"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property" I'd say that having things such that it's impossible for the blind to properly use cash money abridges their privileges, especially since cash money is essentially the only way to make a purchase while protecting their privacy granted in Griswold v. Connecticut.
What??? You're trying to use the 14th Amendment -- I'm sorry, the 14th F-ing Amendment??? First off, states don't mint their own currency, the Federal Government does. Second... there is no second. By accepting irrational arguements, you allow the unelected to make arbitrary law. Whether you or I think that law is good or bad is irrelevent.
Honestly... no structure, no planning, no discipline, nothing but planning not to have a plan.
According to the article, Agile implies "Let Design Guide, Not Dictate". That sounds a WHOLE lot different than "Don't Design". My understanding is that the idea is to have an ADAPTABLE plan. After all, an inflexible plan is a bad plan.
This judge needs to be taken out and shot. He may be right that it would be a good thing to change our currency to be more blind-friendly, but it is certainly not mandated by Sec. 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. This kind of behavior by judges is in stark opposition to the U.S. Constitution which they are sworn to protect, and is why we are living in less and less of a republican (democratic) system of government. He is the very definition of a "domestic enemy of the Constitution".
as big a difference as you might think, since most ordinary North Koreans really buy into the communism thing just the same.
No, people who are starving to death do NOT typically buy into the ideology of their government. And the propaganda only makes it worse, since the people making it are so clueless as to the lot of the common people. Such as telling about North Korean prisoners in South Korea going on hunger strikes. "Hunger strikes??? There's food in South Korean prisons?????"
Instead of banning them outright, since only Kim himself gets the luxories, why not let them import segways, but remove the speed limiting electronics. Assasination by runaway segway. We'll also need to allow them to import camcorders, so that there a chance for them to get the event on videotape.
I'm saying let him prove it before all the people here say it is impossible because they can't think of how it works.
The arguements people are giving are provably refutations of what is claimed. If he's using colored shapes for storage, fine, but the MAXIMAL amount of information that could be gotten from the paper is if each individual dot could be independently written and read. That's not possible, but if it were, that would not be anywhere close to 256GB. This guy's technique can store necessarily significantly less information that that hypothetical. The former technique is a small subset of the latter.
Somewhere a GB was probably swapped for a MB, or he did some bad math, or something like that.
I think what the article must have failed to mention is that it was a 256GB text file containing almost completely white space that he was storing in this manner -- after compressing it.
Just a dude who got hooked on C 17 years ago and likes to mess around with a computer
I had some difficulty parsing this sentence. My first thought was, "C-17, is that like C-4? And the dude's hooked on it? And ever since he can't help messing with computers???" My second thought was, "C17, was that an earlier version of the C64? But who in their right mind would build a 17-bit processor??? I mean I guess it would have its advantages, as you'd have a full 16 bits for both signed and unsigned number, plus a 1's compliment sign bit available." My third thought was to look up C 17, and then I thought, "holy crap, it's a hugely massive cargo jet! Dude, that must've hurt!!!" My fourth thought was to reread the sentence, and now I think I understand it properly. Yeah, dude, patents suck.
How are they planning to make money on this??? Are they going to pour through plublicly available source code, looking for someone else using "their" data structure, so they can sue??? Seems unlikely. The only other possibility is to license the technology to someone. So what do they do, go around door-to-door saying, "hey do want to write some code with a list with multiple pointers in it? It's really fun, but you'll have to pay us."??????
it is certainly *NOT* a simple doubly-linked-list.
There's one claim for a list where the nodes have two pointers, and another where the nodes have three pointers. A double-linked list is a specific implementation of the first claim, where the two sort orders happen to be forward and backward. His claim is broader than that, since his two sort orders can be unrelated to each other, but since a double-linked list falls into his definition, his first claim is certainly not novel. And, of course, nothing he claims would be non-obvious to a programmer, but I have no idea how one goes about showing that in court.
You know, it's up to the oil company to make sure that no one gets their hands on the software, just like Coca Cola makes sure no one finds out about the "secret formula"....I think most of burden of protecting trade secrets should fall on the industry that has the secret.
That's what patents were invented to avoid. They offer the best of both worlds -- the company reveals their innovation for the benefit of the world, and in return the government grants them the right to license the use of the invention for a limited time. Of course, there's always the option of keeping it secret instead -- but in commercial hardware and software anything can be reverse engineered.
What I think should be changed, is that patents should be made harder to get, but free. As it is now, for IBM and Microsoft, it might as well be free, at around $1000 in fees over the life of the patent -- but for an individual, that's prohibitively expensive, unless he has a rock-solid business plan for how he's going to use that patent to recoup that money.
I think we've barely penetrated the real reasons for sleep.
Just to amuse all you atheistic/.ers, my theory is that the purpose of sleep is dreaming. It's a kind of forced meditation to keep us capable of abstract and spiritual thought. Even with animals, it probably serves to help expand the bounds of their own mental/emotional horizons.
Think about it -- the body spends hours shutting down the brain, the body, the senses, and only once it's optimally quiescent, it wakes up only the mind, with the bodily senses still asleep. The once the dream stage is accomplished, you're done, and It's time to wake up "in your body" again -- often just in time so that you can possibly remember the content of your dreams.
Ah the classic misconception. Voltage doesn't affect kill-power, current does.
Like that other classic misconception that falling from great heights kills you, when really it's the sudden stop at the bottom. When I'm finally sentenced to the electric chair, I'll call you as an expert witness in my motion to have the electric chair configured for a very large current at 1.5 volts.
I've been saying for years that the "random mutation" model is not sufficient to explain observed reality. To me it's self-evident that what organisms do, or try to do, or possibly even want to do, has an effect on the mutations that occur (before natural selection plays its part), and natural history cannot otherwise be reasonably explained. However, this theory would mean that we're 99% ignorant of the mechanism of evolution, and modern science strongly prefers irrational but seemingly complete solutions over rational solutions that admit of our great ignorance.
Also, why does every fucking keyboard manufacturer in the world feel that they have to screw around with the enter key at every opportunity? You'd think they'd learn that people want a rectangular enter key, with a rectangular backslash/pipe key above it and a rectangular, full-width backspace key above that.
The best thing is when they decide, "backslash key, who on earth uses a backslash key? Let's make it tiny, and then let's think up a whole new freakin location for it."
Icebergs are natural, icebergs so far up north aren't. The chief reason why this indicates global warming is to sail this far up north, the sea surrounding the iceberg must have been cooler than usual. This can only happen if more and more ice is melting from the iceberg, which reduces the temperature of the ocean current, enabling the iceberg to move further north without melting.
Wow, you should publish a paper on that! Or sell some of this special ice that doesn't melt because it melts so fast! Or read what you write before you submit it! Or stop trying to think about science altogether!
You just claimed that this iceberg able to make it so far north without melting because the water around it is colder than usual, and the that water around it is colder than usual because global warming is making it melt so fast!...Or maybe you were joking, in which case please redirect my derision to those who modded you +3 informative.
Are people really under the impression that icebergs don't naturally exist and are really a product of the evil Bush administration's plan to cause global warming so they can drown the entire West coast?
Yep. Also, Bush made hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans because he found out that they had a large black population. (and he doesn't like black people, if you hadn't heard.)
The validity of science is itself is based upon acceptance of the laws of cause and effect. So, if you propose a theory that invalidates the laws of cause effect, and then prove it with science, well, at best you have a new paradox to deal with.
Do you remember the principle, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence?"
Yes. But I find it an extraordinary claim.
The Monckton article is at the extraordinary end of the scale because he is a journalist making claims that run contrary to the consensus of climate scientists. To be credible, his evidence has to be impeccable and virtually irrefutable.
Maybe, but "credible" has little relation to true or false. It's like what the Article says, "a scientific paper is one that is published in a peer-reviewed journal." That is incorrect. A scientific paper is one that contains valid science. It has been repeatedly proven that utter crap can be published in peer-reviewed journals. Now peer-review is a good process for the scientific community, but it is neither a test of "scientificness" nor should it be tolerated to be used as a way of excluding the science of people who are not accepted by the community.
I judged it likely that he was wrong -- the scientific consensus is not easily overturned.
There is no scientific consensus. What there is, is scientists of various disciplines signing on to climate science statements, and then the politicos treating that as a scientific statement. When scientists are making mass "scientific statements" OUTSIDE THEIR FIELDS OF STUDY, you can be sure that it is no "scientific" statement. Political or religious, sure, but not scientific.
Now that Monboit has shown several of Monckton's claims to be not only wrong, but an egregious misrepresentation of the facts, now I know that he is not credible. His somewhat extraordinary claims have weak or no evidence that we can believe, so his claims should be rejected by reasonable people. In this way Monboit, by answering some major claims convincingly as shown that we can believe nothing really that Monckton says on this issue and has refuted indirectly everything.
Monboit has "cherry-picked" a few of the things from in Monckton's claims which were misleading. That' all. He hasn't addressed the more substantial claims. If that undermines his credibility in your eyes, well that's up to you of course. But a scientific approach would examine all the arguments claims on both sides.
Of course there is no way to disprove the idea of a god or gods. Neither is there a way to prove their existence, either. Hence, believing either that none exist or that there is definitively one or more is demonstrably stupid.
Please demonstrate. Upon what do you base your statement that there is no way to prove or disprove the idea of God? When I was ignorant of the existence of God, I sometimes made the same claim. I made it on the basis of ego... my ignorance of the matter was obvious, so if it was actually impossible to know, then that would make me more more insightful than all who claimed to know, instead of just more ignorant. Do you have a different basis for the claim?
The proof of God is like the proof of the rules of logic. The the rules of logic are the basis for logical and mathematical proofs. Therefore, either the proofs for the rules of logic are as strong as logical and mathematical proofs, or else mathematics and logic are exercises in irrationality. But the rules of logic, and indeed, the fundamentals of mathematics in their actual origins, are exercises in pure perception of underlying truth. This is what mind of man is designed for, and is the basis of all reason, whether it is recognized or not. It is therefore also the basis of all logical, mathematical, and thus also scientific proof. If someone refuses to believe in the rules of logic, or even the fundamental laws of mathematics, you can't prove him wrong to his satisfaction. He either sees it or he doesn't. But that doesn't make them unprovable truly, and it certainly doesn't make them unknowable.
The presence of God can likewise be directly perceived on a similar fundamental level of the rational mind.
But print out your rant on the stupidity of believers, and keep it. Then if you ever find yourself no longer ignorant of God, you can tack it up on your wall as a motivator for humility. As Socrates and Confucius said, without humility, and without coming to terms with the perpetual enormity of our ignorance, there is no basis whatsoever for the development of reason or intellect.
The usefulness of [the knowledge of the existence of God] comes from our ability to use that knowledge to predict the likely consequences of various actions before we commit ourselves to those actions. Knowledge that comes from religion can't be used to make better-than-random predictions.
If you mean the ability to, e.g., predict the path of a projectile, then you're right. If the only decisions you're making are of the most pragmatic and short-term kind, then you're right. If however, you wish to possess a reality-based philosophy of life, then the existence or non-existence of God is the most essential knowledge there is.
When I didn't know the answer to that question, I admit that I liked to think of it as "unanswerable." However, it is answerable. Because God does exist, and He is merciful, everyone who wants to know that answer is capable of finding it.
faith in any deity (or phanteon) is impossible to prove by logic - you either have it or not - so i was guaranteed a win;)
What is "a win"? That you would successfully convince yourself of your arguments? That's not much of a win. Thay you would convince them? Then I doubt you won. That you would be more correct than them? To be guaranteed of that, you would have to live in a universe where the full nature of reality could be proven by logic alone, which you do not.
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What??? You're trying to use the 14th Amendment -- I'm sorry, the 14th F-ing Amendment??? First off, states don't mint their own currency, the Federal Government does. Second... there is no second. By accepting irrational arguements, you allow the unelected to make arbitrary law. Whether you or I think that law is good or bad is irrelevent.
According to the article, Agile implies "Let Design Guide, Not Dictate". That sounds a WHOLE lot different than "Don't Design". My understanding is that the idea is to have an ADAPTABLE plan. After all, an inflexible plan is a bad plan.
This judge needs to be taken out and shot. He may be right that it would be a good thing to change our currency to be more blind-friendly, but it is certainly not mandated by Sec. 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. This kind of behavior by judges is in stark opposition to the U.S. Constitution which they are sworn to protect, and is why we are living in less and less of a republican (democratic) system of government. He is the very definition of a "domestic enemy of the Constitution".
No, people who are starving to death do NOT typically buy into the ideology of their government. And the propaganda only makes it worse, since the people making it are so clueless as to the lot of the common people. Such as telling about North Korean prisoners in South Korea going on hunger strikes. "Hunger strikes??? There's food in South Korean prisons?????"
Instead of banning them outright, since only Kim himself gets the luxories, why not let them import segways, but remove the speed limiting electronics. Assasination by runaway segway. We'll also need to allow them to import camcorders, so that there a chance for them to get the event on videotape.
The arguements people are giving are provably refutations of what is claimed. If he's using colored shapes for storage, fine, but the MAXIMAL amount of information that could be gotten from the paper is if each individual dot could be independently written and read. That's not possible, but if it were, that would not be anywhere close to 256GB. This guy's technique can store necessarily significantly less information that that hypothetical. The former technique is a small subset of the latter.
Somewhere a GB was probably swapped for a MB, or he did some bad math, or something like that.
I think what the article must have failed to mention is that it was a 256GB text file containing almost completely white space that he was storing in this manner -- after compressing it.
The same study essentially threw out the "98% the same as chimps" conclusion.
I had some difficulty parsing this sentence. My first thought was, "C-17, is that like C-4? And the dude's hooked on it? And ever since he can't help messing with computers???" My second thought was, "C17, was that an earlier version of the C64? But who in their right mind would build a 17-bit processor??? I mean I guess it would have its advantages, as you'd have a full 16 bits for both signed and unsigned number, plus a 1's compliment sign bit available." My third thought was to look up C 17, and then I thought, "holy crap, it's a hugely massive cargo jet! Dude, that must've hurt!!!" My fourth thought was to reread the sentence, and now I think I understand it properly. Yeah, dude, patents suck.
How are they planning to make money on this??? Are they going to pour through plublicly available source code, looking for someone else using "their" data structure, so they can sue??? Seems unlikely. The only other possibility is to license the technology to someone. So what do they do, go around door-to-door saying, "hey do want to write some code with a list with multiple pointers in it? It's really fun, but you'll have to pay us."??????
Yes, but a patent must describe something novel. It can't just be a more broad description of something common.
There's one claim for a list where the nodes have two pointers, and another where the nodes have three pointers. A double-linked list is a specific implementation of the first claim, where the two sort orders happen to be forward and backward. His claim is broader than that, since his two sort orders can be unrelated to each other, but since a double-linked list falls into his definition, his first claim is certainly not novel. And, of course, nothing he claims would be non-obvious to a programmer, but I have no idea how one goes about showing that in court.
That's what patents were invented to avoid. They offer the best of both worlds -- the company reveals their innovation for the benefit of the world, and in return the government grants them the right to license the use of the invention for a limited time. Of course, there's always the option of keeping it secret instead -- but in commercial hardware and software anything can be reverse engineered.
What I think should be changed, is that patents should be made harder to get, but free. As it is now, for IBM and Microsoft, it might as well be free, at around $1000 in fees over the life of the patent -- but for an individual, that's prohibitively expensive, unless he has a rock-solid business plan for how he's going to use that patent to recoup that money.
Just to amuse all you atheistic
Think about it -- the body spends hours shutting down the brain, the body, the senses, and only once it's optimally quiescent, it wakes up only the mind, with the bodily senses still asleep. The once the dream stage is accomplished, you're done, and It's time to wake up "in your body" again -- often just in time so that you can possibly remember the content of your dreams.
Like that other classic misconception that falling from great heights kills you, when really it's the sudden stop at the bottom. When I'm finally sentenced to the electric chair, I'll call you as an expert witness in my motion to have the electric chair configured for a very large current at 1.5 volts.
I've been saying for years that the "random mutation" model is not sufficient to explain observed reality. To me it's self-evident that what organisms do, or try to do, or possibly even want to do, has an effect on the mutations that occur (before natural selection plays its part), and natural history cannot otherwise be reasonably explained. However, this theory would mean that we're 99% ignorant of the mechanism of evolution, and modern science strongly prefers irrational but seemingly complete solutions over rational solutions that admit of our great ignorance.
I think the best market for it is going to be cash register systems.
The best thing is when they decide, "backslash key, who on earth uses a backslash key? Let's make it tiny, and then let's think up a whole new freakin location for it."
Wow, you should publish a paper on that! Or sell some of this special ice that doesn't melt because it melts so fast! Or read what you write before you submit it! Or stop trying to think about science altogether!
You just claimed that this iceberg able to make it so far north without melting because the water around it is colder than usual, and the that water around it is colder than usual because global warming is making it melt so fast!
Yep. Also, Bush made hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans because he found out that they had a large black population. (and he doesn't like black people, if you hadn't heard.)
The validity of science is itself is based upon acceptance of the laws of cause and effect. So, if you propose a theory that invalidates the laws of cause effect, and then prove it with science, well, at best you have a new paradox to deal with.
Yes. But I find it an extraordinary claim.
Maybe, but "credible" has little relation to true or false. It's like what the Article says, "a scientific paper is one that is published in a peer-reviewed journal." That is incorrect. A scientific paper is one that contains valid science. It has been repeatedly proven that utter crap can be published in peer-reviewed journals. Now peer-review is a good process for the scientific community, but it is neither a test of "scientificness" nor should it be tolerated to be used as a way of excluding the science of people who are not accepted by the community.
There is no scientific consensus. What there is, is scientists of various disciplines signing on to climate science statements, and then the politicos treating that as a scientific statement. When scientists are making mass "scientific statements" OUTSIDE THEIR FIELDS OF STUDY, you can be sure that it is no "scientific" statement. Political or religious, sure, but not scientific.
Monboit has "cherry-picked" a few of the things from in Monckton's claims which were misleading. That' all. He hasn't addressed the more substantial claims. If that undermines his credibility in your eyes, well that's up to you of course. But a scientific approach would examine all the arguments claims on both sides.
Please demonstrate. Upon what do you base your statement that there is no way to prove or disprove the idea of God? When I was ignorant of the existence of God, I sometimes made the same claim. I made it on the basis of ego... my ignorance of the matter was obvious, so if it was actually impossible to know, then that would make me more more insightful than all who claimed to know, instead of just more ignorant. Do you have a different basis for the claim?
The proof of God is like the proof of the rules of logic. The the rules of logic are the basis for logical and mathematical proofs. Therefore, either the proofs for the rules of logic are as strong as logical and mathematical proofs, or else mathematics and logic are exercises in irrationality. But the rules of logic, and indeed, the fundamentals of mathematics in their actual origins, are exercises in pure perception of underlying truth. This is what mind of man is designed for, and is the basis of all reason, whether it is recognized or not. It is therefore also the basis of all logical, mathematical, and thus also scientific proof. If someone refuses to believe in the rules of logic, or even the fundamental laws of mathematics, you can't prove him wrong to his satisfaction. He either sees it or he doesn't. But that doesn't make them unprovable truly, and it certainly doesn't make them unknowable.
The presence of God can likewise be directly perceived on a similar fundamental level of the rational mind.
But print out your rant on the stupidity of believers, and keep it. Then if you ever find yourself no longer ignorant of God, you can tack it up on your wall as a motivator for humility. As Socrates and Confucius said, without humility, and without coming to terms with the perpetual enormity of our ignorance, there is no basis whatsoever for the development of reason or intellect.
If you mean the ability to, e.g., predict the path of a projectile, then you're right. If the only decisions you're making are of the most pragmatic and short-term kind, then you're right. If however, you wish to possess a reality-based philosophy of life, then the existence or non-existence of God is the most essential knowledge there is.
When I didn't know the answer to that question, I admit that I liked to think of it as "unanswerable." However, it is answerable. Because God does exist, and He is merciful, everyone who wants to know that answer is capable of finding it.
What is "a win"? That you would successfully convince yourself of your arguments? That's not much of a win. Thay you would convince them? Then I doubt you won. That you would be more correct than them? To be guaranteed of that, you would have to live in a universe where the full nature of reality could be proven by logic alone, which you do not.