Rarely here do I see a sig that is as relevant to the point you are making as yours is. So true.
But in a way your professor was right: a theory is "just a" tool for understanding reality, in the same way as you brains "just" allow you to think.
I don't think that's quite (pedantically *G*) accurate. A theory is a pure mental framework useful for translating reality into a context that human brains can understand. The human brain is the tool we use to develop theories... calling a theory a tool is somewhat of a stretch, as not all theories are useful as such, ie, don't lead to a change in our knowledge.
(I'm badly paraphrasing and misusing some of Iain M Banks' commentary from his novels but the gist of it's the same)
Evolutionism promotes and falls back on the Big Bang and primordial goo for the very start of things being created.
That statement shows just how ignorant you are. Evolution and cosmology are two entirely different fields of science, and the term "primordial goo" is mostly used by the media and idiots who write books about creationism.
The rest of your post is just nonsense. Go get a real education.
I have the same Asus running dd-wrt, while I'm not entirely satisfied with it (it's a bit slower than I'd like and like all of them not all printers will work without a lot of fooling around) it's better than most. Range isn't bad, either. I'll check out the Rosewill, I have someone looking for something with enough range to cover a large apartment building. How is it for handling multiple connections at once?
Your last point makes sense; doesn't stop me from being frustrated... I don't mind spending money on a good setup, but many of my customers are handicapped or living on fixed incomes, and they do...
True; my last comment was aimed at IE fanboys, I'll admit;-)
YMMV, true. I do like Opera, it is my second browser of choice. I still find Firefox more stable and I like the fact I can remove features I don't want.
See my other post regarding background programs, in particular antivirus programs. I have only run Avast here for many years, and it's one of the few common factors between my machines and my customer's machines, where Firefox seems to work just fine.
I don't have and probably never will have enough data to know for sure, but I suspect that antivirus and some malware scanners might contribute to FF stability somewhat. Other than that it's kind of a crapshoot.
However I'd bet money that if your machine is hardware/driver stable, I could build it to be software stable. Made it so for hundreds of people over the last couple years. Post back and if you're willing to share some email I can try and help.
Gotta crash myself, tho, been up too long just like Win98;-)
Oh hell yeah. I would mod you up, but for some reason the moderation system just doesn't seem to be working for me tonight - I have mod points, but I try to mod and nothing happens. (Let me add that "cheap" often is equivalent to "overheats, crashes, drops connections, slow, etc"
Anyway, I agree entirely with what you are saying. The home router market is saturated and due for a buggy whip ugrade. I upgraded recently only because I wanted one that did network printer sharing, and it still does it poorly, even after reflashing the router with a custom system.
In the last six months I've installed a lot of of print server solutions for customers. That's been a cast iron bitch making them work with even some of the best printers on the market - and HP has been better than most, but forget most of the garbage cheap printers.
Customers want to have a router that does wifi and print serving and talks to anything laptop, windows, macs, etc. The first company that delivers that will make a killing.
So in other words, the thing runs perfectly if you disable the default options and install ad-ons to make it work right and then disable plugins.
I'm running the release with over sixty tabs open, adblock, noscript, flashblock, + other addons, an HD youtube video for entertainment on the second monitor, several adobe plugin pdfs open, plus some active weather flash running (it was storming here earlier, watching the radar) and Firefox is only using about six hundred MB or so. My three year old desktop X2/32bitW7/4GB is still snappy, I hardly notice the difference.
I don't even remember the last time Firefox crashed on this system (W7). Sometime in February I think, I'd have to look at my logs. Firefox has been incredibly stable for me for at least a couple years, and that experience has been echoed on the systems I build for customers as well. I suspect at least some it may be due the other memory resident programs on the computer, particularly antivirus programs, although I can't name any offhand, not enough data yet.
I've been using Opera, Google's Chrome, and IE alongside Firefox on W7 for about four months now on three computers, on a consistent basis, meaning every day.
Opera is a bit faster, Chrome is a lot faster, but we are talking about tenths of a second here when rendering anything other than extremely complicated web pages which to be honest would render a lot faster in any browser if the designers wouldn't include so much crap in them that demands connections to multiple websites for stupid things like a small advertising gif image from a server that is already overloaded.
Over that time, Firefox has been easily the most stable browser I've ever used - that might have something to do with me running addons such as adblock, flashblock, and NoScript - denying access to a lot of the poorly written or implemented crap websites that can crash any browser. I can count the number of times that Firefox has crashed on all three of my computers on one hand since the beginning of the year - that's two laptops and one desktop, running combinations of Windows XP, Windows 7, Ubuntu and Fedora.
It didn't used to be that way, no. But it is now. Firefox also consistently recalls my previous browsing sessions - even after the multiple downtimes I had tonight during numerous power outages due to bad storms (the new battery for the UPS is in transit and should arrive tomorrow, and I ordered it from a website that does not list Firefox in their supported browsers list) neither Opera nor Chrome did so.
The addon Xmarks has proven to be both useful and consistently stable, I'd highly recommend it.
YMMV, YEMV, etc. This is just mine. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'll take stable over fast any day. I regularly have from a dozen to several dozen tabs open at any one time, and being able to recover my work after any crash, no matter the cause, means a lot to me. These features should have been written into browsers as DEFAULT features from the beginning. Somewhat around ten years ago I remember wishing that someone would just code a browser that could remember what I was doing before a crash, and do so consistently. Now, finally, I have one. Thank you, Mozilla.
What I find ironic about the whole browser war is that the "feature leader" over the last decade has been the open source solutions - specifically firefox, and the rest of the field is playing catchup - especially Microsoft.
When one has a disease that one *knows* is going to kill you, and soon, where's the risk in trying unproven treatments? Whether the researchers knew or disclosed all of the risks is ultimately irrelevant in this case. If I were in her shoes and the researchers told me that the treatment had a 90% chance of killing me after it was applied, when I knew I was going to die in a matter of weeks or months anyway, I would make the same choice. Some chance is better than none at all.
Thank you for the formatting. I realize it's hard...
But humans are the result of natural processes in the universe, and if you wish, the leather shoes they create are also the result of a long history of transitions between thermodynamic states.
That's philosophy, not science. While both exist within the universe, it doesn't follow that the creations of human imagination follow the rules of the universe. There are plenty of examples which show otherwise.
So on one hand you are offended by some statement I made that you claim smells faintly of creationism (I'm sorry, but I really don't know how you came to this conclusion), and in the statement above you seem to claim that the universe had no part in the creation of leather shoes. So what are humans? Supernatural? Not part of the universe?
Human beings have dreamed up all sorts of silly stuff that obviously has no basis in reality. Much of it currently seems to determine our course as a species, even in the face of massive amounts of evidence which shows that we are in fact being very, very stupid.
The fact that I can't find a local cobbler who can produce shoes to fit my 13W feet doesn't reflect on the basic laws the universe operates under.
Doesn't make it any less of a fact - just means it has nothing to do with the universe writ large.
"Experimental design" doesn't necessarily reflect reality, either - it can and has been taken too far; one can design experiments that are totally logical within the framework of the lab, but have little if any relevance to the world outside the lab. There are numerous examples of that.
You might have to figure out the rest of my refs on your own. Irony and Sarcasm are a dying lingual art, it seems.
Hint: Mathematics rarely describes reality, even when it does.
SB
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let me into heaven for"
Newton thought his explanations were correct, also;-)
Meanwhile, we're trying to explain away the conflicts in current theories by what amounts to handwaving - "dark energy", "dark matter". If inertial mass and gravitational mass really are different, it would require us to revisit our assumptions.
Not trolling, I just don't like inconsistencies in our theories. There are an awful lot of them at this point in time, and to me they indicate that we aren't on the right path.
I am reminded of what Lee Smolin said in his forward to his book Three Roads "". We really know nothing, but we persist in trying to find out, and everyone out there thinks their theory is the right one. Good read.
I for one hope that experiment proves that there is a difference. Might shake things up some.
Since you seem to be all scientific-like, you might want to learn the basics of language structure, paragraphs, etc. I can parse what you wrote but it takes more effort than it's worth to try and reply to.
I don't care if you are a hundred years old, learn how to use the language properly. You don't have the excuse that english isn't your first language.
Your analogies are getting further away from the subject the more you post, as is your understanding of what life is about.
Creationism, global climate change, teleological descriptions of the universe, dystopias, are all related by the fact that none of them are at all related to any of the posts in this thread.
The Slashdot moderation systems is a system of lawyers. FIXED.
As someone who has no damned clue why I seem to get randomly assigned either 5 to 15 moderation points, your explanation makes as much sense as any other.
This year has been really weird. It seems that the more I post, the more mod points, but the more I post, the fewer mod points, varies from week to week;_)
If that seems somewhat redunant, see Rule #34 about mod points: Don't talk about moderation assignations. There may even be Content involved! Nah...
This is what happens when human beings relinquish control of voting to corporate algorithms. Oh, wait, wrong forum...
I'm damned now, I've divulged Secrets. It was good to know ya'll...
(Finger)
"Karma:Excellent" for more than seven years, now. "Friends" capped. It's Fucking Meaningless.
Smite me, Oh Overlords, Please. Give me a good reason to dump this addiction.
Fuck. you. Corporate. Whores. If you want yes-men, you won't find them here. Go live in your little world.
What's really amazing about all the data there is that it showed that even over a very short span of time a suspension of one part of human activity had an effect on our climate.
Remember that the shields *must be* in some way coupled to the shield generators, and hence to the rest of the ship's structure. This works whether the shields are electromagnetic or gravitic in nature.
The scientific method is also a human invention, with which the universe cares nothing about.
But humans do, and that's how we've managed to invent the technology that allows us to debate this on this forum.
I don't enjoy being baited, but I'll answer. You might get more than you bargained for.
Your leather analogy fails because there is a limited sample to draw the data from, in comparison. Even amongst seven billion human beings there is a fairly small number of finite combinations that create the demand for the various sizes of leather; we are all built more or less in the same framework in a physical sense. Put simply, leatherwork is a human technology built on demand - the universe didn't invent it.
Clouds aren't - the variables there are at least several orders of magnitude more complicated on local scales. One cumuli isn't remotely like another cumuli. That's not only why we can't predict storms, but why we can't say why one cloud is different from another cloud. If we could model reality on that level then we'd all be living within computer simulations - at least then we could make it all work the way we want... you don't do much cloud watching, do you?
The dystopia/eye part was sarcastic commentary on a large part of human society's continuing stubborn refusal to accept that it wasn't created by some superstitious entities' whim but rather from basic physical processes that had very large amounts of time to act; in other words, that part of what you said sounds like creationism, and it pushes some of my bullshit buttons.
We as a species should not lie to ourselves - and, especially in our technological age - that we have all the answers. That does not mean that we should accept simple answers because they make us feel good.
If you intend to spin this into global climate change argument, I'm game, but be aware that I work for a living and can't respond immediately.
Call me arrogant, call me whatever, I don't give much of a fuck anymore.
The cloud example is not nearly as efficient as the leather example above...
That is where your analogies fail in this context. "Efficient". The universe cares not about efficiency; efficiency is a human invention. A good example of that dystopia is the debate over the 'design' of the eye.
Your analogy might make sense if you could find 1000 clouds that had some overall structure in common other than the basic small scale physics.
Slashdot Mirror
Rarely here do I see a sig that is as relevant to the point you are making as yours is. So true.
But in a way your professor was right: a theory is "just a" tool for understanding reality, in the same way as you brains "just" allow you to think.
I don't think that's quite (pedantically *G*) accurate. A theory is a pure mental framework useful for translating reality into a context that human brains can understand. The human brain is the tool we use to develop theories... calling a theory a tool is somewhat of a stretch, as not all theories are useful as such, ie, don't lead to a change in our knowledge.
(I'm badly paraphrasing and misusing some of Iain M Banks' commentary from his novels but the gist of it's the same)
SB
Evolutionism promotes and falls back on the Big Bang and primordial goo for the very start of things being created.
That statement shows just how ignorant you are. Evolution and cosmology are two entirely different fields of science, and the term "primordial goo" is mostly used by the media and idiots who write books about creationism.
The rest of your post is just nonsense. Go get a real education.
SB
I have the same Asus running dd-wrt, while I'm not entirely satisfied with it (it's a bit slower than I'd like and like all of them not all printers will work without a lot of fooling around) it's better than most. Range isn't bad, either. I'll check out the Rosewill, I have someone looking for something with enough range to cover a large apartment building. How is it for handling multiple connections at once?
Your last point makes sense; doesn't stop me from being frustrated... I don't mind spending money on a good setup, but many of my customers are handicapped or living on fixed incomes, and they do...
SB
True; my last comment was aimed at IE fanboys, I'll admit ;-)
YMMV, true. I do like Opera, it is my second browser of choice. I still find Firefox more stable and I like the fact I can remove features I don't want.
SB
Looks like nice kit but I have very few customers who use DSL. Cable broadband is dirt cheap where I live (comparatively for the US anyway)
SB
See my other post regarding background programs, in particular antivirus programs. I have only run Avast here for many years, and it's one of the few common factors between my machines and my customer's machines, where Firefox seems to work just fine.
I don't have and probably never will have enough data to know for sure, but I suspect that antivirus and some malware scanners might contribute to FF stability somewhat. Other than that it's kind of a crapshoot.
However I'd bet money that if your machine is hardware/driver stable, I could build it to be software stable. Made it so for hundreds of people over the last couple years. Post back and if you're willing to share some email I can try and help.
Gotta crash myself, tho, been up too long just like Win98 ;-)
SB
Oh hell yeah. I would mod you up, but for some reason the moderation system just doesn't seem to be working for me tonight - I have mod points, but I try to mod and nothing happens. (Let me add that "cheap" often is equivalent to "overheats, crashes, drops connections, slow, etc"
Anyway, I agree entirely with what you are saying. The home router market is saturated and due for a buggy whip ugrade. I upgraded recently only because I wanted one that did network printer sharing, and it still does it poorly, even after reflashing the router with a custom system.
In the last six months I've installed a lot of of print server solutions for customers. That's been a cast iron bitch making them work with even some of the best printers on the market - and HP has been better than most, but forget most of the garbage cheap printers.
Customers want to have a router that does wifi and print serving and talks to anything laptop, windows, macs, etc. The first company that delivers that will make a killing.
Open call, for open standards ;-\
SB
So in other words, the thing runs perfectly if you disable the default options and install ad-ons to make it work right and then disable plugins.
I'm running the release with over sixty tabs open, adblock, noscript, flashblock, + other addons, an HD youtube video for entertainment on the second monitor, several adobe plugin pdfs open, plus some active weather flash running (it was storming here earlier, watching the radar) and Firefox is only using about six hundred MB or so. My three year old desktop X2/32bitW7/4GB is still snappy, I hardly notice the difference.
I don't even remember the last time Firefox crashed on this system (W7). Sometime in February I think, I'd have to look at my logs. Firefox has been incredibly stable for me for at least a couple years, and that experience has been echoed on the systems I build for customers as well. I suspect at least some it may be due the other memory resident programs on the computer, particularly antivirus programs, although I can't name any offhand, not enough data yet.
SB
I've been using Opera, Google's Chrome, and IE alongside Firefox on W7 for about four months now on three computers, on a consistent basis, meaning every day.
Opera is a bit faster, Chrome is a lot faster, but we are talking about tenths of a second here when rendering anything other than extremely complicated web pages which to be honest would render a lot faster in any browser if the designers wouldn't include so much crap in them that demands connections to multiple websites for stupid things like a small advertising gif image from a server that is already overloaded.
Over that time, Firefox has been easily the most stable browser I've ever used - that might have something to do with me running addons such as adblock, flashblock, and NoScript - denying access to a lot of the poorly written or implemented crap websites that can crash any browser. I can count the number of times that Firefox has crashed on all three of my computers on one hand since the beginning of the year - that's two laptops and one desktop, running combinations of Windows XP, Windows 7, Ubuntu and Fedora.
It didn't used to be that way, no. But it is now. Firefox also consistently recalls my previous browsing sessions - even after the multiple downtimes I had tonight during numerous power outages due to bad storms (the new battery for the UPS is in transit and should arrive tomorrow, and I ordered it from a website that does not list Firefox in their supported browsers list) neither Opera nor Chrome did so.
The addon Xmarks has proven to be both useful and consistently stable, I'd highly recommend it.
YMMV, YEMV, etc. This is just mine. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'll take stable over fast any day. I regularly have from a dozen to several dozen tabs open at any one time, and being able to recover my work after any crash, no matter the cause, means a lot to me. These features should have been written into browsers as DEFAULT features from the beginning. Somewhat around ten years ago I remember wishing that someone would just code a browser that could remember what I was doing before a crash, and do so consistently. Now, finally, I have one. Thank you, Mozilla.
What I find ironic about the whole browser war is that the "feature leader" over the last decade has been the open source solutions - specifically firefox, and the rest of the field is playing catchup - especially Microsoft.
SB
While Pinero was one of his story characters, the quote is pure Heinlein.
SB
When one has a disease that one *knows* is going to kill you, and soon, where's the risk in trying unproven treatments? Whether the researchers knew or disclosed all of the risks is ultimately irrelevant in this case. If I were in her shoes and the researchers told me that the treatment had a 90% chance of killing me after it was applied, when I knew I was going to die in a matter of weeks or months anyway, I would make the same choice. Some chance is better than none at all.
SB
Nail, head; indeed. ;-\
SB
Thank you for the formatting. I realize it's hard...
But humans are the result of natural processes in the universe, and if you wish, the leather shoes they create are also the result of a long history of transitions between thermodynamic states.
That's philosophy, not science. While both exist within the universe, it doesn't follow that the creations of human imagination follow the rules of the universe. There are plenty of examples which show otherwise.
So on one hand you are offended by some statement I made that you claim smells faintly of creationism (I'm sorry, but I really don't know how you came to this conclusion), and in the statement above you seem to claim that the universe had no part in the creation of leather shoes. So what are humans? Supernatural? Not part of the universe?
Human beings have dreamed up all sorts of silly stuff that obviously has no basis in reality. Much of it currently seems to determine our course as a species, even in the face of massive amounts of evidence which shows that we are in fact being very, very stupid.
The fact that I can't find a local cobbler who can produce shoes to fit my 13W feet doesn't reflect on the basic laws the universe operates under.
Doesn't make it any less of a fact - just means it has nothing to do with the universe writ large.
"Experimental design" doesn't necessarily reflect reality, either - it can and has been taken too far; one can design experiments that are totally logical within the framework of the lab, but have little if any relevance to the world outside the lab. There are numerous examples of that.
You might have to figure out the rest of my refs on your own. Irony and Sarcasm are a dying lingual art, it seems.
Hint: Mathematics rarely describes reality, even when it does.
SB
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let me into heaven for"
Newton thought his explanations were correct, also ;-)
Meanwhile, we're trying to explain away the conflicts in current theories by what amounts to handwaving - "dark energy", "dark matter". If inertial mass and gravitational mass really are different, it would require us to revisit our assumptions.
Not trolling, I just don't like inconsistencies in our theories. There are an awful lot of them at this point in time, and to me they indicate that we aren't on the right path.
I am reminded of what Lee Smolin said in his forward to his book Three Roads "". We really know nothing, but we persist in trying to find out, and everyone out there thinks their theory is the right one. Good read.
I for one hope that experiment proves that there is a difference. Might shake things up some.
SB
Go argue that with the other person who replied to my post - if you dare ;-)
I'd say that it's a lot more likely that all our theories are incomplete. Occam had a point.
SB
Since you seem to be all scientific-like, you might want to learn the basics of language structure, paragraphs, etc. I can parse what you wrote but it takes more effort than it's worth to try and reply to.
I don't care if you are a hundred years old, learn how to use the language properly. You don't have the excuse that english isn't your first language.
Your analogies are getting further away from the subject the more you post, as is your understanding of what life is about.
Creationism, global climate change, teleological descriptions of the universe, dystopias, are all related by the fact that none of them are at all related to any of the posts in this thread.
Just so.
SB
The Slashdot moderation systems is a system of lawyers. FIXED.
As someone who has no damned clue why I seem to get randomly assigned either 5 to 15 moderation points, your explanation makes as much sense as any other.
This year has been really weird. It seems that the more I post, the more mod points, but the more I post, the fewer mod points, varies from week to week ;_)
If that seems somewhat redunant, see Rule #34 about mod points: Don't talk about moderation assignations. There may even be Content involved! Nah...
This is what happens when human beings relinquish control of voting to corporate algorithms. Oh, wait, wrong forum...
I'm damned now, I've divulged Secrets. It was good to know ya'll...
(Finger)
"Karma:Excellent" for more than seven years, now. "Friends" capped. It's Fucking Meaningless.
Smite me, Oh Overlords, Please. Give me a good reason to dump this addiction.
Fuck. you. Corporate. Whores. If you want yes-men, you won't find them here. Go live in your little world.
Salut, Anachragnome. Thanks. Irony bites, don't it?
SB
What's really amazing about all the data there is that it showed that even over a very short span of time a suspension of one part of human activity had an effect on our climate.
SB
Remember that the shields *must be* in some way coupled to the shield generators, and hence to the rest of the ship's structure. This works whether the shields are electromagnetic or gravitic in nature.
Yeah, that's the easy part to explain.
They wouldn't be much use if they weren't.
SB
Good question.
Are optical waveguides (fiber) subject to interference from hard radiation (high gamma) EMP? I can't answer that one. Anyone?
SB
The scientific method is also a human invention, with which the universe cares nothing about.
But humans do, and that's how we've managed to invent the technology that allows us to debate this on this forum.
I don't enjoy being baited, but I'll answer. You might get more than you bargained for.
Your leather analogy fails because there is a limited sample to draw the data from, in comparison. Even amongst seven billion human beings there is a fairly small number of finite combinations that create the demand for the various sizes of leather; we are all built more or less in the same framework in a physical sense. Put simply, leatherwork is a human technology built on demand - the universe didn't invent it.
Clouds aren't - the variables there are at least several orders of magnitude more complicated on local scales. One cumuli isn't remotely like another cumuli. That's not only why we can't predict storms, but why we can't say why one cloud is different from another cloud. If we could model reality on that level then we'd all be living within computer simulations - at least then we could make it all work the way we want... you don't do much cloud watching, do you?
The dystopia/eye part was sarcastic commentary on a large part of human society's continuing stubborn refusal to accept that it wasn't created by some superstitious entities' whim but rather from basic physical processes that had very large amounts of time to act; in other words, that part of what you said sounds like creationism, and it pushes some of my bullshit buttons.
We as a species should not lie to ourselves - and, especially in our technological age - that we have all the answers. That does not mean that we should accept simple answers because they make us feel good.
If you intend to spin this into global climate change argument, I'm game, but be aware that I work for a living and can't respond immediately.
Call me arrogant, call me whatever, I don't give much of a fuck anymore.
SB
The cloud example is not nearly as efficient as the leather example above...
That is where your analogies fail in this context. "Efficient". The universe cares not about efficiency; efficiency is a human invention. A good example of that dystopia is the debate over the 'design' of the eye.
Your analogy might make sense if you could find 1000 clouds that had some overall structure in common other than the basic small scale physics.
SB
Shut up, already. Don't give the infant skynet any more ideas, K?
SB
The world is being taken over by paranoids and lawyers. Disclaimers are rapidly becoming mandatory, and therefore even more useless than useless.
SB
The FBI scanning the public traffic of an American website is in no way is comparable to monitoring you in the UK. Take off the tin foil.
SB