All kidding aside, the value of a pound of aluminum in LEO has to be thousands of dollars... I wonder if someday it might make sense for a larger, commercial space station to try to capture any random piece of matter that crosses its orbit, just for raw materials.
I think the real ignorance here is your ignorance of Go. Go is a game in which the difference between a "good" and "bad" position has to be judged intuitively and, dare I say, artistically. It is not really comparable to mathematically reducible games like Mancala, Chess, Backgammon, Draughts/Checkers, etc., because of the level of pattern recognition required just to understand what is going on and to recognize a pattern developing early on when there may be just one or two stones going in that direction.
In the words of the novel Shibumi, "Go is to chess as philosophy is to double-entry accounting."
Trying to teach a computer to play Go has, up to this point, been about like trying to teach a computer how to evaluate a painting. And, judging by the computing resources required, it sounds like all they did here was brute-force it, so they really haven't "taught" the computer anything.
Reading this got me to thinking about what, exactly, I would like to see in a new space sim in this post-WoW age. And what occurred to me was this: a realistic space sim would have a fairly unique advantage over most other mmo's. Namely, the physics of it are well understood and easily modeled. And that in turn set me to wondering whether it would be possible to have a truly distributed gaming universe. That is, one in which people could create their own weapons/ships/whatever, and it would be fair because such items would have to follow a shared set of well understood rules in order to work. These rules could then be enforced on the server side, and you could (perhaps) have a working economy. Think of it as an open source MMORPG, based around space combat, space exploration, trading (a la Elite), all built around a shared physics and economics engine enforced on the server side... I really think it could be quite cool.
I play a lot of WoW, but I think the thing that frustrates me most about it is that it's all arbitrary. I can only craft what Blizzard says I can craft. If Blizzard decides to make all of my hard-won T6 gear obsolete (say with the release of Wrath of the Lich King?), then I'm up the proverbial creek, and have no choice but to go back to grinding just to remain competitive. If they choose tomorrow to release a leather helm with 5000 armor and +1000 stamina for the bargain price of 10,000 gold, they can. Not that there's necessarily anything WRONG with that... just would love to have something a bit more open.
Sadly, while I'm a programmer, I'm not a games programmer, so I'm not in a position to do anything about this idea. But let me place it in the public domain, and hope someone else gets what I'm not managing to express very clearly enough to run with it. I'd certainly pay for the server side:)
Heinlein published a bunch of Juveniles in the fifties aimed at precisely that age group. Some of the titles (can't remember all) include:
Star Beast
Have Spacesuit, Will Travel
Rocketship Galileo
Between Planets
Podkayne of Mars (think this was actually published later, has a female protagonist.)
Also, you might take a look at *some* of Orson Scott Card's stuff. My son (10) loved Ender's game and the "back on earth" followups (Ender's Shadow, etc.)
At my current employer, we use a scheme something like "{location}{application}{function}{number}". And I hate it. DNS is designed to be a hierarchical system, and I don't understand why, in the name of all that's sane, we don't use that. I'd suggest that, at the very least, create a DNS subdomain for each location. So, you might have "richmond.company.com" for all the servers in your Richmond data center. Or, perhaps application groupings are more important to you (I actually think that, on modern networks, location is not all that important.) So how about "www1.hr.internal.company.com"?
What I truly hate is something like this: ricldapweb1.company.com. It's completely illegible, makes no sense, and tries to pack way to much information into just one level of the dns hierarchy. DNS has hierarchies with semantic significance. Use them.
In philosophy of science, there's a very interesting concept called "falsifiability". This was offered back in the 30's and 40's by Karl Popper as the dividing line between a scientific theory and a non-scientific theory. Popper argued (I personally think convincingly) that the process by which one arrives at a theory was irrelevant to the question of whether it was scientific. What was much more important was the ease with which a theory could be falsified. The issue is not whether a falsifying observation has been found, but whether one CAN be conceived of. On this basis, Popper opined that many of the social sciences (especially history and political science) were NOT scientific.
What I find intriguing here is that we have what would appear to be a falsifying observation being offered for Intelligent Design, which ironically tends to validate it as being a scientific theory, even as it is perhaps being disproved. However, as I try to think of a simply, falsifying observation that would disprove evolution, I'm drawing a blank. Yes, there are many complex possibilities -- develop a time machine and go back and check, etc. -- but nothing simple and straightforward that could happen in the here and now. Maybe I'm wrong, and those wiser than I can offer something. (My training is in philosophy and theology, not biology.) But right now, it looks to me like Intelligent Design is actually *more* scientific by Popper's criteria than Evolution, because it is more easily disproved.
And if evolution is not really falsifiable by a simple observation (and I've debated this more than once and never been offered a *simple* falsifying observation), then perhaps it is evolution that is not scientific?
Not to be a snob, but my IQ according to at least 3 professionally administered IQ tests when I was in elementary and secondary school is at least 150, and they scored me at 112. SAT and GRE scores are similarly high. This might have had something to do with lag and the slashdot effect, but I still wouldn't put too much credence on this test.
(Why the schools kept giving me IQ tests is a sad, complicated story, but suffice it to say that I was NOT an over-achiever. One of my proudest achievements is being both a national merit semi-finalist and a high-school dropout.)
1) Automated copy-n-paste is still copy-n-paste
Maybe it's changed since the last time I used it, but creating a rails application COPIES a bunch of files from the distribution into the app directory it creates. How do you upgrade? Painfully, that's how. I have numerous small applications that break when I upgrade rails and it's dependencies because the copied files don't work with the newer version. My applications should be 100% code I write directly. Everything else should be kept separate and accessed via includes so emerge/apt/yum/gem dependencies can keep the rails code compatible with itself and I never have to "fix" code I didn't write.
This alone realizes just how low the SNR is on this comment. The "copied" files, in a default rails generation, are something along the lines of:
class Blah
When you upgrade rails, the upgrade comes along automatically unless you deliberately peg to a particular version. Likewise, most of your other comments simply don't make sense in the default case. It seems like you are doing a bunch of stuff that is deliberately "non-Railsish" and that's the source of your problems... and if that's the level of control you want, then, no, Rails is not the framework for you.
My opinion.
In the first place, let me just point out that "Darwinism" and "neo-Darwinism" are terms used within the study of philosophy of science, quite often. Specifically, they refer to philosophical underpinnings of "species formation by natural selection". It does not imply, in any way, that Darwinism is a religious belief, and frankly those who are trying to misinterpret me that way are pretty much showing their collective arses.
In the second place... what term would you have me use? Would you have me spell out "species formation by natural selection" every time I needed to make reference to that concept? Evolution is not a sufficient term, since saying that species evolve is not the same thing as saying that such evolution is sufficient to explain the variety of species we have around us. Most creationists and Intelligent Design types (and, no, they're not the same thing, which you would know if you had ever bothered to study them directly instead of just taking the party line) will acknowledge some sort of evolution. However, to equate evolution within a species to "species formation by natural selection" is a horrible fallacy of composition.
In the third place... if the shoe fits, wear it. The whole point of my post was that "Darwinism" has been attributed an importance it doesn't really merit, for ideological reasons. In response to that core point, I've gotten many screeds about the importance "evolution", on a micro scale, in understanding modern biology--which just shows how little people understand about the Intelligent Design movement. Intelligent design does not deny evolution--it denies that evolution is a sufficient explanation for the variety of biological diversity we see around us. It makes no appeal to the Bible or anything else to justify this--instead, the critique proceeds on scientific grounds. They might be wrong, but they are not "creationists." Creationism proceeds on entirely different grounds--namely, Genesis 1-3--yet even the most hard core Young Earth Creationist will accept that natural selection and evolution are things that are now occurring.
Last of all, I kind of resent being painted as a fundamentalist. I thought I made it fairly clear in the parent post that I actually accept "species formation by natural selection" as a scientific theory. I think that the poorly thought out, ill-informed way in which people have responded to my original post demonstrates exactly the point I was trying to make. Reading all the responses, it appears to me that much of the defense of "species formation by natural selection" proceeds on rather ignorant ideological grounds, driven by people who've never bothered to understand the real reasons of those they caricature.
Saying it's "the woman's business" is a silly, cowardly argument, because it completely sidesteps the real issue: namely, how does the fetus go from "part of the mother's body" to "baby", simply because it traversed the birth canal? Surely you don't think that society should allow infanticide? Would you say, "if a mother wants to kill her baby, that's the woman's business?" You aren't seriously dealing with the very real moral issues that abortion raises.
The current, "only the woman chooses" approach is logically absurd, anyway. Under this approach, if I impregnate a woman, I have no authority, rights, or responsibilities to the baby until it's born. Then, suddenly, I'm responsible again. This doesn't make sense. Either I'm the father all along, and should have both rights and responsibility throughout, or I'm just a sperm donor and shouldn't be responsible at all.
The argument that it isn't a big deal is flawed. An assault on science is an assault on science, and it should be treated as such.
Here you do a grand job of making my precise point. This isn't about what's true. It's about a grand, failed vision of science as the only source of meaning and significance. 1950 called, they want their logical positivism back.
I also find it instructive the way you conflate Darwinism with genetics. This is a fallacy of composition: the Intelligent Design movement criticizes one, and only one proposition, that Darwinian natural selection is a sufficient explanation for the biological world as we see it. This really has *nothing* to do with genetics--it's more a question of how hard you're willing to squint to fit everything into a secularist worldview.
I think it's a pretty poor parody, since it really misses the point. The PI=3 thing is much like the earth being flat... something that no one ever seriously advocated, yet is often brought up as "proof" of the Bible being useful for proving the absurd.
In the second place, the Biblical case against homosexuality is a lot more than "out-of-context Leviticus quotes." The Bible consistently rejects homosexuality, in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.
There's really a much simpler way to do this... Just impregnate your cows, then abort them right before they would have given birth anyway. Since the fetus wasn't "alive" anyway (according to liberal dogma), nothing suffered.
Don't be silly... The Bible's measurement of those "Seas" was exactly correct: to one significant digit. I know a lot of fundamentalists althought I'm not one (I'm a part-time pastor), yet I don't know ANYONE who believes pi is exactly equal to 3. Everyone recognizes that that is just not the point of the Bible. It's like what I've always said: "I don't believe in the sort of {Bible,God} that the skeptics don't believe in, either." Stop beating up on straw men.
There's so much I would like to say here, and I rather doubt that I'll get it all said, but I'll make a stab at it.
In the first place, I haven't seen the movie, so can't really comment on Stein's take. However, I have looked at the "sociology" of the Evolution/Intelligent Design/Creationism debate a fair amount, and what I see disturbs me from all sides.
One major concern I have is the elevation of Darwinian natural selection as a means of species creation to an unrealistic importance. I just don't see why it's so important in and of itself. One could certainly be a competent physician, for example, and not believe in Darwinism (or neo-Darwinism). It seems to me that one could even be a quite competent practitioner of any of the biological sciences (other than the various sorts of paleontology) without necessarily agreeing with Darwinism. Yet, we are constantly told that a failure to teach Darwinism at the high school level will destroy science education as we know it and result in a US population that is hopelessly ignorant of all science, etc. etc.
I just don't buy it. Bluntly, I can scarcely think of a job where a belief in Darwinism is necessary. On the other hand, we have school systems that literally teach absolutely no information science, computer science, etc. etc., and people graduating from college who literally don't know the different between a byte and a gigabyte. It's hard for me to see why this ONE THING is so vitally important, when it has virtually no practical application and there are scientific topics with enormous practical application that go untaught.
Could the real problem be social or (speak softly now) political? It seems to me that that is exactly the case. The extraordinary efforts put forth by various scientific bodies to defend Darwinism from all criticism strike me as a knee-jerk reaction to a knee-jerk fear that the Scope's trial will happen all over again. This isn't about science--it's about continuing the Enlightenment project of supplanting all sources of Meaning (capitalization intended) with Scientific Meaning.
That doesn't mean that I think that Darwinism is wrong. I actually think that it's as right as you're going to get within the boundaries that it sets itself. But I certainly don't think that the loss of Darwinism would destroy American education or anything along those lines. So... people... GET A GRIP.
My $0.02.
The problem I've always had is that few employers seem to really grasp the concept of a salaried position. In a salaried position, I'm hired to get a job done, irrespective of how many hours it takes. If it takes me 40 hours a week, great. 50 hours a week, oh well. 30 hours a week? PARTY!
But most employers don't get this. So they look on salaried as a minimum of 40 hours week. In my particular specialty (troubleshooting really big systems), that's just silly, because often there's nothing to do... so when I was really doing my specialty, I would often end up doing nothing, sitting at my computer just to keep the IM icon lit up, when I could have been resting up for the next 48 hour marathon problem.
It's just annoying... I mean, if I'm salaried, why do a timesheet? Yet they all want a timesheet. If they want me to work free overtime, then they need to g
Remember when the first generation of Windows-ready iPod's came out, which came with MusicMatch Jukebox? Steve extolled it's virtues... only to release iTunes for Windows a year or so later. My guess is that Apple will eventually become a carrier, but just weren't ready to dive into that business Quite Yet. Just give it time, they'll stab AT&T in the back.
If it's like the MSI board I just spent a week fighting with, it actually WILL boot off the CD-ROM. However, what is labeled "CDROM" in the BIOS is NOT the IDE cdrom. It's a SATA CDROM. To select the IDE CDROM, you have to go further down the list and select the actual IDE cdrom drive by name (e.g. mine was a "Memorex DVD-RAM" or something like that.)
This may not work with your board, but might be worth a try.
Configuring failover for Lustre's metadata server seems the obvious solution... there are plenty of FOSS failover solutions (although I for one prefer Veritas VCS for anything critical).
Re:Gotta have source for small, important programs
on
TextMate
·
· Score: 1
Normally, I'd agree with you. But TextMate has made a believer out of me. The advantage of textmate is the extreme ease with which you can write your own macros, snippets, etc.
For example, last night I was doing some coding, and had to do a bunch of form rows in a table. I wrote a textmate snippet to generate the following (never wrote one before, and it took all of five minutes:) <tr>
<th><label for="class_field">Field</th><!--note the capitalization of Field.-->
t;td><%= f.text_field:field></td> </tr>
What cool about this is that all I had to do to enter that and get it correctly adapted for any row was type: frow[tab]CLASS_NAME[tab]FIELD_NAME
TextMate then automatically adjusted each place the class and field name were used to match, including capitalizing and humanizing the field name in the label.
What would have been 5 minutes of grunt code was resolved in five seconds. Could I have done this in other editors? Certainly. But in text mate I did it in five minutes, without even looking at the manual. (And I had never done my own snippet before.)
Add to that the fact that it supports all sorts of snippets by default (in Rails, hit "habtm[tab]" to enter "has_and_belongs_to_many:table...") and it's incredibly productive.
I was a die-hard emacs guy, but textmate has made a conver out of me. It's worth every penny.
1) The difference between true North and magnetic north,
Why not just a "magellan" auto-navigation doohick?
2) How to calculate the rought height of cloud based on knowing dewpoint, ambient temperature, and current altitude. Knowing these things allow you to avoid areas where clouds are likely to form.
Or just send it to the afore-mentioned navigation doohick, and let it plot the route.
3) Knowing all the different altitudes: true, absolute, density, pressure, and indicated.
Did I mention the navigation doohick?
4) Knowing the difference between nautical miles and statutory miles
Navigation... oh, never mind.
5) Knowing how to read a RADAR weather chart, and knowing what it does and does not show.
Doohick.
6) Knowing how to calculate the effect of a crosswind on your actual traveling speed.
Doo.
7) Knowing the difference between true speed, indicated airspeed, and actual airspeed.
Hick.
8) Knowing what altitude to fly at under what conditions based on heading and flight rules.
D... (fill in the blanks.)
9) Knowing how to pull out of a stall or a tailspin reliably.
Seems to me that this is a problem of a fixed-wing aircraft, that wouldn't *necessarily* effect something like the (legendary vapor-ware) Moller (spelling?) air-cars.
The point is that all the problems you enumerate are problems that could either be eliminated or substantially mitigated by the application of appropriate technology. I'm not saying that the technology is there, but I could visualize all of it eventually being developed. To my way of thinking, the biggest issue is identifying a suitably energy-dense/efficient fuel to power the turbines to do something Moller/Herrier style.
uh huh. So, tell me, since I carry a Palm Treo with me, which is perfectly capable of playing MP3s (except for the DRM), how then do I play itunes files on my Treo? Why should I have to by a separate box to play my iTunes files?
Tell me... who was it who politicized science? The evil, wicked, pernicious "fundamentalists" (I'm not one, but I know and like plenty) or the scientific establishment that wants the government to pay for them to teach their position? Like it or not, origin questions, whether we're talking about the age of the universe or evolution or whatever are fundamentally different from other sorts of science, in that they attempt to use scientific means to discover historical facts. By logical necessity, historical studies are NOT subject to reproducible experimentation.
Frankly, I don't CARE whether the guy who makes my burgers, does my taxes, or fixes my computers is a creationist. In fact, I really can't see much of any reason why it matters for anyone in any usual profession what one believes about evolution. My doctor, for example, is one of those nasty fundamentalist creationists that people keep bitching about, and yet he manages to be a very good doctor.
Could it be that there is something bigger than practical concerns at play here? Could it be that the over-the-top efforts to get evolution taught in schools (while ignoring the much more interesting implications of the Big Bang -- so much for steady state!) are part of the larger Enlightenment project of declaring itself as the sole source and final arbiter of truth and meaning?
Nawww... That wouldn't be why the president of the national academy of sciences descended upon some kids science fair project a few years back when it raised questions about Darwinian evolution... It's just Good Science.
The medieval christians thought the purpose of government was to spread the gospel. The chineese thought the purpose of government was to maintain the celestial order.
Balderdash yourself. The medieval Christians weren't particularly concerned with spreading the gospel. Rather, they thought the purpose of government was to preserve civil order by defending the gospel. See, for example, Aquinas. The "crusading" impulse was an impulse to defend Christendom (and something to do with those pesky younger sons), not a missionary plan. The modern missions movement really only got going in the 18th century. The ancient missions movement was a quite different thing.
One more very important one. If you are going to be depending on health insurance offered by your employer, make sure it works at home. Often, HMO style plans really suck if you are not in the same area that they were purchased for. Call the company and make sure there won't be any surprises, and be aware that just because a company has the same name (e.g. United Healthcare) doesn't mean it's the same company in different states.
Yes, I found this out the hard way and it cost me thousands.
Slashdot Mirror
All kidding aside, the value of a pound of aluminum in LEO has to be thousands of dollars... I wonder if someday it might make sense for a larger, commercial space station to try to capture any random piece of matter that crosses its orbit, just for raw materials.
In the words of the novel Shibumi, "Go is to chess as philosophy is to double-entry accounting."
Trying to teach a computer to play Go has, up to this point, been about like trying to teach a computer how to evaluate a painting. And, judging by the computing resources required, it sounds like all they did here was brute-force it, so they really haven't "taught" the computer anything.
I play a lot of WoW, but I think the thing that frustrates me most about it is that it's all arbitrary. I can only craft what Blizzard says I can craft. If Blizzard decides to make all of my hard-won T6 gear obsolete (say with the release of Wrath of the Lich King?), then I'm up the proverbial creek, and have no choice but to go back to grinding just to remain competitive. If they choose tomorrow to release a leather helm with 5000 armor and +1000 stamina for the bargain price of 10,000 gold, they can. Not that there's necessarily anything WRONG with that... just would love to have something a bit more open.
Sadly, while I'm a programmer, I'm not a games programmer, so I'm not in a position to do anything about this idea. But let me place it in the public domain, and hope someone else gets what I'm not managing to express very clearly enough to run with it. I'd certainly pay for the server side :)
Also, you might take a look at *some* of Orson Scott Card's stuff. My son (10) loved Ender's game and the "back on earth" followups (Ender's Shadow, etc.)
What I truly hate is something like this: ricldapweb1.company.com. It's completely illegible, makes no sense, and tries to pack way to much information into just one level of the dns hierarchy. DNS has hierarchies with semantic significance. Use them.
What I find intriguing here is that we have what would appear to be a falsifying observation being offered for Intelligent Design, which ironically tends to validate it as being a scientific theory, even as it is perhaps being disproved. However, as I try to think of a simply, falsifying observation that would disprove evolution, I'm drawing a blank. Yes, there are many complex possibilities -- develop a time machine and go back and check, etc. -- but nothing simple and straightforward that could happen in the here and now. Maybe I'm wrong, and those wiser than I can offer something. (My training is in philosophy and theology, not biology.) But right now, it looks to me like Intelligent Design is actually *more* scientific by Popper's criteria than Evolution, because it is more easily disproved.
And if evolution is not really falsifiable by a simple observation (and I've debated this more than once and never been offered a *simple* falsifying observation), then perhaps it is evolution that is not scientific?
(Why the schools kept giving me IQ tests is a sad, complicated story, but suffice it to say that I was NOT an over-achiever. One of my proudest achievements is being both a national merit semi-finalist and a high-school dropout.)
In the first place, let me just point out that "Darwinism" and "neo-Darwinism" are terms used within the study of philosophy of science, quite often. Specifically, they refer to philosophical underpinnings of "species formation by natural selection". It does not imply, in any way, that Darwinism is a religious belief, and frankly those who are trying to misinterpret me that way are pretty much showing their collective arses.
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinism
In the second place ... what term would you have me use? Would you have me spell out "species formation by natural selection" every time I needed to make reference to that concept? Evolution is not a sufficient term, since saying that species evolve is not the same thing as saying that such evolution is sufficient to explain the variety of species we have around us. Most creationists and Intelligent Design types (and, no, they're not the same thing, which you would know if you had ever bothered to study them directly instead of just taking the party line) will acknowledge some sort of evolution. However, to equate evolution within a species to "species formation by natural selection" is a horrible fallacy of composition.
In the third place ... if the shoe fits, wear it. The whole point of my post was that "Darwinism" has been attributed an importance it doesn't really merit, for ideological reasons. In response to that core point, I've gotten many screeds about the importance "evolution", on a micro scale, in understanding modern biology--which just shows how little people understand about the Intelligent Design movement. Intelligent design does not deny evolution--it denies that evolution is a sufficient explanation for the variety of biological diversity we see around us. It makes no appeal to the Bible or anything else to justify this--instead, the critique proceeds on scientific grounds. They might be wrong, but they are not "creationists." Creationism proceeds on entirely different grounds--namely, Genesis 1-3--yet even the most hard core Young Earth Creationist will accept that natural selection and evolution are things that are now occurring.
Last of all, I kind of resent being painted as a fundamentalist. I thought I made it fairly clear in the parent post that I actually accept "species formation by natural selection" as a scientific theory. I think that the poorly thought out, ill-informed way in which people have responded to my original post demonstrates exactly the point I was trying to make. Reading all the responses, it appears to me that much of the defense of "species formation by natural selection" proceeds on rather ignorant ideological grounds, driven by people who've never bothered to understand the real reasons of those they caricature.
Saying it's "the woman's business" is a silly, cowardly argument, because it completely sidesteps the real issue: namely, how does the fetus go from "part of the mother's body" to "baby", simply because it traversed the birth canal? Surely you don't think that society should allow infanticide? Would you say, "if a mother wants to kill her baby, that's the woman's business?" You aren't seriously dealing with the very real moral issues that abortion raises.
The current, "only the woman chooses" approach is logically absurd, anyway. Under this approach, if I impregnate a woman, I have no authority, rights, or responsibilities to the baby until it's born. Then, suddenly, I'm responsible again. This doesn't make sense. Either I'm the father all along, and should have both rights and responsibility throughout, or I'm just a sperm donor and shouldn't be responsible at all.
I also find it instructive the way you conflate Darwinism with genetics. This is a fallacy of composition: the Intelligent Design movement criticizes one, and only one proposition, that Darwinian natural selection is a sufficient explanation for the biological world as we see it. This really has *nothing* to do with genetics--it's more a question of how hard you're willing to squint to fit everything into a secularist worldview.
In the second place, the Biblical case against homosexuality is a lot more than "out-of-context Leviticus quotes." The Bible consistently rejects homosexuality, in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.
Right?
Don't be silly... The Bible's measurement of those "Seas" was exactly correct: to one significant digit. I know a lot of fundamentalists althought I'm not one (I'm a part-time pastor), yet I don't know ANYONE who believes pi is exactly equal to 3. Everyone recognizes that that is just not the point of the Bible. It's like what I've always said: "I don't believe in the sort of {Bible,God} that the skeptics don't believe in, either." Stop beating up on straw men.
There's so much I would like to say here, and I rather doubt that I'll get it all said, but I'll make a stab at it. In the first place, I haven't seen the movie, so can't really comment on Stein's take. However, I have looked at the "sociology" of the Evolution/Intelligent Design/Creationism debate a fair amount, and what I see disturbs me from all sides. One major concern I have is the elevation of Darwinian natural selection as a means of species creation to an unrealistic importance. I just don't see why it's so important in and of itself. One could certainly be a competent physician, for example, and not believe in Darwinism (or neo-Darwinism). It seems to me that one could even be a quite competent practitioner of any of the biological sciences (other than the various sorts of paleontology) without necessarily agreeing with Darwinism. Yet, we are constantly told that a failure to teach Darwinism at the high school level will destroy science education as we know it and result in a US population that is hopelessly ignorant of all science, etc. etc. I just don't buy it. Bluntly, I can scarcely think of a job where a belief in Darwinism is necessary. On the other hand, we have school systems that literally teach absolutely no information science, computer science, etc. etc., and people graduating from college who literally don't know the different between a byte and a gigabyte. It's hard for me to see why this ONE THING is so vitally important, when it has virtually no practical application and there are scientific topics with enormous practical application that go untaught. Could the real problem be social or (speak softly now) political? It seems to me that that is exactly the case. The extraordinary efforts put forth by various scientific bodies to defend Darwinism from all criticism strike me as a knee-jerk reaction to a knee-jerk fear that the Scope's trial will happen all over again. This isn't about science--it's about continuing the Enlightenment project of supplanting all sources of Meaning (capitalization intended) with Scientific Meaning. That doesn't mean that I think that Darwinism is wrong. I actually think that it's as right as you're going to get within the boundaries that it sets itself. But I certainly don't think that the loss of Darwinism would destroy American education or anything along those lines. So ... people... GET A GRIP.
My $0.02.
The problem I've always had is that few employers seem to really grasp the concept of a salaried position. In a salaried position, I'm hired to get a job done, irrespective of how many hours it takes. If it takes me 40 hours a week, great. 50 hours a week, oh well. 30 hours a week? PARTY! But most employers don't get this. So they look on salaried as a minimum of 40 hours week. In my particular specialty (troubleshooting really big systems), that's just silly, because often there's nothing to do... so when I was really doing my specialty, I would often end up doing nothing, sitting at my computer just to keep the IM icon lit up, when I could have been resting up for the next 48 hour marathon problem. It's just annoying ... I mean, if I'm salaried, why do a timesheet? Yet they all want a timesheet. If they want me to work free overtime, then they need to g
Remember when the first generation of Windows-ready iPod's came out, which came with MusicMatch Jukebox? Steve extolled it's virtues ... only to release iTunes for Windows a year or so later. My guess is that Apple will eventually become a carrier, but just weren't ready to dive into that business Quite Yet. Just give it time, they'll stab AT&T in the back.
This may not work with your board, but might be worth a try.
Configuring failover for Lustre's metadata server seems the obvious solution... there are plenty of FOSS failover solutions (although I for one prefer Veritas VCS for anything critical).
For example, last night I was doing some coding, and had to do a bunch of form rows in a table. I wrote a textmate snippet to generate the following (never wrote one before, and it took all of five minutes:)
<tr>
<th><label for="class_field">Field</th><!--note the capitalization of Field.-->
t;td><%= f.text_field
</tr>
What cool about this is that all I had to do to enter that and get it correctly adapted for any row was type:
frow[tab]CLASS_NAME[tab]FIELD_NAME
TextMate then automatically adjusted each place the class and field name were used to match, including capitalizing and humanizing the field name in the label.
What would have been 5 minutes of grunt code was resolved in five seconds. Could I have done this in other editors? Certainly. But in text mate I did it in five minutes, without even looking at the manual. (And I had never done my own snippet before.)
Add to that the fact that it supports all sorts of snippets by default (in Rails, hit "habtm[tab]" to enter "has_and_belongs_to_many
I was a die-hard emacs guy, but textmate has made a conver out of me. It's worth every penny.
Why not just a "magellan" auto-navigation doohick?
Or just send it to the afore-mentioned navigation doohick, and let it plot the route.
Did I mention the navigation doohick?
Navigation
Doohick.
Doo.
Hick.
D... (fill in the blanks.)
Seems to me that this is a problem of a fixed-wing aircraft, that wouldn't *necessarily* effect something like the (legendary vapor-ware) Moller (spelling?) air-cars.
The point is that all the problems you enumerate are problems that could either be eliminated or substantially mitigated by the application of appropriate technology. I'm not saying that the technology is there, but I could visualize all of it eventually being developed. To my way of thinking, the biggest issue is identifying a suitably energy-dense/efficient fuel to power the turbines to do something Moller/Herrier style.
uh huh. So, tell me, since I carry a Palm Treo with me, which is perfectly capable of playing MP3s (except for the DRM), how then do I play itunes files on my Treo? Why should I have to by a separate box to play my iTunes files?
Frankly, I don't CARE whether the guy who makes my burgers, does my taxes, or fixes my computers is a creationist. In fact, I really can't see much of any reason why it matters for anyone in any usual profession what one believes about evolution. My doctor, for example, is one of those nasty fundamentalist creationists that people keep bitching about, and yet he manages to be a very good doctor.
Could it be that there is something bigger than practical concerns at play here? Could it be that the over-the-top efforts to get evolution taught in schools (while ignoring the much more interesting implications of the Big Bang -- so much for steady state!) are part of the larger Enlightenment project of declaring itself as the sole source and final arbiter of truth and meaning?
Nawww... That wouldn't be why the president of the national academy of sciences descended upon some kids science fair project a few years back when it raised questions about Darwinian evolution ... It's just Good Science.
Yes, I found this out the hard way and it cost me thousands.