The shiny rock doesn't represent something valuable, it is something valuable.
But the value we assign to the shiny rock is no more absolute than the value we assign to, say, an Internet stock. Back a few months, tech stocks were everybody's favorite stuff, so people paid more for them than their intrinsic worth.
The intrinsic value of gold is actually probably fairly low, and it's not "backed" by anything. Personally, I don't see the attraction of gold - it appeals to people with unrehabilited caveman sensibilities - ooh, shiny thing, me want! If gold went out of fashion, then it would lose value as surely as Amazon did when tech stocks went out of fashion.
There's nothing at all irrational about a market based on the trade value of shiny things.
Why couldn't you say the same thing about, say, tulips? (cf Dutch Tulip Mania) The difference is a perceptual one. As you said, "it's just everybody's favorite stuff". And it's only valuable as long as it stays that way. You're betting on fashion, like buying Armani suit futures.
I don't think it would kill Microsoft to test this with IE4, and at least inform their customers whether they were affected, even if they don't supply a patch.
My guess is the reason they don't do that, is that they don't believe IE4 is affected. Admitting that would make them look bad, so they're rather spread FUD about the safety of their older software, to try to encourage upgrades.
That kind of violates the idea idea of having software versioning, now doesn't it?
No, it doesn't. It's perfectly normal to continue to release patches for older products, for just about any software company other than Microsoft. In fact, Microsoft itself has done this in the past: they released a service pack for NT 3.51 after NT 4.0 was out. I don't remember the timing on NT4 SP6a - that may have come out after Win2K, too.
When talking about [quantum computing] systems, the usual computer scientist gives you a look like you were talking about warp drives.
I think the warp drive analogy is fairly accurate. Building quantum computers is a task somewhat outside the realm of computer science, at least as it's usually defined. And, since no useful quantum computer has yet been built, we don't know for sure what physical limits we're going to run into with them. A lot of the discussion about quantum computing to date has been about unrestricted theoretical possibilities. Sure, we could develop a mathematical computing theory based on the imagined properties of a perfect quantum computer - but what are the chances that a real-world quantum computer will be as unconstrained as we would like it to be? I suggest we revisit this discussion in 25 years, when I predict that quantum computers will be "about five years" from being viable...
> Also it would take a LONG time to work out the biology of a human being from
quantum physics, but it could be done.:-)
That may be true (although I'd like to see you prove it),
but would it be meaningful or useful? As another reply has pointed out,
you're expressing a standard reductionist position, but it's one that isn't even
held by most good physicists. For example, here's a quote from quantum
physics professor Howard Georgi of Harvard (taken from here):
...the statement, "chemistry and biology are branches
of physics" is not true. It *is* true that in chemistry and
biology one does not encounter any new physical principles. But the
systems on which the old principles act differ in such a drastic and
qualitative way in the different fields that it is simply not *useful* to
regard one as a branch of another. Indeed, the systems are so
different that `principles' of new kinds must be developed, and it is the
principles which are inherently chemical or biological which are
important.
-- Howard Georgi, "Effective quantum field
theories", in The New Physics, ed. Paul Davies
Another good intro to these kinds of issues is Murray
Gell-Mann's book, "The Quark and the Jaguar". Gell-Mann's
credentials as a quantum physicist are beyond reproach, but he is by no means a
reductionist, and has a keen appreciation for the unique properties of complex
systems - the jaguar in the title of his book is a metaphor for this.
Since many other physicists and philosophers more
qualified than I have written on this topic, I'll restrict my reponse to a
freewheeling, extended analogy: quantum physics can be compared to a CPU's
instruction set, or "machine code". On top of that, we layer
assemblers, and then compilers and interpreters for various languages.
Using compilers and interpreters, we build various systems and
applications. Since ultimately, all of these things are done using machine
code, is it meaningful to say that all applications are "just machine
code"? There's a sense in which this is true, but let's examine it
further.
With the CPU analogy, we can do something we can't do in
our single physical universe: we can take an application and compile it on a
different type of CPU - a CPU with a different instruction set. Compiled
for this CPU, the application still behaves identically. So by claiming
that an application is machine code, we're clearly missing an important point,
since the same application functionality can be achieved with completely
different machine code. [Of course, both CPUs follow a more fundamental
set of information theory laws, but that's not important to the argument.]
The point is that complex systems exhibit "emergent properties",
characteristics which arise from interactions between components of the system
in question, and which can't be meaningfully analyzed, or even easily inferred,
from the perspective of more basic, underlying systems.
To cut this short (well, shorter than it would be
otherwise), I'm going to make a few leaps. Imagine for a moment that we
could build a toy universe in the laboratory, with different physical laws than
our own. Even though its physical laws are different, it's not impossible
- in fact it's quite likely - that complex systems in that universe could share
some of the properties of complex systems in our universe. To take an
extreme example (as I said, I'm leaping), imagine an intelligence in this other
universe, and assume we could communicate with it somehow. We would
probably find that we share some basic characteristics with this alien
intelligence. For example, it is a common characteristic of living systems
that they have a strong bias toward survival, simply because those that don't,
die out. This survival instinct is something that's not a direct or
obvious consequence of quantum mechanics - it's actually rooted in simple logic
(perhaps all science is logic?!)
Even if you could somehow come up with a
QM model for the survival instinct, it would miss the point, since it's quite
conceivable that a survival instinct could arise in a universe not based on QM -
it really has nothing to do with QM. The survival instinct is just one
example of an emergent property of complex systems - in this case a living
system - that has little or nothing to do with the physical construction of the
system.
This is just the NY Times doing a typical media headline troll. The article doesn't actually say what the headline implies.
Computers have become an incredible and indispensable tool in the advancement of all the sciences, but that doesn't make "all science computer science". One could just as easily say that "all science is quantum physics" or "all science is math" and it would have the same degree of truth, i.e. some but not enough to be considered a generally true statement.
Whenever you find yourself thinking "Slashdot sucks", just step back for a moment and try to figure out where you went wrong in your train of thought. It's usually one of four things:
You were suckered into thinking that Microsoft was not truly evil, possibly by an article on MSNBC or ZDNet. Take note: All your media are belong to Microsoft.
You were suckered into thinking that Linux, open source, or free software is less than perfect in some way. See above.
You were reading an article written by Jon Katz. I have to admit, this is strong evidence that/. sucks. Happily, you can set your user profile to filter out such articles.
The only reason this had to go to court was because Amazon itself didn't have the common sense to realize that the patent had no merit.
The argument that Bezos and others gave for enforcing this patent was that of fiduciary responsibility: their responsibility to make full use of the "assets" at their disposal. The claim was made that they could be sued by shareholders if they failed to exploit this patent.
So now, what's needed is a disincentive. Losing the actual patent in court (as I'm sure they will) is not enough. By pushing this patent against all common sense, they have wasted company money, squandered goodwill, diluted their management focus, and generally done a bad job of doing what they're supposed to do, sell stuff on the web.
A shareholder lawsuit would be symbolic, and perhaps give the next dumb corporate management group something to think about next time such a worthless patent is being sought or enforced.
This is exactly how software gets so bloated. You have a niche requirement that most people have never even thought of the need for (yes, I'm calling all authors and journalists a niche). But unless the package you use has that feature, it's virtually useless to you.
Result: Microsoft Word is one of the most bloated packages in existence, and can require significant training and support for low-level users to be able to use it effectively. (If you've never had to support secretaries, you may not realize this.) But it has just about every niche feature that any paying customer on the planet has ever requested.
To get back on topic, all you journalists and writers need to do is find a friendly Linux geek and convince her that adding this feature would be an enormous contribution to world happiness. You'll have your wordcount feature, StarOffice will be that much more bloated, and Microsoft will be that much less necessary. Everybody wins! (Everyone we care about, anyway.)
Either your boycotting the music industry for moral reasons (and not using their product at all) or your just avoiding paying for the product because in your opinion it's too expensive.
Or, we're using a hardball negotiating tactic. If we sat around waiting for the record companies to provide downloadable music, we'd be here till the Earth stops rotating. For a change, consumers have some power to make the record companies sit up and take notice, and they have. They're now scrambling to develop electronic music distribution systems. Why is that? Just one word: Napster.
Being "moral" when dealing with the record companies would be like being "polite" when dealing with Saddam Hussein. Doesn't make any sense.
Thanks for the clarification. I knew that MIME attachments were supported by SOAP, but I wasn't sure of whether pure binary attachments - as opposed to encoded attachments like Base64 - were allowed, whether by SOAP or even HTTP. I haven't seen them used very often so I wondered if there was a reason for that.
Yeah, they talk about the marketers allegedly aiming at the baby boomers - but the truth is that the marketers in question are themselves baby boomers, and apparently the only ones around who actually get nostalgic for '60s schlock.
As others have mentioned, encoding via BASE64 is the common way to do this, but if that's not good enough, another way to handle it in SOAP and XML in general is to reference your binary data from within the XML, as an external resource.
This makes sense when you have rich structured data that can benefit from XML, but also have large binary data - like media files - which are effectively blobs. If all your data needs to be shipped in binary form, then this approach would probably be pointless, except as a way to tunnel through an XML/SOAP-based system.
The resource reference can use any protocol and implementation mechanism you want, limited only by the environment you plan to run in. For example, you could use an IIOP URI to reference the binary data.
You might also package the binary data along with the XML, like a MIME attachment, in which case the URI would reference that. Although possible, AFAIK, this is non-standard and so whether it makes sense depends on what your reasons are for being interested in XML/SOAP, and again, the environment you need to run in.
I think you could help answer your own question by trying to identify more clearly what you want to get out of going back to school. You mention that you feel that you're "lacking in [your] skills". I know people who've gone through full undergrad and masters degrees in CS who still feel that way when it comes to writing code in the real world, so I think you need to figure out more about what you need or want to know more about, and try to find a school that'll give you that, or even pursue that knowledge outside of school.
If one of your goals is to have the piece of paper that says you're a qualified computer scientist, then clearly you have to go back to school in some form to get that. But if that doesn't matter so much to you, there are plenty of ways outside of school to gain knowledge that's directly relevant to your skills, or that will provide you with an excellent foundation to work from.
If you're good at studying by yourself, on the CS side there are classic textbooks like SICP (link has full text; also see the Slashdot review) and other reference books like Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, or more focused books like Aho et al on Compilers. Studying material like this on your own can be difficult without any guidance, which is of course one of the reasons people go to college. But starting along this road may also help identify what you're interested in and what you're not, and where your strong and weak points are. That could help you choose your next step.
If you do start self-studying, some social support can help - joining mailing lists related to the topics you're interested in, finding local people who're interested in pursuing something similar (perhaps via clubs), etc.
Aside from the traditional pure CS material, there are plenty of good books out there that relate more directly to the world of work. One book that I've recently found helpful is "Analysis Patterns - Reusable Object Models" by Martin Fowler. This covers patterns that arise often in general business and financial applications, so may not be the kind of thing you're looking for specifically, but I mention it as an example of the kind of stuff that's out there - there's far more than just "Java for Dummies", and if you want to improve your skills and knowledge, you should seek some of these out.
If you do go back to to school, I think in some respects, Math might be a better choice, since (a) you really love it and (b) I think it's a "deeper" subject - compared to many advanced math topics, much of computer science is simple by comparison. But this comes back to what you want out of it: a math degree would open up science and engineering jobs that you could never get without it, but it doesn't directly provide you with CS skills, although a smart employer should recognize that a math major with CS skills is a great catch.
But posting as a non-AC has the advantage that I can tell when someone has replied to my messages, so for the record:
but we basicly agree and are now simply negotiating definitions of different sample points among the possiblity space.
Well, yeah, except one end of that possibility space includes "God", but to get to that part of the space requires as high an evidentiary standard as any other postulate. Scientifically, we need repeatable experiments (or even experiments that should be repeatable, but aren't) or consistent mathematical/theoretical proposals to give some support for the existence of a God-like entity, whether conceived of as a metauniverse or not.
My wording "'not contraindicated' and 'no evidentiary support'" was poorly chosen, so I'll rephrase it: all the existing evidence points to is that it is possible that there may exist something beyond the 4-dimensional universe we perceive. In other words, the evidence suggests that a valid answer may lie in the possibility space we're talking about. However, since we currently have no way of further refining this postulate, we can only speculate about it.
Making claims about its properties that go beyond what we have direct evidence for isn't logical or scientific. All we can really say about its properties is that it would need to have spatial characteristics that dimensionally go beyond the 4D spacetime we're familiar with it. We can then propose mathematical models that seem consistent in order to describe the possibilities, and there are quite a few of these, although we have no certain way of choosing between them. But attributing sentience to it just seems to have no basis, and not even any relevance unless we have evidence to support it.
Or, I could be trolling;). Unsuccessfully, since no one else is joining the thread. Darn it. Guess I should stick to serious comments.
Hey, I'm enjoying it. You're doing a fine job!;) I completely agree, the original message and the anonymous followups look like a classic troll and subsequent feeding. If it walks like a troll...
No sane person could possibly buy the AC's line that it was an honest opinion. Even if it is, it's couched like a troll and extreme to a fault, without the slightest acknowledgement of such. It's a troll, no matter which way you slice it.
It came from natural processes which followed physical laws: the coalescing of a gas cloud which was the remnant of earlier stellar explosions and thus contained sufficient heavy elements to form planets.
The point is this: that the existence of a big bang, which from our perspective "created" the universe, doesn't necessarily mean that the universe was created in the sense that we intuitively tend to think of. As such, the apparent appearance of "the beginning of time" doesn't necessarily raise the question of what went before.
There's always going to be a fundamental issue here which may never be resolved: at some level, we reach a point where no amount of observation, testing, or theorizing is going to yield any further information. At that point, all we can do is speculate about what lies beyond, as has been happening in this thread. However, simply because we don't have sufficient information to explain something, doesn't require the invention of an omnipotent being capable of explaining anything. As I've said elsewhere, that's a huge cop-out, logically speaking.
In other words, God sentience combined with the omni-presence thing is hard for me to differentiate from non-understood physics of a metauniverse.
Well, I guess we're arguing about the likely or possible properties of a metauniverse. My point is simply that it's possible to logically distinguish between "simple" metauniverses, which merely exist as a substrate of some kind on/in which universes form (and may always have existed); and more complex metaverses, which might be indistinguishable from a God. Occam's Razor, while not exactly a natural law, would fall on the side of simpler metaverses.
Actually, 'normal' physics even has a window to bind through via quantum probabilities. Spooky action at a distance and omni-presence are not really that far apart without more evidence.
But the difference is sentience. Even assuming we don't find good explanations for spooky action at a distance, as far as we know it happens the same way every time, so we can assume there's some physical law we don't understand. But an active omni-presence that makes changes as "it" sees fit - perhaps depending on which humans are praying and what they're praying about - requires a major departure from what we understand as science or physics, and basically requires a conversion to the standard kiss-God's-ass mentality of the religious.
The latter view requires more evidence, in this universe, to be able to accept it from a scientific point of view. So my position is that a non-Godlike metaverse is possible, and not contraindicated by the evidence, whereas there's no evidentiary support (scientifically speaking) for a God-like metaverse.
but it seems in this sense that since you could not find a solution to your problem, you say that some omnipotent being did it.
Yes, it's a really lazy way out, isn't it? Once you've postulated an omnipotent god, you don't have to explain anything ever again. "It's God's will!"
Your reference to cavemen is most appropriate - belief in gods is a caveman mentality, probably embedded in our genes as part of our evolved social programming, and very difficult for many people to overcome.
Of course the difference I guess comes in if you layer some aware presence on top of it.
Absolutely!
Then you get a God that does stuff with purpose and intent versus a metauniverse with some 'physics' that generates universes. Of course these can be bound to equivalence as well, so we could in effect say our religion is a theory of the physics of the metauniverse.
I don't see how these can be made equivalent. My point is that the existence of a metauniverse is a possibility we can't logically ignore, and if it did exist, would have consequences for some of the questions we have about our universe. Of course, we can't currently prove the existence of a metauniverse.
But a metauniverse that took sentient action in our universe, for example parting the Red Sea for Moses, is impossible to explain by any normal model of physics.
But I agree, there's no reason that Judeo-Christianity should reject the idea of metauniverses out of hand, unless they wish to continue arguing an anthropocentric point of view which might suggest that there can be only one universe, the one which contains us.
First, I'd like to comment that if there were a logical proof of a god's existence, this debate would have been over long before now. Trying to prove god logically is futile. That said, I shall now demolish all your logical arguments!;)
In contrast, the God of Judeo-Christianity simply exists--that is his identifying characteristic. He exists outside of our cause-and-effect universe and so does not a demand a cause of his own.
You're defining God as an axiom. I can just as easily say that the universe has "always" existed, but you need to be able to step outside the universe to understand how that's possible. Stepping outside is something that can be done mathematically. Please see this message for a brief example and a reference.
The universe cannot explain itself. There is no reason why the universe should exist.
It can explain itself just as easily as a god can, with the advantage that it is directly detectable, unlike god.
On the other hand, had the universe always existed, how can you explain the fact that the stars still shine?
There are a number of possible explanations. You need to take a less naive viewpoint of the universe, though. Certainly, if you make no attempt to understand it, it's an easy cop-out to postulate that it was created by an omnipotent being. Some alternative possibilities include the Hawking-Hartle explanation referenced in the above link; but even without bending our minds to the point of trying to understand the universe from "the outside", the universe could have always existed, but it goes throug through big bang/expansion/contraction/big crunch cycles, and we're just living through one of those expansion cycles.
As for a metauniverse containing the universe: this proposition is as unscientific as saying that God created the universe. While possibly true, it is unverifiable, and any belief in one must be take on faith.
The proposition is not unscientific. It's obviously a possibility, and logically speaking, one that can't easily be denied. The omnipotent God, however, goes against science in the sense of being the most complex possible explanation - a being that can break all the rules and make anything possible.
But from the big-bang onwards we don't require from a god to explain the Universe.
This brief summary describes Hawking & Hartle's proposal for a no-boundary universe, in which the issue of what happened before the big bang is taken care of with some neat mathematics. The bottom line is that the progression of time from the big bang as a "beginning" is just something we perceive from within the universe - looked at from an appropriate conceptual/mathematical perspective, there's no problem.
In this model, what happened before the big bang is a little analogous to the problem of "where does all the water go that falls off the edge of the horizon?" was when we believed the earth was flat. The imagined problem disappeared once we comprehended the larger structure.
Slashdot Mirror
But the value we assign to the shiny rock is no more absolute than the value we assign to, say, an Internet stock. Back a few months, tech stocks were everybody's favorite stuff, so people paid more for them than their intrinsic worth.
The intrinsic value of gold is actually probably fairly low, and it's not "backed" by anything. Personally, I don't see the attraction of gold - it appeals to people with unrehabilited caveman sensibilities - ooh, shiny thing, me want! If gold went out of fashion, then it would lose value as surely as Amazon did when tech stocks went out of fashion.
There's nothing at all irrational about a market based on the trade value of shiny things.
Why couldn't you say the same thing about, say, tulips? (cf Dutch Tulip Mania) The difference is a perceptual one. As you said, "it's just everybody's favorite stuff". And it's only valuable as long as it stays that way. You're betting on fashion, like buying Armani suit futures.
My guess is the reason they don't do that, is that they don't believe IE4 is affected. Admitting that would make them look bad, so they're rather spread FUD about the safety of their older software, to try to encourage upgrades.
That kind of violates the idea idea of having software versioning, now doesn't it?
No, it doesn't. It's perfectly normal to continue to release patches for older products, for just about any software company other than Microsoft. In fact, Microsoft itself has done this in the past: they released a service pack for NT 3.51 after NT 4.0 was out. I don't remember the timing on NT4 SP6a - that may have come out after Win2K, too.
He's also an expert in artificial intelligence, apparently. Beware the aging mathematical physicist who strays outside his discipline!
Good catch!
When talking about [quantum computing] systems, the usual computer scientist gives you a look like you were talking about warp drives.
I think the warp drive analogy is fairly accurate. Building quantum computers is a task somewhat outside the realm of computer science, at least as it's usually defined. And, since no useful quantum computer has yet been built, we don't know for sure what physical limits we're going to run into with them. A lot of the discussion about quantum computing to date has been about unrestricted theoretical possibilities. Sure, we could develop a mathematical computing theory based on the imagined properties of a perfect quantum computer - but what are the chances that a real-world quantum computer will be as unconstrained as we would like it to be? I suggest we revisit this discussion in 25 years, when I predict that quantum computers will be "about five years" from being viable...
That may be true (although I'd like to see you prove it), but would it be meaningful or useful? As another reply has pointed out, you're expressing a standard reductionist position, but it's one that isn't even held by most good physicists. For example, here's a quote from quantum physics professor Howard Georgi of Harvard (taken from here):
Another good intro to these kinds of issues is Murray Gell-Mann's book, "The Quark and the Jaguar". Gell-Mann's credentials as a quantum physicist are beyond reproach, but he is by no means a reductionist, and has a keen appreciation for the unique properties of complex systems - the jaguar in the title of his book is a metaphor for this.
Since many other physicists and philosophers more qualified than I have written on this topic, I'll restrict my reponse to a freewheeling, extended analogy: quantum physics can be compared to a CPU's instruction set, or "machine code". On top of that, we layer assemblers, and then compilers and interpreters for various languages. Using compilers and interpreters, we build various systems and applications. Since ultimately, all of these things are done using machine code, is it meaningful to say that all applications are "just machine code"? There's a sense in which this is true, but let's examine it further.
With the CPU analogy, we can do something we can't do in our single physical universe: we can take an application and compile it on a different type of CPU - a CPU with a different instruction set. Compiled for this CPU, the application still behaves identically. So by claiming that an application is machine code, we're clearly missing an important point, since the same application functionality can be achieved with completely different machine code. [Of course, both CPUs follow a more fundamental set of information theory laws, but that's not important to the argument.] The point is that complex systems exhibit "emergent properties", characteristics which arise from interactions between components of the system in question, and which can't be meaningfully analyzed, or even easily inferred, from the perspective of more basic, underlying systems.
To cut this short (well, shorter than it would be otherwise), I'm going to make a few leaps. Imagine for a moment that we could build a toy universe in the laboratory, with different physical laws than our own. Even though its physical laws are different, it's not impossible - in fact it's quite likely - that complex systems in that universe could share some of the properties of complex systems in our universe. To take an extreme example (as I said, I'm leaping), imagine an intelligence in this other universe, and assume we could communicate with it somehow. We would probably find that we share some basic characteristics with this alien intelligence. For example, it is a common characteristic of living systems that they have a strong bias toward survival, simply because those that don't, die out. This survival instinct is something that's not a direct or obvious consequence of quantum mechanics - it's actually rooted in simple logic (perhaps all science is logic?!)
Even if you could somehow come up with a QM model for the survival instinct, it would miss the point, since it's quite conceivable that a survival instinct could arise in a universe not based on QM - it really has nothing to do with QM. The survival instinct is just one example of an emergent property of complex systems - in this case a living system - that has little or nothing to do with the physical construction of the system.
Computers have become an incredible and indispensable tool in the advancement of all the sciences, but that doesn't make "all science computer science". One could just as easily say that "all science is quantum physics" or "all science is math" and it would have the same degree of truth, i.e. some but not enough to be considered a generally true statement.
- You were suckered into thinking that Microsoft was not truly evil, possibly by an article on MSNBC or ZDNet. Take note: All your media are belong to Microsoft.
- You were suckered into thinking that Linux, open source, or free software is less than perfect in some way. See above.
- You were reading an article written by Jon Katz. I have to admit, this is strong evidence that
/. sucks. Happily, you can set your user profile to filter out such articles.
Therefore,Excellent post, thank you. It's Insightful, Interesting, Informative, and Underrated!
The argument that Bezos and others gave for enforcing this patent was that of fiduciary responsibility: their responsibility to make full use of the "assets" at their disposal. The claim was made that they could be sued by shareholders if they failed to exploit this patent.
So now, what's needed is a disincentive. Losing the actual patent in court (as I'm sure they will) is not enough. By pushing this patent against all common sense, they have wasted company money, squandered goodwill, diluted their management focus, and generally done a bad job of doing what they're supposed to do, sell stuff on the web.
A shareholder lawsuit would be symbolic, and perhaps give the next dumb corporate management group something to think about next time such a worthless patent is being sought or enforced.
Result: Microsoft Word is one of the most bloated packages in existence, and can require significant training and support for low-level users to be able to use it effectively. (If you've never had to support secretaries, you may not realize this.) But it has just about every niche feature that any paying customer on the planet has ever requested.
To get back on topic, all you journalists and writers need to do is find a friendly Linux geek and convince her that adding this feature would be an enormous contribution to world happiness. You'll have your wordcount feature, StarOffice will be that much more bloated, and Microsoft will be that much less necessary. Everybody wins! (Everyone we care about, anyway.)
Or, we're using a hardball negotiating tactic. If we sat around waiting for the record companies to provide downloadable music, we'd be here till the Earth stops rotating. For a change, consumers have some power to make the record companies sit up and take notice, and they have. They're now scrambling to develop electronic music distribution systems. Why is that? Just one word: Napster.
Being "moral" when dealing with the record companies would be like being "polite" when dealing with Saddam Hussein. Doesn't make any sense.
"Yes, sir, you must be thinking of Super Mario Brothers. Here you go, it's on special this week, only $49.95!"
(Note: name of game supplied doesn't matter. Be sure to have a suitably restrictive return policy!)
Thanks for the clarification. I knew that MIME attachments were supported by SOAP, but I wasn't sure of whether pure binary attachments - as opposed to encoded attachments like Base64 - were allowed, whether by SOAP or even HTTP. I haven't seen them used very often so I wondered if there was a reason for that.
Yeah, they talk about the marketers allegedly aiming at the baby boomers - but the truth is that the marketers in question are themselves baby boomers, and apparently the only ones around who actually get nostalgic for '60s schlock.
This makes sense when you have rich structured data that can benefit from XML, but also have large binary data - like media files - which are effectively blobs. If all your data needs to be shipped in binary form, then this approach would probably be pointless, except as a way to tunnel through an XML/SOAP-based system.
The resource reference can use any protocol and implementation mechanism you want, limited only by the environment you plan to run in. For example, you could use an IIOP URI to reference the binary data.
You might also package the binary data along with the XML, like a MIME attachment, in which case the URI would reference that. Although possible, AFAIK, this is non-standard and so whether it makes sense depends on what your reasons are for being interested in XML/SOAP, and again, the environment you need to run in.
If one of your goals is to have the piece of paper that says you're a qualified computer scientist, then clearly you have to go back to school in some form to get that. But if that doesn't matter so much to you, there are plenty of ways outside of school to gain knowledge that's directly relevant to your skills, or that will provide you with an excellent foundation to work from.
If you're good at studying by yourself, on the CS side there are classic textbooks like SICP (link has full text; also see the Slashdot review) and other reference books like Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, or more focused books like Aho et al on Compilers. Studying material like this on your own can be difficult without any guidance, which is of course one of the reasons people go to college. But starting along this road may also help identify what you're interested in and what you're not, and where your strong and weak points are. That could help you choose your next step.
If you do start self-studying, some social support can help - joining mailing lists related to the topics you're interested in, finding local people who're interested in pursuing something similar (perhaps via clubs), etc.
Aside from the traditional pure CS material, there are plenty of good books out there that relate more directly to the world of work. One book that I've recently found helpful is "Analysis Patterns - Reusable Object Models" by Martin Fowler. This covers patterns that arise often in general business and financial applications, so may not be the kind of thing you're looking for specifically, but I mention it as an example of the kind of stuff that's out there - there's far more than just "Java for Dummies", and if you want to improve your skills and knowledge, you should seek some of these out.
If you do go back to to school, I think in some respects, Math might be a better choice, since (a) you really love it and (b) I think it's a "deeper" subject - compared to many advanced math topics, much of computer science is simple by comparison. But this comes back to what you want out of it: a math degree would open up science and engineering jobs that you could never get without it, but it doesn't directly provide you with CS skills, although a smart employer should recognize that a math major with CS skills is a great catch.
but we basicly agree and are now simply negotiating definitions of different sample points among the possiblity space.
Well, yeah, except one end of that possibility space includes "God", but to get to that part of the space requires as high an evidentiary standard as any other postulate. Scientifically, we need repeatable experiments (or even experiments that should be repeatable, but aren't) or consistent mathematical/theoretical proposals to give some support for the existence of a God-like entity, whether conceived of as a metauniverse or not.
My wording "'not contraindicated' and 'no evidentiary support'" was poorly chosen, so I'll rephrase it: all the existing evidence points to is that it is possible that there may exist something beyond the 4-dimensional universe we perceive. In other words, the evidence suggests that a valid answer may lie in the possibility space we're talking about. However, since we currently have no way of further refining this postulate, we can only speculate about it.
Making claims about its properties that go beyond what we have direct evidence for isn't logical or scientific. All we can really say about its properties is that it would need to have spatial characteristics that dimensionally go beyond the 4D spacetime we're familiar with it. We can then propose mathematical models that seem consistent in order to describe the possibilities, and there are quite a few of these, although we have no certain way of choosing between them. But attributing sentience to it just seems to have no basis, and not even any relevance unless we have evidence to support it.
Hey, I'm enjoying it. You're doing a fine job! ;) I completely agree, the original message and the anonymous followups look like a classic troll and subsequent feeding. If it walks like a troll...
No sane person could possibly buy the AC's line that it was an honest opinion. Even if it is, it's couched like a troll and extreme to a fault, without the slightest acknowledgement of such. It's a troll, no matter which way you slice it.
C'mon, in a sentence relating to /., you can't use "editorial" and "work" in the same sentence!
It came from natural processes which followed physical laws: the coalescing of a gas cloud which was the remnant of earlier stellar explosions and thus contained sufficient heavy elements to form planets.
The point is this: that the existence of a big bang, which from our perspective "created" the universe, doesn't necessarily mean that the universe was created in the sense that we intuitively tend to think of. As such, the apparent appearance of "the beginning of time" doesn't necessarily raise the question of what went before.
There's always going to be a fundamental issue here which may never be resolved: at some level, we reach a point where no amount of observation, testing, or theorizing is going to yield any further information. At that point, all we can do is speculate about what lies beyond, as has been happening in this thread. However, simply because we don't have sufficient information to explain something, doesn't require the invention of an omnipotent being capable of explaining anything. As I've said elsewhere, that's a huge cop-out, logically speaking.
Well, I guess we're arguing about the likely or possible properties of a metauniverse. My point is simply that it's possible to logically distinguish between "simple" metauniverses, which merely exist as a substrate of some kind on/in which universes form (and may always have existed); and more complex metaverses, which might be indistinguishable from a God. Occam's Razor, while not exactly a natural law, would fall on the side of simpler metaverses.
Actually, 'normal' physics even has a window to bind through via quantum probabilities. Spooky action at a distance and omni-presence are not really that far apart without more evidence.
But the difference is sentience. Even assuming we don't find good explanations for spooky action at a distance, as far as we know it happens the same way every time, so we can assume there's some physical law we don't understand. But an active omni-presence that makes changes as "it" sees fit - perhaps depending on which humans are praying and what they're praying about - requires a major departure from what we understand as science or physics, and basically requires a conversion to the standard kiss-God's-ass mentality of the religious.
The latter view requires more evidence, in this universe, to be able to accept it from a scientific point of view. So my position is that a non-Godlike metaverse is possible, and not contraindicated by the evidence, whereas there's no evidentiary support (scientifically speaking) for a God-like metaverse.
Fun argument though, thanks!
I like that! Civility on /.!
but it seems in this sense that since you could not find a solution to your problem, you say that some omnipotent being did it.
Yes, it's a really lazy way out, isn't it? Once you've postulated an omnipotent god, you don't have to explain anything ever again. "It's God's will!"
Your reference to cavemen is most appropriate - belief in gods is a caveman mentality, probably embedded in our genes as part of our evolved social programming, and very difficult for many people to overcome.
Sorry if I appear rude! ;)
Absolutely!
Then you get a God that does stuff with purpose and intent versus a metauniverse with some 'physics' that generates universes. Of course these can be bound to equivalence as well, so we could in effect say our religion is a theory of the physics of the metauniverse.
I don't see how these can be made equivalent. My point is that the existence of a metauniverse is a possibility we can't logically ignore, and if it did exist, would have consequences for some of the questions we have about our universe. Of course, we can't currently prove the existence of a metauniverse.
But a metauniverse that took sentient action in our universe, for example parting the Red Sea for Moses, is impossible to explain by any normal model of physics.
But I agree, there's no reason that Judeo-Christianity should reject the idea of metauniverses out of hand, unless they wish to continue arguing an anthropocentric point of view which might suggest that there can be only one universe, the one which contains us.
In contrast, the God of Judeo-Christianity simply exists--that is his identifying characteristic. He exists outside of our cause-and-effect universe and so does not a demand a cause of his own.
You're defining God as an axiom. I can just as easily say that the universe has "always" existed, but you need to be able to step outside the universe to understand how that's possible. Stepping outside is something that can be done mathematically. Please see this message for a brief example and a reference.
The universe cannot explain itself. There is no reason why the universe should exist.
It can explain itself just as easily as a god can, with the advantage that it is directly detectable, unlike god.
On the other hand, had the universe always existed, how can you explain the fact that the stars still shine?
There are a number of possible explanations. You need to take a less naive viewpoint of the universe, though. Certainly, if you make no attempt to understand it, it's an easy cop-out to postulate that it was created by an omnipotent being. Some alternative possibilities include the Hawking-Hartle explanation referenced in the above link; but even without bending our minds to the point of trying to understand the universe from "the outside", the universe could have always existed, but it goes throug through big bang/expansion/contraction/big crunch cycles, and we're just living through one of those expansion cycles.
As for a metauniverse containing the universe: this proposition is as unscientific as saying that God created the universe. While possibly true, it is unverifiable, and any belief in one must be take on faith.
The proposition is not unscientific. It's obviously a possibility, and logically speaking, one that can't easily be denied. The omnipotent God, however, goes against science in the sense of being the most complex possible explanation - a being that can break all the rules and make anything possible.
This brief summary describes Hawking & Hartle's proposal for a no-boundary universe, in which the issue of what happened before the big bang is taken care of with some neat mathematics. The bottom line is that the progression of time from the big bang as a "beginning" is just something we perceive from within the universe - looked at from an appropriate conceptual/mathematical perspective, there's no problem.
In this model, what happened before the big bang is a little analogous to the problem of "where does all the water go that falls off the edge of the horizon?" was when we believed the earth was flat. The imagined problem disappeared once we comprehended the larger structure.