...the principle of falsifiability has gone out of vogue...Karl Popper...shifted to a weaker form...post-modern critiques...have eroded its popularity greatly...scientific propositions require auxilliary hypotheses to have any predictive value. When a specific prediction is falsified, it is possible to "get around" the problem by modifying the auxilliary hypotheses. Since such modification to auxilliary hypotheses is considered a normal part of the scientific process, falsifiability doesn't really work very well.
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Could you give some examples of what you're talking about? For the record, I work in biotech, and pretty much our whole business is built on falsifiability; I've never heard a working scientist argue seriously against it.
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I'll take a stab. Suppose I say "It's raining outside." This sounds like a classicly falsifiable statement. But is it? If you look out the window and don't see rain, it may be that I was wrong. Or (I could perversely argue) it could be that you (incorrectly) assumed that
1) by "outside" I meant "outside, near this building" not "outside, somewhere"
2) the rain would be all around, not just on the side of the building with the window
3) the rain drops would be large enough to see
4) there would be enough rain drops to notice
5) it would still be raining by the time you looked
6) enough photons would interact with enough raindrops before reaching your eyes that you would detect the rain (instead of all missing)
7) the window really is a window, and not a clever high-res display
...and so on and so forth. The point is there are an infinite number of these silly secondary assumptions needed to go from "it's raining outside" to "if I look out that window I should see rain"; failure of the second claim does not falsify the first.
The hard core rationalist claim that "all it takes is a single counter example to disprove a theory" doesn't really work. In practice, then, we deal with a sort of fuzzy-falsification, and come up with estimates (w. specified confidence levels) that an assertion is true or false. A single test can't really topple a theory since you can't know for sure that the problem was in the theory and not in your test.
Now I'm one semester away from graduation [...] in CS, and I'm liking it less and less every day[...]I drag myself to classes and through projects, and it all seems really pointless--I'm just implementing what's written in the book, and eradicating the countless off-by-one bugs is nothing short of mind-numbing. I'd like nothing better than to recapture the feeling of joy I used to get out of doing this, and to once again be able to say I'm doing what I love. What do you do when it isn't fun any more, but you'd like it to be?
The big thing that is missing in school is users. It's like saying that being a pilot isn't fun anymore because you have gotten sick of flight simulators. In the real world it isn't clean "just implementing things out of the book" anymore. You have real people counting on you (and often, other real people counting on you to fail). The stakes (and the pressure, and the thrill) go up accordingly.
Yes, batting practice gets dull. So does field stripping a gun. But we do these things, not as an end in themselves, but so we'll be ready when it's for real. That's when the fun starts.
I was going to check it out -- but I *refuse* to give them free reign to spam me by phone, fax, email, and snal mail for the privilege of doing so.
I've been using Borland products since the early eighties, and the most I've gotten is a few mailings telling me about events in my area, product updates, and an occasional bit of free stuff. I typically tweek my address to catch/track spammers (e.g. misspell my name), and I've never had anyone else send me something using the address I gave Borland. In short, I'd trust them.
Has someone of you used this to port Delphi app to Linux?
I used K1 to port two smallish apps from D6. I had to do a few small source code changes, but it was mostly painless (much easier, say, than going from T5.5 to D1 w. the class/object change).
I just bought Kylix version 1 in July. I thought releasing an entire new product rather than fixing the existing product was a trick that only Microsoft pulled. I guess the economy crunch is getting to Borland as well.
1. For any active product, someone will have bought it just before each new version is announced, so the date you bought it isn't relevant.
2. There is very little wrong with K1, and there is a patch for that, so "fixing the existing product" isn't an issue.
3. Since it isn't a "trick" comparing it (the non-existent "trick") to MS is either silly or flamebait.
Do we really need these things anymore? I'm sure most television viewers out there can associate shows to networks, these days.
This is silly. All the shows I watch are on the Sony network, but the only way I know is that they slap there logo on it. They've got it rigged now so that it's even there when my TV is off. I think that's going too far!
The huge gotcha, that IMHO makes most if not all schedules fantasy, is that people talk about how long it will take to finish coding when what they are really interested in is the time it will take to have the code finished and debugged. Of course, the time it takes to have debugged code depends on things like:
* A tester or test suite exhibiting the bug
* Someone recognizing that it is a bug
* Enough data being gathered to define the bug ("It hangs sometimes" or "I don't think the results are always correct" doesn't cut it).
* Enough eyeball hours to find the bug (this in itself makes the process equivalent to solving a crime. Do we ask the cops to schedule crime solving?)
* About two minutes (average) to devise and implement a fix
This has to be done for N bugs, where N is unknown. People who think you can estimate software development schedules with any accuracy are either dreaming or assuming that they just have to estimate how long it will take to get it coded, not how long it will take to get it working correctly.
A polygon, and thus 2d (not three). The previous poster was off base saying a polygon has three points (in the biz, we call those "triangles"; all triangles are polygons, but not all polygons are triangles).
Where did Tesla get the megatons of destructive power in order to broadcast it about haphazardly?
Good point, though not conclusive. IIRC, one of his stunts was to wrap an old tower with cable, ground one end, fill the tower with scrap iron, and put a lightning rod on the top. You then have a large inductor coil (the tower), a very large capacitor (the earth / sky) and various resistance. As it turned out, this made an resonant circuit with a frequency on the order of a quarter of an hour, and had all sorts of interesting effects between the first time it was struck by lightning and when it exploded, about twelve hours later.
Since I wrote the original, I did a bit of digging and found this [mediaone.net] (scroll down a bit for a really flash diagram). By affecting the measured polarisation on one end, they are, instantly, affecting the measured polarisation on the other.
The snag is, the only way for them to know that we did it is for us to tell them by some other means. This system can't be used to transmit any information since there's absolutely no way for them to know that the polarization entanglement has colapsed without either 1) measuring it first (which would make them the sender) or 2) getting a regular old non-quantum message from the sender.
So unlike Ma Bell and church Bell's, etc. J. S. Bell doesn't help you get your message through.
Their logic seems similar to that of "whisper" chambers, but they break one of the assumptions when they start sending a steady stream of phase encoded ones and zeros. Now instead of having to reconstruct a complex wave form, all an eavesdropper has to do is:
1) Listen for pink-noise with a strong 1kHz component.
2) Play with the (recorded) signal a bit (e.g. adding 1us delayed copies to the original) until you can decompose it into two types of 1us segments--call them A & B.
3) Now you have a stream of As and Bs, and two possibilities; either A=0 and B=1, or visa versa. Test both.
Before you pack KY Jelly, make sure sodomy is not illegal in MD
There's no problem with KY jelly. Just take some grapes, a coconut, or a frisbee or something too, and tell them (with a straight face) that the KY is for the random item. If they make any suggestion of something sexual, act shocked and threaten to sue.
Unfortunately, it looks like the site might already be hosed. How about if we just speculate wildly, make irrational calls-to-action that will never commence, throw in a few anti-government rants, and top it all off with a good old fashion linux/bsd flamewar?
If breach of contract was such a terrible thing, it would be a felony. Only self-deceiving libertarians think contracts are equivalent to holy writ.
Wow. The gap between us is very wide. I can't even respond to your "points" here; they just fall apart when I try to pick them up. (Being eaten alive by rats can't be "a terrible thing" because all terrible things are felonies? How do you tell "self-deceiving libertarians" from libertarians that are deceived by others? Do you mean that atheist libertarians think contracts are worthless?)
But what boggles me most is that, leaving aside the various reasons someone might want to honour their contracts (e.g., self respect), you don't even seem to realize that it's often demonstrably a good strategy. How can you even function in society?
AC: Don't use that phrase that way unless you want to look like an idiot.
While I don't particularly mind looking like an idiot, I doubt that my use of "begs the question" here will do it.
To "beg the question" is to speak as if you are addressing a point, when in fact you are not. The original poster suggested having someone drink magnetic liquid and then going after them with a magnet. We all know what the expected outcome was. Then I suggested sending them to the airport, as if I knew what the outcome would be (and was making a sly joke), when in fact I don't know what would happen. Thus I was begging the question.
What may seem odd here is that I didn't wait for someone else to point this out; I called myself on it. While this is about as common as someone saying "I'm full of shit here,..." or "If you'd like to hear a bogus view, I think..." that doesn't make it wrong.
Which some might say is still better than being rude.
Why do you think breach of contract clauses exist?
To spell out penalties, the only purpose of which is to discourage people from breaching contracts.
Perhaps if you had actually read Adam Smith's work you would know that he addresses this in both The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
As it turns out, I have read The Wealth of Nations. I don't recall anything about domain name registrations, or about breaking contracts whenever it would be profitable to do so (perhaps you could provide a citation?). I do recall a great deal about freely making advantageous agreements, and it is pretty clear from game theory that anyone who makes a habit of breaking agreements will be at a disadvantage when it comes to making them, so I doubt he would have endorsed your view.
Breach of contract is as integral to commerce and the free market as banking.
The existence of penalties for breach of contract is as important as the existence of penalties for interfering with the free market, or for robbing banks. But I don't agree that commerce depends on people breaking contracts, monoplizing markets, or robbing banks.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Note that termination of a contract by either party, if under the terms of the contract, is not breach.
And, no, to presuppose the silly question I was asked earlier, of course one of the poles isn't in the centre of the magnet. If it were, how the hell would the flux lines get to the outside?!
If it were shaped like an apple and you wanted both poles inside there would of course be no problem. But to have one pole in the centre of a sphere you'd need to use a worm hole.
As far as I can see, this isn't a very well thought-out plan. For example, they say (under "other information to be tracked") that they are going to store everyone's karma. But will this be karma from slash-dot proper, or from some other site that uses slash code? How will we know? And, even more seriously, how do they expect to update it? I don't think we can just piggy-back on the e-bay update system, although I do see the merits of keeping the number of spinal implants to an absolute minimum.
I know this may sound like a silly thing to quibble over in such an important plan, but I think we (like all special interest groups) have a right to be heard.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. I am quite relieved to see that they dropped the idea of trying to track mod-points real-time. That would have been a nightmare!
Slashdot Mirror
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Could you give some examples of what you're talking about? For the record, I work in biotech, and pretty much our whole business is built on falsifiability; I've never heard a working scientist argue seriously against it.
----------
I'll take a stab. Suppose I say "It's raining outside." This sounds like a classicly falsifiable statement. But is it? If you look out the window and don't see rain, it may be that I was wrong. Or (I could perversely argue) it could be that you (incorrectly) assumed that
1) by "outside" I meant "outside, near this building" not "outside, somewhere"
2) the rain would be all around, not just on the side of the building with the window
3) the rain drops would be large enough to see
4) there would be enough rain drops to notice
5) it would still be raining by the time you looked
6) enough photons would interact with enough raindrops before reaching your eyes that you would detect the rain (instead of all missing)
7) the window really is a window, and not a clever high-res display
The hard core rationalist claim that "all it takes is a single counter example to disprove a theory" doesn't really work. In practice, then, we deal with a sort of fuzzy-falsification, and come up with estimates (w. specified confidence levels) that an assertion is true or false. A single test can't really topple a theory since you can't know for sure that the problem was in the theory and not in your test.
Make sense?
-- MarkusQ
G. Nolst Trenité
Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
Spot on! Not only would it have to disambiguate homonyms by semantic context, it would even need to use poetic context. Great poem!
-- MarkusQ
The lead story read: "Unionized environmental health workers object to new chip that can read un-ionized lead levels."
Reading english is a lot tougher than most English speaking people think.
-- MarkusQ
The big thing that is missing in school is users. It's like saying that being a pilot isn't fun anymore because you have gotten sick of flight simulators. In the real world it isn't clean "just implementing things out of the book" anymore. You have real people counting on you (and often, other real people counting on you to fail). The stakes (and the pressure, and the thrill) go up accordingly.
Yes, batting practice gets dull. So does field stripping a gun. But we do these things, not as an end in themselves, but so we'll be ready when it's for real. That's when the fun starts.
-- MarkusQ
I've been using Borland products since the early eighties, and the most I've gotten is a few mailings telling me about events in my area, product updates, and an occasional bit of free stuff. I typically tweek my address to catch/track spammers (e.g. misspell my name), and I've never had anyone else send me something using the address I gave Borland. In short, I'd trust them.
-- MarkusQ
I used K1 to port two smallish apps from D6. I had to do a few small source code changes, but it was mostly painless (much easier, say, than going from T5.5 to D1 w. the class/object change).
-- MarkusQ
1. For any active product, someone will have bought it just before each new version is announced, so the date you bought it isn't relevant.
2. There is very little wrong with K1, and there is a patch for that, so "fixing the existing product" isn't an issue.
3. Since it isn't a "trick" comparing it (the non-existent "trick") to MS is either silly or flamebait.
-- MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ
Doh!
I hate it when I do that!
-- MarkusQ
This is silly. All the shows I watch are on the Sony network, but the only way I know is that they slap there logo on it. They've got it rigged now so that it's even there when my TV is off. I think that's going too far!
-- MarkusQ
* A tester or test suite exhibiting the bug
* Someone recognizing that it is a bug
* Enough data being gathered to define the bug ("It hangs sometimes" or "I don't think the results are always correct" doesn't cut it).
* Enough eyeball hours to find the bug (this in itself makes the process equivalent to solving a crime. Do we ask the cops to schedule crime solving?)
* About two minutes (average) to devise and implement a fix
This has to be done for N bugs, where N is unknown. People who think you can estimate software development schedules with any accuracy are either dreaming or assuming that they just have to estimate how long it will take to get it coded, not how long it will take to get it working correctly.
-- MarkusQ
A polygon, and thus 2d (not three). The previous poster was off base saying a polygon has three points (in the biz, we call those "triangles"; all triangles are polygons, but not all polygons are triangles).
Polygons are by definition two dimensional.
-- MarkusQ
Good point, though not conclusive. IIRC, one of his stunts was to wrap an old tower with cable, ground one end, fill the tower with scrap iron, and put a lightning rod on the top. You then have a large inductor coil (the tower), a very large capacitor (the earth / sky) and various resistance. As it turned out, this made an resonant circuit with a frequency on the order of a quarter of an hour, and had all sorts of interesting effects between the first time it was struck by lightning and when it exploded, about twelve hours later.
-- MarkusQ
The snag is, the only way for them to know that we did it is for us to tell them by some other means. This system can't be used to transmit any information since there's absolutely no way for them to know that the polarization entanglement has colapsed without either 1) measuring it first (which would make them the sender) or 2) getting a regular old non-quantum message from the sender.
So unlike Ma Bell and church Bell's, etc. J. S. Bell doesn't help you get your message through.
-- MarkusQ
Their logic seems similar to that of "whisper" chambers, but they break one of the assumptions when they start sending a steady stream of phase encoded ones and zeros. Now instead of having to reconstruct a complex wave form, all an eavesdropper has to do is:
1) Listen for pink-noise with a strong 1kHz component.
2) Play with the (recorded) signal a bit (e.g. adding 1us delayed copies to the original) until you can decompose it into two types of 1us segments--call them A & B.
3) Now you have a stream of As and Bs, and two possibilities; either A=0 and B=1, or visa versa. Test both.
-- MarkusQ
There's no problem with KY jelly. Just take some grapes, a coconut, or a frisbee or something too, and tell them (with a straight face) that the KY is for the random item. If they make any suggestion of something sexual, act shocked and threaten to sue.
-- MarkusQ
Hey! That's "(GNU/linux)/bsd" flamewar, buddy!
And don't you forget it.
-- MarkusQ
Wow. The gap between us is very wide. I can't even respond to your "points" here; they just fall apart when I try to pick them up. (Being eaten alive by rats can't be "a terrible thing" because all terrible things are felonies? How do you tell "self-deceiving libertarians" from libertarians that are deceived by others? Do you mean that atheist libertarians think contracts are worthless?)
But what boggles me most is that, leaving aside the various reasons someone might want to honour their contracts (e.g., self respect), you don't even seem to realize that it's often demonstrably a good strategy. How can you even function in society?
-- MarkusQ
AC: Don't use that phrase that way unless you want to look like an idiot.
While I don't particularly mind looking like an idiot, I doubt that my use of "begs the question" here will do it.
To "beg the question" is to speak as if you are addressing a point, when in fact you are not. The original poster suggested having someone drink magnetic liquid and then going after them with a magnet. We all know what the expected outcome was. Then I suggested sending them to the airport, as if I knew what the outcome would be (and was making a sly joke), when in fact I don't know what would happen. Thus I was begging the question.
What may seem odd here is that I didn't wait for someone else to point this out; I called myself on it. While this is about as common as someone saying "I'm full of shit here,..." or "If you'd like to hear a bogus view, I think..." that doesn't make it wrong.
-- MarkusQ
You are certainly naive.
Which some might say is still better than being rude.
Why do you think breach of contract clauses exist?
To spell out penalties, the only purpose of which is to discourage people from breaching contracts.
Perhaps if you had actually read Adam Smith's work you would know that he addresses this in both The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
As it turns out, I have read The Wealth of Nations. I don't recall anything about domain name registrations, or about breaking contracts whenever it would be profitable to do so (perhaps you could provide a citation?). I do recall a great deal about freely making advantageous agreements, and it is pretty clear from game theory that anyone who makes a habit of breaking agreements will be at a disadvantage when it comes to making them, so I doubt he would have endorsed your view.
Breach of contract is as integral to commerce and the free market as banking.
The existence of penalties for breach of contract is as important as the existence of penalties for interfering with the free market, or for robbing banks. But I don't agree that commerce depends on people breaking contracts, monoplizing markets, or robbing banks.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Note that termination of a contract by either party, if under the terms of the contract, is not breach.
This is utter nonsense. If the law of supply and demand is to operate properly, it must first be possible to trust that people will honour contracts.
-- MarkusQ
Better: send them to the airport.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. That begs the question--what comes after strip & cavity search?
And do we realy want to know?
Liquid mercury isn't affected by magnets.
-- MarkusQ
If it were shaped like an apple and you wanted both poles inside there would of course be no problem. But to have one pole in the centre of a sphere you'd need to use a worm hole.
Irony and a pun. I couldn't resist.
-- MarkusQ
I know this may sound like a silly thing to quibble over in such an important plan, but I think we (like all special interest groups) have a right to be heard.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. I am quite relieved to see that they dropped the idea of trying to track mod-points real-time. That would have been a nightmare!