See, "there's no reason to be driving a car with less than 20mpg" is such a bigoted, inexperienced thing to say. A Pontiac GTO gets 17mpg and is the greatest thing since sliced bread. How about, instead of having you steal my money - since I'm already paying for increased gas, I instead say that you just flat out should not be allowed to work at all, and should be you know, sent to Gitmo or something.
First paragraph: knee-jerk ranting about environmentalists
Knee jerk ranting? Let's see, I said that there is an environmentalist industry that seeks to perpetuate itself, and you replied with:
He brought up the Ebola virus to shock his audience into thinking about his message: airborne agents that can kill 90% of the human population are not science
Which is to say, AT BEST, that, "I'm researching these viruses, and if you don't give me any money, then 90% of humanity will be destroyed."
I'm going to state that I consider you a vile sort of liar, who lies by misrepresenting what others have said.
As you just did? I state that if you want to really do the world some good, shoot yourself in the head, you commie maggot!
Unreasonable faith in the free market, which treats the environment as a commons that they can use up. When a company uses the environment as a dumping ground, they are stealing from everybody else.
Stop peddling this myth that the market doesn't value the environment. Well, its' not even a myth, just another one of your bald faced lies. The market does, just not as much as your socialist aims would dictate! If someone dumps on your property, you can sue for the damages. If someone leaches onto your property, you can sue. If someone emits some gas that kills a bird on my land, then, that's damages as well. In fact, land can be valued to include the birds and bugs and streams and bears and it is being valued to include that. Every try shopping for waterfront property? Even wooded lots command a premium. Nature has value and the market reflects it, and if it doesn't have enough value, its that people like you aren't willing to pay for it.
A police state to save the environment is still a police state. If "environmentalists" were genuinely about the environment, then, nuclear power would have been adopted 30 years in the USA, and we would have met Kyoto targets decades ago. Environmentalism is not about solving environmental problems, its about using supposed environmental problems for a coterie of some scientists and activists to get money.
Just the other day, one scientist was cheering for ebola to wipe out 90% of the people to save the animals. Just give me one good reason to trust these people, just one! Sorry, I just can't see the reason that I should put my faith in someone that wants my entire family dead. That's the problem with the environmental movement in a nutshell. After 40 years of hearing these people call humanity a virus, the vast majority of americans backwards, telling us that Europe is better even though you can't get a job over there and they don't reproduce, why we should trust them?
However, with that said, fuel prices are sky high, and if you believe in "peak oil", then they will continue to climb. The free market works better than any federal leadership ever will. Ethanol looks to be a slam dunk replacement, and, with several million ethanol capable cars on the American roads, its only a matter of time before the US follows Brazil's lead and makes the switch.
So, we will get to screw the arabs and you people can have your environmental cake and eat it too. But we on the right wing were oh so right about nuclear power, all along.
ou tested one application for one month and you then determined that across the board, "Virtual Center is better" For, our kind of application.
Were you using a SAN or some type of shared storage? Tested both configurations.
How smooth was the moving of a running virtual machine from one host to another? copy a file
How configurable or easy was configuring the automatic load balacing across multiple hosts? the system we were benchmarking performed load balancing of the application for us.
Were you only monitoring CPU or were you looking at many parameters across all of the virtual machines and hosts? all parameters, however, our own previous experience with benchmarks indicated tat CPU was the bottleneck.
Did you adjust the "shares" for the CPU and/or dedicate CPU's to different virtual hosts at all? Yep.
What was the effect of using hyperthreading if so equiped (effectively using 2 CPU's but must wait for both to become availalbe if enabled). I turned hyperthreading off as previous data indicated this was advisable.
What were your bottlenecks. How many virtual machines were running on your host? Bottleneck is always primarily CPU with this app. We ran the test over several configurations of virtual machine on two kinds of blade processors. There were times Intel came out on top, a few where AMD came out on top, but the VMWARE NEVER came out on top.
64-bit OSes run 32-bit code just fine (well, except linux distros that screw up the 32-bit compatability layer... but windows runs 32-bit code fine). The real test is running 64-bit guest OSes - who can give the application the advantage of 64 bits? Because it's the application that matters, not the OS.`
Have you even -tried- to run 32 bit software on 64 bit Windows?
Sometimes you just have to wonder if Microsoft actually invents anything on their own these days. Their own flagship products, Windows, Office, and Visual Studio have been in maintenance now for how long?
I had the opportunity to conduct a month long virtualization pilot which, among other things, evaluated Virtual Server vs VMWare, and, Virtual Server surprisingly came out on top.
a) Virtual Server is 64 on a 64 bit OS, if you want it, but VMWare was only available in 32 bit.
b) Virtual Server, running the application as VMWare, actually ran those apps 10% faster than did VMWare. Our application pegs the CPU for several hours, and so we felt that this was as good as test as any.
c) Virtual Server was easier to set up and use.
d) For the price difference, you could get another few datablades.
Your mileage may very, but the bottom line is, until you download Virtual Server and compare it to VMWare, don't believe the hype about performance, because, it may well be hype.
This isn't science though and this is what you're describing.
I agree with that sentiment. Believing that science will make humanity better is an act of faith in its own right. I happen to have that faith, but its no different from believing that eating fish on fridays or walking into malls wired for detonation is going to get me to paradise.
However, there are those that like to say that there is a difference between, a "scientific lifestyle", and a religious one, as if, the presence of a belief in a diety is a danger in and of itself. Truth is, people will rally around the belief in anything, and if that belief is sufficiently polarizing, much mischief will be the inevitable result.
Richard Dawkins claims that the biggest problem with religious faith is that it rewards the suspension of critical thought
The irony of that though, is delicious, is that, in order for science to learn new things, one generally forms a mental of image of how they believe the universe is, and, then, seeks to prove it by producing repeatable results.
Alas, science these days has become a religion in its own right, focused less on the utility of its results, and more on the politically correct interpretation of its findings. Having failed to cure cancer or disease, deliver nuclear fusion, give us flying cars, science is increasingly competing with religion using essentially religious arguments.
"Buy into our way of life, because its better for humanity". So what, I say, give me a flying car and a cancer cure and nuclear fusion... so I can get to church and then the bar! Until that time, you got nothing!
I said limited. Limited is different from zero utility, and it is you that lack the imagination to see how limited our weather forecasting really is.
Were rainfall predictable for months or even years in advance, people would know when to plant successfully, plan vacations, and, above all, if we could make predictions that accurate, chances are, we could also make it rain when and where we wanted to. We could know where to put solar panels and wind farms, and for that matter, if we understood, could understand, the mechanisms of weather so precisely, we should no doubt be able to control it ourselves. So, there's some uses of knowing that 3 days it out it might rain, but, comparitively speaking, since we can't control the rain, it's not a complete science!
Take astronomy as a great example. What good is all that star gazing to anyone?
Star gazing was an important time keeping and navigational tool in the times before GPS. Thus, knowledge of the positions of heavenly bodies was extremely important. It was all these people that built a whole house of astrological, political, and religious cards on top of star tracking that wrecked it, the same way people today build a house of evolutionary cards on top of fossil digging and computer simulations.
Well, without it Einstein wouldn't have had any data to suggest that Newtonian physics were incorrect
Well, no, Einstein had an intuition that he arrived at long before relativity as to the order of things, AND, a viewpoint that his discoveries would actually yield to useful things. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, most real scientific inventions of math, physics and chemistry were made in response to needs of the management of governments, armies, and private enterprise.
Studying evolution taught as a lot about genetics and diseases
No, studying genetics and diseases has taught us a lot about genetics and diseases. Evolution is a mental framework that gives some ideas to how one might model an overall system of life, but it lacks any real rigor of prediction. Evolution by itself has to describe how and when species will evolve in response to various stimuli in order to be proven useful as a genuine scientific discipline in and of itself.
No, you need to make up a word for "science that I can currently think of a use for".
No, you need to understand the historical context and realize that science has lowered its standards for what it calls science over the last century. You can read many texts from the turn of the century and see that the hope of science would be that man would be the complete master of the universe by being able to understand all processes large and small. Now, science doesn't promise that, because it knows it can't fix numbers to everything - in particular, what math exists that describes a species anyway? We barely have the math to describe the shapes of things, let alone, how those shapes interact.
Evolution is an elegant theory, but "City of God" is an elegant book. Real utility and the ability to deliver improvements to products is the only measure of knowledge that genuinely matters.
Besides, people just want to know stuff because, well, it's a human drive.
I like to know what's out there, or something new, but I'm not going to delude myself into believing that such knowledge is intrinsically useful. I'm not saying people shouldn't study it any more than poets should stop writing poems. It just isn't useful, that's all, until it proves otherwise. Just don't go passing off something as useful when its not. Physics and chemistry can deliver on the hype, but evolution can't.
Do you suggest that we should scrap history in school as well? No one can change it, so what use is it?
History, when properly taught, inculcates a shared national identity into children and helps preserve the country and promote its economic and military expansion. History is extremely useful, so long as it is not watered down with a bunch of wishy washy nonsense about the so called victims on the other side. Evolutionary speaking, after all, they simply were incapable of adaptation and so those cultures became extinct!
This is of course complete and utter baloney. Would you, dear Sir, be so kind as to tell me what the weather will be three weeks from now?
You can't, no one can, and no one will EVER be able. Chaos rules. Therefor, meteorology is of limited use. At best, you can claim, in similar fashion, that evolution is of limited use. My question is not to advocate the teaching of intelligent design, it is to say that science stick to covering ground where it is USEFUL, and to do otherwise undermines the rest of science. To lump evolution in with real, useful sciences such as physics or chemistry or medicine undermines physics and chemistry and medicine more than it does help "the cause" of evolution.
Evolution is an interesting story, but is it useful? If you can't predict speciation, you can't control it, so at the end of the day you have a story about the origins of life but can't do anything with it. How's that really any different from the FSM?
In short, I'm not advocating that ID be taught, but I am saying that there needs to be some other label for evolution besides "science", because it's not.
actually both theories are subject of quantum effects
Essentially, this means that the science of anything is intrinsically less useful as the number of probable outcomes increases. Most of the time, the brick hits the floor, and what comes out of mom is different.
I remember writing for the Amiga and the menus were actually associated with the application window, like Windows does it more than Macintosh. If multiple applications shared the same screen, then, yes, each window on that screen would have its own menu.
But....
The difference was that you could have multiple full screen windows because each application could create its own screen, and you could slide multiple screen sections up and down. Amiga used display list interrupts to essentially switch display modes on the fly. So you could have a 320x200 at the top, and a 640x480 at the bottom.
And who could ever forget: "GURU MEDITATION ERROR".
ID is total crap, and evolution is informed crap. Neither can make repeatable predictions, whereas physics can.
For example, if you drop a brick off a bridge, you know roughly what speed it will be travelling at when it hits the ground. However, you cannot predict what a given species will look like ten years down the road. Thus, the model of gravity is useful because it produces repeatable results, and evolution does not.
That's where NASA gets it wrong. First off, the public doesn't even know, when asked, who the Vice President of the United States is, and also cannot name the members of the Supreme Court, and probably doesn't know who Watson and Crick are.
I don't think the public needs its astronauts to be rock stars, it just wants to know they are up in space doing stuff.
Unmanned space probes are cool, no doubt, but manned space flight is where it is at. We have to learn how to live off planet. There is a whole universe that, absent any proof of intelligent life, is ours for the taking, and using NASA to create some orbital mirror of satellites with which we can watch ourselves flex is boring. I don't fund NASA so some scientist who can't get a job making a cool product can do a thesis, I do it so that I can be inspired, and yes, manned space flight is inspiring.
I like the Space Shuttle. Yes, we can rail on about how it didn't meet its goals, how it was overhyped, but stop for a moment and look at what it actually is and does? It's practically a space station in its own right, it is so big. It launches like a rocket, lands like a plane, can bring back stuff in a fairly roomy cargo bay and has a cool robot arm. It's turned the notion of in-space assembly from the stuff of science fiction into ho hum routine. Before the space shuttle, we didn't even know if we could build a human space habitat. Sure, we could launch one, but build one? And we've done it.
I wish that we could build a newer shuttle, and, I wish we could send it to the Moon. I understand that CEV is better built for that. But, when they launch that CEV, look around inside, and compare it to the shuttle. The new CEV will have less room than the old shuttle.
Mars, or even a base on the moon, most certainly test our limits. We'll be putting more stuff on the moon than we ever had, landing on places that we never could. AS far as Mars goes, what bigger test of a limit do you need than that? If anything robots do not test our limits at all, but manned flight does. If a robot screws up, so what, but if a manned flight screws up, boom. For that reason, to echo Jack Kennedy: "We choose to go not because it is easy, but because it is hard."
And PS, we have to beat the Chinese back to the Moon, and to Mars.
The moment Microsoft aggressively goes after Linux for software patents, the EU would come slamming down on Microsoft even harder than they already have for anti-trust.
You missed the point of what I wrote: Vanity is indeed the reason we do things, we just don't have the stones to admit it. For each of your issues:
1. Research in medical science(why bother saving the poor? It is all vanity in any case)
Vanity by doctors.
2. Research in aviation(Oh those damned Wright brothers! Trying to get all these poor masses to fly in air. It will have no practical application! Flight will be of no use to mankind... it is all vanity.)
Vanity by Wright Brothers.
3. All works of art and literature, cinema etc.. (Entertaining the masses ? Who wants these poor folks to be entertained ? They are a pox on us, I tell you! Wanting your name to live on, after you are dead ? Vanity! It is all vanity, I tell you!).
Vanity by artists. Come on, do you think the likes of Picasso, Dahli, etc, were humble people? Or for that matter, Bob Dylan. Art IS vanity!
4. Research in navigation and seafaring.(Bah! Trying to get all those poor teeming masses to float on water and go to some place farway. Discovering new searoutes and lands ? What for? Who cares about whether these damned undeserving poor folks go to this place called the New World and establish some country called America... or populate some place called Australia. America...bah! who needs it!)
Empire is the vanity of Kings.
On all of those things you mention, people did them because they thought they would be cool, and it would make them look good. You can even see the proof of this in the world today. In societies where the people are allowed to be expressive to the point of arrogance, great advances are born. This is particularly true in the western world, and even more so in the United States, where Vanity is King. Even in asian cultures, vanity rules. On the other hand, if you look at those cultures whose people are forced to be humble, or, an autocracy where only one person is allowed be vain, such as in Islamic countries North Korea respectively, then, nothing happens.
There's nothing wrong with vanity in some degree. I just wish you lefties would stop trying to deny the full extent of what you are, and see that some emotions are better harnessed than suppressed. Really, you liberals need to be as introspective and self aware as we right wing lunatics!
Apple records is a holding company for a defunct ban. Let them sue all they want - I'll never buy another Beatle's product and I can't wait for the rest of the sorry washed up old lot to be as dead as george and john and the twist.
Vanity is a worthwhile reason for manned space
on
US Plans Lunar Motel
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What's the practical purpose of feeding poor people live through government assistance? Why bother with giving stupid people the right to vote? I mean, in the 2000 election, the biggest democratic complaint was that poor, stupid, ex-cons did not get their votes counted twice. Or that, there weren't busses for people who were too poor to vote to take them to the booth. Helping the poor through government is aid is not to their benefit really. At the end of the day, most people are poor are poor because they make bad decisions, and, history has shown that, even when you shower these people with money (just follow lottery winners), they STILL make bad decisions. Helping the poor is a vanity effort, it's more so that the people doing the feeding of the poor, through taxes, can basically make some sort of minimal effort, not be engaged, and still feel good about themselves even though they cheat on their spouses, neglect their kids, and buy foreign cars. It's a total vanity thing for those that buy into it. "I'm in favor of raising taxes on someone who isn't me in order to help the pooor, and that shows I'm more responsible than you." If that's not vanity, I don't know what is. Well, I tell you what. I want a manned base on the moon, I'm on board with Bush's space exploration initiative, and I'd like to even shower more deficit bucks on it. I think we should have people walking around on the moon, because I think it would be cool, and that's the only reason that you need to have for space flight, if not anything. It's ALL vanity.
Where are the investors of D2Fusion when you need them for my own whacky ideas! Hey, check out my shareware commodity server, my blog, a few unfinished next generation C languages.... come on dudes, shower some of those greenbacks over my way and I'll throw in a stupid fusion fraud to boot!
Every Windows release is supposedly a total rewrite, and any more, I really don't believe that they are rewriting it. Why should I? The source is closed!
Windows NT was a total rewrite of OS/2. Windows 2000 was a total rewrite of Windows NT. Windows XP was a total rewrite of Windows 2000. Come on, how many claims of Microsoft making a total rewrite do they have to make for you to realize that, given a system with an installed base of a bazillion applications that they must be compatible with at any price, that a total rewrite is probably the last thing they would do. A total rewrite is just marketing spin, and probably all lies. Yeah, they may make some decent changes, but, a total rewrite? I think not! Why would you rewrite something whose primary job is to be compatible with the code that is already out there.
You probably are not aware how Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have discredited the U.S. in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. You are no longer seen as The Good Guys (TM). For many Muslims you are now the bad guys
I don't mean to be a dick, but, when were Muslims ever the "The Good Guys (TM)". After 1500 years of constant Islamic invasions, bullying, and threats, since that excuse for a religion was even founded, one has to ask, when has ANY Islamic country ever been, "The Good Guys (TM)". Even the Crusades, such a horrific affront to the Islamic world, were initially just a military response to an invasion by Islamic countries.
More recently, for the last 30 years, at least, American Foreign Policy in the middle east has been one to avoid enraging the Muslims. Indeed, Bill Clinton bent over backwards, arguably even siding with the wrong side in the Balkans in order to make Muslims happy. But what did any of it get the United States? I will tell you: The World Trade Centers were destroyed, 3000 people were killed, and Muslims around the world danced in the streets and burned American flags in celebration.
Europeans fall over by themselves in appeasement to Islamic fury. Spain bails on Iraq, the France caves on Islamic issues left and right, all in an effort to try and court Islamic people, and what do they get? A Dutch writer stabbed to death, death threats against cartoonists, and riots and France.
At some point, one has to ask, will there ever be anything that will make any Islamic country see any non-islamic country as anything less than a target? Judging by what the Koran says, I think the answer is no.
Despite all of this obvious facts, Bush at least kept to a rhetoric of trying to bring democracy to the middle east. And, in the USA, the Democrats of all people are basically calling Bush onto the carpet by arguing that it is impossible to teach an Islamic person Democracy, it is impossible for them to learn freedom and respect, and, we sure as hell don't want them watching over our ports.
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See, "there's no reason to be driving a car with less than 20mpg" is such a bigoted, inexperienced thing to say. A Pontiac GTO gets 17mpg and is the greatest thing since sliced bread. How about, instead of having you steal my money - since I'm already paying for increased gas, I instead say that you just flat out should not be allowed to work at all, and should be you know, sent to Gitmo or something.
First paragraph: knee-jerk ranting about environmentalists
Knee jerk ranting? Let's see, I said that there is an environmentalist industry that seeks to perpetuate itself, and you replied with:
He brought up the Ebola virus to shock his audience into thinking about his message: airborne agents that can kill 90% of the human population are not science
Which is to say, AT BEST, that, "I'm researching these viruses, and if you don't give me any money, then 90% of humanity will be destroyed."
I'm going to state that I consider you a vile sort of liar, who lies by misrepresenting what others have said.
As you just did? I state that if you want to really do the world some good, shoot yourself in the head, you commie maggot!
Unreasonable faith in the free market, which treats the environment as a commons that they can use up. When a company uses the environment as a dumping ground, they are stealing from everybody else.
Stop peddling this myth that the market doesn't value the environment. Well, its' not even a myth, just another one of your bald faced lies. The market does, just not as much as your socialist aims would dictate! If someone dumps on your property, you can sue for the damages. If someone leaches onto your property, you can sue. If someone emits some gas that kills a bird on my land, then, that's damages as well. In fact, land can be valued to include the birds and bugs and streams and bears and it is being valued to include that. Every try shopping for waterfront property? Even wooded lots command a premium. Nature has value and the market reflects it, and if it doesn't have enough value, its that people like you aren't willing to pay for it.
A police state to save the environment is still a police state. If "environmentalists" were genuinely about the environment, then, nuclear power would have been adopted 30 years in the USA, and we would have met Kyoto targets decades ago. Environmentalism is not about solving environmental problems, its about using supposed environmental problems for a coterie of some scientists and activists to get money.
Just the other day, one scientist was cheering for ebola to wipe out 90% of the people to save the animals. Just give me one good reason to trust these people, just one! Sorry, I just can't see the reason that I should put my faith in someone that wants my entire family dead. That's the problem with the environmental movement in a nutshell. After 40 years of hearing these people call humanity a virus, the vast majority of americans backwards, telling us that Europe is better even though you can't get a job over there and they don't reproduce, why we should trust them?
However, with that said, fuel prices are sky high, and if you believe in "peak oil", then they will continue to climb. The free market works better than any federal leadership ever will. Ethanol looks to be a slam dunk replacement, and, with several million ethanol capable cars on the American roads, its only a matter of time before the US follows Brazil's lead and makes the switch.
So, we will get to screw the arabs and you people can have your environmental cake and eat it too. But we on the right wing were oh so right about nuclear power, all along.
ou tested one application for one month and you then determined that across the board, "Virtual Center is better"
For, our kind of application.
Were you using a SAN or some type of shared storage?
Tested both configurations.
How smooth was the moving of a running virtual machine from one host to another?
copy a file
How configurable or easy was configuring the automatic load balacing across multiple hosts?
the system we were benchmarking performed load balancing of the application for us.
Were you only monitoring CPU or were you looking at many parameters across all of the virtual machines and hosts?
all parameters, however, our own previous experience with benchmarks indicated tat CPU was the bottleneck.
Did you adjust the "shares" for the CPU and/or dedicate CPU's to different virtual hosts at all?
Yep.
What was the effect of using hyperthreading if so equiped (effectively using 2 CPU's but must wait for both to become availalbe if enabled).
I turned hyperthreading off as previous data indicated this was advisable.
What were your bottlenecks. How many virtual machines were running on your host?
Bottleneck is always primarily CPU with this app. We ran the test over several configurations of virtual machine on two kinds of blade processors. There were times Intel came out on top, a few where AMD came out on top, but the VMWARE NEVER came out on top.
Your mileage may vary.
64-bit OSes run 32-bit code just fine (well, except linux distros that screw up the 32-bit compatability layer ... but windows runs 32-bit code fine). The real test is running 64-bit guest OSes - who can give the application the advantage of 64 bits? Because it's the application that matters, not the OS.`
Have you even -tried- to run 32 bit software on 64 bit Windows?
Sometimes you just have to wonder if Microsoft actually invents anything on their own these days. Their own flagship products, Windows, Office, and Visual Studio have been in maintenance now for how long?
I had the opportunity to conduct a month long virtualization pilot which, among other things, evaluated Virtual Server vs VMWare, and, Virtual Server surprisingly came out on top.
a) Virtual Server is 64 on a 64 bit OS, if you want it, but VMWare was only available in 32 bit.
b) Virtual Server, running the application as VMWare, actually ran those apps 10% faster than did VMWare. Our application pegs the CPU for several hours, and so we felt that this was as good as test as any.
c) Virtual Server was easier to set up and use.
d) For the price difference, you could get another few datablades.
Your mileage may very, but the bottom line is, until you download Virtual Server and compare it to VMWare, don't believe the hype about performance, because, it may well be hype.
This isn't science though and this is what you're describing.
I agree with that sentiment. Believing that science will make humanity better is an act of faith in its own right. I happen to have that faith, but its no different from believing that eating fish on fridays or walking into malls wired for detonation is going to get me to paradise.
However, there are those that like to say that there is a difference between, a "scientific lifestyle", and a religious one, as if, the presence of a belief in a diety is a danger in and of itself. Truth is, people will rally around the belief in anything, and if that belief is sufficiently polarizing, much mischief will be the inevitable result.
Humans do not need God's help to act like idiots!
Richard Dawkins claims that the biggest problem with religious faith is that it rewards the suspension of critical thought
The irony of that though, is delicious, is that, in order for science to learn new things, one generally forms a mental of image of how they believe the universe is, and, then, seeks to prove it by producing repeatable results.
Alas, science these days has become a religion in its own right, focused less on the utility of its results, and more on the politically correct interpretation of its findings. Having failed to cure cancer or disease, deliver nuclear fusion, give us flying cars, science is increasingly competing with religion using essentially religious arguments.
"Buy into our way of life, because its better for humanity".
So what, I say, give me a flying car and a cancer cure and nuclear fusion... so I can get to church and then the bar! Until that time, you got nothing!
This is completely wrong on so many counts
I said limited. Limited is different from zero utility, and it is you that lack the imagination to see how limited our weather forecasting really is.
Were rainfall predictable for months or even years in advance, people would know when to plant successfully, plan vacations, and, above all, if we could make predictions that accurate, chances are, we could also make it rain when and where we wanted to. We could know where to put solar panels and wind farms, and for that matter, if we understood, could understand, the mechanisms of weather so precisely, we should no doubt be able to control it ourselves. So, there's some uses of knowing that 3 days it out it might rain, but, comparitively speaking, since we can't control the rain, it's not a complete science!
Take astronomy as a great example. What good is all that star gazing to anyone?
Star gazing was an important time keeping and navigational tool in the times before GPS. Thus, knowledge of the positions of heavenly bodies was extremely important. It was all these people that built a whole house of astrological, political, and religious cards on top of star tracking that wrecked it, the same way people today build a house of evolutionary cards on top of fossil digging and computer simulations.
Well, without it Einstein wouldn't have had any data to suggest that Newtonian physics were incorrect
Well, no, Einstein had an intuition that he arrived at long before relativity as to the order of things, AND, a viewpoint that his discoveries would actually yield to useful things. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, most real scientific inventions of math, physics and chemistry were made in response to needs of the management of governments, armies, and private enterprise.
Studying evolution taught as a lot about genetics and diseases
No, studying genetics and diseases has taught us a lot about genetics and diseases. Evolution is a mental framework that gives some ideas to how one might model an overall system of life, but it lacks any real rigor of prediction. Evolution by itself has to describe how and when species will evolve in response to various stimuli in order to be proven useful as a genuine scientific discipline in and of itself.
No, you need to make up a word for "science that I can currently think of a use for".
No, you need to understand the historical context and realize that science has lowered its standards for what it calls science over the last century. You can read many texts from the turn of the century and see that the hope of science would be that man would be the complete master of the universe by being able to understand all processes large and small. Now, science doesn't promise that, because it knows it can't fix numbers to everything - in particular, what math exists that describes a species anyway? We barely have the math to describe the shapes of things, let alone, how those shapes interact.
Evolution is an elegant theory, but "City of God" is an elegant book. Real utility and the ability to deliver improvements to products is the only measure of knowledge that genuinely matters.
Besides, people just want to know stuff because, well, it's a human drive.
I like to know what's out there, or something new, but I'm not going to delude myself into believing that such knowledge is intrinsically useful. I'm not saying people shouldn't study it any more than poets should stop writing poems. It just isn't useful, that's all, until it proves otherwise. Just don't go passing off something as useful when its not. Physics and chemistry can deliver on the hype, but evolution can't.
Do you suggest that we should scrap history in school as well? No one can change it, so what use is it?
History, when properly taught, inculcates a shared national identity into children and helps preserve the country and promote its economic and military expansion. History is extremely useful, so long as it is not watered down with a bunch of wishy washy nonsense about the so called victims on the other side. Evolutionary speaking, after all, they simply were incapable of adaptation and so those cultures became extinct!
This is of course complete and utter baloney. Would you, dear Sir, be so kind as to tell me what the weather will be three weeks from now?
You can't, no one can, and no one will EVER be able. Chaos rules. Therefor, meteorology is of limited use. At best, you can claim, in similar fashion, that evolution is of limited use. My question is not to advocate the teaching of intelligent design, it is to say that science stick to covering ground where it is USEFUL, and to do otherwise undermines the rest of science. To lump evolution in with real, useful sciences such as physics or chemistry or medicine undermines physics and chemistry and medicine more than it does help "the cause" of evolution.
Evolution is an interesting story, but is it useful? If you can't predict speciation, you can't control it, so at the end of the day you have a story about the origins of life but can't do anything with it. How's that really any different from the FSM?
In short, I'm not advocating that ID be taught, but I am saying that there needs to be some other label for evolution besides "science", because it's not.
actually both theories are subject of quantum effects
Essentially, this means that the science of anything is intrinsically less useful as the number of probable outcomes increases. Most of the time, the brick hits the floor, and what comes out of mom is different.
I remember writing for the Amiga and the menus were actually associated with the application window, like Windows does it more than Macintosh. If multiple applications shared the same screen, then, yes, each window on that screen would have its own menu.
But....
The difference was that you could have multiple full screen windows because each application could create its own screen, and you could slide multiple screen sections up and down. Amiga used display list interrupts to essentially switch display modes on the fly. So you could have a 320x200 at the top, and a 640x480 at the bottom.
And who could ever forget: "GURU MEDITATION ERROR".
ID is total crap, and evolution is informed crap. Neither can make repeatable predictions, whereas physics can.
For example, if you drop a brick off a bridge, you know roughly what speed it will be travelling at when it hits the ground. However, you cannot predict what a given species will look like ten years down the road. Thus, the model of gravity is useful because it produces repeatable results, and evolution does not.
That's where NASA gets it wrong. First off, the public doesn't even know, when asked, who the Vice President of the United States is, and also cannot name the members of the Supreme Court, and probably doesn't know who Watson and Crick are.
I don't think the public needs its astronauts to be rock stars, it just wants to know they are up in space doing stuff.
Unmanned space probes are cool, no doubt, but manned space flight is where it is at. We have to learn how to live off planet. There is a whole universe that, absent any proof of intelligent life, is ours for the taking, and using NASA to create some orbital mirror of satellites with which we can watch ourselves flex is boring. I don't fund NASA so some scientist who can't get a job making a cool product can do a thesis, I do it so that I can be inspired, and yes, manned space flight is inspiring.
I like the Space Shuttle. Yes, we can rail on about how it didn't meet its goals, how it was overhyped, but stop for a moment and look at what it actually is and does? It's practically a space station in its own right, it is so big. It launches like a rocket, lands like a plane, can bring back stuff in a fairly roomy cargo bay and has a cool robot arm. It's turned the notion of in-space assembly from the stuff of science fiction into ho hum routine. Before the space shuttle, we didn't even know if we could build a human space habitat. Sure, we could launch one, but build one? And we've done it.
I wish that we could build a newer shuttle, and, I wish we could send it to the Moon. I understand that CEV is better built for that. But, when they launch that CEV, look around inside, and compare it to the shuttle. The new CEV will have less room than the old shuttle.
BIG IS BETTER
Mars, or even a base on the moon, most certainly test our limits. We'll be putting more stuff on the moon than we ever had, landing on places that we never could. AS far as Mars goes, what bigger test of a limit do you need than that? If anything robots do not test our limits at all, but manned flight does. If a robot screws up, so what, but if a manned flight screws up, boom. For that reason, to echo Jack Kennedy: "We choose to go not because it is easy, but because it is hard."
And PS, we have to beat the Chinese back to the Moon, and to Mars.
The moment Microsoft aggressively goes after Linux for software patents, the EU would come slamming down on Microsoft even harder than they already have for anti-trust.
You missed the point of what I wrote: Vanity is indeed the reason we do things, we just don't have the stones to admit it. For each of your issues:
1. Research in medical science(why bother saving the poor? It is all vanity in any case)
Vanity by doctors.
2. Research in aviation(Oh those damned Wright brothers! Trying to get all these poor masses to fly in air. It will have no practical application! Flight will be of no use to mankind... it is all vanity.)
Vanity by Wright Brothers.
3. All works of art and literature, cinema etc.. (Entertaining the masses ? Who wants these poor folks to be entertained ? They are a pox on us, I tell you! Wanting your name to live on, after you are dead ? Vanity! It is all vanity, I tell you!).
Vanity by artists. Come on, do you think the likes of Picasso, Dahli, etc, were humble people? Or for that matter, Bob Dylan. Art IS vanity!
4. Research in navigation and seafaring.(Bah! Trying to get all those poor teeming masses to float on water and go to some place farway. Discovering new searoutes and lands ? What for? Who cares about whether these damned undeserving poor folks go to this place called the New World and establish some country called America... or populate some place called Australia. America...bah! who needs it!)
Empire is the vanity of Kings.
On all of those things you mention, people did them because they thought they would be cool, and it would make them look good. You can even see the proof of this in the world today. In societies where the people are allowed to be expressive to the point of arrogance, great advances are born. This is particularly true in the western world, and even more so in the United States, where Vanity is King. Even in asian cultures, vanity rules. On the other hand, if you look at those cultures whose people are forced to be humble, or, an autocracy where only one person is allowed be vain, such as in Islamic countries North Korea respectively, then, nothing happens.
There's nothing wrong with vanity in some degree. I just wish you lefties would stop trying to deny the full extent of what you are, and see that some emotions are better harnessed than suppressed. Really, you liberals need to be as introspective and self aware as we right wing lunatics!
Apple records is a holding company for a defunct ban. Let them sue all they want - I'll never buy another Beatle's product and I can't wait for the rest of the sorry washed up old lot to be as dead as george and john and the twist.
What's the practical purpose of feeding poor people live through government assistance? Why bother with giving stupid people the right to vote? I mean, in the 2000 election, the biggest democratic complaint was that poor, stupid, ex-cons did not get their votes counted twice. Or that, there weren't busses for people who were too poor to vote to take them to the booth. Helping the poor through government is aid is not to their benefit really. At the end of the day, most people are poor are poor because they make bad decisions, and, history has shown that, even when you shower these people with money (just follow lottery winners), they STILL make bad decisions. Helping the poor is a vanity effort, it's more so that the people doing the feeding of the poor, through taxes, can basically make some sort of minimal effort, not be engaged, and still feel good about themselves even though they cheat on their spouses, neglect their kids, and buy foreign cars. It's a total vanity thing for those that buy into it. "I'm in favor of raising taxes on someone who isn't me in order to help the pooor, and that shows I'm more responsible than you." If that's not vanity, I don't know what is. Well, I tell you what. I want a manned base on the moon, I'm on board with Bush's space exploration initiative, and I'd like to even shower more deficit bucks on it. I think we should have people walking around on the moon, because I think it would be cool, and that's the only reason that you need to have for space flight, if not anything. It's ALL vanity.
Where are the investors of D2Fusion when you need them for my own whacky ideas! Hey, check out my shareware commodity server, my blog, a few unfinished next generation C languages.... come on dudes, shower some of those greenbacks over my way and I'll throw in a stupid fusion fraud to boot!
Every Windows release is supposedly a total rewrite, and any more, I really don't believe that they are rewriting it. Why should I? The source is closed!
Windows NT was a total rewrite of OS/2. Windows 2000 was a total rewrite of Windows NT. Windows XP was a total rewrite of Windows 2000. Come on, how many claims of Microsoft making a total rewrite do they have to make for you to realize that, given a system with an installed base of a bazillion applications that they must be compatible with at any price, that a total rewrite is probably the last thing they would do. A total rewrite is just marketing spin, and probably all lies. Yeah, they may make some decent changes, but, a total rewrite? I think not! Why would you rewrite something whose primary job is to be compatible with the code that is already out there.
It's more Microsoft spin than ever!
Whose propaganda?
You probably are not aware how Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have discredited the U.S. in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. You are no longer seen as The Good Guys (TM). For many Muslims you are now the bad guys
I don't mean to be a dick, but, when were Muslims ever the "The Good Guys (TM)". After 1500 years of constant Islamic invasions, bullying, and threats, since that excuse for a religion was even founded, one has to ask, when has ANY Islamic country ever been, "The Good Guys (TM)". Even the Crusades, such a horrific affront to the Islamic world, were initially just a military response to an invasion by Islamic countries.
More recently, for the last 30 years, at least, American Foreign Policy in the middle east has been one to avoid enraging the Muslims. Indeed, Bill Clinton bent over backwards, arguably even siding with the wrong side in the Balkans in order to make Muslims happy. But what did any of it get the United States? I will tell you: The World Trade Centers were destroyed, 3000 people were killed, and Muslims around the world danced in the streets and burned American flags in celebration.
Europeans fall over by themselves in appeasement to Islamic fury. Spain bails on Iraq, the France caves on Islamic issues left and right, all in an effort to try and court Islamic people, and what do they get? A Dutch writer stabbed to death, death threats against cartoonists, and riots and France.
At some point, one has to ask, will there ever be anything that will make any Islamic country see any non-islamic country as anything less than a target? Judging by what the Koran says, I think the answer is no.
Despite all of this obvious facts, Bush at least kept to a rhetoric of trying to bring democracy to the middle east. And, in the USA, the Democrats of all people are basically calling Bush onto the carpet by arguing that it is impossible to teach an Islamic person Democracy, it is impossible for them to learn freedom and respect, and, we sure as hell don't want them watching over our ports.
Why aren't they right? You tell me.