Yes, Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills is one of my favorites (BTW, the authors are Gibas and Jambeck.) I think this is probably the book that some previous poster characterized as being "for absolute newbies who are looking for the ON button," but the point he's probably missing is that the book isn't intended to be an end in itself -- one of its major functions (for me) is as a list of resources. I'd say it averages about one useful URL per page... and while the idea of storing URL's in dead tree form may seem kind of silly, I don't know of any bioinformatics Web sites' "links" sections that have this wealth of information (and the dead tree bibliography is pretty useful too.) As a student of bioinformatics and a biotech software engineer, I strongly recommend this book.
[shrug] To each his own. I still use WordPerfect 3.5e on my Mac simply because I think it's the best werp I've ever seen, on any platform. Office (any version) feels slow and clunky to me. For spreadsheets, I use AppleWorks; and all my database work is Web-based, using a PHP front end to MySQL. I know a lot of Mac users do like Office, but while I wouldn't describe it as "shit and vomit" (which is, in fact, an accurate description of any version of Windows) I personally don't understand why it's so popular.
For that matter, as someone who is (primarily) a Mac user, I don't even want it for Mac, though I can see how it has some business value (convincing PHB's that the Mac is a "real" computer, etc.) Cringely is right -- the settlement is a sham, and even with the states' proposed changes, it's still pretty toothless. The real problem, unfortunately, is that there is no conduct remedy that will do a damned bit of good. Breakup is the only solution...
... and since that's not going to happen, my next preferred remedy would be one something like the one Steve Jobs is asking for: a big cash fine (not a "donation" to schools designed to ensure that future generations of developers will use all Microsoft all the time). But the proposed $1 billion is nothing, pocket change for Bill Gates. Make it $10 billion per year for ten years, and you're maybe talking about real money.
Where should the money go? Although my first impulse is to say "to Microsoft's competitors and/or to free software," I don't think that's quite right in the long run, because it puts the government in the position of deciding who's worthy. Better, I think, would be to parcel the money out for public math and comp. sci. education according to some simple, objective formula (primary/secondary schools get money based on the number of students in the district, colleges get it based on the current size of their math and CS departments, say.)
Is this ideal? No, because Microsoft will still be there, as one company. But it will seriously limit their ability to crush innovation in the industry for a decade (by which time things will no doubt have changed in all kinds of ways) and produce a generation of well-educated computer scientists, and hopefully be politically acceptable to all sides.
Communism is not the opposite of capitalism; socialism is the opposite of capitalism. Communism is a sociopolitical worldview which incorporates socialism as one of its guiding principles. In the real world, of course, neither absolute socialism nor absolute capitalism works too well -- capitalist transactions take place even in the most officially socialist countries, and even the most laissez-faire capitalist countries (e.g. the US) incorporate some government control of the economy.
Apache has more than twice the marketshare of IIS, but gets hacked less than a tenth as much. Now, it may be true that it takes more technical knowledge to set up and run an Apache server than an IIS server that is enabled by default in the OS... but it doesn't take that _much_ knowledge, and it's certainly possible for inexperienced admins to make dumb mistakes that leave Apache servers open to attack. And yet Apache is much more secure in the real world. This isn't just a difference in the quality of the users; it's a difference in the quality of the products.
Physical strength, not so much, although a certain minimum level is still important since modern infantrymen carry a really absurd amount of heavy equipment around with them. (In the Korean war, the average infantryman's load, including pack, rifle, ammunition, etc., was ~40 lbs. These days, it's over 100 lbs.) But endurance, resistance to heat and cold, hand-eye coordination... all those things still matter a lot in modern land warfare. Also, I can see task-specific modifications like engineering fighter pilots to handle high g loads being useful.
So what you need is a system of identity where you can say "Show me all pages rated highly by people in my trusted user list".
Which would require user accounts, as you said, but I wouldn't have any problem at all with having a Google cookie on my browser. Once you've got that, then maybe something like Amazon.com's system would work without setting up explicit user groups: "The following pages were high-ranked by users whose page rankings were similar to yours:..."
According to the latest US census data, there are about 21 million people in Texas. OTOH, there are over 50 million in France. And the Texas state gov't is waaay smaller, in both per capita and absolute terms, than the French national gov't. I'm not sure there's a meaningful comparison to be made between US state and national governments, regardless of their relative sizes; national governments even of small countries (and France is not small) have to think about things such as defense that even the largest US states don't have to worry about.
Check out the history of Buddhism in Japan some time. The Buddhist takeover was just as unpleasant as any Crusade, Inquisition, or Jihad.
As for the Hare Krishnas, the only reason there's never been an H.K. holy war is because there aren't enough of them. Same reason there's never been a Wiccan Crusade, or whatever. Meanwhile, recall that H.K. is an offshoot of Hinduism -- and India's history shows plenty of horror committed in the name of that religion.
And people who fly airliners into skyscrapers cannot claim any basis in the Koran for their actions... except they do. The reason people equate fundamentalists of different religions is because, regardless of the tenets of their religion (and the Koran, like the Bible, is composed of stuff that's about equal parts beautiful and horrifying) they all tend to follow the same principle: "Believe the way I do or I'll kill you." Moslems are not "compelled" to kill unbelievers any more than Christians are, but followers of both religions have a long and evil history of doing just that. To deny this is to deny reality.
Not that it's just a Christian and Islamic problem, of course. Fundamentalists of all religions, as I said above, tend to act the same way.
Well, yeah, it makes sense, but frankly, to me it sounds like the argument of a philosopher who doesn't really understand how good science operates. Any well-designed experiment or well-written report of observations will list the assumptions involved.
And, therefore, F = m a is falsifiable, and is a theory (or a law, at this point), while 2 + 2 = 4 is unfalsifiable, and is a fact. Where's the contradiction?
Could you give some examples of what you're talking about? For the record, I work in biotech, and pretty much our whole business is built on falsifiability; I've never heard a working scientist argue seriously against it.
There are two reasons. The first is that evolution is uniquely under attack -- there are cranks who attack relativity, plate tectonics, and other major, well-supported scientific theories (in fact, I'd go so far as to call all of these "laws") but few of them have the numbers or the potential power the creationists do. So Dawkins, quite understandably, feels defensive.
Second, without exception, creationists fail to mount a scientific attack on evolution. They either just say it contradicts the Bible and so must be false (the old school) or they use pseudo-scientific language and deliberate misrepresentation of scientific evidence (the new school.) What they don't do is attack the theory the way real scientists attack a theory, with hard evidence, because they don't have any.
But the new-school creationists have very good PR, and an amazing number of otherwise rational people are fooled by their rhetoric into thinking that "evidence against evolution" actually exists. This, of course, gets Dawkins' goat. And although I think his "undisguised clarity" may be a bit counterproductive, the more dangerous creationism gets, the more I find myself in sympathy with his outspoken exasperation.
No, I meant "can't." 2 + 2 = 4 is a fact, and you can't prove it wrong, period. (This is why mathematics, despite being called "the queen of the sciences" and immensely valuable to just about every branch of science, isn't a science in itself. It's... something else, really, its own field of endeavor.) But F = m a, while borne out by an enormous amount of experimental evidence and almost certainly true, _can_ be proven wrong if in fact it _is_ wrong. Now, if you just assert that F =/= m a, you're most likely wrong, and I feel free to heap upon you the same scorn Richard Dawkins shows for creationists... but if you're right, science (uniquely) gives you a mechanism to show that you're right. Er, until someone else does a better experiment and shows us that we're both wrong, of course...
All science is based on "educated guesses." It's just that some guesses are much more educated than others, and turn out to fit the facts pretty well. Relativity is one of those very good guesses, along with Newton's laws (and no, Einstein didn't replace Newton, just refined Newtonian physics in a small but significant way), Darwinian evolution, plate tectonics, Boyle's law, etc....
But this is the defining characteristic of science: everything, always, is open to question. Hypotheses that are borne out by experiment and observation turn into theories, and those theories which stand the test of time are honored by being called laws, but none of them are "facts" in the sense that they can't be proven wrong. This is the principle of falsifiability, and it is the one thing which sets science apart from religion, philosophy, law, and other areas of human intellectual endeavor which seek to make statements about our world.
So relativity isn't a "hard fact." Neither is gravity. But that gravity, and relativity, and evolution, and plate tectonics, et bloody cetera, will operate the way the theories say they will, is the way to bet unless and until something dramatically better -- and by "better" I mean "backed by lots of reproducible evidence" -- comes along.
You know, maybe you should have paid a _little_ attention when you were in college, so you could have learned not to sound like an idiot. "Tenyear" professors. Jesus Christ.
Try working with a fanless desktop computer -- e.g., an iMac -- for a while and then go back to your regular desktop. See what a difference it makes. Fan noise never used to bother me until I got an iMac at home; now sitting down at my desk at work bothers the hell out of me for the first hour or so, because I'm always aware of the noise from the CPU. And I'm convinced that even if one isn't aware of it, the constant background noise harms productivity.
Not that it harms productivity as much as posting to/. when one should be coding, of course...;)
Genre is sometimes a meaningful categorization and sometimes a trap. It's meaningful to talk about "Classics of Science Fiction" and "Literary Classics" as two separate but intersecting sets. There are certainly SF/F/H novels which are clasics within their own genres but don't really qualify for that status in the outside world, but there are also a few which are big and important enough to achieve that status overall, both inside and outside the genre. Part of the problem, of course, is that SF really hasn't been around long enough to decide if any of its works will stand the test of time the way Shakespeare has (though I should make the obligatory note that while Shakespeare didn't write SF, much of what he wrote can be classified as either fantasy or horror.)
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Yes, Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills is one of my favorites (BTW, the authors are Gibas and Jambeck.) I think this is probably the book that some previous poster characterized as being "for absolute newbies who are looking for the ON button," but the point he's probably missing is that the book isn't intended to be an end in itself -- one of its major functions (for me) is as a list of resources. I'd say it averages about one useful URL per page ... and while the idea of storing URL's in dead tree form may seem kind of silly, I don't know of any bioinformatics Web sites' "links" sections that have this wealth of information (and the dead tree bibliography is pretty useful too.) As a student of bioinformatics and a biotech software engineer, I strongly recommend this book.
[shrug] To each his own. I still use WordPerfect 3.5e on my Mac simply because I think it's the best werp I've ever seen, on any platform. Office (any version) feels slow and clunky to me. For spreadsheets, I use AppleWorks; and all my database work is Web-based, using a PHP front end to MySQL. I know a lot of Mac users do like Office, but while I wouldn't describe it as "shit and vomit" (which is, in fact, an accurate description of any version of Windows) I personally don't understand why it's so popular.
For that matter, as someone who is (primarily) a Mac user, I don't even want it for Mac, though I can see how it has some business value (convincing PHB's that the Mac is a "real" computer, etc.) Cringely is right -- the settlement is a sham, and even with the states' proposed changes, it's still pretty toothless. The real problem, unfortunately, is that there is no conduct remedy that will do a damned bit of good. Breakup is the only solution ...
... and since that's not going to happen, my next preferred remedy would be one something like the one Steve Jobs is asking for: a big cash fine (not a "donation" to schools designed to ensure that future generations of developers will use all Microsoft all the time). But the proposed $1 billion is nothing, pocket change for Bill Gates. Make it $10 billion per year for ten years, and you're maybe talking about real money.
Where should the money go? Although my first impulse is to say "to Microsoft's competitors and/or to free software," I don't think that's quite right in the long run, because it puts the government in the position of deciding who's worthy. Better, I think, would be to parcel the money out for public math and comp. sci. education according to some simple, objective formula (primary/secondary schools get money based on the number of students in the district, colleges get it based on the current size of their math and CS departments, say.)
Is this ideal? No, because Microsoft will still be there, as one company. But it will seriously limit their ability to crush innovation in the industry for a decade (by which time things will no doubt have changed in all kinds of ways) and produce a generation of well-educated computer scientists, and hopefully be politically acceptable to all sides.
Yep.
Short version: I want a lameness filter that eliminates mindless anti-Katz posts.
Communism is not the opposite of capitalism; socialism is the opposite of capitalism. Communism is a sociopolitical worldview which incorporates socialism as one of its guiding principles. In the real world, of course, neither absolute socialism nor absolute capitalism works too well -- capitalist transactions take place even in the most officially socialist countries, and even the most laissez-faire capitalist countries (e.g. the US) incorporate some government control of the economy.
If you really believe that, I've got some land in Florida I'd like to sell you ...
Apache has more than twice the marketshare of IIS, but gets hacked less than a tenth as much. Now, it may be true that it takes more technical knowledge to set up and run an Apache server than an IIS server that is enabled by default in the OS ... but it doesn't take that _much_ knowledge, and it's certainly possible for inexperienced admins to make dumb mistakes that leave Apache servers open to attack. And yet Apache is much more secure in the real world. This isn't just a difference in the quality of the users; it's a difference in the quality of the products.
Physical strength, not so much, although a certain minimum level is still important since modern infantrymen carry a really absurd amount of heavy equipment around with them. (In the Korean war, the average infantryman's load, including pack, rifle, ammunition, etc., was ~40 lbs. These days, it's over 100 lbs.) But endurance, resistance to heat and cold, hand-eye coordination ... all those things still matter a lot in modern land warfare. Also, I can see task-specific modifications like engineering fighter pilots to handle high g loads being useful.
Which would require user accounts, as you said, but I wouldn't have any problem at all with having a Google cookie on my browser. Once you've got that, then maybe something like Amazon.com's system would work without setting up explicit user groups: "The following pages were high-ranked by users whose page rankings were similar to yours: ..."
According to the latest US census data, there are about 21 million people in Texas. OTOH, there are over 50 million in France. And the Texas state gov't is waaay smaller, in both per capita and absolute terms, than the French national gov't. I'm not sure there's a meaningful comparison to be made between US state and national governments, regardless of their relative sizes; national governments even of small countries (and France is not small) have to think about things such as defense that even the largest US states don't have to worry about.
You think you're kidding, don't you?
Check out the history of Buddhism in Japan some time. The Buddhist takeover was just as unpleasant as any Crusade, Inquisition, or Jihad.
As for the Hare Krishnas, the only reason there's never been an H.K. holy war is because there aren't enough of them. Same reason there's never been a Wiccan Crusade, or whatever. Meanwhile, recall that H.K. is an offshoot of Hinduism -- and India's history shows plenty of horror committed in the name of that religion.
And people who fly airliners into skyscrapers cannot claim any basis in the Koran for their actions ... except they do. The reason people equate fundamentalists of different religions is because, regardless of the tenets of their religion (and the Koran, like the Bible, is composed of stuff that's about equal parts beautiful and horrifying) they all tend to follow the same principle: "Believe the way I do or I'll kill you." Moslems are not "compelled" to kill unbelievers any more than Christians are, but followers of both religions have a long and evil history of doing just that. To deny this is to deny reality.
Not that it's just a Christian and Islamic problem, of course. Fundamentalists of all religions, as I said above, tend to act the same way.
The parent should not have been modded "flamebait." It's a joke, and a funny one.
Will you please not assume that we "don't understand" the issues involved, you arrogant prick?
Well, yeah, it makes sense, but frankly, to me it sounds like the argument of a philosopher who doesn't really understand how good science operates. Any well-designed experiment or well-written report of observations will list the assumptions involved.
Yeah, that's fair enough.
And, therefore, F = m a is falsifiable, and is a theory (or a law, at this point), while 2 + 2 = 4 is unfalsifiable, and is a fact. Where's the contradiction?
Could you give some examples of what you're talking about? For the record, I work in biotech, and pretty much our whole business is built on falsifiability; I've never heard a working scientist argue seriously against it.
What the hell, I'll answer it, AC post or not.
There are two reasons. The first is that evolution is uniquely under attack -- there are cranks who attack relativity, plate tectonics, and other major, well-supported scientific theories (in fact, I'd go so far as to call all of these "laws") but few of them have the numbers or the potential power the creationists do. So Dawkins, quite understandably, feels defensive.
Second, without exception, creationists fail to mount a scientific attack on evolution. They either just say it contradicts the Bible and so must be false (the old school) or they use pseudo-scientific language and deliberate misrepresentation of scientific evidence (the new school.) What they don't do is attack the theory the way real scientists attack a theory, with hard evidence, because they don't have any.
But the new-school creationists have very good PR, and an amazing number of otherwise rational people are fooled by their rhetoric into thinking that "evidence against evolution" actually exists. This, of course, gets Dawkins' goat. And although I think his "undisguised clarity" may be a bit counterproductive, the more dangerous creationism gets, the more I find myself in sympathy with his outspoken exasperation.
No, I meant "can't." 2 + 2 = 4 is a fact, and you can't prove it wrong, period. (This is why mathematics, despite being called "the queen of the sciences" and immensely valuable to just about every branch of science, isn't a science in itself. It's ... something else, really, its own field of endeavor.) But F = m a, while borne out by an enormous amount of experimental evidence and almost certainly true, _can_ be proven wrong if in fact it _is_ wrong. Now, if you just assert that F =/= m a, you're most likely wrong, and I feel free to heap upon you the same scorn Richard Dawkins shows for creationists ... but if you're right, science (uniquely) gives you a mechanism to show that you're right. Er, until someone else does a better experiment and shows us that we're both wrong, of course ...
All science is based on "educated guesses." It's just that some guesses are much more educated than others, and turn out to fit the facts pretty well. Relativity is one of those very good guesses, along with Newton's laws (and no, Einstein didn't replace Newton, just refined Newtonian physics in a small but significant way), Darwinian evolution, plate tectonics, Boyle's law, etc. ...
But this is the defining characteristic of science: everything, always, is open to question. Hypotheses that are borne out by experiment and observation turn into theories, and those theories which stand the test of time are honored by being called laws, but none of them are "facts" in the sense that they can't be proven wrong. This is the principle of falsifiability, and it is the one thing which sets science apart from religion, philosophy, law, and other areas of human intellectual endeavor which seek to make statements about our world.
So relativity isn't a "hard fact." Neither is gravity. But that gravity, and relativity, and evolution, and plate tectonics, et bloody cetera, will operate the way the theories say they will, is the way to bet unless and until something dramatically better -- and by "better" I mean "backed by lots of reproducible evidence" -- comes along.
Um, everyone does know that Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet, right?
/. is much too smart to fall for that absurd bit of Republican propaganda.
Of course. Everyone on
Of course.
You know, maybe you should have paid a _little_ attention when you were in college, so you could have learned not to sound like an idiot. "Tenyear" professors. Jesus Christ.
-- your fellow Air Force vet
Try working with a fanless desktop computer -- e.g., an iMac -- for a while and then go back to your regular desktop. See what a difference it makes. Fan noise never used to bother me until I got an iMac at home; now sitting down at my desk at work bothers the hell out of me for the first hour or so, because I'm always aware of the noise from the CPU. And I'm convinced that even if one isn't aware of it, the constant background noise harms productivity.
/. when one should be coding, of course ... ;)
Not that it harms productivity as much as posting to
Those are also classics, of course. :)
Genre is sometimes a meaningful categorization and sometimes a trap. It's meaningful to talk about "Classics of Science Fiction" and "Literary Classics" as two separate but intersecting sets. There are certainly SF/F/H novels which are clasics within their own genres but don't really qualify for that status in the outside world, but there are also a few which are big and important enough to achieve that status overall, both inside and outside the genre. Part of the problem, of course, is that SF really hasn't been around long enough to decide if any of its works will stand the test of time the way Shakespeare has (though I should make the obligatory note that while Shakespeare didn't write SF, much of what he wrote can be classified as either fantasy or horror.)