Mandatory voting doesn't mean that people actually have to vote, they just have to get their name ticked off. If they like, they can write some rude comment on the ballot paper and drop it in the box. Perfectly legal. Still, you do get more ignorant voters. One of the most common types of ignorant vote is voting for the person who's at the top of the ballot paper (the "donkey vote" in Australia). Part of me wants a basic level of knowledge required before one can vote as well (I think a quiz like "who is the current president?" might not be that bad...) but it's not really practical or ethical for many reasons.
On the other hand, if voting is optional, then it opens up an avenue for unscrupulous politicians to manipulate the results: they hold an election under conditions which make it difficult or annoying for a certain segment of the population to vote, and hope that less of them turn up. For instance, I think that holding an election on weekdays is generally a bad idea: most people who work are working on a weekday, and voting is often more inconvenient for these people. So voting is more inconvenient for the group in society that pays the most tax.
In Queensland state elections, they have "optional preferential" voting, where you don't have to give preferences to candidates if you don't want to. You can give as many or as few preferences as you like. Putting a "1" in the box beside your chosen candidate is a valid vote that is counted, and if they are knocked out, then your vote is discarded.
It makes for some interesting voting patterns, as you mention. In the most recent state election, the incumbent premier, Peter Beattie, was pretty much assured of winning. However, he encouraged people to just put a "1" next to the Labor candidate (his party), and not put down any preferences. This annoyed the smaller parties, who can sometimes get a seat by making a preference deal with the major parties. The deals are: "We'll ask our voters to put you as second preference if you ask your voters to put as as second preference," or a similar idea. Obviously, in electorates where the Labor party wasn't going to be one of the top two parties after preference redistribution, the candidate who would've gotten preferences from Labor voters would get less votes and probably lose. In extreme cases where almost nobody puts down preferences, it reverts to "whoever has the most votes wins" contest, which tends to favour major parties.
I strongly disagree, the era of kicking windows for being unstable is hardly over, it is still extremely unstable. But it is better. The biggest thing making a windows system unstable is lack of true protected memory space. Actually implementing this would mean program startup would appear to slow down and microsoft won't have that in exchange for stability, an app will always be able to hit the system. The system will always be insecure because it does implement kernel level handling of process security. Instead it relies on layers laid atop the kernel for security and every user is admin as far as the windows kernel is concerned.
Well, Windows (NT, not 9x) does implement correct memory protection. I've done quite a bit of programming, and never had the computer crash because of my program overwriting memory where it shouldn't have. You can't read other programs' address spaces unless they deliberately share memory.
The Windows kernel does know about security (including process security), it's not just a Win32 API thing. Programs which are run in kernel mode (during the boot screen) are run under the "localsystem" account by default, and you can start services under the localsystem account as well. But programs which are run during *nix startup scripts are usually run as "root". The kernel does know about users and security, including ACLs. The Win32 API layer is actually very close to the kernel-mode API (NT API), and most Win32 API (kernel, GDI, and USER) calls result in a message passed to part of the kernel. Some security is provided by the login program, for example, but it's the same deal as with "login" in Unix.
And not every user is an admin. That's just the default in WinXP Home. Not Pro. Not Win2K, NT or.NET server.
However, Windows has it's share of problems. The scheduler in particular is one of the weakest parts of the NT kernel IMHO. Fairness is a major problem: processes can be starved for tens of seconds at a time fairly easily. This is unacceptable for an interactive process that the user is waiting on. The VM has a few cases which cause it to thrash excessively, but it's not too bad. There are far more issues outside the kernel, but on the whole, the kernel is quite solidly designed.
Actually, that it *has* predicted some things well. You cannot say with certainty that it *can*.
For all you know, the world is utter and complete chaos lasting for billions of years. With complete randomness every moment changing the structure of the universe. And, as it just so happens, within the randomness and chaos, "order" seemed to appear for a century or two. No different than someone takiung a random set of numbers from pi and finding order, seeing that it lasts in order for a few more numbers, and then completely goes otherwise.
Very true. IMHO, the way that the universe does seem to be predictable is absolutely amazing.
You may have missed my point. I was showing two things. One, that just as Science has its way of discerning truths, so does Religion. Neither being better than the other. Two, that has its place. Whereas Science can provide where religion cannot, Religion can provide where Science cannot. In the places where they can both provide is where one makes his choice.
OK, I think I understand what you're saying now. I think I've got a subtlely different idea of what a truth is to you. Somehow slightly less personal or something. I suppose I think of truths as things that transcend an individual's beliefs. In other words, there are lots of religious truths, which conflict to an extent, so according to my definition, they aren't all truths because they all can't be completely true. For example, one person says "there is only one God, not ten", and someone else says, "there are exactly ten Gods, not one". I don't understand how both can be true simultaneously, but that's kinda a logical thing, and... yuck.
And regarding logic: The only reason that we see logic around is because people understand it in a sense. It fits in with a certain mode of thought that many people are comfortable with after some practice, and it can be applied in science, which as we've already established, isn't proof, but is useful. These things also apply to religion.
Inference is Logical.
Sorry, inference was an ambigious word to choose. I meant induction (not in the mathematical sense), not deduction. Deduction is logical, but induction isn't.
Interpretation, extrapolation, and even guesses are merely brute-force attacks to provide Science with what to test.
OK, yes, but if you're a scientist, and "do" science, then you have to be able to do that stuff. Even if you're just applying a theory, you still have to match up a physical situation to a more mathematical/logical description, which isn't covered by logic.
First, as someone pointed out to me, the difference between zero and one, is much greater than the difference between one and two. So, even if you did prove to me that wild theory that space "expanded" , it still provides no solution for how the first bit of space got there.
Yes, that was just me plucking a simplistic theory out as an example. Science has no answer about how the first bit of space got there. Current physics breaks down when things get that compact. At the first 10^-40 seconds or so (not very long;) ) don't have any sort of widely accepted theory to describe them, or the moment of creation itself. There are lots of ideas around, but that's beyond science's self-imposed boundaries at the moment. It might be beyond science's reach forever.
As an aside, one of the most annoying things is how current versions of IE, if completing a page render when the user is dragging the window (and assuming solid drag is off), "cancel" out of the drag.
My pet hate, similar to the complaint you describe, is how Windows always makes menus disappear whenever a new window appears. It drives me nuts. I often start quite a few programs when I've just logged on, and then search for something in the start menu, and I'm about to click, and the menu disappears! I've got focus-follows-mouse turned on, and the option where programs can't steal the focus, and it still happens.
Thanks for the in-depth reply:). My point re science was that it can predict reality very well. There's a huge philiosiphical debate that you can get into about what is physically real and what isn't, what our observations really mean, and whether the predictable behaviour that we observe is really there or just an illusion.
I agree with what you're saying on the whole. My personal belief is that religions have been there for two reasons: to give people comfort that there are "greater things" out there, and to explain things that have no other explanation. As science progresses and offers alternative explanations for things (such as how the planet came into existance, or what stars are), there is less need for religions to explain phenomena. I really don't see what the problem is with people saying: OK, so the story of Creation was a simplistic, symbolic way of explaining a complex process to people thousands of years ago, but isn't literally true. The fact that the mechanism for Creation was in fact so fantasically complex that humanity still can't understand it fully enhances the believability of God, as you said. The classic example of an explanation moving from a religious domain to a scientific one is Gallileo's explanation of how the Earth fit into the solar system, as opposed to Aristotle's. People's interpretation of religion over time necessarily reflects on other aspects of their society: obviously current Christians' interpretations of the Bible is substantially different to that of Christians 2000 years ago.
To my mind, it is perfectly plausible that our translated record of people's beliefs thousands of years ago may not have been the word of God in the way that we currently interpret the words. Indeed, the message may have been tailored to the people whom it targets to fit in with the existing ideas at the time, or they may have interpreted God's message in this way themselves. Again, IMHO, this doesn't lessen the possibility or plausability of God, or dilute the fundamental messages of a religion.
By the way, the bit about space being created: yes, it's a very difficult theory to understand, and when it comes down to it, the interpretation is just an interpretation. It's the maths which counts, but it's hard to say what the maths describes if it's not the creation of space itself. It relies on the idea that space may not be a huge expanse that's everywhere, that space may curve back onto itself. The standard explanation asks you to imagine being an ant on a balloon and thinking of what you observe as the balloon is inflated. The amount of space (surface area on the balloon) actually increases in this process, and space could be curved in that way (General relativity describes space in this way). So space could have gone from being nonexistant to being a very very small "balloon" in a sense. Nasty to think about, I know;).
And I disagree about logic not being a good way of proving things. Logic provides an excellent way of developing ideas (Maths is entirely based on logic), but it can be misapplied. The problems that you see with logic are those that you see when it is misapplied: when the system that you're considering doesn't fit within the assumptions of a purely logical system (i.e. has statements which are not either true or false only). Not just that, but science relies on other things apart from logic, such as inference, interpretation, extrapolation, and straight out guessing at times. So you can't say that logic doesn't provide good truths. It does provide truths that are as good as you get, but some people don't understand how it's applied, and so people claim that "X is logically true" when it's not. In fact, you can't say anything at all about our physical world using just logic without a whole lot of assumptions that are usually left out.
We have pretty good evidence that testability leads to better results. Look at all the technology around you. Virtually all of it was designed using a combination of theory and then prototypes to test the results of that theory. Many inventions and phenomena were predicted by the theories that you deride. For example, the transistor was predicted in the 1920s, and electromagnetic waves were predicted in the 1800s. Most of the tall buildings that you see are standing because of the predictions of Newton's laws, something that he probably did not envisage in the 1600s. Ironically, the fact that science has gotten so far as for you to not understand where it "begins", so to speak, is further testament to that. Science is science because it is rigorously testable, and that property is unique compared to other disciplines.
You can go out and make measurements yourself that demonstrate in a very accurate way how the theories work. It's amazing how much science you can see around you (and measure!) every day, with no equipment except your own body. Science can predict what is possible, and what will happen in certain circumstances, with incredible accuracy. That's not to say that religion has no value, but from a purely pragmatic viewpoint, applying logic and scientific investigation gets you results time after time. Religion may not. What you get out of it depends on how much faith you put into it, and even then, society may discover something the next day which will show beyond reasonable doubt that you were actually wrong about certain beliefs.
One further nitpick: the Big Bang doesn't mean an explosion in the normal sense. Time and space themselves were created. There was no matter at that stage, only energy. There was no sound. Even light, a manifestation of the electromagnetic force, wasn't in the form that we know it today. Yes, there are very specific observations that are extremely hard to explain without such a theory. You won't see detailed explanations for the composition of matter and the way it interacts with itself in most religion's theories of creation. But you'll need to spend years leaning about physics to even understand the big bang theory as it currently stands.
An explanation of why the universe is, is not something that mainstream science claims to have a definate answer to. There's lots of ideas, such as the many-universe theories (which I don't really subscribe to personally) that say something like, "Well, one of the tickets (universes) in the lottery has to win." Or the anthropomorphic ones: "If the universe didn't have intelligent life, then I wouldn't be around to know if I lost." Or a myriad of other ideas that aren't based around a God per se. So in summary, just because it's improbable that a universe would be this way by chance, it doesn't mean that it's impossible, ever.
I think this trend towards putting DRM into other things, e.g. business, is worrying. In many cases these days, electronic copies are replacing paper copies of documents, and being able to "lock down" electronic documents so that they can't be copied, printed, etc. makes them far less useful than a dead-trees version to the receiver. Look at overly restrictive e-books, and see what a huge market there is there...
In some cases in businesses (I'm thinking engineering-related stuff especially), being able to access documents at the right time may even be life-saving. For example, say you contract out someone to build a power station for you. If something goes wrong with the power station, then that could be a major problem if the DRM settings on your drawings are stuffed. Even in less extreme situations, someone sending you documents with bad DRM settings can render them useless at inopportune moments, with no prior warning. In my opinion, Microsoft is trying to create a far larger market for DRM technology than actually exists.
Heh. I think the reason that Excel is used in place of a database is for one main reason: Access is crap. Excel is actually faster and certainly more reliable for many things, and you can do a lot with linked sheets, lookup functions, filters, and maybe even a VBA form if you need that stuff. Not only that, but in Excel you can do more complex math and see results graphically. For many simple applications that don't need queries which trace through dozens of tables, Excel is better. As far as the back-end goes, I think Excel is the best MS-Office app by far.
Anyway, yes, I know what you mean about people wasting time with Office. But people will always find a way of wasting time. And there are some pretty clever hacked-together VBA apps in Office, despite Microsoft's obvious attempts to have VBA and Automation go the way of MS Bob. So there are some good things that have come out of it all.
You're right, it isn't possible to be completely objective. But it is possible for some organizations to be more objective than others, and that doesn't depend on one's own preconcieved notions. Yes, you're less likely to get annoyed if you agree with the bias, but I find myself annoyed by excessive bias in news reporting even when I agree with the point of view. For example, reporting more than one side to a story without using loaded words is a good start.
There's no doubt that Slashdot has a bias. However, given that the editors rarely edit submissions, and maybe only add their own two cents worth afterwards, it's also bias on the part of submitters whose stories get accepted. Of course, the editors' bias comes through in the choice of stories that get accepted, too. But if everyone who submits a story tries to clearly separate their opinion from a reasonably objective summary of the facts, we'd get a long way.
OK, well, there are three things that I'd like to comment on:
(1) Time is not just how fast things change. Time also provides a way of ordering observed events. I don't see how you could remove time from Einstein's equations. I mean, there are lots of situations where physicists make up "non-physical" quantities that aren't necessarily part of a physical understanding. These quantities could be more or less removed from the physical equations. Many people would consider electromagnetic fields to be non-physical, for example. I've actually never seen a clear definition of what a "physical quantity" is, but time and space are pretty much assumed to be physical. In classical quantum mechanics, time is treated as a parameter of the system, not as an observable (i.e. physical quantity in the normal sense) like position, energy, momentum etc. I think though, in relativistic quantum mechanics, time is an observable, because otherwise the relativistic transformations wouldn't work correctly. It's hard to get anywhere if you don't want to assume that there's anything like time that really exists.
(2) Objects travelling near the speed of light don't actually have slower time, they just seem to from a "stationary" observer. The reverse also applies: the stationary observer seems to have slower time from the point of view of the "moving" object. So neither observer's time is actually slower. When objects accelerate, e.g. in the twin paradox, then you can say that one object's time is going slower than anothers, but that's a whole new kettle of fish.
(3) If the total energy available were to change between different reference frames in the way that you describe, it probably would mean that different outcomes are observed in different reference frames. This is a bad thing, if say one observer sees something blow up and another observer sees it stay intact. As it is, the total energy of an object does depend on the observer (the kinetic energy changes in different reference frames), but this energy doesn't necessarily affect the internal workings of the moving object.
Anyway, if you want to read a good popular account about this sort of stuff that gets the details right, I'd recommend The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. It doesn't cover the theory specifically mentioned in this article, but covers a "competing" theory, string theory. On the way, it also discusses special and general relativity, the nature of space and time, quantum mechanics, extra dimensions, and all sorts of other fun stuff.
So the Administrator installs the game, but ordinary users run it. Not a big deal, really. You don't have to log off even: Windows 2K and XP both automatically ask you if you want to run programs named "setup.exe" as an Admin. Lots of programs work better when installed as root in Unix too, especially when they need to be accessible to lots of users.
Cool. That's a really good idea. It'd solve Telstra's problem of being a monopoly and having poor customer service, and allow the government to keep costs in the bush low. I'm not sure what it'd do to Telstra's wholesaling business, because I've never dealt with that side of them.
Telstra is bound by legislation to provide a "minimum level" of service to bush, or something like that. I know, it's weak, but Telstra is constantly being harassed at the moment because of it, and it does nothing for Telstra's reputation to have bad service levels in the bush. There's no reason why this legislation and mindset would go away if Telstra was privatised. Telstra's service ranges from reasonably good to pretty appaling, but it was far worse when it was fully government owned and had no competition. If you want to see what governments do when they run stuff, look no further than the disgusting inefficiency of the public service as a whole, and stuff like the ATO or Centrelink in particular. Huge amounts of red tape, with a mentality like they've got tenure. Telstra still has a lot of this sort of mentality and it'll take some time before it gets shaken out. And as for Telstra being an essential service: so is electricity, and it's going (or has gone, depending on where you are) that way too. So is the whole food industry.
On the other hand, I completely agree with you on the point that Alston has no clue about the IT and telecomms industry. I mean, had he actually had any experience with a large-scale communications network before 1996 or so? Even using the Internet? I have my doubts there. Heck, most slashdotters probably used a computer before he did, and he's minister for IT.
The reason that time is regarded as a dimension like space is because you can "rotate" space-time (as a whole) in a sense. When an observer travels past you, their reference frames of space and time will effectively be rotated (transformed in a predictable way). And their idea of "time" will depend on what you think of as time, as well as what you think of as position, or space.
Yes, time is different to the spatial dimensions; it's often converted into a distance-like quantity by multiplying by i and c (that's sqrt(-1) and speed of light). The other spatial dimensions aren't imaginary. The reason for the i is so that the metric for space-time in special relativity turns out to look like the Euclidean metric. In normal words, this means that you can write a "distance" in space-time (which is the same no matter how you "rotate" the axes, i.e. no matter what speed you travel at) as s^2=x^2 + y^2 + z^2 + (ict)^2. This is all special rel stuff, it gets much ickier when you look at general rel. The metrics (i.e. "distances") in space aren't Euclidean because of the curvature of space-time, and nothing seems to work out nicely.
But if the billboard automatically chooses an ad based on the station, then it could be amusing. Also, if the billboard was badly designed, you might be able to get the billboard to change ads really quickly by changing your transmitted frequency quickly. Imagine a DOS attack on a billboard;).
Nonsense.. I have antiques and heirlooms in my family that have been there for generations. I'm fairly confident that the public at large won't have access to those anytime soon.
Perturb didn't say that all property rights expire, he said that in some cases, they can. I'm not a lawyer, but I'd give an example of Hong Kong: the British had property rights over it for 99 years, but not forever.
Are there any statuatory defenses for driving off in someone's car? Is there a law somewhere that lists guidelines for when a complete stranger can take something from a store and not infringe the owner's rights? (FBI seizures don't count:-)
I can't think of an analogy there, but there are analogies to other property rights. For example, I'd argue that an important property right is controlling who is and isn't allowed on your property. However, it is still legal for someone to approach the door to your house and knock on it, which you could think of as analagous to a "fair use" right. If you ask them to leave, then they have to leave, but in many cases you can't stop them from approaching your front door.
There are many similarities between property rights and copyrights. Whether you like the term "intellectual property" or not is up to you. I personally dislike it because it's often a misapplied analogy, and by the way you've written your post, I'd say that you think that too. But if lawyers want to define copyright as a type of property right then that's OK, as long as copyrights aren't stretched beyond what they should be because of these similarities.
I think this was one of the improvements that the the Hotmail article noted. Firstly, he/she notes:
It proves to be difficult to configure IIS in a precisely controlled way. The metabase is obscure and poorly documented, and produced too many surprises. Furthermore, a system created using sysprep does not produce a ready-to-run metabase.
Consequently, it was necessary to construct the metabase by using scripts. The scripts were a mixture of command files that repeatedly call the mdutil utility, and some special-purpose pieces of scripting code (VBScript in this case, although any language that supports COM would work). The scripts are run as part of the mini-setup step that follows construction of the operating system on the target computer.
Figuring out the metabase structure, which elements needed to be set, and how to suppress the unwanted elements (for example, the trees defining the default and administration site) was the most complex and error-prone part of the entire setup design. Considerable reverse engineering was necessary. Major improvement is needed in the way the metabase is described to users, and the way that administrators can script the commonest tasks.
In the conclusion, the fact that IIS6 programmers are looking into that issue is stated:
3) The metabase needs to be ripped out and replaced with something that is much easier for an administrator to see and understand, and be confident that there are no hidden surprises. The IIS6 planners have heard this opinion.
So that feature may be due to Microsoft's Hotmail experience.
I've never seen one of the chips, so your opinion is worth more than mine. However, odds are that slowness starting up mozilla is due to a slow/cheap hard disk, and not much RAM, and postscript print filters use floating point math. Athlons have pretty good FP hardware for their clock speed, so I'd that the Vias would be pretty bad in comparison.
That said, I wouldn't buy one. But I know people who would put up with some things being slower (even significantly slower) if they could save a hundred bucks.
We're already getting junk mail from companies which say in fine print down the bottom, "You must accept the terms and conditions on the back page to use this catalogue." I'm allowed to read the thing whether or not I accept their stupid terms!
DivX decoding is very floating-point intensive, moreso than MPEG 2 decoding for DVDs. This Via chip has a very slow FP unit. It probably would be slightly slower than a Celeron 800MHz on office apps, but much better than half the speed. FP is important if you're doing 3D gaming, lots of video encoding/decoding (watching DvDs or DivX), or scientific computations/simulations, but otherwise I doubt it would make a big difference. It's unlikely that a web browser would be significantly slower, for instance. So it really depends on what you're doing as to whether the extra $100 or whatever is worth it.
Let me just point out that you're free to do the same. Lie, persuade, complain, change services, take undue advantage of introductory offers... Really. Being aggressive is sometimes necessary, and standing up for yourself will usually get yourself a better deal. But don't be rude if you can avoid it. Get angry, sure, but rudeness often just gets you a bad comment next to your name, and less patience the next time you have to deal with them. Treat them in the same way as they treat you.
This sort of stuff has been going on ever since there was competition. People have been taking advantage of each other for thousands of years. It's not new, it's just obvious in this case.
And since when did "free" ever mean "fair"? Fairness is nice, but for the most part I'd prefer to have freedoms than government-mandated "fairness".
Well, Telstra (biggest telco in Australia) advertises "unlimited" dialup for $AU25/month. It's unlimited total time, but they disconnect you every 3 hours and charge you a high per-MB rate if you download more than around 300MB/month. It's pretty decpetive, and they have even advertised the 3 hour time limit as a feature ("we'll disconnect you after 3 hours if you forget to disconnect yourself!"). They're also the major telco, so the odds are that they also get money for every call you make to reconnect. IMHO, it's rather deceptive and dishonest on a number of fronts, but luckily you can easily get a better deal from lots of other ISPs.
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On the other hand, if voting is optional, then it opens up an avenue for unscrupulous politicians to manipulate the results: they hold an election under conditions which make it difficult or annoying for a certain segment of the population to vote, and hope that less of them turn up. For instance, I think that holding an election on weekdays is generally a bad idea: most people who work are working on a weekday, and voting is often more inconvenient for these people. So voting is more inconvenient for the group in society that pays the most tax.
It makes for some interesting voting patterns, as you mention. In the most recent state election, the incumbent premier, Peter Beattie, was pretty much assured of winning. However, he encouraged people to just put a "1" next to the Labor candidate (his party), and not put down any preferences. This annoyed the smaller parties, who can sometimes get a seat by making a preference deal with the major parties. The deals are: "We'll ask our voters to put you as second preference if you ask your voters to put as as second preference," or a similar idea. Obviously, in electorates where the Labor party wasn't going to be one of the top two parties after preference redistribution, the candidate who would've gotten preferences from Labor voters would get less votes and probably lose. In extreme cases where almost nobody puts down preferences, it reverts to "whoever has the most votes wins" contest, which tends to favour major parties.
Well, Windows (NT, not 9x) does implement correct memory protection. I've done quite a bit of programming, and never had the computer crash because of my program overwriting memory where it shouldn't have. You can't read other programs' address spaces unless they deliberately share memory.
The Windows kernel does know about security (including process security), it's not just a Win32 API thing. Programs which are run in kernel mode (during the boot screen) are run under the "localsystem" account by default, and you can start services under the localsystem account as well. But programs which are run during *nix startup scripts are usually run as "root". The kernel does know about users and security, including ACLs. The Win32 API layer is actually very close to the kernel-mode API (NT API), and most Win32 API (kernel, GDI, and USER) calls result in a message passed to part of the kernel. Some security is provided by the login program, for example, but it's the same deal as with "login" in Unix.
And not every user is an admin. That's just the default in WinXP Home. Not Pro. Not Win2K, NT or .NET server.
However, Windows has it's share of problems. The scheduler in particular is one of the weakest parts of the NT kernel IMHO. Fairness is a major problem: processes can be starved for tens of seconds at a time fairly easily. This is unacceptable for an interactive process that the user is waiting on. The VM has a few cases which cause it to thrash excessively, but it's not too bad. There are far more issues outside the kernel, but on the whole, the kernel is quite solidly designed.
For all you know, the world is utter and complete chaos lasting for billions of years. With complete randomness every moment changing the structure of the universe. And, as it just so happens, within the randomness and chaos, "order" seemed to appear for a century or two. No different than someone takiung a random set of numbers from pi and finding order, seeing that it lasts in order for a few more numbers, and then completely goes otherwise.
Very true. IMHO, the way that the universe does seem to be predictable is absolutely amazing.
You may have missed my point. I was showing two things. One, that just as Science has its way of discerning truths, so does Religion. Neither being better than the other. Two, that has its place. Whereas Science can provide where religion cannot, Religion can provide where Science cannot. In the places where they can both provide is where one makes his choice.
OK, I think I understand what you're saying now. I think I've got a subtlely different idea of what a truth is to you. Somehow slightly less personal or something. I suppose I think of truths as things that transcend an individual's beliefs. In other words, there are lots of religious truths, which conflict to an extent, so according to my definition, they aren't all truths because they all can't be completely true. For example, one person says "there is only one God, not ten", and someone else says, "there are exactly ten Gods, not one". I don't understand how both can be true simultaneously, but that's kinda a logical thing, and... yuck.
And regarding logic: The only reason that we see logic around is because people understand it in a sense. It fits in with a certain mode of thought that many people are comfortable with after some practice, and it can be applied in science, which as we've already established, isn't proof, but is useful. These things also apply to religion.
Inference is Logical.
Sorry, inference was an ambigious word to choose. I meant induction (not in the mathematical sense), not deduction. Deduction is logical, but induction isn't.
Interpretation, extrapolation, and even guesses are merely brute-force attacks to provide Science with what to test.
OK, yes, but if you're a scientist, and "do" science, then you have to be able to do that stuff. Even if you're just applying a theory, you still have to match up a physical situation to a more mathematical/logical description, which isn't covered by logic.
First, as someone pointed out to me, the difference between zero and one, is much greater than the difference between one and two. So, even if you did prove to me that wild theory that space "expanded" , it still provides no solution for how the first bit of space got there.
Yes, that was just me plucking a simplistic theory out as an example. Science has no answer about how the first bit of space got there. Current physics breaks down when things get that compact. At the first 10^-40 seconds or so (not very long ;) ) don't have any sort of widely accepted theory to describe them, or the moment of creation itself. There are lots of ideas around, but that's beyond science's self-imposed boundaries at the moment. It might be beyond science's reach forever.
My pet hate, similar to the complaint you describe, is how Windows always makes menus disappear whenever a new window appears. It drives me nuts. I often start quite a few programs when I've just logged on, and then search for something in the start menu, and I'm about to click, and the menu disappears! I've got focus-follows-mouse turned on, and the option where programs can't steal the focus, and it still happens.
I agree with what you're saying on the whole. My personal belief is that religions have been there for two reasons: to give people comfort that there are "greater things" out there, and to explain things that have no other explanation. As science progresses and offers alternative explanations for things (such as how the planet came into existance, or what stars are), there is less need for religions to explain phenomena. I really don't see what the problem is with people saying: OK, so the story of Creation was a simplistic, symbolic way of explaining a complex process to people thousands of years ago, but isn't literally true. The fact that the mechanism for Creation was in fact so fantasically complex that humanity still can't understand it fully enhances the believability of God, as you said. The classic example of an explanation moving from a religious domain to a scientific one is Gallileo's explanation of how the Earth fit into the solar system, as opposed to Aristotle's. People's interpretation of religion over time necessarily reflects on other aspects of their society: obviously current Christians' interpretations of the Bible is substantially different to that of Christians 2000 years ago.
To my mind, it is perfectly plausible that our translated record of people's beliefs thousands of years ago may not have been the word of God in the way that we currently interpret the words. Indeed, the message may have been tailored to the people whom it targets to fit in with the existing ideas at the time, or they may have interpreted God's message in this way themselves. Again, IMHO, this doesn't lessen the possibility or plausability of God, or dilute the fundamental messages of a religion.
By the way, the bit about space being created: yes, it's a very difficult theory to understand, and when it comes down to it, the interpretation is just an interpretation. It's the maths which counts, but it's hard to say what the maths describes if it's not the creation of space itself. It relies on the idea that space may not be a huge expanse that's everywhere, that space may curve back onto itself. The standard explanation asks you to imagine being an ant on a balloon and thinking of what you observe as the balloon is inflated. The amount of space (surface area on the balloon) actually increases in this process, and space could be curved in that way (General relativity describes space in this way). So space could have gone from being nonexistant to being a very very small "balloon" in a sense. Nasty to think about, I know ;).
And I disagree about logic not being a good way of proving things. Logic provides an excellent way of developing ideas (Maths is entirely based on logic), but it can be misapplied. The problems that you see with logic are those that you see when it is misapplied: when the system that you're considering doesn't fit within the assumptions of a purely logical system (i.e. has statements which are not either true or false only). Not just that, but science relies on other things apart from logic, such as inference, interpretation, extrapolation, and straight out guessing at times. So you can't say that logic doesn't provide good truths. It does provide truths that are as good as you get, but some people don't understand how it's applied, and so people claim that "X is logically true" when it's not. In fact, you can't say anything at all about our physical world using just logic without a whole lot of assumptions that are usually left out.
You can go out and make measurements yourself that demonstrate in a very accurate way how the theories work. It's amazing how much science you can see around you (and measure!) every day, with no equipment except your own body. Science can predict what is possible, and what will happen in certain circumstances, with incredible accuracy. That's not to say that religion has no value, but from a purely pragmatic viewpoint, applying logic and scientific investigation gets you results time after time. Religion may not. What you get out of it depends on how much faith you put into it, and even then, society may discover something the next day which will show beyond reasonable doubt that you were actually wrong about certain beliefs.
One further nitpick: the Big Bang doesn't mean an explosion in the normal sense. Time and space themselves were created. There was no matter at that stage, only energy. There was no sound. Even light, a manifestation of the electromagnetic force, wasn't in the form that we know it today. Yes, there are very specific observations that are extremely hard to explain without such a theory. You won't see detailed explanations for the composition of matter and the way it interacts with itself in most religion's theories of creation. But you'll need to spend years leaning about physics to even understand the big bang theory as it currently stands.
An explanation of why the universe is, is not something that mainstream science claims to have a definate answer to. There's lots of ideas, such as the many-universe theories (which I don't really subscribe to personally) that say something like, "Well, one of the tickets (universes) in the lottery has to win." Or the anthropomorphic ones: "If the universe didn't have intelligent life, then I wouldn't be around to know if I lost." Or a myriad of other ideas that aren't based around a God per se. So in summary, just because it's improbable that a universe would be this way by chance, it doesn't mean that it's impossible, ever.
In some cases in businesses (I'm thinking engineering-related stuff especially), being able to access documents at the right time may even be life-saving. For example, say you contract out someone to build a power station for you. If something goes wrong with the power station, then that could be a major problem if the DRM settings on your drawings are stuffed. Even in less extreme situations, someone sending you documents with bad DRM settings can render them useless at inopportune moments, with no prior warning. In my opinion, Microsoft is trying to create a far larger market for DRM technology than actually exists.
Anyway, yes, I know what you mean about people wasting time with Office. But people will always find a way of wasting time. And there are some pretty clever hacked-together VBA apps in Office, despite Microsoft's obvious attempts to have VBA and Automation go the way of MS Bob. So there are some good things that have come out of it all.
So Microsoft is using IBM's e-business services now? Or just their slogans? ;)
You can tell that I've been brainwashed by those ads...
There's no doubt that Slashdot has a bias. However, given that the editors rarely edit submissions, and maybe only add their own two cents worth afterwards, it's also bias on the part of submitters whose stories get accepted. Of course, the editors' bias comes through in the choice of stories that get accepted, too. But if everyone who submits a story tries to clearly separate their opinion from a reasonably objective summary of the facts, we'd get a long way.
(1) Time is not just how fast things change. Time also provides a way of ordering observed events. I don't see how you could remove time from Einstein's equations. I mean, there are lots of situations where physicists make up "non-physical" quantities that aren't necessarily part of a physical understanding. These quantities could be more or less removed from the physical equations. Many people would consider electromagnetic fields to be non-physical, for example. I've actually never seen a clear definition of what a "physical quantity" is, but time and space are pretty much assumed to be physical. In classical quantum mechanics, time is treated as a parameter of the system, not as an observable (i.e. physical quantity in the normal sense) like position, energy, momentum etc. I think though, in relativistic quantum mechanics, time is an observable, because otherwise the relativistic transformations wouldn't work correctly. It's hard to get anywhere if you don't want to assume that there's anything like time that really exists.
(2) Objects travelling near the speed of light don't actually have slower time, they just seem to from a "stationary" observer. The reverse also applies: the stationary observer seems to have slower time from the point of view of the "moving" object. So neither observer's time is actually slower. When objects accelerate, e.g. in the twin paradox, then you can say that one object's time is going slower than anothers, but that's a whole new kettle of fish.
(3) If the total energy available were to change between different reference frames in the way that you describe, it probably would mean that different outcomes are observed in different reference frames. This is a bad thing, if say one observer sees something blow up and another observer sees it stay intact. As it is, the total energy of an object does depend on the observer (the kinetic energy changes in different reference frames), but this energy doesn't necessarily affect the internal workings of the moving object.
Anyway, if you want to read a good popular account about this sort of stuff that gets the details right, I'd recommend The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. It doesn't cover the theory specifically mentioned in this article, but covers a "competing" theory, string theory. On the way, it also discusses special and general relativity, the nature of space and time, quantum mechanics, extra dimensions, and all sorts of other fun stuff.
So the Administrator installs the game, but ordinary users run it. Not a big deal, really. You don't have to log off even: Windows 2K and XP both automatically ask you if you want to run programs named "setup.exe" as an Admin. Lots of programs work better when installed as root in Unix too, especially when they need to be accessible to lots of users.
And happens to be able to configure Outlook Express to browse the newsgroup... ;)
Cool. That's a really good idea. It'd solve Telstra's problem of being a monopoly and having poor customer service, and allow the government to keep costs in the bush low. I'm not sure what it'd do to Telstra's wholesaling business, because I've never dealt with that side of them.
On the other hand, I completely agree with you on the point that Alston has no clue about the IT and telecomms industry. I mean, had he actually had any experience with a large-scale communications network before 1996 or so? Even using the Internet? I have my doubts there. Heck, most slashdotters probably used a computer before he did, and he's minister for IT.
Yes, time is different to the spatial dimensions; it's often converted into a distance-like quantity by multiplying by i and c (that's sqrt(-1) and speed of light). The other spatial dimensions aren't imaginary. The reason for the i is so that the metric for space-time in special relativity turns out to look like the Euclidean metric. In normal words, this means that you can write a "distance" in space-time (which is the same no matter how you "rotate" the axes, i.e. no matter what speed you travel at) as s^2=x^2 + y^2 + z^2 + (ict)^2. This is all special rel stuff, it gets much ickier when you look at general rel. The metrics (i.e. "distances") in space aren't Euclidean because of the curvature of space-time, and nothing seems to work out nicely.
But if the billboard automatically chooses an ad based on the station, then it could be amusing. Also, if the billboard was badly designed, you might be able to get the billboard to change ads really quickly by changing your transmitted frequency quickly. Imagine a DOS attack on a billboard ;).
There are many similarities between property rights and copyrights. Whether you like the term "intellectual property" or not is up to you. I personally dislike it because it's often a misapplied analogy, and by the way you've written your post, I'd say that you think that too. But if lawyers want to define copyright as a type of property right then that's OK, as long as copyrights aren't stretched beyond what they should be because of these similarities.
That said, I wouldn't buy one. But I know people who would put up with some things being slower (even significantly slower) if they could save a hundred bucks.
We're already getting junk mail from companies which say in fine print down the bottom, "You must accept the terms and conditions on the back page to use this catalogue." I'm allowed to read the thing whether or not I accept their stupid terms!
DivX decoding is very floating-point intensive, moreso than MPEG 2 decoding for DVDs. This Via chip has a very slow FP unit. It probably would be slightly slower than a Celeron 800MHz on office apps, but much better than half the speed. FP is important if you're doing 3D gaming, lots of video encoding/decoding (watching DvDs or DivX), or scientific computations/simulations, but otherwise I doubt it would make a big difference. It's unlikely that a web browser would be significantly slower, for instance. So it really depends on what you're doing as to whether the extra $100 or whatever is worth it.
This sort of stuff has been going on ever since there was competition. People have been taking advantage of each other for thousands of years. It's not new, it's just obvious in this case.
And since when did "free" ever mean "fair"? Fairness is nice, but for the most part I'd prefer to have freedoms than government-mandated "fairness".
Well, Telstra (biggest telco in Australia) advertises "unlimited" dialup for $AU25/month. It's unlimited total time, but they disconnect you every 3 hours and charge you a high per-MB rate if you download more than around 300MB/month. It's pretty decpetive, and they have even advertised the 3 hour time limit as a feature ("we'll disconnect you after 3 hours if you forget to disconnect yourself!"). They're also the major telco, so the odds are that they also get money for every call you make to reconnect. IMHO, it's rather deceptive and dishonest on a number of fronts, but luckily you can easily get a better deal from lots of other ISPs.