Except there is one key requirement for any scientific theory; it has to be testable. Otherwise it is completely worthless. Since what happened prior to the big bang (assuming such a time exists, of course) is unknowable, it is completely untestable. Thus any speculation on it cannot be considered a theory.
Which one can say "We don't know yet"? Certainly not scientists, as under most current theories of the origin of the universe, what happened before the big bang is unknowable (assuming there is such a before, we have nothing more than our intuitive view of the world around us on which to base that assumption).
Unless of course they are one of the many students out there who has a professor that uses Office and requires its use. I'm sure that ends up being much more than 1% of the student population. Yes, you can convert an OO document to an Office document, but there are often glitches and formatting problems, which professors are often not that tolerant of.
Last I heard, solar observations confirmed long ago that the sun has been producing more heat since we started measuring it, and that has probably been the trend for at least a hundred years. Though that doesn't mean the sun is the only factor in our planet's ever changing climate. There are many different factors in there, human activity has just been getting the most attention because it is the one we can blame someone for.
No, you know a lot of people who claim to have asperger syndrome because they read an article about it and figured if they had it, they would have an excuse to be anti-social. I doubt you know many (if any) people with legitimate diagnosed cases of autism.
Anyways, this type of attitude (we should reject the cure because the inflicted are interesting) isn't very different from objecting to correcting a birth defect because you want to stare at the freaks in the circus.
"what gives any company the right to discriminate?"
The federal government gives them the obligation to discriminate. If the manager hadn't taken action, the employee who had caught him could have sued for sexual harassment, arguing that the sexual content on the computer made for a hostile work environment.
I was an early gmail user as well, and while Firefox was never as bad as Opera was initially (in that it simply was not supported), I do certainly remember a few bugs with it.
Why do you assume they have been paid off just because their app doesn't work with multiple browsers? Lots of apps out there are specific to IE, especially when they first come out. I remember even gmail, the hero of the non-MS world, didn't originally work with Opera and had questionable support for Firefox when it was first released. Its not a big MS conspiracy, its laziness by the developers. Yes, its been slowly getting better, but I disagree with the statement that now its considered unacceptable for something to be IE only.
"It's highly likely that if this had happened on September 10, 2001, there wouldn't have been this kind of uproar. "
Of course there would be. I'm really sick of this whole "this only happened because of 9/11" attitude. Do people really have such a short memory that you cannot remember back what pre-9/11 life was like? We were not completely ignorant of terrorism, skipping around in a field of flowers, singing about how great life is. In fact, we thought we had been through a lot with the unabomber, Oklahoma City, and the Atlanta Olympics bombing. We got more of our collective fear of suspicious packages from those incidents than 9/11 when they used planes, not bombs. And we heard plenty of stories from overseas, from suicide bombings in Israel to the IRA bombings in the UK. Even Al Queda wasn't exactly unfamiliar to us, with the Cole bombing. And of course Hollywood fed plenty of bombing nightmares to us, from The Siege to Die Hard 3. There were bomb scares before 9/11, and there will be bomb scare far into the future.
Oh, I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't have gmail addresses. Privacy freaks who are mad at them for including advertisements taken from email data, people who are mad at them for caving into China's demands (and who didn't hear that Yahoo and MS did the same thing), old people, etc. Hell there are people out there who don't even have computers. And of course there are plenty of people out there who are perfectly satisfied with their existing email service, and don't want to go through the hassle of switching.
Though I'm sure most college students are at least aware of its existence.
"Digital broadcast television (which I have by satellite) is basically the same resolution as a DVD unless the DVD is anamorphic widescreen and you play it back on a widescreen television."
Several issues here...
First, most people do not get digital broadcast television.
Second, just because what you are receiving supports digital broadcast does not mean that whatever you were watching was created and sent in digital.
Third, if they don't have a widescreen TV, they most likely don't have HD, making the whole point moot.
So yes, if you compare broadcast in its best case scenario with DVD in its worst case scenario, they are fairly comparable. But that is hardly the point. Just because someone notices a difference between a regular broadcast TV show and the HD version does not mean they will be able to notice the difference (without help) between a DVD and an HD-DVD. The evidence of this is the many people I have known who thought DVD was already in HD, and who were outright surprised when they heard of the new formats to introduce HD to DVDs.
"High definition movies benefit the same way as HD TV shows. "
Again, there is a much bigger difference in quality between standard broadcast TV and HD than in DVD and HD. If you thought they look the same (as that comment indicates), then you are just proving my point. Most people cannot on their own detect the better resolution unless it is very pronounced, on a huge TV, or if what they are watching has a lot more detail than a standard movie. They think they can, but its much more of a response to being told that one is better than the other. Its the brain that notices the quality difference, not the eyes. Sure, the brain is a powerful thing so they may well appreciate the difference. But that doesn't mean their eyes can tell them apart (without watching them both next to each other or one right after the other).
So you are against people pushing their faith on others, and your proposed policy is to force visitors to the moon to become atheists while they are there? Isn't that just a tad bit hypocritical? Or is it only bad to force one person's faith on another person if their faith is different from yours? Because I know lots of religious people who would agree with you on that.
My eyes are fine, but yours might need some work. Again, I didn't say everyone cannot tell the difference, only the average consumer. And the average consumer doesn't have a 1080i TV, nor do they watch movies really close up, nor do they buy DVDs containing PBS nature shows that they leave on as background visuals. For the average consumer, DVD quality (which is better than the standard def broadcast TV which your wife thought looked grainy) is perfectly fine for their movies.
Yes, if you buy a high quality TV and watch something that has an unusually large amount of detail (nature shows are one, football is another, though neither are that popular in the DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray market), you can tell the difference. But thats rarely going to be the case.
In other words, you were unable to tell anything wrong until you compared it directly to an HD version? Well, that was my point. For the average consumer (most of whom do not have 65 inch TVs), DVD quality is perfectly fine.
The average person cannot tell the difference (unless they are looking at the pictures side by side), and if they claim otherwise, they only think the HD version is better because they have been told its better, not because they see anything different.
Case in point, a couple of years ago I was back home for Christmas, and we were planning on getting a movie to watch on my parent's new plasma TV. I suggested we save the time from going to the video store by just watching something from the cable companies movies on demand service. My dad would hear nothing of it, claiming that those movies are not broadcast in HD and would look bad on their new expensive TV. I didn't have the heart to tell him what we rented from Blockbuster wasn't HD either.
Most people out there are still comparing their DVD's quality with that of their old VHS tapes. They see nothing wrong with it. If you do (or if you think you do), you are in the minority by a long shot. And if you really need (or think you need) HD movies in your movie collection, well I guess you will have to purchase expensive new equipment without a set standard.
Congratulations, three posts without responding to any point made. Instead nothing but strawmen, red herrings, and ad hominems. But if you really believe Ted Kaczynski doesn't exist in reality (as you said earlier) and we should ignore basic security policies that pose no real restriction on the general public just because a sufficiently well funded group could bypass it, go ahead and believe what you want. And if you want to claim I'm fear mongering while you claim China is about to launch an all out strike against our nuclear power plants, well I don't really give a damn.
So in other words, your argument is putting your hands over your ears and screaming "LALALALAICANTHEARYOULALA!"
Well, this is/., so I guess I can't expect much better from armchair policy 'experts' who think they know more than the people who really are in charge of things like nuclear power plant security...
"Of course governments are plotting to blow up nuclear facilities. What do you think they do in their war departments? What do you think we do in ours about their facilities?"
Draw up contingency plans to blow up military targets? Besides, there is a difference between drawing up contingency plans that could be enacted under extreme conditions and actual 'plotting', which implies an intention to implement those plans.
"As for corporations, and governments, blowing them up isn't the only thing they'd like to do. They'd like to copy them, or just learn about security, construction or science techniques. That's what espionage, corporate or government, is mainly used for. Every day."
Right... you know we are talking about aerial photos from which you can barely make out cars, let alone the details you would need to build a nuclear fission reactor, right? I really don't think industrial espionage is what they are trying to protect by blurring out those images.
"And what kind of defense is "who needs this public info"?"
You were trying to claim they were hiding the pictures from the public as part of a cover up. I am really curious who you think is going to use those photos to undercover security holes...
"Yeah, reality. Not like that Unabomber, because it's not as exciting to the oversimplistic imagination."
Uh, you don't think the Unabomber (or McVeigh or the 9-11 hijackers) are real? Thats some serious crack you are smoking...
"Yeah, because the security threats to facilities come from the general public which gets its aerial imagery free from these years-old databases, not from corporate, governement or international orgs with budgets for the plentiful (even cheap) aerial/satellite products with recent updates, higher resolution, GIS overlays, even realtime observations. Or their own aircraft/satellites to generate their own custom data."
What? Are you claiming corporations and government agencies are plotting to blow up the nations nuclear facilities? I think you need to stop watching X-Files reruns.
The real people they are trying to hide it from is terrorists from Kaczynski to the 9-11 hijackers to McVeigh, none of which were rich enough to buy their own satellite.
"These blurred images are just Google caving into various narrow interests with either something negligent to hide from an enquiring public or its reporters, or just pretending to secure facilities with meaningless handwaving, or both."
First of all, how many members of the "enquiring (sic) public" really need overhead shots of nuclear power plants?
Second, Google compiles these images, they do not create them. Do you really think Google hired someone to photograph every square inch of the planet?
I think the point of the research being referenced (though the link is bad, so its hard to tell) is that new experiments show the water loss rate should be much lower than they previously thought, which means all that water that used to be there must have gone somewhere.
I've got some karma to spare, I think I can afford to be modded down by Mac fanboys. So here it goes...
If you read the real article that this blog entry links to (note to editors, why can't you just use the actual stories in the summaries instead of making us go through some blogger first? If I just wanted to hear some nobody write stuff he is pulling out of his ass on a subject he knows nothing about, I'd skip straight to the comments section...), it doesn't even mention DRM. This seems to be more of an anti-trust thing, rather than an intellectual property thing. Which makes sense, I mean if it is illegal in Europe for Microsoft to include a copy of music playing software with their operating system that users have the choice to use, why would it be legal for Apple to force their users to buy a specific piece of hardware? Microsoft may not be the king of open standards by any standard, but they are miles ahead of Apple.
Now you are getting into a semantics argument. "Proof" means different things in different contexts. In mathematics, it means it cannot logically be false. But there are plenty of contexts in which the standards for "proof" are much smaller (such as when establishing the safety of drugs). In fact, the dictionary gives 28 different definitions of the word. The mathematical definition of the word doesn't even make any sense when applied to a physical science.
The 6th Amendment is not what people are referring to when they talk about the Constitutional basis of Habeas Corpus. Its from Article 1, Section 9: " The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."
Now it may be difficult (though not impossible, a 'speedy' trial is of course relative) to enforce the 6th Amendment without Habeas Corpus, but the law that specifically concerns Habeas Corpus is written in the negative. It prohibits the government from denying you it, it does not create a natural human right. Same with 'rights' to privacy and free speech, and here it is an especially important distinction. The government is prohibited from denying you free speech, but that doesn't necessarily mean you will be able to practice it. If no publisher is willing to publish the book you just wrote, you are not having any right of yours being violated.
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Except there is one key requirement for any scientific theory; it has to be testable. Otherwise it is completely worthless. Since what happened prior to the big bang (assuming such a time exists, of course) is unknowable, it is completely untestable. Thus any speculation on it cannot be considered a theory.
Which one can say "We don't know yet"? Certainly not scientists, as under most current theories of the origin of the universe, what happened before the big bang is unknowable (assuming there is such a before, we have nothing more than our intuitive view of the world around us on which to base that assumption).
Unless of course they are one of the many students out there who has a professor that uses Office and requires its use. I'm sure that ends up being much more than 1% of the student population. Yes, you can convert an OO document to an Office document, but there are often glitches and formatting problems, which professors are often not that tolerant of.
Last I heard, solar observations confirmed long ago that the sun has been producing more heat since we started measuring it, and that has probably been the trend for at least a hundred years. Though that doesn't mean the sun is the only factor in our planet's ever changing climate. There are many different factors in there, human activity has just been getting the most attention because it is the one we can blame someone for.
No, you know a lot of people who claim to have asperger syndrome because they read an article about it and figured if they had it, they would have an excuse to be anti-social. I doubt you know many (if any) people with legitimate diagnosed cases of autism.
Anyways, this type of attitude (we should reject the cure because the inflicted are interesting) isn't very different from objecting to correcting a birth defect because you want to stare at the freaks in the circus.
"what gives any company the right to discriminate?"
The federal government gives them the obligation to discriminate. If the manager hadn't taken action, the employee who had caught him could have sued for sexual harassment, arguing that the sexual content on the computer made for a hostile work environment.
I was an early gmail user as well, and while Firefox was never as bad as Opera was initially (in that it simply was not supported), I do certainly remember a few bugs with it.
Why do you assume they have been paid off just because their app doesn't work with multiple browsers? Lots of apps out there are specific to IE, especially when they first come out. I remember even gmail, the hero of the non-MS world, didn't originally work with Opera and had questionable support for Firefox when it was first released. Its not a big MS conspiracy, its laziness by the developers. Yes, its been slowly getting better, but I disagree with the statement that now its considered unacceptable for something to be IE only.
"It's highly likely that if this had happened on September 10, 2001, there wouldn't have been this kind of uproar. "
Of course there would be. I'm really sick of this whole "this only happened because of 9/11" attitude. Do people really have such a short memory that you cannot remember back what pre-9/11 life was like? We were not completely ignorant of terrorism, skipping around in a field of flowers, singing about how great life is. In fact, we thought we had been through a lot with the unabomber, Oklahoma City, and the Atlanta Olympics bombing. We got more of our collective fear of suspicious packages from those incidents than 9/11 when they used planes, not bombs. And we heard plenty of stories from overseas, from suicide bombings in Israel to the IRA bombings in the UK. Even Al Queda wasn't exactly unfamiliar to us, with the Cole bombing. And of course Hollywood fed plenty of bombing nightmares to us, from The Siege to Die Hard 3. There were bomb scares before 9/11, and there will be bomb scare far into the future.
Oh, I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't have gmail addresses. Privacy freaks who are mad at them for including advertisements taken from email data, people who are mad at them for caving into China's demands (and who didn't hear that Yahoo and MS did the same thing), old people, etc. Hell there are people out there who don't even have computers. And of course there are plenty of people out there who are perfectly satisfied with their existing email service, and don't want to go through the hassle of switching.
Though I'm sure most college students are at least aware of its existence.
"Digital broadcast television (which I have by satellite) is basically the same resolution as a DVD unless the DVD is anamorphic widescreen and you play it back on a widescreen television."
Several issues here...
So yes, if you compare broadcast in its best case scenario with DVD in its worst case scenario, they are fairly comparable. But that is hardly the point. Just because someone notices a difference between a regular broadcast TV show and the HD version does not mean they will be able to notice the difference (without help) between a DVD and an HD-DVD. The evidence of this is the many people I have known who thought DVD was already in HD, and who were outright surprised when they heard of the new formats to introduce HD to DVDs.
"High definition movies benefit the same way as HD TV shows. "
Again, there is a much bigger difference in quality between standard broadcast TV and HD than in DVD and HD. If you thought they look the same (as that comment indicates), then you are just proving my point. Most people cannot on their own detect the better resolution unless it is very pronounced, on a huge TV, or if what they are watching has a lot more detail than a standard movie. They think they can, but its much more of a response to being told that one is better than the other. Its the brain that notices the quality difference, not the eyes. Sure, the brain is a powerful thing so they may well appreciate the difference. But that doesn't mean their eyes can tell them apart (without watching them both next to each other or one right after the other).
So you are against people pushing their faith on others, and your proposed policy is to force visitors to the moon to become atheists while they are there? Isn't that just a tad bit hypocritical? Or is it only bad to force one person's faith on another person if their faith is different from yours? Because I know lots of religious people who would agree with you on that.
My eyes are fine, but yours might need some work. Again, I didn't say everyone cannot tell the difference, only the average consumer. And the average consumer doesn't have a 1080i TV, nor do they watch movies really close up, nor do they buy DVDs containing PBS nature shows that they leave on as background visuals. For the average consumer, DVD quality (which is better than the standard def broadcast TV which your wife thought looked grainy) is perfectly fine for their movies.
Yes, if you buy a high quality TV and watch something that has an unusually large amount of detail (nature shows are one, football is another, though neither are that popular in the DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray market), you can tell the difference. But thats rarely going to be the case.
"I was not convinced until i saw it in person. "
In other words, you were unable to tell anything wrong until you compared it directly to an HD version? Well, that was my point. For the average consumer (most of whom do not have 65 inch TVs), DVD quality is perfectly fine.
The average person cannot tell the difference (unless they are looking at the pictures side by side), and if they claim otherwise, they only think the HD version is better because they have been told its better, not because they see anything different.
Case in point, a couple of years ago I was back home for Christmas, and we were planning on getting a movie to watch on my parent's new plasma TV. I suggested we save the time from going to the video store by just watching something from the cable companies movies on demand service. My dad would hear nothing of it, claiming that those movies are not broadcast in HD and would look bad on their new expensive TV. I didn't have the heart to tell him what we rented from Blockbuster wasn't HD either.
Most people out there are still comparing their DVD's quality with that of their old VHS tapes. They see nothing wrong with it. If you do (or if you think you do), you are in the minority by a long shot. And if you really need (or think you need) HD movies in your movie collection, well I guess you will have to purchase expensive new equipment without a set standard.
Congratulations, three posts without responding to any point made. Instead nothing but strawmen, red herrings, and ad hominems. But if you really believe Ted Kaczynski doesn't exist in reality (as you said earlier) and we should ignore basic security policies that pose no real restriction on the general public just because a sufficiently well funded group could bypass it, go ahead and believe what you want. And if you want to claim I'm fear mongering while you claim China is about to launch an all out strike against our nuclear power plants, well I don't really give a damn.
So in other words, your argument is putting your hands over your ears and screaming "LALALALAICANTHEARYOULALA!"
Well, this is /., so I guess I can't expect much better from armchair policy 'experts' who think they know more than the people who really are in charge of things like nuclear power plant security...
"Of course governments are plotting to blow up nuclear facilities. What do you think they do in their war departments? What do you think we do in ours about their facilities?"
Draw up contingency plans to blow up military targets? Besides, there is a difference between drawing up contingency plans that could be enacted under extreme conditions and actual 'plotting', which implies an intention to implement those plans.
"As for corporations, and governments, blowing them up isn't the only thing they'd like to do. They'd like to copy them, or just learn about security, construction or science techniques. That's what espionage, corporate or government, is mainly used for. Every day."
Right... you know we are talking about aerial photos from which you can barely make out cars, let alone the details you would need to build a nuclear fission reactor, right? I really don't think industrial espionage is what they are trying to protect by blurring out those images.
"And what kind of defense is "who needs this public info"?"
You were trying to claim they were hiding the pictures from the public as part of a cover up. I am really curious who you think is going to use those photos to undercover security holes...
"Yeah, reality. Not like that Unabomber, because it's not as exciting to the oversimplistic imagination."
Uh, you don't think the Unabomber (or McVeigh or the 9-11 hijackers) are real? Thats some serious crack you are smoking...
"Yeah, because the security threats to facilities come from the general public which gets its aerial imagery free from these years-old databases, not from corporate, governement or international orgs with budgets for the plentiful (even cheap) aerial/satellite products with recent updates, higher resolution, GIS overlays, even realtime observations. Or their own aircraft/satellites to generate their own custom data."
What? Are you claiming corporations and government agencies are plotting to blow up the nations nuclear facilities? I think you need to stop watching X-Files reruns.
The real people they are trying to hide it from is terrorists from Kaczynski to the 9-11 hijackers to McVeigh, none of which were rich enough to buy their own satellite.
"These blurred images are just Google caving into various narrow interests with either something negligent to hide from an enquiring public or its reporters, or just pretending to secure facilities with meaningless handwaving, or both."
First of all, how many members of the "enquiring (sic) public" really need overhead shots of nuclear power plants?
Second, Google compiles these images, they do not create them. Do you really think Google hired someone to photograph every square inch of the planet?
I think the point of the research being referenced (though the link is bad, so its hard to tell) is that new experiments show the water loss rate should be much lower than they previously thought, which means all that water that used to be there must have gone somewhere.
"Anyone could make a music player that uses XP Embedde and has iTunes loaded on it."
Sure, if they don't mind getting sued. Apple has to open it up first, which they have until October to do.
I've got some karma to spare, I think I can afford to be modded down by Mac fanboys. So here it goes...
If you read the real article that this blog entry links to (note to editors, why can't you just use the actual stories in the summaries instead of making us go through some blogger first? If I just wanted to hear some nobody write stuff he is pulling out of his ass on a subject he knows nothing about, I'd skip straight to the comments section...), it doesn't even mention DRM. This seems to be more of an anti-trust thing, rather than an intellectual property thing. Which makes sense, I mean if it is illegal in Europe for Microsoft to include a copy of music playing software with their operating system that users have the choice to use, why would it be legal for Apple to force their users to buy a specific piece of hardware? Microsoft may not be the king of open standards by any standard, but they are miles ahead of Apple.
Now you are getting into a semantics argument. "Proof" means different things in different contexts. In mathematics, it means it cannot logically be false. But there are plenty of contexts in which the standards for "proof" are much smaller (such as when establishing the safety of drugs). In fact, the dictionary gives 28 different definitions of the word. The mathematical definition of the word doesn't even make any sense when applied to a physical science.
The 6th Amendment is not what people are referring to when they talk about the Constitutional basis of Habeas Corpus. Its from Article 1, Section 9: " The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."
Now it may be difficult (though not impossible, a 'speedy' trial is of course relative) to enforce the 6th Amendment without Habeas Corpus, but the law that specifically concerns Habeas Corpus is written in the negative. It prohibits the government from denying you it, it does not create a natural human right. Same with 'rights' to privacy and free speech, and here it is an especially important distinction. The government is prohibited from denying you free speech, but that doesn't necessarily mean you will be able to practice it. If no publisher is willing to publish the book you just wrote, you are not having any right of yours being violated.