> Given Microsoft's record of continual failure with regards to security, I've always thought putting MS in charge of security (as with Palladium) was like asking the wolf to guard the sheep.
No, it's more like asking a sheep to guard the wolves.
IANAEconomist, but I doubt that any of the US economy is going to last.
Forget long-term sustainablity issues, and just notice the increasing flood of companies moving manufacturing offshore to cut their costs. Certainly a smart move if all else were equal, but as more and more companies do it there's going to be less and less money to go around for the American worker, and as the total worker income drops the total consumer spending will drop as well.
And consumer spending amounts to almost 2/3 of the US economy. Expect a viscious cycle until the US economy stabilizes on a new equilibrium, with few US citizens able to participate in our traditional profligate lifestyle.
> If we can demonstrate creationism as being true apart from God - ie, that the history given in the Bible was in fact correct, from Adam & Eve, age of the earth, flood, history of the nations, etc. Then [...]
Since much of your 'if' has already been demonstrated to be false, your 'then' is dead code that doesn't really matter.
> Ok...I have no problem with that. What he was trying to say is that events do not occur in a specific order. What the theory actually says is that the order of events cannot be reliably determined. There is a world of difference in those two things.
You have failed to grok the reason relativity is called 'relativity'.
Ancient intuitions about time, space, mass, human ancestry, etc., simply don't stand up to a check against reality.
> God is the first cause, the creator, the origin. Atheistic evolution has no answer for first cause, while there must be one.
You don't seem to require a cause for God. You're simply trying to hold the opposition to a standard that you don't hold yourself to.
> In 2000 years, I fully expect evolution to be recorded in history as a time when people beleived that absurd idea that all life evolved over billions of years. They'll laugh at us as much as we laugh at those who believed in a flat earth.
Blissfully unaware that you already live in a time when people get laughed at for denying evolution.
Can you think of any instance where progress in science led to a theory that was more like previously rejected folkloric explanations, rather than to something even stranger than we had previously imagined?
ps - I agree that there is no mathematical proof that an eternal god is impossible. (Unless of course you pick arbitrary axioms to make it provable. But arbitrary axioms don't tell us much about reality.)
> We do not necessarily know it all. It is possible that God is deliberately hiding knowledge from our eyes. He knows all, and who are we to question his infallible (at least IMHO) Word?
One boggles at the simultaneous claims that (a) God is deceiving us and (b) God's word is perfectly trustworthy.
> Hmmmm... no, when I write a paper on it, I'll get labelled a quack, no matter how much scientific evidence I put in to support my theory, no matter how well it explains observable phenomenon.
> That 'fact' is based on the big bang theory. As such, it cannot be a 'fact'.
I don't like the big bang theory either, but I notice that astronomers have observations supporting their view and I don't have any observations supporting mine, and it seems better to concede the point with good grace rather than with ill grace... because I do have to concede it.
And so do you, though you don't seem to recognize it. Now when you have a model that actually explains the observations as well as the big bang does, you can write a paper on it and get a big expensive telescope named after you. Til then, good grace becomes you more than ill grace.
> I think the february deal right before the case makes it MORE suspect. And so do the stock options. It's not common to buy these kinds of rights with stock option deals... that's a bet on SCO's future, made right before the coming case went PUBLIC. We would have to assume at least SCO knew at the time the case was imminent. It looks to me like Sun did too.
IIRC that's about the same time a bunch of SCOX board members bought up dirt-cheap options on piles of near worthless stock. And you can bet that this kind of high-profile lawsuit doesn't come into being overnight.
I won't be surprised if some insider trading charges are the most visible outcome of this whole affair.
There was just now a segment on ABC World News about The [Grateful] Dead's new model for making money off music. They record their shows every night, take orders from fans at the show, have their audio man master it, ship it off for duplication on CDs, and have it in the mail to the fan within about three days.
Instead of the $1/album typically made by signed bands they make $8-$10 on the three-CD set that sells for $22. They've turned a quarter of a million dollars on the CDs from their performances at Red Rocks over the past couple of weeks.
Not mentioned at the link, but Peter Jennings added that the music companies don't like being cut out of the loop like that.
> Here is why creationism would affirm God's existence: > 1. It would show that the history in the Bible was accurate and true
As a good scientist you know that when observations falsify the consequences of a claim then that claim is false. And since we know that some of the history in the Bible is inaccurate and false, your claim must be rejected.
> I have a full education and background in the cosmic, biochemical, and biological "evolution" story line.
Please tell us about your education and background.
Not that I care; it's just that Creationist Credential Inflation (CCI) is rampant among, well, creationists, and a vague statement like "I have a full education" rings the alarm bells. So what exactly is your degree or degrees, what were the granting institutions, what fields were they in (as stated on the diplomas)?
> However it comes down to a key point - it is mathematically impossible for life to arise spontaneously by stochastic processes.
Please show your math.
> The Bible has it right from the first verse ("n the beginning God created the heaven and the earth") to the last (" The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen").
What is the basis for this claim? (Especially when some of the intervening material is demonstrably false, e.g. the story of the global flood.)
> If you choose to believe in evolution, that's fine, just be honest enough to admit that it is more of a leap of faith than believing in 6 day creation.
No, because we have evidence refuting the six day creation and we don't have evidence refuting evolution.
And even if we didn't have evidence refuting the six day creation the two claims still wouldn't balance in the scale, because evolution doesn't claim the existence of anything other than the ordinary workings of matter and energy in well-observed processes of chemistry, genetics, and the behavior of individuals and populations. Special creation OTOH requires the existence of an omni*ent being with an individual personality, for whom not the slightest evidence exists, along with the additional claims that he, she, or it decided to actually do what creationists claim he/she/it did, and then decided to falsify the evidence afterward to make it look like he/she/it didn't do it.
There is no symmetry at all between science and religion.
> I've always thought the title of the GOTO paper was a master stroke. Anyone else would have called it "Why GOTO statements are bad" or "Structural problems caused by GOTO", and your reaction would be "That's his opinion" or "Gee, everyone knows that". He made it sound like it came from absolute authority, and if you disagreed, you were setting programming back.
Thing is, it wasn't his title; it was stuck on by Niklaus Wirth, inventor of Pascal, when he converted the paper to a "letter to the editor" to sneak it into the current issue of the ACM rag.
> Since CS is (or at least should be) learning how to apply known algorithms to problems and the development of new algorithms to solve problems, CS should be very similar to math, and computer scientists ought to seem fairly similar to mathematicians.
For researchers in the 'theory' and 'algorithms' sub-fields of CS, I'd say they are mathematicians. They work with axioms and theorems and stuff just like other mathematicians do.
Other CS researchers are empiricists instead, e.g. most of those who do data mining or statistical natural language processing. And of course there's lots of other stuff in between. (E.g., network researchers may start off with an algorithmic concept but then run simulations to demonstrate their algorithm's effectiveness.)
There's a family of jokes to the effect that PhDs in computer science don't know anything about computers or programming or whatever. In actuality the individual's engagement with computers/programming will vary very much with the sub-field he's in. These days a theorist will need to be able to use LaTeX to write papers and read e-mail to see the conference announcements, but doesn't need to program at all. OTOH someone doing experiments with genetic algorithms will probably write their own code for their experiments, and may even turn into a hardware geek by building beowulf clusters to run the massively CPU-intensive experiments on.
> Most early CS people, as I understand it, were math people with an interest in computers.
I think you can still find a lot of older CS professors with degrees in applied mathematics. Computers were around long before CS departments even existed.
Slashdot Mirror
> Given Microsoft's record of continual failure with regards to security, I've always thought putting MS in charge of security (as with Palladium) was like asking the wolf to guard the sheep.
No, it's more like asking a sheep to guard the wolves.
> > Bush's tax cut for the top 5%
> People earning from $20K to $27K had their tax burden reduced by 10% with the tax cut.
The news said people making $30K will take home an extra $3 per week, $90K will take home a whopping $15/week.
IANAEconomist, but I doubt that any of the US economy is going to last.
Forget long-term sustainablity issues, and just notice the increasing flood of companies moving manufacturing offshore to cut their costs. Certainly a smart move if all else were equal, but as more and more companies do it there's going to be less and less money to go around for the American worker, and as the total worker income drops the total consumer spending will drop as well.
And consumer spending amounts to almost 2/3 of the US economy. Expect a viscious cycle until the US economy stabilizes on a new equilibrium, with few US citizens able to participate in our traditional profligate lifestyle.
> If we can demonstrate creationism as being true apart from God - ie, that the history given in the Bible was in fact correct, from Adam & Eve, age of the earth, flood, history of the nations, etc. Then [...]
Since much of your 'if' has already been demonstrated to be false, your 'then' is dead code that doesn't really matter.
> Ok...I have no problem with that. What he was trying to say is that events do not occur in a specific order. What the theory actually says is that the order of events cannot be reliably determined. There is a world of difference in those two things.
You have failed to grok the reason relativity is called 'relativity'.
Ancient intuitions about time, space, mass, human ancestry, etc., simply don't stand up to a check against reality.
> God is the first cause, the creator, the origin. Atheistic evolution has no answer for first cause, while there must be one.
You don't seem to require a cause for God. You're simply trying to hold the opposition to a standard that you don't hold yourself to.
> In 2000 years, I fully expect evolution to be recorded in history as a time when people beleived that absurd idea that all life evolved over billions of years. They'll laugh at us as much as we laugh at those who believed in a flat earth.
Blissfully unaware that you already live in a time when people get laughed at for denying evolution.
Can you think of any instance where progress in science led to a theory that was more like previously rejected folkloric explanations, rather than to something even stranger than we had previously imagined?
ps - I agree that there is no mathematical proof that an eternal god is impossible. (Unless of course you pick arbitrary axioms to make it provable. But arbitrary axioms don't tell us much about reality.)
> We do not necessarily know it all. It is possible that God is deliberately hiding knowledge from our eyes. He knows all, and who are we to question his infallible (at least IMHO) Word?
One boggles at the simultaneous claims that (a) God is deceiving us and (b) God's word is perfectly trustworthy.
> Hmmmm... no, when I write a paper on it, I'll get labelled a quack, no matter how much scientific evidence I put in to support my theory, no matter how well it explains observable phenomenon.
And your evidence for that assertion is...?
> What always impressed me about carriers- beyond the obvious, was that all that high tech is backed up by very simple means of getting the job done.
> I worked in the V-2 division...
Wow, that is old technology!
> And following that logic, the next one will be named the USS William Clinton, right?
No better better ship for 'creaming' the enemy, eh? Send the Big Willie over to launch a load at them?
> One can't help but think it should have been named the USS Bill Clinton instead....
Lacks "distinguishing physical characteristics".
> That 'fact' is based on the big bang theory. As such, it cannot be a 'fact'.
I don't like the big bang theory either, but I notice that astronomers have observations supporting their view and I don't have any observations supporting mine, and it seems better to concede the point with good grace rather than with ill grace... because I do have to concede it.
And so do you, though you don't seem to recognize it. Now when you have a model that actually explains the observations as well as the big bang does, you can write a paper on it and get a big expensive telescope named after you. Til then, good grace becomes you more than ill grace.
> No, I understand the theories, I simply disagree with them. Those who disagree with them are immediately scoffed at as being "non-scientific."
Well, yes, if you reject science you do leave a rather strong impression of being non-scientific.
> Interesting how mentioning the Bible is marked as "funny" these days
Alas, it is funny, but only because a nation of k00ks is in the habit of citing its Bronze Age mythology as the correct model of the universe.
With a straight face, no less.
> I'm sure some people on this board can comment on how they may have learned this lesson.
I, for one, read about it on Slashdot.
> I think the february deal right before the case makes it MORE suspect. And so do the stock options. It's not common to buy these kinds of rights with stock option deals... that's a bet on SCO's future, made right before the coming case went PUBLIC. We would have to assume at least SCO knew at the time the case was imminent. It looks to me like Sun did too.
IIRC that's about the same time a bunch of SCOX board members bought up dirt-cheap options on piles of near worthless stock. And you can bet that this kind of high-profile lawsuit doesn't come into being overnight.
I won't be surprised if some insider trading charges are the most visible outcome of this whole affair.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
There was just now a segment on ABC World News about The [Grateful] Dead's new model for making money off music. They record their shows every night, take orders from fans at the show, have their audio man master it, ship it off for duplication on CDs, and have it in the mail to the fan within about three days.
Instead of the $1/album typically made by signed bands they make $8-$10 on the three-CD set that sells for $22. They've turned a quarter of a million dollars on the CDs from their performances at Red Rocks over the past couple of weeks.
Not mentioned at the link, but Peter Jennings added that the music companies don't like being cut out of the loop like that.
> Here is why creationism would affirm God's existence:
> 1. It would show that the history in the Bible was accurate and true
As a good scientist you know that when observations falsify the consequences of a claim then that claim is false. And since we know that some of the history in the Bible is inaccurate and false, your claim must be rejected.
> I have a full education and background in the cosmic, biochemical, and biological "evolution" story line.
Please tell us about your education and background.
Not that I care; it's just that Creationist Credential Inflation (CCI) is rampant among, well, creationists, and a vague statement like "I have a full education" rings the alarm bells. So what exactly is your degree or degrees, what were the granting institutions, what fields were they in (as stated on the diplomas)?
> However it comes down to a key point - it is mathematically impossible for life to arise spontaneously by stochastic processes.
Please show your math.
> The Bible has it right from the first verse ("n the beginning God created the heaven and the earth") to the last (" The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen").
What is the basis for this claim? (Especially when some of the intervening material is demonstrably false, e.g. the story of the global flood.)
> If you choose to believe in evolution, that's fine, just be honest enough to admit that it is more of a leap of faith than believing in 6 day creation.
No, because we have evidence refuting the six day creation and we don't have evidence refuting evolution.
And even if we didn't have evidence refuting the six day creation the two claims still wouldn't balance in the scale, because evolution doesn't claim the existence of anything other than the ordinary workings of matter and energy in well-observed processes of chemistry, genetics, and the behavior of individuals and populations. Special creation OTOH requires the existence of an omni*ent being with an individual personality, for whom not the slightest evidence exists, along with the additional claims that he, she, or it decided to actually do what creationists claim he/she/it did, and then decided to falsify the evidence afterward to make it look like he/she/it didn't do it.
There is no symmetry at all between science and religion.
> And if He did create everything, then you would expect everything to be related in some kind of an organized hierarchy.
Why would you expect that?
> I've always thought the title of the GOTO paper was a master stroke. Anyone else would have called it "Why GOTO statements are bad" or "Structural problems caused by GOTO", and your reaction would be "That's his opinion" or "Gee, everyone knows that". He made it sound like it came from absolute authority, and if you disagreed, you were setting programming back.
Thing is, it wasn't his title; it was stuck on by Niklaus Wirth, inventor of Pascal, when he converted the paper to a "letter to the editor" to sneak it into the current issue of the ACM rag.
> Would that make Japan Darl McBride's next stop on his 2003 FUD World Tour?
Yeah, I hear he's doing a trio with Bill Gates and an American ambassador.
Got to be an airplane joke in there somewhere, too.
> Since CS is (or at least should be) learning how to apply known algorithms to problems and the development of new algorithms to solve problems, CS should be very similar to math, and computer scientists ought to seem fairly similar to mathematicians.
For researchers in the 'theory' and 'algorithms' sub-fields of CS, I'd say they are mathematicians. They work with axioms and theorems and stuff just like other mathematicians do.
Other CS researchers are empiricists instead, e.g. most of those who do data mining or statistical natural language processing. And of course there's lots of other stuff in between. (E.g., network researchers may start off with an algorithmic concept but then run simulations to demonstrate their algorithm's effectiveness.)
There's a family of jokes to the effect that PhDs in computer science don't know anything about computers or programming or whatever. In actuality the individual's engagement with computers/programming will vary very much with the sub-field he's in. These days a theorist will need to be able to use LaTeX to write papers and read e-mail to see the conference announcements, but doesn't need to program at all. OTOH someone doing experiments with genetic algorithms will probably write their own code for their experiments, and may even turn into a hardware geek by building beowulf clusters to run the massively CPU-intensive experiments on.
> Most early CS people, as I understand it, were math people with an interest in computers.
I think you can still find a lot of older CS professors with degrees in applied mathematics. Computers were around long before CS departments even existed.