1. Funding issues will, for evolutionary reasons (i.e. whether a scientific career 'lives' or 'dies') have a profound effect on prevailing attitudes in the mainstream of various areas of the sciences (i.e. if your research group generally turns out pro-drug papers in journals, you are more likely to get pharmaceutical sponsorship than if you don't.)
2. The 'no scientific evidence' argument appears many times in an attempt to discredit an unpopular idea. The problem is that you have to show that the idea that you are against would reasonably imply the existence of the scientific evidence that hasn't been observed. (This bit of the logic is regularly lacking when 'scientists' dismiss ideas on the account of 'no scientific evidence'.)
3. Statistics. There is a very good book: http://www.amazon.com/Common-Errors-Statistics-Avoid-Them/dp/0471460680 and the first two sentences of the first chapter spell it out: no matter how precise the 'maths' is, it is an error to rely solely on statistics. From a pure maths perspective, bear in mind that a random number chosen from the reals in the interval [0,1], with equal probability for each number, has 0% chance of being a real number that will ever be explicitly picked out in any scientific document, past present or future. (This is a trivial application of measure theory.)
4. The 'evolution theory' bit on the end heavily oversimplifies things. (If you assume that (a) does not happen, it does not follow, even from evolution theory, that (b) will necessarily happen: there are other possibilities).
If you store in base 3 or base 5, but compute in base 2, you would have to do a conversion with every load and store operation, which is a little silly!
Patents give an unnatural degree of control over an abstract idea or principle. While such a system may promote some degree of innovation, it must be used with care, and at present is used rampantly, wantonly and without concern for knock-on effects through either the economy or the rest of life in general.
If you make something material and someone steals it, you no longer have it. If you have information and somebody copies it, you still have your copy. You lose exclusivity as to who know that information, but that exclusivity is not a material thing and cannot be stolen (since the person who makes a copy does not gain that exclusivity.)
Material and information are totally different and it's a real shame that lawmakers aren't clever enough to see something so simple. That or they are too busy collecting campaign funds.
It has always been 'fast enough' for appropriate programming problems. If Ruby is too slow, you're in the wrong problem domain to use Ruby.
Note that there is, and can never be, OneTrueLanguage(TM).
Efficient development is all about playing to the advantages of the development tools available to you. Complaining about weaknesses is usually indicative of a lack of understanding.
The defence is 'it did click, the accuser didn't hear it'. How do you prove that the camera emitted an audible sound? The intuitive notion of audible is too flexible for law, so it will be interesting to see what requirements they come up with.
Brain function vs higher level functions
on
More Brains Needed
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· Score: 1
In computers, it would be pointless to relentlessly study the physics of semiconductors or arrangements of NAND gates if your interest was object oriented and functional programming. Equally, such an understanding (physics and logic circuits) would not help find most software bugs (especially a case of the wrong algorithm being used.) In such cases, the meaning occurs on a higher level of abstraction.
Why do the many researchers into the human brain think that this sort of thing won't happen with the brain and the mind, i.e. why do they think understanding the brain will give an understanding of mental dysfunction?
If there are universality phenomena at work (analogous to Turing completeness), then many of the workings of the mind will not be specific to the implementation details (i.e. the specifics of brain under study.) Such things need theoretical and mathematical insight, and not the cutting up of more brains.
These days, corporations arrange themselves like a line of dominoes. They are squeezing the bailouts because people in general can't afford for all the 'dominoes' to fall.
One or two companies going out of business isn't too much of a problem, but large chains of companies that depend on each other is. That's what's changed. That, and the general cooking of the financial books that's been going on for the last decade or two, fuelled by and fuelling the immediate results and greed culture that is prevalent today.
I guess for hard drives, the question is how close to eSATA it gets. Also, does USB3 still have the CPU overhead and latency of earlier USB compared to FW?
Whilst I'd agree that vision in the sense that we know it is unlikely to be replicated through the skin, the sensitivity of the skin and of the body in general allows a great deal of information from the body's environment to be perceived and, effectively 'seen'. For practical evidence you only need to look into areas such as internal martial arts, where such perception is often deliberately trained to some degree or other.
Faith, to a certain degree is absolutely necessary. One must have faith in the reliability of reason itself, the foundations of mathematics and effectively believe that, if basic physics isn't on sound footing as it stands, then it can in principle be placed on sound footing given sufficient information... or something like that.
That said, the amount of stuff that is done based on faith in one's fellow 'scientists' is scary, and I'm not going to name names here.
Back to basics bouncy platform games, simple racers etc... absolutely nostalgically brilliant (and damn cheap if you know which bargain bin to look in;-)
Superstition allows one to perceive, albeit rather inaccurately, aspects of nature that would otherwise be ignored completely. This is of great evolutionary advantage... eventually, though the jury is still out, and will remain out for a very long time.
Your ignorance is forgiven. Physics is like maths except it's about the real world rather than the abstract world. There's a continuous tradeoff from pure maths thru applied maths thru physics etc.
Besides, how exactly is an electron like a good hard fsck?
No one know why we do it, not even ourselves." - John
It's always the same logic, except it's not really logic - like Logic Pro, it's a combination of logic (computer) and music. But it goes on...
If you spend money on something, you tend to be more motivated to understand and use it -- if you got it for free, you tend not to want to waste time getting it to work. This effect is underutilised IMO. If you make yourself pay for software, you can then tell yourself 'this cost me X, and I'm damn well going to extract value from it.'
Demos help people who do spend money to make informed decisions -- I carefully demo audio plugins before buying, for example.
I'll outline some problems that Cliff will face.
Problem no 1 is that many people feel good about getting something 'for free' or 'cheaper' without considering knock-on effects.
Problem no 2 is that many people get a kick from 'not playing by the rules' and so find pirating software fun.
Problem no 3 is that it is hard to work out the optimal price point, given his distribution aims: charge a lower price and more people will probably by (within limits)
These are just quick thoughts.
(Though I'm not the type that Cliff wants to contact -- I pay for my proprietary software where I use it, and gladly try, consider and help free alternatives where I can, but I don't pirate -- I find you get less software, music, etc. but have a far greater respect for it, and this respect and motivation-to-use generally brings bigger rewards than a pirate-everything-in-sight approach.)
Slashdot Mirror
I mainly agree with you. Just a few quick points.
1. Funding issues will, for evolutionary reasons (i.e. whether a scientific career 'lives' or 'dies') have a profound effect on prevailing attitudes in the mainstream of various areas of the sciences (i.e. if your research group generally turns out pro-drug papers in journals, you are more likely to get pharmaceutical sponsorship than if you don't.)
2. The 'no scientific evidence' argument appears many times in an attempt to discredit an unpopular idea. The problem is that you have to show that the idea that you are against would reasonably imply the existence of the scientific evidence that hasn't been observed. (This bit of the logic is regularly lacking when 'scientists' dismiss ideas on the account of 'no scientific evidence'.)
3. Statistics. There is a very good book: http://www.amazon.com/Common-Errors-Statistics-Avoid-Them/dp/0471460680 and the first two sentences of the first chapter spell it out: no matter how precise the 'maths' is, it is an error to rely solely on statistics. From a pure maths perspective, bear in mind that a random number chosen from the reals in the interval [0,1], with equal probability for each number, has 0% chance of being a real number that will ever be explicitly picked out in any scientific document, past present or future. (This is a trivial application of measure theory.)
4. The 'evolution theory' bit on the end heavily oversimplifies things. (If you assume that (a) does not happen, it does not follow, even from evolution theory, that (b) will necessarily happen: there are other possibilities).
If you store in base 3 or base 5, but compute in base 2, you would have to do a conversion with every load and store operation, which is a little silly!
Looking at your profile, I wonder how you can pick up anything at all. Well done for being daring!
Fate got bored of temptation long ago, though nice try.
Patents give an unnatural degree of control over an abstract idea or principle. While such a system may promote some degree of innovation, it must be used with care, and at present is used rampantly, wantonly and without concern for knock-on effects through either the economy or the rest of life in general.
If you make something material and someone steals it, you no longer have it. If you have information and somebody copies it, you still have your copy. You lose exclusivity as to who know that information, but that exclusivity is not a material thing and cannot be stolen (since the person who makes a copy does not gain that exclusivity.)
Material and information are totally different and it's a real shame that lawmakers aren't clever enough to see something so simple. That or they are too busy collecting campaign funds.
Cocoa and CoreFoundation, though not as high level, do something similar.
It has always been 'fast enough' for appropriate programming problems. If Ruby is too slow, you're in the wrong problem domain to use Ruby.
Note that there is, and can never be, OneTrueLanguage(TM).
Efficient development is all about playing to the advantages of the development tools available to you. Complaining about weaknesses is usually indicative of a lack of understanding.
Emotions are continuous in nature, and cannot truly be emulated with a device that is discrete in both space and time.
The defence is 'it did click, the accuser didn't hear it'. How do you prove that the camera emitted an audible sound? The intuitive notion of audible is too flexible for law, so it will be interesting to see what requirements they come up with.
In computers, it would be pointless to relentlessly study the physics of semiconductors or arrangements of NAND gates if your interest was object oriented and functional programming. Equally, such an understanding (physics and logic circuits) would not help find most software bugs (especially a case of the wrong algorithm being used.) In such cases, the meaning occurs on a higher level of abstraction.
Why do the many researchers into the human brain think that this sort of thing won't happen with the brain and the mind, i.e. why do they think understanding the brain will give an understanding of mental dysfunction?
If there are universality phenomena at work (analogous to Turing completeness), then many of the workings of the mind will not be specific to the implementation details (i.e. the specifics of brain under study.) Such things need theoretical and mathematical insight, and not the cutting up of more brains.
Just my 0.02 euros...
These days, corporations arrange themselves like a line of dominoes. They are squeezing the bailouts because people in general can't afford for all the 'dominoes' to fall.
One or two companies going out of business isn't too much of a problem, but large chains of companies that depend on each other is. That's what's changed. That, and the general cooking of the financial books that's been going on for the last decade or two, fuelled by and fuelling the immediate results and greed culture that is prevalent today.
I guess for hard drives, the question is how close to eSATA it gets.
Also, does USB3 still have the CPU overhead and latency of earlier USB compared to FW?
Whilst I'd agree that vision in the sense that we know it is unlikely to be replicated through the skin, the sensitivity of the skin and of the body in general allows a great deal of information from the body's environment to be perceived and, effectively 'seen'. For practical evidence you only need to look into areas such as internal martial arts, where such perception is often deliberately trained to some degree or other.
Faith, to a certain degree is absolutely necessary. One must have faith in the reliability of reason itself, the foundations of mathematics and effectively believe that, if basic physics isn't on sound footing as it stands, then it can in principle be placed on sound footing given sufficient information... or something like that.
That said, the amount of stuff that is done based on faith in one's fellow 'scientists' is scary, and I'm not going to name names here.
Back to basics bouncy platform games, simple racers etc... absolutely nostalgically brilliant (and damn cheap if you know which bargain bin to look in ;-)
Superstition allows one to perceive, albeit rather inaccurately, aspects of nature that would otherwise be ignored completely. This is of great evolutionary advantage... eventually, though the jury is still out, and will remain out for a very long time.
But are the bits analog(ue) or digital(e)? There is a tradeoff between accuracy and flexibility and freedom.
Check out my sub 1000 user number on /.
I am Not new here, I was almost born here, though that is another story.
Your ignorance is forgiven. Physics is like maths except it's about the real world rather than the abstract world. There's a continuous tradeoff from pure maths thru applied maths thru physics etc.
Besides, how exactly is an electron like a good hard fsck?
No one know why we do it, not even ourselves." - John
It's always the same logic, except it's not really logic - like Logic Pro, it's a combination of logic (computer) and music. But it goes on...
No -- just all those Linux distros that refuse to be called GNU/Linux. I'm afraid the FSF are well and truly closing that barn door...
Linux won't fail, so it's pointless to consider the consequences if you want to think logically...
It really is a case of 'he who controls the present controls the past...'
That said, I doubt the changes that Photoshop can do will ever become undetectable.
If you spend money on something, you tend to be more motivated to understand and use it -- if you got it for free, you tend not to want to waste time getting it to work. This effect is underutilised IMO. If you make yourself pay for software, you can then tell yourself 'this cost me X, and I'm damn well going to extract value from it.'
Demos help people who do spend money to make informed decisions -- I carefully demo audio plugins before buying, for example.
I'll outline some problems that Cliff will face.
Problem no 1 is that many people feel good about getting something 'for free' or 'cheaper' without considering knock-on effects.
Problem no 2 is that many people get a kick from 'not playing by the rules' and so find pirating software fun.
Problem no 3 is that it is hard to work out the optimal price point, given his distribution aims: charge a lower price and more people will probably by (within limits)
These are just quick thoughts.
(Though I'm not the type that Cliff wants to contact -- I pay for my proprietary software where I use it, and gladly try, consider and help free alternatives where I can, but I don't pirate -- I find you get less software, music, etc. but have a far greater respect for it, and this respect and motivation-to-use generally brings bigger rewards than a pirate-everything-in-sight approach.)