"Building your robot" wife isn't the dream of any lonely guy. Because it isn't a person, it cannot really relieve lonelyness at all. Building robot wives comes in two categories only:
Either it's really just a brainless robot. In that case, you're probably better off with fantasizing than buying a fragile piece of animated plastic for big bugs. Fantasy is more flexible and healthier from a psychological perspective (I don't need to go into the "why" on this one, don't I?).
The second category is some sort of machine with artificial intelligence in it. We're getting closer and closer to this scenario, and I predict we'll see the first edge cases in the next few years. Well, in that case buying a robot wife is more like buying time with a hooker, only it's more sinister because this amounts to nothing else but slavery. And the argument that we can build the willingness to serve right into their brains doesn't count either.
In any case, there is no way this is healthy or ethical. It's wrong.
API compatibility and dependency nightmares are one thing that makes using and maintaining Linux hard both on developers and on the end users. With some distros it's gotten so bad that you're better off not touching the system once it's running, ever again. You can't just download stuff of the net and expect it to compile. Even if - by pure chance - it does compile, odds are you'll break something else while you're trying to meet the dependency requirements. Libraries undergo severe changes not just between minor version numbers (bad enough) but sometimes also between builds.
The other big problem is the desktop usage scenario. X11/Xorg is a huge pain in the ass to configure, and worst of all, it has even more mindboggling design limitations. In the year 2008 you shouldn't be required to log off first before changing your resolution or before attaching another screen. Speaking of attaching another screen, say a projector during a presentation: forget it, it's not feasible with X. No amount of maturation will change that, it's a design flaw that can't be fixed. Neither can the huge complexity of the protocol. However, it's unlikely desktop Linux will ever start over fresh with a new display architecture.
On top of that come minor issues that nevertheless frustrate users immensely. Bad integration of GUI applications with their own desktop environment, much less with each other. In a standard distro, half the applications won't install, start up, or be usable in any meaningful way.
The system is designed from the ground up to not self configure, which is a big nuisance for end users. What happens when you plug in a USB device? A new network card? A webcam? Anything? Chances are: nothing will happen. If you're very lucky, some notifier icon will start to blink, maybe displaying an astonishingly cryptic hint about what to do next.
To be honest, I seriously doubt any of these issues can be fixed at all, even if the community was willing to care about them. The entire ecosystem is designed to behave that way, that's including the prevalent developer culture.
Therefore it's an emerging property of a very complex system that can reflect on itself. And if you were to create a system that had similar properties, similar level of complexity it would therefore have the same emerging property.
Yeah, nice way to answer the question directly in the text snippet below the sensationalist headline, there. To be fair, any other answer would have diminished my respect for Kurzweil beyond measure, but I'm still glad we're all on the same page.
Or, to use the populist version of the answer: Please keep in mind that our bodies are nothing but machines, too. So, yes, barring any magical fairytale definition of a brain, machines can obviously have "souls".
From my experience, more women than men are tool users, but there are plenty of both genders. Many more men than women are codeheads, and there are very few women codeheads. (I've only met one.)
I don't think I agree with that assessment. I believe the desire to actually create something from nothing (which is what codeheads do) is not gender-specific at all. Sure, most people are tool users and that's fine, too. Without them, we'd have a lot less practical advances in technology. But I don't think non-codeheads should be programmers at all, no matter what gender they are.
Incidentally, I have met many tool users who simply had the wrong jobs as programmers. They were terrible at it and all of them were men. On the other hand, the few developer women I've seen were all codeheads.
"How? I can't just... make stuff up. How will the compiler know to do that? Why would it listen to me? It can't be as easy as just typing out a definition. That doesn't *do* anything."
To me this just shows that you put more thought into the whole process than most people (maybe too much for your own good, but still). Most people just swallow anything and never bother to fully understand the 'why'. I believe that the lack of desire to understand a concept in its entirety is a key reason why so many software people are really really bad at programming.
Also, since you brought up the verbal orientation thing - I remember reading that good hackers are more likely to have above-average verbal skills when it comes to non-machine languages as well.
It's points like these that lead me to assume it all boils down to a 'simple' cultural issue. The good news is, it can be fixed. On the negative side, it'll take ages to get there. But, remember, the very first programmers were in fact women - feeding the giant electrical brains of defense and intelligence systems in the early history of information technology!
Yet every time I feel like I live and work in a sausage factory, I wander to HR or Marketing, and wonder where all the men went.
That's because culture has conditioned women into believing that computers are really boring and marketing on the other hand is a fast-paced exciting world full of opportunity and not much hard work where you can get by solely on social aptitude and good looks. That said, there are a few very cool girl programmers out there, and they primarily work on Web 2.0-style hip things and Ruby startups. Not that, you know, there is anything wrong with that.
can men and women socialize together the same way they can in their same gender? I don't think so, not in college and not afterwards. I may go out to lunch with one of my male coworkers, but I'm scared to do so with one of my (young, attractive) female coworkers.
Wow, this hasn't been my experience at all. When I get along with someone, it usually doesn't matter what gender they have - neither to me nor to my environment.
OS X supports many of the Windows Protocols (a lot better then linux in some ways) as well there is a better selection of high quality closed source applications, then linux has.
I'm a huge Mac fan on the desktop, for servers I prefer Linux. There is however one major gripe with OS X protocol integration: there is no way to refresh a Finder window. If a Windows/SMB share changes while the Finder window is open, it does not get updated. Maybe it's a combination of two problems, because I believe SMB supports change notifications. So that Finder doesn't notice a folder changed is bad enough, but to top it all off, you can't refresh even when you know the content has changed. I wouldn't call this better support of protocols.
And, while we're at it: it sucks that Finder doesn't support the FTP protocol. As far as I know, it's the only OS on the market that doesn't support FTP out of the box. Oh, you can mount an FTP directory alright, but it's always read only. Useless. And needlessly frustrating.
To clarify: the multiple pond hypothesis is only useful (in this context) if you're coming from a creationist's perspective. It's a logical and entirely hypothetical argument that serves to defeat the perceived necessity for a creator, but in doing so lends credence to the initial superstition that gave birth to Intelligent Design in the first place. It apparently never crossed anyone's mind to challenge the basic religious assumption of our "specialness", instead we keep building on top of a belief that has no basis in reality, solving "puzzles" that are entirely self-fabricated and erroneously giving them the aura of fundamental scientific questions in the process.
But there are/were many volcanic pools, and in order for that particular cyano bacteria to arise the conditions had to be right for it.
The point was that it doesn't matter how many ponds there are. It could be the only one and it would still exist! In fact, the bacteria don't know how many ponds are out there, and how they're different. Furthermore, they can't really use the hypothesis of multiple alternative ponds to arrive at any reasonable conclusion at all. It's utterly irrelevant.
The way I understand it is not the "the pool was created for us", but rather "we were created from the pool" and are inextricably a part of it.
Its not a scientific observation. Again, its a principle of reasoning, and observations, anyhow, aren't scientific (what you do with them, and perhaps how you plan to gather new ones, may be, but the observation involved in the anthropic principleâ""we exist"â"is not an observation derived from any kind of structured inquiry.)
I cede that the term "observation" was used lightly by me in this context, as this is obviously not something you can see with your own eyes without any context in (deeper) logical thought. And it is that same context which makes the Principle a tool for scientific reasoning, yes. And I stand by that. While we can play definitions games all day long and - if we really try hard enough - can keep purposefully misunderstanding and lecturing each other on semantics for all of eternity, I prefer to end this particular line of discussion now and come back to the actual content if that's alright with you.
I mean, does it matter which observation, principle, theory, or other thing originating in the domain of science is the most abused? Isn't the problem, insofar as there is one, that any are abused?
It matters to me, and I implied several times that this is a personal frustration I have, it's my personal opinion and I recognize that my bias against superstition probably plays a big role here. I'm irked this article even exists. It is my understanding that the scientific community has in spirit regressed considerably by even addressing this issue, again and again, just to keep the dialogue open with religion, in the vague hope to convince some creationists with a line of reasoning that is based on an invalid premise to begin with. As far as I can tell the article is biased in a way that makes perfect sense for religious people, but there is very little actual scientific value in it, if you discount the interesting insights into psychology perhaps.
Actually, no. The "anthropic principle" has always been, from the time that it was coined by Brandon Carter, a rule of reasoning that starts with that observation and then says further that, consequently, any reasoning about the universe ought to take that rather significant observation into account
I'm aware of the term's history, thanks. However, what I was talking about is: taking that observation into account is exactly what has been going wrong since the Principle was first formulated.
I don't disagree with Carter's intentions, I'm just appalled that this is still the number one scientific observation being relentlessly abused and perverted by delusional people, turning the meaning of its original premise on its head.
And the worst part of it is that even the "science philosophers" in charge of the original discussion seemed so prone to fundamentally misunderstand the difference between cause and effect when it comes to the nature of our existence. This whole issue should have been laid to rest decades if not centuries ago, yet keeps on unliving.
I think I'm about to puke. The Anthropic Principle in its purest form does nothing but make the observation that our surroundings obviously support lifeforms such as ourselves who in turn are able to make observations about their surroundings.
It really, really does not matter how many universes are out there. This is ours, and it exists without any need for justification. Sure, theoretically a vast number of universes could have parameters that make life impossible (like, say, because they have no temporal dimension), and just as unprovably many universes could exist that do support life in some form.
There is no discrepancy, there is no need for an explanation - at least scientifically speaking. Only religion demands an explanation, because it introduces the concept of "meaning".
To make a more earth-bound analogy: assume, somewhere in the desert, there is a volcanically heated pond of slime. The conditions in this pond are unique: it has a water temperature of 70 degrees Celsius and only a few uncommon amino acids can be found in the slime, making it a hostile environment for most known forms of life. However, in time, a type of cyano bacteria evolves that can handle the heat and live off the odd amino mixture.
Now, suppose that, by some freakish accident, the cyano bacteria were intelligent. They ask questions like "why is this pond so superbly designed to support us?". Of course, we as humans looking into the slimey pond, recognize the absurdity of the question right away, but the bacteria remain ignorant as to the stupidity of their premise.
They go on to ask "surely there must be an omnipotent creator who made this pond just for us". Again, looking from the outside in, we know better, but for the bacteria it's a huge deal. Next, they discover secularism and say "well, if there is indeed no creator, we must find another explanation why this pond is exactly the right kind of pond, because it is so exquisitly tailored to our needs!"
Then it dawns on the bacteria: "hey, maybe there is an infinite number of pools with different environments! So the explanation for the Bacteric Principle lies in the fact that one out of infinity has exactly the features we need!" At this point, we as outside observes realize the futility. The bacteria will never understand that the number of pools does not matter, because it was them who evolved to live there, it was never the pool that had to be adapted to them...
This is where we are now. And, just like the outside observer looking in, I realize the futility. But it nevertheless frustrates me immensely.
Brain waves on the battlefield, specifically negative waves [youtube.com], have been a concern of the US Army every since WWII.
It is simply not workable to "communicate through brain waves on the battlefield". Come on, we're talking about comic book style science here. This sounds all very cool and spiffy until you realize that brainwaves are not a one-to-one translation of delicate thought processes, but are rather based on crude electromagnetic measurements of the cortex as a whole. Please, these people need to wake up from their magical fairytale world and actually read up on the scientific basics behind the concepts they are talking about.
Life is not a Hellboy comic, and just because people at the DoD want sharks with frigging lasers, preposterous Supersoldat projects do not magically become feasible through willpower alone!
The problem with mental illness - in this case: massive delusions - is that it's not a "boolean" state. Psychiatry as a science makes the massive mistake of ignoring the gradual slope of those problems. From TFA:
those who believed they had been abducted were not psychotic, but suffering from severe memory and sleep problems, or personal traumas, Dr. Bell said
Maybe they are not in the strictest sense psychotic, but they clearly are delusional and suffer from a severe mental disease. I do understand the reluctance to acknowledge this, because in consequence it means that we have to shine a not-so-positive light on closely related phenomena, like say, fundamentalist religious beliefs. However, this is science, and psychiatrists should stop making all kinds of concessions to avoid clashing with cultural beliefs.
And another thing from the article:
For people who say they are the target of mind control or gang stalking, there may be enough evidence in the scientific literature to fan their beliefs. [...] Recently the sites have linked to an article published in September in Time magazine, "The Army's Totally Serious Mind-Control Project," which described a $4 million contract given to the Army to develop "thought helmets" that would allow troops to communicate through brain waves on the battlefield.
I don't understand how this legitimizes any of those mass delusions. If anything, examples like these go a long way to show that government spending is disgustingly influenced by a lack of education, common sense, and yes: sanity.
Computer memory is actually a pretty good analogy for this: the "unused" DNA is not reachable by any "pointers" and thus wasn't important when eucaryote evolution began. Some of these areas are obviously non-coding ever-repeating nonsense sequences, others appear to be random information - exactly like unused RAM in a computer system. Of course, nothing in there is really random, it's just a product of whatever process happened to use the areas before.
Here's the catch, however. Just like a programmer who develops against an ancient API with a lot of well-known bugs and workarounds, some transcription mechanisms actually began to rely on the presence of the "useless" areas in order to work.
It's all a huge mess, the deeper you look, the less elegant it all becomes. For example, epigenetic mechanisms modify the meaning of DNA code depending on different contexts, as the article mentioned. But that's still not the whole picture. In order to create a protein, DNA is first transcribed into RNA, which then in turn gets executed in order to assemble the protein. However, the intermediate RNA information is modified beyond recognition before it is used. Then, after the protein is finally assembled, it too can be modified extensively. All of these steps are hopelessly interwoven, and they use zillions of chemical messenger signals in order to tweak an manipulate each other.
Genetics really is the worst spaghetti code project ever and I assume that more advanced (=complex) organisms really paint themselves into an evolutionary corner eventually, because the whole system - while beautifully specialized - is essentially becoming more and more difficult to alter meaningfully when radical change needs to happen.
The government should be a reflection of society's values, not a separate life form with a will of its own.
That's what many religious groups think, and you're thinking like them.
Whether that statement is true depends on the nature of those values. In this case, we are talking about democracy and freedom. As they are opposed to the goals of organized religion, I would say that, no, your analogy does not hold up.
Obviously, besides the government because you can't legalize the way people think, there is no guarantee that same sex couple will enjoy the same kind of support, as a straight couple, from family, neighbors, or a religious institution. Not to say that they won't either, but they're on their own. Would this be good enough for you and your gay friends?
There is no measure of "good enough", I am not advocating special rights or special treatment for anyone. I just feel very strongly that the promise of equal rights and opportunities should be available to everybody, including whatever groups are not favored by the majority of the time.
There is simply no just reason to deny equal treatment to homosexuals, just as there was no justification for the way black people were treated until not so long a go. And at the time, they too got told that, for example, Apartheit was a good thing for both sides and that black people simply would have no need for full rights as citizens and human beings. Just like you are telling us today that gay persons should not care if they don't have access to all the same rights as everyone else. In the future it will no doubt be another group that gets discriminated, but the arguments will all remain the same.
It is not the government's job to ensure the support of family, neighbors, or religious institutions. Its job is to make sure everyone gets treated fairly and equally, to make sure our consitutional and our natural rights are not compromised. I acknowledge that your job description of a good government is completely different, but this is mine and it is based on nothing but the wish to keep improving ourselves, our society and or government towards the ideals of democracy and freedom.
Just because a minority is unpopular does not make it OK to institutionalize the repression of their rights, especially since exercising those rights will do no harm whatsoever to anyone. And, no, religious indignation does not count as harm.
What do you do when you are not feeling welcome in your family, or when your neighbors treat you poorly, or when your religious organization despises you? You move on to other people who actually like you, it's easy and it's your right. However, when your government is repressing you, there is really nowhere to go. This is why it's important to make sure hatred is not made into law.
To the government, marriage carries consequence for tax, social benefits, property ownership, parenthood, and census.
The government should be a reflection of society's values, not a separate life form with a will of its own. The motivation for people to marry is not tax, social benefits, property ownership, and census. They now (usually) do it because they do love their partner and they use this institution to signal commitment to this partnership. It's a symbolic step.
However, if it's about love, then not even a government or church certificate will testify for you. Only the couple, homosexual or straight, will testify about their love in their own hearts.
Correct! And they do, that's why they marry! The government's function is only to acknowledge their testament to another. Over the years, since the government has a vested interest in stabilizing committed couples as the basic building blocks of society, marriage came to be incentivized through tax breaks and other benefits.
Then, why the fuss about legalizing gay marriage? If you know your love is true, why do you need people to approve?
Why treat gay people any differently? Who exactly is harmed by having equal access to society's institutions? Why does public certification of your private partnership matter so much if you're straight, when at the same time your gay neighbor is essentially demoted to a second class citizen who should be glad to be allowed to love, as long as they make sure the homo stuff stays at home behind closed doors?
> that we are actually in quite close agreement on this issue.
You are absolutely right, we are! I'm sorry to have misjudged you like this. Your historic reference has probably triggered my response, and I completely misunderstood your point about homophoby because I was under the impression that you seemed to imply a person can be completely open-minded and yet arrive at the "logical" conclusion that gay people should not have equal rights. But they should.
If the state certifies marriage as the fundamental unit of our society, it shouldn't matter what gender the people involved have.
Anyway, I still disagree about the Greeks;-)
Re:African Americans are overwhelmingly homophobic
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Obama Launches Change.gov
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· Score: 3, Insightful
> "Homophobic" is newspeak. Does it ever occur to you that people who oppose adoption by gays, for example, may do so on the basis of principles they hold and not irrational fear?
No, I don't think fear is the biggest factor here. Your post makes it perfectly clear that you people are striving to deny equal rights to members of society that are different, out of principle. You define yourself by conjuring up an in-group that is on a perpetual mission to prevent the emergence of other social structures, acting as though the mere existence of alternative lifestyles is a threat to your way of life. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume this is all religiously motivated.
It's not fear, it's a combination of hate and the desire to impose authoritarian values on others in an effort to hide your own deficiencies. Maybe there is also the thought that, by making the lives of others more miserabe, you won't feel so bad about your own anymore.
> I think of ancient Greece, which can hardly be considered a culture that discriminated against homosexuality, yet I know of no movement for gay marriage in ancient Greece.
We are not ancient Greece, and that's a good thing. While ancient greek culture was certainly a milestone that represented the best knowledge about how to build a free society at the time, I'm very glad that we have evolved much further from those days. Being in a civil union with a life partner is not merely a commercially driven endeavor to procreate anymore, it is a concept based on the modern notion that two people are bound together by love.
My opinion? Maybe it's not the government's place to define or grant the status of "marriage" at all. Maybe legally, there should instead be just one concept of "civil unions", defined to be any partnership of two people who want to spend their lives together. Let the churches have that word, "marriage" and do whatever they want with it.
On a personal note, I have many homosexual friends, but even if I did not, it would still make me deeply ashamed to see that people still refuse to stand up for the rights of others. Many seem to think not having a personal stake in something makes it OK to look the other way when human beings are treated with contempt and their rights are called into question. But we need to recognize that we have to keep fighting, not only for our own personal freedoms but also for the freedoms of every single person who is treated wrongly. And that includes not letting people like you get away with pseudo-reasonable arguments of intolerance and inequality.
I recognize the right of my friends to express their lifestyle by entering into a recognized union, and I know it should make no damn difference what gender they happen to have.
Right now there are two reasons. First, it's an important technical milestone to make sure we regained the expertise necessary to get there before we go any further. Second, a permanent Moon base might make more sense than ISS economically, scientifically as well as possibly being a convenient staging area for advanced solar system exploration.
Because now, almost 40 years after Apollo 11, "we" have utterly lost the capability to go to the moon and beyond. Hell, we should at least be on Mars by now, but we just can't do it anymore. That should bother us. We, as a society, have regressed substantially without realizing it.
We should be bothered by the fact that we are planning to regain Moon flight capabilities somewhere within the next 15 years, and from the way things look right now, we won't even manage that in time and without blowing a huge budget on the endeavor. For reference, Apollo 11 landed on the Moon less than 8 years after Kennedy announced his plan.
With 40 years of technological advances behind us, we should be able to accomplish this much faster. Instead it'll take us twice as long, if we even manage at all.
I agree, with the exception of YouTube and sites like it.
The problem is, most computers don't have appropriate codecs installed that play inside the browser. And even if there was H264/AAC on each and every modern computer, you couldn't expect them to display those videos in the browser window next to your content.
Thus, the reasons for using Flash on YouTube are valid, since it comes with its own streaming codec and designers can make sure the stuff plays on every platform just fine.
In summary, just because we observe a universe of nature X doesn't mean our existence depends on X.
You're right of course, and the reason the anthropic principle got trapped in this pretentious and totalitarian implication about what our existence seemingly depends on is, because it got mutilated by "spiritual" pseudo philosophers in an effort to make themselves seem relevant, when in fact those particular questions should have been directed towards biologists in the first place.
But to expand on the problem of logic and religion, because I believe you have hit a broader theme here: religion's job description is to defy logic and scientific understanding. I postulate that for each and every scientific theory conceivable, an unlimited number of unprovable twisted religious explanations can be conjured up. This works basically by defining supernatural influence as whatever areas are poorly understood by the people at the time. Whenever the horizon of scientific understanding is updated, religious people have the option of either rejecting the new findings or updating the nature of god to reflect the new border beyond which there be dragons. And you'll find both things happening in real societies as a reaction to scientific progress all the time.
I may be wrong, but isn't the term anthropic principle essentially the opposite of what you're describing? IMHO the anthropic principle just states that there is nothing special about our particular environment beyond the fact that we happen to live here and there is not much else that we have experience with?
Sadly, religious nutjobs have completely turned around what was once an important scientific reasoning tool that existed to make sure our observations of nature are not biased towards human existence.
The anthropic principle is the mother of all cause-and-effect observations. The obvious cause here is that we live in a certain environment with a certain set of rules and random environmental factors, as a consequence of this, we have turned out the way we are now - including our way of interpreting the world around us. Now religious people, for whatever fucked-up reason, believe our environment was actually created by someone just for us to live in, and that the purpose of our universe is to support human life - thereby turning common sense on its head by confusing cause and effect.
Slashdot Mirror
"Building your robot" wife isn't the dream of any lonely guy. Because it isn't a person, it cannot really relieve lonelyness at all. Building robot wives comes in two categories only:
Either it's really just a brainless robot. In that case, you're probably better off with fantasizing than buying a fragile piece of animated plastic for big bugs. Fantasy is more flexible and healthier from a psychological perspective (I don't need to go into the "why" on this one, don't I?).
The second category is some sort of machine with artificial intelligence in it. We're getting closer and closer to this scenario, and I predict we'll see the first edge cases in the next few years. Well, in that case buying a robot wife is more like buying time with a hooker, only it's more sinister because this amounts to nothing else but slavery. And the argument that we can build the willingness to serve right into their brains doesn't count either.
In any case, there is no way this is healthy or ethical. It's wrong.
API compatibility and dependency nightmares are one thing that makes using and maintaining Linux hard both on developers and on the end users. With some distros it's gotten so bad that you're better off not touching the system once it's running, ever again. You can't just download stuff of the net and expect it to compile. Even if - by pure chance - it does compile, odds are you'll break something else while you're trying to meet the dependency requirements. Libraries undergo severe changes not just between minor version numbers (bad enough) but sometimes also between builds.
The other big problem is the desktop usage scenario. X11/Xorg is a huge pain in the ass to configure, and worst of all, it has even more mindboggling design limitations. In the year 2008 you shouldn't be required to log off first before changing your resolution or before attaching another screen. Speaking of attaching another screen, say a projector during a presentation: forget it, it's not feasible with X. No amount of maturation will change that, it's a design flaw that can't be fixed. Neither can the huge complexity of the protocol. However, it's unlikely desktop Linux will ever start over fresh with a new display architecture.
On top of that come minor issues that nevertheless frustrate users immensely. Bad integration of GUI applications with their own desktop environment, much less with each other. In a standard distro, half the applications won't install, start up, or be usable in any meaningful way.
The system is designed from the ground up to not self configure, which is a big nuisance for end users. What happens when you plug in a USB device? A new network card? A webcam? Anything? Chances are: nothing will happen. If you're very lucky, some notifier icon will start to blink, maybe displaying an astonishingly cryptic hint about what to do next.
To be honest, I seriously doubt any of these issues can be fixed at all, even if the community was willing to care about them. The entire ecosystem is designed to behave that way, that's including the prevalent developer culture.
Yeah, nice way to answer the question directly in the text snippet below the sensationalist headline, there. To be fair, any other answer would have diminished my respect for Kurzweil beyond measure, but I'm still glad we're all on the same page.
Or, to use the populist version of the answer: Please keep in mind that our bodies are nothing but machines, too. So, yes, barring any magical fairytale definition of a brain, machines can obviously have "souls".
I don't think I agree with that assessment. I believe the desire to actually create something from nothing (which is what codeheads do) is not gender-specific at all. Sure, most people are tool users and that's fine, too. Without them, we'd have a lot less practical advances in technology. But I don't think non-codeheads should be programmers at all, no matter what gender they are.
Incidentally, I have met many tool users who simply had the wrong jobs as programmers. They were terrible at it and all of them were men. On the other hand, the few developer women I've seen were all codeheads.
To me this just shows that you put more thought into the whole process than most people (maybe too much for your own good, but still). Most people just swallow anything and never bother to fully understand the 'why'. I believe that the lack of desire to understand a concept in its entirety is a key reason why so many software people are really really bad at programming.
Also, since you brought up the verbal orientation thing - I remember reading that good hackers are more likely to have above-average verbal skills when it comes to non-machine languages as well.
It's points like these that lead me to assume it all boils down to a 'simple' cultural issue. The good news is, it can be fixed. On the negative side, it'll take ages to get there. But, remember, the very first programmers were in fact women - feeding the giant electrical brains of defense and intelligence systems in the early history of information technology!
That's because culture has conditioned women into believing that computers are really boring and marketing on the other hand is a fast-paced exciting world full of opportunity and not much hard work where you can get by solely on social aptitude and good looks. That said, there are a few very cool girl programmers out there, and they primarily work on Web 2.0-style hip things and Ruby startups. Not that, you know, there is anything wrong with that.
Wow, this hasn't been my experience at all. When I get along with someone, it usually doesn't matter what gender they have - neither to me nor to my environment.
I'm a huge Mac fan on the desktop, for servers I prefer Linux. There is however one major gripe with OS X protocol integration: there is no way to refresh a Finder window. If a Windows/SMB share changes while the Finder window is open, it does not get updated. Maybe it's a combination of two problems, because I believe SMB supports change notifications. So that Finder doesn't notice a folder changed is bad enough, but to top it all off, you can't refresh even when you know the content has changed. I wouldn't call this better support of protocols.
And, while we're at it: it sucks that Finder doesn't support the FTP protocol. As far as I know, it's the only OS on the market that doesn't support FTP out of the box. Oh, you can mount an FTP directory alright, but it's always read only. Useless. And needlessly frustrating.
To clarify: the multiple pond hypothesis is only useful (in this context) if you're coming from a creationist's perspective. It's a logical and entirely hypothetical argument that serves to defeat the perceived necessity for a creator, but in doing so lends credence to the initial superstition that gave birth to Intelligent Design in the first place. It apparently never crossed anyone's mind to challenge the basic religious assumption of our "specialness", instead we keep building on top of a belief that has no basis in reality, solving "puzzles" that are entirely self-fabricated and erroneously giving them the aura of fundamental scientific questions in the process.
The point was that it doesn't matter how many ponds there are. It could be the only one and it would still exist! In fact, the bacteria don't know how many ponds are out there, and how they're different. Furthermore, they can't really use the hypothesis of multiple alternative ponds to arrive at any reasonable conclusion at all. It's utterly irrelevant.
Exactly!
I cede that the term "observation" was used lightly by me in this context, as this is obviously not something you can see with your own eyes without any context in (deeper) logical thought. And it is that same context which makes the Principle a tool for scientific reasoning, yes. And I stand by that. While we can play definitions games all day long and - if we really try hard enough - can keep purposefully misunderstanding and lecturing each other on semantics for all of eternity, I prefer to end this particular line of discussion now and come back to the actual content if that's alright with you.
It matters to me, and I implied several times that this is a personal frustration I have, it's my personal opinion and I recognize that my bias against superstition probably plays a big role here. I'm irked this article even exists. It is my understanding that the scientific community has in spirit regressed considerably by even addressing this issue, again and again, just to keep the dialogue open with religion, in the vague hope to convince some creationists with a line of reasoning that is based on an invalid premise to begin with. As far as I can tell the article is biased in a way that makes perfect sense for religious people, but there is very little actual scientific value in it, if you discount the interesting insights into psychology perhaps.
I'm aware of the term's history, thanks. However, what I was talking about is: taking that observation into account is exactly what has been going wrong since the Principle was first formulated.
I don't disagree with Carter's intentions, I'm just appalled that this is still the number one scientific observation being relentlessly abused and perverted by delusional people, turning the meaning of its original premise on its head.
And the worst part of it is that even the "science philosophers" in charge of the original discussion seemed so prone to fundamentally misunderstand the difference between cause and effect when it comes to the nature of our existence. This whole issue should have been laid to rest decades if not centuries ago, yet keeps on unliving.
I think I'm about to puke. The Anthropic Principle in its purest form does nothing but make the observation that our surroundings obviously support lifeforms such as ourselves who in turn are able to make observations about their surroundings.
It really, really does not matter how many universes are out there. This is ours, and it exists without any need for justification. Sure, theoretically a vast number of universes could have parameters that make life impossible (like, say, because they have no temporal dimension), and just as unprovably many universes could exist that do support life in some form.
There is no discrepancy, there is no need for an explanation - at least scientifically speaking. Only religion demands an explanation, because it introduces the concept of "meaning".
To make a more earth-bound analogy: assume, somewhere in the desert, there is a volcanically heated pond of slime. The conditions in this pond are unique: it has a water temperature of 70 degrees Celsius and only a few uncommon amino acids can be found in the slime, making it a hostile environment for most known forms of life. However, in time, a type of cyano bacteria evolves that can handle the heat and live off the odd amino mixture.
Now, suppose that, by some freakish accident, the cyano bacteria were intelligent. They ask questions like "why is this pond so superbly designed to support us?". Of course, we as humans looking into the slimey pond, recognize the absurdity of the question right away, but the bacteria remain ignorant as to the stupidity of their premise.
They go on to ask "surely there must be an omnipotent creator who made this pond just for us". Again, looking from the outside in, we know better, but for the bacteria it's a huge deal. Next, they discover secularism and say "well, if there is indeed no creator, we must find another explanation why this pond is exactly the right kind of pond, because it is so exquisitly tailored to our needs!"
Then it dawns on the bacteria: "hey, maybe there is an infinite number of pools with different environments! So the explanation for the Bacteric Principle lies in the fact that one out of infinity has exactly the features we need!" At this point, we as outside observes realize the futility. The bacteria will never understand that the number of pools does not matter, because it was them who evolved to live there, it was never the pool that had to be adapted to them...
This is where we are now. And, just like the outside observer looking in, I realize the futility. But it nevertheless frustrates me immensely.
I know, I'm sorry... I wanted to get back to that, but I got worked up and lost my way. By the way, I lol'd :-D
It is simply not workable to "communicate through brain waves on the battlefield". Come on, we're talking about comic book style science here. This sounds all very cool and spiffy until you realize that brainwaves are not a one-to-one translation of delicate thought processes, but are rather based on crude electromagnetic measurements of the cortex as a whole. Please, these people need to wake up from their magical fairytale world and actually read up on the scientific basics behind the concepts they are talking about.
Life is not a Hellboy comic, and just because people at the DoD want sharks with frigging lasers, preposterous Supersoldat projects do not magically become feasible through willpower alone!
The problem with mental illness - in this case: massive delusions - is that it's not a "boolean" state. Psychiatry as a science makes the massive mistake of ignoring the gradual slope of those problems. From TFA:
Maybe they are not in the strictest sense psychotic, but they clearly are delusional and suffer from a severe mental disease. I do understand the reluctance to acknowledge this, because in consequence it means that we have to shine a not-so-positive light on closely related phenomena, like say, fundamentalist religious beliefs. However, this is science, and psychiatrists should stop making all kinds of concessions to avoid clashing with cultural beliefs.
And another thing from the article:
I don't understand how this legitimizes any of those mass delusions. If anything, examples like these go a long way to show that government spending is disgustingly influenced by a lack of education, common sense, and yes: sanity.
Computer memory is actually a pretty good analogy for this: the "unused" DNA is not reachable by any "pointers" and thus wasn't important when eucaryote evolution began. Some of these areas are obviously non-coding ever-repeating nonsense sequences, others appear to be random information - exactly like unused RAM in a computer system. Of course, nothing in there is really random, it's just a product of whatever process happened to use the areas before.
Here's the catch, however. Just like a programmer who develops against an ancient API with a lot of well-known bugs and workarounds, some transcription mechanisms actually began to rely on the presence of the "useless" areas in order to work.
It's all a huge mess, the deeper you look, the less elegant it all becomes. For example, epigenetic mechanisms modify the meaning of DNA code depending on different contexts, as the article mentioned. But that's still not the whole picture. In order to create a protein, DNA is first transcribed into RNA, which then in turn gets executed in order to assemble the protein. However, the intermediate RNA information is modified beyond recognition before it is used. Then, after the protein is finally assembled, it too can be modified extensively. All of these steps are hopelessly interwoven, and they use zillions of chemical messenger signals in order to tweak an manipulate each other.
Genetics really is the worst spaghetti code project ever and I assume that more advanced (=complex) organisms really paint themselves into an evolutionary corner eventually, because the whole system - while beautifully specialized - is essentially becoming more and more difficult to alter meaningfully when radical change needs to happen.
Whether that statement is true depends on the nature of those values. In this case, we are talking about democracy and freedom. As they are opposed to the goals of organized religion, I would say that, no, your analogy does not hold up.
There is no measure of "good enough", I am not advocating special rights or special treatment for anyone. I just feel very strongly that the promise of equal rights and opportunities should be available to everybody, including whatever groups are not favored by the majority of the time.
There is simply no just reason to deny equal treatment to homosexuals, just as there was no justification for the way black people were treated until not so long a go. And at the time, they too got told that, for example, Apartheit was a good thing for both sides and that black people simply would have no need for full rights as citizens and human beings. Just like you are telling us today that gay persons should not care if they don't have access to all the same rights as everyone else. In the future it will no doubt be another group that gets discriminated, but the arguments will all remain the same.
It is not the government's job to ensure the support of family, neighbors, or religious institutions. Its job is to make sure everyone gets treated fairly and equally, to make sure our consitutional and our natural rights are not compromised. I acknowledge that your job description of a good government is completely different, but this is mine and it is based on nothing but the wish to keep improving ourselves, our society and or government towards the ideals of democracy and freedom.
Just because a minority is unpopular does not make it OK to institutionalize the repression of their rights, especially since exercising those rights will do no harm whatsoever to anyone. And, no, religious indignation does not count as harm.
What do you do when you are not feeling welcome in your family, or when your neighbors treat you poorly, or when your religious organization despises you? You move on to other people who actually like you, it's easy and it's your right. However, when your government is repressing you, there is really nowhere to go. This is why it's important to make sure hatred is not made into law.
The government should be a reflection of society's values, not a separate life form with a will of its own. The motivation for people to marry is not tax, social benefits, property ownership, and census. They now (usually) do it because they do love their partner and they use this institution to signal commitment to this partnership. It's a symbolic step.
Correct! And they do, that's why they marry! The government's function is only to acknowledge their testament to another. Over the years, since the government has a vested interest in stabilizing committed couples as the basic building blocks of society, marriage came to be incentivized through tax breaks and other benefits.
Why treat gay people any differently? Who exactly is harmed by having equal access to society's institutions? Why does public certification of your private partnership matter so much if you're straight, when at the same time your gay neighbor is essentially demoted to a second class citizen who should be glad to be allowed to love, as long as they make sure the homo stuff stays at home behind closed doors?
> that we are actually in quite close agreement on this issue.
You are absolutely right, we are! I'm sorry to have misjudged you like this. Your historic reference has probably triggered my response, and I completely misunderstood your point about homophoby because I was under the impression that you seemed to imply a person can be completely open-minded and yet arrive at the "logical" conclusion that gay people should not have equal rights. But they should.
If the state certifies marriage as the fundamental unit of our society, it shouldn't matter what gender the people involved have.
Anyway, I still disagree about the Greeks ;-)
> "Homophobic" is newspeak. Does it ever occur to you that people who oppose adoption by gays, for example, may do so on the basis of principles they hold and not irrational fear?
No, I don't think fear is the biggest factor here. Your post makes it perfectly clear that you people are striving to deny equal rights to members of society that are different, out of principle. You define yourself by conjuring up an in-group that is on a perpetual mission to prevent the emergence of other social structures, acting as though the mere existence of alternative lifestyles is a threat to your way of life. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume this is all religiously motivated.
It's not fear, it's a combination of hate and the desire to impose authoritarian values on others in an effort to hide your own deficiencies. Maybe there is also the thought that, by making the lives of others more miserabe, you won't feel so bad about your own anymore.
> I think of ancient Greece, which can hardly be considered a culture that discriminated against homosexuality, yet I know of no movement for gay marriage in ancient Greece.
We are not ancient Greece, and that's a good thing. While ancient greek culture was certainly a milestone that represented the best knowledge about how to build a free society at the time, I'm very glad that we have evolved much further from those days. Being in a civil union with a life partner is not merely a commercially driven endeavor to procreate anymore, it is a concept based on the modern notion that two people are bound together by love.
My opinion? Maybe it's not the government's place to define or grant the status of "marriage" at all. Maybe legally, there should instead be just one concept of "civil unions", defined to be any partnership of two people who want to spend their lives together. Let the churches have that word, "marriage" and do whatever they want with it.
On a personal note, I have many homosexual friends, but even if I did not, it would still make me deeply ashamed to see that people still refuse to stand up for the rights of others. Many seem to think not having a personal stake in something makes it OK to look the other way when human beings are treated with contempt and their rights are called into question. But we need to recognize that we have to keep fighting, not only for our own personal freedoms but also for the freedoms of every single person who is treated wrongly. And that includes not letting people like you get away with pseudo-reasonable arguments of intolerance and inequality.
I recognize the right of my friends to express their lifestyle by entering into a recognized union, and I know it should make no damn difference what gender they happen to have.
Right now there are two reasons. First, it's an important technical milestone to make sure we regained the expertise necessary to get there before we go any further. Second, a permanent Moon base might make more sense than ISS economically, scientifically as well as possibly being a convenient staging area for advanced solar system exploration.
Because now, almost 40 years after Apollo 11, "we" have utterly lost the capability to go to the moon and beyond. Hell, we should at least be on Mars by now, but we just can't do it anymore. That should bother us. We, as a society, have regressed substantially without realizing it.
We should be bothered by the fact that we are planning to regain Moon flight capabilities somewhere within the next 15 years, and from the way things look right now, we won't even manage that in time and without blowing a huge budget on the endeavor. For reference, Apollo 11 landed on the Moon less than 8 years after Kennedy announced his plan.
With 40 years of technological advances behind us, we should be able to accomplish this much faster. Instead it'll take us twice as long, if we even manage at all.
And that's damn frustrating.
I agree, with the exception of YouTube and sites like it.
The problem is, most computers don't have appropriate codecs installed that play inside the browser. And even if there was H264/AAC on each and every modern computer, you couldn't expect them to display those videos in the browser window next to your content.
Thus, the reasons for using Flash on YouTube are valid, since it comes with its own streaming codec and designers can make sure the stuff plays on every platform just fine.
In summary, just because we observe a universe of nature X doesn't mean our existence depends on X.
You're right of course, and the reason the anthropic principle got trapped in this pretentious and totalitarian implication about what our existence seemingly depends on is, because it got mutilated by "spiritual" pseudo philosophers in an effort to make themselves seem relevant, when in fact those particular questions should have been directed towards biologists in the first place.
But to expand on the problem of logic and religion, because I believe you have hit a broader theme here: religion's job description is to defy logic and scientific understanding. I postulate that for each and every scientific theory conceivable, an unlimited number of unprovable twisted religious explanations can be conjured up. This works basically by defining supernatural influence as whatever areas are poorly understood by the people at the time. Whenever the horizon of scientific understanding is updated, religious people have the option of either rejecting the new findings or updating the nature of god to reflect the new border beyond which there be dragons. And you'll find both things happening in real societies as a reaction to scientific progress all the time.
I may be wrong, but isn't the term anthropic principle essentially the opposite of what you're describing? IMHO the anthropic principle just states that there is nothing special about our particular environment beyond the fact that we happen to live here and there is not much else that we have experience with?
Sadly, religious nutjobs have completely turned around what was once an important scientific reasoning tool that existed to make sure our observations of nature are not biased towards human existence.
The anthropic principle is the mother of all cause-and-effect observations. The obvious cause here is that we live in a certain environment with a certain set of rules and random environmental factors, as a consequence of this, we have turned out the way we are now - including our way of interpreting the world around us. Now religious people, for whatever fucked-up reason, believe our environment was actually created by someone just for us to live in, and that the purpose of our universe is to support human life - thereby turning common sense on its head by confusing cause and effect.