It always bothers me when a news report talks about the strategic future of things, when the reporter makes a fairly fundamental mistake to show that he/she isn't really all that familiar with the subject matter.
As an owner of a new Treo 650p (about a month now) I've been quite pleased with it. It doesn't do Wifi, and that's a bit disappointing, but so far I haven't really missed it. As a Palm it's a good unit, as a phone it works well, and having them combined is a nice convenience. Battery life's been (much) better than I feared. I know my CDMA phone won't work in Europe, but that would happen with (almost) any phone I could get in the US.
I've even been playing with some of the oddball stuff, like The Core Pocket Media Player - the picture quality is much better than I expected. Many ScummVM games work, and the ones that don't, fail because they need a 640x480 screen. Doom is very nearly playable - the controls are the sticking point, the graphics are smooth.
The thing's been nice and reliable, too. The only resets have been because I was trying things that it just can't do (some games just need more RAM than this thing has, that's all).
Everyone I know with a Windows-based PDA has had missed alarms at some point - you set a reminder and it just doesn't go off. I've never had that happen with a Palm.
Maybe Palm will go away - developing for the Palm OS is much more bother than for most of the others due to the way they handle memory, and the multithreading issue. But it won't be because the units themselves are so terrible.
There's no measurable, practical difference, though.
Sure there is. We may not know the details of precisely what the weather will do in a given location, but the fact that weather is comprehensible means we can put fairly sharp boundaries on what the weather will do. I live in Michigan, and predictions of whether it will rain or not aren't always accurate. (Usually they are biased towards predicting rain when none happens; that might deliberate, though, since the consequences of a false positive are lower in that direction.) However, predictions of temperature ranges during the day, and usually several days in advance, tend to be spot-on. We can predict when tornadoes are more likely and when they are vanishingly likely to happen.
Being able to make these kinds of predictions, to be able to specify likely behavior and the error bars, has measurable and nontrivial consequences. Economic for example - don't think the insurance companies aren't paying attention to that data. Casinos (honest ones, anyway) don't know exactly how the dice are going to land, but they know statistics and the house still makes a profit.
...there are infinitely many knowable things.
How do you know this?
Even if it's true, that could be trivial. Perhaps the set of knowable things fits into a classification system that can fit into the human brain, so we could learn what we needed to know when we needed to know it, and not bother learning things we don't care about. Of course, the size of the human brain need not be static, as well.
The point is, having only two classifications of "something we understand" and "something we don't understand yet" is logically incomplete. There is also the set of "something we cannot understand".
Logically incomplete, perhaps, but complete for any and all practical purposes. When you solve a quadratic equation describing some real-world quantity, you often get a negative and a positive root. Freqeuently, the negative root makes no physical sense. It may be "mathematically incomplete" to ignore it, but it's not "incomplete" in any practical sense.
To ignore the possibility that some things cannot be understood by the scientific method is an act of faith... The premise cannot be proven false - this is a situation ripe for being classified as a fundamentalist belief.
If something cannot be proven false, then it's not science, that's right. But the proposition being discussed here is, "some [unspecified] things cannot be understood by the scientific method". How would you go about disproving that?
If you can give me a way I can test for incomprehensibility other than trying to understand I'd love to hear it. To make this very very plain, I put to you the question: Let's assume you're right. Some things are forever incomprehensible. Now, what should we do differently because we accept this premise? What practical difference does it make? Be specific. A few examples would be helpful.
My point is that determining that two particular individuals were not terrorists would not, BY ITSELF, be strong evidence that terrorism is not a threat
Oh, I understand what your point was, but I've heard that construction so often anymore, and it's so ridiculous (come to think of it, not unlike creationism) that it just bugs me to see it.
this would be evidence that terrorism isn't really a threat to the country
Terrorism isn't a threat to this country. Terrorists can cause upset and, sometimes, kill largish numbers of people. (Nowhere near as much as traffic accidents or obesity or cancer or workplace accidents, but somewhat significant.) They can't threaten the survival of the United States. Sure, it makes sense to take some precautions against it, but (for example) a wholesale restructuring of our legal system is disproportionate. (And largely ineffective anyway, and has too many bad side effects. Go read up on the Red Scare.)
Actually, that use of Shannon's law alone is good enough to prove there are unknowable things...
There's a difference beetween "unknowable" and "incomprehensible". Given what we understand of chaos theory, long-range weather forecasting is impossible. In many areas of the world we can't know whether it will be raining or sunny a week from today, there's no way to gather sufficient data with sufficient precision to make a prediction that far in advance.
That doesn't mean that weather isn't comprehensible. We understand the processes involved in weather well enough to even specify what conditions make such predictions impossible, and when. (For example, we can predict that it'll be sunny next week in the Sahara desert with a very high degree of reliability.)
we might never have enough available energy to do the experiements required to prove exactly what happened [at the Big Bang]
Yup, we might not. Then again, we might figure out ways to do the experiments with less energy, or come up with alternative cosmologies with more testable features. That's a different proposition altogether from saying that the Big Bang is forever beyond human ken.
In the late 1700's, as scientists started getting a handle on
electricity, they realized that lightning was electrical, and
should respond in the same ways as the electricity they generated
in their labs. Lightning rods
were proposed, and the officials of various churches vociferously
denounced them. After all, they knew that lightning was a direct
expression of Divine fury, and it was hubristic to attempt to
interfere with that.
Of course, since God wouldn't strike a church with lightning, very
often people would store explosives in the local church (the tallest
building in town, with ungrounded metal on top). After a church in
Europe was struck by lightning in 1769, and 3,000 people were killed
when the tons of gunpowder stored there exploded, those objections
began to die out.
Now, even before the 1700's, was it reasonable to say that
God (or Thor, or the Thunderbirds, or Ulohora, or what have you)
caused lightning? No, the proper response to "What causes lighting?"
was "Darn if I, or anyone else, knows."
And, obviously, it was similarly incorrect to say, "No one ever will know, either."
You seem to have a blind faith that the human brain is capable of understanding every facet of the universe. Why is that?
Because there is no practical way to differentiate between "something we don't understand yet", and "something we cannot understand". There isn't anything you can point to and say "that's forever incomprehensible". They used to say that about life and now we have molecular biology, for example.
As Woody Allen pithily put it, "Is knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know this?"
It makes absolutely no testable, measurable, detectable difference whatsoever. No profit of any kind is gained by assuming something is incomprehensible. If you assume something's incomprehensible, and don't try to understand it, you never will. If you assume something's comprehensible, you might eventually figure it out. In other words, the only possible test for incomprehensibility is to try to understand it. If at the end of forever you've failed, then you can tentatively conclude that maybe it's unknowable.
It's a shame that that meant the police were down a quarter of a million dollars, that just goes to some rich kid. I'd have prefered to hear that the officers responsible were severely disciplined.
I agree, fired would be about right. But I rather imagine losing $250K from the budget had a deterrent effect.
People who feel that the Earth is becoming overpopulated don't see colonization as a real cure. Even if you avoided the problem of cost-to-orbit with rockets by constructing space elevators, at this rate you would never be able to move more people off the planet than are being born on it.
It's not about moving people off-planet. It's establishing alternate populations that can maintain civilization (and possibly humanity's existence) if something catastrostrophic happened on Earth. Worst case, people re-(over?)populate the Earth after the current inhabitants get wiped out. Disease, meteor impact, nuclear conflict, whatever.
Supporting robots in a factory in rural Italy, outside of Milan, 1997. I managed to talk work into letting my new wife come along, both of us going coach instead of just me in business class. I had the debug software loaded on the laptop, but I'd used a floppy disk to transfer it, and it was corrupted (had to book to the airport in a hurry, no time to check).
So, I'm in this plant in the middle of the night, no one can figure out how to turn on the lights so we're using our laptops as flashlights, the giant mutant Italian mosquitos are on the hunt, and the debug software won't load (bad checksum). I can't download it since the Italian phone system doesn't use quite the same dial tone and the modem won't let me dial, and of course there's no way to look up the ATX1 command on the net if I can't dial up, and these damn French engineers I'm working with will take a two hour lunch, and a two hour dinner, but won't give up on an obviously hopeless case until 5:30am.
And I did manage to get one of the engineer's cell phones to connect and call the States to talk to my boss, and he chews me out for about five minutes because he's been stuck at home waiting for my call (heaven forfend!). I tell him I'll call him back, hang up, calm down, then call one more time and explain, in detail, exactly what the situation is. I get a grudging sort-of apology. Last time that phone worked from the plant.
So I get back to the hotel and my wife is all dolled up in a very interesting costume (newlyweds by a month), but she's furious that I'm so late and didn't call. Once she calms down enough I manage to explain and then she's okay, but I have two hours to sleep before the Frenchies come back to take me to the plant again.
Of course it's the weekend and no one's around. And we get bounced from hotel to hotel 'cause everything's full (four hotels in five nights). And I finally find a computer shop in town that has an email account (1997, rural Italy) and they let me borrow their account to get the software, and it works, and we can go home.
After that, any support call I get where I'm at my desk is no big deal.
"...flexible displays that process information in the screen itself."
Now the
signal doesn't just get decrypted in the monitor, it doesn't even get decrypted
and displayed until it reaches the display surface itself.
Still doesn't close the analog hole, though...
Besides which, why does anyone think programmers will always be a "tiny proportion of the public"? Today, the vast majority of citizens in the "developed " world are literate. A couple centuries ago this was very definitely not the case. Heck, when writing was invented it was known only to a few palace scribes and such, a tiny elite. No one today doubts universal literacy is possible; what exactly makes "universal programming literacy" impossible?
It's actually a useful technique in some areas. If you want to generate a random number for a group, but don't trust the people you're working with, you can use a generalization of RPS, where each 'player' generates a number and shares them publicly. The result is at least as random as the most honest player.
I realize that it's unlikely that this was what you were going for with your post, but it's what I got out of it, so thanks anyhow.
While I disagree with your apparent conclusions, I respect someone who doesn't engage in the doublethink most theists seem to. Glad you got something out of it.
Every threaten to punish a child if the question a belief?
It turns out kids notice that nobody says "I believe germs exist" or "I believe in gravity", but people do say "I believe in God". And so kids are much less sure about God existing. (Nobody gets punished for not believing in atoms.)
I only wish more parents would realize that about their "beliefs", and think about it.
i am willing to give this new one a shot. can i just fire up the hedgehog and update?
Not quite. You have to upgrade to the intermediate Breezy Badger first. Wifi should be better, my Atheros-based card didn't work in Hedgehog but worked fine in Badger. I'm going to be curious to see how things go with Drake...
The little guys are discouraged from doing IPOs because they complex and can become very messy very quickly.
I got in on the VA Linux IPO. At the time, the tech IPO market was going insane, and Red Hat had, just a couple months before, shot up dramatically. I figured that the odds were small that we would lose money. We decided to go for it and my parents put in some money, too. I sold most of my shares the next day for a (really) hefty profit, and held onto a few (which are now worth... quite a bit less).
(I remember calling my wife up on the phone the day of the IPO, when I was checking the price. I was so numb when I first spoke, just from my tone of voice she thought we'd lost everything. I corrected her quickly.:-> )
I was also offered to get in on this Vonage IPO, but I simply figured that the IPO market wasn't in anything like the special situation it was back in 1999. Since I wasn't qualified to assess the risks involved, it was better to stay away. Glad I did...
Software, with its millions of lines of code, is so complicated that experts don't know for sure that open source has fewer bugs, nor can they say with certainty that having fewer bugs makes open source more secure.
It seems to me that this may be all the evidence we need of astroturfing. While I don't really know for sure if this statement is true...
It's not, at least for the classes of bugs that can be automatically detected.
As far as anyone knows, backwards time travel is impossible.
In our local environment. Of course, it's a natural outcome of applying the (extremely well-verified) predictions of General Relativity to situations that we know exist in nature, like rotating black holes. Plenty of phenomena were predicted before being observed; indeed, that's a primary way to test a scientific theory.
if you get a photon out the system before you sent one, are you locked into sending one?
If you can travel to the past at all (and to send any kind of signal involves at least sending energy into the past) then the past must physically exist for you to travel to. And we are the future's past. So the future must exist, too. If a photon arrives from the future (relative to the current moment) then you know that photon "will have been" sent. A reasonable inference might be that you "will send" it, but technically all you really know is the photon "will be sent".
Can't have it both ways, and while I'm inclined to err on the side of collecting and only judiciously (and judicially) using information, I'm really dis-inclined to later agree with anyone who complains that law enformcement didn't do enough to stop something that's otherise only obvious after the fact.
Well, the laws already allow action based on probable cause. Oh, and then there's FISA, which, out of more than 18,000 requests in the decades of its operation, has denied only six. If 3,000-to-one odds in favor aren't good enough, I can't imagine what would satisfy.
How about a rule that evidence obtained without a warrant could not be used in any kind of judicial proceeding? I have plenty of problems even with that (look at what J. Edgar Hoover did without even prosecuting most of the people and groups he hounded) but it would still allow the foiling of imminent threats while at least attempting to limit the effect on civil liberties...
You can't go down to best buy and buy a 1,001 of the best screensavers compilation for linux.
After getting my parents onto Firefox and Thunderbird, I moved them over to Ubuntu 5.04. They had no problems at all using the system. The only setup problem I had was a printer tweak (one single checkbox needed to be selected).
The only thing they commented on? "The screensavers are so much better!":->
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno about that. And this one, while nuclear, is non-polluting!
As an owner of a new Treo 650p (about a month now) I've been quite pleased with it. It doesn't do Wifi, and that's a bit disappointing, but so far I haven't really missed it. As a Palm it's a good unit, as a phone it works well, and having them combined is a nice convenience. Battery life's been (much) better than I feared. I know my CDMA phone won't work in Europe, but that would happen with (almost) any phone I could get in the US.
I've even been playing with some of the oddball stuff, like The Core Pocket Media Player - the picture quality is much better than I expected. Many ScummVM games work, and the ones that don't, fail because they need a 640x480 screen. Doom is very nearly playable - the controls are the sticking point, the graphics are smooth.
The thing's been nice and reliable, too. The only resets have been because I was trying things that it just can't do (some games just need more RAM than this thing has, that's all). Everyone I know with a Windows-based PDA has had missed alarms at some point - you set a reminder and it just doesn't go off. I've never had that happen with a Palm.
Maybe Palm will go away - developing for the Palm OS is much more bother than for most of the others due to the way they handle memory, and the multithreading issue. But it won't be because the units themselves are so terrible.
Sure there is. We may not know the details of precisely what the weather will do in a given location, but the fact that weather is comprehensible means we can put fairly sharp boundaries on what the weather will do. I live in Michigan, and predictions of whether it will rain or not aren't always accurate. (Usually they are biased towards predicting rain when none happens; that might deliberate, though, since the consequences of a false positive are lower in that direction.) However, predictions of temperature ranges during the day, and usually several days in advance, tend to be spot-on. We can predict when tornadoes are more likely and when they are vanishingly likely to happen.
Being able to make these kinds of predictions, to be able to specify likely behavior and the error bars, has measurable and nontrivial consequences. Economic for example - don't think the insurance companies aren't paying attention to that data. Casinos (honest ones, anyway) don't know exactly how the dice are going to land, but they know statistics and the house still makes a profit.
How do you know this?
Even if it's true, that could be trivial. Perhaps the set of knowable things fits into a classification system that can fit into the human brain, so we could learn what we needed to know when we needed to know it, and not bother learning things we don't care about. Of course, the size of the human brain need not be static, as well.
Logically incomplete, perhaps, but complete for any and all practical purposes. When you solve a quadratic equation describing some real-world quantity, you often get a negative and a positive root. Freqeuently, the negative root makes no physical sense. It may be "mathematically incomplete" to ignore it, but it's not "incomplete" in any practical sense.
To ignore the possibility that some things cannot be understood by the scientific method is an act of faith... The premise cannot be proven false - this is a situation ripe for being classified as a fundamentalist belief.
If something cannot be proven false, then it's not science, that's right. But the proposition being discussed here is, "some [unspecified] things cannot be understood by the scientific method". How would you go about disproving that?
If you can give me a way I can test for incomprehensibility other than trying to understand I'd love to hear it. To make this very very plain, I put to you the question: Let's assume you're right. Some things are forever incomprehensible. Now, what should we do differently because we accept this premise? What practical difference does it make? Be specific. A few examples would be helpful.
Oh, I understand what your point was, but I've heard that construction so often anymore, and it's so ridiculous (come to think of it, not unlike creationism) that it just bugs me to see it.
Terrorism isn't a threat to this country. Terrorists can cause upset and, sometimes, kill largish numbers of people. (Nowhere near as much as traffic accidents or obesity or cancer or workplace accidents, but somewhat significant.) They can't threaten the survival of the United States. Sure, it makes sense to take some precautions against it, but (for example) a wholesale restructuring of our legal system is disproportionate. (And largely ineffective anyway, and has too many bad side effects. Go read up on the Red Scare.)
There's a difference beetween "unknowable" and "incomprehensible". Given what we understand of chaos theory, long-range weather forecasting is impossible. In many areas of the world we can't know whether it will be raining or sunny a week from today, there's no way to gather sufficient data with sufficient precision to make a prediction that far in advance.
That doesn't mean that weather isn't comprehensible. We understand the processes involved in weather well enough to even specify what conditions make such predictions impossible, and when. (For example, we can predict that it'll be sunny next week in the Sahara desert with a very high degree of reliability.)
we might never have enough available energy to do the experiements required to prove exactly what happened [at the Big Bang]
Yup, we might not. Then again, we might figure out ways to do the experiments with less energy, or come up with alternative cosmologies with more testable features. That's a different proposition altogether from saying that the Big Bang is forever beyond human ken.
In the late 1700's, as scientists started getting a handle on electricity, they realized that lightning was electrical, and should respond in the same ways as the electricity they generated in their labs. Lightning rods were proposed, and the officials of various churches vociferously denounced them. After all, they knew that lightning was a direct expression of Divine fury, and it was hubristic to attempt to interfere with that.
Of course, since God wouldn't strike a church with lightning, very often people would store explosives in the local church (the tallest building in town, with ungrounded metal on top). After a church in Europe was struck by lightning in 1769, and 3,000 people were killed when the tons of gunpowder stored there exploded, those objections began to die out.
Now, even before the 1700's, was it reasonable to say that God (or Thor, or the Thunderbirds, or Ulohora, or what have you) caused lightning? No, the proper response to "What causes lighting?" was "Darn if I, or anyone else, knows."
And, obviously, it was similarly incorrect to say, "No one ever will know, either."
Because there is no practical way to differentiate between "something we don't understand yet", and "something we cannot understand". There isn't anything you can point to and say "that's forever incomprehensible". They used to say that about life and now we have molecular biology, for example.
As Woody Allen pithily put it, "Is knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know this?"
It makes absolutely no testable, measurable, detectable difference whatsoever. No profit of any kind is gained by assuming something is incomprehensible. If you assume something's incomprehensible, and don't try to understand it, you never will. If you assume something's comprehensible, you might eventually figure it out. In other words, the only possible test for incomprehensibility is to try to understand it. If at the end of forever you've failed, then you can tentatively conclude that maybe it's unknowable.
I agree, fired would be about right. But I rather imagine losing $250K from the budget had a deterrent effect.
They have the right to try (however self-defeating the attempt may be). But we also have the right to try to crack it.
(Well, we did until the DMCA...)
It's not about moving people off-planet. It's establishing alternate populations that can maintain civilization (and possibly humanity's existence) if something catastrostrophic happened on Earth. Worst case, people re-(over?)populate the Earth after the current inhabitants get wiped out. Disease, meteor impact, nuclear conflict, whatever.
Redundancy. Problem is, it'll take a hundred years to establish viable, self-sustaining populations out there...
So, I'm in this plant in the middle of the night, no one can figure out how to turn on the lights so we're using our laptops as flashlights, the giant mutant Italian mosquitos are on the hunt, and the debug software won't load (bad checksum). I can't download it since the Italian phone system doesn't use quite the same dial tone and the modem won't let me dial, and of course there's no way to look up the ATX1 command on the net if I can't dial up, and these damn French engineers I'm working with will take a two hour lunch, and a two hour dinner, but won't give up on an obviously hopeless case until 5:30am.
And I did manage to get one of the engineer's cell phones to connect and call the States to talk to my boss, and he chews me out for about five minutes because he's been stuck at home waiting for my call (heaven forfend!). I tell him I'll call him back, hang up, calm down, then call one more time and explain, in detail, exactly what the situation is. I get a grudging sort-of apology. Last time that phone worked from the plant.
So I get back to the hotel and my wife is all dolled up in a very interesting costume (newlyweds by a month), but she's furious that I'm so late and didn't call. Once she calms down enough I manage to explain and then she's okay, but I have two hours to sleep before the Frenchies come back to take me to the plant again.
Of course it's the weekend and no one's around. And we get bounced from hotel to hotel 'cause everything's full (four hotels in five nights). And I finally find a computer shop in town that has an email account (1997, rural Italy) and they let me borrow their account to get the software, and it works, and we can go home.
After that, any support call I get where I'm at my desk is no big deal.
Now the signal doesn't just get decrypted in the monitor, it doesn't even get decrypted and displayed until it reaches the display surface itself. Still doesn't close the analog hole, though...
Besides which, why does anyone think programmers will always be a "tiny proportion of the public"? Today, the vast majority of citizens in the "developed " world are literate. A couple centuries ago this was very definitely not the case. Heck, when writing was invented it was known only to a few palace scribes and such, a tiny elite. No one today doubts universal literacy is possible; what exactly makes "universal programming literacy" impossible?
It's actually a useful technique in some areas. If you want to generate a random number for a group, but don't trust the people you're working with, you can use a generalization of RPS, where each 'player' generates a number and shares them publicly. The result is at least as random as the most honest player.
While I disagree with your apparent conclusions, I respect someone who doesn't engage in the doublethink most theists seem to. Glad you got something out of it.
It turns out kids notice that nobody says "I believe germs exist" or "I believe in gravity", but people do say "I believe in God". And so kids are much less sure about God existing. (Nobody gets punished for not believing in atoms.)
I only wish more parents would realize that about their "beliefs", and think about it.
Not quite. You have to upgrade to the intermediate Breezy Badger first. Wifi should be better, my Atheros-based card didn't work in Hedgehog but worked fine in Badger. I'm going to be curious to see how things go with Drake...
I got in on the VA Linux IPO. At the time, the tech IPO market was going insane, and Red Hat had, just a couple months before, shot up dramatically. I figured that the odds were small that we would lose money. We decided to go for it and my parents put in some money, too. I sold most of my shares the next day for a (really) hefty profit, and held onto a few (which are now worth... quite a bit less).
(I remember calling my wife up on the phone the day of the IPO, when I was checking the price. I was so numb when I first spoke, just from my tone of voice she thought we'd lost everything. I corrected her quickly. :-> )
I was also offered to get in on this Vonage IPO, but I simply figured that the IPO market wasn't in anything like the special situation it was back in 1999. Since I wasn't qualified to assess the risks involved, it was better to stay away. Glad I did...
It's not, at least for the classes of bugs that can be automatically detected.
In our local environment. Of course, it's a natural outcome of applying the (extremely well-verified) predictions of General Relativity to situations that we know exist in nature, like rotating black holes. Plenty of phenomena were predicted before being observed; indeed, that's a primary way to test a scientific theory.
If you can travel to the past at all (and to send any kind of signal involves at least sending energy into the past) then the past must physically exist for you to travel to. And we are the future's past. So the future must exist, too. If a photon arrives from the future (relative to the current moment) then you know that photon "will have been" sent. A reasonable inference might be that you "will send" it, but technically all you really know is the photon "will be sent".
Believe me, I've thought about this stuff way too much.
Well, the laws already allow action based on probable cause. Oh, and then there's FISA, which, out of more than 18,000 requests in the decades of its operation, has denied only six. If 3,000-to-one odds in favor aren't good enough, I can't imagine what would satisfy.
How about a rule that evidence obtained without a warrant could not be used in any kind of judicial proceeding? I have plenty of problems even with that (look at what J. Edgar Hoover did without even prosecuting most of the people and groups he hounded) but it would still allow the foiling of imminent threats while at least attempting to limit the effect on civil liberties...
After getting my parents onto Firefox and Thunderbird, I moved them over to Ubuntu 5.04. They had no problems at all using the system. The only setup problem I had was a printer tweak (one single checkbox needed to be selected).
The only thing they commented on? "The screensavers are so much better!" :->