It seems like most of slashdot, based on the responses to your first two points, has had no experience with philosophy whatsoever. It used to be that college courses forced students to come into contact with a good amount of philosophy and consider it with a good amount of weight. Now, it seems like college has become little more than a vocational school for engineers.
The debates also result from a denial of philosophy where one exists and is believed implicitly. This should be the most basic of philosophy, but most here have pre-ascribed to an unconsidered materialism and fight tooth and nail to protect this philosophy while not even realizing that it is just a philosophy they are protecting. It comes out many times in the Intelligent Design debate, which I think is useful because it centers on the fact that science has changed its underlying philosophy in the last 100 or so years, and needs serious examination. This unconsidered underlying philosophy of science may be the basis for the encroachment of pseudoscience into science classrooms. The pseudoscience can pass muster not because it is strictly science, but agrees with the modern philosophy that underlies science.
Before the web, there were BBS's so why would you want to have a web when you had a BBS, and why would people just give away content? Similar situation here. Imagine an online game or gaming community as a BBS, and this as being the Internet. In order to have ubiquitous game, you would have to have a free game engine (analagous to a web browser), and a way to connect to game servers (analagous to web servers).
In such a situation, it could piggyback on the web. Existing webservers could transmit maps, textures, and models. The game engine itself could transmit character movements to others (and verify movements to limit cheating). Users create more content and upload it to their own webservers. If the game engine is flexible enough, then people could do anything from FPS to in-game online shopping.
Also not many people realize this, but 720p actually has more pixel information than 1080i due to having 60 frames per second at a full 720 lines
The difference is completely obliterated in your case since we're talking about film (24p) conversion. 1920x1080i at 60 fields/30frames is more than enough to convey the full 1080 resolution when the source material is shot at 24p. Probably HD-DVD/BluRay movies will be in 1080p/24 and players will sort out the difference.
I don't think a robot would ever get to the point where it could create new innovative inventions, art, music, etc. and also there would be, even after robots could fix themselves or other robots, a massive need for human "consulting", maybe like amazon's mechanical turk system. I would imagine the main non-creative jobs after robots reached a certain level would be some form of manager over a group of robots, and a "consultant", that would sit in front of a computer and answer simple questions all day.
Right now you have multiple single points of total fraud that are trivial to break. I think if you made one point of fraud that was a little harder, it would be an improvement.
The LORD said:
I will turn against any of my people who eat blood. This also includes any foreigners living among you. Life is in the blood, and I have given you the blood of animals to sacrifice in place of your own. That's also why I have forbidden you to eat blood. Even if you should hunt and kill a bird or an animal, you must drain out the blood and cover it with soil.
It's kind of hard to interpret both what it meant to the ancient Hebrew when it says "I will turn against...". Probably in this context it was something to do with a person will fall to ill health by consuming blood. In the "Life is in the blood" section it goes on to reference the animal sacrifice religious practice of the time. It was important in this tradition to set apart things that were at all unclean, and similarly set apart things that were "holy". The blood here would qualify as being holy all the way back to Abraham when he cut animals in half to enter into a contract with God.
Second in context:
Jesus answered:
I tell you for certain that you won't live unless you eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man. But if you do eat my flesh and drink my blood, you will have eternal life, and I will raise you to life on the last day. My flesh is the true food, and my blood is the true drink. If you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you are one with me, and I am one with you.
To put this in a little more context, this was the middle of the Passover Seder, probably the second or third drinks of wine. This is the time where the Jewish people were supposed to remember the redemption of Moses and in particular the Passover Lamb (as in the Ten Commandments movie). Jesus, by placing himself in this section of the ritual was taking the place of the sacrificial animal as mentioned in the first verse. Therefore establishing himself as the sacrifice in place of the animal. (And literally being killed the next day on the cross)
The cost of labor would be much higher without illegal immigrants from mexico taking the mushroom picking jobs that americans "just won't do". Instead of spurring innovation into more mechanized farming, we are spurring innovation into getting more cheap labor over the border. I would imagine that eventually robots will take over these jobs anyway and you will go to your automated grocery store in your self-driving car to purchase food grown on an automated farm.
Sure someone could break PKI, but it is mathematically proven to be difficult. If the ID expired, then there would be a time-limit to how long one would have to break the key. The last weak link in the chain is how do you know the person standing in front of you is really what the ID says? This could be biometrically solved, but most biometric readers can easily be fooled. The ones that are more difficult to fool are too intrusive. It could be that vein/heat patterns in the thumb would be easy enough to read to make something reliable, but that may be a little far off.
Re:Why isn't there a *real* bluetooth watch?
on
Top 10 Geek Watches
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· Score: 1
Best comment so far.
A watch should not try to be something else. It would be interesting to have something that would be a sort of central hub for many devices though, like a control for whatever you have on and a standard alerter.
It could control or receive information from:
A cellphone
Flash for ring - caller id - text message display - accept/deny call - dial from address book
An iPod
Current song display - FM tuning - back/next - volume
A nearby computer
headlines - weather - alerts - appointments
A PDA
alerts - calendar info - contacts
Seems like something that could bring back the watch. Who wants to have to fish around in their pockets for a cellphone or PDA? Memory wouldn't have to be that large because it would leverage what is around it.
I agree, currently it is *way* too easy to copy a number or two and steal an identity. A rational world would have gone to a single id card, since whatever databases that can be made with an id card number can be made just as well with a SSN. Most of the problems with a national ID card revolve around the gov't knowing "too much" about its citizens and rounding up gun-owners. If the federal gov't simply digitally signs a public key and biometric id/photograph of the person to be stored on the card, and doesn't store it in a database, then we get the benefit of a more secure id without the dangers privacy advocates warn us about.
I would much prefer a biometrically locked card, with something that required a thumbprint or something to release my signed public key stored on the card along with the digitally signed receipt. The key could encrypt a picture that is displayed on the cash register, but it seems like having a computer do a biometric rejection is less likely to cause a lawsuit. Plus, what clerk wants to examine a photograph and say "this doesn't look like you" several times a day?
The reasoning behind this is that C teaches a lot of basic (easy and complex ) things such a variable and memory, functions, types, stucture, control flow...After new programmers have done it the hard way, Python is great to...
Why would you want to start with "the hard way"? Bringing students into a EECS program might benefit from starting out with C or even assembler, but for anything else it is overkill. Python teaches variables, functions, structure, and control flow as well, so I don't see the disadvantage of starting with Python. The main thing that Python does not teach is memory management and some of the more interesting bugs that C can produce.
The main reason to introduce a student to more than one language is to begin without the more complex parts of languages like object oriented code, and even structured code. The nice thing about python is that you can start with procedural code, continue through structured code, and end up at object oriented code, introducing only a few concepts at a time.
With C, you have the problem of explaining the main() function or doing handwaving before you get around to explaining functions. With Java, you have the problem of classes even before you get to a main function. When even the most basic program requires structured or object oriented code, you have a problem teaching it to beginners. Take the following examples:
Java:
class myfirstjavaprog { public static void main ( String args[] ) { System.out.println ( "Hello World!" ); } }
Student asks:
What is a class?, What is that funny looking bracket?, What is public?, What is static?, What is void for?, What is main?, What are the parenthesis for?, What is a String?, What is args?, How come there are funny square brackets?, What is system?, What does the dot do?, What is out?, What is println?, Why are there quotes there?, What does the semicolon do?, How come it's all indented like that?.
C:
#include <stdio.h>
main() { printf ( "Hello, World!\n" ); }
Student asks:
What is #include?, What are the greater than and less than signs doing there?, What is stdio.h?, What is main? What are the parenthesis for?, What is the funny bracket for?, What is printf?, Why is hello world in quotes?, What is the backslash-N doing at the end?, What is the semicolon for?
After differences in cost of living level out, there will need to be some serious labor deregulation in order to make the US a viable economy. Also, lawsuits would have to be severely restricted. Either that or other major markets would have to be pushed to make similar OSHA, worker's-comp, and legal changes that the US has. I doubt any other country wants to follow in the lawsuit-happy US. In my opinion, the biggest drags on the economy are not cost of living, but gov't regulators and lawyers.
If earning ability adjusts downward by even 25%, a huge swath of the middle class looses their homes.
Assuming the majority are in 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, the devaluation of the dollar would equally affect the value of their salary and the value of their mortgage. Sure, imported goods will cost more, but internal markets like housing are only affected by internal regulations affecting housing supply, and loan regulations and local wages affecting demand. The current housing push was affected by loan regulations almost exclusively. The biggest worry the current housing market should have is the removal of the new loan types and a greater restriction of loan approvals.
Yeah, maybe I'm just not cynical enough. They could just be salivating over a per disc encoding license for every unit printed (before a sale ever takes place). Lock it down to one player, disable the player if it ever tries to play a pirated or damaged disc. Reap in sales from dozens of re-bought movies without spending another dime creating new content. The consumers are pushed to actively persue ever more complex ways to get content that won't break their hardware or at least will play in the first place. The MPAA retaliates using the federal government to enforce their business model.
Pretty soon they get the FBI to do random computer searches for pirated content and storm college dorms and old ladies houses while violent criminals go free or have less jail time because they aren't theoretically hurting as large of a corporate conglomerate.
It's nice that there is a combination of cell enzymes and proteins in this virus, but is it because the Mimivirus devolved from an original cell, or evolved closer to a cell, due to some kind of copy error that grabbed some DNA from a host?
I don't doubt that viruses have evolved, but they very well may have evolved separately from other life, and finding one that is a hybrid raises more questions than it answers.
A) all creationists are stupid
B) all non-creationists are smart
It's the classic political argument! We have found the root of the debate and it is politics. On each side of political issues there is inevitably a calling into question of the opposite side's intelligence, while there is a bolstering of the intelligence of the same side. The Bush is dumb line is now classic, but people on the opposite side said the same thing about presidents through the latter half of last century. Other than stupid and dumb, there is "brainwashed", "lemmings", "morons", etc. and phrases meaning the same thing. Anyone following the same side is hailed ironically as an "independent thinker", "resolute", "above average", etc. Usually there is also a random person who believes in some mishmash of the two sides who believes he is right because he isn't "stooping to their level" while in effect alienating both sides and creating a new smaller side that the other two can crush. Just look at how third parties are faring in the US federal gov't.
This fits the creation/evolution debate very well, as it does Republicans/Democrats, abortion, capital punishment, gun control, religious involvement in government, Linux/Windows, Vi/Emacs, etc. Although I think the reason why these attacks come about is because both sides are no longer listening to reason.
If the creepy Burger-King mascot is the supreme being, then we're all doomed.
No, they are saying that Mimi devolved to lose the ability to reproduce on its own, but just not very much. Therefore, all viruses must have devolved from earlier reproducing cells. Therefore these hypothetical pre-virus cells must be simpler than bacteria. Therefore, they must have been before bacteria, since simpler life means earlier in time.
Now may I count the assumptions:
The Mimivirus has devolved from a cell instead of evolved closer to a cell
All viruses were like the Mimivirus at one point
There is a fairly straight progression of simpler to complex life in the earliest days of the earth, and there were not multiple, widely varying pre-cell life forms evolving and devolving from independent starting points
While it is a nice idea, the Mimivirus does not give us much to go on, and I would rather lean on hard evidence than assumptions.
Why would science care if people are hating and killing over religion? And there are dozens of examples where different science disciplines have taught people to not think, examine evidence or question authority--the Eugenics movement comes to mind. Each professor/researcher who wants to keep his funding/tenure/reputation has his own agenda in mind, and the scientific community often falls into camps when the evidence is not clear--as is true with abiogenesis.
And before you think that science should muck around in religion's territory, do a careful watch of What the Bleep to find out how religion could use science to push its own agenda.
Mimivirus underwent reductive evolution early on and shed some of its genome, including the genes necessary to replicate on its own.
Wait, doesn't that suggest that the Mimivirus is the opposite of what we are looking for? How does a bacteria devolving to a virus help us find what started life in the first place?
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like most of slashdot, based on the responses to your first two points, has had no experience with philosophy whatsoever. It used to be that college courses forced students to come into contact with a good amount of philosophy and consider it with a good amount of weight. Now, it seems like college has become little more than a vocational school for engineers.
The debates also result from a denial of philosophy where one exists and is believed implicitly. This should be the most basic of philosophy, but most here have pre-ascribed to an unconsidered materialism and fight tooth and nail to protect this philosophy while not even realizing that it is just a philosophy they are protecting. It comes out many times in the Intelligent Design debate, which I think is useful because it centers on the fact that science has changed its underlying philosophy in the last 100 or so years, and needs serious examination. This unconsidered underlying philosophy of science may be the basis for the encroachment of pseudoscience into science classrooms. The pseudoscience can pass muster not because it is strictly science, but agrees with the modern philosophy that underlies science.
Amen, brother!
Anyone else see the irony here?
So we get campaign commercials that sound like Public Service Announcements?
Before the web, there were BBS's so why would you want to have a web when you had a BBS, and why would people just give away content? Similar situation here. Imagine an online game or gaming community as a BBS, and this as being the Internet. In order to have ubiquitous game, you would have to have a free game engine (analagous to a web browser), and a way to connect to game servers (analagous to web servers).
In such a situation, it could piggyback on the web. Existing webservers could transmit maps, textures, and models. The game engine itself could transmit character movements to others (and verify movements to limit cheating). Users create more content and upload it to their own webservers. If the game engine is flexible enough, then people could do anything from FPS to in-game online shopping.
Heh, I think the mere fact that the population is rising is evidence enough that people are having sex more often than killing others.
Are you aware that essentially *all* applied scientific knowledge and applications are derived from basic science research?
Quick, someone tell Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson that the federal gov't should have been funding their research instead of Bell Telephone.
Also not many people realize this, but 720p actually has more pixel information than 1080i due to having 60 frames per second at a full 720 lines
The difference is completely obliterated in your case since we're talking about film (24p) conversion. 1920x1080i at 60 fields/30frames is more than enough to convey the full 1080 resolution when the source material is shot at 24p. Probably HD-DVD/BluRay movies will be in 1080p/24 and players will sort out the difference.
I don't think a robot would ever get to the point where it could create new innovative inventions, art, music, etc. and also there would be, even after robots could fix themselves or other robots, a massive need for human "consulting", maybe like amazon's mechanical turk system. I would imagine the main non-creative jobs after robots reached a certain level would be some form of manager over a group of robots, and a "consultant", that would sit in front of a computer and answer simple questions all day.
Right now you have multiple single points of total fraud that are trivial to break. I think if you made one point of fraud that was a little harder, it would be an improvement.
First Verse in context:
The LORD said:
I will turn against any of my people who eat blood. This also includes any foreigners living among you. Life is in the blood, and I have given you the blood of animals to sacrifice in place of your own. That's also why I have forbidden you to eat blood. Even if you should hunt and kill a bird or an animal, you must drain out the blood and cover it with soil.
It's kind of hard to interpret both what it meant to the ancient Hebrew when it says "I will turn against...". Probably in this context it was something to do with a person will fall to ill health by consuming blood. In the "Life is in the blood" section it goes on to reference the animal sacrifice religious practice of the time. It was important in this tradition to set apart things that were at all unclean, and similarly set apart things that were "holy". The blood here would qualify as being holy all the way back to Abraham when he cut animals in half to enter into a contract with God.
Second in context:
Jesus answered:
I tell you for certain that you won't live unless you eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man. But if you do eat my flesh and drink my blood, you will have eternal life, and I will raise you to life on the last day. My flesh is the true food, and my blood is the true drink. If you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you are one with me, and I am one with you.
To put this in a little more context, this was the middle of the Passover Seder, probably the second or third drinks of wine. This is the time where the Jewish people were supposed to remember the redemption of Moses and in particular the Passover Lamb (as in the Ten Commandments movie). Jesus, by placing himself in this section of the ritual was taking the place of the sacrificial animal as mentioned in the first verse. Therefore establishing himself as the sacrifice in place of the animal. (And literally being killed the next day on the cross)
The cost of labor would be much higher without illegal immigrants from mexico taking the mushroom picking jobs that americans "just won't do". Instead of spurring innovation into more mechanized farming, we are spurring innovation into getting more cheap labor over the border. I would imagine that eventually robots will take over these jobs anyway and you will go to your automated grocery store in your self-driving car to purchase food grown on an automated farm.
Sure someone could break PKI, but it is mathematically proven to be difficult. If the ID expired, then there would be a time-limit to how long one would have to break the key. The last weak link in the chain is how do you know the person standing in front of you is really what the ID says? This could be biometrically solved, but most biometric readers can easily be fooled. The ones that are more difficult to fool are too intrusive. It could be that vein/heat patterns in the thumb would be easy enough to read to make something reliable, but that may be a little far off.
A watch should not try to be something else. It would be interesting to have something that would be a sort of central hub for many devices though, like a control for whatever you have on and a standard alerter.
It could control or receive information from:
Seems like something that could bring back the watch. Who wants to have to fish around in their pockets for a cellphone or PDA? Memory wouldn't have to be that large because it would leverage what is around it.
I agree, currently it is *way* too easy to copy a number or two and steal an identity. A rational world would have gone to a single id card, since whatever databases that can be made with an id card number can be made just as well with a SSN. Most of the problems with a national ID card revolve around the gov't knowing "too much" about its citizens and rounding up gun-owners. If the federal gov't simply digitally signs a public key and biometric id/photograph of the person to be stored on the card, and doesn't store it in a database, then we get the benefit of a more secure id without the dangers privacy advocates warn us about.
I would much prefer a biometrically locked card, with something that required a thumbprint or something to release my signed public key stored on the card along with the digitally signed receipt. The key could encrypt a picture that is displayed on the cash register, but it seems like having a computer do a biometric rejection is less likely to cause a lawsuit. Plus, what clerk wants to examine a photograph and say "this doesn't look like you" several times a day?
Why would you want to start with "the hard way"? Bringing students into a EECS program might benefit from starting out with C or even assembler, but for anything else it is overkill. Python teaches variables, functions, structure, and control flow as well, so I don't see the disadvantage of starting with Python. The main thing that Python does not teach is memory management and some of the more interesting bugs that C can produce.
The main reason to introduce a student to more than one language is to begin without the more complex parts of languages like object oriented code, and even structured code. The nice thing about python is that you can start with procedural code, continue through structured code, and end up at object oriented code, introducing only a few concepts at a time.
With C, you have the problem of explaining the main() function or doing handwaving before you get around to explaining functions. With Java, you have the problem of classes even before you get to a main function. When even the most basic program requires structured or object oriented code, you have a problem teaching it to beginners. Take the following examples:
Java:Student asks:
What is a class?, What is that funny looking bracket?, What is public?, What is static?, What is void for?, What is main?, What are the parenthesis for?, What is a String?, What is args?, How come there are funny square brackets?, What is system?, What does the dot do?, What is out?, What is println?, Why are there quotes there?, What does the semicolon do?, How come it's all indented like that?.
C:Student asks:
What is #include?, What are the greater than and less than signs doing there?, What is stdio.h?, What is main? What are the parenthesis for?, What is the funny bracket for?, What is printf?, Why is hello world in quotes?, What is the backslash-N doing at the end?, What is the semicolon for?
Python: Student asks:
What is print?, Why is hello world in quotes?
Get the picture?
After differences in cost of living level out, there will need to be some serious labor deregulation in order to make the US a viable economy. Also, lawsuits would have to be severely restricted. Either that or other major markets would have to be pushed to make similar OSHA, worker's-comp, and legal changes that the US has. I doubt any other country wants to follow in the lawsuit-happy US. In my opinion, the biggest drags on the economy are not cost of living, but gov't regulators and lawyers.
If earning ability adjusts downward by even 25%, a huge swath of the middle class looses their homes.
Assuming the majority are in 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, the devaluation of the dollar would equally affect the value of their salary and the value of their mortgage. Sure, imported goods will cost more, but internal markets like housing are only affected by internal regulations affecting housing supply, and loan regulations and local wages affecting demand. The current housing push was affected by loan regulations almost exclusively. The biggest worry the current housing market should have is the removal of the new loan types and a greater restriction of loan approvals.
Yeah, maybe I'm just not cynical enough. They could just be salivating over a per disc encoding license for every unit printed (before a sale ever takes place). Lock it down to one player, disable the player if it ever tries to play a pirated or damaged disc. Reap in sales from dozens of re-bought movies without spending another dime creating new content. The consumers are pushed to actively persue ever more complex ways to get content that won't break their hardware or at least will play in the first place. The MPAA retaliates using the federal government to enforce their business model.
Pretty soon they get the FBI to do random computer searches for pirated content and storm college dorms and old ladies houses while violent criminals go free or have less jail time because they aren't theoretically hurting as large of a corporate conglomerate.
It's nice that there is a combination of cell enzymes and proteins in this virus, but is it because the Mimivirus devolved from an original cell, or evolved closer to a cell, due to some kind of copy error that grabbed some DNA from a host?
I don't doubt that viruses have evolved, but they very well may have evolved separately from other life, and finding one that is a hybrid raises more questions than it answers.
A) all creationists are stupid
B) all non-creationists are smart
It's the classic political argument! We have found the root of the debate and it is politics. On each side of political issues there is inevitably a calling into question of the opposite side's intelligence, while there is a bolstering of the intelligence of the same side. The Bush is dumb line is now classic, but people on the opposite side said the same thing about presidents through the latter half of last century. Other than stupid and dumb, there is "brainwashed", "lemmings", "morons", etc. and phrases meaning the same thing. Anyone following the same side is hailed ironically as an "independent thinker", "resolute", "above average", etc. Usually there is also a random person who believes in some mishmash of the two sides who believes he is right because he isn't "stooping to their level" while in effect alienating both sides and creating a new smaller side that the other two can crush. Just look at how third parties are faring in the US federal gov't.
This fits the creation/evolution debate very well, as it does Republicans/Democrats, abortion, capital punishment, gun control, religious involvement in government, Linux/Windows, Vi/Emacs, etc. Although I think the reason why these attacks come about is because both sides are no longer listening to reason.
If the creepy Burger-King mascot is the supreme being, then we're all doomed.
Now may I count the assumptions:
While it is a nice idea, the Mimivirus does not give us much to go on, and I would rather lean on hard evidence than assumptions.
Why would science care if people are hating and killing over religion? And there are dozens of examples where different science disciplines have taught people to not think, examine evidence or question authority--the Eugenics movement comes to mind. Each professor/researcher who wants to keep his funding/tenure/reputation has his own agenda in mind, and the scientific community often falls into camps when the evidence is not clear--as is true with abiogenesis.
And before you think that science should muck around in religion's territory, do a careful watch of What the Bleep to find out how religion could use science to push its own agenda.
Who cares what creationists think?
Apparently the writers of the GP's college science text.
Well, there are quite a few creation stories, mostly with indeterminate authoring dates. I don't think the GP narrowed it down much at all.
Mimivirus underwent reductive evolution early on and shed some of its genome, including the genes necessary to replicate on its own.
Wait, doesn't that suggest that the Mimivirus is the opposite of what we are looking for? How does a bacteria devolving to a virus help us find what started life in the first place?