing. Sure the noise she made and her increased heart rate was her maternal instincts kicking in, but how did she know she should protect them? It suggests that she could put herself in their position and realised that it would be unpleasant. Which is empathy. The reason it might not work if you APC another hen's chick is that she wouldn't have cause to react to it even if she could empathise with their situation. The maternal instinct is what determines the nature of the reaction, the empathic response is what determines the need for a reaction.
To the poster below, I'd guess that if the chicken was frightened she would get the APC then that's an empathic response as well. She's put herself in the position of the chicks and realised she doesn't want it to happen to her.
The cool thing is that this sort of behaviour is one of the things that them trick-cyclists attribute to decision making. I.e. you have an empathic ability to place yourself in someone else's position compared to putting yourself in an imaginary situation to make a decision. I sort of got this from The Philosophical Baby, but psychology isn't one of my well-read subjects so I could be completely wrong.
"do actualy get quight a large chunk of money from the local congrigation... To many athist zelots around in my opinion. Most people are agnostic, not athist"
I won't pick up on the spelling because that would just be mean, however:
Atheist - person without belief
Theist - person with belief
Agnostic - without knowledge
Gnostic - with knowledge
So, an atheist is either agnostic or gnostic, just as a theist can be agnostic or gnostic, the difference is that a gnostic atheist is essentially someone who believes that they know there isn't a god, an agnostic atheist is someone who doesn't believe in any god but can't be sure that there isn't one. Pretty much all atheists who are so for rational reasons are agnostics because to be gnostic requires belief, something they've shunned as irrational (myself included).
An agnostic theist would be someone who doesn't believe that they have absolute knowledge that a god exists, but they do believe in a god, whereas a gnostic theist (probably more common I'd guess) believes that a god exists and that they have absolute knowledge that one does.
So let's just be clear here, either you're an atheist or a theist, and you're either a gnostic or agnostic one of those, but it's dead simple really, if you don't believe in any particular god then you're an atheist, no matter how much you might "still be looking". Agnostic or gnostic describes how strong your belief essentially is, not what it is.
If you believe that there's something out there which isn't described by any of the major religions but which is all powerful then you're probably a Deist or a believer in Spinoza's god.
Personally I'm about 6.5ish on the Dawkins' Scale.
"If you want to make a multitouch table for example, the kinect is definitely not the best solution."
Wouldn't the best solution be a multi-touch table?
The guy below the post also said that he can point to a hundred or so Kinect projects and no Move ones, surely that's just because there isn't any way of interacting with the Move yet?
Quite often I feel you're just trolling or strongly disagree with you, but I generally agree with everything you've said in this thread.
For Wikipedia you should just treat it like any other source and judge it on its relative merits. When we were kids we used to just accept everything in books, but most of us (I'd guess that this would be more true of people in professional jobs and, naturally, academia) now realise that books tell big fat lies some of the time, and quote hearsay a lot of the time. Realistically any book which suggests it is in any way factual, or Wikipedia, should be judged on the quality of its references and not on suspicion about whether the article is legitimate or not, or perceived authority. If I am actually trying to learn something on Wikipedia there are some things which really don't need to be checked up on (maths is a particularly obvious one) and some topics where it's important to check the references and make sure they're legitimate and say what the article author is saying they do.
Of course, this doesn't matter if you're just bored and browsing information, because people don't tend to lie about the mundane stuff.
"Whenever I need to consult an encyclopaedia, it is to research information for topics I'm either unfamiliar with, or not fully experienced on. How would I know if an article in Wikipedia is accurate if by definition I am not qualified to make this assessment?"
The real question is, how do you know if an article in anything is accurate? Then just apply the same techniques to Wikipedia. Here's something fun, Wikipedia submitted errors in the EB, how do you assess their validity?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Errors_in_the_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica_that_have_been_corrected_in_Wikipedia
while I'm not sure how much I actually support the idea of taking 30% of subscription services, I have to say there's a lot of fuss about nothing here.
1) It is a GOOD thing for consumers to have one point of access for buying things and makes it a safer shopping experience. You could say that you only buy things off of websites you trust, but I think there is a legitimate concern with that, which should be blatantly clear to anyone involved in IT.
2) If it's too much for you then don't bother. If you can't support that 30% then write your app for something else, if it's good enough it'll still sell. The main problem seems to be that they want the visibility of the app store but don't want to have to pay 30% of their income to Apple. If their profits don't support it they need to either raise the price or stop. Whining about it probably won't change Apple's mind.
3) Complaining about Apple using source that they released for free seems a bit rich. Considering it would be completely different departments anyway...well.
the physics you could relate to would be things like relativity and the fun things that happen near the speed of light and on a quantum level. Just general weirdness. But then you have the problems of:
1) It's too advanced for most kids to really grasp
2) If you apply physics that they will actually grasp, it would be too weakly related to the show to actually hold interest
I reckon you might be able to do something, but it would be more "look at how cool this is" rather than teaching science, the real avenue might be constructing an adventure which incorporated things like Natural History for a short-term exhibition.
On a side-note, I'd be interested whether teaching the real basics of QM to kids would change the way that they view the world, or if it would just confuse them and make them lose interest in science.
so presumably you can point us in the direction of some metrics to prove your point?
The JIT compiler only compiles CLR code into native code ONCE, then simply does an address lookup from then on in. It may be very, very slightly slower on the first run of stuff, but I very much doubt there's a critical difference in the timings (unless there's a difference in resolution of the timings, .NET is limited to 10ms IIRC, but I've run tests on it before and it has performed very well). If you have some figures to back it up, instead of making assumptions, I'll happily apologise and retract. I also can't speak for Java, but I would expect that it does suffer from some slowdown on real time-critical systems because that extra layer does actually exist.
up until the last half hour or so when it all got exceedingly silly. Until it's compared to the other Indy films it's ok as a film, not terrible. The reason the other films got away with so much is that they had a pretty much perfect mix of humour, fantasy, action and good dialogue. The plots were incidental to those other components but held up enough to set the stage for them. The problem I had with DH4.0 was that it just didn't make sense from the word go. You've got international terrorists who are watching these kids, have had access to their apartments, HAVE TO ACTIVATE THE BOMBS before they can be triggered, and then are reliant on the kid pressing escape (the escape key? Seriously? Do these people use computers?). If you had all that explosive, and knew when the person you wanted to kill was in their room, why not just have some sort of trigger? And if you don't care if it looks like an accident or not, why not just shoot them full stop? When you have to be that contrived to make the start of the movie work, I just lose all interest. The great thing about the first films was that, no matter how ridiculous it got, you actually felt like it all made sense because of the slow and well-executed escalation and the fact that the bad guys took the SIMPLEST route to their goal that you could think of, with the really silly stuff near the end. Is it really sensible to wire explosives to the ground floor of a tall building? I don't care, it works in the film, but once you drive a car into a helicopter, the film can't go much further.
Presumably you could plant some memories of being trained to go to Mars in the "astronauts" to convince them that it was real, but then one of them might realise he actually had been to Mars and it's all a setup, and he has to get to Mars and kill the bad guy and turn on the atmosphere generators left by an ancient alien civilisation.
Yup.
I'll be watching that tonight then.
Let's be honest, 90% of people who buy a phone might be vaguely interested in battery life, will have some interest in the camera, but you know what? You give someone a phone that's shiny and easy to use and they'll be sold on it. Under the hood Symbian is a pretty good OS, but things like Ovi, a dire, DIRE touch-screen GUI which was hopelessly bolted on at the last minute, and slowness in the UI (which, given the slimline nature of Symbian is unforgivable) meant that people were being put off buying Nokia phones. Do you think it would matter if they released another version of Symbian? Or do you think that if someone has a really bad experience with an OS, or even a manufacturer, they'll go back that easily?
"Really, if you think that killing Symbian for a platform that means unified software, GUI and hardware and which in 2011 still lacks basic things like cut&paste and multitasking actually is a good thing then you're truly delusional."
You know what, I kind of agree with you. WP7 is generally a really good OS though, I've played around with it and it's easy to use and reasonably intuitive. While we're talking about delusional, you're actually arguing the case for an OS which doesn't orientate the screen 4 ways from the accelerometer, forcing you to remember which 2 ways up you can use it.
For the record, I'm an MS fb, but I do have an iPhone, because it does what I need it to and (yup) it's shiny and easy to use. If there had been a W7 Nokia out I would probably have gone for it, simply because I love their phone cameras.
if you looked at the number of people who believed in the trinity amongst the lay and the priesthood. If there was a staggering difference you might say that the more religiously educated favoured the idea of the trinity. Of course, that doesn't mean it's correct (and being an atheist means that I don't accept the basic premise anyway), but if this was the case, who would have better reasons for believing such? It might also raise interesting questions about a disparity between the priesthood and the lay people. Kinda like climate science. The real question should be, why don't people trust the science (noting, of course, that it goes back far before "Climategate")?
but, while it's an amusing comment, it's probably worth remembering that the church was well established back then and that a Latin Bible was simply another way of subjugating the general populace and controlling knowledge. Without the English translation I strongly doubt that atheism would have prospered so happily.
and don't think that they're without justification (in some cases), and I can understand that at some level it is a response by people who feel powerless to express their discontent in any other way.
But (and it's a very very big but), if you participate you know that it's illegal. Regardless of who you're attacking and whether they're breaking the law, attacking them is illegal. If you do choose to participate then you can't have any complaint if the police catch you.
1) Let's ask a simple question here, if you saw someone falling into a fountain because they were texting, what would be your very first response? Would you immediately run over to help them, scared that they might have broken a hip, or would you actually just laugh a bit first. Let's imagine that they're not even texting, let's say that they were pissed, staggering everywhere, and fell into the fountain. The first response of most people would be to laugh. This is why You've Been Framed is still on our televisions, because there is something inherently funny about people ending up covered in water because of an accident. The issue is whether they should have posted it, but your third paragraph seems to suggest that you think there's no humour in the situation at all.
2) If you watch the clip with sound, you clearly hear someone saying "and this was at 4 this afternoon?" It's not something that's just happened, it's the camera recording system. They're not playing it back, recording it and laughing at it while she's down there, drenched. Who knows why it took 20 minutes to help her? Maybe because they thought she'd get adequate help from the store? Or maybe they didn't even see it? Maybe they got told about it by the store staff afterwards and reviewed the tapes, I mean, how many cameras does an average American mall actually have?
I actually understand exactly why you support her action as well, because I think there has to be lines in the sand based on privacy and CCTV usage, and someone has to do something about it from time to time. Unfortunately she comes across as someone who just can't laugh at herself, and it's so trivial when compared to really bad breaches of privacy that occur and aren't flagged, I just think there could be less time spent on this and more on the serious matters.
that people who like one type of music should like another type of music that uses that music. Take Barber's Adagio for Strings (if it's the study I'm thinking of then this actually was the winner in terms of chill response), everyone who likes the original should also like the trance version, and probably moreso because of the higher BPM. I don't think that many classical afficionados would agree though. It may be a starting point, but there's a lot more to it than just the frequencies used and the overall mix, and if it was just a case of that then you would have favourite songs, not artists, as the frequencies and harmonics would be different across all of their songs. I'm pretty deterministic, but I really don't think it's as simple as that.
Anecdotal evidence doesn't mean that the whole carrier is bad. For example, I've been with VM since they were Telewest, for something like 10 years, and had two biggish problems which were fixed immediately (in the first they gave us Sky Sports free for 3 months, in the second they limited the cost of our package). Every carrier has problems, and for some percentage of their customers those problems will result in awful experiences for their customers. While those experiences might drive you away from a provider on principle, it doesn't really give an impression of the provider overall. So while it's interesting to see these stories, it doesn't really add anything to the discussion, other than sympathy for your awful experience. Judge providers based on customer experience surveys and what they offer you at what price, not on a few examples.
there's not even any evidence for the Exodus. The Bible is far too unreliable to be a primary source, and until events are confirmed by other means I don't think it's that much use historically except as a culture reference. I think you also have to be careful to assume that because something appears in other religious texts it is true. Remembering that many religious texts share other details which could be interpreted as having simply come from the same source mythology.
but I think there's a flaw with one of the things you said cake:
"I argue that those who make the conscious choice to do so are those who have most advanced our civilisation"
That makes the Pope some sort of laser-shooting cybernetic genius in my book.
I guess my real question would be, how do you define a conscious decision and what enables it? I think that the fact that we can 'suppress' emotions is probably just an extension of the mating behaviour seen in apes (i.e. a weak subordinate male won't mess with the dominant one because he probably won't survive) and probably its benefits to society have allowed it to become more ingrained over time. Maybe I can better explain with a slightly unrelated example. Why is it that you don't, when you get home from the shops with some chicken, just tear into it and start munching? Is it really anything to do with suppressing instinct or is it because you're conditioned not to eat raw meat (because generally it's bad for you). Does your stomach turn slightly at the thought of eating raw beef mince? There's nothing wrong with eating it really, and there's all those lovely French sandwiches which take advantage of that.
I sort of agree. The underlying cause of wars is economics, but without religion or politics you wouldn't have the soldiers to do your bidding :) Whether it's a belief in a divine war or a belief in your country, people don't generally risk their lives purely because it's a job, most of them have an underlying belief that they're doing something worthy. With that sort of argument, of course, you can also say that you wouldn't have the weapons without science so science is to blame for almost all war.
While I'm an atheist, I'm not of the opinion that religion is necessarily evil, although I do think it creates an environment which makes it relatively simple to foster corruption.
This is also a bad analogy. It's more like they always have one Ford advert in every break. You know, sort of like how every channel offers now does an advert at the start and end of each break advertising its own programmes. Other people can still advertise, and you also get things like Sky advertising in the middle of ITV breaks, even though they know they're competing against the channel and that channel will use the two most commonly viewed adverts (I'm guessing on this because I suppose it's more likely that you'll be concentrating on the first 30 seconds after the programme stops and your attention is moved to something else, and also more likely to come back early after making a tea and catch the last advert) to promote its own show. Granted ITV have got very little share of the market, but what about, say, Sky Sports? Do they offer prime advertising space for their adverts?
I did prefer the general feel of MW2 multiplayer (until it got overrun with cheaters). If they had just given us that with dedi servers (as a PC player) I would have been happy. 10 years ago it would have been a patch. I don't understand how the engine looks worse and runs significantly worse on my PC than MW2 (hardly a high-spec system any more, but quad-core + HD5770 shouldn't be struggling with it I would have thought). Regardless of IWs sins, they did wonderful things with that engine.
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