Despite what you may think, science does not live on the island alone. It lives with most, if not all, the other disciplines because they all deal with a common link: humans. Therefore the disciplines interact with each other. Although with the way scientists think/act and how they come across to others maybe they should be on the island by themselves since they don't seem to want to play with anyone else who disagrees with them. I'll go take my toys and play at my house now. Call me when you can act more mature.
I much prefer Scrat from Ice Age 2 as he is trying to plug the holes in the wall of ice using every free limb he can as the water is shooting out of it in various places while holding on to his precious acorn.
because plasmas have such vibrant colors and they are bright. They may have burn-in but my 19" LCD monitor for my PC also can suffer burn-in if the same image is on it for more than a couple days at a time so LCDs aren't impervious to it. Plasmas may be more expensive but IMO they are superior which warrants the price.
Unfortunately many projects that are funded by taxpayer money (many are FBI related) get deployed without a hitch but you never hear about those (especially if they are classified). So you complain that they really messed things up but where is your praise when they do something right? True, you don't necessarily hear about those projects but you know they have to exist (I've been on some FBI projects and I'm proud to say they have worked well and continue to do so) so why make a statement such as yours blaming them for messing up when their successes outnumber their failures?
By the way, although it was a project where the FBI was the customer, it wasn't only the gov't at fault nor was it totally purposeful. SAIC (the contractor) had management changes on their side and the FBI did as well, and I'm sure we all know that managers like to put their 2 cents in which caused requirements to change all the time. You can't deploy a system when you are trying to hit a moving target. I'm not sure why this story is even news since VCF failed months ago and there were articles posted then on various sites about it. One article I remember reading mentioned that a large portion of the money spent was on hardware which can be reused so it's not like it was all wasted. By the way, many corporations in the public sector screw up big projects too; that ability isn't relegated to the US (or foreign) gov't.
One last note I have to say is that a project is underway to supercede VCF due to its failures. I can't say what its name is since I don't know if it has been made public but I work as a subcontractor for the prime contractor who was awarded the contract. There is a huge amount of pressure to get things done quickly to show the gov't that the people working on it know what they are doing so it won't fail like the previous version of the VCF. If I'm lucky I may get to work on it in the coming months just to expand my technical skills and learn a thing or two.
what a book talking about the Divine Proportion as in the number Phi. I'm nearing the end of a book called the Golden Ratio that mentions various names for phi (golden ratio, divine proportion, and there are others). It seems the reviewed book is way too reliant upon mathematics to be fun reading. This book might about the same Divine Proportion but I didn't see anything speciying so in the review.
I still wonder how scientists *know* that their estimates for the amount of anything in the universe is close or how they can be so bold to even attempt to calculate a value on the scale of the universe. Sure, they can perform additional experiments or observations with better equipment (such as this article explains) but they are still attempting to put a value on something that has to be measured across the whole universe. It seems they are a just a bit big-headed to think they can measure something on that scale. They may be only 15% off now than what they were at before but where is the proof that the value they had before was even remotely close? How do we know it isn't 30% in the other direction? It's like the fox guarding the henhouse; we have scientists telling us they are either right or wrong concerning their own measurements. I truly am interested in how scientists can make measurements on the scale of the universe and how they know whether or not they are even close to being correct. Does anyone have any answer for me?
You would think that a university campus, full of students who could use that extra hundreds of dollars saved from not buying MSO more than most people, would be a perfect place to push Open Office.
Remember, the campus book store is the same place that gives you $10 for a $150 calculus book after the semester is over, and the campus itself is a money-making scheme to keep you going there for 4 years (to take the same classes you had the previous 12 years) while you wait for that piece of paper that says you know something (in reference to the US collegiate system).
given the fact that cats can get a feline form of AIDS and pass it on to other cats through the same means as the dogs in the article. One of my mom's cats got AIDS (not sure how) and ended up passing it on to another one of her's because they were always playing with each other and the one bit the other. The bitten one is so bad now that he may have to be put to sleep because his organs are beginning to shutdown. It has probably been about 7 years since he was infected. The originally infected cat is still doing just fine and shows no signs of infection.
The point wasn't to state for a fact whether X or Y exists at all but to only state that whether you believe in something or not doesn't affect the outcome of X or Y's existence. The atheists of the world don't believe in God but He still exists despite what their beliefs are.
I want my games to be played by millions of people everywhere (the last one I worked on had 2+ million copies sold).
... and 10,000+ pirated.
Grammar/spelling nazi mode on On a side note, you don't need to use apostrophes with acronyms when showing the plural form and the market for games on Macs is nonexistent, not inexistant. Carry on. Grammar/spelling nazi mode off
There is an article in the latest Wired about the guy who was called in to design the $100 laptop. It looks like something Fisher Price would make (but he gives the reason for that in the article).
Actually you can see more than just a road going into the side of the mountain. Using GoogleEarth I can see a large parking lot surrounding a large building next to the mountainside. Also, for some reason, there seems to be 2 relatively large black spots ( of irregular shape) in that area and I'm not sure if they are trying to hide something or if it is just a hole in their image data. Using GoogleMaps you can zoom in far enough that you can see through the black areas so it almost leads me to believe they are hiding something but the weird thing is that some of the black splotches are over top of a nearby golf course.
Itanium is dead but not Itanium2. HP uses Itanium2 chips in their SuperDome enterprise servers. There is a study going on where I work for a gov't agency as to the viability (I guess that's what they are studying; I'm not part of it and just know the study exists) of using SuperDomes with Itanium2 instead of the current installment of PA-RISC processors in their SuperDomes.
That's because they've found the back door I embedded in it while no-one was looking last Christmas. Wait, someone's at the door.
Offtopic - It's "last holiday" you insensitive clod. Think of all the atheists you just offended. By the way, I forgot to wish all the Americans happy holiday recently. Remember, we aren't allowed to say "Independence Day" (oops, sorry) because that would offend people who don't set off fireworks or maybe it offends those who aren't truly independent. I don't know.
I know you were being sarcastic but I'll bite. The answer is yes at least for certain U.S. gov't departments. I work on a U.S. gov't contract and when implementing a custom application that was ported to Java we had to abide by security requirements as part of our overall project requirements. One of those requirements was that no passwords shall be sent in the clear but the kicker was that we had to use something that was FIPS compliant and certified. I was told the mere use of certified algorithms wasn't enough but that meant we had to buy something because rolling our own implementation of the algorithms would require certification and we didn't have time or the money for that.
In the end it was sufficient to roll our own and write up what was done until a long term solution was developed. It was a pain in the ass because of the products that are FIPS compliant, a lot of them are hardware solutions and some of the others weren't even available for use outside of the company who developed them. An example of that was a library that I believe IBM made. I contacted the people listed on the FIPS site for that item and I was told that the library was for internal use only. A lot of good it does for it to be listed on the FIPS site. We also needed a Java implementation which made it even more difficult because the FIPS 140-2 list just isn't that long which lowers the chances of finding just what you need. YMMV
It wasn't even that the software was of higher quality than software from MS but in many cases MS doesn't even provide utilities like Sysinternals and Winternals provided. I love regmon, filemon, and process explorer and I don't know of any equivalents from MS (but they may very well exist).
IANAL of course, but it looks to me like if you're a sysadmin at a commercial entity, you can't use their previously-free tools for free any more.
I don't like the sound of this either. The better question is whether an admin can continue to use the tools at a commercial entity if they had downloaded the files prior to the EULA changing. Since the EULA that they received upon that download said they could I would think that they can but I wonder how that works now that there is a different EULA. Can they be forced to operate under the new EULA without having downloaded another (new) copy of the software or the new EULA?
Actually the Big Bang could very well be the exact same thing that is called the Creation in the Holy Bible. They do not necessarily have to be 2 different events. Whether the scientists know it or not they may very well be finding evidence of events that are described in the Holy Bible but you'll never hear them admit that. Actually, when I say divine intervention it is still nice to know that there is evidence to support the idea because without such there are people like you who declare it to be nonsense. Some would argue that there is no evidence for evolution or that any evidence that does exist is being interpreted incorrectly so just because evidence exists for a theory or fact doesn't mean it is used properly.
The reason for a causitive agent to not also be subject to the rules of causality is due to what philosophers call absolution. There has to be absolutes in the world (universe). The Creator of the universe does not need to be created himself/herself if he/she is capable of creating the universe. The Creator just is.
I ask you to re-examine some of the things that physicists are proposing (and also the ideas that the other person who replied to my message mentioned) before you say that people who believe in divine intervention are abandoning the rules of reason and logic. Physicists define the period before the Big Bang as being before time existed. How logical and reasonable is that? Evidence and observation can also be meaningless if not interpreted correctly as I stated before and don't act like scientists are perfect in doing those interpretations because if they were we would probably already have the Grand Unified Theory defined. Scientists abandon the rules of evidence when evidence resembling swiss cheese is used to treat a theory as fact (evolution) without any caveats that they could be wrong (such as in the book I'm reading by Martin Rees called Just 6 Numbers). Bottom line: Scientists abandon the same rules you accuse others of abandoning.
Well the Big Bang was the process of a ball of matter the size of a quarter (or in the current book I'm reading I believe the author says that it could be the size of a single atom) that exploded to create the universe. If that is the case then the obvious part of the complete answer to "what existed before the Big Bang?" would be "a ball of matter" however that still doesn't explain what else there was. Scientists should at least be willing to answer where the ball of matter came from. There has to be something that even placed that ball into existence whether the physicists want to admit it (or have an answer to that) or not. At a certain point you have to start inserting external factors into the equation (no pun intended) in order to have some way of answering those types of questions. One (and maybe the only one needed) external factor would be divine intervention as much as most scientists and many laymen would hate to hear. That ball just didn't exist "forever" and decided to explode one day to create the universe as we know it. If it did then why can't it be said that the universe already existed with that ball of matter as a part of it and the nature of the universe just simply changed by the explosion of that ball?
He then proceeds on to the standard "argument from conditional probability" where the universe has exactly these constants because if it didn't we wouldn't be here to see it.
It could be argued that the cause and effect you describe is backwards. We aren't here because of the universe the way it is but the universe is the way it is because we are here and we need the universe to be the way it is to survive. Of course, if you believe everything is left to chance then scientists are left to figure this stuff out on their own wondering whether they have any of it right (and many times they do not). That is in opposition to the concept of every living entity being placed here (not just appeared one day because of a few hundred chance occurrences that happened to have all occurred in the right order). There are lots of cosmology books that all but say that there was divine intervention that set the various values of the universe (expansion rate, force levels, etc.) but instead of actually just accepting divine intervention scientists still try to figure out exactly what caused the universe variables to have the value they have and when that actually occurred.
I still have to wonder what the scientific view is on what existed before the Big Bang occurred since that created the *whole* universe and without that there is nothing. Does the Big Bang imply that the whole universe was created from a ball of something that existed in a bunch of nothing? What existed before the universe while it was still in its ball? Where did the ball (of matter) come from (first issue I brought up in this paragraph)? I've never read a cosmology book that answered that interesting question.
Not to label religious zealots as fools, but we can't move to another place until the zealots decide, one way or another, to not be zealots anymore.
Something similar can be said for the progressive zealots in that we can move to another place but it won't necessarily be the right one (although they will obviously think it is because it was their idea).
why state-sponsored murder of people in a coma is a Bad Thing. They are still alive, period. They aren't dead until they are dead; quality of life is just inserted into the situation for people who like making a gray area where none exists to begin with. Keeping things black and white makes them simpler.
Slashdot Mirror
These issues do not belong in science.
Despite what you may think, science does not live on the island alone. It lives with most, if not all, the other disciplines because they all deal with a common link: humans. Therefore the disciplines interact with each other. Although with the way scientists think/act and how they come across to others maybe they should be on the island by themselves since they don't seem to want to play with anyone else who disagrees with them. I'll go take my toys and play at my house now. Call me when you can act more mature.
I much prefer Scrat from Ice Age 2 as he is trying to plug the holes in the wall of ice using every free limb he can as the water is shooting out of it in various places while holding on to his precious acorn.
because plasmas have such vibrant colors and they are bright. They may have burn-in but my 19" LCD monitor for my PC also can suffer burn-in if the same image is on it for more than a couple days at a time so LCDs aren't impervious to it. Plasmas may be more expensive but IMO they are superior which warrants the price.
Unfortunately many projects that are funded by taxpayer money (many are FBI related) get deployed without a hitch but you never hear about those (especially if they are classified). So you complain that they really messed things up but where is your praise when they do something right? True, you don't necessarily hear about those projects but you know they have to exist (I've been on some FBI projects and I'm proud to say they have worked well and continue to do so) so why make a statement such as yours blaming them for messing up when their successes outnumber their failures?
By the way, although it was a project where the FBI was the customer, it wasn't only the gov't at fault nor was it totally purposeful. SAIC (the contractor) had management changes on their side and the FBI did as well, and I'm sure we all know that managers like to put their 2 cents in which caused requirements to change all the time. You can't deploy a system when you are trying to hit a moving target. I'm not sure why this story is even news since VCF failed months ago and there were articles posted then on various sites about it. One article I remember reading mentioned that a large portion of the money spent was on hardware which can be reused so it's not like it was all wasted. By the way, many corporations in the public sector screw up big projects too; that ability isn't relegated to the US (or foreign) gov't.
One last note I have to say is that a project is underway to supercede VCF due to its failures. I can't say what its name is since I don't know if it has been made public but I work as a subcontractor for the prime contractor who was awarded the contract. There is a huge amount of pressure to get things done quickly to show the gov't that the people working on it know what they are doing so it won't fail like the previous version of the VCF. If I'm lucky I may get to work on it in the coming months just to expand my technical skills and learn a thing or two.
what a book talking about the Divine Proportion as in the number Phi. I'm nearing the end of a book called the Golden Ratio that mentions various names for phi (golden ratio, divine proportion, and there are others). It seems the reviewed book is way too reliant upon mathematics to be fun reading. This book might about the same Divine Proportion but I didn't see anything speciying so in the review.
I still wonder how scientists *know* that their estimates for the amount of anything in the universe is close or how they can be so bold to even attempt to calculate a value on the scale of the universe. Sure, they can perform additional experiments or observations with better equipment (such as this article explains) but they are still attempting to put a value on something that has to be measured across the whole universe. It seems they are a just a bit big-headed to think they can measure something on that scale. They may be only 15% off now than what they were at before but where is the proof that the value they had before was even remotely close? How do we know it isn't 30% in the other direction? It's like the fox guarding the henhouse; we have scientists telling us they are either right or wrong concerning their own measurements. I truly am interested in how scientists can make measurements on the scale of the universe and how they know whether or not they are even close to being correct. Does anyone have any answer for me?
You would think that a university campus, full of students who could use that extra hundreds of dollars saved from not buying MSO more than most people, would be a perfect place to push Open Office.
Remember, the campus book store is the same place that gives you $10 for a $150 calculus book after the semester is over, and the campus itself is a money-making scheme to keep you going there for 4 years (to take the same classes you had the previous 12 years) while you wait for that piece of paper that says you know something (in reference to the US collegiate system).
class action lawsuit? What ever happened to "guarantee of merchantability" and "works as advertised"?
given the fact that cats can get a feline form of AIDS and pass it on to other cats through the same means as the dogs in the article. One of my mom's cats got AIDS (not sure how) and ended up passing it on to another one of her's because they were always playing with each other and the one bit the other. The bitten one is so bad now that he may have to be put to sleep because his organs are beginning to shutdown. It has probably been about 7 years since he was infected. The originally infected cat is still doing just fine and shows no signs of infection.
The point wasn't to state for a fact whether X or Y exists at all but to only state that whether you believe in something or not doesn't affect the outcome of X or Y's existence. The atheists of the world don't believe in God but He still exists despite what their beliefs are.
Just because you don't believe in Him or despite how much you may not want Him to exist that doesn't stop him from existing.
I want my games to be played by millions of people everywhere (the last one I worked on had 2+ million copies sold).
... and 10,000+ pirated.
Grammar/spelling nazi mode on On a side note, you don't need to use apostrophes with acronyms when showing the plural form and the market for games on Macs is nonexistent, not inexistant. Carry on. Grammar/spelling nazi mode off
There is an article in the latest Wired about the guy who was called in to design the $100 laptop. It looks like something Fisher Price would make (but he gives the reason for that in the article).
Actually you can see more than just a road going into the side of the mountain. Using GoogleEarth I can see a large parking lot surrounding a large building next to the mountainside. Also, for some reason, there seems to be 2 relatively large black spots ( of irregular shape) in that area and I'm not sure if they are trying to hide something or if it is just a hole in their image data. Using GoogleMaps you can zoom in far enough that you can see through the black areas so it almost leads me to believe they are hiding something but the weird thing is that some of the black splotches are over top of a nearby golf course.
Don't forget http://www.kde-look.org/index.php?xcontentmode=8x9 x10x11x12x13x14x15x16
Itanium is dead but not Itanium2. HP uses Itanium2 chips in their SuperDome enterprise servers. There is a study going on where I work for a gov't agency as to the viability (I guess that's what they are studying; I'm not part of it and just know the study exists) of using SuperDomes with Itanium2 instead of the current installment of PA-RISC processors in their SuperDomes.
That's because they've found the back door I embedded in it while no-one was looking last Christmas. Wait, someone's at the door.
Offtopic - It's "last holiday" you insensitive clod. Think of all the atheists you just offended. By the way, I forgot to wish all the Americans happy holiday recently. Remember, we aren't allowed to say "Independence Day" (oops, sorry) because that would offend people who don't set off fireworks or maybe it offends those who aren't truly independent. I don't know.
I know you were being sarcastic but I'll bite. The answer is yes at least for certain U.S. gov't departments. I work on a U.S. gov't contract and when implementing a custom application that was ported to Java we had to abide by security requirements as part of our overall project requirements. One of those requirements was that no passwords shall be sent in the clear but the kicker was that we had to use something that was FIPS compliant and certified. I was told the mere use of certified algorithms wasn't enough but that meant we had to buy something because rolling our own implementation of the algorithms would require certification and we didn't have time or the money for that.
In the end it was sufficient to roll our own and write up what was done until a long term solution was developed. It was a pain in the ass because of the products that are FIPS compliant, a lot of them are hardware solutions and some of the others weren't even available for use outside of the company who developed them. An example of that was a library that I believe IBM made. I contacted the people listed on the FIPS site for that item and I was told that the library was for internal use only. A lot of good it does for it to be listed on the FIPS site. We also needed a Java implementation which made it even more difficult because the FIPS 140-2 list just isn't that long which lowers the chances of finding just what you need. YMMV
It wasn't even that the software was of higher quality than software from MS but in many cases MS doesn't even provide utilities like Sysinternals and Winternals provided. I love regmon, filemon, and process explorer and I don't know of any equivalents from MS (but they may very well exist).
IANAL of course, but it looks to me like if you're a sysadmin at a commercial entity, you can't use their previously-free tools for free any more.
I don't like the sound of this either. The better question is whether an admin can continue to use the tools at a commercial entity if they had downloaded the files prior to the EULA changing. Since the EULA that they received upon that download said they could I would think that they can but I wonder how that works now that there is a different EULA. Can they be forced to operate under the new EULA without having downloaded another (new) copy of the software or the new EULA?
Actually the Big Bang could very well be the exact same thing that is called the Creation in the Holy Bible. They do not necessarily have to be 2 different events. Whether the scientists know it or not they may very well be finding evidence of events that are described in the Holy Bible but you'll never hear them admit that. Actually, when I say divine intervention it is still nice to know that there is evidence to support the idea because without such there are people like you who declare it to be nonsense. Some would argue that there is no evidence for evolution or that any evidence that does exist is being interpreted incorrectly so just because evidence exists for a theory or fact doesn't mean it is used properly.
The reason for a causitive agent to not also be subject to the rules of causality is due to what philosophers call absolution. There has to be absolutes in the world (universe). The Creator of the universe does not need to be created himself/herself if he/she is capable of creating the universe. The Creator just is.
I ask you to re-examine some of the things that physicists are proposing (and also the ideas that the other person who replied to my message mentioned) before you say that people who believe in divine intervention are abandoning the rules of reason and logic. Physicists define the period before the Big Bang as being before time existed. How logical and reasonable is that? Evidence and observation can also be meaningless if not interpreted correctly as I stated before and don't act like scientists are perfect in doing those interpretations because if they were we would probably already have the Grand Unified Theory defined. Scientists abandon the rules of evidence when evidence resembling swiss cheese is used to treat a theory as fact (evolution) without any caveats that they could be wrong (such as in the book I'm reading by Martin Rees called Just 6 Numbers). Bottom line: Scientists abandon the same rules you accuse others of abandoning.
Well the Big Bang was the process of a ball of matter the size of a quarter (or in the current book I'm reading I believe the author says that it could be the size of a single atom) that exploded to create the universe. If that is the case then the obvious part of the complete answer to "what existed before the Big Bang?" would be "a ball of matter" however that still doesn't explain what else there was. Scientists should at least be willing to answer where the ball of matter came from. There has to be something that even placed that ball into existence whether the physicists want to admit it (or have an answer to that) or not. At a certain point you have to start inserting external factors into the equation (no pun intended) in order to have some way of answering those types of questions. One (and maybe the only one needed) external factor would be divine intervention as much as most scientists and many laymen would hate to hear. That ball just didn't exist "forever" and decided to explode one day to create the universe as we know it. If it did then why can't it be said that the universe already existed with that ball of matter as a part of it and the nature of the universe just simply changed by the explosion of that ball?
He then proceeds on to the standard "argument from conditional probability" where the universe has exactly these constants because if it didn't we wouldn't be here to see it.
It could be argued that the cause and effect you describe is backwards. We aren't here because of the universe the way it is but the universe is the way it is because we are here and we need the universe to be the way it is to survive. Of course, if you believe everything is left to chance then scientists are left to figure this stuff out on their own wondering whether they have any of it right (and many times they do not). That is in opposition to the concept of every living entity being placed here (not just appeared one day because of a few hundred chance occurrences that happened to have all occurred in the right order). There are lots of cosmology books that all but say that there was divine intervention that set the various values of the universe (expansion rate, force levels, etc.) but instead of actually just accepting divine intervention scientists still try to figure out exactly what caused the universe variables to have the value they have and when that actually occurred.
I still have to wonder what the scientific view is on what existed before the Big Bang occurred since that created the *whole* universe and without that there is nothing. Does the Big Bang imply that the whole universe was created from a ball of something that existed in a bunch of nothing? What existed before the universe while it was still in its ball? Where did the ball (of matter) come from (first issue I brought up in this paragraph)? I've never read a cosmology book that answered that interesting question.
Not to label religious zealots as fools, but we can't move to another place until the zealots decide, one way or another, to not be zealots anymore.
Something similar can be said for the progressive zealots in that we can move to another place but it won't necessarily be the right one (although they will obviously think it is because it was their idea).
why state-sponsored murder of people in a coma is a Bad Thing. They are still alive, period. They aren't dead until they are dead; quality of life is just inserted into the situation for people who like making a gray area where none exists to begin with. Keeping things black and white makes them simpler.