Care to explain where you get that info from? Using at most 50% of a resource at any given time is a waste of the other 50%.
I don't know if this is related to the GP's post, but a common reason to cap utilization at 50% (or upgrade the link when you approach 50%) is because of redundancy: given two separate links each carrying half the load and where the links are not used beyond 50%, if one link fails, the other can pick up the remaining load without significant (perhaps slight) service degradation.
Well, you'd be hard pressed to find a firewall whose purpose was not "access control."
Perhaps you mean a firewall with a restrictive default outbound policy. In this case, of course Skype, like another other software of its ilk, will require special configuration. But the common case (for Skype's target audience) is restrictive inbound and permissive outbound.
Yes, but the network effect doesn't invariably result in lock-in.
My point is that with something like Skype, you're dealing with transient data, the software itself requires very little configuration (and no configuration generally needed outside of the software [e.g. networking]), and usage of the software doesn't require a lot of training. The barrier to replacement is, compared to other examples, really fairly low.
All that's really required is that you agree with those you want to conference with to use a given piece of software, and then install it. This is an obstacle, but it's not a substantial one. Because this effort is roughly equivalent to the original effort of agreeing to use and installing Skype, the I disagree with the lock-in argument.
Nobody disagrees that the ideal situation is to use OSS if some viable candidate exists. If it doesn't, all I'm arguing is that using something like Skype -- if it provided the necessary capabilities (which apparently it doesn't, but that's moot for this discussion) -- is a sensible stop-gap. In this particular case, I don't accept that the implied alternative (use nothing while you wait for an OSS solution) is the best option. (Sometimes it might be.)
The reason Microsoft maintains a monopoly with Office is because its grip on the market perpetuates and expands due to proprietary formats. Skype deals with transient data, so the analogy to Office, or MP3, or GIF (or any other kind of file format) doesn't work.
I also don't quite understand your point about networking externalities. In fact, as I see it, because Skype sort of Just Works through firewalls and doesn't typically require any explicit configuration, any OSS product which also Just Works for the same reason could be used without involving any networking changes.
I understand what you're saying about the risk of Skype being a de facto standard, but this is different from monopolostic vendor lock-in because the initial "expense" of deploying Skype is roughly equivalent to the later "expense" of deploying some OSS alternative. (Maybe that initial expense is a bit less, but it's eclipsed by the benefits of being able to actually do the video conferencing in the interim.)
Luckily, using Skype isn't something that is likely to create vendor lock-in. So when a viable OSS alternative becomes available in the future, switching to it will involve about the same amount of effort as it would if that software had existed today.
So if the options are using Skype now and switching in 2 years (say), or using nothing for 2 years and waiting for something to come along, the former option seems more agreeable.
But even if he was, so what? Short of inciting violence, why shouldn't he be able to say that he hates orange people or that Pastafarians are evil?
As a Canadian, the criminalization of "hate speech" has always been disconcerting for reasons that are expertly articulated by Christopher Hitchens in this speech, delivered at the University of Toronto (see also part 2).
Science theorizes what happened from about 10(-43) seconds after the Big Bang, what came before? Where did all that stuff come from? If the Universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?
The God of the Gaps. Indeed, you may wish to inject god into the gaps where science currently has no (or less than satisfying) answers. The problem with that is that the gap is and always has been narrowing. Religion is constantly losing ground to scientific discovery; there is nothing for which our best explanation is a now religious one that has displaced a scientific one.
On the contrary, if a being hypothetically "alters the natural order" or is said to bring about Scientific impossibilities then science, by definition, cannot answer such a question.
If we have evidence to support the claim that a god disrupts what we currently consider to be the natural order, then science must accommodate the evidence by modifying its definitions. Anything that is observable or measurable necessarily treads in the scientific domain.
What you call a scientific impossibility I actually consider as something where science is wrong and needs to be modified to fit the evidence. Where current theories cannot be reconciled with the evidence they must be discarded.
It's incorrect to say that Dawkins only criticises Religion on Scientific grounds and not Philosophical ones
I agree, which is why I didn't say that.
I'm curious about the specific philosophical arguments Dawkins has made which you object to?
And again, Darwin [Dawkins] is still not an authority in Science, though it's again obvious he likes to imply this idea.
Certainly he has a lot of fans that imply this idea, for certain definitions of "authority." Dawkins unarguably has contributed a lot to the public's acceptance and consumption of science. Being an outspoken atheist is just one of his hats.
The existence of a Supreme Being is a Philosophical question [...]
Perhaps the deist position is strictly a philosophical question, but the theist position regularly treads in the domain of science (and is furthermore continually eroded by science), and that is the position Dawkins most often criticizes and attacks. A god which periodically suspends or alters the natural order is quite clearly not just a matter of philosophy.
You might also say that something like morality is a philosophical and sociological matter. But in fact an evolutionary biologist still has much to contribute to that conversation, because there is plenty of evolutionary evidence to explain the origin of moral behavior (even if it, on the surface, appears to compete against our selfish gene).
As a Philosophy undergrad, I find Dawkins pretty irritating.
I think it's forgivable seeing as his background is not in philosophy. Read Daniel Dennett; free will is one of his areas of interest. In particular he is a compatibilist, and says that the kinds of free will that are relevant (for moral responsibility, for example) are available even in a deterministic universe.
I have no idea how many other extensions are in the same boat as mine, but I submitted my update for Firefox 3 to addons.mozilla.org in February, and it is still pending review.
TFA says the site went live on Feb 28 and was taken down on March 11. That's not quite 30 days. Also, where are you getting the 250KB per page view figure? That's pretty huge, even for today's bloated wide web.
Plausibility implies a fair measure of probability. It's possible that evolution is a process initiated or guided by God. But there's no evidence whatsoever to support this, and the fact that you can't disprove it doesn't in the slightest bit imply it's equally as probable as the alternative. Indeed, because of the lack of any evidence to support the claim, implausible is precisely what it is. If you want to believe it, it's a faith belief, not an evidence-based one.
Security isn't really a concern, that's what I run AV and a software firewall,...
There are plenty of attacks (such as CSRF or XSS) for which your AV software and a firewall are useless against. You say security isn't a concern now, until you fall victim to one of these attacks that can only be thwarted by proper security in the browser.
There are many of us who want text zoom and not page zoom, and it looks like it will be in beta 4.
My extension, NoSquint, will allow nicer integration of page zoom and text zoom features. But for me, it's important I be able to relegate page zoom to second class citizen.
I disagree that it would be easy for government to pressure unfavorable religions. But a viable alternative in my view would be to provide tax exemption status to atheistic organizations (for-profit or otherwise) such as the Richard Dawkins Foundation.
I suspect it would be easier to find reasonable answers to questions were those questions not formed ridiculous to begin with.
Whereas the problem simply doesn't exist unless you must work an omnipotent, undetectable sky god who takes great interest in human affairs into every equation. Though I am genuinely curious to know how the Church reconciles the chimera scenario.
Ahh, I get it. And in the case of the chimera, God simply changed his mind afterward. Omnipotence and omniscience is a lot of pressure, we certainly can't expect him to always get it right the first time!
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if this is related to the GP's post, but a common reason to cap utilization at 50% (or upgrade the link when you approach 50%) is because of redundancy: given two separate links each carrying half the load and where the links are not used beyond 50%, if one link fails, the other can pick up the remaining load without significant (perhaps slight) service degradation.
I guess it was a typo, as it now reads 29,919 with 22,919 stroked out.
Well, you'd be hard pressed to find a firewall whose purpose was not "access control."
Perhaps you mean a firewall with a restrictive default outbound policy. In this case, of course Skype, like another other software of its ilk, will require special configuration. But the common case (for Skype's target audience) is restrictive inbound and permissive outbound.
Yes, but the network effect doesn't invariably result in lock-in.
My point is that with something like Skype, you're dealing with transient data, the software itself requires very little configuration (and no configuration generally needed outside of the software [e.g. networking]), and usage of the software doesn't require a lot of training. The barrier to replacement is, compared to other examples, really fairly low.
All that's really required is that you agree with those you want to conference with to use a given piece of software, and then install it. This is an obstacle, but it's not a substantial one. Because this effort is roughly equivalent to the original effort of agreeing to use and installing Skype, the I disagree with the lock-in argument.
Nobody disagrees that the ideal situation is to use OSS if some viable candidate exists. If it doesn't, all I'm arguing is that using something like Skype -- if it provided the necessary capabilities (which apparently it doesn't, but that's moot for this discussion) -- is a sensible stop-gap. In this particular case, I don't accept that the implied alternative (use nothing while you wait for an OSS solution) is the best option. (Sometimes it might be.)
The reason Microsoft maintains a monopoly with Office is because its grip on the market perpetuates and expands due to proprietary formats. Skype deals with transient data, so the analogy to Office, or MP3, or GIF (or any other kind of file format) doesn't work.
I also don't quite understand your point about networking externalities. In fact, as I see it, because Skype sort of Just Works through firewalls and doesn't typically require any explicit configuration, any OSS product which also Just Works for the same reason could be used without involving any networking changes.
I understand what you're saying about the risk of Skype being a de facto standard, but this is different from monopolostic vendor lock-in because the initial "expense" of deploying Skype is roughly equivalent to the later "expense" of deploying some OSS alternative. (Maybe that initial expense is a bit less, but it's eclipsed by the benefits of being able to actually do the video conferencing in the interim.)
Luckily, using Skype isn't something that is likely to create vendor lock-in. So when a viable OSS alternative becomes available in the future, switching to it will involve about the same amount of effort as it would if that software had existed today.
So if the options are using Skype now and switching in 2 years (say), or using nothing for 2 years and waiting for something to come along, the former option seems more agreeable.
As a Canadian, the criminalization of "hate speech" has always been disconcerting for reasons that are expertly articulated by Christopher Hitchens in this speech, delivered at the University of Toronto (see also part 2).
That was one of the most gratifying slashdot smackdowns I've seen in a while.
If we have evidence to support the claim that a god disrupts what we currently consider to be the natural order, then science must accommodate the evidence by modifying its definitions. Anything that is observable or measurable necessarily treads in the scientific domain.
What you call a scientific impossibility I actually consider as something where science is wrong and needs to be modified to fit the evidence. Where current theories cannot be reconciled with the evidence they must be discarded.
I agree, which is why I didn't say that.
I'm curious about the specific philosophical arguments Dawkins has made which you object to?
Certainly he has a lot of fans that imply this idea, for certain definitions of "authority." Dawkins unarguably has contributed a lot to the public's acceptance and consumption of science. Being an outspoken atheist is just one of his hats.
Perhaps the deist position is strictly a philosophical question, but the theist position regularly treads in the domain of science (and is furthermore continually eroded by science), and that is the position Dawkins most often criticizes and attacks. A god which periodically suspends or alters the natural order is quite clearly not just a matter of philosophy.
You might also say that something like morality is a philosophical and sociological matter. But in fact an evolutionary biologist still has much to contribute to that conversation, because there is plenty of evolutionary evidence to explain the origin of moral behavior (even if it, on the surface, appears to compete against our selfish gene).
I have no idea how many other extensions are in the same boat as mine, but I submitted my update for Firefox 3 to addons.mozilla.org in February, and it is still pending review.
TFA says the site went live on Feb 28 and was taken down on March 11. That's not quite 30 days. Also, where are you getting the 250KB per page view figure? That's pretty huge, even for today's bloated wide web.
Excuse me, but the burden of proof is not on we who disbelieve.
On what basis do you reject the historical attestation that Alexander the Great was conceived of a lightning bolt?
Plausibility implies a fair measure of probability. It's possible that evolution is a process initiated or guided by God. But there's no evidence whatsoever to support this, and the fact that you can't disprove it doesn't in the slightest bit imply it's equally as probable as the alternative. Indeed, because of the lack of any evidence to support the claim, implausible is precisely what it is. If you want to believe it, it's a faith belief, not an evidence-based one.
... or a scintilla of evidence.
And evolution is both a theory and a "scientific fact." Evolution occurs; the theory explains how.
There are plenty of attacks (such as CSRF or XSS) for which your AV software and a firewall are useless against. You say security isn't a concern now, until you fall victim to one of these attacks that can only be thwarted by proper security in the browser.
There are many of us who want text zoom and not page zoom, and it looks like it will be in beta 4.
My extension, NoSquint, will allow nicer integration of page zoom and text zoom features. But for me, it's important I be able to relegate page zoom to second class citizen.
I disagree that it would be easy for government to pressure unfavorable religions. But a viable alternative in my view would be to provide tax exemption status to atheistic organizations (for-profit or otherwise) such as the Richard Dawkins Foundation.
The problem with the Stalin, Mao, Hitler (etc.) regimes was not too much skeptical inquiry. It was dogmatic ideology.
A good start would be complete eradication of tax exemption and shelters for religious institutions.
Whereas the problem simply doesn't exist unless you must work an omnipotent, undetectable sky god who takes great interest in human affairs into every equation. Though I am genuinely curious to know how the Church reconciles the chimera scenario.
Ahh, I get it. And in the case of the chimera, God simply changed his mind afterward. Omnipotence and omniscience is a lot of pressure, we certainly can't expect him to always get it right the first time!