This thread isn't really off topic. It tends to come up every time evolution is mentioned, so we must be linked somehow. Anyway, we're not flaming away at each other, so the moderators might have some tolerance.
The argument you bring up does not refute Hume as you claim it does. In fact, it justifies his argument. Hume was correct in saying that there is not a necessity to assume causation. His example with the pool ball contacts might not have been the best, but in this century quantum mechanics has indeed proven that causation does not hold universally.
Your example justified Hume in a different way. Those who claim universal causation are making an assumption which cannot be proven. As you bring up, causation can only be verified in those cases where a person is the cause. The entire set of actions caused by a person is smaller than the entire set of actions. To claim that causation is universal based on the observation of a small subset is a premature conclusion. Hume's objection was a very valid one, and it has proven to be a well founded objection. To say that he was a sort of shallow thinker (No it doesn't type) doesn't do him justice.
Aquinas borrowed the first cause argument from the arabs who originally thought of it as early as 800 AD I think. Though his argument is delicately phrased, it's a misrepresentation to say that it is the definitive statement of the first cause argument. The argument was countered by David Hume. He attacked the universality of the causal judgement, as well as the necessity of the judgement. The counter that I originally gave was a description of the latter: if you are going to say that everything requires a cause, then you are forced to say that god also requires a cause.
Quantum physics gives us a glimmer of what Hume meant when he attacked the universality of the causative assumption. Not every event requires a cause, and especially on the quantum mechanical level events can be completely uncaused. Causation is not universal.
Furthermore, the description of the first cause given by Thomas Aquinas differs from my own in that he doesn't entangle it with the argument from design, which I have done, and which is commonly done. The arguments are related, and so are the counter arguments.
The unentangled first cause argument that I had in mind is indeed the same as the one described by Aquinas which you helpfully quoted in your message.
Re:answer provided ??
on
RNA Computer
·
· Score: 1
1024 positions a week? This is much slower than a regular computer. Probably because of the speed of the chemical processes to actually sort out the DNA. On the other hand, I can imagine that with enough vats of DNA the process wouldn't take much longer for even really really difficult problems, like a calculation of the optimal placment of fiber cables between houses in the U.S., or cracking RCS-64 really really fast.
First cause is the idea that life is a complex system and any complex system *must* have a creator. Keep going down the chain of causes, until you have something that doesn't appear to have been caused by something else. Well, that first something *must* have been cause by something, and we'll say that it is god. The first cause argument is usually combined or enhanced with the argument from design (nature is designed so well it must have had a designer).
The argument against the first cause is if that if god caused that first thing, then god must be a remarkable and complex being. For the same reason that all the other things that are complex *must* have had a cause, then *god* must have had a cause too! oops.
A beowulf cluster can be assembled with *multiple* network cards to decrease the network distance between each processor. Basically instead of the machines sharing a single network, there are several separate networks to split the traffic. The reason for this is that as traffic on Ethernet rises, it reaches a point where it hits a wall and throughput can really decline fast.
Appleseed is set up using the internal ethernet card (though I would guess you could use a different interface like a fiber optic connection) connected in the usual fashion to a regular switch. The article didn't mention any option to install more network cards and use those.
Now, for most things a shared 100M network will be suficient. Depending on your applications I would guess that a beowulf would be more configurable. If I were to make a 1024 node cluster, it would be a beowulf with the nodes arranged into a hypercube. Putting 1024 Macs onto a single beowulf might cause performance problems depending on what you're doing. Usually programs that don't require a lot of communications between nodes run best on beowulf type clusters, so the problem of having only one network card in a machine might be no big deal after all.
crypto means hidden. crypto-fascist means hidden fascist.
Standard plot device: a secret fascist conspiracy is gonna take over the world, call in FEMA, suspend the constitution, and Kris Kristoferson will star in the movie they make about it.
Matrick plot device: a not so secret artificial intelligence already took over the world. I call this the decrypto-automatic menace, because I don't think anyone's named that one yet. For example, Terminator and T2 used the decripto-automatic menace as a plot device.
We need separate units to measure the temperature, and what you actually measure with a thermometer.
For example, we've got Mass (kilograms) and weight. In space, objects retain their mass, but they weigh nothing. (weight being what you measure on a scale)
Likewise, in space, the temperature might be a description of how fast the molecules are moving but the new unit I just made up would correspond to the reading on a thermometer in space - very cold!
Maybe I'm a bit different than most people in thinking this, but what is it about leadership that it is supposed to be a universal good? I'm not knocking leadership; I'm questioning why they are selecting for it. The dichotomy that is implicit here is that leadership is good, and following is bad. Not everyone can be a good leader. Not being a good leader doesn't mean that a person can't be an excellent follower. Without followers, there can be no leaders. If everyone is a leader, that creates chaos.
As an aside, has anyone found it funny that US Army commercials make a point to say that leadership is something taught in the armed forces? Then, just as soon as you get to boot camp, they yell at you and make you good at following orders... heh heh...
In companies that I've worked for that made it a point to hire only people with leadership qualities we had a lot of cooks in the kitchen, but dinner was always late. Now I'm a contractor and I am expected to write the programs that I am told to write, not set business policy. I prefer to do it that way, not because I am deficient, but because it's more of my natural style. Leadership sometimes demands a lot of arguing and confrontation in order to forge a path for those you are trying to lead. People who are not naturally willing to push their ideas might not be as effective as those who are more agressive that way. I doubt that leadership is an effective predictor of your final GPA at college. It might be more useful in predicting who will become a fraternity or sorority president.
OK, name 800 of them that publish short stories. Now name 800 of them that you can actually purchase within 5 miles of your home.
See the point? What's one of the biggest mags you can publish your short story in? What magazine will actually get circulated to more than 10 people in a college town? Thousands of small publishers that nobody ever heard of. The big ones are mostly all gone now.
Verne should definitely be on your list. The books aren't too long, and they are still entertaining more than a century after they were written. In particular I liked The Time Machine which was requires some knowlege of the social classes of the time.
Plus, after you read the book you can watch the movies.
That's right. To have the energy to put the patient back together again, as you say, you'd have to add energy to the system. As your patient got colder and colder from the activity of the energy using nano surgeons, your job would be to try to keep the patient warm by heating. This won't violate any theromodynamics laws at all, and your nanoprobes will have the energy needed to do their work.
I'm thinking the exact opposite. Where will the nanomachines get their energy to operate from? Heat! They might work in an endothermic way, cooling their environment in order to perform work.
So you inject the nanosurgeons into your patient, and.... OOPS!....the patient is frozen solid.
Not only that, take a look at a spec book. The instruction set isn't hacked together like the 8086 instruction set is. The MIPS instruction set is a thing of beauty.
I was thinking of the moon orbiting Ida. The moon's name is Dactyl. Anyway, I just looked it up and I was wrong. Dactyl is in a regular circular orbit around Ida.
"If they want to throw more people onto a late project, don't just tell them it won't work. Tell them *why*, quote Fred Brookes, *reason* with them."
Oh if it were that easy! Besides programming, I'm pretty good at UML designing. I understand the importance of designing with tools that can generate code, as well as integrate changes back into the design. I've argued with my manager at length about this.
Their response? "Visio is good enough. Nobody's going to read the documentation, but we've to to have it to mee the requirements. We can't afford to spend the time to train everyone to learn UML either. So, just do the docs in Visio, call it a design, and get back to porting the app from Perl to Java. And while I appreciate you working 20 hour days for the past week, we've got to keep that up for another three weeks to meet our deadline. If we miss it, our vice president will get a demerit on his annual goals, and that affects his bonus."
No shit! This is exactly what is happening to me right now. But don't get me wrong - I *love* this situation. I get paid overtime, and I don't have any responsibility for the project schedule.
The orbit isn't technically *around* the Earth. The orbit is a sort of horseshoe shaped wobbly motion as the moon follows behind the earth.
The moon isn't stable, and it will probably leave it's position within a few hundred years. There's some evidence that the moon was in a similar situation about 100,000 years ago. It sort of falls into place every once in awhile.
As a point of interest, the first object discovered in such a peculiar horseshoe shaped orbit was a moon of an asteroid.
The problems with software engineering are fundamentally a management problem. It's been many years since the "Mythical Man Month" showed us how adding programmers to a project can only make it later because of communications overhead. But, many many managers are still doing just that. Furthermore, many managers are afraid of the technology, proclaiming loudly that they don't know anything at all about programming computers; good managers can manage anything at all without knowing about it.
Gantt charts and org charts are something that programmers should never see. But yet in many companies I work with, you can't get anything done unless you've got a big graph of the organization to help you find someone who is high enough to have some weight, but low enough to actually have some brains.
And even worse, technologies are often driven by management needs. Software costs too much, so all the managers want to get some of that good object orientated stuff on the project. So, they hire a few C++ programmers out of school and give them Visio. The programmers are told that their highest goal is re-use. Never mind that the system they are building is meant to handle 320 contradictory/arbitrary business rules for selling widgets to a client in New Zeeland. So, the programmers dutifully build the system to be as re-usable as possible. And, those 320 business rules never get used anywhere else but New Zealand. Meanwhile, the primary goal of re-use has caused the maintainability of the system to go to hell, because management ignored the faster/cheaper/better trichotomy and gave the team a week and half to design the system.
I could go on and on and on about management horror stories. Every place I've ever worked has been the same way, and a lot of those places were Fortune 500 companies. Books outlining ideal software development worlds are great. We really need some new ideas in that area. But how much progress can we make if our managers have never READ the books?
DOS doesn't even have a scheduler, so you can't laugh at what isn't there.
DOS is essentially a program loader with some hardware abstractions. This is a very useful environment for a great many devices. You seem to think that the lack of multitasking is a huge problem. In the embedded world, a lot of things are built in hardware, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a TCP chip someday for these embedded devices. Anyway, for low datarate devices, DOS can handle TCP just fine.
But, I wouldn't want to be the one building a DOS microwave oven...
Slashdot Mirror
Not just some lawyers....
These were some very special lawyers, who were hired by the Scientology org.
The bad press surrounding prozac was bought and paid for by Scientology marketers.
This thread isn't really off topic. It tends to come up every time evolution is mentioned, so we must be linked somehow. Anyway, we're not flaming away at each other, so the moderators might have some tolerance.
The argument you bring up does not refute Hume as you claim it does. In fact, it justifies his argument. Hume was correct in saying that there is not a necessity to assume causation. His example with the pool ball contacts might not have been the best, but in this century quantum mechanics has indeed proven that causation does not hold universally.
Your example justified Hume in a different way. Those who claim universal causation are making an assumption which cannot be proven. As you bring up, causation can only be verified in those cases where a person is the cause. The entire set of actions caused by a person is smaller than the entire set of actions. To claim that causation is universal based on the observation of a small subset is a premature conclusion. Hume's objection was a very valid one, and it has proven to be a well founded objection. To say that he was a sort of shallow thinker (No it doesn't type) doesn't do him justice.
Aquinas borrowed the first cause argument from the arabs who originally thought of it as early as 800 AD I think. Though his argument is delicately phrased, it's a misrepresentation to say that it is the definitive statement of the first cause argument. The argument was countered by David Hume. He attacked the universality of the causal judgement, as well as the necessity of the judgement. The counter that I originally gave was a description of the latter: if you are going to say that everything requires a cause, then you are forced to say that god also requires a cause.
Quantum physics gives us a glimmer of what Hume meant when he attacked the universality of the causative assumption. Not every event requires a cause, and especially on the quantum mechanical level events can be completely uncaused. Causation is not universal.
Furthermore, the description of the first cause given by Thomas Aquinas differs from my own in that he doesn't entangle it with the argument from design, which I have done, and which is commonly done. The arguments are related, and so are the counter arguments.
The unentangled first cause argument that I had in mind is indeed the same as the one described by Aquinas which you helpfully quoted in your message.
1024 positions a week? This is much slower than a regular computer. Probably because of the speed of the chemical processes to actually sort out the DNA. On the other hand, I can imagine that with enough vats of DNA the process wouldn't take much longer for even really really difficult problems, like a calculation of the optimal placment of fiber cables between houses in the U.S., or cracking RCS-64 really really fast.
I wonder what the speed would be in MIPS?
First cause was demolished over 200 years ago.
First cause is the idea that life is a complex system and any complex system *must* have a creator. Keep going down the chain of causes, until you have something that doesn't appear to have been caused by something else. Well, that first something *must* have been cause by something, and we'll say that it is god. The first cause argument is usually combined or enhanced with the argument from design (nature is designed so well it must have had a designer).
The argument against the first cause is if that if god caused that first thing, then god must be a remarkable and complex being. For the same reason that all the other things that are complex *must* have had a cause, then *god* must have had a cause too! oops.
A beowulf cluster can be assembled with *multiple* network cards to decrease the network distance between each processor. Basically instead of the machines sharing a single network, there are several separate networks to split the traffic. The reason for this is that as traffic on Ethernet rises, it reaches a point where it hits a wall and throughput can really decline fast.
Appleseed is set up using the internal ethernet card (though I would guess you could use a different interface like a fiber optic connection) connected in the usual fashion to a regular switch. The article didn't mention any option to install more network cards and use those.
Now, for most things a shared 100M network will be suficient. Depending on your applications I would guess that a beowulf would be more configurable. If I were to make a 1024 node cluster, it would be a beowulf with the nodes arranged into a hypercube. Putting 1024 Macs onto a single beowulf might cause performance problems depending on what you're doing. Usually programs that don't require a lot of communications between nodes run best on beowulf type clusters, so the problem of having only one network card in a machine might be no big deal after all.
Shit.
That should be the *post* decrypto-automatic menace.
That means after the not so secret menacing machines took over the world.
crypto means hidden. crypto-fascist means hidden fascist.
Standard plot device: a secret fascist conspiracy is gonna take over the world, call in FEMA, suspend the constitution, and Kris Kristoferson will star in the movie they make about it.
Matrick plot device: a not so secret artificial intelligence already took over the world. I call this the decrypto-automatic menace, because I don't think anyone's named that one yet. For example, Terminator and T2 used the decripto-automatic menace as a plot device.
22:59 and I'm still at work. Can you tell?
We need separate units to measure the temperature, and what you actually measure with a thermometer.
For example, we've got Mass (kilograms) and weight. In space, objects retain their mass, but they weigh nothing. (weight being what you measure on a scale)
Likewise, in space, the temperature might be a description of how fast the molecules are moving but the new unit I just made up would correspond to the reading on a thermometer in space - very cold!
Maybe I'm a bit different than most people in thinking this, but what is it about leadership that it is supposed to be a universal good? I'm not knocking leadership; I'm questioning why they are selecting for it. The dichotomy that is implicit here is that leadership is good, and following is bad. Not everyone can be a good leader. Not being a good leader doesn't mean that a person can't be an excellent follower. Without followers, there can be no leaders. If everyone is a leader, that creates chaos.
As an aside, has anyone found it funny that US Army commercials make a point to say that leadership is something taught in the armed forces? Then, just as soon as you get to boot camp, they yell at you and make you good at following orders... heh heh...
In companies that I've worked for that made it a point to hire only people with leadership qualities we had a lot of cooks in the kitchen, but dinner was always late. Now I'm a contractor and I am expected to write the programs that I am told to write, not set business policy. I prefer to do it that way, not because I am deficient, but because it's more of my natural style. Leadership sometimes demands a lot of arguing and confrontation in order to forge a path for those you are trying to lead. People who are not naturally willing to push their ideas might not be as effective as those who are more agressive that way. I doubt that leadership is an effective predictor of your final GPA at college. It might be more useful in predicting who will become a fraternity or sorority president.
That was my first program too, but my first version was about 25 lines long.
I had nothing but questions back then. I even remember testing if it was possible to assign a variable to another variable.
30 let a=i
All my experiments stayed in that little program, so by the time it could print out consecutive numbers it was 25 lines long.
OK, name 800 of them that publish short stories. Now name 800 of them that you can actually purchase within 5 miles of your home.
See the point? What's one of the biggest mags you can publish your short story in? What magazine will actually get circulated to more than 10 people in a college town? Thousands of small publishers that nobody ever heard of. The big ones are mostly all gone now.
Welcome to America! I kiss you!
Verne should definitely be on your list. The books aren't too long, and they are still entertaining more than a century after they were written. In particular I liked The Time Machine which was requires some knowlege of the social classes of the time.
Plus, after you read the book you can watch the movies.
That's right. To have the energy to put the patient back together again, as you say, you'd have to add energy to the system. As your patient got colder and colder from the activity of the energy using nano surgeons, your job would be to try to keep the patient warm by heating. This won't violate any theromodynamics laws at all, and your nanoprobes will have the energy needed to do their work.
I'm thinking the exact opposite. Where will the nanomachines get their energy to operate from? Heat! They might work in an endothermic way, cooling their environment in order to perform work.
.... OOPS!....the patient is frozen solid.
/dev/null
So you inject the nanosurgeons into your patient, and
redirect comments about petrification to
Don't forget the button bar on Windows programs.
The really stupid part is that they make you put your mouse on the icon in order to see a TEXT description!
Duh! put text on buttons.
Not only that, take a look at a spec book. The instruction set isn't hacked together like the 8086 instruction set is. The MIPS instruction set is a thing of beauty.
Remember you can use www.xoom.com and www.nettaxi.com also have free web pages.
Come on folks, get your mirrors going, and make sure you register the pages with the search engines.
I was thinking of the moon orbiting Ida. The moon's name is Dactyl. Anyway, I just looked it up and I was wrong. Dactyl is in a regular circular orbit around Ida.
This link has more info
"If they want to throw more people onto a late project, don't just tell them it won't work. Tell them *why*, quote Fred Brookes, *reason* with them."
Oh if it were that easy! Besides programming, I'm pretty good at UML designing. I understand the importance of designing with tools that can generate code, as well as integrate changes back into the design. I've argued with my manager at length about this.
Their response? "Visio is good enough. Nobody's going to read the documentation, but we've to to have it to mee the requirements. We can't afford to spend the time to train everyone to learn UML either. So, just do the docs in Visio, call it a design, and get back to porting the app from Perl to Java. And while I appreciate you working 20 hour days for the past week, we've got to keep that up for another three weeks to meet our deadline. If we miss it, our vice president will get a demerit on his annual goals, and that affects his bonus."
No shit! This is exactly what is happening to me right now. But don't get me wrong - I *love* this situation. I get paid overtime, and I don't have any responsibility for the project schedule.
The orbit isn't technically *around* the Earth. The orbit is a sort of horseshoe shaped wobbly motion as the moon follows behind the earth.
The moon isn't stable, and it will probably leave it's position within a few hundred years. There's some evidence that the moon was in a similar situation about 100,000 years ago. It sort of falls into place every once in awhile.
As a point of interest, the first object discovered in such a peculiar horseshoe shaped orbit was a moon of an asteroid.
A good website about these strange orbits is:
right here
The problems with software engineering are fundamentally a management problem. It's been many years since the "Mythical Man Month" showed us how adding programmers to a project can only make it later because of communications overhead. But, many many managers are still doing just that. Furthermore, many managers are afraid of the technology, proclaiming loudly that they don't know anything at all about programming computers; good managers can manage anything at all without knowing about it.
Gantt charts and org charts are something that programmers should never see. But yet in many companies I work with, you can't get anything done unless you've got a big graph of the organization to help you find someone who is high enough to have some weight, but low enough to actually have some brains.
And even worse, technologies are often driven by management needs. Software costs too much, so all the managers want to get some of that good object orientated stuff on the project. So, they hire a few C++ programmers out of school and give them Visio. The programmers are told that their highest goal is re-use. Never mind that the system they are building is meant to handle 320 contradictory/arbitrary business rules for selling widgets to a client in New Zeeland. So, the programmers dutifully build the system to be as re-usable as possible. And, those 320 business rules never get used anywhere else but New Zealand. Meanwhile, the primary goal of re-use has caused the maintainability of the system to go to hell, because management ignored the faster/cheaper/better trichotomy and gave the team a week and half to design the system.
I could go on and on and on about management horror stories. Every place I've ever worked has been the same way, and a lot of those places were Fortune 500 companies. Books outlining ideal software development worlds are great. We really need some new ideas in that area. But how much progress can we make if our managers have never READ the books?
"The scheduler for DOS is laughable at best"
Here's my implementation:
void scheduler (void) {
}
Ha haha.
DOS doesn't even have a scheduler, so you can't laugh at what isn't there.
DOS is essentially a program loader with some hardware abstractions. This is a very useful environment for a great many devices. You seem to think that the lack of multitasking is a huge problem. In the embedded world, a lot of things are built in hardware, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a TCP chip someday for these embedded devices. Anyway, for low datarate devices, DOS can handle TCP just fine.
But, I wouldn't want to be the one building a DOS microwave oven...
You asked for it, you got it.
e nsource/linux390/index.html
IBM did the 390 port of Linux. Read all about it at:
http://www10.software.ibm.com/developerworks/op