You can't be very good at it if you can't tell we can't read minds.
On a more serious note, it's worth pointing out that it's been known for some time that men have a wider range of IQ at both ends of the scale. Although men may, on average, be slighly brighter than women, at the top end of the scale men outnumber women 5-1, but that's also true at the bottom end of the scale. More of the really stupid people are male too.
Many economics is often regarded as a science by those who study it, and scientific modelling processes are often applied to it. In fact, many of those models are remarkably similar to natural processes and as such similar conclusions can be made about both scientific and economic realities. Besides, top scientists are some of the most intelligent people on the planet, and that intellect can be applied with equal success to many fields. Compared to quantum physics, economics is childs play. The only spanner in the works are the politicians whose sole motivation is personal wellbeing, which usually means telling people (their voters) exactly what they want to here, and that means either good news, or bad news as long as it can be blamed on the opposing politicians. Bad news for which the blame cannot be deflected, it is the interest of the politician to supress, deny or discredit. This is why politics and science must be seperate, and why the insistance of this current Bush administration to filter scientific research is so wrong.
Because the state of the economy relies upon science, whereas good science is independent of economics. Besides, scientists are not giving economic opinions, they are simply giving scientific opinions which happen to have economic consequences.
I've not been conditioned to believe. I chose to believe just a little over 1a year ago because I was (and am) convinced of the historical accuracy of the Bible.
I didn't mean religion as in religious people, I meant the christian explaination of why there is murder/rape etc in the world at all. Secularism has not solved the issue of crime, and indeed has no answer beyond saying "punish the wrongdoers", and certainly has nothing to say about who we are or why we are here, except to say that everything is meaningless.
My argument about happiness was that without religion people try to define who they are by their job, their position at work, the house they own, or the car they drive. They think that if only I had this much money, or that woman as my girlfriend, THEN I would be happy. If they are luck or apply themselves they may get what they want, only to find it doesn't satisfy their desires. Christian teaching is that this constant searching for satisfaction in this world is futile, because we have been created to have an intimate relationship with the God who made us, and that only that can give us a true sense of contentment, peace and rest. At this time when people are living every busier lives, frantically search for personal meaning and happiness in work, sex, shopping etc, the message of rest and being content with what you have is one I think people need.
Christians are not people who have miraculously been changed into good people, they are simply people who have become aware of how bad they are and accept that if getting into heaven is something you have to earn, then not one human in all history would be good enough.
we're not talking about pacifism, were saying no large scale retaliation. We'll quite happily stand stong against their actions and provide a good defence, which may result in killing people who try to attack us. We're not, however, into pre-emptive attacks, especially without near perfect intelligence. The kind of wide ranging military attacks are counter productive, but small scale special forces ops may well be the right approach.
I got lots of interesting replies. Some good ones from the lib dems MEPs, some so-so ones from the conservatives, a disappointing one from my labour MEP and some bizzare ones from UKIP (this is the South West, damned silly west country farmers). I also wrote to my MP who forwarded my letter to Lord Sainsbury at the DTI, and I got a very intersting letter back from him saying, on one hand, that the CIID wouldn't really change anything, but on the other hand that it was neccesary for encouraging innovation. I didn't really understand that. Either it changes nothing or it's going to be really beneficial. It can't be both.
It just showed me how the council of ministers was trying to pull a fast one.
I guess what this proves is that in modern Britain, and contrary to UKIP claims, the MEPs do the best job of all our elected representatives. I suspect that is because they are fairly low profile and are therefore aware of their role as servant of their electorates, rather than the self-serving nature of most politicians who are in it for the power, fame and influence. Time to scrap westminster I say.
Hmm. How's that greed working out for you? Have you got enough money to buy happiness yet?
Why don't you tell me what fairness, justice and right mean to you? Tell me what everyone deserves, and why some people deserve to starve, or die because they can't afford health care. Tell me why 10's of thousands die every day from the effects of poverty around the world while a few people have enough personal wealth to make poverty history, for ever.
You have to remember that the money that people have isn't theirs by right anyway. It's only because the government makes laws and keeps order that you could have a stable society where money could be made at all. If there was no government you'd have anarchy, and the hyper rich would be lynched because that's what they deserve. So you're wrong. Modern society is built on the basis of law and justice, and basic human rights, such as the right of representation for all, regardless of wealth. It's a deal between the poor majority and the rich minority, where the poor agree not to violently overthrow the rich, in exchange for the right to make laws to balance the inequality of power caused by the disparities of wealth and privilage.
No seriously, they are. If there is only one guy making something then he can charge whatever he likes, and never make it better. That's bad for consumers. If he has a bunch of patents, it's even worse, because no one can even start to compete. If someone does come on the market with a better, cheaper product and the incumbent monpolist uses his money and power to force the little guy out of business then the consumer has lost the ability to buy the better and cheaper product. That's bad.
Governments exist to make life better for the people they represent, and in this case, making life better means preserving fair competition so that better and cheaper products are available, forcing both parties to innovate and produce a better product.
Get it?
How would you like it if microsoft was able to force all ISP's to stop routing/.? What if Ford had never been forced to compete? We might all be driving around in model T's
IIRC Intel and AMD have a pretty tight, and royalty free, cross-licensing deal going on. That is why Intel could implement AMD64 so easily, and why AMD can implement SSE3. Either one could stop the other making chips if the deal was scrapped.
I reckon they've waited until they had the products in place to make the lawsuit really hurt intel. Up until now they've had a good product but Intel has always been close. Now AMD really seems to have the only real plans for the future and they have a product which mostly kicks intel's ass in the X2 line. It's now that Intel is weakest and AMD is strongest, and now that the damages would be highest.
What exactly do you believe ABOUT God? What kind of being/entity is he/she/it.
If you believe in God, I assume you're talking about some all omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient entity that created you/me and the universe for some purpose. Presumably if we truly have free will, God gave us that for a reason too, rather than just force us to do what He wants.
The question is, what was that purpose, what's our role here, and what does this God want us to do? Have we been told anything about what He's like, or what His purposes are?
Whether or not it is obsolete now is rather a question of whether it is true or not, and that has very much not been solved definitively one way or the other. Face it, atheism is as much a position of faith as theism, in that both assert something about the existence of God without proof.
IF a religion (say, Christianity, for sake of argument) is true then there is a heaven and a hell and we're all going to one or the other, depending on whether you believe or not. If, on the other hand, there is no god, no heaven, and no hell, then we all just cease to exist and you've not really lost anything.
OK so I've just outlined Pascal's wager.
There is also less metaphysical argument on obsolete. Look around at the world you live in and the people you know. Do they seem happy? Do they seem joyful? Is society free from crime and violence and anger and hatred? Are people only living in happy stable families with children growing up with both parents? Is no one being murdered or raped, robbed or abused, oppressed or discarded? Are you truly happy?
Looking around at where I live and my co-workers, I'd argue that religion has never been more relevant, or more necessary. People are in the grip of a mania to fill the void in their lives with something. Money, sex, power, academic respect, shopping. People are in therapy trying to learn to love themselves and be totally self reliant. Huge numbers of people today in the west are on anti-depressants and are stressed out by the pressures of consumerism, or by the demands of unreasonable bosses. People are becoming isolated and lonely, and more and more in denial of their own misery.
Actually, amongst techno-savvy users the proportion of firefox users in MUCH higher. Some tech sites have over 50% firefox users. If you're a tech site you'd better be standards complient, conversely, if you run a IT management site and you want to keep the PHB's in and the geeks out, run LOTS of IE specific code.
I guess the problem with torrent files is that anyone can create one and host one, so you never know whether what you are downloading is a patch, a movie, a game or a trojan, unless you are one of the few that either gets the.torrent files from the original server or checks the checksum.
It's probably not an either or, and what I've read so far does seem to indicate that microsoft has DRM in mind and will stop unauthorised people from offering content, but if there is going to be legal distribution of large amounts of protected content this kind of DRM'd edge network is what would be needed. Now whether or not you agree with copyrighted material on principle is a different matter.
I think microsoft really want this to be a cost cutting venture, rather than profit generating. The current bandwidth cost to microsoft for all it downloadable content must be staggering, given they have probably hundred of gigabytes or even more available to millions of users. If they can get some of the enormous install base of users to peer platform SDKs, betas, patches, etc that could add up to a major saving. Imagine, if you wiil, that they shift the windows update app to using P2P instead of direct downloads.
That said, once they have a large install base of users then they would be able to sell access to the P2P network. I'm sure many software publishers would like to take the opportunity to use the P2P network to distribute apps, especially if Microsoft can control who is allowed to initiate the distribution of software, and so allow advantages of scalable bandwidth together with benefits of being able to charge before a user can start a download.
Somebody made a case out of a fish tank and filled it with a non-conducting coolant. The PC ran fully submerged in the liquid, and IIRC, without a heatsink on the CPU.
They even state that the purpose of increasing the term is to increase record company profits, but the purpose of copyright is to reward the creator of the work, not the guy who forced the copyright to be handed over.
NOt to mention the noise. One of the biggest thrills of F1 is the unbelievable amount of noise those cars make. How dull would it be if they were silent?
furthermore, an objectivist response to the boxing day tsunami would be to say "Good, thats a few hundred thousand less mouths to feed. All the more for me."
Perhaps, but in every other sport, for a title to have the word "world" in it, you have to have some international competition. Even snooker and darts have some foreigners in their world championships.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't be very good at it if you can't tell we can't read minds.
On a more serious note, it's worth pointing out that it's been known for some time that men have a wider range of IQ at both ends of the scale. Although men may, on average, be slighly brighter than women, at the top end of the scale men outnumber women 5-1, but that's also true at the bottom end of the scale. More of the really stupid people are male too.
Many economics is often regarded as a science by those who study it, and scientific modelling processes are often applied to it. In fact, many of those models are remarkably similar to natural processes and as such similar conclusions can be made about both scientific and economic realities. Besides, top scientists are some of the most intelligent people on the planet, and that intellect can be applied with equal success to many fields. Compared to quantum physics, economics is childs play. The only spanner in the works are the politicians whose sole motivation is personal wellbeing, which usually means telling people (their voters) exactly what they want to here, and that means either good news, or bad news as long as it can be blamed on the opposing politicians. Bad news for which the blame cannot be deflected, it is the interest of the politician to supress, deny or discredit. This is why politics and science must be seperate, and why the insistance of this current Bush administration to filter scientific research is so wrong.
Because the state of the economy relies upon science, whereas good science is independent of economics. Besides, scientists are not giving economic opinions, they are simply giving scientific opinions which happen to have economic consequences.
You stole my .sig!!! You'll be hearing from my lawyers
I've not been conditioned to believe. I chose to believe just a little over 1a year ago because I was (and am) convinced of the historical accuracy of the Bible.
I didn't mean religion as in religious people, I meant the christian explaination of why there is murder/rape etc in the world at all. Secularism has not solved the issue of crime, and indeed has no answer beyond saying "punish the wrongdoers", and certainly has nothing to say about who we are or why we are here, except to say that everything is meaningless.
My argument about happiness was that without religion people try to define who they are by their job, their position at work, the house they own, or the car they drive. They think that if only I had this much money, or that woman as my girlfriend, THEN I would be happy. If they are luck or apply themselves they may get what they want, only to find it doesn't satisfy their desires. Christian teaching is that this constant searching for satisfaction in this world is futile, because we have been created to have an intimate relationship with the God who made us, and that only that can give us a true sense of contentment, peace and rest. At this time when people are living every busier lives, frantically search for personal meaning and happiness in work, sex, shopping etc, the message of rest and being content with what you have is one I think people need.
Christians are not people who have miraculously been changed into good people, they are simply people who have become aware of how bad they are and accept that if getting into heaven is something you have to earn, then not one human in all history would be good enough.
Quite right. It was you aussies wasn't it? I know, trying to put us off our game today. Well it didn't work.
we're not talking about pacifism, were saying no large scale retaliation. We'll quite happily stand stong against their actions and provide a good defence, which may result in killing people who try to attack us. We're not, however, into pre-emptive attacks, especially without near perfect intelligence. The kind of wide ranging military attacks are counter productive, but small scale special forces ops may well be the right approach.
welcome to my friends list. Top answer.
now that's funny.
I got lots of interesting replies. Some good ones from the lib dems MEPs, some so-so ones from the conservatives, a disappointing one from my labour MEP and some bizzare ones from UKIP (this is the South West, damned silly west country farmers). I also wrote to my MP who forwarded my letter to Lord Sainsbury at the DTI, and I got a very intersting letter back from him saying, on one hand, that the CIID wouldn't really change anything, but on the other hand that it was neccesary for encouraging innovation. I didn't really understand that. Either it changes nothing or it's going to be really beneficial. It can't be both.
It just showed me how the council of ministers was trying to pull a fast one.
I guess what this proves is that in modern Britain, and contrary to UKIP claims, the MEPs do the best job of all our elected representatives. I suspect that is because they are fairly low profile and are therefore aware of their role as servant of their electorates, rather than the self-serving nature of most politicians who are in it for the power, fame and influence. Time to scrap westminster I say.
Hmm. How's that greed working out for you? Have you got enough money to buy happiness yet?
Why don't you tell me what fairness, justice and right mean to you? Tell me what everyone deserves, and why some people deserve to starve, or die because they can't afford health care. Tell me why 10's of thousands die every day from the effects of poverty around the world while a few people have enough personal wealth to make poverty history, for ever.
You have to remember that the money that people have isn't theirs by right anyway. It's only because the government makes laws and keeps order that you could have a stable society where money could be made at all. If there was no government you'd have anarchy, and the hyper rich would be lynched because that's what they deserve. So you're wrong. Modern society is built on the basis of law and justice, and basic human rights, such as the right of representation for all, regardless of wealth. It's a deal between the poor majority and the rich minority, where the poor agree not to violently overthrow the rich, in exchange for the right to make laws to balance the inequality of power caused by the disparities of wealth and privilage.
Monopoly's are bad MMmmkay.
/.? What if Ford had never been forced to compete? We might all be driving around in model T's
No seriously, they are. If there is only one guy making something then he can charge whatever he likes, and never make it better. That's bad for consumers. If he has a bunch of patents, it's even worse, because no one can even start to compete. If someone does come on the market with a better, cheaper product and the incumbent monpolist uses his money and power to force the little guy out of business then the consumer has lost the ability to buy the better and cheaper product. That's bad.
Governments exist to make life better for the people they represent, and in this case, making life better means preserving fair competition so that better and cheaper products are available, forcing both parties to innovate and produce a better product.
Get it?
How would you like it if microsoft was able to force all ISP's to stop routing
IIRC Intel and AMD have a pretty tight, and royalty free, cross-licensing deal going on. That is why Intel could implement AMD64 so easily, and why AMD can implement SSE3. Either one could stop the other making chips if the deal was scrapped.
I reckon they've waited until they had the products in place to make the lawsuit really hurt intel. Up until now they've had a good product but Intel has always been close. Now AMD really seems to have the only real plans for the future and they have a product which mostly kicks intel's ass in the X2 line. It's now that Intel is weakest and AMD is strongest, and now that the damages would be highest.
What exactly do you believe ABOUT God? What kind of being/entity is he/she/it.
If you believe in God, I assume you're talking about some all omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient entity that created you/me and the universe for some purpose. Presumably if we truly have free will, God gave us that for a reason too, rather than just force us to do what He wants.
The question is, what was that purpose, what's our role here, and what does this God want us to do? Have we been told anything about what He's like, or what His purposes are?
What effect does it have on your life day to day?
Whether or not it is obsolete now is rather a question of whether it is true or not, and that has very much not been solved definitively one way or the other. Face it, atheism is as much a position of faith as theism, in that both assert something about the existence of God without proof.
IF a religion (say, Christianity, for sake of argument) is true then there is a heaven and a hell and we're all going to one or the other, depending on whether you believe or not. If, on the other hand, there is no god, no heaven, and no hell, then we all just cease to exist and you've not really lost anything.
OK so I've just outlined Pascal's wager.
There is also less metaphysical argument on obsolete. Look around at the world you live in and the people you know. Do they seem happy? Do they seem joyful? Is society free from crime and violence and anger and hatred? Are people only living in happy stable families with children growing up with both parents? Is no one being murdered or raped, robbed or abused, oppressed or discarded? Are you truly happy?
Looking around at where I live and my co-workers, I'd argue that religion has never been more relevant, or more necessary. People are in the grip of a mania to fill the void in their lives with something. Money, sex, power, academic respect, shopping. People are in therapy trying to learn to love themselves and be totally self reliant. Huge numbers of people today in the west are on anti-depressants and are stressed out by the pressures of consumerism, or by the demands of unreasonable bosses. People are becoming isolated and lonely, and more and more in denial of their own misery.
Religion is not obsolete. It's vital.
Actually, amongst techno-savvy users the proportion of firefox users in MUCH higher. Some tech sites have over 50% firefox users. If you're a tech site you'd better be standards complient, conversely, if you run a IT management site and you want to keep the PHB's in and the geeks out, run LOTS of IE specific code.
I guess the problem with torrent files is that anyone can create one and host one, so you never know whether what you are downloading is a patch, a movie, a game or a trojan, unless you are one of the few that either gets the .torrent files from the original server or checks the checksum.
It's probably not an either or, and what I've read so far does seem to indicate that microsoft has DRM in mind and will stop unauthorised people from offering content, but if there is going to be legal distribution of large amounts of protected content this kind of DRM'd edge network is what would be needed. Now whether or not you agree with copyrighted material on principle is a different matter.
I think microsoft really want this to be a cost cutting venture, rather than profit generating. The current bandwidth cost to microsoft for all it downloadable content must be staggering, given they have probably hundred of gigabytes or even more available to millions of users. If they can get some of the enormous install base of users to peer platform SDKs, betas, patches, etc that could add up to a major saving. Imagine, if you wiil, that they shift the windows update app to using P2P instead of direct downloads.
That said, once they have a large install base of users then they would be able to sell access to the P2P network. I'm sure many software publishers would like to take the opportunity to use the P2P network to distribute apps, especially if Microsoft can control who is allowed to initiate the distribution of software, and so allow advantages of scalable bandwidth together with benefits of being able to charge before a user can start a download.
Somebody made a case out of a fish tank and filled it with a non-conducting coolant. The PC ran fully submerged in the liquid, and IIRC, without a heatsink on the CPU.
Hey what's with the slashdot "worm" image? Its a caterpillar, not a worm. Look, it has legs!
They even state that the purpose of increasing the term is to increase record company profits, but the purpose of copyright is to reward the creator of the work, not the guy who forced the copyright to be handed over.
NOt to mention the noise. One of the biggest thrills of F1 is the unbelievable amount of noise those cars make. How dull would it be if they were silent?
furthermore, an objectivist response to the boxing day tsunami would be to say "Good, thats a few hundred thousand less mouths to feed. All the more for me."
Perhaps, but in every other sport, for a title to have the word "world" in it, you have to have some international competition. Even snooker and darts have some foreigners in their world championships.