Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Yesterday makes tomorrow possible. One thing that seperates humans from animals is we don't just live in the moment.
Thank you for that very true piece of thought there. It is the things that happen in the past that give a frame of refernce to what we do today - how can we improve our lives without something we can compare against?
I was taught sexism, and I was taught DOS. I learned UNIX and I learned true equality.
While I totally agree with your comments on the values that children learn, I can't really see what open source has to do with this at all. Skepticism has nothing to do with whether you like to have the source code for your current operating system / application. I'm sorry, but it really doesn't follow that enjoying hacking around with source code makes you some kind of social guru.
P.S. Don't take this as a flame - the rest ofyour comment was well thought out.
Seriously, lighten up. If you don't like those posts, browse at 0 or 1 or whatever. I personally think a lot of those posts are quite amusing - however not the cut and paste posts about hobbits or other crap. Anyway I believe the AC account currently has about 1500+ karma points from all moderations done on it, so ACs have obviously contributed quite a lot to discussions here.
I have about 8 million years of evolution behind my position which states that this is the best system we have. Feel free to argue with mother nature.
The logical conclusion of your argument is that we have somehow reached the pinnicle of evolution and that no more improvement can occur. This is nonsense - evolution is a continuous process and given another million years, we will have evolved into something better for whatever envionment we will find ourselves in. Using genetic engineering we can take shortcuts and condense a million years of evolution into a far shorter, directed process.
We certainly aren't the best system at all - I can think of a dozen things that could be done to improve the human race as a whole off the top of my head, and I'm sure you could too if you think about it.
Now, granted, Mist and Riven were nice games and all, but they hardly make up the majority of the market, and just don't hold most gamer's attention.
Ummm, no. IIRC Myst is one of the best-selling games ever and still sells today. Other best-selling games include Sim City, Civilisation and Command & Conquer - all of which require more thought than "oh look there's the other player - shoot him!" Personally I can't be bothered to play Quake or its many derivatives - I'd rather play Civ or Alpha Centauri any day where I have to think rather than twitch:) Oh and I'm a 22 year old male FYI.
Thank you for posting any number of amusing posts here and making my/. reading more enjoyable:) BTW, for a troll, I'm pretty sure your karma's higher than mine:(.
Knowing that such and such a post was by a 14 year old student would reduce the time it takes to hit the NEXT button to zero. Or knowing that a post was by a 35 year old Sys Admin would encourage me to read it.
What a load of crap. I know plenty of 35 year olds whose opinions are a bigoted loads of rubbish, and I know several 14 year olds who are extremeley sensible and serious. Of course I also know idiotic 14 year olds and clever 35 year olds, but assuming that anything posted by someone below a certain age or who doesn't have a "proper" job is not worth reading is being a bigot.
Having more information about the poster would help greatly.
No it wouldn't, it'd just make it easier for others to post personally offensive flames in reply. You sound like the kind of person who'd do that, to be honest. I'd dearly like to know what you do and how old you are, but I'm glad that this information is unavailable to others.
...or at least what gets posted to his topics always is:) There's always guarenteed to be at least 50 amusing -1, Flamebait posts slagging off everyone and their mom, a few good flame wars about ACs / moderation on/. / Jon Katz himself - well the list goes on. And then there's always a lot of intellegent discussion as well just to top it off. Personally I think his essays are so much rubbish, but it wouldn't suprise me if he thought so too, and sits there laughing at the 600+ posts that his stories seem to get every time:)
I got to agree about the flames and troll posts - a lot of them are completely pants, but every now and again there's something which just cracks me up. There's also some subtle irony in some of the posts - probably the ones posted by people who regularly post on/. under their usual name.
Barring, of course, the 200 comment religious flamewar on his last -real- article. (Re: God hates fags, or does he?)
Hey, the topic was a little touchy maybe, but there was a great argument, whichever side you came down on. Yes, there was a lose of crap from others to do with the thread, but it was a generally polite argument - if you read their closing comments they both agreed it had been a good argument and they had had to think a lot about it. Which is unusual for/.:)
The whole reason for these essays of his are so that people can consider the issue he raises and agree/disagree on it. You don't really know what his opinion on the matter is from the essay - it's just something to provoke discussion.
I used to read one of the "net.religion" newsgroups about 15 years ago, and the attacks between people who disagreed on theological issues were vicious.
From a lot of the posts I've read here on/. it seems like some (not all by any means) of the people here have adopted Linux and Open Source as their religion, although I'm sure it wouldn't occur to them to think of it in those terms. The same things we see today from Christian fundamentalists that annoy us are occuring here in parts of the Linux community. I've lost count of the number of topics I've seen which has nothing to do with Linux where X number of people post "but it'd be much better if it was open source" / "I won't touch it because it's not open source" / "Linux is the One True Way and everything else is evil". I always browse at -1 since that way I do get all opinions, including the ones that have been moderated down because the moderator disagreed with them.
Actually due to calculational constraints I doubt the models themselves are anywhere near perfect. The physics of fluid dynamics involves vast reams of very messy non-linear differential equations IIRC and these require complex numerical methods to solve even approximately. Even if they had the data at every single point (impossible I know) the current models would still fail in the long-term / small scale.
The older Cray C-90 computer had been in use since 1994 and was to be offered to other government agencies when replaced, but it was destroyed in a fire last September.
What a tragic waste of a computer. Oh, the humanity!
... while seeing the guts of your system is a God given right.:)
I'm so glad you put the:) at the end of that sentance. But then again maybe not, because you spend the next four paragraphs ranting about how this is evil because they haven't released the source code!!!! Wow, they must be a Bad Company! They're giving away their opererating system for free, along with the development tools to create apps for it (and it is a very good OS for multimedia apps) but because you can't fiddle with the kernel code this should be denouced as the enemy of every right-minded/. user. Grow up - if you don't like it then don't download it, but don't knock this just because it doesn't further the 'Cause'.
So you'd rather go without than buy something for which the code is not available? (waits for howls of rage from the open source zealots). Can you honestly say that you don't own or use anything which you don't have the code for? I very much doubt it. I personally think that the signature is extremely insightful when applied to a lot of the posters here on/. There's a huge amount of crap from people who are just posting to flame anyone who says that Linux isn't perfect / closed-source or commercial software can be good / Microsoft and Bill Gates isn't actually the devil come to Earth.
Don't insult people for your own short-sightedness.
How is he doing that? Either you're a master at reading between the lines or it's you that's being short-sighted. His post simply says that anything that makes our lives better is good, no matter what that is. BeOS is far superior to Linux currently for any kind of multimedia work since it was designed with those tasks in mind. Linux is far superior to BeOS for networking, since it was designed with that in mind. Each is a solution for some problems - neither is the ultimate solution.
It's people like you who encourage people to post as Anonymous Coward when they say things which could be construed as being anti-Linux, just to avoid personal attacks and being moderated down to -1, Flamebait. Look at the recent GPL story.
Wow, that's possibly one of the most refreshing comments I've heard here in a while. Not very nice, but true:) I'm getting somewhat sick of all of the blind faith in every thing to do with Linux and open source - if I wanted to see that kind of zealotry I'd go badger some Christian fundamentalists. There's a core of very thoughtful, intellegent people posting here, and then a vast herd of sheep following behind them flaming anything that dares to criticise their Favourite Cause. It's not religion, but it's the next best/worst thing.
One answer to why strings is that they have much more freedom than point particles. A point particle has relatively few degrees of freedom - they can rotate in n-dimensions. However a string, as well as rotating, can also vibrate in n-dimensions with different modes of vibration. Because of this they have enough freedom to allow a single string to represent every other particle depending on how it is rotating and vibrating. Also, the simplest mode of vibration of the superstring corresponds to the graviton (the force particle of gravity) which means superstring theory automatically includes gravity, which is the thing that other quantum theories have failed to do.
I believe current superstring theories utilise lots and lots of maths to do with the topology of multi-dimensional spaces such as Calabi-Yau spaces (a specific class of a more general space called an orbifold). There are other related fields which have found a use, such as cohomology.
The other interesting element in all this current research is that the physicists have had to develop new maths to cope with some of the problems they have faced. One example I can think of it duality, in which calculations involving one particular toplogy of a Calabi-Yau space can instead be done using a different, simpler Calabi-Yau space and give the same results. This has meant that some of the more complication calculations can be made much simpler i.e. possible to solve. If you're interested there's a non-technical discussion of this in Brian Greene's recent book, The Elegant Universe.
It's not a case of having any of the major theories we have so far being debunked, any more than Newton's theory of gravity was undermined by Einstein's theory of relativity. Newton's theory is perfectly valid in its domain of applicability - speeds much less than the speed of light and weak gravitational fields (i.e. compared to neutron stars or black holes). The two main theories we have at the moment - general relativity and quantum field theory - are both valid in their domains - large graviational fields and scales for general relativity and subatomic scales for quantum field theory. The next step, a so-called "theory of everything", won't render these invalid, it will just cover a far wider domain of applicability - the large and the small.
1) Whilst macroscopically conservation of energy (which of course includes matter) is always preserved, at the quantum level it is certainly violated thanks to the Uncertainty Principle, which allows "virtual" particles to be created from nothing so long as they vanish after a certain period of time. But while these virtual particles have considerable effects on every interaction that occurs in the universe, the energy they have is always lost when they annihilate each other. "Regular" matter does obey the conservation of energy.
2) Whilst biological systems certainly impose states of greater order upon themselves and their surroundings, the energy that they expend in doing so is always greater than the energy they make back. Food is generally a high order system, but the process of eating and getting energy from it involves turning it into lots of heat and molecules such as ATP which are much higher in entropy.
This one is explained by Einstein's general theory. It's core principle, the Equivalence Principle, states that for any system undergoing acceleration there is an equivalent gravitational field for which the laws of physics are identical i.e. there is no way of telling whether the system is accelerating or if it is in a gravitational field. Hence the interial and gravitational masses must be equal or else you could determine whether you were accelerating or in a gravitational field.
I'm pretty sure I've read the same book as well (seeing as it's the only place which has any real information on twistor theory). Currently superstring theory is far more popular and twistor theory seems to be mainly worked on by Roger Penrose's group at Oxford. However I've just read Brian Greene's book on superstrings, The Elegant Universe, and it does briefly mention at the back that certain results from twistor theory are being examined for their use in the current topics in superstring theory, so maybe its popularity will pick up somewhat.
Slashdot Mirror
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Yesterday makes tomorrow possible. One thing that seperates humans from animals is we don't just live in the moment.
Thank you for that very true piece of thought there. It is the things that happen in the past that give a frame of refernce to what we do today - how can we improve our lives without something we can compare against?
You really need to go and sit down, have a nice cup of hot chocolate and think about the meaning of the word humour...
I was taught sexism, and I was taught DOS. I learned UNIX and I learned true equality.
While I totally agree with your comments on the values that children learn, I can't really see what open source has to do with this at all. Skepticism has nothing to do with whether you like to have the source code for your current operating system / application. I'm sorry, but it really doesn't follow that enjoying hacking around with source code makes you some kind of social guru.
P.S. Don't take this as a flame - the rest ofyour comment was well thought out.
Seriously, lighten up. If you don't like those posts, browse at 0 or 1 or whatever. I personally think a lot of those posts are quite amusing - however not the cut and paste posts about hobbits or other crap. Anyway I believe the AC account currently has about 1500+ karma points from all moderations done on it, so ACs have obviously contributed quite a lot to discussions here.
I have about 8 million years of evolution behind my position which states that this is the best system we have. Feel free to argue with mother nature.
The logical conclusion of your argument is that we have somehow reached the pinnicle of evolution and that no more improvement can occur. This is nonsense - evolution is a continuous process and given another million years, we will have evolved into something better for whatever envionment we will find ourselves in. Using genetic engineering we can take shortcuts and condense a million years of evolution into a far shorter, directed process.
We certainly aren't the best system at all - I can think of a dozen things that could be done to improve the human race as a whole off the top of my head, and I'm sure you could too if you think about it.
Now, granted, Mist and Riven were nice games and all, but they hardly make up the majority of the market, and just don't hold most gamer's attention.
Ummm, no. IIRC Myst is one of the best-selling games ever and still sells today. Other best-selling games include Sim City, Civilisation and Command & Conquer - all of which require more thought than "oh look there's the other player - shoot him!" Personally I can't be bothered to play Quake or its many derivatives - I'd rather play Civ or Alpha Centauri any day where I have to think rather than twitch :) Oh and I'm a 22 year old male FYI.
Thank you for posting any number of amusing posts here and making my /. reading more enjoyable :) BTW, for a troll, I'm pretty sure your karma's higher than mine :(.
Knowing that such and such a post was by a 14 year old student would reduce the time it takes to hit the NEXT button to zero. Or knowing that a post was by a 35 year old Sys Admin would encourage me to read it.
What a load of crap. I know plenty of 35 year olds whose opinions are a bigoted loads of rubbish, and I know several 14 year olds who are extremeley sensible and serious. Of course I also know idiotic 14 year olds and clever 35 year olds, but assuming that anything posted by someone below a certain age or who doesn't have a "proper" job is not worth reading is being a bigot.
Having more information about the poster would help greatly.
No it wouldn't, it'd just make it easier for others to post personally offensive flames in reply. You sound like the kind of person who'd do that, to be honest. I'd dearly like to know what you do and how old you are, but I'm glad that this information is unavailable to others.
...or at least what gets posted to his topics always is :) There's always guarenteed to be at least 50 amusing -1, Flamebait posts slagging off everyone and their mom, a few good flame wars about ACs / moderation on /. / Jon Katz himself - well the list goes on. And then there's always a lot of intellegent discussion as well just to top it off. Personally I think his essays are so much rubbish, but it wouldn't suprise me if he thought so too, and sits there laughing at the 600+ posts that his stories seem to get every time :)
I got to agree about the flames and troll posts - a lot of them are completely pants, but every now and again there's something which just cracks me up. There's also some subtle irony in some of the posts - probably the ones posted by people who regularly post on /. under their usual name.
Barring, of course, the 200 comment religious flamewar on his last -real- article. (Re: God hates fags, or does he?)
Hey, the topic was a little touchy maybe, but there was a great argument, whichever side you came down on. Yes, there was a lose of crap from others to do with the thread, but it was a generally polite argument - if you read their closing comments they both agreed it had been a good argument and they had had to think a lot about it. Which is unusual for /. :)
The whole reason for these essays of his are so that people can consider the issue he raises and agree/disagree on it. You don't really know what his opinion on the matter is from the essay - it's just something to provoke discussion.
I used to read one of the "net.religion" newsgroups about 15 years ago, and the attacks between people who disagreed on theological issues were vicious.
From a lot of the posts I've read here on /. it seems like some (not all by any means) of the people here have adopted Linux and Open Source as their religion, although I'm sure it wouldn't occur to them to think of it in those terms. The same things we see today from Christian fundamentalists that annoy us are occuring here in parts of the Linux community. I've lost count of the number of topics I've seen which has nothing to do with Linux where X number of people post "but it'd be much better if it was open source" / "I won't touch it because it's not open source" / "Linux is the One True Way and everything else is evil". I always browse at -1 since that way I do get all opinions, including the ones that have been moderated down because the moderator disagreed with them.
Actually due to calculational constraints I doubt the models themselves are anywhere near perfect. The physics of fluid dynamics involves vast reams of very messy non-linear differential equations IIRC and these require complex numerical methods to solve even approximately. Even if they had the data at every single point (impossible I know) the current models would still fail in the long-term / small scale.
The older Cray C-90 computer had been in use since 1994 and was to be offered to other government agencies when replaced, but it was destroyed in a fire last September.
What a tragic waste of a computer. Oh, the humanity!
I'm so glad you put the :) at the end of that sentance. But then again maybe not, because you spend the next four paragraphs ranting about how this is evil because they haven't released the source code!!!! Wow, they must be a Bad Company! They're giving away their opererating system for free, along with the development tools to create apps for it (and it is a very good OS for multimedia apps) but because you can't fiddle with the kernel code this should be denouced as the enemy of every right-minded /. user. Grow up - if you don't like it then don't download it, but don't knock this just because it doesn't further the 'Cause'.
Some of us will not choose propietary software.
So you'd rather go without than buy something for which the code is not available? (waits for howls of rage from the open source zealots). Can you honestly say that you don't own or use anything which you don't have the code for? I very much doubt it. I personally think that the signature is extremely insightful when applied to a lot of the posters here on /. There's a huge amount of crap from people who are just posting to flame anyone who says that Linux isn't perfect / closed-source or commercial software can be good / Microsoft and Bill Gates isn't actually the devil come to Earth.
Don't insult people for your own short-sightedness.
How is he doing that? Either you're a master at reading between the lines or it's you that's being short-sighted. His post simply says that anything that makes our lives better is good, no matter what that is. BeOS is far superior to Linux currently for any kind of multimedia work since it was designed with those tasks in mind. Linux is far superior to BeOS for networking, since it was designed with that in mind. Each is a solution for some problems - neither is the ultimate solution.
It's people like you who encourage people to post as Anonymous Coward when they say things which could be construed as being anti-Linux, just to avoid personal attacks and being moderated down to -1, Flamebait. Look at the recent GPL story.
Oh, and before I forget,
Open Source. Closed Minds. We Are Slashdot. :)
Wow, that's possibly one of the most refreshing comments I've heard here in a while. Not very nice, but true :) I'm getting somewhat sick of all of the blind faith in every thing to do with Linux and open source - if I wanted to see that kind of zealotry I'd go badger some Christian fundamentalists. There's a core of very thoughtful, intellegent people posting here, and then a vast herd of sheep following behind them flaming anything that dares to criticise their Favourite Cause. It's not religion, but it's the next best/worst thing.
One answer to why strings is that they have much more freedom than point particles. A point particle has relatively few degrees of freedom - they can rotate in n-dimensions. However a string, as well as rotating, can also vibrate in n-dimensions with different modes of vibration. Because of this they have enough freedom to allow a single string to represent every other particle depending on how it is rotating and vibrating. Also, the simplest mode of vibration of the superstring corresponds to the graviton (the force particle of gravity) which means superstring theory automatically includes gravity, which is the thing that other quantum theories have failed to do.
I believe current superstring theories utilise lots and lots of maths to do with the topology of multi-dimensional spaces such as Calabi-Yau spaces (a specific class of a more general space called an orbifold). There are other related fields which have found a use, such as cohomology.
The other interesting element in all this current research is that the physicists have had to develop new maths to cope with some of the problems they have faced. One example I can think of it duality, in which calculations involving one particular toplogy of a Calabi-Yau space can instead be done using a different, simpler Calabi-Yau space and give the same results. This has meant that some of the more complication calculations can be made much simpler i.e. possible to solve. If you're interested there's a non-technical discussion of this in Brian Greene's recent book, The Elegant Universe.
It's not a case of having any of the major theories we have so far being debunked, any more than Newton's theory of gravity was undermined by Einstein's theory of relativity. Newton's theory is perfectly valid in its domain of applicability - speeds much less than the speed of light and weak gravitational fields (i.e. compared to neutron stars or black holes). The two main theories we have at the moment - general relativity and quantum field theory - are both valid in their domains - large graviational fields and scales for general relativity and subatomic scales for quantum field theory. The next step, a so-called "theory of everything", won't render these invalid, it will just cover a far wider domain of applicability - the large and the small.
To answer your questions:
1) Whilst macroscopically conservation of energy (which of course includes matter) is always preserved, at the quantum level it is certainly violated thanks to the Uncertainty Principle, which allows "virtual" particles to be created from nothing so long as they vanish after a certain period of time. But while these virtual particles have considerable effects on every interaction that occurs in the universe, the energy they have is always lost when they annihilate each other. "Regular" matter does obey the conservation of energy.
2) Whilst biological systems certainly impose states of greater order upon themselves and their surroundings, the energy that they expend in doing so is always greater than the energy they make back. Food is generally a high order system, but the process of eating and getting energy from it involves turning it into lots of heat and molecules such as ATP which are much higher in entropy.
This one is explained by Einstein's general theory. It's core principle, the Equivalence Principle, states that for any system undergoing acceleration there is an equivalent gravitational field for which the laws of physics are identical i.e. there is no way of telling whether the system is accelerating or if it is in a gravitational field. Hence the interial and gravitational masses must be equal or else you could determine whether you were accelerating or in a gravitational field.
I'm pretty sure I've read the same book as well (seeing as it's the only place which has any real information on twistor theory). Currently superstring theory is far more popular and twistor theory seems to be mainly worked on by Roger Penrose's group at Oxford. However I've just read Brian Greene's book on superstrings, The Elegant Universe, and it does briefly mention at the back that certain results from twistor theory are being examined for their use in the current topics in superstring theory, so maybe its popularity will pick up somewhat.
Seeing as they're 1-dimensional, I don't think they have to be made of anything, they just are :)
.