Basically our psychological sense that the past is different from the future comes from the direction of the thermodynamic arrow of time, but the second law of thermodynamics doesn't come from the basic laws of physics (which are essentially time-reversal symmetric) but from the boundary conditions of the universe: for some reason unknown to us, we had a low-entropy big bang. The meaning of "past" is really "that way to the big bang.
This is not true. There are few physical interactions which are time-reversal symmetric. If any two objects interact so as to alter their states, say two rocks bumping into each other in space. There is a heat loss that cannot be reversed. Not to mention gravity, which is obviously not time-reversal symmetric. It is these one-way functions of nature which are the reason for the second law of thermodynamics, and thus for the speculation of an inevitable low entropy initial condition. To look at it another way, the flow of time is synonymous with the chain of causes and effects, which are obviously also one-way functions. How you can explain cause and effect, and how you can explain one-way functions, is, I think, going to be the fundamental problem of anyone trying to make sense of a multi-dimensional theory of time.
My bias would be to land on the dark side of the moon (cue music) in order to build an observatory that will be uninfluenced by the earths, radio/tv/light/RF pollution. It could be powered by a small nuclear reactor eliminating the need for solar panels and there may in fact be larger ice deposits on the far side of the moon anyway.
That works until you consider communicating back to earth... I don't think a luno-stationary communication satellite would stay in orbit. But since they're talking about landing on a polar mountain, I think it would be ideal to build a nice shielded observatory on the "dark" side of the mountain, and a perpetually available solar collector and communication array on the peak of the mountain....And an Eath observatory on the "light" side of the mountain.
It is rash to condemn where you are ignorant.
-Seneca
Quick summary for the ignorant: This is research comparing the measurable anotomical differences between the brains of statistically meaningful samples of 18-year-olds versus 25-35-year-olds, also tracking the anatomical changes in the brains in the former group over the course of a year.
It is illegal to use a monopoly to gain an advantage in other markets or to build barriers to entry to those markets....MS has a monopoly and they are using that monopoly to collect an additional toll from developers in the separate software application market. That is illegal.
That's an absurd leap. They set a high price to appeal to a particular type of customer. That's a lot different from freezing out other parties from doing application development on their platform. They obviously don't do that, as many people, myself included, develop Windows applications every day using Borland and Open Source tools.
A correct analogy would be with a chemical manufacturer who sells chemicals by ton to other businesses, but won't sell small quantities to individuals because that's not the business they choose to be in.
Wikipedia is an open document. The revisions are clear and publicly visible. Why is it all right to censor and prohibit posters whose motivations are obviously suspect, while completely (naively?) ignoring the gazillions of posters whose motivations are probably no less base, but not obviously so? This is wrong.
They're not ignored. It's called "POV Pushing" and it's removed no matter who does it. The standard for objectivity comprises neutral language and verifable facts. Anything that deviates from that will eventually get removed.
We'll need three Earths to continue on our present course... The source of this observation? The commie pinkos at the Harvard Business School.
I donno, my figures show we'll need like FIFTY THOUSOUND earths, at least! But I guess if the Agricultural Scientists and Futurists at Harvard Business School say so, then... hey wait a minute, since when are there... hey!... TROLL!!! TROLL!!!
http://illmob.org/
It's pretty hillarious when he describes the "bust". The feds pound on the door early in the morning. He asks who's there, they say that some cars were broken into and they want to check if his was one of them. So... he gets his shoes on goes out the BACK door to the parking lot. There's guy in a bullet-proof vest guarding his car, who obviously has no idea that he's the guy they're coming to arrest. When he indicates that that's his car, he's like "oh, uh... did you talk to the men inside?" It's freakin hillarious. They should make a TV special on FBI busts gone bad.
The issue is that the only clear crime was that of leaking the code to the public. And that was committed by someone other than the person going to jail.
No, there's no difference. What he did was not illegal given the state of the intellectual property in question. On the advice of the public defender, he plead out for 2 years instead of the 10 he could gotten if convincted. However, with adequate counsel, there's no way in the world he would've been convicted.
Yes, it is/was available on P2P, and I believe the article said that the Feds were his only customers. And, yes, lawyers are basically saying that there was no case, as the code was in the public domain at that point. However, the poor sap took the advise of the public defender, so he'll be spending 2 years in jail.
I'd be all for going after the guy who originally distributed this, I think this case really sucks.
Smarts are not a good trait at all. It usually implies that one puts energy in thinking and less in keeping a healthy body...smarts is bad. It's better to be athletic. Chances that you reproduce are greater...The state we are currently in is more an accident of nature. It will eventually settle back to normality where intelligence is a drawback.
It's a far enough stretch to suggest that Intelligence is a product of a long series of random mutations which each lead to greater survivability. But you're saying that it's a mere accident of nature? That THE most complex thing we know of, the thing responsible for the works of Beethoven, Shakespeare, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, is neither the work of a darwinian process driven by survivability, nor the work of God, but rather a simple "accident of nature"? That's sort of like supposing that there was a giant dust cloud in space earlier this morning, which was pulled together by its own gravity and fused into our planet, and, by accident, also fused together all the life forms and the people and societies, with what they think are their memories in their brains. In other words... I think there are better theories out there.
Again the "you can't have it all" fallacy? Even if it's impossible with today's genes to be both brilliant, handsome and socially capable (which I doubt), it's not at all impossible that, over time, genes will mutate and spread so that one can be all of these.
It's not a fallacy, it's an inevitability. The things you mention, intelligence, good looks, and social skills, can only be meaningfully measured in comparison with the societal norms. To quantify, I would throw out that the terms brilliant, handsome and socially capable, are applied to say, those in the 98th or 99th percentile of those categories. Regardless of how humanity evolves in the future, the likelihood of the same person being in the high percentile in all three is necessarilly extremely low (myself being the obvious exception:-)). Maybe some future society is full of nothing but beautiful geniuses, relative to our standards. Or maybe we're that society relative to some pre-historic version of ourselves. It doesn't really matter, as people are judged by the standards of their own societies, which will always have a high end and a low end in any given measure.
The point is that a balance is needed. Slashdotters: find yourself an artsy chick to get down with; one who's pretty smart and asthetically pleasing. Add a little creativity to them logical sperm you've been carrying around.
But try to avoid the phrase "asthetically pleasing" when complimenting her.
That's nothing. My computer simulations indicate that even a one degree C temperature increase will cause the entire frickin planet frickin explode into a billion pieces. And if that's not enough, Clinton just said that it's the biggest problem ever, and Gore said he was going to write ANOTHER book about it, so... try arguing with that. What we really need to is trigger a new ice age to counteract this. Anyone who doesn't agree with me is stupid and probably believes in creationism.
And MIDWIVES! We need more male MIDWIVES! And what's all this crap about calling them "midwives" anyway, they're just "midpeople"! Where are the positive male role models, !@#!@$ it?
Exactly. We now have the over-crowded field of software development, and there exist people so incapacitated by their own delusions that they think they'll be doing girls a favor by convincing them to enter that field, when they weren't drawn to it on their own. Somebody please push these people off a cliff.
Here's a radical idea: Stop trying to mold society into the image of your preconcieved science-fiction unisex utopia, and let girls pursue what they want to pursue. How about this: If a girl is interested in weaving baskets, and sewing, and making pretty things, let's not bombard her with the idea that there's something wrong with her because she's not more interested in math and science.
As a father of four (yes, four) girls, I would be ecstatic if one of them were really interested in math... or science... or programming... or military aircraft... or baseball, NOT that they ought to be, but because it would be a great opportunity to share my enthusiasm with them and bond with them. But they're not. Like most girls, they're mostly interested in girl stuff. THAT'S RIGHT, I said GIRL STUFF.
"Girl stuff" is just as valuable as "boy stuff", so stop crapping all over your childrens' development, and let them be whatever they actually are inside.
If they were turning over the names of people who searched for banned things, I would agree with charactorizing that as "collaborating". But providing a censored search engine is no more -- probably less -- collaborating than engaging in trade which will make the repressors rich and finance their armies and secret police, etc.
Since the U.N. is now involved, assuming they ship a million units, they'll need to raise to price to about... (tapping on calculator)...$1750 for them to siphon out all the customary kickbacks. If the U.N. is listening, hey I've got a sweet infomercial idea for you:
"Act now, and for $2999 you get two laptops and a free oil voucher!"
Google was faced with two options -- 1) deal with China in such a way that may "enable" their evilness, or 2) don't deal with them at all.
That's the same situation the U.S. Gvt was twice put in after the communist revolutions in Cuba and China. In the case of Cuba they chose (2), and in the case of China they chose (1). In choosing (1) for China they have for years been subject to the exact same critisism that Google is now recieving. But all these years later, look at what the decisions of the U.S. Gvt has meant for the people of those countries. Exactly nothing has happened in Cuba in all that time, and stillthey only hope the Cuban people have is that maybe one day Castro might die. China has been transformed by the economic forces we let in, and the political and social forces that accompany them. People today in China have great cause for hope.
So in light of the evidence, I find it a stretch to argue that the isolationist course is the higher ideal.
If you believe that these are fitting analogies, then you don't understand evolution theory.
Macro-evolution is NOT micro-evolution on a larger scale, and cannot be explained by micro-evolution over a long period of time. By "cannot be explained" I actually mean that it was formerly explained that way until the fossil record showed that macro changes occur suddenly, not gradually. Now evolutionary "scientists" have various theories for what triggers these changes.
I put "scientists" in quotes because real science is the branch of philosophy that is concerned with discovering truth about the natural world. Science today, with exceptions, but universally among evolutionary biologists, is committed to an arbitrary dogma of explaining the natural world strictly as if there were no super-natural world. In other words, real science would be committed to determining the truth about how evolution works. Evolutionary biology is committed to finding a strictly naturallistic explaination of how evolution works -- meaning that if God is actually involved in any way, then whatever they come up with is necessarily wrong. They intentionally, according to their dogma, elliminate a vast set of possibilities before they even begin their "science."
This is not a quest for truth. It is not what Darwin did either. His theory was that God created a few, or one, initial organisms, and that everything else evolved from them by the mechanisms he described. By what we know now, that seems naive, but it was a coherant theory. But now, in the interest of making it a purely naturalistic theory, "scientists" actually try to explain the origins of the first cells in terms of molecules "evolving" into them. As this kind of evolution pre-supposes the ability to reproduce and pass along genetic coding to its offspring, ability that by definition, a pre-organism does not have. This "scientific theory" can therefore only be believed by the delusional. But since it doesn't go against the dogma, like ID obviously does, it's apparently ok to teach our kids.
The initial scientific observation of ID is simply that the mind-bending complexity and intricacy in living organisms is such that cannot be plausibly correlated to the explainations of their origins that we've heard thus far. The theory goes on to attempt to prove the impossibility of certain complex systems being the result darwinian-style evolution, but I think the essential thing is that initial observation. As long as that is considered a taboo observation, we will never take the next step in understanding natural life.
Hence why we're one of the most secular states in Europe.
The most secular state in Europe is the only place in the world where people kill each other over which brand of Christianity they believe in?
Actually, that would sort of make sense, if religion over there is some sort of secularized religion, a religion without morallity, or religion purely as ritual. Like someone else said, atheism isn't a deterent to advancement in the Church of England!???? I hope that's not the case. That would really suck.
Slashdot Mirror
A correct analogy would be with a chemical manufacturer who sells chemicals by ton to other businesses, but won't sell small quantities to individuals because that's not the business they choose to be in.
The fact that the idiot is going to spend two years in jail for having a bad lawyer.
http://illmob.org/ It's pretty hillarious when he describes the "bust". The feds pound on the door early in the morning. He asks who's there, they say that some cars were broken into and they want to check if his was one of them. So... he gets his shoes on goes out the BACK door to the parking lot. There's guy in a bullet-proof vest guarding his car, who obviously has no idea that he's the guy they're coming to arrest. When he indicates that that's his car, he's like "oh, uh... did you talk to the men inside?" It's freakin hillarious. They should make a TV special on FBI busts gone bad.
The issue is that the only clear crime was that of leaking the code to the public. And that was committed by someone other than the person going to jail.
Yes, but the fact that he's stupid doesn't make it any less outrageous.
IRC, he had a prior conviction for some hacking offense (and breaking into cars, etc). So I think he was a hacker, just not as related to this case.
No, there's no difference. What he did was not illegal given the state of the intellectual property in question. On the advice of the public defender, he plead out for 2 years instead of the 10 he could gotten if convincted. However, with adequate counsel, there's no way in the world he would've been convicted.
Yes, it is/was available on P2P, and I believe the article said that the Feds were his only customers. And, yes, lawyers are basically saying that there was no case, as the code was in the public domain at that point. However, the poor sap took the advise of the public defender, so he'll be spending 2 years in jail.
I'd be all for going after the guy who originally distributed this, I think this case really sucks.
That's nothing. My computer simulations indicate that even a one degree C temperature increase will cause the entire frickin planet frickin explode into a billion pieces. And if that's not enough, Clinton just said that it's the biggest problem ever, and Gore said he was going to write ANOTHER book about it, so... try arguing with that. What we really need to is trigger a new ice age to counteract this. Anyone who doesn't agree with me is stupid and probably believes in creationism.
And MIDWIVES! We need more male MIDWIVES! And what's all this crap about calling them "midwives" anyway, they're just "midpeople"! Where are the positive male role models, !@#!@$ it?
Exactly. We now have the over-crowded field of software development, and there exist people so incapacitated by their own delusions that they think they'll be doing girls a favor by convincing them to enter that field, when they weren't drawn to it on their own. Somebody please push these people off a cliff.
Here's a radical idea: Stop trying to mold society into the image of your preconcieved science-fiction unisex utopia, and let girls pursue what they want to pursue. How about this: If a girl is interested in weaving baskets, and sewing, and making pretty things, let's not bombard her with the idea that there's something wrong with her because she's not more interested in math and science.
As a father of four (yes, four) girls, I would be ecstatic if one of them were really interested in math... or science... or programming... or military aircraft... or baseball, NOT that they ought to be, but because it would be a great opportunity to share my enthusiasm with them and bond with them. But they're not. Like most girls, they're mostly interested in girl stuff. THAT'S RIGHT, I said GIRL STUFF.
"Girl stuff" is just as valuable as "boy stuff", so stop crapping all over your childrens' development, and let them be whatever they actually are inside.
If they were turning over the names of people who searched for banned things, I would agree with charactorizing that as "collaborating". But providing a censored search engine is no more -- probably less -- collaborating than engaging in trade which will make the repressors rich and finance their armies and secret police, etc.
Google was faced with two options -- 1) deal with China in such a way that may "enable" their evilness, or 2) don't deal with them at all.
That's the same situation the U.S. Gvt was twice put in after the communist revolutions in Cuba and China. In the case of Cuba they chose (2), and in the case of China they chose (1). In choosing (1) for China they have for years been subject to the exact same critisism that Google is now recieving. But all these years later, look at what the decisions of the U.S. Gvt has meant for the people of those countries. Exactly nothing has happened in Cuba in all that time, and stillthey only hope the Cuban people have is that maybe one day Castro might die. China has been transformed by the economic forces we let in, and the political and social forces that accompany them. People today in China have great cause for hope.
So in light of the evidence, I find it a stretch to argue that the isolationist course is the higher ideal.
If you believe that these are fitting analogies, then you don't understand evolution theory.
Macro-evolution is NOT micro-evolution on a larger scale, and cannot be explained by micro-evolution over a long period of time. By "cannot be explained" I actually mean that it was formerly explained that way until the fossil record showed that macro changes occur suddenly, not gradually. Now evolutionary "scientists" have various theories for what triggers these changes.
I put "scientists" in quotes because real science is the branch of philosophy that is concerned with discovering truth about the natural world. Science today, with exceptions, but universally among evolutionary biologists, is committed to an arbitrary dogma of explaining the natural world strictly as if there were no super-natural world. In other words, real science would be committed to determining the truth about how evolution works. Evolutionary biology is committed to finding a strictly naturallistic explaination of how evolution works -- meaning that if God is actually involved in any way, then whatever they come up with is necessarily wrong. They intentionally, according to their dogma, elliminate a vast set of possibilities before they even begin their "science."
This is not a quest for truth. It is not what Darwin did either. His theory was that God created a few, or one, initial organisms, and that everything else evolved from them by the mechanisms he described. By what we know now, that seems naive, but it was a coherant theory. But now, in the interest of making it a purely naturalistic theory, "scientists" actually try to explain the origins of the first cells in terms of molecules "evolving" into them. As this kind of evolution pre-supposes the ability to reproduce and pass along genetic coding to its offspring, ability that by definition, a pre-organism does not have. This "scientific theory" can therefore only be believed by the delusional. But since it doesn't go against the dogma, like ID obviously does, it's apparently ok to teach our kids.
The initial scientific observation of ID is simply that the mind-bending complexity and intricacy in living organisms is such that cannot be plausibly correlated to the explainations of their origins that we've heard thus far. The theory goes on to attempt to prove the impossibility of certain complex systems being the result darwinian-style evolution, but I think the essential thing is that initial observation. As long as that is considered a taboo observation, we will never take the next step in understanding natural life.
Hence why we're one of the most secular states in Europe.
The most secular state in Europe is the only place in the world where people kill each other over which brand of Christianity they believe in?
Actually, that would sort of make sense, if religion over there is some sort of secularized religion, a religion without morallity, or religion purely as ritual. Like someone else said, atheism isn't a deterent to advancement in the Church of England!???? I hope that's not the case. That would really suck.