More specifically, a theory must make falsifiable predictions in order to be considered valid. For example, special relativity makes predictions regarding the bending of star light as it passes near the horizon of the sun during a total eclipse. This has been confirmed. Natural selection makes predictions as well, though the predictions are not so risky (making the theory less strong). Some of these predictions have been confirmed in moths changing their color in 19th century england due to the saturation of coal on tree bark. Intelligent design makes no predictions. It cannot be falsified or proved. It, therefore, is not a valid theory (even in the philisophical sense) or science.
For more information, interested/. readers should checkout Karl Popper's Conjectures and Refutations. This will provide a reader with a solid understanding of science as it is viewed by the majority of scientists in our time as well as an explanation of why theories like ID are not scientific.
That is an interesting take on it. But would not any tool or medium, by your definition, be the transferal of human thought and action to a different medium?
There is Action Theory which describes the development of tools through the interaction between Acts (intentions), internal actions (thoughts, ideas), and external actions. Tool refinement is a major component of this theory whereby tools are created to meet some Act, by the interplay between internal and external actions. Tools themselves are physical manifestations of that interplay. They are also refined and become a major component of our thought process. This, according to the theory, is because external artifacts, like tools, are inextricably related to internal actions like our theories and ideas. This relates to XML in that the concept of an extensible markup to impose structure to flat data, and the way in which we do it, are too related to be kept separate.
Therefore, a patent on the idea of something necessarily imbues purvue over any tool or technology that reflects that idea. Such patents themselves are tools of a sort and I think it is worth considering just what Acts they must have been developed to realize.
Perhaps they just have a very sick sense of humor? When I think of the patent office, I imagine John Cleese walking like a bird with tinfoil on his head. Maybe they are just really big Monty Python fans?
Bandwidth and the number of tables on which one can set a laptop and comfortable use the WiFi access are limited and therefore become a commodity. Any scheme you can think of to mitigate these issues always comes down to deciding who gets bandwidth and for how long (including the usage of a table). Because of this, there is no way WiFi provided by a restaurant using 802.11 technologies can ever be considered free. There is always a cost to be paid somewhere.
If the business just set-up an unencrypted network, then the establishment would be flooded with squatters. Even paying customers would sometimes stay longer than usual without purchasing anything. Various schemes I read in other posts merely attempt to redirect these costs but they simply just change the market a little bit.
In the end, price is the only way to balance out the supply demand imbalance when you are dealing with the limited bandwidth and range of 802.11.
I agree with everything you said. The problem is that most of the thousands of workers who have been laid off over the past years are still left-out. Many have taken on less paying jobs just to get by.
The unemployment numbers do not reflect the reality of what has happened because of the way the U.S. accounts for unemployment. Even if you don't care what impact this has on those people, you should at least recognize the impact it has on our economy -- especially to small businesses like yours and other freelance-type businesses about which we are discussing.
If sunw, msft, mot, etc. laid off thousands more workers this year - and offshored more development and engineering work to Russia, India, China, etc. - then they would actually improve profits. That is because they also operate in global markets which are only now starting to emerge. But back here in the U.S., these layoffs cause a drop in expenditures, savings, and indirectly governement spending due to the ensuing reduction in payroll tax revenue. This creates severe downward pressure on our economy which will certainly affect small firms like yours.
It is also devastating to the people who are left aside.
I never doubted that the U.S. is the best place to build a business and pull oneself out of the middle class. I am just saying that for most of these people, what is happening is the opposite.
Fuck you. I have a nice job at a fortune 500 company and have no prospects of losing it. Just because I have to work for a system that does these things doesn't mean I have to like it. I survived because I am very good and because I am much higher educated.
I just happen to feel more compassion for those who were left behind than to my company's profit margin. I would rather have less bonus compensation and see more engineers working again, feeding their families, contributing, etc. That is what separates good people from people like you.
Here is a lesson for all of you boo-fucking-hoo fucks out there. Shit can happen to anyone. Anyone. In one day your whole life can turn upside down and all of your fortunes evaporated. It doesn't matter who you are. Shit happens. Get some fucking compassion.
You don't insult me and I do not have a cynical world-view. People like you are the cynics who see everything in terms of competition and "me". So what if you succeed? You could be one in hundreds, or even thousands. Your success, though positive, hardly compensates for the lost productivity represented by all of those who were laid-off and could not succeed. We can only hope that your business is successful enough such that you hire more people and further increase the GDP.
You just don't get it. It is not about you and your personal talents and/or successes -- if you gain those. It is about everybody. It is about the whole country. The boo-fucking-hoo attitude is what got us here in the first place. That is cynical.
Yes you do need a huge wad of cash to start a decent business. What do you think venture capitalist firms do every day? What you need is a good idea. That good should not easily be reproduced by others -- i.e. patents, or some other kind of barrier. Then, you need a really good salesman to sell the idea to venture capitalists.
Anything you can think of that doesn't take a giant wad of cash is probably being attempted right now in your particular market by at east a dozen other slobs. You can't start a business doing what you did before.
The reason your job was outsourced is because the kind of business that has the capital and assets to have employed you to do that work is large enough to offshore significant amounts of labor to the other side of the planet.
Good ideas that will get you investment money to start a firm are rare. Don't cheapen people's experience with your bullshit. There are lots of engineers and other white-collar workers out there who will never see the same standard of living again in their lives. Telling them that they just need a good idea is insulting.
Never in our history have a significant portion of workers who lost jobs in this way regained their living standards. Not the steal workers, not miners, not factory laborers, not textile workers. None of them. You can always find a sweet little success story but the statistics tell the whole truth. That is the cold reality of economics. Telling people that all they need is a good idea is stupid.
I think the problem is that most of these people honestly believe that logic cannot be employed to infer anything truthful about creation.
They believe, in faith and without question, that God created this universe X years ago (where X depends on the particular brand of faith) and no amount of logic could prove that statement false.
Where they get mind-stabbingly annoying is when they attempt to use logic to disprove science. They are basically claiming that our logic cannot infer anything about creation and is therefore moot. However, they can employ their own logic - based upon sketchy facts and assumptions - to disprove scientific arguments.
And I am not even here considering the people who make invalid arguments accompanied with their sketchy facts and assumptions. They make my head ache.
For any theory to be scientific - inmo - the theory must be well-grounded and make many risky, testable, and (most importantly) falsifiable predictions. Most interpretations of Evolution fit that bill yet intelligent design does not. I place it in the philosophy bucket. Not that there is anything wrong with philosophy. Philosophers are better equipped to deal with these people anyway...
A better comparison would be to an 18th century ship of indentured servants. This really is a modern form of indenture. What happens when one of the workers decides to quit?
You two have become masters of irony by using your experience playing the computer game masters of orion to infer the difficulties and consequences of space colonization and then labeling the article "utter fantasy".
So many here love to mock the line goers, but how many of those people have been to a Linux, gaming or hacker convention? How many have gone to some sort of industry conference? It's the same thing. Lots of geeks gathering in one place to talk about the stuff they enjoy.
A strategic resource implies a finite quantity - like oil. Proprietary software might be something like a strategic resource in that you must pay money to license it but open source certainly is not.
Furthermore, the author assumes that all open source is developed by companies and like proprietary software, if the company folds, so does the open source software. But the open source software could obviously be picked up by some other company. Or dare I say... not picked up by one company but a collection of companies and individuals maintaining the project for themselves and not to sell services.
The only strategic decision that needs to be made is to choose a project that has a sufficient number of users and developers to continue to be maintained and extended. It doesn't matter if the company who released the code folds if the users can take up the task of maintaining the project at least until they can migrate to another.
Motorola has dealt with this before by creating a new company to introduce the technology they developed to the market - Nextel. Of course, Nextel has since pulled a Jerry Springer on Motorola with the latest merger and probably abandonment of the iDEN architecture.
But, there is nothing like iDEN right now (no, CDMA push to talk is just a phone call) and many business customers value it very much
This is product is no different. It doesn't take an MBA to realize that there is a huge number of potential customers that carry *both* iPods and cell phones with them everywhere. A very well design cell-phone integrated with iPod technology would be awesome and I am sure there would be significant demand.
This is also a central piece of Zander's strategy of seamless mobility. Zander's dream is that you should not have to pay for songs on each device or even think about what device on which your media is currently being stored. It sucks to have to agree with a fortune 500 CEO but he absolutely right and I hope these two companies together can make a significant dent in the crap-hole barriers these little greedy service providers and the recording industry have been erecting.
I read this article and thought the exact same things. GPS is already installed on many cellular systems per new federal regulations.
But like the previous/. article covered, the Bells that maintain the 911 services have an economic interest in witholding it from VoIP subscribers. When it comes to the bottom line, none of these corporations have any interest in our well-being.
I completely agree about a hybrid approach. The best example is in GUI builders. Take Java for instance. While writing a Swing interface out by hand is probably the clearest and most robust method, and there are plenty of good Java programmers who prefer writing GUIs out by hand, there obviously was great demand for Java GUI builders that caused the development of so many GUI solutions. I think the key point though is that despite GUI tools making things easier, many really good Java programmers I know of still prefer writing the code because they don't like "what the builder's have to say" so to speak:-)
A programming language is a language used to communicate both to a machine and to other humans. Language features help us encapsulate, hide, and organize complexities so that communicating very complex ideas to a human or machine is more efficient and maintainable.
Non-written languages do not provide the same depth and strength. For example, a CD of James Joyce's Ulysses is not as accessible and understandable as the same book in written form. Furthermore, how would you express those concepts visually? In my opinion, we developed our forms of written communication over the years because it is the most efficient and expressive.
Take hieroglyphics for example. Everybody knows that the Egyptians used a written language of symbols referring to entire concepts rather than words. However, many people do not know that in every day practice, the Egyptians developed a linear form of the same language. Similarly, Asian cultures have adapted their languages to a linear form to use with computers because it is easier than adapting a computer to work with more complex symbols.
Also consider that amount of complexity that can be expressed in a written (text) programming language. When you begin thinking about designing a visual language, you begin thinking about logic flow and control structures. However, you should begin at the most basic level. A programming language's lexicon has both closed and open classes. The keywords are closed but the open class of identifiers is infinite. Furthermore, the idioms used to express these identifiers in various statements are also practically infinite with respect to designing a visual language. Statements can be combined into idioms that vary between languages, programmers, development teams, and application domains.
Worse, is the problem of side-effects. Many programmers using languages such as C and C++ use side effects all of the time. How do you adequately express that in a visual language?
UML is a visual language that has seen a massive amount of research and development. Much progress has been made but even the most die-hard UML designer still has to go down to the code-level to fix the various idioms they wish to express in the programming language that the UML cannot express.
Ultimately, I think the biggest problem is the lexical and syntactic constraints. A programming language allows one to easily expand the lexicon of a programming language as well as various syntactical forms. To do this visually, you will have to create a symbol set to handle each form. If you tried to implement this dynamically like how a written language works, then you are really just developing a written language that uses pictures for words. In that case, you are wasting your time and may as well stick with text.
I still prefer my naquada-clad protection. If it can deflect a direct blast from jaffa staff weapons, it should be able to shield me from that purple monkey that showed up on my desktop one day.
Slashdot Mirror
For more information, interested /. readers should checkout Karl Popper's Conjectures and Refutations. This will provide a reader with a solid understanding of science as it is viewed by the majority of scientists in our time as well as an explanation of why theories like ID are not scientific.
That is an interesting take on it. But would not any tool or medium, by your definition, be the transferal of human thought and action to a different medium?
There is Action Theory which describes the development of tools through the interaction between Acts (intentions), internal actions (thoughts, ideas), and external actions. Tool refinement is a major component of this theory whereby tools are created to meet some Act, by the interplay between internal and external actions. Tools themselves are physical manifestations of that interplay. They are also refined and become a major component of our thought process. This, according to the theory, is because external artifacts, like tools, are inextricably related to internal actions like our theories and ideas. This relates to XML in that the concept of an extensible markup to impose structure to flat data, and the way in which we do it, are too related to be kept separate.
Therefore, a patent on the idea of something necessarily imbues purvue over any tool or technology that reflects that idea. Such patents themselves are tools of a sort and I think it is worth considering just what Acts they must have been developed to realize.
Perhaps they just have a very sick sense of humor? When I think of the patent office, I imagine John Cleese walking like a bird with tinfoil on his head. Maybe they are just really big Monty Python fans?
Thanks Plato. We are now living 2500 years ahead of you. Trying reading Karl Popper.
Bandwidth and the number of tables on which one can set a laptop and comfortable use the WiFi access are limited and therefore become a commodity. Any scheme you can think of to mitigate these issues always comes down to deciding who gets bandwidth and for how long (including the usage of a table). Because of this, there is no way WiFi provided by a restaurant using 802.11 technologies can ever be considered free. There is always a cost to be paid somewhere. If the business just set-up an unencrypted network, then the establishment would be flooded with squatters. Even paying customers would sometimes stay longer than usual without purchasing anything. Various schemes I read in other posts merely attempt to redirect these costs but they simply just change the market a little bit. In the end, price is the only way to balance out the supply demand imbalance when you are dealing with the limited bandwidth and range of 802.11.
I agree with everything you said. The problem is that most of the thousands of workers who have been laid off over the past years are still left-out. Many have taken on less paying jobs just to get by.
The unemployment numbers do not reflect the reality of what has happened because of the way the U.S. accounts for unemployment. Even if you don't care what impact this has on those people, you should at least recognize the impact it has on our economy -- especially to small businesses like yours and other freelance-type businesses about which we are discussing.
If sunw, msft, mot, etc. laid off thousands more workers this year - and offshored more development and engineering work to Russia, India, China, etc. - then they would actually improve profits. That is because they also operate in global markets which are only now starting to emerge. But back here in the U.S., these layoffs cause a drop in expenditures, savings, and indirectly governement spending due to the ensuing reduction in payroll tax revenue. This creates severe downward pressure on our economy which will certainly affect small firms like yours.
It is also devastating to the people who are left aside.
I never doubted that the U.S. is the best place to build a business and pull oneself out of the middle class. I am just saying that for most of these people, what is happening is the opposite.
Fuck you. I have a nice job at a fortune 500 company and have no prospects of losing it. Just because I have to work for a system that does these things doesn't mean I have to like it. I survived because I am very good and because I am much higher educated.
I just happen to feel more compassion for those who were left behind than to my company's profit margin. I would rather have less bonus compensation and see more engineers working again, feeding their families, contributing, etc. That is what separates good people from people like you.
Here is a lesson for all of you boo-fucking-hoo fucks out there. Shit can happen to anyone. Anyone. In one day your whole life can turn upside down and all of your fortunes evaporated. It doesn't matter who you are. Shit happens. Get some fucking compassion.
You don't insult me and I do not have a cynical world-view. People like you are the cynics who see everything in terms of competition and "me". So what if you succeed? You could be one in hundreds, or even thousands. Your success, though positive, hardly compensates for the lost productivity represented by all of those who were laid-off and could not succeed. We can only hope that your business is successful enough such that you hire more people and further increase the GDP.
You just don't get it. It is not about you and your personal talents and/or successes -- if you gain those. It is about everybody. It is about the whole country. The boo-fucking-hoo attitude is what got us here in the first place. That is cynical.
Yes you do need a huge wad of cash to start a decent business. What do you think venture capitalist firms do every day? What you need is a good idea. That good should not easily be reproduced by others -- i.e. patents, or some other kind of barrier. Then, you need a really good salesman to sell the idea to venture capitalists.
Anything you can think of that doesn't take a giant wad of cash is probably being attempted right now in your particular market by at east a dozen other slobs. You can't start a business doing what you did before.
The reason your job was outsourced is because the kind of business that has the capital and assets to have employed you to do that work is large enough to offshore significant amounts of labor to the other side of the planet.
Good ideas that will get you investment money to start a firm are rare. Don't cheapen people's experience with your bullshit. There are lots of engineers and other white-collar workers out there who will never see the same standard of living again in their lives. Telling them that they just need a good idea is insulting.
Never in our history have a significant portion of workers who lost jobs in this way regained their living standards. Not the steal workers, not miners, not factory laborers, not textile workers. None of them. You can always find a sweet little success story but the statistics tell the whole truth. That is the cold reality of economics. Telling people that all they need is a good idea is stupid.
Accenture began its spin-off before the Enron scandal.
I think the problem is that most of these people honestly believe that logic cannot be employed to infer anything truthful about creation.
They believe, in faith and without question, that God created this universe X years ago (where X depends on the particular brand of faith) and no amount of logic could prove that statement false.
Where they get mind-stabbingly annoying is when they attempt to use logic to disprove science. They are basically claiming that our logic cannot infer anything about creation and is therefore moot. However, they can employ their own logic - based upon sketchy facts and assumptions - to disprove scientific arguments.
And I am not even here considering the people who make invalid arguments accompanied with their sketchy facts and assumptions. They make my head ache.
For any theory to be scientific - inmo - the theory must be well-grounded and make many risky, testable, and (most importantly) falsifiable predictions. Most interpretations of Evolution fit that bill yet intelligent design does not. I place it in the philosophy bucket. Not that there is anything wrong with philosophy. Philosophers are better equipped to deal with these people anyway...
A better comparison would be to an 18th century ship of indentured servants. This really is a modern form of indenture. What happens when one of the workers decides to quit?
You two have become masters of irony by using your experience playing the computer game masters of orion to infer the difficulties and consequences of space colonization and then labeling the article "utter fantasy".
..sounds like we have another job for the dog.
How is the parent post anymore flaimbate than the article. The poster was not violating slashdot TOS or even posting off-topic.
When I get mod points, I don't f*****g mod people's posts down because I don't agree with them.
So many here love to mock the line goers, but how many of those people have been to a Linux, gaming or hacker convention? How many have gone to some sort of industry conference? It's the same thing. Lots of geeks gathering in one place to talk about the stuff they enjoy.
The same except for restrooms and AC.
What else are they supposed to do while waiting in line for three days?
How do you think our government came up with these crazy ideas?
thanks England.
A strategic resource implies a finite quantity - like oil. Proprietary software might be something like a strategic resource in that you must pay money to license it but open source certainly is not.
Furthermore, the author assumes that all open source is developed by companies and like proprietary software, if the company folds, so does the open source software. But the open source software could obviously be picked up by some other company. Or dare I say... not picked up by one company but a collection of companies and individuals maintaining the project for themselves and not to sell services.
The only strategic decision that needs to be made is to choose a project that has a sufficient number of users and developers to continue to be maintained and extended. It doesn't matter if the company who released the code folds if the users can take up the task of maintaining the project at least until they can migrate to another.
Motorola has dealt with this before by creating a new company to introduce the technology they developed to the market - Nextel. Of course, Nextel has since pulled a Jerry Springer on Motorola with the latest merger and probably abandonment of the iDEN architecture.
But, there is nothing like iDEN right now (no, CDMA push to talk is just a phone call) and many business customers value it very much
This is product is no different. It doesn't take an MBA to realize that there is a huge number of potential customers that carry *both* iPods and cell phones with them everywhere. A very well design cell-phone integrated with iPod technology would be awesome and I am sure there would be significant demand.
This is also a central piece of Zander's strategy of seamless mobility. Zander's dream is that you should not have to pay for songs on each device or even think about what device on which your media is currently being stored. It sucks to have to agree with a fortune 500 CEO but he absolutely right and I hope these two companies together can make a significant dent in the crap-hole barriers these little greedy service providers and the recording industry have been erecting.
I read this article and thought the exact same things. GPS is already installed on many cellular systems per new federal regulations.
/. article covered, the Bells that maintain the 911 services have an economic interest in witholding it from VoIP subscribers. When it comes to the bottom line, none of these corporations have any interest in our well-being.
But like the previous
I completely agree about a hybrid approach. The best example is in GUI builders. Take Java for instance. While writing a Swing interface out by hand is probably the clearest and most robust method, and there are plenty of good Java programmers who prefer writing GUIs out by hand, there obviously was great demand for Java GUI builders that caused the development of so many GUI solutions. I think the key point though is that despite GUI tools making things easier, many really good Java programmers I know of still prefer writing the code because they don't like "what the builder's have to say" so to speak :-)
That is interesting. Thanks.
A programming language is a language used to communicate both to a machine and to other humans. Language features help us encapsulate, hide, and organize complexities so that communicating very complex ideas to a human or machine is more efficient and maintainable.
Non-written languages do not provide the same depth and strength. For example, a CD of James Joyce's Ulysses is not as accessible and understandable as the same book in written form.
Furthermore, how would you express those concepts visually? In my opinion, we developed our forms of written communication over the years because it is the most efficient and expressive.
Take hieroglyphics for example. Everybody knows that the Egyptians used a written language of symbols referring to entire concepts rather than words. However, many people do not know that in every day practice, the Egyptians developed a linear form of the same language. Similarly, Asian cultures have adapted their languages to a linear form to use with computers because it is easier than adapting a computer to work with more complex symbols.
Also consider that amount of complexity that can be expressed in a written (text) programming language. When you begin thinking about designing a visual language, you begin thinking about logic flow and control structures. However, you should begin at the most basic level. A programming language's lexicon has both closed and open classes. The keywords are closed but the open class of identifiers is infinite. Furthermore, the idioms used to express these identifiers in various statements are also practically infinite with respect to designing a visual language. Statements can be combined into idioms that vary between languages, programmers, development teams, and application domains.
Worse, is the problem of side-effects. Many programmers using languages such as C and C++ use side effects all of the time. How do you adequately express that in a visual language?
UML is a visual language that has seen a massive amount of research and development. Much progress has been made but even the most die-hard UML designer still has to go down to the code-level to fix the various idioms they wish to express in the programming language that the UML cannot express.
Ultimately, I think the biggest problem is the lexical and syntactic constraints. A programming language allows one to easily expand the lexicon of a programming language as well as various syntactical forms. To do this visually, you will have to create a symbol set to handle each form. If you tried to implement this dynamically like how a written language works, then you are really just developing a written language that uses pictures for words. In that case, you are wasting your time and may as well stick with text.
I still prefer my naquada-clad protection. If it can deflect a direct blast from jaffa staff weapons, it should be able to shield me from that purple monkey that showed up on my desktop one day.