you doubt the test's validity in one sentence, and then try to satisfy it in the next? Weird...
I concede that other hypertext implementations came first, and you think I'm trying to
claim patent rights for Sir Tim? That is weird.
So? Did RIM ("Blackberry") invent "wireless email"?
And if anyone was hailing Tim as the Father of Hypertext, then this would be a relevant point.
That's NCSA's Mosaic, of which Sir Tim was only one of the contributors -- and Netscape...
According to the wikipedia talk page that you found so devastatingly authoritative,
Tim wrote the first implementation of a web server and the first client. This from a
non anonymous contributor who claims to have been there at the time, which is rather
more authority that you've been able to summon so far.
I don't think anyone is crediting Tim with authoring the whole of Mosaic, (much less Netscape),
any more than they are calling him the inventor of the internet or the father of hypertext.
I don't know, if you've used it, but it really was quite similar -- the graphical Mosaic was simply the next logical step, as the hardware became better.
Whoop dee do. No one is saying that he invented Gopher, either. Do you have anything to support this silly attack that isn't
a blatant Straw Man?
Please keep in mind that 'species' are a human convention, nature doesn't necessarily agree with our interpretation here, in fact nature probably sees us all as individuals, some of which are unable to mate. That we assign a rather arbitrary label 'species' to that ability may not reflect reality.
And yet we find
Tyrannosaurus Rex fossils dated over a period of three million years scattered across the whole of western North America.
The issue here isn't whether Tyrannosaurs could have sex outside their species. It's that the species apprently stayed stable for
three million years, which shoudn't happen if we're seeing random mutation as an ongoing process. Given the conceeded
spottiness of the fossil record, and the time span in question, we shouldn't see enough data points to identify species
at all.
The 'short legged giraffe' example shows a serious lack of understanding in how genes affect the development of an organism
Yes, yes, yes, I know that genes don't affect things in quite that way. I also understand
that the mathematics of complexity allow for several apprently unconnected changes to emerge
all at once.
But that's not what Darwin originally proposed. He knew none of this.
Hence my comment that Darwinian evolution was flawed. We don't see the gradual
change in, one characteristic at a time that he described. See?
I really don't see why this notion inspires such vehement opposition. The best tested science we have
probably lies with Newton's laws of motion - and they've been refined at least twice. Once for speeds approaching
lightspeed, and once for interactions on the atomic and subatomic scale. What makes Darwin so Holy that none dare
suggest he might bear some improvement?
Personally I expect Darwins theory to be further refined but never replaced by anything dramatically different.
Yes. That's been my point from the beginning. Darwin's theory required some refinement.
the fossil record is - by necessity - incomplete, if every organism left its skeleton intact then you would be able to trace an unbroken line between us and any ancestor, and the same would go for any other organism alive.
But still we see speciaition. You'd expect species to be in a constant state of flux viewed over evolutionary timescales, but we find species widespread over area and time. Tyrannosaurus Rex fossils, for instance date over about three million years.
And we still don't see any short legged giraffes.
The spotty fossil record does not in any way invalidate Darwins theory, it just doesn't reinforce it as strongly as it would if it were complete.
I never said Darwin's theory was invalid, just that it doesn't seem to fit the available evidence as well as it might.
Arguing that it would fit the evidence if we had more of it, on the other hand is a classic faith based argument.
Khmm... I wonder, what made him a "nutter" in your opinion. The disagreement with you or the desire to remain anonymous?
Well, there's the madly over the top accusation that heads it all off for the start. "Fraud of the Century" forsooth. I mean even if the point had merit, and I'm far from convinced of that, I think we could find numerous cases of actual fraud where actual harm was done. Then there's the fact the author keeps trying to prove that Sir Tim in unworthy of any accolade by reference to the fact that lots of people contributed to the Internet, even though he elsewhere demonstrates some basic understanding that Web != Internet. And beyond that, there's something about the tone that puts me in mind of the rolling glassy eye and foam-flecked mouth. Oh, and the author seems to share your notion that the nationality of the man has some bearing on the magnitude of his contribution to the project.
Apart from that, it's hard to say, really....
that's the test, that we should be employing in determining, whether anyone is an inventor of something. The ability to pass the patent's requirements may not be sufficient to deserve the honor (there are some ridiculous patents awarded), but it ought to be a required condition. And Tim would've failed, if only for the abundance of prior art...
I'm not sure that's a good test. I mean, yes, there were other hypertext interfaces, and yes there were other people working on similar ideas. Tim's protocols and markup language were the ones that became widely adopted. It's generally
accepted that the web's success is down to the accessibility of the technology rather than the basic ideas behind it. I'd say Sir Tim deserves some credit for that.
Citing Gopher as prior art seems to me to be seriously missing the point.
My intention was to show, that I'm not alone in my opinion
But the source you cite appears to have been written by an anonymous nutter. If that's the best support you can muster, I'm afraid you may have something of a mountain to climb.
The main point is, if Tim were to file a patent based on the claims made on his behalf, and try to enforce it to, say, collect royalties, the entire "community" would've been up in arms.
But he isn't trying to file a patent, so, you know, so what? If Tsar Nicholas the Second had been a bit more considerate to the russian working classes, we would probably never have seen the soviet union. So what? We can debate what ifs all day.
And then, of course, is the fact, that he was not an American, while doing some of this inventing at CERN
So if he'd been a US citizen working at MIT his whole career it would be OK? I really don't see what you're trying to achieve here.
His contribution was, no doubt, huge, but the inventor he was not -- considering the existence of all the prior works, including Gopher, there was nothing in his work, that was not "obvious to someone skilled in the art".
Umm... your wikipedia link points at an entry in the talk page for Sir Tim's wikipedia entry. It cheerfully conflates Internet and Web in order to try and make a case. There are some fairly robust rebuttals there as well.
Citing such poor quality references weakens your argument rather than strengthening it.
"First of all absence of evidence is never evidence of absence, nor even "as good as" evidence of absence."
In terms of making accurate predictions about the nature of reality it is.
I keep thinking of Ecluidean geometry in this connection. Euclid couldn't prove that parallel lines never cross, but he reckoned that he had pretty much made the case,
and for more than a thousand years mathematicians tried to prove it for him. It wasn't until someone had the bright idea of trying to disprove the converse case that we discovered that you can construct consistent non-Euclidean
spaces, and the area was able to move on. Godel did something similar with respect to attempts to
automate the proving of theorems. So I think "as good as" really can get in the way of making accurate predictions. Of course, I'm assuming here that mathematicians are pretty much the same as scientists here, so maybe I just invalidated my own argument:)
If I find a god-of-the-gaps style gap, put all sorts of mythos into it, and then berate people to live their lives according to my dogma, going so far as to solicit changes in the law
Mmmm... but I'd have said that the problem with berating people was that you were bullying them,
not that you had a non-scientific belief. People are entitled to believe as they please, but that doesn't carry with it an entitlement to behave like assholes. Nor does it excuse legislators passing measures without any evidence to suggest they may be useful and effective.
"I don't think you can absolve those scientists who abandon the scientific method in favour of "pretty much as good
as" any more than we should tolerate the religious types who dress up belief in pseudo-science in the hopes of deceiving their audience. "
I respectfully disagree, so long as they are not using it in their science.
See, to me that smacks of a double standard. It's like saying: What you say is rubbish
because it depends upon assumptions that are fundamentally unfalsifiable,
bit it's ok for me because I'm not doing it as part of my job.
I also don't really think the term scientist is particularly appropriate
here.
mmm... I'm using it loosely to mean people arguing the science side of the
creationism debate, rather than guys in white coats who count quarks for
a living.:)
Not everyone that understands scientific method and the nature
of this debate is necessarily a scientist by trade, nor do they need to
be.
I think if you're going to argue what is and what is not science,
you ought to have a decent understanding of what science is.
And I think we ought to hold ourselves to the same level of intellectual
rigour we require from the other side of the debate.
I know some scientists. They're human like the rest of us,
and usually drink more:)
If you know of any demonstrated flaws in Darwinian Evolution I for one would very much like to hear of them.
Well, as I understand it, Darwin proposed a series of single mutations - each a rare event that happened over time and were selected for by the environment and survival of the fittest.
So once upon a time you'd have a species of short necked short legged giraffes. Then one of the got the long neck gene, and you had a herd or short stubby giraffes plus one with short legs but a stupidly long neck, but because of that, he could get at mroe food, so he had more descendants and eventually they all had long necks.
The thing is that the fossil record seems to show species appearing with several changes at once. Giraffes don't just get long necks. They get necks and legs and those subby little horns that only really make sense if you've got a really long neck and can put a hell of a lot of angular momentum behind them. That's hard to see in terms of a single mutation.
I'm not saying the mutation + survival of the fittest ideal is wrong. But the notion of mutations causing single features that are gradually selected for and amplified over time doesn't seem to fit with the evidence we have.
I'm also not saying this is evidence of God. I just think that Darwin's original theory
(at least as it was taught to me) needed a little tweaking.
No, the problem is that (the bad kind of) religious folks don't see that absence of evidence is pretty much as good evidence as absence when it comes to building a huge, precarious worldview and belief system, and then using that to make claims about objective reality
Three things there. First of all absence of evidence is never evidence of absence,
nor even "as good as" evidence of absence. If a scientist can't make his or her case without resorting to logical fallacy then they can't make it, full stop. At least, not without departing
from science.
Second, I agree that religion is a poor way to make predictions about objective reality.
But that, I submit is a separate discussion and doesn't in any case invalidate their faith.
Thirdly, there's poor logic and flawed reasoning on both sides of the debate. I don't think
you can absolve those scientists who abandon the scientific method in favour of "pretty much as good as" any more than we should tolerate the religious types who dress up belief in pseudo-science in the hopes of deceiving their audience.
Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, is doubting even in the slightest that Saddam did this :
I don't think that anyone's disputing that he once had some rockets. However he didn't seem to have any when we invaded. The justification for war was that Saddam apparently possessed
WMDs at that time and was preparing to use them. In that context, the fact that Saddam didn't
in fact seem to posses any such weapons casts doubts on both the integrity or the
competence of those who took us into the war.
Unless you actually believe Saddam would shoot every last of his best weapons at unarmed civilians.
You mean he was saving some to use against a greater threat? Like invading foreign troops, maybe?
If we know a guy shot some children, then gets arrested with powder on his hands, but without a gun, that does not mean the witnesses who saw him shoot lied. It merely means we're short a gun
On the other hands, rockets aren't guns. You shoot a rocket, you don't have it any more. What you're suggesting (to use your analogy) is launching an operation that could engulf half a city in riots, purely on the suspicion that there may be some more bullets somewhere around the place.
Why would it need to be constrained by time and space and create a universe 6000 years ago and limit the past as perceived within that universe to 6000 years?
I'm told that if you add up the years in all the X-begat-Y-begat-Z bits, you get a date for God saying "Let there be light" some six and a bit thousand years ago. If you accept the assumption that all the stories in the Old Testament are literally true, then this gives you the true age of Creation and the zero point for absolute time.
Personally, I find the phrase "dingo's kidneys" springs to mind in this connection. But then it's not my beliefs that we're discussing here.
What you describe is called "Intelligent Design", and that idea has already been kicked around enough on both sides.
Nah. Intelligent design is religion dressed up as science to try and fool people. I'm just pointing out that it's
not that hard do construct a philosophical framework that allow both science and religion to co-exist peacefully.
The age-old quandary still remains, how can an all-loving and all-powerful god allow evil things to happen?
I dunno. If I ever see Him, I'll ask Him. Although I expect Heaven will have a FAQ by this stage...
The problem is that this is a completely meaningless supposition. From our point of view, there is absolutely no difference between a universe that really is fifteen billion years old and a universe that's 6.5 thousand years old with nearly fifteen billion years of perfectly falsified history.
Not falsified. Imagine you have a fractal equation with four variables. Arbitrarily label one of them "time", and assign the other three to spatial axes. Now, with the right software you can watch the fractal unfold in time as well as navigating it in spatial terms.
Now, suppose you want to start the software running with temporal variable set to 50% of the way through the fratal's sequence. Does that make the unviewed portion false in some way?
Science claims to attempt to explain the universe. If God stands completely outside spacetime and never affects the universe in a way that violates the physical laws we believe it operates by, then God may as well not exist. He has no influence on us in any way we can ever quantify.
Exactly right, from a scientific viewpoint. We have two ways of understanding the universe here that are (or should be)
orthogonal to one another. Trying to discus them as polar values is pointless - they don't intersect at all.
comparing your theory to Science is like trying to compute the nutritional value of a rock
It's not a theory. It's an epistemological framework that lets scientists ignore religion and
get on with actual science, and which lets creationists believe in the Creation without needing
to feel threatened by scientific evidence for evolution.
What you propose is a philosophical explanation, not a scientific one.
Or, we're all just brains in jars. Or I'm a brain in a jar, and you're a figment of my imagination. Do you see how that doesn't buy you anything?
I do. Which means that the scientists are free to ignore the whole thing and get on with doing actual science. That's more or less the point.
You say that the scientists are zealous to debunk anything that can't be measured. I don't understand how that's a bad thing, given that, as scientists, that's their job.
I say some scientists are, and I strongly disagree that debunking is the job of science.
As I see it, the correct scientific response to any belief that cannot be scientifically verified is to say "there is no way to verify such a proposition", and then to move on. The trouble is that many scientists seem prone to the fallacy that absence of evidence implies evidence of absence.
"Debunking", from its very name, starts from a position of disbelief, which makes the debunker's arguments just as much faith based as that of their opponents. I think this demeans science, just as religion is debased by attempts to masquerade as science, such as Intelligent Design.
I've always thought that these ideas were nowhere neither as polar as they are usually presented.
I mean, if you accept the initial premise of an all powerful God, standing outside spacetime, then it's
not so far a step to imagining a God who created the whole shebang in all its four dimensional glory, and then
instantiated it at a point in time about six and a half thousand years ago.
Hey presto! Science works. Physics works. Evolution works. And God created it all, quite possibly in six days, albeit in some other frame of temporal reference. Job done. The scientist can carry on with what they do, and the creationists can carry on with their beliefs,
and neither has to feel threatened by the other side's epistemology. Granted there's a bit of work needed to reconcile 200,000 years of biological human history with six thousand or so from biblical references - but then Darwinian evolution isn't entirely without flaw either. I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to reconcile the two.
Except that I don't think anyone's interested in a framework that lets both belief systems co-exist. I think this is about
intellectual authority. The religious right would like to be the ones who control what we are and are not allowed to believe,
just like in the good old days when they could burn inconvenient scientists and philosophers at the stake if need be.
I don't think some of the science community do themselves any favours either, in their zeal to debunk anything that can't
be measured, weighed or dissected.
So you are opposed to net neutrality ? Because every law I've seen about net neutrality forbids payment of any kind for prioritising traffic by end-users, making your second option worthless.
I don't know what you mean by by "end users". ISPs can traffic shape for their own customers to their hearts content, so long as they don't downgrade it unevenly based on kind or source of traffic. So no choking youTube to make their own (or their partner's) video service more attractive, and no choking Asterix to make Skype look better.
What they can't do, and this is the point of net neutrality, is to choke packets from users who are not
their customers. So if YouTube get their connectivity from ISP A and you get yours from ISP B, then ISP C who just happen to link the two together should not be allowed to throttle youtube packets heading for your computer until either you or Google pay them a lot of money. There are two reasons for that.
Firstly, they already get paid to shift those packets through peering agreements and if they want more money, they can re-negotiate with the others. There's no need to hold third parties to ransom just to get a ROI.
Secondly, once ISP gets away with such tactics, they'll all want to join in. Everyone will block everyone else's
packets until new recripiocal arrangements are drawn up, and when the dust settles, the only Internet you'll get will be that which is sanctioned by a cartel of ISPs, at which point you might as well go back to watching TV.
Interesting that you use the phrase "what they paid for" in defending people who are illegally downloading large volumes of copyrighted material.
Yep. Because they paid for the bandwidth. And that remains true regardless of whether they're downloading pr0n,
sharing movies, running a 24/7 multi-webcam stream or just streaming white noise between locations.
You can't have it both ways. If the law is the law, then it protects the subscribers right to fully use the service they paid for, just as it does much as rights of copyright holders. You can't justify throttling
everyone just because some of those people using the full amount they contracted to have available may be
engaging activities that arguably impact the profitability of the big studios and software houses.
It's easy to blame Microsoft or the ISO for the host of things that could be perceived to be wrong here.
This isn't about Microsoft. I don't think this episode does them any credit, but we're discussing ISO.
ISO are easy to blame. Not necessarily for letting Microsoft stack the deck, (although they could have
co-operated a little less enthusiastically) but for not following their own written procedures and for ramrodding through a standard that plainly was not ready for the fast track process, for doing so over the protests and
complaints of many member countries, and for not even giving a hearing to the protests raised after the fact.
It simply isn't good enough. Sorry.
I will repeat what I've previously stated for emphasis: Nothing has changed here in the nature of the ISO.
You keep saying that as if it lets ISO off the hook, but I really don't see your point. Yes, you're probably right
and ISO have probably been permitting this sort of chicanery for years on end. One criticism of ISO I keep seeing in the wake this debacle is for their apparent inability to adapt to the needs of the technical community in a changing world. The sort of gamesmanship that mattered little when fixing the diameter of a bolt can seriously undermine the
process when applied to something as complex as a multi-document file format. If ISO wish to remain relevant they need to realise this.
But really it matters little whether ISO have lapsed from once lofty standards, or if they have always been corrupt, with this issue but showing them in their true light to thousands of people who previously lived in happy ignorance.
What is important is that ISO need to raise their game if they are to continue to be taken seriously as a world standards body.
The responsibility for any poor decision-making should rest squarely on the members, which requires the fairly obvious, but posturing-deficient solution of fixing national corruption.
Many of whose issues were not discussed at all due to the inadequate time allocated for the discussion. Perhaps that's their fault as well? And the refusal of ISO to consider any appeal for these issues? Is that too the fault of member bodies? I'm sorry, but no. That doesn't seem at all reasonable.
At a more abstract level, I'm not convinced that I want a technical standards body to make moral determinations of goodness or badness of an idea
I'm not sure I want ISO making moral judgements either. But this isn't a question of morality. It's a matter of
a standard that quite clearly fell far short of the required level of consensus being forced through by a standards body
quite happy to bend, break or re-write its own rules purely in order to favour one party over all the other participants.
This is not, I feel, behaviour we want to encourage. Not because of the ethics of the matter, questionable as they undoubtedly are, but because it leaves the distinct impression that ISO's standards are for sale to the highest bidder.
And I don't think that's a particularly good way to choose a standard.
In this regard, nothing which has happened with OOXML has changed the fundamental nature of standards bodies in their lack of prescriptive abilities.
I might buy that if the MSOOXML spec was for for purpose. If three vendors make screws for one purpose, they all want their size and pitch to be the standard chosen, if only to avoid retooling costs. But whoever wins, everyone can use the standard thereafter. Everyone gets what they want.
This does not appear to be the case with the MSOOXML spec, where the final version remains unpublished, and where a large number of objections have never been discussed, let alone resolved,
where the control of the standard remains in the control of the major playing in the field, and
where a conforming reference implementation does not exist and likely never will.
Under such circumstances, it's hard to see how this could ever serve the purpose of interoperability in the field of office documents. The spec is simply and blatantly unfit
for its stated purpose.
But the problem here is not so much that ISO favoured Microsoft. The problem is that, using your example, they did indeed force through a gravel based flotation device. And while no one is compelled to adopt the standard, a major that reason ISO standards have been followed in the past is that people trust their flotation devices to at least float. If they force through one that
sinks, and then have the effrontery claim that nothing is the matter,
then it would be surprising if this didn't damage confidence in other standards they may produce.
Thought experiment: What if the DRM was "perfect?" That is, somehow, through magic, completely unobtrusive. The only thing it did (again, through magic) was keep you from installing the game on computers you didn't own.
Yep. I'm in favour of DRM that doesn't spy on me, deliver rental software at purchase prices, corrupt my computer, or insult my morality.
I'm also in favour of cheap free non-polluting energy, a communist system that is both fair and efficient, faster than light travel and Santa Claus.
The trouble is that I don't believe in any of them (although im willing to be proved wrong on FTL) so
the discussion seems kind of pointless.
It's usually only the idiots who believe that science answers questions like "what ought we to do." Science is just a method for observing natural phenomenon. It cannot satisfactorally answer many fundamental philosophical questions that form the basis of law, morality and human interaction
Well said sir. I quite agree.
Maybe you find religion to be flawed here too, and I can see why, even though I may disagree
Well, yes. The way I see it is that both disciplines start with a set of assumptions and values, and then taking these as starting points, reason logically looking for a course of action that will maximise the values they find desirable and minimise those they they find undesirable. The starting point might be "The market is never wrong", "knowledge is always good", or "thou shalt not kill".
In that respect, there's little to choose between religion, science, and any other philosophical framework.
The quality of decision can only be as good as the starting assumptions, and those can't be selected rationally.
The best we can hope is that they are set forth explicitly, and subject to question and review.
This, to my mind is where religion loses out to science. The starting point for a religious line of reasoning is usually a matter of faith, and therefore not subject to question. Furthermore, it's entirely acceptable in religious circles for these to be purely subjective - "god spoke to me" is often sufficient justification. The problem there is this is open to abuse, especially when politics meets religion. Everything becomes a matter of faith, policy may not be questioned, and debate is condemned as evil.
What it comes down to is that while neither science nor religion is completely reliable when it comes to
setting policy, I nevertheless tend to the opinion that we get a higher quality of decision when the base assumptions of an argument can be questioned.
Audio tape and a player coupled with instructions on how to read it.
Or for that matter, get some 33 1/3 vinyl LPs pressed in place of the tape. Won't decay, there are enough vinyl enthusiasts that getting playback should be easy enough and even if they break, it should be possible to recover the data,
OK, probably not a practical solution to the problem due to costs. But for long term durability, it could well be the best solution.
Slashdot Mirror
I concede that other hypertext implementations came first, and you think I'm trying to claim patent rights for Sir Tim? That is weird.
And if anyone was hailing Tim as the Father of Hypertext, then this would be a relevant point.
According to the wikipedia talk page that you found so devastatingly authoritative, Tim wrote the first implementation of a web server and the first client. This from a non anonymous contributor who claims to have been there at the time, which is rather more authority that you've been able to summon so far.
I don't think anyone is crediting Tim with authoring the whole of Mosaic, (much less Netscape), any more than they are calling him the inventor of the internet or the father of hypertext.
Whoop dee do. No one is saying that he invented Gopher, either. Do you have anything to support this silly attack that isn't a blatant Straw Man?
And yet we find Tyrannosaurus Rex fossils dated over a period of three million years scattered across the whole of western North America. The issue here isn't whether Tyrannosaurs could have sex outside their species. It's that the species apprently stayed stable for three million years, which shoudn't happen if we're seeing random mutation as an ongoing process. Given the conceeded spottiness of the fossil record, and the time span in question, we shouldn't see enough data points to identify species at all.
Yes, yes, yes, I know that genes don't affect things in quite that way. I also understand that the mathematics of complexity allow for several apprently unconnected changes to emerge all at once.
But that's not what Darwin originally proposed. He knew none of this. Hence my comment that Darwinian evolution was flawed. We don't see the gradual change in, one characteristic at a time that he described. See?
I really don't see why this notion inspires such vehement opposition. The best tested science we have probably lies with Newton's laws of motion - and they've been refined at least twice. Once for speeds approaching lightspeed, and once for interactions on the atomic and subatomic scale. What makes Darwin so Holy that none dare suggest he might bear some improvement?
Yes. That's been my point from the beginning. Darwin's theory required some refinement.
But still we see speciaition. You'd expect species to be in a constant state of flux viewed over evolutionary timescales, but we find species widespread over area and time. Tyrannosaurus Rex fossils, for instance date over about three million years.
And we still don't see any short legged giraffes.
I never said Darwin's theory was invalid, just that it doesn't seem to fit the available evidence as well as it might. Arguing that it would fit the evidence if we had more of it, on the other hand is a classic faith based argument.
Well, there's the madly over the top accusation that heads it all off for the start. "Fraud of the Century" forsooth. I mean even if the point had merit, and I'm far from convinced of that, I think we could find numerous cases of actual fraud where actual harm was done. Then there's the fact the author keeps trying to prove that Sir Tim in unworthy of any accolade by reference to the fact that lots of people contributed to the Internet, even though he elsewhere demonstrates some basic understanding that Web != Internet. And beyond that, there's something about the tone that puts me in mind of the rolling glassy eye and foam-flecked mouth. Oh, and the author seems to share your notion that the nationality of the man has some bearing on the magnitude of his contribution to the project.
Apart from that, it's hard to say, really....
I'm not sure that's a good test. I mean, yes, there were other hypertext interfaces, and yes there were other people working on similar ideas. Tim's protocols and markup language were the ones that became widely adopted. It's generally accepted that the web's success is down to the accessibility of the technology rather than the basic ideas behind it. I'd say Sir Tim deserves some credit for that.
Citing Gopher as prior art seems to me to be seriously missing the point.
But the source you cite appears to have been written by an anonymous nutter. If that's the best support you can muster, I'm afraid you may have something of a mountain to climb.
But he isn't trying to file a patent, so, you know, so what? If Tsar Nicholas the Second had been a bit more considerate to the russian working classes, we would probably never have seen the soviet union. So what? We can debate what ifs all day.
So if he'd been a US citizen working at MIT his whole career it would be OK? I really don't see what you're trying to achieve here.
Umm... your wikipedia link points at an entry in the talk page for Sir Tim's wikipedia entry. It cheerfully conflates Internet and Web in order to try and make a case. There are some fairly robust rebuttals there as well.
Citing such poor quality references weakens your argument rather than strengthening it.
I keep thinking of Ecluidean geometry in this connection. Euclid couldn't prove that parallel lines never cross, but he reckoned that he had pretty much made the case, and for more than a thousand years mathematicians tried to prove it for him. It wasn't until someone had the bright idea of trying to disprove the converse case that we discovered that you can construct consistent non-Euclidean spaces, and the area was able to move on. Godel did something similar with respect to attempts to automate the proving of theorems. So I think "as good as" really can get in the way of making accurate predictions. Of course, I'm assuming here that mathematicians are pretty much the same as scientists here, so maybe I just invalidated my own argument :)
Mmmm... but I'd have said that the problem with berating people was that you were bullying them, not that you had a non-scientific belief. People are entitled to believe as they please, but that doesn't carry with it an entitlement to behave like assholes. Nor does it excuse legislators passing measures without any evidence to suggest they may be useful and effective.
See, to me that smacks of a double standard. It's like saying: What you say is rubbish because it depends upon assumptions that are fundamentally unfalsifiable, bit it's ok for me because I'm not doing it as part of my job.
mmm... I'm using it loosely to mean people arguing the science side of the creationism debate, rather than guys in white coats who count quarks for a living. :)
I think if you're going to argue what is and what is not science, you ought to have a decent understanding of what science is. And I think we ought to hold ourselves to the same level of intellectual rigour we require from the other side of the debate.
Pretty much my experience as well :)
Well, as I understand it, Darwin proposed a series of single mutations - each a rare event that happened over time and were selected for by the environment and survival of the fittest. So once upon a time you'd have a species of short necked short legged giraffes. Then one of the got the long neck gene, and you had a herd or short stubby giraffes plus one with short legs but a stupidly long neck, but because of that, he could get at mroe food, so he had more descendants and eventually they all had long necks.
The thing is that the fossil record seems to show species appearing with several changes at once. Giraffes don't just get long necks. They get necks and legs and those subby little horns that only really make sense if you've got a really long neck and can put a hell of a lot of angular momentum behind them. That's hard to see in terms of a single mutation.
I'm not saying the mutation + survival of the fittest ideal is wrong. But the notion of mutations causing single features that are gradually selected for and amplified over time doesn't seem to fit with the evidence we have.
I'm also not saying this is evidence of God. I just think that Darwin's original theory (at least as it was taught to me) needed a little tweaking.
Three things there. First of all absence of evidence is never evidence of absence, nor even "as good as" evidence of absence. If a scientist can't make his or her case without resorting to logical fallacy then they can't make it, full stop. At least, not without departing from science.
Second, I agree that religion is a poor way to make predictions about objective reality. But that, I submit is a separate discussion and doesn't in any case invalidate their faith.
Thirdly, there's poor logic and flawed reasoning on both sides of the debate. I don't think you can absolve those scientists who abandon the scientific method in favour of "pretty much as good as" any more than we should tolerate the religious types who dress up belief in pseudo-science in the hopes of deceiving their audience.
I don't think that anyone's disputing that he once had some rockets. However he didn't seem to have any when we invaded. The justification for war was that Saddam apparently possessed WMDs at that time and was preparing to use them. In that context, the fact that Saddam didn't in fact seem to posses any such weapons casts doubts on both the integrity or the competence of those who took us into the war.
You mean he was saving some to use against a greater threat? Like invading foreign troops, maybe?
On the other hands, rockets aren't guns. You shoot a rocket, you don't have it any more. What you're suggesting (to use your analogy) is launching an operation that could engulf half a city in riots, purely on the suspicion that there may be some more bullets somewhere around the place.
I'll rephrase that: I don't think any of the people making all the fuss are interested in reconciling the two viewpoints.
I'd forgotten about Strata. Must read that one again.
I'm told that if you add up the years in all the X-begat-Y-begat-Z bits, you get a date for God saying "Let there be light" some six and a bit thousand years ago. If you accept the assumption that all the stories in the Old Testament are literally true, then this gives you the true age of Creation and the zero point for absolute time.
Personally, I find the phrase "dingo's kidneys" springs to mind in this connection. But then it's not my beliefs that we're discussing here.
Yeah, like starting a video half way through. It's a matter of perspective.
Nah. Intelligent design is religion dressed up as science to try and fool people. I'm just pointing out that it's not that hard do construct a philosophical framework that allow both science and religion to co-exist peacefully.
I dunno. If I ever see Him, I'll ask Him. Although I expect Heaven will have a FAQ by this stage ...
Not falsified. Imagine you have a fractal equation with four variables. Arbitrarily label one of them "time", and assign the other three to spatial axes. Now, with the right software you can watch the fractal unfold in time as well as navigating it in spatial terms.
Now, suppose you want to start the software running with temporal variable set to 50% of the way through the fratal's sequence. Does that make the unviewed portion false in some way?
Exactly right, from a scientific viewpoint. We have two ways of understanding the universe here that are (or should be) orthogonal to one another. Trying to discus them as polar values is pointless - they don't intersect at all.
It's not a theory. It's an epistemological framework that lets scientists ignore religion and get on with actual science, and which lets creationists believe in the Creation without needing to feel threatened by scientific evidence for evolution.
Indeed. You got a problem with that?
I do. Which means that the scientists are free to ignore the whole thing and get on with doing actual science. That's more or less the point.
I say some scientists are, and I strongly disagree that debunking is the job of science.
As I see it, the correct scientific response to any belief that cannot be scientifically verified is to say "there is no way to verify such a proposition", and then to move on. The trouble is that many scientists seem prone to the fallacy that absence of evidence implies evidence of absence.
"Debunking", from its very name, starts from a position of disbelief, which makes the debunker's arguments just as much faith based as that of their opponents. I think this demeans science, just as religion is debased by attempts to masquerade as science, such as Intelligent Design.
I've always thought that these ideas were nowhere neither as polar as they are usually presented.
I mean, if you accept the initial premise of an all powerful God, standing outside spacetime, then it's not so far a step to imagining a God who created the whole shebang in all its four dimensional glory, and then instantiated it at a point in time about six and a half thousand years ago.
Hey presto! Science works. Physics works. Evolution works. And God created it all, quite possibly in six days, albeit in some other frame of temporal reference. Job done. The scientist can carry on with what they do, and the creationists can carry on with their beliefs, and neither has to feel threatened by the other side's epistemology. Granted there's a bit of work needed to reconcile 200,000 years of biological human history with six thousand or so from biblical references - but then Darwinian evolution isn't entirely without flaw either. I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to reconcile the two.
Except that I don't think anyone's interested in a framework that lets both belief systems co-exist. I think this is about intellectual authority. The religious right would like to be the ones who control what we are and are not allowed to believe, just like in the good old days when they could burn inconvenient scientists and philosophers at the stake if need be. I don't think some of the science community do themselves any favours either, in their zeal to debunk anything that can't be measured, weighed or dissected.
I don't know what you mean by by "end users". ISPs can traffic shape for their own customers to their hearts content, so long as they don't downgrade it unevenly based on kind or source of traffic. So no choking youTube to make their own (or their partner's) video service more attractive, and no choking Asterix to make Skype look better.
What they can't do, and this is the point of net neutrality, is to choke packets from users who are not their customers. So if YouTube get their connectivity from ISP A and you get yours from ISP B, then ISP C who just happen to link the two together should not be allowed to throttle youtube packets heading for your computer until either you or Google pay them a lot of money. There are two reasons for that.
Firstly, they already get paid to shift those packets through peering agreements and if they want more money, they can re-negotiate with the others. There's no need to hold third parties to ransom just to get a ROI. Secondly, once ISP gets away with such tactics, they'll all want to join in. Everyone will block everyone else's packets until new recripiocal arrangements are drawn up, and when the dust settles, the only Internet you'll get will be that which is sanctioned by a cartel of ISPs, at which point you might as well go back to watching TV.
Yep. Because they paid for the bandwidth. And that remains true regardless of whether they're downloading pr0n, sharing movies, running a 24/7 multi-webcam stream or just streaming white noise between locations.
You can't have it both ways. If the law is the law, then it protects the subscribers right to fully use the service they paid for, just as it does much as rights of copyright holders. You can't justify throttling everyone just because some of those people using the full amount they contracted to have available may be engaging activities that arguably impact the profitability of the big studios and software houses.
This isn't about Microsoft. I don't think this episode does them any credit, but we're discussing ISO. ISO are easy to blame. Not necessarily for letting Microsoft stack the deck, (although they could have co-operated a little less enthusiastically) but for not following their own written procedures and for ramrodding through a standard that plainly was not ready for the fast track process, for doing so over the protests and complaints of many member countries, and for not even giving a hearing to the protests raised after the fact.
It simply isn't good enough. Sorry.
You keep saying that as if it lets ISO off the hook, but I really don't see your point. Yes, you're probably right and ISO have probably been permitting this sort of chicanery for years on end. One criticism of ISO I keep seeing in the wake this debacle is for their apparent inability to adapt to the needs of the technical community in a changing world. The sort of gamesmanship that mattered little when fixing the diameter of a bolt can seriously undermine the process when applied to something as complex as a multi-document file format. If ISO wish to remain relevant they need to realise this.
But really it matters little whether ISO have lapsed from once lofty standards, or if they have always been corrupt, with this issue but showing them in their true light to thousands of people who previously lived in happy ignorance.
What is important is that ISO need to raise their game if they are to continue to be taken seriously as a world standards body.
Many of whose issues were not discussed at all due to the inadequate time allocated for the discussion. Perhaps that's their fault as well? And the refusal of ISO to consider any appeal for these issues? Is that too the fault of member bodies? I'm sorry, but no. That doesn't seem at all reasonable.
I'm not sure I want ISO making moral judgements either. But this isn't a question of morality. It's a matter of a standard that quite clearly fell far short of the required level of consensus being forced through by a standards body quite happy to bend, break or re-write its own rules purely in order to favour one party over all the other participants.
This is not, I feel, behaviour we want to encourage. Not because of the ethics of the matter, questionable as they undoubtedly are, but because it leaves the distinct impression that ISO's standards are for sale to the highest bidder. And I don't think that's a particularly good way to choose a standard.
I might buy that if the MSOOXML spec was for for purpose. If three vendors make screws for one purpose, they all want their size and pitch to be the standard chosen, if only to avoid retooling costs. But whoever wins, everyone can use the standard thereafter. Everyone gets what they want.
This does not appear to be the case with the MSOOXML spec, where the final version remains unpublished, and where a large number of objections have never been discussed, let alone resolved, where the control of the standard remains in the control of the major playing in the field, and where a conforming reference implementation does not exist and likely never will. Under such circumstances, it's hard to see how this could ever serve the purpose of interoperability in the field of office documents. The spec is simply and blatantly unfit for its stated purpose.
But the problem here is not so much that ISO favoured Microsoft. The problem is that, using your example, they did indeed force through a gravel based flotation device. And while no one is compelled to adopt the standard, a major that reason ISO standards have been followed in the past is that people trust their flotation devices to at least float. If they force through one that sinks, and then have the effrontery claim that nothing is the matter, then it would be surprising if this didn't damage confidence in other standards they may produce.
Yep. I'm in favour of DRM that doesn't spy on me, deliver rental software at purchase prices, corrupt my computer, or insult my morality.
I'm also in favour of cheap free non-polluting energy, a communist system that is both fair and efficient, faster than light travel and Santa Claus.
The trouble is that I don't believe in any of them (although im willing to be proved wrong on FTL) so the discussion seems kind of pointless.
Well said sir. I quite agree.
Well, yes. The way I see it is that both disciplines start with a set of assumptions and values, and then taking these as starting points, reason logically looking for a course of action that will maximise the values they find desirable and minimise those they they find undesirable. The starting point might be "The market is never wrong", "knowledge is always good", or "thou shalt not kill".
In that respect, there's little to choose between religion, science, and any other philosophical framework. The quality of decision can only be as good as the starting assumptions, and those can't be selected rationally. The best we can hope is that they are set forth explicitly, and subject to question and review.
This, to my mind is where religion loses out to science. The starting point for a religious line of reasoning is usually a matter of faith, and therefore not subject to question. Furthermore, it's entirely acceptable in religious circles for these to be purely subjective - "god spoke to me" is often sufficient justification. The problem there is this is open to abuse, especially when politics meets religion. Everything becomes a matter of faith, policy may not be questioned, and debate is condemned as evil.
What it comes down to is that while neither science nor religion is completely reliable when it comes to setting policy, I nevertheless tend to the opinion that we get a higher quality of decision when the base assumptions of an argument can be questioned.
Or for that matter, get some 33 1/3 vinyl LPs pressed in place of the tape. Won't decay, there are enough vinyl enthusiasts that getting playback should be easy enough and even if they break, it should be possible to recover the data,
OK, probably not a practical solution to the problem due to costs. But for long term durability, it could well be the best solution.