Not having read Derrida, I'll take your word for it. However, if we can't understand what we're saying, how can we hope to communicate anything?
> That "linuguistic meaning is > fundamentally uncertain" is a > statement that illustrates its own uncertainty.
Does it illustrate that? It seems to me to be an example of a contradiction, same as "there is absolutely no absolute truth".
> I claim that it's not epistemologically > self-evident that there is one way to God
Ah, OK. Yes, I agree that his last conclusion "there is indeed one way to God" doesn't follow from his previous statement "Either there is one way to God or there is no one way to God".
Your English is as good or better than mine, so no need for apologies there:-)
> confusing artificiality with > convention and deceptive and false.
Hm. I'm not sure what differences you're pointing out here.
> What we think of the world is not the world
Well... er... sure. However, this moves towards what C.S. Lewis called "nothing buttery" - that is, "that no smoking sign is nothing but ink on paper, so I'll keep on smoking."
> "linguistic meaning is fundamentally > indeterminate," means the same as > "I cannot utter a word of English."
Perhaps another way to state his idea is "I cannot utter a word of English and have anyone understand what I am trying to say"? I'm not sure how his idea is either bad logic or bad rhetoric.
> tenet (n : a religious doctrine
From dictionary.com: "tenet - An opinion, doctrine, or principle held as being true by a person or especially by an organization." No religious implications yet.
> the author goes out to scare people away > from those who do not share that doctrine > by spewing a lot of nonsense.
I don't agree with your analysis, but if it's true, then he'd truly be "deconstructing deconstructionism with deconstructionism":-)
> This article is just a bunch of > anti-anti-religious propaganda
I assume you're referring to this line from the article: "Either there is one way to God or there is no one way to God". I don't understand - do you feel this is a false assertion? How is it false?
> using skills that are important to your > profession for a task which is not > useful in furthering anything but experience
Hm. To me, the battlebot thing seems to be an example of "sharpening the saw". Kind of like a baseball player taking batting practice - it doesn't score any runs, but it will later. Does literary deconstructionism serve as practice for writers?
> it is not always the best written bot > who wins Robocode style bot battles
Sometimes, yes... but I think that's more a statement about the other bot writers' skills than the virtue of randomness. Also, a randomly constructed bot wouldn't win much, because it would probably throw exceptions all over the place. That is, there's a fair bit of order that needs to occur to produce a "random bot" - implementing the correct interfaces, choosing a random action to take, etc.
You have an interesting take on this, though. I had never considered deconstructionism as literary fun... that's a whole different viewpoint. Thanks!
> And it's certainly no different from > engineers engaging in robot battles
Hm. I wouldn't lump this in with the obfuscated code contests. Programming a Robocode bot, for example, is "clever fun", yes, but it's also a good exercise in learning more about search and evade techniques, trig, and so forth.
A bot programmer is bound by the constraints of the bot environment - time allowed for each move, effect of a hit, etc - and thus must deal with those constraints to produce an effective bot. And the bots themselves are certainly "capable of being wrong" in that a poorly written bot will usually be crushed by the better ones.
Deconstruction is a theory that is beyond being intellectually bankrupt -- it is intellectually meaningless and thus had no intellectual capital to begin with!
Although VeriSign has been providing instructions on how to manually install the new Global Server Intermediate Root CA to all GSID customers since December, 2001, it is possible that some customers may not have noticed the reminder and are unaware of this issue.
...is a big supporter of this sort of thing. Check them out here. The OSSI is chaired by John Weathersby, who seems to have a good handle on how to communicate effectively via standards, reports, certifications, and so on with folks in the U.S. government.
Slashdot Mirror
...is right here.
Looks pretty good; there are some duplicates that could be knocked out, though - in db_server_xdr.c, for example.
That's because folks (like, for example, Will Sargent, just to pull a name out of the blue) have contributed lots of ideas and rules and such!
> The military is funding the semantic
> web technologies
Quite right. Speaking of which, here's a new project site for semantic web projects that just came online about a week ago.
Nothing much there yet, but stuff from the DAML site will start migrating that way soon...
...by David Weekly can be found here.
Good summary of CIDR and NATing adoption, too.
> Can you clarify?
Just based on this.
> Logical, reasonable evangelical Christians
> says it all, I think.
Hm. Supposing that blurb said "logical, evangelical Muslims"? Would you still dismiss it?
...can be found on AsiaOSC.
There's a note on the front page there about a recent Mongolian Linux release, too.
> Understanding Derrida is probably impossible
Not having read Derrida, I'll take your word for it. However, if we can't understand what we're saying, how can we hope to communicate anything?
> That "linuguistic meaning is
> fundamentally uncertain" is a
> statement that illustrates its own uncertainty.
Does it illustrate that? It seems to me to be an example of a contradiction, same as "there is absolutely no absolute truth".
> I claim that it's not epistemologically
> self-evident that there is one way to God
Ah, OK. Yes, I agree that his last conclusion "there is indeed one way to God" doesn't follow from his previous statement "Either there is one way to God or there is no one way to God".
> but answers.org is a fundamentalist tripe-site
Dunno about that. The article I linked to seemed pretty reasonable; that's the only one I can speak for.
Your English is as good or better than mine, so no need for apologies there :-)
:-)
> confusing artificiality with
> convention and deceptive and false.
Hm. I'm not sure what differences you're pointing out here.
> What we think of the world is not the world
Well... er... sure. However, this moves towards what C.S. Lewis called "nothing buttery" - that is, "that no smoking sign is nothing but ink on paper, so I'll keep on smoking."
> "linguistic meaning is fundamentally
> indeterminate," means the same as
> "I cannot utter a word of English."
Perhaps another way to state his idea is "I cannot utter a word of English and have anyone understand what I am trying to say"? I'm not sure how his idea is either bad logic or bad rhetoric.
> tenet (n : a religious doctrine
From dictionary.com: "tenet - An opinion, doctrine, or principle held as being true by a person or especially by an organization." No religious implications yet.
> the author goes out to scare people away
> from those who do not share that doctrine
> by spewing a lot of nonsense.
I don't agree with your analysis, but if it's true, then he'd truly be "deconstructing deconstructionism with deconstructionism"
> This article is just a bunch of
> anti-anti-religious propaganda
I assume you're referring to this line from the article: "Either there is one way to God or there is no one way to God". I don't understand - do you feel this is a false assertion? How is it false?
> using skills that are important to your
> profession for a task which is not
> useful in furthering anything but experience
Hm. To me, the battlebot thing seems to be an example of "sharpening the saw". Kind of like a baseball player taking batting practice - it doesn't score any runs, but it will later. Does literary deconstructionism serve as practice for writers?
> it is not always the best written bot
> who wins Robocode style bot battles
Sometimes, yes... but I think that's more a statement about the other bot writers' skills than the virtue of randomness. Also, a randomly constructed bot wouldn't win much, because it would probably throw exceptions all over the place. That is, there's a fair bit of order that needs to occur to produce a "random bot" - implementing the correct interfaces, choosing a random action to take, etc.
You have an interesting take on this, though. I had never considered deconstructionism as literary fun... that's a whole different viewpoint. Thanks!
> a sourceforge site with nothing on it!
Hm. There's a release here with both a RubyCon '03 presentation and the code in there...
> And it's certainly no different from
> engineers engaging in robot battles
Hm. I wouldn't lump this in with the obfuscated code contests. Programming a Robocode bot, for example, is "clever fun", yes, but it's also a good exercise in learning more about search and evade techniques, trig, and so forth.
A bot programmer is bound by the constraints of the bot environment - time allowed for each move, effect of a hit, etc - and thus must deal with those constraints to produce an effective bot. And the bots themselves are certainly "capable of being wrong" in that a poorly written bot will usually be crushed by the better ones.
Crikey!
If you're doing Lego-Mindstorms development, consider the Ruby Lego-Mindstorms development kit.
Ruby's a nifty language and is (I think, anyway) well suited to stuff like this.
...can be found here.
Lots of stuff to work on there... that's just the architecture directory...
Heh.
...the Sanyo TS7.
I don't think it'll be much good at busting bunkers, but it does have nice Star Wars-looking armor (mirror in case of Slashdotting).
...some unused variables and such-like in there, though, as reported by PMD.
> cycle. Document. Release
That's not iterating, though... that's "big design up front". Here's iterating:See? Like they say: design is important - it's so important that it needs to be done throughout the lifetime of the project!
...is a big supporter of this sort of thing. Check them out here. The OSSI is chaired by John Weathersby, who seems to have a good handle on how to communicate effectively via standards, reports, certifications, and so on with folks in the U.S. government.
Besides, if it was spam, folks wouldn't be viewing the report so much: