Is it cheating if you specifically take this class taught by this professor (as opposed to the same class taught by a different professor) because you know her final exam will be open notes and collaborative?
Of course not. Unless the goal of studying is to maximize arbitrary values on a piece of paper they give you at the end.
One need to keep in mind, that "cheating" in school means nothing else than stepping outside arbitrary rule system that is, most of the time, totally opposed to what a honest, rational person would do in real life. Not that it's all bad; education is a training framework.
From my experience porting CUDA code to OpenCL code, CUDA is much cleaner and more succinct since it is able to assume a lot about the underlying hardware.
1. I'm getting really good at predicting what the intellectual hipster perspective on a particular issue will be. I knew yesterday we would see op eds like this.
Pretty much what they did. Overwhelming force. That's how the justice system is supposed to work.
The problem is that these kids were "organized" after a fashion. They were muslims, discontent, and grabbed up by some radical muslim and told that massacring random americans is the way to heaven. They're very unlikely to be the only ones that believe so.
And what choice is there but to move against whatever persons and/or organizations that radicalized their "interpretation of islam". They pointed out that the muslim prophet was a mass-murdering genocidal raider, which is correct, so it's hard to argue against this point. And of course these 2 boys chose to join their prophet's ways, as opposed to denying them. It's an ingenious way for an ideology to create terror, really. You center the ideology around a figure that's described as "perfect"(/holy/enlightened/...), but in reality that figure is a mass-murdering lying cheating bastard. Then of course the vast majority of people will choose to deny that fact (because 90% of people even in the most radicalized islamic country know perfectly well there's nothing good about massacres, and if "the prophet" committed genocide, that means he and his islam is evil), leading to a society that's workable, even if periodic sudden mass-outbursts of violence are unavoidable if you expect people to live in cognitive dissonance, with the associated risk that such an outburst wins over any government in place, destroying everything
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But any preacher can of course trivially use this to get recruits for terror acts against anyone he pleases (anyone he can realistically paint as an enemy of the ideology, which is to say anyone, if the preacher is any good). Now the vast majority of people will choose to maintain their cognitive dissonance and just add this preacher to the list of things they flat-out deny about the world, so the preacher that has just advocated genocide for 30 minutes can easily share dinner with anyone who just listened (When I first saw someone deny in his mind that a door existed to the point that he had to be restrained because he would keep "walking through it". He was hurting himself to the point that restraint + sedation was the only solution. I left that institution still firmly convinced that such people didn't exist, but after a few nights I seem to have come to terms with it).
However some people will chose to end their dissonance, usually under stress, and crucially, at this point they'll have been in the ideology for years and years, with everybody they know telling them that islam is good and great and can't be criticized. Then this "great insight" comes, that they've known about for decades too : islam works by ambushes and genocide, that's how the prophet did it, that's how muslims should do it. And at that point they will be extremely vulnerable to "suggestions" from said preacher, and of course they'll be looking to imitate what their prophet did, and they'll be looking for exactly the kind of mission that the preacher is likely to give them : ambush and kill innocents who are part of a group that "opposes" islam (and the prophet massacred muslims that he accused of allying with an enemy just the same, so no need to worry about killing a few traitor muslims).
No amount of policies can prevent psychological stress, nor by the way, would you want to do that. Stress may be the way to insanity, but it's also the way to improving yourself. Aside from that, of course you can't "end" psychological stress (though of course you can massively reduce it by providing basic needs services). But you'll never minimize it to the point the supply of terrorists dries up. And of course there's going to be points where the economy of the country is stressed, and there's an explosion in the number of candidate terrorists.
As a bonus, any society with this ideology can of course not allow "free" preachers, or any form of freedom of ideology. That would lead to mass acts of terrorism in short order (what we're about to see in Europe and America). So any society where this ideology takes root either becomes a complete monoculture or destroys the "invading" ideology, at great cost.
I bet this is how a lot of the terror ideologies work, not just islam. This seems like it's roughly the same concept as the stalinism and leninism concepts of communism (and of course the lesser ones too, with Castro, Guevara* and Chavez), or things like the Japanese ideology before WWII, and of course nazism, any such person cultus with anything less than a perfect being like Buddha or Jesus, that no rational being can really criticize any actions of (which means that Christian and Buddhist "terrorists" exist, except they do what Jesus and Buddha did, probably leading to self-sacrifice for a noble cause, because these are ideologies where people's cognitive dissonance has to deny the fact that they themselves are not as moral as their ideology). I bet this is what a "meme" virus looks like, like Hitches professed exist.
Of course negative ideologies (where the ideology is morally worse than most human minds that partake in it) like islam would be fundamentally unstable, and will destroy themselves if they don't have (realistic) enemies, or insufficient access to their enemies. But small pockets will survive even then, ready to start again, in slightly different forms. So preventing terror is the exact same thing as eradicating islam itself, problem is that of course you're never going to be able to do that without attacking individuals.
* Guevara is a perfect example. He's a hero of commusnism, but it is well documented he randomly killed people for fun when they can't defend themselves. And that's not all he's reputed to do either.
The point may be that the personification of some religions/ideologies can reasonably be considered as morally a significantly better person than "average", like Jesus or Buddha, whereas other religions/ideologies, like Islam, have a morally reprehensible personification.
The point seems to be that in neither case does the "average" follower become any better or worse, but the extremists of those religions are significantly different. In every case the extremists become closer to the idealized figures from the ideology, so Christians are prone to self sacrifice, Buddhists are prone to an ascetic, isolated life, and Muslims are prone to violence if this happens.
Not sure about how it causes mono-culture. It seems to me at the beginning of the 20th century, every region on earth was a mono-culture, no matter it's ideology.
Do you actually believe this crap as stated, or were you going to go back and add "and Judaism and Christianity" to that "Islam is a terror religion" stuff you were spewing?
It's the Old Testament that's the terror religion, whether as practiced by Mohammed or by Moses or by the Crusaders.
And Moslems react when they think their religion is under attack just like Christians do. Have a look at some of the IRA types who were into butchering Irish Protestants. They were "defending" the Catholics in their minds.
It's not "kill the infidels to get into heaven". The religion is merely the language they use to frame the real motivation, which can be defensiveness, reaction, or even sheer prejudice.
And not all the bombers are loonies, by the way, not even the suicidal ones. If the official story so far is correct, the Boston two seem to be good planners with a healthy sense of self-preservation.
> There is no expectation of danger while spectating at the Boston Marathon.
You are in the presence of many other human beings. You are always in a present state of danger around everyone, ever. It is naive to think you can predict the actions of others.
I'm not saying be paranoid, I'm saying treat people like people and not faces in a crowd. You don't know their intentions with rare exception to those you actually know.
> There is no expectation of danger while spectating at the Boston Marathon.
There also is no expectation of getting struck by lightning while spectating at the Boston Marathon, yet that is much more likely to happen than getting hit by a terrorist's bomb.
Yes, which is why we don't hold large public events in the middle of a thunderstorm. And when a thunderstorm rolls into major public events, we do evacuate them.
Unless you're trying to say that the odds of being struct by lightning while spectating the Boston Marathon, on a clear sunny day, is high.
Perhaps then we can say there should be some expectation of terrorism as long as the US continues to elect leaders that pursue this sort of foreign policy in the Middle East.
> There also is no expectation of getting struck by lightning while spectating at the Boston Marathon, yet that is much more likely to happen than getting hit by a terrorist's bomb.
It doesn't matter. People can go indoors if thunderclouds form. Terrorist attacks freak people out because such attacks make people feel powerless to control the risk.
The OP said "It's not every day that people have their legs blown off while enjoying a public social event."
It's an obvious appeal to emotion that doesn't refute the point that terrorist attacks are so infrequent that the average person ought to worry more about, say, slipping and falling in their bath tubs than getting killed by a terrorist.
