Until it hurts, U.S. consumers will not switch anything.
There are two responses the U.S. government may take to tightening oil supplies: one is to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in energy research, perhaps setting an idealistic, Kennedy-esque goal of full reliance on cheap, clean renewable energy by 2025.
The other is to do everything in its power to suck the very last drop of the black stuff out of the ground, no matter who or what happens to be living on that ground at the time, and no matter what the human or environmental cost of propping up a short-term solution to a long-term problem.
One of these solutions is essentially American in character: innovative, daring and creative. The other is profoundly un-American, and far more expensive.
One can only hope that 2006 will be the year the United States government returns to the path that reflects fundamental American values.
(E.g. early Australians were H. erectus; later they had mixed erectus and sap. characteristics; eventually the erectus features faded and vanished, leaving pure H. sap.)
Your argument would be stronger if there were any non-controversial evidence for H. erectus in Australia:
Gene complexes hardly ever travel without organisms wrapped around them, so what you seem to be arguing for is a specific mechanism for multi-regional evolution. It isn't impossible, but whatever happened is radically under-determined by the data, and it is very likely that we are quite wrong about at least some major components of any story we tell about human evolution.
For example, it is virtually certain that H. sapiens evolved much earlier than the earliest currently-known examples, simply because the sampling rate due to fossilazation and discovery is so fantastically low. The sum total of H. sapiens fossils antedating 10000 years ago is only a few dozen, out of hundreds of thousands or more inviduals who lived over the early history of our species. The odds of us just happening to have found a skeleton from the very earliest period, when the smallest numbers of individuals would be around, is very unlikely.
I am therefore betting we will eventually find that H. sapiens evolved much earlier, but went through a genetic bottleneck 200,000 years ago, giving us our most recent common ancestor. Such bottlenecks can be seen in a lot of North American fauna, where you frequently see populations that can be traced back to a single, small, non-diverse population 10,000 years ago that was in a geographically-restricted range due to the last ice age.
Of course not -- I don't believe anyone ever does anything out of the kindness of their heart. I have yet to meet a person (even the diehard communists I know) who don't do everything out of self sufficiency and personal profit.
You need to get out more. And open your eyes. You are living in poverty while surrounded by riches.
That's their product. Farmers don't need to buy it.
Companies selling GM seeds have a responsibility to ensure that their product does no harm to bystanders. The free market ends where my fields begin. Unless Monstanto et al can guarantee that the modified genes will not get loose and hybridize with wildtype plants in adjacent fields they are introducing harmful genes into the environment for their own benefit.
The Monsanto Terminator gene is the perfect example of this: Terminator-infected plants will hybridize with wildtype plants in adjacent fields, resulting in progressive sterilization of surrouding farms. Monsanto will use this "marketing pportunity" in the "free market" to sell more Terminator-infected seeds to those farmers.
This is evil: doing willful harm to others for personal gain.
Piaget did quite a few experiments very similar to what you described when he was working out his stages of development. The preoperational(~3-7 years old) stage is when children have difficulty realizing that the volume of liquid is actually the same. Concrete operational(~7-11 years old) is when children start developing the skills for thinking logically about stuff(such as the conservation of liquid), and can realize that the volume of liquid is indeed the same. It's really a bit odd at first to see a group of children at one age say that one glass has more water than the other, and another group of children a year or two older realize they have the same amount.
These experiments went so far as to involve pouring the water from one glass to the other, so the younger children would be telling you that the volume of water was different depending on which glass it was in.
The interesting thing in the current story is that while older children and adults are able to correct their preceptual misjudgement in side-by-side experiments of this kind, most people are not able to make good absolute judgements about volume, and are systematically biased in consistent ways.
This is not really surprising. After all, we know that you can for example:
save a guy from being laid off
present the case for him being given equal treatment to the board of a company that he has yet to contribute anything to
bail him out of projects that he is incapable of finishing himself
defend his late and low-quality work from clients who complain about it
and the the first time you ask him for a favour or have a misunderstanding he will go from whining to threatening in under ten seconds, without ever trying to understand what you're asking for, and when he does understand it he will flatly deny that he owes you anything. It's all about perception, and most people have a vastly distorted perception of themselves and the world around them, and actively select their perceptions to fit the needs of their midget souls and cowardly hearts.
I think that a part of the blame should also be shared by the Internet Explorer designers (and any other browser that does unexpected things while trying to guess what the user "really meant").
The viability of the Web is entirely dependent on browsers trying to figure out from incomplete, incorrect and/or inconsistent information what users "really meant." A browser that only renders standards-compliant HTML with unambiguous character encodings would only be able to handle a few percent of the Web.
The fundamental problem with a distributed system like the Web is that the strength of the contract between browsers and content-providers is extremely weak, and both sides are effectively encouraged to abuse that weakness by putting the blame on the other. If a browser won't render common HTML errors "properly" it is considered broken, and if a content-provider doesn't hack up their HTML to take advantage of non-standard browser extensions they are considered backward and dull.
It's fascinating that most people think the laws of physics are discovered rather than invented, yet accept uncritically the idea that the cosmological constant was an addition to the original GR equations, rather than an overlooked term that was belatedly discovered, even though its value happens to be almost zero.
I take the view that the laws of physics are invented. They are tools to describe reality. They are no different in the manner of their creation than shovels, which are tools to alter reality. No one, I hope, would think that shovels were discovered rather than invented.
But even though the laws of physics are invented, the forms of the equations are determined by the reality they describe. On that basis, there is at most a purely conceptual distinction between equations that have a cosmological constant whose value is zero, and equations that do not have a cosmological constant. Simply because we might think the value is identically zero and therefore leave it out does not mean that the value is not there, or could not be there.
To put it another way: there is nothing in reality that would limit the form of the equations of GR to ones in which the cosmological constant is identically zero. In the absence of such a limitation--which empirical measurement of the cosmological constant itself can never provide--there is no basis for excluding the constant from the equations, any more than there is a basis for excluding the constant of integration from a formal integral.
Every time I hear the teacher talking about such intellectually bankrupt concepts as 'irreducible complexity' I want to scream, but I'm not sure how to approach this without alienating the rest of the church.
My suggestion: alienate the rest of the church. There is no shortage of churches in the US, and I'm sure you can find one that has a more rational view of God's nature than ID. If you're a young person going to a family church, you can hold your breath for a bit until you're out from under your parent's wings before choosing a church of your own.
There may be costs to such a stand. It might cut your ties with a communal organization that you have a long-established place in. If so, you have to ask yourself if you are willing to bear those costs to take action in defense of the truth and the scientific process that is the only known way of knowing anything like the truth.
I think it's interesting - general relativity makes some very hard to verify but specific predictions. Many competing theories to it over the last 50 years have made predicitions that have, one by one, turned out to be false.
This experiment may help kill off one of the more interesting alternatives, John Moffat's asymmetric variant of GR. Moffat is a self-taught savant, now at the University of Waterloo's Perimeter Institute, iirc. He realized that Einstein's equations contained a symmetry condition that is not required by the principle of equivalence (the idea that acceleration and gravity are indistinguishable, or that inertial and gravitational mass are identical).
The only physical consequences of Moffat's generalization are quite subtle, although careful analysis has shown that there would be consequences like depolarization of electro-magnetic radiation from strong gravitational sources. This has resulted in some limits on the theory from astronomical observations of certain types of massive radio-emitting objects. I don't know if GP-B will be sensitive enough to put the final nail in the coffin, but the theory does have some predictions for rotating frames that differ from "standard" GR.
"No one could have predicted this..."
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
Given the recent history of predictable and preventable deaths due to hurricanes in New Orleans, we can now confidently predict that three or four years from now, when the flu pandemic hits the U.S., the administration of the day will:
a) completely mishandle the response
b) claim loudly and repeatedly that "No one could have predicted this."
This will happen regardless of the party affiliation of the administration, because to screw up completely really does require years of bipartisan co-operation across multiple levels of government, as it did in New Orleans.
Here is a useful definition of "natural right" that might help people understand the natural rights perspective:
natural right(n): A political condition required for the life of a morally autonomous being.
A natural right, in this view, is to political or social life what the requrirement for food, water or air is to physical life. I cannot say, "I relenquish my need for food" in any meaningful sense, because it is my nature to need food to live.
Likewise, for a being whose mode of life involves making and acting on its own value judgements, certain political conditions are required. The need for these political conditions cannot be relenquished.
"Tyranny" is a political condition, as is "republic", "police state", etc. Not all of these political conditions allow morally autonomous beings to live as such.
Note that I do not believe that natural rights theory is sufficient to construct a theory of society. Nor do I believe that protection of natural rights is a sufficient basis for a just society. Humans are more than rights-bearing creatures, and our social needs are far more complex than the needs described by natural rights. A natural-rights-only society is the bread-and-water diet of social theory: sufficient to sustain some kind of existence, but not sufficient for genuine health and happiness.
Yet what would a non-natural explanation look like?
A natural explanation has the form: Because X is Y it does Z. Because the electron is charged it accelerates in an electric field.
What would the form of a non-natural explanation be? And how does it function as an explanation? "Because God wants it the Earth appears old." This has exactly the same form as a natural explanation, except that it is the nature of a third thing that is doing the explaining. But we have natural explanations of this form as well: "Because she is beautiful I am attracted."
In these cases the form is: "Because X is Y, P does Q."
So what is it that makes a natural explanation involving God non-natural?
The violation of Bayes Theorem.
Bayes theorem allows us to draw inferences from effects about causes. But we are told that we cannot infer anything about God from any finite series of events. We are told that God cannot be bid. We are told that God is good, even though he is all powerful and yet allows good people to die painful and pointless deaths.
A non-natural explanation is formally identical to a natural explanation, but involves a subject that we are arbitrarily and without justification told violates Bayes theorem. Yet Bayes theorem is the foundation of explanation in modern probability theory. To "explain" something is just to identify the things that maximize its posterior probability.
So a non-natural explanation is not, in fact, an explanation at all. It is a nothing, merely empty noise with the apparent form of an explanation, like Chomsky's furious green ideas.
Any explanation of an effect tells us about the cause. To claim that explaining disasters by invoking God's will doesn't tell us that God is petty, childish and violent is to claim that God's will does not explain disasters.
To believe otherwise is to proclaim that you do not believe in the basic mathematics of probability.
Call me cynical, but technical knowledge is a secondary aspect of a university education. If you want to work as a geek for a PHB for the rest of your life, doing stupid things for stupid people who get paid a great deal more than you do, then by all means go for an on-line degree. Nothing says, "canon fodder" quite so clearly.
But to have a career that will leave you in control of your own destiny a meat-space degree is a requirement. You will meet people, work in teams, and generally have a broader, more human experience. These things are far more important than technical skills or knowledge.
I am saying this based on a career that has so far been pretty successful based on a combination of technical and interpersonal skills, but has recently hit some serious rocks due to my focussing too much on the technical for a couple of years and neglecting the interpersonal. Doing a fabulous technical job, delivering quality software on time and to the client's satisfaction, won't do your career any good if no one notices because you've neglected to handle the monkey-politics of your organization properly.
This component...does not compromise security. The Sony CDs install a rootkit that virus-writers can take advantage of. How does making the job of virus-writers easier "not compromise security"?
DOS is actually not a bad system for developing embedded controllers on x86 hardware, especially if you've been doing it since forever. It's stable, well-documented, and gives you ownership of every singel clock-cycle. So for hobbiests and experimenters, at least, it is a pretty good choice.
Not only does SGML predate these patents by a long, long time, XML itself was announced at SGML'96. I took a copy of the draft standard home from that meeting. So XML also predates the earliest patent application by on the order of a year.
I was once a judge at a "Phyics Olympics" where there was one puzzle in which students had to figure out the wiring if a circuit consisting of a couple of light bulbs and a couple of switches. They were "supposed" to solve the puzzle by flipping the switches, noting what lights were on and off, and inferring the circuit.
One team took the apparatus apart and inspected the wiring.
I gave 'em full marks.
The head judge went spare.
Science is not a game, and there aren't any rules according to which you are "supposed" to solve the problem. Alexander the Great was demonstrating the practice of experimental science when he unravelled the Gordian knot, and Feyrabend was onto something when he said, "Anything goes."
Puzzles set by humans have more to do with communication between the puzzle-setter and the puzzle-solver than anything else. Some people even decry computer-generated puzzles because of this--they say that the pleasure they get from solving puzzles comes from the feeling of interaction with another mind.
As such, "math puzzles" of the "what is the next number?" kind are not math puzzles at all--they are psychology and common-knowledge puzzles. They should be stated, "I'm thinking of a number. To me, the number is the next in the following sequence: (...). Your job is to guess, based on what you know of me (or people like me), of mathematics, and of common knowledge, which of the infinite number of mathematical relationships betweeen the numbers in that sequence is the one that is important to me."
People who work in numerical methods are only too aware of how little information finite sequences contain beyond their own bounds. Interpolation is hard enough. Extrapolation is virtually impossible. Even simple sequences like "1,2,3,4..." can have literally anything as the next value--it is trivial to come up with generating functions that give integers for the first few integer arguments and wildly varying irrational values after that. Unless you know what the generating function is, the finite sequence tells you nothing. Guessing the generating function from a finite sequence is all about guessing what the questioner knows and what kind of generating function a person with their knowlege (or common knowledge) is likely to choose that would produce the given sequence.
A modicum of mathematical knowledge is still required, but far more psychology is necessary.
responsibility lies at the browser developers' feet.
Users want browsers that will render their webpages, including pages they author themselves. Because the average person is not capable of writing a web page that parses, and many tools for writing web pages generate invalid HTML, any standards-compliant browser will not render most of the web. Try running your own web pages through SP using any W3C HTML DTD and see what I mean.
The situation is an artefact left over like a minefield from the browser war in the '90's. If either Netscape or Microsoft had focused in standards-compliance they would have lost market share. It is likely that both companies were actively trying to break standards as a means of locking in users.
Now that things have settled down Microsoft is the only corporate player with an ongoing interest in locking in users, but users are still going to expect browsers to render everything, no matter how malformed. Users experience any failure to render as a browser problem, not an authoring problem. As such, it is going to be difficult to get the web as a whole to be standards-compliant.
One of the fundamental laws of human behaviour was most clearly enunciated by Han Solo: "It's not my fault! It's not my fault!" We can sit back and say that any user of IE deserves to get burned by exploits, or that anyone authoring an invalid web page deserves to not get page views, but the Darwinian market is fundamentally a mechanism for humans to shift blame for their own failures onto others, and users choose IE and users choose MySpace, so neither browser choice nor website choice will ever be accepted as the cause of user's problems.
Sadly, it probably needs to be said that I am fully in favour of women's sufferage, although blackly amused by the claims that it would usher in an era of peaceful prosperity, rather than the bloodiest century in human history. And if anyone thinks women were generally opposed to war in the 20th century, google "women white feather britain" before you post...
The use of smart pointers in C++ is only a complete solution when you have control of 100% of the code. Those of us who write libs for other people, and heavily use libs from other people, are stuck with dumb pointers for interfaces, at least until the next pass at the STL finally gives us a standard for something smarter than auto_ptr.
I can use Boost's counted_ptr or whatever internally, but the interface is always going to be lowest common denominator because I can't realistically expect people to use whatever my choice is for their smart pointer unless it's part of the STL.
And I can always tune garbage collection performance by forcing a garbage collect when I know my app's got the time, like outside of a loop or before creating more objects in storage.
No, you can't. At most you can give the JVM a hint that it would be nice to collect garbage now. The JVM is free to ignore that hint, and many JVMs will do just that.
Slashdot Mirror
Until it hurts, U.S. consumers will not switch anything.
There are two responses the U.S. government may take to tightening oil supplies: one is to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in energy research, perhaps setting an idealistic, Kennedy-esque goal of full reliance on cheap, clean renewable energy by 2025.
The other is to do everything in its power to suck the very last drop of the black stuff out of the ground, no matter who or what happens to be living on that ground at the time, and no matter what the human or environmental cost of propping up a short-term solution to a long-term problem.
One of these solutions is essentially American in character: innovative, daring and creative. The other is profoundly un-American, and far more expensive.
One can only hope that 2006 will be the year the United States government returns to the path that reflects fundamental American values.
(E.g. early Australians were H. erectus; later they had mixed erectus and sap. characteristics; eventually the erectus features faded and vanished, leaving pure H. sap.)
l
t us.html
2 23122209.htm) and the most-likely genetic date based on mitocondrial DNA is so improbable as to be disturbing.
Your argument would be stronger if there were any non-controversial evidence for H. erectus in Australia:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/kowswamp.htm
But I take that to be an unfortunately-choosen hypothetical example, rather than an actual error.
Your position is not entirely-dissimilar to the old The Multiregional Evolution Model: http://www.geocities.com/palaeoanthropology/Herec
Gene complexes hardly ever travel without organisms wrapped around them, so what you seem to be arguing for is a specific mechanism for multi-regional evolution. It isn't impossible, but whatever happened is radically under-determined by the data, and it is very likely that we are quite wrong about at least some major components of any story we tell about human evolution.
For example, it is virtually certain that H. sapiens evolved much earlier than the earliest currently-known examples, simply because the sampling rate due to fossilazation and discovery is so fantastically low. The sum total of H. sapiens fossils antedating 10000 years ago is only a few dozen, out of hundreds of thousands or more inviduals who lived over the early history of our species. The odds of us just happening to have found a skeleton from the very earliest period, when the smallest numbers of individuals would be around, is very unlikely.
Indeed, the apparent concordance between the current "earliest human skeleton" (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/050
I am therefore betting we will eventually find that H. sapiens evolved much earlier, but went through a genetic bottleneck 200,000 years ago, giving us our most recent common ancestor. Such bottlenecks can be seen in a lot of North American fauna, where you frequently see populations that can be traced back to a single, small, non-diverse population 10,000 years ago that was in a geographically-restricted range due to the last ice age.
Of course not -- I don't believe anyone ever does anything out of the kindness of their heart. I have yet to meet a person (even the diehard communists I know) who don't do everything out of self sufficiency and personal profit.
You need to get out more. And open your eyes. You are living in poverty while surrounded by riches.
That's their product. Farmers don't need to buy it.
Companies selling GM seeds have a responsibility to ensure that their product does no harm to bystanders. The free market ends where my fields begin. Unless Monstanto et al can guarantee that the modified genes will not get loose and hybridize with wildtype plants in adjacent fields they are introducing harmful genes into the environment for their own benefit.
The Monsanto Terminator gene is the perfect example of this: Terminator-infected plants will hybridize with wildtype plants in adjacent fields, resulting in progressive sterilization of surrouding farms. Monsanto will use this "marketing pportunity" in the "free market" to sell more Terminator-infected seeds to those farmers.
This is evil: doing willful harm to others for personal gain.
These experiments went so far as to involve pouring the water from one glass to the other, so the younger children would be telling you that the volume of water was different depending on which glass it was in.
The interesting thing in the current story is that while older children and adults are able to correct their preceptual misjudgement in side-by-side experiments of this kind, most people are not able to make good absolute judgements about volume, and are systematically biased in consistent ways.
This is not really surprising. After all, we know that you can for example:
and the the first time you ask him for a favour or have a misunderstanding he will go from whining to threatening in under ten seconds, without ever trying to understand what you're asking for, and when he does understand it he will flatly deny that he owes you anything. It's all about perception, and most people have a vastly distorted perception of themselves and the world around them, and actively select their perceptions to fit the needs of their midget souls and cowardly hearts.
--Tom
I think that a part of the blame should also be shared by the Internet Explorer designers (and any other browser that does unexpected things while trying to guess what the user "really meant").
The viability of the Web is entirely dependent on browsers trying to figure out from incomplete, incorrect and/or inconsistent information what users "really meant." A browser that only renders standards-compliant HTML with unambiguous character encodings would only be able to handle a few percent of the Web.
The fundamental problem with a distributed system like the Web is that the strength of the contract between browsers and content-providers is extremely weak, and both sides are effectively encouraged to abuse that weakness by putting the blame on the other. If a browser won't render common HTML errors "properly" it is considered broken, and if a content-provider doesn't hack up their HTML to take advantage of non-standard browser extensions they are considered backward and dull.
it would be a major violation of Federal laws, including The Constitution
And since when has that been a problem?
With specific reference to ammendments IV, V and VI.
I'm doubtful about using the term "market" for a commodity that is given away in exchange for nothing. To have a market there must be a price.
It's fascinating that most people think the laws of physics are discovered rather than invented, yet accept uncritically the idea that the cosmological constant was an addition to the original GR equations, rather than an overlooked term that was belatedly discovered, even though its value happens to be almost zero.
I take the view that the laws of physics are invented. They are tools to describe reality. They are no different in the manner of their creation than shovels, which are tools to alter reality. No one, I hope, would think that shovels were discovered rather than invented.
But even though the laws of physics are invented, the forms of the equations are determined by the reality they describe. On that basis, there is at most a purely conceptual distinction between equations that have a cosmological constant whose value is zero, and equations that do not have a cosmological constant. Simply because we might think the value is identically zero and therefore leave it out does not mean that the value is not there, or could not be there.
To put it another way: there is nothing in reality that would limit the form of the equations of GR to ones in which the cosmological constant is identically zero. In the absence of such a limitation--which empirical measurement of the cosmological constant itself can never provide--there is no basis for excluding the constant from the equations, any more than there is a basis for excluding the constant of integration from a formal integral.
Every time I hear the teacher talking about such intellectually bankrupt concepts as 'irreducible complexity' I want to scream, but I'm not sure how to approach this without alienating the rest of the church.
My suggestion: alienate the rest of the church. There is no shortage of churches in the US, and I'm sure you can find one that has a more rational view of God's nature than ID. If you're a young person going to a family church, you can hold your breath for a bit until you're out from under your parent's wings before choosing a church of your own.
There may be costs to such a stand. It might cut your ties with a communal organization that you have a long-established place in. If so, you have to ask yourself if you are willing to bear those costs to take action in defense of the truth and the scientific process that is the only known way of knowing anything like the truth.
I think it's interesting - general relativity makes some very hard to verify but specific predictions. Many competing theories to it over the last 50 years have made predicitions that have, one by one, turned out to be false.
This experiment may help kill off one of the more interesting alternatives, John Moffat's asymmetric variant of GR. Moffat is a self-taught savant, now at the University of Waterloo's Perimeter Institute, iirc. He realized that Einstein's equations contained a symmetry condition that is not required by the principle of equivalence (the idea that acceleration and gravity are indistinguishable, or that inertial and gravitational mass are identical).
The only physical consequences of Moffat's generalization are quite subtle, although careful analysis has shown that there would be consequences like depolarization of electro-magnetic radiation from strong gravitational sources. This has resulted in some limits on the theory from astronomical observations of certain types of massive radio-emitting objects. I don't know if GP-B will be sensitive enough to put the final nail in the coffin, but the theory does have some predictions for rotating frames that differ from "standard" GR.
Given the recent history of predictable and preventable deaths due to hurricanes in New Orleans, we can now confidently predict that three or four years from now, when the flu pandemic hits the U.S., the administration of the day will:
a) completely mishandle the response
b) claim loudly and repeatedly that "No one could have predicted this."
This will happen regardless of the party affiliation of the administration, because to screw up completely really does require years of bipartisan co-operation across multiple levels of government, as it did in New Orleans.
I mean, anyone can just go back in time with my intention and claim my patent!! WTF??
On the flip-side, your time machine project can never be behind schedule...
Men are much better at multi-tasking than women.
Think about it: if a woman is doing two tasks, she's thinking about two things, so she's doing twice as much work as when she was doing one task.
But if a man is doing two tasks, he's thinking about three things, so he's only doing half-again as much work as when he was doing one task.
Here is a useful definition of "natural right" that might help people understand the natural rights perspective:
natural right(n): A political condition required for the life of a morally autonomous being.
A natural right, in this view, is to political or social life what the requrirement for food, water or air is to physical life. I cannot say, "I relenquish my need for food" in any meaningful sense, because it is my nature to need food to live.
Likewise, for a being whose mode of life involves making and acting on its own value judgements, certain political conditions are required. The need for these political conditions cannot be relenquished.
"Tyranny" is a political condition, as is "republic", "police state", etc. Not all of these political conditions allow morally autonomous beings to live as such.
Note that I do not believe that natural rights theory is sufficient to construct a theory of society. Nor do I believe that protection of natural rights is a sufficient basis for a just society. Humans are more than rights-bearing creatures, and our social needs are far more complex than the needs described by natural rights. A natural-rights-only society is the bread-and-water diet of social theory: sufficient to sustain some kind of existence, but not sufficient for genuine health and happiness.
What is the alternative to natural explanations?
Non-natural explanations.
Yet what would a non-natural explanation look like?
A natural explanation has the form: Because X is Y it does Z. Because the electron is charged it accelerates in an electric field.
What would the form of a non-natural explanation be? And how does it function as an explanation? "Because God wants it the Earth appears old." This has exactly the same form as a natural explanation, except that it is the nature of a third thing that is doing the explaining. But we have natural explanations of this form as well: "Because she is beautiful I am attracted."
In these cases the form is: "Because X is Y, P does Q."
So what is it that makes a natural explanation involving God non-natural?
The violation of Bayes Theorem.
Bayes theorem allows us to draw inferences from effects about causes. But we are told that we cannot infer anything about God from any finite series of events. We are told that God cannot be bid. We are told that God is good, even though he is all powerful and yet allows good people to die painful and pointless deaths.
A non-natural explanation is formally identical to a natural explanation, but involves a subject that we are arbitrarily and without justification told violates Bayes theorem. Yet Bayes theorem is the foundation of explanation in modern probability theory. To "explain" something is just to identify the things that maximize its posterior probability.
So a non-natural explanation is not, in fact, an explanation at all. It is a nothing, merely empty noise with the apparent form of an explanation, like Chomsky's furious green ideas.
Any explanation of an effect tells us about the cause. To claim that explaining disasters by invoking God's will doesn't tell us that God is petty, childish and violent is to claim that God's will does not explain disasters.
To believe otherwise is to proclaim that you do not believe in the basic mathematics of probability.
Call me cynical, but technical knowledge is a secondary aspect of a university education. If you want to work as a geek for a PHB for the rest of your life, doing stupid things for stupid people who get paid a great deal more than you do, then by all means go for an on-line degree. Nothing says, "canon fodder" quite so clearly.
But to have a career that will leave you in control of your own destiny a meat-space degree is a requirement. You will meet people, work in teams, and generally have a broader, more human experience. These things are far more important than technical skills or knowledge.
I am saying this based on a career that has so far been pretty successful based on a combination of technical and interpersonal skills, but has recently hit some serious rocks due to my focussing too much on the technical for a couple of years and neglecting the interpersonal. Doing a fabulous technical job, delivering quality software on time and to the client's satisfaction, won't do your career any good if no one notices because you've neglected to handle the monkey-politics of your organization properly.
This component...does not compromise security.
The Sony CDs install a rootkit that virus-writers can take advantage of. How does making the job of virus-writers easier "not compromise security"?
And if you do upgrade, why to DOS?
DOS is actually not a bad system for developing embedded controllers on x86 hardware, especially if you've been doing it since forever. It's stable, well-documented, and gives you ownership of every singel clock-cycle. So for hobbiests and experimenters, at least, it is a pretty good choice.
Not only does SGML predate these patents by a long, long time, XML itself was announced at SGML'96. I took a copy of the draft standard home from that meeting. So XML also predates the earliest patent application by on the order of a year.
Turn a light on.
I was once a judge at a "Phyics Olympics" where there was one puzzle in which students had to figure out the wiring if a circuit consisting of a couple of light bulbs and a couple of switches. They were "supposed" to solve the puzzle by flipping the switches, noting what lights were on and off, and inferring the circuit.
One team took the apparatus apart and inspected the wiring.
I gave 'em full marks.
The head judge went spare.
Science is not a game, and there aren't any rules according to which you are "supposed" to solve the problem. Alexander the Great was demonstrating the practice of experimental science when he unravelled the Gordian knot, and Feyrabend was onto something when he said, "Anything goes."
Puzzles set by humans have more to do with communication between the puzzle-setter and the puzzle-solver than anything else. Some people even decry computer-generated puzzles because of this--they say that the pleasure they get from solving puzzles comes from the feeling of interaction with another mind.
what's the next line?
5.
No finite sequence determines the subsequent.
As such, "math puzzles" of the "what is the next number?" kind are not math puzzles at all--they are psychology and common-knowledge puzzles. They should be stated, "I'm thinking of a number. To me, the number is the next in the following sequence: (...). Your job is to guess, based on what you know of me (or people like me), of mathematics, and of common knowledge, which of the infinite number of mathematical relationships betweeen the numbers in that sequence is the one that is important to me."
People who work in numerical methods are only too aware of how little information finite sequences contain beyond their own bounds. Interpolation is hard enough. Extrapolation is virtually impossible. Even simple sequences like "1,2,3,4..." can have literally anything as the next value--it is trivial to come up with generating functions that give integers for the first few integer arguments and wildly varying irrational values after that. Unless you know what the generating function is, the finite sequence tells you nothing. Guessing the generating function from a finite sequence is all about guessing what the questioner knows and what kind of generating function a person with their knowlege (or common knowledge) is likely to choose that would produce the given sequence.
A modicum of mathematical knowledge is still required, but far more psychology is necessary.
responsibility lies at the browser developers' feet.
Users want browsers that will render their webpages, including pages they author themselves. Because the average person is not capable of writing a web page that parses, and many tools for writing web pages generate invalid HTML, any standards-compliant browser will not render most of the web. Try running your own web pages through SP using any W3C HTML DTD and see what I mean.
The situation is an artefact left over like a minefield from the browser war in the '90's. If either Netscape or Microsoft had focused in standards-compliance they would have lost market share. It is likely that both companies were actively trying to break standards as a means of locking in users.
Now that things have settled down Microsoft is the only corporate player with an ongoing interest in locking in users, but users are still going to expect browsers to render everything, no matter how malformed. Users experience any failure to render as a browser problem, not an authoring problem. As such, it is going to be difficult to get the web as a whole to be standards-compliant.
One of the fundamental laws of human behaviour was most clearly enunciated by Han Solo: "It's not my fault! It's not my fault!" We can sit back and say that any user of IE deserves to get burned by exploits, or that anyone authoring an invalid web page deserves to not get page views, but the Darwinian market is fundamentally a mechanism for humans to shift blame for their own failures onto others, and users choose IE and users choose MySpace, so neither browser choice nor website choice will ever be accepted as the cause of user's problems.
only a handful of people wanted to allow women to vote?
if you dont count all the women......
Many women were opponents of universal sufferage. Tarbell's attitude was not at all uncommon, to the extent that there was an active anti-sufferage women's movement. Google on "women opposed sufferage" to find out more.
Sadly, it probably needs to be said that I am fully in favour of women's sufferage, although blackly amused by the claims that it would usher in an era of peaceful prosperity, rather than the bloodiest century in human history. And if anyone thinks women were generally opposed to war in the 20th century, google "women white feather britain" before you post...
The use of smart pointers in C++ is only a complete solution when you have control of 100% of the code. Those of us who write libs for other people, and heavily use libs from other people, are stuck with dumb pointers for interfaces, at least until the next pass at the STL finally gives us a standard for something smarter than auto_ptr.
I can use Boost's counted_ptr or whatever internally, but the interface is always going to be lowest common denominator because I can't realistically expect people to use whatever my choice is for their smart pointer unless it's part of the STL.
And I can always tune garbage collection performance by forcing a garbage collect when I know my app's got the time, like outside of a loop or before creating more objects in storage.
No, you can't. At most you can give the JVM a hint that it would be nice to collect garbage now. The JVM is free to ignore that hint, and many JVMs will do just that.