The primary thing that makes grammer checkers useful to me is NOT checking for me being too stupid to write correct grammar, but to check for sloppy editing - like dropping a word that I was thinking as I spoke the sentence to myself in my head. My fingers can drop entire words just as easily as a single letter, and for exactly the same reason - my mind gets ahead of my fingers and I trick myself into thinking I've already typed it.
OO's export as PDF ability doesn't render a file formatted the same as it was in OO. I've verified this by re-opening them in Acrobat and finding that the fonts are slightly different sizes sometimes, which makes words wrap in different places and thus can really screw with the formatting.
Bill Joy used HJKL for a very odd historical reason. The vi editor was developed on a terminal called a "ADM-3A". That terminal had little arrow pictures drawn on the H,J,K, and L keycaps. Bill Joy just decided to use those to make the editor "easy" to remember for people using that terminal that was prevelent where he was developing it. Of course, later on newer terminals came out that had actual independant arrow keys, but that was long after vi was already out.
In retrospect, it worked very well by accident, I say. I find myself more often wishing I could configure all my other text editing apps to use vi keymaps. Vi is very hard to learn but extremely fast to type with once you learn it because you never have to break context by switching over to the external keys and back just to move the cursor - you keep your hands in the touch-typing zone the whole time.
The only two complaints I'd have about it are: 1 - It would be very hard for me to learn Dvorak layout and use vi, since HJKL would no longer be in a row. 2 - It would be nicer if it was JKL;, since that's where your home row fingers sit. as it is, my index finger does double-duty on the H and J keys.
I never understood this complaint. It might be kinda nice to get a little bit more similar look between apps, but it's not the end of the world (now, not having a similar cut & paste model, that is a big problem, and is one of the failings of X - there never should have been four kinds of clipboard, but I digress). After all, there are oodles of programs out there with COMPLETELY different interfaces totally unique to each program and they sell rather well. They're called games. Real time strategies, first person shooters, each one sold has its own unique look and feel to its interface, and people *like* this.
Why is it so different for non-game applications? I've got up on my X screen right now, mozilla, kterm, xterm, xlock, evolution, gimp, and and grip. That's something like three different GUI toolkits represented there. Why do people on Mac have such a problem with this?
Being aware of a likely use of your product is different than building your product with the explicit purpose of being used that way. On the scale of how much blame an inventor has for a product used for a crime, I see it this way:
1. some blame: The inventor made the product explicitly for the purpose of the crime in question. 2. zero blame: The inventor made the product for a different purpose, but knew it would be likely to be misused for the purpose of the crime. 3. zero blame: The inventor made the product for different purpose, and had no clue it would be misused for the purpose of the crime.
I don't think #2 and #3 are any different, blame-wise. You seem to be behaving as if you think they are.
One of the key differences between Napster and BitTorrent is that with Napster the downloading of mp3s other people had burned was specifically what the network was designed for. BitTorrent was for any generic large file, and of course mp3's are what it got used for the most.
What you say is true, but there are already cases of the law applying in lopsided ways with regards to little guys versus big guys. I don't have the faith in the system to believe that the point you made would be that much of an obsticle. Someone would find a legalistic loophole, or invent one.
The JVM is always a sandbox. In web applet contexts it is more limiting, but there are still sandbox limits outside that context - like a maximum pretend memory size, the requirement that all memory access be done via references and not pointers, and so on.
The ability to test something scientifically is quite different from the ability to know something.
This is where we disagree. The scientific method is nothing more than the explicit codification of the process by which intelligence can lead to greater certainty - by repeated affirmation of the theories in your head. Anything else is at a level of certainty that is low enough that I would avoid calling it "knowlege".
Re:TROLL: how about "creationism" crap?
on
Bad Science Awards
·
· Score: 1
If you believe being off-topic is deporable, and replying to something off-topic is equally deplorable, especially when it won't change anyone's mind, then you are a hypocrite by continuing this thread. (I'm not, because I don't share the attitude you claim to have.)
it became such a problem that the moderation system was evolved, imperfect as it is.
Learn to use the tree structure. If a branch of discussion offends, then go back up to the point where it branched and look at stuff indented to that level.
What would fix this "problem" better than telling people that only your opinion of what is on topic is valid, would be a collapsable tree-view like most threaded usenet newsreaders have.
And you didn't respond to the point I made that this was not off topic. The topic was bad science. Many feel that creation "science" is the primary best example of this topic. By telling them that they are off-topic, you are dictating what their opinion on whether creationism is bad science or not must be.
By dictating what does or does not fit within a category of discussion, and posting about it, you are trolling also (by your own definitions, not by mine) - since you know you won't change people's minds on it. I too deplore trolling, but trolling doesn't just mean posting something you predict might get a flood of responses off-topic. Trolling means doing so by deliberately lying - by pretending to hold an opinion you don't actually hold, such that getting off-topic discussions is your only goal, rather than being an unfortunate side-effect of your goal of honestly telling people what you think even when you know it is controversial.
None of those involved ever changes their opinions. No one else reads them.
This is obviously a lie. If nobody read them, then the thread wouldn't continue and get to a point that you consider to be out of hand.
It depends on your intent. With Grokster it was intended for the other 10% of uses, and people who came along afterward swelled the numbers with the other 90% of uses. Most guns were designed with the object in mind of being capable of putting deadly holes in living things. In some cases, it was meant to be animals (hunting rifles) and in other cases it was meant to be people (handguns {excepting those with small bullets made for target practice only} ), and in some cases it was left unclear and could be either.
Analogies between guns and other deadly things (cars, power tools, etc) fail because with other deadly things, the deadliness is a side effect of the intended purpose. With guns, the deadliness IS very deliberate and is the primary design purpose.
People often use this bad argument to defend gun ownership, and I think it's a huge mistake. If you want to defend gun ownership, it is a far stronger argument to just accept that guns are designed to kill, and often in many cases they are designed to kill humans - but then ask, "given that this is what they are made to be able to do, then do you trust the government enough to allow them to be the only ones with exclusive access to this ability?" For me that is the far stronger argument.
"Guns that are owned" != "guns that are used". The comment was not "most guns that are owned are used to commit crimes", but "most guns that are used are used to commit crimes". Now, exactly what that means really depends on how much you need to actively use the gun for it to count as "use", and whether not not practice shooting at a target range counts as "use".
I'm not sure how honest it is in this kind of argument to count practice as a "use" independant of what it is that is being practiced for. After all, by that argument the military is primarily NOT about fighting, since soldiers spend more time practicing than fighting - and in fact a lot of soldiers end up enlisting and doing nothing but practice and never end up being used in action.
A much better statistic would be when a gun isn't being used for practice, but is being used for real, what are the percentages then (I still think crime would not be the top - it would probably be hunting then.)
No, they aren't about attacking companies that are getting profit from infringement. They are about stopping the loss of profit to the original company, from infringement. That's why they also attack sites that aren't making any profit. All they care about is losing a potential sale due to the site, not whether or not the site itself is making any money off it.
And what technologies they kill off in the process? They don't care about that. The industry prefers stagnation to embracing and using new technology. The RIAA is making it so that your only choices for getting music legitimately are old-fashioned physical CDs, and proprietary iTunes downloads that don't transfer to generic players. If you want to buy mp3's for your generic player - piracy is the only viable option because the industry has chosen not to embrace the technology.
The head of the ICR not only said that their purpose was to challenge ideas that "didn't fit their worldview," he actually made sure I repeated it back to him to make sure I got the point.
And yet you still defend them for some odd reason.
Those quotes, by the way, were wonderful examples of precisely what I was talking about.
Creationists are in the business of fitting the facts to their worldview, rather than composing a worldview to fit the evidence as things are, and they admit as much quite gladly.
They are not generally in the practice of admitting that this is what they are doing. Usually they claim just the opposite. it's poetry, and pretty good stuff at that.
Poetry has no place whatsoever in determining objective reality, which is what Creationists are trying to do with the bible. As to whether it is any good or not, I generally don't like it. I can't force myself to get past the meaning of the lyrics to see whether or not they are beautifully expressed. The lyrics are usualy advocating an ethical system I find very deplorable - namely that might makes right, and since god is the biggest might around, the right thing to do is follow his orders. If I actually believed the premises put forth in the bible, then I'd still not worship such a god. I find his ethics reprehensable. Thankfully I just view it as a work of fiction - otherwise it would be incredibly depressing.
So, anyway, because of that it's hard for me to tell if the poetry is actually any good or not. It's like trying to read Mein Kampf and judging it based purely on its literary quality while ignoring the message.
If you have a question about the way the Bible was edited, why not go read about the people who compiled it in the early Church,
I'm not the idiot that thought one of the books should be interpreted using poetry from an entirely different book when there was no connection whatsoever between them until the early church decided to bound them together.
You aren't advocating intelligent study of the bible (read it first, then decide if it's true afterward). You are advocating coming to the conclusion that it is true first, and then studying it in a manner designed to force an interpretation to fit the premise that it is true.
Being called stupid by the likes of people who do that doesn't mean much.
"demonstratable" != "testable" "demonstratable" is a subset of "testable".
Other types of "testable" include comparing the theory against the evidence already present (You don't have to create the situation to use it as data to test a theory. If you did have to, then that would mean that Newton observing the motion of planets to try to decipher the equation for gravity would not have been science since the planets weren't under his control in a lab.)
Besides, you don't behave as if you understand waht the scientific method actually entails. It's not about proving theories true. It's about trying to find ways that would prove theories false, and accepting only those theories that consistently fail to be proven false, and yet in theory should have been provable as false if they were. That last part is important. In order for a hypothesis to be a valid subject for science, it must be falsifiable. The hypothesis of God existing is not falsifiable because it is defined in such a manner that he could manipulate evidence at will. The Big Bang, on the other hand, could be proven false in a few ways, for example, if a lot of matter in the universe was found to be moving in a pattern other than radially out from a central point. Right now we only have observation on a small sliver of the universe, so that's not enough to tell yet if the phenomenon (things moving from a central point) is is a local anomoly or not. But this is one possible way to prove it wrong eventually.
In science, a theory being testable doesn't mean it's something you could prove true. It means it's something you could prove false.
Even the theory of gravity has never been proven true.
Science can only asymptotically approach truth. It can never claim to have achieved it 100%. The difference between science and religion is that science admits it and therefore skeptically tests things over and over and over, and always leaves the door open for a possible turning-on-the-head of previously accepted ideas. But that's what comes from basing belief on testable theories instead of made up conjecture.
Re:TROLL: how about "creationism" crap?
on
Bad Science Awards
·
· Score: 1
So if you were talking with some acquaintances and someone butted in and said "Gays should be allowed to marry/Hitler had the right idea/Microsoft makes great software/whatever" you'd just respond to him and forget about what you were talking about before?
1 - My memory lasts longer than five seconds. Responding to what he said does not require forgetting what we were talking about. 2 - The topic could be relevant, but on the side of, the conversation at hand, as was the case here. (If the topic is bad science, and you think creationism is bad science, then bringing it up is NOT off-topic. It is a perfectly natural drift of the topic.)
Labelling a post as a troll is itself a troll.
The ancient rule is: Don't feed the trolls.
The more ancient rule is that the tactic of the Big Lie works best when lazy people stop bothering to deny it.
While it is technically possible that the earth was created with a retroactive false history recorded in the physical evidence, to resort to such a claim to explain the differences between observations and theories that don't fit them, is to abandon the path of all knowlege.
As soon as a supernatural element is involved, science is incapable of determining the truth and is the wrong tool to use for it.
Then as soon as a supernatural element is involved, you lose the right to make any claims whatseover because you've just moved it out of the realm of the knowable, and even out of the realm of the remotely guessable. In other words, if you start claiming supernatural things exist, and start using them to explain phenomena, then you have just abandoned the ability to test theories, and thus all made up theories are equally valid, and there is never any reason to bother trying to determine what objective reality is anymore, so you might as well stop bothering to sift truth from conjecture in any aspect of your life.
Only if you take the approach that there is no absolute way to prove anything whatsoever. I am perfectly willing, however, to state that earth being created in 4004 BC is no more likely to be true than my having been abducted by space aliens this morning and released with my memory altered so I don't remember any of it.
Slashdot Mirror
The primary thing that makes grammer checkers useful to me is NOT checking for me being too stupid to write correct grammar, but to check for sloppy editing - like dropping a word that I was thinking as I spoke the sentence to myself in my head. My fingers can drop entire words just as easily as a single letter, and for exactly the same reason - my mind gets ahead of my fingers and I trick myself into thinking I've already typed it.
OO's export as PDF ability doesn't render a file formatted the same as it was in OO. I've verified this by re-opening them in Acrobat and finding that the fonts are slightly different sizes sometimes, which makes words wrap in different places and thus can really screw with the formatting.
Bill Joy used HJKL for a very odd historical reason. The vi editor was developed on a terminal called a "ADM-3A". That terminal had little arrow pictures drawn on the H,J,K, and L keycaps. Bill Joy just decided to use those to make the editor "easy" to remember for people using that terminal that was prevelent where he was developing it. Of course, later on newer terminals came out that had actual independant arrow keys, but that was long after vi was already out.
In retrospect, it worked very well by accident, I say. I find myself more often wishing I could configure all my other text editing apps to use vi keymaps. Vi is very hard to learn but extremely fast to type with once you learn it because you never have to break context by switching over to the external keys and back just to move the cursor - you keep your hands in the touch-typing zone the whole time.
The only two complaints I'd have about it are:
1 - It would be very hard for me to learn Dvorak layout and use vi, since HJKL would no longer be in a row.
2 - It would be nicer if it was JKL;, since that's where your home row fingers sit. as it is, my index finger does double-duty on the H and J keys.
xlock,
that was supposed to be xclock. xlock doesn't have much of an interface at all, obviously.
I never understood this complaint. It might be kinda nice to get a little bit more similar look between apps, but it's not the end of the world (now, not having a similar cut & paste model, that is a big problem, and is one of the failings of X - there never should have been four kinds of clipboard, but I digress). After all, there are oodles of programs out there with COMPLETELY different interfaces totally unique to each program and they sell rather well. They're called games. Real time strategies, first person shooters, each one sold has its own unique look and feel to its interface, and people *like* this.
Why is it so different for non-game applications? I've got up on my X screen right now, mozilla, kterm, xterm, xlock, evolution, gimp, and and grip. That's something like three different GUI toolkits represented there. Why do people on Mac have such a problem with this?
Being aware of a likely use of your product is different than building your product with the explicit purpose of being used that way.
On the scale of how much blame an inventor has for a product used for a crime, I see it this way:
1. some blame: The inventor made the product explicitly for the purpose of the crime in question.
2. zero blame: The inventor made the product for a different purpose, but knew it would be likely to be misused for the purpose of the crime.
3. zero blame: The inventor made the product for different purpose, and had no clue it would be misused for the purpose of the crime.
I don't think #2 and #3 are any different, blame-wise. You seem to be behaving as if you think they are.
One of the key differences between Napster and BitTorrent is that with Napster the downloading of mp3s other people had burned was specifically what the network was designed for. BitTorrent was for any generic large file, and of course mp3's are what it got used for the most.
How did you verify that there were no false positives when a false positive would mean you don't see the message??
What you say is true, but there are already cases of the law applying in lopsided ways with regards to little guys versus big guys. I don't have the faith in the system to believe that the point you made would be that much of an obsticle. Someone would find a legalistic loophole, or invent one.
The JVM is always a sandbox. In web applet contexts it is more limiting, but there are still sandbox limits outside that context - like a maximum pretend memory size, the requirement that all memory access be done via references and not pointers, and so on.
Are those songs being offered by the RIAA, which is what my post explicitly said it was talking about? It doesn't look like it.
The ability to test something scientifically is quite different from the ability to know something.
This is where we disagree. The scientific method is nothing more than the explicit codification of the process by which intelligence can lead to greater certainty - by repeated affirmation of the theories in your head. Anything else is at a level of certainty that is low enough that I would avoid calling it "knowlege".
If you believe being off-topic is deporable, and replying to something off-topic is equally deplorable, especially when it won't change anyone's mind, then you are a hypocrite by continuing this thread. (I'm not, because I don't share the attitude you claim to have.)
it became such a problem that the moderation system was evolved, imperfect as it is.
Learn to use the tree structure. If a branch of discussion offends, then go back up to the point where it branched and look at stuff indented to that level.
What would fix this "problem" better than telling people that only your opinion of what is on topic is valid, would be a collapsable tree-view like most threaded usenet newsreaders have.
And you didn't respond to the point I made that this was not off topic. The topic was bad science. Many feel that creation "science" is the primary best example of this topic. By telling them that they are off-topic, you are dictating what their opinion on whether creationism is bad science or not must be.
By dictating what does or does not fit within a category of discussion, and posting about it, you are trolling also (by your own definitions, not by mine) - since you know you won't change people's minds on it. I too deplore trolling, but trolling doesn't just mean posting something you predict might get a flood of responses off-topic. Trolling means doing so by deliberately lying - by pretending to hold an opinion you don't actually hold, such that getting off-topic discussions is your only goal, rather than being an unfortunate side-effect of your goal of honestly telling people what you think even when you know it is controversial.
None of those involved ever changes their opinions. No one else reads them.
This is obviously a lie. If nobody read them, then the thread wouldn't continue and get to a point that you consider to be out of hand.
It depends on your intent. With Grokster it was intended for the other 10% of uses, and people who came along afterward swelled the numbers with the other 90% of uses. Most guns were designed with the object in mind of being capable of putting deadly holes in living things. In some cases, it was meant to be animals (hunting rifles) and in other cases it was meant to be people (handguns {excepting those with small bullets made for target practice only} ), and in some cases it was left unclear and could be either.
Analogies between guns and other deadly things (cars, power tools, etc) fail because with other deadly things, the deadliness is a side effect of the intended purpose. With guns, the deadliness IS very deliberate and is the primary design purpose.
People often use this bad argument to defend gun ownership, and I think it's a huge mistake. If you want to defend gun ownership, it is a far stronger argument to just accept that guns are designed to kill, and often in many cases they are designed to kill humans - but then ask, "given that this is what they are made to be able to do, then do you trust the government enough to allow them to be the only ones with exclusive access to this ability?" For me that is the far stronger argument.
"Guns that are owned" != "guns that are used". The comment was not "most guns that are owned are used to commit crimes", but "most guns that are used are used to commit crimes". Now, exactly what that means really depends on how much you need to actively use the gun for it to count as "use", and whether not not practice shooting at a target range counts as "use".
I'm not sure how honest it is in this kind of argument to count practice as a "use" independant of what it is that is being practiced for. After all, by that argument the military is primarily NOT about fighting, since soldiers spend more time practicing than fighting - and in fact a lot of soldiers end up enlisting and doing nothing but practice and never end up being used in action.
A much better statistic would be when a gun isn't being used for practice, but is being used for real, what are the percentages then (I still think crime would not be the top - it would probably be hunting then.)
No, they aren't about attacking companies that are getting profit from infringement. They are about stopping the loss of profit to the original company, from infringement. That's why they also attack sites that aren't making any profit. All they care about is losing a potential sale due to the site, not whether or not the site itself is making any money off it.
And what technologies they kill off in the process? They don't care about that. The industry prefers stagnation to embracing and using new technology. The RIAA is making it so that your only choices for getting music legitimately are old-fashioned physical CDs, and proprietary iTunes downloads that don't transfer to generic players. If you want to buy mp3's for your generic player - piracy is the only viable option because the industry has chosen not to embrace the technology.
The head of the ICR not only said that their purpose was to challenge ideas that "didn't fit their worldview," he actually made sure I repeated it back to him to make sure I got the point.
And yet you still defend them for some odd reason.
Those quotes, by the way, were wonderful examples of precisely what I was talking about.
Creationists are in the business of fitting the facts to their worldview, rather than composing a worldview to fit the evidence as things are, and they admit as much quite gladly.
They are not generally in the practice of admitting that this is what they are doing. Usually they claim just the opposite.
it's poetry, and pretty good stuff at that.
Poetry has no place whatsoever in determining objective reality, which is what Creationists are trying to do with the bible.
As to whether it is any good or not, I generally don't like it. I can't force myself to get past the meaning of the lyrics to see whether or not they are beautifully expressed. The lyrics are usualy advocating an ethical system I find very deplorable - namely that might makes right, and since god is the biggest might around, the right thing to do is follow his orders. If I actually believed the premises put forth in the bible, then I'd still not worship such a god. I find his ethics reprehensable. Thankfully I just view it as a work of fiction - otherwise it would be incredibly depressing.
So, anyway, because of that it's hard for me to tell if the poetry is actually any good or not. It's like trying to read Mein Kampf and judging it based purely on its literary quality while ignoring the message.
If you have a question about the way the Bible was edited, why not go read about the people who compiled it in the early Church,
I'm not the idiot that thought one of the books should be interpreted using poetry from an entirely different book when there was no connection whatsoever between them until the early church decided to bound them together.
You aren't advocating intelligent study of the bible (read it first, then decide if it's true afterward). You are advocating coming to the conclusion that it is true first, and then studying it in a manner designed to force an interpretation to fit the premise that it is true.
Being called stupid by the likes of people who do that doesn't mean much.
"demonstratable" != "testable"
"demonstratable" is a subset of "testable".
Other types of "testable" include comparing the theory against the evidence already present (You don't have to create the situation to use it as data to test a theory. If you did have to, then that would mean that Newton observing the motion of planets to try to decipher the equation for gravity would not have been science since the planets weren't under his control in a lab.)
Besides, you don't behave as if you understand waht the scientific method actually entails. It's not about proving theories true. It's about trying to find ways that would prove theories false, and accepting only those theories that consistently fail to be proven false, and yet in theory should have been provable as false if they were. That last part is important. In order for a hypothesis to be a valid subject for science, it must be falsifiable. The hypothesis of God existing is not falsifiable because it is defined in such a manner that he could manipulate evidence at will. The Big Bang, on the other hand, could be proven false in a few ways, for example, if a lot of matter in the universe was found to be moving in a pattern other than radially out from a central point. Right now we only have observation on a small sliver of the universe, so that's not enough to tell yet if the phenomenon (things moving from a central point) is is a local anomoly or not. But this is one possible way to prove it wrong eventually.
In science, a theory being testable doesn't mean it's something you could prove true. It means it's something you could prove false.
Even the theory of gravity has never been proven true.
Science can only asymptotically approach truth. It can never claim to have achieved it 100%. The difference between science and religion is that science admits it and therefore skeptically tests things over and over and over, and always leaves the door open for a possible turning-on-the-head of previously accepted ideas. But that's what comes from basing belief on testable theories instead of made up conjecture.
So if you were talking with some acquaintances and someone butted in and said "Gays should be allowed to marry/Hitler had the right idea/Microsoft makes great software/whatever" you'd just respond to him and forget about what you were talking about before?
1 - My memory lasts longer than five seconds. Responding to what he said does not require forgetting what we were talking about.
2 - The topic could be relevant, but on the side of, the conversation at hand, as was the case here. (If the topic is bad science, and you think creationism is bad science, then bringing it up is NOT off-topic. It is a perfectly natural drift of the topic.)
Labelling a post as a troll is itself a troll.
The ancient rule is: Don't feed the trolls.
The more ancient rule is that the tactic of the Big Lie works best when lazy people stop bothering to deny it.
While it is technically possible that the earth was created with a retroactive false history recorded in the physical evidence, to resort to such a claim to explain the differences between observations and theories that don't fit them, is to abandon the path of all knowlege.
As soon as a supernatural element is involved, science is incapable of determining the truth and is the wrong tool to use for it.
Then as soon as a supernatural element is involved, you lose the right to make any claims whatseover because you've just moved it out of the realm of the knowable, and even out of the realm of the remotely guessable. In other words, if you start claiming supernatural things exist, and start using them to explain phenomena, then you have just abandoned the ability to test theories, and thus all made up theories are equally valid, and there is never any reason to bother trying to determine what objective reality is anymore, so you might as well stop bothering to sift truth from conjecture in any aspect of your life.
Only if you take the approach that there is no absolute way to prove anything whatsoever. I am perfectly willing, however, to state that earth being created in 4004 BC is no more likely to be true than my having been abducted by space aliens this morning and released with my memory altered so I don't remember any of it.
Why do things like your last three statements occur? Because things like your first three statements occur.