This is true. My general point was that a science doesn't work if you factor omnipotent beings into the theories. However, I was wrong to state that evolution dictates that life was not created by an omnipotent and omniscient being. I should have stated that such a being must just be assumed to be uninvolved in the actual process of evolution, for it to be scientific.
ID states that information must originate from intelligence. This is falsifiable. All that must be demonstrated is an instance of information occurring without the involvement of intelligence.
Nice try, but I'm afraid this doesn't work. Allow me to explain:
Information is the reduction of uncertainty. For instance, if I don't know what 4 digit PIN to type in, there are 1:10'000 possibilities. If I know 3 of the digits, then there are only 10 possible values the PIN can be. If I know all 4 of the digits, then there is only 1 value the PIN can be.
When something is ordered, uncertainty is reduced and information increased. Going back to the PIN example, if I know that the numbers in the 4 digit PIN are completely random, then there are 1:10'000 possibilities. But if I know that all the digits are even, then there is only 1:625 possibilities.
There are many examples in natural of ordered structures coming from random and chaotic systems. The shape of snow-clouds is chaotic; you can't predict much about the exact structure. Snow flakes, on the other hand, always have hexagonal symmetry. An ordered structure coming from an unordered origin. An increase in information occuring without intelligence.
However, this is academic, since ID can happily state that everything in the Universe was created by an omnipotent, omniscient, intelligent designer. Information exists within the Universe, therefore this intelligent designer created every piece of information. Thus, ID starts off assuming that every piece of information occurs because of intelligence. Which is why ID is still not falsifiable.
Neither does evolution "state that life was not created by an omnipotent and omniscient God." By your reasoning evolution is "unprovable and thus unscientific."
The whole point of evolution is that it isn't designed. If it was, then it wouldn't be evolution, it would be ID pretending to be evolution. So, yes, I'm afraid that evolution does "state that life was not created by an omnipotent and omniscient God".
Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that God didn't have a hand in the creation of life (though I don't really believe it myself). I'm merely saying that the inclusion of an omnipotent being in a theory results in it being unprovable. Scientists may talk about getting into the mind of God, but amongst all those variables representing distance and energy and spin, you won't find a variable representing an omnipotent being, because if you include an omnipotent being in your equations, logic goes out the window and you can't infer anything.
There's a reason why Darwin called it "Natural Selection", not "Natural and/or Supernatural Selection".
I can't tell you until we discover energy life. I can tell you that my watch is too complex to arise on its own and that biological life is orders of magnitude more complex than my watch.
Biological life has two advantages over your watch:
Life can reproduce.
Life can mutate.
Now, I'm not a biologist, but it seems to me that those are some rather big advantages life has.
Secondly, whilst you may be very proud of your watch, cosmologists know of a variety of natural timepieces that are far more accurate than yours. For instance, some quasars are accurate to 1 second in 10 million years; they may not look like a watch, but they do the same job. In a similar way, legs don't look like wheels, but they do the same job. Why assume that legs were designed just because wheels were?
ID does not deal with the qualities of the designer. It does not state that life is created by an omnipotent and omniscient God. It simply states that life as we know it was designed.
But nor does it state that life was not created by an omnipotent and omniscient God, and because of that, it is unprovable and thus unscientific.
Now, I'd be perfectly happy to accept ID as a valid scientific theory if we set limits on the nature of the Designer. The creation of humanity by aliens in spaceships, for example, is perfectly scientific (though admittedly not too likely).
However, an ID theory which sets no limit on the Designer's capabilities cannot be disproved and thus cannot be classed as a scientific theory.
I don't think so. At the level of specific constructs alleged to be examples of irreducible complexity, all a scientist has to do is demonstrate said construct arising outside of intentional design. Hence, ID is falsifiable in principle on a scientific level because its proponents suggest specific constructs found in nature that they hold to be examples of ID. In principle, this is no different than the falsifiability of evolution.
You're incorrect. The problem with ID is that the Intelligent Designer in question can potentially be omnipotent and omniscient. Indeed, most proponents of ID are Christians that believe that an all-powerful, all-seeing God created the Universe.
Now, a scientific theory must be falsifiable by observational evidence. With ID, because the Designer can be omnipotent and omniscient, any evidence can be faked, and therefore is no evidence at all. Indeed, with ID, the Universe could have been created a mere two seconds ago, and all of our memories mere fabrications.
Intelligent Design is, by definition, not scientific, because it places no limits on the capabilities of the Designer, and therefore cannot be proven false. Don't believe me? Then give me an example of evidence that would disprove ID.
Evolution, on the other hand, is falsifiable because, unlike ID, it is restricted by physical laws.
The lock-ups seem to be rather rare, at least in my case. I get one about once every 2 months, which doesn't really bother me too much. It would be nice if there weren't any, but I can put up with the necessity of 6 hard reboots a year.
Third, be aware that the state of 3d under Linux sucks. I'm sorry, but that's how it is. ATI and NVidia ship binary drivers that produce friction from the kernel folks. The fastest cards with open-source drivers are some of ATIs, and those drivers are *not* rock-solid. Linux was actually better off in the 3d arena a couple of years back, when Matrox had good open source support and ATI was allowing open source drivers -- the state of Linux 3d has actually regressed.
I have to somewhat disagree with you here. ATI drivers for Linux do suck, but there's nothing wrong with NVidia's. The speed I get on games on Linux with my NVidia card is indistinguishable from the speed I get on Windows XP. Indeed, some of the OpenGL demos I've worked on have run at a faster FPS on Linux than on Windows! However, this may just be a coincidence, or an effect of having services on Windows that may take up more processing power than those on Linux.
I agree with you somewhat about the binary support though. But it's not quite as bad as you make out. Neverwinter Nights, for example, was released three years ago, and the binary still works under modern systems.
I can't believe you just said that. I'm sorry, but you've just ruined any credibility you may have had to discuss Java ever again.
Aside from being a professional Java developer? I use Java more than I use any other language, but that doesn't mean that I am blind to its flaws. Compared to other languages, Java is low level, though admittedly a little less so with 1.5. I shall explain my reasoning in a moment.
Can you possibly think of a more HLL than Java?
There are many languages that can be considered to be higher-level than Java, although I suspect you have not had experience with any of them. The best way to illustrate this, then, is to point out the features that Java lacks:
A complete object model:
Java has an incomplete object model. Yes, even with autoboxing, which is a nice little workaround that solves most of the primative problems pre-1.5 Java had, but it a workaround never-the-less. Consider, whilst in Java I can do this:
Integer x = 3; String y = x.toString();
In a truly OO language, like Nice, where everything is an object, I can do this:
String y = 3.toString();
The latter piece of code is, of course, not possible in Java. Now, whilst this is a trivial example, it does demonstrate that Java is not truly OO. A theoretical technicality, you may very well reply. Well, hang on a moment and lets get to some more juict bits.
Higher order functions:
Higher order functions are a way of treating functions, or methods, if you prefer that lingo, as variables. Higher-order methods can be passed as arguments, or returned as the output from other methods. Another feature that goes hand in hand with this is anonymous methods.
What practical use do anonymous methods have? Well, recently I came across the need to use a tree data structure in some of my code. It so happened that I required the ability to recursively iterate over all of nodes in the tree. This task is made much simpler with the use of higher level methods:
Now what if I wished to find the sum of all of a tree's values. Well, in Nice I can do thus:
// Create a new tree Tree t = new Tree(value: 10, children: [ new Tree(value: 3), new Tree(value: 4, children: [ new Tree(value: 23) ]) ]); // Find the total of all the vales int total = 0; t.each(Tree tree => { total += tree.value; }); println(total);
Neat, no? Granted, without indentation it's tricky to follow (stupid slashdot ecode), but I hope you can appreciate the power of anonymous methods. They're like anonymous objects, but without the bulk.
Multiple inheritance
Need I say more? Most high level languages support this, or the equivalent thereof. Python supports multiple inheritance. Nice supports interfaces that can contain methods; Ruby calls this feature "mixins".
The practical benefit of this is obvious, of course. Just the other day I was going through the sourcecode of HTTPUnit, and noting the amount of copy-and-pasted code where multiple inheritance would make such redundant
Value dispatch
In Java you can overload methods based on type. In Nice you can overload methods based on value:
But for web development, Java is generally the right choice for the backend. Lots of competent people available who will require no learning curve.
I'll have to disagree somewhat with this. Firstly, I have to take issue with the premise that because a language is well known, you can hire more competant people. For a competant programmer, the time needed to learn a new language is negligible. A competant python programmer, for instance, will be a competant java programmer.
The other difficulty I have with Java is the syntax. Java is a low level language, and thus generally unsuitable for tasks where a high level language can be used. Java's use of primatives and its reduced syntax are perfect for applications such as J2ME, but on more advanced architectures, this low level behavior becomes more of a hinderance than a benefit.
The support tools available for java on the backend are also clearly the best right now, as you pointed out (hibernate etc.). The tools for working in java are also a step ahead of anything else right now (idea and even its slightly retarded younger brother eclipse are both way ahead of the tools for any other language).
Now this I happen to agree with. Java has a lot of good tools, and most are very robust. I wouldn't really class them as a step ahead, as RoR seems a more efficient development environment, but Hibernate and Java servlets seem pretty good for designing large, complex systems.
If you combined these tools with Nice, I'd agree further. Nice is a high-level programming language that compiles into native Java bytecode. With Nice, one gets all the benefits of the Java library, along with the advantage of working in a strongly typed, high-level language with similar capabilities to Ruby or Smalltalk.
That all said, for the majority of web applications, RoR seems the better choice.
Microsoft doesn't create markets, it attempts to take over young markets through agressive (and sometimes illegal) marketing. It aims to achieve a monopoly, which it can then use to lock its customers in, creating a long-lasting cash-cow.
This is the technique used for Microsoft Windows, Word and Internet Explorer. It isn't always successful, but it is successful often enough to make a lot of money and annoy a lot of people.
It has always amazed me that the Japanese can be amazing animators, yet consistently hold to the same tired cliches in all of their animated series.
The same could be said of US television and film. Look at the current US Box Office:
Batman Begins
Bewitched
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
Herbie: Fully Loaded
Land of the Dead
Madagascar
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
The Longest Yard
The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D
Cinderella Man
This is hardly very original stuff. Even Batman Begins, though fairly good, hardly breaks very much new ground.
Similarly, a lot of anime is cliched. It seems to be human nature that the masses tend toward the mundane, and the studios gravitate toward the tried-and-tested.
That said, there are some pretty interesting and original anime out there, if you know where to look. I'd even go so far as to say that anime seems to come up with originality more often than western media; certainly more often than western animation.
Haibane Renmei, an anime that revolves around the relationships of a group of children born from eggs with wings and halos, is fairly original. As is most of the work from Studio Ghibli; Grave of the Fireflies, Howl's Moving Castle, and so forth. Wings of Honneamise, an alternative-universe tale about a space-race between two superpowers, does without schoolgirls. And if you liked Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor is an anime in the same vein.
Personally, I'm looking forward to getting my hands on Steamboy; when was the last time Hollywood did an alternative Steam-Punk universe?
I'm not saying that anime is in any way superior to western media. Just that it isn't necessarily made entirely up of cliches - at least no more than western films and TV. Perhaps even a bit less.
Qt looks rather slick and professional, both in Windows and Linux, which is one of the reasons why I use it. I've seen some rather ugly Linux toolkits, though, so I was wondering how Ultimate++ measures up.
Looks, aside, Qt has a few advantages over Ultimate++, at least for me: 1. It also works well with KDE, my OS of choice 2. It has Python, Perl and (IIRC) Ruby bindings, which mean much faster development than C++.
Eastern Standard Tribe is a science fiction novel by Cory Doctorow. Sorry if I didn't make that clear.
Re:Sounds similar to a system in Cory Doctorow's E
on
Coming Soon, Roadcasting
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Er... I forgot to add that Eastern Standard Tribe, like most of Doctorow's novels, can be downloaded for free. However, I generally find the dead-tree version a lot more easy-going on the eyes- and a lot more portable, too:)
Sounds similar to a system in Cory Doctorow's EST
on
Coming Soon, Roadcasting
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe had essentially the same system described. I wonder if these chaps got their inspiration from EST, or if it's a case of life imitating art.
I agree BT is absolutely useless. They needed two weeks to connect me to broadband. Zen Internet did it in two days. After the amount of delays and hold-music BT subjected me to, I rather doubt I'll have very much more to do with them in future.
Surely it depends on what's being offered and what it costs. For instance, if the BBC were to put all of its archived content online, DRM free, put up podcasts of all its media shows (in ogg;) and declared that anyone in Britain could rip'n'mix old BBC shows together without restriction, then I'd be all for it.
Imagine being able to edit and compile new shows from old BBC material:). Mmm... Copyleft.
The BBC is nice because commercial interests isn't the primary concern. This in turn raises the bar for commercial media in the UK. If the BBC seems to be faltering from its task, then I'd be the first to complain. But if it manages to pull off what it has promised, I'm all for it.
Less government taxes mean less public services. The NHS sucks up a lot of tax-payer money, and the general feeling in the UK seems to be that people would rather have better healthcare than lower taxes (up to a point).
Likewise, I don't really have too much of a problem with the TV Licensing system, so long as the BBC keep up the good work. The idea of putting all past content online is something that appeals greatly to me. Especially since they were talking about opening up old content to be remixed by modern day artists. So long as the BBC keep their promises, the licensing fee seems worth it.
As for fuel taxes, don't you think that high fuel prices increase demand for efficient engines? I suspect the average car found in the UK has a greater efficiency than the average car found in the US.
The state is permitted to levy extremely high taxes and nobody cares
This seems a little odd to me. As far as I'm aware, the British government isn't any more inefficient and bureaucratic than your average democracy. The higher taxes go to pay for services that people in the UK seem to want, like the NHS. The US has lower taxes because it has less public services.
The UK also spends proportionally much less than the US when it comes to military spending. Even though I'd pay less taxes in US, I'm not sure I'd be comfortable knowing that a far larger proportion of my money would go into the military.
Look at it this way, we now have more CCTV than ever, and more voilent crime than ever. That would seem to suggest that CCTV is not a deterrant to voilent crime.
I doubt it's as black and white as that. It could be that violent crime would rise at a more rapid pace without all of the cameras, to play devil's advocate to your argument.
I would suggest that it is because our society is becomming more disfunctional.
Another factor to consider is that as the technology of security increases, humans become the weak links in the chain.
There was a story a few months back about an expensive car that was designed to be opened by the thumbprint of the owner. In past decades the thieves might have hotwired it, stolen the car without the owner knowing. But with the car so secure, the easiest option for the thieves was to attack the owner and chop off his thumb. A vicious assault that would not have taken place was the security of the car less.
However, I do agree that the youth of today is growing up more 'disfunctional' if you like, than in times past. Children aren't taught responsibility and maturity, but seem to be increasingly left to their own devices.
However, class divides have gotten bigger. The poor are even more disenfanchised than they used to be.
Mm, I disagree here. The class divides of times past were far more strict than today. People's backgrounds don't matter so much as how they act in the present.
Privacy is important to. If I put a camera in every room of your house, I could guaruntee that no crime would go unpunished on your property. I bet you wouldn't be too pleased about it though.
Oh, I never said it wasn't. But on a public street you give up some rights to privacy. Privacy wise, what's the difference between people watching you do something live in the street, or on a tape from a CCTV camera?
Frankly, I don't really care if my attacker was caught on CCTV, or even brought to justice. What I care about is not being mugged in the first place, feeling safe and protecting my privacy.
This seems a curious thing to say. I take it you believe that jail is not an effective deterrent against crime? What would you suggest in its place?
I take it you're not British. Might I ask if you have any experience living in Britain, or if you're just basing your opinion on second-hand information?
You've hit the nail on the head. Creationism is no more a scientific theory than an the idea that an invisible magical pink unicorn orbits the earth. I believe that's what the GP post was trying to point out.
Slashdot Mirror
This is true. My general point was that a science doesn't work if you factor omnipotent beings into the theories. However, I was wrong to state that evolution dictates that life was not created by an omnipotent and omniscient being. I should have stated that such a being must just be assumed to be uninvolved in the actual process of evolution, for it to be scientific.
Information is the reduction of uncertainty. For instance, if I don't know what 4 digit PIN to type in, there are 1:10'000 possibilities. If I know 3 of the digits, then there are only 10 possible values the PIN can be. If I know all 4 of the digits, then there is only 1 value the PIN can be.
When something is ordered, uncertainty is reduced and information increased. Going back to the PIN example, if I know that the numbers in the 4 digit PIN are completely random, then there are 1:10'000 possibilities. But if I know that all the digits are even, then there is only 1:625 possibilities.
There are many examples in natural of ordered structures coming from random and chaotic systems. The shape of snow-clouds is chaotic; you can't predict much about the exact structure. Snow flakes, on the other hand, always have hexagonal symmetry. An ordered structure coming from an unordered origin. An increase in information occuring without intelligence.
However, this is academic, since ID can happily state that everything in the Universe was created by an omnipotent, omniscient, intelligent designer. Information exists within the Universe, therefore this intelligent designer created every piece of information. Thus, ID starts off assuming that every piece of information occurs because of intelligence. Which is why ID is still not falsifiable.
The whole point of evolution is that it isn't designed. If it was, then it wouldn't be evolution, it would be ID pretending to be evolution. So, yes, I'm afraid that evolution does "state that life was not created by an omnipotent and omniscient God".
Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that God didn't have a hand in the creation of life (though I don't really believe it myself). I'm merely saying that the inclusion of an omnipotent being in a theory results in it being unprovable. Scientists may talk about getting into the mind of God, but amongst all those variables representing distance and energy and spin, you won't find a variable representing an omnipotent being, because if you include an omnipotent being in your equations, logic goes out the window and you can't infer anything.
There's a reason why Darwin called it "Natural Selection", not "Natural and/or Supernatural Selection".
Biological life has two advantages over your watch:
Now, I'm not a biologist, but it seems to me that those are some rather big advantages life has.
Secondly, whilst you may be very proud of your watch, cosmologists know of a variety of natural timepieces that are far more accurate than yours. For instance, some quasars are accurate to 1 second in 10 million years; they may not look like a watch, but they do the same job. In a similar way, legs don't look like wheels, but they do the same job. Why assume that legs were designed just because wheels were?
But nor does it state that life was not created by an omnipotent and omniscient God, and because of that, it is unprovable and thus unscientific.
Now, I'd be perfectly happy to accept ID as a valid scientific theory if we set limits on the nature of the Designer. The creation of humanity by aliens in spaceships, for example, is perfectly scientific (though admittedly not too likely).
However, an ID theory which sets no limit on the Designer's capabilities cannot be disproved and thus cannot be classed as a scientific theory.
You're incorrect. The problem with ID is that the Intelligent Designer in question can potentially be omnipotent and omniscient. Indeed, most proponents of ID are Christians that believe that an all-powerful, all-seeing God created the Universe.
Now, a scientific theory must be falsifiable by observational evidence. With ID, because the Designer can be omnipotent and omniscient, any evidence can be faked, and therefore is no evidence at all. Indeed, with ID, the Universe could have been created a mere two seconds ago, and all of our memories mere fabrications.
Intelligent Design is, by definition, not scientific, because it places no limits on the capabilities of the Designer, and therefore cannot be proven false. Don't believe me? Then give me an example of evidence that would disprove ID.
Evolution, on the other hand, is falsifiable because, unlike ID, it is restricted by physical laws.
The lock-ups seem to be rather rare, at least in my case. I get one about once every 2 months, which doesn't really bother me too much. It would be nice if there weren't any, but I can put up with the necessity of 6 hard reboots a year.
I have to somewhat disagree with you here. ATI drivers for Linux do suck, but there's nothing wrong with NVidia's. The speed I get on games on Linux with my NVidia card is indistinguishable from the speed I get on Windows XP. Indeed, some of the OpenGL demos I've worked on have run at a faster FPS on Linux than on Windows! However, this may just be a coincidence, or an effect of having services on Windows that may take up more processing power than those on Linux.
I agree with you somewhat about the binary support though. But it's not quite as bad as you make out. Neverwinter Nights, for example, was released three years ago, and the binary still works under modern systems.
Aside from being a professional Java developer? I use Java more than I use any other language, but that doesn't mean that I am blind to its flaws. Compared to other languages, Java is low level, though admittedly a little less so with 1.5. I shall explain my reasoning in a moment.
There are many languages that can be considered to be higher-level than Java, although I suspect you have not had experience with any of them. The best way to illustrate this, then, is to point out the features that Java lacks:
A complete object model:Java has an incomplete object model. Yes, even with autoboxing, which is a nice little workaround that solves most of the primative problems pre-1.5 Java had, but it a workaround never-the-less. Consider, whilst in Java I can do this:
In a truly OO language, like Nice, where everything is an object, I can do this:
The latter piece of code is, of course, not possible in Java. Now, whilst this is a trivial example, it does demonstrate that Java is not truly OO. A theoretical technicality, you may very well reply. Well, hang on a moment and lets get to some more juict bits.
Higher order functions:Higher order functions are a way of treating functions, or methods, if you prefer that lingo, as variables. Higher-order methods can be passed as arguments, or returned as the output from other methods. Another feature that goes hand in hand with this is anonymous methods.
What practical use do anonymous methods have? Well, recently I came across the need to use a tree data structure in some of my code. It so happened that I required the ability to recursively iterate over all of nodes in the tree. This task is made much simpler with the use of higher level methods:
Now what if I wished to find the sum of all of a tree's values. Well, in Nice I can do thus:
Neat, no? Granted, without indentation it's tricky to follow (stupid slashdot ecode), but I hope you can appreciate the power of anonymous methods. They're like anonymous objects, but without the bulk.
Multiple inheritanceNeed I say more? Most high level languages support this, or the equivalent thereof. Python supports multiple inheritance. Nice supports interfaces that can contain methods; Ruby calls this feature "mixins".
The practical benefit of this is obvious, of course. Just the other day I was going through the sourcecode of HTTPUnit, and noting the amount of copy-and-pasted code where multiple inheritance would make such redundant
Value dispatchIn Java you can overload methods based on type. In Nice you can overload methods based on value:
And the output:
I'll have to disagree somewhat with this. Firstly, I have to take issue with the premise that because a language is well known, you can hire more competant people. For a competant programmer, the time needed to learn a new language is negligible. A competant python programmer, for instance, will be a competant java programmer.
The other difficulty I have with Java is the syntax. Java is a low level language, and thus generally unsuitable for tasks where a high level language can be used. Java's use of primatives and its reduced syntax are perfect for applications such as J2ME, but on more advanced architectures, this low level behavior becomes more of a hinderance than a benefit.
Now this I happen to agree with. Java has a lot of good tools, and most are very robust. I wouldn't really class them as a step ahead, as RoR seems a more efficient development environment, but Hibernate and Java servlets seem pretty good for designing large, complex systems.
If you combined these tools with Nice, I'd agree further. Nice is a high-level programming language that compiles into native Java bytecode. With Nice, one gets all the benefits of the Java library, along with the advantage of working in a strongly typed, high-level language with similar capabilities to Ruby or Smalltalk.
That all said, for the majority of web applications, RoR seems the better choice.
Microsoft doesn't create markets, it attempts to take over young markets through agressive (and sometimes illegal) marketing. It aims to achieve a monopoly, which it can then use to lock its customers in, creating a long-lasting cash-cow.
This is the technique used for Microsoft Windows, Word and Internet Explorer. It isn't always successful, but it is successful often enough to make a lot of money and annoy a lot of people.
The same could be said of US television and film. Look at the current US Box Office:
This is hardly very original stuff. Even Batman Begins, though fairly good, hardly breaks very much new ground.
Similarly, a lot of anime is cliched. It seems to be human nature that the masses tend toward the mundane, and the studios gravitate toward the tried-and-tested.
That said, there are some pretty interesting and original anime out there, if you know where to look. I'd even go so far as to say that anime seems to come up with originality more often than western media; certainly more often than western animation.
Haibane Renmei, an anime that revolves around the relationships of a group of children born from eggs with wings and halos, is fairly original. As is most of the work from Studio Ghibli; Grave of the Fireflies, Howl's Moving Castle, and so forth. Wings of Honneamise, an alternative-universe tale about a space-race between two superpowers, does without schoolgirls. And if you liked Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor is an anime in the same vein.
Personally, I'm looking forward to getting my hands on Steamboy; when was the last time Hollywood did an alternative Steam-Punk universe?
I'm not saying that anime is in any way superior to western media. Just that it isn't necessarily made entirely up of cliches - at least no more than western films and TV. Perhaps even a bit less.
Do you have any screenshots?
Qt looks rather slick and professional, both in Windows and Linux, which is one of the reasons why I use it. I've seen some rather ugly Linux toolkits, though, so I was wondering how Ultimate++ measures up.
Looks, aside, Qt has a few advantages over Ultimate++, at least for me:
1. It also works well with KDE, my OS of choice
2. It has Python, Perl and (IIRC) Ruby bindings, which mean much faster development than C++.
Try reading this aloud in your best Comic Book Guy voice. It makes a lot more sense that way.
Eastern Standard Tribe is a science fiction novel by Cory Doctorow. Sorry if I didn't make that clear.
Er... I forgot to add that Eastern Standard Tribe, like most of Doctorow's novels, can be downloaded for free. However, I generally find the dead-tree version a lot more easy-going on the eyes- and a lot more portable, too :)
Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe had essentially the same system described. I wonder if these chaps got their inspiration from EST, or if it's a case of life imitating art.
I agree BT is absolutely useless. They needed two weeks to connect me to broadband. Zen Internet did it in two days. After the amount of delays and hold-music BT subjected me to, I rather doubt I'll have very much more to do with them in future.
Surely it depends on what's being offered and what it costs. For instance, if the BBC were to put all of its archived content online, DRM free, put up podcasts of all its media shows (in ogg ;) and declared that anyone in Britain could rip'n'mix old BBC shows together without restriction, then I'd be all for it.
:). Mmm... Copyleft.
Imagine being able to edit and compile new shows from old BBC material
The BBC is nice because commercial interests isn't the primary concern. This in turn raises the bar for commercial media in the UK. If the BBC seems to be faltering from its task, then I'd be the first to complain. But if it manages to pull off what it has promised, I'm all for it.
Less government taxes mean less public services. The NHS sucks up a lot of tax-payer money, and the general feeling in the UK seems to be that people would rather have better healthcare than lower taxes (up to a point).
Likewise, I don't really have too much of a problem with the TV Licensing system, so long as the BBC keep up the good work. The idea of putting all past content online is something that appeals greatly to me. Especially since they were talking about opening up old content to be remixed by modern day artists. So long as the BBC keep their promises, the licensing fee seems worth it.
As for fuel taxes, don't you think that high fuel prices increase demand for efficient engines? I suspect the average car found in the UK has a greater efficiency than the average car found in the US.
This seems a little odd to me. As far as I'm aware, the British government isn't any more inefficient and bureaucratic than your average democracy. The higher taxes go to pay for services that people in the UK seem to want, like the NHS. The US has lower taxes because it has less public services.
The UK also spends proportionally much less than the US when it comes to military spending. Even though I'd pay less taxes in US, I'm not sure I'd be comfortable knowing that a far larger proportion of my money would go into the military.
Another factor to consider is that as the technology of security increases, humans become the weak links in the chain.
There was a story a few months back about an expensive car that was designed to be opened by the thumbprint of the owner. In past decades the thieves might have hotwired it, stolen the car without the owner knowing. But with the car so secure, the easiest option for the thieves was to attack the owner and chop off his thumb. A vicious assault that would not have taken place was the security of the car less.
However, I do agree that the youth of today is growing up more 'disfunctional' if you like, than in times past. Children aren't taught responsibility and maturity, but seem to be increasingly left to their own devices.
Mm, I disagree here. The class divides of times past were far more strict than today. People's backgrounds don't matter so much as how they act in the present.
Oh, I never said it wasn't. But on a public street you give up some rights to privacy. Privacy wise, what's the difference between people watching you do something live in the street, or on a tape from a CCTV camera?
I take it you're not British. Might I ask if you have any experience living in Britain, or if you're just basing your opinion on second-hand information?
You've hit the nail on the head. Creationism is no more a scientific theory than an the idea that an invisible magical pink unicorn orbits the earth. I believe that's what the GP post was trying to point out.