I would like to share in this sort of optimism, but the simple fact is modern rocketry developed out of a desire for long range ballistic missiles and most of the other countries that have major space programs tend to be nuclear powers. I don't know offhand how difficult it would be for UAE to get their hands on enriched uranium, (or how difficult it would be for them to sell some large ballistic missiles to, say, Pakistan at some point down the road), but I would tentatively suggest that these details are worth keeping a close eye on as we applaud the official/stated goal of scientific exploration.

This proportion has been trending down for centuries. And take a look at what they mean by "God"--much of the time, they are not talking about the guy Abraham chatted with. Also: Arguably the most important scientist of all time--the inventor of optics, differential calculus and integral calculus--had no doubt about the existence of alchemy. Science is a thing you do or you don't do; it isn't an identity.

If you want to define your magic and/or your god as a metaphor or something amorphous as to refer to anything, that's true. Science doesn't have much ot say about things that are merely poetically true, metaphorical or too incoherent to mean anything.

But the moment you start making claims about the way things are, the way things were, or the way things will be then science DOES have something to say about that, even if that something is "we do not have any data to reach conclusions or even speculate about X at this time."

This doesn't hold nationwide.

Also, I think there is a hard-to-quantify currency of "bad school / bad teachers / bad students." involved here that ensures failure even in cases where the dollars and cents are equalized. Schools get bad reps, well-off parents with (on average) kids doing well in school do their best to avoid them, poor parents can't and parents of hooligans don't care so the reputation continues to spiral downward, teachers prefer not to work with the students because of the stress (exacerbated by standardized testing, which is fine in principle but the accountability of teachers bit is often not set up correctly) and lack of job satisfaction so the teachers that do end up there are the apathetic or incompetent, performance deteriorates even further, etc. This process can operate even if the salaries of teachers remains constant. The annual operating budget also presumably neglects static assets like the value of the buildings (which are usually MUCH shittier, although the location of the land within city limits might offset this a bit.)

I don't necessarily say I have a good solution for this (the "magnet school" program was good in theory but laughable in practice), but 1. I don't blame the liberals. and 2. It could indeed be solved by an extremely (likely prohibitively) large outlay of money to make the buildings themselves attractive and to bring in higher quality teachers.

I should have mentioned some details here: many Islamic hardliners (primarily in the Arab world) decry TV as unIslamic and as I recall, ISIS has done things like ban the display of mannequins (including clothed male ones, IIRC). So, I didn't mean to imply that no one had this belief in animal/human aniconism any more--it's just that this taboo it isn't being strictly enforced by anyone at the moment, to my knowledge. (Probably on the grounds of it being too inconvenient and socially unpopular.) The concept is still alive; the practice/enforcement remains lax and dormant on purely pragmatic grounds--they have bigger fish to fry, but they certainly have not forgotten.

If you think this is too much of a stretch, I call your attention again to the soft censorship of pigs going on in the UK--my overall point here was simply that the Muhammad thing was simply an easy rallying point for the pro-censorship brigade, and that there is obviously plenty more for them to take offense over even if they won this first battle. The battle isn't over this one taboo; it's over whether or not this kind of offense-taking and sensitivity-showing is compatible with a free society.

Reasonable, yes. Relevant, no. The event was, after all, unambiguously named "Draw the Prophet Muhammad" and I assume there is no significant movement calling on non-Aborigenes to refrain from depicting or naming the dead in private, amongst themselves.

The broader point I'd really like to harp on here is that drawing Muhammad is not an automatic insult against all Muslims. This particular event probably wasn't a great example of this, but just look at Molly Norris--in hiding for the past 5 years after she drew neutral and lighthearted depictions of Muhammad and wound up on some hit lists because of it.

Were legions and legions of non-violent Muslims deeply offended by these neutral drawings? Were they offended by those of the liberal Muslim Maajid Nawaz? Were they offended by those of conservative Shia Muslims? None of these three examples were intended to cause offense except (in the case of the first two) offense to violent jihadis.

Communication is a two-way street here. If there is a misunderstanding that causes non-jihadi Muslims to be horribly offended by neutral or positive depictions, then the solution is to educate (or dare I say, "assimilate") them. But if among some Muslims there is no 'misunderstanding' at all and they truly do believe that their religious taboos must be respected by non-believers (including other Muslims who have a different set of beliefs)... then those people are spiritual friends of the jihadis and they should be called out as such.

Very roughly put: "If you're offended, you're my enemy. If you're not offended, then you're not my enemy and this was never directed at you to begin with." This is an oversimplification that misses some caveats and plot twists (like Gellar being an asshole), but it captures the essence of why so many of us think this "indiscriminately punching down" characterization is absurd.

How deep is your head in the sand? Christ almighty, school funding is based on property taxes. These poor-er schools are filled with poor-er teachers and poor-er students--oh yes, this is all obviously the fault of the liberals! Why, it was obviously the liberals who insisted on the geographic school zoning policies that (while obviously sensible from a busing standpoint) prevent strata mixing and perpetuate the stigma of the decaying schools you speak of, making it harder to attract either decent teachers or "school-choice" parents. It was obviously the liberals who insisted on using decaying structures from the 1950s instead of building attractive new campuses (yes, this is shallow but it is still a huge factor for attracting better teachers and choosy parents.)

I am actually much more pro-standardized testing and pro-accountability than most people around here, but to blame run-down schools on the "liberals" instead of the conservative unwillingness to subsidize an infrastructure similar to what the upper middle class suburban kids have access to is laughable.

Nonsense. This empowers the middle and upper-middle class, not the parents who do not have the time or money necessary to screw around driving their kids to a different school across town. Accountability is a good thing, but vouchers and school choice is a regressive "solution" that further concentrates and exacerbates the problem among those least able to cope with it.

Now, if you want an actual example of "liberal" (more accurately, "progressive") harm being done, the anti-gentrification and anti-development brigades have plenty of blood on their hands re: inner city decay.

I'm fuzzy on the details, but Flash animation lends itself to a particular style. The Drawn Together series vs. the standalone movie is an interesting example of someone taking traditional animation and (for the movie) switching to Flash for the cost savings. They tried to keep the style the same and it was fairly similar but when you looked at the movements of the characters they carried the unmistakable hallmark of being Flash animation.

While I don't actively hate it pixel art, I agree it's overused. If you're not specifically going for a retro vibe, I don't really see it as attractive. I think decrying the decline of this 'art form' is definitely premature at this point.

But the alternative in the 2D universe is all too often Flash or Flash-style animation, which IMO is a harbinger of cheesiness and not very attractive looking at all. It's very garish and cartoony--given the choice between the two I think I'd rather have pixel art, since (for me) it's a bit easier on the eyes, draws less attention to itself once you've been playing it for a bit.

What I really miss is that one art form that has been absolutely massacred by the trio of pixel art, flash graphics and (the ever easier to implement) 3D graphics--high quality sprite artwork. Think late 90s / early 2000s RTSes and CRPGs like Starcraft, Diablo 1/2, Fallout 1/2, Planescape Torment, Baldur's Gate, etc. If you have any of these games a high resolution makeover (the sad part is, in many cases higher resolution versions of many of the sprites probably existed on the artists' hard drives at the time) and they would look rather good. Improve the animations a bit (either by using 2.5D or by generating 2D sprites from 3D models) and I really think it could rival many of today's 3D games, for at least somewhat less money. (I'm not sure how much quality 2D artists cost vs. high end 3D graphics, so I couldn't say for sure how much less.) Scaling to different resolutions would be an issue, but not an impossible one and on the plus side you wouldn't have to worry about graphics card performance at all...

But alas, the AAA developers simply aren't going to sully themselves with such oldschool nonsense, and the indie developers are inevitably going to gravitate towards pixel art or cartoony Flash art due to the cost savings.

Fair enough, as long as we don't discriminate for that list of commonplace "addictions": smartphones, Facebook, celebrity gossip, cars, TV shows, fan fiction, antidepressants, sports, bodybuilding, shopping, religion, (over)eating, etc.

While "addiction" is a nebulous and overused concept, I agree that obsession with anything could potentially be harmful. But surely you can see that pathologizing certain popular activities and not others is disingenuous.

Talking about correlation and causation is also rather important but I was asking for something a little more fundamental--exposing the term "statistically insignificant" for the bullshit that it is.

Maybe the mainstream media can't understand anything more complicated than that woefully misleading phrase, but why can't "techie news" and "news for nerds" give us the details? As-is, we can't have any sort of meaningful discussion here about the results of this experiment; we can only speculate.

Look, it is two thousand freaking fifteen. This is an article from some site called "Techie News" being re-reported at Slashdot. Can we please get a little ridicule of this supposed binary concept of "statistical significance" ? It would take us one or two sentences to tell us the actual numbers involved--the expected value, expected deviation, margin of error, confidence level, etc.

And then when all's said and done, if indeed the level of significance was too low (e.g. p too high), maybe we could get a Bayesian or two in here to criticize the traditional 5% value is being arbitrary and tell us all a little about the Frequentist vs. Bayesian rivalry in statistics that persists to this day? (Obligatory XKCDs: https://xkcd.com/1132/ , https://xkcd.com/882/)

Old people do it too (arguably moreso), but it's not called "whining"--it's called "grouching" or "grumbling" or "ranting" or "bitching" something. I mean hell, just look at the "get off my lawn!" meme we have here. This phrase is always, ALWAYS attached to a rant that would, if uttered by a kid, be considered "whining".

(Disclaimer: I am on balance anti-systemd although I freely admit I'm not familiar enough with the specifics to be confident in my appraisal.)

Just take a look at the systemd fiasco for a great example of this. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to be against it (even vehemently against it, from what I've seen so far), but the average post I see arguing against it is a pile of self-centered, self-entitled whining I've ever seen. It introduces a new standard for "no reason", boo fucking hoo. It's not at all uncommon to hear you greybeards explicitly say that you don't want to learn a new standard, period. Just complain and complain and complain that you can't do X any more... oh wait... there's a new tool that does everything the old tool did and more? Who the hell cares--why should *you* ever have to learn anything new!? Goddamn kids fixing things that aren't broken! I'm not whining; I'm righteously indignant!

You're too wrapped up in your "real work" to even notice that half of the claims you make against systemd are FUD-fabricated bullshit (again, my disclaimer: the other half of the criticisms seem valid. And on a big picture level, of course it's terribly anti-UNIX and Pottering's rambling justifications for this shit is terrifying.) But just stop and think--how arrogant would this attitude seem if it was coming from a recent grad? And as the experienced ones, you guys are supposed to know better.

Not a new concept or phenomenon. You should've seen how the Victorians did things.

Yeah, kids still do that all the damn time. Just because in some isolated cases & areas the cops have gotten uppity and called CPS doesn't mean it's the norm. If you live within a couple miles of the schools near where I live, you are REQUIRED to walk/bike/skateboard to school--no buses are provided.

The headline-grabbing liberals in a handful of upper-middle / upper class towns are not even remotely representative of the country as a whole. For every hyper-egalitarian anti-competitive nutjob teacher (or parent) out there, there are fifty burned out and working to get by just as their parents did. Harder, even--average weekly hours worked by Americans have been steadily increasing, not decreasing. This is not a country of millionaires. Most parents do not have the luxury of behaving like whatever punching bag O'Reilly is roasting this week.

Ironically enough, the overprotective parents and cops are falling prey to the same trap you've apparently fallen into--believing the bullshit the infotainment media sells you. The scaremongers still seem to believe that crime is rising, well over 20 years into a major decline. And you seem to believe that most people are overreacting, despite the fact that most parents don't have the time, money or energy to bother overreacting, because they are in fact working harder (or at least longer) than their parents ever did and (adjusting for inflation) earning less for it.

One more major detail you failed to mention: my parents didn't need a degree to get a reasonable job. My grandparents' generation didn't need a degree to get a GREAT job. The jobs themselves haven't changed very much; only the requirements have. This is a result of increased prosperity combined with an enabling government and horribly (if understandably) cynical universities that realize that fleecing millions of undergrads is the only way they are going to be able to fund their grad students' and postdocs' research. So if there is a tiny bit of increase in the so-called "entitlement attitude", well, maybe it has something to do with the fact that our society has just recently begun demanding indentured servitude for anything more complicated than flipping burgers.

They aren't. Overall, the Amish have a pretty horrendous view of how we should live but when it comes to figuring out how we can coexist with them, I would hope you can see that the situation is not at all the same.

Incorrect. The belief that I say is crap is the belief that it is wrong to draw Muhammad. My opinions on idol worship[1] are irrelevant. I do not accept the logic of these religious homicidal maniacs, nor the logic of the men who authored the relevant hadith.

As for muddying the waters, well, the simple approach has already been tried: attacking and/or flouting bad beliefs is an inherently good act. But I admit there could be exceptions to this principle, hence the wider discussion


1.It depends on what that involves. If there's supernatural nonsense then no, I probably don't hold a high opinion of it

There seems to be a large amount of people who failed to grasp your point, then. Would you like to try to clarify it while you are still able to post here?