I think that in this case the mantra will be "conflict of interest" instead of "anti-competitive". Having one branch of a corporation sell shoddy products security-wise, and having another branch selling the 'fix' sure sounds like a conflict. And to bring anti-competitiveness in as well, they might actually be tempted at some point to put in a bug in the OS, put the fix in the AV software, and put other AV vendors out of business by pointing out that they didn't handly the issue in a timely manner. They've done worse.
I'm awfully sorry, but the whole point was that I didn't sign anything, not for my studies, nor for my professional memberships. I specifically didn't say anything about feeling bound or not by the memberships, but that's not the point. I merely pointed out that in my career I have been able, without any effort on my part, to circumvent any signature on ethics or code of conduct. The original parent stated that this was not the case. Whether I feel morally bound be these codes is a wholly different issue, an issue on which I have not expressed myself here.
I actually signed anything when becoming a member? I filled in a web form, no signature required. Where I come from that is not legally binding.
For ACM, there is some stuff on subscribing to the purposes of ACM, which includes ethics, but first of all I didn't sign, and second I definitely subscribe to the purpose of ACM to promote the highest professional and ethical standards. I think the ACM should do that, really I do;)
Hmm, funny, I'm a member of both ACM and IEEE, hold a masters in CS and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, and I don't recall ever signing any ethics agreement.
Corporatism was invented by Mussolini, and the US has historically steered very clear from it by insisting on a free market and government legislation, not corporate. You seem to be arguing that the US has always been communist and only recently saw the light of corporatism.
Not really. The supernatural being begets one crucial question: who begot the supernatural being? The question is the same as the original, nothing solved here. The evolution question begets a lot of more detailed questions that are more specific, for instance: how could ant behaviour and worker bees evolve from selfish actions?
Note that the origin of evolution itself is not covered by the theory of evolution, at least not by Darwinian evolution. Evolution covers the 'Origin of species', not the 'Origin of evolution'. That's a different field in which remarkably little progress has been made. Your question about how the little atoms did it is thus not aimed against evolution as a whole, but against a different science, which, for lack of a better name, is known as pre-biotic evolution. It is highly doubtful that the principles of natural selection apply there, as there are counter-examples developed for that. This does not change the validity of 'biotic' evolution though. Given that we don't know the exact origin of the universe, doesn't make the Newtonian laws less valid.
Theism is faith in the existence of God.
Atheism is a practically zero belief in the existence of God.
An agnost is a lazy bastard that neither wants to quantify his belief or express his faith.
There's a big difference between faith and belief. Faith is absolute, the dimwitted brother of truth. Belief is always quantifiable and finite, never 100% true or false. I personally would put the existence of God at a level of around -1000 decibel (meaning 10^-1000 percent probabilitity).
None whatsoever, that's why archeology is a part of the study of history, not of (natural) science. Also English literature doesn't make many predictions.
Winston Churchill was visiting another country. The first evening there, at the state dinner, he pointed to the chicken entree and said, "May I have some breast?"
The hostess raised her eyebrows and curtly responded, "Mr. Churchill, in this country we ask for white meat or dark meat."
"My apologies, Madam, I was not aware of your customs."
The following day, a thank you gift was delivered to the party's hostess with a large orchid. The following was written on the note: "I would be obliged if you would pin this on your white meat."
Everything supports ID because every possible way a being is put together can be construed to point to a designer. The designer would have just designed it that way.
That's the problem with ID. It's empty. In the case of DNA: if for instance it was found that every species has a completely different way of passing genetic information trough the generations, with completely different means of reproduction, this would have meant the death of evolution as a theory, as there is no way to reconcile this. People would have tried of course, but probably a new theory would have to be construed. As it is, the discovery of DNA is a great point for evolution. It was predicted, it was searched for, it was found, and finally DNA gives quantative ways of describing the distance between men, ape, chicken and whatever other species there are.
The hypothetical non-existance of common DNA would have been no problem whatsoever for ID, as it would simply been construed as pointing to a common designer that tried some different things in different species. If 'scientists' would have followed the ID way of reasoning, DNA would never have been found, as no one would have searched for it. I doubt your 19th century IDists predicted a common genetic carrier as a requisite for ID. Didn't happen. ID has no predictions and is intellectually empty.
You can also view atheism as the view that the 'theory of God' is utterly unfalsifiable, and unless the guy/girl shows him/herself (verifies his/herself), it is a matter of general principle to not believe in God's existence. Similar reasoning holds for the tooth fairy: atheists are generally atoothfairyists as well.
If ID would have been developed in the late 19th century and would have predicted the existence of a common carrier of genetic information, you might have a point. As it is, ID is fitting the theory to the data. A common carrier of information, between species, is not a prerequisite for ID. It is one for evolution.
A blanket statement about how DNA is too complex to evolve is not credible without proving hard limits (mathematically) on the bounds of evolutionary innovation. Considering that mutations and other changes themselves can be evolved through natural selection, this is hard.
Well, given that we're talking about the natural sciences here, anything supernatural is by definition out. Go build your school of supernatural sciences and see if you can intelligently design a microwave based on such principles.
Experiment. Falsify that man descends from ape. Take a man, take an ape. If they are related there must be some common information that helps in building the creatures. Find this common, let's call it 'genetic', information. If it differs by enormous amounts, it is not possible that they have evolved from the same ancestor.
This is done, by simple counting of common base-pairs, men is closer to ape than both are to a chicken. If it were not, or if there was no carrier of genetic information (which could have been the case until the 1950's when it was found), evolution would have been dead. It's alive and kicking though.
One of the predictions of evolution was that there must be a common carrier of genetic material. Mendel already used the existence of it implicitly.
After a long search Watson and Crick found it: DNA. The discovery of DNA is one of the great predictions of evolution theory that came through.
Fortran has bounds checking and doesn't have pointers. The last part is important, because it means that the compiler can do a much better job at optimization. Look at the following C-snippet:
void f(double *a, double *b, int sz) { int i; for (i=0; i < sz; ++i) { *(a+i) = *(a+i) + *(b+i); } }
Having only this information, the compiler has no way of knowing that 'a' and 'b' do or do not point to the same piece of memory, and thus it cannot optimize this loop (as b might point to a-1 for instance). In Fortran the compiler does have this information and can optimize accordingly. Note that this is only a problem with C, not with Pascal. Pascal can in principle run as fast as Fortran, but is probably even more annoying.
Interestingly enough, C++ should be able to reach Fortran speeds when the C++ compiler writers would finally use the leanage they've gotten for optimizing the hell out of 'valarray'. This class doesn't have aliasing problems and can be used in the same way as Fortran arrays.
For the rest, the freaks and weenies have simply been brought up with Fortran and therefore prefer it.
Lemma 1 of that dictionary does agree with me, it's lemma 2 that you're quoting. I was specifically attacking the statement: "we're not living in a democracy, but a republic". Even with lemma 2, this is false. A representative democracy is still a democracy.
Furthermore, if we're talking about representative democracies, there is no fundamental difference between a democratic republic as the US, France and Germany, or a democratic monarchy such as the UK, the Netherlands and Scandinavia other than that the head of state is either royalty or a civilian. So, what would be your word to describe all these states with a similar way to run the country? Republic doesn't cut it, as there are monarchies amongst them. Maybe democracy as a shorthand for representative democracy?
In any case, if, in a republic like the US, you elect three wolves to run your country, dinner will be mutton.
First, we do not live in a democracy. A democracy is when three wolves and a sheep vote what's for supper. We are a republic.
As usual in this audience, very wrong. What you've said above is, in short: we don't live in a democracy, because we don't have a king . Completely non-sensical. A republic is simply a form of state that has a president as its head instead of a monarch. Nothing more, nothing less. Shining examples of republics are the The Peoples Republic of China, the former USSR, the republic of Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, Iraq, Iran, etc. etc., etc.
When people say democracy , they hardly ever mean the Athenian ideal of laws being voted on by the populace.
What is meant is a representative democracy, where the ones voting for laws are elected by the population. Whether that's done in a republic like the United States or a monarchy like in Great Britain is irrelevant.
Would you override + to mean something totally different than addition?
If you were to design a language that doesn't allow operator overloading *cough* java *cough*, you sure as hell would:
String str = "" + a + b;
Where a and b are arbitrary objects (not necessarily strings), so you've got auto-casting to boot!
Actually, most languages overload addition to mean string concatenation as well, so what was the point about '+'?
I actually thought the reply was brilliant. The guy clearly looked at the paper, looked at it again and decided that he would not insult any reviewer by exposing them to blatant nonsense that was in the paper. Then, after being asked for the reviews, he answers in the same style as the paper, complete with obscure and irrelevant references. Score 1 for the organizer, I thought.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that in this case the mantra will be "conflict of interest" instead of "anti-competitive". Having one branch of a corporation sell shoddy products security-wise, and having another branch selling the 'fix' sure sounds like a conflict. And to bring anti-competitiveness in as well, they might actually be tempted at some point to put in a bug in the OS, put the fix in the AV software, and put other AV vendors out of business by pointing out that they didn't handly the issue in a timely manner. They've done worse.
I'm awfully sorry, but the whole point was that I didn't sign anything, not for my studies, nor for my professional memberships. I specifically didn't say anything about feeling bound or not by the memberships, but that's not the point. I merely pointed out that in my career I have been able, without any effort on my part, to circumvent any signature on ethics or code of conduct. The original parent stated that this was not the case. Whether I feel morally bound be these codes is a wholly different issue, an issue on which I have not expressed myself here.
For ACM, there is some stuff on subscribing to the purposes of ACM, which includes ethics, but first of all I didn't sign, and second I definitely subscribe to the purpose of ACM to promote the highest professional and ethical standards. I think the ACM should do that, really I do ;)
Ethics training? Where was I supposed to get one of those? Again, not mandatory, and in my particular case, never even been brought to my attention.
Interesting, but as I said, I'm a member of both and have never signed them, nor has this ever been brought to my attention by the organizations.
It's a good idea though, we should do that.
Well, maybe these days the owners of the countless spamming zombies are patching 'their' windows machines ;)
Corporatism was invented by Mussolini, and the US has historically steered very clear from it by insisting on a free market and government legislation, not corporate. You seem to be arguing that the US has always been communist and only recently saw the light of corporatism.
Note that the origin of evolution itself is not covered by the theory of evolution, at least not by Darwinian evolution. Evolution covers the 'Origin of species', not the 'Origin of evolution'. That's a different field in which remarkably little progress has been made. Your question about how the little atoms did it is thus not aimed against evolution as a whole, but against a different science, which, for lack of a better name, is known as pre-biotic evolution. It is highly doubtful that the principles of natural selection apply there, as there are counter-examples developed for that. This does not change the validity of 'biotic' evolution though. Given that we don't know the exact origin of the universe, doesn't make the Newtonian laws less valid.
Theism is faith in the existence of God.
Atheism is a practically zero belief in the existence of God.
An agnost is a lazy bastard that neither wants to quantify his belief or express his faith.
There's a big difference between faith and belief. Faith is absolute, the dimwitted brother of truth. Belief is always quantifiable and finite, never 100% true or false. I personally would put the existence of God at a level of around -1000 decibel (meaning 10^-1000 percent probabilitity).
None whatsoever, that's why archeology is a part of the study of history, not of (natural) science. Also English literature doesn't make many predictions.
The hostess raised her eyebrows and curtly responded, "Mr. Churchill, in this country we ask for white meat or dark meat."
"My apologies, Madam, I was not aware of your customs."
The following day, a thank you gift was delivered to the party's hostess with a large orchid. The following was written on the note: "I would be obliged if you would pin this on your white meat."
That's the problem with ID. It's empty. In the case of DNA: if for instance it was found that every species has a completely different way of passing genetic information trough the generations, with completely different means of reproduction, this would have meant the death of evolution as a theory, as there is no way to reconcile this. People would have tried of course, but probably a new theory would have to be construed. As it is, the discovery of DNA is a great point for evolution. It was predicted, it was searched for, it was found, and finally DNA gives quantative ways of describing the distance between men, ape, chicken and whatever other species there are.
The hypothetical non-existance of common DNA would have been no problem whatsoever for ID, as it would simply been construed as pointing to a common designer that tried some different things in different species. If 'scientists' would have followed the ID way of reasoning, DNA would never have been found, as no one would have searched for it. I doubt your 19th century IDists predicted a common genetic carrier as a requisite for ID. Didn't happen. ID has no predictions and is intellectually empty.
You can also view atheism as the view that the 'theory of God' is utterly unfalsifiable, and unless the guy/girl shows him/herself (verifies his/herself), it is a matter of general principle to not believe in God's existence. Similar reasoning holds for the tooth fairy: atheists are generally atoothfairyists as well.
A blanket statement about how DNA is too complex to evolve is not credible without proving hard limits (mathematically) on the bounds of evolutionary innovation. Considering that mutations and other changes themselves can be evolved through natural selection, this is hard.
Well, given that we're talking about the natural sciences here, anything supernatural is by definition out. Go build your school of supernatural sciences and see if you can intelligently design a microwave based on such principles.
Experiment. Falsify that man descends from ape. Take a man, take an ape. If they are related there must be some common information that helps in building the creatures. Find this common, let's call it 'genetic', information. If it differs by enormous amounts, it is not possible that they have evolved from the same ancestor. This is done, by simple counting of common base-pairs, men is closer to ape than both are to a chicken. If it were not, or if there was no carrier of genetic information (which could have been the case until the 1950's when it was found), evolution would have been dead. It's alive and kicking though.
One of the predictions of evolution was that there must be a common carrier of genetic material. Mendel already used the existence of it implicitly. After a long search Watson and Crick found it: DNA. The discovery of DNA is one of the great predictions of evolution theory that came through.
Having only this information, the compiler has no way of knowing that 'a' and 'b' do or do not point to the same piece of memory, and thus it cannot optimize this loop (as b might point to a-1 for instance). In Fortran the compiler does have this information and can optimize accordingly. Note that this is only a problem with C, not with Pascal. Pascal can in principle run as fast as Fortran, but is probably even more annoying.
Interestingly enough, C++ should be able to reach Fortran speeds when the C++ compiler writers would finally use the leanage they've gotten for optimizing the hell out of 'valarray'. This class doesn't have aliasing problems and can be used in the same way as Fortran arrays.
For the rest, the freaks and weenies have simply been brought up with Fortran and therefore prefer it.
Furthermore, if we're talking about representative democracies, there is no fundamental difference between a democratic republic as the US, France and Germany, or a democratic monarchy such as the UK, the Netherlands and Scandinavia other than that the head of state is either royalty or a civilian. So, what would be your word to describe all these states with a similar way to run the country? Republic doesn't cut it, as there are monarchies amongst them. Maybe democracy as a shorthand for representative democracy?
In any case, if, in a republic like the US, you elect three wolves to run your country, dinner will be mutton.
As usual in this audience, very wrong. What you've said above is, in short: we don't live in a democracy, because we don't have a king . Completely non-sensical. A republic is simply a form of state that has a president as its head instead of a monarch. Nothing more, nothing less. Shining examples of republics are the The Peoples Republic of China, the former USSR, the republic of Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, Iraq, Iran, etc. etc., etc.
When people say democracy , they hardly ever mean the Athenian ideal of laws being voted on by the populace. What is meant is a representative democracy, where the ones voting for laws are elected by the population. Whether that's done in a republic like the United States or a monarchy like in Great Britain is irrelevant.
hmm, modded this up. Apparently made a mistake. damn liquor. Posting to get rid of the false mod. Mod OT at will.
If you were to design a language that doesn't allow operator overloading *cough* java *cough*, you sure as hell would:
Where a and b are arbitrary objects (not necessarily strings), so you've got auto-casting to boot! Actually, most languages overload addition to mean string concatenation as well, so what was the point about '+'?
Results 1 - 10 of about 387,000,000 for important?. (0.19 seconds)
I actually thought the reply was brilliant. The guy clearly looked at the paper, looked at it again and decided that he would not insult any reviewer by exposing them to blatant nonsense that was in the paper. Then, after being asked for the reviews, he answers in the same style as the paper, complete with obscure and irrelevant references. Score 1 for the organizer, I thought.