So... discussions about an Intelligent Creator don't belong in science class.
Then would you agree that professional "scientists" [or, in this case, "science" educrats] should be forbidden to teach that either:
1) There is evidence in favor of the theory of the existence of an Intelligent Creator, or
2) There is evidence in favor of the theory of the non-existence of an Intelligent Creator.
To go one step further, would you then agree that professional "scientists" should be forbidden to search for both
1) Evidence that supports the theory of the existence of an Intelligent Creator, and
2) Evidence that supports the theory of the non-existence of an Intelligent [or any other, possibly Stupider] Creator?
While we're on the subject, are there any other topics that you would forbid "scientists" from examining, or, status post said examinations, then teaching to their students?
1) Intelligent Design is not just unproven, it is inherently unprovable. Intelligent Design is not a science in any sense, but a theology, and as such, its place is in the church/mosque/synagogue/whatever, not in the classroom.
2) Un-intelligent Design is not just inherently provable, it is proven. Un-intelligent Design is not a religion in any sense, but a science, and as such, its place is in the classroom, not in the church/mosque/synagogue/whatever.
As I type, this is what is installed on the computer:
Windows XP 5.1.2600 SP2 Build 2600
Windows Media Player 9.00.00.3250
This is the error message that I get when I try to run the file "serenityT1_720p_8mbit_LTRT_NR.wmv":
The owner of the protected content you are trying to access requires you to first upgrade some of the Microsoft digital rights management (DRM) components on your computer.
Click OK to upgrade your DRM components.
Details
When you click OK, a unique identifier and a DRM security file are sent to a Microsoft service on the Internet. The file is replaced with a customized version that contains your unique identifier.
This increases the level of protection provided by DRM.
I've spent the last few days doing some very important searching - we're thinking about launching a new product in a rather arcane field, and I want to be absolutely certain who the potential competition might be - hence I decided to search both Google & Yahoo!.
Guess what? Yahoo! search beats Google search, hands down. Not even close.
Two thoughts:
1) While everybody was oohing and ahhing about Google's IPO, Yahoo! very quietly went about purchasing some excellent search engine/caching outfits, like Inktomi and AllTheWeb, and, owing to the great dot-com bust, only had to pay pennies on the dollar to acquire some outstanding talent and IP.
2) I think Google's been reading too many of their own press releases, and has been resting on their laurels for a few years now. And it doesn't help matters that their CEO, Eric Schmidt, is the same fella who damn near drove Novell to bankruptcy.
Type in "cdkey xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx" as in x's are your SP2 compatable CD key.
We're thinking about undertaking a big.NET project, but I'm hearing horror stories about MSDN Universal & the new licensing stuff.
Back in the day, you got basically unlimited licenses with MSDN Univerisal, which was pretty much a necessity: In a research/development/testing environment, you're constantly wiping drives clean and re-installing OSes and applications. But if M$FT starts this crap with their MSDN Universal developers, then Linux is gonna look all the more enticing by comparison.
PS: I used to do a little certified Microsoft training, and the thought of attempting to install a classroom's worth of computers, each of which requires a unique authorization key, is enough to send shivers down my spine.
In the Novell classes, the single biggest problem was ALWAYS the sh!tty server licenses that Novell Education dumped on us. They never worked properly - for the entire week, the servers would beep error messages about license infractions.
As a card-carrying member of the tinfoil hat brigade, I prefer anonimity
Here are the seven principles, in abbreviated form [if anyone could make voodoo dolls of the creators of the PDF format, and stick pins in their - ah - whatevers, I'd be most grateful]:
1) User Control and Consent
Technical identity systems must only reveal information identifying a user with the user's consent.
2) Minimal Disclosure for a Constrained Use
The solution which discloses the least amount of identifying information and best limits its use is the most stable long term solution.
3) Justifiable Parties
Digital identity systems must be designed so the disclosure of identifying information is limited to parties having a necessary and justifiable place in a given identity relationship.
4) Directed Identity
A universal identity system must support both "omni-directional" identifiers for use by public entities and "unidirectional" identifiers for use by private entities, thus facilitating discovery while preventing unnecessary release of correlation handles.
5) Pluralism of Operators and Technologies
A universal identity system must channel and enable the inter-working of multiple identity technologies run by multiple identity providers.
6) Human Integration
The universal identity metasystem must define the human user to be a component of the distributed system integrated through unambiguous human-machine communication mechanisms offering protection against identity attacks.
7) Consistent Experience Across Contexts
The unifying identity metasystem must guarantee its users a simple, consistent experience while enabling separation of contexts through multiple operators and technologies.
I'm with you: Any WWW/Internet-ish global identity management system is gonna need a principle zero:
0) Anonymity.
All users are free to opt to retain their anonymity.
With the understanding that the subsequent rules 1-7 apply only to those users who chose to forgo their principle zero rights.
When my mother told my father that she was pregnant, he gave her some money and told her to get an abortion. She gave the money back, and told him to go to hell. They never spoke after that.
Good thing you aren't an Intel lawyer, since that argument does nothing to address Intel deliberately running slower code on AMD parts. "Write your own damn compiler" doesn't address the issue of Intel's compiler producing code that, despite the expectations of its users, avoids using extensions available on a processor because Intel doesn't like that processor. But good luck.
"Its users" are Intel customers, not AMD customers. If Intel were to guarantee the performance of their compiler on AMD platforms, then they would have to purchase and assemble a small warehouse full of platforms, and train and support a small army of specialists in those platforms. That's a huge expenditure in time and money and employee man-years, which is not Intel's responsibility: It's AMD's responsibility. And if Intel releases a compiler that includes a fatal bug on AMD hardware, then they could become legally culpable for any damage caused by that bug.
By the way, I use AMD CPUs exclusively. I just don't like this idea that Intel is responsible for everybody else's hardware platform, and that somehow Intel is supposed to provide all of these services to AMD for free.
Again, the obvious solution is for AMD to write their own compiler.
That's just not feasible. Unlike Intel, AMD isn't huge and they don't have a massive software team.
If I were an Intel lawyer, your post [and others like it] would be defense exhibit #1:
A) Writing a compiler is tedious, costly, and time consuming, and requires an enormous investment from the company [on the order of hundreds, or even thousands, of employee man-years].
B) That kind of investment is not going to be given away for free to some Johnny-Come-Lately imitator who has done nothing but copy our IP for the last two decades [64-bit extensions notwithstanding].
C) If Johnny-Come-Lately wants his own compiler, then he can damn well write it himself.
It seems to me that the obvious long-term solution for AMD is to write their own compiler.
And I've often thought the same of Novell - I always believed that one of the primary reasons NetWare foundered was because Novell never wrote their own compiler for the operating system. It was damned near impossible to write an NLM in the old days - you had to get a copy of Dr Watcom, and then do a bunch of undocumented wizardry just to get it to produce a simple "Hello World" output.
Anyway, for those of you computer establishments that lack your own in-house compiler, there's this cell phone company, called Motorola, which has pretty much ditched their chip fab subdivision, but which retains this little subsidiary called "Metrowerks", a subsidiary which doesn't seem to integrate very well with their forward-looking core strategy of providing the means to share Paris Hilton pr0n over hand-held cellular devices...
However, I found those particular books to be quite useless and found that cramming for the test using Braindumps and practice exams the night before was far more effective and relevant to the test content. I did not even bother finishing the 70-290 book.
The purpose of taking the exam is to pass it. Short of outright cheating, it doesn't matter how you pass it, only that you pass it.
It also doesn't matter whether you retain any of the knowledge afterwards: ALL THAT MATTERS IS THAT YOU RECEIVE THE SHEEPSKIN.*
I'm with you: Purchase the practice exams, and study backwards from there, i.e. investigate the theory behind only those questions you can't answer correctly a priori.
*If you are wondering, the purpose of the sheepskin is to help you get your foot in the door, or, if you're already inside, to help in justifying a raise in salary [and maybe a promotion to a more chi-chi sounding job title].
Slashcode filters partial HTML tags [left tags, "<", and right tags, ">"], which, unfortunately, mathematics & C-geeks know as "less than" and "greater than" symbols.
To get a "less than" symbol, you must use the "ampersand-l-t-;" notation; for a "greater than" symbol, use the "ampersand-g-t-;" notation.
The only pressure that would 'kill them at the source' would be a full-scale genocide, killing everybody of a threatening (ethnical, religious, etc) group, their relatives, the relatives of relatives, their friends, relatives of their friends.... But that's not a 'good' action from anybody's viewpoint, and even that will not be enough to stop all potential terrorists.
Since when did genocide get such a bad name?
I'm all for killing every God-damned one of 'em.
And stuffing their God-damned corpses in pig bellies afterwards.
Where "better" is (as you note) defined as "more compatible with Microsoft's existing product". Where the competition was compatible, Microsoft changed their software to make it incompatible (this is not simply speculation, it's well documented by MS employees and in MS memos). Microsoft really DID have that kind of power to cripple a competing product back in 1987 (or the early '90s: Windows wasn't really usable until Windows 3.11 and the 386 came together).
But the key thing that you're missing is that the fact that "better" means "more compatible with DOS" means that Microsoft was starting the race at the finish line.
IBM bet the farm on innovation [OS/2]; Microsoft bet the farm on backwards compatibility [Windows 95]. Backwards compatibility won.
Motorola bet the farm on innovation [Iridium satellites], Nokia & Ericsson bet the farm on backwards compatibility [land-based cell towers]. Nokia & Ericsson won.
Intel bet the farm on innovation [Itanic & EPIC], AMD bet the farm on backwards compatibility [Opteron & x86-64]. AMD won.
Once in a while, innovation wins. But the vast majority of the time, backwards compatibility wins.
I.e. backwards compatibility is almost always better.
In addition to Professor Kahan's site, listed above, you might want to read this article over at Sun [which references SPARC's 128-bit IEEE double, known as the "SPARC-quad"]:
The kinds of things that interest high-end computing geeks tend to be extremely sensitive to round-off error.
If you're trying to get accurate results by spreading calculations around among disparate machines that might deploy e.g. IEEE 64-bit doubles, IEEE 96-bit doubles [Intel & AMD], IEEE 128-bit doubles [Sparc], or various hardware cheats [MMX, SSE, 3dNow, Altivec], then trying to make any sense of the results will drive you absolutely bonkers.
PS: A good place to start in understanding the uselessness of e.g. 64-bit doubles is Professor Kahan's site at UC-Berkeley; you might want to glance at the following PDF files:
I used to be a big Pricewatch fan, but lately I'm getting my best prices from Yahoo Shopping. Not to sound politically incorrect, but Yahoo seems to have the best of the little Mom-n-Pop Chinese & Korean shops, in places like City of Industry, who work like crazy to get you the best prices.
Plus I get the best hits on a wide variety of junque at Yahoo - I got hits on an obscure video card with LabVIEW drivers, and a huge old ALR 6x6 server at a government auction, etc.
When searching Yahoo Shopping, be sure to hit the sort-by-price link. Also, if it's a pre-configured product item [e.g. a known book, or DVD, or CD-ROM], then Yahoo will compute the S&H [and order the results by price] if you enter your zip code.
Slashdot Mirror
So... discussions about an Intelligent Creator don't belong in science class.
Then would you agree that professional "scientists" [or, in this case, "science" educrats] should be forbidden to teach that either:
To go one step further, would you then agree that professional "scientists" should be forbidden to search for both While we're on the subject, are there any other topics that you would forbid "scientists" from examining, or, status post said examinations, then teaching to their students?Okay, which assertion is more ludicrous?
more complicated than building a rocket ship from scratch using only a stick of gum and some 2x4's
Gromit, that's it! Cheese! We'll go somewhere where there's cheese!
Everybody knows the moon is made of cheese...
As I type, this is what is installed on the computer: This is the error message that I get when I try to run the file "serenityT1_720p_8mbit_LTRT_NR.wmv": I guess we were wrong about Joss.
I've spent the last few days doing some very important searching - we're thinking about launching a new product in a rather arcane field, and I want to be absolutely certain who the potential competition might be - hence I decided to search both Google & Yahoo!.
Guess what? Yahoo! search beats Google search, hands down. Not even close.
Two thoughts:
Type in "cdkey xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx" as in x's are your SP2 compatable CD key.
We're thinking about undertaking a big .NET project, but I'm hearing horror stories about MSDN Universal & the new licensing stuff.
Back in the day, you got basically unlimited licenses with MSDN Univerisal, which was pretty much a necessity: In a research/development/testing environment, you're constantly wiping drives clean and re-installing OSes and applications. But if M$FT starts this crap with their MSDN Universal developers, then Linux is gonna look all the more enticing by comparison.
PS: I used to do a little certified Microsoft training, and the thought of attempting to install a classroom's worth of computers, each of which requires a unique authorization key, is enough to send shivers down my spine.
In the Novell classes, the single biggest problem was ALWAYS the sh!tty server licenses that Novell Education dumped on us. They never worked properly - for the entire week, the servers would beep error messages about license infractions.
They list a "BSD/OS" in addition to FreeBSD [as well as "NetBSD/OpenBSD"].
My question: What is "BSD/OS" supposed to be? The old BSDi?
As a card-carrying member of the tinfoil hat brigade, I prefer anonimity
Here are the seven principles, in abbreviated form [if anyone could make voodoo dolls of the creators of the PDF format, and stick pins in their - ah - whatevers, I'd be most grateful]:
I'm with you: Any WWW/Internet-ish global identity management system is gonna need a principle zero: With the understanding that the subsequent rules 1-7 apply only to those users who chose to forgo their principle zero rights.When my mother told my father that she was pregnant, he gave her some money and told her to get an abortion. She gave the money back, and told him to go to hell. They never spoke after that.
And all things considered I would bet that Sarah Doohan doesn't mind the fact that she exists
Back in my day, we had to walk 10 miles uphill in the snow wearing a sun dress, just to submit our punchcards to the mainframe guy!
Uh, got any pictures?
Good thing you aren't an Intel lawyer, since that argument does nothing to address Intel deliberately running slower code on AMD parts. "Write your own damn compiler" doesn't address the issue of Intel's compiler producing code that, despite the expectations of its users, avoids using extensions available on a processor because Intel doesn't like that processor. But good luck.
"Its users" are Intel customers, not AMD customers. If Intel were to guarantee the performance of their compiler on AMD platforms, then they would have to purchase and assemble a small warehouse full of platforms, and train and support a small army of specialists in those platforms. That's a huge expenditure in time and money and employee man-years, which is not Intel's responsibility: It's AMD's responsibility. And if Intel releases a compiler that includes a fatal bug on AMD hardware, then they could become legally culpable for any damage caused by that bug.
By the way, I use AMD CPUs exclusively. I just don't like this idea that Intel is responsible for everybody else's hardware platform, and that somehow Intel is supposed to provide all of these services to AMD for free.
Again, the obvious solution is for AMD to write their own compiler.
That's just not feasible. Unlike Intel, AMD isn't huge and they don't have a massive software team.
If I were an Intel lawyer, your post [and others like it] would be defense exhibit #1:
It seems to me that the obvious long-term solution for AMD is to write their own compiler.
And I've often thought the same of Novell - I always believed that one of the primary reasons NetWare foundered was because Novell never wrote their own compiler for the operating system. It was damned near impossible to write an NLM in the old days - you had to get a copy of Dr Watcom, and then do a bunch of undocumented wizardry just to get it to produce a simple "Hello World" output.
Anyway, for those of you computer establishments that lack your own in-house compiler, there's this cell phone company, called Motorola, which has pretty much ditched their chip fab subdivision, but which retains this little subsidiary called "Metrowerks", a subsidiary which doesn't seem to integrate very well with their forward-looking core strategy of providing the means to share Paris Hilton pr0n over hand-held cellular devices...
All that heat in that itty bitty package
That's jailbait yer talkin' 'bout...
However, I found those particular books to be quite useless and found that cramming for the test using Braindumps and practice exams the night before was far more effective and relevant to the test content. I did not even bother finishing the 70-290 book.
The purpose of taking the exam is to pass it. Short of outright cheating, it doesn't matter how you pass it, only that you pass it.
It also doesn't matter whether you retain any of the knowledge afterwards: ALL THAT MATTERS IS THAT YOU RECEIVE THE SHEEPSKIN.*
I'm with you: Purchase the practice exams, and study backwards from there, i.e. investigate the theory behind only those questions you can't answer correctly a priori.
*If you are wondering, the purpose of the sheepskin is to help you get your foot in the door, or, if you're already inside, to help in justifying a raise in salary [and maybe a promotion to a more chi-chi sounding job title].
Slashcode filters partial HTML tags [left tags, "<", and right tags, ">"], which, unfortunately, mathematics & C-geeks know as "less than" and "greater than" symbols.
To get a "less than" symbol, you must use the "ampersand-l-t-;" notation; for a "greater than" symbol, use the "ampersand-g-t-;" notation.
What the GP meant to display was
PS: Under Slashcode, HTML's "ampersand-pound sign-decimal number-;" notation doesn't work, either.The only pressure that would 'kill them at the source' would be a full-scale genocide, killing everybody of a threatening (ethnical, religious, etc) group, their relatives, the relatives of relatives, their friends, relatives of their friends.... But that's not a 'good' action from anybody's viewpoint, and even that will not be enough to stop all potential terrorists.
Since when did genocide get such a bad name?
I'm all for killing every God-damned one of 'em.
And stuffing their God-damned corpses in pig bellies afterwards.
Where "better" is (as you note) defined as "more compatible with Microsoft's existing product". Where the competition was compatible, Microsoft changed their software to make it incompatible (this is not simply speculation, it's well documented by MS employees and in MS memos). Microsoft really DID have that kind of power to cripple a competing product back in 1987 (or the early '90s: Windows wasn't really usable until Windows 3.11 and the 386 came together).
But the key thing that you're missing is that the fact that "better" means "more compatible with DOS" means that Microsoft was starting the race at the finish line.
IBM bet the farm on innovation [OS/2]; Microsoft bet the farm on backwards compatibility [Windows 95]. Backwards compatibility won.
Motorola bet the farm on innovation [Iridium satellites], Nokia & Ericsson bet the farm on backwards compatibility [land-based cell towers]. Nokia & Ericsson won.
Intel bet the farm on innovation [Itanic & EPIC], AMD bet the farm on backwards compatibility [Opteron & x86-64]. AMD won.
Once in a while, innovation wins. But the vast majority of the time, backwards compatibility wins.
I.e. backwards compatibility is almost always better.
In addition to Professor Kahan's site, listed above, you might want to read this article over at Sun [which references SPARC's 128-bit IEEE double, known as the "SPARC-quad"]: Unfortunately, I don't think it lists an elapsed time for the 128-bit calculation [only for the 64-bit calculation].
Heterogeneous Hardware - This is a major issue.
The kinds of things that interest high-end computing geeks tend to be extremely sensitive to round-off error.
If you're trying to get accurate results by spreading calculations around among disparate machines that might deploy e.g. IEEE 64-bit doubles, IEEE 96-bit doubles [Intel & AMD], IEEE 128-bit doubles [Sparc], or various hardware cheats [MMX, SSE, 3dNow, Altivec], then trying to make any sense of the results will drive you absolutely bonkers.
PS: A good place to start in understanding the uselessness of e.g. 64-bit doubles is Professor Kahan's site at UC-Berkeley; you might want to glance at the following PDF files:
Yahoo! Shopping is usually my first destination.
I used to be a big Pricewatch fan, but lately I'm getting my best prices from Yahoo Shopping. Not to sound politically incorrect, but Yahoo seems to have the best of the little Mom-n-Pop Chinese & Korean shops, in places like City of Industry, who work like crazy to get you the best prices.
Plus I get the best hits on a wide variety of junque at Yahoo - I got hits on an obscure video card with LabVIEW drivers, and a huge old ALR 6x6 server at a government auction, etc.
When searching Yahoo Shopping, be sure to hit the sort-by-price link. Also, if it's a pre-configured product item [e.g. a known book, or DVD, or CD-ROM], then Yahoo will compute the S&H [and order the results by price] if you enter your zip code.
If the increased profits don't translate into good jobs at good pay for regular workers, nobody's recovering a damn thing.
Has it ever occurred to you that maybe the loss in good job opportunities is offset by a gain in good entrepreneurial opportunities?
I.e. instead of waiting around for someone else to provide you with a living, maybe you should become your own boss and hire yourself?
P.S.You would be surprised what sort of results you can get when you start throwing random synthetic peptides on the virus infected cells.
Hopefully nothing like what David Morse's character was up to in this Bruce Willis vehicle.
Sorry - I was had.