I really, really wish "Kids don't need cell phones" was true. And it may be that it is some places. Unfortunately, it also seems that it is a real need in some places: Lacking a cell phone will totally cut the kid off from their social circle, because very large parts of communication goes by SMS.
It's the same with net access; I personally believe that kids would mature better if they were all without cell phones and unmonitored net access until they're well into their teens. Alas, when almost all kids get cellphones and net access, denying to just one kid makes that kid an outcast:-(
``To say that one method of error handling is superior or correct or even required over the other is a little naive.''
I disagree. Forget to check a return code and nobody might ever find out, except that some people will end up with corrupted data. Forget to check an exception and you will (in most implementations, at least) get an error message telling you what went wrong and where in the program.
I think both paradigms has their strenghts and weaknesses.
I prefer exceptions for "semi-dirty" code, where I'll try to do error handling but won't really, really verify for it, because exceptions take most of the hassle out of this and means that one error in coding won't leave the user with corrupted data but will create a stacktrace that is possible to debug. This fits for most business code.
I prefer returned error codes for code where I really want to make it solid (e.g, the operating system code I've worked on in FreeBSD), because I can verify that the handling is correct much more easily. The handling is explicit, in the way, and more of a hassle to write in the first place - but it is also easier to verify.
I suspect that there is some paradigm out there that has the ability to work like both of these (possibly some kind of wrapped return types a la Haskell's Maybe / Just types with possible exception information included), but I don't yet know this paradigm.
its always a choice between the guy who wants change to go a little faster and the guy who wants change to go a little slower
any other candidates, who represent more fringe positions, are not viable candidates
if no political parties existed (which is impossible: its politics, people associate) or if there were 3, or 4 or 5 major parties (which would naturally devolve to 2 truly powerful parties anyway, along the main ideological axis), there would still only be 2 valid candidates along the only ideological axis that really matters
if there were 3, and 2 had similar views, they would simply cannibalize each others support and the other guy would win, regardless of your voting method, political parties, etc
your views are just sort of a wallowing in pessimism and helplessness
Your hypothesis about politics is interesting - but unfortunately it doesn't seem to match reality. If you look at different countries with different voting systems (e.g, Norway, where I grew up), you will find that there are several parties with a different distribution of power, that there are regular cases of parties growing and shrinking, and that there are parties (including large parties) that want radical change in several directions.
science can never answer why as a simple consequence of what science is
Science can answer "why" a ball falls to the ground when I throw it (and the how), though I suspect you were trying to make another point:-)
Which "why" questions, which are sensible, are you concerned with?
This just shows how you've misunderstood what a why question is. "Why?" the ball fell to the ground is not "Gravity", but "Because you threw it", which leads to "Why did you throw it?", which science cannot really answer.
Please tell that to the authors of my books on motivation - if you can convince them, I'll probably get my money back. The argument that convince them that all they wrote was nonsense will also be interesting to hear.
Your argument that God could be intervening at a miniscule level is correct; the God hypothesis is not falsifiable. The closest is that we could show the kind of psychological mechanisms that lead to believing in God, could show their evolutionary cause, and can show that there are thousands of Gods, and those of us that are atheists just disbelieve in say 2000 gods while the people that believe in "God" disbelieve 1999 gods.
There's a committed portion of the US population who don't need to "head..towards understanding the origins of life" because they are absolutely certain that they know exactly how life came about because a guy who though of the cell as a simple blob wrote a book that tells them what he thought happened after you have the first life. They're not going to take kindly to anything that could challenge their certainty.
There. Fixed that for you;)
So, you replaced one factual error (the bible wasn't all written on scrolls) with two much larger ones: That people that believe in evolution believe it due Darwin's book (scientists believe in evolution because there are mountains of evidence and thousands of ways it is being confirmed every day), and that people believe in abiogenesis because of this. Many of us (most of us?) believe in abiogenesis because it is the only actual explanation we know of - saying "God did it" doesn't explain anything. (To make that more impactful, you might want to think of it in Robin Ince's words - "magic man dunnit".)
Mods can have my karma if they want it, its still a purely religious assertion to say that life spontaneously arises. It's unobserved and there's good reason to believe its impossible (e.g. the chirality problem).
So, can you explain why you think chirality rules out e.g. Graham Cairns-Smith's clay hypothesis?
We have a word for that where I come from, we call it unscientific.
We have a word for positing that we need to add "magic man dunnit" to our explanations: It's called unscientific.
As others have told you, finnbiff is reindeer cut into small pieces. It's just pure, lean meat, often served with a sauce of sour cream, onion, mushrooms spiced with juniper berries and black pepper, usually with lingonberry (AKA cowberry, or in norwegian "tyttebær") jam and boiled potatoes on the side.
Cold weather, hot women, health care, and common sense. If their food is any good, maybe I'll move also
Whether the food is good depends on where you are. There's a quite good selection in the cities in the southern part of the country (most of the ones you'll hear about), both in terms of quality and availability in shops and restaurants (ethnic or french inspired, for the most part). There's more remote parts that have a horrid selection.
Norway does not really have that much of a classic food culture; we used to be poor. The present day food culture is to a large degree imported; lots of Italian and a bit of indian/mexican/etc. Going back a while, it was more germanic, so you'll find germanic inspired dishes as the more "old school" dishes. E.g, first fry and then cook meat, and serve with root vegetables and gravy.
A lot of what we have seen so far on this is second hand, conjecture, etc. The "leaked document" in this case doesn't seem to exist -- it looks like Michael Geist's blog entry is what is being referenced. I think it is reasonable to suppose that the blog entry may be accurate, but we don't really know that it is.
So what do we know? What conclusions can we draw from the information we have?
1. It is called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The word "counterfeiting" in there seems like an important data point. 2. It has been quashed by citing national security. National security has certainly become an extraordinarily loose standard, but it still means something. 3. Lots of copyright bigwigs have signed the NDA. 4. Three Google representatives have signed the NDA. (not sure what that contributes to this post, but I think it is worth noting)
Relevant links from the Internet (from a Google search for "google acta"):
Wow, you're a little nuts aren't you. I've said not what is, but what I'd want to be. I don't want my friends to take my songs and mix them. I'm fully aware that it's legal today. I don't want it to be.
It's not, assuming a simple constraint: You're not allowed to publish them. The moment you publish things you're putting them into the brains of people, making part of their value that they're part of the culture and people know them - which means that naturally, your rights change, as other people are providing part of the value. You're allowed to keep from this situation - then you won't get the benefits of it, of course, but you also won't get the drawbacks (e.g, people are allowed to remix.)
People generally don't remember things from before they are three years old, so those that get to vote this year don't remember a time without the web.
(Personally, I'm getting to be an old fart - I was on the net before Mosaic. But there was still a million people on net before me.)
I read Robert Jordan's stuff only after Brandon Sanderson was chosen to finish the series. Endless series tend to be dull as time passes - but Sanderson's recommendation was enough to make me read this one. I'm looking forward to Sanderson's finish - I find that his books are generally better than Jordan's, though Jordan is also fairly good. It might come come from Sanderson having more experience - he's written a whole lot of books, just not published so many of them.
Yes, lets give up on airport security. That will end well.
What in particular makes you think that these things increase security? The penetration testing reports I've seen (18 out of 20 guns pass through) doesn't really seem to indicate much help. Security theater.
Barter is a mild form of capitalism where you hope you get a bit more than you bargain for.
The way I understand what you write here, you think that one person will lose and one person will win in barter. It's better than that: Both people can win. The theory behind this is called "comparative advantage"; if you don't know it and are generally curious, I think you'll be happy if you look it up:) I know I found it extremely intriguing the first time I learned about it.
Your statement that every fossil is from an evolutionary dead end is wrong however - as there are plenty of 'missing-link' fossils that are found that have a (very likely) lineage (as a species rather than individuals) to current species.
Excellent. That is exactly what I'm looking for. Is there a link (URL, not "missing":-)
I see you've been provided one by another poster.
However, I'd like to point out that fossils is just some extra evidence. It's not necessary to show evolution.
To use an analogy, let's compare the evidence to a murder trial: You find the murderer's semen in the victim's vagina, his fingerprints on the icepick left in her body, and her blood under his fingernails and on his clothes.
Focusing on lack of transitional forms in the fossils is like focusing on the fact that the eye witness only saw him going *out* of the room, and it was several minutes after the screams stopped, and there is no eye witness for the actual murder.
Fossils can help us get extra evidence for how evolution happened - that evolution happened is established by how presently living plants and animals are related and develop.
My GP nags me to have an anti-flu vaccination every October. For quite a few years I did accept and I would say the treatment actually was effective in the sense of I did have lower incidence of cold/flu than previously when I didn't get the innoculation.
However, over the past few years I refused to take it. Reasons: worry about dependency (am I heading towards being unable to live without annual shots) and uneasiness about what the hell is actually in this stuff. No matter how nicely you ask they will not tell you what -exactly- they are proposing to stick into your body. If you want me to stop being an anti-vaxxer then maybe that's possible but "just trust us we are medical professionals" is not going to do it for me.
It's weakened influenza bacteria (usually weakened to the point of "dead") and solvent (water + passive ingredients to make it less annoying to your body) plus possibly preservatives.
Now, having taken the step of "being an anti-vaxxer", I assume you've taken the time to carefully learn about the functioning of the immune system and the body, so that you can make a reasonable evaluation based on the above. If you're going to say things about "aluminium" or "thimerosal" I assume you've at least looked cursorily at the scientific literature on this - looking at least a couple of review papers (that's summary papers that's written in each area) that isn't particularly selected to support your opinion, or read a textbook in the area, or something like that.
I also assume that you look carefully at the label of the things you eat, and make sure that you understand at least how the major ingredients influence you - what minerals do you need to have a functioning immune system, what ratio of macro-nutrients influence you how, etc.
I'm all in favor of people building their own, reasoned opinions. It's a good thing. It's just that building a reasoned opinion is a quite expensive proposition. For instance, I have a relatively reasoned opinion about evolution. It's probably cost me somewhere in the 100-200 hours range of concentrated time. I've read about 3500-4000 pages of material directly covering it, including criticism, written simulators for genetic algorithms, taken high school biology, and tried to apply evolutionary understanding to things I've encountered for a couple of decades.
I haven't got a good, reasoned opinion about flu vaccination. To have a reasoned opinion, I'd have to know most of the following:
How does the immune system work in this kind of area
What kind of research methods are used to test flu vaccines
What kind of errors are likely to show up in this kind of research, based on the history of vaccine research (and medical research in general, and research in general)
What effect does the flu vaccine have on society overall? (Ie, some epidemiology)
How does the flu evolve?
What is the overall risk of inserting a foreign substance into the body?
How does this risk compare to other risks?
What does the vaccine contain, and what kind of risks could this give that wouldn't show up in the direct research discussed above?
In practice, very few people have this kind of knowledge. Because it is so expensive to get it, the best we can do is rely on experts. It sucks, but the opinion of the expert is likely to be much better considered than the opinion of a random person. Nobody has the time to have reasoned opinions in all areas - the best we can hope for is to learn enough to have a reasonable chance of selecting good experts to trust. Even researchers in the particular area very often have to trust other experts - there is never time to verify all the research.
The key here is the code behind grand central dispatch is not GPL compatible [arstechnica.com], so Linux will probably never get this code
That's not quite correct. There are two parts to GCD: libdispatch and the kernel support. The kernel support is MIT license, so is compatible with GPL.
Assume you're going to distribute a large program on an embedded device, with paper documentation along with it.
Assume a program put together with pieces from five hundred of other sources, following the promise of open source.
Assume these sources are all licenses with the GPLv2. How many pages of documentation do you need to distribute with the embedded device to comply with the license?
Assume these sources are all licensed under different variations of the MIT/BSD license. How many pages of documentation do you need to distribute with the embedded device to comply with the licenses?
What extra cost do you think this adds to each device sold?
You asked me to read this after I commented about the one big loophole of the GPL: People can avoid your codebase, in which case there is zero chance of contributions back.
Your experience with somebody using your BSD licensed code is that they ignored your license, and when you pointed it out to them they did the minimum required by the license and didn't contribute back.
This happens. When people ignore your license, it doesn't really matter that much what license you have - that only matters if you have enough clout to force it (and to find people that break it).
I don't know what kind of application you had - was it another version of your project WebDiplomacy or some other kind of game? Because if it was, I think you're quite right in assertion that the BSD license is not a good fit. I think it would probably be a good fit for a game engine - but not for a game itself. I'm trying to put into words why it feels that way - but it's hard. The best I'm able to do is that games are unlikely to go in quite different directions based on their utility while still sharing code - and that's where you get proper sharing and feedback from semi-competing project, from different utility (and also to some degree from community feedback and goodwill, but that requires a strong community.)
"Fair" vary from person to person. The question I'm most interested in is "Is it efficient for your goals?"
There is one big loophole in all of these licenses, one the kill all of the code contribution: People can choose to use a different codebase to avoid the license. If they use your codebase and make changes to it, there is a relatively large chance that they contribute back, because most changes are not critical to their business and it gets better community relations. If they use somebody else's codebase (e.g, Microsoft's), there is no chance whatsoever they'll contribute back to you.
Could be treating it more as a job and less as a hobby. I personally suspect that the difference is inherent in the kind of personality men and women have, but I'd be very happy to be proved wrong:)
red taking the job but refrained to do it because you thought it might hurt your chances of getting other jobs. That is a very questionable moral and hypocritical. Please choose what you want to do with your life based on your own moral judgement.
My moral code is consequential ethics, you insensitive clod!
On the contrary, if you were THAT concerned that someone was being a nuisance, you wouldn't want them having access to your wall posts and all of your information. So removing someone from your friends list would rank higher on my priority list than filing the restraining order. On the other hand, maybe this person wasn't very technical and didn't realize they could delete someone.
You assume that everybody is a heavy Facebook user. I'm on several different social networks (not including Facebook), and there's sometimes been years between when I logged into them - and it wouldn't surprise me if I don't remember all of them. If some friend or ex of mine went bonkers, I'd be unlikely to have as my first priority to log into sites I hadn't been on for a year and update them - and the poke could come the first time I logged into something.
In my very humble opinion, tools such as Emacs and vi are precursors to larger development environments, such as Eclipse or Delphi.
I see where you're coming from. I think they might be precursors to something else that's coming later - something that integrate the benefits of each. As it is, I run Eclipse and vim side by side. I find that there's some things that are faster to do in Eclipse and some things that are faster to do in vim + shell w/pipes and support tools, so I take the benefits of each. When I browsing the codebase or use refactoring tools or write to an unfamiliar API where I need to look up a lot, I usually find that I'm faster in Eclipse. When I'm doing more text-editor style stuff (just writing code) or need to search over the entire codebase in more free form, I am more productive in vim + shell w/pipes and support tools.
In your case, and assuming my argument is true, we would all be going back to flipping switches and pressing buttons, since that's the only true way of understanding the code.
If you don't accept my argument, then why are syntax highlighting,:make macros and identifier matching part of every vi install nowadays? And don't even get me started about emacs, which design purposes was to help programmers write better code. So, if you don't accept my premise, where do you draw the line?
For me, this development can't go fast enough. I'm looking forward to languages that integrate completely with an IDE, and leave simple character representation (ASCII e.a.) behind.
Smalltalk has done this for long time - at least since 1976. The language itself is from 1971, but as I understand it the first versions didn't have that kind of virtual machine. Self is another programming language strongly inspired by Smalltalk. These both use quite simple and regular syntaxes to get flexibility.
For a very different tack on the issue, there's the Fortress language that operates on alternative representations, to avoid limiting to ASCII. It features a very rich syntax and alternate display methods, looking closer to traditional mathematics.
LabVIEW is a visual programming language in widespread use; it abandons any pretense at being able to represent in a traditional text-oriented manner.
I've never worked with a language that's not primarily text based, so I can't say anything personal about how it feels. I know there are lots of people that loves working with Smalltalk, and feel that the rest of us are stuck with stupid, non-integrated technology. I'd be worried about losing the good tools I have for working with text - there's a lot of things I can do very efficiently with the toolset I have, and anything that was to replace it would have to be good at those things. For the first 10 years or so I programmed, I'd switch around between different editors whenever there was some little incentive to - but with first emacs and now vim combined with the Unix command line, I find there is so much "depth" to my editing and text processing that any simple editor (like Eclipse's) will lose out in a majority of cases. If something was to go purely IDE based, it would really have to provide a lot of other benefits to compete with the benefits I presently get from it being text.
Slashdot Mirror
I really, really wish "Kids don't need cell phones" was true. And it may be that it is some places. Unfortunately, it also seems that it is a real need in some places: Lacking a cell phone will totally cut the kid off from their social circle, because very large parts of communication goes by SMS.
It's the same with net access; I personally believe that kids would mature better if they were all without cell phones and unmonitored net access until they're well into their teens. Alas, when almost all kids get cellphones and net access, denying to just one kid makes that kid an outcast :-(
Eivind.
``To say that one method of error handling is superior or correct or even required over the other is a little naive.''
I disagree. Forget to check a return code and nobody might ever find out, except that some people will end up with corrupted data. Forget to check an exception and you will (in most implementations, at least) get an error message telling you what went wrong and where in the program.
I think both paradigms has their strenghts and weaknesses.
I prefer exceptions for "semi-dirty" code, where I'll try to do error handling but won't really, really verify for it, because exceptions take most of the hassle out of this and means that one error in coding won't leave the user with corrupted data but will create a stacktrace that is possible to debug. This fits for most business code.
I prefer returned error codes for code where I really want to make it solid (e.g, the operating system code I've worked on in FreeBSD), because I can verify that the handling is correct much more easily. The handling is explicit, in the way, and more of a hassle to write in the first place - but it is also easier to verify.
I suspect that there is some paradigm out there that has the ability to work like both of these (possibly some kind of wrapped return types a la Haskell's Maybe / Just types with possible exception information included), but I don't yet know this paradigm.
Eivind.
its always a choice between the guy who wants change to go a little faster and the guy who wants change to go a little slower
any other candidates, who represent more fringe positions, are not viable candidates
if no political parties existed (which is impossible: its politics, people associate) or if there were 3, or 4 or 5 major parties (which would naturally devolve to 2 truly powerful parties anyway, along the main ideological axis), there would still only be 2 valid candidates along the only ideological axis that really matters
if there were 3, and 2 had similar views, they would simply cannibalize each others support and the other guy would win, regardless of your voting method, political parties, etc
your views are just sort of a wallowing in pessimism and helplessness
Your hypothesis about politics is interesting - but unfortunately it doesn't seem to match reality. If you look at different countries with different voting systems (e.g, Norway, where I grew up), you will find that there are several parties with a different distribution of power, that there are regular cases of parties growing and shrinking, and that there are parties (including large parties) that want radical change in several directions.
Eivind.
religion answers why
How does religion answer the "why"?
science can never answer why as a simple consequence of what science is
Science can answer "why" a ball falls to the ground when I throw it (and the how), though I suspect you were trying to make another point :-)
Which "why" questions, which are sensible, are you concerned with?
This just shows how you've misunderstood what a why question is. "Why?" the ball fell to the ground is not "Gravity", but "Because you threw it", which leads to "Why did you throw it?", which science cannot really answer.
Please tell that to the authors of my books on motivation - if you can convince them, I'll probably get my money back. The argument that convince them that all they wrote was nonsense will also be interesting to hear.
Your argument that God could be intervening at a miniscule level is correct; the God hypothesis is not falsifiable. The closest is that we could show the kind of psychological mechanisms that lead to believing in God, could show their evolutionary cause, and can show that there are thousands of Gods, and those of us that are atheists just disbelieve in say 2000 gods while the people that believe in "God" disbelieve 1999 gods.
Eivind.
There's a committed portion of the US population who don't need to "head..towards understanding the origins of life" because they are absolutely certain that they know exactly how life came about because a guy who though of the cell as a simple blob wrote a book that tells them what he thought happened after you have the first life. They're not going to take kindly to anything that could challenge their certainty.
There. Fixed that for you ;)
So, you replaced one factual error (the bible wasn't all written on scrolls) with two much larger ones: That people that believe in evolution believe it due Darwin's book (scientists believe in evolution because there are mountains of evidence and thousands of ways it is being confirmed every day), and that people believe in abiogenesis because of this. Many of us (most of us?) believe in abiogenesis because it is the only actual explanation we know of - saying "God did it" doesn't explain anything. (To make that more impactful, you might want to think of it in Robin Ince's words - "magic man dunnit".)
Mods can have my karma if they want it, its still a purely religious assertion to say that life spontaneously arises. It's unobserved and there's good reason to believe its impossible (e.g. the chirality problem).
So, can you explain why you think chirality rules out e.g. Graham Cairns-Smith's clay hypothesis?
We have a word for that where I come from, we call it unscientific.
We have a word for positing that we need to add "magic man dunnit" to our explanations: It's called unscientific.
Eivind.
Another factor to include: Much of the size increase in muscles are actually not muscle fibers but blood vessels.
As others have told you, finnbiff is reindeer cut into small pieces. It's just pure, lean meat, often served with a sauce of sour cream, onion, mushrooms spiced with juniper berries and black pepper, usually with lingonberry (AKA cowberry, or in norwegian "tyttebær") jam and boiled potatoes on the side.
Eivind.
Cold weather, hot women, health care, and common sense. If their food is any good, maybe I'll move also
Whether the food is good depends on where you are. There's a quite good selection in the cities in the southern part of the country (most of the ones you'll hear about), both in terms of quality and availability in shops and restaurants (ethnic or french inspired, for the most part). There's more remote parts that have a horrid selection.
Norway does not really have that much of a classic food culture; we used to be poor. The present day food culture is to a large degree imported; lots of Italian and a bit of indian/mexican/etc. Going back a while, it was more germanic, so you'll find germanic inspired dishes as the more "old school" dishes. E.g, first fry and then cook meat, and serve with root vegetables and gravy.
Eivind.
A lot of what we have seen so far on this is second hand, conjecture, etc. The "leaked document" in this case doesn't seem to exist -- it looks like Michael Geist's blog entry is what is being referenced. I think it is reasonable to suppose that the blog entry may be accurate, but we don't really know that it is.
So what do we know? What conclusions can we draw from the information we have?
1. It is called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The word "counterfeiting" in there seems like an important data point.
2. It has been quashed by citing national security. National security has certainly become an extraordinarily loose standard, but it still means something.
3. Lots of copyright bigwigs have signed the NDA.
4. Three Google representatives have signed the NDA. (not sure what that contributes to this post, but I think it is worth noting)
Relevant links from the Internet (from a Google search for "google acta"):
Result #2: http://communities.canada.com/ottawacitizen/blogs/bitsandbytes/archive/2008/09/24/google-takes-up-the-fight-against-acta.aspx
Result #12: http://guardianhost.com/realweeklynews/uploads/Google_ACTA_Comments2008.pdf
Disclaimer: I work for Google, but any opinion is my own. I also don't have any internal information on this topic.
Eivind.
Wow, you're a little nuts aren't you. I've said not what is, but what I'd want to be. I don't want my friends to take my songs and mix them. I'm fully aware that it's legal today. I don't want it to be.
It's not, assuming a simple constraint: You're not allowed to publish them. The moment you publish things you're putting them into the brains of people, making part of their value that they're part of the culture and people know them - which means that naturally, your rights change, as other people are providing part of the value. You're allowed to keep from this situation - then you won't get the benefits of it, of course, but you also won't get the drawbacks (e.g, people are allowed to remix.)
Eivind.
People generally don't remember things from before they are three years old, so those that get to vote this year don't remember a time without the web.
(Personally, I'm getting to be an old fart - I was on the net before Mosaic. But there was still a million people on net before me.)
Eivind.
I read Robert Jordan's stuff only after Brandon Sanderson was chosen to finish the series. Endless series tend to be dull as time passes - but Sanderson's recommendation was enough to make me read this one. I'm looking forward to Sanderson's finish - I find that his books are generally better than Jordan's, though Jordan is also fairly good. It might come come from Sanderson having more experience - he's written a whole lot of books, just not published so many of them.
>not the invasion of their privacy!
Yes, lets give up on airport security. That will end well.
What in particular makes you think that these things increase security? The penetration testing reports I've seen (18 out of 20 guns pass through) doesn't really seem to indicate much help. Security theater.
Barter is a mild form of capitalism where you hope you get a bit more than you bargain for.
The way I understand what you write here, you think that one person will lose and one person will win in barter. It's better than that: Both people can win. The theory behind this is called "comparative advantage"; if you don't know it and are generally curious, I think you'll be happy if you look it up :) I know I found it extremely intriguing the first time I learned about it.
Eivind.
It brings up a point that should have been obvious, but that I at least have not thought about.
Your statement that every fossil is from an evolutionary dead end is wrong however - as there are plenty of 'missing-link' fossils that are found that have a (very likely) lineage (as a species rather than individuals) to current species.
Excellent. That is exactly what I'm looking for. Is there a link (URL, not "missing":-)
I see you've been provided one by another poster.
However, I'd like to point out that fossils is just some extra evidence. It's not necessary to show evolution.
To use an analogy, let's compare the evidence to a murder trial: You find the murderer's semen in the victim's vagina, his fingerprints on the icepick left in her body, and her blood under his fingernails and on his clothes.
Focusing on lack of transitional forms in the fossils is like focusing on the fact that the eye witness only saw him going *out* of the room, and it was several minutes after the screams stopped, and there is no eye witness for the actual murder.
Fossils can help us get extra evidence for how evolution happened - that evolution happened is established by how presently living plants and animals are related and develop.
Eivind.
My GP nags me to have an anti-flu vaccination every October. For quite a few years I did accept and I would say the treatment actually was effective in the sense of I did have lower incidence of cold/flu than previously when I didn't get the innoculation.
However, over the past few years I refused to take it. Reasons: worry about dependency (am I heading towards being unable to live without annual shots) and uneasiness about what the hell is actually in this stuff. No matter how nicely you ask they will not tell you what -exactly- they are proposing to stick into your body. If you want me to stop being an anti-vaxxer then maybe that's possible but "just trust us we are medical professionals" is not going to do it for me.
It's weakened influenza bacteria (usually weakened to the point of "dead") and solvent (water + passive ingredients to make it less annoying to your body) plus possibly preservatives.
Now, having taken the step of "being an anti-vaxxer", I assume you've taken the time to carefully learn about the functioning of the immune system and the body, so that you can make a reasonable evaluation based on the above. If you're going to say things about "aluminium" or "thimerosal" I assume you've at least looked cursorily at the scientific literature on this - looking at least a couple of review papers (that's summary papers that's written in each area) that isn't particularly selected to support your opinion, or read a textbook in the area, or something like that.
I also assume that you look carefully at the label of the things you eat, and make sure that you understand at least how the major ingredients influence you - what minerals do you need to have a functioning immune system, what ratio of macro-nutrients influence you how, etc.
I'm all in favor of people building their own, reasoned opinions. It's a good thing. It's just that building a reasoned opinion is a quite expensive proposition. For instance, I have a relatively reasoned opinion about evolution. It's probably cost me somewhere in the 100-200 hours range of concentrated time. I've read about 3500-4000 pages of material directly covering it, including criticism, written simulators for genetic algorithms, taken high school biology, and tried to apply evolutionary understanding to things I've encountered for a couple of decades.
I haven't got a good, reasoned opinion about flu vaccination. To have a reasoned opinion, I'd have to know most of the following:
In practice, very few people have this kind of knowledge. Because it is so expensive to get it, the best we can do is rely on experts. It sucks, but the opinion of the expert is likely to be much better considered than the opinion of a random person. Nobody has the time to have reasoned opinions in all areas - the best we can hope for is to learn enough to have a reasonable chance of selecting good experts to trust. Even researchers in the particular area very often have to trust other experts - there is never time to verify all the research.
Eivind.
That's not quite correct. There are two parts to GCD: libdispatch and the kernel support. The kernel support is MIT license, so is compatible with GPL.
Assume you're going to distribute a large program on an embedded device, with paper documentation along with it.
Assume a program put together with pieces from five hundred of other sources, following the promise of open source.
Assume these sources are all licenses with the GPLv2. How many pages of documentation do you need to distribute with the embedded device to comply with the license?
Assume these sources are all licensed under different variations of the MIT/BSD license. How many pages of documentation do you need to distribute with the embedded device to comply with the licenses?
What extra cost do you think this adds to each device sold?
Eivind.
You asked me to read this after I commented about the one big loophole of the GPL: People can avoid your codebase, in which case there is zero chance of contributions back.
Your experience with somebody using your BSD licensed code is that they ignored your license, and when you pointed it out to them they did the minimum required by the license and didn't contribute back.
This happens. When people ignore your license, it doesn't really matter that much what license you have - that only matters if you have enough clout to force it (and to find people that break it).
I don't know what kind of application you had - was it another version of your project WebDiplomacy or some other kind of game? Because if it was, I think you're quite right in assertion that the BSD license is not a good fit. I think it would probably be a good fit for a game engine - but not for a game itself. I'm trying to put into words why it feels that way - but it's hard. The best I'm able to do is that games are unlikely to go in quite different directions based on their utility while still sharing code - and that's where you get proper sharing and feedback from semi-competing project, from different utility (and also to some degree from community feedback and goodwill, but that requires a strong community.)
Eivind.
"Fair" vary from person to person. The question I'm most interested in is "Is it efficient for your goals?"
There is one big loophole in all of these licenses, one the kill all of the code contribution: People can choose to use a different codebase to avoid the license. If they use your codebase and make changes to it, there is a relatively large chance that they contribute back, because most changes are not critical to their business and it gets better community relations. If they use somebody else's codebase (e.g, Microsoft's), there is no chance whatsoever they'll contribute back to you.
Eivind.
I see you're modded Funny - but in a way I feel "Insightful" or at least "Interesting" would be better. Nice simile.
Eivind.
Could be treating it more as a job and less as a hobby. I personally suspect that the difference is inherent in the kind of personality men and women have, but I'd be very happy to be proved wrong :)
red taking the job but refrained to do it because you thought it might hurt your chances of getting other jobs. That is a very questionable moral and hypocritical. Please choose what you want to do with your life based on your own moral judgement.
My moral code is consequential ethics, you insensitive clod!
Eivind.
On the contrary, if you were THAT concerned that someone was being a nuisance, you wouldn't want them having access to your wall posts and all of your information. So removing someone from your friends list would rank higher on my priority list than filing the restraining order. On the other hand, maybe this person wasn't very technical and didn't realize they could delete someone.
You assume that everybody is a heavy Facebook user. I'm on several different social networks (not including Facebook), and there's sometimes been years between when I logged into them - and it wouldn't surprise me if I don't remember all of them. If some friend or ex of mine went bonkers, I'd be unlikely to have as my first priority to log into sites I hadn't been on for a year and update them - and the poke could come the first time I logged into something.
Eivind.
In my very humble opinion, tools such as Emacs and vi are precursors to larger development environments, such as Eclipse or Delphi.
I see where you're coming from. I think they might be precursors to something else that's coming later - something that integrate the benefits of each. As it is, I run Eclipse and vim side by side. I find that there's some things that are faster to do in Eclipse and some things that are faster to do in vim + shell w/pipes and support tools, so I take the benefits of each. When I browsing the codebase or use refactoring tools or write to an unfamiliar API where I need to look up a lot, I usually find that I'm faster in Eclipse. When I'm doing more text-editor style stuff (just writing code) or need to search over the entire codebase in more free form, I am more productive in vim + shell w/pipes and support tools.
In your case, and assuming my argument is true, we would all be going back to flipping switches and pressing buttons, since that's the only true way of understanding the code.
If you don't accept my argument, then why are syntax highlighting, :make macros and identifier matching part of every vi install nowadays? And don't even get me started about emacs, which design purposes was to help programmers write better code. So, if you don't accept my premise, where do you draw the line?
For me, this development can't go fast enough. I'm looking forward to languages that integrate completely with an IDE, and leave simple character representation (ASCII e.a.) behind.
Smalltalk has done this for long time - at least since 1976. The language itself is from 1971, but as I understand it the first versions didn't have that kind of virtual machine. Self is another programming language strongly inspired by Smalltalk. These both use quite simple and regular syntaxes to get flexibility.
For a very different tack on the issue, there's the Fortress language that operates on alternative representations, to avoid limiting to ASCII. It features a very rich syntax and alternate display methods, looking closer to traditional mathematics.
LabVIEW is a visual programming language in widespread use; it abandons any pretense at being able to represent in a traditional text-oriented manner.
I've never worked with a language that's not primarily text based, so I can't say anything personal about how it feels. I know there are lots of people that loves working with Smalltalk, and feel that the rest of us are stuck with stupid, non-integrated technology. I'd be worried about losing the good tools I have for working with text - there's a lot of things I can do very efficiently with the toolset I have, and anything that was to replace it would have to be good at those things. For the first 10 years or so I programmed, I'd switch around between different editors whenever there was some little incentive to - but with first emacs and now vim combined with the Unix command line, I find there is so much "depth" to my editing and text processing that any simple editor (like Eclipse's) will lose out in a majority of cases. If something was to go purely IDE based, it would really have to provide a lot of other benefits to compete with the benefits I presently get from it being text.
Eivind.