As I stated, I am a Christian, which means I know that God created man.
No, as a Christian, you believe that God created man. There is a difference.
Belief does not imply knowledge (read up on discourses on epistemology etc).
All I ask is that you grant me the same respect and stop trying to tell me what I should be believing or that my belief system is somehow not compatible with reality.
Aye. I fully agree with you - but only as long as it is stated that it is a belief and not a fact. Faith and facts are entirely different entities.
Faith and intelligence are in no way mutually exclusive.
That is arguable. Faith and facts, however, are mutually exclusive, unless substantiated with reproducible, empirical, scientific evidence.
I may believe in a purple dragon, however that does not imply that a purple dragon exists. And moreover, as an intelligent man, it is my opinion that because of the lack of any reproducible, empirical, scientific evidence, the probability of the exitence of a purple dragon is minimal. Therefore, without sufficient evidence (despite the appearance of dragons in several pieces of literature), I would have to say that I do not particularly believe in a purple dragon, or more precisely that the existence of such a creature is highly improbable.
Similarly, one's belief in something is rather independent of one's intelligent thoughts on the topic.
Just because one is intelligent in other domains (e.g. arts, music, maths, literature, biology, physical and natural sciences etc.) does not necessarily imply that they are intelligent when it comes to what they believe in.
As a physicist, I may be excellent in solving differential equations, however that does nothing for my skills in biology. Or painting. Or music.
Likewise, intelligence exhibited in other domains does not necessarily imply the application intelligence when it comes to faith.
The believers think that there is a voice-in-the-sky without any evidence (rather, with circular evidence -- believe and you will know, and since you do not believe you will not know).
The atheists insist that there is no voice-in-the-sky (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and all that) without sufficient proof.
Sometimes, both sides are a tad nutty. The only difference is that the latter tends to have more rational folks (rather than, say, $FOO_BOOK says this).
As an agnost, my whole take is that we do not have enough evidence to say one way or the other, so why bother. We have a brain, to think and analyse, so why not just use it for that, rather than just spend your life pondering over some entity, fictional or otherwise?
Welcome to a world that lacks accountability and responsibility for your actions.
I mean, if you are addicted to something, it is squarely your fault for being in that position (unless someone tied you up and injected you with $substance every other day).
It's like people blaming cigarette companies for their addiction and health problems, when they should have stopped smoking, knowing that it is dangerous and harmful.
I mean, why bother laying off that pack of smokes or that bottle of vodka when it is just easy to give in and not be responsible for your actions. "Hey, it wasn't me! It was that gene that causes addiction. You know? That disease?"
Obviously you can't be held accountable for your actions, for you getting lung cancer -- it is those damn cigarette companies! Because obviously, they tied you up and made you smoke every day.
With rights and freedom comes responsibility. It's about bloody time that people learnt that. If you're "addicted" to the Internet, get off of it. Stay off it for a week, go out fishing or hiking or camping. Go on a holiday somewhere. Or just read a book. Just how hard is that going to be?
And if your job requires you to be on the Internet, just use it for only that and nothing else. If that is hard for you, take a week off from your job and go to a place without a connection.
Moderation, people. Moderation.
This culture of making every habit or behaviour into a disease is just ridiculous. Folks just need to be held accountable and responsible for their actions.
Rock climbing is more than about merely having a hold.
I mean, if that were the only thing that mattered, then you'd see a lot more climbers out there than there actually are. Although technology has greatly improved the safety and climbing ability of folks out there, it still is a hard and dangerous sport.
The only thing that I forsee happening is an increase in the level of difficulty and the challenges that people tackle.
Until a few years ago, a climbing a 5'14+ was extremely rare, or even unheard of. Today, it is not so anymore.
Makes their lack of innovation all the more remarkable.
Heh, do you even *know* what the hell you are talking about? Maybe you should try looking at some of the ACM SIG* or IEEE publications in the various fields related to CS.
MSR produces some of the best CS research in the world. Just because their work does not percolate down to the products and services teams at MS does not make MSR lack any innovation.
In fact, if you look into most areas, MSR has made some very cutting edge and valuable contributions.
Do not confuse research with development. Then again, given that this is Slashdot, blind and ignorant Microsoft bashing is welcome, even if the person bashing it has absolutely no clue whatsoever.
Because we are human beings and it in our nature to question.
Because as a sentient species, we strive to find purpose in our existence, and the existence of all things around us.
Because there is more than one way to find the truth - theoretical physics, experimental simulation, exploration using spacecrafts etc.
See, at the end of the day, there is no one methodology set in stone. It does not matter how we do it, what matters is that we are doing it. That you consider Big Bang research a waste is an opinion, an opinion that someone else may not share. Of course, you may also find some religious folks saying the same thing, because apparently they already know the truth through their faith.
So, why do we need to do anything at all? Just pick your religion and do what it says and everything is going to be peachy at the end. I mean, the truth is apparently all in some book (or books) out there.
That's how ridiculous your statement sounds to some of us, because you feel that it is a waste of time. It is a question of what you want to understand and know, and how you want to get to that understanding.
>> A lot of these applications use almost entirely ActiveX and simply do not work well with alternate browsers.
Don't do that then.
Heh.
Easy to say, but difficult to do when there are a few thousand installations of such systems, and when changing such a system would be in the order of millions.
Obviously you have not had to interact or work with other third party applications. Try having a Siebel app look exactly the same on Firefox.:-\
A lot of these applications use almost entirely ActiveX and simply do not work well with alternate browsers. It simply isn't possible, and sometimes you just have to resort to having the app supported on just one browser.
Then why do companies use them? Legacy.
You see, these apps have been around forever, and people have been using them forever with a lot of investment made into them, and folks aren't ready to just give it all up. Of course, they ignore such things as TCO (e.g. having a Microsoft environment with IE, money spent on security and combating worms etc).
If I have used his services in anyway, then I have no right to complain. The folks that complain have used Microsoft's services in some way. Expensive? Yes. Forced, even? Perhaps (although this is a fine line).
The guy hasn't stolen money for you - you paid that money because you wanted something in return (i.e. an Operating System, an Office application or whatever). Oh, he might have been sly and cunning in making you use that software, but you always had the choice to walk away. Is it unethical? Most definitely.
But comparable to murder and rape? Hell, no.
Secondly, Microsoft is a corporation with the bottom line as its objective and Bill is but a part of the corporation. The actions of the corporation do not equal the actions of Bill, and vice versa.
I'd rather have a hundred Microsofts with a Bill at the helm helping the poor than a hundred Larry Ellisons.
Well, is speeding over the speed limit comparable to killing a man?
Sure, you break the law in both cases but the conditions and consequences are different.
Bill is breaking the traffic rules but saving people's lives -- while he's definitely breaking the law, I'd rather have him break the speed limit and help save people's lives than not.
Get some perspective, people. Perspective.
Life is bigger than software, and I cannot believe that folks are comparing antitrust violations and business practices with raping and killnig babies. Sheesh.
Anti-trust violations, corporate bullying, it's acceptable so long as you later form a charity.
It is the degree of committing something wrong.
You see, if I commit a traffic violation and if I save a man's life, does it really matter?
Now Microsoft's business practices aren't particularly wonderful, but if at the end of the day, if it could help save millions of lives and help improve the quality of life for people across the world, then I honestly don't give a damn.
Secondly, Bill Gates != Microsoft -- the latter is a corporation, and all corporations always have one motto - improve share holder value by working on the bottomline. Microsoft is no exception, and if a part of that profit is being used to help the *really* needy, then so be it.
The way I see it is that all the whining about business practices is for the rich (i.e. a society that has enough money to afford computers and expensive software) and Bill using this money to help the poor. Of course, since _you_ are the rich being ripped off, you don't quite see it that way.
Bill is a geek who was shrewd enough to hack the system to make money out of it, and he is giving it to the poor. More power to him.
I'd rather have someone like him than someone like, say, Larry Ellison or Sam Walton.
I mean, look at Larry Ellison's charity track record -- there is nothing stopping Bill from doing the exact same thing. But instead, he is using it for not just *some* good, but a lot of good.
For a graduate class at Georgia Tech, we built a system called ScheduleNanny that used a combination of GPS + user schedule to build an adaptive correlation.
The system could learn and adapt to a user's schedule and build a mapping of that with the user's location using the GPS.
We also saw some funky emergent behaviour, where the system would build its own internal mapping as a function of where you were (e.g. the bathroom or the bus-stop got tagged as a destination to be at, during certain time-frames).
And if you're interested, here's a formal paper on it.
I was raised Hindu (although I do not particularly adhere to it anymore) and a lot of Hindus, Buddhists, Jains (amongst others) do not eat meat nor consume alchohol.
And if they were checking for something (say, eating pork and not consuming alchohol), all these folks will get tagged too.
Isn't that sad?
Then again, I'm resigned to the fact that if I am flying, I'm almost certainly going to get pulled aside for being brown.
Haven't you looked at mammoths? Even our cave-men ancestors looked puny in comparison.
The point I was trying to make is that science and technology are not some kind of evil that are screwing things over. They are keeping us away from the ruthless side of nature that we'd otherwise be exposed to. Goodluck trying to find a cave in the middle of a winter in the midwest with just a sheepskin. Let's see how long you last (and how comfortable you are). And goodluck finding one in the jungles of India or the grasslands of Africa, before you ruthlessly get torn apart or stomped upon.
The very coal that causes pollution is what keeps you warm, comfortable and safe.
And Dodos? Bah, so humans wiped them out. As if nature hasn't selected other species for extinction before. There is a reason evolution happened and we came out on top of the foodchain. I am not advocating the extinction of species, merely that if it has already happened because of our ignorance, then the solution is not to stop science (or our curiosity) but rather to channel it in a way that this does not happen again.
Are there social and ecological side effects to using technology? Yes. Most certainly. Nobody is denying that.
But sometimes, it takes risks for science and society to take that leap forward. Someone wanted to make sure that there were no dragons out there. Someone took a ship and explored. Sure, there was spread of disease but there was also progress.
I think that is what counts. In the long run, it is how much better we've made the life of humanity's lot.
Slashdot Mirror
As I stated, I am a Christian, which means I know that God created man.
No, as a Christian, you believe that God created man. There is a difference.
Belief does not imply knowledge (read up on discourses on epistemology etc).
All I ask is that you grant me the same respect and stop trying to tell me what I should be believing or that my belief system is somehow not compatible with reality.
Aye. I fully agree with you - but only as long as it is stated that it is a belief and not a fact. Faith and facts are entirely different entities.
Faith and intelligence are in no way mutually exclusive.
That is arguable. Faith and facts, however, are mutually exclusive, unless substantiated with reproducible, empirical, scientific evidence.
I may believe in a purple dragon, however that does not imply that a purple dragon exists. And moreover, as an intelligent man, it is my opinion that because of the lack of any reproducible, empirical, scientific evidence, the probability of the exitence of a purple dragon is minimal. Therefore, without sufficient evidence (despite the appearance of dragons in several pieces of literature), I would have to say that I do not particularly believe in a purple dragon, or more precisely that the existence of such a creature is highly improbable.
Similarly, one's belief in something is rather independent of one's intelligent thoughts on the topic.
Just because one is intelligent in other domains (e.g. arts, music, maths, literature, biology, physical and natural sciences etc.) does not necessarily imply that they are intelligent when it comes to what they believe in.
As a physicist, I may be excellent in solving differential equations, however that does nothing for my skills in biology. Or painting. Or music.
Likewise, intelligence exhibited in other domains does not necessarily imply the application intelligence when it comes to faith.
Cheers.
Oops! My bad.
BSG is Space Opera meets West Wing, set in space with hot chicks and human-looking robots.
There are many other series out there, such as Stargate, Babylon 5, Firefly and so on.
So, is there a reason that we have to keep coming back to Star Trek - The Search for More Money every damn time?
The franchise is dead. People just don't seem to get it.
Totally. And I know exactly what you mean.
Have I ever told you about my deeply spiritual and ethereal relationship with my pink pony and purple unicorn? No?
Apparently there was a silver dragon that created the unicorn whose eggs hatched into making humans. Didn't you know?
I dare you to disprove it though.
> Oh, PS: I'm agnostic.
See, that's the problem, right.
The believers think that there is a voice-in-the-sky without any evidence (rather, with circular evidence -- believe and you will know, and since you do not believe you will not know).
The atheists insist that there is no voice-in-the-sky (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and all that) without sufficient proof.
Sometimes, both sides are a tad nutty. The only difference is that the latter tends to have more rational folks (rather than, say, $FOO_BOOK says this).
As an agnost, my whole take is that we do not have enough evidence to say one way or the other, so why bother. We have a brain, to think and analyse, so why not just use it for that, rather than just spend your life pondering over some entity, fictional or otherwise?
Welcome to a world that lacks accountability and responsibility for your actions.
I mean, if you are addicted to something, it is squarely your fault for being in that position (unless someone tied you up and injected you with $substance every other day).
It's like people blaming cigarette companies for their addiction and health problems, when they should have stopped smoking, knowing that it is dangerous and harmful.
I mean, why bother laying off that pack of smokes or that bottle of vodka when it is just easy to give in and not be responsible for your actions. "Hey, it wasn't me! It was that gene that causes addiction. You know? That disease?"
Obviously you can't be held accountable for your actions, for you getting lung cancer -- it is those damn cigarette companies! Because obviously, they tied you up and made you smoke every day.
With rights and freedom comes responsibility. It's about bloody time that people learnt that. If you're "addicted" to the Internet, get off of it. Stay off it for a week, go out fishing or hiking or camping. Go on a holiday somewhere. Or just read a book. Just how hard is that going to be?
And if your job requires you to be on the Internet, just use it for only that and nothing else. If that is hard for you, take a week off from your job and go to a place without a connection.
Moderation, people. Moderation.
This culture of making every habit or behaviour into a disease is just ridiculous. Folks just need to be held accountable and responsible for their actions.
Oh trust me, you really don't want to see some of those women topless.
*shudders*
Rock climbing is more than about merely having a hold.
I mean, if that were the only thing that mattered, then you'd see a lot more climbers out there than there actually are. Although technology has greatly improved the safety and climbing ability of folks out there, it still is a hard and dangerous sport.
The only thing that I forsee happening is an increase in the level of difficulty and the challenges that people tackle.
Until a few years ago, a climbing a 5'14+ was extremely rare, or even unheard of. Today, it is not so anymore.
Can you imagine the rock climbing possibilities!
As a rock climber, this is too cool.
Trad, Sport and Gecko? That would be something.
Makes their lack of innovation all the more remarkable.
Heh, do you even *know* what the hell you are talking about? Maybe you should try looking at some of the ACM SIG* or IEEE publications in the various fields related to CS.
MSR produces some of the best CS research in the world. Just because their work does not percolate down to the products and services teams at MS does not make MSR lack any innovation.
In fact, if you look into most areas, MSR has made some very cutting edge and valuable contributions.
Maybe you should have a look at the list of publications they have put out since 2000.
Do not confuse research with development. Then again, given that this is Slashdot, blind and ignorant Microsoft bashing is welcome, even if the person bashing it has absolutely no clue whatsoever.
Nice.
Because.
Because we are human beings and it in our nature to question.
Because as a sentient species, we strive to find purpose in our existence, and the existence of all things around us.
Because there is more than one way to find the truth - theoretical physics, experimental simulation, exploration using spacecrafts etc.
See, at the end of the day, there is no one methodology set in stone. It does not matter how we do it, what matters is that we are doing it. That you consider Big Bang research a waste is an opinion, an opinion that someone else may not share. Of course, you may also find some religious folks saying the same thing, because apparently they already know the truth through their faith.
So, why do we need to do anything at all? Just pick your religion and do what it says and everything is going to be peachy at the end. I mean, the truth is apparently all in some book (or books) out there.
That's how ridiculous your statement sounds to some of us, because you feel that it is a waste of time. It is a question of what you want to understand and know, and how you want to get to that understanding.
>> A lot of these applications use almost entirely ActiveX and simply do not work well with alternate browsers.
Don't do that then.
Heh.
Easy to say, but difficult to do when there are a few thousand installations of such systems, and when changing such a system would be in the order of millions.
Sure, if the said applications support such communication.
What if they are intentionally built to obfuscate and prevent such communication (i.e. lock-in).
Most CRM apps out there are built that way, which makes it extremely hard for external applications to interface and work with these applications.
Obviously you have not had to interact or work with other third party applications. Try having a Siebel app look exactly the same on Firefox. :-\
A lot of these applications use almost entirely ActiveX and simply do not work well with alternate browsers. It simply isn't possible, and sometimes you just have to resort to having the app supported on just one browser.
Then why do companies use them? Legacy.
You see, these apps have been around forever, and people have been using them forever with a lot of investment made into them, and folks aren't ready to just give it all up. Of course, they ignore such things as TCO (e.g. having a Microsoft environment with IE, money spent on security and combating worms etc).
So, the end result is problems like this.
I would agree with you, were it not for a conference publication that's on the website.
Agreed, it's not a peer-reviewed journal publication, but the publication suggests that this idea is probably not vapourware.
If I have used his services in anyway, then I have no right to complain. The folks that complain have used Microsoft's services in some way. Expensive? Yes. Forced, even? Perhaps (although this is a fine line).
The guy hasn't stolen money for you - you paid that money because you wanted something in return (i.e. an Operating System, an Office application or whatever). Oh, he might have been sly and cunning in making you use that software, but you always had the choice to walk away. Is it unethical? Most definitely.
But comparable to murder and rape? Hell, no.
Secondly, Microsoft is a corporation with the bottom line as its objective and Bill is but a part of the corporation. The actions of the corporation do not equal the actions of Bill, and vice versa.
I'd rather have a hundred Microsofts with a Bill at the helm helping the poor than a hundred Larry Ellisons.
Wow, what a troll.
Well, is speeding over the speed limit comparable to killing a man?
Sure, you break the law in both cases but the conditions and consequences are different.
Bill is breaking the traffic rules but saving people's lives -- while he's definitely breaking the law, I'd rather have him break the speed limit and help save people's lives than not.
Get some perspective, people. Perspective.
Life is bigger than software, and I cannot believe that folks are comparing antitrust violations and business practices with raping and killnig babies. Sheesh.
Anti-trust violations, corporate bullying, it's acceptable so long as you later form a charity.
It is the degree of committing something wrong.
You see, if I commit a traffic violation and if I save a man's life, does it really matter?
Now Microsoft's business practices aren't particularly wonderful, but if at the end of the day, if it could help save millions of lives and help improve the quality of life for people across the world, then I honestly don't give a damn.
Secondly, Bill Gates != Microsoft -- the latter is a corporation, and all corporations always have one motto - improve share holder value by working on the bottomline. Microsoft is no exception, and if a part of that profit is being used to help the *really* needy, then so be it.
The way I see it is that all the whining about business practices is for the rich (i.e. a society that has enough money to afford computers and expensive software) and Bill using this money to help the poor. Of course, since _you_ are the rich being ripped off, you don't quite see it that way.
Bill is a geek who was shrewd enough to hack the system to make money out of it, and he is giving it to the poor. More power to him.
I'd rather have someone like him than someone like, say, Larry Ellison or Sam Walton.
I mean, look at Larry Ellison's charity track record -- there is nothing stopping Bill from doing the exact same thing. But instead, he is using it for not just *some* good, but a lot of good.
For a graduate class at Georgia Tech, we built a system called ScheduleNanny that used a combination of GPS + user schedule to build an adaptive correlation.
The system could learn and adapt to a user's schedule and build a mapping of that with the user's location using the GPS.
We also saw some funky emergent behaviour, where the system would build its own internal mapping as a function of where you were (e.g. the bathroom or the bus-stop got tagged as a destination to be at, during certain time-frames).
And if you're interested, here's a formal paper on it.
What does your car run on?
/stupidity
Mine runs on blood, sweat and tears! =)
And if they were checking for something (say, eating pork and not consuming alchohol), all these folks will get tagged too.
I meant, "not eating pork and not consuming alchohol" -- my bad.
You want to know the funny thing?
I was raised Hindu (although I do not particularly adhere to it anymore) and a lot of Hindus, Buddhists, Jains (amongst others) do not eat meat nor consume alchohol.
And if they were checking for something (say, eating pork and not consuming alchohol), all these folks will get tagged too.
Isn't that sad?
Then again, I'm resigned to the fact that if I am flying, I'm almost certainly going to get pulled aside for being brown.
If you're talking about the one by Daniel Quinn, I have.
Haven't you looked at mammoths? Even our cave-men ancestors looked puny in comparison.
The point I was trying to make is that science and technology are not some kind of evil that are screwing things over. They are keeping us away from the ruthless side of nature that we'd otherwise be exposed to. Goodluck trying to find a cave in the middle of a winter in the midwest with just a sheepskin. Let's see how long you last (and how comfortable you are). And goodluck finding one in the jungles of India or the grasslands of Africa, before you ruthlessly get torn apart or stomped upon.
The very coal that causes pollution is what keeps you warm, comfortable and safe.
And Dodos? Bah, so humans wiped them out. As if nature hasn't selected other species for extinction before. There is a reason evolution happened and we came out on top of the foodchain. I am not advocating the extinction of species, merely that if it has already happened because of our ignorance, then the solution is not to stop science (or our curiosity) but rather to channel it in a way that this does not happen again.
Are there social and ecological side effects to using technology? Yes. Most certainly. Nobody is denying that.
But sometimes, it takes risks for science and society to take that leap forward. Someone wanted to make sure that there were no dragons out there. Someone took a ship and explored. Sure, there was spread of disease but there was also progress.
I think that is what counts. In the long run, it is how much better we've made the life of humanity's lot.