That is not a prediction. That is an observation made after the fact.
You are joking, right? Science is full of such, including the bending of light in gravitational fields, the existance of the Tau Meson, the positron and so forth. These are all considered to be important support for the theories that made these predictions.
An observation IS an experiment. If the result of the observation is predicted, i.e. that there should be an Ur-ant, or that light bends in a gravitational field, and in fact it is observed according to the prediction, then there is in fact a succesful test of the theory.
The idea that we, and other organisms evolved from lifelessness into our present state cannot make testable predictions.
Utter nonsense. Testable predictions based on the theory of evolution are made routinely. Succesful predictions go back to the very origin of the theory by Darwin.
A prediction can be tested with an empirical experiment that can either support or refute the prediction.
A prediction can also be satisfied by an observation. The famous curvature of light observation predicted by Einstein is exactly such an example.
If you don't like that, there are still experimental tests of evolution aplenty. It isn't hard to study evolution, all you need is to study a system of life forms that has a short generational period.
Or perhaps I should say evolution has no predictive power at all.
If you say that you are utterly wrong. Darwin himself used his evolutionary theory to succesfully predict that man evolved in Africa. A quick search of Google will turn up many other examples where theories of evolution have been used to make succesful predictions.
People in our time lose sight of how radical a change Darwinism brought to the philisophical outlook of man. It was one of the great sea changes in modern thought.
Baloney. Evolution has predicted huge numbers of things. Here are some examples:
1. Darwin predicted, based on homologies with African apes, that human ancestors arose in Africa. That prediction has been supported by fossil evidence and genetic evidence [Ingman et al. 2000].
2. Theory predicted that organisms in heterogeneous and rapidly changing environments should have higher mutation rates. This has been found in the case of bacteria infecting the lungs of chronic cystic fibrosis patients [Oliver et al. 2000].
3. Predator-prey dynamics are altered in predictable ways by evolution of the prey [Yoshida et al. 2003].
4. Mayr predicted in 1954 that speciation should be accompanied with faster genetic evolution. A phylogenetic analysis has supported this prediction [Webster et al. 2003].
5. Several authors predicted characteristics of the ancestor of craniates. Based on a detailed study, the fossil Haikouella "fit these predictions closely" [Mallatt and Chen 2003].
Diseases jump between us and birds too. Not a good argument.
This baloney about evolution not being proven has to stop. The fact is that scientific theories are never proven. The concept of a proof is mathematical, not scientific.
Science is a process where theories are continually tested/refined to improve their predictive capacity. There is no 'proof' involved, ever.
That is just not true in any way, shape or form. Particle/Wave duality is a conceptual tool used to help understand the underlying mathematical model in easily visualized terms. There is no contradiction at all, and there is even a mathematical relationship that can be used to calculate the wavelength of any particle (the de Broglie wavelength).
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/deBrogli eW avelength.html
There is in fact NO conflict here.
Conflicts in theory are do to two different models making different predictions. They are settled when one model gives more accurate predictions.
Creationism fails utterly as a theory because it has no predictive power at all.
Eh, inventor here. The fellow that makes his employers rich.
If an independent claim is not allowable, all claims depending on it are rejected as well; however, it is best to additionally reject each dependent claims on some other grounds tied specifically to the matter of said dependent claims.
The list of claims in the original application is basically a wish list, and when the examiner rejects you in the first go-around you just narrow the claims to get around his objections. If your first application is approved you didn't ask for enough.
What is the old saying? A patent is the residual of the fraud by the inventor and his attorney that went undetected by the examiner.?
What happens afterwards is that the dependent claims provide you with backup in case the broader independent claim(s) are knocked out in court.
Every one of the claims must be implemented for a system to be covered by the patent.
Well, no. Claims may be independent, or they may be dependent. Implementation of a single independent claim is enough. Dependent claims include other claims by reference, and are more narrow in scope. The purpose of dependent claims is to give (more narrow) coverage in the broader independent claim is found to be unsustainable by the examiner or in court.
If a competitor constructs a system that implements all but one of the claims, it is not an infringement.
In this patent implementation of any of 1, 9, 19 OR 22 would be enough to trigger infringement.
Additonal claims do NOT narrow a patent's coverage. What does narrow coverage is the inclusion of various requirements in the claims themselves.
The list of claims and supporting information defines the coverage of the patent precisely.
Get the warranty. You will find that the price of the warranty varies a lot from manufacturer to manufacturer and should be factored into the price part of the buying process.
Everything else you can get on an as-needed basis after you have the machine and use it for a while. No need to buy a bunch of stuff that you might find out that you don't need later.
The poster of this article made a false assumption - the increase in US jobs by 22 million is due to offshoring.
No such thing
It is due to normal job creation which in the US averages about 3 million per year. If it weren't for offshoring, it would be 24 million new US jobs.
The main thing to take away fropm this is that while offshoring has hurt some specialties fairly hard, overall it isn't a huge detriment to the US employment picture.
And before you bitch at me, no I don't think that I own my employees.
If you are trying to influence what an employee does outside the workplace, you are out of line. An employee owes you ethical behavior and a honest day's work. Otherwise what he does in none of your business.
Bungie was the Great Hero of Mac gaming with titles like Myth and Marathon. Fabulous games that didn't require a supercomputer to get interesting graphics and great game play. Scenario editors that spawned communities.
Steve Jobs was using Halo to demonstrate 400 MHz G4 Power Macs. Halo was being voted the Game of the Year before release. We were going to have it for Christmas 1998.
What did we get? Shafted. Bungie Sold Out to the Great Satan. Sure, when the sellout occurred there were still promises that Bungie would release for the Mac at the same time as the XBox. Never Happened. When Halo finally became available what did we get? Bug ridden trash with insane hardware demands and a non-functional scenario editor. Myth sold off, and the result - a well documented failure.
If Mac Halo is being pirated in great numbers as a result, I don't have a lot of sympathy for Bungie/Microsoft. They broke faith with their users.
The problem with Cable + VOIP is QoS. When your cable goes out, no phone. This includes power outages - and even if YOU have UPS or whatever, the likelihood is that your cable headend doesn't have anything but a few minutes of battery. POTS is generally provisioned to run indefinitely independent of power outages etc.
Other things to watch out for are 911 service, Caller ID.
Operating system is generally not an issue - VOIP means installation of a Cisco or some other such box that sits on your LAN.
Personally I chose AT&T One Rate USA instead. I didn't want to deal with the VOIP teething pains.
In many cases there are other issues with the speaker as well that make it worthwhile to have the speaker looked at by somebody with experience at this sort of thing.
I have dealt with these guys with a great deal of success.
http://layneaudio.hypermart.net/repair.htm
Not cheap, but if you have good speakers they are usually worth repairing. The owner is a real geek about this sort of stuff too, so you are getting somebody who has some real knowledge.
The medical professions in this country are heading for a fall. The costs of health care are so high and growing so fast that the only long term solution is going to be a revolution in the way care is delivered. Most people feel the way this is going to happen is socialized medicine.
Biological based research is a different issue altogether - that is an area that has tremendous upside because of the pace of technical change in the field. Unfortunately to do well in that area you are going to need a lot more education than a 4 year degree.
Last I heard India is still a developing country in many aspects.
Right.
I think that a lot of people grossly underestimate the difficulty of making the transition from a third world country to a US-Western European level economy. Both India and China have large issues with developing the cultural and governmental isntitutions necessary to support this. China is still wrestling with problems in building infrastructure, a looming debt crises, and corruption. China's problems are so large that they are LOSING manufacturing jobs faster than any country (even on a percentage basis).
India has similar issues - foreign investment is still small, and liberalization of the regulations that have strangled their economy in the past have only really been lifted in the IT field.
I used to work with a fellow that wore a hearing aid. When we were in long, tedious business meetings he would sometimes snea his hand into his pocket and turn the thing off.
Slashdot Mirror
That is not a prediction. That is an observation made after the fact.
You are joking, right? Science is full of such, including the bending of light in gravitational fields, the existance of the Tau Meson, the positron and so forth. These are all considered to be important support for the theories that made these predictions.
An observation IS an experiment. If the result of the observation is predicted, i.e. that there should be an Ur-ant, or that light bends in a gravitational field, and in fact it is observed according to the prediction, then there is in fact a succesful test of the theory.
The idea that we, and other organisms evolved from lifelessness into our present state cannot make testable predictions.
Utter nonsense. Testable predictions based on the theory of evolution are made routinely. Succesful predictions go back to the very origin of the theory by Darwin.
A prediction can be tested with an empirical experiment that can either support or refute the prediction.
p l? group=aad
A prediction can also be satisfied by an observation. The famous curvature of light observation predicted by Einstein is exactly such an example.
If you don't like that, there are still experimental tests of evolution aplenty. It isn't hard to study evolution, all you need is to study a system of life forms that has a short generational period.
One Example:
http://myxo.css.msu.edu/cgi-bin/lenski/prefman.
Or perhaps I should say evolution has no predictive power at all.
If you say that you are utterly wrong. Darwin himself used his evolutionary theory to succesfully predict that man evolved in Africa. A quick search of Google will turn up many other examples where theories of evolution have been used to make succesful predictions.
People in our time lose sight of how radical a change Darwinism brought to the philisophical outlook of man. It was one of the great sea changes in modern thought.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinism
The theory of evolution doesn't predict anything.
Baloney. Evolution has predicted huge numbers of things. Here are some examples:
1. Darwin predicted, based on homologies with African apes, that human ancestors arose in Africa. That prediction has been supported by fossil evidence and genetic evidence [Ingman et al. 2000].
2. Theory predicted that organisms in heterogeneous and rapidly changing environments should have higher mutation rates. This has been found in the case of bacteria infecting the lungs of chronic cystic fibrosis patients [Oliver et al. 2000].
3. Predator-prey dynamics are altered in predictable ways by evolution of the prey [Yoshida et al. 2003].
4. Mayr predicted in 1954 that speciation should be accompanied with faster genetic evolution. A phylogenetic analysis has supported this prediction [Webster et al. 2003].
5. Several authors predicted characteristics of the ancestor of craniates. Based on a detailed study, the fossil Haikouella "fit these predictions closely" [Mallatt and Chen 2003].
diseases can make the leap between them and us
Diseases jump between us and birds too. Not a good argument.
This baloney about evolution not being proven has to stop. The fact is that scientific theories are never proven. The concept of a proof is mathematical, not scientific.
Science is a process where theories are continually tested/refined to improve their predictive capacity. There is no 'proof' involved, ever.
Yet they are fundamentally contradictory.
i eW avelength.html
That is just not true in any way, shape or form. Particle/Wave duality is a conceptual tool used to help understand the underlying mathematical model in easily visualized terms. There is no contradiction at all, and there is even a mathematical relationship that can be used to calculate the wavelength of any particle (the de Broglie wavelength).
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/deBrogl
There is in fact NO conflict here.
Conflicts in theory are do to two different models making different predictions. They are settled when one model gives more accurate predictions.
Creationism fails utterly as a theory because it has no predictive power at all.
former examiner here...
Eh, inventor here. The fellow that makes his employers rich.
If an independent claim is not allowable, all claims depending on it are rejected as well; however, it is best to additionally reject each dependent claims on some other grounds tied specifically to the matter of said dependent claims.
The list of claims in the original application is basically a wish list, and when the examiner rejects you in the first go-around you just narrow the claims to get around his objections. If your first application is approved you didn't ask for enough.
What is the old saying? A patent is the residual of the fraud by the inventor and his attorney that went undetected by the examiner.?
What happens afterwards is that the dependent claims provide you with backup in case the broader independent claim(s) are knocked out in court.
The idea was to run stuff like tractors on hydrogen created from ethanol... :-)
The problem is that it takes 1.4 gallons of ethanol to run the tractors, produce the fertilizer, and refine the corn to get 1 gallon of ethanol.
Every one of the claims must be implemented for a system to be covered by the patent.
Well, no. Claims may be independent, or they may be dependent. Implementation of a single independent claim is enough. Dependent claims include other claims by reference, and are more narrow in scope. The purpose of dependent claims is to give (more narrow) coverage in the broader independent claim is found to be unsustainable by the examiner or in court.
If a competitor constructs a system that implements all but one of the claims, it is not an infringement.
In this patent implementation of any of 1, 9, 19 OR 22 would be enough to trigger infringement.
Additonal claims do NOT narrow a patent's coverage. What does narrow coverage is the inclusion of various requirements in the claims themselves.
The list of claims and supporting information defines the coverage of the patent precisely.
Ever hear of the 'doctrine of equivalents'???
Get the warranty. You will find that the price of the warranty varies a lot from manufacturer to manufacturer and should be factored into the price part of the buying process.
Everything else you can get on an as-needed basis after you have the machine and use it for a while. No need to buy a bunch of stuff that you might find out that you don't need later.
The poster of this article made a false assumption - the increase in US jobs by 22 million is due to offshoring.
No such thing
It is due to normal job creation which in the US averages about 3 million per year. If it weren't for offshoring, it would be 24 million new US jobs.
The main thing to take away fropm this is that while offshoring has hurt some specialties fairly hard, overall it isn't a huge detriment to the US employment picture.
And before you bitch at me, no I don't think that I own my employees.
If you are trying to influence what an employee does outside the workplace, you are out of line. An employee owes you ethical behavior and a honest day's work. Otherwise what he does in none of your business.
Bungie was the Great Hero of Mac gaming with titles like Myth and Marathon. Fabulous games that didn't require a supercomputer to get interesting graphics and great game play. Scenario editors that spawned communities.
Steve Jobs was using Halo to demonstrate 400 MHz G4 Power Macs. Halo was being voted the Game of the Year before release. We were going to have it for Christmas 1998.
What did we get? Shafted. Bungie Sold Out to the Great Satan. Sure, when the sellout occurred there were still promises that Bungie would release for the Mac at the same time as the XBox. Never Happened. When Halo finally became available what did we get? Bug ridden trash with insane hardware demands and a non-functional scenario editor. Myth sold off, and the result - a well documented failure.
If Mac Halo is being pirated in great numbers as a result, I don't have a lot of sympathy for Bungie/Microsoft. They broke faith with their users.
If you are getting that kind of electrical cost, you can buy a new modem for just the power savings. My Toshiba cost me $50 and draws 6W.
The problem with Cable + VOIP is QoS. When your cable goes out, no phone. This includes power outages - and even if YOU have UPS or whatever, the likelihood is that your cable headend doesn't have anything but a few minutes of battery. POTS is generally provisioned to run indefinitely independent of power outages etc.
Other things to watch out for are 911 service, Caller ID.
Operating system is generally not an issue - VOIP means installation of a Cisco or some other such box that sits on your LAN.
Personally I chose AT&T One Rate USA instead. I didn't want to deal with the VOIP teething pains.
The daily strain my hands felt hasn't reappeared at all since the day I switched.
My RSI problems were solved by switching to the Eclipse IDE. A lot of the time choice of editor makes a big difference.
I have a couple $100+ PS/2 keyboards
I dug mine out of several hundreds in a dumpster. Cost to me 0.0.
Now I kick myself for not taking them all.
Are there really people out there who are going to buy a brand new computer but still have a vital need for an old keyboard?
h tm l
Goddammit YES. The IBM Model M is the best keyboard ever made. I have 6 of them. Typing on one is an epiphany. The Stuff Of Legend.
And they have a PS/2 connection.
http://www.tavi.co.uk/ps2pages/ohland/keyboard.
In many cases there are other issues with the speaker as well that make it worthwhile to have the speaker looked at by somebody with experience at this sort of thing.
I have dealt with these guys with a great deal of success.
http://layneaudio.hypermart.net/repair.htm
Not cheap, but if you have good speakers they are usually worth repairing. The owner is a real geek about this sort of stuff too, so you are getting somebody who has some real knowledge.
Doctors are still making great salaries
The medical professions in this country are heading for a fall. The costs of health care are so high and growing so fast that the only long term solution is going to be a revolution in the way care is delivered. Most people feel the way this is going to happen is socialized medicine.
Biological based research is a different issue altogether - that is an area that has tremendous upside because of the pace of technical change in the field. Unfortunately to do well in that area you are going to need a lot more education than a 4 year degree.
Last I heard India is still a developing country in many aspects.
Right.
I think that a lot of people grossly underestimate the difficulty of making the transition from a third world country to a US-Western European level economy. Both India and China have large issues with developing the cultural and governmental isntitutions necessary to support this. China is still wrestling with problems in building infrastructure, a looming debt crises, and corruption. China's problems are so large that they are LOSING manufacturing jobs faster than any country (even on a percentage basis).
India has similar issues - foreign investment is still small, and liberalization of the regulations that have strangled their economy in the past have only really been lifted in the IT field.
Academics pretty much have to do it as a matter of course; after your PhD,
I haven't heard of academics moving to India unless they are studying some aspect of Indian culture, language, etc.
I used to work with a fellow that wore a hearing aid. When we were in long, tedious business meetings he would sometimes snea his hand into his pocket and turn the thing off.
There are times when I wish I could do that.
Well, I have tried IDEA. I like it a lot, but the $500 that I'd have to shell out plus periodic upgrades fees isn't worth it to me.