I was with you (more or less) right up to the point where you started talking about how "we" are moving through space-time at the speed of light... which is confusing, since I don't think any human being has ever attained that velocity in any frame of reference.:-) Similarly, talk of protons traveling at the speed of light doesn't make much sense because protons have mass. Yet the context doesn't make it clear that you meant to say photons. So I think you may have confused matters further here.
Last time I checked, people who are not citizens of these great United States of America are not entitled to protections offered under the bill of rights.
Actually, since the U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land (and by extension, the Bill of Rights, which is the first 10 amendments to the Constitution), it applies to any person or entity operating on U.S. soil, whether or not they are citizens. This is why it's not legal to murder illegal immigrants, for example -- they still have rights that are recognized, and they don't need to be citizens of the U.S. to be afforded basic rights.
So, sorry to burst your bubble, but if a jihadist publishes a video through YouTube, that video has First Amendment protections, by virtue of the fact that YouTube is owned by Google (a U.S. company operating in the United States) and by virtue of the place where the material is "published" -- regardless of where the author might reside. So YouTube can't be legally compelled to censor said video.
Freedom of Speech applies universally in the United States, not just to speech that you agree with, and not just to people you happen to like. That's why you can run out and buy a copy of Mein Kampf in this country, and why we have a Nazi party here when the same political party is outlawed in Germany. If the First Amendment only applied to citizens, the effect on any kind of diplomatic or political discourse would be chilling to say the least... not to mention the effect on the cultural contributions of foreign authors. Picture an America devoid of Harry Potter because some religious nutbag in the government decided that J.K. Rowling was promoting witchcraft.
I wonder if they've considered Groovy on Grails instead of Java or PHP? Groovy has all the dynamic language features that make Ruby and JavaScript popular with developers, but is essentially 100% backward compatible with Java (since it's running on top of the Java VM and is implemented in Java). Groovy also leverages Java and any other language that can be hosted on the Java VM because it interoperates with all of that stuff, and itself runs on the same VM. You also get legitimate closures and simplified syntax for many things. It can even give you Java 5 semantics (generics, enumerations, etc.) under JDK 1.4.
Grails is very similar to Rails, but is not a straight port -- more "inspired by," as it's described by its proponents. Grails also doesn't have the problem that Rails has in terms of scalability and performance, since it's built on Groovy/Java (which have a real threading model). No screwing around with creating a zillion Mongrel instances to scale your site, etc. And if you don't care to use the built-in web server that comes with Grails, you can have the Grails framework generate a WAR file which you can deploy in any container like Tomcat or Jboss.
At a recent 3-day Grails training session taught by Scott Davis, I was surprised to hear that some major corporations have jumped on the Groovy/Grails bandwagon, including Mutual of Omaha. For a conservative company to make that kind of leap says something. (Furthermore, they used to be a COBOL shop -- the rationale appears to be that it's easier to get COBOL programmers to make the leap to Groovy first, then switch slowly to Java, as opposed to migrating directly to Java.)
After that 3-day training, I was pretty impressed. The biggest win for Grails seems to be rapid development and deployment, but all the other stuff you get for free in the package makes it something you'd like to stick with. I'd say the thing that most impressed me with Grails was GORM, which makes Hibernate even easier to work with. GORM spoils me, since it obviates the need to write SQL most of the time.
Goal 1 is achieved by putting social pressure on a repressive/authoritarian regime -- the citizenry of that country (e.g., China) will presumably be upset that they can no longer access certain sites, and will complain, or engage in civil disobedience by bypassing any locks and controls enforcing the ban on those sites. Alternately, people within the repressive nation might be motivated to create their own alternative site that is inside the nation's firewall, and thus harder to block (at least in the short run -- someone maintaining the site might still have to do subversive things like move the server periodically to avoid detection by the authorities).
Goal 2 is absolutely guaranteed, in the sense that it prevents U.S. companies from developing "unclean hands." If a foreign nation wants to censor the Internet and prohibit its citizens from seeing certain material, that's their prerogative -- but no U.S. company should ever be complicit in such censorship, and this bill would mandate a moral or ethical imperative for businesses. It's sad that U.S. companies wouldn't choose to avoid such coercion on their own, but as their rationale for supporting foreign censorship efforts is the consequence of non-compliance (i.e., not being able to do business in that country), these companies are heavily motivated to just "go with the flow" by profits. This law mandates a moral backbone at the expense of profits.
Personally, I don't see this as any different from child labor laws -- when such laws were enacted in the United States in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, many capitalists decried them, but morally it is the right thing to prevent the exploitation of children, especially in dangerous jobs. Many companies now get around these laws by exporting labor to countries which don't have adequate child labor laws (nor adequate enforcement of any existing laws), but the social climate in the U.S. has changed to the point where the exposure of such wrongdoing elicits the appropriate outraged response.
So, in the long view, goal #1 is preserved, even if in the short view Chinese citizens get a bunch of web sites blocked. In a sense, that's kind of the point -- force the issue and see what develops. If the Chinese people (or the Iranian people, etc.) don't complain and demand change after their own inept regime is forced to do all the dirty work itself, then they didn't deserve what little illusion of freedom they had to begin with. You're either totally free or you're not. I'm sure at least one of the authors if this bill is counting on the Chinese government reacting in knee-jerk fashion the second this goes through, possibly by yanking the rights of American IT companies to keep offices in and do business in mainland China.
Having said all that, I'm sure the Chinese authorities will probably take a pragmatic approach and try to reach some kind of compromise which allows them to continue with business as usual, while letting U.S. companies off the hook. "You can host whatever you want in our country, but we reserve the right to place filters on all network connections going in and out of your local data centers."
If you use software that is properly licensed with Fraunhofer, you're covered. There's no need for an end user to purchase a license from Fraunhofer if the software the end user has obtained has a properly paid-for license, paid for by the seller or distributor of that software. Thus, Apple iTunes is legit -- you can rip CDs to MP3 format using iTunes and not worry about being licensed with Fraunhofer, because Apple did that for you. Apple pays a ton of money to Fraunhofer to license that patent, you betcha.
If you're using LAME to rip your CDs to MP3, though, and you haven't paid Fraunhofer or one of the other MPEG patent holders for the right to do so, you could get in trouble. LAME isn't patent licensed, although some companies and individuals have bought licenses from Fraunhofer in order to legally use the LAME code.
But this is all related to patent issues with MP3 codecs and not the copyright infringement issue that the RIAA is grousing about.
Hold on there, partner... the court in the Diamond Rio case ruled that the components of a computer used in "space shifting" were not subject to the AHRA, nor was the MP3 player in question. So while the AHRA does grant the right to space shift music, it also places burdens upon the manufacturers of devices compliant with that law -- it mandates SCMS (Serial Copy Management System) to limit copying, and it mandates royalties paid by device manufacturers to the recording industry.
Since a computer's components and the MP3 players used to listen to these music files are not covered by the AHRA, that particular argument doesn't hold water. For more information on what was ruled, see here and here.
Also, see my other response in this thread -- the RIAA is claiming these MP3s are "unauthorized" and not "illegal." There is a difference, and it would really inform the discussion here better if folks would tune up a bit and read these things carefully. These MP3s are unauthorized in the sense that the defendant didn't explicitly ask for permission from the copyright holder to space shift his music. Whether authorization is required is a separate question, and one that the RIAA lawyers are hoping doesn't get answered in a way they don't like. It's in their best interests to sow confusion here, so they deliberately confuse the issue -- not unlike conflating "copyright infringement" with "theft."
Standard IANAL disclaimer applies. This is my opinion (backed by some research), not legal advice.
While the RIAA stipulated their assertion that the MP3 files are "unauthorized" copies of the music the defendant purchased on CDs, they never claim these copies are "illegal." It's a very precarious legal tightrope they're walking. If they claim those copies are illegal, that opens up a whole can of worms, and things might not go the way they'd like. So they claim those copies are "unauthorized" -- which is technically true, but doesn't address the issue of whether the defendant needed authorization.
Whether you need authorization or not depends on whether ripping those CDs into MP3 format is considered "fair use" or not. Although many geeks like to point to the Rio case against Diamond Multimedia as establishing that ripping CDs to space shift is a protected fair use, a careful reading of the decision will show that the judge in that case largely side-stepped the fair use question; rather, the judge focused on how the parts of a computer used to space-shift music were not covered by the Audio Home Recording Act, and therefore not subject to its restrictions. (The judge did say that the Rio was consistent with fair use provisions in copyright law, making an analogy to the Sony Betamax case, but that's as far as it went.) I found a pretty good article here, reprinted from Federal Communications Law Journal. (The relevant section discussing the Rio case starts at the bottom of the first page and continues into page 2 with the following quote: "Because the court had no occasion to look at the Rio case from a fair use perspective, this Note examines the case as one of fair use to reach the same conclusion as the Ninth Circuit.")
We need more case law to establish this once and for all -- or else we need a piece of legislation that explicitly balances corporate and consumer copyright interests and defines what is considered "fair use."
Standard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. I'm merely stating personal observations and opinions.
The incident you cite was an experimental pebble bed reactor, and the fault was that one of the spherical fuel pebbles got stuck in the pipe used to feed the fuel into the reactor. The release of radiation from this incident was due to operator error (when the operator attempted to dislodge the stuck pebble). Just because you've provided one counter-example of the safety of pebble bed reactors doesn't mean that pebble bed reactors are in general a bad idea! And, it still remains that pebble bed reactors are far safer than most other commercial nuclear designs.
The claims that you can "walk away from" any particular design and have it shut itself down safely are just industry hype, but it doesn't follow that pebble bed reactors a bad idea.
He's just saying that Custom's officers aren't any better at noticing lies. I don't know about that, but if the study says that is true, then I can accept that. However, my point was that noticing lies is EASY, regardless of who is doing the noticing.
That's kind of self-contradictory. If you accept the study cited as valid, then you can't be sure of your own conviction -- i.e., your belief that noticing lies is easy. Because the cited study specifically concludes that noticing lies is not easy, in point of fact. Said study further concludes that people who think they can spot lies are, in fact, delusional.
The only reason authority figures have any luck ferreting out any lies is that most people are socially programmed to respond with deference, respect, and a modicum of fear to any given authority figure. Authority figures in turn reinforce this by arbitrary enforcement of minor rules, making up rules that don't exist, and other ridiculous practices designed to throw other people "off balance." Your goal as a customs agent is to put the person you're questioning on the defensive, in the hopes that they screw up and make a serious blunder. Most people are also too stupid to keep track of their lies, or to keep them logically consistent.
And then there are the cold, rational liars out there who are of above average intelligence -- many of whom fit the clinical definition of a psychopath, but who may very well be functional members of society and not criminals at all. (I've read that 1% of the general population fits the clinical definition of a psychopath.) These are the people who can lie without batting an eyelash and pass a polygraph test, often without formal training to do so. (One of many reasons polygraph results are not admissible as evidence in court in the U.S.)
Just so we're clear, the study linked by the GP was not specific to Customs agents, but applies across the population. And there's nothing special about Customs agents that makes them better judges of truth or falsehood. Sure, you might get some training to help you better spot some types of suspicious body language, but a seasoned liar is fully aware of and able to control their body language effectively. Heck, there are classes you can take to learn how to lie effectively... how do you think CIA spooks learn how to be good at what they do? In other words, don't let your training lull you into a false sense of security.
I believe this behavior is off by default. The last XP laptop I used required me to agree to connect to an unsecured hotspot, let alone a peer-to-peer one.
Actually, it depends on the manufacturer of your device. I bought an Acer laptop that automatically connected to a neighbor's unsecured WiFi access point without asking, even though I had my own access point which had a stronger signal -- thing is, my access point was secured with a password and WEP encryption, but my neighbor's access point was running wide open. The Acer laptop was running Vista, but had quite a few custom applications supplied by Acer, including their own custom WiFi management tools.
When I returned the Acer (due to keyboard problems) and tried an HP laptop which also ran Vista, I believe the HP required user action before connecting to anyone's access point for the first time.
So, the GP was at least partially correct -- some Windows laptops will automatically connect to any wide-open access point without asking.
Comparing against OS X laptops: My old iBook running OS X 10.2 would connect to any access point indiscriminately until I changed this behavior. (That was the source of a huge headache, as one of the access points I connected to was set up illicitly by a Honeywell employee... and Honeywell eventually tried to go after me for writing a blog entry about their security lapse, although I didn't know it was a security lapse at the time.) My new laptop, a MacBook Pro running 10.5, will ask the first time it can't find any preferred networks but finds a wide-open access point that isn't in the preferred network list. If you say yes, the wireless networking stack will automatically connect to that access point forever after whenever it sees it (unless there's a preferred network connection with a higher priority that's visible).
What you're recalling is political spin that was promulgated by some engineers, both inside and outside of Apple, to allay fears of Carbon developers. Apple needed everyone they could get writing code for OS X in the early days, so they couldn't afford to be seen as obsoleting the investment many Mac developers had made in learning the Classic Mac APIs (which grew into Carbon). This is the same reason that Finder was written using Carbon instead of Cocoa (and, some would argue, why Finder sucked so badly in the early days of OS X, and why it still has so many warts).
Hell, when it was announced that the control strip would be replaced by the Dock, I got into an argument with some Mac software developer who decided to write a look-alike, work-alike replacement for the control strip using, you guessed it, Carbon! When I asked him why, he trotted out the same line that you recalled: Carbon is going to be co-equal with Cocoa; Carbon APIs are even being called behind the scenes by some Cocoa APIs; there are some things you can't yet do in Cocoa that you'll be able to do immediately in Carbon; and besides, why would Apple write the Finder for OS X in Carbon if they weren't serious about supporting it?
Here it is, 2007, and it looks like I got the last laugh in that argument... and the control strip this guy was working on has probably been shelved, since I never saw the final version (though he let me play with an early, mostly-functioning alpha). The Docklets concept was quietly dropped in favor of menu bar extras, and the Dock plus the menulets/status items worked out to be a pretty decent replacement for the control strip. (And incidentally, you use Cocoa to develop menu bar extras -- Apple provides a NSStatusItem class, as well as a NSMenuExtra class for their own private use.)
Look up the WWDC presentation on YouTube. Steve Jobs *clearly* says that Carbon would be a transitional API to Cocoa.
Well, Steve said many things, and other people at Apple said many things, regarding Cocoa and Carbon. Depending on who they were talking to, the story might change. For political reasons, Carbon was often touted (though maybe not by Steve) as being "co-equal" with Cocoa -- so much so that the Finder for OS X was written in Carbon, not Cocoa, to reassure some 3rd party software developers that Apple was serious about supporting Carbon.
As we all remember, the Finder in 10.0 and 10.1 was kind of painful. It wasn't until 10.2 that the Finder became multi-threaded, and even then, there were still deficiencies. Since Leopard is now "fully" 64-bit, you'd expect Finder to be migrated to Cocoa, but I can't find anything to confirm that by doing some quick Google searches. (Maybe just not the right search terms?)
In David Brin's novel Earth IIRC the Earth's orbit crosses a tiny black hole, which ends up falling into the Earth's core, threatening both the planet and the survival of life on it.
Actually, the object was thought to be a microscopic black hole, but was discovered later in the story to be a synthetic object -- not a black hole, but "black hole like," and probably alien in origin. The characters of the story speculated that this object was sent to wipe out an upstart civilization that had just become detectable (i.e., us).
How disaster is averted is pretty cool too, and one of many big ideas that makes the book an interesting read.
There's a Larry Niven story in a similar vein called The Hole Man, though it takes place on Mars. In that case, the black hole was trapped in a device on Mars that was left there by aliens, some kind of communication device that used gravity waves. (And someone manages to hit the equivalent of an EMO and shuts off power to the electromagnetic containment, since this black hole apparently had a charge and could therefore be held in place by powerful magnetic fields. Naturally, once the fields are off, you can imagine the hilarity that ensues... although really, why would a race smart enough to build a gravity wave communicator put a button somewhere that could do something so insanely dangerous?) In that story, the outcome was less cheerful, but the ultimate loss of Mars was calculated to occur well into the future -- a black hole that size can only gobble up tiny bits of matter at first.
If such an exotic object hit Earth before evaporating into a puff of Hawking radiation, we might notice the impact site but remain ignorant of the cause -- in Brin's book, one of the characters speculates that the exotic object was the cause of the Tunguska explosion. If the object has sufficient velocity, it might pass right through the planet... and if not, it would settle down to oscillate back and forth through the Earth, turning the interior into Swiss cheese before collapsing the planet into a singularity.
Man, I wish I had the mod points, but hopefully others will step in and give them to you.
I grew up in a mill town in Connecticut, and my family was not very wealthy -- they never owned a home, and because my parents had decided early on to put me through college, they decided to forego home ownership indefinitely because (at that time) colleges considered home equity when deciding who got financial aid, and how much.
The town library was converted from an old mansion, previously owned by one of the textile mill owners. It wasn't large, and so I frequently had issues finding sufficient resources to write papers or do adequate research for a project. Typically, I'd go to neighboring towns to get superior research materials from their superior libraries; sometimes, I'd go to Hartford, because no other town had what I needed. I was in constant competition with my other classmates, and with students at other grammar- and high schools. In at least one case, a book I wanted to use as a source went missing for over a year.
For a kid in all honors classes, it was simply understood and expected that this was "the way things were," and if I wanted good grades, I had to be fast and I had to be ruthless. But it definitely was not the way I preferred to work. The system was definitely unfair. Not every kid had parents willing to drive them two towns over to go look up some obscure book that our own library didn't have. And my parents were far better off than many of those living in my town, because my dad had a (relatively) good job working for Pratt and Whitney.
If the Internet and the Web had existed then as they do now, I imagine some of that drudgery would have been alleviated, and far less fuel would have been burned. (I am reminded of one instance where a reference librarian got testy with me on the phone because I asked if her library had a resource -- she got on my case because she thought I was trying to get her to do my research for me. "No, ma'am, I just don't want to ask my father to drive me there this late at night unless you have what I need.") I could have focused more on the subject matter and less on doing the leg work.
So yeah, I look at what these kind-hearted hackers are trying to do for a poor community, and think it's wonderful. Just because you have enough food on your plate and a roof over your head doesn't mean you have everything you need to be successful. My parents were stingy -- they didn't splurge on luxuries like cable TV or a CompuServe subscription. Today, a cable subscription may be necessary for you to have credibly usable network access, or else you'll be stuck in the slow lane with dial-up. Today, you need an ISP subscription if you want to have any sort of home network access. Otherwise, you're stuck going to the local library -- assuming that your library has computers with Internet access. Even so, you then have to deal with long wait times for a limited resource, along with any network filtering barriers. Any kind of low-cost or no-cost network access for poor students and their families would be a huge help.
Incidentally, all the textile mills where I grew up were all shut down by the time I got to college. Most of those mills have either sat unused, gutted, or they've been converted into apartments and condos. I'm so glad I was able to move away and make something of myself... there were others who never made it, for whatever reason. My parents sacrificed a lot to give me an education and make a better life for myself, but many more either didn't have the resources to begin with, or refused to make those sacrifices. A project such as described in TFA would have helped a lot of kids where I grew up.
Wow, somebody is really playing fast and loose with the "Flamebait" moderation.
For what it's worth, I think the parent makes a good point. Whether he's right or not, only time will tell... but I find his POV interesting. The PS3 and the Xbox 360 are both much, much more than game systems, whereas the Wii is primarily a gaming system that has a few extra features (e.g., web browser) thrown in for good measure. Nintendo focused on one core area of competency -- they wanted a big slice of one pie -- whereas Sony and Microsoft are both after slices of other pies in addition to the gaming pie.
While gaming might be a fast growing entertainment market segment, it's not the only segment, and it's still not the biggest. Devices that play well in multiple segments are going to do better in the long run, or so Sony and Microsoft are betting. I wouldn't bet against them.
My only point of disagreement with the parent is when he claims that video games will be one of the least important roles of a living room convergence device -- I think gaming is and will continue to be a very important role, even if a cynic might argue that gaming is just a trojan horse to get these devices into the living room.
I can see why someone would have modded the parent Redundant, but Flamebait? Why is demanding transparency and openness in the voting process "Flamebait"? IMHO, forcing manufacturers of voting machines to disclose source code should be mandatory. It's just good accountability. I don't think corporations should be able to hide behind trade secrets when the public interest is involved. (And really, there can't possibly be something novel about the code for a voting machine, so why make it proprietary?)
What would be even better is an open architectural standard for both the hardware and software, and all manufacturers are required to adhere to both. That leaves some room for innovation and customization, but at least the interfaces are all well defined, and test suites can be written without regard for actual implementation.
However, if you're modeling the part of the Earth in which (for example) the airlines operate, the geocentric model is quite effective. It allows you to ignore forces like the Coriolis effect, and the gravitational pulls of the moon and sun, which are inconsequential in flight calculations. You even ignore the Earth's rotation, and consider the sun to be in orbit around the Earth, because this greatly simplifies your equations.
I was mostly agreeing with what you said until you said that flight calculations can omit things like the Coriolis effect and the Earth's rotation; in point of fact, both of these play a major role in calculating trajectories for long distance flights. For example, check out this page, which has some great animations of the Coriolis effect, along with this quote (that directly contradicts you): "In reality, pilots take the Coriolis effect into account so they do not miss their targets."
Similarly, in scientific study of the molecular mechanics of our bodies (medicine), the orbits of the earth, moon, etc. are rarely if ever mentioned. Their effects are unmeasurable at the molecular level, so there's no point in taking them into account.
Rarely? Try never. The notion that tidal forces somehow affect our bodies internally has been largely discredited, and while it's true that some organisms respond to lunar cycles, this has more to do with cycles of luminosity and responses to ocean tides going on around them.
Your point is well taken, but... erm... it's kind of stating the obvious to anyone with a background in the physical sciences. And I have a background in the physical sciences, incidentally.:-) Case in point:
Part of such an approach is recognizing that you're not really dealing with "the Truth" in any philosophical sense. Rather, you are dealing with the equations, and including in your model only the motions and forces that are required to explain the parts of the system that you're dealing with.
Thank you, Captain Obvious! Yes, we do this all the time to reduce the number of free variables we have to consider in any mathematical model. You don't throw stuff in your model that will only have a miniscule or immeasureable effect. (The trick comes in trying to figure out what things can truly be ignored and what things can't. Sometimes, that isn't so obvious.)
As for philosophical "Truth," I believe that is what science and religion are both seeking, ultimately... but they do it in their own, very different ways. (I won't say "equally valid," because that's a whole other kettle of fish, and I personally don't think the two approaches are equally valid, not even for the domains in which they are meant to be applied.) I think, though, scientists don't get as hung up on philosophy because they're more focused on empirical evidence than on being in love with ideas for their own sake and spinning complex notions that have zero grounding in concrete reality. Maybe that's because most of the physical sciences focus on a philosophically materialist world view, but it happens to be a very useful viewpoint to have if you're in the business of doing science.
Personally, I find it absurd to state with a straight face that heliocentrism and geocentrism are totally equivalent and that heliocentrism is "merely" a computational convenience, for many of the reasons you yourself mention. This is where starry-eyed philosophers get a smack-down from reality, and where I have to tip my hat to another philosopher... if you're going to invoke philosophy, then I have to invoke Occam's Razor, and point out that the real win of heliocentrism (and follow-on theories that mark the advent of modern physics) isn't the convenience of being able to do orbital calculations simply! No, the real win is having a single set of rational, co
That's a better translation -- and someone even helpfully provided a comment which attempts to paraphrase Ratzinger's comments in more plain English.
I'm still a bit dubious of the translation you provide the link for, though, because it's published by the National Catholic Reporter... but as I am having trouble digging up the translation I used, we can talk about your preferred translation instead.
However, that's not even the entire story, because if you study the matter more, you will discover that although Galileo was correct about heliocentrism (which others thought of and supported before he was even born), it was for the wrong reasons, and the evidence he offered as proof was fallacious.
You know, this claim was made in several other discussion threads about this article, but it's worth noting that only some of Galileo's evidence was fallacious -- specifically, his evidence relating to tides. The phases of Venus and the four Galilean satellites of Jupiter are certainly not fallacious evidence for heliocentrism. (The moons of Jupiter don't directly prove that the Sun is the center of anything -- they only serve to show that not all bodies revolve around the Earth.) So yes, his evidence was weak, and some of it didn't mean what he claimed it did. But he also made legitimate contributions, and I don't just mean (re)introducing the Western world to the idea of heliocentrism, so let's not dismiss those, eh?
No need to be condescending by inviting me to "study the matter more." I took a semester of astronomy and have a BS in Physics, so I know the basic facts.
The comments on relativity in reference to other quotes, and relativity changes nothing about Galileo's case.
While I agree that Relativity changes nothing about Galileo's case, I disagree that the comments on Relativity were irrelevant to the discussion of Galileo, as you imply by saying they were in reference to other quotes. Let's be specific here. Ratzinger discusses Ernst Bloch in the context of heliocentrism vs. geocentrism, and that bears on our historical perspective of Galileo. Ratzinger states that Relativity forbids a privileged frame of reference (in a very roundabout fashion), and this is a true statement in itself; but he then uses this fact along with Bloch's arguments to minimize the true value of heliocentrism, relegating the notion to a mere computational convenience, and uses this as a justification (in part) of the view that the Galileo case was blown into a "myth of the Enlightenment."
Frankly, it is of no concern to me what point Ratzinger may be making about religion making humans the "moral center" of the universe, or some other such anthropocentric nonsense. (Incidentally, he wasn't really saying "the earth is what matters most to us," as you put it, but rather, it is the human condition that matters most to us... it isn't the place so much but the people who inhabit it, because that's what religion is about -- the relationship between people and the Divine.)
I'm not sure where the phrase "undue rationalism" comes in. I guess I can suggest that maybe this was another compare and contrast historical quote, or that the phrase was "undue rationalization" as in trying to excuse something unjustifiably. Given the Catholic teaching, and even Benedict's own statements about the necessity of exercising the human faculty of reason, it wouldn't make any sense for him to turn 180 degrees and saying you should try to be rational.
First off, no, it wasn't (to the best of my recollection) a compare-and-contrast historical quote, and I know for a fact I was not misreading the phrase "undue rationalization" because I never confuse "rationalism" with "rationalization." (My brain's parser has other failure modes, but that's not one of them.) Since the translation offered by the NCR doesn't contain this phrase at all, there's no more I can say except that I'm still digging around.
now all i ask of you, in intellectual honesty, is to admit to me that the big bang theory has an anthropocentric bias to it
Well, if you're so convinced that there is an anthropocentric bias to the Big Bang theory (which itself is really just a consequence of General Relativity), then could you at least do us the favor of articulating what, precisely, this supposed bias is? Once you do that, then maybe other people might have a chance to actually respond to your challenge. It's hard to respond to a challenge when the challenger can't even really frame the challenge in a way that can be understood.
Looking at the original comment you made in this thread, it seems as if you're implying that the "anthropocentric bias" in Big Bang cosmology is the mere idea of the universe having a "beginning, middle, and end." And yet, that was not the prevailing belief of scientists prior to the emergence of hard evidence for the Big Bang (e.g., cosmic microwave background radiation). In fact, even Einstein himself preferred the idea that you so blithely toss out there -- the idea that the universe is, to borrow your words, "endless, in time and space." Einstein rather liked the idea of a static, mostly unchanging universe, in point of fact; that's why he added the cosmological constant to his GR equations. It was a way to balance everything out. (TFA actually mentions this, incidentally.)
It was the hard, empirical evidence gathered from real astronomical observations that unseated the previously orthodox view and gave us the Big Bang. So I would submit to you that in fact, the notion of an "endless" universe is in fact the anthropomorphic bias, not the idea of a Big Bang. You're not suggesting anything radical by espousing this idea... you're just about a half century (roughly) behind the understanding curve that cosmologists are on.
Some of the other ideas you floated (e.g., multiple big bangs, existence of "exotic" spacetime properties outside of the local part of the universe which we can see and inhabit) are not as radical as you think. They've all been suggested, and unfortunately, most have no solid evidence to back them versus the prevailing model; for that matter, most of these theories don't made predictions that we can test currently, or they make predictions that have already been tested and falsified. Ergo, what we're left with is the Big Bang, with lots of modifications due to our ever-changing and evolving understanding of the fundamental physics.
But please, can the talk about "angering the defenders of the status-quo" just cease? You're trying to paint yourself as a scientific martyr in the vein of Galileo or Darwin, and that's just not tenable. Especially since your ideas are actually not new at all, have been tried before and discarded.
Again, I really would ask that you simply explain what, specifically, you mean when you talk about anthropocentric bias. All we've got from you are comments like this:
to me, the big bang has the stink of abrahamic religious myth all over it.
...which really doesn't tell me anything substantive. Can you quanitfy what the "stink" is, exactly? If you're reacting against the idea that the foundation of several organized religions dovetails with current cosmological theory, then there are a few holes in your thinking:
Most major religions based on the Abrahamic myth have not exactly embraced the Big Bang model, because they, too, prefer to view the heavens as a static, unchanging abode of the divine. Remember that the Earth was traditionally not seen as a part of the heavens, but something separate. End of the world does not equate to end of the heavens.
Modern cosmology tends to obviate the need for God in general.
Even if I ignore the glaring dissonance (to my way of thinking) between Big Bang cosmology and Abrahamic religions, it is a logical fallacy to reject a scientific theory solely because it resembles the "re
How is using bit torrent to obtain data that you would otherwise have to pay for any different from gathering up a thousand people, walking into Best Buy and walking out with all the music and software on the shelves?
Because in the latter example, you're stealing material property. That crime is called theft. In the former example, you're copying data illegally -- that crime is called copyright infringement, and the difference is that nobody was deprived of a physical copy of the merchandise. Thievery means taking something physical or otherwise tangible (money counts) and depriving someone else of it.
As for admitting that you engage in willful copyright infringement... well, that just wasn't too smart, now was it? But people like you do give a bad name to those who use BitTorrent for legitimate purposes.
No you don't. You can do 3D graphics with a pencil and a ream of paper, which is how it was done before computers.
I would argue that doing "3D graphics" with a pencil and paper just replaces one kind of computer with another. I would call what the human brain does when drawing such figures a kind of computation. That the practitioner (the person doing the drawing) isn't seeing what she's doing as computation or "math" is irrelevant. Some information is transformed in such a way that it results in a 2D drawing that appears three-dimensional, and what internal symbols or neural potentials are involved in that transformation process (or information representation for that matter) are quite irrelevant to the end result.
TFA makes sure to point out the recent controversy regarding the Pope's cancelled visit to a school, and the reasons why the Pope was disinvited. I was rather curious to see for myself what Benedict's comments were that supposedly defended the Church's prosecution of Galileo.
I managed to find a translation -- the BBC pointed me in the right direction when the news story broke. The translation is pretty difficult reading, because it's full of flowery language and doesn't come right out and give you convenient bullet points. However, here were my take-aways from my reading of this document:
The document was written when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, in charge of the Vatican office for what is essentially the modern successor to the Inquisition. Ratzinger was acting as a defender of orthodoxy within the Catholic Church. (That's not an excuse... just trying to provide some context. He was called "God's bulldog" for a reason.)
Ratzinger did in fact seem to be saying exactly what his detractors claimed -- that he was justifying the Church's arrest and prosecution of Galileo.
The phrase "undue Rationalism" or "unwarranted Rationalism" (or substantially similar) did appear in the document.
Ratzinger goes so far as to invoke Relativity to claim that heliocentrism and geocentrism are (paraphrasing) "effectively equal," and that heliocentrism is merely a mathematical convenience.
Of course, every time Pope Benedict opens his mouth to insert his foot, the Vatican handlers around him are certain to claim that his remarks were taken out of context. It's really hard to see how they can claim that with a straight face this time. I'm willing to acknowledge that the translations available are not perfect, but I can't believe they'd be so bad as to say the opposite of what the source material appears to be saying.
One solution, I suppose, is that the original Cylons created by people were something of an in-between. More advanced than the tin cans, but not up to the humanoids. Those could have decided to radically change their course of advancement by splitting future generations of Cylons into the master race versions and the slave race versions.
You hit the nail on the head, and this was amplified by quotes from the "good" Sharon and Adama, around the time that the Battlestar fleet was working on a plan to rescue the humans on New Caprica. Adama was discussing using "their" Sharon as an infiltrator, and he pointed out (to Tigh, IIRC) that the Cylons engineered their newer Centurion models to not be able to distinguish between ANY of the humanoid Cylons; he said explicitly that this was to prevent another rebellion.
Censorship may be necessary, but should it be overseen by Government.
Er, excuse me... while everyone seems to be commenting on the second half of this sentence, I'm concerned about the premise stated in the first clause before the conjunction: "Censorship may be necessary."
Why? What possible legitimate purpose could censorship possibly serve? People will find ways to work around information embargoes, and frankly, I'm hard pressed to find any legitimate reason to censor anything, no matter how offensive the material might be to me personally. Maybe if the blurb's author had qualified that statement a bit further, I wouldn't be reacting to it so strongly -- e.g., "Censorship of child pornography may be necessary." But no such qualifications were made!
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I was with you (more or less) right up to the point where you started talking about how "we" are moving through space-time at the speed of light... which is confusing, since I don't think any human being has ever attained that velocity in any frame of reference. :-) Similarly, talk of protons traveling at the speed of light doesn't make much sense because protons have mass. Yet the context doesn't make it clear that you meant to say photons. So I think you may have confused matters further here.
So, sorry to burst your bubble, but if a jihadist publishes a video through YouTube, that video has First Amendment protections, by virtue of the fact that YouTube is owned by Google (a U.S. company operating in the United States) and by virtue of the place where the material is "published" -- regardless of where the author might reside. So YouTube can't be legally compelled to censor said video.
Freedom of Speech applies universally in the United States, not just to speech that you agree with, and not just to people you happen to like. That's why you can run out and buy a copy of Mein Kampf in this country, and why we have a Nazi party here when the same political party is outlawed in Germany. If the First Amendment only applied to citizens, the effect on any kind of diplomatic or political discourse would be chilling to say the least... not to mention the effect on the cultural contributions of foreign authors. Picture an America devoid of Harry Potter because some religious nutbag in the government decided that J.K. Rowling was promoting witchcraft.
I wonder if they've considered Groovy on Grails instead of Java or PHP? Groovy has all the dynamic language features that make Ruby and JavaScript popular with developers, but is essentially 100% backward compatible with Java (since it's running on top of the Java VM and is implemented in Java). Groovy also leverages Java and any other language that can be hosted on the Java VM because it interoperates with all of that stuff, and itself runs on the same VM. You also get legitimate closures and simplified syntax for many things. It can even give you Java 5 semantics (generics, enumerations, etc.) under JDK 1.4.
Grails is very similar to Rails, but is not a straight port -- more "inspired by," as it's described by its proponents. Grails also doesn't have the problem that Rails has in terms of scalability and performance, since it's built on Groovy/Java (which have a real threading model). No screwing around with creating a zillion Mongrel instances to scale your site, etc. And if you don't care to use the built-in web server that comes with Grails, you can have the Grails framework generate a WAR file which you can deploy in any container like Tomcat or Jboss.
At a recent 3-day Grails training session taught by Scott Davis, I was surprised to hear that some major corporations have jumped on the Groovy/Grails bandwagon, including Mutual of Omaha. For a conservative company to make that kind of leap says something. (Furthermore, they used to be a COBOL shop -- the rationale appears to be that it's easier to get COBOL programmers to make the leap to Groovy first, then switch slowly to Java, as opposed to migrating directly to Java.)
After that 3-day training, I was pretty impressed. The biggest win for Grails seems to be rapid development and deployment, but all the other stuff you get for free in the package makes it something you'd like to stick with. I'd say the thing that most impressed me with Grails was GORM, which makes Hibernate even easier to work with. GORM spoils me, since it obviates the need to write SQL most of the time.
Goal 1 is achieved by putting social pressure on a repressive/authoritarian regime -- the citizenry of that country (e.g., China) will presumably be upset that they can no longer access certain sites, and will complain, or engage in civil disobedience by bypassing any locks and controls enforcing the ban on those sites. Alternately, people within the repressive nation might be motivated to create their own alternative site that is inside the nation's firewall, and thus harder to block (at least in the short run -- someone maintaining the site might still have to do subversive things like move the server periodically to avoid detection by the authorities).
Goal 2 is absolutely guaranteed, in the sense that it prevents U.S. companies from developing "unclean hands." If a foreign nation wants to censor the Internet and prohibit its citizens from seeing certain material, that's their prerogative -- but no U.S. company should ever be complicit in such censorship, and this bill would mandate a moral or ethical imperative for businesses. It's sad that U.S. companies wouldn't choose to avoid such coercion on their own, but as their rationale for supporting foreign censorship efforts is the consequence of non-compliance (i.e., not being able to do business in that country), these companies are heavily motivated to just "go with the flow" by profits. This law mandates a moral backbone at the expense of profits.
Personally, I don't see this as any different from child labor laws -- when such laws were enacted in the United States in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, many capitalists decried them, but morally it is the right thing to prevent the exploitation of children, especially in dangerous jobs. Many companies now get around these laws by exporting labor to countries which don't have adequate child labor laws (nor adequate enforcement of any existing laws), but the social climate in the U.S. has changed to the point where the exposure of such wrongdoing elicits the appropriate outraged response.
So, in the long view, goal #1 is preserved, even if in the short view Chinese citizens get a bunch of web sites blocked. In a sense, that's kind of the point -- force the issue and see what develops. If the Chinese people (or the Iranian people, etc.) don't complain and demand change after their own inept regime is forced to do all the dirty work itself, then they didn't deserve what little illusion of freedom they had to begin with. You're either totally free or you're not. I'm sure at least one of the authors if this bill is counting on the Chinese government reacting in knee-jerk fashion the second this goes through, possibly by yanking the rights of American IT companies to keep offices in and do business in mainland China.
Having said all that, I'm sure the Chinese authorities will probably take a pragmatic approach and try to reach some kind of compromise which allows them to continue with business as usual, while letting U.S. companies off the hook. "You can host whatever you want in our country, but we reserve the right to place filters on all network connections going in and out of your local data centers."
If you use software that is properly licensed with Fraunhofer, you're covered. There's no need for an end user to purchase a license from Fraunhofer if the software the end user has obtained has a properly paid-for license, paid for by the seller or distributor of that software. Thus, Apple iTunes is legit -- you can rip CDs to MP3 format using iTunes and not worry about being licensed with Fraunhofer, because Apple did that for you. Apple pays a ton of money to Fraunhofer to license that patent, you betcha.
If you're using LAME to rip your CDs to MP3, though, and you haven't paid Fraunhofer or one of the other MPEG patent holders for the right to do so, you could get in trouble. LAME isn't patent licensed, although some companies and individuals have bought licenses from Fraunhofer in order to legally use the LAME code.
But this is all related to patent issues with MP3 codecs and not the copyright infringement issue that the RIAA is grousing about.
Hold on there, partner... the court in the Diamond Rio case ruled that the components of a computer used in "space shifting" were not subject to the AHRA, nor was the MP3 player in question. So while the AHRA does grant the right to space shift music, it also places burdens upon the manufacturers of devices compliant with that law -- it mandates SCMS (Serial Copy Management System) to limit copying, and it mandates royalties paid by device manufacturers to the recording industry.
Since a computer's components and the MP3 players used to listen to these music files are not covered by the AHRA, that particular argument doesn't hold water. For more information on what was ruled, see here and here.
Also, see my other response in this thread -- the RIAA is claiming these MP3s are "unauthorized" and not "illegal." There is a difference, and it would really inform the discussion here better if folks would tune up a bit and read these things carefully. These MP3s are unauthorized in the sense that the defendant didn't explicitly ask for permission from the copyright holder to space shift his music. Whether authorization is required is a separate question, and one that the RIAA lawyers are hoping doesn't get answered in a way they don't like. It's in their best interests to sow confusion here, so they deliberately confuse the issue -- not unlike conflating "copyright infringement" with "theft."
Standard IANAL disclaimer applies. This is my opinion (backed by some research), not legal advice.
While the RIAA stipulated their assertion that the MP3 files are "unauthorized" copies of the music the defendant purchased on CDs, they never claim these copies are "illegal." It's a very precarious legal tightrope they're walking. If they claim those copies are illegal, that opens up a whole can of worms, and things might not go the way they'd like. So they claim those copies are "unauthorized" -- which is technically true, but doesn't address the issue of whether the defendant needed authorization.
Whether you need authorization or not depends on whether ripping those CDs into MP3 format is considered "fair use" or not. Although many geeks like to point to the Rio case against Diamond Multimedia as establishing that ripping CDs to space shift is a protected fair use, a careful reading of the decision will show that the judge in that case largely side-stepped the fair use question; rather, the judge focused on how the parts of a computer used to space-shift music were not covered by the Audio Home Recording Act, and therefore not subject to its restrictions. (The judge did say that the Rio was consistent with fair use provisions in copyright law, making an analogy to the Sony Betamax case, but that's as far as it went.) I found a pretty good article here, reprinted from Federal Communications Law Journal. (The relevant section discussing the Rio case starts at the bottom of the first page and continues into page 2 with the following quote: "Because the court had no occasion to look at the Rio case from a fair use perspective, this Note examines the case as one of fair use to reach the same conclusion as the Ninth Circuit.")
We need more case law to establish this once and for all -- or else we need a piece of legislation that explicitly balances corporate and consumer copyright interests and defines what is considered "fair use."
Standard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. I'm merely stating personal observations and opinions.
The incident you cite was an experimental pebble bed reactor, and the fault was that one of the spherical fuel pebbles got stuck in the pipe used to feed the fuel into the reactor. The release of radiation from this incident was due to operator error (when the operator attempted to dislodge the stuck pebble). Just because you've provided one counter-example of the safety of pebble bed reactors doesn't mean that pebble bed reactors are in general a bad idea! And, it still remains that pebble bed reactors are far safer than most other commercial nuclear designs.
The claims that you can "walk away from" any particular design and have it shut itself down safely are just industry hype, but it doesn't follow that pebble bed reactors a bad idea.
That's kind of self-contradictory. If you accept the study cited as valid, then you can't be sure of your own conviction -- i.e., your belief that noticing lies is easy. Because the cited study specifically concludes that noticing lies is not easy, in point of fact. Said study further concludes that people who think they can spot lies are, in fact, delusional.
The only reason authority figures have any luck ferreting out any lies is that most people are socially programmed to respond with deference, respect, and a modicum of fear to any given authority figure. Authority figures in turn reinforce this by arbitrary enforcement of minor rules, making up rules that don't exist, and other ridiculous practices designed to throw other people "off balance." Your goal as a customs agent is to put the person you're questioning on the defensive, in the hopes that they screw up and make a serious blunder. Most people are also too stupid to keep track of their lies, or to keep them logically consistent.
And then there are the cold, rational liars out there who are of above average intelligence -- many of whom fit the clinical definition of a psychopath, but who may very well be functional members of society and not criminals at all. (I've read that 1% of the general population fits the clinical definition of a psychopath.) These are the people who can lie without batting an eyelash and pass a polygraph test, often without formal training to do so. (One of many reasons polygraph results are not admissible as evidence in court in the U.S.)
Just so we're clear, the study linked by the GP was not specific to Customs agents, but applies across the population. And there's nothing special about Customs agents that makes them better judges of truth or falsehood. Sure, you might get some training to help you better spot some types of suspicious body language, but a seasoned liar is fully aware of and able to control their body language effectively. Heck, there are classes you can take to learn how to lie effectively... how do you think CIA spooks learn how to be good at what they do? In other words, don't let your training lull you into a false sense of security.
Actually, it depends on the manufacturer of your device. I bought an Acer laptop that automatically connected to a neighbor's unsecured WiFi access point without asking, even though I had my own access point which had a stronger signal -- thing is, my access point was secured with a password and WEP encryption, but my neighbor's access point was running wide open. The Acer laptop was running Vista, but had quite a few custom applications supplied by Acer, including their own custom WiFi management tools.
When I returned the Acer (due to keyboard problems) and tried an HP laptop which also ran Vista, I believe the HP required user action before connecting to anyone's access point for the first time.
So, the GP was at least partially correct -- some Windows laptops will automatically connect to any wide-open access point without asking.
Comparing against OS X laptops: My old iBook running OS X 10.2 would connect to any access point indiscriminately until I changed this behavior. (That was the source of a huge headache, as one of the access points I connected to was set up illicitly by a Honeywell employee... and Honeywell eventually tried to go after me for writing a blog entry about their security lapse, although I didn't know it was a security lapse at the time.) My new laptop, a MacBook Pro running 10.5, will ask the first time it can't find any preferred networks but finds a wide-open access point that isn't in the preferred network list. If you say yes, the wireless networking stack will automatically connect to that access point forever after whenever it sees it (unless there's a preferred network connection with a higher priority that's visible).
What you're recalling is political spin that was promulgated by some engineers, both inside and outside of Apple, to allay fears of Carbon developers. Apple needed everyone they could get writing code for OS X in the early days, so they couldn't afford to be seen as obsoleting the investment many Mac developers had made in learning the Classic Mac APIs (which grew into Carbon). This is the same reason that Finder was written using Carbon instead of Cocoa (and, some would argue, why Finder sucked so badly in the early days of OS X, and why it still has so many warts).
Hell, when it was announced that the control strip would be replaced by the Dock, I got into an argument with some Mac software developer who decided to write a look-alike, work-alike replacement for the control strip using, you guessed it, Carbon! When I asked him why, he trotted out the same line that you recalled: Carbon is going to be co-equal with Cocoa; Carbon APIs are even being called behind the scenes by some Cocoa APIs; there are some things you can't yet do in Cocoa that you'll be able to do immediately in Carbon; and besides, why would Apple write the Finder for OS X in Carbon if they weren't serious about supporting it?
Here it is, 2007, and it looks like I got the last laugh in that argument... and the control strip this guy was working on has probably been shelved, since I never saw the final version (though he let me play with an early, mostly-functioning alpha). The Docklets concept was quietly dropped in favor of menu bar extras, and the Dock plus the menulets/status items worked out to be a pretty decent replacement for the control strip. (And incidentally, you use Cocoa to develop menu bar extras -- Apple provides a NSStatusItem class, as well as a NSMenuExtra class for their own private use.)
Well, Steve said many things, and other people at Apple said many things, regarding Cocoa and Carbon. Depending on who they were talking to, the story might change. For political reasons, Carbon was often touted (though maybe not by Steve) as being "co-equal" with Cocoa -- so much so that the Finder for OS X was written in Carbon, not Cocoa, to reassure some 3rd party software developers that Apple was serious about supporting Carbon.
As we all remember, the Finder in 10.0 and 10.1 was kind of painful. It wasn't until 10.2 that the Finder became multi-threaded, and even then, there were still deficiencies. Since Leopard is now "fully" 64-bit, you'd expect Finder to be migrated to Cocoa, but I can't find anything to confirm that by doing some quick Google searches. (Maybe just not the right search terms?)
Actually, the object was thought to be a microscopic black hole, but was discovered later in the story to be a synthetic object -- not a black hole, but "black hole like," and probably alien in origin. The characters of the story speculated that this object was sent to wipe out an upstart civilization that had just become detectable (i.e., us).
How disaster is averted is pretty cool too, and one of many big ideas that makes the book an interesting read.
There's a Larry Niven story in a similar vein called The Hole Man, though it takes place on Mars. In that case, the black hole was trapped in a device on Mars that was left there by aliens, some kind of communication device that used gravity waves. (And someone manages to hit the equivalent of an EMO and shuts off power to the electromagnetic containment, since this black hole apparently had a charge and could therefore be held in place by powerful magnetic fields. Naturally, once the fields are off, you can imagine the hilarity that ensues... although really, why would a race smart enough to build a gravity wave communicator put a button somewhere that could do something so insanely dangerous?) In that story, the outcome was less cheerful, but the ultimate loss of Mars was calculated to occur well into the future -- a black hole that size can only gobble up tiny bits of matter at first.
If such an exotic object hit Earth before evaporating into a puff of Hawking radiation, we might notice the impact site but remain ignorant of the cause -- in Brin's book, one of the characters speculates that the exotic object was the cause of the Tunguska explosion. If the object has sufficient velocity, it might pass right through the planet... and if not, it would settle down to oscillate back and forth through the Earth, turning the interior into Swiss cheese before collapsing the planet into a singularity.
Man, I wish I had the mod points, but hopefully others will step in and give them to you.
I grew up in a mill town in Connecticut, and my family was not very wealthy -- they never owned a home, and because my parents had decided early on to put me through college, they decided to forego home ownership indefinitely because (at that time) colleges considered home equity when deciding who got financial aid, and how much.
The town library was converted from an old mansion, previously owned by one of the textile mill owners. It wasn't large, and so I frequently had issues finding sufficient resources to write papers or do adequate research for a project. Typically, I'd go to neighboring towns to get superior research materials from their superior libraries; sometimes, I'd go to Hartford, because no other town had what I needed. I was in constant competition with my other classmates, and with students at other grammar- and high schools. In at least one case, a book I wanted to use as a source went missing for over a year.
For a kid in all honors classes, it was simply understood and expected that this was "the way things were," and if I wanted good grades, I had to be fast and I had to be ruthless. But it definitely was not the way I preferred to work. The system was definitely unfair. Not every kid had parents willing to drive them two towns over to go look up some obscure book that our own library didn't have. And my parents were far better off than many of those living in my town, because my dad had a (relatively) good job working for Pratt and Whitney.
If the Internet and the Web had existed then as they do now, I imagine some of that drudgery would have been alleviated, and far less fuel would have been burned. (I am reminded of one instance where a reference librarian got testy with me on the phone because I asked if her library had a resource -- she got on my case because she thought I was trying to get her to do my research for me. "No, ma'am, I just don't want to ask my father to drive me there this late at night unless you have what I need.") I could have focused more on the subject matter and less on doing the leg work.
So yeah, I look at what these kind-hearted hackers are trying to do for a poor community, and think it's wonderful. Just because you have enough food on your plate and a roof over your head doesn't mean you have everything you need to be successful. My parents were stingy -- they didn't splurge on luxuries like cable TV or a CompuServe subscription. Today, a cable subscription may be necessary for you to have credibly usable network access, or else you'll be stuck in the slow lane with dial-up. Today, you need an ISP subscription if you want to have any sort of home network access. Otherwise, you're stuck going to the local library -- assuming that your library has computers with Internet access. Even so, you then have to deal with long wait times for a limited resource, along with any network filtering barriers. Any kind of low-cost or no-cost network access for poor students and their families would be a huge help.
Incidentally, all the textile mills where I grew up were all shut down by the time I got to college. Most of those mills have either sat unused, gutted, or they've been converted into apartments and condos. I'm so glad I was able to move away and make something of myself... there were others who never made it, for whatever reason. My parents sacrificed a lot to give me an education and make a better life for myself, but many more either didn't have the resources to begin with, or refused to make those sacrifices. A project such as described in TFA would have helped a lot of kids where I grew up.
I know your comment was intended to be humorous, but Microsoft called it iHD to begin with, then renamed it to HDi later. One of the articles linked in the summary actually mentions this, as does the Wikipedia article.
Wow, somebody is really playing fast and loose with the "Flamebait" moderation.
For what it's worth, I think the parent makes a good point. Whether he's right or not, only time will tell... but I find his POV interesting. The PS3 and the Xbox 360 are both much, much more than game systems, whereas the Wii is primarily a gaming system that has a few extra features (e.g., web browser) thrown in for good measure. Nintendo focused on one core area of competency -- they wanted a big slice of one pie -- whereas Sony and Microsoft are both after slices of other pies in addition to the gaming pie.
While gaming might be a fast growing entertainment market segment, it's not the only segment, and it's still not the biggest. Devices that play well in multiple segments are going to do better in the long run, or so Sony and Microsoft are betting. I wouldn't bet against them.
My only point of disagreement with the parent is when he claims that video games will be one of the least important roles of a living room convergence device -- I think gaming is and will continue to be a very important role, even if a cynic might argue that gaming is just a trojan horse to get these devices into the living room.
I can see why someone would have modded the parent Redundant, but Flamebait? Why is demanding transparency and openness in the voting process "Flamebait"? IMHO, forcing manufacturers of voting machines to disclose source code should be mandatory. It's just good accountability. I don't think corporations should be able to hide behind trade secrets when the public interest is involved. (And really, there can't possibly be something novel about the code for a voting machine, so why make it proprietary?)
What would be even better is an open architectural standard for both the hardware and software, and all manufacturers are required to adhere to both. That leaves some room for innovation and customization, but at least the interfaces are all well defined, and test suites can be written without regard for actual implementation.
I was mostly agreeing with what you said until you said that flight calculations can omit things like the Coriolis effect and the Earth's rotation; in point of fact, both of these play a major role in calculating trajectories for long distance flights. For example, check out this page, which has some great animations of the Coriolis effect, along with this quote (that directly contradicts you): "In reality, pilots take the Coriolis effect into account so they do not miss their targets."
Rarely? Try never. The notion that tidal forces somehow affect our bodies internally has been largely discredited, and while it's true that some organisms respond to lunar cycles, this has more to do with cycles of luminosity and responses to ocean tides going on around them.
:-) Case in point:
Your point is well taken, but... erm... it's kind of stating the obvious to anyone with a background in the physical sciences. And I have a background in the physical sciences, incidentally.
Thank you, Captain Obvious! Yes, we do this all the time to reduce the number of free variables we have to consider in any mathematical model. You don't throw stuff in your model that will only have a miniscule or immeasureable effect. (The trick comes in trying to figure out what things can truly be ignored and what things can't. Sometimes, that isn't so obvious.)
As for philosophical "Truth," I believe that is what science and religion are both seeking, ultimately... but they do it in their own, very different ways. (I won't say "equally valid," because that's a whole other kettle of fish, and I personally don't think the two approaches are equally valid, not even for the domains in which they are meant to be applied.) I think, though, scientists don't get as hung up on philosophy because they're more focused on empirical evidence than on being in love with ideas for their own sake and spinning complex notions that have zero grounding in concrete reality. Maybe that's because most of the physical sciences focus on a philosophically materialist world view, but it happens to be a very useful viewpoint to have if you're in the business of doing science.
Personally, I find it absurd to state with a straight face that heliocentrism and geocentrism are totally equivalent and that heliocentrism is "merely" a computational convenience, for many of the reasons you yourself mention. This is where starry-eyed philosophers get a smack-down from reality, and where I have to tip my hat to another philosopher... if you're going to invoke philosophy, then I have to invoke Occam's Razor, and point out that the real win of heliocentrism (and follow-on theories that mark the advent of modern physics) isn't the convenience of being able to do orbital calculations simply! No, the real win is having a single set of rational, co
I'm still a bit dubious of the translation you provide the link for, though, because it's published by the National Catholic Reporter... but as I am having trouble digging up the translation I used, we can talk about your preferred translation instead.
You know, this claim was made in several other discussion threads about this article, but it's worth noting that only some of Galileo's evidence was fallacious -- specifically, his evidence relating to tides. The phases of Venus and the four Galilean satellites of Jupiter are certainly not fallacious evidence for heliocentrism. (The moons of Jupiter don't directly prove that the Sun is the center of anything -- they only serve to show that not all bodies revolve around the Earth.) So yes, his evidence was weak, and some of it didn't mean what he claimed it did. But he also made legitimate contributions, and I don't just mean (re)introducing the Western world to the idea of heliocentrism, so let's not dismiss those, eh?
No need to be condescending by inviting me to "study the matter more." I took a semester of astronomy and have a BS in Physics, so I know the basic facts.
While I agree that Relativity changes nothing about Galileo's case, I disagree that the comments on Relativity were irrelevant to the discussion of Galileo, as you imply by saying they were in reference to other quotes. Let's be specific here. Ratzinger discusses Ernst Bloch in the context of heliocentrism vs. geocentrism, and that bears on our historical perspective of Galileo. Ratzinger states that Relativity forbids a privileged frame of reference (in a very roundabout fashion), and this is a true statement in itself; but he then uses this fact along with Bloch's arguments to minimize the true value of heliocentrism, relegating the notion to a mere computational convenience, and uses this as a justification (in part) of the view that the Galileo case was blown into a "myth of the Enlightenment."
Frankly, it is of no concern to me what point Ratzinger may be making about religion making humans the "moral center" of the universe, or some other such anthropocentric nonsense. (Incidentally, he wasn't really saying "the earth is what matters most to us," as you put it, but rather, it is the human condition that matters most to us... it isn't the place so much but the people who inhabit it, because that's what religion is about -- the relationship between people and the Divine.)
First off, no, it wasn't (to the best of my recollection) a compare-and-contrast historical quote, and I know for a fact I was not misreading the phrase "undue rationalization" because I never confuse "rationalism" with "rationalization." (My brain's parser has other failure modes, but that's not one of them.) Since the translation offered by the NCR doesn't contain this phrase at all, there's no more I can say except that I'm still digging around.
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Well, if you're so convinced that there is an anthropocentric bias to the Big Bang theory (which itself is really just a consequence of General Relativity), then could you at least do us the favor of articulating what, precisely, this supposed bias is? Once you do that, then maybe other people might have a chance to actually respond to your challenge. It's hard to respond to a challenge when the challenger can't even really frame the challenge in a way that can be understood.
Looking at the original comment you made in this thread, it seems as if you're implying that the "anthropocentric bias" in Big Bang cosmology is the mere idea of the universe having a "beginning, middle, and end." And yet, that was not the prevailing belief of scientists prior to the emergence of hard evidence for the Big Bang (e.g., cosmic microwave background radiation). In fact, even Einstein himself preferred the idea that you so blithely toss out there -- the idea that the universe is, to borrow your words, "endless, in time and space." Einstein rather liked the idea of a static, mostly unchanging universe, in point of fact; that's why he added the cosmological constant to his GR equations. It was a way to balance everything out. (TFA actually mentions this, incidentally.)
It was the hard, empirical evidence gathered from real astronomical observations that unseated the previously orthodox view and gave us the Big Bang. So I would submit to you that in fact, the notion of an "endless" universe is in fact the anthropomorphic bias, not the idea of a Big Bang. You're not suggesting anything radical by espousing this idea... you're just about a half century (roughly) behind the understanding curve that cosmologists are on.
Some of the other ideas you floated (e.g., multiple big bangs, existence of "exotic" spacetime properties outside of the local part of the universe which we can see and inhabit) are not as radical as you think. They've all been suggested, and unfortunately, most have no solid evidence to back them versus the prevailing model; for that matter, most of these theories don't made predictions that we can test currently, or they make predictions that have already been tested and falsified. Ergo, what we're left with is the Big Bang, with lots of modifications due to our ever-changing and evolving understanding of the fundamental physics.
But please, can the talk about "angering the defenders of the status-quo" just cease? You're trying to paint yourself as a scientific martyr in the vein of Galileo or Darwin, and that's just not tenable. Especially since your ideas are actually not new at all, have been tried before and discarded.
Again, I really would ask that you simply explain what, specifically, you mean when you talk about anthropocentric bias. All we've got from you are comments like this:
Because in the latter example, you're stealing material property. That crime is called theft. In the former example, you're copying data illegally -- that crime is called copyright infringement, and the difference is that nobody was deprived of a physical copy of the merchandise. Thievery means taking something physical or otherwise tangible (money counts) and depriving someone else of it.
As for admitting that you engage in willful copyright infringement... well, that just wasn't too smart, now was it? But people like you do give a bad name to those who use BitTorrent for legitimate purposes.
I would argue that doing "3D graphics" with a pencil and paper just replaces one kind of computer with another. I would call what the human brain does when drawing such figures a kind of computation. That the practitioner (the person doing the drawing) isn't seeing what she's doing as computation or "math" is irrelevant. Some information is transformed in such a way that it results in a 2D drawing that appears three-dimensional, and what internal symbols or neural potentials are involved in that transformation process (or information representation for that matter) are quite irrelevant to the end result.
I managed to find a translation -- the BBC pointed me in the right direction when the news story broke. The translation is pretty difficult reading, because it's full of flowery language and doesn't come right out and give you convenient bullet points. However, here were my take-aways from my reading of this document:
Of course, every time Pope Benedict opens his mouth to insert his foot, the Vatican handlers around him are certain to claim that his remarks were taken out of context. It's really hard to see how they can claim that with a straight face this time. I'm willing to acknowledge that the translations available are not perfect, but I can't believe they'd be so bad as to say the opposite of what the source material appears to be saying.
John Paul II is a tough act to follow.
You hit the nail on the head, and this was amplified by quotes from the "good" Sharon and Adama, around the time that the Battlestar fleet was working on a plan to rescue the humans on New Caprica. Adama was discussing using "their" Sharon as an infiltrator, and he pointed out (to Tigh, IIRC) that the Cylons engineered their newer Centurion models to not be able to distinguish between ANY of the humanoid Cylons; he said explicitly that this was to prevent another rebellion.
Er, excuse me... while everyone seems to be commenting on the second half of this sentence, I'm concerned about the premise stated in the first clause before the conjunction: "Censorship may be necessary."
Why? What possible legitimate purpose could censorship possibly serve? People will find ways to work around information embargoes, and frankly, I'm hard pressed to find any legitimate reason to censor anything, no matter how offensive the material might be to me personally. Maybe if the blurb's author had qualified that statement a bit further, I wouldn't be reacting to it so strongly -- e.g., "Censorship of child pornography may be necessary." But no such qualifications were made!