But what he is doing isn't groundbreaking, at all.
I don't know what your definition of "groundbreaking" is, but cheap access to space qualifies in my definition. Has anybody done that before? No. If no one has done it before, then it must be ground breaking, by definition.
also not ground breaking or original idea.
No one said it was original, but again, no one has done it successfully, unless you happen to know of someone. In this area especially, Carmack is getting a lot of "it'll never work" from the usual suspects.
How many VTVL rockets do you see hovering and flying around these days? None, and of the couple that have flown in the past, none have done it as cheaply.
The other ground they're breaking is in the area of modular rocket systems, the idea of using clusters of cheap, mass-produced rocket modules that will lead directly to an orbital vehicle.
You don't think that NASA had hundreds (if not thousands) of test flights? Go back to the late '40s and '50s NASA, well the air force back then, did a lot of test flights both manned and unmanned.
That you have to tell me to look back 60 years ought to tell you something.
I have no opinion on Carmack one way or another, but tagging this story with 'haha' and 'hesnorocketscientist' seems a tad mean.
I've noticed that Carmack gets a lot of flack whenever Armadillo stumbles, and it's an interesting psychological phenomena. You'd think that especially on Slashdot, there would be a lot of people who like seeing smart people succeed, but in Carmack's case, there seems to be a lot of resentment about a "mere" video game programmer daring to learn something like rocket science. Not only learn about, but actually be *serious* about it! And doing it without any sort of engineering degree! The gall!
This seems to be especially true of amny "real" engineers, who seem jealous that an outsider with money is trying to do what they can't seem to do, which is produce very low cost access to space. "Yeah, if I had Carmack's money, I could do what he's doing better than he could do it..."
Never mind that Armadillo is one of only a few VTVL ships to actually fly.
Carmack is an incredibly smart guy, and he's not given near enough credit for raw intelligence, rather than just being a good game hacker.
Had Carmack's rocket killed someone (or many people), he would would have been stopped by "paralysis by lawsuit-ysis". Ignoring the huge dangers of rocketry by cutting corners during design may be cheaper in the short run, but as soon as real human lives are lost because of it, you can bet your ass they are going to have to spend more time and money testing their designs "on paper".
The point isn't "cutting corners", the point is learning by testing and learning with actual hardware, rather than testing with paper. No one was in any danger at any point during this test. You would have a point if you could claim they were cutting corners in *safety culture*, but they're not. They're not strapping people into test vehicles. There is no human risk here at all.
And to think, they want us all to ride in these things commercially....
Actually, this is exactly why John and company will be successful. The biggest problem with modern aerospace is "paralysis by analysis". They're so afraid of crashing anything that they have to produce (sometimes literally) millions of pages of documentation before they actually put something into the air.
Armadillo learns by *doing*, not just by creating paper studies. When they're ready to put humans in space, you can bet that their ships will have had hundreds of test flights.
It was a bad weekend for Armadillo. We set out to put some flights on Texel, the backup Quad vehicle, and it didn't go so well. We have video that we will be releasing, but Matt had to leave for Germany the next day, so it won't be digitized for a week and a half.
We started out with a normal 90 second elevated / tethered hover test, but we ran into a problem with the actuator power. We initially thought it was a bad main power switch, but it turned out to be the lithium-polymer battery pack cutoff circuit incorrectly shutting down at 16 amps of load instead of 40. This was a new battery pack ( www.batteryspace.com HPL-8059156-4S-WR), and it had passed all the individual actuator checks, but when the igniter started firing with both high amp NOS solenoids, the battery shut down (went to 0.3 volts indicated) after one second and stayed there until it was physically disconnected. Russ made a fairly heroic field repair, cutting open the battery pack and wiring around the protection circuit while sitting on top of the rocket. The total time spent on this after three attempts was 90 minutes, and enough lox had boiled off that the vehicle hit lox depletion at 60 seconds of flight. We got a few good data points from this: the batteries need to be checked at full current load, with vents open we boil off about two pounds of lox a minute, and lox-depletion runs are benign, if a little flamey.
For the second flight we were going to do a ground liftoff (still tethered for runaway protection) to test the automatic ground contact engine shutoff code. We have had several reasons to want to automate this: We get a fair bit of bounce on touchdown, because the engine is essentially keeping the vehicle weightless during the terminal descent. A computer controlled shutdown would be at least a half second faster than my manual punching of the shutdown when I visually see ground contact. The quads will just safely bounce around on the ground a bit if the engine just goes to idle and doesn't shut down, but the module, with the gimbal below the CG, will try to tip itself over when a landing leg becomes a pivot point, so there is extra incentive to get it shut off fast. You can see that in our XPC '05 vehicle flight. We also need to handle the case of the vehicle landing in a situation where I can't shut the engine off promptly, either because there was a telemetry problem, or when we are doing high altitude flights, it lands out of direct sight. There is a separate shutdownTime parameter that will keep it from sitting there at idle for ten minutes, but a telemetry abort could still have it on the ground and cooking for the better part of 220 seconds. We could still shut the flight safety fuel valve, which would result in just idle level lox pouring out of the engine, but that has its own problems.
I have been very hesitant to put in ground contact shutoff code, because shutting the engine down for some incorrect reason would be catastrophic, and I would feel awful if that ever happened. We had some switch based ground contact sensors on the old VDR, but they never got tested. We have concluded that the landing jolt, as seen by the IMU accelerometers, is a good enough ground contact signal. There is always the worry that combustion instability, or a nozzle ejection event, might trigger the signal level, so there are additional guards about it only functioning when you are within three meters of the ground (we must leave some slop for uneven terrain or GPS innacuracy) and trying to descend.
We loaded up again, being very thankful that we now pack three six-packs of helium for each test trip after we were forced to cancel the second flight on a previous test session due to insufficient helium after troubleshooting a problem forced a repressurization on the first flight. Liftoff and hover was fine, and at the 45 second mark (no sense pushing it on a ground liftoff), I had it come in for a landing. It hit the ground, and I saw it bounce back up. My first thought was "That didn't seem to help at all".
Considering the type of music that typically has two versions, I can only assume that parts of it being removed can only be an improvement.
Wait a minute, I wonder if that CD of Beethoven Piano Sonatas I bought the other day from Wal-Mart was censored... *then* we would have something to complain about.
If you'd have done a tiny bit of searching [openmoko.org], you'd see that the version available right now is the developer edition (aka GTA01). [...] The next revision is the consumer edition (aka GTA02) which happens to be coming out in October. If my math is correct, that's 2 months away... much sooner than "a few years away".
Note that I said a few years until it's a competitor with the iPhone or S60-based phones, not that you couldn't get a box with some sort of software on it.
The site also says that the *software* will be barely useful in October -- at the earliest. And maybe you can find them, but I see absolutely no screenshots of any applications beyond the basic phone. Is the browser going to suck like most phones? Who knows? The FAQ says:
What software is on the phone?
At the moment, almost no 'end-user' applications are present and working in a usable state. It is possible to make and receive calls in some software revisions, this frequently breaks though.
So they don't even have phone calls working at this point! The second rev hardware *might* be available in two months, but I highly doubt it will be stable and useful (much less mature and bug free) in 2 months.
It's cool if someone wants to buy one of these to play around with, but it's worthless at this point if you want a phone that is stable with a rich set of applications, which is easily a few years off.
If you want to build/install third party apps on a smartphone, why not buy something a little more open [openmoko.org]?
Because the software is not actually finished and some people want a functional phone? (The web site you link specifically screams "Currently it is not suitable for users.") The operating system isn't even functional, much less having applications (such as a good browser).
Then there's the fact that the phone that's available doesn't have WiFi (a deal breaker for me), nor a camera (which kind of sucks, but maybe forgivable).
In short, this is a few years away from being any sort of competitor with the iPhone or S60-based phones.
The problem with inventing things machine can't do is often people can't do ti either.
Even if I grant your point that most humans can't do some specific thing, so what? Not all computers are fast enough or have enough memory to do every task. Does that make them not computers? Does the definition of intelligence have to include the lowest-common denominator?
I don't really care what most people can't do, I care about what some people can do, and that's the standard that most people think of when they think of something (or somebody) that's intelligent.
A small subset of people can do what you propose for any problem that extends beyond common everyday tasks like tying shoes laces.
The question isn't whether any random person off the street can instantly answer any question put to them. The question is whether most random people, given sufficient time and motivation, can learn enough about a subject to render an answer to most questions. And the answer to that is 'yes'.
That doesn't mean I'm asking for an Oracle that can "answer all questions about life, the universe, and everything." Sometimes the answer to a specific question is "there isn't enough information", or "the answer is too complex", or the answer might even be wrong -- intelligence isn't perfect. But the nature of intelligence is that it's capable of learning and expanding the knowledge base.
After it was discovered that IBM was tinkering using chess experts (that is, humans) to tinker with its software between matches, they're personae non gratae in the chess world now.
Oh, bull. They didn't "cheat" in the slightest. If they had changed things *during a game*, then you could call it cheating. But during a game, it was machine versus man. Who cares that they might've tweaked programming between games? And even if you somehow could argue that it wasn't fair, how much can they actually change anyway without totally screwing things up?
I should be able to do this: Machine, here is problem A. Given the set of facts of human knowledge, solve the problem, extending knowledge if necessary via experimentation.
That's what a human can do. When a machine can do it, I will call that intelligence.
Note that this does NOT require self-awareness, only intelligence.
British scientists are reporting today that the odds of life starting on Earth rather than inside a comet are one trillion trillion (10 to the power of 24) to one against.
That they can even presume to put a number on the probability of life is evidence enough that they have no idea what they're talking about.
Anyway, the odds of life are totally irrelevent to anything. See: anthropic principle.
How about instead of going after corporate IP addresses, a study of the corrupted power structure, administrator abuses, and Linda Mack/Jayjg?
When I quickly scanned this, I first read "Linda Mack/Jayjg" as "Linda McCartney/Mick Jagger". I was like, wha??? Is there some conspiracy from the 70s I didn't know about?
Some Buddhist communities are a lot like a "church without God". Instead of "God" as the placeholder for the absolute, you get "nothingness".
I'm not an expert on Buddhism, but my impression is that while that don't have a "God of worshhip" in the usual Judeo-Christian sense, they do have beliefs that qualify as supernatural (i.e., in the sense of "beyond the natural world"). Maybe you might call it spiritualism.
To me, God, spirits or anything supposedly "beyond" the universe are all equally superstition. Now, I do agree that science doesn't necessarily give us answers to "happiness", defined as optimizing the psychological abstractions of the human brain in all areas. The "software" of the human brain doesn't physically exist; it's a mathematical abstraction encoded in physical neurons. That it's not actually real doesn't make it less important to us as humans, of course.
So Secular Humanism is a lot closer to what I'm looking for. It leaves *all* supernaturalism and/or spiritualism out of the picture, but recognizes that morals and ethics are important to human existence, even though they don't fit within the usual scientific framework.
I take issue with folks who want to label everyone who believes in God as wacko, senile or necessarily superstitious.
I agree. I believe that people who believe in God, without judging them inferior, are misguided. But who isn't misguided about something? If it were that easy to pin down the "right" answers to everything, we'd all be in agreement. And let's face it, there are people who *need* the structure of religion and a belief in God. Whether God is real or not, the effect on their life is real, and as long as they don't start going crazy with pushing beliefs on others, it's a net positive.
I look at it this way: I commonly tell my kids they're the "best kids in the whole world." Objectively, is this true? Who knows? But it doesn't matter... it's true *to me*, and that personal truth is important to me. God works the same way for a lot of people. God is subjectively real to them, and the objective reality doesn't really matter that much.
Superstition and scientism are both bad approaches to modern life. Regarding my role as a pastor, it is a deep and difficult struggle...
Yep, it's tough nut to crack.:) I had a lot of Christian friends growing up, and in fact I used to go to a lot of Christian youth groups. I never "made the pledge", however. My brain simply isn't designed to be able to believe in God. If God really exists, then it's all his fault for designing me this way.:) I do have to say, that if God really exists, it's a pretty silly way to run a railroad. I personally would give a lot more direct communication if I wanted my people to believe in me.
Modern theology contends that questions of value are inadequately answered by science alone. It's not that values aren't suggested by the scientific method, it's more that we bring value, human values, to every endeavor we choose, including science.
Honestly, it sounds like you're talking about Secular Humanism. I've often said that I could totally get behind a church without God. What I mean is a place where morals and ethics can be discussed with others, along with the fellowship (which is the best part of religion) but without all the hocus-pocus superstition. Unfortunately, such an animal doesn't exist at this stage of our human societal evolution. I pretty much consider it factual that God doesn't exist, but I can't stand most atheist's groups (the reason most people join a group of atheists is because they hate religion, and want to sit around talking about how stupid everyone else is). Also unfortunately, a, say, "secular humanist church" would be considered too weird by everyone else, and I don't care enough about the whole thing to blaze any trails.
(for a similar reason, in normal life, I don't admit to being an atheist, and just define God as "that natural process by which the universe was created", and thus I believe in God. Life is too short.)
Check the short reading list I ALREADY gave you. I can give you more selections if you have an honest interest.
I'm not interested enough in the subject of religion to read a book about it, honestly. What's the nutshell version of "the state of the art" in theology?
When I see slashdotters slam anyone for belief in "God" I recognize once again that ignorance about the current state of the art in theology is as rampant as ignorance in the realm of science.
"Current state of the art in theology"? What does that even mean? As far as I can see, religion is exactly the same as it was 1,000, 2,000, 4,000 or 10,000 years ago. Faith-based (i.e., un-factual) belief in the supernatural. Some of the rituals vary, of course, but what is the difference between a modern man in church and a cave-man 10,000 years ago dancing to the rain god in the special cave?
Tests can be a form of documentation too. A proper suite of unit tests will show exactly what a method does.
This is silly. 1) Instead of reading reasonable comments, I'm supposed to dig out the module test and read the source code to see what that does, to tell me what a module does? 2) A test suite tells me nothing about how a method is used in the overall context of the program -- the whole point of comments. 3) Method comments are only one type of comment. I full expect methods within the code telling me exactly how it's doing what it's supposed to do.
I don't know why you'd single out open source, this applies to code at large. I think it's just one of those '90% percent of everything is crap' things.
I agree that a lot of closed source code is crappy as well, but there's at least a chance of institutional standards that can be enforced. There's also a higher proportion of professionals that believe in good code, whereas you have a higher proportion of amateurs for OSS (because anyone can work on an OSS, but not everyone can manage to be hired at a company).
Now that I've been in the real world, I have to say that I don't agree.
I have to respectfully say that if you believe this, you haven't written 1) enough code, and 2) complex enough code, to have filled up your brain sufficiently to where you can't remember what the hell you were thinking at that time. When you've reached that level of programmer maturity, THEN you will understand the importance of comments.:)
Never mind trying to blaze the trail for programmers that come after you. I also predict that you haven't tried to unravel another programmer's crappy code.
The problem with comments is that you now have two things to maintain, the code and the comments
Yes. People who change code but don't update the comments should be flayed appropriately.
I find that (for me at least) I have the greatest success with short, composed methods that do one thing and one thing well all backed up by unit tests that test behavior and requirements, not simply that foo() returns 15.
Testing and commenting are two different subjects. Comments are not to tell you that "foo() returns 15", comments are to tell you the *context* of code, how it fits in with the overall goal of the subroutine.
I always get burned at the stake when I say this, but the biggest problem with OSS that I run into is horribly ugly code with very few useful comments. My favorite whipping boy example of this is 'ssh', one of the more critical applications. If I had written that thing, I'd be hiding my head in shame (apparently Theo seems pretty proud of it, though).
I'm sure there has to be *some* good examples of open source beautiful code out there (heck, I know at least one exists... I released it myself a long time ago. I'm a huge believer in well commented, well structured, understandable code), but I have yet to see a really good example other than my own.
"How do you know..." is a childish argument. There are an infinite number of "How do you know"s. The simplist explanation is that there simply isn't anything. Until you can show some evidence of another explanation, we have to go with the simple, logical one.
I mean, aside from the hilarious comedy of your overblown egos, what do you think you have to offer that anyone who talks among the stars would find the least bit interesting?
Yeah, why would anthropologists want to study other cultures that don't have technology? What would they have to say that's the least bit interesting?
Slashdot Mirror
But what he is doing isn't groundbreaking, at all.
I don't know what your definition of "groundbreaking" is, but cheap access to space qualifies in my definition. Has anybody done that before? No. If no one has done it before, then it must be ground breaking, by definition.
also not ground breaking or original idea.
No one said it was original, but again, no one has done it successfully, unless you happen to know of someone. In this area especially, Carmack is getting a lot of "it'll never work" from the usual suspects.
what, exactly, new grounds are they breaking?
How many VTVL rockets do you see hovering and flying around these days? None, and of the couple that have flown in the past, none have done it as cheaply.
The other ground they're breaking is in the area of modular rocket systems, the idea of using clusters of cheap, mass-produced rocket modules that will lead directly to an orbital vehicle.
You don't think that NASA had hundreds (if not thousands) of test flights? Go back to the late '40s and '50s NASA, well the air force back then, did a lot of test flights both manned and unmanned.
That you have to tell me to look back 60 years ought to tell you something.
I have no opinion on Carmack one way or another, but tagging this story with 'haha' and 'hesnorocketscientist' seems a tad mean.
I've noticed that Carmack gets a lot of flack whenever Armadillo stumbles, and it's an interesting psychological phenomena. You'd think that especially on Slashdot, there would be a lot of people who like seeing smart people succeed, but in Carmack's case, there seems to be a lot of resentment about a "mere" video game programmer daring to learn something like rocket science. Not only learn about, but actually be *serious* about it! And doing it without any sort of engineering degree! The gall!
This seems to be especially true of amny "real" engineers, who seem jealous that an outsider with money is trying to do what they can't seem to do, which is produce very low cost access to space. "Yeah, if I had Carmack's money, I could do what he's doing better than he could do it..."
Never mind that Armadillo is one of only a few VTVL ships to actually fly.
Carmack is an incredibly smart guy, and he's not given near enough credit for raw intelligence, rather than just being a good game hacker.
Had Carmack's rocket killed someone (or many people), he would would have been stopped by "paralysis by lawsuit-ysis". Ignoring the huge dangers of rocketry by cutting corners during design may be cheaper in the short run, but as soon as real human lives are lost because of it, you can bet your ass they are going to have to spend more time and money testing their designs "on paper".
The point isn't "cutting corners", the point is learning by testing and learning with actual hardware, rather than testing with paper. No one was in any danger at any point during this test. You would have a point if you could claim they were cutting corners in *safety culture*, but they're not. They're not strapping people into test vehicles. There is no human risk here at all.
And to think, they want us all to ride in these things commercially....
Actually, this is exactly why John and company will be successful. The biggest problem with modern aerospace is "paralysis by analysis". They're so afraid of crashing anything that they have to produce (sometimes literally) millions of pages of documentation before they actually put something into the air.
Armadillo learns by *doing*, not just by creating paper studies. When they're ready to put humans in space, you can bet that their ships will have had hundreds of test flights.
It was a bad weekend for Armadillo. We set out to put some flights on Texel, the backup Quad vehicle, and it didn't go so well. We have video that we will be releasing, but Matt had to leave for Germany the next day, so it won't be digitized for a week and a half.
We started out with a normal 90 second elevated / tethered hover test, but we ran into a problem with the actuator power. We initially thought it was a bad main power switch, but it turned out to be the lithium-polymer battery pack cutoff circuit incorrectly shutting down at 16 amps of load instead of 40. This was a new battery pack ( www.batteryspace.com HPL-8059156-4S-WR), and it had passed all the individual actuator checks, but when the igniter started firing with both high amp NOS solenoids, the battery shut down (went to 0.3 volts indicated) after one second and stayed there until it was physically disconnected. Russ made a fairly heroic field repair, cutting open the battery pack and wiring around the protection circuit while sitting on top of the rocket. The total time spent on this after three attempts was 90 minutes, and enough lox had boiled off that the vehicle hit lox depletion at 60 seconds of flight. We got a few good data points from this: the batteries need to be checked at full current load, with vents open we boil off about two pounds of lox a minute, and lox-depletion runs are benign, if a little flamey.
For the second flight we were going to do a ground liftoff (still tethered for runaway protection) to test the automatic ground contact engine shutoff code. We have had several reasons to want to automate this: We get a fair bit of bounce on touchdown, because the engine is essentially keeping the vehicle weightless during the terminal descent. A computer controlled shutdown would be at least a half second faster than my manual punching of the shutdown when I visually see ground contact. The quads will just safely bounce around on the ground a bit if the engine just goes to idle and doesn't shut down, but the module, with the gimbal below the CG, will try to tip itself over when a landing leg becomes a pivot point, so there is extra incentive to get it shut off fast. You can see that in our XPC '05 vehicle flight. We also need to handle the case of the vehicle landing in a situation where I can't shut the engine off promptly, either because there was a telemetry problem, or when we are doing high altitude flights, it lands out of direct sight. There is a separate shutdownTime parameter that will keep it from sitting there at idle for ten minutes, but a telemetry abort could still have it on the ground and cooking for the better part of 220 seconds. We could still shut the flight safety fuel valve, which would result in just idle level lox pouring out of the engine, but that has its own problems.
I have been very hesitant to put in ground contact shutoff code, because shutting the engine down for some incorrect reason would be catastrophic, and I would feel awful if that ever happened. We had some switch based ground contact sensors on the old VDR, but they never got tested. We have concluded that the landing jolt, as seen by the IMU accelerometers, is a good enough ground contact signal. There is always the worry that combustion instability, or a nozzle ejection event, might trigger the signal level, so there are additional guards about it only functioning when you are within three meters of the ground (we must leave some slop for uneven terrain or GPS innacuracy) and trying to descend.
We loaded up again, being very thankful that we now pack three six-packs of helium for each test trip after we were forced to cancel the second flight on a previous test session due to insufficient helium after troubleshooting a problem forced a repressurization on the first flight. Liftoff and hover was fine, and at the 45 second mark (no sense pushing it on a ground liftoff), I had it come in for a landing. It hit the ground, and I saw it bounce back up. My first thought was "That didn't seem to help at all".
Considering the type of music that typically has two versions, I can only assume that parts of it being removed can only be an improvement.
Wait a minute, I wonder if that CD of Beethoven Piano Sonatas I bought the other day from Wal-Mart was censored... *then* we would have something to complain about.
If you'd have done a tiny bit of searching [openmoko.org], you'd see that the version available right now is the developer edition (aka GTA01). [...] The next revision is the consumer edition (aka GTA02) which happens to be coming out in October. If my math is correct, that's 2 months away... much sooner than "a few years away".
Note that I said a few years until it's a competitor with the iPhone or S60-based phones, not that you couldn't get a box with some sort of software on it.
The site also says that the *software* will be barely useful in October -- at the earliest. And maybe you can find them, but I see absolutely no screenshots of any applications beyond the basic phone. Is the browser going to suck like most phones? Who knows? The FAQ says:
What software is on the phone?
At the moment, almost no 'end-user' applications are present and working in a usable state. It is possible to make and receive calls in some software revisions, this frequently breaks though.
So they don't even have phone calls working at this point! The second rev hardware *might* be available in two months, but I highly doubt it will be stable and useful (much less mature and bug free) in 2 months.
It's cool if someone wants to buy one of these to play around with, but it's worthless at this point if you want a phone that is stable with a rich set of applications, which is easily a few years off.
If you want to build/install third party apps on a smartphone, why not buy something a little more open [openmoko.org]?
Because the software is not actually finished and some people want a functional phone? (The web site you link specifically screams "Currently it is not suitable for users.") The operating system isn't even functional, much less having applications (such as a good browser).
Then there's the fact that the phone that's available doesn't have WiFi (a deal breaker for me), nor a camera (which kind of sucks, but maybe forgivable).
In short, this is a few years away from being any sort of competitor with the iPhone or S60-based phones.
The problem with inventing things machine can't do is often people can't do ti either.
Even if I grant your point that most humans can't do some specific thing, so what? Not all computers are fast enough or have enough memory to do every task. Does that make them not computers? Does the definition of intelligence have to include the lowest-common denominator?
I don't really care what most people can't do, I care about what some people can do, and that's the standard that most people think of when they think of something (or somebody) that's intelligent.
A small subset of people can do what you propose for any problem that extends beyond common everyday tasks like tying shoes laces.
The question isn't whether any random person off the street can instantly answer any question put to them. The question is whether most random people, given sufficient time and motivation, can learn enough about a subject to render an answer to most questions. And the answer to that is 'yes'.
That doesn't mean I'm asking for an Oracle that can "answer all questions about life, the universe, and everything." Sometimes the answer to a specific question is "there isn't enough information", or "the answer is too complex", or the answer might even be wrong -- intelligence isn't perfect. But the nature of intelligence is that it's capable of learning and expanding the knowledge base.
After it was discovered that IBM was tinkering using chess experts (that is, humans) to tinker with its software between matches, they're personae non gratae in the chess world now.
Oh, bull. They didn't "cheat" in the slightest. If they had changed things *during a game*, then you could call it cheating. But during a game, it was machine versus man. Who cares that they might've tweaked programming between games? And even if you somehow could argue that it wasn't fair, how much can they actually change anyway without totally screwing things up?
All that is just whining from the Kasparov camp.
Definition of intelligence...
I should be able to do this: Machine, here is problem A. Given the set of facts of human knowledge, solve the problem, extending knowledge if necessary via experimentation.
That's what a human can do. When a machine can do it, I will call that intelligence.
Note that this does NOT require self-awareness, only intelligence.
British scientists are reporting today that the odds of life starting on Earth rather than inside a comet are one trillion trillion (10 to the power of 24) to one against.
That they can even presume to put a number on the probability of life is evidence enough that they have no idea what they're talking about.
Anyway, the odds of life are totally irrelevent to anything. See: anthropic principle.
How about instead of going after corporate IP addresses, a study of the corrupted power structure, administrator abuses, and Linda Mack/Jayjg?
When I quickly scanned this, I first read "Linda Mack/Jayjg" as "Linda McCartney/Mick Jagger". I was like, wha??? Is there some conspiracy from the 70s I didn't know about?
Some Buddhist communities are a lot like a "church without God". Instead of "God" as the placeholder for the absolute, you get "nothingness".
I'm not an expert on Buddhism, but my impression is that while that don't have a "God of worshhip" in the usual Judeo-Christian sense, they do have beliefs that qualify as supernatural (i.e., in the sense of "beyond the natural world"). Maybe you might call it spiritualism.
To me, God, spirits or anything supposedly "beyond" the universe are all equally superstition. Now, I do agree that science doesn't necessarily give us answers to "happiness", defined as optimizing the psychological abstractions of the human brain in all areas. The "software" of the human brain doesn't physically exist; it's a mathematical abstraction encoded in physical neurons. That it's not actually real doesn't make it less important to us as humans, of course.
So Secular Humanism is a lot closer to what I'm looking for. It leaves *all* supernaturalism and/or spiritualism out of the picture, but recognizes that morals and ethics are important to human existence, even though they don't fit within the usual scientific framework.
I take issue with folks who want to label everyone who believes in God as wacko, senile or necessarily superstitious.
I agree. I believe that people who believe in God, without judging them inferior, are misguided. But who isn't misguided about something? If it were that easy to pin down the "right" answers to everything, we'd all be in agreement. And let's face it, there are people who *need* the structure of religion and a belief in God. Whether God is real or not, the effect on their life is real, and as long as they don't start going crazy with pushing beliefs on others, it's a net positive.
I look at it this way: I commonly tell my kids they're the "best kids in the whole world." Objectively, is this true? Who knows? But it doesn't matter... it's true *to me*, and that personal truth is important to me. God works the same way for a lot of people. God is subjectively real to them, and the objective reality doesn't really matter that much.
Superstition and scientism are both bad approaches to modern life. Regarding my role as a pastor, it is a deep and difficult struggle...
Yep, it's tough nut to crack. :) I had a lot of Christian friends growing up, and in fact I used to go to a lot of Christian youth groups. I never "made the pledge", however. My brain simply isn't designed to be able to believe in God. If God really exists, then it's all his fault for designing me this way. :) I do have to say, that if God really exists, it's a pretty silly way to run a railroad. I personally would give a lot more direct communication if I wanted my people to believe in me.
Modern theology contends that questions of value are inadequately answered by science alone. It's not that values aren't suggested by the scientific method, it's more that we bring value, human values, to every endeavor we choose, including science.
Honestly, it sounds like you're talking about Secular Humanism. I've often said that I could totally get behind a church without God. What I mean is a place where morals and ethics can be discussed with others, along with the fellowship (which is the best part of religion) but without all the hocus-pocus superstition. Unfortunately, such an animal doesn't exist at this stage of our human societal evolution. I pretty much consider it factual that God doesn't exist, but I can't stand most atheist's groups (the reason most people join a group of atheists is because they hate religion, and want to sit around talking about how stupid everyone else is). Also unfortunately, a, say, "secular humanist church" would be considered too weird by everyone else, and I don't care enough about the whole thing to blaze any trails.
(for a similar reason, in normal life, I don't admit to being an atheist, and just define God as "that natural process by which the universe was created", and thus I believe in God. Life is too short.)
Check the short reading list I ALREADY gave you. I can give you more selections if you have an honest interest.
I'm not interested enough in the subject of religion to read a book about it, honestly. What's the nutshell version of "the state of the art" in theology?
When I see slashdotters slam anyone for belief in "God" I recognize once again that ignorance about the current state of the art in theology is as rampant as ignorance in the realm of science.
"Current state of the art in theology"? What does that even mean? As far as I can see, religion is exactly the same as it was 1,000, 2,000, 4,000 or 10,000 years ago. Faith-based (i.e., un-factual) belief in the supernatural. Some of the rituals vary, of course, but what is the difference between a modern man in church and a cave-man 10,000 years ago dancing to the rain god in the special cave?
Tests can be a form of documentation too. A proper suite of unit tests will show exactly what a method does.
This is silly. 1) Instead of reading reasonable comments, I'm supposed to dig out the module test and read the source code to see what that does, to tell me what a module does? 2) A test suite tells me nothing about how a method is used in the overall context of the program -- the whole point of comments. 3) Method comments are only one type of comment. I full expect methods within the code telling me exactly how it's doing what it's supposed to do.
I don't know why you'd single out open source, this applies to code at large. I think it's just one of those '90% percent of everything is crap' things.
I agree that a lot of closed source code is crappy as well, but there's at least a chance of institutional standards that can be enforced. There's also a higher proportion of professionals that believe in good code, whereas you have a higher proportion of amateurs for OSS (because anyone can work on an OSS, but not everyone can manage to be hired at a company).
Now that I've been in the real world, I have to say that I don't agree.
I have to respectfully say that if you believe this, you haven't written 1) enough code, and 2) complex enough code, to have filled up your brain sufficiently to where you can't remember what the hell you were thinking at that time. When you've reached that level of programmer maturity, THEN you will understand the importance of comments. :)
Never mind trying to blaze the trail for programmers that come after you. I also predict that you haven't tried to unravel another programmer's crappy code.
The problem with comments is that you now have two things to maintain, the code and the comments
Yes. People who change code but don't update the comments should be flayed appropriately.
I find that (for me at least) I have the greatest success with short, composed methods that do one thing and one thing well all backed up by unit tests that test behavior and requirements, not simply that foo() returns 15.
Testing and commenting are two different subjects. Comments are not to tell you that "foo() returns 15", comments are to tell you the *context* of code, how it fits in with the overall goal of the subroutine.
I always get burned at the stake when I say this, but the biggest problem with OSS that I run into is horribly ugly code with very few useful comments. My favorite whipping boy example of this is 'ssh', one of the more critical applications. If I had written that thing, I'd be hiding my head in shame (apparently Theo seems pretty proud of it, though).
I'm sure there has to be *some* good examples of open source beautiful code out there (heck, I know at least one exists... I released it myself a long time ago. I'm a huge believer in well commented, well structured, understandable code), but I have yet to see a really good example other than my own.
And you know this... How again do you know this?
"How do you know..." is a childish argument. There are an infinite number of "How do you know"s. The simplist explanation is that there simply isn't anything. Until you can show some evidence of another explanation, we have to go with the simple, logical one.
I mean, aside from the hilarious comedy of your overblown egos, what do you think you have to offer that anyone who talks among the stars would find the least bit interesting?
Yeah, why would anthropologists want to study other cultures that don't have technology? What would they have to say that's the least bit interesting?
Sheesh.