Why, on your account, must it be unpredictable/irrational/random without a creator?
It need not necessarily be irrational without a creator If the theory predicts neither a rational nor irrational universe, you are left with only the assertion that we have a rational universe purely by coincidence (and absolutely no confidence that this rationality is anything more than illusory). Effectively, having been asked why an incredibly unlikely event came about, you have responded "why not?". It's a non-answer, try again.
An integrated circuit etc, sure, because we know how to build those, how they work, how they were developed and have been improved etc.
If you're talking about biology, then we also have some understanding of how the "circuit" started, how it works, how it has changed over time. That understanding doesn't involve a person (even a person of dubious, immaterial existence such as your "Creator"):-)
This appears to be falling back on neo-darwinian evolution as a logical axiom. Unfortunately the neo-darwinian hypothesis of evolution by natural selection of traits arising from random mutation CANNOT account for biology as we observe it. I refer you to the overwhelming body of evidence.
12345
. Yes I'm a fan of CMI's website:)
As a person is our only seriously tenable explanation for the existence of an integrated circuit, so an intelligent agent well beyond humans is our only seriously tenable explanation for the existence of even a single cell.
So, this statement,
we also have some understanding of how the "circuit" started, how it works, how it has changed over time
is proved invalid by denying one of its axioms. Unless of course, you can prove me wrong and build a cell personally. Then I'd have something to think about. I'll recant my whole setup if you can get a cell to arise from non-living components without human intervention. And pay you every cent in my bank account:)
So again, what is your reasoning process for predicting a rational universe from a non-rational, non-intelligent, impersonal, naturalistic beginning?
You'd have a long and difficult (perhaps impossible) road if you're arguing for Theism/an interventionist deity.:-)
Okay, so you would argue that basically, Theory Y above does not predict Observation B. That's fine. Would you mind illuminating to me your reasoning process for predicting a rational universe from a non-rational, non-intelligent, impersonal, naturalistic beginning?
the rationality we might expect from a physical system:-)
We wouldn't expect rationality from a physical system inherently. For example, we wouldn't expect the paths carved out by a river to naturally form a simple addition circuit. When we find a physical circuit that performs an addition, we naturally infer a person built it. The "person building" theory predicts a logical circuit, but the natural movements of water do not predict that the river's paths will form any particular logic circuit.
Wow, there's a whole lot of stuff you've brought in there that I could pretty much spend the rest of my life talking about. To keep it useful though, I'm just going to stick to my original point.
I'm saying that if there is a personal, rational being that created the universe, we could reasonably predict the rationality of the world. But if there is no such being behind the universe, we have no reason to predict a rational universe. In fact, we'd probably predict the inability to predict anything.
What do we observe? A seemingly rational universe.
Theory X predicts Observation A, Theory Y predicts Observation B. A and B are mutually exclusive, A is observed.
This does not formally prove Theory X (because there may be alternate theories that also predict Observation A), but if each part of the section in italics holds, Theory Y cannot be true.
So, in your opinion, which part of the section in italics does not hold?
No "instinsic reason" apart from a somewhat logical brain tending to be more "useful" (like the animal calculating sin values I mentioned).
There's plenty of empirical evidence giving us great confidence that our brains are somewhat logical.
If you can't see the circular reasoning here, I'm afraid I probably can't help you. I'll break it down.
a somewhat logical brain tending to be more "useful"
This is an axiom. A starting truth claim that the argument rests upon, so it must be shown to be valid if the argument itself is to be valid.
There's plenty of empirical evidence giving us great confidence that our brains are somewhat logical.
In order to make this statement, you must rely on the axiom that you are actually capable of doing empirical testing (i.e. that you have a logical brain, not an illogical one).
But you have invoked the logical nature of your brain, and your capability to do empirical testing, as the evidence for that same starting axiom you are trying to prove! And round and round we go.
Now don't misunderstand me, I am not trying to deny the obvious. I think it is obvious that your brain *is* logical and you *can* do empirical tests, but I am trying to get you to see that if you try to justify that belief with logic, starting from naturalistic axioms, you come up empty handed or chasing your own tail.
On the other hand, if you start from a super-naturalistic axiom, it is possible to justify this belief. For example, the axiom that there is a personal deity that made the universe, who is logical themselves. It would be reasonable to infer that the things this logical deity made would have a logical order to them (including our own minds). As I understand it, just this sort of reasoning was behind the birth of science in the western world.
Which is why I added the example of simple collections of neurons. If you're arguing against the theory of evolution in being able to account for this, then you're welcome to your state of denial:-)
I am perfectly aware that I hold a minority position on this point. I think its a perfectly rational position, but I don't for a second think that means everyone who looks at the evidence will agree;) If only the world were that simple.
Any indication of how adding a supernatural component to a brain solves this problem of rationality, or are happy to simply argue against my position and not support your own?
It was you, after all, who claimed without the supernatural we have to throw out all rationality:-)
Ok, fair enough. If your brain is the result of a long process of evolution by random mutation and natural selection, what intrinsic reason is there to believe that you have evolved a logical brain rather than an illogical one? Maybe an illogical brain has some survival value we're just not completely aware of and none of your thought processes actually make sense.
However, if the reasoning process is rooted in a supernatural reality beyond mere matter and energy, then we would have some foundation upon which to rest the starting axiom that we are capable of rationality in the first place.
A simple collection of neurons can do the same, with no need for a soul, and can be accounted for by evolutionary processes with no need for a designer.
I'm inclined to disagree. Not interested in shifting topic of conversation, but my disagreement is part of a large coherent worldview.
You were arguing that our minds must have a "supernatural" component, else we'd need to throw out rationality. I showed a simple instance where logical/rational processing takes place without the need for a supernatural component.
What I was trying to get at was that the "supernatural" component, in the analogy of a logic circuit, is the humans who made them. There is nothing inherent in (at the "natural" level of) the circuit that means it must be functional/useful/logical. It is only so because of the mind (the "supernatural" component) behind it.
Try as you may, if you start by saying that the circuit is not man made, you will have a hard time justifying the belief that it consistently produces logical output. Conversely, if you thoroughly test the circuit and find that it does consistently produce logical output, you will find it very difficult to justify the belief that it is not man made.
Electrical circuits manage the process of information processing without too much problem and without the need for a "soul". Why would our brains/minds be any different (in kind)?
I'm glad you asked, because I believe this question holds the answer to your others. Electrical circuits which process information manage to do so, only because they were engineered with this purpose in mind. They only function in a useful way because something of a qualitatively more advanced intelligence designed them. I find it reasonable to extrapolate this explanation of ordered electrical circuits up to an intelligence qualitatively beyond ourselves that explains our own mental "circuitry".
Specifically what problems do you feel that such an inference introduces?
It's speculative because there are many pieces still missing.
You want to be careful with a statement like this, its easy to fall into the trap of a double standard. For example, problems with one theory equal missing pieces, but problems with a competing theory make it incorrect. Just a word of caution.
I find no way to deny the existence of at least *something* supernatural without throwing away all rationality with it. After all, if there is nothing but matter and energy, if nothing higher is behind my thoughts, why would I assume that the paths of electrons through my brain actually make real sense and lead to logical conclusions? What do you make of this question?
Dude, you seem so irratable:) I'll be honest, I'm a jaded ex-junky for internet arguments. From reading your sig, I expect a lot more bigotry than rationality from attempting to have a proper conversation with you. So I mock your ideas in a public forum, in order that others may read your responses and get a laugh out of them like I do.
When the guys at the Discovery institute can produce a list of hundreds of PhD scientists who signed their names on dissentfromdarwin.org, it's clearly *wrong* to claim that *all* doubters are "uninformed".
But inherent in that statement seems to be a denial of the validity of the question, lol.
If there is a lot of evidence in favour of life spontaneously arising, I would hardly call that "speculative". My understanding however is that there is a distinct absence of a viable theory for the arising of living from non-living material. It seems there are many theories, but each has its own share show-stopping problems.
And, the question must be raised, what would be admissable, "credible" evidence for the supernatural? For instance, a philosophical line of reasoning, leading to the conclusion that the supernatural, as a category, must necessarily exist? Would such a thing count, in your opinion, as evidence that the supernatural exists?
I would agree with that statement, however, that wasn't the question, lol. The question was not whether a purely scientific account of the origin of life is on equal footing with an account which mainly refers to the supernatural.
Rather, the question was whether the notion that life spontaneously arises and the notion that life exists as the result of a deity intervening are equally logical (since both are given the label "speculative").
Despite the unfortunate tone of my first post, I'd be interested in what you think.
If we refer to the notion that life spontaneously arises as "speculative", is the notion that life exists as a result of some divine intervention speculative also? In the same sense? Meaning, are these two notions on equal footing with regard to their logical merit?
There's a committed portion of the US population who don't need to "head..towards understanding the origins of life" because they are absolutely certain that they know exactly how life came about because a guy who though of the cell as a simple blob wrote a book that tells them what he thought happened after you have the first life. They're not going to take kindly to anything that could challenge their certainty.
There. Fixed that for you;)
Mods can have my karma if they want it, its still a purely religious assertion to say that life spontaneously arises. It's unobserved and there's good reason to believe its impossible (e.g. the chirality problem). We have a word for that where I come from, we call it unscientific.
Maybe even closer to the point, I have a Nintendo Wii Remote, but I don't own a Wii. Yet I still have some great uses for it. It's also a cheap infra-red camera, which has some interesting applications. So really, there's a market being tapped that Nintendo might never have intended to tap.
The reality however is that average consumers (but perhaps not the typical slashdotter) are shackled with all sorts of DRM everyday whether it's movies, videogames, software or even eBooks.
I agree, and this is appalling to the average slashdotter (with good reason). So what if the average user is simply ignorant that they are being ripped off in a big-brother fashion? How exactly does that make it OK? If anything it makes the whole thing seem more devious because those who peddle DRM are attempting to have it go unnoticed until it has too much momentum to stop. Thank goodness for the tech-savvy folks who speak up and don't let stuff like this just slide.
What? You want to be able to stop me doing what I want with stuff I bought? You want to make it impossible to build a playback device of my own that can actually play my music without having to pay an arm-and-a-leg in royalties. And this is not because you're choosing not to invest in extra features, but because your actually going out of your way, investing in R&D to cause this to happen?
I'll have to agree with Stallman. This is just another product being manufactured Defective By Design.
It seems to me that this uzbl thing is basically a page-rendering widget, based on webkit, that is made to allow interested hackers to quickly develop their own, totally customized user interface. They give you the "browser", but you are pretty much left to design and create your own systems for cookie management, bookmarks, history, navigation, etc.
Sounds like I might have fun doing that if I ever had that much spare time. More likely, I would find myself using it as a convenient way to embed Webkit rendering into some app I was developing.
At one point, I was considering giving a new distro a go, one with more tech knowledge necessary, mainly in the hopes of finishing up with a much lower memory foot print. I was thinking through slackware and gentoo when I saw an article on howtoforge called "Debian from Scratch". I think it was meant to be a parody of LFS, I didn't read it, but it gave me an idea. I fired up the Ubuntu Alternate CD and installed a base system with no extras (think kernel + bash + apt). I just started building it up from there.
Added X11, the fluxbox, alsa and pulseaudio. Added mplayer and audacious, after a couple of days of tinkering I had up and running with everything I actually use and nothing I don't. The memory footprint on this little Dell laptop was under 40mb (compare to my desktop multimedia editing machine running full ubuntu+gnome+compiz with all the usual trimmings which idles at 300Mb of RAM in use, lol).
At the end of this process, I had the lightweight system I wanted and I still had all the benefits of ubuntu's packaging system (because truly, I like not having to think about dependencies at all). And to be perfectly honest, I still learned a lot about the components that actually make up a linux desktop system (albeit at a much less intense level than I might have with slackware). I highly recommend this path to anyone trying to go lightweight and custom but who doesn't want to spend a week in config files to get there.
Not that I have any stats handy to back this up, but my understanding is that its actually quite a common thing for people to be browsing porn on company time (i.e. at work, in work hours, using work machines). Anyone know of a source that says for or against?
Use HTML for a GUI, easy to use and produces VERY pretty results for first timers. Suddenly you've got a very easy environment installed on almost every computer for learning an interpreted (fast to compile and debug) language with C-like syntax. Note: I'm of the totally unbiased opinion that C/C++ programming is *real* programming. Anything lower than that (e.g. ASM) is probably wasting time reinventing the wheel, and anything higher than that (e.g. Java, Python, PHP) is like having the actual work done for you (though this is often a very relaxing bonus, lol).
And though this will be incredibly unpopular, I can only promise it isn't flamebait when I say: I despise PERL's syntax and all the the people who love PERL are well-meaning, sincere and BADLY mistaken, lol.
Fair enough, I hadn't done the testing personally on IE8 for png, I was just under the impression it was fixed.
I remember doing the testing for CSS layouts (deprecating ) when IE7 came out and being SORELY disappointed that it was left unaddressed. Guess the situation is even worse than I thought.
I agree strongly with this. There was a long period where we could count on firefox, but not IE to render PNG files with transparency (boy, do I remember), or a large portion of the CSS spec. Didn't stop anyone from using transparent PNG files and standards-compliant CSS in their design if they wished, they just had to know that it wouldn't look good in IE (a show stopper for many). But IE e...v...e...n...t...u...a...l...l...y caught up.
I say implement the tag, give the web developers what they want. Let them host the video in multiple formats and just serve up the appropriate one based on the detected browser or the user's preference (as many sites already do anyways). Ideally history would repeat itself and all the dominant browsers will eventually be able to handle all the major formats used with the tag.
Slashdot Mirror
Why, on your account, must it be unpredictable/irrational/random without a creator?
It need not necessarily be irrational without a creator If the theory predicts neither a rational nor irrational universe, you are left with only the assertion that we have a rational universe purely by coincidence (and absolutely no confidence that this rationality is anything more than illusory). Effectively, having been asked why an incredibly unlikely event came about, you have responded "why not?". It's a non-answer, try again.
An integrated circuit etc, sure, because we know how to build those, how they work, how they were developed and have been improved etc. If you're talking about biology, then we also have some understanding of how the "circuit" started, how it works, how it has changed over time. That understanding doesn't involve a person (even a person of dubious, immaterial existence such as your "Creator") :-)
This appears to be falling back on neo-darwinian evolution as a logical axiom. Unfortunately the neo-darwinian hypothesis of evolution by natural selection of traits arising from random mutation CANNOT account for biology as we observe it. I refer you to the overwhelming body of evidence. 1 2 3 4 5 . Yes I'm a fan of CMI's website :)
As a person is our only seriously tenable explanation for the existence of an integrated circuit, so an intelligent agent well beyond humans is our only seriously tenable explanation for the existence of even a single cell.
So, this statement,
we also have some understanding of how the "circuit" started, how it works, how it has changed over time
is proved invalid by denying one of its axioms. Unless of course, you can prove me wrong and build a cell personally. Then I'd have something to think about. I'll recant my whole setup if you can get a cell to arise from non-living components without human intervention. And pay you every cent in my bank account :)
So again, what is your reasoning process for predicting a rational universe from a non-rational, non-intelligent, impersonal, naturalistic beginning?
You'd have a long and difficult (perhaps impossible) road if you're arguing for Theism/an interventionist deity. :-)
Agreed, but lets not get ahead of ourselves ;)
Okay, so you would argue that basically, Theory Y above does not predict Observation B. That's fine. Would you mind illuminating to me your reasoning process for predicting a rational universe from a non-rational, non-intelligent, impersonal, naturalistic beginning?
the rationality we might expect from a physical system :-)
We wouldn't expect rationality from a physical system inherently. For example, we wouldn't expect the paths carved out by a river to naturally form a simple addition circuit. When we find a physical circuit that performs an addition, we naturally infer a person built it. The "person building" theory predicts a logical circuit, but the natural movements of water do not predict that the river's paths will form any particular logic circuit.
Wow, there's a whole lot of stuff you've brought in there that I could pretty much spend the rest of my life talking about. To keep it useful though, I'm just going to stick to my original point.
I'm saying that if there is a personal, rational being that created the universe, we could reasonably predict the rationality of the world. But if there is no such being behind the universe, we have no reason to predict a rational universe. In fact, we'd probably predict the inability to predict anything.
What do we observe? A seemingly rational universe.
Theory X predicts Observation A, Theory Y predicts Observation B. A and B are mutually exclusive, A is observed.
This does not formally prove Theory X (because there may be alternate theories that also predict Observation A), but if each part of the section in italics holds, Theory Y cannot be true.
So, in your opinion, which part of the section in italics does not hold?
No "instinsic reason" apart from a somewhat logical brain tending to be more "useful" (like the animal calculating sin values I mentioned). There's plenty of empirical evidence giving us great confidence that our brains are somewhat logical.
If you can't see the circular reasoning here, I'm afraid I probably can't help you. I'll break it down.
a somewhat logical brain tending to be more "useful"
This is an axiom. A starting truth claim that the argument rests upon, so it must be shown to be valid if the argument itself is to be valid.
There's plenty of empirical evidence giving us great confidence that our brains are somewhat logical.
In order to make this statement, you must rely on the axiom that you are actually capable of doing empirical testing (i.e. that you have a logical brain, not an illogical one).
But you have invoked the logical nature of your brain, and your capability to do empirical testing, as the evidence for that same starting axiom you are trying to prove! And round and round we go.
Now don't misunderstand me, I am not trying to deny the obvious. I think it is obvious that your brain *is* logical and you *can* do empirical tests, but I am trying to get you to see that if you try to justify that belief with logic, starting from naturalistic axioms, you come up empty handed or chasing your own tail.
On the other hand, if you start from a super-naturalistic axiom, it is possible to justify this belief. For example, the axiom that there is a personal deity that made the universe, who is logical themselves. It would be reasonable to infer that the things this logical deity made would have a logical order to them (including our own minds). As I understand it, just this sort of reasoning was behind the birth of science in the western world.
Which is why I added the example of simple collections of neurons. If you're arguing against the theory of evolution in being able to account for this, then you're welcome to your state of denial :-)
I am perfectly aware that I hold a minority position on this point. I think its a perfectly rational position, but I don't for a second think that means everyone who looks at the evidence will agree ;) If only the world were that simple.
Any indication of how adding a supernatural component to a brain solves this problem of rationality, or are happy to simply argue against my position and not support your own? It was you, after all, who claimed without the supernatural we have to throw out all rationality :-)
Ok, fair enough. If your brain is the result of a long process of evolution by random mutation and natural selection, what intrinsic reason is there to believe that you have evolved a logical brain rather than an illogical one? Maybe an illogical brain has some survival value we're just not completely aware of and none of your thought processes actually make sense.
However, if the reasoning process is rooted in a supernatural reality beyond mere matter and energy, then we would have some foundation upon which to rest the starting axiom that we are capable of rationality in the first place.
A simple collection of neurons can do the same, with no need for a soul, and can be accounted for by evolutionary processes with no need for a designer.
I'm inclined to disagree. Not interested in shifting topic of conversation, but my disagreement is part of a large coherent worldview.
You were arguing that our minds must have a "supernatural" component, else we'd need to throw out rationality. I showed a simple instance where logical/rational processing takes place without the need for a supernatural component.
What I was trying to get at was that the "supernatural" component, in the analogy of a logic circuit, is the humans who made them. There is nothing inherent in (at the "natural" level of) the circuit that means it must be functional/useful/logical. It is only so because of the mind (the "supernatural" component) behind it.
Try as you may, if you start by saying that the circuit is not man made, you will have a hard time justifying the belief that it consistently produces logical output. Conversely, if you thoroughly test the circuit and find that it does consistently produce logical output, you will find it very difficult to justify the belief that it is not man made.
Electrical circuits manage the process of information processing without too much problem and without the need for a "soul". Why would our brains/minds be any different (in kind)?
I'm glad you asked, because I believe this question holds the answer to your others. Electrical circuits which process information manage to do so, only because they were engineered with this purpose in mind. They only function in a useful way because something of a qualitatively more advanced intelligence designed them. I find it reasonable to extrapolate this explanation of ordered electrical circuits up to an intelligence qualitatively beyond ourselves that explains our own mental "circuitry".
Specifically what problems do you feel that such an inference introduces?
It's speculative because there are many pieces still missing.
You want to be careful with a statement like this, its easy to fall into the trap of a double standard. For example, problems with one theory equal missing pieces, but problems with a competing theory make it incorrect. Just a word of caution.
I find no way to deny the existence of at least *something* supernatural without throwing away all rationality with it. After all, if there is nothing but matter and energy, if nothing higher is behind my thoughts, why would I assume that the paths of electrons through my brain actually make real sense and lead to logical conclusions? What do you make of this question?
Dude, you seem so irratable :) I'll be honest, I'm a jaded ex-junky for internet arguments. From reading your sig, I expect a lot more bigotry than rationality from attempting to have a proper conversation with you. So I mock your ideas in a public forum, in order that others may read your responses and get a laugh out of them like I do.
When the guys at the Discovery institute can produce a list of hundreds of PhD scientists who signed their names on dissentfromdarwin.org, it's clearly *wrong* to claim that *all* doubters are "uninformed".
But inherent in that statement seems to be a denial of the validity of the question, lol.
If there is a lot of evidence in favour of life spontaneously arising, I would hardly call that "speculative". My understanding however is that there is a distinct absence of a viable theory for the arising of living from non-living material. It seems there are many theories, but each has its own share show-stopping problems.
And, the question must be raised, what would be admissable, "credible" evidence for the supernatural? For instance, a philosophical line of reasoning, leading to the conclusion that the supernatural, as a category, must necessarily exist? Would such a thing count, in your opinion, as evidence that the supernatural exists?
I would agree with that statement, however, that wasn't the question, lol. The question was not whether a purely scientific account of the origin of life is on equal footing with an account which mainly refers to the supernatural.
Rather, the question was whether the notion that life spontaneously arises and the notion that life exists as the result of a deity intervening are equally logical (since both are given the label "speculative").
They're not going to take kindly to anything that could challenge their certainty.
Thank you for proving my point ;) </cheeky>
Despite the unfortunate tone of my first post, I'd be interested in what you think.
If we refer to the notion that life spontaneously arises as "speculative", is the notion that life exists as a result of some divine intervention speculative also? In the same sense? Meaning, are these two notions on equal footing with regard to their logical merit?
ha ha, I accept the correction. "speculative" is a more accurate way to say it.
There's a committed portion of the US population who don't need to "head..towards understanding the origins of life" because they are absolutely certain that they know exactly how life came about because a guy who though of the cell as a simple blob wrote a book that tells them what he thought happened after you have the first life. They're not going to take kindly to anything that could challenge their certainty.
There. Fixed that for you ;)
Mods can have my karma if they want it, its still a purely religious assertion to say that life spontaneously arises. It's unobserved and there's good reason to believe its impossible (e.g. the chirality problem). We have a word for that where I come from, we call it unscientific.
I see it this way:
A Linux machine is an industrial-strength computing device.
A Windows machine is more of a consumer-grade home appliance.
Maybe even closer to the point, I have a Nintendo Wii Remote, but I don't own a Wii. Yet I still have some great uses for it. It's also a cheap infra-red camera, which has some interesting applications. So really, there's a market being tapped that Nintendo might never have intended to tap.
The reality however is that average consumers (but perhaps not the typical slashdotter) are shackled with all sorts of DRM everyday whether it's movies, videogames, software or even eBooks.
I agree, and this is appalling to the average slashdotter (with good reason). So what if the average user is simply ignorant that they are being ripped off in a big-brother fashion? How exactly does that make it OK? If anything it makes the whole thing seem more devious because those who peddle DRM are attempting to have it go unnoticed until it has too much momentum to stop. Thank goodness for the tech-savvy folks who speak up and don't let stuff like this just slide.
What? You want to be able to stop me doing what I want with stuff I bought? You want to make it impossible to build a playback device of my own that can actually play my music without having to pay an arm-and-a-leg in royalties. And this is not because you're choosing not to invest in extra features, but because your actually going out of your way, investing in R&D to cause this to happen?
I'll have to agree with Stallman. This is just another product being manufactured Defective By Design.
It seems to me that this uzbl thing is basically a page-rendering widget, based on webkit, that is made to allow interested hackers to quickly develop their own, totally customized user interface. They give you the "browser", but you are pretty much left to design and create your own systems for cookie management, bookmarks, history, navigation, etc.
Sounds like I might have fun doing that if I ever had that much spare time. More likely, I would find myself using it as a convenient way to embed Webkit rendering into some app I was developing.
At one point, I was considering giving a new distro a go, one with more tech knowledge necessary, mainly in the hopes of finishing up with a much lower memory foot print. I was thinking through slackware and gentoo when I saw an article on howtoforge called "Debian from Scratch". I think it was meant to be a parody of LFS, I didn't read it, but it gave me an idea. I fired up the Ubuntu Alternate CD and installed a base system with no extras (think kernel + bash + apt). I just started building it up from there.
Added X11, the fluxbox, alsa and pulseaudio. Added mplayer and audacious, after a couple of days of tinkering I had up and running with everything I actually use and nothing I don't. The memory footprint on this little Dell laptop was under 40mb (compare to my desktop multimedia editing machine running full ubuntu+gnome+compiz with all the usual trimmings which idles at 300Mb of RAM in use, lol).
At the end of this process, I had the lightweight system I wanted and I still had all the benefits of ubuntu's packaging system (because truly, I like not having to think about dependencies at all). And to be perfectly honest, I still learned a lot about the components that actually make up a linux desktop system (albeit at a much less intense level than I might have with slackware). I highly recommend this path to anyone trying to go lightweight and custom but who doesn't want to spend a week in config files to get there.
Not that I have any stats handy to back this up, but my understanding is that its actually quite a common thing for people to be browsing porn on company time (i.e. at work, in work hours, using work machines). Anyone know of a source that says for or against?
Use HTML for a GUI, easy to use and produces VERY pretty results for first timers. Suddenly you've got a very easy environment installed on almost every computer for learning an interpreted (fast to compile and debug) language with C-like syntax. Note: I'm of the totally unbiased opinion that C/C++ programming is *real* programming. Anything lower than that (e.g. ASM) is probably wasting time reinventing the wheel, and anything higher than that (e.g. Java, Python, PHP) is like having the actual work done for you (though this is often a very relaxing bonus, lol).
And though this will be incredibly unpopular, I can only promise it isn't flamebait when I say: I despise PERL's syntax and all the the people who love PERL are well-meaning, sincere and BADLY mistaken, lol.
Fair enough, I hadn't done the testing personally on IE8 for png, I was just under the impression it was fixed.
I remember doing the testing for CSS layouts (deprecating ) when IE7 came out and being SORELY disappointed that it was left unaddressed. Guess the situation is even worse than I thought.
I agree strongly with this. There was a long period where we could count on firefox, but not IE to render PNG files with transparency (boy, do I remember), or a large portion of the CSS spec. Didn't stop anyone from using transparent PNG files and standards-compliant CSS in their design if they wished, they just had to know that it wouldn't look good in IE (a show stopper for many). But IE e...v...e...n...t...u...a...l...l...y caught up.
I say implement the tag, give the web developers what they want. Let them host the video in multiple formats and just serve up the appropriate one based on the detected browser or the user's preference (as many sites already do anyways). Ideally history would repeat itself and all the dominant browsers will eventually be able to handle all the major formats used with the tag.
Any BSD/Linux devs who can shed light on why bsd does this and not linux? It sounds like a perfect, treat-everything-as-a-file, "unixy" solution.