>>But I have difficulty talking to anyone who believes a few miniscule globules of rock millions of miles away can effect something as complex as our personalities and day-to-day activities.
Actually, I'm quite sure they do, via chaos theory and butterfly wings and all that stuff. A slight tug in gravity causes a wave to splash just high enough to wake up the girl who sees the boy who get married...
I just find it highly, highly, implausible that the effects of celestial bodies here on Earth can be in any conceivable way be predicted.
It's even more fantastically unlikely that the exact same fortunate or unfortunate events happen to the same twelfths of the population day in and day out.
Uh, no. Ignorance and bigotry go hand in hand. You seem to be a case in point -- your ignorance of religion has led you to a ridiculously illogical hatred of it.
Guess which Muslims hate Jews. Guess!
A: The poor and uneducated ones. The educated ones in general laugh at the teenagers in Palestine throwing rocks at tanks.
Guess which Christians in Ireland blow each other up?
A: The poor and uneducated ones. There's still tension between educated Catholics and Protestants in Belfast, but they're not the ones blowing each other up, by and large.
If you're looking for hatred and intolerance, look for the most insular and ignorant areas of the world. It won't matter if they're Christian or Atheist, they'll still be much more bigoted than a well-educated man from the same area. Actually, I take that back. I'd much rather have my car break down in a bigoted Christian town than a bigoted Atheist one. Much more likely to get help -- it's that whole universal love thing.
>>Religion is harmful, and the world would be better without it.
Religion has been the most powerful force for positive change in history, and is much more helpful than harmful. Stop listening to semi-literate bigots like Hitchens and try thinking for yourself.
It's not that much bigger of a statement. I think a lot of atheists view it simply as a matter of consistency. Hence the invisible pink aardvark example - most religious people would agree that believing in such a thing is ludicrous, because of a complete lack of evidence for it. Yet when it comes to one particular entity lacking any evidence, their philosophical stance inexplicably changes. Pointing out this inconsistency is hardly a strong philosophical statement in and of itself.
You're mixing your metaphors, trying to say that the question of the existence of God in Heaven is equitable to the existence of a pink invisible animal in a chair next to you. There's a number of reasons why they're not the same, namely: they're on different dimensions of existence, there's no evidence that a pink aardvark exists (there's plenty of people who have at least claimed to have seen God), it's not an important question (the aardvark won't send you to hell), and you're not really forced into believing or not believing in the aardvark. In other words, it's a dead option, unforced, and trivial, failing all the possible tests for belief established by James.
Instead, I think the problem with consistency lies with atheist scientists who will accept cause and effect for everything except the Big Bang, solely because they don't want to think about the logical conclusion that something outside of time must have caused it.
Worse, as the summary says: "...very best young scientists to make more ambitious, long-term -- but high-risk -- career choices"
And they'll do this only by awarding the mega-prize to people who make the breakthrough.
It's like expecting smart people to want to play the lottery. It's smart people don't base a career on a 0.1% chance of making $1M, with a 99.9% chance of $0. They might do it if it's easy enough to do in their garage on their free time (i.e., the lottery ticket is free), but it's too risky to expect smart people that understand math to enter as a career field.
On the contrary, just expanding NSF funding for researchers in the specific direction, with smaller prizes for specific endeavors, is probably the best way to go. I might not have ever left college (I was a researcher for years) if the pay was good and I had an interesting task to solve.
The great man theory of science is true, it just somewhat discounts the impact of luck. People who discount the great man theory place too much emphasis on the luck.
Truth is, you need both luck and talent.
Any number of petri dishes had been contaminated by the year that Fleming his "breakthrough" on penicillin. It took a person with the sort of curiosity to go, "Hmm, that's odd -- I wonder why?" when he got his lucky (or unlucky... it ruined his experiment) break.
If implemented correctly, removing the lock would result in a non-functional chip, since the lock would be part of some vital circuit. It would require all 128 bits to be set the correct way in order to work correctly, and each chip would have a different set of bits (based on the public key it creates) to function correctly. Since each chip would be fabbed slightly differently, I don't really see a way around this.
The weirder thing is that the reaction to this on Slashdot is overwhelmingly negative, even though all the chips would be unlocked before a customer ever saw the damn things.
Isn't this oldnews? I mean seriously, The Transparent Society came out like 10 years ago. Schneider is responding to it now?
But the point Brin is making is not mutual disclosure per se, but rather that governments already (and will have) ubiquitous monitoring (see for example England's "Safe under the watchful eyes" system), and so citizens need to insist on an equal level of transparency from the government. Which is more or less the same thing that Schneider is arguing for -- more transparency from governments.
I honestly have to say that I was creeped out when I was in England watching cameras track me (of all people) in a crowd. I was eating an ice cream cone. Scary, no? Or do terrorists like pistachio? And then an English friend told me to not look at the cameras since, "They don't like it when you do that." I would really feel a lot more comfortable if there was a web site where I could monitor these English police/voyeurs and see what it was they were doing (especially when tracking around Americans eating ice cream).
I do agree with Schneider's main point (that systems like the English have shouldn't be installed at all), but as Brin points out, even government cameras make up a small percentage of all the surveillance in the world. Was the recent Times Square Bicycle Bomberman caught on government surveillance or on a camera attached to some building? Brin's right -- surveillance becomes more an more ubiquitous every year, and we can't really even stop businesses from installing cameras on their properties. Enforcing transparency at the government level we can do, though.
The problem is, all the RPGA players are looking at all of their play experiences going out the window at once, which is a bad thing. Pretty much all my friends are done with the RPGA now, and have moved into other hobbies (poker, soccer, video games, etc.), which means that 4ed won't sell as well as it could.
Not to say it won't sell well, since it probably will, but that they're hurting themselves, definitely.
Basically, he needs to tap dance like this because the response to 4ed has been overwhelmingly negative (Mike Mearls estimated it as a 50% negative response when they introduced the idea), as opposed to 3.5, which was seen in a much more positive light. Apparently, when people play it, they like it, but nothing changes the fact that they're killing off 3.5 (what feels like) 2 years too early, and half the books they've been introducing over the last two years has been blatant test runs for 4ed - all sorts of alternate systems for doing combat (Bo9S) and Magic (ToM, MoI).
They're also killing every extant RPGA campaign (which is a big mistake, IMO, since LG came out before LC died, allowing players to bridge over).
But the only thing that actually kind of pisses me off is the snarky comments the developers have posted online (and in the 4ed Preview books) that people have been wrongly predicting the development of 4ed for years now. Of course, they started work on it 3 years ago...
36 tracks for 5 bucks... and priced correctly. I've listened to it twice through now and have found two tracks I like out of the lot. Most of it is just ambient music that doesn't really go anywhere.
Yeah, the thing took the skin off my fingers the last time I lifted it, and thought I was clever by buying an LCD TV and donating it to my sister (it's a very nice CRT, too, a 38XBR4). But then I had to bribe her to do some work for me, and now I'm stuck having to transport the damn thing again.
"...too later fall under the weight of plasma and LCD technologies."
As someone who just bought an LCD TV and is trying to figure out how the hell he'll get his 250lb 38" Hi-Def Sony CRT to his sister 400 miles away, I find this statement just a little ironic. The damn thing weighs more than most people.
Thank you -- my dad is always harping on me about how waste heat from CPUs can be converted into energy, and doesn't understand the Carnot efficiency in a system with a very small delta-T would be very low.
There's nothing incompatible about 3.5 and 4ed, except that it looks like 4ed PCs get a bunch of extra hps at 1st level, and can't full attack, and so will probably have a much lower high end at high levels. But who knows. The preview scans are all for 1st level characters.
Awesome. I love how someone making an actual rational point on the evolution/creationism debate gets modded troll. It's not wrong either, just something that most people, including, apparently, Slashdot moderators, don't understand./shrug, so much for trying to enlighten the world.
>>The ID movement is explicitly trying to be a "big tent" theory uniting Young Earth Creationism activists and Old Earth Creationism activists.
What it is trying to be is irrelevant. What it says (by Behe and Dembski) is that evolution and the fossil record and all that other stuff that YECs reject is actually true, but that God or something else was behind evolution.
This fact gets lost in the noise. ID and YEC are mutually contradictory positions, and you can't really get to YEC from ID.
Except Intelligent Design isn't Creationism -- it's contradictory to the idea of a young earth theory. ID says that God or someone else was behind evolution, which is at odds with the 6000 year old Earth idea.
I was lucky enough to have a superstar as my mentor when I started working during my freshman year of college. He wrote some code on his lunch breaks that ended up becoming a software product that earned about a quarter of all the company's income. He could do stuff in an afternoon that would take me all week to write. The only edge I had was in math, so that whenever something needed a mathematical solution, I could solve it, when he would just approximate it, but that was about it. The best part is, he was an awesome guy, and taught me a lot. I still play racquetball with him.
It kind of rubbed off on me after a while, and definitely led to me being able to write code faster, and more cleanly. Eventually, when I got around to writing CustomTF (which has been one of the largest mods for Quake for a while now), it basically was just two days of solid effort, and the thing ran more or less perfectly right out the gate.
I haven't been writing code much recently, as I've move on to more business-running stuff, but he's still in the thick of things 13 years later... I think his previous project was writing Cars for the Wii. I dunno what he's doing now though.
Slashdot Mirror
Glad to know that religious conversions never happen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_converts_to_Christianity
Ah well, they were all faking it anyway.
>>But I have difficulty talking to anyone who believes a few miniscule globules of rock millions of miles away can effect something as complex as our personalities and day-to-day activities.
Actually, I'm quite sure they do, via chaos theory and butterfly wings and all that stuff. A slight tug in gravity causes a wave to splash just high enough to wake up the girl who sees the boy who get married...
I just find it highly, highly, implausible that the effects of celestial bodies here on Earth can be in any conceivable way be predicted.
It's even more fantastically unlikely that the exact same fortunate or unfortunate events happen to the same twelfths of the population day in and day out.
>>Bigotry and religion go hand in hand
Uh, no. Ignorance and bigotry go hand in hand. You seem to be a case in point -- your ignorance of religion has led you to a ridiculously illogical hatred of it.
Guess which Muslims hate Jews. Guess!
A: The poor and uneducated ones. The educated ones in general laugh at the teenagers in Palestine throwing rocks at tanks.
Guess which Christians in Ireland blow each other up?
A: The poor and uneducated ones. There's still tension between educated Catholics and Protestants in Belfast, but they're not the ones blowing each other up, by and large.
If you're looking for hatred and intolerance, look for the most insular and ignorant areas of the world. It won't matter if they're Christian or Atheist, they'll still be much more bigoted than a well-educated man from the same area. Actually, I take that back. I'd much rather have my car break down in a bigoted Christian town than a bigoted Atheist one. Much more likely to get help -- it's that whole universal love thing.
>>Religion is harmful, and the world would be better without it.
Religion has been the most powerful force for positive change in history, and is much more helpful than harmful. Stop listening to semi-literate bigots like Hitchens and try thinking for yourself.
>>The whole basis of the scientific method is that the "observations" used to lend strength to a hypothesis are repeatable.
Which is why the scientific method is worthless for a large class of interesting problems.
You're mixing your metaphors, trying to say that the question of the existence of God in Heaven is equitable to the existence of a pink invisible animal in a chair next to you. There's a number of reasons why they're not the same, namely: they're on different dimensions of existence, there's no evidence that a pink aardvark exists (there's plenty of people who have at least claimed to have seen God), it's not an important question (the aardvark won't send you to hell), and you're not really forced into believing or not believing in the aardvark. In other words, it's a dead option, unforced, and trivial, failing all the possible tests for belief established by James.
Instead, I think the problem with consistency lies with atheist scientists who will accept cause and effect for everything except the Big Bang, solely because they don't want to think about the logical conclusion that something outside of time must have caused it.
>>Sorry, but the "Newtonian mechanics proven wrong" meme bugs the hell out of me almost as much as astrology.
Cool, so you can build a spaceship that travels 900,000 km/s!
I know this chick that's totally into space aliens and crystal healing magic that would be perfect for you.
>>That may be, but many peoples' religion is based on these stories being absolutely correct and infallible
That's the fundamentalist viewpoint, but most non-fundamentalists see parts of the Bible as symbolic instead of literal.
It's hardly a new idea - St. Augustine wrote about this back in the 300s, and it's sort of been a core tenet of the Catholic church for ~2000 years.
Worse, as the summary says: "...very best young scientists to make more ambitious, long-term -- but high-risk -- career choices"
And they'll do this only by awarding the mega-prize to people who make the breakthrough.
It's like expecting smart people to want to play the lottery. It's smart people don't base a career on a 0.1% chance of making $1M, with a 99.9% chance of $0. They might do it if it's easy enough to do in their garage on their free time (i.e., the lottery ticket is free), but it's too risky to expect smart people that understand math to enter as a career field.
On the contrary, just expanding NSF funding for researchers in the specific direction, with smaller prizes for specific endeavors, is probably the best way to go. I might not have ever left college (I was a researcher for years) if the pay was good and I had an interesting task to solve.
The great man theory of science is true, it just somewhat discounts the impact of luck. People who discount the great man theory place too much emphasis on the luck.
Truth is, you need both luck and talent.
Any number of petri dishes had been contaminated by the year that Fleming his "breakthrough" on penicillin. It took a person with the sort of curiosity to go, "Hmm, that's odd -- I wonder why?" when he got his lucky (or unlucky... it ruined his experiment) break.
If implemented correctly, removing the lock would result in a non-functional chip, since the lock would be part of some vital circuit. It would require all 128 bits to be set the correct way in order to work correctly, and each chip would have a different set of bits (based on the public key it creates) to function correctly. Since each chip would be fabbed slightly differently, I don't really see a way around this.
The weirder thing is that the reaction to this on Slashdot is overwhelmingly negative, even though all the chips would be unlocked before a customer ever saw the damn things.
>>100 years from now. Do you thing proprietary software has a chance in hell?
I think it's more or less impossible to make any sort of statement about the world 10 years from now, let alone 100.
Isn't this oldnews? I mean seriously, The Transparent Society came out like 10 years ago. Schneider is responding to it now?
But the point Brin is making is not mutual disclosure per se, but rather that governments already (and will have) ubiquitous monitoring (see for example England's "Safe under the watchful eyes" system), and so citizens need to insist on an equal level of transparency from the government. Which is more or less the same thing that Schneider is arguing for -- more transparency from governments.
I honestly have to say that I was creeped out when I was in England watching cameras track me (of all people) in a crowd. I was eating an ice cream cone. Scary, no? Or do terrorists like pistachio? And then an English friend told me to not look at the cameras since, "They don't like it when you do that." I would really feel a lot more comfortable if there was a web site where I could monitor these English police/voyeurs and see what it was they were doing (especially when tracking around Americans eating ice cream).
I do agree with Schneider's main point (that systems like the English have shouldn't be installed at all), but as Brin points out, even government cameras make up a small percentage of all the surveillance in the world. Was the recent Times Square Bicycle Bomberman caught on government surveillance or on a camera attached to some building? Brin's right -- surveillance becomes more an more ubiquitous every year, and we can't really even stop businesses from installing cameras on their properties. Enforcing transparency at the government level we can do, though.
The problem is, all the RPGA players are looking at all of their play experiences going out the window at once, which is a bad thing. Pretty much all my friends are done with the RPGA now, and have moved into other hobbies (poker, soccer, video games, etc.), which means that 4ed won't sell as well as it could.
Not to say it won't sell well, since it probably will, but that they're hurting themselves, definitely.
>>You must be European?
No, just Ironic
Basically, he needs to tap dance like this because the response to 4ed has been overwhelmingly negative (Mike Mearls estimated it as a 50% negative response when they introduced the idea), as opposed to 3.5, which was seen in a much more positive light. Apparently, when people play it, they like it, but nothing changes the fact that they're killing off 3.5 (what feels like) 2 years too early, and half the books they've been introducing over the last two years has been blatant test runs for 4ed - all sorts of alternate systems for doing combat (Bo9S) and Magic (ToM, MoI).
They're also killing every extant RPGA campaign (which is a big mistake, IMO, since LG came out before LC died, allowing players to bridge over).
But the only thing that actually kind of pisses me off is the snarky comments the developers have posted online (and in the 4ed Preview books) that people have been wrongly predicting the development of 4ed for years now. Of course, they started work on it 3 years ago...
Los Angeles is already way ahead of you on the ozone production issue.
36 tracks for 5 bucks... and priced correctly. I've listened to it twice through now and have found two tracks I like out of the lot. Most of it is just ambient music that doesn't really go anywhere.
Yeah, the thing took the skin off my fingers the last time I lifted it, and thought I was clever by buying an LCD TV and donating it to my sister (it's a very nice CRT, too, a 38XBR4). But then I had to bribe her to do some work for me, and now I'm stuck having to transport the damn thing again.
"...too later fall under the weight of plasma and LCD technologies."
As someone who just bought an LCD TV and is trying to figure out how the hell he'll get his 250lb 38" Hi-Def Sony CRT to his sister 400 miles away, I find this statement just a little ironic. The damn thing weighs more than most people.
Thank you -- my dad is always harping on me about how waste heat from CPUs can be converted into energy, and doesn't understand the Carnot efficiency in a system with a very small delta-T would be very low.
There's nothing incompatible about 3.5 and 4ed, except that it looks like 4ed PCs get a bunch of extra hps at 1st level, and can't full attack, and so will probably have a much lower high end at high levels. But who knows. The preview scans are all for 1st level characters.
Awesome. I love how someone making an actual rational point on the evolution/creationism debate gets modded troll. It's not wrong either, just something that most people, including, apparently, Slashdot moderators, don't understand. /shrug, so much for trying to enlighten the world.
>>The ID movement is explicitly trying to be a "big tent" theory uniting Young Earth Creationism activists and Old Earth Creationism activists.
What it is trying to be is irrelevant. What it says (by Behe and Dembski) is that evolution and the fossil record and all that other stuff that YECs reject is actually true, but that God or something else was behind evolution.
This fact gets lost in the noise. ID and YEC are mutually contradictory positions, and you can't really get to YEC from ID.
Except Intelligent Design isn't Creationism -- it's contradictory to the idea of a young earth theory. ID says that God or someone else was behind evolution, which is at odds with the 6000 year old Earth idea.
I was lucky enough to have a superstar as my mentor when I started working during my freshman year of college. He wrote some code on his lunch breaks that ended up becoming a software product that earned about a quarter of all the company's income. He could do stuff in an afternoon that would take me all week to write. The only edge I had was in math, so that whenever something needed a mathematical solution, I could solve it, when he would just approximate it, but that was about it. The best part is, he was an awesome guy, and taught me a lot. I still play racquetball with him.
It kind of rubbed off on me after a while, and definitely led to me being able to write code faster, and more cleanly. Eventually, when I got around to writing CustomTF (which has been one of the largest mods for Quake for a while now), it basically was just two days of solid effort, and the thing ran more or less perfectly right out the gate.
I haven't been writing code much recently, as I've move on to more business-running stuff, but he's still in the thick of things 13 years later... I think his previous project was writing Cars for the Wii. I dunno what he's doing now though.