Believing that an intelligence got the ball rolling requires divine faith; and believing that chance got the ball rolling -- that it happened because it happened, requires secular faith (whether you like it or not).
No it doesn't. It requires only the assumptions of the mathematical model that proves it can happen. Have you ever heard of genetic programming? Look it up. If you don't want to accept the axioms of mathematics, that's fine. But then please stop using your computer. Von Neumann's ghost would be very upset.
Its funny how ID is being so shot down... i mean its so far reached that 1 miracle brought about everything rather than 1 trillion miracles by chance.
There's nothing miraculous about random mutation and natural selection. Do the math. It's not improbable that life evolved. It's practically inevitable. Your example was also a logical fallacy.
1) life never comes from non-life.... Have sex, or observe animals engaged in sexual reproduction. Notice how life mysteriously appears where it was not before.
Of course the typical IDer response is "It's the MIRACLE of life!!!". Sorry mac; it's just chemistry and physics. Get over it.
Infact, DNA which was discovered after the evolution theory is a huge slap in the face to evolution and a dramatic proof of intelligent design.
You are either ignorent, or simply outright lying. From the moment of its discovery, it was realised that DNA was instrumental in the process of evolution. To quote Watson and Crick's FIRST paper upon the discovery of the structure of DNA:
"It has not escaped our attention that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."
Care to retort?
These are just a few of the reasons why creationism is a more excellent science than the blind faith of an evoltuionary naturalist viewpoint.
I am unable to begin to articulate how completely laughable this statement is. Please. Read a book... other than the Bible.
An event that is too complex to be described as fact by finite human beings; that must be described in terms of probability because we don't want to or can't do the work neccessary to make it predictible. Thus, anything steming from a random event is by definition not predictable; thus evolution and ID are scientifically equivalent depending on the set of arbitrary rules you use to define science.
Educate yourself. If you're going to go around arguing that a random event is the result of divine intervention and that the results of any system based on random events cannot be scientifically explained, then you should just shut down your PC right now, and stop taking flu shots.
Ok, falsify a random number for me. Or better yet, predict what it will be........Appearances are not proof. Observations are not proof........Funny how the enlightenment failed to do anything but create another religion....
Your comments speak volumes. Do you seriously stand by these statements? Do you believe that these stand on par with the arguments of Intelligent Design?
Your claim that indoctrinating children is always wrong is even more ludicrous. What do you think I'll be doing when I teach my children that stealing is wrong, or that driving on the right side of the road is right, or that all men are created equal?
And what about when people teach their children that masturbation is wrong; that women are unclean during menstruation; that infidels should all be killed; that unelected leaders must be obeyed unconditionally; that young girls' must be castrated; that homosexuals are evil; that unbaptisted children go to hell; that people who commit suicide will go to hell. The list goes on and on and on.
If I, a secular person, said any of these things to anyone, especially a child, I would be thrown in jail. There's is clearly a line somewhere that is being crossed daily, using religion as a legal and constitutional loophole.
And don't give me the "because I'm right and he's wrong" argument until you can prove that there is no god.
Prove something that is by definition unprovable? That's a derisible statement. It's even lower down on the scale than people who believe in UFO's, vampires and ghosts. At least they make attempts to subject their beliefs to science and experiment. I might not be right, but you're certainly standing on shaky ground.
You, on the other hand, are going to press on with religious intolerance. The only reason people like you aren't just as damaging now as the Roman Catholic Church was centuries ago is because there aren't enough of you in charge.
I am intolerant of injustice, and I see many people perpetuating injustice in the name of religion. I'm not going to start a crusade, but I will speak my mind. And the only reason "people like me" are not as damaging as religious leaders in the past is because democracy and the rule of law hold sway in our society. And these two things are coming under attack from the kind of people that promote ID.
So by this set of completely arbitrary and capricious rules, which are DIFFERENT from the 5 given for the previous poster, Evolution is not science and should not be taught as science, and neither should biology, quantum mechanics, economics, psychiatry....you get the picture.
No I don't. Are you seriously suggesting that biology and quantum mechanics are not subjected to scientific rigor? Have you never heard of medical trials? Medical experiments? Particle accellerators?
Evolution is firmly backed by experiment. We've dug up dinosaur bones! That's an experiment. It gathers data that was not known beforehand. Evolution is proably one of the most tested theories on earth. Numerical models fit evolution. We can interpolate the evolution of species by using fossils as data points. It's a successful technique. Believing in thunder gods is not.
All you've done is replace the church council with peer-reviewed journals.
Yeah. It's called The Age of Reason? Some people like to call it a Free Society, where thought is not surpressed and we are free to laugh at ridiculous and irrational ideas like Intelligent Design and beliveing that masturbation is evil.
The premise that random mutation happens is neither testable or falsifiable, and it's completely counter to human logic, for instance.
What? Not only is random mutation testable and potentially falsifiable, it has in fact been tested and proved to be the case, time and time and time again. That's why flu shots must be reissued every flu season. That's why virii become immune to vaccination. That's why birds beaks change shape.
As for it being contrary to human logic; I'm sure it would be to someone who belived in magical divine incarnations of new evolved life. Or that women are unclean during menstruation. The rest of us will be over here in the Enlightenment if you'd care to join us.
"It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy."
ID is all about religion. It was made by the religious, for the religious and to be religious. Any debate about ID is a debate about religion. This fact is unescapable.
There is a problem with evolution, in that darwinian THEORY cannot explain where life came from, only how it continued to change.... I mean how could DNA or the process of cell division 'evolve' if evolution itself requires cells to divide and carry on it's genetic blueprint.
Evolution, when combined with other disiplines, can explain every facet of evolution. It's all in the numbers. the sheer amount of oppertunies for mutation, combined with natural selection, ensure that processes are constantly being refined and streamlined for their enviornment.
And yes this process is completely random. That is in fact its primary strength. Through random mutations, organisims have a higher chance of adapting to any changes in their ecosystem, no matter how it changes.
I don't understand the anti-religous crusade so many people seem to take on as their own little holy war. Why the hell can't you leave me alone? You believe what you want, and I'll believe what I want. I won't teach your kids to believe what I do, and you can just stay away from mine.
Ever hear of this guy. He was right. He almost got burned at the stake. There are thousands more like him, a lot of whom did get burned at the stake. For what? Being right.
You think this won't happen again? Think that humanity has "grown up"? What happens when your kids and their irrational beliefs propagate and my kids get derided, supressed, or even killed for simply saying the truth.
Billions have lived under the boot of religion. Billions are still living under it. You think that's right? I don't. I think that indoctrinating your children, or anyone elses, is morally wrong; and socially dangerous.
as is the claim that ID is not science because of some incredibly arbitrary and subjective rules about who is a scientist and what a science is.
Science is the experiment. Observation, Hypothesis, Experiment, Result, Conclusion. ID omits entirely Experiment and result, thus is NOT science. ID doesn't even admit the possibility of experiment. Not science.
What the argument is really about to me is arrogance, certainty, and the nature of the word "fact".
The argument to me is about turning the clock back 300 years, and placing society back under the boot of the first and second estates, or their nearest cultural equivilants.
....but creationists? For some reason each and every single time a story about evolution, intelligent design or even the origins of life appears, it amasses enourmous amounts of comments in a short period of time. I predict the same for this story, with regret.
I'm wondering what the hell is going on? Is it just a political hot potato and./'ers are simply venting here? This might be, but I've seen a lot of comments from Slashdoters in support for ID one way or the other. It's scary because the Slashdot readership to me is apparently amoung the most educated on the net. We are mostly geeks after all.
It would be scary to think that all the geeks around me actually believe in religion. When I was younger I just assummed that most people were completely secular like me, and didn't believe in religion at all; delegating it to the status of fictional works like comic books etc. It came as something of a shock to my world view that most people are not in fact secular but do hold religious beliefs. I haven't quite recovered from it.
Or maybe it's just trolling by the GNAA et al, with Slashdotters flaming back. I'd like to believe this.
If you're going to argue with these guys it helps if you can take the moral high ground.
ID'ers have to be ridiculed. Engaging in any kind of rationale debate with them simply plays into their hands. If you treat their arguments like you would any serious debate, you're simply giving some kind of legitimacy to them. People won't hear your deconstruction. They'll hear a debate, and assume that ID is debatable, which it isn't. It's laughable.
I'd rather not sit back and watch the last 300 years of the enlightenment be publically shat on by fundamentalists. I might not live in the US, but if it falls to theocracy, my country could be next.
When the experiment is repeated with this atmosphere, it yields cyanide and formaldehyde, which are not known for being friendly to proteins. It is unfortunate that this experiment continues to be perpetuated as 'the way' to form proteins, especially after it was dismissed by an article by John Cohen in Science in 1995
Given the unscrupulous nature of most intelligent designers, I'm going to have to request that you back up this statement with a reference. In paticular some kind of scientific paper that was written by a professional and not a zealot.
The smallest human chromosome is a chain of 50 million base pairs (over an alphabet of 4: ACGT). 4^1,000,000 is roughly 10^608,000.
No one has ever suggested that a fully formed human chromosome could just pop into existance out of constituant elements. Your example is a straw man.
No explanation has yet been demonstrated of how the initial chemical constituents formed to produce a DNA/RNA based life form.....No, a lightning strike/spark on an early 1950's high scholl science project that produces some organic slime is not the same thing.
Yes it danm well is, sunshine. That experiment proved that these elements, amino acids etc, were almost guaranteed to have existed in abundance in the early earth. These elements ARE the building blocks of life.
Take a look a a model where a soup of these elements exists, add in factors, look at the probabilites, then multiply by the collasal timescales and particle counts involved and you'll quickly realise that not only was it likely that life evolved out of slime or pools around geysters, it was practically inevitable.
Go back to Kansas and take last years flu vaccine, and go pray to whatever straw man is up there in the sky. We'll be over here in the Age of the Enlightenment if you'd care to join us.
You thought fashion fads just happened? It's much more organized than that.
There's actually a mathematical model for the spread and sustainment of fashions and trends. These are called self-sustaining norms in the paper.
The most facinating part of the paper is the revelation that many upheld social norms are in fact unpopular amoung the general population, but are sustained by essentially falsely sensed peer pressure. For example, most students privately disappove of heavy drinking, but nonthe;ess engage in thsi behaviour to "fit in".
I wonder if it's the same for Java programmers. They all secretly despair over their language, but nontheless continue to program in in "because that's what everyone else is doing".
Java remains an excellent choice for serious web apps which you're going to want to maintain later.
Java remains an overly verbose and inflexible language that requires intensive and detailed study of the gargantuan API before ANY development work can even begin. I have never understodd the allure of Java, and I probably never will.
After reading the article, I've decided to at last take a glimpse at Ruby. First google result was this, an interactive web tutorial. I'm tinkering away like a kid in a sandbox. It's kind of fun.
Compare to Java. Here's the spec. You WILL need to read substantial portions of this before you even begin to program anything of substance. Learning Java, along with all its quicks, restrictions, paradigms and frameworks, reminds me of going to church and hearing all that nonsensical dogma. I never liked church. Ruby just reminds me of perl.
For me, a language has to be somehow fun to program in for it to be useful. You may find that ridiculous, but if I'm not enjoying what I'm doing, my work will be substandard. Java was never fun. I don't think java is even fun for Java zealots. Java has always felt like a chore.
I'm on lesson four in the Ruby tutorial. It feels like it could be fun. I'll let you extrapolate the future.
Problem is that neither side of the software development community (proprietary and open source) have either the incentive or clarity of mind to to support the proof.
You forgot to mention the proof in your post. It goes as follows:
1. Under current patent system rules, mathematical algorithms cannot be patented. 2. Computer software IS a mathematcial algorithm. 3. Therefore computer software cannot be patented.
It's really quite unambiguous. If someone comes at you claiming they have a patent on a piece of software you own, simply use the defence that your software is a mathematical algorithm, and thus is not subject to patentability.
Of course this defense would be flawless if i weren't for the fact that: "Here at the USPTO, we grant patents without predjudice towards trifling things such as unoriginality, gross obviousness and indeed, patentability itself! We've been a proud supporter of the legal industry for over 200 years!"
I only half touchtype. There is still no rhyme or reason to which fingers hit which keys. On occassion I will still pause for a moment before finding the key I intend to press.
I have to look down at the keyboard to type but I do find that this is reasonably quick for me. I'm never typing and reading at the same time so it doesn't really bother me very much.
However, I will never be as fast as a professional touch typer.
The problem is nobody's likely to stay hunt-and-peck forever.
It's been 15 years. I'm still hunting and pecking at the old qwerty keyboards. My typing is erratic, as is my spelling, but I can get up to sixty words a minute if I even bother.
I don't really feel a huge incentive to go through a touch type course. Most of my programming time is spent just stitting back and thinking of how I can write the least possible code without being too terse... if you follow.
People I know who touch type are only good if they keep it up ALL the time. Those I know who only dip into a touch type program and then don't really use it tend to be slower than I am as I glance down at the keyboard.
Is touch type worth it? If you type a LOT then yes, it's a no brainer. But if the biggest typing sessions of your day are posts to Slashdot, then I'm not so sure. Besides, touch typing doesn't really cater to programming syntax, especially perl's. ($@%{} etc,etc)
Yes. I am aware that I look like a fool as I look down at the keys. But I simlpy don't type enought to make a touch typing course worth it.
Sorry mac. Looks like you're finally going to find out the real purpose of the Google images servers. Just wait till Imageshack and Photobucket get in on the deal as well.
Typical racist media! Polar bears--WHITE bears--swim to FIND FOOD. But you KNOW that if that had been BLACK bears instead of white bears, this article would have called it LOOTING.
Ironically black and grizzly bears are often accused of looting and general mayhem when they encroach on human development. or more appropriately, human development encroches on them.
Polar bears also "loot" and rummage in this way, but this is largely overlooked.
These facts however, have no bearing on race relations withing the continental United States, but do make for good comedy routine material.
Slashdot Mirror
Believing that an intelligence got the ball rolling requires divine faith; and believing that chance got the ball rolling -- that it happened because it happened, requires secular faith (whether you like it or not).
No it doesn't. It requires only the assumptions of the mathematical model that proves it can happen. Have you ever heard of genetic programming? Look it up. If you don't want to accept the axioms of mathematics, that's fine. But then please stop using your computer. Von Neumann's ghost would be very upset.
Its funny how ID is being so shot down... i mean its so far reached that 1 miracle brought about everything rather than 1 trillion miracles by chance.
There's nothing miraculous about random mutation and natural selection. Do the math. It's not improbable that life evolved. It's practically inevitable. Your example was also a logical fallacy.
Have sex, or observe animals engaged in sexual reproduction. Notice how life mysteriously appears where it was not before.
Of course the typical IDer response is "It's the MIRACLE of life!!!". Sorry mac; it's just chemistry and physics. Get over it.
Infact, DNA which was discovered after the evolution theory is a huge slap in the face to evolution and a dramatic proof of intelligent design.
You are either ignorent, or simply outright lying. From the moment of its discovery, it was realised that DNA was instrumental in the process of evolution. To quote Watson and Crick's FIRST paper upon the discovery of the structure of DNA:
Care to retort?
These are just a few of the reasons why creationism is a more excellent science than the blind faith of an evoltuionary naturalist viewpoint.
I am unable to begin to articulate how completely laughable this statement is. Please. Read a book... other than the Bible.
An event that is too complex to be described as fact by finite human beings; that must be described in terms of probability because we don't want to or can't do the work neccessary to make it predictible. Thus, anything steming from a random event is by definition not predictable; thus evolution and ID are scientifically equivalent depending on the set of arbitrary rules you use to define science.
Educate yourself. If you're going to go around arguing that a random event is the result of divine intervention and that the results of any system based on random events cannot be scientifically explained, then you should just shut down your PC right now, and stop taking flu shots.
Ok, falsify a random number for me. Or better yet, predict what it will be....
Your comments speak volumes. Do you seriously stand by these statements? Do you believe that these stand on par with the arguments of Intelligent Design?
Your claim that indoctrinating children is always wrong is even more ludicrous. What do you think I'll be doing when I teach my children that stealing is wrong, or that driving on the right side of the road is right, or that all men are created equal?
And what about when people teach their children that masturbation is wrong; that women are unclean during menstruation; that infidels should all be killed; that unelected leaders must be obeyed unconditionally; that young girls' must be castrated; that homosexuals are evil; that unbaptisted children go to hell; that people who commit suicide will go to hell. The list goes on and on and on.
If I, a secular person, said any of these things to anyone, especially a child, I would be thrown in jail. There's is clearly a line somewhere that is being crossed daily, using religion as a legal and constitutional loophole.
And don't give me the "because I'm right and he's wrong" argument until you can prove that there is no god.
Prove something that is by definition unprovable? That's a derisible statement. It's even lower down on the scale than people who believe in UFO's, vampires and ghosts. At least they make attempts to subject their beliefs to science and experiment. I might not be right, but you're certainly standing on shaky ground.
You, on the other hand, are going to press on with religious intolerance. The only reason people like you aren't just as damaging now as the Roman Catholic Church was centuries ago is because there aren't enough of you in charge.
I am intolerant of injustice, and I see many people perpetuating injustice in the name of religion. I'm not going to start a crusade, but I will speak my mind. And the only reason "people like me" are not as damaging as religious leaders in the past is because democracy and the rule of law hold sway in our society. And these two things are coming under attack from the kind of people that promote ID.
So by this set of completely arbitrary and capricious rules, which are DIFFERENT from the 5 given for the previous poster, Evolution is not science and should not be taught as science, and neither should biology, quantum mechanics, economics, psychiatry....you get the picture.
No I don't. Are you seriously suggesting that biology and quantum mechanics are not subjected to scientific rigor? Have you never heard of medical trials? Medical experiments? Particle accellerators?
Evolution is firmly backed by experiment. We've dug up dinosaur bones! That's an experiment. It gathers data that was not known beforehand. Evolution is proably one of the most tested theories on earth. Numerical models fit evolution. We can interpolate the evolution of species by using fossils as data points. It's a successful technique. Believing in thunder gods is not.
All you've done is replace the church council with peer-reviewed journals.
Yeah. It's called The Age of Reason? Some people like to call it a Free Society, where thought is not surpressed and we are free to laugh at ridiculous and irrational ideas like Intelligent Design and beliveing that masturbation is evil.
The premise that random mutation happens is neither testable or falsifiable, and it's completely counter to human logic, for instance.
What? Not only is random mutation testable and potentially falsifiable, it has in fact been tested and proved to be the case, time and time and time again. That's why flu shots must be reissued every flu season. That's why virii become immune to vaccination. That's why birds beaks change shape.
As for it being contrary to human logic; I'm sure it would be to someone who belived in magical divine incarnations of new evolved life. Or that women are unclean during menstruation. The rest of us will be over here in the Enlightenment if you'd care to join us.
Judge John Jones disagres. A direct quote from his 139 page ruling:
ID is all about religion. It was made by the religious, for the religious and to be religious. Any debate about ID is a debate about religion. This fact is unescapable.
There is a problem with evolution, in that darwinian THEORY cannot explain where life came from, only how it continued to change.... I mean how could DNA or the process of cell division 'evolve' if evolution itself requires cells to divide and carry on it's genetic blueprint.
Evolution, when combined with other disiplines, can explain every facet of evolution. It's all in the numbers. the sheer amount of oppertunies for mutation, combined with natural selection, ensure that processes are constantly being refined and streamlined for their enviornment.
And yes this process is completely random. That is in fact its primary strength. Through random mutations, organisims have a higher chance of adapting to any changes in their ecosystem, no matter how it changes.
I don't understand the anti-religous crusade so many people seem to take on as their own little holy war. Why the hell can't you leave me alone? You believe what you want, and I'll believe what I want. I won't teach your kids to believe what I do, and you can just stay away from mine.
Ever hear of this guy. He was right. He almost got burned at the stake. There are thousands more like him, a lot of whom did get burned at the stake. For what? Being right.
You think this won't happen again? Think that humanity has "grown up"? What happens when your kids and their irrational beliefs propagate and my kids get derided, supressed, or even killed for simply saying the truth.
Billions have lived under the boot of religion. Billions are still living under it. You think that's right? I don't. I think that indoctrinating your children, or anyone elses, is morally wrong; and socially dangerous.
as is the claim that ID is not science because of some incredibly arbitrary and subjective rules about who is a scientist and what a science is.
Science is the experiment. Observation, Hypothesis, Experiment, Result, Conclusion. ID omits entirely Experiment and result, thus is NOT science. ID doesn't even admit the possibility of experiment. Not science.
What the argument is really about to me is arrogance, certainty, and the nature of the word "fact".
The argument to me is about turning the clock back 300 years, and placing society back under the boot of the first and second estates, or their nearest cultural equivilants.
....but creationists? For some reason each and every single time a story about evolution, intelligent design or even the origins of life appears, it amasses enourmous amounts of comments in a short period of time. I predict the same for this story, with regret.
./'ers are simply venting here? This might be, but I've seen a lot of comments from Slashdoters in support for ID one way or the other. It's scary because the Slashdot readership to me is apparently amoung the most educated on the net. We are mostly geeks after all.
I'm wondering what the hell is going on? Is it just a political hot potato and
It would be scary to think that all the geeks around me actually believe in religion. When I was younger I just assummed that most people were completely secular like me, and didn't believe in religion at all; delegating it to the status of fictional works like comic books etc. It came as something of a shock to my world view that most people are not in fact secular but do hold religious beliefs. I haven't quite recovered from it.
Or maybe it's just trolling by the GNAA et al, with Slashdotters flaming back. I'd like to believe this.
If you're going to argue with these guys it helps if you can take the moral high ground.
ID'ers have to be ridiculed. Engaging in any kind of rationale debate with them simply plays into their hands. If you treat their arguments like you would any serious debate, you're simply giving some kind of legitimacy to them. People won't hear your deconstruction. They'll hear a debate, and assume that ID is debatable, which it isn't. It's laughable.
I'd rather not sit back and watch the last 300 years of the enlightenment be publically shat on by fundamentalists. I might not live in the US, but if it falls to theocracy, my country could be next.
When the experiment is repeated with this atmosphere, it yields cyanide and formaldehyde, which are not known for being friendly to proteins. It is unfortunate that this experiment continues to be perpetuated as 'the way' to form proteins, especially after it was dismissed by an article by John Cohen in Science in 1995
Given the unscrupulous nature of most intelligent designers, I'm going to have to request that you back up this statement with a reference. In paticular some kind of scientific paper that was written by a professional and not a zealot.
The smallest human chromosome is a chain of 50 million base pairs (over an alphabet of 4: ACGT). 4^1,000,000 is roughly 10^608,000.
No one has ever suggested that a fully formed human chromosome could just pop into existance out of constituant elements. Your example is a straw man.
No explanation has yet been demonstrated of how the initial
chemical constituents formed to produce a DNA/RNA based life form.....No, a lightning strike/spark on an early 1950's high scholl science project that produces some organic slime is not the same thing.
Yes it danm well is, sunshine. That experiment proved that these elements, amino acids etc, were almost guaranteed to have existed in abundance in the early earth. These elements ARE the building blocks of life.
Take a look a a model where a soup of these elements exists, add in factors, look at the probabilites, then multiply by the collasal timescales and particle counts involved and you'll quickly realise that not only was it likely that life evolved out of slime or pools around geysters, it was practically inevitable.
Go back to Kansas and take last years flu vaccine, and go pray to whatever straw man is up there in the sky. We'll be over here in the Age of the Enlightenment if you'd care to join us.
Also, just from the list of references cited, it appears that this patent was examined more thoroughly than many software patents I have seen.
Ten minutes is still too short a time in which to approve a patent.
You thought fashion fads just happened? It's much more organized than that.
There's actually a mathematical model for the spread and sustainment of fashions and trends. These are called self-sustaining norms in the paper.
The most facinating part of the paper is the revelation that many upheld social norms are in fact unpopular amoung the general population, but are sustained by essentially falsely sensed peer pressure. For example, most students privately disappove of heavy drinking, but nonthe;ess engage in thsi behaviour to "fit in".
I wonder if it's the same for Java programmers. They all secretly despair over their language, but nontheless continue to program in in "because that's what everyone else is doing".
ROR is nice but let's get real - ruby isn't as fast and the few applications around ruby aren't nearly as mature as Java.
Java is mature in the sense that stale cheese is mature. And as for speed, most people stopped caring after home machines passed 3GHz or whatever.
Ruby developers have only to wait for the Ruby JIT compiler. That is, if it doesn't already exist.
Java remains an excellent choice for serious web apps which you're going to want to maintain later.
Java remains an overly verbose and inflexible language that requires intensive and detailed study of the gargantuan API before ANY development work can even begin. I have never understodd the allure of Java, and I probably never will.
After reading the article, I've decided to at last take a glimpse at Ruby. First google result was this, an interactive web tutorial. I'm tinkering away like a kid in a sandbox. It's kind of fun.
Compare to Java. Here's the spec. You WILL need to read substantial portions of this before you even begin to program anything of substance. Learning Java, along with all its quicks, restrictions, paradigms and frameworks, reminds me of going to church and hearing all that nonsensical dogma. I never liked church. Ruby just reminds me of perl.
For me, a language has to be somehow fun to program in for it to be useful. You may find that ridiculous, but if I'm not enjoying what I'm doing, my work will be substandard. Java was never fun. I don't think java is even fun for Java zealots. Java has always felt like a chore.
I'm on lesson four in the Ruby tutorial. It feels like it could be fun. I'll let you extrapolate the future.
Problem is that neither side of the software development community (proprietary and open source) have either the incentive or clarity of mind to to support the proof.
You forgot to mention the proof in your post. It goes as follows:
1. Under current patent system rules, mathematical algorithms cannot be patented.
2. Computer software IS a mathematcial algorithm.
3. Therefore computer software cannot be patented.
It's really quite unambiguous. If someone comes at you claiming they have a patent on a piece of software you own, simply use the defence that your software is a mathematical algorithm, and thus is not subject to patentability.
Of course this defense would be flawless if i weren't for the fact that:
"Here at the USPTO, we grant patents without predjudice towards trifling things such as unoriginality, gross obviousness and indeed, patentability itself! We've been a proud supporter of the legal industry for over 200 years!"
I only half touchtype. There is still no rhyme or reason to which fingers hit which keys. On occassion I will still pause for a moment before finding the key I intend to press.
I have to look down at the keyboard to type but I do find that this is reasonably quick for me. I'm never typing and reading at the same time so it doesn't really bother me very much.
However, I will never be as fast as a professional touch typer.
The problem is nobody's likely to stay hunt-and-peck forever.
It's been 15 years. I'm still hunting and pecking at the old qwerty keyboards. My typing is erratic, as is my spelling, but I can get up to sixty words a minute if I even bother.
I don't really feel a huge incentive to go through a touch type course. Most of my programming time is spent just stitting back and thinking of how I can write the least possible code without being too terse... if you follow.
People I know who touch type are only good if they keep it up ALL the time. Those I know who only dip into a touch type program and then don't really use it tend to be slower than I am as I glance down at the keyboard.
Is touch type worth it? If you type a LOT then yes, it's a no brainer. But if the biggest typing sessions of your day are posts to Slashdot, then I'm not so sure. Besides, touch typing doesn't really cater to programming syntax, especially perl's. ($@%{} etc,etc)
Yes. I am aware that I look like a fool as I look down at the keys. But I simlpy don't type enought to make a touch typing course worth it.
Errr... Last time I checked I was still getting about 50 spam messages a day.
Yes. But now almost 10% of those comply with regulations!
Sorry mac. Looks like you're finally going to find out the real purpose of the Google images servers. Just wait till Imageshack and Photobucket get in on the deal as well.
Image Adblockers are history.
Typical racist media! Polar bears--WHITE bears--swim to FIND FOOD. But you KNOW that if that had been BLACK bears instead of white bears, this article would have called it LOOTING.
Ironically black and grizzly bears are often accused of looting and general mayhem when they encroach on human development. or more appropriately, human development encroches on them.
Polar bears also "loot" and rummage in this way, but this is largely overlooked.
These facts however, have no bearing on race relations withing the continental United States, but do make for good comedy routine material.