Chrome takes roughly exactly half as long to start on my system as Konqueror, which is puzzling, as I'm running KDE4. Same with new windows.
I haven't tested the RAM it's wasting, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was using less RAM, even after running Google's toolkit on top of GTK+.
Of course, Konqueror does more, so far -- it's got built-in adblock, for one. But the extension API, while in development, already works and has already been used to build an adblocker. It's not Firefox, but I'm typing this into a Chrome window, and I'm thinking this stands a strong chance of becoming my default browser in the near future.
No, what's really puzzling is why they don't seem to be linking against Webkit. I'm essentially running one version of Webkit in Chrome, and one version of KHTML in Konqueror, and another version of Webkit is built into Qt4. Why?
Cars still work, and are still fun, and can still be innovative, despite all of them using the exact same UI, even when the steering column is no longer necessarily directly connected to anything, and the car could've been driven as easily with a joystick.
The same could be said of first person shooters. The gameplay mechanic may not change much, but the games can be very different experiences, and they are still fun. Indeed, many of us still have fun with the occasional Doom 1 game, so if Doom 4 ends up playing just like Doom 1 but with better graphics, I don't see that as a bad thing.
However, it would be *nicer* not to have to reboot into Windows for a specific app even if that were unnecessary.
There's also the fact that I'm likely to keep my Linux OS cleaner than Windows, that my Windows is 32-bit while my Linux is 64-bit, and I keep things like wireless keys and VPN access on Linux.
He's not done anything *bad* here, he's just not necessarily doing something we'd hoped for.
That, I'll agree with. In the past, the fact that he's stuck to OpenGL has made ports easier, and it's also forced vendors to keep OpenGL relevant.
I think his point about proprietary drivers... he's right and wrong. He's right in that the second biggest thing that sucks about my Linux desktop today is nVidia drivers. (The biggest thing is KDE4 -- I really should move on.) But he's wrong in that both nVidia and AMD have made noises about open video drivers. If those ever happen, the id tech, being a nice GL engine, should work just fine -- unless it's a Windows-only engine, in which case it'll only run on proprietary stacks, top to bottom.
Problem with that is, I still see less than no point to Quake Live, other than that it's free. And even that doesn't buy much.
Why would I play Quake Live instead of, say, Nexuiz?
I think low usage of Quake Live would point more to the average Linux user being somewhat more discriminating, and actually taking the step to think about it before downloading random browser plugins.
If I'm only playing Quake Live to show him that there's another Linux user, maybe. But even here, I sort of don't see the point -- if buying Doom 3 and Quake 4 wasn't enough, why would it be meaningful to show how many Linux users are willing to play a free game, as opposed to actually put down money for a good game?
You and I both know that the people that Childs met on July 9th were authorized to receive those passwords.
Did he know?
To pretend that between then and when he was arrested on July 12th he had no opportunity to meet with anyone that he could identify as authorized to receive those passwords is farce.
Three days? That really doesn't seem plausible to you?
To maintain that, once in jail, he had no idea that maybe the people he was meeting were who they were claiming to be is either paranoid fantasy
Paranoid, maybe, but not fantasy. Keep in mind, as a system administrator, paranoia is part of the job.
It's especially interesting how outraged people got at the "chauvinistic" attitudes of people "assuming" that better performance means male. They certainly didn't complain about the fact that these events are split up by gender in the first place -- if they don't want questions like this, then simply make one mixed-gender competition, problem solved.
They can switch to h.264, yet continue to use the Flash player.
No, I think the point is that Flash can be a bitch to program in (vs html), and they'd much rather be in control of the code -- right now, they're limited in what they can port Chrome to, because they have to wait for Adobe to port Flash. There's also the stability and performance issues that Google can't fix -- again, they have to wait for Adobe.
Or take platforms like the iPhone, which doesn't have Flash support at all, or the Wii, which has an old version of Flash -- not to mention that both of these platforms likely have hardware acceleration for certain codecs. Sure, Google can support them now, but it's not fun -- they have to support old, buggy, broken versions of Flash, and/or write a completely separate, platform-specific interface (as they did for the iPhone).
Contrast this to html5 -- now all they need is a decent browser, and even if they end up waiting for Apple or Nintendo, at least they aren't waiting for Apple/Nintendo and Adobe. And on platforms they control (Android, Chrome OS), they could have YouTube working with minimal effort before Flash is ported at all.
On top of this, Google is the type of company that likes open standards, and likes to advance them. They used Flash because it was needed. Now that it isn't, I imagine they'd love to get rid of it.
On Windows, you have DirectShow. On OS X, you have QuickTime. On Linux, you have gstreamer, or if you want something even more meta, phonon.
If this is too much to ask, I would expect someone to add some sort of extension (or just fork Firefox) and wrap up VLC's video support. Obviously, Mozilla can't do this themselves (licensing issues), but it technically can be done.
you claim that OpenOffice was created by Sun and therefor should be able to tie into Java nicely..
Well, no, I didn't say "therefore". OpenOffice and Java are both created by Sun -- but I also have noticed that OpenOffice has some heavy dependencies on Java, so I'd be very surprised if it doesn't tie in nicely.
I wasnt calling Java a scam, I was calling the fact that it states it is cross platform a scam, and still is,
Well, no, it still works.
might as well just download wine and the linux framework, and can port all my.NET apps over to linux !
Wine is working from a largely undocumented spec which was never designed to be cross-platform. It sometimes works well, and sometimes fails utterly.
Wine also is not an emulator -- you can't run Windows apps on a PowerPC processor without combining Wine with an emulator. But you can run Java apps on any architecture, and as it was designed for this purpose, it's going to be much faster than trying to emulate a real architecture.
And finally, the only way something can be cross-platform without requiring a download is if every platform already supports it -- for example, Javascript apps are relatively cross platform, as are Flash apps, but only because you've already installed a browser and the Flash plugin. And Java was preinstalled on plenty of systems.
No, if there's anything whose "cross-platform-ness" is a scam, it's.NET, because of how easily and frequently people use p/invoke, because of how patented it is, and because of how little Microsoft puts into either releasing the.NET engine itself under a more permissive license, or improving Mono to the point where we really could use Mono+Wine instead of Windows.
When the "Placebo Effect" can make head-aches and body pains go away, (or alternatively appear), then it is clear that intention and belief in the subject do indeed exert a very powerful influence over the state of the subject. Researchers accept this reality and all it well and good.
Yes -- it's an observed fact.
But if you dare call some aspects of the "Placebo Effect" the result instead of "Energy Manipulation", why suddenly everybody gets terribly upset, refuses to study the phenomenon on grounds that it offends their personal Bullshit-Meter, denies that the phenomenon exists, demands that the term be defined exactly and generally gets all huffy and stubborn.
Ah... then, you're claiming this is an attempt to explain why the Placebo Effect happens?
You may be mistaking derisive laughter for "huffiness". Sure, you can suggest anything, but it's pure speculation without making it testable and falsifiable. The Placebo Effect has been verified to exist, but it also seems quite likely that it could be shown to work with nothing other than chemicals and hormones we already understand.
It's similar to the actions of some religious people -- find something we don't understand yet, (or more often, something they don't understand yet,) claim it's some impossible, not-understandable problem, and substitute "God did it." This looks very much like what you've done here: We know the Placebo effect exists, we don't know exactly how it works, thus, "Energy did it."
But if you agree that you and everything around you may merely be elaborate thought patterns, then it is also reasonable to agree that thoughts might carry more influence than you are currently allowing for.
But without evidence to back that up, it's not useful.
For example: It could well be that whenever I think the word "Pasta", the Flying Spaghetti Monster comes and alters my results. Certainly, this fits with the "universe-is-a-simulation" theory -- why wouldn't the simulators have a sick sense of humor? But I can't reasonably adjust my mental state for all possibilities, any more than I could come up with a Pascal's Wager that covers all religions.
Are you telling me that it tends to work when people really, really want the phenomenon to succeed -- yet are still keeping to protocol?
I'd be happy to attempt an answer here, but I confess I'm not entirely clear what you are asking.
Well, it seems like you're claiming that the phenomenon fails when people want it to fail, and succeeds when they want it to succeed. So it seems that if you had a group of scientists who want it to succeed, sticking strictly to protocol and method to compensate for their own bias, you could show the phenomenon to exist -- and you could even make it repeatable.
I haven't heard of experiments like this, though.
I don't know that, because you've put it into "other words" which I didn't say, which are deliberately made to sound absurd and which do poor service to my actual meaning, (and which, I might add, is a rather cheeky form of argument which I'm sure has a long Latin name).
If I did so deliberately, no Latin, it'd just be a Strawman argument.
Your current mind is constantly moving thoughts around, and invoking emotional reactions, etc. It's also doing the grunt work of making your heart pump and your various organs do their thing. Whether or not at your conscious layer you believe that any of this is happening, these systems will carry on. Energy is just another system.
Ah -- but this also provides no means by which I could verify this phenomenon. My heart beats, and this does change with my mental state, but I can't consciously stop my heart, nor can I observe my brain regulating it -- I can only externally measure it, by, for example, taking my pulse.
in this case I don't see how it was possible for you to misinterpret my words unless you were reading too quickly with your mind actively repelling reality...
That, or I was taking you at your word. You said "energy", so I used that word the way I understand it.
If you meant something different, the problem is that pseudoscientific people use the word "energy" to refer to all kinds of stuff. Kind of like science fiction and "Quantum Flux" (which could also be "subspace") -- it's a convenient term that people sort of understand, so you steal it to describe something different. Eventually, the term loses all practical meaning -- kind of like "cloud computing".
What's more, I would think you'd be excited at the prospect that Qi could be measured -- in Joules, no less. Were this the case, it'd certainly give your position more credibility. Oh well.
What is more likely is that you're simply trying to lie to yourself retroactively...
I have to ask: Do you actually listen to yourself? Do you realize how you've managed to sound both incredibly silly and highly offensive here?
But no, it's not really worth having much of a discussion with someone who's going to call me a liar to my face (and then whine about me being ad-hom). But let's see what you've got in the other thread.
JAVA as I like to call it, seems to have been stagnating for awhile. No new REAL improvements...
The open sourcing of the language and the interpreter, and the other languages that have been developing for it, should help.
I wonder... How do you define a "real" improvement?
I'm no Java fan, but you are coming off as the kind of zealot who, given different circumstances, might dismiss.NET out of hand because it's associated with M$ and has something to do with DRM.
RUBY, (yes I capped it) is a modern day 3rd level language, a language for a language. The way assembler is created by the c++ code, to then be further changed into binary...is the same as RUBY is more of a module creator, to which upon sits on top of C++, in a nutshell.
You realize Ruby is written in C, not C++, right? And deliberately so?
Java (for you...no caps) is on its way out, because the language is at the furthest it can be.
Really?
It does not belong to a company to that has a market share of the OS in use today.
How does that help? Java runs on Windows, as on pretty much everything else. Explain to me how Microsoft's monopoly makes.NET a better choice than anything else that targets the Windows platform.
It is much slower then others amongst its kind
Citation needed. Yes, I can "goggle" it (and I can spell, too!), but it would've helped to point to at least one benchmark that supported your position.
Oh, and Jruby means Java the platform is not irrelevant, nor is its cross-platform-ness irrelevant, even if the language itself becomes irrelevant.
I wish Java the language would die. I also wish we had a better VM, but right now, Java is actually one of the better cross-platform VMs -- and.NET is still fairly patent-encumbered, so unless I was working for Microsoft, I wouldn't risk it on a cross-platform project.
there is no real inter relationship with a major Office application like Office from M$.
Oh, you mean like OpenOffice and Java? Sun is behind both of them, and OpenOffice does use Java for several things. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a Java API.
I hate Java for what it stands for... a missed opportunity to give M$ a great competitor.
Then call it that.
Calling it a scam isn't just insulting, it's dishonest, and you know it.
if it really irks you that much
It mostly just makes you look like you have no understanding of the subject. It's a bit like a misspelling -- it's not that I get offended that you can't spell "Google", it's that it makes you look like you either have trouble typing, or you're too lazy to spellcheck, or you actually are that misinformed about Google.
Not a big deal -- you misspelled Google once. But you've been saying JAVA repeatedly, so...
MIGHT have different coding standards then you
Irrelevant -- the point is that JAVA is actually not correct.
That would be like suggesting single-quoted strings as a "coding standard" in C. A different style is one thing; blatantly incorrect is another.
One is the idea of putting everything into a webservice. The other is the idea of utility computing. They often overlap, but plenty of web services run their own datacenters, and there are plenty of applications of utility computing beyond web services.
Specifically, your "scalability issues" are relevant to the "utility computing" part, but not so much to the "web services" part -- unless you were bringing up issues completely irrelevant to this article.
This is my main annoyance with the use of the word "cloud" -- even people with some technical knowledge still get fooled into thinking one kind of "cloud" has anything at all to do with another type of cloud.
It doesn't make much sense in the SG1 universe, however, as it seems like the different Goa'uld are constantly skirmishing each other.
It makes perfect sense once you realize a few things:
First, slaves aren't the only ones who need intimidating -- other Jaffa could use a little intimidation, also.
And second, do you really want to say that the weapons given to you by your god aren't actually good weapons, only good firework shows? Seems that if a god makes it clear that he needs to impress people, he's admitting some failing as a god.
Oh, and Ra was in charge for a very long time.
You could argue that some faction should've broken free, done it the right way, and taken over the galaxy -- a sort of natural selection. But the second argument still holds. Those gods live for thousands of years, so if they're going to be stupid, they're going to be stupid for awhile. Keep in mind, even with superior weapons (for some value of "superior"), it took a long time for Earth to free the Jaffa.
Ummmm.....have you looked out the window lately, I don't really see much of the JAVA run stuff
You know, I love Ruby. I use it almost exclusively now. But if you think Java is "stagnating", try looking for a job.
Indeed, one of the recent major improvements of Ruby was version 1.9. One of the large improvements this brought was a 2x improvement in speed. That doesn't tell me that Ruby is evolving so much faster than Java, it tells me that even when Ruby doubles in speed, it's still far slower than Java -- it tells me that there's far less that can be done to squeeze every drop of performance out of Java, mostly because Java is actually pretty optimized already.
In fact, JRuby has been one of the best and fastest implementations of Ruby for awhile now.
.NET is 4.0 already,
Because version numbers mean so much. You know what? Java is on version 6 already, and depending on how you're counting, version 7 is due soon.
Regardless, as much as you seem willing to spew meaningless hate -- there are plenty of legitimate reasons to hate Java, yet you haven't cited one -- you also didn't address the actual point. That is: You claimed "cross-platform" was a scam. I called bullshit. And indeed, Java is cross-platform -- every phone except the iPhone, every Blu-Ray player, and every major OS on every major architecture used on the server.
And, you didn't learn your lesson. It's Java, not JAVA. It's not an acronym. I noticed you didn't apply the same treatment to PYTHON or RUBY -- why is that?
The word is used because it embraces some of the perceived characteristics of 'chi'. It's a useful word in this regard and that is all.
But it does illustrate my point -- energy, among many other strange things, once beyond comprehension, can now be clearly quantified.
Then you are not thinking. I explained it clearly enough the first time. ..
That's not a definition, that's a cop-out.
More seriously, read it again -- it's not a definition. You're defining all of the reasons I shouldn't be able to detect it, but not what it is, or what it does.
If such a force existed, it would pose interesting problems for traditional measurement techniques;
Not entirely -- we already have an effect which depends on the thought and mental state of the individual. It's called the Placebo effect, and it's well documented and repeatedly measured.
More specifically, the Placebo effect, the healing power of laughter, and other, similar things, all suffer from the same flaws you mention -- that they depend on the mental state of the subject.
None of them depend on the mental state of the examiner, and certainly, they don't depend on the mental state of the individual who later analyzes the resultant data.
But let's suppose you're right. This presents a problem for you -- see, science is the most reliable way we have of understanding the world, and of knowing what's true and what's not. If science doesn't work to detect something, it becomes very difficult to know very much about it.
You cannot prove that the world really exists beyond your own mind.
This is true, but it also doesn't matter. You see, I can perform reliable and repeatable experiments that will tell me the nature of the universe-that-appears-to-exist. Even if it's an elaborate dream or simulation, the scientific method gives me a greater understanding of how that simulation works, and what I can expect from it.
Indeed, as I'm a software developer, I often do some computer science of my own -- and while I know that none of the software is actually "real", it still behaves in a certain way when I do certain things.
Oh, by the way, tell me again that I'm simply following intellectual authorities. I've read the Tao Te Ching, I've read David Hume, and I've made up my own mind.
Energy, as it pertains to, say, sending messages from one mind to another over long distances, tends not to work so well when angry people are scowling and really, really wanting the phenomenon to fail.
Are you telling me that it tends to work when people really, really want the phenomenon to succeed -- yet are still keeping to protocol?
Actually, yes.... There are deeper parts of your mind....
In other words, you're telling me that there's a deeper part of my mind that believes in Qi.
Aside from the fact that this seems absurd on its face, can you tell me how you know that?
While I hate to invoke the Doug Henning brigade, the Transcendental Meditation people have mountains of work studying their claims.
I live in Fairfield, IA. I was raised in the Movement, and was taught TM at a very early age. I know of what I speak.
They suffer from the success effect -- they have their mountains of research, but I'm too lazy to evaluate it all when I can see a few places where it fails absurdly. For example, you're describing the Maharishi Effect, the idea that a sufficient portion of the population practicing TM, or especially the Sidhis, will affect all aspects of society for the better.
Quantifying this as crime rate, perhaps it's worked in the past, but you'd think it would work in Fairfield. Not at all -- in fact, one student stabbed another to death in the MUM cafeteria (Annapurna) in 2
Rude and dismissive, I'll grant you, but not thoughtless.
And there's a reason for that. It gets your attention, and it's a way of cutting quickly to the point. For example, you claimed that energy could not be quantified, and I showed that it can. You're now claiming that you weren't talking about the same kind of energy -- but why can't Qi be quantified?
Certainly, there was a time when electricity could not be quantified, and those bold enough to suggest that we'd be able to quantify lightning would've been seen as eccentric, to say the least.
in this case a face smack was what I settled on because it seemed he wasn't entirely lost and might simply have needed a kick-start.
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Chrome takes roughly exactly half as long to start on my system as Konqueror, which is puzzling, as I'm running KDE4. Same with new windows.
I haven't tested the RAM it's wasting, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was using less RAM, even after running Google's toolkit on top of GTK+.
Of course, Konqueror does more, so far -- it's got built-in adblock, for one. But the extension API, while in development, already works and has already been used to build an adblocker. It's not Firefox, but I'm typing this into a Chrome window, and I'm thinking this stands a strong chance of becoming my default browser in the near future.
No, what's really puzzling is why they don't seem to be linking against Webkit. I'm essentially running one version of Webkit in Chrome, and one version of KHTML in Konqueror, and another version of Webkit is built into Qt4. Why?
Cars still work, and are still fun, and can still be innovative, despite all of them using the exact same UI, even when the steering column is no longer necessarily directly connected to anything, and the car could've been driven as easily with a joystick.
The same could be said of first person shooters. The gameplay mechanic may not change much, but the games can be very different experiences, and they are still fun. Indeed, many of us still have fun with the occasional Doom 1 game, so if Doom 4 ends up playing just like Doom 1 but with better graphics, I don't see that as a bad thing.
However, it would be *nicer* not to have to reboot into Windows for a specific app even if that were unnecessary.
There's also the fact that I'm likely to keep my Linux OS cleaner than Windows, that my Windows is 32-bit while my Linux is 64-bit, and I keep things like wireless keys and VPN access on Linux.
He's not done anything *bad* here, he's just not necessarily doing something we'd hoped for.
That, I'll agree with. In the past, the fact that he's stuck to OpenGL has made ports easier, and it's also forced vendors to keep OpenGL relevant.
I think his point about proprietary drivers... he's right and wrong. He's right in that the second biggest thing that sucks about my Linux desktop today is nVidia drivers. (The biggest thing is KDE4 -- I really should move on.) But he's wrong in that both nVidia and AMD have made noises about open video drivers. If those ever happen, the id tech, being a nice GL engine, should work just fine -- unless it's a Windows-only engine, in which case it'll only run on proprietary stacks, top to bottom.
Problem with that is, I still see less than no point to Quake Live, other than that it's free. And even that doesn't buy much.
Why would I play Quake Live instead of, say, Nexuiz?
I think low usage of Quake Live would point more to the average Linux user being somewhat more discriminating, and actually taking the step to think about it before downloading random browser plugins.
If I'm only playing Quake Live to show him that there's another Linux user, maybe. But even here, I sort of don't see the point -- if buying Doom 3 and Quake 4 wasn't enough, why would it be meaningful to show how many Linux users are willing to play a free game, as opposed to actually put down money for a good game?
You and I both know that the people that Childs met on July 9th were authorized to receive those passwords.
Did he know?
To pretend that between then and when he was arrested on July 12th he had no opportunity to meet with anyone that he could identify as authorized to receive those passwords is farce.
Three days? That really doesn't seem plausible to you?
To maintain that, once in jail, he had no idea that maybe the people he was meeting were who they were claiming to be is either paranoid fantasy
Paranoid, maybe, but not fantasy. Keep in mind, as a system administrator, paranoia is part of the job.
It's especially interesting how outraged people got at the "chauvinistic" attitudes of people "assuming" that better performance means male. They certainly didn't complain about the fact that these events are split up by gender in the first place -- if they don't want questions like this, then simply make one mixed-gender competition, problem solved.
Apparently, they have, and they're not satisfied with the results.
God damn, how hard is it to RTFS, really?
They can switch to h.264, yet continue to use the Flash player.
No, I think the point is that Flash can be a bitch to program in (vs html), and they'd much rather be in control of the code -- right now, they're limited in what they can port Chrome to, because they have to wait for Adobe to port Flash. There's also the stability and performance issues that Google can't fix -- again, they have to wait for Adobe.
Or take platforms like the iPhone, which doesn't have Flash support at all, or the Wii, which has an old version of Flash -- not to mention that both of these platforms likely have hardware acceleration for certain codecs. Sure, Google can support them now, but it's not fun -- they have to support old, buggy, broken versions of Flash, and/or write a completely separate, platform-specific interface (as they did for the iPhone).
Contrast this to html5 -- now all they need is a decent browser, and even if they end up waiting for Apple or Nintendo, at least they aren't waiting for Apple/Nintendo and Adobe. And on platforms they control (Android, Chrome OS), they could have YouTube working with minimal effort before Flash is ported at all.
On top of this, Google is the type of company that likes open standards, and likes to advance them. They used Flash because it was needed. Now that it isn't, I imagine they'd love to get rid of it.
A video tag is different from a plugin,
Indeed, but at the same time...
On Windows, you have DirectShow. On OS X, you have QuickTime. On Linux, you have gstreamer, or if you want something even more meta, phonon.
If this is too much to ask, I would expect someone to add some sort of extension (or just fork Firefox) and wrap up VLC's video support. Obviously, Mozilla can't do this themselves (licensing issues), but it technically can be done.
It's my understanding that their "High Quality" and "HD" videos are h.264, but the rest are actually whatever codec FLV used to be limited to.
I don't think there's any evidence that the video tag is catching on in any meaningful way. Can anyone point me to evidence of the contrary?
Here you go.
Is the video tag DRM friendly?
Hell no, but neither is Flash, realistically.
you claim that OpenOffice was created by Sun and therefor should be able to tie into Java nicely..
Well, no, I didn't say "therefore". OpenOffice and Java are both created by Sun -- but I also have noticed that OpenOffice has some heavy dependencies on Java, so I'd be very surprised if it doesn't tie in nicely.
I wasnt calling Java a scam, I was calling the fact that it states it is cross platform a scam, and still is,
Well, no, it still works.
might as well just download wine and the linux framework, and can port all my .NET apps over to linux !
Wine is working from a largely undocumented spec which was never designed to be cross-platform. It sometimes works well, and sometimes fails utterly.
Wine also is not an emulator -- you can't run Windows apps on a PowerPC processor without combining Wine with an emulator. But you can run Java apps on any architecture, and as it was designed for this purpose, it's going to be much faster than trying to emulate a real architecture.
And finally, the only way something can be cross-platform without requiring a download is if every platform already supports it -- for example, Javascript apps are relatively cross platform, as are Flash apps, but only because you've already installed a browser and the Flash plugin. And Java was preinstalled on plenty of systems.
No, if there's anything whose "cross-platform-ness" is a scam, it's .NET, because of how easily and frequently people use p/invoke, because of how patented it is, and because of how little Microsoft puts into either releasing the .NET engine itself under a more permissive license, or improving Mono to the point where we really could use Mono+Wine instead of Windows.
When the "Placebo Effect" can make head-aches and body pains go away, (or alternatively appear), then it is clear that intention and belief in the subject do indeed exert a very powerful influence over the state of the subject. Researchers accept this reality and all it well and good.
Yes -- it's an observed fact.
But if you dare call some aspects of the "Placebo Effect" the result instead of "Energy Manipulation", why suddenly everybody gets terribly upset, refuses to study the phenomenon on grounds that it offends their personal Bullshit-Meter, denies that the phenomenon exists, demands that the term be defined exactly and generally gets all huffy and stubborn.
Ah... then, you're claiming this is an attempt to explain why the Placebo Effect happens?
You may be mistaking derisive laughter for "huffiness". Sure, you can suggest anything, but it's pure speculation without making it testable and falsifiable. The Placebo Effect has been verified to exist, but it also seems quite likely that it could be shown to work with nothing other than chemicals and hormones we already understand.
It's similar to the actions of some religious people -- find something we don't understand yet, (or more often, something they don't understand yet,) claim it's some impossible, not-understandable problem, and substitute "God did it." This looks very much like what you've done here: We know the Placebo effect exists, we don't know exactly how it works, thus, "Energy did it."
But if you agree that you and everything around you may merely be elaborate thought patterns, then it is also reasonable to agree that thoughts might carry more influence than you are currently allowing for.
But without evidence to back that up, it's not useful.
For example: It could well be that whenever I think the word "Pasta", the Flying Spaghetti Monster comes and alters my results. Certainly, this fits with the "universe-is-a-simulation" theory -- why wouldn't the simulators have a sick sense of humor? But I can't reasonably adjust my mental state for all possibilities, any more than I could come up with a Pascal's Wager that covers all religions.
Are you telling me that it tends to work when people really, really want the phenomenon to succeed -- yet are still keeping to protocol?
I'd be happy to attempt an answer here, but I confess I'm not entirely clear what you are asking.
Well, it seems like you're claiming that the phenomenon fails when people want it to fail, and succeeds when they want it to succeed. So it seems that if you had a group of scientists who want it to succeed, sticking strictly to protocol and method to compensate for their own bias, you could show the phenomenon to exist -- and you could even make it repeatable.
I haven't heard of experiments like this, though.
I don't know that, because you've put it into "other words" which I didn't say, which are deliberately made to sound absurd and which do poor service to my actual meaning, (and which, I might add, is a rather cheeky form of argument which I'm sure has a long Latin name).
If I did so deliberately, no Latin, it'd just be a Strawman argument.
Your current mind is constantly moving thoughts around, and invoking emotional reactions, etc. It's also doing the grunt work of making your heart pump and your various organs do their thing. Whether or not at your conscious layer you believe that any of this is happening, these systems will carry on. Energy is just another system.
Ah -- but this also provides no means by which I could verify this phenomenon. My heart beats, and this does change with my mental state, but I can't consciously stop my heart, nor can I observe my brain regulating it -- I can only externally measure it, by, for example, taking my pulse.
Also, while the act of takin
in this case I don't see how it was possible for you to misinterpret my words unless you were reading too quickly with your mind actively repelling reality...
That, or I was taking you at your word. You said "energy", so I used that word the way I understand it.
If you meant something different, the problem is that pseudoscientific people use the word "energy" to refer to all kinds of stuff. Kind of like science fiction and "Quantum Flux" (which could also be "subspace") -- it's a convenient term that people sort of understand, so you steal it to describe something different. Eventually, the term loses all practical meaning -- kind of like "cloud computing".
What's more, I would think you'd be excited at the prospect that Qi could be measured -- in Joules, no less. Were this the case, it'd certainly give your position more credibility. Oh well.
What is more likely is that you're simply trying to lie to yourself retroactively...
I have to ask: Do you actually listen to yourself? Do you realize how you've managed to sound both incredibly silly and highly offensive here?
But no, it's not really worth having much of a discussion with someone who's going to call me a liar to my face (and then whine about me being ad-hom). But let's see what you've got in the other thread.
JAVA as I like to call it, seems to have been stagnating for awhile. No new REAL improvements...
The open sourcing of the language and the interpreter, and the other languages that have been developing for it, should help.
I wonder... How do you define a "real" improvement?
I'm no Java fan, but you are coming off as the kind of zealot who, given different circumstances, might dismiss .NET out of hand because it's associated with M$ and has something to do with DRM.
RUBY, (yes I capped it) is a modern day 3rd level language, a language for a language.
The way assembler is created by the c++ code, to then be further changed into binary...is the same as RUBY is more of a module creator, to which upon sits on top of C++, in a nutshell.
You realize Ruby is written in C, not C++, right? And deliberately so?
Java (for you ...no caps) is on its way out, because the language is at the furthest it can be.
Really?
It does not belong to a company to that has a market share of the OS in use today.
How does that help? Java runs on Windows, as on pretty much everything else. Explain to me how Microsoft's monopoly makes .NET a better choice than anything else that targets the Windows platform.
It is much slower then others amongst its kind
Citation needed. Yes, I can "goggle" it (and I can spell, too!), but it would've helped to point to at least one benchmark that supported your position.
Oh, and Jruby means Java the platform is not irrelevant, nor is its cross-platform-ness irrelevant, even if the language itself becomes irrelevant.
I wish Java the language would die. I also wish we had a better VM, but right now, Java is actually one of the better cross-platform VMs -- and .NET is still fairly patent-encumbered, so unless I was working for Microsoft, I wouldn't risk it on a cross-platform project.
there is no real inter relationship with a major Office application like Office from M$.
Oh, you mean like OpenOffice and Java? Sun is behind both of them, and OpenOffice does use Java for several things. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a Java API.
I hate Java for what it stands for... a missed opportunity to give M$ a great competitor.
Then call it that.
Calling it a scam isn't just insulting, it's dishonest, and you know it.
if it really irks you that much
It mostly just makes you look like you have no understanding of the subject. It's a bit like a misspelling -- it's not that I get offended that you can't spell "Google", it's that it makes you look like you either have trouble typing, or you're too lazy to spellcheck, or you actually are that misinformed about Google.
Not a big deal -- you misspelled Google once. But you've been saying JAVA repeatedly, so...
MIGHT have different coding standards then you
Irrelevant -- the point is that JAVA is actually not correct.
That would be like suggesting single-quoted strings as a "coding standard" in C. A different style is one thing; blatantly incorrect is another.
Especially given App Engine, if I recall, does all of this for you.
You're confusing two definitions of "cloud".
One is the idea of putting everything into a webservice. The other is the idea of utility computing. They often overlap, but plenty of web services run their own datacenters, and there are plenty of applications of utility computing beyond web services.
Specifically, your "scalability issues" are relevant to the "utility computing" part, but not so much to the "web services" part -- unless you were bringing up issues completely irrelevant to this article.
This is my main annoyance with the use of the word "cloud" -- even people with some technical knowledge still get fooled into thinking one kind of "cloud" has anything at all to do with another type of cloud.
On the other hand, Azimov's Trantor did have oceans with algae in them -- thus, the oxygen wasn't an issue, at least.
To be fair, many of the space vehicles we've seen which do have wings are also capable of landing on planets.
It doesn't make much sense in the SG1 universe, however, as it seems like the different Goa'uld are constantly skirmishing each other.
It makes perfect sense once you realize a few things:
First, slaves aren't the only ones who need intimidating -- other Jaffa could use a little intimidation, also.
And second, do you really want to say that the weapons given to you by your god aren't actually good weapons, only good firework shows? Seems that if a god makes it clear that he needs to impress people, he's admitting some failing as a god.
Oh, and Ra was in charge for a very long time.
You could argue that some faction should've broken free, done it the right way, and taken over the galaxy -- a sort of natural selection. But the second argument still holds. Those gods live for thousands of years, so if they're going to be stupid, they're going to be stupid for awhile. Keep in mind, even with superior weapons (for some value of "superior"), it took a long time for Earth to free the Jaffa.
That's not a giveaway -- could easily be a stereotype, rather than a clone.
Ummmm.....have you looked out the window lately, I don't really see much of the JAVA run stuff
You know, I love Ruby. I use it almost exclusively now. But if you think Java is "stagnating", try looking for a job.
Indeed, one of the recent major improvements of Ruby was version 1.9. One of the large improvements this brought was a 2x improvement in speed. That doesn't tell me that Ruby is evolving so much faster than Java, it tells me that even when Ruby doubles in speed, it's still far slower than Java -- it tells me that there's far less that can be done to squeeze every drop of performance out of Java, mostly because Java is actually pretty optimized already.
In fact, JRuby has been one of the best and fastest implementations of Ruby for awhile now.
.NET is 4.0 already,
Because version numbers mean so much. You know what? Java is on version 6 already, and depending on how you're counting, version 7 is due soon.
Regardless, as much as you seem willing to spew meaningless hate -- there are plenty of legitimate reasons to hate Java, yet you haven't cited one -- you also didn't address the actual point. That is: You claimed "cross-platform" was a scam. I called bullshit. And indeed, Java is cross-platform -- every phone except the iPhone, every Blu-Ray player, and every major OS on every major architecture used on the server.
And, you didn't learn your lesson. It's Java, not JAVA. It's not an acronym. I noticed you didn't apply the same treatment to PYTHON or RUBY -- why is that?
Which has nothing to do with whether they're a walled garden or not.
The word is used because it embraces some of the perceived characteristics of 'chi'. It's a useful word in this regard and that is all.
But it does illustrate my point -- energy, among many other strange things, once beyond comprehension, can now be clearly quantified.
Then you are not thinking. I explained it clearly enough the first time. . .
That's not a definition, that's a cop-out.
More seriously, read it again -- it's not a definition. You're defining all of the reasons I shouldn't be able to detect it, but not what it is, or what it does.
If such a force existed, it would pose interesting problems for traditional measurement techniques;
Not entirely -- we already have an effect which depends on the thought and mental state of the individual. It's called the Placebo effect, and it's well documented and repeatedly measured.
More specifically, the Placebo effect, the healing power of laughter, and other, similar things, all suffer from the same flaws you mention -- that they depend on the mental state of the subject.
None of them depend on the mental state of the examiner, and certainly, they don't depend on the mental state of the individual who later analyzes the resultant data.
But let's suppose you're right. This presents a problem for you -- see, science is the most reliable way we have of understanding the world, and of knowing what's true and what's not. If science doesn't work to detect something, it becomes very difficult to know very much about it.
You cannot prove that the world really exists beyond your own mind.
This is true, but it also doesn't matter. You see, I can perform reliable and repeatable experiments that will tell me the nature of the universe-that-appears-to-exist. Even if it's an elaborate dream or simulation, the scientific method gives me a greater understanding of how that simulation works, and what I can expect from it.
Indeed, as I'm a software developer, I often do some computer science of my own -- and while I know that none of the software is actually "real", it still behaves in a certain way when I do certain things.
Oh, by the way, tell me again that I'm simply following intellectual authorities. I've read the Tao Te Ching, I've read David Hume, and I've made up my own mind.
Energy, as it pertains to, say, sending messages from one mind to another over long distances, tends not to work so well when angry people are scowling and really, really wanting the phenomenon to fail.
Are you telling me that it tends to work when people really, really want the phenomenon to succeed -- yet are still keeping to protocol?
Actually, yes.... There are deeper parts of your mind....
In other words, you're telling me that there's a deeper part of my mind that believes in Qi.
Aside from the fact that this seems absurd on its face, can you tell me how you know that?
While I hate to invoke the Doug Henning brigade, the Transcendental Meditation people have mountains of work studying their claims.
I live in Fairfield, IA. I was raised in the Movement, and was taught TM at a very early age. I know of what I speak.
They suffer from the success effect -- they have their mountains of research, but I'm too lazy to evaluate it all when I can see a few places where it fails absurdly. For example, you're describing the Maharishi Effect, the idea that a sufficient portion of the population practicing TM, or especially the Sidhis, will affect all aspects of society for the better.
Quantifying this as crime rate, perhaps it's worked in the past, but you'd think it would work in Fairfield. Not at all -- in fact, one student stabbed another to death in the MUM cafeteria (Annapurna) in 2
being rude, thoughtless and dismissive,
Rude and dismissive, I'll grant you, but not thoughtless.
And there's a reason for that. It gets your attention, and it's a way of cutting quickly to the point. For example, you claimed that energy could not be quantified, and I showed that it can. You're now claiming that you weren't talking about the same kind of energy -- but why can't Qi be quantified?
Certainly, there was a time when electricity could not be quantified, and those bold enough to suggest that we'd be able to quantify lightning would've been seen as eccentric, to say the least.
in this case a face smack was what I settled on because it seemed he wasn't entirely lost and might simply have needed a kick-start.
That was pretty much my purpose.
So, now I'll actually reply...