Yes, I'm sure GP has nothing else he'd rather work on, and should work on this because he's skeptical. Come on, GP posted because he knows something about the topic, and has an informed opinion. You're telling him what to research based on... a slashdot post?
And if you don't believe that something will work, I don't think that's an unreasonable reason to avoid the area... you don't choose your research area on a whim.
Carbon dating does work, when done correctly. It can give ridiculous results, for certain situations. It is *known* why carbon dating doesn't work with (say) freshwater clams. I quote from the "Institute of Creation Research" webpage (http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-189.htm):
MYTH #3. The shells of live freshwater clams have been radiocarbon dated in excess of 1600 years old, clearly showing that the radiocarbon dating technique is not valid.
The shells of live freshwater clams can, and often do, give anomalous radiocarbon results. However, the reason for this is understood and the problem is restricted to only a few special cases, of which freshwater clams are the best-known example. It is not correct to state or imply from this evidence that the radiocarbon dating technique is thus shown to be generally invalid.
The problem with freshwater clams arises because these organisms derive the carbon atoms which they use to build their shells from the water in their environment. If this water is in contact with significant quantities of limestone, it will contain many carbon atoms from dissolved limestone. Since limestone contains very little, if any, radiocarbon, clam shells will contain less radiocarbon than would have been the case if they had gotten their carbon atoms from the air. This gives the clam shell an artificially old radiocarbon age.
This problem, known as the "reservoir effect," is not of very great practical importance for radiocarbon dating since most of the artifacts which are useful for radiocarbon dating purposes and are of interest to archaeology derive from terrestrial organisms which ultimately obtain their carbon atoms from air, not the water.
(This is from an essentially creationist website; they appear to be more scientific than most, which is not too difficult)
There seem to be a lot of comments here along the lines of 'Eeek, XML looks ugly, why on earth would I want a language that looks like that'. Now if you bother to read the article... the idea is to *store* the code as XML, not display it as XML. It would look the same to you, but your editor would store it differently - in XML as opposed to plain text. One of the points being it would be easier to manipulate the display of the source code without changing its meaning.
I quote: '...programmers will not see (much less type in) XML tags'.
Now one can certainly discuss whether this is a good idea or not, but it might be worth commenting on the actual idea rather than a straw man, yes?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, Windows users need the second core to run all that spyware. It'll probably help a lot!
Heh heh.
(You *are* joking, right?)
Yes, I'm sure GP has nothing else he'd rather work on, and should work on this because he's skeptical. Come on, GP posted because he knows something about the topic, and has an informed opinion. You're telling him what to research based on... a slashdot post?
And if you don't believe that something will work, I don't think that's an unreasonable reason to avoid the area... you don't choose your research area on a whim.
Of course users will be able to trivially cicumvent the DRM anyway after it gets hacked in two days.
Any system which requires obfuscation for its DRM is not going to last long.
Man, the type-
setting of that
bill is aw-
ful. Do all
bills have stu-
pid margin
sizes?
Carbon dating does work, when done correctly. It can give ridiculous results, for certain situations. It is *known* why carbon dating doesn't work with (say) freshwater clams. I quote from the "Institute of Creation Research" webpage (http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-189.htm):
(This is from an essentially creationist website; they appear to be more scientific than most, which is not too difficult)
There seem to be a lot of comments here along the lines of 'Eeek, XML looks ugly, why on earth would I want a language that looks like that'. Now if you bother to read the article... the idea is to *store* the code as XML, not display it as XML. It would look the same to you, but your editor would store it differently - in XML as opposed to plain text. One of the points being it would be easier to manipulate the display of the source code without changing its meaning.
I quote: '...programmers will not see (much less type in) XML tags'.
Now one can certainly discuss whether this is a good idea or not, but it might be worth commenting on the actual idea rather than a straw man, yes?