This is certainly true. However, we must also look at the fact that in any market, it's rarely the best (whatever we define that to mean) product that ends up the most dominant. Just look at motor vehicles, food, music and entertainment for examples. In some cases there is a price issue to look at, in others not.
Microsoft have designed a system that the mass market is comfortable with (whether those of us use other systems like it or not). People are now starting to see that there are alternatives, whether from the Open Sector or from places like Apple. Their behaviour may change over time, but if any change happens it will not do so overnight.
Windows is the white sliced bread of computing: adequate but not wonderful; filling but not necessarily the most nutritious of choices. We also have to accept that in some cases, that is all people want. I think that is perhaps what the orignal author's thrust was, judging by the article, even though he could have been a little less peevish in saying so.
No, he's filmed the first series of 13 and will appear in a special at Christmas.
I'm not sure I understand his typecasting concerns; he was a pretty famous actor in the UK way before doing Who, and is well known for, how can I put it, roles requiring a certain amount of intensity to play (for example DI Bilborough in the orginal, and by far the best, UK series of Cracker). Here in Britain, he's far more likely to be typecast in that way.
He did say that he wanted to do Who to, "prove to people that he wasn't just a miserable bastard", to paraphrase. Maybe he's just proved enough. Or maybe it's stooking the publicity machine for this run.
And he mentioned that the filming for the series took about nine months, which he found gruelling working pretty much 14-16 hour days full-on. If he wants to do other things, Who would pretty much set a seal on that, preventing hime doing much other work.
I personally would have liked to see him do series 2 and bail then if he was concenrned. But still, we can't always have what we want. It's ashame, I've been a Who fan since the mid 70s when I was a six year old and I think Ecclestone shows a lot of promise, with more than an air of Patrick Troughton about him (now there as a great character acotr who didn't get typecast by Who!)
No, that's what the problem actually is: providing a document format that can fulfil the needs of all of these user groups. If you want to hack it by hand in emacs (or similar), then great. The same applies if you want to do it it in a GUI. The point is that the format lets the user decide which tool, or more accurately, tools to use to read and write the files. In such circumstances a user can choose to use different tools for each. The choice is the important thing. There seems to be little point (to me at least) in designing for the lowest common denominator. That's like trying to make TV or the internet a, 'place fit for children' and ending up making it a place fit only for children.
Some earlier posts talked about the need for a number of formats for differing purposes and I can see the point of this: the overhead of marking up is document that only needs to be in plain text is wasteful of resource (including storage space and bandwidth if it is to be transmitted). Then again, if that's the case, why not just use plain text? In other cases the markup will be desirable or necessary to indicate metadata or other content. That may even include securing or adding DRM info to them: this is soemthing can be vendor specific, if the creator so wishes. In any case, linking and embedding objects of other types has always been there in the SGML family, for example. The Groklaw article talks about issues connected with the embedding of binary data in MS's own doc formats. This little aside by Rick Jelliffe explains why it's a bad idea http://www.stylusstudio.com/xmldev/200303/post9073 0.html. In the end, the purpose is not to replace, but to provide an alternative when transparency and perspicuity is essential. not an unreasonable goal, I'd have thought.
I know this is going to sound like I too am part of the problem, but soemtimes users just have to think and must be educated to think in the correct way. You have to use the right tool for the job. Would you would use a knitting needle to hammer in a nail? Why should ignorance be a vaild excuse?
There was an interesting article published recently in the New Scientist magazine in the UK (http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524 814.900 - unfortunately only a preview). which talks about a lot of work going on about hyperglots (people who are able to speak 6 languages or more) and about the facility for language being stronger in some people than in others. The facility didn't appear to be age dependent either. I still think there's something in what you say, though.
I think that reducing things simply to one variable like the age question can be counter-productive sometimes, especially in human and social science.
It's difficult to resist the temptation sometimes, but I happen to think that people are so fantastically unpredictable that the predictive power of many theories is severely limited in the real world.
Prodigies like Mozart or Yehudi Menuhin are examples of those who take a mallet to most age-centred learning theories, albeit in a highly specialised way.
I supposes it's a bit like quantum mechanics or statistical mechanics (like Boltzman's work); you can't predict the behaviour of an individual child or person, but you might hope to estimate behaviour over a larger, macroscopic sample. I'm not sure what this average behaviour would really be useful for in a human system, but there you go.
This, I think, is what I understood about the original argument when I paraphrased it: God and the Universe cannot be separate. This leaves two options: either there is no God and the Universe stands on its own (a more Richard Dawkins perspective) or they are both the same thing and are therefore indivisible. It certainly means God is omnipresent and ominscient, because He simply is everything.
Like I said previously, I'm an atheist based on the evidence before us now, but if I were to believe in a God of some sort, I must admit that the second position might be an attractive one.
This is the bit that is faith-related; we will likely never know exactly how the universe came into being, let alone if there is any why, but I personally cannot reconcile the idea of a non-interventionist God that say, a weakly anthropic universe suggests, and the kind of interventionist God portrayed by religious writing. This is one of the difficulites of the I see about the Creationsit/Intelligent Design position: they can't really decide which kind of God He is.
Bad phrasing on my part, this is how I interpret Spinoza's argument:
God created the universe. This universe is a separate entity (as previously opined by earlier christian philosophers). It makes little sense to assume that this entity is part of the existing one, viz God. Therefore there is now an entity containing both God and the created universe. The root of Spinoza's argument, as far as I understand, is not that there is a separate God, but that God IS the universe. To be fair, Spinoza expressed this better than I ever could, which was why he was one of the greatest renaissance philosphers and I'm not (as well as the fact that I was born about 450 years too late;-) ).
If you are going to use the Bible in schools (as a required textbook) then why shouldn't it have the same disclaimers as any other required textbook that you would use, especially if they are dealing with the same issues. This might also apply to the Koran, the Torah, the Vedas and other scriptures or holy books. Here's a radical thought: why not leave the stickers of all the books and let people make up their own minds? Or is that just me being silly?
As an aside someone mentioned that the Bible was in fact written in very few languages, as opposed to my contention of many languages. This may be true, but before they were even written down, they may have been passed on orally using any number of local languages and dialects. and yes, each of these introduce errors and differing interpretations into the original sources. That's why I said it. It just seemed much more concise to phrase it that way. You only have to look at the story of Cinderella to see how easy it is to change the sense of something. As far as I am aware the orignial story, which I think was from medieval French, talked about a slipper made of vair (fur), as opposed to verre (glass). It's clear how similar they sound.
Religion is a deeply personal thing; a relationship between the individual and whichever God they choose to worship. I happen to be an atheist but wouldn't dream of denying anyone's right to worship whom or what they so wished. I might even have some sympathy for the idea of a God of some description as some kind of initiating agent for creation, were it not for Spinoza's argument (around about the 16th century I believe) which goes something like this:
God is omniscient,omnipotent and omnipresent, and is the greatest entity that exists.
God created the universe and everything it.
Therefore, there is an entity which contains both God and the Universe he created.
This entity must be greater than God. Oh dear.
I might, therefore, choose to think of God as a personification of the Laws of Nature. This has many attractions, because we could then say that God mediates the way the universe works, that God is in some way responsible for creation and that we even have a non-interventionist God in a non-deterministic universe.
In the end, true science is not about faith, religion is. In science you can believe something to be true without proof because available data might put the balance of probability that way. Religious faith is, I contend, different: you are "allowed" to believe with fewer constraints on likelihood and evidence is less of an issue. This is not necessarily all bad, because sometimes faith can be a comfort. Carl Sagan's book, 'The Demon Haunted World' talks about this issue in a very accessible and clear way.
I don't think there is any way that those two sides can be properly reconciled. I just don't like living in a world where either side is not willing to let each other other believe what they want without attempting to indoctrinate the other.
[Disclosure: I am an atheist, who was a Christian when I was much younger. I have a scientific education-Physics at degree level. I am British and still living here. That'sall the cultural bases covered, I think.]
In addition I would say that, as a theory, it has stayed around so long because it explains observation better than any of the alternatives offered so far (my emphasis).
That is the purpose of a theory; to construct a model of the world that we can use to explain what we observe. For example, light is neither a particle or a wave, it is something that can sometimes be modelled one way to describe its behaviour and sometimes the other. for each purpose, either model will explain the behaviour adequately. In a sense, it doesn't actually matter what it really is, merely that the model can describe and predict it. This echoes Richard Feynman, who once said something along those lines (I forget the exact quote).
Theories are not foolproof and set in stone, which is precisely what positivists like Popper said about empirical science: nothing could be proved, only disproved, because the set of data for such things is infinite and there may always be some condition to disprove just around the corner. This is precisely how the Laws of Thermodynamics were presented to me in my first year of a Physics degree: a set of "laws" making up a theory about thermal energy that seems to hold up with the observational data we have so far.
From Britain I look at the sticker and think, OK, have your sticker with the message written on it, just so long as those who don't think the same can put the following on bibles:
The Bible is a story, not a collection of facts, regarding the origin of living things. The material was written by many people over hundreds of years in many different languages. The material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.
Somehow, I don't think the Creationist lobby will go for that though...
I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything this post says. I've used linux for about 6 years now both at home and work and while it si fun to mess around with at low level, sometimes the Apple approach just fits. I notice how quite a lot of Apple-isms have taken root in Fedora core 3, specifically in Gnome. This is not a bad thing; a more usable linux desktop for eveyone may encourage more users and if that model is based on the relative intuitiveness and simplicity of the Mac interface then so much the better.
There are of course problems, particularly if you work in networks with them (like not being able to use SMB mounts as homedirs without third party software - trust us we've tried), but much of this is minor.
The unupdated apache/php problem mentioned elsewhere also applies. Although webserver installs and configs hold no fears for me (doing it and teaching it is part of my job), the way that Apple have it set up on OS X make me fight shy of rolling my own config manually.
Well, the stuttering kind of got the, "Peter Jones is dead, what the hell do we do now-oh let's use Bill Franklin instead" part sorted. And I liked the Marvin stuff. The only disappointment was that he didn't say "Zootlewurdle,Zootlewurdle,Zootlewurdle..." while screwing himself into the swamp with his artifical leg.
First episodes are genrally strange anyway as you have to give it time to get all the characters setup and reintroduced. I was a bit disappointed that they didn't have the drinking part with the sofa, but where would it fit?
There is actually some work that a colleague of mine is fairly prominent in which is going a stage further and applying forensic techniques to such problems.
One idea he's pursuing is that of a silicon pathology, which talks about how some foreign agent was introduced into a system. The follow-on from this was talking about the systems themselves and whether there was some way of classifying them. This led to the idea of a genome for computer systems and how infection mutates it. See http://www.forensic-science-society.org.uk/pdf/con tents44-1.pdf and http://forcomp.n-gate.net/silpath.pdf for more details. Some inital work has suggested this is a not a bad model! It's an area I'm becoming increasingly interested in myself because of the nature of network attacks and the growth of possible delivery mechanisms, such as spoofing proxies, web service malware etc.
When most people in Europe complain about Americans, we don't mean the average US citizen, just worried about earning enough to stay afloat and provide for their families. Many of the Americans I've met in the past have been decent hard-working and genuinely nice people.
No, what we get pissed off about are the bellicose meat-headed Yanks, who believe that they have a God-given right to treat anything and anyone the way they wish, cos' they're from the US of fuckin' A and don't you forget it.
Unfortunately in Europe, we don't tend to see the totality of US political culture (although European news media do a better job of world news than the US networks - I've seen this with my own eyes).
I'm British and I can't complain about how many people voted for Bush in 2000 because proportionately more voted Labour (Blair's party) in the UK in 2001. The only defence we have is that Gore was a more credible alternative choice than anything in the UK. I'm not even an anti-war nutcase. I believed that action in Afghanistan was right and justified (though no-none really talks about Afghanistan much now, do they?) but that Iraq seemed to be an excuse to settle old scores and if not for Blair the US may never have even been able to go in. I'm ashamed that our Prime Minister did that. He is indeed paying for that now; no-one trusts a single word he says about anything anymore. He is likely to win the next election, but on a reduced majority because there is still no credible other government.
There are two quotes that sum up the US state's behaviour and the paranoia amongst its citizens that threatens to ruin your nation. the first is by the Roman historian Polybius, who says:
Since the multitude is ever
fickle, full of lawless desires, irrational passions and violence, there is
no other way to keep them in order but by the fear and terror of the
invisible world; on which account our ancestors seem to me to have acted
judiciously, when they contrived to bring into the popular belief these
notions of the gods, and of the infernal regions.
This quote is about the use of Gods but is particularly appropriate for the fear of terrorism now, I feel.
The next is of course by Benjamin Franklin:
Those who would give up liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety, and will lose both.
The scoadmin tool reminds me lot of Mac OS X server and its serveradmin tool. I have been banging my head against walls just trying to find basic config files I can hack, without success.
In spite of all that, I find myself liking OS X Server more the more I use it, because, unlike UnixWare, OS X seems to have had more than about 15 minutes of thought put into it; stuff like ARD, for instance. That and the fact that there are Open source tools integrated (Samba, Apache inter alia) and that the integration is done fairly well. I still find Linux sysadmin a whole load easier, but I can understand why some people like the Apple way of doing things.
Thank you. I was was just about to post on this very issue when I saw this post, although I'll think I'll pass on the profanity.
He was a good man in a modest unassuming way. He also happened to be one of the great scientists of the twentieth century and now he is dead. From the anecdotes by people who have met him and knew him, this would be the simple matter-of-fact way he may have liked it. Can we dispense with the euphemisms, please?
Secondly, whoever said that the Nobel Prize gave people the credit they deserved? A cursory check for instance, of the Nobel (http://www.nobel.se) archives shows that Einstein won only one prize: in 1921 for the photoelectric effect (admittedly a key part of the beginning of the quantum theory), but he won nothing for either general or special relativity at all. An the Peace prizes are make fairly interesting reading too - particularly 1973, which reminds me of a Tom Lehrer quote, to paraphrase:
I realised that satire was dead when they gave Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize.
Well, how about The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Ozzy, The Who, The Kinks, Queen, Status Quo...
Should I go on? Yes, alright you did give us Elvis, FZ and some other cool stuff but you are responsible for Britney, Justin, NKOTB (anyone old enough to remember that suffering) and a whole bunch of stuff so execrable that it makes me wince just to even think about it. For that reason, I wouldn't go around insulting British muscial taste.
Back to the orignal question, however: I listen to a whole load of stuff, from things like Beethoven, whose 9th Symphony is one of the pinnacles of all human achivement; Ministry; Pink Floyd; Led Zep;Jean Michel Jarre; Kraftwerk; Frank Zappa, The Beatles, The Stones and whole load of other stuff which either makes me schizophrenic or makes this little survey fun but somewhat unscientific. I know which one I'm betting on
I must admit to pissing myself laughing at the though of all those MCSE chimps nodding along to Britney. Is it me or is that just the gayest thing in the world ever (with all due respect to any gay readers out there)
Re:Why it wasn't put in already
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Hacking Quartz
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Apple could always do what M$ do: release it as an unsupported PowerToy. That way, those of us who like (or need) virtual desktops can have them and those who like the way Expose works can stay with it. It seems silly not to if the API support is there.
Alternatively, why can't they make the API public and then let the community provide a solution?
The only problem with this is that the British Parilament is generally an appallingly impotent body of (mostly) middle-aged old men, who would have trouble locating their arses with an atlas.
Things are worse when one party has a huge parliamentary majority, as the current government does. If we did have a properly combative lower house, then we might never have given the Bush administration the supposed legitimacy to go inot Iraq in the first place.
Re:Let the british have their moment in the sun
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...and wasn't Tom Paine actually British as well.
Of course, the medium you are using now was invented by an Englishman working in Switzerland.
The underlying technology (that became ARPANet) was actually suggested by researchers at the National Physical Laboratory in England, built on Baran's (an American!) packet switching idea.
And any time you use PKI, remember that it was someone from Britain (GCHQ) who actually invented it, althuogh the UK government made him sit on it (see www.gchq.gov.uk)
But then of course, most of the interesting work in Science and Mathematics was done either by the British or by others working here like Dirac, Wittgenstein, Rutherford, Davy, Hooke and Newton inter alia.
This is not meant to sound like a flag-waving exercise for the UK, just to remind some of our less intelligent colonial friends that they did not, in fact, invent everything and bless the world with their very existence. I mean, you can't even find WMD in a country the size of Iraq...
Did he tell Disney he was going to make a political movie that would criticize the president and they said they wouldn't distribute it.
Well, let me see. The guy who wrote Stupid White Men ands Dude, Where's My Country as well as directing Bowling for Columbine tells Disney he's making a new movie. What do you think it's going to be about? If Disney were expecting Sesame Street then they must have been pretty naive. Look at what happened with Dogma. Disney shat their pants at that film and in the end, it turned out not to be what was expected (pro-God but anti-church)
Of course Moore has a political agenda. Who doesn't? And in spite of all of the attacks on what has been said in his work, I notice that very few ever actually question the veracity of things, merely argue their degree. It was interesting to listen to an advisor who worked for Bush Snr talking on a radio station in the UK yesterday in exactly this position. Well, yes she said, the Bushes have had contact with the Bin Ladens, but the Bin Laden's are a very big family. Yes, Osama is nasty, but all the other Bin LAdens are lovely, lovely people: besides, look at how much cash they have invested here, we don't want to piss them off too much now do we? I believe there murky waters that certain people in the Bush administration would rather stay that way (like the ever trustworthy Cheney and Rumsfeld)
I can't say that I trust Michael Moore, but I will admit to being far more amenable to what he says than to what the US and UK governemnts have about some of the things he mentions
In amongst all this, you know who I feel sorry for? Think of all of those troops stuck in Iraq, getting tied up in a conflict that they should never have been involved in and risking their lives for objectives that weren't clear then and are even less clear now.
Caveat: IANAL
Yep, the fact that the domain name contains his own name should be a significant defence against bad faith (it's the same defence used by family businesses called McDonalds, for example). In fact, as long as he does not attempt to pass himself off as having any association to M$ on his site, he should be free to continue as is. Offering to sell the domain could be used as a reasonable defence to discourage Microsoft's approach - effectively telling the company the domain is not for sale by putting a silly price on it.
I think he'd have a fair chance of victory if he pushed this up to an international level (WIPO domain dispute resolution) for resolution.
Slashdot Mirror
This is certainly true. However, we must also look at the fact that in any market, it's rarely the best (whatever we define that to mean) product that ends up the most dominant. Just look at motor vehicles, food, music and entertainment for examples. In some cases there is a price issue to look at, in others not.
Microsoft have designed a system that the mass market is comfortable with (whether those of us use other systems like it or not). People are now starting to see that there are alternatives, whether from the Open Sector or from places like Apple. Their behaviour may change over time, but if any change happens it will not do so overnight.
Windows is the white sliced bread of computing: adequate but not wonderful; filling but not necessarily the most nutritious of choices. We also have to accept that in some cases, that is all people want. I think that is perhaps what the orignal author's thrust was, judging by the article, even though he could have been a little less peevish in saying so.
PS: I'm a heavy user of XP, Mac OS X and Fedora
No, he's filmed the first series of 13 and will appear in a special at Christmas.
I'm not sure I understand his typecasting concerns; he was a pretty famous actor in the UK way before doing Who, and is well known for, how can I put it, roles requiring a certain amount of intensity to play (for example DI Bilborough in the orginal, and by far the best, UK series of Cracker). Here in Britain, he's far more likely to be typecast in that way.
He did say that he wanted to do Who to, "prove to people that he wasn't just a miserable bastard", to paraphrase. Maybe he's just proved enough. Or maybe it's stooking the publicity machine for this run. And he mentioned that the filming for the series took about nine months, which he found gruelling working pretty much 14-16 hour days full-on. If he wants to do other things, Who would pretty much set a seal on that, preventing hime doing much other work.
I personally would have liked to see him do series 2 and bail then if he was concenrned. But still, we can't always have what we want. It's ashame, I've been a Who fan since the mid 70s when I was a six year old and I think Ecclestone shows a lot of promise, with more than an air of Patrick Troughton about him (now there as a great character acotr who didn't get typecast by Who!)
Or, to quote Albert Einstein:
No, that's what the problem actually is: providing a document format that can fulfil the needs of all of these user groups. If you want to hack it by hand in emacs (or similar), then great. The same applies if you want to do it it in a GUI. The point is that the format lets the user decide which tool, or more accurately, tools to use to read and write the files. In such circumstances a user can choose to use different tools for each. The choice is the important thing. There seems to be little point (to me at least) in designing for the lowest common denominator. That's like trying to make TV or the internet a, 'place fit for children' and ending up making it a place fit only for children.
Some earlier posts talked about the need for a number of formats for differing purposes and I can see the point of this: the overhead of marking up is document that only needs to be in plain text is wasteful of resource (including storage space and bandwidth if it is to be transmitted). Then again, if that's the case, why not just use plain text? In other cases the markup will be desirable or necessary to indicate metadata or other content. That may even include securing or adding DRM info to them: this is soemthing can be vendor specific, if the creator so wishes. In any case, linking and embedding objects of other types has always been there in the SGML family, for example. The Groklaw article talks about issues connected with the embedding of binary data in MS's own doc formats. This little aside by Rick Jelliffe explains why it's a bad idea http://www.stylusstudio.com/xmldev/200303/post9073 0.html. In the end, the purpose is not to replace, but to provide an alternative when transparency and perspicuity is essential. not an unreasonable goal, I'd have thought.
I know this is going to sound like I too am part of the problem, but soemtimes users just have to think and must be educated to think in the correct way. You have to use the right tool for the job. Would you would use a knitting needle to hammer in a nail? Why should ignorance be a vaild excuse?
There was an interesting article published recently in the New Scientist magazine in the UK (http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524 814.900 - unfortunately only a preview). which talks about a lot of work going on about hyperglots (people who are able to speak 6 languages or more) and about the facility for language being stronger in some people than in others. The facility didn't appear to be age dependent either. I still think there's something in what you say, though.
I think that reducing things simply to one variable like the age question can be counter-productive sometimes, especially in human and social science. It's difficult to resist the temptation sometimes, but I happen to think that people are so fantastically unpredictable that the predictive power of many theories is severely limited in the real world.
Prodigies like Mozart or Yehudi Menuhin are examples of those who take a mallet to most age-centred learning theories, albeit in a highly specialised way.
I supposes it's a bit like quantum mechanics or statistical mechanics (like Boltzman's work); you can't predict the behaviour of an individual child or person, but you might hope to estimate behaviour over a larger, macroscopic sample. I'm not sure what this average behaviour would really be useful for in a human system, but there you go.
This, I think, is what I understood about the original argument when I paraphrased it: God and the Universe cannot be separate. This leaves two options: either there is no God and the Universe stands on its own (a more Richard Dawkins perspective) or they are both the same thing and are therefore indivisible. It certainly means God is omnipresent and ominscient, because He simply is everything.
Like I said previously, I'm an atheist based on the evidence before us now, but if I were to believe in a God of some sort, I must admit that the second position might be an attractive one.
This is the bit that is faith-related; we will likely never know exactly how the universe came into being, let alone if there is any why, but I personally cannot reconcile the idea of a non-interventionist God that say, a weakly anthropic universe suggests, and the kind of interventionist God portrayed by religious writing. This is one of the difficulites of the I see about the Creationsit/Intelligent Design position: they can't really decide which kind of God He is.
Bad phrasing on my part, this is how I interpret Spinoza's argument:
God created the universe. This universe is a separate entity (as previously opined by earlier christian philosophers). It makes little sense to assume that this entity is part of the existing one, viz God. Therefore there is now an entity containing both God and the created universe. The root of Spinoza's argument, as far as I understand, is not that there is a separate God, but that God IS the universe. To be fair, Spinoza expressed this better than I ever could, which was why he was one of the greatest renaissance philosphers and I'm not (as well as the fact that I was born about 450 years too late ;-) ).
Indeed I wasn't: parity is the issue here.
If you are going to use the Bible in schools (as a required textbook) then why shouldn't it have the same disclaimers as any other required textbook that you would use, especially if they are dealing with the same issues. This might also apply to the Koran, the Torah, the Vedas and other scriptures or holy books. Here's a radical thought: why not leave the stickers of all the books and let people make up their own minds? Or is that just me being silly?
As an aside someone mentioned that the Bible was in fact written in very few languages, as opposed to my contention of many languages. This may be true, but before they were even written down, they may have been passed on orally using any number of local languages and dialects. and yes, each of these introduce errors and differing interpretations into the original sources. That's why I said it. It just seemed much more concise to phrase it that way. You only have to look at the story of Cinderella to see how easy it is to change the sense of something. As far as I am aware the orignial story, which I think was from medieval French, talked about a slipper made of vair (fur), as opposed to verre (glass). It's clear how similar they sound.
Religion is a deeply personal thing; a relationship between the individual and whichever God they choose to worship. I happen to be an atheist but wouldn't dream of denying anyone's right to worship whom or what they so wished. I might even have some sympathy for the idea of a God of some description as some kind of initiating agent for creation, were it not for Spinoza's argument (around about the 16th century I believe) which goes something like this:
I might, therefore, choose to think of God as a personification of the Laws of Nature. This has many attractions, because we could then say that God mediates the way the universe works, that God is in some way responsible for creation and that we even have a non-interventionist God in a non-deterministic universe.
In the end, true science is not about faith, religion is. In science you can believe something to be true without proof because available data might put the balance of probability that way. Religious faith is, I contend, different: you are "allowed" to believe with fewer constraints on likelihood and evidence is less of an issue. This is not necessarily all bad, because sometimes faith can be a comfort. Carl Sagan's book, 'The Demon Haunted World' talks about this issue in a very accessible and clear way.
I don't think there is any way that those two sides can be properly reconciled. I just don't like living in a world where either side is not willing to let each other other believe what they want without attempting to indoctrinate the other.
[Disclosure: I am an atheist, who was a Christian when I was much younger. I have a scientific education-Physics at degree level. I am British and still living here. That'sall the cultural bases covered, I think.]
I'll second all of that.
In addition I would say that, as a theory, it has stayed around so long because it explains observation better than any of the alternatives offered so far (my emphasis). That is the purpose of a theory; to construct a model of the world that we can use to explain what we observe. For example, light is neither a particle or a wave, it is something that can sometimes be modelled one way to describe its behaviour and sometimes the other. for each purpose, either model will explain the behaviour adequately. In a sense, it doesn't actually matter what it really is, merely that the model can describe and predict it. This echoes Richard Feynman, who once said something along those lines (I forget the exact quote).
Theories are not foolproof and set in stone, which is precisely what positivists like Popper said about empirical science: nothing could be proved, only disproved, because the set of data for such things is infinite and there may always be some condition to disprove just around the corner. This is precisely how the Laws of Thermodynamics were presented to me in my first year of a Physics degree: a set of "laws" making up a theory about thermal energy that seems to hold up with the observational data we have so far.
From Britain I look at the sticker and think, OK, have your sticker with the message written on it, just so long as those who don't think the same can put the following on bibles:
Somehow, I don't think the Creationist lobby will go for that though...
I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything this post says. I've used linux for about 6 years now both at home and work and while it si fun to mess around with at low level, sometimes the Apple approach just fits. I notice how quite a lot of Apple-isms have taken root in Fedora core 3, specifically in Gnome. This is not a bad thing; a more usable linux desktop for eveyone may encourage more users and if that model is based on the relative intuitiveness and simplicity of the Mac interface then so much the better.
There are of course problems, particularly if you work in networks with them (like not being able to use SMB mounts as homedirs without third party software - trust us we've tried), but much of this is minor.
The unupdated apache/php problem mentioned elsewhere also applies. Although webserver installs and configs hold no fears for me (doing it and teaching it is part of my job), the way that Apple have it set up on OS X make me fight shy of rolling my own config manually.
Well, the stuttering kind of got the, "Peter Jones is dead, what the hell do we do now-oh let's use Bill Franklin instead" part sorted. And I liked the Marvin stuff. The only disappointment was that he didn't say "Zootlewurdle,Zootlewurdle,Zootlewurdle..." while screwing himself into the swamp with his artifical leg.
First episodes are genrally strange anyway as you have to give it time to get all the characters setup and reintroduced. I was a bit disappointed that they didn't have the drinking part with the sofa, but where would it fit?
Good to see it back!
There is actually some work that a colleague of mine is fairly prominent in which is going a stage further and applying forensic techniques to such problems.
One idea he's pursuing is that of a silicon pathology, which talks about how some foreign agent was introduced into a system. The follow-on from this was talking about the systems themselves and whether there was some way of classifying them. This led to the idea of a genome for computer systems and how infection mutates it. See http://www.forensic-science-society.org.uk/pdf/con tents44-1.pdf and http://forcomp.n-gate.net/silpath.pdf for more details. Some inital work has suggested this is a not a bad model! It's an area I'm becoming increasingly interested in myself because of the nature of network attacks and the growth of possible delivery mechanisms, such as spoofing proxies, web service malware etc.
A voice of reason.
When most people in Europe complain about Americans, we don't mean the average US citizen, just worried about earning enough to stay afloat and provide for their families. Many of the Americans I've met in the past have been decent hard-working and genuinely nice people.
No, what we get pissed off about are the bellicose meat-headed Yanks, who believe that they have a God-given right to treat anything and anyone the way they wish, cos' they're from the US of fuckin' A and don't you forget it.
Unfortunately in Europe, we don't tend to see the totality of US political culture (although European news media do a better job of world news than the US networks - I've seen this with my own eyes).
I'm British and I can't complain about how many people voted for Bush in 2000 because proportionately more voted Labour (Blair's party) in the UK in 2001. The only defence we have is that Gore was a more credible alternative choice than anything in the UK. I'm not even an anti-war nutcase. I believed that action in Afghanistan was right and justified (though no-none really talks about Afghanistan much now, do they?) but that Iraq seemed to be an excuse to settle old scores and if not for Blair the US may never have even been able to go in. I'm ashamed that our Prime Minister did that. He is indeed paying for that now; no-one trusts a single word he says about anything anymore. He is likely to win the next election, but on a reduced majority because there is still no credible other government.
There are two quotes that sum up the US state's behaviour and the paranoia amongst its citizens that threatens to ruin your nation. the first is by the Roman historian Polybius, who says:
This quote is about the use of Gods but is particularly appropriate for the fear of terrorism now, I feel.
The next is of course by Benjamin Franklin:
Ring any bells George?
The scoadmin tool reminds me lot of Mac OS X server and its serveradmin tool. I have been banging my head against walls just trying to find basic config files I can hack, without success.
In spite of all that, I find myself liking OS X Server more the more I use it, because, unlike UnixWare, OS X seems to have had more than about 15 minutes of thought put into it; stuff like ARD, for instance. That and the fact that there are Open source tools integrated (Samba, Apache inter alia) and that the integration is done fairly well. I still find Linux sysadmin a whole load easier, but I can understand why some people like the Apple way of doing things.
I'm sorry, I'm speaking fluent bollocks there, aren't I?
Thank you. I was was just about to post on this very issue when I saw this post, although I'll think I'll pass on the profanity.
He was a good man in a modest unassuming way. He also happened to be one of the great scientists of the twentieth century and now he is dead. From the anecdotes by people who have met him and knew him, this would be the simple matter-of-fact way he may have liked it. Can we dispense with the euphemisms, please?
Secondly, whoever said that the Nobel Prize gave people the credit they deserved? A cursory check for instance, of the Nobel (http://www.nobel.se) archives shows that Einstein won only one prize: in 1921 for the photoelectric effect (admittedly a key part of the beginning of the quantum theory), but he won nothing for either general or special relativity at all. An the Peace prizes are make fairly interesting reading too - particularly 1973, which reminds me of a Tom Lehrer quote, to paraphrase:
What do the British know about music anyway?
Well, how about The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Ozzy, The Who, The Kinks, Queen, Status Quo...Should I go on? Yes, alright you did give us Elvis, FZ and some other cool stuff but you are responsible for Britney, Justin, NKOTB (anyone old enough to remember that suffering) and a whole bunch of stuff so execrable that it makes me wince just to even think about it. For that reason, I wouldn't go around insulting British muscial taste.
Back to the orignal question, however: I listen to a whole load of stuff, from things like Beethoven, whose 9th Symphony is one of the pinnacles of all human achivement; Ministry; Pink Floyd; Led Zep;Jean Michel Jarre; Kraftwerk; Frank Zappa, The Beatles, The Stones and whole load of other stuff which either makes me schizophrenic or makes this little survey fun but somewhat unscientific. I know which one I'm betting on
I must admit to pissing myself laughing at the though of all those MCSE chimps nodding along to Britney. Is it me or is that just the gayest thing in the world ever (with all due respect to any gay readers out there)
Apple could always do what M$ do: release it as an unsupported PowerToy. That way, those of us who like (or need) virtual desktops can have them and those who like the way Expose works can stay with it. It seems silly not to if the API support is there.
Alternatively, why can't they make the API public and then let the community provide a solution?
The only problem with this is that the British Parilament is generally an appallingly impotent body of (mostly) middle-aged old men, who would have trouble locating their arses with an atlas.
Things are worse when one party has a huge parliamentary majority, as the current government does. If we did have a properly combative lower house, then we might never have given the Bush administration the supposed legitimacy to go inot Iraq in the first place.
Tripe and onions perhaps. Yum
Of course, the medium you are using now was invented by an Englishman working in Switzerland. The underlying technology (that became ARPANet) was actually suggested by researchers at the National Physical Laboratory in England, built on Baran's (an American!) packet switching idea.
And any time you use PKI, remember that it was someone from Britain (GCHQ) who actually invented it, althuogh the UK government made him sit on it (see www.gchq.gov.uk)
But then of course, most of the interesting work in Science and Mathematics was done either by the British or by others working here like Dirac, Wittgenstein, Rutherford, Davy, Hooke and Newton inter alia.
This is not meant to sound like a flag-waving exercise for the UK, just to remind some of our less intelligent colonial friends that they did not, in fact, invent everything and bless the world with their very existence. I mean, you can't even find WMD in a country the size of Iraq...
burglarized. Ugh.
The word is burgled
Well, let me see. The guy who wrote Stupid White Men ands Dude, Where's My Country as well as directing Bowling for Columbine tells Disney he's making a new movie. What do you think it's going to be about? If Disney were expecting Sesame Street then they must have been pretty naive. Look at what happened with Dogma. Disney shat their pants at that film and in the end, it turned out not to be what was expected (pro-God but anti-church)
Of course Moore has a political agenda. Who doesn't? And in spite of all of the attacks on what has been said in his work, I notice that very few ever actually question the veracity of things, merely argue their degree. It was interesting to listen to an advisor who worked for Bush Snr talking on a radio station in the UK yesterday in exactly this position. Well, yes she said, the Bushes have had contact with the Bin Ladens, but the Bin Laden's are a very big family. Yes, Osama is nasty, but all the other Bin LAdens are lovely, lovely people: besides, look at how much cash they have invested here, we don't want to piss them off too much now do we? I believe there murky waters that certain people in the Bush administration would rather stay that way (like the ever trustworthy Cheney and Rumsfeld)
I can't say that I trust Michael Moore, but I will admit to being far more amenable to what he says than to what the US and UK governemnts have about some of the things he mentions
In amongst all this, you know who I feel sorry for? Think of all of those troops stuck in Iraq, getting tied up in a conflict that they should never have been involved in and risking their lives for objectives that weren't clear then and are even less clear now.
But C64 BASIC was a Microsoft BASIC. Just not a very good one, that's all.
Caveat: IANAL
Yep, the fact that the domain name contains his own name should be a significant defence against bad faith (it's the same defence used by family businesses called McDonalds, for example). In fact, as long as he does not attempt to pass himself off as having any association to M$ on his site, he should be free to continue as is. Offering to sell the domain could be used as a reasonable defence to discourage Microsoft's approach - effectively telling the company the domain is not for sale by putting a silly price on it.
I think he'd have a fair chance of victory if he pushed this up to an international level (WIPO domain dispute resolution) for resolution.