I don't think anyone is denying that these people have the freedom to practice their religion or believe what they want. But we have the freedom to express and criticize what we feel is silly, stupid, or even mildly dangerous delusions. For some reason people tend to feel that religion is the one topic that is beyond criticism. You can deride someone's politics, but you have to respect their cherished religious beliefs. No you don't. You only have to respect their right to hold them and practice them so far as it doesn't infringe upon other more basic rights (e.g., so murder in the name of religious belief is unacceptable).
My point is that people have a right to believe and practice their religion, and they have a right to express themselves verbal (I can't just beat people senseless because I don't agree with them), but there is no right not to be offended. Not only would such a right be completely incompatible with freedom of speech, it is completely unpractical to enforce. I, as the speaker, do not have complete control over whether I offend my listeners. Many important things that must be said will offend some either intentionally or unintentionally. This has as much to do with the listener as the speaker. And someone can always claim offense if they don't like what they hear, and such a right would quickly translate into a right not to hear anything you don't want to hear. Such a right would be nearly the opposite of freedom of expression, giving anybody the ability to silence anyone. No, a right not to be offended would quickly lead to a very silent world.
So one might say, "who cares what these people believe and profess; just let them live in their deluded world." I think that is the wrong way to look at this. While they have the right to believe this young Earth creationist crap, their evangelism of such beliefs has a real impact. Science and the pursuit of knowledge is endangered whenever we have pseudoscience that fools people or we replace science with dogmatism that we mislabel as science. Education of our youth is what is endangered here. I don't care if a particular person does not value science and chooses to live by faith while completely forsaking reason. Not everyone is even interested in science, and there is more to life than this one topic. What angers me, and what must be stopped is people being intellectually dishonest about science and twisting it. It degrades and pollutes science. Be honest. Say that science and literal interpretation of the biblical creation story don't match but that you believe the creation story by faith, which triumphs reason for you. I know Christians who do this. At least it is intellectually honest. But don't tell me black is white and hot is cold. Don't accept science everywhere else but be the biggest skeptic in the world only where it challenges your faith. These are the people that readily accept everything else in science, accept the play up the "it's just a theory line" only for evolution (or geology, cosmology, physics and nearly every other discipline if they are young Earth creationists instead of just "intelligent design adherents").
So in conclusion, there is no right not to offend, and this is a serious issue with real consequences. We should not be silent or complacent on this issue.
Windows sucked just as much at the time. It was just the marketing and the fact that it was overpriced. To be so much more expnsive, they really needed to offer something more. And they didn't at the time.
Sure it is AS much a disease AS alcholism. But I think the latter is B.S. It isn't a pathogen. I don't know why they don't classify all disabling addictions as one psychological disorder with multiple mainifestations. You can be addicted to anythign and let it destroy your life.
The first bad assumption is that these tests measure intelligence. Much like polygraphs used by the NSA, they suffer from a high false positive rate. This is especially true of people with anxiety disorders. These tests (as well as things like the GRA and SAT) will often result in poor scores for very intelligent and good students with test anxiety. So much riding on one test, especially one that is timed, severely handicaps these intelligent individuals. The polygraph has the same problem as it is an anxiety and not a lie detector.
We also have to consider that speed isn't everything. Some people more than compensate with diligence and single-minded determination. This is particularly true of many of the great mathematicians. Sure they were intelligent, but the single-minded focus to hammer away on one problem for years means a lot more than speedly solving trite puzzles.
Even if one argues that they don't care about it being unfair or the false negatives (say they just don't want false positives), or someone says they don't want to take a chance on people with anxity problems, there is a more major false assumption. That is the assumption that intelligence makes someone a good worker or employee. It is hardly the only important attribute, and intelligence alone does not imply someone is a good employee or you will get much from them. In fact, you may only get headaches. Intelligence is one of many important attributes in a potential employee. A narrow focus on any single desired attribute is a bad idea.
Just last week we saw a story on slashdot about iTunes 6 FairPlay DRM being cracked. I imagine it is just a matter of time before the Hymanal project will pick that up. But if iTunes 7 uses new DRM tech, then anyone who updates prematurely might not be able to use the new iTunes 6 DRM crack. Interesting that iTunes 7 came out just a week after that crack was made public. Get your "upgrades" now!
Maybe you should have a potassium party someday. When I was a teenager, I did a little pyrotechnic experiment with K. I had a rod about 4 inches long and the width of a half dollar. I decided to take a 5 gallon bucket of water, set it in the middle of our Cul de Sac, cut off a 2 inch chunk, and toss it into the bucket. It took a couple of tosses to get it in from a safe distance. There was fire, a huge amount of water sprayed all over the place and a very destroyed bucket in the end. The majority of the Cul de Sac was covered in a silverish coating. I figured it was Potassium Oxide.
Later, in my freshman year of college I would put something like the size of a half dollar of potassium on the floor of a dry shower in the dorm. I never did hear back any stories about fire in the shower.:-( I suppose I should be glad that a stupid thing like that never got anyone hurt.
Anyway, if Theo does any other cool experiments, he should post them here. I work at the NCSA @ UIUC not too far from Wolfram. I am always up for interesting pyrotechnics, and I enjoy those Pop Sci experiments from his column.
When you turn on your Mac, it has that stupid sound before the boot device is even touched. It seems to be driven by the openfirmware. Unless there is some obscure firmware variable to disable it, you must turn off the sound not to hear it. It isn't anything that can be changed from within the OS.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is featured on an interesting podcast discussing the subject of panet classification and education. I highly recommend a listen to anyone intrested in this subject.
I am an SG-1 fan, but the last 2 seasons have been poor. It isn't just that Richard Dean Anderson has left, but the show tied up nicely at the end of season 8 and should have ended there. Actors that wanted to stay, could have migrated to Atlantis, like Worf to DS-9.
My biggest beef, if there always has to be this epic war, and each time they win, they have to come up with a more powerful enemy. This has happened to the ridiculous extreme till they are literally fighting "gods". This is a bad sign, a sign that they are running out of ideas. This is the sort of thing DS-9, a very sub-par substitute for TNG, did to boost its ratings. They had a 3 year war between the federation and dominion.
A good sci-fi show should be able to sustain interesting plots without the constant backdrop of annihilation. And when you keep replacing old enemies with more powerful ones, it degrades the battle with the old and the new enemies become ridiculously powerful after a while.
I hope they wrap up this Ori crap soon and never return to the ascending being junk. However that seems unlikely, because they have just introduced a new antagonist into Atlantis. I guess the Wraith aren't enough to deal with.
It really wasn't that bad. I have used it on SAS flights. I first used it because I had a paper deadline for a conference that day. We worked on a paper stored on a subversion server. I just needed to use it to update and commit changes. But then I found it so useful to get other work done. So I used it on other flights. Plus, it was a business expense and I got it reimbrsed. I really don't think it adds that much (especially if you don't use it the entire flight) to the expense of a business trip. In the end, it was a fraction of a percent of my expenses.
I have been waiting for 9 months to replace my desktop Mac. I was pretty ecited about the new desktop. It is what I wanted to hear more than anythign else they speculated about.
Boeing provides the service on non-Boeing planes. I used the BOeing ISP on a SAS flight on Airbus.
Better Native Mac Support
on
Opera 9.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
A real disappointment is that you have to use "Wand" to manage passwords. I wish it would integrate with Apple's keychain and Apple's bookmarks. Then I could sync it more easily. I guess the Mac market isn't large enough for them to create better NAtive support for OS X.
This, like problems in people's understanding of evolution, is from our (human's) tendencies to think discretely. We like discrete groupings and classifications. But obviously there wasn't a single generation where we can say the parent wasn't a chicken but the offspring was. THese changes are gradual, and any attempt to put some hard division between chicken and nonchicken like that would be making some arbitrary division point.
It's news if a worm doesn't exploit a large piece of monoculture software (a.k.a. MS Windows or Word). This same story could have been rewritten with the same words, just exchanging virus names for almost any virus. News would be a terrible virus exploiting a less wide-spread piece of software, like the blackice firewall software and the witty worm a few years ago.
I believe it was the dos shell program that could be used to make a text based menu to run DOS programs (v4.0 maybe). Anyway, when I was a kid I cracked how they stored the passwords that could protect menu items (like if you didn't want your kids running Lotus123 or something). The shifted all the ascii characters by 13 if memory serves me right.
It isn't like it mattered a lot since there where so many ways to prevent this menu system from coming up on boot and thus getting to a eal DOS prompt anyway, but it was enough to stop your parents.:-)
I don't know about the comment that software engineers use some pretty advanced math skills. I would say that is the minority, and the advanced mathematics is done by mathematicians who have learned to program. It is hard to become an applied mathematician of any regard without some serious programmning experience.
I would bet money that the most software engineers never use anything beyond simple calculus that many learn in high school. Crypto requires some more complex mathematics, but the software engineers that implement crypto often don't understand the theoretical underpinnings of the crypto and are just implementing algorithms described by pseudo-code in crypto books. Even in computer graphics programming, which is fairly mathematical, the mathematics isn't very complex, and itis abstracted away from the applications programmer who is using some library.
No, the physicists and the mathematicians tend to do most of the advanced mathematics in programming.
Of course it isn't going to have much of an effect on piracy there. It is too wide-spread and too much a part of the culture. It is all about looking like they are doing something and trying to comply with international copyright law. They are throwing US and other companies a bone basically.
It is a real shame that this debate has been taken from the laboratory and instead fought on the floors of legislatures (probably the courts eventually). The media's sensationalist coverage only makes things worse. As a whole, the media does a crappy job at covering science news. Now people don't know what to be believe as it has become such a politicized topic, and the lose trust in science to bring us real answers and say something to the affect, "I can always find a scientist to support any viewpoint I want, so I can't trust science for anything".
A couple things really need to change. First, the media needs to be more responsible in its covereage. It needs to communicate when there really is a significant scientific debate and what specifics are actually being debated. For instance, scientists aren't debating that global warming is happening or even that humans are having an effect, it is how much of an effect. And there is more consensus on the latter than most realize. In other topics that are far from fringe science and well-established (evolution and the idea of an old earth especially), the portray a social debate as a scientific debate, even though there isn't much of a sceintific debate. Part of this could be because of teh mantra journalists are taught that there are always two sides to a story and that they want to be "fair". But science isn't about being fair. Good theories are strengthened, bad ones are discarded. All theories are not created equally, and science is NOT a democracy. However, I think more often the media is just catering to their audience, hoping not to offfend someone, or just trying to make the news more sensational.
The other major problem is with politicians. There really needs to be a politically neutral (i.e. one where the governing party can't appoint their favorite bureaucrats) science advisory board for Congress. Instead, what they do is have somethign liek a science court where they pit some people representing the majority of mainstream scientists against some fringe scientist or fanatic. And the give equal weight to to the one or two fanatics and the rest of the scientific community. Nothing gets resolved, they say we have to wait for more evidence, and nothing happens.
Well, enough of my rant. The politicizing of science is a real pet peeve of mine. Politicians must make decisions based on science and other social and economic factors, unfortunately, they aren't getting the sound expert advice they need, and things are just decided by party lines. It isn't that I think there is no debate in the global warming research, there is some, certainly more than other areas, but it is still plagued by these problems.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think anyone is denying that these people have the freedom to practice their religion or believe what they want. But we have the freedom to express and criticize what we feel is silly, stupid, or even mildly dangerous delusions. For some reason people tend to feel that religion is the one topic that is beyond criticism. You can deride someone's politics, but you have to respect their cherished religious beliefs. No you don't. You only have to respect their right to hold them and practice them so far as it doesn't infringe upon other more basic rights (e.g., so murder in the name of religious belief is unacceptable).
My point is that people have a right to believe and practice their religion, and they have a right to express themselves verbal (I can't just beat people senseless because I don't agree with them), but there is no right not to be offended. Not only would such a right be completely incompatible with freedom of speech, it is completely unpractical to enforce. I, as the speaker, do not have complete control over whether I offend my listeners. Many important things that must be said will offend some either intentionally or unintentionally. This has as much to do with the listener as the speaker. And someone can always claim offense if they don't like what they hear, and such a right would quickly translate into a right not to hear anything you don't want to hear. Such a right would be nearly the opposite of freedom of expression, giving anybody the ability to silence anyone. No, a right not to be offended would quickly lead to a very silent world.
So one might say, "who cares what these people believe and profess; just let them live in their deluded world." I think that is the wrong way to look at this. While they have the right to believe this young Earth creationist crap, their evangelism of such beliefs has a real impact. Science and the pursuit of knowledge is endangered whenever we have pseudoscience that fools people or we replace science with dogmatism that we mislabel as science. Education of our youth is what is endangered here. I don't care if a particular person does not value science and chooses to live by faith while completely forsaking reason. Not everyone is even interested in science, and there is more to life than this one topic. What angers me, and what must be stopped is people being intellectually dishonest about science and twisting it. It degrades and pollutes science. Be honest. Say that science and literal interpretation of the biblical creation story don't match but that you believe the creation story by faith, which triumphs reason for you. I know Christians who do this. At least it is intellectually honest. But don't tell me black is white and hot is cold. Don't accept science everywhere else but be the biggest skeptic in the world only where it challenges your faith. These are the people that readily accept everything else in science, accept the play up the "it's just a theory line" only for evolution (or geology, cosmology, physics and nearly every other discipline if they are young Earth creationists instead of just "intelligent design adherents").
So in conclusion, there is no right not to offend, and this is a serious issue with real consequences. We should not be silent or complacent on this issue.
Windows sucked just as much at the time. It was just the marketing and the fact that it was overpriced. To be so much more expnsive, they really needed to offer something more. And they didn't at the time.
Sure it is AS much a disease AS alcholism. But I think the latter is B.S. It isn't a pathogen. I don't know why they don't classify all disabling addictions as one psychological disorder with multiple mainifestations. You can be addicted to anythign and let it destroy your life.
I was afraid I would see my site up there. :-) Good thing no one visits it.
The first bad assumption is that these tests measure intelligence. Much like polygraphs used by the NSA, they suffer from a high false positive rate. This is especially true of people with anxiety disorders. These tests (as well as things like the GRA and SAT) will often result in poor scores for very intelligent and good students with test anxiety. So much riding on one test, especially one that is timed, severely handicaps these intelligent individuals. The polygraph has the same problem as it is an anxiety and not a lie detector.
We also have to consider that speed isn't everything. Some people more than compensate with diligence and single-minded determination. This is particularly true of many of the great mathematicians. Sure they were intelligent, but the single-minded focus to hammer away on one problem for years means a lot more than speedly solving trite puzzles.
Even if one argues that they don't care about it being unfair or the false negatives (say they just don't want false positives), or someone says they don't want to take a chance on people with anxity problems, there is a more major false assumption. That is the assumption that intelligence makes someone a good worker or employee. It is hardly the only important attribute, and intelligence alone does not imply someone is a good employee or you will get much from them. In fact, you may only get headaches. Intelligence is one of many important attributes in a potential employee. A narrow focus on any single desired attribute is a bad idea.
Just last week we saw a story on slashdot about iTunes 6 FairPlay DRM being cracked. I imagine it is just a matter of time before the Hymanal project will pick that up. But if iTunes 7 uses new DRM tech, then anyone who updates prematurely might not be able to use the new iTunes 6 DRM crack. Interesting that iTunes 7 came out just a week after that crack was made public. Get your "upgrades" now!
Maybe you should have a potassium party someday. When I was a teenager, I did a little pyrotechnic experiment with K. I had a rod about 4 inches long and the width of a half dollar. I decided to take a 5 gallon bucket of water, set it in the middle of our Cul de Sac, cut off a 2 inch chunk, and toss it into the bucket. It took a couple of tosses to get it in from a safe distance. There was fire, a huge amount of water sprayed all over the place and a very destroyed bucket in the end. The majority of the Cul de Sac was covered in a silverish coating. I figured it was Potassium Oxide.
:-( I suppose I should be glad that a stupid thing like that never got anyone hurt.
Later, in my freshman year of college I would put something like the size of a half dollar of potassium on the floor of a dry shower in the dorm. I never did hear back any stories about fire in the shower.
Anyway, if Theo does any other cool experiments, he should post them here. I work at the NCSA @ UIUC not too far from Wolfram. I am always up for interesting pyrotechnics, and I enjoy those Pop Sci experiments from his column.
So this explains why the request demographic and ethnic questions when applying for financial aid. :-)
When you turn on your Mac, it has that stupid sound before the boot device is even touched. It seems to be driven by the openfirmware. Unless there is some obscure firmware variable to disable it, you must turn off the sound not to hear it. It isn't anything that can be changed from within the OS.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is featured on an interesting podcast discussing the subject of panet classification and education. I highly recommend a listen to anyone intrested in this subject.
I am an SG-1 fan, but the last 2 seasons have been poor. It isn't just that Richard Dean Anderson has left, but the show tied up nicely at the end of season 8 and should have ended there. Actors that wanted to stay, could have migrated to Atlantis, like Worf to DS-9.
My biggest beef, if there always has to be this epic war, and each time they win, they have to come up with a more powerful enemy. This has happened to the ridiculous extreme till they are literally fighting "gods". This is a bad sign, a sign that they are running out of ideas. This is the sort of thing DS-9, a very sub-par substitute for TNG, did to boost its ratings. They had a 3 year war between the federation and dominion.
A good sci-fi show should be able to sustain interesting plots without the constant backdrop of annihilation. And when you keep replacing old enemies with more powerful ones, it degrades the battle with the old and the new enemies become ridiculously powerful after a while.
I hope they wrap up this Ori crap soon and never return to the ascending being junk. However that seems unlikely, because they have just introduced a new antagonist into Atlantis. I guess the Wraith aren't enough to deal with.
It really wasn't that bad. I have used it on SAS flights. I first used it because I had a paper deadline for a conference that day. We worked on a paper stored on a subversion server. I just needed to use it to update and commit changes. But then I found it so useful to get other work done. So I used it on other flights. Plus, it was a business expense and I got it reimbrsed. I really don't think it adds that much (especially if you don't use it the entire flight) to the expense of a business trip. In the end, it was a fraction of a percent of my expenses.
I have been waiting for 9 months to replace my desktop Mac. I was pretty ecited about the new desktop. It is what I wanted to hear more than anythign else they speculated about.
Aren't you supposed to get at least four 30" monitors with your new Mac Pro?
I think this time machine is just going to make it harder to remove porn off my work computer without leaving forensic evidence.
Boeing provides the service on non-Boeing planes. I used the BOeing ISP on a SAS flight on Airbus.
A real disappointment is that you have to use "Wand" to manage passwords. I wish it would integrate with Apple's keychain and Apple's bookmarks. Then I could sync it more easily. I guess the Mac market isn't large enough for them to create better NAtive support for OS X.
I can gurantee it won't affect U.S. ISPs. :-)
This, like problems in people's understanding of evolution, is from our (human's) tendencies to think discretely. We like discrete groupings and classifications. But obviously there wasn't a single generation where we can say the parent wasn't a chicken but the offspring was. THese changes are gradual, and any attempt to put some hard division between chicken and nonchicken like that would be making some arbitrary division point.
It's news if a worm doesn't exploit a large piece of monoculture software (a.k.a. MS Windows or Word). This same story could have been rewritten with the same words, just exchanging virus names for almost any virus. News would be a terrible virus exploiting a less wide-spread piece of software, like the blackice firewall software and the witty worm a few years ago.
I believe it was the dos shell program that could be used to make a text based menu to run DOS programs (v4.0 maybe). Anyway, when I was a kid I cracked how they stored the passwords that could protect menu items (like if you didn't want your kids running Lotus123 or something). The shifted all the ascii characters by 13 if memory serves me right.
:-)
It isn't like it mattered a lot since there where so many ways to prevent this menu system from coming up on boot and thus getting to a eal DOS prompt anyway, but it was enough to stop your parents.
I don't know about the comment that software engineers use some pretty advanced math skills. I would say that is the minority, and the advanced mathematics is done by mathematicians who have learned to program. It is hard to become an applied mathematician of any regard without some serious programmning experience.
I would bet money that the most software engineers never use anything beyond simple calculus that many learn in high school. Crypto requires some more complex mathematics, but the software engineers that implement crypto often don't understand the theoretical underpinnings of the crypto and are just implementing algorithms described by pseudo-code in crypto books. Even in computer graphics programming, which is fairly mathematical, the mathematics isn't very complex, and itis abstracted away from the applications programmer who is using some library.
No, the physicists and the mathematicians tend to do most of the advanced mathematics in programming.
Of course it isn't going to have much of an effect on piracy there. It is too wide-spread and too much a part of the culture. It is all about looking like they are doing something and trying to comply with international copyright law. They are throwing US and other companies a bone basically.
Yeah, I forgot slashdot doesn't preserve white space liek a wiki and that I should break the paragraphs manually
It is a real shame that this debate has been taken from the laboratory and instead fought on the floors of legislatures (probably the courts eventually). The media's sensationalist coverage only makes things worse. As a whole, the media does a crappy job at covering science news. Now people don't know what to be believe as it has become such a politicized topic, and the lose trust in science to bring us real answers and say something to the affect, "I can always find a scientist to support any viewpoint I want, so I can't trust science for anything". A couple things really need to change. First, the media needs to be more responsible in its covereage. It needs to communicate when there really is a significant scientific debate and what specifics are actually being debated. For instance, scientists aren't debating that global warming is happening or even that humans are having an effect, it is how much of an effect. And there is more consensus on the latter than most realize. In other topics that are far from fringe science and well-established (evolution and the idea of an old earth especially), the portray a social debate as a scientific debate, even though there isn't much of a sceintific debate. Part of this could be because of teh mantra journalists are taught that there are always two sides to a story and that they want to be "fair". But science isn't about being fair. Good theories are strengthened, bad ones are discarded. All theories are not created equally, and science is NOT a democracy. However, I think more often the media is just catering to their audience, hoping not to offfend someone, or just trying to make the news more sensational. The other major problem is with politicians. There really needs to be a politically neutral (i.e. one where the governing party can't appoint their favorite bureaucrats) science advisory board for Congress. Instead, what they do is have somethign liek a science court where they pit some people representing the majority of mainstream scientists against some fringe scientist or fanatic. And the give equal weight to to the one or two fanatics and the rest of the scientific community. Nothing gets resolved, they say we have to wait for more evidence, and nothing happens. Well, enough of my rant. The politicizing of science is a real pet peeve of mine. Politicians must make decisions based on science and other social and economic factors, unfortunately, they aren't getting the sound expert advice they need, and things are just decided by party lines. It isn't that I think there is no debate in the global warming research, there is some, certainly more than other areas, but it is still plagued by these problems.