But without written and verified documentation on history, Science can not find out the facts of what did happen, it can only guess based on evidence.
Your alternative is? Random pontificating based on one persons interpretation of religious texts that someone claims are inspired by a 'creator' of some kind
That really the only problem I have with Science people is they assume it is fact when it isn't.
Last time I checked the whole point of the scientific method is to not assume anything. I'm not entirely certain what you mean 'it' (this pronoun seems to point to the noun Science, but that would make the statement absurd since science is a method, not something that can be a fact) so I'm going to assume you meant scientific theories. Theories can be assumed to be correct as far as they have been tested. Theories get revised/replaced for fringe cases that don't follow the rules of the last theory. The theory still holds for all cases tested and repeatably shown to be an accurate predictor of the test outcome. Anyone who told you otherwise didn't understand science.
It is the best guess based on the recently collected evidence. However guessing on recently collected evidence can have its own flaws based on assumptions. How can we say that 1000 years of evidence can accurately predict billions of years before?
and again your alternative is? When you come up with a time machine to let us all observe first hand what actually happened please let us know, until then I'll take my testable proxy data over your non-disprovable claims thank you.
I'm thinking he must mean the UI which I must admit by default looks a little too cartoonish. Otherwise it's a fairly useful utility, and my primary graphic editor (Unless I need to do something Adobe specific, which I must admit I can't think of right now since most things can be accomplished by taking 10s to find the right plug-in).
That depends, if you are engineering T-cells from host stem cells there is no reason you couldn't include a small set of memory T-cells to prevent re-infection/'Lazy Immune Systems'. In fact it might be more practical in some cases to do just memory T-cells and let the body do the heavy lifting, since it would give you a wider error margin in terms of dosage.
next option... well, The Conservatives have proven willing to sell Canadian citizens and their rights. The Liberals, as usual, are internally divided and as such will bury their heads in the sand and hope it blows over. The NDP... well they get THIS issue right, but they have the financial management skills of my 12 year old with a credit card, and lately every time they get the chance to do something run away like frightened children.
I suppose we could try building a new party... we've been known to do that from time to time up here...
Ballot box - inconclusive
Hey I have an Idea to fix the recession! You guys down there have any bullets?
Bio-polymers are fairly cheap to refine, have been in use for thousands of years and relatively plentiful, but most are simply incinerated today as industrial waste. Investing in their development hasn't been a priority for a few centuries because oil was cheaper, but the fact they still exist and compete with oil based polymer products indicates to me that the cost threshold shouldn't be to much higher than oil, especially since most sources can be grown in such a manner as to not compete with food production. As for fertilizer, again it's simply a case of synthetic solutions being cheaper to manufacture due to a readily available source, and the cost of oil hovering just above the profitability threshold for the alternatives.
He's over simplifying. Other things being equal, a population with a higher reproductive rate will out compete a similar population with a lower reproductive rate. The key there is other things being equal differences in organization of a complex population can be sufficient to counterbalance a reproductive rate advantage.
Ok, I don't mean to get pedantic here, but the general layout hardware wise is almost identical to my old Palm IIIc. Thinner lighter and more seamless perhaps, but that's more a result of technology changes than any design decisions. If you are referring to the software interface I'll give you that they had some influential Ideas, but again it seems somewhat obvious given the technology used. I'm not saying that isn't unique or influential, The FSM only knows how many kludgy interfaces some people can and have come up with for various types hardware, but hardly non-obvious to anyone who is willing to put some effort in to the interface design.
You are all missing the point. ISOhunt does not host.torrent files. It indexes them. Period. No tracker. No.torrent's. The only thing downloaded from the site is an index of where to find the.torrent files.
Contributory infringement was established because, in addition to this, Fung made forum posts detailing how to rip specific copyrighted works
Yes it looks bad that he told people how to rip copyrighted material. The same could be said of any site that states diesel fuel + fertilizer = bomb or explains how to induce the fission of uranium.
and suggesting search terms to help find specific copyrighted works on his site
and every site that points out that you can Google these things.
If ISOhunt goes down, Google, Bing, Yahoo! et al are equally liable.
I think he means dot product. In scalar numbers the dot product and cross product are the same thing so in some cases it is conventional to write 2 X 2 = 4 or 2 . 2 = 4 interchangeably (note the 'dot' should be at center (around the same height as - ) however there is no such keyboard character) and the difference is only relevant in vector algebra.
I may be able to shed some light on that one. IMHO what he is fighting for has nothing to do with money or power so much as it has to do with legacy. In all likelihood he has committed more time, effort and personal resources to building up NewsCorp than he has with his wife or children, certainly more than he has spent working on world peace or saving the environment. 15 years ago he was well on his way to building what seemed to be an everlasting institution that would be a constant factor in the lives of every individual in the western world, an institution built on what appeared at the time to be an industry essential to our way of life and civilization. While you and I and many members of/. would consider our primary contribution to society (our kids, our communities, the passion for understanding and discovery that we instill in those around us) he made a conscious choice to neglect in favor of what appeared to be a more monumental and potentially even more enduring monument to his achievement.
Now the industry on which he built his legacy is crumbling. While he could devote his final years and vast fortune to things like his family, friends, and community, and sit back and watch while his corporate monument fall, he would never have the chance to recover the lost time and effort it took to build what he perceives as greatest contribution to society. 15 years ago he was looking forward to being remembered for being the architect of an enduring corporate institution, today he's facing the possibility of that being reduced to being a footnote on the Wikipedia page describing the spectacular fall of the corporate news industry.
A similar perspective could be used to describe why we see so much resistance from other industries failing as a result of new information technologies, they are afraid of becoming irrelevant, from falling on the wrong side of the current technological revolution and becoming lost, and forgotten, a fate worse even than their certain death.
Or he could just be evil... whatever works for you.
The problem is not the "Research for Hire" approach, but the fact they are using multiple puppet fronts to launder their opinions or "Astroturf". The fact that these studies were bought and paid for is irrelevant. The fact that they are trying to make it sound like they are the only opinion in town is the problem.
The fact that they are actively trying to suppress studies that differ from their party line, and are citing multiple studies, all bought and paid for by them to make their bias seem to have more support than it actually does is what has allowed them to push studies through organizations that generally have a shred of academic credibility, like the Conference board of Canada.
Their mistake was not being creative enough, the fact that all the studies have almost the same wording would tip a 5th Grade English teacher off that there might be some plagiarism involved.
For the most part I agree with your argument, however there are some points I would like to contend
Unless you use it you lose it. That is part of evolution.
Unless you use it you lose it is true, but not necessarily evolution. Unless there is specific selective pressure AGAINST something, in this case development of competence in math or other intellectual pursuits the change isn't evolutionary its mono-generational atrophy. Shop counter staff not being able to run simple sums in their heads is due to lack of use of that part of their brains. A comparable analogy would be having your arm in a cast for several years. You may have been a body builder before, but by the time you take the cast off the arm will be little more than a withered stick. Now if you were to suggest that this decrease in mental capacity is a result of the marginalization of intelligentsia (nerds, geeks, and eggheads being treated like second class citizens) leading to decreased likelihood of them passing on their natural (genetic) or acquired (cultural) ability, that might suggest evolution, but mere atrophy is hardly a case for an 'Idiocracy' style change in society.
Culture created the [...] standardized education system to allow escape from monoculture.
This seems a little overstated in my opinion though I'm not sure the use of that term you intended is the use I'm reading it as. I'm interpreting your comment here to mean familial monoculture as in your example of the children of buggy whip manufacturers having to follow their parents in to the trade as that was the only thing they knew. The fact of the matter is this type of shift may have been somewhat eased by the introduction of a standardized education system, but is by no means unique. You didn't see many bowyers in colonial America but at one time it was a thriving trade in early Europe. We can assume there was a small percentage of individuals who didn't pick up a new trade and just died off, but the more frequent result of the dying bowyer trade was the migration to other trades albeit they likely never reached the level of mastery they had as a bowyer.
One thing you need to remember (and I say this as the husband of a teacher) is that while universal standardized education sounds good in principle, like many ideological concepts (free-market, communism, democracy, etc.) there is no such thing as the ideal case in practice. Like all things in an organic society education is politicized and as such is in-compatible with the idea of a "universal basic skill set". Teachers teach what school boards mandate, school boards mandate what will get them re-elected next term. The "3 R's" was a good idea, but it's not SEXY enough to get it back in to the classroom; "Technology Integration" (ie. Googling it) is today's hot buzz word in education circles. Before you go laying the blame at the feet of today's "Lazy, incompetent youth" take a moment to consider the fact that her/his indifference to simple skills may have a root in the "Elders" who are supposedly charged with making sure the right education is presented to them.
As for society becoming completely dependent on computer technology to the detriment of our basic skills? Perhaps, and perhaps in a generation or two the gloss will wear off and being able to count without a calculator will become chic again. Or we may end up in a Kurzweillian Singularity where the mind/machine barrier gets breached and Google just becomes another 'lobe' of the brain... on second thought... bad idea... there are some youtube clips I'd rather NOT remember and I'd rather not have the MAFIAA taxing me every time I remember a song, story or movie written since 1CE... but that's another topic.
As a player who would fall in to the "Actor" (ie. RPer) category, I would have to disagree. We don't tend to do MMO's simply because it's harder to establish and maintain a well rounded party and really experience the richness of the setting, even in those games where they have a very good mythology. However singleplayer or even limited multiplayer (think NWN 1&2 where you can run through a custom mod with a few friends) often still provide a stimulating experience provided there is a good story line and sufficient flexibility in achieving the per-determined goals.
However you are correct in that they are far less appealing than a good table top game or LARPing, a good actor is nothing without a good director, likewise a good RPer is far weaker without a creative GM... Now if someone created a powerful enough GM AI that could adapt the story based on completely random player choices, omniscient, omnipotent and liked F***ing with player's heads... aside from having created skynet, that could be an MMO worth playing.
The game is not the problem, the game is an attempt to escape something (stress at school, work, family) he is scared of something and his only way to deal with it is to run from it. If it wasn't video games it would be gambling or alcohol/drugs or any one of the many things that people do to avoid things that scare them
So what can you do?
1)Talk to him. Not about the game but about what's bothering him, discuss his options and help him work out a 'battle plan' that doesn't involve the game.
2)Engage him. Keep pestering him to get involved in social activities that don't involve a keyboard/controller. Guys night, card games, board games, a weekend camping trip, anything that involves socializing in meatspace.
3)Educate him. Make him realize what he is doing, that he is running away from something and doing in a self-destructive way. A little self awareness goes a long way, remember, he must DECIDE to break the addiction, and he can't make a decision if he doesn't realize he is facing one.
4)As has been noted repeatedly above, sex. It's one of the few basic instincts that is stronger than fear and in some cases is the only reward powerful enough to overcome the fear of the thing he is running from.
I wish you good luck, breaking an addiction is one of the hardest things someone can do.
Slashdot Mirror
But without written and verified documentation on history, Science can not find out the facts of what did happen, it can only guess based on evidence.
Your alternative is? Random pontificating based on one persons interpretation of religious texts that someone claims are inspired by a 'creator' of some kind
That really the only problem I have with Science people is they assume it is fact when it isn't.
Last time I checked the whole point of the scientific method is to not assume anything. I'm not entirely certain what you mean 'it' (this pronoun seems to point to the noun Science, but that would make the statement absurd since science is a method, not something that can be a fact) so I'm going to assume you meant scientific theories. Theories can be assumed to be correct as far as they have been tested. Theories get revised/replaced for fringe cases that don't follow the rules of the last theory. The theory still holds for all cases tested and repeatably shown to be an accurate predictor of the test outcome. Anyone who told you otherwise didn't understand science.
It is the best guess based on the recently collected evidence. However guessing on recently collected evidence can have its own flaws based on assumptions. How can we say that 1000 years of evidence can accurately predict billions of years before?
and again your alternative is? When you come up with a time machine to let us all observe first hand what actually happened please let us know, until then I'll take my testable proxy data over your non-disprovable claims thank you.
I'm thinking he must mean the UI which I must admit by default looks a little too cartoonish. Otherwise it's a fairly useful utility, and my primary graphic editor (Unless I need to do something Adobe specific, which I must admit I can't think of right now since most things can be accomplished by taking 10s to find the right plug-in).
So what you're saying is copyright == entropy of culture...? By the FSM I think you're on to something...
I'm not sure how you define ID, but the whole 'evolution is the observable effect God's master plan' sounds like ID to me.
That depends, if you are engineering T-cells from host stem cells there is no reason you couldn't include a small set of memory T-cells to prevent re-infection/'Lazy Immune Systems'. In fact it might be more practical in some cases to do just memory T-cells and let the body do the heavy lifting, since it would give you a wider error margin in terms of dosage.
oh dear... Mormons are Intelligent Design believers, not Creationists specifically, there is a difference.
(Full disclosure, I'm an Agnostic, I don't believe in ID or Creationism, but was raised Mormon)
I played it like CD for years in my car. It transformed a giant robot game into Wagner.
For some reason I read that as "It transformed my car in to a giant robot."... which also would have been cool.
Precisely
Soapbox - failed
next option... well, The Conservatives have proven willing to sell Canadian citizens and their rights. The Liberals, as usual, are internally divided and as such will bury their heads in the sand and hope it blows over. The NDP... well they get THIS issue right, but they have the financial management skills of my 12 year old with a credit card, and lately every time they get the chance to do something run away like frightened children.
I suppose we could try building a new party... we've been known to do that from time to time up here...
Ballot box - inconclusive
Hey I have an Idea to fix the recession! You guys down there have any bullets?
Ironic when you consider that many of those old school digital watches were LED backlit...
Meanwhile, a girl might want to spend more than your toy's ticket price on a Symbian.
I'm curious as to what you believe some women are doing with their Nokia phones... oh wait you meant a Sybian.
Except sales don't count for much to the musician(s) unless they are selling platinum and then they still make more money off of major concerts.
Bio-polymers are fairly cheap to refine, have been in use for thousands of years and relatively plentiful, but most are simply incinerated today as industrial waste. Investing in their development hasn't been a priority for a few centuries because oil was cheaper, but the fact they still exist and compete with oil based polymer products indicates to me that the cost threshold shouldn't be to much higher than oil, especially since most sources can be grown in such a manner as to not compete with food production. As for fertilizer, again it's simply a case of synthetic solutions being cheaper to manufacture due to a readily available source, and the cost of oil hovering just above the profitability threshold for the alternatives.
He's over simplifying. Other things being equal, a population with a higher reproductive rate will out compete a similar population with a lower reproductive rate. The key there is other things being equal differences in organization of a complex population can be sufficient to counterbalance a reproductive rate advantage.
Ok, I don't mean to get pedantic here, but the general layout hardware wise is almost identical to my old Palm IIIc. Thinner lighter and more seamless perhaps, but that's more a result of technology changes than any design decisions. If you are referring to the software interface I'll give you that they had some influential Ideas, but again it seems somewhat obvious given the technology used. I'm not saying that isn't unique or influential, The FSM only knows how many kludgy interfaces some people can and have come up with for various types hardware, but hardly non-obvious to anyone who is willing to put some effort in to the interface design.
Contributory infringement was established because, in addition to this, Fung made forum posts detailing how to rip specific copyrighted works
Yes it looks bad that he told people how to rip copyrighted material. The same could be said of any site that states diesel fuel + fertilizer = bomb or explains how to induce the fission of uranium.
and suggesting search terms to help find specific copyrighted works on his site
and every site that points out that you can Google these things. If ISOhunt goes down, Google, Bing, Yahoo! et al are equally liable.
Bah, use correct descriptors. Atheism == no god; Agnostisism == do not believe in god.
Wait, this is M$FT... I thought humiliating the customer was already their business model.
Plants are the most efficient at storing energy as some form of hydrocarbon. We already have a huge infrastructure to distribute hydrocarbons.
I'm not aware of any plant which uses hydrocarbons for energy storage (or anything else). Plants typically use polysaccharides for this purpose.
<pedantic>Polysaccharides = Polymer of Saccharides; Saccharides = subclass of Carbohydrates; Carbohydrates = Subclass of Hydrocarbons </pedantic>
I think he means dot product. In scalar numbers the dot product and cross product are the same thing so in some cases it is conventional to write 2 X 2 = 4 or 2 . 2 = 4 interchangeably (note the 'dot' should be at center (around the same height as - ) however there is no such keyboard character) and the difference is only relevant in vector algebra.
I may be able to shed some light on that one. IMHO what he is fighting for has nothing to do with money or power so much as it has to do with legacy. In all likelihood he has committed more time, effort and personal resources to building up NewsCorp than he has with his wife or children, certainly more than he has spent working on world peace or saving the environment. 15 years ago he was well on his way to building what seemed to be an everlasting institution that would be a constant factor in the lives of every individual in the western world, an institution built on what appeared at the time to be an industry essential to our way of life and civilization. While you and I and many members of /. would consider our primary contribution to society (our kids, our communities, the passion for understanding and discovery that we instill in those around us) he made a conscious choice to neglect in favor of what appeared to be a more monumental and potentially even more enduring monument to his achievement.
Now the industry on which he built his legacy is crumbling. While he could devote his final years and vast fortune to things like his family, friends, and community, and sit back and watch while his corporate monument fall, he would never have the chance to recover the lost time and effort it took to build what he perceives as greatest contribution to society. 15 years ago he was looking forward to being remembered for being the architect of an enduring corporate institution, today he's facing the possibility of that being reduced to being a footnote on the Wikipedia page describing the spectacular fall of the corporate news industry.
A similar perspective could be used to describe why we see so much resistance from other industries failing as a result of new information technologies, they are afraid of becoming irrelevant, from falling on the wrong side of the current technological revolution and becoming lost, and forgotten, a fate worse even than their certain death.
Or he could just be evil... whatever works for you.
That one's easy. Minimum sentence: 3 years tier 1 tech support.
The problem is not the "Research for Hire" approach, but the fact they are using multiple puppet fronts to launder their opinions or "Astroturf". The fact that these studies were bought and paid for is irrelevant. The fact that they are trying to make it sound like they are the only opinion in town is the problem.
The fact that they are actively trying to suppress studies that differ from their party line, and are citing multiple studies, all bought and paid for by them to make their bias seem to have more support than it actually does is what has allowed them to push studies through organizations that generally have a shred of academic credibility, like the Conference board of Canada.
Their mistake was not being creative enough, the fact that all the studies have almost the same wording would tip a 5th Grade English teacher off that there might be some plagiarism involved.
For the most part I agree with your argument, however there are some points I would like to contend
Unless you use it you lose it. That is part of evolution.
Unless you use it you lose it is true, but not necessarily evolution. Unless there is specific selective pressure AGAINST something, in this case development of competence in math or other intellectual pursuits the change isn't evolutionary its mono-generational atrophy. Shop counter staff not being able to run simple sums in their heads is due to lack of use of that part of their brains. A comparable analogy would be having your arm in a cast for several years. You may have been a body builder before, but by the time you take the cast off the arm will be little more than a withered stick. Now if you were to suggest that this decrease in mental capacity is a result of the marginalization of intelligentsia (nerds, geeks, and eggheads being treated like second class citizens) leading to decreased likelihood of them passing on their natural (genetic) or acquired (cultural) ability, that might suggest evolution, but mere atrophy is hardly a case for an 'Idiocracy' style change in society.
Culture created the [...] standardized education system to allow escape from monoculture.
This seems a little overstated in my opinion though I'm not sure the use of that term you intended is the use I'm reading it as. I'm interpreting your comment here to mean familial monoculture as in your example of the children of buggy whip manufacturers having to follow their parents in to the trade as that was the only thing they knew. The fact of the matter is this type of shift may have been somewhat eased by the introduction of a standardized education system, but is by no means unique. You didn't see many bowyers in colonial America but at one time it was a thriving trade in early Europe. We can assume there was a small percentage of individuals who didn't pick up a new trade and just died off, but the more frequent result of the dying bowyer trade was the migration to other trades albeit they likely never reached the level of mastery they had as a bowyer.
One thing you need to remember (and I say this as the husband of a teacher) is that while universal standardized education sounds good in principle, like many ideological concepts (free-market, communism, democracy, etc.) there is no such thing as the ideal case in practice. Like all things in an organic society education is politicized and as such is in-compatible with the idea of a "universal basic skill set". Teachers teach what school boards mandate, school boards mandate what will get them re-elected next term. The "3 R's" was a good idea, but it's not SEXY enough to get it back in to the classroom; "Technology Integration" (ie. Googling it) is today's hot buzz word in education circles. Before you go laying the blame at the feet of today's "Lazy, incompetent youth" take a moment to consider the fact that her/his indifference to simple skills may have a root in the "Elders" who are supposedly charged with making sure the right education is presented to them.
As for society becoming completely dependent on computer technology to the detriment of our basic skills? Perhaps, and perhaps in a generation or two the gloss will wear off and being able to count without a calculator will become chic again. Or we may end up in a Kurzweillian Singularity where the mind/machine barrier gets breached and Google just becomes another 'lobe' of the brain... on second thought... bad idea... there are some youtube clips I'd rather NOT remember and I'd rather not have the MAFIAA taxing me every time I remember a song, story or movie written since 1CE... but that's another topic.
Actors probably will avoid computer RPGs.
As a player who would fall in to the "Actor" (ie. RPer) category, I would have to disagree. We don't tend to do MMO's simply because it's harder to establish and maintain a well rounded party and really experience the richness of the setting, even in those games where they have a very good mythology. However singleplayer or even limited multiplayer (think NWN 1&2 where you can run through a custom mod with a few friends) often still provide a stimulating experience provided there is a good story line and sufficient flexibility in achieving the per-determined goals.
However you are correct in that they are far less appealing than a good table top game or LARPing, a good actor is nothing without a good director, likewise a good RPer is far weaker without a creative GM... Now if someone created a powerful enough GM AI that could adapt the story based on completely random player choices, omniscient, omnipotent and liked F***ing with player's heads... aside from having created skynet, that could be an MMO worth playing.
So what can you do?
1)Talk to him. Not about the game but about what's bothering him, discuss his options and help him work out a 'battle plan' that doesn't involve the game.
2)Engage him. Keep pestering him to get involved in social activities that don't involve a keyboard/controller. Guys night, card games, board games, a weekend camping trip, anything that involves socializing in meatspace.
3)Educate him. Make him realize what he is doing, that he is running away from something and doing in a self-destructive way. A little self awareness goes a long way, remember, he must DECIDE to break the addiction, and he can't make a decision if he doesn't realize he is facing one.
4)As has been noted repeatedly above, sex. It's one of the few basic instincts that is stronger than fear and in some cases is the only reward powerful enough to overcome the fear of the thing he is running from.
I wish you good luck, breaking an addiction is one of the hardest things someone can do.