Google made the "one principle" bussiness API, as one would expect, the MS copy (err, implementation) is 12 times as big as the original and hasn't been tested properly./sarcasm
You have hit the nail on the head, they say that any new idea that takes root in society after you turn 40 is automatically to be considered "unnatural". I'm approaching 50, I don't see the attraction of myspace or "big brother" style TV shows.
Myspace doesn't bother me because I can simply ignore it, I don't know if it's usefull or not, I just don't care about it, I don't want to understand. I'm content to die without ever having experienced myspace, read all my junkmail or watched the Titanic remake all the way through to the end.
OTHOH: Does anyone know the number I am supposed to call to vote that unnatural big brother crap off my TV? Not just one at a time, the whole lot of them at once, including the airhead commentators that bounce around like they just snorted half a pound of sugar.
"If this were true double-blind experiments wouldn't exist."
The "fact" that you, me and millions of others are totally convinced that double-blind experiments exist does not mean that our perceptions are conveying a true picture of "reality".
The only thing I can hold up as absolute truth is that I exist (I think thefore...), problem is that I cannot hold up the existance of anything else as absolute truth since you, slashdot, double-blind experiments, philosophical ideas and the rest of the universe may be mere figments of my imagination.
Realizing that science is ultimately based on faith is a hard pill to swallow but remeber that we are talking about philosophy, not everyday science or "common-sense". A nice place to start on this stuff is not the "matrix movies", rather look up the mathematician Godel who demonstrated that truth is a much stronger notion than proof and then work backwards to the ancient Greeks.
While on the subject of skepticism, I highly recommend that anyone who belives the crap spouted by phycics, soothsayers and religion not only read Randi, but also take a look at the book "Demon haunted world" by Carl Sagan.
"maybe the ability depends heavily on the environment and situation"
Yes, and if you ask Randi he will tell you that magic tricks are also heavily dependent on the environment and situation. (The rest of the post is not aimed at you personally)
How Randi helped me see the light (a bedtime story):
Thirty odd years ago I dropped out of high school with reasonably good marks in science, shortly after this Uri Geller appered on my TV and started bending spoons and such. He conducted an "experiment" with the TV audience where he asked everyone who had access to a broken watch to hold it in their hand. I did this and watched as Uri mustered his best concentration expression and stared into the camera for about 30 seconds, lo and behold my watch that had not ticked for more than two years was now ticking away and kept running for several minutes only to break down again.
I was hooked, and over the next four years collected a shelf full of books describing all sorts of paranomal observations and theories. I belived every word of it, after all the books were written by people with letters behind their names and had a large number of refrencess in the back that sounded very scientific and impressive.
One day I picked up a small paperback by a magician (Randi) who claimed to be able to explain all of this as mere trickery. I was skeptical but decided to read it because I had so far not read anything to counter the claims of these "scientific" books and magazines. That slim paperback taught me more about the scientific method than 10yrs of public schooling. I became a rabid sceptic and started to learn how to spot the "psuedo" in the science. Ten years later I obtained a BSc in computer science and now consider myself very literate in what was once called "natural philosophy". (To those who say Randi is in it for the money/fame, I say you have not done your research).
For a while I became convinced that science could (eventually) tell us exactly how the universe works and was a devoted atheist. About 15 years ago I became interested in philosophy and eventually came to the conclusion that although science is the most usefull and productive philosophy we have ever invented it is still ultimately based on the faith that what we perceive via our senses is in fact the "real world". Fining out that it is IMPOSSIBLE to ever really understand yourself (let alone the universe) is ironically a great relief and is (IMO) why so many people simply put their faith in an omnipotent God rather than following the long and tourturous route I took.
Disclaimer: Telepathy is not impossible but after decades of research it has never been observed in a controlled environment. From this logic and the theory of evolution it would seem that telepathy is very unlikely, so unlikely that it is virtually indistinguishable from impossible.
"I don't understand the logic behind the above statement"
I think that the OP was implying that both joggers and sunbathers "sweat buckets". Sweat is salt water and salt water is a good electrical conductor, therefore both groups would have lower than normal electrical resistance on the surface of their respective hides, regardless of their emotional state.
"I would need two hands to count the number of places I have worked at where everything that happened on a user's PC was IT's responsibility, regardless of the cause of the problem."
Don't get legality confused with office politics, the same situation is common over here in Australia. However I have also had the pleasure of working with some bosses with enough balls to reject the "whipping boy" role for all other departments.
Just nitpicking the point, but the begining of the SDLC is requirements gathering not development. If you nail the requirements acuurately (eg: write the user manual first and make sure the PHB's agree in writing) your maintenance and testing battles will be half over before you write any code.
In other words: If both the sponsoring PHB's and the developers fail to communicate to others "what the software is supposed to do" every user/tester complaint becomes a bug and the software rapidly deteriorates into a costly white elephant.
"You'd need to catch her on a video camera, entering the password, to have any legal basis for an accusation."
Rubbish, Mary is responsible for a company asset and her boss is responsible for making sure she knows what is expected from her. The company only needs to show that she was made aware of the applicable procedures before the loss and she can be shot, err I mean terminated.
Legally there at least three possibile scapegoats...
1.Mary was negligent in her responsibility and therfore sackable.
2.Her boss was negligent in delegating to an unqualified Mary and therfore sackable.
3.The procedure is broken or non-existant, PHB who approved or failed to set procedure(s) may be sackable.
"I'm 110% convinced that the only way to avoid the bozos is to be your own boss."
Thing is, everyone is somebody else's "bozo", had you been sucessfull in your start-up the "bozo's" would be working for you. The only way to avoid "bozo's" is to live like a hermit and even a hermit does stupid shit to themselves every now and then.
What you say (global wages will even out eventually) makes sense to a degree but I don't see why socialist/capitalist is a binary choice, some things just don't lend themselves well to "the market", health care being a prime example.
Excellent explaination, even the car analogy made sense.
"...and all the ISPs in the middle (with the exception of Tier-1 ISPs that pass and generate traffic equally) pay."
I can't imagine the double toll principle making it's way into international telecomms treaties. If tolls start springing up in the US is there any reason why the rest of the planet could not bypass these tolls by subscribing to Tier-1 ISPs based in say the EU or Canada. (As I understand it all the dozen or so "master DNS tables" are housed in US institutions but are unofficially mirrored around the world).
In other words how hard would it be for the EU to contain the "fragmentation" to mainland USA and shift "the interenet" to Europe?
"Nowhere will you find my real name associated with my slashdot or myspace account--though you may be able to link them."
There will be alot of unrelatable accounts for one person, I expect to read articles telling me the spooks are tracking 10 trillion people on the net, and have managed to connect M.Moore to OBL with less than six "go betweens".
"Do you really believe that it's a sign of freedom for a woman [man] to dress in outfits that don't leave much to the imagination."
I just gave up 3 mod points on this discussion to answer YES!
All the major religions teach tolerance, yet many ardent followers preach the opposite, sexual mores and drugs are two of the most powerfull "wedge" issues that can be used to divide a modern western population. The Queen, the pope, the president and the peasant all scratch their arse with one hand. Apart from notifyable diseases and the mentally ill, what gives any of them the right to in anyway intefere in what I wear, what I do/don't put into my body or what I do in a sexual encounter with a consenting adult? Don't try too hard to answer that, I have been asking similar questions since I was a teenager and I'm now approaching 50, the best answer I have heard so far is "crack babies" but saving a few crack babies (so they can be alcohol/nicotine babies?) doesn't justify the misery caused by the intolerant and their violently conflicting mores.
Disclaimer: My partner is religious (BAC) and yet somehow manages to tolerate my views to the point of downloading porno clips and showing me the ones that make her horny.
"Yes, she said it laughingly but she DID think it."
"Redneck" is an attitude, nationalities are no more than interchangable scapegoats. I think she was taking the piss out of the rednecks in her own country. BTW: Your country also cops alot of suspision for earthquakes, disease oubreaks, pretty much any unusual occurence. Even here in Australia there are plenty of people who "know" you guys have aliens hidden away somewhere at NASA.
An excellent book that touches on some of this is Carl Sagan's "Demon haunted world".
...bit to much to be a coincidece...the phenomena of mysterious "plug holes" seem to be spreading worldwide. OMG we may have uncovered another Dr.Evil film plot.
(Seriously, thanks for the link, I love the bizzare stuff humans do to themselves)
"yhbt hand: The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself." (your sig. my emphasis)
ybth:
You are adapting to an ideology that substiutes for culture, not the world. Adapting our technology to the world is what the current GW argument and related (but more serious) "peak oil" problem is all about. Reasonable people do not think armagedon is apon you and me in particular, the threat is to the civilizations of my kids & grandkids. Any objective audit of mankinds near term (20-200yrs) prospects will show a dramatic downturn in global population, the trick as the economists say is a "soft landing". Efforts to slow the rate of environmental change can only assist "our" long term prospects as we inevitably experiment with the only planet we have.
BTW: The quote in your sig is a "slogan" often used by pot smoking hippies in the environmental movement.
I know what the nazi's did (and more recently Idi Amin [sic-who cares]), that sort of experiment is simply using science as a banner to promote an "evil agenda", no different than religion using an "evil adgenda" such as witch burning. Both are not intellectually honest.
"Would you allow yourself to be cloned, to grow spare organs for you if your organs were failing? Why or why not?"
I'm a smoker, a spare set of lungs could come in handy one day...
"As much as scientists go on about the line between science and religion, why do they suddenly get uppity when people claim that ethics (which might not derive from the laws of nature!) can and should impose its will upon science?"
You answered your own question..."but the use and employment of nuclear weapons absolutely is an ethical problem"
The scientific method demands the ethic of intellectual honesty, if people (scientists included) cherry pick the products of scientific enquiry to unethically oppress a segment of the population then you have a political problem not a scientific one.
Slashdot Mirror
Google made the "one principle" bussiness API, as one would expect, the MS copy (err, implementation) is 12 times as big as the original and hasn't been tested properly. /sarcasm
You have hit the nail on the head, they say that any new idea that takes root in society after you turn 40 is automatically to be considered "unnatural". I'm approaching 50, I don't see the attraction of myspace or "big brother" style TV shows.
Myspace doesn't bother me because I can simply ignore it, I don't know if it's usefull or not, I just don't care about it, I don't want to understand. I'm content to die without ever having experienced myspace, read all my junkmail or watched the Titanic remake all the way through to the end.
OTHOH: Does anyone know the number I am supposed to call to vote that unnatural big brother crap off my TV? Not just one at a time, the whole lot of them at once, including the airhead commentators that bounce around like they just snorted half a pound of sugar.
"so?"
Ummm, I am not trying to prove a point or start a debate. I raised it because I also find it is "interesting" and worth sharing.
"If this were true double-blind experiments wouldn't exist."
The "fact" that you, me and millions of others are totally convinced that double-blind experiments exist does not mean that our perceptions are conveying a true picture of "reality".
The only thing I can hold up as absolute truth is that I exist (I think thefore...), problem is that I cannot hold up the existance of anything else as absolute truth since you, slashdot, double-blind experiments, philosophical ideas and the rest of the universe may be mere figments of my imagination.
Realizing that science is ultimately based on faith is a hard pill to swallow but remeber that we are talking about philosophy, not everyday science or "common-sense". A nice place to start on this stuff is not the "matrix movies", rather look up the mathematician Godel who demonstrated that truth is a much stronger notion than proof and then work backwards to the ancient Greeks.
While on the subject of skepticism, I highly recommend that anyone who belives the crap spouted by phycics, soothsayers and religion not only read Randi, but also take a look at the book "Demon haunted world" by Carl Sagan.
"maybe the ability depends heavily on the environment and situation"
Yes, and if you ask Randi he will tell you that magic tricks are also heavily dependent on the environment and situation. (The rest of the post is not aimed at you personally)
How Randi helped me see the light (a bedtime story):
Thirty odd years ago I dropped out of high school with reasonably good marks in science, shortly after this Uri Geller appered on my TV and started bending spoons and such. He conducted an "experiment" with the TV audience where he asked everyone who had access to a broken watch to hold it in their hand. I did this and watched as Uri mustered his best concentration expression and stared into the camera for about 30 seconds, lo and behold my watch that had not ticked for more than two years was now ticking away and kept running for several minutes only to break down again.
I was hooked, and over the next four years collected a shelf full of books describing all sorts of paranomal observations and theories. I belived every word of it, after all the books were written by people with letters behind their names and had a large number of refrencess in the back that sounded very scientific and impressive.
One day I picked up a small paperback by a magician (Randi) who claimed to be able to explain all of this as mere trickery. I was skeptical but decided to read it because I had so far not read anything to counter the claims of these "scientific" books and magazines. That slim paperback taught me more about the scientific method than 10yrs of public schooling. I became a rabid sceptic and started to learn how to spot the "psuedo" in the science. Ten years later I obtained a BSc in computer science and now consider myself very literate in what was once called "natural philosophy". (To those who say Randi is in it for the money/fame, I say you have not done your research).
For a while I became convinced that science could (eventually) tell us exactly how the universe works and was a devoted atheist. About 15 years ago I became interested in philosophy and eventually came to the conclusion that although science is the most usefull and productive philosophy we have ever invented it is still ultimately based on the faith that what we perceive via our senses is in fact the "real world". Fining out that it is IMPOSSIBLE to ever really understand yourself (let alone the universe) is ironically a great relief and is (IMO) why so many people simply put their faith in an omnipotent God rather than following the long and tourturous route I took.
Disclaimer: Telepathy is not impossible but after decades of research it has never been observed in a controlled environment. From this logic and the theory of evolution it would seem that telepathy is very unlikely, so unlikely that it is virtually indistinguishable from impossible.
"I don't understand the logic behind the above statement"
I think that the OP was implying that both joggers and sunbathers "sweat buckets". Sweat is salt water and salt water is a good electrical conductor, therefore both groups would have lower than normal electrical resistance on the surface of their respective hides, regardless of their emotional state.
"I would need two hands to count the number of places I have worked at where everything that happened on a user's PC was IT's responsibility, regardless of the cause of the problem."
Don't get legality confused with office politics, the same situation is common over here in Australia. However I have also had the pleasure of working with some bosses with enough balls to reject the "whipping boy" role for all other departments.
Just nitpicking the point, but the begining of the SDLC is requirements gathering not development. If you nail the requirements acuurately (eg: write the user manual first and make sure the PHB's agree in writing) your maintenance and testing battles will be half over before you write any code.
In other words: If both the sponsoring PHB's and the developers fail to communicate to others "what the software is supposed to do" every user/tester complaint becomes a bug and the software rapidly deteriorates into a costly white elephant.
"You'd need to catch her on a video camera, entering the password, to have any legal basis for an accusation."
Rubbish, Mary is responsible for a company asset and her boss is responsible for making sure she knows what is expected from her. The company only needs to show that she was made aware of the applicable procedures before the loss and she can be shot, err I mean terminated.
Legally there at least three possibile scapegoats...
1.Mary was negligent in her responsibility and therfore sackable.
2.Her boss was negligent in delegating to an unqualified Mary and therfore sackable.
3.The procedure is broken or non-existant, PHB who approved or failed to set procedure(s) may be sackable.
"You are forgetting that standard of living and wages are closely linked."
Thanks captain obvious.
"I'm 110% convinced that the only way to avoid the bozos is to be your own boss."
Thing is, everyone is somebody else's "bozo", had you been sucessfull in your start-up the "bozo's" would be working for you. The only way to avoid "bozo's" is to live like a hermit and even a hermit does stupid shit to themselves every now and then.
And who could forget Humpty Dumpty on such an auspicious occasion...
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less." - Lewis Carroll.
What you say (global wages will even out eventually) makes sense to a degree but I don't see why socialist/capitalist is a binary choice, some things just don't lend themselves well to "the market", health care being a prime example.
Excellent explaination, even the car analogy made sense.
"...and all the ISPs in the middle (with the exception of Tier-1 ISPs that pass and generate traffic equally) pay."
I can't imagine the double toll principle making it's way into international telecomms treaties. If tolls start springing up in the US is there any reason why the rest of the planet could not bypass these tolls by subscribing to Tier-1 ISPs based in say the EU or Canada. (As I understand it all the dozen or so "master DNS tables" are housed in US institutions but are unofficially mirrored around the world).
In other words how hard would it be for the EU to contain the "fragmentation" to mainland USA and shift "the interenet" to Europe?
"Nowhere will you find my real name associated with my slashdot or myspace account--though you may be able to link them."
There will be alot of unrelatable accounts for one person, I expect to read articles telling me the spooks are tracking 10 trillion people on the net, and have managed to connect M.Moore to OBL with less than six "go betweens".
"Do you really believe that it's a sign of freedom for a woman [man] to dress in outfits that don't leave much to the imagination."
I just gave up 3 mod points on this discussion to answer YES!
All the major religions teach tolerance, yet many ardent followers preach the opposite, sexual mores and drugs are two of the most powerfull "wedge" issues that can be used to divide a modern western population. The Queen, the pope, the president and the peasant all scratch their arse with one hand. Apart from notifyable diseases and the mentally ill, what gives any of them the right to in anyway intefere in what I wear, what I do/don't put into my body or what I do in a sexual encounter with a consenting adult? Don't try too hard to answer that, I have been asking similar questions since I was a teenager and I'm now approaching 50, the best answer I have heard so far is "crack babies" but saving a few crack babies (so they can be alcohol/nicotine babies?) doesn't justify the misery caused by the intolerant and their violently conflicting mores.
Disclaimer: My partner is religious (BAC) and yet somehow manages to tolerate my views to the point of downloading porno clips and showing me the ones that make her horny.
"Yes, she said it laughingly but she DID think it."
"Redneck" is an attitude, nationalities are no more than interchangable scapegoats. I think she was taking the piss out of the rednecks in her own country. BTW: Your country also cops alot of suspision for earthquakes, disease oubreaks, pretty much any unusual occurence. Even here in Australia there are plenty of people who "know" you guys have aliens hidden away somewhere at NASA.
An excellent book that touches on some of this is Carl Sagan's "Demon haunted world".
Ah, so unreasonable men such as yourself are a GoodThingTM, yeah right.
The basic problem is that they have lost their old way of life and don't understand the new one.
...bit to much to be a coincidece...the phenomena of mysterious "plug holes" seem to be spreading worldwide. OMG we may have uncovered another Dr.Evil film plot.
(Seriously, thanks for the link, I love the bizzare stuff humans do to themselves)
"yhbt hand: The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself." (your sig. my emphasis)
ybth:
You are adapting to an ideology that substiutes for culture, not the world. Adapting our technology to the world is what the current GW argument and related (but more serious) "peak oil" problem is all about. Reasonable people do not think armagedon is apon you and me in particular, the threat is to the civilizations of my kids & grandkids. Any objective audit of mankinds near term (20-200yrs) prospects will show a dramatic downturn in global population, the trick as the economists say is a "soft landing". Efforts to slow the rate of environmental change can only assist "our" long term prospects as we inevitably experiment with the only planet we have.
BTW: The quote in your sig is a "slogan" often used by pot smoking hippies in the environmental movement.
"Godwin's Law"
I know what the nazi's did (and more recently Idi Amin [sic-who cares]), that sort of experiment is simply using science as a banner to promote an "evil agenda", no different than religion using an "evil adgenda" such as witch burning. Both are not intellectually honest.
"Would you allow yourself to be cloned, to grow spare organs for you if your organs were failing? Why or why not?"
I'm a smoker, a spare set of lungs could come in handy one day...
In other news:
Scientists in nearby Perth are sudying a 20m wide plug shaped object that was dragged up from the ocean floor by local fishermen.
"...living in the land of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation."
....I suppose that explains why you parrot the corporate GW FUD but it's still no excuse for sloppy thinking.
"As much as scientists go on about the line between science and religion, why do they suddenly get uppity when people claim that ethics (which might not derive from the laws of nature!) can and should impose its will upon science?"
You answered your own question..."but the use and employment of nuclear weapons absolutely is an ethical problem"
The scientific method demands the ethic of intellectual honesty, if people (scientists included) cherry pick the products of scientific enquiry to unethically oppress a segment of the population then you have a political problem not a scientific one.