There is aways the option to run a virtual machine with the outdated API installed. In fact there is aways the possibility of selling those compatibility APIs so that those business who depend on those and do not wish to maintain an old machine. Those could even be a set of DLLs that would run in a different environment.
This would qualify every single movie, music or tv series that has been broad casted in the air for free as public domain. Sure it would weaken GPL a lot but imagine what this would do to with the entertainment industry...
If this is their argument I don't think they have any chance of winning.
In short, I'm probably not your target. I lived overseas in multiple countries and immigrated with my folks. I worked for a year in the country of my birth as an adult and I've traveled extensively (in mostly western countries).
Well you're not my target, as I try (not always successfully) not to target people.:-D I live in a country, Brazil, that has many different people in it, the country in it self is bigger then all Europe and from the south to the north we have all different kinds of people, but in fact I believe that most big cities has many "tribes" of different people, I believe that the same is true in the US. But there are many things that we don't actually see that are similar and having in other countries show those things to you.
It's not a question of uniformity, from the inside people from your country may seem very different and diverse from each other, but once you get to another country you see real difference. The urban US, in this aspect has an advantage in this point of view since it is the target of many people from all around the world that come to study, work or simply for tourism.
But I believe that a real contact with a foreign country is a good thing, it is a different culture a different way of living, different values. This is an eye opener. People when confronted with such difference has two options (or maybe ten options, but I will only state two)
1) Try to understand this new kind of thinking and this people, that may seem weird and different at first but when you look real close you'll find out that they are really similar.
2) Just think "look how they are weird and different, we are much better then them since we do/have XXXXXX." This kind of people will be probably be laughing and making jokes about how strange is this or that habit.
The problem is that many Americans have the mind set #2. They get in other countries and demand that we speak English, they even demand that we foreigners get ever single aspect of their spelling and grammatical rules when we post on slashdot:) (ok just kidding, but I do get mad about those grammatical and spell nazis). This added to the fact that the foreign police of the American govern is to stick his finger in every country business and creating wars to "save" those poor people from that country that the American people didn't even know it existed until last week and don't know where it is on the map from that "big bad dictator" so we can poorly reconstruct the country later.
This politics don't help to improve your image in the eyes of those pesky non-American eyes. But this problem is not unsolvable, there are a few ways that you can help to improve the image of the Americans. First, vote Bush and all this "corja"(*) out of the government, this mid-term election showed that you people can, there is a second step that is voting for a person who is not a "democrat" nor a "republican", but this is a too biug a step I think.
If you're slashdotter and got offended by some reasonable post, count to 10 before posting, during this count think exactly what has offended you and why it has done so. Try to explain why this point has made you mad, without targeting the poster of the original message try to target his points and show your points of view and your ideas on the subject. I know that this seem impossible, more so from slashdot, but it is possible and I already have some nice discussions with people from the US and with completely different point of views from mine.
Also I think it is important to say that those bad ways are not only coming from Americans, and I have seen several people who form their speeches starting with 'fucking Americans" or "it had to be an American to do...", this is just as bad and to those people I recommend to re-read this comment replacing "American" with "your nationality" because it fits you right.
(*) Corja is a Brazilian Portuguese for "bad people", "worthless people" that I believe is the right word in this case.:-)
I am not saying that the grand-parent's idea is good, because I do not like it also and I do like you idea of putting out a contact form.
That being said, sometimes I think that creating a filter in the clients that can reach you is in fact a good idea. If I could only work with clients that can, as you said "think", I would gladly implement this filter in my site. Sure I might loose some clients, but the quality of the rest would hopefully compensate, unless off course there are no clients that can think, in this case I would be in a bad place.:-)
The question is why is it possible under the law to have a company that produces nothing and sue all the companies that do produce? This is absurd, patents should not exist at all, but ok let's pretend that they are useful for something, the company that hold the patent should at least have a product (or products) that each of the details in the patent contest.
This is my opinion, patents are road blocks to innovation and even to freedom. As it is today every programmer in the world has already breached at least a few patents in his professional life, having they worked with open source or closed source. Patents work like trading cards to big corporations and like sledge hammers to small companies that dare to enter a market that a big corp does not want them. And now the new patent only company that does not produce anything, so they cannot have broken any patent, and sue every one under the sun.
Uff I hate patents, I think the rant is over now... colling head...
In Brazil each candidate has a unique number, witch aways start with the party prefix, if there can be only one candidate per party in such runs such as president, governor or mayor the number of the candidate is the number of the party. So all the voter has to do is to type the number see if the picture/name is from what you desire and press an accept button.
Here all people is demanded to vote, every one, even the ones that are not literate, so this method is tested with people who don't know how to read or write. Every one knows how to recognize numbers, everyone deals with money so it is not an otherworldly to ask people to know how to type a number and check a picture afterwards.
There are ways of doing things. One thing you should do is to normalize your election, if everyone has to vote in a different manner there are thousands of procedures to check for potential holes.
You seem to have never used a touch screen in your life. Allow me to explain: They are always poorly calibrated peices of shit due to the seperation between the display and the sensors. They often read inputs a bit above or below what you intend to push. Depending on the type of touchscreen, this often is due to the height of the user, though simple poor maintenence is also an issue and can lead to left/right problems as well.
So don't use them, I agree with you touch screens are a pain in the ass, even more when they are used in a place where they are used frequently and sometime brutally. The question is why use them? Isn't the good old push buttons not enough? We've been using them for at least a hundred years and they don't get misaligned or loose the precision with use. So why use a relatively new tech when there is another one just as good?
The pencil is actually a good example, many of us "grown ups" don't think twice when we get a pen or pencil to start writing or drawing. So the pencil/paper technology is almost "interfaceless", right? Wrong, just go to watch some children drawing with pencils and you are likely to see them getting the pencil in an awkward way that makes it very hard to have any kind of precision, the paper below is not well fixed and the strength applied in the pencil almost aways end up breaking the tip.
So we do learn how to use the pencil/paper interface, we just do it so early in life that most of us do not really think about it. This multi-touch is a revolution, and if it can recognize writing with a stylus it would be very cool to have. There are a few things that I question, though, fingers have natural oils on them, and the screen will become dirty and ugly in no time. Other problem is with on-screen keyboards, those do not have a sensitive feedback, this is essential to any one that type without actually looking at the keys. And how does that computer knows that he want a keyboard, anyway? It simply shows up when he make a magical hand shake with the screen, I don't see why this is different from a command, that has to be remembered, in a command line interface, mainly if you need to communicate more and more with the computer.
Which set of rules doesn't really matter, though it should be a set that fits you. The only rule that I see as important with morality is that the standard comes from *outside yourself*, that is, that you have an objective standard. Otherwise you're just fooling yourself into not feeling guilty about your favorite sins. It's interesting that you bring up Brazil- I find South American cultures to often be very schizophrenic. They've got a deep history of Roman Catholicism going back before the Spanish rule and Simon Boliviar; but they've also got a deep history of REJECTING what the rest of the world would consider anything related to sexual or functional morality. I suspect this is much like the American Evangelical Christian Preacher- who tries very hard to avoid ever preaching on his own favorite sins.
There is aways a set of standards that come from "outside", the norms and rules of your local culture and this has little connection to the religion people believe in. This is apparent in the exact fact that you shown in your comment, we tend to reject some forms of sexual morality that other places put a high value. That is also true to the Americans, you tend to make no notice to the sin of greed or gluttony for instance.
The problem is not that that we reject something, is simply that we define this in a different way, we deal with sexuality in a more natural way, but we do have our sexual taboos, the point is that they are different. If you go to a beach around here, you will probably think that all the people is "nude" or near it, but for us there is no nudity there. While some times all of those people would be more self conscious of appearing in their underwear, even though they may "show less skin" than the bath suits.
People here are not afraid of being touched or kissed, but no one expects that some one would slap some friend asses like we see in many movies.
The point is the norms are quite different from what you are used too and it may seem wrong for you, but many of the things we hear from you seem wrong to us. We don't think it is horrible to show a mother breast feeding it's baby in a cover of a magazine, for instance.
And by the way, Brasil was never under a Spanish ruler, we were colonized by the Portuguese. Also each South American country has a different way, and Brazil specially, due to it's size, has many different ways and the way people follow the religion varies wildly from region to region and even inside the cities depending on witch social group you belong.
Do you know anything about the history of science? Science is NOT atheistic- atheists have co-opted science yes, but it simply isn't. It is in fact a very theistic pursuit- the idea that by looking at divine revelation only, we're missing a large part of the story. If God is a creator- an artist- then he left a lot of himself in his creation, and by studying his creation we can learn things we can't learn from scripture alone. It's the ultimate retort to the Sola Scriptura folks, the ones who I blame for creating atheists and agnostics by insisting on an anthromorphic, and very irrational, God.
Just because something started in a way, it doesn't mean it stays this way. Astronomy began as astrology, and today you probably going to make an astronomer mad if you confuse the two. Both science and religion have the same base, the nature of question why are we here and where did it all came from? Science grew into a mindset that requires verification and solid facts that can be separated from pure faith. If a theory don't predict something and or be tested it is not scientific.
Science, scriptures and faith do mix well today, I believe that they are not incompatible as some believe, but when you're making science you have to put your faith to the side. It is a difficult thing to do, and many scientist get to a wrong conclusion due to some faith. This was the case of Johannes Kepler, you may have seen this story on the series 'cosmos' by Carl Sagan, but in the case you haven't he followed all his life a dream of a perfect cosmos based in the 5 perfect polyhedral solids, his search was futile and when he finally had access to a more precise measurements he abandoned his faith and created a new theory that stayed current till the times of Einstein.
So science, western science at least, may have spent it's youth locked in monasteries and being practiced solely by monks, but it has grown out of this. In fact the followers of the "insane allah" did have the most advanced science during the middle ages, and that made them expand and conquer a great empire that invaded and conquered the Spanish. This was obtained by a forward thinking of educating the people and not to lock the knowledge in the hands of the clergy.
The fact that there is a completely random, that do not depend on no measurable variable could be a very good way for a higher being introduce his will into our reality.
Only for a fundamentalist. No rational God would behave that way. Rational Gods follow their own rules- fundamentalist idols are as capricious as Zeus and as insane as Allah.
If there is a "god" that must follow "his rules" to the letter and it cannot show his will in no way whatsoever then why do you need a god? A god that has no influence is as good as no god at all. That is why many scientist are not comfortable with the notion of a black matter, that is predicted by some accepted equations, that has no influence in normal matter apart from the gravitational one, witch is very weak. It seem that it could be simpler to review the equations that shows that there is such need and not to depend on this ghost like matter that has almost no influence in the world we see.
Interesting thought- but how do you objectively know that your standards are correct? From my point of view, that's almost as irrational as saying a scripture written during the reign of King David (within recorded history) has anything factual to say about the beginings of life on this planet.
Correct? According to what rules? What is okay for me to do here, in Brazil, might be immoral or inappropriate in the US, and vice versa. As I said, there as many point of views of what is the correct way to live as there is cultures or even people in the world. Most people, in the west at least, have a large intersection in what they believe is good or bad, but
I don't see in what manner a non-deterministic chaotic and random universe implies in a purposeless universe. In fact this could be a major point to insert your favorite 'god' into scheme, where scientist see chaos and random events the believers could see divine intervention. The fact that there is a completely random, that do not depend on no measurable variable could be a very good way for a higher being introduce his will into our reality.
I, myself, am an agnostic, I do not know if there is a god or not. I choose to live my life as if there isn't since most of what I see and learn points to a direction that even if there exists a god then the probability I have to choose the exact correct religion to follow is so low that most of the people world will end up in hell anyway, so I might just live my life by my standards anyway, witch in my point of view is better and more tolerant then most of the official POVs of most of the religions around the world.
An inability to predict is not randomness- it's a limitation of our species at present time. To say otherwise is just arrogance.
There have been some debate on the field of quantic theory about this. The problem is that quantum mechanics works with the use of probabilities, instead of saying that a particle is at the position (x,y,z) a quantum scientist will say that the point, or some region around this point, is the most probable place to this particle to be.
But where does this probability comes from? Is it a dice thrown or more scientifically speaking random? Or does it come from hidden variables that we are not capable of watching? There was some theory and some discussion about this and a lot of tests, but according to a dear friend of mine that studies and research this for a living and also according to some wikipedia articles (1, 2, 3 and 4) that does not happen and in fact the quantum theory states that the universe is indeed a random place.
Many people is not comfortable with that, including scientists that are still looking for those hidden variables, witch would be able to predict the results, and they may even be correct, but for all we know now the universe is random. And this is what science is all about, testing and accepting your ignorance. If there is anyone being arrogant and saying that this or that scientific theory (witch ID is not) is the absolute truth then this person is probably not a scientist or at least is not a very good one.
Not all people are equal, some have less little or no knowledge and are easy target to sites that promote hate. If a suburban dumb person decide to break some store window, or maybe hit someone with violence because he was following some "hate speech site" do you think that the person who uttered the words have no guilt at all in the after math?
If your answer is "yes" then you should start to believe that Osama Bin Laden is probably guiltless of 9/11 and other terrorist attacks all he did was use his hate speech against Americans and the USA and some people convinced themselves that this was a good cause to kill them selves and another 3000 people with them. Sure this is a stretch of the facts and Osama probably had money involved in the training and planing, but you got the idea.
The problem is where is the line, is it ok for someone to publish or talk about a fictional plan to explode buildings in New York City? Is it ok for some one to convince other people that the right thing to do is to strap bombs to it self and explode them in some crowded place? Is it ok for some extreme-right "pro-life" activist to publish the private address of medical staff that do abortions on the net so that someone would show them what is right (probably in a violent manner)? Is it ok to incite people to become violent against some minority based on half-truths and distorted visions?
I am all for free-speech and I hate censorship, but as much as yelling "fire" in a crowded theater there a should be some limitations, and I believe that to some extension hate-speech, or at least the one that incites violence, is one of those exceptions.
1) One huge swf is the site. This is the worst design, not only I have to download the hole thing but it don't allow me to go back the usual way (back in the browser does not work). This also implies that I am not allowed to bookmark a part in the middle of the site or send it to a friend.
2) Sound without previous approval, sound should be always optional and user activate, no site should ever make a noise just by entering it. It is unexpected and many people don't like, not counting when you're in a environment that do allow noises like a library or in the work.
3) No selection, to read large texts I usually use the selection as a tool to mark where I am, text that cannot be selected is a text with a "do not read" tag for me. I agree that this is a more personal opinion, but not being able to select will not help in the "people should not copy my text" avenue. People who do want to copy your text will be able to do it, in the worst case scenario all you need to do is to use a OCR with a screenshot.
4) The abuse of moving things is not a good thing. Movement, only because you can is annoying and should be avoided. Off course that if you're showcasing your animation work people expect it to move. But even so the site can gain from movement just when the user selects something to watch.
None of those are problems with flash it self, some AJAX sites do fall in the same mistakes so you can see that this has nothing to do with the closed sourceness quality of the flash player.
I read, and I thought I was agreeing with you.:-) But I wanted to make it clear that in the movement area this is important, as much as people are starting to experiment with "non-realistic" shading, movement that is not strictly realistic is better then the motion capture.
What we expect to see is not always what is realistic, sometimes a more exaggerated movement seem more natural to a viewer than a correct and precise reproduction of what would really happen. Even actors learn how to make some movements in a more dramatic way they act. Maybe this technology could give a "good enough" result, if the actor has some training with it before hand, but I bet the best results in computer generated characters will still come from the hands and sweat of a good animator.
You affirm that "and there are a lot of people who don't feel guilt, remorse or empathy, enough that I'd say it's normal", and I ask how do you know? Many people uses tricks, self-deception, to separate themselves from the people they harm or treat badly. People would say that in fact is helping that under payed employee because otherwise he would be jobless. Others would argue that those poor people actually deserve to be poor and hungry because they do not work as hard as they do, not noticing that probably they work as hard or harder. And finally some simply convince them selves that that person who he just killed is "the enemy" or maybe they "deserve to die" or simply "they are less human because of their color, origin or believes in some other super powered divinity that I don't really like".
Self deception is a powerful toy and many people use them to do horrible things and sleep at night, but that don't make them psycho. Psychopaths, know that what they made are wrong and yet they do not feel any guilty, they don't need to create a self-deception.
I made a quick program and discovered that the last date that appear in PI is 12/03 in the position 60872, so at least in theory he can memorize anyone's birthday using indexes. Unless you are trying to compute the year also.:-)
No, I would say MS is playing unfairly if a MS (or of an affiliated) add-on would not be disabled by the reset. I don't know why the yahoo toolbar did not disappeared, if it is a bug in the disabling code it should be fixed, if it is for a non-tecnical reason this is MS being bad as usual.
But considering that vista+ie7 are both betas, and the user had many more warnings and he could almost clean it all up afterwards even if I am not sure if all the spyware related to the toolbars are also disabled. This is clearly an advance to the state of affair that we have today with XP+IE6.
He remembers birthdays by index of pi, for instance my birthday may 24th appear at the index 15,634 of pi witch clearly is easier to memorize then "may 24th":-D.
TPM in Brazilian Portuguese stands for "tençao pré mesnstrual" witch is that time of the month you want to stay clear of your wife/girlfriend...:-)
Okay, completely off-topic and unfunny, but every time I read TPM my mind gets this view that there is a joke (that no one but Brasilian people or possibly Portuguese would get it) and I had to get it out of the way...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
There is aways the option to run a virtual machine with the outdated API installed. In fact there is aways the possibility of selling those compatibility APIs so that those business who depend on those and do not wish to maintain an old machine. Those could even be a set of DLLs that would run in a different environment.
This would qualify every single movie, music or tv series that has been broad casted in the air for free as public domain. Sure it would weaken GPL a lot but imagine what this would do to with the entertainment industry...
If this is their argument I don't think they have any chance of winning.
Does gnu/hero reimplement this closed source application?
g
http://stella.sourceforge.net/game-images/hero.pn
Well you're not my target, as I try (not always successfully) not to target people.
It's not a question of uniformity, from the inside people from your country may seem very different and diverse from each other, but once you get to another country you see real difference. The urban US, in this aspect has an advantage in this point of view since it is the target of many people from all around the world that come to study, work or simply for tourism.
:) (ok just kidding, but I do get mad about those grammatical and spell nazis). This added to the fact that the foreign police of the American govern is to stick his finger in every country business and creating wars to "save" those poor people from that country that the American people didn't even know it existed until last week and don't know where it is on the map from that "big bad dictator" so we can poorly reconstruct the country later.
...", this is just as bad and to those people I recommend to re-read this comment replacing "American" with "your nationality" because it fits you right.
:-)
But I believe that a real contact with a foreign country is a good thing, it is a different culture a different way of living, different values. This is an eye opener. People when confronted with such difference has two options (or maybe ten options, but I will only state two)
1) Try to understand this new kind of thinking and this people, that may seem weird and different at first but when you look real close you'll find out that they are really similar.
2) Just think "look how they are weird and different, we are much better then them since we do/have XXXXXX." This kind of people will be probably be laughing and making jokes about how strange is this or that habit.
The problem is that many Americans have the mind set #2. They get in other countries and demand that we speak English, they even demand that we foreigners get ever single aspect of their spelling and grammatical rules when we post on slashdot
This politics don't help to improve your image in the eyes of those pesky non-American eyes. But this problem is not unsolvable, there are a few ways that you can help to improve the image of the Americans. First, vote Bush and all this "corja"(*) out of the government, this mid-term election showed that you people can, there is a second step that is voting for a person who is not a "democrat" nor a "republican", but this is a too biug a step I think.
If you're slashdotter and got offended by some reasonable post, count to 10 before posting, during this count think exactly what has offended you and why it has done so. Try to explain why this point has made you mad, without targeting the poster of the original message try to target his points and show your points of view and your ideas on the subject. I know that this seem impossible, more so from slashdot, but it is possible and I already have some nice discussions with people from the US and with completely different point of views from mine.
Also I think it is important to say that those bad ways are not only coming from Americans, and I have seen several people who form their speeches starting with 'fucking Americans" or "it had to be an American to do
(*) Corja is a Brazilian Portuguese for "bad people", "worthless people" that I believe is the right word in this case.
I am not saying that the grand-parent's idea is good, because I do not like it also and I do like you idea of putting out a contact form.
:-)
That being said, sometimes I think that creating a filter in the clients that can reach you is in fact a good idea. If I could only work with clients that can, as you said "think", I would gladly implement this filter in my site. Sure I might loose some clients, but the quality of the rest would hopefully compensate, unless off course there are no clients that can think, in this case I would be in a bad place.
The question is why is it possible under the law to have a company that produces nothing and sue all the companies that do produce? This is absurd, patents should not exist at all, but ok let's pretend that they are useful for something, the company that hold the patent should at least have a product (or products) that each of the details in the patent contest.
This is my opinion, patents are road blocks to innovation and even to freedom. As it is today every programmer in the world has already breached at least a few patents in his professional life, having they worked with open source or closed source. Patents work like trading cards to big corporations and like sledge hammers to small companies that dare to enter a market that a big corp does not want them. And now the new patent only company that does not produce anything, so they cannot have broken any patent, and sue every one under the sun.
Uff I hate patents, I think the rant is over now... colling head...
In Brazil each candidate has a unique number, witch aways start with the party prefix, if there can be only one candidate per party in such runs such as president, governor or mayor the number of the candidate is the number of the party. So all the voter has to do is to type the number see if the picture/name is from what you desire and press an accept button.
Here all people is demanded to vote, every one, even the ones that are not literate, so this method is tested with people who don't know how to read or write. Every one knows how to recognize numbers, everyone deals with money so it is not an otherworldly to ask people to know how to type a number and check a picture afterwards.
There are ways of doing things. One thing you should do is to normalize your election, if everyone has to vote in a different manner there are thousands of procedures to check for potential holes.
So don't use them, I agree with you touch screens are a pain in the ass, even more when they are used in a place where they are used frequently and sometime brutally. The question is why use them? Isn't the good old push buttons not enough? We've been using them for at least a hundred years and they don't get misaligned or loose the precision with use. So why use a relatively new tech when there is another one just as good?
The pencil is actually a good example, many of us "grown ups" don't think twice when we get a pen or pencil to start writing or drawing. So the pencil/paper technology is almost "interfaceless", right? Wrong, just go to watch some children drawing with pencils and you are likely to see them getting the pencil in an awkward way that makes it very hard to have any kind of precision, the paper below is not well fixed and the strength applied in the pencil almost aways end up breaking the tip.
So we do learn how to use the pencil/paper interface, we just do it so early in life that most of us do not really think about it. This multi-touch is a revolution, and if it can recognize writing with a stylus it would be very cool to have. There are a few things that I question, though, fingers have natural oils on them, and the screen will become dirty and ugly in no time. Other problem is with on-screen keyboards, those do not have a sensitive feedback, this is essential to any one that type without actually looking at the keys. And how does that computer knows that he want a keyboard, anyway? It simply shows up when he make a magical hand shake with the screen, I don't see why this is different from a command, that has to be remembered, in a command line interface, mainly if you need to communicate more and more with the computer.
There is aways a set of standards that come from "outside", the norms and rules of your local culture and this has little connection to the religion people believe in. This is apparent in the exact fact that you shown in your comment, we tend to reject some forms of sexual morality that other places put a high value. That is also true to the Americans, you tend to make no notice to the sin of greed or gluttony for instance.
The problem is not that that we reject something, is simply that we define this in a different way, we deal with sexuality in a more natural way, but we do have our sexual taboos, the point is that they are different. If you go to a beach around here, you will probably think that all the people is "nude" or near it, but for us there is no nudity there. While some times all of those people would be more self conscious of appearing in their underwear, even though they may "show less skin" than the bath suits.
People here are not afraid of being touched or kissed, but no one expects that some one would slap some friend asses like we see in many movies.
The point is the norms are quite different from what you are used too and it may seem wrong for you, but many of the things we hear from you seem wrong to us. We don't think it is horrible to show a mother breast feeding it's baby in a cover of a magazine, for instance.
And by the way, Brasil was never under a Spanish ruler, we were colonized by the Portuguese. Also each South American country has a different way, and Brazil specially, due to it's size, has many different ways and the way people follow the religion varies wildly from region to region and even inside the cities depending on witch social group you belong.
Just because something started in a way, it doesn't mean it stays this way. Astronomy began as astrology, and today you probably going to make an astronomer mad if you confuse the two. Both science and religion have the same base, the nature of question why are we here and where did it all came from? Science grew into a mindset that requires verification and solid facts that can be separated from pure faith. If a theory don't predict something and or be tested it is not scientific.
Science, scriptures and faith do mix well today, I believe that they are not incompatible as some believe, but when you're making science you have to put your faith to the side. It is a difficult thing to do, and many scientist get to a wrong conclusion due to some faith. This was the case of Johannes Kepler, you may have seen this story on the series 'cosmos' by Carl Sagan, but in the case you haven't he followed all his life a dream of a perfect cosmos based in the 5 perfect polyhedral solids, his search was futile and when he finally had access to a more precise measurements he abandoned his faith and created a new theory that stayed current till the times of Einstein.
So science, western science at least, may have spent it's youth locked in monasteries and being practiced solely by monks, but it has grown out of this. In fact the followers of the "insane allah" did have the most advanced science during the middle ages, and that made them expand and conquer a great empire that invaded and conquered the Spanish. This was obtained by a forward thinking of educating the people and not to lock the knowledge in the hands of the clergy.
If there is a "god" that must follow "his rules" to the letter and it cannot show his will in no way whatsoever then why do you need a god? A god that has no influence is as good as no god at all. That is why many scientist are not comfortable with the notion of a black matter, that is predicted by some accepted equations, that has no influence in normal matter apart from the gravitational one, witch is very weak. It seem that it could be simpler to review the equations that shows that there is such need and not to depend on this ghost like matter that has almost no influence in the world we see.
Correct? According to what rules? What is okay for me to do here, in Brazil, might be immoral or inappropriate in the US, and vice versa. As I said, there as many point of views of what is the correct way to live as there is cultures or even people in the world. Most people, in the west at least, have a large intersection in what they believe is good or bad, but
I don't see in what manner a non-deterministic chaotic and random universe implies in a purposeless universe. In fact this could be a major point to insert your favorite 'god' into scheme, where scientist see chaos and random events the believers could see divine intervention. The fact that there is a completely random, that do not depend on no measurable variable could be a very good way for a higher being introduce his will into our reality.
I, myself, am an agnostic, I do not know if there is a god or not. I choose to live my life as if there isn't since most of what I see and learn points to a direction that even if there exists a god then the probability I have to choose the exact correct religion to follow is so low that most of the people world will end up in hell anyway, so I might just live my life by my standards anyway, witch in my point of view is better and more tolerant then most of the official POVs of most of the religions around the world.
There have been some debate on the field of quantic theory about this. The problem is that quantum mechanics works with the use of probabilities, instead of saying that a particle is at the position (x,y,z) a quantum scientist will say that the point, or some region around this point, is the most probable place to this particle to be.
But where does this probability comes from? Is it a dice thrown or more scientifically speaking random? Or does it come from hidden variables that we are not capable of watching? There was some theory and some discussion about this and a lot of tests, but according to a dear friend of mine that studies and research this for a living and also according to some wikipedia articles (1, 2, 3 and 4) that does not happen and in fact the quantum theory states that the universe is indeed a random place.
Many people is not comfortable with that, including scientists that are still looking for those hidden variables, witch would be able to predict the results, and they may even be correct, but for all we know now the universe is random. And this is what science is all about, testing and accepting your ignorance. If there is anyone being arrogant and saying that this or that scientific theory (witch ID is not) is the absolute truth then this person is probably not a scientist or at least is not a very good one.
Not all people are equal, some have less little or no knowledge and are easy target to sites that promote hate. If a suburban dumb person decide to break some store window, or maybe hit someone with violence because he was following some "hate speech site" do you think that the person who uttered the words have no guilt at all in the after math?
If your answer is "yes" then you should start to believe that Osama Bin Laden is probably guiltless of 9/11 and other terrorist attacks all he did was use his hate speech against Americans and the USA and some people convinced themselves that this was a good cause to kill them selves and another 3000 people with them. Sure this is a stretch of the facts and Osama probably had money involved in the training and planing, but you got the idea.
The problem is where is the line, is it ok for someone to publish or talk about a fictional plan to explode buildings in New York City? Is it ok for some one to convince other people that the right thing to do is to strap bombs to it self and explode them in some crowded place? Is it ok for some extreme-right "pro-life" activist to publish the private address of medical staff that do abortions on the net so that someone would show them what is right (probably in a violent manner)? Is it ok to incite people to become violent against some minority based on half-truths and distorted visions?
I am all for free-speech and I hate censorship, but as much as yelling "fire" in a crowded theater there a should be some limitations, and I believe that to some extension hate-speech, or at least the one that incites violence, is one of those exceptions.
I don't like most flash sites because :
1) One huge swf is the site. This is the worst design, not only I have to download the hole thing but it don't allow me to go back the usual way (back in the browser does not work). This also implies that I am not allowed to bookmark a part in the middle of the site or send it to a friend.
2) Sound without previous approval, sound should be always optional and user activate, no site should ever make a noise just by entering it. It is unexpected and many people don't like, not counting when you're in a environment that do allow noises like a library or in the work.
3) No selection, to read large texts I usually use the selection as a tool to mark where I am, text that cannot be selected is a text with a "do not read" tag for me. I agree that this is a more personal opinion, but not being able to select will not help in the "people should not copy my text" avenue. People who do want to copy your text will be able to do it, in the worst case scenario all you need to do is to use a OCR with a screenshot.
4) The abuse of moving things is not a good thing. Movement, only because you can is annoying and should be avoided. Off course that if you're showcasing your animation work people expect it to move. But even so the site can gain from movement just when the user selects something to watch.
None of those are problems with flash it self, some AJAX sites do fall in the same mistakes so you can see that this has nothing to do with the closed sourceness quality of the flash player.
I read, and I thought I was agreeing with you. :-) But I wanted to make it clear that in the movement area this is important, as much as people are starting to experiment with "non-realistic" shading, movement that is not strictly realistic is better then the motion capture.
Realistic animation != good animation.
What we expect to see is not always what is realistic, sometimes a more exaggerated movement seem more natural to a viewer than a correct and precise reproduction of what would really happen. Even actors learn how to make some movements in a more dramatic way they act. Maybe this technology could give a "good enough" result, if the actor has some training with it before hand, but I bet the best results in computer generated characters will still come from the hands and sweat of a good animator.
What exactly are 'layer styles"?
I don't know if I am feeding a troll here, but...
You affirm that "and there are a lot of people who don't feel guilt, remorse or empathy, enough that I'd say it's normal", and I ask how do you know? Many people uses tricks, self-deception, to separate themselves from the people they harm or treat badly. People would say that in fact is helping that under payed employee because otherwise he would be jobless. Others would argue that those poor people actually deserve to be poor and hungry because they do not work as hard as they do, not noticing that probably they work as hard or harder. And finally some simply convince them selves that that person who he just killed is "the enemy" or maybe they "deserve to die" or simply "they are less human because of their color, origin or believes in some other super powered divinity that I don't really like".
Self deception is a powerful toy and many people use them to do horrible things and sleep at night, but that don't make them psycho. Psychopaths, know that what they made are wrong and yet they do not feel any guilty, they don't need to create a self-deception.
I made a quick program and discovered that the last date that appear in PI is 12/03 in the position 60872, so at least in theory he can memorize anyone's birthday using indexes. Unless you are trying to compute the year also. :-)
No, I would say MS is playing unfairly if a MS (or of an affiliated) add-on would not be disabled by the reset. I don't know why the yahoo toolbar did not disappeared, if it is a bug in the disabling code it should be fixed, if it is for a non-tecnical reason this is MS being bad as usual.
But considering that vista+ie7 are both betas, and the user had many more warnings and he could almost clean it all up afterwards even if I am not sure if all the spyware related to the toolbars are also disabled. This is clearly an advance to the state of affair that we have today with XP+IE6.
He remembers birthdays by index of pi, for instance my birthday may 24th appear at the index 15,634 of pi witch clearly is easier to memorize then "may 24th" :-D.
Source: http://www.angio.net/pi/bigpi.cgi
TPM in Brazilian Portuguese stands for "tençao pré mesnstrual" witch is that time of the month you want to stay clear of your wife/girlfriend... :-)
:-)
Okay, completely off-topic and unfunny, but every time I read TPM my mind gets this view that there is a joke (that no one but Brasilian people or possibly Portuguese would get it) and I had to get it out of the way...
I hate perl : 9 results
I hate C++ : 11 results
I hate C : about 8000 results (?)
I hate Python : 7 results
It seems that the most hated language is 'C'. Well at least by the people who force them self to use it, witch may be a good measure...