I do not have "faith" that the sun will rise tomorrow, for example. I simply know that there's a high enough probability that it will, based on past experience that I'd be extremely surprised if it didn't.
Interesting... what do you think the probability that there is some creator is? I honestly don't know... and if you don't have any idea, then you have to assume that the probability is greater than 0. Which means there is a possibility of the existence of some creator. Our (severely limited) level of understanding is based entirely what we have been able to figure out sitting at the particular point in space that we have existed for the entire span of the species. So, I think that any argument for or against the existence of a creator is barely worthy of the label of hypothesis - an educated guess - because our level of understanding of the universe in which we believe that we exist is EXTREMELY NARROW.
There should be a threshold for scientific validity for anything taught in a science class. Things such as gravity, evolution, motion all pass that threshold because they have been extensively tested and SEEM to be a reasonable explaination of the mechanics of what they propose to describe. Other things, such as Intelligent Design and String Theory, have not been tested. They have been pondered. The ideas have been intellectually explored. However, they are nothing more than philosophy until a test can be formulated to test the ideas.
A lot of people are complaining that this is anti-liberty, anti-freedom, 1984, etc. I don't know the details of this bill, so I can't comment on whether or not it's a good bill. I agree with many people that the term "sex offender" has been watered down to the point that what in our society is normal sexual behaviour, is illegal in some states and some people have been convicted of things that most people would not apply the "sexual offender" label to. However, the law still does. For, those offenses, this bill doesn't make sense.
In fact, I think most criminal indiscretions should not be treated this way. However, there is a class of "sexual offender" that has proven to be virtually incapable of avoiding committing their convicted offense again and again. That is the class of child molestation. This is not the 17 year old with the fake id type, but the pedophile with a 7 year old child type. Personally, I think those people should get a life sentence without parole. However, some people argue (despite overwhelming statistics to the contrary) that these people can be rehabilitated. I don't have a problem tracking these people for the rest of their life.
An anonymous member of the Longhorn team has stated that the proof will be included in Longhorn. Other problems to be solved by Longhorn are perpetual motion and cold fusion.
A good browser is actually a lot more complex than a simple OS nowadys.
Not sure where you get this idea. Sure the W3C standards are complex, but an OS does A LOT more than a browser. I guess I could agree with it if you're extreme about the modifier "simple." However, any OS that supports enough hardware to actually be useful to the world is going to be much more complex than the most complicated browser. Just look at the sizes of them. Firefox is in the 10's of MB. I don't know of any useful OS that is that small. Sure, you could compile a kernel with the minimal of what you would need to run a specific system and only do a base OS install, but that's still going to be larger in size than a complex browser and the configuring building process itself would illustrate how complicated the whole thing is.
Creating a browser that fully supports all the newer standards, is stable, secure, featurefull, *and* has good performance, is a tremendous task.
And an OS is less so? Which has taken more development hours and time to mature, Linux or Firefox? Which is the most criticized as not being mature enough for the average person to use even though it has had a longer time to develop and has more development effort put into it, Linux or Firefox?
During the browser wars I used Explorer instead of Netscape because I really did like it better.
Same here. I advocated IE over Netscape because the releases were coming faster and the product worked better. It just stagnated after it won... which should be expected since there's no real revenue stream attached to the browser market.
There's no reason that Microsoft can't make IE7 good.
I agree. They did it before and it's not like a browser is something as complex as an operating system. However, I suspect that I will continue using Firefox on OS X for quite awhile.
When it comes to learning, it's essential to reinvent the wheel, again and again, and again until reinventing the wheel is as natural as breathing.
While this may be somewhat true, it can't be that way forever. Eventually the body of human knowledge is going to be so great, that its going to be impractical and impossible for people to learn everything from first principles. Your critique of the "need" for technology in education is a common one. However, the students of today will be working in a much different world of tomorrow. They won't be valued for what they know. They will be valued for how well they can apply knowledge that has already been derived to solve much more complex problems than we are currently imagining. This is happening exponentially. So, where us that graduated from high school more than a decade ago don't understand why they need this in school, we need to realize that the world is changing more and more rapidly.
Where we used to be a world of generalists where everyone made their own clothes, gathered/raised/hunted their own food, built their own homes, treated themselves medically, etc, through the expansion of knowledge in all fields, we have evolved into a world of specialists. Someone from just a couple of centuries ago would think it impossible that the average person would know nothing about securing a food supply from the natural environment. Our growth in knowledge has allowed an increase in productivity that has made it possible for the majority of people to only need to be consumers. Food is produced by a small minority of the people that have to consume it.
Now the world has changed even more and the change continues to accelerate. We will increasingly have to become more and more specialized. It's evolution. Just as single cell organisms continued to advance and became forced to specialize more and more until they eventually became the complex animals that we are today, our societies are going to force us to do the same. Eventually, it is going to be unnecessary to know alot of the things we learned in school.
I hope this is an attempt at humor... those "conservatives" would make sure that anything indicating that marijuana doesn't have significant negative effects would be silenced...
From TFA, Much has been made in the computer press recently of the surprising similarities between Longhorn and Apple's upcoming new Macintosh operating system, Tiger.
The sad thing about this is that Tiger is going to be out a nearly two years before Longhorn. Where will the Mac OS be by the time Longhorn is rolled out on enough machines to have a significant install base?
...if it doesn't have to. Tax dollars are wasted enough as things are without spending billions on software when there are free solutions available that are just as good as the commercial ones. Government should not buy Windows over Linux, Office over OpenOffice, etc. If there is something that meets requirements and doesn't cost as much, that's what government should use.
And they shouldn't be putting information that I need to access in a format that requires me to purchase software to use it...
The way I see it, there are two seperate arguments in the IP debate.
First, there are the technological patents. I believe that if a company or person invests its resources in the development of a technology solution, then it has the right to enjoy the benefits of that development how it sees fit (for a reasonable period of time - we have to allow for truly innovative ideas that change the world and become ingrained in our culture(s)). That is a necessary component of innovation. People need that incentive to work toward something. Some people are looking for financial gain (Microsoft). Other people just want recognition (FOSS developers - although some get financial gain also).
The problem arises when patents are granted for obfuscated ideas. The operative term in my argument for protecting someones technological solution is SOLUTION. Abstract ideas that anyone could come up with if they only had a high enough grade of pot don't qualify as solutions. The patent office should not be awarding patents for those... but they are. That's the problem with that side of the IP debate.
The other side of the debate is creative content and copyrights. With this side, I believe that the content creator has the right to protect their creation and distribute/use/sell/whatever any way that they wish. However, today, most of the issue is with copyrights that aren't owned by the creator. Most artists sign over the copyright of their recordings to the record company in exchange for the power the record company suposedly has to make the artist more money.
There's nothing wrong with that, except, as TFA points out, the rights are retained long after the production is no longer commercially viable. So, the productions end up not being accessible to the public because it would actually cost the record company money to release the recordings or publisher to print a book for sale. So, these companies sit on the work and deny the public usufruct just because they can't make money on it.
Today, most recordings are only commercially viable for a few years. Very few, such as Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, continue to sell and be produced for longer than 5 years. Copyright law should provide that if the product is not commercially viable, then the copyright should be released to the original creator. If the creator doesn't want to make it available, that's their perogative. However, most artists I know would rather have their works enjoyed than sit on them. I believe that that would resolve the copyright issue.
I admit that the powers that be in the US are corrupt. There are many people that claim we have a monopoly on that. It's nice to actually see some evidence on Slashdot that the holier-than-thou Europeans are just as greedy... that subject tends to get ignored by a lot of people around here.
My friend Paul is currently "testing" a Longhorn alpha and it's quite apparent to me that just from the quality of that alpha, the finished product won't be good.
I have little confidence that Microsoft will create anything so great that it will completely change the face of computing. However, judging any software by an alpha release of a system that's final release is two years away is... not meaning to sound harsh, but ignorant. Longhorn will have its problems. It most likely will not be a better desktop OS than OS X. It most likely will not be a better server OS than Linux. However, Microsoft has demonstrated in the last few years that with respect to the general state of their systems, it will be better than the OS that they released before it.
I've been reading today about Iterative and Increment Design (IID) which is based around the principle of breaking a major project up into smaller iterations (of say 1-6 weeks) and at the end of each of these, integrating all the code and demonstrating it to the customer, whose feedback is used to adapt the product development in order to eventually end up with a final release which is useful.
Where have you been for the last 10 years? You sound like you just heard of this.
Someone should really reverse engineer BK and publish the results. It would be interesting to find out what all the real problems are with a system that can't handle a rogue client without trashing the repository.
is a pretty good one: penetrate markets with low priced products that get people hooked on the elegance and simplicity of Apple's designs. I picked up an iPod last year because of all of the buzz. After playing with it for awhile, I realized how brilliant Apple's design was. So, I decided to check out what else they had at the local Apple store. OS X seemed to be so easy to use, not to mention the power of having a CLI with every utility I'm used to using with linux, I had to buy a PowerBook. Now I do all my development work as well as meet my other desktop application work on one machine that JUST WORKS. I don't have spyware/virus worries. I don't have to worry about finding a driver that works for my wireless card. I just power on and start working.
I used to laugh at the Mac zealots... now I know what they were so excited about.
I do not buy into the Lou Dobbs nationalist claptrap, either. I believe that outsourcing is a logical direction for business to move in. However, with the state of the global environment today, there is something to be said about having to deal with domestic employees that do things like this instead of having to worry about two different nations with two different sets of laws. Once there is more structure in the laws dealing with international crimes such as this, the issue is irrelevant. But, business does have to consider it today.
I understand how academia works, but instead of selling this software the professor should get a grant and open-source his work. Students and teachers alike could benefit from Qualrus and derivitives that would certainly arise out of making it an open-source project. In addition, the project would benefit from the input of other people with semantic analysis expertise. Otherwise, the market will keep going the direction that the article covered where everybody is using some different software to evaluate student's writings. If there were a single definitive resource for written evaluation, then there would likely be an improvement in students writing from high school on up as professors and teachers adopt a standard software for written evaluation.
But maybe that would sound too much like charity for the capitalist acting (though likely not capitalist minded) sociology professor...
Slashdot Mirror
There should be a threshold for scientific validity for anything taught in a science class. Things such as gravity, evolution, motion all pass that threshold because they have been extensively tested and SEEM to be a reasonable explaination of the mechanics of what they propose to describe. Other things, such as Intelligent Design and String Theory, have not been tested. They have been pondered. The ideas have been intellectually explored. However, they are nothing more than philosophy until a test can be formulated to test the ideas.
...another argument against government school in the US.
A lot of people are complaining that this is anti-liberty, anti-freedom, 1984, etc. I don't know the details of this bill, so I can't comment on whether or not it's a good bill. I agree with many people that the term "sex offender" has been watered down to the point that what in our society is normal sexual behaviour, is illegal in some states and some people have been convicted of things that most people would not apply the "sexual offender" label to. However, the law still does. For, those offenses, this bill doesn't make sense.
In fact, I think most criminal indiscretions should not be treated this way. However, there is a class of "sexual offender" that has proven to be virtually incapable of avoiding committing their convicted offense again and again. That is the class of child molestation. This is not the 17 year old with the fake id type, but the pedophile with a 7 year old child type. Personally, I think those people should get a life sentence without parole. However, some people argue (despite overwhelming statistics to the contrary) that these people can be rehabilitated. I don't have a problem tracking these people for the rest of their life.
An anonymous member of the Longhorn team has stated that the proof will be included in Longhorn. Other problems to be solved by Longhorn are perpetual motion and cold fusion.
A good browser is actually a lot more complex than a simple OS nowadys.
Not sure where you get this idea. Sure the W3C standards are complex, but an OS does A LOT more than a browser. I guess I could agree with it if you're extreme about the modifier "simple." However, any OS that supports enough hardware to actually be useful to the world is going to be much more complex than the most complicated browser. Just look at the sizes of them. Firefox is in the 10's of MB. I don't know of any useful OS that is that small. Sure, you could compile a kernel with the minimal of what you would need to run a specific system and only do a base OS install, but that's still going to be larger in size than a complex browser and the configuring building process itself would illustrate how complicated the whole thing is.
Creating a browser that fully supports all the newer standards, is stable, secure, featurefull, *and* has good performance, is a tremendous task.
And an OS is less so? Which has taken more development hours and time to mature, Linux or Firefox? Which is the most criticized as not being mature enough for the average person to use even though it has had a longer time to develop and has more development effort put into it, Linux or Firefox?
During the browser wars I used Explorer instead of Netscape because I really did like it better.
Same here. I advocated IE over Netscape because the releases were coming faster and the product worked better. It just stagnated after it won... which should be expected since there's no real revenue stream attached to the browser market.
There's no reason that Microsoft can't make IE7 good.
I agree. They did it before and it's not like a browser is something as complex as an operating system. However, I suspect that I will continue using Firefox on OS X for quite awhile.
When it comes to learning, it's essential to reinvent the wheel, again and again, and again until reinventing the wheel is as natural as breathing.
While this may be somewhat true, it can't be that way forever. Eventually the body of human knowledge is going to be so great, that its going to be impractical and impossible for people to learn everything from first principles. Your critique of the "need" for technology in education is a common one. However, the students of today will be working in a much different world of tomorrow. They won't be valued for what they know. They will be valued for how well they can apply knowledge that has already been derived to solve much more complex problems than we are currently imagining. This is happening exponentially. So, where us that graduated from high school more than a decade ago don't understand why they need this in school, we need to realize that the world is changing more and more rapidly.
Where we used to be a world of generalists where everyone made their own clothes, gathered/raised/hunted their own food, built their own homes, treated themselves medically, etc, through the expansion of knowledge in all fields, we have evolved into a world of specialists. Someone from just a couple of centuries ago would think it impossible that the average person would know nothing about securing a food supply from the natural environment. Our growth in knowledge has allowed an increase in productivity that has made it possible for the majority of people to only need to be consumers. Food is produced by a small minority of the people that have to consume it.
Now the world has changed even more and the change continues to accelerate. We will increasingly have to become more and more specialized. It's evolution. Just as single cell organisms continued to advance and became forced to specialize more and more until they eventually became the complex animals that we are today, our societies are going to force us to do the same. Eventually, it is going to be unnecessary to know alot of the things we learned in school.
Man... I should be a genius. I telnet into my POP3 server to go through my mail.
So... what's 14 IQ points... you're going to die one day, anyway. Toke up. POP3 away.
I hope this is an attempt at humor... those "conservatives" would make sure that anything indicating that marijuana doesn't have significant negative effects would be silenced...
From TFA, Much has been made in the computer press recently of the surprising similarities between Longhorn and Apple's upcoming new Macintosh operating system, Tiger.
The sad thing about this is that Tiger is going to be out a nearly two years before Longhorn. Where will the Mac OS be by the time Longhorn is rolled out on enough machines to have a significant install base?
...if it doesn't have to. Tax dollars are wasted enough as things are without spending billions on software when there are free solutions available that are just as good as the commercial ones. Government should not buy Windows over Linux, Office over OpenOffice, etc. If there is something that meets requirements and doesn't cost as much, that's what government should use.
And they shouldn't be putting information that I need to access in a format that requires me to purchase software to use it...
The way I see it, there are two seperate arguments in the IP debate.
First, there are the technological patents. I believe that if a company or person invests its resources in the development of a technology solution, then it has the right to enjoy the benefits of that development how it sees fit (for a reasonable period of time - we have to allow for truly innovative ideas that change the world and become ingrained in our culture(s)). That is a necessary component of innovation. People need that incentive to work toward something. Some people are looking for financial gain (Microsoft). Other people just want recognition (FOSS developers - although some get financial gain also).
The problem arises when patents are granted for obfuscated ideas. The operative term in my argument for protecting someones technological solution is SOLUTION. Abstract ideas that anyone could come up with if they only had a high enough grade of pot don't qualify as solutions. The patent office should not be awarding patents for those... but they are. That's the problem with that side of the IP debate.
The other side of the debate is creative content and copyrights. With this side, I believe that the content creator has the right to protect their creation and distribute/use/sell/whatever any way that they wish. However, today, most of the issue is with copyrights that aren't owned by the creator. Most artists sign over the copyright of their recordings to the record company in exchange for the power the record company suposedly has to make the artist more money.
There's nothing wrong with that, except, as TFA points out, the rights are retained long after the production is no longer commercially viable. So, the productions end up not being accessible to the public because it would actually cost the record company money to release the recordings or publisher to print a book for sale. So, these companies sit on the work and deny the public usufruct just because they can't make money on it.
Today, most recordings are only commercially viable for a few years. Very few, such as Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, continue to sell and be produced for longer than 5 years. Copyright law should provide that if the product is not commercially viable, then the copyright should be released to the original creator. If the creator doesn't want to make it available, that's their perogative. However, most artists I know would rather have their works enjoyed than sit on them. I believe that that would resolve the copyright issue.
I admit that the powers that be in the US are corrupt. There are many people that claim we have a monopoly on that. It's nice to actually see some evidence on Slashdot that the holier-than-thou Europeans are just as greedy... that subject tends to get ignored by a lot of people around here.
Now mod me flamebait...
My friend Paul is currently "testing" a Longhorn alpha and it's quite apparent to me that just from the quality of that alpha, the finished product won't be good.
I have little confidence that Microsoft will create anything so great that it will completely change the face of computing. However, judging any software by an alpha release of a system that's final release is two years away is... not meaning to sound harsh, but ignorant. Longhorn will have its problems. It most likely will not be a better desktop OS than OS X. It most likely will not be a better server OS than Linux. However, Microsoft has demonstrated in the last few years that with respect to the general state of their systems, it will be better than the OS that they released before it.
I've been reading today about Iterative and Increment Design (IID) which is based around the principle of breaking a major project up into smaller iterations (of say 1-6 weeks) and at the end of each of these, integrating all the code and demonstrating it to the customer, whose feedback is used to adapt the product development in order to eventually end up with a final release which is useful.
Where have you been for the last 10 years? You sound like you just heard of this.
Someone should really reverse engineer BK and publish the results. It would be interesting to find out what all the real problems are with a system that can't handle a rogue client without trashing the repository.
Vaporware
So let's develop the technology now, when a screw up won't mean utter devastation of part of the planet.
Unless that screw-up knocks it into the planet...
Apple developers have had it for awhile now. The rest of us will have it April 29.
is a pretty good one: penetrate markets with low priced products that get people hooked on the elegance and simplicity of Apple's designs. I picked up an iPod last year because of all of the buzz. After playing with it for awhile, I realized how brilliant Apple's design was. So, I decided to check out what else they had at the local Apple store. OS X seemed to be so easy to use, not to mention the power of having a CLI with every utility I'm used to using with linux, I had to buy a PowerBook. Now I do all my development work as well as meet my other desktop application work on one machine that JUST WORKS. I don't have spyware/virus worries. I don't have to worry about finding a driver that works for my wireless card. I just power on and start working.
I used to laugh at the Mac zealots... now I know what they were so excited about.
Do you actually think Microsoft is going to produce anything as logical as OS X?
I do not buy into the Lou Dobbs nationalist claptrap, either. I believe that outsourcing is a logical direction for business to move in. However, with the state of the global environment today, there is something to be said about having to deal with domestic employees that do things like this instead of having to worry about two different nations with two different sets of laws. Once there is more structure in the laws dealing with international crimes such as this, the issue is irrelevant. But, business does have to consider it today.
I understand how academia works, but instead of selling this software the professor should get a grant and open-source his work. Students and teachers alike could benefit from Qualrus and derivitives that would certainly arise out of making it an open-source project. In addition, the project would benefit from the input of other people with semantic analysis expertise. Otherwise, the market will keep going the direction that the article covered where everybody is using some different software to evaluate student's writings. If there were a single definitive resource for written evaluation, then there would likely be an improvement in students writing from high school on up as professors and teachers adopt a standard software for written evaluation. But maybe that would sound too much like charity for the capitalist acting (though likely not capitalist minded) sociology professor...