this may be getting slightly offtopic, but i think Tribes has got to be the only example of a creative 3d shooter type game in a long time.
every other has been the same idea, the only thing that has been any different at all is just some different prettier maps, some different gun combinations, some prettier graphics and light effects and explosions.
Tribes, on the other hand, was working off something totally other: huge landscape maps, bases, teams, 128-person games.. it would be nice to see such innovation more often.
how funny would it be if someone *cough cough* just happened to replace the file at http://www.mtv.com/index.html with a little dissertation on the difference between a hacker and a cracker? (EG, Alan Cox and the people at L0pht are hackers, people playing war games on EFNet and defacing web pages using downloaded scripts aren't..)
C'mon, it would be doing mtv a _favor_. It would give them some free extra content for when their special goes on air.
umm.. maybe i'm ignorant for only paying attention to those creationists with the extremist views, but seems to me like the extremists are the only ones trying to get political power, and as a result the only ones i should care/worry about.
Creationism, in any varient, cannot be proven. Neither can evolution. Both have flaws, both have strengths. The difference? The evolutionists have willed evolution into unquestionable, unchallenged fact. They don't want to have a principled, non-slighted debate on the facts and problems of the theories out there
My God. I have no clue where you're getting this interpretation from. I don't see many scientific type people stating that evoloution is truth and cannot be adulterated; i see them defending the idea that it is important enough knowledge that people should be taught about it as part of their high school education. I don't see many creationists clamoring for "principled, non-slighted debate"; maybe there are a couple out there, but those aren't the ones making the most noise, and those aren't the ones on the kansas school board. As far as willing things into unquestionable, unchallenged fact goes, this seems to describe the entire creationist viewpoint. Since the only objection to evoloution theory being put forth is that it contradicts the bible-- i doubt there's anyone out there objecting to it for no other reason than flaws in evoloution theory itself.
the problem in kansas obviously isn't that evoloution is being taught as fact instead of scientific theory, or they would have just put something on the curriculum explaining that ALL science is uncertain, experimental, and based on which explanation works best not which explanation is known to be true. (this is, by the way, something that really ought to be on any school curriculum somewhere) Instead they simply deleted evoloution.
You say creationism and evoloution both have "flaws and strengths".. what strengths could creationism possibly have? Does it help other scientific theories, or help predict the way natural phenomena will behave? I don't see any creationists making real valid points toward creating some new theory; i just see them making a great deal out of things evoloution doesn't cover and doesn't claim to cover, or else simply flatly stating that established science is wrong for no other reason than that it's wrong, and then saying it shouldn't be taught in schools because it isn't perfect. And what on earth does creationism _teach_ us? If you made it something taught in schools, what would they teach? Genesis?
I repeat: Maybe i'm ignorant for only paying attention to those creationists with the extremist views, but seems to me like the extremists are the only ones trying to get political power, and as a result the only ones i should care/worry about. If all you're saying is that evoloution should be treated as theory not truth, you're right. I agree with you. I'm sorry if i may have offended you, but you weren't the person the original post was talking about. The original post was talking simply about those who aren't willing let church and state be seperate..
the problem with creationism is that the yahoos and the reasonable people are talking _just as loudly_. You can't easily seperate the two. You say "read what people are actually saying on the other side of the issue", but where am i supposed to get that? all i have to work off of is the people writing in to the newspaper and such. Since there is no one specifc group of non-yahoo's standing out, i'm left forced to use the "broad brush, false, misleading" views of creationism because that's the only part of the creationist philosophy that is being shoved in my face.
And ok, so not all creationists believe in the 7000 years thing. So what? You really think that if they start putting creationists on school boards, it will all be the reasonable catholics or whoever you're talking about that actually cares about science? No, of course you're going to have a number of yahoos. And there are _some_ people who want to bring in the 7000 year limit on everything; you think the presense of people who don't have a completely literal Genesis interpretation will suddenly nullify the votes of those who do? Start giving religion any power in schools, and it _will_ take more and more.
I'm sorry if i offended you with some kind of generalizing, but my generisations of creationist "theory" are simply the way its most vocal proponents are representing it. Thanks for the link, btw.. -_-
the G3 does not. the G4 will soon. the G3 is really pretty awful at multiprocessing; one of the modes that you kind of need for good MP isn't functional, or something. i think that it works if the software organizes the MP-ing, but the hardware can't handle it alone. I dunno, either way there's something that makes MPing a g3 not worth the bother.
the G4, on the other hand, not only SMPs but does multiple-coring beautifully, has been doing so in the lab for months, and will be doing so in shipping computers relatively soon. When the multiple core g4s do start showing up, it should be truly impressive..
what, exactly, are the pro-creationists after? i mean, really, they just seem to be destroying science without putting anything in its place. "creationism", the alternative to evoloution they seem to be pushing, doesn't seem to, like, contain any science. It has no factual basis, doesn't help with predicting things or explain anything, and it's based entirely on faith. If it's based on faith, what is there to teach? nothing.
They seem to be splitting things up into "macroevoloution" and "microevoloution" with some hazy distinction between the two they never really get into. I mean, where's the line? I'm sure they would rather not have to pay attention to that, but you can't completely _ignore_ it; i mean, genetics isn't something you can ignore, and what they call "microevoloution" can kill you, since diseases do it constantly.
It's one thing to say evoloution theory is bad, but when you try to get rid of it in the school and replace it with something concrete, well, creationism breaks down completely. The only option is to simply not teach anything. (which, i'll bet, is what they're doing in Kansas)
Where does "microevoloution" stop and "macroevoloution" start? You can interbreed dogs and get new things; so are all dogs related? What about wolves? At some point in order for creationism to work you've got to point at one specific thing that begat all doglike creatures, or all catlike or cowlike or undersea protazoa or fish. But are all fish from the same ancestor? What about sharks? They're a lot bigger. Things get very hazy, especially if you pay any attention to the fossil record. You start looking for the one ancestor of all those things and find it's pretty similar to a lot of other things at that time. They point a lot to "gaps in the fossil record", but they seem to be saying that since evoloution isn't supported at every step by fossils, you should reject it in favor of a system that totally ignores the fossil record. How do they explain that the fossils seem to follow a kind of pattern of starting simpler and diverging into more adapted creatures? is it just a coincidence?
and this is where things get REALLY wierd. since of course they _start_ with claiming that man are not directly related to bacteria, but eventually it becomes less clear what they're after. What it comes down to is that eventually they claim that the earth can't be older than 7000 years. (if you allow more than that to occur it would contradict a literal interpretation of Genesis, and anyway if you lend any credence to carbon dating it kind of makes macroevoloution look kind of likely.) But if the earth isn't older than 7,000 years that kind of hurts history a lot. You've got to throw out quite a bit of early history-- i mean, historians seem to claim that real humans started around 35000 BC. Oh, and what about all those "homo habilis" and "austrolopithicus" things there seem to be fossils of? What the hell are THOSE? what about all those kind-of-humanlike fossils that start to get more and more humanlike over time?
Oh, that's right, carbon dating is all lies. But then if THAT'S true, we've got to reevaluate a LOT of history, since we base dates of certain early historical things on carbon dating and similar technologies. All our dates must be wrong. And what about atomic science? it describes exactly how and why carbon dating works; if carbon dating is lies, then that means our entire hypothesis of nuclear decay is totally wrong. We've got to come up with something in it's place. But nothing is offered to replace it. No good reason is offered as to why our theory of atoms is correct as far as it can make nuclear power plants and atomic bombs work, but its description of carbon isotopes decaying at a certain rate over time is somehow dead wrong. Do we have to throw out the periodic table, since it's where the neutrons come from?
The point is you wind up destroying more and more science the more you poke into this. Oh, and wouldn't our entire system of geology be wrong? plate tectonics describes earthquakes and how the mountains form and the deep-sea trenches and everything, but it describes things in terms of millions of years; there are only 7000 years.
You can't really put creationism in a school. It isn't science. Simple as that. It isn't like evoloution theory, which starts with a number of questions about why things are the way they are, and attempts to come up with the best explanation possible; creationism starts with an answer, and treats the questions as if they were totally irrelivant and unimportant. But if you're TEACHING SCIENCE, at some point questions do matter after a fashion.
ok i'm done rambling now.
--mcc-baka "If we could just get everyone to close their eyes and visualize world peace for an hour, imagine how serene and quiet it would be until he looting started." -anonymous
how will this affect Redhat's ability to include things like SSH, or other packages involving strong crypto, in european releases?
they aren't allowed to ship those things outside the US now, right? so now will they be allowed to just send over the source code to the european offices and have _them_ compile the packages, thus circumventing the export controls?
unless i'm really confused, this would be a _very_ interesting test of the "code-is-free-speech" waiver to the export controls. An american country publishing open source software with strong crypto through a branch located outside the US.. hmm
one big thing about the imac-- and what i think he nicest part is-- is that it's _portable_.
Not portable by laptop standards at all, but portable in the sense that it isn't actually painful to lug around. In the sense that you can _carry_ it with _one hand_. If you ever get in a situation where you have to move the computer around a room or building a lot, you'll find out how nice this is..
With a larger-than-15-inch monitor that just wouldn't work. at some point putting the monitor in the case begins to cause problems if the monitor's big enough.
15" is good enough. If you want bigger, well, you're not going to be buying an imac are you?
macs are unparallelled in their capabilities of handling multiple independent monitors at once, but since i don't see where you'd plug the multiple monitors in..well, that's not an option with the imac
lessee.. a good 3d card, good speakers. Now if only they'd put in an extended keyboard..:)
this would obviously be the best idea. or, just to make it absoloutely certain _they_ found it first, why not just write up the exploit/advisory whatever, then post the full thing to some big newsgroup _encrypted_?
then they could notify the company, and if the company hadn't done anything after a couple weeks, release the key to the encrypted advisory along with the plaintext advisory. with the right kind of encryption it would prove they did, in fact, find it first..
some programs all that matters is whether they get the task done, and not whether they do the task well. But not all. the perfect example of something that works the other way is a web browser: stabilty really _is_ more important than features there. Because it isn't simply performing a certain task and then leaving; it's omnipresent, always there running in the background, never being quit since ther'es no way of knowing when it will be needed again.
as someone on an OS with no memory protection (macintosh) i wind up with this problem amplified-- since any one program crashing automatically means i have to reboot. And MSIE causes more crashes than any other app for me, almost always while i'm just kinda checking on something on the web as i do something in another program. (and stability is one of the main reasons i switched from netscape to begin with.)
which brings me to the most important thing: the ship-first-fix-later philosophy doesn't work unless you actually fix later. Meanwhile the web browser companies _never_ go back and do the fix-later part; they just ship, over and over, constantly adding new features and never considering he validity or stability of old ones. The proverbial feature freeze doesn't even happen _after_ the product is shipped.
The point is, even if features are more important than stability, at some point stability should be at least a _consideration_.
-mcc why web browsers suck: http://home.earthlink.net/~mcclure111/cyberleary.h tml#discontent
this article ignores what is clearly the worst part of USCITA: legitimisation of prohibhiting reverse engineering of a product.
The whole lack-of-a-warranty thing is nothing new in software, and i seriously doubt any company would try the PR disaster of setting up their program so that they can kill it remotely. But we should really be worried about anything that gives a company the power to prevent someone from using cleanroomed reverse engineering on their product.
The big defense of software lisenses is that hey, if you don't like it, you can take it back to the store. But in a world without reverse engineering, you have to face the possibility that at some point you'll wind up with a program where switching to a different program isn't an option because the new program is prohibhited from communicating with the old one, or prohibhited from using the old one's files, and you'll be left with a large amount of data or work rendered useless..
(A question: could USCITA apply to hardware as well as software, such that, say, Nintendo could put a no-reverse-engineering software liscensing requirement on the N64, and then use that to prosecute anyone who exersizes their right under the patent laws to cleanroomed reverse engineering? What if you didn't actually buy or open the product yourself, but just found it laying on the street or something? Do you still violate the liscense?)
anyway, this article is completely right. software makers, especially those that make web browsers, pay a little too much attention to "features" and not quite enough to stability..
-mcc why web browsers suck: http://home.earthlink.net/~mcclure111/cyberleary.h tml#discontent
so, working on the very shaky assumption that the Sunday Times isn't just talking out of their ass and this device could actually be created, how does this fare for Elliptic Encryption?
How do you go about brute-forcing elliptic encryption, and is it similar to brute-forcing RSA? could this RSA-killing device be adapted to do EE?
just curious. i have very little idea of how elliptic encryption works, or how it's broken. Can anyone explain for me?
It appears that transmeta has patented the run-on sentence.
Perhaps they are working on a microchip that will translate x86 instructions into difficult-to-read english in real time.
(score: 0 redundant)
transmeta will let you know what they're doing when they're ready. have patience. getting all worked up and making wild guesses won't really accomplish anything.:)
why isn't it letting me use A HREF tags today..? oh well http://www.denverpost.com/news/news0814a.htm -- Denver Post article, august 14
"A minister used a blowtorch and a sword during a church service this week to drive home his belief that Pokemon games and toys are only sugar-coated instruments of the occult and evil... During the demonstration, the children chanted: "Burn it. Burn it,'' and "Chop it up. Chop it up.''"
Visit the Pokemon + Violence Shockwave Archive at http://www.aceplanet.net/users/_piku
Personally i thought the pepsi logo on the card was the worst part. But don't think any other soda company is better for schools-- Coke has been doing some fairly evil things in the local public school districts around here in houston, mostly involving donating a bunch of money to the school and getting a monopoly on the cafeteria (and a promise the kids would buy a certain amount of coke), then raising prices (along with some other stuff)-- they're all pretty bad. A wonderful overview is at: http://www.houstonpress.com/1998/121798/news1-1. html
And i vaguely remember something i think happened around here about a "Coke day" a public school held, where they basically gave the school over to coke propaganda for a day, and took a group picture of the school to send to coke. Apparently this was somehow getting them a grant from coke. One kid wore a Pepsi t-shirt and got suspended.
Lets face it, our schools don't get enough money. Until we do something about this, the schools are going to whore themselves out to corporate interests.
I drink RC Cola.
(P.S. For awhile there a couple years ago the Free Burma Coalition was leading a boycott against pepsi for tacitly helping the totaltarian governmnent of Burma. They were selling "boycott pepsi" stickers off their website at wholesale.. I think that Pepsi pulled out of Burma, ending the boycott, but if you call them up you could maybe still get some leftover stickers.) http://www.freeburmacoalition.org/ http://metalab.unc.edu/freeburma/boycott/boycott .html)
alright.. maybe the word "all" is too broad. Maybe "everyone involved" works better.
Still the point remains that nobody is being hurt in any way. And as for the consumer, well, either their prices will lower if they buy PPCs or AMD chips, or they won't be affected.
First: the debate here is about _internal_ hard drives that are installed by default at the factory, and usage of either IDE or SCSI for those drives. Not about external optional hard drives the user adds later. There are no internal firewire hard drives. I'm not even sure internal firewire is an option. Firewire is totally irrelivant.
also, your comment about RAID is totally mind-boggling. did i just misunderstand ou? RAID is a design philosophy, not a protocol. It stands for Redundant Array of Independant Disks and bascically means that any RAID drive contains several hard disks inside it in case one fails. You can have a RAID disk under SCSI, IDE, firewire, or anything-- it's independant of connection type.
Anyway, i have a random question for anyone who may be listening: _is_ internal firewire a good idea, or even possible? i'd imagine there's some reason apple isn't doing it already. What is it?
ok, that's it.. the line between gambling and investment has now completely disappeared. please explain to me how that buying weather futures are legal in states with no anti-gambling laws. Or does it fall under the category of "internet gambling" and thus wind up outide the jurisdiction of the states?
It took me until about halfway through this article to convince myself that "oregon live" wasn't just some kind of attempt to cash in on the success of The Onion.
-mcc-baka who misses disinfectant, and wishes the guy who made it had just GPLed what code he had when he retired.
so the question is, what happens now? how much you wanna bet the answer is "nothing"?
probably the answer is, a bunch of slashdotters get to say "see, i told you so" although nobody's listening, and we are forced to accept Salon's view as true because it's better backed up than anyone else's and a totally objective viewpoint is unavailable.
will this alternate point of view on the columbine killings get any attention? will the actual facts get a front-cover Time article like the half-truths and assumptions did? probably not. The jury of Public Opinion has heard what it wants to hear and made its verdict. The columbine killers _were_ members of the trenchcoat mafia, the christian girl who died _was_ somehow a martyr (although what for i can't imagine) and marilyn manson is responsible. Not because any of these things are true, but because that is what people walk away thinking and these are the "facts" that will color people's desisions from now on.
Because when we come down to it, why does the truth about Columbine matter? Will knowing what motivated the two killers bring anyone back to life? Motivations don't help law enforcement; all that matters to them is whether there were any accompices, and whether anyone still alive is a threat to others. Who really cares, though, are the parents and such across the nation who want more food for their own self-rightiousness. Parents and school officials get complete verification, once and for all, that if you're a Goth you're evil. Christians get to look at themselves as victims; 80% of america thinks religion is "very important" in their lives and 50% favor teaching of creationism in public schools, but still the Christian establishment gets to make itself out as a victim, a repressed minority that needs to stand strong against the world around it, which is apparently trying to destroy it; all because one person who died in an attack by crazy people on a high school in colorado was apparently christian. A great number of people get to wallow in self-pity and invigorating anger because they managed to elevate empathy for those who have lived through a very sad, horrible event in Colorado into, somehow, a feeling of personal loss or involvement.
What actually happened at columbine is irrelivant. All that matters is how what people belive about it will affect what people think, how people act, or what already fairly repressed groups are denied their only outlet (black clothing, music) of self-expression.
everyone here keeps referring to microsoft being "punished".
my question: is a breakup really "punishment"?
i mean, you wind up with the interesting position that microsoft claims that their monopoly on O.S. doesn't help them to foist their applications on people; but then again they claim that having the O.S. and applications be different companies would be somehow bad for them. How?
The obvious answer is that if microsoft can't use it's 90+% market share to leverage its other products, the other products won't be used, or else MS will be forced to promote the products on basis of their own merits, something they've up to now only done occasionally. But microsoft won't admit this, of course. interesting to wach their minds at work.
Claiming that microsoft would be somehow be hurt by a split down the middle is, in fact, admitting that their strongest asset is their monopoly.
I hope that MS gets cut up, just because that would free me from the "microsoft guilt" of using MSIE4.5 for macintosh. Although the "AOL guilt" of using netscape is pretty much worse, so whatever. A MS breakup would help _everyone_; it would destroy MS's more worthless products, force them to make the others better, and generally restore choice to things. My only regret is that it wouldn't really hurt microsoft's OS business; but that seems to be doing a pretty good job of destroying itself.
wonderful idea. After all, they're suing gun companies for abuses of the gun companies' products by consumers that the gun companies have no way of preventing; so obviously what's to stop someone from suing the patent office for abuses of the patent office itself which the patent office could have very easily prevented by policing itself more?
Of course, the only result will be that the entire settlement will go into the pockets of various lawyers, but it would be worth it for the sheer irony value.
In the not so distant future, as Free Software and Open Source begins to make a real impact, we can probably expect this phenominon to shift, where lawsuites are aimed at entities (and probably individuals) without deep pockets. Not for the purpose of getting a settlement and some easy cash, but for purposes of disrupting and even destroying (financially) the entity in question, who presumably cannot afford to defend themselves in court. Countless opponents of software patents have been warning us of this ugly scenerio for quite some time.
Not so distant future? try not so distant past. This is happening already on a regular basis. Large companies are already trying the extremely effective tactic of frivolously suing tiny companies for the sole purpose of destroying them. As you said, even if the lawsuit would be thrown out of court the instant it went before a judge, the mere act of hiring a lawyer can be enough to take the small company out.
This is primarily happening in cases of emulators-- for example, Nintendo knows that clean-roomed reverse-engineered emulation is legal and not a patent violation, but that isn't important. They've lost every single lawsuit against a creator of an emulator, but that isn't important. What is important is that they are a huge corporation with deep pockets and the emulation people are generally hobbyists who can't pay legal bills. So, nintendo has been suing pretty much everyone. The more you look into emulation the more instances similar to this you see.
The biggest problem i see is that patents were designed as a shield; a defense against unscrupulous people who would simply rip off what you have spent so long inventing. But lately patents have been used more as weapons; to prevent competition, to hurt specific people, or to simply extort money with no basis. Any case of patents being used for offense rather than defense in my eyes proves the system doesn't work..
ha ha! how humorous! let me try to come up with a joke like that. Alright, how's this:
A company called "microware" has recently filed suit against Apple Computer for naming their new update of the Mac OS "Mac OS 9". Microware has an existing product named "OS 9" for mostly PPC-based mostly embedded applications. Since it's clear that the apple could not possibly have come up with any other source for the name "Mac OS 9" (which comes after Mac OS 8.6, Mac OS 8.5, Mac OS 8, and Mac OS 7.6) other than purposefully copying microware, Microware has come to the defense of its intellectual property to keep apple from defaming its reputation.
Ha ha! How was that?..oh, wait a minute. i forgot. that actually happened. www.appleinsider.com has been talking about it for weeks. Damn. OK, let me try again.
Garth Brooks and the rapper "Warren G" have both sued each other over usage of a lower-case "g" as a logo. Both artists recently began using a huge lower-case "g" in their stage sets during live shows. It is uncertain who came up with the idea of a letter named "g", but since it is so creative and unobvious it is certain between Garth and Warrren, one is attempting to copy the other, and they didn't just come up with it independantly.
Err, wait a minute-- That happened too. i saw it on MTV news earlier this year. Dammit, i give up!! this satire stuff is too hard.
-mcc [this post brought to you by the letters B and S, and the number 9]
you just didn't read it closely enough. here, i'll quote the relevant sections for you:
"The enigmatic, unknown extraterrestial forces which have apparently been cultivating sentient life throughout the galaxy for aeons abruptly reversed their stance on the Europa project yesterday and embraced the Open Source philosophy.
Formerly Europa had been totally propeitary, and the only statement released by the extraterrestrial forces was "ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS. EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE." However the extraterrestrials are now planning to release under the GNU public liscence the full genomes of all life that develops on Europa, and are inviting other sentient beings to help in the creation.
There is no word yet as to whether they may be considering open-sourcing the DNA sequences used by life on earth. In the absense of publicly available source, some humans have turned to attempting to reverse-engineer the DNA sequences under the banner "WINE^H^H^H^HThe Human Genome Project".
The extraterrestrial announcement may help to explain the incident last month in which Linus Tourevalds, RMS, and several other experienced programmers were inexplicably turned into radiation-based life forms by a large black monolith which mysteriously appeared at LinuxExpo in what appears to have been some kind of recruitment drive.
[snip]
Since the life on europa is still carbon-based, it is believed that porting of the Linux kernel will be relatively easy. Judging from a strange and slightly cryptic message (apparently from Linus) that mysteriously flashed across all of slashdot.org's monitors shortly after the extraterrestrial announcement as some strange force briefly seized control of all the computers in the building, work is preceeding very well; while right now they are concentrating on a port of GCC, it is possible there may be penguins on Europa as early as next year.
Slashdot Mirror
this may be getting slightly offtopic, but i think Tribes has got to be the only example of a creative 3d shooter type game in a long time.
every other has been the same idea, the only thing that has been any different at all is just some different prettier maps, some different gun combinations, some prettier graphics and light effects and explosions.
Tribes, on the other hand, was working off something totally other: huge landscape maps, bases, teams, 128-person games.. it would be nice to see such innovation more often.
how funny would it be if someone *cough cough* just happened to replace the file at http://www.mtv.com/index.html with a little dissertation on the difference between a hacker and a cracker? (EG, Alan Cox and the people at L0pht are hackers, people playing war games on EFNet and defacing web pages using downloaded scripts aren't..)
C'mon, it would be doing mtv a _favor_. It would give them some free extra content for when their special goes on air.
Where's HFG when you need them?
-_-
Creationism, in any varient, cannot be proven. Neither can evolution. Both have flaws, both have strengths. The difference? The evolutionists have willed evolution into unquestionable, unchallenged fact. They don't want to have a principled, non-slighted debate on the facts and problems of the theories out there
My God. I have no clue where you're getting this interpretation from. I don't see many scientific type people stating that evoloution is truth and cannot be adulterated; i see them defending the idea that it is important enough knowledge that people should be taught about it as part of their high school education. I don't see many creationists clamoring for "principled, non-slighted debate"; maybe there are a couple out there, but those aren't the ones making the most noise, and those aren't the ones on the kansas school board. As far as willing things into unquestionable, unchallenged fact goes, this seems to describe the entire creationist viewpoint. Since the only objection to evoloution theory being put forth is that it contradicts the bible-- i doubt there's anyone out there objecting to it for no other reason than flaws in evoloution theory itself.
the problem in kansas obviously isn't that evoloution is being taught as fact instead of scientific theory, or they would have just put something on the curriculum explaining that ALL science is uncertain, experimental, and based on which explanation works best not which explanation is known to be true. (this is, by the way, something that really ought to be on any school curriculum somewhere) Instead they simply deleted evoloution.
You say creationism and evoloution both have "flaws and strengths".. what strengths could creationism possibly have? Does it help other scientific theories, or help predict the way natural phenomena will behave? I don't see any creationists making real valid points toward creating some new theory; i just see them making a great deal out of things evoloution doesn't cover and doesn't claim to cover, or else simply flatly stating that established science is wrong for no other reason than that it's wrong, and then saying it shouldn't be taught in schools because it isn't perfect. And what on earth does creationism _teach_ us? If you made it something taught in schools, what would they teach? Genesis?
I repeat: Maybe i'm ignorant for only paying attention to those creationists with the extremist views, but seems to me like the extremists are the only ones trying to get political power, and as a result the only ones i should care/worry about. If all you're saying is that evoloution should be treated as theory not truth, you're right. I agree with you. I'm sorry if i may have offended you, but you weren't the person the original post was talking about. The original post was talking simply about those who aren't willing let church and state be seperate..
the problem with creationism is that the yahoos and the reasonable people are talking _just as loudly_. You can't easily seperate the two. You say "read what people are actually saying on the other side of the issue", but where am i supposed to get that? all i have to work off of is the people writing in to the newspaper and such. Since there is no one specifc group of non-yahoo's standing out, i'm left forced to use the "broad brush, false, misleading" views of creationism because that's the only part of the creationist philosophy that is being shoved in my face.
And ok, so not all creationists believe in the 7000 years thing. So what? You really think that if they start putting creationists on school boards, it will all be the reasonable catholics or whoever you're talking about that actually cares about science? No, of course you're going to have a number of yahoos. And there are _some_ people who want to bring in the 7000 year limit on everything; you think the presense of people who don't have a completely literal Genesis interpretation will suddenly nullify the votes of those who do? Start giving religion any power in schools, and it _will_ take more and more.
I'm sorry if i offended you with some kind of generalizing, but my generisations of creationist "theory" are simply the way its most vocal proponents are representing it. Thanks for the link, btw.. -_-
the G3 does not. the G4 will soon.
the G3 is really pretty awful at multiprocessing; one of the modes that you kind of need for good MP isn't functional, or something. i think that it works if the software organizes the MP-ing, but the hardware can't handle it alone. I dunno, either way there's something that makes MPing a g3 not worth the bother.
the G4, on the other hand, not only SMPs but does multiple-coring beautifully, has been doing so in the lab for months, and will be doing so in shipping computers relatively soon. When the multiple core g4s do start showing up, it should be truly impressive..
what, exactly, are the pro-creationists after?
i mean, really, they just seem to be destroying science without putting anything in its place. "creationism", the alternative to evoloution they seem to be pushing, doesn't seem to, like, contain any science. It has no factual basis, doesn't help with predicting things or explain anything, and it's based entirely on faith. If it's based on faith, what is there to teach? nothing.
They seem to be splitting things up into "macroevoloution" and "microevoloution" with some hazy distinction between the two they never really get into. I mean, where's the line? I'm sure they would rather not have to pay attention to that, but you can't completely _ignore_ it; i mean, genetics isn't something you can ignore, and what they call "microevoloution" can kill you, since diseases do it constantly.
It's one thing to say evoloution theory is bad, but when you try to get rid of it in the school and replace it with something concrete, well, creationism breaks down completely. The only option is to simply not teach anything. (which, i'll bet, is what they're doing in Kansas)
Where does "microevoloution" stop and "macroevoloution" start? You can interbreed dogs and get new things; so are all dogs related? What about wolves? At some point in order for creationism to work you've got to point at one specific thing that begat all doglike creatures, or all catlike or cowlike or undersea protazoa or fish. But are all fish from the same ancestor? What about sharks? They're a lot bigger. Things get very hazy, especially if you pay any attention to the fossil record. You start looking for the one ancestor of all those things and find it's pretty similar to a lot of other things at that time.
They point a lot to "gaps in the fossil record", but they seem to be saying that since evoloution isn't supported at every step by fossils, you should reject it in favor of a system that totally ignores the fossil record. How do they explain that the fossils seem to follow a kind of pattern of starting simpler and diverging into more adapted creatures? is it just a coincidence?
and this is where things get REALLY wierd. since of course they _start_ with claiming that man are not directly related to bacteria, but eventually it becomes less clear what they're after. What it comes down to is that eventually they claim that the earth can't be older than 7000 years. (if you allow more than that to occur it would contradict a literal interpretation of Genesis, and anyway if you lend any credence to carbon dating it kind of makes macroevoloution look kind of likely.) But if the earth isn't older than 7,000 years that kind of hurts history a lot. You've got to throw out quite a bit of early history-- i mean, historians seem to claim that real humans started around 35000 BC. Oh, and what about all those "homo habilis" and "austrolopithicus" things there seem to be fossils of? What the hell are THOSE? what about all those kind-of-humanlike fossils that start to get more and more humanlike over time?
Oh, that's right, carbon dating is all lies. But then if THAT'S true, we've got to reevaluate a LOT of history, since we base dates of certain early historical things on carbon dating and similar technologies. All our dates must be wrong. And what about atomic science? it describes exactly how and why carbon dating works; if carbon dating is lies, then that means our entire hypothesis of nuclear decay is totally wrong. We've got to come up with something in it's place. But nothing is offered to replace it. No good reason is offered as to why our theory of atoms is correct as far as it can make nuclear power plants and atomic bombs work, but its description of carbon isotopes decaying at a certain rate over time is somehow dead wrong. Do we have to throw out the periodic table, since it's where the neutrons come from?
The point is you wind up destroying more and more science the more you poke into this. Oh, and wouldn't our entire system of geology be wrong? plate tectonics describes earthquakes and how the mountains form and the deep-sea trenches and everything, but it describes things in terms of millions of years; there are only 7000 years.
You can't really put creationism in a school. It isn't science. Simple as that. It isn't like evoloution theory, which starts with a number of questions about why things are the way they are, and attempts to come up with the best explanation possible; creationism starts with an answer, and treats the questions as if they were totally irrelivant and unimportant. But if you're TEACHING SCIENCE, at some point questions do matter after a fashion.
ok i'm done rambling now.
--mcc-baka
"If we could just get everyone to close their eyes and visualize world peace for an hour, imagine how serene and quiet it would be until he looting started." -anonymous
how will this affect Redhat's ability to include things like SSH, or other packages involving strong crypto, in european releases?
they aren't allowed to ship those things outside the US now, right? so now will they be allowed to just send over the source code to the european offices and have _them_ compile the packages, thus circumventing the export controls?
unless i'm really confused, this would be a _very_ interesting test of the "code-is-free-speech" waiver to the export controls. An american country publishing open source software with strong crypto through a branch located outside the US.. hmm
-mcc-baka
one big thing about the imac-- and what i think he nicest part is-- is that it's _portable_.
:)
Not portable by laptop standards at all, but portable in the sense that it isn't actually painful to lug around. In the sense that you can _carry_ it with _one hand_. If you ever get in a situation where you have to move the computer around a room or building a lot, you'll find out how nice this is..
With a larger-than-15-inch monitor that just wouldn't work. at some point putting the monitor in the case begins to cause problems if the monitor's big enough.
15" is good enough. If you want bigger, well, you're not going to be buying an imac are you?
macs are unparallelled in their capabilities of handling multiple independent monitors at once, but since i don't see where you'd plug the multiple monitors in..well, that's not an option with the imac
lessee.. a good 3d card, good speakers. Now if only they'd put in an extended keyboard..
this would obviously be the best idea. or, just to make it absoloutely certain _they_ found it first, why not just write up the exploit/advisory whatever, then post the full thing to some big newsgroup _encrypted_?
then they could notify the company, and if the company hadn't done anything after a couple weeks, release the key to the encrypted advisory along with the plaintext advisory. with the right kind of encryption it would prove they did, in fact, find it first..
some programs all that matters is whether they get the task done, and not whether they do the task well. But not all. the perfect example of something that works the other way is a web browser: stabilty really _is_ more important than features there. Because it isn't simply performing a certain task and then leaving; it's omnipresent, always there running in the background, never being quit since ther'es no way of knowing when it will be needed again.
as someone on an OS with no memory protection (macintosh) i wind up with this problem amplified-- since any one program crashing automatically means i have to reboot. And MSIE causes more crashes than any other app for me, almost always while i'm just kinda checking on something on the web as i do something in another program. (and stability is one of the main reasons i switched from netscape to begin with.)
which brings me to the most important thing: the ship-first-fix-later philosophy doesn't work unless you actually fix later. Meanwhile the web browser companies _never_ go back and do the fix-later part; they just ship, over and over, constantly adding new features and never considering he validity or stability of old ones. The proverbial feature freeze doesn't even happen _after_ the product is shipped.
The point is, even if features are more important than stability, at some point stability should be at least a _consideration_.
-mcch tml#discontent
why web browsers suck: http://home.earthlink.net/~mcclure111/cyberleary.
this article ignores what is clearly the worst part of USCITA: legitimisation of prohibhiting reverse engineering of a product.
h tml#discontent
The whole lack-of-a-warranty thing is nothing new in software, and i seriously doubt any company would try the PR disaster of setting up their program so that they can kill it remotely. But we should really be worried about anything that gives a company the power to prevent someone from using cleanroomed reverse engineering on their product.
The big defense of software lisenses is that hey, if you don't like it, you can take it back to the store. But in a world without reverse engineering, you have to face the possibility that at some point you'll wind up with a program where switching to a different program isn't an option because the new program is prohibhited from communicating with the old one, or prohibhited from using the old one's files, and you'll be left with a large amount of data or work rendered useless..
(A question: could USCITA apply to hardware as well as software, such that, say, Nintendo could put a no-reverse-engineering software liscensing requirement on the N64, and then use that to prosecute anyone who exersizes their right under the patent laws to cleanroomed reverse engineering? What if you didn't actually buy or open the product yourself, but just found it laying on the street or something? Do you still violate the liscense?)
anyway, this article is completely right. software makers, especially those that make web browsers, pay a little too much attention to "features" and not quite enough to stability..
-mcc
why web browsers suck: http://home.earthlink.net/~mcclure111/cyberleary.
so, working on the very shaky assumption that the Sunday Times isn't just talking out of their ass and this device could actually be created, how does this fare for Elliptic Encryption?
How do you go about brute-forcing elliptic encryption, and is it similar to brute-forcing RSA? could this RSA-killing device be adapted to do EE?
just curious. i have very little idea of how elliptic encryption works, or how it's broken. Can anyone explain for me?
It appears that transmeta has patented the run-on sentence.
:)
Perhaps they are working on a microchip that will translate x86 instructions into difficult-to-read english in real time.
(score: 0 redundant)
transmeta will let you know what they're doing when they're ready. have patience. getting all worked up and making wild guesses won't really accomplish anything.
http://www.denverpost.com/news/news0814a.htm -- Denver Post article, august 14
Visit the Pokemon + Violence Shockwave Archive at http://www.aceplanet.net/users/_piku
-mcc-bak a
Personal responsibility is dead.
Personally i thought the pepsi logo on the card was the worst part. But don't think any other soda company is better for schools-- Coke has been doing some fairly evil things in the local public school districts around here in houston, mostly involving donating a bunch of money to the school and getting a monopoly on the cafeteria (and a promise the kids would buy a certain amount of coke), then raising prices (along with some other stuff)-- they're all pretty bad. A wonderful overview is at:. html
t .html)
http://www.houstonpress.com/1998/121798/news1-1
And i vaguely remember something i think happened around here about a "Coke day" a public school held, where they basically gave the school over to coke propaganda for a day, and took a group picture of the school to send to coke. Apparently this was somehow getting them a grant from coke. One kid wore a Pepsi t-shirt and got suspended.
Lets face it, our schools don't get enough money. Until we do something about this, the schools are going to whore themselves out to corporate interests.
I drink RC Cola.
(P.S. For awhile there a couple years ago the Free Burma Coalition was leading a boycott against pepsi for tacitly helping the totaltarian governmnent of Burma. They were selling "boycott pepsi" stickers off their website at wholesale..
I think that Pepsi pulled out of Burma, ending the boycott, but if you call them up you could maybe still get some leftover stickers.)
http://www.freeburmacoalition.org/
http://metalab.unc.edu/freeburma/boycott/boycot
alright.. maybe the word "all" is too broad. Maybe "everyone involved" works better.
Still the point remains that nobody is being hurt in any way. And as for the consumer, well, either their prices will lower if they buy PPCs or AMD chips, or they won't be affected.
i dunno. whatever.
First: the debate here is about _internal_ hard drives that are installed by default at the factory, and usage of either IDE or SCSI for those drives. Not about external optional hard drives the user adds later. There are no internal firewire hard drives. I'm not even sure internal firewire is an option. Firewire is totally irrelivant.
also, your comment about RAID is totally mind-boggling. did i just misunderstand ou? RAID is a design philosophy, not a protocol. It stands for Redundant Array of Independant Disks and bascically means that any RAID drive contains several hard disks inside it in case one fails. You can have a RAID disk under SCSI, IDE, firewire, or anything-- it's independant of connection type.
Anyway, i have a random question for anyone who may be listening: _is_ internal firewire a good idea, or even possible? i'd imagine there's some reason apple isn't doing it already. What is it?
ok, that's it.. the line between gambling and investment has now completely disappeared. please explain to me how that buying weather futures are legal in states with no anti-gambling laws. Or does it fall under the category of "internet gambling" and thus wind up outide the jurisdiction of the states?
It took me until about halfway through this article to convince myself that "oregon live" wasn't just some kind of attempt to cash in on the success of The Onion.
-mcc-baka
who misses disinfectant, and wishes the guy who made it had just GPLed what code he had when he retired.
computer companies cooperating for the better good of all, instead of fighting each other for short-term gain. wish we could see more of this.
so now that apple is facing a smaller shortage of G4s, will their stock go back _up_? or am i naive to impose some kind of logic on the stock market?
so the question is, what happens now? how much you wanna bet the answer is "nothing"?
probably the answer is, a bunch of slashdotters get to say "see, i told you so" although nobody's listening, and we are forced to accept Salon's view as true because it's better backed up than anyone else's and a totally objective viewpoint is unavailable.
will this alternate point of view on the columbine killings get any attention? will the actual facts get a front-cover Time article like the half-truths and assumptions did? probably not. The jury of Public Opinion has heard what it wants to hear and made its verdict. The columbine killers _were_ members of the trenchcoat mafia, the christian girl who died _was_ somehow a martyr (although what for i can't imagine) and marilyn manson is responsible. Not because any of these things are true, but because that is what people walk away thinking and these are the "facts" that will color people's desisions from now on.
Because when we come down to it, why does the truth about Columbine matter? Will knowing what motivated the two killers bring anyone back to life? Motivations don't help law enforcement; all that matters to them is whether there were any accompices, and whether anyone still alive is a threat to others. Who really cares, though, are the parents and such across the nation who want more food for their own self-rightiousness. Parents and school officials get complete verification, once and for all, that if you're a Goth you're evil. Christians get to look at themselves as victims; 80% of america thinks religion is "very important" in their lives and 50% favor teaching of creationism in public schools, but still the Christian establishment gets to make itself out as a victim, a repressed minority that needs to stand strong against the world around it, which is apparently trying to destroy it; all because one person who died in an attack by crazy people on a high school in colorado was apparently christian. A great number of people get to wallow in self-pity and invigorating anger because they managed to elevate empathy for those who have lived through a very sad, horrible event in Colorado into, somehow, a feeling of personal loss or involvement.
What actually happened at columbine is irrelivant. All that matters is how what people belive about it will affect what people think, how people act, or what already fairly repressed groups are denied their only outlet (black clothing, music) of self-expression.
everyone here keeps referring to microsoft being "punished".
my question: is a breakup really "punishment"?
i mean, you wind up with the interesting position that microsoft claims that their monopoly on O.S. doesn't help them to foist their applications on people; but then again they claim that having the O.S. and applications be different companies would be somehow bad for them. How?
The obvious answer is that if microsoft can't use it's 90+% market share to leverage its other products, the other products won't be used, or else MS will be forced to promote the products on basis of their own merits, something they've up to now only done occasionally. But microsoft won't admit this, of course. interesting to wach their minds at work.
Claiming that microsoft would be somehow be hurt by a split down the middle is, in fact, admitting that their strongest asset is their monopoly.
I hope that MS gets cut up, just because that would free me from the "microsoft guilt" of using MSIE4.5 for macintosh. Although the "AOL guilt" of using netscape is pretty much worse, so whatever. A MS breakup would help _everyone_; it would destroy MS's more worthless products, force them to make the others better, and generally restore choice to things. My only regret is that it wouldn't really hurt microsoft's OS business; but that seems to be doing a pretty good job of destroying itself.
wonderful idea. After all, they're suing gun companies for abuses of the gun companies' products by consumers that the gun companies have no way of preventing; so obviously what's to stop someone from suing the patent office for abuses of the patent office itself which the patent office could have very easily prevented by policing itself more?
Of course, the only result will be that the entire settlement will go into the pockets of various lawyers, but it would be worth it for the sheer irony value.
heh.. kewl.
Not so distant future? try not so distant past. This is happening already on a regular basis. Large companies are already trying the extremely effective tactic of frivolously suing tiny companies for the sole purpose of destroying them. As you said, even if the lawsuit would be thrown out of court the instant it went before a judge, the mere act of hiring a lawyer can be enough to take the small company out.
This is primarily happening in cases of emulators-- for example, Nintendo knows that clean-roomed reverse-engineered emulation is legal and not a patent violation, but that isn't important. They've lost every single lawsuit against a creator of an emulator, but that isn't important. What is important is that they are a huge corporation with deep pockets and the emulation people are generally hobbyists who can't pay legal bills. So, nintendo has been suing pretty much everyone. The more you look into emulation the more instances similar to this you see.
The biggest problem i see is that patents were designed as a shield; a defense against unscrupulous people who would simply rip off what you have spent so long inventing. But lately patents have been used more as weapons; to prevent competition, to hurt specific people, or to simply extort money with no basis. Any case of patents being used for offense rather than defense in my eyes proves the system doesn't work..
-mcc-baka
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
ha ha! how humorous! let me try to come up with a joke like that. Alright, how's this:
..oh, wait a minute. i forgot. that actually happened. www.appleinsider.com has been talking about it for weeks. Damn. OK, let me try again.
A company called "microware" has recently filed suit against Apple Computer for naming their new update of the Mac OS "Mac OS 9". Microware has an existing product named "OS 9" for mostly PPC-based mostly embedded applications. Since it's clear that the apple could not possibly have come up with any other source for the name "Mac OS 9" (which comes after Mac OS 8.6, Mac OS 8.5, Mac OS 8, and Mac OS 7.6) other than purposefully copying microware, Microware has come to the defense of its intellectual property to keep apple from defaming its reputation.
Ha ha! How was that?
Garth Brooks and the rapper "Warren G" have both sued each other over usage of a lower-case "g" as a logo. Both artists recently began using a huge lower-case "g" in their stage sets during live shows. It is uncertain who came up with the idea of a letter named "g", but since it is so creative and unobvious it is certain between Garth and Warrren, one is attempting to copy the other, and they didn't just come up with it independantly.
Err, wait a minute-- That happened too. i saw it on MTV news earlier this year. Dammit, i give up!! this satire stuff is too hard.
-mcc
[this post brought to you by the letters B and S, and the number 9]
you just didn't read it closely enough. here, i'll quote the relevant sections for you:
"The enigmatic, unknown extraterrestial forces which have apparently been cultivating sentient life throughout the galaxy for aeons abruptly reversed their stance on the Europa project yesterday and embraced the Open Source philosophy.
Formerly Europa had been totally propeitary, and the only statement released by the extraterrestrial forces was "ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS. EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE." However the extraterrestrials are now planning to release under the GNU public liscence the full genomes of all life that develops on Europa, and are inviting other sentient beings to help in the creation.
There is no word yet as to whether they may be considering open-sourcing the DNA sequences used by life on earth. In the absense of publicly available source, some humans have turned to attempting to reverse-engineer the DNA sequences under the banner "WINE^H^H^H^HThe Human Genome Project".
The extraterrestrial announcement may help to explain the incident last month in which Linus Tourevalds, RMS, and several other experienced programmers were inexplicably turned into radiation-based life forms by a large black monolith which mysteriously appeared at LinuxExpo in what appears to have been some kind of recruitment drive.
[snip]
Since the life on europa is still carbon-based, it is believed that porting of the Linux kernel will be relatively easy. Judging from a strange and slightly cryptic message (apparently from Linus) that mysteriously flashed across all of slashdot.org's monitors shortly after the extraterrestrial announcement as some strange force briefly seized control of all the computers in the building, work is preceeding very well; while right now they are concentrating on a port of GCC, it is possible there may be penguins on Europa as early as next year.
God could not be reached for comment."
-mcc-baka
who is even more tired than you