The bad news is that if "The War In Heaven" sells, expect a slew of Christian (and soon, no doubt, Jewish and Muslim) save-the-soul games marketed by greedy Web entrepeneurs who want to appear wholesome while raking in big money.
A "slew of Jewish and Muslim save-the-soul games" is not real likely. This game preys on a huge, lucrative, and gullible Christian subculture. I could be wrong, but I don't believe a comparable Jewish or Muslim subculture exists in this country. At least, I've never seen anybody wearing a WWAD ("What Would Allah Do?") t-shirt, and I'm unaware of a large marketing/distribution network for such merchandise.
( Note to self: 1. Secure wwcd.com domain 2. Sell "What Would Cthulhu Do" t-shirts )
The game's creators are doubtless following a proven strategy. 1. Become popular with Christians. 2. Use popularity to launch mainstream career. If this game is a success, the game's creators will point to it in discussions with potential investors for a more mainstream production. Of course, I could be wrong. If the game is a success, the game's creators may simply crank out a series of sequels, following another proven strategy: 1. Become popular with Christians. 2. Take 'em for all they're worth.
Anyway, don't confuse the Christian subculture (which most/.ers appear to hate - not without cause) with the Christion religion. The subculture is mostly the result of hypocrisy, attempted brain-washing, and marketing (aren't those last two about the same?). The religion can be the genuine item when it's not influenced by greed.
The Intel users might not switch, but that's irrelevant. Everyone would have the right, under the GPL, to take ALL the existing code and make something useful. While I haven't read the SCSL, Mr. Brandt's representation of it implies that were Linux licensed under the SCSL, you'd merely have the right to a list of well-documented kernel calls...
Somehow he claims that the right to implement compatible applications (i.e. to reverse engineer an API in the case of Java) is the "right to fork" granted by the SCSL. I refuse to believe that this seasoned programmer doesn't understand the meaning of a code fork.
I had exactly the same reaction. Your summation is too polite, though.
The man is either STUPID or a LIAR.
Possibly both, because if his intent is to deceive, he is doing badly.
I think I'll by a copy for use as bathroom reading material...
I am tempted to agree, but I think we need to wait until the book actually comes out so we can see how soft and fluffy the pages are. A lot of the books by pop psychology hacks are printed on paper that feels like steel wool when you put it to the appropriate use.
Can't address the others, but I must go on record as being rabid over the C64, and there are still many active C64 users out there, even more rabid than me.
The C64 "OS", of course, is already open sourced. Just disassemble it from the ROMs...
Are there any Amiga emulators out there for the PC?
cleaver hack LOL...was this intentional, or a typo?
What is the real utility of that kill process code? Umm...what is the real utility of Doom? What is the real utility of a GUI for that matter? you can do the same thing with a CLI.
It's an interesting thing about pure research. It can produce a long chain of useless (but neato-cool) stuff. Then somebody comes along and says "I can take these six useless research projects and create something AMAZING out of them!" What many people forget is that the amazing thing is merely the final link in a long chain of useless things.
So what good is the "cleaver hack"? Don't know, but I saw a lot of creative thinking in the discussion that resulted from it...some of it might be useful some day.
But imagine it's your responsibility to keep a system up while lots of users log in from remote locations and start their own processes. More important people get bigger monsters to represent their processes. Lusers get grunts. Gives new meaning to "Bastard Operator From Hell." I guess he'd be one of those goat-legged green-fireball-throwing creatures.
No oops. Earnings were expected to be positive numbers. They were negative numbers (aka "losses") Thus earnings were lower than expected. QED. losses: earnings which are less than zero earnings: losses which are less than zero
You're right, but any decent "universal translator" will not stop at translating individual words. Its dictionary would extend to phrases of the sort you mention. Perhaps it would define "stand at window" as "stand.1m - 1m away from window, while normal vector from plane of body intersects window." Regardless, it would be quite a chore to accomplish this. Context is everything. The more subtle the meaning, the more context you need For example, if I said "That's really smart", you don't know if I'm being complimentary, self-deprecating, ironic, or insulting.
In other words, CS != MIS . My university offered degrees in both. You didn't learn about Novell in the CS curriculum, and you didn't study the principle of mathematical induction (in three separate courses!) in the MIS curriculum. But have you read the classifieds lately? To most managers (MBA DEFINITELY != CS), a CS degree is a computer degree. I've seen jobs for NT admins, VB programmers (I am one, so don't get your knickers is a knot), HTML writers, and even tape monkeys, where one of the REQUIREMENTS for an interview was a CS degree.
I would also note that programming is not necessarily computer science, if you believe that CS is a scientific discipline. Most programming is more along the lines of engineering. You have to study physics to become a civil engineer, but building bridges does not make you a physicist. I don't think you're doing REAL computer science unless you're researching clever new algorithms in conjunction with others in the field who are studying the same kind of problem that the algorithm applies to. (I think the people who write 3-D engines for Quake etc. are doing computer science.) If you're writing a Visual Basic front end to an Access database, or even an HTML front-end for a Perl interface to a MySQL database, I don't care what your degree says; you're not dong computer science. At best, you're a computer scientist in the sense that all those waiters in LA are really actors.
I feel the same way about the "least squares" technique for determining the line of best fit. It is popular precisely because it is easy to do calculus on x^2.
And if you want the technical exposition (rather than the narrative one he provides in the novels), then pick up Pratchett's Discworld RPG from Steve Jackson Games.:) Hmmm...if Bill Gates lived on the Discworld, who would come for him when he died? And since rare events are much more common under this newly discovered distribution than under a Gaussian distribution, and since the Discworld is said to reside under the far tails of the probability curve, does that mean there are more Discworlds than were previously believed to exist?
I like Slashdot and all that, but well over 50% of the content is just re-linking to stories on salon, news.com, or wired
i agree, BUT...
Almost all of the tech news I read fits into one of these categories:
1. Rehash of some company's press release "Cool new product (tm) available Real Soon Now" (I used to work for Gateway and was both saddened and amused when corporate press releases were reworded slightly and printed under a tech reporter's byline major PC magazines).
2. Rehash of come company's financial statement - or "UberTeq posts record sales".
3. Media / corporate collaboration to produce "news" (ZD anyone?).
4. Opinion pieces, where one person lets their thought ricochet around their skull and writes about it. The level of interestingness depends on the cluefulness of the writer.
5. The reporter talked to someone who knew something and then wrote about it.
In short, there is very little originality in tech journalism. Slashdot makes an excellent filter for categories 1-3, and produces categories 4-5 by default.
i sent the author a note about this (and I'm probably not the only one - poor guy:) Anyway, read the following...
All that seems to be missing from Slashdot-type sites is some kind of reputation rating system, where participants are assigned a trust rating based on feedback from the group and managed by a central authority. One such system is up and running on eBay, ensuring that buyers and sellers on the auction site can trust one other.
Three paragraphs later...
A version of the eBay system is in place at Slashdot. Participants can earn moderation points, and readers can pick a threshold that will screen posts accordingly. Registered users automatically begin with a higher rating than anonymous users.
Either the article wasn't edited well ("Wait, there is a rating system - better add this paragraph here") or I missed his point...
Windows 1.0 Windows 2.0 Windows 386 Windows 3.0 Windows 3.1 Windows 3.11 Windows for Workgroups Windows 95 Windows 95A Windows 95B Windows 95 OSR 2 Windows 95 OSR 2.1 Windows 95 OSR 2.5 Windows 98 (8 versions, currently) Windows NT 3.1 Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server Windows NT 3.51 Workstation Windoes NT 3.51 Server Windows NT 4.0 Workstation Windows NT 4.0 Server Windows NT 4.0 Server Enterprise Edition (Not to mention all the service packs for the above...)
I'm sure I missed some. Does anybody have a canonical list of all the versions of Windows?
Actually, no. Ender's Game existed because OSC wanted to write Speaker for the Dead. He had the idea to write about someone who spoke the truth about the dead, and though it would be cool if the character who did this was Ender, from his short store "Ender's Game." He tried to work this into a single novel and realized that he'd need a separate novel to set it up. That, in my mind, is the reason why BOTH novels rocked. They were conceived together, they were written with each other in mind. It wasn't a case of "Oh, people liked this book, let's see what happened next" or "Gosh, I've got to write three books; I guess I'll take my 300-page story and stretch it into 900 pages"
Ender's game was an excellent short story long before it was an excellent novel. So consider this - "Ender's Game: the Movie. Based on Ender's Game, the short story, with ideas from Ender's Game, the novel."
Hitting people is stupid and primitive. No matter how much of an asshole someone chooses to be, breaking out your drunken monkey style on their asses isn't going to change the way they are.
Reminds me of an anecdote (supposedly true, but who knows). In the US, during WWI, a Quaker was harassed while walking down the street by a group of young men who derided his pacifist beliefs. The Quaker took off his shirt and offered to wrestle the largest among them. The two faced off. The Quaker picked up his opponent and threw him across the street, where he landed heavily. As he put his shirt back on, the Quaker asked the young man, "Do you agree now that violence cannot change the beliefs of another man?" "No!" he grunted as he got up. "I've proved my point, then," replied the Quaker, and he walked off.
Besides, their dragon style just might beat your tiger style. What was that movie?
Fun facts? Sad facts if you ask me... I think "Fun facts" was meant to be ironic...
It says the computer community is missing some brilliant minds because it breeds a hostile environment for anyone who's not a white heterosexual male. At that time, there wasn't a "computer community" as there is today; rather, there was a mathematical community that was working on computing machinery. Regardless, Alan Turing's peers, those who worked with him, cared little about his personal life. It was the the British government, and by extension British society at large, that persecuted him, not the "computer community." Keep in mind also that Turing was about as Anglo as they come, and was male, so I fail to see what his feelings have to do with exclusion of non-whites or non-males. Non-heteros I'd grant, but the fledgling computer community of post-WWII is not the computer community of today. Comparisons, while interesting, are largely fruitless.
The community needs to encourage more gender and racial parity, This I'll grant. I had a physics (not computer science, but a similar mindset) professor in college who failed a female student because he felt that females had no place in physics.
and facts like these won't be novelties. In order for this fact to become uninteresting, suicides by brilliant pioneering white male homosexual computer scientist would have to become common. I would hope that the computer community will always remember a novel tragedy that cost it one of its most brilliant theoreticians.
And who invented the printing press? Got the answer? If you said "Guttenberg", you're wrong; he merely came up with the idea of movable type. I'll grant that this was an excellent innovation; it made it much easier to set up a press. However, the printing press (which is the example you mentioned) had already been invented, and with it the ability to mass-produce printed matter.
Movable type was inevitable. Guttenberg, like many inventors, is merely given credit for thinking of it first.
(gasp) a...a...a rational, noninflammatory discussion on slashdot? (swoon)
email me at dillon_rinker@hotmail.com, as I'd like to continue the discussion beyond here.
Science does not assume that non-repeatable phenomena do not exist. I would have to respectfully disagree. Given the same initial conditions, the same result will occur; this is the bedrock of the scientific method. Correct me if I'm wrong. If an observation is nonrepeatable, you can't really do much science with it.
Instead it deliberately tries to work with and extrapolate from repeatable phenomena wherever possible. Unrepeatable phenomena yield no information. HOWEVER, what is at first glance a unique event may, upon sufficient abstraction, be found to be like lots of other events. If you drop a rock, it will fall to earth. This exact event will never happen again, as you will have aged, the earth will have moved, friction will have sheared off a few molecules, etc. Regardless, I still maintain that science is in the business of drawing conclusions from repeatable events.
Even in such cases science will try to figure out what happened according to rules that themselves come from repeatable phenomena. Sure. This is where science is useful. On a some level, as I indicated, I don't think that any event is repeatable. But given a particular event and a high enough level of abstraction, you can ask if current theory could have predicted it, or if the event violates current theory.
The start of life. Isn't there some hypothesis that given the number of galaxies, and the number of stars, and the number of planets, there should still be 10^? planets with life on them? And if we nuked the earth and dropped a few asteroids on it, doesn't current theory suggest that the return of life (possibly very different life) is at least possible?
The extinction of the dinosaurs. If they existed again, they could be made extinct again. See previous bit about nukes and asteroids:)
The Big Bang I don't know much cosmology. My understanding is that current theory can't predict what existed before the big bang - it's a singularity or something. My impression was more that the Big Bang was a conclusion, rather than a piece of evidence, with the logic going something like this: - the stars are all moving away from a point; reverse the motion far enough and all matter was at that point. - Do lots of other complicated math using other cosmological observations and quantum and relativity and chaos and other cool words and it quantifies this. - Let's call that point (or rather the events that involve it) the Big Bang. - If there were a Big Bang, there'd be background microwave radiation. There is; ergo there was a big bang.
Even if the Big Bang was a cosmologically unrepeatable event, it doesn't matter, because the big bang was not observed; it was predicted. Science can perhaps predict non-repeatable events, but it can't draw conclusions from them. You can't extrapolate from a point.
As for religion, I agree that some religious beliefs are contradicted by scientific findings. However evolution itself does not imply atheism, and there are many people who both are devout Christians and who believe in evolution. Sure. I mainly meant to address your rather broad original statement "evolution does not contradict religion".
It is not silly of scientists in general to suggest that their epistemological beliefs are of greater value than others when there are several hundred years of evidence suggesting just that. The scientific method excels above all else at increasing knowledge of the physical but fails dreadfully where the metaphysical is concerned. That may not even be an issue to you; I don't know.
The priests used to say that faith could move mountains, but nobody believed them. The scientists tell us that science can level mountains and nobody doubts them.
Reflect on that for a while... Ummmm...Ok, done. Campbell was wrong; millions believed them. Scientific American this month says that science can't build an effective natinal missile defense system. Does anyone doubt that? And I would ask "Should we level the mountains?" To me, that is the point of this particular discussion. Science can answer some questions, but it cannot answer all questions. I believe it is foolish to believe that the only important questions are the ones science can answer, or that science can answer all important questions. Reflect on the following...
Is there a god? What is right and what is wrong? Is there life after death? When does life begin? Are people happier now than they were before modern science existed? Should we map the human genome? What will humanity be like in 10,000 years? What do women REALLY want?
>>Religion assumes the existence of non-repeatable >>phenomena.
>I don't understand your assertion. Would you >elaborate on this? Can you provide examples of >'non-repeatable' phenomena (which religion >assumes exists)?
Sure. I meant miracles, or any other supernatural happening. For example, someone dying and coming back to life. These are usually one-of-a-kind happenings. They generally cannot be made to happen on command. You can't write them up for a reputable journal and expect the scientific community to confirm them.
Slashdot Mirror
The bad news is that if "The War In Heaven" sells, expect a slew of Christian (and soon, no doubt, Jewish and Muslim) save-the-soul games marketed by greedy Web entrepeneurs who want to appear wholesome while raking in big money.
/.ers appear to hate - not without cause) with the Christion religion. The subculture is mostly the result of hypocrisy, attempted brain-washing, and marketing (aren't those last two about the same?). The religion can be the genuine item when it's not influenced by greed.
A "slew of Jewish and Muslim save-the-soul games" is not real likely. This game preys on a huge, lucrative, and gullible Christian subculture. I could be wrong, but I don't believe a comparable Jewish or Muslim subculture exists in this country. At least, I've never seen anybody wearing a WWAD ("What Would Allah Do?") t-shirt, and I'm unaware of a large marketing/distribution network for such merchandise.
(
Note to self:
1. Secure wwcd.com domain
2. Sell "What Would Cthulhu Do" t-shirts
)
The game's creators are doubtless following a proven strategy.
1. Become popular with Christians.
2. Use popularity to launch mainstream career.
If this game is a success, the game's creators will point to it in discussions with potential investors for a more mainstream production. Of course, I could be wrong. If the game is a success, the game's creators may simply crank out a series of sequels, following another proven strategy:
1. Become popular with Christians.
2. Take 'em for all they're worth.
Anyway, don't confuse the Christian subculture (which most
The Intel users might not switch, but that's irrelevant. Everyone would have the right, under the GPL, to take ALL the existing code and make something useful. While I haven't read the SCSL, Mr. Brandt's representation of it implies that were Linux licensed under the SCSL, you'd merely have the right to a list of well-documented kernel calls...
Somehow he claims that the right to implement compatible applications (i.e. to reverse engineer an API in the case of Java) is the "right to fork" granted by the SCSL. I refuse to believe that this seasoned programmer doesn't understand the meaning of a code fork.
I had exactly the same reaction. Your summation is too polite, though.
The man is either STUPID or a LIAR.
Possibly both, because if his intent is to deceive, he is doing badly.
I think I'll by a copy for use as bathroom reading material...
I am tempted to agree, but I think we need to wait until the book actually comes out so we can see how soft and fluffy the pages are. A lot of the books by pop psychology hacks are printed on paper that feels like steel wool when you put it to the appropriate use.
Can't address the others, but I must go on record as being rabid over the C64, and there are still many active C64 users out there, even more rabid than me.
The C64 "OS", of course, is already open sourced. Just disassemble it from the ROMs...
Are there any Amiga emulators out there for the PC?
cleaver hack
LOL...was this intentional, or a typo?
What is the real utility of that kill process code?
Umm...what is the real utility of Doom? What is the real utility of a GUI for that matter? you can do the same thing with a CLI.
It's an interesting thing about pure research. It can produce a long chain of useless (but neato-cool) stuff. Then somebody comes along and says "I can take these six useless research projects and create something AMAZING out of them!" What many people forget is that the amazing thing is merely the final link in a long chain of useless things.
So what good is the "cleaver hack"? Don't know, but I saw a lot of creative thinking in the discussion that resulted from it...some of it might be useful some day.
But imagine it's your responsibility to keep a system up while lots of users log in from remote locations and start their own processes. More important people get bigger monsters to represent their processes. Lusers get grunts. Gives new meaning to "Bastard Operator From Hell." I guess he'd be one of those goat-legged green-fireball-throwing creatures.
No oops. Earnings were expected to be positive numbers. They were negative numbers (aka "losses") Thus earnings were lower than expected. QED. losses: earnings which are less than zero earnings: losses which are less than zero
You're right, but any decent "universal translator" will not stop at translating individual words. Its dictionary would extend to phrases of the sort you mention. Perhaps it would define "stand at window" as "stand .1m - 1m away from window, while normal vector from plane of body intersects window." Regardless, it would be quite a chore to accomplish this. Context is everything. The more subtle the meaning, the more context you need For example, if I said "That's really smart", you don't know if I'm being complimentary, self-deprecating, ironic, or insulting.
In other words, CS != MIS . My university offered degrees in both. You didn't learn about Novell in the CS curriculum, and you didn't study the principle of mathematical induction (in three separate courses!) in the MIS curriculum. But have you read the classifieds lately? To most managers (MBA DEFINITELY != CS), a CS degree is a computer degree. I've seen jobs for NT admins, VB programmers (I am one, so don't get your knickers is a knot), HTML writers, and even tape monkeys, where one of the REQUIREMENTS for an interview was a CS degree.
I would also note that programming is not necessarily computer science, if you believe that CS is a scientific discipline. Most programming is more along the lines of engineering. You have to study physics to become a civil engineer, but building bridges does not make you a physicist. I don't think you're doing REAL computer science unless you're researching clever new algorithms in conjunction with others in the field who are studying the same kind of problem that the algorithm applies to. (I think the people who write 3-D engines for Quake etc. are doing computer science.) If you're writing a Visual Basic front end to an Access database, or even an HTML front-end for a Perl interface to a MySQL database, I don't care what your degree says; you're not dong computer science. At best, you're a computer scientist in the sense that all those waiters in LA are really actors.
Uhhh...yeah. So I suppose you'd like to be surrounded by naked guys? Or perhaps you like to watch videos of guys getting it on?
YEAH! RIGHT ON!
I feel the same way about the "least squares" technique for determining the line of best fit. It is popular precisely because it is easy to do calculus on x^2.
And if you want the technical exposition (rather than the narrative one he provides in the novels), then pick up Pratchett's Discworld RPG from Steve Jackson Games. :) Hmmm...if Bill Gates lived on the Discworld, who would come for him when he died? And since rare events are much more common under this newly discovered distribution than under a Gaussian distribution, and since the Discworld is said to reside under the far tails of the probability curve, does that mean there are more Discworlds than were previously believed to exist?
Go here - http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/08/23/priso ns/index.html (No deep linking here, boss - just an URL)
I like Slashdot and all that, but well over 50% of the content is just re-linking to stories on salon, news.com, or wired
i agree, BUT...
Almost all of the tech news I read fits into one of these categories:
1. Rehash of some company's press release "Cool new product (tm) available Real Soon Now" (I used to work for Gateway and was both saddened and amused when corporate press releases were reworded slightly and printed under a tech reporter's byline major PC magazines).
2. Rehash of come company's financial statement - or "UberTeq posts record sales".
3. Media / corporate collaboration to produce "news" (ZD anyone?).
4. Opinion pieces, where one person lets their thought ricochet around their skull and writes about it. The level of interestingness depends on the cluefulness of the writer.
5. The reporter talked to someone who knew something and then wrote about it.
In short, there is very little originality in tech journalism. Slashdot makes an excellent filter for categories 1-3, and produces categories 4-5 by default.
i sent the author a note about this (and I'm probably not the only one - poor guy :) Anyway, read the following...
All that seems to be missing from Slashdot-type sites is some kind of reputation rating system, where participants are assigned a trust rating based on feedback from the group and managed by a central authority. One such system is up and running on eBay, ensuring that buyers and sellers on the auction site can trust one other.
Three paragraphs later...
A version of the eBay system is in place at Slashdot. Participants can earn moderation points, and readers can pick a threshold that will screen posts accordingly. Registered users automatically begin with a higher rating than anonymous users.
Either the article wasn't edited well ("Wait, there is a rating system - better add this paragraph here") or I missed his point...
Windows 1.0
Windows 2.0
Windows 386
Windows 3.0
Windows 3.1
Windows 3.11
Windows for Workgroups
Windows 95
Windows 95A
Windows 95B
Windows 95 OSR 2
Windows 95 OSR 2.1
Windows 95 OSR 2.5
Windows 98 (8 versions, currently)
Windows NT 3.1
Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server
Windows NT 3.51 Workstation
Windoes NT 3.51 Server
Windows NT 4.0 Workstation
Windows NT 4.0 Server
Windows NT 4.0 Server Enterprise Edition
(Not to mention all the service packs for the above...)
I'm sure I missed some. Does anybody have a canonical list of all the versions of Windows?
NEWS FOR NERDS!!!
STUFF THAT MATTERS!!!
NEWS FOR NERDS!!!
STUFF THAT MATTERS!!!
TASTES GREAT!!!
LESS FILLING!!!
TASTES GREAT!!!
LESS FILLING!!!
Ender's Game could have stood on its own.
Actually, no. Ender's Game existed because OSC wanted to write Speaker for the Dead. He had the idea to write about someone who spoke the truth about the dead, and though it would be cool if the character who did this was Ender, from his short store "Ender's Game." He tried to work this into a single novel and realized that he'd need a separate novel to set it up. That, in my mind, is the reason why BOTH novels rocked. They were conceived together, they were written with each other in mind. It wasn't a case of "Oh, people liked this book, let's see what happened next" or "Gosh, I've got to write three books; I guess I'll take my 300-page story and stretch it into 900 pages"
Ender's game was an excellent short story long before it was an excellent novel. So consider this - "Ender's Game: the Movie. Based on Ender's Game, the short story, with ideas from Ender's Game, the novel."
Hitting people is stupid and primitive. No matter how much of an asshole someone chooses to be, breaking out your drunken monkey style on their asses isn't going to change the way they are.
Reminds me of an anecdote (supposedly true, but who knows). In the US, during WWI, a Quaker was harassed while walking down the street by a group of young men who derided his pacifist beliefs. The Quaker took off his shirt and offered to wrestle the largest among them. The two faced off. The Quaker picked up his opponent and threw him across the street, where he landed heavily. As he put his shirt back on, the Quaker asked the young man, "Do you agree now that violence cannot change the beliefs of another man?"
"No!" he grunted as he got up.
"I've proved my point, then," replied the Quaker, and he walked off.
Besides, their dragon style just might beat your tiger style.
What was that movie?
Fun facts? Sad facts if you ask me...
I think "Fun facts" was meant to be ironic...
It says the computer community is missing some brilliant minds because it breeds a hostile environment for anyone who's not a white heterosexual male.
At that time, there wasn't a "computer community" as there is today; rather, there was a mathematical community that was working on computing machinery. Regardless, Alan Turing's peers, those who worked with him, cared little about his personal life. It was the the British government, and by extension British society at large, that persecuted him, not the "computer community." Keep in mind also that Turing was about as Anglo as they come, and was male, so I fail to see what his feelings have to do with exclusion of non-whites or non-males. Non-heteros I'd grant, but the fledgling computer community of post-WWII is not the computer community of today. Comparisons, while interesting, are largely fruitless.
The community needs to encourage more gender and racial parity,
This I'll grant. I had a physics (not computer science, but a similar mindset) professor in college who failed a female student because he felt that females had no place in physics.
and facts like these won't be novelties.
In order for this fact to become uninteresting, suicides by brilliant pioneering white male homosexual computer scientist would have to become common. I would hope that the computer community will always remember a novel tragedy that cost it one of its most brilliant theoreticians.
And who invented the printing press? Got the answer? If you said "Guttenberg", you're wrong; he merely came up with the idea of movable type. I'll grant that this was an excellent innovation; it made it much easier to set up a press. However, the printing press (which is the example you mentioned) had already been invented, and with it the ability to mass-produce printed matter.
Movable type was inevitable. Guttenberg, like many inventors, is merely given credit for thinking of it first.
(gasp) a...a...a rational, noninflammatory discussion on slashdot? (swoon)
:)
email me at dillon_rinker@hotmail.com, as I'd like to continue the discussion beyond here.
Science does not assume that non-repeatable phenomena do not exist.
I would have to respectfully disagree. Given the same initial conditions, the same result will occur; this is the bedrock of the scientific method. Correct me if I'm wrong. If an observation is nonrepeatable, you can't really do much science with it.
Instead it deliberately tries to work with and extrapolate from repeatable phenomena wherever possible.
Unrepeatable phenomena yield no information. HOWEVER, what is at first glance a unique event may, upon sufficient abstraction, be found to be like lots of other events. If you drop a rock, it will fall to earth. This exact event will never happen again, as you will have aged, the earth will have moved, friction will have sheared off a few molecules, etc. Regardless, I still maintain that science is in the business of drawing conclusions from repeatable events.
Even in such cases science will try to figure out what happened according to rules that themselves come from repeatable phenomena.
Sure. This is where science is useful. On a some level, as I indicated, I don't think that any event is repeatable. But given a particular event and a high enough level of abstraction, you can ask if current theory could have predicted it, or if the event violates current theory.
The start of life.
Isn't there some hypothesis that given the number of galaxies, and the number of stars, and the number of planets, there should still be 10^? planets with life on them? And if we nuked the earth and dropped a few asteroids on it, doesn't current theory suggest that the return of life (possibly very different life) is at least possible?
The extinction of the dinosaurs.
If they existed again, they could be made extinct again. See previous bit about nukes and asteroids
The Big Bang
I don't know much cosmology. My understanding is that current theory can't predict what existed before the big bang - it's a singularity or something. My impression was more that the Big Bang was a conclusion, rather than a piece of evidence, with the logic going something like this:
- the stars are all moving away from a point; reverse the motion far enough and all matter was at that point.
- Do lots of other complicated math using other cosmological observations and quantum and relativity and chaos and other cool words and it quantifies this.
- Let's call that point (or rather the events that involve it) the Big Bang.
- If there were a Big Bang, there'd be background microwave radiation. There is; ergo there was a big bang.
Even if the Big Bang was a cosmologically unrepeatable event, it doesn't matter, because the big bang was not observed; it was predicted. Science can perhaps predict non-repeatable events, but it can't draw conclusions from them. You can't extrapolate from a point.
As for religion, I agree that some religious beliefs are contradicted by scientific findings. However evolution itself does not imply atheism, and there are many people who both are devout Christians and who believe in evolution.
Sure. I mainly meant to address your rather broad original statement "evolution does not contradict religion".
It is not silly of scientists in general to suggest that their epistemological beliefs are of greater value than others when there are several hundred years of evidence suggesting just that.
The scientific method excels above all else at increasing knowledge of the physical but fails dreadfully where the metaphysical is concerned. That may not even be an issue to you; I don't know.
The priests used to say that faith could move mountains, but nobody believed them. The scientists tell us that science can level mountains and nobody doubts them.
Reflect on that for a while...
Ummmm...Ok, done. Campbell was wrong; millions believed them. Scientific American this month says that science can't build an effective natinal missile defense system. Does anyone doubt that? And I would ask "Should we level the mountains?" To me, that is the point of this particular discussion. Science can answer some questions, but it cannot answer all questions. I believe it is foolish to believe that the only important questions are the ones science can answer, or that science can answer all important questions. Reflect on the following...
Is there a god?
What is right and what is wrong?
Is there life after death?
When does life begin?
Are people happier now than they were before modern science existed?
Should we map the human genome?
What will humanity be like in 10,000 years?
What do women REALLY want?
>>Religion assumes the existence of non-repeatable
>>phenomena.
>I don't understand your assertion. Would you
>elaborate on this? Can you provide examples of
>'non-repeatable' phenomena (which religion
>assumes exists)?
Sure. I meant miracles, or any other supernatural happening. For example, someone dying and coming back to life. These are usually one-of-a-kind happenings. They generally cannot be made to happen on command. You can't write them up for a reputable journal and expect the scientific community to confirm them.