as judges release convicted fileswappers with suspended sentences associated with otherwise draconian penalties stipulated by copyright law.
[emphasis added]
File swapping is not a crime! Copyright infringement is. We wouldn't call someone who downloaded child pornography a "convicted web-surfer"
I suppose I'm rehashing the tired hacker/cracker terminology argument, but terminology does matter.
Public opinion shapes public policy, and ultimately creates laws. Even though their are legitimate uses for file sharing programs, we may find them made illegal simply because they were publicly associated with copyright infringement. Nevermind the fact that web browsers facilitate more copyright infringement than filesharing programs - it's the public perception that matters.
I'm a file swapper too. But that doesn't mean I'm guilty of copyright infringement.
You want a camera with dedicated hardware encoding:
XGA @ 24 fps with RGB color is 56 megabytes per second uncompressed.
Even D1 (720 x 480) is ~ 25 megabytes per second uncompressed.
By contrast, MPEG encoding of D1 can move across a 12 megabyte per second pipe. Your best bet for video conferencing is probably to leave the Mac behind and get a camera with an RJ45 jack.
The former requires specialized hardware and substantial processing on the host, where as the latter requires only an internet connection.
As an engineer who recently wrapped up a video camera project, here's are the problems we ran into:
The CCD sensor can easily do full-motion XGA or SXGA video, but:
The DSP has a very difficult time encoding MPEG video at full-motion frame rates for anything larger than VGA resolutions.
100 Mbit ethernet is just barely capable of supporting a VGA or D1 bitstream, and,
XGA has ~twice the number of pixels as D1; SXGA is even more bandwidth intensive.
Now granted, we do build boards which could probably handle HDTV video conferencing. But the problem is that the 4 processors alone cost more than the average low-end PC. From a technical perspective, HDTV video conferencing is possible, but the hardware required is far more expensive than what the market would tolerate.
Are you willing to pay $10k for HDTV versus a few hundred for a QVGA webcam setup?
I'd love to be building HDTV cameras, but the problem is that we can't find customers willing to pay the extra expense for the higher resolution.
everyone's a shrill paranoid fantasist with delusions of self-importance
Or perhaps they don't like the thought of our hard-earned tax dollars being used to detain innocent people. It's not so much the fear of being imprisoned as knowing that our government is using our money to do some very unethical things. Why should we have to be ashamed of our own government?
UIR is an example of text mining, going across documents and uncovering things that are not apparent to the user," she said.
[emphasis mine]
So, IOW, someone who posts in their blog a phrase they overheard in a bar can now be surrepitiously linked to terrorism. Thanks to the PATRIOT act, their house could be then searched without them even knowing it. Isn't it wonderful that we have this computer program which even further undermines our basic liberties?!
So what this tool basically does is allow the FBI to portray an otherwise innocent person as having "links to terrorism". Considering the degree to which the common person (read: grand juror) trusts computers, this is a very dangerous extension of power for the FBI.
I wonder if the authors of this software are even aware of the oppression and injustice they are enabling.
The proponents of increased surveillance used to say, "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?" Well, thanks to those numbskulls who wrote this software, even those who have nothing to hide may still be judged guilty.
Evolution is not Natural Selection. Natural Selection made sense - it provided an explanation for paring down of an already existing diverse gene pool. And, it was mathematically sound. Evolution, OTOH, claims that nature created that diversity in the first place without ever explaining how. Perhaps if evolutionary theorists had had Darwin's skepticism, science wouldn't have had to suffer the embarrassment of theory whose only reasoning lay in statistically improbable events.
It's a description of how to go from lines in the sand to a rough sketch to a fine drawing through many small steps and the occasional hop.
Except for the fact that the many small steps are explained as "... a series of random events..." If they actually explained what those steps were, I don't think I'd have a problem with it. But, even something as simple as protein folding requires extraordinary odds to get right in a truly random universe. It is much more likely that the process was directed by an intelligent designer, or was governed by a very complicated set of physical laws. While ID argues the former, evolutionary theorists try to deny the latter, only undermining their position further. I think evolution would be much more believable if scientists came out and explained the mechanisms by which a series of random events could produce even a single cell. Currently, they haven't, which makes ID (even though I disagree with statistical reasoning) the best explanation for life on this planet.
As a sophomore in college, I too had to write a version of the game of life. What struck me as particularly interesting was the fact that changing either of the criteria for living or dying had a dramatic effect on how the game played out. It turned out that in order to do something interesting with input of random numbers, you had to restrict the criteria for living and dying to a very narrow set of values; IIRC, Conway's constants were the only ones that would work correctly all the time.
So yes, random events may produce interesting patterns, but only in a highly structured environment. And the environmental requirements for evolution to flourish have been largely ignored by evolutionary theorists. Instead, we're supposed to believe in the power of big numbers, as if this is enlightening.
It all comes back to order and structure. Life could not exist, or come to have existed without a great deal of organization. Whether or not that organization was the result of random events impinged on a structured universe, or of intelligent events impinged on an unordered universe remains to be seen. But evolutionary theorists will discover neither, because current evolutionary theory pre-supposes that life is inevitable given enough time and random events. It's the scientific equivalent of: "Because I said so". There's no attempt to actually discover or explain the natural mechanisms or requirements for evolution. And I think if such an attempt was made, we'd discover that the formation of life is substantially more complicated than currently envisioned.
And so that we don't argue past each other, I understand that there are biologists who have made some progress in this area. But their research is far above the elementary textbook level explanation of evolution that will be given to children. Instead, our children will be told that evolution is a process where random events created life and kept on improving it - as if a string of random events alone, however long, would produce something useful.
If the new mutation is more interesting than it's parent, keep it...
And how does a mindless force of nature differentiate between what is interesting and what is not?
This is the whole crux of ID - that the forces of nature don't possess the ability to discriminate between what is good and bad. Or, to put it another way, creating sophisticated life forms requires sophisticated means.
But again, this is elementary to someone with a college education. Besides, the point still holds - as soon as someone comes up with a suitable explanation for the variety of species, it ceases to be driven by merely random events. Instead, it becomes structured. Now, whether or not you buy the whole argument that structure implies design and design implies a creator - this is another argument entirely. But I do wish those who don't understand how evolution really works would stop saying that it is the result of random events. It is not, and this is empirically provable. Granted, you don't have to believe in an intelligent designer, but neither should you fall for what is provably false.
but some theories are overwhelmingly more likely than others given the weight of supporting evidence.
And unfortunately, Intelligent Design is just one of those theories. Given the evidence, the explanation of an intelligent creator purposefully crafting life makes much more sense and is much more plausible than merely positing that the beauty in nature is due to a rather serendipitous accident caused by random events.
Incidentally, it's not hard to disprove evolution - at least the part which suggests that it was shaped by merely random events. Simply write a program which fills a framebuffer with random numbers and tell me if it ever produces anything structured or resembling life, or even anything worth looking at.
The problem with 'random interactions did everything' hypothesis is that it just does not work. A sequence of random numbers will always be random regardless of size. It won't ever form something with structure because then it would cease to be random.
I've come to view evolution as a test for critical thinking skills. If someone comes to me and claims that life on this planet was the result of a serious of fortunate, random events, I simply regard them as lacking in critical thinking skills. If, OTOH, someone comes to me and explains a mechanism by which environmental factors can change DNA and produce traits which are of use to a species, then I'll listen. But what is most unfortunate is that there's a great many more people in the former category than the latter.
Explaining the existence of life on this planet by stating that we are the result of random mutations is less intellectual and much less enlightening than simply saying we were created by God. At least the latter doesn't contradict the laws of mathematics. If evolutionary biologists were held to the same standard as the other sciences, they would be showing us the mechanisms of evolution, rather than simply professing blind faith in the power of random numbers.
(As an aside, I do realize that there are biologists who are able to show the mechanisms of evolutionary change - however, their work is relatively recent, incomplete, and usually overlooked by textbook writers. When I speak of evolution, I'm talking about evolution as presented in elementary and secondary school textbooks. In fact, I think we'd all be much better off if schools simply left the question of the origins of life out altogether - there are better uses of time than teaching obsolete theories that have since become an embarassment to the scientific community.)
That the rate of continental drift is constant. If this assumption is incorrect, well, then so is the age of the Earth. Consider me a skeptic, but I don't place much faith in scientific hypotheses based on unproven assumptions. Granted, I might not believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old, but then, I'm not keen on believing it is 6 billion years old, either. From where I sit, it seems like neither side can really prove their case. In fact, for those with true faith, the age of the Earth is irrelevant; it might be a nice intellectual curiosity, but it has nothing to do with importance of the sacrifice Jesus Christ made on the cross.
ID is more of an evangelical curiosity than a good argument for the existence of God. This is mostly due to the fact that ID's arguments are statistical in nature - while ID shows (and rather convincingly) that a universe as complex as ours would be a statistical anomoly, it does nothing to show that we aren't exactly that - a statistical anomoly. Anyone willing to believe that we are a rather fortunate accident can live with both the claims of evolution and ID without any apparent conflict between the two.
That said, it still irks me that so many proudly proclaim what they in fact do not know. Yes, if continental drift, atomic decay, etc, were constant throughout the ages, we may be able to safely conclude that the earth is more than 6000 years old. Problem is, we can't prove this. Therefore, we can hypothesize about what might have happened, but definitive proof will have to wait for a time machine.
Instead of bickering about the past, we should instead be looking at what is happening now. At least this we can prove through scientific experiment.
And one final thing: The conflict over Earth's age isn't about the age of sedimentary rock. Rather, it is a struggle for cultural authority between atheists and theists. Each side seeks to be the authority trusted by the people for truth. The age of the Earth is irrelevant; what is really being sought is the authority to impose one's worldview on others. And in this regard, at least the theists are willing to tolerate those who believe something other than what they believe, as they understand that faith is a gift given from above. But I've yet to meet an atheist willing to consider the possibility that those who disagree with them arrived at such a conclusion through rational analysis of their own experiences.
They had cold fusion back in the eighties. Personally, I'm waiting for the nucular powered cars - can't wait for the Chevy Trailblazer with a nuetron V8.
Longhorn doesn't just show you an icon for a document, for example, but rather an itsy-bitsy picture of the first page.
Um, excuse me, but isn't this what KDE has been doing for quite some time now? Why do Windows users have to wait for features I'm already using in Linux?
I don't know whether Linux is just coming of age or if Microsoft is starting to slip behind the times, but it seems like more and more features are showing up in Linux before Windows:
Linux offered true 32 bit multitasking before Windows.
Linux had 64 bit support before Windows.
Now, Windows is copying KDE?!
Okay, so I haven't seen a Mac in a while, so the whole file preview thing might not have originated with KDE. But from this, it looks as if Microsoft is starting to lose some momentum.
...a patent being filed by Google, a number of you who decry this move would be celebrating their the foresight and genius.
Or maybe it could be:
The fact that Google does it right the first time, or:
The fact that Microsoft is a convicted felon, with a reputation of unethical behavior and producing unreliable software, or
The fact that the claimed invention is obvious even by laymen's standards, or
That the patentee has a history of suing government entities for IP violations - IIRC, they sued the L.A. school district.
Granted, Microsoft may make a good games platform. But software on which lives depend requires a degree of care and professionalism that Microsoft simply can't, or won't, produce. That's where the objections lie.
Does Nikon feel the need to encrypt my copyrighted work, against my wishes?
What possible advantage is there in a making camera that doesn't work with the most popular photo editing software available?
What strikes me as odd is that Adobe considered breaking the encryption in the first place. Why would Adobe bother to reverse engineer Nikon's format when it is clear that Nikon doesn't want their cameras working with Adobe's software (or anyone else's, for that matter). Adobe doesn't need Nikon; Nikon needs Adobe's support! Nikon doesn't seem to realize that lack of photoshop support is going to hurt them in the long run - Photoshop is the de facto standard in the industry. Unless Nikon can offer something vastly better than Photoshop (they can't), they're only shooting themselves in the foot. Nobody's going to pay $5,000 for a camera which doesn't work with Photoshop.
If I were an Adobe exec, I'd wait until Nikon asked for photoshop support, and then charge them a hefty royalty for the priveledge.
You can code with the tools of your choice and in the programming language of your choice, and unless you stray too far from the rule book, everything you create will interoperate with everything others write for Windows.
As a "former" Windows programmer, this is absolute bunk. In the first place, I've found that with the exception of Visual Studio, the development tools available on Linux have always been of higher quality than those available on Windows. Furthermore, Windows is typically the last platform for tools to be ported (consider Tcl, Python, Bash, gcc, etc...) But worse to get two applications to interoperate in Windows requires (using the "recommended method of OLE"):
Writing a program with VB or VC++, using OLE. Even the most basic communication takes a few hundred lines of code.
You have to register the OLE object with the operating system
You have to instantiate an object of the particular class you need.(i.e. Word or Excel)
You then issue cryptic commands to the object to get it to do what you want.
Compared with Linux, which requires:
A pipe operator.
Maybe a shell script.
Windows apps don't interoperate with each other unless specifically designed for such. The UNIX design philosophy makes interaction standard. But what is even more embarassing is that for Windows' lack of cooperation, it has far more security holes than Linux/UNIX, even though the Linux/UNIX model has far greater potential for abuse. (Consider a random user typing: cat/dev/zero >/dev/hda)
even the Extreme Edition dual core CPU only has an 800MHz effective FSB, not 1066MHz
It doesn't make much sense to put two processors on the same bus, and then lower the bus speed. And, as the benchmarks showed, single-threaded applications ran slower on the dual-core processor than on the regular P4
I understand "dual core" has a certain market appeal - much like faster clock speeds. Never mind the fact that bus bandwidth and hard drive speed have a greater overall effect on system performance.
Those who want dual cores would be better off buying a computer that was designed to support multiple cpu's - for example, a UNIX workstation. It doesn't matter how many cores you put on a chip if your memory bus can't feed them:
An P4 can theoretically execute 2 instructions every clock cycle.
Make that 4 instructions/clock for a dual core.
Each instruction averages 4 bytes of data access. Since we'll consider the instructions to be cached, we'll ignore the memory access for them, for now. So we're up to 16 bytes of throughput per clock cycle.
At 3200 MHz, times 16 bytes/clock, we're up to 51,200 MB/s theoretical throughput.
Yet, the 800 MHz FSB (which transfers 8 bytes/cycle) can only do 6400 MB/s throughput.
Granted, 6.4 GB/s is very fast - But even a single core P4 can saturate the memory bus. What point is there in adding another core (aside from marketing hoopla), when the bus can't run fast enough to support it!
It seems to me that Intel added the power management features to the chip because they knew that the second core was going to be idle most of the time.
I think what is being forgotten is that the opponents of gay marriage are speaking to those who already understand it as wrong, as if to stir up their collective anger against it. They aren't trying to convince you that it's wrong, but rather, stir up those who already believe it to be so.
Really, the so called "gay" marriage issue was settled about 20 years ago when "No Fault Divorce" became legal in most states. This is what really destroyed the sanctity of marriage, in effect reducing marriage to a merely legal covenant - muchy like a contract, but not quite as binding. Once marriage had been reduced from a transcendental, divine arrangement to merely a legal one, it was only a matter of time before gays would demand to marry, as they understood it - a contract devoid of any spiritual or moral meaning.
But despite the action of legislators, many people still consider the institution of marriage to be sacred and holy. It is an undertaking of selfless service and sacrifice - something at polar odds to what a "gay marriage" would be. Hence the debate rages on today, even though the law no longer recognizes marriage as a divine covenant.
So here's just one logical reason: the state is charged with protecting society as a whole. As future societies are the result of heterosexual relationships, the state need only recognize marriage as a covenant between a man and a woman. There's simply no need for the state to recognize relationships in which the possibility of childbearing is explicitly disallowed. Yes, you may claim that some heterosexual marriages don't result in children, but these are the exception, rather than the rule. And you may also claim that gays love each other. So what? A lot of people have loving relationships which benefit only themselves. Even my brother loves his dog, but that doesn't mean it deserves legal recognition as marriage.
But what gets me is that gays are trying to have their relationships recognized as marriage. Why on earth would they want to use a term which represents a heterosexual relationship - a term which implies their relationship is somehow wrong? Why can't they just be honest about it - heck, even my brother loves his dog, but he's not asking anyone to consider it marriage. It doesn't need to be called marriage for a relationship to be recognized as loving - something you would think gays would understand, but apparently they don't.
And incidentally, from a legal perspective, the term marriage no longer means a loving, committed, and indissoluble relationship. If it did, a divorce would be a lot harder to get. You could even argue that what gays are really saying when they say they want to marry legally is that they're looking forward to going through a messy divorce in 5 years... but I digress...
you had the SAE, the standards body which publishes the standards, which essentially tried to claim copyright on the software and intended to charge DrewTech thousands per year to use the very software DrewTech employees had written and released under the GPL. [emphasis mine]
Nothing says greed like charging someone else for the right to use his own work.
The problem with the patent system is not that it rewards the inventor - that's fine - but that it also allows a lazy but devious patent applicant to make a profit at the expense of those who actually implement the design in question. Nothing could be closer to communism, in spite of what Microsoft and others might say.
In fact, if one really thinks about it, patents are probably the most anti-capitalist, anti-freedom, anti-progress part of our Constitution. They are the equivalent of economic terrorism - patent liability can strike any business, anywhere, with devastating effect.
Ok, I know it's kind of trollish to equate patents with terrorism, but at least it provides a way of explaining the situation to the average, non-technical person. They'll at least understand the appeal to terrorism (**GASP!! THE HORROR!!**).
Would you object if someone from Canada called your boss in the U.S. and made slanderous accusations about your character?
Would it be any different if the phone call had come from the U.S.?
It is one thing if someone slanders my name in a country far away, but quite another if that slander is extended into my own country. The latter has a much greater impact than the former. The fact that the slander originated outside of his country didn't stop it from affecting him.
Slashdot Mirror
as judges release convicted fileswappers with suspended sentences associated with otherwise draconian penalties stipulated by copyright law. [emphasis added]
File swapping is not a crime! Copyright infringement is. We wouldn't call someone who downloaded child pornography a "convicted web-surfer"
I suppose I'm rehashing the tired hacker/cracker terminology argument, but terminology does matter. Public opinion shapes public policy, and ultimately creates laws. Even though their are legitimate uses for file sharing programs, we may find them made illegal simply because they were publicly associated with copyright infringement. Nevermind the fact that web browsers facilitate more copyright infringement than filesharing programs - it's the public perception that matters.
I'm a file swapper too. But that doesn't mean I'm guilty of copyright infringement.
You want a camera with dedicated hardware encoding:
The former requires specialized hardware and substantial processing on the host, where as the latter requires only an internet connection.
As an engineer who recently wrapped up a video camera project, here's are the problems we ran into:
- The CCD sensor can easily do full-motion XGA or SXGA video, but:
- The DSP has a very difficult time encoding MPEG video at full-motion frame rates for anything larger than VGA resolutions.
- 100 Mbit ethernet is just barely capable of supporting a VGA or D1 bitstream, and,
- XGA has ~twice the number of pixels as D1; SXGA is even more bandwidth intensive.
Now granted, we do build boards which could probably handle HDTV video conferencing. But the problem is that the 4 processors alone cost more than the average low-end PC. From a technical perspective, HDTV video conferencing is possible, but the hardware required is far more expensive than what the market would tolerate.Are you willing to pay $10k for HDTV versus a few hundred for a QVGA webcam setup?
I'd love to be building HDTV cameras, but the problem is that we can't find customers willing to pay the extra expense for the higher resolution.
Or perhaps they don't like the thought of our hard-earned tax dollars being used to detain innocent people. It's not so much the fear of being imprisoned as knowing that our government is using our money to do some very unethical things. Why should we have to be ashamed of our own government?
UIR is an example of text mining, going across documents and uncovering things that are not apparent to the user," she said. [emphasis mine]
So, IOW, someone who posts in their blog a phrase they overheard in a bar can now be surrepitiously linked to terrorism. Thanks to the PATRIOT act, their house could be then searched without them even knowing it. Isn't it wonderful that we have this computer program which even further undermines our basic liberties?!
So what this tool basically does is allow the FBI to portray an otherwise innocent person as having "links to terrorism". Considering the degree to which the common person (read: grand juror) trusts computers, this is a very dangerous extension of power for the FBI.
I wonder if the authors of this software are even aware of the oppression and injustice they are enabling.
The proponents of increased surveillance used to say, "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?" Well, thanks to those numbskulls who wrote this software, even those who have nothing to hide may still be judged guilty .
Evolution is not Natural Selection. Natural Selection made sense - it provided an explanation for paring down of an already existing diverse gene pool. And, it was mathematically sound. Evolution, OTOH, claims that nature created that diversity in the first place without ever explaining how. Perhaps if evolutionary theorists had had Darwin's skepticism, science wouldn't have had to suffer the embarrassment of theory whose only reasoning lay in statistically improbable events.
Except for the fact that the many small steps are explained as "... a series of random events ..." If they actually explained what those steps were, I don't think I'd have a problem with it. But, even something as simple as protein folding requires extraordinary odds to get right in a truly random universe. It is much more likely that the process was directed by an intelligent designer, or was governed by a very complicated set of physical laws. While ID argues the former, evolutionary theorists try to deny the latter, only undermining their position further. I think evolution would be much more believable if scientists came out and explained the mechanisms by which a series of random events could produce even a single cell. Currently, they haven't, which makes ID (even though I disagree with statistical reasoning) the best explanation for life on this planet.
As a sophomore in college, I too had to write a version of the game of life. What struck me as particularly interesting was the fact that changing either of the criteria for living or dying had a dramatic effect on how the game played out. It turned out that in order to do something interesting with input of random numbers, you had to restrict the criteria for living and dying to a very narrow set of values; IIRC, Conway's constants were the only ones that would work correctly all the time.
So yes, random events may produce interesting patterns, but only in a highly structured environment. And the environmental requirements for evolution to flourish have been largely ignored by evolutionary theorists. Instead, we're supposed to believe in the power of big numbers, as if this is enlightening.
It all comes back to order and structure. Life could not exist, or come to have existed without a great deal of organization. Whether or not that organization was the result of random events impinged on a structured universe, or of intelligent events impinged on an unordered universe remains to be seen. But evolutionary theorists will discover neither, because current evolutionary theory pre-supposes that life is inevitable given enough time and random events. It's the scientific equivalent of: "Because I said so". There's no attempt to actually discover or explain the natural mechanisms or requirements for evolution. And I think if such an attempt was made, we'd discover that the formation of life is substantially more complicated than currently envisioned.
And so that we don't argue past each other, I understand that there are biologists who have made some progress in this area. But their research is far above the elementary textbook level explanation of evolution that will be given to children. Instead, our children will be told that evolution is a process where random events created life and kept on improving it - as if a string of random events alone, however long, would produce something useful.
And how does a mindless force of nature differentiate between what is interesting and what is not?
This is the whole crux of ID - that the forces of nature don't possess the ability to discriminate between what is good and bad. Or, to put it another way, creating sophisticated life forms requires sophisticated means.
But again, this is elementary to someone with a college education. Besides, the point still holds - as soon as someone comes up with a suitable explanation for the variety of species, it ceases to be driven by merely random events. Instead, it becomes structured. Now, whether or not you buy the whole argument that structure implies design and design implies a creator - this is another argument entirely. But I do wish those who don't understand how evolution really works would stop saying that it is the result of random events. It is not, and this is empirically provable. Granted, you don't have to believe in an intelligent designer, but neither should you fall for what is provably false.
And unfortunately, Intelligent Design is just one of those theories. Given the evidence, the explanation of an intelligent creator purposefully crafting life makes much more sense and is much more plausible than merely positing that the beauty in nature is due to a rather serendipitous accident caused by random events.
Incidentally, it's not hard to disprove evolution - at least the part which suggests that it was shaped by merely random events. Simply write a program which fills a framebuffer with random numbers and tell me if it ever produces anything structured or resembling life, or even anything worth looking at.
The problem with 'random interactions did everything' hypothesis is that it just does not work. A sequence of random numbers will always be random regardless of size. It won't ever form something with structure because then it would cease to be random.
I've come to view evolution as a test for critical thinking skills. If someone comes to me and claims that life on this planet was the result of a serious of fortunate, random events, I simply regard them as lacking in critical thinking skills. If, OTOH, someone comes to me and explains a mechanism by which environmental factors can change DNA and produce traits which are of use to a species, then I'll listen. But what is most unfortunate is that there's a great many more people in the former category than the latter.
Explaining the existence of life on this planet by stating that we are the result of random mutations is less intellectual and much less enlightening than simply saying we were created by God. At least the latter doesn't contradict the laws of mathematics. If evolutionary biologists were held to the same standard as the other sciences, they would be showing us the mechanisms of evolution, rather than simply professing blind faith in the power of random numbers.
(As an aside, I do realize that there are biologists who are able to show the mechanisms of evolutionary change - however, their work is relatively recent, incomplete, and usually overlooked by textbook writers. When I speak of evolution, I'm talking about evolution as presented in elementary and secondary school textbooks. In fact, I think we'd all be much better off if schools simply left the question of the origins of life out altogether - there are better uses of time than teaching obsolete theories that have since become an embarassment to the scientific community.)
That the rate of continental drift is constant. If this assumption is incorrect, well, then so is the age of the Earth. Consider me a skeptic, but I don't place much faith in scientific hypotheses based on unproven assumptions. Granted, I might not believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old, but then, I'm not keen on believing it is 6 billion years old, either. From where I sit, it seems like neither side can really prove their case. In fact, for those with true faith, the age of the Earth is irrelevant; it might be a nice intellectual curiosity, but it has nothing to do with importance of the sacrifice Jesus Christ made on the cross.
ID is more of an evangelical curiosity than a good argument for the existence of God. This is mostly due to the fact that ID's arguments are statistical in nature - while ID shows (and rather convincingly) that a universe as complex as ours would be a statistical anomoly, it does nothing to show that we aren't exactly that - a statistical anomoly. Anyone willing to believe that we are a rather fortunate accident can live with both the claims of evolution and ID without any apparent conflict between the two.
That said, it still irks me that so many proudly proclaim what they in fact do not know. Yes, if continental drift, atomic decay, etc, were constant throughout the ages, we may be able to safely conclude that the earth is more than 6000 years old. Problem is, we can't prove this. Therefore, we can hypothesize about what might have happened, but definitive proof will have to wait for a time machine.
Instead of bickering about the past, we should instead be looking at what is happening now. At least this we can prove through scientific experiment.
And one final thing: The conflict over Earth's age isn't about the age of sedimentary rock. Rather, it is a struggle for cultural authority between atheists and theists. Each side seeks to be the authority trusted by the people for truth. The age of the Earth is irrelevant; what is really being sought is the authority to impose one's worldview on others. And in this regard, at least the theists are willing to tolerate those who believe something other than what they believe, as they understand that faith is a gift given from above. But I've yet to meet an atheist willing to consider the possibility that those who disagree with them arrived at such a conclusion through rational analysis of their own experiences.
Considering that in the U.S., the RIAA wants you to pay $150,000 per song.
For all of the oppression done by the communist party, the RIAA still has them beat.
They had cold fusion back in the eighties. Personally, I'm waiting for the nucular powered cars - can't wait for the Chevy Trailblazer with a nuetron V8.
From the article:
Longhorn doesn't just show you an icon for a document, for example, but rather an itsy-bitsy picture of the first page.
Um, excuse me, but isn't this what KDE has been doing for quite some time now? Why do Windows users have to wait for features I'm already using in Linux?
I don't know whether Linux is just coming of age or if Microsoft is starting to slip behind the times, but it seems like more and more features are showing up in Linux before Windows:
Okay, so I haven't seen a Mac in a while, so the whole file preview thing might not have originated with KDE. But from this, it looks as if Microsoft is starting to lose some momentum.
Something tells me these folks didn't buy the right judges...
Or maybe it could be:
Granted, Microsoft may make a good games platform. But software on which lives depend requires a degree of care and professionalism that Microsoft simply can't, or won't, produce. That's where the objections lie.
Does Nikon feel the need to encrypt my copyrighted work, against my wishes?
What possible advantage is there in a making camera that doesn't work with the most popular photo editing software available?
What strikes me as odd is that Adobe considered breaking the encryption in the first place. Why would Adobe bother to reverse engineer Nikon's format when it is clear that Nikon doesn't want their cameras working with Adobe's software (or anyone else's, for that matter). Adobe doesn't need Nikon; Nikon needs Adobe's support! Nikon doesn't seem to realize that lack of photoshop support is going to hurt them in the long run - Photoshop is the de facto standard in the industry. Unless Nikon can offer something vastly better than Photoshop (they can't), they're only shooting themselves in the foot. Nobody's going to pay $5,000 for a camera which doesn't work with Photoshop.
If I were an Adobe exec, I'd wait until Nikon asked for photoshop support, and then charge them a hefty royalty for the priveledge.
Have lower taxes ever kept politicians from spending money they don't have?
Especially considering the current administration is spending money like a drunken democrat?
Congress just has to write a check. They'll let someone else (i.e. the American taxpayers) figure out how to pay for it.
From the article:
You can code with the tools of your choice and in the programming language of your choice, and unless you stray too far from the rule book, everything you create will interoperate with everything others write for Windows.
As a "former" Windows programmer, this is absolute bunk. In the first place, I've found that with the exception of Visual Studio, the development tools available on Linux have always been of higher quality than those available on Windows. Furthermore, Windows is typically the last platform for tools to be ported (consider Tcl, Python, Bash, gcc, etc...) But worse to get two applications to interoperate in Windows requires (using the "recommended method of OLE"):
Compared with Linux, which requires:
Windows apps don't interoperate with each other unless specifically designed for such. The UNIX design philosophy makes interaction standard. But what is even more embarassing is that for Windows' lack of cooperation, it has far more security holes than Linux/UNIX, even though the Linux/UNIX model has far greater potential for abuse. (Consider a random user typing: cat /dev/zero > /dev/hda)
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!!
Um... Err, wait...
even the Extreme Edition dual core CPU only has an 800MHz effective FSB, not 1066MHz
It doesn't make much sense to put two processors on the same bus, and then lower the bus speed. And, as the benchmarks showed, single-threaded applications ran slower on the dual-core processor than on the regular P4
I understand "dual core" has a certain market appeal - much like faster clock speeds. Never mind the fact that bus bandwidth and hard drive speed have a greater overall effect on system performance.
Those who want dual cores would be better off buying a computer that was designed to support multiple cpu's - for example, a UNIX workstation. It doesn't matter how many cores you put on a chip if your memory bus can't feed them:
- An P4 can theoretically execute 2 instructions every clock cycle.
- Make that 4 instructions/clock for a dual core.
- Each instruction averages 4 bytes of data access. Since we'll consider the instructions to be cached, we'll ignore the memory access for them, for now. So we're up to 16 bytes of throughput per clock cycle.
- At 3200 MHz, times 16 bytes/clock, we're up to 51,200 MB/s theoretical throughput.
- Yet, the 800 MHz FSB (which transfers 8 bytes/cycle) can only do 6400 MB/s throughput.
Granted, 6.4 GB/s is very fast - But even a single core P4 can saturate the memory bus. What point is there in adding another core (aside from marketing hoopla), when the bus can't run fast enough to support it!It seems to me that Intel added the power management features to the chip because they knew that the second core was going to be idle most of the time.
I think what is being forgotten is that the opponents of gay marriage are speaking to those who already understand it as wrong, as if to stir up their collective anger against it. They aren't trying to convince you that it's wrong, but rather, stir up those who already believe it to be so.
Really, the so called "gay" marriage issue was settled about 20 years ago when "No Fault Divorce" became legal in most states. This is what really destroyed the sanctity of marriage, in effect reducing marriage to a merely legal covenant - muchy like a contract, but not quite as binding. Once marriage had been reduced from a transcendental, divine arrangement to merely a legal one, it was only a matter of time before gays would demand to marry, as they understood it - a contract devoid of any spiritual or moral meaning.
But despite the action of legislators, many people still consider the institution of marriage to be sacred and holy. It is an undertaking of selfless service and sacrifice - something at polar odds to what a "gay marriage" would be. Hence the debate rages on today, even though the law no longer recognizes marriage as a divine covenant.
So here's just one logical reason: the state is charged with protecting society as a whole. As future societies are the result of heterosexual relationships, the state need only recognize marriage as a covenant between a man and a woman. There's simply no need for the state to recognize relationships in which the possibility of childbearing is explicitly disallowed. Yes, you may claim that some heterosexual marriages don't result in children, but these are the exception, rather than the rule. And you may also claim that gays love each other. So what? A lot of people have loving relationships which benefit only themselves. Even my brother loves his dog, but that doesn't mean it deserves legal recognition as marriage.
But what gets me is that gays are trying to have their relationships recognized as marriage. Why on earth would they want to use a term which represents a heterosexual relationship - a term which implies their relationship is somehow wrong? Why can't they just be honest about it - heck, even my brother loves his dog, but he's not asking anyone to consider it marriage. It doesn't need to be called marriage for a relationship to be recognized as loving - something you would think gays would understand, but apparently they don't.
And incidentally, from a legal perspective, the term marriage no longer means a loving, committed, and indissoluble relationship. If it did, a divorce would be a lot harder to get. You could even argue that what gays are really saying when they say they want to marry legally is that they're looking forward to going through a messy divorce in 5 years... but I digress...
From the article:
you had the SAE, the standards body which publishes the standards, which essentially tried to claim copyright on the software and intended to charge DrewTech thousands per year to use the very software DrewTech employees had written and released under the GPL. [emphasis mine]
Nothing says greed like charging someone else for the right to use his own work.
The problem with the patent system is not that it rewards the inventor - that's fine - but that it also allows a lazy but devious patent applicant to make a profit at the expense of those who actually implement the design in question. Nothing could be closer to communism, in spite of what Microsoft and others might say.
In fact, if one really thinks about it, patents are probably the most anti-capitalist, anti-freedom, anti-progress part of our Constitution. They are the equivalent of economic terrorism - patent liability can strike any business, anywhere, with devastating effect.
Ok, I know it's kind of trollish to equate patents with terrorism, but at least it provides a way of explaining the situation to the average, non-technical person. They'll at least understand the appeal to terrorism (**GASP!! THE HORROR!!**).
It is illegal to expose security flaws in software...
But you can download all you like for free....
Hmmm.... Not sure how to feel on this one.
To continue your analogy,
It is one thing if someone slanders my name in a country far away, but quite another if that slander is extended into my own country. The latter has a much greater impact than the former. The fact that the slander originated outside of his country didn't stop it from affecting him.