Aristotle had a great theory on gravitation. He even *invented* the word "gravitation". His theory stood undisputed for two thousand years. It was considered absolute truth. There was only one problem: it was a WRONG theory.
It was only after Galileo invented a method to measure the speed and acceleration of falling bodies that the foundations were laid for Newton's theory of gravitation. And it was Michelson's experiments showing small discrepancies in measuring the speed of light that allowed Einstein to develop his corrections to Newton's theory.
In my opinion, a truly intelligent mini-brain with no more than a few tens of thousands of neurons would surprise us with its clever abilities
The big problem with human-level intelligence is that it appears to need a human-brain sized neural network. Consider how successful intelligence is from an evolutionary point of view. Humans have totally dominated the biosphere, no other animal within the same range of body size is as numerous as humans, except for those animals we raise for food.
If it were possible to evolve human-level intelligence with smaller brains, it would probably have happened by now. Looking from the biological evolution side, we see in the fossil record a steady increase in brain size in our ancestors. I seriously doubt human-level intelligence is possible with less than about a hundred billion neurons.
There are many sites that bring the whole system nearly to a halt when konqueror loads the page. Looking into the CPU usage with top shows that 99% of the CPU time is being used by kde-gnash. Doing a "killall kde-gnash" brings everything back to normal, with a grey square where the flash was.
You are right that konqueror does not crash the whole computer, but that's still very far from the desired result.
The SMTP standard used for sending email does not support anything but plain text. What you see as binary attachments are actually encoded as plain text.
The problem with email executable attachments is not in the email itself, but in the piss-poor operating system most people use, which runs with superuser rights most of the time. In a superior OS, like Linux for instance, a virus in an email attachment wouldn't have privileges to infect anything but the user's own directory.
Windows does NOT run a ship of war; I cannot say exactly what operating systems are used on the critical components (i.e. NOT shipboard LAN)but can say that they are a derivative of Unix
Then I suggest that you go and correct Wikipedia. It's clearly stated there that "The ship was equipped with a network of 27 dual 200 MHz Pentium Pro based machines running Windows NT 4.0 communicating over fiber-optic cable with a Pentium Pro based server. This network was responsible for running the integrated control center on the bridge, monitoring condition assessment, damage control, machinery control and fuel control, monitoring the engines and navigating the ship."
I think the big question for older people is not about how young they started. It's about the ability to keep up with the times. I know people who program in Fortran because they learned it in college and "do not have time to learn another language".
My name IS Anonymous Coward, you insensitive clod!
What I find hard to believe is that your mother named your brother "Noël". What a ridiculous name! No wonder she had second thoughts and decided to leave you Anonymous.
Miracles that are repeatable are not "miracles". Observations of singular miracles are ipso facto not credible.
Do you realize that many physical events are not repeatable, in the sense that scientists cannot cause them at will? On the other hand, many claimed miracles are very similar to each other. For example, if you look at the alleged miracles used in the canonization of saints in the last decades, most of them are about cures of diseases.
Miracles can be studied by science just as supernovas can, even if both are unpredictable and unrepeatable vents.
The belief that prayer can alter outcomes independent of any other factor is one that can be empirically tested.
That belief can be tested scientifically, methodically, in the same way as the belief that temperature can alter the result of a chemical reaction can be tested. That's what statistics are for.
Linux is a kernel. It's useful to distinguish two kinds of Linux-based operating systems: GNU/Linux that uses glibc and GNU Coreutils, and uClinux that uses uClibc and BusyBox.
The only use for that distinction is when you are comparing those two different ways in which the Linux operating system can be used.
Before RMS no one had ever heard of this "just a kernel" meme. I used the VMS operating system in the 1980s, and no one ever called VMS "just a kernel". It was implicitly known that an operating system needs a set of libraries and utilities, but the term "operating system" was always used as an exact synonym for the kernel.
An operating system is a system composed of a task scheduler, memory manager, hardware interface, etc. The operating system, as its name implies, is the system of software that allows one to operate a computer. It's not sufficient by itself to do anything really useful with the computer, it needs additional software: basic libraries and utilities, and applications. Until RMS came up with this "just a kernel" dogma, people in the software business used to divide software in three categories: operating system, libraries and utilities, and applications.
Let's face it, the utilities, although indispensable, are much less visible than the applications. They aren't as basic and fundamental as the operating system. They tend to be lost and forgotten, they aren't as sexy and fashionable. Once they get working no one takes a second look at them. But all that is not a valid reason to distort the facts: libraries and utilities are not part of the operating system. By insisting on distorting what has always been accepted as a consensus, RMS isn't helping the free software community.
just needs to go visit any communist/socialist society and live in it to discover that his ideals just don't work because human nature will not allow it.
This has been discussed many, many times here. Sharing ideas is different from sharing physical goods. Making a copy doesn't take the original away from its owner.
science can explain only what we can observe, directly or indirectly
Can we observe miracles? Then science can, at least, perform observations on God and His work. If we cannot observe any sort of physical effects of God's intervention in this universe, well, then He is totally irrelevant to us.
Is it ever possible for mankind to discern the true nature of God from our limited vantage point?
That's an emotionally loaded question. You could apply it to science as well as religion: Is is ever possible for mankind to discern the true nature of subatomic particles from our limited vantage point? No matter how much we learn, one can always argue that the "true" nature of something is still beyond our perception.
The main problem I see with philosophical statements such as those you made is that they are very restricted. If you wish to discuss God from a philosophically neutral point of view, then you must also open your mind to consider questions such as theodicy. If God is so powerful and good, then why do we have so much random suffering in this world?
Note that there could exist an intelligent creator that's less than perfect. We see this with computers all the time. I have the power to change any variable in my programs, I have the power to inspect the value of any variable, I wish everything worked as I planned. Yet, all the time, I find that the variables, for some reason or other, behave differently from what I intended.
I think one can conclude with a great deal of confidence that the existence of a God that's everything most Christians believe is extremely unlikely. If they would accept an imperfect Creator then what we observe around us would make more sense.
To infer the existence of a planet around a star from the 'wobble' we see in the position or spectrum of the star may be sound science but it hardly grabs the imagination.
Funny thing is, it grabs *my* imagination! To see something, we have been doing this since eyes evolved on animals. But to perform careful calculations and realize that the results imply the existence of a planet, well, that's what I call awesome.
Wake me up when there's a pic of what the weather (atmosphere) looks like on an extrasolar planet.
What they have right now can give a pretty accurate idea of the atmosphere on that planet. Pass the light from that dot through a diffraction grating and the spectrum will tell you which gases are present in what proportion in the atmosphere, and what is their temperature.
The classical example is that the belief that the world is flat was not delusional during the dark ages
Yes, but look at the effects of that belief, together with all the other irrational beliefs people held at that time. There's a reason why those were the "dark" ages.
It doesn't matter if it's only a few people or a large group who believe in a falsehood. Actually, it's even worse if many people believe it. They will waste their time and resources fighting something that does not exist, they will live lower quality lives, full of fear.
Delusion or not, false beliefs should be eliminated.
Your points about technology saving money are true, but irrelevant. No one is proposing going back to doing by hand things that are currently done by computer.
The right comparison, IMHO, should be between how much your salary costs, compared to how much would be spent if everyone did by themselves the work you do. Compare the productivity of office jobs supported by a well trained professional to the productivity of unsupported amateurs.
Scratches head. Doh, I was aiming for "get a life, don't be a terrorist", but go understand/. moderators. Maybe they *are* a terrorist communications unit, after all...
Or what if they find out there are communication tools used by terrorists that are grown inside the terrorists bodies, which can only be removed by surgical procedures?
the internet is nothing but a gigantic communications tool
That's right! And, what's worse, they have infiltrated the Slashdot moderation system! They are using Slashdot moderators to transmit their messages. Watch this:
If this post is moderated (-1, Offtopic) it means "skyjack an aircraft"
If this post is moderated (-1, Redundant) it means "bomb the Pentagon"
If this post is moderated (-1, Overrated) it means "spread anthrax over a large US city"
If this post is moderated (-1, Troll) it means "put child pornography in the internet"
If this post is moderated (-1, Flamebait) it means "send a suicide bomber to the subway"
If this post is moderated (+1, Insightful) it means "disband, they found us out"
If this post is moderated (+1, Interesting) it means "go to the FBI and tell everything about us"
If this post is moderated (+1, Informative) it means "sorry, we are wrong"
If this post is moderated (+1, Funny) it means "get a life, don't be a terrorist"
If this post is moderated (+1, Underrated) it means "terrorist? Oops, sorry, I wanted to be a theorist"
Where I work, YouTube is blocked and rightly so. A true scientist has more effective communication methods than videos. That's why *writing* was invented in the first place. A set of abstract symbols is perfect for sending through ideas and findings.
I think it's a sad side effect of computers and the internet that people are forgetting how to write effectively, using icons and videos instead of clearly structured and written text.
I once did a lot of work on PHP. Today, when people ask me for upgrades I just migrate it to Python.
This unfortunate choice of the escape character for namespace separator is stupid, but seems almost irrelevant to me. How many nails do they need in the PHP coffin to bury it?
if people elected their dictators, is it still a dictatorship?
Yes, like when people elected Hitler. It was a crooked election, there was a lot of political maneuvering involved, it's true, but it's still a fact that Hitler was elected, and, given the political situation in Germany at the time, he would probably be elected in an honest system as well.
The definition of "democracy" isn't one of elected politicians only, that word has the connotation of a just and fair political system, one where the rights of minorities are also considered. Democracy implies necessarily in the existence of a basic set of human rights. Otherwise, it would be demagogy.
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Aristotle had a great theory on gravitation. He even *invented* the word "gravitation". His theory stood undisputed for two thousand years. It was considered absolute truth. There was only one problem: it was a WRONG theory.
It was only after Galileo invented a method to measure the speed and acceleration of falling bodies that the foundations were laid for Newton's theory of gravitation. And it was Michelson's experiments showing small discrepancies in measuring the speed of light that allowed Einstein to develop his corrections to Newton's theory.
This was done nearly twenty years ago with a simulated cockroach brain.
The big problem with human-level intelligence is that it appears to need a human-brain sized neural network. Consider how successful intelligence is from an evolutionary point of view. Humans have totally dominated the biosphere, no other animal within the same range of body size is as numerous as humans, except for those animals we raise for food.
If it were possible to evolve human-level intelligence with smaller brains, it would probably have happened by now. Looking from the biological evolution side, we see in the fossil record a steady increase in brain size in our ancestors. I seriously doubt human-level intelligence is possible with less than about a hundred billion neurons.
There are many sites that bring the whole system nearly to a halt when konqueror loads the page. Looking into the CPU usage with top shows that 99% of the CPU time is being used by kde-gnash. Doing a "killall kde-gnash" brings everything back to normal, with a grey square where the flash was.
You are right that konqueror does not crash the whole computer, but that's still very far from the desired result.
The SMTP standard used for sending email does not support anything but plain text. What you see as binary attachments are actually encoded as plain text.
The problem with email executable attachments is not in the email itself, but in the piss-poor operating system most people use, which runs with superuser rights most of the time. In a superior OS, like Linux for instance, a virus in an email attachment wouldn't have privileges to infect anything but the user's own directory.
Then I suggest that you go and correct Wikipedia. It's clearly stated there that "The ship was equipped with a network of 27 dual 200 MHz Pentium Pro based machines running Windows NT 4.0 communicating over fiber-optic cable with a Pentium Pro based server. This network was responsible for running the integrated control center on the bridge, monitoring condition assessment, damage control, machinery control and fuel control, monitoring the engines and navigating the ship."
Try this: how many Os do you want in your WOOOOSH? You can make it either shorter or longer. Capisce?
I think the big question for older people is not about how young they started. It's about the ability to keep up with the times. I know people who program in Fortran because they learned it in college and "do not have time to learn another language".
What I find hard to believe is that your mother named your brother "Noël". What a ridiculous name! No wonder she had second thoughts and decided to leave you Anonymous.
Do you realize that many physical events are not repeatable, in the sense that scientists cannot cause them at will? On the other hand, many claimed miracles are very similar to each other. For example, if you look at the alleged miracles used in the canonization of saints in the last decades, most of them are about cures of diseases.
Miracles can be studied by science just as supernovas can, even if both are unpredictable and unrepeatable vents.
That belief can be tested scientifically, methodically, in the same way as the belief that temperature can alter the result of a chemical reaction can be tested. That's what statistics are for.
This idea isn't new. It has been tried before, but didn't work as expected.
The only use for that distinction is when you are comparing those two different ways in which the Linux operating system can be used.
Before RMS no one had ever heard of this "just a kernel" meme. I used the VMS operating system in the 1980s, and no one ever called VMS "just a kernel". It was implicitly known that an operating system needs a set of libraries and utilities, but the term "operating system" was always used as an exact synonym for the kernel.
An operating system is a system composed of a task scheduler, memory manager, hardware interface, etc. The operating system, as its name implies, is the system of software that allows one to operate a computer. It's not sufficient by itself to do anything really useful with the computer, it needs additional software: basic libraries and utilities, and applications. Until RMS came up with this "just a kernel" dogma, people in the software business used to divide software in three categories: operating system, libraries and utilities, and applications.
Let's face it, the utilities, although indispensable, are much less visible than the applications. They aren't as basic and fundamental as the operating system. They tend to be lost and forgotten, they aren't as sexy and fashionable. Once they get working no one takes a second look at them. But all that is not a valid reason to distort the facts: libraries and utilities are not part of the operating system. By insisting on distorting what has always been accepted as a consensus, RMS isn't helping the free software community.
This has been discussed many, many times here. Sharing ideas is different from sharing physical goods. Making a copy doesn't take the original away from its owner.
Can we observe miracles? Then science can, at least, perform observations on God and His work. If we cannot observe any sort of physical effects of God's intervention in this universe, well, then He is totally irrelevant to us.
That's an emotionally loaded question. You could apply it to science as well as religion: Is is ever possible for mankind to discern the true nature of subatomic particles from our limited vantage point? No matter how much we learn, one can always argue that the "true" nature of something is still beyond our perception.
The main problem I see with philosophical statements such as those you made is that they are very restricted. If you wish to discuss God from a philosophically neutral point of view, then you must also open your mind to consider questions such as theodicy. If God is so powerful and good, then why do we have so much random suffering in this world?
Note that there could exist an intelligent creator that's less than perfect. We see this with computers all the time. I have the power to change any variable in my programs, I have the power to inspect the value of any variable, I wish everything worked as I planned. Yet, all the time, I find that the variables, for some reason or other, behave differently from what I intended.
I think one can conclude with a great deal of confidence that the existence of a God that's everything most Christians believe is extremely unlikely. If they would accept an imperfect Creator then what we observe around us would make more sense.
Funny thing is, it grabs *my* imagination! To see something, we have been doing this since eyes evolved on animals. But to perform careful calculations and realize that the results imply the existence of a planet, well, that's what I call awesome.
What they have right now can give a pretty accurate idea of the atmosphere on that planet. Pass the light from that dot through a diffraction grating and the spectrum will tell you which gases are present in what proportion in the atmosphere, and what is their temperature.
Yes, but look at the effects of that belief, together with all the other irrational beliefs people held at that time. There's a reason why those were the "dark" ages.
It doesn't matter if it's only a few people or a large group who believe in a falsehood. Actually, it's even worse if many people believe it. They will waste their time and resources fighting something that does not exist, they will live lower quality lives, full of fear.
Delusion or not, false beliefs should be eliminated.
Your points about technology saving money are true, but irrelevant. No one is proposing going back to doing by hand things that are currently done by computer.
The right comparison, IMHO, should be between how much your salary costs, compared to how much would be spent if everyone did by themselves the work you do. Compare the productivity of office jobs supported by a well trained professional to the productivity of unsupported amateurs.
Scratches head. Doh, I was aiming for "get a life, don't be a terrorist", but go understand /. moderators. Maybe they *are* a terrorist communications unit, after all...
Or what if they find out there are communication tools used by terrorists that are grown inside the terrorists bodies, which can only be removed by surgical procedures?
That's right! And, what's worse, they have infiltrated the Slashdot moderation system! They are using Slashdot moderators to transmit their messages. Watch this:
If this post is moderated (-1, Offtopic) it means "skyjack an aircraft"
If this post is moderated (-1, Redundant) it means "bomb the Pentagon"
If this post is moderated (-1, Overrated) it means "spread anthrax over a large US city"
If this post is moderated (-1, Troll) it means "put child pornography in the internet"
If this post is moderated (-1, Flamebait) it means "send a suicide bomber to the subway"
If this post is moderated (+1, Insightful) it means "disband, they found us out"
If this post is moderated (+1, Interesting) it means "go to the FBI and tell everything about us"
If this post is moderated (+1, Informative) it means "sorry, we are wrong"
If this post is moderated (+1, Funny) it means "get a life, don't be a terrorist"
If this post is moderated (+1, Underrated) it means "terrorist? Oops, sorry, I wanted to be a theorist"
I don't do minor upgrades, there are other people for that. When a major upgrade is needed, let's say from version "2.7" to "3.0" they call me.
The last one was seen downloading a Ruby On Rails development environment.
Where I work, YouTube is blocked and rightly so. A true scientist has more effective communication methods than videos. That's why *writing* was invented in the first place. A set of abstract symbols is perfect for sending through ideas and findings.
I think it's a sad side effect of computers and the internet that people are forgetting how to write effectively, using icons and videos instead of clearly structured and written text.
Now get off my lawn.
I once did a lot of work on PHP. Today, when people ask me for upgrades I just migrate it to Python.
This unfortunate choice of the escape character for namespace separator is stupid, but seems almost irrelevant to me. How many nails do they need in the PHP coffin to bury it?
Yes, like when people elected Hitler. It was a crooked election, there was a lot of political maneuvering involved, it's true, but it's still a fact that Hitler was elected, and, given the political situation in Germany at the time, he would probably be elected in an honest system as well.
The definition of "democracy" isn't one of elected politicians only, that word has the connotation of a just and fair political system, one where the rights of minorities are also considered. Democracy implies necessarily in the existence of a basic set of human rights. Otherwise, it would be demagogy.