Regardless, in this case the actor was superb, CGI or not.
Remember: Tron was kept out of the awards becuase 'it's all just computer graphics.' Movies like Tron - filmed on a tight budget with almost all back-lit live-action sets and only ~15 min of digital affects - would fit the frequently ignorant biases within this closeted community of elite. However, the technology-illiterate panels of judges frequently consider anything out of the range of 'poor-starving college actors' to be horrid.
Just look at what they did with Tom Hanks as da Gump. Last time I checked, many of my local college hacks could play belivably dumb. (Fortunately, I've also had the opportinuty to hang out with actors who have slightly more range.)
Unless they can mine diamonds or gold from the upper atmosphere...
Actually, the Moon has a lot of nice resources. Plenty of Gold and diamonds (shocked carbon from lunar 'meteorites' and a less differentiated crust implying *easier* heavy metal prospecting.) There are things, much more valuable than gold or diamonds, however, are on the moon that make such an endeavour worth it.
Cheap Helium 3 (Moon's been soaking in Solar wind for a bit of a while)
Rare earth minerals (molybdenum, etc)
Convenient near-vacuum/low-g manufacturing (just cover, stir and presto! complex alloys that differentiate on earth before cooling)
Great positioning for satellite frame manufacturing
Assuming you can deal with the ever-present Lunar dust, all you need to do is scoop up regolith and shoot buckets of it down to earth for processing. Unfortunately, getting the first mining and support equipment to the moon, assuming tele-operated rigs, is very expensive.
But, wait...a space elevator could be hauling multi-ton stuff at a fraction of the cost-per-kilo of the equivalently expensive[1] Saturn 5 program (okay, 6.5% of the U.S. gov't annual budget vs. 6% for Neil Armstrong's legendary words.)
[1] total cost is almost equal. But you can use the cable a few more times that you can use a Saturn 5, thus your cost-per trip goes down with more trips.
'By presenting non-information theoretic statistics and a considerable amount of evidence interpreted without any regard to information theory, this paper hopes to aoid being grouped with a series of papers generically entitled "Information Theory, Photosynthesis, and Religion."'
-- A New Account of Personalization and Effective Communication. FCC: Douglas A. Galbi, 2001.
Actually, this form of 'encryption' is very interesting. I my experiences with doing short-order fry cook work I've had people speak pig-latin (English with the first-letter-of-a-word-spoken-last,+ay suffix) to me just for fun. I am amazed that, while I have great difficulty with learning and using non-English non-progamming languages, my brain simply parses out plain English from this stream of corrupted words.
IANAL, but the PBS ran a series on coincs. They mentioned a lot of 'security' features involved in both U.S. bank notes, which are no longer redemable in gold, and coincs, some of which ARE gold.
Apparently the U.S. treasury has a legal monoploly on the printing of U.S. federal bank notes. These are the only recognized 'legal tender for all depts public and private' according to the same U.S. government department (read the fine print on any handy dollar bill.)
It would seem, then, that one would not be in the most legal of situtations to be printing and publishing your own tender. That could be seen as violating the 'monoploy on money.'
The common practice of paraphrasing "LOOK!! Someone is using our product so it MUST work perfectly." is actually quite disturbing.
You must deal with management. A lot of 'product evalutations' by the clueless or uninitiated (into engineering or science thinking) tend to devolve into 6th grade 'look-at-that' with much finger pointing and jumping up-and-down. Its fun to see who gets the most buzzwords per evaluation or jumps so much they bust a button on their Armani.
However, one must remember that ususaly a tiny portion of the current employees that can use whatever they pick. These will probably become the only employees left once they start counting headcount. After all, the money for the 'project' has to come from somebody's buget.
Re:Why can't we have legal restrictions on spam?
on
Plan for Spam, Version 2
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Conventional wisdom seems to say that we can't outlaw spam. I don't understand why this is.
Traditionally and in general, anything on the 'net that can be achived through both technical means and legal recourse is almost always implemented via the technical route.
The reasons for this are many; the major reasons are simple. While most people on the 'net have not been lawyers, most of the first people - esp. USENET users - were engineers and scientists. Such people develop a distain for legal recourse after spending (wasting) so much of their time in political and legal battles in the *real world* justifying and defending their work and themselves. Just ask any graduate student standing in line at his college Bursar's office how he feels about contracts and (non-technical) paperwork.
Furethermore, by avoiding the often easy to circumvent and hard to quantify political avenue, the solutions are usually more effecitve in both the short an long term. Many solutions, such as the Baysian SPAM filtering disscussed here, also give these technical people a chance to prove their worth or gain some small measure of fame by association with a good solution.
Remember: Conventional Wisdom is an oxymoron. There are always reasons for something, even if theose reasons are nothing but hubris and desire. It is up to you to accept or change them.
Yeah...and water ain't *organic* (is composed of at least 1 carbon atom per molecule,) since it is only oxygen and hydrogen (inevitable contaminates aside.)
that after four years the URL reference cited in a term paper stood an 80 percent chance of no longer existing.
I don't kown about you alma mater, but mine has data retention policies on websites. All websites of graduated persons, and their accounts, are to be flushed after 6 months from the date of said graduation. Whether this happens regularly is up to debate, cosmics rays and the free time of the tiny and overworked IT staff.
As far as other locations, I'm sure the recent DNS-wide expiration of domain names would 'skew' your results had you been checking during that time. (I wonder if there is an MLA standard for using dotted-quads in place of domain names for longevity..hmmmm.) I'm still surprised at how long some things survive - even when a website gets overhauled and noone provides any 'forwarding' pages like some of the better website design books recommend. Probably too much of a hassle, when you don't have time to read your references 'cause of a conference deadline from your advisor.
There are programs that can encrypt plaintext to plaintext, usually converting things like normal email conversations into Shakpearean sonnets. I'm wondering if it weren't possible to build one that used hate speach or terrorist-manifesto keywords to confound 'the man.'
I don't know about you, but a phone won't be close to perfect until it can *meld* with my TI-92. (Which also has Doom, so...)
Hmmm...I need to find the variance on this set of test data. Wait! I got my TI-2000 cellphone! Throw in some data, hit [calc], switch to Doom until done, call some friends to tell them how I just TRASHED them on level X, switch back and write down meaningless stats while boss walks by.
shouldn't the common men[sic] get seomthing out of it as well??
One of my favorite quotes:
"Cutting the space budget really restores
my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams,
goals, and ideals and lets us get straight
to the business of hate, debauchery, and
self-annihilation."
-- Johnny Hart
I've got DSL from the phone company. The sales people on the phone insisted on getting my machine info down to the last minutae (me:'ok, wait a minute, I gotta reboot to windows here..' sales-droid:'huh?') but the installer was clued in.
When he arrived and noticed my huge pile'o'computer stuff was VERY far from the nearest jack (he'd need MUCH longer cables to install the DSL modem) I hit him up with using my little router box and letting me string cat-5 all around my apartment. One small home network later and all my computers are talking to the net fine - EULA, Spyware, and Adware free.
Even accepting the good doctor's view that the brain is a computer, this is an absurd position. After all, the software is in the brain. It's not like it gets bootstrapped from outside sources. So either the software is built into the whole structure of the brain and we can only learn about it by studying the rules (a la neural nets) or we have to figure out which part of the brain bootstraps the rest of it.
I would tend to agree with the Dr. Richard's interest in looking beyond the neuron, but I believe his metaphor of looking at the transistor is wholly off base.
A CPU, even to an alien is composed of a lot of wired physics experiments built into a glorified chunk of sand. Not only would they have difficulty analyzing a transistor, they would likely miss the important parts, the logical gate structures. Without understanding these "higher level" abstractions (literally groups of physics experiments) the hardware and, more importantly the software that runs on them, is of little value.
In the case of brain tissue, the many neurons in even a simple creature bunch together to form clumps or 'nodes' almost equivalent to a CPU's register or other sub-elements. These nodes combine to create larger physical components, again like an ALU or FPU. The structure of the brain, in other words, is directly analogous to embedded, firmware-loaded computers (e.g. a BIOS is the first to come to mind.)
Fortunately for those children of Turing who are addicted to a formal systems approach, the black box of a brain, like any other system, is prone to reverse-engineering. I like to call systems like A.L.C.E. True A.I. (Since nature seems to have avoided using the formal-production rule methods of A.L.I.C.E. they are definitely artificial.) What interests many Computer/Electrical Engineers and current researchers are kinds of Simulated Intelligence (S.I.) that propose to emulate natural intelligence (whatever that is.) It usually involves like fuzzy logic and neural networks (neither of which is for the mathematically disinclined.)
To quote Larry Wall,
"Either approach may give birth to various sorts of monstrosities."
(disclaimer: my A.I. formal training has been exclusively GOFAI - Good. Ol' Fasion. A.I. while my prost-graduate research has to this point been exclusively )
"They all look like derivative, amateurish, sloppy game systems. They lack the Blizzard polish."
A lot of this has to do with the quality of the Artists on these projects. Regardless of what you might think, the 'cool' programming of the game engine underneath the game is only a small part. You still need the game scripting for realistic behaviours, and a lot of artwork.
You might like to give your software away, but its funny that a lot of the artists I know are as adverse to giving away their 'Content' as the RIAA is about free music.
If I could hold a (tablet) pen, I'd gladly join one of those projects hand help out with the imprtant content side. Which bring the question, if YOU don't like what you're getting from these Open Source games, why aren't YOU joining them in development? I fail to belive that every Nerd on Slashdot has (a) no artisitc ability (b) no time to devote to doolding for a video game in which THEIR artwork will be show cased and (c) inability to give back to the community rather than just take (there is an 'upload' as well and 'download' feature to the networking thingy.)
BTW - see the developer's journals from Bilzzard to see just how UNGL/NASTY/SUCKY Starcraft was until the placeholder graphics were replaced with real artwork. Try arstechnica or gamepost archive if you're looking for it (I can't find it anymore...)
The accepted theory in Galileo's time - spheres within spheres with Earth at the centre - predicted positions of the planets visible to the naked eye quite well.
Considering I just took a final in History of Science on this very topic (pre-Newtonian, Early Modern Period Natural Philosophy emphasizing the History of Astronomy) I will say that history backs up the 'wild revelation' in a can that was the spyglass used by Galileo to discover his Medecian stars.
The problem with the Ptolemaic cosmos is that it never fit the data at all. The geocentric world model with its many layers of perfect solid, crystal spheres can't even be used to create a simple calendar that works from one year to the next. Now, the data before Tycho Brahe was wildly inaccurate and at times just made up. The Church wanted to known when to hold Easter, so they had Tycho study the skies to find out when every normal (verses the unusual that always got recorded) astronomical event took place. Kepler used this data to justify the Copernican claim of a heliocentric world. A heliocentric world that designed to get rid of a foreign Pagan influence: the Equant added by the Islamic Averroes to Aristotle's geocentric cosmos.
It didnâ(TM)t help the Catholic dogma that the comet of 1577 showed that the skies changed and that their canâ(TM)t be solid crystal spheres holding up the planets. Before, people used Copernicus's geocentric model with perfect circles for orbits only for the math (nobody dared belive it was a physical reality.) Kepler declared the orbits to be ellipses and got a near perfect match. He got published after his death. Galileo, for suporting a geocentric theory that was 'obviously only for the foolish and heretical' (i.e. Tarot reading, Psionic using Esping Devil worshipers) was put under house arrest for life.
The problem with science is that it is a gradual, often minutely incremental evolution from philosophy to natural philosophy, (via Catholic condemnations) theology and eventually toward a mathematical and experimental philosophy supported by a dogma of scholasticism (from scholism - literally to comment upon others work rather than produce something new.)
However, you are right in claiming that belief in something just because we don't see it now is not âunscientific.â(TM) The proper way a 'scientific' experiment is run entails denying the vacuous proof that the variable didn't change when the independent was adjusted. No where is it listed that you proved something did happen.
Kind of twisted, but that how it really is (according to my PHd 'science' professor written textbooks.)
Picture this: for years people (especially managment type with their MBAs) sat around playing games instead of running the business. Suddenly, these same people stop playing their games and try to run their businesses. What'd ya get? A lot of people who were better at playing solitare than balancing and Enron income sheet thwoing pie-in-the-sky ideas at investors.
Wait two years: "Oh no! My isn't making a profit! Guess it doesn't matter that it had the 5-year Profit/Loss curve of the U.S. Military budget! Must've been those people gaming on my [investor's] time!" It's time to face the reality: the Internet boom and its bust was caused by a lot of people trying to build financial castles in the air. Long before this, and long after, people will be playing at work (if your lucky, playing is work.) It's not fair to build those castles in the sky and then blame the contractors when bricks start killing pedestrians bellow:-)
It's a valid point to say that playing games on company time is taking away from the business. That's why some companies will allow it, but (oh my gosh!) dock you for that time. The fact that many games need company resources is a better argument (i.e. network bandwidth - although the space needed to run even a Kaza mp3 farm is less than that for the financial department's multi-meg.xls email attachment traffic.) Of course, with the purchasing policies where I've worked, to play any game not on an abandonware list I have to bring my own machine. I'm usually gonna steal as much juice with my souped-up PC as the guy next door with his personal microwave/coffee maker combo.
It could be much worse: I worked for a College IT department that once had a 'let the students study when everything is cleaned/nobodies there' policy. Just becuase people have ignored their duties in the past and customer serivce has been hurt, the policy was revoked. Sad thing is, student IT workers were still ignoring the problem people and nothing improved. It's just got harder to work long hours and progress toward a degree at the same time (what, pay rent and make grades?) It's odd that the same College IT deparment was suppossed to use advancement in your degree as a measure of good employment. Too bad it was't progress in Diablo II character levels. Now that'd be an interesting conflict of interest (anybody from the game industry like to comment?) Well, at least it ain't surfin' for pr0n on company time.
Re:Apple "invented" the beige Personal Computer...
on
Black Is The New Beige
·
· Score: 1
..that would blend in to the average home
Gotta have something to go with those old 70's era plaid couches and Martha-Stewart drapes thick enought that they could smother pets. Not to mention the *lovely* natrual (dirt == beige) carpeting that got pulled out of everyone's home. I think it all got sold to Univeristy dorm systmes when people started to wake up from the drug-induced haze to Regan-induced economics.
[A quick glace at my dorm floor] - looks like they sold the 70's era dirt with it too.
IMHO - That seemes to be the essential problem here. If I work at a Casino playing cards during the day, can any money I make playing cards at home after hours be considered the property (additional income) of my employer? How is this different from Free Software/Open Source development on personal time?
It's posts like these that remind me of why the scientists on the FUSE team (like any competent Geek or Scientist) is able to pull off great stunts and saves like this: they are diverse in their skillset. NASA tends to encourage this by being involved in many of the most 'interesting' projects that wouldn't (at first) seem relevant to the agencies goals of manned space exploration. Disolving or reducing NASA would probably have to start with the expensive and not very popular nitche projects such as / AIDS / environmental / fusion / fuel cell / quantum computing / immortality research. See
for a few examples. A lot of the stranger and more 'profitable' science that gets done through the NSA starts under the umbrella of a NASA project. There is something to be said for name recognition like NASA's when it comes Congressional belt-tightening-so-we-can-make-a-few-more-bombs time in the all to political world of publicly funded research.
Apple and its user community are a very complex group. However, even with such a diversity of factors, here's the perfect way to test this hypothesis:
Wait till Job's dies.
Once an heir or other succesor rises to the "MAC throne" we can see if Apple the Co. changes much. The claim of Job's core-to-Apple nature predicts massive restructuing even in light of any post-mortem instructions. (Pretty much what was going on while he was at NeXT IMHO.) No more Steve eventually means no more (new) MACs. Too bad the Amiga platform didn't have a booster like him, just a dedicated user base.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember: Tron was kept out of the awards becuase 'it's all just computer graphics.' Movies like Tron - filmed on a tight budget with almost all back-lit live-action sets and only ~15 min of digital affects - would fit the frequently ignorant biases within this closeted community of elite. However, the technology-illiterate panels of judges frequently consider anything out of the range of 'poor-starving college actors' to be horrid.
Just look at what they did with Tom Hanks as da Gump. Last time I checked, many of my local college hacks could play belivably dumb. (Fortunately, I've also had the opportinuty to hang out with actors who have slightly more range.)
Ignorance is bad. M'kay.
Actually, the Moon has a lot of nice resources. Plenty of Gold and diamonds (shocked carbon from lunar 'meteorites' and a less differentiated crust implying *easier* heavy metal prospecting.) There are things, much more valuable than gold or diamonds, however, are on the moon that make such an endeavour worth it.
Assuming you can deal with the ever-present Lunar dust, all you need to do is scoop up regolith and shoot buckets of it down to earth for processing. Unfortunately, getting the first mining and support equipment to the moon, assuming tele-operated rigs, is very expensive.
But, wait...a space elevator could be hauling multi-ton stuff at a fraction of the cost-per-kilo of the equivalently expensive[1] Saturn 5 program (okay, 6.5% of the U.S. gov't annual budget vs. 6% for Neil Armstrong's legendary words.)
[1] total cost is almost equal. But you can use the cable a few more times that you can use a Saturn 5, thus your cost-per trip goes down with more trips.
I like the footnote on page 17 of their report:
-- A New Account of Personalization and Effective Communication. FCC: Douglas A. Galbi, 2001.
Economics papers are funny. Hehehe.
This seems to be similar to the native ability to understand the gist of Yoda-speak. IMHO, this implies there may be considerable flexability in the parsing of natural languages and plasticity in the language areas of a human brain. But, this idea is not new.
OBtopic: A shuttle
So any part should be (roughly): $131,250/lbs. Don't accept those low bids!
Who needs a spam archive? Just let good ol' Kevin sell you his junk-email box. It'd probabily double the success of current email filters.
Yeah,yeah,yeah..and all you right-handed=everyone mouse freaks can suck my left-handed X11 mousing!
Apparently the U.S. treasury has a legal monoploly on the printing of U.S. federal bank notes. These are the only recognized 'legal tender for all depts public and private' according to the same U.S. government department (read the fine print on any handy dollar bill.)
It would seem, then, that one would not be in the most legal of situtations to be printing and publishing your own tender. That could be seen as violating the 'monoploy on money.'
And we all no how important government backed monopolies are, don't we?
You must deal with management. A lot of 'product evalutations' by the clueless or uninitiated (into engineering or science thinking) tend to devolve into 6th grade 'look-at-that' with much finger pointing and jumping up-and-down. Its fun to see who gets the most buzzwords per evaluation or jumps so much they bust a button on their Armani.
However, one must remember that ususaly a tiny portion of the current employees that can use whatever they pick. These will probably become the only employees left once they start counting headcount. After all, the money for the 'project' has to come from somebody's buget.
Traditionally and in general, anything on the 'net that can be achived through both technical means and legal recourse is almost always implemented via the technical route.
The reasons for this are many; the major reasons are simple. While most people on the 'net have not been lawyers, most of the first people - esp. USENET users - were engineers and scientists. Such people develop a distain for legal recourse after spending (wasting) so much of their time in political and legal battles in the *real world* justifying and defending their work and themselves. Just ask any graduate student standing in line at his college Bursar's office how he feels about contracts and (non-technical) paperwork.
Furethermore, by avoiding the often easy to circumvent and hard to quantify political avenue, the solutions are usually more effecitve in both the short an long term. Many solutions, such as the Baysian SPAM filtering disscussed here, also give these technical people a chance to prove their worth or gain some small measure of fame by association with a good solution.
Remember: Conventional Wisdom is an oxymoron. There are always reasons for something, even if theose reasons are nothing but hubris and desire. It is up to you to accept or change them.
Yeah...and water ain't *organic* (is composed of at least 1 carbon atom per molecule,) since it is only oxygen and hydrogen (inevitable contaminates aside.)
I don't kown about you alma mater, but mine has data retention policies on websites. All websites of graduated persons, and their accounts, are to be flushed after 6 months from the date of said graduation. Whether this happens regularly is up to debate, cosmics rays and the free time of the tiny and overworked IT staff.
As far as other locations, I'm sure the recent DNS-wide expiration of domain names would 'skew' your results had you been checking during that time. (I wonder if there is an MLA standard for using dotted-quads in place of domain names for longevity..hmmmm.) I'm still surprised at how long some things survive - even when a website gets overhauled and noone provides any 'forwarding' pages like some of the better website design books recommend. Probably too much of a hassle, when you don't have time to read your references 'cause of a conference deadline from your advisor.
There are programs that can encrypt plaintext to plaintext, usually converting things like normal email conversations into Shakpearean sonnets. I'm wondering if it weren't possible to build one that used hate speach or terrorist-manifesto keywords to confound 'the man.'
As an ex-Oklahoman turned Texan (i.e. darn hick S'utherner), I resemble^H^H^H^H^Hresent that argument!
I don't know about you, but a phone won't be close to perfect until it can *meld* with my TI-92. (Which also has Doom, so...)
Hmmm...I need to find the variance on this set of test data. Wait! I got my TI-2000 cellphone! Throw in some data, hit [calc], switch to Doom until done, call some friends to tell them how I just TRASHED them on level X, switch back and write down meaningless stats while boss walks by.
One of my favorite quotes:
"Cutting the space budget really restores
my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams,
goals, and ideals and lets us get straight
to the business of hate, debauchery, and
self-annihilation."
-- Johnny Hart
I've got DSL from the phone company. The sales people on the phone insisted on getting my machine info down to the last minutae (me:'ok, wait a minute, I gotta reboot to windows here..' sales-droid:'huh?') but the installer was clued in.
When he arrived and noticed my huge pile'o'computer stuff was VERY far from the nearest jack (he'd need MUCH longer cables to install the DSL modem) I hit him up with using my little router box and letting me string cat-5 all around my apartment. One small home network later and all my computers are talking to the net fine - EULA, Spyware, and Adware free.
You could always switch to B/W mode. (Of course, strobbing the B/W switch will let you walk through walls :-)
I would tend to agree with the Dr. Richard's interest in looking beyond the neuron, but I believe his metaphor of looking at the transistor is wholly off base.
A CPU, even to an alien is composed of a lot of wired physics experiments built into a glorified chunk of sand. Not only would they have difficulty analyzing a transistor, they would likely miss the important parts, the logical gate structures. Without understanding these "higher level" abstractions (literally groups of physics experiments) the hardware and, more importantly the software that runs on them, is of little value.
In the case of brain tissue, the many neurons in even a simple creature bunch together to form clumps or 'nodes' almost equivalent to a CPU's register or other sub-elements. These nodes combine to create larger physical components, again like an ALU or FPU. The structure of the brain, in other words, is directly analogous to embedded, firmware-loaded computers (e.g. a BIOS is the first to come to mind.)
Fortunately for those children of Turing who are addicted to a formal systems approach, the black box of a brain, like any other system, is prone to reverse-engineering. I like to call systems like A.L.C.E. True A.I. (Since nature seems to have avoided using the formal-production rule methods of A.L.I.C.E. they are definitely artificial.) What interests many Computer/Electrical Engineers and current researchers are kinds of Simulated Intelligence (S.I.) that propose to emulate natural intelligence (whatever that is.) It usually involves like fuzzy logic and neural networks (neither of which is for the mathematically disinclined.)
To quote Larry Wall,
"Either approach may give birth to various sorts of monstrosities."
(disclaimer: my A.I. formal training has been exclusively GOFAI - Good. Ol' Fasion. A.I. while my prost-graduate research has to this point been exclusively )
A lot of this has to do with the quality of the Artists on these projects. Regardless of what you might think, the 'cool' programming of the game engine underneath the game is only a small part. You still need the game scripting for realistic behaviours, and a lot of artwork.
You might like to give your software away, but its funny that a lot of the artists I know are as adverse to giving away their 'Content' as the RIAA is about free music.
If I could hold a (tablet) pen, I'd gladly join one of those projects hand help out with the imprtant content side. Which bring the question, if YOU don't like what you're getting from these Open Source games, why aren't YOU joining them in development? I fail to belive that every Nerd on Slashdot has (a) no artisitc ability (b) no time to devote to doolding for a video game in which THEIR artwork will be show cased and (c) inability to give back to the community rather than just take (there is an 'upload' as well and 'download' feature to the networking thingy.)
BTW - see the developer's journals from Bilzzard to see just how UNGL/NASTY/SUCKY Starcraft was until the placeholder graphics were replaced with real artwork. Try arstechnica or gamepost archive if you're looking for it (I can't find it anymore...)
Considering I just took a final in History of Science on this very topic (pre-Newtonian, Early Modern Period Natural Philosophy emphasizing the History of Astronomy) I will say that history backs up the 'wild revelation' in a can that was the spyglass used by Galileo to discover his Medecian stars.
The problem with the Ptolemaic cosmos is that it never fit the data at all. The geocentric world model with its many layers of perfect solid, crystal spheres can't even be used to create a simple calendar that works from one year to the next. Now, the data before Tycho Brahe was wildly inaccurate and at times just made up. The Church wanted to known when to hold Easter, so they had Tycho study the skies to find out when every normal (verses the unusual that always got recorded) astronomical event took place. Kepler used this data to justify the Copernican claim of a heliocentric world. A heliocentric world that designed to get rid of a foreign Pagan influence: the Equant added by the Islamic Averroes to Aristotle's geocentric cosmos.
It didnâ(TM)t help the Catholic dogma that the comet of 1577 showed that the skies changed and that their canâ(TM)t be solid crystal spheres holding up the planets. Before, people used Copernicus's geocentric model with perfect circles for orbits only for the math (nobody dared belive it was a physical reality.) Kepler declared the orbits to be ellipses and got a near perfect match. He got published after his death. Galileo, for suporting a geocentric theory that was 'obviously only for the foolish and heretical' (i.e. Tarot reading, Psionic using Esping Devil worshipers) was put under house arrest for life.
The problem with science is that it is a gradual, often minutely incremental evolution from philosophy to natural philosophy, (via Catholic condemnations) theology and eventually toward a mathematical and experimental philosophy supported by a dogma of scholasticism (from scholism - literally to comment upon others work rather than produce something new.)
However, you are right in claiming that belief in something just because we don't see it now is not âunscientific.â(TM) The proper way a 'scientific' experiment is run entails denying the vacuous proof that the variable didn't change when the independent was adjusted. No where is it listed that you proved something did happen.
Kind of twisted, but that how it really is (according to my PHd 'science' professor written textbooks.)
Picture this: for years people (especially managment type with their MBAs) sat around playing games instead of running the business. Suddenly, these same people stop playing their games and try to run their businesses. What'd ya get? A lot of people who were better at playing solitare than balancing and Enron income sheet thwoing pie-in-the-sky ideas at investors.
Wait two years: "Oh no! My isn't making a profit! Guess it doesn't matter that it had the 5-year Profit/Loss curve of the U.S. Military budget! Must've been those people gaming on my [investor's] time!" It's time to face the reality: the Internet boom and its bust was caused by a lot of people trying to build financial castles in the air. Long before this, and long after, people will be playing at work (if your lucky, playing is work.) It's not fair to build those castles in the sky and then blame the contractors when bricks start killing pedestrians bellow
It's a valid point to say that playing games on company time is taking away from the business. That's why some companies will allow it, but (oh my gosh!) dock you for that time. The fact that many games need company resources is a better argument (i.e. network bandwidth - although the space needed to run even a Kaza mp3 farm is less than that for the financial department's multi-meg
It could be much worse: I worked for a College IT department that once had a 'let the students study when everything is cleaned/nobodies there' policy. Just becuase people have ignored their duties in the past and customer serivce has been hurt, the policy was revoked. Sad thing is, student IT workers were still ignoring the problem people and nothing improved. It's just got harder to work long hours and progress toward a degree at the same time (what, pay rent and make grades?) It's odd that the same College IT deparment was suppossed to use advancement in your degree as a measure of good employment. Too bad it was't progress in Diablo II character levels. Now that'd be an interesting conflict of interest (anybody from the game industry like to comment?) Well, at least it ain't surfin' for pr0n on company time.
Gotta have something to go with those old 70's era plaid couches and Martha-Stewart drapes thick enought that they could smother pets. Not to mention the *lovely* natrual (dirt == beige) carpeting that got pulled out of everyone's home. I think it all got sold to Univeristy dorm systmes when people started to wake up from the drug-induced haze to Regan-induced economics.
[A quick glace at my dorm floor] - looks like they sold the 70's era dirt with it too.
IMHO - That seemes to be the essential problem here. If I work at a Casino playing cards during the day, can any money I make playing cards at home after hours be considered the property (additional income) of my employer? How is this different from Free Software/Open Source development on personal time?
See
for a few examples. A lot of the stranger and more 'profitable' science that gets done through the NSA starts under the umbrella of a NASA project. There is something to be said for name recognition like NASA's when it comes Congressional belt-tightening-so-we-can-make-a-few-more-bombs time in the all to political world of publicly funded research.
Wait till Job's dies.
Once an heir or other succesor rises to the "MAC throne" we can see if Apple the Co. changes much. The claim of Job's core-to-Apple nature predicts massive restructuing even in light of any post-mortem instructions. (Pretty much what was going on while he was at NeXT IMHO.) No more Steve eventually means no more (new) MACs. Too bad the Amiga platform didn't have a booster like him, just a dedicated user base.