One day you may be able to get to Google fast and then the next, it may take forever to load.
Peer to Peer internet would be horrible. Not only would it be unreliable, but at time slow.
You mean like today's Internet, outside of major cities?
It seems to me that adding more data paths to the current Internet shouldn't decrease the speed of the current Internet. It would either have no effect at all, or would speed things up slightly. For those outside the good-service areas, it should be a major improvement over what they have now, which is often not very good at all.
..if we change our consensus, the existing [Root DNS] servers will become unneeded.
So what makes people think they're needed now?
There are a number of other sets of root servers, in addition to the "standard" ones. Nothing stops you or any group of people from setting up their own, and pointing their own resolv.conf files at them. Various organizations have done this, for various reasons.
I've worked on a couple of projects where we did this. We wanted to test our own stuff without interfering with the rest of the Net, while using the public wires for our transport. So we just set up a few DNS servers for our own.foo and.bar root domains, told our machines about those servers, and proceeded with our testing. When we were done with the testing, we stopped those servers. Nobody outside our group ever knew about it. It's not all that difficult.
So the standard set are really just a bunch of sites standing up and hollering "We're in charge here", and some listeners saying "Yeah, right". They're in charge only as long as we let them be in charge. If a bunch of us defect and set up an independent system, there's not a whole lot they can do about it. It could take them a long time to even discover what we've done.
Of course, the best-known example of this is milnet...
They'll probably submit it a few more times, with different titles and slightly different wording, until they hit a patent examiner who's not paying attention. Then they'll withdraw the others.
Or maybe they won't withdraw them. If I have N slightly differently-worded patents on the same thing, can I sue someone N times for violating all of them, and collect N x damages?
IANAPL, but it'd be nice to know such things, to get an idea of just how absurd the patent law thing has gotten.
As a programmer, I'm curious about how much of this they can really enforce. Does it mean that all "independent" software development will cease, because after every compile, I'll have to apply to Microsoft for a license to run the test version of my program? This would make testing several orders of magnitude slower than now, and effectively stop software development on such machines.
Does it mean that you can't install an OS without Microsoft permission? If so, it would end the recycling of old hardware that's no longer supported, radically raising the price of computers for non-profits and most of the world's poorer people.
Maybe the computing future for all but the wealthy really does lie with Negroponte's $100 laptop (and whatever its clones are called). You can bet it won't have a DRM chip, and emphasis will be on making it programmable by its users.
Anyway, I'm curious about the details of how this "DRM chip" works. All I have to go on now are vaguely-worded scare stories like this one. But, as a programmer, I can't tell anything at all about what it really does. Is there a spec somewhere, so I can learn to program the thing?
Possibly not, because if I had that info, the first thing I'd do would be to program my own authenticator so I could test my own software. They obviously don't want me to do this, so I'd predict that a full spec isn't going to be available to people like me.
There are many reasons for looking at "porn" besides getting off.
And note that many of those reasons have a history of being attacked as "porn", both in libraries and on the internet.
For example, google for "porn filter" and "breast cancer". There have been many instances of porn filters blocking sites that deal with things like breast cancer and sexually-transmitted diseases, on the grounds that they're pornographic.
For another example in the legal sphere, back in the late 60's and early 70's, when I was a student at the U of Wisconsin, there was a bit of a fuss over the fact that the state laws against contraceptives couldn't legally be fought politically, because anything mentioning the topic was legally considered pornography, and would lead to prosecution. Finally some people got the funding together to publicly challenge it, by getting arrested, and the state supreme court threw out the law on First Ammendment grounds.
But this is an old story. Governments routinely label anything their opponents do as "pornography", even if it has nothing to do with porn as we know it.
This case was a bit more bizarre than usual, but it's not really out of the common range of intimidation by government agents.
While it's easy to think of examples of most of these, I'm curious about including gays in the list. I can't recall ever hearing any gays try to force their views on others, except in the silly sense that they advocate a "live and let live" policy, which hardly qualifies as forcing anything on anyone. My wife and I (;-) have a number of gay friends, and we've never heard anything like this from any of them. Unless you consider objecting to assault or murder as "forcing their views on others".
I have seen some of the obvious parody, of course But what gays have ever seriously advocated forcing their "lifestyle" on others?
Have you tried typing "MSN search quality" into Google?
That is interesting. I also tried it with msgsearchandwin.com, and the differences are instructive.
With google, you get a list of a lot of search sites, especially the meta-search sites. With msnsearchandwin, you get mostly ads for msn's search.
I know which I find more credible and trustworthy. I wonder how many people would trust a search site that responds to such queries by telling you about itself.
This, from people who insist that evolution is "just a theory"!
Of course, it is "just a theory", constantly being tested in new ways by biologists.
What we should be doing is publicly insisting that other "just theories" be labelled as such.
Imagine if all bibles had a warning on the cover: "This book contain theories that haven't been tested thoroughly. Alternative theories should be considered." Or something like that.
It might be useful to label political ads similarly.
I've actually had the fun of using these isolated cases of an "extra" visual pigment in discussions with religious types. The idea is that they are obviously special, isolated cases, especially the occasional human with a fourth pigment. Why would God do it this way? If there's a benefit to it, and it seems fairly obvious to them that seeing more color should be a benefit, why wouldn't God give it to everyone? It's especially mysterious that in the human case, God would give this improved vision to only a few females, since we know that God prefers males, right?
It's easy to explain such things using evolutionary bioloy, but not so easy to explain why an all-knowing, all-powerful God would things that way.
But ultimately, it's not a very interesting argument, because it's hard to get past the "God moves in mysterious ways" stage. You really can't argue productively with willful ignorance.
Our computer screens must not look very realistic to a bird.
Yeah; it refers to having four color pigments in the retina rather than the four that (most) humans have. It's the norm in birds, who have three pigments with about the same sensitivity as ours, plus a fourth that's sensitive to violet/UV.
Actually, there's good evidence that all these color-sensitive pigments are derived from a common ancestor. What happens is that the color-pigment gene in a chromosome gets duplicated, and then one of them starts "drifting" so that it has a different peak absorption frequency. Anyway, all the color pigments in vertebrates are nearly identical; they have small differences that alter the frequencies that they absorb.
This splitting doesn't cause a new species, but there's a similar phenomenon, tetraploidy, which does. This is common in some kinds of plants, including the grasses. What happens is that an individual has double the number of chromosomes. Usually that individual is sterile, as with the common domestic banana. Sometimes the individual is fertile. Usually it can only fertilize itself, though sometimes there are others that appear at the same time. This happened in the ancestors of some of our grains.
In this case, you get an individual that is literally a new species, in one generation. This isn't common, but it has happened a few times during our domestication of plants.
The domestic banana is a tetraploid plant that appeared only around a century ago. But that one wasn't self-fertile, so it's a "species" that consists of only a single genetic individual that is reproduced by cloning.
Actually, the "telephone game" isn't an exact analogy, since it's based on a chain of rewordings by people who only hear the one version before theirs.
In the case of holy texts, translators usually do have access to earlier translations. But, of course, those are usually in dead languages or obsolete dialects, so the same sort of problems do exist.
A bigger problem is that the translators are usually highly-religious people who "know" things about the text that come from their recent religious training, and might not actually be there in the original text. There are lots of examples of this in biblical translations, and they're pretty easy to find online.
For that matter, getting back to the main-line topic here, look at a lot of the "translations" of Einstein's writings for the general public. The fact that he was writing in modern German isn't much help. You still read all sorts of incorrect things about how the universe works, after the information has filtered down to what your typical journalist with two courses in "science" can understand and write about.
We just saw a nice case of this on/. in the discussion of travel at just under light speed. Some of the comments were pretty funny if you understand the subject at all.
That would be God's instruction to man as reported through the ages, by man, in the Bible and its ancestor documents.
It couldn't have been reported that way "through the ages", because before roughly 1000 years ago, the English language didn't exist, and nobody would have understood the words "Thou shalt not kill".
This is germane to the discussion, because it hinges on the exact meaning of the word that the KJV translated to English as "kill". The original text was in classical Hebrew, not English, and as with any translation, word meanings don't always line up exactly. This always leads to questions about the accuracy of a translation, since there are often alternate words possible that don't quite mean the same thing in the target language. And for a long-dead language, you really can't know all the possible meanings a word may have had to the original speakers.
There is consensus among biblical scholars that the passage was closer to "Don't murder". But that's also ambiguous in English, with many court cases depending on how the jury members interpret the word "murder" (and how they interpret the judge's instructions).
In any case, a claim that the English phrasing of a biblical passage was "as reported through the ages" is absurd. It can't even be close to true. Only a small minority of followers of the Jewish/Christian bible(s) have ever understood English.
If Asterisk has so many problems, why are they pushing it so hard on their website?
Consider what asterisk is. A lot of people seem to think it's just another VoIP package. But it's actually a VoIP PBX package. It's designed for offices with a lot of phones and a fast IP connection.
There aren't too many of these things out there so far (and probably won't ever be). The impression I get from reading comments of people who've tried them is that asterisks, for all its warts, is the best. But a PBX isn't ever an install-it-and-forget-it sort of toy. You have to have someone quickly available who understands it, or your office's phones will be royally screwed up.
Asterisk seems to have lived up to its promise to provide businesses with a PBX that's orders of magnitude cheaper than the telco equipment. And instead of being a huge cabinet (or a rat's nest of wires in a large closet), it runs in a PC box off in a corner. But it's still a PBX, and I don't think anyone knows how to make them so simple that they don't need a telephony geek around.
Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe someone has just built a plug-n-pray black-box VoIP PBX that "just works", including reading your mind to determine what extension number and options you want on each phone. If so, I haven't heard of it. Of course, it's not my job.
Actually, a few years ago it was, sorta. I got involved in an attempt to find a cheaper "solution" for the phones in a client's somewhat-volatile office than the telco could lease them. Asterisk looked really cool. So I downloaded it and tried to install it. I couldn't make it work right. So I got a couple of other guys involved who knew a bit about phones. They failed to make it work. We gave up, and paid for a telco PBX.
Since then, when I've checked back, I've read lots of comments about how much better asterisk is now. There are people testifying that their office is using it and everyone loves it. Especially the accountants.
But YMMV. As the previous poster mentioned, it's still a work in progress. If it works for you, it's apparently very nice. But some people still find that it's not quite perfect.
I'm encouraged by a distributor who is open about its shortcomings. I'm more likely to trust someone like that than someone who paints a rosy picture of something that I know is still under development.
Anyway, I'm still on the asterisk mailing list, though I haven't submitted any questions for a while.
Interesting. A prospective customer criticising a supplier for open honesty about technical problems in the stuff they're selling. I'd think you'd want to hear about such things.
Threatening to go with suppliers who don't tell you about the problem strikes me as a bit unwise. Do you really want to teach them a lesson like this?
Maybe I'm misreading something, but this sure doesn't strike me as a very good approach, if you want something that works well.
Of course, this would hint at why companies like Microsoft have done so well in the market.
They say "[T]here's no talk this time of producing endless supplies of power."
C'mon now; whenever there's any sort of energy-related announcement, you are required to predict that it may lead to unlimited, unmetered power. This is one of the news industry's most revered traditions.
The young folk these days; they just have no respect for tradition.
"Christians have no need to choose between religion and science."
I beg to differ. The premise of religion is to accept that certain things are mysterious and cannot be investigated, or that certain things are true whether there is evidence for them or not.
Actually, this is mostly true for Western religions, mostly Christianity but to a lesser degree some Jewish and Islamic sects. There are a number of religions such a Buddhism that make no claims to special knowledge about the physical world. Those religions have no real dispute with science. Many Christians are faced with a choice. But the rest of the world doesn't have to listen to them.
One could argue that this is a bit of a pathology in Christianity, where there is a widespread insistence on some literal interpretation of a (translation of a translation of a) text written by pre-scientific people.
Many other religions, including a few sects of the Western religions, don't presume to speak knowledgeably about matters of observable fact. They only speak to questions of how we should act toward each other. These aren't questions of "is", but rather of "should", which isn't a matter that science deals with.
Our basic battle now is with the religious factions that claim special knowledge about the world, and insist they are right even when shown wrong. And, of course, when you are wrong as many times as they have been, your judgement is quite properly questioned on other matters, too.
I mean, really, if someone claims that evolution doesn't happen, and we see disease organisms evolving before our very eyes, that should totally discredit the people claiming that evolution doesn't happen. It shouldn't just discredit their biological theories. We should also dismiss their social theories (e.g. on education), on the grounds that those theories are probably wrong too.
Similarly, the growing malaria epidemic is a direct result of the disease organism and its mosquito vector both evolving resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. This in turn is a result of the religious people suppressing the teaching of evolution, so that people overuse antibiotics and pesticides, leading to the evolution of resistance. We shouldn't just ignore the religious people that did this; we should forbid the their interference with our education system because of the damage that they've caused.
Similarly, we hear a lot from religious people on the HIV/AIDS problem. And many of them are not helping much. Thus, the Catholic church is to be commended for finally, after centuries, acknowledging the validity of much science that they formerly suppressed. But in the case of sexually-transmitted diseases, they are still on the side of the disease. They block attempts use sex education and technology (e.g. condoms) to control such diseases. This should throughly discredit them in the eyes of anyone seriously fighting such diseases, not just on medical issues, but also in other "moral" issues.
Instead, we should be listening more to the religious people who specialize in the "should" questions. They have some good ideas about how we should run our world. Much better than the ideas of the religious people who claim that their ideas about the natural world are valid even when we've shown that they are wrong.
After all, if a religious group is wrong on the things that we can test, why should we listen to them on topics that we can't test?
Science can only be reasonably applied the things that can be observed.
While true in some sense, the usual way this would be interpreted by most people is distincty wrong.
Thus, we use electrons routinely now, but no human has ever "observed" an electron in any normal sense of the word. We can't observe electrons or an electromagnetic field directly via our own senses; we can only observe their effects.
And this is the basis of much scientific understanding. We routinely hypothesize the existence of things that we can't directly observe, and also hypothesize the ways that they interact with other things. We devise ways of testing these hypotheses. Sometimes we can set up experiments whose outcomes will be different if different hypotheses are valid. Sometimes (or usually, if we're astronomers), we can only observe and make inferences.
And, of course, we have slowly learned to build gadgets that can observe things beyond the reach of our senses. We can make photographic film or CCDs that are sensitive to photons outside our visual range, and translate the results into "false color" images that are in our visual range. Centuries ago, we learned to use optics to make microscopes and telescopes, tools to observe images that our eyes can't resolve. And, most importantly, we learned to reason from our observations to the reality lurking behind those observations.
This wouldn't be important if the religious people didn't insist on misunderstanding phrases like "things that can be observed". We could just say that "observe" includes things that can't be detected by our senses, if we can find ways of translating data into something that our senses can handle. Then things become observable that weren't before.
But the religious people have historically claimed that we can't "observe" things like Jupiter's satellites or the evolutionary process. Of course we can, and we do, but only if you accept a translation via our technology as "observation". The fact that some religious people don't accept things like evolution as observed fact implies that we need a serious discussion of what our words really mean. By their limited definition of "observe", we can't observe most of the stuff that scientists and engineers deal with routinely, so those scientists and engineers must be wrong. Telling them that we do observe such things doesn't work; they call us liars. How often have we read here that we can't observe evolution or climate change?
Part of the fun of this was reading this discussion yesterday while being "snowed in" by the storm that just hit the northeastern US. I kept a window on my screen that showed the false-color IR images from www.goes.noaa.gov. These are images that, even if I were in the satellite, I couldn't observe with my own senses. To human senses, the storm was just a swirl of white. To an IR-sensitive CCD, the storm was full of colors that impart a great deal of information about what's going on. Those colors are just as distinct at night as during the day. And computers can translate them into our visual range.
Science can observe such things. Religions can't, and have to attribute such a storm as an "act of God".
This is especially significant when you consider that, while I was watching the white swirls outside my window, the main part of the storm was out at sea. Back when religion ruled the world, sailors would have died in that storm. Now, anyone with Internet access can follow such a storm, and can route their ships and planes around it. Even if their own eyes could never have "observed" the storm directly.
If the "christians" are right in the long run those who did not absolutely believe will be in hell.
Ah, yes; the argument traditionally known as "Pascal's wager". Unfortunately, it has some glaring logical problems, as many people have pointed out since Pascal published his now-canonical version.
The biggest problem can even be presented in a form that both Jews and Christians should understand: The bible states that God created us "in His image". It's pretty obvious that this isn't meant literally, in that we almost certainly aren't physically much like the Judeo-Christian God, or like any other god that might exist.
If this statement means anything, it most likely refers to our intelligence and ability to understand the universe. One common interpretation is that God was lonely, and wanted companions who were capable of talking and acting on his level.
This seems a much more likely interpretation, if you think a bit about what must be the nature of a being who would create a world like ours. So what does it imply that this God's attitude towards believers and nonbelievers would be?
The most reasonable reply is that this God would heartily approve of those of us questioning and investigating His creation. He wouldn't care whether we believe or not, only whether we are working toward being a good intellectual companion.
If you accept this biblical passage, you'd have to conclude that the rational skeptics, including scientists, are the people that God was aiming for. Those who reject such attempts to "play god" and insist on uncritical faith in someone else's words are not acting "in His image" at all. He'll dismiss them as uninteresting, on a level with the dumb animals, and reward those who have made a good attempt to act "in His image". Those who have successfully created new things, especially living things, will be especially rewarded.
Of course, this could be wrong, too. The real God might not be the Judeo-Christian God at all, and could have created this world as a habitat for mosquitos or sharks. If that's what actually happened, then Pascal and the rest of us are truly doomed.
Just to stoke the fire a bit, I'll point out that whales aren't fish.
We can extend the fun a bit by also mentioning that actually whales are fish, if you are speaking strict biological terminology.
This topic reappeared as a biological debate in the 1960s and 70s, in the form of "cladistics". Eventually the cladists won, and most biologists now pretty much agree with that "doctrine". So now, strictly speaking, whales are fish - as are we humans. More precisely, whales and humans are mammals, which are a branch of the lobe-finned fish. Our branch was heavily modified for land life, and then the whales were further modified for aquatic life. Google for "Crossopterygii" for further information.
Of course, biologists tend to be not very doctrinaire about it, and are quite accepting of using terms like "fish" in their common sense. Strictly speaking, "fish" isn't a scientific term. So if you use it, you aren't speaking strict biological technical terminology, and it's socially acceptable to use such words in their common sense. Just as long as you understand that technically the term "fish" properly refers to the entire clade, which includes all land vertebrates, and their non-land offshoots like whales and bats.
Of course, this isn't as much fun as when people talk about the extinction of the dinosaurs, and biologists reply "What are you talking about? Dinosaurs aren't extinct. There are around 8000 species in the world today." We have four small dinosaurs living in our house: a parakeet, two cockatiels, and a blue-crowned conure. Cute little devils. They're not nearly as impressive as their close relatives, the tyrannosaurs. But they make much better pets. (And they're all technnically "fish", too.;-)
Not that I'd expect the religious fundies to follow any of this...
Obviously, what God^Wthe Intellient Designer did as to remove a stem cell from the rib's marrow, delete the Y chromasome, duplicate the X chromosome, and implant the resulting cell into an appropriate womb (any large ape's would do).
Though somehow, I suspect that not all Christian fundamentalists would agree with this scenario.
Actually, using a second breast as a control for the other may not be all that great an idea. Usually they are slightly different in size and shape, as are most men's testes. And both breasts get exposed to anything in the blood stream.
What you obviously want is a second woman who is a match for the first in as many ways as possible. Then you compare all four breasts.
My reference to asbestos... was to note the now well known effects of cancer caused by asbestos.
Actually, this has been pretty well understood since at least the 1930's. There are papers on the asbestos-cancer link in major medical journals back then. Google found them for me with a single try. (Homework problem: Guess the keywords.;-)
The use of asbestos in construction for half a century afterwards is one of the many textbook examples of why we need government regulation of industry. A lot of corporate management is quite willing to endanger their employees' and customers' lives for a small per-sale profit. Despite the knowledge of asbestos's dangers, many companies only stopped using it when threatened with serious criminal penalties.
This will only last about as long as the Sony rootkit-like DRM lasted.
There have been a few reports that hardly anyone who bought those Sony CDs has done anything about delousing their computers. The main reason is that most of the public hasn't heard about it. Sony may have lost a handful of sales to people like/. readers, but it actually hasn't affected them much. And I haven't seen any followup stating that Sony has stopped putting their DRM stuff on new CDs.
This is only important if your clients/customers are technically knowledgeable on the topic. So it may be significant for a security-related company, whose employees might be expected to understand the issues. But anything like these, aimed at the general public, will likely get pushback only from geeks like us.
Is this the first time civilians have been required to do thing type of thing?
This may not be exactly the same thing, but it's somewhat of a precedent: A few years ago, after a mammogram, my wife had a biopsy to check out something "suspicious". It turned out to be nothing important, though.
Some time later, she had another x-ray at a different place, and she saw that the image had a visible object at the site of the biopsy. She was told that it was a small piece of plastic left behind during the biopsy procedure, and that this was a fairly common thing. Sort of a "We were here" tag.
Whether it's an RFID chip we don't know. But at least some medical people are already implanting small "innocuous" things without mentioning it to the patient. And there have been stories of medical uses of RFID chips to help avoid the common problem of misidentifying a patient.
It's easy to put such things together. If you've had any "penetrative" medical work done in the past few years, there's a good chance that you're carrying an RFID chip now.
Slashdot Mirror
One day you may be able to get to Google fast and then the next, it may take forever to load.
Peer to Peer internet would be horrible. Not only would it be unreliable, but at time slow.
You mean like today's Internet, outside of major cities?
It seems to me that adding more data paths to the current Internet shouldn't decrease the speed of the current Internet. It would either have no effect at all, or would speed things up slightly. For those outside the good-service areas, it should be a major improvement over what they have now, which is often not very good at all.
..if we change our consensus, the existing [Root DNS] servers will become unneeded.
.foo and .bar root domains, told our machines about those servers, and proceeded with our testing. When we were done with the testing, we stopped those servers. Nobody outside our group ever knew about it. It's not all that difficult.
...
So what makes people think they're needed now?
There are a number of other sets of root servers, in addition to the "standard" ones. Nothing stops you or any group of people from setting up their own, and pointing their own resolv.conf files at them. Various organizations have done this, for various reasons.
I've worked on a couple of projects where we did this. We wanted to test our own stuff without interfering with the rest of the Net, while using the public wires for our transport. So we just set up a few DNS servers for our own
So the standard set are really just a bunch of sites standing up and hollering "We're in charge here", and some listeners saying "Yeah, right". They're in charge only as long as we let them be in charge. If a bunch of us defect and set up an independent system, there's not a whole lot they can do about it. It could take them a long time to even discover what we've done.
Of course, the best-known example of this is milnet
At least one examiner is paying attention!
They'll probably submit it a few more times, with different titles and slightly different wording, until they hit a patent examiner who's not paying attention. Then they'll withdraw the others.
Or maybe they won't withdraw them. If I have N slightly differently-worded patents on the same thing, can I sue someone N times for violating all of them, and collect N x damages?
IANAPL, but it'd be nice to know such things, to get an idea of just how absurd the patent law thing has gotten.
As a programmer, I'm curious about how much of this they can really enforce. Does it mean that all "independent" software development will cease, because after every compile, I'll have to apply to Microsoft for a license to run the test version of my program? This would make testing several orders of magnitude slower than now, and effectively stop software development on such machines.
Does it mean that you can't install an OS without Microsoft permission? If so, it would end the recycling of old hardware that's no longer supported, radically raising the price of computers for non-profits and most of the world's poorer people.
Maybe the computing future for all but the wealthy really does lie with Negroponte's $100 laptop (and whatever its clones are called). You can bet it won't have a DRM chip, and emphasis will be on making it programmable by its users.
Anyway, I'm curious about the details of how this "DRM chip" works. All I have to go on now are vaguely-worded scare stories like this one. But, as a programmer, I can't tell anything at all about what it really does. Is there a spec somewhere, so I can learn to program the thing?
Possibly not, because if I had that info, the first thing I'd do would be to program my own authenticator so I could test my own software. They obviously don't want me to do this, so I'd predict that a full spec isn't going to be available to people like me.
There are many reasons for looking at "porn" besides getting off.
And note that many of those reasons have a history of being attacked as "porn", both in libraries and on the internet.
For example, google for "porn filter" and "breast cancer". There have been many instances of porn filters blocking sites that deal with things like breast cancer and sexually-transmitted diseases, on the grounds that they're pornographic.
For another example in the legal sphere, back in the late 60's and early 70's, when I was a student at the U of Wisconsin, there was a bit of a fuss over the fact that the state laws against contraceptives couldn't legally be fought politically, because anything mentioning the topic was legally considered pornography, and would lead to prosecution. Finally some people got the funding together to publicly challenge it, by getting arrested, and the state supreme court threw out the law on First Ammendment grounds.
But this is an old story. Governments routinely label anything their opponents do as "pornography", even if it has nothing to do with porn as we know it.
This case was a bit more bizarre than usual, but it's not really out of the common range of intimidation by government agents.
While it's easy to think of examples of most of these, I'm curious about including gays in the list. I can't recall ever hearing any gays try to force their views on others, except in the silly sense that they advocate a "live and let live" policy, which hardly qualifies as forcing anything on anyone. My wife and I (;-) have a number of gay friends, and we've never heard anything like this from any of them. Unless you consider objecting to assault or murder as "forcing their views on others".
I have seen some of the obvious parody, of course But what gays have ever seriously advocated forcing their "lifestyle" on others?
Have you tried typing "MSN search quality" into Google?
That is interesting. I also tried it with msgsearchandwin.com, and the differences are instructive.
With google, you get a list of a lot of search sites, especially the meta-search sites. With msnsearchandwin, you get mostly ads for msn's search.
I know which I find more credible and trustworthy. I wonder how many people would trust a search site that responds to such queries by telling you about itself.
This, from people who insist that evolution is "just a theory"!
Of course, it is "just a theory", constantly being tested in new ways by biologists.
What we should be doing is publicly insisting that other "just theories" be labelled as such.
Imagine if all bibles had a warning on the cover: "This book contain theories that haven't been tested thoroughly. Alternative theories should be considered." Or something like that.
It might be useful to label political ads similarly.
I've actually had the fun of using these isolated cases of an "extra" visual pigment in discussions with religious types. The idea is that they are obviously special, isolated cases, especially the occasional human with a fourth pigment. Why would God do it this way? If there's a benefit to it, and it seems fairly obvious to them that seeing more color should be a benefit, why wouldn't God give it to everyone? It's especially mysterious that in the human case, God would give this improved vision to only a few females, since we know that God prefers males, right?
It's easy to explain such things using evolutionary bioloy, but not so easy to explain why an all-knowing, all-powerful God would things that way.
But ultimately, it's not a very interesting argument, because it's hard to get past the "God moves in mysterious ways" stage. You really can't argue productively with willful ignorance.
Our computer screens must not look very realistic to a bird.
Do you know what tetrachromatism is?
Yeah; it refers to having four color pigments in the retina rather than the four that (most) humans have. It's the norm in birds, who have three pigments with about the same sensitivity as ours, plus a fourth that's sensitive to violet/UV.
Actually, there's good evidence that all these color-sensitive pigments are derived from a common ancestor. What happens is that the color-pigment gene in a chromosome gets duplicated, and then one of them starts "drifting" so that it has a different peak absorption frequency. Anyway, all the color pigments in vertebrates are nearly identical; they have small differences that alter the frequencies that they absorb.
This splitting doesn't cause a new species, but there's a similar phenomenon, tetraploidy, which does. This is common in some kinds of plants, including the grasses. What happens is that an individual has double the number of chromosomes. Usually that individual is sterile, as with the common domestic banana. Sometimes the individual is fertile. Usually it can only fertilize itself, though sometimes there are others that appear at the same time. This happened in the ancestors of some of our grains.
In this case, you get an individual that is literally a new species, in one generation. This isn't common, but it has happened a few times during our domestication of plants.
The domestic banana is a tetraploid plant that appeared only around a century ago. But that one wasn't self-fertile, so it's a "species" that consists of only a single genetic individual that is reproduced by cloning.
Heh. I hadn't thought of it like that.
/. in the discussion of travel at just under light speed. Some of the comments were pretty funny if you understand the subject at all.
Actually, the "telephone game" isn't an exact analogy, since it's based on a chain of rewordings by people who only hear the one version before theirs.
In the case of holy texts, translators usually do have access to earlier translations. But, of course, those are usually in dead languages or obsolete dialects, so the same sort of problems do exist.
A bigger problem is that the translators are usually highly-religious people who "know" things about the text that come from their recent religious training, and might not actually be there in the original text. There are lots of examples of this in biblical translations, and they're pretty easy to find online.
For that matter, getting back to the main-line topic here, look at a lot of the "translations" of Einstein's writings for the general public. The fact that he was writing in modern German isn't much help. You still read all sorts of incorrect things about how the universe works, after the information has filtered down to what your typical journalist with two courses in "science" can understand and write about.
We just saw a nice case of this on
This would be God's Law:
Thou shalt not kill...
That would be God's instruction to man as reported through the ages, by man, in the Bible and its ancestor documents.
It couldn't have been reported that way "through the ages", because before roughly 1000 years ago, the English language didn't exist, and nobody would have understood the words "Thou shalt not kill".
This is germane to the discussion, because it hinges on the exact meaning of the word that the KJV translated to English as "kill". The original text was in classical Hebrew, not English, and as with any translation, word meanings don't always line up exactly. This always leads to questions about the accuracy of a translation, since there are often alternate words possible that don't quite mean the same thing in the target language. And for a long-dead language, you really can't know all the possible meanings a word may have had to the original speakers.
There is consensus among biblical scholars that the passage was closer to "Don't murder". But that's also ambiguous in English, with many court cases depending on how the jury members interpret the word "murder" (and how they interpret the judge's instructions).
In any case, a claim that the English phrasing of a biblical passage was "as reported through the ages" is absurd. It can't even be close to true. Only a small minority of followers of the Jewish/Christian bible(s) have ever understood English.
If Asterisk has so many problems, why are they pushing it so hard on their website?
Consider what asterisk is. A lot of people seem to think it's just another VoIP package. But it's actually a VoIP PBX package. It's designed for offices with a lot of phones and a fast IP connection.
There aren't too many of these things out there so far (and probably won't ever be). The impression I get from reading comments of people who've tried them is that asterisks, for all its warts, is the best. But a PBX isn't ever an install-it-and-forget-it sort of toy. You have to have someone quickly available who understands it, or your office's phones will be royally screwed up.
Asterisk seems to have lived up to its promise to provide businesses with a PBX that's orders of magnitude cheaper than the telco equipment. And instead of being a huge cabinet (or a rat's nest of wires in a large closet), it runs in a PC box off in a corner. But it's still a PBX, and I don't think anyone knows how to make them so simple that they don't need a telephony geek around.
Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe someone has just built a plug-n-pray black-box VoIP PBX that "just works", including reading your mind to determine what extension number and options you want on each phone. If so, I haven't heard of it. Of course, it's not my job.
Actually, a few years ago it was, sorta. I got involved in an attempt to find a cheaper "solution" for the phones in a client's somewhat-volatile office than the telco could lease them. Asterisk looked really cool. So I downloaded it and tried to install it. I couldn't make it work right. So I got a couple of other guys involved who knew a bit about phones. They failed to make it work. We gave up, and paid for a telco PBX.
Since then, when I've checked back, I've read lots of comments about how much better asterisk is now. There are people testifying that their office is using it and everyone loves it. Especially the accountants.
But YMMV. As the previous poster mentioned, it's still a work in progress. If it works for you, it's apparently very nice. But some people still find that it's not quite perfect.
I'm encouraged by a distributor who is open about its shortcomings. I'm more likely to trust someone like that than someone who paints a rosy picture of something that I know is still under development.
Anyway, I'm still on the asterisk mailing list, though I haven't submitted any questions for a while.
Interesting. A prospective customer criticising a supplier for open honesty about technical problems in the stuff they're selling. I'd think you'd want to hear about such things.
Threatening to go with suppliers who don't tell you about the problem strikes me as a bit unwise. Do you really want to teach them a lesson like this?
Maybe I'm misreading something, but this sure doesn't strike me as a very good approach, if you want something that works well.
Of course, this would hint at why companies like Microsoft have done so well in the market.
They say "[T]here's no talk this time of producing endless supplies of power."
C'mon now; whenever there's any sort of energy-related announcement, you are required to predict that it may lead to unlimited, unmetered power. This is one of the news industry's most revered traditions.
The young folk these days; they just have no respect for tradition.
"Christians have no need to choose between religion and science."
I beg to differ. The premise of religion is to accept that certain things are mysterious and cannot be investigated, or that certain things are true whether there is evidence for them or not.
Actually, this is mostly true for Western religions, mostly Christianity but to a lesser degree some Jewish and Islamic sects. There are a number of religions such a Buddhism that make no claims to special knowledge about the physical world. Those religions have no real dispute with science. Many Christians are faced with a choice. But the rest of the world doesn't have to listen to them.
One could argue that this is a bit of a pathology in Christianity, where there is a widespread insistence on some literal interpretation of a (translation of a translation of a) text written by pre-scientific people.
Many other religions, including a few sects of the Western religions, don't presume to speak knowledgeably about matters of observable fact. They only speak to questions of how we should act toward each other. These aren't questions of "is", but rather of "should", which isn't a matter that science deals with.
Our basic battle now is with the religious factions that claim special knowledge about the world, and insist they are right even when shown wrong. And, of course, when you are wrong as many times as they have been, your judgement is quite properly questioned on other matters, too.
I mean, really, if someone claims that evolution doesn't happen, and we see disease organisms evolving before our very eyes, that should totally discredit the people claiming that evolution doesn't happen. It shouldn't just discredit their biological theories. We should also dismiss their social theories (e.g. on education), on the grounds that those theories are probably wrong too.
Similarly, the growing malaria epidemic is a direct result of the disease organism and its mosquito vector both evolving resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. This in turn is a result of the religious people suppressing the teaching of evolution, so that people overuse antibiotics and pesticides, leading to the evolution of resistance. We shouldn't just ignore the religious people that did this; we should forbid the their interference with our education system because of the damage that they've caused.
Similarly, we hear a lot from religious people on the HIV/AIDS problem. And many of them are not helping much. Thus, the Catholic church is to be commended for finally, after centuries, acknowledging the validity of much science that they formerly suppressed. But in the case of sexually-transmitted diseases, they are still on the side of the disease. They block attempts use sex education and technology (e.g. condoms) to control such diseases. This should throughly discredit them in the eyes of anyone seriously fighting such diseases, not just on medical issues, but also in other "moral" issues.
Instead, we should be listening more to the religious people who specialize in the "should" questions. They have some good ideas about how we should run our world. Much better than the ideas of the religious people who claim that their ideas about the natural world are valid even when we've shown that they are wrong.
After all, if a religious group is wrong on the things that we can test, why should we listen to them on topics that we can't test?
Science can only be reasonably applied the things that can be observed.
While true in some sense, the usual way this would be interpreted by most people is distincty wrong.
Thus, we use electrons routinely now, but no human has ever "observed" an electron in any normal sense of the word. We can't observe electrons or an electromagnetic field directly via our own senses; we can only observe their effects.
And this is the basis of much scientific understanding. We routinely hypothesize the existence of things that we can't directly observe, and also hypothesize the ways that they interact with other things. We devise ways of testing these hypotheses. Sometimes we can set up experiments whose outcomes will be different if different hypotheses are valid. Sometimes (or usually, if we're astronomers), we can only observe and make inferences.
And, of course, we have slowly learned to build gadgets that can observe things beyond the reach of our senses. We can make photographic film or CCDs that are sensitive to photons outside our visual range, and translate the results into "false color" images that are in our visual range. Centuries ago, we learned to use optics to make microscopes and telescopes, tools to observe images that our eyes can't resolve. And, most importantly, we learned to reason from our observations to the reality lurking behind those observations.
This wouldn't be important if the religious people didn't insist on misunderstanding phrases like "things that can be observed". We could just say that "observe" includes things that can't be detected by our senses, if we can find ways of translating data into something that our senses can handle. Then things become observable that weren't before.
But the religious people have historically claimed that we can't "observe" things like Jupiter's satellites or the evolutionary process. Of course we can, and we do, but only if you accept a translation via our technology as "observation". The fact that some religious people don't accept things like evolution as observed fact implies that we need a serious discussion of what our words really mean. By their limited definition of "observe", we can't observe most of the stuff that scientists and engineers deal with routinely, so those scientists and engineers must be wrong. Telling them that we do observe such things doesn't work; they call us liars. How often have we read here that we can't observe evolution or climate change?
Part of the fun of this was reading this discussion yesterday while being "snowed in" by the storm that just hit the northeastern US. I kept a window on my screen that showed the false-color IR images from www.goes.noaa.gov. These are images that, even if I were in the satellite, I couldn't observe with my own senses. To human senses, the storm was just a swirl of white. To an IR-sensitive CCD, the storm was full of colors that impart a great deal of information about what's going on. Those colors are just as distinct at night as during the day. And computers can translate them into our visual range.
Science can observe such things. Religions can't, and have to attribute such a storm as an "act of God".
This is especially significant when you consider that, while I was watching the white swirls outside my window, the main part of the storm was out at sea. Back when religion ruled the world, sailors would have died in that storm. Now, anyone with Internet access can follow such a storm, and can route their ships and planes around it. Even if their own eyes could never have "observed" the storm directly.
If the "christians" are right in the long run those who did not absolutely believe will be in hell.
Ah, yes; the argument traditionally known as "Pascal's wager". Unfortunately, it has some glaring logical problems, as many people have pointed out since Pascal published his now-canonical version.
The biggest problem can even be presented in a form that both Jews and Christians should understand: The bible states that God created us "in His image". It's pretty obvious that this isn't meant literally, in that we almost certainly aren't physically much like the Judeo-Christian God, or like any other god that might exist.
If this statement means anything, it most likely refers to our intelligence and ability to understand the universe. One common interpretation is that God was lonely, and wanted companions who were capable of talking and acting on his level.
This seems a much more likely interpretation, if you think a bit about what must be the nature of a being who would create a world like ours. So what does it imply that this God's attitude towards believers and nonbelievers would be?
The most reasonable reply is that this God would heartily approve of those of us questioning and investigating His creation. He wouldn't care whether we believe or not, only whether we are working toward being a good intellectual companion.
If you accept this biblical passage, you'd have to conclude that the rational skeptics, including scientists, are the people that God was aiming for. Those who reject such attempts to "play god" and insist on uncritical faith in someone else's words are not acting "in His image" at all. He'll dismiss them as uninteresting, on a level with the dumb animals, and reward those who have made a good attempt to act "in His image". Those who have successfully created new things, especially living things, will be especially rewarded.
Of course, this could be wrong, too. The real God might not be the Judeo-Christian God at all, and could have created this world as a habitat for mosquitos or sharks. If that's what actually happened, then Pascal and the rest of us are truly doomed.
Just to stoke the fire a bit, I'll point out that whales aren't fish.
;-)
...
We can extend the fun a bit by also mentioning that actually whales are fish, if you are speaking strict biological terminology.
This topic reappeared as a biological debate in the 1960s and 70s, in the form of "cladistics". Eventually the cladists won, and most biologists now pretty much agree with that "doctrine". So now, strictly speaking, whales are fish - as are we humans. More precisely, whales and humans are mammals, which are a branch of the lobe-finned fish. Our branch was heavily modified for land life, and then the whales were further modified for aquatic life. Google for "Crossopterygii" for further information.
Of course, biologists tend to be not very doctrinaire about it, and are quite accepting of using terms like "fish" in their common sense. Strictly speaking, "fish" isn't a scientific term. So if you use it, you aren't speaking strict biological technical terminology, and it's socially acceptable to use such words in their common sense. Just as long as you understand that technically the term "fish" properly refers to the entire clade, which includes all land vertebrates, and their non-land offshoots like whales and bats.
Of course, this isn't as much fun as when people talk about the extinction of the dinosaurs, and biologists reply "What are you talking about? Dinosaurs aren't extinct. There are around 8000 species in the world today." We have four small dinosaurs living in our house: a parakeet, two cockatiels, and a blue-crowned conure. Cute little devils. They're not nearly as impressive as their close relatives, the tyrannosaurs. But they make much better pets. (And they're all technnically "fish", too.
Not that I'd expect the religious fundies to follow any of this
Was Eve fashioned out of Adam's rib?
Obviously, what God^Wthe Intellient Designer did as to remove a stem cell from the rib's marrow, delete the Y chromasome, duplicate the X chromosome, and implant the resulting cell into an appropriate womb (any large ape's would do).
Though somehow, I suspect that not all Christian fundamentalists would agree with this scenario.
WTF? Who moderated this "troll"?
...
I almost didn't read it when I noticed the -1.
Maybe the meta-mods will catch it, or maybe not.
Actually, using a second breast as a control for the other may not be all that great an idea. Usually they are slightly different in size and shape, as are most men's testes. And both breasts get exposed to anything in the blood stream.
What you obviously want is a second woman who is a match for the first in as many ways as possible. Then you compare all four breasts.
Lessee what sort of mod this gets
My reference to asbestos ... was to note the now well known effects of cancer caused by asbestos.
;-)
Actually, this has been pretty well understood since at least the 1930's. There are papers on the asbestos-cancer link in major medical journals back then. Google found them for me with a single try. (Homework problem: Guess the keywords.
The use of asbestos in construction for half a century afterwards is one of the many textbook examples of why we need government regulation of industry. A lot of corporate management is quite willing to endanger their employees' and customers' lives for a small per-sale profit. Despite the knowledge of asbestos's dangers, many companies only stopped using it when threatened with serious criminal penalties.
Actually, it'll probably last until some employee tests HIV positive.
This might not take long, considering the nature of your typical "security" firm.
This will only last about as long as the Sony rootkit-like DRM lasted.
/. readers, but it actually hasn't affected them much. And I haven't seen any followup stating that Sony has stopped putting their DRM stuff on new CDs.
There have been a few reports that hardly anyone who bought those Sony CDs has done anything about delousing their computers. The main reason is that most of the public hasn't heard about it. Sony may have lost a handful of sales to people like
This is only important if your clients/customers are technically knowledgeable on the topic. So it may be significant for a security-related company, whose employees might be expected to understand the issues. But anything like these, aimed at the general public, will likely get pushback only from geeks like us.
Is this the first time civilians have been required to do thing type of thing?
This may not be exactly the same thing, but it's somewhat of a precedent: A few years ago, after a mammogram, my wife had a biopsy to check out something "suspicious". It turned out to be nothing important, though.
Some time later, she had another x-ray at a different place, and she saw that the image had a visible object at the site of the biopsy. She was told that it was a small piece of plastic left behind during the biopsy procedure, and that this was a fairly common thing. Sort of a "We were here" tag.
Whether it's an RFID chip we don't know. But at least some medical people are already implanting small "innocuous" things without mentioning it to the patient. And there have been stories of medical uses of RFID chips to help avoid the common problem of misidentifying a patient.
It's easy to put such things together. If you've had any "penetrative" medical work done in the past few years, there's a good chance that you're carrying an RFID chip now.