I know practicing scientists in biological fields who are atheists and do not give credence to any of the prevailing theories of evolution. Really, I think it's only in the U.S. that the issue is so politicized that failure to conform to the prevailing academic dogma is fatal to a scientific career.
> a lot of christians believe humans have a soul and that animals do not. For that to be true you > need some divine intervention in the evolutionary process to grant humans a soul once they become > human
I don't get that reasoning. I'm a Christian, in most worldviews, but I don't see any reason why the soul can't be an emergent property which can only arise at a certain level of complexity of consciousness. Nor do I see why the medieval adaptation of the primitive Hebrew concept of "nephesh" to fit into what was then already a millenium-old greek metaphysical system should constrain my understanding of reality.
So your point is that vendors sell crap? Whoa, who wudda thunk it?
I just stopped buying the consumer crap because of this behaviour. I send the extra money I save to South-east Asia, and I estimate that I've saved over 2000 lives so far, just by telecommuting and downloading all my entertainment for the past ten years.
Mono might converge, given infinite time, on 5% of the.NET API, but it's still not nearly so xplat as JVM, which is approximately universally available.
C# is not now and never will be a cross-platform development environment. It's a nice, useful language, and the class library is vast beyond the dreams of avarice, but to choose to deliver a project in C# is to bind that project forever and irrevocably to the.NET platform. I'd prefer to support more than that. My code wants to live. Win16 is dead, Win32 is dying in the ICU, COM is being denied hydration. I'm guessing.NET will have 5 more years before Microsoft decides to deprecate it, and all that code will become legacy.
My Java 1.1 applications from 1998 are still producing results for customers on MacOSX, Win98/ME, NT 4.0, dozens if not hundreds of Linux distributions, Solaris versions from 7 through 10, and God alone knows what else. Thankfully, I don't need to worry about it because it just works. And I can still fix bugs or add features using 2005 free state-of-the-art development tools, while maintaining that broad user base.
Does that come at a cost? Certainly, but the benefits overwhelm those costs by orders of magnitude. Now you know why I'm a Java "fanboi": It's the bottom-line, silly.
You seem to have overlooked the fact that the suit was settled in Sun's favor because Microsoft violated its licensing terms in an effort to break the cross-platform capability of Java.
If you consider defending victims against murder to be immoral, I think your vocabulary is very idiosyncratic. There is nothing immoral about using deadly force to prevent a deadly crime. If I were to refuse to save a life because I would have to use proprietary software to do it, that would be immoral.
Yes, it is important to compare apples to apples. When I load OO Calc, it takes less than two seconds to start. I have Java turned off, because I don't need it. When I load Excel, Java isn't an option, so any comparison in start-up times has to compare both systems without the feature set supported by Java, otherwise I am comparing the start-up time of a system configured to include Java extensions with one configured not to include Java extensions, which is inherently unfair. On my system, OO Calc loads faster than Excel. That's just a fact.
Re:Bloat? Don't talk to me about bloat...
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 1
Eighty Megabytes and Constantly Swapping.
Emacs grows to fit the available space. Or at least it did when it was still growing. It seems all the competent hackers have lost interest, because everybody has been trained not to understand lisp.
It is capable of eliminating the ability to sell software without source code for a profit, and will do so in time. Some of us don't buy closed-source software because we consider it immoral to so do, barring some overriding need, and are willing to pay in money, features and even time in order to avoid it.
Obviously hurricanes are particle accellerators. The wind consists of small particles called "molecules", which hurricanes accellerate to speeds in excess of 100 knots. And yes, hurricanes are also characterized by separation of charge. I find it difficult to imagine how anyone could fail to recognize these obvious facts.
Perhaps we should think of them rather as colored holes, and employ perichromicon and apochromicon?
Re:Watch a little more closely ...
on
Deep in the Core
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· Score: 1
Whereas, among arrogant fools the use of dismissive ad hominem is held in the highest regard, eh?
Re:Watch a little more closely ...
on
Deep in the Core
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· Score: 1
You have a fairly idiosyncratic definition of a black hole, then. I think the term is generally taken to refer to a density singularity, where the escape velocity of a mass exceeds the speed of light, creating and event horizon beyond which no signal can escape. That's a much stronger claim than "something heavy that you can't see", like my obese cousin Albert in Idaho.
Re:Watch a little more closely ...
on
Deep in the Core
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Yeah, but since the star S2 is so much heavier than tiny Pluto (not even a planet maybe, but just an asteroid), therefore S2 falls much faster than Pluto. You can reproduce this effect easily at home. Drop a quarter from one hand at the same time that you drop a tissue from the other. Now imagine how much faster a star would fall! And of course, this proves that there is a hole at the center of the gravity, since you can't fall unless there's a hole to fall into.
The only justification which has ever been offered for the establishment of patents and copyrights is to promote progress in the useful arts. That justification can be compared to the social cost of a patent by means of a consequential utilitarian calculus, in the manner of epidemiology: Simply, generate a statistical estimation of the outcome in lost man-years of life for each case. Such calculations are endlessly debatable, but a respectable result can be generated, which represents a state-of-the-art best-effort due-diligence.
But one can easily imagine pushing such vehicles about using laser beams. A single laser can push millions of little cars around, using spinning mirrors and judicious timing.
> Intel declined to comment on the specifics of how the technology works only saying that > 'More information will be revealed later'.
So in other words, they didn't actually "unveil" it. They "veiled" it. Sort of like the dance of a thousand veils. You can't actually get any, or even see what it is, but they're going to tease the hell out of you if they can, and hope that is enough to keep you buying the hella-overpriced softdrinks.
For a while their over-inflated stock price (110:1 P/E, was it?) made them seem much larger than they really were, but they're still enormous and have a multi-billion-dollar warchest. They've also got a lot of technical talent, and even if the middle-management was positively cancerous in at the turn-of-the-century, hopefully the flattening that came with belt-tightening after the dotcom crash pruned that dead wood and they can become an engine of innovative technology applications once more. I think they're a steal now, at 3.95/share, and I'd even take a job there, if they were doing something interesting.
It's easy now to implement input methods, html does standardize most of the characters, and large unicode fonts are generally available, so most of these considerations are obsolete. It would be a useful and trivial hack to make gcc accept & ne; et filia, for example. The result would be fewer bugs, more readable code. It is really is about time. Usually a new level of technique does not become predominant until it offers substantial advantage at marginal cost. Now that international communication, WYSIWYG, are prevalent, now that universal encodings have been standardized and memory is cheap, it's time to leave behind the fetters of ASCII. There will always be a C99, so it's no threat to the few botique, niche applications where a more expressive style is contraindicated.
Slashdot Mirror
I know practicing scientists in biological fields who are atheists and do not give credence to any of the prevailing theories of evolution. Really, I think it's only in the U.S. that the issue is so politicized that failure to conform to the prevailing academic dogma is fatal to a scientific career.
> a lot of christians believe humans have a soul and that animals do not. For that to be true you
> need some divine intervention in the evolutionary process to grant humans a soul once they become
> human
I don't get that reasoning. I'm a Christian, in most worldviews, but I don't see any reason why
the soul can't be an emergent property which can only arise at a certain level of complexity of
consciousness. Nor do I see why the medieval adaptation of the primitive Hebrew concept of "nephesh"
to fit into what was then already a millenium-old greek metaphysical system should constrain my
understanding of reality.
So your point is that vendors sell crap? Whoa, who wudda thunk it?
I just stopped buying the consumer crap because of this behaviour.
I send the extra money I save to South-east Asia, and I estimate
that I've saved over 2000 lives so far, just by telecommuting and
downloading all my entertainment for the past ten years.
Mono might converge, given infinite time, on 5% of the .NET API, but it's still not nearly so xplat as JVM, which is approximately universally available.
C# is not now and never will be a cross-platform development environment. It's a nice, useful language, and the class library is vast beyond the dreams of avarice, but to choose to deliver a project in C# is to bind that project forever and irrevocably to the .NET platform. I'd prefer to support more than that. My code wants to live. Win16 is dead, Win32 is dying in the ICU, COM is being denied hydration. I'm guessing .NET will have 5 more years before Microsoft decides to deprecate it, and all that code will become legacy.
My Java 1.1 applications from 1998 are still producing results for customers on MacOSX, Win98/ME, NT 4.0, dozens if not hundreds of Linux distributions, Solaris versions from 7 through 10, and God alone knows what else. Thankfully, I don't need to worry about it because it just works. And I can still fix bugs or add features using 2005 free state-of-the-art development tools, while maintaining that broad user base.
Does that come at a cost? Certainly, but the benefits overwhelm those costs by orders of magnitude. Now you know why I'm a Java "fanboi": It's the bottom-line, silly.
You seem to have overlooked the fact that the suit was settled in Sun's favor because Microsoft violated its licensing terms in an effort to break the cross-platform capability of Java.
If you consider defending victims against murder to be immoral, I think your vocabulary is very idiosyncratic. There is nothing immoral about using deadly force to prevent a deadly crime. If I were to refuse to save a life because I would have to use proprietary software to do it, that would be immoral.
Yes, it is important to compare apples to apples. When I load OO Calc, it takes less than two seconds to start. I have Java turned off, because I don't need it. When I load Excel, Java isn't
an option, so any comparison in start-up times has to compare both systems without the feature
set supported by Java, otherwise I am comparing the start-up time of a system configured to include
Java extensions with one configured not to include Java extensions, which is inherently unfair.
On my system, OO Calc loads faster than Excel. That's just a fact.
Eighty Megabytes and Constantly Swapping.
Emacs grows to fit the available space. Or at least it did when it was still growing.
It seems all the competent hackers have lost interest, because everybody has been
trained not to understand lisp.
It is capable of eliminating the ability to sell software without source code for a profit, and will do so in time. Some of us don't buy closed-source software because we consider it immoral to so do, barring some overriding need, and are willing to pay in money, features and even time in order to avoid it.
Obviously hurricanes are particle accellerators. The wind consists of small particles called "molecules", which hurricanes accellerate to speeds in excess of 100 knots. And yes, hurricanes are also characterized by separation of charge. I find it difficult to imagine how anyone could fail to recognize these obvious facts.
What once required talent and brilliance today only requires reading a how-to file, configuring,
and rebooting.
EMC is obsolete. Their customers just haven't discovered it yet.
Perhaps we should think of them rather as colored holes, and
employ perichromicon and apochromicon?
Whereas, among arrogant fools the use of dismissive ad hominem is held in the highest regard, eh?
You have a fairly idiosyncratic definition of a black hole, then.
I think the term is generally taken to refer to a density singularity,
where the escape velocity of a mass exceeds the speed of light, creating
and event horizon beyond which no signal can escape. That's a much
stronger claim than "something heavy that you can't see", like my
obese cousin Albert in Idaho.
Yeah, but since the star S2 is so much heavier than tiny Pluto (not even a planet maybe, but just an asteroid), therefore S2 falls much faster than Pluto. You can reproduce this effect easily at home. Drop a quarter from one hand at the same time that you drop a tissue from the other. Now imagine how much faster a star would fall! And of course, this proves that there is a hole at the center of the gravity, since you can't fall unless there's a hole to fall into.
QED
If you read the paper, the orbital elements do not constrain the object to being more dense than neutrons. Sorry, there's no proof here.
But this has nothing to do with NASA. The video is hosted by the ESO.
The observations were made using ESO facilities, by ESO researchers.
Insert snide comment about the folly of American arrogance here.
58% of which is devoted to killing people. Frankly, I'd prefer that they spent it ALL on TVs. An enormous mountain of TVs, say, in Oklahoma.
The only justification which has ever been offered for the establishment of patents and copyrights is to promote progress in the useful arts. That justification can be compared to the social cost of a patent by means of a consequential utilitarian calculus, in the manner of epidemiology: Simply, generate a statistical estimation of the outcome in lost man-years of life for each case. Such calculations are endlessly debatable, but a respectable result can be generated, which represents a state-of-the-art best-effort due-diligence.
But one can easily imagine pushing such vehicles about using laser beams. A single laser can
push millions of little cars around, using spinning mirrors and judicious timing.
> Intel declined to comment on the specifics of how the technology works only saying that
> 'More information will be revealed later'.
So in other words, they didn't actually "unveil" it. They "veiled" it. Sort of like
the dance of a thousand veils. You can't actually get any, or even see what it is,
but they're going to tease the hell out of you if they can, and hope that is enough
to keep you buying the hella-overpriced softdrinks.
That's because even obsolete sun hardware is rock-stable. Your old Dells are in a landfill, by way of comparison.
For a while their over-inflated stock price (110:1 P/E, was it?) made them seem much larger than they really were, but they're still enormous and have a multi-billion-dollar warchest.
They've also got a lot of technical talent, and even if the middle-management was positively cancerous in at the turn-of-the-century, hopefully the flattening that came with belt-tightening after the dotcom crash pruned that dead wood and they can become an engine of innovative technology applications once more. I think they're a steal now, at 3.95/share, and I'd even take a job there, if they were doing something interesting.
It's easy now to implement input methods, html does standardize most of the characters, and large unicode fonts are generally available, so most of these considerations are obsolete. It would be a useful and trivial hack to make gcc accept & ne; et filia, for example. The result would be fewer bugs, more readable code. It is really is about time. Usually a new level of technique does not become predominant until it offers substantial advantage at marginal cost. Now that international communication, WYSIWYG, are prevalent, now that
universal encodings have been standardized and memory is cheap, it's time to leave behind the fetters of ASCII. There will always be a C99, so it's no threat to the few botique, niche applications where a more expressive style is contraindicated.