"Why do humans have to be in a line of descent from chimps, rather than the Creator simply reusing sequences of already working code." Well, they wouldn't have to, except that it correlates well with our observations whereas you simply appeal to some alternate explanation with no evidence.
"...that humans and monkeys/apes come from some common ancestor...
is a belief in the same way that the origin of humans from Adam and Eve is a belief."
No, it isn't. We can track the evolutionary history and observe changes correlated with time. You have book...which is inconsistent, I might add. And no not all theory is gray. You wish to attack science as a web of theories to argue it is gray and somehow your book is clear. But your book is inconsistent, and science thrives on rooting out its inconsistencies. Can you say as much for religion?
There are two myths in Genesis about the creation of the world and they differ about which days stuff happens. Example: in Genesis 1:25-26, man was created after the animals, but in Genesis 2:18-19 man is first, then the animals. Biblical scholars attribute this to two books being shuffled like a deck of playing cards into one story, but there are clearly two books and their styles differ. So the Torah is inconsistent.
In the New Testament, read the Gospels in parallel not serially and you'll find they too differ about what happened. In Matthew:20, the angel speaks to Joseph, in Luke 1:28 the angel spoke to Mary. So even the New Testament is inconsistent.
This is to be expected, men are inconsistent and they wrote it. So you probably now wish to argue that G-d inspired the consistent parts. Well, men decided which books made it into the Bible (new and old) and which didn't. There were many that didn't. So G-d inspired the correct ones to make it and the others were left out.
G-d gave Man a free will, yet he was also pulling strings behind the scenes to get the 'correct' Bible. So now G-d is inconsistent. Or maybe Man simply cannot see the consistent structure of it all...in which case, G-d isn't giving us the correct instructions. Or is he behind the scenes, in which case our grasp of the transcendental nature of G-d and all is so tenuous no one, including you, has reason to be absolutely sure about your interpretation of the Bible or even if it is fact....short of mere belief.
One goal of science is to weave a consistent whole out of admittedly confusing information, and as your Bible is inconsistent, we are left to argue about science and not your Bible.
Also, not all theory is gray. Let's take Group Theory for instance. It is abstract but it is not gray. Neither is gravitation. Presumably you wish to argue that evolution is gray. Which part? The theory is fairly precise, it gets altered occasionally (punctuated equilibrium) but it's direction has not appreciably changed since Darwin. We can even see it working on island habitats. To discount evolution you would have to replace it with something equally convincing. Attempting to replace it with G-d would mean that G-d is one sneaky Guy, burying those dino bones, rigging the age tests to record billions of years rather than a few odd thousands. Rigging the change in animals over time to look like evolution. So, what you'd be saying is that G-d is lying to us.
I agree with most of what you wrote, except I don't find Windows users ignorant or scared. They seem to come in two main groups. Group one generally have another goal in life than to become one with their computer. The computer is simply a tool to get something done. If it does the job for them, they have no reason to switch. Telling them they will have a better user experience won't matter because they don't consider the user experience to be such a big thing. Group two have specific software that only runs on Windows or have used it for a long time and are comfortable with it. Both groups have been snake bitten by MS Malware enough to not want to pfutz with the system very much lest they land in limbo from which there is no escape, even a new machine would still be a royal pain in the tuckus.
A third group of Windows enthusiasts really, really like Windows, why is a mystery to me but I imagine it is similar to the way I feel about my Mac. A fourth group are psychos. They generally think of Apple or Linux as a threat, would gladly go Bowling with Ballmer, and think of Gates as some sort of genius.
That's not the only small problem. One should distinguish among 'data', 'information', and 'knowledge'. Data is raw stuff (text, graphs, etc.). Information is relative to the individual, i.e., you must know the language in which the text is written to unlock the content, you must understand the axes, etc. to unlock the content of a graph. Knowledge is information in the context of a structure allowing one to predict or extract information from other information. The boundaries are also a bit fuzzy. (There are other definitions, these aren't definitive but I only put them there to give the indication that there are significant differences among the three.)
Shipping data through interweb pipes is not distance learning. Universities are more than mere gatekeepers of data. They are generators too. Universities are supposed to give one the tools for one to be a generator for him/herself. These 'self' generators are not generators of data, but generators of information and knowledge. The short adage is that Universities are to teach one to think for him/herself. But writ large, Universities are there to encourage the extension of information and knowledge within the collective soul of the human condition...unless you are Business School Product, in which case an education is merely a stamp to sell for more monetary riches, the education having no intrinsic value other than what someone is willing to give you for it.
I think Douglas Adams had a neat idea called the Electric Monk. Just as you have devices for recording TV, etc., an Electric Monk believes things for you. Here, I believe we want an Electric Gumby; its job is to watch all the advertising for you so you can be free to concentrate on actual content rather than effluvium from Business School Product.
I see many more posts complaining about mac fans than I see posts by mac fans. Don't you guys have anything better to do than get emotional about a blob of hardware+software?
Wow, you mean you told us this before and we didn't listen?
Sun's demise had just as much to do with the.bust as anything. That was their major market on the way up, and that was their major market on the way down. Their effort to change their fortunes with Java succeeded on the server-side, but to make it fly they had to essentially give it away. On the client, well, their big machine background shows in Java which doesn't match up well with small machine/clients. Those are very gui oriented and people get quite attached to their guis. Sun gave the impression any gui for the masses would do, the masses were offended...that and the gui they did provide was a bloated pile of silly-putty.
Linux/Intel also ate their lunch. Sun was going down no matter what they did. They had the wrong mix of technology and that's almost impossible to change.
And yes they did succumb to the MS way of Business School Product, but that only accelerated inherent weaknesses in the company.
The 1000 years does matter though, one always needs a sense of proportion. If it were witihin 100 years, then the required effort needs to be compressed than if it were 1000 years. Also, the ways to solve the problem change depending upon the time scale. I think the effect is real, the necessary effort per time frame is open to debate mainly because the time frame is open to debate.
I think this is where robotics can help MS here. What they need is a robot that can move around the data center and be remotely linked to the developers. When a machine BSODs, the clarion call to the bot goes out. The bot trundles down the aisle, locates the offending machine. And a very highly crafted thumb extends from the bot to delicately press the off switch. The bot trundles away and another bot trundles up. A highly crafted thumb then extends to delicately press the on switch. They need to be different bots because, after all, this is an MS bot, there should only be one app per bot.
Yup, and it isn't just the music industry. Every industry now appears to be trying to turn you in an annuity. Another way to phrase that is every mosquito wants to insert its straw into your behind. This is what happens when one turns industries over to Business School Product. Service agreements are another example of this insidious trend.
I think you miss MS's position. Being dragged into court doesn't bother them, it is part of their cost of business. What bothers them is not being able to intimidate or drag others to court. FOSS is a wild card that MS's business plan cannot contain...unless there is a global patent regime where they can enforce their will upon non-corporate entities outside the U.S. Corporate entitles can be bought, intimidated, stabbed in the back, dragged though lengthy legal proceedings, forced to accept dumb formats, etc. Governments can be lobbied, bought, sold, bribed, etc. What can they do to dispersed organizations whose only goal appears to be to make software free of restrictions....a software model with which they cannot compete unless they are able to apply they kind of pressure they themselves cannot. The only entities able to do that are governments, hence MS must give the governments a structure within which MS can force FOSS to work. Embrace, extend, extinguish...you didn't think it only applied to software's bits and bytes, eh?
The kicker is that, according to quantum mechanics which t'Hooft is attempting to dispute (I think), some of your numbers will be probabilities. So it isn't like you could predict the position and velocity of an electron. And even the probabilities might not conform to a logic system you would use, they might conform to a quantum logic. So reasoning from your automata might not be entirely straightforward.
This has nothing to do with Linux, it is merely an argument over Unix copyrights. SCO has never been able to show any Unix code in Linux. Their beef with Novell centered on the Unix copyrights.Their beef with IBM wandered around witlessly for awhile and finally centered on Unix in AIX or contract disputes involving the Monterrey project. SCO hasn't been making noises about Linux for awhile...for good reason, other then putting Linux on their own servers for download, they have nothing to do with it.
And one of those resources is time. It takes a lot of time to do good research. Do you want to spend part of your finite lifetime attempting to ascertain that Raelians live on the far side of a comet and will be visiting us shortly, or do you want to spend part of your finite lifetime working on your computation model of rainfall to predict drought...decisions, decisions...
I don't think ending the prohibition on, say, marijuana, would eliminate the underground market. There is a very lucrative underground market in cigarettes. In part because they are taxed, but there are also hidden taxes like import/export controls. Many people think that marijuana should be taxed like liquor, but there's an underground market for that too. Just about any scheme short of an entirely free market with no taxes, controls, etc. would probably fail due to the cartel's ability to evade the taxes and controls. By free market I mean freedom of entry and exit AND no government taxes or controls (the latter is necessary for a "free market" to keep the playing field level). But very few free markets in this sense actually exist, and when they do, monopolies tend to take over. So, the cartels, with their weapons and infrastructure would be well-positioned to dominate the free market in marijuana. They'd be stronger then, and they wouldn't object to the use of force in keep their monopoly.
You thought was my thought, this was straight from the Business School Product in the Marketing Dept. at MS. The person who responsible for getting it onto Slashdot must get something special for his effort....maybe a plaque for the office...or a blender...or something...
Yep, let's not think for the future. I Pakistan bought their nuclear technology from N. Korea. I don't doubt the U.S. sold some to them, that would clearly be a mistake and won't make the Pakistanis love the U.S. after they go all Taliban..
Maybe you should read on the conflict between the Muslims and Christians in Indonesia. Periodically, it erupts into that foundation of Islam, violence. Maylaysians also have conflict between Muslims and Buddhists, Hindus, Christians...just about anyone not Muslim. They've got laws that discriminate against non-Muslims. Check out the Muslims in S. Thailand, they don't live peacefully with non-Muslims either.
Hmmm...accusations of Nazism, must be Democrat. Did you have to play that card so soon, it gets sooooo tiring.
You mean the civil war the Shi'ites and Sunnis have been engaged in ever since the 3rd imam took one for the team and his nephew failed to become the Big Dork of Islam? Or the one that pleasant Iraqi president started with Iran a few decades ago...what was his name...Sad...Saddo...Saddom...Gommorah? Ooo...that wasn't a civil war, not by anybody's stretch of imagination. Or maybe it was the Kurdish war against everyone else, because, damnit, no self-respecting Islamic society should have to live in peace with their Islamic brothers.
Get a clue, Islam means Surrender...please feel free to surrender yourself to it's tender loving mercies. The U.S. tried to civilize one small Islamic microcosm in the apparently mistaken belief the people wanted a better life. The Iraqis decided that killing each other was a wonderful pasttime and supported by the Koran...all sides. Neat trick.
Slashdot Mirror
"Why do humans have to be in a line of descent from chimps, rather than the Creator simply reusing sequences of already working code." Well, they wouldn't have to, except that it correlates well with our observations whereas you simply appeal to some alternate explanation with no evidence.
"...that humans and monkeys/apes come from some common ancestor...
is a belief in the same way that the origin of humans from Adam and Eve is a belief."
No, it isn't. We can track the evolutionary history and observe changes correlated with time. You have book...which is inconsistent, I might add. And no not all theory is gray. You wish to attack science as a web of theories to argue it is gray and somehow your book is clear. But your book is inconsistent, and science thrives on rooting out its inconsistencies. Can you say as much for religion?
There are two myths in Genesis about the creation of the world and they differ about which days stuff happens. Example: in Genesis 1:25-26, man was created after the animals, but in Genesis 2:18-19 man is first, then the animals. Biblical scholars attribute this to two books being shuffled like a deck of playing cards into one story, but there are clearly two books and their styles differ. So the Torah is inconsistent.
In the New Testament, read the Gospels in parallel not serially and you'll find they too differ about what happened. In Matthew :20, the angel speaks to Joseph, in Luke 1:28 the angel spoke to Mary. So even the New Testament is inconsistent.
This is to be expected, men are inconsistent and they wrote it. So you probably now wish to argue that G-d inspired the consistent parts. Well, men decided which books made it into the Bible (new and old) and which didn't. There were many that didn't. So G-d inspired the correct ones to make it and the others were left out.
G-d gave Man a free will, yet he was also pulling strings behind the scenes to get the 'correct' Bible. So now G-d is inconsistent. Or maybe Man simply cannot see the consistent structure of it all...in which case, G-d isn't giving us the correct instructions. Or is he behind the scenes, in which case our grasp of the transcendental nature of G-d and all is so tenuous no one, including you, has reason to be absolutely sure about your interpretation of the Bible or even if it is fact....short of mere belief.
One goal of science is to weave a consistent whole out of admittedly confusing information, and as your Bible is inconsistent, we are left to argue about science and not your Bible.
Also, not all theory is gray. Let's take Group Theory for instance. It is abstract but it is not gray. Neither is gravitation. Presumably you wish to argue that evolution is gray. Which part? The theory is fairly precise, it gets altered occasionally (punctuated equilibrium) but it's direction has not appreciably changed since Darwin. We can even see it working on island habitats. To discount evolution you would have to replace it with something equally convincing. Attempting to replace it with G-d would mean that G-d is one sneaky Guy, burying those dino bones, rigging the age tests to record billions of years rather than a few odd thousands. Rigging the change in animals over time to look like evolution. So, what you'd be saying is that G-d is lying to us.
I agree with most of what you wrote, except I don't find Windows users ignorant or scared. They seem to come in two main groups. Group one generally have another goal in life than to become one with their computer. The computer is simply a tool to get something done. If it does the job for them, they have no reason to switch. Telling them they will have a better user experience won't matter because they don't consider the user experience to be such a big thing. Group two have specific software that only runs on Windows or have used it for a long time and are comfortable with it. Both groups have been snake bitten by MS Malware enough to not want to pfutz with the system very much lest they land in limbo from which there is no escape, even a new machine would still be a royal pain in the tuckus.
A third group of Windows enthusiasts really, really like Windows, why is a mystery to me but I imagine it is similar to the way I feel about my Mac. A fourth group are psychos. They generally think of Apple or Linux as a threat, would gladly go Bowling with Ballmer, and think of Gates as some sort of genius.
"Things that make you go." Errr....they are selling constipation cures? And on a vertical enterprise scale? Now that is a solutions company!!
That's not the only small problem. One should distinguish among 'data', 'information', and 'knowledge'. Data is raw stuff (text, graphs, etc.). Information is relative to the individual, i.e., you must know the language in which the text is written to unlock the content, you must understand the axes, etc. to unlock the content of a graph. Knowledge is information in the context of a structure allowing one to predict or extract information from other information. The boundaries are also a bit fuzzy. (There are other definitions, these aren't definitive but I only put them there to give the indication that there are significant differences among the three.)
Shipping data through interweb pipes is not distance learning. Universities are more than mere gatekeepers of data. They are generators too. Universities are supposed to give one the tools for one to be a generator for him/herself. These 'self' generators are not generators of data, but generators of information and knowledge. The short adage is that Universities are to teach one to think for him/herself. But writ large, Universities are there to encourage the extension of information and knowledge within the collective soul of the human condition...unless you are Business School Product, in which case an education is merely a stamp to sell for more monetary riches, the education having no intrinsic value other than what someone is willing to give you for it.
I think Douglas Adams had a neat idea called the Electric Monk. Just as you have devices for recording TV, etc., an Electric Monk believes things for you. Here, I believe we want an Electric Gumby; its job is to watch all the advertising for you so you can be free to concentrate on actual content rather than effluvium from Business School Product.
I see many more posts complaining about mac fans than I see posts by mac fans. Don't you guys have anything better to do than get emotional about a blob of hardware+software?
Wow, you mean you told us this before and we didn't listen?
Sun's demise had just as much to do with the .bust as anything. That was their major market on the way up, and that was their major market on the way down. Their effort to change their fortunes with Java succeeded on the server-side, but to make it fly they had to essentially give it away. On the client, well, their big machine background shows in Java which doesn't match up well with small machine/clients. Those are very gui oriented and people get quite attached to their guis. Sun gave the impression any gui for the masses would do, the masses were offended...that and the gui they did provide was a bloated pile of silly-putty.
Linux/Intel also ate their lunch. Sun was going down no matter what they did. They had the wrong mix of technology and that's almost impossible to change.
And yes they did succumb to the MS way of Business School Product, but that only accelerated inherent weaknesses in the company.
The 1000 years does matter though, one always needs a sense of proportion. If it were witihin 100 years, then the required effort needs to be compressed than if it were 1000 years. Also, the ways to solve the problem change depending upon the time scale. I think the effect is real, the necessary effort per time frame is open to debate mainly because the time frame is open to debate.
It's easy, it has the stench of MS marketing about it. Business School Product never get the facts quite right.
I think this is where robotics can help MS here. What they need is a robot that can move around the data center and be remotely linked to the developers. When a machine BSODs, the clarion call to the bot goes out. The bot trundles down the aisle, locates the offending machine. And a very highly crafted thumb extends from the bot to delicately press the off switch. The bot trundles away and another bot trundles up. A highly crafted thumb then extends to delicately press the on switch. They need to be different bots because, after all, this is an MS bot, there should only be one app per bot.
Yup, and it isn't just the music industry. Every industry now appears to be trying to turn you in an annuity. Another way to phrase that is every mosquito wants to insert its straw into your behind. This is what happens when one turns industries over to Business School Product. Service agreements are another example of this insidious trend.
I think you miss MS's position. Being dragged into court doesn't bother them, it is part of their cost of business. What bothers them is not being able to intimidate or drag others to court. FOSS is a wild card that MS's business plan cannot contain...unless there is a global patent regime where they can enforce their will upon non-corporate entities outside the U.S. Corporate entitles can be bought, intimidated, stabbed in the back, dragged though lengthy legal proceedings, forced to accept dumb formats, etc. Governments can be lobbied, bought, sold, bribed, etc. What can they do to dispersed organizations whose only goal appears to be to make software free of restrictions....a software model with which they cannot compete unless they are able to apply they kind of pressure they themselves cannot. The only entities able to do that are governments, hence MS must give the governments a structure within which MS can force FOSS to work. Embrace, extend, extinguish...you didn't think it only applied to software's bits and bytes, eh?
The kicker is that, according to quantum mechanics which t'Hooft is attempting to dispute (I think), some of your numbers will be probabilities. So it isn't like you could predict the position and velocity of an electron. And even the probabilities might not conform to a logic system you would use, they might conform to a quantum logic. So reasoning from your automata might not be entirely straightforward.
Because it would reward thieves and encourage a whole raft of me-too lawsuits.
This has nothing to do with Linux, it is merely an argument over Unix copyrights. SCO has never been able to show any Unix code in Linux. Their beef with Novell centered on the Unix copyrights.Their beef with IBM wandered around witlessly for awhile and finally centered on Unix in AIX or contract disputes involving the Monterrey project. SCO hasn't been making noises about Linux for awhile...for good reason, other then putting Linux on their own servers for download, they have nothing to do with it.
And one of those resources is time. It takes a lot of time to do good research. Do you want to spend part of your finite lifetime attempting to ascertain that Raelians live on the far side of a comet and will be visiting us shortly, or do you want to spend part of your finite lifetime working on your computation model of rainfall to predict drought...decisions, decisions...
I don't think ending the prohibition on, say, marijuana, would eliminate the underground market. There is a very lucrative underground market in cigarettes. In part because they are taxed, but there are also hidden taxes like import/export controls. Many people think that marijuana should be taxed like liquor, but there's an underground market for that too. Just about any scheme short of an entirely free market with no taxes, controls, etc. would probably fail due to the cartel's ability to evade the taxes and controls. By free market I mean freedom of entry and exit AND no government taxes or controls (the latter is necessary for a "free market" to keep the playing field level). But very few free markets in this sense actually exist, and when they do, monopolies tend to take over. So, the cartels, with their weapons and infrastructure would be well-positioned to dominate the free market in marijuana. They'd be stronger then, and they wouldn't object to the use of force in keep their monopoly.
You thought was my thought, this was straight from the Business School Product in the Marketing Dept. at MS. The person who responsible for getting it onto Slashdot must get something special for his effort....maybe a plaque for the office...or a blender...or something...
Incidentally, the U.S. Military has a standing directive to reduce its enviro-footprint wherever possible.
Yep, let's not think for the future. I Pakistan bought their nuclear technology from N. Korea. I don't doubt the U.S. sold some to them, that would clearly be a mistake and won't make the Pakistanis love the U.S. after they go all Taliban..
Maybe you should read on the conflict between the Muslims and Christians in Indonesia. Periodically, it erupts into that foundation of Islam, violence. Maylaysians also have conflict between Muslims and Buddhists, Hindus, Christians...just about anyone not Muslim. They've got laws that discriminate against non-Muslims. Check out the Muslims in S. Thailand, they don't live peacefully with non-Muslims either.
Hmmm...accusations of Nazism, must be Democrat. Did you have to play that card so soon, it gets sooooo tiring.
You mean the civil war the Shi'ites and Sunnis have been engaged in ever since the 3rd imam took one for the team and his nephew failed to become the Big Dork of Islam? Or the one that pleasant Iraqi president started with Iran a few decades ago...what was his name...Sad...Saddo...Saddom...Gommorah? Ooo...that wasn't a civil war, not by anybody's stretch of imagination. Or maybe it was the Kurdish war against everyone else, because, damnit, no self-respecting Islamic society should have to live in peace with their Islamic brothers.
Get a clue, Islam means Surrender...please feel free to surrender yourself to it's tender loving mercies. The U.S. tried to civilize one small Islamic microcosm in the apparently mistaken belief the people wanted a better life. The Iraqis decided that killing each other was a wonderful pasttime and supported by the Koran...all sides. Neat trick.
Errr...as an Project Manager at DARPA, we'd like to see you and discuss possible funding levels for your popcorn weapon.