Trademarks need to be actively defended or they can be lost (Xerox, Kleenex, etc.); some people confuse this with patents and copyrights, where this is not the case.
They're not going to do that. If for no other reason than their own texture compression technology (S3TC) which they license to other video card makers (namely ATI and Nvidia, as well as MS for DirectX drivers)... Even if they were to release the souce you probably couldn't use it unless they granted some kind of license to use the patented algorithms freely.
It's entirely possible to grant licenses for patents to some people and not others, for whatever reasons you like. It's not like copyrights or trademarks. IBM and CA are two companies that have granted licenses for open-source programs to use their patented technologies. S3 could hand out GPL code for it and grant a patentl license for use in open-source programs. Nvidia and ATI would still have to pay money to use it with their products and drivers.
Of course, people who actually know this have been saying it everytime someone says "open up the source!" to video card makers, and most people still don't get it. Sigh.
Maybe the people who keep bringing it up hope that S3 might have learned their lesson. Not yet, apparently, but it would be nice if they did. Good driver code really helps the hardware shine, and it's nontrivial to develop - as Nvidia and ATI have learned. But there are lots of clever students and other developers who would love to play with, grok, and improve such code.
Nvidia currently dominates the Linux 3d landscape because they have good drivers. If S3 came out with open ones, and even halfway-competitive hardware, they'd take that market, and get a significant number of people working on their drivers. Some of the improvements therefrom could benefit the Windows side, too. As others have noted, there's the Mac contigent, too, though I'm not sure how much they'd grab there - they don't tend to muck with their hardware so much.
I'll beleive things have actually changed in their policies when... um... man, I can't think of anything that would prove to me those leopards have changed their spots.
Why the hell are they repurchasing their own porperty?
Isn't that going to turn theft of military equipment and information into a whole economy?
Well, if they can get to them fast enough, they might be able to prevent secrets from getting out. Offering a reward to get them back makes a certain amount of sense in that context. If the value of the secrets outweighs the cost in money and risk...
Perhaps they are counting on increased vigilance and revised procedures to keep more drives from getting lifted.
Our puny reason, logic, and data is useless against their advanced willful ignorance!
Piltdown, Java, Nebraska, Orce, Neanderthal, Yale DNA Hybridization Scandal, etc... Logic? Not even close. Proven fraud? You bet!
Thanks for providing an example! I really appreciate it!
(Hint: your list would be a lot more impressive if you could point to even one example that was debunked by a creationist or intelligent design type... instead of being disproven by scientists precisely because they didn't fit with the evidence.)
However, I have heard that the newer Linksys WRT54G router (v. 5), the one that now uses Linux instead of VxWorks, does not perform as well.
You meant "now uses VxWorks instead of Linux", of course. I, too, have heard reports that the new version isn't terribly reliable. Like you, I suspect Wind River lowballed the specs to score a design win, but couldn't quite deliver.
StarForce installs special drivers that allow user-level code to jump to System level. (That's even higher than Administrator, BTW.) Why does anyone think they'd do anything different in Vista? Malware will just find these kind of holes, and exploit them. And those holes will exist because even semi-legit software companies want them to.
But 8:00 is when many families have just gotten done eating dinner with their kids who just got home from soccer practice. They should be free to watch something other than "the family channel" or disney with their kids.
There was a sequel? I'm an 80s buff and didn't even know that. Link, please?
He's talking about the game they did a couple years back. Should be cheap, I just saw it for $6 at the local Big Lots. Amusing, and it really does look very much like the movie - sobering to think we can do those kinds of graphics in real-time now.
The average cell phone is a pretty powerful computer. With a display. And an always-on wireless link. And a storage system. And a data-entry pad. And, and, and.
But it doesn't have a good, easy way to enter data. Full-size keyboards do matter. It's also hard to do self-hosted development on a cell phone, though that's less of a priority.
Now, come up with an external, plugin keyboard for a cell phone, and you might have something...
So, DirecTV accepted my VISA number with (a) a misspelled name and (b) an invalid expiration date and (c) a mailing address halfway across the country from mine. Now I've had to bounce a bunch of mail back and forth (including a "fraud affidavit" that requested so much information on me it might as well have been an identity theft kit in its own right).
Clearly they didn't make even the slightest attempt to validate the charge. I've closed that account and put fraud watches on our credit and so forth, of course, and no other suspicious charges have shown up. Still, it makes me nervous.
Meanwhile, my father-in-law discovered his bank account was several hundred dollars short. Turns out he was auto-paying someone else's gas bill. My wife had a heck of a time straightening that out. The bank insisted it was the utility's responsibility and vice versa. "He signed up for automatic payment!"
"My father doesn't own a computer. Why would you authorize withdrawls for someone else's utility bill in the first place? Especially when their account number is identical except for two transposed digits..."
A mistake in that case, but it would be so easy to do that deliberately...
But it was a great tongue-in-cheek poke at those who elevate the military to God-like status. Wonderfully subversive!
No, it sucked as a parody.
A parody should point out something about the original work. The movie didn't, at all. It didn't even try for sophistication or intelligence. An example:
A soldier asks why they are training with knives when both they and the enemies have nukes.
Book: The drill sergeant says the soldiers are there to provide measured force. "Would you housetrain a puppy by cutting its head off?"
Movie: The drill sergeant throws a knife through the hand of the soldier asking the question. "Hard to launch a nuke now, eh?"
That isn't "great", "tongue-in-cheek", or "subversive".
Some schmuck in Washington state (halfway across the country from me) used my credit card number with a missing letter from my name and the wrong expiration date to get DirectTV service. Now I have to come up with all kinds of stuff and a signed police report or else they'll charge me for it, even though I'm in another state.
(Yes, we cancelled that card and put fraud watches on our credit report - no other signs so far.)
Meanwhile, someone transposed digits and ended up getting their gas bill paid by my father-in-law for a couple of months. The bank said it had to be resolved by the utility company and vice versa. It took my wife over a month to get things resolved and get his money back.
"But your father signed up online for electronic bill payment!"
"That's not his name, or his address, and he doesn't own a computer. The account numbers are identical except for two swapped digits. Exactly why are you, as a bank, authorizing these withdrawls?"
At least we can agree that you have no specific logic argument against the existance of a creator.
No, I just have specific logical reasons for believing that, if there were such a creator, it wasn't anything like the Judeo/Christaian/Islamic "God".
I think youmisunderstood about christian's meeting God's standard. The Christian belief does not contend that a Christian's flesh and bones, any aspect concerning their moral behavior, or any aspect of their thoughts or dreams will ever meet God's standard after becoming Christian.
A difference which makes no difference is no difference. But anyway...
You're back to the start - if God allegedly created this universe, then It created things which don't meet Its standards. Which, according to you, could never do so. Deliberately. And then punishes them for it. This isn't 'good' by any recognizable definition. Does kind of fit with 'insane' or 'abusive', though.
A freshman reply would be, "Well that means Christian's can be like Hitler, and still go to Heaven." The short reply is yes.
And, as already addressed on the page, this means that God's standards have nothing to do with anything humans would recognize as 'good' or 'evil'. To quote:
But now we simply have the ultimate case of "might makes right".
There's no real difference between "Speed Limit 55" and "Thou shalt not kill"
except that presumably God enforces Its rules better. In the end, the people
who collaborated with the Nazis had the right idea, they just picked the wrong
bully to submit to.
There's nothing special about God's rules, then. It could just has easily have ordered you kill babies (oh, wait... It did: 1
Samuel 15:3,
Joshua
10:40) and that would be perfectly 'good'.
lol Ok, have I mentioned Christianity in particular?
I didn't mention Christianity in particular either. From the page: "...for the traditional monotheistic religions (Judeo/Christian/Islamic conceptions of 'God')". More than Christianity teaches the Adam & Eve thing.
If you want to conceal a Christian leaning, you need to work on your terminology a bit.
The focus of my argument is whether your argument can proove the non=existance of a creator, in general.
My argument wasn't about 'creators in general'. But as I state: "In general, I take the position of not(believe(God)). Obviously I haven't investigated every religion in detail, but lacking any convincing evidence, I return the Scottish verdict of 'not proven'."
Of course, aside from maybe the Unitarians, nobody believes in a "creator in general". In North America, and most of the "western" world, it's monotheism, and the argument works well in that area. Anyway...
For that particular individual, all of creation has now become complete, and the spirit/ soul of that person has been washed clean of imperfections and now meets the standards set by God.
Sure, except for the fact that such "saved" people still commit sins, which are, by Christian definition, not up to God's standards... as you tacitly admit. How can they be 'perfect' (in the Christian definition) and 'sinful' (again, in the Christian definition)?
This doesn't avoid the problem of evil at all. It doesn't even really address it.
Perhaps this God's standard for Universe making is applied only after creation is complete and the flaws of human kind are being shed layer by layer like a carpenter shapes wood... Ok what about a previous subset of creation which does not meet God's standards? Can God excuse the means for the ends? The idea here is that it is possible that God's standards for a Universe that is unfinished differ from the criteria of a finished Universe. This can obviously inclde having free-willed agents that choose to do good or evil independednt from God.
Y'know, I may have heard that before. Oh wait, yeah I did. To quote from the actual page:
A fourth option is proposed by some theists, that beings simply cannot
be created as perfect ex nihilo, but rather must mature into
perfect beings. I haven't seen a clear explanation of why this must be.
Humans are not born knowing how to walk, or even crawl; they must learn
to do so. Most other skills (besides crying and suckling and voiding)
need to be learned. But God allegedly created at least two beings (Adam
and Eve) that were able to talk, and speak, and feed themselves from the
get-go. I haven't seen a clear explanation of why these traits can
legitimately be directly implanted while others cannot.
Even if one regards the Adam and Eve story as allegorical rather than
literal, the objection stands. Humans are born almost totally helpless,
but other animals, even other primates, are born with significant
skills. Horse foals can walk within a few minutes of birth. Dolphin
calves can swim within a similar length of time. Swimming and walking
are, as any baby human can attest, complex operations to master. It's
obvious that both animals have inbuilt, instinctive predispositions
for these skills. It would appear that any 'learning' that is done
is more 'calibration' than actual acquisition of skills from scratch.
Nor are these animals limited to only the skills they are born with.
The ability of trainers to teach canters and 'tricks' not seen in
nature shows that significant flexibility can be available even if
the 'basics' are instinctive. I don't see why the emotional and
intellectual skills necessary for at least basic moral behavior
could not be 'inborn' in humans...
And, of course, your argument would imply that, say, the people gassed to death in death chambers, and the native american babies killed immediately after baptism by Spanish missionaries are morally equivalent to 'shed layers of wood'.
I note your point. However, a logic proof is only as good as it's assumptions.
The proof linked uses the theistic assumptions. Are you saying they're bad assumptions?
I contend that if there is an infinite God of more complexity than can be imagined, etc. then no single conceivable set of axioms could accurately and precisely capture the essential nature of such a God.
Nor could one realistically know anything about such a god - motives, abilities, or even existence. Pointless to even worry about. You couldn't be sure of anything.
The problem, as I see it, with logic is that it builds complex, towering hierarchies of arguments and proofs upon unworthy foundations, of language. In particular, I mean human language, though it may extend to all theoretically possible languages.
Of course, you're expressing your point in human language, so why should I trust your point?
We all know it is not the business of science to tell us what is not there.
No, "we" don't know that. Science can tell us there isn't, for example, a 'counter-Earth' rotating on the opposite side of the Sun from us.
But all this is just smoke and mirrors. Until and unless you can come up with an actual logical flaw in the linked proof, you're basically quoting freshman philosophy. Sure, it could be wrong, but absent any reason to believe it's wrong, why even worry about it?
And certainly you cannot be sure that your conclusion upon this matter are sound, since if God did exist you would not be capable of discerning the 'logic' of the arguments. God is our first principle.
Incorrect. It's a principle that leads to internal contradiction, and therefore is false, like any proof from contradiction.
I always tell atheists this: Actually read the bible and leave out God and the afterlife and stuff you don't want to believe in. When you do that, you will realize that it is actually teaching you a way of life. One with minimum pain.
The problem is that it covers ethics (and yeah, the core elements of ethics are pretty common and universal - they kinda have to be, we're all human) but from a very primitive, immature perspective. "Do this because you're told to by someone bigger and tougher than you."
Plus it converted Heinlein's liberterian-fascism into humorous political parody.
Bad parody. In the book, a soldier asks why they are drilling with knives when they have nukes. The drill sergeant explains that soliders are there to provide measured force. "Would you housetrain a puppy by cutting its head off?"
In the movie, he throws a knife through the curious soldier's hand.
I don't mind parody, but it should be clever and funny. Starship Troopers was neither.
Slashdot Mirror
Can they work around it with an external add-on, like the Rumble Pak?
Trademarks need to be actively defended or they can be lost (Xerox, Kleenex, etc.); some people confuse this with patents and copyrights, where this is not the case.
It's entirely possible to grant licenses for patents to some people and not others, for whatever reasons you like. It's not like copyrights or trademarks. IBM and CA are two companies that have granted licenses for open-source programs to use their patented technologies. S3 could hand out GPL code for it and grant a patentl license for use in open-source programs. Nvidia and ATI would still have to pay money to use it with their products and drivers.
Of course, people who actually know this have been saying it everytime someone says "open up the source!" to video card makers, and most people still don't get it. Sigh.
Maybe the people who keep bringing it up hope that S3 might have learned their lesson. Not yet, apparently, but it would be nice if they did. Good driver code really helps the hardware shine, and it's nontrivial to develop - as Nvidia and ATI have learned. But there are lots of clever students and other developers who would love to play with, grok, and improve such code.
Nvidia currently dominates the Linux 3d landscape because they have good drivers. If S3 came out with open ones, and even halfway-competitive hardware, they'd take that market, and get a significant number of people working on their drivers. Some of the improvements therefrom could benefit the Windows side, too. As others have noted, there's the Mac contigent, too, though I'm not sure how much they'd grab there - they don't tend to muck with their hardware so much.
Hey, that shouldn't be hard to whip up, using whiptail or zenity or something!
See here I like "Better" and "I Feel Fantastic"; "Todd the T1000" ain't bad either.
I'll beleive things have actually changed in their policies when... um... man, I can't think of anything that would prove to me those leopards have changed their spots.
Isn't that going to turn theft of military equipment and information into a whole economy?
Well, if they can get to them fast enough, they might be able to prevent secrets from getting out. Offering a reward to get them back makes a certain amount of sense in that context. If the value of the secrets outweighs the cost in money and risk...
Perhaps they are counting on increased vigilance and revised procedures to keep more drives from getting lifted.
Thanks for providing an example! I really appreciate it!
(Hint: your list would be a lot more impressive if you could point to even one example that was debunked by a creationist or intelligent design type... instead of being disproven by scientists precisely because they didn't fit with the evidence.)
(Trust me, that's what they'll say. Our puny reason, logic, and data is useless against their advanced willful ignorance!)
You meant "now uses VxWorks instead of Linux", of course. I, too, have heard reports that the new version isn't terribly reliable. Like you, I suspect Wind River lowballed the specs to score a design win, but couldn't quite deliver.
Wouldn't those be fuzzy memories? :->
StarForce installs special drivers that allow user-level code to jump to System level. (That's even higher than Administrator, BTW.) Why does anyone think they'd do anything different in Vista? Malware will just find these kind of holes, and exploit them. And those holes will exist because even semi-legit software companies want them to.
Why?
He's talking about the game they did a couple years back. Should be cheap, I just saw it for $6 at the local Big Lots. Amusing, and it really does look very much like the movie - sobering to think we can do those kinds of graphics in real-time now.
Music available here.
But it doesn't have a good, easy way to enter data. Full-size keyboards do matter. It's also hard to do self-hosted development on a cell phone, though that's less of a priority.
Now, come up with an external, plugin keyboard for a cell phone, and you might have something...
Clearly they didn't make even the slightest attempt to validate the charge. I've closed that account and put fraud watches on our credit and so forth, of course, and no other suspicious charges have shown up. Still, it makes me nervous.
Meanwhile, my father-in-law discovered his bank account was several hundred dollars short. Turns out he was auto-paying someone else's gas bill. My wife had a heck of a time straightening that out. The bank insisted it was the utility's responsibility and vice versa. "He signed up for automatic payment!"
"My father doesn't own a computer. Why would you authorize withdrawls for someone else's utility bill in the first place? Especially when their account number is identical except for two transposed digits..."
A mistake in that case, but it would be so easy to do that deliberately...
No, it sucked as a parody.
A parody should point out something about the original work. The movie didn't, at all. It didn't even try for sophistication or intelligence. An example:
A soldier asks why they are training with knives when both they and the enemies have nukes.
That isn't "great", "tongue-in-cheek", or "subversive".
(Yes, we cancelled that card and put fraud watches on our credit report - no other signs so far.)
Meanwhile, someone transposed digits and ended up getting their gas bill paid by my father-in-law for a couple of months. The bank said it had to be resolved by the utility company and vice versa. It took my wife over a month to get things resolved and get his money back.
"But your father signed up online for electronic bill payment!"
"That's not his name, or his address, and he doesn't own a computer. The account numbers are identical except for two swapped digits. Exactly why are you, as a bank, authorizing these withdrawls?"
What makes you say that? (Be specific.)
At least we can agree that you have no specific logic argument against the existance of a creator.
No, I just have specific logical reasons for believing that, if there were such a creator, it wasn't anything like the Judeo/Christaian/Islamic "God".
I think youmisunderstood about christian's meeting God's standard. The Christian belief does not contend that a Christian's flesh and bones, any aspect concerning their moral behavior, or any aspect of their thoughts or dreams will ever meet God's standard after becoming Christian.
A difference which makes no difference is no difference. But anyway...
You're back to the start - if God allegedly created this universe, then It created things which don't meet Its standards. Which, according to you, could never do so. Deliberately. And then punishes them for it. This isn't 'good' by any recognizable definition. Does kind of fit with 'insane' or 'abusive', though.
A freshman reply would be, "Well that means Christian's can be like Hitler, and still go to Heaven." The short reply is yes.
And, as already addressed on the page, this means that God's standards have nothing to do with anything humans would recognize as 'good' or 'evil'. To quote:
There's nothing special about God's rules, then. It could just has easily have ordered you kill babies (oh, wait... It did: 1 Samuel 15:3, Joshua 10:40) and that would be perfectly 'good'.
The focus of my argument is whether your argument can proove the non=existance of a creator, in general.
My argument wasn't about 'creators in general'. But as I state: "In general, I take the position of not(believe(God)). Obviously I haven't investigated every religion in detail, but lacking any convincing evidence, I return the Scottish verdict of 'not proven'."
Of course, aside from maybe the Unitarians, nobody believes in a "creator in general". In North America, and most of the "western" world, it's monotheism, and the argument works well in that area. Anyway...
For that particular individual, all of creation has now become complete, and the spirit/ soul of that person has been washed clean of imperfections and now meets the standards set by God.
Sure, except for the fact that such "saved" people still commit sins, which are, by Christian definition, not up to God's standards... as you tacitly admit. How can they be 'perfect' (in the Christian definition) and 'sinful' (again, in the Christian definition)?
This doesn't avoid the problem of evil at all. It doesn't even really address it.
Y'know, I may have heard that before. Oh wait, yeah I did. To quote from the actual page:
And, of course, your argument would imply that, say, the people gassed to death in death chambers, and the native american babies killed immediately after baptism by Spanish missionaries are morally equivalent to 'shed layers of wood'.
The proof linked uses the theistic assumptions. Are you saying they're bad assumptions?
I contend that if there is an infinite God of more complexity than can be imagined, etc. then no single conceivable set of axioms could accurately and precisely capture the essential nature of such a God.
Nor could one realistically know anything about such a god - motives, abilities, or even existence. Pointless to even worry about. You couldn't be sure of anything.
The problem, as I see it, with logic is that it builds complex, towering hierarchies of arguments and proofs upon unworthy foundations, of language. In particular, I mean human language, though it may extend to all theoretically possible languages.
Of course, you're expressing your point in human language, so why should I trust your point?
We all know it is not the business of science to tell us what is not there.
No, "we" don't know that. Science can tell us there isn't, for example, a 'counter-Earth' rotating on the opposite side of the Sun from us.
But all this is just smoke and mirrors. Until and unless you can come up with an actual logical flaw in the linked proof, you're basically quoting freshman philosophy. Sure, it could be wrong, but absent any reason to believe it's wrong, why even worry about it?
Incorrect. It's a principle that leads to internal contradiction, and therefore is false, like any proof from contradiction.
The problem is that it covers ethics (and yeah, the core elements of ethics are pretty common and universal - they kinda have to be, we're all human) but from a very primitive, immature perspective. "Do this because you're told to by someone bigger and tougher than you."
I look at ethics rather differently.
Bad parody. In the book, a soldier asks why they are drilling with knives when they have nukes. The drill sergeant explains that soliders are there to provide measured force. "Would you housetrain a puppy by cutting its head off?"
In the movie, he throws a knife through the curious soldier's hand.
I don't mind parody, but it should be clever and funny. Starship Troopers was neither.