I would almost agree with you if we were talking about chess, where players are meaningfully distinguished by the rules of the game, but we're not talking about a game in which that happens. There are exactly six different games in rock-paper-scissors. A computer doesn't have to do anything differently to account for which player is which in analyzing this game.
Even if I agreed with you, you're missing the point. The OP stated that there are an infinite number of rock-paper-scissors games. Either one is substantially less than infinite.
I am a Mercurial user from way back, and my platforms of choice are OS X, BSD and Linux. Don't use Windows at all. But I would admit that it is somewhat easier for Windows users to get rolling with it than Git, or at least, it has been in the past.
According to Wikipedia, there are 2,455,837 "total" military personnel in the USA. Do you find it as statistically interesting when phrased like this: "0.4% of the military was willing to break their oaths and testify in front of congress"?
The interest the government has in granting security clearances is in whether or not you can be bought or blackmailed, not whether or not you are rational or follow orders perfectly. Furthermore, being told not to talk about something doesn't necessarily constitute an oath. Does it seem far-fetched that a superior officer would tell a subordinate not to talk about a weird hallucination they had? Would that not jive better with suppression and accusation of destroyed evidence, which probably never existed in the first place?
In any event, what would make these stories more compelling is greater detail and internal consistency. The vague stuff we get in PR dispatches like this intentionally leave out a lot of the detail, both to make it creepier and to hide inconsistencies between different reports.
Re:Waiting for a capable PostgreSQL front-end
on
PostgreSQL 9.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This is because MySQL and PostgreSQL are in the same class. If you need a small, embeddable database, SQLite fits the bill better than MySQL or PostgreSQL. If you need a multi-user database and are willing to run a server, there's no technical reason to choose MySQL over PostgreSQL. And indeed, the only reasons I see MySQL being chosen are:
It's the only thing the developer knows, or
The business people want the software to run on the lowest-end web hosts, or
Some third-party depends on it (WordPress), or
Lack of information about MySQL or its alternatives
I see a lot less misinformation about PostgreSQL these days, just a lot of ignorance of its existence and capabilities.
Database prudes are the way we are because there's a lot riding on the decision, and people choosing MySQL almost invariably have neither the education nor the experiences we have had and simply don't understand the issues.
Only open sourcing it earlier? So they could undermine a larger version of their own community?
Open sourcing Solaris clearly did not save Solaris. Solaris is probably a better operating system than Linux, but apparently the only way Oracle thought it could be “saved” it is by charging a fortune to shove it down the throats of its own customers. Whatever. Worse certainly seems better in this case.
The research which came out today showed that the difference in performance was on the order of 30%. I have played plenty of other Flash games that didn't have this problem. "Apple hates Adobe" or "Adobe hates Apple" are insufficient explanations for why what is essentially a Super Nintendo game in terms of complexity runs like ass on a platform that's at least three orders of magnitude faster.
You might not like Macs, but if Flash always ran like this, nobody would use it.
I used to play FarmVille, and it astonished me the way it could demolish my <1-year-old MacBook Pro. Does anybody know what exactly it's doing that's so CPU-intensive? The paranoid in me figured it was probably running some sort of password cracker in the background. Is faux 3D tile-based gaming really that expensive on a modern CPU? Is it doing a bunch of unnecessary communication with the server? Is it just really poorly written? That's my best guess. Anybody know what's the deal?
The point is that religion and science don't have anything to do with each other. Science marched forward in the past without it mattering what the people on the street thought, and that is going to continue to be the case for as long as experiments can be made and predictions succeed or be disproven.
For some reason in this age, it seems to matter a lot to a particular group of people—atheists—whether or not people take science as a replacement for religion. Yet I don't see anywhere anything like empirical proof that it matters what people believe. As I've said elsewhere in defense of my remarks, science is not a dainty and fragile ideology. Science is made of facts, a method, and math. You can't get a paper accepted to a journal by citing a personal revelation or an obscure verse in a religious text. Nobody's even trying. So what's the fuss about?
The truth is that there is a fuss because atheism is itself a religion. Why would it matter to scientific progress what the practitioners believe? Either the results are valid or they aren't. There's a desire for policy decisions to be made based on science, but science doesn't and cannot produce morality because there is no fundamental particle of morality.
Don't misunderstand me, I'm not arguing for theocracy. I'm just pointing out that science is not a philosophy of life and it isn't vulnerable to these things at all. If the whole country decides science is wrong, that won't change the fact that it is right, and whatever countries retain that will succeed. That's the history. I'm certainly not arguing that religion needs to be there to sponsor science. On the contrary. I'm arguing that science and religion are completely independent entities.
The only thing atheists have to be pissed off about is biblical literalists who disbelieve in evolution or cosmology. Well, so what? You don't have to believe in Von Neumann for computers to be real and for them to work the way they do. Let the people who choose to be ignorant choose to be ignorant. And leave all the other religious people out of it! They aren't looking for scientific validation and science isn't looking for religious validation.
Until somebody gets a paper accepted in an academic journal which cites the Bible for proof instead of empirical results, there's nothing to discuss. Science is safe simply because it is science—you cannot fake empiricism.
The best you are going to get here is one out of five. Their book even makes provision for people of any other faith based on their actions, not their beliefs.
You take your feelings on faith. You love your boyfriend, girlfriend, dog or whatever on faith. You choose your career based on what you like to do. Rationality is not the only thing happening in that head of yours. Nor is religion the only thing happening in the head of the faithful of whatever religion we happen to be talking about.
One of the ironies here is that the defenders of science seem to believe (without any empirical evidence, of course) that something really bad will happen to science if religious people practice it. Well, science is invulnerable to religion. Science is nothing more than the scientific method plus a little math. There's no room there for belief. So please explain to me what exactly is so threatening about religion? Either the experiment works and the math is right, or it isn't. No amount of prayer has any effect on it.
The answer is a definite yes. For two reasons. The most obnoxious one is that you're conflating two different things: religion and faith. Christianity is the only religion that conflates religion and belief. You can be Jewish without having faith. All you have to believe in to be Muslim is that there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet. Nothing in there about creation in seven days. Buddhists and Taoists would laugh at this debate.
The second, and I think more important point is that you're ignoring history. Scientific inquiry was really initiated during our dark ages not by some island of enlightened atheists, but by Muslims living in tolerant Muslim empires. Their science got hamstrung essentially by a combination of factors including the fact that they couldn't study anatomy (it would require images of people). Then science took root, again, not in some atheist dreamworld, but in an extremely Catholic Europe.
It is a fundamental idea in Judaism, Christianity and Islam that G-d created a universe that is comprehensible and that studying it is a form of praise. Religion, by and large, does not have a problem with science. Certain sects of Christianity may have a problem with it, but they are the tiny--but very vocal--minority. Positioning science as an epic battle between the religious and the atheist is probably the best way to ensure its irrelevance to the vast majority of humanity. So why bother? The best way to avoid a dark age is to avoid creating a false dichotomy and thus avoid an unpleasant war over feelings, which have no place in science anyway.
Science and religion mix great. Literally, for over a thousand years. Get a grip. As you point out, there's no room for religion in scientific discovery, so why do you assholes insist on bringing it up?
I believe that people who do work should be paid for it. I believe the people doing the buying should select a good vendor. I don't believe the government is entitled to a different reality than the rest of us in this regard.
I'm really annoyed at Google for this bullshit, and the new license is only going to increase adoption of a technology that should have been stillborn.
I think the unfortunate truth is that cross-platform as a concept doesn't really exist today. With clever tricks, you can manage to get "the same" app to run on several OSes but truly different platforms and those codebases are going to have to be forked. And this sucks.
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I would almost agree with you if we were talking about chess, where players are meaningfully distinguished by the rules of the game, but we're not talking about a game in which that happens. There are exactly six different games in rock-paper-scissors. A computer doesn't have to do anything differently to account for which player is which in analyzing this game.
Even if I agreed with you, you're missing the point. The OP stated that there are an infinite number of rock-paper-scissors games. Either one is substantially less than infinite.
There are exactly 6 different rock-paper-scissors games:
The other factors you bring up are irrelevant if the number of possible games is small.
I am a Mercurial user from way back, and my platforms of choice are OS X, BSD and Linux. Don't use Windows at all. But I would admit that it is somewhat easier for Windows users to get rolling with it than Git, or at least, it has been in the past.
According to Wikipedia, there are 2,455,837 "total" military personnel in the USA. Do you find it as statistically interesting when phrased like this: "0.4% of the military was willing to break their oaths and testify in front of congress"?
The interest the government has in granting security clearances is in whether or not you can be bought or blackmailed, not whether or not you are rational or follow orders perfectly. Furthermore, being told not to talk about something doesn't necessarily constitute an oath. Does it seem far-fetched that a superior officer would tell a subordinate not to talk about a weird hallucination they had? Would that not jive better with suppression and accusation of destroyed evidence, which probably never existed in the first place?
In any event, what would make these stories more compelling is greater detail and internal consistency. The vague stuff we get in PR dispatches like this intentionally leave out a lot of the detail, both to make it creepier and to hide inconsistencies between different reports.
This is because MySQL and PostgreSQL are in the same class. If you need a small, embeddable database, SQLite fits the bill better than MySQL or PostgreSQL. If you need a multi-user database and are willing to run a server, there's no technical reason to choose MySQL over PostgreSQL. And indeed, the only reasons I see MySQL being chosen are:
I see a lot less misinformation about PostgreSQL these days, just a lot of ignorance of its existence and capabilities.
Database prudes are the way we are because there's a lot riding on the decision, and people choosing MySQL almost invariably have neither the education nor the experiences we have had and simply don't understand the issues.
Look on the back of all your ATM cards. I bet you have one with the Pulse logo.
Maybe the problem is that in the time it takes you to remove the stickers, you've already gotten three viruses.
Ironic, then, that in the choice-laden PC laptop market, you don't get to choose not having these fucking stickers.
Only open sourcing it earlier? So they could undermine a larger version of their own community?
Open sourcing Solaris clearly did not save Solaris. Solaris is probably a better operating system than Linux, but apparently the only way Oracle thought it could be “saved” it is by charging a fortune to shove it down the throats of its own customers. Whatever. Worse certainly seems better in this case.
First, let's make sure there are no jobs in America for people with advanced degrees.
Second, let's make sure having a Bachelor's degree is meaningless with respect to getting jobs too.
Third, let's take away all the things that make going to college fun.
Boy, this country's going to be a lot of fun in about 20 years...
Thanks. That actually helped a lot.
That's the best explanation I've heard. Thanks.
It's common knowledge that the porn industry optimizes better than the rest of the tech industry.
The research which came out today showed that the difference in performance was on the order of 30%. I have played plenty of other Flash games that didn't have this problem. "Apple hates Adobe" or "Adobe hates Apple" are insufficient explanations for why what is essentially a Super Nintendo game in terms of complexity runs like ass on a platform that's at least three orders of magnitude faster.
You might not like Macs, but if Flash always ran like this, nobody would use it.
I used to play FarmVille, and it astonished me the way it could demolish my <1-year-old MacBook Pro. Does anybody know what exactly it's doing that's so CPU-intensive? The paranoid in me figured it was probably running some sort of password cracker in the background. Is faux 3D tile-based gaming really that expensive on a modern CPU? Is it doing a bunch of unnecessary communication with the server? Is it just really poorly written? That's my best guess. Anybody know what's the deal?
The Y combinator: y f = f (y f).
Quicksort in Haskell:
qsort [] = []
qsort (x:xs) = qsort (filter (< x) xs) ++ [x] ++ qsort (filter (>= x) xs)
The unification algorithm, if you need to use up some space.
The point is that religion and science don't have anything to do with each other. Science marched forward in the past without it mattering what the people on the street thought, and that is going to continue to be the case for as long as experiments can be made and predictions succeed or be disproven.
For some reason in this age, it seems to matter a lot to a particular group of people—atheists—whether or not people take science as a replacement for religion. Yet I don't see anywhere anything like empirical proof that it matters what people believe. As I've said elsewhere in defense of my remarks, science is not a dainty and fragile ideology. Science is made of facts, a method, and math. You can't get a paper accepted to a journal by citing a personal revelation or an obscure verse in a religious text. Nobody's even trying. So what's the fuss about?
The truth is that there is a fuss because atheism is itself a religion. Why would it matter to scientific progress what the practitioners believe? Either the results are valid or they aren't. There's a desire for policy decisions to be made based on science, but science doesn't and cannot produce morality because there is no fundamental particle of morality.
Don't misunderstand me, I'm not arguing for theocracy. I'm just pointing out that science is not a philosophy of life and it isn't vulnerable to these things at all. If the whole country decides science is wrong, that won't change the fact that it is right, and whatever countries retain that will succeed. That's the history. I'm certainly not arguing that religion needs to be there to sponsor science. On the contrary. I'm arguing that science and religion are completely independent entities.
The only thing atheists have to be pissed off about is biblical literalists who disbelieve in evolution or cosmology. Well, so what? You don't have to believe in Von Neumann for computers to be real and for them to work the way they do. Let the people who choose to be ignorant choose to be ignorant. And leave all the other religious people out of it! They aren't looking for scientific validation and science isn't looking for religious validation.
Until somebody gets a paper accepted in an academic journal which cites the Bible for proof instead of empirical results, there's nothing to discuss. Science is safe simply because it is science—you cannot fake empiricism.
Do you know what the Five Pillars of Islam are?
The best you are going to get here is one out of five. Their book even makes provision for people of any other faith based on their actions, not their beliefs.
You take your feelings on faith. You love your boyfriend, girlfriend, dog or whatever on faith. You choose your career based on what you like to do. Rationality is not the only thing happening in that head of yours. Nor is religion the only thing happening in the head of the faithful of whatever religion we happen to be talking about.
One of the ironies here is that the defenders of science seem to believe (without any empirical evidence, of course) that something really bad will happen to science if religious people practice it. Well, science is invulnerable to religion. Science is nothing more than the scientific method plus a little math. There's no room there for belief. So please explain to me what exactly is so threatening about religion? Either the experiment works and the math is right, or it isn't. No amount of prayer has any effect on it.
I'm really not worried about it.
I'm getting really sick of having this debate.
The answer is a definite yes. For two reasons. The most obnoxious one is that you're conflating two different things: religion and faith. Christianity is the only religion that conflates religion and belief. You can be Jewish without having faith. All you have to believe in to be Muslim is that there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet. Nothing in there about creation in seven days. Buddhists and Taoists would laugh at this debate.
The second, and I think more important point is that you're ignoring history. Scientific inquiry was really initiated during our dark ages not by some island of enlightened atheists, but by Muslims living in tolerant Muslim empires. Their science got hamstrung essentially by a combination of factors including the fact that they couldn't study anatomy (it would require images of people). Then science took root, again, not in some atheist dreamworld, but in an extremely Catholic Europe.
It is a fundamental idea in Judaism, Christianity and Islam that G-d created a universe that is comprehensible and that studying it is a form of praise. Religion, by and large, does not have a problem with science. Certain sects of Christianity may have a problem with it, but they are the tiny--but very vocal--minority. Positioning science as an epic battle between the religious and the atheist is probably the best way to ensure its irrelevance to the vast majority of humanity. So why bother? The best way to avoid a dark age is to avoid creating a false dichotomy and thus avoid an unpleasant war over feelings, which have no place in science anyway.
Science and religion mix great. Literally, for over a thousand years. Get a grip. As you point out, there's no room for religion in scientific discovery, so why do you assholes insist on bringing it up?
I believe that people who do work should be paid for it. I believe the people doing the buying should select a good vendor. I don't believe the government is entitled to a different reality than the rest of us in this regard.
Upmod. You're absolutely right.
I'm really annoyed at Google for this bullshit, and the new license is only going to increase adoption of a technology that should have been stillborn.
I think the unfortunate truth is that cross-platform as a concept doesn't really exist today. With clever tricks, you can manage to get "the same" app to run on several OSes but truly different platforms and those codebases are going to have to be forked. And this sucks.