Today children (and even adults) occasionally get killed by domestic dogs. But if you were frozen and woke up in 50,000 AD and got told by an anthropologist that in AD 2000 human beings were preyed on by domestic canines wouldn't you tell him that he was mistaken?
So what are the odds of that happening? It's not like after 48000 years archeologists dig up everything, and deliberately choose a misleading sample to base their theories upon. Whether you are killed by a dog or not, chances are you will be cremated (in which case the evidence disappears), or buried along with thousands of others who have not been attacked by dogs.
The best way to give people in 50000AD a statistically wrong picture of our deaths, would be to make sure a large number of statistically unlikely deaths were not buried in a cemetary, but somewhere else. But I don't think there's much need to mislead them. Understanding the enormous difference in our lifestyle from 1600AD to now, is bound to create enough difficulties for future archaelogists.
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I'm not sure what you're getting at. According to wikipedia, Condoleeza Rice got her PhD in the normal way from U. of Denver in 1981 (age 26). She has since received a number of honorary doctorates, something which should not be confused with either non-accredited PhDs or ordinary doctorates.
Honorary doctorates are something universities give to people for their achievements outside the university. Some universities give them out only for academic achievments , while some give them for other things (such as being famous). Getting an honorary degree is usually more like getting a lifetime-achievement award, then it's like getting a real degree.
We'll most likely see Flash storage grow in cell phones and PDAs, not in notebook computers. If you were a pilot, you wouldn't just have the mechanic swap out the propeller for a Rolls Royce jet engine. You'd want the whole plane overhauled to handle the increased stress on it. Better to have a system designed from the ground up that could handle the new engine rather than try to bolt it onto an older, proven design.
It's not like it's something new and completely unproven. Solid-state disks (SSDs) have been used for years in server-applications, especially for large databases, where the speed of harddisks or RAID just won't cut it. This is an expensive solution, but if you have gazillions of transactions (think mastercard), it might still be cheaper than more traditional solutions (add more servers, add more disk-cache, make sure things don't fail).
Given that it has worked pretty well at both the server-side as well as in gadgets and appliances, I'd say flash-memory notebooks are going to happen pretty soon. It's just a matter of hitting the right pricepoint. Today you can (theoretically) get a 2GB SSD for the same price as a 200GB HD. This is pretty uncool, although I would believe many enthusiasts would buy it, if there were producers of cheap SSDs (today only high-end SSDs exist).
But if you could get a 20GB SSD for the same price as 200GB HD (which is a sane estimate, given the article), things start to make sense. It would be enough for running MS office on a laptop, and seriously reduce startup-time, as well as battery usage. Given it's performance, it would also be a great add-on for desktop computers (put the OS, most used applications, and swap-space on it, and use traditional harddisks for your videos/music/porn).
Re:Oh Please
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now the PhD is absolutely bogus because the paper it came on was regular wine white, and the seal that shittly done
Oh, so that's why the PhD was bogus! And here I thought it might be bogus because it was from an unaccredited university, because you bought it instead of taking the required courses, doing the thesis, and so on...
Please don't buy things from spammers, you're the reason the rest of us gets spam!
Quantum encryption isn't really encryption. It's a scheme for transferring data on a secure line. You can't use quantum encryption to send data across the Internet, or an untrusted phone line. A better comparison would be to compare quantum encryption with sending your data with a courier on a disk in a sealed envelope (For better security, you could use multiple couriers, and letting your data be the XOR of all the disks).
If you want traditional cryptography to continue working, then you either need to use larger keys than the largest quantum computer can handle, or you need to use encryption schemes that are not crackable by quantum computers (such encryption schemes exist, but AFAIK not for public-key cryptography).
Steganography is also an increasingly attractive option, especially when considering the amount of data people exchange these days (bury your "meet me at the pub at 18:30" among the 8GB of data in a DVD movie, and it could be pretty hard to detect!)
Don't we already have this? I mean 64kB RAM and an old slow 68k processor. Shouldn't take up much space on a die... Probably much lesss than a grain of rice would!
Keep in mind a 64 bit processor can address 17 billion gig of ram
We have a name for this: 16 exabytes!
The wikipedia article on 128 bit processing points out that it's probably not efficient for a single 128 bit processor to have over 17 billion gig of ram to itself anyway -- it'd probably make far more sense to split the ram up between several 64 bit processors instead.
So how would you address ram on a different processor? Ok, this is so far into the future, that anyones guess is valid, but a 128 bit address space isn't too silly.
Assuming we use some form of nano-storage with an atom per bit, 2^64 bytes needs storage space measured in cubic mm. 2^128 bytes needs storage space measured in cubic km.
2^256 bytes needs storage space measured in cubic deci-parsecs. This is still conceivable for a science fiction scenario, and would be the preferred memory addressing size for a dyson-sphere (or cluster of dyson-spheres, with still a bit of room for virtual memory). A 512 bit address space starts to get pretty unrealistic though, at least if you need it for memory addressing reasons...
But I digress. The point is that it's still very conceivable that future advances in nanotechnology will bring cheap nanoscale-memory, where a 64-bit address-space is still too small. A 128-bit address space ought to be enough for everybody though (at least on a conceivable time-scale).
I thought of the same thing. But I guess we'll have to wait untill the first scanned images show up. Then you can try making a program to do it. If it works well, you should rank pretty well at stardust@home...
I've always found it perplexing that the ID crowd and the Evolutionist crowd can never seem to get along.
To make it straight, it's the ID crowd that can't get along. They are the one with an agenda. The evolutionist-"crowd" is everyone else with rational beliefs. This includes most christians (including most protestants and catholics (and every pope for the last 50 years or so)).
It seems to me that there is no real conflict of interest: is it not possible that God created evolution? That is to say, yes, there could have been an initial creator being, but he was smart enough to create a self-automating system of creation. He/she got the ball rolling, then just let it go.
No, that conflicts with the ID crowd, because in reality they are creationists, not someone who merely believes in "intelligent design".
That seems to satisfy both camps if they just let it.
Clearly it doesn't. It conflicts with other beliefs, such as the earth being 5000 years old, water-canopy theory, that the speed of light is slowing down, and other ridiculous ideas the creationists have spawned. And it also conflicts with just as silly beliefs the ID-crowd still speaks loudly about, such as "irreducable complexity", the difference between "micro" and "macro"-evolution, and so on... In short, they are the one with an agenda!
The ID crowd shouldn't be so naïve as to say that God is up there controlling the every movements of a bee's wings,
Yes, the ID crowd should stop beliving silly things. More importantly, they should stop saying their silly beliefs have anything to do with science.
but the Evolutionist crowd should be more open to the possibility that all things in the known world had a start initiated by intelligence rather than "it just magically happened." That's just as ingenuous as saying God just magically controls everything.
Nobody in the evolutionist-"crowd" is saying "it just magically happened". They are saying that life evolves, most likely from a common single source, although they haven't been able to find a good candidate. Stuff gets tricky when you try to find out what happened millions of years ago, and so on...
Common hypotheses for the origins of life among evolutionists is that life may have come to earth from space (which doesn't really help), that it came about spontaneously in some way (of which there are several unconvincing theories), or even that God created it (although that isn't a testable hypothesis either, and thus has little to do with science).
To conclude: Saying that the ID-crowd and evolutionst-crowd should both moderate their beliefs, is just as silly as saying that both Germany and the allies should both have moderated their beliefs before WW2. In either case, it's pretty clear which side wanted the conflict most.
hat's not how science works. One does not set out to prove that something exists, but rather that it does not. If you succeed, you know it does not exist. If you fail, you have reason to suspect it might exist.
It's that whole ``falsifiability'' thing.
Nope, that has nothing to do with science. In science, you make a hypothesis (based on observation, intuition, insight, belief, etc...), and test that hypothesis through experiments to see if it is a reasonable belief. When a hypothesis is strengthened through several succesful experiments, it becomes a theory.
To be able to test that hypothesis, it must, as you say, be 'falsifiable'. I.e. you need to come up with something that can be proven wrong.
Say I make a hypothesis that everything I throw up will eventually fall down. This is a falsifiable hypothesis, because if something does not fall down some day, the hypothesis is falsified, and you should no longer believe in it. Examples of this would be things thrown above escape velocity of the earth, or gas balloons. Thus the hypothesis is wrong. The next step would be to discard that hypothesis, and/or make refined ones, such as the law of gravity, archimedes principle, etc...
With regard to proving/disproving the existence of God, I agree in principle that "God does exist" is unfalsifiable, and "God does not exist" is falsifiable (if God were ever to pop up somewhere; although "prove" has nothing to do with scientific method, as it is a method of mathematic/logic, not science). But that doesn't really make the question get into the realm of science. Either hypothesis doesn't lend itself to any kinds of reasonable experiments.
To scientifically say anything about the existence of God, the "God" hypothesis must make predictions that can be tested in a scientific experiement. One such prediction would be that "there exists a christian God that responds to prayer". In that case we could conduct scientific experiments where people prayed to God to make the outcome of a random experiment go in a certain direction, and use statistical methods to analyse the outcome. As far as I know, all experiments of this type has been statistically insignificant.
Another useful prediction would be to do as the creationists have done, and say that the bible when interpreted literally (whatever that means), gives a correct description of the creation of the earth and all life on it. So far, all such interpretations have been shown wrong, e.g. by fossils, radio-dating methods, etc...
Thus, the scientific position would be to say nothing about the existence of any "God", but that so far, if there exists any such "God", nobody has been able to come up with an experiment that could strengthen the hypothesis that he exists. On the other hand, most experiments seem to indicate that he does not exist.
Ah, you're an "audiophile". For the best sound-quality, I recommend that you get the new deoxidized monster ultraTHX speakerphone cable. It will really increase the "warmth" of the music. We also have in stock a specially shielded cable you can run between the battery and the unit, to remove interference from the battery. And we also have these practical spikes to mount your ipod on, that will reduce vibration from the ground... Moreover, if you open your ipod, and use a green felt pen around the case of the harddisk, it will improve the sound-quality a lot!
Personally, I think the sound quality of most portable audio players are more than adequate for a portable audio player. What I really want is a portable disk-based audio-player that has a completely normal USB harddisk interface to the computer, and that supports ogg vorbis, musepack, flac, and other common formats. But I guess there's no market for that, people really want to limit their choices to the iTunes I guess, and never have a need for portable harddisks in the same unit...
Normally hard drives require air for the read heads to maintain a proper height above the platters. Additionally, the heads would probably break if they were quickly moved through a viscous medium like oil. As far as I know, hard drives aren't completely air tight. Any ideas why this wasn't a problem?
Yes. Look at the absolutely first picture on page 1 in the article. What is sitting on top of the power supply?
Which of course defeats the whole purpose, the power supply has a fan of its own.
Actually, I think the entire law against crank calling is pretty worthless now, anyway.
Ever met a girl? Many of those have had problems in the past (or now) with stalkers or horny obnoxious men calling all the time. There ought to be a law against that. And it is.
We have Caller ID -- we can refuse to answer the phone.
Not all of us can, for some of us, it's our job to take important phone calls 24/7. Nor all people have caller ID. And the phonebook on my phone is of limited size (it could also be an international call, someone using a phone-card, etc...).
Companies would come up with "quiet time" phone features that would prevent any ring after a certain hour unless you coded it with numbers that were acceptable.
My cell-phone does.
In this end, this is an abridgement on the freedom of speech. Every time government wants to penalize "edgy" speech, they are just finding another way to control normal speech.
This is a common way of writing law, and it has been for a long time. When the law-makers can't seem to come up with a reasonable formulation of their intent, they write something vague instead, and leave it to the courts to interpret it. I don't like it either, but it's the way it is.
That being said, there are certainly individuals who deserve up till two years in prison + fines, for their behaviour in blogs. I'm not talking about spammers or annoying teenagers. Use your imagination, and remember that this law is part of "Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act".
If you take that thought to it's logical conclusion, the patent office should grant anyone a patent for anything, and let the court system figure it out. Why have a patent office at all then?
We could just as well have an automated database-system where people file their own "patents", and fight it out in the court later!
Most people view that as a problem, although it is increasingly becoming the status quo, especially when it comes to software and business-method patents.
allowing usable schematics allows single inventors to patent things like industrial processes, which may need 10 million dollars to build
I'm sorry, but I can't imagine an industrial process that costs 10 million dollars to build, that cannot be reproduced on a smaller scale in a lab, yet is completely worked out, so that you can just follow the plans.
The example is entirely hypothetical. If you build a new industrial process (say, for a chemical plant), then you have either tested it in the lab, or it is experimental and no one will know whether it works at all!
Allowing patents for experimental ideas that might or might not work is not a good idea. Patents should protect the inventor, which in this case is not the guy who comes up with a half-baked idea, but the guy who first builds a completely working prototype.
This is also the reason why perpeetum-mobile inventions are not generally granted patents. They may have fine schematics, but they don't work!
This is the Bush administration we're talking about. They all use HTML mail with lots of attached graphics. On top of that, many messages get forwarded hundreds of times.
Huh, HTML?
This is the Bush administration we're talking about. They all send each other word documents (or perhaps a powerpoint presentation if they need to invade a country). HTML is for techies!
And again, number 2 is fairly uncommon to nonexistant. Every patent holding company i've ever seen actively works on marketing their patents. That's their business! The notion that they are just lying in wait, hoping someone will stumble into their minefield is blatantly false: the patents are all fully publicized through the patent office, that's one of the requirements of getting a patent.
No, it's not uncommon. Read the fucking article! This is how software patents work, and why lots of people have been heavily against them since they were first introduced!
If that's not enough, american patent law allows you to publish a patent long after it's filed. It's even got it's own word: a submarine patent.
what we need to do is go back to requiring a reference implementation. you wouldn't have to actually build it, but you would have to provide plans that COULD be used to build it using only current technology.
If you want a reference implementation, you want a reference implementation, not plans, ideas, or anything else... I fail to see that having "plans" would be anything different from having the patent itself.
What we really want, however, is to have all software and business-model patents nullified. Now and forever. The patent system seemed to work pretty well before that became common!
If I use Qt to build a UI for my application, I can licence my app however I darn well please. I only need to include the GPL as an additional license for the Qt portion of my app. An application to balance my check book is not in any way, shape, or form derrived from Qt. However, if I take Qt and add some bells and whistles to it and then package it as "Qt Plus Bells and Whistles", then that must be GPL because it is in fact a derrived work.
You are of course free to interpret the text of the GPL in any way you wish. But what matters isn't your interpretation, it's the interpretation of the court! And while the GPL has yet to really be tested in the court, it has been inspected by lots of lawyers! So many, in fact, that some businesses are willing to base their entire business model on it. Trolltech is one such example.
I'm not going to argue with you. Go ahead, try your interpretation, and watch Trolltech sue you to the ground.
This is a particulary obnoxious naming practice in unix. Because it is somehow related to gnu or gnome, we must have a "g" somewhere; or if it's related to kde, a "k"; or if it's using python, "py"; if it's made in PHP, it must contain "php"; if it's made in perl, it must contain "p" or "perl"; and if it's using gtk+, the name must contain "gtk".
It makes no sense at all. I'd rather have a program named "brenda" than one called "pygtkpaint" or "gPhotoshop". Of course, "imagemagick" has the advantage of being descriptive, but what's up with the strange spelling?
But the name "gimp" is retarded. At least use something with positive connotations. I wouldn't recommend "crapPaint" either, but it certainly falls into the same category as "gimp". At least microsoft named their spreadsheet "excel" rather than "inferior" or "outclassed".
Look at the names of popular programming languages, "perl" is obviously positive. And "Pascal" was a man that certainly deserved having something named after him. "BASIC" implies simplicity. But there is no programming language called "dung", "Hitler", or "DIFFICULT". (On the other hand, C, FORTRAN, LISP, ML, etc... doesn't seem like very good names to me).
This looks all good in theory. Fortunately, the objective C developers have thought about the problem, and they have come up with a solution that is quite fast. So in the real world, and objective C message send is about 2x-3x as slow as a C function call. Which is not too bad. The obvious implementation you hint at, would probably be more like 50x-100x slower. Fortunately, it's not the one that's used in practice, and I doubt you will ever find it in an objective C compiler (unless you were to write one yourself, just to prove your point).
Zealot: "Oh that's easy! If you have Redhat, you have to download quake_3_rh_8_i686_010203_glibc.bin, then do chmod +x on the file. Then you have to su to root, make sure you type export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5 but ONLY if you have that latest libc6 installed. If you don't, don't set that environment variable or the installer will dump core.
This is sadly all true, I guess, although I haven't tried it. Quake is an old game, and linux isn't as binary backwards compatible as windows.
Before you run the installer, make sure you have the GL drivers for X installed. Get them at [some obscure web address], chmod +x the binary, then run it, but make sure you have at least 10MB free in/tmp or the installer will dump core. After the installer is done, edit/etc/X11/XF86Config and add a section called "GL" and put "driver nv" in it. Make sure you have the latest version of X and Linux kernel 2.6 or else X will segfault when you start.
Would you want to tell your windows users how to install the latest graphics drivers when installing quake too? This section is just added to make it sound more complicated than it really is.
OK, run the Quake 3 installer and make sure you set the proper group and setuid permissions on quake3.bin. If you want sound, look here [link to another obscure web site], which is a short HOWTO on how to get sound in Quake 3. That's all there is to it!"
And in my opinion the right people to blame for all this mess is the people behind quake, not the people behind linux. It shouldn't be that hard to create a binary that doesn't need a HOWTO in order to get sound. And I see no reason why a game need to be setuid <something>
User: "How do I get Quake 3 to run in Windows?"
Zealot: "Oh God, I had to install Quake 3 in Windoze for some lamer friend of mine! God, what a fucking mess! I put in the CD and it took about 3 minutes to copy everything, and then I had to reboot the fucking computer! Jesus Christ! What a retarded operating system!"
Well, if you need to get a CD and reboot your computer, just to play a simple old game, that's a pretty big hurdle for me. Much easier to just "apt-get install quake3" or "emerge quake3". Of course, quake3 isn't open source software, so it will never happen that you can just apt-get or emerge it. The problem with linux, if you agree that it's a problem, is that it doesn't make it easy for people to package non-free software. Many people view that as a strength, and those are the ones we call zealots.
You shouldn't ask this question, because you ask it for the wrong reason. If you really want to know my screensize, say because you're curious, or are doing a scientific study, I would answer you. But you are building a website, and there's absolutely nothing I hate more than morons designing web-sites so that I have to resize my browser.
What you should instead ask, is how large do I prefer to have my browser windows. And that is as small as possible, because I just hate wide windows. I bought a big screen so I could work with several things at once, not so that moron webdesigners could fill it with crap.
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So what are the odds of that happening? It's not like after 48000 years archeologists dig up everything, and deliberately choose a misleading sample to base their theories upon. Whether you are killed by a dog or not, chances are you will be cremated (in which case the evidence disappears), or buried along with thousands of others who have not been attacked by dogs.
The best way to give people in 50000AD a statistically wrong picture of our deaths, would be to make sure a large number of statistically unlikely deaths were not buried in a cemetary, but somewhere else. But I don't think there's much need to mislead them. Understanding the enormous difference in our lifestyle from 1600AD to now, is bound to create enough difficulties for future archaelogists.
Honorary doctorates are something universities give to people for their achievements outside the university. Some universities give them out only for academic achievments , while some give them for other things (such as being famous). Getting an honorary degree is usually more like getting a lifetime-achievement award, then it's like getting a real degree.
It's not like it's something new and completely unproven. Solid-state disks (SSDs) have been used for years in server-applications, especially for large databases, where the speed of harddisks or RAID just won't cut it. This is an expensive solution, but if you have gazillions of transactions (think mastercard), it might still be cheaper than more traditional solutions (add more servers, add more disk-cache, make sure things don't fail).
Given that it has worked pretty well at both the server-side as well as in gadgets and appliances, I'd say flash-memory notebooks are going to happen pretty soon. It's just a matter of hitting the right pricepoint. Today you can (theoretically) get a 2GB SSD for the same price as a 200GB HD. This is pretty uncool, although I would believe many enthusiasts would buy it, if there were producers of cheap SSDs (today only high-end SSDs exist).
But if you could get a 20GB SSD for the same price as 200GB HD (which is a sane estimate, given the article), things start to make sense. It would be enough for running MS office on a laptop, and seriously reduce startup-time, as well as battery usage. Given it's performance, it would also be a great add-on for desktop computers (put the OS, most used applications, and swap-space on it, and use traditional harddisks for your videos/music/porn).
Oh, so that's why the PhD was bogus! And here I thought it might be bogus because it was from an unaccredited university, because you bought it instead of taking the required courses, doing the thesis, and so on...
Please don't buy things from spammers, you're the reason the rest of us gets spam!
If you want traditional cryptography to continue working, then you either need to use larger keys than the largest quantum computer can handle, or you need to use encryption schemes that are not crackable by quantum computers (such encryption schemes exist, but AFAIK not for public-key cryptography).
Steganography is also an increasingly attractive option, especially when considering the amount of data people exchange these days (bury your "meet me at the pub at 18:30" among the 8GB of data in a DVD movie, and it could be pretty hard to detect!)
Don't we already have this? I mean 64kB RAM and an old slow 68k processor. Shouldn't take up much space on a die... Probably much lesss than a grain of rice would!
We have a name for this: 16 exabytes!
The wikipedia article on 128 bit processing points out that it's probably not efficient for a single 128 bit processor to have over 17 billion gig of ram to itself anyway -- it'd probably make far more sense to split the ram up between several 64 bit processors instead.
So how would you address ram on a different processor? Ok, this is so far into the future, that anyones guess is valid, but a 128 bit address space isn't too silly.
Assuming we use some form of nano-storage with an atom per bit, 2^64 bytes needs storage space measured in cubic mm. 2^128 bytes needs storage space measured in cubic km.
2^256 bytes needs storage space measured in cubic deci-parsecs. This is still conceivable for a science fiction scenario, and would be the preferred memory addressing size for a dyson-sphere (or cluster of dyson-spheres, with still a bit of room for virtual memory). A 512 bit address space starts to get pretty unrealistic though, at least if you need it for memory addressing reasons...
But I digress. The point is that it's still very conceivable that future advances in nanotechnology will bring cheap nanoscale-memory, where a 64-bit address-space is still too small. A 128-bit address space ought to be enough for everybody though (at least on a conceivable time-scale).
I thought of the same thing. But I guess we'll have to wait untill the first scanned images show up. Then you can try making a program to do it. If it works well, you should rank pretty well at stardust@home...
To make it straight, it's the ID crowd that can't get along. They are the one with an agenda. The evolutionist-"crowd" is everyone else with rational beliefs. This includes most christians (including most protestants and catholics (and every pope for the last 50 years or so)).
It seems to me that there is no real conflict of interest: is it not possible that God created evolution? That is to say, yes, there could have been an initial creator being, but he was smart enough to create a self-automating system of creation. He/she got the ball rolling, then just let it go.
No, that conflicts with the ID crowd, because in reality they are creationists, not someone who merely believes in "intelligent design".
That seems to satisfy both camps if they just let it.
Clearly it doesn't. It conflicts with other beliefs, such as the earth being 5000 years old, water-canopy theory, that the speed of light is slowing down, and other ridiculous ideas the creationists have spawned. And it also conflicts with just as silly beliefs the ID-crowd still speaks loudly about, such as "irreducable complexity", the difference between "micro" and "macro"-evolution, and so on... In short, they are the one with an agenda!
The ID crowd shouldn't be so naïve as to say that God is up there controlling the every movements of a bee's wings,
Yes, the ID crowd should stop beliving silly things. More importantly, they should stop saying their silly beliefs have anything to do with science.
but the Evolutionist crowd should be more open to the possibility that all things in the known world had a start initiated by intelligence rather than "it just magically happened." That's just as ingenuous as saying God just magically controls everything.
Nobody in the evolutionist-"crowd" is saying "it just magically happened". They are saying that life evolves, most likely from a common single source, although they haven't been able to find a good candidate. Stuff gets tricky when you try to find out what happened millions of years ago, and so on...
Common hypotheses for the origins of life among evolutionists is that life may have come to earth from space (which doesn't really help), that it came about spontaneously in some way (of which there are several unconvincing theories), or even that God created it (although that isn't a testable hypothesis either, and thus has little to do with science).
To conclude: Saying that the ID-crowd and evolutionst-crowd should both moderate their beliefs, is just as silly as saying that both Germany and the allies should both have moderated their beliefs before WW2. In either case, it's pretty clear which side wanted the conflict most.
It's that whole ``falsifiability'' thing.
Nope, that has nothing to do with science. In science, you make a hypothesis (based on observation, intuition, insight, belief, etc...), and test that hypothesis through experiments to see if it is a reasonable belief. When a hypothesis is strengthened through several succesful experiments, it becomes a theory.
To be able to test that hypothesis, it must, as you say, be 'falsifiable'. I.e. you need to come up with something that can be proven wrong.
Say I make a hypothesis that everything I throw up will eventually fall down. This is a falsifiable hypothesis, because if something does not fall down some day, the hypothesis is falsified, and you should no longer believe in it. Examples of this would be things thrown above escape velocity of the earth, or gas balloons. Thus the hypothesis is wrong. The next step would be to discard that hypothesis, and/or make refined ones, such as the law of gravity, archimedes principle, etc...
With regard to proving/disproving the existence of God, I agree in principle that "God does exist" is unfalsifiable, and "God does not exist" is falsifiable (if God were ever to pop up somewhere; although "prove" has nothing to do with scientific method, as it is a method of mathematic/logic, not science). But that doesn't really make the question get into the realm of science. Either hypothesis doesn't lend itself to any kinds of reasonable experiments.
To scientifically say anything about the existence of God, the "God" hypothesis must make predictions that can be tested in a scientific experiement. One such prediction would be that "there exists a christian God that responds to prayer". In that case we could conduct scientific experiments where people prayed to God to make the outcome of a random experiment go in a certain direction, and use statistical methods to analyse the outcome. As far as I know, all experiments of this type has been statistically insignificant.
Another useful prediction would be to do as the creationists have done, and say that the bible when interpreted literally (whatever that means), gives a correct description of the creation of the earth and all life on it. So far, all such interpretations have been shown wrong, e.g. by fossils, radio-dating methods, etc...
Thus, the scientific position would be to say nothing about the existence of any "God", but that so far, if there exists any such "God", nobody has been able to come up with an experiment that could strengthen the hypothesis that he exists. On the other hand, most experiments seem to indicate that he does not exist.
Ah, you're an "audiophile". For the best sound-quality, I recommend that you get the new deoxidized monster ultraTHX speakerphone cable. It will really increase the "warmth" of the music. We also have in stock a specially shielded cable you can run between the battery and the unit, to remove interference from the battery. And we also have these practical spikes to mount your ipod on, that will reduce vibration from the ground... Moreover, if you open your ipod, and use a green felt pen around the case of the harddisk, it will improve the sound-quality a lot!
Personally, I think the sound quality of most portable audio players are more than adequate for a portable audio player. What I really want is a portable disk-based audio-player that has a completely normal USB harddisk interface to the computer, and that supports ogg vorbis, musepack, flac, and other common formats. But I guess there's no market for that, people really want to limit their choices to the iTunes I guess, and never have a need for portable harddisks in the same unit...
Yes. Look at the absolutely first picture on page 1 in the article. What is sitting on top of the power supply?
Which of course defeats the whole purpose, the power supply has a fan of its own.
Ever met a girl? Many of those have had problems in the past (or now) with stalkers or horny obnoxious men calling all the time. There ought to be a law against that. And it is.
We have Caller ID -- we can refuse to answer the phone.
Not all of us can, for some of us, it's our job to take important phone calls 24/7. Nor all people have caller ID. And the phonebook on my phone is of limited size (it could also be an international call, someone using a phone-card, etc...).
Companies would come up with "quiet time" phone features that would prevent any ring after a certain hour unless you coded it with numbers that were acceptable.
My cell-phone does.
In this end, this is an abridgement on the freedom of speech. Every time government wants to penalize "edgy" speech, they are just finding another way to control normal speech.
This is a common way of writing law, and it has been for a long time. When the law-makers can't seem to come up with a reasonable formulation of their intent, they write something vague instead, and leave it to the courts to interpret it. I don't like it either, but it's the way it is.
That being said, there are certainly individuals who deserve up till two years in prison + fines, for their behaviour in blogs. I'm not talking about spammers or annoying teenagers. Use your imagination, and remember that this law is part of "Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act".
Hello, moderators! This isn't interesting. It's either a bad joke, or someone completely clueless.
We could just as well have an automated database-system where people file their own "patents", and fight it out in the court later!
Most people view that as a problem, although it is increasingly becoming the status quo, especially when it comes to software and business-method patents.
I'm sorry, but I can't imagine an industrial process that costs 10 million dollars to build, that cannot be reproduced on a smaller scale in a lab, yet is completely worked out, so that you can just follow the plans.
The example is entirely hypothetical. If you build a new industrial process (say, for a chemical plant), then you have either tested it in the lab, or it is experimental and no one will know whether it works at all!
Allowing patents for experimental ideas that might or might not work is not a good idea. Patents should protect the inventor, which in this case is not the guy who comes up with a half-baked idea, but the guy who first builds a completely working prototype.
This is also the reason why perpeetum-mobile inventions are not generally granted patents. They may have fine schematics, but they don't work!
Huh, HTML?
This is the Bush administration we're talking about. They all send each other word documents (or perhaps a powerpoint presentation if they need to invade a country). HTML is for techies!
No, it's not uncommon. Read the fucking article! This is how software patents work, and why lots of people have been heavily against them since they were first introduced!
If that's not enough, american patent law allows you to publish a patent long after it's filed. It's even got it's own word: a submarine patent.
If you want a reference implementation, you want a reference implementation, not plans, ideas, or anything else... I fail to see that having "plans" would be anything different from having the patent itself.
What we really want, however, is to have all software and business-model patents nullified. Now and forever. The patent system seemed to work pretty well before that became common!
You are of course free to interpret the text of the GPL in any way you wish. But what matters isn't your interpretation, it's the interpretation of the court! And while the GPL has yet to really be tested in the court, it has been inspected by lots of lawyers! So many, in fact, that some businesses are willing to base their entire business model on it. Trolltech is one such example.
I'm not going to argue with you. Go ahead, try your interpretation, and watch Trolltech sue you to the ground.
This is a particulary obnoxious naming practice in unix. Because it is somehow related to gnu or gnome, we must have a "g" somewhere; or if it's related to kde, a "k"; or if it's using python, "py"; if it's made in PHP, it must contain "php"; if it's made in perl, it must contain "p" or "perl"; and if it's using gtk+, the name must contain "gtk".
It makes no sense at all. I'd rather have a program named "brenda" than one called "pygtkpaint" or "gPhotoshop". Of course, "imagemagick" has the advantage of being descriptive, but what's up with the strange spelling?
But the name "gimp" is retarded. At least use something with positive connotations. I wouldn't recommend "crapPaint" either, but it certainly falls into the same category as "gimp". At least microsoft named their spreadsheet "excel" rather than "inferior" or "outclassed".
Look at the names of popular programming languages, "perl" is obviously positive. And "Pascal" was a man that certainly deserved having something named after him. "BASIC" implies simplicity. But there is no programming language called "dung", "Hitler", or "DIFFICULT". (On the other hand, C, FORTRAN, LISP, ML, etc... doesn't seem like very good names to me).
Yeah, it's really obvious how to pronounce words that start with "mpl".
This looks all good in theory. Fortunately, the objective C developers have thought about the problem, and they have come up with a solution that is quite fast. So in the real world, and objective C message send is about 2x-3x as slow as a C function call. Which is not too bad. The obvious implementation you hint at, would probably be more like 50x-100x slower. Fortunately, it's not the one that's used in practice, and I doubt you will ever find it in an objective C compiler (unless you were to write one yourself, just to prove your point).
This is sadly all true, I guess, although I haven't tried it. Quake is an old game, and linux isn't as binary backwards compatible as windows.
Before you run the installer, make sure you have the GL drivers for X installed. Get them at [some obscure web address], chmod +x the binary, then run it, but make sure you have at least 10MB free in /tmp or the installer will dump core. After the installer is done, edit /etc/X11/XF86Config and add a section called "GL" and put "driver nv" in it. Make sure you have the latest version of X and Linux kernel 2.6 or else X will segfault when you start.
Would you want to tell your windows users how to install the latest graphics drivers when installing quake too? This section is just added to make it sound more complicated than it really is.
OK, run the Quake 3 installer and make sure you set the proper group and setuid permissions on quake3.bin. If you want sound, look here [link to another obscure web site], which is a short HOWTO on how to get sound in Quake 3. That's all there is to it!"
And in my opinion the right people to blame for all this mess is the people behind quake, not the people behind linux. It shouldn't be that hard to create a binary that doesn't need a HOWTO in order to get sound. And I see no reason why a game need to be setuid <something>
User: "How do I get Quake 3 to run in Windows?" Zealot: "Oh God, I had to install Quake 3 in Windoze for some lamer friend of mine! God, what a fucking mess! I put in the CD and it took about 3 minutes to copy everything, and then I had to reboot the fucking computer! Jesus Christ! What a retarded operating system!"
Well, if you need to get a CD and reboot your computer, just to play a simple old game, that's a pretty big hurdle for me. Much easier to just "apt-get install quake3" or "emerge quake3". Of course, quake3 isn't open source software, so it will never happen that you can just apt-get or emerge it. The problem with linux, if you agree that it's a problem, is that it doesn't make it easy for people to package non-free software. Many people view that as a strength, and those are the ones we call zealots.
What you should instead ask, is how large do I prefer to have my browser windows. And that is as small as possible, because I just hate wide windows. I bought a big screen so I could work with several things at once, not so that moron webdesigners could fill it with crap.
So I guess my answer to your question is 640x480.