I would posit that we'd have more diversity if scientists stopped being so conservative about what qualifies as a planet.
Take, for example, the plight of Ceres. Residing somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, it's been called a dwarf planet for quite some time, just because of its immutable physical characteristics. Size discrimination is very real in the physics community, a practice which continues to this day.
Imagine how many more planets we'd be able to discover if we'd just liberalize the definition of a planet. I know it's served us well, but it is time to redefine the term planet to be more inclusive of our increasingly diverse universe. And how, exactly, would this hurt the status of existing planets? I know it wouldn't affect my planet.
And why, exactly isn't Ceres a planet? Because the IAU decided to redefine the term "planet" to exclude it! Such blatant bigotry has no place in a pluralistic universe. We should be ashamed.
You know, I think I've found a place for my civil rights movement.
That's right - LA - I'm looking at you. Of all the places where PI could be considered equal to 3, you've distinguished yourself as the most likely for
this to happen. You see, not everyone believes in Integer Equality - but they're on the wrong side of history.
Of course, there will be some REAL bigots who insist that even though it's irrational, PI is *supposed* to have numbers on both sides of the decimal point.
They'll say that it is different from the integers; that it doesn't belong with them, that it is somehow different; that the differences can't be expressed
in a rational way - but we all know that's just a cover for their integer intolerant attitudes.
So I propose that we pass a law that PI is exactly three. And an integer. If you want to believe otherwise in your heart, fine - but know this,
in any aspect affecting public infrastructure or services, you can't discriminate against the integers. Your private, personal beliefs about an irrational number have
no place in a universe where integers and fractions are supposed to coexist and live together.
To get the first point out of the way: a taxpayer funded organization promoting homosexuality in Milwaukee estimates that between twenty and forty percent of gay men in Milwaukee are HIV positive. And this from people arguing for the acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle. Homosexuals really do "get AIDS and die", and at much greater rates than their heterosexual counterparts. Thus, while it is a concern for both heterosexuals and homosexuals, it is a much more pressing concern for homosexuals.
Through marriage, I can extend to another the same gift of life given to me. Two homosexuals may be fond of each other, but their relationship will never give life to another person. The ability of male and female to reproduce, and that marriage is oriented toward reproduction, distinguish it from other loving relationships.
There are heterosexuals who, like homosexuals, use one another purely for personal pleasure. Their relationship is contingent on receiving, rather than giving. But these heterosexuals aren't asking us to consider them married; on the contrary, they often go to great lengths to assure people of the just the opposite.
Were it not for the desires of the flesh, so to speak, the relationships between homosexuals would be merely very good friendships. There's nothing wrong with loving another person. On the other hand, homosexuals take the human capacity for reproduction, and instead of using it to give life and love to others, use it for their own personal pleasure. Again, there are heterosexuals who do the same thing - but they aren't asking us to consider themselves married.
I can understand and respect the love two people have for each other. But I also recognize that to use another person as an object of sexual pleasure is to deny them the dignity due someone made in the image and likeness of God. In short, homosexuals are worth more than their partners esteem them, and are content to continue a self-deprecating relationship. They either do not understand their dignity and worth as human beings, or don't care. I can also recognize that many of them are probably very confused with respect to what a good relationship should feel like, and are intimately aware that their sex lives make them feel undignified, but don't quite understand what to do about it.
Would it be enough to regard two homosexuals as one regards the cohabitating couple? Would that be granting them enough dignity? Because I can recognize the value of loving another person independently of their sexuality. But I can also recognize the value of giving to others the gift of life, in a selfless act of sacrifice, and esteem it more highly than two people who are merely happy to be together.
Recognizing this difference is not unjust discrimination; rather, it is simply being truthful about reality. Unjust discrimination stems from pretending a an insignificant difference is significant. This is what the proponents of gay marriage are trying to argue: that the self-giving sacrifice of marriage, that the complementarity of the sexes, that the action of God in bringing two people together, is not significant. This view is particularly insulting to those of us who are married and do make significant sacrifices for marriage, which extend far beyond what a gay couple is willing to give. By the very nature of their homosexuality, gays have intentionally ordered their relationship in such a manner that they will avoid giving to others the same gift of life they received from their parents. They will avoid the struggles of raising children and facing hardships together, yet wish to be esteemed as those who do.
Now, if you don't believe in God, don't believe humans to be made in the image of God, and believe that marriage is nothing special, nothing permanent, inconsequential in the raising of children, then why would the state recognize it at all? If you want the state to affirm that a loving, committed relationship is a societal good, then wouldn't a loving, committed rela
Even if you thought homosexuality was the epitome of bliss, and every gay person a saint, you'd eventually have to come to grips with the fact that no gay person came into this world except through the union of male and female.
So, if you were gay, why wouldn't you honor traditional marriage as something sacred, yet different from the relationship you have? Why would you tear down the relationship which produced the person you love?
My belief is that gays want their relationship to be accepted for what it is, not for the rest of the heterosexual community to treat them as pseudo-heterosexuals. That's what "gay marriage" is - a way of saying "we don't really accept what you do, but we'd rather avoid the conflict, because, personally, you're not worth fighting over."
Moreover, not every homosexual dies of AIDS, but enough of them do that to legitimize the gay lifestyle is to wish pain and misery on someone who is already struggling with who they are, and with temptations they are loathe to admit. If we loved them, we would help them to understand their struggle is the same struggle we all face, for as scripture say, "All have fallen short of the glory of God". Every one of us was "born that way". Not all are tempted as gays are tempted, but everyone is tempted by something. Everyone starts out separated from God, and for someone who can't even talk about their struggle, their fight for dignity and self worth must seem particularly difficult.
Well, difficult to someone who hasn't been married. I've seen marriage redefined in my lifetime from something which was sacred and permanent, to something which is little more than a formal expression that two people feel something strong for each other. It might be called love, but "love" has so many meanings as to render the expression meaningless. I've also seen the societal cost of redefining marriage - from legal divorce, to no-fault divorce, to common-law marriage, all with disastrous consequences. Nearly half of new marriages fail. This is not a problem of gay rights, but of society's fundamental (mis) understanding of marriage. It is a relationship instituted by God between a man and a woman, for as long as they live. When the societal definition of marriage is changed from this one, people suffer:
No-fault divorce has resulted in many divorces which shouldn't have happened; most of them occur in the first 5 years of marriage, which are typically the most difficult time for the newly-married couple. I've never known anyone for whom getting divorced made them happier than getting married.
As men age, the typically acquire the wealth which makes them attractive to younger women. As women age, they typically gain fat which makes them less attractive to younger men. With the possibility of no-fault divorce, a woman knows that younger women remain an ever-present threat to the stability of their relationship with their husband, and this in turn affects their relationships with the rest of the community. In a society in which marriage was permanent, and divorce subject to great social stigma, this threat wouldn't exist. Instead, we now have a society in which women experience numerous unwarranted emotional and psychological issues related to their body image.
Having lived through two divorces, neither of which needed to happen, I can say truthfully that I don't wish that experience on anyone. Yet the acceptance of gay marriage transforms the societal understanding of marriage from an act of service and giving to another, to merely a relationship in which two people feel something strongly for each other. Such an understanding belittles the very real and serious struggles that married people face, and undermines the support that marriage typically provided for children (i.e. being raised in a stable home, with a loving mother and father).
The redefinition of marriage is a serious issue for heterosexuals, because the changing notion of marriage has resulted in more mis
Um, Intelligent Design is skepticism - a necessary part of science. Unfortunately, like it's evolutionary counterpart, it does not have predictive power.
The fact that evolutionary theory doesn't have (yet) predictive power is the primary reason why ID survives. When evolutionary biology produces falsifiable hypotheses with predictive power, ID will silently go away.
And it doesn't work, either. Ignoring the Do Not Track standard won't give you a case against them because:
You can't prove the tracking caused actual harm - unless you were caught doing something illegal.
If you were doing something illegal, the tracker has no obligation to conceal illegal activity.
The Do Not Track standard is why I don't use Chrome: Google believes (and probably rightly so) that its users are idiots. This is designed to give the user a false sense of security, and to further entrench Google's position in the market.
It seems you're burning a straw man. The project goals were not to "detect toxins" in the general sense, but to detect the presence of certain chemicals with a well-known, easily identifiable spectrum.
And your bit about molecules being "mind bogglingly small" is irrelevant. Such a limitation didn't prevent 18th century chemists from discovering the elements, and is not likely to pose a problem for the spectrometry crowd, either.
Naturally, it is easier to detect the spectrum of something for which you have a large sample, hence the lackluster initial goals. But this could be used - or something similar - with even a moderately-sized telescope (75mm or larger) to do spectra of the planets. Which is the likely final direction of this project.
They might have to use something other than a CCD, though. But I would think it could be done with a 10 cent CdS photocell and a prism - but that's just me. (The mechanical part would be more challenging, though.)
Because I had assumed that with a 2 day window of fertility in a 30 day cycle, the rate of pregnancy in rape was about 1/15. It turns out that the studies to which you linked present it as a 1/1000 chance.
As someone who has a daughter, this is somewhat reassuring, because I don't wish a pregnancy from rape on anyone. But I wish for infanticide even less.
If a woman can kill an unborn child because the child reminds her of a bad experience, why can't a man beat his wife after a bad day at the office?
Because both the unborn infant and the man's wife are human beings. Men figured this out a long time ago, but it seems that (American) women are still in the chauvinist stage of cultural development where they feel it's somehow acceptable to kill their innocent child, but let the man who raped them get away with it by not reporting the rape to authorities.
The problem isn't so much that women get pregnant from rape, but that rape occurs in the first place and women treat it not as the heinous crime it is, but as a merely unpleasant experience that can be brushed under the rug and forgotten as long as there's an abortion clinic nearby.
No man would put up with being victimized like that, and no women should either.
Those of us who use the CLI on a regular basis find ourselves feeling confined on those odd occasions when we have to use Windows. With a GUI, everything is visual, but nothing can be automated or repeated. This greatly aids someone who doesn't know what they are doing, but since when did business want someone who didn't know what they were doing sitting behind a terminal?
In Windows, everything is point-and-click easy, but nothing can be automated. In UNIX, the important things have a GUI shortcut, and everything can be automated.
If you develop open source software, people will compile your app from source and you won't get paid.
If you develop closed source software, people will pirate your app and you won't get paid.
The problem is one of taking the work of another without paying for it, and computers are good at copying - be it the binary bits of closed source software or the source code of open source software. Ethical people will pay for their software, unethical people won't, and releasing the source has very little to do with whether your users behave in an ethical fashion.
If you used a license other than the GPL, you could sell your software (the binary), and allow registered users to download the source. Since you have copyrighted it, additional users would still be required to buy the software, or commit copyright infringement (which happens to be a problem which nobody - closed or open - has currently solved).
The primary difference between open and closed source is that open source authors regard their users as their friends, and closed source shops regard the users as their enemy. The problem of copyright infringement remains unchanged, and the difference is largely a matter of how you treat your paying customers.
And what leads you to believe this is what is taught as "evolution" in American schools? What you said may be true about the theory of evolution, but it is not true about what is taught under the banner of evolution in the American school system.
The interesting thing about this is that I, quite frankly, don't trust the Left-leaning American public school establishment to teach science of any kind. I remember being taught in 8th grade that satellite orbits were due not to the balance of forces between rotational acceleration and gravity, but rather, that the satellite was moving so fast that it managed to "miss" the Earth as it fell. It's bad to teach things that are untrue, but much worse when those untruths have significant consequences. Here in the US, evolution is the only scientific theory taught which is not experimentally verifiable, has no predictive power, and has significant gaps in its ability to explain the origins and forms of life, and relies on an astronomically improbable, random event in order to get started. With science misrepresented as some pseudo-intellectual voodoo, it should not surprise anyone that the US lags the industrialized world in accepting the authority of science on subjects such as climate change. In the US at least, the debate over teaching evolution is not a debate about the implications of a scientific theory, but about teaching atheism. As a Christian, I'm content to regard evolution as an explanation of how God created what Genesis describes. But I recognize that what is called "evolution" in our public school system discredits both faith and science.
As for evolutionary theory itself, even at its best it is still an explanation of how things could have happened, not necessarily how they did. Given that humankind has almost reached the ability to engineer life in a mere 10,000 years, it seems to me more likely that life on Earth is the vestige of the genetic engineering efforts of another. Of course, I can't prove it, but life more closely resembles something engineered (or, more accurately, programmed - with all the code reuse and cruft that entails) than something directed by random events. And the problem evolution encounters - as does any theory about past events, even an engineered life hypothesis - is that the past can't be experimentally verified. At best it will be only an explanation - one of many. An explanation which could be disproven, but never proven. 200 years from now, evolution theory will have changed so much that today's biologists would not recognize it as such.
100 years ago, evolutionary theories implied that racism was scientifically justifiable. Today, it reveals (or rather, genetics does) that racial distinctions have no significant scientific basis. Imagine if you had lived in the 1800s - would you want your children to be taught racism because it has a scientific basis? If not, perhaps you can understand the objection Christians have to teaching a theory which implies that God does not exist. Even though I can appreciate the distinctions between revealed truths and scientific speculation, such distinctions are difficult for even the general population to make, much less primary and secondary students. As a result, students taught evolution will be inclined to believe that God doesn't exist, in spite of the philosophical problems with such a position. We in America are still dealing with the consequences of racism a full century after scientific racism was discredited, largely due to the fact that science in the 1800's had such a large impact on the culture, and taught things which were not only untrue, but justified immoral behavior.
"Evolution cannot be "experimentally proven". but it can be used to formulate a great number of hypotheses which can then be verified experimentally."
You seem not to understand that here in America, when we talk of evolution, we are talking of the naturalist philosophy that God doesn't exist. It has nothing to do with experimentally verifiable theories and everything to do with discrediting Christianity and the Biblical account of creation.
Which is why you can teach genetics, but not "Evilution". Americans are generally not as ignorant as our atheist critics would have you believe.
If the civil rights era hadn't awakened people to the fact that a moral wrong can't be a right, you wouldn't have people objecting to gay marriage today. People discarded racism because it was morally wrong - a person couldn't wake up and decide not to be black. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a world where people were judged, "Not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character..."
So now that we have that world - where people pay attention to one's character, rather than one's physical characteristics - gays are upset because people actually reflect upon the morality of their actions. Instead, they want us to believe the same discredited argument that racists used against blacks: they can't help the way they are because, well, "they were born that way." In the same way racists would claim that blacks would commit crime because they were born that way, now gays want us to believe they're destined to commit immoral acts because they too, were "born that way." Only now it's supposed to be a positive thing, and we're supposed to somehow excuse their sin, but no one else's. As if Jesus Christ died only for the heterosexual sinners.
It seems as if those who defend the notion of gay marriage have more in common with the KKK than they realize.
It is disappointing to hear people attribute objection to gay marriage to a desire to hate, or to discriminate, when the real reason people object to the notion of gay marriage is because they've spent time thinking about the issue and have come to the realization that marriage and the union of homosexuals are fundamentally different relationships - they seek different ends, and use different means. One really is an avoidance of the other.
For those of us who understand what marriage is about, we really see it as a moral issue. If I object to racism because it's morally wrong, even to the point where I tell a person what they can and can't do with their business (i.e. prohibit them from discrimination against blacks), I would likewise be bound to treat any other immoral behavior in a similar manner. But rather than exercise authority over the bedroom, all we're asking is that the state preserve the original definition of marriage, one that has served America well. If we were as vindictive as liberals, businesses would be disciplining employees for making comments insensitive to Christians, and outright homosexuality would be grounds for firing.
The prerequisite for an honest and open discussion is basic agreement on what the meaning of the terms used. Rather than ask us to accept a new type of relationship, the gay lobby is asking us to accept, and the government to enforce, a definition of marriage which denigrates the union of a man and a woman. It is a definition which is not accepted by the majority.
Even though we'd prefer gays refrain from evil, their sin is not merely personal; they're not content to leave their sexuality in the bedroom and instead want to force their view of things on the rest of us. If it was truly personal, private, then the rest of us wouldn't have a problem with it.
Regardless of whether you believe homosexuality to be a sin or the epitome of bliss, the fact of the matter is that the relationships homosexuals have with each other isn't marriage, and to ask the government to force others to accept your view on the subject is just plain wrong. It seems odd to me that, instead of asking people to accept them for who they are and their relationship for what it is, they are asking us to recognize them as married, as if they were merely eccentric heterosexuals. To do so only lends credence to the notion that the primary, fundamental human relationship is the union of a man and a woman. It also glosses over the distinctions between the union of man and woman and that of two people who, ostensibly, love each other.
Gays would do better just to be honest about their relationships. Even though my fellow heterosexuals do things with other heterosexuals I personally find morally objectionable, we can continue to treat each other like human beings because we are honest with each other, and honest about our disagreement on moral issues. It keeps the discussion open. But it seems like gays and lesbians have a problem with terms such as girlfriend or boyfriend, and oddly believe that a culture in which committed, non-marriage relationships are the norm, will not understand their relationship unless it's called marriage. As if we've never loved anyone passionately or deeply.
But with such dishonesty going on, an open dialogue is impossible. It is difficult for gays to understand the opposing point of view - that marriage is more than just a committed relationship, that it is more than just a matter of how two people feel about each other. Marriage - as traditionally understood - is the only relationship from which new life comes into the world, and is the best relationship in which to raise children. Having myself been raised for a portion of my life without my father in the home, I wouldn't wish the experience on anyone. No one would doubt the love of my mother, but she just wasn't a father when I needed one. And yet I see lesbians adopting children, who lack even the ability to understand the emotional harm they'll inflict on their adopted child. They really, genuinely don't see what a mother and father give to their children, nor understand the joy of bringing your spouse's child into the world. To have a loving relationship sanctioned by God seems a concept beyond their reach.
And I don't blame gays or lesbians for being the way they are. I blame the rest of the world for suggesting that the basis and core of marriage is simply a strong love for someone else. I blame the sympathizers who - without any understanding of real marriage in the first place - suggest that gay and lesbian relationships are equivalent to the one I have with my wife, in spite of the profound moral and logical ignorance of such a position. The debate over marriage has never been about "who people love", but rather, about the role and expectations of marriage in society. From a governmental point of view, marriage is treated differently, and needs special treatment, only because it is the relationship from which new life comes into the world. It is the genesis of the family, which is crucial to the health of our society.
The debate about marriage is not about discriminating against homosexuals, but recognizing the merits of the traditional family. If you chose not to go that route - and many very holy people have - fine. But making that choice doesn't entitle you to the treatment given to those of us who have. Those of us who marry spouses of the opposite sex take on a commitment and role in society that gay and lesbian couples will never do. Again, from a social perspective, there's nothing wrong with not getting married. But we are a people capable of recognizing fine distinctions in relationships, and we must be honest with each other if we expect all people to be treated with dignity and respect. Calling the union of two homosexuals marriage isn't respecting them; rather, it suggests that you really wish they'd married someone of the opposite sex. In other words, you don't understand their relationship, and would rather avoid conflict than come to terms with what their relationship is really about.
Provided that you're selling something else. The reason we open source things is to give something back to the community; it helps us get our jobs done. But we don't give away our work.
Incidentally, I'm split on the issue. I happen to know a chip vendor that lost at least one contract because their development tools were proprietary; we instead developed with their competitor's FPGA because the tools provided were free.
But it sounds like your expertise is not in the HW, but the SW. Consider that your competition sounds like they're expertise is not in SW, but HW. With their better expertise in HW, they could probably use your algorithms to offer a better overall solution than you can, effectively shutting you out of the market.
If what you say is true, this is truly bad news for cryptography. Algorithms like AES owe their security largely to the fact that brute-forcing all of the keys is generally impractical; with a 256 qubit machine, AES 256 would be cracked in *a single clock cycle*.
If they can do this with two qubits, why not 4? Why not 8, or 128, or 512?
In the same way the WWII cipher designers probably had a hard time imagining that in 40 years there would exist a machine which could crack their ciphers in real time, the designers of block ciphers like DES and AES probably had a difficult time imagining that their ciphers would be insecure in mere decades. DES took 30 years before brute force became practical; will AES survive even 20?
It was just 20 years from the invention of the transistor to the first 32 bit computer. How long will it be before a machine with more computing power than in all of recorded history can be built on something the size of a postage stamp, for a few dollars?
To the extent that not only should the user not need to know the underlying system, but I should not have to learn a new UI every five years because UI designers are too ignorant (yes, ignorant) or arrogant to learn the history of computing and the UIs that worked before them.
What exactly, did the ribbon provide? It made experienced users waste millions of hours relearning their tools so the could be less productive than before.
What this merely means is that if/when we do encounter extra-terrestrial life, it will probably be very different from us.
Alien civilizations have probably dismissed Earth as unlikely to contain life because of its magnetism, it's solid surface, and the presence of a solvent (H2O) almost everywhere on the planet.
And who is wrong? You - or all of humanity, throughout all of human history? The belief in God and tendency to organize this belief in a formal way is something which has been with humanity for all of recorded history, and even among peoples isolated from each other.
You don't really expect us to believe that some armchair philosopher somewhere on the internet has solved a problem which has confounded philosophers for centuries, do you? And if you possessed such wit to see what others have not, why is it that you cannot explain it in a manner that anyone reading can understand? If organized religion really was complete bullshit, as you posit, why hasn't humanity abandoned it by now?
The problem is twofold: 1.) Someone who thinks we need more programming languages doesn't understand the problem, but it's generally a moot point because 2.) Someone implementing the latest fad in languages inevitably ends up re-inventing the wheel, albeit poorly.
The end result is that while 10% of the features of the new language may be novel and interesting, only about 1% of the features will be useful in the practical sense. And 90% of the time spent in language development will be put into recreating existing functionality in the new language. Look at Java, for example. Just when UI design was starting to make sense, Java reimplemented the entire GUI in Java, and threw away a large portion of what had been learned on how to do UIs well.
And the result? Nobody used the Java UI. Remember Swing? Yeah, I actually wrote GUI apps with it, but Java went the route of the server - hidden from the user, and never ever came close to challenging C++ for work on Desktop apps. Oh, sure, maybe Swing (or whatever they're calling it these days) has improved, but Java missed an entire generation of programmers in the interim.
The problem today is that by the time your new paradigm catches on, and you've developed all of the attending libraries and functionality to make it competitive with existing languages, the paradigm is already obsolete.
There really has been very little progress on languages since C++. There's very little that's new, functionally speaking. The new languages of today aren't revolutionizing the software paradigm - more often than not, they're just reimplementations of existing functionality and language paradigms with a new set of strange and irritating behavior. Python's use of whitespace to perform block delimiting is an interesting step backwards - it was first done in COBOL - and it was just as much a defect then as it is today. When I had to learn COBOL in school, I thought it a waste of time until Python came out, and then I recognized the value: it had taught me the danger of making stupid decisions in language design.
We've come to the point where unless you're using a really old language - older than C - the language is pretty much irrelevant. Granted, some languages are better than others at solving certain problems, but I've yet to find a new language (after Java, that is) that brought something new and important to the realm of computer science. Even Java was a draw - you lost operator overloading and multiple inheritance - in favor of a simpler, more practical paradigm (sound like C, anyone?!). And C# was definitely a step backward; you got none of the advantages of a vm with all of the disadvantages. And Python has just decided to break backward compatibility on a whim, leaving anyone with a substantial codebase out in the cold.
I can understand no one taking his ideas seriously because he didn't have anything interesting to say. But the sort of people who judge what people say by the way they are dressed probably wouldn't be capable of understanding anything insightful he might otherwise have said.
Have you considered that he dumbed things down because - upon seeing everyone dressed like an MBA - that he assumed most of you couldn't understand the deeper thoughts he would have otherwise said?
My experience is that people dressed casually in formal situations usually do so because they have nothing to lose by doing so. Sometimes they're already wealthy, own the business, etc... Or perhaps (like RMS) they're already a recognized authority in their field. Professors often fall into this category - maintaining their train of thought in the morning is more important than the particulars of how they're dressed.
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I would posit that we'd have more diversity if scientists stopped being so conservative about what qualifies as a planet.
Take, for example, the plight of Ceres. Residing somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, it's been called a dwarf planet for quite some time, just because of its immutable physical characteristics. Size discrimination is very real in the physics community, a practice which continues to this day.
Imagine how many more planets we'd be able to discover if we'd just liberalize the definition of a planet. I know it's served us well, but it is time to redefine the term planet to be more inclusive of our increasingly diverse universe. And how, exactly, would this hurt the status of existing planets? I know it wouldn't affect my planet.
And why, exactly isn't Ceres a planet? Because the IAU decided to redefine the term "planet" to exclude it! Such blatant bigotry has no place in a pluralistic universe. We should be ashamed.
You know, I think I've found a place for my civil rights movement. That's right - LA - I'm looking at you. Of all the places where PI could be considered equal to 3, you've distinguished yourself as the most likely for this to happen. You see, not everyone believes in Integer Equality - but they're on the wrong side of history. Of course, there will be some REAL bigots who insist that even though it's irrational, PI is *supposed* to have numbers on both sides of the decimal point. They'll say that it is different from the integers; that it doesn't belong with them, that it is somehow different; that the differences can't be expressed in a rational way - but we all know that's just a cover for their integer intolerant attitudes. So I propose that we pass a law that PI is exactly three. And an integer. If you want to believe otherwise in your heart, fine - but know this, in any aspect affecting public infrastructure or services, you can't discriminate against the integers. Your private, personal beliefs about an irrational number have no place in a universe where integers and fractions are supposed to coexist and live together.
To get the first point out of the way: a taxpayer funded organization promoting homosexuality in Milwaukee estimates that between twenty and forty percent of gay men in Milwaukee are HIV positive. And this from people arguing for the acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle. Homosexuals really do "get AIDS and die", and at much greater rates than their heterosexual counterparts. Thus, while it is a concern for both heterosexuals and homosexuals, it is a much more pressing concern for homosexuals.
Through marriage, I can extend to another the same gift of life given to me. Two homosexuals may be fond of each other, but their relationship will never give life to another person. The ability of male and female to reproduce, and that marriage is oriented toward reproduction, distinguish it from other loving relationships.
There are heterosexuals who, like homosexuals, use one another purely for personal pleasure. Their relationship is contingent on receiving, rather than giving. But these heterosexuals aren't asking us to consider them married; on the contrary, they often go to great lengths to assure people of the just the opposite.
Were it not for the desires of the flesh, so to speak, the relationships between homosexuals would be merely very good friendships. There's nothing wrong with loving another person. On the other hand, homosexuals take the human capacity for reproduction, and instead of using it to give life and love to others, use it for their own personal pleasure. Again, there are heterosexuals who do the same thing - but they aren't asking us to consider themselves married.
I can understand and respect the love two people have for each other. But I also recognize that to use another person as an object of sexual pleasure is to deny them the dignity due someone made in the image and likeness of God. In short, homosexuals are worth more than their partners esteem them, and are content to continue a self-deprecating relationship. They either do not understand their dignity and worth as human beings, or don't care. I can also recognize that many of them are probably very confused with respect to what a good relationship should feel like, and are intimately aware that their sex lives make them feel undignified, but don't quite understand what to do about it.
Would it be enough to regard two homosexuals as one regards the cohabitating couple? Would that be granting them enough dignity? Because I can recognize the value of loving another person independently of their sexuality. But I can also recognize the value of giving to others the gift of life, in a selfless act of sacrifice, and esteem it more highly than two people who are merely happy to be together.
Recognizing this difference is not unjust discrimination; rather, it is simply being truthful about reality. Unjust discrimination stems from pretending a an insignificant difference is significant. This is what the proponents of gay marriage are trying to argue: that the self-giving sacrifice of marriage, that the complementarity of the sexes, that the action of God in bringing two people together, is not significant. This view is particularly insulting to those of us who are married and do make significant sacrifices for marriage, which extend far beyond what a gay couple is willing to give. By the very nature of their homosexuality, gays have intentionally ordered their relationship in such a manner that they will avoid giving to others the same gift of life they received from their parents. They will avoid the struggles of raising children and facing hardships together, yet wish to be esteemed as those who do.
Now, if you don't believe in God, don't believe humans to be made in the image of God, and believe that marriage is nothing special, nothing permanent, inconsequential in the raising of children, then why would the state recognize it at all? If you want the state to affirm that a loving, committed relationship is a societal good, then wouldn't a loving, committed rela
Even if you thought homosexuality was the epitome of bliss, and every gay person a saint, you'd eventually have to come to grips with the fact that no gay person came into this world except through the union of male and female.
So, if you were gay, why wouldn't you honor traditional marriage as something sacred, yet different from the relationship you have? Why would you tear down the relationship which produced the person you love?
My belief is that gays want their relationship to be accepted for what it is, not for the rest of the heterosexual community to treat them as pseudo-heterosexuals. That's what "gay marriage" is - a way of saying "we don't really accept what you do, but we'd rather avoid the conflict, because, personally, you're not worth fighting over."
Moreover, not every homosexual dies of AIDS, but enough of them do that to legitimize the gay lifestyle is to wish pain and misery on someone who is already struggling with who they are, and with temptations they are loathe to admit. If we loved them, we would help them to understand their struggle is the same struggle we all face, for as scripture say, "All have fallen short of the glory of God". Every one of us was "born that way". Not all are tempted as gays are tempted, but everyone is tempted by something. Everyone starts out separated from God, and for someone who can't even talk about their struggle, their fight for dignity and self worth must seem particularly difficult.
Well, difficult to someone who hasn't been married. I've seen marriage redefined in my lifetime from something which was sacred and permanent, to something which is little more than a formal expression that two people feel something strong for each other. It might be called love, but "love" has so many meanings as to render the expression meaningless. I've also seen the societal cost of redefining marriage - from legal divorce, to no-fault divorce, to common-law marriage, all with disastrous consequences. Nearly half of new marriages fail. This is not a problem of gay rights, but of society's fundamental (mis) understanding of marriage. It is a relationship instituted by God between a man and a woman, for as long as they live. When the societal definition of marriage is changed from this one, people suffer:
The redefinition of marriage is a serious issue for heterosexuals, because the changing notion of marriage has resulted in more mis
Um, Intelligent Design is skepticism - a necessary part of science. Unfortunately, like it's evolutionary counterpart, it does not have predictive power. The fact that evolutionary theory doesn't have (yet) predictive power is the primary reason why ID survives. When evolutionary biology produces falsifiable hypotheses with predictive power, ID will silently go away.
It's called the evil bit.
And it doesn't work, either. Ignoring the Do Not Track standard won't give you a case against them because:
The Do Not Track standard is why I don't use Chrome: Google believes (and probably rightly so) that its users are idiots. This is designed to give the user a false sense of security, and to further entrench Google's position in the market.
It seems you're burning a straw man. The project goals were not to "detect toxins" in the general sense, but to detect the presence of certain chemicals with a well-known, easily identifiable spectrum.
And your bit about molecules being "mind bogglingly small" is irrelevant. Such a limitation didn't prevent 18th century chemists from discovering the elements, and is not likely to pose a problem for the spectrometry crowd, either.
Naturally, it is easier to detect the spectrum of something for which you have a large sample, hence the lackluster initial goals. But this could be used - or something similar - with even a moderately-sized telescope (75mm or larger) to do spectra of the planets. Which is the likely final direction of this project.
They might have to use something other than a CCD, though. But I would think it could be done with a 10 cent CdS photocell and a prism - but that's just me. (The mechanical part would be more challenging, though.)
Because I had assumed that with a 2 day window of fertility in a 30 day cycle, the rate of pregnancy in rape was about 1/15. It turns out that the studies to which you linked present it as a 1/1000 chance.
As someone who has a daughter, this is somewhat reassuring, because I don't wish a pregnancy from rape on anyone. But I wish for infanticide even less.
If a woman can kill an unborn child because the child reminds her of a bad experience, why can't a man beat his wife after a bad day at the office?
Because both the unborn infant and the man's wife are human beings. Men figured this out a long time ago, but it seems that (American) women are still in the chauvinist stage of cultural development where they feel it's somehow acceptable to kill their innocent child, but let the man who raped them get away with it by not reporting the rape to authorities.
The problem isn't so much that women get pregnant from rape, but that rape occurs in the first place and women treat it not as the heinous crime it is, but as a merely unpleasant experience that can be brushed under the rug and forgotten as long as there's an abortion clinic nearby.
No man would put up with being victimized like that, and no women should either.
Those of us who use the CLI on a regular basis find ourselves feeling confined on those odd occasions when we have to use Windows. With a GUI, everything is visual, but nothing can be automated or repeated. This greatly aids someone who doesn't know what they are doing, but since when did business want someone who didn't know what they were doing sitting behind a terminal?
In Windows, everything is point-and-click easy, but nothing can be automated. In UNIX, the important things have a GUI shortcut, and everything can be automated.
If you develop open source software, people will compile your app from source and you won't get paid.
If you develop closed source software, people will pirate your app and you won't get paid.
The problem is one of taking the work of another without paying for it, and computers are good at copying - be it the binary bits of closed source software or the source code of open source software. Ethical people will pay for their software, unethical people won't, and releasing the source has very little to do with whether your users behave in an ethical fashion.
If you used a license other than the GPL, you could sell your software (the binary), and allow registered users to download the source. Since you have copyrighted it, additional users would still be required to buy the software, or commit copyright infringement (which happens to be a problem which nobody - closed or open - has currently solved).
The primary difference between open and closed source is that open source authors regard their users as their friends, and closed source shops regard the users as their enemy. The problem of copyright infringement remains unchanged, and the difference is largely a matter of how you treat your paying customers.
"Evolution describes..."
And what leads you to believe this is what is taught as "evolution" in American schools? What you said may be true about the theory of evolution, but it is not true about what is taught under the banner of evolution in the American school system.
The interesting thing about this is that I, quite frankly, don't trust the Left-leaning American public school establishment to teach science of any kind. I remember being taught in 8th grade that satellite orbits were due not to the balance of forces between rotational acceleration and gravity, but rather, that the satellite was moving so fast that it managed to "miss" the Earth as it fell. It's bad to teach things that are untrue, but much worse when those untruths have significant consequences. Here in the US, evolution is the only scientific theory taught which is not experimentally verifiable, has no predictive power, and has significant gaps in its ability to explain the origins and forms of life, and relies on an astronomically improbable, random event in order to get started. With science misrepresented as some pseudo-intellectual voodoo, it should not surprise anyone that the US lags the industrialized world in accepting the authority of science on subjects such as climate change. In the US at least, the debate over teaching evolution is not a debate about the implications of a scientific theory, but about teaching atheism. As a Christian, I'm content to regard evolution as an explanation of how God created what Genesis describes. But I recognize that what is called "evolution" in our public school system discredits both faith and science.
As for evolutionary theory itself, even at its best it is still an explanation of how things could have happened, not necessarily how they did. Given that humankind has almost reached the ability to engineer life in a mere 10,000 years, it seems to me more likely that life on Earth is the vestige of the genetic engineering efforts of another. Of course, I can't prove it, but life more closely resembles something engineered (or, more accurately, programmed - with all the code reuse and cruft that entails) than something directed by random events. And the problem evolution encounters - as does any theory about past events, even an engineered life hypothesis - is that the past can't be experimentally verified. At best it will be only an explanation - one of many. An explanation which could be disproven, but never proven. 200 years from now, evolution theory will have changed so much that today's biologists would not recognize it as such.
100 years ago, evolutionary theories implied that racism was scientifically justifiable. Today, it reveals (or rather, genetics does) that racial distinctions have no significant scientific basis. Imagine if you had lived in the 1800s - would you want your children to be taught racism because it has a scientific basis? If not, perhaps you can understand the objection Christians have to teaching a theory which implies that God does not exist. Even though I can appreciate the distinctions between revealed truths and scientific speculation, such distinctions are difficult for even the general population to make, much less primary and secondary students. As a result, students taught evolution will be inclined to believe that God doesn't exist, in spite of the philosophical problems with such a position. We in America are still dealing with the consequences of racism a full century after scientific racism was discredited, largely due to the fact that science in the 1800's had such a large impact on the culture, and taught things which were not only untrue, but justified immoral behavior.
"Evolution cannot be "experimentally proven". but it can be used to formulate a great number of hypotheses which can then be verified experimentally."
You seem not to understand that here in America, when we talk of evolution, we are talking of the naturalist philosophy that God doesn't exist. It has nothing to do with experimentally verifiable theories and everything to do with discrediting Christianity and the Biblical account of creation.
Which is why you can teach genetics, but not "Evilution". Americans are generally not as ignorant as our atheist critics would have you believe.
worships the same imaginary friend in the sky,
Good luck convincing a judge or jury that you don't practice illegal religious discrimination after having made a statement like that.
Sure, you'd hire any qualified Christian, Muslim, or Hindu that comes your way, but strangely, none have applied. I wonder why?
If the civil rights era hadn't awakened people to the fact that a moral wrong can't be a right, you wouldn't have people objecting to gay marriage today. People discarded racism because it was morally wrong - a person couldn't wake up and decide not to be black. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a world where people were judged, "Not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character..."
So now that we have that world - where people pay attention to one's character, rather than one's physical characteristics - gays are upset because people actually reflect upon the morality of their actions. Instead, they want us to believe the same discredited argument that racists used against blacks: they can't help the way they are because, well, "they were born that way." In the same way racists would claim that blacks would commit crime because they were born that way, now gays want us to believe they're destined to commit immoral acts because they too, were "born that way." Only now it's supposed to be a positive thing, and we're supposed to somehow excuse their sin, but no one else's. As if Jesus Christ died only for the heterosexual sinners.
It seems as if those who defend the notion of gay marriage have more in common with the KKK than they realize.
It is disappointing to hear people attribute objection to gay marriage to a desire to hate, or to discriminate, when the real reason people object to the notion of gay marriage is because they've spent time thinking about the issue and have come to the realization that marriage and the union of homosexuals are fundamentally different relationships - they seek different ends, and use different means. One really is an avoidance of the other.
For those of us who understand what marriage is about, we really see it as a moral issue. If I object to racism because it's morally wrong, even to the point where I tell a person what they can and can't do with their business (i.e. prohibit them from discrimination against blacks), I would likewise be bound to treat any other immoral behavior in a similar manner. But rather than exercise authority over the bedroom, all we're asking is that the state preserve the original definition of marriage, one that has served America well. If we were as vindictive as liberals, businesses would be disciplining employees for making comments insensitive to Christians, and outright homosexuality would be grounds for firing.
The prerequisite for an honest and open discussion is basic agreement on what the meaning of the terms used. Rather than ask us to accept a new type of relationship, the gay lobby is asking us to accept, and the government to enforce, a definition of marriage which denigrates the union of a man and a woman. It is a definition which is not accepted by the majority.
Even though we'd prefer gays refrain from evil, their sin is not merely personal; they're not content to leave their sexuality in the bedroom and instead want to force their view of things on the rest of us. If it was truly personal, private, then the rest of us wouldn't have a problem with it.
Regardless of whether you believe homosexuality to be a sin or the epitome of bliss, the fact of the matter is that the relationships homosexuals have with each other isn't marriage, and to ask the government to force others to accept your view on the subject is just plain wrong. It seems odd to me that, instead of asking people to accept them for who they are and their relationship for what it is, they are asking us to recognize them as married, as if they were merely eccentric heterosexuals. To do so only lends credence to the notion that the primary, fundamental human relationship is the union of a man and a woman. It also glosses over the distinctions between the union of man and woman and that of two people who, ostensibly, love each other.
Gays would do better just to be honest about their relationships. Even though my fellow heterosexuals do things with other heterosexuals I personally find morally objectionable, we can continue to treat each other like human beings because we are honest with each other, and honest about our disagreement on moral issues. It keeps the discussion open. But it seems like gays and lesbians have a problem with terms such as girlfriend or boyfriend, and oddly believe that a culture in which committed, non-marriage relationships are the norm, will not understand their relationship unless it's called marriage. As if we've never loved anyone passionately or deeply.
But with such dishonesty going on, an open dialogue is impossible. It is difficult for gays to understand the opposing point of view - that marriage is more than just a committed relationship, that it is more than just a matter of how two people feel about each other. Marriage - as traditionally understood - is the only relationship from which new life comes into the world, and is the best relationship in which to raise children. Having myself been raised for a portion of my life without my father in the home, I wouldn't wish the experience on anyone. No one would doubt the love of my mother, but she just wasn't a father when I needed one. And yet I see lesbians adopting children, who lack even the ability to understand the emotional harm they'll inflict on their adopted child. They really, genuinely don't see what a mother and father give to their children, nor understand the joy of bringing your spouse's child into the world. To have a loving relationship sanctioned by God seems a concept beyond their reach.
And I don't blame gays or lesbians for being the way they are. I blame the rest of the world for suggesting that the basis and core of marriage is simply a strong love for someone else. I blame the sympathizers who - without any understanding of real marriage in the first place - suggest that gay and lesbian relationships are equivalent to the one I have with my wife, in spite of the profound moral and logical ignorance of such a position. The debate over marriage has never been about "who people love", but rather, about the role and expectations of marriage in society. From a governmental point of view, marriage is treated differently, and needs special treatment, only because it is the relationship from which new life comes into the world. It is the genesis of the family, which is crucial to the health of our society.
The debate about marriage is not about discriminating against homosexuals, but recognizing the merits of the traditional family. If you chose not to go that route - and many very holy people have - fine. But making that choice doesn't entitle you to the treatment given to those of us who have. Those of us who marry spouses of the opposite sex take on a commitment and role in society that gay and lesbian couples will never do. Again, from a social perspective, there's nothing wrong with not getting married. But we are a people capable of recognizing fine distinctions in relationships, and we must be honest with each other if we expect all people to be treated with dignity and respect. Calling the union of two homosexuals marriage isn't respecting them; rather, it suggests that you really wish they'd married someone of the opposite sex. In other words, you don't understand their relationship, and would rather avoid conflict than come to terms with what their relationship is really about.
And yet neither of those beliefs were bullshit, but simply the best explanation given the available data.
And not surprisingly, when someone was able to show them incorrect, the *whole world* changed their beliefs.
Provided that you're selling something else. The reason we open source things is to give something back to the community; it helps us get our jobs done. But we don't give away our work.
Incidentally, I'm split on the issue. I happen to know a chip vendor that lost at least one contract because their development tools were proprietary; we instead developed with their competitor's FPGA because the tools provided were free.
But it sounds like your expertise is not in the HW, but the SW. Consider that your competition sounds like they're expertise is not in SW, but HW. With their better expertise in HW, they could probably use your algorithms to offer a better overall solution than you can, effectively shutting you out of the market.
If what you say is true, this is truly bad news for cryptography. Algorithms like AES owe their security largely to the fact that brute-forcing all of the keys is generally impractical; with a 256 qubit machine, AES 256 would be cracked in *a single clock cycle*.
If they can do this with two qubits, why not 4? Why not 8, or 128, or 512?
In the same way the WWII cipher designers probably had a hard time imagining that in 40 years there would exist a machine which could crack their ciphers in real time, the designers of block ciphers like DES and AES probably had a difficult time imagining that their ciphers would be insecure in mere decades. DES took 30 years before brute force became practical; will AES survive even 20?
It was just 20 years from the invention of the transistor to the first 32 bit computer. How long will it be before a machine with more computing power than in all of recorded history can be built on something the size of a postage stamp, for a few dollars?
To the extent that not only should the user not need to know the underlying system, but I should not have to learn a new UI every five years because UI designers are too ignorant (yes, ignorant) or arrogant to learn the history of computing and the UIs that worked before them.
What exactly, did the ribbon provide? It made experienced users waste millions of hours relearning their tools so the could be less productive than before.
Sure, his company could have called - if they had someone who knew how to speak BRITISH.
Language barriers allow these sorts of things to go unnoticed for years.
What this merely means is that if/when we do encounter extra-terrestrial life, it will probably be very different from us.
Alien civilizations have probably dismissed Earth as unlikely to contain life because of its magnetism, it's solid surface, and the presence of a solvent (H2O) almost everywhere on the planet.
And who is wrong? You - or all of humanity, throughout all of human history? The belief in God and tendency to organize this belief in a formal way is something which has been with humanity for all of recorded history, and even among peoples isolated from each other.
You don't really expect us to believe that some armchair philosopher somewhere on the internet has solved a problem which has confounded philosophers for centuries, do you? And if you possessed such wit to see what others have not, why is it that you cannot explain it in a manner that anyone reading can understand? If organized religion really was complete bullshit, as you posit, why hasn't humanity abandoned it by now?
The problem is twofold: 1.) Someone who thinks we need more programming languages doesn't understand the problem, but it's generally a moot point because 2.) Someone implementing the latest fad in languages inevitably ends up re-inventing the wheel, albeit poorly.
The end result is that while 10% of the features of the new language may be novel and interesting, only about 1% of the features will be useful in the practical sense. And 90% of the time spent in language development will be put into recreating existing functionality in the new language. Look at Java, for example. Just when UI design was starting to make sense, Java reimplemented the entire GUI in Java, and threw away a large portion of what had been learned on how to do UIs well.
And the result? Nobody used the Java UI. Remember Swing? Yeah, I actually wrote GUI apps with it, but Java went the route of the server - hidden from the user, and never ever came close to challenging C++ for work on Desktop apps. Oh, sure, maybe Swing (or whatever they're calling it these days) has improved, but Java missed an entire generation of programmers in the interim.
The problem today is that by the time your new paradigm catches on, and you've developed all of the attending libraries and functionality to make it competitive with existing languages, the paradigm is already obsolete.
There really has been very little progress on languages since C++. There's very little that's new, functionally speaking. The new languages of today aren't revolutionizing the software paradigm - more often than not, they're just reimplementations of existing functionality and language paradigms with a new set of strange and irritating behavior. Python's use of whitespace to perform block delimiting is an interesting step backwards - it was first done in COBOL - and it was just as much a defect then as it is today. When I had to learn COBOL in school, I thought it a waste of time until Python came out, and then I recognized the value: it had taught me the danger of making stupid decisions in language design.
We've come to the point where unless you're using a really old language - older than C - the language is pretty much irrelevant. Granted, some languages are better than others at solving certain problems, but I've yet to find a new language (after Java, that is) that brought something new and important to the realm of computer science. Even Java was a draw - you lost operator overloading and multiple inheritance - in favor of a simpler, more practical paradigm (sound like C, anyone?!). And C# was definitely a step backward; you got none of the advantages of a vm with all of the disadvantages. And Python has just decided to break backward compatibility on a whim, leaving anyone with a substantial codebase out in the cold.
I can understand no one taking his ideas seriously because he didn't have anything interesting to say. But the sort of people who judge what people say by the way they are dressed probably wouldn't be capable of understanding anything insightful he might otherwise have said.
Have you considered that he dumbed things down because - upon seeing everyone dressed like an MBA - that he assumed most of you couldn't understand the deeper thoughts he would have otherwise said?
My experience is that people dressed casually in formal situations usually do so because they have nothing to lose by doing so. Sometimes they're already wealthy, own the business, etc... Or perhaps (like RMS) they're already a recognized authority in their field. Professors often fall into this category - maintaining their train of thought in the morning is more important than the particulars of how they're dressed.