If the site works and renders correctly on the browser used by 90% of the planet, then it's not designed poorly and doesn't need fixing that is true as long as the browser used by 90% of the planet doesn't change. the problem is that it does change. some surveys already give firefox a 30% market share. what happens if everyone starts using opera overnight? and what happens when all the ie6 users upgrade to IE8? IE9?
when that happens, i'd like to see you tell the site managers that their site "isn't designed poorly and doesn't need fixing."
then maybe people would actually *notice* that their sites are designed poorly. an easy fix would be available, but perhaps they would be motivated to bring their site up to par.
except that alien races discovered would likely be hundreds of light years away, or more. so unless they happened to be broadcasting their encyclopedia galactica, we wouldn't necessarily learn much, even if we could make sense of it. and they wouldn't know that we had received their transmissions until hundreds of years later--or thousands, depending on exactly how far away they really are.
our goal in developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing web I don't see how it can *really* be standards compliant and not "break" pages coded specifically for IE6. If I code an extra 6px into a margin to fix the IE margin doubling error, is IE8 going to somehow not "break" the work I put into fixing their bug while simultaneously rendering the margin correctly in the first place? It's just not possible.
They have to stop worrying about "breaking" the web. If they stopped worrying about that maybe they could get a decent version of IE out the door. After all, how hard is it for webmasters to write some code that cancels IE specific hacks if IE version is 8?
The caveat is that you have to let them monitor your use of the program. This is misleading. The real caveat is you have to let them monitor your *current* OS for 3 months. *Then* you get the free software.
You are saying that I've been using increasingly efficient tools to "dig myself into a hole." (btw this doesn't mean that I agree, but curiosity has gotten the better of me) What do the shovel and dozer represent? Lines of argument? I don't quite think I get it.
The rate of change in scientific thought over even 10 years doesn't support scientific dogmatism very well.
Could say the same thing about theological change. Some things change very quickly and some things very slowly--science has it's slow moving aspects as well.
The axioms of faith are based on subjective feeling (or are taken from a book that is true because it is a special book). They contain no predictive power.
I think this is a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of faith. Faith (like science) is an explanation of why the universe works the way it does. Yes--it can be based on subjective feelings or blind trust in a book--but more commonly it is accepted because it is a worldview that makes sense of a person's experiences. Which is not so very unlike science, actually.
Saying that faith has no predictive power is surely false. Whereas science may predict that a dropped rock will fall to the ground due to gravity, faith can predict that the sun will rise tomorrow because God will not end the world until the "end times." Perhaps a Newtonian scientist is slightly wrong, and perhaps the person of faith is wrong, but to deny that they are predictive is silly.
creationists are essentially united in their denial of fact, and their willingness to usurp actual knowledge in favor of myths handed down in a book.
Faith that denies fact does not last for long. Huge numbers of Christians today believe in evolution. Creationists exist because they are unconvinced by the science of (for example) evolution. By proposing alternate theories and challenging it, they are participating in science. The only real difference is that they demand a much more rigorous proof to be convinced than most scientists. Being skeptical is not the same as being dogmatic. Believe me, if/when evolution is proven as solidly and cleanly as gravity, no people of faith will "cling to dogma" for long--they will overturn that belief (despite what the article says) just as all disproven faithful beliefs have been overturned. Think of geocentricism.
the point is that you can't make blanket statements about how dogmatic all people of faith or all people of science are. The article does that. And I challenge the idea that people of faith are more dogmatic than people of science.
No, science is not based on axioms -- you're thinking of mathematics, which is not the same thing. Science is not based on deductive logic like math is -- quite the opposite, in fact. Science is based on inductive logic, which works in the opposite direction: the scientist observes the world around him and tries to elucidate its underlying structure from those observations. So in a sense, the scientist does not know what the axioms are; he is trying to discover them.
I suppose you are right about the differences between math and science--I have always tied the two together in my mind, and my background in philosophy probably hasn't helped that. But inductive as science may be, it still has axiomatic beliefs at it's foundation. Science depends on the assumption that observations of the world actually correlate to a real world that exists. Also there is the belief that one has the ability to interact with the world, hence experiments are possible.
Then there is the fact that science depends heavily on math. Can you express Einstein's theory of relativity without assuming any mathematic axioms?
Doesn't inductive reasoning itself require an unsupported axiomatic trust in the idea that "the future will be like the past"? Finally, isn't there an axiomatic trust that the scientific process itself works?
>>The idea that all scientific knowledge is provisional, able to be challenged and overturned, is one thing that separates matters of science from matters of faith.
Not necessarily. Blanket statements like this are stupid. Sure, some people refuse to allow their faiths to be challenged, but most of my experience with people of faith has been the opposite. Faith is more like an axiom than blindness--it is believed because with it as a foundation, the rest of the world makes sense, even though there may not be a positive proof for it to stand on. All science is based on axioms as well, which aren't supported either, that's why they're called axioms.
Both scientists and people of faith have a hard time when someone questions their axioms. But I see no evidence to show that people of faith are less likely to accept a challenge of their axioms: in fact, they are more likely to accept that challenge, and if truly presented with something that can prove it's falsity, I would say a person of faith is much more likely to overturn that belief than a mathematician would be to overturn one of Euler's axioms.
How is it in "the noblest tradition of science" to retract a scientific paper on the grounds that it supports a theory that you don't like? This is not science at all, but dogmatism.
You may say that he retracted it because of the errors he found, but that is clearly not the case--it was to thwart the creationists. Wouldn't it have been better to make a clarification?
Or even better than that--build a few space elevators. This would dramatically reduce the amount of money required to get each pound of material into space.
Then we can use nuclear energy which *does* pollute, but cheaply lift the waste up the elevator and send it to the sun or even just lock it in some obscure orbit.
Even the earliest version of the CSS 2 spec has passed its ninth birthday. Why should a web developer use a brand new web standard that requires the use of such an outdated and difficult-to-use spec? Making web pages to standards won't be worth the extra time until 90% of surfers are using fully CSS3 compliant user agents. That still looks a long way off.
Slashdot Mirror
then maybe people would actually *notice* that their sites are designed poorly. an easy fix would be available, but perhaps they would be motivated to bring their site up to par.
except that alien races discovered would likely be hundreds of light years away, or more. so unless they happened to be broadcasting their encyclopedia galactica, we wouldn't necessarily learn much, even if we could make sense of it. and they wouldn't know that we had received their transmissions until hundreds of years later--or thousands, depending on exactly how far away they really are.
I think it's the iframes failing due to the slashdot effect.
actually, firefox 3 does pass: http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/acid/
Just add water!!
get a session manager add-on and save the session.
Martian robots drive YOU!
The journalists wrote the questions in *Hebrew*, not English.
You are saying that I've been using increasingly efficient tools to "dig myself into a hole." (btw this doesn't mean that I agree, but curiosity has gotten the better of me) What do the shovel and dozer represent? Lines of argument? I don't quite think I get it.
Saying that faith has no predictive power is surely false. Whereas science may predict that a dropped rock will fall to the ground due to gravity, faith can predict that the sun will rise tomorrow because God will not end the world until the "end times." Perhaps a Newtonian scientist is slightly wrong, and perhaps the person of faith is wrong, but to deny that they are predictive is silly. Faith that denies fact does not last for long. Huge numbers of Christians today believe in evolution. Creationists exist because they are unconvinced by the science of (for example) evolution. By proposing alternate theories and challenging it, they are participating in science. The only real difference is that they demand a much more rigorous proof to be convinced than most scientists. Being skeptical is not the same as being dogmatic. Believe me, if/when evolution is proven as solidly and cleanly as gravity, no people of faith will "cling to dogma" for long--they will overturn that belief (despite what the article says) just as all disproven faithful beliefs have been overturned. Think of geocentricism.
the point is that you can't make blanket statements about how dogmatic all people of faith or all people of science are. The article does that. And I challenge the idea that people of faith are more dogmatic than people of science.
I suppose you are right about the differences between math and science--I have always tied the two together in my mind, and my background in philosophy probably hasn't helped that. But inductive as science may be, it still has axiomatic beliefs at it's foundation. Science depends on the assumption that observations of the world actually correlate to a real world that exists. Also there is the belief that one has the ability to interact with the world, hence experiments are possible.
Then there is the fact that science depends heavily on math. Can you express Einstein's theory of relativity without assuming any mathematic axioms?
Doesn't inductive reasoning itself require an unsupported axiomatic trust in the idea that "the future will be like the past"? Finally, isn't there an axiomatic trust that the scientific process itself works?
>>The idea that all scientific knowledge is provisional, able to be challenged and overturned, is one thing that separates matters of science from matters of faith. Not necessarily. Blanket statements like this are stupid. Sure, some people refuse to allow their faiths to be challenged, but most of my experience with people of faith has been the opposite. Faith is more like an axiom than blindness--it is believed because with it as a foundation, the rest of the world makes sense, even though there may not be a positive proof for it to stand on. All science is based on axioms as well, which aren't supported either, that's why they're called axioms. Both scientists and people of faith have a hard time when someone questions their axioms. But I see no evidence to show that people of faith are less likely to accept a challenge of their axioms: in fact, they are more likely to accept that challenge, and if truly presented with something that can prove it's falsity, I would say a person of faith is much more likely to overturn that belief than a mathematician would be to overturn one of Euler's axioms.
How is it in "the noblest tradition of science" to retract a scientific paper on the grounds that it supports a theory that you don't like? This is not science at all, but dogmatism. You may say that he retracted it because of the errors he found, but that is clearly not the case--it was to thwart the creationists. Wouldn't it have been better to make a clarification?
but are they liable for their libel?
and the drivers to support it so i can plug in a keyboard, camera, printer, or any other USB device using the standard cable.
Or even better than that--build a few space elevators. This would dramatically reduce the amount of money required to get each pound of material into space. Then we can use nuclear energy which *does* pollute, but cheaply lift the waste up the elevator and send it to the sun or even just lock it in some obscure orbit.