Therefore, every kid at the age of 2 should be able to learn programming really easy:-)
not really, its easy for them to learn symbols and possibly syntax, however, the logic would completely escape them, they wouldnt be able to write anything worth a damn. Grab a book/paper on childrens thinking developmental stages, very interesting.
...CDN$1.19, isnt that like, $0.06USD? but yeah, from being in the business world as long as i have, they'll gouge you if they think they can remotely get away with it.
not that it matters much to those who had heard them , but i can say in all honesty (in my defense) these were original at the time, not by myself, by a coworker c.1995-6...
Wow, how completely close-minded and uncaring of you. People like you should work in the camps in Auschitz and help in the cause to eliminate from the world those that you deem unfit to live/love/reproduce in it.
...you stupid piece of shit...open your eyes and realize there are other people in the world besides you and your apparent self-hate. It's people like you that cause the sadness and hate and ugliness, not those that may have an affliction that they're dealing with, they're just looking for ways to be happy. All you can do is make life a little dark, hateful, and more negative.
I applaud all those in this post who have come forward with personal stories and have supported the guy in the original post that just wanted a little help from a group of peers that he respects. It's sad to see evidence of exactly the kind of thing I was afraid that I would ready when I clicked "Read more..."
...and Benzapp, no, i have no mental illness or record of it in my family, but I guess you probably wont care. Go to hell, there's plenty of negativity down there for you.
--J
PS: and no, i wouldnt stop with this post, i'd love to whip your stupid ass any day of the week...show you what pain is. Mod this down if you want, I really dont care, this is for two people only.
Basically, understand that your entire consciousness is simply the result of electrochemical reactions of neurotransmitters. These neurotransmitters get jacked up and youre going to have a skewed view of reality, or lost touch with it all together. You can only understand the world/reality through what your 5 senses tell you about what i happening, so what happens when your senses begin to lie to you? On top of that, reasoning and rational thought becomes very difficult, so you dont know any better. That's schizophrenia in a nutshell. (Look, Im in a nutshell! How did i get into this nutshell!)... well the positive affective schizophrenia anyhow, there are other types where it is more the reaction to external stimuli that becomes encumbered.
I have heard statistics that something outrageous like 80% of homeless people are/or could be mentally ill. As much as it is horrible to EVER take away an individual's right to freedom, there are times when that person is unable to take care of themselves, and I think it would not be a hard argument to say that homeless people are often unable to care for themselves. As far as the medication, again, there are times when it is not necessary, such as the person above a bit who said he was able to control it, and that are definitely going to be more intense cases where the individual is so out of touch with reality that something MUST be done. I remember the first part of my Abnormal Psychology class simply took time to lay down the notion that normalcy is a very relative state of being. --J
* we told one lady her computer was crashing because she was wearing yellow, and it was causing a larger than normal static buildup.
* sunspots were causing electrical issues, causing computers to crash
* and then, old faithful, El Nino (affecting the magnetosphere or something, take your pick).
...and then there was the one guy who was complaining his computer was going to slow. This was back in the days of the digital clock speed on the front of the case, so we just fixed the display to read 300 instead of 166, and he thought we were the best thing since sliced bread.
The problem is that SPAM makes people money to the tune of BILLIONS OF DOLLARS PER YEAR. There is no way you will ever turn the tide of that financial force with an RBL or a Challenge-Response solution. It will take more than that.
Please allow me to preface my response by saying that I am not an Internet-love-in-Hippy.
That being said, I think you miss the critical difference between the Internet and the real world. People that make products for use in the real world rely on a certain number of people that want/need their product to keep themselves financially viable. Over the years, there have been many, MANY examples of consumer groups attempting boycotts of large companies because of the company's actions. There is almost always a much larger group of consumers that dont CARE and continue to buy the product out of either apathy, laziness, or they simply just dont care enough about the issue to do without the product in question.
On the Internet, however, you find that people are making money off of a product that noone needs or wants! Noone WANTS spam, there may be a tiny population that will buy the spammed product, but that audience is so tiny they're inconsequential to the argument against spam. Spamming, compared to running a shop, or even doing a mass advertising/marketing campaign is EXTREMELY cheap, so a spammer can create a HUGE marketing campaign for almost nothing. So when this spammer gets a tiny response, ANY response is profitable, as opposed to RL advertising/marketing that must hit a certain level of response to be economically practical and worth continuing.
That is the difference, and THAT is why a challenge-response solution can work on the Internet as opposed to RL. If you think who is aware of the spam problem, its the computer geeks, who are, in turn, the admin's of the Internet as we know it. Its a completely antithetical situation that RL is. Those that have the power to stop the madness actually HAVE the desire. If the huge chunk of sysadmins across the Internet began blocking open relays and IP ranges that are a constant cause of pain and suffering for the rest of the Internet, these spammers will get the same feeling that failed junk mail campaigners get, they'll find it cost prohibitive to continue, and eventually quit, or worse, find another way to bug the living FSCK out of us.
The reason people are blocking all mail from Asia is that Asian ISPs either dont know or dont care that they are relaying spam (I'm not even referring to the open, unsecured relays which are abused for sending spam, those should be blocked no matter where they originate). They are taking the customers' moneys regardless of intent or use. Plus, as has been mentioned in other posts, if the ISP admin's cant read English proficiently enough, they how would they even know what is being sent?
...and please, dont let it go, let us know how banning open relays is in any way/shape/form bad???
Ok, maybe I'm just totally missing something here, but I have an interest in this sort of stuff, and something strikes me as very odd about the statement in the article.
The Hubble telescope is able to look at events that took place 13.3 billion light-years ago. But the James E. Webb space telescope, currently under construction, and scheduled to be launched in 2011, will be able to see even further and catch phenomena which happened 13.5 billion light-years ago. The astronomers think the Webb telescope might even be able to see up to 13.7 billion light-years ago, when our universe was just 200 or 300 million years old.
OOOooooK. Well, if we're seeing the light from 13.7 billion years ago, and we're expecting that to be when our universe was 300 million years old, does that mean that our universe would be at LEAST 27.4 billion years old? 13.7 billion + 0.3 billion doesnt equal 27.4 billion, or am I missing something?
I know there was a period of hyper-expansion following the Big Bang, but during this hyper-expansion, were the laws of physics GROSSLY broken so that particles with mass (anything besides photons) travelled at faster-than-light speed?? Someone explain this to me!
1. Not really, unless the objects themselves were able to combine, the gravitational pull of each one would be separate force. However, these forces could work in aggregate to a certain extent. Think of gravity acting like the curve of a trampoline with a bowling ball in the center. If both bowling balls sat in the middle right next to one another, yes, the trampoline would sag that much more, however, if the two balls were rotating each other, the sag of the trampoline would be separate for each one. There would a bit of an increase, but it all depends on how close the massive bodies were to each other, whether that force would be vastly different.
2. Could the non-mass of individual photons actually have mass I'm really sorry, and not intending to be rude, but this makes no sense. A photon has no mass, we are pretty sure of that because of that simple fact that anything with any mass at all that travels at the speed of light would acheive an infinite mass. Photons can only travel at the speed of light because they have no mass.
I actually haven't played Everquest, but I am an avid fan of Star Wars Galaxies, which is the same genre of game. Basically, it's what it sounds like, A Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. You start out character with no skills, no abilities, and no possessions. As you play, you rack up experience points by doing various things in the game. Weapons, armor, and clothing are all made by armorsmith or weaponsmith players in the game. The only way to amass wealth is to mine, hunt, run bounties, etc. It's very similar to the way real life works. You must be somewhat self-sufficient to survive, which is why Player Associations are so popular. In PA's/Guilds/Clans, players essentially function as a small tribe, sharing resources for the greater good of the group. You should read up on it, there have been some interesting studies done on the sub-cultures of the MMORPG games, as well as numerous economic studies. I know a recent economic study in Star Wars Galaxies showed that, just as in a real life capitalistic economy, the large majority of the currency is held by a very small group of individuals. Additionally, the economy has consistently seen more money travelling out of circulation (via taxes, repair fees, bank-to-bank xfer fees, etc) that there is money coming in. Fascinating stuff.
...completely random how? Random as in that their behavior is totally, completely arbitrary in all ways? Or random as in the way a snowflake forms, ie, we know how the crystallization of the ice takes place, but each snowflake will develop based on a certain set of rules and principles, even if it seems random on the first look. This may be our "first look" at the quantum world, and what may seem completely random to us now (we have already found out rules for the way they behave) will be fully explained in some day to come. This is a VERY simple analogy, so just bear with me. It's along the lines of Schrodingers cat, but imagine a black box with a computer inside that is spitting out numbers that seem to be completely random. After further examination, the numbers are all prime, but seem to be in no order. The Albert Einstein of the quantum physics world comes along someday and all of the sudden is able to reverse engineer the computational patterns that are happening inside, thereby showing the numbers arent random at all. The whole parallel universe concept is like someone deciding that there is a sentient race of tiny green men inside the black box that are very intelligent and are randomly sending us prime numbers out of the box, which are messages on how to solve the worlds problems. Einstein's theory of relativity abided by Occam's razor in that it was very simple in its explanation of the speed of light constancy, yet it was a totally NEW way to perceive the whole problem. Like I said before, we need someone to come along that can look at the randomness of the quantum world from an original fresh perspective, and all the physicists of the world will let out a huge, "oooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooh, *forehead slap*" in unison.
Praise Jesus Praise Jesus, a light in a sea of speculative and ignorant darkness!
Bravo, well put. Our *ideas* dont matter, the human brain is good at one thing, attempting to make sense of the information that it is fed by our senses. We feel an inherent compelling feeling to try to explain things away to such a tremendous extent that we will accept a solution that creates a magnitude more problems than it solves if it only fits the square peg into the round hole.
Like I said in an earlier post, what we're going to need is another genius to put the puzzle together with the pieces we already have, rather than try to fabricate pieces ourselves, just as Einstein did when he eradicated the need for a cosmological ether by creating warped space-time... BRILLIANT!
Now take chaos theory... "that a butterfly's flight and subsequent disturbance of air caused a hurricane in the Atlantic." Miniscule & nearly impossible to measure changes can affect the long term outcomes of events.
I understand what you mean, but it still seems to be apples and oranges. Considering that we really dont understand how/why the particles exhibit signs of wave interference, the notion of parallel universes strikes me as the same kind of explanation that Michelson & Morley's ether turned out to be. It is an ad hoc explanation for something we dont understand. We're creating an extremely profound and far-reaching theory to cover for something we dont understand. I predict we will not be able to understand what exactly is happening until the next "Einstein" appears with a theory that works with something in the universe we can know and learn to measure, as Big Al did when he came up with the notion of relativism and warped space-time. Stephen Hawking discussed a new type of scientific determinism in his book A Brief History of Time which said that if we could map and vector every particle in the universe and plug it into a simulation on the mother of all computers, we could essentially use the particle interactions as a way to fast forward or rewind through time since the big bang until the end of the universe, which would be quite informative. This, of course is impossible, but it would seem to me that Dr. Steve is saying that, even though these particles show some very odd and unusual behavior (when compared with classical physics), they still are very consistent in how they behave and how they interact. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but if our universe was constantly interacting with other universives parallel to our own, particles would behave in a much more random way... as I type this, I feel as if I'm missing something, but I cant put my finger on it. I'm sure someone in the/. community with be kind enough to enlighten me.
IANAQP either, but to the best of my understanding, the notion of parallel universes is actually a fairly logical result of empirical quantum physics experiments.
Experiments have shown that subatomic particles act very funny when you try to describe or figure them out. Basically, these particles act like particles half the time, and like waves the other half of the time, but never both at the same time. Certain well known experiments (like the banding described in the article, which are due to wave interference of light particles) have shown that particles can somehow seem to act is if they are in multiple places at once, yet they cannot be observed in multiple places at once. This has led a lot of physicists to surmise that there are 'multiple parallel universes' where that exist simultaneously. The rationale is that since the inherent particles that make up our universe are in multiple states at the same time, these inherently MPD (multiple personality disorder) particles make up a sort of multi-verse that exists at the same time in different states, thereby creating different realities/parallel universes.
...and I will reiterate, IANAQP, but it seems to me that there is a lot of going from A, B, C to X, Y, Z with nothing in the middle with that notion. We cant observe the quantum weirdness at our human-sized perceivable universe, and to assume that this quantum weirdness can cause other realities where GWBush is in Mensa seems to be a far step of logic.
If there are any quantum experts out there, and see a problem with my reasoning, or just want to educate the ignorant masses (please leave out the math, its just boring), I urge you to help.
1. The technology of the Church states that the processes known as the OT levels must be done in order, must not be done out of sequence, and a person MUST be qualified to use them in order to get the desired results.
This sounds a LOT like a process we sane folks like to call brainwashing in order to have an individual believe and trust everything you tell them without doubt.
2. it is currently +2 Funny... thats just awesome, gotta love/.
Look up the definition of a cult in a social psychology book sometime, it sounds a lot like what you are saying.
FYI, it wasn't Christopher Walken, it was Christopher Lambert of Highlander fame. Walken is the guy who shoves watches up his ass and talks with incessant unnecessary (however dramatic) pauses... Lambert is the guy with the weird accent that cant seem to talk above a husky whisper. --J
You seem to misunderstand...time DOES slow down the faster that you're traveling. Einstein's famous twins paradox, for example. Imagine twins born at the same time, one is put on the on a spacecraft travelling through space at near-light speed (since C is unachieveable), and the other child grows up on earth normally. When the earth-twin is 30 years old, his space-twin returns, and is only 3 days old.
Your modified analogy misses the point. You countered your own argument by saying that the user's judgement is the problem. When you're drunk,your judgement is impaired. I was referring to ignorance, not a judgement call. EVERYONE knows they shouldn't drive after drinking any alcohol, however, people justify it and do it anyhow.
The whole point is that Microsoft is making a product that they marketing to people as "EASY TO USE,"...to use your analogy, it would be like auto manufacturers marketing a car specifically as "EASIER TO DRIVE WHEN INTOXICATED!!".
I am in NO way saying that people are not responsible for their own actions, but seriously, (to make a Slashdot appropriate statement) there was a reason that the Federation has a Prime Directive for all of its ships and officers on Star Trek. The same reason you don't give guns to children because they simply do not understand the possible ramifications of misuse. If you have a child that needs some sort of self-proctection, you give them mace or a whistle or self-defense classes, you dont hand them a damned.357 and tell them simply to point and pull the trigger.
In the same way, MS has given our grandparents/parents/kids an email application that by default runs whatever scripts or executables may be in an email message.
Sorry, but I must disagree here. Althought it probably wasnt a coding error within the product, it was a error in design. They work so hard to throw as many bells and whistles into the application that they overlook the idea that the bells and whistles are the media that malicious individuals will use to cause havoc. If Microsoft wasn't trying to make Outlook do so much needless crap (email scripting), then we wouldnt have these problems. Its along the same lines as giving a car a "feature" that turns out to be deadly in a collision.
I do hold Microsoft accountable because they tout their own products for being so "user-friendly" while they add no security into the products...if you're going to design an application that a child could use, for God's sakes, don't stop half-way, make sure the user is safe from the very ignorance your product feeds.
To use the car analogy again, its as if Microsoft has built super-easy to drive cars for all of our parents, grandparents, and kids, but the car explodes upon even the slightest collision.
Seriously, how can you not blame Microsoft? The "vulnerability" isnt in the code, its in the coders.
DNA is [like] spaghetti code because nature has been tinkering with the system for billions of years like a bad programmer.
I dont know that I could imagine a worse metaphor. Anyone that has ever studied the tendencies of human beings to be insanely ethnocentric and myopic should appreciate what I mean. To make an analogy that the simplistic beauty of DNA is anything like "spaghetti code" is hilarious. You're comparing a bad algorithm method with an incredibly complex (yet very beautiful in its simplisitic design) and far more brilliant system. Most programmers cant write code to do one simple task without having some sort of bug or malady arise, whereas DNA is able to manipulate individual molecules and chemical reactions in order to create a system magnitudes above anything the most brilliant human could think to design. Its like comparing apples to books if you ask me.
Actually, in the newest WIRED, Carmack mentions that MS has made an offer to have Id port Doom3 to XBox and he said that even he wasnt sure if they would....so the odds of it going from a "Maybe we'll port to XBox" to "XBox Eclusive" seem rather high.
Slashdot Mirror
not really, its easy for them to learn symbols and possibly syntax, however, the logic would completely escape them, they wouldnt be able to write anything worth a damn. Grab a book/paper on childrens thinking developmental stages, very interesting.
--j
--J
not that it matters much to those who had heard them , but i can say in all honesty (in my defense) these were original at the time, not by myself, by a coworker c.1995-6...
--J
...you stupid piece of shit...open your eyes and realize there are other people in the world besides you and your apparent self-hate. It's people like you that cause the sadness and hate and ugliness, not those that may have an affliction that they're dealing with, they're just looking for ways to be happy. All you can do is make life a little dark, hateful, and more negative.
I applaud all those in this post who have come forward with personal stories and have supported the guy in the original post that just wanted a little help from a group of peers that he respects. It's sad to see evidence of exactly the kind of thing I was afraid that I would ready when I clicked "Read more..."
...and Benzapp, no, i have no mental illness or record of it in my family, but I guess you probably wont care. Go to hell, there's plenty of negativity down there for you.
--J
PS: and no, i wouldnt stop with this post, i'd love to whip your stupid ass any day of the week...show you what pain is. Mod this down if you want, I really dont care, this is for two people only.
--J
I have heard statistics that something outrageous like 80% of homeless people are/or could be mentally ill. As much as it is horrible to EVER take away an individual's right to freedom, there are times when that person is unable to take care of themselves, and I think it would not be a hard argument to say that homeless people are often unable to care for themselves. As far as the medication, again, there are times when it is not necessary, such as the person above a bit who said he was able to control it, and that are definitely going to be more intense cases where the individual is so out of touch with reality that something MUST be done. I remember the first part of my Abnormal Psychology class simply took time to lay down the notion that normalcy is a very relative state of being. --J
* we told one lady her computer was crashing because she was wearing yellow, and it was causing a larger than normal static buildup.
* sunspots were causing electrical issues, causing computers to crash
* and then, old faithful, El Nino (affecting the magnetosphere or something, take your pick).
...and then there was the one guy who was complaining his computer was going to slow. This was back in the days of the digital clock speed on the front of the case, so we just fixed the display to read 300 instead of 166, and he thought we were the best thing since sliced bread.
god, i miss tech support. --J
Please allow me to preface my response by saying that I am not an Internet-love-in-Hippy.
That being said, I think you miss the critical difference between the Internet and the real world. People that make products for use in the real world rely on a certain number of people that want/need their product to keep themselves financially viable. Over the years, there have been many, MANY examples of consumer groups attempting boycotts of large companies because of the company's actions. There is almost always a much larger group of consumers that dont CARE and continue to buy the product out of either apathy, laziness, or they simply just dont care enough about the issue to do without the product in question.
On the Internet, however, you find that people are making money off of a product that noone needs or wants! Noone WANTS spam, there may be a tiny population that will buy the spammed product, but that audience is so tiny they're inconsequential to the argument against spam. Spamming, compared to running a shop, or even doing a mass advertising/marketing campaign is EXTREMELY cheap, so a spammer can create a HUGE marketing campaign for almost nothing. So when this spammer gets a tiny response, ANY response is profitable, as opposed to RL advertising/marketing that must hit a certain level of response to be economically practical and worth continuing.
That is the difference, and THAT is why a challenge-response solution can work on the Internet as opposed to RL. If you think who is aware of the spam problem, its the computer geeks, who are, in turn, the admin's of the Internet as we know it. Its a completely antithetical situation that RL is. Those that have the power to stop the madness actually HAVE the desire. If the huge chunk of sysadmins across the Internet began blocking open relays and IP ranges that are a constant cause of pain and suffering for the rest of the Internet, these spammers will get the same feeling that failed junk mail campaigners get, they'll find it cost prohibitive to continue, and eventually quit, or worse, find another way to bug the living FSCK out of us.
--J
...and please, dont let it go, let us know how banning open relays is in any way/shape/form bad???
--J
The Hubble telescope is able to look at events that took place 13.3 billion light-years ago. But the James E. Webb space telescope, currently under construction, and scheduled to be launched in 2011, will be able to see even further and catch phenomena which happened 13.5 billion light-years ago. The astronomers think the Webb telescope might even be able to see up to 13.7 billion light-years ago, when our universe was just 200 or 300 million years old.
OOOooooK. Well, if we're seeing the light from 13.7 billion years ago, and we're expecting that to be when our universe was 300 million years old, does that mean that our universe would be at LEAST 27.4 billion years old? 13.7 billion + 0.3 billion doesnt equal 27.4 billion, or am I missing something?
I know there was a period of hyper-expansion following the Big Bang, but during this hyper-expansion, were the laws of physics GROSSLY broken so that particles with mass (anything besides photons) travelled at faster-than-light speed?? Someone explain this to me!
--Confused in Katmandu, J
1. Not really, unless the objects themselves were able to combine, the gravitational pull of each one would be separate force. However, these forces could work in aggregate to a certain extent. Think of gravity acting like the curve of a trampoline with a bowling ball in the center. If both bowling balls sat in the middle right next to one another, yes, the trampoline would sag that much more, however, if the two balls were rotating each other, the sag of the trampoline would be separate for each one. There would a bit of an increase, but it all depends on how close the massive bodies were to each other, whether that force would be vastly different.
2. Could the non-mass of individual photons actually have mass I'm really sorry, and not intending to be rude, but this makes no sense. A photon has no mass, we are pretty sure of that because of that simple fact that anything with any mass at all that travels at the speed of light would acheive an infinite mass. Photons can only travel at the speed of light because they have no mass.
-J
J
...completely random how? Random as in that their behavior is totally, completely arbitrary in all ways? Or random as in the way a snowflake forms, ie, we know how the crystallization of the ice takes place, but each snowflake will develop based on a certain set of rules and principles, even if it seems random on the first look. This may be our "first look" at the quantum world, and what may seem completely random to us now (we have already found out rules for the way they behave) will be fully explained in some day to come. This is a VERY simple analogy, so just bear with me. It's along the lines of Schrodingers cat, but imagine a black box with a computer inside that is spitting out numbers that seem to be completely random. After further examination, the numbers are all prime, but seem to be in no order. The Albert Einstein of the quantum physics world comes along someday and all of the sudden is able to reverse engineer the computational patterns that are happening inside, thereby showing the numbers arent random at all. The whole parallel universe concept is like someone deciding that there is a sentient race of tiny green men inside the black box that are very intelligent and are randomly sending us prime numbers out of the box, which are messages on how to solve the worlds problems. Einstein's theory of relativity abided by Occam's razor in that it was very simple in its explanation of the speed of light constancy, yet it was a totally NEW way to perceive the whole problem. Like I said before, we need someone to come along that can look at the randomness of the quantum world from an original fresh perspective, and all the physicists of the world will let out a huge, "oooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooh, *forehead slap*" in unison.
--J
Bravo, well put. Our *ideas* dont matter, the human brain is good at one thing, attempting to make sense of the information that it is fed by our senses. We feel an inherent compelling feeling to try to explain things away to such a tremendous extent that we will accept a solution that creates a magnitude more problems than it solves if it only fits the square peg into the round hole.
Like I said in an earlier post, what we're going to need is another genius to put the puzzle together with the pieces we already have, rather than try to fabricate pieces ourselves, just as Einstein did when he eradicated the need for a cosmological ether by creating warped space-time... BRILLIANT!
--J
I understand what you mean, but it still seems to be apples and oranges. Considering that we really dont understand how/why the particles exhibit signs of wave interference, the notion of parallel universes strikes me as the same kind of explanation that Michelson & Morley's ether turned out to be. It is an ad hoc explanation for something we dont understand. We're creating an extremely profound and far-reaching theory to cover for something we dont understand. I predict we will not be able to understand what exactly is happening until the next "Einstein" appears with a theory that works with something in the universe we can know and learn to measure, as Big Al did when he came up with the notion of relativism and warped space-time. Stephen Hawking discussed a new type of scientific determinism in his book A Brief History of Time which said that if we could map and vector every particle in the universe and plug it into a simulation on the mother of all computers, we could essentially use the particle interactions as a way to fast forward or rewind through time since the big bang until the end of the universe, which would be quite informative. This, of course is impossible, but it would seem to me that Dr. Steve is saying that, even though these particles show some very odd and unusual behavior (when compared with classical physics), they still are very consistent in how they behave and how they interact. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but if our universe was constantly interacting with other universives parallel to our own, particles would behave in a much more random way... as I type this, I feel as if I'm missing something, but I cant put my finger on it. I'm sure someone in the /. community with be kind enough to enlighten me .
--J
Experiments have shown that subatomic particles act very funny when you try to describe or figure them out. Basically, these particles act like particles half the time, and like waves the other half of the time, but never both at the same time. Certain well known experiments (like the banding described in the article, which are due to wave interference of light particles) have shown that particles can somehow seem to act is if they are in multiple places at once, yet they cannot be observed in multiple places at once. This has led a lot of physicists to surmise that there are 'multiple parallel universes' where that exist simultaneously. The rationale is that since the inherent particles that make up our universe are in multiple states at the same time, these inherently MPD (multiple personality disorder) particles make up a sort of multi-verse that exists at the same time in different states, thereby creating different realities/parallel universes.
...and I will reiterate, IANAQP, but it seems to me that there is a lot of going from A, B, C to X, Y, Z with nothing in the middle with that notion. We cant observe the quantum weirdness at our human-sized perceivable universe, and to assume that this quantum weirdness can cause other realities where GWBush is in Mensa seems to be a far step of logic.
If there are any quantum experts out there, and see a problem with my reasoning, or just want to educate the ignorant masses (please leave out the math, its just boring), I urge you to help.
--J
1. The technology of the Church states that the processes known as the OT levels must be done in order, must not be done out of sequence, and a person MUST be qualified to use them in order to get the desired results.
This sounds a LOT like a process we sane folks like to call brainwashing in order to have an individual believe and trust everything you tell them without doubt.
2. it is currently +2 Funny... thats just awesome, gotta love
Look up the definition of a cult in a social psychology book sometime, it sounds a lot like what you are saying.
d
FYI, it wasn't Christopher Walken, it was Christopher Lambert of Highlander fame. Walken is the guy who shoves watches up his ass and talks with incessant unnecessary (however dramatic) pauses... Lambert is the guy with the weird accent that cant seem to talk above a husky whisper. --J
You seem to misunderstand...time DOES slow down the faster that you're traveling. Einstein's famous twins paradox, for example. Imagine twins born at the same time, one is put on the on a spacecraft travelling through space at near-light speed (since C is unachieveable), and the other child grows up on earth normally. When the earth-twin is 30 years old, his space-twin returns, and is only 3 days old.
-J
Your modified analogy misses the point. You countered your own argument by saying that the user's judgement is the problem. When you're drunk,your judgement is impaired. I was referring to ignorance, not a judgement call. EVERYONE knows they shouldn't drive after drinking any alcohol, however, people justify it and do it anyhow.
...to use your analogy, it would be like auto manufacturers marketing a car specifically as "EASIER TO DRIVE WHEN INTOXICATED!!".
.357 and tell them simply to point and pull the trigger.
The whole point is that Microsoft is making a product that they marketing to people as "EASY TO USE,"
I am in NO way saying that people are not responsible for their own actions, but seriously, (to make a Slashdot appropriate statement) there was a reason that the Federation has a Prime Directive for all of its ships and officers on Star Trek. The same reason you don't give guns to children because they simply do not understand the possible ramifications of misuse. If you have a child that needs some sort of self-proctection, you give them mace or a whistle or self-defense classes, you dont hand them a damned
In the same way, MS has given our grandparents/parents/kids an email application that by default runs whatever scripts or executables may be in an email message.
J
Sorry, but I must disagree here. Althought it probably wasnt a coding error within the product, it was a error in design. They work so hard to throw as many bells and whistles into the application that they overlook the idea that the bells and whistles are the media that malicious individuals will use to cause havoc. If Microsoft wasn't trying to make Outlook do so much needless crap (email scripting), then we wouldnt have these problems. Its along the same lines as giving a car a "feature" that turns out to be deadly in a collision.
I do hold Microsoft accountable because they tout their own products for being so "user-friendly" while they add no security into the products...if you're going to design an application that a child could use, for God's sakes, don't stop half-way, make sure the user is safe from the very ignorance your product feeds.
To use the car analogy again, its as if Microsoft has built super-easy to drive cars for all of our parents, grandparents, and kids, but the car explodes upon even the slightest collision.
Seriously, how can you not blame Microsoft? The "vulnerability" isnt in the code, its in the coders.
J
I dont know that I could imagine a worse metaphor. Anyone that has ever studied the tendencies of human beings to be insanely ethnocentric and myopic should appreciate what I mean. To make an analogy that the simplistic beauty of DNA is anything like "spaghetti code" is hilarious. You're comparing a bad algorithm method with an incredibly complex (yet very beautiful in its simplisitic design) and far more brilliant system. Most programmers cant write code to do one simple task without having some sort of bug or malady arise, whereas DNA is able to manipulate individual molecules and chemical reactions in order to create a system magnitudes above anything the most brilliant human could think to design. Its like comparing apples to books if you ask me.
J
Actually, in the newest WIRED, Carmack mentions that MS has made an offer to have Id port Doom3 to XBox and he said that even he wasnt sure if they would....so the odds of it going from a "Maybe we'll port to XBox" to "XBox Eclusive" seem rather high.
Back in my day, we compiled all our software that we ever installed, that's the way it was, and WE LIKED IT!
These new distributions with their fancy-schmancy package management...BAH!!
Viva la Slack!!
J