It's good enough now that I've found a windows program (presumably written for ~win98) that will run under wine but not on windows 2000. Unfortunately I'm not willing to publicly admit to posessing the program in question, so you'll have to take my word for it.
Does the electric universe theory explain the remarkable fit on that iconic graph of the CMB? More importantly, did it do so _before_ the results were found?
I'm always open to new ideas, but tere's a long way to go to disprove the big bang.
One is useful and explanatory and the other isn't - That would be a reply lacking any objectivity. Perhaps it is useful to you but not to me.
No. That which allows us to make predictions is useful. That which doesn't, isn't.
Matter can be created spontaneusly if there is sufficent energy. Yes, but where did the energy come from.
Matter in a gravitational well has a certain amount of negative energy; the theory is that enough matter was created that the rest mass energy of the matter was exactly equal to the amount of negative energy it had by dint of being near the rest of it.
As theory, I understand that science claims that the universe began with an explosion of an infinitely small volume having infinite mass. What does your scientific observation of explosions tell you about ensuing order?
That it would mostly destroy any structure present before it; that that which remained afterwards would be largely homogeneous. Which is true of the universe, if you look at it on the right scale.
Not at all; maybe Vista has bugs in (e.g.) its PCI support but the GP has a non-pci mobo, or there's some API which is broken but the GP's audio player doesn't use it. The GP hasn't done an exhaustive test of all of vista, and it's not as if vista runs the exact same code on every hardware configuration.
This is a US story, and they used kilometer as the unit of measurement for this story?
Maybe someone younger than you wrote it. The switch to metric is inevitable when the system makes so much more sense to someone who looks at it without preconceptions.
So you want to cross a road. You haven't looked both ways yet but your default position is to behave as if there are no cars coming from either direction. You claim your default position is disbelief. Go ahead and cross without looking. I bet you're chicken.
For what it's worth, I do this all the time - unless I hear something to indicate otherwise, I assume no cars are coming, and I haven't got flattened yet. But in any case, taking my *default* position as disbelief doesn't mean not looking for evidence. Barely a week goes by when I don't talk to some religious person - but none of them have pointed me to enough evidence to believe in a god yet.
As for myself, I started out (as a child) by believing everything I was told. If my little neices and nephews are any indication, that seems to be the "default position".
Yes, but they're still believing nothing without having a reason for it; being told something isn't a particularly good reason for believing something, but it's still a reason.
I.m sorry, but your answer begs the question. You say 'one possible explanation...'. But at the same time you deny another possible explanation.
Yes; that's because one of these possible explanations is useful, and explanatory, and the other isn't.
Your explanation also poses another unanswered question: 'the lump came into being'. Why and how did the lump come into being?
At random, in the same way as the (well observed) creation of particle-antiparticle pairs in regions of space with enough energy. And that theory is something we can reason, and predict, about, and is a simpler than assuming it just happened (since we already have to assume that matter can be spontaneously created if there is sufficient energy), wheras positing a creator only complicates things, so lacks any explanatory power.
In logic, you cannot answer a question by posing another question, it does not fly.
But in science, it is perfectly reasonable to explain something unexplained in terms of something else unexplained if the latter is simpler. There is no "full" explanation for "why do things fall down?"; if we say "gravity" and give the rule for it, then we have only reduced the question to "why is there gravity?" But nevertheless, this is a good scientific idea, because it allows us to explain many complicated things (the motion of particles) with only one small assumption.
You have to start with some sort of belief, otherwise, you don't even dare experiment. If you can't experiment, you can't get evidence.
You dare experiment - you have no reason to believe it will cause anything bad.
Even believing an experiment will produce results requires belief. And who is going to perform an experiment (correctly) without some sort of belief in results?
You don't need to believe the experimental method works; you can make an empirical comparison with other possible ways of finding results (e.g. divine inspiration or something).
Actually the problem is no different from the problem of origins in science. So far science claims that the universe began when an infinitely small lump having infinite mass exploded. So, where did the mass come from?
We don't know. The point is that positing a creator doesn't help any; it doesn't explain anything more, it doesn't make it more understandable, it doesn't make any more predictions.
One possible explanation is that, since in quantum theory things can spontaneously happen as long as energy is conserved, the lump came into being with its positive rest mass energy exactly balanced with the negative energy it has by virtue of being in a gravity well.
You must be kidding. Last week a group of Scientist said life came from a comet. They stated that this theory was 1000000000000000000000000 times more likely than the conventional evolutionary theory.
And they were probably just talking crap; just because you're a scientist doesn't necessarily make you honest.
When I was a kid they taught that species evolved gradually from one species to another. When they could not find any fossil evidence to support that they changed their story to species jump from one species to another.
Very few people are seriously claiming that. You need to find a better source for your science reporting.
As we get more information; evolutionary theory is getting weaker not stronger.
And what practical benefit does your "knowledge" that there is no God provide you? Would your behavior be any different if you did believe in God? If so, then you are nothing but a slave to your desires. And by that, I mean that you choose to behave in such a way that you think God--if he in fact existed--would disapprove of. However, because you believe there is nobody to "keep you honest", you behave that way with impunity.
Who said God had to be "good"? I don't attend services of any church, and fully believe that I there is nothing immoral in my not doing so; nevertheless, if I did believe in God I would do so.
People sometimes ask me if I believe in God. I always reply that the question is meaningless to me, because God's existence or nonexistence cannot be proven, and it has no bearing on my life. That is, I would behave exactly the way I do whether or not God were proven to exist or not, or even if I chose to believe he did or did not exist.
To believe that God has no effect upon you is entirely equivalent to not believing in God at all; those who care about God do because they believe that it *does* affect their lives.
You may, of course, say that you shouldn't have to disprove something, and you'd be correct. However, just because nobody has proved the existence of something doesn't necessarily mean that thing does not exist.
No, but it means the only logical position is to behave as if it didn't exist.
But realize that, in this case, you are choosing to believe it does not.
No. The default position is disbelief. We don't start believing in all the countless billions of possibilities and then eliminate those which are false; we start from nothing, and believe only in that which we have reason to believe exists. To say that something's existence is undecidable or irrelevant is a positive step, a choice that you are making.
3) This still doesn't make time travel possible. Time is still going forward, even saying the group velocity of light was broken. You could get ahead of light and see something that happened in the past, earlier than you should have, because you can communicate quicker than light, but it still is an event in the past. You could move to a location you otherwise wouldn't be able to be at by the given time moving below the speed of light, and have an effect you couldn't have had at that point in time otherwise, but you didn't go into the future, in the way normally thought, time kept ticking, you just traveled a different path through space-time, that normally was excluded.
Actually, no. If you go faster than the speed of light, then there is an inertial frame of reference (as valid as any other, since that's relativity) in which you have gone backwards in time.
Randomness established? What experiment could possibly establish randomness? I'm with Einstein on that one.
The famous double-slit experiment, or in fact just about any experiment dealing with quantum phenomena. Of course, if you like you can choose to believe that it's all determined (although, according to Conway's "free will theorem" you then have to assume your own behaviour is entirely determined) and merely appears in every way as if it were random - but from the point of view of science, by Occam's razor, the reasonable belief is that it truly is random.
What are people doing with drives to make them fail?
Powering them on and off a lot, in my experience. People who turn their machines on and off several times a day get through hard drives fairly quickly.
I generally don't mix up batches because I want to know where all the drives from a particular batch are, but maybe I should.
If you're not using drives from different batches in your arrays you have no business talking about data security. Seriously, to not even be using different batches (I would go with different manufacturers, in general) is just stupid.
Recently, I've just started getting into C++, and I can't understand why so many people hate the language with such a passion. The thing is, if you need/want to write your program in a compiled language with plenty of library support, then aside from C, what options are there?
Delphi or OCaml, several implementations of common lisp, and with SWIG you can wrap any library you need for any number of more obscure languages.
One very smart and experienced C programmer I know hates C++ with a passion complaining that "it's too complex" and just rejecting it outright.In my experience, he's right.
I haven't yet written (or debugged) any large programs in C++, so that could be why I'm still enthusastic. Perhaps after some time with the language I might see what everyone is so worked up about.
It's when you try reading (and debugging) someone else's large C++ program, written by someone who knew and used the advanced features, that you'll notice the problems. There are just far too many things in the language to learn easily, too many of which redefine syntax which you thought you knew what it did.
Streams - awsome. Shared (reference counting) pointers - awsome. Less need for the preprocessor - awsome. And the standard library (plus Boost too) is so vast... containers, algorithms, it's all there.
It's the vastness that's the problem. The parts of C++ that different people know never entirely overlap (and *no-one* knows the entire language), so when you have half a dozen programmers on a project you end up with everyone only able to maintain their own code.
It'll be done by genetic modification of humans, and I suspect we'll have to wait for a few generations to die out before that becomes politically acceptable. But yes, that's the way to do it, no doubt about it.
Why is that? What is "worse" about it than Ecmascript?
The huge amount of extra typing one has to do to write it. The many problems with the type system, like arrays losing their type at runtime. The lack of operator overloading. All the memory requirements and slowness of a scripting language without any of the ease of coding. The terrible default GUI library. And more.
For extra credit, explain why Java Web Start is worse than downloading a traditional application and installing it...
Because the traditional application will be handled by your package manager; you know where to go to uninstall it, if you are doing some sort of testing on all programs before installing that will get done, if you're deploying it across a large organisation you can use your existing mechanisms to do so, rather than having to learn a new, java-only way of doing all this. Next?
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, it's the internet. If you think we wouldn't laugh at the same thing happening to white people, well, you must be new here.
It's good enough now that I've found a windows program (presumably written for ~win98) that will run under wine but not on windows 2000. Unfortunately I'm not willing to publicly admit to posessing the program in question, so you'll have to take my word for it.
I'm always open to new ideas, but tere's a long way to go to disprove the big bang.
No. That which allows us to make predictions is useful. That which doesn't, isn't.
Matter can be created spontaneusly if there is sufficent energy. Yes, but where did the energy come from.
Matter in a gravitational well has a certain amount of negative energy; the theory is that enough matter was created that the rest mass energy of the matter was exactly equal to the amount of negative energy it had by dint of being near the rest of it.
As theory, I understand that science claims that the universe began with an explosion of an infinitely small volume having infinite mass. What does your scientific observation of explosions tell you about ensuing order?
That it would mostly destroy any structure present before it; that that which remained afterwards would be largely homogeneous. Which is true of the universe, if you look at it on the right scale.
Not at all; maybe Vista has bugs in (e.g.) its PCI support but the GP has a non-pci mobo, or there's some API which is broken but the GP's audio player doesn't use it. The GP hasn't done an exhaustive test of all of vista, and it's not as if vista runs the exact same code on every hardware configuration.
Because of course only black people can be rappers. I'd say you're the one being racist here.
Maybe someone younger than you wrote it. The switch to metric is inevitable when the system makes so much more sense to someone who looks at it without preconceptions.
For what it's worth, I do this all the time - unless I hear something to indicate otherwise, I assume no cars are coming, and I haven't got flattened yet. But in any case, taking my *default* position as disbelief doesn't mean not looking for evidence. Barely a week goes by when I don't talk to some religious person - but none of them have pointed me to enough evidence to believe in a god yet.
Yes, but they're still believing nothing without having a reason for it; being told something isn't a particularly good reason for believing something, but it's still a reason.
Yes; that's because one of these possible explanations is useful, and explanatory, and the other isn't.
Your explanation also poses another unanswered question: 'the lump came into being'. Why and how did the lump come into being?
At random, in the same way as the (well observed) creation of particle-antiparticle pairs in regions of space with enough energy. And that theory is something we can reason, and predict, about, and is a simpler than assuming it just happened (since we already have to assume that matter can be spontaneously created if there is sufficient energy), wheras positing a creator only complicates things, so lacks any explanatory power.
In logic, you cannot answer a question by posing another question, it does not fly.
But in science, it is perfectly reasonable to explain something unexplained in terms of something else unexplained if the latter is simpler. There is no "full" explanation for "why do things fall down?"; if we say "gravity" and give the rule for it, then we have only reduced the question to "why is there gravity?" But nevertheless, this is a good scientific idea, because it allows us to explain many complicated things (the motion of particles) with only one small assumption.
You dare experiment - you have no reason to believe it will cause anything bad.
Even believing an experiment will produce results requires belief. And who is going to perform an experiment (correctly) without some sort of belief in results?
You don't need to believe the experimental method works; you can make an empirical comparison with other possible ways of finding results (e.g. divine inspiration or something).
We don't know. The point is that positing a creator doesn't help any; it doesn't explain anything more, it doesn't make it more understandable, it doesn't make any more predictions.
One possible explanation is that, since in quantum theory things can spontaneously happen as long as energy is conserved, the lump came into being with its positive rest mass energy exactly balanced with the negative energy it has by virtue of being in a gravity well.
And they were probably just talking crap; just because you're a scientist doesn't necessarily make you honest.
When I was a kid they taught that species evolved gradually from one species to another. When they could not find any fossil evidence to support that they changed their story to species jump from one species to another.
Very few people are seriously claiming that. You need to find a better source for your science reporting.
As we get more information; evolutionary theory is getting weaker not stronger.
That's just utterly false.
Who said God had to be "good"? I don't attend services of any church, and fully believe that I there is nothing immoral in my not doing so; nevertheless, if I did believe in God I would do so.
People sometimes ask me if I believe in God. I always reply that the question is meaningless to me, because God's existence or nonexistence cannot be proven, and it has no bearing on my life. That is, I would behave exactly the way I do whether or not God were proven to exist or not, or even if I chose to believe he did or did not exist.
To believe that God has no effect upon you is entirely equivalent to not believing in God at all; those who care about God do because they believe that it *does* affect their lives.
You may, of course, say that you shouldn't have to disprove something, and you'd be correct. However, just because nobody has proved the existence of something doesn't necessarily mean that thing does not exist.
No, but it means the only logical position is to behave as if it didn't exist.
But realize that, in this case, you are choosing to believe it does not.
No. The default position is disbelief. We don't start believing in all the countless billions of possibilities and then eliminate those which are false; we start from nothing, and believe only in that which we have reason to believe exists. To say that something's existence is undecidable or irrelevant is a positive step, a choice that you are making.
Actually, no. If you go faster than the speed of light, then there is an inertial frame of reference (as valid as any other, since that's relativity) in which you have gone backwards in time.
The famous double-slit experiment, or in fact just about any experiment dealing with quantum phenomena. Of course, if you like you can choose to believe that it's all determined (although, according to Conway's "free will theorem" you then have to assume your own behaviour is entirely determined) and merely appears in every way as if it were random - but from the point of view of science, by Occam's razor, the reasonable belief is that it truly is random.
They do exist. If you're using 4-bit keys, better worry, the man's gonna find out that 15=3x5 soon.
If we get an open implementation of it then yes, it is cross-platform, just like C is cross-platform.
Powering them on and off a lot, in my experience. People who turn their machines on and off several times a day get through hard drives fairly quickly.
If you're not using drives from different batches in your arrays you have no business talking about data security. Seriously, to not even be using different batches (I would go with different manufacturers, in general) is just stupid.
Delphi or OCaml, several implementations of common lisp, and with SWIG you can wrap any library you need for any number of more obscure languages.
One very smart and experienced C programmer I know hates C++ with a passion complaining that "it's too complex" and just rejecting it outright.In my experience, he's right.
I haven't yet written (or debugged) any large programs in C++, so that could be why I'm still enthusastic. Perhaps after some time with the language I might see what everyone is so worked up about.
It's when you try reading (and debugging) someone else's large C++ program, written by someone who knew and used the advanced features, that you'll notice the problems. There are just far too many things in the language to learn easily, too many of which redefine syntax which you thought you knew what it did.
Streams - awsome. Shared (reference counting) pointers - awsome. Less need for the preprocessor - awsome. And the standard library (plus Boost too) is so vast... containers, algorithms, it's all there.
It's the vastness that's the problem. The parts of C++ that different people know never entirely overlap (and *no-one* knows the entire language), so when you have half a dozen programmers on a project you end up with everyone only able to maintain their own code.
But at the moment, openJDK and all the other open java projects are less usable than WINE.
It'll be done by genetic modification of humans, and I suspect we'll have to wait for a few generations to die out before that becomes politically acceptable. But yes, that's the way to do it, no doubt about it.
Are you allowed to do that with any other currency or means of payment?
The huge amount of extra typing one has to do to write it. The many problems with the type system, like arrays losing their type at runtime. The lack of operator overloading. All the memory requirements and slowness of a scripting language without any of the ease of coding. The terrible default GUI library. And more.
For extra credit, explain why Java Web Start is worse than downloading a traditional application and installing it...
Because the traditional application will be handled by your package manager; you know where to go to uninstall it, if you are doing some sort of testing on all programs before installing that will get done, if you're deploying it across a large organisation you can use your existing mechanisms to do so, rather than having to learn a new, java-only way of doing all this. Next?