Top coder has an asteriod challenge that is open right now : http://www.topcoder.com/astero.... They're trying to track asteriods and also identify false-positives and ignore them.
Er.. no. Leaders get replaced by bureaucrats, who go on to become the next generation of leaders - only with more experience, since he just saw how the enemy killed his leader. Every good leader was a bureaucrat once. He needs to be, to know how his subordinates think.
No one person is really important, especially to a globally distributed terrorist organization like Al-Qaeda. Imagine if an important executive of IBM were to die. How's that going to affect IBM at all? He'll just be replaced. If you think there's ever going to be a shortage for people willing to take risks in the name of their belief, there's a surprise waiting for you.
Yes, but his brothers and sons and daughters are alive. Next time you go to a restaurant you better watch your back. Oh, better let your son and daughter and friends know about it as well. Because they're not in their friends list as well.
I think the argument is wait and see. Any major research effort takes time to yield benefits that can actually be used by humans. For example when people started medelling with worms and flies in the early 20th century no one could've really thought that it may one day be the platform for gene therapy.
In case of space exploration we already know what the results can be. It means we finally get a chance to leave this planet. If that's the ONLY benefit we get I say let's promote this program.
I'd prefer the cliche "fix the problems on this planet first, then we'll worry about others".
There'll NEVER be a time when the problem's on this planet will be fixed. To begin with there're too many and there's too many of us to control. One of us is bound to go crazy. There'll always be wars, famines, droughts, murders. This is because we're humans and this is how we act. And this is how we act because we're selfish beings to begin with, like all other plants and animals.
I keep thinking how so much research in the past few decades has focused on improving communication and health. And we see benefits immediately and it's very tangible. But we have to think about more missions to other planets atleast. May be we can send robots to build environments suitable for human inhabitation and then we can go colonize the planet. I really think this will become feasible in a few thousand years. We can send space probes with human and other useful animal and plant embryos frozen to some far off planet with some robots and they can start something fresh away from sun in a different star system..
I think I'm going mad. But I think these are very exciting opportunities and and just saying where are the benefits now is being very shortsighted.
Getting back to the natural phenomenon reported in the bible, I take it we are talking about miracles of various sorts. I'm not sure I totally understand the question. Are you saying that they didn't/couldn't have occurred, or that there are natural explanations for them? In answer to the first option, God created the world, he can intervene in it to alter it. In answer to the second option, I personally don't think it matters much. If God chose to use events we can now explain, all well and good. Eg parting of the red sea. Some believe that this was actually the tide and the red sea. It doesn't actually matter because the main point is that the Hebrews escaped. Whichever way it goes the timing was miraculous.
I'm talking about how the Bible explains simple questions that may arise by just observing the world. You see diversity in living beings and science provides what can thought of as a rational answer, while the Bible just says God created everybody. My idea of a rational thought is when you observe something and you come up with a theory for it and then you prove or disprove your theory by further observations. The Bible fails this test badly.
Obviously you can say this is the word of God and you shaln't question it. And many people do just that. But you can't call that rational.
Personally I've thought about this a lot and concluded there's no way either science or religion can provide a wholesome answer. I've reached a state where I don't completely believe or disbelieve in God and kinda stoppped thinking about this. But if you follow the way of science you'll atleast endup finding out more about the natural world. I agree that science fails BADLY when it comes to questions of ethics and morality and I think that's kinda where one can seek some guidance from religions. But I don't agree when you say believing the Bible completely is rational. Rationality arises from questioning any postulate before believing, which is exactly what you're NOT supposed when it comes to religion
But I don't understand. There's no way you can rationally deduce more than half the stuff the bible says starting from the origin of earth, diversity on earth, extinction of animals, origin of this universe - almost every single field science is striving to answer. I understand if you say that you believe the 'principles' stated in the Bible makes sense, which obviously is very subjective. But how can you believe something without being able to question it when there's mounting evidence against almost every natural phenomenon as explained in it.
I don't understand, why do we have to come up with arguments that belittle us all the time. As a species I say we kicked ass BIG time. Humanity is the ONLY hope for life, hope to move to another planet or even a new solar system in a million years. who knows. If it's not for us all the plants and animals would just die burning to hell when the sun becomes a red-giant asshole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Life_cycle/ in about 4 billion years.
And if it's not been for us the earth would be greener, less polluted and all the glaciers wouldn't be melting now.
So? who cares? There won't be anyone to appreciate it. All the life forms would be busy killing each other and reproducing.
No man-kind and life will just die away in a few billion years.
The problem lies in realising our importance and getting our act together and trying to figure out a way out of earth and not ending up bombing the whole planet to death.
But man, like, what can google possibly gain from this? Nobody goes to google to see the stupid logos. Of course they do things for commercial gain. But this is something thats done to honor the guy. If anything, he probably became more famous because of all this hoopla!, give it a break.
Actually if a population mates completely randomly and is of infinite size then the gene pool of the population will never change. This is called the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Infact randomness will sort of act against change because there's no 'SELECTION' which by the way is the key to evolution. Randomness is seen only in the mutations that are transmitted genetically. The dolphin example is so bogus.. No natural system 'WANTS' to keep the dolphins alive.. If the dolphins die because the bigger lunged once were selected and perished later due to some other reason, some animal which was it's prey or competition on the food chain will become more succesful. Also being not able to point out the favorable gene in the humans doesn't mean that some genes will be favored 10 years from now or 10000 years from now.
You need to bo back home and pick your biology book..
" That's like saying if a rabbit darts in front of my car, I make a minor course correction and magically become a new species."
The idea of speciation is that under the given circumstances (like say geographical separation) two populations of stop breeding amongst themselves and start evolving separarately(multiple mutations get accumalated over hunders of thousands of years). For example the asian and african elephant populations had probably the same ancestor some many million years back, but when India separated from Africa at some point, they were geographically isolated accumalated mutations and now today they're two different species of elephants.
"
It is difficult to imagine that a species could change because it wanted to or was simply adapting to terrain or environment. Environment changes drastically in 1 billion years, to extreme ups and downs within a year. By the time a successful alteration is made a billion years later, the scenario for which it was manifested has long past."
This is the whole point of evolution and I don't understand how you twisted it for ID. You think for example that a 'Giraffe 'evolved' a long neck because it somehow figured that with a long neck it can eat the tree tops. There was no gradual elaongation of the Giraffe's neck. At no point was a Giraffe with half the length of the modern Giraffe neck. The long neck came out of an accident(mutation whatever you want to call it) and since it helped the animal survive better(because it can graze the top of the tree without any competition for example,) it passed it's gene on to future generations.
"How did his progenitors know they needed to mutate in order to survive? The "tendency of an object in motion to stay in motion" is too strong to stop just because it happened to.
"
same point again.. infact the progenitors can do NOTHING to enhance their/or their offsprings survival other than what they can do physically. By adaptation scientists don't mean that there's willing contribution to the process by the organism. The process occurs naturally ( guided by natural selection). There're more species that are extinct in the history of the earth than there're surviving today.
"So, we can declare that everyone must accept homosexuality as a valid lifestyle, but must martyr all ID'ers for having such an impossibly absurd idea. Loads of sense there, Plato.
"
Finally something that can be accepted as something that's close to a valid point.
"It is also baffling as to why "fundamentalist" is such a dirty word."
Because the believe in ideas blindly. Has there ever been ANY proof at all that all this happened by some supreme god. Inspite of mounting evidence for evolution, they just want to play it down, because it shakes up their belief system.
I understand that evolution still has a lot of explaining to do with respect to the chemical origin of life, factors which actually distinguishes life from non-life. But that does not explain why anyone would just take this big 'blackbox' that is creation and believe in it, instead of being curious( which I think is the most important human quality) and dig in for more plausible explanations.
Maybe you should read the news first, before jumping to blame the US . This was caused by tectonic plate movements http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami/ and has nothing to do global warming.
I for one have seen a lots of students preferring Windows/Mac against a Linux based network. My college has huge labs with Mac/Windows just distributed on random. There's also a tiny-tiny linux lab, only no one goes there. Being a grad student I don't use these labs much and loiter around the comp sc. dept lab, where Windows is not very popular. I attended a meeting about two years back in the Bio lab i use to work for and the Bio dept bought this huge chunk of computers for about 75k and they wont even think about Linux/Sun as an alternative. The students from other depts use computers to either type docs/run specific softwares (not reaesrch oriented) which are more readily available on Windows. Frankly I'm not surprised windows has a huge market in colleges, what with so many non comp-sc students having used windows-based systems in their schools and all. but the change is apparent once they start getting into research and stuff.
When I first read the 'I Robot' book, this is what I was trying to figure - how can the Robot figure out what 'harm' is. The book (books) don't explain much or even attempt to explain how this can be achieved and most of the stories are based on tweeking with these laws..It'll be interesting to think about this though... I remember this one story where in this robot keeps going in circles because the second law and the first law are contradicting and compliment each other with the same potential and the robot follows the exact path of a circle.
I think the first robots Asimov introduced weren't that intelligent as to consider and weigh the pros/cons of its actions with reference to the rest of the humanity.But they got smarter and in one of his books - the foundation series - they establish this thingy called gia, because that's the best model that can work for all of humanity, without much work..
I'd like to see someday where the robots can actually identify 'harm' atleast in its immediate sense and change actions based on that.. that'll be fun
But you can say the saemthing about the war in Iraq. Where was all this skepticism when Bush accused Iraq of a countless many things, the proff for which he's yet to provide. Atleast after watching the movie you see that Mooore migt have a point because you do see Bush acting stupid and you do see in the news EVERY FUCKING DAY atleast 10 people getting killed. And the worst thing that can happen if Moore's point is taken, without skeptisicm is that Bush might loose november, which might not be such a bad thing to happen afterall..
The plan is to keep it under control by pointing out to the person who is the reason, that he better cut to the chase and do something. Dont you think it's better if we try avoid the problem instead of 'devising' new ways which might/might not work to overcome it..
And no one has thought of any clever ways to engineer out way through this problem..It's here and the only solution is to take responsibility and do something.. - printing on both the sides of a paper will be a good start..
But that reaaly doen't matter.. Whats more important is the relevance of the first 70-100 links they bring. Most of the time, you just serach for something and don't even bother checking after page 2 or 3. The only time when I tried going all the way down to the 200th page was when I serached for my name and had to find my page the 212th page of links.. to be precise..
The size of the database matters only when you do the search. not when you bring up the results.. Accuracy is pretty much the only thing that concerns a user. Period.
Slashdot Mirror
Top coder has an asteriod challenge that is open right now : http://www.topcoder.com/astero.... They're trying to track asteriods and also identify false-positives and ignore them.
Good thing, the government is not paying you to do this..
Er.. no. Leaders get replaced by bureaucrats, who go on to become the next generation of leaders - only with more experience, since he just saw how the enemy killed his leader. Every good leader was a bureaucrat once. He needs to be, to know how his subordinates think.
No one person is really important, especially to a globally distributed terrorist organization like Al-Qaeda. Imagine if an important executive of IBM were to die. How's that going to affect IBM at all? He'll just be replaced. If you think there's ever going to be a shortage for people willing to take risks in the name of their belief, there's a surprise waiting for you.
Yes, but his brothers and sons and daughters are alive. Next time you go to a restaurant you better watch your back. Oh, better let your son and daughter and friends know about it as well. Because they're not in their friends list as well.
Ok, here you go : http://xkcd.com/793/
Yeah, but then it won't be so unexpected since Turing himself is gay.
I think the argument is wait and see. Any major research effort takes time to yield benefits that can actually be used by humans. For example when people started medelling with worms and flies in the early 20th century no one could've really thought that it may one day be the platform for gene therapy.
In case of space exploration we already know what the results can be. It means we finally get a chance to leave this planet. If that's the ONLY benefit we get I say let's promote this program.
I'd prefer the cliche "fix the problems on this planet first, then we'll worry about others".
There'll NEVER be a time when the problem's on this planet will be fixed. To begin with there're too many and there's too many of us to control. One of us is bound to go crazy. There'll always be wars, famines, droughts, murders. This is because we're humans and this is how we act. And this is how we act because we're selfish beings to begin with, like all other plants and animals.
I keep thinking how so much research in the past few decades has focused on improving communication and health. And we see benefits immediately and it's very tangible. But we have to think about more missions to other planets atleast. May be we can send robots to build environments suitable for human inhabitation and then we can go colonize the planet. I really think this will become feasible in a few thousand years. We can send space probes with human and other useful animal and plant embryos frozen to some far off planet with some robots and they can start something fresh away from sun in a different star system..
I think I'm going mad. But I think these are very exciting opportunities and and just saying where are the benefits now is being very shortsighted.
I'm talking about how the Bible explains simple questions that may arise by just observing the world. You see diversity in living beings and science provides what can thought of as a rational answer, while the Bible just says God created everybody. My idea of a rational thought is when you observe something and you come up with a theory for it and then you prove or disprove your theory by further observations. The Bible fails this test badly.
Obviously you can say this is the word of God and you shaln't question it. And many people do just that. But you can't call that rational.
Personally I've thought about this a lot and concluded there's no way either science or religion can provide a wholesome answer. I've reached a state where I don't completely believe or disbelieve in God and kinda stoppped thinking about this. But if you follow the way of science you'll atleast endup finding out more about the natural world. I agree that science fails BADLY when it comes to questions of ethics and morality and I think that's kinda where one can seek some guidance from religions. But I don't agree when you say believing the Bible completely is rational. Rationality arises from questioning any postulate before believing, which is exactly what you're NOT supposed when it comes to religion
But I don't understand. There's no way you can rationally deduce more than half the stuff the bible says starting from the origin of earth, diversity on earth, extinction of animals, origin of this universe - almost every single field science is striving to answer. I understand if you say that you believe the 'principles' stated in the Bible makes sense, which obviously is very subjective. But how can you believe something without being able to question it when there's mounting evidence against almost every natural phenomenon as explained in it.
And if it's not been for us the earth would be greener, less polluted and all the glaciers wouldn't be melting now. So? who cares? There won't be anyone to appreciate it. All the life forms would be busy killing each other and reproducing. No man-kind and life will just die away in a few billion years.
The problem lies in realising our importance and getting our act together and trying to figure out a way out of earth and not ending up bombing the whole planet to death.
But man, like, what can google possibly gain from this? Nobody goes to google to see the stupid logos. Of course they do things for commercial gain. But this is something thats done to honor the guy. If anything, he probably became more famous because of all this hoopla!, give it a break.
Actually if a population mates completely randomly and is of infinite size then the gene pool of the population will never change. This is called the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Infact randomness will sort of act against change because there's no 'SELECTION' which by the way is the key to evolution. Randomness is seen only in the mutations that are transmitted genetically. The dolphin example is so bogus.. No natural system 'WANTS' to keep the dolphins alive.. If the dolphins die because the bigger lunged once were selected and perished later due to some other reason, some animal which was it's prey or competition on the food chain will become more succesful. Also being not able to point out the favorable gene in the humans doesn't mean that some genes will be favored 10 years from now or 10000 years from now.
" That's like saying if a rabbit darts in front of my car, I make a minor course correction and magically become a new species."
The idea of speciation is that under the given circumstances (like say geographical separation) two populations of stop breeding amongst themselves and start evolving separarately(multiple mutations get accumalated over hunders of thousands of years). For example the asian and african elephant populations had probably the same ancestor some many million years back, but when India separated from Africa at some point, they were geographically isolated accumalated mutations and now today they're two different species of elephants.
" It is difficult to imagine that a species could change because it wanted to or was simply adapting to terrain or environment. Environment changes drastically in 1 billion years, to extreme ups and downs within a year. By the time a successful alteration is made a billion years later, the scenario for which it was manifested has long past."
This is the whole point of evolution and I don't understand how you twisted it for ID. You think for example that a 'Giraffe 'evolved' a long neck because it somehow figured that with a long neck it can eat the tree tops. There was no gradual elaongation of the Giraffe's neck. At no point was a Giraffe with half the length of the modern Giraffe neck. The long neck came out of an accident(mutation whatever you want to call it) and since it helped the animal survive better(because it can graze the top of the tree without any competition for example,) it passed it's gene on to future generations.
"How did his progenitors know they needed to mutate in order to survive? The "tendency of an object in motion to stay in motion" is too strong to stop just because it happened to. "
same point again.. infact the progenitors can do NOTHING to enhance their/or their offsprings survival other than what they can do physically. By adaptation scientists don't mean that there's willing contribution to the process by the organism. The process occurs naturally ( guided by natural selection). There're more species that are extinct in the history of the earth than there're surviving today.
"So, we can declare that everyone must accept homosexuality as a valid lifestyle, but must martyr all ID'ers for having such an impossibly absurd idea. Loads of sense there, Plato. "
Finally something that can be accepted as something that's close to a valid point.
"It is also baffling as to why "fundamentalist" is such a dirty word."
Because the believe in ideas blindly. Has there ever been ANY proof at all that all this happened by some supreme god. Inspite of mounting evidence for evolution, they just want to play it down, because it shakes up their belief system. I understand that evolution still has a lot of explaining to do with respect to the chemical origin of life, factors which actually distinguishes life from non-life. But that does not explain why anyone would just take this big 'blackbox' that is creation and believe in it, instead of being curious( which I think is the most important human quality) and dig in for more plausible explanations.
Maybe you should read the news first, before jumping to blame the US . This was caused by tectonic plate movements http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami/ and has nothing to do global warming.
aren't we optimistic today?
"Welcome Slashdot users! (we're experiencing a little bandwidth problem, we're looking into getting some offical mirrors up) " on the NASA page!!.
Damn.. I knew someone would think of this. Another vote for Kerry down the drain.
I for one have seen a lots of students preferring Windows/Mac against a Linux based network. My college has huge labs with Mac/Windows just distributed on random. There's also a tiny-tiny linux lab, only no one goes there. Being a grad student I don't use these labs much and loiter around the comp sc. dept lab, where Windows is not very popular. I attended a meeting about two years back in the Bio lab i use to work for and the Bio dept bought this huge chunk of computers for about 75k and they wont even think about Linux/Sun as an alternative. The students from other depts use computers to either type docs/run specific softwares (not reaesrch oriented) which are more readily available on Windows. Frankly I'm not surprised windows has a huge market in colleges, what with so many non comp-sc students having used windows-based systems in their schools and all. but the change is apparent once they start getting into research and stuff.
When I first read the 'I Robot' book, this is what I was trying to figure - how can the Robot figure out what 'harm' is. The book (books) don't explain much or even attempt to explain how this can be achieved and most of the stories are based on tweeking with these laws..It'll be interesting to think about this though... I remember this one story where in this robot keeps going in circles because the second law and the first law are contradicting and compliment each other with the same potential and the robot follows the exact path of a circle. I think the first robots Asimov introduced weren't that intelligent as to consider and weigh the pros/cons of its actions with reference to the rest of the humanity.But they got smarter and in one of his books - the foundation series - they establish this thingy called gia, because that's the best model that can work for all of humanity, without much work.. I'd like to see someday where the robots can actually identify 'harm' atleast in its immediate sense and change actions based on that.. that'll be fun
But you can say the saemthing about the war in Iraq. Where was all this skepticism when Bush accused Iraq of a countless many things, the proff for which he's yet to provide. Atleast after watching the movie you see that Mooore migt have a point because you do see Bush acting stupid and you do see in the news EVERY FUCKING DAY atleast 10 people getting killed. And the worst thing that can happen if Moore's point is taken, without skeptisicm is that Bush might loose november, which might not be such a bad thing to happen afterall..
The plan is to keep it under control by pointing out to the person who is the reason, that he better cut to the chase and do something. Dont you think it's better if we try avoid the problem instead of 'devising' new ways which might/might not work to overcome it.. And no one has thought of any clever ways to engineer out way through this problem..It's here and the only solution is to take responsibility and do something .. - printing on both the sides of a paper will be a good start..
But that reaaly doen't matter.. Whats more important is the relevance of the first 70-100 links they bring. Most of the time, you just serach for something and don't even bother checking after page 2 or 3. The only time when I tried going all the way down to the 200th page was when I serached for my name and had to find my page the 212th page of links.. to be precise.. The size of the database matters only when you do the search. not when you bring up the results.. Accuracy is pretty much the only thing that concerns a user. Period.