pcollins

I don't see how this follows from anything stated in Jost et. al.

Verizon would've likely responded the same way. Why get dragged deeper into a fight than necessary? This works only if you view Verizon as absolved of the content which crosses its network, which is hardly the case. Verizon brands damn near every point along the way--this should be obvious to anyone who flips open their cell phone. They carry the presumption of responsibility for content that crosses their network as a result. Once again, this is a consequence of the business model mobile phone services have adopted. On the same (political) grounds with which we attack radio stations and television broadcasters.

I subscribed to Nature at the time, but the Jost-Greenberg exchange is available online. The original Jost et. al. paper claims that 37 percent of participants were undergraduates, while the remainder spread the across the spectrum. Whatever correlation there is with age is not addressed in this discussion. It's evidence insofar as anyone can follow the inferences behind the operational definitions. Why is that worth anything, or say worth more than observing that these authors work in a field that tips overwhelmingly to the left? There's a simple matter of trust we should establish first.

For who? Abortion rights isn't Verizon's fight, they're just being dragged into it. They're damned if they do and damned if they don't--the question is whether its less costly to take a stand or not.

Hmmm...so the guy had dying woman in his house, books on bioweapons, and bacteria cultures. Nothing to see here.

This aptly describes my position.

No. I'm saying Verizon would rather be portrayed as caving in than championing a controversial cause. The bullies, in this case, would be pro-life interests. This way, they don't have to rock the boat while decreasing their exposure to pro-choice anger.

How does presenting some set of facts carry the additional obligation to advocate accepting them on philosophical grounds? Today's legal environment doesn't prevent a teacher on the public payroll from dismissing the issue by giving students the choice to "take it or leave it." After all, the objective is to test student's familiarity with the subject matter, not their belief or lack thereof in its accuracy. That's irrelevant to the facts not in dispute--specifically the comment made. This is the argument used precisely by defenders of publicly posting the Ten Commandments. The counter-argument is to point out that Congressmen, as officials drawing a federal salary and who act under and with the privileges contained in the speech and debate clause make such comments at public expense.

Because Verizon, unlike the Internet, is an easily identifiable entity. It does, but it goes to highlight that there's lightyears difference between the notion of "end-to-end" in data networks and that in mobile phone communications. OSI greatly diminishes service provider responsibility by spreading it out from the carriers to anyone adding value at any layer. Can you imagine how different things would've been in the walled garden model of AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve triumped in the mid-1990s? The idea isn't to avoid controversy; Verizon would run into that wall no matter what. The question is whether or not it's better for the bottom line to be portrayed as a victim of bullying rather than a champion for some cause. Verizon calculated the former was less expensive.

The distinction is drawn between statements that may lead to an inferred contradiction and statements that endorse a particular view on a religious matter. For example, claiming that evolution is a scientific fact does not require endorsing of the positivist ethic necessary to elevate fact to truth.

Not very. The intersection of the sciences and controversy is so small it's hard for me to get worked about about science as an 'issue.'

Dynamic typing takes a bit of getting used to because its pretty damn easy to loose track of type when piling through highly coupled, large yet poorly documented codebases. This is a problem in most every scripting language and the price you pay for brevity in introspection. That said, I can't agree with bascule that Ruby is especially more programmer friendly than other languages. Semantically it's not introducing anything thing different from Perl and syntactically its extremely close to Python in the 2.1 era. On top of that, Ruby is by far more poorly documented both as a language and in its libraries than either Perl or Python. Disregarding frameworks, I've seen no improvement in the time to deployment or release stability in Ruby projects. Including frameworks, I'd find little advantage in eRuby over any number of Perl or Python templating engines and I'd give preference to DBIC--which merely wraps around a well established, well-supported, enterprise ready database handler--over ActiveRecord. I don't mean to fault the design decisions reached by the Ruby and Rails communities or their issue tracking, but simply noting that language and tools offered often don't offer much to set them apart from competitors and in some key areas fall short. Only to prototype J2EE apps in Win32 shops. I'm not sure how well bundle solutions work in the small to mid-size space, but I don't know any large company that uses them and I imagine you're eventually going to cut away from the database and webserver in favor of something...well...scalable.

The 'bullshit' is necessary, as an alternative reading might be "conservatives think and act decisively yet with a caution rooted in experience, whereas liberals are wishy washy and prone to seizing on any new thinking regardless of its merits." Does anyone doubt that Jost et. al. are poltiical liberals? No. Does that fact color some of the commentary in the paper? Yes. That doesn't mean that their findings aren't rooted in facts. After two rounds of objections and answers in the journals, the original research holds up as well as you can expect something to in the cognitive sciences without reaching the level of DSM authority.

Disabling UAC is unnecessary. If he can't do it as an administrator then he can't do it period.

You want to be a bit more clear on what you mean by 'progressive?'

You don't get to be omniscient without knowing how to get some answers.

Jack Bauerist.

(define (factorial n) (iter 1 1 n)) (define (iter p c c_m) (if (> c c_m) p (iter (* p c) (+ 1 c) c_m))) Time is O(n), space is O(1)

Before you dive into hacking a piece of source, perhaps you should try checking out a project and writing tests that expose known issues.

The extent of math used in string theory is hardly the cause of its lack of verification. It struggles because of key predictions it makes are not testable at this time. The math, if anything, does nothing but allow physicists to make plentiful and more importantly less ambiguous predictions. I think you mean to say that it's better to fit theory directly to experimental results rather than to try and infer it in the derivative manner theoreticians do. I have no dog in that fight, but I'll point out it has little to do with Dirk's paper. Everything he's describing is in the realm of theoretical physics. The absence of math in this context makes it extremely difficult to evaluate his proposals in any meaningful sense. That's where experimentation comes in. I'd need more context about the debate to say anything, but I would hesitantly treat with great importance the correspondence between two theoreticians on a highly conjectural matter. Yes, the fine-tuning problem which motivates this entire discussion. When somebody comes up with something that at least gives a hint that it's testable, then I'll be concerned about what if anything came before the Big Bang. As for Dirk's piece, I don't see how it at all illuminates a possible answer to the question. I object to this paper because it doesn't say much that is obviously meaningful. Dirk spends a good chunk of 15 pages drawing analogies and constructing definitions. By the time you get to his argument, it's inaccessible. Maybe that's because it's a first draft, but the lack of math is really a stumbling block. It also triggers my bullshit warning light.

There is no new math here. In fact, Dirk's 'arguments' and 'analogies' are impenetrably wordy and suspiciously lacking in mathematical development of any kind. I seriously don't see anything of value here, and I hope that's because this first draft is supposed to qualitatively signal some upcoming research.

It's also a first draft that seems to build on a copy of Sean Carroll's GR book and some pop-sci stuff. This Dirk character spends a lot of time on definitions and analogies, little time in actually presenting formal arguments that come close to explaining, let alone justifying, his claims in the abstract.

As I understand Spyman's question, it's two parts. 1. What would an observer in a frame comoving with some spherical mass orbiting a supermassive black hole see if that masses' radius intersected with the horizon such that the center of gravity remains outside. 2. What would a distant observer see? I'd like to actually see the math worked out on this one.

All you have to do is show a set is not closed under an operation. That is, an operation on some subset T in S produces a set U that contains elements not in S. For example, the set of integers 1 through 10 under addition is not closed under binary addition, the generated set contains values from 2 to 20. Hence, the sum can be greater than the whole in two ways, the size of the generated set is larger and so is the maximum value therein.

A massive body's motion through space-time is also affected by the curve. Simplest example is a satellite orbiting the Earth. I chose light only to show that there is a curve to begin with. Not quite sure what you're saying here. Could you clarify? My point was that light travels along a path that is bent by a gravitating body. That curved path is the most direct path through space-time from the light beam's origin through some distant point. A massive body will take a less direct path, but that path is still curved in space-time. Math really helps with this kind of discussion. There are some semantic analogies out there that capture part of the problems in these kind of discussions, but nothing that really captures all of them without resorting to some math. It's physical property is topology, a fancy word for shape. That is, space-time is simply geometry. The reason I used light in my explanation was to as a way to illuminate the geometry of space-time. And as you know, geometry affects how things other than light--massive bodies--move. An analogy would be a ball bearing rolled along the curve of a sink. The sink has a geometry, right? Well, so does space-time, and its geometry of a region of space-time is the result of the distribution of matter and energy inside it. It's actually a valuable exercise for people like me who are working with or still studying the material. Also, I think it's important that scientists try to accurately but clearly break down their knowledge for people who, by and large through their tax dollars, pay their bills. You can learn a lot while trying to explain ideas to others, and on top of that it's a great way to capture that gee-whiz experience that makes the whole exercise fun in the first place.