The GP made a good argument, so it's hard to even guess the nature of your objection to it. Care to elaborate? Do you have some kind of "humans are all that matters" response?
On behalf of mankind, I welcome you to planet Earth! From what star system are you visiting our fair world?
Isn't it obvious? He's from the alternate reality which Bush created. From what I hear, it's a wonderful place: in that reality, Bush is a uniter, not a divider; the mission in Iraq was accomplished, years ago; and Brownie did a heck of a job dealing with Katrina. It's not surprising that some people actually want to live in that reality!
Even if string theory fails as a theory, it's still an attempt to provide a mathematical model for space, matter, and the various forces. It is falsifiable in the simple sense that if it predicts things that are at odds with known theories and observations, there's a problem that would have to be resolved. If string theory could be falsified in this sense, it would have been dropped long ago. To qualify as scientific, it doesn't actually have to make new predictions, particularly in the realm it's operating in. ID makes absolutely no comparable predictions, other than, as I said, "That's what God wanted".
We're at a point in fundamental theoretical physics were progress is incredibly difficult because of the limitations on our ability to analyze the necessary structures. Those limitations aren't going away any time soon - the next generation of accelerators might help a little, but quite likely not in any major way. For all we know at the moment, it's possible that we'll never discover a better theory of everything than the Standard Model + GR + SR. So does that mean we should stop trying? At this point, one of the best tools we have is mathematics, and that's what ST is exploiting.
ST has some suspicious features: with so many degrees of freedom, and so few ways to experimentally constrain those freedoms, it can be tweaked endlessly to produce the desired results. However, that in itself doesn't mean that there's not a workable theory there. Think of it as exploring a mathematical space, looking for something which fits our universe. In fact, it's not that different from how previous theoretical discoveries were made, except that the mathematics of previous theories was trivial by comparison, so it was much easier to hit on the "right" theory in the space being explored.
You might claim that ST is a bad scientific theory, or a failed scientific theory, but to say that it's comparable with ID shows a serious lack of understanding of the distinction between science and fantasy.
What nonsense. Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory by any stretch of the imagination. Show me the math, the testable, specific and accurate predictions, the falsifiability (even if only in theory). You can't.
It's not even remotely a question of needing "something to believe in". If you think that, you don't understand science at all. Scientific theories don't give us something to believe in, they give us ways to predict what will happen under specific circumstances, which allows us to understand what's going on around us better. If they don't make such predictions, they're no use as scientific theories. Intelligent Design makes no predictions other than "Whatever God wants".
The computer you used to type your post relies on electrons transmitting signals through a semiconductor at nearly the speed of light. The people who invented that technology relied on science. Science works, and contributes constructively to the daily lives of most of humanity. Intelligent Design only works as a political tool, and as a way to identify people not capable of rational thought.
What's your point, exactly? It's okay for them to provide worse service in other countries they do business in since they're based in the US?
In some circumstances, yes. There are all sorts of issues which come up when shipping internationally that don't arise for domestic customers, and in particular, returns are much more expensive (not to mention that shipping is slower, in either direction). I don't know the specifics of anyone's bad experience in Hungary, but before blaming Amazon I'd look at whether there might have been reasons outside of their control. After all, someone else just posted what a great experience they had in Slovenia, so clearly Amazon isn't just blowing off its international customers as a matter of course.
People making $1600 a day do make mistakes like this, and the reason is because it's not necessarily part of their core mission, which is often just to get some system working in the first place. In that context, things like cross-site scripting errors are far down the road. If you're being paid by the hour or day, your time is usually spent on things the client has explicitly told you to spend it on, and budgeted for. Unless there's an identified chunk of the budget devoted to "audit and fix cross-site scripting holes", any time spent even thinking about that is a loss to the consultant. If the system ends up with such errors, and they weren't explicitly budgeted for, then consultants get paid to fix them, if the client decides to fix them. You don't have to be the smartest person on earth to make a lot of money as a consultant...
No-one seems to have pointed out that "to deduct human opinions from factual information" means to subtract human opinions from factual information. The intended word is deduce.
Apparently, everyone who actually knows English has now officially abandoned Slashdot. (Unless the lack of corrections is a sign that the/. audience is maturing, and no longer finds it necessary to correct every little error. Hmmm - sounds a little far-fetched...)
Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have all claimed that various criticism of the current policies of the executive branch are anti-American. They may not use the term directly, but they phrases like "helping the terrorists", "unacceptable to think...", etc. Of course, sane people ignore them, but that's where the parent poster is coming from.
I'll buy this week's New Scientist in the hope of some sort of grovelling apology for this appalling mess of an article. Or at least of a proper flaming of the editors in the letters pages. And then I think I'll see if I can't get a reliable supply of Scientific American - it's quite scarce in UK newsagents but always has some really solid science in it.
When I was a kid, I used to think that New Scientist and Scientific American were somehow comparable because they both have "science" in the title. That's misleading, though. The point of this microwave drive article is really just so the author can say at the end "gee whiz, imagine if we had such a drive". The fact that it isn't going to happen doesn't matter. In that sense, New Scientist is much more like the old Omni magazine - a blend of scifi and questionable gee-whiz science news from the fringe. Except Omni was more interesting.
Oh, and BTW, the inventor of the microwave drive isn't dumb - he's already built in his prediction of why the drive won't work - buried in the article is the observation that once the drive starts moving, it's output will drop[*]. But even assuming the drive somehow works, the goes the "strap a nuclear reactor & go to Saturn" scenario is ruled out by the inventor's own description of the drive's capability.
[*] This is perhaps a restatement of conservation of momentum, and once the tests are done it'll turn out that the net useful energy this drive can produce is... zero. How surprising!
(Please, if there are any psychologists or psychiatrists who read Slashdot, don't have me committed. It's a joke, m'kay?)
You don't need to worry about that, psychiatrists are reasonable people. In fact, they're so taken with your wit that they've decided to give you a free vacation -- the men coming up your stairs right now have a complimentary white jacket for you, and they'll take you to a, uh, let's say hotel room, tastefully decorated right down to the designer padding on all surfaces. Just go quietly, we don't want to have to start getting needles involved, now do we?
The implementor's convenience should only be a pedagogical issue if you're teaching how to implement Scheme. Afaik, courses that teach how to implement Scheme always teach a simplified subset anyway, so that wouldn't really change with R6RS.
I see a separate issue with the elegance of the language, which often correlates with simplicity of implementation. But I don't think requiring some implementation complexity, particularly in libraries, in the interests of supporting portable code, is a bad thing. Scheme isn't purely a pedagogical language.
Thanks for the reply. On the question of required vs. recommended features, it seems to me that if R6RS is to have much meaning as a standard, it should require as much as possible, within reason. Otherwise, you can't write serious R6RS-compliant programs - you can only write R6RS-compliant programs for implementations which support X, Y & Z optional features. In environments where some R6RS features don't make sense, they'll of course be omitted, but it doesn't make much sense to dilute the requirements for other implementations because of that. I don't think a single standard can cater to all the needs - look at Java, with J2ME, J2SE, J2EE etc. I also don't think whether something is hard to implement should affect anything by itself - the language isn't designed for the implementor's convenience, although aspects of it may be simple enough that it sometimes seems that way.
It's just childish, pure and simple. Humans cooperate in social networks by trusting each other in various unspoken ways. It's easy to abuse that trust. People who think that they've achieved something by abusing that trust are either children, still experimenting with social limits, or mentally defective in some way, whether sociopathic, desperately insecure, or whatever. That's all there is to it.
What do you mean about continuations being so easy in Python, considering that Python doesn't have first-class continuations? Are you talking about Stackless Python?
Keep in mind that R6RS is a language definition aimed largely at Scheme implementors. It's useful for users, too, but it's not supposed to be a tutorial, particularly not for concepts like continuations, or hygienic macros.
Google doesn't win arguments for you if you don't bother to read the documents that come up in a search.
The term officially used by the GAO at least is "undocumented immigrant", which is defined in the definitions section of e.g. this document as "A person entering the United States without inspection by the INS or with fraudulent documentation, or one who enters legally but subsequently violates the visa terms."
The same document defines "illegal alien" as "a commonly used synonym for Undocumented Immigrant".
BTW, "undocumented" implies that they don't have legal documentation. Your idea that someone with fraudulent documentation qualifies as "documented" is a bit strange, and it's easy to see why official terminology wouldn't follow that approach, since it implicitly grants some kind of valid status to fraudulent documents -- even though it's only in language, misleading language can lead to problems.
Huh? I'm pretty sure the Egyptians didn't do a lot of work to decide if it was safe.
Oh please. Many ancient Egyptian papers (or papyruses) demonstrating the safety of lead nanoparticles were published. Why, there were whole shelves devoted to them in the Library of Alexandria!
Slashdot Mirror
The GP made a good argument, so it's hard to even guess the nature of your objection to it. Care to elaborate? Do you have some kind of "humans are all that matters" response?
Isn't it obvious? He's from the alternate reality which Bush created. From what I hear, it's a wonderful place: in that reality, Bush is a uniter, not a divider; the mission in Iraq was accomplished, years ago; and Brownie did a heck of a job dealing with Katrina. It's not surprising that some people actually want to live in that reality!
I agree with everything in your post. :)
Even if string theory fails as a theory, it's still an attempt to provide a mathematical model for space, matter, and the various forces. It is falsifiable in the simple sense that if it predicts things that are at odds with known theories and observations, there's a problem that would have to be resolved. If string theory could be falsified in this sense, it would have been dropped long ago. To qualify as scientific, it doesn't actually have to make new predictions, particularly in the realm it's operating in. ID makes absolutely no comparable predictions, other than, as I said, "That's what God wanted".
We're at a point in fundamental theoretical physics were progress is incredibly difficult because of the limitations on our ability to analyze the necessary structures. Those limitations aren't going away any time soon - the next generation of accelerators might help a little, but quite likely not in any major way. For all we know at the moment, it's possible that we'll never discover a better theory of everything than the Standard Model + GR + SR. So does that mean we should stop trying? At this point, one of the best tools we have is mathematics, and that's what ST is exploiting.
ST has some suspicious features: with so many degrees of freedom, and so few ways to experimentally constrain those freedoms, it can be tweaked endlessly to produce the desired results. However, that in itself doesn't mean that there's not a workable theory there. Think of it as exploring a mathematical space, looking for something which fits our universe. In fact, it's not that different from how previous theoretical discoveries were made, except that the mathematics of previous theories was trivial by comparison, so it was much easier to hit on the "right" theory in the space being explored.
You might claim that ST is a bad scientific theory, or a failed scientific theory, but to say that it's comparable with ID shows a serious lack of understanding of the distinction between science and fantasy.
What nonsense. Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory by any stretch of the imagination. Show me the math, the testable, specific and accurate predictions, the falsifiability (even if only in theory). You can't. It's not even remotely a question of needing "something to believe in". If you think that, you don't understand science at all. Scientific theories don't give us something to believe in, they give us ways to predict what will happen under specific circumstances, which allows us to understand what's going on around us better. If they don't make such predictions, they're no use as scientific theories. Intelligent Design makes no predictions other than "Whatever God wants". The computer you used to type your post relies on electrons transmitting signals through a semiconductor at nearly the speed of light. The people who invented that technology relied on science. Science works, and contributes constructively to the daily lives of most of humanity. Intelligent Design only works as a political tool, and as a way to identify people not capable of rational thought.
There's already a competitor to the theory of gravity: Intelligent Falling.
I, for one, welcome our new overlord-joke hating overlords!
People making $1600 a day do make mistakes like this, and the reason is because it's not necessarily part of their core mission, which is often just to get some system working in the first place. In that context, things like cross-site scripting errors are far down the road. If you're being paid by the hour or day, your time is usually spent on things the client has explicitly told you to spend it on, and budgeted for. Unless there's an identified chunk of the budget devoted to "audit and fix cross-site scripting holes", any time spent even thinking about that is a loss to the consultant. If the system ends up with such errors, and they weren't explicitly budgeted for, then consultants get paid to fix them, if the client decides to fix them. You don't have to be the smartest person on earth to make a lot of money as a consultant...
No-one seems to have pointed out that "to deduct human opinions from factual information" means to subtract human opinions from factual information. The intended word is deduce.
/. audience is maturing, and no longer finds it necessary to correct every little error. Hmmm - sounds a little far-fetched...)
Apparently, everyone who actually knows English has now officially abandoned Slashdot. (Unless the lack of corrections is a sign that the
Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have all claimed that various criticism of the current policies of the executive branch are anti-American. They may not use the term directly, but they phrases like "helping the terrorists", "unacceptable to think...", etc. Of course, sane people ignore them, but that's where the parent poster is coming from.
When I was a kid, I used to think that New Scientist and Scientific American were somehow comparable because they both have "science" in the title. That's misleading, though. The point of this microwave drive article is really just so the author can say at the end "gee whiz, imagine if we had such a drive". The fact that it isn't going to happen doesn't matter. In that sense, New Scientist is much more like the old Omni magazine - a blend of scifi and questionable gee-whiz science news from the fringe. Except Omni was more interesting.
Oh, and BTW, the inventor of the microwave drive isn't dumb - he's already built in his prediction of why the drive won't work - buried in the article is the observation that once the drive starts moving, it's output will drop[*]. But even assuming the drive somehow works, the goes the "strap a nuclear reactor & go to Saturn" scenario is ruled out by the inventor's own description of the drive's capability.
[*] This is perhaps a restatement of conservation of momentum, and once the tests are done it'll turn out that the net useful energy this drive can produce is... zero. How surprising!
Mod parent up, it mentions Australia!
The implementor's convenience should only be a pedagogical issue if you're teaching how to implement Scheme. Afaik, courses that teach how to implement Scheme always teach a simplified subset anyway, so that wouldn't really change with R6RS.
I see a separate issue with the elegance of the language, which often correlates with simplicity of implementation. But I don't think requiring some implementation complexity, particularly in libraries, in the interests of supporting portable code, is a bad thing. Scheme isn't purely a pedagogical language.
Thanks for the reply. On the question of required vs. recommended features, it seems to me that if R6RS is to have much meaning as a standard, it should require as much as possible, within reason. Otherwise, you can't write serious R6RS-compliant programs - you can only write R6RS-compliant programs for implementations which support X, Y & Z optional features. In environments where some R6RS features don't make sense, they'll of course be omitted, but it doesn't make much sense to dilute the requirements for other implementations because of that. I don't think a single standard can cater to all the needs - look at Java, with J2ME, J2SE, J2EE etc. I also don't think whether something is hard to implement should affect anything by itself - the language isn't designed for the implementor's convenience, although aspects of it may be simple enough that it sometimes seems that way.
It's just childish, pure and simple. Humans cooperate in social networks by trusting each other in various unspoken ways. It's easy to abuse that trust. People who think that they've achieved something by abusing that trust are either children, still experimenting with social limits, or mentally defective in some way, whether sociopathic, desperately insecure, or whatever. That's all there is to it.
What do you mean about continuations being so easy in Python, considering that Python doesn't have first-class continuations? Are you talking about Stackless Python?
Keep in mind that R6RS is a language definition aimed largely at Scheme implementors. It's useful for users, too, but it's not supposed to be a tutorial, particularly not for concepts like continuations, or hygienic macros.
The language definition part of R6RS is still about 50 pages. The rest is libraries and other stuff.
Which things do you think overreach? Just curious.
Google doesn't win arguments for you if you don't bother to read the documents that come up in a search.
The term officially used by the GAO at least is "undocumented immigrant", which is defined in the definitions section of e.g. this document as "A person entering the United States without inspection by the INS or with fraudulent documentation, or one who enters legally but subsequently violates the visa terms."
The same document defines "illegal alien" as "a commonly used synonym for Undocumented Immigrant".
BTW, "undocumented" implies that they don't have legal documentation. Your idea that someone with fraudulent documentation qualifies as "documented" is a bit strange, and it's easy to see why official terminology wouldn't follow that approach, since it implicitly grants some kind of valid status to fraudulent documents -- even though it's only in language, misleading language can lead to problems.
Who knows, maybe he meant onus. They all end in a similar "iss" sound after all, what kind of genius could possibly tell them apart?