It has been said that "Quantity has a Quality all it's own". Proof is just a preponderance of evidence, there is no magic line you can draw to say something is proven by a single utterly convincing fact. Proof of evolution is a preponderance of evidence, same as anything else.
There are dozens of fossils of early hominids. Between every one of them, there is a gap. so the more fossils we find, the more gaps we create. See? full of holes. That is one interpretation. It isn't credible to any reasonable person. The more different fossils we find at different times, the more pieces of the puzzle that fit together are discovered, the better the evidence for evolution. I already provided that link, but here it is again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fossil_primates#Catarrhini
Your issue is speciation... "A Prometheus-type event"... hmm you mean a race of aliens creates another race of aliens to ship to Earth to devour the current inhabitants? no... your reference is to another fictional concoction, the supposed creation of man from clay by a member of the Graeco-Roman pantheon. There is this strange habit of religionists to use "appeal to fiction" as something they think is convincing. It isn't. What do you think Zeus was trying to tell us by condemning Prometheus to be attached to a rock, and have his liver eaten by an eagle every day, only to grow back? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus ) what phenomena are explained by this "fact."? What proof do you offer to accept one "fact" from Prometheus, but reject others?
But we'll take your point in the name of saving the wretched... If we have literally hundreds of thousands of different fossils at different times in the fossil beds, how many "Prometheus type" events were there? What triggers them? Were Dinosaurs and Humans created by the same Promethean event? Did we eat them or they eat us? how come all the fossil dinosaurs are far lower in the earth, at the same depth as only some small rodentish mammals, than any human remains? If there was only a few or one Promethean event, why aren't the same species found in the fossil beds at wildly different depths? Why are all mammals eyes wired backwards? Couldn't Prometheus get it right on at least some species? Why don't birds have arms as well as wings, it would be much easier to pick things up if they did? Why don't some prey species have more sets of eyes to look in all directions, instead of just changing the placement of two? Why create cuckoos and leeches? if there were a lot of promethean events, why don't we see new species all the time? There is an infinite number of these types of questions that can be posed that are readily understood with reference to evolution. No other credible explanation has been put forward.
You keep disparaging evolution as "only a theory" but fail to grasp that all of science is only a collection of theories, which are more or less strongly supported by the evidence available, and is universally subject to falsification by future evidence. There is no such thing as "proven science" to any greater degree for any other field than there is for Evolution. All science is a matter of accepting the balance of evidence.
You bring up Gravity. take a look here, it's not hard, it's just
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_law_of_universal_gravitation#Problematic_aspects )
People don't know what causes gravity, it requires instantaneous, infinite propagation. Further, The observed fact that the gravitational mass and the inertial mass is the same for all objects is unexplained within Newton's Theories. There are so many holes! How could you possible accept gravity, when we don't know what causes it, don't know what it is made of, and has effects we cannot explain. Until you can prove it to me. Gravity is just a Theory!
You claim there was no proof offered, yet my original post gave a referenced a mountain of evidence from animal taxonomy, morphology, the fossil record, and genetics, that would lead any un-biased, reasonable person to accept that the theory of Evolution matches and unifies many lines of evidence in a convincing way, and that is all that people who "believe" in Evolution actually assert. That it is the best scientific explanation offered so far, in exactly the same way that Newton's laws, or Einstein's Theory are the best explanations for other phenomena. Are there holes? sure! Got a better idea? no. It's that simple.
To question Evolution in a credible way, the onus is on you to posit some other explanation that provides a more elegant answer, either by better fitting the facts available, or by providing an explanation for additional ones. Substitute "Newton's laws" for evolution in your statements and see how credible you are. "Newton's laws" are not proven! It's just nonsense. You are deluded and afflicted and have my sympathy, but I could never "respect" such idiocy.
I'm guessing that you agree that we do have proven science, so your initial assertion that everything is hypothesis is wrong so you dropped that argument.
I said things start out as a hypothesis, and graduate to the status of Theory when they get enough supporting evidence. That's true. nothing to drop. don't know what you mean. My initial post pointed out there is a so-called "Law" (Newton's) that is over-ridden by a mere Theory (Einstein's) How could this happen if "Laws" are so much stronger than "Theories"? You didn't choose to deal with that. Newton's laws are presumably what you call "proven science." what do you do if it is proven wrong? Why does NASA demote Newton's Laws to mere Theories? http://www-spof.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Sgravity.htm ?
I have no idea why you then point to an OP-ED piece to describe "Theory" instead of using the definition we have in dictionaries and defined by a couple thousand years of science. Are you trying to redefine the word, or do you accept that a theory is not proven?
1 : the analysis of a set of facts in their relation to one another
2 : abstract thought : speculation
3 : the general or abstract principles of a body of fact, a science, or an art <music theory>
4 : a belief, policy, or procedure proposed or followed as the basis of action <her method is based on the theory that all children want to learn>
5 : an ideal or hypothetical set of fact
I take definitions 1, 3, 4, and 5 into account. You are oddly obsessed with meaning 2 to the exclusion of all others.
Until I have proof preaching my belief as better than theirs is foolish because nobody can win the argument.
If you will not accept any proof offerred, then it is unfalsifiable, and by definition, not science. If no-one can win an argument, that doesn't mean both sides are justified. It is possible that one side is simply unreasonable.
Perhaps you personally believe it's proven and don't want more data. You are not alone, but that is a belief and not a scientific point of view (which claims it's a good theory with lots of promise). You having convictions in that belief is different from a person that believes a deity did it how exactly?
A "theory" is something which fits a lot of facts. it is not an unproven idea. You are simply wrong.
Look it up, like here: http://www.livescience.com/21491-what-is-a-scientific-theory-definition-of-theory.html
In Science we are supposed to apply Occam's Razor, and take the simplest theory that matches all the data given.
A theory is also, as the definition is given, falsifiable, that is it can be proven wrong if new data shows up that contradicts it. "A deity did it", a) can cover any arrangement of facts imaginable, so has no predictive value, b) is the cosmic equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine, something vastly more complicated than anything being explained. c) cannot be evaluated as better or worse than the creation myths of thousands of other religions.
So if you want your pet hypothesis to be granted greater weight than the thousands of discredited ones from historical religions, you have to find convincing good reasons why yours fits the facts better than any of these
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_creation_myths )
Think really hard about that one, because it's not any different.
So back to what I closed with, claiming your belief is better than someone else' belief only works with company that believes like you do. I'm not belittling your belief, telling you it's wrong, or asking you to question your belief. I'm suggesting that you recognize your belief for what it is, and understand that it conflicts with other beliefs. When we have the missing proof, then we can all jump up and down yelling 'told ya so'.
If someone says that the sun moves around the earth, or that it is pulled across the sky each day by a god on a chariot pulled by horses, you are going to agree with me that those ideas are potentially meaningful stories to someone, and ought to be studied in mythology, but are not worthy of modern people. I don't think that religious people should be belittled, any more than one should kick someone because they only have lost a leg, or have cancer. You are afflicted with a mental illness, passed on to you by you ancestors. It prevents you from thinking rationally on certain subjects. The world view of the mentally ill are bent such that they think their sick perceptions are true. That's the nature of it. I respect you, the human, and your ancestors, but the infection does not get any respect.
You have an meme-infection, and the infection ought to be cured, but that is very difficult to do in practice. You are a cripple and I would like to help you, but all you will do is spout nonsense and venom at me in the best case, and threaten violence in the worst case. And most of humanity is infected. Zombie movies are real. I should just ignore to ridiculous eruptions, much as one would the ravings of someone delirious with fever. If you press me, however, I have the choice of either agreeing with you to let you calm yourself, or trying, no doubt vainly, to express how you are misguided. I know there is a human in there that deserves to be saved, so once in a while I will try the latter, but it is almost always wiser to pursue the former course.
Being silent does nothing to help you: It abandons you to your fate. It does help me: It lightens the burden on myself, so that I can work on other tasks more likely to succeed, and less likely to breed resentment. So the rational argument to give you silent forbearance is fairly strong, but it should never be misconstrued as true respect of paleolithic superstition. That would be ridiculous.
ugh... I'll feed this troll.. and take a shot at the traditional "Just a Theory" canard..
Even people that claim to be "educated" fail at science.
Last I checked, "Science" and "The Scientific Method" had numerous requirements. If you wish to claim that humans evolved from other primates, or dogs evolved from another species, or cats from another, we lack proof. This is why "Evolution" is called a "Theory".
Actually, no. An idea without proof is a "hypothesis." When you get evidence that confirms the hypothesis, it becomes a theory. No matter how much evidence piles up, it never graduates to anything else in practice. A scientific theory is only upheld if it is a way of explaining a set of observations. the more observations a theory fits or "explains", the more powerful and well supported the theory is. In this case, the facts are that people keep digging up fossils out of the ground. They can date those fossils by using many dating techniques, and can determine that they are very old. that the younger fossils show up higher in the strata than the older ones. When they put some of the fossils together to get a good idea of the animals they came from, it seems the animals are different at different times (the remains and fossils you find at different depths are from different kinds of animals.) There are for examples, many identified versions of dog-like animals, that aren't exactly dogs in the fossil record ( http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/otherprehistoriclife/a/Prehistoric-Dogs-The-Story-Of-Dog-Evolution.htm ), cats that aren't exactly cats ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felidae#Fossil_felids ) and yes different types of monkeys/gorillas/humans that aren't exactly like the ones we see walking about today ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fossil_primates. ) These different types of animals show up in the same place at different times, based on their depth in the fossil record.
There is also that in many parts of the world there are species that are similar to, but different from other species which are in neighbouring areas but separated by barriers such as mountains or large bodies of water. Classic example here is the Galapagos Finches. They don't look like finches from the mainland, they are all different on each island, with the differences suiting type of food available. There is also the fact that humans have been able to make dog breeds over relatively short periods of time, selective breeding clearly can alter skeletal characteristics.
There is also the strange poverty of designs in large animals. They have the same types of skeletons, same number of appendages and limbs, and innumerable common features that lead to groupings of animals into hierarchies of similarity. Once genetics were discovered, these hierarchies of similarity were found to be reflected in the degree of similarity of species genomic variation. Humans have genes that are 98% identical to those of chimpanzees, but only 50% identical to those of bananas.
but we can go beyond fossils, taxonomies, and genetics into innumerable examples from the living world that make perfect sense through an evolutionary lens. take a look at this:
( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22848088 ) where it shows how there are hundreds of different species of fig, and each one or two has a corresponding single species of wasp that pollinates it. Or the fact that our eye design (same design used in all animals with a backbone) is "backwards" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye#Evolutionary_baggage ) in that nerve fibres pass in front of the retina and all go to the centre whe
The article assumes that robots will be deployed, and be in a position to kill people. Sure that will happen, but how long will it be before the other side starts deploying robots, and especially when the robots are humanoid, how long is it going to take to determine whether that shape in the distance is friend or foe, human or robot ? Then it is a classic arms race, and side that has robots making the decisions will be much faster to shoot and rapidly annihilate the ones with fleshy overlords a continent away.
Ethics will give way to survival. The humans that die as a result will be collateral damage. Don't want to die? Don't be where the robots are.
It has the added benefit that the metadata can be mined for advertising purposes. Oh you are phoning Afghanistan? I guess you are muslim and perhaps are interested in low cost travel to those countries and ads from islamic banks. Oh, I see you a phoning a cancer centre, perhaps I can interest you in the funeral homes... the market value of this metadata is quite significant. I see you are phoning a singles hotline... NSA budget could be halved, and advertisers would subsidize lawful access through advertising dollars. Where have I seen a business model like this before, it seems familiar...
You're wrong it's not a white wash, it says that rather than the NSA or other government organizations gather and index the information, AT&T, Verizon, and all those other upright and accountable to tax payers organizations should hold the information instead, and respond to court orders... I feel so much better knowing that information is kept in private hands.
This... Further... It is not just that CA's can sign for any site, it is that sites can only ever use one CA. If you want to make CA's accountable (ie. when one has awful security, or is buddies with people you don't trust) then the groups and people, need to be able to un-trust them without large parts of the internet going dark. Also, Different people will trust different CA's. There is no CA that both the Chinese and American governments will trust. If you want to sell to both, you will likely need to use an approved CA for each. Similarly, privacy advocates, likely do not want to be using a CA approved by any government. So a single CA makes no sense because it has to be a trusted third party, and there is no such thing as a third party that every combination of two parties trusts. CA's should be negotiated on connection, just like ciphers. A bank could have a dozen certificates, and other, less well funded groups, might have fewer ones. When a CA gets compromised, people can drop it from their list, and use other certificates. There would be reputation systems to figure out which CA's are reasonable to trust (WoT-like systems...)
The person/entity you are doing the transaction with will get the right data. It is random people/programs elsewhere in the cluster that might be behind the times. I don't care when the NSA learns what my insurance premium is. A couple of minutes delay is fine. Also for Google trying to figure out what ads to show me, also the business intelligence part of the vendors stack, etc... there are many, many perfectly reasonable business applications where ACID is not necessary.
cheap performance trumps pointless reliability in a surprisingly large number of cases.
Completely agree with that. It only emphasizes that people who insist on using SQL for data safety and security reasons are doing it out of a kneejerk reaction. There is no magic tech that will just make stuff work. Folks need to understand the application. Choice of tools/engines is largely a matter of taste, and success a matter of the skill of the craftsmen in selecting and applying the chosen tools.
Why do people insist that NoSQL means losing data and inconsistency? What you are losing with NoSQL real-time consistency horizontally across large number of instances spread over multiple data centres. When you are doing a transaction, and it should be "eventually consistent." meaning on the order of minutes. So if someone, somewhere else, who you do not know about and are not interacting with asks about your data, it might be a few minutes old. ACID makes it so that random person will get an upto the milli-second accurate answer. That makes transactions orders of magnitude slower, and much more complicated to scale. When you relax that constraint and let the people doing the transactions (the person, and the providers they are dealing with) get the right answer immediately, but just post the transaction so that the backups etc... get informed in due course, you gain much simpler scaling.
The choice of NoSQL vs. SQL is not about the importance of the transaction. It is about application scaling and design, and the biases (tastes?) of the team doing the work.
Using dropbox or any cloud data storage provider to store sensible information is not a good idea.
Most people put total nonsense in their cloud storage, so that's fine...
(hint: foreign speaker alert! "Sensible" does not mean the same thing it means in French (at least, perhaps some other language in question. for Spanish speakers, try translating "No me molestes!" for fun...)
yup. nexus 5 works fine on a nexus 4 qi port, except that on the nexus4 the coil works almost anywhere on the phone, but on the nexus 5 you have to be nearer the centre. I'm using both while waiting for the new charger for my 5.
fwiw... It's 230 K, not 22 K$. but doesn't change your point.
ECG is so nerdy... He should emphasize other uses, and try to market based on that.
He could call it a "biorhythmic training device for understanding the crystals, and getting in touch with your aura.
or talk up the "biofeedback" aspects of it, how it will help with meditation.
That will sell to one crowd.
Figure out how to use it as a kind of game controller, and the internet will fund in a (wait for it!) heartbeat.
As in collectively the three of them are going to have CGI drag a cross on their back around the country for a few months, before they have the company install the cross, and they will nail CGI to it in a standing, sunward facing position? On Good Friday, they will go into Chapter 11. only to return a few days later, clean up some left over bills, and then disappear for good?
I think the point is that when an AI is driving, an accident will be a rare occurrence that people will want to understand, because it will be rare, and because the AI can be improved so that that problem does not happen again, and because if it happens for one person, the AI will do the same thing for other people, and if someone wants to sue, after the first time it happen, they will have a much stronger case for negligence on behalf of whoever is responsible for the AI.
Everything possible will be done to ensure that the same thing doesn't happen again, to avoid liability and/or a satire piece (like the Pinto gas tanks) that will kill the model involved. So a autonomous car accident will look more like an airline accident, with an investigative team coming in from wherever, and really nailing what went wrong, because just like an airline crash, hundreds of lives, sales, and big-time law suits will be on the line. That focus will change the numbers.
Look at fatality stats. When are normalized by distance travelled, it is 7.97/0.03 --> 266 times more likely to die in a car today than an airplane. That's where the direction things are going to go, only more so, because airplanes are still driven by humans, and there is an upper limit of reliability of humans that is much lower than can eventually be achieved by automation. So the airline numbers should continue to improve as automation is further refined.
In the past, there was always something humans could do that machiness could not. When people went off the farm, they could do mechanical assembly work, they could clean, serve food, judge whether someone was likely to pay back a loan, or know how to build something. Computers and robotics are progressing such that there are fewer and fewer tasks that they cannot do. Eventually the number of tasks that need humans will be very small. Humans will either need to compete fiercely for the few jobs available, or be born into independence. If the normal state of affairs is 80% or 90% unemployment, and robots can do any task that a human can do cheaper, faster and better, it makes no sense to employ humans to do that task.
If almost everyone shouldn't work, the value of human labour being practically nil, maintaining social stability and order become a problem and you need more labour to maintain order, robotic labour. Expressions like "Peace, Order, and Good Governance", "the american dream", "social justice", "life, liberty, and the pursuit f Happiness" change their meaning.
Insteon is low power, low range, low bandwidth... 2800 bit/s. If I don't have any other insteon equipment, why would I have a bridge? I wouldn't. I already have a wifi point because it is useful for general purpose (computers, smartphones, gaming devices, etc...) I prefer general purpose network that uses a medium thoroughly, rather one that uses multiple media and needs to share all of them and worry about multiple networks interfering. I prefer to debug interference with one PHY at a time. Granted... Insteon is going to be at a completely different wavelength, being so slow, but that also means I cannot see the packets going by without an Insteon sniffer... I'd rather just be able to use tcpdump on a wifi or ethernet port.
It isn't about whether Insteon works, It does. And it is here now... and it will be crushed by wifi and homeplug as adapters for those get cheaper/easier to incorporate into hardware because they are far more flexible future facing. What these people are doing, using existing networks instead of inventing your own is just a better way to solve the problem over the long run.
I like wifi better because it is already here, rather than having to add more hardware and have to support yet another network with yet another addressing scheme routing, etc... And Insteon is not IP, uses both RF and powerline..., and very low bandwidth... interesting but I prefer to use general purpose networks, say Wifi for RF, and HomePlug for powerline, both of which can be used by many more devices (in terms of compatibility), so reducing the total RF flying around.
allocating 1ms in 10 to a process on a process sounds pointless because in an environment with that many cores, getting a cpu will not be a problem. It's a bit like implementing QoS for VOIP on a gigabit ethernet link. Your voip channel is what a few kbps at most... a millionth of the available resource? What is the point of managing/scheduling it? That management overhead dwarfs the benefit in all but very rare cases.
What I suspect they are really about is assigning (ie. dedicating) groups of processors which are geometrically localized (patches or polygons on the compute surface) together, so they can run multi-processor apps on the surface without getting bogged down by noise of general purpose processes. This is well known in supercomputing, and is often termed reducing OS jitter, and is very important. It is about reducing contention for scheduling by undoing the last 50 years of OS work to share CPUs. CPUS are cheap, so dedicate them. It is typically the job of the batch scheduer, but I can see how pushing this down to the OS itself, in these days of many core on a chip, is a useful improvement.
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There are dozens of fossils of early hominids. Between every one of them, there is a gap. so the more fossils we find, the more gaps we create. See? full of holes. That is one interpretation. It isn't credible to any reasonable person. The more different fossils we find at different times, the more pieces of the puzzle that fit together are discovered, the better the evidence for evolution. I already provided that link, but here it is again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fossil_primates#Catarrhini
Your issue is speciation... "A Prometheus-type event"... hmm you mean a race of aliens creates another race of aliens to ship to Earth to devour the current inhabitants? no... your reference is to another fictional concoction, the supposed creation of man from clay by a member of the Graeco-Roman pantheon. There is this strange habit of religionists to use "appeal to fiction" as something they think is convincing. It isn't. What do you think Zeus was trying to tell us by condemning Prometheus to be attached to a rock, and have his liver eaten by an eagle every day, only to grow back? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus ) what phenomena are explained by this "fact."? What proof do you offer to accept one "fact" from Prometheus, but reject others?
But we'll take your point in the name of saving the wretched... If we have literally hundreds of thousands of different fossils at different times in the fossil beds, how many "Prometheus type" events were there? What triggers them? Were Dinosaurs and Humans created by the same Promethean event? Did we eat them or they eat us? how come all the fossil dinosaurs are far lower in the earth, at the same depth as only some small rodentish mammals, than any human remains? If there was only a few or one Promethean event, why aren't the same species found in the fossil beds at wildly different depths? Why are all mammals eyes wired backwards? Couldn't Prometheus get it right on at least some species? Why don't birds have arms as well as wings, it would be much easier to pick things up if they did? Why don't some prey species have more sets of eyes to look in all directions, instead of just changing the placement of two? Why create cuckoos and leeches? if there were a lot of promethean events, why don't we see new species all the time? There is an infinite number of these types of questions that can be posed that are readily understood with reference to evolution. No other credible explanation has been put forward.
You bring up Gravity. take a look here, it's not hard, it's just ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_law_of_universal_gravitation#Problematic_aspects ) People don't know what causes gravity, it requires instantaneous, infinite propagation. Further, The observed fact that the gravitational mass and the inertial mass is the same for all objects is unexplained within Newton's Theories. There are so many holes! How could you possible accept gravity, when we don't know what causes it, don't know what it is made of, and has effects we cannot explain. Until you can prove it to me. Gravity is just a Theory!
You claim there was no proof offered, yet my original post gave a referenced a mountain of evidence from animal taxonomy, morphology, the fossil record, and genetics, that would lead any un-biased, reasonable person to accept that the theory of Evolution matches and unifies many lines of evidence in a convincing way, and that is all that people who "believe" in Evolution actually assert. That it is the best scientific explanation offered so far, in exactly the same way that Newton's laws, or Einstein's Theory are the best explanations for other phenomena. Are there holes? sure! Got a better idea? no. It's that simple.
To question Evolution in a credible way, the onus is on you to posit some other explanation that provides a more elegant answer, either by better fitting the facts available, or by providing an explanation for additional ones. Substitute "Newton's laws" for evolution in your statements and see how credible you are. "Newton's laws" are not proven! It's just nonsense. You are deluded and afflicted and have my sympathy, but I could never "respect" such idiocy.
I'm guessing that you agree that we do have proven science, so your initial assertion that everything is hypothesis is wrong so you dropped that argument.
I said things start out as a hypothesis, and graduate to the status of Theory when they get enough supporting evidence. That's true. nothing to drop. don't know what you mean. My initial post pointed out there is a so-called "Law" (Newton's) that is over-ridden by a mere Theory (Einstein's) How could this happen if "Laws" are so much stronger than "Theories"? You didn't choose to deal with that. Newton's laws are presumably what you call "proven science." what do you do if it is proven wrong? Why does NASA demote Newton's Laws to mere Theories? http://www-spof.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Sgravity.htm ?
I have no idea why you then point to an OP-ED piece to describe "Theory" instead of using the definition we have in dictionaries and defined by a couple thousand years of science. Are you trying to redefine the word, or do you accept that a theory is not proven?
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/theory -
I take definitions 1, 3, 4, and 5 into account. You are oddly obsessed with meaning 2 to the exclusion of all others.
Until I have proof preaching my belief as better than theirs is foolish because nobody can win the argument.
If you will not accept any proof offerred, then it is unfalsifiable, and by definition, not science. If no-one can win an argument, that doesn't mean both sides are justified. It is possible that one side is simply unreasonable.
Perhaps you personally believe it's proven and don't want more data. You are not alone, but that is a belief and not a scientific point of view (which claims it's a good theory with lots of promise). You having convictions in that belief is different from a person that believes a deity did it how exactly?
A "theory" is something which fits a lot of facts. it is not an unproven idea. You are simply wrong. Look it up, like here: http://www.livescience.com/21491-what-is-a-scientific-theory-definition-of-theory.html In Science we are supposed to apply Occam's Razor, and take the simplest theory that matches all the data given. A theory is also, as the definition is given, falsifiable, that is it can be proven wrong if new data shows up that contradicts it. "A deity did it", a) can cover any arrangement of facts imaginable, so has no predictive value, b) is the cosmic equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine, something vastly more complicated than anything being explained. c) cannot be evaluated as better or worse than the creation myths of thousands of other religions. So if you want your pet hypothesis to be granted greater weight than the thousands of discredited ones from historical religions, you have to find convincing good reasons why yours fits the facts better than any of these ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_creation_myths )
Think really hard about that one, because it's not any different.
So back to what I closed with, claiming your belief is better than someone else' belief only works with company that believes like you do. I'm not belittling your belief, telling you it's wrong, or asking you to question your belief. I'm suggesting that you recognize your belief for what it is, and understand that it conflicts with other beliefs. When we have the missing proof, then we can all jump up and down yelling 'told ya so'.
If someone says that the sun moves around the earth, or that it is pulled across the sky each day by a god on a chariot pulled by horses, you are going to agree with me that those ideas are potentially meaningful stories to someone, and ought to be studied in mythology, but are not worthy of modern people. I don't think that religious people should be belittled, any more than one should kick someone because they only have lost a leg, or have cancer. You are afflicted with a mental illness, passed on to you by you ancestors. It prevents you from thinking rationally on certain subjects. The world view of the mentally ill are bent such that they think their sick perceptions are true. That's the nature of it. I respect you, the human, and your ancestors, but the infection does not get any respect.
You have an meme-infection, and the infection ought to be cured, but that is very difficult to do in practice. You are a cripple and I would like to help you, but all you will do is spout nonsense and venom at me in the best case, and threaten violence in the worst case. And most of humanity is infected. Zombie movies are real. I should just ignore to ridiculous eruptions, much as one would the ravings of someone delirious with fever. If you press me, however, I have the choice of either agreeing with you to let you calm yourself, or trying, no doubt vainly, to express how you are misguided. I know there is a human in there that deserves to be saved, so once in a while I will try the latter, but it is almost always wiser to pursue the former course.
Being silent does nothing to help you: It abandons you to your fate. It does help me: It lightens the burden on myself, so that I can work on other tasks more likely to succeed, and less likely to breed resentment. So the rational argument to give you silent forbearance is fairly strong, but it should never be misconstrued as true respect of paleolithic superstition. That would be ridiculous.
Even people that claim to be "educated" fail at science.
Last I checked, "Science" and "The Scientific Method" had numerous requirements. If you wish to claim that humans evolved from other primates, or dogs evolved from another species, or cats from another, we lack proof. This is why "Evolution" is called a "Theory".
Actually, no. An idea without proof is a "hypothesis." When you get evidence that confirms the hypothesis, it becomes a theory. No matter how much evidence piles up, it never graduates to anything else in practice. A scientific theory is only upheld if it is a way of explaining a set of observations. the more observations a theory fits or "explains", the more powerful and well supported the theory is. In this case, the facts are that people keep digging up fossils out of the ground. They can date those fossils by using many dating techniques, and can determine that they are very old. that the younger fossils show up higher in the strata than the older ones. When they put some of the fossils together to get a good idea of the animals they came from, it seems the animals are different at different times (the remains and fossils you find at different depths are from different kinds of animals.) There are for examples, many identified versions of dog-like animals, that aren't exactly dogs in the fossil record ( http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/otherprehistoriclife/a/Prehistoric-Dogs-The-Story-Of-Dog-Evolution.htm ), cats that aren't exactly cats ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felidae#Fossil_felids ) and yes different types of monkeys/gorillas/humans that aren't exactly like the ones we see walking about today ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fossil_primates. ) These different types of animals show up in the same place at different times, based on their depth in the fossil record.
There is also that in many parts of the world there are species that are similar to, but different from other species which are in neighbouring areas but separated by barriers such as mountains or large bodies of water. Classic example here is the Galapagos Finches. They don't look like finches from the mainland, they are all different on each island, with the differences suiting type of food available. There is also the fact that humans have been able to make dog breeds over relatively short periods of time, selective breeding clearly can alter skeletal characteristics.
There is also the strange poverty of designs in large animals. They have the same types of skeletons, same number of appendages and limbs, and innumerable common features that lead to groupings of animals into hierarchies of similarity. Once genetics were discovered, these hierarchies of similarity were found to be reflected in the degree of similarity of species genomic variation. Humans have genes that are 98% identical to those of chimpanzees, but only 50% identical to those of bananas.
but we can go beyond fossils, taxonomies, and genetics into innumerable examples from the living world that make perfect sense through an evolutionary lens. take a look at this: ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22848088 ) where it shows how there are hundreds of different species of fig, and each one or two has a corresponding single species of wasp that pollinates it. Or the fact that our eye design (same design used in all animals with a backbone) is "backwards" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye#Evolutionary_baggage ) in that nerve fibres pass in front of the retina and all go to the centre whe
Ethics will give way to survival. The humans that die as a result will be collateral damage. Don't want to die? Don't be where the robots are.
It has the added benefit that the metadata can be mined for advertising purposes. Oh you are phoning Afghanistan? I guess you are muslim and perhaps are interested in low cost travel to those countries and ads from islamic banks. Oh, I see you a phoning a cancer centre, perhaps I can interest you in the funeral homes... the market value of this metadata is quite significant. I see you are phoning a singles hotline... NSA budget could be halved, and advertisers would subsidize lawful access through advertising dollars. Where have I seen a business model like this before, it seems familiar...
You're wrong it's not a white wash, it says that rather than the NSA or other government organizations gather and index the information, AT&T, Verizon, and all those other upright and accountable to tax payers organizations should hold the information instead, and respond to court orders... I feel so much better knowing that information is kept in private hands.
subject had a greater than sign.. sigh... subject was meant to read, use more than one...
This... Further... It is not just that CA's can sign for any site, it is that sites can only ever use one CA. If you want to make CA's accountable (ie. when one has awful security, or is buddies with people you don't trust) then the groups and people, need to be able to un-trust them without large parts of the internet going dark. Also, Different people will trust different CA's. There is no CA that both the Chinese and American governments will trust. If you want to sell to both, you will likely need to use an approved CA for each. Similarly, privacy advocates, likely do not want to be using a CA approved by any government. So a single CA makes no sense because it has to be a trusted third party, and there is no such thing as a third party that every combination of two parties trusts. CA's should be negotiated on connection, just like ciphers. A bank could have a dozen certificates, and other, less well funded groups, might have fewer ones. When a CA gets compromised, people can drop it from their list, and use other certificates. There would be reputation systems to figure out which CA's are reasonable to trust (WoT-like systems...)
cheap performance trumps pointless reliability in a surprisingly large number of cases.
Completely agree with that. It only emphasizes that people who insist on using SQL for data safety and security reasons are doing it out of a kneejerk reaction. There is no magic tech that will just make stuff work. Folks need to understand the application. Choice of tools/engines is largely a matter of taste, and success a matter of the skill of the craftsmen in selecting and applying the chosen tools.
Why do people insist that NoSQL means losing data and inconsistency? What you are losing with NoSQL real-time consistency horizontally across large number of instances spread over multiple data centres. When you are doing a transaction, and it should be "eventually consistent." meaning on the order of minutes. So if someone, somewhere else, who you do not know about and are not interacting with asks about your data, it might be a few minutes old. ACID makes it so that random person will get an upto the milli-second accurate answer. That makes transactions orders of magnitude slower, and much more complicated to scale. When you relax that constraint and let the people doing the transactions (the person, and the providers they are dealing with) get the right answer immediately, but just post the transaction so that the backups etc... get informed in due course, you gain much simpler scaling. The choice of NoSQL vs. SQL is not about the importance of the transaction. It is about application scaling and design, and the biases (tastes?) of the team doing the work.
Using dropbox or any cloud data storage provider to store sensible information is not a good idea.
Most people put total nonsense in their cloud storage, so that's fine... (hint: foreign speaker alert! "Sensible" does not mean the same thing it means in French (at least, perhaps some other language in question. for Spanish speakers, try translating "No me molestes!" for fun...)
yup. nexus 5 works fine on a nexus 4 qi port, except that on the nexus4 the coil works almost anywhere on the phone, but on the nexus 5 you have to be nearer the centre. I'm using both while waiting for the new charger for my 5.
fwiw... It's 230 K, not 22 K$. but doesn't change your point. ECG is so nerdy... He should emphasize other uses, and try to market based on that. He could call it a "biorhythmic training device for understanding the crystals, and getting in touch with your aura. or talk up the "biofeedback" aspects of it, how it will help with meditation. That will sell to one crowd. Figure out how to use it as a kind of game controller, and the internet will fund in a (wait for it!) heartbeat.
It is native code but still running in a sandbox.
https://developers.google.com/native-client/dev/overview#security
The only interaction between this process and the outside world is through sanctioned browser interfaces.
As in collectively the three of them are going to have CGI drag a cross on their back around the country for a few months, before they have the company install the cross, and they will nail CGI to it in a standing, sunward facing position? On Good Friday, they will go into Chapter 11. only to return a few days later, clean up some left over bills, and then disappear for good?
Everything possible will be done to ensure that the same thing doesn't happen again, to avoid liability and/or a satire piece (like the Pinto gas tanks) that will kill the model involved. So a autonomous car accident will look more like an airline accident, with an investigative team coming in from wherever, and really nailing what went wrong, because just like an airline crash, hundreds of lives, sales, and big-time law suits will be on the line. That focus will change the numbers.
Look at fatality stats. When are normalized by distance travelled, it is 7.97/0.03 --> 266 times more likely to die in a car today than an airplane. That's where the direction things are going to go, only more so, because airplanes are still driven by humans, and there is an upper limit of reliability of humans that is much lower than can eventually be achieved by automation. So the airline numbers should continue to improve as automation is further refined.
If almost everyone shouldn't work, the value of human labour being practically nil, maintaining social stability and order become a problem and you need more labour to maintain order, robotic labour. Expressions like "Peace, Order, and Good Governance", "the american dream", "social justice", "life, liberty, and the pursuit f Happiness" change their meaning.
Hard to say how it will turn out...
It isn't about whether Insteon works, It does. And it is here now... and it will be crushed by wifi and homeplug as adapters for those get cheaper/easier to incorporate into hardware because they are far more flexible future facing. What these people are doing, using existing networks instead of inventing your own is just a better way to solve the problem over the long run.
I like wifi better because it is already here, rather than having to add more hardware and have to support yet another network with yet another addressing scheme routing, etc... And Insteon is not IP, uses both RF and powerline..., and very low bandwidth... interesting but I prefer to use general purpose networks, say Wifi for RF, and HomePlug for powerline, both of which can be used by many more devices (in terms of compatibility), so reducing the total RF flying around.
Why use IR, phones have cameras and LED flashes... better to use visual spectrum...
What I suspect they are really about is assigning (ie. dedicating) groups of processors which are geometrically localized (patches or polygons on the compute surface) together, so they can run multi-processor apps on the surface without getting bogged down by noise of general purpose processes. This is well known in supercomputing, and is often termed reducing OS jitter, and is very important. It is about reducing contention for scheduling by undoing the last 50 years of OS work to share CPUs. CPUS are cheap, so dedicate them. It is typically the job of the batch scheduer, but I can see how pushing this down to the OS itself, in these days of many core on a chip, is a useful improvement.
Look! http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/m-c-escher/horseman-1
A tessellation that is not made up of regular polygons. Dang.
There... fixed that for you...