PS How do you know that THE NAME always deals in absolute values
It was a vague attempt at a ha-ha. Y'know, absolute good, absolute knowledge, absolute power... all the things that make up omin-everything beings... absolute values.
Mind you, a truly omnipotent being could make the square root of 9 plus or minus three (ie, zero or 6). That's what omnipotence is all about!
Yeah, okay.... I was referring to the pronounciation of JHVH being anglicized viz. j is j not y and v is v not w. Honestly, I have a bag of reference material on this, but it resides at the fabled Distant Storage Locker
A number of scholars have commented on how Christianity gave birth to modern science.
This has a (not so) vague hint of historical revisionism to it...
1. The inerrency of the bible as touted from 400ish CE to post-1500-ish CE effectively quashed any scientific investigation that might have reached conclusions contrary to scripture. If the bible says there's a fixed firmament, then there's a fixed firmament... and don't you go building no "firmament testing machine".
2. Original sin was the quest for philisophical knowledge. If questing for knowledge is a sin then I'm a heretic (thank you very much)
3. The "medieval insistence on the rationality of god" probably worked contrary to scientific pursuit. More time was spent attempting to figure out the "rationale" behind God's actions than actually studying the phenomena in question.
4. I see the earth at the right distance from the sun to receive the proper amounts of light and heat. I admit Newton was a Smart Guy, but what the hell is he thinking with a statement like this? Of course the sun's distance is "perfect". If it wasn't he wouldn't be around to wonder the question in the first place! There's no life on Neptune pondering why they got the wrong ratio! Ack. Maybe if he hadn't consulted his bible daily he would have got past this one...
5. Some of the greatest pioneers of science were committed Christians Well, that's just an appeal to authority and an anecdotal one at that... There have been numerous studies showing that Christianity tends to impede scientific thought in general. This is a dangerous game, however. Most white supremacists are Xtians (the Aryan Nations is a registered church, for example). Then again, a very large chunk of the civil rights movement where christians as well... In this line of argument, there be danger!
6. Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent Well, if that isn't a "chilling effect" on scientific inquiry I don't know what is...
7. This is just a cheap shot, but considering the hevy reference to Newton, I'm gonna take it. Democritus of abeda almost assuradly discovered some form of Calculus before Newton. There are many references to his work on "calculating the volume of cones" which resided in the Library at Alexandrea. Unfortunately, St. (yes, that's "Saint"!) Cyril's mob had the head librarian (hepatia?) skinned alive with sharpened conch shells and burnt the structure, books and all to the ground. Calculus goes up in a puff of holy smoke (ha! holy smoke! get it?) and we have to wait for Newton to get it back. So, what if jesus had never been born? We might be living on Europa now!
How do you know that what your percieve is real? What for that matter is "real"?
Ack! it's "Epistemiology 220" all over again!
Ultimately, all epistemilogical contentions are unprovable and circular. The only thing you can do is weigh the contending theories as to the knowable and, based on that, pick an epistemiological theory from the veritable smorgasbord provided to you in the buffet of the mind we call First Year Liberal Arts... Personally, I went with predictability. The laws of physics and chemistry are predictable. Biology too, although they're far, far more complex and actually getting enough data to make anything vaguely resembling a functional prediction is about zero, but it could be done. The result of this choice is twofold:
1. Atheism. "God" (name brand term for generic concept, like Kleenex) is inherently unpredictable and implies an unpredictable and arbitrary rule. Occam's razor is applied and the supreme being winds up on the cutting room floor.
2. Determinism. This one sucks. But working on the (valid for lack of effective contrary evidence) assumption that state T is always a function of state T - 1, all T's from the big bang to "the end" (colloquial use) are predictable. Throwing out free will is, natch, a toughie. My solution was not to get uptight about it and just decide that I would ignore it for the sake of my quality of life.
It is quite possible (although quite hideous) that - as I mentioned in my last essay - everything around one is also just a machine,
Firstly, I would question why it is hideous. This is solely an argument from semantics. We have cooked up a word "machine" and used it describe a certain class of things. As we delve into the concepts of what life is and isn't, we find that the concept "machine" can be extended to living creatures, but it comes with pejorative connotations from generations of usage. Purely semantic, actually. Besides, there are dramatic qualitative shifts across the spectrum of devices defined as "machines". A ramp is a machine. A printed circuit borad is a machine.
square root of 9 is three - plus or minus three thank you very much
I assume you mean positive or negative three, not plus or minus... besides, I though Jehova always dealt in absolute values...
... and shouldn't it be "yahweh"... unless you're using Anglicized values for the consonants JHVH and the vowel markings for "elohim" to avoid getting stoned to death by Levites.
I hear ya... but I hate being misunderstood more:)
I think there's a cover-up behind the pen here.
So do I, but I think my theory about that is different than yours. What exactly do they mean by a $2M pen? Let's say we have a scientist who make $52K/yr. He spends a week on the pen. No biggie, but we could now argue that we have a $1,000 pen. Obviously, the pen needs to be manufactured and this, obviously, requires personell and equipment (we can skip raw materials, realistically). So, let's say they contract Parker to make this pen. They shutdown 10% of their plant for 1 day to re-tool to make the pen. Parker makes a million dollars profit a year so their loss is 1/3650 of a million. Now, we want to actually get the pen into space to test it (testing is part of the manufacturing process afterall). Let's say the pen takes up 1/10 of 1% of the space ship that costs $50M to put into space... hm.
It's easy to inflate the price of things if you start factoring in fixed and ambient costs. I bought some cable clamps at home depot for 45. If I factor in parking, gas, loss of time from contract work I could have been doing, vehicle depreciation and insurance for the duration of the trip yatta yatta, I've go a $75 cable clip.
I live in a province that's a hotbet of neo-populist right-wing economic theory and I am surrounded by people who use this technique to prove that the government is frittering away our tax dollars on junkets, paper clips and wallpaper for 24 Sussex.
Coca-Cola-Corp. relies completely on public complacency
Well, technically, so does the government. NASA's on the more-for-cheaper kick big time. This isn't because of some illustrious insight or attack of mental illness, it's because of public opinion that NASA spends too much and is part of "fat, inefficient" government. The result of this new faster-cheaper philosophy, or course, is a dramatic increase in litter on Mars, but that's a digression.
If anything, they would have benefited $2Million Dollars of research funding.
I wonder, really, how much we learned about zero g fluid dynamics as the result of this pen. Potentially quite a lot. Ultimately, the great breakthroughs are generated by the urges of curiosity or showing off....
Anyway, to reiterate:
1. I'm skeptical that the pen really cost $2M.
2. The public backlash against government spending (Thanks Ron!) has seriously damanged NASA (and a lot of other things...)
3. Showing-off and "poking about" generate a lot of progress as a spin off. Did the pen generate progress spin off. I suspect so.
Besides, they sell them for $40 or so each to the general public. Who knows? Maybe the pen's turned a profit?
We are all originally atheists. Newborns have no knowledge of or belief in god[s].
After all, if you are willing to believe God created life on earth, why wouldn't He create it other places as well?
My big concern is that if you're capable of believing that god created life on earth, what aren't you capable of believing? The "all powerful" creature that works in "ways that cannot be understood" is a monsterous monkeywrench in critical thinking. There are people who believe the earth is hollow. If you believe in the all-pwerful/not-understandable god, you have no basis to disbelieve or be skeptical of the hollow-earthists. The supreme and incomprehensible being could easily hollow the earth out. Go and look, see the earth isn't hollow. But it could have been filled in seconds before you looked and hollowed out again as soon as you turn your back. Or it's non-hollowness could be an illusion. With an omnipotent/incomprehensible god it's as equally probable as any other possibility.
Everything becomes arbitrary, subject to the whims of an omnipotent and incomprehensible force. Anything is possible and even your senses cannot be trusted (an omnipotent being could spoof your senses surely). The laws of physics could change tomorrow, pi could be rounded down to three...
Don't forget that the US spent millions on developing a pen that could write in space. The russians when faced with the same problem: chose a pencil.
The coca-cola company spends that much a day to convince us that their bubbly sugared water is better than that of the other company who spends about the same amount. That's obscene. Really. I'd rather have the pen, thanks. Besides, no space program of the past, no communications sattelites of the present. So we blew some bucks on a pen and saved billions on copper wire across the atlantic. If we blow some bucks on space exploration now, who the hell knows what we'll get in 20 or 30 years. I'm counting on limitless solar power for L2 orbital manufacturing.
The story may one day actually pan out. This is just further confirmation of greek and sumeric myths of the same time.
Fair enough. Since most ancient civilizations that lived on fertile flood plains (nile, tigris) equated flooding with rebirth (silt deposit equaling regeneration of soil quality) The flood-wipes-clean-and-gives-birth-to-new-and-impro ved motif makes perfect sense. My complaint is that there are a lot of people who do read the bible literally in the sense of every-word-is-inspired-and-true and use that interpretation to contest sceintific issues. The most notable, of course, is 7-day, 6K-year-old-earth creationists... but there are plenty of other instances of literal-biblist anti-science-isms (anti-science-isms? You heard it here first!) My fave, of course, is good old immanuel velikovsky and his amazing venus-as-asteroid theories to account for everything from the sun standing still to the great flood to appearance of manna from heaven (although I suspect in the last case he confuses carbohydrates with hydrocarbons... I can just see the ancient isrealites mowing down on 10W30!).
Okay, I will buy your creationist story if you're willing to stand up to the same level of proof that you subject neo-darwinists to. To whit:
Show me one insect that naturally has four legs (Leviticus 11:23)
Show me one.. just one fossil or sekeleton of a Nephilim or giant (gen 6:4)... I'll take a partial!
Hey, gen 7 tells me that the earth was covered in salt water for an entire year. You show me one species of flower that can survive a year under dozens of meters of salt water. Just one.
You show me one of those things. But remember that you've been shown thousands and thousands of dinosaur fossils (provided you bothered to look).
Let's see if you can meet the standards of proof you hold neo-darwinists to.
If God had created any life outside of this Earth He would have written so in his word, the Bible
Really, you don't want to take the lack-of-inclusion-equals-false approach to using the Bible truth-o-meter. The bible never explicitly states that the square root of 9 is three, Bill Clinton smoked pot or my shirt is blue... but all those things are true.
there is really no way they can verify this without actually finding existing life
... now if only people would apply that high standard of proof to the existence of god we'd be getting somewhere!
I agree with a lot of your points but would quibble on one point... I think the mouse may have been conceived and (later) invented by Doug Englebart in '68... or thereabouts.
You call him Englebart, I call him Whatshisname... he'll always be "that guy from SRI with the chord thingy" to me....
1. Irony is the best policy... or something like that.
2. If you only tell the truth with the keyboard then you can catch the sucker offgaurd with the mouse! ha! The ol' Good input device Bad input device gets 'em every time.
3. "open the pod bay doors hal"... that's why.
4. A new windowing environment for DOS? Are you on probation or something?
Hey, you know...the PCs of tommorrow will be very similiar to todays. Here's my prediction:
Goddamn, I gotta play this game too...
2010 State of the Industry
1. Msfts new mouse goes "beyond optical"... it now tracks movement based on the earth's magnetic field. Naysayers point out that Sun produced a similar mouse back in '01, but you had to use a special planet with it...
2. In a button-adding frenzy, logitech has released the 101-button mouse (wheel, lever, hand crank and ripcord included as well). Ad campaign: "it's a second keyboard... on wheels!"
3. Logitech's new mouse prompts Wired Magazine to declare "The Keyboard is Dead"
4. What the hell comes after "pita"? Now we gotta find out!
5. Transmeta announces the ultimate in software emulation and completely eliminates all physical components in their new chip. Company officials say the zero mass of the chip will reduce shipping costs and inventory overhead... Torvalds admits in an interview that it's basically a Turing Machine with a box...
6. Windows '09... It's got fins!
7. Oni released.
8. moodMac line released, a throwback to post-gen-X 70's nostalgia it changes colour depending on your mood. Features quad G9 processors with repoVec, a sub-processor that actually uses photoshop for you.
9. Mac releases OS XVII.LXIV.rVII. considers upgrading to Arabic numerals
10. You're still playing minesweeper?
11. Compaq releases a "computer so advanced, it's smaller than a dime". Pundits say monitor size is a serious limitation. Ex-VP Lieberman new CEO of Compaq, changes ad campaign to "24x6 nonstop" to keep the sabbath...
12. Seti@home finds alien life! He's doing 2 units a day on an AMD K21 TweetyBird.
13. Bill Gates says "640Mb ought to be enough for anybody"
I thought that the computer of 2010 would have as many as 40,000 vacuum tubes,
Totally different theory of predicting there... the prediction you cite is a Quantitative prediction, ie "in the future it will be bigger (or for computers, smaller) and faster". A change in quantity. What we have in the article is a Qualitative change, ie the very nature of how it works, what it does etc is changed (albeit not as dramatically as one could speculate). We've seen a lot of qualitative changes in computers: The transistor, the GUI yatta yatta.
Of course, sometimes quantitative change results in qualitative change.... as Stalin said "bigger is different". But that's for the 200-level. ha!
Face it: keyboards are still around after all these years because THEY WORK
At least you didn't say they worked well. Hey, let's look at some input device "theory" shall we?
1. You store information in your brain. It's chemical. It's analog.
2. You want that information in your computer. It's electric. It's digital.
3. Can it possibly be that the best way to bridge these two qualitative gaps is by wiggling physical limbs over hard plastic nubbins?
4. Depressingly, the answer appears to be "yes"...
5. So now it's down to a matter of appendages, nubbins and how you wiggle them (feel free to make porn jokes now)
6. Alternate WAN (wiggling appendages over nubbins) techs have risen and fallen. The mouse is a popular WAN... but the guy who came up with the mouse idea (you know, whats-his-name who worked at SRI) also had this bizarre "chord playing" device for input as well... sorta like using an one-handed accordian.
7. Text. We want text input because we're slaves to alphabetic, pseudo-phoenetic written languages.
8. WAN techs must not only be efficient but be acceptable by people as well...
9. So, we need a WAN. It must be text-oriented, efficient and have a high acceptance rate among people.
10. You're answer to that is the keyboard. I work with a guy who turns blue under the eyes without his stylus.... the bottom line is:
We have WANs now that do the job, but we have seen new WANS (mouse, stylus) come along and there is no reason to think that WAN evolution will stop just because we like our F-keys and Num Lock. In 1983 I would never have imagined a mouse. But it happened.
Few people know that Alan Turing committed suicide
Okay, I'm not normally one given to wild conspiracy theories (well, except for that hollow earth/atlantis stuff and how it effects L. Ron's alchohol preserved aliens from controlling world banking...) But I gotta say that the ol' cyanide-dipped apple is just too... uh, suspicious sounding. Really. "Notorious" homosexual entrusted with Secrets of Immense National Importence commits suicide with poisoned foodstuff has the air of cover up to me...
What I want, really, is a series called "for people who earnestly believe that they could figgure this out if it was just writtend down somewhere by someone who doesn't use excessive numbers of sentence fragments or un-tranlated TLA's(1) and sells for under $30"
No really. My biggest complaint about most books is that they cover the easy stuff in excessive detail an shorten up the paragraphs dramatically when it gets harder. Here's an excerpt from "Upgrading PC's for Hebephrenics"
1. Remove the upper casing of the computer. To do this, find the two screws at the back of the case first. Make sure you have a screwdriver whose head matches the pattern of the screws (see chpts 12-27 on how to use a screwdriver). Turn the screws clockwise until completely removed from case. Place the screws in a safe place and keep the screwsriver handy. Remove the upper case by lifting it gently until it is completely removed and the inner workings are exposed.
2. Remove the CPU with a pistol hot soldering iron and a can of compressed air. Don't forget the masking tape! Insert new CPU, soldering the appropriate pins to the appropriate places.
3. Put the case back on the top of the computer, lowering it at about the rate of 1.2 km/h in a downward motion. If you put the case on backwards, you will have diffiuclty re-inserting the screws so be careful (see chapters 1 - 9 "telling back from front" and appendix B "Up or Down. How to tell the difference") When inserting the screws this time, you may want to try the "continental grip" on the screwdriver (Appendix L "Placement of Feet and Hands during screw-driving"). Study the diagram frist though.....
no, seriously, Steven Levy seems to make a decent living at it (Insanely Great, Hackers et al.)
Personally, I've always been a bit of a computer history geek myself (as my.sig probably attests) and I'd sure as hell be willing to buy yet another book on the subject... so write it.
My only suggestion is start at Alan Turing (or if you go back to babage, at least include him). Most people look at the pre-dawn of computers as a hardware-only affair and tend to skip over Good Ol' Al's contribution on the software front....
The Mac version is coded by a separate team and is written with what would now be considered the Classic Mac OS APIs and not Win32 ones.
Actually, the latest Mac Office is widely heralded as being "Quite Good". This is for a couple of reasons.
1. It was built pretty much as an independent product, although the final spec and probably the initial modelling were the same. It's tough to look at a win32 call and say "how would I do that in the toolbox"? Kinda like translating German to English by looking up each word in the dictionary and writing it down. There are majore diffs between the two platforms... I know one otherwise bright person who does a lot of win developement who thought a resource fork was hardware. So, it's mostly a total re-write.
2. Apple published this really swell book on interface guidelines. It's big enough to stun an ox and you need to get your brother-in-law to help you carry it home from the store. Apparently, msft actually bought a copy of it and paid someone to read it. Now things are where they're supposed to be and look, more or less, like mac widgets. Using Office 5 - 6 on a mac was like living in a house where the light switches weren't by the door and right-handed door knobs were pulls. Everything worked, but just getting to the bathroom required a map..
3. msft says they're gonna carbonize (no word on cocoa that I've heard).
All this shows that msft realizes that Office is a big money maker and that non-win users are just itching to use something else. They're plan is to make a product that doesn't rile the feathers of the non-win crowd so they don't jump on the first passable alternative. Although it would be nice if they bothered to set the lines on the IE window the same length apart as those on OS X...
hey, is it normal for qt to take an hour to compile? Sheesh.
Obviously the people who have developed these things have no intention of using it for "evil" and only have the best intentions in mind... however that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be paranoid about it. Technology developed for the best reasons often can be used, later on, for ideas the cretors never intended. Two examples:
1. Social Security/Insurance numbers. I don't know about the US but in Canada when it was introduced it was stated that you would never have to give it to anyone except voluntarily. That included income tax and TD-1 (employment taxation form). Now it's mandatory on tax from and it is against the law to take a job and not give your SIN on your TD-1. Certainly it means you can't cheat on your taxes (I'm opposed to cheating on your taxes, btw) and that's good, but it does show that this idea was expanded to be more intrusive than originally devised.
2. Finger printing. I was finger printed as a child to "protect me from being abducted" (how that works I'm not sure, but that's the line they give...) 23 years later, I popped over to my friend's house with a 2 litre bottle of pop to watch movies. I left the empty bottle there. 2 days later he used the bottle to transport gasoline to a building which he burned to the ground. Smart guy he is, he wore gloves. Dumb ass he is, he left the cap there. Did he go to prison? Yes. Did I get arrested, lose my job and $4000 to lawyers first? Yes. Oh yes indeed.
The finger printing thing must work though. I never got abducted as a child....
"Hi, my name is joe and I have dual-proc 200MHz Bombardier sunk under the ice at the North Battleford Bonspieler and Overclockers Community Association and it's doing 3.2 Tflops. That's almost 5 Tflops in Metric (7.2 American, 8.30 in Newfoundland). thank you"
Slashdot Mirror
It was a vague attempt at a ha-ha. Y'know, absolute good, absolute knowledge, absolute power... all the things that make up omin-everything beings... absolute values.
Mind you, a truly omnipotent being could make the square root of 9 plus or minus three (ie, zero or 6). That's what omnipotence is all about!
Yeah, okay.... I was referring to the pronounciation of JHVH being anglicized viz. j is j not y and v is v not w. Honestly, I have a bag of reference material on this, but it resides at the fabled Distant Storage Locker
This has a (not so) vague hint of historical revisionism to it...
1. The inerrency of the bible as touted from 400ish CE to post-1500-ish CE effectively quashed any scientific investigation that might have reached conclusions contrary to scripture. If the bible says there's a fixed firmament, then there's a fixed firmament... and don't you go building no "firmament testing machine".
2. Original sin was the quest for philisophical knowledge. If questing for knowledge is a sin then I'm a heretic (thank you very much)
3. The "medieval insistence on the rationality of god" probably worked contrary to scientific pursuit. More time was spent attempting to figure out the "rationale" behind God's actions than actually studying the phenomena in question.
4. I see the earth at the right distance from the sun to receive the proper amounts of light and heat. I admit Newton was a Smart Guy, but what the hell is he thinking with a statement like this? Of course the sun's distance is "perfect". If it wasn't he wouldn't be around to wonder the question in the first place! There's no life on Neptune pondering why they got the wrong ratio! Ack. Maybe if he hadn't consulted his bible daily he would have got past this one...
5. Some of the greatest pioneers of science were committed Christians Well, that's just an appeal to authority and an anecdotal one at that... There have been numerous studies showing that Christianity tends to impede scientific thought in general. This is a dangerous game, however. Most white supremacists are Xtians (the Aryan Nations is a registered church, for example). Then again, a very large chunk of the civil rights movement where christians as well... In this line of argument, there be danger!
6. Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent Well, if that isn't a "chilling effect" on scientific inquiry I don't know what is...
7. This is just a cheap shot, but considering the hevy reference to Newton, I'm gonna take it. Democritus of abeda almost assuradly discovered some form of Calculus before Newton. There are many references to his work on "calculating the volume of cones" which resided in the Library at Alexandrea. Unfortunately, St. (yes, that's "Saint"!) Cyril's mob had the head librarian (hepatia?) skinned alive with sharpened conch shells and burnt the structure, books and all to the ground. Calculus goes up in a puff of holy smoke (ha! holy smoke! get it?) and we have to wait for Newton to get it back. So, what if jesus had never been born? We might be living on Europa now!
Ack! it's "Epistemiology 220" all over again!
Ultimately, all epistemilogical contentions are unprovable and circular. The only thing you can do is weigh the contending theories as to the knowable and, based on that, pick an epistemiological theory from the veritable smorgasbord provided to you in the buffet of the mind we call First Year Liberal Arts... Personally, I went with predictability. The laws of physics and chemistry are predictable. Biology too, although they're far, far more complex and actually getting enough data to make anything vaguely resembling a functional prediction is about zero, but it could be done. The result of this choice is twofold:
1. Atheism. "God" (name brand term for generic concept, like Kleenex) is inherently unpredictable and implies an unpredictable and arbitrary rule. Occam's razor is applied and the supreme being winds up on the cutting room floor.
2. Determinism. This one sucks. But working on the (valid for lack of effective contrary evidence) assumption that state T is always a function of state T - 1, all T's from the big bang to "the end" (colloquial use) are predictable. Throwing out free will is, natch, a toughie. My solution was not to get uptight about it and just decide that I would ignore it for the sake of my quality of life.
It is quite possible (although quite hideous) that - as I mentioned in my last essay - everything around one is also just a machine,
Firstly, I would question why it is hideous. This is solely an argument from semantics. We have cooked up a word "machine" and used it describe a certain class of things. As we delve into the concepts of what life is and isn't, we find that the concept "machine" can be extended to living creatures, but it comes with pejorative connotations from generations of usage. Purely semantic, actually. Besides, there are dramatic qualitative shifts across the spectrum of devices defined as "machines". A ramp is a machine. A printed circuit borad is a machine.
I assume you mean positive or negative three, not plus or minus... besides, I though Jehova always dealt in absolute values...
I hear ya... but I hate being misunderstood more :)
I think there's a cover-up behind the pen here.
So do I, but I think my theory about that is different than yours. What exactly do they mean by a $2M pen? Let's say we have a scientist who make $52K/yr. He spends a week on the pen. No biggie, but we could now argue that we have a $1,000 pen. Obviously, the pen needs to be manufactured and this, obviously, requires personell and equipment (we can skip raw materials, realistically). So, let's say they contract Parker to make this pen. They shutdown 10% of their plant for 1 day to re-tool to make the pen. Parker makes a million dollars profit a year so their loss is 1/3650 of a million. Now, we want to actually get the pen into space to test it (testing is part of the manufacturing process afterall). Let's say the pen takes up 1/10 of 1% of the space ship that costs $50M to put into space... hm.
It's easy to inflate the price of things if you start factoring in fixed and ambient costs. I bought some cable clamps at home depot for 45. If I factor in parking, gas, loss of time from contract work I could have been doing, vehicle depreciation and insurance for the duration of the trip yatta yatta, I've go a $75 cable clip.
I live in a province that's a hotbet of neo-populist right-wing economic theory and I am surrounded by people who use this technique to prove that the government is frittering away our tax dollars on junkets, paper clips and wallpaper for 24 Sussex.
Coca-Cola-Corp. relies completely on public complacency
Well, technically, so does the government. NASA's on the more-for-cheaper kick big time. This isn't because of some illustrious insight or attack of mental illness, it's because of public opinion that NASA spends too much and is part of "fat, inefficient" government. The result of this new faster-cheaper philosophy, or course, is a dramatic increase in litter on Mars, but that's a digression.
If anything, they would have benefited $2Million Dollars of research funding.
I wonder, really, how much we learned about zero g fluid dynamics as the result of this pen. Potentially quite a lot. Ultimately, the great breakthroughs are generated by the urges of curiosity or showing off....
Anyway, to reiterate:
1. I'm skeptical that the pen really cost $2M.
2. The public backlash against government spending (Thanks Ron!) has seriously damanged NASA (and a lot of other things...)
3. Showing-off and "poking about" generate a lot of progress as a spin off. Did the pen generate progress spin off. I suspect so.
Besides, they sell them for $40 or so each to the general public. Who knows? Maybe the pen's turned a profit?
We are all originally atheists. Newborns have no knowledge of or belief in god[s].
After all, if you are willing to believe God created life on earth, why wouldn't He create it other places as well?
My big concern is that if you're capable of believing that god created life on earth, what aren't you capable of believing? The "all powerful" creature that works in "ways that cannot be understood" is a monsterous monkeywrench in critical thinking. There are people who believe the earth is hollow. If you believe in the all-pwerful/not-understandable god, you have no basis to disbelieve or be skeptical of the hollow-earthists. The supreme and incomprehensible being could easily hollow the earth out. Go and look, see the earth isn't hollow. But it could have been filled in seconds before you looked and hollowed out again as soon as you turn your back. Or it's non-hollowness could be an illusion. With an omnipotent/incomprehensible god it's as equally probable as any other possibility.
Everything becomes arbitrary, subject to the whims of an omnipotent and incomprehensible force. Anything is possible and even your senses cannot be trusted (an omnipotent being could spoof your senses surely). The laws of physics could change tomorrow, pi could be rounded down to three...
If you believe the Bible, you believe nothing...
The coca-cola company spends that much a day to convince us that their bubbly sugared water is better than that of the other company who spends about the same amount. That's obscene. Really. I'd rather have the pen, thanks. Besides, no space program of the past, no communications sattelites of the present. So we blew some bucks on a pen and saved billions on copper wire across the atlantic. If we blow some bucks on space exploration now, who the hell knows what we'll get in 20 or 30 years. I'm counting on limitless solar power for L2 orbital manufacturing.
Fair enough. Since most ancient civilizations that lived on fertile flood plains (nile, tigris) equated flooding with rebirth (silt deposit equaling regeneration of soil quality) The flood-wipes-clean-and-gives-birth-to-new-and-impro ved motif makes perfect sense. My complaint is that there are a lot of people who do read the bible literally in the sense of every-word-is-inspired-and-true and use that interpretation to contest sceintific issues. The most notable, of course, is 7-day, 6K-year-old-earth creationists... but there are plenty of other instances of literal-biblist anti-science-isms (anti-science-isms? You heard it here first!) My fave, of course, is good old immanuel velikovsky and his amazing venus-as-asteroid theories to account for everything from the sun standing still to the great flood to appearance of manna from heaven (although I suspect in the last case he confuses carbohydrates with hydrocarbons... I can just see the ancient isrealites mowing down on 10W30!).
But I digress...
Show me one insect that naturally has four legs (Leviticus 11:23)
Show me one.. just one fossil or sekeleton of a Nephilim or giant (gen 6:4)... I'll take a partial!
Hey, gen 7 tells me that the earth was covered in salt water for an entire year. You show me one species of flower that can survive a year under dozens of meters of salt water. Just one.
You show me one of those things. But remember that you've been shown thousands and thousands of dinosaur fossils (provided you bothered to look).
Let's see if you can meet the standards of proof you hold neo-darwinists to.
Really, you don't want to take the lack-of-inclusion-equals-false approach to using the Bible truth-o-meter. The bible never explicitly states that the square root of 9 is three, Bill Clinton smoked pot or my shirt is blue... but all those things are true.
there is really no way they can verify this without actually finding existing life
teflon
yeah, it's called gcc... with 'unfurl'...
You call him Englebart, I call him Whatshisname... he'll always be "that guy from SRI with the chord thingy" to me....
1. Irony is the best policy... or something like that.
2. If you only tell the truth with the keyboard then you can catch the sucker offgaurd with the mouse! ha! The ol' Good input device Bad input device gets 'em every time.
3. "open the pod bay doors hal"... that's why.
4. A new windowing environment for DOS? Are you on probation or something?
Goddamn, I gotta play this game too...
2010 State of the Industry
1. Msfts new mouse goes "beyond optical"... it now tracks movement based on the earth's magnetic field. Naysayers point out that Sun produced a similar mouse back in '01, but you had to use a special planet with it...
2. In a button-adding frenzy, logitech has released the 101-button mouse (wheel, lever, hand crank and ripcord included as well). Ad campaign: "it's a second keyboard... on wheels!"
3. Logitech's new mouse prompts Wired Magazine to declare "The Keyboard is Dead"
4. What the hell comes after "pita"? Now we gotta find out!
5. Transmeta announces the ultimate in software emulation and completely eliminates all physical components in their new chip. Company officials say the zero mass of the chip will reduce shipping costs and inventory overhead... Torvalds admits in an interview that it's basically a Turing Machine with a box...
6. Windows '09... It's got fins!
7. Oni released.
8. moodMac line released, a throwback to post-gen-X 70's nostalgia it changes colour depending on your mood. Features quad G9 processors with repoVec, a sub-processor that actually uses photoshop for you.
9. Mac releases OS XVII.LXIV.rVII. considers upgrading to Arabic numerals
10. You're still playing minesweeper?
11. Compaq releases a "computer so advanced, it's smaller than a dime". Pundits say monitor size is a serious limitation. Ex-VP Lieberman new CEO of Compaq, changes ad campaign to "24x6 nonstop" to keep the sabbath...
12. Seti@home finds alien life! He's doing 2 units a day on an AMD K21 TweetyBird.
13. Bill Gates says "640Mb ought to be enough for anybody"
Totally different theory of predicting there... the prediction you cite is a Quantitative prediction, ie "in the future it will be bigger (or for computers, smaller) and faster". A change in quantity. What we have in the article is a Qualitative change, ie the very nature of how it works, what it does etc is changed (albeit not as dramatically as one could speculate). We've seen a lot of qualitative changes in computers: The transistor, the GUI yatta yatta.
Of course, sometimes quantitative change results in qualitative change.... as Stalin said "bigger is different". But that's for the 200-level. ha!
At least you didn't say they worked well. Hey, let's look at some input device "theory" shall we?
1. You store information in your brain. It's chemical. It's analog.
2. You want that information in your computer. It's electric. It's digital.
3. Can it possibly be that the best way to bridge these two qualitative gaps is by wiggling physical limbs over hard plastic nubbins?
4. Depressingly, the answer appears to be "yes"...
5. So now it's down to a matter of appendages, nubbins and how you wiggle them (feel free to make porn jokes now)
6. Alternate WAN (wiggling appendages over nubbins) techs have risen and fallen. The mouse is a popular WAN... but the guy who came up with the mouse idea (you know, whats-his-name who worked at SRI) also had this bizarre "chord playing" device for input as well... sorta like using an one-handed accordian.
7. Text. We want text input because we're slaves to alphabetic, pseudo-phoenetic written languages.
8. WAN techs must not only be efficient but be acceptable by people as well...
9. So, we need a WAN. It must be text-oriented, efficient and have a high acceptance rate among people.
10. You're answer to that is the keyboard. I work with a guy who turns blue under the eyes without his stylus.... the bottom line is:
We have WANs now that do the job, but we have seen new WANS (mouse, stylus) come along and there is no reason to think that WAN evolution will stop just because we like our F-keys and Num Lock. In 1983 I would never have imagined a mouse. But it happened.
Okay, I'm not normally one given to wild conspiracy theories (well, except for that hollow earth/atlantis stuff and how it effects L. Ron's alchohol preserved aliens from controlling world banking...) But I gotta say that the ol' cyanide-dipped apple is just too... uh, suspicious sounding. Really. "Notorious" homosexual entrusted with Secrets of Immense National Importence commits suicide with poisoned foodstuff has the air of cover up to me...
No really. My biggest complaint about most books is that they cover the easy stuff in excessive detail an shorten up the paragraphs dramatically when it gets harder. Here's an excerpt from "Upgrading PC's for Hebephrenics"
1. Remove the upper casing of the computer. To do this, find the two screws at the back of the case first. Make sure you have a screwdriver whose head matches the pattern of the screws (see chpts 12-27 on how to use a screwdriver). Turn the screws clockwise until completely removed from case. Place the screws in a safe place and keep the screwsriver handy. Remove the upper case by lifting it gently until it is completely removed and the inner workings are exposed.
2. Remove the CPU with a pistol hot soldering iron and a can of compressed air. Don't forget the masking tape! Insert new CPU, soldering the appropriate pins to the appropriate places.
3. Put the case back on the top of the computer, lowering it at about the rate of 1.2 km/h in a downward motion. If you put the case on backwards, you will have diffiuclty re-inserting the screws so be careful (see chapters 1 - 9 "telling back from front" and appendix B "Up or Down. How to tell the difference") When inserting the screws this time, you may want to try the "continental grip" on the screwdriver (Appendix L "Placement of Feet and Hands during screw-driving"). Study the diagram frist though.....
(1)Trecherously Long Adjectives
Personally, I've always been a bit of a computer history geek myself (as my .sig probably attests) and I'd sure as hell be willing to buy yet another book on the subject... so write it.
My only suggestion is start at Alan Turing (or if you go back to babage, at least include him). Most people look at the pre-dawn of computers as a hardware-only affair and tend to skip over Good Ol' Al's contribution on the software front....
Actually, the latest Mac Office is widely heralded as being "Quite Good". This is for a couple of reasons.
1. It was built pretty much as an independent product, although the final spec and probably the initial modelling were the same. It's tough to look at a win32 call and say "how would I do that in the toolbox"? Kinda like translating German to English by looking up each word in the dictionary and writing it down. There are majore diffs between the two platforms... I know one otherwise bright person who does a lot of win developement who thought a resource fork was hardware. So, it's mostly a total re-write. 2. Apple published this really swell book on interface guidelines. It's big enough to stun an ox and you need to get your brother-in-law to help you carry it home from the store. Apparently, msft actually bought a copy of it and paid someone to read it. Now things are where they're supposed to be and look, more or less, like mac widgets. Using Office 5 - 6 on a mac was like living in a house where the light switches weren't by the door and right-handed door knobs were pulls. Everything worked, but just getting to the bathroom required a map.. 3. msft says they're gonna carbonize (no word on cocoa that I've heard).
All this shows that msft realizes that Office is a big money maker and that non-win users are just itching to use something else. They're plan is to make a product that doesn't rile the feathers of the non-win crowd so they don't jump on the first passable alternative. Although it would be nice if they bothered to set the lines on the IE window the same length apart as those on OS X...
hey, is it normal for qt to take an hour to compile? Sheesh.
1. Social Security/Insurance numbers. I don't know about the US but in Canada when it was introduced it was stated that you would never have to give it to anyone except voluntarily. That included income tax and TD-1 (employment taxation form). Now it's mandatory on tax from and it is against the law to take a job and not give your SIN on your TD-1. Certainly it means you can't cheat on your taxes (I'm opposed to cheating on your taxes, btw) and that's good, but it does show that this idea was expanded to be more intrusive than originally devised.
2. Finger printing. I was finger printed as a child to "protect me from being abducted" (how that works I'm not sure, but that's the line they give...) 23 years later, I popped over to my friend's house with a 2 litre bottle of pop to watch movies. I left the empty bottle there. 2 days later he used the bottle to transport gasoline to a building which he burned to the ground. Smart guy he is, he wore gloves. Dumb ass he is, he left the cap there. Did he go to prison? Yes. Did I get arrested, lose my job and $4000 to lawyers first? Yes. Oh yes indeed.
The finger printing thing must work though. I never got abducted as a child....
That has got to be the best beowulf cluster joke I've heard in a long time... honestly.
Personally, I'm gonna overclock mine... rig up a peletier cooler that can be worn under a suit jacket and I'm all set.
I can just see the beer ad now...
"Hi, my name is joe and I have dual-proc 200MHz Bombardier sunk under the ice at the North Battleford Bonspieler and Overclockers Community Association and it's doing 3.2 Tflops. That's almost 5 Tflops in Metric (7.2 American, 8.30 in Newfoundland). thank you"