> ? Evolution does not have a target or a final destination. It keeps on going.
Evolution is a general concept meaning slow/gradual change, as opposed to revolution which mean sudden/large change.
Biological evolution is only one kind of evolution. Clearly, the GP wasn't talking about biological evolution when he talked about the evolution of gods.
There is a trend to limit the number of gods:
Hunter/Gathers: animism, spirits of nature, every tree and stone has its own spirit..
Agriculture: Polytheism, gods are associated with concepts, such as love, war, fertility.
City states: Monotheism, we have the omnipotent create God.
Industrialism: God is dead.
As we can't really have fewer than zero Gods, that would seem to be the endpoint.
Of course, one could argue that humanism, materialism, and liberalism makes every one of us our own god, multiplying the number again.
Most likely, there are far more members who vote Democratic than Republican. This doesn't mean that the National Academy of Science should start promoting democratic candidates in political elections.
These people who are smart enough to be atheists, and smart enough to not vote for republicans, are also smart enough to realize that these questions are not scientific in nature. The existence of God is not a scientific hypothesis, not is political allegiance.
The can talk science and politics as private citizens, as scientists their obligations ends with explaining people how these questions are not scientific in nature. Which, apparently, they do with the new book.
Every question asking for meanings ("why") rather than mechanisms ("how").
I'm an atheist, I believe the only meaning that exists is what we create ourself. But that is a philosophical position, not a scientific position. There are excellent philosophical arguments for why I'm right and the theists are wrong. But they are philosophical, not scientific. Those who believe science can disprove God is as delusioned as the ID people who believe science can prove God.
Those religions that has a well-educated clergy, such as the Catholic Church, have long ago decided to leave the Emperor (science) what is his, namely the mechanisms, and leave God (religion) what is his, namely the meanings. Only, Those churches that mainly consist of in-breed hillbillies, mostly some US Protestant groupings and some Arab Sunni-Islamic groups, still want religion to describe mechanisms, despite the overwhelming evidence that religion sucks at mechanism.
In science class, don't ask why it rains, ask how it rains. Mechanism, not meanings.
Public education *should* include the limitation of science. Too many lay people see scientists as modern priests, and take our models as gospel. It is important to realize that unlike fundamentalist interpretation of religious texts, scientific laws and theories are mutable (they change whenever conflicting observations are made) and limited in scope (they are only really trustworthy within the scope of the measurements they are based on).
Much of the creationist/ID nonsense is due to people not understanding how science should be hold to different standards than religious texts. "The theory of Evolution" is very much different today than what Darwin proposed. This would have been a weakness in a religion, but is a strength for a scientific theory.
You see logic and faith as orthogonal concepts that supplement each other, rather than as competing concepts.
Or as the old Pope hold, science provides a description of how God created the world, while religion provides a description of why God created the world.
There is nothing "ambiguous" about the GPL, at least not on the context presented.
Both cases, "security by obscurity" and "keep part of the program proprietary" are simple no goes with regard to the GPL.
What "ambiguous" it really means is that some companies hope they can get away with ignoring the GPL, either directly or by finding some legal loophole.
McAfee correct that either strategy put the company at risk. Just as it puts the company to risk to ignore or circomvent the license of any proprietary software they might use.
1) Don't use any license that requires you disclose your code if you rely on obscurity for your security.
and
2) Only use code owned by others and covered by a strong copyleft in a product, if you are willing to release all the code for that product under a strong copyleft.
Things may happen the way they happen because it is God's will, or because we live in a virtual reality simulation. Both theories may very well be true. But being true doesn't mean they are worthwhile scientific theories.
Both theories have plenty of explanatory power, but zero predictive power. And how good a a scientific theory is doesn't depend on whether it is true, or how many things they explain, but how much they help us make better predictions.
You confuse the ability to make unfounded claims with the ability to make an argument.
> Which of the items on that page represent innovation, rather than purchase or copying an existing system?
A priori, all of them. You can't prove a negative, so the burden of proof is on you to show prior art for each item.
[ The common claim here that Microsoft doesn't innovate is usually followed by prior art for all counter examples. Of course the claim is nonetheless false, Microsoft Research (kind of equivalent to Google Labs) does lost of innovation, they are just rarely successfully commercialized. ]
> Oh, and you've never owned an IBM laptop. Otherwise you'd understand the durability.
Well, I managed to ruin mine. Two hours in an unpadded backpack when I was riding a bicycle was two much for it, it only survived that kind of abuse for 1½ year. So I'm more careful with my X61:-) (Actually, the X61 feels significantly less durable).
Well, my old laptop was a Thinkpad X40 (last IBM generation), which is only slightly heavier (1.1 kg). It still has a much larger screen (12") and faster CPU (1G Pentium M). Same RAM. Battery time is only about 1 hour though, so that might be the deciding factor.
Since another article claimed we had forgotten about it, Google Trends claims the eee have surpassed ThinkPad, and close to but not still on par with MacBook. If we look at Google News instead, the advantage over ThinkPad is even greater, and even "asus eee" has have more than three times the number of hits than ThinkPad, and half the hits of the MacBook.
I'd consider a position between two of the most recognized brands pretty good.
On the other hands, if we were to believe Internet statistics, Ron Paul would be elected president with the greatest margin in the history of the country.
I had the same experience, my new computer with a core 2 duo, 4 GiB ram and Vista felt much slower than mu old Pentium-M computer with 512 MiB ram and XP.
I spend the first two weeks fighting to install my software on Vista, and connect to the office net facilities. Everything was different than previous versions of MS Windows, and great care was made in the UI to hide information about what really was going on.
But after getting so far that I could start compiling, I was first amazed how fast the compiler (Cygiwn GCC) was, and the UI didn't feel so sluggish any more.
Can it be that Vista is somehow self-optimizing, so you have to use it for a couple of weeks before it runs at acceptable speed?
Apparently the new government is just as bad as the old government. Is it something in the Australian mentality that you have to be totalitarian to win an election?
As I said last time, unauthorized is not synonymous with illegal. It is even in the article, the unauthorized copies won't give legal trouble as long as you don't distribute the copies.
If possession of child pornography is illegal, the guy should be punished.
If peeking through his hard drive during repair is illegal as well, the two repairmen should be punished as well. But that should have absolutely no influence on the first case.
The law shouldn't be a game where you get a free pass just because the other side broke the rules when discovering you.
The background for the question is whether Science is a path to some kind of Truth about Life, The Universe and Everything, or if is just a collection of empirical relationships between measurements.
I'm for the second interpretation. If you seek Truth, go to a priest. We (scientists) deal only in predictions.
> In either case, I get more news off the Internet now, and from non-established sources > (e.g. not CNN, not Fox, not the NYT)..
Like/.? I'm not joking, apart from the web versions of the established news sources, I seem to get much of my news from special interest sources like/. or the site specializing in bike racing. The journalistic standards are horrible, but then again, so are they in the establish sources. They are invariably wrong about subjects I have first or second hand knowledge off. But the specialist sources tend to be closer to the primary sources for the stories, where you can get the real information.
In older science fiction novels, people could get personalized versions of the generic newspapers, with emphasis on the stuff they were interested in. Today, we create our own "personalized newspapers" by combining various specialized news sources.
You can cheat and mistakes can be made with pen and paper voting, just like with any other voting system. That is not why it is superior.
But the public can understand the process. You put you X on a piece of paper. The papers are sorted into columns after party and candidate and counted. Every step of the vote counting procedure is completely transparent to ordinary people. If someone cheats or if an error is made, it also happens in a way the public can understand.
The reliance of what is essentially "magic boxes" for the mechanical procedure must be very alienating to the voters.
[ As an aside, living in a country with proportional representation, what happens after the vote count, that is how we go from who got number of votes to who gets elected is much more convoluted, but people seems to be satisfied that the final composition of the parliament between parties represents the composition of the vote. The party that got 10% of the vote also got 10% of the seats. ]
I was forced to upgrade my work laptop from a Thinkpad X40 with 512 MiB and XP to a Thinkpad X61s with 4 GiB and Vista, as the old one broke in an accident. It did not feel like an upgrade.
1) The new computer felt much less responsive, probably due to the UI. Despite the new computer being basically a fully equipped top-of-the-line model, and the old computer being two generation behind the time.
2) The UI is significantly different, meaning I could not reuse much of what I learned from earlier incarnations of NT (4.0 and XP). And I'm not talking about the look, I did not like the look of XP, so I switched it to classic theme and could use it as 4.0.
3) The new functionality seem to assume you are either total ignorant or Vista expert, it doesn't leave much for people like me who know what an IP address is, and what DNS stands for.
4) The constant "allow or deny" pop-ups when doing anything. I can see the idea behind them (they are basically a GUI implementation of what Unix people know as sudo), but I doubt training people who don't have the same OS background to blindly type "Allow" will do much for security.
5) I never managed to get access to the files on our University's shared servers (running SAMBA), so I still have to copy files through an XP machine.
It cost me about two weeks of work time before the new computer was in a condition that I could use it for my real job, meaning the TCO is already about twice the cost of the machine.
Once I started working I loved it, mostly because I'm a programmer and compilation is way faster than on the old computer. And having finished configuring machine to the best of my ability, the Allow/Deny pop-ups are much rarer. And the UI feels faster than in the beginning, maybe I have just gotten used to it.
Nonetheless, if I could go back in time I'd advice myself to insist that the new computer was delivered with XP. I would then have had a faster and better configured machine, and I would have saved two weeks of work.
The reason I didn't was that I expected Vista to work as well as XP (except for larger memmory use, something I had plenty of), and assumed that although I didn't need any of the extra functionality today, applications would start taking advantage of it in a few years, and then it would be nice to have.
Giving detention for using unauthorized software for school work actually makes some sense, and not knowing FireFox is a lot less outrageous in the real world it would appear to the users of a nerd forum.
However it seemed to me that the kid was trying to rationally justify his decision, and the reason (as you indicate) that the detention was given as a punishment for questioning authority. That is a much more serious problem, especially if you believe one of the goals of primary school is to teach the pupils how to function in a democratic society.
> Broken analogy. The injured software author in the article is not being impersonated.
No, you just missed it (most likely deliberately, but I'll give you the benefit of doubt: The analogy didn't went on "George Lucas" as a person, but on "George Lucas" as the creator of Star Wars.
Slashdot Mirror
> ? Evolution does not have a target or a final destination. It keeps on going.
Evolution is a general concept meaning slow/gradual change, as opposed to revolution which mean sudden/large change.
Biological evolution is only one kind of evolution. Clearly, the GP wasn't talking about biological evolution when he talked about the evolution of gods.
There is a trend to limit the number of gods:
Hunter/Gathers: animism, spirits of nature, every tree and stone has its own spirit..
Agriculture: Polytheism, gods are associated with concepts, such as love, war, fertility.
City states: Monotheism, we have the omnipotent create God.
Industrialism: God is dead.
As we can't really have fewer than zero Gods, that would seem to be the endpoint.
Of course, one could argue that humanism, materialism, and liberalism makes every one of us our own god, multiplying the number again.
Most likely, there are far more members who vote Democratic than Republican. This doesn't mean that the National Academy of Science should start promoting democratic candidates in political elections.
These people who are smart enough to be atheists, and smart enough to not vote for republicans, are also smart enough to realize that these questions are not scientific in nature. The existence of God is not a scientific hypothesis, not is political allegiance.
The can talk science and politics as private citizens, as scientists their obligations ends with explaining people how these questions are not scientific in nature. Which, apparently, they do with the new book.
> So what's left in the god basket?
Every question asking for meanings ("why") rather than mechanisms ("how").
I'm an atheist, I believe the only meaning that exists is what we create ourself. But that is a philosophical position, not a scientific position. There are excellent philosophical arguments for why I'm right and the theists are wrong. But they are philosophical, not scientific. Those who believe science can disprove God is as delusioned as the ID people who believe science can prove God.
Those religions that has a well-educated clergy, such as the Catholic Church, have long ago decided to leave the Emperor (science) what is his, namely the mechanisms, and leave God (religion) what is his, namely the meanings. Only, Those churches that mainly consist of in-breed hillbillies, mostly some US Protestant groupings and some Arab Sunni-Islamic groups, still want religion to describe mechanisms, despite the overwhelming evidence that religion sucks at mechanism.
In science class, don't ask why it rains, ask how it rains. Mechanism, not meanings.
Public education *should* include the limitation of science. Too many lay people see scientists as modern priests, and take our models as gospel. It is important to realize that unlike fundamentalist interpretation of religious texts, scientific laws and theories are mutable (they change whenever conflicting observations are made) and limited in scope (they are only really trustworthy within the scope of the measurements they are based on).
Much of the creationist/ID nonsense is due to people not understanding how science should be hold to different standards than religious texts. "The theory of Evolution" is very much different today than what Darwin proposed. This would have been a weakness in a religion, but is a strength for a scientific theory.
You see logic and faith as orthogonal concepts that supplement each other, rather than as competing concepts.
Or as the old Pope hold, science provides a description of how God created the world, while religion provides a description of why God created the world.
There is nothing "ambiguous" about the GPL, at least not on the context presented.
Both cases, "security by obscurity" and "keep part of the program proprietary" are simple no goes with regard to the GPL.
What "ambiguous" it really means is that some companies hope they can get away with ignoring the GPL, either directly or by finding some legal loophole.
McAfee correct that either strategy put the company at risk. Just as it puts the company to risk to ignore or circomvent the license of any proprietary software they might use.
1) Don't use any license that requires you disclose your code if you rely on obscurity for your security.
and
2) Only use code owned by others and covered by a strong copyleft in a product, if you are willing to release all the code for that product under a strong copyleft.
It is really not that complicated.
Things may happen the way they happen because it is God's will, or because we live in a virtual reality simulation. Both theories may very well be true. But being true doesn't mean they are worthwhile scientific theories.
Both theories have plenty of explanatory power, but zero predictive power. And how good a a scientific theory is doesn't depend on whether it is true, or how many things they explain, but how much they help us make better predictions.
You confuse the ability to make unfounded claims with the ability to make an argument.
> Which of the items on that page represent innovation, rather than purchase or copying an existing system?
A priori, all of them. You can't prove a negative, so the burden of proof is on you to show prior art for each item.
[ The common claim here that Microsoft doesn't innovate is usually followed by prior art for all counter examples. Of course the claim is nonetheless false, Microsoft Research (kind of equivalent to Google Labs) does lost of innovation, they are just rarely successfully commercialized. ]
Eh, I guess I miss something, what is the point of predicting the past? Poorly?
> Oh, and you've never owned an IBM laptop. Otherwise you'd understand the durability.
:-) (Actually, the X61 feels significantly less durable).
Well, I managed to ruin mine. Two hours in an unpadded backpack when I was riding a bicycle was two much for it, it only survived that kind of abuse for 1½ year. So I'm more careful with my X61
With a large (8 cell) batery, the x40 is nearly double weight of the eee.
Well, my old laptop was a Thinkpad X40 (last IBM generation), which is only slightly heavier (1.1 kg). It still has a much larger screen (12") and faster CPU (1G Pentium M). Same RAM. Battery time is only about 1 hour though, so that might be the deciding factor.
Since another article claimed we had forgotten about it, Google Trends claims the eee have surpassed ThinkPad, and close to but not still on par with MacBook. If we look at Google News instead, the advantage over ThinkPad is even greater, and even "asus eee" has have more than three times the number of hits than ThinkPad, and half the hits of the MacBook.
I'd consider a position between two of the most recognized brands pretty good.
On the other hands, if we were to believe Internet statistics, Ron Paul would be elected president with the greatest margin in the history of the country.
I had the same experience, my new computer with a core 2 duo, 4 GiB ram and Vista felt much slower than mu old Pentium-M computer with 512 MiB ram and XP.
I spend the first two weeks fighting to install my software on Vista, and connect to the office net facilities. Everything was different than previous versions of MS Windows, and great care was made in the UI to hide information about what really was going on.
But after getting so far that I could start compiling, I was first amazed how fast the compiler (Cygiwn GCC) was, and the UI didn't feel so sluggish any more.
Can it be that Vista is somehow self-optimizing, so you have to use it for a couple of weeks before it runs at acceptable speed?
Apparently the new government is just as bad as the old government. Is it something in the Australian mentality that you have to be totalitarian to win an election?
As I said last time, unauthorized is not synonymous with illegal. It is even in the article, the unauthorized copies won't give legal trouble as long as you don't distribute the copies.
If possession of child pornography is illegal, the guy should be punished.
If peeking through his hard drive during repair is illegal as well, the two repairmen should be punished as well. But that should have absolutely no influence on the first case.
The law shouldn't be a game where you get a free pass just because the other side broke the rules when discovering you.
The background for the question is whether Science is a path to some kind of Truth about Life, The Universe and Everything, or if is just a collection of empirical relationships between measurements.
I'm for the second interpretation. If you seek Truth, go to a priest. We (scientists) deal only in predictions.
> In either case, I get more news off the Internet now, and from non-established sources
/.? I'm not joking, apart from the web versions of the established news sources, I seem to get much of my news from special interest sources like /. or the site specializing in bike racing. The journalistic standards are horrible, but then again, so are they in the establish sources. They are invariably wrong about subjects I have first or second hand knowledge off. But the specialist sources tend to be closer to the primary sources for the stories, where you can get the real information.
> (e.g. not CNN, not Fox, not the NYT)..
Like
In older science fiction novels, people could get personalized versions of the generic newspapers, with emphasis on the stuff they were interested in. Today, we create our own "personalized newspapers" by combining various specialized news sources.
You can cheat and mistakes can be made with pen and paper voting, just like with any other voting system. That is not why it is superior.
But the public can understand the process. You put you X on a piece of paper. The papers are sorted into columns after party and candidate and counted. Every step of the vote counting procedure is completely transparent to ordinary people. If someone cheats or if an error is made, it also happens in a way the public can understand.
The reliance of what is essentially "magic boxes" for the mechanical procedure must be very alienating to the voters.
[ As an aside, living in a country with proportional representation, what happens after the vote count, that is how we go from who got number of votes to who gets elected is much more convoluted, but people seems to be satisfied that the final composition of the parliament between parties represents the composition of the vote. The party that got 10% of the vote also got 10% of the seats. ]
I was forced to upgrade my work laptop from a Thinkpad X40 with 512 MiB and XP to a Thinkpad X61s with 4 GiB and Vista, as the old one broke in an accident. It did not feel like an upgrade.
1) The new computer felt much less responsive, probably due to the UI. Despite the new computer being basically a fully equipped top-of-the-line model, and the old computer being two generation behind the time.
2) The UI is significantly different, meaning I could not reuse much of what I learned from earlier incarnations of NT (4.0 and XP). And I'm not talking about the look, I did not like the look of XP, so I switched it to classic theme and could use it as 4.0.
3) The new functionality seem to assume you are either total ignorant or Vista expert, it doesn't leave much for people like me who know what an IP address is, and what DNS stands for.
4) The constant "allow or deny" pop-ups when doing anything. I can see the idea behind them (they are basically a GUI implementation of what Unix people know as sudo), but I doubt training people who don't have the same OS background to blindly type "Allow" will do much for security.
5) I never managed to get access to the files on our University's shared servers (running SAMBA), so I still have to copy files through an XP machine.
It cost me about two weeks of work time before the new computer was in a condition that I could use it for my real job, meaning the TCO is already about twice the cost of the machine.
Once I started working I loved it, mostly because I'm a programmer and compilation is way faster than on the old computer. And having finished configuring machine to the best of my ability, the Allow/Deny pop-ups are much rarer. And the UI feels faster than in the beginning, maybe I have just gotten used to it.
Nonetheless, if I could go back in time I'd advice myself to insist that the new computer was delivered with XP. I would then have had a faster and better configured machine, and I would have saved two weeks of work.
The reason I didn't was that I expected Vista to work as well as XP (except for larger memmory use, something I had plenty of), and assumed that although I didn't need any of the extra functionality today, applications would start taking advantage of it in a few years, and then it would be nice to have.
Giving detention for using unauthorized software for school work actually makes some sense, and not knowing FireFox is a lot less outrageous in the real world it would appear to the users of a nerd forum.
However it seemed to me that the kid was trying to rationally justify his decision, and the reason (as you indicate) that the detention was given as a punishment for questioning authority. That is a much more serious problem, especially if you believe one of the goals of primary school is to teach the pupils how to function in a democratic society.
> Broken analogy. The injured software author in the article is not being impersonated.
No, you just missed it (most likely deliberately, but I'll give you the benefit of doubt: The analogy didn't went on "George Lucas" as a person, but on "George Lucas" as the creator of Star Wars.
If you have to use that fancy new X11 stuff, I prefer uwm. It wastes no precious screen estate on useless "decorations".