Reading the bible tells you what the people running the crusades were supposed to believe and/or follow as their higher calling, whether you believe it or not isn't relevant.
Does it? Do you stone people in all the situations called for in the bible? Obviously not -- you have to pick and choose which parts of the bible you want to follow (and that as well is based on translation & interpretation -- the majority of the bible is not prescriptive; it's stories).
Reading the bible and realizing that the modern-day church as created by the disciples from the teachings of Jesus ought not to be going around wiping people off the planet for their disbelief. I believe "shaking the dust from your shoes as you leave town" was the instruction, alongside loving those who persecute you.
There is no biblical teaching that should lead to anything like the hatred perpetrated by the Crusaders and others.
Did you look at the page I linked? Here it is again, if you're interested. You personally choose the "shake the dust off your feet" bit (instructions from Jesus to his 12 disciples); others (justifying the Crusades, for example) might choose this:
When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations -- the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you -- 2 and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. 3 Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, 4 for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods, and the LORD's anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. 5 This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire. (Deut 7.1-5) However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. 17 Completely destroy them -- the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites -- as the LORD your God has commanded you. 18 Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the LORD your God. (Deut 20.16ff)
Even about shaking the dust from your shoes -- here's the full quote:
"And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart thence, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them. Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city."
So... you should just shake off the dust, and later God will utterly annihilate them with fire & brimstone -- man, woman, child & animal alike -- as he did with Sodom & Gomorrah.
Sodom & Gomorrah was a genocide carried out by God himself, but obviously (as in the example above) sometimes God wanted people to carry out the genocide for him.
So... how do you choose which parts of the bible to ignore and which to build your morality on? Do you just ignore the OT? (That loses the 10 commandments, though).
I have never understood why people hold up the bible as a useful moral guide. Sure, there are some useful things in there... but if you don't have some other moral yardstick already, you'll end up with the Crusades if you pick & choose the wrong bits. There's justification for all kinds of things.
What God's followers do in his name is not the same as what it is he wants done by his followers.
Reading the Bible helps clear a lot of these misunderstandings up.
That depends on which part of the Bible you read, unfortunately (link is to an attempt to explain the various God-commanded or performed genocides in the Bible... perhaps you will find it convincing, but they've got a pretty tough job trying to justify wiping out entire populations, including infants, etc.).
So how does reading the Bible help? It seems to me that either: * you believe the Bible to be inerrant, in which case you agree that wholesale genocide is occasionally justified, OR * you believe the Bible is NOT inerrant -- it contains some stories with valuable moral lessons, and others which must be disregarded... hence you have to use your own moral sense to judge that (you can't *base* your morality on the Bible).
If that's flawed logic, feel free to call me out.
Consider this: the Crusades were justified by filtering & interpreting the Bible differently from the way most folks do it today. Do you have any way of showing that they were wrong and you are right?
It makes sense in some sense. I was reading a book by Morgan Freeman and he made the following point: Democracy works until the poor realize that they can get shiny things by taxing "the rich" without taxing themselves.
Obviously, as that process happens, we'll see the gap between rich and poor shrink, as the poor grab more and more wealth from the rich. (Doesn't seem to be trending that way at ALL, though, does it?).
Then the country keeps devolving until a civil war breaks out.
In which the rich (perhaps that 1% of the population which currently owns more than 1/3rd of the total wealth) would take up arms against the 99% with the remainder? Actually, half of that remaining 2/3rds is still in the top 10% of the population, so maybe they'd join in?
Still not seeing it. Which of these groups is Morgan Freeman in, by the way?
The trick is for all government programs to be sponsored by everyone accepting a equal (you have to define this) burden. This keeps the government small and thus all taxes lower.
That approach would certainly stop the rich from taking to the streets with machetes. Of course, taxes pay for services, though, frequently services for people who aren't the ultra-rich -- but hey, if that's the price to pay to appease those bloodthirsty rich people.... BTW, we'd all like government to be more efficient, but this "plan" doesn't address that at all, so lower taxes would simply mean lost services.
I'm not saying that the fair tax is necessarily the best implementation, but I think that its concept is a step in the right direction.
Because it moves the tax burden onto sales taxes, it's a significant tax *increase* for anyone who is forced to spend all of their income, and taxes shrink for anyone who *invests* most of their money instead of spending it (the richer you are, generally the larger percentage you invest). So -- a step in the right direction for whom?
No, the joke part was that maybe he's not really a nerd and thus doesn't have the extra motile sperm.
But you quoted the part where he discusses marriage status, not the bit where he says tests showed that he has an abnormally low count. I assumed you chose that line to show somehow that he wasn't smart, not at random.
The serious part was that maybe his wife is barren.
See above about abnormally low sperm count, again. They've done the standard testing already.
If the license could be revoked, that would no longer be the case, as nothing else would give those other people permission to distribute it. Again, the possibility of revoking the license is controversial, but there is case law on both sides (even case law specific to computer software licenses!)
I read the link you provided (and the comments), and it's pretty clear that's a very big "if".
Particularly because of the nature of the GPL -- i.e., the initial "contract" specifically grants recipients permission to make the same contract with still more people, so to revoke a GPL license completely you'd have to not only revoke the initial contract -- you'd also have to force everyone else to revoke their contracts based on that first one.
I don't deny that almost nothing is crystal-clear impossible in copyright/contract law, but I'm not convinced there's any risk here.
I'm sure that's what happened -- a basic math mistake like that is fine, I've typed the numbers in wrong before as well -- but if it had *just* been a rapid math mistake (i.e., he left out the figure until the end to use a recent rate) then his argument would have been different, e.g., "75K sounds decent enough in dollars... but remember, this is the euro, which has left the sinking dollar in the dust in recent years... so particularly if you're sending some of that money home, it's a lot: [number here]".
He just didn't even know that the euro was worth more than the dollar, so his entire discussion (based on the bad math and nothing else) is wrong.
Yeah, it's open source, but they have to consider their target, and they have to consider that their target has already been hit, and more than once in the closed source world.
Okay, so are you saying that runrev is a closed-source competitor to Sophie? What are the major *OSS* competitors? OSS doesn't compete directly with closed source software -- if the functionality is "close enough", the OSS project will win by default for many people.
And I'm still baffled as to why the Mellon Foundation might possibly give money to a for-profit company vs. funding open source. If there were truly no place for Sophie, they would fund a different open source project.
And they also need to try to figure out why (besides runrev being closed source) runrev hasn't killed MSOffice.
Man, you just keep saying these things that sound like non-sequiturs. I'm pretty damned sure runrev isn't a consumer office suite...?
Near as I can tell, Java 7 hasn't addressed the problem that makes the Java implementations of hypercard interpreters founder. (I suppose I might be off-base, but until the Java camp gets past talking about dynamic objects, I can only suppose that things will remain as they are.)
Again, I know Java fairly well, but I have no clue what you're talking about (then again, I certainly haven't tried to implement a hypercard interpreter in Java). Any kind of specific detail or link might help, if this is even worth discussing. The Bulgarian company that's leading the Java implementation was also deeply involved in the development of the Squeak version of Sophie -- if that implementation is impossible in Java, I suspect they'd know it.
Question one, did you consider Runtime Revolution at any point in your analysis/development?
It's an open source project. I don't think requiring a proprietary dev environment to modify the code is even *legal* for distributing OSS.
Runtime Revolution looks like a non-free development environment with its own custom dev language -- even if it were free, how could this possibly help the problem of a too-small developer community with the Squeak version?
Does everyone on your team understand the implications of Sun's move from Java 5 to Java 7?
A link here might help. What implications? I'm a Java developer, and I read a decent amount on Java's evolution and haven't seen anything frightening.
There may be much more than sore grapes motivating the disappointment you are hearing expressed from the original team. You're literally trying to move the earth underneath your project. Business manager's instinctive reach for the mainstream or for the "cool" (whichever it might have been) is not a good technical reason for inducing an earthquake in the code base. They have to have more than that, or all the "acceptance" available in business circles really is not good enough reason for this kind of decision. When you let marketing determine the technical directions[...]
I'd agree that it's a big decision to rewrite a project in a new language -- it usually takes significantly more effort than expected, so that's a very valid thing to discuss. But the language chosen for an open source project is very important in building a developer community -- it's not for marketing reasons, it's simple math; when developers with an "itch" want to add a feature, if they don't know the development technology they won't be able to participate.
You'd have a pretty tough time in court if you tried to actively revoke an existing GPL license, forcing other folks to stop using it and stop distributing it, stop distributing derivatives however many steps down the line, etc... you'd be attempting to grab control not only of your copyrighted material, but of OTHER people's copyrighted work derived legally from yours.
You certainly *can* take a product closed source if you own the copyright completely -- this has always been true and is not disputed. But what that means is that you simply stop offering the product via GPL personally. OTHER people can still offer it for download (via the GPL) and offer their derived work via the GPL as long as they want. You can't prevent forks, though the forks (because they include your copyrighted code) don't have the option of going closed source themselves.
I'm assuming that's what this company did -- they owned the copyright, so they went closed source, and while you might find old versions freely elsewhere, all new versions would be closed source.
Dr. McNinja Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Dinosaur Comics Least I Could Do Transmission-X has a couple super-imaginative & well-done comics (less of a focus on humor) and a few clunkers. White Ninja if you're in the mood for it.
Achewood never did much for me either. I've tried a few times.
Little Gamers suggested above... never heard of it, just looked now, and for today they have a storyline-only comic with "loose" instead of "lose". Not for me.
Minor addendum -- we also have other sources of data that are less precise, but that provide independent dating methods.
Example -- different kinds of rock erode at different rates. We don't know exactly what the weather has been like over X millions of years, but we can deduce a range (hint: huge mountains of hard rock don't get worn to nubs in a thousand years). Sediment build-up is another similar clue.
That's how science works -- you gather *all* the clues possible, and if your theory doesn't account for all of them, it has to change.
And what alternate interpretations have you considered and discarded?
Unfortunately, there's a large mass of scientific-sounding drivel on the internet that makes incoherent points based on basic misunderstandings of the science involved -- you can often do a tiny amount of research and find that they are misrepresenting the situation, often maliciously and with an unsubtle agenda.
If you provide some sources perhaps you might get help evaluating them.
If you're actually doing ground-breaking research yourself, bravo, and let us know when the Nobel prize ceremony is. I'm not getting that sense, though.
In a sense, the interpretations (not the facts) of science are based as much on faith as any religion.
This is a profound misunderstanding of science.
You're (unknowingly) pointing to the exact reason why the scientific method was developed, and why the scientific approach has been so extremely successful at winnowing out valid, supported, useful theories from all of the possible conceptions of how the world works.
Removing faith from the search for knowledge was essential. Removing "unquestionable fact" from consideration was essential. No theory or conclusion is ever a closed book -- as more observations are made (and more are possible, because our technology continues to advance), theory must always be updated to account for those observations.
It's amazing to me that we're born into a world where one set of grownups tell us that X and Y happened magically, done by a magic invisible being, and we must take their word for it because *other* people wrote it down rather cryptically a long time ago, and there's no way to investigate for ourselves. And ANOTHER group of grownups tells us no, we can get a pretty good idea of how X and Y happened if we gather up the clues left everywhere and apply a strict process to weed out the weak ideas... and here, you can try it for yourself, and read how we figured it out in as much depth as you want, and even help us figure out more.
Why does anyone join the first group? Because they seem nice? (well, not all of them...) Because they were forced to decide while still children (and it can be hard to change)?
So, which papers have you read where an actual scientist takes constant speed for plate movement as assumed? You keep saying "they assume this", but I can't find even "geology for laypeople" web pages containing that huge logical gap. Can you?
1) what are you actually arguing for (i.e., do you believe the plates moved drastically faster, say, 5500 years ago)?
2) You ignored the rest of my comment -- about there being many other sources of information, not just current direct measurements of drift. The theory didn't have any real backing until other sources of data fell into place.
We also do have a good understanding of how heat transference works (again, bringing to bear another set of observations and scientific knowledge) that will give us separate data on how fast heat can actually convect through the mantle, crust, etc. From what I remember of geology (ages ago), it's a pretty damned slow process -- which we know not because we just extrapolate, but because heat doesn't convect through rock at random; it obeys natural laws.
Based on all of those differing sources of data, scientists can define *ranges* of when the continents would have been at different locations. That's how it works when you don't have exact ways to pin down a date -- you calculate your margin of error based on the precision of your data and you work from there.
Because when plates move it makes such dramatic changes on the surface (mountain ranges which then age on the surface, volcanoes, levels of sediment on the sea floor, etc. etc..) we don't just have to guess at historical movement, we can track it *also* based on all of that external change.
It would most certainly be much faster than what we observe today.
Er... WHEN would it have been "much faster" than today? If you want to make actual arguments, I can probably address them, or at least tell you where to look. If you want to look at areas of plate tectonic theory that still need expansion, sure -- like all theories, it's still being extended as new observations become possible, and if you could actually advance it you'd probably win some awards (tenure, at least). You can also ask the scientists themselves which parts they'd most like to improve.
If you want to draw a conclusion that's drastically different from what actual geologists support, though, you have to be able to address the whole body of data their theories cover. If you don't even understand the basis for the theory in the first place, you don't have much hope of saying anything coherent at all.
I can't believe I'm going to bite on this... but that would be a water hypothesis... not a theory. It's not provable or disprovable (or even testable) and therefore is not a theory.
I should also mention that it's not even a hypothesis, not in scientific terms.
A hypothesis must be a reasoned explanation of existing observations that IS testable (but not yet tested). It has to be coherent and not already disproved by existing evidence.
Yes, indeed, scientists observe California move a few inches and then extrapolate that movement and come up with utter crap stating that in x number of millions of years California will be next to Alaska. They assume (believe) this rate will be or has been constant for all that time. They do this backwards in time also.
Once rock is forced up to the surface, it doesn't weather the same as rock still in liquid (or solid) form under the surface.
I'm no geologist, and I came up with that just off the top of my head. Why would they assume constant movement? They can't, so they have to correlate those observations with other sources of data to come up with any kind of extrapolation.
We have far more ways of gathering data on the plate movements than just taking California's movement over a few years and extrapolating to millions of years.
It can be observed that the continents sort of fit together like a huge jigsaw puzzle. What cannot be derived from this however is the time scale over which this continental drifting took place. This assumed, not measured or observed. Assuming that rate of present processes can be applied over vast time scales may be correct, but it is nevertheless an unprovable assumption. Most processes observed in nature today are neither linear nor constant.
It is quite conceivable, that when the earth was younger and hotter, the underlying layers where more fluid. This would mean that the continents moved much more easily and faster than we observe them to be doing today.
Sources?
Follow-up: I did 30 seconds of research and pretty much confirmed my guesses -- the plate tectonics concept sat on the shelf for years because of lack of solid evidence... until the 1950s, when we developed methods of mapping out the ocean floor, which held a lot of clues.
Holy crap; I was joking, but some other commenter replied to you saying the same shit, but absolutely seriously.
Apparently plate tectonics is *also* disputed by the creationists, and subject to the same muddy "theory" attacks? I guess it must be, though I hadn't thought of it... after all, it's yet another pile of evidence that points to an earth much older than a few thousand years.
"Q: What do I get if my idea is chosen? A: You get good karma and the satisfaction of knowing that your idea might truly help a lot of people."
Doesn't sound like profit is the name of the game here.
Not for the idea submitter, no. Google may profit from the implementation of the idea -- they're handling that side of it, so this isn't anything like the MacArthur genius grant, etc -- but I think primarily in terms of image.
Basically, they are looking to splash out some money implementing a cool philanthropic project (which costs some money but gains them cred and image), and to get the coolest possible idea they are asking outside people for suggestions as well.
It's not evil -- in the end, the world does benefit -- but submitting an idea as your route to fame & glory would be rather starry-eyed.
The most popular ideas will be put before a panel of experts to be considered for implementation by Google.
Google isn't giving this money to the folks with the winning ideas. They're using the money themselves to enact your great idea.
This is clarified by the FAQ -- once the ideas are chosen, they will start an RFP process to choose who will do the implementation (I would assume they will also have Google people involved in the implementation at various levels). You (as the idea submitter) can suggest an organization you think would be a good choice for implementation, but it's up to them to decide.
Either way, a winning idea certainly doesn't mean a chunk of money is headed your way, or that you'll even be involved in the implementation in any way.
Logic failure - how did evolution come into being? Who or what created it? It obviously did not evolve from evolution -- circular logic. So someone or something must have created it.
Evolution is a process, not a thing that "comes into being". Evolution happens as long as there is life reproducing and undergoing natural selection.
Are you trying to ask how the first life came into being?
Slashdot Mirror
Reading the bible tells you what the people running the crusades were supposed to believe and/or follow as their higher calling, whether you believe it or not isn't relevant.
Does it? Do you stone people in all the situations called for in the bible? Obviously not -- you have to pick and choose which parts of the bible you want to follow (and that as well is based on translation & interpretation -- the majority of the bible is not prescriptive; it's stories).
Reading the bible and realizing that the modern-day church as created by the disciples from the teachings of Jesus ought not to be going around wiping people off the planet for their disbelief. I believe "shaking the dust from your shoes as you leave town" was the instruction, alongside loving those who persecute you.
There is no biblical teaching that should lead to anything like the hatred perpetrated by the Crusaders and others.
Did you look at the page I linked? Here it is again, if you're interested. You personally choose the "shake the dust off your feet" bit (instructions from Jesus to his 12 disciples); others (justifying the Crusades, for example) might choose this:
When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations -- the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you -- 2 and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. 3 Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, 4 for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods, and the LORD's anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. 5 This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire. (Deut 7.1-5)
However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. 17 Completely destroy them -- the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites -- as the LORD your God has commanded you. 18 Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the LORD your God. (Deut 20.16ff)
Even about shaking the dust from your shoes -- here's the full quote:
"And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart thence, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them. Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city."
So... you should just shake off the dust, and later God will utterly annihilate them with fire & brimstone -- man, woman, child & animal alike -- as he did with Sodom & Gomorrah.
Sodom & Gomorrah was a genocide carried out by God himself, but obviously (as in the example above) sometimes God wanted people to carry out the genocide for him.
So... how do you choose which parts of the bible to ignore and which to build your morality on? Do you just ignore the OT? (That loses the 10 commandments, though).
I have never understood why people hold up the bible as a useful moral guide. Sure, there are some useful things in there... but if you don't have some other moral yardstick already, you'll end up with the Crusades if you pick & choose the wrong bits. There's justification for all kinds of things.
What God's followers do in his name is not the same as what it is he wants done by his followers.
Reading the Bible helps clear a lot of these misunderstandings up.
That depends on which part of the Bible you read, unfortunately (link is to an attempt to explain the various God-commanded or performed genocides in the Bible... perhaps you will find it convincing, but they've got a pretty tough job trying to justify wiping out entire populations, including infants, etc.).
So how does reading the Bible help? It seems to me that either:
* you believe the Bible to be inerrant, in which case you agree that wholesale genocide is occasionally justified, OR
* you believe the Bible is NOT inerrant -- it contains some stories with valuable moral lessons, and others which must be disregarded... hence you have to use your own moral sense to judge that (you can't *base* your morality on the Bible).
If that's flawed logic, feel free to call me out.
Consider this: the Crusades were justified by filtering & interpreting the Bible differently from the way most folks do it today. Do you have any way of showing that they were wrong and you are right?
It makes sense in some sense. I was reading a book by Morgan Freeman and he made the following point: Democracy works until the poor realize that they can get shiny things by taxing "the rich" without taxing themselves.
Obviously, as that process happens, we'll see the gap between rich and poor shrink, as the poor grab more and more wealth from the rich. (Doesn't seem to be trending that way at ALL, though, does it?).
Then the country keeps devolving until a civil war breaks out.
In which the rich (perhaps that 1% of the population which currently owns more than 1/3rd of the total wealth) would take up arms against the 99% with the remainder? Actually, half of that remaining 2/3rds is still in the top 10% of the population, so maybe they'd join in?
Still not seeing it. Which of these groups is Morgan Freeman in, by the way?
The trick is for all government programs to be sponsored by everyone accepting a equal (you have to define this) burden. This keeps the government small and thus all taxes lower.
That approach would certainly stop the rich from taking to the streets with machetes. Of course, taxes pay for services, though, frequently services for people who aren't the ultra-rich -- but hey, if that's the price to pay to appease those bloodthirsty rich people.... BTW, we'd all like government to be more efficient, but this "plan" doesn't address that at all, so lower taxes would simply mean lost services.
I'm not saying that the fair tax is necessarily the best implementation, but I think that its concept is a step in the right direction.
Because it moves the tax burden onto sales taxes, it's a significant tax *increase* for anyone who is forced to spend all of their income, and taxes shrink for anyone who *invests* most of their money instead of spending it (the richer you are, generally the larger percentage you invest). So -- a step in the right direction for whom?
I don't know why I'm continuing to respond to this, but you must see the oddity of this exchange:
The serious part was that maybe his wife is barren.
See above about abnormally low sperm count, again. They've done the standard testing already.
Which is only important if I'm giving him actual advice and not making a joke.
No, the joke part was that maybe he's not really a nerd and thus doesn't have the extra motile sperm.
But you quoted the part where he discusses marriage status, not the bit where he says tests showed that he has an abnormally low count. I assumed you chose that line to show somehow that he wasn't smart, not at random.
The serious part was that maybe his wife is barren.
See above about abnormally low sperm count, again. They've done the standard testing already.
I've been married 2 years now and been trying to conceive for 3+ with no luck.
No offense is intended, but maybe you're not as smart as you think you are.
Also, maybe it's her problem.
LK
Did... did you just assume that conception isn't possible before marriage?
That's amazing.
And you're saying it's potentially his wife's fault that his sperm count is low? Maybe she's been kicking him in the groin a bit too often?
If the license could be revoked, that would no longer be the case, as nothing else would give those other people permission to distribute it. Again, the possibility of revoking the license is controversial, but there is case law on both sides (even case law specific to computer software licenses!)
I read the link you provided (and the comments), and it's pretty clear that's a very big "if".
Particularly because of the nature of the GPL -- i.e., the initial "contract" specifically grants recipients permission to make the same contract with still more people, so to revoke a GPL license completely you'd have to not only revoke the initial contract -- you'd also have to force everyone else to revoke their contracts based on that first one.
I don't deny that almost nothing is crystal-clear impossible in copyright/contract law, but I'm not convinced there's any risk here.
I'm sure that's what happened -- a basic math mistake like that is fine, I've typed the numbers in wrong before as well -- but if it had *just* been a rapid math mistake (i.e., he left out the figure until the end to use a recent rate) then his argument would have been different, e.g., "75K sounds decent enough in dollars... but remember, this is the euro, which has left the sinking dollar in the dust in recent years... so particularly if you're sending some of that money home, it's a lot: [number here]".
He just didn't even know that the euro was worth more than the dollar, so his entire discussion (based on the bad math and nothing else) is wrong.
No shit. I thought for a second they meant cost of living, or something like that, but no.
Exchange rate when the article was written (back in June, when it was even worse than today) was 1.00 EUR = 1.5451 USD.
So 75K euros = $115,882.50
So they miscalculated your potential salary by... $67,882.50.
"Whoopsy."
Yeah, it's open source, but they have to consider their target, and they have to consider that their target has already been hit, and more than once in the closed source world.
Okay, so are you saying that runrev is a closed-source competitor to Sophie? What are the major *OSS* competitors? OSS doesn't compete directly with closed source software -- if the functionality is "close enough", the OSS project will win by default for many people.
And I'm still baffled as to why the Mellon Foundation might possibly give money to a for-profit company vs. funding open source. If there were truly no place for Sophie, they would fund a different open source project.
And they also need to try to figure out why (besides runrev being closed source) runrev hasn't killed MSOffice.
Man, you just keep saying these things that sound like non-sequiturs. I'm pretty damned sure runrev isn't a consumer office suite...?
Near as I can tell, Java 7 hasn't addressed the problem that makes the Java implementations of hypercard interpreters founder. (I suppose I might be off-base, but until the Java camp gets past talking about dynamic objects, I can only suppose that things will remain as they are.)
Again, I know Java fairly well, but I have no clue what you're talking about (then again, I certainly haven't tried to implement a hypercard interpreter in Java). Any kind of specific detail or link might help, if this is even worth discussing. The Bulgarian company that's leading the Java implementation was also deeply involved in the development of the Squeak version of Sophie -- if that implementation is impossible in Java, I suspect they'd know it.
This is a... confusing response.
Question one, did you consider Runtime Revolution at any point in your analysis/development?
It's an open source project. I don't think requiring a proprietary dev environment to modify the code is even *legal* for distributing OSS.
Runtime Revolution looks like a non-free development environment with its own custom dev language -- even if it were free, how could this possibly help the problem of a too-small developer community with the Squeak version?
Does everyone on your team understand the implications of Sun's move from Java 5 to Java 7?
A link here might help. What implications? I'm a Java developer, and I read a decent amount on Java's evolution and haven't seen anything frightening.
There may be much more than sore grapes motivating the disappointment you are hearing expressed from the original team. You're literally trying to move the earth underneath your project. Business manager's instinctive reach for the mainstream or for the "cool" (whichever it might have been) is not a good technical reason for inducing an earthquake in the code base. They have to have more than that, or all the "acceptance" available in business circles really is not good enough reason for this kind of decision. When you let marketing determine the technical directions[...]
I'd agree that it's a big decision to rewrite a project in a new language -- it usually takes significantly more effort than expected, so that's a very valid thing to discuss. But the language chosen for an open source project is very important in building a developer community -- it's not for marketing reasons, it's simple math; when developers with an "itch" want to add a feature, if they don't know the development technology they won't be able to participate.
Excellent, clear response, and exactly what I suspected the situation was....
Original submitter: if you want to jump in somewhere, responding directly to parent is the likely place to do it.
You'd have a pretty tough time in court if you tried to actively revoke an existing GPL license, forcing other folks to stop using it and stop distributing it, stop distributing derivatives however many steps down the line, etc... you'd be attempting to grab control not only of your copyrighted material, but of OTHER people's copyrighted work derived legally from yours.
You certainly *can* take a product closed source if you own the copyright completely -- this has always been true and is not disputed. But what that means is that you simply stop offering the product via GPL personally. OTHER people can still offer it for download (via the GPL) and offer their derived work via the GPL as long as they want. You can't prevent forks, though the forks (because they include your copyrighted code) don't have the option of going closed source themselves.
I'm assuming that's what this company did -- they owned the copyright, so they went closed source, and while you might find old versions freely elsewhere, all new versions would be closed source.
Some other non-gamer-related comics:
Dr. McNinja
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Dinosaur Comics
Least I Could Do
Transmission-X has a couple super-imaginative & well-done comics (less of a focus on humor) and a few clunkers.
White Ninja if you're in the mood for it.
Achewood never did much for me either. I've tried a few times.
Little Gamers suggested above... never heard of it, just looked now, and for today they have a storyline-only comic with "loose" instead of "lose". Not for me.
Minor addendum -- we also have other sources of data that are less precise, but that provide independent dating methods.
Example -- different kinds of rock erode at different rates. We don't know exactly what the weather has been like over X millions of years, but we can deduce a range (hint: huge mountains of hard rock don't get worn to nubs in a thousand years). Sediment build-up is another similar clue.
That's how science works -- you gather *all* the clues possible, and if your theory doesn't account for all of them, it has to change.
Sources?
And what alternate interpretations have you considered and discarded?
Unfortunately, there's a large mass of scientific-sounding drivel on the internet that makes incoherent points based on basic misunderstandings of the science involved -- you can often do a tiny amount of research and find that they are misrepresenting the situation, often maliciously and with an unsubtle agenda.
If you provide some sources perhaps you might get help evaluating them.
If you're actually doing ground-breaking research yourself, bravo, and let us know when the Nobel prize ceremony is. I'm not getting that sense, though.
In a sense, the interpretations (not the facts) of science are based as much on faith as any religion.
This is a profound misunderstanding of science.
You're (unknowingly) pointing to the exact reason why the scientific method was developed, and why the scientific approach has been so extremely successful at winnowing out valid, supported, useful theories from all of the possible conceptions of how the world works.
Removing faith from the search for knowledge was essential. Removing "unquestionable fact" from consideration was essential. No theory or conclusion is ever a closed book -- as more observations are made (and more are possible, because our technology continues to advance), theory must always be updated to account for those observations.
It's amazing to me that we're born into a world where one set of grownups tell us that X and Y happened magically, done by a magic invisible being, and we must take their word for it because *other* people wrote it down rather cryptically a long time ago, and there's no way to investigate for ourselves. And ANOTHER group of grownups tells us no, we can get a pretty good idea of how X and Y happened if we gather up the clues left everywhere and apply a strict process to weed out the weak ideas... and here, you can try it for yourself, and read how we figured it out in as much depth as you want, and even help us figure out more.
Why does anyone join the first group? Because they seem nice? (well, not all of them...) Because they were forced to decide while still children (and it can be hard to change)?
So, which papers have you read where an actual scientist takes constant speed for plate movement as assumed? You keep saying "they assume this", but I can't find even "geology for laypeople" web pages containing that huge logical gap. Can you?
1) what are you actually arguing for (i.e., do you believe the plates moved drastically faster, say, 5500 years ago)?
2) You ignored the rest of my comment -- about there being many other sources of information, not just current direct measurements of drift. The theory didn't have any real backing until other sources of data fell into place.
We also do have a good understanding of how heat transference works (again, bringing to bear another set of observations and scientific knowledge) that will give us separate data on how fast heat can actually convect through the mantle, crust, etc. From what I remember of geology (ages ago), it's a pretty damned slow process -- which we know not because we just extrapolate, but because heat doesn't convect through rock at random; it obeys natural laws.
Based on all of those differing sources of data, scientists can define *ranges* of when the continents would have been at different locations. That's how it works when you don't have exact ways to pin down a date -- you calculate your margin of error based on the precision of your data and you work from there.
Because when plates move it makes such dramatic changes on the surface (mountain ranges which then age on the surface, volcanoes, levels of sediment on the sea floor, etc. etc..) we don't just have to guess at historical movement, we can track it *also* based on all of that external change.
It would most certainly be much faster than what we observe today.
Er... WHEN would it have been "much faster" than today? If you want to make actual arguments, I can probably address them, or at least tell you where to look. If you want to look at areas of plate tectonic theory that still need expansion, sure -- like all theories, it's still being extended as new observations become possible, and if you could actually advance it you'd probably win some awards (tenure, at least). You can also ask the scientists themselves which parts they'd most like to improve.
If you want to draw a conclusion that's drastically different from what actual geologists support, though, you have to be able to address the whole body of data their theories cover. If you don't even understand the basis for the theory in the first place, you don't have much hope of saying anything coherent at all.
I can't believe I'm going to bite on this... but that would be a water hypothesis... not a theory. It's not provable or disprovable (or even testable) and therefore is not a theory.
I should also mention that it's not even a hypothesis, not in scientific terms.
A hypothesis must be a reasoned explanation of existing observations that IS testable (but not yet tested). It has to be coherent and not already disproved by existing evidence.
Yes, indeed, scientists observe California move a few inches and then extrapolate that movement and come up with utter crap stating that in x number of millions of years California will be next to Alaska. They assume (believe) this rate will be or has been constant for all that time. They do this backwards in time also.
Once rock is forced up to the surface, it doesn't weather the same as rock still in liquid (or solid) form under the surface.
I'm no geologist, and I came up with that just off the top of my head. Why would they assume constant movement? They can't, so they have to correlate those observations with other sources of data to come up with any kind of extrapolation.
We have far more ways of gathering data on the plate movements than just taking California's movement over a few years and extrapolating to millions of years.
It can be observed that the continents sort of fit together like a huge jigsaw puzzle. What cannot be derived from this however is the time scale over which this continental drifting took place. This assumed, not measured or observed. Assuming that rate of present processes can be applied over vast time scales may be correct, but it is nevertheless an unprovable assumption. Most processes observed in nature today are neither linear nor constant.
It is quite conceivable, that when the earth was younger and hotter, the underlying layers where more fluid. This would mean that the continents moved much more easily and faster than we observe them to be doing today.
Sources?
Follow-up: I did 30 seconds of research and pretty much confirmed my guesses -- the plate tectonics concept sat on the shelf for years because of lack of solid evidence... until the 1950s, when we developed methods of mapping out the ocean floor, which held a lot of clues.
Holy crap; I was joking, but some other commenter replied to you saying the same shit, but absolutely seriously.
Apparently plate tectonics is *also* disputed by the creationists, and subject to the same muddy "theory" attacks? I guess it must be, though I hadn't thought of it... after all, it's yet another pile of evidence that points to an earth much older than a few thousand years.
"Q: What do I get if my idea is chosen? A: You get good karma and the satisfaction of knowing that your idea might truly help a lot of people."
Doesn't sound like profit is the name of the game here.
Not for the idea submitter, no. Google may profit from the implementation of the idea -- they're handling that side of it, so this isn't anything like the MacArthur genius grant, etc -- but I think primarily in terms of image.
Basically, they are looking to splash out some money implementing a cool philanthropic project (which costs some money but gains them cred and image), and to get the coolest possible idea they are asking outside people for suggestions as well.
It's not evil -- in the end, the world does benefit -- but submitting an idea as your route to fame & glory would be rather starry-eyed.
Notice this, right at the start:
Google isn't giving this money to the folks with the winning ideas. They're using the money themselves to enact your great idea.
This is clarified by the FAQ -- once the ideas are chosen, they will start an RFP process to choose who will do the implementation (I would assume they will also have Google people involved in the implementation at various levels). You (as the idea submitter) can suggest an organization you think would be a good choice for implementation, but it's up to them to decide.
Either way, a winning idea certainly doesn't mean a chunk of money is headed your way, or that you'll even be involved in the implementation in any way.
I have a Peugeot 206 diesel that gets over 50 mpg even in a hilly area with mostly short drives.
No hybrid, no special tuning, etc..
Diesel is also quite a bit cheaper than regular gas here (France).
Logic failure - how did evolution come into being? Who or what created it? It obviously did not evolve from evolution -- circular logic. So someone or something must have created it.
Evolution is a process, not a thing that "comes into being". Evolution happens as long as there is life reproducing and undergoing natural selection.
Are you trying to ask how the first life came into being?