>6000? Not 300? Maybe it's only 2 days old - a simulation that was checkpointed and restarted >2 days ago (our subjective time).
See, now you're rejecting things out of hand just because of your own assumptions (that the world is older than 6,000 years).
>6000 years? So, core samples from ice in antarctica that shows seasonal snowfall for hundreds >of thousands of years? Faked? God has quite a sense of humor;-)
No, it doesn't show snowfall for hundreds of thousands of years. How can you prove that snow is a hundred thousand years old? Even carbon dating is a questionable method, but as far as I know they don't even use that on the snow at the south pole. In fact, as far as I know - which I already admitted isn't a whole lot, on the subject of antarctic snowfall - the only reason they think that snow is that old is because it never snows down there, so they figure it would take that long for it to build up. I'm just suggesting that maybe it *used* to snow a whole lot more - or, maybe, it all got there at the same time. Instead of this sill idea of everything always being the same (uniformitarianism), i.e. the amount of snow that falls each year.
>Who knows.
Indeed. I consider myself to be at least a mediocre computer expert, and at this point, I'm somewhat unimpressed with a lot of the things that many so-called experts in *any* field get away with saying, if it just so happens to be something popular to say.
Evolution theory makes more sense from a politcal and (im)moral point of view than it does from a scientific point of view.
What I mean is, evolution is more comfortable for man than this theory of a God who has the right to judge the earth; if evolution is true you don't have to wait until you're married to have sex, or to not get drunk, or to be faithful to your spouse.. because who's going to stop you? It seems fairly clear that a lot of people have a vested interest in keeping the evolution theory going for their own comfort, whether or not it is true. In fact, if it *is* true, that would be all the more reason to stick up for it - why live a self-sacrificing life if there's no possible benefit? Why not just party and do whatever you feel like, if all that waits at death is cessation of existence?
Like I say, your basic philosophy on life makes a lot of difference in how you see the world - and in how you intepret what you see in the world, whether it be drunkenness, fornication, or antarctic ice core samples:)
What if those samples aren't actually a million or whatever years old, and are actually stratified based on, well, let's see.. maybe the ice at the south pole came from a comet. Does the relatively minute wobbling of the earth around its orbit actually make enough of a difference to cause a whole ice age? Is mars cold enough that it would be in a continual ice age, even if it had a good thick atmosphere like earth, and life to support it? If so, then okay, maybe it makes sense, but if not then what, was earh swinging out as far as mars is from the sun, in order to cool off? On the other hand, how much closer to the sun would it have to be to warm up again?
I'm not a geologist, but sometimes you gotta wonder.
Really, if you start with the assumption that the world is young, but that there's been at least one huge major gigantic catastrophy to hit it (like for instance a comet) rather than extremely old with multiple smaller catastrophies (where did all the craters on the moon come from? millions of years worth of one-small-comet-every-50,000-years, or a one time hit from a big long comet tail on its way to the earth?), your view of how things work skews radically.
Incidentally, that's why I think anyone who claims to be able to keep their religion - or maybe I should say more properly, their philosophy of life - seperate from anything they do, is full of balogny (no comments from the peanut gallery about my language, if you please). Your basic philosophy cannot be seperated from anything you think, because it *is* the collection of assumptions that you set out with before thinking anything.
If you believe the world is millions of years old (justifiably or not) you will by default interpret everything you see and try to fit it into your belief. If you see a bunch of sedimentary rock all piled up in layers you'll think "That probably happened slowly, since the world is so old. It must have been millions of years of debris getting piled up a year at a time, and then solidifying over long periods of time, that did that."
If you think the earth is young, you'll think "Hey look, that's sedimentary rock. I.E. it was formed from mud and stuff. It so happens that mud has water in it, and also that if you shake up water with dirt in it, the dirt settles out into layers based on density and whatnot. So, these layers were formed by shaking up water with mud in it, and could have happened in, well, days or months or years, not millions of years." So, clams are on the bottom of the set of layers, and birds are on the top? Hey, you know, clams are heavy. Also they live like.. on the bottom of the ocean (where the bottom layer of dirt comes from). Birds are light (they have o be, to fly). Also, they start off *above* the ocean, and so they'd land on the top layers.... woah! dude, you're right, that does skew things.
Either one seems to make sense, really, if you accept the assumptions behind it. Of course, since I believe the latter, I will now also mention that millions of years worth of sedimentary rock would also be ground down to rejoin the other sedimentary rock within well.. not too long, i.e. any mountains we have now would have to be relatively new even if the earth *is* millions of years old, due to continual rain and erosion, and furthermore there is *no way* that 80 million year old fossil dinosaur (the old name is "dragon") remains would still be around; they'd have been eroded away and replaced with new mountains only a few million years ago, if that was how old they were.
So.. in conclusion.. if the world is millions of years old, there should be absolutely no way to know it, because we shouldn't have any identifiable remains that *are* that old.
One final question, and this is more a question than a challenge.. if there's more carbon dioxide now than there used to be, and carbon dating works by checking how much carbon there is in something, then wouldn't anything from awhile back seem o be from a really really *long* while back, simply by virtue of the fact that it *
"I am actually pretty surprised that here on Slashdot, this article recieves such a mocking response."
Uh.. yeah.. well, just because I read on average something like 5 books a month, and just because they're mostly science fiction, doesn't mean I actually think there's any other intelligent life out there - except for the slight possibility of other human life out there.
I am not an evolutionist. I believe the earth is only about 6,000 years old. Now, it's possible that people made space ships and travelled to other planets or maybe even galaxies in that time, but, well, the lack of archeological evidence is interesting. Not enough, I think, to entirely disprove any ideas of past space flight ability.. but certainly enough to throw shadows of doubt.
Secondly, like has already been mentioned, I don't see any reason for any kind of society that can attain interstellar space flight to be afrai of us - whether you're talking black projects or not is irrelevant. The only reason they might have to be afraid of us is if they came down on the ground; space flight capabilities wouldn't mean ground combat capabilities, necessarily.
But, furthermore, I don't understand how the Canadian government (and btw, I am Canadian and also singularly unimpressed by a lot of the government we've had for the last.. oh.. 100 years or so) or, actualy, I suppose, one particular member of it, thinks that preparing to defend ourselves if necessary is likely to provoke a war.
Umm, does the fact that there are guys patrolling in armed boats around the oceans surrounding the US make France more likely to get into a war with the US? No. Why not? well because, France knows those boats are there primarily for defense, not offense.
Anyone intelligent enough to have developed space flight is bound to be intelligent enough to know that weapons aren't necessarily there because the owners *want* to use them. Don't go trying to feed me any balogny about super intelligent and highly advanced races being completely peaceful; that's laughably unlikely (and besides, there being any aliens is pretty unlikely already).
Finally, even if they did decide to just bomb us instead of saying "hi, what are the guns for?" first, that would probably mean that they wouldn't have been particularly averse to the idea of bombing us even if we hadn't had the guns. And who knows, maybe the guns actually would come in handy.
Anyway, my major point is, try to keep the line between purely wild conjecture, possibilities, and probablities, a little more visibly drawn.
"It is not, nor should it ever be, a professor's job to prepare people for the workplace. It is their job to prepare people like themselves going into academia professionally."
(Note: I'm Canadian, so I'm also using the Canadian ideas of University and College) I disagree, with the second sentence. Now, this may just be a case of my misunderstanding The Way Things Work. But, what I think is that a University's most important job is to teach you *how to learn* and *how to think critically*. Only secondarily, to be able to teach; for instance, like you said, to go into academia professionally.
A University's job shouldn't be to teach how to do a particular job. But it *should* be teaching you how to learn for yourself to do whatever job needs doing. In fact, for that matter, after getting a 4-year degree in pretty well anything, you ought to be able to go into a related field without needing anything except to learn more about specifics, a lot of which *should* be on-the-job kind of stuff. Now, maybe it's not that way.. but I think that's the way it's *supposed* to be.
For instance, someone earlier on in the discussion was talking bout hiring a Linux system administrator. Here's a scenario for you; what if there's a guy who has a degree in mathematics, say, and he wants a job as a linux administrator. He's never adminstered Linux before, or, in fact, had a whole lot to do with networking in general, although he has at least a basic understanding of how to use computers, and maybe even has some experience using Linux with mathematics problems he's had in the past. If this guy goes and buys about 5 books, one on Linux administration, one on server administration in general, another on networks, another on network security, and finally "The Road to Damascus" by John Ringo and Linda Evans (sci fi), to pass the tim when h gets bored, how long will it take him to be as competent at being a day-to-day administrator for a linux system, compared to someone who just finished a 2-year long college course on administering linux? Okay, let's say it takes him around six months or so to reach a decent level of proficiency. Now, what happens when somebody invents a new protocol and TCP dies (okay, so maybe it's not that likely, but bear with me)? The guy who took 2 years of college just to learn Linux administration is sort of screwed, because he had a very specific set of information. The Math guy, on the other hand, only has to repeat his six month stint to learn this newer technology, an away he goes. Six months is too long to learn an entirely new technology in the fast moving world of computers, you say? Balogny.. C/C++ are more than six months old. Java is more than six months old. TCP/IP is older than six months. Sure, computer technology has a lot of bleeding edge stuff going all the time; but that's the sort of thing that you *can* learn as you go. The stuff that takes longer to learn - like how Operating Systems interact with the hardware - is also the stuff that lasts longer, even in the "high paced world" of computers.
Anyway, my point is that *learning to learn*, and learning about the fundamental ideas and theories about how things work, and how things should work (if the two are different), and learning to *think* is what University is all about. College is a place to learn the specifics - nicely compacted into as little time as possible.
Neither one is necessary for success; Thomas Edison got kicked out of school because his teacher said he was an idiot and couldn't learn anything, but.. 'nuf said about that. But, they both have their places, and they can both help. If only HR, and managers, would learn that ATTITUDE and APTITUDE is more important than papers, maybe we would realy start getting somewhere.
"Basically what I'm saying is that the majority of jobs do NOT require a degree, nor will a degree really help them."
Ah, but the REAL question is not whether a particular *job* will be helped by a degree, but whether a *person* will be helped by that degree.
Maybe his particular job flipping burgers/digging trenches/toting barges/lifting bales won't be helped much by his education - but I think it's a stupid attitude to think that we require people to do menial tasks and therefore shouldn't bother letting them waste their time educating themselves. I think society should be based on individuals, not on classes, and I think that any individual is better suited for.. well.. anything, if he has #1 most importantly, the idea that work begets prosperity, and #2 that work is both mental and physical. And sometimes if you do a little bit of mental work, you'll save a lot of physical work.
For the reader's benefit, it might be helpful to envision a soap-box preacher foaming a the mouth and red in the face during the next paragraph or so.
It all comes down to attitude. And this attitude that jobs are a depleteable comodity is the STUPIDEST BURGER-FLIPPING IDEA I HAVE HEARD IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. The only point at which there are NO MORE JOBS TO BE HAD is when EVERYTHING THAT IS POSSIBLE TO BE DONE IS DONE. I.e. when everybody is fed, clothed, sheltered, watered, entertained, etc etc. So.. if you're starving because you don't have a job to pay for food, the PROBLEM is not a lack of a job or lack of money; you HAVE a job - the job is to get food. The PROBLEM is a lack of FOOD which can be remedied by DOING YOUR JOB. And no, stealing food from somone who currently has it is not doing your job. All you are doing then is shuffling around a limited comodity - that of food - instead of introducing MORE of that comodity into the market. I.e. GROWING MORE FOOD. Or, paying someone else to grow more food. Or something. but the problem is NOT A LACK OF JOBS AND NEVER WILL BE SO LONG AS WE DON'T LIVE IN UTOPIA. There will NEVER be too few jobs. If stupid people would stop thinking all about what their neighbour already has, and how it would be less work to go and steal their neighbour's food than it would be to grow their own, or spend all their time and intellect thinking of ways to swindle "money" i.e. food and goods, in an indirect fashion, out of other people, and instead SPEND THEIR TIME PRODUCING SOMETHING WORTHWHILE, then 'society', along with all the individuals in it, will be a lot better off.
Well, being as I'm the second eldest in a family of 7 kids, I have changed diapers (more than once), but there's a few others I am missing:)
If computer games count, though, I've done my fair share of dying gallantly, that's for sure.. I have dialup ^.^ (he says as though it explains everything.. which by the way, it does)
"I know there will be the crowd that says - but we were designed to die. That is bunk! Self aware intelligence is bound and destined to perpetuated and proliferate."
Okay, first of all before I say anything else, you have to understand that I'm a christian (presbyterian by the way, not catholic) and my position is, "I'll believe the Bible unless or until someone proves it wrong" - and, guess what, according to the bible, if you take all the ages of people that it mentions before the flood, the average lifespan of humans was something like 900 years. The oldest man ever mentioned was Methuselah, who was 969 when he died (take that, Guiness book of records!), right before the flood happened. There were around 1654 years between when Adam was created during the creation week, and when the flood happened. I.E., Adam was still alive when Methuselah was born, and Methuselah was alive right up until the flood..
Now, of course, to anobody who believes in evolution (in which theory everything starts off at "blech" (rock soup) and works its way up to "w00t" (intelligent life), as opposed to what the bible says, where everything pretty much starts out at "w00t" while Adam and Eve were in the garden, and those goes to "blech" when they et the fruit and later goes to "sub-basement-of-blechness" when humanity gets to be so revolting that they bring the flood upon themselves and chop their lifespans waaay down), this probably sounds ridiculous. In fact, even to a lot of people who believe what the bible says, but who have never really thought about it, this probably sounds a bit crazy (people living NINE HUNDRED years?!), and/or just an "old wives' tale"/legend.
But, personally, like I said, I'm going to believe it until someone proves it's wrong (which I don't think will happen, but then I don't know everything..)
Another thing to note is that lifespans dropped off very rapidly after the flood. Shem (Noah's son) lived only 600 years, as opposed to Noah's 950. Shem's son Arphaxad, grandson Selah, and great-grandson Eber lived around 430 years each (incidentally, there were some weird things happeneing with ancestors living rather long than their descendants during this period - Shem outlived Arphaxad, Selah, Peleg, and Reu, among others), and Eber's son Peleg, grandson Reu, and great grandson Serug each lived only about 230 years. (Nice little history lesson, for anyone who doesn't dismiss it off-hand simply because it's from the Bible:) ) So, it seems like something happened during or after the flood - which, by the way it's described in the bible, must have been an extremely catastrophic event. According to the way things are written in Genesis, it seems that there was a shield of water around the Earth when it was first made - maybe like another layer to the atmosphere, made of water. If so, and it all came crashing down onto the earth, maybe it had something do with an ice age, and/or maybe that's where alot of water in the oceans came from - maybe the oceans used to be shallow, allowing people to walk across from asia/russia to north america, rather than boating across.. which is an interesting alternate, or even complementary, theory to a major ice age - maybe it was an ice comet that hit the earth and kocked the water shield down and caused the flood? Maybe the water filled the oceans up to the continental shelves after the flood, and then the ice began to melt and filled it even further, so as to submerge the shelf? I'm not a geologist, but I would be interested in knowing how much of this could possibly have happened, and how much is merely wild conjecture and fiction:)
Some people have wondered where all the water for the flood came from, since it says that the water was over the tops of the mountains, and even if mountains were shorter at the time, and got stirred up because of the flood - alot of water dumping on the crust would, I should think, do a lot of shaking up of tectonic activity, creating of mountains, messing up of axial tilts, who kno
"It reminds me a heck of a lot of the speech Captain Beatty gavein Fahrenheit 451, where he talks about how this line offended a group, so it got trimmed, that line bothered someone else who didn't understand it, so it got nixed, and so on"
That or "Mostly Harmless" (which is what Ford Prefect's report on the planet earth, which took him 9 years of research, was paired down to after it made it through the Hitchhiker's Guide's editor department - for anyone who hasn't read the book:) )
"However, McLellan said that just like in the old wiretap days, police investigators will have to get the approval of a judge before they can have access."
Then again, since when does anyone with brains trust McLellan? You know what I *really* can't figure out? How on earth does she keep getting elected when she's like the only liberal in Alberta who *ever* gets elected and then keeps doing stupid things that Albertans don't like (like Gun Control) and *still* keeps getting elected?
>If you were all good, God-fearing Christians, you'd be fine.
I'm a God fearing christian, and I'm halfway through a four-year degree in Computer Science. Seriously, if there's one thing at the very top of the list of annoying attitudes that a lot of americans have, it's this stupid idea that being an evolutionist/atheist somehow makes you smarter than people who follow "outdated" religions.
Just because evolution is newer doesn't make it righter.
Smart+educated people can still be wrong, and when they *want* to be wrong (as is the case with many atheists/evolutionists - 'if there's no God then we can do whatever *we* want, so let's get rid of God!'), they can be wrong in a much more convincing manner.
>Much as I dislike the MPAA, the fact is that movies cost money to make. A lot of money. >Yet you're proposing that the best way to view those movies is to download an >unauthorised copy from the net before it's even hit the cinemas. That brings in >precisely zero revenue to recoup the cost of making the film.
So, maybe the movie studio should get smart and offer the movie for download on their website for $20... people who still want to see it in a theater can, people who still want to buy it on a DVD for $40 can, and people who want to download can do that *and* pay the company.
It seems to me that the whole stopping people from sharing files *isn't* working very well (without even considering whether or not it's morally or legally right or wrong), so I think the publishers are going to have to embrace the current technology that allows insanely quick copy and distribution, rather than continuing to try to make that technology illegal. Think of ways to use it to your advantage, movie guys, or it *will* kill you. That's how I see it.
>What about with violence? "The Passion of the Christ" was basically just a snuff film to anyone who >isn't Christian, and yet, because it was Jesus in there, it's okay. And then compare that to any run >of the mill kill fest flick, and see how people complain about the violence, even though it's so >much less than the torture doled out on screen in TPotC.
Actually, I'm a Christian and I take a great deal of offense over the "Passion of the Christ" movie myself.. it's obvious, to me at least, that Gibson did *not* make the movie for purely religious reasons.. or, I should be more specific, not for christian religious ideas. And I certainly ought to mention that the movie is a whole lot more catholic than it is protestant, and protestants are Christians too, so any protestant ought to be complaining about that already. On the other hand, let's take a movie like Schindler's List (World War 2); if that movie had been made without a story line, purely so that they could grovel in the violence and nudity aspects, I would certainly condone being a whole lot more critical of it; but the movie had a *point*. No, I wouldn't let my kids watch it (you know, not till they're like 18). But I'd still rather watch a movie that had violence and nudity in it, but *had a point*, than a movie with violence and nudity simply for the sake of violence and nudity. The same goes for games.
But, to get back on topic, I agree with the general idea of what you're saying. A parent/guardian *should* have the primary responsibility for what their kids are doing; that's why they're called "guardian". Sure, kids might be able to go and get a part time job and buy their own game which their parents already told them not to go buy. But it's an entirely different matter if the parents can't be bothered to do anything more than check the letter on the front of the box. It's a whole lot worse if they don't even do that. The GTA box said M, 17+; so why on earth would you get it for your 14 year old in the first place? One year, from 17 to 18, reall isn't making all that much of a difference. Okay, so some people might not understand the ESRB ratings. So what? So, go and learn! It's your kids you're buying the games for - don't you care enough to at least find out how the current rating system works, and use it to your advantage? If I was a carpenter, I'd be sure to find out how saws an hammers work before I'd use them. If my job is to raise my kids (which as a parent, it is), then I'll make sure I use the available tools to help me out in any way they can. No, maybe I won't actually have the time to play every game myself in order to find out what's in it (just as I wouln't have time to read through every book my kid might want to read, before they read it - and that's an even worse situation, come to think of it.. books don't even have ratings on the fronts! but, let's not even go there at this point:p), but for goodness sake, they already have letters on the box - if it says 17+ and I buy it for my 12 year old, only later to find that it has things in it that I didn't want my 12 year old seeing, then it's just as much my fault for getting him a game rated 3 years over his head as it is the rating system's fault for supposedly rating the game a year younger than they should have.
On the other hand, everyone knows it will need patches, so I think their admitting it instead of pretending the patches won't be needed is a good sign:)
I think the entire problem lies in the word "consumer" which, to the "consumers", is just a word, but which, to the companies, is actually an idea.
We exist to consume what the companies make. If we don't do that we are not fulfilling our purpose in life and must be adjusted.
It shouldn't be "consumers", it should be "customers" and it shouldn't be passively "consuming" the products, but rather actively deciding what we want and, if it already exists, getting it. If it doesn't already exist then start your own company.
It seems that legislation is, for whatever reason (although I can think of a few, myself) more interested in (forcibly, by which I mean by force of law) adjusting the attitudes of "consumers" than in adjusting the attitudes of companies. Which is not a good thing, because although I think both companies and customers need some adjusting of attitudes, these laws aren't the right adjustments.
The right adjustments would be for the attitudes - and I must stress, of *both* companies *and* "consumers" - away from the "consumer" idea and towards the actual idea of the company providing a service the user actually *wants*. People shouldn't *be* buying flashy new movie X on DVD if it also has a pain in the butt 'region encoded, DRM scheme DVD encryption' on it which they don't want, simply because the company produced it that way.
And for the record, I am of course just as guilty in this regard as anyone else you can point a finger at.
That (uncrackable) is totally impossible. If all the information is physically on the media then you *can* read it. It just might be kind of hard to do so.
At the same time, does Linux *claim* to innovate? No, it doesn't..
The GNU manifesto ( http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html ) clearly says in the very first line that the point was: "Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it." Stallman did not intend to innovate in software, he intended to make a good operating system that people could use.
The same goes for Linus, who in fact didn't even intend that much out of Linux. From an archive thingie I found on google ( http://www.li.org/linuxhistory.php ) with some early posts by Linus about Linux:
"Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."
So.. it's unfair to criticize Linux or GNU for not being innovative, because that wasn't the point.
And, in fairness to everybody, innovation is a lot harder than refining an innovation once it is made.
On the other hand, I think it's also more honest to say that Microsoft is much better at presenting innovations (whether their own or other people's) than they are at coming up with innovations in the first place. Whatever else you criticize about Microsoft, you have to admire their marketing.
Re:well at least they can't sue me...
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Well, I'm glad that's not what the 14yr old girl was doing.
>Why do new words have to be invented for something, especially when they are just the lazy contraction of existing words that work perfectly well?
Umm.. that's how English works. Blogs are something that is fairly easy to identify, to the exclusion of anything else, so why not have a word dedicated specifically to it? Why do we call cars cars instead of "motorized carriages"? That's how they started off.. then they shortened it to "motor cars" and now we usually just call them "cars". But, it works, and nobody complains about it. Why complain about "blog" if you don't complain about "car" ?:)
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>6000? Not 300? Maybe it's only 2 days old - a simulation that was checkpointed and restarted
;-)
:)
>2 days ago (our subjective time).
See, now you're rejecting things out of hand just because of your own assumptions (that the world is older than 6,000 years).
>6000 years? So, core samples from ice in antarctica that shows seasonal snowfall for hundreds
>of thousands of years? Faked? God has quite a sense of humor
No, it doesn't show snowfall for hundreds of thousands of years. How can you prove that snow is a hundred thousand years old? Even carbon dating is a questionable method, but as far as I know they don't even use that on the snow at the south pole. In fact, as far as I know - which I already admitted isn't a whole lot, on the subject of antarctic snowfall - the only reason they think that snow is that old is because it never snows down there, so they figure it would take that long for it to build up. I'm just suggesting that maybe it *used* to snow a whole lot more - or, maybe, it all got there at the same time. Instead of this sill idea of everything always being the same (uniformitarianism), i.e. the amount of snow that falls each year.
>Who knows.
Indeed. I consider myself to be at least a mediocre computer expert, and at this point, I'm somewhat unimpressed with a lot of the things that many so-called experts in *any* field get away with saying, if it just so happens to be something popular to say.
Evolution theory makes more sense from a politcal and (im)moral point of view than it does from a scientific point of view.
What I mean is, evolution is more comfortable for man than this theory of a God who has the right to judge the earth; if evolution is true you don't have to wait until you're married to have sex, or to not get drunk, or to be faithful to your spouse.. because who's going to stop you? It seems fairly clear that a lot of people have a vested interest in keeping the evolution theory going for their own comfort, whether or not it is true.
In fact, if it *is* true, that would be all the more reason to stick up for it - why live a self-sacrificing life if there's no possible benefit? Why not just party and do whatever you feel like, if all that waits at death is cessation of existence?
Like I say, your basic philosophy on life makes a lot of difference in how you see the world - and in how you intepret what you see in the world, whether it be drunkenness, fornication, or antarctic ice core samples
Because, after all, there isn't much water on the earth.
What if those samples aren't actually a million or whatever years old, and are actually stratified based on, well, let's see.. maybe the ice at the south pole came from a comet. Does the relatively minute wobbling of the earth around its orbit actually make enough of a difference to cause a whole ice age? Is mars cold enough that it would be in a continual ice age, even if it had a good thick atmosphere like earth, and life to support it? If so, then okay, maybe it makes sense, but if not then what, was earh swinging out as far as mars is from the sun, in order to cool off? On the other hand, how much closer to the sun would it have to be to warm up again?
I'm not a geologist, but sometimes you gotta wonder.
Really, if you start with the assumption that the world is young, but that there's been at least one huge major gigantic catastrophy to hit it (like for instance a comet) rather than extremely old with multiple smaller catastrophies (where did all the craters on the moon come from? millions of years worth of one-small-comet-every-50,000-years, or a one time hit from a big long comet tail on its way to the earth?), your view of how things work skews radically.
Incidentally, that's why I think anyone who claims to be able to keep their religion - or maybe I should say more properly, their philosophy of life - seperate from anything they do, is full of balogny (no comments from the peanut gallery about my language, if you please). Your basic philosophy cannot be seperated from anything you think, because it *is* the collection of assumptions that you set out with before thinking anything.
If you believe the world is millions of years old (justifiably or not) you will by default interpret everything you see and try to fit it into your belief. If you see a bunch of sedimentary rock all piled up in layers you'll think "That probably happened slowly, since the world is so old. It must have been millions of years of debris getting piled up a year at a time, and then solidifying over long periods of time, that did that."
If you think the earth is young, you'll think "Hey look, that's sedimentary rock. I.E. it was formed from mud and stuff. It so happens that mud has water in it, and also that if you shake up water with dirt in it, the dirt settles out into layers based on density and whatnot. So, these layers were formed by shaking up water with mud in it, and could have happened in, well, days or months or years, not millions of years." So, clams are on the bottom of the set of layers, and birds are on the top? Hey, you know, clams are heavy. Also they live like.. on the bottom of the ocean (where the bottom layer of dirt comes from). Birds are light (they have o be, to fly). Also, they start off *above* the ocean, and so they'd land on the top layers.... woah! dude, you're right, that does skew things.
Either one seems to make sense, really, if you accept the assumptions behind it. Of course, since I believe the latter, I will now also mention that millions of years worth of sedimentary rock would also be ground down to rejoin the other sedimentary rock within well.. not too long, i.e. any mountains we have now would have to be relatively new even if the earth *is* millions of years old, due to continual rain and erosion, and furthermore there is *no way* that 80 million year old fossil dinosaur (the old name is "dragon") remains would still be around; they'd have been eroded away and replaced with new mountains only a few million years ago, if that was how old they were.
So.. in conclusion.. if the world is millions of years old, there should be absolutely no way to know it, because we shouldn't have any identifiable remains that *are* that old.
One final question, and this is more a question than a challenge.. if there's more carbon dioxide now than there used to be, and carbon dating works by checking how much carbon there is in something, then wouldn't anything from awhile back seem o be from a really really *long* while back, simply by virtue of the fact that it *
"I am actually pretty surprised that here on Slashdot, this article recieves such a mocking response."
Uh.. yeah.. well, just because I read on average something like 5 books a month, and just because they're mostly science fiction, doesn't mean I actually think there's any other intelligent life out there - except for the slight possibility of other human life out there.
I am not an evolutionist. I believe the earth is only about 6,000 years old. Now, it's possible that people made space ships and travelled to other planets or maybe even galaxies in that time, but, well, the lack of archeological evidence is interesting. Not enough, I think, to entirely disprove any ideas of past space flight ability.. but certainly enough to throw shadows of doubt.
Secondly, like has already been mentioned, I don't see any reason for any kind of society that can attain interstellar space flight to be afrai of us - whether you're talking black projects or not is irrelevant. The only reason they might have to be afraid of us is if they came down on the ground; space flight capabilities wouldn't mean ground combat capabilities, necessarily.
But, furthermore, I don't understand how the Canadian government (and btw, I am Canadian and also singularly unimpressed by a lot of the government we've had for the last.. oh.. 100 years or so) or, actualy, I suppose, one particular member of it, thinks that preparing to defend ourselves if necessary is likely to provoke a war.
Umm, does the fact that there are guys patrolling in armed boats around the oceans surrounding the US make France more likely to get into a war with the US? No. Why not? well because, France knows those boats are there primarily for defense, not offense.
Anyone intelligent enough to have developed space flight is bound to be intelligent enough to know that weapons aren't necessarily there because the owners *want* to use them. Don't go trying to feed me any balogny about super intelligent and highly advanced races being completely peaceful; that's laughably unlikely (and besides, there being any aliens is pretty unlikely already).
Finally, even if they did decide to just bomb us instead of saying "hi, what are the guns for?" first, that would probably mean that they wouldn't have been particularly averse to the idea of bombing us even if we hadn't had the guns. And who knows, maybe the guns actually would come in handy.
Anyway, my major point is, try to keep the line between purely wild conjecture, possibilities, and probablities, a little more visibly drawn.
"It is not, nor should it ever be, a professor's job to prepare people for the workplace. It is their job to prepare people like themselves going into academia professionally."
(Note: I'm Canadian, so I'm also using the Canadian ideas of University and College)
I disagree, with the second sentence. Now, this may just be a case of my misunderstanding The Way Things Work. But, what I think is that a University's most important job is to teach you *how to learn* and *how to think critically*. Only secondarily, to be able to teach; for instance, like you said, to go into academia professionally.
A University's job shouldn't be to teach how to do a particular job. But it *should* be teaching you how to learn for yourself to do whatever job needs doing. In fact, for that matter, after getting a 4-year degree in pretty well anything, you ought to be able to go into a related field without needing anything except to learn more about specifics, a lot of which *should* be on-the-job kind of stuff. Now, maybe it's not that way.. but I think that's the way it's *supposed* to be.
For instance, someone earlier on in the discussion was talking bout hiring a Linux system administrator. Here's a scenario for you; what if there's a guy who has a degree in mathematics, say, and he wants a job as a linux administrator. He's never adminstered Linux before, or, in fact, had a whole lot to do with networking in general, although he has at least a basic understanding of how to use computers, and maybe even has some experience using Linux with mathematics problems he's had in the past. If this guy goes and buys about 5 books, one on Linux administration, one on server administration in general, another on networks, another on network security, and finally "The Road to Damascus" by John Ringo and Linda Evans (sci fi), to pass the tim when h gets bored, how long will it take him to be as competent at being a day-to-day administrator for a linux system, compared to someone who just finished a 2-year long college course on administering linux?
Okay, let's say it takes him around six months or so to reach a decent level of proficiency.
Now, what happens when somebody invents a new protocol and TCP dies (okay, so maybe it's not that likely, but bear with me)?
The guy who took 2 years of college just to learn Linux administration is sort of screwed, because he had a very specific set of information.
The Math guy, on the other hand, only has to repeat his six month stint to learn this newer technology, an away he goes.
Six months is too long to learn an entirely new technology in the fast moving world of computers, you say? Balogny.. C/C++ are more than six months old. Java is more than six months old. TCP/IP is older than six months. Sure, computer technology has a lot of bleeding edge stuff going all the time; but that's the sort of thing that you *can* learn as you go. The stuff that takes longer to learn - like how Operating Systems interact with the hardware - is also the stuff that lasts longer, even in the "high paced world" of computers.
Anyway, my point is that *learning to learn*, and learning about the fundamental ideas and theories about how things work, and how things should work (if the two are different), and learning to *think* is what University is all about. College is a place to learn the specifics - nicely compacted into as little time as possible.
Neither one is necessary for success; Thomas Edison got kicked out of school because his teacher said he was an idiot and couldn't learn anything, but.. 'nuf said about that. But, they both have their places, and they can both help.
If only HR, and managers, would learn that ATTITUDE and APTITUDE is more important than papers, maybe we would realy start getting somewhere.
"Basically what I'm saying is that the majority of jobs do NOT require a degree, nor will a degree really help them."
Ah, but the REAL question is not whether a particular *job* will be helped by a degree, but whether a *person* will be helped by that degree.
Maybe his particular job flipping burgers/digging trenches/toting barges/lifting bales won't be helped much by his education - but I think it's a stupid attitude to think that we require people to do menial tasks and therefore shouldn't bother letting them waste their time educating themselves. I think society should be based on individuals, not on classes, and I think that any individual is better suited for.. well.. anything, if he has #1 most importantly, the idea that work begets prosperity, and #2 that work is both mental and physical. And sometimes if you do a little bit of mental work, you'll save a lot of physical work.
For the reader's benefit, it might be helpful to envision a soap-box preacher foaming a the mouth and red in the face during the next paragraph or so.
It all comes down to attitude. And this attitude that jobs are a depleteable comodity is the STUPIDEST BURGER-FLIPPING IDEA I HAVE HEARD IN MY ENTIRE LIFE.
The only point at which there are NO MORE JOBS TO BE HAD is when EVERYTHING THAT IS POSSIBLE TO BE DONE IS DONE. I.e. when everybody is fed, clothed, sheltered, watered, entertained, etc etc. So.. if you're starving because you don't have a job to pay for food, the PROBLEM is not a lack of a job or lack of money; you HAVE a job - the job is to get food. The PROBLEM is a lack of FOOD which can be remedied by DOING YOUR JOB. And no, stealing food from somone who currently has it is not doing your job. All you are doing then is shuffling around a limited comodity - that of food - instead of introducing MORE of that comodity into the market. I.e. GROWING MORE FOOD. Or, paying someone else to grow more food. Or something. but the problem is NOT A LACK OF JOBS AND NEVER WILL BE SO LONG AS WE DON'T LIVE IN UTOPIA. There will NEVER be too few jobs. If stupid people would stop thinking all about what their neighbour already has, and how it would be less work to go and steal their neighbour's food than it would be to grow their own, or spend all their time and intellect thinking of ways to swindle "money" i.e. food and goods, in an indirect fashion, out of other people, and instead SPEND THEIR TIME PRODUCING SOMETHING WORTHWHILE, then 'society', along with all the individuals in it, will be a lot better off.
Well, being as I'm the second eldest in a family of 7 kids, I have changed diapers (more than once), but there's a few others I am missing :)
If computer games count, though, I've done my fair share of dying gallantly, that's for sure.. I have dialup ^.^ (he says as though it explains everything.. which by the way, it does)
"I know there will be the crowd that says - but we were designed to die. That is bunk! Self aware intelligence is bound and destined to perpetuated and proliferate."
:) ) :)
Okay, first of all before I say anything else, you have to understand that I'm a christian (presbyterian by the way, not catholic) and my position is, "I'll believe the Bible unless or until someone proves it wrong" - and, guess what, according to the bible, if you take all the ages of people that it mentions before the flood, the average lifespan of humans was something like 900 years.
The oldest man ever mentioned was Methuselah, who was 969 when he died (take that, Guiness book of records!), right before the flood happened. There were around 1654 years between when Adam was created during the creation week, and when the flood happened. I.E., Adam was still alive when Methuselah was born, and Methuselah was alive right up until the flood..
Now, of course, to anobody who believes in evolution (in which theory everything starts off at "blech" (rock soup) and works its way up to "w00t" (intelligent life), as opposed to what the bible says, where everything pretty much starts out at "w00t" while Adam and Eve were in the garden, and those goes to "blech" when they et the fruit and later goes to "sub-basement-of-blechness" when humanity gets to be so revolting that they bring the flood upon themselves and chop their lifespans waaay down), this probably sounds ridiculous. In fact, even to a lot of people who believe what the bible says, but who have never really thought about it, this probably sounds a bit crazy (people living NINE HUNDRED years?!), and/or just an "old wives' tale"/legend.
But, personally, like I said, I'm going to believe it until someone proves it's wrong (which I don't think will happen, but then I don't know everything..)
Another thing to note is that lifespans dropped off very rapidly after the flood. Shem (Noah's son) lived only 600 years, as opposed to Noah's 950. Shem's son Arphaxad, grandson Selah, and great-grandson Eber lived around 430 years each (incidentally, there were some weird things happeneing with ancestors living rather long than their descendants during this period - Shem outlived Arphaxad, Selah, Peleg, and Reu, among others), and Eber's son Peleg, grandson Reu, and great grandson Serug each lived only about 230 years. (Nice little history lesson, for anyone who doesn't dismiss it off-hand simply because it's from the Bible
So, it seems like something happened during or after the flood - which, by the way it's described in the bible, must have been an extremely catastrophic event. According to the way things are written in Genesis, it seems that there was a shield of water around the Earth when it was first made - maybe like another layer to the atmosphere, made of water. If so, and it all came crashing down onto the earth, maybe it had something do with an ice age, and/or maybe that's where alot of water in the oceans came from - maybe the oceans used to be shallow, allowing people to walk across from asia/russia to north america, rather than boating across.. which is an interesting alternate, or even complementary, theory to a major ice age - maybe it was an ice comet that hit the earth and kocked the water shield down and caused the flood? Maybe the water filled the oceans up to the continental shelves after the flood, and then the ice began to melt and filled it even further, so as to submerge the shelf? I'm not a geologist, but I would be interested in knowing how much of this could possibly have happened, and how much is merely wild conjecture and fiction
Some people have wondered where all the water for the flood came from, since it says that the water was over the tops of the mountains, and even if mountains were shorter at the time, and got stirred up because of the flood - alot of water dumping on the crust would, I should think, do a lot of shaking up of tectonic activity, creating of mountains, messing up of axial tilts, who kno
"It reminds me a heck of a lot of the speech Captain Beatty gavein Fahrenheit 451, where he talks about how this line offended a group, so it got trimmed, that line bothered someone else who didn't understand it, so it got nixed, and so on"
:) )
That or "Mostly Harmless" (which is what Ford Prefect's report on the planet earth, which took him 9 years of research, was paired down to after it made it through the Hitchhiker's Guide's editor department - for anyone who hasn't read the book
"However, McLellan said that just like in the old wiretap days, police investigators will have to get the approval of a judge before they can have access."
Then again, since when does anyone with brains trust McLellan?
You know what I *really* can't figure out? How on earth does she keep getting elected when she's like the only liberal in Alberta who *ever* gets elected and then keeps doing stupid things that Albertans don't like (like Gun Control) and *still* keeps getting elected?
>If you were all good, God-fearing Christians, you'd be fine.
I'm a God fearing christian, and I'm halfway through a four-year degree in Computer Science.
Seriously, if there's one thing at the very top of the list of annoying attitudes that a lot of americans have, it's this stupid idea that being an evolutionist/atheist somehow makes you smarter than people who follow "outdated" religions.
Just because evolution is newer doesn't make it righter.
Smart+educated people can still be wrong, and when they *want* to be wrong (as is the case with many atheists/evolutionists - 'if there's no God then we can do whatever *we* want, so let's get rid of God!'), they can be wrong in a much more convincing manner.
>Not that I agree with the original poster, you can certainly emulate C++ in C.
:)
t rapping )
Somebody should already have said this, but, for that matter, you can *WRITE* C++ in C... Bjarne did
( http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq.html#boots
>Much as I dislike the MPAA, the fact is that movies cost money to make. A lot of money.
>Yet you're proposing that the best way to view those movies is to download an
>unauthorised copy from the net before it's even hit the cinemas. That brings in
>precisely zero revenue to recoup the cost of making the film.
So, maybe the movie studio should get smart and offer the movie for download on their website for $20... people who still want to see it in a theater can, people who still want to buy it on a DVD for $40 can, and people who want to download can do that *and* pay the company.
It seems to me that the whole stopping people from sharing files *isn't* working very well (without even considering whether or not it's morally or legally right or wrong), so I think the publishers are going to have to embrace the current technology that allows insanely quick copy and distribution, rather than continuing to try to make that technology illegal. Think of ways to use it to your advantage, movie guys, or it *will* kill you. That's how I see it.
Err, I mean, 5 years over his head :)
>What about with violence? "The Passion of the Christ" was basically just a snuff film to anyone who
:p), but for goodness sake, they already have letters on the box - if it says 17+ and I buy it for my 12 year old, only later to find that it has things in it that I didn't want my 12 year old seeing, then it's just as much my fault for getting him a game rated 3 years over his head as it is the rating system's fault for supposedly rating the game a year younger than they should have.
>isn't Christian, and yet, because it was Jesus in there, it's okay. And then compare that to any run
>of the mill kill fest flick, and see how people complain about the violence, even though it's so
>much less than the torture doled out on screen in TPotC.
Actually, I'm a Christian and I take a great deal of offense over the "Passion of the Christ" movie myself.. it's obvious, to me at least, that Gibson did *not* make the movie for purely religious reasons.. or, I should be more specific, not for christian religious ideas.
And I certainly ought to mention that the movie is a whole lot more catholic than it is protestant, and protestants are Christians too, so any protestant ought to be complaining about that already.
On the other hand, let's take a movie like Schindler's List (World War 2); if that movie had been made without a story line, purely so that they could grovel in the violence and nudity aspects, I would certainly condone being a whole lot more critical of it; but the movie had a *point*.
No, I wouldn't let my kids watch it (you know, not till they're like 18). But I'd still rather watch a movie that had violence and nudity in it, but *had a point*, than a movie with violence and nudity simply for the sake of violence and nudity.
The same goes for games.
But, to get back on topic, I agree with the general idea of what you're saying.
A parent/guardian *should* have the primary responsibility for what their kids are doing; that's why they're called "guardian". Sure, kids might be able to go and get a part time job and buy their own game which their parents already told them not to go buy. But it's an entirely different matter if the parents can't be bothered to do anything more than check the letter on the front of the box. It's a whole lot worse if they don't even do that. The GTA box said M, 17+; so why on earth would you get it for your 14 year old in the first place? One year, from 17 to 18, reall isn't making all that much of a difference.
Okay, so some people might not understand the ESRB ratings.
So what?
So, go and learn!
It's your kids you're buying the games for - don't you care enough to at least find out how the current rating system works, and use it to your advantage?
If I was a carpenter, I'd be sure to find out how saws an hammers work before I'd use them.
If my job is to raise my kids (which as a parent, it is), then I'll make sure I use the available tools to help me out in any way they can.
No, maybe I won't actually have the time to play every game myself in order to find out what's in it (just as I wouln't have time to read through every book my kid might want to read, before they read it - and that's an even worse situation, come to think of it.. books don't even have ratings on the fronts! but, let's not even go there at this point
On the other hand, everyone knows it will need patches, so I think their admitting it instead of pretending the patches won't be needed is a good sign :)
I think the entire problem lies in the word "consumer" which, to the "consumers", is just a word, but which, to the companies, is actually an idea.
We exist to consume what the companies make. If we don't do that we are not fulfilling our purpose in life and must be adjusted.
It shouldn't be "consumers", it should be "customers" and it shouldn't be passively "consuming" the products, but rather actively deciding what we want and, if it already exists, getting it. If it doesn't already exist then start your own company.
It seems that legislation is, for whatever reason (although I can think of a few, myself) more interested in (forcibly, by which I mean by force of law) adjusting the attitudes of "consumers" than in adjusting the attitudes of companies. Which is not a good thing, because although I think both companies and customers need some adjusting of attitudes, these laws aren't the right adjustments.
The right adjustments would be for the attitudes - and I must stress, of *both* companies *and* "consumers" - away from the "consumer" idea and towards the actual idea of the company providing a service the user actually *wants*. People shouldn't *be* buying flashy new movie X on DVD if it also has a pain in the butt 'region encoded, DRM scheme DVD encryption' on it which they don't want, simply because the company produced it that way.
And for the record, I am of course just as guilty in this regard as anyone else you can point a finger at.
That (uncrackable) is totally impossible.
If all the information is physically on the media then you *can* read it.
It just might be kind of hard to do so.
Now those should have been modded as Funny ;)
Technology Prevention Mechanism and an article about stifling innovation.. snigger..
At the same time, does Linux *claim* to innovate? No, it doesn't..
The GNU manifesto ( http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html ) clearly says in the very first line that the point was:
"Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it."
Stallman did not intend to innovate in software, he intended to make a good operating system that people could use.
The same goes for Linus, who in fact didn't even intend that much out of Linux. From an archive thingie I found on google ( http://www.li.org/linuxhistory.php ) with some early posts by Linus about Linux:
"Hello everybody out there using minix -
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."
So.. it's unfair to criticize Linux or GNU for not being innovative, because that wasn't the point.
And, in fairness to everybody, innovation is a lot harder than refining an innovation once it is made.
On the other hand, I think it's also more honest to say that Microsoft is much better at presenting innovations (whether their own or other people's) than they are at coming up with innovations in the first place. Whatever else you criticize about Microsoft, you have to admire their marketing.
Well, I'm glad that's not what the 14yr old girl was doing.
> in fact, it was the arguably equally evil Disney that came up with this one.
:)
No argument.. definitely more evil.
Plus, they give themselves such a respectable image what with all the family friendly movies..
>Why do new words have to be invented for something, especially when they are just the lazy contraction of existing words that work perfectly well?
:)
Umm.. that's how English works.
Blogs are something that is fairly easy to identify, to the exclusion of anything else, so why not have a word dedicated specifically to it?
Why do we call cars cars instead of "motorized carriages"? That's how they started off.. then they shortened it to "motor cars" and now we usually just call them "cars". But, it works, and nobody complains about it.
Why complain about "blog" if you don't complain about "car" ?
Say, I wonder why they're so popular in Canada.. is it because we aren't really quite so frozen as everyone south of us seems to think?
;)
Or wait, I know, maybe we just can't stand to be warm in summer, because it reminds us of how everything's *supposed* to be frozen
>That's not rational.
Ah, if only everybody was always rational.
Unfortunately, I don't think that's going to happen any time soon.