Adobe Connect is a big deal for the Army and is quickly becoming as indispensable as e-mail for a means of collaboration.
Is it replacing e-mail? Part of the point is that Wave merges the capabilities of e-mail with those of IM and group chat and collaboration tools all into one protocol and program. Further, Wave is free, can be used from the Web without a plug-in, and is an open protocol so that it can freely interoperate with any other Wave tools/clients anyone makes for any platform. By contrast Adobe Connect cost $40/month and limited to 15 users per chat. It requires Adobe Flash and can't interoperate with any other clients because it is closed and owned by Adobe. This means, for example, there will not be an Adobe Connect client for the iPhone in the foreseeable future, but there will almost certainly be a Google Wave client in short order.
I don't think Adobe Connect is the same thing, even though in conjunction with e-mail and powerpoint it can be used for a subset of the same tasks. Not that that will necessarily matter to the US Army. The decision making process there, for procurement and standardization is fundamentally broken. It's good to know what the army is doing and what other parts of the government are doing, if for no other reason so that we can complain about how much money they're wasting on proprietary software licensing when the army is big enough to commission the creation of OSS tools which provide more value and long term flexibility.
Does it even matter why they aren't taking the money?
I fear it might.
If the application system is being flooded, that means that the market will potentially be flooded with companies that are required to respect net neutrality. Since they will by default provide a service that is better than the incumbent monopoly, then assuming that it is not a true natural monopoly the market place will become competitive.
There are two types of companies taking this money. The first are companies trying to compete in municipal areas where there is already competition. These companies, however, are still dependent upon the big boys who are not participating for backbone. That means the net neutrality can be castrated by those few. The second type of companies are trying to expand into unserved, rural areas. They are, again, wholly dependent upon one large company per area for access to the backbone. This provides the same problem as before. Anytime the big companies want they can move into these areas and undercut the little company that did all the hard work and all that government stimulus goes away, providing only the advantage that they sped up getting broadband to an area, not in making it any cheaper or more competitive in the long run.
Theoretically, small companies taking this money could grow and build their own backbone and compete with the big ones, but realistically we gave the big companies so many billions in subsidies in the first place that the playing field could only be leveled by addition monies given for this purpose as at a later date. Basically, we dug ourselves into an uncompetitive hole with government money and it will take either more money or serious legislation to undo the damage. Given how much the incumbents have to lobby with, it seems unlikely.
Oh yes, because I want my internet connection tapped 24/7 and all my comments that criticize the US government to be flagged
Why would you think this isn't happening now anyway? Except now the government isn't the only one who can tap into your connection, private corporations get to do so as well.
And just look at the crappy service you get from other government agencies like medicare, the lackluster performance of veterans hospitals, the annoyances of the post office, the general greed of the IRS, and the pain of it all.
Government run markets can and do suck in many instances, but privately run markets can and do suck as well. You list three government organizations. Of them, VA hospitals are currently among the best in the nation according to patients (although they were bad 20 years ago). The post Office does a pretty good job in my book compared to UPS and FedEx. The IRS is a lousy example since it isn't something private industry can do, collect taxes.
Yah, I really want the US government to provide broadband.
Broadband is a utility these days and should be treated as such. I happen to live in one of the best cities in the country for internet access because it has one of the largest wireless co-ops around. You can get free internet access anywhere in the city and much of the surrounding area, provided by local businesses and individuals who share part of their home connections. It sure beats all the privately run broadband options. I would like to see government step up and subsidize the creation of fast internet backbones with real competition for service across them, as other countries have done. We've already given more money to private corporations, per citizen, than many other countries, we just didn't attach strings to the money so nothing resulted. Right now the big providers aren't touching this money because they're counting on waiting for more later, without strings. The last thing they want is actual competition within a geographical area.
but you can bet that the US government will suck even worse. Or are you forgetting all the times they've screwed up technology (BBS raids, DMCA, etc)
Yeah, and there's also DARPA net, breaking up Bell, and several other things they've done that greatly benefited telecom technology. What's your point?
I've seen Jose speak a couple of times, and I am impressed by the manner in which they are finding the ghosts who think they can't be found.
I haven't talked to Jose for a while, but last I heard he and the other guys were doing well finding new types of malware and separating out malicious network traffic that is hard to differentiate from legitimate traffic. That said, they were not really doing things to find the one off attacks perpetrated by people who weren't interested in large scale and automated network attacks. The people I'd call ghosts are the ones who do small scale, specifically targeted attacks to get what they want, then walk away. If you're running a botnet, you aren't being very ghostlike; maybe more vampire like:)
All I'm trying to say is that, yes, there are fanatics that have adopted the concept of ID and have corrupted many of it's ideas to fit their own religious and political agendas. This outspoken sampling, however does not represent what the mainstream ID movement believes.
I see, so you assert there is a "mainstream" ID movement that doesn't express themselves publicly but instead form a secret cabal and meet in the sewers or something? They don't sound very mainstream to me.
Both Dawkins and Gould, as well as many other Evolutionists have openly made statements proclaiming that it was their understanding of evolution that led to their atheism.
So? Before that many famous people said astronomy led them to atheism. Neither implies that they are fundamentally incompatible with religious belief, they simply provide understanding of the universe that shows he universe makes sense without religion and, perhaps, makes better sense.
I know that there are evolutionary scientists that are also theists - I've met a few, but they don't advertise so I have no clue how to find others.
Of course there are, including notable and outspoken ones. Some of them certainly do advertise.
Similarly, there are a lot of people who subscribe to ID but not creationism.
I don't think that is true according to the common definition of ID.
Don't assume that just because the first 30 hits on Google revealed only crackpots, that you know what all IDers believe.
You mentioned a specific organization (ARN) as representing mainstream ID, yet Google doesn't present any information on their beliefs or show any publications of theirs or even references to their publications by others.If you claim they represent a mainstream view, surely you can provide a link to some of their papers or discussion or something. Otherwise, they can't exactly be mainstream.
But most people don't use the term "probability" in that way unless it is understood that they are talking in terms of pure statistics and probability theory. It is perfectly acceptable to use the term "probability" in the bayesian sense as it's been used here to express their beliefs about their perception of the likelihood of some evolutionary or pre-evolutionary sequence of events.
The likelihood of something happening is probability and perception has nothing to do with it except how accurate an estimate one can make. The argument about it being improbable therefor something else must have guided it is a non sequitur.
I understand your point, but it demonstrates that you don't understand the ID point. The real point that the IDers want to make is that they think the evidence shows that some of the events required for life have a probability of zero.
I've never heard anyone make such an argument, in this thread or elsewhere. Trying to claim you know what everyone else thinks and is trying to argue is presumptuous and pointless.
Therefore, your argument becomes a logical fallacy known as "assuming the consequent".
I take it you've never actually studied logic, since it becomes no such thing.
But that argument requires you to assume( and your debaters to agree) that only a natural sequence of events, all with probabilities greater than zero, could have occurred.
Umm, well that is true, but that's also a requirement of a logical argument.
I believe their use of the term "probability" is just fine for the argument that they are trying to make.
I don't see how any definition of "probability" negates the basic premises regarding how probability can be applied logically.
Therefore, I don't think it is productive to beat them up about the misuse of a mathematical term. Instead I choose to challenge them to consider that what they perceive is improbable might be highly probable under the right conditions.
Why? Life forming from nonliving chemicals is highly improbable in any given instance, but that is immaterial to logically determining what did happen. If people don't understand that, telling them isn't "beating them up" it's informing them of basic mental tools they need to reason in the real world.
Most intelligent theist that believe in evolution, don't make the probabilities argument about evolution from one 'species' to another.
It doesn't matter since both are flawed concepts from a probability standpoint. I'd have though most people here would have had to have passed at least an introductory probability course in their education at some point.
So the question isn't about some mythical alligator but rather a particular mythical single cell prokaryote... What are those odds?
What are the odds of every atom in the sun being in the exact position they are currently in? What are the odds that random background radiation would cause exactly the static coming out of the speakers when your radio is not tuned to a station? In any complex system all odds are going to be infinitesimally small and looking at past event and trying to use probability to justify things violates basic tenets of probability. Odds like that are only useful predictively. By the logic you're presenting, the sun could not have formed naturally either, not could any complex thing have happened. The logic is flawed.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. From my reading that definition claim the evolution of species cannot function according to the existing theory and there is another component (god) which while not observed or demonstrated by any experiment must be intervening.
Just because you are only exposed to the rantings of fanatics
I read the available literature on the topic. I'm not sure who the ARN is, but Google shows no published research from them in the first 30 hits. They claim to have a journal but none of it is available for review online and none of it seems to be quoted anywhere in any peer reviewed journals.
If I only listened to Richard Dawkins' and Stephen J. Gould's views on evolution, I might come to the conclusion that acceptance of the theory requires me to become an atheist.
Only if you misunderstand what they say, from what I've read of them. They have beliefs and they aren't shy about expressing them, but I've never heard either claim atheism is a requirement for the theory of evolution, only that evolution and science in general provides no support for religious belief and, therefor, logic dictates that there is no reason to hold religious beliefs.
If OEMs have the freedom to choose which Notepad to ship with Windows they'll pick the one that offers them the best deal.
Absolutely. This is how it works in other markets.
Whatever the consumer ends up with will be added to the list of crapware we already have to uninstall every time you buy a new Dell or other OEM system.
I disagree. Right now, those markets are not operating at all and without any real choice there is little incentive for OEMs to try to differentiate their products to win end users using anything but hardware. The perception among users is that software is the same on all computers, with mild differentiation between XP and Vista for some users. Fixing the broken market would make other software a real differentiating factor and OEMs would be motivated to install whatever is best for them... but their sales numbers would change based upon the sort of reputation they developed from the installed software. The market would quickly shift towards computers that gained a reputation for installing good software that was not annoying and which worked well and most OEMs would respond.
I'd rather have a less functional bundled MS notepad by default than some other crapware app that paid the OEM to distribute it.
Why? If you read Slashdot you almost certainly install a decent text editor before doing anything on a system anyway and if you regularly work on other people's computers you probably already have a flash drive full of decent applications to use. Why is uninstalling some text editor chosen by the OEM which may suck or may be decent any more onerous? Especially when the potential reward of a properly operating free market has such potential?
Imagine if Microsoft had built an ad-blocker into the heart of IE8. Not an add-on engine for ABP&co to use, but built into the browser, on by default, administered by Microsoft themselves. It wouldn't be "targeting" Google directly, any more than blocking pop-ups targeted any specific advertiser, it would none-the-less royally fuck Google's revenue. 40% browser marketshare to Firefox, most using ABP, 20% IE8 all using MS-ad-block.
That's an interesting idea. MS could go about it in one of two ways. They could either block all ads or they could block a subset of ads that does not include MS's own. This latter idea would raise red flags to antitrust regulators immediately, but MS hasn't shied away from such action in the past. The former would hit MS's advertising revenue, but nothing they couldn't write off in the interest of strategy if internal politics don't block it.
I also think the EU's ruling that shipping windows with IE as illegal doesn't make a lot of sense, given all the other stuff they ship with windows and always have shipped with windows. Why is only one of them a bad thing? If the others are ok, why is the browser not?
Actually, many of the things that ship bundled with Windows are bad, as in bad for the operation of the free market and benefits normally brought by competition. You might have noticed MS went to court over bundling WMP as well. The determining factor would be if there was a separate, preexisting market at the time of the tying. Many of the things that ship with Windows would be decisions better left to OEMs (if MS could be prevented from illegally pressuring them) and decided by the market.
The example I hear most often from people who don't understand antitrust law but are adamant about expressing their uneducated opinions anyway, is Notepad. Shouldn't MS be forced to unbundle that? I say, yes. Notepad sucks. It can't properly handle unicode and line endings hundreds of freeware programs have been able to deal with fine for years. It doesn't spell or grammar check, doesn't have a search and replace and doesn't have multiple undo. If Notepad were not bundled with Windows OEMs would be out there right now picking a text editor to include with the computers they ship. Pretty much all of them are better than Notepad and suddenly there would be a point of competition for computer vendors with consumers giving their money to whatever company gives them the best experience. Why shouldn't Notepad be forced to compete on even ground based upon its merits? If it had to, maybe MS would fix some of these problems going forward and we'd all be better off.
The long-odds I'm talking about aren't just drawing one particular permutation after shuffling the deck. It's more like, what are the odds of putting many decks of cards into one of those old machines they used to blow money around in and have contentstants grab at the money, then turning off the machine, and getting several royal flushes that just happen to land in a nice neat pile?
The problem with that analogy is that who decides that a royal flush is any more significant than a 1,5,6,8,J combination? That's even less likely to have happened, but if after the fact you compute the odds, that's not a logical argument for something other than random chance being a factor.
It *could* happen, but the odds would seem to be so far against it it should be close to impossible in practice.
And this is why I say you don't understand probability. What are the odds that of all the possibilities a given atom of carbon would be at a given set of coordinates in the universe? The odds are so infinitesimally small as to dwarf the chances of life coming about as a result of random processes. Does that mean god had to have placed every carbon atom where they are or does it mean carbon can't exist in space? Neither, it means your argument is flawed because the chances of any specific thing happening in a complex system is always infinitesimally small, but the odds that something will happen are 100%. It's only if you predict an event in advance that probabilities are useful. If you flipped a fair coin 50 times and got heads every time, what are the chances you'll get heads if you flip it one more time? 50%. You'll note this is significantly better than the odds that if you flip a coin 51 times you'll get heads every time. This is a critical concept to understand in order to pass your intro to probability class. After the fact, the probability of something having happened is not useful in the way you're trying to apply it in your argument.
If OS X can't change the Windows mindset, Chrome sure as hell can't.
The difference between OS X and ChromeOS is that OS X is Apple's crown jewel. It is how they differentiate their computers and make money.If they were to seperate it from their hardware they'd be directly competing against windows and MS could use their Windows monopoly to crush Apple unless Apple wrote it off as a loss and used their other revenue streams to support it. In short, Apple would have to put 50%+ of their profit on the line for very little return at high risk. It's not good business.
ChromeOS, on the other hand, is a value added to Google's crown jewels, their advertising and search business. Google is not risking any primary investment and can afford to develop the OS at a loss. Further, they can go past Apple's use of open source and gain more free code and work from the community than is practical for Apple.
Apple's only practical business model is to chip away at the Windows monopoly and hope others do the same until it is no longer powerful enough to be used to crush them. Google can go whole hog right away and directly compete with Windows by giving Chrome OS away and supporting it without any fear of their profits being destroyed. It's a different game.
However, looking at the amazing complexities of life, I still feel that given the long odds, the 'completely random permutation moderated by natural selection' isn't wholly sufficient to explain all life either.
I don't think you understand probabilities. If someone gets a royal flush in poker, there was only a 0.000154% chance they would have gotten that, so they must be cheating. Except of course that they have four times the odds of getting that as of getting any specific hand. A royal flush is only meaningful because we've assigned meaning to that particular combination, just as we've attached meaning to our current state of existence. If we lived in a world slightly different than we do now would you be thinking, "well clearly this can be explained by evolution because alligators are mythical, but darn if they existed I'd have to say some magical force had a hand in things"?
ID: Evolution is directed by an unseen, omniscient being who is undetectable and not bound by the laws of physics or the boundries of reality.
I've never heard an ID proponent or read an ID paper that conforms to this definition. In fact, 90% of the things with Intelligent Design in them are attacks on the validity of the theory of evolution, in attempts to discredit it. From my experience a better example for ID would be: Evolution is wrong because X so what really happened must have been directed by some unknown being whose name we aren't going to mention for legal reasons *wink*.
There are people on both sides that believe they're incompatible. Richard Dawkins is one of them.
That's not my understanding of Dawkin's position. He says there is not a god, because there is no evidence to support the existence of one. He doesn't say evolution specifically proves there is not a god, nor that if there was a god, that god could not have used the process of evolution to create things.
Here's an analogy. You're standing in front of a closed door. Some people think there is a dangerous gorilla on the other side because there is a slip of paper that reads "dangerous gorilla" that was on the floor. After doing some research, it is clear that the slip of paper was torn from a novel about a gorilla and further, there is a an old label on the door that says "bathroom", but which was covered up. The equivalent position in this situation would be saying there is not a dangerous gorilla on the other side of the door, because there is no actual evidence or that. Not that it is impossible there is a gorilla on the other side of the door because the slip of paper came from a novel.
Intelligent design is not based on Biblical literalism at all.
I disagree. Intelligent design was created for the purpose of promoting young earth creationism and was, in fact, young earth creationism documents with a quick copy and paste done to them. Theology students should, of course, be versed in the origins of these movements. Young earth creationism began with the literal interpretation and was trying to defend it against prevailing scientific findings by attacking those findings without presenting scientific evidence for any alternative theory.
Instead it is a philosophical point based on a scientific argument.
What "scientific argument"? I've never found anyone who can tell me what the hypothesis of intelligent design even is. What experiments have been performed? What predictions were made and confirmed? Many times I've heard people claim that intelligent design is scientific, but none of those people, when questioned, even seem to understand what the scientific method is. A near as I can tell the assertion that intelligent design is is science is just propaganda designed to make is sound more credible to people who don't know what science is in the first place.
Now, most scientists have found the argument unconvincing.
To find an argument unconvincing there has to be a scientific hypothesis and an experiment. So far, I haven't seen anything to even consider.
But to conflate it with creationism per se shows that you know as little about theology...
Actually it shows you don't know the origins of the movement you're discussing. The Freshwater trial did a very good job of going through the origins of the movement. Look up the search and replace graph from Kitzmiller v. Dover trial or the "wedge document" if you'd like to educate yourself on the actual origins of intelligent design as shown in several court cases.
...as the use of the word "theologist" does (the word is "theologian".)
Again you're mistaken. "theologist" and "theologian" are both valid words you'll find in the dictionary. I used the former because the connotation implies that we're talking about people who study christianity in particular instead of religion in general. This is completely appropriate for discussion of learning at a christian seminary (although one would hope they cover comparative religion as well).
Wait, wait, wait... You're telling me that a Christian, theological seminary actually has a class that involves defending the tenets of the school's beliefs? This is an outrage!
I think the point being, said seminary is having students defend a belief that pretty much all educated christians and respectable organized churches abandoned as disproved a hundred years ago. It's the same as a seminary requiring their student to preach that the earth is flat or that the sun and planets revolve around the earth. Sure wackos on the internet and uneducated independent preachers might espouse these ideas... but not people who went to school and are even moderately educated.
The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools [wikipedia.org] is a regional accreditation agency recognized by the DOE.
Yeah, it's amusing to look at the list of schools accredited by SACS. Strange how none of them are anything you've ever heard of unless spanish is you first language, huh?
SBTS is part of the "new" SBC, and so is basically fundamentalist in outlook, and virtually all students and faculty will be fundamentalist in outlook. If they weren't, they would have gone somewhere else. It's not unreasonable to assume that most students are going to hold to an ID or Creationist point of view.
Does no one else find this insane? It's like starting a "new" school for optometrists and recruiting only various stripes of white supremacists. Nearly all students already believe people with blue eyes can see further and better or they'd be going to another school. Silly me, I thought schools were supposed to be for educating oneself, not reinforcing already existing beliefs. Any serious optometrist, upon educating themselves a little bit has to reject such an unsupported belief. Any serious christian theologist upon reading the bible has to reject biblical literalism, including the elements of creationism that the intelligent design propaganda espouses.
This leaves me with two possibilities. Either this "school" is not in the business of educating students in any serious way or this school is educating students in the art of spreading propaganda to others which they (having a modicum of eduction) do not believe themselves. Either is quite contemptible.
I don't understand, what you are talking about. Maybe, you need to put some more work into your postings, rather than argue in one-liners. Thanks.
This always amazes me. This is an article talking about potential antitrust problems with cell phone companies and you're chiming in with your opinions, but you don't know what trusts are in this context. Doesn't it seem prudent to learn at least the concept of what you're discussing before forming opinions on it and expressing those opinions?
They can probably keep it up until 2010 when their exclusivity contract with AT&T expires. Then we'll see what happens. I suspect Apple will go one of two routes:
sign exclusivity with either Verizon or AT&T based upon which will give them the most ability to sell more iphones by enabling all the functions they want including VoIP and SMS type applications.
Refuse to sign exclusivity with any vendor and sell to all of them and let the vendors compete for service contracts by supporting more of the cool or money saving abilities of the iPhone apps like this one.
...slam after slam of bad press against it is slowly turning the opinion of the technically inclined.
That's never been their target market. Buy a Blackberry or Android based phone if you want to be able to hack it to do everything. Apple is targeting the mainstream user who wants a smartphone with limited features, but ones that actually are easy enough for them to use. It's a lot bigger market than technically inclined people are.
Google Wave could be something really nice but Google really have to clean up their "we want to own all your data", "you use our software freely but here are the terms which are privacy breaking" image which has really reached beyond "high tech tinfoil hat" community to general public.
Umm, Google open sourced the protocol and client. What more do you want? You will soon be able to run Google Wave on your own server with your own client and never touch anything Google runs. I don't see the problem.
I didn't like their "we sudo software update every 2 hours or don't install google earth" attitude. Oh really? I replied " Get the hell out of my machine." with rm -rf
Why don't you run Google Earth for you amusement but limit it so it can't sudo update, ala ACLs, sandboxing , SELinux, VM, etc? It seems like OS's should make this easier, but it is doable now. Aren't OS's supposed to be giving users control over what applications running on top of them are doing?
If all you need is a VPN connection to home office to be productive, suddenly Indians and Chinese and Israelis and Irishman can bid for and compete for the same job.
This is true, but how will they get the job in the first place? When telecommuting so long as your code gets checked in and works, many employers are happy. Many of those same employers, however, will balk at hiring a coder they haven sat down and talked to face to face.
In the long term, however, there will absolutely be more and more work done remotely and put up for bids around the world to the detriment of people living in places with a high cost of living. Of course the whole outsourcing versus internal growth thing swings back and forth over time. The former provides more agility and lower risks in some cases, but also reduces in house talent, generates new, trained competitors, and shrinks headcount and accompanying power of managers within the company. If the only thing you have going for you over the average worker in the third world is that you're physically closer, well that sucks, even if it will be enough of an advantage much of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Adobe Connect is a big deal for the Army and is quickly becoming as indispensable as e-mail for a means of collaboration.
Is it replacing e-mail? Part of the point is that Wave merges the capabilities of e-mail with those of IM and group chat and collaboration tools all into one protocol and program. Further, Wave is free, can be used from the Web without a plug-in, and is an open protocol so that it can freely interoperate with any other Wave tools/clients anyone makes for any platform. By contrast Adobe Connect cost $40/month and limited to 15 users per chat. It requires Adobe Flash and can't interoperate with any other clients because it is closed and owned by Adobe. This means, for example, there will not be an Adobe Connect client for the iPhone in the foreseeable future, but there will almost certainly be a Google Wave client in short order.
I don't think Adobe Connect is the same thing, even though in conjunction with e-mail and powerpoint it can be used for a subset of the same tasks. Not that that will necessarily matter to the US Army. The decision making process there, for procurement and standardization is fundamentally broken. It's good to know what the army is doing and what other parts of the government are doing, if for no other reason so that we can complain about how much money they're wasting on proprietary software licensing when the army is big enough to commission the creation of OSS tools which provide more value and long term flexibility.
Google Wave sounds like an interesting idea but the need for an always on broadband connection to make it work could be a problem...
Umm, what need? From the demos it works just fine for people who are sporadically online, much like e-mail in fact.
Does it even matter why they aren't taking the money?
I fear it might.
If the application system is being flooded, that means that the market will potentially be flooded with companies that are required to respect net neutrality. Since they will by default provide a service that is better than the incumbent monopoly, then assuming that it is not a true natural monopoly the market place will become competitive.
There are two types of companies taking this money. The first are companies trying to compete in municipal areas where there is already competition. These companies, however, are still dependent upon the big boys who are not participating for backbone. That means the net neutrality can be castrated by those few. The second type of companies are trying to expand into unserved, rural areas. They are, again, wholly dependent upon one large company per area for access to the backbone. This provides the same problem as before. Anytime the big companies want they can move into these areas and undercut the little company that did all the hard work and all that government stimulus goes away, providing only the advantage that they sped up getting broadband to an area, not in making it any cheaper or more competitive in the long run.
Theoretically, small companies taking this money could grow and build their own backbone and compete with the big ones, but realistically we gave the big companies so many billions in subsidies in the first place that the playing field could only be leveled by addition monies given for this purpose as at a later date. Basically, we dug ourselves into an uncompetitive hole with government money and it will take either more money or serious legislation to undo the damage. Given how much the incumbents have to lobby with, it seems unlikely.
Oh yes, because I want my internet connection tapped 24/7 and all my comments that criticize the US government to be flagged
Why would you think this isn't happening now anyway? Except now the government isn't the only one who can tap into your connection, private corporations get to do so as well.
And just look at the crappy service you get from other government agencies like medicare, the lackluster performance of veterans hospitals, the annoyances of the post office, the general greed of the IRS, and the pain of it all.
Government run markets can and do suck in many instances, but privately run markets can and do suck as well. You list three government organizations. Of them, VA hospitals are currently among the best in the nation according to patients (although they were bad 20 years ago). The post Office does a pretty good job in my book compared to UPS and FedEx. The IRS is a lousy example since it isn't something private industry can do, collect taxes.
Yah, I really want the US government to provide broadband.
Broadband is a utility these days and should be treated as such. I happen to live in one of the best cities in the country for internet access because it has one of the largest wireless co-ops around. You can get free internet access anywhere in the city and much of the surrounding area, provided by local businesses and individuals who share part of their home connections. It sure beats all the privately run broadband options. I would like to see government step up and subsidize the creation of fast internet backbones with real competition for service across them, as other countries have done. We've already given more money to private corporations, per citizen, than many other countries, we just didn't attach strings to the money so nothing resulted. Right now the big providers aren't touching this money because they're counting on waiting for more later, without strings. The last thing they want is actual competition within a geographical area.
but you can bet that the US government will suck even worse. Or are you forgetting all the times they've screwed up technology (BBS raids, DMCA, etc)
Yeah, and there's also DARPA net, breaking up Bell, and several other things they've done that greatly benefited telecom technology. What's your point?
I've seen Jose speak a couple of times, and I am impressed by the manner in which they are finding the ghosts who think they can't be found.
I haven't talked to Jose for a while, but last I heard he and the other guys were doing well finding new types of malware and separating out malicious network traffic that is hard to differentiate from legitimate traffic. That said, they were not really doing things to find the one off attacks perpetrated by people who weren't interested in large scale and automated network attacks. The people I'd call ghosts are the ones who do small scale, specifically targeted attacks to get what they want, then walk away. If you're running a botnet, you aren't being very ghostlike; maybe more vampire like :)
All I'm trying to say is that, yes, there are fanatics that have adopted the concept of ID and have corrupted many of it's ideas to fit their own religious and political agendas. This outspoken sampling, however does not represent what the mainstream ID movement believes.
I see, so you assert there is a "mainstream" ID movement that doesn't express themselves publicly but instead form a secret cabal and meet in the sewers or something? They don't sound very mainstream to me.
Both Dawkins and Gould, as well as many other Evolutionists have openly made statements proclaiming that it was their understanding of evolution that led to their atheism.
So? Before that many famous people said astronomy led them to atheism. Neither implies that they are fundamentally incompatible with religious belief, they simply provide understanding of the universe that shows he universe makes sense without religion and, perhaps, makes better sense.
I know that there are evolutionary scientists that are also theists - I've met a few, but they don't advertise so I have no clue how to find others.
Of course there are, including notable and outspoken ones. Some of them certainly do advertise.
Similarly, there are a lot of people who subscribe to ID but not creationism.
I don't think that is true according to the common definition of ID.
Don't assume that just because the first 30 hits on Google revealed only crackpots, that you know what all IDers believe.
You mentioned a specific organization (ARN) as representing mainstream ID, yet Google doesn't present any information on their beliefs or show any publications of theirs or even references to their publications by others.If you claim they represent a mainstream view, surely you can provide a link to some of their papers or discussion or something. Otherwise, they can't exactly be mainstream.
But most people don't use the term "probability" in that way unless it is understood that they are talking in terms of pure statistics and probability theory. It is perfectly acceptable to use the term "probability" in the bayesian sense as it's been used here to express their beliefs about their perception of the likelihood of some evolutionary or pre-evolutionary sequence of events.
The likelihood of something happening is probability and perception has nothing to do with it except how accurate an estimate one can make. The argument about it being improbable therefor something else must have guided it is a non sequitur.
I understand your point, but it demonstrates that you don't understand the ID point. The real point that the IDers want to make is that they think the evidence shows that some of the events required for life have a probability of zero.
I've never heard anyone make such an argument, in this thread or elsewhere. Trying to claim you know what everyone else thinks and is trying to argue is presumptuous and pointless.
Therefore, your argument becomes a logical fallacy known as "assuming the consequent".
I take it you've never actually studied logic, since it becomes no such thing.
But that argument requires you to assume( and your debaters to agree) that only a natural sequence of events, all with probabilities greater than zero, could have occurred.
Umm, well that is true, but that's also a requirement of a logical argument.
I believe their use of the term "probability" is just fine for the argument that they are trying to make.
I don't see how any definition of "probability" negates the basic premises regarding how probability can be applied logically.
Therefore, I don't think it is productive to beat them up about the misuse of a mathematical term. Instead I choose to challenge them to consider that what they perceive is improbable might be highly probable under the right conditions.
Why? Life forming from nonliving chemicals is highly improbable in any given instance, but that is immaterial to logically determining what did happen. If people don't understand that, telling them isn't "beating them up" it's informing them of basic mental tools they need to reason in the real world.
Most intelligent theist that believe in evolution, don't make the probabilities argument about evolution from one 'species' to another.
It doesn't matter since both are flawed concepts from a probability standpoint. I'd have though most people here would have had to have passed at least an introductory probability course in their education at some point.
So the question isn't about some mythical alligator but rather a particular mythical single cell prokaryote... What are those odds?
What are the odds of every atom in the sun being in the exact position they are currently in? What are the odds that random background radiation would cause exactly the static coming out of the speakers when your radio is not tuned to a station? In any complex system all odds are going to be infinitesimally small and looking at past event and trying to use probability to justify things violates basic tenets of probability. Odds like that are only useful predictively. By the logic you're presenting, the sun could not have formed naturally either, not could any complex thing have happened. The logic is flawed.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. From my reading that definition claim the evolution of species cannot function according to the existing theory and there is another component (god) which while not observed or demonstrated by any experiment must be intervening.
Just because you are only exposed to the rantings of fanatics
I read the available literature on the topic. I'm not sure who the ARN is, but Google shows no published research from them in the first 30 hits. They claim to have a journal but none of it is available for review online and none of it seems to be quoted anywhere in any peer reviewed journals.
If I only listened to Richard Dawkins' and Stephen J. Gould's views on evolution, I might come to the conclusion that acceptance of the theory requires me to become an atheist.
Only if you misunderstand what they say, from what I've read of them. They have beliefs and they aren't shy about expressing them, but I've never heard either claim atheism is a requirement for the theory of evolution, only that evolution and science in general provides no support for religious belief and, therefor, logic dictates that there is no reason to hold religious beliefs.
If OEMs have the freedom to choose which Notepad to ship with Windows they'll pick the one that offers them the best deal.
Absolutely. This is how it works in other markets.
Whatever the consumer ends up with will be added to the list of crapware we already have to uninstall every time you buy a new Dell or other OEM system.
I disagree. Right now, those markets are not operating at all and without any real choice there is little incentive for OEMs to try to differentiate their products to win end users using anything but hardware. The perception among users is that software is the same on all computers, with mild differentiation between XP and Vista for some users. Fixing the broken market would make other software a real differentiating factor and OEMs would be motivated to install whatever is best for them... but their sales numbers would change based upon the sort of reputation they developed from the installed software. The market would quickly shift towards computers that gained a reputation for installing good software that was not annoying and which worked well and most OEMs would respond.
I'd rather have a less functional bundled MS notepad by default than some other crapware app that paid the OEM to distribute it.
Why? If you read Slashdot you almost certainly install a decent text editor before doing anything on a system anyway and if you regularly work on other people's computers you probably already have a flash drive full of decent applications to use. Why is uninstalling some text editor chosen by the OEM which may suck or may be decent any more onerous? Especially when the potential reward of a properly operating free market has such potential?
Imagine if Microsoft had built an ad-blocker into the heart of IE8. Not an add-on engine for ABP&co to use, but built into the browser, on by default, administered by Microsoft themselves. It wouldn't be "targeting" Google directly, any more than blocking pop-ups targeted any specific advertiser, it would none-the-less royally fuck Google's revenue. 40% browser marketshare to Firefox, most using ABP, 20% IE8 all using MS-ad-block.
That's an interesting idea. MS could go about it in one of two ways. They could either block all ads or they could block a subset of ads that does not include MS's own. This latter idea would raise red flags to antitrust regulators immediately, but MS hasn't shied away from such action in the past. The former would hit MS's advertising revenue, but nothing they couldn't write off in the interest of strategy if internal politics don't block it.
I also think the EU's ruling that shipping windows with IE as illegal doesn't make a lot of sense, given all the other stuff they ship with windows and always have shipped with windows. Why is only one of them a bad thing? If the others are ok, why is the browser not?
Actually, many of the things that ship bundled with Windows are bad, as in bad for the operation of the free market and benefits normally brought by competition. You might have noticed MS went to court over bundling WMP as well. The determining factor would be if there was a separate, preexisting market at the time of the tying. Many of the things that ship with Windows would be decisions better left to OEMs (if MS could be prevented from illegally pressuring them) and decided by the market.
The example I hear most often from people who don't understand antitrust law but are adamant about expressing their uneducated opinions anyway, is Notepad. Shouldn't MS be forced to unbundle that? I say, yes. Notepad sucks. It can't properly handle unicode and line endings hundreds of freeware programs have been able to deal with fine for years. It doesn't spell or grammar check, doesn't have a search and replace and doesn't have multiple undo. If Notepad were not bundled with Windows OEMs would be out there right now picking a text editor to include with the computers they ship. Pretty much all of them are better than Notepad and suddenly there would be a point of competition for computer vendors with consumers giving their money to whatever company gives them the best experience. Why shouldn't Notepad be forced to compete on even ground based upon its merits? If it had to, maybe MS would fix some of these problems going forward and we'd all be better off.
The long-odds I'm talking about aren't just drawing one particular permutation after shuffling the deck. It's more like, what are the odds of putting many decks of cards into one of those old machines they used to blow money around in and have contentstants grab at the money, then turning off the machine, and getting several royal flushes that just happen to land in a nice neat pile?
The problem with that analogy is that who decides that a royal flush is any more significant than a 1,5,6,8,J combination? That's even less likely to have happened, but if after the fact you compute the odds, that's not a logical argument for something other than random chance being a factor.
It *could* happen, but the odds would seem to be so far against it it should be close to impossible in practice.
And this is why I say you don't understand probability. What are the odds that of all the possibilities a given atom of carbon would be at a given set of coordinates in the universe? The odds are so infinitesimally small as to dwarf the chances of life coming about as a result of random processes. Does that mean god had to have placed every carbon atom where they are or does it mean carbon can't exist in space? Neither, it means your argument is flawed because the chances of any specific thing happening in a complex system is always infinitesimally small, but the odds that something will happen are 100%. It's only if you predict an event in advance that probabilities are useful. If you flipped a fair coin 50 times and got heads every time, what are the chances you'll get heads if you flip it one more time? 50%. You'll note this is significantly better than the odds that if you flip a coin 51 times you'll get heads every time. This is a critical concept to understand in order to pass your intro to probability class. After the fact, the probability of something having happened is not useful in the way you're trying to apply it in your argument.
If OS X can't change the Windows mindset, Chrome sure as hell can't.
The difference between OS X and ChromeOS is that OS X is Apple's crown jewel. It is how they differentiate their computers and make money.If they were to seperate it from their hardware they'd be directly competing against windows and MS could use their Windows monopoly to crush Apple unless Apple wrote it off as a loss and used their other revenue streams to support it. In short, Apple would have to put 50%+ of their profit on the line for very little return at high risk. It's not good business.
ChromeOS, on the other hand, is a value added to Google's crown jewels, their advertising and search business. Google is not risking any primary investment and can afford to develop the OS at a loss. Further, they can go past Apple's use of open source and gain more free code and work from the community than is practical for Apple.
Apple's only practical business model is to chip away at the Windows monopoly and hope others do the same until it is no longer powerful enough to be used to crush them. Google can go whole hog right away and directly compete with Windows by giving Chrome OS away and supporting it without any fear of their profits being destroyed. It's a different game.
However, looking at the amazing complexities of life, I still feel that given the long odds, the 'completely random permutation moderated by natural selection' isn't wholly sufficient to explain all life either.
I don't think you understand probabilities. If someone gets a royal flush in poker, there was only a 0.000154% chance they would have gotten that, so they must be cheating. Except of course that they have four times the odds of getting that as of getting any specific hand. A royal flush is only meaningful because we've assigned meaning to that particular combination, just as we've attached meaning to our current state of existence. If we lived in a world slightly different than we do now would you be thinking, "well clearly this can be explained by evolution because alligators are mythical, but darn if they existed I'd have to say some magical force had a hand in things"?
ID: Evolution is directed by an unseen, omniscient being who is undetectable and not bound by the laws of physics or the boundries of reality.
I've never heard an ID proponent or read an ID paper that conforms to this definition. In fact, 90% of the things with Intelligent Design in them are attacks on the validity of the theory of evolution, in attempts to discredit it. From my experience a better example for ID would be: Evolution is wrong because X so what really happened must have been directed by some unknown being whose name we aren't going to mention for legal reasons *wink*.
There are people on both sides that believe they're incompatible. Richard Dawkins is one of them.
That's not my understanding of Dawkin's position. He says there is not a god, because there is no evidence to support the existence of one. He doesn't say evolution specifically proves there is not a god, nor that if there was a god, that god could not have used the process of evolution to create things.
Here's an analogy. You're standing in front of a closed door. Some people think there is a dangerous gorilla on the other side because there is a slip of paper that reads "dangerous gorilla" that was on the floor. After doing some research, it is clear that the slip of paper was torn from a novel about a gorilla and further, there is a an old label on the door that says "bathroom", but which was covered up. The equivalent position in this situation would be saying there is not a dangerous gorilla on the other side of the door, because there is no actual evidence or that. Not that it is impossible there is a gorilla on the other side of the door because the slip of paper came from a novel.
Intelligent design is not based on Biblical literalism at all.
I disagree. Intelligent design was created for the purpose of promoting young earth creationism and was, in fact, young earth creationism documents with a quick copy and paste done to them. Theology students should, of course, be versed in the origins of these movements. Young earth creationism began with the literal interpretation and was trying to defend it against prevailing scientific findings by attacking those findings without presenting scientific evidence for any alternative theory.
Instead it is a philosophical point based on a scientific argument.
What "scientific argument"? I've never found anyone who can tell me what the hypothesis of intelligent design even is. What experiments have been performed? What predictions were made and confirmed? Many times I've heard people claim that intelligent design is scientific, but none of those people, when questioned, even seem to understand what the scientific method is. A near as I can tell the assertion that intelligent design is is science is just propaganda designed to make is sound more credible to people who don't know what science is in the first place.
Now, most scientists have found the argument unconvincing.
To find an argument unconvincing there has to be a scientific hypothesis and an experiment. So far, I haven't seen anything to even consider.
But to conflate it with creationism per se shows that you know as little about theology...
Actually it shows you don't know the origins of the movement you're discussing. The Freshwater trial did a very good job of going through the origins of the movement. Look up the search and replace graph from Kitzmiller v. Dover trial or the "wedge document" if you'd like to educate yourself on the actual origins of intelligent design as shown in several court cases.
...as the use of the word "theologist" does (the word is "theologian".)
Again you're mistaken. "theologist" and "theologian" are both valid words you'll find in the dictionary. I used the former because the connotation implies that we're talking about people who study christianity in particular instead of religion in general. This is completely appropriate for discussion of learning at a christian seminary (although one would hope they cover comparative religion as well).
Wait, wait, wait... You're telling me that a Christian, theological seminary actually has a class that involves defending the tenets of the school's beliefs? This is an outrage!
I think the point being, said seminary is having students defend a belief that pretty much all educated christians and respectable organized churches abandoned as disproved a hundred years ago. It's the same as a seminary requiring their student to preach that the earth is flat or that the sun and planets revolve around the earth. Sure wackos on the internet and uneducated independent preachers might espouse these ideas... but not people who went to school and are even moderately educated.
The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools [wikipedia.org] is a regional accreditation agency recognized by the DOE.
Yeah, it's amusing to look at the list of schools accredited by SACS. Strange how none of them are anything you've ever heard of unless spanish is you first language, huh?
SBTS is part of the "new" SBC, and so is basically fundamentalist in outlook, and virtually all students and faculty will be fundamentalist in outlook. If they weren't, they would have gone somewhere else. It's not unreasonable to assume that most students are going to hold to an ID or Creationist point of view.
Does no one else find this insane? It's like starting a "new" school for optometrists and recruiting only various stripes of white supremacists. Nearly all students already believe people with blue eyes can see further and better or they'd be going to another school. Silly me, I thought schools were supposed to be for educating oneself, not reinforcing already existing beliefs. Any serious optometrist, upon educating themselves a little bit has to reject such an unsupported belief. Any serious christian theologist upon reading the bible has to reject biblical literalism, including the elements of creationism that the intelligent design propaganda espouses.
This leaves me with two possibilities. Either this "school" is not in the business of educating students in any serious way or this school is educating students in the art of spreading propaganda to others which they (having a modicum of eduction) do not believe themselves. Either is quite contemptible.
I don't understand, what you are talking about. Maybe, you need to put some more work into your postings, rather than argue in one-liners. Thanks.
This always amazes me. This is an article talking about potential antitrust problems with cell phone companies and you're chiming in with your opinions, but you don't know what trusts are in this context. Doesn't it seem prudent to learn at least the concept of what you're discussing before forming opinions on it and expressing those opinions?
How long can Apple keep this up?
They can probably keep it up until 2010 when their exclusivity contract with AT&T expires. Then we'll see what happens. I suspect Apple will go one of two routes:
...slam after slam of bad press against it is slowly turning the opinion of the technically inclined.
That's never been their target market. Buy a Blackberry or Android based phone if you want to be able to hack it to do everything. Apple is targeting the mainstream user who wants a smartphone with limited features, but ones that actually are easy enough for them to use. It's a lot bigger market than technically inclined people are.
Google Wave could be something really nice but Google really have to clean up their "we want to own all your data", "you use our software freely but here are the terms which are privacy breaking" image which has really reached beyond "high tech tinfoil hat" community to general public.
Umm, Google open sourced the protocol and client. What more do you want? You will soon be able to run Google Wave on your own server with your own client and never touch anything Google runs. I don't see the problem.
I didn't like their "we sudo software update every 2 hours or don't install google earth" attitude. Oh really? I replied " Get the hell out of my machine." with rm -rf
Why don't you run Google Earth for you amusement but limit it so it can't sudo update, ala ACLs, sandboxing , SELinux, VM, etc? It seems like OS's should make this easier, but it is doable now. Aren't OS's supposed to be giving users control over what applications running on top of them are doing?
If all you need is a VPN connection to home office to be productive, suddenly Indians and Chinese and Israelis and Irishman can bid for and compete for the same job.
This is true, but how will they get the job in the first place? When telecommuting so long as your code gets checked in and works, many employers are happy. Many of those same employers, however, will balk at hiring a coder they haven sat down and talked to face to face.
In the long term, however, there will absolutely be more and more work done remotely and put up for bids around the world to the detriment of people living in places with a high cost of living. Of course the whole outsourcing versus internal growth thing swings back and forth over time. The former provides more agility and lower risks in some cases, but also reduces in house talent, generates new, trained competitors, and shrinks headcount and accompanying power of managers within the company. If the only thing you have going for you over the average worker in the third world is that you're physically closer, well that sucks, even if it will be enough of an advantage much of the time.