Physicists today are groping for this "theory of everything." [...] So far, the leading--in fact, the only--candidate is string theory.
There is at least one mainstream alternative to string theory, namely loop quantum gravity (see John Baez's This week's finds in mathematical physics, week 134 for a discussion of some of the problems plaguing the various approaches.)
And:
Unfortunately, no one has ever seen negative matter. In principle, it should weigh less than nothing and fall up, rather than down.
If one holds the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass, then this is wrong. A negative mass object will fall towards a positive mass, but the positive mass will be repelled. A pair of perfectly matched masses of opposite 'sign' would, if unimpeded, accelerate for ever.
Now, as LISP has shown, programming straight to the AST, while it has its advantages, is a historical loser. But that doesn't make exposing it in a standard fashion a Bad Idea. On top of it, you layer a more conventional language... and as strongly as I am defending an XML-exposed AST, I even more strongly believe it would be a stupid, fatal mistake to make that the human-exposed language that one actually programs in.
The syntax of the programming language Dylan was originally s-expression based; but observing that this was going to hinder its acceptance, the syntax was changed to a much more familiar (to most programmers) traditional procedural syntax. Sadly in the end, it didn't help sufficiently to make Dylan a popular language, despite all the cool features it offered. But the thing to observe I think is that the syntax of a programming language is not so special that it can't be changed and manipulated. I don't think in the end Dylan compilers and interpreters supported the older style syntax directly, but essentially the new form was syntactic sugar, and could have been transformed to and from an s-expression form automatically.
I'd love to use a derivative of C++ whose source was maintained structurally, and which had tools (editors, etc.) that supported it, provided I didn't need to learn a new syntax to code in. It would certainly allow for much easier to understand and code compile-time processing, which is currently performed with template meta-programming and which is generally a royal pain to get right, portable and not too buggy. Hygienic macros for C++? Cool!
The Pentium M is a nice chip, but as far as Linux comparisons go, comparing it to 32-bit compiled applications on the A64 is also misleading.
With Linux on the Athlon64 and sources for your programs, there is just no reason not to compare against x86-64 versions of the code. This would offer a much more realistic comparison between a Linux Pentium-M machine and a Linux Athlon64 machine.
Given that performance generally improves greatly on the Athlons when everything is compiled for and run in 64-bit mode, it seems premature to state that the Pentium M and the A64 are on par for a system running a recent, x86-64 capable version of Linux.
For Adelaide, I've had good experiences with Adrenalin on Hindley Street for the most part. Linux isn't their specialty, but they're not ignorant of it and they will research hardware compatibility.
They do burn-in tests on the systems they assemble, and try to cater to the high-performace and (to a lesser extent) the low-noise crowds.
Languages like Cantonese and Hakka and Mandarin are for the most part mutually unintelligable. They are at least as dissimilar as European Romance languages are.
The word 'dialect' is often used to describe them, but there are much greater differences between them than one might expect given that appellation. The common use of dialect in this context is probably at least partly due to the common writing system, and also to political concerns.
As long as it's not that asinine and snippy "point for point" alternating-quote-and-reply nonsense I had to grow up with, I don't get bent out of shape either way.
Huh? You get aggravated by people taking the time and care to make their response as clear and unambiguous as possible?
There is a reason why people used that style for so long on Usenet and in email: it's practical and adds clarity!
When I get top-posted responses to emails which had multiple points, I just get the impression that the responder was being lazy. Now I, the recipient, need to dredge through the (fully-quoted) original message for the point which is most likely to correspond to the response.
This sort of practice (non-interleaved responses) also allows very sloppy replies -- which can be a useful tactic, if that is your aim -- whereby difficult aspects of the original message are glossed over or ignored, while the vagueness of specificity in the style allows for 'plausible deniability' of slackness on the part of the responder. Again, it smacks of laziness, careleness or deceitfulness, depending on context.
Nothing asinine about point-for-point, unless your aim is to be imprecise or unspecific.
snot and skin cells (and sperm) are only dna carriers, not the self-sustaining organism capable of life that the dna is the blueprint for.
Take a premature infant, for example, and leave them to fend for themselves. Most will not be self-sustaining either. At the other end, any number of cell lines, derived from cancers, that are extant around the world
right now are self-sustaining in the sense that provided with nutrients and an appropriate environment, they sustain themselves perfectly well.
There are people who do not integrate well into society (the short bus comes to mind).
That they might not integrate 'well' is a different (though related) question. That they participate and have other human qualities ascribed to them means they count.
As far as empathy and self-consciousness, don't advanced animals have that?
Yes. And many other animals form societies, and culture too (in the sense that it is community local and passed on independently of genetics.) Perhaps we should reconsider whether being cruel to other animals is acceptable behaviour, ethically speaking?
A person in a coma, who is not going to come out of it unassisted, and who does not have anyone care about them one way or the other, is effectively not any more human than a forgotten dead person is, at least as far as anyone else is concerned.
People in comas who have relationships with other people, are definitely part of the network of human society, even though it may be passive. You can make a case for them being human in some senses but not others. Same applies for infants.
Even if you disagree with these sorts of criteria for determining human-ness, you have to acknowledge that the DNA-based one makes no sense at all. Or else attack me for the inhumane way I subject soiled hankerchiefs to chemical warfare when I do the washing.
Such thinking is behind all the current nonsense concerning abortion and stem cells research.
If you believe DNA is what determines human-ness, then all the cellular detritus that you leave scattered about every day is just as human as you are. You would have to claim that the snot you pick out of your nose has the same human rights as your mother. It's just daft.
What counts as human is not the DNA.
What constitutes human then? The sensible answer is my view (and others) is that it depends upon the thing's ability to be part of a society with other 'humans', and to have qualities such as empathy, self-consciousness and the like which are regarded as human qualities. Without those, a thing is no more human than its DNA might be.
I imagine that every time I sneeze, I eject more 'human' than there is in a 3-day old embryo -- by the DNA line of reasoning. It's just silly.
DNA is simply something that current humans have in common. Given how unimportant it really is, it seems quite possible in the future that there will be (human-constructed) things which are human in all the important senses, even if they don't have the same DNA as my toe-nail clippings.
I spent some time working for a game company producing their first game. The last 9 weeks, the hours rose from 80 or so per week to over 105.
It was possible to code those crazy hours, but only because of tactical napping. Get too tired to concentrate -- 10 minute nap. Didn't help? 2 hours. Every 30-50 hours or so, go home, grab a shower and maybe 5 hours sleep. Trying to work straight 15 hours simply did not work. There were of course large amounts of caffeine involved, but napping made all the difference.
Occasionally it took a very physical toll. I remember one morning, at around 9am (when the artists started turning up), I couldn't keep warm. Just constantly shivering, despite it being quite hot. Too exhausted to keep warm. That was a little scary.
Oh, and most of the extra time required was due to interactions with awful, awful code from 3rd parties. Yes, I'm looking at you, DirectPlay. That project turned a strong dislike of Microsoft into a murderous antipathy. I don't think anyone has found the bodies yet.
Ironically, the very same word in the same sentence refered to in the OP's comment, appears to get mangled in a different way by excite.co.jp.
To quote: "moreover, it was called reference keyword ranking and the U.S. Amazon's CD sales ranking -- it pushes -- end -- information is also carried"
Here, it looks like "osusume" (recommendation) is also being misinterpreted as "osu" + "sume". Instead of taking "osu" as 'male animal', it interprets it as the verb 'to push', and then it parses "sume" as the imperative form (!) of "sumu" , to be completed, or 'to end' (intransitive).
Unfortunately slashdot seems to ignore Japanese characters in comments...
I think the Fish got confused trying to parse "osusume" which means recommendation, which has an honorific "o-" at the front; the first two syllables "osu" by themselves can be read as a different word, meaning the male (of some sort of animal).
Because written Japanese rarely has divisions between words marked, trying to decipher text written in hiragana can be a challenge for translation software (and for people like me trying to learn the language!)
If there were no monetary interest to advertisers to advertise on TV, then certainly free-to-air TV would have to find another source of revenue.
Remember there is always product placement though.
But the key thing to note is: it's not just people who are paying for their TV service who are paying for ads. Everytime you go to the supermarket, or the department store, or buy just about anything, you're paying for TV advertising. Every day we consumers subsidise companies' marketting machines; we are paying for the privilege of watching adverts.
So from a moral point of view, only those who watch free-to-air TV and don't ever buy anything, are in any way getting something for nothing. I honestly think that that's probably not so many people in the US.
Advertising is the force behind some of the huge inequities in income and power in the Western world. Why do star athletes earn millions of dollars? Where does that money come from? From advertising. Do TV stars and top atheletes really do work which is ten or a hundred times more valuable than that of scientific researchers and educators? Yes, but only because of advertising. And we are all paying what is effectively a consumption tax to support this disparity whether we are in favour of it or not.
So should the power of marketing be curtailed to a degree, for example by people gaining the ability to choose to see advertising only if they wish, it is likely a good thing. Even if it does mean less 'commercial' television.
To deny the existence of any psychic phenomena is also going too far.
Have you never had a dream of a place that you later visited? Have you never known who was on the phone before you picked it up (without other evidence)? Have you never known in advance what someone was going to say before they said it, with insufficient context to be able to figure it out?
Speaking personally, all these have happened to me, and more, and friends as well. And we are all involved in the sciences professionally one way or another.
Such events won't satisfy James Randi's stringent tests. I'm not claiming the existence of any sort of even vaguely reliable psychic abilities. Yet subjectively, these things do happen from time to time, and they are not restricted to one or two 'special' people. They almost certainly is a perfectly consistent explanation for such events that does not require a radically different scientific paradigm. Nonetheless, having been burnt so badly by so many charlatans and bogus claims, the world of science on the whole these days has no interest in persuing such matters any further.
There is evidence of psychic phenomena, but it that evidence consists of unrepeatable, sporadic events distributed amongst a great many people's subjective experiences. Such occurances are so common among people I have met, that I would be very surprised if you the reader had not ever had one yourself. But if such events constitute the only such evidence, then the confirmation of psychic phenomena remains outside the purview of scientific enquiry, being as it is subjective, inconsistent and non-repeatable.
Australian defamation laws are quite harsh --- for example truth is not a valid defence in many Australian states, and elsewhere the onus is still upon the defendant to prove the truthfulness of the statements;
the racial anti-vilification laws, no matter how well intentioned, do run counter to principles of free speech;
journalists are not accorded any legal protection for keeping their sources confidential; they can be held in contempt of court for not revealing them. Recently granted powers allow quite onerous penalties for journalists if any sort of connection with terrorism can be made.
In addition there is a lot of media power concentrated in the hands of a few individuals, who can and do exert an editorial influence on content.
[...] and more significantly, neurons have a steady rate of death, and zero regeneration.
That's not strictly speaking true - while it was long held that the neurons you have at twenty are all you are going to get, it's been discovered that we do in fact continue to grow more neurons over time. At least, in some parts of the brain. Whether or not neurogenesis occurs in the neocortex of adult primate brains is still a matter of dispute.
Still in the end, it appears to be a losing battle.
In the meantime, if you want to encourage neural growth, keep stretching that brain. Learn new stuff, do new things. Don't stop. Drink alcohol, but in strict moderation. Oh, and don't smoke, and stay aerobically fit.
You have to forgive people for thinking that the motivation for the invasion of Iraq had something to do with oil.
Because as it has become apparent, it certainly had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction, nor with 'liberating' the Iraqi people. Or if it did, it was executed so incompetently that claiming an ulterior motive is almost charitable.
None of the evidence that has come to light so far paints the actions of the current US administration in a positive light, inasmuch as it relates to the wars it has started. As regards other international affairs, it has actively fought any steps that would impinge upon the short-term benefit of large US corporations, for example in the arms industry, drug manufacture, agriculture. And of course there is the blatant disregard for the US' contribution to global warming.
Policies based in religious thought, not science, shape the US' position when looking at international family planning and poverty issues; the US has thrown its political weight around in trying to stymie UN policies on education and family planning which touch on contraception.
In international policy the US has been consistently belligerent; even now it is unilaterally trying to bully Iran on nuclear issues. It has strained relations with major allies, and amazingly has made itself even more disliked in the middle East.
So there are very good reasons why people outside the US have a very low opinion of Bush. Calling him a modern Hitler is hyperbole, but such low opinion of him is not unfounded.
But you have to remember, the Sparcstation 2 was pretty special. One of the best workstations produced... ever.
Sun may still have good server hardware -- it's been a while since I've had to deal with it -- but as far as workstations are concerned, I don't think they've ever matched what they achieved with the SS2, compared with the contemporary competition.
Why is it okay to shoot someone for stealing and taunting? Their life (or in this case, the use of their leg) is more important than your stuff? Your pride? This is the impression I'm getting.
Stuff can be reacquired. There is insurance as well. Criminals occasionally even get caught by the police. But people don't get better after being shot to death. Splintered knee caps don't magically repair themselves.
The only case where it seems justifiable to maim or kill someone, is when not doing so presents the high likelihood of worse happening. Even then, it is all too easy to make a mistake in judgement, and one can't make amends for mistakes like that. To think that wounded pride and a car is worth someone's life just boggles my imagination. Seriously, you think that's ok?
You know, I used to think that the high rate of gun ownership in the US was largely responsible for the incredibly high rate of murders, higher by far than any other similarly wealthy nation, and that effective gun control could reduce this tragedy.
But the above poster and other commenters are saying, it's better to kill someone than let them steal.
So the NRA and their followers are right: gun control will do little to help. Because it is clear that the reason the US has such a high murder rate, is that it is populated to a large degree by sociopaths.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to use a derivative of C++ whose source was maintained structurally, and which had tools (editors, etc.) that supported it, provided I didn't need to learn a new syntax to code in. It would certainly allow for much easier to understand and code compile-time processing, which is currently performed with template meta-programming and which is generally a royal pain to get right, portable and not too buggy. Hygienic macros for C++? Cool!
The Pentium M is a nice chip, but as far as Linux comparisons go, comparing it to 32-bit compiled applications on the A64 is also misleading.
With Linux on the Athlon64 and sources for your programs, there is just no reason not to compare against x86-64 versions of the code. This would offer a much more realistic comparison between a Linux Pentium-M machine and a Linux Athlon64 machine.
Given that performance generally improves greatly on the Athlons when everything is compiled for and run in 64-bit mode, it seems premature to state that the Pentium M and the A64 are on par for a system running a recent, x86-64 capable version of Linux.
For Adelaide, I've had good experiences with Adrenalin on Hindley Street for the most part. Linux isn't their specialty, but they're not ignorant of it and they will research hardware compatibility.
They do burn-in tests on the systems they assemble, and try to cater to the high-performace and (to a lesser extent) the low-noise crowds.
Just on the point of Chinese dialects:
Languages like Cantonese and Hakka and Mandarin are for the most part mutually unintelligable. They are at least as dissimilar as European Romance languages are.
The word 'dialect' is often used to describe them, but there are much greater differences between them than one might expect given that appellation. The common use of dialect in this context is probably at least partly due to the common writing system, and also to political concerns.
When I get top-posted responses to emails which had multiple points, I just get the impression that the responder was being lazy. Now I, the recipient, need to dredge through the (fully-quoted) original message for the point which is most likely to correspond to the response.
This sort of practice (non-interleaved responses) also allows very sloppy replies -- which can be a useful tactic, if that is your aim -- whereby difficult aspects of the original message are glossed over or ignored, while the vagueness of specificity in the style allows for 'plausible deniability' of slackness on the part of the responder. Again, it smacks of laziness, careleness or deceitfulness, depending on context.
Nothing asinine about point-for-point, unless your aim is to be imprecise or unspecific.
Actually there is a concern that certain types of animal-human chimerae may produce 'human' germ cells.
A person in a coma, who is not going to come out of it unassisted, and who does not have anyone care about them one way or the other, is effectively not any more human than a forgotten dead person is, at least as far as anyone else is concerned.
People in comas who have relationships with other people, are definitely part of the network of human society, even though it may be passive. You can make a case for them being human in some senses but not others. Same applies for infants.
Even if you disagree with these sorts of criteria for determining human-ness, you have to acknowledge that the DNA-based one makes no sense at all. Or else attack me for the inhumane way I subject soiled hankerchiefs to chemical warfare when I do the washing.
No it's not about DNA.
Such thinking is behind all the current nonsense concerning abortion and stem cells research.
If you believe DNA is what determines human-ness, then all the cellular detritus that you leave scattered about every day is just as human as you are. You would have to claim that the snot you pick out of your nose has the same human rights as your mother. It's just daft.
What counts as human is not the DNA.
What constitutes human then? The sensible answer is my view (and others) is that it depends upon the thing's ability to be part of a society with other 'humans', and to have qualities such as empathy, self-consciousness and the like which are regarded as human qualities. Without those, a thing is no more human than its DNA might be.
I imagine that every time I sneeze, I eject more 'human' than there is in a 3-day old embryo -- by the DNA line of reasoning. It's just silly.
DNA is simply something that current humans have in common. Given how unimportant it really is, it seems quite possible in the future that there will be (human-constructed) things which are human in all the important senses, even if they don't have the same DNA as my toe-nail clippings.
I spent some time working for a game company producing their first game. The last 9 weeks, the hours rose from 80 or so per week to over 105.
It was possible to code those crazy hours, but only because of tactical napping. Get too tired to concentrate -- 10 minute nap. Didn't help? 2 hours. Every 30-50 hours or so, go home, grab a shower and maybe 5 hours sleep. Trying to work straight 15 hours simply did not work. There were of course large amounts of caffeine involved, but napping made all the difference.
Occasionally it took a very physical toll. I remember one morning, at around 9am (when the artists started turning up), I couldn't keep warm. Just constantly shivering, despite it being quite hot. Too exhausted to keep warm. That was a little scary.
Oh, and most of the extra time required was due to interactions with awful, awful code from 3rd parties. Yes, I'm looking at you, DirectPlay. That project turned a strong dislike of Microsoft into a murderous antipathy. I don't think anyone has found the bodies yet.
Ironically, the very same word in the same sentence refered to in the OP's comment, appears to get mangled in a different way by excite.co.jp.
To quote: "moreover, it was called reference keyword ranking and the U.S. Amazon's CD sales ranking -- it pushes -- end -- information is also carried"
Here, it looks like "osusume" (recommendation) is also being misinterpreted as "osu" + "sume". Instead of taking "osu" as 'male animal', it interprets it as the verb 'to push', and then it parses "sume" as the imperative form (!) of "sumu" , to be completed, or 'to end' (intransitive).
Unfortunately slashdot seems to ignore Japanese characters in comments ...
I think the Fish got confused trying to parse "osusume" which means recommendation, which has an honorific "o-" at the front; the first two syllables "osu" by themselves can be read as a different word, meaning the male (of some sort of animal).
Because written Japanese rarely has divisions between words marked, trying to decipher text written in hiragana can be a challenge for translation software (and for people like me trying to learn the language!)
If there were no monetary interest to advertisers to advertise on TV, then certainly free-to-air TV would have to find another source of revenue.
Remember there is always product placement though.
But the key thing to note is: it's not just people who are paying for their TV service who are paying for ads. Everytime you go to the supermarket, or the department store, or buy just about anything, you're paying for TV advertising. Every day we consumers subsidise companies' marketting machines; we are paying for the privilege of watching adverts.
So from a moral point of view, only those who watch free-to-air TV and don't ever buy anything, are in any way getting something for nothing. I honestly think that that's probably not so many people in the US.
Advertising is the force behind some of the huge inequities in income and power in the Western world. Why do star athletes earn millions of dollars? Where does that money come from? From advertising. Do TV stars and top atheletes really do work which is ten or a hundred times more valuable than that of scientific researchers and educators? Yes, but only because of advertising. And we are all paying what is effectively a consumption tax to support this disparity whether we are in favour of it or not.
So should the power of marketing be curtailed to a degree, for example by people gaining the ability to choose to see advertising only if they wish, it is likely a good thing. Even if it does mean less 'commercial' television.
To deny the existence of any psychic phenomena is also going too far.
Have you never had a dream of a place that you later visited? Have you never known who was on the phone before you picked it up (without other evidence)? Have you never known in advance what someone was going to say before they said it, with insufficient context to be able to figure it out?
Speaking personally, all these have happened to me, and more, and friends as well. And we are all involved in the sciences professionally one way or another.
Such events won't satisfy James Randi's stringent tests. I'm not claiming the existence of any sort of even vaguely reliable psychic abilities. Yet subjectively, these things do happen from time to time, and they are not restricted to one or two 'special' people. They almost certainly is a perfectly consistent explanation for such events that does not require a radically different scientific paradigm. Nonetheless, having been burnt so badly by so many charlatans and bogus claims, the world of science on the whole these days has no interest in persuing such matters any further.
There is evidence of psychic phenomena, but it that evidence consists of unrepeatable, sporadic events distributed amongst a great many people's subjective experiences. Such occurances are so common among people I have met, that I would be very surprised if you the reader had not ever had one yourself. But if such events constitute the only such evidence, then the confirmation of psychic phenomena remains outside the purview of scientific enquiry, being as it is subjective, inconsistent and non-repeatable.
Contributing factors may be:
In addition there is a lot of media power concentrated in the hands of a few individuals, who can and do exert an editorial influence on content.
Still in the end, it appears to be a losing battle.
In the meantime, if you want to encourage neural growth, keep stretching that brain. Learn new stuff, do new things. Don't stop. Drink alcohol, but in strict moderation. Oh, and don't smoke, and stay aerobically fit.
According to one of those links, it was a doctored quote. Which was then accompanied by doctored video footage on FOX. Amazing!
For a country obsessed about bringing democracy to the world, it would be nice if they considered giving it a go at home.
You have to forgive people for thinking that the motivation for the invasion of Iraq had something to do with oil.
Because as it has become apparent, it certainly had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction, nor with 'liberating' the Iraqi people. Or if it did, it was executed so incompetently that claiming an ulterior motive is almost charitable.
None of the evidence that has come to light so far paints the actions of the current US administration in a positive light, inasmuch as it relates to the wars it has started. As regards other international affairs, it has actively fought any steps that would impinge upon the short-term benefit of large US corporations, for example in the arms industry, drug manufacture, agriculture. And of course there is the blatant disregard for the US' contribution to global warming.
Policies based in religious thought, not science, shape the US' position when looking at international family planning and poverty issues; the US has thrown its political weight around in trying to stymie UN policies on education and family planning which touch on contraception.
In international policy the US has been consistently belligerent; even now it is unilaterally trying to bully Iran on nuclear issues. It has strained relations with major allies, and amazingly has made itself even more disliked in the middle East.
So there are very good reasons why people outside the US have a very low opinion of Bush. Calling him a modern Hitler is hyperbole, but such low opinion of him is not unfounded.
Hmm, 20 million divided by 30 billion is about 0.00067. That's 0.067%.
It's within an order of magnitude of pocket change, relatively speaking.
But you have to remember, the Sparcstation 2 was pretty special. One of the best workstations produced ... ever.
Sun may still have good server hardware -- it's been a while since I've had to deal with it -- but as far as workstations are concerned, I don't think they've ever matched what they achieved with the SS2, compared with the contemporary competition.
And it even looked good.
I don't understand.
Why is it okay to shoot someone for stealing and taunting? Their life (or in this case, the use of their leg) is more important than your stuff? Your pride? This is the impression I'm getting.
Stuff can be reacquired. There is insurance as well. Criminals occasionally even get caught by the police. But people don't get better after being shot to death. Splintered knee caps don't magically repair themselves.
The only case where it seems justifiable to maim or kill someone, is when not doing so presents the high likelihood of worse happening. Even then, it is all too easy to make a mistake in judgement, and one can't make amends for mistakes like that. To think that wounded pride and a car is worth someone's life just boggles my imagination. Seriously, you think that's ok?
You know, I used to think that the high rate of gun ownership in the US was largely responsible for the incredibly high rate of murders, higher by far than any other similarly wealthy nation, and that effective gun control could reduce this tragedy.
But the above poster and other commenters are saying, it's better to kill someone than let them steal.
So the NRA and their followers are right: gun control will do little to help. Because it is clear that the reason the US has such a high murder rate, is that it is populated to a large degree by sociopaths.
Develop immunity to that!