That's an odd perspective. Most people see the credentials (degrees, certificates, etc) as evidence of having successfully completed your training and that one is now an accredited scientist, engineer, etc.
I think our misunderstanding is purely on the language level. Papers don't make you a scientist, but they provide evidence that you are a scientist. Can we agree on that?
Wrong. Telling students to stay away from a topic is politics. Dismissing or being prejudiced against a hypothesis because the author is a priest is also politics. These are things quite different from a methodical change from one paradigm to another.
Again, maybe we should not use the word "politics". But yes, I agree that these two examples are part of human nature, not of the scientific method. As I said: Scientists are also humans.
Paradigm shifts are usually not methodical, and often chaotic. Catastrophe theory applies in full force to metaphysics.
The people who believe in creationism will never be swayed away from it,
Of course not. These debates are not for their benefit, but for the benefit of those who might fall for their nonsense.
It is not out of an attempt to explain nature and the universe, but an egotistical need to be above it.
There's actually more to it than that. Fortunately, science has begun to find out the psychological needs behind religious thinking. I'm waiting for the day that religion is declared an insanity, like paranoia or schizophrenia.
religion has usually opposed arts and sciences until they gained enough traction to threaten the religion itself should it resist further.
Actually, that's not true. Religion has often embraced art, and sometimes science. Christianity is really a bad model for "all religions". It's one of the worst when it comes to stuff like that. Many other religions, eastern ones, or the ancient ones, actually had a god for arts and sciences (sometimes the same, sometimes different ones).
"Faith" has no place in a field based on empirical evidence and doubt.
Of course it has. But as a subject to be studied, not as an equal alternative.
So, what I'm understanding you to say, is that your wild-ass GUESS about the origin of man is better than someone else's wild-ass GUESS, just because they may believe that the Flying Spagetti Monster or some other Deity is responsible for creating us?
No, because the evidence we have available supports our "guess", and thoroughly debunks the religious one.
It's a guess at first. You always start out with a guess. Say you and I don't know what the weather is like in Norway today. We both make a guess. Now we part ways. Religion starts to write a book about it, explaining why the weather is as it guessed it is, and burning everyone who says otherwise. Science, on the other hand, tries to find out whether or not the guess is right. Assume we can't get to Norway within a day, so we can never find out for sure what the weather was. But we can go there and see what the weather is tomorrow. And ask the people who live there. And check the ground for signs of recent rain or snow. We can gather all kinds of evidence that either supports or refutes our initial guess. Using that, we may modify our initial "guess". It now becomes what scientists call a "theory". The more our evidence converges, the stronger our theory gets. If the ground is dry, locals are saying it has been sunny all week, it is sunny today - it becomes very, very likely that it was indeed sunny on the day in question.
Problem is, both sides have no PROOF of their position.
See above. Your request of absolute proof borders on the psychotic. We regularily send people to prison for life based on evidence, not proof. A lot of conclusive evidence all pointing to the same result is very often as close to proof as we can get in the real world.
Yes, both sides do not have 100% proof. But one side has a mountain of evidence on their side, and the other has a badly written book of folk-tales.
someone will find a bone fragment (not even a whole bone), yet conceptually render what that person looked like.
It's called inference. It's a perfectly normal process. In fact, you do it yourself every day. You see a small part of a human body, say a leg under a table, and you assume that there's a whole body attached to it. Scientists do the same, just a lot more complicated. But we have enough knowledge about anatomy to be able to make those "guesses". For example, if you have a leg, you can usually assume that there's at least a second leg and that it looks a lot alike, because almost all the animals we know work that way.
Either way, there is no scientific PROOF as you are requiring, and in my opinion, all there will ever be are Wild-Ass Guesses. Then again, maybe the FSM will show itself tomorrow, and prove that we're all descended from bees.
No, we know that it's not bees. The FSM didn't have a license for winged flight.
Look, you have an extremist binary definition of proof. You ignore that the real world isn't binary, that proof is just the name we use for conclusive evidence, and that not every guess is a "wild-ass" guess. There are different qualities of guesses. If we both were to guess about where exactly Barack Obama is at this very moment, a guess of "in his bed" would be a likely guess at this time, while a guess of "on a small moon orbiting one of the planets of Betelgeuse" would be a very unlikely guess. The point being that not all guesses are equal.
It's a stupid trick. "You have no proof, so your guess is as good as mine! Nanana". Sorry, no. Obama may not actually in bed right now, but the two guesses are not equally likely.
Even Jesus seems to be a composite of lots of earlier pagan traditions. Lots of what he said can be traced back to earlier philosophers and the similarities are so uncanny that it's basically plagiarism.
Not just what he said. There are also stories much like his or parts of his all around the middle east at that time. Basically, The Life of Brian is probably the most accurate movie regarding the proliferance of people a lot like Jesus.
Really? You need a page to explain it? I always thought it'd be a ton easier:
Look: Noah took in all the animals. Let's just accept that point. But what about all the plants? Not many of the plants we have around today would survive 40 days submerged. So either they evolved after the flood (say hi to evolution) or the bible forgets to mention a second creation (the holy book incomplete?) or it's all a big pile of nonsense.
Perhaps I was too brief. Credentials, or academic record as you wrote, can make you a scientist.
You still have that backwards. You don't get credentials and then you become a scientist. You are a scientist and if you're good, you start getting credentials.
And anecdotal evidence doesn't provide for a general rule, sorry. Sure there are always people who don't deserve the paper trail they have, just like there are people who have little to show in papers, but are really good at what they do.
Dictionary definitions are one thing but what happens in the real world is something else.
Really? You should desperately tell that to the people who write the dictionaries. I was kind of under the impression they are writing about the real world, not some fantasy lalaland. Like, say, the holy books.
I'm talking about politics within the scientific community.
No, you are talking about something we wouldn't call "politics". Kuhn called it "paradigm shifts" and provided an extensive analysis as to why new knowledge takes a while to penetrate. That's not necessarily a bad thing, either. Giving up a good position at the first sight of trouble is not a good approach, either. As it stands, science may theoretically be able to progress faster still, if it weren't for human traits like this. However, compared to every other attempt at building knowledge, especially religion, magic, mysticism and folk-lore - the major approaches aside from science - the speed of science is breathtaking.
So when I am referring to "true" scientists I am referring to those who consider theories and evidence without politics and other social pressures influencing them.
While I understand what you are getting at, I don't follow you there. First, I accept that scientists are also human beings, with all the baggage that comes with. Second, I understand that many negative traits are the flip side of positive traits. For example: Many of the greatest artists of history were deeply troubled people, and evidence suggests that these two parts are often interrelated. Real scientific work requires persistence and quite a bit of being stubborn, because much of it is years of doing boring experiments, with hundreds of failures. If that same persistence that enables the progress in the first place occasionally slows down new theories, that's a small price to pay.
Play is the best way to learn. If you get a new tool, and your first reaction isn't "Sweet, let's see what this thing can do!", you're probably dumb.
You assume that everyone in the world either is or ought to be thinking like you do. Many people do not have that fascination with new toys, and live perfectly good lives without it. One part of evolution is that many strategies are explored, often in parallel. As regarding this curiosity, many variations are still around, the final verdict is still open.
If you learn a tool, any tool, by simple rote memorization of the tasks you need to do, instead of understanding the theory behind the usage, then you're dumb.
Not at all. Again, there are several different types of learners. And there are different kinds of tasks. Some do in fact get learnt best by repetition, others by understanding, many by a balance of both.
If you use a computer for a living and don't know how to open a text file, you're dumb.
I smell a failed reductio ad absurdum. Of course the average user knows how to open a text file: Double-click it. What he doesn't know is what exactly happens in the background, and he really shouldn't have to. When I drive a car, I need to know that pressing the right pedal makes it go faster, but I don't need to understand combustion engines.
It's not "dumb" when your knowledge is limited to that which matters to your task at hand. Every single one of those "dumb" users very likely has an area of expertise in which you are "dumb".
I've written lengthy articles and given speeches about this topic. I'm trying to sum up a complicated matter in very few words, but your (and most tech peoples) expectations of the mindset of an average user are dramatically wrong.
You are telling your example user things that appear to you as simple, obvious and important. But to him it's a load of technical crap where he doesn't understand one half, and for the other can't see why the computer, this powerful machine that does all the other things all by itself, can't handle that. And the more nanny-like computers get, with all their "you need to do this", "you need to update that", "new this available" - the less you can explain to an average computer user why it nags him with all kinds of nonsense, but can't take care of the important things.
Or, in a car analogy, that's like a car having neither a fuel gauge nor an oil warning lamp, but exploding when either runs out.
Ok, it appears the zombies on Halloween did eat a lot of brains.
The summary alone shows the idiocity in its own conclusion. No, prisoners can game if they want. They just have to use something else. The problem wasn't the gaming, it was the Internet connectivity.
I'm sure with a prison population as gigantic as the US has, there'll soon be a prison-friendly (i.e. no internet) version of either console. You'd not want to pass up those sweet sales, would you?
"Even Linux's most passionate partisans will admit that its filesystem, which stashes vital files in a variety of arcane directories, can be baffling to users.
Errr... no?
First up, you rarely need to dig out those directories, especially not during daily use. A systems administrator may need to venture into/var/lib/whatever occasionally, but a user? Another non-problem created by people confusing their audiences. A system administrator, who needs to know these things, shouldn't be baffled by it, or whatever you're paying him, it's too much. A user, who would be baffled, shouldn't need to worry about it.
There's method to the madness - the mentioned filesystem standard, for example. If you don't grok the method, don't try to "simplify" it. Simplification only works, if you understand the thing you're simplifying really, really well. Otherwise, you're just throwing stuff out, and then say "oh, crap" when you realize much later that you shouldn't have.
A true scientist has nothing to do with academic credentials.
Uh, what? You can't be serious. But let's play: If not for progressing the sciences, and thus being a scientist, what do academic credentials have something to do with?
I'll gladly agree that the quantity is secondary - you're not a better scientist with a longer list of credentials. But saying they have nothing to do with each other is ridiculous.
It is more along the lines of not letting social or cultural factors influence a position.
Errr... that is a very strange way of putting it. Science is (Merriam-Webster) "knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method". In short: Science is a method. The not-being-influenced-by you state is a consequence of the method, but really, neither the core nor the most important part. Science is a lot more about stating theories, testing them, adapting them to the evidence available, etc.
Science certainly is not about not having an informed opinion or taking a stand. What science is a lot about is not being dogmatic about a position, and being willing to change it if the evidence shows it is wrong.
It would be trivial for them to flip this and be 100% locked down until you unlock various purchase options.
Uh, you do need to enter your credit card details, you know?
And I personally like being treated like an adult. I hate that the entire world has to be made child-safe, even for those of us who aren't children anymore. If you don't want your brats to spend your hard-earned cash, it isn't too much to ask you to spend two minutes. And if you think the settings are poorly worded, about a thousand step-by-step instructions are one Google search away.
Perhaps if we stop having SCIENTISTS like Dawkins engaging in these debates - i.e. people who are completely unschooled in Theology presenting their scienfitic opinion as if it is a theological one - we could actually have a productive one.
opposing theology per se. You don't have to study something if you have good reasons to consider it all bullshit. You do need to name your reasons for thinking that way. But the fine points of bible study are really irrelevant if you don't subscribe to the view that it's a divine document. Because then it's just another ancient book that might be of interest to historians, etc.
And we need scientists to be the ones opposing theology. Both science and theology make the same general promise: To explain the world to us and to be able to tell us how to act. That is the common ground upon which they debate. What the scientists lack in beating-your-enemy-in-a-discussion training, they make up with having evidence and stuff that actually works on their side.
Not the first time they publish upper nonsense. First, you don't just make up words and then claim they are already established. Dishonesty.
Aside from the (few, yes it's a lottery in that regard) filthy-rich developers, there are also quite a few who aren't filthy rich, but they make a living. I don't call that "losing out". A friend of mine is one of them, and I have maybe 20 more people like him in my extended circles.
Like every business, people fail. In sum total, the App Store seems to be a place where a small developer can still get his stuff sold - contrary to brick&mortar shops. The App Store is a big equalizer. Sure the big names can spend advertisement money outside, but in the App Store, they're the same as everyone else. And that gives small competition a fighting chance, which translates into a job that feeds the family for quite a few.
Many, not everything. There are a number of companies known for announcing vaporware (MS is among them), and there are companies known for following their announcements with "available today" (Apple) or to reliably follow up with a real release - but most companies fall somewhere in the middle.
Blaming everyone is short-sighted. Check out who delivers and who doesn't. You'll notice patterns.
You got that backwards - OS X is made to run on everything that Apple sells. They didn't have an OS and invented a phone for it the way windows mobile was birthed. They had this vision of a phone and needed an OS for it. If you already have an in-house developed OS, modifying that is the most obvious thing you can imagine.
I don't get how it would not "mesh with office." A company with Microsoft's resources shouldn't have any problem creating an Office Lite that has a touch UI. If they'd actually taken it to its logical conclusion with a solid phone, this very well might have done in RIM in the business market.
Ah, but you don't get how MS works as a corporation.
They don't invent new products and then change the company around them. They go through their departments every now and then and look for "unrealised profits". Or they look at where other people make a fortune and ask themselves if they can get a piece of the cake, preferably the largest piece, without changing themselves.
That's MS greatest strength and greatest burden: It has never really changed itself. There is this strong core consisting of windows and office and everything that doesn't enjoy their company gets shot.
When true scientists are asked about God the answer tends to be: I don't know, there is no evidence one way or the other.
No, they don't.
First, qualify "true scientist". Dawkins would certainly qualify, he has quite extensive academic records. And many other scientists also realize that "I don't know for certain" doesn't mean every possible option is equally likely.
I don't know that US President Barack Obama isn't really a white girl aged 15. However, all the evidence I have suggests otherwise. While I can not personally disprove the theory, in light of available evidence, it is so unlikely that I can ask the person who makes the claim to be the one who should present evidence, not ask for me to do it.
Nothing whatsoever in my world requires "God" as an explanation. If someone wants to convince me of his, he'd better be the one who brings the evidence. Just saying "but he's there, really, I have this book..." proves bugger all.
That is an awfully unscientific statement. One fact is that there is no proof that his friend is imaginary. Your worldview seems to be predicated upon an article of faith. A truly scientific worldview would lead to opinions such as: we don't know, there is no proof one way or the other.
Over the years, I've come to a very pragmatic and evidence-based view on medicine. It applies to many other fields:
Yes, it is true we don't know everything. Yes, it is true that new discoveries are being made all the time. Yes, it is likely that something not part of the current medicine will work.
No, that doesn't mean every treatment is equal. No, that doesn't mean stuff that has been tested and found to be lacking should be considered "alternative medicine".
So yes, there is always room for things we don't yet know. And yes, for some things there is no proof one way or the other. But often there are likelihoods. If we both don't know how that hat came to sit on that statue's head, then theory A - "some joker put it there last night" and theory B - "it's a subtle message from extraterestials" are not equally likely true.
Sciene can never be incompatible with these because science describes things, it doesn't assign moral values to them.
But ethics, moral values and how they come to be, why we feel what about them, what the psychological foundations are, etc. etc. are coming into the part of knowledge that science is checking out.
Even if science doesn't assign moral values, it is good at discovering which moral values are bullshit. And that's a great deal of progress for society. Many of the prejudices against blacks or gays, for example, were based on faulty "knowledge" about them. With the debunking of that crap, science did its share in dismantling the prejudices. In finding out why we have prejudices and what purpose they used to have and which part of that we don't need anymore, we open our minds.
Paul provided Christianity with the rope to hang itself. Because he created the clause in the Bible that requires the initial original sin of Adam to take place for any of this to mean anything. The Original sin of Adam is the PRIMARY reason for the Crucifixion in Jesus, ordinary Human failings are SECONDARY.
Even as an atheist, I'm aware that there are various interpretations.
The one I like best is that with the sacrifice of Jesus, the original sin is finally resolved, over and done. From here on in, it's our own sins that condemn us.
As I don't believe in either of it, I'm not worried by either kind of sin, but this strikes me as the more humane interpretation as you're finally not being judged for something someone did long before you were born.
Richard Dawkins, for instance, who is by now a champion of atheism, and has absolutely no need to do so, *still* resorts almost continuously to ad hominem attacks in his debates
the Christian side "wins" most of these debates. The reason isn't necessarily that they Christian side is right, but that the Christian side generally has the better public debating skills: they dominate and frame the questions.
Not surprising. I know a couple people (remotely, friends of friends) who studied Theology - the amount of rhetorical and dialectical training that future priests receive has no competition. The only people who can hold a candle to them are those who either have a natural talent or have received special training. And by that I don't mean a week, you'd need a lot more than that, these guys receive years of training in writing their speeches and winning discussions.
99% of "computer" users are dumb when it comes to IT, it's a sad fact.
No, it's not a fact. It's an urban legend perpetrated by geeks so they can feel superior to others. I've seen people with no computer knowledge whatsoever get their first PC and get familiar with it, and while they aren't IT experts, "dumb" doesn't describe it correctly. What they have is a different attitude - to them the machine has a purpose, it's not a toy by itself, they care about learning its fine details as much as most average geeks care about the difference between buckshot and birdshot and how to clean a shotgun blindfolded.
Additionally it might be an idea for Apple and other resellers to create the concept of "sub accounts" for the kids, where they either can't make purchases at all, or can have a pre-paid account which can only be replenished from the "master account". Oddly enough, everybody's favourite whipping-boy, Sony PSN, already have this, more or less...
Slashdot Mirror
That's an odd perspective. Most people see the credentials (degrees, certificates, etc) as evidence of having successfully completed your training and that one is now an accredited scientist, engineer, etc.
I think our misunderstanding is purely on the language level. Papers don't make you a scientist, but they provide evidence that you are a scientist. Can we agree on that?
Wrong. Telling students to stay away from a topic is politics. Dismissing or being prejudiced against a hypothesis because the author is a priest is also politics. These are things quite different from a methodical change from one paradigm to another.
Again, maybe we should not use the word "politics". But yes, I agree that these two examples are part of human nature, not of the scientific method. As I said: Scientists are also humans.
Paradigm shifts are usually not methodical, and often chaotic. Catastrophe theory applies in full force to metaphysics.
The people who believe in creationism will never be swayed away from it,
Of course not. These debates are not for their benefit, but for the benefit of those who might fall for their nonsense.
It is not out of an attempt to explain nature and the universe, but an egotistical need to be above it.
There's actually more to it than that. Fortunately, science has begun to find out the psychological needs behind religious thinking.
I'm waiting for the day that religion is declared an insanity, like paranoia or schizophrenia.
religion has usually opposed arts and sciences until they gained enough traction to threaten the religion itself should it resist further.
Actually, that's not true. Religion has often embraced art, and sometimes science. Christianity is really a bad model for "all religions". It's one of the worst when it comes to stuff like that. Many other religions, eastern ones, or the ancient ones, actually had a god for arts and sciences (sometimes the same, sometimes different ones).
"Faith" has no place in a field based on empirical evidence and doubt.
Of course it has. But as a subject to be studied, not as an equal alternative.
So, what I'm understanding you to say, is that your wild-ass GUESS about the origin of man is better than someone else's wild-ass GUESS, just because they may believe that the Flying Spagetti Monster or some other Deity is responsible for creating us?
No, because the evidence we have available supports our "guess", and thoroughly debunks the religious one.
It's a guess at first. You always start out with a guess. Say you and I don't know what the weather is like in Norway today. We both make a guess. Now we part ways. Religion starts to write a book about it, explaining why the weather is as it guessed it is, and burning everyone who says otherwise. Science, on the other hand, tries to find out whether or not the guess is right. Assume we can't get to Norway within a day, so we can never find out for sure what the weather was. But we can go there and see what the weather is tomorrow. And ask the people who live there. And check the ground for signs of recent rain or snow. We can gather all kinds of evidence that either supports or refutes our initial guess. Using that, we may modify our initial "guess". It now becomes what scientists call a "theory". The more our evidence converges, the stronger our theory gets. If the ground is dry, locals are saying it has been sunny all week, it is sunny today - it becomes very, very likely that it was indeed sunny on the day in question.
Problem is, both sides have no PROOF of their position.
See above. Your request of absolute proof borders on the psychotic. We regularily send people to prison for life based on evidence, not proof. A lot of conclusive evidence all pointing to the same result is very often as close to proof as we can get in the real world.
Yes, both sides do not have 100% proof. But one side has a mountain of evidence on their side, and the other has a badly written book of folk-tales.
someone will find a bone fragment (not even a whole bone), yet conceptually render what that person looked like.
It's called inference. It's a perfectly normal process. In fact, you do it yourself every day. You see a small part of a human body, say a leg under a table, and you assume that there's a whole body attached to it. Scientists do the same, just a lot more complicated. But we have enough knowledge about anatomy to be able to make those "guesses". For example, if you have a leg, you can usually assume that there's at least a second leg and that it looks a lot alike, because almost all the animals we know work that way.
Either way, there is no scientific PROOF as you are requiring, and in my opinion, all there will ever be are Wild-Ass Guesses. Then again, maybe the FSM will show itself tomorrow, and prove that we're all descended from bees.
No, we know that it's not bees. The FSM didn't have a license for winged flight.
Look, you have an extremist binary definition of proof. You ignore that the real world isn't binary, that proof is just the name we use for conclusive evidence, and that not every guess is a "wild-ass" guess. There are different qualities of guesses. If we both were to guess about where exactly Barack Obama is at this very moment, a guess of "in his bed" would be a likely guess at this time, while a guess of "on a small moon orbiting one of the planets of Betelgeuse" would be a very unlikely guess. The point being that not all guesses are equal.
It's a stupid trick. "You have no proof, so your guess is as good as mine! Nanana". Sorry, no. Obama may not actually in bed right now, but the two guesses are not equally likely.
Even Jesus seems to be a composite of lots of earlier pagan traditions. Lots of what he said can be traced back to earlier philosophers and the similarities are so uncanny that it's basically plagiarism.
Not just what he said. There are also stories much like his or parts of his all around the middle east at that time. Basically, The Life of Brian is probably the most accurate movie regarding the proliferance of people a lot like Jesus.
Creationists also have a hard time talking their way around the massive problems with Noah's flood: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html
Really? You need a page to explain it? I always thought it'd be a ton easier:
Look: Noah took in all the animals. Let's just accept that point. But what about all the plants? Not many of the plants we have around today would survive 40 days submerged. So either they evolved after the flood (say hi to evolution) or the bible forgets to mention a second creation (the holy book incomplete?) or it's all a big pile of nonsense.
Perhaps I was too brief. Credentials, or academic record as you wrote, can make you a scientist.
You still have that backwards. You don't get credentials and then you become a scientist. You are a scientist and if you're good, you start getting credentials.
And anecdotal evidence doesn't provide for a general rule, sorry. Sure there are always people who don't deserve the paper trail they have, just like there are people who have little to show in papers, but are really good at what they do.
Dictionary definitions are one thing but what happens in the real world is something else.
Really? You should desperately tell that to the people who write the dictionaries. I was kind of under the impression they are writing about the real world, not some fantasy lalaland. Like, say, the holy books.
I'm talking about politics within the scientific community.
No, you are talking about something we wouldn't call "politics". Kuhn called it "paradigm shifts" and provided an extensive analysis as to why new knowledge takes a while to penetrate. That's not necessarily a bad thing, either. Giving up a good position at the first sight of trouble is not a good approach, either. As it stands, science may theoretically be able to progress faster still, if it weren't for human traits like this. However, compared to every other attempt at building knowledge, especially religion, magic, mysticism and folk-lore - the major approaches aside from science - the speed of science is breathtaking.
So when I am referring to "true" scientists I am referring to those who consider theories and evidence without politics and other social pressures influencing them.
While I understand what you are getting at, I don't follow you there. First, I accept that scientists are also human beings, with all the baggage that comes with. Second, I understand that many negative traits are the flip side of positive traits. For example: Many of the greatest artists of history were deeply troubled people, and evidence suggests that these two parts are often interrelated. Real scientific work requires persistence and quite a bit of being stubborn, because much of it is years of doing boring experiments, with hundreds of failures. If that same persistence that enables the progress in the first place occasionally slows down new theories, that's a small price to pay.
Play is the best way to learn. If you get a new tool, and your first reaction isn't "Sweet, let's see what this thing can do!", you're probably dumb.
You assume that everyone in the world either is or ought to be thinking like you do. Many people do not have that fascination with new toys, and live perfectly good lives without it. One part of evolution is that many strategies are explored, often in parallel. As regarding this curiosity, many variations are still around, the final verdict is still open.
If you learn a tool, any tool, by simple rote memorization of the tasks you need to do, instead of understanding the theory behind the usage, then you're dumb.
Not at all. Again, there are several different types of learners. And there are different kinds of tasks. Some do in fact get learnt best by repetition, others by understanding, many by a balance of both.
If you use a computer for a living and don't know how to open a text file, you're dumb.
I smell a failed reductio ad absurdum. Of course the average user knows how to open a text file: Double-click it. What he doesn't know is what exactly happens in the background, and he really shouldn't have to. When I drive a car, I need to know that pressing the right pedal makes it go faster, but I don't need to understand combustion engines.
It's not "dumb" when your knowledge is limited to that which matters to your task at hand. Every single one of those "dumb" users very likely has an area of expertise in which you are "dumb".
I've written lengthy articles and given speeches about this topic. I'm trying to sum up a complicated matter in very few words, but your (and most tech peoples) expectations of the mindset of an average user are dramatically wrong.
You are telling your example user things that appear to you as simple, obvious and important. But to him it's a load of technical crap where he doesn't understand one half, and for the other can't see why the computer, this powerful machine that does all the other things all by itself, can't handle that. And the more nanny-like computers get, with all their "you need to do this", "you need to update that", "new this available" - the less you can explain to an average computer user why it nags him with all kinds of nonsense, but can't take care of the important things.
Or, in a car analogy, that's like a car having neither a fuel gauge nor an oil warning lamp, but exploding when either runs out.
Ok, it appears the zombies on Halloween did eat a lot of brains.
The summary alone shows the idiocity in its own conclusion. No, prisoners can game if they want. They just have to use something else. The problem wasn't the gaming, it was the Internet connectivity.
I'm sure with a prison population as gigantic as the US has, there'll soon be a prison-friendly (i.e. no internet) version of either console. You'd not want to pass up those sweet sales, would you?
Is it nonsense-week on /. or what?
"Even Linux's most passionate partisans will admit that its filesystem, which stashes vital files in a variety of arcane directories, can be baffling to users.
Errr... no?
First up, you rarely need to dig out those directories, especially not during daily use. A systems administrator may need to venture into /var/lib/whatever occasionally, but a user? Another non-problem created by people confusing their audiences. A system administrator, who needs to know these things, shouldn't be baffled by it, or whatever you're paying him, it's too much. A user, who would be baffled, shouldn't need to worry about it.
There's method to the madness - the mentioned filesystem standard, for example. If you don't grok the method, don't try to "simplify" it. Simplification only works, if you understand the thing you're simplifying really, really well. Otherwise, you're just throwing stuff out, and then say "oh, crap" when you realize much later that you shouldn't have.
A true scientist has nothing to do with academic credentials.
Uh, what? You can't be serious. But let's play: If not for progressing the sciences, and thus being a scientist, what do academic credentials have something to do with?
I'll gladly agree that the quantity is secondary - you're not a better scientist with a longer list of credentials. But saying they have nothing to do with each other is ridiculous.
It is more along the lines of not letting social or cultural factors influence a position.
Errr... that is a very strange way of putting it. Science is (Merriam-Webster) "knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method". In short: Science is a method. The not-being-influenced-by you state is a consequence of the method, but really, neither the core nor the most important part. Science is a lot more about stating theories, testing them, adapting them to the evidence available, etc.
Science certainly is not about not having an informed opinion or taking a stand. What science is a lot about is not being dogmatic about a position, and being willing to change it if the evidence shows it is wrong.
It would be trivial for them to flip this and be 100% locked down until you unlock various purchase options.
Uh, you do need to enter your credit card details, you know?
And I personally like being treated like an adult. I hate that the entire world has to be made child-safe, even for those of us who aren't children anymore. If you don't want your brats to spend your hard-earned cash, it isn't too much to ask you to spend two minutes. And if you think the settings are poorly worded, about a thousand step-by-step instructions are one Google search away.
Perhaps if we stop having SCIENTISTS like Dawkins engaging in these debates - i.e. people who are completely unschooled in Theology presenting their scienfitic opinion as if it is a theological one - we could actually have a productive one.
opposing theology per se. You don't have to study something if you have good reasons to consider it all bullshit. You do need to name your reasons for thinking that way. But the fine points of bible study are really irrelevant if you don't subscribe to the view that it's a divine document. Because then it's just another ancient book that might be of interest to historians, etc.
And we need scientists to be the ones opposing theology. Both science and theology make the same general promise: To explain the world to us and to be able to tell us how to act. That is the common ground upon which they debate. What the scientists lack in beating-your-enemy-in-a-discussion training, they make up with having evidence and stuff that actually works on their side.
There's only one fitting comment:
Bwuahahahahaha!!!
Not the first time they publish upper nonsense. First, you don't just make up words and then claim they are already established. Dishonesty.
Aside from the (few, yes it's a lottery in that regard) filthy-rich developers, there are also quite a few who aren't filthy rich, but they make a living. I don't call that "losing out". A friend of mine is one of them, and I have maybe 20 more people like him in my extended circles.
Like every business, people fail. In sum total, the App Store seems to be a place where a small developer can still get his stuff sold - contrary to brick&mortar shops. The App Store is a big equalizer. Sure the big names can spend advertisement money outside, but in the App Store, they're the same as everyone else. And that gives small competition a fighting chance, which translates into a job that feeds the family for quite a few.
Really it applies to everything in the industry
Many, not everything. There are a number of companies known for announcing vaporware (MS is among them), and there are companies known for following their announcements with "available today" (Apple) or to reliably follow up with a real release - but most companies fall somewhere in the middle.
Blaming everyone is short-sighted. Check out who delivers and who doesn't. You'll notice patterns.
You got that backwards - OS X is made to run on everything that Apple sells. They didn't have an OS and invented a phone for it the way windows mobile was birthed. They had this vision of a phone and needed an OS for it. If you already have an in-house developed OS, modifying that is the most obvious thing you can imagine.
I don't get how it would not "mesh with office." A company with Microsoft's resources shouldn't have any problem creating an Office Lite that has a touch UI. If they'd actually taken it to its logical conclusion with a solid phone, this very well might have done in RIM in the business market.
Ah, but you don't get how MS works as a corporation.
They don't invent new products and then change the company around them. They go through their departments every now and then and look for "unrealised profits". Or they look at where other people make a fortune and ask themselves if they can get a piece of the cake, preferably the largest piece, without changing themselves.
That's MS greatest strength and greatest burden: It has never really changed itself. There is this strong core consisting of windows and office and everything that doesn't enjoy their company gets shot.
When true scientists are asked about God the answer tends to be: I don't know, there is no evidence one way or the other.
No, they don't.
First, qualify "true scientist". Dawkins would certainly qualify, he has quite extensive academic records. And many other scientists also realize that "I don't know for certain" doesn't mean every possible option is equally likely.
I don't know that US President Barack Obama isn't really a white girl aged 15. However, all the evidence I have suggests otherwise. While I can not personally disprove the theory, in light of available evidence, it is so unlikely that I can ask the person who makes the claim to be the one who should present evidence, not ask for me to do it.
Nothing whatsoever in my world requires "God" as an explanation. If someone wants to convince me of his, he'd better be the one who brings the evidence. Just saying "but he's there, really, I have this book..." proves bugger all.
That is an awfully unscientific statement. One fact is that there is no proof that his friend is imaginary. Your worldview seems to be predicated upon an article of faith. A truly scientific worldview would lead to opinions such as: we don't know, there is no proof one way or the other.
Over the years, I've come to a very pragmatic and evidence-based view on medicine. It applies to many other fields:
Yes, it is true we don't know everything.
Yes, it is true that new discoveries are being made all the time.
Yes, it is likely that something not part of the current medicine will work.
No, that doesn't mean every treatment is equal.
No, that doesn't mean stuff that has been tested and found to be lacking should be considered "alternative medicine".
So yes, there is always room for things we don't yet know. And yes, for some things there is no proof one way or the other. But often there are likelihoods. If we both don't know how that hat came to sit on that statue's head, then theory A - "some joker put it there last night" and theory B - "it's a subtle message from extraterestials" are not equally likely true.
Sciene can never be incompatible with these because science describes things, it doesn't assign moral values to them.
But ethics, moral values and how they come to be, why we feel what about them, what the psychological foundations are, etc. etc. are coming into the part of knowledge that science is checking out.
Even if science doesn't assign moral values, it is good at discovering which moral values are bullshit. And that's a great deal of progress for society. Many of the prejudices against blacks or gays, for example, were based on faulty "knowledge" about them. With the debunking of that crap, science did its share in dismantling the prejudices. In finding out why we have prejudices and what purpose they used to have and which part of that we don't need anymore, we open our minds.
Paul provided Christianity with the rope to hang itself. Because he created the clause in the Bible that requires the initial original sin of Adam to take place for any of this to mean anything. The Original sin of Adam is the PRIMARY reason for the Crucifixion in Jesus, ordinary Human failings are SECONDARY.
Even as an atheist, I'm aware that there are various interpretations.
The one I like best is that with the sacrifice of Jesus, the original sin is finally resolved, over and done. From here on in, it's our own sins that condemn us.
As I don't believe in either of it, I'm not worried by either kind of sin, but this strikes me as the more humane interpretation as you're finally not being judged for something someone did long before you were born.
Richard Dawkins, for instance, who is by now a champion of atheism, and has absolutely no need to do so, *still* resorts almost continuously to ad hominem attacks in his debates
[citation needed]
the Christian side "wins" most of these debates. The reason isn't necessarily that they Christian side is right, but that the Christian side generally has the better public debating skills: they dominate and frame the questions.
Not surprising. I know a couple people (remotely, friends of friends) who studied Theology - the amount of rhetorical and dialectical training that future priests receive has no competition. The only people who can hold a candle to them are those who either have a natural talent or have received special training. And by that I don't mean a week, you'd need a lot more than that, these guys receive years of training in writing their speeches and winning discussions.
99% of "computer" users are dumb when it comes to IT, it's a sad fact.
No, it's not a fact. It's an urban legend perpetrated by geeks so they can feel superior to others. I've seen people with no computer knowledge whatsoever get their first PC and get familiar with it, and while they aren't IT experts, "dumb" doesn't describe it correctly. What they have is a different attitude - to them the machine has a purpose, it's not a toy by itself, they care about learning its fine details as much as most average geeks care about the difference between buckshot and birdshot and how to clean a shotgun blindfolded.
Additionally it might be an idea for Apple and other resellers to create the concept of "sub accounts" for the kids, where they either can't make purchases at all, or can have a pre-paid account which can only be replenished from the "master account". Oddly enough, everybody's favourite whipping-boy, Sony PSN, already have this, more or less...
As does Apple: http://www.apple.com/itunes/inside-itunes/2010/11/using-itunes-allowances-with-your-kids.html