I've never bought a console before. I got a PS2 with a jammed drive from a cousin and fixed it, but it was mostly my kids who played it. Last week, though, my wife surprised the heck out of me with a PS3 for my birthday, along with a few games. I'm pretty happy with it. (I'm lucky... she also likes flat-panel TVs, so we have a goodly-sized 1080p to hook it up to.)
I don't care about exclusive games particularly. I was waiting for UT3 for Linux, but it's looking like that might never happen, so I've got it for the PS3. With a wireless keyboard and mouse, it's pretty nice. (I'm too old to be anything but a convenient target, but it's fun.) "Resistance: Fall of Man" is an exclusive, and I'm slowly getting used to using the controller for an FPS... meh. The kids like playing "The Simpsons Game" with me, and I've got a PS2-to-USB adapter that lets us use a PS2 controller so we can double up. Bought "flOw" from the network, not bad. Worth $8, anyway. It's the 40GB model, so no PS2 games... but we have a PS2, so oh well.
The Blu-ray stuff is nice, but I'm not going out and re-buying my library. After the 45 minutes of updating the firmware to the latest version (Oy!), upconverted DVDs look good, and it's much more responsive changing menus than our old upconverting DVD player. (Given the CPU in there, it had better be.) Still, now that the format war is over, the PS3's the obvious choice over the Xbox 360, given that I'm not a big gamer worried about exclusives. It's the best Blu-ray player, and I can play some games with it. For 'drama' movies, DVD is fine, but for the occasional F/X-heavy blockbuster, I'll want Blu-ray. ("Iron Man" will probably be my first Blu-ray purchase.)
I'm going to set up MediaTomb on my downstairs box as soon as I update to Ubuntu 8.04, and then it'll be a nice way to watch videos and play music, too.
Sony made a risky play hitching the PS3 to Blu-ray, but it seems to have paid off. Nintendo made a different risky play eschewing raw horsepower for simple, social games... and that paid off, too. Microsoft didn't take too many risks with the 360, and that doesn't seem to have paid off so hot. (Well, except for the risks that backfired on them.)
"Personally, I've been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes." - Patrick Nielsen Hayden
By Introversion Software. It's the "Global Thermonuclear War" game from the movie, mostly. Fun, though a little disturbing at times. Runs on Linux and Mac, too. Inexpensive as well.
It was about eight years between the first World Trade Center bombing (February 26, 1993) and 9/11/2001. Al Quaeda already has a long history of taking plenty of time between attacks on U.S. soil. We'd need to wait until maybe 2012 to be reasonably sure our procedures were actually dissuading them.
...to replace my Treo 650. I've got a 'two-year upgrade' due, and I like PalmOS, despite its limitations. But a Linux-based phone - assuming it wasn't totally locked-down by Verizon - would be even better. Maybe I'll hold off a while.:->
My nephew got something or other on his laptop. I made a desultory effort to clean it, but whatever crap was on there would kill the anti-spyware install routines within seconds. Fortunately I'd installed Ubuntu on another partition, and he was still able to do web and email and stuff, and I told him to back up the data he needs and I'll wipe it and start fresh.
I'm pretty sure it was trojaned game mods that got him instead of the usual porn sites. At least, if it was porn, he did a pretty good job hiding his tracks.:->
Of course, the "multi-paragraph responses" actually explain why that is:
However, every model (even by the same manufacturer) is different.
But, you are going to have to verify that the card you are buying has the right chipset.
It's not as easy to answer your question as it should be, because manufacturers sometimes change chipsets but don't change model numbers. For example, I have a desktop card, a DLink DWL-G520 (rev B), works fine with Linux. But the (rev B) is important - the (rev A) version has a totally different chipset.
If the manufacturers are going to withhold critical information, there's only so much other people can do.
I dunno about Best Buy, I check the circulars and look for deals when I need hardware. You don't say what kind of card you're looking for. If you're looking for a notebook adapter, I've had good results with two different Trendnet TEW-441PC Cardbus cards and Ubuntu - WPA & WEP, etc., works "out of the box". If you're looking for a desktop PCI card, well, Trendnet has a page telling which ones work with Linux. (I think the TEW-443PI has the same chipset as the Cardbus card I have; it's not listed as supported at Trendnet, but then again, neither is mine. But the TEW-441PC works anyway.)
I picked them up from an InkStop store, they usually have some in stock, at least here in Michigan.
It's not as easy to answer your question as it should be, because manufacturers sometimes change chipsets but don't change model numbers. For example, I have a desktop card, a DLink DWL-G520 (rev B), works fine with Linux. But the (rev B) is important - the (rev A) version has a totally different chipset.
...an application with a single process with a single thread won't utilize more than about one-fourth of a quad-core server. What do you plan to do with the other three cores...
I use threads a fair amount, because they are there. But I kinda wish path expressions would catch on. Let the compiler sort out the scheduling given the constraints - that's the kind of scut work computers are good for anyway.
Too bad it doesn't look like it'd be practical in the real world, but if it could be... a nuclear isomer power source would just about fit the bill. "One gram of pure Hf-178-m2 contains approximately 1330 megajoules of energy, the equivalent of exploding about 317 kilograms (700 pounds) of TNT." However, it doesn't look like one can induce the isomers to relax on cue.
the point is that if the sciences won't grant degrees to creationists, it's rather odd to turn around and talk about creationists' lack of scientific achievement in the field
But I'm not asking about a lack of scientific achievement. I'm asking about a lack of economic and business achievement. You don't need an advanced degree to do well in business. Bill Gates is a college dropout, for example. However, it seems like only con men actually try to apply creationism to a useful purpose.
Why does geology predict rather well where to find oil? Because it begins with observed facts.
But - and this is critical - it doesn't end there. Oil exploration is not just a matter of, "Gee, we found oil and the rocks looked kinda like this, let's look up in our records where other rock that looks like that can be found." You need to fit those facts into a framework. If oil forms primarily from reefs that have been buried under the right kind of sediment, and maintained under the right sort of temperatures and pressures, and then collected in other kinds of rock formations, then to find oil, you need to be able to identify where such conditions have obtained in the past.
You need to know where the oceans were, and how deep they were, and from that where their coasts were, and which of those coasts have been buried. You need to be able to figure out what areas have had the right kind of elevated temperatures for the right length of time, and where reservoirs could form, and which of those would have been geologically stable for long periods of time. All of this connects to other fields - chemistry and physics for dating, modeling, and assaying, paleontology and biology for dating and modeling again, then toss in seismology and so forth. It's not exactly a coincidence that creationists who enter the oil business either leave the field or stop being creationists.
I assert that there are no "facts" about the origin or age of the universe, because you must choose your epistemological presuppositions first.
We do have an epistemological difference, but it's not the one you're proposing. It's much more fundamental. You believe in the 'supernatural' - something forever unknowable by humans, even in principle. However, that's a troublesome concept.
How can we, in practice, distinguish between something 'currently unknown but comprehensible' and something 'forever unknowable'? (We could also add other categories like 'knowable in principle but impractical to discover' and 'knowable and practical but, just by bad luck, will never have the explanation stumbled upon'.) From a practical perspective, the only way to tell which category something falls into is to try to understand it; if you succeed, then it was knowable. The problem is, if you fail, you can't conclude that it's unknowable. It might be... but it also might be the case that you just didn't happen to figure out something knowable, and you or someone else might have better luck on a subsequent attempt.
If you decide that something is fundamentally incomprehensible, you will stop trying to understand it. Richard Feynman once joked that "You don't understand Quantum Mechanics, you just get used to it," but he never stopped trying to advance understanding of QM, despite how counterintuitive it is. And it's worth noting that QM is not quite as incomprehensible as it's popularly portrayed - if it were, the computer you're reading this on could never have been designed and built.
Accepting that there are things that we don't know is not the same as accepting that there are things that we cannot, even in principle, know. As discussed above, the notion of 'the unknowable' adds nothing from a pr
None of that really addresses the question. The first point is a non-sequitor. I wasn't asking about how few creationists have geology degrees, I was asking why so few creationists strike oil. (Or, indeed, find any deposits of any raw material.)
The second point is interesting. Oil is indeed found in "certain kinds of geological formations". That's a fact. And as Jules Henri Poincare pointed out, "Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house." Conventional geology isn't just a catalog of where the oil is. It also explains why the oil is there and not elsewhere, and it uses those frameworks to predict where else oil can be found. Young-Earth creationism, as you say in the third point, doesn't - can't - put those facts into a framework. In other words, it's not science.
Now, an "epistemological" question - why does the framework of modern geology work so well, if it's not actually (an incomplete but basically accurate) picture the truth?
The "omphalos" issue pretty much destroys science, and actually causes other issue. If light was created "on the way" from stars, then you have a God that is presenting evidence of things like supernovae that never actually happened. Even many religious people have issues with that.
If someone doesn't trust ssh, which has popular open and closed-source implementations, and been reviewed by many, why would they trust some home-grown alternative with a significantly smaller base of eyes?
Because it's a lot smaller, simpler, and easier to check. For example, you only need to look at about 58 lines of code (including comments) to determine that remote buffer overflows are impossible.
not to be picky, but that is not really a standard normal distribution.
You're right! There's noise in the data! But can you show that the 'noise' rises to the level of statistical significance? Can you show that there's a recognizable chance that there's a 'signal' in that noise? I said that it fit a bell curve "very, very well" - I didn't say it fit "perfectly", because you don't get perfection in the real world.
The point is, despite a lot of people looking very very carefully, nobody's been able to show any statistically-significant deviation from random in mutations. That doesn't prove that such deviations don't exist, but it does justify a presumption of randomness until and unless someone can show something different. Feel free to get started - if you succeed, the Nobel Prize awaits.
I believe that Dawkins has written several books about evolutionary biology. How is it that he is not helping?
He is, indeed, doing a good job of spreading understanding of the science of evolution. But he does (frequently) conflate the fact of evolution with disproof of God(s). It's in that narrow sense that he's "not helping". I also think he's off on the historical utility of religion. For a better treatment of that, I'd suggest David Sloan Wilson's "Evolution For Everyone". Wilson makes a good case that religious belief has, in the past, been "practically realistic", even if religious beliefs are not, in fact, true. (Of course, that doesn't mean that religious beliefs are necessary to get those benefits.)
If the abiotic oil people are correct, or if the process of crude oil & coal creation doesn't require millions of years, then Flood geology is equivalent to non-Flood geology.
Uh... no. Flood geology has a lot of mutually-incompatible subvariants. Many of them, for example, propose that the continental plates shifted in the year or so of the Flood. That's, er, substantially different from standard geology and makes different predictions about where the organic matter will be that eventually becomes oil. More, the conditions that produce oil in an accelerated way are fairly specific. For those conditions to hold, specific geological conditions and features have to be present, which in turn makes predictions about where and how oil will form, and suggests what to look for when doing exploratory drilling. Somehow no one seems to apply these predictions, though.
Either that, or else you're saying that the young-Earth theory doesn't actually make any specific predictions at all.
So, is young-Earth geology failed science, or not science at all?
Go look at the second link I posted, and search for the phrase "unequal in most cases". You will see a graph of the divergence of over two thousand genes between mice and humans. The data fits a bell curve very, very well. This is exactly what we'd expect if mutations were random. Lots of studies have been done in this vein, and no one has been able to find statistically-significant deviations from random, ever. (And not for lack of looking. Google "directed mutagenesis" to hip yourself to an example.)
It's true that the origin of life on Earth is still effectively a mystery. We don't know how the first cells originated. We have some interesting hypotheses, though, and they are being tested. Assuming that, just because we don't know something, we won't ever know - that hasn't worked out well, historically.
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I don't care about exclusive games particularly. I was waiting for UT3 for Linux, but it's looking like that might never happen, so I've got it for the PS3. With a wireless keyboard and mouse, it's pretty nice. (I'm too old to be anything but a convenient target, but it's fun.) "Resistance: Fall of Man" is an exclusive, and I'm slowly getting used to using the controller for an FPS... meh. The kids like playing "The Simpsons Game" with me, and I've got a PS2-to-USB adapter that lets us use a PS2 controller so we can double up. Bought "flOw" from the network, not bad. Worth $8, anyway. It's the 40GB model, so no PS2 games... but we have a PS2, so oh well.
The Blu-ray stuff is nice, but I'm not going out and re-buying my library. After the 45 minutes of updating the firmware to the latest version (Oy!), upconverted DVDs look good, and it's much more responsive changing menus than our old upconverting DVD player. (Given the CPU in there, it had better be.) Still, now that the format war is over, the PS3's the obvious choice over the Xbox 360, given that I'm not a big gamer worried about exclusives. It's the best Blu-ray player, and I can play some games with it. For 'drama' movies, DVD is fine, but for the occasional F/X-heavy blockbuster, I'll want Blu-ray. ("Iron Man" will probably be my first Blu-ray purchase.)
I'm going to set up MediaTomb on my downstairs box as soon as I update to Ubuntu 8.04, and then it'll be a nice way to watch videos and play music, too.
Sony made a risky play hitching the PS3 to Blu-ray, but it seems to have paid off. Nintendo made a different risky play eschewing raw horsepower for simple, social games... and that paid off, too. Microsoft didn't take too many risks with the 360, and that doesn't seem to have paid off so hot. (Well, except for the risks that backfired on them.)
"Personally, I've been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes." - Patrick Nielsen Hayden
In fact, I think I'll go home and play some.
Oh, I agree, just putting things in perspective a bit.
"[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was [perfectly] spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
It was about eight years between the first World Trade Center bombing (February 26, 1993) and 9/11/2001. Al Quaeda already has a long history of taking plenty of time between attacks on U.S. soil. We'd need to wait until maybe 2012 to be reasonably sure our procedures were actually dissuading them.
Despite their past ambivalence to the OS and its partisans.
...to replace my Treo 650. I've got a 'two-year upgrade' due, and I like PalmOS, despite its limitations. But a Linux-based phone - assuming it wasn't totally locked-down by Verizon - would be even better. Maybe I'll hold off a while. :->
I'm pretty sure it was trojaned game mods that got him instead of the usual porn sites. At least, if it was porn, he did a pretty good job hiding his tracks. :->
I know, kids these days, they don't know how good they have it.
Of course, the "multi-paragraph responses" actually explain why that is:
If the manufacturers are going to withhold critical information, there's only so much other people can do.
I picked them up from an InkStop store, they usually have some in stock, at least here in Michigan.
It's not as easy to answer your question as it should be, because manufacturers sometimes change chipsets but don't change model numbers. For example, I have a desktop card, a DLink DWL-G520 (rev B), works fine with Linux. But the (rev B) is important - the (rev A) version has a totally different chipset.
Run CGIs and the database.
Unix's select/poll mechanism avoids all that. See, e.g., here.
I use threads a fair amount, because they are there. But I kinda wish path expressions would catch on. Let the compiler sort out the scheduling given the constraints - that's the kind of scut work computers are good for anyway.
...like this one. People are complicated critters.
Too bad it doesn't look like it'd be practical in the real world, but if it could be... a nuclear isomer power source would just about fit the bill. "One gram of pure Hf-178-m2 contains approximately 1330 megajoules of energy, the equivalent of exploding about 317 kilograms (700 pounds) of TNT." However, it doesn't look like one can induce the isomers to relax on cue.
But I'm not asking about a lack of scientific achievement. I'm asking about a lack of economic and business achievement. You don't need an advanced degree to do well in business. Bill Gates is a college dropout, for example. However, it seems like only con men actually try to apply creationism to a useful purpose.
But - and this is critical - it doesn't end there. Oil exploration is not just a matter of, "Gee, we found oil and the rocks looked kinda like this, let's look up in our records where other rock that looks like that can be found." You need to fit those facts into a framework. If oil forms primarily from reefs that have been buried under the right kind of sediment, and maintained under the right sort of temperatures and pressures, and then collected in other kinds of rock formations, then to find oil, you need to be able to identify where such conditions have obtained in the past.
You need to know where the oceans were, and how deep they were, and from that where their coasts were, and which of those coasts have been buried. You need to be able to figure out what areas have had the right kind of elevated temperatures for the right length of time, and where reservoirs could form, and which of those would have been geologically stable for long periods of time. All of this connects to other fields - chemistry and physics for dating, modeling, and assaying, paleontology and biology for dating and modeling again, then toss in seismology and so forth. It's not exactly a coincidence that creationists who enter the oil business either leave the field or stop being creationists.
We do have an epistemological difference, but it's not the one you're proposing. It's much more fundamental. You believe in the 'supernatural' - something forever unknowable by humans, even in principle. However, that's a troublesome concept.
How can we, in practice, distinguish between something 'currently unknown but comprehensible' and something 'forever unknowable'? (We could also add other categories like 'knowable in principle but impractical to discover' and 'knowable and practical but, just by bad luck, will never have the explanation stumbled upon'.) From a practical perspective, the only way to tell which category something falls into is to try to understand it; if you succeed, then it was knowable. The problem is, if you fail, you can't conclude that it's unknowable. It might be... but it also might be the case that you just didn't happen to figure out something knowable, and you or someone else might have better luck on a subsequent attempt.
If you decide that something is fundamentally incomprehensible, you will stop trying to understand it. Richard Feynman once joked that "You don't understand Quantum Mechanics, you just get used to it," but he never stopped trying to advance understanding of QM, despite how counterintuitive it is. And it's worth noting that QM is not quite as incomprehensible as it's popularly portrayed - if it were, the computer you're reading this on could never have been designed and built.
Accepting that there are things that we don't know is not the same as accepting that there are things that we cannot, even in principle, know. As discussed above, the notion of 'the unknowable' adds nothing from a pr
The second point is interesting. Oil is indeed found in "certain kinds of geological formations". That's a fact. And as Jules Henri Poincare pointed out, "Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house." Conventional geology isn't just a catalog of where the oil is. It also explains why the oil is there and not elsewhere, and it uses those frameworks to predict where else oil can be found. Young-Earth creationism, as you say in the third point, doesn't - can't - put those facts into a framework. In other words, it's not science.
Now, an "epistemological" question - why does the framework of modern geology work so well, if it's not actually (an incomplete but basically accurate) picture the truth?
The "omphalos" issue pretty much destroys science, and actually causes other issue. If light was created "on the way" from stars, then you have a God that is presenting evidence of things like supernovae that never actually happened. Even many religious people have issues with that.
You want "overall bizarre", look up Deuteronomy 25:11-12.
Because it's a lot smaller, simpler, and easier to check. For example, you only need to look at about 58 lines of code (including comments) to determine that remote buffer overflows are impossible.
You're right! There's noise in the data! But can you show that the 'noise' rises to the level of statistical significance? Can you show that there's a recognizable chance that there's a 'signal' in that noise? I said that it fit a bell curve "very, very well" - I didn't say it fit "perfectly", because you don't get perfection in the real world.
The point is, despite a lot of people looking very very carefully, nobody's been able to show any statistically-significant deviation from random in mutations. That doesn't prove that such deviations don't exist, but it does justify a presumption of randomness until and unless someone can show something different. Feel free to get started - if you succeed, the Nobel Prize awaits.
He is, indeed, doing a good job of spreading understanding of the science of evolution. But he does (frequently) conflate the fact of evolution with disproof of God(s). It's in that narrow sense that he's "not helping". I also think he's off on the historical utility of religion. For a better treatment of that, I'd suggest David Sloan Wilson's "Evolution For Everyone". Wilson makes a good case that religious belief has, in the past, been "practically realistic", even if religious beliefs are not, in fact, true. (Of course, that doesn't mean that religious beliefs are necessary to get those benefits.)
Uh... no. Flood geology has a lot of mutually-incompatible subvariants. Many of them, for example, propose that the continental plates shifted in the year or so of the Flood. That's, er, substantially different from standard geology and makes different predictions about where the organic matter will be that eventually becomes oil. More, the conditions that produce oil in an accelerated way are fairly specific. For those conditions to hold, specific geological conditions and features have to be present, which in turn makes predictions about where and how oil will form, and suggests what to look for when doing exploratory drilling. Somehow no one seems to apply these predictions, though.
Either that, or else you're saying that the young-Earth theory doesn't actually make any specific predictions at all.
So, is young-Earth geology failed science, or not science at all?
It's true that the origin of life on Earth is still effectively a mystery. We don't know how the first cells originated. We have some interesting hypotheses, though, and they are being tested. Assuming that, just because we don't know something, we won't ever know - that hasn't worked out well, historically.