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User: jandrese

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  1. Re:Xbox 360 v. PS3 on PlayStation 3 Unveiled · · Score: 1
    One of the lines looked really strange to me:
    Ethernet: (10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T) x 3 (input x 1 + output x 2)
    I've never heard of a unidirectional Ethernet port before. Is this an artefact of the way you network them together or is there some bizarre limitation to the hardware?
  2. Re:oblig. Red Dwarf! on Excursions at the Speed of Light · · Score: 1

    It's best not to think about the Science of Red Dwarf. I saw one guy try to put up a website with all of the Science gaffs and continuity holes in Red Dwarf and I think his brain exploded.

  3. Re:Lemme guess... on Dissidents Seeking Anonymous Web Solutions? · · Score: 4, Funny

    It used to only be Blacks that were disenfranchised in the South. It's good to see that we have progress.

  4. Re:Lemme guess... on Dissidents Seeking Anonymous Web Solutions? · · Score: 2, Funny

    You'd better be careful. I hear they shoot real Democrats down there.

  5. Re:Exactly, streaming bandwidth changes everything on Bill Gates: Cellphone will Beat iPod · · Score: 1

    Except that you will be in violation of your TOS if you run any services on your broadband connection (even P2P applications usually fall under this provision). There are some exceptions (Speakeasy for instance), but by and large the TOS you agreed to when you signed up explicitly prohibits servers of any kind.

    Heck, some TOSes are so restrictive that you can be in violation for doing anything other than surfing the web or reading your email. The problem is that some providers have started enforcing these agreements, especially if they overprovision the network and need to cut down on their less profitable customers (like the ones that do more than visit Hotmail).

  6. Re:ESA cursed on Mars on Mars Express' 2nd Boom Deployment Postponed · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think if you look around you'll notice that just about every space program is a joint venture with the JPL.

  7. Re:Fundamental Fundamentalist question... on Kansas Challenges Definition of Science · · Score: 1

    Uh, I don't think anyone is saying that the first life was something like a modern Bacteria or Amoeba. I think the current theory is that the precursors to modern life were little more than long lived chemical reactions on the seafloor that slowly developed life-like features (protective membranes for instance).

  8. Re:Fundamental Fundamentalist question... on Kansas Challenges Definition of Science · · Score: 1

    Nice handwave of the complexity issue.

  9. Re:Fundamental Fundamentalist question... on Kansas Challenges Definition of Science · · Score: 1

    Ah, I see you are in the "life is too complicated, something must have designed it" camp.

    I have two problems with that theory:
    1. Whoever designed "life" must have been _really_ complicated. Can you imagine how complex a being like "God" or an "intelligent designer" must be? But then how did God come into being? Did God evolve?
    2. Scientists are doing a pretty good job of explaining how simple structures turn into complex structures over time. There was an interesting study about a year ago about how wings can evolve over time (based on fossil evidence) for example. Evolution doesn't have _all_ of the answers (and probably never will), but that's part of science. If we had all of the answers there would be nothing left to study, but obviously there is still a lot we don't know. Evolution gets stronger over time as more and more processes are discovered and identified. This is part of what it means to be a scientific theory. Creationism on the other hand, is just dogma. It doesn't change in the light of new evidence, it tries to change the evidence to fit pre-concieved notions.

    You are right though, we can never be sure that evolution is 100% accurate because there's always the chance that it will be disproven. This is not a problem, it's just the nature of science. Science does not provide absolute truth, it only provides the most plausable scenario given the current evidence. If there are multiple equally plausible scenarios, choose the simplest one.

  10. Re:Fundamental Fundamentalist question... on Kansas Challenges Definition of Science · · Score: 1

    There are other ways of gathering evidence that don't include directly observing it. In some sciences, half of the science is just finding new ways to observe what happens, be it too small to see (Quantum Mechanics, Particle Physiscs), too large (Universal Expansion), or normally slow (Evolution). Fortunatly, some organisms evolve fairly rapidly in the labratory or in nature (very simple life tends to evolve faster). The process of extrapolating all of that data into a workable theory is called science. History doesn't vanish with the passage of time. Clues get left behind (Fossils for instance) that allow scientists a greater understanding of what happened.

    If you hear a bang and run into a room one second later and see one tied up dead guy lying on the floor with a bullet hole in his head, and another guy holding a smoking gun with a bit of blood spatter and GSR over his arm and only his fingerprints on it: well you can't say that he shot the guy. It's not a "fact". But you can form a theory based on the evidence, even if you didn't observe the act directly.

  11. Re:Intelligent Navel Theory on Kansas Challenges Definition of Science · · Score: 1

    Huh? Judgement of you? I'm judging Creationism and ID as Not Science. Nothing against you personally.

    Stickers? I can't find mention of stickers anywhere in the writeup or article. The article was about changing the definition of science.

  12. Re:Fundamental Fundamentalist question... on Kansas Challenges Definition of Science · · Score: 1

    Eh, textbooks also include drawings of the Bohr model of the atom, even though they are wrong. Is this bad? No, for a teaching tool you can talk about the "correct" parts of the drawings (like the idea of electons being seperate from the protons and neutrons) without bogging down kids with excess detail too quickly. It's also enlightening to see how the process evolves over time.

  13. Re:Fundamental Fundamentalist question... on Kansas Challenges Definition of Science · · Score: 1

    I had to laugh when you included "theory vs. science" in there. Is your next argument: Science is at odds with itself! It can't even seem to distingush between Theories and "Facts"!

  14. Re:Fundamental Fundamentalist question... on Kansas Challenges Definition of Science · · Score: 1

    You forget, Creationism isn't a theory. We still have a hell of a lot more evidence for Evolution than we do for Creationism to boot.

  15. Re:Fundamental Fundamentalist question... on Kansas Challenges Definition of Science · · Score: 1

    Actually, if you look harder you'll notice that the Creationism camp is full of people who don't actually have to work with this stuff on a day-to-day basis. It's full of people with PhDs from unrelated fields, or people who have never written any peer reviewed papers.

    All of the actual scientists are on the Evolution side, mostly because it's an actual workable theory, unlike Creationism or ID. In other words, real scientists believe in the scientific method, and therefore fall naturally on the Evolution side.

  16. Re:Intelligent Navel Theory on Kansas Challenges Definition of Science · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You've never read a science book have you? There are no "Facts" per say, only observations (Laws) and the processes that describe them (Theoies).

    Evolution is obviously a Theory. It is descriptive and predictive and could be disproved. Scientists can use Evolution as a basis for understanding how the world works and how it was created. You can run repeatable experiments that would fail if Evolution were false. Scientists do this all the time, and thus far we have no examples of (say) some divine hand changing the outcome of an experiment (messing with the lab rats as it were) in some repeatable way. Evolution COULD be disproven, in fact it would be quite easy for an actual intelligent designer to do so, but thus far they havn't.

    What you forgot to ask is the corrilary: Is ID a Theory? No, it is not, it cannot be used to predict anything and it cannot be disproved. Therefore, ID (and Creationism) have no place in science. They are not useful. They are NOT Theories. Teaching this to our kids in Science Class just does't make sense, because it isn't science.

  17. Re:Idiots. on Kansas Challenges Definition of Science · · Score: 1
    Belief in God and evolution need not be mutually exclusive. That being said, evolution is as much a theory as creationism, and some may say it evolution relies on faith just as much (if not more) than creationism.
    Oh, I missed one other thing in my previous reply to this post.

    "Some may say" is not evidence. Some may say that you like the feel of your own sphincter around your neck, this doesn't make it true. The whole evolution requires more faith than creationism argument is so laughable that you should really stop repeating it. I've posted the reasons in another post.

    The short of it is: It takes more faith to believe in more complex things. It would (for instance) take a lot of faith to belive that we are all just a simulation being run on an alien's PDA and our end of days comes when the batteries run out. It takes less faith to believe in Occams Razor, because it has been right time and time again and has been a very useful tool.

    Your argument is kind of like saying: Well, it takes a lot of faith to believe in gravity. Some say it takes less faith to belive that invisible Pixies hold everything down instead and there is no gravity.
  18. Re:Intelligent Navel Theory on Kansas Challenges Definition of Science · · Score: 1

    Yeah, the only thing Evolution has to fall back on is observed data and extrapolated results. Obviously Creationism is much better because they didn't have to muck about with actual testing, hypothesis forming, or any of that nasty Scientific Method crap. Everything they need to know is written down for them already!

    IMHO, Faith that there is some invisible creator doing all of this work (just for you!) is a lot harder to keep than faith that observations and repeatable tests aren't the work of some omnipitent invisible prankster (in which case all bets are off).

    I know creationists hate the whole idea of Occams Razor, but in practice it holds up time and time again. What's more, evolution produces actual science, unlike ID which basically says: Don't bother trying to predict stuff, you can't know God's (sorry: Unknown Creator's) will. There is literally NO point in teaching Creationism/ID because it is not science. Why the heck are we going to spend the first 2 weeks of class teaching the scientific method if we're instantly going to throw it out when we turn to chapter two: Origins of Life? That doesn't make any sense.

    Evolution is still a work in progress (like most scientific works), but it is at least actual science.

  19. Re:Fascinating device. on PSP UMD Format Cracked · · Score: 2, Informative

    Gutenburg failed to anticipate what would happen when Copyright law was dicked with long enough to make sure that no media can be sold without paying half a dozen middlemen and the great great great grandchildren of the original creator.

  20. Re:One significant thing about the iMac on iMacs Freshened with 2.0 GHz G5, Bluetooth, WiFi · · Score: 1

    Obviously you need a Gigabit switch/router and Cat 6 (well, you can get away with Cat 5 as long as you don't run it too far). Also, if you want to push traffic through at the maximum rate possible, you're going to need Gigabit Ethernet or faster from your Mac to wherever the data is going. This doesn't include any of the current-generation Wi-Fi technologies, although in the future it might. The wireless connection won't slow you down unless you have to actually send over it though.

    Network technology is not magic. You can only go as fast as the slowest componenet. Upgrading to a Gigabit connection on your PC won't make your cablemodem run any faster. That said, in a few years it will probably be commonplace for you to walk into BestBuy or CompUSA or wherever and pick up a 5 port Gigabit switch for your home network. When this is commonplace, your Mac will be ready to integrate nicely into your network. Before then, well, it still integrate nicely and you just had to pay a bit more for some functionality you aren't using (yet).

  21. Re:One significant thing about the iMac on iMacs Freshened with 2.0 GHz G5, Bluetooth, WiFi · · Score: 1

    The majority of people don't have Gigabit now, but in a few years a 10/100 card will look like 10 meg cards look today. Apple generally designs its products to have a longer lifespan than your average PC, so this makes sense. Also, Gig-E chipsets have come down in price enough that it's probably only a few dollars difference.

  22. Re:Military Payloads Need Reliability: Titan Deliv on Last Titan Launch from Florida · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well that an 50 year old cars have terrible gas milage, put out way more pollution than a modern car (orders of magnitude), and require near constant maintence to keep running. People romanticize about old cars all the time, but forget that it used to be rare for a car to make it 100,000 miles, a feat that is commonplace today, even among cheap and nasty cars. The old hardware isn't worthless, but the new stuff is considerably better in most areas. The only major area where modern cars continually score worse than older cars is in maintainability by shade-tree mechanics. Old cars are a lot simpler and don't need sophisticated tools to be worked on, unlike many modern cars.

  23. Re:Reinventing the wheel on Third Parties Already Taking Advantage of Tiger · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yeah, but this way it can be combined with non-Photoshop operations. You could build a script to generate an index and filesystem with an integrated browser to build customized demonstration CDs.

  24. The next big thing on Dvorak Trashes Modern Gaming Industry · · Score: 1

    I've been waiting for this for awhile, but I'm sure it's coming at some point. The next big thing I'm expecting is an extremely sophisticated for game engine that allows people to create complex games without spending the hundreds of man-hours doing the same stuff over and over again. Such a system, if flexible and not too locked up in the FPS or RTS mold, could revolutionize the industry by allowing single person teams to create games again. If the development costs can be brought down enough we could see people taking more risks and coming out with more unique games instead of just releasing yet more sequels to successful franchies.

  25. Re:Can Crushing on Microsoft States Full TCP/IP Too Dangerous · · Score: 1

    Wow, what a waste of metal. Must have been expensive.