Alas, you proceed to destroy your credibility with an ad hominem attack:
There's nothing wrong about an "ad hominem" claim if it is both true and topical- it's actually a valid (though rare) part of formal philosophical debate. In this case, his statement is sufficiently true: creationists are religionists, who believe their position was Divinely affirmed.
An "atheist creationist" is not a contradition in terms; somebody could decide that life evolved by natural selection on some distant planet, from which bioengineers came to Earth in flying saucers. But you don't find people with those beliefs, because (virtually) all creationists are starting from a religious perspective, and then trying to squeeze science to fit the viewpoint they've already decided on.
It was created by something more intelligent than yourself
By the scientific definition of intelligence ("the ability to score highly on an intelligence test"), the planet earth is surely deficient, or at least not much better than a human slashdot poster.
the ability to test out nearly every possibility, and keep only the ones that work.
Indeed, for most modern researchers and philosophers, "intellgence" is specifically the ability to deduce a solution without exhaustively attempting every possible move (ie, those things humans do so much better than computers). AI developers think of brute-force solutions as cheating.
Citing e2 is a laughable form of proof. And, botanists have no right to redefine words in the English language.
Specialists in a field often like to create new definitions for existing words when they find more specificity to be convenient. But nobody outside that field is obligated to obey them. "Experts" like to forget this, such as military types who claimed John Allen Muhammad wasn't a "sniper" because he attacked from less than 500 meters. Or computer salesmen who claim a hard disk drive isn't "Random Access Memory".
. This article brings up the point that this device, which is not exclusive to pond scum, is "irreducibly complex"
The rhetorical trick we see here is to slip a logical fallacy into the prelude, so it appears to be an indisputable axiom, rather than a challengable part of the argument.
In fact, those structures are not irreducibly complex. In the case of flagellum, scientists have already explained how incomplete organs were beneficial to microbes.
However, even if we do not have an explanation for how a complex structure could've evolved, that doesn't harm the theory of evolution. An inability to explain is not proof of falsehood. Just because you haven't seen a writeup walking through each and every little step of a process, doesn't mean that process can't work. (I don't think any human alive can truely understand all of the machines used for modern, daily life. Yet they carry on somehow.). In fact, given that primitive life was created so many billions of years ago in conditions that were so adverse to preserving evidence, it should be unsuprising that the precise details are unknown.
If one disgards arguments simply because one cannot personally comprehend every little detail, then creationism could be assailed with many more objections.
Wrong, that is an incorrect reduction of a complex issue. Every "absolute" assertion is incorrect sometimes. (Even that one). In reality, we can concoct several scenarios where vector-based graphics can be faster.
Your video display is bitmap based,
Wrong. It is understandable that if one lacks this base fact, invalid conclusions will be reached.
For 10 years or more, we have had what's called "accelerated" video cards. And for 5 years, there have been "3-d accelerated" cards. Both kinds of hardware accept vector-based inputs, in addition to some bitmap support.
If a UI theme is designed such that the majority of its needed can be handled by 3-d accelerator functions on videocards, then it might be much faster than the equivalent them represented as bitmaps. And more importantly, the speed limiting bottlenecks will come in different places- ie, a vector-theme's speed is mostly independent of screen resolution, so you can go to 2048x1540 or beyond.
A prime motivation to develope SVG-based UI imagery is to leverge the vector-processing abilities of current videocards, which are currently utilized only by videogames.
What happened next was a mess - the new Afghan government has been more or less abandoned - but the initial job was done well.
Who performed that job? A military equipped and trained under 8 years of Clinton.
Once the NYC WTC was destroyed, the decision to attack Afganistan was basically unavoidable. Any US President, Gore or Bush, would've told the Pentagon to overthrow the Taliban. And from then on, the job is done by warfighters recruited and molded long before 2000.
The reason is that Microsoft is rich and powerful and Bill Gates can be talked into making huge campaign contributions. Thus, Microsoft can help the Republicans stay in power, so the Republicans help Microsoft.
The Democrats do the same thing, just with a different set of campaign contributors.
Not all that different. After the "wake-up call" of a nearly disasterous anti-trust trial, Microsoft(tm) contributes to both parties.
I don't have the full numbers handy anymore, but for example, in 2000, Microsoft gave Republicans $1,300,000 and Democrats $900,000. Sometimes (as with the presidential election), they'd contribute to opposing candidaties! It sounds weird, but apparently many corporations care less about who wins than that the winner will owe a favor.
How is that any different than the moderation mob on Slashdot?
It's different because on Slashdot, you can browse at -1. Moderators can never delete a post, just push it down a little.
And downmods can't terminate your account, either. Violating Microsoft(tm) TOS could get you whole access suspended. Just look at OCG; he gets modded into the dirt every few days, but he's still sticking around.
Not an OS? What is an OS? Ah, an "Operating System". So if it isn't an OS, it must be a Non-Operating System. Therefore those crashes were totally expected!
Seriously though, every piece of software which provides critical support to another layer of software running on top of it is an "Operating System", and any crash should be treated as an exceptionally bad event. If your computer runs Gnome, then it's probably a desktop or workstation, and a crash of Gnome will suddenly terminate the applications you'd been using. To the end-user, that's just as bad as an OS crash! It's not as if data that was unsaved when Gnome died will be recoverable. The process is dead.
Being able to claim "The Linux kernel didn't crash, it was just Xfree86 or KDE or Gnome" is nothing to be proud of.
Gnome is a window manager
That is specifically untrue. Gnome doesn't manage windows, and in fact requires you to have some actual Window Manager running before it can work. Popular WM choices for Gnome users include enlightenment, sawfish, and metacity. There's a whole category of "Gnome-compatible Window Managers" out there.
The comparison between libc and Google is not valid.
1. libc is not patented. Its behavior is specified in published technical documentation. Google is patented, and it's exact behavior can only be inferred from use.
2. If SCO claimed libc, that would probably include a threat to discontinue use. Microsoft(tm) owning Google would leave it as a public webpage for at least a few years (maybe later migrating it to an Internet Explorer(r) specific feature). With no compelling reason to change, who will change? Only fanatics.
3. libc is a developer system, but Google is a consumer system. The users of libc are savy to technical and legal pitfalls, and can see when a change is needed. The big, big majority of Google's users have no fear of Microsoft(tm)'s practices (they probably run Windows(r), after all). When Google.com starts sporting a tiny "Microsoft(tm)" GIF on the corner of the page, few will notice and fewer will care.
Rather, the earth is not a closed system, and solar energy is here to stay for billions of years to come.
Did you read my post? I did not say the earth is a closed system.
Since you didn't read it, please don't respond. The continual transfer of energy from sun to earth is just one example of shifting "wealth" from place to place. "Transfer" is NOT "creation". My point that one can't "create" wealth still stands.
Whenever I go, I stop by the printer aisle and give a cable or two away to anyone who mich need one.
That sounds like fun, but do people really accept them?
I mean, you're standing in a store, looking at products on a rack, and a boy comes up behind you, slips one of a similar product into your hand, and says "Go ahead and walk out with this. I paid for it before. You're fine! It's my gift." Aren't they suspicious?
Oddly enough, you're wrong, at least as far as the customers I deal with are concerned. I work at a Kinko's,
I suspect that your experience is nonrepresentive, as it is filtered by the fact that the subjects have already decided to be Kinko's customers by the time you observe them.
Those who don't care about quality will drop $25 for an inkjet from Walmart, figuring the saving from 3 fewer trips to the shop will cover that investment.
A very common pattern for medium-sized business is to print drafts and internal documents in-house, and then to go to Kinko's for the rare job where they're willing to put up the money to make a good impression.
By ruling that the law won't apply in limited cases involving physical equipment, the courts have allowed the DMCA to go on existing. It will continue to forbid performing activities to support interoperability, re-use, fair-use, and security as long as the venue is software, and not hardware.
The preferred result would've been for Lexmark's claims to have been upheld, so the true wrongness of the DMCA would be painfully apparent to the public, creating pressure for Congress to revise (or just erase) the law.
Instead of smoothing off the particularly bad implications, they should've been let remain, so the whole thing would eventually be cut down. A law which forbids you from doing a traditional, harmless behavior will be raise outcry and quickly be modified (as we've seen with the toner and garage door cases). But the parts of the law banning new, nontraditional activities that are nonetheless harmless will not be so obvious, as people don't realize they're missing what they've never had.
If the DMCA had stood for hardware, it would've quickly been revoked for both hardware and software.
Re:Been saying it for years
on
CNet on WinFS
·
· Score: 1
What is a "Bhuddist"? I'll assume you meant to say "Buddhist".
My pastor at church described a situation where some Bhuddists found what they believed to be a peice of Bhudda's finger.
That makes little sense (not that I should expect any religion to make sense for long). In the Buddhist faith, "Buddha" is not an individual, but a category of person. It is a word used similarly to "saint". Of course, it's quite possible that the worshippers he described were not doctrinally correct, and had instead fallen into theism and idolatry. That happens with a lot of major churches- the people demand it, so the clergy provide.
Such behavior is quite similar to what Catholics have done for millenia (right up to the present). Does kissing the skull of a saint bring you any closer to Jesus?
I wonder why the pastor choose to use an alien, Asian religion in his example, when plenty of well-known Christian branches do exactly the same thing.
All in all, I would say this counts as proprietary information.
It absolutely doesn't. "Proprietary information" means information that is owned, and that it is illegal for other people to have without consent, regardless of their employment status. If this guy wasn't a temp (who can be fired at will simply by failing to renew him each day), it wouldn't be so easy to remove him for something like this. The information he reported was plainly visible to any 3rd party deliveryman or even unrelated civilian standing on the sidewalk outside.
"Proprietary information" = "intellectual property" = "trademark, patent, or copyright".
First, it's not a law, but an observation. (Intel admits this in their own advertising). A law would be like the "law of gravity", which states acceleration=(mass*mass)/(distance*distance). "Obsreved gravity" is that objects near the earth accelerate at around 9.8m/s/s. Observations are much weaker than laws.
Second, "Moore's Observation" is, in the text you link, talking specifically about silicon chips. So this optical thing isn't strictly relevant.
Thirdly. However, much of Moore's justification can apply to optical chips too. But, he is generally understood to have been talking about CPU-like processors, which is not what this new development is. It's not an arbitrary, stored-program computer, but a single-function converter for a digital stream. It's not fair to compare it to the Pentium3's speed benchmarks, since the P3 does so many more things. Instead, it should be held up against the other special-purpose chips made for military signal processing, some of which are terrifically impressive even in their old-fashioned silicon embodiment.
There is no problem at all. Current encryption techniques are formally protected against faster CPUs.
A linear increase in key length requires exponentially more CPU power to crack it. One more bit of key means twice as much work to solve.
This meshes neatly with "Moore's Law" ("CPU speeds will double each 18 months"). So we can calculate that if a 512 bit key is practically uncrackable today, a 4096 key will remain unbroken until 3584 years of technical advance have passed by.
Interestingly, many cities have "World Trade Centers". And unlike the one in New York, they are attached to international ports and used for trade. "Office space for financial services" is not "world trade".
The NYC WTC was fraudulently named. Really, the whole construction of those two buildings was borderline illegal. Or at least pinko anti-American...
Anyway, in the movie, Gates lies to Jobs, telling Jobs they want to develop software for the Lisa(?)
Then I guess that movie was lying, because Microsoft(tm) really did want to sell software for Apple computers. Since the birth of the Macintosh(r), Microsoft has always been in the top 3 software vendors for the platform, if not flat-out number one.
The experience Microsoft accured with Microsoft Word(r) for Mac importantly influenced the development of their Windows(r) line.
Fortunately, he was slashdotted. So now whenever anyone questions this subject, he can point to a famous, persistent web page explaining the whole story and how silly it was.
And any employer not impressed by a sympathetic slashdot article is probably one he doesn't want a job from anyhow.
Slashdot Mirror
Alas, you proceed to destroy your credibility with an ad hominem attack:
There's nothing wrong about an "ad hominem" claim if it is both true and topical- it's actually a valid (though rare) part of formal philosophical debate. In this case, his statement is sufficiently true: creationists are religionists, who believe their position was Divinely affirmed.
An "atheist creationist" is not a contradition in terms; somebody could decide that life evolved by natural selection on some distant planet, from which bioengineers came to Earth in flying saucers. But you don't find people with those beliefs, because (virtually) all creationists are starting from a religious perspective, and then trying to squeeze science to fit the viewpoint they've already decided on.
It was created by something more intelligent than yourself
By the scientific definition of intelligence ("the ability to score highly on an intelligence test"), the planet earth is surely deficient, or at least not much better than a human slashdot poster.
the ability to test out nearly every possibility, and keep only the ones that work.
Indeed, for most modern researchers and philosophers, "intellgence" is specifically the ability to deduce a solution without exhaustively attempting every possible move (ie, those things humans do so much better than computers). AI developers think of brute-force solutions as cheating.
Citing e2 is a laughable form of proof. And, botanists have no right to redefine words in the English language.
Specialists in a field often like to create new definitions for existing words when they find more specificity to be convenient. But nobody outside that field is obligated to obey them. "Experts" like to forget this, such as military types who claimed John Allen Muhammad wasn't a "sniper" because he attacked from less than 500 meters. Or computer salesmen who claim a hard disk drive isn't "Random Access Memory".
. This article brings up the point that this device, which is not exclusive to pond scum, is "irreducibly complex"
The rhetorical trick we see here is to slip a logical fallacy into the prelude, so it appears to be an indisputable axiom, rather than a challengable part of the argument.
In fact, those structures are not irreducibly complex. In the case of flagellum, scientists have already explained how incomplete organs were beneficial to microbes.
However, even if we do not have an explanation for how a complex structure could've evolved, that doesn't harm the theory of evolution. An inability to explain is not proof of falsehood. Just because you haven't seen a writeup walking through each and every little step of a process, doesn't mean that process can't work. (I don't think any human alive can truely understand all of the machines used for modern, daily life. Yet they carry on somehow.). In fact, given that primitive life was created so many billions of years ago in conditions that were so adverse to preserving evidence, it should be unsuprising that the precise details are unknown.
If one disgards arguments simply because one cannot personally comprehend every little detail, then creationism could be assailed with many more objections.
And fruits, including berries and tomatoes, are vegetables...
First, it will be slower. Period.
Wrong, that is an incorrect reduction of a complex issue. Every "absolute" assertion is incorrect sometimes. (Even that one). In reality, we can concoct several scenarios where vector-based graphics can be faster.
Your video display is bitmap based,
Wrong. It is understandable that if one lacks this base fact, invalid conclusions will be reached.
For 10 years or more, we have had what's called "accelerated" video cards. And for 5 years, there have been "3-d accelerated" cards. Both kinds of hardware accept vector-based inputs, in addition to some bitmap support.
If a UI theme is designed such that the majority of its needed can be handled by 3-d accelerator functions on videocards, then it might be much faster than the equivalent them represented as bitmaps. And more importantly, the speed limiting bottlenecks will come in different places- ie, a vector-theme's speed is mostly independent of screen resolution, so you can go to 2048x1540 or beyond.
A prime motivation to develope SVG-based UI imagery is to leverge the vector-processing abilities of current videocards, which are currently utilized only by videogames.
What happened next was a mess - the new Afghan government has been more or less abandoned - but the initial job was done well.
Who performed that job? A military equipped and trained under 8 years of Clinton.
Once the NYC WTC was destroyed, the decision to attack Afganistan was basically unavoidable. Any US President, Gore or Bush, would've told the Pentagon to overthrow the Taliban. And from then on, the job is done by warfighters recruited and molded long before 2000.
The reason is that Microsoft is rich and powerful and Bill Gates can be talked into making huge campaign contributions. Thus, Microsoft can help the Republicans stay in power, so the Republicans help Microsoft.
The Democrats do the same thing, just with a different set of campaign contributors.
Not all that different. After the "wake-up call" of a nearly disasterous anti-trust trial, Microsoft(tm) contributes to both parties.
I don't have the full numbers handy anymore, but for example, in 2000, Microsoft gave Republicans $1,300,000 and Democrats $900,000. Sometimes (as with the presidential election), they'd contribute to opposing candidaties! It sounds weird, but apparently many corporations care less about who wins than that the winner will owe a favor.
How is that any different than the moderation mob on Slashdot?
It's different because on Slashdot, you can browse at -1. Moderators can never delete a post, just push it down a little.
And downmods can't terminate your account, either. Violating Microsoft(tm) TOS could get you whole access suspended. Just look at OCG; he gets modded into the dirt every few days, but he's still sticking around.
It's a fine comparison.
One is software that supports interactive desktop applications. But, the other is software that supports interactive desktop applications!
Gnome is not an OS.
Not an OS? What is an OS? Ah, an "Operating System". So if it isn't an OS, it must be a Non-Operating System. Therefore those crashes were totally expected!
Seriously though, every piece of software which provides critical support to another layer of software running on top of it is an "Operating System", and any crash should be treated as an exceptionally bad event. If your computer runs Gnome, then it's probably a desktop or workstation, and a crash of Gnome will suddenly terminate the applications you'd been using. To the end-user, that's just as bad as an OS crash! It's not as if data that was unsaved when Gnome died will be recoverable. The process is dead.
Being able to claim "The Linux kernel didn't crash, it was just Xfree86 or KDE or Gnome" is nothing to be proud of.
Gnome is a window manager
That is specifically untrue. Gnome doesn't manage windows, and in fact requires you to have some actual Window Manager running before it can work. Popular WM choices for Gnome users include enlightenment, sawfish, and metacity. There's a whole category of "Gnome-compatible Window Managers" out there.
The comparison between libc and Google is not valid.
1. libc is not patented. Its behavior is specified in published technical documentation. Google is patented, and it's exact behavior can only be inferred from use.
2. If SCO claimed libc, that would probably include a threat to discontinue use. Microsoft(tm) owning Google would leave it as a public webpage for at least a few years (maybe later migrating it to an Internet Explorer(r) specific feature). With no compelling reason to change, who will change? Only fanatics.
3. libc is a developer system, but Google is a consumer system. The users of libc are savy to technical and legal pitfalls, and can see when a change is needed. The big, big majority of Google's users have no fear of Microsoft(tm)'s practices (they probably run Windows(r), after all). When Google.com starts sporting a tiny "Microsoft(tm)" GIF on the corner of the page, few will notice and fewer will care.
Rather, the earth is not a closed system, and solar energy is here to
stay for billions of years to come.
Did you read my post? I did not say the earth is a closed system.
Since you didn't read it, please don't respond. The continual transfer of energy from sun to earth is just one example of shifting "wealth" from place to place. "Transfer" is NOT "creation". My point that one can't "create" wealth still stands.
Yeah that's right... double the processor, less than half the performance.
After learning this, I hope they scrapped the previous 4-proc systems and upgraded to Uniprocessor Technology.
Extrapolating from those datapoints, they'll be able to run 160 users on a single box!
Whenever I go, I stop by the printer aisle and give a cable or two away to anyone who mich need one.
That sounds like fun, but do people really accept them?
I mean, you're standing in a store, looking at products on a rack, and a boy comes up behind you, slips one of a similar product into your hand, and says "Go ahead and walk out with this. I paid for it before. You're fine! It's my gift." Aren't they suspicious?
Which is why I buy the cheap Schick (heh) knock-off of the Mach3, which works well enough.
Enjoy it while it lasts! The lawsuit to terminate this despicable piracy is already in progress.
Oddly enough, you're wrong, at least as far as the customers I deal with are concerned. I work at a Kinko's,
I suspect that your experience is nonrepresentive, as it is filtered by the fact that the subjects have already decided to be Kinko's customers by the time you observe them.
Those who don't care about quality will drop $25 for an inkjet from Walmart, figuring the saving from 3 fewer trips to the shop will cover that investment.
A very common pattern for medium-sized business is to print drafts and internal documents in-house, and then to go to Kinko's for the rare job where they're willing to put up the money to make a good impression.
Au contraire. This result is a bad thing.
By ruling that the law won't apply in limited cases involving physical equipment, the courts have allowed the DMCA to go on existing. It will continue to forbid performing activities to support interoperability, re-use, fair-use, and security as long as the venue is software, and not hardware.
The preferred result would've been for Lexmark's claims to have been upheld, so the true wrongness of the DMCA would be painfully apparent to the public, creating pressure for Congress to revise (or just erase) the law.
Instead of smoothing off the particularly bad implications, they should've been let remain, so the whole thing would eventually be cut down. A law which forbids you from doing a traditional, harmless behavior will be raise outcry and quickly be modified (as we've seen with the toner and garage door cases). But the parts of the law banning new, nontraditional activities that are nonetheless harmless will not be so obvious, as people don't realize they're missing what they've never had.
If the DMCA had stood for hardware, it would've quickly been revoked for both hardware and software.
What is a "Bhuddist"? I'll assume you meant to say "Buddhist".
My pastor at church described a situation where some Bhuddists found what they believed to be a peice of Bhudda's finger.
That makes little sense (not that I should expect any religion to make sense for long). In the Buddhist faith, "Buddha" is not an individual, but a category of person. It is a word used similarly to "saint". Of course, it's quite possible that the worshippers he described were not doctrinally correct, and had instead fallen into theism and idolatry. That happens with a lot of major churches- the people demand it, so the clergy provide.
Such behavior is quite similar to what Catholics have done for millenia (right up to the present). Does kissing the skull of a saint bring you any closer to Jesus?
I wonder why the pastor choose to use an alien, Asian religion in his example, when plenty of well-known Christian branches do exactly the same thing.
All in all, I would say this counts as proprietary information.
It absolutely doesn't. "Proprietary information" means information that is owned, and that it is illegal for other people to have without consent, regardless of their employment status. If this guy wasn't a temp (who can be fired at will simply by failing to renew him each day), it wouldn't be so easy to remove him for something like this. The information he reported was plainly visible to any 3rd party deliveryman or even unrelated civilian standing on the sidewalk outside.
"Proprietary information" = "intellectual property" = "trademark, patent, or copyright".
First, it's not a law, but an observation. (Intel admits this in their own advertising). A law would be like the "law of gravity", which states acceleration=(mass*mass)/(distance*distance). "Obsreved gravity" is that objects near the earth accelerate at around 9.8m/s/s. Observations are much weaker than laws.
Second, "Moore's Observation" is, in the text you link, talking specifically about silicon chips. So this optical thing isn't strictly relevant.
Thirdly. However, much of Moore's justification can apply to optical chips too. But, he is generally understood to have been talking about CPU-like processors, which is not what this new development is. It's not an arbitrary, stored-program computer, but a single-function converter for a digital stream. It's not fair to compare it to the Pentium3's speed benchmarks, since the P3 does so many more things. Instead, it should be held up against the other special-purpose chips made for military signal processing, some of which are terrifically impressive even in their old-fashioned silicon embodiment.
There is no problem at all. Current encryption techniques are formally protected against faster CPUs.
A linear increase in key length requires exponentially more CPU power to crack it. One more bit of key means twice as much work to solve.
This meshes neatly with "Moore's Law" ("CPU speeds will double each 18 months"). So we can calculate that if a 512 bit key is practically uncrackable today, a 4096 key will remain unbroken until 3584 years of technical advance have passed by.
Interestingly, many cities have "World Trade Centers". And unlike the one in New York, they are attached to international ports and used for trade. "Office space for financial services" is not "world trade".
The NYC WTC was fraudulently named. Really, the whole construction of those two buildings was borderline illegal. Or at least pinko anti-American...
Anyway, in the movie, Gates lies to Jobs, telling Jobs they want to develop software for the Lisa(?)
Then I guess that movie was lying, because Microsoft(tm) really did want to sell software for Apple computers. Since the birth of the Macintosh(r), Microsoft has always been in the top 3 software vendors for the platform, if not flat-out number one.
The experience Microsoft accured with Microsoft Word(r) for Mac importantly influenced the development of their Windows(r) line.
Good luck to him finding work again.
Fortunately, he was slashdotted. So now whenever anyone questions this subject, he can point to a famous, persistent web page explaining the whole story and how silly it was.
And any employer not impressed by a sympathetic slashdot article is probably one he doesn't want a job from anyhow.