Actually, as it turns out, there is *no way* to say for sure whether the earth, the sun, or my left ear is the center of the universe. In fact, if you'll do a little checking up, you'll find it was exactly this issue that got Einstein thinking about relativity - someone has asked him to "prove" whether or not the earth was the center of the universe. He came up with the theory of relativity, but failed at the primary question: there is simply no way to know.
For all we can prove, the earth *could be* the center of the universe, and rotating around us every 24 hours. Ultimately, any arguments against this position boil down to one of two forms: 1) I don't belive this because my worldview has problems with possible implications of that, or 2) it violates Occam's razor. Neither is absolutely compelling. We simply don't know, and never will, that's what Dr. Einstien told us...
I just did: retributive ethics is sufficient. I know I can't convince you that I'm a well-behaved person, and I know I can't ask you to take my word for it.
I didn't argue that you didn't have ethics, just that you no longer have a rational basis for having them. In fact, you make my point - the fact that you still have ethics after no longer having any rational basis for them shows that you are in fact acting as if you presuppose the Christian theistic worldview, and do not in fact fully believe what you propound.
If there is no such thing as good and evil, what possible justification can there be for your sustaining the golden rule? Why *can't* you do something to someone that you don't want done to yourself? After all, there's no good and no evil, right?
Thanks for responding so well. You deserve a better answer than I have time to give right here. I'll respond in detail a bit later, but for now, here are a few things you might want to check out that more or less express my position:
First, a 2+ hour realaudio file of the famous Bahnsen vs. Stein debate. It's long, but well worth the time and effort to listen to (the audio is poor in spots.) This debate faced off the late Dr. Greg Bahnsen and Dr. Gordon Stein, both respected advocates of the Christian and atheist worldviews, respectively, on the question, "Does God exist?" Regardless of your point of view, it's an interesting and lively debate that picks up sharply in intensity once both participants establish the groundwork on which they will build in thier opening statements.
Bahnsen is judged by most to have won the debate handily (but by all means listen and judge for yourself) by (correctly, IMO) basing his argument on three foundational principles: the nature of evidence, the presuppostional argument (as expounded and promoted by Cornelius van Til) and the transcendental argument for the existence of God.
Again, I don't have time to go into more detail right now, but highly recommend listening to the debate yourself. Sorry for the shortness of this response.
Sounds to me like what they really need is a tam of engineers facing off against a team of scientists. The scientists will have elegant theories that are totally impractical, and they will die. The engineers will build crap just good enough to get the job done, in true junk yard wars fashion, and win handily.
That's assuming the engineers are from a real school, instead of some prissy place like MIT or Stanford, where real engineers are harder to find than supermodels that have read Calvin's Institutes. (Now there's a perfect woman!:-)
You obviously have never used any major linux distro. You should go to rhn.redhat.com or heck out any of the other major distributions. You have no idea what you're talking about.
No, you obviously are far to quick to assume you know far more than other people, when in fact, you don't.
Over the years, I've used literally dozens of Linux distros, including the "major" ones such as Red Hat, SuSE, Turbo, Caldera, Mandrake, Corel, Slack, and Debian. My "production" Linux experience goes back to version 0.99 patch level 56. I've even built commercial products around Linux (RedHat itself in the most recent case of a high performance storage-over-IP server.)
So actually, I *do* know what I'm talking about on this topic, and I stand by my statements. (They were, as was clear in the context, aimed at applications, not the OS itself...)
FWIW, I find BSD is a far better choice these days than any Linux distro, especially for production use where stability, reliabilty and security are important.
Regardless of what the original poster said, this *is* pretty much the best answer open source has come up with. I've been an open source advocate longer than the FSF has been around, and this is an area where to be honest, we've failed miserably.
There's no way that the logical rejection of Good and Evil can lead logically to a rejection of ethics.
Oh really? So you're willing to stand there and tell me that Good and Evil do not exist, but yet there is presumably some other standard by which you can determine whether something is ethical? No, to admit ethics can exist at all is to presuppose the very Christian worldview you are trying to refute.
It should entail a rejection of morality (conceived as a transcendent code of conduct, that somehow is "inherent" to Man (another hypostasis, see?)), but on the basis outlined above, not out of sheer perversity.
And on just what basis do you plan to reject morality and call that a good thing, now that you've abolished good and evil?
To "answer Dostoievski:" yes, all things are permissible; that doesn't mean you have to carry them out.
Dostoyevsky, of course, did not agree with that assertion himself, it was, rather, that of a character in one of his books to point out the absurdity of such thinking. And really, if all things are permissable, on what grounds can you possibly oppose killing someone, for instance? Answering this is impossible without appealing to some external concept of higher good, which you've already rejected but will have to rely on in your defense. End of argument.
I've read talk.origins, going back to when it was only a newsgroup, and uucp was the only way to get it.
Talk.origins makes no pretense of being obective on the issue of evolution - the very purpose of the site is to serve as an altar for the evolutionist religion.
You go from objective physical truth (which science doesn't claim, but does investigate) to objective moral and ethical truth (which science doesn't claim or investigate).
That's kind of the point. But I disagree with your assertion that science doesn't claim the position of objective ttruth for itself. That's the very reason evolutionis such a hot-button issue...
But such evolution is not tenable as a reasonably possible event, even given very long periods of time. The Bombardier beetle link in the orginal Slashdot story included this comment at the bottom, which is quite relevant here:
The beetle, on his way to becoming a bombardier beetle, would have to be smart enough to carefully store the chemicals in a storage chamber apart from the enzymes but in the presence of an inhibitor to prevent them from reacting prematurely with one another. He also would have to be smart enough to know which enzymes he needs to catalyze the chemical reactions involved, and he would have to be smart enough to secrete them into the combustion chamber. The combustion chamber itself must be very special, able to resist the corrosive effect of the hot, irritating chemicals and strong enough to contain the high pressure without rupturing. The combustion chamber must also be equipped with a highly efficient valve, and the appropriate muscles must exist to manipulate the combustion tube and point it in the right direction. Of course, all of this incredibly complex apparatus would be totally useless without a precisely designed and perfectly functional communication system to squirt the charge of chemicals into the combustion tube, secrete the enzymes into the combustion tube, activate the valve at the appropriate moment, and send the correct signals to all of the muscles involved, in order to point the combustion tube in the right direction. Evolutionists would have us believe that all of the hundreds, and most likely thousands, of genes required to direct the construction and operation of all of this arose through a series of copying errors. Furthermore, these complex genetic changes had to occur in just the right order, so that at every stage of development the beetle was not only able to survive but also was actually superior to the preceding stage. Creation scientists reject this notion as more than scientifically untenable; it is simply preposterous, a fairy tale!
I'd like to see that, too. For one thing, it would prove that we can entirely disregard those pesky environmental activists, as it would then be demonstrable that species extinction is no longer problematic because new species should can be certainly expected to arise and fill the void...
The fact that everyone recognizes that extinction is forever points out the underlying fact that evolutionary belief is simply not tenable in a scientific age. It continues only as an effort to oppose religion and the concept that there is something bigger than our own selfish desires.
Then perhaps you'll be prepared to make a judgement about the validity of both positions. FWIW, I think the SciAm article in question did as much damage to the evolutionist position (through wrecking even the pretense of objectivity of the evolutionist community) as some of the loonier creationist writings have done to undermine that position.
Before you bet too solidly on evolution, you might want to check out the facts. There are a good number of valid scientific reasons for questioning evolutionary theory.
Any thoughtful view of the evidence will, I think, bring one to the realization that this is a complex subject for which no simple answer is possible, as the evidence "contradicts" the common arguments of both sides in various ways.
But ultimately, if you believe in objective truth at all, you have to wind up believing in God as well. This is why postmodern philosophers all reach the same (correctly reasoned) conclusion: that there can be no good or evil, everything is relative, and the best we can hope for is to sink into a nihilistic morass. As Dostoevsky said, "If God does not exist, all things are permissable." This is a point that has ramifications far beyond the realm of science.
God and the very concept of absolute, objective truth are inseparable. If objective truth exists, it can only exist because it is embodied in the nature of God. This is the battle that has been raging for millenia, and will continue to the end of this world...
The realms of science and religion are not contrary, nor are they "non-overlapping magisteria" as Gould proposed. They are, rather, totally immersed in the same space, but science is a subset, and cannot provide a full picture since it begins by presupposing that nothing can exist outside itself. It is this act of philosohical hubris will always separate the two realms.
1) That wraparound screen actually looks pretty cool and potentially useful. I find myself glancing back and forth slightly across my large screen, so something like this could help with limited screen real estate. Not everyone's comfortable with X-style multiple desktops. My one worry is that this monitor would be MS-only
It is cool. It's also a blatant ripoff of the work Bruce Tognazzini did at Sun: In his "Starfire" movie (in which we are shown exactly why Bruce should not attempt a career as director) one of the core ideas is the Starfire desktop, a 6-foot wide vertical arc that also sweeps down onto the physical "desktop". While the film is flat, the thinking that went into the world it portrays is excellent, and has stood the test of time quite well.
Not only is the idea presented there, but there are some clever demonstrations of possible features of such tchnology, for instance: The desktop portion of the display incorporates phototransistors as the 4th element of each pixel. The entire screen is touch sensitive, allowing one to "scan" a document by simply placing it face down on the display and rubbing it with your knuckles. The image then visibly flips to "un-mirror" itself and is OCRed into usable form. Cool. Another neat idea is that of merging touchscreen gestures with the giant Starfire display - for instance, a duplicate of a graphics object in Ashlar Vellum for Starfire is created by touching it with thumb and finger joined, then spreading them apart, creating a selected copy of the object.
The MS center sounds interesting, but it looks to be a simple rip-off of the ideas that Sun first expressed in the Starfire film. (That said, I think Sun wasn't quite ready to deal with a vision so bold, either. One of the interesting things about the film is the implied e-business connectedness that underlies the system. In some ways, it is very much like what we have today with Google and large scale information repository sites.)
This vision still needs to happen. Here's hoping it will...
FORTRAN. Even after all these years, still the best way to kick floating point butt!
Seriously, reagardless of your fellings about the language, it's still vital - the modern world would literally come to a screeching halt if FORTRAN went away. It does the vast majority of the heavy lifting in areas such as oil exploration, computational fluid dynamics, finite element modeling, weather forecasting, and increasingly, protein folding and other bioinformatics applications.
In may ways, post Y2K, it may be a more vital part of the world computing infrastructure than even COBOL. I've worked for one major oil company where FORTRAN code is the backbone of the exploration business, a business that makes a billion dollars a year, a figure that reliably pays the company's dividend year-in and year-out. It may be old, but it's still straegically vital.
Re:"... William F. Buckley, but this one sounds fu
on
Little Green Men
·
· Score: 2
Regardless of your position on William F. Buckley Jr.'s politics (I happen to think he's right on the money on nearly every issue but drug legalization, where he's dead wrong), there's no denying that the man is an *exceptional* writer.
Many people have remarked that had he never entered the field of political commentary, he would perhaps been even more successful as a novelist. John Kenneth Galbraith, who is nearly WFB's political opposite, amusingly put it this way:
Mr. Buckley should give up politics and concentrate on writing. He cannot afford to have serious people think he is a failed politician when he is master of a higher craft.
Even barring WFB's excellent political works (which all exhibit the unerring logic and rationality of the true conservative position as opposed to that of the fickle and weak-willed Republican party), there is much here for all that enjoy good literature: His collection of books chronicling his several ocean crossings under sail are unlike anything else, and positively overflow with the joy he finds in life. His series of spy novels centered around the fictional Blackford Oakes, while not the absolute best of thier genre (I prefer Forsythe and Ludlum), hold their own quite well against others that have managed to claim the number spot on the NY Times bestseller list.
So, bottom line, there's good news for those of you that have not done the rigorously rational and thorough thinking required to become a "right wing nut": Even liberals can enjoy the work a a gifted wordsmith. (Or perhaps even socialists, to the very limited degree they're able to enjoy anything at all...)
You mean like this old Army jumper's song? (The last verse (which may hold some kind of record for musically portrayed gore) stayed with me from one reading when I was maybe 9 or 10, which has been thirty years now... It wasn't hard to find on the web.)
Blood on the Risers
Military Version
to the tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"
"Is everybody happy?" cried the Sergeant, looking up. Our hero feebly answered "yes" and then they stood him up. He leaped right out into the blast, his static line unhooked. He ain't gonna jump no more.
Chorus:
Gory, Gory, what a helluva way to die, Gory, gory, what a helluva way to die Gory, gory what a helluva way to die He ain't going to jump no more.
He counted long, he counted loud, he waited for the shock He felt the wind, he felt the clouds, he felt the awful drop; He jerked his cord, the silk spilled out and wrapped around his legs. He ain't gonna jump no more.
Chorus
The risers wrapped around his neck, connectors cracked his dome The lines were snarled and tied in knots around his skinny bones The canopy became his shroud, he hurtled to the ground He ain't gonna jump no more.
Chorus
The days he'd lived and loved and laughed kept running through his mind He thought about the girl below, the one he'd left behind He thought about the medico's and wondered what they'd find He ain't gonna jump no more.
Chorus
The ambulance was on the spot, the jeeps were running wild; The medics jumped and screamed with glee, they rolled their sleeves and smiled For it had been a week or more since last a chute had failed He ain't gonna jump no more.
Chorus
He hit the ground,the sound was splat, his blood went spurting high; His comrades then were heard to say "A helluva way to die"; He lay there rolling 'round in the welter of his gore. He ain't gonna jump no more.
Chorus
There was blood upon the risers There were brains upon the chute Intestines were a dangling from this paratrooper's boots. They picked him up, still in his chute, and poured him from his boots. He ain't gonna jump no more!
That is why patent reform (eradication) is necessary. Patents only serve to protect those with money and not who should have coverage namely small time inventors.
Absolutely wrong. The US patent system can be and is abused, but it is by far the best method ever devised for protecting the rights of small inventors against large, well-funded usurpers. There are good reasons why the US has led the world in technological innovation for the past century, and the patent system is one of the primary ones.
Anyone saying patents don't do immense public good, and provide worthwhile,
needed, and *effective* protection of small inventors against large corporations is simply ignorant of the history of even quite recent technology. Many inventors started small, but because of patent protection were indeed able to profit greatly from their inventions.
From the "gararge-shop" POV, well, just off the top of my head, there are the examples everyone is familiar with: Bill Hewlett and David Packard (HP, instruments), Steves Jobs and Wozniak (Apple, home computer), and outside the computer industry, folks like Edwin Land (Polaroid, polarized materials and instant camera), Chester Carlson (Xerox, xerography), Henry Ford (Ford, affordable automobiles), Thomas Edison (GE, light bulb, motion pictures, phonograph...), and Alexander Graham Bell (AT&T, telephone), all of whom profited greatly from their patented works. (One could argue for the inclusion of Jeff Bezos in that list, although around here, that's a bit like whacking a hornet's nest with a stick...)
Patents *definitely* protect the little guys, and can, if used properly, level the playing field more than any other single factor. The *last* thing we want to do is eliminate patent protection, since doing so would only ensure that the big companies would dominate forever, with no chance of opposition from small inventors/innovators.
It is a shame that software development companies do not have a legal obligation to fix significant flaws for a certain amount of time.
Other than the fact that I can find no rational basis for such a law, it would also have to apply equally to open source software. (There's that "equal protection" thing that totally changed the nature of the Constitution in 1865...)
If we enact laws around the idea that software developers have some sort of responsibility to deliver functioning products, then that standard must be applied across the board. Open source software might find it quite hard to survive in such an environment, where a lawsuit could put the authors' personal assets at risk.
There is a big difference. Open source software developers rarely dish out patches. They can't, really. Windows software gets patched because they have complete control over the binary and know exactly what was shipped to customers. Open source software could be compiled on a dozen different platforms with who-knows-what kind of optimizations.
This is a great case against open source software for anyone that either cannot or, like me, just falt refuses to compile things.
If the best answer open source can come up with is "keep track of all the patches yourself, download them, and rebuild your apps, then open source software will lose. (And if that scenario is true, open source *should* lose.) It's just not reasonable to expect end users to ever have to compile *anything*. As long as that's the mindset, people have plenty of reason to avoid open source software.
No they haven't, he's just called Clippy now. Don't believe me? In Office97, press F1 for help and type "bob" into the search field, and see what you get...
As I've posted here before, I supect Bob will never really dis for the very simple reason that the product manager for Bob was none other than Melinda Gates (pre-marriage, of course.)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, as it turns out, there is *no way* to say for sure whether the earth, the sun, or my left ear is the center of the universe. In fact, if you'll do a little checking up, you'll find it was exactly this issue that got Einstein thinking about relativity - someone has asked him to "prove" whether or not the earth was the center of the universe. He came up with the theory of relativity, but failed at the primary question: there is simply no way to know.
For all we can prove, the earth *could be* the center of the universe, and rotating around us every 24 hours. Ultimately, any arguments against this position boil down to one of two forms: 1) I don't belive this because my worldview has problems with possible implications of that, or 2) it violates Occam's razor. Neither is absolutely compelling. We simply don't know, and never will, that's what Dr. Einstien told us...
Sorry, correct link is: http://www.asktog.com/papers/videoPrototypePaper.h tml
I just did: retributive ethics is sufficient. I know I can't convince you that I'm a well-behaved person, and I know I can't ask you to take my word for it.
I didn't argue that you didn't have ethics, just that you no longer have a rational basis for having them. In fact, you make my point - the fact that you still have ethics after no longer having any rational basis for them shows that you are in fact acting as if you presuppose the Christian theistic worldview, and do not in fact fully believe what you propound.
If there is no such thing as good and evil, what possible justification can there be for your sustaining the golden rule? Why *can't* you do something to someone that you don't want done to yourself? After all, there's no good and no evil, right?
Thanks for responding so well. You deserve a better answer than I have time to give right here. I'll respond in detail a bit later, but for now, here are a few things you might want to check out that more or less express my position:
First, a 2+ hour realaudio file of the famous Bahnsen vs. Stein debate. It's long, but well worth the time and effort to listen to (the audio is poor in spots.) This debate faced off the late Dr. Greg Bahnsen and Dr. Gordon Stein, both respected advocates of the Christian and atheist worldviews, respectively, on the question, "Does God exist?" Regardless of your point of view, it's an interesting and lively debate that picks up sharply in intensity once both participants establish the groundwork on which they will build in thier opening statements.
Bahnsen is judged by most to have won the debate handily (but by all means listen and judge for yourself) by (correctly, IMO) basing his argument on three foundational principles: the nature of evidence, the presuppostional argument (as expounded and promoted by Cornelius van Til) and the transcendental argument for the existence of God.
If you're in a hurry, an annotated summary of the debate (useful when listening to the audio, too) and an accompanying analysis of the debate are available.
Again, I don't have time to go into more detail right now, but highly recommend listening to the debate yourself. Sorry for the shortness of this response.
Sounds to me like what they really need is a tam of engineers facing off against a team of scientists. The scientists will have elegant theories that are totally impractical, and they will die. The engineers will build crap just good enough to get the job done, in true junk yard wars fashion, and win handily.
:-)
That's assuming the engineers are from a real school, instead of some prissy place like MIT or Stanford, where real engineers are harder to find than supermodels that have read Calvin's Institutes. (Now there's a perfect woman!
You obviously have never used any major linux distro. You should go to rhn.redhat.com or heck out any of the other major distributions. You have no idea what you're talking about.
No, you obviously are far to quick to assume you know far more than other people, when in fact, you don't.
Over the years, I've used literally dozens of Linux distros, including the "major" ones such as Red Hat, SuSE, Turbo, Caldera, Mandrake, Corel, Slack, and Debian. My "production" Linux experience goes back to version 0.99 patch level 56. I've even built commercial products around Linux (RedHat itself in the most recent case of a high performance storage-over-IP server.)
So actually, I *do* know what I'm talking about on this topic, and I stand by my statements. (They were, as was clear in the context, aimed at applications, not the OS itself...)
FWIW, I find BSD is a far better choice these days than any Linux distro, especially for production use where stability, reliabilty and security are important.
Regardless of what the original poster said, this *is* pretty much the best answer open source has come up with. I've been an open source advocate longer than the FSF has been around, and this is an area where to be honest, we've failed miserably.
There's no way that the logical rejection of Good and Evil can lead logically to a rejection of ethics.
Oh really? So you're willing to stand there and tell me that Good and Evil do not exist, but yet there is presumably some other standard by which you can determine whether something is ethical? No, to admit ethics can exist at all is to presuppose the very Christian worldview you are trying to refute.
It should entail a rejection of morality (conceived as a transcendent code of conduct, that somehow is "inherent" to Man (another hypostasis, see?)), but on the basis outlined above, not out of sheer perversity.
And on just what basis do you plan to reject morality and call that a good thing, now that you've abolished good and evil?
To "answer Dostoievski:" yes, all things are permissible; that doesn't mean you have to carry them out.
Dostoyevsky, of course, did not agree with that assertion himself, it was, rather, that of a character in one of his books to point out the absurdity of such thinking. And really, if all things are permissable, on what grounds can you possibly oppose killing someone, for instance? Answering this is impossible without appealing to some external concept of higher good, which you've already rejected but will have to rely on in your defense. End of argument.
I've read talk.origins, going back to when it was only a newsgroup, and uucp was the only way to get it.
Talk.origins makes no pretense of being obective on the issue of evolution - the very purpose of the site is to serve as an altar for the evolutionist religion.
You go from objective physical truth (which science doesn't claim, but does investigate) to objective moral and ethical truth (which science doesn't claim or investigate).
That's kind of the point. But I disagree with your assertion that science doesn't claim the position of objective ttruth for itself. That's the very reason evolutionis such a hot-button issue...
I'd like to see that, too. For one thing, it would prove that we can entirely disregard those pesky environmental activists, as it would then be demonstrable that species extinction is no longer problematic because new species should can be certainly expected to arise and fill the void...
The fact that everyone recognizes that extinction is forever points out the underlying fact that evolutionary belief is simply not tenable in a scientific age. It continues only as an effort to oppose religion and the concept that there is something bigger than our own selfish desires.
I agree, read that article, and then read this rebuttal in two parts: SciAm rebuttal Part I, and SciAm rebuttal, Part II.
Then perhaps you'll be prepared to make a judgement about the validity of both positions. FWIW, I think the SciAm article in question did as much damage to the evolutionist position (through wrecking even the pretense of objectivity of the evolutionist community) as some of the loonier creationist writings have done to undermine that position.
Before you bet too solidly on evolution, you might want to check out the facts. There are a good number of valid scientific reasons for questioning evolutionary theory.
s .htm
I recommend reading a few of these articles for at least an overview of why science itself argues against evolution in many cases: http://www.scienceagainstevolution.org/newsletter
Any thoughtful view of the evidence will, I think, bring one to the realization that this is a complex subject for which no simple answer is possible, as the evidence "contradicts" the common arguments of both sides in various ways.
But ultimately, if you believe in objective truth at all, you have to wind up believing in God as well. This is why postmodern philosophers all reach the same (correctly reasoned) conclusion: that there can be no good or evil, everything is relative, and the best we can hope for is to sink into a nihilistic morass. As Dostoevsky said, "If God does not exist, all things are permissable." This is a point that has ramifications far beyond the realm of science.
God and the very concept of absolute, objective truth are inseparable. If objective truth exists, it can only exist because it is embodied in the nature of God. This is the battle that has been raging for millenia, and will continue to the end of this world...
The realms of science and religion are not contrary, nor are they "non-overlapping magisteria" as Gould proposed. They are, rather, totally immersed in the same space, but science is a subset, and cannot provide a full picture since it begins by presupposing that nothing can exist outside itself. It is this act of philosohical hubris will always separate the two realms.
Another Starfire link, for those interested in knowing a bit more about the ultimate desktop environment: "The "Starfire" Video Prototype Project: A Case History"
Remember that MS is just now getting around to aping what Tog and Sun were proposing in 1994!
1) That wraparound screen actually looks pretty cool and potentially useful. I find myself glancing back and forth slightly across my large screen, so something like this could help with limited screen real estate. Not everyone's comfortable with X-style multiple desktops. My one worry is that this monitor would be MS-only
It is cool. It's also a blatant ripoff of the work Bruce Tognazzini did at Sun: In his "Starfire" movie (in which we are shown exactly why Bruce should not attempt a career as director) one of the core ideas is the Starfire desktop, a 6-foot wide vertical arc that also sweeps down onto the physical "desktop". While the film is flat, the thinking that went into the world it portrays is excellent, and has stood the test of time quite well.
Not only is the idea presented there, but there are some clever demonstrations of possible features of such tchnology, for instance: The desktop portion of the display incorporates phototransistors as the 4th element of each pixel. The entire screen is touch sensitive, allowing one to "scan" a document by simply placing it face down on the display and rubbing it with your knuckles. The image then visibly flips to "un-mirror" itself and is OCRed into usable form. Cool. Another neat idea is that of merging touchscreen gestures with the giant Starfire display - for instance, a duplicate of a graphics object in Ashlar Vellum for Starfire is created by touching it with thumb and finger joined, then spreading them apart, creating a selected copy of the object.
The MS center sounds interesting, but it looks to be a simple rip-off of the ideas that Sun first expressed in the Starfire film. (That said, I think Sun wasn't quite ready to deal with a vision so bold, either. One of the interesting things about the film is the implied e-business connectedness that underlies the system. In some ways, it is very much like what we have today with Google and large scale information repository sites.)
This vision still needs to happen. Here's hoping it will...
FORTRAN. Even after all these years, still the best way to kick floating point butt!
Seriously, reagardless of your fellings about the language, it's still vital - the modern world would literally come to a screeching halt if FORTRAN went away. It does the vast majority of the heavy lifting in areas such as oil exploration, computational fluid dynamics, finite element modeling, weather forecasting, and increasingly, protein folding and other bioinformatics applications.
In may ways, post Y2K, it may be a more vital part of the world computing infrastructure than even COBOL. I've worked for one major oil company where FORTRAN code is the backbone of the exploration business, a business that makes a billion dollars a year, a figure that reliably pays the company's dividend year-in and year-out. It may be old, but it's still straegically vital.
Many people have remarked that had he never entered the field of political commentary, he would perhaps been even more successful as a novelist. John Kenneth Galbraith, who is nearly WFB's political opposite, amusingly put it this way:Even barring WFB's excellent political works (which all exhibit the unerring logic and rationality of the true conservative position as opposed to that of the fickle and weak-willed Republican party), there is much here for all that enjoy good literature: His collection of books chronicling his several ocean crossings under sail are unlike anything else, and positively overflow with the joy he finds in life. His series of spy novels centered around the fictional Blackford Oakes, while not the absolute best of thier genre (I prefer Forsythe and Ludlum), hold their own quite well against others that have managed to claim the number spot on the NY Times bestseller list.
So, bottom line, there's good news for those of you that have not done the rigorously rational and thorough thinking required to become a "right wing nut": Even liberals can enjoy the work a a gifted wordsmith. (Or perhaps even socialists, to the very limited degree they're able to enjoy anything at all...)
Absolutely wrong. The US patent system can be and is abused, but it is by far the best method ever devised for protecting the rights of small inventors against large, well-funded usurpers. There are good reasons why the US has led the world in technological innovation for the past century, and the patent system is one of the primary ones.
See my letter to LWN on this subject a couple of years ago. An excerpt:
Patents *definitely* protect the little guys, and can, if used properly, level the playing field more than any other single factor. The *last* thing we want to do is eliminate patent protection, since doing so would only ensure that the big companies would dominate forever, with no chance of opposition from small inventors/innovators.
Why they didn't just hire a couple of software developers at $80k a year/each and deploy Linux is beyond me...
<SARCASM>Perhaps because they're in business to make money, not support an IT staff?</SARCASM>
It is a shame that software development companies do not have a legal obligation to fix significant flaws for a certain amount of time.
Other than the fact that I can find no rational basis for such a law, it would also have to apply equally to open source software. (There's that "equal protection" thing that totally changed the nature of the Constitution in 1865...)
If we enact laws around the idea that software developers have some sort of responsibility to deliver functioning products, then that standard must be applied across the board. Open source software might find it quite hard to survive in such an environment, where a lawsuit could put the authors' personal assets at risk.
There is a big difference. Open source software developers rarely dish out patches. They can't, really. Windows software gets patched because they have complete control over the binary and know exactly what was shipped to customers. Open source software could be compiled on a dozen different platforms with who-knows-what kind of optimizations.
This is a great case against open source software for anyone that either cannot or, like me, just falt refuses to compile things.
If the best answer open source can come up with is "keep track of all the patches yourself, download them, and rebuild your apps, then open source software will lose. (And if that scenario is true, open source *should* lose.) It's just not reasonable to expect end users to ever have to compile *anything*. As long as that's the mindset, people have plenty of reason to avoid open source software.
No they haven't, he's just called Clippy now. Don't believe me? In Office97, press F1 for help and type "bob" into the search field, and see what you get...
As I've posted here before, I supect Bob will never really dis for the very simple reason that the product manager for Bob was none other than Melinda Gates (pre-marriage, of course.)