I think one of the great tragedies of the modern era is the idea that science (as defined by some variant of empiricism or positivism) is the only valid form of knowledge and, consequently, the only method one should use to base decisions upon.
But the reality is that science itself has limits on both ends of the spectrum. At one end of that spectrum science cannot tell us much about math and logic and how much (if at all) those things are constructs of the human mind if they actually correspond to the world as it is. At the other end of the spectrum science can tell us how to build a nuclear bomb (or at least why building one will work if you want to split hairs between science and engineering) but it cannot tell us whether we should build that bomb.
The appeal to science as certainty about life, the universe, and everything is the echo of Descartes. But it seems that the real world might be far more messy than such a view of knowledge allows.
You're conflating all creationists with young earth creationists who base their beliefs on a literal reading of the Bible.
let's replay part of the conversation:
me: Those creationists who aren't young earth creationists may very well believe in evolution. Screwmaster: I think "believe in evolution" would be better phrased as "accept the scientific validity of evolution." Me: I don't think that the new terminology buys one any additional certainty You: I could take or leave evolution or whatever it's current state is. You simply cannot say that of a "creationist".
The things to note:
(a) The creationists in question were not young earth creationists. so, presumably, they've already accepted that the account of creation in the Christian scriptures is either irrelevant, meant to be interpreted allegorically, or factually untrue.
(b) I have a hard time believing that by distinguishing between generic belief and acceptance of scientific validity, Screwmaster was trying to state that the scientifically accepted validity was actually more shakable. Rather, it seems to me that he was trying to say that such validity was somehow more certain and less likely to change than belief in general. So I'm not certain this answers the question I was asking.
(c) That science doesn't burn heretics as the stake is more of a function of increasing social distaste for capital punishment than anything else. One need only look at self-styled scientific movements in modern history: eugenics, Hitlerism, Marxist-Leninism, et cetera. I find it hard to believe that if Ferdinand and Isabella shared a scientific outlook but still faced the same cultural, economic, political and ethnic pressures of the time, they would not have been just as brutal in persecuting their opponents under some revised form of the Inquisition. The difference between then and now is less a matter of the advance in science and more of a change in what makes us squeamish.
(d) As for the possibility of change in science, I highly recommend Feyerabend's/Against Method/. I agree that science/should/ allow for changes in worldview. But the fact of the matter is that much of the "scientific" outlook actually locks people into various forms of conceptual conservatism that makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for that worldview to change. Especially interesting is Feyerabend's treatment of Galileo. Most of us have learned in grade school and high school the myth that Galileo invented the telescope, made empirical observations, used those observations to fight against religiously mandated orthodoxy, and was persecuted for doing so. The reality is that Galileo had an unworkable theory (planets orbiting the sun in perfect circles) that was completely unsupported by the evidence that he gathered. Moreover, there was a model put forth by Tycho Brahe that satisfactorily explained the motions of the planets from a geocentric point of view albeit was rather cumbersome to calculate. But Galileo continued despite the physical evidence being plainly against him and started a propaganda campaign to get people to look at the skies differently. Once that conceptual shift occurred, others were able to make new observations and these observations eventually produced a workable model (elliptical orbits) that was as good as the Tychonian system at modeling observations and better at predicting other observations. This new system, however, disproved much of Galileo's work even if it was built upon the conceptual shift started by Galileo. The lesson Feyerabend would have us learn is that Galileo's faith in a Neoplatonic solar system where more perfect entities had more perfect motions is what led to one of the most important conceptual shifts in science but this faith was not only unsupported by evidence, it was contradicted by the evidence at the time. Yet he persevered and knowledge was advanced.
I think "believe in evolution" would be better phrased as "accept the scientific validity of evolution."
I don't think that the new terminology buys one any additional certainty. Beliefs come in all sorts of flavors and all sorts of strengths. For example, there is absolutely no difference between asking a non-scientist to ``accept the scientific validity of evolution'' and asking that same non-scientist to ``accept evolution on faith.'' Heck, the same is even true for scientists that do not investigate fields related to evolution.
A hot issue in both science and philosophy, and that dates back to when science and philosophy were considered to be the same thing, is whether the universe is created or self-existent. A related hot issue is whether the universe is eternal or temporal.
Generally speaking, creationists are those that the world is created. Most of these also believe the world is temporal. Some of these, which should be strictly referred to as young earth creationists, hold that the world is only 5,000 (or 6,000 or 7,000 or 10,000) years old.
In the press, and in every day conversation, most young earth creationists are simply referred to as `creationists' with no distinction made between them and those who hold that the universe was created many millions of years ago and those who think that the world was created eternally (i.e. not in time because it has no temporal beginning).
Those creationists who aren't young earth creationists may very well believe in evolution.
Similar problems plague the English language in other contexts, e.g. the question of who is a true liberal by US standards, whether Mormons can be properly considered Christians. Generally speaking, most of us pick whatever grouping best fits our preconceived notions or ideological agenda and stick with that one. Then we insist that anyone using the word with any other nuance is using it incorrectly.
Unless things have changed, the streaming that Comedy Central does is not closed captioned. Consequently, hard of hearing individuals like myself find it useless. This is likely to change by summer as new regulations come into effect.
But, if I was going to stream it, I would want it available from some sort of set top box so that I could have watch on my television with its nice big screen instead instead of on my laptop with its tiny screen. Most networks are presently trying very hard to not let that happen.
Cable companies and content providers want to live in a world where all play back devices are "pay for play" and consumers have to pay a marginal fee for every video watched and every song listened to. Even better would be if the play back devices could detect how many people were in the room and a charge per viewer/listener could be assessed. Fortunately for consumers such a system is presently unworkable.
But encrypted digital channels allow cable providers to get pretty close. On top of subscription fees and premium packages, consumers now have to rent a set top box (or cable card) for each playback device in the house. My television with clear QAM tuner, useless. My wife's eyeTV with the clear QAM tuner, useless. My DVR with the clear QAM tuner, useless. To get set top boxes for all those devices would almost double my cable bill.
So I did the reasonable thing, I cancelled the TV portion and kept just the Internet and phone service. But, unlike the ones mentioned in the article, I didn't replace the subscription with online streaming. There are some shows I miss (AMC's Walking Dead, Comedy Central's The Daily Show, MSNBC's Morning Joe) but, at least so far as I can tell, there is no streaming service that has all of those shows available unless I sign back up for a TV package at a cable provider.
... nevertheless, the claim that CMS is ``the de facto style guide for American writers'' is overblown at best. In academia, I would be surprised if even a plurality of journals preferred CMS. The graduate school I'm attending prefers it but most journal articles I read certainly use other style guides.
Moreover, as someone who does technical support for a living and reads MSDN and TechNet quite a bit, I can tell you first hand that the claim that ``Anyone who has read Microsoft documentation knows it has a consistent look, feel and consistency'' is utter bunk.
A question that was not addressed by this review, I think, is quite telling. What does this style guide have over and above such style guides as the venerable CMS (my preference) or other style guides (APA, MLA, the EU's Interinstitutional Style Guide, et cetera)?
A "negative" finding, as you put it, is really just failure to find a positive outcome. In other words, they were not able to replicate the original study even though apparently using the same methods. This doesn't prove that psychic phenomena does not exist. But it is a data point that suggests that there are no good scientific reasons to believe in psychic phenomena.
The real interesting bit of the article is this:
Wiseman has a registry of attempts to replicate Bem's work and has plans to analyze all of the data together, Ritchie said. One big problem facing the work is reluctance on the part of journals to publish studies with negative findings, especially those that are replications.
When Ritchie and his colleagues submitted their paper to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the journal that had originally published Bem's work, they were told that the journal does not publish replications.
"There's a real problem with finding shocking findings and then not being interested in publishing replications," Ritchie said.
That's the real controversy here. Many journals are biased against articles that describe attempts to replicate previously published results, even if the outcome is negative. This is a disincentive for scientists to engage in much of what would be very useful research.
Wikipedia NOR Britannica are citable sources. EVER. Nor any other encyclopedia. They may be citable in grade school, but not once you get to university.
Incorrect, many encyclopedias are citable sources, e.g. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Depending on the context, sometimes even non-specialized encyclopedia's are citable.
Encyclopedias are not primary sources
Secondary sources are frequently cited in academia. For example, it is not out of place to see a sentence in a research paper that looks like ``For a discussion of Professor Foo's results that proffers an alternate analysis, see Doctor Bar's article `How Foo Fooled Us' in The American Journal of Foology.'' And then there are meta-studies, discussions about those meta-studies, et cetera. This is especially true in history. For example, a source I cited last semester was an English translation of an article recently written in Latin (!) offering an argument against an slightly older English article about a medieval Latin argument against a medieval Arabic argument against an ancient Greek text.
I quite like coffee. I like the way it tastes. I like the way it smells. It's has more anti-oxidants than tea. It's a lovely drink.
But, the older I get, the less well my body deals with caffeine. It's not that I can't go to sleep if I drink coffee later than around 3pm, but if I do, I will toss and turn and constantly wake up all night. My sleep will be crap.
Ten years or so ago, I had a laptop stolen out of my home. A couple of kids came in while we were watching a movie in the other room and snagged my briefcase with my laptop in it. We reported this to the police. Several months later, the police arrested the kids while they breaking into another home. They found my laptop under one of the kid's bed.
So I went down to the county courthouse to talk with the prosecutor. In that meeting, they brought my laptop out, I identified it. The prosecutor asked me how much the laptop was worth. I was honest, a hundred bucks if that. (It was an old Toshiba 486 with 8MB of RAM that I'd bought used off of ebay with no OS and installed Linux.) I can recall the way her face fell to this day. It was as if the words "felony conviction" were floating through her head and just floated away never to be seen again.
So she bluffed the kid. She implied that she might be bringing serious felony charges, ones that could certainly be avoided if he plead out to lesser felony charges. He took the bait and plead guilty. By doing do, he avoided being charged with something that the prosecutor could not have proven had the case gone to court.
OTA broadcasts, when in HD, are far superior to most digital cable HD feeds. There are exceptions, but most digital cable providers compress or use other tricks so that they can fit more channels on the same feed. OTA channels don't have to worry about this for the most part. Anyway, most new content from the networks is vastly improved by 1080p sets. The local news may not be. The latest episode of The River (or whatever the cool kids are watching these days) almost certainly will be.
Which leads to another issue. Reruns of syndicated content is rarely HD. It may be digital. The picture may be the same size. But it is rarely HD. If vendors want, they can scale the picture size up without actually adding pixels. Many do. When this is done, you're not going to get any benefit out of a higher resolution set because regardless of what resolution the set is capable of, the source is still in the same resolution.
That's not really the same thing. You can effectively do that with one of Apple's iPad to HDMI cables. Sending the output to the Apple TV isn't the same thing as playing a game on the Apple TV. For example, it you went out into the hallway to take a phone call, all of your friends would have had to stop playing Pizza vs Skeletons. That doesn't happen if the Apple TV can actually play the games.
A few months after I quite cable, I bought a Roku box. It's pretty nifty. AppleTV doesn't do much beyond what the Roku box does. Should Apple bring their app store to the Apple TV, that will help that. But Roku already has apps. Granted, they don't have very many. But my device came with Angry Birds and there are other apps out there. I suppose what the Apple TV would offer is the whole world of iPad and iPhone apps ready to go. That would be a decided advantage.
But, aside from the premium content, the one thing that I really miss from having cable is the set top box that doubled as a DVR. The ability to pausing live TV is really a killer feature. The ability to record shows and watch them later is also a killer feature. I also really miss nodding off during a drama and being able to rewind to the point where I fell asleep. Or beng able to the REC button to grab the last fifteen minutes of a movie while I'm off to eat dinner or go out with my family. If an Apple TV allowed me to do that, I would buy one in a heartbeat. Instead, my next AV equipment purchase is probably going to be a Channel Master DVR with dual ATSC tuners that costs three times as much as an Apple TV.
I can understand why Apple is taking this approach. They're playing the long game. I suspect that it is only a matter of time before most over the air (OTA) broadcasts are also streamed. At such time OTA tuners will be obsolete equipement. Unfortunately, I suspect that such a development is 5 to 10 years down the road. For the present, you can have my ATSC tuner when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
You're off your rocker. I have a 720p television set. My brother in law has a 1080p set of the same size. The difference is pretty noticeable given the same source.
Now, it is true that not all digital content is 1080p. Watching content that is 720p is not going to be noticeably different on a 1080p television set. Moreover, not all digital content is even 720p. One thing I noticed when I cut my cable subscription was that the "HD" local channels from my cable provider had a lesser resolution than the over the air (OTA) broadcasts from those same local channels.
Good luck finding a netbook at 1/3 of that price, $133. Even with an added keyboard, the netbook would have to clock in at $150 to be 1/3 of the price.
The point that netbooks are less expensive, I think, is a fair one. But the low end ones typically come with anemic software (e.g. Windows 7 Home Starter) and are underpowered for doing much of anything. Once you add in the cost of software on machines that will run that software, netbooks start being about the same price as iPads. So the original claim, which I understand that you were not making but a post upstream was making, that netbooks have 1/3 the cost of iPads is pretty silly.
A better argument is utility. While there are some niche applications where iPads are obviously the better machine, in most cases a netbook or low end laptop will be a more appropriate choice.
Rather than having a case with a built-in keyboard, it may make sense for users to have a bluetooth keyboard at their desks. Then they can use the keyboard at their desks and grab just the iPad when going mobile for meetings, et cetera.
It seems to me that such would be great for insurance agents with a vertical app installed. They could use the iPad at the site of the insured to take pictures and complete the form but they wouldn't be bogged down by the additional weight of the keyboard.
For example, many insurance agents, coaches, doctors and pilots are moving to iPads because of vertical apps that make their professions easier.
If one doesn't fall into a profession where that is true, don't buy an iPad.
(And the various Android market places really do not compare to the Apple app store nor do the cases with blue tooth keyboards make an iPad thicker than most net books. But, to be fair, sometimes those Android market places do have apps that aren't on the iPad. But see the first two sentences of this post.)
I spent about a year with a first generation iPad as my primary computing device. I'd purchased a blue tooth keyboard and it worked fine for what I needed it to do, most write term papers.
What I found is that it was a royal pain to switch back and forth between my text editor and my web browser (or PDF viewer). This was the largest draw back for me.
I also found Mobile Safari to be less than stellar. Now that I've switched to a Mac Book Air, I tend to have 20 to 30 Chrome tabs open at once. Good luck with that on Mobile Safari. And, worse, it would tend to refresh the page and lose its position when I switched to the text editor and then back. That makes it difficult to write term papers.
Lastly, my preferred text editing solution (LaTeX) was unavailable (and will always be unavailable) for iOS. This meant that I'd have to borrow my kids computer for a half hour to an hour to finish up my term papers. In the grand scheme of writing 10 or 15 thousand words from start to finish, that's not so bad.
I still miss the iPad. Gestures on the touch screen were a thing of brilliance. Lion makes up for some of that with the track pad. But it just isn't the same. I also miss the battery life and the ability to take it somewhere without the keyboard.
For many people, an iPad is probably all the computer they really need. For me, not so much. But the hardware limitations weren't what I bumping into. The problem was policy. Apple does not want apps that can run turing machines. LaTeX with its macro language is right out. Apple hasn't made a way to task switch back and forth between programs in an intuitive fashion. Maybe by the time it comes to replace my Mac Book, they'll finally be there. They aren't there yet.
First, good luck getting a decently powered Netbook at 1/3 of the cost.
Now, as for the differences:
1. It runs iOS 2. It has the App Store 3. It is lighter and thinner 4. It has better battery life
For many, probably most, users none of those will matter much. Such users are most likely better off with a Netbook (or inexpensive laptop). Users that depend on Windows applications will almost certainly be better off with a laptop.
But, in some cases, it does make sense, especially in vertical markets.
Perhaps more relevant, I'm not certain that there is any meaningful distinction between box cutters and pocket utility knives with blades under 4 inches.
And I'm not certain of the reason for banning "numchucks" but allowing pool cues.
If you take the empiricist stance seriously, then you have to say that neither Galileo nor Einstein practiced science. Galileo proceeded counter-inductively. He ignored the empirical evidence at hand because he thought that his theory was more harmonious. Eventually he was proved right, with regards to heliocentrism, but only because elliptical rather than spherical orbits were discovered. The evidence Galileo actually recorded was an argument/against/ his theory.
Similarly, Einstein's relativity was a mathematical construct that took years to be validated via empirical methods.
And much of string theory seems to be in principle unfalsifiable at the empirical level.
So if we're going to hold to strict empiricism, we have to say that much of what seems to be science isn't actually science.
And then there is good old Piere Duhem's observation that empiricists, when trying to falsify a hypothesis, really have no good way to determine whether the experiment is falsifying the experimental method, the hypothesis, or the over-arching conceptual schema that the hypothesis depends on. This line of logic was (apparently) independently discovered by WVO Quine and is now commonly referred to as the Duhem-Quine Indeterminacy Thesis. The empiricist school of thought still has not come with a good argument against it. For the most part, they just ignore it.
Despite the fact that formal representations of categorical syllogisms had yet to be discovered, Plato understood quite well how logic worked. Claiming that defining first order logic was somehow necessary to create "philosophy" is like claiming that the hundreds of years during which builders and engineers were using the Pythagorean theorem before the birth of Pythagoras, they weren't really doing math because they didn't have the formal proof of the theorem.
Moreover unlike most political analysts these days, Plato was quite cognizant of the limitations of both purely logical methods and purely empirical methods.
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I quite like your comment.
I think one of the great tragedies of the modern era is the idea that science (as defined by some variant of empiricism or positivism) is the only valid form of knowledge and, consequently, the only method one should use to base decisions upon.
But the reality is that science itself has limits on both ends of the spectrum. At one end of that spectrum science cannot tell us much about math and logic and how much (if at all) those things are constructs of the human mind if they actually correspond to the world as it is. At the other end of the spectrum science can tell us how to build a nuclear bomb (or at least why building one will work if you want to split hairs between science and engineering) but it cannot tell us whether we should build that bomb.
The appeal to science as certainty about life, the universe, and everything is the echo of Descartes. But it seems that the real world might be far more messy than such a view of knowledge allows.
You're conflating all creationists with young earth creationists who base their beliefs on a literal reading of the Bible.
let's replay part of the conversation:
me: Those creationists who aren't young earth creationists may very well believe in evolution.
Screwmaster: I think "believe in evolution" would be better phrased as "accept the scientific validity of evolution."
Me: I don't think that the new terminology buys one any additional certainty
You: I could take or leave evolution or whatever it's current state is. You simply cannot say that of a "creationist".
The things to note:
(a) The creationists in question were not young earth creationists. so, presumably, they've already accepted that the account of creation in the Christian scriptures is either irrelevant, meant to be interpreted allegorically, or factually untrue.
(b) I have a hard time believing that by distinguishing between generic belief and acceptance of scientific validity, Screwmaster was trying to state that the scientifically accepted validity was actually more shakable. Rather, it seems to me that he was trying to say that such validity was somehow more certain and less likely to change than belief in general. So I'm not certain this answers the question I was asking.
(c) That science doesn't burn heretics as the stake is more of a function of increasing social distaste for capital punishment than anything else. One need only look at self-styled scientific movements in modern history: eugenics, Hitlerism, Marxist-Leninism, et cetera. I find it hard to believe that if Ferdinand and Isabella shared a scientific outlook but still faced the same cultural, economic, political and ethnic pressures of the time, they would not have been just as brutal in persecuting their opponents under some revised form of the Inquisition. The difference between then and now is less a matter of the advance in science and more of a change in what makes us squeamish.
(d) As for the possibility of change in science, I highly recommend Feyerabend's /Against Method/. I agree that science /should/ allow for changes in worldview. But the fact of the matter is that much of the "scientific" outlook actually locks people into various forms of conceptual conservatism that makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for that worldview to change. Especially interesting is Feyerabend's treatment of Galileo. Most of us have learned in grade school and high school the myth that Galileo invented the telescope, made empirical observations, used those observations to fight against religiously mandated orthodoxy, and was persecuted for doing so. The reality is that Galileo had an unworkable theory (planets orbiting the sun in perfect circles) that was completely unsupported by the evidence that he gathered. Moreover, there was a model put forth by Tycho Brahe that satisfactorily explained the motions of the planets from a geocentric point of view albeit was rather cumbersome to calculate. But Galileo continued despite the physical evidence being plainly against him and started a propaganda campaign to get people to look at the skies differently. Once that conceptual shift occurred, others were able to make new observations and these observations eventually produced a workable model (elliptical orbits) that was as good as the Tychonian system at modeling observations and better at predicting other observations. This new system, however, disproved much of Galileo's work even if it was built upon the conceptual shift started by Galileo. The lesson Feyerabend would have us learn is that Galileo's faith in a Neoplatonic solar system where more perfect entities had more perfect motions is what led to one of the most important conceptual shifts in science but this faith was not only unsupported by evidence, it was contradicted by the evidence at the time. Yet he persevered and knowledge was advanced.
I don't think that the new terminology buys one any additional certainty. Beliefs come in all sorts of flavors and all sorts of strengths. For example, there is absolutely no difference between asking a non-scientist to ``accept the scientific validity of evolution'' and asking that same non-scientist to ``accept evolution on faith.'' Heck, the same is even true for scientists that do not investigate fields related to evolution.
Words change over time.
A hot issue in both science and philosophy, and that dates back to when science and philosophy were considered to be the same thing, is whether the universe is created or self-existent. A related hot issue is whether the universe is eternal or temporal.
Generally speaking, creationists are those that the world is created. Most of these also believe the world is temporal. Some of these, which should be strictly referred to as young earth creationists, hold that the world is only 5,000 (or 6,000 or 7,000 or 10,000) years old.
In the press, and in every day conversation, most young earth creationists are simply referred to as `creationists' with no distinction made between them and those who hold that the universe was created many millions of years ago and those who think that the world was created eternally (i.e. not in time because it has no temporal beginning).
Those creationists who aren't young earth creationists may very well believe in evolution.
Similar problems plague the English language in other contexts, e.g. the question of who is a true liberal by US standards, whether Mormons can be properly considered Christians. Generally speaking, most of us pick whatever grouping best fits our preconceived notions or ideological agenda and stick with that one. Then we insist that anyone using the word with any other nuance is using it incorrectly.
Unless things have changed, the streaming that Comedy Central does is not closed captioned. Consequently, hard of hearing individuals like myself find it useless. This is likely to change by summer as new regulations come into effect.
But, if I was going to stream it, I would want it available from some sort of set top box so that I could have watch on my television with its nice big screen instead instead of on my laptop with its tiny screen. Most networks are presently trying very hard to not let that happen.
Cable companies and content providers want to live in a world where all play back devices are "pay for play" and consumers have to pay a marginal fee for every video watched and every song listened to. Even better would be if the play back devices could detect how many people were in the room and a charge per viewer/listener could be assessed. Fortunately for consumers such a system is presently unworkable.
But encrypted digital channels allow cable providers to get pretty close. On top of subscription fees and premium packages, consumers now have to rent a set top box (or cable card) for each playback device in the house. My television with clear QAM tuner, useless. My wife's eyeTV with the clear QAM tuner, useless. My DVR with the clear QAM tuner, useless. To get set top boxes for all those devices would almost double my cable bill.
So I did the reasonable thing, I cancelled the TV portion and kept just the Internet and phone service. But, unlike the ones mentioned in the article, I didn't replace the subscription with online streaming. There are some shows I miss (AMC's Walking Dead, Comedy Central's The Daily Show, MSNBC's Morning Joe) but, at least so far as I can tell, there is no streaming service that has all of those shows available unless I sign back up for a TV package at a cable provider.
... nevertheless, the claim that CMS is ``the de facto style guide for American writers'' is overblown at best. In academia, I would be surprised if even a plurality of journals preferred CMS. The graduate school I'm attending prefers it but most journal articles I read certainly use other style guides.
Moreover, as someone who does technical support for a living and reads MSDN and TechNet quite a bit, I can tell you first hand that the claim that ``Anyone who has read Microsoft documentation knows it has a consistent look, feel and consistency'' is utter bunk.
A question that was not addressed by this review, I think, is quite telling. What does this style guide have over and above such style guides as the venerable CMS (my preference) or other style guides (APA, MLA, the EU's Interinstitutional Style Guide, et cetera)?
A "negative" finding, as you put it, is really just failure to find a positive outcome. In other words, they were not able to replicate the original study even though apparently using the same methods. This doesn't prove that psychic phenomena does not exist. But it is a data point that suggests that there are no good scientific reasons to believe in psychic phenomena.
The real interesting bit of the article is this:
That's the real controversy here. Many journals are biased against articles that describe attempts to replicate previously published results, even if the outcome is negative. This is a disincentive for scientists to engage in much of what would be very useful research.
Incorrect, many encyclopedias are citable sources, e.g. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Depending on the context, sometimes even non-specialized encyclopedia's are citable.
Secondary sources are frequently cited in academia. For example, it is not out of place to see a sentence in a research paper that looks like ``For a discussion of Professor Foo's results that proffers an alternate analysis, see Doctor Bar's article `How Foo Fooled Us' in The American Journal of Foology.'' And then there are meta-studies, discussions about those meta-studies, et cetera. This is especially true in history. For example, a source I cited last semester was an English translation of an article recently written in Latin (!) offering an argument against an slightly older English article about a medieval Latin argument against a medieval Arabic argument against an ancient Greek text.
I quite like coffee. I like the way it tastes. I like the way it smells. It's has more anti-oxidants than tea. It's a lovely drink.
But, the older I get, the less well my body deals with caffeine. It's not that I can't go to sleep if I drink coffee later than around 3pm, but if I do, I will toss and turn and constantly wake up all night. My sleep will be crap.
Ten years or so ago, I had a laptop stolen out of my home. A couple of kids came in while we were watching a movie in the other room and snagged my briefcase with my laptop in it. We reported this to the police. Several months later, the police arrested the kids while they breaking into another home. They found my laptop under one of the kid's bed.
So I went down to the county courthouse to talk with the prosecutor. In that meeting, they brought my laptop out, I identified it. The prosecutor asked me how much the laptop was worth. I was honest, a hundred bucks if that. (It was an old Toshiba 486 with 8MB of RAM that I'd bought used off of ebay with no OS and installed Linux.) I can recall the way her face fell to this day. It was as if the words "felony conviction" were floating through her head and just floated away never to be seen again.
So she bluffed the kid. She implied that she might be bringing serious felony charges, ones that could certainly be avoided if he plead out to lesser felony charges. He took the bait and plead guilty. By doing do, he avoided being charged with something that the prosecutor could not have proven had the case gone to court.
OTA broadcasts, when in HD, are far superior to most digital cable HD feeds. There are exceptions, but most digital cable providers compress or use other tricks so that they can fit more channels on the same feed. OTA channels don't have to worry about this for the most part. Anyway, most new content from the networks is vastly improved by 1080p sets. The local news may not be. The latest episode of The River (or whatever the cool kids are watching these days) almost certainly will be.
Which leads to another issue. Reruns of syndicated content is rarely HD. It may be digital. The picture may be the same size. But it is rarely HD. If vendors want, they can scale the picture size up without actually adding pixels. Many do. When this is done, you're not going to get any benefit out of a higher resolution set because regardless of what resolution the set is capable of, the source is still in the same resolution.
That's not really the same thing. You can effectively do that with one of Apple's iPad to HDMI cables. Sending the output to the Apple TV isn't the same thing as playing a game on the Apple TV. For example, it you went out into the hallway to take a phone call, all of your friends would have had to stop playing Pizza vs Skeletons. That doesn't happen if the Apple TV can actually play the games.
A few months after I quite cable, I bought a Roku box. It's pretty nifty. AppleTV doesn't do much beyond what the Roku box does. Should Apple bring their app store to the Apple TV, that will help that. But Roku already has apps. Granted, they don't have very many. But my device came with Angry Birds and there are other apps out there. I suppose what the Apple TV would offer is the whole world of iPad and iPhone apps ready to go. That would be a decided advantage.
But, aside from the premium content, the one thing that I really miss from having cable is the set top box that doubled as a DVR. The ability to pausing live TV is really a killer feature. The ability to record shows and watch them later is also a killer feature. I also really miss nodding off during a drama and being able to rewind to the point where I fell asleep. Or beng able to the REC button to grab the last fifteen minutes of a movie while I'm off to eat dinner or go out with my family. If an Apple TV allowed me to do that, I would buy one in a heartbeat. Instead, my next AV equipment purchase is probably going to be a Channel Master DVR with dual ATSC tuners that costs three times as much as an Apple TV.
I can understand why Apple is taking this approach. They're playing the long game. I suspect that it is only a matter of time before most over the air (OTA) broadcasts are also streamed. At such time OTA tuners will be obsolete equipement. Unfortunately, I suspect that such a development is 5 to 10 years down the road. For the present, you can have my ATSC tuner when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
You're off your rocker. I have a 720p television set. My brother in law has a 1080p set of the same size. The difference is pretty noticeable given the same source.
Now, it is true that not all digital content is 1080p. Watching content that is 720p is not going to be noticeably different on a 1080p television set. Moreover, not all digital content is even 720p. One thing I noticed when I cut my cable subscription was that the "HD" local channels from my cable provider had a lesser resolution than the over the air (OTA) broadcasts from those same local channels.
Good luck finding a netbook at 1/3 of that price, $133. Even with an added keyboard, the netbook would have to clock in at $150 to be 1/3 of the price.
The point that netbooks are less expensive, I think, is a fair one. But the low end ones typically come with anemic software (e.g. Windows 7 Home Starter) and are underpowered for doing much of anything. Once you add in the cost of software on machines that will run that software, netbooks start being about the same price as iPads. So the original claim, which I understand that you were not making but a post upstream was making, that netbooks have 1/3 the cost of iPads is pretty silly.
A better argument is utility. While there are some niche applications where iPads are obviously the better machine, in most cases a netbook or low end laptop will be a more appropriate choice.
Rather than having a case with a built-in keyboard, it may make sense for users to have a bluetooth keyboard at their desks. Then they can use the keyboard at their desks and grab just the iPad when going mobile for meetings, et cetera.
It seems to me that such would be great for insurance agents with a vertical app installed. They could use the iPad at the site of the insured to take pictures and complete the form but they wouldn't be bogged down by the additional weight of the keyboard.
For example, many insurance agents, coaches, doctors and pilots are moving to iPads because of vertical apps that make their professions easier.
If one doesn't fall into a profession where that is true, don't buy an iPad.
(And the various Android market places really do not compare to the Apple app store nor do the cases with blue tooth keyboards make an iPad thicker than most net books. But, to be fair, sometimes those Android market places do have apps that aren't on the iPad. But see the first two sentences of this post.)
I spent about a year with a first generation iPad as my primary computing device. I'd purchased a blue tooth keyboard and it worked fine for what I needed it to do, most write term papers.
What I found is that it was a royal pain to switch back and forth between my text editor and my web browser (or PDF viewer). This was the largest draw back for me.
I also found Mobile Safari to be less than stellar. Now that I've switched to a Mac Book Air, I tend to have 20 to 30 Chrome tabs open at once. Good luck with that on Mobile Safari. And, worse, it would tend to refresh the page and lose its position when I switched to the text editor and then back. That makes it difficult to write term papers.
Lastly, my preferred text editing solution (LaTeX) was unavailable (and will always be unavailable) for iOS. This meant that I'd have to borrow my kids computer for a half hour to an hour to finish up my term papers. In the grand scheme of writing 10 or 15 thousand words from start to finish, that's not so bad.
I still miss the iPad. Gestures on the touch screen were a thing of brilliance. Lion makes up for some of that with the track pad. But it just isn't the same. I also miss the battery life and the ability to take it somewhere without the keyboard.
For many people, an iPad is probably all the computer they really need. For me, not so much. But the hardware limitations weren't what I bumping into. The problem was policy. Apple does not want apps that can run turing machines. LaTeX with its macro language is right out. Apple hasn't made a way to task switch back and forth between programs in an intuitive fashion. Maybe by the time it comes to replace my Mac Book, they'll finally be there. They aren't there yet.
First, good luck getting a decently powered Netbook at 1/3 of the cost.
Now, as for the differences:
1. It runs iOS
2. It has the App Store
3. It is lighter and thinner
4. It has better battery life
For many, probably most, users none of those will matter much. Such users are most likely better off with a Netbook (or inexpensive laptop). Users that depend on Windows applications will almost certainly be better off with a laptop.
But, in some cases, it does make sense, especially in vertical markets.
``Honey, what's this on your computer?''
`What's what? Oh! That!'
``How did it get there honey?''
`Uh, I don't know. It must have gotten downloaded when I was downloading music or something.'
``We should call the police.''
`Uh, yeah, we should do that.'
Perhaps more relevant, I'm not certain that there is any meaningful distinction between box cutters and pocket utility knives with blades under 4 inches.
And I'm not certain of the reason for banning "numchucks" but allowing pool cues.
The difference between a good language and a bad one is whether the easiest and most obvious way of doing something is a correct way.
If you take the empiricist stance seriously, then you have to say that neither Galileo nor Einstein practiced science. Galileo proceeded counter-inductively. He ignored the empirical evidence at hand because he thought that his theory was more harmonious. Eventually he was proved right, with regards to heliocentrism, but only because elliptical rather than spherical orbits were discovered. The evidence Galileo actually recorded was an argument /against/ his theory.
Similarly, Einstein's relativity was a mathematical construct that took years to be validated via empirical methods.
And much of string theory seems to be in principle unfalsifiable at the empirical level.
So if we're going to hold to strict empiricism, we have to say that much of what seems to be science isn't actually science.
And then there is good old Piere Duhem's observation that empiricists, when trying to falsify a hypothesis, really have no good way to determine whether the experiment is falsifying the experimental method, the hypothesis, or the over-arching conceptual schema that the hypothesis depends on. This line of logic was (apparently) independently discovered by WVO Quine and is now commonly referred to as the Duhem-Quine Indeterminacy Thesis. The empiricist school of thought still has not come with a good argument against it. For the most part, they just ignore it.
Despite the fact that formal representations of categorical syllogisms had yet to be discovered, Plato understood quite well how logic worked. Claiming that defining first order logic was somehow necessary to create "philosophy" is like claiming that the hundreds of years during which builders and engineers were using the Pythagorean theorem before the birth of Pythagoras, they weren't really doing math because they didn't have the formal proof of the theorem.
Moreover unlike most political analysts these days, Plato was quite cognizant of the limitations of both purely logical methods and purely empirical methods.