> Matter = Stuff Anti-Matter = Stuff that blows stuff up Dark Matter = The stuff that isn't there, that we keep bumping into
To paraphrase the old saw about virtual memory:
If you can see it and it's there, it's matter. If you can see it and it's not there, it's a virtual particle. If you can't see it and it's there, it's dark matter. If you can't see it and it's not there, it's dark energy.
> "[...] According to theory, only dark matter can do the trick." Why can only "dark" matter be the cause ?
Presumably they mean it looks like a gravitational effect but we can't see any matter in the right place to have that effect, therefore it is "dark" matter (by definition).
Presumably [i.e. not according to current theory] it could be some force we haven't discovered yet instead of gravity, or some "stuff" we haven't discovered yet other than matter, but since we already have independent reasons to believe dark matter exists and has a gravitational effect, it's more Occam-compliant to stick with with the dark matter explanation for this.
> While not plagarism, I read both Slashdot and BBC News daily and its often very surprising the number of BBC News articles that pop up on subjects right after the same story is covered on Slashdot, often with a similiar slant to it. I keep thinking that their tech editor is a slashdotter.
OTOH, look how often posters describe Slashdot as a discussion site for stories they saw in the regular media two days earlier.
Maybe if you don't consider phish to be a kind of spam. That accounts for 90% of what gets past my filters these days. (And I suspect that that's because of the distribution of message types, rather than a problem with the filters.)
> The Singularity is the true point of destruction, the actual hole part of the black hole
No, the event horizon is the methaphorical "hole in space".
Lots of physicists doubt that singularities even exist. Singularity essentially means "the math broke", a result of applying GR at scales where QM effects almost certainly dominate. If we ever get a theory that unifies GR and QM, we might discern what actually happens at the center of a black hole.
> > When it comes to religious questions, the IDEA Center's staff and founders believe that compelling evidence shows that the universe was as a whole designed by a "superintellect" that was not natural.
> They aren't interested in understanding nature. They're just trying to redefine science.
To let their preferred answer in.
And the quoted text reveals that after the Dover spanking they're not bothering to pretend ID isn't religion anymore.
> Besides, wasn't ADA created for exactly these types of detail-spec'd, high-reliability systems?
Only as a side-effect, I think. Those are desirable properties of any programming language, and a natural fallout of the search/design process that resulted in Ada.
That process started way back in the 1970's - more than halfway back to the beginning of time, so far as the art of programming is concerned. The US military decided it needed a standard, high-level, cross-platform language, and Ada was the ultimate result.
In addition to its focus on reliability, it is intended to support real-time embedded systems, which is a very common need in military hardware.
The Wikipedia article has a good summary of the history and target features.
> > The Master Money server done by Praxis was done Fixed Price, and with a warranty that says Praxis would fix any bug discovered over the net 10 years -for free-.
> How many of you would be willing to place that kind of warranty on YOUR CODE?
Also, how many of you have ever had a customer who could state their requirements clearly enough to offer that kind of warranty?
I'm not going to spend the hours it would take to check all the "Updated" entries in the list, but I picked one at random and looked at the original and two of the updates, and the only changes between was the addition of links to distribution-specific patches. Looks like they're counting individual exploits multiple times.
> Your argument that atheism can't be blamed for the mass slaughters of the 20th century by atheistic states is exactly the same as the argument that religion can't be blamed for the atrocities throughout history.
It's hard to apply that logic to the Flowery Wars, which were very overtly motivated by religion.
> Does this mean religion is inherently evil? Only if the last century means atheism is inherently evil.
Sorry, but I haven't found any evidence that the two causes are actually symmetrical.
> No, I'm just making the obvious point that atheism in gov't is not necessarily superior to reliogion in gov't, on clearly visible evidence.
Yes, it's clear that state atheism hasn't been a reliable moderator of state violence, though it doesn't look like religion has either.
> Dogmatism leading to totalitarianism is the most obvious factor uniting the 20th century's atheistic death states with their nearest theistic analogues, like parts of Europe at different points during the Inquisition.
I can agree with that, though it takes a really broad definition of dogmatism. Enforced collectivism has probably been the primary bane of the past 100 years, and I suppose you could say the enforcers "dogmatically" insisted that collectivism would lead to some desired result. I'm not sure it would be as easy to cast racism and nationalism as dogmatism, but that seems like a minor quibble.
An important issue for claims that religion or atheism have been the worst causes of inhumanity is the difficult or impossible question of how much religion or atheism per se had to do with the various crimes. E.g., the Thirty Years War wasn't solely about religion, and the rampages of mercenaries probably didn't typically have the least bit to do with religion. The way European Christians treated Native Americans was despicable, but I doubt that much of it was motivated by religion per se (though religion was sometimes used as an excuse). Even OBL seems to be motivated by a combination of religion, pan-Arab nationalism, and a sort of racism (or "ethnicism").
For those who are interested, here is a tentative list of history's worst slaughters. If you don't like the numbers in the table, scroll down to the section that shows the great variety of numbers different authors have put on the various episodes.
At any rate, it seems to me that religion per se can be blamed for "a lot" of violence, but I don't see a case that atheism per se can. However, I don't think you can reasonably claim that religion was the worst. Though it's hard to sort the causes out, I suspect that (in no particular order) greed, nationalism, imperialism, racism, disputes over territory/resources, and forced collectivism have each resulted in more deaths than religion per se. But by the same reasoning, I have to reject those who claim or insinuate that atheism was responsible for the tragedy of the twentieth century.
Re: the recommended changes require MORE laws?
on
The Patent Epidemic
·
· Score: 1
> If you are sympathetic to the idea of abolishing patents and you live on this planet, the best you can hope for is gradual change towards weakening the power of patent monopolies.
Unfortunately our lobbyarchy is eagerly strengthening it rather than weakening it.
There's a law in the works (google for "patent reform"; also discussed on Slashdot last spring, IIRC) that would change a number of the provisions of current patent law, supposedly in the name of reducing lawsuits. The most shocking provision, IMO, is that patents would be awarded to whoever filed first rather than whoever actually invented it (to reduce court cases, of course).
Thus if you created a game that had a nifty idea in it that some company or rich fart saw, he could patent it and charge you a fee for using your own idea.
And it doesn't even have to be an idea certain to be worth patenting. We already have "technology firms" that operate by buying up everything on the assurance that a few "hits" will compensate for all the stuff they paid to patent but couldn't leverage. The little guy can't afford to do that.
I don't have the faintest idea what this would do to the doctrine of prior art. It seems to be completely incompatible. Wouldn't you like to be the "first to file" for a patent on the wheel, the wing, the nail, the roof, etc.?
> However, there is a (depressingly stupid, imho) trend at the moment to use nouns as verbs
It's not a trend of the moment, it's a basic property of the English language.
For example, it should take you about a minute to think of 25-30 long-accepted verbs that are the result of "verbing" the names of body parts. Start with "head" and work your way down to "toe".
Slashdot Mirror
> Matter = Stuff Anti-Matter = Stuff that blows stuff up Dark Matter = The stuff that isn't there, that we keep bumping into
To paraphrase the old saw about virtual memory:
If you can see it and it's there, it's matter.
If you can see it and it's not there, it's a virtual particle.
If you can't see it and it's there, it's dark matter.
If you can't see it and it's not there, it's dark energy.
Gods and theology can be theorized and tested too. For instance, "If God is real then I'll get a hot date on Friday night."
Of course the existence of Slashdotters falsifies that particular theological theory.
AFAIK the only theories of God that pass every test are -
> "[...] According to theory, only dark matter can do the trick." Why can only "dark" matter be the cause ?
Presumably they mean it looks like a gravitational effect but we can't see any matter in the right place to have that effect, therefore it is "dark" matter (by definition).
Presumably [i.e. not according to current theory] it could be some force we haven't discovered yet instead of gravity, or some "stuff" we haven't discovered yet other than matter, but since we already have independent reasons to believe dark matter exists and has a gravitational effect, it's more Occam-compliant to stick with with the dark matter explanation for this.
> I, for one, bow before our dark matter photino bird overlords from Andromeda...
How do you know you're not bowing behind them or in the wrong direction entirely, given that you can't see them?
> While not plagarism, I read both Slashdot and BBC News daily and its often very surprising the number of BBC News articles that pop up on subjects right after the same story is covered on Slashdot, often with a similiar slant to it. I keep thinking that their tech editor is a slashdotter.
OTOH, look how often posters describe Slashdot as a discussion site for stories they saw in the regular media two days earlier.
Well, if people would just learn to take the absolute value of that image, the problem would go away.
> Who are these 21% of people who haven't felt stressed in the last 365 days?
In the coma ward.
> ... and I put alcohol in my cereal I eat before going to work.
Isn't merely waking up sufficient?
Maybe if you don't consider phish to be a kind of spam. That accounts for 90% of what gets past my filters these days. (And I suspect that that's because of the distribution of message types, rather than a problem with the filters.)
> > The NSA revoked Tice's security clearance in May of last year based on what it called psychological concerns and later dismissed him.
> Psychological concerns like, say, his inability to keep a secret?
More likely psychological concerns like respect for the rule of law.
> I counted 45! exclamation points in that article!
It's probably malware for your web browser, encoded in base 1.
...if you pull the facts out quickly.
> The Singularity is the true point of destruction, the actual hole part of the black hole
No, the event horizon is the methaphorical "hole in space".
Lots of physicists doubt that singularities even exist. Singularity essentially means "the math broke", a result of applying GR at scales where QM effects almost certainly dominate. If we ever get a theory that unifies GR and QM, we might discern what actually happens at the center of a black hole.
> When did this bullshit start anyway?
.goldrush
When they sold themselves to a corporate pwner, back in the
Shouldn't that be "taking root?"
> > When it comes to religious questions, the IDEA Center's staff and founders believe that compelling evidence shows that the universe was as a whole designed by a "superintellect" that was not natural.
> They aren't interested in understanding nature. They're just trying to redefine science.
To let their preferred answer in.
And the quoted text reveals that after the Dover spanking they're not bothering to pretend ID isn't religion anymore.
> Besides, wasn't ADA created for exactly these types of detail-spec'd, high-reliability systems?
Only as a side-effect, I think. Those are desirable properties of any programming language, and a natural fallout of the search/design process that resulted in Ada.
That process started way back in the 1970's - more than halfway back to the beginning of time, so far as the art of programming is concerned. The US military decided it needed a standard, high-level, cross-platform language, and Ada was the ultimate result.
In addition to its focus on reliability, it is intended to support real-time embedded systems, which is a very common need in military hardware.
The Wikipedia article has a good summary of the history and target features.
> > The Master Money server done by Praxis was done Fixed Price, and with a warranty that says Praxis would fix any bug discovered over the net 10 years -for free-.
> How many of you would be willing to place that kind of warranty on YOUR CODE?
Also, how many of you have ever had a customer who could state their requirements clearly enough to offer that kind of warranty?
I'm not going to spend the hours it would take to check all the "Updated" entries in the list, but I picked one at random and looked at the original and two of the updates, and the only changes between was the addition of links to distribution-specific patches. Looks like they're counting individual exploits multiple times.
> Your argument that atheism can't be blamed for the mass slaughters of the 20th century by atheistic states is exactly the same as the argument that religion can't be blamed for the atrocities throughout history.
It's hard to apply that logic to the Flowery Wars, which were very overtly motivated by religion.
> Does this mean religion is inherently evil? Only if the last century means atheism is inherently evil.
Sorry, but I haven't found any evidence that the two causes are actually symmetrical.
> This isn't like North Carolina requiring that the source be placed in escrow, they're actually requiring it be available to the public.
Though it won't make much difference if they also decide to ignore the new law when no vendors offer anything compliant.
> No, I'm just making the obvious point that atheism in gov't is not necessarily superior to reliogion in gov't, on clearly visible evidence.
Yes, it's clear that state atheism hasn't been a reliable moderator of state violence, though it doesn't look like religion has either.
> Dogmatism leading to totalitarianism is the most obvious factor uniting the 20th century's atheistic death states with their nearest theistic analogues, like parts of Europe at different points during the Inquisition.
I can agree with that, though it takes a really broad definition of dogmatism. Enforced collectivism has probably been the primary bane of the past 100 years, and I suppose you could say the enforcers "dogmatically" insisted that collectivism would lead to some desired result. I'm not sure it would be as easy to cast racism and nationalism as dogmatism, but that seems like a minor quibble.
An important issue for claims that religion or atheism have been the worst causes of inhumanity is the difficult or impossible question of how much religion or atheism per se had to do with the various crimes. E.g., the Thirty Years War wasn't solely about religion, and the rampages of mercenaries probably didn't typically have the least bit to do with religion. The way European Christians treated Native Americans was despicable, but I doubt that much of it was motivated by religion per se (though religion was sometimes used as an excuse). Even OBL seems to be motivated by a combination of religion, pan-Arab nationalism, and a sort of racism (or "ethnicism").
For those who are interested, here is a tentative list of history's worst slaughters. If you don't like the numbers in the table, scroll down to the section that shows the great variety of numbers different authors have put on the various episodes.
At any rate, it seems to me that religion per se can be blamed for "a lot" of violence, but I don't see a case that atheism per se can. However, I don't think you can reasonably claim that religion was the worst. Though it's hard to sort the causes out, I suspect that (in no particular order) greed, nationalism, imperialism, racism, disputes over territory/resources, and forced collectivism have each resulted in more deaths than religion per se. But by the same reasoning, I have to reject those who claim or insinuate that atheism was responsible for the tragedy of the twentieth century.
> If you are sympathetic to the idea of abolishing patents and you live on this planet, the best you can hope for is gradual change towards weakening the power of patent monopolies.
Unfortunately our lobbyarchy is eagerly strengthening it rather than weakening it.
There's a law in the works (google for "patent reform"; also discussed on Slashdot last spring, IIRC) that would change a number of the provisions of current patent law, supposedly in the name of reducing lawsuits. The most shocking provision, IMO, is that patents would be awarded to whoever filed first rather than whoever actually invented it (to reduce court cases, of course).
Thus if you created a game that had a nifty idea in it that some company or rich fart saw, he could patent it and charge you a fee for using your own idea.
And it doesn't even have to be an idea certain to be worth patenting. We already have "technology firms" that operate by buying up everything on the assurance that a few "hits" will compensate for all the stuff they paid to patent but couldn't leverage. The little guy can't afford to do that.
I don't have the faintest idea what this would do to the doctrine of prior art. It seems to be completely incompatible. Wouldn't you like to be the "first to file" for a patent on the wheel, the wing, the nail, the roof, etc.?
> However, there is a (depressingly stupid, imho) trend at the moment to use nouns as verbs
It's not a trend of the moment, it's a basic property of the English language.
For example, it should take you about a minute to think of 25-30 long-accepted verbs that are the result of "verbing" the names of body parts. Start with "head" and work your way down to "toe".
> First you architect solutions, then you're leveraging synergies, and it's a downhill slope from there into corporate marketspeak.
The trouble starts when you find yourself thinking outside the box. Next thing you know, you're talking out your ass.