What you call the Holy Spirit, I call a viable systems model. It only requires an executor branch (Systems 1-2), a managerial layer (Systems 3-4) with self-regulating oversight, and a central core (System 5) responsible to keep the organization's identity steering it to adapt to changes in the environment. A viable system may very well last for centuries or millenia if its parts are kept under control with, say, a really strict ideollogy that punish getting out of the orthodoxy.
Guess what? The Catholic church has all these, and are all human (you may even recognize System 5 as a Very Important figure).
As long as you are creating software artifacts that can execute automated behavior, you are programming. You may not be using a general purpose programming language, but it's giving instructions to a computer nevertheless.
Their two current causes (educating the House and the Senate about Internet and excluding corporations from using "people" laws) are underfunded and running out of time. Come on Slashdot, is your money where your mouth is?
You're right that he needs to hire a good marketing person, but the device does have value as it stands. I'd love to have one for personal use. It's Linux based; I don't care about the interface, that can be changed.
When people in the target audience are already considering a change in the interface, which is the single major sale point, I am reassured: this is doomed!
"The vision of Plasma Active is to create an innovative and fresh data-centric UI which is not concerned with applications but rather offers a user oriented interface with logically combined items through activities, which reflect the workflow and usage of the device by the user".
Didn't understand a word? Me neither. And this is from a commercial company trying to sell the thing. No more luck with the promotional video, which only shows some loading times for some unexplained tasks for which the benefit is not clear.
Until they hire some marketing people able to explain why consumers should buy the thing, and some UX people making the users feel at home when using it, nobody -not even geeks- will want to buy one.
"We assume full configurability of the amount of ghosts and ghost houses, speeds, and the durations of Chase, Scatter, and Frightened modes (see [1] for definitions)." That's all well and good but there is no configurability with the level designs, amount of ghosts, or ghost houses.
There was, while they designed the game.
The PacMan videogame is one instance of a problem class. Algorithmic complexity is calculated for classes of problems, since for any particular instance you can always design a trivial, constant time algorithm if at least one solution is known...
You might be surprised how little crap Dreamweaver actually inserts into the code. We're not talking about Frontpage here.
I'm glad that Dreamweaver is better in that respect, and I recognize the value of automating the creation of repetitive tags even if it only allows for a partial pipeline that must be completed by hand in text. But color me sceptical that the code thus generated will not suffer from a fixed layout that's hard to reshape into a properly resizable layout - I have yet to see it to believe it.
Now you're going to decide who can and cannot create web content? No sir, you don't get to make that decision. You can decide whether or not you want to visit his website with all its sloppy cruft-filled code, but you don't get to decide whether or not he is allowed to create such a page or which software he uses.
Well yes, of course I will decide which pages look modern to me. And I'll keep my opinion that people creating fixed layouts are a blame to the web's usability when they break my navigation habits at my preferred zoom level, window size or portable device. A page that doesn't render correctly in modern devices is not modern by definition. The sad thing is that likely they are not even aware of the pain they impose on their users.
And I'll keep thinking that someone who wants to create pixel-perfect content should be using pdf documents instead of HTML, which has always been intended to be a semantic markup to be reinterpreted by the client in alternate ways as controlled by the user, not the publisher; that's the foundation of the Web as an internet application, to allow content that can outlive the software environment in which it was created. Not recognizing the basic purpose for which the tool you use was created will make you a sloppy creator, and no amount of "I'm-entitled-to-use-the-tool-my-own-way" will turn a bad use of the technology into a good one.
No. I don't want to think of it like writing source code. I want to think of it like placing objects on a blank page. I want to be able to manipulate the elements directly, and think of shapes and locations and colors as shapes and locations and colors, not hex code.
As much as I empathize with your wants, I'm afraid the other answers in this thread are right. If you want to approach content creation as if it were page layout software, you shouldn't be creating web content. The web has always been primarily about the content logical structure. The native visual style for the web is the reflowing layout.
Now that responsive web design is gaining traction, we finally have a chance to have WYSIWYIG tools that create native web structures, but that moment simply hasn't arrived yet. Dreamweaver and the equivalent group of visual HTML generators from the late XX century create fixed content, and are not up to the task to create modern pages that can be adapted to the current explosion of diverging form factors. To apply responsive design, you must learn the basics of semantic HTML layout + CSS presentation, and there's no visual tool to create that (yet).
What I don't have (but *should*, IMHO) are tools that make this pipeline so effortless that I can use them regularly during web surfing.
I agree that it's a major problem in using computers nowadays. The first one to publish a solution to this problem will have the next Facetwitoogle. I have my own design for this solution, but have to code it in my free time and will take a while to wire all the needed background processing.
The key to get it right is having an interface simple enough that pipes can be built without thinking, as if the scrapping and piping were part of the browsing itself.
1) Build web crawler (man, nobody talks of them nowadays) 2) Crawler flags all visited sites 3) Publish crawler code so that others can also run it on their own sites
Result: the input channel gets flooded with a neverending stream of random false positives.
Flagging concentrated on a few main corporate sites won't do it since they can just remove them from the list, and then go after the first unknown remaining site. But distributed automatic notifications would make human flags dissapear inside the noise.
I can break down that 'axiom' and give you my reason for beleiving in it.
You are right, you have a logical way to contradict Descartes.
But note how you needed to introduce additional axioms in order to do it, you couldn't do it by logic alone; for that you have needed to show that a contradiction arises from Descartes axioms, and no one can be found. Descartes axioms where self-consistent and thus logical; there's nothing in logic that forces someone to accept any additional axiom.
The axiom that you added to the mix in order to refute the old philosopher is that the God idea is generated from observation. First, note that this is not enough on itself to refute the existence of God with logic; there's the possibility that someone imagined God and that God exists at the same time.
For your argument to work, it relies on your hidden assumption (a second axiom) that ideas are true when supported by observation, and should be discarded when they don't match observation. This idea comes from the natural sciences (physics, primarily). It's not a part of logic itself, so it has to be accepted as a separate belief. As LordLimecat rightly pointed out, you can't assume that everything that exists must observable and then use observation as proof that the assumption is true; that's circular reasoning. As a general rule you can't contradict an axiom on its own with logic alone, logic will work either way if you assume that it's true (admit it) or false (reject it); you must keep throwing new axioms to the mix until one of them generates a logical contradiction with all the previous ones. Every axiom added this way is a new "act of faith", not a logical deduction.
Religious people usually tend to discard the naturalistic assumption and say that there are things that exist and can't be proven by observation; it's a logical way to articulate their belief in God. The other way is thinking that God's existence can be proven by observation, and then think that the observed good things (feelings like men's goodwill or happiness, or wonders like nature's beauty) are evidence of his existence; that's also a logical and consistent belief system if handled with care.
Not that I believe all this, I'm working as a "reverse devil's advocate" here. But I wanted to show you how logic works outside of your own moral frame of reference, if you're willing to suspend part of your beliefs as a theoretical exercise.
The idea that because one has an idea of a God means it must be innate to yourself is clearly false
Well done. This is one of the points were you are having problems with your though: every time that you say "clearly" you've stopped using logic and started using belief (except if you were applying a syllogism, but you're not doing that now).
This same idea was clearly true to Descartes, in the same way that "I think, therefore I exist" was clearly true to him. Clear ideas were the basis for Descartes rational thought (what we now call 'axioms') from which to apply rational deduction. Given the state of Philosophy at the time, this approach was a radical advance.
In hindsight we now know that clear ideas are not created in a vacuum but are evolved from the brain's development and learning, but that's independent of the logic of Descartes philosophy. As applied to your expressed beliefs, you can see that if you accept your "clearly false" axiom as a "clearly true" axiom instead, you get a perfectly logical theory that includes religion. And this is only one of the many possible ways to do it; western theology has at least 3000 years of examples.
It's not that. It's that you believe things that agree with your emotions, and your emotions are developed in your infancy.
I'm not sure how all this works exactly, but this is what recent neuropsychiatry has discovered about rational beliefs, that they're ground on emotion - logic and rationalization is an afterthought of your preexisting beliefs.
Slashdot Mirror
Right off the bat I can think of the Egypt and Chinese dinasties, and the Roman empire (on which the Catholic church piggybacked).
What you call the Holy Spirit, I call a viable systems model. It only requires an executor branch (Systems 1-2), a managerial layer (Systems 3-4) with self-regulating oversight, and a central core (System 5) responsible to keep the organization's identity steering it to adapt to changes in the environment. A viable system may very well last for centuries or millenia if its parts are kept under control with, say, a really strict ideollogy that punish getting out of the orthodoxy.
Guess what? The Catholic church has all these, and are all human (you may even recognize System 5 as a Very Important figure).
You kidding? 'Lesser bing' is with no doubts recognized and allowed by the Google spellchecker.
Where are the mod points when you really need them?
-1 Troll.
As long as you are creating software artifacts that can execute automated behavior, you are programming. You may not be using a general purpose programming language, but it's giving instructions to a computer nevertheless.
And I must say that they aren't going well.
Their two current causes (educating the House and the Senate about Internet and excluding corporations from using "people" laws) are underfunded and running out of time. Come on Slashdot, is your money where your mouth is?
Done.
http://www.wethelobby.com/
But it matters now.
:-)
When people in the target audience are already considering a change in the interface, which is the single major sale point, I am reassured: this is doomed!
Surely he is the first Slashdot troll? :-P
"The vision of Plasma Active is to create an innovative and fresh data-centric UI which is not concerned with applications but rather offers a user oriented interface with logically combined items through activities, which reflect the workflow and usage of the device by the user".
Didn't understand a word? Me neither. And this is from a commercial company trying to sell the thing. No more luck with the promotional video, which only shows some loading times for some unexplained tasks for which the benefit is not clear.
Until they hire some marketing people able to explain why consumers should buy the thing, and some UX people making the users feel at home when using it, nobody -not even geeks- will want to buy one.
Persuasion: it's statistical cohertion.
There was, while they designed the game.
The PacMan videogame is one instance of a problem class. Algorithmic complexity is calculated for classes of problems, since for any particular instance you can always design a trivial, constant time algorithm if at least one solution is known...
If you mix them they taste terrible. (SOPA = soup in Spanish)
I'm glad that Dreamweaver is better in that respect, and I recognize the value of automating the creation of repetitive tags even if it only allows for a partial pipeline that must be completed by hand in text. But color me sceptical that the code thus generated will not suffer from a fixed layout that's hard to reshape into a properly resizable layout - I have yet to see it to believe it.
Well yes, of course I will decide which pages look modern to me. And I'll keep my opinion that people creating fixed layouts are a blame to the web's usability when they break my navigation habits at my preferred zoom level, window size or portable device. A page that doesn't render correctly in modern devices is not modern by definition. The sad thing is that likely they are not even aware of the pain they impose on their users.
And I'll keep thinking that someone who wants to create pixel-perfect content should be using pdf documents instead of HTML, which has always been intended to be a semantic markup to be reinterpreted by the client in alternate ways as controlled by the user, not the publisher; that's the foundation of the Web as an internet application, to allow content that can outlive the software environment in which it was created. Not recognizing the basic purpose for which the tool you use was created will make you a sloppy creator, and no amount of "I'm-entitled-to-use-the-tool-my-own-way" will turn a bad use of the technology into a good one.
As much as I empathize with your wants, I'm afraid the other answers in this thread are right. If you want to approach content creation as if it were page layout software, you shouldn't be creating web content. The web has always been primarily about the content logical structure. The native visual style for the web is the reflowing layout.
Now that responsive web design is gaining traction, we finally have a chance to have WYSIWYIG tools that create native web structures, but that moment simply hasn't arrived yet. Dreamweaver and the equivalent group of visual HTML generators from the late XX century create fixed content, and are not up to the task to create modern pages that can be adapted to the current explosion of diverging form factors. To apply responsive design, you must learn the basics of semantic HTML layout + CSS presentation, and there's no visual tool to create that (yet).
It's being reimplemented in the forn of the Semantic Web. It just doesn't have a proper GUI (yet).
I agree that it's a major problem in using computers nowadays. The first one to publish a solution to this problem will have the next Facetwitoogle. I have my own design for this solution, but have to code it in my free time and will take a while to wire all the needed background processing.
The key to get it right is having an interface simple enough that pipes can be built without thinking, as if the scrapping and piping were part of the browsing itself.
1) Build web crawler (man, nobody talks of them nowadays)
2) Crawler flags all visited sites
3) Publish crawler code so that others can also run it on their own sites
Result: the input channel gets flooded with a neverending stream of random false positives.
Flagging concentrated on a few main corporate sites won't do it since they can just remove them from the list, and then go after the first unknown remaining site. But distributed automatic notifications would make human flags dissapear inside the noise.
You are right, you have a logical way to contradict Descartes.
But note how you needed to introduce additional axioms in order to do it, you couldn't do it by logic alone; for that you have needed to show that a contradiction arises from Descartes axioms, and no one can be found. Descartes axioms where self-consistent and thus logical; there's nothing in logic that forces someone to accept any additional axiom.
The axiom that you added to the mix in order to refute the old philosopher is that the God idea is generated from observation. First, note that this is not enough on itself to refute the existence of God with logic; there's the possibility that someone imagined God and that God exists at the same time.
For your argument to work, it relies on your hidden assumption (a second axiom) that ideas are true when supported by observation, and should be discarded when they don't match observation. This idea comes from the natural sciences (physics, primarily). It's not a part of logic itself, so it has to be accepted as a separate belief. As LordLimecat rightly pointed out, you can't assume that everything that exists must observable and then use observation as proof that the assumption is true; that's circular reasoning. As a general rule you can't contradict an axiom on its own with logic alone, logic will work either way if you assume that it's true (admit it) or false (reject it); you must keep throwing new axioms to the mix until one of them generates a logical contradiction with all the previous ones. Every axiom added this way is a new "act of faith", not a logical deduction.
Religious people usually tend to discard the naturalistic assumption and say that there are things that exist and can't be proven by observation; it's a logical way to articulate their belief in God. The other way is thinking that God's existence can be proven by observation, and then think that the observed good things (feelings like men's goodwill or happiness, or wonders like nature's beauty) are evidence of his existence; that's also a logical and consistent belief system if handled with care.
Not that I believe all this, I'm working as a "reverse devil's advocate" here. But I wanted to show you how logic works outside of your own moral frame of reference, if you're willing to suspend part of your beliefs as a theoretical exercise.
Well done. This is one of the points were you are having problems with your though: every time that you say "clearly" you've stopped using logic and started using belief (except if you were applying a syllogism, but you're not doing that now).
This same idea was clearly true to Descartes, in the same way that "I think, therefore I exist" was clearly true to him. Clear ideas were the basis for Descartes rational thought (what we now call 'axioms') from which to apply rational deduction. Given the state of Philosophy at the time, this approach was a radical advance.
In hindsight we now know that clear ideas are not created in a vacuum but are evolved from the brain's development and learning, but that's independent of the logic of Descartes philosophy. As applied to your expressed beliefs, you can see that if you accept your "clearly false" axiom as a "clearly true" axiom instead, you get a perfectly logical theory that includes religion. And this is only one of the many possible ways to do it; western theology has at least 3000 years of examples.
It's not that. It's that you believe things that agree with your emotions, and your emotions are developed in your infancy.
I'm not sure how all this works exactly, but this is what recent neuropsychiatry has discovered about rational beliefs, that they're ground on emotion - logic and rationalization is an afterthought of your preexisting beliefs.
Hint: "not observably true" and "illogical" are not synonyms.
Well, that's where you are using flawed logic. I already said what part of your reasoning is incorrect, go on and review it.