Why is it that Christian "logic" dictates that God is real even though you can't see Him, yet it does not follow that alien life must be real even though we can't see it?
It doesn't say that. It says that the ways of seeing God are not always the same as the ways of seeing, say, a brick. This makes perfect sense when you consider what Christians claim God is - uncreated, super-natural, etc. You can't "see" love for your wife, or mom, or whoever, in an purely rational sense, yet you believe it exists (I assume). I could just as well bemoan your "logic" of loving your mom, even though you can't see or define love.
That being said there is "evidence" you love your mom. By the same token, Christians do think there is evidence pointing to some aspects of God- Mandelbrot called his discovery of fractal patterns in nature the "fingerprint of God". Pascal and others had similar things to say about the apparent order in the universe. Things really appear- to many people- to be designed. Explaining the physical processes behind something doesn't negate this either- The fact that trees come from seeds doesn't make them seem any less "designed" in my mind. Or to use a more complex example, if quantum physics were to give us a theory of everything tommorrow, I would still wonder why everything worked that way. And I would credit God for creating it that way.
The problem you've run into is fueled by ignorant Christians and ignorant non- (sometimes anti-) Christians. Christians fall into a "God-of-the-Gap" mentality and try to use God to explain just the unexplainable. They then say silly things like the "earth is flat," only to be prooven wrong and make a bad name for Christians. Non-Christians sieze on those instances and dismiss Christianity because it's "illogical", when in fact it is no more illogical that loving your mom. These two things create an environment in which it seems, to the ignorant Christian or non-Christian, that Christianity is opposed to Science.
The fact is though, Christians have a vested interest in learning as much about the universe as possible, because they believe it to be created by the same Creator that created them. Which brings me to you last point: Christianity does not teach that life does not exist elsewhere. It very well may be that God chose to create life elsewhere in the universe. Again, some Christians may balk, but then there are also Atheists who would as well. The bottom line, and the right answer to the question, is "we don't know, but lets find out."
There is one universe in which life exists on mars, and one in which it doesn't, and one in which/. decided not to post this article and one in which I get modded up for this post (but probably not this one)...
You will not find any answer from the government to the spam problem that does not have worse side effects. Why the hell would I pay $10 a year- a price that would most definitely go up- for another beuaracracy to manage my email.
The best solutions to spam- and just about anything- come from the private sector or private/public research and always will. Putting this in the hands of government would stifle innovation, cost taxpayers more, and end up being a half-baked service. If you doubt it, compare USPS to FedEx or UPS, or check out the computers at your local government office.
As for offering a better solution, fingerprint-based filtering like CloudMark works the best for me- catching 90% with no false-positives. Sure, it could be improved, and I think ultimately a sort of automated white-list would be the best solution. But I can tell you the worst idea is getting the FTC involved and socializing email.
Seems like there'd be a sigificant performance hit too...
A day at the genome office
on
Genome Surprise
·
· Score: 3, Funny
scientist 1: Hey have you seen gene #40,001? scientist 2: It was just here with the others next to my sandwich...Oh. scientist 1: Great, you ate 40,001 through 140,000! Forget this. scientist 2: But what'll I tell the press???
*** ...In other news scientists revealed today that
we have substantially fewer genes than expected; between 27,000 and 40,000 as compared to an original estimate of 140,000. Experts say that this discovery means that chimpanzees are even more like humans than people are...
So you're saying:
if(Progress.FailedAttempts > acThreshold) Progress.Quit();
Of course 4th gen. languages aren't there yet, but I think the concept is sound. Want to program a window and some buttons? Then draw a window and some buttons! Where IDE developers haven't done as good (yet) is creating a visual paradigm for telling the computer how to do non-visual things, like make logic or finer design decisions.
The proof you're wrong is that we still use flowcharts to design apps. It's often said that a "well designed application practically writes itself." I just think once it's well designed...it should.
The article said nothing about visual programming models. I've always thought a really good, powerful, simple visual language would eventually make mainstream. Not just visual front-ends like VB or Softwire, but something completely visual and more fluid. Complex things are more easily grasped visually- a picture is worth a thousand lines of code?
Anyway, that's the way it was on Star Trek and Minority Report.
I've tried Photoshop on somewhat comparable Windows and Mac boxes several years in a row, and the Windows was always faster.
Intel-and-friends make better, more easily and cheaply upgraded hardware. That's great, but makes it more difficult for OSes to keep up. Which explains both why Macs are slower and why Windows crashes.
That being said, is it really fair to compare "Mac", which is OS AND hardware, to "Windows" which is OS only? You'll never get a true comparison- it's like comparing apples and really cheap easily upgraded fast apples. =)
Yes, HDTV, assuming it ever happens, will happen because of the FCC...and it will be an inferior and out-dated technology by the time it does. If the FCC hadn't been envolved, I believe we would have had several generations of HDTV by now. As the other reply said, we see that happening with 801.11b. We also see it in computer hardware development, and just about anywhere government regulation is at a minimum. The reason "incumbent broadcasters" are there in the first place is because government has regulated out their competition! In a true free market, they would be competing to provide better service cheaper. Instead the competition is regulated, so there is no motivation for innovation.
Imagine that there was a government beuaracracy overseeing computer operating systems, since there is "so much potential for chaos, if multiple operating systems interfere with eachother." If you have any doubt as to which OS they'd force you to buy, check out the PCs at your local public library.
I think what Reed is saying, to use your examples, is that you need to get the soap bubbles out of the way, and get the right sized pin-hole. You can think of the potentiometers and transistors as the soap bubble, interfering with the signal because they are not precise or fast enough. The antenna is the pinhole, which in current systems, restricts the reviever's ability to recieve certain wavelengths at certain directions.
I don't think he meant there's infinite spectrum, just that it isn't being efficiently regulated, which is pretty obvious considering who's doing the regulating. I don't think you'd even have to rely on quantum mechanics to figure this out. Think of moving water around. Is it more efficient to use a big pipe intellegently, or tons of little pipes dumbly.
Could someone come in and "clog up the big pipe", by transmitting loudly on every frequency? Sure, but they could do the same thing now. However, to continue the analogy, it would actually be harder to clog the big pipe than the little one- water would re-route itself in the big pipe, wheras the small pipe would simply be blocked.
Finally, the problem isn't as much physics as just basic politics. Which scenario produces better goods and services? The government deciding which technology gets produced and who can use it, or technology companies participating in competition and producing technology, while consumers decide which is better? Just look at how long it's taken to do HDTV if you're unsure of how inefficient the FCC is. Compare the advances in radio technology to the advances in internet technology over the same period. Clearly, regulation suppresses innovation, and that's what the key issue is, whether Reed is correct or not.
ASP.NET is not a language as much as a set of classes to use when programming for a.NET enabled web server. You can use VB.NET or C# (or any of the other implementations) to program "Web Forms", which are rendered as HTML. Thus ASP.NET is more analagous to a SDK than a language.
The reason there can be more than one language is that each language is compiled to a "Common Language Runtime". Really, there's just that one language, and I suppose if you were insane you could program straight tokenized CLR. But, since each language uses the same framework, it is usually fairly easy to translate between them, if you know the basic syntax.
The benefit of.NET is the framework, which provides a logical way to program for pretty much all of the functionality of todays computers and OSes. Stuff like threading, data access, graphics, etc. are rolled into convenient classes that implement "best-practices" with minimal coding required. It's a big, smart toolbox. =)
That Perl was geared toward text proccessing has been an obstacle to XML support in my admittedly limited experience. We're trying to interface with a 3rd party system that claims to use XML for data interchange. But because their programmers are used to traditional text-proccessing, their XML support is _very_ kludgy. Stupid things like requiring line feeds after each element, etc.
One could well argue that ENRON is a result of regulation. More to the point, though, is that captialism worked beautifully in Enron's case- they're gone! Capitalism has said to businesses: be honest, or die. Even if you could point out a few failures, all one has to do is look at the GDP, per-capita #s, etc. of capitalist vs non- or semi- capitalist countries, and you'll see that capitalism wins every time. It may not be perfect, but it is the best option available.
I would agree they have the right do do this, since these are open networks. BUT, they should realize they are lending validity to the claim that the government need not be involved. At that point, it becomes a simple business vs consumer game:
Consumers want better, cheaper music aquired more easily.
Music industry does not provide
Consumers develop network to provide better(?) cheaper music more easily.
Music industry tries to break network
Consumers develop safeguards against industry attempts (firewall, blacklist, file signatures)
... <-- You are here
Business adopts consumer ideas to make money
Music industry follows
At some point, as long as anti-capitalists don't step in and ruin it, it is inevitable that the music industry will give consumers what they want. Somebody will step in and build a viable music business around a p2p platform, and make lots of money. Then everyone else will follow. This is exactly how capitalism is supposed to work, and has for a few hundred of years. The only time it fails is when government steps in and throws it off. That is why capitalist countries produce better goods and services than communist ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it that Christian "logic" dictates that God is real even though you can't see Him, yet it does not follow that alien life must be real even though we can't see it? It doesn't say that. It says that the ways of seeing God are not always the same as the ways of seeing, say, a brick. This makes perfect sense when you consider what Christians claim God is - uncreated, super-natural, etc. You can't "see" love for your wife, or mom, or whoever, in an purely rational sense, yet you believe it exists (I assume). I could just as well bemoan your "logic" of loving your mom, even though you can't see or define love. That being said there is "evidence" you love your mom. By the same token, Christians do think there is evidence pointing to some aspects of God- Mandelbrot called his discovery of fractal patterns in nature the "fingerprint of God". Pascal and others had similar things to say about the apparent order in the universe. Things really appear- to many people- to be designed. Explaining the physical processes behind something doesn't negate this either- The fact that trees come from seeds doesn't make them seem any less "designed" in my mind. Or to use a more complex example, if quantum physics were to give us a theory of everything tommorrow, I would still wonder why everything worked that way. And I would credit God for creating it that way. The problem you've run into is fueled by ignorant Christians and ignorant non- (sometimes anti-) Christians. Christians fall into a "God-of-the-Gap" mentality and try to use God to explain just the unexplainable. They then say silly things like the "earth is flat," only to be prooven wrong and make a bad name for Christians. Non-Christians sieze on those instances and dismiss Christianity because it's "illogical", when in fact it is no more illogical that loving your mom. These two things create an environment in which it seems, to the ignorant Christian or non-Christian, that Christianity is opposed to Science. The fact is though, Christians have a vested interest in learning as much about the universe as possible, because they believe it to be created by the same Creator that created them. Which brings me to you last point: Christianity does not teach that life does not exist elsewhere. It very well may be that God chose to create life elsewhere in the universe. Again, some Christians may balk, but then there are also Atheists who would as well. The bottom line, and the right answer to the question, is "we don't know, but lets find out."
This would be so much easier in Panama...
Begun the spam wars have.
There is one universe in which life exists on mars, and one in which it doesn't, and one in which /. decided not to post this article and one in which I get modded up for this post (but probably not this one)...
You will not find any answer from the government to the spam problem that does not have worse side effects. Why the hell would I pay $10 a year- a price that would most definitely go up- for another beuaracracy to manage my email.
The best solutions to spam- and just about anything- come from the private sector or private/public research and always will. Putting this in the hands of government would stifle innovation, cost taxpayers more, and end up being a half-baked service. If you doubt it, compare USPS to FedEx or UPS, or check out the computers at your local government office.
As for offering a better solution, fingerprint-based filtering like CloudMark works the best for me- catching 90% with no false-positives. Sure, it could be improved, and I think ultimately a sort of automated white-list would be the best solution. But I can tell you the worst idea is getting the FTC involved and socializing email.
-dr
This post was created for boatboy by a tribe of Bob Ross Midgets.
Doesn't Mac know that everybody uses touch-tone now? These young wipper-snappers wouldn't know what to do with a rotary mouse.
Isn't that how Jango Fett got started???
Seems like there'd be a sigificant performance hit too...
scientist 1: Hey have you seen gene #40,001?
...In other news scientists revealed today that
we have substantially fewer genes than expected; between 27,000 and 40,000 as compared to an original estimate of 140,000. Experts say that this discovery means that chimpanzees are even more like humans than people are...
scientist 2: It was just here with the others next to my sandwich...Oh.
scientist 1: Great, you ate 40,001 through 140,000! Forget this.
scientist 2: But what'll I tell the press???
***
So you're saying:
if(Progress.FailedAttempts > acThreshold) Progress.Quit();
Of course 4th gen. languages aren't there yet, but I think the concept is sound. Want to program a window and some buttons? Then draw a window and some buttons! Where IDE developers haven't done as good (yet) is creating a visual paradigm for telling the computer how to do non-visual things, like make logic or finer design decisions.
The proof you're wrong is that we still use flowcharts to design apps. It's often said that a "well designed application practically writes itself." I just think once it's well designed...it should.
The article said nothing about visual programming models. I've always thought a really good, powerful, simple visual language would eventually make mainstream. Not just visual front-ends like VB or Softwire, but something completely visual and more fluid. Complex things are more easily grasped visually- a picture is worth a thousand lines of code? Anyway, that's the way it was on Star Trek and Minority Report.
If you have a regular CRT, your monitor can already do this fairly easily! iMac monitors seem to work the best.
Virgin Atlantic has offered to buy the Concord fleet...for one pound british sterling ($1.6). Shoot, I'll give 'em $10. Do I hear $20?
I've tried Photoshop on somewhat comparable Windows and Mac boxes several years in a row, and the Windows was always faster.
Intel-and-friends make better, more easily and cheaply upgraded hardware. That's great, but makes it more difficult for OSes to keep up. Which explains both why Macs are slower and why Windows crashes.
That being said, is it really fair to compare "Mac", which is OS AND hardware, to "Windows" which is OS only? You'll never get a true comparison- it's like comparing apples and really cheap easily upgraded fast apples. =)
OK, Dumb Question: Why doesn't it short out easily?
((//PROGRAMMER[@KnowsXML='true']/@Skillz) >
(//PROGRAMMER[@KnowsXML='false']/@Skillz))
Now what's so hard about that?
Yes, HDTV, assuming it ever happens, will happen because of the FCC...and it will be an inferior and out-dated technology by the time it does. If the FCC hadn't been envolved, I believe we would have had several generations of HDTV by now. As the other reply said, we see that happening with 801.11b. We also see it in computer hardware development, and just about anywhere government regulation is at a minimum. The reason "incumbent broadcasters" are there in the first place is because government has regulated out their competition! In a true free market, they would be competing to provide better service cheaper. Instead the competition is regulated, so there is no motivation for innovation.
Imagine that there was a government beuaracracy overseeing computer operating systems, since there is "so much potential for chaos, if multiple operating systems interfere with eachother." If you have any doubt as to which OS they'd force you to buy, check out the PCs at your local public library.
Bottom line: regulation decreases innovation.
I think what Reed is saying, to use your examples, is that you need to get the soap bubbles out of the way, and get the right sized pin-hole. You can think of the potentiometers and transistors as the soap bubble, interfering with the signal because they are not precise or fast enough. The antenna is the pinhole, which in current systems, restricts the reviever's ability to recieve certain wavelengths at certain directions.
I don't think he meant there's infinite spectrum, just that it isn't being efficiently regulated, which is pretty obvious considering who's doing the regulating. I don't think you'd even have to rely on quantum mechanics to figure this out. Think of moving water around. Is it more efficient to use a big pipe intellegently, or tons of little pipes dumbly.
Could someone come in and "clog up the big pipe", by transmitting loudly on every frequency? Sure, but they could do the same thing now. However, to continue the analogy, it would actually be harder to clog the big pipe than the little one- water would re-route itself in the big pipe, wheras the small pipe would simply be blocked.
Finally, the problem isn't as much physics as just basic politics. Which scenario produces better goods and services? The government deciding which technology gets produced and who can use it, or technology companies participating in competition and producing technology, while consumers decide which is better? Just look at how long it's taken to do HDTV if you're unsure of how inefficient the FCC is. Compare the advances in radio technology to the advances in internet technology over the same period. Clearly, regulation suppresses innovation, and that's what the key issue is, whether Reed is correct or not.
Assuming a somewhat standard http client-server app serving the XML and handling user input, here are some other fairly simple applications:
-Accurate "hit counters" for TV shows.
-Cookie-based tracking of viewer's prefrences
-Targeted advertising
-Surviellance method for TIA
ASP.NET is not a language as much as a set of classes to use when programming for a .NET enabled web server. You can use VB.NET or C# (or any of the other implementations) to program "Web Forms", which are rendered as HTML. Thus ASP.NET is more analagous to a SDK than a language.
.NET is the framework, which provides a logical way to program for pretty much all of the functionality of todays computers and OSes. Stuff like threading, data access, graphics, etc. are rolled into convenient classes that implement "best-practices" with minimal coding required. It's a big, smart toolbox. =)
The reason there can be more than one language is that each language is compiled to a "Common Language Runtime". Really, there's just that one language, and I suppose if you were insane you could program straight tokenized CLR. But, since each language uses the same framework, it is usually fairly easy to translate between them, if you know the basic syntax.
The benefit of
That Perl was geared toward text proccessing has been an obstacle to XML support in my admittedly limited experience. We're trying to interface with a 3rd party system that claims to use XML for data interchange. But because their programmers are used to traditional text-proccessing, their XML support is _very_ kludgy. Stupid things like requiring line feeds after each element, etc.
One could well argue that ENRON is a result of regulation. More to the point, though, is that captialism worked beautifully in Enron's case- they're gone! Capitalism has said to businesses: be honest, or die. Even if you could point out a few failures, all one has to do is look at the GDP, per-capita #s, etc. of capitalist vs non- or semi- capitalist countries, and you'll see that capitalism wins every time. It may not be perfect, but it is the best option available.
Consumers want better, cheaper music aquired more easily.
Music industry does not provide
Consumers develop network to provide better(?) cheaper music more easily.
Music industry tries to break network
Consumers develop safeguards against industry attempts (firewall, blacklist, file signatures)
... <-- You are here
Business adopts consumer ideas to make money
Music industry follows
At some point, as long as anti-capitalists don't step in and ruin it, it is inevitable that the music industry will give consumers what they want. Somebody will step in and build a viable music business around a p2p platform, and make lots of money. Then everyone else will follow. This is exactly how capitalism is supposed to work, and has for a few hundred of years. The only time it fails is when government steps in and throws it off. That is why capitalist countries produce better goods and services than communist ones.
Just to think, years ago, it took 450,000 cubits just to store the genetic sequence of the known animal kingdom...