No. AFAIK if they don't give ownership of the shares back, they get to see their company ownership grow, even if they are fired.
That's not how that works. Contracts with unvested stocks always involve, "you must work with the company until such and such date" clauses. They get fired, they lose the stocks.
Not quite correct. You're obviously using the newer "Kickoff" menu. Right-click on the "K" icon, select "Switch to Classic Menu Style", and try it again.
You can customize things? I've obviously spent far too long a time using gnome, looking for that option didn't even occur to me when I tried out KDE.
When have you really checked a detailed weather forecast before going out?
I'm a skydiver, so I live for detailed weather forecasts. "It's 78 degrees and sunny" sounds like perfect weather until you see the 30mph wind gusts or 3,000ft cloud ceiling.
On everything else, I'm with you, though. If it's not broken, don't fix it.
Everything you wrote is spot-on, except the part here about the "K". KDE is the one heavyweight Linux DE that hasn't drunk the one-UI-for-every-device kool-aid. The "K" menu is still there in the latest 4.7 release, and it isn't going anywhere.
The "K" menu no longer expands to use my screen real-estate. I click on a category, and it replaces the menu with the stuff in that category, and requires me to scroll if I have more stuff than the menu size. Compare that to the menu in gnome 2 and kde 3.5.
So... why not try KDE4? The latest KDE4.7.3 is pretty good - I would not recommend the Kubuntu spin on it... I've yet to see a "good" Kubuntu. It's not bad, but there are better choices - in particular I'm thinking of the upcoming openSUSE 12.1 (out in a few days). The KDe build there is pretty rock solid.
Regardless... Ubuntu is not just Unity... or Gnome
I have tried KDE. They made other stupid decisions when moving to 4. Like the applications menu. You click on a category and the menu stays the same size and the icons are replaced by the icons of the category you've selected. So now if you want to go back.
I don't believe Microsoft has any plans to ever sue anyone using Mono, and I absolutely don't believe it's Microsoft's responsibility to make a linux version of.NET. That said, your little link is disingenuous as you are not allowed to use that source code to create Linux packages, or really use it to create any modified version at all. Here are the relevant parts of the license under which that source is released, with additional emphasis placed by me:
The Microsoft Reference Source License (MS-RSL) is the most restrictive of the Microsoft source code licenses. The license prohibits all use of source code other than the viewing of the code for reference purposes...Microsoft commonly uses this license for developer libraries where modification is not required to make use of the source code. In these cases, the importance of transparency is based on the need for developers to more deeply understand the inner workings of the source code...The license limits the source code release to use on the Windows platform only.
The full license text, lest I be accused of taking words out of context, is here.
Ah yes, Ron Paul; the fellow who wants to shut down any federal agency not involved in killing foreigners. Education, science funding, medical care, environmental protection? Screw 'em, all we need is to be able to kill people. THAT makes for a great country: one built on the corpses of its enemies, real or imagined.
You do realize you're talking about the guy who voted against the war in Iraq and has been consistently saying we need to bring troops home and stop having overseas military bases in places that don't want us there, right?
He wants us to have defensive capabilities, but he wants to cut down on the military budget by quite a lot as well. Which I personally think is a really bad idea along with most of the other stuff he wants cut. That said, I do respect the man a hell of a lot. He knows he can't possibly win with his severely non-mainstream views. That doesn't prevent him from saying what he believes. Attack Ron Paul's proposals on their merits all you want, but you can't attack his honesty. He truly cares more about being honest than he does about winning, and that makes him a rare breed of politician, one that we truly need more of.
Yes, IIRC IQ was normed at 100 (and spanned at sd=15) in the 1940s based on US GI testing. Averages have drifted slightly down, but sd has not changed.
Uh, no. IQ is continuously normalized such that 100 is always the average, and the adjustments that need to be made have always and consistenly been to compensate for a rise in IQ, not a decrease. It's called the Flynn effect
One of the explanations for it is that, even though IQ tests try to be as culture neutral as possible, as education improves, people are more familiar with the type of questions in an IQ tests and as a result become better at answering them.
I'm a Christian. There, I said it. I've been hanging out on Slashdot for over 10 years. And I'm a Christian.
Heh. So what? The majority of slashdot readers are christians. There's a higher percentage of atheists here, but that's because there's a higher percentage of atheists among techies. That's still not a majority, you're just more likely to come across them on slashdot and get a reply.
I am a degreed engineer from one of the top private engineering schools in the country. I watch sci-fi. A lot. I believe in Evolution.
Ok.
I don't think humans evolved from pond scum OR monkeys.
What does that mean? You're commenting on how pond scum and monkeys are bad terms for the organic material in primordial earth and our primate ancestors? Or are you saying we don't come from those things? If you're saying we didn't evolve from these things, what did we evolve from? I mean, you believe in evolution, so you believe we evolved, right? Or did everything else evolve, and just not humans. Dude, that was confusing.
I believe in God. I believe he is on our side and is in favor of us. I believe God made the universe.
That's your prerogative, it's fine. I don't have a beef with that.
I believe in the Bible.
Literally? Because we have scientific evidence that proves beyond the shadow of a doubt the Bible is not literally true. If you want to believe they are allegories, you are free to believe that. If you want to believe in the literal creation story, the flood, and all that....well, you're being intellectually dishonest with yourself by ignoring evidence that goes against your beliefs.
I know strict interpretation of the Bible says the earth is 6000 years old. I wasn't there then, I'm not going to argue about it.
There are other dating methods, you don't need to be there. It's like watching one of the sci-fi movies you like and going, "they say they used cgi for the special effects, but I wasn't there for the filming. I'm not going to argue whether this is real or not."
As a Christian, an Engineer and a Technologist I point to the spooky stuff in Quantum Physics as an olive branch between the two camps.
"I don't understand Quantum Physics, so I think God has something to do with it." Pointing out things you don't understand doesn't prove it can't be understood. Same goes for things nobody understands. We understand a whole lot more about the universe now than we did 200 years ago, and we'll understand a whole lot more 200 years from now.
There is a God, and we don't understand enough things yet to make science agree with that.
If you want to take the existence of God as an axiom, you are completely free to do so. Just understand that you've done that. You've made a choice and said, "I believe God exists no matter what. I take it on faith that it's true." This prevents you from using stupid arguments trying to prove the existence of God, and it prevents others from trying to use stupid arguments to try to prove God doesn't exist. It's an unfalsifiable concept, it's not the realm of science. Always believe on evidence first. For everything else, you can have faith or not. Just don't try to force the rest of us to share your faith, and we'll get along fine. If anyone tries to force their lack of faith on you, I'll side with you on that. Even if I don't share your faith, I believe you have the right to lead the life you want according to the principles you hold dear.
However, it is a shame that the person at the receiving end of the criticism wasn't given a chance to present his version of things, and now that he has, it has still not received the same attention that the original controversy did here on slashdot.
Not really, no. What slashdot is attacking is that it's justifiable, under any circumstances, to censor the video. I'm still of the opinion that it isn't. If Haught hadn't tried to do so, everyone would see the video, decide Coyne is a bad debater, and move on. Anytime you take the stance, "don't let people see the data and form their own opinions", you should be burned. It's a far more important issue than the debate itself.
How about you cite something enlightening... If it's more advanced than the AC above suggested, you might change my mind, but I am seriously skeptical. I've read enough on sociology and political science to say that those fields are hopeless as far as hard science goes. Maybe there's something special about psychology that we've all missed...
The only reason it's difficult to reproduce some psychology experiments is because of ethical concerns. There's nothing about the data being measured or the methodology used that is unscientific. I mean, I'm sure you can find bad experiments out there, but you can say that about any field, what you consider to be a hard science included. I'm an EE, and I've read some pretty bad papers in my field.
Might want to go back and read it again, more carefully. Consult a good commentary if you're confused.
I'd like to hear how he's wrong.
First God lies to them:
And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
They ate from it, and it didn't kill them. Some people argue that it was now possible for them to die because God then expelled them from Eden, but that's like me telling you, "don't read that book, or you will die." You read the book, and then I shoot you. The book didn't kill you, I killed you because of arbitrary rules I created about not wanting you to have the knowledge in that book. If I thought that the knowledge was dangerous and I wanted to protect you from that knowledge, I'd hide the damn book, but it was clearly more important to just have your blind obedience. I'm going to dangle this in front of you, but you can't touch it, because I said so.
Then he punished them:
To the woman He said:
“I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception;
In pain you shall bring forth children;
Your desire shall be for your husband,
And he shall rule over you.” 17 Then to Adam He said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’:
“ Cursed is the ground for your sake;
In toil you shall eat of it
All the days of your life.
18 Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you,
And you shall eat the herb of the field.
19 In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread
Till you return to the ground,
For out of it you were taken;
For dust you are,
And to dust you shall return.”
And finally, he cast them out because they had become more like God, and to prevent them from becoming more like God and living forever:
Then the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”— 23 therefore the LORD God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. 24 So He drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.
Why don't you explain where exactly we're wrong with a literal interpretation of Genesis?
Except that those who say the Universe popped into being 13.7 billion years ago and that life evolved naturally over the period of approx. 4 billion years have literally mountains of evidence to back up their claims.
And no evidence to suggest that a god didn't do this.
There are so many things wrong here that I'm not entirely sure where to start.
First, nobody says "the Universe popped into being 13.7 billion years ago." All cosmologists say was that the universe was all there, but was very small and very dense 13.7 billion years ago. It expanded into what it currently is. Saying that the universe was "created" there implies that you can point to a time, say 15 billion years ago, when there was no universe. You can't do that, because there's no such thing as 15 billion years ago. Time is not constant, it is relative, you may have heard of the theory. Somebody once told me Hawking put it this way in one of his books: to ask what was there before the Big Bang is as meaningful as asking what is North of the North Pole. There was never a point in time without a universe.
Second, your situation brings in the real version of Occam's Razor, not the whole layman "the simplest explanation is the right one" that people like to quote. Occam's Razor says nothing about correctness. It says that if you have two different theories that give the exact same predictions, there's zero reason to pick the one with more variables. Unless more variables are necessary to explain the measure data, assume they don't exist. I give you a black box and ask you to figure out what it does. You give it an input, "2" and you get back "4". You give it an input "7" and it gives you back "9". You give it an input "11" and it gives you back "13". So you come up with a theory. "The black box adds 2 to the input given." I come up with a separate theory. "No, the black box first adds 5, and then it subtracts 3 from the input." Both our theories give correct predictions, mine has an additional operation. What's actually happening inside the black box? Who cares? That's not the domain of science, science only deals with what you can measure. Until you find some way of measuring what's going on inside the black box, we should all agree that the "+2 theory" correctly predicts the behavior of the box.
The same concept, applied to your example: if we all agree the universe is 13.7 billion years old and that life evolved, who cares if something directed it? Unless you can point to some measurement you can take that would give different results with God than without God, you don't add the extra variable of God. That's why the burden is on those that claim the existence of God.
In one hour flight I could do it twice or more the way from my house to work and back. That with the fact of being quiet and possibly take up less space than a car when saved creates an interesting way to replace a car
Can you? Your scenario is exactly where I was going with it. The flying car is approaching us and all that. However, that's only assuming the thing moves fast enough that you could make it to work in back in a reasonable time. If we're talking about an hour's flight hovering around for fun, that's still incredibly cool in that it makes hobby flying more accessible to people, but it's not going to change the world.
By the same twisted logic, Turbo Pascal itself was bloatware, and I thought it produced horribly slow and big code. Assemblers were where the real efficiency lay, and they were a lot smaller than 39K.
Turbo Pascal optimized compilation speed and it did this partly by trading off optimizations for the executable, which is why it produced larger and slower code than other compilers. That said, as noted in the article, the compilation optimization was so extreme that it was faster than assemblers. This was worth the cost for developers.
I agree with your point to a certain extent. Comparing program sizes of today with program sizes from 1986 is just stupid. Programs do more now, and I wouldn't want to trade that for a smaller disk size or memory footprint. Hard drives and RAM are cheap now. That said, saying that not everything is bloat is a far cry from saying there's no bloat. Turbo Pascal was a heavily optimized program (just not optimized in the areas you mentioned, but that was a tradeoff they were aware of), and we just don't see people giving much thought to optimization of any kind these days. As an example, I tried out SpiderOak the other day, and no released product should ever have an interface that runs that slow, ever. There's no freaking excuse.
Note for the compression ratio, smaller percentage is better. ALAC is slightly better than FLAC. But it's so marginal it makes no difference.
Then again, the table also said that compression ratios are determined by the codec's default settings, and that flac scored "very good" in flexibility whereas apple scored "bad" (flexibility being defined as number of options given to the user). It could be that you could tweak flac's settings for slower encoding / decoing speed and better compression ratio.
And yes, they're close enough that it doesn't matter, so the point is moot.
I don't know any non-nerd who uses Vorbis or FLAC.
And why do we care what non-nerds do?
I mean, this isn't a "we're more important than everybody else" thing. It's just that if we have better technical alternatives, and we're the type of people who are informed about such alternatives, why would make a decision to use an inferior format? "What is my neighbor using for a router" was not a thought that crossed through my mind when I was deciding which one to purchase, I'm not sure I understand why it should be a factor when I pick which codec to rip my music to. If Apple doesn't want to play ball and support my format of choice, that's their right, and I won't purchase their device. No, I'm obviously not hurting them, but that's not my goal when deciding not to purchase an iPod. My goal is to purchase a freaking music player that supports all the music I have without re-encoding. That includes mp3, aac, and yes, vorbis and flac. It doesn't include wma right now, but I'd still like the option in the hardware. Who knows if I'll get something in wma format for some reason in the future?
What they lack, is a strong personality like Steve Jobs in their leadership, who had no issues playing hardball with anyone, anytime.
Uh...from what I hear, they did play hardball. And Stars said, "ok, bye".
The movie industry saw what happened to the music industry, and their strategy to a really powerful player is to make them less powerful by diminishing their library. Hulu and Youtube are just entering the arena now, but eventually what they want is for you to be completely unable to get everything you want from a single provider for $8. You'll have to pay $8 to netflix in order to stream Warner Brothers movies, pay $8 to hulu to stream things Stars has the rights to, pay $8 to youtube to stream HBO movies, etc, etc...
Basically, they want to turn the streaming service into cable.
Steve Jobs was a bit of an unusual case, because the man had a brand unlike almost any other corporate executive in the United States. Think about how he took most of Apple's engineering staff off of MacBook upgrades and OS X development to create the iPhone. It worked, and created Apple its most profitable product line ever. But what other person, at what other large company, has the political capital to sacrifice development of an existing profitable product line for an unknown?
Jobs did that back when Apple had less resources too. He pretty much completely killed the Apple II team to make the Macintosh team. He just got his best people, and put them to work on what he thought was the future product. Take this story for example. Eventually, the people who remained on the Apple II team were only the engineers he didn't have much confidence on (and by "eventually" I mean before the Macintosh got released, not after the user base for the Mac surpassed the Apple II). Relevant quote:
"No, you're just wasting your time with that! Who cares about the Apple II? The Apple II will be dead in a few years. Your OS will be obsolete before it's finished. The Macintosh is the future of Apple, and you're going to start on it now!".
With that, he walked over to my desk, found the power cord to my Apple II, and gave it a sharp tug, pulling it out of the socket, causing my machine to lose power and the code I was working on to vanish. He unplugged my monitor and put it on top of the computer, and then picked both of them up and started walking away. "Come with me. I'm going to take you to your new desk."
Jobs was an asshole in a lot of ways, but it's undeniable that his driven attitude was responsible for his successes. He didn't play it safe, he put his faith in the next product and went ahead full steam. If it doesn't work out, drop the project without a second thought and move on.
Do I mind if an individual takes a picture of my house? No. Do I mind if he posts it on the internet for the world to see? Probably not. Do I mind if he posts it on the internet along with my address and GPS coordinates? Hmm, not so sure I am ok with this. Do I mind if he posts it on the internet along with my address, GPS coordinates, and name? Hey! WTF are you doing?
Each one of those things by itself may not be a problem, but the more information you aggregate the more of a problem it is. And Google seems intent on aggregating every bit of information they can get.
Actually, no. The only thing that is relevant is the method by which the information was acquired. Whether I like my picture taken and posted on the net is irrelevant. Was the picture taken in a public place? If so, if I don't like it, that's my problem, I don't have the right to demand others to stop taking pictures in public places. Was it taken from my living room? You need my permission.
The same applies for all the other stuff including GPS coordinates, address, and name. How did they get the info? Was it public information, scraped from info you made public yourself? Well, then they have a right to the info. Did they ask your bank for information? Then that's not cool.
Am I missing your point? The source code for Gingerbread is, and has been, available. Sure.
The article is talking about Ice Cream Sandwich.
Yes, because you didn't read the full post. It wasn't even that long, but here's the relevant part: We plan to release the source for the recently-announced Ice Cream Sandwich soon, once it’s available on devices.
I am an android developer fulltime. The UI builder in Eclipse (which is the one that comes with the SDK) is crap. Just plain crap. So what you end up having to do, is, to edit the XML manually, which is cumbersome and unintuitive.
Developers have different preferences. I readily admit that I've only played with iPhone and Android development, but I am a full-time windows developer, and I deal with.net and xaml all day long. I end up editing the xaml manually, but I don't find it cumbersome and unintuitive. Frankly, I find Interface Builder cumbersome.
After I've placed a combo box on a screen, I want to bind the selected item to a property. The editing xaml manually method is to click on the combo box to take you to its ComboBox definition tag in the xaml, and add the attribute:
SelectedItem="{Binding TheSelectedItem}"
Where "TheSelectedItem" is the property name in the object set as the data context. The Apple method is more like, "ok, I need to find the menu item that does binding, click on that, then click on the combo box, and drag the arrow to the objective c file that contains the class description, then select the attribute I wish to bind and the variable name I want to bind to."
Again, I'm not going to say that one method is better than the other, because I know people have different preferences, and I bet you can be pretty proficient if you know your way around interface builder better than I do. That said, I can tell you that my personal preference is for editing the xml manually.
Slashdot Mirror
No. AFAIK if they don't give ownership of the shares back, they get to see their company ownership grow, even if they are fired.
That's not how that works. Contracts with unvested stocks always involve, "you must work with the company until such and such date" clauses. They get fired, they lose the stocks.
So yeah, sue the bastards.
Not quite correct. You're obviously using the newer "Kickoff" menu. Right-click on the "K" icon, select "Switch to Classic Menu Style", and try it again.
You can customize things? I've obviously spent far too long a time using gnome, looking for that option didn't even occur to me when I tried out KDE.
You woudl rather have the screen taken up by endlessly cascading menus?
Yes. Therefore, I can see the whole menu even if I'm not in a particular category. I have that screen real-estate, so why not use it?
Then use a DE that provides that like Fluxbox
Right...I don't use KDE. I'm explaining one of the reasons why I dislike KDE and use other alternatives.
When have you really checked a detailed weather forecast before going out?
I'm a skydiver, so I live for detailed weather forecasts. "It's 78 degrees and sunny" sounds like perfect weather until you see the 30mph wind gusts or 3,000ft cloud ceiling.
On everything else, I'm with you, though. If it's not broken, don't fix it.
Everything you wrote is spot-on, except the part here about the "K". KDE is the one heavyweight Linux DE that hasn't drunk the one-UI-for-every-device kool-aid. The "K" menu is still there in the latest 4.7 release, and it isn't going anywhere.
The "K" menu no longer expands to use my screen real-estate. I click on a category, and it replaces the menu with the stuff in that category, and requires me to scroll if I have more stuff than the menu size. Compare that to the menu in gnome 2 and kde 3.5.
So... why not try KDE4? The latest KDE4.7.3 is pretty good - I would not recommend the Kubuntu spin on it... I've yet to see a "good" Kubuntu. It's not bad, but there are better choices - in particular I'm thinking of the upcoming openSUSE 12.1 (out in a few days). The KDe build there is pretty rock solid.
Regardless... Ubuntu is not just Unity... or Gnome
I have tried KDE. They made other stupid decisions when moving to 4. Like the applications menu. You click on a category and the menu stays the same size and the icons are replaced by the icons of the category you've selected. So now if you want to go back.
I have a large screen. Use that space.
It is now number 2 behind mint! Which "is an Ubuntu-based distribution"
What's your point? Debian is below Ubuntu, and Ubuntu is a Debian-based distribution.
Normally the generic form is a source-code tarball
Have fun.
I don't believe Microsoft has any plans to ever sue anyone using Mono, and I absolutely don't believe it's Microsoft's responsibility to make a linux version of .NET. That said, your little link is disingenuous as you are not allowed to use that source code to create Linux packages, or really use it to create any modified version at all. Here are the relevant parts of the license under which that source is released, with additional emphasis placed by me:
The Microsoft Reference Source License (MS-RSL) is the most restrictive of the Microsoft source code licenses. The license prohibits all use of source code other than the viewing of the code for reference purposes...Microsoft commonly uses this license for developer libraries where modification is not required to make use of the source code. In these cases, the importance of transparency is based on the need for developers to more deeply understand the inner workings of the source code...The license limits the source code release to use on the Windows platform only.
The full license text, lest I be accused of taking words out of context, is here.
Ah yes, Ron Paul; the fellow who wants to shut down any federal agency not involved in killing foreigners. Education, science funding, medical care, environmental protection? Screw 'em, all we need is to be able to kill people. THAT makes for a great country: one built on the corpses of its enemies, real or imagined.
You do realize you're talking about the guy who voted against the war in Iraq and has been consistently saying we need to bring troops home and stop having overseas military bases in places that don't want us there, right?
He wants us to have defensive capabilities, but he wants to cut down on the military budget by quite a lot as well. Which I personally think is a really bad idea along with most of the other stuff he wants cut. That said, I do respect the man a hell of a lot. He knows he can't possibly win with his severely non-mainstream views. That doesn't prevent him from saying what he believes. Attack Ron Paul's proposals on their merits all you want, but you can't attack his honesty. He truly cares more about being honest than he does about winning, and that makes him a rare breed of politician, one that we truly need more of.
Yes, IIRC IQ was normed at 100 (and spanned at sd=15) in the 1940s based on US GI testing. Averages have drifted slightly down, but sd has not changed.
Uh, no. IQ is continuously normalized such that 100 is always the average, and the adjustments that need to be made have always and consistenly been to compensate for a rise in IQ, not a decrease. It's called the Flynn effect
One of the explanations for it is that, even though IQ tests try to be as culture neutral as possible, as education improves, people are more familiar with the type of questions in an IQ tests and as a result become better at answering them.
I'm a Christian. There, I said it. I've been hanging out on Slashdot for over 10 years. And I'm a Christian.
Heh. So what? The majority of slashdot readers are christians. There's a higher percentage of atheists here, but that's because there's a higher percentage of atheists among techies. That's still not a majority, you're just more likely to come across them on slashdot and get a reply.
I am a degreed engineer from one of the top private engineering schools in the country. I watch sci-fi. A lot. I believe in Evolution.
Ok.
I don't think humans evolved from pond scum OR monkeys.
What does that mean? You're commenting on how pond scum and monkeys are bad terms for the organic material in primordial earth and our primate ancestors? Or are you saying we don't come from those things? If you're saying we didn't evolve from these things, what did we evolve from? I mean, you believe in evolution, so you believe we evolved, right? Or did everything else evolve, and just not humans. Dude, that was confusing.
I believe in God. I believe he is on our side and is in favor of us. I believe God made the universe.
That's your prerogative, it's fine. I don't have a beef with that.
I believe in the Bible.
Literally? Because we have scientific evidence that proves beyond the shadow of a doubt the Bible is not literally true. If you want to believe they are allegories, you are free to believe that. If you want to believe in the literal creation story, the flood, and all that....well, you're being intellectually dishonest with yourself by ignoring evidence that goes against your beliefs.
I know strict interpretation of the Bible says the earth is 6000 years old. I wasn't there then, I'm not going to argue about it.
There are other dating methods, you don't need to be there. It's like watching one of the sci-fi movies you like and going, "they say they used cgi for the special effects, but I wasn't there for the filming. I'm not going to argue whether this is real or not."
As a Christian, an Engineer and a Technologist I point to the spooky stuff in Quantum Physics as an olive branch between the two camps.
"I don't understand Quantum Physics, so I think God has something to do with it." Pointing out things you don't understand doesn't prove it can't be understood. Same goes for things nobody understands. We understand a whole lot more about the universe now than we did 200 years ago, and we'll understand a whole lot more 200 years from now.
There is a God, and we don't understand enough things yet to make science agree with that.
If you want to take the existence of God as an axiom, you are completely free to do so. Just understand that you've done that. You've made a choice and said, "I believe God exists no matter what. I take it on faith that it's true." This prevents you from using stupid arguments trying to prove the existence of God, and it prevents others from trying to use stupid arguments to try to prove God doesn't exist. It's an unfalsifiable concept, it's not the realm of science. Always believe on evidence first. For everything else, you can have faith or not. Just don't try to force the rest of us to share your faith, and we'll get along fine. If anyone tries to force their lack of faith on you, I'll side with you on that. Even if I don't share your faith, I believe you have the right to lead the life you want according to the principles you hold dear.
However, it is a shame that the person at the receiving end of the criticism wasn't given a chance to present his version of things, and now that he has, it has still not received the same attention that the original controversy did here on slashdot.
Not really, no. What slashdot is attacking is that it's justifiable, under any circumstances, to censor the video. I'm still of the opinion that it isn't. If Haught hadn't tried to do so, everyone would see the video, decide Coyne is a bad debater, and move on. Anytime you take the stance, "don't let people see the data and form their own opinions", you should be burned. It's a far more important issue than the debate itself.
How about you cite something enlightening... If it's more advanced than the AC above suggested, you might change my mind, but I am seriously skeptical. I've read enough on sociology and political science to say that those fields are hopeless as far as hard science goes. Maybe there's something special about psychology that we've all missed...
How about the classics?
On obedience to authority figures
On conditioning
And, of course, the Pit of Despair.
The only reason it's difficult to reproduce some psychology experiments is because of ethical concerns. There's nothing about the data being measured or the methodology used that is unscientific. I mean, I'm sure you can find bad experiments out there, but you can say that about any field, what you consider to be a hard science included. I'm an EE, and I've read some pretty bad papers in my field.
Might want to go back and read it again, more carefully. Consult a good commentary if you're confused.
I'd like to hear how he's wrong.
First God lies to them:
And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
They ate from it, and it didn't kill them. Some people argue that it was now possible for them to die because God then expelled them from Eden, but that's like me telling you, "don't read that book, or you will die." You read the book, and then I shoot you. The book didn't kill you, I killed you because of arbitrary rules I created about not wanting you to have the knowledge in that book. If I thought that the knowledge was dangerous and I wanted to protect you from that knowledge, I'd hide the damn book, but it was clearly more important to just have your blind obedience. I'm going to dangle this in front of you, but you can't touch it, because I said so.
Then he punished them:
To the woman He said:
“I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception;
In pain you shall bring forth children;
Your desire shall be for your husband,
And he shall rule over you.”
17 Then to Adam He said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’:
“ Cursed is the ground for your sake;
In toil you shall eat of it
All the days of your life.
18 Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you,
And you shall eat the herb of the field.
19 In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread
Till you return to the ground,
For out of it you were taken;
For dust you are,
And to dust you shall return.”
And finally, he cast them out because they had become more like God, and to prevent them from becoming more like God and living forever:
Then the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”— 23 therefore the LORD God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. 24 So He drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.
Why don't you explain where exactly we're wrong with a literal interpretation of Genesis?
Except that those who say the Universe popped into being 13.7 billion years ago and that life evolved naturally over the period of approx. 4 billion years have literally mountains of evidence to back up their claims.
And no evidence to suggest that a god didn't do this.
There are so many things wrong here that I'm not entirely sure where to start.
First, nobody says "the Universe popped into being 13.7 billion years ago." All cosmologists say was that the universe was all there, but was very small and very dense 13.7 billion years ago. It expanded into what it currently is. Saying that the universe was "created" there implies that you can point to a time, say 15 billion years ago, when there was no universe. You can't do that, because there's no such thing as 15 billion years ago. Time is not constant, it is relative, you may have heard of the theory. Somebody once told me Hawking put it this way in one of his books: to ask what was there before the Big Bang is as meaningful as asking what is North of the North Pole. There was never a point in time without a universe.
Second, your situation brings in the real version of Occam's Razor, not the whole layman "the simplest explanation is the right one" that people like to quote. Occam's Razor says nothing about correctness. It says that if you have two different theories that give the exact same predictions, there's zero reason to pick the one with more variables. Unless more variables are necessary to explain the measure data, assume they don't exist. I give you a black box and ask you to figure out what it does. You give it an input, "2" and you get back "4". You give it an input "7" and it gives you back "9". You give it an input "11" and it gives you back "13". So you come up with a theory. "The black box adds 2 to the input given." I come up with a separate theory. "No, the black box first adds 5, and then it subtracts 3 from the input." Both our theories give correct predictions, mine has an additional operation. What's actually happening inside the black box? Who cares? That's not the domain of science, science only deals with what you can measure. Until you find some way of measuring what's going on inside the black box, we should all agree that the "+2 theory" correctly predicts the behavior of the box.
The same concept, applied to your example: if we all agree the universe is 13.7 billion years old and that life evolved, who cares if something directed it? Unless you can point to some measurement you can take that would give different results with God than without God, you don't add the extra variable of God. That's why the burden is on those that claim the existence of God.
In one hour flight I could do it twice or more the way from my house to work and back. That with the fact of being quiet and possibly take up less space than a car when saved creates an interesting way to replace a car
Can you? Your scenario is exactly where I was going with it. The flying car is approaching us and all that. However, that's only assuming the thing moves fast enough that you could make it to work in back in a reasonable time. If we're talking about an hour's flight hovering around for fun, that's still incredibly cool in that it makes hobby flying more accessible to people, but it's not going to change the world.
Damn that's economical!
Depends on how far you can travel in 1 hour of flight...
By the same twisted logic, Turbo Pascal itself was bloatware, and I thought it produced horribly slow and big code. Assemblers were where the real efficiency lay, and they were a lot smaller than 39K.
Turbo Pascal optimized compilation speed and it did this partly by trading off optimizations for the executable, which is why it produced larger and slower code than other compilers. That said, as noted in the article, the compilation optimization was so extreme that it was faster than assemblers. This was worth the cost for developers.
I agree with your point to a certain extent. Comparing program sizes of today with program sizes from 1986 is just stupid. Programs do more now, and I wouldn't want to trade that for a smaller disk size or memory footprint. Hard drives and RAM are cheap now. That said, saying that not everything is bloat is a far cry from saying there's no bloat. Turbo Pascal was a heavily optimized program (just not optimized in the areas you mentioned, but that was a tradeoff they were aware of), and we just don't see people giving much thought to optimization of any kind these days. As an example, I tried out SpiderOak the other day, and no released product should ever have an interface that runs that slow, ever. There's no freaking excuse.
It seems like FLAC has a slight compression edge
Not according to this table.
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossless_comparison
Note for the compression ratio, smaller percentage is better. ALAC is slightly better than FLAC. But it's so marginal it makes no difference.
Then again, the table also said that compression ratios are determined by the codec's default settings, and that flac scored "very good" in flexibility whereas apple scored "bad" (flexibility being defined as number of options given to the user). It could be that you could tweak flac's settings for slower encoding / decoing speed and better compression ratio.
And yes, they're close enough that it doesn't matter, so the point is moot.
I don't know any non-nerd who uses Vorbis or FLAC.
And why do we care what non-nerds do?
I mean, this isn't a "we're more important than everybody else" thing. It's just that if we have better technical alternatives, and we're the type of people who are informed about such alternatives, why would make a decision to use an inferior format? "What is my neighbor using for a router" was not a thought that crossed through my mind when I was deciding which one to purchase, I'm not sure I understand why it should be a factor when I pick which codec to rip my music to. If Apple doesn't want to play ball and support my format of choice, that's their right, and I won't purchase their device. No, I'm obviously not hurting them, but that's not my goal when deciding not to purchase an iPod. My goal is to purchase a freaking music player that supports all the music I have without re-encoding. That includes mp3, aac, and yes, vorbis and flac. It doesn't include wma right now, but I'd still like the option in the hardware. Who knows if I'll get something in wma format for some reason in the future?
What they lack, is a strong personality like Steve Jobs in their leadership, who had no issues playing hardball with anyone, anytime.
Uh...from what I hear, they did play hardball. And Stars said, "ok, bye".
The movie industry saw what happened to the music industry, and their strategy to a really powerful player is to make them less powerful by diminishing their library. Hulu and Youtube are just entering the arena now, but eventually what they want is for you to be completely unable to get everything you want from a single provider for $8. You'll have to pay $8 to netflix in order to stream Warner Brothers movies, pay $8 to hulu to stream things Stars has the rights to, pay $8 to youtube to stream HBO movies, etc, etc...
Basically, they want to turn the streaming service into cable.
Steve Jobs was a bit of an unusual case, because the man had a brand unlike almost any other corporate executive in the United States. Think about how he took most of Apple's engineering staff off of MacBook upgrades and OS X development to create the iPhone. It worked, and created Apple its most profitable product line ever. But what other person, at what other large company, has the political capital to sacrifice development of an existing profitable product line for an unknown?
Jobs did that back when Apple had less resources too. He pretty much completely killed the Apple II team to make the Macintosh team. He just got his best people, and put them to work on what he thought was the future product. Take this story for example. Eventually, the people who remained on the Apple II team were only the engineers he didn't have much confidence on (and by "eventually" I mean before the Macintosh got released, not after the user base for the Mac surpassed the Apple II). Relevant quote:
"No, you're just wasting your time with that! Who cares about the Apple II? The Apple II will be dead in a few years. Your OS will be obsolete before it's finished. The Macintosh is the future of Apple, and you're going to start on it now!".
With that, he walked over to my desk, found the power cord to my Apple II, and gave it a sharp tug, pulling it out of the socket, causing my machine to lose power and the code I was working on to vanish. He unplugged my monitor and put it on top of the computer, and then picked both of them up and started walking away. "Come with me. I'm going to take you to your new desk."
Jobs was an asshole in a lot of ways, but it's undeniable that his driven attitude was responsible for his successes. He didn't play it safe, he put his faith in the next product and went ahead full steam. If it doesn't work out, drop the project without a second thought and move on.
Do I mind if an individual takes a picture of my house? No.
Do I mind if he posts it on the internet for the world to see? Probably not.
Do I mind if he posts it on the internet along with my address and GPS coordinates? Hmm, not so sure I am ok with this.
Do I mind if he posts it on the internet along with my address, GPS coordinates, and name? Hey! WTF are you doing?
Each one of those things by itself may not be a problem, but the more information you aggregate the more of a problem it is. And Google seems intent on aggregating every bit of information they can get.
Actually, no. The only thing that is relevant is the method by which the information was acquired. Whether I like my picture taken and posted on the net is irrelevant. Was the picture taken in a public place? If so, if I don't like it, that's my problem, I don't have the right to demand others to stop taking pictures in public places. Was it taken from my living room? You need my permission.
The same applies for all the other stuff including GPS coordinates, address, and name. How did they get the info? Was it public information, scraped from info you made public yourself? Well, then they have a right to the info. Did they ask your bank for information? Then that's not cool.
Am I missing your point? The source code for Gingerbread is, and has been, available. Sure.
The article is talking about Ice Cream Sandwich.
Yes, because you didn't read the full post. It wasn't even that long, but here's the relevant part: We plan to release the source for the recently-announced Ice Cream Sandwich soon, once it’s available on devices.
I am an android developer fulltime. The UI builder in Eclipse (which is the one that comes with the SDK) is crap. Just plain crap.
So what you end up having to do, is, to edit the XML manually, which is cumbersome and unintuitive.
Developers have different preferences. I readily admit that I've only played with iPhone and Android development, but I am a full-time windows developer, and I deal with .net and xaml all day long. I end up editing the xaml manually, but I don't find it cumbersome and unintuitive. Frankly, I find Interface Builder cumbersome.
After I've placed a combo box on a screen, I want to bind the selected item to a property. The editing xaml manually method is to click on the combo box to take you to its ComboBox definition tag in the xaml, and add the attribute:
SelectedItem="{Binding TheSelectedItem}"
Where "TheSelectedItem" is the property name in the object set as the data context. The Apple method is more like, "ok, I need to find the menu item that does binding, click on that, then click on the combo box, and drag the arrow to the objective c file that contains the class description, then select the attribute I wish to bind and the variable name I want to bind to."
Again, I'm not going to say that one method is better than the other, because I know people have different preferences, and I bet you can be pretty proficient if you know your way around interface builder better than I do. That said, I can tell you that my personal preference is for editing the xml manually.