And before I get flamed, I don't for a moment want to suggest that Microsoft did the ideal Windows '95 style desktop right. Windows 95 got a lot wrong, Windows 98 got a few more bits wrong, and added USB support, Windows 2000 fixed the kernel a bit, and added a heap of other stuff, and still got a lot wrong, Windows XP took a quick and dirty attempt to copy MacOsX's then gummy-bear feel and liberally smothered everything with it (a feature I am glad one can still switch off even in Windows 7... and I haven't touched Windows HateThyUser^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H 8...)
The Windows '95 style desktop captures an ideal well. The MacOS 9 did as well, so does the original MacOs X design. The trouble is that they are far from perfect, but small deviations from the ideal makes for no real improvement, and large explorations away from the ideal tend to be horrible. Kde were probably the first to really wrestle with this horror, and they seem to be past the worst of it, though I have no idea where they're headed; gnome is trying to do the 'HUD Overlay Control / MoreThanAToyDashboard' thing which would be good if they work out how to do it well. But the Windows 95 style, with Gnome2 additions like desktop toolbars you can just stuff what you like in, are a good ideal.
I wish they would invest more effort in making it easy to repurpose what is there: make a simple Gnome Terminal a 3-line program:
w = Gnome.Window(menu=DefaultMenu,content=Terminal.Default)
w.content.run("/bin/bash",["-"])
w.show() and make customising what the terminal window does as easy as this. Do likewise for getting a browse component running (recall the Cocoa browser demo on MacOsX?)
We should be working less to come up with new stuff, and more on making what we have both rock-solid, dead-simple, and as trivially easy to implement as possible. I wrote a little note about this idea on my Wiki: http://thewikiman.allsup.co/Im... where the idea is to write your program in your ideal imaginary language, and then build from the language you have towards that ideal, striving to make as much of what you produce reusable in other projects (and to share with others so that they don't have to repeat your progress: DRY is good, DRIP (Dont-Repeat-If-at-all-Possible) would be a better principle, since with proprietary software the DRY principle is violated whenever a different developer has to rewrite functionality because of legal or lack-of-source issues).
Google's main priority is the Android ecosystem. One attractive property of Android is the level-playing field (or at least one that is only reasonably bumpy rather than mountainous). Google's ownership of Mobility gave it patents that will probably be useful, and of course they aren't letting go of those, so what is sold is not what is bought. Google's ownership of one player can at least give the impression that Google will favour its own, or at least will tend to under commercial pressure. Letting Mobility go, even for a significant writedown compared to what they paid, may in the long run be repaid in the value of Android compared to what it would have been had Google held onto Mobility. We can never tell, though, since we can't do a copy-on-write fork of the universe, and run both cases in parallel: and if we could there would surely be better uses for the facility than evaluating smartphone economics.
Trying to cover all cases with one universal standard is rarely the best solution. Covering the core with a small number of good standards, and having a few others that work differently to handle the rest is often the best way. This is simply because the 'solution space' covered by a single universal standard has many more regions of possibility that will never be touched than a few more focussed standards. Whilst it's massively oversimplifying, imagine the problem of covering a bounded region of a plane, that has an interesting shape, with squares. Hardcore minimalists will point out that one big square will do. That is what the universal standard approach tries to do. The trouble is that a few interesting cases can push the required size of the square to large proportions. If one wants to optimise for area, many small squares are better, but at the expense of having to manage many squares. A balance between these two, with a very small number of large squares and a slightly larger number of smaller squares, tends to be the best solution. Things work similarly with languages, both human and computer ones.
HTML+CSS attempts to have a content-with-markup source file, and a standard format non-programming language for styling, with no control over how things are layed out. This is great for simpler styling duties, but eventually becomes unwieldy. What is needed is to analyse and factorise how a web browser today actually does layout internally, and create a programming language that can access that directly, drawing on specifications in a CSS-like stylesheet for its source information. That would result in the CSS not, by itself, determining the style, but being subject to the whims of the engine that maps CSS-styles to actual screen representations. But hey, isn't that what we've already got with multiple browsers each implementing their own layout, and the programmable mapping layers hard-coded into the browsers (especially with IE and standards vs. quirks mode)?
I would like to see the Cairo model of drawing standardised, and the layout facilities of an HTML browser and other things added at an API level with the actual browser implemented as a light wrapper on top of that. That would also allow broswer-like apps with different document structures to be developed much more easily. I can dream, I guess.
When faced with an inconvenient truth, the corrupt will try to hide that truth, and destroy those who would speak it. This is hardly a new phenomena for humankind. Thsoe who are not corrupt will, naturally, be joyously corrected and be happy to have improved their understanding of the world. Thus those who would try to suppress the truth about polygraphs can hardly be seen to be in the latter category, so why are they tolerated in government and police?
But those leading the 'Christian faithful' in states where these arguments are happening seem to have no understanding of what they claim to follow, nor how to actually live the examples their scriptures describe. What happens is that wanabee religious leaders learn all the political and power grabbing techniques, almost subliminally, since this is the shorter route to their 'pastor dream', and effectively bypass the hard work involved in actually internalising the spiritual discipline that should lie at the heart of a true spiritual faith. Then, of course, they cannot translate the abstract concepts and principles described into modern language and conceptual frameworks, and are left just spouting the external form of the words in their scriptures with no real understanding. This is tragic, especially in Christianity where there is a clear illustration of this problem, how it unfolds, and the natural egotistical reaction of those in power when faced with someone who actually understands what the scriptures are there to teach... and if you have a Bible to hand you can hardly miss it, since it's repeated four times in four different accounts at the start of the New Testament. How organised religion can make the same mistakes over again is an almost comical picture of precisely what the core of Christianity is meant, in part, to teach against. It's amazing how the faith, so distorted as it is, can still support many in their lives even still.
My understanding and point of view (with a background in maths and logic and a passion for physics, computers and internal martial arts) make the lessons of scripture/spiritual writing, whether Judeo-Christian, Buddhist, Vedic and Taoist, to be important and logical consequences of the maths and science we have discovered, explained insightfully in a way that contemporaries of the authors of these teachings would have a good chance of understanding. I have yet, in my studies (and I am rather thorough and minimalist about what I do and do not assume), to find a single teaching that, given a suitable interpretation, does not make proper sense in light of modern scientific discoveries. I just wish others would see it that way.
When faced with difficulties or inconveniences in daily life, humans are adapted to find a way to reduce the difficulty and inconvenience. This is natural, but has a few consequences.
This basic nature does not understand the difference between facts like 1+1=2, 0.999...=0, etc; Newton's Laws; QM; That JFK did get assasinated and didn't just decide to revert to his Lizardman form, and fake his death to explain his absence; etc...
When faced with facts like global warming, man's instinct is to change the facts: the problem appears to be people complaining about Global Warming... naive bloke thinks 'I can't see it--it's not there--just tell these guys they're imagining it and to get on with their lives'. It takes a lot of learning to understand that you can't change the laws of maths or nature. We take this obviousness for granted, because it is endemic in how we are brought up, but a perusal of the history of human thought should help you see that what is obvious today wasn't always obvious. Also, these more naive aspects of how we think on a more basic level are often obscured by our unified sense of self.
Is that the approx. 2000 year old Gospel accounts illustrate precisely that this behaviour occurs in organised religion, that it's not right, and that a good teacher teaches against such stuff. How can so many from so many Christian churches read their Bible regularly and not see this???
The government has a real chance of learning the lesson that pieces of paper containing the words 'A will do B or else C' for various combinations of A, B and C, are nowhere near as effective as an imaginary fairy with a wand when it comes to actually getting stuff done. If real fairies with real, working magic wands were an option, it would most likely work much better than the current approach, but alas all the fairies were driven out long ago by the forces of insistent scientists demanding that fairy magic has no place in a modern scientific world. 'Suit yourself,' said the Fairy Queen, 'we thought we were doing you a favour, seriously, it's better where we come from, magic works properly there, and we're only too happy to oblige!' So the Fairy Queen and all the magic fairies and their magic wands disappeared into the sunset, and the US government was left with only paper, letters and no magic spell power besides 'contractual terms' to allow the pieces of paper to have any useful effect.
There is no way we can experimentally test our ability to accurately predict the distant past from present day evidence, and no way we could have already done so. The past will never happen again, and we cannot magically create time machines. We do not know, and cannot know. What we can work out, however, is the answer to the question of what happened provided we assume 'continuity' of things like the laws of physics, and many other such assumptions.
There is a nice neat parallel in mathematics. You'll see people claim that 1+2+3+... = -1/12. This is not true, but is almost true. The zeta funciton zeta(s) = sum_{n=1}^{infinity} 1/n^s for all s>1. There is a unique analytic continuation of the funciton given by this sum where convergent to almost of the rest of the complex plane (and that almost the rest includes -1). If you evaluate that continuation at -1, you get -1/12. If you abuse notation, you get 1+2+3+...=-1/12. What is actually the case is that if 1+2+3+... converged to a meaningful value, that value would have to be -1/12. But obviously this doesn't prove convergence.
When it comes to distant past stuff, everything is done under an unproven hypothesis that the methods used work: there is no point researchers questioning this since it can't be verified. Again, this is similar to proofs that rely on the Riemann hypothesis. When we can't show something, we do our best to work around it. What you read in science books comes from that sensible school.
When people forget those tacit assumptions and make metaphysical pronouncements that things we can never have seen must look a certain way, using arguments based on evidence that we cannot possibly have tested in the circumstances we are applying them, is when proper science descends into pseudoscience. And too many of the science crowd are guilty here. You should know precisely what hypotheses your results rely on, and only a few have the time to care, what with all the need to crank out n peer-reviewed research papers a year to satisfy your funding body.
Though I tend to be sceptical of skeptics. They tend to reason things through with evidence until it is close enough to supporting what they want to believe, and then stop. Often there are subtle issues they have missed, or they have oversimplified things, or made unwarranted (though reasonable sounding) conclusions in their arguments that, on closer inspection, do not hold. Take skeptics with a dose of salt: be skeptical of their claims and let them convince you. I hope a good skeptic would want nothing less (and would tear their hair out if people blindly took their words at face value).
People should learn to sit properly, and type properly. This greatly increases health and mechanical efficiency. It is from poor mechanical efficiency and techniques that stress the body that injuries and wear-and-tear come. Fixing this is a matter of training: stretches like Yoga, on a daily basis, movement like Taiji, again practised daily, studing how one moves in activities they do regularly and striving to understand and refine them, like the way a concert pianist develops from a beginner to what you see perform on stage. There is no substitute for proper learning, whether a special chair or a weird keyboard. If you can't sit properly, a fancy chair won't fix that. If you can't type reasonably effortlessly and with a minimum of stress, changing the keyboard layout won't help. At best a new layout can give you a few percent improvement in speed, but that is unimportant: time spent learning a new layout should instead be spent improving basic posture and technique, and proper posture and technique will give sufficient speed on a standard layout.
Obviously if you can't be bothered to learn and practice and improve, you won't develop in terms of posture and technique, and this short-sightedness and laziness is endemic in the West, and is exacerbated by pressures to do more and more in ones job. But work pressures will not magically make things better, and work pressures plus strange keyboard will not do so either.
I do not disagree with ads per se, given how they function in the internet economy. But the level of intrusiveness of adverts is the problem. For a long time I actually resisted ad blocking technology, since I agree with the idea that one should support what they use, and if this is by seeing adverts, so be it. When it came to Vibrant ads, however, a line was crossed. Having floating divs appear when moving my mouse to click a link (and the div obscuring the link) and stuff like that is too intrusive, and not on.
There needs to be a solid code of ethics for where adverts are acceptable and where they're not, and if that is not sufficient for certain lines of business, then those lines of business should just disappear off the web. If ad blocking software had a clear code of ethics, and maintained a blacklist of sites that crossed it, and that only those sites got ad-blocked, and would be unblocked once they got back in conformance with the code of ethics, things would be better. If that was enforced by government regulation like the UK's Advertising Standards Authority, or suchlike then things would be better.
At present, advertisers do not have a regulating authority that controls how intrusive they can make advertising, and thus there is a need for technology like ad-blocking to avoid this. If sites use Javascript or log-checking to try and catch ad-blockers, I can see an arms race developing. We do not need that. What we need is for advertisers to be more gentlemanly, less greedy, and above all, to behave and be civil about how they go about their business. Until they do they get no sympathy from my end. It is right that those who misbehave should be put at a disadvantage.
Jet engines are natures way of pruning the weakest of the species: nature evolves animals, then man, then man evolves ideas, ideas evolve into plans for jet planes, then man develops real jet planes, then jet planes swallow birds. It's just basic evolution silly.
This illustrates the state of modern science. There is/was no debate: it is clear that evolution will reward mechanical efficiency, like it always does. Pelaton cyclists take turns at the front and draft each other, and you need only compare a road-race to a time-trial to see the efficiency gain (look at the length of the race, and how few small breakaways succeed). Bird's V-formations allow the same efficiency gain, and an evolution process too stupid to learn this and take advantage would have died out long ago. The only debate should be whether there are any other additional pressures towards this (such as females preferring the flying aesthetics in funny ways, leading to strange sexual selection patterns, but it should be clear that there are unlikely to be any of these). Is there any biological organism that doesn't seek out ease over difficulty? How some could think that birds wouldn't is beyond me.
There are also phenomena like the phase-locked loop that illustrate how feedback can contribute to stability in a dynamical system. That birds have brains, and brains relate sensory input to motor output, and involve lots of internal feedback should surely suggest that such a mechanism is at work.
How good is the mathematics and physics intuition of these people? It's amazing how things that are obvious to those that know a little maths are somehow strange wonders that are heralded as scientific discoveries to those who don't.
Unpredictability is a necessary trait when evading predators, so an organism that always chose C when C > B and B > A would be more predictable and easier for an intelligent predator to catch. This tendency not to would need to be deeply hardwired into the nature of the organism, since otherwise it would rarely kick in and, again, the organism would be easy prey. Optimising a small subset of a problem (and the whole problem is survival and procreation) often leads to locally optimal yet seriously globally subobtimal solutions. The greedy algorithm works on only a few cases (sometimes called monoids if I remember my combinatorial optimisation text, though that was over a decade ago); and with only slightly more complex problems it is often easy to construct pathological cases where the greedy algorithm gets it wrong. I see this result about organisms as another example of the principle that straightforward rational solutions are only the best when the problem is straightforward and simple.
A 386 has a built in 8086 emulator (esp when running in '386 enhanced mode' or whatever the proper name for that is). An i3 or other x64 chip has a built in x86 emulator (emulation of old instruction sets is built into the new one). Their implementations of old technology (like the 8086) are about as similar as a software emulator running on an i3 is to the original code running on a real 8086. (Compare an 8086 and an i3 die in an electon microscope and play spot-the-similarity...) Working code is a sequence of numbers designed to be interpreted according to certain well defined rules. It matters little whether those rules are implemented directly in the logic of a chip, or via software on a different chip (excepting performance implications).
Where's the incentive for the creative mind to write the software when commercial exploitation of his own work runs a real risk of falling foul of one of a huge number of patents he knew nothing about. When mutual dependency of ideas is such as happens once software becomes possible, what you have is not an incentive but a minefield.
When searching for information relavent to a release, say Debian 7, putting 'debian 7' into Google is useless, since Google can't infer the meaning of a number 7 in a document. Searching for 'debian wheezy', however, is far more specific, since 'wheezy' isn't used where the number 7 might be (for example 'bug with proglet 7 on debian 3' might match pages talking about bugs with proglet running on debian 7 where the error code is 3). If they don't have a codename, at least attach a unique memorable short string to each release so that it can be easily searched for.
This is yet another example of how 'business decisions' can cause a Cloud service you rely on to shut down for no technical reason, and without warning. You can't rely on Cloud services unless you are running them yourself. They are fun to play with, and can aid efficiency in the short term, but they must be regarded as fun, practical toys.
It's well known that Mental Health is dominated in many ways by vested economic and political interests. It would be nice for the anti-drug lobby if research showed that drugs cause MH problems, so there is funding for that. It would be nice for Big Pharma if clinical trials show their next wonder drug works. Thus funding appears for such trials, and the ones with the desired results get published whilst others get shelved (though they need to take care not to make this too obvious). Then occasionally (like Western Lapland), things get done differently, with better results than the medication heavy Western approach, and do the medical science research community clamour to reproduce and investigate? That is not to mention the occasional meta-analysis that correlates a drug trial's sponsor to the best remedy in the trial... Pot is a bogeyman for politicians to campaign against, and isn't a moneymaker for Big Pharma, nor can it be patented, so it's in their best interest if as much anti-pot research is produced. Basic politics and economics when you get down to it, and the 'science' bit in medical science needs to be take with a truckload of salt when it comes to Mental Health. Health in that context also needs a similar dose of salt, since drugged-up zombies with no motivation, poor physical drive, poor quality of life and a chemically supressed emotional system that can't drive them hard enough to do something about it... are deemed to be 'well, compliant with treatment, etc.' whereas someone with better physical health, who is motivated to get on with their life, but doesn't rely heavily on strong tranquilising drugs often has this non-reliance put down as a 'risk factor'.
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Then its good enough for me too. So "Thumbs up!" Nvidia!
And before I get flamed, I don't for a moment want to suggest that Microsoft did the ideal Windows '95 style desktop right. Windows 95 got a lot wrong, Windows 98 got a few more bits wrong, and added USB support, Windows 2000 fixed the kernel a bit, and added a heap of other stuff, and still got a lot wrong, Windows XP took a quick and dirty attempt to copy MacOsX's then gummy-bear feel and liberally smothered everything with it (a feature I am glad one can still switch off even in Windows 7... and I haven't touched Windows HateThyUser^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H 8...)
The Windows '95 style desktop captures an ideal well. The MacOS 9 did as well, so does the original MacOs X design. The trouble is that they are far from perfect, but small deviations from the ideal makes for no real improvement, and large explorations away from the ideal tend to be horrible. Kde were probably the first to really wrestle with this horror, and they seem to be past the worst of it, though I have no idea where they're headed; gnome is trying to do the 'HUD Overlay Control / MoreThanAToyDashboard' thing which would be good if they work out how to do it well. But the Windows 95 style, with Gnome2 additions like desktop toolbars you can just stuff what you like in, are a good ideal.
I wish they would invest more effort in making it easy to repurpose what is there: make a simple Gnome Terminal a 3-line program:
w = Gnome.Window(menu=DefaultMenu,content=Terminal.Default)
w.content.run("/bin/bash",["-"])
w.show()
and make customising what the terminal window does as easy as this. Do likewise for getting a browse component running (recall the Cocoa browser demo on MacOsX?)
We should be working less to come up with new stuff, and more on making what we have both rock-solid, dead-simple, and as trivially easy to implement as possible. I wrote a little note about this idea on my Wiki: http://thewikiman.allsup.co/Im... where the idea is to write your program in your ideal imaginary language, and then build from the language you have towards that ideal, striving to make as much of what you produce reusable in other projects (and to share with others so that they don't have to repeat your progress: DRY is good, DRIP (Dont-Repeat-If-at-all-Possible) would be a better principle, since with proprietary software the DRY principle is violated whenever a different developer has to rewrite functionality because of legal or lack-of-source issues).
Google's main priority is the Android ecosystem. One attractive property of Android is the level-playing field (or at least one that is only reasonably bumpy rather than mountainous). Google's ownership of Mobility gave it patents that will probably be useful, and of course they aren't letting go of those, so what is sold is not what is bought. Google's ownership of one player can at least give the impression that Google will favour its own, or at least will tend to under commercial pressure. Letting Mobility go, even for a significant writedown compared to what they paid, may in the long run be repaid in the value of Android compared to what it would have been had Google held onto Mobility. We can never tell, though, since we can't do a copy-on-write fork of the universe, and run both cases in parallel: and if we could there would surely be better uses for the facility than evaluating smartphone economics.
Trying to cover all cases with one universal standard is rarely the best solution. Covering the core with a small number of good standards, and having a few others that work differently to handle the rest is often the best way. This is simply because the 'solution space' covered by a single universal standard has many more regions of possibility that will never be touched than a few more focussed standards. Whilst it's massively oversimplifying, imagine the problem of covering a bounded region of a plane, that has an interesting shape, with squares. Hardcore minimalists will point out that one big square will do. That is what the universal standard approach tries to do. The trouble is that a few interesting cases can push the required size of the square to large proportions. If one wants to optimise for area, many small squares are better, but at the expense of having to manage many squares. A balance between these two, with a very small number of large squares and a slightly larger number of smaller squares, tends to be the best solution. Things work similarly with languages, both human and computer ones.
HTML+CSS attempts to have a content-with-markup source file, and a standard format non-programming language for styling, with no control over how things are layed out. This is great for simpler styling duties, but eventually becomes unwieldy. What is needed is to analyse and factorise how a web browser today actually does layout internally, and create a programming language that can access that directly, drawing on specifications in a CSS-like stylesheet for its source information. That would result in the CSS not, by itself, determining the style, but being subject to the whims of the engine that maps CSS-styles to actual screen representations. But hey, isn't that what we've already got with multiple browsers each implementing their own layout, and the programmable mapping layers hard-coded into the browsers (especially with IE and standards vs. quirks mode)?
I would like to see the Cairo model of drawing standardised, and the layout facilities of an HTML browser and other things added at an API level with the actual browser implemented as a light wrapper on top of that. That would also allow broswer-like apps with different document structures to be developed much more easily. I can dream, I guess.
When faced with an inconvenient truth, the corrupt will try to hide that truth, and destroy those who would speak it. This is hardly a new phenomena for humankind. Thsoe who are not corrupt will, naturally, be joyously corrected and be happy to have improved their understanding of the world. Thus those who would try to suppress the truth about polygraphs can hardly be seen to be in the latter category, so why are they tolerated in government and police?
But those leading the 'Christian faithful' in states where these arguments are happening seem to have no understanding of what they claim to follow, nor how to actually live the examples their scriptures describe. What happens is that wanabee religious leaders learn all the political and power grabbing techniques, almost subliminally, since this is the shorter route to their 'pastor dream', and effectively bypass the hard work involved in actually internalising the spiritual discipline that should lie at the heart of a true spiritual faith. Then, of course, they cannot translate the abstract concepts and principles described into modern language and conceptual frameworks, and are left just spouting the external form of the words in their scriptures with no real understanding. This is tragic, especially in Christianity where there is a clear illustration of this problem, how it unfolds, and the natural egotistical reaction of those in power when faced with someone who actually understands what the scriptures are there to teach... and if you have a Bible to hand you can hardly miss it, since it's repeated four times in four different accounts at the start of the New Testament. How organised religion can make the same mistakes over again is an almost comical picture of precisely what the core of Christianity is meant, in part, to teach against. It's amazing how the faith, so distorted as it is, can still support many in their lives even still.
My understanding and point of view (with a background in maths and logic and a passion for physics, computers and internal martial arts) make the lessons of scripture/spiritual writing, whether Judeo-Christian, Buddhist, Vedic and Taoist, to be important and logical consequences of the maths and science we have discovered, explained insightfully in a way that contemporaries of the authors of these teachings would have a good chance of understanding. I have yet, in my studies (and I am rather thorough and minimalist about what I do and do not assume), to find a single teaching that, given a suitable interpretation, does not make proper sense in light of modern scientific discoveries. I just wish others would see it that way.
When faced with difficulties or inconveniences in daily life, humans are adapted to find a way to reduce the difficulty and inconvenience. This is natural, but has a few consequences.
This basic nature does not understand the difference between facts like 1+1=2, 0.999...=0, etc; Newton's Laws; QM; That JFK did get assasinated and didn't just decide to revert to his Lizardman form, and fake his death to explain his absence; etc...
When faced with facts like global warming, man's instinct is to change the facts: the problem appears to be people complaining about Global Warming... naive bloke thinks 'I can't see it--it's not there--just tell these guys they're imagining it and to get on with their lives'. It takes a lot of learning to understand that you can't change the laws of maths or nature. We take this obviousness for granted, because it is endemic in how we are brought up, but a perusal of the history of human thought should help you see that what is obvious today wasn't always obvious. Also, these more naive aspects of how we think on a more basic level are often obscured by our unified sense of self.
Is that the approx. 2000 year old Gospel accounts illustrate precisely that this behaviour occurs in organised religion, that it's not right, and that a good teacher teaches against such stuff. How can so many from so many Christian churches read their Bible regularly and not see this???
The government has a real chance of learning the lesson that pieces of paper containing the words 'A will do B or else C' for various combinations of A, B and C, are nowhere near as effective as an imaginary fairy with a wand when it comes to actually getting stuff done. If real fairies with real, working magic wands were an option, it would most likely work much better than the current approach, but alas all the fairies were driven out long ago by the forces of insistent scientists demanding that fairy magic has no place in a modern scientific world. 'Suit yourself,' said the Fairy Queen, 'we thought we were doing you a favour, seriously, it's better where we come from, magic works properly there, and we're only too happy to oblige!' So the Fairy Queen and all the magic fairies and their magic wands disappeared into the sunset, and the US government was left with only paper, letters and no magic spell power besides 'contractual terms' to allow the pieces of paper to have any useful effect.
There is no way we can experimentally test our ability to accurately predict the distant past from present day evidence, and no way we could have already done so. The past will never happen again, and we cannot magically create time machines. We do not know, and cannot know. What we can work out, however, is the answer to the question of what happened provided we assume 'continuity' of things like the laws of physics, and many other such assumptions.
There is a nice neat parallel in mathematics. You'll see people claim that 1+2+3+... = -1/12. This is not true, but is almost true. The zeta funciton zeta(s) = sum_{n=1}^{infinity} 1/n^s for all s>1. There is a unique analytic continuation of the funciton given by this sum where convergent to almost of the rest of the complex plane (and that almost the rest includes -1). If you evaluate that continuation at -1, you get -1/12. If you abuse notation, you get 1+2+3+...=-1/12. What is actually the case is that if 1+2+3+... converged to a meaningful value, that value would have to be -1/12. But obviously this doesn't prove convergence.
When it comes to distant past stuff, everything is done under an unproven hypothesis that the methods used work: there is no point researchers questioning this since it can't be verified. Again, this is similar to proofs that rely on the Riemann hypothesis. When we can't show something, we do our best to work around it. What you read in science books comes from that sensible school.
When people forget those tacit assumptions and make metaphysical pronouncements that things we can never have seen must look a certain way, using arguments based on evidence that we cannot possibly have tested in the circumstances we are applying them, is when proper science descends into pseudoscience. And too many of the science crowd are guilty here. You should know precisely what hypotheses your results rely on, and only a few have the time to care, what with all the need to crank out n peer-reviewed research papers a year to satisfy your funding body.
Though I tend to be sceptical of skeptics. They tend to reason things through with evidence until it is close enough to supporting what they want to believe, and then stop. Often there are subtle issues they have missed, or they have oversimplified things, or made unwarranted (though reasonable sounding) conclusions in their arguments that, on closer inspection, do not hold. Take skeptics with a dose of salt: be skeptical of their claims and let them convince you. I hope a good skeptic would want nothing less (and would tear their hair out if people blindly took their words at face value).
People should learn to sit properly, and type properly. This greatly increases health and mechanical efficiency. It is from poor mechanical efficiency and techniques that stress the body that injuries and wear-and-tear come. Fixing this is a matter of training: stretches like Yoga, on a daily basis, movement like Taiji, again practised daily, studing how one moves in activities they do regularly and striving to understand and refine them, like the way a concert pianist develops from a beginner to what you see perform on stage. There is no substitute for proper learning, whether a special chair or a weird keyboard. If you can't sit properly, a fancy chair won't fix that. If you can't type reasonably effortlessly and with a minimum of stress, changing the keyboard layout won't help. At best a new layout can give you a few percent improvement in speed, but that is unimportant: time spent learning a new layout should instead be spent improving basic posture and technique, and proper posture and technique will give sufficient speed on a standard layout.
Obviously if you can't be bothered to learn and practice and improve, you won't develop in terms of posture and technique, and this short-sightedness and laziness is endemic in the West, and is exacerbated by pressures to do more and more in ones job. But work pressures will not magically make things better, and work pressures plus strange keyboard will not do so either.
I do not disagree with ads per se, given how they function in the internet economy. But the level of intrusiveness of adverts is the problem. For a long time I actually resisted ad blocking technology, since I agree with the idea that one should support what they use, and if this is by seeing adverts, so be it. When it came to Vibrant ads, however, a line was crossed. Having floating divs appear when moving my mouse to click a link (and the div obscuring the link) and stuff like that is too intrusive, and not on.
There needs to be a solid code of ethics for where adverts are acceptable and where they're not, and if that is not sufficient for certain lines of business, then those lines of business should just disappear off the web. If ad blocking software had a clear code of ethics, and maintained a blacklist of sites that crossed it, and that only those sites got ad-blocked, and would be unblocked once they got back in conformance with the code of ethics, things would be better. If that was enforced by government regulation like the UK's Advertising Standards Authority, or suchlike then things would be better.
At present, advertisers do not have a regulating authority that controls how intrusive they can make advertising, and thus there is a need for technology like ad-blocking to avoid this. If sites use Javascript or log-checking to try and catch ad-blockers, I can see an arms race developing. We do not need that. What we need is for advertisers to be more gentlemanly, less greedy, and above all, to behave and be civil about how they go about their business. Until they do they get no sympathy from my end. It is right that those who misbehave should be put at a disadvantage.
Jet engines are natures way of pruning the weakest of the species: nature evolves animals, then man, then man evolves ideas, ideas evolve into plans for jet planes, then man develops real jet planes, then jet planes swallow birds. It's just basic evolution silly.
This illustrates the state of modern science. There is/was no debate: it is clear that evolution will reward mechanical efficiency, like it always does. Pelaton cyclists take turns at the front and draft each other, and you need only compare a road-race to a time-trial to see the efficiency gain (look at the length of the race, and how few small breakaways succeed). Bird's V-formations allow the same efficiency gain, and an evolution process too stupid to learn this and take advantage would have died out long ago. The only debate should be whether there are any other additional pressures towards this (such as females preferring the flying aesthetics in funny ways, leading to strange sexual selection patterns, but it should be clear that there are unlikely to be any of these). Is there any biological organism that doesn't seek out ease over difficulty? How some could think that birds wouldn't is beyond me.
There are also phenomena like the phase-locked loop that illustrate how feedback can contribute to stability in a dynamical system. That birds have brains, and brains relate sensory input to motor output, and involve lots of internal feedback should surely suggest that such a mechanism is at work.
How good is the mathematics and physics intuition of these people? It's amazing how things that are obvious to those that know a little maths are somehow strange wonders that are heralded as scientific discoveries to those who don't.
"And if any or all of these things can also let me play streaming video off the web (like BBC iPlayer content), I'll be in heaven.)"
Yes. If you see all of that in one product, it means either you're dreaming or your dead.
No, but in my early programming days, trying to program Windows nearly put me off programming entirely.
Unpredictability is a necessary trait when evading predators, so an organism that always chose C when C > B and B > A would be more predictable and easier for an intelligent predator to catch. This tendency not to would need to be deeply hardwired into the nature of the organism, since otherwise it would rarely kick in and, again, the organism would be easy prey. Optimising a small subset of a problem (and the whole problem is survival and procreation) often leads to locally optimal yet seriously globally subobtimal solutions. The greedy algorithm works on only a few cases (sometimes called monoids if I remember my combinatorial optimisation text, though that was over a decade ago); and with only slightly more complex problems it is often easy to construct pathological cases where the greedy algorithm gets it wrong. I see this result about organisms as another example of the principle that straightforward rational solutions are only the best when the problem is straightforward and simple.
A 386 has a built in 8086 emulator (esp when running in '386 enhanced mode' or whatever the proper name for that is). An i3 or other x64 chip has a built in x86 emulator (emulation of old instruction sets is built into the new one). Their implementations of old technology (like the 8086) are about as similar as a software emulator running on an i3 is to the original code running on a real 8086. (Compare an 8086 and an i3 die in an electon microscope and play spot-the-similarity...) Working code is a sequence of numbers designed to be interpreted according to certain well defined rules. It matters little whether those rules are implemented directly in the logic of a chip, or via software on a different chip (excepting performance implications).
Where's the incentive for the creative mind to write the software when commercial exploitation of his own work runs a real risk of falling foul of one of a huge number of patents he knew nothing about. When mutual dependency of ideas is such as happens once software becomes possible, what you have is not an incentive but a minefield.
When searching for information relavent to a release, say Debian 7, putting 'debian 7' into Google is useless, since Google can't infer the meaning of a number 7 in a document. Searching for 'debian wheezy', however, is far more specific, since 'wheezy' isn't used where the number 7 might be (for example 'bug with proglet 7 on debian 3' might match pages talking about bugs with proglet running on debian 7 where the error code is 3). If they don't have a codename, at least attach a unique memorable short string to each release so that it can be easily searched for.
This is yet another example of how 'business decisions' can cause a Cloud service you rely on to shut down for no technical reason, and without warning. You can't rely on Cloud services unless you are running them yourself. They are fun to play with, and can aid efficiency in the short term, but they must be regarded as fun, practical toys.
It's well known that Mental Health is dominated in many ways by vested economic and political interests. It would be nice for the anti-drug lobby if research showed that drugs cause MH problems, so there is funding for that. It would be nice for Big Pharma if clinical trials show their next wonder drug works. Thus funding appears for such trials, and the ones with the desired results get published whilst others get shelved (though they need to take care not to make this too obvious). Then occasionally (like Western Lapland), things get done differently, with better results than the medication heavy Western approach, and do the medical science research community clamour to reproduce and investigate? That is not to mention the occasional meta-analysis that correlates a drug trial's sponsor to the best remedy in the trial... Pot is a bogeyman for politicians to campaign against, and isn't a moneymaker for Big Pharma, nor can it be patented, so it's in their best interest if as much anti-pot research is produced. Basic politics and economics when you get down to it, and the 'science' bit in medical science needs to be take with a truckload of salt when it comes to Mental Health. Health in that context also needs a similar dose of salt, since drugged-up zombies with no motivation, poor physical drive, poor quality of life and a chemically supressed emotional system that can't drive them hard enough to do something about it... are deemed to be 'well, compliant with treatment, etc.' whereas someone with better physical health, who is motivated to get on with their life, but doesn't rely heavily on strong tranquilising drugs often has this non-reliance put down as a 'risk factor'.