Most people don't have the slightest understanding of how the Internet works; for them, it is indistinguishable from magic. It would be nice if users understood how their machine fits into the Internet, how one computer communicates to another (at a high level, not necessarily the gritty details), and precisely what sort of hazards that subjects them to (and doesn't subject them to - e.g. everything that goes wrong on your machine is NOT necessarily the fault of a "virus").
I'm just suggesting that their review of scientific material by such creationists is beneficial to all scientists. Their attempts to prove science wrong will weed out the results and data that may be falsified.
The problem is that creationists generally don't make such attempts in good faith, nor do they have much appreciation for scientists' notion of what constitutes true falsification. They are advocates for an agenda, not impartial seekers of verifiable truth. (And yes, scientists aren't always honest and impartial either - but the scientific community still holds up impartiality as an ideal in a way creationists don't and can't.)
We VERY rarely hear of research actually failing, when in fact we should be hearing it ALL THE TIME since taking stabs at new ideas shouldn't be successful all the time.
Oh, research does fail all the time, believe me. In fact, right before I wrote this, one of my own experimental setups came up with disappointing results.
The reason you don't hear about it is that no one tends to publish the negative results - they're usually not nearly as interesting (or profitable) as the positive ones. I will not get a paper out of the experiment I just ran, for instance - instead, I will probably change my setup or hypothesis, and try running other ones.
It is unfortunate that this happens, though - sometimes this can produce what is known as the "file drawer effect", where positive results from one study are not compared against unpublished negative results in similar experiments.
The reason being shrill is looked down upon by a lot of serious politicos is that the message can be overwhelmed by the tone -- if the argument needs to be shrill to get attention, how valid can the argument be?
You say this as if arguments or ideas gain attention in our society on the merits of their content alone. This is plainly absurd, as anyone with any familiarity with politics, media, or marketing knows far too well. Sometimes screaming is the only way to be heard.
You seem to presume that a company's value can be measured in terms of your personal experience with it. In fact, there are many companies which, if they went bankrupt tomorrow, would not be noticed by you, but nonetheless bring in good profits and offer strong growth.
And a company's valuation has as much, if not more, to do with how well it is managed as how well its products are received. Google's popularity says they can bring in revenue, sure, but if Google's management is deficient, it doesn't matter how popular its services are; as a company, it's a bad investment.
Yes, programming and software engineering isn't science, as you say - but that's not what computer science is. Computer science is the study of information management and processing. Fields like data mining, machine learning, and networking actually do employ empirical techniques and experiments on real data. It's not just about coding.
Computer science, in my perception, is more academic, research oriented, ivory tower stuff while the real work is getting done in software engineering.
Yes, CS is more academic in nature, but it's not quite fair to say computer science majors aren't doing "real work". AI, robotics, natural language processing, machine learning, data mining, animation - the work in these areas is done by people with a CS background, and not just in ivory towers.
The ammount of therory in CS is what is killing these programs. What is needed is job training. You can graduate from a school like WPI with a degree in CS without knowing how to write a VB app. It's pretty sickening.
You miss the point of a CS major entirely. The point is not to crank out legions of coding monkeys. Rather, the point is to understand the process of computation. Anyone who went through a good CS program could pick up VB in no time. Technology specifics change all the time, but the principles learned in the CS curriculum remain valuable. Those Indian students? The good ones know these things, too, rest assured.
You may think all of this knowledge is useless, but I respond by pointing to Visual Basic "programmers" without a CS degree who don't even know enough to avoid using an O(n^2) sorting algorithm.
Linux will not be there (by your definition) until OEM's build systems that will run Linux and are tested on Linux just like they do with Windows.
Perhaps - or when Linux software companies start picking up the slack for them and putting much more effort into maintaining third-party drivers for the hardware in every major manufacturer's machines.
It's unfortunate, yes, but to expect Linux to catch on as a mainstream OS when it only can correctly install 85% of your hardware correctly 85% of the time without tweaking of configuration files and grabbing tarballs is just not realistic.
I know others who have given up on installing Linux because of that one piece of hardware that they just couldn't figure out how to work with any distro. Linux will not "be there" until there are one or two distributions on which ALL common off-the-shelf components install correctly the first time, or perhaps with another RPM install. No "./configure; make; make install", no tweaking text files, etc. Even when the drivers are there, the distros frequently aren't providing the updates quickly enough.
Actually, the campaign issue is whether a major news organization used memos which it either (1) knew or (2) reasonably should have known were falsified as the basis for a story which was released with the intent of influencing the outcome of the election.
Unless either the Bush or Kerry team were complicit in the forgery - and there's no evidence to indicate either campaign was - there is no campaign issue, period. It's CBS's problem.
To the Kos, the CBS forged memos were real and still are.
Like many people that cite Kos, you're probably basing this on someone else's diary entry on the blog, not on Kos's own entries. For some reason, people just don't understand that anyone can keep a diary on his site. It's not an endorsement of the views.
I'd like you to point to a recent example of Kos insisting the documents were real. He barely spoke about them at all, even early on.
"Regardless of what you think about Bush, this isn't totally fair and I think he'd have a good case for libel, if he wasn't president."
Not really. IANAL, but I believe that to claim libel, they'd have to show that CBS knew the documents were forged, and did it specifically to harm Bush. Unless some internal memos or whistle-blowers show otherwise, there's plenty of reason to believe CBS was merely sloppy in their work, not dishonest.
Researchers, for instance, could benefit from a P2P network to distribute academic work. In general, it would be well suited for swapping data in any community which actively encourages that kind of sharing, and which could enjoy increased efficiency by cutting out middlemen (e.g. academic journals).
But it's not the nicotine they really need to wean themselves off of. Nicotine isn't terribly harmful in the tiny doses you get it in cigarettes - at least not compared to the damage the smoke does. Why would this be better for quitting smoking than using a patch or nicotine gum? It's the nicotine that gets them hooked, but it's the carcinogens they really want to avoid.
I wonder what makes them think they can pull it off.
Perhaps they saw what a crappy job they did in the antitrust trial. For such an allegedly powerful legal team, they don't seem to have their act together at all. The only thing that saved them was the appearance of a more Microsoft-friendly execute branch.
But why do we feel the need to eat more? Is it because with less fat, we feel less full, and feel the need to consume more food more often?
Quite possibly. There's something called the Satiety Index, which attempts, somewhat unscientifically, to measure the satisfaction or "fullness" derived from various foods. Foods high in refined flour and sugar foods tend to score very low on it, whole grains fare a little better, and foods high in protein and fat score high. (Staying away from refined grains and simple sugars is a good idea, regardless of whether it's fat or carbs that make you fat.)
Americans have not become fatter since the 1980's just because we're eating less fat, which is what this article seems to suggest. The simple fact is: We've been eating more. And more, and more. The average size of a restaurant entree today is 1.5 times that of one twenty-five years ago. We sip from larger Cokes and Supersize our fries. The simple fact is that if you eat more calories than you burn, you get bigger. It's quite basic. Now, your balance of calories on top of that in terms of fats, carbs, and such matters, but the fact that Americans get fat on low-fat "diets" doesn't mean much by itself.
Last I heard, a one-year subscription to the L Report, a website for marketers on trends among urban youth, cost $20K a year. That's just a username and password too - and companies actually shell out for it, just so they'll know that kids in Seattle these days wear color X nail polish and enjoy bowling and taking E on weekends or whatever.
"So if I understand correctly, the logic involved to win a game isn't really the problem, it is more
of a mechanical problem, isn't it?"
Mechanical? Oh, there's far more to it than that. Designing good algorithms for vision and planning is not a trivial task, even if it does get easier with increased memory availability. How do you tell where the ball is, and discern the ball from a similarly colored spherical object on the sidelines? How do you identify your teammates? What motions should you use to respond to the ball headed towards you? A chess player is far easier to implement - the problem space is small and well-delineated (you have X many possible moves, with Y many possible responses, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
Most people don't have the slightest understanding of how the Internet works; for them, it is indistinguishable from magic. It would be nice if users understood how their machine fits into the Internet, how one computer communicates to another (at a high level, not necessarily the gritty details), and precisely what sort of hazards that subjects them to (and doesn't subject them to - e.g. everything that goes wrong on your machine is NOT necessarily the fault of a "virus").
I'm just suggesting that their review of scientific material by such creationists is beneficial to all scientists. Their attempts to prove science wrong will weed out the results and data that may be falsified.
The problem is that creationists generally don't make such attempts in good faith, nor do they have much appreciation for scientists' notion of what constitutes true falsification. They are advocates for an agenda, not impartial seekers of verifiable truth. (And yes, scientists aren't always honest and impartial either - but the scientific community still holds up impartiality as an ideal in a way creationists don't and can't.)
We VERY rarely hear of research actually failing, when in fact we should be hearing it ALL THE TIME since taking stabs at new ideas shouldn't be successful all the time.
Oh, research does fail all the time, believe me. In fact, right before I wrote this, one of my own experimental setups came up with disappointing results.
The reason you don't hear about it is that no one tends to publish the negative results - they're usually not nearly as interesting (or profitable) as the positive ones. I will not get a paper out of the experiment I just ran, for instance - instead, I will probably change my setup or hypothesis, and try running other ones.
It is unfortunate that this happens, though - sometimes this can produce what is known as the "file drawer effect", where positive results from one study are not compared against unpublished negative results in similar experiments.
The reason being shrill is looked down upon by a lot of serious politicos is that the message can be overwhelmed by the tone -- if the argument needs to be shrill to get attention, how valid can the argument be?
You say this as if arguments or ideas gain attention in our society on the merits of their content alone. This is plainly absurd, as anyone with any familiarity with politics, media, or marketing knows far too well. Sometimes screaming is the only way to be heard.
You seem to presume that a company's value can be measured in terms of your personal experience with it. In fact, there are many companies which, if they went bankrupt tomorrow, would not be noticed by you, but nonetheless bring in good profits and offer strong growth.
And a company's valuation has as much, if not more, to do with how well it is managed as how well its products are received. Google's popularity says they can bring in revenue, sure, but if Google's management is deficient, it doesn't matter how popular its services are; as a company, it's a bad investment.
There certainly is science in CS.
Yes, programming and software engineering isn't science, as you say - but that's not what computer science is. Computer science is the study of information management and processing. Fields like data mining, machine learning, and networking actually do employ empirical techniques and experiments on real data. It's not just about coding.
Computer science, in my perception, is more academic, research oriented, ivory tower stuff while the real work is getting done in software engineering.
Yes, CS is more academic in nature, but it's not quite fair to say computer science majors aren't doing "real work". AI, robotics, natural language processing, machine learning, data mining, animation - the work in these areas is done by people with a CS background, and not just in ivory towers.
The ammount of therory in CS is what is killing these programs. What is needed is job training. You can graduate from a school like WPI with a degree in CS without knowing how to write a VB app. It's pretty sickening.
You miss the point of a CS major entirely. The point is not to crank out legions of coding monkeys. Rather, the point is to understand the process of computation. Anyone who went through a good CS program could pick up VB in no time. Technology specifics change all the time, but the principles learned in the CS curriculum remain valuable. Those Indian students? The good ones know these things, too, rest assured.
You may think all of this knowledge is useless, but I respond by pointing to Visual Basic "programmers" without a CS degree who don't even know enough to avoid using an O(n^2) sorting algorithm.
Check out the second paper on this guy's papers list.
http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/~dm/home/papers.html
Linux will not be there (by your definition) until OEM's build systems that will run Linux and are tested on Linux just like they do with Windows.
Perhaps - or when Linux software companies start picking up the slack for them and putting much more effort into maintaining third-party drivers for the hardware in every major manufacturer's machines.
It's unfortunate, yes, but to expect Linux to catch on as a mainstream OS when it only can correctly install 85% of your hardware correctly 85% of the time without tweaking of configuration files and grabbing tarballs is just not realistic.
I know others who have given up on installing Linux because of that one piece of hardware that they just couldn't figure out how to work with any distro. Linux will not "be there" until there are one or two distributions on which ALL common off-the-shelf components install correctly the first time, or perhaps with another RPM install. No "./configure; make; make install", no tweaking text files, etc. Even when the drivers are there, the distros frequently aren't providing the updates quickly enough.
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved."
Phew! Finally. Guess we don't need a DoJ anymore.
Actually, the campaign issue is whether a major news organization used memos which it either (1) knew or (2) reasonably should have known were falsified as the basis for a story which was released with the intent of influencing the outcome of the election.
Unless either the Bush or Kerry team were complicit in the forgery - and there's no evidence to indicate either campaign was - there is no campaign issue, period. It's CBS's problem.
To the Kos, the CBS forged memos were real and still are.
Like many people that cite Kos, you're probably basing this on someone else's diary entry on the blog, not on Kos's own entries. For some reason, people just don't understand that anyone can keep a diary on his site. It's not an endorsement of the views.
I'd like you to point to a recent example of Kos insisting the documents were real. He barely spoke about them at all, even early on.
"Regardless of what you think about Bush, this isn't totally fair and I think he'd have a good case for libel, if he wasn't president."
Not really. IANAL, but I believe that to claim libel, they'd have to show that CBS knew the documents were forged, and did it specifically to harm Bush. Unless some internal memos or whistle-blowers show otherwise, there's plenty of reason to believe CBS was merely sloppy in their work, not dishonest.
using randomized algorithms to perform the same tasks, exactly, other than being performed at the hardware level?
(insert BSD is dying troll here)
Researchers, for instance, could benefit from a P2P network to distribute academic work. In general, it would be well suited for swapping data in any community which actively encourages that kind of sharing, and which could enjoy increased efficiency by cutting out middlemen (e.g. academic journals).
But it's not the nicotine they really need to wean themselves off of. Nicotine isn't terribly harmful in the tiny doses you get it in cigarettes - at least not compared to the damage the smoke does. Why would this be better for quitting smoking than using a patch or nicotine gum? It's the nicotine that gets them hooked, but it's the carcinogens they really want to avoid.
I wonder what makes them think they can pull it off.
Perhaps they saw what a crappy job they did in the antitrust trial. For such an allegedly powerful legal team, they don't seem to have their act together at all. The only thing that saved them was the appearance of a more Microsoft-friendly execute branch.
But why do we feel the need to eat more? Is it because with less fat, we feel less full, and feel the need to consume more food more often?
Quite possibly. There's something called the Satiety Index, which attempts, somewhat unscientifically, to measure the satisfaction or "fullness" derived from various foods. Foods high in refined flour and sugar foods tend to score very low on it, whole grains fare a little better, and foods high in protein and fat score high. (Staying away from refined grains and simple sugars is a good idea, regardless of whether it's fat or carbs that make you fat.)
Americans have not become fatter since the 1980's just because we're eating less fat, which is what this article seems to suggest. The simple fact is: We've been eating more. And more, and more. The average size of a restaurant entree today is 1.5 times that of one twenty-five years ago. We sip from larger Cokes and Supersize our fries. The simple fact is that if you eat more calories than you burn, you get bigger. It's quite basic. Now, your balance of calories on top of that in terms of fats, carbs, and such matters, but the fact that Americans get fat on low-fat "diets" doesn't mean much by itself.
Last I heard, a one-year subscription to the L Report, a website for marketers on trends among urban youth, cost $20K a year. That's just a username and password too - and companies actually shell out for it, just so they'll know that kids in Seattle these days wear color X nail polish and enjoy bowling and taking E on weekends or whatever.
All concerned RoadRunner customers should change their organization name to "is a sh*tty ISP."
"So if I understand correctly, the logic involved to win a game isn't really the problem, it is more
of a mechanical problem, isn't it?"
Mechanical? Oh, there's far more to it than that. Designing good algorithms for vision and planning is not a trivial task, even if it does get easier with increased memory availability. How do you tell where the ball is, and discern the ball from a similarly colored spherical object on the sidelines? How do you identify your teammates? What motions should you use to respond to the ball headed towards you? A chess player is far easier to implement - the problem space is small and well-delineated (you have X many possible moves, with Y many possible responses, etc.)