If you believe in science AND god then your a bloody hypocrite because the scientific method can never be used on god.
I'm not seeing the logic here.
A hypocrite is someone who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings.
Let's say for the sake of argument (I don't actually agree with this) that there is no aspect of God and religion (specifically in this case Christianity) to which the scientific method can be applied.
If I stated that the scientific method provides the only valid grounds for any kind of belief, and then acted in a way that implied I believed in God, and if we also accept the earlier point that there is no aspect of God to which the scientific method can be applied, then I would be a hypocrite.
However, if I never claimed that the scientific method provides the only valid grounds for any kind of belief, then I would not be a hypocrite to believe in the scientific method and also in God.
So please, don't be too hasty in calling Christians hypocrites. It's one of those words that too often comes out in this kind of discussion, and is not always appropriate. Yes, I'm sure I do act hypocritically at times, over all sorts of things. I try not to, and I don't think that believers have a monopoly on hypocrisy.
In any case, I don't think there is any hypocrisy at all in the pursuit of science as a Christian.
What is more usual is for the public to vastly over-estimate the risks. This often occurs when scientists cannot say with 100% certainty that a certain thing is safe, and is largely a result of the public's generally poor understanding of risk and probability.
It could be said that the public's opposition to nuclear power, GM crops, etc, is largely an irrational reaction to the impossibility of scientists and policy-makers giving cast-iron guarantees that accidents can never and will never happen (not a view I necessarily agree with).
The issue with nanotechnology is that so far there has been almost no public discussion of the risks, which is probably why Joe Public is currently pretty much unaware of the issues at all.
So many Web 2.0 apps are sold (or given away for free) by software-as-a-service companies like Google that people can bypass IT altogether, and IT might not even know until it's too late.
Since when has allowing people to use the tools they need to get their job done been a bad thing?
In my experience, while there are IT departments (or individuals within IT departments) that give excellent service, there are also the control-freaks who think it is their job to decide what their users' requirements should be.
Anyone would think from the quotation above that the primary purpose of an IT department is its self-perpetuation.
the Open Rights Group gently suggested that streaming was a far better short term solution to on-demand services than DRM-restricted market-distorting technologies
There is a technical advantage to downloading rather than streaming. Streaming must happen in (more-or-less) real-time, which means that the quality of the audio/video is limited by the available bandwidth. Although a lot of people in the UK are now on broadband, typically speeds are not higher than 2 to 4 Mbps. That isn't enough, for example, for high definition television.
A download on the other hand can take as long as necessary, and can be carried out at times when the networks are less busy, such as overnight. Many UK ISPs with metered plans or usage caps allow unmetered access at off-peak times.
Actually streaming and downloading data is not always equivalent, even from the sender's point of view.
With the BBC's RealPlayer streams, even if you have a high bandwidth connection, you can still only receive a stream at the stream's data rate. That means to download a 30 minute radio program that is offered via rtsp, you still have to wait 30 minutes as the data is sent at 45 kbps (or whatever) down your 4Mbps pipe.
(Yes, I realise that the main thrust of the parent's contribution was that the BBC cannot hope to control what I do with the data once it reaches my end purely by technical means, and I don't argue with that bit.)
It would make more sense to use some kind of chording configuration, to avoid the need to move your fingers from key to key. Six keys is enough, though there's no reason why all eight fingers shouldn't be used. In fact you might as well give a button to each thumb too, on the top of the device.
The buttons would need to have enough resistance so that they can support the weight of the device without registering accidental presses.
Those are all excellent questions and I hope you don't mind if I adapt them for my forum.
My point about trivia questions is that they are often very culturally-dependent. What is obvious and very easy for an average American (or English person) may not be at all obvious to someone from Burkina Faso (for example).
A simple text-based question that requires actual intelligence is a much better Turing test... writing a foolproof system that can produce a nearly infinite amount of such questions is a challenging problem by itself.
I think it is more than a challenge. I have introduced a system like this on a public forum that I administer. It's a phpBB mod that asks a question during the registration phase to which the registrant is required to give a correct answer.
The problem is that I have found it very hard to come up with even a relatively small number of questions and answers that require understanding, have unambiguous answers, and do not assume any cultural or 'trivia' knowledge (other than understanding of the language).
Here are some examples that I came up with, along with my critique:
What is the third word of this sentence?
I think this is quite a good one. No knowledge other than understanding the language is required.
What is the result of three multiplied by three?
Mathematical question - I imagine this is probably the easiest category to crack by AI.
What day of the week comes after Wednesday?
Can probably assume that anyone with understanding of the language knows the answer, but strictly, this is a trivia question, and therefore unsuitable.
What is a shape with three sides called?
Another trivia question.
What colour is a ripe tomato?
Another trivia question. Additionally, a blind person might conceivably not know the answer.
How many days are there in a fortnight?
Trivia again.
As you can see, these are not very good questions. In fact, I think the first is the only one that does not depend on any specific knowledge.
It seems to me that a credit freeze is similar to the system administrators' principle that you don't leave running services that you don't need. If you get no benefit from a service, why accept the risk that it poses, even if that risk is very small? Similarly, if you don't need credit, why make it even possible for someone else to get credit in your name?
Here in the UK, someone by the name of Jamie Jamieson came up with a way to exploit a UK law that says that everyone has a right to place a "Notice of Correction" in their credit report, which lenders must take into account when they assess your credit. Full details are given at http://www.freeidprotection.co.uk/ but in short, you send the three UK credit agencies a notice of correction stating that any application for credit by you will be accompanied by your thumbprint, and that any application not accompanied by your thumbprint should be considered fraudulent.
It's important to note that the credit agency is not expected to verify that the thumbprint is yours. But most fraudsters would not know in advance that a thumbprint would be necessary, and certainly would not want to supply their own...
I have no idea whether this would work in the USA.
I'm not sure what your point is, but I don't think we're really in major disagreement. Of course A 440 Hz is an arbitrary standard. Come to that, 440 Hz as a number is dependent on an arbitrary definition of the length of a second, the use of the base ten number system, etc.
What isn't arbitrary is the relative pitches of notes in the Western scale - that is the ratio between pitches - which as I was trying to explain above, is related to real physics and is not at all arbitrary.
The twelve tone pitch system may well be a human invention, but it is based very closely (but not exactly) on the natural harmonics of a string (or open pipe).
If you take a string whose fundamental frequency is 440 Hz (an A) then harmonics are produced at twice, three times, four times, etc. that frequency. The notes corresponding to these are:
A (fundamental) A one octave above (first harmonic) E one octave and a fifth above (second harmonic) A two octaves above C# two octaves and a third above E two octaves and a fifth above G two octaves and a seventh above - slightly flat A three octaves above
Beyond that the notes you get approximate less closely to the even-tempered western scale.
The pitch ratios for the even-tempered scale are given by a power-relationship:
p'/p = 2^(n/12)
where n is the number of semitones above p.
So for example, the closest even-tempered note to the second harmonic of A 440, E which is 19 semitones above, would have a pitch of
p' = 2.9966 * 440 Hz
which is slightly flatter than the natural harmonic 3 * 440 Hz.
What is interesting (to me at least) is that this means that if you follow a cycle of fifths from a starting note using natural pitches rather than even-tempered pitches, you never exactly get back to the note you started on. (Apparently Pythagoras was one of the first to record this observation.)
This caused no end of problems for early musicians. Instruments used to be tuned with systems based on natural pitches. This meant that instruments with fixed tunings (that the musicians could not easily alter as they played) would sound more in-tune in some keys than in others.
J S Bach was one of those who worked on a solution to this, and he came up with the modern even-tempered scale, which averages out the intervals so that all keys are equally in-tune (or out-of-tune).
If you have a well-trained ear then you can hear the slight beating that indicates this slight out-of-tuneness when you strike an open fifth on an even-tempered instrument (such as a piano). String and wind players are of course able to make the slight adjustments to overcome this tuning compromise, and if you listen to a really good string quartet you can sometimes hear the difference.
Well I for one won't be using this to process command-line arguments (that's what getopt() and getopt_long() are for), but it is certainly useful to know of a tool that I can use to generate a perfect hash. The next time I need some simple but efficient code to quickly discriminate between a fixed set of strings, I'll know to Google for gperf. (Before I read this article I didn't even know it existed.)
There is an interesting question of reductionism here. There a good form of reductionism, were a complex idea is described in terms of an aggregation of simpler parts. But there is also a bad form of reductionism in which the complex idea is claimed to be 'nothing but' the aggregation of simpler parts.
This bad reductionism has been called alternately 'nothing buttery' and 'Greedy Reductionism'. (Greedy Reductionism.)
In this case we just need to be careful not to suppose that if intelligence might perhaps be well-described in terms of swarm-theory of neurons then intelligence is not "real".
(Incidently, there is a difference that might be relevant here between describing something and explaining it.)
The article summary even implies that the reasons for not providing a filter to remove shopping sites are not technical:
A final check encourages "diversity" in the results, for example, a manufacturer's page, a blog review, and a comparison shopping site."
So if they have an algorithm to ensure that the results contain a good mix including comparison shopping sites, doesn't that imply that they could technically provide exactly the kind of switch that the parent poster asked for - i.e. to exclude those comparison sites?
Or does the fact that so many searches return a first page entirely made up of comparison shopping sites indicate that the "diversity check" simply doesn't work properly yet?
Actually, my point was about the inconsistency of putting the toolchain into CM but not the OS. Personally I don't think it is the right thing to do.
Eventually, the OS updates but the tool chain updates with it.
If you put the toolchain (but not the OS) into CM, you can't guarantee that the toolchain will still work after the OS has updated. But if you try the updated toolchain, then why did you put the old toolchain into CM in the first place?
If nobosy could see the difference, how would they have known to sue?
If only 'twere so. There is a whole audiophile industry built upon the notion that people will pay large amounts just so that they 'know' that they are getting perfect fidelity in playback (whether they could actually hear the difference in a blind A/B test or not...)
If you put the toolchain into CM, do you also put the operating system in? Just as the sourcecode is no good if you don't have the right toolchain to build it, the toolchain is no good if you don't have the right OS to run it.
I suspect the answer (if you really need it) is to save a 'Virtual PC' image of the machine that does the build each time you make an important baseline (or each time the build machine configuration changes). Since the image is likely to be in the GB size range, you might want to store it on a DVD rather than in your CM system.
On my MacBook Pro, both squares initially looked smooth. But when I started dragging the window around, I noticed that there was clear banding on the left square, and very slight banding on the right square. The banding on the left square flickered while I was moving the window. The right square did not flicker.
Well, on blowing up the images, I see that the first one is dithered with a crude regular spatial dither. The second uses no dithering. I guess that means that my MacBook Pro display is doing some dithering though much less noticable than that on the left image. The flickering when I move the image is due to interference as the image's dithering and the screen's dithering going into and out of registration with each other.
Slashdot Mirror
A hypocrite is someone who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings.
Let's say for the sake of argument (I don't actually agree with this) that there is no aspect of God and religion (specifically in this case Christianity) to which the scientific method can be applied.
If I stated that the scientific method provides the only valid grounds for any kind of belief, and then acted in a way that implied I believed in God, and if we also accept the earlier point that there is no aspect of God to which the scientific method can be applied, then I would be a hypocrite.
However, if I never claimed that the scientific method provides the only valid grounds for any kind of belief, then I would not be a hypocrite to believe in the scientific method and also in God.
So please, don't be too hasty in calling Christians hypocrites. It's one of those words that too often comes out in this kind of discussion, and is not always appropriate. Yes, I'm sure I do act hypocritically at times, over all sorts of things. I try not to, and I don't think that believers have a monopoly on hypocrisy.
In any case, I don't think there is any hypocrisy at all in the pursuit of science as a Christian.
What is more usual is for the public to vastly over-estimate the risks. This often occurs when scientists cannot say with 100% certainty that a certain thing is safe, and is largely a result of the public's generally poor understanding of risk and probability.
It could be said that the public's opposition to nuclear power, GM crops, etc, is largely an irrational reaction to the impossibility of scientists and policy-makers giving cast-iron guarantees that accidents can never and will never happen (not a view I necessarily agree with).
The issue with nanotechnology is that so far there has been almost no public discussion of the risks, which is probably why Joe Public is currently pretty much unaware of the issues at all.
Yes, numbers above 31 are said to be a good choice because many people pick numbers based on dates significant to them.
In my experience, while there are IT departments (or individuals within IT departments) that give excellent service, there are also the control-freaks who think it is their job to decide what their users' requirements should be.
Anyone would think from the quotation above that the primary purpose of an IT department is its self-perpetuation.
Feel free of course to ignore this suggestion.
A download on the other hand can take as long as necessary, and can be carried out at times when the networks are less busy, such as overnight. Many UK ISPs with metered plans or usage caps allow unmetered access at off-peak times.
Actually streaming and downloading data is not always equivalent, even from the sender's point of view.
With the BBC's RealPlayer streams, even if you have a high bandwidth connection, you can still only receive a stream at the stream's data rate. That means to download a 30 minute radio program that is offered via rtsp, you still have to wait 30 minutes as the data is sent at 45 kbps (or whatever) down your 4Mbps pipe.
(Yes, I realise that the main thrust of the parent's contribution was that the BBC cannot hope to control what I do with the data once it reaches my end purely by technical means, and I don't argue with that bit.)
It would make more sense to use some kind of chording configuration, to avoid the need to move your fingers from key to key. Six keys is enough, though there's no reason why all eight fingers shouldn't be used. In fact you might as well give a button to each thumb too, on the top of the device.
The buttons would need to have enough resistance so that they can support the weight of the device without registering accidental presses.
Yes, Microsoft Word has had this facility for ages.
http://www.c-wilkie.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/jokes/pages/word1.html
Those are all excellent questions and I hope you don't mind if I adapt them for my forum.
My point about trivia questions is that they are often very culturally-dependent. What is obvious and very easy for an average American (or English person) may not be at all obvious to someone from Burkina Faso (for example).
The problem is that I have found it very hard to come up with even a relatively small number of questions and answers that require understanding, have unambiguous answers, and do not assume any cultural or 'trivia' knowledge (other than understanding of the language).
Here are some examples that I came up with, along with my critique: I think this is quite a good one. No knowledge other than understanding the language is required. Mathematical question - I imagine this is probably the easiest category to crack by AI. Can probably assume that anyone with understanding of the language knows the answer, but strictly, this is a trivia question, and therefore unsuitable. Another trivia question. Another trivia question. Additionally, a blind person might conceivably not know the answer. Trivia again.
As you can see, these are not very good questions. In fact, I think the first is the only one that does not depend on any specific knowledge.
Can anyone come up with better questions?
There, fixed that for you.
It seems to me that a credit freeze is similar to the system administrators' principle that you don't leave running services that you don't need. If you get no benefit from a service, why accept the risk that it poses, even if that risk is very small? Similarly, if you don't need credit, why make it even possible for someone else to get credit in your name?
Here in the UK, someone by the name of Jamie Jamieson came up with a way to exploit a UK law that says that everyone has a right to place a "Notice of Correction" in their credit report, which lenders must take into account when they assess your credit. Full details are given at http://www.freeidprotection.co.uk/ but in short, you send the three UK credit agencies a notice of correction stating that any application for credit by you will be accompanied by your thumbprint, and that any application not accompanied by your thumbprint should be considered fraudulent.
It's important to note that the credit agency is not expected to verify that the thumbprint is yours. But most fraudsters would not know in advance that a thumbprint would be necessary, and certainly would not want to supply their own...
I have no idea whether this would work in the USA.
I'm not sure what your point is, but I don't think we're really in major disagreement. Of course A 440 Hz is an arbitrary standard. Come to that, 440 Hz as a number is dependent on an arbitrary definition of the length of a second, the use of the base ten number system, etc.
What isn't arbitrary is the relative pitches of notes in the Western scale - that is the ratio between pitches - which as I was trying to explain above, is related to real physics and is not at all arbitrary.
The twelve tone pitch system may well be a human invention, but it is based very closely (but not exactly) on the natural harmonics of a string (or open pipe).
If you take a string whose fundamental frequency is 440 Hz (an A) then harmonics are produced at twice, three times, four times, etc. that frequency. The notes corresponding to these are:
A (fundamental)
A one octave above (first harmonic)
E one octave and a fifth above (second harmonic)
A two octaves above
C# two octaves and a third above
E two octaves and a fifth above
G two octaves and a seventh above - slightly flat
A three octaves above
Beyond that the notes you get approximate less closely to the even-tempered western scale.
The pitch ratios for the even-tempered scale are given by a power-relationship:
p'/p = 2^(n/12)
where n is the number of semitones above p.
So for example, the closest even-tempered note to the second harmonic of A 440, E which is 19 semitones above, would have a pitch of
p' = 2.9966 * 440 Hz
which is slightly flatter than the natural harmonic 3 * 440 Hz.
What is interesting (to me at least) is that this means that if you follow a cycle of fifths from a starting note using natural pitches rather than even-tempered pitches, you never exactly get back to the note you started on. (Apparently Pythagoras was one of the first to record this observation.)
This caused no end of problems for early musicians. Instruments used to be tuned with systems based on natural pitches. This meant that instruments with fixed tunings (that the musicians could not easily alter as they played) would sound more in-tune in some keys than in others.
J S Bach was one of those who worked on a solution to this, and he came up with the modern even-tempered scale, which averages out the intervals so that all keys are equally in-tune (or out-of-tune).
If you have a well-trained ear then you can hear the slight beating that indicates this slight out-of-tuneness when you strike an open fifth on an even-tempered instrument (such as a piano). String and wind players are of course able to make the slight adjustments to overcome this tuning compromise, and if you listen to a really good string quartet you can sometimes hear the difference.
I use C for any low-level programming project that doesn't warrent an object-oriented approach.
The trick is to identify the best tool for the job.
There is an interesting question of reductionism here. There a good form of reductionism, were a complex idea is described in terms of an aggregation of simpler parts. But there is also a bad form of reductionism in which the complex idea is claimed to be 'nothing but' the aggregation of simpler parts.
This bad reductionism has been called alternately 'nothing buttery' and 'Greedy Reductionism'. (Greedy Reductionism.)
In this case we just need to be careful not to suppose that if intelligence might perhaps be well-described in terms of swarm-theory of neurons then intelligence is not "real".
(Incidently, there is a difference that might be relevant here between describing something and explaining it.)
Or does the fact that so many searches return a first page entirely made up of comparison shopping sites indicate that the "diversity check" simply doesn't work properly yet?
If you put the toolchain into CM, do you also put the operating system in? Just as the sourcecode is no good if you don't have the right toolchain to build it, the toolchain is no good if you don't have the right OS to run it.
I suspect the answer (if you really need it) is to save a 'Virtual PC' image of the machine that does the build each time you make an important baseline (or each time the build machine configuration changes). Since the image is likely to be in the GB size range, you might want to store it on a DVD rather than in your CM system.
On my MacBook Pro, both squares initially looked smooth.
But when I started dragging the window around, I noticed that there was clear banding on the left square, and very slight banding on the right square. The banding on the left square flickered while I was moving the window. The right square did not flicker.
Well, on blowing up the images, I see that the first one is dithered with a crude regular spatial dither. The second uses no dithering. I guess that means that my MacBook Pro display is doing some dithering though much less noticable than that on the left image. The flickering when I move the image is due to interference as the image's dithering and the screen's dithering going into and out of registration with each other.