"If MS was to keep a major piece of software in Beta for three or four years (as does Google)"
You're looking at this through a very crooked lens.
Google has some services that they have never released as supported software. So does Microsoft. So does Red Hat.
Can you think of a major company that doesn't?
What's unusual about the Googles and Microsofts and Red Hats of the world is that they actually release, unsupported, a fair amount of software that, though without formal support, is still very useful to people.
So -- and I appologize in advance for being rude -- screw you and your "give me free stuff, and support my every whim" attitude. They'll support what they want when and if they should decide to, and I'm just glad to have use of some amazingly useful software until then.
I don't know anyone involved, but I woudl expect that anyone with sufficient resources (read: major governments) can find out who owns what satellites, and where they are and will be at what times. Based on that you should be able to determine when they will be in a position to see anything useful, and just not leave your bleeping dead aliens lying out in the sun then.
The U.S. federal government also had a strangle-hold on most earth-observing for quite some time, so it's possible that no one got an eye in the sky until very recently that didn't clear their data through "proper channels". This is not really a matter of "conspiracy", so much as just common sense. You don't give up tactical advantages like being the only ones who can see everything without a fair amount of kicking and screaming.
No. No it did not, and that's what gets people so upset about this. READ Cerf's account. It's very clear on this point.
"The Internet" is two things. It is a set of protocols and it is an national (international now) infrastructure. Gore "took the lead in creating" that national infrastructure. There was nothing but a small research network, vaguely similar in design to the heart of what we call the Internet today, when Gore got involved in pushing for funding the 70s (though his largest contributions were as a Senetor in the 80s).
Remember that to do this he had to oppose his own party, which was firmly entrenched in the "all products of the DoD are republican tools of evil" mantra. The Internet as you know it today would likely have been a far more private (and therefore balkenized) as well as international effort had Gore not pushed as hard as he did to fund it fully. It was an effort on-par with going to the moon, and yet we try to downplay his accomplishment. Somehow I doubt that if you'd worked on the Net back then that you would be so glib then. Funding was a constant source of concern, and Gore was always there to push for it.
"Vinton Cerf's statement simply highlights the fact that he (VC) happened to be a corporate guy"
Uh... excuse me. Do you have any clue who Cerf is?! This is the guy who actually did INVENT the Internet. He's a VP at MCI because he's one of the technology giants of our age, not because he's a shrewd businesman. "corporate guy" indeed!
"How long has Google Groups been labelled Beta now, two years maybe? How many users does it have?"
So you would have them move it out of beta sooner? Not beta it? What's the solution you're proposing?
Are you saying that software that Google issues in beta should be bug free, or are you suggesting that Google, being a search engine and all, should be scraping all of the Web's most popular forums as their bug reporting mechanism?
The last time this topic came up, someone cited this paper by V.C. and the person they were arguing with had the unmitigated gall to say that V.C.'s opinion on the matter was moot!
I was stunned. There is no person who can put a stronger claim on having "invented" the Internet than V.C., and he fully agreed with Gore's statement. How exactly is is opinion on the matter moot?!
Bah, I just have to relax and remember that not all conservatives are this brain dead (just as not all liberals are as brain dead as the extremists can be).
It's really sad that people feel the need to disregard this man's AMAZING contribution to the United States, and its standing in the world.
If not for Al Gore, Congress would have continued to vote against funding anything that came out of the DoD, based solely on party politics. He championed the Internet when it needed the funding to grow from a lab experiment to a national research network, long before most of you were out of diapers!
He TOOK THE INITIATIVE in CREATING the Internet, and I challenge anyone who thinks differently to go create their own network. You'll quickly find that writing RFCs isn't all you need, and without a money man, you have nothing. There is NO other person you can point to who has more of a claim on the title, "the Internet's money man".
He broke with his party in order to make it possible for you to blather on Slashdot, and yet you feel the need to cut him down. Feh!
"A targeted ad may be sold to the consumer on the premise of "an ad for a product that you'll want to watch and are interested in", but I think the reality is a bit darker. To me, targeted ads are a step away from using psychological profiling to sell everyone exactly the same things."
Sure, and we're already doing that to a large extent. But, I'm not so sure I call that "dark". Truth in advertising is something we should fight for. I really think that there should be a CSPAN-like network that covers ads and refutes their bad claims.
"They'll still be selling viagra, but they'll be doing in such a way as to directly appeal to your individual demographic."
Fine. Go for it. Companies that advertise wastefully will suffer for it. Those that USE profile information correctly will spend less money for more result. If I actually NEEDED Viagra, then I'd be happy to see legit ads for it (and that might kill the profitability for the spammers at the same time).
"Don't think of it as "I can see you're interested in this product, shall I show you who sells these things", but instead think of it as "His personality shows a preference towards the colour blue, green eyed women, long words and Star Trek references.""
Hey, anything that makes these folks learn a few long words can't be all bad, right?;-)
"[ads] that are targeted at somebody else aren't objectionable [Ads] targeted at me personally I find extremely objectionable, offensive even."
I can think of some scenarios in which targetted ads would be a problem (mostly where they would disclose preferences of mine to others), but if I'm going to get an ad anyway, I'd much rather that it be for something that I'd like, and/or presented in a way that I would find apealing.
What's more, I'd like to stop getting ads for viagra (don't need it), Windows products (don't run it), baby clothes (not going to reproduce any time soon), etc. If all of the ads I got were for things I actually gave a rat's petard about, then ads might just start to work again.
"Well, what google is doing is DoubleClick *10^100"
Wow, I was wondering why my browser was so slow! With that many cookies, I guess I must just be running low on RAM;-)
"Does anyone else remember the days when Slashdot ranted daily"
Yep... I think that was... ah, let me check my watch...
The "Some people on Slashdot ranted about X, thus X has been proved to be useful only for the forces of darkest evil" line of logic isn't really all that sound, you realize.
"everyone's hunkydory with it because they *might* help runner-ups like OpenOffice or Firefox become more popular by morphing them into data collection mechanisms"
No, I'm OK with what Google does because they have a track record of doing the right thing. They support open source projects, they have never disclosed my personal information, they write damned good code, their services continue to benefit the state of the art and my life is a bit more productive because of them.
"Anyway, don't kid yourselves. Google is really an advertisement vendor"
OK.... and? Did you think no one had noticed what their revenue model was?!
"They want this data to build consumer profiles on you"
Targetted advertising is not a problem except in that it's a type of advertising. If you have a problem with ads, targetted ads should be no more objectionable, and at least in my case, they're slightly LESS objectionable.
If Google were to start selling that database to anyone with cash, then I'd be pretty irrate. Google has demonstrated, though, that they are committed to a more reasonable course of action. A lot of people get upset because Google put "Don't be evil," in their S-1, but keep in mind that the standard retort to "they are doing good so far," is that they have an obligation to stockholders and will HAVE to do anything they can to meet that obligation. That's not quite true. For example, if McDonalds got involved in the diamond trade, they might make more money, but they don't HAVE to try to do that because it's not in their business plan, and thus not in their SEC filings.
Google's anti-evil statement in their S-1 is a fair warning to investors (and they go into detail on this in their S-1) that they operate at a disadvantage by applying ethics. This shields them from the obligation to do "whatever it takes" to increase shareholder value. They still have to work on the stockholders' behalf, but only within those parameters.
"and probably governmental profiles too"
Oooh, "governmental"! Sounds spooky. Of course, even you aren't sure what you mean by that, and it's certainly a wild guess.
Jebus... 5 mod points, and I've already replied to this story. Doh!
For the moderators who thought the parent was "redundant": The parent is quite correct. Arguably a troll, and not very well informed, but not at all redundant.
The grandparent *is* linking to a copyrighted work... perhaps. Actually, I'm pretty seriously doubtful that it's real. If it *is* real, I'm very disapointed as it lacks several things:
1. No balance restored to the force (Lucas said point-blank that this was something resolved in ep 3, back when ep 1 came out).
2. Band-aid resolution to the ghost-jedi issue from ep 4-6, and nothing that would justify Obi Wan's comment from 4 ("If you cut me down...")
3. From what I've heard many of the events in the script are in the wrong time sequence.
4. It directly conflicts with other plot summaries on the same site!
In terms of on-and-off screen body count, this movie will dwarf Sin City and Kill Bill (both volumes combined, plus Pulp Fiction just for fun) by orders (plural) of magnitude.
I won't spoil the movie for you, but suffice to say that if there are ANY space battles in the movie, more people die than both of those movies. Of course, you won't see most of the PEOPLE who die thusly....
So, then we switch to on-screen death. Let's see, we know that all of the Jedi have to be gone by Ep 4, right? So, let's assume that we see some fraction of them killed. Of course, in the process we can assume that some stormtroopers get killed. That's probably Kill Bill levels right there.
These are just the obvious deaths that have to happen.
Add in the fact that we know one person gets horribly mutilated.... I think it's safe to say that this one will be bloody.
First off: I'm wrong. He cited Buffy, which had a much more obvious bi (gay? hard to tell for sure) character in a main role, so that wasn't likely his motivation in not mentioning B5. Still, your comments deserve a response.
"The only thing I can think you're referring to is Talia and Ivanova, and that certainly wasn't prominent. To tell the truth it was only hinted at"
You and I must have watched different shows. They slept together (we see Ivanova getting out of Talia's bed), and Talia's rant when she turns is quite specific about sleeping with Ivanova and telling her that she pretended to care for her.
You might consider this "hinting", but to get a sense of Card's reaction, read his rather long essay on the topic of homosexuality. He says, "laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books [...] to be used when necessary to send a clear message [...that open homosexuals...] cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society."
Not exactly someone who is going to say, "well, they're sleeping together, but they might just be friends," IMHO.
"I have a GeForce Ti4800 128mb and it runs all of my games, including doom3 and halflife two just fine. I'm not sure how people even justify the cost to them selves."
First off, not all the world is video games, and in the Windows world, many high-end graphics tools correctly take advantage of extra video RAM.
That said, more video ram directly translates to the ability to render faster at higher resolutions. No increase in performance? Try running an MMORPG with 50+ mobs/characters in front of you in 1280x1024x24 mode. I would be shocked if (even given the lack of a GPU-to-RAM bandwidth change), this card did not perform better than the equivalent card with less RAM.
Buffy was SF from time to time, though overall, it was fantasy. It was *never* hard-SF.
I don't watch Smallville, so I can't say on that count.
If you want to talk about the SF/Fantasy that changed what we expected from episodic TV, then you *must* include Babylon 5. Card didn't which I find interesting. Is he just forgetting, or did he have a problem with B5? Keep in mind that Card is a Mormon and has published his strong feelings about homosexuality (he thinks that laws against homosexuality keep society civil), so I can only imagine how B5's prominent use of a gay relationship struck him... just a guess.
"The demand will scale with the supply, in fact you start running into MORE problems with finding content on a large network, not less."
In THEORY, this is incorrect. I say "in theory" because I don't know this protocol or implementation.
However, the central idea in distributed, anonymous filesharing is to replicate most the bits that are most commonly requested. That is, if you proxy something for someone and 10 other people ask you for it, you leave it lying around. If you proxy somthing once and no one mentions it again, you drop it in favor of other proxied data.
When a network scales up to sufficient size, this SHOULD result in acceptable scaling of popular data, while at least preserving access to less popular data.
You're correct. In fact, there's a decentralized, searchable, swarming-download system that has been in place for years: Gnutella.
Current itterations of Gnutella are very impressive, and if you port-forward UDP and TCP from your firewall, the performance for popular downloads is comparable to BT, but it's the performance of rare and unpopular downloads that makes Gnutella shine. I can leave a search open for something that I saw once, weeks ago, and when someone responds again, my download automatically resumes even though this person had no knowledge of the first person (e.g. no tracker, no database, just a search result with a name and a checksum).
I'm not convinced that this test shows that gcc4 is less effecitve than gcc3, though.
First off, all of the programs tested are programs that use hand-tooled assembly in the most performance-sensitive code. That has to mean that the compiler is moot in those sections.
A better test would be to compare three things: the hand-optimized assembly under gcc 3 vs the C code (usually there's a configure switch that tells the code to ignore the hand-tuned assembly, and use a C equivalent) under gcc4 vs that same C code under gcc4.
I think you'd see a surprising result, and if the vectorization code is good enough, you should even see a small boost over the hand-tuned assembly (since ALL of the code is being optimized this way, not just critical sections).
You can't prove eugenics, any more than you can "prove" chicken soup. First off, let's avoid weighted words like "prove" since that's used only in mainstream media and formal sciences where you can reduce problems to axioms. If you cannot reduce problems to axioms, you must perorm expeiments that support or disprove your theory, but you can never prove it.
You can perform experiments that support the theory that chicken soup, administered orally during illness has certain effects on the immune system, and thus the duration of illness, but that's a seperate thing entirely from "proving chicken soup".
Same deal with eugenics. Eugenics is a science that deals with the application of controled breeding to humans. It is an umbrella for many theories, some of which are well supported and some of which were disproved.
"The earth moving around the Sun is based totally on work by Aristotle"
I assume you mean the sum moving around the earth... and you are correct there. It was Copernicus who contradicted him in the 14th century, and whose theory was accepted in the 15th century.
And Aristotle was a brilliant natural philosopher (arguably the first) and logician, but he was not a scientist in the sense that he did not apply the scientific method (but he was the first to suggest that experimentation should be a requirement of investigation into natural laws... an important first step to be sure).
Thus your claim that science held that the Sun revolved around the Earth for 2000 years is simply wrong. It was the CHURCH and enforced adherence to Aristotle, and the CHURCH that attacked Copernicus and Gallileo for their theories that contradicted Aristotle (and thus church doctrine). The establishment of the scientific method in the 15th century culminated in the general acceptance of its application in the 19th century (with the onset of the industrial revolution).
That period, between the 15th and 19th centuries, was the birth of science, and had its roots in inquiries such as the debate surrounding the Copernican System and church doctrine which it contradicted.
"Your grammar and spelling are possible explained by"
When you saw that you had typed that, you must have turned green... heh. I know how you feel. I post between debugging sessions, so I can't take the time to proof-read as much as I'd like either.
"this: I've been to a number of sermons of differnt christian sects"
And this establishes WHAT exactly?
Go ahead, use that rope... and while you're running it around your neck, please explain to me how the fact that I'm an atheist ties in here.
Ad hominem attacks are rarely useful tools. Try again.
"2nd big problem: I.D. states that life is too complex to have have arisen from less-complex non-living origins. Well what about the "designer?" It must be more complex than the things it designed"
That is not sound logic. A simple though experiment can, in fact, disprove it. Given that we develop time travel later today, we have most of the tools needed to begin guiding an evolutionary process in prehistoric earth, thus being our own designers (this introduces a paradox, but since we can replace the human race in that scenario with an equally capable, but non-human race, we can ignore the paradox for sake of argument).
The assumption that greater complexity is required to produce a given amount of complexity might even be the opposite of the facts. We know that many simple systems can produce vast complexity (the Mandelbrot Set for example).
"Don't forget theses other great scientific theories. Eugenics."
You're way off base here. Eugenics is not a theory, it is a set of methods, conclusions and practices. The theory on which it is based is natural selection. That theory combined with plant and animal breeding practices pointed scientists in the late 1800s (especially Sir Francis Galton) toward the idea that human development could be refined and controled by controling the process of reproduction (esentially breeding humans).
The THEORY here is rock-solid. The PRACTICE would require an unquestionably rational, unbiased and fair nexus of control (for example, one that would not select a racial group for exclusion because they happen to include disproportionate numbers of bankers). As evidenced by eugenics programs from sterilization programs to Nazi Germany, there is simply no way to apply the theories behind eugentics safely in the large, and probably not on a small scale either.
"That all stomach ulcers are caused by stress and no way bacteria could cause it."
Ah, good example! It is, however, a myopic one. The amount of information learned about the human gastric system between 1800 and 1950 is frankly stunning, and nearly all of it has been proven sound time and time again.
Of course, there are areas in which any theory breaks down, and while the system should resist capricious change, it must allow established theories to be modified (or it's not science). This is exactly what happened in the case you cite, and we now not only accept the modified theory, but apply it successfuly to treating disease.
This is one of the problems with I.D. It chooses certain areas in which the theory of the evolution of species is weak, and assumes that that weakness can be generalized to the whole theory. It cannot.
"Even that the earth stands still and the Sun moves around it. That was the scientific thinking for over 2000 years"
The scientific method has not been in use for 2000 years, so there was no "scientific thinking" for most of that period. You meant to say, "popular philosophical theory."
"and watch out what would happen to you if you disagreed with that scientific theory."
Actually, what would happen to you if you disagreed with most established philosophical theories was simple: the CHURCH would attack you. Remember that the sole word on knowledge in the western world between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance WAS the church.
We'll say that in our classrooms when your ministers say "God is a theory, not a fact" on their pulpits.
I've been to a number of sermons of differnt christian sects which have included something along the line of, "you cannot prove the existence of God, only faith can demonstrate His existence to you."
Please feel free to credit me in the new I.D. textbook;-)
Seriously, that's about the weakest attack on I.D. that I've heared, and the K5 article was pretty weak to start.
The article is actually pretty bad. I read it last week, and it makes some sweeping assumptions that it never proves. Most of it is just a rather ugly rant about I.D. until it gets into one software simulation topic, at which point the article switches gears and becomes far more technical (not more methodical, mind you, just more technical).
It seems that the author knew about one specific area of research and set out to write an article that was beyond their capbilities.
Too bad, as I.D. is a deeply flawed effort, but every attack against it that I've seen outside of the highly technical have been arm-waving affairs that can be easily shot down.
Real problems with I.D.:
It applies Occam's Razor in reverse. That is, it starts with a conclusion, and for every complex question resolves that the simplest explanation is not to deviate from the conclusion.
Evolution is not linear. One thing that many people looking at existing species forget is that many of their traits are the result of FAILURES as much as success. An example of this would be marine mammals, which have many structures that are so different from other sea creatures that you could conclude that they could not have evolved naturally. And yet, when you factor in land-mammals the features of sea mammals are easily explained: they are the vesiges of a (as far as marine mammal evolution is concerned) failed attempt to adapt to land.
Evolution and design are seen as radically seperate topics because of the nature of the initial assumptions, and yet the idea that evolution could progress from some initially designed state is equally (im)plausible.
Evolution and natural selection are often conflated incorrectly
These are just thoughts off the top of my head, and I'm sure that there are many other excellent examples.
None the less, it's quite reasonable to use modern examples rather than archaic ones. And to say that 20 years makes an example archaic in the computer industry would seem to be a vast understatement.
Slashdot Mirror
"If MS was to keep a major piece of software in Beta for three or four years (as does Google)"
You're looking at this through a very crooked lens.
Google has some services that they have never released as supported software. So does Microsoft. So does Red Hat.
Can you think of a major company that doesn't?
What's unusual about the Googles and Microsofts and Red Hats of the world is that they actually release, unsupported, a fair amount of software that, though without formal support, is still very useful to people.
So -- and I appologize in advance for being rude -- screw you and your "give me free stuff, and support my every whim" attitude. They'll support what they want when and if they should decide to, and I'm just glad to have use of some amazingly useful software until then.
I don't know anyone involved, but I woudl expect that anyone with sufficient resources (read: major governments) can find out who owns what satellites, and where they are and will be at what times. Based on that you should be able to determine when they will be in a position to see anything useful, and just not leave your bleeping dead aliens lying out in the sun then.
The U.S. federal government also had a strangle-hold on most earth-observing for quite some time, so it's possible that no one got an eye in the sky until very recently that didn't clear their data through "proper channels". This is not really a matter of "conspiracy", so much as just common sense. You don't give up tactical advantages like being the only ones who can see everything without a fair amount of kicking and screaming.
"The Internet ALREADY EXISTED."
No. No it did not, and that's what gets people so upset about this. READ Cerf's account. It's very clear on this point.
"The Internet" is two things. It is a set of protocols and it is an national (international now) infrastructure. Gore "took the lead in creating" that national infrastructure. There was nothing but a small research network, vaguely similar in design to the heart of what we call the Internet today, when Gore got involved in pushing for funding the 70s (though his largest contributions were as a Senetor in the 80s).
Remember that to do this he had to oppose his own party, which was firmly entrenched in the "all products of the DoD are republican tools of evil" mantra. The Internet as you know it today would likely have been a far more private (and therefore balkenized) as well as international effort had Gore not pushed as hard as he did to fund it fully. It was an effort on-par with going to the moon, and yet we try to downplay his accomplishment. Somehow I doubt that if you'd worked on the Net back then that you would be so glib then. Funding was a constant source of concern, and Gore was always there to push for it.
"Vinton Cerf's statement simply highlights the fact that he (VC) happened to be a corporate guy"
Uh... excuse me. Do you have any clue who Cerf is?! This is the guy who actually did INVENT the Internet. He's a VP at MCI because he's one of the technology giants of our age, not because he's a shrewd businesman. "corporate guy" indeed!
"How long has Google Groups been labelled Beta now, two years maybe? How many users does it have?"
So you would have them move it out of beta sooner? Not beta it? What's the solution you're proposing?
Are you saying that software that Google issues in beta should be bug free, or are you suggesting that Google, being a search engine and all, should be scraping all of the Web's most popular forums as their bug reporting mechanism?
I'm really not sure what you're proposing, here.
The last time this topic came up, someone cited this paper by V.C. and the person they were arguing with had the unmitigated gall to say that V.C.'s opinion on the matter was moot!
I was stunned. There is no person who can put a stronger claim on having "invented" the Internet than V.C., and he fully agreed with Gore's statement. How exactly is is opinion on the matter moot?!
Bah, I just have to relax and remember that not all conservatives are this brain dead (just as not all liberals are as brain dead as the extremists can be).
It's really sad that people feel the need to disregard this man's AMAZING contribution to the United States, and its standing in the world.
If not for Al Gore, Congress would have continued to vote against funding anything that came out of the DoD, based solely on party politics. He championed the Internet when it needed the funding to grow from a lab experiment to a national research network, long before most of you were out of diapers!
He TOOK THE INITIATIVE in CREATING the Internet, and I challenge anyone who thinks differently to go create their own network. You'll quickly find that writing RFCs isn't all you need, and without a money man, you have nothing. There is NO other person you can point to who has more of a claim on the title, "the Internet's money man".
He broke with his party in order to make it possible for you to blather on Slashdot, and yet you feel the need to cut him down. Feh!
"A targeted ad may be sold to the consumer on the premise of "an ad for a product that you'll want to watch and are interested in", but I think the reality is a bit darker. To me, targeted ads are a step away from using psychological profiling to sell everyone exactly the same things."
;-)
Sure, and we're already doing that to a large extent. But, I'm not so sure I call that "dark". Truth in advertising is something we should fight for. I really think that there should be a CSPAN-like network that covers ads and refutes their bad claims.
"They'll still be selling viagra, but they'll be doing in such a way as to directly appeal to your individual demographic."
Fine. Go for it. Companies that advertise wastefully will suffer for it. Those that USE profile information correctly will spend less money for more result. If I actually NEEDED Viagra, then I'd be happy to see legit ads for it (and that might kill the profitability for the spammers at the same time).
"Don't think of it as "I can see you're interested in this product, shall I show you who sells these things", but instead think of it as "His personality shows a preference towards the colour blue, green eyed women, long words and Star Trek references.""
Hey, anything that makes these folks learn a few long words can't be all bad, right?
"[ads] that are targeted at somebody else aren't objectionable [Ads] targeted at me personally I find extremely objectionable, offensive even."
I can think of some scenarios in which targetted ads would be a problem (mostly where they would disclose preferences of mine to others), but if I'm going to get an ad anyway, I'd much rather that it be for something that I'd like, and/or presented in a way that I would find apealing.
What's more, I'd like to stop getting ads for viagra (don't need it), Windows products (don't run it), baby clothes (not going to reproduce any time soon), etc. If all of the ads I got were for things I actually gave a rat's petard about, then ads might just start to work again.
"Well, what google is doing is DoubleClick *10^100"
;-)
Wow, I was wondering why my browser was so slow! With that many cookies, I guess I must just be running low on RAM
"Does anyone else remember the days when Slashdot ranted daily"
Yep... I think that was... ah, let me check my watch...
The "Some people on Slashdot ranted about X, thus X has been proved to be useful only for the forces of darkest evil" line of logic isn't really all that sound, you realize.
"everyone's hunkydory with it because they *might* help runner-ups like OpenOffice or Firefox become more popular by morphing them into data collection mechanisms"
No, I'm OK with what Google does because they have a track record of doing the right thing. They support open source projects, they have never disclosed my personal information, they write damned good code, their services continue to benefit the state of the art and my life is a bit more productive because of them.
"Anyway, don't kid yourselves. Google is really an advertisement vendor"
OK.... and? Did you think no one had noticed what their revenue model was?!
"They want this data to build consumer profiles on you"
Targetted advertising is not a problem except in that it's a type of advertising. If you have a problem with ads, targetted ads should be no more objectionable, and at least in my case, they're slightly LESS objectionable.
If Google were to start selling that database to anyone with cash, then I'd be pretty irrate. Google has demonstrated, though, that they are committed to a more reasonable course of action. A lot of people get upset because Google put "Don't be evil," in their S-1, but keep in mind that the standard retort to "they are doing good so far," is that they have an obligation to stockholders and will HAVE to do anything they can to meet that obligation. That's not quite true. For example, if McDonalds got involved in the diamond trade, they might make more money, but they don't HAVE to try to do that because it's not in their business plan, and thus not in their SEC filings.
Google's anti-evil statement in their S-1 is a fair warning to investors (and they go into detail on this in their S-1) that they operate at a disadvantage by applying ethics. This shields them from the obligation to do "whatever it takes" to increase shareholder value. They still have to work on the stockholders' behalf, but only within those parameters.
"and probably governmental profiles too"
Oooh, "governmental"! Sounds spooky. Of course, even you aren't sure what you mean by that, and it's certainly a wild guess.
Jebus... 5 mod points, and I've already replied to this story. Doh!
For the moderators who thought the parent was "redundant": The parent is quite correct. Arguably a troll, and not very well informed, but not at all redundant.
The grandparent *is* linking to a copyrighted work... perhaps. Actually, I'm pretty seriously doubtful that it's real. If it *is* real, I'm very disapointed as it lacks several things:
1. No balance restored to the force (Lucas said point-blank that this was something resolved in ep 3, back when ep 1 came out).
2. Band-aid resolution to the ghost-jedi issue from ep 4-6, and nothing that would justify Obi Wan's comment from 4 ("If you cut me down...")
3. From what I've heard many of the events in the script are in the wrong time sequence.
4. It directly conflicts with other plot summaries on the same site!
In terms of on-and-off screen body count, this movie will dwarf Sin City and Kill Bill (both volumes combined, plus Pulp Fiction just for fun) by orders (plural) of magnitude.
I won't spoil the movie for you, but suffice to say that if there are ANY space battles in the movie, more people die than both of those movies. Of course, you won't see most of the PEOPLE who die thusly....
So, then we switch to on-screen death. Let's see, we know that all of the Jedi have to be gone by Ep 4, right? So, let's assume that we see some fraction of them killed. Of course, in the process we can assume that some stormtroopers get killed. That's probably Kill Bill levels right there.
These are just the obvious deaths that have to happen.
Add in the fact that we know one person gets horribly mutilated.... I think it's safe to say that this one will be bloody.
First off: I'm wrong. He cited Buffy, which had a much more obvious bi (gay? hard to tell for sure) character in a main role, so that wasn't likely his motivation in not mentioning B5. Still, your comments deserve a response.
"The only thing I can think you're referring to is Talia and Ivanova, and that certainly wasn't prominent. To tell the truth it was only hinted at"
You and I must have watched different shows. They slept together (we see Ivanova getting out of Talia's bed), and Talia's rant when she turns is quite specific about sleeping with Ivanova and telling her that she pretended to care for her.
You might consider this "hinting", but to get a sense of Card's reaction, read his rather long essay on the topic of homosexuality. He says, "laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books [...] to be used when necessary to send a clear message [...that open homosexuals...] cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society."
Not exactly someone who is going to say, "well, they're sleeping together, but they might just be friends," IMHO.
"I have a GeForce Ti4800 128mb and it runs all of my games, including doom3 and halflife two just fine. I'm not sure how people even justify the cost to them selves."
First off, not all the world is video games, and in the Windows world, many high-end graphics tools correctly take advantage of extra video RAM.
That said, more video ram directly translates to the ability to render faster at higher resolutions. No increase in performance? Try running an MMORPG with 50+ mobs/characters in front of you in 1280x1024x24 mode. I would be shocked if (even given the lack of a GPU-to-RAM bandwidth change), this card did not perform better than the equivalent card with less RAM.
Buffy was SF from time to time, though overall, it was fantasy. It was *never* hard-SF.
I don't watch Smallville, so I can't say on that count.
If you want to talk about the SF/Fantasy that changed what we expected from episodic TV, then you *must* include Babylon 5. Card didn't which I find interesting. Is he just forgetting, or did he have a problem with B5? Keep in mind that Card is a Mormon and has published his strong feelings about homosexuality (he thinks that laws against homosexuality keep society civil), so I can only imagine how B5's prominent use of a gay relationship struck him... just a guess.
-ftree-vectorize works fine.
"The demand will scale with the supply, in fact you start running into MORE problems with finding content on a large network, not less."
In THEORY, this is incorrect. I say "in theory" because I don't know this protocol or implementation.
However, the central idea in distributed, anonymous filesharing is to replicate most the bits that are most commonly requested. That is, if you proxy something for someone and 10 other people ask you for it, you leave it lying around. If you proxy somthing once and no one mentions it again, you drop it in favor of other proxied data.
When a network scales up to sufficient size, this SHOULD result in acceptable scaling of popular data, while at least preserving access to less popular data.
"This kind of thing is not new"
You're correct. In fact, there's a decentralized, searchable, swarming-download system that has been in place for years: Gnutella.
Current itterations of Gnutella are very impressive, and if you port-forward UDP and TCP from your firewall, the performance for popular downloads is comparable to BT, but it's the performance of rare and unpopular downloads that makes Gnutella shine. I can leave a search open for something that I saw once, weeks ago, and when someone responds again, my download automatically resumes even though this person had no knowledge of the first person (e.g. no tracker, no database, just a search result with a name and a checksum).
I'm not convinced that this test shows that gcc4 is less effecitve than gcc3, though.
First off, all of the programs tested are programs that use hand-tooled assembly in the most performance-sensitive code. That has to mean that the compiler is moot in those sections.
A better test would be to compare three things: the hand-optimized assembly under gcc 3 vs the C code (usually there's a configure switch that tells the code to ignore the hand-tuned assembly, and use a C equivalent) under gcc4 vs that same C code under gcc4.
I think you'd see a surprising result, and if the vectorization code is good enough, you should even see a small boost over the hand-tuned assembly (since ALL of the code is being optimized this way, not just critical sections).
"Eugenics [...] had been proven"
You can't prove eugenics, any more than you can "prove" chicken soup. First off, let's avoid weighted words like "prove" since that's used only in mainstream media and formal sciences where you can reduce problems to axioms. If you cannot reduce problems to axioms, you must perorm expeiments that support or disprove your theory, but you can never prove it.
You can perform experiments that support the theory that chicken soup, administered orally during illness has certain effects on the immune system, and thus the duration of illness, but that's a seperate thing entirely from "proving chicken soup".
Same deal with eugenics. Eugenics is a science that deals with the application of controled breeding to humans. It is an umbrella for many theories, some of which are well supported and some of which were disproved.
"The earth moving around the Sun is based totally on work by Aristotle"
I assume you mean the sum moving around the earth... and you are correct there. It was Copernicus who contradicted him in the 14th century, and whose theory was accepted in the 15th century.
And Aristotle was a brilliant natural philosopher (arguably the first) and logician, but he was not a scientist in the sense that he did not apply the scientific method (but he was the first to suggest that experimentation should be a requirement of investigation into natural laws... an important first step to be sure).
Thus your claim that science held that the Sun revolved around the Earth for 2000 years is simply wrong. It was the CHURCH and enforced adherence to Aristotle, and the CHURCH that attacked Copernicus and Gallileo for their theories that contradicted Aristotle (and thus church doctrine). The establishment of the scientific method in the 15th century culminated in the general acceptance of its application in the 19th century (with the onset of the industrial revolution).
That period, between the 15th and 19th centuries, was the birth of science, and had its roots in inquiries such as the debate surrounding the Copernican System and church doctrine which it contradicted.
"Your grammar and spelling are possible explained by"
When you saw that you had typed that, you must have turned green... heh. I know how you feel. I post between debugging sessions, so I can't take the time to proof-read as much as I'd like either.
"this: I've been to a number of sermons of differnt christian sects"
And this establishes WHAT exactly?
Go ahead, use that rope... and while you're running it around your neck, please explain to me how the fact that I'm an atheist ties in here.
Ad hominem attacks are rarely useful tools. Try again.
"2nd big problem: I.D. states that life is too complex to have have arisen from less-complex non-living origins. Well what about the "designer?" It must be more complex than the things it designed"
That is not sound logic. A simple though experiment can, in fact, disprove it. Given that we develop time travel later today, we have most of the tools needed to begin guiding an evolutionary process in prehistoric earth, thus being our own designers (this introduces a paradox, but since we can replace the human race in that scenario with an equally capable, but non-human race, we can ignore the paradox for sake of argument).
The assumption that greater complexity is required to produce a given amount of complexity might even be the opposite of the facts. We know that many simple systems can produce vast complexity (the Mandelbrot Set for example).
"Don't forget theses other great scientific theories.
Eugenics."
You're way off base here. Eugenics is not a theory, it is a set of methods, conclusions and practices. The theory on which it is based is natural selection. That theory combined with plant and animal breeding practices pointed scientists in the late 1800s (especially Sir Francis Galton) toward the idea that human development could be refined and controled by controling the process of reproduction (esentially breeding humans).
The THEORY here is rock-solid. The PRACTICE would require an unquestionably rational, unbiased and fair nexus of control (for example, one that would not select a racial group for exclusion because they happen to include disproportionate numbers of bankers). As evidenced by eugenics programs from sterilization programs to Nazi Germany, there is simply no way to apply the theories behind eugentics safely in the large, and probably not on a small scale either.
"That all stomach ulcers are caused by stress and no way bacteria could cause it."
Ah, good example! It is, however, a myopic one. The amount of information learned about the human gastric system between 1800 and 1950 is frankly stunning, and nearly all of it has been proven sound time and time again.
Of course, there are areas in which any theory breaks down, and while the system should resist capricious change, it must allow established theories to be modified (or it's not science). This is exactly what happened in the case you cite, and we now not only accept the modified theory, but apply it successfuly to treating disease.
This is one of the problems with I.D. It chooses certain areas in which the theory of the evolution of species is weak, and assumes that that weakness can be generalized to the whole theory. It cannot.
"Even that the earth stands still and the Sun moves around it. That was the scientific thinking for over 2000 years"
The scientific method has not been in use for 2000 years, so there was no "scientific thinking" for most of that period. You meant to say, "popular philosophical theory."
"and watch out what would happen to you if you disagreed with that scientific theory."
Actually, what would happen to you if you disagreed with most established philosophical theories was simple: the CHURCH would attack you. Remember that the sole word on knowledge in the western world between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance WAS the church.
We'll say that in our classrooms when your ministers say "God is a theory, not a fact" on their pulpits.
;-)
I've been to a number of sermons of differnt christian sects which have included something along the line of, "you cannot prove the existence of God, only faith can demonstrate His existence to you."
Please feel free to credit me in the new I.D. textbook
Seriously, that's about the weakest attack on I.D. that I've heared, and the K5 article was pretty weak to start.
It seems that the author knew about one specific area of research and set out to write an article that was beyond their capbilities.
Too bad, as I.D. is a deeply flawed effort, but every attack against it that I've seen outside of the highly technical have been arm-waving affairs that can be easily shot down.
Real problems with I.D.:
- It applies Occam's Razor in reverse. That is, it starts with a conclusion, and for every complex question resolves that the simplest explanation is not to deviate from the conclusion.
- Evolution is not linear. One thing that many people looking at existing species forget is that many of their traits are the result of FAILURES as much as success. An example of this would be marine mammals, which have many structures that are so different from other sea creatures that you could conclude that they could not have evolved naturally. And yet, when you factor in land-mammals the features of sea mammals are easily explained: they are the vesiges of a (as far as marine mammal evolution is concerned) failed attempt to adapt to land.
- Evolution and design are seen as radically seperate topics because of the nature of the initial assumptions, and yet the idea that evolution could progress from some initially designed state is equally (im)plausible.
- Evolution and natural selection are often conflated incorrectly
These are just thoughts off the top of my head, and I'm sure that there are many other excellent examples.None the less, it's quite reasonable to use modern examples rather than archaic ones. And to say that 20 years makes an example archaic in the computer industry would seem to be a vast understatement.