See, your response had nothing to do with the claim I was making
Well, there were two related claims. The quote was relevant to both. The first claim boils down to "a paradoxical god could exist". The second one's basically, "there are things orthogonal to logic and reason". The first is false, as Allen and others demonstrated centuries ago, and the second, while true (and even true in non-trivial ways, e.g. Goedel's Theorem), does not mean that such things are inconsistent with what's known with logic and reason - and that was one of Allen's points.
If you were making some other claims than those, well, you're just going to have to show some pantheist charity to a guy who obviously wasn't nearly clever enough to grasp your pellucid prose, since it's clearly impossible that you could have phrased your points poorly.
Go ahead and Google the context. Go ahead, I'll wait. The guy was arguing for a God, but he was arguing that a God could only be logical and rational. So, how was the quote "out of context"? Or is you who's unclear about the meaning of the phrase "out of context"?
Ah, the legendary inclusiveness and tolerance the left is famous for is again on display for all to behold.
And your evidence that the poster is in any way "leftist" is...
And lets not even speak of Quantum Mechanics, if anything needs to be taken as a matter of blind faith, find better examples than some of the spookier bits of that.
Except QM works. It makes predictions - numerical predictions, to many decimal places - that are actually borne out. You can verify that the predictions are measurable and accurate even if you don't understand how the predictions were made. Contrast that with the vague 'prophecies' you get out of most religions.
Yeah, QM is hard and counterintuitive. (Feynman's supposed to have said, "You don't understand quantum mechanics, you just get used to it.") And it's known to be incomplete - no one's reconciled QM and gravity yet. But comparing it to "blind faith" is either ignorant or downright deceptive.
What if I told you the one defining characteristic of my god was that my god can exist as a paradox?... There are questions science and logic cannot answer.
Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principles that they are laboring to dethrone: but if they argue without reason (which, in order to be consistent with themselves they must do), they are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument. - Ethan Allen
If you think that a KDE theme is all you need to get the user experience of OSX you're just being silly.
How long do you need to use OSX to be sucked into a Nirvana-like state of union with the machine? I spent about an hour and a half with one about a month ago, and didn't make it. I was trying to download and install Xcode so I could test a POSIX program I wrote. Used my aunt's iMac.
Safari locked up so bad (on Apple's website, mind you) that I had to totally log out and log back in again - "Force Quit" had no effect. I can't blame OSX for Apple's poor site design (took forever to find the right package, it was running 10.3.something, not 10.4) but it wasn't a magic, blissful frolic with the Aqua interface or anything. I had a hard time finding the way to fire up a terminal.
Once I got Xcode installed, and got a terminal up, it only took about five minutes to run the actual test. Worked just fine, thanks to./configure and friends. Maybe I'm "just being silly", but I wasn't so utterly impressed with OSX vs. the Ubuntu I normally use. Can you tell me what I missed?
There was the notion of "The Riddle" which I read in the compendium edited by Hofstadter and Dennet called "The Mind's I". The story took the form of a report about an idea that would shut down the consciousness of a human mind as soon as it was comprehended. A slightly similar idea was in Stephenson's "Snow Crash", and I think even A. E. Van Vogt had a story about aliens creating ideas and messages that hijacked the thinking of the reader.
I suppose it's theoretically possible, but we've already coevolved with some pretty agressive ideologies that are designed to hijack the thinking of their hosts and use them to infect others (religions). It's worth noting that most people have at least some level of infection with these, but it's only a small minority that have really raging, out-of-control outbreaks (religious fanatics). I think humans have a reasonably good 'mental immune system' that keeps such things from warping behavior too much, most of the time anyway.
The strength of the Chronicles of Amber was enough to make me go out and read a bunch of other Zelazy -- it didn't measure up.
In keeping with the theme, might I humbly recommend "Doorways in the Sand". The protagonist is a geek, and the opening chapter is one of the very few items I've read that made me actually laugh out loud. The rest of the book is nicely done, each chapter opening in medias res and the rest of the chapter explaining how he got into the predicament and how he gets out of it. Zelazny always did seem to like playing with storytelling forms.
As others have noted, "Lord of Light" is extremely good. "Creatures of Light and Darkness" is a bit too experimental for my tastes, but when it's good it's very good.
When a "work that uses the Library" uses material from a header file that is part of the Library, the object code for the work may be a derivative work of the Library even though the source code is not.
Note the words "may be". Copyright law is funny. Using things that are necessary to interoperate (e.g. simple definitions of constants and function prototypes) is not a problem from a copyright perspective (c.f. "scenes a faire"). If there's only one way to express an idea (e.g. "errno.h", which maps POSIX specified numbers to POSIX specified constant names), it's called "merger" and is not subject to copyright.
Now, if the header file contains substantial code in its own right, either in the form of code that compiles or just macros, it's possible that a case might be made that the resultant object file might be considered a derived work (though note that the other source code is expressly not).
Indeed, there might be a case to be made that dynamic linking doesn't create a derived work, and that would make the GPL legally equivalent to the LGPL. But no one's tried to make that case in a court yet.
If you statically link in LGPL code (i.e. part of the binary), then the whole thing must be LGPL. If you dynamically link to the LGPL code (e.g. shared library, DLL) then you don't have to open up the code that links to it (this is the primary difference between the GPL and the LGPL) but if you distribute the LGPL library with your binaries, you must offer the code for the LGPL portion, too.
That being said, from what I've read it appears that the Sony DRM code may be looking for LAME on the system (to block it from working on their 'protected' stuff) but doesn't appear to actually contain LAME code.
Art. 5. The present Convention shall apply to the persons referred to in Article 4 from the time they fall into the power of the enemy and until their final release and repatriation.
Should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy, belong to any of the categories enumerated in Article 4, such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal.
Kinda the whole point is that the U.S. government isn't doing that whole "competent tribunal" part, even when doubt exists.
Good point. In practice, I've found that developing on Linux/ia32, Solaris/SPARC, and then something 64-bit works pretty well. If you'll need to port to things like Windows or oddballs like Netware or OpenVMS (floating point isn't the same there!) it makes sense to test occasionally, but if you do the first three you'll be, like I said, about 85% of the way there already.
How can I write portable versions of Mac OS X apps when the Cocoa API doesn't exist outside of Mac OS X
Well, you factor the UI away from the engine. The guts can do things portably, perhaps with a few wrappers (I have my own personal set that abstracts threads, so I can use POSIX threads and Windows threads without having to change the guts around). The user interface can be as Maclike as you want.
Write and test on three different platforms
on
Write Portable Code
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Best combination is one big-endian, one little-endian, and a 64-bit machine. That catches at least 85% of the portability problems right off the bat, and has the bonus of catching memory errors very quickly. Something that silently corrupts data on one platform will often cause an instant loud crash on a different one.
"If you haven't ported your code, it isn't portable."
Sticking to the libraries and (subsets of) languages that are really portable helps, too, like this book appears to cover, but if you just start off on a small mix of platforms, it becomes usually quite trivial to port to others. My Ostiary program runs on (at least) Linux, *BSD, OSX, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Tru64, IRIX, and Cygwin. I've written commercial code that runs on all of those plus Windows, NetWare, and OpenVMS, though that requires a few more #ifdefs.
But you are assuming you are even in a position to evaluate the prospect of God.
Ah, a devotee of C.S. Lewis! Here's how he put this:
Perhaps we feel inclined to disagree with Him. But there is a
difficulty in disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all
reasoning power comes: you could not be right and He wrong any more
than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are
arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes
you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are
sitting on.
And here's my response:
First, of course, in disagreeing with what Lewis stated here,
one is not necessarily disagreeing with God. One is
disagreeing with Lewis' statements about God, something
entirely different, and presumably less fraught with logical peril.
Second, Lewis is begging
the question here by assuming the existence of God to forestall an
argument against that very proposition. To put words in his mouth, he's
saying something like, "Sure, you may think you've found a
problem with this argument for God's existence, but since God exists
and He's much smarter than you, you must be wrong somewhere, though
I won't specifically point out where or how."
But even if one both ignores the circular reasoning, and assumes that
God Itself dictated these sentences to Lewis, they are still wrong.
Consider the following conversation: Automobile: "I can move faster
than you can." Henry Ford: "I am the source from which all your
locomotion comes from. You could not be faster and me slower any more
than a stream can rise higher than its own source." Consider that none
of the computer scientists and chess professionals who collaborated to
build Deep Blue could have beaten Garry Kasparov at chess, and yet
Deep Blue did so. Creations surpass their creators in some capacities
all the time; indeed, that's why we make the class of
creations called "tools".
The example itself is not even technically accurate. If we use a
stream to turn a water wheel, which drives a pump, which raises some
water, we can raise part of a stream higher than its source. The
energy from a larger amount of falling water is used to raise a
smaller amount of water.
(Note: I am not claiming to be smarter than God. I am pointing
out Lewis's mistake; creations frequently surpass their creators in
specific capacities and for specific purposes. Lewis asserts a logical
contradiction where none exists.)
Most of these kinds of worms look for Windows files, but a few look for "awstats" and similar. I have a simple CGI that does an http redirect back to the originating machine.
Now, I don't think most worms really process such errors but it makes me feel better than just ignoring them, and it seems to be far more legal than either redirecting them to fbi.gov or launching some kind of counterattack.
Y'know, it's a darn shame more zombie outbreaks don't happen in the winter. No body heat => corpsicles. Then it's just a matter of getting some good clean exercise with a sledgehammer.:->
While I agree that for the forseeable future there is no way to get around nuclear technology in large sized space craft for deep space exploration I also share some of the concerns voiced by people arguing against using nuclear power with wild abandon in the design of spacecraft. The problem is how do you build a large sized space craft capable of really worth while deep space journeys?
I can get my hands on an 'old' P3 (about 1GHz) system for free. Would this distro be good?
I've got 5.04 running on a P3/450MHz, with 512MB RAM. Default stuff, Gnome and all.
Works pretty darn well. Slower to boot than on my dual Athlon box, but runs nice and
is pleasant for desktop stuff. Its the kids computer and they have fun with it.
(If you don't want the old system, can you send it my way?:-> )
Hardware mixing is completely pointless, which is why nobody does it anymore. It takes more CPU bandwidth to send N individual streams to the hardware than it does to mix, resample if necessary, and clamp the same N streams in software.
Sending 32 44.1KHz 16-bit 2-channel streams is about 5.4MB of data per second. On a standard 32-bit PCI bus, that's about 1/24th of the available bandwidth, and much of it can be done in bursts using DMA, which doesn't involve the CPU at all. I have a hard time believing that mixing and resampling 32 streams in software is that much cheaper.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm going to need a bit more of an explanation to accept that you're right. It seems more likely that the reason hardware mixing isn't more widely supported is that the game companies can't count on it being there and just do their sound engines in software. In other words, a standard chicken/egg problem.
Actually, Europe and other western countries as well as online forums (especially slashdot) are too busy abusing (verbally and even sometimes physically irl) people who say anything Christian. A lot of these place are very strongly anti-Christian.
"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." - Jon Stewart
"Derek Bond, 72, was held at Durban [South Africa] police station under FBI orders for nearly three weeks after being arrested at gunpoint while on holiday with his wife."
Get the book Obfiscated C and Other Mysteries by Don Libes. Explanations of various Obfuscated C contest entries, and alternate chapters illustrate neat corners of C, including a few things similar to this little library. Occupies a place of honor on my shelf.
The Morris worm wasn't supposed to cripple the Internet. But it ended up being too agressive and crippled systems for days. A tiny change in reproduction rate can have a huge effect on a population's size, and getting it right the first time isn't something people are good at.
Speaking of that, the sandbox these nematodes run in has to be perfect, or else it's just another malware vector.
Yeah, I've got a P3-450MHz, 512MB RAM. Plays everything up to DVDs just fine, though HD video is beyond its capacities. Slower to boot up than my dual Athlon machine, but once up it runs just fine and is quite snappy. Running stock Ubuntu. Just for grins one time I used the mem= kernel option to limit it to 96MB, and y'know what? It worked pretty well.
Now, my P-133, 32MB laptop is another story. I got stock Debian onto it, but it took a while, and Dillo's about the only browser that works acceptably on it. XFCE works pretty well, but much of anything GUI and it'll swap like mad. If I could get even 64MB of RAM into the thing I'd be happier, but it's not worth the hassle or cost. (I remember when I upgraded my 486-100 from 16MB to 64MB... it was like a whole new machine after that.)
In short, 128MB of RAM should be plenty. That's a lot of memory if you use it right.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there were two related claims. The quote was relevant to both. The first claim boils down to "a paradoxical god could exist". The second one's basically, "there are things orthogonal to logic and reason". The first is false, as Allen and others demonstrated centuries ago, and the second, while true (and even true in non-trivial ways, e.g. Goedel's Theorem), does not mean that such things are inconsistent with what's known with logic and reason - and that was one of Allen's points.
If you were making some other claims than those, well, you're just going to have to show some pantheist charity to a guy who obviously wasn't nearly clever enough to grasp your pellucid prose, since it's clearly impossible that you could have phrased your points poorly.
Go ahead and Google the context. Go ahead, I'll wait. The guy was arguing for a God, but he was arguing that a God could only be logical and rational. So, how was the quote "out of context"? Or is you who's unclear about the meaning of the phrase "out of context"?
And your evidence that the poster is in any way "leftist" is...
And lets not even speak of Quantum Mechanics, if anything needs to be taken as a matter of blind faith, find better examples than some of the spookier bits of that.
Except QM works. It makes predictions - numerical predictions, to many decimal places - that are actually borne out. You can verify that the predictions are measurable and accurate even if you don't understand how the predictions were made. Contrast that with the vague 'prophecies' you get out of most religions.
Yeah, QM is hard and counterintuitive. (Feynman's supposed to have said, "You don't understand quantum mechanics, you just get used to it.") And it's known to be incomplete - no one's reconciled QM and gravity yet. But comparing it to "blind faith" is either ignorant or downright deceptive.
How long do you need to use OSX to be sucked into a Nirvana-like state of union with the machine? I spent about an hour and a half with one about a month ago, and didn't make it. I was trying to download and install Xcode so I could test a POSIX program I wrote. Used my aunt's iMac.
Safari locked up so bad (on Apple's website, mind you) that I had to totally log out and log back in again - "Force Quit" had no effect. I can't blame OSX for Apple's poor site design (took forever to find the right package, it was running 10.3.something, not 10.4) but it wasn't a magic, blissful frolic with the Aqua interface or anything. I had a hard time finding the way to fire up a terminal.
Once I got Xcode installed, and got a terminal up, it only took about five minutes to run the actual test. Worked just fine, thanks to ./configure and friends. Maybe I'm "just being silly", but I wasn't so utterly impressed with OSX vs. the Ubuntu I normally use. Can you tell me what I missed?
I suppose it's theoretically possible, but we've already coevolved with some pretty agressive ideologies that are designed to hijack the thinking of their hosts and use them to infect others (religions). It's worth noting that most people have at least some level of infection with these, but it's only a small minority that have really raging, out-of-control outbreaks (religious fanatics). I think humans have a reasonably good 'mental immune system' that keeps such things from warping behavior too much, most of the time anyway.
In keeping with the theme, might I humbly recommend "Doorways in the Sand". The protagonist is a geek, and the opening chapter is one of the very few items I've read that made me actually laugh out loud. The rest of the book is nicely done, each chapter opening in medias res and the rest of the chapter explaining how he got into the predicament and how he gets out of it. Zelazny always did seem to like playing with storytelling forms.
As others have noted, "Lord of Light" is extremely good. "Creatures of Light and Darkness" is a bit too experimental for my tastes, but when it's good it's very good.
Note the words "may be". Copyright law is funny. Using things that are necessary to interoperate (e.g. simple definitions of constants and function prototypes) is not a problem from a copyright perspective (c.f. "scenes a faire"). If there's only one way to express an idea (e.g. "errno.h", which maps POSIX specified numbers to POSIX specified constant names), it's called "merger" and is not subject to copyright.
Now, if the header file contains substantial code in its own right, either in the form of code that compiles or just macros, it's possible that a case might be made that the resultant object file might be considered a derived work (though note that the other source code is expressly not).
Indeed, there might be a case to be made that dynamic linking doesn't create a derived work, and that would make the GPL legally equivalent to the LGPL. But no one's tried to make that case in a court yet.
That being said, from what I've read it appears that the Sony DRM code may be looking for LAME on the system (to block it from working on their 'protected' stuff) but doesn't appear to actually contain LAME code.
Kinda the whole point is that the U.S. government isn't doing that whole "competent tribunal" part, even when doubt exists.
Good point. In practice, I've found that developing on Linux/ia32, Solaris/SPARC, and then something 64-bit works pretty well. If you'll need to port to things like Windows or oddballs like Netware or OpenVMS (floating point isn't the same there!) it makes sense to test occasionally, but if you do the first three you'll be, like I said, about 85% of the way there already.
Well, you factor the UI away from the engine. The guts can do things portably, perhaps with a few wrappers (I have my own personal set that abstracts threads, so I can use POSIX threads and Windows threads without having to change the guts around). The user interface can be as Maclike as you want.
"If you haven't ported your code, it isn't portable."
Sticking to the libraries and (subsets of) languages that are really portable helps, too, like this book appears to cover, but if you just start off on a small mix of platforms, it becomes usually quite trivial to port to others. My Ostiary program runs on (at least) Linux, *BSD, OSX, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Tru64, IRIX, and Cygwin. I've written commercial code that runs on all of those plus Windows, NetWare, and OpenVMS, though that requires a few more #ifdefs.
Ah, a devotee of C.S. Lewis! Here's how he put this:
And here's my response:
The example itself is not even technically accurate. If we use a stream to turn a water wheel, which drives a pump, which raises some water, we can raise part of a stream higher than its source. The energy from a larger amount of falling water is used to raise a smaller amount of water.
(Note: I am not claiming to be smarter than God. I am pointing out Lewis's mistake; creations frequently surpass their creators in specific capacities and for specific purposes. Lewis asserts a logical contradiction where none exists.)
Now, I don't think most worms really process such errors but it makes me feel better than just ignoring them, and it seems to be far more legal than either redirecting them to fbi.gov or launching some kind of counterattack.
Y'know, it's a darn shame more zombie outbreaks don't happen in the winter. No body heat => corpsicles. Then it's just a matter of getting some good clean exercise with a sledgehammer. :->
Like this.
I've got 5.04 running on a P3/450MHz, with 512MB RAM. Default stuff, Gnome and all. Works pretty darn well. Slower to boot than on my dual Athlon box, but runs nice and is pleasant for desktop stuff. Its the kids computer and they have fun with it.
(If you don't want the old system, can you send it my way? :-> )
That site rocks. Got almost everything I could want set up very nicely. I probably won't even move up to 5.10 until Ubuntuguide is updated.
Sending 32 44.1KHz 16-bit 2-channel streams is about 5.4MB of data per second. On a standard 32-bit PCI bus, that's about 1/24th of the available bandwidth, and much of it can be done in bursts using DMA, which doesn't involve the CPU at all. I have a hard time believing that mixing and resampling 32 streams in software is that much cheaper.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm going to need a bit more of an explanation to accept that you're right. It seems more likely that the reason hardware mixing isn't more widely supported is that the game companies can't count on it being there and just do their sound engines in software. In other words, a standard chicken/egg problem.
"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." - Jon Stewart
"Derek Bond, 72, was held at Durban [South Africa] police station under FBI orders for nearly three weeks after being arrested at gunpoint while on holiday with his wife."
Get the book Obfiscated C and Other Mysteries by Don Libes. Explanations of various Obfuscated C contest entries, and alternate chapters illustrate neat corners of C, including a few things similar to this little library. Occupies a place of honor on my shelf.
Speaking of that, the sandbox these nematodes run in has to be perfect, or else it's just another malware vector.
Yeah, I've got a P3-450MHz, 512MB RAM. Plays everything up to DVDs just fine, though HD video is beyond its capacities. Slower to boot up than my dual Athlon machine, but once up it runs just fine and is quite snappy. Running stock Ubuntu. Just for grins one time I used the mem= kernel option to limit it to 96MB, and y'know what? It worked pretty well.
Now, my P-133, 32MB laptop is another story. I got stock Debian onto it, but it took a while, and Dillo's about the only browser that works acceptably on it. XFCE works pretty well, but much of anything GUI and it'll swap like mad. If I could get even 64MB of RAM into the thing I'd be happier, but it's not worth the hassle or cost. (I remember when I upgraded my 486-100 from 16MB to 64MB... it was like a whole new machine after that.)
In short, 128MB of RAM should be plenty. That's a lot of memory if you use it right.