There is no evidence that disproves ID. Because ID is an untestable hypothesis, it is not falsifiable. Therefore it is not scientific, because science concerns itself with testable hypotheses.
The tech industry as a whole increasingly treats software developers and engineers as cattle, as expedable, as dime-a-dozen code monkeys.
Some companies come around and create better working conditions with more opportunities, conditions which recognize and honour the talents that these workers have spent years honing.
Well, I guess these other companies which are being 'drained' (a pejorative meaning they can't compete to attract workers) will just have to improve their working conditions.
Are you saying you prefer AMD to Intel based on power and heat issues?
It's been a while since I built a system, but when I was building a linux cluster a couple years back I decided to go with AMD chips in spite of their power and heat issues. At that time, AMD chips were always reputed to run hotter than Intel chips.
While this may be good for you, let us not act like that is a good reason for enacting this law, for doing so would just be proclaiming a version of the broken window fallacy.
The idea is that breaking windows (or in this case, artificially breaking software) is good for the economy because it creates work for the glazzier/software developer, who then has money to buy stuff from the baker, and the store owner, etc.
It's a fallacy because no new money has actually been created, as the window owner, instead of having the window AND money to put into the economy, now just has a window and less money.
I agree with what you're saying, but that is not, exactly, the issue here.
This isn't about hypotheses turning out to be false, it's about experiments which produce bad data, seemingly, at there release, supporting bad hypotheses.
While even a good scientist can come up with wrong hypotheses, no good experimental scientist should be creating experiments which don't have proper controls to prevent them from drawing the wrong conclusions, nor should they be deriving conclusions based on an statistically insignificant sample.
Arguably, the ability to design and implement properly controlled experiments and derive statistically significant results is what makes an experimental scientist and experimental scientist.
Dude/Dudette, you need NeedleSearch; highlighting of search terms, context menu accessible, and you can very easily configure it to search ANY search engine, as many as you want.
I especially like its integration into the context menu: simply highlight an interesting term or phrase, right click and select the search engine you want to use to find a match (results will open in a new tab). Right now I have mine set up for searching IMDB, Amazon, Wikipedia, Merriam Websters as well as to Google search just wikipedia.
"What's wrong with this country, can't somebody walk down the street without being offered a job"
Seriously, I think the arrogance is on the part of this Sorkin guy. Poor bastard keeps getting asked to work for a large successful software company which pays well, boo fucking hoo.
EVERYTHING is a means to an end. The important thing is what kind of software has the most utility. Free open source software has (all other factors being equal) more utility than proprietary software because people are not inhibited from building upon existing work since they aren't encumbered by lack of 'copyright' rights as they are with non-free software.
The AIQ of an AI is simply the ratio of the size of the uncompressed writings to the size of the program that, when executed, produces the uncompressed writings.
First off: cool prize idea, I find it quite interesting.
But, should the measure of AI be the ability to losslessly compress data? In many (probably most) real world situations, lossy compression is not only acceptable, but sensible, since exact compression is often more effort than it is worth. Perhaps you should parameterize the problem such that you take into account the penalty for not reproducing the input exactly.
Firstly, thanks for replying with some interesting points(and buzzwords for me to google).
While I agree that competition can be a positive force, consider that there wasn't really anything stoping another private venture from competing with ACS, so there was always the posibility for competition. Also, the new competition isn't really a fair form of competition, because it is government subsidized; theoretically, pubchem could do a poorer job than ACS, and yet gain market share to the detriment of ACS, as pubchem is offered for free at taxpayers expense. You could even have the better service driven out of business.
As for your points on the benefits of information sharing of basic research outweighing the benefits of a free market approach, I agree this is true in many if not most cases. But my initial question is still left unanswered: how do we measure the relative benefits of each approach (state-subsidization and free-market, however defined) such that we can decide when to favour one or the other?
If governments, as society, decide, on their own free will to do "X", is that really a lessening of freedom?
It's easy to think of "X"'s which very certainly result in a lessening of freedom (I leave it as an exercise for the reader to come up with some).
Most of the comments on this thread have been in support of the free online database, but where is the line between the free-market economy and government programs to be drawn?
I think anyone of us would be somewhat pissed if we worked hard to create a successful business, only to be driven out of it by a government subsidized effort which was able to undercut your prices because it received free money from the taxpayers.
That's essentially what these programs are: corporate welfare; taking tax-payer dollars and giving it to some corporate entity (whether it be a non-profit, city or a university) to subsidize some effort.
While I'll be the first to agree that some programs are worth subsidizing (law enforcement and health care being examples), what happens to the argument that free and open markets lead to more efficient practices? When and why doesn't it apply in these cases?
Like when Arthur C. Clarke chronicalled the near magical evolution of mankind into a race of star beings, in Childhood's end, or when Professor Isaac Asimov(PHd in physics) described the evolution of a super-mutant with tremendous psychic power, who came to dominate the (faster than light hyperspace capable) galactic empire in the 1950's classic Foundation and Empire.
No, wait, that was utter junk science.
Sorry to be facetious, but I have (what I claim to be) a serious point: real science ability does not mean that you write hard science fiction. There are many science fiction writers, past and present, who have a science background and yet don't write hard science fiction. And in my opinion this doesn't really effect the quality of the writing, or even the quality of the ideas described, but only what category it is labeled under.
1. So they'll have a whole department sitting like hawks watching the patent office and challenging everything remotely connected to their markets, and you and I will not have a department challenging every BS patent Microsoft submits.
When you come to challenge it, they'll say "well he didn't challenge it within the alloted time...."
I guess it will be the Cathedral versus the Bazaar, then.
In contract law, there is a concept known as 'consideration', which basically means says that each member of a contract has to get something out of it in order for it to be valid. This is why you sometimes hear about very expensive things being sold for a dollar: it is in order to legally distinguish it from a gift.
So in the case of contractual restrictions on an employee after the employment relationship ends, these may not be binding unless the employer provides some consideration, monetary or otherwise, to the employee; ie, legally you gotta pay to play. In some cases non-competition agreements have been found to be non-binding because the former employee was not getting paid to not compete.
While you are employed and being paid is a bit of a grayer area, and most lawyers I know wouldn't make a quick judgement on it, so I won't even try. Here's one link I found discussing contract law and consideration in general.
Will these kids inheric the original bad gene of their parent?
It depends. If you are doing somatic cell genetic engineering, then you only fix those cells in the patient in which the defect manifests itself, and not the germ-line cells (ie, sperm and eggs), so the 'fix' is not passed on to the next generation. If instead you modify the germ-line cells as well, then the 'fix' is passed on to the next generation.
One of the main reasons for doing the somatic fix rather than the germ-line fix is that we're still pretty damned new to this genetic engineering thingy, so it's probably a good idea to not fuck with the genetic heritage of future generations just to cure a patient today. However, as the science and technology develops, and we gain more experience with it, our self-assuredness in our abilities will likely increase, and we'll think we know what we're doing enough to risk making 'permanant' changes to the germ-line. I put 'permanant' in quotes, because if we make genetic changes one way, we should be able to turn them back if and when we decide they are mistakes.
True enough, but the same could be said for mercenaries. I think it's fair to say that if a situation needs a mercenary, theres probably something wrong with the system that created that situation.
Slashdot Mirror
Osama Bin Laden alone is/was worth several hundred million dollars.
There is no evidence that disproves ID. Because ID is an untestable hypothesis, it is not falsifiable. Therefore it is not scientific, because science concerns itself with testable hypotheses.
It's easy to understand why people think that. It's because most people's experience with management is highly conducive to that belief.
Preposterous example! What you would have needed was a dose of gamma radiation!
Hmm, a composition of ad hominem attacks and groundless assertions counts as +3 interesting? A sad state of affairs.
Comparing Rock 'n Roll to Gaming is like comparing Marijuana to Crack.
If all it takes to do great things is to be 'passionately curious', then it should be possible for a great many people to change the world.
Some companies come around and create better working conditions with more opportunities, conditions which recognize and honour the talents that these workers have spent years honing.
Well, I guess these other companies which are being 'drained' (a pejorative meaning they can't compete to attract workers) will just have to improve their working conditions.
They can cry me a river until they do.
It's been a while since I built a system, but when I was building a linux cluster a couple years back I decided to go with AMD chips in spite of their power and heat issues. At that time, AMD chips were always reputed to run hotter than Intel chips.
Has the situation reversed?
The idea is that breaking windows (or in this case, artificially breaking software) is good for the economy because it creates work for the glazzier/software developer, who then has money to buy stuff from the baker, and the store owner, etc.
It's a fallacy because no new money has actually been created, as the window owner, instead of having the window AND money to put into the economy, now just has a window and less money.
I wonder whether or not he's worked for many modern software corporations.
This isn't about hypotheses turning out to be false, it's about experiments which produce bad data, seemingly, at there release, supporting bad hypotheses.
While even a good scientist can come up with wrong hypotheses, no good experimental scientist should be creating experiments which don't have proper controls to prevent them from drawing the wrong conclusions, nor should they be deriving conclusions based on an statistically insignificant sample.
Arguably, the ability to design and implement properly controlled experiments and derive statistically significant results is what makes an experimental scientist and experimental scientist.
I especially like its integration into the context menu: simply highlight an interesting term or phrase, right click and select the search engine you want to use to find a match (results will open in a new tab). Right now I have mine set up for searching IMDB, Amazon, Wikipedia, Merriam Websters as well as to Google search just wikipedia.
Seriously, I think the arrogance is on the part of this Sorkin guy. Poor bastard keeps getting asked to work for a large successful software company which pays well, boo fucking hoo.
Of course, I didn't read TFA ...
EVERYTHING is a means to an end. The important thing is what kind of software has the most utility. Free open source software has (all other factors being equal) more utility than proprietary software because people are not inhibited from building upon existing work since they aren't encumbered by lack of 'copyright' rights as they are with non-free software.
First off: cool prize idea, I find it quite interesting.
But, should the measure of AI be the ability to losslessly compress data? In many (probably most) real world situations, lossy compression is not only acceptable, but sensible, since exact compression is often more effort than it is worth. Perhaps you should parameterize the problem such that you take into account the penalty for not reproducing the input exactly.
While I agree that competition can be a positive force, consider that there wasn't really anything stoping another private venture from competing with ACS, so there was always the posibility for competition. Also, the new competition isn't really a fair form of competition, because it is government subsidized; theoretically, pubchem could do a poorer job than ACS, and yet gain market share to the detriment of ACS, as pubchem is offered for free at taxpayers expense. You could even have the better service driven out of business.
As for your points on the benefits of information sharing of basic research outweighing the benefits of a free market approach, I agree this is true in many if not most cases. But my initial question is still left unanswered: how do we measure the relative benefits of each approach (state-subsidization and free-market, however defined) such that we can decide when to favour one or the other?
If governments, as society, decide, on their own free will to do "X", is that really a lessening of freedom?
It's easy to think of "X"'s which very certainly result in a lessening of freedom (I leave it as an exercise for the reader to come up with some).
I think anyone of us would be somewhat pissed if we worked hard to create a successful business, only to be driven out of it by a government subsidized effort which was able to undercut your prices because it received free money from the taxpayers.
That's essentially what these programs are: corporate welfare; taking tax-payer dollars and giving it to some corporate entity (whether it be a non-profit, city or a university) to subsidize some effort.
While I'll be the first to agree that some programs are worth subsidizing (law enforcement and health care being examples), what happens to the argument that free and open markets lead to more efficient practices? When and why doesn't it apply in these cases?
No, wait, that was utter junk science.
Sorry to be facetious, but I have (what I claim to be) a serious point: real science ability does not mean that you write hard science fiction. There are many science fiction writers, past and present, who have a science background and yet don't write hard science fiction. And in my opinion this doesn't really effect the quality of the writing, or even the quality of the ideas described, but only what category it is labeled under.
This is about software dude, not oil. Microsoft doesn't have the lobby to start wars. Yet.
So is 64-bit really nothing to Apple? And why did they make such a big deal about it in their earlier marketing[emphasis mine]?
Question answered.
I guess it will be the Cathedral versus the Bazaar, then.
In contract law, there is a concept known as 'consideration', which basically means says that each member of a contract has to get something out of it in order for it to be valid. This is why you sometimes hear about very expensive things being sold for a dollar: it is in order to legally distinguish it from a gift.
So in the case of contractual restrictions on an employee after the employment relationship ends, these may not be binding unless the employer provides some consideration, monetary or otherwise, to the employee; ie, legally you gotta pay to play. In some cases non-competition agreements have been found to be non-binding because the former employee was not getting paid to not compete.
While you are employed and being paid is a bit of a grayer area, and most lawyers I know wouldn't make a quick judgement on it, so I won't even try. Here's one link I found discussing contract law and consideration in general.
It depends. If you are doing somatic cell genetic engineering, then you only fix those cells in the patient in which the defect manifests itself, and not the germ-line cells (ie, sperm and eggs), so the 'fix' is not passed on to the next generation. If instead you modify the germ-line cells as well, then the 'fix' is passed on to the next generation.
One of the main reasons for doing the somatic fix rather than the germ-line fix is that we're still pretty damned new to this genetic engineering thingy, so it's probably a good idea to not fuck with the genetic heritage of future generations just to cure a patient today. However, as the science and technology develops, and we gain more experience with it, our self-assuredness in our abilities will likely increase, and we'll think we know what we're doing enough to risk making 'permanant' changes to the germ-line. I put 'permanant' in quotes, because if we make genetic changes one way, we should be able to turn them back if and when we decide they are mistakes.
True enough, but the same could be said for mercenaries. I think it's fair to say that if a situation needs a mercenary, theres probably something wrong with the system that created that situation.