Isn't the LED just the backlight? If the LED is as bright as the old screens and gives a nice clean white spectrum, how would it change the bit-depth of the display?
Natural selection and the big bang are so profound precisely because they do force (some of us) to re-evaluate the very simple questions that Genesis frames and to some degree answers: who and where are we?
I don't know that Genesis and the Big Bang are in conflict unless you think Genesis was a scientific/objective account of creation. As I've been saying, I think it's a real mistake to think that it's supposed to be a scientific "history", i.e. a precise, unbiased description of scientific facts as they occurred in such a way that, if you had a video camera and a time machine, you could go back in time and video the events. Pro-religion people make the mistake and use the story to argue that the Big Bang didn't happen, and that's silly. Pro-science people try to use the idea of a "Big Bang" to claim that Genesis is meaningless and stupid, and that's silly too.
(I'm not arguing for any supremacy of the judeo-christian tradition, but you brought up Genesis)
Your soda can analogy is faulty, as both participants in the discussion are describing testable observations of said soda can. Religion, on the other hand, offers no testable observations (not unlike certain modern cosmological theories, by the way).
Analogies are inherently imperfect-- otherwise they wouldn't be analogies, they'd be direct descriptions. My point is that it's possible to say different things about the same thing. If you really want to get technical, it's worth noting that "Coke cans are cylindrical" is both true and false, depending exactly what you mean to be claiming. It's roughly cylindrical, but is it perfectly cylindrical? What does it mean for material objects to be a shape, since they never fit the shape exactly and perfectly. Even though you could measure whether a can in cylindrical, you can only measure that within a given precision, and there is no perfectly precise means to measure anything. Therefore, whenever you claim that something is "cylindrical", it's always an approximation.
And beyond that, coke cans are also tapered at each end. So the Coke can is cylindrical (true), but it is also not cylindrical (true). See? It's a better analogy than you thought.
Either way, it seems you've missed my point entirely. If a religious claim is made that Earth is the stationary center of the world, it is a mistake for either religious people or for scientists to think that the claim is a scientific claim. Scientifically, the claim has no support. Scientifically, we should know that all motion is relative, and so there is no objective preference for any frame of motion, and therefore the Earth could be said to be stationary or moving (according to General Relativity).
The religious claim, however, may have different significance. It's hard to say what, unless you ground it in a particular context and tradition, but it might ground our concern for moral affairs in the Earthly plane. It might be an encouragement to care for the earth which serves for the center of our lives (environmentalism!). It might mean a lot of things.
It's really a mistake to think that religion is a hold-over from ancient peoples who wanted explanations for the universe without having the scientific understanding to "actually explain". Religion shouldn't be a stand-in for science, but it's actually doing something else and operating in a different world of thought.
Once you accept the presence of an all-powerful all-knowing all-good all-rational being who you can't understand, can't trust, and doesn't provide you with any testable knowledge you cease being rational.
You have your formulation wrong. If you accept the presence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, perfectly rational, perfectly good being, what would lead you to believe that you "couldn't trust" that being? Also, if you accept this, what would it mean to "test" knowledge coming from such a being, since "coming from" that being would be the most full-proof test possible.
But let's pretend for a moment that your god exists and that I'm rational. Why wouldn't I want to know why god deceives us into thinking that the Earth is over 4,000 years old?
Oh, the problems with this quote! First, it's not "my" god. Second, who here said anything about "4,000 years"? Third, who, besides you, is claiming that god would "deceive"? Fourth, I said you wouldn't be capable of understanding, but I never said you wouldn't want to know.
It seems we're spiraling out of anything sensible and we're way off-topic. But in a way, perhaps this spiral illustrates the idea that's eluding you: isn't it possible for someone to hear the truth, yet still come to incorrect conclusions? So let's reframe the problem and see what happens? Let's assume there were a "god" of the sort we're talking about, and he sent some kind of a "message" to mankind through some means (whatever you care to imagine). From this message men came up with ideas that are false. Now, given our assumptions, which is most likely:
The "god" intended deceive people.
The "god" was unable to send the message as he intended.
Man, upon receiving the "message", reads the message incorrectly.
Given that (1) and (2) go against our assumptions of a good and omnipotent god, we would be forced to conclude that the third possibility is the answer (excepting you can come up with an alternative). Given the highly fallible nature of mankind, it's not an implausible answer.
Therefore, if you accept the presence of a god of the sort we're talking about, the question is not as to whether "God" can be trusted-- inherent to what he is, he can be trusted. The question is as to whether you and other men can be trusted to receive and promulgate his message properly. "No" is a likely answer.
Or do you see another way to regard this? Of course, everything I'm saying assumes that we accept that this God is a real thing. You can easily say "no, I don't accept this God." Still, assuming this God is real, there's no rational way to doubt him.
I really don't want to get into a very theological argument here (I tried to avoid it in my post because i think it goes off-topic), but since people are doing the exact sort of thing i was hoping they wouldn't, I'll say more.
I'd prefer to say it this way: Religious thought won't yield good scientific explanations, and neither will science provide good theological explanations. Religion is properly in the business of describing the natural world, but not in the business of providing scientific and "objective" explanations. In other words, using religious "explanations" to fill gaps in your scientific knowledge is improper, but using religion to increase your understanding of the world is not improper. These two different worlds offer two different types of explanations.
People seem to think that, since there is only one world, there should only be one explanation for that world. However, as the long history of philosophy clearly illustrates, there are many different things that can be said about the same object. If you asked me about a Coke can, I might say it's made of metal, and someone else might say that the same can is cylindrical; we would not be arguing. If that person said, "It's cylindrical" and I said, "No! It's metallic!" then my response wouldn't make sense. The "debate" between religion and science is similar to this-- they're talking about different things, but the debaters often fail to grasp that "science" and "God" conflict with each other no more (in fact less!) than "metal" and "cylinder".
So if we properly understand the religious claim that "God created the universe", then we would all see that no science could ever conflict with this claim. It's simply not a scientific claim, but instead it informs our relationship to the universe. It claims that the universe is planned by the source of all Good, and therefore the universe is itself "good". It's a claim that we properly have a place and a role within the universe, since we were made to be in it, and so therefore we are good too. It doesn't matter whether there was, at some point, a "big bang," because the religious explanation cannot be refuted by empirical facts or scientific theories.
Unfortunately, even the people arguing in favor of the "religious" description sometimes forget the purpose of the explanation. They mistake the explanation for a scientific explanation of the material creation of the universe. And also the scientists forget-- they start to believe that they can discover the goodness and meaning of the universe (or "disprove" the existence of goodness and meaning) if they find just one more particle, smaller than those that have been observed before. All these things are nonsense.
How so? I think you've made a misstep in your reasoning. A rational man might question the existence of an all-powerful all-knowing all-good all-rational god, and might question whether a given being is all-powerful all-knowing all-good and all-rational. However, supposing you accept the presence of an all-powerful all-knowing all-good all-rational being, it would be foolish to then question the motivations of that being.
What rational man would question the motives of an all-powerful all-knowing all-good all-rational god? If such a god were to present himself to mankind in a way which happened to mislead some people, it must necessarily be done that way for a good purpose.
And as to why he would be incomprehensible, it only makes sense that such a god would be incomprehensible to man. How would a limited being like the mind of man every be able to encompass a perfect and unlimited being?
But the heart of your post is correct-If someone believe Pink Invisible Ponies created the universe, then no amount of logic will change that.
I'll settle for that. So people, next time you hear someone claiming that the universe was created by Pink Invisible Ponies, be reasonable-- don't try to present a logical argument to the contrary. Even if you consider this person to be insane, recognize that arguing with the insane is a mark of insanity too.
Well ok. I think the reason we all ignored it is because it sounded like a throw-away line. Do you have any idea how many posts I've seen online where someone says, "don't get me wrong, I agree with you, but..." and then go on to say that they don't agree at all?
Much of your post seems to say that WYSIWYG editors allow designers to focus on design and ignore code, and further that this can be a good thing. Though I suppose that many people won't do things well, and that it really doesn't matter, I would still say that this is the wrong way to make web pages. If you're a designer who wants to focus on design, then design in Photoshop or InDesign, and then hand it off to a coder.
The only value I can see in WYSIWYG webpage editors is perhaps instructional, and insofar as we're talking about education, I'll grant you that much. As an inexperienced web-developer, it's helpful to flip back-and-forth between editing the visual layout and editing the code so that you can see how the code changes. In order to help people understand positioning concepts, it's helpful if they can see code which accomplishes the desired effect, and a WYSIWYG editor is a decent way to generate code to analyze. However, it's not really a good way to make web pages.
So basically this will reduce "God"'s role in the creation of the universe further back before the big bang
Why must we use physics to support atheistic antagonization of religious people? What relation does one thing have to another? I'll give you a tip here: If someone believes in God today, the discovery of a new particle tomorrow won't make the stop believing.
There's no room for argumentation; if you posit the existence of an all-powerful god, then it would be within that god's power to make the universe however he chose. He could have made it so that all scientific evidence and all possible human understanding would imply that the universe had always existed. If you held this belief, it would not be the sort of belief that science deals with, and therefore no amount of scientific discovery could take away from it.
And before you start flaming me, calling me a crazy zealot or whatever you like, it may be worthwhile to note that I don't hold the sort of belief I'm describing. I just wish that people wouldn't waste all this energy antagonizing each other for no reason. If your grand hope for science is to refute some religion's particular creation myth, then you'll only waste your own time and try other people's patience.
No, the GP is right. People who can't hand-write HTML and CSS shouldn't be doing web-design work. You can be a graphic designer without any web knowledge, and a graphic designer might come up with a web-page design, but you really should still have someone else-- a web designer-- put the thing together into a web page.
And that's a large part of the job of a web designer-- to know how to make a given graphic design into a web page that will render properly and work across the various browsers. A graphic designer can lay things out visually in Photoshop or whatever and decide how things should look visually, but a real web designer should decide how to make it work. Like, "Do I want to use tables to accomplish this layout, or DIVs?"
The point could be argued that Macs can be cheap, but in reality, Macs will be more expensive when comparing high-quality software (and performing hardware upgrades) with that of Windows/Linux/PCs, and it's a point that should be emphasized if you're in the market and deciding if you want to go with Mac OS X/Windows/Linux.
But how is this "high quality" software situation any different than with any other operating system? Yeah, if you want MS Office and don't pirate it, you'll have to pay for it. If you won't scheme enough to get the student/teacher edition, it will cost something like $400. This is true on OSX, but it's true on Windows, too, and on Linux, you simply won't be able to run Office (basically). Of course, you could argue that Windows/Linux users can use OOo, but Mac users can also use NeoOffice.
There really isn't any significant way in which Mac users must pay more for software than Windows/Linux users, so it's not anything to be emphasized if you're deciding which OS you want.
Indeed, it seems the preferred method for solving Mac computer problems is to buy your way out of it. Slow computer? Buy a new one. Want to convert a file? Buy a utility. Want to do simple tasks? Buy a commercial program. Peripherals don't work? Buy replacements.
I couldn't agree less.
I just don't even understand the complaint.
"Slow computer? Buy a new one." Um... yeah? That's what most people do when their computer it too slow.
"Want to convert a file? Buy a utility." Convert what file? What kind of file? There are many converters that can run on OSX, including the same FOSS converters available for Linux.
"Want to do simple tasks? Buy a commercial program." Again, examples? Or is he referring to MS Office & Photoshop, which are equally expensive on Windows and simply unavailable anywhere else?
"Peripherals don't work? Buy replacements." ??? What peripherals? Where? OSX supports a wide variety of peripherals, often the same peripherals you'd buy for Windows. Not everything, but name me an operating system which has driver support from every single peripheral ever. The number of times I've even needed to install a driver in order to get a USB device to work in OSX-- I could count them on one hand. And I've supported Macs professionally for years.
Also, the author says things like, "A new Mac user can expect to pay $400 for the Office Suite, and more for Adobe Photoshop if they want to do any serious photo editing." And how is this noteworthy? If you want MS Office or Photoshop, you'll have to buy them and they're expensive. WOW! And this is written right after mentioning NeoOffice (free, and does not require X11) and iWork ($80).
It seems like every couple weeks, someone else writes an article or reads on article on this sort of teleportation and posts it all over the Internet. "Omigawd, we are SOOOO close to having Star Trek transporters!!!"
And then everyone has to explain, "No, we really aren't." This really doesn't bring us any closer to being able to break material objects down to nothing (effectively) and simultaneously rebuild them perfectly at a far-away location.
Could we all just stop this now? This article doesn't have any significant depth or any clear/new information. Quantum entanglement has been know for a while, but (and I am not a physicist, but AFAIK) there's never been any way to use it to transmit data in a way that breaks the speed of light. That would be a discovery, but it still wouldn't be moving actual matter across distances. It wouldn't be deconstructing atoms, molecules, or whole organisms on one side and rebuilding them on the other. So please, no more stores about how "Star Trek transporters are just around the corner!"
Depends on the movie. Usually when I go to Best Buy, new releases are right around $20. Look at their website, and you'll see a lot of movies saying something like:
List Price: $29.95
Our Price: $19.99
Old movies, yeah, you might be able to get them for $5-$10. But at this moment, Best Buy is selling a copy of "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" (the movie in question) with a list price of $34.99 with Best Buy's price of $26.99.
I don't remember him saying that. I remember vaguely that he implied, somewhere, that people didn't value their phones because, for all the money paid by customers and by cell carriers (as subsidies), the phones that you ended up with were still total crap.
He said from the beginning that it was going to pay $500 for the iPhone, and that the price was for a 2 year contract. He just claimed that the phone would be worth it.
Yeah yeah, woo whoo. Where can you buy a legal copy online that you can download to your phone?
I'm not denying that your device can have it's advantages, but if you're going to pretend that there's nothing neat or cool or better than the iPhone then you're being biased.
Yeah, the only new part of that is being able to watch a DRM'd copy of Pirates of Caribbean that you paid $10 to download
Are you trying to make this sound bad? I mean, I know that writing the word "DRM" around here is like dropping chum in water filled with sharks-- people go crazy-- but hell, that sounds pretty convenient to me.
Of course, the iPhone will be able to play non-DRMed movies, so if you wanted you could go to Best Buy, spend $25 on Pirates of the Caribbean, use Handbrake to rip it as mp4, and put that on your iPhone. I mean, if you want, you have that option. Still, it sounds mighty convenient to be able to, if you like, buy Pirates for $10 and copy it to your iPhone, the whole process taking a little longer than however long you can download it over your internet connection, and being ready to go without leaving your house.
Yeah, yeah, I get it, "...but DRM is bad and $10 is too expensive!" Well you don't HAVE TO buy it from Apple, but you have that option, and I don't see anyone else giving such an elegant solution. I'll tell you, if you'd told me a couple years ago that in 2007 I'd be able to buy movies online, download them, and copy it to a hybrid iPod/phone/PDA-- showing me how easy the whole process is, how small and thin the iPhone would be-- I'm not sure I'd have believed you. I'd say, "Yeah, sure, and I'll probably have a flying car too!"
Either the RIAA is stingy or Congressmen are desperate for extra cash.
Might I posit "both"?
Now its like $1000-9000. I mean I could buy a Congressman for that amount of money. If Slashdotters just collaborate then for $50 a head we could get Congress to ban Microsoft...
Really, considering the amount of influence donations/lobbyists have, why don't more people organize around the issues that are important to them, raise money, and buy their own congressmen? At this point, we really should.
Even if laws were easy to circumvent, you could still make it harder to coordinate without someone involving lots of people, shifting money around in suspicious ways, and increasing the risk of getting "caught" doing something you obviously know is wrong.
If, instead of companies being able to contribute a big lump of money, they had to get 100 employees to make little donations, they still might be able to do that. But it's be harder to set that up, it'd be harder to coordinate, and it'd be harder to get away with.
Even to get the CEO to contribute the money himself, I bet he's less likely to do it when it comes out of his own pocket. These greedy fuckers-- if you gave them the "bonus" to pay lobbyists and donate to senators, they'd probably pocket most of that "bonus" anyway.
are Mac users that desperate for this functionality that its worth it?
Most of them aren't. They'll either find a way to get Parallels+Windows for free, or they'll live without. That's not to say there won't be enough Mac users (which is to say, "enough to make a profit), but most Mac users probably won't bother.
Well i guess that's why you have an interview rather than a standardized test. A good manager or HR person should be able to get some kind of a read on people, even if it's not always 100% correct. You know, you see their response to different sorts of questions, check whether they know as much as they claim, and check to see if their resume/cover letter is accurate. You talk to them and hopefully you'll have some sense.
However, I'm not really talking about how you tell people are trustworthy. That's more of a philosophic, sociological, or psychological sort of question. I'm just advising that, however you get a sense of trustworthiness, you set that as a priority when hiring.
So lets say you have two potential hires come into your office. One of them appears to be competent, but perhaps merely 'competent'; he seems like a decent person that you could trust. The other seems a little smarter, has more certificates, more experience, and even impresses you a little, but whom you have a gut feeling is probably a little dishonest and not-so-much a "good person".
Now, some people would say you should go with the more qualified person without much consideration for whether he's a "decent person". After all, he's going to be your employee, and not necessarily your friend. On the other hand, I would claim that trustworthiness should be a huge factor in your hiring process because IT people often (necessarily) have access to private, sensitive, and confidential information. Of course, you don't want to hire an incompetent moron just because he seems honest-- it shouldn't be the ONLY factor, but it is an important factor.
I gather that not many things are refused for being "obvious" these days. Personally, I think the standard of proving something "obvious" should be very different:
If the same method is used in other fields and industries, it's "obvious". (you can't patent 'a menu system on an MP3 player' or 'using live-motion video in a computer game')
If, upon demonstration of the results of your "invention", other people would be able to duplicate it, then it's "obvious".
If another person in your field, faced with the same problem, would easily/necessarily come to the same solution, it's "obvious".
The reason I suggest these rules is that, as far as I can understand, the value in a patent system is to encourage people to disclose their inventions so that technology isn't lost or limited. But if it's a simple enough and obvious enough technology that people could replicate it, knowing only the problem to be solved by the "invention" or the results of the "invention", then you really aren't patenting a method or technology, you're patenting an idea. You had an idea of a problem that should be solved, or an idea of how to solve the problem, and you're patenting the obvious way of solving that idea because you can't patent the idea.
I know, with some inventions the big deal is the idea, even though the technology isn't that inventive. It's nice to think that people should be rewarded for having nice ideas. However, the patent system isn't meant (or, at least IMO shouldn't be meant) to protect smart people who have ideas. It's meant to protect inventors who develop new technology. When an inventor (or company employing an inventor) invest resources into inventing and developing technology, we've decided as a society to protect that technology's use so that the inventor (or company) can make a return on that investment.
So it's not enough that "no one has thought to solve this problem before", but it should also require that "having looked into solving this problem, another person with expertise in the field would still need to invest a significant amount of time and money into developing this particular method/technology to solve the problem".
I'm not sure how the USPTO should go about measuring that standard, but I believe that should be the idea behind the standard.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't the LED just the backlight? If the LED is as bright as the old screens and gives a nice clean white spectrum, how would it change the bit-depth of the display?
Natural selection and the big bang are so profound precisely because they do force (some of us) to re-evaluate the very simple questions that Genesis frames and to some degree answers: who and where are we?
I don't know that Genesis and the Big Bang are in conflict unless you think Genesis was a scientific/objective account of creation. As I've been saying, I think it's a real mistake to think that it's supposed to be a scientific "history", i.e. a precise, unbiased description of scientific facts as they occurred in such a way that, if you had a video camera and a time machine, you could go back in time and video the events. Pro-religion people make the mistake and use the story to argue that the Big Bang didn't happen, and that's silly. Pro-science people try to use the idea of a "Big Bang" to claim that Genesis is meaningless and stupid, and that's silly too.
(I'm not arguing for any supremacy of the judeo-christian tradition, but you brought up Genesis)
Your soda can analogy is faulty, as both participants in the discussion are describing testable observations of said soda can. Religion, on the other hand, offers no testable observations (not unlike certain modern cosmological theories, by the way).
Analogies are inherently imperfect-- otherwise they wouldn't be analogies, they'd be direct descriptions. My point is that it's possible to say different things about the same thing. If you really want to get technical, it's worth noting that "Coke cans are cylindrical" is both true and false, depending exactly what you mean to be claiming. It's roughly cylindrical, but is it perfectly cylindrical? What does it mean for material objects to be a shape, since they never fit the shape exactly and perfectly. Even though you could measure whether a can in cylindrical, you can only measure that within a given precision, and there is no perfectly precise means to measure anything. Therefore, whenever you claim that something is "cylindrical", it's always an approximation.
And beyond that, coke cans are also tapered at each end. So the Coke can is cylindrical (true), but it is also not cylindrical (true). See? It's a better analogy than you thought.
Either way, it seems you've missed my point entirely. If a religious claim is made that Earth is the stationary center of the world, it is a mistake for either religious people or for scientists to think that the claim is a scientific claim. Scientifically, the claim has no support. Scientifically, we should know that all motion is relative, and so there is no objective preference for any frame of motion, and therefore the Earth could be said to be stationary or moving (according to General Relativity).
The religious claim, however, may have different significance. It's hard to say what, unless you ground it in a particular context and tradition, but it might ground our concern for moral affairs in the Earthly plane. It might be an encouragement to care for the earth which serves for the center of our lives (environmentalism!). It might mean a lot of things.
It's really a mistake to think that religion is a hold-over from ancient peoples who wanted explanations for the universe without having the scientific understanding to "actually explain". Religion shouldn't be a stand-in for science, but it's actually doing something else and operating in a different world of thought.
Once you accept the presence of an all-powerful all-knowing all-good all-rational being who you can't understand, can't trust, and doesn't provide you with any testable knowledge you cease being rational.
You have your formulation wrong. If you accept the presence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, perfectly rational, perfectly good being, what would lead you to believe that you "couldn't trust" that being? Also, if you accept this, what would it mean to "test" knowledge coming from such a being, since "coming from" that being would be the most full-proof test possible.
But let's pretend for a moment that your god exists and that I'm rational. Why wouldn't I want to know why god deceives us into thinking that the Earth is over 4,000 years old?
Oh, the problems with this quote! First, it's not "my" god. Second, who here said anything about "4,000 years"? Third, who, besides you, is claiming that god would "deceive"? Fourth, I said you wouldn't be capable of understanding, but I never said you wouldn't want to know.
It seems we're spiraling out of anything sensible and we're way off-topic. But in a way, perhaps this spiral illustrates the idea that's eluding you: isn't it possible for someone to hear the truth, yet still come to incorrect conclusions? So let's reframe the problem and see what happens? Let's assume there were a "god" of the sort we're talking about, and he sent some kind of a "message" to mankind through some means (whatever you care to imagine). From this message men came up with ideas that are false. Now, given our assumptions, which is most likely:
Given that (1) and (2) go against our assumptions of a good and omnipotent god, we would be forced to conclude that the third possibility is the answer (excepting you can come up with an alternative). Given the highly fallible nature of mankind, it's not an implausible answer.
Therefore, if you accept the presence of a god of the sort we're talking about, the question is not as to whether "God" can be trusted-- inherent to what he is, he can be trusted. The question is as to whether you and other men can be trusted to receive and promulgate his message properly. "No" is a likely answer.
Or do you see another way to regard this? Of course, everything I'm saying assumes that we accept that this God is a real thing. You can easily say "no, I don't accept this God." Still, assuming this God is real, there's no rational way to doubt him.
I really don't want to get into a very theological argument here (I tried to avoid it in my post because i think it goes off-topic), but since people are doing the exact sort of thing i was hoping they wouldn't, I'll say more.
I'd prefer to say it this way: Religious thought won't yield good scientific explanations, and neither will science provide good theological explanations. Religion is properly in the business of describing the natural world, but not in the business of providing scientific and "objective" explanations. In other words, using religious "explanations" to fill gaps in your scientific knowledge is improper, but using religion to increase your understanding of the world is not improper. These two different worlds offer two different types of explanations.
People seem to think that, since there is only one world, there should only be one explanation for that world. However, as the long history of philosophy clearly illustrates, there are many different things that can be said about the same object. If you asked me about a Coke can, I might say it's made of metal, and someone else might say that the same can is cylindrical; we would not be arguing. If that person said, "It's cylindrical" and I said, "No! It's metallic!" then my response wouldn't make sense. The "debate" between religion and science is similar to this-- they're talking about different things, but the debaters often fail to grasp that "science" and "God" conflict with each other no more (in fact less!) than "metal" and "cylinder".
So if we properly understand the religious claim that "God created the universe", then we would all see that no science could ever conflict with this claim. It's simply not a scientific claim, but instead it informs our relationship to the universe. It claims that the universe is planned by the source of all Good, and therefore the universe is itself "good". It's a claim that we properly have a place and a role within the universe, since we were made to be in it, and so therefore we are good too. It doesn't matter whether there was, at some point, a "big bang," because the religious explanation cannot be refuted by empirical facts or scientific theories.
Unfortunately, even the people arguing in favor of the "religious" description sometimes forget the purpose of the explanation. They mistake the explanation for a scientific explanation of the material creation of the universe. And also the scientists forget-- they start to believe that they can discover the goodness and meaning of the universe (or "disprove" the existence of goodness and meaning) if they find just one more particle, smaller than those that have been observed before. All these things are nonsense.
How so? I think you've made a misstep in your reasoning. A rational man might question the existence of an all-powerful all-knowing all-good all-rational god, and might question whether a given being is all-powerful all-knowing all-good and all-rational. However, supposing you accept the presence of an all-powerful all-knowing all-good all-rational being, it would be foolish to then question the motivations of that being.
What rational man would question the motives of an all-powerful all-knowing all-good all-rational god? If such a god were to present himself to mankind in a way which happened to mislead some people, it must necessarily be done that way for a good purpose.
And as to why he would be incomprehensible, it only makes sense that such a god would be incomprehensible to man. How would a limited being like the mind of man every be able to encompass a perfect and unlimited being?
Deceitful-- probably not. But possibly misleading or incomprehensible.
But the heart of your post is correct-If someone believe Pink Invisible Ponies created the universe, then no amount of logic will change that.
I'll settle for that. So people, next time you hear someone claiming that the universe was created by Pink Invisible Ponies, be reasonable-- don't try to present a logical argument to the contrary. Even if you consider this person to be insane, recognize that arguing with the insane is a mark of insanity too.
Well ok. I think the reason we all ignored it is because it sounded like a throw-away line. Do you have any idea how many posts I've seen online where someone says, "don't get me wrong, I agree with you, but..." and then go on to say that they don't agree at all?
Much of your post seems to say that WYSIWYG editors allow designers to focus on design and ignore code, and further that this can be a good thing. Though I suppose that many people won't do things well, and that it really doesn't matter, I would still say that this is the wrong way to make web pages. If you're a designer who wants to focus on design, then design in Photoshop or InDesign, and then hand it off to a coder.
The only value I can see in WYSIWYG webpage editors is perhaps instructional, and insofar as we're talking about education, I'll grant you that much. As an inexperienced web-developer, it's helpful to flip back-and-forth between editing the visual layout and editing the code so that you can see how the code changes. In order to help people understand positioning concepts, it's helpful if they can see code which accomplishes the desired effect, and a WYSIWYG editor is a decent way to generate code to analyze. However, it's not really a good way to make web pages.
So basically this will reduce "God"'s role in the creation of the universe further back before the big bang
Why must we use physics to support atheistic antagonization of religious people? What relation does one thing have to another? I'll give you a tip here: If someone believes in God today, the discovery of a new particle tomorrow won't make the stop believing.
There's no room for argumentation; if you posit the existence of an all-powerful god, then it would be within that god's power to make the universe however he chose. He could have made it so that all scientific evidence and all possible human understanding would imply that the universe had always existed. If you held this belief, it would not be the sort of belief that science deals with, and therefore no amount of scientific discovery could take away from it.
And before you start flaming me, calling me a crazy zealot or whatever you like, it may be worthwhile to note that I don't hold the sort of belief I'm describing. I just wish that people wouldn't waste all this energy antagonizing each other for no reason. If your grand hope for science is to refute some religion's particular creation myth, then you'll only waste your own time and try other people's patience.
No, the GP is right. People who can't hand-write HTML and CSS shouldn't be doing web-design work. You can be a graphic designer without any web knowledge, and a graphic designer might come up with a web-page design, but you really should still have someone else-- a web designer-- put the thing together into a web page.
And that's a large part of the job of a web designer-- to know how to make a given graphic design into a web page that will render properly and work across the various browsers. A graphic designer can lay things out visually in Photoshop or whatever and decide how things should look visually, but a real web designer should decide how to make it work. Like, "Do I want to use tables to accomplish this layout, or DIVs?"
But how is this "high quality" software situation any different than with any other operating system? Yeah, if you want MS Office and don't pirate it, you'll have to pay for it. If you won't scheme enough to get the student/teacher edition, it will cost something like $400. This is true on OSX, but it's true on Windows, too, and on Linux, you simply won't be able to run Office (basically). Of course, you could argue that Windows/Linux users can use OOo, but Mac users can also use NeoOffice.
There really isn't any significant way in which Mac users must pay more for software than Windows/Linux users, so it's not anything to be emphasized if you're deciding which OS you want.
I just don't even understand the complaint.
Also, the author says things like, "A new Mac user can expect to pay $400 for the Office Suite, and more for Adobe Photoshop if they want to do any serious photo editing." And how is this noteworthy? If you want MS Office or Photoshop, you'll have to buy them and they're expensive. WOW! And this is written right after mentioning NeoOffice (free, and does not require X11) and iWork ($80).
It seems like every couple weeks, someone else writes an article or reads on article on this sort of teleportation and posts it all over the Internet. "Omigawd, we are SOOOO close to having Star Trek transporters!!!"
And then everyone has to explain, "No, we really aren't." This really doesn't bring us any closer to being able to break material objects down to nothing (effectively) and simultaneously rebuild them perfectly at a far-away location.
Could we all just stop this now? This article doesn't have any significant depth or any clear/new information. Quantum entanglement has been know for a while, but (and I am not a physicist, but AFAIK) there's never been any way to use it to transmit data in a way that breaks the speed of light. That would be a discovery, but it still wouldn't be moving actual matter across distances. It wouldn't be deconstructing atoms, molecules, or whole organisms on one side and rebuilding them on the other. So please, no more stores about how "Star Trek transporters are just around the corner!"
Depends on the movie. Usually when I go to Best Buy, new releases are right around $20. Look at their website, and you'll see a lot of movies saying something like:
Old movies, yeah, you might be able to get them for $5-$10. But at this moment, Best Buy is selling a copy of "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" (the movie in question) with a list price of $34.99 with Best Buy's price of $26.99.
I don't remember him saying that. I remember vaguely that he implied, somewhere, that people didn't value their phones because, for all the money paid by customers and by cell carriers (as subsidies), the phones that you ended up with were still total crap.
He said from the beginning that it was going to pay $500 for the iPhone, and that the price was for a 2 year contract. He just claimed that the phone would be worth it.
Yeah yeah, woo whoo. Where can you buy a legal copy online that you can download to your phone?
I'm not denying that your device can have it's advantages, but if you're going to pretend that there's nothing neat or cool or better than the iPhone then you're being biased.
Yeah, the only new part of that is being able to watch a DRM'd copy of Pirates of Caribbean that you paid $10 to download
Are you trying to make this sound bad? I mean, I know that writing the word "DRM" around here is like dropping chum in water filled with sharks-- people go crazy-- but hell, that sounds pretty convenient to me.
Of course, the iPhone will be able to play non-DRMed movies, so if you wanted you could go to Best Buy, spend $25 on Pirates of the Caribbean, use Handbrake to rip it as mp4, and put that on your iPhone. I mean, if you want, you have that option. Still, it sounds mighty convenient to be able to, if you like, buy Pirates for $10 and copy it to your iPhone, the whole process taking a little longer than however long you can download it over your internet connection, and being ready to go without leaving your house.
Yeah, yeah, I get it, "...but DRM is bad and $10 is too expensive!" Well you don't HAVE TO buy it from Apple, but you have that option, and I don't see anyone else giving such an elegant solution. I'll tell you, if you'd told me a couple years ago that in 2007 I'd be able to buy movies online, download them, and copy it to a hybrid iPod/phone/PDA-- showing me how easy the whole process is, how small and thin the iPhone would be-- I'm not sure I'd have believed you. I'd say, "Yeah, sure, and I'll probably have a flying car too!"
In summary: Where's my flying car?!
Either the RIAA is stingy or Congressmen are desperate for extra cash.
Might I posit "both"?
Now its like $1000-9000. I mean I could buy a Congressman for that amount of money. If Slashdotters just collaborate then for $50 a head we could get Congress to ban Microsoft...
Really, considering the amount of influence donations/lobbyists have, why don't more people organize around the issues that are important to them, raise money, and buy their own congressmen? At this point, we really should.
Even if laws were easy to circumvent, you could still make it harder to coordinate without someone involving lots of people, shifting money around in suspicious ways, and increasing the risk of getting "caught" doing something you obviously know is wrong.
If, instead of companies being able to contribute a big lump of money, they had to get 100 employees to make little donations, they still might be able to do that. But it's be harder to set that up, it'd be harder to coordinate, and it'd be harder to get away with.
Even to get the CEO to contribute the money himself, I bet he's less likely to do it when it comes out of his own pocket. These greedy fuckers-- if you gave them the "bonus" to pay lobbyists and donate to senators, they'd probably pocket most of that "bonus" anyway.
whose basement do you live in, then?
are Mac users that desperate for this functionality that its worth it?
Most of them aren't. They'll either find a way to get Parallels+Windows for free, or they'll live without. That's not to say there won't be enough Mac users (which is to say, "enough to make a profit), but most Mac users probably won't bother.
Well i guess that's why you have an interview rather than a standardized test. A good manager or HR person should be able to get some kind of a read on people, even if it's not always 100% correct. You know, you see their response to different sorts of questions, check whether they know as much as they claim, and check to see if their resume/cover letter is accurate. You talk to them and hopefully you'll have some sense.
However, I'm not really talking about how you tell people are trustworthy. That's more of a philosophic, sociological, or psychological sort of question. I'm just advising that, however you get a sense of trustworthiness, you set that as a priority when hiring.
So lets say you have two potential hires come into your office. One of them appears to be competent, but perhaps merely 'competent'; he seems like a decent person that you could trust. The other seems a little smarter, has more certificates, more experience, and even impresses you a little, but whom you have a gut feeling is probably a little dishonest and not-so-much a "good person".
Now, some people would say you should go with the more qualified person without much consideration for whether he's a "decent person". After all, he's going to be your employee, and not necessarily your friend. On the other hand, I would claim that trustworthiness should be a huge factor in your hiring process because IT people often (necessarily) have access to private, sensitive, and confidential information. Of course, you don't want to hire an incompetent moron just because he seems honest-- it shouldn't be the ONLY factor, but it is an important factor.
The reason I suggest these rules is that, as far as I can understand, the value in a patent system is to encourage people to disclose their inventions so that technology isn't lost or limited. But if it's a simple enough and obvious enough technology that people could replicate it, knowing only the problem to be solved by the "invention" or the results of the "invention", then you really aren't patenting a method or technology, you're patenting an idea. You had an idea of a problem that should be solved, or an idea of how to solve the problem, and you're patenting the obvious way of solving that idea because you can't patent the idea.
I know, with some inventions the big deal is the idea, even though the technology isn't that inventive. It's nice to think that people should be rewarded for having nice ideas. However, the patent system isn't meant (or, at least IMO shouldn't be meant) to protect smart people who have ideas. It's meant to protect inventors who develop new technology. When an inventor (or company employing an inventor) invest resources into inventing and developing technology, we've decided as a society to protect that technology's use so that the inventor (or company) can make a return on that investment.
So it's not enough that "no one has thought to solve this problem before", but it should also require that "having looked into solving this problem, another person with expertise in the field would still need to invest a significant amount of time and money into developing this particular method/technology to solve the problem".
I'm not sure how the USPTO should go about measuring that standard, but I believe that should be the idea behind the standard.