> Right, but what else is new? Anything and everything government does necessarily comes at the expense of freedom. Government is the agency which holds the unique "right" to employ coercion as a means to an end; anyone else who does so is a criminal. Even a minimal libertarian government, strictly limited to protecting against actual coercion, would have to be funded through coercion.
> If only the average individual understood this, instead of blindly swallowing the idea that government is somehow "voluntary" on the part of the citizen. You cannot volunteer to be subject to coercion, just as you cannot coerce a person to volunteer! The concepts are exactly opposite and mutually exclusive.
Yeah, 'cause Joe Citizen would be sooo much happier under an anarchy.
> I REALLY do think that if a company is based the U.S.A. it should have to abide by minimum standardars that represent what our country stands for (reguardless if you think the U.S. is hypacritical or not!).
I presume you mean our myths about what we stand for, instead of what we actually stand for.
> I always wondered about this..how long before digging up or "discovering" someone's grave before you're no longer a vandal of the worst kind, but a hero in the Indiana Jones mood?
Indy was portrayed as a treasure hunter. If he practiced archaeology at all, it was between movies.
BTW, Harrison Ford was on Jay Leno last week, and said they were going ahead with a fourth movie, which was now "on the front burner".
> The only reason Bush is in hot water is because he didn't get a warrant, but had he asked, some judge would have given it to him anyway... Judges almost always rubber stamp warrants, after all, if "Law Enforcement" asks, they must need it, right?
I don't know if that's true in general, but it is the track record of the FISA court Bush is skipping around.
The law also allows that court to give post hoc warrants, up to 72 hours after the unwarranted spying took place. The bit about needing to work without warrants in order to track immediate threats is pure bunkum.
> Ada was developed by the DoD precisely because they wanted to have one programming language for the entire US department of defense. Naturally this was a massive undertaking. The programming language had to be all things to all people, and thus grew very, very large.
That was a popular critique 20 years ago, but these days people tend to criticize it in the opposite direction (i.e. no standard class library).
> The problem with this large programming language is that it is so complex that most programmers can't know all of it, and they only use a part of it. That, in turn, becomes a problem whe two sequential developers on the same piece of code know different parts of the language, and the second developer can't read the first developer's code.
I don't think that's correct. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know every obscure feature, but then I don't use it professionally either.
> It also produces a few problems in trying to build a correct, compliant compiler:)
I have heard that that was true when the spec was first published a generation ago, but any such problems have long since been solved.
> So the point here is that "standardizing on one language" has been tried before, and it was a huge flop.
But a political flop rather than a technical flop. By the time the DoD was ready to start using it everyone wanted to program in C++, and the administrators were giving out waivers like Halloween candy.
Also (as often seen by people's ill-informed comments about it on Slashdot (no, I'm not referring to your post)), Ada has an unjustified bad reputation based on ignorance, such as the oft-encountered claim that the first Arianne 5 rocket crashed due to a problem with Ada, and oft-encountered quotes from Hoare (saw it as a Slashdot cookie earlier today, as a matter of fact) that was actually a critique of an early draft of the language. Much of Hoare's critique was addressed in the final project, and of course we've had the '95 spec since then. (And an 0? update coming out RSN.)
People who actually use it tend to have a high opinion of it. I use it by choice for my hobby projects.
Also, the switch from complaints about it being "too big" a generation ago to being "too little" now show just how fickle out notions of what a language 'ought' to be like actually are.
FYI, it's "Ada". Named after Miss Lovelace, not an acronym.
> And to be pedantic it was designed for mission crictical embedded systems.
To support those, but to be a general-purpose programming language as well.
> It is horrible at text processing.
Ada95 improved a lot on the original. There are also some powerful SNOBOL-style packages out there, though I can't comment on them because I've never used them.
> There are also loads of good features to ADA, after learning it my programming style improved in all other languages I used (Java, perl, C, C#, PHP ect).
Yes, I've seen the same effect in my programming habits as well.
It's unpopular among programmers because "it makes you say what you mean and mean what you say" (Ada programmers laugh when people call C++ or Java a "strongly typed" language), but when you discipline yourself to ignore your innate tendency toward laziness you find it to be an extremely powerful tool.
Think back how many "flavor of the month" languages we've had over the past 50 years. How long do you think it will be before your "standard" language is considered déclassé, and your company has a huge code base that no one wants to work on?
I suspect there's a trade-off. Standardizing on something makes things easier in the short run, but eventually you have an "earthquake" discontinuity and find yourself converting your whole code base to a "modern" language. Avoiding standardization gives you a mish-mash at any given time, but your code base drifts along with what the rest of the world is doing, so you get continuous slips along the fault rather than letting the out-of-synchness build up to the earthquake level.
> isnt anything that is purported to be true as a result of some a mathematical proof a theorem and something that is known to be true but has no proof a postulate(Law)?
Notice that "theory" and "theorem" are different words. Theorems arise from applying rules of inferences to sets of axioms (and previously proven theorems).
In general, the empirical sciences work by induction and hypothesis testing rather than by applying rules of inference to known truths, and thus don't produce theorems.
Also, I suspect we will continue to call it "string theory" even if it is eventually shown to be wrong.
I'm not crazy about that choice of names for it - we don't have any problems naming GR or QM without putting "theory" in the name - but language and terminology seem to have lives of their own.
> Is it my imagination, or does everything on the Discovery channels in the UK seem to be related to either World War II, hurricanes, tornados, crime, accidents?
A few weeks back Jay Leno observed, "This week in 1933, Adolph Hitler came to power in Germany... thus creating The History Channel."
> I suspect, in fact, that even the intelligent design crowd would want to disown this clown. Their best hope of avoiding widespread recognition that they're creationists under a false flag is to pretend that it's all about biology.
They've pretty much given up the pretense since the Dover trial. At talk.origins they've been posting links to editorial after editorial where some ID supporter falls down and claims the ruling was religious persecution, or that the Establishment Clause shouldn't prevent public schools from teaching religious beliefs an a par with science, or that the Constitution is just a piece of paper, or anything at all - other than an attempt to shore up their position with facts.
> It's a scientific quarrel with Darwin. It's about evolution being inadequate. Once the intelligent design flag is raised over cosmology too, it becomes very clear what the name of the intelligent designer is supposed to be.
> Uh, last time I checked, the Big Bang IS just a theory, just as black holes are. They may be credible theories, theories with a lot of evidence, but are still just theories. There is nothing wrong with not proclaiming a theory to be fact.
Except when you single out one theory that shows that a politically powerful religious group's beliefs are a bunch of hooey, and let all the other theories pass unremarked.
> Using your definition, science now dictates one set of beliefs (why do we need to look any further if its "proven" in any realistic definition of the word?
Scientists often use the word 'proven' in a sense that's different from what it means in math or logic. I'm not aware of any cases where it has kept us from looking any further.
> (and to see how this makes science like religion, replace the word "science" with "religion")
But your premise is false. Science doesn't dictate one set of beliefs. Science doesn't do anything at all. Scientists try to convince people with evidence and analysis.
> I disagree that science is restricted to that which can be demonstrated using the scientific method. Humans have been engaging in scientific inquiries for millenia, yet the scientific method is a recent invention. The scientific method facilitates the acquisition of scientific knowledge, but it is not the only possibility. There are times when performing a scientific experiment is impossible or immoral. In these cases, we can still make observations and construct models, even though we cannot directly test those models.
It sounds like you're saying that "the scientific method" = "laboratory experimentation". If so, that's not correct. Astronomy, for example, uses the scientific method.
Also, "directly test" is a pretty slippery concept. Arguably nothing is direct, e.g. when we weigh a compound we are getting its weight indirectly (through whatever mechanism the scale uses), and we only see the output via the photons that our retina catches.
> I disagree that science is restricted to that which can be demonstrated using the scientific method. Humans have been engaging in scientific inquiries for millenia, yet the scientific method is a recent invention.
Arguably we have been using the scientific method for millenia as well. It's just a formulation of "guess the cause and then check to see if you were right" - exactly what you do when your computer starts making noise or your car won't crank.
> The Big Bang is actually a model according to scientific methods. To call it a theory is a stretch. To have something as a model is not a bad thing it's just a different descriptor for it.
Slashdot Mirror
> Right, but what else is new? Anything and everything government does necessarily comes at the expense of freedom. Government is the agency which holds the unique "right" to employ coercion as a means to an end; anyone else who does so is a criminal. Even a minimal libertarian government, strictly limited to protecting against actual coercion, would have to be funded through coercion.
> If only the average individual understood this, instead of blindly swallowing the idea that government is somehow "voluntary" on the part of the citizen. You cannot volunteer to be subject to coercion, just as you cannot coerce a person to volunteer! The concepts are exactly opposite and mutually exclusive.
Yeah, 'cause Joe Citizen would be sooo much happier under an anarchy.
> I REALLY do think that if a company is based the U.S.A. it should have to abide by minimum standardars that represent what our country stands for (reguardless if you think the U.S. is hypacritical or not!).
I presume you mean our myths about what we stand for, instead of what we actually stand for.
> Are we talking x-ray laser sort of technology? Is 200,000 electron volts enough to do significant damage? Surface burns and radiation poisoning?
That's why we mount them on sharks' heads.
> I always wondered about this..how long before digging up or "discovering" someone's grave before you're no longer a vandal of the worst kind, but a hero in the Indiana Jones mood?
Indy was portrayed as a treasure hunter. If he practiced archaeology at all, it was between movies.
BTW, Harrison Ford was on Jay Leno last week, and said they were going ahead with a fourth movie, which was now "on the front burner".
> To think that after a lavish burial, a few thousand years later you'll be dug up for the rest of the world to gawk at.
So dress your best and comb your hair!
> Just because this can be used this way doesn't mean it will.
Yeah, that's what they said about street-light cams and automobile black boxes.
> The only reason Bush is in hot water is because he didn't get a warrant, but had he asked, some judge would have given it to him anyway... Judges almost always rubber stamp warrants, after all, if "Law Enforcement" asks, they must need it, right?
I don't know if that's true in general, but it is the track record of the FISA court Bush is skipping around.
The law also allows that court to give post hoc warrants, up to 72 hours after the unwarranted spying took place. The bit about needing to work without warrants in order to track immediate threats is pure bunkum.
> Double standards boggle my mind. Microsoft would be lynched for half the things Google gets away from.
That's an odd take on an article warning people to be wary of Google.
> By that logic fdisk and format are evil programs because they delete stuff.
Hmmm... maybe that's why I keep losing my files.
> Ada was developed by the DoD precisely because they wanted to have one programming language for the entire US department of defense. Naturally this was a massive undertaking. The programming language had to be all things to all people, and thus grew very, very large.
:)
That was a popular critique 20 years ago, but these days people tend to criticize it in the opposite direction (i.e. no standard class library).
> The problem with this large programming language is that it is so complex that most programmers can't know all of it, and they only use a part of it. That, in turn, becomes a problem whe two sequential developers on the same piece of code know different parts of the language, and the second developer can't read the first developer's code.
I don't think that's correct. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know every obscure feature, but then I don't use it professionally either.
> It also produces a few problems in trying to build a correct, compliant compiler
I have heard that that was true when the spec was first published a generation ago, but any such problems have long since been solved.
> So the point here is that "standardizing on one language" has been tried before, and it was a huge flop.
But a political flop rather than a technical flop. By the time the DoD was ready to start using it everyone wanted to program in C++, and the administrators were giving out waivers like Halloween candy.
Also (as often seen by people's ill-informed comments about it on Slashdot (no, I'm not referring to your post)), Ada has an unjustified bad reputation based on ignorance, such as the oft-encountered claim that the first Arianne 5 rocket crashed due to a problem with Ada, and oft-encountered quotes from Hoare (saw it as a Slashdot cookie earlier today, as a matter of fact) that was actually a critique of an early draft of the language. Much of Hoare's critique was addressed in the final project, and of course we've had the '95 spec since then. (And an 0? update coming out RSN.)
People who actually use it tend to have a high opinion of it. I use it by choice for my hobby projects.
Also, the switch from complaints about it being "too big" a generation ago to being "too little" now show just how fickle out notions of what a language 'ought' to be like actually are.
> I still work with ADA you insenstive clod!
FYI, it's "Ada". Named after Miss Lovelace, not an acronym.
> And to be pedantic it was designed for mission crictical embedded systems.
To support those, but to be a general-purpose programming language as well.
> It is horrible at text processing.
Ada95 improved a lot on the original. There are also some powerful SNOBOL-style packages out there, though I can't comment on them because I've never used them.
> There are also loads of good features to ADA, after learning it my programming style improved in all other languages I used (Java, perl, C, C#, PHP ect).
Yes, I've seen the same effect in my programming habits as well.
It's unpopular among programmers because "it makes you say what you mean and mean what you say" (Ada programmers laugh when people call C++ or Java a "strongly typed" language), but when you discipline yourself to ignore your innate tendency toward laziness you find it to be an extremely powerful tool.
Think back how many "flavor of the month" languages we've had over the past 50 years. How long do you think it will be before your "standard" language is considered déclassé, and your company has a huge code base that no one wants to work on?
I suspect there's a trade-off. Standardizing on something makes things easier in the short run, but eventually you have an "earthquake" discontinuity and find yourself converting your whole code base to a "modern" language. Avoiding standardization gives you a mish-mash at any given time, but your code base drifts along with what the rest of the world is doing, so you get continuous slips along the fault rather than letting the out-of-synchness build up to the earthquake level.
> isnt anything that is purported to be true as a result of some a mathematical proof a theorem and something that is known to be true but has no proof a postulate(Law)?
Notice that "theory" and "theorem" are different words. Theorems arise from applying rules of inferences to sets of axioms (and previously proven theorems).
In general, the empirical sciences work by induction and hypothesis testing rather than by applying rules of inference to known truths, and thus don't produce theorems.
As others have pointed, there are several meanings of the word "theory", even in the world of science. I don't know the history of it, but I suspect "string theory" is called a theory because of its very mathematical nature, like "computational complexity theory".
Also, I suspect we will continue to call it "string theory" even if it is eventually shown to be wrong.
I'm not crazy about that choice of names for it - we don't have any problems naming GR or QM without putting "theory" in the name - but language and terminology seem to have lives of their own.
> Is it my imagination, or does everything on the Discovery channels in the UK seem to be related to either World War II, hurricanes, tornados, crime, accidents?
A few weeks back Jay Leno observed, "This week in 1933, Adolph Hitler came to power in Germany... thus creating The History Channel."
> but golly gee whiz, what happens if the the mini black holes don't behave quite exactly like they're supposed to?
Given 11 dimensions to work with, it will be easier to kiss your ass good-bye.
> If its a theory, just call it one and get it over with, that applies to everything theoretical.
I suppose we could do that, but it get be very tedious, since everything science comes up with is theory (if it passes).
> I suspect, in fact, that even the intelligent design crowd would want to disown this clown. Their best hope of avoiding widespread recognition that they're creationists under a false flag is to pretend that it's all about biology.
They've pretty much given up the pretense since the Dover trial. At talk.origins they've been posting links to editorial after editorial where some ID supporter falls down and claims the ruling was religious persecution, or that the Establishment Clause shouldn't prevent public schools from teaching religious beliefs an a par with science, or that the Constitution is just a piece of paper, or anything at all - other than an attempt to shore up their position with facts.
> It's a scientific quarrel with Darwin. It's about evolution being inadequate. Once the intelligent design flag is raised over cosmology too, it becomes very clear what the name of the intelligent designer is supposed to be.
As if it wasn't already clear.
> Uh, last time I checked, the Big Bang IS just a theory, just as black holes are. They may be credible theories, theories with a lot of evidence, but are still just theories. There is nothing wrong with not proclaiming a theory to be fact.
Except when you single out one theory that shows that a politically powerful religious group's beliefs are a bunch of hooey, and let all the other theories pass unremarked.
> The person that is responsible for appointing that underualified-chucklhead needs to resign or be fired too.
On the contrary, I suspect he had exactly the qualifications they were looking for.
> Using your definition, science now dictates one set of beliefs (why do we need to look any further if its "proven" in any realistic definition of the word?
Scientists often use the word 'proven' in a sense that's different from what it means in math or logic. I'm not aware of any cases where it has kept us from looking any further.
> (and to see how this makes science like religion, replace the word "science" with "religion")
But your premise is false. Science doesn't dictate one set of beliefs. Science doesn't do anything at all. Scientists try to convince people with evidence and analysis.
> I disagree that science is restricted to that which can be demonstrated using the scientific method. Humans have been engaging in scientific inquiries for millenia, yet the scientific method is a recent invention. The scientific method facilitates the acquisition of scientific knowledge, but it is not the only possibility. There are times when performing a scientific experiment is impossible or immoral. In these cases, we can still make observations and construct models, even though we cannot directly test those models.
It sounds like you're saying that "the scientific method" = "laboratory experimentation". If so, that's not correct. Astronomy, for example, uses the scientific method.
Also, "directly test" is a pretty slippery concept. Arguably nothing is direct, e.g. when we weigh a compound we are getting its weight indirectly (through whatever mechanism the scale uses), and we only see the output via the photons that our retina catches.
> I disagree that science is restricted to that which can be demonstrated using the scientific method. Humans have been engaging in scientific inquiries for millenia, yet the scientific method is a recent invention.
Arguably we have been using the scientific method for millenia as well. It's just a formulation of "guess the cause and then check to see if you were right" - exactly what you do when your computer starts making noise or your car won't crank.
"Human evolution" is just a theory.
If you don't believe me, ask the next A&M dropout you meet.
> now we find that the people who put him in the job weren't smart enough to do a background check.
These are the same hobophomes who set up a Gay ho pitch easy questions at presidential press conferences.
Maybe Bush's history with the National Guard made him decide on a "no background checks" policy.
> The Big Bang is actually a model according to scientific methods. To call it a theory is a stretch. To have something as a model is not a bad thing it's just a different descriptor for it.
A theory is a model.