As a proud Roman Catholic, I have this advice: If you want your kids to learn the theory of evolution, send them to a Catholic school.
I was skipping through the AM stations a few weeks back and picked up on the "Drew Mariani Show" on Catholic radio, attacking evolution pretty heavily. I emailed in, and had a bit of a conversation with the producer of the show - turns out he's a "Young Earth" creationist. I'd appreciate it if you could help educate some of your brethren...
I mean, if I have free will, I don't have to worry about it. And if I don't have free will, there's no point in worrying about it. Either way, it makes zero phenomenological difference. Fun for some people to ponder but not of any practical importance.
I'll admit that some of this was hokey but it's the least hokey computer movie ever by a long shot.
Like the The Manhattan Project or Real Genius where the science isn't right, but they
put in a little work to make it feel right. Hardly anyone bothers with that anymore. I think Primer's the last one I saw that even attempted it.
It's no different to the sudo password prompts users blindly enter their passwords into.
I disagree. I've seen users (my parents and family) using Ubuntu and sudo dialogs don't come up on a day-to-day basis. They don't see them at all. My boys don't have sudo access and never complain, and my parents only see them when the 'updates available' dialog comes up, and most of the time they just let the updates pile up until I visit once a week or so. (Of course, running a quick batch of updates is way better and less time-consuming than the Windows maintenance I used to have to do.)
Everything I've heard about UAC/LUA indicates that the security dialogs come up at least several times a day, on the other hand. It appears to be a legacy from designing an interface with no user security at all (Windows 3.0 and its successors), and trying to carry that over to a more secure system. The privileges were never properly separated so code that could do its job without privileges neverless does things in an insecure way.
Wait a sec. I thought bucking the system, questioning authority, considering multiple ideas, and not believing everything you were told were good things. Are we now saying that this girl should sit down, shut up and believe what the government tells her? When did that become cool?
Everything's a balancing act. You have to make some judgements about what seems solid and unquestionable and what seems farfetched. And yes, it's good to at least occasionally entertain even far-out ideas.
However, there's also such a thing as evidence to help guide one in making such judgements. The evidence has accumulated to the point where no sane individual questions (except for fun) the (more or less) spherical nature of the Earth, or the basically Copernican model of the solar system. And yes, the evidence for common descent and descent with modification is at least as solid. There are still questions and areas of research, of course. Even General Relativity, our most-thorougly-and-precisely-tested-theory-ever, has areas where we need more research - the interface with Quantum Mechanics, for example, which is very nearly as solidly tested.
I'm comfortable in dismissing those who propose a flat earth. I'm equally comfortable in dismissing those who dispute the basic outline of current geology and biology. We'll have more accurate theories as time goes on, but they will still match those very-well-documented-and-tested broad outlines, in the same way that Newton's Laws are still so valid that even NASA uses them with a few relativistic fudge factors thrown in, because a full relativistic treatment of a space probe's travel is too dang complicated to be useful.
Caldera subpoenad a large number of Microsoft emails and the attitude displayed in them is just reprehensible. They didn't want to compete on merits, or provide a better product. They just wanted to win, regardless of their own merit in the marketplace.
Seriously, doppler effect at car speeds? How fast do you drive?
Hey, I'm not an expert but everything I've read indicates that, yeah, 8VSB really is that sensitive.
It is worth noticing that a google search on 8vsb +doppler reveals that your claim about problems with moving vehicles is repeated almost exclusively in Wikipedia and its mirrors.
I could go either way on that. The Predator at least had some interesting weapons. If they used some kind of 'code of honor' to encourage unusual gameplay, it could work. It'd take some careful thought, though.
Give us a plot that hopefully doesn't involve yet-another-mad-scientist-trying-to-control-the-Al iens
From your lips to the developer'r ears, please!
Hell, let us do the whole "fortify an area and then defend it" thing
Bingo. They might take a few cues from Natural Selection. Not all of them, mind you - but a few.
a little more tolerance of brute-force solutions than we saw in the AvP games would be extremely nice
Another consideration - these days all the rage is destructible environments. The acid blood in the games would hurt enemies but not, say, the floor. That could easily be part of the Marine campaign - you have to kill enough aliens to burn through to an inaccessible area, or you have to not kill aliens near critical equipment, etc.
If you have any other strains that fit the plot, then use them. Just be sure to keep the look and feel of anything you add consistent with the original setting.
It's more-or-less canon that the aliens take on at least the rough outline of whatever they 'infect'. It'd be interesting to see some other creatures as aliens. An elephant? A snake? A bird?
I'm mucking with icculus' AvP port, trying to finish off the features. I've fixed some compile issues and got the music playing from Ogg files instead of CD-ROM, and I'm about halfway there on getting the in-game movies to play (yay ffmpeg for supporting Smacker vids now). (BTW, the in-game movies on the first edition are way better than the ones in the 'Gold' edition. The first edition had actual actors, for the 'Gold' edition they let the developers flex their vanity and 'act'. Bad move.)
One irritating thing is that the files are encrypted on the Gold CD, and the CD-check doesn't work in Wine, so you need a Windows install to get the game data (but VMware images will work). I think it's a simple scheme but I'm not a crypto guy. Anyone want to take a crack at it? I have the decrypted files so it's basically a known-plaintext attack. Indeed, some of the files have regular patterns so it becomes almost a chosen-plaintext attack.
Watching TV in a moving car? Not something that would have been thought of in "the rest of the world".
Theoretically the view would be for passengers, e.g. in a limousine.
It must require a much more powerful signal...
No, actually 8VSB requires less power to transmit (one of the reasons it was selected for the U.S. - large land area, much of it rural), but the timing constraints to pick up the heavily processed signal are very critical. The Doppler effect screws up the timing enough that the signal's hard to lock onto. The COFDM standard is, from what I gather, only a tiny bit less sensitive.
Almost all the boxes have been discontinued and there are very few being made anymore. Took me a while to find one (I get to pick out my xmas present this year). Maybe in 2009 that'll change when the switchover is supposed to happen in the US (I'll beleive that when I see it).
Of course, by FCC mandate all new TVs regardless of size are supposed to have an ATSC tuner in them starting March 2007. So the market for set-top boxes will be very small until 2009 at least, and even then will most people have switched to cable or satellite?
It's really bad for the North American 8VSB standard used in ATSC. The COFDM used in the "rest of the world's" "DVB-T" is only marginally better.
Probably mucho DSP power will eventually compensate, but don't expect portable units to pick up digital TV signals terribly well if they are moving for at least the next several years.
Very well. P is defined as 'The universe began to exist'. Therefore, (P v ~P)
Still using English. What if the duration of the universe prior to now is finite but unbounded, like the surface of a sphere? In such a model, asking "What came before the universe?" Would be like asking "What's north of the North Pole?" Note that Stephen Hawking proposes just such a model in "A Brief History of Time".
As I say in my web page, I don't think that we've had the right insights yet to make sense of the origin of the universe. Our normal, evolved intuitions of physics say that heavy things fall faster than light ones - because in general experience, for the kinds of environments we've evolved for, they do, thanks to air friction. But this doesn't apply in environments we don't normally experience, like vacuum. We already have encountered areas where our commonsense notions of time break down - close to the speed of light, or near really big masses. Even our very best, most rigorous and thoroughly-tested models of time break down when confronted with things like black holes. (And when those black holes are rotating... yeesh!) We just don't know what to expect there, and we can't even hope to run experiments for a long time.
We've never been particularly good at guessing how things work. Scientists need to actually do experiments, and they are surprised all the time. Talking about something like the "origin of time", which is so far outside our present experience and ability to experiment... Well, I strongly doubt our ability to reason correctly about it.
[Y]ou either believe the universe did begin to exist, or it did not... These are the only options, according to the law of excluded middle.
A 2D surface must have an edge, or else it must go on forever. A photon must be either a wave or a particle. "These are the only options, according to the law of excluded middle."
Except for, say, the surface of a sphere. Or a quantum "wavicle". Google for the "fallacy of the excluded middle".
Hint: if you can phrase your argument in terms of mathematical logic, then maybe you can apply the "law of the excluded middle". So long as you're just using English, and the fuzzy definitions that go with it, you can't argue that applies. Not by just saying it's so, anyway.
So the atheist must either claim the absurdity that the universe came from nothing, or he(/she) must acknowledge that there was something that created it.
Too bad it must be one of only those two choices, and there's no possibility of any kind of other option.
SCO talked a good line, while Open Source was a newcomer to business, of questionable utility, promoted by people who looked like "a bunch of socialist hippies" who didn't respect "intellectual property" and the related legal framework.
Except that now Lyons specifically states that SCO never produced any evidence. And even then the "noisy fanatics" (his words) were producing evidence that SCO was flat wrong.
Now he just sort of mumbles, "Gee, SCO was just flapping gums" without actually acknowledging that he was a prominent FUD disseminator himself, and they didn't - even then - back up their claims, to him or anyone else. I'd think at least a small apology would be in order.
"SCO Gets TKO'ed" - Forbes "The judges seem to be growing frustrated with SCO. For years, the company has gone around making outlandish claims--including many to Forbes--about IBM stealing huge amounts of code from Unix. Yet SCO has never shown any evidence to back up its claims."
Compare that article to this one from when the whole SCO fiasco was getting started. Same author, you'll note - very different attitude. I love the hilarity of juxtaposing the titles of the two articles. Back then Lyons was calling Linux advocates and users "crunchies" - now he just calls them "fans" and says things like "companies... have built booming businesses around Linux."
Not that he'll get called on the hypocrisy or anything.
Open-source software, particularly the big, high-profile projects, tends to be better-written than the closed-source alternatives. There are objective tests
that illustrate
this, over
and over.
You can also point out that, when bugs are found, they tend to be fixed
very rapidly, frequently within hours of their discovery. Since
the source code is available to everyone, anyone affected can create an
update to fix the problem. This happens exceedingly
rarely in the closed-source world, despite the large numbers of bugs
encountered.
She wants to use it for banking. Banking sites are often designed for IE and nothing else. Maybe Firefox will work, but that's not guaranteed.
IE runs pretty darn well under Wine, along with most of the ActiveX controls and other nonsense the banks seem to want. However, it tends not to run the illegitimate malware crap.
Set her up with Firefox for general internet and IE for specific banking stuff.
At least, two books, #7, Richard Dawkins book, and #17, A Letter to a Christian Nation, have atheist overtones.
You forgot "CULTURE WARRIOR" at #3 by noted atheist Bill O'Reilly, and "THE MYSTICAL LIFE OF JESUS" at #13 by Sylvia Browne. Oh, right - the world is so "anti-religion" nowadays. It's actually news that atheists have books that are selling now, but "Godless" by Ann Coulter and "Deliver Us From Evil" by Sean Hannity are, of course, not any cause for special note.
Let me just quote Jon Stewart on this one: "Yes, the long war on Christianity. I pray that one day we may live in an America where Christians can worship freely, in broad daylight, openly wearing symbols of their religion, perhaps around their necks. And maybe - dare I dream it - maybe one day there could even be an openly Christian president. Or, perhaps, 43 of them. Consecutively."
Linux had a lot of that rep even before it was 'portable' to anything but an x86. And there's research to show that the code itself is just plain well written. But yeah, that certainly helps.
Of course, by developing code on multiple platforms from the start you quickly find all kinds of subtle bugs that come back to bite you later if you don't find them. A bit of memory corruption that causes a failure 10,000 cycles later on one platform, can cause obvious instant death on another. Write on one big-endian, one little-endian, and one 64-bit platform simultaneously and you'll find at least 80% of your memory bugs early on, usually more. Bonus points if one of them is like a SPARC and has alignment requirements.
Also, portability tends to ecourage modularity, which helps isolate bugs and make them less likely in the first place, since the modules are smaller and easier to reason about than large chunks of code.
...it can be easily shown that [time travel] is impossible due to causality.
Of course, my entire point all along is that naive understandings of causality break down when you assume time travel. I agree (and go to some lengths to explicate) that paradoxes (self-inconsistent series of events) are impossible. I also even say, specifically, that the many-worlds solution is not truly time travel.
However, there is another possibility: self-consistent, self-causing loops, or what I and others have termed "perpendoxes". In this model, every effect has a cause, and every cause has effects, but some of them can "loop around" and end up causing themselves.
A lot of people don't like this idea because it either bothers their notions of free will or violates their ordinary notions of cause-and-effect, but they are quite consistent and logical (and dovetail quite nicely with extremely standard notions of general relativity). You might say that the idea has problems - but to do that you'd first have to start actually addressing what I've written rather than what you seem to wish or imagine I wrote.
Slashdot Mirror
I was skipping through the AM stations a few weeks back and picked up on the "Drew Mariani Show" on Catholic radio, attacking evolution pretty heavily. I emailed in, and had a bit of a conversation with the producer of the show - turns out he's a "Young Earth" creationist. I'd appreciate it if you could help educate some of your brethren...
I mean, if I have free will, I don't have to worry about it. And if I don't have free will, there's no point in worrying about it. Either way, it makes zero phenomenological difference. Fun for some people to ponder but not of any practical importance.
Like the The Manhattan Project or Real Genius where the science isn't right, but they put in a little work to make it feel right. Hardly anyone bothers with that anymore. I think Primer's the last one I saw that even attempted it.
I disagree. I've seen users (my parents and family) using Ubuntu and sudo dialogs don't come up on a day-to-day basis. They don't see them at all. My boys don't have sudo access and never complain, and my parents only see them when the 'updates available' dialog comes up, and most of the time they just let the updates pile up until I visit once a week or so. (Of course, running a quick batch of updates is way better and less time-consuming than the Windows maintenance I used to have to do.)
Everything I've heard about UAC/LUA indicates that the security dialogs come up at least several times a day, on the other hand. It appears to be a legacy from designing an interface with no user security at all (Windows 3.0 and its successors), and trying to carry that over to a more secure system. The privileges were never properly separated so code that could do its job without privileges neverless does things in an insecure way.
Everything's a balancing act. You have to make some judgements about what seems solid and unquestionable and what seems farfetched. And yes, it's good to at least occasionally entertain even far-out ideas.
However, there's also such a thing as evidence to help guide one in making such judgements. The evidence has accumulated to the point where no sane individual questions (except for fun) the (more or less) spherical nature of the Earth, or the basically Copernican model of the solar system. And yes, the evidence for common descent and descent with modification is at least as solid. There are still questions and areas of research, of course. Even General Relativity, our most-thorougly-and-precisely-tested-theory-ever, has areas where we need more research - the interface with Quantum Mechanics, for example, which is very nearly as solidly tested.
I'm comfortable in dismissing those who propose a flat earth. I'm equally comfortable in dismissing those who dispute the basic outline of current geology and biology. We'll have more accurate theories as time goes on, but they will still match those very-well-documented-and-tested broad outlines, in the same way that Newton's Laws are still so valid that even NASA uses them with a few relativistic fudge factors thrown in, because a full relativistic treatment of a space probe's travel is too dang complicated to be useful.
Caldera subpoenad a large number of Microsoft emails and the attitude displayed in them is just reprehensible. They didn't want to compete on merits, or provide a better product. They just wanted to win, regardless of their own merit in the marketplace.
Hey, I'm not an expert but everything I've read indicates that, yeah, 8VSB really is that sensitive.
Of course, even using your terms, it turns up things like "VSB is a single carrier transmission system, with no provisions for mobile operation" and "[F]rom all available information it seems that the ATSC system of terrestrial digital television used in the US and other NTSC territories will never be capable of mobile reception", so apparently at least a few other people think that, too.
And "atsc doppler" turned up this interview with the former chairman of the ATSC: "The ATSC system was specifically not designed to satisfied or reach moving receivers. This was not an oversight. When you try to satisfy mobile reception, it comes at a huge trade off in terms of bit rate."
I'm getting an ATSC tuner for xmas, as I said. Maybe I'll try it out in a car someday and we'll see.
I could go either way on that. The Predator at least had some interesting weapons. If they used some kind of 'code of honor' to encourage unusual gameplay, it could work. It'd take some careful thought, though.
From your lips to the developer'r ears, please!
Bingo. They might take a few cues from Natural Selection. Not all of them, mind you - but a few.
Another consideration - these days all the rage is destructible environments. The acid blood in the games would hurt enemies but not, say, the floor. That could easily be part of the Marine campaign - you have to kill enough aliens to burn through to an inaccessible area, or you have to not kill aliens near critical equipment, etc.
It's more-or-less canon that the aliens take on at least the rough outline of whatever they 'infect'. It'd be interesting to see some other creatures as aliens. An elephant? A snake? A bird?
One irritating thing is that the files are encrypted on the Gold CD, and the CD-check doesn't work in Wine, so you need a Windows install to get the game data (but VMware images will work). I think it's a simple scheme but I'm not a crypto guy. Anyone want to take a crack at it? I have the decrypted files so it's basically a known-plaintext attack. Indeed, some of the files have regular patterns so it becomes almost a chosen-plaintext attack.
Theoretically the view would be for passengers, e.g. in a limousine.
No, actually 8VSB requires less power to transmit (one of the reasons it was selected for the U.S. - large land area, much of it rural), but the timing constraints to pick up the heavily processed signal are very critical. The Doppler effect screws up the timing enough that the signal's hard to lock onto. The COFDM standard is, from what I gather, only a tiny bit less sensitive.
Of course, by FCC mandate all new TVs regardless of size are supposed to have an ATSC tuner in them starting March 2007. So the market for set-top boxes will be very small until 2009 at least, and even then will most people have switched to cable or satellite?
Probably mucho DSP power will eventually compensate, but don't expect portable units to pick up digital TV signals terribly well if they are moving for at least the next several years.
Still using English. What if the duration of the universe prior to now is finite but unbounded, like the surface of a sphere? In such a model, asking "What came before the universe?" Would be like asking "What's north of the North Pole?" Note that Stephen Hawking proposes just such a model in "A Brief History of Time".
As I say in my web page, I don't think that we've had the right insights yet to make sense of the origin of the universe. Our normal, evolved intuitions of physics say that heavy things fall faster than light ones - because in general experience, for the kinds of environments we've evolved for, they do, thanks to air friction. But this doesn't apply in environments we don't normally experience, like vacuum. We already have encountered areas where our commonsense notions of time break down - close to the speed of light, or near really big masses. Even our very best, most rigorous and thoroughly-tested models of time break down when confronted with things like black holes. (And when those black holes are rotating... yeesh!) We just don't know what to expect there, and we can't even hope to run experiments for a long time.
We've never been particularly good at guessing how things work. Scientists need to actually do experiments, and they are surprised all the time. Talking about something like the "origin of time", which is so far outside our present experience and ability to experiment... Well, I strongly doubt our ability to reason correctly about it.
A 2D surface must have an edge, or else it must go on forever. A photon must be either a wave or a particle. "These are the only options, according to the law of excluded middle."
Except for, say, the surface of a sphere. Or a quantum "wavicle". Google for the "fallacy of the excluded middle".
Hint: if you can phrase your argument in terms of mathematical logic, then maybe you can apply the "law of the excluded middle". So long as you're just using English, and the fuzzy definitions that go with it, you can't argue that applies. Not by just saying it's so, anyway.
Too bad it must be one of only those two choices, and there's no possibility of any kind of other option.
Except that now Lyons specifically states that SCO never produced any evidence. And even then the "noisy fanatics" (his words) were producing evidence that SCO was flat wrong.
Now he just sort of mumbles, "Gee, SCO was just flapping gums" without actually acknowledging that he was a prominent FUD disseminator himself, and they didn't - even then - back up their claims, to him or anyone else. I'd think at least a small apology would be in order.
Compare that article to this one from when the whole SCO fiasco was getting started. Same author, you'll note - very different attitude. I love the hilarity of juxtaposing the titles of the two articles. Back then Lyons was calling Linux advocates and users "crunchies" - now he just calls them "fans" and says things like "companies... have built booming businesses around Linux."
Not that he'll get called on the hypocrisy or anything.
You can also point out that, when bugs are found, they tend to be fixed very rapidly, frequently within hours of their discovery. Since the source code is available to everyone, anyone affected can create an update to fix the problem. This happens exceedingly rarely in the closed-source world, despite the large numbers of bugs encountered.
IE runs pretty darn well under Wine, along with most of the ActiveX controls and other nonsense the banks seem to want. However, it tends not to run the illegitimate malware crap.
Set her up with Firefox for general internet and IE for specific banking stuff.
In theory, that could be a time machine... anyone know the details of the math?
You forgot "CULTURE WARRIOR" at #3 by noted atheist Bill O'Reilly, and "THE MYSTICAL LIFE OF JESUS" at #13 by Sylvia Browne. Oh, right - the world is so "anti-religion" nowadays. It's actually news that atheists have books that are selling now, but "Godless" by Ann Coulter and "Deliver Us From Evil" by Sean Hannity are, of course, not any cause for special note.
Let me just quote Jon Stewart on this one: "Yes, the long war on Christianity. I pray that one day we may live in an America where Christians can worship freely, in broad daylight, openly wearing symbols of their religion, perhaps around their necks. And maybe - dare I dream it - maybe one day there could even be an openly Christian president. Or, perhaps, 43 of them. Consecutively."
Ah, you are a troll, or good simulation thereof. Okay, have a nice life.
Linux had a lot of that rep even before it was 'portable' to anything but an x86. And there's research to show that the code itself is just plain well written. But yeah, that certainly helps.
Also, portability tends to ecourage modularity, which helps isolate bugs and make them less likely in the first place, since the modules are smaller and easier to reason about than large chunks of code.
Funny, at this point I regard you the same way.
Of course, my entire point all along is that naive understandings of causality break down when you assume time travel. I agree (and go to some lengths to explicate) that paradoxes (self-inconsistent series of events) are impossible. I also even say, specifically, that the many-worlds solution is not truly time travel.
However, there is another possibility: self-consistent, self-causing loops, or what I and others have termed "perpendoxes". In this model, every effect has a cause, and every cause has effects, but some of them can "loop around" and end up causing themselves.
A lot of people don't like this idea because it either bothers their notions of free will or violates their ordinary notions of cause-and-effect, but they are quite consistent and logical (and dovetail quite nicely with extremely standard notions of general relativity). You might say that the idea has problems - but to do that you'd first have to start actually addressing what I've written rather than what you seem to wish or imagine I wrote.