> Reading his discussion of language, specifically semiotics, is so profound that you must admit, at the very least, human kind are radically different that animals simply because we have the capacity for language as distinguished from communication. You'd have to read him for that last statement to make any sesne.
No, I apply my claim even to language. It is quite clear that chimps share with us the rudimentary intellectual capabilites that language is built on. Again, we differ only in degree (though a wonderful degree it is!).
> You've never been to one but you feel you can take the liberty to concoct a set of lies suggesting some vast scheme.
You apparently dislexed over that little "from what I've read" part. No, I haven't been to one, but I have corresponded with others who have been to many.
> In the light of the fact that governments tend to need to interact with other bodies, I would say they need to use what most other people are using. Which is MS Office.
Thank you for pointing out the need for an ISO standard for document representations.
A standard unencumbered by some robber baron's IP, I should add.
Nothing would unravel Microsoft's hegemony in the WP field as quick as the existence of such a standard and governments that insisted on using it.
> Choosing software JUST because it's open sourced is just as bad as choosing software just because it's closed.
Perhaps "just because it's open sourced" is merely shorthand for "just because of several things that immediately follow from being open sourced", namely -
auditability (for spyware), and
maintainability (for when you need something the vendor doesn't care to offer, or when the vendor isn't quick enough to close a known exploit), and
not having to go down with the ship if the vendor enrons.
Those sound like excellent reasons for choosing a product in the current business environment.
I agree with the commonsense point that no one can predict the future of science. I strongly disagree with the contention that, because we can[']t guarantee the success of intelligent design theory, it can be dismissed, or should not be pursued. If science operated in such a manner, no theory would ever be investigated, because no theory is guaranteed success forever.
This is nothing more than spin doctoring. What Behe hopes his audience doesn't know is that real science starts with the evidence and builds a theory to explain it; he, OTOH, has started with his 'theory' and is now fishing around for evidence to support it. (He has offered a few catches, but they have all been refuted.)
I agree that any scientific result is subject to being discarded if new evidence conflicts with it. But that's not Behe's position at all: Behe doesn't have any scientific result to begin with, because scientific results are the results of evidence.
Behe just wants a blank check, "Accept my theory now, and I'll muster some evidence for it someday." Alas for him, no scientific theory has ever come about in the absence of evidence. He might just as well be arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
> Last time I checked a dictionary, irreduceably means that it cannot be broken down into smaller parts, i.e. that if it is irreduceably complex now, it has always been irreduceably complex since the beginning of time.
You have fallen for Behe's trick. He gives a precise meaning to "irreducible complexity", but he gives it a name that will lead the casual reader to think it means something other than what his definition says. (I suspect that this is deliberate deceit on his part, though of course I can't prove it.)
His actual definition is "if you remove a part it quits working properly". It does not follow from that definition that something that is IC has been IC since the beginning of time. Next time you're in a building with stone archways you might want to ask yourself whether they meet Behe's definition of IC, and then ask yourself how they were built.
The whole "intelligent design" form of creationism is just a collection of smoke and mirrors designed to mislead the unwary.
And it's targeted at the unwary rather than at critical thinkers, because it's part of Johnson's "wedge strategy" for sneaking creationism into the public education system in the USA. That requires a political win, not a scientific win. And that's fortunate for them, because they aren't doing any science -- they're just going through the motions in hopes of fooling the masses and the courts.
People who want to know what's going on with Behe, Johnson, irreducible complexity, intelligent design, and the wedge, and all that stuff, should visit the talk.origins archive and browse the FAQs.
> As always, and as you stated, evolution is a theory. There is easily as much evidence, if not more, of the same type for the theory of creationism.
Creationists don't even have a theory, let alone any evidence to support it. If you doubt me, ease on over to talk.origins and make a post summarizing your 'theory' and the evidence supporting it. And post a reply here telling us when you're going to do it, so we can lurk on over and watch you get run through the shredder.
> It seems kind of narrow minded to categorically throw out the theory of creationism all together, without looking at the evidence for both.
Well, it would be narrow minded if creationists actually offered any evidence for their claims. Unfortunately they choose to spend their time slinging mud at the theory of evolution (or at its proponents) and/or trying to win in the political arena rather than the scientific arena. Whenever creationists are pressured into making concrete claims and supporting them with evidence, they infallibly reveal themselves to be clueless and/or dishonest.
Again, if you doubt me please ease over to talk.origins and show me wrong. And do post a reply here saying when you're going to start, so we won't miss the grand demonstration.
> Gathering more evidence bolsters a theory in an inductive reasoning sense, but in the framework above, you can only prove for sure that theories are false.
True enough, but that's how all science works. You gather up all the hypotheses that claim to explain the available evidence, apply Occam's Razor, and go with the result until new evidence demands otherwise.
And while the result isn't 'true' in the same sense as a mathematical theorem or a boolean variable, on the big scale it seems to work very well in practice. Yes, we twiddle the details all the time, but big theories like the heliocentric solar system, gravity, atomic theory, evolution, etc. seem to stand the test of time. The only one I can think of that has undergone substantial revision after general acceptance is the replacement of Newtonian physics with Einsteinian relativity, and even that was nothing more than extending a specific case to a more general framework.
When creationists argue that "evolution is just a theory" they reveal first that they don't understand basic science, and second that they don't have anything constructive to offer toward an explanation of the universe.
> This particular problem has frequently been pointed out by creationists, but evolutionists have dismissed it as a non-issue. Until now. Now when they have found an answer to the problem, it suddenly makes sense to address the issue.
You seem to be unaware that scientists have been growing insects with extra body segments, legs sprouting from their heads, etc., for decades now. All the quoted text means is that they have found the built-in mechanism for managing this, not that they have suddenly discovered that it is possible.
Thank you for showing the lurkers how bad creationists are about twisting everything around in hopes of discrediting science, and how pathetic that spin control is when you dissect it.
> I also believe in creation to the extent that some higher being at one point installed the last "spark plug", if you will, in order to give humans that certain something extra that separates us from mere beasts.
Your delusions arise from the false assumption that we are separate from 'mere' beasts. The more we learn about the other apes, the more we realize that all the "humans only" stuff is merely a difference in degree of ability, not some great unbridgeable gap.
> Interesting theory. It's not actually backed by anything in history, as far as I've ever seen, but interesting...
Read up on the story of how the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire. (The story is interesting in its own right, and also offers many analogies with the current situation in the USA beyond the spectre of praetorianism.)
> I find it odd to assert that a conscript army would be more reliable, or more friendly to democratic institutions, than a volunteer one.
See above.
> The move toward volunteer armies has, in general, made armies more professional and less easily swayed to seize power for themselves.
> On the other hand the survival of our species would only be perpetuated by a permanent move into space.
I agree. However... the administration (regardless of which party is in power) is more interested in keeping the stock market high so they can get re-elected.
American politicians govern to optimize the next election's returns; American businesses manage to optimize the next quarterly report. There ain't no long-term perspective, let alone a long-term plan.
> Well, if you shout "every military personel will get a raise" in front of 10.000 military personel you're bound to attract some press.
I fear we're slipping down the same road the Roman emperors led their country down a couple of millenia ago.
Much as I hate to say it, our long-term freedom depends on ditching the volunteer army and going to an all-draft army, even in peacetime. Otherwise the army becomes an object for political manipulation, and later a political force in its own right, and finally a kingmaker institution. We're dangerously deep in the first stage already.
> Scraping in the budget to feed the rich and cut back in science/welfare/health/etc is not going to improve the US's image, and will hardly create any sympathy or compassion.
Yes, but if he doesn't cut back his tax cut will be seen for the foolishness that it was, and his party desparately needs the votes you can buy with tax cuts.
Besides, the cuts you named aren't going to hurt the stock portfolios of the people who are calling the shots these days.
I know that suggesting a different programming language usually gets the same kind of reception that suggesting swapping underwear would, but why not consider writing it in Ada 95?
The learning slope will be very steep at first, but once you get the hang of it it will pay off in spades. Ada is a software engineering language, and it makes you do a good bit more thinking before you start spilling code, but over the long haul you end up spending most of your time in the think-program cycle rather than in the more popular but IMO less satisfying program-debug cycle.
Supports both high-level and low-level programming. (OO, generics, etc. all the way down to in-line machine code. But all are optional; you can write simple code when that's what the problem calls for.)
Built-in support for multitasking and distributed computing, if you want it. (And distributed might be the way to go for a big-game server.)
If you need a GUI there are thick bindings for GTK+, portable between UNIX and Windows. These bindings are OO, so you can create custom widgets by inheritance.
Everything mentioned above is available for free.
Cons:
The aforementioned learning curve.
Probably fewer volunteers on the project once it gets big.
> Why isn't there a big blind spot on the opposite side of the calactic center? Can the MASS see through the center, or are they just filling in what they assume is there?
The image is a screenshot, which accidentally had some astronomer dude's wallpaper showing through the gap.
Too bad it wasn't the wallpaper he uses when journalists aren't around.
> Sorry to say it, but that picture of Saturn is just too perfect, it looks like a cheap computer rendition. Can we go back to the less sophisticated, grainy pictures? They were more exciting and seemed more "real".
Load it in the gimp and try filters-->noise-->hurl.
Advanced users may want to try writing a make-planet-photo-grainy.scm script instead.
> Unfortunately this doesn't hurt the people responsible, just the people being paid very little to make thephone calls
Probably it does: cheap labor may be their biggest expense. If you've noticed, they all switched over to mass-dialing systems about a year ago, so now when you pick up the phone you immediately know it's a telemarketer because there is a 4-second pause while their war-dialer says "hey, a sucker anwsered" and tries to find a free human operator to connect you to.
I've started doing essentially what Restil suggests -- as soon as the operator makes the required introduction, I say "hang on a second" and put the phone down on my desk as quietly as I can.
If they waste my time, I don't feel the least bit guilty about wasting theirs. Hopefully they'll decide that I'm too expensive for them to waste their time on.
Slashdot Mirror
> Reading his discussion of language, specifically semiotics, is so profound that you must admit, at the very least, human kind are radically different that animals simply because we have the capacity for language as distinguished from communication. You'd have to read him for that last statement to make any sesne.
No, I apply my claim even to language. It is quite clear that chimps share with us the rudimentary intellectual capabilites that language is built on. Again, we differ only in degree (though a wonderful degree it is!).
> You've never been to one but you feel you can take the liberty to concoct a set of lies suggesting some vast scheme.
You apparently dislexed over that little "from what I've read" part. No, I haven't been to one, but I have corresponded with others who have been to many.
> In the light of the fact that governments tend to need to interact with other bodies, I would say they need to use what most other people are using. Which is MS Office.
Thank you for pointing out the need for an ISO standard for document representations.
A standard unencumbered by some robber baron's IP, I should add.
Nothing would unravel Microsoft's hegemony in the WP field as quick as the existence of such a standard and governments that insisted on using it.
> Choosing software JUST because it's open sourced is just as bad as choosing software just because it's closed.
Perhaps "just because it's open sourced" is merely shorthand for "just because of several things that immediately follow from being open sourced", namely -
- auditability (for spyware), and
- maintainability (for when you need something the vendor doesn't care to offer, or when the vendor isn't quick enough to close a known exploit), and
- not having to go down with the ship if the vendor enrons.
Those sound like excellent reasons for choosing a product in the current business environment.
This is nothing more than spin doctoring. What Behe hopes his audience doesn't know is that real science starts with the evidence and builds a theory to explain it; he, OTOH, has started with his 'theory' and is now fishing around for evidence to support it. (He has offered a few catches, but they have all been refuted.)Thou quotest Behe thusly:
I agree that any scientific result is subject to being discarded if new evidence conflicts with it. But that's not Behe's position at all: Behe doesn't have any scientific result to begin with, because scientific results are the results of evidence.
Behe just wants a blank check, "Accept my theory now, and I'll muster some evidence for it someday." Alas for him, no scientific theory has ever come about in the absence of evidence. He might just as well be arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
> Last time I checked a dictionary, irreduceably means that it cannot be broken down into smaller parts, i.e. that if it is irreduceably complex now, it has always been irreduceably complex since the beginning of time.
You have fallen for Behe's trick. He gives a precise meaning to "irreducible complexity", but he gives it a name that will lead the casual reader to think it means something other than what his definition says. (I suspect that this is deliberate deceit on his part, though of course I can't prove it.)
His actual definition is "if you remove a part it quits working properly". It does not follow from that definition that something that is IC has been IC since the beginning of time. Next time you're in a building with stone archways you might want to ask yourself whether they meet Behe's definition of IC, and then ask yourself how they were built.
The whole "intelligent design" form of creationism is just a collection of smoke and mirrors designed to mislead the unwary.
And it's targeted at the unwary rather than at critical thinkers, because it's part of Johnson's "wedge strategy" for sneaking creationism into the public education system in the USA. That requires a political win, not a scientific win. And that's fortunate for them, because they aren't doing any science -- they're just going through the motions in hopes of fooling the masses and the courts.
People who want to know what's going on with Behe, Johnson, irreducible complexity, intelligent design, and the wedge, and all that stuff, should visit the talk.origins archive and browse the FAQs.
> As always, and as you stated, evolution is a theory. There is easily as much evidence, if not more, of the same type for the theory of creationism.
Creationists don't even have a theory, let alone any evidence to support it. If you doubt me, ease on over to talk.origins and make a post summarizing your 'theory' and the evidence supporting it. And post a reply here telling us when you're going to do it, so we can lurk on over and watch you get run through the shredder.
> It seems kind of narrow minded to categorically throw out the theory of creationism all together, without looking at the evidence for both.
Well, it would be narrow minded if creationists actually offered any evidence for their claims. Unfortunately they choose to spend their time slinging mud at the theory of evolution (or at its proponents) and/or trying to win in the political arena rather than the scientific arena. Whenever creationists are pressured into making concrete claims and supporting them with evidence, they infallibly reveal themselves to be clueless and/or dishonest.
Again, if you doubt me please ease over to talk.origins and show me wrong. And do post a reply here saying when you're going to start, so we won't miss the grand demonstration.
> Gathering more evidence bolsters a theory in an inductive reasoning sense, but in the framework above, you can only prove for sure that theories are false.
True enough, but that's how all science works. You gather up all the hypotheses that claim to explain the available evidence, apply Occam's Razor, and go with the result until new evidence demands otherwise.
And while the result isn't 'true' in the same sense as a mathematical theorem or a boolean variable, on the big scale it seems to work very well in practice. Yes, we twiddle the details all the time, but big theories like the heliocentric solar system, gravity, atomic theory, evolution, etc. seem to stand the test of time. The only one I can think of that has undergone substantial revision after general acceptance is the replacement of Newtonian physics with Einsteinian relativity, and even that was nothing more than extending a specific case to a more general framework.
When creationists argue that "evolution is just a theory" they reveal first that they don't understand basic science, and second that they don't have anything constructive to offer toward an explanation of the universe.
> This particular problem has frequently been pointed out by creationists, but evolutionists have dismissed it as a non-issue. Until now. Now when they have found an answer to the problem, it suddenly makes sense to address the issue.
You seem to be unaware that scientists have been growing insects with extra body segments, legs sprouting from their heads, etc., for decades now. All the quoted text means is that they have found the built-in mechanism for managing this, not that they have suddenly discovered that it is possible.
Thank you for showing the lurkers how bad creationists are about twisting everything around in hopes of discrediting science, and how pathetic that spin control is when you dissect it.
> The creationists mostly lied the whole time.
I've never been to a creationist debate, but from what I've read about them their SOP involves -
- Pack the audience with True Believers (sometimes by bussing, though that probably wouldn't be necessary at a university).
- Use their clock time to throw out scores of false claims, each of which would take the scientists several minutes to refute.
The net result is the appearance of having won. And of course that's all their striving for, since the movement is political rather than scientific.> I also believe in creation to the extent that some higher being at one point installed the last "spark plug", if you will, in order to give humans that certain something extra that separates us from mere beasts.
Your delusions arise from the false assumption that we are separate from 'mere' beasts. The more we learn about the other apes, the more we realize that all the "humans only" stuff is merely a difference in degree of ability, not some great unbridgeable gap.
> The programmer might be enjoying himself, but to an external viewer he is only tapping at a keyboard.
Don't forget all the time we spend pulling on our joysticks!
> Interesting theory. It's not actually backed by anything in history, as far as I've ever seen, but interesting...
Read up on the story of how the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire. (The story is interesting in its own right, and also offers many analogies with the current situation in the USA beyond the spectre of praetorianism.)
> I find it odd to assert that a conscript army would be more reliable, or more friendly to democratic institutions, than a volunteer one.
See above.
> The move toward volunteer armies has, in general, made armies more professional and less easily swayed to seize power for themselves.
See above.
> On the other hand the survival of our species would only be perpetuated by a permanent move into space.
I agree. However... the administration (regardless of which party is in power) is more interested in keeping the stock market high so they can get re-elected.
American politicians govern to optimize the next election's returns; American businesses manage to optimize the next quarterly report. There ain't no long-term perspective, let alone a long-term plan.
> Well, if you shout "every military personel will get a raise" in front of 10.000 military personel you're bound to attract some press.
I fear we're slipping down the same road the Roman emperors led their country down a couple of millenia ago.
Much as I hate to say it, our long-term freedom depends on ditching the volunteer army and going to an all-draft army, even in peacetime. Otherwise the army becomes an object for political manipulation, and later a political force in its own right, and finally a kingmaker institution. We're dangerously deep in the first stage already.
> Scraping in the budget to feed the rich and cut back in science/welfare/health/etc is not going to improve the US's image, and will hardly create any sympathy or compassion.
Yes, but if he doesn't cut back his tax cut will be seen for the foolishness that it was, and his party desparately needs the votes you can buy with tax cuts.
Besides, the cuts you named aren't going to hurt the stock portfolios of the people who are calling the shots these days.
> I hope they point the hubble torwards it.
Don't do it! This it the latest goatse trick - probably a black hole or something.
I know that suggesting a different programming language usually gets the same kind of reception that suggesting swapping underwear would, but why not consider writing it in Ada 95?
The learning slope will be very steep at first, but once you get the hang of it it will pay off in spades. Ada is a software engineering language, and it makes you do a good bit more thinking before you start spilling code, but over the long haul you end up spending most of your time in the think-program cycle rather than in the more popular but IMO less satisfying program-debug cycle.
Pros:
- Ada is designed for large software projects.
- Bullet-proof against buffer overflows and such.
- Supported by GVD (the visual version of gdb).
- Very strong portability properties.
- Supports both high-level and low-level programming. (OO, generics, etc. all the way down to in-line machine code. But all are optional; you can write simple code when that's what the problem calls for.)
- Built-in support for multitasking and distributed computing, if you want it. (And distributed might be the way to go for a big-game server.)
- If you need a GUI there are thick bindings for GTK+, portable between UNIX and Windows. These bindings are OO, so you can create custom widgets by inheritance.
- Everything mentioned above is available for free.
Cons:> Why isn't there a big blind spot on the opposite side of the calactic center? Can the MASS see through the center, or are they just filling in what they assume is there?
The image is a screenshot, which accidentally had some astronomer dude's wallpaper showing through the gap.
Too bad it wasn't the wallpaper he uses when journalists aren't around.
> Sorry to say it, but that picture of Saturn is just too perfect, it looks like a cheap computer rendition. Can we go back to the less sophisticated, grainy pictures? They were more exciting and seemed more "real".
Load it in the gimp and try filters-->noise-->hurl.
Advanced users may want to try writing a make-planet-photo-grainy.scm script instead.
> Had the title been simply "Pictures From Near And Far", nobody would read it. But, the addition of "Space" makes it infinitely more attractive.
I suppose we'll start seeing links labeled [space.goatse.cx] now?
...beowulf cluster of beowulf cluster jokes.
> Let the on-topic (for once) Beowulf comments fly...
Sorry d00d, but it ain't no fun when it's legal.
> I think I'm going to filter the words diploma, enlarge, and celebrity.
Ah, so you get all that CELEBRITY TELLS HOW TO ENLARGE YOUR DIPLOMA spam too, eh?
Love your
> Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
> Unfortunately this doesn't hurt the people responsible, just the people being paid very little to make thephone calls
Probably it does: cheap labor may be their biggest expense. If you've noticed, they all switched over to mass-dialing systems about a year ago, so now when you pick up the phone you immediately know it's a telemarketer because there is a 4-second pause while their war-dialer says "hey, a sucker anwsered" and tries to find a free human operator to connect you to.
I've started doing essentially what Restil suggests -- as soon as the operator makes the required introduction, I say "hang on a second" and put the phone down on my desk as quietly as I can.
If they waste my time, I don't feel the least bit guilty about wasting theirs. Hopefully they'll decide that I'm too expensive for them to waste their time on.
> A golfer would never consider a cool catalogue with the latest golf toys spam. A hacker would welcome the latest diff of O'Reilly titles.
Not me. I know where to shop for the stuff I want. I don't need a mailbox full of people clamoring for my money.