Yes a kindergardener possibly. That pretty much proves my point there. If you add two clouds you have one larger cloud. That's pretty obvious. You don't think I'm right... ok you're entitled to your opinion, but you cannot prove me wrong. There are inconsistencies in math just like every other science. If you don't like my arguments on a macroscopic level lets look at the quantumn level. The basics are broken time and time again, because the basics that we've defined do not apply on that level.
Of course, it seems that you're pretty slow on the uptake. It's not whether it's clouds or water or any other object. I can throw examples at you all day, but you still probably wouldn't be able to look beyond the surface and see the argument rather than the surface. You've proven my point. You've just stated that mathematics cannot explain an abstract idea on it's own (which is ridiculous, mathematics only deals with abstracts). So what is that missing part... it's the framework that I was talking about, wow fancy that. You would like to say that math is true, but first you have to pick a framework, in the case of two clouds you have to define what you call a cloud.
>>If I were high I might agree with you but I'm >>not
I assume that you mean higher up on the intelligence scale, which you shouldn't worry about, which I'll agree yes since your'renot it's probably why you cannot understand the argument.
Now see you've redifined my terms. I wasn't talking about individual water vapor molecules, but let's look at it you way. Just how many water molecules are exactly one clouds worth? There is no answer, there's no way to differentiate between two small clouds or one larger cloud. Mathematics IS semantics.
Wrong, you are basing your logic on your assignment of sugar and water as two separate objects. He could have easily defined them more abstractly. He's added two "things" to two "things" and still has two things. Of course, the sugar and water example is still weak. How about this? Add two clouds together, how many clouds do you have?
Mathmatics is no more "true" than any other science. It only provides a (mostly) consistent framework that enable us to describe the world.
That's ridiculous. I'm still not sure whether Napster is "right" or "wrong", but certainly if it is wrong then you cannot justify use of it because it's there. Especially if you admit to a belief that it is stealing. That's similar to saying that you can take anything you want just because it's there and you are physically able to pick it up and walk away with it.
Ummm if you don't do anything illegal?? That's making the assumption that all laws are just. We is certainly not the case now, let alone the etreme case where the government gets out of had and needs to be altered. Sometimes in order for progress to me made you have to break laws. We wouldn't (those of us that are that is) be living in the U.S. right now if the colonists hadn't decided to break the law.
Theres nothing scientific about science either. All science is based on concepts that are unfalsifiable. Besides the fact that the laws of science, which science is ruled by state that in order for anything to exist, it maust have mass and be extensible. Niether of which are qualities possesed by the laws of science, therefore they do not exist.
And science vanishes in a puff of logic.
Really though, we can't rule out any possibility that we cannot disprove... I tend to believe in evolution as well, but it is not the only possibility.
Interesting article, though more than a little biased. This guy seems like he's just gloating that the theory he believes in, evolution, is correct.
Now don't get me wrong, I tend to lean towards evolution myself, (for a really wild, mind blowing description of eveolution check out The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins), but to make blanket statements, such as "there is no other possible explanation, when referring to the validity of Darwins Theory. Bullshit, there are an infinite number of possibilities. If I were a religious man I could say that God made us that way, case closed. It's pure arrogance that make the author, and humans in general, believe they know what is truly going on. The truth is we don't know... science only serves to build a consistent framework through which we view the world.
Einstein characterizes science really well with his watch analogy. It goes something like this:
Imagine a watch that we cannot open, we can observe it's behavior, and possibly make reasonably educated guesses about it's internal workings, we may postulate that there are gears, springs ect. inside which give this watch it's distinctive behavior, but if the watch is unopenable, we can never really know what is going on.
All this is not to say that science is worthless. Like I said before it provides a framework for us to operate in, but any explanation we have for our world is not necessarily the true one.
In order for this article to have been a little more accurate, the author should have said, "there is no other possible explanation... that we are aware of". Truth is a function of time, fifty years from now a biologist may discover something that completely revolutionizes biology in the same way that Quantum Mechanice altered physics. We also cannot rule out the possiblility that humans do not even have the capacity to understand certain things, and never will.
I agree, in fact when I win we all win. So give me everything.
Re:Open Source Movement and America
on
eWeek on Linux
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· Score: 1
Hmmm let's see. If I read this correctly, middle America is idealistic, while people on the east and west coasts are not. And OSS (which was started more or less at MIT, and east coast school) is too heavily influenced, you believe, by idealistic people.
I was going to flame you for this post. But it's so devoid of sense, and just reeks of someone who likes to hear himself talk that I'm going to consider it a troll.
Re:Open Source Movement and America
on
eWeek on Linux
·
· Score: 1
Maybe so but his point was that the ideals of OSS are (apparently midwest) American. At least as far as it's inception goes. These movements were started here, not to ignore the numerous contributions from around the world. Linus did not start Open Source or Free Software (though of course he contributed, but according to him it had nothing to do with the ethics of open software), so is not even a factor.
Many of the replies to this post are drawing analogies that I feel come close, but are really not accurately characterizing the situation. The most common of these is the "Everquest is a tool so whatever I create with it is mine, just like a word processor". This is not strictly true. In the game you are using objects created by the company, not something of your own that you designed with their software.
I believe that a better analogy wold be this:
Take, for instance, a collectible card game made be Foo Games called BazWar. Many other games would work as well, but a CCG is familiar to most of us in theory if not in practice. Players of BazWar by packs of cards and put them together in decks in order to give themselves the greatest chance of winning the game. Players also trade and sell the cards that they have aquired over time. Now this is clearly outside the realm of the game, real world money is affecting the game outside of the intent of the Foo Games. Foo would certainly rather players buy many packs of cards to get the particular card they want, creating more revenue for their company. So is Foo allowed to ban the trade of these cards?
The answer is, of course, no. So should Sony be allowed to prevent the sale of Everquest items, in my opinion, no. These items are not being copied and then sold, they are the actual items earned through Sony's system by a player. Many times the fact that an issue is related to computing invalidates applying real world* ideas to it, but in this case an almost perfect ananlogy can be drawn. Does this mean that Sony is completely wrong, unfortunately... no again. The break down of this analogy is that Sony is hosting this game, and may draw any rules they like. Again I'll use the analogy of CCG. Many CCG tournaments will have a sealed deck rule. This way they can prevent any one player from dominating the tournament through the use of outside means of gathering cards. This is entirely legal and ethical, and has the benefit of allowing the skills of the players become the primary means of success. Sony has a similar situation in Everquest. The manner in which they enforce fairness is through the banning of selling or trading items. I think that this class action suit is attacking the wrong policy.
I may be mistaken, but I believe that Sony has tried to block the use of Everquest servers other than their own. This is the issue that should be in question. I'll return to the CCG analogy again, (might as well squeeze all the life out of it), say Foo Games runs a yearly sealed deck BazWar tournament. Should I be banned from running my own tournament, of course not, and this is essentially what Sony is trying to do.
I wholeheartedly agree, ethics is an incredibly interesting area of study, when it's not in the form of (for instance) the religous school type method of this is the way you should be. And that's what I meant by my post.
I'm sorry, I hope that this is a joke. Any class that claims to teach ethics is a waste of time. Ethics aren't learned by saying "this is wrong, and that is right" who the hell is anyone to tell anyone else how to live. Ethics should be taught as open discussion. Ungraded classes, that may be required, but are more for enlightenment than anything else.
I'm not so sure this is true. IANAL but, I do know that when I have signed employment contracts in the IT industry, they have always been "at will employment" and when I, or anyone else signs that paper they are acknowledging two things. The company may terminater their employment at any time with no notice, and the employee may resign at anytime with no notice. Many of us also sign a no competition clause, which prevents us from working for a competitor for an arbitrary amount of time. This is in direct contrast to the laws of many states called "right to work", but I believe that singing a contract with these stipulations waives our rights in these circmstances.
I do work for a dot com, however, I've encountered none of these problems. In fact when my company decided to let go of some people, I'm poud to say that they handled it with dignity and compassion. They really made efforts to make the termination as easy as possible, much more than they had to do, or indeed was ever expected of them.
Personally, all this negativity about dot coms going under, ticks me off. It's always assumed that if you work for a dot com you are working on borrowed time. Anyone with half a brain can see that this is a stupid claim. There will always be dot coms, business on the internet is not going away. There will always be internet businesses, and yes many are failing now, but that's a resulty of it being a new field, with relatively young, inexperienced people running the companies. This will change over time, dot com businesses are becoming more savvy by the day, and many will survive. They failres we've seen over the past year or so are the companies that were ineffectually managed. Companies that had no product and used vaporware to get investors for example. With the tremendous rate of growth of dot coms it's no wonder that such a high percentage are failing. But that is more a result of the weeding out of all those who were in it for a quicck buck. The companies that truly have something to offer business will remain.
...this is kind of funny, and exciting... You see more geeks up in arms and outraged at the mass murder of Diablo characters than you might at a Real World tragedy. I'm not asking for flames here so please refrain, but isn't this the kind of things that are interesting about the online world we live in?
I'm sure I'd feel a little differently if I had a hard earned HC character killed, but looking from the outside I can afford to be amused. Especially since Blizzard did such a horrible job with this game, granted horrible b y their standards is still good by other companies.
Yeah right, sounds like you don't know anything about the two fields. Computer Science is about computation theory, finite, linear, and discrete maths. Computer Engineering and CS are two totally separate and equal fields. Go read Knuth if you think CS is so much easier than CE. In my mind it's the difference between an architect and a laborer. CS is much more pure, abstract and theoretical.
Computer Science is no more about about computers than telescopes are about astronomy Dikstra
And of course CIS is for people who can't do math. If you're in it for the money you don't deserve an answer, if you're in it for the love no answer is needed, you already know that CS is the way to go.
Maybe you're missing the key point here... the cable modem is free, if it breaks I can go back to leasing. It's not as if I can't spend $100 at Radio Shack and come away with stuff I want/need.
This is cool, I can find something at the Shack to get a cable modem, I live in MD and already subscribe but it'd be nice to get rid of the rental fee on my bill.
Speaking of free aol and free hardware. I just started getting a new free mailing from aol... a cd in a DVD case. I'm sure you can by them somewhere, but thanks AOL for sending me a case... your cd is in the trash.
Got to love the tendency for people to get snide when someone doesn't know the answer to something. Especially wheen they have no idea of who they're talking to or what areas they may have expertise in.
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Regardless of perspective, mathmetics is by nature not an absolute truth. Two syllables... Godel.
Of course, it seems that you're pretty slow on the uptake. It's not whether it's clouds or water or any other object. I can throw examples at you all day, but you still probably wouldn't be able to look beyond the surface and see the argument rather than the surface. You've proven my point. You've just stated that mathematics cannot explain an abstract idea on it's own (which is ridiculous, mathematics only deals with abstracts). So what is that missing part... it's the framework that I was talking about, wow fancy that. You would like to say that math is true, but first you have to pick a framework, in the case of two clouds you have to define what you call a cloud.
>>If I were high I might agree with you but I'm >>not I assume that you mean higher up on the intelligence scale, which you shouldn't worry about, which I'll agree yes since your'renot it's probably why you cannot understand the argument.
Now see you've redifined my terms. I wasn't talking about individual water vapor molecules, but let's look at it you way. Just how many water molecules are exactly one clouds worth? There is no answer, there's no way to differentiate between two small clouds or one larger cloud. Mathematics IS semantics.
Mathmatics is no more "true" than any other science. It only provides a (mostly) consistent framework that enable us to describe the world.
>>Mathematics has always been considered free of >>uncertainty Errr... Godel?
That's ridiculous. I'm still not sure whether Napster is "right" or "wrong", but certainly if it is wrong then you cannot justify use of it because it's there. Especially if you admit to a belief that it is stealing. That's similar to saying that you can take anything you want just because it's there and you are physically able to pick it up and walk away with it.
Ummm if you don't do anything illegal?? That's making the assumption that all laws are just. We is certainly not the case now, let alone the etreme case where the government gets out of had and needs to be altered. Sometimes in order for progress to me made you have to break laws. We wouldn't (those of us that are that is) be living in the U.S. right now if the colonists hadn't decided to break the law.
Really though, we can't rule out any possibility that we cannot disprove... I tend to believe in evolution as well, but it is not the only possibility.
Now don't get me wrong, I tend to lean towards evolution myself, (for a really wild, mind blowing description of eveolution check out The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins), but to make blanket statements, such as "there is no other possible explanation, when referring to the validity of Darwins Theory. Bullshit, there are an infinite number of possibilities. If I were a religious man I could say that God made us that way, case closed. It's pure arrogance that make the author, and humans in general, believe they know what is truly going on. The truth is we don't know... science only serves to build a consistent framework through which we view the world.
Einstein characterizes science really well with his watch analogy. It goes something like this: Imagine a watch that we cannot open, we can observe it's behavior, and possibly make reasonably educated guesses about it's internal workings, we may postulate that there are gears, springs ect. inside which give this watch it's distinctive behavior, but if the watch is unopenable, we can never really know what is going on.
All this is not to say that science is worthless. Like I said before it provides a framework for us to operate in, but any explanation we have for our world is not necessarily the true one.
In order for this article to have been a little more accurate, the author should have said, "there is no other possible explanation... that we are aware of". Truth is a function of time, fifty years from now a biologist may discover something that completely revolutionizes biology in the same way that Quantum Mechanice altered physics. We also cannot rule out the possiblility that humans do not even have the capacity to understand certain things, and never will.
I agree, in fact when I win we all win. So give me everything.
I was going to flame you for this post. But it's so devoid of sense, and just reeks of someone who likes to hear himself talk that I'm going to consider it a troll.
Maybe so but his point was that the ideals of OSS are (apparently midwest) American. At least as far as it's inception goes. These movements were started here, not to ignore the numerous contributions from around the world. Linus did not start Open Source or Free Software (though of course he contributed, but according to him it had nothing to do with the ethics of open software), so is not even a factor.
I believe that a better analogy wold be this:
Take, for instance, a collectible card game made be Foo Games called BazWar. Many other games would work as well, but a CCG is familiar to most of us in theory if not in practice. Players of BazWar by packs of cards and put them together in decks in order to give themselves the greatest chance of winning the game. Players also trade and sell the cards that they have aquired over time. Now this is clearly outside the realm of the game, real world money is affecting the game outside of the intent of the Foo Games. Foo would certainly rather players buy many packs of cards to get the particular card they want, creating more revenue for their company. So is Foo allowed to ban the trade of these cards?
The answer is, of course, no. So should Sony be allowed to prevent the sale of Everquest items, in my opinion, no. These items are not being copied and then sold, they are the actual items earned through Sony's system by a player. Many times the fact that an issue is related to computing invalidates applying real world* ideas to it, but in this case an almost perfect ananlogy can be drawn. Does this mean that Sony is completely wrong, unfortunately... no again. The break down of this analogy is that Sony is hosting this game, and may draw any rules they like. Again I'll use the analogy of CCG. Many CCG tournaments will have a sealed deck rule. This way they can prevent any one player from dominating the tournament through the use of outside means of gathering cards. This is entirely legal and ethical, and has the benefit of allowing the skills of the players become the primary means of success. Sony has a similar situation in Everquest. The manner in which they enforce fairness is through the banning of selling or trading items. I think that this class action suit is attacking the wrong policy.
I may be mistaken, but I believe that Sony has tried to block the use of Everquest servers other than their own. This is the issue that should be in question. I'll return to the CCG analogy again, (might as well squeeze all the life out of it), say Foo Games runs a yearly sealed deck BazWar tournament. Should I be banned from running my own tournament, of course not, and this is essentially what Sony is trying to do.
I wholeheartedly agree, ethics is an incredibly interesting area of study, when it's not in the form of (for instance) the religous school type method of this is the way you should be. And that's what I meant by my post.
I'm sorry, I hope that this is a joke. Any class that claims to teach ethics is a waste of time. Ethics aren't learned by saying "this is wrong, and that is right" who the hell is anyone to tell anyone else how to live. Ethics should be taught as open discussion. Ungraded classes, that may be required, but are more for enlightenment than anything else.
I do work for a dot com, however, I've encountered none of these problems. In fact when my company decided to let go of some people, I'm poud to say that they handled it with dignity and compassion. They really made efforts to make the termination as easy as possible, much more than they had to do, or indeed was ever expected of them.
Personally, all this negativity about dot coms going under, ticks me off. It's always assumed that if you work for a dot com you are working on borrowed time. Anyone with half a brain can see that this is a stupid claim. There will always be dot coms, business on the internet is not going away. There will always be internet businesses, and yes many are failing now, but that's a resulty of it being a new field, with relatively young, inexperienced people running the companies. This will change over time, dot com businesses are becoming more savvy by the day, and many will survive. They failres we've seen over the past year or so are the companies that were ineffectually managed. Companies that had no product and used vaporware to get investors for example. With the tremendous rate of growth of dot coms it's no wonder that such a high percentage are failing. But that is more a result of the weeding out of all those who were in it for a quicck buck. The companies that truly have something to offer business will remain.
I'm sure I'd feel a little differently if I had a hard earned HC character killed, but looking from the outside I can afford to be amused. Especially since Blizzard did such a horrible job with this game, granted horrible b y their standards is still good by other companies.
But there are plenty of great uses, the visual traceroute is one.
Dynamically creating flash output from a program and being able to view it anytime from anywhere can be a powerful tool.
If I was a professor right now, as an experiment, I'd make my students write a perl program and submit the output as flash.
I'll definitely play with it... once I can get to the page that is.
It's just as shallow to focus solely on someones mind as it is on their body. A person is the whole package.
Hmmm interesting that someone complaining about others misuse of the language has a sig with the misuse of the word hacker.
Yeah right, sounds like you don't know anything about the two fields. Computer Science is about computation theory, finite, linear, and discrete maths. Computer Engineering and CS are two totally separate and equal fields. Go read Knuth if you think CS is so much easier than CE. In my mind it's the difference between an architect and a laborer. CS is much more pure, abstract and theoretical.
Computer Science is no more about about computers than telescopes are about astronomy
Dikstra
And of course CIS is for people who can't do math. If you're in it for the money you don't deserve an answer, if you're in it for the love no answer is needed, you already know that CS is the way to go.
Maybe you're missing the key point here... the cable modem is free, if it breaks I can go back to leasing. It's not as if I can't spend $100 at Radio Shack and come away with stuff I want/need.
Speaking of free aol and free hardware. I just started getting a new free mailing from aol... a cd in a DVD case. I'm sure you can by them somewhere, but thanks AOL for sending me a case... your cd is in the trash.
Got to love the tendency for people to get snide when someone doesn't know the answer to something. Especially wheen they have no idea of who they're talking to or what areas they may have expertise in.