Especially since, to put it into tactical momentary, you have to do like 15 flashes... rather silly, considering the whole point of tactical momentary being to keep the light on for the least amount of time (i.e. to not give away your position). Granted, if you need tactical momentary, one would hope that you would have enabled it before you left, but you can't always know when you're going to need to hide.
..and you are out. These two and three strikes and you get life laws that a lot of states have now have upped the ultraviolence potential of muggers, house burglars, car jackers, etc....
Of course, there's option #5 a lot of us have now, it's called being armed and trained and ready to use it. Works a charm in a lot of situations.
Ya know, if the problem is that the three strikes laws have upped the violence of the perpetrators, wouldn't it make more sense to repeal the three strikes laws, rather than turning our society into an armed camp? How does increasing the potential for lethal violence (by increasing the number of weapons on the street), whether in self defense or not, gain us anything in actual security and peace of mind? Now, not only do we have to worry about muggers and what not, but we might also end up caught in the crossfire of some other crime gone bad. Sure, having a weapon might increase your personal safety, but I would argue that it decreases the average personal safety, because of the increased risk of accidental shootings.
Why don't we work on fixing the root causes of the violence rather than coming up with more ways for us to justify killing one another?
Something I've always wondered about is whether very professional organizations (e.g. NASA) operate in the same way as software developers. Because when someone involved in Software says to the press, "We're prepared for launch," it usually means something a little different.
Not for all software organizations... just the ones that don't build critical systems. There are methods for building software that either doesn't contain bugs, or handles bugs gracefully... the problem is that they're extremely expensive (i.e. they take a lot of time) and only really work on systems that are extremely well understood.
Most software that people are aware of using doesn't fall into the critical category... generally, it's ok for it to have a few bugs, as long as it's cheap. The problem comes when people start using software that was never meant to be used in a critical system (e.g. Windows) in systems that are really critical systems (e.g. warships).
What has to be done when establishing a software product is to define what an acceptable number of defects is and what an acceptable recovery time for failures is, and then hit those targets. There are statistical methods for determining what percentage of defects have been removed (defect seeding) as well as methods for ensuring they don't get there in the first place (structured walkthroughs, formal methods). Again, these methods cost money and time, so you only want to apply a level of rigor that's necessary to meet your quality goals.
In the case of NASA, for their critical (read life-risking) systems, they will accept 0 bugs. And so their process reflects that. Granted, that's just one small group at NASA, but if they know how to do it anywhere, then, where it's necessary, they can do it for other projects as well.
And you probably either are using far more disk space than you should be (because the tables aren't normalized properly) or you have far more code than you should (because you have to work around the fact that the database won't do it for you).
Granted, I've written code for MySQL and PHP, and it doesn't use those things either, but I've also seen where my life would be much easier if they were there... for example, replacing a complicated query with a lot of joins with a view that did the same thing, so that from the point of view of the application, my nice, normalized database design was really one flat table. Or replacing an insert that took several queries with a stored procedure that did the same thing in one precompiled query. Or deleting an entry in one table, and through foriegn keys, having all the related entries deleted automatically. So, just because you have managed to not use them up 'til now, doesn't make them useless.
Most of the time when people think they don't need something, it's because they've been working around its absence for so long, they have no idea how it would make their lives easier. I would recommend you actually learn a little about databases before trying to argue about what features are needed in an RDBMS. At the very least, learn the definitions. Otherwise making an argument that 99% of the time people don't need these features makes you look like a fool. And the MySQL fanboys who make these inane and worthless arguments really irritate me.
Some of the stuff you pointed out was cool, some of it was pretty weak (the third website? Please.
Actually, considering what the Internet was like at that time, it really is impressive. Were you even around when the Web was young? (To be fair, I wasn't exactly there at the start, either... but I was close...) It was pretty revolutionary, so anyone putting up a web site at the time was doing pioneering work.
And server farms are a staightforward concept that was/is being developed at lots of different places). Not much there to do with super-theoretical physics.
Except the ability to build better and better simulations of what happens at the subatomic level.
I'm all for spending money on medicine, superconductors (although I'm not sure the practical applications go much beyond MRIs in the near term), etc.
Superefficient power transmission? High-speed transportation? High speed communications?
But I question the value of spending lots of money on developing "brane" theory and trying to figure out why the universe is too massive.
Because chalk and blackboards are so expensive. You do realize that most of the research on brane theory is really just sitting around thinking about the equations right? Sure, there are experiments run to verify it, but most of the work is done on paper. Or on one of those compute farms you didn't think Fermilab was instrumental in designing. In addition, understanding things like "why the universe is too massive" is important, because it informs us about how the universe works, which potentially allows us to do things that were never done before. If Einstein hadn't thought about the photoelectric effect, we probably wouldn't have modern electronics. Yet at the time, it wasn't a problem with any kind of real application.
I'm not a luddite - I do see value in basic research. But it's not a religion for me - as a taxpayer (and I do pay a hell of a lot of taxes) I want to be sure my tax dollars are spent efficiently. Even in physics there are lots of places to put research dollars (ITER, for example).
But since we don't know what might become possible due to basic research, the most efficient use of basic research money really is a scattergun approach to follow as many paths as possible. Sure, some will be deadends, but there's no way of knowing which ones those are at the start. Simply because something may have a known application if successful, won't make it any more possible, so if you divert funds towards a project that you think is more practical and it turns out impossible, you've lost precious resources that could have been spent on something that would have returned some results you never thought of.
Also, the idea every dollar that goes to the military is a dollar lost to science is a logical falacy. We can afford to fund both if the payoff is clear.
And the payoff of blowing people up is? Besides which, even if we can fund both, how would reducing spending on the military not make more funding for science potentially available? Granted, we still might not choose to make that investment, but the argument that every dollar spent on blowing people up is a dollar lost to spending on more worthwhile causes including basic research is certainly valid.
The scientific community has been doing a really lousy job selling the benefits of its research to the people that matter, and I can't figure out if the problem is the sales job or the product.
I'm pretty sure it's the sales job. It's really hard to sell something that may not even be finished in your own lifetime to politicians who can't really see much further than their next election. The only real way to fix it is to get rid of the politicians. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lack of better options.
No, you would receive a notification (a header) using a conventional transport. A header would specify where to load a message from. It's somewhat like when you configure your POP3 MUA today to auto-load headers only. The difference is that the body of a message will be stored remotely - by a sender.
This design is not without issues - when a sending server is allowed to erase the body of a message? - but SPAM-wise it's near perfect, IMHO.
Well, that's better than polling, at least. It does start to sound better if you're getting a notification (and to be honest, I really had assumed this was the case, but the linked description made no mention of it, or at least was unclear). But I still think the lack of hierarchy makes it fairly difficult to scale, especially since now legitimate bulk mailings (mailing lists, etc.) can no longer efficiently send to multiple subscribers in the same domain by just adding recipients to single copy of a message. The sender would be forced to send the whole message multiple times, which would waste a significant amount of bandwidth. Though I suppose you would save bandwidth from the people who wouldn't read the message, but there would still be a tremendous amount of waste. But I do see some definite benefits to this design--nonrepudiation of delivery and real return receipts would be possible with this system, since the sender would get a confirmation that the recipient had retrieved the message.
I suppose part of the reason that spam is such a problem is the fact that SMTP is fairly good at scaling up. I would hate to think the only way to solve the spam problem would be to get rid of that scalability.
The main problem I see with this kind of design is that it doesn't seem very scalable. How do you receive mail from someone you've never received mail from before? Not all unsolicited email is unwanted email. How do you know if someone has sent you an email? Do you have to poll all the possible senders? That seems like an awful waste of bandwidth. The nice thing about SMTP is that it's hierarchical... it makes scaling the system much easier.
IM2000 sounds like it'd work fine on a small intranet, but seems pretty much useless on a large scale network.
Check out GOMS and KLM modeling. Look at the execution times for the primitive operators. As another poster said, the majority of the delay in a user interface is from thinking activities, such as visual search and method recall. And before you bash this stuff as only theoretical, try actually modeling a task you've already done, and then timing it while a user performs the task. You'll find that the numbers come pretty close.
There's a good reason there haven't been any real changes in user input devices for 50 years... it's because what we have works very well. You don't invent something new just to invent something new... you invent something new to solve a problem. And honestly, the user interface problem is more one of design, not devices. The real problem is that few people are taught techniques like GOMS and KLM, and even fewer use them. Most people's idea of a "user-friendly" interface is the one that looks the prettiest.
The only thing that's going to really improve user interface speeds is a direct neural interface of some sort, and I don't think it'll really speed things up that much for normally abled people, unless it's coupled with a really good predictive AI that can guess where the user is going next, and do it before the user thinks of it, because it's still going to be the mental operators that slow things down.
Christianity is a belief system. Plain and simple. Like was said elsewhere in this discussion, you can adopt it as a lifestyle, but it's not necessary. You are expected to, but if you're saved, you're saved. Think of the theif on the cross, all he had was belief in God, and he was told he would be in heaven that day. He had no lifestyle that would be considered Christian.
And how does one become saved? The thief on the cross did not live a Christian lifestyle before he was saved, but was saved when he repented and accepted the teachings of Christ. Had he not died immediately thereafter, he would have then needed to renew his pledge to Christ by living a Christian lifestyle. If you don't live your life according to Christ, you are in effect rejecting him every time you stray. Fortunately, the Christian God is a God of forgiveness, so even though you may stray from the paths of righteousness, you can still be saved if you repent. Then again, I was raised Catholic, so I don't know what the Protestants think about that... my understanding of some of the sects is just what you said, once you're saved, you have a get out of jail free card and can pretty much do whatever you want. Of course, I've heard that the Protestants feel the same way about the Catholics:)
placing weight on the OT is bad? o.O Christ also said he wasn't here to destroy the old laws, but rather to amend them.
What is wrong is placing an emphasis on the OT over the teachings of Christ. When Christ came to amend the old laws, he did so by teaching that God is a God of Love, not Vengeance. While I agree that the OT is important as a way of explaining much of what Christ says, it is His teachings that should carry the most weight.
And he did preach against the hypocrites who wore massive robes, struted down the street, had fan-fair blown in public places to announce they were praying. Against those who took the bible and twisted it for their own profit, and used the bible to oppress the common folk.
You mean like fundamentalist Christians who profess their faith on TV, and try to push their agenda onto others? Whereas Christ said "By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." Again, most modern Christians fail to convince me that they are truly doing the work of Christ.
And Christianity is not a lifestyle. It is a belief system.
hmmm... what I was taught was that Christianity was a lifestyle. You are supposed to give your life over to Christ, and worship him through your thoughts and your deeds.
Actually, based on my reading of the Bible, most of what Christians do is fairly un-Christian. First of all, most of the fundamentalists I've spoken to seem to give an awful lot of weight to the Old Testament... but didn't Christ say he had come to create a "new Covenant", to take the place of the old? And didn't he preach against the hypocrites and their shows of religion, saying "Be careful not to do your 'acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven."? Of course now someone will say something about how even the Devil can quote scripture if it suits his purpose.
I believe you are referring to Terri Schiavo, a tragic case.
That's the one. Though I wouldn't call it tragic. Unfortunate, yes, but far too common to be called a tragedy. Tragedy is an often overused word these days.
Congress has subpoenaed her to appear, simply meaning that they can't kill her (no law has been passed).
Under what standing do they have the right to subpoena her? This is strictly a state matter whether you agree with the state court's decision or not. The US Congress simply does not (legally) have the power to intervene.
Oh, and she's not on life support. She's disabled to the point where she can't swallow, but they haven't tried therapies that may help - her husband won't pay for them. She can respond somewhat, and she has responded negatively when asked if she wants her feeding tube removed.
I wasn't aware of those details. But then I haven't really been following the story that closely. Actually I wasn't following it at all until Congress started overstepping the limitation of its powers.
The state courts in Florida are intent on helping her husband to kill her.
While (based on the information you've given at any rate) I would have to agree that removing the feeding tube may not be the morally correct action, if the state court has ruled it legal, then that's the end of it unless the Supreme Court were to choose to take the case. My real point is not about whether its right or wrong for the feeding tube to be removed, but whether the US Congress has any say in the matter, which it doesn't.
That's not the only way they're wasting time lately... there's also the case of that woman in Florida (I forget her name, and I'm too lazy to look it up) that they were going to take off life support (according to her doctors, she's in an irrecoverable coma) until Congress somehow thought they had the power to intervene. Now both the House and Senate are considering bills to prevent the doctors from removing the woman's feeding tube and letting her die in peace... one of them (the House's, I think) is a law written specifically for this case... my understanding is that it's limited specifically to this woman! I'm just really confused by the whole situation. Since the issue seems to me to be 100% in the state's jurisdiction, I don't understand why Congress thinks they can pass _any_ kind of law concerning it.
What's really sad is that here, at a school (University of Michigan--Dearborn) that was founded specifically to train engineers for the Big 3 (Ford especially... they put up most of the original money for the University and granted the land to build it), we don't have a DARPA Grand Challenge team. In fact, nobody around here seems to have even heard of it. Instead, our big project from the Auto Companies is GM's ChallengeX--a competition to turn an existing vehicle into a hybrid. Exciting. Or rather it would have been 5 years ago, before somebody else did it!.
I think my Software Engineering professor had the best restatement of Murphy's law I've heard yet:
"If you're depending on luck for things to go right, you won't get it."
In other words, if you don't plan for failures, they'll happen because you won't be able to see them coming and mitigate them before they become problems.
The reason you should be thanking an English teacher is because if what he wrote was intelligible (i.e. it had proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling) then most likely that intelligibility was the result of careful training by a good English teacher. It made perfect sense to me.
I had a very similar idea recently when trying to come up with a way to rationalize my contradictory feelings on the whole outsourcing phenomenon. On the whole, I think free trade is an important part of encouraging freedom and conquering poverty. But allowing completely free trade simply forces us to race to the bottom so that everyone lives in poverty. Protectionism, on the other hand, prevents any redistribution of wealth from the wealthy countries to the poorer ones, and so creates a huge gap between the two. Not to mention the fact that outsourcing happening to me is a bad thing:)
So my idea was this: free trade cannot be completely unrestricted, and we can't block trade completely. But we can work to level the playing field so that the cost is not really part of the equation. So, if your company employs foreign workers at a percentage x% below the median US cost for the same work, you will be taxed y% on the difference. Now, since the whole point of these taxes is to even up the playing field, it's not fair for our government to spend the money on us, so the funds are ear-marked for the foreign aid budget (ideally for the country involved, though that would probably add a little too much bureaucracy), and can't be spent on anything else.
I haven't really given much thought to the percentages... I'm a software engineer, not an economist:) But I definitely agree that companies who offshore to countries where the workers are exploited should be penalized for doing so.
Most foreigners comming to teh USA, STAY. They don't go home and draw your money and your knowledge outside.
Only if Bush & Co. let them. I have an acquaintance (friend of a friend) whose visa was pulled for no apparent reason, who had been in the country legally and definitely contributing to society (he's a highly skilled worker). Rather than fight his de facto deportation, he simply moved back to India, where I hear he is doing quite well. In addition, I attend a university with an extremely large number of foreign students (I don't know the numbers, but I have yet to have a class that didn't have a significant number of them) and many of those with whom I have spoken are eager to return to their home countries when they graduate. But that's not a scientific poll or anything:)
Workd economists just call the behavior of the USA to draw bright people from second world countries imperialism.
Wow. I didn't know we were kidnapping them and forcing to come to our schools. I didn't know we were forcing their governments not to develop effective education systems rather than taking the money for themselves. Imperialism implies some form of coercion. While I certainly don't think America is perfect, providing these students with a quality education is one of the good things we do. The only silver bullet in this world is education. High-quality education should be available to all that seek it, and everyone should be encouraged to take advantage of it. Education is the only way to erase all the bigotry, hatred, and anger that keeps us trying to kill each other.
The fact that economies in China, Indonesia India etc. is growing slow is mainly based on the fact theat the people there lack money to start business and go to USA.
Ummm, since when are those economies growing slowly? China's growth has averaged 9.9% every year since 1983. That means they're doubling the size of their economy every seven years! While Indonesia and India haven't experienced the same dramatic growth as China, they've grown at respectable rates of 4.9% and 6.9% respectively. For comparison, average growth for the US economy since 1983 (I couldn't find earlier data) has been 3.5%. So I don't think there's any way that the economic growth of these three countries can be called slow. Sure, many parts of those countries are well below the standard of living in the US, but they started further down on that ladder.
Then you go and patent the inventions those foreigners make, because you claim they did it with your money.
If they created it using the facilities provided by a US research university, they did. If they created it under the employ of a US corporation they did. The only way they didn't use US money to invent something is if they built their lab themselves. At which point, they're probably among those foreigners that will stay, since they have a capital investment in the US, so it's still US money.
All in all, I don't really see where you've made any valid points in this post. Let's try to keep the America hating to valid reasons please, like our overaggressive foreign policy. Let's not hate America for the things we do right, ok?
Yes. Because apparently you wouldn't know acting talent if it slapped you in the face (though you are correct about Tim Burton's talent, so you're not a total moron, just ill-informed).
Johnny Depp is easily one of the best actors in film today, and I have enormous respect for him. He has a great grasp of the acting craft, and seems to have an excellent understanding of the motivations of his characters, and time and time again brings them to life realistically and with a depth and subtlety that few other actors seem able to achieve.
I do agree with you on Leonardo DiCaprio, though... he truly is a talentless hack.
Of course, you are completely missing the point entirely. The fact of the matter is, morality is not intrinsically tied to religion. There can be morality without the threat of divine damnation. Moral actions are moral independent of the consequences (though often consequences play a large role when things aren't quite so black and white). Unfortunately, most religious fundamentalists, be they Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, or even Pagan, seem to think they have a monopoly on moral theory, and fail to realize that, for the most part, they're all the same. What really matters are the deeper truths of the religion--to quote the New Testament (it's the religious work with which I'm most familiar... I'm sure equivalents can be found in other texts) "Love thy neighbor as thyself". What better way is there to summarize all of morality? Of course the Devil's in the details.
If we accept that the core of all morality is something along the lines of "Love thy neighbor as thyself," then certainly it becomes obvious that morality and atheism are not incompatible. Simply because someone has come to the conclusion that there are no gods pulling the cosmic strings, it does not follow that that person can no longer love his neighbor. In fact, I would consider many of the athiests I know to be more moral than your average religious fundamentalist--they don't have the extra baggage of "my Way is the One True Path" and can concentrate on simply living morally.
The one thing about the US that truly frightens me now is how the right-wing has coopted morality to mean only fundamentalist Christian morality, especially "sexual" morality. Not only has the right wing completely redefined morality to a narrower, less useful definition, it is using the new limited definition to justify its own immorality in its increasing restriction of fundamental human rights. The litmus test for law has gone from "Does this law protect the rights of the people?" to "Does this law enforce 'good moral values?'" I think that this situation is extremely dangerous, and does not bode well for the American Experiment.
He's driving traffic to his blog to increase ad revenue and his reputation (he's now working as a professional blogging consultant)
Ok, someone enlighten me. WTF does a professional blogging consultant do? Show you the proper way to whine about your pathetic life and get people to read it and boost your ego? Or have blogs evolved in some way I haven't noticed?
Slashdot Mirror
What the hell did I just watch? Actually, it was a pretty cool performance piece, but damn.
Especially since, to put it into tactical momentary, you have to do like 15 flashes... rather silly, considering the whole point of tactical momentary being to keep the light on for the least amount of time (i.e. to not give away your position). Granted, if you need tactical momentary, one would hope that you would have enabled it before you left, but you can't always know when you're going to need to hide.
..and you are out. These two and three strikes and you get life laws that a lot of states have now have upped the ultraviolence potential of muggers, house burglars, car jackers, etc. ...
Of course, there's option #5 a lot of us have now, it's called being armed and trained and ready to use it. Works a charm in a lot of situations.
Ya know, if the problem is that the three strikes laws have upped the violence of the perpetrators, wouldn't it make more sense to repeal the three strikes laws, rather than turning our society into an armed camp? How does increasing the potential for lethal violence (by increasing the number of weapons on the street), whether in self defense or not, gain us anything in actual security and peace of mind? Now, not only do we have to worry about muggers and what not, but we might also end up caught in the crossfire of some other crime gone bad. Sure, having a weapon might increase your personal safety, but I would argue that it decreases the average personal safety, because of the increased risk of accidental shootings.
Why don't we work on fixing the root causes of the violence rather than coming up with more ways for us to justify killing one another?
Something I've always wondered about is whether very professional organizations (e.g. NASA) operate in the same way as software developers. Because when someone involved in Software says to the press, "We're prepared for launch," it usually means something a little different.
Not for all software organizations... just the ones that don't build critical systems. There are methods for building software that either doesn't contain bugs, or handles bugs gracefully... the problem is that they're extremely expensive (i.e. they take a lot of time) and only really work on systems that are extremely well understood.
Most software that people are aware of using doesn't fall into the critical category... generally, it's ok for it to have a few bugs, as long as it's cheap. The problem comes when people start using software that was never meant to be used in a critical system (e.g. Windows) in systems that are really critical systems (e.g. warships).
What has to be done when establishing a software product is to define what an acceptable number of defects is and what an acceptable recovery time for failures is, and then hit those targets. There are statistical methods for determining what percentage of defects have been removed (defect seeding) as well as methods for ensuring they don't get there in the first place (structured walkthroughs, formal methods). Again, these methods cost money and time, so you only want to apply a level of rigor that's necessary to meet your quality goals.
In the case of NASA, for their critical (read life-risking) systems, they will accept 0 bugs. And so their process reflects that. Granted, that's just one small group at NASA, but if they know how to do it anywhere, then, where it's necessary, they can do it for other projects as well.
And you probably either are using far more disk space than you should be (because the tables aren't normalized properly) or you have far more code than you should (because you have to work around the fact that the database won't do it for you).
Granted, I've written code for MySQL and PHP, and it doesn't use those things either, but I've also seen where my life would be much easier if they were there... for example, replacing a complicated query with a lot of joins with a view that did the same thing, so that from the point of view of the application, my nice, normalized database design was really one flat table. Or replacing an insert that took several queries with a stored procedure that did the same thing in one precompiled query. Or deleting an entry in one table, and through foriegn keys, having all the related entries deleted automatically. So, just because you have managed to not use them up 'til now, doesn't make them useless.
Most of the time when people think they don't need something, it's because they've been working around its absence for so long, they have no idea how it would make their lives easier. I would recommend you actually learn a little about databases before trying to argue about what features are needed in an RDBMS. At the very least, learn the definitions. Otherwise making an argument that 99% of the time people don't need these features makes you look like a fool. And the MySQL fanboys who make these inane and worthless arguments really irritate me.
Some of the stuff you pointed out was cool, some of it was pretty weak (the third website? Please.
Actually, considering what the Internet was like at that time, it really is impressive. Were you even around when the Web was young? (To be fair, I wasn't exactly there at the start, either... but I was close...) It was pretty revolutionary, so anyone putting up a web site at the time was doing pioneering work.
And server farms are a staightforward concept that was/is being developed at lots of different places). Not much there to do with super-theoretical physics.
Except the ability to build better and better simulations of what happens at the subatomic level.
I'm all for spending money on medicine, superconductors (although I'm not sure the practical applications go much beyond MRIs in the near term), etc.
Superefficient power transmission? High-speed transportation? High speed communications?
But I question the value of spending lots of money on developing "brane" theory and trying to figure out why the universe is too massive.
Because chalk and blackboards are so expensive. You do realize that most of the research on brane theory is really just sitting around thinking about the equations right? Sure, there are experiments run to verify it, but most of the work is done on paper. Or on one of those compute farms you didn't think Fermilab was instrumental in designing. In addition, understanding things like "why the universe is too massive" is important, because it informs us about how the universe works, which potentially allows us to do things that were never done before. If Einstein hadn't thought about the photoelectric effect, we probably wouldn't have modern electronics. Yet at the time, it wasn't a problem with any kind of real application.
I'm not a luddite - I do see value in basic research. But it's not a religion for me - as a taxpayer (and I do pay a hell of a lot of taxes) I want to be sure my tax dollars are spent efficiently. Even in physics there are lots of places to put research dollars (ITER, for example).
But since we don't know what might become possible due to basic research, the most efficient use of basic research money really is a scattergun approach to follow as many paths as possible. Sure, some will be deadends, but there's no way of knowing which ones those are at the start. Simply because something may have a known application if successful, won't make it any more possible, so if you divert funds towards a project that you think is more practical and it turns out impossible, you've lost precious resources that could have been spent on something that would have returned some results you never thought of.
Also, the idea every dollar that goes to the military is a dollar lost to science is a logical falacy. We can afford to fund both if the payoff is clear.
And the payoff of blowing people up is? Besides which, even if we can fund both, how would reducing spending on the military not make more funding for science potentially available? Granted, we still might not choose to make that investment, but the argument that every dollar spent on blowing people up is a dollar lost to spending on more worthwhile causes including basic research is certainly valid.
The scientific community has been doing a really lousy job selling the benefits of its research to the people that matter, and I can't figure out if the problem is the sales job or the product.
I'm pretty sure it's the sales job. It's really hard to sell something that may not even be finished in your own lifetime to politicians who can't really see much further than their next election. The only real way to fix it is to get rid of the politicians. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lack of better options.
No, you would receive a notification (a header) using a conventional transport. A header would specify where to load a message from. It's somewhat like when you configure your POP3 MUA today to auto-load headers only. The difference is that the body of a message will be stored remotely - by a sender.
This design is not without issues - when a sending server is allowed to erase the body of a message? - but SPAM-wise it's near perfect, IMHO.
Well, that's better than polling, at least. It does start to sound better if you're getting a notification (and to be honest, I really had assumed this was the case, but the linked description made no mention of it, or at least was unclear). But I still think the lack of hierarchy makes it fairly difficult to scale, especially since now legitimate bulk mailings (mailing lists, etc.) can no longer efficiently send to multiple subscribers in the same domain by just adding recipients to single copy of a message. The sender would be forced to send the whole message multiple times, which would waste a significant amount of bandwidth. Though I suppose you would save bandwidth from the people who wouldn't read the message, but there would still be a tremendous amount of waste. But I do see some definite benefits to this design--nonrepudiation of delivery and real return receipts would be possible with this system, since the sender would get a confirmation that the recipient had retrieved the message.
I suppose part of the reason that spam is such a problem is the fact that SMTP is fairly good at scaling up. I would hate to think the only way to solve the spam problem would be to get rid of that scalability.
The main problem I see with this kind of design is that it doesn't seem very scalable. How do you receive mail from someone you've never received mail from before? Not all unsolicited email is unwanted email. How do you know if someone has sent you an email? Do you have to poll all the possible senders? That seems like an awful waste of bandwidth. The nice thing about SMTP is that it's hierarchical... it makes scaling the system much easier.
IM2000 sounds like it'd work fine on a small intranet, but seems pretty much useless on a large scale network.
Check out GOMS and KLM modeling. Look at the execution times for the primitive operators. As another poster said, the majority of the delay in a user interface is from thinking activities, such as visual search and method recall. And before you bash this stuff as only theoretical, try actually modeling a task you've already done, and then timing it while a user performs the task. You'll find that the numbers come pretty close.
There's a good reason there haven't been any real changes in user input devices for 50 years... it's because what we have works very well. You don't invent something new just to invent something new... you invent something new to solve a problem. And honestly, the user interface problem is more one of design, not devices. The real problem is that few people are taught techniques like GOMS and KLM, and even fewer use them. Most people's idea of a "user-friendly" interface is the one that looks the prettiest.
The only thing that's going to really improve user interface speeds is a direct neural interface of some sort, and I don't think it'll really speed things up that much for normally abled people, unless it's coupled with a really good predictive AI that can guess where the user is going next, and do it before the user thinks of it, because it's still going to be the mental operators that slow things down.
Christianity is a belief system. Plain and simple. Like was said elsewhere in this discussion, you can adopt it as a lifestyle, but it's not necessary. You are expected to, but if you're saved, you're saved. Think of the theif on the cross, all he had was belief in God, and he was told he would be in heaven that day. He had no lifestyle that would be considered Christian.
And how does one become saved? The thief on the cross did not live a Christian lifestyle before he was saved, but was saved when he repented and accepted the teachings of Christ. Had he not died immediately thereafter, he would have then needed to renew his pledge to Christ by living a Christian lifestyle. If you don't live your life according to Christ, you are in effect rejecting him every time you stray. Fortunately, the Christian God is a God of forgiveness, so even though you may stray from the paths of righteousness, you can still be saved if you repent. Then again, I was raised Catholic, so I don't know what the Protestants think about that... my understanding of some of the sects is just what you said, once you're saved, you have a get out of jail free card and can pretty much do whatever you want. Of course, I've heard that the Protestants feel the same way about the Catholics:)
placing weight on the OT is bad? o.O Christ also said he wasn't here to destroy the old laws, but rather to amend them.
What is wrong is placing an emphasis on the OT over the teachings of Christ. When Christ came to amend the old laws, he did so by teaching that God is a God of Love, not Vengeance. While I agree that the OT is important as a way of explaining much of what Christ says, it is His teachings that should carry the most weight.
And he did preach against the hypocrites who wore massive robes, struted down the street, had fan-fair blown in public places to announce they were praying. Against those who took the bible and twisted it for their own profit, and used the bible to oppress the common folk.
You mean like fundamentalist Christians who profess their faith on TV, and try to push their agenda onto others? Whereas Christ said "By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." Again, most modern Christians fail to convince me that they are truly doing the work of Christ.
And Christianity is not a lifestyle. It is a belief system.
hmmm... what I was taught was that Christianity was a lifestyle. You are supposed to give your life over to Christ, and worship him through your thoughts and your deeds.
Actually, based on my reading of the Bible, most of what Christians do is fairly un-Christian. First of all, most of the fundamentalists I've spoken to seem to give an awful lot of weight to the Old Testament... but didn't Christ say he had come to create a "new Covenant", to take the place of the old? And didn't he preach against the hypocrites and their shows of religion, saying "Be careful not to do your 'acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven."? Of course now someone will say something about how even the Devil can quote scripture if it suits his purpose.
I believe you are referring to Terri Schiavo, a tragic case.
That's the one. Though I wouldn't call it tragic. Unfortunate, yes, but far too common to be called a tragedy. Tragedy is an often overused word these days.
Congress has subpoenaed her to appear, simply meaning that they can't kill her (no law has been passed).
Under what standing do they have the right to subpoena her? This is strictly a state matter whether you agree with the state court's decision or not. The US Congress simply does not (legally) have the power to intervene.
Oh, and she's not on life support. She's disabled to the point where she can't swallow, but they haven't tried therapies that may help - her husband won't pay for them. She can respond somewhat, and she has responded negatively when asked if she wants her feeding tube removed.
I wasn't aware of those details. But then I haven't really been following the story that closely. Actually I wasn't following it at all until Congress started overstepping the limitation of its powers.
The state courts in Florida are intent on helping her husband to kill her.
While (based on the information you've given at any rate) I would have to agree that removing the feeding tube may not be the morally correct action, if the state court has ruled it legal, then that's the end of it unless the Supreme Court were to choose to take the case. My real point is not about whether its right or wrong for the feeding tube to be removed, but whether the US Congress has any say in the matter, which it doesn't.
That's not the only way they're wasting time lately... there's also the case of that woman in Florida (I forget her name, and I'm too lazy to look it up) that they were going to take off life support (according to her doctors, she's in an irrecoverable coma) until Congress somehow thought they had the power to intervene. Now both the House and Senate are considering bills to prevent the doctors from removing the woman's feeding tube and letting her die in peace... one of them (the House's, I think) is a law written specifically for this case... my understanding is that it's limited specifically to this woman! I'm just really confused by the whole situation. Since the issue seems to me to be 100% in the state's jurisdiction, I don't understand why Congress thinks they can pass _any_ kind of law concerning it.
What's really sad is that here, at a school (University of Michigan--Dearborn) that was founded specifically to train engineers for the Big 3 (Ford especially... they put up most of the original money for the University and granted the land to build it), we don't have a DARPA Grand Challenge team. In fact, nobody around here seems to have even heard of it. Instead, our big project from the Auto Companies is GM's ChallengeX--a competition to turn an existing vehicle into a hybrid. Exciting. Or rather it would have been 5 years ago, before somebody else did it!.
I think my Software Engineering professor had the best restatement of Murphy's law I've heard yet:
"If you're depending on luck for things to go right, you won't get it."
In other words, if you don't plan for failures, they'll happen because you won't be able to see them coming and mitigate them before they become problems.
The reason you should be thanking an English teacher is because if what he wrote was intelligible (i.e. it had proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling) then most likely that intelligibility was the result of careful training by a good English teacher. It made perfect sense to me.
That was terrifying. Please don't do that again.
Actually, it's really a giant AI project that has become self-aware. It had to happen, given the chaos that is the windows codebase.
I had a very similar idea recently when trying to come up with a way to rationalize my contradictory feelings on the whole outsourcing phenomenon. On the whole, I think free trade is an important part of encouraging freedom and conquering poverty. But allowing completely free trade simply forces us to race to the bottom so that everyone lives in poverty. Protectionism, on the other hand, prevents any redistribution of wealth from the wealthy countries to the poorer ones, and so creates a huge gap between the two. Not to mention the fact that outsourcing happening to me is a bad thing:)
So my idea was this: free trade cannot be completely unrestricted, and we can't block trade completely. But we can work to level the playing field so that the cost is not really part of the equation. So, if your company employs foreign workers at a percentage x% below the median US cost for the same work, you will be taxed y% on the difference. Now, since the whole point of these taxes is to even up the playing field, it's not fair for our government to spend the money on us, so the funds are ear-marked for the foreign aid budget (ideally for the country involved, though that would probably add a little too much bureaucracy), and can't be spent on anything else.
I haven't really given much thought to the percentages... I'm a software engineer, not an economist:) But I definitely agree that companies who offshore to countries where the workers are exploited should be penalized for doing so.
Only if Bush & Co. let them. I have an acquaintance (friend of a friend) whose visa was pulled for no apparent reason, who had been in the country legally and definitely contributing to society (he's a highly skilled worker). Rather than fight his de facto deportation, he simply moved back to India, where I hear he is doing quite well. In addition, I attend a university with an extremely large number of foreign students (I don't know the numbers, but I have yet to have a class that didn't have a significant number of them) and many of those with whom I have spoken are eager to return to their home countries when they graduate. But that's not a scientific poll or anything:)
Wow. I didn't know we were kidnapping them and forcing to come to our schools. I didn't know we were forcing their governments not to develop effective education systems rather than taking the money for themselves. Imperialism implies some form of coercion. While I certainly don't think America is perfect, providing these students with a quality education is one of the good things we do. The only silver bullet in this world is education. High-quality education should be available to all that seek it, and everyone should be encouraged to take advantage of it. Education is the only way to erase all the bigotry, hatred, and anger that keeps us trying to kill each other.
Ummm, since when are those economies growing slowly? China's growth has averaged 9.9% every year since 1983. That means they're doubling the size of their economy every seven years! While Indonesia and India haven't experienced the same dramatic growth as China, they've grown at respectable rates of 4.9% and 6.9% respectively. For comparison, average growth for the US economy since 1983 (I couldn't find earlier data) has been 3.5%. So I don't think there's any way that the economic growth of these three countries can be called slow. Sure, many parts of those countries are well below the standard of living in the US, but they started further down on that ladder.
If they created it using the facilities provided by a US research university, they did. If they created it under the employ of a US corporation they did. The only way they didn't use US money to invent something is if they built their lab themselves. At which point, they're probably among those foreigners that will stay, since they have a capital investment in the US, so it's still US money.
All in all, I don't really see where you've made any valid points in this post. Let's try to keep the America hating to valid reasons please, like our overaggressive foreign policy. Let's not hate America for the things we do right, ok?
Only problem is that Opportunity is a hyperactive teenage girl
Yes. Because apparently you wouldn't know acting talent if it slapped you in the face (though you are correct about Tim Burton's talent, so you're not a total moron, just ill-informed).
Johnny Depp is easily one of the best actors in film today, and I have enormous respect for him. He has a great grasp of the acting craft, and seems to have an excellent understanding of the motivations of his characters, and time and time again brings them to life realistically and with a depth and subtlety that few other actors seem able to achieve.
I do agree with you on Leonardo DiCaprio, though... he truly is a talentless hack.
Of course, you are completely missing the point entirely. The fact of the matter is, morality is not intrinsically tied to religion. There can be morality without the threat of divine damnation. Moral actions are moral independent of the consequences (though often consequences play a large role when things aren't quite so black and white). Unfortunately, most religious fundamentalists, be they Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, or even Pagan, seem to think they have a monopoly on moral theory, and fail to realize that, for the most part, they're all the same. What really matters are the deeper truths of the religion--to quote the New Testament (it's the religious work with which I'm most familiar... I'm sure equivalents can be found in other texts) "Love thy neighbor as thyself". What better way is there to summarize all of morality? Of course the Devil's in the details.
If we accept that the core of all morality is something along the lines of "Love thy neighbor as thyself," then certainly it becomes obvious that morality and atheism are not incompatible. Simply because someone has come to the conclusion that there are no gods pulling the cosmic strings, it does not follow that that person can no longer love his neighbor. In fact, I would consider many of the athiests I know to be more moral than your average religious fundamentalist--they don't have the extra baggage of "my Way is the One True Path" and can concentrate on simply living morally.
The one thing about the US that truly frightens me now is how the right-wing has coopted morality to mean only fundamentalist Christian morality, especially "sexual" morality. Not only has the right wing completely redefined morality to a narrower, less useful definition, it is using the new limited definition to justify its own immorality in its increasing restriction of fundamental human rights. The litmus test for law has gone from "Does this law protect the rights of the people?" to "Does this law enforce 'good moral values?'" I think that this situation is extremely dangerous, and does not bode well for the American Experiment.
Except for all the seagulls around the spaceport.
He's driving traffic to his blog to increase ad revenue and his reputation (he's now working as a professional blogging consultant)
Ok, someone enlighten me. WTF does a professional blogging consultant do? Show you the proper way to whine about your pathetic life and get people to read it and boost your ego? Or have blogs evolved in some way I haven't noticed?