If you wanted your wedding vows in written, just for the keeping, what would you have, a laser printout or a hand written letter from you fiance?
The don't torture little kids with poor hand-eye coordination by teaching them the butt-ugly Palmer method. Let them get a bit older, then teach them in art class how to write a decent Chancery with a broad-nibbed calligraphic marker. Then you'll have letters that people really will treasure. Cursive handwriting in this day and age is not a necessity for communication, it is an art form, and should be taught accordingly.
But the reason people can even read each others' impromptu scrawls (doctors excepted) is because all those "print cursives" have their basis in common foundations: regular print and the Palmer Method.
The Palmer Method is butt-ugly, not particularly legible (the letters are too similar), and the single biggest obstacle to developing a decent cursive script. It is just another example of a stupid and destructive educational fad being crammed down children's throats. I couldn't write legible cursive until I abandoned the Palmer method completely, and went back to printing. I now have a cursive that is far more legible and attractive than that Palmer crap.
Schools have long been locked into forcing children to learn a rigid and extraordinarily ugly cursive hand. Cursive is difficult under any circumstances for many children whose hand-eye coordination has yet to mature. And any child with even a rudimentary esthetic sense will rebel at being forced to reproduce the ugly cursive hand being crammed down his throat.
In reality, the teaching of cursive is an obstacle, not an aid to the acquisition of cursive hadwriting. Children should be taught to print, and be allowed develop their own natural cursive handwriting over time--which will almost always more attractive and legible than the one taught in the schools.
Clock speed is not very informative when comparing processors of different design, but it is certainly relevant when comparing similar processors. PPC's are faster than Intel processors at comparable clock speeds--but clock speeds have not been comparable for some time. The speed advantage of the PPC is not enough to compensate for the much faster clock speed of current Intel chips. So Apple does need faster processors, and one part of this is a faster clock.
Whether or not they are programmed to have cycles, they will seem to do so. This is because human beings are very poor at judging randomness. Real random sequences have more and longer "runs" than people intuitively expect. So if you play a genuinely random machine, you will perceive it as having "hot" and "cold" cycles. For the same reason, it would be a waste of effort to program a gambling machine to do this. People will think it is even if you don't bother.
I've never seen a machine that guaranteed a particular statistical distribution of winnings. So long as the stated probabilities are correct, they are free to use any statisistical distribution they choose.
Mathematically, of course, it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever whether the program makes any use of user input (whether you go high or low, etc.), because none of that affects your probability of winning. Of course, the program could be implemented either way--i.e. it could simply determine whether you win, and adjust the display appropriately, or it could determine an outcome, and then compare it to your "bet." But I wouldn't be surprised if user input that doesn't affect probabilities is ignored, because that is the most straightforward (and therefore less bug-prone) way to program it. It doesn't seem to me that either way is "cheating," so long as the machine is paying the correct percentage. Still, I can understand why people could be upset to discover that their input was being disregarded. Whether it is legal depends upon exactly how the law is written, but it is a subtle point, and I wouldn't be surprised if the law doesn't address this particular issue specifically.
If you don't want to watch it, then it isn't very well focused. I expect they'll do it like the ads they are currently showing--it appears on the menu, and you watch it or not, as you choose.
Your analogy doesn't fit...the write ups and logs said they used a flag in the protocol put their by developers to activate god like abilities. The analogy there, would be that the cable company left a plug, in the middle of a crowded street, with a sign on it saying "This is the main cable that runs the cable company, anything broadcast on this will be broadcast to all our viewers. Please don't use it"...In which case, the cable company deserves everything they get...laws shouldn't take the place of common sense.
Actually, in many areas, the cable company, the phone company, and the electric company all have important equipment--transformers, switchboxes, etc.--that is in the middle of crowded streets. And yes, if you screw around with that stuff, you will be prosecuted.
Perhaps people might think it unreasonable, but I have to take issue with a book claiming to deliver A New Kind of Science in which all the science appears to be held under lock and key.
He is merely insisting on the basic standards of scholarship and proper attribution that every ethical scientist observes routinely.
The biggest challenge for a compression scheme is a scene in the rain. I record most things in the next-to-highest TiVo quality (the highest is overkill for most shows) but it will choke badly in the rain.
The Dreamcast didnt die because gamers dont like innovative games. Some chalk it up to its easy no-mod-needed piracy
Huh? The Dreamcast had an oddball high-density CD format that could not be written by normal burners. Piracy developed rather slowly compared to other platforms.
This is mostly an illusion of perspective. If you climb a tree in the woods, and look off in the distance, it seems like the trees are clustered far less densely where you are than far away. Similarly, as we look back, it seems like most of the innovation is in the past. But really, there have always been only a handful of real game design innovations per year (with occasional brief bursts when new hardware allowed people to implement games they'd thought of before, but couldn't previously implement). Most games have always been sequels and clones.
The hard thing to convey is just how well-designed the TiVo software is. Virtually everything from the remote to the system for setting recording priorities seems to work in a straightforward, intuitive way, and it manages to be very powerful without overloading the user with options. And I've never known the thing to crash. I was a bit skeptical of the Home Media Option, but once I installed it, all my photos and mp3's from the computer in the next room were "just there."
No, I'm listening to ReplayTV owners. The many comments in this thread from ReplayTV owners who find it more trouble than it's worth are pretty representative of what I've heard.
ReplayTV has also always had a manual 27s skip feature that's fully supported and has a dedicated button on the remote. I don't think the 30s advance, even formal support of it, is going to get any PVR manufacturer in any legal trouble.
So with TiVo, you enter the code once and the rarely used skip-to-end button becomes a dedicated 30s skip button. Not much of a difference. I doubt if it would get them in legal trouble, but I expect that it helps them maintain a good relationship with the networks.
I strongly suspect even the ReplayTV CA wouldn't have caused any trouble if news reports about it hadn't misreported how it works in combination with the sharing feature. CA happens strictly on playback. The commercials are still in the recorded show, and they are shared along with the rest of the show when you send the show to a friend
I never heard anybody suggest that the commercials were physically removed, and it never even occurred to me that that might be the case. I'm not sure why the networks would care what stage of the process the commercial-skip occurs.
By most accounts, the ReplayTV commercial skip never was all that reliable. TiVo seems to have been a lot more clever about it. They provide only a 30 s skip (which works pretty well because commercials are usually 30 s or 1 minute), and made that an "unsupported" feature (i.e. they've kept it in all revisions, but you have to enter a "code" to turn it on). This seems to have protected them from the kind legal difficulties that led to the downfall of ReplayTV
Its unfortunate that some owners of the Tivo series 1 product, despite having seen it enhanced by numerous feature that it did not have when they bought it, are upset that TiVo is now focused on enhancements to the new Series II platform. TiVo even offered to let people who moved up to series II transfer their lifetime service contracts to the new machine (service contracts normally are asscociated with the particular unit). But some apparently chose to hold onto their old systems, and now are griping that they aren't receiving some of the cool new features like streaming of music and photos from PCs. My suspicion is some Series I owners chose not to upgrade because the old units are far more easily "hackable." That's fine, but they shouldn't complain when the new system starts to get enhancements that aren't shared with the old one.
I tire of these conversations. If you want to get serious and look at these questions in depth from a creationist perspective, then my e-mail address is tunip at tyreth.homelinux.org. If you want to try and tell us things we know aren't true (such as creationism not having had a single valid prediction), then don't bother.
Actually, I went through a period a few years back where I investigated creationism in some detail. I had the notion that even if creationism was wrong, they might have identified some real problems with conventional theory, and there might actually be something to learn there. It turned out to be a complet waste of time. All I found were fallacies and falsehoods, repeated over and over years after they had been shown to be wrong. I came to the conclusion that creationists were engaged in ideology, not science. They didn't care about whether a claim was true or false, so long as they could use it to score debating points. So when you suddenly find the conversation "too tiring" when asked to provide even one correct prediction of creationism or explain the theoretical foundations for such a prediction, or indeed engage in any kind of debate more substantive than simple contradiction, I can only conclude that nothing has changed.
In nature, a wrong-handed molecule can, by binding incorrectly, bollox up an otherwise useful organic molecule. It is essentially operating as a poison.
The earliest forms of life probably used both d and l amino acids. There is no such thing as correct or incorrect binding in nature. There is just binding. The consequences of binding may be beneficial or harmful, depending upon other factors, but binding is just binding. Organisms evolve to deal with the compounds that are present in their environment. Grow a microorganism in the presence of a d-amino acid for awhile, and it will evolve to use it, exclude it, or degrade it. So modern organisms have trouble dealing with some d-amino acids because they are not around any more, not because they are inherently inimical. And they are not around because life, probably at a fairly early stage, evolved to standardize on a particular chirality. Early life probably used both, but with the evolution of the ribosome--a programmable protein family--there was a strong selective force for standardizing on a particular chirality.
How is automatically downloading a antivirus any more legal or ethical than automatically downloading a virus without user permission?
In the former case, a vandal has broken into a computer using a virus and instructed it to download damaging code from a location on the web. In the latter case, a public-spirited person has not broken into any computers, but legally removed damaging code from that location on the net, and replaced it with code to disable the virus, should some person's virus-infected computer attempt to disable it. The first person is like a car thief. The second person is like the guy who passes by, notices that the thief abandoned your car with the lights on, and shuts them off. And you are like the guy who insists that the second guy should be prosecuted for trespassing.
I'm sorry, but you really don't understand. There are limits on the creationist model. If you've encountered a few christians who say "God did it" to give the appearance of an old earth, or whatever, then please don't take that as an example of the authoritative creationist position.
So what, specifically, are the limits on the ominipotence of a creator, and on what theoretical basis were these limits derived?
You will find that the creationist explanation for the finches is ultimately superior to the evolutionary one - it fits the data perfectly, like a glove. And to fit like a glove it must have both expectations and limitations.
It is very easy to craft a theory to fit data when you already know the data. This is retrodiction, not prediction. The finch data is of historical importance in the development of evolutionary theory, but it is not a prediction of that theory and from a modern standpoint is not particularly strong evidence for the theory. The strong evidence in favor of evolution is the things that the theory predicted that were not known in advance--the commonality of the genetic material and genetic code among all organisms, the patterns of genetic sequence similarity among differnt species, etc., etc. To my knowledge, creationism has never come up with s single valid prediction. For evolution, the list is too long to enumerate.
But it's just proving my point fabulously. No one has yet explained how the creationist can explain the finches. All they offer are reasons like yours - that creationists will appeal to magic.
Creationism is inherently an appeal to a supernatural creator. The appropriate term for any supernatural explanation of a phenomenon is "magic."
Whether creationism could come up with an after-the-fact explanation of the finches might have been of interest to somebody back in the 19th century, but science has moved on since then.
It is contrary to the 2nd law of thrmodynamics.
This has to win the award as the single stupidest argument against evolution. The second law merely says that it takes energy to create order. Do we have energy? Hellooo. Look up in the sky. Do you see that bright thing up there?
Would the discovery of carbon on the earth and in the rest of the universe convince most scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos?
It is certainly an important piece of evidence in support of that proposition. Turn it around--if carbon were rare, don't you think scientists would conclude that life is probably rare, also?
But some would like more evidence than that. Showing the basic building blocks of life are readily formed certainly adds additional evidence on top of the ubiquity of carbon.
Slashdot Mirror
Schools have long been locked into forcing children to learn a rigid and extraordinarily ugly cursive hand. Cursive is difficult under any circumstances for many children whose hand-eye coordination has yet to mature. And any child with even a rudimentary esthetic sense will rebel at being forced to reproduce the ugly cursive hand being crammed down his throat.
In reality, the teaching of cursive is an obstacle, not an aid to the acquisition of cursive hadwriting. Children should be taught to print, and be allowed develop their own natural cursive handwriting over time--which will almost always more attractive and legible than the one taught in the schools.
Clock speed is not very informative when comparing processors of different design, but it is certainly relevant when comparing similar processors. PPC's are faster than Intel processors at comparable clock speeds--but clock speeds have not been comparable for some time. The speed advantage of the PPC is not enough to compensate for the much faster clock speed of current Intel chips. So Apple does need faster processors, and one part of this is a faster clock.
Whether or not they are programmed to have cycles, they will seem to do so. This is because human beings are very poor at judging randomness. Real random sequences have more and longer "runs" than people intuitively expect. So if you play a genuinely random machine, you will perceive it as having "hot" and "cold" cycles. For the same reason, it would be a waste of effort to program a gambling machine to do this. People will think it is even if you don't bother.
I've never seen a machine that guaranteed a particular statistical distribution of winnings. So long as the stated probabilities are correct, they are free to use any statisistical distribution they choose.
Mathematically, of course, it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever whether the program makes any use of user input (whether you go high or low, etc.), because none of that affects your probability of winning. Of course, the program could be implemented either way--i.e. it could simply determine whether you win, and adjust the display appropriately, or it could determine an outcome, and then compare it to your "bet." But I wouldn't be surprised if user input that doesn't affect probabilities is ignored, because that is the most straightforward (and therefore less bug-prone) way to program it. It doesn't seem to me that either way is "cheating," so long as the machine is paying the correct percentage. Still, I can understand why people could be upset to discover that their input was being disregarded. Whether it is legal depends upon exactly how the law is written, but it is a subtle point, and I wouldn't be surprised if the law doesn't address this particular issue specifically.
If you don't want to watch it, then it isn't very well focused. I expect they'll do it like the ads they are currently showing--it appears on the menu, and you watch it or not, as you choose.
The biggest challenge for a compression scheme is a scene in the rain. I record most things in the next-to-highest TiVo quality (the highest is overkill for most shows) but it will choke badly in the rain.
This is mostly an illusion of perspective. If you climb a tree in the woods, and look off in the distance, it seems like the trees are clustered far less densely where you are than far away. Similarly, as we look back, it seems like most of the innovation is in the past. But really, there have always been only a handful of real game design innovations per year (with occasional brief bursts when new hardware allowed people to implement games they'd thought of before, but couldn't previously implement). Most games have always been sequels and clones.
The hard thing to convey is just how well-designed the TiVo software is. Virtually everything from the remote to the system for setting recording priorities seems to work in a straightforward, intuitive way, and it manages to be very powerful without overloading the user with options. And I've never known the thing to crash. I was a bit skeptical of the Home Media Option, but once I installed it, all my photos and mp3's from the computer in the next room were "just there."
By most accounts, the ReplayTV commercial skip never was all that reliable. TiVo seems to have been a lot more clever about it. They provide only a 30 s skip (which works pretty well because commercials are usually 30 s or 1 minute), and made that an "unsupported" feature (i.e. they've kept it in all revisions, but you have to enter a "code" to turn it on). This seems to have protected them from the kind legal difficulties that led to the downfall of ReplayTV
Its unfortunate that some owners of the Tivo series 1 product, despite having seen it enhanced by numerous feature that it did not have when they bought it, are upset that TiVo is now focused on enhancements to the new Series II platform. TiVo even offered to let people who moved up to series II transfer their lifetime service contracts to the new machine (service contracts normally are asscociated with the particular unit). But some apparently chose to hold onto their old systems, and now are griping that they aren't receiving some of the cool new features like streaming of music and photos from PCs. My suspicion is some Series I owners chose not to upgrade because the old units are far more easily "hackable." That's fine, but they shouldn't complain when the new system starts to get enhancements that aren't shared with the old one.
Whether creationism could come up with an after-the-fact explanation of the finches might have been of interest to somebody back in the 19th century, but science has moved on since then.
It is contrary to the 2nd law of thrmodynamics. This has to win the award as the single stupidest argument against evolution. The second law merely says that it takes energy to create order. Do we have energy? Hellooo. Look up in the sky. Do you see that bright thing up there?
But some would like more evidence than that. Showing the basic building blocks of life are readily formed certainly adds additional evidence on top of the ubiquity of carbon.