Comment Re:C strings strike again! (Score 1) 156
1978! That's so last millenium!
Quasi-periodic tiling of magnetic spin axii?
Perhaps you meant "axes" (ahk-sees). See also: Irregular plurals from Latin and Greek.
Sorry, don't mean to be pedantic, but made-up plurals are a pet peeve.
</rant>
Unless you live in France, the burden of proof is always on the accuser. So if you want to get your panties in a bunch because some people believe in God, you need some kind of evidence that they are wrong, it's not the other way around.
The burden of proof goes to the one making a positive declaration. In court, that's the accuser. Think of it another way. Religions accuse God of existing, and therefore must bear the burden of proof to support this accusation.
Your personal belief that there is no God is not a fact (unless someone is writing an article about you) and therefore does not qualify as evidence. This belief is shared by about 10% of the American population (14% world-wide) so that makes you part of a minority. Which means that even if the existence of God was to be decided by a jury, by an election or by an "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe" process, odds are that God would win.
Beliefs are mere thoughts, regardless of whether they are subscribed to by a majority or a minority, and do not constitute facts or evidence. One may believe in a provable fact, but the truth of the fact does not depend one your belief.
There's thoughts and there's reality. When they disagree, in the long run, reality wins.
quantity goes up this gains a higher margin with higher quantities. This is why you don't term your 10m a year product line with a 5% return rate. But on a 500k a year product line, 5% may not be as acceptable. So, if OCZ sold 1m drives and crucial 100k... and OCZ's failure rate is 5% and crucial's is 2%, your chances are still higher to get a working drive with OCZ.
To quote someone's Slashdot sig:
Protip: Never go full retard.
US gun ownership is about 89 per 100 people. For comparison, Switzerland has around 46 guns per 100 people and a homicide rate of 0.6 per 100k people. If you look at the list of firearm-related death statistics and compare homicide rates, and cross reference with gun ownership statistics, you'll find no recognizable pattern.
El Salvador, 50 homicides per 100k, 6 guns per 100. Jamaica 47/8. Honduras 47/6. Guatemala 39/13. Swaziland 37/6. Colombia 27/6. Brazil 19/8. Panama 13/22. Mexico 10/15. Philippines 9/5. South Africa 9/13. USA 3/89.
Do the reverse: USA 89/3; Serbia 58/4; Yemen 55/?; Switzerland 46/0.6; Cyprus 36/0.8; Saudi Arabia 35/?; Iraq 34/?; Finland 32/4; Uruguay 32/3; Sweden 32/(1.5?); Norway 31/2; France 31/0.06; Canada 31/0.8. Same story, no pattern.
TL;DR; It's not the guns, it's the crazy.
No, you are quite wrong indeed.
There are bad students out there, we do not live in a perfect happy smiley little world where every human has limitless potential and can do *anything* if only they tried and had good teachers. That nonsense view comes out of what political correctness has done to modern western society.
There are students who truly are unwilling to learn, dont want to be there, and are only in class because they have to.
Perhaps you need to look earlier. Who are your first teachers? Your parents and your early environment. A child can have poor teachers and poor teaching there, and that leaves it mark on them, scars that they'll have to struggle with the rest of their lives. But that struggle began with poor teaching.
There are actually students out there who will never be able to pass certain exams, no matter how good the teachers are and no matter how much they try. Some things are just beyond some people.
If the task or test requires significant physical ability that the student is incapable of performing, maybe. But if the task is primarily mental and the student has a functional brain, I'd disagree. I've taught (tutored, actually) math to kids to were bad, bad, bad at math. High school kids who couldn't do fractions and didn't fully understand numeric place values. Basically, they could do simple arithmetic and that was it. They, their parents and their teachers were convinced they just "couldn't do math". Every single one of those half-dozen kids I've taught passed their math classes and were able to get into college. So maybe I didn't get one of those completely incapable students, but I doubt it. I work on 2 things when I teach: foundational concepts self-belief. It takes a lot of time and a lot of work, but if you can convince your student that it's possible for them to learn the material, you've done the hard part. After that, the foundational concepts are just tools and building blocks and once you get to a certain point, a critical mass of ideas which will vary from student to student, they won't even need you to teach them.
The *real world* is not perfect, humans are not perfect.
If you think that is a cynical view, well then that is utterly irrelevant to my point. Facts are facts, no matter how much we dont or do like that fact.
No, humans aren't perfect and there are a few who have specific physical issues which hinder them. But the vast majority of humans have 1.5kg of functional, self-modifying biological supercomputer in their heads. Sure, some will need more modifying, more programming, more instruction. But all of them are capable of learning. And no, I'm not a shiny-happy-people kind of guy. I'm probably as jaded and cynical as many here on Slashdot, but I do recognize one very simple fact. Stupidity is a choice, the result of laziness. Yes, over 90% of the planet is stupid and getting worse, but it is still a choice.
"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."
