Don't get me wrong, I understand it, and am willing to part with money in order to help the school district handle more students, keep par with inflation (so they don't have to gut all the goodies and extras, which in the end are some of the few truly valuable parts of the institutions), and all that good stuff, but I am still waiting for the study that links higher school district budgets with more educated students. I wouldn't be upset if they could justify it. But they don't bother!

Schools seem to be one of those few industries where they can mandate steep price hikes practically overnight in order for you to get... the same damned thing. The only other one that springs to mind is telcos.

My school district just declared that their budget is going to increase by 40% over the next 4 years, to over $180 million! Why not throw some of these in there too?? They already announced those numbers so they can let us know that unless we pass gargantuan levies over the next three years, they'll be $70 million in the hole by then - why not throw in some incredibly expensive chairs, too?

Of course it's protecting them.

It can't sell them to corporations if they're damaged!

</sarcasm>

torrent link please.

I don't frequently take the time to feed the trolls, but It's better than what I'm working on right now, and you were rather rude, so...

Infinity is a great abstraction, and perhaps difficult for anyone but great minds such as yourself to truly grasp. For practical purposes, however, most people DO understand it to mean something to the effect of "bigger than the biggest number I can imagine."

It's a turn of phrase. I was alluding to its zero-ness. Just in case your autism interferes with your comprehension in the future, sometimes when people write or speak, they use literary devices to add color to what they say. Best of luck with that.

Once again, allusion. My post might be your first exposure to it, but I didn't invent it.

Get real. People can't intuitively imagine one thousand doors any more than they can intuitively imagine infinite doors. Perhaps when I tell you to imagine 1000 doors, you can pull up a room with each of them labeled, clearly in view, but the majority of humans can't imagine more than 6 or 7 distinct things at once. A thousand, a million, infinite, it doesn't matter. They'll use the same machinery to picture it - "a huge number bigger than I can imagine."

I would argue that the Monty Hall problem is difficult because people don't take into account the fact that the result is NOT path independent.

It would be much easier (I think) to understand intuitively if people realized that it was highly likely that they picked the wrong door to start. A more intuitive way of explaining the problem to somebody would be to increase the number of doors - to say, infinity. If there are infinity minus one closed doors with goats behind them, and a single door with a car behind it, the odds are obviously very high that you picked a goat. The probability that you picked the car is vanishingly small. Therefore, when the host opens every door except yours and one other, and they all reveal goats, the odds are very, very high that the other door hides a car, and yours hides a goat.

Now, reduce that to 3 doors. The same logic applies.

I think you forgot long cat.

From everything I learned in school, long cat is long.

Please, for the love of math, stop this.

I'm not going to pull a no-true-Scotsman and say that there aren't people like you described that bill themselves as Libertarian, but at the same time most of us don't fit your mold, so please stop accusing us. It's as empty as if someone slandered socialists, claiming that they would starve to death without the government to hold their spoon. It's disingenuous and insulting, and does nothing to open up productive discourse, but does a lot to prevent it.

Libertarians are in favor of individualism and individual responsibility. Only the most shortsighted and foolish people are in favor of letting a stranger's life be destroyed because they made a hardheaded decision.

The Libertarian response to this is to wonder why they were letting their grandson recklessly burn garbage.

The Libertarian response to this is to expect people to be responsible enough to pay their fire department fees.

The Libertarian response to this is to expect the firefighters to prevent externalities by putting the fire out, and sending the fools who caused it the bill.

It is NOT the Libertarian response to this to herald it as a victory of the free market, or some such nonsense.

If someone in earnest represents Libertarian philosophy to you as "fuck you, I've got mine," that person probably has an ulterior motive, and is using the word Libertarian to mask their true intent. Some of us might take it pretty far, but at it's core, Libertarianism derives its logic from the Non-Aggression Principle. I think a quick reading would find that it takes a twisted interpretation to come to the conclusion that Libertarians encourage the destitution of people that make simple mistakes.

TL;DR: Please, can't we just be rational about these things, instead of just flatly slandering each other?

I feel at times like this that English may be short a word. Now, I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment, but pedants like to flock to statements like this and say things like, "anything is possible!" On the flip side though, a word like improbable simply doesn't properly convey the true odds of this happening (not that anyone can guess the TRUE odds, but, really, first contact? pshaw).

I don't have the largest possible vocabulary out there, so there may already be such a word, but I like portmanteaus, so might I propose improbsible?

That's a fantastic point. I should have been more specific - what I meant was the only reason security concerns and bugs are being found out in a pre-alpha is that it is open. It is exceedingly rare that a closed piece of software releases up a pre-alpha for general review (and hence, you wouldn't have ever even known about them). In more mature released closed software, though, you're right that my point holds no water.

Biases and accusations of bias run rampant on slashdot. So yes, I was trying to avoid just that. I've followed them mostly because I found their way of getting funding novel, and have been curious how it would pan out in the end.

Okay, I have no horse in this race, as I only have a passing interest in online social networks (enough to read the article, but not enough to join one), so I am not very passionate about this news in one way or another, but...

Isn't that why it's called pre-Alpha software?? I mean, bugs happen. In open architectures, you fix them. If this were a closed software project, you wouldn't even know about them. If there were endemic, critical flaws inherent in their underlying assumptions going into this project, then that would be news, but "oversold Alpha software contains bugs!!!" is hardly worth noting. Being free software, many eyes will ensure that the Beta version is better, presumably.

Ironic then that the name means something to the effect of "pointing to your heart's desire". Having eaten a fair amount of Dim Sum, I somehow think that it got that name for a reason.

Feel free to leave all of the worthwhile food in the world to people with taste buds, though. We'll leave you all the Whoppers you can eat.