Creationism is about a supernatural force overseeing things--it says nothing specific about how things actually happened.
I agree with you that theism is not necessarily incompatible with a Darwinian view of life. I think there's a lot to Galileo's old line about "how to get to heaven not how the heavens go."
However I must disagree with your statement about Creationism saying nothing specific. Many creationists make specific claims that are in direct opposition to scientific theory. For example: the Earth is six thousand years old, dinosaurs and humans lived together, and the Flood created the grand canyon and caused the extinction of many species. Furthermore, intelligent design is often presented as a scientific theory. It clearly is not, because it has no testable hypotheses. Attempts to put both Creationism and Intelligent Design in classrooms upset many scientific people including myself. The former because it makes so many incorrect claims of fact and the latter because it confuses religion or philosophy with the scientific method.
Exhaustive Search is not realistic
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
...theoretically has 10^60 potential endings. Is conquering the game via exhaustive search of all possibilities possible?
No.
A typical star is made up of ~10^57 hyrdogen atoms. If you could store an all the information you needed about a single ending position in a single atom, you'd need storage that had the mass of thousands of stars.
Shipping the source in a tarball doesn't reduce your user base to geeks who compile software only. If you've written something good, distributions will package it for you. Lots of projects supply the source, and maybe an rpm or deb. But typically no attempt is made to create hundreds of builds. As long as the source is available, the community will create the binaries and solve the weird, distro-specific issues themselves.
I went and looked at a few major projects' download pages. None of Apache, Postgres, Firefox, Blender, KDE, Gnome, and Openoffice offer a.deb, but all are just an apt-get away. (This is based on poking around for 5 minutes - maybe I missed one).
Leave the distributing to the distributors. Third parties should want to have their software installed from a repository - they don't pay for the bandwidth, the distributor gets to screw around with dependencies, and users get updates in a uniform way. Many users from windows expect an installer, but that is a severely dysfunctional way to install software.
My understanding is that the worry is that people won't use them for education. Instead, they will just copy and paste spam into a blog, and then match symbols. Making captchas that require literacy would prevent illiterate captcha solvers. I don't think its necessary to worry about literate captcha solvers because if someone can read and use a computer, that's a huge skill in the developing world. It puts them ahead, and they can do something more profitable than solve captchas. That's completely a guess pulled out of my ass, but it seems reasonable to me given that spam only works because of the ridiculous low cost.
I wasn't there when it happened, but my reading of environmental history goes something like this: Around 1970, people started saying "wow, we're really trashing the Earth. If we don't do something, all kinds of bad things could happen". In response we had the first Earth Day and the Clean Air Act and the EPA in 1970, and the Endangered Species Act in 1973, and the Clean Water Act in 1977. The environmental movement accomplished a lot, and most of the bad things didn't happen.
The goal all along has been to make the predictions not happen. When the predictions don't occur, it makes me appreciative of the amazing work that has been done, not cynical because some of the estimates weren't quite right.
...some suggest that their owners would man a CAPTCHA solving army. Captchas could be changed so that in order to pass, you have to demonstrate ability to read in addition to just matching symbols. This would prevent illiterate people from copy-pasting and then matching shapes. I think that literate people with basic internet skills would be able to do more with their lives than solve captchas. I don't think spammers can pay them enough. This is without any facts, figures or research, but hey... this is slashdot.
I attended a Renaissance festival last weekend. The entertainers who perform there make money mostly from tips (and maybe a bit of merchandising). Tipping is completely optional, yet many of the same acts return year after year. My understanding is that the performers typically don't have day jobs because they travel too much. They make their living by entertaining people and then asking them to put money in a hat so they can keep doing it. The rational person from the Tragedy of the commons won't tip, but apparently many people aren't rational. This makes me think that Radiohead's idea might result in good profits for the band.
The psychology involved may be different; entertainers at the Renaissance Festival typically hold out their hats and thank people as they leave the stage. It isn't easy to walk away from an entertainer asking for your support, especially if you just enjoyed their show. Downloading from a website lets people feel much more anonymous. Guilt attached to a person seems worse than guilt attached to a download link.
It's too bad TFA is an automatically translated copy. The results are predictably bad. The first sentence is a representative sample:
If you ever wanted starting in 3D creation today, you probably need to know with which 3D applications package with you will feel better and which is the most suitable for you and business ?
My impression is that security bugs are more narrowly defined - something like "only bugs that allow remote execution of code." An outage caused by unsync'd times is a problem, but it won't allow any systems to be broken into. In that more limited sense it is not a security bug.
I think it makes sense to have the Volatile repository, and put updates like this in it. Most people will probably end up pulling from stable and volatile, but thats not a problem. Some will choose not to pull from volatile. Having that option is good for them.
I already USE Linux. If I could use it to run all the software I need to run, I'd toss my Windows machine. Have you considered running windows in a virtual machine?
The article (and the political process, as far as I can tell) doesn't address several important issues.
The DMCA is draconian; it needs to be repealed. (I'm thinking of protecting academics who study security from being pushed around, let alone 13 year old girls and grandmothers who download a couple of songs). Yes, I did just use the "Think of the children" defense. Anyway, I've never seen a political candidate who even has a public position on the DMCA.
Government documents need to be archived in an open format. Microsoft abused the standards process, hard. Again, no politicians are even talking about odf/ooxml. No one even mentioned Microsoft's abuse.
It is frustrating that these things aren't even being talked about.
I'm not saying that Politicians should spend a huge amount of time on these issues. I just some candidate would write two sentences somewhere, to the effect of
"I oppose the DMCA and favor open standards. If elected, I would work with congress to repeal the DMCA, I would investigate Microsoft's manipulation of the standardization process, and I would make ODF the standard from government documents."
Is that too much to ask?
I thought they were a corporation that was all about the capitalist ideal and not the one-size-fits-all socialism style solution? I know my user id is about 10 orders of magnitude too high to start a new meme, but I wish there was a "socialism vs capitalism" analog to Goodwin's Law.
Slashdot Mirror
Empire was the best, it even has the words I need to express myself right now: HAN: I feel terrible. LEIA: Why are they doing this?
I agree with you that theism is not necessarily incompatible with a Darwinian view of life. I think there's a lot to Galileo's old line about "how to get to heaven not how the heavens go."
However I must disagree with your statement about Creationism saying nothing specific. Many creationists make specific claims that are in direct opposition to scientific theory. For example: the Earth is six thousand years old, dinosaurs and humans lived together, and the Flood created the grand canyon and caused the extinction of many species. Furthermore, intelligent design is often presented as a scientific theory. It clearly is not, because it has no testable hypotheses. Attempts to put both Creationism and Intelligent Design in classrooms upset many scientific people including myself. The former because it makes so many incorrect claims of fact and the latter because it confuses religion or philosophy with the scientific method.
...theoretically has 10^60 potential endings. Is conquering the game via exhaustive search of all possibilities possible?No.
A typical star is made up of ~10^57 hyrdogen atoms. If you could store an all the information you needed about a single ending position in a single atom, you'd need storage that had the mass of thousands of stars.
All I can say is "You know what you doing". Oh, and that link is broken, should be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AYB.
Shipping the source in a tarball doesn't reduce your user base to geeks who compile software only. If you've written something good, distributions will package it for you. Lots of projects supply the source, and maybe an rpm or deb. But typically no attempt is made to create hundreds of builds. As long as the source is available, the community will create the binaries and solve the weird, distro-specific issues themselves.
I went and looked at a few major projects' download pages. None of Apache, Postgres, Firefox, Blender, KDE, Gnome, and Openoffice offer a .deb, but all are just an apt-get away. (This is based on poking around for 5 minutes - maybe I missed one).
Leave the distributing to the distributors. Third parties should want to have their software installed from a repository - they don't pay for the bandwidth, the distributor gets to screw around with dependencies, and users get updates in a uniform way. Many users from windows expect an installer, but that is a severely dysfunctional way to install software.
My understanding is that the worry is that people won't use them for education. Instead, they will just copy and paste spam into a blog, and then match symbols. Making captchas that require literacy would prevent illiterate captcha solvers. I don't think its necessary to worry about literate captcha solvers because if someone can read and use a computer, that's a huge skill in the developing world. It puts them ahead, and they can do something more profitable than solve captchas. That's completely a guess pulled out of my ass, but it seems reasonable to me given that spam only works because of the ridiculous low cost.
I wasn't there when it happened, but my reading of environmental history goes something like this:
Around 1970, people started saying "wow, we're really trashing the Earth. If we don't do something, all kinds of bad things could happen". In response we had the first Earth Day and the Clean Air Act and the EPA in 1970, and the Endangered Species Act in 1973, and the Clean Water Act in 1977. The environmental movement accomplished a lot, and most of the bad things didn't happen.
The goal all along has been to make the predictions not happen. When the predictions don't occur, it makes me appreciative of the amazing work that has been done, not cynical because some of the estimates weren't quite right.
...some suggest that their owners would man a CAPTCHA solving army. Captchas could be changed so that in order to pass, you have to demonstrate ability to read in addition to just matching symbols. This would prevent illiterate people from copy-pasting and then matching shapes. I think that literate people with basic internet skills would be able to do more with their lives than solve captchas. I don't think spammers can pay them enough. This is without any facts, figures or research, but heyThe actual quote is "R2, that stabilizer's broken loose again ..."
One person could have walked off with 2-3 laptops all at once.
I attended a Renaissance festival last weekend. The entertainers who perform there make money mostly from tips (and maybe a bit of merchandising). Tipping is completely optional, yet many of the same acts return year after year. My understanding is that the performers typically don't have day jobs because they travel too much. They make their living by entertaining people and then asking them to put money in a hat so they can keep doing it. The rational person from the Tragedy of the commons won't tip, but apparently many people aren't rational. This makes me think that Radiohead's idea might result in good profits for the band.
The psychology involved may be different; entertainers at the Renaissance Festival typically hold out their hats and thank people as they leave the stage. It isn't easy to walk away from an entertainer asking for your support, especially if you just enjoyed their show. Downloading from a website lets people feel much more anonymous. Guilt attached to a person seems worse than guilt attached to a download link.
My impression is that security bugs are more narrowly defined - something like "only bugs that allow remote execution of code." An outage caused by unsync'd times is a problem, but it won't allow any systems to be broken into. In that more limited sense it is not a security bug. I think it makes sense to have the Volatile repository, and put updates like this in it. Most people will probably end up pulling from stable and volatile, but thats not a problem. Some will choose not to pull from volatile. Having that option is good for them.
- The DMCA is draconian; it needs to be repealed. (I'm thinking of protecting academics who study security from being pushed around, let alone 13 year old girls and grandmothers who download a couple of songs). Yes, I did just use the "Think of the children" defense. Anyway, I've never seen a political candidate who even has a public position on the DMCA.
- Government documents need to be archived in an open format. Microsoft abused the standards process, hard. Again, no politicians are even talking about odf/ooxml. No one even mentioned Microsoft's abuse.
It is frustrating that these things aren't even being talked about. I'm not saying that Politicians should spend a huge amount of time on these issues. I just some candidate would write two sentences somewhere, to the effect of "I oppose the DMCA and favor open standards. If elected, I would work with congress to repeal the DMCA, I would investigate Microsoft's manipulation of the standardization process, and I would make ODF the standard from government documents." Is that too much to ask?Between this and the "Mac Underground", its been a slow day.