You seem to be confusing "truth" with "dealing with truth". Theology and metaphysics "deal with truth" but are not "truth" (if you claim otherwise, please tell me which one of the incompatible religions and conflicting philosophies is true).
Theology and philosophy also have their limitations. There is not one true theological or philosophical system, although some are more true than others.
Yes, and science can't explain why it happens. But it does still happen, none the less, and it is quite powerful. Many think that there is a psychological connection, but they have not yet found the physiological mechanism. Otherwise, it would be a useful effect for doctors to exploit.
ultimate truth?... There isn't one. Sorry to burst your new-age bubble. That's why I became a scientist- to whittle away at the edges of falsehoods.
First of all, I'm a Christian, not a new-ager, even if I think that some forms of alternative medicine might have some validity. Also, my understanding of most new-agers is that they don't believe in "ultimate truth" either.
Secondly, I was necessarily arguing for "ultimate truth", whatever that is, but truth as opposed to falsehood. If you are endeavoring to "whittle away the edges of falsehoods", then either what is left is truth, or it is nothing.
(I'm not knocking alternative mecidine, it surely warrants scientific inquiry!)
I guess the article missed a #8. Anyone invoking the word Truth (Caped or not) in the argument is sure to be a hoaxster. From the Pope on down.
So Socrates and Plato were hoaxters? Much of Plato's writing was non-scientific, but I would think that many of the most rigorous scientists of the day would admit that they contained truth. Of course, I may be wrong. The scientific community might be more jaded than I thought, rejecting those on whose shoulders they stand.
But do these 'millions of people' get well because of, or *in spite of* said ancient folk remedies?
I don't have an answer to that. Acupuncture is the practice that I had in mind when I mentioned "millions of people", as I understand that despite advances in modern medicine, it is still very popular in the east, and is growing in popularity in the west. However, I'm no authority on any of this stuff; I'm just arguing for the possibility that modern medicine has its limitations, and that non-scientific methods may have advantages in some areas.
And if ancient folk remedies were really all that great, why is the average human lifespan so much shorter where that's the only medicine available? (Even when other living conditions are good.)
I'm not saying that ancient practices are superior to modern medicine in all areas, but that they include helpful treatments that cannot yet be explained by science. And if there is some kind of spiritual element to health, science may never be able to explain it. Be that as it may, antibiotics and other modern advances have provided unprecedented advances in health, and I'm glad of that.
I agree that these seven rules are useful for judging bogus science, but I reject the implication that if it's not scientific, it is not true. Just because someone cannot point to a scientific reason, doesn't mean that various herbal or eastern medicines don't work. There is much about the workings of the human body that scientists cannot explain, so I'm not surprised that there are centuries-old non-scientific medical practices that cure millions of people every year.
In the same way, science is unable to deal with any reality that is not observable or verifiable. Theology and metaphysics are by definition unscientific, but that doesn't mean that they don't deal with truth; it just shows the limitations of science.
I'm not knocking science; I'm just saying that it's not ultimate truth.
I've been using Safari for about a year at the $9.95 for 5 slots level. Although I prefer to use physical books, it is frustrating to have to pay >$30 for a book and only use a small fraction of it. Safari has been great for those kinds of books. However, if I'm going to use the book extensively, or read it cover-to-cover, I prefer the old-fashioned kind.
This becomes an issue when you use your GSM SIM card to authenticate access to a WiFi hotspot that is affiliated with your GSM network service provider. This is part of a scheme to provide seamless roaming between GSM/GPRS and WiFi.
My understanding of the problem is that when you access a hotspot that you think belongs to AT&T (or whoever your GSM service provider is) but it actually is a counterfeit, the rogue hotspot can glean information from your SIM card that would enable them to hack into the AT&T GSM network.
I had difficulty when I tried to read the Silmarillion years ago, but recently I listened to the unabridged audio book while driving to work. If you just let it wash over you and don't try to keep track of every name and detail, it can be very enjoyable. The important characters names are repeated enough that you will become familiar with them.
Fortunately there are other people besides Cisco in this business, and some of them are putting more emphasis on SIP. As I mentioned in another post, there is Nortel Networks, and I forgot to mention DynamicSoft, too.
One advantage to SIP is that it is much easier to write a client for it than for H.323. Hopefully this will allow more experimentation with new kinds of applications.
You would need a network of gateways connected to the telephone network at all of the locations you would want to call. Net2Phone provides such a service, but I don't think it is SIP compatable. They also supply VoIP software that is compatable with their network.
Nortel Network's Succession products do have SIP as well as H.323 compatability, and they are designed for building large VoIP networks. Also see SIPCenter for other venders. Hopefully we will see services built with this stuff soon, and then SIP phones, and SIP software for your PC will be more useful.
VoIP works very well in a controlled IP network. However, on the Internet, there is no guarantee of control. Telephony service providers that use VoIP technology often use their own private IP network.
I saw a presentation a few years ago by one service provider who used their own proprietary VoIP protocols over the Internet with VoIP-to-circuit-switched telephony gateways all over the world. Each gateway was connected to at least 2 ISPs, and the gateways would all ping each other to check for congestion. If routes through one ISP were congested, it would switch to the other ISP. If both were congested, it would start routing calls through a backup, traditional long-distance service. Even though they couldn't use the Internet for every call, they were able to use it enough to save a significant amount of money.
This is just a standards group, and its primarily a merger of two existing standards groups, the WAP Forum and the Open Mobile Architecture group. This is really good news because WAP includes a bunch of protocols and data formats especially designed for wireless, such as Wireless Markup Language, but Open Mobile Architecture is built around the new customizable web protocols like XHTML/CSS. There is no need for the industry to be going in two different directions.
Cell phone companies need to be involved so that their phones will all use the same protocols and data formats. This is just like operating system vendors and web browser venders being involved in the IETF and W3C. Content producers like Disney want to be involved so that the standards can support the content and services they are wanting to provide.
Will Microsoft try to force things to their advantage? Of course. They do this all the time in IETF and other standards bodies. Fortunately, they don't always get their way.
The Internet and the Web developed rather organically. A handful of computers could be connected together to begin with, and then people just kept adding to the net until it became something that could make money. But cellular infrastructure costs a lot more to build out, and most people won't pay for a particular service until they can get it just about everywhere. Since cellular has limited range, this means building or upgrading lots of cell sites.
On the application side, the web standards evolved organically as servers and browsers added more features. To try out a new feature you just had to download a Netscape upgrade and you had it. In the cell phone world, though, it is much more difficult to upgrade a phone.
Because of these differences, it will be harder for cellular based services to evolve organically. The players involved will have to agree to more stuff up front before they start building things if they want to be able to interoperate.
By the way, all of this only affects the 2.5G, 3G and beyond cellular world. Wi-Fi is a whole different ball game, and it has more Internet like dynamics. Since access points are cheap, and the terminals are highly programmable computers, experimentation is much easier.
The question of the existence of God is quite a bit different from the existence of purple flying cheese. I seriously devote my life towards the first question, while ignoring the second question, for the following reasons:
Many wise people throughout human history considered it an important question.
The question has serious implications for my life. Life takes on a completely different meaning if it is the product of a loving creator rather than an accident.
Initial impression: boy are they in a hurry. Very aggressive time table for this project. 6 Months to "Emergency DARPA", 18 Months to 3 functional prototypes.
Government projects like this could fuel a recovery in the technology sector. In this "war on terrorism", the U.S. government is going to be looking for technological solutions to the various problems that will be encountered, so we will likely see more projects like this in the next year. Tech people looking for work should keep an eye on the technologies that will be needed. I found a page on Doing Business with DARPA that might be a good starting point.
One warning, however, is that working effectively with the government requires patience. A lot of what they will require will seem stupid, and you will run into plenty of clueless people along the way. However, there are some really bright technical people working for government agencies, so don't despair.
Thanks for the comparison link; it is a very thorough analysis, although it feels like the authors are biased towards H.323. They are definately more telephony minded rather than Internet minded, being worried about centralized control and billing for example.
Since I work for a company that has products using both protocols, any bias I have is hopefully personal rather than commercial. Here are the differences between the protocol that really matter to me:
H.323 is definately telecom oriented, being a product of the ITU. If you just want to get a phone call across the Internet, this is the protocol to use.
The packetizer.com comparison mentions that H.323 is built on the ASN.1 notation, but it fails to mention that there are multiple options for encoding. Most ASN.1 protocols, such as SNMP, use the Basic Encoding Rules (BER), which are relatively easy to understand and implement. However, H.323 is the only protocol family I know of that uses Packed Encoding Rules (PER). The PER spec is HUGE and hard to understand. As of a couple of years ago, just about all H.323 apps were built on three or four commercial toolkits which were quite expensive because there were very few people who wanted to devote a year of their life to figure out PER. Now that OpenH.323 is out, I suppose the situation is better, but this used to be a huge barrier against getting into the H.323 space.
SIP is more Internet oriented, and its design takes advantage of capabilities on the Interent that you don't have in a telephony network. On the Internet, if you want to send queries to a dozen different servers to see which one I'm connected to, its not that big of a deal, but the equivalent search in a telephony network would tie up a lot of resources. Therefore, telephony data tends to be centralized, but Internet data can easily be distributed. This differences shows up in that H.323 favors a central Registration/Authentication Service (RAS), where SIP offers a distributed search mechanism.
Since SIP is a text base protocol, a Perl hacker can experiment with SIP services without a toolkit.
Because of these issues, I think SIP is a better protocol for next generation Internet multimedia. However, SIP is immature, and there are some compatibility problems, and I suspect there are some basic design problems that may continue to plague it. I wonder if we won't see people move onto something that is SOAP based before this is all over. (Of course, now we have to get into the whole SOAP-RPC verses REST debate!)
I'm sure that age discrimination does happen in some places, and I'm sorry that you've had to go through that. However, I know that it is not inevitable. I'm turning 40 this year, and I haven't had a problem with age discrimination so far. My father is a programmer, and at 64 I'm sure he's probably run into it some, but he is also highly valued for his experience. He has never been unemployed for more than a few days since I was born. He did management for a short amount of time, but he didn't like it and went back into the technical side.
One thing that helps him is he is always messing with new stuff. He's been a hacker since before the word was invented, and rather than resting on old skills he's always learning.
It can be difficult to keep up with quickly changing technology, but it can also be exciting. What I've found in my career is that my flexibility, ability to work with others, and desire to learn has allowed me after 17 years in the industry to be in some really interesting work.
So, although this is not a career that guarantees success, there is a lot of opportunity for it. As other posters have said, if you like to program, that's great. A lot of people spend their lives doing work that they hate for subsistence wages. I'm very thankful that I'm paid well to do work that I like.
What has made i-mode popular in Japan is that it has a mix of services that people really like. Much of the revenue comes from seemingly mundane applications such as teenagers exchanging Hello Kitty cartoons and ringer tunes. AT&T said that some of the services that are popular in Japan, such as cartoons, will not be included, so the question is can they figure out a mix of services that will be popular in the U.S.?
The one service that is most likely to be successful is Short Message Service (SMS). But success of SMS depends more on service interoperation and an easy way to type in your message than it does on high bandwidth technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Theology and philosophy also have their limitations. There is not one true theological or philosophical system, although some are more true than others.
Ever heard of the placebo effect?
Yes, and science can't explain why it happens. But it does still happen, none the less, and it is quite powerful. Many think that there is a psychological connection, but they have not yet found the physiological mechanism. Otherwise, it would be a useful effect for doctors to exploit.
ultimate truth? ... There isn't one. Sorry to burst your new-age bubble. That's why I became a scientist- to whittle away at the edges of falsehoods.
First of all, I'm a Christian, not a new-ager, even if I think that some forms of alternative medicine might have some validity. Also, my understanding of most new-agers is that they don't believe in "ultimate truth" either.
Secondly, I was necessarily arguing for "ultimate truth", whatever that is, but truth as opposed to falsehood. If you are endeavoring to "whittle away the edges of falsehoods", then either what is left is truth, or it is nothing.
(I'm not knocking alternative mecidine, it surely warrants scientific inquiry!)
I agree. We might learn something!
I guess the article missed a #8. Anyone invoking the word Truth (Caped or not) in the argument is sure to be a hoaxster. From the Pope on down.
So Socrates and Plato were hoaxters? Much of Plato's writing was non-scientific, but I would think that many of the most rigorous scientists of the day would admit that they contained truth. Of course, I may be wrong. The scientific community might be more jaded than I thought, rejecting those on whose shoulders they stand.
But do these 'millions of people' get well because of, or *in spite of* said ancient folk remedies?
I don't have an answer to that. Acupuncture is the practice that I had in mind when I mentioned "millions of people", as I understand that despite advances in modern medicine, it is still very popular in the east, and is growing in popularity in the west. However, I'm no authority on any of this stuff; I'm just arguing for the possibility that modern medicine has its limitations, and that non-scientific methods may have advantages in some areas.
And if ancient folk remedies were really all that great, why is the average human lifespan so much shorter where that's the only medicine available? (Even when other living conditions are good.)
I'm not saying that ancient practices are superior to modern medicine in all areas, but that they include helpful treatments that cannot yet be explained by science. And if there is some kind of spiritual element to health, science may never be able to explain it. Be that as it may, antibiotics and other modern advances have provided unprecedented advances in health, and I'm glad of that.
I agree that these seven rules are useful for judging bogus science, but I reject the implication that if it's not scientific, it is not true. Just because someone cannot point to a scientific reason, doesn't mean that various herbal or eastern medicines don't work. There is much about the workings of the human body that scientists cannot explain, so I'm not surprised that there are centuries-old non-scientific medical practices that cure millions of people every year.
In the same way, science is unable to deal with any reality that is not observable or verifiable. Theology and metaphysics are by definition unscientific, but that doesn't mean that they don't deal with truth; it just shows the limitations of science.
I'm not knocking science; I'm just saying that it's not ultimate truth.
I've been using Safari for about a year at the $9.95 for 5 slots level. Although I prefer to use physical books, it is frustrating to have to pay >$30 for a book and only use a small fraction of it. Safari has been great for those kinds of books. However, if I'm going to use the book extensively, or read it cover-to-cover, I prefer the old-fashioned kind.
This becomes an issue when you use your GSM SIM card to authenticate access to a WiFi hotspot that is affiliated with your GSM network service provider. This is part of a scheme to provide seamless roaming between GSM/GPRS and WiFi.
My understanding of the problem is that when you access a hotspot that you think belongs to AT&T (or whoever your GSM service provider is) but it actually is a counterfeit, the rogue hotspot can glean information from your SIM card that would enable them to hack into the AT&T GSM network.
I've got bluetooth on my mobile, and GPRS. Someone please tell me why I'd want 802.11b as well ?
Two reasons:
Years from now people will be asking the question, "why does it start with C:?"
I had difficulty when I tried to read the Silmarillion years ago, but recently I listened to the unabridged audio book while driving to work. If you just let it wash over you and don't try to keep track of every name and detail, it can be very enjoyable. The important characters names are repeated enough that you will become familiar with them.
One advantage to SIP is that it is much easier to write a client for it than for H.323. Hopefully this will allow more experimentation with new kinds of applications.
Nortel Network's Succession products do have SIP as well as H.323 compatability, and they are designed for building large VoIP networks. Also see SIPCenter for other venders. Hopefully we will see services built with this stuff soon, and then SIP phones, and SIP software for your PC will be more useful.
VoIP works very well in a controlled IP network. However, on the Internet, there is no guarantee of control. Telephony service providers that use VoIP technology often use their own private IP network.
I saw a presentation a few years ago by one service provider who used their own proprietary VoIP protocols over the Internet with VoIP-to-circuit-switched telephony gateways all over the world. Each gateway was connected to at least 2 ISPs, and the gateways would all ping each other to check for congestion. If routes through one ISP were congested, it would switch to the other ISP. If both were congested, it would start routing calls through a backup, traditional long-distance service. Even though they couldn't use the Internet for every call, they were able to use it enough to save a significant amount of money.
This is just a standards group, and its primarily a merger of two existing standards groups, the WAP Forum and the Open Mobile Architecture group. This is really good news because WAP includes a bunch of protocols and data formats especially designed for wireless, such as Wireless Markup Language, but Open Mobile Architecture is built around the new customizable web protocols like XHTML/CSS. There is no need for the industry to be going in two different directions.
Cell phone companies need to be involved so that their phones will all use the same protocols and data formats. This is just like operating system vendors and web browser venders being involved in the IETF and W3C. Content producers like Disney want to be involved so that the standards can support the content and services they are wanting to provide.
Will Microsoft try to force things to their advantage? Of course. They do this all the time in IETF and other standards bodies. Fortunately, they don't always get their way.
The Internet and the Web developed rather organically. A handful of computers could be connected together to begin with, and then people just kept adding to the net until it became something that could make money. But cellular infrastructure costs a lot more to build out, and most people won't pay for a particular service until they can get it just about everywhere. Since cellular has limited range, this means building or upgrading lots of cell sites.
On the application side, the web standards evolved organically as servers and browsers added more features. To try out a new feature you just had to download a Netscape upgrade and you had it. In the cell phone world, though, it is much more difficult to upgrade a phone.
Because of these differences, it will be harder for cellular based services to evolve organically. The players involved will have to agree to more stuff up front before they start building things if they want to be able to interoperate.
By the way, all of this only affects the 2.5G, 3G and beyond cellular world. Wi-Fi is a whole different ball game, and it has more Internet like dynamics. Since access points are cheap, and the terminals are highly programmable computers, experimentation is much easier.
Government projects like this could fuel a recovery in the technology sector. In this "war on terrorism", the U.S. government is going to be looking for technological solutions to the various problems that will be encountered, so we will likely see more projects like this in the next year. Tech people looking for work should keep an eye on the technologies that will be needed. I found a page on Doing Business with DARPA that might be a good starting point.
One warning, however, is that working effectively with the government requires patience. A lot of what they will require will seem stupid, and you will run into plenty of clueless people along the way. However, there are some really bright technical people working for government agencies, so don't despair.
Since I work for a company that has products using both protocols, any bias I have is hopefully personal rather than commercial. Here are the differences between the protocol that really matter to me:
- H.323 is definately telecom oriented, being a product of the ITU. If you just want to get a phone call across the Internet, this is the protocol to use.
- The packetizer.com comparison mentions that H.323 is built on the ASN.1 notation, but it fails to mention that there are multiple options for encoding. Most ASN.1 protocols, such as SNMP, use the Basic Encoding Rules (BER), which are relatively easy to understand and implement. However, H.323 is the only protocol family I know of that uses Packed Encoding Rules (PER). The PER spec is HUGE and hard to understand. As of a couple of years ago, just about all H.323 apps were built on three or four commercial toolkits which were quite expensive because there were very few people who wanted to devote a year of their life to figure out PER. Now that OpenH.323 is out, I suppose the situation is better, but this used to be a huge barrier against getting into the H.323 space.
- SIP is more Internet oriented, and its design takes advantage of capabilities on the Interent that you don't have in a telephony network. On the Internet, if you want to send queries to a dozen different servers to see which one I'm connected to, its not that big of a deal, but the equivalent search in a telephony network would tie up a lot of resources. Therefore, telephony data tends to be centralized, but Internet data can easily be distributed. This differences shows up in that H.323 favors a central Registration/Authentication Service (RAS), where SIP offers a distributed search mechanism.
- Since SIP is a text base protocol, a Perl hacker can experiment with SIP services without a toolkit.
Because of these issues, I think SIP is a better protocol for next generation Internet multimedia. However, SIP is immature, and there are some compatibility problems, and I suspect there are some basic design problems that may continue to plague it. I wonder if we won't see people move onto something that is SOAP based before this is all over. (Of course, now we have to get into the whole SOAP-RPC verses REST debate!)I'm sure that age discrimination does happen in some places, and I'm sorry that you've had to go through that. However, I know that it is not inevitable. I'm turning 40 this year, and I haven't had a problem with age discrimination so far. My father is a programmer, and at 64 I'm sure he's probably run into it some, but he is also highly valued for his experience. He has never been unemployed for more than a few days since I was born. He did management for a short amount of time, but he didn't like it and went back into the technical side.
One thing that helps him is he is always messing with new stuff. He's been a hacker since before the word was invented, and rather than resting on old skills he's always learning.
It can be difficult to keep up with quickly changing technology, but it can also be exciting. What I've found in my career is that my flexibility, ability to work with others, and desire to learn has allowed me after 17 years in the industry to be in some really interesting work.
So, although this is not a career that guarantees success, there is a lot of opportunity for it. As other posters have said, if you like to program, that's great. A lot of people spend their lives doing work that they hate for subsistence wages. I'm very thankful that I'm paid well to do work that I like.
That's what the pause button and chapter select on the DVD player is for. You don't have to watch the whole thing in one sitting.
I felt that the movie was a little bit rushed, so I think an extra hour might be perfect.
What has made i-mode popular in Japan is that it has a mix of services that people really like. Much of the revenue comes from seemingly mundane applications such as teenagers exchanging Hello Kitty cartoons and ringer tunes. AT&T said that some of the services that are popular in Japan, such as cartoons, will not be included, so the question is can they figure out a mix of services that will be popular in the U.S.?
The one service that is most likely to be successful is Short Message Service (SMS). But success of SMS depends more on service interoperation and an easy way to type in your message than it does on high bandwidth technology.