I believe you are confused because you do not understand what the word "provable" means. I think you believe it means "possibly being true." That is not what "provable" means. "Provable" means "testable".
The US Army's Dugway Proving Grounds is a testing facility. The saying "the exception that proves the rule" does not mean, as many nonsensically believe, that an exception lends validity to a rule. It means that an exception tests a rule, i.e., it forces an examination of the rule to see if it is truly valid. (The use of the word "proof" in reference to the alcohol content of spirits also relates to its meaning as a synonym for "test".)
The statement "I can lift an elephant over my head" is provable. I can attempt to lift an elephant over my head. The statement "Life (or a living structure like the eyeball) is so irreducibly complex that it could only have been created by an intelligent designer" is not provable. It is not testable. Therefore it is not scientific and it has no place in a science curriculum.
Nope. I sure can't. Of course my inability to fathom how the universe came about doesn't lead me to believe that it therefore must have been fabricated by an eternal personality.
The universe doesn't take up space. The universe is space. There is no space outside of space. As the universe expanded it expanded space itself.
That having been said there are a number of theories that propose a "metaverse" in which our universe is one of many universes. The more you look at the idea the weirder it gets.
Don't laugh man. Have you heard the latest? There are people who say, presumably with a straight face, that the differences among languages are too great to have been caused by happenstance. They say the differences indicate there must have been a "wrathful dispersion" (a la the Tower of Babel).
And thus the "just a theory" defense is trotted out once more. When scientists use the word "theory" it's in a very different sense from the way non-scientists use it. Google "just a theory" and you'll come up with many explanations, including this one.
Has anyone else noticed that Newsweek breaks your Back button? If you click your Back button immediately upon entering the site you can get back to your previous site. Otherwise four(!) pages show up in your Back button's history. WTF? Do they do this to try to keep you nailed to their site or is it some kind of Ajax (or whatever) side-effect? Either way it's annoying.
On a related point, isn't it time browsers were fixed so that when clicking the Back button would bring you to a page that redirected you to the current page, the browser has enough sense to bypass the redirecting page?
Not in any state in the US, as far as I know, are they required to pay you. Unless there's a union contract, employment contract or some other kind of existing agreement you're an "at will" employee. That means they can fire you at any time, for any legal reason, with or without cause. And if you offer two weeks' notice or two years' notice, they can take you up on it immediately and show you the door.
I wish the hell they would just make the the damned thing more stable in the first place.
Microsoft acts like a kid who won't eat his vegetables, won't do his homework, won't clean up after himself and won't take out the garbage and yells, "Hey, hey Ma look! I can balance a beachball on my nose! Aren't you proud of what a clever boy I am?"
I'd like to take Billg by the hair and tell him, "No Windows Vista for you young man until you fix all the broken crap in XP! And stop making faces at cousin Linus."
How do you know it's ridiculous and resource wasting? It might very well be. The government has a real talent for creating ridiculous, resource wasting projects. But how do you know this particular project is one of them?
This guy "Doc" Searls comes across as a bit hysterical. His essay is filled with hyperbole, half-truths and misinterpretations.
First, as others have pointed out, this is a very America-centric story. He starts off with a dumb question:
"Are you ready to see the Net privatized from the bottom to the top?"
In the US the Net is largely in private hands already: SBC, Level Three, inter alia.
Here's a bigger problem I have with the essay:
Searls misinterprets or simply ignores one aspect of SBC CEO Edward Whitacre's argument. Whitacre is a douchebag but he does have one legitimate beef. Here in the states cable companies have been granted monopolies in most cities in which they operate in return for a cut of the take going to the cities in which they operate. Now, in addition to carrying TV shows they're offering telephone service (and by the nature of broadband, providing the means for others to offer it) over their pipes.
Telephone companies have long been heavily regulated. They now have the opportunity to lay down fiber optic lines to customers' homes and businesses. As they do it, it will become natural for them to offer television programming. But they can't do it in many cases because of the cable monopoly. Here in New Jersey they're running radio ads arguing for ending those monopolies so they can compete with cable.
So although Whitacre might aspire to charge tolls above and beyond the fees he already gets from his customers (insane) he does have a (reasonable) point. In a nutshell: If the cable companies can offer telephone service without needing any further regulatory approval then the phone companies should be able to offer television without any further regulatory approval.
Here, here. Mod that post up. The fact that we're still using the folder metaphor on computers is insane. Having to organize your stuff by putting each thing in only one container is a limitation of the real world. It's like a word processor that makes you paint your screen with Wite-Out to undo a typing error.
Sentence fragments are perfectly acceptable. For emphasis. Like this.
"Fourth grade" does not require a hyphen. Google "fourth grade" and you'll see it's more commonly used without the hyphen than with, even when used as an adjective. Example: Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume.
What strikes me about the responses here is that 1) every point made in every one of them has been either wrong or at best a matter of style; 2) some of the responses display a vehemence that's just crazy.
My conclusions: Many geeks have weak English skills. Their lack of skills frustrates them and makes them defensive.
That comment reminds me of the film critic Pauline Kael's famous line after Richard Nixon's landslide victory over George McGovern in 1972: "I can't believe Nixon won. Nobody I know voted for him." Of course they hadn't. Kael lived in the cocoon of Manhattan liberalism.
AOL has about 27 million subscribers worldwide. That's more than the entire populations of say, Australia (20 million) and New Zealand (4 million) combined.
No. It should be "allowing players to create their own superheroes." The plural noun "players" has to be matched with a plural noun: "superheroes". They're not all working on the same superhero.
Why has fourth grade English become so damned challenging?
When Witacre talks about content providers using his company's pipes I think he may be thinking of them going into the ISP business. Google and Yahoo are intent on branching out in all directions and to Witacre's mind becoming ISPs may be a logical step for them. I remember reading how steamed he was that he had to open his switches to competitive DSL providers like Covad. He thought that was "unfair."
Of course if he does indeed want to impose some kind of a toll on his customers for accessing sites like Google and Yahoo he is utterly delusional.
So in other words, shortcuts will work like they should have worked all along. What a concept. But only in the server edition. They'll still be broken in the other "editions." Smooth move.
Trivia Question: AT&T's chosen name?
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 1
What name did the company we now know as AT&T have all picked out for use after the divestiture? Judge Greene didn't let them choose it because he wanted to reserve the key word in it for use by the Baby Bells.
As it turns out, that word wasn't very popular and now none of the remaining Baby Bells uses it in their names.
That's exactly the kind of small-dick machismo that too many Slashjerks are guilty of. Simply reading stories and replying to them is easy enough of course. But Slashdot has dozens of useful features that are both poorly designed and poorly explained. Technical sophistication is no excuse for slovenly design and execution.
Here I am posting a comment and I can't view the story I'm commenting on. That's ridiculous. And it takes too long to learn how to use Slashdot because the most important information is buried among a lot of trivia in the FAQs.
If Slashdot were a person it would wear taped together glasses, a pocket protector and floods.
Slashdot Mirror
In Soviet Union government log... Oh damn. That's exactly what the Brits ARE doing! Stalin would be proud.
I believe you are confused because you do not understand what the word "provable" means. I think you believe it means "possibly being true." That is not what "provable" means. "Provable" means "testable".
The US Army's Dugway Proving Grounds is a testing facility. The saying "the exception that proves the rule" does not mean, as many nonsensically believe, that an exception lends validity to a rule. It means that an exception tests a rule, i.e., it forces an examination of the rule to see if it is truly valid. (The use of the word "proof" in reference to the alcohol content of spirits also relates to its meaning as a synonym for "test".)
The statement "I can lift an elephant over my head" is provable. I can attempt to lift an elephant over my head. The statement "Life (or a living structure like the eyeball) is so irreducibly complex that it could only have been created by an intelligent designer" is not provable. It is not testable. Therefore it is not scientific and it has no place in a science curriculum.
Nope. I sure can't. Of course my inability to fathom how the universe came about doesn't lead me to believe that it therefore must have been fabricated by an eternal personality.
The universe doesn't take up space. The universe is space. There is no space outside of space. As the universe expanded it expanded space itself.
That having been said there are a number of theories that propose a "metaverse" in which our universe is one of many universes. The more you look at the idea the weirder it gets.
Don't laugh man. Have you heard the latest? There are people who say, presumably with a straight face, that the differences among languages are too great to have been caused by happenstance. They say the differences indicate there must have been a "wrathful dispersion" (a la the Tower of Babel).
Google "wrathful dispersion".
I can't make an atom of hydrogen or lithium. Does that mean that the periodic table is a bunch of hogwash?
And thus the "just a theory" defense is trotted out once more. When scientists use the word "theory" it's in a very different sense from the way non-scientists use it. Google "just a theory" and you'll come up with many explanations, including this one.
Wikipedia is better except for the occasional libelous outright lie and the fact that virtually every article is filled with grammatical errors.
What is the "law of demand and answer"? I've never heard this term before. What language is this from?
Has anyone else noticed that Newsweek breaks your Back button? If you click your Back button immediately upon entering the site you can get back to your previous site. Otherwise four(!) pages show up in your Back button's history. WTF? Do they do this to try to keep you nailed to their site or is it some kind of Ajax (or whatever) side-effect? Either way it's annoying.
On a related point, isn't it time browsers were fixed so that when clicking the Back button would bring you to a page that redirected you to the current page, the browser has enough sense to bypass the redirecting page?
Not in any state in the US, as far as I know, are they required to pay you. Unless there's a union contract, employment contract or some other kind of existing agreement you're an "at will" employee. That means they can fire you at any time, for any legal reason, with or without cause. And if you offer two weeks' notice or two years' notice, they can take you up on it immediately and show you the door.
I wish the hell they would just make the the damned thing more stable in the first place.
Microsoft acts like a kid who won't eat his vegetables, won't do his homework, won't clean up after himself and won't take out the garbage and yells, "Hey, hey Ma look! I can balance a beachball on my nose! Aren't you proud of what a clever boy I am?"
I'd like to take Billg by the hair and tell him, "No Windows Vista for you young man until you fix all the broken crap in XP! And stop making faces at cousin Linus."
"Cryptically stating that Asia wants the U.S. to become 'the France of the 21st century,'
It's not cryptic. He's saying Asia wants to reduce the U.S. to being irrelevant cheese-eating surrender monkeys.
How do you know it's ridiculous and resource wasting? It might very well be. The government has a real talent for creating ridiculous, resource wasting projects. But how do you know this particular project is one of them?
This guy "Doc" Searls comes across as a bit hysterical. His essay is filled with hyperbole, half-truths and misinterpretations.
First, as others have pointed out, this is a very America-centric story. He starts off with a dumb question:
"Are you ready to see the Net privatized from the bottom to the top?"
In the US the Net is largely in private hands already: SBC, Level Three, inter alia.
Here's a bigger problem I have with the essay:
Searls misinterprets or simply ignores one aspect of SBC CEO Edward Whitacre's argument. Whitacre is a douchebag but he does have one legitimate beef. Here in the states cable companies have been granted monopolies in most cities in which they operate in return for a cut of the take going to the cities in which they operate. Now, in addition to carrying TV shows they're offering telephone service (and by the nature of broadband, providing the means for others to offer it) over their pipes.
Telephone companies have long been heavily regulated. They now have the opportunity to lay down fiber optic lines to customers' homes and businesses. As they do it, it will become natural for them to offer television programming. But they can't do it in many cases because of the cable monopoly. Here in New Jersey they're running radio ads arguing for ending those monopolies so they can compete with cable.
So although Whitacre might aspire to charge tolls above and beyond the fees he already gets from his customers (insane) he does have a (reasonable) point. In a nutshell: If the cable companies can offer telephone service without needing any further regulatory approval then the phone companies should be able to offer television without any further regulatory approval.
If they do, consumers will benefit.
Here, here. Mod that post up. The fact that we're still using the folder metaphor on computers is insane. Having to organize your stuff by putting each thing in only one container is a limitation of the real world. It's like a word processor that makes you paint your screen with Wite-Out to undo a typing error.
Another idiot.
Sentence fragments are perfectly acceptable. For emphasis. Like this.
"Fourth grade" does not require a hyphen. Google "fourth grade" and you'll see it's more commonly used without the hyphen than with, even when used as an adjective. Example: Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume.
What strikes me about the responses here is that 1) every point made in every one of them has been either wrong or at best a matter of style; 2) some of the responses display a vehemence that's just crazy.
My conclusions: Many geeks have weak English skills. Their lack of skills frustrates them and makes them defensive.
"No-one I know uses AOL"
That comment reminds me of the film critic Pauline Kael's famous line after Richard Nixon's landslide victory over George McGovern in 1972: "I can't believe Nixon won. Nobody I know voted for him." Of course they hadn't. Kael lived in the cocoon of Manhattan liberalism.
AOL has about 27 million subscribers worldwide. That's more than the entire populations of say, Australia (20 million) and New Zealand (4 million) combined.
I'd say AOL is relevant.
Everything single thing you said is wrong.
You put a comma before quotation marks only in dialog.
Your ideas on the proper usage of parentheses are simply bizarre.
The colon is a matter of style. It was perfectly ok.
Are you a troll or an idiot? Back to your cube, Bosco.
Are you people ever going to learn how to write?
"allowing players to create their own superhero."
No. It should be "allowing players to create their own superheroes." The plural noun "players" has to be matched with a plural noun: "superheroes". They're not all working on the same superhero.
Why has fourth grade English become so damned challenging?
Go ahead. Mod me down. I dare you.
When Witacre talks about content providers using his company's pipes I think he may be thinking of them going into the ISP business. Google and Yahoo are intent on branching out in all directions and to Witacre's mind becoming ISPs may be a logical step for them. I remember reading how steamed he was that he had to open his switches to competitive DSL providers like Covad. He thought that was "unfair."
Of course if he does indeed want to impose some kind of a toll on his customers for accessing sites like Google and Yahoo he is utterly delusional.
So in other words, shortcuts will work like they should have worked all along. What a concept. But only in the server edition. They'll still be broken in the other "editions." Smooth move.
What name did the company we now know as AT&T have all picked out for use after the divestiture? Judge Greene didn't let them choose it because he wanted to reserve the key word in it for use by the Baby Bells.
As it turns out, that word wasn't very popular and now none of the remaining Baby Bells uses it in their names.
I'll reply with the answer if nobody gets it.
That's exactly the kind of small-dick machismo that too many Slashjerks are guilty of. Simply reading stories and replying to them is easy enough of course. But Slashdot has dozens of useful features that are both poorly designed and poorly explained. Technical sophistication is no excuse for slovenly design and execution.
Here I am posting a comment and I can't view the story I'm commenting on. That's ridiculous. And it takes too long to learn how to use Slashdot because the most important information is buried among a lot of trivia in the FAQs.
If Slashdot were a person it would wear taped together glasses, a pocket protector and floods.
News for nerds indeed.