Will glamorizing science in the movies make kids pay better attention in chemistry class?
Judging by the number of friends I had in grade school that busted by the Secret Service after teaching themselves how to use a war dialer after watching War Games, I'd say that the answer is yes.
Hint to budding hackers: don't point your war dialers at air force bases.
The problem with ID is that the Intelligent Designer in question can potentially be omnipotent and omniscient.
Only if one presumes, for whatever reason, that naturalism is not the case. Nothing within ID itself makes that claim. That some (or most, if you like) proponents of ID make that claim is irrelevent to the issue at hand.
Irreducible complexity cannot be falsified because ID practitioners have never given a model for how to determine if something is Irreducibly Complex.
That is not an argument against ID based on principles, but one based on methodology. And one that I, if you pay attention to what I said in my former post, agree with.
The foundation of the scientific method is to investigate Nature on the assumption that all natural processes can be explained through naturalistic means.
I have no quibble with that, but you appear to be fallaciously assuming that ID requires something unnatural. Nothing within ID itself requires the intelligence in ID be of supernatural origin.
I don't think so. At the level of specific constructs alleged to be examples of irreducible complexity, all a scientist has to do is demonstrate said construct arising outside of intentional design. Hence, ID is falsifiable in principle on a scientific level because its proponents suggest specific constructs found in nature that they hold to be examples of ID. In principle, this is no different than the falsifiability of evolution.
Where evolution really differs form ID is the amount of evidence that supports the theory. The theory of evolution has been played around with for well over a century. Not so, ID. To my knowledge there has been no discussion in peer reviewed journals of constructs in the natural world that would meet ID's criteria for being considered irreducibly complex. Until such articles begin to appear and withstand criticism over many years, I'm not real fond of the idea of ID being taught in schools.
But to say that ID is unscientific in principle is balderdash. A good deal of ID proponents might be unscientific in their principles, but to brush ID itself with the same level of credibility of some of its proponents is fallacious reasoning. In the world of science, ideas ought to stand or fall on their own merits, not the credibility of some of the proponents of those ideas.
According to one Microsoft programmer, the problems encountered by Lotus were not unexpected. A few of the key people working on DOS 2.0, he claimed, had a saying at the time that ``DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run.'' They managed to code a few hidden bugs into DOS 2.0 that caused Lotus 1-2-3 to break down when it was loaded. ``There were as few as three or four people who knew this was being done,'' he said.
(disclosure: i cross posted the above to the comments section in TFA)
Wallace and Erikson use an unnamed source. This makes it difficult to verify their anecdote. If their source is correct, however, it explains why so many people at Microsoft and Lotus have never heard of the story. Very few people were alleged to be in on the job.
As far as I know, Wallace and Erikson have generally proved to be reliable reporters with regard to this book. I've seen accusations that Hard Drive is a hatchet job. But, having read the book myself many years ago, I thought that it was fairly well balanced.
But they could always just change the name to Agamemnon.
Aside from which, I don't think Colgate-Palmolive will be concerned unless the AJAX folks get into the dishwashing business.
All versions of Windows from 2000 on have the WSH embedded and, consequently, interpret both JavaScript and VBScript on the fly. In this case, the language was absolutely nothing to do with the crack. It's the equivalent of feeding a shell command to a shell script when it reads input or feeding perl code to a cgi program written in perl. It isn't the language that's vulnerable, its the widget that doesn't check to see if the text it contains is executable.
Traditionally, typical users have very limited access in Unix while PC operating systems such as DOS, Windows (pre NT) and Mac OS (pre OS X) allowed the user to pretty much have complete control of the hardware. It seems to me that locking users out of the hardware is much more in line with the way that Unix traditionally works than the way that PC operatings systems have traditionally worked. The only difference is that instead of the root account being controlled by a BOFH that lives down in the ops center, it gets controlled by DRM chips.
If we assume that neoclassical supply/demand economics sets market prices (a big assumption, but one you seem to be making) then we know that the market equilibrium price is determined by the intersection of the demand curve and the supply curve. The mere existence of a demand curve is no guarantee that a corresponding supply curve will develop at all, let alone one that will interesect with the demand curve at all.
Further, supply/demand price theory entails certain assumptions, including the the total freedom of entry into and exit out of all market segments. The very assertion under contention is that Microsoft has destroyed this aspect of the computer market by its monopolistic practices. In the world of perfect competition, any computer supplier would be free to start producing computers preloaded with operating systems other than Windows. The allegation under contention that if a computer supplier does do this, that their costs for Windows licences go up. This creates an artificial exit barrier from the Windows market segment. A manufacturer cannot transition to supplying non-Windows computer without running into costs that its competitors who remain do not run into.
Consequently, even if there is a demand for non-Windows PCs, the supply curve is shifted along the cost axis because of the way that Microsoft has allegedly created an artificial exit barrier to the Windows PC market segment.
So even if the demand is there, if Microsoft is a monopoly, the supply curve is unnaturally shifted and the demand and supply curves may never intersect when they would normally in a free market.
``Space ships, people shooting guns, "mercs," a hot chick doing kung fu... this is exactly the kind of crap I expect to see on any given Tuesday on the Sci-Fi Channel.
and
I like the new Battlestar Galactica
The new battlestar Galactica is full of space ships, people shooting guns and hot chicks doing kung-fu. And it's even on the Sci Fi channel.
HPFS is not really all that similar to NTFS, but that isn't really relevant to the discussion. The original JFS was on AIX and the OS/2 division re-engineered it from its formal specifications for OS/2. That version was later ported back to AIX. But in the final analysis, it's fair to say that JFS was part of OS/2, even if was never released for certain members of the OS/2 family.
The OS/2 SMP engine, likewise, was only released for the OS/2 SMP product line. This doesn't mean that SMP kernel wasn't part of the OS/2 family, only that it wasn't included in the entire family of products.
The point being that IBM has taken the bits of OS/2 that it thought were advantageous to open source and have released them into the wild. Which member of the OS/2 family tree they came from doesn't really matter.
My employer used an modified (in house) version of CCUnit to automate testing on Solaris. For Windows testing, we used WinRunner. But that was two years ago. CCUnit claims to be platform dependent, so it might work on Windows.
Like the JFS filesystem and IBM's OMNIPRINT driver?
IBM has already raided the OS/2 code base for projects that it felt would be helpful to be released as open source. While it would be neat if they could release the WorkPlace Shell or the OS/2 2.1 SMP kernel as open source, if they haven't done it by now, there is probably a good reason such as the code being tainted with third party licences.
Of course given that most of the kernel was written in assembler gives it limited practicality, but it would be an great exercise in kernel design to look at OS/2's SMP engine that was so wickedly fast.
But there was an IBM skunkworks WPS clone that could replace PROGMAN.EXE as the shell in Windows 3.x. I remember downloading it to put install over Windows for Workgroups to alieviate the cognitive dissonance I encountered on those occasions when I had to dual boot to run one of those few programs that wouldn't run under OS/2's version of Windows 3.1 running on OS/2's dos box.
I doubt that it was much more than a hack. It almost certainly didn't contain all of SOM classes. Nonetheless, it was pretty slick.
IBM has open sourced about as much of OS/2 as it is going to. OS/2's file system (JFS) was opened up as well as IBM's Omniprint driver. So it isn't like we can really claim that IBM is entirely opposed to opening up OS/2. They've already opened large swaths of it to be rewarded by constant complaints that what they've opened isn't enough.
The balance is probably so tainted by third party licensed code (and not only from Microsoft) as to make separating out the IBM code from the third party code an expensive proposition.
One thing that might be interesting is that there was an unsupported IBM WPS clone that could replace PROGMAN.EXE as the shell for Windows. It might be interesting if that particular skunkworks product could be released as well, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Actually, I think the parent poster was simply misguided by the intuitive, but wrong, idea that consumer prices are directly proportional to input costs. I doubt the poster really cares whether the difference is due to labor, technology, fixed costs of equipment, or anything else. In neo-classical supply/demand price theory, which most economists in the US assume to be true, input costs (of which the cost of labor is/one/) only play a relatively minor role in determining the market equilibrium price of a product. In this theory it is not the willingness of the buyer that determines value, but the intersection of the willingness of the buyer to buy at a certain price with the willingness of the seller to sell at a certain price that determines the equilibrium price that commodities will be found at in a free market.
But if the assumptions of neo-classical supply/demand price theory were true, then it would be the case that branding would have no impact on sales as all units would be identical. In the music industry, this is demonstrably false. Branding has an enormous impact on sales. The assumptions that have to hold for neo-classical supply/demand price theory to hold are utterly unrealistic.
Further, the labor theory of value that you decry can be used to entirely explain the fluctuations of price in the free market. While it is true that Marxian economics is based somewhat on labor theory of value, neo-Ricardian economics also is and explains the world we live in far better than either Marxian or neo-classical economics. There is good empirical evidence to hold to labor theory of value. The only thing neo-classical economics has going for it is wide spread acceptance in the US. There are no good empirical studies that suggest supply/demand price theory actually holds in the real world.
If the ethanol is being made from organic waste after harvesting the edible portions of a food crop, the net energy yield of ethanol production may be higher once one subtracts out the cost of the energy that would have been spent on the production of those food crops regardless of whether one was seeking to produce ethanol.
Its like the countries that extract oil from old tires. Superficially, this is a net energy loss as it takes more petroleum to extract oil from tires than the process provides. But, the process as a whole is a net gain once one factors in the cost of disposal of those same tires.
So one possible solution to the problem is to look for ways to make ethanol as by-products of processes that are going to take place regardless of whether or not ethanol is produced. As long as the value of the by-products exceed the marginal increase in inputs to create the by-product, ethanol becomes viable.
Does IPTV offer closed captioning? If not, it will alienate a small, but significant, segment of the market.
It also may bring up some thorny legal issues. All US televisions past a certain size are required to be able to decode the closed captioning signal. Should Congress (or, more likely, a federal judge) decide that computers count as televisions due to IPTV, it may make life interesting for digital streaming of AV content.
IBM has two options: to trade with China or to not trade with China.
Each of these options has two possible consequences: to make things better for the people of China or to not make things better for the people of China.
Your criticism of IBM's actions are only valid if it is the case that if [(1) IBM chooses to not trade with China/and/ (2) the decision to not trade with China makes things better for the people of China/and/ if (3) IBM chooses to trade with China/and/ (4) the decision to trade with China does not make things better for the people of China]/or/ [(1) IBM chooses to not trade with China/and/ (2) the decision to not trade with China does not make things better for the people of China/and/ if (3) IBM chooses to trade with China/and/ (4) the decision to trade with China does not make things better for the people of China/and/ (5) the consequences of the decision to trade with China are *worse* than the consequences of the decision to not trade with China]
In other words, if you have reason to believe that the people of China are worse off/than they would have been all other things being equal and IBM had decided to not trade with China/, then you have a point.
Personally, I'm not convinced. I see no reason to think that freedom in China would be more prevalent if western companies had decided to not trade with China. Further, most economic theories predict that the freedom would have been less prevalent without that trade. And, lastly, there are numerous examples of similar situations to compare. Do the people in similar regimes that have/not/ had an influx of trade have more or less freedom relative to fifteen years ago in their past?
If you can give me some concrete evidence on this, I'll gladly change my mind. Until then, I'll be skeptical.
Your stance presupposes that doing business with China does not promote human rights for Chinese citizens. Or at the very least, it presupposes that it doesn't promote human rights to the same extent as some other alternative. On what evidence do you claim that the involvement of US companies with China has, in fact, made the Chinese government more oppressive? Economists from the Marxian school as well as the neo-classical school would argue that such trade necessarily makes the people of China more free.
Slashdot Mirror
Hint to budding hackers: don't point your war dialers at air force bases.
Where evolution really differs form ID is the amount of evidence that supports the theory. The theory of evolution has been played around with for well over a century. Not so, ID. To my knowledge there has been no discussion in peer reviewed journals of constructs in the natural world that would meet ID's criteria for being considered irreducibly complex. Until such articles begin to appear and withstand criticism over many years, I'm not real fond of the idea of ID being taught in schools.
But to say that ID is unscientific in principle is balderdash. A good deal of ID proponents might be unscientific in their principles, but to brush ID itself with the same level of credibility of some of its proponents is fallacious reasoning. In the world of science, ideas ought to stand or fall on their own merits, not the credibility of some of the proponents of those ideas.
(disclosure: i cross posted the above to the comments section in TFA)
Wallace and Erikson use an unnamed source. This makes it difficult to verify their anecdote. If their source is correct, however, it explains why so many people at Microsoft and Lotus have never heard of the story. Very few people were alleged to be in on the job.
As far as I know, Wallace and Erikson have generally proved to be reliable reporters with regard to this book. I've seen accusations that Hard Drive is a hatchet job. But, having read the book myself many years ago, I thought that it was fairly well balanced.
But back in the nineties, Microsoft was the proverbial 600 pound monkey. This is why they lost not one, but two, antitrust trials.
But they could always just change the name to Agamemnon. Aside from which, I don't think Colgate-Palmolive will be concerned unless the AJAX folks get into the dishwashing business.
All versions of Windows from 2000 on have the WSH embedded and, consequently, interpret both JavaScript and VBScript on the fly. In this case, the language was absolutely nothing to do with the crack. It's the equivalent of feeding a shell command to a shell script when it reads input or feeding perl code to a cgi program written in perl. It isn't the language that's vulnerable, its the widget that doesn't check to see if the text it contains is executable.
Traditionally, typical users have very limited access in Unix while PC operating systems such as DOS, Windows (pre NT) and Mac OS (pre OS X) allowed the user to pretty much have complete control of the hardware. It seems to me that locking users out of the hardware is much more in line with the way that Unix traditionally works than the way that PC operatings systems have traditionally worked. The only difference is that instead of the root account being controlled by a BOFH that lives down in the ops center, it gets controlled by DRM chips.
If we assume that neoclassical supply/demand economics sets market prices (a big assumption, but one you seem to be making) then we know that the market equilibrium price is determined by the intersection of the demand curve and the supply curve. The mere existence of a demand curve is no guarantee that a corresponding supply curve will develop at all, let alone one that will interesect with the demand curve at all.
Further, supply/demand price theory entails certain assumptions, including the the total freedom of entry into and exit out of all market segments. The very assertion under contention is that Microsoft has destroyed this aspect of the computer market by its monopolistic practices. In the world of perfect competition, any computer supplier would be free to start producing computers preloaded with operating systems other than Windows. The allegation under contention that if a computer supplier does do this, that their costs for Windows licences go up. This creates an artificial exit barrier from the Windows market segment. A manufacturer cannot transition to supplying non-Windows computer without running into costs that its competitors who remain do not run into.
Consequently, even if there is a demand for non-Windows PCs, the supply curve is shifted along the cost axis because of the way that Microsoft has allegedly created an artificial exit barrier to the Windows PC market segment.
So even if the demand is there, if Microsoft is a monopoly, the supply curve is unnaturally shifted and the demand and supply curves may never intersect when they would normally in a free market.
and
The new battlestar Galactica is full of space ships, people shooting guns and hot chicks doing kung-fu. And it's even on the Sci Fi channel.
HPFS is not really all that similar to NTFS, but that isn't really relevant to the discussion. The original JFS was on AIX and the OS/2 division re-engineered it from its formal specifications for OS/2. That version was later ported back to AIX. But in the final analysis, it's fair to say that JFS was part of OS/2, even if was never released for certain members of the OS/2 family.
The OS/2 SMP engine, likewise, was only released for the OS/2 SMP product line. This doesn't mean that SMP kernel wasn't part of the OS/2 family, only that it wasn't included in the entire family of products.
The point being that IBM has taken the bits of OS/2 that it thought were advantageous to open source and have released them into the wild. Which member of the OS/2 family tree they came from doesn't really matter.
My employer used an modified (in house) version of CCUnit to automate testing on Solaris. For Windows testing, we used WinRunner. But that was two years ago. CCUnit claims to be platform dependent, so it might work on Windows.
IBM has already raided the OS/2 code base for projects that it felt would be helpful to be released as open source. While it would be neat if they could release the WorkPlace Shell or the OS/2 2.1 SMP kernel as open source, if they haven't done it by now, there is probably a good reason such as the code being tainted with third party licences.
Of course given that most of the kernel was written in assembler gives it limited practicality, but it would be an great exercise in kernel design to look at OS/2's SMP engine that was so wickedly fast.
But there was an IBM skunkworks WPS clone that could replace PROGMAN.EXE as the shell in Windows 3.x. I remember downloading it to put install over Windows for Workgroups to alieviate the cognitive dissonance I encountered on those occasions when I had to dual boot to run one of those few programs that wouldn't run under OS/2's version of Windows 3.1 running on OS/2's dos box.
I doubt that it was much more than a hack. It almost certainly didn't contain all of SOM classes. Nonetheless, it was pretty slick.
IBM has open sourced about as much of OS/2 as it is going to. OS/2's file system (JFS) was opened up as well as IBM's Omniprint driver. So it isn't like we can really claim that IBM is entirely opposed to opening up OS/2. They've already opened large swaths of it to be rewarded by constant complaints that what they've opened isn't enough.
The balance is probably so tainted by third party licensed code (and not only from Microsoft) as to make separating out the IBM code from the third party code an expensive proposition.
One thing that might be interesting is that there was an unsupported IBM WPS clone that could replace PROGMAN.EXE as the shell for Windows. It might be interesting if that particular skunkworks product could be released as well, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Ever noticed either of those check boxes on the submission form?
Actually, I think the parent poster was simply misguided by the intuitive, but wrong, idea that consumer prices are directly proportional to input costs. I doubt the poster really cares whether the difference is due to labor, technology, fixed costs of equipment, or anything else. In neo-classical supply/demand price theory, which most economists in the US assume to be true, input costs (of which the cost of labor is /one/) only play a relatively minor role in determining the market equilibrium price of a product. In this theory it is not the willingness of the buyer that determines value, but the intersection of the willingness of the buyer to buy at a certain price with the willingness of the seller to sell at a certain price that determines the equilibrium price that commodities will be found at in a free market.
But if the assumptions of neo-classical supply/demand price theory were true, then it would be the case that branding would have no impact on sales as all units would be identical. In the music industry, this is demonstrably false. Branding has an enormous impact on sales. The assumptions that have to hold for neo-classical supply/demand price theory to hold are utterly unrealistic.
Further, the labor theory of value that you decry can be used to entirely explain the fluctuations of price in the free market. While it is true that Marxian economics is based somewhat on labor theory of value, neo-Ricardian economics also is and explains the world we live in far better than either Marxian or neo-classical economics. There is good empirical evidence to hold to labor theory of value. The only thing neo-classical economics has going for it is wide spread acceptance in the US. There are no good empirical studies that suggest supply/demand price theory actually holds in the real world.
If the ethanol is being made from organic waste after harvesting the edible portions of a food crop, the net energy yield of ethanol production may be higher once one subtracts out the cost of the energy that would have been spent on the production of those food crops regardless of whether one was seeking to produce ethanol.
Its like the countries that extract oil from old tires. Superficially, this is a net energy loss as it takes more petroleum to extract oil from tires than the process provides. But, the process as a whole is a net gain once one factors in the cost of disposal of those same tires.
So one possible solution to the problem is to look for ways to make ethanol as by-products of processes that are going to take place regardless of whether or not ethanol is produced. As long as the value of the by-products exceed the marginal increase in inputs to create the by-product, ethanol becomes viable.
Netmeeting can be used to share a single browser window pointed at a Wiki.
And if one doesn't like Netmeeting, one can user an OSS application that supports H.323 such as GNOMEMeeting
Does IPTV offer closed captioning? If not, it will alienate a small, but significant, segment of the market.
It also may bring up some thorny legal issues. All US televisions past a certain size are required to be able to decode the closed captioning signal. Should Congress (or, more likely, a federal judge) decide that computers count as televisions due to IPTV, it may make life interesting for digital streaming of AV content.
IBM has two options: to trade with China or to not trade with China.
/and/ (2) the decision to not trade with China makes things better for the people of China /and/ if (3) IBM chooses to trade with China /and/ (4) the decision to trade with China does not make things better for the people of China] /or/ [(1) IBM chooses to not trade with China /and/ (2) the decision to not trade with China does not make things better for the people of China /and/ if (3) IBM chooses to trade with China /and/ (4) the decision to trade with China does not make things better for the people of China /and/ (5) the consequences of the decision to trade with China are *worse* than the consequences of the decision to not trade with China]
/than they would have been all other things being equal and IBM had decided to not trade with China/, then you have a point.
/not/ had an influx of trade have more or less freedom relative to fifteen years ago in their past?
Each of these options has two possible consequences: to make things better for the people of China or to not make things better for the people of China.
Your criticism of IBM's actions are only valid if it is the case that if [(1) IBM chooses to not trade with China
In other words, if you have reason to believe that the people of China are worse off
Personally, I'm not convinced. I see no reason to think that freedom in China would be more prevalent if western companies had decided to not trade with China. Further, most economic theories predict that the freedom would have been less prevalent without that trade. And, lastly, there are numerous examples of similar situations to compare. Do the people in similar regimes that have
If you can give me some concrete evidence on this, I'll gladly change my mind. Until then, I'll be skeptical.
Your stance presupposes that doing business with China does not promote human rights for Chinese citizens. Or at the very least, it presupposes that it doesn't promote human rights to the same extent as some other alternative. On what evidence do you claim that the involvement of US companies with China has, in fact, made the Chinese government more oppressive? Economists from the Marxian school as well as the neo-classical school would argue that such trade necessarily makes the people of China more free.