"I use the word "faith" as simply something that is accepted, not proven (in fact, by definition not proven)"
By that definition, I agree with everything you say. Unfortunately, proof in science is never a binary 1 or 0 event. 1 and 0 are more like asymptotes. I don't think any (real) scientist will ever have pure faith in their axioms. Do Christians have pure faith in their dogma? I fear far too many do...:-(
Agreed, basic genetics is pretty easy. And it is pretty easy to get a laymans understanding of just about everything... I once was able to explain Einsteins theory of relativity to a dyslexic biker in 15 minutes. (It was a dare.)
But laymans knowlege is not true understanding, because they still have to take your word for it on the nitty gritty. Suppose the layman disagreed with your explanation of genetics. You would need to pull out the university level texts that requires higher math knowlege to further prove your points. This would be beyond the layman. Therefore, you could never satisfy a laymans request to "prove it", because the proof would be beyond his/her ability to understand it. They either take your word for it, or they don't.
Unfortunately, we have organizations that exist that offer unscientific explanations that are also equally beyond the laymans understanding. "Divine creation." Since the nitty gritty of either evolution or creation are equally beyond most people, they must go on the credibility of the person speaking... Who would Jed and his cousin Cletus listen to? Some scientist, or their pastor? To you its an easy answer, but you're not as dumb as Jed and Cletus.
You can educate people, but you can't make them smart, and there are always others trying to educate different things.
Well... Look at it from the other point. Assuming there is a set of universal truths, if you have already found them, should you not accept them? Or perhaps, people are just accepting them because something better hasn't come around yet? I mean what are their options...? Take the best axioms around at face value, or just simply assume the universe does not exist? Seriously though, I see what you're getting at. But then again, seeing how successful science has become based on the axioms it's founded on, and how poorly it performs if you change those axioms... I think people don't need faith to stick to their axioms, they just need evidence of a proven track record. Faith is not needed. Perhaps you should have used a different word than "faith", because faith does not require reason.
I wonder what useful would come of making up your own axioms...
To ask how, one does not need to know why. You do not need to know the purpose of a V8 engine to figure out how and what it does.
But to ask "why", you better know "how" first, or everything will be meaningless. All the old ignorant views religious people used to have that explained "why", were stupid because nobody knew "how". The earth was at the center of the universe, because the earth is the most important thing. There's an example of a "why" that requires one know "how".
So... Science can exist without religion, but religion has a hard time existing without knowlege. (If you had no knowlege, how could you read the bible and understand meaning?) Science is just knowlege, nothing more. Amazing how christians are so scared of that.
You must be one of the people ripe for conversion to religion, if you think everything is based on faith.
I have studied logic and mathematics for a long time, and the proofs are not based on faith. They're based on axioms. They basically say "Well, if we assume x, y, and z are true, What would we get?" It's an excercise. If axioms were faith, then scientists would never be able to assimilate new theories that challenge old ways of looking at things. We'd still be staring at Mercury, wondering why it doesn't orbit the sun properly, because we would never be able to bring ourselves to understand Einstein's different way of looking at the universe. Faith doesn't allow for change.
Sorry man. Good science requries changable assumptions. Bad science requires faith.
As Science progresses, the theories which scientists propose tend to become more and more complex, and in the process more and more difficult for your average layman to even remotely understand. Things like moon landings, or that the earth is round, are things that are relatively easy to prove to even someone who doesn't want to learn.
The only person a geneticist can convince about this proof of evolution is another geneticist, or some equally smart person. The only way a layman can ever understand evolutions in terms of the human genome is to "Take this respectable genetecist's word for it." Now suppose this layman is an obstinate Christian... At least with people in the flat earth society you can slap their faces with photographs taken from the space station! Few people are too dumb to understand pictures... But what would a geneticist do?
There are limits to how much the scientific community can communicate with the general public, and I think the theory of evolution is the greatest example of this. The masses are generally too dumb to understand it, and if they don't want to, they will use their own inability to understand as proof that "nobody could ever prove evolution to me".
Damn straight.
On the bright side, smart peoples understanding of the universe continues to progress, more or less unhindered by idiots. I'm very happy that we've got one more big piece of the puzzle of understanding how the universe works!
Seriously, a display that evokes varied and strong responses in people, especially if it makes people challenge and perhaps re-evaluate their values, is ART! The debate on Slashdot, the wired articles, and the fact that the FBI had to be involved are all suggesting that this website is a beautiful work of art! I think the designer should recieve an award!
I think the only real concern anyone has is that dumb people will stuff their cats into bottles after seeing this page. Much like how some dumb kid burnt his penis when he stuck it into a freshly baked apple pie... I say we give these people every chance to remove themselves from the gene pool. Stupid people breed too much.
"Certainly, you'd hope that laid off miners would get retraining etc. and in western countries that *might* happen depending on what unions managed to get out of the bosses."
Employee retraining? In Canada? Under a liberal government?
Not only will the miners be re-trained, but their great-grandchilderen will recieve generous pensions to compensate for the hardship the miners underwent during their period of retraining.
Mind you, none of these compensations will even come close to the miners tax bills...
John Katz notwithstanding in his lameness, this is just sick. Its good to see at least JK is doing some sort of good here, this kind of garbage needs to be exposed, so then someone with power can take this trash out.
Everyone toots on about what Beowulf can do... But to get a good idea of what it really is, can someone explain to me what Beowulf CANNOT do as of yet? I'm not a highschool student anymore, and I'm afraid I don't have my MCSE, so be easy on me...
In my imagination Jetfire would be the most expensive Transformer out there, exactly because he IS a Veritech. For anyone who still plays the old Robotech RPG (yes we still exist), having a Jetfire toy standing around while playing a game adds quite the realism.
I remember once I came across an old Macross MAC III Destroid for $2 at a toy liquidator. I bought all three and sold them for $50 a pop to collectors. Meanest destroid ever made.
I'm thinking this guy could have possibly made more money selling these things separately, but is the bidding finished?
The Wing Commander live action movie was the first full-feature film to use this type of special effect. Matrix was filmed much after Wing Commander. Surely geeks would give credit where credit is due, especially to something as geeky as a computer game.
Arguably, Matrix is a much better movie, but I still heartily enjoyed Wing Commander. Come on guys, give credit where credit is due, instead of pandering to the masses who don't watch anything past the top-ten list.
Open Source... Closed source... What's the diff? Either way I can't feel safe installing it unless I understand the increasingly complicated legalese of the licencing agreement.
On one hand, it is true that if I did truly understand most commercial closed source softwares licencing agreements, I would even be more scared. On the other hand, for something like Linux, while the licencing agreements are less draconian, every second piece of software inside will be differently licenced... Would this force me to read 20 or thirty different licencing agreements with every distro?
Come on, I would rather just compute! When will sanity come to this licencing craze???
It's called your monitor. Last time my grandma came over, she asked me to change the channel on my monitor....
But really, with a big pipe, you can watch digital TV in almost every resolution you want. Someone just has to be smart enough to start selling cheap over-large black monitors with long enough cables to reach your living room, and a little IR remote that connects back to your computer through that same long cable.
Then come up with a napster like service provider, and your remote can let you watch whatever program you want, whenever you want. THIS is what they're afraid of. I don't see why someone starts pushing for that, somewhat like TIVO is going. Soon enough the big boys will catch on and offer their services too.
Most states or provinces in north america have a set of landlord/tenant laws, and there is a clause in those laws that says one cannot sign any contract giving up certain rights, the rights remain, regardless of any contract signed giving them up. This prevents unscrupulous landlords from writing up horrid contracts and then abusing their tenants, or vice versa.
If they had a similar thing for internet access, all this would be solved.
"10.16 You grant to Sprint or any appointed subcontractors an irrevocable license to enter into or onto your Premises during normal business hours, Monday through Saturday, in order to install, repair, replace or remove Equipment. This license will survive termination or cancellation of this Agreement and will run with the land and inure to the parties' successors and assigns."
So basically they have the right to enter the property for all time, regardless of who buys/sells/leases the property after, even someone who tears down the building and puts something else up. I could just see, 20 years from now, some "sprint" employees walk in and start snooping around your new house, saying they're looking for thier network setup, because someone who lived in the house 20 years ago had sprint... Using this TOS, they're collecting lists of properties that they can enter at will.
"You're completely correct that this action-reaction pair here is the metal and the magnet."
Are we sure of this? The way I read the article, and understand field equations, the magnet interacts with everything, including the whole universe, to a greater or lesser extent.
So the magnet interacts equally with the entire universe... Unless shielded. In one direction, the magnet can't interact as well with the rest of the universe, because the metal is in the way. So the universe will be pulling on the magnet asymmetrically. And the piece of metal won't move, if it's fixed to the magnet...
It's strange, and unless I'm wrong, it seems like the magnet will be pulling only in a selected direction... This seems really bizarre to me, but I've seen stranger mathematics that do work. I sure would love to have a few years to study the theory of this and related stuff.
Simple... Set up an array of pixels of arbitrary resolution, then program the quantum computer to search through all combinations of pixels to produce say 2^16 of the best porn pictures possible. Because quantum computers calculate all possibilities simultaneously, you'd have your porn in a femtosecond. And it would literally be the best porn that could possibly ever be made, because the computer went through every possible solution!!
The actual possibilities of a decent quantum computer are so vast, that people either have no way to comprehend them yet, or comprehend enough to be frightened by the power.
Imagine programming a quantum computer to search through every possible combination of a large array of atoms, so that you would have a transwarp engine. Basically, you can set up whatever paramaters you want, and the quantum computer will find for you what you want, or tell you that it doesn't exist.
The examples I used are a bit off, as how do you define for a computer what good porn is? But if you somehow connected an arousal-sensor to the human brain, it could be trivial... Quantum computers will basically answer any question you ask, as long as you ask it properly, and the computer has enough qbits. Near infinite amounts of brute-force computing power is nothing to sneeze at.
"Violence has brought out many good things."... "The fall of communism in europe."
In principle, I agree with you. Violence does bring about good fairly often, however, I would like to correct you about the fall of Communism in Europe, that was for the most part a completely peaceful event. However, the cold war that preceded the fall, I'm not sure if that could be called violent or not. After the second world war, considering the tensions, I'm still quite suprirsed that the human race is still here.
Sure, they can have a very clear policy. But how soon until that policy contradicts their advertising as an internet service provider?
Before I even got to the "no mp3's" clause, I was shocked by some other things. Such as 3.1.1
"Further examples of unacceptable content or links include"... "game rooms or MUDs, Chat Rooms, IRC Bots"
Whoah, they just banned a whole lot there. On one side they may be scared of bandwidth, but connected to the mp3 debate, what do people think of this? How do these restrictive terms of use compare to their advertising?
This is like renting a house... Nobody would argue about a "no pets" or "no smoking" clause, but how far is too far? Is there any law about this in the united states for either cyberspace or meatspace, or does the market handle this?
Slashdot Mirror
"I use the word "faith" as simply something that is accepted, not proven (in fact, by definition not proven)"
:-(
By that definition, I agree with everything you say. Unfortunately, proof in science is never a binary 1 or 0 event. 1 and 0 are more like asymptotes. I don't think any (real) scientist will ever have pure faith in their axioms. Do Christians have pure faith in their dogma? I fear far too many do...
BTW thanks for the nice discussion.
Agreed, basic genetics is pretty easy. And it is pretty easy to get a laymans understanding of just about everything... I once was able to explain Einsteins theory of relativity to a dyslexic biker in 15 minutes. (It was a dare.)
But laymans knowlege is not true understanding, because they still have to take your word for it on the nitty gritty. Suppose the layman disagreed with your explanation of genetics. You would need to pull out the university level texts that requires higher math knowlege to further prove your points. This would be beyond the layman. Therefore, you could never satisfy a laymans request to "prove it", because the proof would be beyond his/her ability to understand it. They either take your word for it, or they don't.
Unfortunately, we have organizations that exist that offer unscientific explanations that are also equally beyond the laymans understanding. "Divine creation." Since the nitty gritty of either evolution or creation are equally beyond most people, they must go on the credibility of the person speaking... Who would Jed and his cousin Cletus listen to? Some scientist, or their pastor? To you its an easy answer, but you're not as dumb as Jed and Cletus.
You can educate people, but you can't make them smart, and there are always others trying to educate different things.
Well... Look at it from the other point. Assuming there is a set of universal truths, if you have already found them, should you not accept them? Or perhaps, people are just accepting them because something better hasn't come around yet? I mean what are their options...? Take the best axioms around at face value, or just simply assume the universe does not exist? Seriously though, I see what you're getting at. But then again, seeing how successful science has become based on the axioms it's founded on, and how poorly it performs if you change those axioms... I think people don't need faith to stick to their axioms, they just need evidence of a proven track record. Faith is not needed. Perhaps you should have used a different word than "faith", because faith does not require reason.
I wonder what useful would come of making up your own axioms...
Science asks: How ???
Religion asks: Why ???
To ask how, one does not need to know why. You do not need to know the purpose of a V8 engine to figure out how and what it does.
But to ask "why", you better know "how" first, or everything will be meaningless. All the old ignorant views religious people used to have that explained "why", were stupid because nobody knew "how". The earth was at the center of the universe, because the earth is the most important thing. There's an example of a "why" that requires one know "how".
So... Science can exist without religion, but religion has a hard time existing without knowlege. (If you had no knowlege, how could you read the bible and understand meaning?) Science is just knowlege, nothing more. Amazing how christians are so scared of that.
You must be one of the people ripe for conversion to religion, if you think everything is based on faith.
I have studied logic and mathematics for a long time, and the proofs are not based on faith. They're based on axioms. They basically say "Well, if we assume x, y, and z are true, What would we get?" It's an excercise. If axioms were faith, then scientists would never be able to assimilate new theories that challenge old ways of looking at things. We'd still be staring at Mercury, wondering why it doesn't orbit the sun properly, because we would never be able to bring ourselves to understand Einstein's different way of looking at the universe. Faith doesn't allow for change.
Sorry man. Good science requries changable assumptions. Bad science requires faith.
Bork!
As Science progresses, the theories which scientists propose tend to become more and more complex, and in the process more and more difficult for your average layman to even remotely understand. Things like moon landings, or that the earth is round, are things that are relatively easy to prove to even someone who doesn't want to learn.
The only person a geneticist can convince about this proof of evolution is another geneticist, or some equally smart person. The only way a layman can ever understand evolutions in terms of the human genome is to "Take this respectable genetecist's word for it." Now suppose this layman is an obstinate Christian... At least with people in the flat earth society you can slap their faces with photographs taken from the space station! Few people are too dumb to understand pictures... But what would a geneticist do?
There are limits to how much the scientific community can communicate with the general public, and I think the theory of evolution is the greatest example of this. The masses are generally too dumb to understand it, and if they don't want to, they will use their own inability to understand as proof that "nobody could ever prove evolution to me".
Damn straight.
On the bright side, smart peoples understanding of the universe continues to progress, more or less unhindered by idiots. I'm very happy that we've got one more big piece of the puzzle of understanding how the universe works!
If it's really such a bad business idea, it will flop.
Right?
Not knowing USA law, is this against the DMCA or other progressive digital laws the United States has?
...
... Just an inquisitive idiot
Well, that is one of the definitions of art!
Seriously, a display that evokes varied and strong responses in people, especially if it makes people challenge and perhaps re-evaluate their values, is ART! The debate on Slashdot, the wired articles, and the fact that the FBI had to be involved are all suggesting that this website is a beautiful work of art! I think the designer should recieve an award!
I think the only real concern anyone has is that dumb people will stuff their cats into bottles after seeing this page. Much like how some dumb kid burnt his penis when he stuck it into a freshly baked apple pie... I say we give these people every chance to remove themselves from the gene pool. Stupid people breed too much.
Bleh, I'm done here...
"Certainly, you'd hope that laid off miners would get retraining etc. and in western countries that *might* happen depending on what unions managed to get out of the bosses."
Employee retraining? In Canada? Under a liberal government?
Not only will the miners be re-trained, but their great-grandchilderen will recieve generous pensions to compensate for the hardship the miners underwent during their period of retraining.
Mind you, none of these compensations will even come close to the miners tax bills...
Blek.
John Katz notwithstanding in his lameness, this is just sick. Its good to see at least JK is doing some sort of good here, this kind of garbage needs to be exposed, so then someone with power can take this trash out.
Way to go.
Everyone toots on about what Beowulf can do... But to get a good idea of what it really is, can someone explain to me what Beowulf CANNOT do as of yet? I'm not a highschool student anymore, and I'm afraid I don't have my MCSE, so be easy on me...
In my imagination Jetfire would be the most expensive Transformer out there, exactly because he IS a Veritech. For anyone who still plays the old Robotech RPG (yes we still exist), having a Jetfire toy standing around while playing a game adds quite the realism.
I remember once I came across an old Macross MAC III Destroid for $2 at a toy liquidator. I bought all three and sold them for $50 a pop to collectors. Meanest destroid ever made.
I'm thinking this guy could have possibly made more money selling these things separately, but is the bidding finished?
Bork
It's actually Wing Commander style video...
The Wing Commander live action movie was the first full-feature film to use this type of special effect. Matrix was filmed much after Wing Commander. Surely geeks would give credit where credit is due, especially to something as geeky as a computer game.
Arguably, Matrix is a much better movie, but I still heartily enjoyed Wing Commander. Come on guys, give credit where credit is due, instead of pandering to the masses who don't watch anything past the top-ten list.
Wait, this is slashdot. We are the masses...
Bork!
Open Source... Closed source... What's the diff? Either way I can't feel safe installing it unless I understand the increasingly complicated legalese of the licencing agreement.
On one hand, it is true that if I did truly understand most commercial closed source softwares licencing agreements, I would even be more scared. On the other hand, for something like Linux, while the licencing agreements are less draconian, every second piece of software inside will be differently licenced... Would this force me to read 20 or thirty different licencing agreements with every distro?
Come on, I would rather just compute! When will sanity come to this licencing craze???
Bork!
It's called your monitor. Last time my grandma came over, she asked me to change the channel on my monitor....
But really, with a big pipe, you can watch digital TV in almost every resolution you want. Someone just has to be smart enough to start selling cheap over-large black monitors with long enough cables to reach your living room, and a little IR remote that connects back to your computer through that same long cable.
Then come up with a napster like service provider, and your remote can let you watch whatever program you want, whenever you want. THIS is what they're afraid of. I don't see why someone starts pushing for that, somewhat like TIVO is going. Soon enough the big boys will catch on and offer their services too.
Bork!
Most states or provinces in north america have a set of landlord/tenant laws, and there is a clause in those laws that says one cannot sign any contract giving up certain rights, the rights remain, regardless of any contract signed giving them up. This prevents unscrupulous landlords from writing up horrid contracts and then abusing their tenants, or vice versa.
If they had a similar thing for internet access, all this would be solved.
You come home from work one day, and notice a new cell tower in your back yard, where your bird feeder used to stand!
"10.16 You grant to Sprint or any appointed subcontractors an irrevocable license to enter into or onto your Premises during normal business hours, Monday through Saturday, in order to install, repair, replace or remove Equipment. This license will survive termination or cancellation of this Agreement and will run with the land and inure to the parties' successors and assigns."
So basically they have the right to enter the property for all time, regardless of who buys/sells/leases the property after, even someone who tears down the building and puts something else up. I could just see, 20 years from now, some "sprint" employees walk in and start snooping around your new house, saying they're looking for thier network setup, because someone who lived in the house 20 years ago had sprint... Using this TOS, they're collecting lists of properties that they can enter at will.
I wonder to whom they could sell THOSE rights to!
"You're completely correct that this action-reaction pair here is the metal and the magnet."
Are we sure of this? The way I read the article, and understand field equations, the magnet interacts with everything, including the whole universe, to a greater or lesser extent.
So the magnet interacts equally with the entire universe... Unless shielded. In one direction, the magnet can't interact as well with the rest of the universe, because the metal is in the way. So the universe will be pulling on the magnet asymmetrically. And the piece of metal won't move, if it's fixed to the magnet...
It's strange, and unless I'm wrong, it seems like the magnet will be pulling only in a selected direction... This seems really bizarre to me, but I've seen stranger mathematics that do work. I sure would love to have a few years to study the theory of this and related stuff.
Bork!
Simple... Set up an array of pixels of arbitrary resolution, then program the quantum computer to search through all combinations of pixels to produce say 2^16 of the best porn pictures possible. Because quantum computers calculate all possibilities simultaneously, you'd have your porn in a femtosecond. And it would literally be the best porn that could possibly ever be made, because the computer went through every possible solution!!
The actual possibilities of a decent quantum computer are so vast, that people either have no way to comprehend them yet, or comprehend enough to be frightened by the power.
Imagine programming a quantum computer to search through every possible combination of a large array of atoms, so that you would have a transwarp engine. Basically, you can set up whatever paramaters you want, and the quantum computer will find for you what you want, or tell you that it doesn't exist.
The examples I used are a bit off, as how do you define for a computer what good porn is? But if you somehow connected an arousal-sensor to the human brain, it could be trivial... Quantum computers will basically answer any question you ask, as long as you ask it properly, and the computer has enough qbits. Near infinite amounts of brute-force computing power is nothing to sneeze at.
Ask and ye shall recieve... scary eh?
If the universe is curved, how do we know we are not looking at our own galaxy, from a long ago time?
Bork...
"Violence has brought out many good things." ... "The fall of communism in europe."
In principle, I agree with you. Violence does bring about good fairly often, however, I would like to correct you about the fall of Communism in Europe, that was for the most part a completely peaceful event. However, the cold war that preceded the fall, I'm not sure if that could be called violent or not. After the second world war, considering the tensions, I'm still quite suprirsed that the human race is still here.
I guess that says something.
Sure, they can have a very clear policy. But how soon until that policy contradicts their advertising as an internet service provider? Before I even got to the "no mp3's" clause, I was shocked by some other things. Such as 3.1.1 "Further examples of unacceptable content or links include" ... "game rooms or MUDs, Chat Rooms, IRC Bots"
Whoah, they just banned a whole lot there. On one side they may be scared of bandwidth, but connected to the mp3 debate, what do people think of this? How do these restrictive terms of use compare to their advertising?
This is like renting a house... Nobody would argue about a "no pets" or "no smoking" clause, but how far is too far? Is there any law about this in the united states for either cyberspace or meatspace, or does the market handle this?
I'm from Canada eh.
We here in the great white north would prefer a protocol called the "beaver".