I much prefer the touchscreen for browsing, which is the primary activity of most computer users. I also much prefer it for doing real work. I am an audio engineer, and I love the ability to go into a crowd and use my iPhone to make things sound good where the people are, instead of where the sound board is. Dragging a mouse out there would be absurd. Trying to manipulate multiple parameters at once is also much easier with a touchscreen. (assuming that it is multitouch)
I can't imagine that I'm in the only career for which touchscreens are better than mice. And for the casual user, browsing is much nicer with a touchscreen. And for non-casual use, my observation has been that most power users much prefer using keyboard commands, and use the mouse very little. The mouse is not the best input device for most things. Even in photo editing, most power users are using Wacom tablets rather than mice.
Mobility is a huge, huge feature, though. Mobility and the touchscreen interface. I love tweaking computers, and I ran Linux for years, but now that I have my iPhone, I rarely use a "real" computer. I can't see what major feature could possibly be added to it that would make it consistently more desirable to use than my iPhone. The two reasons I still get it out are A. Proprietary software and B. A real keyboard. The keyboard thing is pretty minor, though; It is trivial to set up a keyboard to work with a mobile device.
I absolutely expect my phone to replace, not supplement, my computer. Maybe not a iPhone, but a phone of some sort. The sooner the better, I hate dragging my computer around just to do a few minor tasks.
The website is infinitely more robust than their iPhone app. Their crappy app is the reason most of my friends don't use Facebook anywhere near as much as they used to.
I don't know why we're trying to relive the worst era in math education in America. Pretty much right after Sputnik launched, American textbooks went from pretty good to awful. Go to an antique store and try to find the best and worst math textbooks. I guarantee you that every single good math textbook you find will be either pre-Sputnik, or after 1980.
Spunik was very helpful in some aspects of American science, but math education, unquestionably, is not a good place to relive Sputnik.
I think it's a lot more than a difference of culture. You'll notice a sharp decline in textbook quality after the launch of Sputnik. Sputnik freaked out Americans, so they started pumping loads of money into revamping math and science education. Money, unfortunately is not the main thing that makes a good textbook. Basically, after Sputnik, for some reason, it became necessary to cram as much set theory into every single math book as possible, whether it needed it or not.
The fact that it's not a 1:1 comparison doesn't make it invalid. The comparison has relevance regardless of the relative values of books and people. People being free and information being free are two good things. Just because one is intensely more good than the other doesn't change the fact that here are two situations that are similar, in that we are balancing one "good" against the "good" of not screwing people.
The comparison illustrates the point that there are clearly things in life that outweigh the good of "not screwing some people." Human freedom is certainly one of those things.
Is freedom of information another such thing? That's obviously a tougher issue, but the slavery comparison makes it clear that it isn't a slam-dunk argument. "It is a bad idea because it screws some people over" is clearly demonstrated to be an incomplete argument. The point was made, and made effectively, I thought. I'm really not sure why all this meta-discussion was necessary.
Absurd. At no point did his comparison imply that problems with copyright are as significant as the problem of slavery.
What is the problem with comparing things with other things of a much greater magnitude? When people compare electrons to planets, do you object because planets are obviously much, much larger and clearly must have nothing at all in common with something with such a far removed size?
His sentence was clearly saying that not screwing specific people over is not always the most important thing. This holds true for big issues like slavery, and for small issues like copyright. It's a valid comparison. What's so wrong with that?
Re:Idle's the right place for this...
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He has shown over and over to be nothing more than a glory hound who likes to cause strife wherever he goes.
Nothing more? That's it? We have encapsulated everything about this guy's humanity in one sentence? I'm a Christian, and I therefore disagree with Dawkins on a great many things, but I still think he's got a lot of good things to offer. I'm glad he's around. I frequently find his talks very refreshing. It's always a good thing to have devil's advocate in a discussion to weed out the crappy ideas. And regardless of your flavor of Christianity, there's certainly a surplus of crappy ideas. (Sam Harris is a way better atheist than Dawkins, though.)
Google doesn't collect peoples' information for the happy, innocent purpose of improving their experience. They collect peoples' information to make money. Why can't they be honest about that?
I can't disagree with your second sentence, but I see no reason to believe the first. Why would you think that they don't do both, and why isn't it ok to make money simultaneously with improving user's experiences?
Unless I seriously misread TFA, this error has nothing to do with the spectral content of the data. Spectral content certainly influences the way things scale, but it seems to have no connection to this particular bug.
Where do you get the idea that the "overwhelming majority" of Christians believe this? Anything beyond anecdotal evidence?
This may be a prominent view in Calvinist churches, (reformed baptist, presbyterian, etc.) but is certainly not a prominent view in churches with a more Arminian flavor (methodist, pentecostal, etc.)
The means are not important, because in modern Christianity once you're "saved" it's irrevocable.
In some branches of modern (and less modern) Christianity this is believed, and in other branches of modern (and less modern) Christianity this is not believed. The beliefs of the christian community are far from homogeneous.
I think we can agree the passages you've cited are clearly talking about the human death. To my reading, there seems to be no strong indication that animal and plant death are included or excluded.
Sorry, you did raise that point earlier, and I should have addressed it then..Anyhow, if the account is in some ways allegorical or symbolic, that does not necessarily mean that it has no bearing on the literal world. And there are a large number of possible interpretations as far as which parts may be literal and which parts may not.
This is such a large issue that, unfortunately, there is no slam dunk argument possible here. There are too many possible interpretations to debunk all of them with such a simple argument. I'm not saying that you're not right. I'm saying that your attack is unfair and oversimplified.
I'm not sure that death is necessarily indicated by Rom 8:19-23; death is never mentioned. It seems to me that a world where nothing ever died would be more cursed than a world with death. As far as I can tell, the Bible only mentions death as a result of sin when it is referring to man's death. Decay could be read in any number of ways. There is no one obvious meaning.
I don't really subscribe to this "long day" viewpoint. I really don't care very much how the world got here. I'm just afraid of calling seemingly reasonable ideas unreasonable without a rational and conclusive discussion.
"19The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21that[i] the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.
22We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time."
Where does this say that anything about "death"? Also, what's wrong with an allegorical meaning? The long day theory is clearly non-literal.
I'm pretty sure I agree with the entirety of your post here, but it doesn't seem to support the idea of creation and evolution being mutually exclusive. The biblical account of creation still doesn't preclude death of organisms before an accountable-for-sin "man" appeared.
There is sin. "Original sin" and "sin" aren't identical. Adam doesn't need to have to have sinned in order for another individual to be guilty of sin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semipelagianism
The beliefs of the christian community are far from homogeneous.
Also the "original sin" mentioned in the GGP seemed to be the Calvinist version of it which is quite different from the Arminian version of original sin, to the point where many Calvinists will claim that Arminians don't believe in original sin.
The bible says that sin causes death, not that death is always caused by sin. (Decapitation causes death, but not all death is the result of decapitation.)
There are quite a few possible interpretations of the account of creation that could reasonably coexist with evolution. I'm not extremely familiar with the long day theory, but I do know that its proponents generally believe either A. that at some specific point in the evolution of mankind, man received a soul, and subsequently committed the original sin. B. Animals and plants evolved, guided by God, and when God was happy with the environment on Earth, he created man.
Both of those perspectives allow evolution and Christianity to peacefully coexist, although the second one takes some more mental gymnastics than the first.
I'm not trying to make a case for Christianity here, I'm just saying that evolution is not the reason to abandon it.
No. The long day theory doesn't dismiss the account of creation, so "original sin" can stay. Furthermore, "original sin" isn't really necessary to Christianity.
I'm not sure what this has to do with free speech. Clergy are free to say anything they please. The only danger is that their churches may lose their tax-exempt status. Unless you think political organizations should be tax exempt, I don't see what the problem would be.
Speaking as someone who was homeschooled for religious reasons, I thought that it was excellent social and mental preparation for life. I share the sentiment against education based on religious propaganda, I just don't think it is worse than traditional American education.
The main advantage for me was social. When I went to college, I was extremely disturbed by the herd mentality exhibited by most of the other students, whose main goal in life was to look macho for their friends. (primarily by getting drunk and taking advantage of females) I certainly felt better equipped to deal with peer-pressure than the average student was. When you have friendships with people in every age bracket, it's way easier to stay grounded than when all of your friends are the same exact age.
I can't say that far right ultra-religious education is a good thing, but the artificially age-segregated traditional school certainly doesn't seem like a lesser evil to me.
Furthermore, I think independent thinking is more encouraged by homeschooling than one might imagine. I had to learn to learn on my own, an extremely valuable skill. Creationist propaganda gave me the discipline of questioning seemingly obvious conclusions. This gave me the mental tools (and the balls) to question the creationist propaganda itself, as well as many other things that I had previously accepted without question.
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I much prefer the touchscreen for browsing, which is the primary activity of most computer users. I also much prefer it for doing real work. I am an audio engineer, and I love the ability to go into a crowd and use my iPhone to make things sound good where the people are, instead of where the sound board is. Dragging a mouse out there would be absurd. Trying to manipulate multiple parameters at once is also much easier with a touchscreen. (assuming that it is multitouch)
I can't imagine that I'm in the only career for which touchscreens are better than mice. And for the casual user, browsing is much nicer with a touchscreen. And for non-casual use, my observation has been that most power users much prefer using keyboard commands, and use the mouse very little. The mouse is not the best input device for most things. Even in photo editing, most power users are using Wacom tablets rather than mice.
What about Enlightenment? It's still got some polishing needed, but the UI design/ eye candy possibilities are awesome.
Mobility is a huge, huge feature, though. Mobility and the touchscreen interface. I love tweaking computers, and I ran Linux for years, but now that I have my iPhone, I rarely use a "real" computer. I can't see what major feature could possibly be added to it that would make it consistently more desirable to use than my iPhone. The two reasons I still get it out are A. Proprietary software and B. A real keyboard. The keyboard thing is pretty minor, though; It is trivial to set up a keyboard to work with a mobile device.
I absolutely expect my phone to replace, not supplement, my computer. Maybe not a iPhone, but a phone of some sort. The sooner the better, I hate dragging my computer around just to do a few minor tasks.
The website is infinitely more robust than their iPhone app. Their crappy app is the reason most of my friends don't use Facebook anywhere near as much as they used to.
I don't know why we're trying to relive the worst era in math education in America. Pretty much right after Sputnik launched, American textbooks went from pretty good to awful. Go to an antique store and try to find the best and worst math textbooks. I guarantee you that every single good math textbook you find will be either pre-Sputnik, or after 1980.
Spunik was very helpful in some aspects of American science, but math education, unquestionably, is not a good place to relive Sputnik.
I think it's a lot more than a difference of culture. You'll notice a sharp decline in textbook quality after the launch of Sputnik. Sputnik freaked out Americans, so they started pumping loads of money into revamping math and science education. Money, unfortunately is not the main thing that makes a good textbook. Basically, after Sputnik, for some reason, it became necessary to cram as much set theory into every single math book as possible, whether it needed it or not.
The fact that it's not a 1:1 comparison doesn't make it invalid. The comparison has relevance regardless of the relative values of books and people. People being free and information being free are two good things. Just because one is intensely more good than the other doesn't change the fact that here are two situations that are similar, in that we are balancing one "good" against the "good" of not screwing people.
The comparison illustrates the point that there are clearly things in life that outweigh the good of "not screwing some people." Human freedom is certainly one of those things.
Is freedom of information another such thing? That's obviously a tougher issue, but the slavery comparison makes it clear that it isn't a slam-dunk argument. "It is a bad idea because it screws some people over" is clearly demonstrated to be an incomplete argument. The point was made, and made effectively, I thought. I'm really not sure why all this meta-discussion was necessary.
Absurd. At no point did his comparison imply that problems with copyright are as significant as the problem of slavery.
What is the problem with comparing things with other things of a much greater magnitude? When people compare electrons to planets, do you object because planets are obviously much, much larger and clearly must have nothing at all in common with something with such a far removed size?
His sentence was clearly saying that not screwing specific people over is not always the most important thing. This holds true for big issues like slavery, and for small issues like copyright. It's a valid comparison. What's so wrong with that?
He has shown over and over to be nothing more than a glory hound who likes to cause strife wherever he goes.
Nothing more? That's it? We have encapsulated everything about this guy's humanity in one sentence? I'm a Christian, and I therefore disagree with Dawkins on a great many things, but I still think he's got a lot of good things to offer. I'm glad he's around. I frequently find his talks very refreshing. It's always a good thing to have devil's advocate in a discussion to weed out the crappy ideas. And regardless of your flavor of Christianity, there's certainly a surplus of crappy ideas. (Sam Harris is a way better atheist than Dawkins, though.)
Google doesn't collect peoples' information for the happy, innocent purpose of improving their experience. They collect peoples' information to make money. Why can't they be honest about that?
I can't disagree with your second sentence, but I see no reason to believe the first. Why would you think that they don't do both, and why isn't it ok to make money simultaneously with improving user's experiences?
As much as I love the idea of open source anything, this statement seems true. Please tell me that there's another side to this discussion.
How much meaningful spectral analysis can be done on the Dirac delta function?
Look at the article for more normal pictures, and how they generally become darker when they are scaled by algorithms with the bug.
Also, the blurring algorithm seems just as likely to have this averaging bug as the scaling algorithm.
Unless I seriously misread TFA, this error has nothing to do with the spectral content of the data. Spectral content certainly influences the way things scale, but it seems to have no connection to this particular bug.
Look at the test picture in the "Explanation" part of the article. http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html#explanation Filtered or not, the test picture should not result in the second column being dark grey.
Where do you get the idea that the "overwhelming majority" of Christians believe this? Anything beyond anecdotal evidence?
This may be a prominent view in Calvinist churches, (reformed baptist, presbyterian, etc.) but is certainly not a prominent view in churches with a more Arminian flavor (methodist, pentecostal, etc.)
The means are not important, because in modern Christianity once you're "saved" it's irrevocable.
In some branches of modern (and less modern) Christianity this is believed, and in other branches of modern (and less modern) Christianity this is not believed. The beliefs of the christian community are far from homogeneous.
I think we can agree the passages you've cited are clearly talking about the human death. To my reading, there seems to be no strong indication that animal and plant death are included or excluded.
Sorry, you did raise that point earlier, and I should have addressed it then..Anyhow, if the account is in some ways allegorical or symbolic, that does not necessarily mean that it has no bearing on the literal world. And there are a large number of possible interpretations as far as which parts may be literal and which parts may not.
This is such a large issue that, unfortunately, there is no slam dunk argument possible here. There are too many possible interpretations to debunk all of them with such a simple argument. I'm not saying that you're not right. I'm saying that your attack is unfair and oversimplified.
I'm not sure that death is necessarily indicated by Rom 8:19-23; death is never mentioned. It seems to me that a world where nothing ever died would be more cursed than a world with death. As far as I can tell, the Bible only mentions death as a result of sin when it is referring to man's death. Decay could be read in any number of ways. There is no one obvious meaning.
I don't really subscribe to this "long day" viewpoint. I really don't care very much how the world got here. I'm just afraid of calling seemingly reasonable ideas unreasonable without a rational and conclusive discussion.
"19The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21that[i] the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. 22We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time."
Where does this say that anything about "death"? Also, what's wrong with an allegorical meaning? The long day theory is clearly non-literal.
"In this way death came to all men"
I'm pretty sure I agree with the entirety of your post here, but it doesn't seem to support the idea of creation and evolution being mutually exclusive. The biblical account of creation still doesn't preclude death of organisms before an accountable-for-sin "man" appeared.
Without that, what else is there?
There is sin. "Original sin" and "sin" aren't identical. Adam doesn't need to have to have sinned in order for another individual to be guilty of sin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semipelagianism
The beliefs of the christian community are far from homogeneous.
Also the "original sin" mentioned in the GGP seemed to be the Calvinist version of it which is quite different from the Arminian version of original sin, to the point where many Calvinists will claim that Arminians don't believe in original sin.
The bible says that sin causes death, not that death is always caused by sin. (Decapitation causes death, but not all death is the result of decapitation.)
There are quite a few possible interpretations of the account of creation that could reasonably coexist with evolution. I'm not extremely familiar with the long day theory, but I do know that its proponents generally believe either A. that at some specific point in the evolution of mankind, man received a soul, and subsequently committed the original sin. B. Animals and plants evolved, guided by God, and when God was happy with the environment on Earth, he created man.
Both of those perspectives allow evolution and Christianity to peacefully coexist, although the second one takes some more mental gymnastics than the first.
I'm not trying to make a case for Christianity here, I'm just saying that evolution is not the reason to abandon it.
No. The long day theory doesn't dismiss the account of creation, so "original sin" can stay. Furthermore, "original sin" isn't really necessary to Christianity.
I'm not sure what this has to do with free speech. Clergy are free to say anything they please. The only danger is that their churches may lose their tax-exempt status. Unless you think political organizations should be tax exempt, I don't see what the problem would be.
Speaking as someone who was homeschooled for religious reasons, I thought that it was excellent social and mental preparation for life. I share the sentiment against education based on religious propaganda, I just don't think it is worse than traditional American education.
The main advantage for me was social. When I went to college, I was extremely disturbed by the herd mentality exhibited by most of the other students, whose main goal in life was to look macho for their friends. (primarily by getting drunk and taking advantage of females) I certainly felt better equipped to deal with peer-pressure than the average student was. When you have friendships with people in every age bracket, it's way easier to stay grounded than when all of your friends are the same exact age.
I can't say that far right ultra-religious education is a good thing, but the artificially age-segregated traditional school certainly doesn't seem like a lesser evil to me.
Furthermore, I think independent thinking is more encouraged by homeschooling than one might imagine. I had to learn to learn on my own, an extremely valuable skill. Creationist propaganda gave me the discipline of questioning seemingly obvious conclusions. This gave me the mental tools (and the balls) to question the creationist propaganda itself, as well as many other things that I had previously accepted without question.