When the overwhelming majority of researchers in a field of study say one thing, and you get at best a handful of researchers with anything like the credentials necessary to evaluate the evidence stating the opposite (the rest being a hodge-podge of scientists in unrelated fields, engineers and journalists), is your first assumption that the naysayers must be right? You do realize that in almost every field there is at least one or two people who make claims opposed to the accepted theories; biology (a few evolution deniers), Big Bang cosmology (probably one or two physicists who claim it's wrong), HIV causing AIDS (that's right, still one or two who claim it doesn't), and the list goes on.
Let's face it, the reason YOU accept the skeptics is because it feeds your ideological leanings. You have political motives to deny AGW, and basically are willing to claim that the overwhelming majority of climatologists are either fools or liars to keep believing it. It's anti-intellectualism at its worst, but it's all been seen before.
Here's a news flash. The Universe doesn't give a fuck about Libertarianism, Communism, Capitalism, Pol Pot or your political beliefs. Reality is not defined by politics.
None of your examples are in fact true. Does it bother you that you cannot even come up with counterexamples that ever happened?
I know of no one who said air vehicles were impossible. Certainly the Greeks pondered it and da Vinci designed air vehicles. As to the world being flat, well yes, in Bronze Age and pre-Bronze Age epochs, many cosmographical myths stated a flat earth, but we've known for something like 2500 not only the shape of the Earth, but its circumference with reasonable accuracy.
For you to in fact provide examples, you should, well, you know bring up some examples from the era of science, and the example has to be something that the general scientific consensus pointed in one direction when ultimately it was determined that it was the other way around. Good luck with that, there aren't a lot of scientific theories that had gained general consensus that have been outright falsified. Big ones like the Steady State model of the universe presented enormous problems that even when there was some general acceptance, Einstein was still forced to insert a Cosmological Constant because his own theory actually demonstrated the steady state model to be false.
But by picking at low lying fruit, like what some Ancient Babylonian believed to be true, you rather prove the point that the pseudo-skeptics aren't terribly interested in a scientific argument at all, but rather in rhetorical games. As to your air vehicle thing, more pure bollocks.
They forked an existing open source project. If Oracle finds such conduct so appalling, why are we not seeing the LibreOffice team hauled into court?
What Oracle (and apparently you, Mr. Shill) want is for two different standards, one for Google, and one for anyone else basing their project on open source code made available by Oracle/Sun. Well, actually in your case, it's probably because you get paid to lambaste Google, but no one is interested in paying you to throw shit at the Apache project.
The post I replied to was written by a moron who uses words he does not understand to make points he cannot support. If you have the words of someone who isn't a moron, then by all means provide them. This is my official "Not Polite To Worthless Fucktards Day", and you sir, qualify, with pathetic idiotic claims that you have somehow debunked Big Bang cosmology.
Are you mentally retarded? Google is charging you to access their servers. That's it. They provide a programming interface to do it, and if you wanted to set up your own server and duplicate their API, there's nothing they can do about it.
Either you're so fucking stupid they should put you in a pillow suit and keep you away from sharp objects, or you're a vile shill in which case I recommend you find the nearest elevator shaft and jump off it, so the world is less one more useless astroturfing dildo cream additive.
Oh look, another fucktard. That's not to pay for the API, you cognitively challenged anal discharge, that's to access their fucking servers. Now please, take kitchen knife A and jab into eyesocket B and twist repeatedly.
Oh shut the fuck up you fucking goddamned shill. Look, you twisted worthless pile of garbage, if they start deciding APIs can be copyrighted, we're all well and truly fucked, even you, you cancerous little toad.
Fucking hell, do you think we're all fucking morons that we don't know that you're getting paid by MS to post this crap? I hope you die horrifically.
I'm not sure what's confusing you. Look, how time is perceived (excluding any particular psychological phenomena) is a function of speed of the object in question; it's all relative to the frame of reference of the observer. The faster you go, the slower external time passes (not your own time, mind you, just the time of anything not moving as fast as you are). The closer to the speed of light you go, the slower time passes, until finally you have a photon which always moves at the speed of light, time does not pass at all from that frame of reference. That's not to say that nothing happens during the lifetime of a photon, it's just from the photon's frame of reference.
It is a counter-intuitive notion, to be sure, but one that has been confirmed many times. It does not mean that there is no time at all. All measurements, of course, are from the frame of reference of folks in the Local Group, more or less. Some observer in some other part of the universe moving at some different speed would measure the time differently.
You couldn't see light from the Big Bang itself because it took until nearly 400,000 years after the Big Bang for the Universe to cool sufficiently for photons to find a clear path through the charged ions. It's this first wave of freed photons that form the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.
Short answer: yes. For anything traveling at luminal speeds, time is not perceived. If you were a photon, it might take you 12.7 billion years to get here, but for you it is an instant.
This assumes that intelligence is some sort of goal. There are plenty of ways to survive far better than just by being smart. Bacteria have it figured out; just reproduce like crazy.
The only thing Darwin missed was a method of heredibility. That is a flaw, no doubt, but as Stephen R. Gould wrote, the overarching theory still works. The Modern Synthesis is just Darwinian selection married to genetics. In other words, both complement the other.
Ask Britain and France how losing air superiority worked out in the pursuit of peace. Peace isn't something that magically happens, it is enforced and protected.
But none of that would have worked if the US had not maintained a large and very well equipped armed forces. Without the ability to hold the Soviets in check militarily, the West would have been screwed.
What defeated the Soviets was Containment. Part of that was economic, and par of it was force projection and the ability to counter or respond to all Soviet military capabilities.
If all da Vinci had done was make accurate anatomical drawings, he'd be another Renaissance genius. What makes da Vinci possibly the most gifted human being in the history of our species is that while he was dissecting bodies to learn how they functioned, he was also designing hydraulic systems, helicopters, submarines, oh, and being one of the greatest painters in all of history. What has, since his time down to ours made him the most breathtaking of intellects was that his genius truly knew no bounds. Every topic fascinated him, and if he turned his mind to understanding it, he seemed almost effortlessly to do so.
I don't see what your point is. I can export Google documents in a number of common formats. I can export Google Mail via IMAP. In fact, I have Thunderbird installed to access Google, MS-Exchange and my ISP's email account and can literally move emails back and forth, except Exchange, whose IMAP implementation pretty much sucks, and tends to bugger up a good deal more. What you're essentially doing is blaming Google because other online providers haven't got the memo and are still trying to use proprietary formats and/or protocols to lock you in.
Let me blunt here. There has never been another online email and document storage company that has been as willing as Google to let you walk away with your data. Every other company that has offered similar things in the past has tried everything in its power to force you to remain with them. I remember back in the day using special software to grab Yahoo and Hotmail email on my Linux box, and both these guys periodically changing the underlying interface deliberately to foil utilities like fetchyahoo. Google, on the other hand, had POP3 from almost the beginning, and thus you could use any email client, and when it turned on IMAP, it made itself a pure drop-in replacement for ISP mail accounts.
You have to be some pretty fucking bizarre person to accuse Google of trying to proprietize data formats. In fact, you have to either be a goddamned liar or a fucking moron.
The Microsoft tax was basically paid on 9 out of 10 personal computers. Microsoft made huge fortunes out of its OEM sales. Google has nothing like OEM software, and really couldn't, as it has to operate in an environment completely alien to that business model (an environment, I might add, that Microsoft has failed to dominate for some 17 years despite throwing billions at).
The only companies that can hope to dominate the Internet in the way Microsoft dominated PCs would be the backbone and wireless providers.
It's not besides the point. Microsoft used its monopoly to force hardware manufacturers to put its operating system on their computers to the exclusion of other operating systems (just how many OEM Dr. DOS or OS/2 installs did you ever see on PC compatibles).
The only way Google would be the equivalent of Microsoft is if Google was somehow bullying DNS servers or ISPs into using its search engine to the exclusion of others. But of course, Google cannot do that because the Internet, unlike PC hardware, is diffused. It has no way to maintain a captured audience, to use whatever market position it has to get rid of the others.
It isn't the same thing at all. At any moment someone could out-Google Google and there's not a damned thing Google could do about it. Once its advertising revenue flew away, it would fall quickly.
Except you don't have to use Google. Whatever its dominance you can always use another search engine. It has no monopoly on search or email, and is in no position to create one. It is in no way the equivalent of Microsoft, it's dominance is not based on force.
Large parts of the tech industry are dominated by non-critical software. Yes, I agree, in those places degrees may be superfluous. But would you want some who hadn't met at least minimal professional standards writing dialysis machine software? It's one thing if it's just some guy writing software to throw on an app store, it's quite another thing if you're dealing with mission critical software. So what we can gather here is that in some cases you very much want someone with a degree, and in some cases it doesn't matter.
But in no case should lying on a resume be let to stand. It's dishonorable and dishonest, and indicates pretty severe character flaws that may become only worse as the amount of power and responsibility increases.
The logical implications of the arguments present in the article make us believe that it's ok to lie if you're important and have money.
Or if your SCO, it's okay to lie and be a proxy for Microsoft because there's money to be made in asserting ownership over something you do not in fact own.
That's something that Lyons should know all about.
Slashdot Mirror
When the overwhelming majority of researchers in a field of study say one thing, and you get at best a handful of researchers with anything like the credentials necessary to evaluate the evidence stating the opposite (the rest being a hodge-podge of scientists in unrelated fields, engineers and journalists), is your first assumption that the naysayers must be right? You do realize that in almost every field there is at least one or two people who make claims opposed to the accepted theories; biology (a few evolution deniers), Big Bang cosmology (probably one or two physicists who claim it's wrong), HIV causing AIDS (that's right, still one or two who claim it doesn't), and the list goes on.
Let's face it, the reason YOU accept the skeptics is because it feeds your ideological leanings. You have political motives to deny AGW, and basically are willing to claim that the overwhelming majority of climatologists are either fools or liars to keep believing it. It's anti-intellectualism at its worst, but it's all been seen before.
Here's a news flash. The Universe doesn't give a fuck about Libertarianism, Communism, Capitalism, Pol Pot or your political beliefs. Reality is not defined by politics.
None of your examples are in fact true. Does it bother you that you cannot even come up with counterexamples that ever happened?
I know of no one who said air vehicles were impossible. Certainly the Greeks pondered it and da Vinci designed air vehicles. As to the world being flat, well yes, in Bronze Age and pre-Bronze Age epochs, many cosmographical myths stated a flat earth, but we've known for something like 2500 not only the shape of the Earth, but its circumference with reasonable accuracy.
For you to in fact provide examples, you should, well, you know bring up some examples from the era of science, and the example has to be something that the general scientific consensus pointed in one direction when ultimately it was determined that it was the other way around. Good luck with that, there aren't a lot of scientific theories that had gained general consensus that have been outright falsified. Big ones like the Steady State model of the universe presented enormous problems that even when there was some general acceptance, Einstein was still forced to insert a Cosmological Constant because his own theory actually demonstrated the steady state model to be false.
But by picking at low lying fruit, like what some Ancient Babylonian believed to be true, you rather prove the point that the pseudo-skeptics aren't terribly interested in a scientific argument at all, but rather in rhetorical games. As to your air vehicle thing, more pure bollocks.
They forked an existing open source project. If Oracle finds such conduct so appalling, why are we not seeing the LibreOffice team hauled into court?
What Oracle (and apparently you, Mr. Shill) want is for two different standards, one for Google, and one for anyone else basing their project on open source code made available by Oracle/Sun. Well, actually in your case, it's probably because you get paid to lambaste Google, but no one is interested in paying you to throw shit at the Apache project.
The post I replied to was written by a moron who uses words he does not understand to make points he cannot support. If you have the words of someone who isn't a moron, then by all means provide them. This is my official "Not Polite To Worthless Fucktards Day", and you sir, qualify, with pathetic idiotic claims that you have somehow debunked Big Bang cosmology.
Are you mentally retarded? Google is charging you to access their servers. That's it. They provide a programming interface to do it, and if you wanted to set up your own server and duplicate their API, there's nothing they can do about it.
Either you're so fucking stupid they should put you in a pillow suit and keep you away from sharp objects, or you're a vile shill in which case I recommend you find the nearest elevator shaft and jump off it, so the world is less one more useless astroturfing dildo cream additive.
This one I'm pretty sure is an MS shill.
Oh look, another fucktard. That's not to pay for the API, you cognitively challenged anal discharge, that's to access their fucking servers. Now please, take kitchen knife A and jab into eyesocket B and twist repeatedly.
Other than some string theorists, I think most physicists are of the opinion that time-space did not exist prior to the Big Bang.
Oh shut the fuck up you fucking goddamned shill. Look, you twisted worthless pile of garbage, if they start deciding APIs can be copyrighted, we're all well and truly fucked, even you, you cancerous little toad.
Fucking hell, do you think we're all fucking morons that we don't know that you're getting paid by MS to post this crap? I hope you die horrifically.
It's always fun to watch pseudo-critical morons dance their little dance. How, pray tell, does any of this cause problems for Big Bang cosmology?
I'm not sure what's confusing you. Look, how time is perceived (excluding any particular psychological phenomena) is a function of speed of the object in question; it's all relative to the frame of reference of the observer. The faster you go, the slower external time passes (not your own time, mind you, just the time of anything not moving as fast as you are). The closer to the speed of light you go, the slower time passes, until finally you have a photon which always moves at the speed of light, time does not pass at all from that frame of reference. That's not to say that nothing happens during the lifetime of a photon, it's just from the photon's frame of reference.
It is a counter-intuitive notion, to be sure, but one that has been confirmed many times. It does not mean that there is no time at all. All measurements, of course, are from the frame of reference of folks in the Local Group, more or less. Some observer in some other part of the universe moving at some different speed would measure the time differently.
You couldn't see light from the Big Bang itself because it took until nearly 400,000 years after the Big Bang for the Universe to cool sufficiently for photons to find a clear path through the charged ions. It's this first wave of freed photons that form the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.
Short answer: yes. For anything traveling at luminal speeds, time is not perceived. If you were a photon, it might take you 12.7 billion years to get here, but for you it is an instant.
This assumes that intelligence is some sort of goal. There are plenty of ways to survive far better than just by being smart. Bacteria have it figured out; just reproduce like crazy.
The only thing Darwin missed was a method of heredibility. That is a flaw, no doubt, but as Stephen R. Gould wrote, the overarching theory still works. The Modern Synthesis is just Darwinian selection married to genetics. In other words, both complement the other.
Ask Britain and France how losing air superiority worked out in the pursuit of peace. Peace isn't something that magically happens, it is enforced and protected.
But none of that would have worked if the US had not maintained a large and very well equipped armed forces. Without the ability to hold the Soviets in check militarily, the West would have been screwed.
What defeated the Soviets was Containment. Part of that was economic, and par of it was force projection and the ability to counter or respond to all Soviet military capabilities.
If all da Vinci had done was make accurate anatomical drawings, he'd be another Renaissance genius. What makes da Vinci possibly the most gifted human being in the history of our species is that while he was dissecting bodies to learn how they functioned, he was also designing hydraulic systems, helicopters, submarines, oh, and being one of the greatest painters in all of history. What has, since his time down to ours made him the most breathtaking of intellects was that his genius truly knew no bounds. Every topic fascinated him, and if he turned his mind to understanding it, he seemed almost effortlessly to do so.
I don't see what your point is. I can export Google documents in a number of common formats. I can export Google Mail via IMAP. In fact, I have Thunderbird installed to access Google, MS-Exchange and my ISP's email account and can literally move emails back and forth, except Exchange, whose IMAP implementation pretty much sucks, and tends to bugger up a good deal more. What you're essentially doing is blaming Google because other online providers haven't got the memo and are still trying to use proprietary formats and/or protocols to lock you in.
Let me blunt here. There has never been another online email and document storage company that has been as willing as Google to let you walk away with your data. Every other company that has offered similar things in the past has tried everything in its power to force you to remain with them. I remember back in the day using special software to grab Yahoo and Hotmail email on my Linux box, and both these guys periodically changing the underlying interface deliberately to foil utilities like fetchyahoo. Google, on the other hand, had POP3 from almost the beginning, and thus you could use any email client, and when it turned on IMAP, it made itself a pure drop-in replacement for ISP mail accounts.
You have to be some pretty fucking bizarre person to accuse Google of trying to proprietize data formats. In fact, you have to either be a goddamned liar or a fucking moron.
The Microsoft tax was basically paid on 9 out of 10 personal computers. Microsoft made huge fortunes out of its OEM sales. Google has nothing like OEM software, and really couldn't, as it has to operate in an environment completely alien to that business model (an environment, I might add, that Microsoft has failed to dominate for some 17 years despite throwing billions at).
The only companies that can hope to dominate the Internet in the way Microsoft dominated PCs would be the backbone and wireless providers.
It's not besides the point. Microsoft used its monopoly to force hardware manufacturers to put its operating system on their computers to the exclusion of other operating systems (just how many OEM Dr. DOS or OS/2 installs did you ever see on PC compatibles).
The only way Google would be the equivalent of Microsoft is if Google was somehow bullying DNS servers or ISPs into using its search engine to the exclusion of others. But of course, Google cannot do that because the Internet, unlike PC hardware, is diffused. It has no way to maintain a captured audience, to use whatever market position it has to get rid of the others.
It isn't the same thing at all. At any moment someone could out-Google Google and there's not a damned thing Google could do about it. Once its advertising revenue flew away, it would fall quickly.
There was that old joke that if aliens were to observe Earth, they would assume cats and dogs were the rulers and humans there slaves.
Except you don't have to use Google. Whatever its dominance you can always use another search engine. It has no monopoly on search or email, and is in no position to create one. It is in no way the equivalent of Microsoft, it's dominance is not based on force.
Large parts of the tech industry are dominated by non-critical software. Yes, I agree, in those places degrees may be superfluous. But would you want some who hadn't met at least minimal professional standards writing dialysis machine software? It's one thing if it's just some guy writing software to throw on an app store, it's quite another thing if you're dealing with mission critical software. So what we can gather here is that in some cases you very much want someone with a degree, and in some cases it doesn't matter.
But in no case should lying on a resume be let to stand. It's dishonorable and dishonest, and indicates pretty severe character flaws that may become only worse as the amount of power and responsibility increases.
Or if your SCO, it's okay to lie and be a proxy for Microsoft because there's money to be made in asserting ownership over something you do not in fact own.
That's something that Lyons should know all about.