No, the scientific answer is to definitely not assume the existence of a creator.
You're confusing "scientific" with "ontologically consistent". It is not scientific to posit any entity which is neither observed directly nor necessary to explain observed behaviour, and it is not unscientific to posit that such an entity does not exist on the basis of parsimony.
It's perfectly scientific to say there is not a mirror universe Earth which is totally inaccessible from our Earth which is currently the exact same as here except that Obama has a goatee, even though there is no evidence and there cannot be any evidence. Don't get caught up in the fact that the statement appears absolute. Consider a case where there can eventually be evidence: it's also possible that the first monkey given a typewriter after 2127 will produce the complete works of Shakespeare on that typewriter, but it's perfectly scientific to say that monkey will not, even though you can say that technically this is possible and you can argue that we won't really know until 2127 at the earliest.
Likewise, there could be a creator, but until you come up with any evidence then no is a valid scientific answer. "Maybe" is also somewhat valid, but only in an extremely unuseful sense, like "maybe Stonehenge was build by leprechauns, which left the world 300 years ago and erased all evidence of their existence save for their legends and stonehenge" or "maybe the universe was created last tuesday with our memories intact" or "maybe the entirety of modern history was an extreme random anomaly that appeared consistent by sheer chance, and we'll start getting more probable results now, basically resetting modern physics to square 1 (if we don't abandon it entirely)". The scientific answer to those is, no, that didn't happen, until and unless you give a good reason for these hypotheses.
I also don't give a shit whether somebody believes so long as they don't hurt anybody else, and I'm not going to try to "convert" them to atheism or anything, but you cannot usefully claim that science is neutral here. If somebody believes in god, fine. You don't have to go and drag science into it and try to claim that the belief is scientifically valid. Everybody is wrong about some things, so if you disagree, leave it at that. Science doesn't have a lot to do with why you believe a lot of other things either, eg. which book you believe is most entertaining (well, unless it's a science textbook...).
Honestly, you're pushing agnosticism pretty hard here, which seems a little contrary to your thing about pushing beliefs on other people.
Ontologically, I would agree that *any* reasonable person is strictly agnostic in the semi-useless sense that we're talking about. It's pretty much my definition of a reasonable, non-fundamentalist person, whether theist or atheist. That doesn't mean they haven't also taken a position, theist or atheist, and I that very few people truly, truly have not to at least some extent. And that doesn't mean it's scientific to entertain the positive and negative notions equally.
What if patent disclosure required you to open up the source code to the public domain, as it was at the date of issue of the patent, when the patent expires, along with sufficient instructions to complete a build of the software? The government could hold it in escrow, and maybe the term limits would have to be changed.
That would obviously make disclosure a necessary part of patentability. I suppose some problems could happen if it turns out that the source that gets opened up infringes on something outside of the patent, eg. you put software in escrow which contains and requires components A and B. A is covered by your patent, and B was ripped off of some GPL software from the 90s. You can't disclose A without B, and you can't unilaterally move B to the public domain. But as a starting point, would this be a more tolerable version of software patents?
Example 1 is evolution, and is probably far more frequent than Example 2 -- you're just missing the fact that evolution starts before Sol even increases its ouput.
In times of relative stability, a lot of mutations happen and they all survive because the species is still generally well-adapted to their environment, even if some adaptations have minor disadvantages. Then an environmental change happens, and suddenly the minor disadvantage is a major advantage and the adaptation spreads throughout the population (other pre-existing adaptations that became major disadvantages also fade away).
Evolution doesn't require that the "new" thing happen before the environmental change that makes it important.
So you see, Example1 is actually identical to Example2, except that the novel protein happened before Sol increased its UV output. And why wouldn't it evolve before? Evolution is undirected and purposeless; it's not "trying" to solve melatonin so there's no reason it would happen more often after than before.
I'm pretty sure the whole pointer is that it can happen. There's plenty of people who complain of it being too cold in indoor temperatures which I feel are too hot.
If you believe that then I doubt you've lived for a significant time outside the US.
US products that aren't sold outside the US are replaced by equivalent products that are sold there, not by desperate attempts to get the exact same thing the Americans have. There's no advantage and huge disadvantages to trying to buy a Kindle Fire (now with no huge array of content backing it!) when you could get this instead.
I'm not convinced that Skype was a great buy, but:
1. Skype was not "almost as much". It was one eighth as much. That's way less. 2. You realise that a recession is *exactly* when you want to make acquisitions? Ballmer dodged a bullet by not buying just before the recession, because it's so much better to buy during a recession and worse to buy during economic prosperity.
It lists the 11.5oz bag (326 g) at $4.79, which works out to $3.67 for 250 g. This is before any sales tax that may be applicable. If it cost $4 that would workj out to $3.07 for 250g. I believe the 11.5oz bag is "standard" in the US.
This sort of concession misses the point. The "infinite monkey theorem" is about how wildly unlikely things are not the same as impossible things. Therefore you cannot discount the possibility that a thing happened or will happen just because it is very improbable to happen, if it was or is going to be subjected to an arbitrarily high number of "chances" to happen.
This experiment breaks it down to brute-forcing a poor password, billions of times, instead of brute forcing a friggin' insane password, which is a substantial difference.
It seems like it could be useful as a thought experiment in a probability problem set or test, or maybe in a programming course (with n suitably reduced to run on a student's machine in reasonable time).
The creation of a simulation of virtual monkeys isn't all that impressive, though. It could basically be a student project.
Your comparison is flawed. Plotting to destroy every human alive at noon GMT June 3rd, 2007 could be considered a waste of time since they all die in the end, because them all dying in the end is already a foregone conclusion. Making a great work of art is not a waste of time even if the appreciators all end up dead and the work forgotten forever, because the point wasn't for the appreciators to end up dead, it was to make the piece of art (and/or to have it appreciated).
I was more impressed with the "journey" before I read the last bit of the summary, because I recall the probabilities here were beyond merely astronomical (far worse than solving chess, IIRC). But matching 9-character sequences instead of the complete works, or even single works, isn't all that inspiring. It's like seeing poor passwords being brute forced over and over and over again. Even single acts would have been pretty cool.
You're extrapolating a third data point from two data points. You have to look at the original equations to figure it out. Wikipedia has a decent simple article:
In short, negative mass is not good enough and has all the same problems as positive mass. Mathematically, that's because the mass term is squared in the important relativity equation, and squaring a value discards the sign. What you would need for a tachyon to exist in the current theories with current mathematical models is imaginary mass. Square imaginary mass and you have negative mass squared, which does work out how you expect.
Price discrimination is not illegal and it's not uncommon. In cases where fixed costs dominate replication costs, it can be necessary to be profitable in a competitive marketplace.
Usually it doesn't happen for a bottle of coke at one store, because that's cheap and the store can't verify your wealth (I've heard of "food stamps" in the US but I'm not familiar with what they are really or if they apply here), but the store down the road which markets to people with higher salaries often has more expensive bottles of coke...
Yes, I know you can calculate P/E by taking the price per share and dividing by the earnings per share, but that's because performing that operation causes the "per share" parts to cancel and it's just the entire price divided by the entire earnings.
AAPL shares can sell at virtually any price and have a 16.3 PE ratio.
I'd say a tax system is fair that has the following traits, when taken as a whole (including income tax, and sales tax, and monetary policy, and and and...):
1. For all possible pairs of taxpayers A and B, if A earns more money than B before taxes, then A should have more money than B after taxes (or at least, certainly not less than B). 2. If A can live with a reasonable standard of living before taxes, then A should be able to live with a reasonable standard of living after taxes. 3. If A cannot live with a reasonable standard of living before taxes, then something has gone wrong and this situation needs to be fixed until A moves from rule 3 to rule 2, regardless of whether the problem is "lazy bum" or "single mother working two jobs and still not keeping up with rent".
I know a "reasonable" standard of living is ill-defined. It kind of has to be, at the macro-level. This does ignore the case of dependents and pooled incomes (most families) which complicates matters.
This leads to a spread of possible fair tax rates, from which we can choose an ideal one for our purposes based on other criteria, like "how we treat our poorest citizens", or "average happiness", or "motivate people to high income", or whatever.
A constant percent only fulfills this if the lowest incomes, multiplied by the tax rate, clears the minimal standard of living. A progressive system can have a little easier time of it.
The old way: Oops, I lost my ability to use this clever unpublished process I invented first, because I don't retain an army of patent lawyers filing every process in my business.
The new way: Oops, I lost my ability to use this clever unpublished process I invented first, because I don't retain an army of patent lawyers filing every process in my business, and I wasn't first-to-file.
The difference with the new way is there's one more escape clause. Don't know where you get the idea that prior art was any less effective as a defense before first-to-file.
I don't know what you're talking about with "forced' here. The GP is saying that prison customers are forced, and contrasting that to the airline industry, whether or not it's private. Airline customers are frequently voluntary.
Why would you assume private airport security would get more profit the more "security" work they do? All that's certain is they have more expenses. The total theoreticaly cash available to them is limited to the number (and wealth) of people passing through the airport, which is inversely proportional to how much of a pain in the ass it is to go through the airport. With prisons, the cash available is proportionate to the number of inmates, which is proportional to how difficult they make it to get out of the prison. So with prisons there's an economic incentive for a private company to be too heavy-handed. For airport security, the economic incentive is being too light-handed. In the current heavy-handed world, that's looking like a happier way to err.
Evolution requires replication, not necessarily self-replication. An earlier poster mentioned viruses, which are an example of a thing, living or not (I'd say not), that evolves without replicating itself.
Broadly speaking, "human men" and "human women" are each not self-replicating, but the system of "human men and human women" is self replicating. Still, you can speak of features that evolved in women distinctly from men, such as prominent breasts, even though human women in isolation do not self-replicate. So as a gedankenexperiment, imagine you have an imperfect cloning machine and a world of only men (the clones pop out full-grown). This single-sex could use it to replicate indefinitely and evolve. And if those men maintain, repair, and build new cloning machines, then you have a species which doesn't self-replicate by itself, but the species-cloning-machine system is self-replicating, much as the man-woman system is self-replicating. Now you can imagine that no new cloning machines are ever made but the one was built to last a hundred million years. Now there is *no* system that's self-replicating but the men still replicate, with the help of the cloning machine, and therefore still evolve.
I don't see why evolution would be a requirement of life anyway. Evolution is merely an inescapable consequence of anything which replicates iteratively and imperfectly, whether or not it is life.
I do know some traditional definitions of life require self-replication, at the species level.
Text is merely a special case of object-oriented data passing. There's really no reason the data cannot be marshalled to text at the endpoints (both on the way into, and out of, powershell).
After all, in most situations what passing text is, is marshalling the data in every application, both on the way in and on the way out. The program is under no obligation to keep it in textual form within its own processing and for many applications that would be absurd.
You're even implying that when you talk about OCR-ing text and printing text. That's marshalling between non-electronic forms and electronic forms, at the endpoints.
Besides, text isn't all that universal when you step out of the English and English-like Latin languages. Dealing with mixed RTL and LTR text is pretty much a nightmare, every time.
Slashdot Mirror
That may be true wherever you live. Are you sure that applies in Israel?
(I honestly don't know, and the thought crossed my mind that there may be radius limits).
No, the scientific answer is to definitely not assume the existence of a creator.
You're confusing "scientific" with "ontologically consistent". It is not scientific to posit any entity which is neither observed directly nor necessary to explain observed behaviour, and it is not unscientific to posit that such an entity does not exist on the basis of parsimony.
It's perfectly scientific to say there is not a mirror universe Earth which is totally inaccessible from our Earth which is currently the exact same as here except that Obama has a goatee, even though there is no evidence and there cannot be any evidence. Don't get caught up in the fact that the statement appears absolute. Consider a case where there can eventually be evidence: it's also possible that the first monkey given a typewriter after 2127 will produce the complete works of Shakespeare on that typewriter, but it's perfectly scientific to say that monkey will not, even though you can say that technically this is possible and you can argue that we won't really know until 2127 at the earliest.
Likewise, there could be a creator, but until you come up with any evidence then no is a valid scientific answer. "Maybe" is also somewhat valid, but only in an extremely unuseful sense, like "maybe Stonehenge was build by leprechauns, which left the world 300 years ago and erased all evidence of their existence save for their legends and stonehenge" or "maybe the universe was created last tuesday with our memories intact" or "maybe the entirety of modern history was an extreme random anomaly that appeared consistent by sheer chance, and we'll start getting more probable results now, basically resetting modern physics to square 1 (if we don't abandon it entirely)". The scientific answer to those is, no, that didn't happen, until and unless you give a good reason for these hypotheses.
I also don't give a shit whether somebody believes so long as they don't hurt anybody else, and I'm not going to try to "convert" them to atheism or anything, but you cannot usefully claim that science is neutral here. If somebody believes in god, fine. You don't have to go and drag science into it and try to claim that the belief is scientifically valid. Everybody is wrong about some things, so if you disagree, leave it at that. Science doesn't have a lot to do with why you believe a lot of other things either, eg. which book you believe is most entertaining (well, unless it's a science textbook...).
Honestly, you're pushing agnosticism pretty hard here, which seems a little contrary to your thing about pushing beliefs on other people.
Ontologically, I would agree that *any* reasonable person is strictly agnostic in the semi-useless sense that we're talking about. It's pretty much my definition of a reasonable, non-fundamentalist person, whether theist or atheist. That doesn't mean they haven't also taken a position, theist or atheist, and I that very few people truly, truly have not to at least some extent. And that doesn't mean it's scientific to entertain the positive and negative notions equally.
Just throwing an idea out there.
What if patent disclosure required you to open up the source code to the public domain, as it was at the date of issue of the patent, when the patent expires, along with sufficient instructions to complete a build of the software? The government could hold it in escrow, and maybe the term limits would have to be changed.
That would obviously make disclosure a necessary part of patentability. I suppose some problems could happen if it turns out that the source that gets opened up infringes on something outside of the patent, eg. you put software in escrow which contains and requires components A and B. A is covered by your patent, and B was ripped off of some GPL software from the 90s. You can't disclose A without B, and you can't unilaterally move B to the public domain. But as a starting point, would this be a more tolerable version of software patents?
Example 1 is evolution, and is probably far more frequent than Example 2 -- you're just missing the fact that evolution starts before Sol even increases its ouput.
In times of relative stability, a lot of mutations happen and they all survive because the species is still generally well-adapted to their environment, even if some adaptations have minor disadvantages. Then an environmental change happens, and suddenly the minor disadvantage is a major advantage and the adaptation spreads throughout the population (other pre-existing adaptations that became major disadvantages also fade away).
Evolution doesn't require that the "new" thing happen before the environmental change that makes it important.
So you see, Example1 is actually identical to Example2, except that the novel protein happened before Sol increased its UV output. And why wouldn't it evolve before? Evolution is undirected and purposeless; it's not "trying" to solve melatonin so there's no reason it would happen more often after than before.
I'm pretty sure the whole pointer is that it can happen. There's plenty of people who complain of it being too cold in indoor temperatures which I feel are too hot.
If you believe that then I doubt you've lived for a significant time outside the US.
US products that aren't sold outside the US are replaced by equivalent products that are sold there, not by desperate attempts to get the exact same thing the Americans have. There's no advantage and huge disadvantages to trying to buy a Kindle Fire (now with no huge array of content backing it!) when you could get this instead.
My brain fizzled. It's one fifth as much (8.5 billion vs. 44 billion), not one eighth as much. Still: way less!
I'm not convinced that Skype was a great buy, but:
1. Skype was not "almost as much". It was one eighth as much. That's way less.
2. You realise that a recession is *exactly* when you want to make acquisitions? Ballmer dodged a bullet by not buying just before the recession, because it's so much better to buy during a recession and worse to buy during economic prosperity.
Even if they did, it would count and in no way contradict this.
And so Anonymous Coward learns of the concept of the "convergent series".
I looked at one website for the US, Safeway.
It lists the 11.5oz bag (326 g) at $4.79, which works out to $3.67 for 250 g. This is before any sales tax that may be applicable. If it cost $4 that would workj out to $3.07 for 250g. I believe the 11.5oz bag is "standard" in the US.
This sort of concession misses the point. The "infinite monkey theorem" is about how wildly unlikely things are not the same as impossible things. Therefore you cannot discount the possibility that a thing happened or will happen just because it is very improbable to happen, if it was or is going to be subjected to an arbitrarily high number of "chances" to happen.
This experiment breaks it down to brute-forcing a poor password, billions of times, instead of brute forcing a friggin' insane password, which is a substantial difference.
It seems like it could be useful as a thought experiment in a probability problem set or test, or maybe in a programming course (with n suitably reduced to run on a student's machine in reasonable time).
The creation of a simulation of virtual monkeys isn't all that impressive, though. It could basically be a student project.
Your comparison is flawed. Plotting to destroy every human alive at noon GMT June 3rd, 2007 could be considered a waste of time since they all die in the end, because them all dying in the end is already a foregone conclusion. Making a great work of art is not a waste of time even if the appreciators all end up dead and the work forgotten forever, because the point wasn't for the appreciators to end up dead, it was to make the piece of art (and/or to have it appreciated).
I was more impressed with the "journey" before I read the last bit of the summary, because I recall the probabilities here were beyond merely astronomical (far worse than solving chess, IIRC). But matching 9-character sequences instead of the complete works, or even single works, isn't all that inspiring. It's like seeing poor passwords being brute forced over and over and over again. Even single acts would have been pretty cool.
You're extrapolating a third data point from two data points. You have to look at the original equations to figure it out. Wikipedia has a decent simple article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_matter
In short, negative mass is not good enough and has all the same problems as positive mass. Mathematically, that's because the mass term is squared in the important relativity equation, and squaring a value discards the sign. What you would need for a tachyon to exist in the current theories with current mathematical models is imaginary mass. Square imaginary mass and you have negative mass squared, which does work out how you expect.
If those are the only three choices you can come up with, you aren't very imaginative.
Price discrimination is not illegal and it's not uncommon. In cases where fixed costs dominate replication costs, it can be necessary to be profitable in a competitive marketplace.
Usually it doesn't happen for a bottle of coke at one store, because that's cheap and the store can't verify your wealth (I've heard of "food stamps" in the US but I'm not familiar with what they are really or if they apply here), but the store down the road which markets to people with higher salaries often has more expensive bottles of coke...
P/E ratio is orthogonal to price per share.
Yes, I know you can calculate P/E by taking the price per share and dividing by the earnings per share, but that's because performing that operation causes the "per share" parts to cancel and it's just the entire price divided by the entire earnings.
AAPL shares can sell at virtually any price and have a 16.3 PE ratio.
He said three months, so he believes he knows when.
I'd say a tax system is fair that has the following traits, when taken as a whole (including income tax, and sales tax, and monetary policy, and and and...):
1. For all possible pairs of taxpayers A and B, if A earns more money than B before taxes, then A should have more money than B after taxes (or at least, certainly not less than B).
2. If A can live with a reasonable standard of living before taxes, then A should be able to live with a reasonable standard of living after taxes.
3. If A cannot live with a reasonable standard of living before taxes, then something has gone wrong and this situation needs to be fixed until A moves from rule 3 to rule 2, regardless of whether the problem is "lazy bum" or "single mother working two jobs and still not keeping up with rent".
I know a "reasonable" standard of living is ill-defined. It kind of has to be, at the macro-level. This does ignore the case of dependents and pooled incomes (most families) which complicates matters.
This leads to a spread of possible fair tax rates, from which we can choose an ideal one for our purposes based on other criteria, like "how we treat our poorest citizens", or "average happiness", or "motivate people to high income", or whatever.
A constant percent only fulfills this if the lowest incomes, multiplied by the tax rate, clears the minimal standard of living. A progressive system can have a little easier time of it.
The difference here is they have an appstore, which should guarantee architectural compatibility.
The main set of people using old apps will be the people using desktop or laptop computers that do not really resemble tablets.
Not quite:
The old way:
Oops, I lost my ability to use this clever unpublished process I invented first, because I don't retain an army of patent lawyers filing every process in my business.
The new way:
Oops, I lost my ability to use this clever unpublished process I invented first, because I don't retain an army of patent lawyers filing every process in my business, and I wasn't first-to-file.
The difference with the new way is there's one more escape clause. Don't know where you get the idea that prior art was any less effective as a defense before first-to-file.
I don't know what you're talking about with "forced' here. The GP is saying that prison customers are forced, and contrasting that to the airline industry, whether or not it's private. Airline customers are frequently voluntary.
Why would you assume private airport security would get more profit the more "security" work they do? All that's certain is they have more expenses. The total theoreticaly cash available to them is limited to the number (and wealth) of people passing through the airport, which is inversely proportional to how much of a pain in the ass it is to go through the airport. With prisons, the cash available is proportionate to the number of inmates, which is proportional to how difficult they make it to get out of the prison. So with prisons there's an economic incentive for a private company to be too heavy-handed. For airport security, the economic incentive is being too light-handed. In the current heavy-handed world, that's looking like a happier way to err.
Or use IE like a normal person would on a laptop. It's the tablet-interface browser that doesn't do plugins.
Evolution requires replication, not necessarily self-replication. An earlier poster mentioned viruses, which are an example of a thing, living or not (I'd say not), that evolves without replicating itself.
Broadly speaking, "human men" and "human women" are each not self-replicating, but the system of "human men and human women" is self replicating. Still, you can speak of features that evolved in women distinctly from men, such as prominent breasts, even though human women in isolation do not self-replicate. So as a gedankenexperiment, imagine you have an imperfect cloning machine and a world of only men (the clones pop out full-grown). This single-sex could use it to replicate indefinitely and evolve. And if those men maintain, repair, and build new cloning machines, then you have a species which doesn't self-replicate by itself, but the species-cloning-machine system is self-replicating, much as the man-woman system is self-replicating. Now you can imagine that no new cloning machines are ever made but the one was built to last a hundred million years. Now there is *no* system that's self-replicating but the men still replicate, with the help of the cloning machine, and therefore still evolve.
I don't see why evolution would be a requirement of life anyway. Evolution is merely an inescapable consequence of anything which replicates iteratively and imperfectly, whether or not it is life.
I do know some traditional definitions of life require self-replication, at the species level.
Text is merely a special case of object-oriented data passing. There's really no reason the data cannot be marshalled to text at the endpoints (both on the way into, and out of, powershell).
After all, in most situations what passing text is, is marshalling the data in every application, both on the way in and on the way out. The program is under no obligation to keep it in textual form within its own processing and for many applications that would be absurd.
You're even implying that when you talk about OCR-ing text and printing text. That's marshalling between non-electronic forms and electronic forms, at the endpoints.
Besides, text isn't all that universal when you step out of the English and English-like Latin languages. Dealing with mixed RTL and LTR text is pretty much a nightmare, every time.