This just in: Information typed into Google's searchbox is sent back to Google! News at 11:00!
If I don't want Google to get information about my interests, I don't do searches through Google. If I don't want the iTunes miniStore to search iTMS for music similar to what I play, I turn it off.
In both cases, the search function is quite obvious, and easily avoided by the user. There is nothing surreptitious here.
When I bought my first VCR, it was a VHS machine. At the time, beta and VHS were still close to neck and neck, with VHS just beginning to pull ahead--indeed, nobody was yet even conceptualizing it as a war that might have a single winner. Longer playing L-750 beta tapes had recently become available, largely neutralizing an early VHS advantage. Video shops (these were video sales shops; rental hadn't really taken off yet) carried prerecorded tapes in both formats. I looked at a bunch of models in both formats. All were front loaders, all had video inputs. But the VHS machines were significantly cheaper. For this reason, I bought VHS (an RCA model as I recall). After living with it for a couple of days, I took it back. Two main reasons: the VHS transport seemed incredibly slow. You'd hit the button, and wait, wait for it to respond. The other reason was that the pause/freeze frame was incredibly noisy. When I took it back, I tried all the other VHS machines in the shop. They all had the same balky transport, and the noisy, jumpy freeze frame. The betas responded instantly, and I could shuttle rapidly between play, pause, forward and reverse. The freeze frame was perfectly clear and steady. Picture quality was maybe a bit better on the beta, but not strikingly so (Super beta, which came out later, did have a much better picture than VHS, but subsequent HQ VHS machines pretty much closed the gap).
What brought down beta? Rental shops. The VHS machines had a bigger market share, because they were cheaper, but Sony was slow to respond in the price arena. After all, Sony had always sold high-end products, and margin was more important to them than market share. Sony believed that consumers bought VCRs mainly for time-shifting. Prerecorded tapes back then typically cost $80, which was significant money at the time--they were pretty much limited to wealthy video enthusiasts and porn fans. What Sony didn't foresee was the emergence of rental shops. The rental shops initially carried both formats, but in about the ratio as the respective VHS and beta userbases--which meant a few more VHS tapes than beta. As people began to rent more and more, they were more likely to buy VHS machines, because their rental store had a better selection--which led the rental stores to buy still more VHS and still fewer beta tapes, which led consumers to favor VHS machines more. By the time that Sony caught on and dropped prices, it was too late; some video stores were already beginning to go VHS-exclusive.
Doug Trumbull (special effects expert best known for "2001 Space Odyssey") developed a 60 fps filming system calledShowscan back in the '70's. The films were said to be startlingly realistic, but he never managed to convince the studios that it was worth the expense of converting. Of course, with digital projectors, this would be much easier to do today.
Honestly these companies keep saying DVD is going the way of the dodo, but for now I predict that these new technologies are the new beta-max. People have bought huge numbers of DVDs of old and new favorites. The video quality is just fine. Is there any real need to buy a whole new player with more expensive media and a smaller number of released titles?
It'll be worth it for the videophiles, who buy far more movies than the average consumer. But rather than the new beta-max, I'd say a better analogy is progressive output. At first it was a feature of high end video hardware. Then it became a selling point, with a $50 or so increment on the price of the player. Now, even the Radio Shack $30 DVD players offer progressive output.
Similarly, there will initially be two editions of films, with the HD ones selling at a premium. Then they will start selling at the same price and there will be some DVDs with HD on one side and SD on the other. Eventually, you'll find only HD copies on the shelves (although standard DVDs will continue be available by special order), but by that time the $30 RadioShack players will be HD capable.
The difference is, people didn't adopt DVD because of the quality alone. They did it because of the convenience of a disc format above all else.
Did they? Is a small disk really all that much more convenient than a large disk? And why was the laserdisk so much more successful in Japan than in the US? I think that convenience may have been a factor, but not for the consumer; I think that it may have more to do with acceptance of the DVD format by rental outlets. And when consumers tried it, they found that the quality was better. I remember that when DVD players were first coming out, everybody I knew who tried it remarked on the picture quality.
The quality difference is going to be negligible for the vast majority of people out there, nothing even remotely as signifigant as VHS to DVD was.
I didn't find the quality jump from VHS to DVD nearly as striking as the jump from interlaced to progressive. A lot of consumers have yet to experience this, as most TVs capable of progressive are HD and until this year have been very expensive. HD DVD formats will be most appreciated by enthusiasts with big screen TVs, but the improvement is quite evident even on a 34" TV, so consumers in general will move to it once the price increment goes down. I imagine that only the big screen videophiles will bother to reacquire movies in HD that they already have on DVD, but those will be the early adopters, anyway.
Let's not also forget the move from Pan and Scan to Widescreen, which worked both ways: some people were turned on by how much better it was, while it took others a very long time to understand and enjoy it
This is linked to the availability of widescreen TVs. With standard format TVs, it is a tradeoff of the original film aspect ratio at the sacrifice of a smaller picture, which is worth it to film enthusiasts, but often not to the average consumer. But widesceen TVs have also dropped dramatically in price, and now the tradeoff works the other way--it is the pan/scan version that gives the smaller picture (or more commonly a stretched image, since many people don't have their aspect ratio settings correct).
I remember a few years ago people were making the very same argument for why DVDs would be a failure. The new DVD players will be picked up initially by the enthusiasts with the big screen TVs, but in a couple of years you won't be able to find a non-HD DVD player on the shelves, just as today it is hard to find a DVD player that isn't capable of at least ED output. By that time, most TVs sold will be HD as well (I saw rows of them at Wal-Mart before Xmas, starting at $500). And while the difference between HD and ED isn't glaring, it is visible, even on modest-sized HD screens.
Everything they are holding up to "replace" DVDs are nothing more than increased storage/better video quality, but that is only benificial to people who do have HD TVs (which isn't many).
However, SD TV is about to go away as well. Before Christmas I saw rows of HD TVs--with digital tuners--at WalMart starting at $500. Combined with the fact that in many areas, you can hook one up to your old roof antenna--or even a set-top antenna--and get all of the network channels as clear as from cable without paying another cent, and the fact that analog over-the-air broadcasts will soon be going away, it hardly makes sense to buy SD. I think that within a couple of years HD will be as ubiquitous as DVD players are today.
Of course, DVD isn't going away--they're just being enhanced. Most consumers will hardly notice the transition, any more than they've noticed that virtually all DVD players on the shelves are now capable of at least ED output. Initially, the HD DVD formats will be pitched to the early adopters with the giant screen TVs. In two or three years, it will be a standard feature of all players (and they'll probably play both formats unless one drops out in the meantime).
!"increasing as much as planned" != "cutting back"
Well, yes, but this isn't the really dumb part. The bandwidth auction will earn the federal government considerably more than they will spend on helping people convert (and this expenditure is necessary to make it politically feasible). So there will actually be more money to spend upon school lunches (or ill-advised foreign adventures, which seems rather more likely).
No one wants to say it, but one factor that I think may account for increased Nintendo DS and GBA sales is the availability of flash backup cartridges and pirated ROMs.
Pirates like to tell themselves that "everybody is doing it," but I'd be amazed if even 1% of DS buyers are playing such pirated games. This isn't something that unsophisticated users can simply trade across the internet like mp3's by simply firing up LimeWire, so it is likely to remain confined to a tiny minority of hackers.
If you read the older literature, it seems that placebos are very powerful treatments for many conditions, with a substantial fraction of subjects showing a positive response to placebo. The effect of placebos has been attributed to patient expectation. Some studies showed that patient expectation could override known pharmacological effects of drugs; patients given a stimulant but told that it was a sedative exhibited signs of sedation, and vice-versa. On the other hand, modern studies (e.g. this study suggest that placebos have rather small effects aside from pain (probably via release of endogenous opiates) and psychiatric conditions.
However, modern studies with placebos are done very differently than the early studies. In the old days, experimenters simply lied to the subjects and told them that they were receiving an active drug. This is no longer considered ethical, and subjects in modern studies must sign a form indicating that they are aware that there is a possibility that they will be given an inactive placebo. Given that the ethical issues preclude the replication of the early studies, this is a question that may never be entirely resolved.
A related issue is whether it is ethical for a physician to lie to a patient and give them a placebo. Modern ethical standards impose an obligation on the physician to be honest with patients, which--if placebos really can have beneficial effects--may be an obstacle to optimum treatment in circumstances where no better treatment is available. I've heard of cases physicians recommending herbal or homeopathic treatments, since in such cases they can honestly tell their patients, "Some patients find this helps." This is not quite the same as being able to say "This is a wonder drug; it will definitely make you feel better," but offers a compromise between the obligation to be honest and the obligation to offer the best therapy available.
Keep in mind that herbicide resistance arises spontaneously in the wild. It's going to happen sooner or later, GM or not. So the practical question is whether gene transfer resulting in viable, fertile plants that can compete effectively with unmodified wildtype plants occurs frequently enough to have a significant impact on the rate at which herbicide resistance arises. It is still unclear whether this is the case.
There are flaws in evolution as well (if there wasn't it wouldn't be called a theory) but we won't get into those else you wouldn't have a leg to stand on anymore.
If you are going to comment, you probably should actually take the trouble to RTFD (note: PDF). I think it deals with this argument rather well:
To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.
I just read the decision. Many have expressed concern over judges deciding scientific issues. But the judge in this case has done a truly admirable job of identifying the key scientific issues, and identifying the flaws in ID doctrine.
NEITHER creation nor evolution fit the strict definition of science: the study of that which is observable and repeatable.
Wrong. Science is NOT the study of that "which is observable and repeatable." What is required for an idea to be considered scientific is that it must yield predictions that are testable by observation. Not everything must be observable; it is only required that there be observable consequences. Until fairly recently, for example, it was not possible to observe atoms, but atomic theory was considered to be scientific because there are observable consequences of the existence of atoms. Similarly, evolutionary theory makes numerous predictions about levels of genetic similarity between species, which can be tested by sequencing studies that yield results that are observable and repeatable.
Nope- because God is no more complex than the concept of a random and indeterministic universe. The two concepts are equally complex.
This is true only if God acts completely randomly--in which case God is indistinguishable from a random universe. In a formal sense, complexity is defined by the number of bits of information required to describe how something behaves. Randomness requires the least amount of information to define--anything that is possible may happen. But if God preferentially takes some actions in preference to others, then some number of bits of information are needed to describe that preference. If God acts upon knowledge, the some number of bits of information are needed to define that knowledge. An omniscient God would require infinite number of bits of information, and hence would be considered infinitely complex.
There are prominent examples of *non-theists* who are proponents of ID (like Michael Behe and Francis Crick, for example
As far as I know, Crick never proposed that life was intelligently designed. He did suggest that a very primitive form of life might have originated elsewhere and arrived on earth from space, and subsequently evolved. And although Behe calls himself an advocate of intelligent design, his hypothesis is similar to Crick's, in that he imagines that a primitive form of life was intelligently designed, and subsequently evolved.
The key point is that neither Crick nor Behe have attempted to offer an alternative to evolution, but rather an alternate explanation for the origin of life (which is not properly a part of the theory of evolution). Whereas evolution is very well established, the initial origin of life is very much an open question among scientists, with multiple competing hypotheses and no generally accepted theory.
One of the few saving graces of the great robber barons is that in their latter years they often feel a need to give something back to the world that they have so ruthlessly exploited.
While it is hard to find much good to say about Gates's business tactics or his impact on the computer industry, he has approached philanthropy with care and consideration, targeting unmet needs where his investment can do the most to relieve human suffering.
Truly sad to see someone who is in a position of teaching employ such contorted and contrived logic in order to justify an agenda. Truly, your are an example of why "open-source" zealots retard the advancement of learning.
The amusing thing here is that I am not particularly an open source advocate. In general, I don't really much care whether the software I use is open source or proprietary; I'm only interested in how useful it is to me in practice. Which is the same way I evaluate Wikipedia.
Given the choice, I'd send a student to Wikipedia over Britanica.
The biggest problem with an "authoritative source" like Britanica, is that people--especially students--are tempted to take it as a final authority. But Britanica is not infallible, and even when it is correct, it is often superficial. People are tempted to settle for predigested opinions instead of forming their own
I think that the vulnerability of Wikipedia is in some respects a good thing, because it inculcates good research habits. I don't take Wikipedia as a final authority on anything, because I know that any given article might have been edited by a crackpot or an ideologue. Quote Wikipedia as an authority in a debate, and people will laugh at you. But I find Wikipedia extremely useful as a starting point for research; I just confirm anything important from primary sources--something that you should be doing this even if you use Britanica.
If 100.000 brain cells is 0.1% then a mouse has 100.000.000 brain cells. How many bytes does it take to describe a brain cell? How many connections are there from a single brain cell to other brain cells? Say it takes 4 bytes to address the connections. Then 10 connections per cell make 4GByte in total. Who is going to write the software to simulate a mouse?
Nobody knows, because nobody knows what level of detail is required. Do you need the exact pattern of dendrite branching and the locations of individual synapses? How about the locations of individual receptors and transmitter uptake sites? That certainly can make a difference in how the cell responds, and would require a lot of bytes to describe. Or can you get away with a statistical distribution that might have a small number of parameters?
They aren't doing it for fun, they are doing it because it gives their genes an advantage (by elimenating some competition) and hence those that were wired to do so had an evolutionary advantage and so that wiring was passed on. Chimps in other groups also are still the same species.
And what is "fun"? It is activation of brain reward systems that have evolved by natural selection to encourage us to engage in activities that increase the probability of passing on our genes. So yes, they probably are doing it for fun.
The example that actually meets what was claimed is cats. Those things won't just kill a small animal for fun, they'll torment it for as long as the thing survives. Then the cat just leaves the dead animal alone, no eating involved... Torturing and killing other species just for fun.
Yes, it certainly appears to be fun for the cat. And it probably evolved to be fun because it encourages the cat to develop skill in prey stalking and catching--skill that will come in handy if food is scarce.
Also, Microsoft already owns and develops a software called VirtualPC that enables x86 code (like XBox I) to run on PowerPC Mac OS X. Adding some wrappers that intercept the graphic function calls would be fairly simple. Don't forget that you emulate a ~700 MHz x86 on a ~3 GHz PowerPC, so it would be a fairly acceptable emulation....
However, game developers often use hardware-specific tweaks, sometimes undocumented, to get maximum performance out of a console. So it is not surprising that Microsoft is needing to come up with tweaked emulators for each title. It's not yet clear what approach Sony will take to emulate the PS2 on the PS3 and whether it will be better or worse than Microsoft's approach; the PS2 essentially incorporated the PS1 hardware, but even then there were some games that wouldn't play; there are even some games that won't play on all PS2 models.
Personally, I think that the extra controllers are a great idea. I'd love to have games that allowed enough players that *everyone* could get involved. With a wireless connection, what reason is there to *not* allow more controllers?
For most games, the limiting factor on the number of players is not likely to be the number of controllers. I think that it will be a rare game that is able to accommodate 7 simultaneous players with a single display. It's uncommon for that many people to be able to get together in one place to play, so it will never be a big selling point, and there will be little incentive for developers to come up with game designs that can handle so many players at once. I predict that the use of this feature will be limited to a handful of "party" games. Perhaps some sports titles will benefit, although to see all players at once, the camera would have to be so zoomed out that much of the graphical appeal would be lost. There is likely to be far more demand for net play, where each person can have his own display.
Slashdot Mirror
This just in: Information typed into Google's searchbox is sent back to Google! News at 11:00!
If I don't want Google to get information about my interests, I don't do searches through Google.
If I don't want the iTunes miniStore to search iTMS for music similar to what I play, I turn it off.
In both cases, the search function is quite obvious, and easily avoided by the user. There is nothing surreptitious here.
When I bought my first VCR, it was a VHS machine. At the time, beta and VHS were still close to neck and neck, with VHS just beginning to pull ahead--indeed, nobody was yet even conceptualizing it as a war that might have a single winner. Longer playing L-750 beta tapes had recently become available, largely neutralizing an early VHS advantage. Video shops (these were video sales shops; rental hadn't really taken off yet) carried prerecorded tapes in both formats. I looked at a bunch of models in both formats. All were front loaders, all had video inputs. But the VHS machines were significantly cheaper. For this reason, I bought VHS (an RCA model as I recall). After living with it for a couple of days, I took it back. Two main reasons: the VHS transport seemed incredibly slow. You'd hit the button, and wait, wait for it to respond. The other reason was that the pause/freeze frame was incredibly noisy. When I took it back, I tried all the other VHS machines in the shop. They all had the same balky transport, and the noisy, jumpy freeze frame. The betas responded instantly, and I could shuttle rapidly between play, pause, forward and reverse. The freeze frame was perfectly clear and steady. Picture quality was maybe a bit better on the beta, but not strikingly so (Super beta, which came out later, did have a much better picture than VHS, but subsequent HQ VHS machines pretty much closed the gap).
What brought down beta? Rental shops. The VHS machines had a bigger market share, because they were cheaper, but Sony was slow to respond in the price arena. After all, Sony had always sold high-end products, and margin was more important to them than market share. Sony believed that consumers bought VCRs mainly for time-shifting. Prerecorded tapes back then typically cost $80, which was significant money at the time--they were pretty much limited to wealthy video enthusiasts and porn fans. What Sony didn't foresee was the emergence of rental shops. The rental shops initially carried both formats, but in about the ratio as the respective VHS and beta userbases--which meant a few more VHS tapes than beta. As people began to rent more and more, they were more likely to buy VHS machines, because their rental store had a better selection--which led the rental stores to buy still more VHS and still fewer beta tapes, which led consumers to favor VHS machines more. By the time that Sony caught on and dropped prices, it was too late; some video stores were already beginning to go VHS-exclusive.
Doug Trumbull (special effects expert best known for "2001 Space Odyssey") developed a 60 fps filming system calledShowscan back in the '70's. The films were said to be startlingly realistic, but he never managed to convince the studios that it was worth the expense of converting. Of course, with digital projectors, this would be much easier to do today.
Honestly these companies keep saying DVD is going the way of the dodo, but for now I predict that these new technologies are the new beta-max. People have bought huge numbers of DVDs of old and new favorites. The video quality is just fine. Is there any real need to buy a whole new player with more expensive media and a smaller number of released titles?
It'll be worth it for the videophiles, who buy far more movies than the average consumer. But rather than the new beta-max, I'd say a better analogy is progressive output. At first it was a feature of high end video hardware. Then it became a selling point, with a $50 or so increment on the price of the player. Now, even the Radio Shack $30 DVD players offer progressive output.
Similarly, there will initially be two editions of films, with the HD ones selling at a premium. Then they will start selling at the same price and there will be some DVDs with HD on one side and SD on the other. Eventually, you'll find only HD copies on the shelves (although standard DVDs will continue be available by special order), but by that time the $30 RadioShack players will be HD capable.
The difference is, people didn't adopt DVD because of the quality alone. They did it because of the convenience of a disc format above all else.
Did they? Is a small disk really all that much more convenient than a large disk? And why was the laserdisk so much more successful in Japan than in the US? I think that convenience may have been a factor, but not for the consumer; I think that it may have more to do with acceptance of the DVD format by rental outlets. And when consumers tried it, they found that the quality was better. I remember that when DVD players were first coming out, everybody I knew who tried it remarked on the picture quality.
The quality difference is going to be negligible for the vast majority of people out there, nothing even remotely as signifigant as VHS to DVD was.
I didn't find the quality jump from VHS to DVD nearly as striking as the jump from interlaced to progressive. A lot of consumers have yet to experience this, as most TVs capable of progressive are HD and until this year have been very expensive. HD DVD formats will be most appreciated by enthusiasts with big screen TVs, but the improvement is quite evident even on a 34" TV, so consumers in general will move to it once the price increment goes down. I imagine that only the big screen videophiles will bother to reacquire movies in HD that they already have on DVD, but those will be the early adopters, anyway.
Let's not also forget the move from Pan and Scan to Widescreen, which worked both ways: some people were turned on by how much better it was, while it took others a very long time to understand and enjoy it
This is linked to the availability of widescreen TVs. With standard format TVs, it is a tradeoff of the original film aspect ratio at the sacrifice of a smaller picture, which is worth it to film enthusiasts, but often not to the average consumer. But widesceen TVs have also dropped dramatically in price, and now the tradeoff works the other way--it is the pan/scan version that gives the smaller picture (or more commonly a stretched image, since many people don't have their aspect ratio settings correct).
I remember a few years ago people were making the very same argument for why DVDs would be a failure. The new DVD players will be picked up initially by the enthusiasts with the big screen TVs, but in a couple of years you won't be able to find a non-HD DVD player on the shelves, just as today it is hard to find a DVD player that isn't capable of at least ED output. By that time, most TVs sold will be HD as well (I saw rows of them at Wal-Mart before Xmas, starting at $500). And while the difference between HD and ED isn't glaring, it is visible, even on modest-sized HD screens.
A similar idea plays a role in Cory Doctorow's novel, Eastern Standard Tribe.
Everything they are holding up to "replace" DVDs are nothing more than increased storage/better video quality, but that is only benificial to people who do have HD TVs (which isn't many).
However, SD TV is about to go away as well. Before Christmas I saw rows of HD TVs--with digital tuners--at WalMart starting at $500. Combined with the fact that in many areas, you can hook one up to your old roof antenna--or even a set-top antenna--and get all of the network channels as clear as from cable without paying another cent, and the fact that analog over-the-air broadcasts will soon be going away, it hardly makes sense to buy SD. I think that within a couple of years HD will be as ubiquitous as DVD players are today.
Of course, DVD isn't going away--they're just being enhanced. Most consumers will hardly notice the transition, any more than they've noticed that virtually all DVD players on the shelves are now capable of at least ED output. Initially, the HD DVD formats will be pitched to the early adopters with the giant screen TVs. In two or three years, it will be a standard feature of all players (and they'll probably play both formats unless one drops out in the meantime).
!"increasing as much as planned" != "cutting back"
Well, yes, but this isn't the really dumb part. The bandwidth auction will earn the federal government considerably more than they will spend on helping people convert (and this expenditure is necessary to make it politically feasible). So there will actually be more money to spend upon school lunches (or ill-advised foreign adventures, which seems rather more likely).
No one wants to say it, but one factor that I think may account for increased Nintendo DS and GBA sales is the availability of flash backup cartridges and pirated ROMs.
Pirates like to tell themselves that "everybody is doing it," but I'd be amazed if even 1% of DS buyers are playing such pirated games. This isn't something that unsophisticated users can simply trade across the internet like mp3's by simply firing up LimeWire, so it is likely to remain confined to a tiny minority of hackers.
If you read the older literature, it seems that placebos are very powerful treatments for many conditions, with a substantial fraction of subjects showing a positive response to placebo. The effect of placebos has been attributed to patient expectation. Some studies showed that patient expectation could override known pharmacological effects of drugs; patients given a stimulant but told that it was a sedative exhibited signs of sedation, and vice-versa. On the other hand, modern studies (e.g. this study suggest that placebos have rather small effects aside from pain (probably via release of endogenous opiates) and psychiatric conditions.
However, modern studies with placebos are done very differently than the early studies. In the old days, experimenters simply lied to the subjects and told them that they were receiving an active drug. This is no longer considered ethical, and subjects in modern studies must sign a form indicating that they are aware that there is a possibility that they will be given an inactive placebo. Given that the ethical issues preclude the replication of the early studies, this is a question that may never be entirely resolved.
A related issue is whether it is ethical for a physician to lie to a patient and give them a placebo. Modern ethical standards impose an obligation on the physician to be honest with patients, which--if placebos really can have beneficial effects--may be an obstacle to optimum treatment in circumstances where no better treatment is available. I've heard of cases physicians recommending herbal or homeopathic treatments, since in such cases they can honestly tell their patients, "Some patients find this helps." This is not quite the same as being able to say "This is a wonder drug; it will definitely make you feel better," but offers a compromise between the obligation to be honest and the obligation to offer the best therapy available.
Keep in mind that herbicide resistance arises spontaneously in the wild. It's going to happen sooner or later, GM or not. So the practical question is whether gene transfer resulting in viable, fertile plants that can compete effectively with unmodified wildtype plants occurs frequently enough to have a significant impact on the rate at which herbicide resistance arises. It is still unclear whether this is the case.
If you are going to comment, you probably should actually take the trouble to RTFD (note: PDF). I think it deals with this argument rather well:
I just read the decision. Many have expressed concern over judges deciding scientific issues. But the judge in this case has done a truly admirable job of identifying the key scientific issues, and identifying the flaws in ID doctrine.
NEITHER creation nor evolution fit the strict definition of science: the study of that which is observable and repeatable.
Wrong. Science is NOT the study of that "which is observable and repeatable." What is required for an idea to be considered scientific is that it must yield predictions that are testable by observation. Not everything must be observable; it is only required that there be observable consequences. Until fairly recently, for example, it was not possible to observe atoms, but atomic theory was considered to be scientific because there are observable consequences of the existence of atoms. Similarly, evolutionary theory makes numerous predictions about levels of genetic similarity between species, which can be tested by sequencing studies that yield results that are observable and repeatable.
Nope- because God is no more complex than the concept of a random and indeterministic universe. The two concepts are equally complex.
This is true only if God acts completely randomly--in which case God is indistinguishable from a random universe. In a formal sense, complexity is defined by the number of bits of information required to describe how something behaves. Randomness requires the least amount of information to define--anything that is possible may happen. But if God preferentially takes some actions in preference to others, then some number of bits of information are needed to describe that preference. If God acts upon knowledge, the some number of bits of information are needed to define that knowledge. An omniscient God would require infinite number of bits of information, and hence would be considered infinitely complex.
There are prominent examples of *non-theists* who are proponents of ID (like Michael Behe and Francis Crick, for example
As far as I know, Crick never proposed that life was intelligently designed. He did suggest that a very primitive form of life might have originated elsewhere and arrived on earth from space, and subsequently evolved. And although Behe calls himself an advocate of intelligent design, his hypothesis is similar to Crick's, in that he imagines that a primitive form of life was intelligently designed, and subsequently evolved.
The key point is that neither Crick nor Behe have attempted to offer an alternative to evolution, but rather an alternate explanation for the origin of life (which is not properly a part of the theory of evolution). Whereas evolution is very well established, the initial origin of life is very much an open question among scientists, with multiple competing hypotheses and no generally accepted theory.
One of the few saving graces of the great robber barons is that in their latter years they often feel a need to give something back to the world that they have so ruthlessly exploited.
While it is hard to find much good to say about Gates's business tactics or his impact on the computer industry, he has approached philanthropy with care and consideration, targeting unmet needs where his investment can do the most to relieve human suffering.
Truly sad to see someone who is in a position of
teaching employ such contorted and contrived logic
in order to justify an agenda. Truly, your are an
example of why "open-source" zealots retard the
advancement of learning.
The amusing thing here is that I am not particularly an open source advocate. In general, I don't really much care whether the software I use is open source or proprietary; I'm only interested in how useful it is to me in practice. Which is the same way I evaluate Wikipedia.
Given the choice, I'd send a student to Wikipedia over Britanica.
The biggest problem with an "authoritative source" like Britanica, is that people--especially students--are tempted to take it as a final authority. But Britanica is not infallible, and even when it is correct, it is often superficial. People are tempted to settle for predigested opinions instead of forming their own
I think that the vulnerability of Wikipedia is in some respects a good thing, because it inculcates good research habits. I don't take Wikipedia as a final authority on anything, because I know that any given article might have been edited by a crackpot or an ideologue. Quote Wikipedia as an authority in a debate, and people will laugh at you. But I find Wikipedia extremely useful as a starting point for research; I just confirm anything important from primary sources--something that you should be doing this even if you use Britanica.
I doubt if commercial success of the platform is dependent upon a big launch in Japan.
If 100.000 brain cells is 0.1% then a mouse has 100.000.000 brain cells. How many bytes does it take to describe a brain cell? How many connections are there from a single brain cell to other brain cells? Say it takes 4 bytes to address the connections. Then 10 connections per cell make 4GByte in total. Who is going to write the software to simulate a mouse?
Nobody knows, because nobody knows what level of detail is required. Do you need the exact pattern of dendrite branching and the locations of individual synapses? How about the locations of individual receptors and transmitter uptake sites? That certainly can make a difference in how the cell responds, and would require a lot of bytes to describe. Or can you get away with a statistical distribution that might have a small number of parameters?
They aren't doing it for fun, they are doing it because it gives their genes an advantage (by elimenating some competition) and hence those that were wired to do so had an evolutionary advantage and so that wiring was passed on. Chimps in other groups also are still the same species.
And what is "fun"? It is activation of brain reward systems that have evolved by natural selection to encourage us to engage in activities that increase the probability of passing on our genes. So yes, they probably are doing it for fun.
The example that actually meets what was claimed is cats. Those things won't just kill a small animal for fun, they'll torment it for as long as the thing survives. Then the cat just leaves the dead animal alone, no eating involved... Torturing and killing other species just for fun.
Yes, it certainly appears to be fun for the cat. And it probably evolved to be fun because it encourages the cat to develop skill in prey stalking and catching--skill that will come in handy if food is scarce.
Also, Microsoft already owns and develops a software called VirtualPC that enables x86 code (like XBox I) to run on PowerPC Mac OS X. Adding some
wrappers that intercept the graphic function calls would be fairly simple. Don't forget that you emulate a ~700 MHz x86 on a ~3 GHz PowerPC, so it would be a fairly acceptable emulation....
However, game developers often use hardware-specific tweaks, sometimes undocumented, to get maximum performance out of a console. So it is not surprising that Microsoft is needing to come up with tweaked emulators for each title. It's not yet clear what approach Sony will take to emulate the PS2 on the PS3 and whether it will be better or worse than Microsoft's approach; the PS2 essentially incorporated the PS1 hardware, but even then there were some games that wouldn't play; there are even some games that won't play on all PS2 models.
Personally, I think that the extra controllers are a great idea. I'd love to have games that allowed enough players that *everyone* could get involved. With a wireless connection, what reason is there to *not* allow more controllers?
For most games, the limiting factor on the number of players is not likely to be the number of controllers. I think that it will be a rare game that is able to accommodate 7 simultaneous players with a single display. It's uncommon for that many people to be able to get together in one place to play, so it will never be a big selling point, and there will be little incentive for developers to come up with game designs that can handle so many players at once. I predict that the use of this feature will be limited to a handful of "party" games. Perhaps some sports titles will benefit, although to see all players at once, the camera would have to be so zoomed out that much of the graphical appeal would be lost. There is likely to be far more demand for net play, where each person can have his own display.