"The picture we DO have is based on what He's revealed to us through the Bible and personal experience."
This point is where we differ. I see no reason to absolutely trust the authenticity of anything the Bible says, in particular that which is not corroborated by independent sources which I have a demonstrable reason to trust (i.e., the parts that aren't heavily stylize history or reasonable moral lessons). Let us consider several alternate definitions of "the Bible:"
the abstract notion of "the word of God"
the divinely inspired ideas in the transcribers' minds
the actual text, at some point in the past
a particular translation of the actual text in its current form
the idea in a reader's mind based on reading of said text
I see no reason that these definitions must all refer to the same identical concept, and based on historical indications and personal experience with human nature, many reasons that they may not, in possibly very gross ways. There is no way for me to rigorously verify that (5) in any way corresponds to (1) without deferring to the authority of a fallible outside authority with ulterior motives. This makes the authority of the Bible indistinguishable from the authority of parents and priests:
"But if you read the textbook, we're supposed to follow God's will and God's will alone...this means that sometimes, parents and priests are going to be wrong. And the Bible might even be 'wrong' on some little things, but not theology, which is another story entirely"
Wait a minute, theology is, in the end, an attempt to explain everything -- strictly, if it is wrong on any matter, it is wrong on a matter of theology, though that is not to say it is wrong on all matters [of theology].
"I choose theism because if you run the equation, I like the answer. I'm a believer because I want to be."
The question, then, is is this truly belief, or merely self-delusion?
"If you reply 'I don't know, and we can never tell' to everything, you won't get anywhere.
Think of it like this: say I have a function on the plane, and I give you 10 random sample points with x values in the interval [0,1]. Now you might interpolate a polynomial through those points, and say you have found my function. But have you? Well, maybe, but there are a lot of other possible functions that also go through those points! In particular, even if I gave you all the values with x in the interval [0,1] and said my function was continuous, you still wouldn't have any idea what's going on outside of [-epsilon,1+epsilon] or so. This is what I think of when I see people trying to model a God based on their experiences. Thus, even if you do choose a particular model, you're going to "get there" with probability zero. So why not just acknowledge this instead of spinning your wheels and getting nowhere?
"Atheists say 'There is no god.' and based on that assumption have made great advances in science."
In science, we restrict our model to the observable world. Science does not require atheism.
"Theists say 'There is a God.' and have made great advances in philosophy."
I'm not familiar with the work to which you refer. The greatest advances I have seen in philosophy have been by agnostic logicians.
"Agnostics say 'Maybe there is nothing, maybe I'm still asleep... mmm sleep I'm going to go sleep.' I doubt there are more than a handful of true Strong Agnostics, and there are far far too many weak agnostics 'Who cares I want a burger.'
Heh, well, I do sleep a lot, and I don't eat burgers, but I think you're mischaracterizing agnosticism. Being an agnostic is really just about not extending your claims beyond what you can fairly and truthfully defend.
"When I say 'comprehend,' I mean fully and completely understand. When you get right down to it, every human is at least a bit of an agnostic, because we can't 100% know if God exists or not. That's that whole 'faith' thing us Christians are always talking about. I'll save discussion about whether or not God exists for another thread, but as Christians we feel like He's out there and deserves some respect."
What I am saying is that, if you assume this notion of God is infinte, etc., any possible (finite) model you may have of it is going to be woefully inadequate, and hence a completely disrespectful trivialization.
As an analogy, say I have a function on the plane, and I give you 10 random sample points with x values in the interval [0,1]. Now you might interpolate a polynomial through those points, and say you have found my function. But have you? Well, maybe, but there are a lot of other possible functions that also go through those points! In particular, even if I gave you all the values with x in the interval [0,1] and said my function was continuous, you still wouldn't have any idea what's going on outside of [-epsilon,1+epsilon] or so. This is what I think of when I see people trying to model a God based on their experiences. It just seems like a huge insult to any possible such figure to assume that you can model them like that when you really know nothing. Sure, maybe your polynomial approximation works quite well to predict things in the observable world. For example, certain moral standards work well, at least in a homogenous group which respects them -- e.g., as far as my own actions are concerned, I tend to adhere to a set of morals often associated with Christianity in the U.S. (though not an extremist). But it seems like unnecessarily, disrespectful human gradiosity to extend those claims to an area with which you have no contact and over which you have no control, and, moreover, to cause all sorts of conflicts with other people who believe in other equally questionable models of that domain.
Disclaimer: The above breaks down if you argue that God is finite or finitely modelable, e.g., by a polynomial interpretation. But in that case, you have a different notion of what a God is, since this places severe restrictions on what it can do. Indeed, we could probably set up scientific tests for a particular instance of a finitely modelable God.
In conclusion, I submit that the sincerest form of respect for a God, or any such entity which may or may not exist, is through deference to its existence and characteristics alone, and not to the judgment of any alleged human representative thereof (including parents, priests and books). Yes, I realize I am expressing a human view on this phenemena, but my goal is not to convince you that I am correct, but rather to try to explain what my viewpoint truly is, because I feel I am gravely misunderstood -- though as with any religion, it seems to me that if someone truly understands what I am saying, they will tend to agree with me.
Since the goal of science is the pursuit of explaining the universe through observation, what's wrong with explaining the unobservable/unexplainable as God -- such as pre-Big Bang.
What's wrong with it is that it's just a baseless claim. Doesn't it strike you as contradictory to explain the unexplainable? If you're going to use the language of "seems likely..." and so on, doesn't it seem likely that you're going to be totally wrong if you try to explain the unexplainable? Why can't people just confess "I don't know" rather than always having to have an answer?
"The problem is, as humans we can never comprehend the idea of God, at least the God presented by Christianity."
Then why do you talk so much about God? Why do you have all those ceremonies and holidays and books? By doing all that, you're acting like you do comprehend God. That just seems dishonest.
Hey, I have hope, I have joy, I have peace, and I have a purpose (I have found my primary callings to be logic, art and helping people). I don't feel guilty for things (I don't even know what you're talking about, what am I supposed to feel guilty for?), and even when I'm alone and feel helpless, I know things will get better and feel I can pull through it and people will help me. But do I believe in God? No. Believing in God may make you feel good, but that doesn't make it the objective truth. For me, not believing in God makes me feel good, because it means I'm not compromising my beliefs (e.g., that I don't know everything) and morals (e.g., not to tell a lie) just to try to feel good. But I don't believe that means God doesn't exist. What annoys me is that I am tolerant of the possibility of God, but religious people push it into my face that they are right without presenting any serious evidence -- so if when you see non-believers they are unhappy, maybe now you know why. I must say, we are surprisingly hopeful considering our constant harassment by the religious establishment. I'm sure one day the innate goodness of human nature will triumph.
Hey, I have hope, I have joy, I have peace, and I have a purpose (I have found my primary callings to be logic, art and helping people). I don't feel guilty for things (I don't even know what you're talking about, what am I supposed to feel guilty for?), and even when I'm alone and feel helpless, I know things will get better and feel I can pull through it and people will help me. But do I believe in God? No. Believing in God may make you feel good, but that doesn't make it the objective truth. For me, not believing in God makes me feel good, because it means I'm not compromising my beliefs and morals just to try to feel good. But I don't believe that means God doesn't exist.
"Can anyone say with any degree of confidence what started the Big Bang? So what precludes that from having been started by God?"
And what precludes it from not having been started by God? Nothing! Religious people really piss me off. What makes them think that they're so great that they know what's going on? I've got to say, I don't know how the hell the universe came to exist or what happens to my consciousness after I die. And, based on my experience, my experiences at one sort of thing aren't very good predictors of other sorts of things -- so should I use my little experiences to make grandiose claims about the universe like you do?
"I have come to believe that life on this earth is not a random occurence driven by simple statistical probability. Instead, I find it more likely that the universe was created with intelligence."
Can't we just leave the unknown as the unknown, rather than making up stories which, in the end, don't explain anything, but rather introduce more mysteries? If a theory is useful, great, I'll use it. But if it's just a mindfuck, why bother?
Agnosticism, is dull and bland, non commital and borderline dishonorable. So rationally I would say theism/deism is the best choice. You get the best bang for your buck.
How is saying "I don't know" more dishonorable than saying "I know" (theism/deism) but then admiting "but not really" (fickly phrasing it as the best bang for your buck).
I'm glad you brought that up. You're right, Creationism is not a hypothesis, it's an assumption. An axiom in religious peoples' system of reasoning. This is why it cannot be disproven: it is not based on something else. Or is it? In terms of developmental psychology, it seems as though this assumption is fundamentally rooted in fear and respect for trusted authorities such as one's parents. That's how we've always done it. Indoctrination.
The scientific method, on the other hand, presupposes a different cardinal axiom: fallibility, the assumption that there are things that you do not know. Not necessarily that they are unknowable, but that you do not know them. This is why, thus far, there have been no scientific arguments for the credibility of the theist axiom: most such attempts rely on the implication "I do not know X ==> not X holds," which is not sound reasoning if you assume there are things which you do not know (this is sometimes termed a false dichotomy).
An earlier poster essentially said that they don't know how the Grand Canyon could have formed such steep walls over the course of millions of years, hence it must instead have been formed much more quickly. But no evidence was presented that these are the only possibilities. Moreover, in the strictest sense, there is no evidence for the veracity of history -- maybe we just suddenly appeared with fabricated (but mostly consistent) memories and all? Thus perhaps instead we should look at the motives for making a particular claim. The Grand Canyon poster made his claim in order to assert a particular worldview which affirms his theist axiom. I choose not to accept this claim not because I think it is false, but because I see no benefit in accepting it nor penalty in rejecting it, but a potential for the opposite if later evidence contradicts the claim.
Science isn't about finding objective truth, as, assuming our own fallibility, that is too grand a claim. Science is about making useful explanations -- useful in that they allow us to make predictions which are consistent with further observations. Religious explanations are useful, too, but for a different reason -- they make people feel good. Are the correct? I don't know. The most I could judge is whether they are consistent with my perception of my experiences.
However, as to your assertions about logic, you're wrong. You don't need exhaustive testing to disprove a statement like Newton's 3rd law, you just need to find one action, somewhere in the universe, which doesn't have an equal and opposite reaction.
I think the parent poster meant that you need to enumerate all the candidate re-actions throughout the universe to show that they are not equal and opposite to ehat one action you claim to have found. If you want to be strict about it, you cannot assume symmetry, continuity, etc. throughout the universe as shortcuts unless you have first proven that... going back to your next point.
To definitely prove a statement containing the universal qualifier is, on the other hand, pretty much logically impossible. Empirical knowledge is necessarily based on inductive reasoning, which can't be used to definitively prove anything the way you can prove things in formal logic or mathematics (even math proofs using the Axiom of Induction are deductive proofs; the name is misleading.)
the 30,000 SSN's removed from it.... by itself JUST the social security numbers represents approximately 264mb of data
Hold it there, cowboy -- you're off by a factor of 1024. 30,000*9 = 270,000, which is about 264kB. Allowing 100 bytes per person, we're still only talking about 3MB of data.
In clonclusion... I think they're jumpingthe gun a bit here before they have all the facts in.
In conclusion, I think you need to check your math next time.
Why does a home user need XP Pro rather than XP Home? I've used both, and I don't really see much difference from the end-user perspective. My brother is fine with XP Home for all his video editing. Also, iMovie is in pretty much the same league as Windows Movie Maker, which is include with XP Home; e.g., you only get one video track! If you need to buy extra video editing software on Windows, you're also going to need it on a Mac; you can get either Adobe Premiere for Windows + a firewire card or Final Cut Express for $299. That said, I think the Mac Mini is at a pretty reasonable price point.
At the consumer level, RAM is actually less of an issue for video editing than still photography. This is due to a combination of two factors. First, individual MiniDV video frames are only 720x480, whereas even a "lowly" 2-megapixel images are 1600x1200; moreover, when editing, you don't need to keep the videos in memory, just a few little thumbnails. Second, when compiling video projects, you are ultimately limited by your hard drive access rate -- MiniDV is around 13GB/hour, so on any decent-size project, there's no way you're going to have all your clips cached in RAM, even with 8GB. Note that unlike the ever-increasing megapixels of digital still cameras, MiniDV is a fixed standard; its resolution and data rate aren't going to change in the next couple of years -- what you'll see instead is cheaper cameras, smaller cameras (which suck, imo), better picture quality, and more footage filling up your hard drives.
To take a real-world example, my brother does a lot of video editing. He has an Athlon XP 2500+ with 512MB RAM and 240GB hard drive space. RAM is never an issue for him, but he's always running out of hard drive space. On the other hand, his computer started getting slow and swapping to disk when I was editing a large picture in PhotoShop, even though it only took a relatively miniscule 78MB as a PSD file on disk (4100x2400, i.e., ~10MP).
In conclusion, I don't think the 1GB RAM limit on the Mac Mini would hamper consumer-level video editing. The 40/80GB hard drives, which are probably not the fastest, being 2.5" notebook drives, are a more serious concern. An external hard drive would take care of the space issue, but I'm not sure about the performance for video editing tasks.
That's interesting, I tend to find the synchronous forms like IM easier than the asynchronous ones like e-mail, because you don't have to wait around wondering how someone is going to react -- you know right away, and can adapt/clarify quickly to avoid making yourself look bad.
Yeah, my camera uses Type I CompactFlash cards only, so I have a couple of those. They're somewhere between 1.5-2x the thickness of the plastic part of the USB connector on my Sandisk Cruzer Mini, and overall considerably larger and thicker than SD cards. As such, I don't see why we should rule out folding USB CompactFlash cards if the SD version proves itself.
As a matter of fact you can delete IE, but Windows quickly restores a backup copy of it from somewhere. However, if you copy another file over C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\IEXPLORE.EXE or even just delete it and quickly rename another file to IEXPLORE.EXE before the backup is restored, Windows doesn't seem to revert your changes (this is probably to allow upgrades). I'm not sure how Windows decides when and how to make a backup. When I replace IE by a simple text file, after deleting the text file, the original IE is restored. But when I replace IE by a copy of HMMAPI.DLL, it seems to stick -- in fact, if I then re-replace this with the real IEXPLORE.EXE, wait a while, and then delete it, IEXPLORE.EXE gets reverted back to the backup copy of HMMAPI.DLL!
HP wouldn't give you replacement drives for your servers just because they stopped manufacturing their own hard drives? That's so lame. Did you get them on breach of contract?
And while it's probably true that NCP as it existed wasn't adequate, TCP/IP is rather kludgey too for today's use. It is there because of inertia and religious support for it (people worship it as if it were handed to Moses on Sinai). Technically speaking, it rather sucks. IPv6 is worse, however, which tells you how competent the now-commercially-motivated protocol community is.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but could you back up your claims as to what's wrong with these protocols, for the benefit of the less-informed?
The newest compact flash memory is REALLY small and thin. I'm not sure this could be possible with the latest variety.
Huh? Seriously, what are you talking about? Can you provide us a link to some pictures of this new "really small and thin" Compact Flash? The form factor is part of the standard, and is significantly larger than SD. Or are you just thinking of xD?
Re:Should always specify North or South.
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This means your CPU could be spread out over larger areas with little to no performance hit.
That's not true at all. At a mere 2GHz, light can only travel 15cm (6in) through free space in one cycle -- hardly a long distance. Add in modulation and switching delays, and you really can't ignore the board-level latency even with optical interconnect. On the other hand, even on-chip communication takes multiple clock cycles these days, so maybe it wouldn't be that much worse..?
Double-sided double-density (DS-DD) 5.25" disks were 360kB, at least on MS-DOS. So SS-DD would be 130kB or so, etc. High-density (HD) 5.25" disks were 1.2MB, while DD 3.5"s were 720kB (800kB on Macs, I think), and, as we still remember today, HD 3.5"s are 1.44MB (yeah, I know you can format them up to 1.6MB, etc.). A little later than what you're talking about, they had hole-punching devices to make 720kB disks masquerade as 1.44MB disks (HD 3.5" disks have a hole opposite the write protect notch, while DD disks did not).
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This point is where we differ. I see no reason to absolutely trust the authenticity of anything the Bible says, in particular that which is not corroborated by independent sources which I have a demonstrable reason to trust (i.e., the parts that aren't heavily stylize history or reasonable moral lessons). Let us consider several alternate definitions of "the Bible:"
- the abstract notion of "the word of God"
- the divinely inspired ideas in the transcribers' minds
- the actual text, at some point in the past
- a particular translation of the actual text in its current form
- the idea in a reader's mind based on reading of said text
I see no reason that these definitions must all refer to the same identical concept, and based on historical indications and personal experience with human nature, many reasons that they may not, in possibly very gross ways. There is no way for me to rigorously verify that (5) in any way corresponds to (1) without deferring to the authority of a fallible outside authority with ulterior motives. This makes the authority of the Bible indistinguishable from the authority of parents and priests:"But if you read the textbook, we're supposed to follow God's will and God's will alone...this means that sometimes, parents and priests are going to be wrong. And the Bible might even be 'wrong' on some little things, but not theology, which is another story entirely"
Wait a minute, theology is, in the end, an attempt to explain everything -- strictly, if it is wrong on any matter, it is wrong on a matter of theology, though that is not to say it is wrong on all matters [of theology].
The question, then, is is this truly belief, or merely self-delusion?
"If you reply 'I don't know, and we can never tell' to everything, you won't get anywhere.
Think of it like this: say I have a function on the plane, and I give you 10 random sample points with x values in the interval [0,1]. Now you might interpolate a polynomial through those points, and say you have found my function. But have you? Well, maybe, but there are a lot of other possible functions that also go through those points! In particular, even if I gave you all the values with x in the interval [0,1] and said my function was continuous, you still wouldn't have any idea what's going on outside of [-epsilon,1+epsilon] or so. This is what I think of when I see people trying to model a God based on their experiences. Thus, even if you do choose a particular model, you're going to "get there" with probability zero. So why not just acknowledge this instead of spinning your wheels and getting nowhere?
"Atheists say 'There is no god.' and based on that assumption have made great advances in science."
In science, we restrict our model to the observable world. Science does not require atheism.
"Theists say 'There is a God.' and have made great advances in philosophy."
I'm not familiar with the work to which you refer. The greatest advances I have seen in philosophy have been by agnostic logicians.
"Agnostics say 'Maybe there is nothing, maybe I'm still asleep... mmm sleep I'm going to go sleep.' I doubt there are more than a handful of true Strong Agnostics, and there are far far too many weak agnostics 'Who cares I want a burger.'
Heh, well, I do sleep a lot, and I don't eat burgers, but I think you're mischaracterizing agnosticism. Being an agnostic is really just about not extending your claims beyond what you can fairly and truthfully defend.
What I am saying is that, if you assume this notion of God is infinte, etc., any possible (finite) model you may have of it is going to be woefully inadequate, and hence a completely disrespectful trivialization.
As an analogy, say I have a function on the plane, and I give you 10 random sample points with x values in the interval [0,1]. Now you might interpolate a polynomial through those points, and say you have found my function. But have you? Well, maybe, but there are a lot of other possible functions that also go through those points! In particular, even if I gave you all the values with x in the interval [0,1] and said my function was continuous, you still wouldn't have any idea what's going on outside of [-epsilon,1+epsilon] or so. This is what I think of when I see people trying to model a God based on their experiences. It just seems like a huge insult to any possible such figure to assume that you can model them like that when you really know nothing. Sure, maybe your polynomial approximation works quite well to predict things in the observable world. For example, certain moral standards work well, at least in a homogenous group which respects them -- e.g., as far as my own actions are concerned, I tend to adhere to a set of morals often associated with Christianity in the U.S. (though not an extremist). But it seems like unnecessarily, disrespectful human gradiosity to extend those claims to an area with which you have no contact and over which you have no control, and, moreover, to cause all sorts of conflicts with other people who believe in other equally questionable models of that domain.
Disclaimer: The above breaks down if you argue that God is finite or finitely modelable, e.g., by a polynomial interpretation. But in that case, you have a different notion of what a God is, since this places severe restrictions on what it can do. Indeed, we could probably set up scientific tests for a particular instance of a finitely modelable God.
In conclusion, I submit that the sincerest form of respect for a God, or any such entity which may or may not exist, is through deference to its existence and characteristics alone, and not to the judgment of any alleged human representative thereof (including parents, priests and books). Yes, I realize I am expressing a human view on this phenemena, but my goal is not to convince you that I am correct, but rather to try to explain what my viewpoint truly is, because I feel I am gravely misunderstood -- though as with any religion, it seems to me that if someone truly understands what I am saying, they will tend to agree with me.
What's wrong with it is that it's just a baseless claim. Doesn't it strike you as contradictory to explain the unexplainable? If you're going to use the language of "seems likely..." and so on, doesn't it seem likely that you're going to be totally wrong if you try to explain the unexplainable? Why can't people just confess "I don't know" rather than always having to have an answer?
Then why do you talk so much about God? Why do you have all those ceremonies and holidays and books? By doing all that, you're acting like you do comprehend God. That just seems dishonest.
Hey, I have hope, I have joy, I have peace, and I have a purpose (I have found my primary callings to be logic, art and helping people). I don't feel guilty for things (I don't even know what you're talking about, what am I supposed to feel guilty for?), and even when I'm alone and feel helpless, I know things will get better and feel I can pull through it and people will help me. But do I believe in God? No. Believing in God may make you feel good, but that doesn't make it the objective truth. For me, not believing in God makes me feel good, because it means I'm not compromising my beliefs (e.g., that I don't know everything) and morals (e.g., not to tell a lie) just to try to feel good. But I don't believe that means God doesn't exist. What annoys me is that I am tolerant of the possibility of God, but religious people push it into my face that they are right without presenting any serious evidence -- so if when you see non-believers they are unhappy, maybe now you know why. I must say, we are surprisingly hopeful considering our constant harassment by the religious establishment. I'm sure one day the innate goodness of human nature will triumph.
Hey, I have hope, I have joy, I have peace, and I have a purpose (I have found my primary callings to be logic, art and helping people). I don't feel guilty for things (I don't even know what you're talking about, what am I supposed to feel guilty for?), and even when I'm alone and feel helpless, I know things will get better and feel I can pull through it and people will help me. But do I believe in God? No. Believing in God may make you feel good, but that doesn't make it the objective truth. For me, not believing in God makes me feel good, because it means I'm not compromising my beliefs and morals just to try to feel good. But I don't believe that means God doesn't exist.
And what precludes it from not having been started by God? Nothing! Religious people really piss me off. What makes them think that they're so great that they know what's going on? I've got to say, I don't know how the hell the universe came to exist or what happens to my consciousness after I die. And, based on my experience, my experiences at one sort of thing aren't very good predictors of other sorts of things -- so should I use my little experiences to make grandiose claims about the universe like you do?
"I have come to believe that life on this earth is not a random occurence driven by simple statistical probability. Instead, I find it more likely that the universe was created with intelligence."
Can't we just leave the unknown as the unknown, rather than making up stories which, in the end, don't explain anything, but rather introduce more mysteries? If a theory is useful, great, I'll use it. But if it's just a mindfuck, why bother?
How is saying "I don't know" more dishonorable than saying "I know" (theism/deism) but then admiting "but not really" (fickly phrasing it as the best bang for your buck).
Try reading a sensationalized newspaper like the Washington Times or the Jerusalem Post or watching Fox News.
The scientific method, on the other hand, presupposes a different cardinal axiom: fallibility, the assumption that there are things that you do not know. Not necessarily that they are unknowable, but that you do not know them. This is why, thus far, there have been no scientific arguments for the credibility of the theist axiom: most such attempts rely on the implication "I do not know X ==> not X holds," which is not sound reasoning if you assume there are things which you do not know (this is sometimes termed a false dichotomy).
An earlier poster essentially said that they don't know how the Grand Canyon could have formed such steep walls over the course of millions of years, hence it must instead have been formed much more quickly. But no evidence was presented that these are the only possibilities. Moreover, in the strictest sense, there is no evidence for the veracity of history -- maybe we just suddenly appeared with fabricated (but mostly consistent) memories and all? Thus perhaps instead we should look at the motives for making a particular claim. The Grand Canyon poster made his claim in order to assert a particular worldview which affirms his theist axiom. I choose not to accept this claim not because I think it is false, but because I see no benefit in accepting it nor penalty in rejecting it, but a potential for the opposite if later evidence contradicts the claim. Science isn't about finding objective truth, as, assuming our own fallibility, that is too grand a claim. Science is about making useful explanations -- useful in that they allow us to make predictions which are consistent with further observations. Religious explanations are useful, too, but for a different reason -- they make people feel good. Are the correct? I don't know. The most I could judge is whether they are consistent with my perception of my experiences.
I think the parent poster meant that you need to enumerate all the candidate re-actions throughout the universe to show that they are not equal and opposite to ehat one action you claim to have found. If you want to be strict about it, you cannot assume symmetry, continuity, etc. throughout the universe as shortcuts unless you have first proven that... going back to your next point.
To definitely prove a statement containing the universal qualifier is, on the other hand, pretty much logically impossible. Empirical knowledge is necessarily based on inductive reasoning, which can't be used to definitively prove anything the way you can prove things in formal logic or mathematics (even math proofs using the Axiom of Induction are deductive proofs; the name is misleading.)
Hold it there, cowboy -- you're off by a factor of 1024. 30,000*9 = 270,000, which is about 264kB. Allowing 100 bytes per person, we're still only talking about 3MB of data.
In clonclusion... I think they're jumpingthe gun a bit here before they have all the facts in.
In conclusion, I think you need to check your math next time.
Why does a home user need XP Pro rather than XP Home? I've used both, and I don't really see much difference from the end-user perspective. My brother is fine with XP Home for all his video editing. Also, iMovie is in pretty much the same league as Windows Movie Maker, which is include with XP Home; e.g., you only get one video track! If you need to buy extra video editing software on Windows, you're also going to need it on a Mac; you can get either Adobe Premiere for Windows + a firewire card or Final Cut Express for $299. That said, I think the Mac Mini is at a pretty reasonable price point.
At the consumer level, RAM is actually less of an issue for video editing than still photography. This is due to a combination of two factors. First, individual MiniDV video frames are only 720x480, whereas even a "lowly" 2-megapixel images are 1600x1200; moreover, when editing, you don't need to keep the videos in memory, just a few little thumbnails. Second, when compiling video projects, you are ultimately limited by your hard drive access rate -- MiniDV is around 13GB/hour, so on any decent-size project, there's no way you're going to have all your clips cached in RAM, even with 8GB. Note that unlike the ever-increasing megapixels of digital still cameras, MiniDV is a fixed standard; its resolution and data rate aren't going to change in the next couple of years -- what you'll see instead is cheaper cameras, smaller cameras (which suck, imo), better picture quality, and more footage filling up your hard drives.
To take a real-world example, my brother does a lot of video editing. He has an Athlon XP 2500+ with 512MB RAM and 240GB hard drive space. RAM is never an issue for him, but he's always running out of hard drive space. On the other hand, his computer started getting slow and swapping to disk when I was editing a large picture in PhotoShop, even though it only took a relatively miniscule 78MB as a PSD file on disk (4100x2400, i.e., ~10MP).
In conclusion, I don't think the 1GB RAM limit on the Mac Mini would hamper consumer-level video editing. The 40/80GB hard drives, which are probably not the fastest, being 2.5" notebook drives, are a more serious concern. An external hard drive would take care of the space issue, but I'm not sure about the performance for video editing tasks.
That's interesting, I tend to find the synchronous forms like IM easier than the asynchronous ones like e-mail, because you don't have to wait around wondering how someone is going to react -- you know right away, and can adapt/clarify quickly to avoid making yourself look bad.
However, it can be overwritten.
Yeah, my camera uses Type I CompactFlash cards only, so I have a couple of those. They're somewhere between 1.5-2x the thickness of the plastic part of the USB connector on my Sandisk Cruzer Mini, and overall considerably larger and thicker than SD cards. As such, I don't see why we should rule out folding USB CompactFlash cards if the SD version proves itself.
As a matter of fact you can delete IE, but Windows quickly restores a backup copy of it from somewhere. However, if you copy another file over C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\IEXPLORE.EXE or even just delete it and quickly rename another file to IEXPLORE.EXE before the backup is restored, Windows doesn't seem to revert your changes (this is probably to allow upgrades). I'm not sure how Windows decides when and how to make a backup. When I replace IE by a simple text file, after deleting the text file, the original IE is restored. But when I replace IE by a copy of HMMAPI.DLL, it seems to stick -- in fact, if I then re-replace this with the real IEXPLORE.EXE, wait a while, and then delete it, IEXPLORE.EXE gets reverted back to the backup copy of HMMAPI.DLL!
HP wouldn't give you replacement drives for your servers just because they stopped manufacturing their own hard drives? That's so lame. Did you get them on breach of contract?
Can you share with us what happened?
I'm not saying you're wrong, but could you back up your claims as to what's wrong with these protocols, for the benefit of the less-informed?
Huh? Seriously, what are you talking about? Can you provide us a link to some pictures of this new "really small and thin" Compact Flash? The form factor is part of the standard, and is significantly larger than SD. Or are you just thinking of xD?
That's not true at all. At a mere 2GHz, light can only travel 15cm (6in) through free space in one cycle -- hardly a long distance. Add in modulation and switching delays, and you really can't ignore the board-level latency even with optical interconnect. On the other hand, even on-chip communication takes multiple clock cycles these days, so maybe it wouldn't be that much worse..?
Double-sided double-density (DS-DD) 5.25" disks were 360kB, at least on MS-DOS. So SS-DD would be 130kB or so, etc. High-density (HD) 5.25" disks were 1.2MB, while DD 3.5"s were 720kB (800kB on Macs, I think), and, as we still remember today, HD 3.5"s are 1.44MB (yeah, I know you can format them up to 1.6MB, etc.). A little later than what you're talking about, they had hole-punching devices to make 720kB disks masquerade as 1.44MB disks (HD 3.5" disks have a hole opposite the write protect notch, while DD disks did not).