science only deals with materialism and is therefore flawed
I did not say that. My position is that science is constrained by the scientific method. It can posit, test, examine, and conclude the "what" but not whether there is ultimate meaning, or what that meaning might be, if it exists. It is unable to verify or reject the untestable.
"That's not a bug, that's a feature."
If you could do all that you want science would lose a lot of it's usefulness as it would no longer serve as a basis of "things we know are pretty likely true". There are already other types of academia which fulfill your likings, such as philosophy. And keep in mind that science branched from philosophy because they (the scientists) wanted a more solid base to base future reasoning on.
You then try to verify if these predictions are true
How? How can you verify a theory about the origins of the universe without either observing or creating a universe?
If you make a hypothesis about the creation of the universe that will have consequences that are still valid. One of those are the existence of the universe of course. This means we can make predictions about things that we can test today and test those.
But really most of the ideas about the creation of the universe are on a more mathematical nature and we can't test them yet. It is still typically ideas that are extrapolated from our current knowledge of physics. There are some that are just wide speculation and more of the nature of philosophy than science.
it doesn't claim to be THE TRUTH, but mearly the best available explaination.
In terms of definition, you are correct. In terms of societal behavior, I disagree. People believe that science is the arbiter of truth. Some scientists errantly believe that, too. "A new study released today shows that..." why does this make news? Because it's sensational, but also because it's the only thing that is accepted as Truth.
The thing is that science really is the arbiter of truth in that it is a system designed to reject non-truths. If we have a hughe pile of ideas we can use science to remove those that we can show are false. This doesn't mean that those remaining must be completely true, but it does mean that we can't really tell that they are false neither. And remember that with science you don't get to add an idea to the pile unless you ensure that it is possible to test the idea first. (Ie adding "There is an invisible pink dragon in my garage." is not allowed.)
Furthermore, keep in mind that if there is a study showing something then this means someone has at least made an effort to test it. These days many studies involve statistics though, and as such it's easy to get fooled by them. (Statistics is hard, and even knowledgeable people can be fooled by it.) BTW I'd say that media by large are completely clueless about science. They are OTOH clueless about most things so you should watch TV with care.
For example, if I said "The Bible says..." What's your response?
Most likely something along the line of "That's nice, what's your point?" If you start pressing the point of using the Bible as a source of knowledge I'll probably move on to comment on how the Bible condone rape, murder and a lot of other really bad stuff.
it doesn't make me want to become one
I'm curious, though. What if Christianity is true? Would you want to know? Would you consider changing your mind about wanting to follow Christ?
If Christianity (or any other religion) is proven true then it would no longer be a faith. From my experience with "Good Christians" I follow a lifestyle that is pretty much that of a follower of Christ. The main differences being that I don't pray or go to church. It would seem like a sensible God would be mainly interested in that you are kind and helpful of others.
So currently I say I follow a moral and ethical code and try to be helpful and kind to other humans and mindful of their problems. Changing that to "following Christ" isn't that much of a change.
I'd say you'd be better off using multiple cameras so that you capture multiple directions at once. If you don't you'll probably have a very hard time making the result match up. (Ie have the same spot in the road in both directions at the same time.)
There are systems like this however. If you look up computer vision research you can typically see stuff about systems that automatically build a "map" of the world. (Typically used with robots.)
I'm not sure you understand how BT works. Or it may just be that I can't quite interpret what you mean.
It is true that when you connect to a BT swarm the tracker will inform you of the other clients currently active. Doing this is quite trivial though, even if it is decentralized.
If you spend 50% of your traffic sending keep-alives then you need to redesign you protocol. (Or rather, design it at all.)
I'm not sure how I can more clearly explain that the whole study of origins is non-scientific in nature. As such, it seems to me that it does not belong in science classes. Do we agree on that point?
No, we do not agree on that point.
I have tried to make my arguments on the matter clear but you haven't really addressed them with anything but repeating that "science only deals with materialism and is therefore flawed".
If you deal with things like beginning of the Universe then things get hairier. Typically these hypothesises are based on mathmatics and physics. In order to test it you do things like try to use the hypothesis about the beginning of the Universe to make predictions that would still be valid. You then try to verify if these predictions are true.
Naturally this doesn't prove that the original hypothesis must be true. But if there is no other way to explain the predictions then it is used.
Intelligent Design and similiar ideas make no predictions. As such they are useless to science as they can not be tested and you can't use them for anything but as a good bedtime story.
As an example, I recently watched a program on TV called 'the search for the ultimate survivor' - supposedly a tale about the path that mankind followed to make it until today.
Well most stuff on TV is sensationalistic crap. That's hardly the fault of science.;-) And many people have problems understanding fundamental aspects of science, such as that it doesn't claim to be THE TRUTH, but mearly the best available explaination.
In our culture, science is often presented as the arbiter of truth, when in point of fact, it can only deal with the physical world.
Not quite. It can only deal with things that are testable and thus possible to prove. That's not necessarily the same thing as as only the physical world. As I have pointed out before, if non-physical phenomena can be proven then they will be added.
My goal is not specifically to convert you, although I do believe that my world view is true, and that you would benefit from becoming a follower of Jesus Christ.
Thanks but no thanks. I have already spent a lot of time with Christians (during an exchange year to the US) and while I like them and all that it doesn't make me want to become one.
In fact, since I have the benefit of an education in religions (which is mandatory in Sweden) if I did become religious it would probably not be as a Christian. On an aside here I could note that I believe that the US school system would benefit greatly from being taugh religion in school. Just not in science class and all major religions should be covered.
I submit to you that naturalism and materialism are insufficient frameworks for exploration of the human experience. That materialistic philosophy has no place in science class, yet it persists.
This is my beef with the 'scientific community.' They rail about the thoughtless, foolish faithful, while they worship in a cathedral built to honor materialism and naturalism. We're all biased. They should acknowledge that.
You keep restating this but have not submitted any further argument for why it is so.
You state that scientist "worship" naturalism and materialism.
I explain that naturalism is something which springs from science; not the other way around. Furthermore I explain that science only can deal with things that can be proven. That materia exist can be proven; that non-materia exists isn't proven. As such non-material hypothesis can't be proven neither true nor false with science; as such they have nothing do to in a science classroom. (Or rather, they shouldn't be taught to be science.)
While you can "believe" in science and create a reliogion around it science in itself isn't a belief. It is rather the opposite and only deal with what can be proven true or false.
I'm not quite sure what it is in this that you object to. Because it seems like we are just talking around each-other right now. (OTOH I doubt either one of us will convert the other, that's not really my plan though.;-)
I have already addressed these points in another reply to one of your posts. In short, testable doesn't require that you go back in time but that you can recreate the same (or similar) conditions and create life in that situation.
If you want to reply please do so in the other thread as that will keep the discussion more on track.
Seriously every time I have tried to use that network I have quit the download after a day or so of waiting in queues. This is before getting anything at all of the file. It sould be faster to just go down to Germany or whatever by car and copy the file to a CDR and go back.
I know I'm supposed to be online for a while before the eDonkey style queues start working in my favour; but I just can't be bothered.
Also note that BT isn't like a typical P2P as you can't really search for files. This is in fact a "good thing" as it protects you from " Nbr_of_files * Loads_of_cash = You_are_bancrupt" type lawsuits.
AFAIK RSS+Bittorrent type functions aren't available in other networks. (Not that it'd be impossible to add; but it's quite natural in BT.)
All that said, networks like eDonkey, DC et al certainly have their uses. So does BT (even if they add some distributed functionality to it).
The fundamental difference is that in order for something to be a scientific theory it MUST be proven to work.
So lets take abiosis on Earth as an example. If you can demonstrate that if you take a tube filled with the type of goo that to the best of our knowledge existed on Earth a long time ago and zap that with electricity and from that get simple forms of life. Then that is a scientific hypothesis that fits the facts (as we understand it today at least) and as such it is likely to become a scientific theory (after more testing of course).
This doesn't mean that it must have happened this way. It means that it is ONE of the possible explainations for how it has happened. If you have multiple competing ideas then you can apply Occams Razor to try to find the least unlikely one.
Please note that science doesn't deal with absolutes. We can never be sure that it is "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth". We only know that this is the best explaination we know of today. Scientific knowledge is always changing, that too is a requirement of science.
Given the cause of the universe most of those theories are (like string theory) born in mathmatics. Often you can find reasonable concepts using mathmatics which you can later form into a scientific hypothesis in physics and test.
Science doesn't require that we go back to the point of creation and look at that. Science requires that we can explain what we can observe with our hypothesis. And the evidence of the creation of the universe (natural or otherwise) is all around us.
Science, as of today, will not be able to accept a hypothesis which require supernatural elements in order to explain something. This is because science deals with things that can be measured and tested. That is a fundamental basis for science (much like how faith is a fundamental basis for religion).
As such a scientist would be led to reject any hypothesis which assumes a supernatural element; not really because of the hypothesis but because the basic assumption isn't true.
If you do logic testing based on unverified assumptions you can reach pretty much any conclusion you want. Because of this the scientific method (and logic in general) requires that you check your assumptions before making any conclusions.
As I said before though. If you can *prove* that supernatural phenomena are in fact true, then we can begin to work on the hypothesis of ID from a scientific viewpoint.
This is something many creationist/IDists seem to fail to grasp. The scientific method IS NOT VALID if you do not apply it correctly. If you can't apply it correctly IT MAKES NO PREDICTIONS what so ever. Iow, it would be hard to apply the scientific method to prove the non-existence of god.
Your argument is basically that science isn't fair because it requires things to be scientific. The entire point of science is that it should NOT be dependent on what the scientists (here used to the describe all people who use the scientific method and not only people wearing white robes) believe.
Naturalism states that scientific laws are adecuate to describe all fenomena. So as such it's not really correct to claim science to be naturallistic, as it's really the other way around. (Ie scientific laws are a prerequesite for naturalism, not the other way around.)
What science does is claim that in order for something to be accepted as "scientifically true" it must first be a falsifiable hypothesis and then it must be tested and not be proved false. If it is proved to be false then the hypothesis can be changed to fit the new evidence and retested. This is the way scientific knowledge is formed.
If it can be demonstrated that non-materialistic phenomena are indeed testable and verified as true then those too will become part of the scientific knowledge. I'm sure it will take some time since all people (even scientist) tend to object to change. But as long as it remains true it will be accepted.
As for your two quite brutally cited quotes I'm not quite sure what you want. The theory of punctuated equilibria by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould doesn't seem to provide any evidence against evolution, it is merly an addition to it [1] (although it seems like it's not quite accepted, paelenetology isn't really my field). As to the quote from Richard Lewontin that doesn't contain anything that refutes evolution; he is just one more scientist who tries to explain evolutionary theory to others.
I can see that you are not a naturalist, and that's just fine and dandy by me. But if you want to make ID a scientific hypothesis you must first fulfill the demands that places on a scientific hypothesis. Because as it stands it's not one.
We cannot use science to speak of origins, because we cannot observe the event, document it and repeat it. Science can collect evidence and propose theories about it, but since these theories are untestable, it is not scientific to draw conclusions about origins in the guide of science! Incorrect.
It is possible to make scientific hypothesis and theories about the origin of life and test there. Naturally it's hard to prove that this is the exact way it happened but if it can be demonstrated that it is in fact possible to "make" life from non-life then that is a big step.
AFAIK quite a bit of progress has been made in this area as well lately.
BTW, Newton was never able to demonstrate what caused the apple that hit him on the head to fall. He could only demonstrate that he could explain it and reproduce it. That is science.
Example 1: human eye. The nerves are connected to the photoreceptors from the outside - the blind spot is where they go through the retina. An engineer would obviously connect them from the outside. It's interesting to note here that eg certain octopus does not suffer from the affliction of "blind spot" as their eyes have the nerves connected from the back of the eye.
Apparently the creator made us humans into the best it could do. Unfortuntaly some details were skipped and he opted to replace a functional solution with a kludge.
Perhaps the octopus was created by another creator and this is all a big case of "Not Invented Here"?
Just FYI "macro evolution" (which isn't a scientific concept AFAIK) is an observed fact in both flora and fauna.
Besides AFAIK evolution doesn't require there to be a single source of life. Only creation doesn (the creator). For all we know life may very well have spontaniously emerged on multiple places on Earth.
Sure you could use StringBuffers instead but that hardly matters does it? It certainly doesn't for demonstrative purposes. Besides only really evil people optimise their program early.
I guess you're just angry because I proved you wrong though. But that's ok, when you grow up you'll learn to handle disappointments in a more adult manner.
I don't care about region coding, as long as the games are region free, I can just rip my own media to memory cards.
Japanese DVDs have the same region as Eu; not sure if that's true for PSP as well. But as you wrote, who cares? I never intend to buy a UMD movie in any case.
I can say that JP PSP works fine with US games though. JP PSP can play against US PSP in WiFi if both uses US games. (I don't know anyone who has a US version of a game for which I have JP version so I haven't tested that.)
Why are old arcade games considered good?
on
10 Gateway Games
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
IMHO if it weren't for sentimental reasons games like Centipide and Ms Pac-Man wouldn't be on that list. Personally I'm not too fond of Tetris (Dr Mario) either, but Centipede?
That game almost killed the mobile phone gaming market. Too boring to even play on the toilet!
We all know that only a morally void character will flip-flop when presented with new evidence. I mean, otherwise it means they held on to the first opinion without substantial evidence.
Wouldn't this be a software patent, and as such perfectly useable in the rest of the world. Or at least those parts that haven't accepted software patents yet.
(Note that at least Java will automatically call the toString() method when you print() an object. Good to know for debugging.)
That's just what I think, I'm not really bothered with the overloading personally. I just think it's turning your println into Perl (ie unreadable lines of non-alphanum characters).
When I tried AOP a few years back it was before they added terms like joint and concern. The principle is the same though.
We were doing a compiler in that project and that was a very good time to use AOP. From the CC programs you get a bunch of object code, but you don't want to edit these files as they are generated by other programs. Instead we used aspects which are then "weaved" into the generated code (this is what is called joints and concerns now). In reality it's pretty much a bunch of pre-compiler steps.
Eg we did an Aspect of the compiler code called Interpret. This aspect added a method "interpret()" in all classes, and you can easily define it's default behaviour as well as adding specific behaviours for some classes. So in our case we defined expressions to return their values and print statements to do a println and so on.
Run the pre-compiler steps, then compile and you've got a compiler that can parse and interpret code. Now add a new stamtement type to the grammar, and do it again and you have a new compiler working. No need to hand edit a bunch of files.
Naturally since this was in the early stages one problem was that looking for compiler errors in generated code was a bit of a bother. All in all it was a great help.
Re:Shouldn't they have done this 10 years ago?
on
GCC 4.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
One _ancient_ compiler (10+ years) I have to use, already has this feature -- and on a large scale: it'll do it over several screensful of code. What took GCC so long?
Because vectorisation and parallelisation are two very hard problems. Normal compiler optimisations pale in comparison for the most part.
Even the best currently available vectorising compilers will do a pretty poor job compared to human optimisations (in cases where it's possible to do by hand). I have seen examples were a simple c-loop could be hand optimised into half a page of asm where a vectorising compiler produced 4 pages.
It is a REALLY hard problem.
Unfortunately, this compiler I mention also has a bug: once it's factored out 'i' in a piece of code like that below, it then complains that 'i' is an unused variable. So you have to do something with 'i' to suppress that warning, which kinda defeats the purpose of the autovectorization.
Which leads me to believe that it wasn't doing a very good job at all. Just because it claims to do vectorisation and adds a few asm instructions doesn't mean it's doing a poor job. That they couldn't even detect the iterator variable may even hint that it could produce broken code.
It's not in the standard packages but it seems among others http://lpnotfr.free.fr/debianpkgs.shtml has a repository you can add which carries deb files for it.
You don't have to use only the Debian main servers after all. Not sure why the maintainer hasn't supplied it to the general branch though.
You have no idea what you're talking about, right?
Points 1 and 3: Linux distros typically put settings in/etc. That's your "registry", only human readable and you can back it up and restore (relatively) effortlessly or move to another computer.
Points 2, 4 and 8: Any modern Linux distro has a package handling system. You don't use the tar.gz files yourself, or even at all. These keep track of all software on your system and keeps it all up-to-date.
Points 5, 6 and 7: That's the work of the desktop app.
Finally: No-one NEEDS to do anything to get Linux out to everyone. OSS is not a product it's a process; you can join now or in a year or never. If you want to change what is happening then involve yourself in the process of making it happen.
First off, "Smartphone" is a class of phones and not a specific OS. Pretty much all those platforms you mention are Smartphones. (I guess you could make a Linux non-Smartphone, but I've never heard of one.)
Now just what are you making? They are looking into the creation of tools that would facilitate the development of mobile applications. Is pretty general. And "Telecom" can be anything from a mobile phone manufacturer to a mobile service provider.
If you want to make applications for the general pulic: Go with Symbian as that has a lot of users. Or go with Java Midp if possible if you want to get a/lot/ of users.
If you want to make inhouse apps: Go with whatever suits your current/future hardware. Of the mentioned platforms I'd still say Symbian, that has the most compatible handsets. Although it can apparently be a bit hellish to develop for (or I've heard from people who actually do it).
If you are making development tools or looking into making mobile phone platforms: Do your own damned research and don't try run before you can crawl.
Slashdot Mirror
"That's not a bug, that's a feature."
If you could do all that you want science would lose a lot of it's usefulness as it would no longer serve as a basis of "things we know are pretty likely true". There are already other types of academia which fulfill your likings, such as philosophy. And keep in mind that science branched from philosophy because they (the scientists) wanted a more solid base to base future reasoning on.
If you make a hypothesis about the creation of the universe that will have consequences that are still valid. One of those are the existence of the universe of course. This means we can make predictions about things that we can test today and test those.
But really most of the ideas about the creation of the universe are on a more mathematical nature and we can't test them yet. It is still typically ideas that are extrapolated from our current knowledge of physics. There are some that are just wide speculation and more of the nature of philosophy than science.
The thing is that science really is the arbiter of truth in that it is a system designed to reject non-truths. If we have a hughe pile of ideas we can use science to remove those that we can show are false. This doesn't mean that those remaining must be completely true, but it does mean that we can't really tell that they are false neither. And remember that with science you don't get to add an idea to the pile unless you ensure that it is possible to test the idea first. (Ie adding "There is an invisible pink dragon in my garage." is not allowed.)
Furthermore, keep in mind that if there is a study showing something then this means someone has at least made an effort to test it. These days many studies involve statistics though, and as such it's easy to get fooled by them. (Statistics is hard, and even knowledgeable people can be fooled by it.) BTW I'd say that media by large are completely clueless about science. They are OTOH clueless about most things so you should watch TV with care.
Most likely something along the line of "That's nice, what's your point?" If you start pressing the point of using the Bible as a source of knowledge I'll probably move on to comment on how the Bible condone rape, murder and a lot of other really bad stuff.
If Christianity (or any other religion) is proven true then it would no longer be a faith. From my experience with "Good Christians" I follow a lifestyle that is pretty much that of a follower of Christ. The main differences being that I don't pray or go to church. It would seem like a sensible God would be mainly interested in that you are kind and helpful of others.
So currently I say I follow a moral and ethical code and try to be helpful and kind to other humans and mindful of their problems. Changing that to "following Christ" isn't that much of a change.
I'd say you'd be better off using multiple cameras so that you capture multiple directions at once. If you don't you'll probably have a very hard time making the result match up. (Ie have the same spot in the road in both directions at the same time.)
There are systems like this however. If you look up computer vision research you can typically see stuff about systems that automatically build a "map" of the world. (Typically used with robots.)
I'm not sure you understand how BT works. Or it may just be that I can't quite interpret what you mean.
It is true that when you connect to a BT swarm the tracker will inform you of the other clients currently active. Doing this is quite trivial though, even if it is decentralized.
If you spend 50% of your traffic sending keep-alives then you need to redesign you protocol. (Or rather, design it at all.)
No, we do not agree on that point.
I have tried to make my arguments on the matter clear but you haven't really addressed them with anything but repeating that "science only deals with materialism and is therefore flawed".
If you deal with things like beginning of the Universe then things get hairier. Typically these hypothesises are based on mathmatics and physics. In order to test it you do things like try to use the hypothesis about the beginning of the Universe to make predictions that would still be valid. You then try to verify if these predictions are true.
Naturally this doesn't prove that the original hypothesis must be true. But if there is no other way to explain the predictions then it is used.
Intelligent Design and similiar ideas make no predictions. As such they are useless to science as they can not be tested and you can't use them for anything but as a good bedtime story.
Well most stuff on TV is sensationalistic crap. That's hardly the fault of science.
Not quite. It can only deal with things that are testable and thus possible to prove. That's not necessarily the same thing as as only the physical world. As I have pointed out before, if non-physical phenomena can be proven then they will be added.
Thanks but no thanks. I have already spent a lot of time with Christians (during an exchange year to the US) and while I like them and all that it doesn't make me want to become one.
In fact, since I have the benefit of an education in religions (which is mandatory in Sweden) if I did become religious it would probably not be as a Christian. On an aside here I could note that I believe that the US school system would benefit greatly from being taugh religion in school. Just not in science class and all major religions should be covered.
You keep restating this but have not submitted any further argument for why it is so.
You state that scientist "worship" naturalism and materialism.
I explain that naturalism is something which springs from science; not the other way around. Furthermore I explain that science only can deal with things that can be proven. That materia exist can be proven; that non-materia exists isn't proven. As such non-material hypothesis can't be proven neither true nor false with science; as such they have nothing do to in a science classroom. (Or rather, they shouldn't be taught to be science.)
While you can "believe" in science and create a reliogion around it science in itself isn't a belief. It is rather the opposite and only deal with what can be proven true or false.
I'm not quite sure what it is in this that you object to. Because it seems like we are just talking around each-other right now. (OTOH I doubt either one of us will convert the other, that's not really my plan though.
I have already addressed these points in another reply to one of your posts. In short, testable doesn't require that you go back in time but that you can recreate the same (or similar) conditions and create life in that situation.
If you want to reply please do so in the other thread as that will keep the discussion more on track.
Because eDonkey sucks?
Seriously every time I have tried to use that network I have quit the download after a day or so of waiting in queues. This is before getting anything at all of the file. It sould be faster to just go down to Germany or whatever by car and copy the file to a CDR and go back.
I know I'm supposed to be online for a while before the eDonkey style queues start working in my favour; but I just can't be bothered.
Also note that BT isn't like a typical P2P as you can't really search for files. This is in fact a "good thing" as it protects you from " Nbr_of_files * Loads_of_cash = You_are_bancrupt" type lawsuits.
AFAIK RSS+Bittorrent type functions aren't available in other networks. (Not that it'd be impossible to add; but it's quite natural in BT.)
All that said, networks like eDonkey, DC et al certainly have their uses. So does BT (even if they add some distributed functionality to it).
The fundamental difference is that in order for something to be a scientific theory it MUST be proven to work.
So lets take abiosis on Earth as an example. If you can demonstrate that if you take a tube filled with the type of goo that to the best of our knowledge existed on Earth a long time ago and zap that with electricity and from that get simple forms of life. Then that is a scientific hypothesis that fits the facts (as we understand it today at least) and as such it is likely to become a scientific theory (after more testing of course).
This doesn't mean that it must have happened this way. It means that it is ONE of the possible explainations for how it has happened. If you have multiple competing ideas then you can apply Occams Razor to try to find the least unlikely one.
Please note that science doesn't deal with absolutes. We can never be sure that it is "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth". We only know that this is the best explaination we know of today. Scientific knowledge is always changing, that too is a requirement of science.
Given the cause of the universe most of those theories are (like string theory) born in mathmatics. Often you can find reasonable concepts using mathmatics which you can later form into a scientific hypothesis in physics and test.
Science doesn't require that we go back to the point of creation and look at that. Science requires that we can explain what we can observe with our hypothesis. And the evidence of the creation of the universe (natural or otherwise) is all around us.
Science, as of today, will not be able to accept a hypothesis which require supernatural elements in order to explain something. This is because science deals with things that can be measured and tested. That is a fundamental basis for science (much like how faith is a fundamental basis for religion).
As such a scientist would be led to reject any hypothesis which assumes a supernatural element; not really because of the hypothesis but because the basic assumption isn't true.
If you do logic testing based on unverified assumptions you can reach pretty much any conclusion you want. Because of this the scientific method (and logic in general) requires that you check your assumptions before making any conclusions.
As I said before though. If you can *prove* that supernatural phenomena are in fact true, then we can begin to work on the hypothesis of ID from a scientific viewpoint.
This is something many creationist/IDists seem to fail to grasp. The scientific method IS NOT VALID if you do not apply it correctly. If you can't apply it correctly IT MAKES NO PREDICTIONS what so ever. Iow, it would be hard to apply the scientific method to prove the non-existence of god.
Your argument is basically that science isn't fair because it requires things to be scientific. The entire point of science is that it should NOT be dependent on what the scientists (here used to the describe all people who use the scientific method and not only people wearing white robes) believe.
Naturalism states that scientific laws are adecuate to describe all fenomena. So as such it's not really correct to claim science to be naturallistic, as it's really the other way around. (Ie scientific laws are a prerequesite for naturalism, not the other way around.)
What science does is claim that in order for something to be accepted as "scientifically true" it must first be a falsifiable hypothesis and then it must be tested and not be proved false. If it is proved to be false then the hypothesis can be changed to fit the new evidence and retested. This is the way scientific knowledge is formed.
If it can be demonstrated that non-materialistic phenomena are indeed testable and verified as true then those too will become part of the scientific knowledge. I'm sure it will take some time since all people (even scientist) tend to object to change. But as long as it remains true it will be accepted.
As for your two quite brutally cited quotes I'm not quite sure what you want. The theory of punctuated equilibria by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould doesn't seem to provide any evidence against evolution, it is merly an addition to it [1] (although it seems like it's not quite accepted, paelenetology isn't really my field). As to the quote from Richard Lewontin that doesn't contain anything that refutes evolution; he is just one more scientist who tries to explain evolutionary theory to others.
I can see that you are not a naturalist, and that's just fine and dandy by me. But if you want to make ID a scientific hypothesis you must first fulfill the demands that places on a scientific hypothesis. Because as it stands it's not one.
We cannot use science to speak of origins, because we cannot observe the event, document it and repeat it. Science can collect evidence and propose theories about it, but since these theories are untestable, it is not scientific to draw conclusions about origins in the guide of science!
Incorrect.
It is possible to make scientific hypothesis and theories about the origin of life and test there. Naturally it's hard to prove that this is the exact way it happened but if it can be demonstrated that it is in fact possible to "make" life from non-life then that is a big step.
AFAIK quite a bit of progress has been made in this area as well lately.
BTW, Newton was never able to demonstrate what caused the apple that hit him on the head to fall. He could only demonstrate that he could explain it and reproduce it. That is science.
Example 1: human eye. The nerves are connected to the photoreceptors from the outside - the blind spot is where they go through the retina. An engineer would obviously connect them from the outside.
It's interesting to note here that eg certain octopus does not suffer from the affliction of "blind spot" as their eyes have the nerves connected from the back of the eye.
Apparently the creator made us humans into the best it could do. Unfortuntaly some details were skipped and he opted to replace a functional solution with a kludge.
Perhaps the octopus was created by another creator and this is all a big case of "Not Invented Here"?
Just FYI "macro evolution" (which isn't a scientific concept AFAIK) is an observed fact in both flora and fauna.
Besides AFAIK evolution doesn't require there to be a single source of life. Only creation doesn (the creator). For all we know life may very well have spontaniously emerged on multiple places on Earth.
*Sigh*. Kids should be quiet when adults talk.
Sure you could use StringBuffers instead but that hardly matters does it? It certainly doesn't for demonstrative purposes. Besides only really evil people optimise their program early.
I guess you're just angry because I proved you wrong though. But that's ok, when you grow up you'll learn to handle disappointments in a more adult manner.
Japanese DVDs have the same region as Eu; not sure if that's true for PSP as well. But as you wrote, who cares? I never intend to buy a UMD movie in any case.
I can say that JP PSP works fine with US games though. JP PSP can play against US PSP in WiFi if both uses US games. (I don't know anyone who has a US version of a game for which I have JP version so I haven't tested that.)
IMHO if it weren't for sentimental reasons games like Centipide and Ms Pac-Man wouldn't be on that list. Personally I'm not too fond of Tetris (Dr Mario) either, but Centipede?
That game almost killed the mobile phone gaming market. Too boring to even play on the toilet!
Quite a lot of universities ban Bittorrent. And no, you can't just change ports, they look at the traffic.
I bet there are lots of other places that also ban BT, and for all of us it would be nice if HTTP/FTP downloads are still around.
We all know that only a morally void character will flip-flop when presented with new evidence. I mean, otherwise it means they held on to the first opinion without substantial evidence.
Wouldn't this be a software patent, and as such perfectly useable in the rest of the world. Or at least those parts that haven't accepted software patents yet.
Personally I don't think so.
Log.println("Some mess " + obj);
Doesn't seem less readable IMHO than
LOG << "Some mess " << obj << ENDL;
(Note that at least Java will automatically call the toString() method when you print() an object. Good to know for debugging.)
That's just what I think, I'm not really bothered with the overloading personally. I just think it's turning your println into Perl (ie unreadable lines of non-alphanum characters).
When I tried AOP a few years back it was before they added terms like joint and concern. The principle is the same though.
We were doing a compiler in that project and that was a very good time to use AOP. From the CC programs you get a bunch of object code, but you don't want to edit these files as they are generated by other programs. Instead we used aspects which are then "weaved" into the generated code (this is what is called joints and concerns now). In reality it's pretty much a bunch of pre-compiler steps.
Eg we did an Aspect of the compiler code called Interpret. This aspect added a method "interpret()" in all classes, and you can easily define it's default behaviour as well as adding specific behaviours for some classes. So in our case we defined expressions to return their values and print statements to do a println and so on.
Run the pre-compiler steps, then compile and you've got a compiler that can parse and interpret code. Now add a new stamtement type to the grammar, and do it again and you have a new compiler working. No need to hand edit a bunch of files.
Naturally since this was in the early stages one problem was that looking for compiler errors in generated code was a bit of a bother. All in all it was a great help.
Because vectorisation and parallelisation are two very hard problems. Normal compiler optimisations pale in comparison for the most part.
Even the best currently available vectorising compilers will do a pretty poor job compared to human optimisations (in cases where it's possible to do by hand). I have seen examples were a simple c-loop could be hand optimised into half a page of asm where a vectorising compiler produced 4 pages.
It is a REALLY hard problem.
Which leads me to believe that it wasn't doing a very good job at all. Just because it claims to do vectorisation and adds a few asm instructions doesn't mean it's doing a poor job. That they couldn't even detect the iterator variable may even hint that it could produce broken code.
It's not in the standard packages but it seems among others http://lpnotfr.free.fr/debianpkgs.shtml has a repository you can add which carries deb files for it.
You don't have to use only the Debian main servers after all. Not sure why the maintainer hasn't supplied it to the general branch though.
You have no idea what you're talking about, right?
/etc. That's your "registry", only human readable and you can back it up and restore (relatively) effortlessly or move to another computer.
Points 1 and 3: Linux distros typically put settings in
Points 2, 4 and 8: Any modern Linux distro has a package handling system. You don't use the tar.gz files yourself, or even at all. These keep track of all software on your system and keeps it all up-to-date.
Points 5, 6 and 7: That's the work of the desktop app.
Finally: No-one NEEDS to do anything to get Linux out to everyone. OSS is not a product it's a process; you can join now or in a year or never. If you want to change what is happening then involve yourself in the process of making it happen.
First off, "Smartphone" is a class of phones and not a specific OS. Pretty much all those platforms you mention are Smartphones. (I guess you could make a Linux non-Smartphone, but I've never heard of one.)
/lot/ of users.
Now just what are you making? They are looking into the creation of tools that would facilitate the development of mobile applications. Is pretty general. And "Telecom" can be anything from a mobile phone manufacturer to a mobile service provider.
If you want to make applications for the general pulic: Go with Symbian as that has a lot of users. Or go with Java Midp if possible if you want to get a
If you want to make inhouse apps: Go with whatever suits your current/future hardware. Of the mentioned platforms I'd still say Symbian, that has the most compatible handsets. Although it can apparently be a bit hellish to develop for (or I've heard from people who actually do it).
If you are making development tools or looking into making mobile phone platforms: Do your own damned research and don't try run before you can crawl.