For a long time, MacOS X could run Classic apps by running most of the classic OS in its own process. Aside from some code sitting on the disk that you won't use much, I see no reason why the old APIs couldn't be supported. Or how about doing it like WINE? Create a thin translation layer to support legacy apps. Or worst case, rely on recent CPU virtualization features.
And finally, legacy app support should be optional, something you can install from the DVD, if you need it. Win32 and even Win16 can be add-ons.
Pure pareto multiobjective genetic algorithms (just submitted a paper to IEEE TEVC) Hinge-loss function discriminative training of neural nets as classifiers Computer vision as a KNOWLEDGE problem (i.e. not just mostly signal processing and statistics) Persistent surveillance (entity tracking) Sensor asset allocation (using a GA) Various things involving abductive inference
Ok, I'm not trying to say that I'm the best or the brightest. But I do have 12 year of industry experience, and I'm working on my Ph.D. in AI right now. I've applied for DARPA grants before, only to be rejected. I get enough funding from other sources, so why waste my time?
I think the problem is with DARPA, not the bright people.
It always amazes me. Many religious people are indeed true bastions of good in our society. They hold to a moral code and teach it to others, but they're thoughtful and recognize the difference between set-in-stone "morality" and ethics. Then you get people like Thompson who have this rigid (but often equally vague) set of rules that they want to impose on everyone, while at the same time breaking all manner of ethics in the process. Is lying, cheating, and hurting people a good way to moralize our society?
There are people who really do have allergies and food sensitivities and such. Those people need to be careful about what they eat and expose themselves to. But when crackpots like this enter the fray, they make trouble for us, because they makes us all look like crackpots. It's no different from over-diagnosing ADHD. There are people who really have it (although I understand, interestingly enough, that some cases are helped by dietary adjustments). But then there are the countless more who just have discipline problems; they need a smack in the butt, not Ritalin.
That all being said, there are some hypotheses that humans can be affected by EM radiation. And maybe it's not good for us. I mean, being exposed to high levels of microwaves can cook you, so I'm sure low-levels aren't entirely risk free. Then there are the proposed links between power lines and leucemia. It's all worth investigating... with a critical scientific eye. But calling it an ALLERGY is just stupid and betrays a total lack of understanding what an allergic reaction is (an immune reaction to a foreign protein).
It's been a long time, but I had read something about a prediction that element 126 was the expected stable superheavy. Just as electrons have shells, and filled shells make elements chemically neutral (like the noble gasses), neuclei have energy shells that occupy a lower ground state energy when completely filled. Based on the known elements, 126 was predicted.
I'm not religious. Religion annoys me, actually. But I don't NOT believe in God. Why? Because Atheism requires stronger faith than I can muster. Some people will tell you that there is no positive evidence of God. Having science explain just about everything we used to attribute to gods, I tend to agree with this. Others will tell you that there is no negative proof against God. Given an appropriate definition of God, I would tend to also support this position.
Let's consider some attributes of God, should s/he exist:
- God is not a meddler. Random stuff happens. People die or not. Catastrophic events happen or not. The universe is a relatively unordered, chaotic place, and as Newton's laws tell us, it's getting more unordered as time progresses. Life is the product of a pocket of relative order due to a surplus of local energy. That is all. God does not reach in and change things. - God does not define moral code. Human morality is a product of human history, and everyone's got a different one. There are no universal moral laws that we can identify. Killing is wrong or not. Rape is wrong or not. Stealing is wrong or not. No one's moral code can truly claim any superiority to any other; viewed objectively, they all suck in some way or other. - God does not dictate the structure of things in the universe. Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that the physical laws of the universe were defined by God. Fine. But as far as we can tell, the universe has obeyed these laws without deviation from the beginning of the big bang. In one sense, the fact that humans evolved from mammals (as opposed to reptiles) is quite random. On the other hand, reptile physiology (as we know it) wouldn't have supported the energy requirements of the human brain. Either way, there's no special reason why life should have evolved here in the first place, except that the right chemicals and supply of energy just happened to be suitable for it.
The idea to draw from this is that if there IS a God, this God is absolutely nothing like the gods made up by the many human religions. Man made God in his own image. But this "God" of the humans doesn't exist; anything we come up with is by definition going to be too limited to encompass a being that could have created the universe. I mean, imaging knowing what the physical laws of the universe are, rather than having to figure them out by inference from inside.
Does God care about us? Non sequitor. Caring is a human concept. Does God influence people's lives? Non sequitor. Influencing lives is a human concept. Hell, LIFE is a human concept. Did God even expect life to evolve in the universe he created? Oh wait, that invokes the concept of time, which God probably transcends.
As a species, we should be mature enough to realize that the universe does not run according to our preconceived notions. Many ideas that seem self-evident to me here in America simply don't apply in Japan. But Japanese and Americans are the same species. Now try applying your preconceived notions to an alien with absolutely no genetic history in common with yourself (or even genes for that matter). That alone is hard to imagine. You watch TV and see human actors playing aliens and get the idea that the human form is 'natural'. Far from it. If we ever meet aliens, sci fi writers will look at them and say "holy crap, I would never have thought of that in a million years." But an alien would be subject to the same physical laws as us. At least we have SOMETHING in common. Even that flies out the window when you try to imagine what God might be like.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that God is undefinable. But I would suggest that whatever you think God might be like is probably very limited and almost completely wrong. The same goes for me. I'm talking out my ass, using what limited brain power I have, and I know I'm not getting very far. But on the other hand, I think, for humans, this kind of speculation is healthy because it expands our
Those off-the-shelf solutions are THE THING to use when for most applications. Definitely savings on time and headaches. But I've encountered a few strange situations where those solutions would not support the resolution and/or pixel rate we needed. No choice but to roll your own. Pain in the ass too!
Considering the expense of manufacturing hardware, the OGP (http://www.opengraphics.org) is trying to find ways to make their hardware both Free (in the Stallman sense) and also profitable. To wit, they have formed a company, Traversal Technology (http://www.traversaltech.com) to handle the monetary issues, make profit, and reinvest the money into designing and fabricating more Free-Design hardware. Their tactic is use the GPL license on all of their hardware designs in a manner much like MySQL or TrollTech. If you want to use designs from the OGP, you can either use them via the GPL (and be required to release your whole design under the GPL), or you can pay money to Traversal to acquire a commercial license that does not require you to open source your whole design. Either way, everybody wins.
If you're going to work on hardware designs, you might want to actually be able to BUILD the hardware you're designing. Putting in a way to make money from it is one good way to achieve that goal. Moreover, using a license like the GPL makes it somewhat less likely that some company will take your design, incorporate it into some product, make gobs of money, and never give you a penny.
It's very important to realize that open hardware is not the same kind of thing as open source software. Software is easy to copy. Hardware _designs_ are easy enough to copy, but physical hardware is _expensive_ to copy.
You seem to have misunderstood me. I know many scientists, and they're awesome. I'm a Ph.D. student in Cognitive Science. If you define "scientist" as one who observes the world, develops hypotheses to explain it, and then conducts controlled experiments the falsify or validate the hypotheses, then I too am a scientist. But that wasn't what I was talking about.
I was talking about the *popular* conception of scientists. Those people presented by the media as scientists and the the scientific theories perpetually misrepresented by the media. And the main point is that it is those people and those theories that the public are familiar with and frustrated with. The textbook definition isn't unfamiliar so much as drowned out by practical experience and perception.
As someone who also studies Linguistics (a subfield of cognitive science), I have developed a habit of taking my definitions and understanding of language from common usage, rather than something prescribed from on high. So, rather than defining "science" based on what's in the dictionary, I pay attention to what it is that the masses define as science. The popular definition is far removed from the textbook definition, is very vague, conflates "science" with "the output of scientists" with "scientists as a culture", and carries negative connotations borne out of perceived "I'm smart and a scientist so I'm right" arrogance and inconsistent explanations of scientific phenomena via the media.
Oh, BTW, while I blame scientists for this predicament, don't think I don't blame the media. I don't think there's any bad thing that the media isn't complicit in.:)
I have no argument with you. You're absolutely right. Unfortunately, most people are presented with what they perceive to be conflicting evidence. Half of the cause is that science changes (which it should do). The other half of the cause is that science is frequently misrepresented by people who don't know what they're talking about (e.g. the media).
The main point I'm trying to make is that people are right to be skeptical of science in general, given the "science" that they're presented with. Oh, sure, there are the dogmatists who refuse to even pay attention because they insist on believing in creationism or something. But most people aren't so much dogmatic as they are frustrated and fed up with trying.
Or they're fed up with the religious dark side of science, being told to just accept what they hear because they're not smart enough to understand the details, or reading books by "scientists" who have an ulterior agenda and set out to use science to "disprove God." Science may have explained away the effects of the gods of ancient history, but in truth, science has no place commenting about things like the existence of God or issues of morality. Those aren't falsifiable issues, so it's not science to explore them. (On the other hand, it's still good to explore these things, philosophically.)
Oh, and how often do you see something on he Discovery channel about evolution that points out where the uncertainties are? Practically never. Some artist's conception of how things might have been is presented as though it's fact, deeply entrenched in the "this is how it was" wording used by the narrator. It's fiction, and there's nothing wrong with fiction or fanciful "maybe it was this way" explorations. But they're not presented as that.
And what's really funny is that when it comes to things like physics, discovery channel does a MUCH better job of explaining the uncertainties. Physics is a nice hard science, where you can often directly test the most fundamental hypotheses. And for those things that can't be tested, there are whole shows dedicated to the issues of the uncertainty. It's great. With evolution, there are facts that we can observe in the laboratory. But most of what is presented in the media about it pertains to evolutionary theory that we have no hope of ever directly testing. Yes, the evidence is strong, but it's not experimental evidence, where you can tweak the conditions; it's indirect evidence left over from something we cannot manipulate or observe. Yet ironically, evolution is presented in the media with far less uncertainty. That sucks.
What do you mean by "Science"?
on
Science Debate 2008
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· Score: 2, Insightful
A popular conception of what it means to be scientifically informed is to swallow the party line given to you by popular sources of so-called scientific knowledge. There is precious little involvement from the actual scientific method, no better than just accepting on faith everything the pope says. The fact is, many people feel mistreated and mislead by this nebulous thing we call "science" and made to feel stupid when they question the status quo. That's ironic because science should be all about questioning the status quo. But when I was a child, questioning evolution and asking for more support for it (I was a kid in high school; I had no clear definition of it) was not met with the knowledge I asked for but derision for so stupidly questioning the God-given truth handed down by our priestly scientists.
Skepticism should be the default position of everyone who studies science, even skepticism of those things that are very strongly established. Yes, it is often the case that someone who is questioning a position may question it less if they have more knowledge in the area. But no one can be an expert in all areas of science, and it should ALWAYS be okay to question what we're told. (ObSlashdot: If we here weren't the questioning sort, we'd all be using Windows instead of Linux.)
So I put it to you that, by taking a skeptical position, some of these anti-science people are in fact more faithful to the underpinnings of science than those people who arrogantly call themselves scientists.
To the masses, "science" (much like "politics" or "medicine") is defined purely in terms of the output of those people who practice it, and not by the principles those practitioners are supposed to follow. Scientists are often full of shit. Plus, most of the science that people are exposed to is the stuff they didn't pay attention to in high school and the stuff they watch on Discovery Channel, both of which are utter crap. So what do you expect people to think?
Oh, and one other thing. Don't think anything's going to be fixed by improving science education. Yes, the education is crap, but science can be unintuitive even when taught well. The solution is to fix the scientists and their massive egos.
There's one thing you're leaving out when you talk about "good" scientists. I've met people who call themselves scientists that don't seem to fully understand the scientific method. There are many vocal people who call themselves scientists who are crackpots, either chasing a ridiculous theory, or trying to mislead people. There are many "scientists" who are just incompetent. In truth, the really competent scientists are probably in the minority. And unfortunately, to most people, those crackpots, liars, and incompetents are what define "science". By that definition, science really sucks.
"Don't you think you ought to actually check what scientists say?"
Why should I when the Discovery Channel doesn't bother?:)
Besides, part of our problem is that while current scientists may be saying something more up to date, people don't have easy access to that because all of the textbooks used in schools are out of date, as are the TV shows and the usual sources people get their info from. That isn't a flaw in the science. But it is why people get frustrated and confused by science! And it's the frustration and confusion that is the root problem here!
Oh, and don't forget that what's up to date now will be overturned in a few years anyhow.
As Weird Al said, "Everything you know is wrong." And that's something that people have a hard time with.
I can see why people would reject evolution. For one thing, as was pointed out by an earlier articled linked to by slashdot, it's counterintuitive. It is not consistent with our every day experience, or at least not with aspects of our experience that we recognize as having those qualities. Secondly, it can be very hard to keep up with. There are aspects of evolution that are rock solid. They're facts about things observed in the laboratory. Then there are things that are highly plausible, such as that we got here through this mechanism. But when you start making claims about specific things that "must" have occurred, you're on damn shaky ground. When humans left Africa, or IF they did, has been revised more times than I can count. When we and chimps branched from our common ancestor keeps getting revised. Now, that's all well and good, except for the fact that any time the layman comes into contact with these theories, they're STATED AS FACT. Ever watch the Discovery channel? Ever notice how none of the dinosaurs have feathers? And yet no mention is made of the fact that we now know that they do and that the original notion that they were scaly was based on assumption (we didn't have good evidence either way). Let me reiterate: Scientists tend to make bold fact-like statements about science that should never be stated that way, because they just fucking don't know! It's no wonder people think scientists are arrogant. They make bold statements and think they're right. Then they change their minds and think they're right. Scientists are never wrong! Isn't that convenient. Perhaps it's not fair to say, but the fact is that evidence supporting specifics of evolutionary theory are trivial compared to the kind of certainty we have about things like physics, chemistry, and biology of living organisms. Yet those, as with any science, are inherently uncertain. Evolutionary biologists need to get off their high horse and admit that they're stabbing in the dark.
That being said, what I cannot understand is why you would want to invoke a much more ridiculous hypothesis like creationism. It's not even a hypothesis. It's not science. It's not falsifiable. Ok, so it's certain and unchanging. I can understand that. But there's no objective evidence for it. Or at least, the evidence there is does not point in the direction of creation than any other alternative, so choosing creationism is arbitrary. So, when it comes down to it, many people probably choose creationism for two reasons: (1) tradition, and (2) because the scientists leave them feeling like a chump who trusted them, just to be betrayed when the scientist changed his mind (while being completely apologetic about having been wrong).
See, scientists are role models. Yes, I realize that they're just presenting the hypothesis that best fits the evidence (sometimes; sometimes they have personal or political agendas), but they need to be damn careful about how they present their theory and explain better their uncertainties and alternative explanations.
Oh, and the scientists who try to use evolution to disprove God are just as screwed up as the creationists who try to use God to prove evolution. God and evolution are not mutually exclusive.
I'm glad that the summary was worded to say "corporate copyrights." I think corporate copyrights, and patents for that matter, should be very limited. On the other hand, individual copyright should be very long. Among other things, this protects them from the interests of big corporations. I'm not sure what to do about individual patents.
Oh, and another good thing would be to have graded patents. You can apply for a short-term patent for less money and have it more likely to be granted, but you only get, say, 5 years. Novelty, by the judgement of the patent examiner, I guess, could weigh in, allowing them to grant patents of different lengths depending on how novel or innovative the patent is. Something like the one-click would have been expired by now.:)
This reviewer makes some really excellent points. Although, the fact is, the things that are inexcusable about this system are inexcusable about all Linux systems. People like to say that Linux "just works." That's a huge stinking load. It took me hours to get wireless networking going recently, and that's only the most recent set of headaches. Ubuntu, I have to say, is the best Linux distro I've ever used. But the fact that I have to so frequently drop to the command line for ANYTHING, in this day and age, is completely unacceptable. Hell, the fact that I need an application to manage other applications (rather than just dragging the app into the Applications folder) is unacceptable, but I digress. I can say all this, because I used Gentoo for years and enjoyed it. Eventually, I got tired of doing stuff manually that damn well should have been completely automatic. Then I bought a Mac. MacOS X is lightyears ahead of Linux in terms of usability, although it has plenty of other drawbacks. Indeed, I can complain almost as long about MacOS as I can about Linux, although the sets of complaints don't have much overlap.
This green PC suffers from some serious oversights, like the builder really didn't try very hard. Basic things are missing that should have been pre-installed. There's no excuse.
On the other hand, no idiot would think that trying to use Vista would be any better. At least with Linux you CAN fix things. With Vista, what's broken is broken. Oh, and don't get me started on having to install antivirus and antispyware tools. There are ways to make an OS secure, but Microsoft just does a half-assed job at it. You want a rock-solid secure OS, spend a little time looking at the measures taken by OpenBSD.
I don't know what you've been reading, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that my ability to concentrate improved dramatically when I identified "irritant" foods (ones that my immune system reacts to) and also eliminated various preservatives and such. Studies have been done where school students were fed balanced meals for lunch instead of this McDonalds crap; absenteeism, behavioral problems and other things like that went down while grades improved.
And haven't you read that in many cases, children with autism improve dramatically when they're taken off wheat and dairy? If not, you should do some research before you dismiss this stuff.
Diet isn't everything, but it's what your body runs on. If you don't take in the right stuff and you take in bad stuff, you're not going to function so well.
Break a bulb and get a mercury in your house in very unhealthy concentrations. We're already giving our kids ADHD with the crap in our foods. How about we give them some more environmental poison! Yeah, that's great.
Seriously, people. I understand why mercury is used in these bulbs, but something has to be done to make them safer. Make them much harder to break, or find a substitute for the mercury.
Oh, and I haven't found a fluorescent bulb that doesn't give me a headache. The light output is never equal to the "equivalent" bulb, and there's something wrong with the color. I'm not sure, but nothing beats a halogen, at least for my eyes.
So, make the bulbs not suck and not poisonous, and I'm all in!
A database file is just data, to be interpreted by a database program. But the database program is just data to be interpreted by the CPU.
Data vs. document is a spectrum. There is no clear distinction. We tend to think of documents as just information, describing some structured knowledge, which is true. But by contrast, we tend to think of programs as containing primarily step-by-step instructions. But those instructions don't execute themselves. They're input to something. And moreover, not all programs are instructions. Consider Prolog, where the functions are described in terms of logical relationships, and the step-by-step instructions are inferred by the interpreter. Just because the Prolog program doesn't include instructions, per se, doesn't make us say it's not a program. At the same time, the distinction between a Prolog program and an expert system knowledge base (in term of form and function) is not clear.
Everything is just data. What makes it meaningful is the order and interpretation that we impose on it.
When I was in high school (graduated in '91), I knew vastly more about computers than the teachers did. That wasn't a major feat considering the time, and I am now aware of how many things I thought I knew but knew wrong at the time. But in any case, because of my "vastly superior" knowledge, I was a total cocky-ass jerk. Because of my (perceived, at least) superior technical knowledge, I was a discipline problem and a disruption in class. I would "correct" what the teacher said and refuse (or at least resist) to do what the teacher told me to do, etc.
I should have gotten my ass beat for this.
Of course, at the time, I was really hard-headed. I'm not sure I would have learned my lesson if I had been punished. I was the sort of person who would get so caught up in being technically correct that I was blind to the concepts of being socially or procedurally or ethically incorrect.
I'm 34 now and in grad school. I took a computational linguistics class where we had to code an Earley parser, which is a dynamic programming approach to human language parsing. I was bothered by the fact that the grammar we were using was, in my opinion, half-assed. I think lexical grammars are a better (if still not very good) model of how humans process language syntactically. But I did not complain. I had a good time chewing the fat with the professor about it during office hours, because it's interesting, but there was no need for me to "complain" about it in any context. After all these years, I'm able to pull my head out of my ass and recognize that we often "simplify" things or make arbitrary choices as a foil for learning something more general. We were not there to learn about lexical grammars. We're there to learn to write parsers, and an Earley parser can be adapted to lexical grammars should I feel inclined to do so. Big picture here!
Let's hope this kid doesn't take as long as I did to learn to see the bigger picture, recognize that life involves judicious compromises, learn to function socially, and not be so self-centered that he makes things harder on other people just for the sake of being "right". (And by "right", I mean that he may have logical support for his hypothesis, but it's technical and the topic can still be debated. I'm NOT talking about moral "right" here, which is a whole other subject matter.)
Slashdot Mirror
For a long time, MacOS X could run Classic apps by running most of the classic OS in its own process. Aside from some code sitting on the disk that you won't use much, I see no reason why the old APIs couldn't be supported. Or how about doing it like WINE? Create a thin translation layer to support legacy apps. Or worst case, rely on recent CPU virtualization features.
And finally, legacy app support should be optional, something you can install from the DVD, if you need it. Win32 and even Win16 can be add-ons.
Let's see.... what I'm working on....
Pure pareto multiobjective genetic algorithms (just submitted a paper to IEEE TEVC)
Hinge-loss function discriminative training of neural nets as classifiers
Computer vision as a KNOWLEDGE problem (i.e. not just mostly signal processing and statistics)
Persistent surveillance (entity tracking)
Sensor asset allocation (using a GA)
Various things involving abductive inference
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti/
Ok, I'm not trying to say that I'm the best or the brightest. But I do have 12 year of industry experience, and I'm working on my Ph.D. in AI right now. I've applied for DARPA grants before, only to be rejected. I get enough funding from other sources, so why waste my time?
I think the problem is with DARPA, not the bright people.
It always amazes me. Many religious people are indeed true bastions of good in our society. They hold to a moral code and teach it to others, but they're thoughtful and recognize the difference between set-in-stone "morality" and ethics. Then you get people like Thompson who have this rigid (but often equally vague) set of rules that they want to impose on everyone, while at the same time breaking all manner of ethics in the process. Is lying, cheating, and hurting people a good way to moralize our society?
There are people who really do have allergies and food sensitivities and such. Those people need to be careful about what they eat and expose themselves to. But when crackpots like this enter the fray, they make trouble for us, because they makes us all look like crackpots. It's no different from over-diagnosing ADHD. There are people who really have it (although I understand, interestingly enough, that some cases are helped by dietary adjustments). But then there are the countless more who just have discipline problems; they need a smack in the butt, not Ritalin.
That all being said, there are some hypotheses that humans can be affected by EM radiation. And maybe it's not good for us. I mean, being exposed to high levels of microwaves can cook you, so I'm sure low-levels aren't entirely risk free. Then there are the proposed links between power lines and leucemia. It's all worth investigating... with a critical scientific eye. But calling it an ALLERGY is just stupid and betrays a total lack of understanding what an allergic reaction is (an immune reaction to a foreign protein).
Are you interested in open source hardware? Bothered by having trouble making PC hardware work with your OS? How about donating to the OGP?
www.opengraphics.org
www.openhardwarefoundation.org
The 3S4000 is the SECOND LARGEST of the Spartan 3 family. What are you talking about?
It's been a long time, but I had read something about a prediction that element 126 was the expected stable superheavy. Just as electrons have shells, and filled shells make elements chemically neutral (like the noble gasses), neuclei have energy shells that occupy a lower ground state energy when completely filled. Based on the known elements, 126 was predicted.
Here's some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbihexium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/84/i10/8410notw9.html
I'm not religious. Religion annoys me, actually. But I don't NOT believe in God. Why? Because Atheism requires stronger faith than I can muster. Some people will tell you that there is no positive evidence of God. Having science explain just about everything we used to attribute to gods, I tend to agree with this. Others will tell you that there is no negative proof against God. Given an appropriate definition of God, I would tend to also support this position.
Let's consider some attributes of God, should s/he exist:
- God is not a meddler. Random stuff happens. People die or not. Catastrophic events happen or not. The universe is a relatively unordered, chaotic place, and as Newton's laws tell us, it's getting more unordered as time progresses. Life is the product of a pocket of relative order due to a surplus of local energy. That is all. God does not reach in and change things.
- God does not define moral code. Human morality is a product of human history, and everyone's got a different one. There are no universal moral laws that we can identify. Killing is wrong or not. Rape is wrong or not. Stealing is wrong or not. No one's moral code can truly claim any superiority to any other; viewed objectively, they all suck in some way or other.
- God does not dictate the structure of things in the universe. Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that the physical laws of the universe were defined by God. Fine. But as far as we can tell, the universe has obeyed these laws without deviation from the beginning of the big bang. In one sense, the fact that humans evolved from mammals (as opposed to reptiles) is quite random. On the other hand, reptile physiology (as we know it) wouldn't have supported the energy requirements of the human brain. Either way, there's no special reason why life should have evolved here in the first place, except that the right chemicals and supply of energy just happened to be suitable for it.
The idea to draw from this is that if there IS a God, this God is absolutely nothing like the gods made up by the many human religions. Man made God in his own image. But this "God" of the humans doesn't exist; anything we come up with is by definition going to be too limited to encompass a being that could have created the universe. I mean, imaging knowing what the physical laws of the universe are, rather than having to figure them out by inference from inside.
Does God care about us? Non sequitor. Caring is a human concept. Does God influence people's lives? Non sequitor. Influencing lives is a human concept. Hell, LIFE is a human concept. Did God even expect life to evolve in the universe he created? Oh wait, that invokes the concept of time, which God probably transcends.
As a species, we should be mature enough to realize that the universe does not run according to our preconceived notions. Many ideas that seem self-evident to me here in America simply don't apply in Japan. But Japanese and Americans are the same species. Now try applying your preconceived notions to an alien with absolutely no genetic history in common with yourself (or even genes for that matter). That alone is hard to imagine. You watch TV and see human actors playing aliens and get the idea that the human form is 'natural'. Far from it. If we ever meet aliens, sci fi writers will look at them and say "holy crap, I would never have thought of that in a million years." But an alien would be subject to the same physical laws as us. At least we have SOMETHING in common. Even that flies out the window when you try to imagine what God might be like.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that God is undefinable. But I would suggest that whatever you think God might be like is probably very limited and almost completely wrong. The same goes for me. I'm talking out my ass, using what limited brain power I have, and I know I'm not getting very far. But on the other hand, I think, for humans, this kind of speculation is healthy because it expands our
Those off-the-shelf solutions are THE THING to use when for most applications. Definitely savings on time and headaches. But I've encountered a few strange situations where those solutions would not support the resolution and/or pixel rate we needed. No choice but to roll your own. Pain in the ass too!
Considering the expense of manufacturing hardware, the OGP (http://www.opengraphics.org) is trying to find ways to make their hardware both Free (in the Stallman sense) and also profitable. To wit, they have formed a company, Traversal Technology (http://www.traversaltech.com) to handle the monetary issues, make profit, and reinvest the money into designing and fabricating more Free-Design hardware. Their tactic is use the GPL license on all of their hardware designs in a manner much like MySQL or TrollTech. If you want to use designs from the OGP, you can either use them via the GPL (and be required to release your whole design under the GPL), or you can pay money to Traversal to acquire a commercial license that does not require you to open source your whole design. Either way, everybody wins.
If you're going to work on hardware designs, you might want to actually be able to BUILD the hardware you're designing. Putting in a way to make money from it is one good way to achieve that goal. Moreover, using a license like the GPL makes it somewhat less likely that some company will take your design, incorporate it into some product, make gobs of money, and never give you a penny.
It's very important to realize that open hardware is not the same kind of thing as open source software. Software is easy to copy. Hardware _designs_ are easy enough to copy, but physical hardware is _expensive_ to copy.
You seem to have misunderstood me. I know many scientists, and they're awesome. I'm a Ph.D. student in Cognitive Science. If you define "scientist" as one who observes the world, develops hypotheses to explain it, and then conducts controlled experiments the falsify or validate the hypotheses, then I too am a scientist. But that wasn't what I was talking about.
:)
I was talking about the *popular* conception of scientists. Those people presented by the media as scientists and the the scientific theories perpetually misrepresented by the media. And the main point is that it is those people and those theories that the public are familiar with and frustrated with. The textbook definition isn't unfamiliar so much as drowned out by practical experience and perception.
As someone who also studies Linguistics (a subfield of cognitive science), I have developed a habit of taking my definitions and understanding of language from common usage, rather than something prescribed from on high. So, rather than defining "science" based on what's in the dictionary, I pay attention to what it is that the masses define as science. The popular definition is far removed from the textbook definition, is very vague, conflates "science" with "the output of scientists" with "scientists as a culture", and carries negative connotations borne out of perceived "I'm smart and a scientist so I'm right" arrogance and inconsistent explanations of scientific phenomena via the media.
Oh, BTW, while I blame scientists for this predicament, don't think I don't blame the media. I don't think there's any bad thing that the media isn't complicit in.
I have no argument with you. You're absolutely right. Unfortunately, most people are presented with what they perceive to be conflicting evidence. Half of the cause is that science changes (which it should do). The other half of the cause is that science is frequently misrepresented by people who don't know what they're talking about (e.g. the media).
The main point I'm trying to make is that people are right to be skeptical of science in general, given the "science" that they're presented with. Oh, sure, there are the dogmatists who refuse to even pay attention because they insist on believing in creationism or something. But most people aren't so much dogmatic as they are frustrated and fed up with trying.
Or they're fed up with the religious dark side of science, being told to just accept what they hear because they're not smart enough to understand the details, or reading books by "scientists" who have an ulterior agenda and set out to use science to "disprove God." Science may have explained away the effects of the gods of ancient history, but in truth, science has no place commenting about things like the existence of God or issues of morality. Those aren't falsifiable issues, so it's not science to explore them. (On the other hand, it's still good to explore these things, philosophically.)
Oh, and how often do you see something on he Discovery channel about evolution that points out where the uncertainties are? Practically never. Some artist's conception of how things might have been is presented as though it's fact, deeply entrenched in the "this is how it was" wording used by the narrator. It's fiction, and there's nothing wrong with fiction or fanciful "maybe it was this way" explorations. But they're not presented as that.
And what's really funny is that when it comes to things like physics, discovery channel does a MUCH better job of explaining the uncertainties. Physics is a nice hard science, where you can often directly test the most fundamental hypotheses. And for those things that can't be tested, there are whole shows dedicated to the issues of the uncertainty. It's great. With evolution, there are facts that we can observe in the laboratory. But most of what is presented in the media about it pertains to evolutionary theory that we have no hope of ever directly testing. Yes, the evidence is strong, but it's not experimental evidence, where you can tweak the conditions; it's indirect evidence left over from something we cannot manipulate or observe. Yet ironically, evolution is presented in the media with far less uncertainty. That sucks.
A popular conception of what it means to be scientifically informed is to swallow the party line given to you by popular sources of so-called scientific knowledge. There is precious little involvement from the actual scientific method, no better than just accepting on faith everything the pope says. The fact is, many people feel mistreated and mislead by this nebulous thing we call "science" and made to feel stupid when they question the status quo. That's ironic because science should be all about questioning the status quo. But when I was a child, questioning evolution and asking for more support for it (I was a kid in high school; I had no clear definition of it) was not met with the knowledge I asked for but derision for so stupidly questioning the God-given truth handed down by our priestly scientists.
Skepticism should be the default position of everyone who studies science, even skepticism of those things that are very strongly established. Yes, it is often the case that someone who is questioning a position may question it less if they have more knowledge in the area. But no one can be an expert in all areas of science, and it should ALWAYS be okay to question what we're told. (ObSlashdot: If we here weren't the questioning sort, we'd all be using Windows instead of Linux.)
So I put it to you that, by taking a skeptical position, some of these anti-science people are in fact more faithful to the underpinnings of science than those people who arrogantly call themselves scientists.
To the masses, "science" (much like "politics" or "medicine") is defined purely in terms of the output of those people who practice it, and not by the principles those practitioners are supposed to follow. Scientists are often full of shit. Plus, most of the science that people are exposed to is the stuff they didn't pay attention to in high school and the stuff they watch on Discovery Channel, both of which are utter crap. So what do you expect people to think?
Oh, and one other thing. Don't think anything's going to be fixed by improving science education. Yes, the education is crap, but science can be unintuitive even when taught well. The solution is to fix the scientists and their massive egos.
There's one thing you're leaving out when you talk about "good" scientists. I've met people who call themselves scientists that don't seem to fully understand the scientific method. There are many vocal people who call themselves scientists who are crackpots, either chasing a ridiculous theory, or trying to mislead people. There are many "scientists" who are just incompetent. In truth, the really competent scientists are probably in the minority. And unfortunately, to most people, those crackpots, liars, and incompetents are what define "science". By that definition, science really sucks.
"Don't you think you ought to actually check what scientists say?"
:)
Why should I when the Discovery Channel doesn't bother?
Besides, part of our problem is that while current scientists may be saying something more up to date, people don't have easy access to that because all of the textbooks used in schools are out of date, as are the TV shows and the usual sources people get their info from. That isn't a flaw in the science. But it is why people get frustrated and confused by science! And it's the frustration and confusion that is the root problem here!
Oh, and don't forget that what's up to date now will be overturned in a few years anyhow.
As Weird Al said, "Everything you know is wrong." And that's something that people have a hard time with.
I can see why people would reject evolution. For one thing, as was pointed out by an earlier articled linked to by slashdot, it's counterintuitive. It is not consistent with our every day experience, or at least not with aspects of our experience that we recognize as having those qualities. Secondly, it can be very hard to keep up with. There are aspects of evolution that are rock solid. They're facts about things observed in the laboratory. Then there are things that are highly plausible, such as that we got here through this mechanism. But when you start making claims about specific things that "must" have occurred, you're on damn shaky ground. When humans left Africa, or IF they did, has been revised more times than I can count. When we and chimps branched from our common ancestor keeps getting revised. Now, that's all well and good, except for the fact that any time the layman comes into contact with these theories, they're STATED AS FACT. Ever watch the Discovery channel? Ever notice how none of the dinosaurs have feathers? And yet no mention is made of the fact that we now know that they do and that the original notion that they were scaly was based on assumption (we didn't have good evidence either way). Let me reiterate: Scientists tend to make bold fact-like statements about science that should never be stated that way, because they just fucking don't know! It's no wonder people think scientists are arrogant. They make bold statements and think they're right. Then they change their minds and think they're right. Scientists are never wrong! Isn't that convenient. Perhaps it's not fair to say, but the fact is that evidence supporting specifics of evolutionary theory are trivial compared to the kind of certainty we have about things like physics, chemistry, and biology of living organisms. Yet those, as with any science, are inherently uncertain. Evolutionary biologists need to get off their high horse and admit that they're stabbing in the dark.
That being said, what I cannot understand is why you would want to invoke a much more ridiculous hypothesis like creationism. It's not even a hypothesis. It's not science. It's not falsifiable. Ok, so it's certain and unchanging. I can understand that. But there's no objective evidence for it. Or at least, the evidence there is does not point in the direction of creation than any other alternative, so choosing creationism is arbitrary. So, when it comes down to it, many people probably choose creationism for two reasons: (1) tradition, and (2) because the scientists leave them feeling like a chump who trusted them, just to be betrayed when the scientist changed his mind (while being completely apologetic about having been wrong).
See, scientists are role models. Yes, I realize that they're just presenting the hypothesis that best fits the evidence (sometimes; sometimes they have personal or political agendas), but they need to be damn careful about how they present their theory and explain better their uncertainties and alternative explanations.
Oh, and the scientists who try to use evolution to disprove God are just as screwed up as the creationists who try to use God to prove evolution. God and evolution are not mutually exclusive.
That's what we call basic abductive inference!
I'm glad that the summary was worded to say "corporate copyrights." I think corporate copyrights, and patents for that matter, should be very limited. On the other hand, individual copyright should be very long. Among other things, this protects them from the interests of big corporations. I'm not sure what to do about individual patents.
:)
Oh, and another good thing would be to have graded patents. You can apply for a short-term patent for less money and have it more likely to be granted, but you only get, say, 5 years. Novelty, by the judgement of the patent examiner, I guess, could weigh in, allowing them to grant patents of different lengths depending on how novel or innovative the patent is. Something like the one-click would have been expired by now.
This reviewer makes some really excellent points. Although, the fact is, the things that are inexcusable about this system are inexcusable about all Linux systems. People like to say that Linux "just works." That's a huge stinking load. It took me hours to get wireless networking going recently, and that's only the most recent set of headaches. Ubuntu, I have to say, is the best Linux distro I've ever used. But the fact that I have to so frequently drop to the command line for ANYTHING, in this day and age, is completely unacceptable. Hell, the fact that I need an application to manage other applications (rather than just dragging the app into the Applications folder) is unacceptable, but I digress. I can say all this, because I used Gentoo for years and enjoyed it. Eventually, I got tired of doing stuff manually that damn well should have been completely automatic. Then I bought a Mac. MacOS X is lightyears ahead of Linux in terms of usability, although it has plenty of other drawbacks. Indeed, I can complain almost as long about MacOS as I can about Linux, although the sets of complaints don't have much overlap.
This green PC suffers from some serious oversights, like the builder really didn't try very hard. Basic things are missing that should have been pre-installed. There's no excuse.
On the other hand, no idiot would think that trying to use Vista would be any better. At least with Linux you CAN fix things. With Vista, what's broken is broken. Oh, and don't get me started on having to install antivirus and antispyware tools. There are ways to make an OS secure, but Microsoft just does a half-assed job at it. You want a rock-solid secure OS, spend a little time looking at the measures taken by OpenBSD.
I don't know what you've been reading, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that my ability to concentrate improved dramatically when I identified "irritant" foods (ones that my immune system reacts to) and also eliminated various preservatives and such. Studies have been done where school students were fed balanced meals for lunch instead of this McDonalds crap; absenteeism, behavioral problems and other things like that went down while grades improved.
And haven't you read that in many cases, children with autism improve dramatically when they're taken off wheat and dairy? If not, you should do some research before you dismiss this stuff.
Diet isn't everything, but it's what your body runs on. If you don't take in the right stuff and you take in bad stuff, you're not going to function so well.
Break a bulb and get a mercury in your house in very unhealthy concentrations. We're already giving our kids ADHD with the crap in our foods. How about we give them some more environmental poison! Yeah, that's great.
Seriously, people. I understand why mercury is used in these bulbs, but something has to be done to make them safer. Make them much harder to break, or find a substitute for the mercury.
Oh, and I haven't found a fluorescent bulb that doesn't give me a headache. The light output is never equal to the "equivalent" bulb, and there's something wrong with the color. I'm not sure, but nothing beats a halogen, at least for my eyes.
So, make the bulbs not suck and not poisonous, and I'm all in!
I'm just painfully curious to know how you were able to interpret "any old data is a program" from what I wrote. Indeed, I was saying the converse.
A database file is just data, to be interpreted by a database program.
But the database program is just data to be interpreted by the CPU.
Data vs. document is a spectrum. There is no clear distinction. We tend to think of documents as just information, describing some structured knowledge, which is true. But by contrast, we tend to think of programs as containing primarily step-by-step instructions. But those instructions don't execute themselves. They're input to something. And moreover, not all programs are instructions. Consider Prolog, where the functions are described in terms of logical relationships, and the step-by-step instructions are inferred by the interpreter. Just because the Prolog program doesn't include instructions, per se, doesn't make us say it's not a program. At the same time, the distinction between a Prolog program and an expert system knowledge base (in term of form and function) is not clear.
Everything is just data. What makes it meaningful is the order and interpretation that we impose on it.
When I was in high school (graduated in '91), I knew vastly more about computers than the teachers did. That wasn't a major feat considering the time, and I am now aware of how many things I thought I knew but knew wrong at the time. But in any case, because of my "vastly superior" knowledge, I was a total cocky-ass jerk. Because of my (perceived, at least) superior technical knowledge, I was a discipline problem and a disruption in class. I would "correct" what the teacher said and refuse (or at least resist) to do what the teacher told me to do, etc.
I should have gotten my ass beat for this.
Of course, at the time, I was really hard-headed. I'm not sure I would have learned my lesson if I had been punished. I was the sort of person who would get so caught up in being technically correct that I was blind to the concepts of being socially or procedurally or ethically incorrect.
I'm 34 now and in grad school. I took a computational linguistics class where we had to code an Earley parser, which is a dynamic programming approach to human language parsing. I was bothered by the fact that the grammar we were using was, in my opinion, half-assed. I think lexical grammars are a better (if still not very good) model of how humans process language syntactically. But I did not complain. I had a good time chewing the fat with the professor about it during office hours, because it's interesting, but there was no need for me to "complain" about it in any context. After all these years, I'm able to pull my head out of my ass and recognize that we often "simplify" things or make arbitrary choices as a foil for learning something more general. We were not there to learn about lexical grammars. We're there to learn to write parsers, and an Earley parser can be adapted to lexical grammars should I feel inclined to do so. Big picture here!
Let's hope this kid doesn't take as long as I did to learn to see the bigger picture, recognize that life involves judicious compromises, learn to function socially, and not be so self-centered that he makes things harder on other people just for the sake of being "right". (And by "right", I mean that he may have logical support for his hypothesis, but it's technical and the topic can still be debated. I'm NOT talking about moral "right" here, which is a whole other subject matter.)