Another thing worth noting is that a small percentage of people choose the other two options. Thus, it can be logically inferred that there's an evolutionary advantage to having a few hermits and sociopaths as a sort of a failsafe in the relatively rare situations where being a hermit or a sociopath confers a survival advantage compared with normal, functioning members of a modern society, such as plagues or corporate boardrooms.
That's remotely possible, but if so, it means Samsung has no cojones. After all, they haven't strong-armed Apple into dropping support so quickly. Either way, it makes Samsung look bad, just for different reasons.
That is interesting, please continue. Tell me s'more about these campfire activities.
The closest anyone has come up with is the "was this review helpful?" but that gets abused easily.
The big problem with the helpful/not helpful dichotomy as a means for rating reviewers is that it fails to take into account why the reviewer didn't find it helpful. What the system needs, IMO, is to ask a second question at that point:
Did you find the review not helpful because (check all that apply):
A review marked with the fourth one will get flagged for review by a human, and if verified to be crap, will lower the reviewer's reputation for everyone, and will be removed.
A review marked with the third one (factually incorrect) will just lower the reviewer's reputation, but at least initially by a smaller amount than a "Helpful" vote increases it. The more reviews this occurs in, the more negatively each negative impacts that person's score, so if a person consistently lies, the negatives count more and more, until they greatly outweigh the positives. However, that balance should only tip when those negatives come from unique users (so that one user can't just mark every review by a particular reviewer as unhelpful and have a bigger impact than marking a single review that way), and those ratings should be cancelled out by a sufficient number of positive reviews, ensuring that a small number of people can't attack a reviewer by each reporting one of his or her reviews as factually incorrect.
A review marked with the first two options ("not interested" and "I disagree") will lower the reviewer's reputation, but only for that reviewer and other people whose "not interested" and "I disagree" ratings on other goods and services are statistically similar to those of the reviewer. This allows users to get better, more individualized reviews that are more likely to match their interests and concerns, without adversely penalizing other people who might be interested in and concerned about the same things as the reviewer in question. To that end, instead of "44 out of 50 people found this helpful", it would say "44 out of 50 people whose tastes match yours found this helpful", such that other users of the site might well see completely different numbers.
And users who frequently give "not helpful" ratings with more than two boxes checked, but rarely give "helpful" ratings, should have progressively smaller impact on the overall helpfulness rating for the reviews that they rate, until at some point their helpful/not helpful ratings end up getting thrown away entirely (except in their own view).
the author shows by his very writing of the article just how bad science education is in the u.s. that is, he himself is a victim of the very low standards and the lack of teaching and emphasis on philosophy of science
That's actually kind of funny. The author is apparently French, lives in Paris, and was educated at the école des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de Paris.
I know this one. It's something about the rightful beneficiary of the estate of Prince Akeem Joffer.
Of course, if it's a minor road, you might be able to save a lot of power by not showing the lines unless there's somebody actually on the road (at least during the day, when cars cast shadows). Then again, I don't suppose you would typically need movable lines on a minor road, so... never mind.
Another approach might be something more passive, where the line areas become reflective when an electrical charge causes them to line up in a certain way, so that the sun provides all the light, and where the line areas change to be transparent when you polarize them the other way, thus showing the relatively dark surface of the solar cells. Then, you could use the LEDs only at night, when the light requirements are much lower, or come up with a means of tweaking the polarity so that the lines reflect the headlights.
If you don't want to be a financial drain to those you love then you must try to make sure you have assets available for yourself should you require them at that age. Or, when the time comes you move to a state where whatever aid is available to you (SS, SSI, whatever) brings more bang for your buck.
Or ENJOY the fact that your family is taking care of YOU now. The whole circle of life thing.
My mother retired to AZ. She had zero money saved, got a mobile home for $500 in 'decent' condition and had $1700/mo coming in (pension + social security). That's QUITE a comfortable income in Arizona. She lived there until she was 82 (about 10 years) when she came back to be closer to family and entered an assisted living home. Her memory isn't great, can't controller her bladder that well, needs help taking her meds regularly and requires a walker, but she's still truckin'. Still smokes a half-pack a day and walks to the near by gas station store to pick up her cigs if we dont bring them to her.
He's wrong. The problem is that the concept of "God" is un-falsifiable. So you can always tack "because God wanted it that way" onto anything.
Which is relevant how? This is what makes religious belief not a science, but that has zero bearing on whether science makes religion irrelevant, except in the minds of people who already believe it to be.
This bizarre misunderstanding of science yields the paradox that even as we expect the impossible from science ("Please, Mr Economist, peer into your crystal ball and tell us what will happen if Obama raises/cuts taxes"), we also have a very anti-scientific mindset in many areas.
He thinks that Economics is a science. That's how wrong he is.
I think you seriously misread that bit. What he said was that people who don't understand science believe that it can explain things like what would happen if the President raises or lowers taxes. In other words, he's saying that economics is not a science.
And in that regard, he is wrong, and so are you (unless that was a typo). At its core, economics is about making hypotheses about how a complex system will react to an event, then observing how it actually reacts and falsifying those hypotheses. Or at least that's what economics is supposed to be about, Reagonomics notwithstanding.
"What's the point of living when their is no real enjoyment?"
This is not some "universal" state -- there will be less things to enjoy, but most likely there will still be enjoyment.
"When it hurts to get out of bed and you can't go and do what you want when you want?"
Then you change your expectation of yourself. You DON'T go and do what you want WHEN you want. You rely more on others and your world will grow "smaller". So long as long as the pain can be managed...
"When you aren't living but just existing and waiting to die?"
That's something else. If you are stuck on a machine completely unable to interact with the world around you, then yes. But that needs to be two-way -- there must be someone on the OTHER end of that (family or friends) who want to interact with you.
"I can see his point easily enough."
I can UNDERSTAND his point. I don't AGREE with it. I'm not saying "forced life" under any condition, of course.
"I'm pretty sure that if I get cancer after 70 I'm just going to start the bucket list."
My mother-in-law has cancer. She's 80. Aside from age related dementia (and the limitations that come along with that) she's doing great and enjoying her home, garden, family and life in general.
"I don't want to be 90 laying in bed waiting for someone to come change my diaper."
Ever read "Tuesday's with Morrie"? I like his outlook on life when HE came to having someone else wipe his arse.
When you ask "why is the universe here" the first thing to notice is you are giving human intent to something that has no intent. It is like asking "why does my shirt want to be blue?"
No, it is like asking, "Why does this shirt exist." It isn't anthropomorphizing the shirt; it is merely assuming that there is a reason for the shirt to exist. In that case, the answer is obvious: because someone created it. Asking the same question about a plant gets you the answer, "because the seed fell on fertile soil and grew." It may or may not have been planted by a human; if it was, then the answer is interesting. If it merely blew in, then the answer is also interesting, but for different reasons.
Asking why the universe exists is a reasonable question. It is a question that may or may not be impossible to answer with science in any useful fashion, if only because science occurs within the universe, and thus probably cannot answer questions about anything that occurs outside that universe.
Religion is one approach to answering the questions that science cannot feasibly answer. It is not the only approach, certainly, but that makes it no less useful than philosophy or any other nonscientific field that concerns the contents of the hearts of man. Where religion strays into problem territory is when it attempts to answer questions that science can answer. Those bounds are constantly shifting as science improves, hence the perceived conflict between the two. However, that conflict is illusory. After all, we can explain religion, or at least the evolutionary path that led us to have religion, scientifically. Therefore, religion is at its core a natural phenomenon that is no less a part of every human being than the desire for knowledge itself.
Science is more than capable of contemplating the cause of anything. It may not be good at anthropomorphizing natural phenomena and giving it intent (like wondering why the universe was created), but that is simply because scientific reasoning easily dismisses such thought as not only irrelevant but ultimately incorrect.
So you're saying that Richard Fenyman was wrong?
. I do not believe that science can disprove the existence of God; I think that is impossible. And if it is impossible, is not a belief in science and in a God – an ordinary God of religion — a consistent possibility?
Yes, it is consistent. Despite the fact that I said that more than half of the scientists don't believe in God, many scientists do believe in both science and God, in a perfectly consistent way. But this consistency, although possible, is not easy to attain....
Why are you right, and he wrong? Why are you right and the many sciences that believe in God are wrong about that?
Perhaps the answer is here:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- Hamlet (1.5.167-8)
Being an atheist doesn't make you smarter any anyone else, it just makes you an atheist.
Ultimately, there are really only three approaches to safety: treat others like you wish to be treated and hope that they reciprocate, wall yourself in and protect yourself from any situation where you would have to put trust in others, or kill everybody else before they kill you. The second approach might work, but isolation is a horrible experience for most people. The third approach, when viewed rationally, leads to ever-escalating violence. This leaves you with only one sensible option.
This. You pretty much have to explain things in an anvilicious way for them to "get" the basic concepts, from what I've seen. They're just like the American public when it comes to technology; most know how to turn on a computer, open "the Internet" (Internet Explorer or, if you're really lucky, Safari), and "go to" Facebook. If you want them to understand, you have to explain it to them like you'd explain it to someone in the 1800s, except with the assumption that they know the names (and little more than the names) of websites.
For example:
The purpose of net neutrality is to prevent cable/Internet companies like Comcast from artificially limiting the speed (and thus quality) of movies on Netflix to pressure you to rent more expensive movies through Comcast On Demand instead, and to prevent them from extorting extra fees from Netflix in exchange for not limiting them in this way.
That's the minimum level of anviliciousness required. Not only does it have to be simple, but it has to be incredibly obvious why every random person who doesn't understand computers should care. When you word it like I worded it above, they get the point. When you don't, their eyes glaze over.
If you get a really highly educated journalist, you might be able to go on from there to say that every time a new technology comes out, it uses more bandwidth than what came before it. And every time, the ISPs have fought to restrict it to keep costs down. The only thing that has enabled the Internet to become as amazing as it is is that customers have fought back and demanded that their service get fast enough to handle the traffic. But ISPs are now fighting against that by pressuring companies like Netflix to pay them money to keep the service to their customers fast. And the goal of net neutrality is to stop that anticompetitive extortion.
But this requires you to get someone who didn't sleep through high school economics, so don't count on it.
Right. The correct solution is to break up the monopolies, requiring the company that owns the physical infrastructure to be a nonprofit that non-prejudicially leases access to that infrastructure to any other company that wants to use it. Such a design gives the wire provider the natural advantages of a monopoly without them being able to capitalize on it for profit (in part because they are limited to providing point-to-point fibers, and are forbidden from ever providing Internet service), and ensures that multiple ISPs can easily compete in any area without having to buy their way past the high barrier to entry.
And those wire providers should be common carriers, complete with the requirement for universal access within the areas they serve, and the state should build out infrastructure as needed to make it truly universal, spawning off nonprofits as it does so.
New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you. - David Letterman
