yeah. i'm also wondering how putting the two hottest components on the mother board (the GPU and CPU) into the same package is a power savings...:-/
maybe on the low end of the market where the performance of the GPU is irrelevant, but for those who actually care about GPU performance, putting the two most power hungry and memory bw hungry components together doesn't seem like a good idea.
true. but nonetheless, a manufacturing company only has a finite amount of production capacity. there is a limit to how much any single company can produce.
IBM in particular has frequently had problems delivering enough chips on time to their volume customers. It is the primary reason, for example, that Apple abandoned IBM's power PC architecture and moved to Intel chips. There were multiple times when Apple was unable to meet peak demand for their products at critical moments because IBM was unable to supply the chips at the appropriate time back when apple was relying on IBM to manufacture its CPUs.
I'm not therefore understanding how IBM benefits from the economy of scale argument. They haven't increased their production capacity. And with them now supplying 3 different console's simultaneously I'm a bit baffled how they are going to keep up with demand unless other companies start manufacturing the chips for them (maybe they already are. I haven't checked.)
You may be right though that IBM somehow got Sony and others to pony up a significant portion of the research costs for the cell processor.
the real point as I see it (and as the article states), is that IBM is leveraging the experience they have working with the console makers to solve their technical design problems to make a business unit that will pursue the same kinds of collaborations in telecom and elsewhere. it's not about selling the chips. It's about selling the technical expertise that is required to design products that use those chips.
nobody wins big by manufacturing the components that go into the console. "winning the micro-chip wars for non-PC gaming" is not much of a victory at all. The console makers sell those things at a loss for the most part, which means they nickel and dime their component suppliers to death on the costs. If you provide the chips (gpu/cpu), you win bragging rights, but that is about it. From a pure profit perspective you'd be much better off selling those chips to the non-console market where the profit margins on hardware are higher.
It's not about the chips. I think that probably works well for IBM's business model. I've never quite been able to figure out exactly how IBM operates, but they don't seem interested in making profits on hardware sales (not primarily anyway). They seem interested in making profits on selling high end technical services to other businesses.
no arguments there. we definitely must have a paper trail. personally I think that any person in government who was involved in selecting a machine for managing voting that doesn't leave a paper trail should be fired as an incompetent. And any company that tried to sell one which doesn't have a paper trail is a company that should be dismissed out of hand as not worth doing business with in the future.
but alas... many involved in making these decisions don't seem interested validity, but only in the illusion thereof.
did you read the article? Did you see that the demonstrated hack which was able to flip the vote count generated by the electronic voting machine (with minimal access to the machine) also worked on the optical scan reader?
I think the push toward electronic voting is a knee jerk reaction to seeing the chaos of the Florida recount of paper ballots during the Gore-Bush election. People some how convinced themselves that the non-electronic nature of that voting system was somehow the root of the problem, and therefor believe they need electronic voting systems.
But what they failed to realize, IMO, is that the root of the problem in the Florida count was simply this: the difference in the vote tally for the two candidates was within the margin of error.
When you've reached the point where you have to argue about the quality of the hanging chads to determine who did or didn't win then the simple truth is that NOBODY won. It was a friggin' tie. No point in fretting about whether or not the eventual result was fair or correct that time. The only "correct" result would have been to split the electoral votes for that state 50/50 and the laws don't allow for that.
But the media and the government didn't view it in those terms. They fretted to no end. It wasn't rational. Their behavior was more akin to that of Lady Macbeth than anything else ("out damn spot").:-b The government seems more intent on covering up the spot (i.e., the unpleasant fact that some votes are just to close to call) rather than to acknowledge the unpleasant truth. Their solution is to replace the people (which will get inconsistent results when forced to count and recount a vote that is within the margin for error) with machines (which won't be any more "correct" when the vote is in the margin for error, but will at least always get the same result when redoing the same calculation with all the same inputs).
The danger that the government seems blind to is that machines are very stupid, only know how to follow orders, and are therefore much more easily manipulated.
exactly. I fully expect that the only reason MS is doing this is because of the BW costs. They'd have nothing to gain by not providing the trailer if doing to was no cost to them (because the trailer stimulates game sales).
Paying customers get access to all content. Non-paying customers don't get access to content that burns large amounts of MS's server BW. Why does this surprise anyone??
...the number of people willing to pay Microsoft every month is most likely going to plummet.
I might agree with you if it was a monthly fee, but an XboxLive customer does not pay microsoft every month for their online service. the payments are made once a year. For the premium service, the yearly fee is less than the cost of a single video game.
yeah. there might be reasons such a setup would not work, but it wouldn't be timing issues. there are no timing issues to consider between separate chips that are plugging into separate sockets.
as I said elsewhere, the question of whether it is doable will likely come down to whether the chipset and/or OS are able to comprehend such an asymmetric configuration. and I don't know if they do.
It's more likely a question of whether or not the OS and chipset can handle it. The cores in one socket very likely do not care in the least how many cores might be running on the other. Only the OS and chipset should need to know about that.
I'd research it before trying though...
I don't know what Intel was thinking with that recent "80 core" announcement. Nobody is going to have 80 general purpose cores in a package in 5 years. Looks like that 80 core announement was talking more about having 80 specialized floating point engines rather 80 general purpose processors and that they were really talking about very specialized niche markets at best rather than general purpose machines. That said Intel was happy to have it misconstrued as the latter by the public and press.
But that aside, core counts are going to surpass 4 and likely go out to 8 or even 16 in the next 5 years for the desktop machines. And you are right. It's not clear what the average user is going to be able to do with so many cores. Out to 2 and 4, its probably easy enough for a decent OS to find work for the extra cores to do even if the individual applications are not multi-threaded, but beyond that?? Be interesting to see what happens.
Do a google search for the string "Intel CSI" and you will see that the solution to the problem you talk about is already in Intel's product pipeline and has been for quite a while. It's just not to market yet.
follow up to my own post: he asserts at the end that the gamers who complete these things quickly are in the 6-17 bracket. He provides no evidence of this other than his own assurance that it is true.
My experience is anecdotal, but just as valid as a claim with no data to back it up.
I've played lots of games that took longer than expected to finish, but Tomb Raider: Legends was not one of them. I finished that game in 2 days, 8 hours each day. It was actually one of the shortest games I've played in a long time.
It was an excellent game though. Good enough that I played it from beginning to end multiple times at different difficulty levels in my "40 hours", and explored every nook and crannie of the game's beautiful 3D environments.
I don't mean to be showing off here, because I know I'm not alone. A great many reviewers complained about that game being too short.
When a big name news organization like NYT gets indexed site right next to some small-time news organization it only degrades the big time news organizations reputation if the stories have the same content and/or the same quality. And if that is the case, then a reader would be quite reasonable to conclude that the bigger news organizations reputation is over inflated.
I can see how that might be something the bigger news organization may be threatended by, because it makes it more difficult for the bigger news organization to hide behind its reputation.
I do not see how that is a problem for the user or for the integrity of news in general. If anything, it is good for the user and for the integrity of the news media because it keeps the bigger news organizations honest. If the bigger news organization is not able to provide content which is unique enough and compelling enough that it continues to stand out as superior when placed up against joe-blow's article on the same topic then all that means to me is that the bigger news organization's reputation isn't deserved.
Now if the bigger news organization wants to be able to provide vanilla content to its dedicated users which it knows is no different than the vanilla content at Joe Blows site and doesn't want the fact that they do provied that kind of content to degrade the value of their stronger content: well, that's what I presume things like this robot.txt file are for. The bigger news organization can selectively prevent that type of content from being indexed so as not to tarnish the image they have built for themselves.
Sounds like a solid and healthy system to me.
you are correct. humans are of course involved in the process and must provide appropriate constraints. what I meant to imply though was that a genetic algorithm can potentially converge on optuse, but quick and efficient, solutions to software problems that cover many contingencies that humans wouldn't have thought of (or would have taken much longer to come up with) if they wrote them directly.
And, a I mentioned, it is my understanding that these kind of genetic approaches to writing the algorithm are used in the auto industry to write the software which controls the airbag.
Software already is controlling a critical safety mechanism in your car: the air bag. Mu understanding though is that the software which controls that is not written by humans. It is written by so-called genetic algorithms. I have no first hand experience with how that software is written, but this is what I have heard.
Programming for a device like this needs to be rock solid in a way that goes beyond standard software practices. When a failure has the potential for causing bodily harm during normal usage, I don't think one should be relying on a human's assumptions about what the control flow should be.
My understanding is that the software that controls automobile air bags is written using genetic algorithms. I would expect that the programmers should be doing the same. Which doesn't mean they are. And doesn't mean I'm write either.
that scheme only works if you actually install the stardock central application.
I personally refuse to install Stardock Central on another machine because I don't trust it.
I have seen reference to it as the pioneer anomaly and as the voyager anomaly. What you are saying makes sense though. Has the anomaly not been observed at all on Voyager craft because the need to periodically reorient the dish makes it impossible to know if it is happenning at all? Or is it just that it is too difficult to study with the voyager craft?
30 years without changing the batteries *AND* 30 years without exploding. Can I get one of those?
i know little about the specs of those generators, but somehow I suspect that you wouldn't find the current they are able to provide satisfactory...:-b
not sure how much data they are getting from it now, but they are tracking it. there is an observed anomaly in its current trajectory that is not well understood. Unfortunately I can't find a good link on it, but the issue is this:
the craft's current rate of acceleration as it heads away from the sun is not consistent with current gravitional laws.
From what I've read, it is considered likely that the issue is just some exotic side effect of the conventional physics inside the space craft itself (like waste heat shedding off the craft's antenna exerting a small force on the craft and altering its trajectory slightly). It's possible though that it is an indication of a hole in our existing understanding of gravity.
Not sure what else the craft might be doing. Probably not much. But that little anomaly is pretty interesting.
well there are numerous examples of scientifically minded people vilifying the religious point of view in the other replies to the original article right in this thread---examples where the argument is based completely on non-scientific reasoning. Like the ones that proclaim that religion and god are a thing of the past.:-b
That is not a new argument. It has been stated numerous times in one form or another ever since the reformation (i.e., once church and state started to separate from each other). Probably sooner. I get the feeling that Richard Dawkins has sometimes been guilty of the same in contemporary circles, but I can't really find a good example of that, so maybe I am mistaken there.
For my comments on the ID proponents:
Michael Behe is the sort who seems completely sincere but when you pick apart his arguments that so-called "irreducible complexity" has already been observed in known biological systems he talks in logical circles and doesn't seem to realize that he's implicitly assuming that the system is irreducibly complex as one of the premises of his argument for why it is irreducibly complex.
Background: to ID theorists, the existence of an irreducibly complex biological system is the holy grail that proves the designer. Because irreducibly complex means, essentially by definition, that the system could not have evolved to its current state. It had to have started in that state (they say), and this in turn proves the existence of the designer. Logically this is absurd because anything you don't sufficiently understand can be proclaimed irreducibly complex because there is no precise notion of what determines something to be biologically irreducible. They are essentially looking for the "prime numbers" of the biological world and think they can prove that complex biological systems that actually already serve specific functions ARE these "prime numbers". One classic example that they have given in the past is the bacterium's flagellum. I have no idea if any of them still believes that the bacterium's flagellum is irreducibly complex but they did at one point.
William Dembski is the far more insidious sort in my opinion. His attempt to build a mathematical framework for irreducible complexity is utter poppy-cock. This is going to sound harsh, but in my opinion, the man seem to be either insane, or systematically disingenuous. I'm hard pressed to believe that one could use so much obscure mathematical jargon and not secretly realize that one's logic is completely without premise. Reading his works leaves the distinct impression that he knows he is talking out of his arse, and is using the convoluted jargon and terminology in an intentional effort to confuse the reader into thinking that he's proven something that he hasn't. It seems to me that it is either that, or he actually has no idea what the heck the terminology he is using actually means. The man builds entire theses on mathematical terminology that he invented, but which he never clearly defines. To any mathematically rigorous thinker, this is the immediate red flag. If nothing else, one thing that is always true about mathematics is that mathematical reasoning always begins with precision in the definition of terms. But that is not his starting point. Instead, he defines vaguely, and then takes advantage of the vagueness in his terms to enable himself to adjust the implied definition of the terms (implied from the context in which he uses them) to suit the paragraph at hand. It's all hand waving nonsense because the definition he uses on one page is incompatible with the definition he uses for the same term in some other page. He then proclaims at the end that he has proven something momentous. But the premise of it all is this imprecisely defined terminology. His notion of "complex specified information" is a specific example of this, in my opinion. Others have disected it better than I: http://www.lecb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/paper/ev/dembski /specified.complexity.html
ID is a bunch of nonsense, and the fact that so many people seem to want/need to believe it is scientific is depressing.
That said, there is a fringe of the scientific community that bears some of the blame for making this issue into the hot-potato that it is in my opinion. It is unfortunate, but there have always (well, at least since the 18th century if not sooner) been those on the fringe in science who embrace science as the antithesis of religion and go beyond what can be scientifically proven themselves in their efforts to vilify the religious sentiments of their peers. It's not surprising that some with strong religious sentiments would be alienated by such behavior, and might turn against scientific reasoning if they feel this abuse is representative of the scientific community as a whole.
This is no defense of ID. I've read the works of the so-called scientists who advocate for ID, because I was curious to how it had elevated its way to a puplic education issue in the US. They are either woefully naive with vague non-scientific meanderings, or shamefully deceptive in their sophistic abuse of logic.
I'm not going to name any names. Most of the people I have in mind are still alive. This isn't a thesis anyway, but just an opinion.
I'm just saying that the absurdity of this apparent controversy over evolution has offenders on both sides.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah. i'm also wondering how putting the two hottest components on the mother board (the GPU and CPU) into the same package is a power savings... :-/
maybe on the low end of the market where the performance of the GPU is irrelevant, but for those who actually care about GPU performance, putting the two most power hungry and memory bw hungry components together doesn't seem like a good idea.
true. but nonetheless, a manufacturing company only has a finite amount of production capacity. there is a limit to how much any single company can produce. IBM in particular has frequently had problems delivering enough chips on time to their volume customers. It is the primary reason, for example, that Apple abandoned IBM's power PC architecture and moved to Intel chips. There were multiple times when Apple was unable to meet peak demand for their products at critical moments because IBM was unable to supply the chips at the appropriate time back when apple was relying on IBM to manufacture its CPUs. I'm not therefore understanding how IBM benefits from the economy of scale argument. They haven't increased their production capacity. And with them now supplying 3 different console's simultaneously I'm a bit baffled how they are going to keep up with demand unless other companies start manufacturing the chips for them (maybe they already are. I haven't checked.) You may be right though that IBM somehow got Sony and others to pony up a significant portion of the research costs for the cell processor.
not even that.
the real point as I see it (and as the article states), is that IBM is leveraging the experience they have working with the console makers to solve their technical design problems to make a business unit that will pursue the same kinds of collaborations in telecom and elsewhere. it's not about selling the chips. It's about selling the technical expertise that is required to design products that use those chips.
nobody wins big by manufacturing the components that go into the console. "winning the micro-chip wars for non-PC gaming" is not much of a victory at all. The console makers sell those things at a loss for the most part, which means they nickel and dime their component suppliers to death on the costs. If you provide the chips (gpu/cpu), you win bragging rights, but that is about it. From a pure profit perspective you'd be much better off selling those chips to the non-console market where the profit margins on hardware are higher.
It's not about the chips. I think that probably works well for IBM's business model. I've never quite been able to figure out exactly how IBM operates, but they don't seem interested in making profits on hardware sales (not primarily anyway). They seem interested in making profits on selling high end technical services to other businesses.
no arguments there. we definitely must have a paper trail. personally I think that any person in government who was involved in selecting a machine for managing voting that doesn't leave a paper trail should be fired as an incompetent. And any company that tried to sell one which doesn't have a paper trail is a company that should be dismissed out of hand as not worth doing business with in the future.
but alas... many involved in making these decisions don't seem interested validity, but only in the illusion thereof.
did you read the article? Did you see that the demonstrated hack which was able to flip the vote count generated by the electronic voting machine (with minimal access to the machine) also worked on the optical scan reader?
I think the push toward electronic voting is a knee jerk reaction to seeing the chaos of the Florida recount of paper ballots during the Gore-Bush election. People some how convinced themselves that the non-electronic nature of that voting system was somehow the root of the problem, and therefor believe they need electronic voting systems.
:-b The government seems more intent on covering up the spot (i.e., the unpleasant fact that some votes are just to close to call) rather than to acknowledge the unpleasant truth. Their solution is to replace the people (which will get inconsistent results when forced to count and recount a vote that is within the margin for error) with machines (which won't be any more "correct" when the vote is in the margin for error, but will at least always get the same result when redoing the same calculation with all the same inputs).
But what they failed to realize, IMO, is that the root of the problem in the Florida count was simply this: the difference in the vote tally for the two candidates was within the margin of error.
When you've reached the point where you have to argue about the quality of the hanging chads to determine who did or didn't win then the simple truth is that NOBODY won. It was a friggin' tie. No point in fretting about whether or not the eventual result was fair or correct that time. The only "correct" result would have been to split the electoral votes for that state 50/50 and the laws don't allow for that.
But the media and the government didn't view it in those terms. They fretted to no end. It wasn't rational. Their behavior was more akin to that of Lady Macbeth than anything else ("out damn spot").
The danger that the government seems blind to is that machines are very stupid, only know how to follow orders, and are therefore much more easily manipulated.
exactly. I fully expect that the only reason MS is doing this is because of the BW costs. They'd have nothing to gain by not providing the trailer if doing to was no cost to them (because the trailer stimulates game sales).
Paying customers get access to all content. Non-paying customers don't get access to content that burns large amounts of MS's server BW. Why does this surprise anyone??
yeah. there might be reasons such a setup would not work, but it wouldn't be timing issues. there are no timing issues to consider between separate chips that are plugging into separate sockets. as I said elsewhere, the question of whether it is doable will likely come down to whether the chipset and/or OS are able to comprehend such an asymmetric configuration. and I don't know if they do.
It's more likely a question of whether or not the OS and chipset can handle it. The cores in one socket very likely do not care in the least how many cores might be running on the other. Only the OS and chipset should need to know about that. I'd research it before trying though...
I don't know what Intel was thinking with that recent "80 core" announcement. Nobody is going to have 80 general purpose cores in a package in 5 years. Looks like that 80 core announement was talking more about having 80 specialized floating point engines rather 80 general purpose processors and that they were really talking about very specialized niche markets at best rather than general purpose machines. That said Intel was happy to have it misconstrued as the latter by the public and press.
But that aside, core counts are going to surpass 4 and likely go out to 8 or even 16 in the next 5 years for the desktop machines. And you are right. It's not clear what the average user is going to be able to do with so many cores. Out to 2 and 4, its probably easy enough for a decent OS to find work for the extra cores to do even if the individual applications are not multi-threaded, but beyond that?? Be interesting to see what happens.
Do a google search for the string "Intel CSI" and you will see that the solution to the problem you talk about is already in Intel's product pipeline and has been for quite a while. It's just not to market yet.
follow up to my own post: he asserts at the end that the gamers who complete these things quickly are in the 6-17 bracket. He provides no evidence of this other than his own assurance that it is true.
My experience is anecdotal, but just as valid as a claim with no data to back it up.
I'm in my mid 30's, have a wife, and a job.
I've played lots of games that took longer than expected to finish, but Tomb Raider: Legends was not one of them. I finished that game in 2 days, 8 hours each day. It was actually one of the shortest games I've played in a long time.
It was an excellent game though. Good enough that I played it from beginning to end multiple times at different difficulty levels in my "40 hours", and explored every nook and crannie of the game's beautiful 3D environments.
I don't mean to be showing off here, because I know I'm not alone. A great many reviewers complained about that game being too short.
When a big name news organization like NYT gets indexed site right next to some small-time news organization it only degrades the big time news organizations reputation if the stories have the same content and/or the same quality. And if that is the case, then a reader would be quite reasonable to conclude that the bigger news organizations reputation is over inflated. I can see how that might be something the bigger news organization may be threatended by, because it makes it more difficult for the bigger news organization to hide behind its reputation. I do not see how that is a problem for the user or for the integrity of news in general. If anything, it is good for the user and for the integrity of the news media because it keeps the bigger news organizations honest. If the bigger news organization is not able to provide content which is unique enough and compelling enough that it continues to stand out as superior when placed up against joe-blow's article on the same topic then all that means to me is that the bigger news organization's reputation isn't deserved. Now if the bigger news organization wants to be able to provide vanilla content to its dedicated users which it knows is no different than the vanilla content at Joe Blows site and doesn't want the fact that they do provied that kind of content to degrade the value of their stronger content: well, that's what I presume things like this robot.txt file are for. The bigger news organization can selectively prevent that type of content from being indexed so as not to tarnish the image they have built for themselves. Sounds like a solid and healthy system to me.
you are correct. humans are of course involved in the process and must provide appropriate constraints. what I meant to imply though was that a genetic algorithm can potentially converge on optuse, but quick and efficient, solutions to software problems that cover many contingencies that humans wouldn't have thought of (or would have taken much longer to come up with) if they wrote them directly. And, a I mentioned, it is my understanding that these kind of genetic approaches to writing the algorithm are used in the auto industry to write the software which controls the airbag.
Software already is controlling a critical safety mechanism in your car: the air bag. Mu understanding though is that the software which controls that is not written by humans. It is written by so-called genetic algorithms. I have no first hand experience with how that software is written, but this is what I have heard.
Programming for a device like this needs to be rock solid in a way that goes beyond standard software practices. When a failure has the potential for causing bodily harm during normal usage, I don't think one should be relying on a human's assumptions about what the control flow should be.
My understanding is that the software that controls automobile air bags is written using genetic algorithms. I would expect that the programmers should be doing the same. Which doesn't mean they are. And doesn't mean I'm write either.
that scheme only works if you actually install the stardock central application. I personally refuse to install Stardock Central on another machine because I don't trust it.
I have seen reference to it as the pioneer anomaly and as the voyager anomaly. What you are saying makes sense though. Has the anomaly not been observed at all on Voyager craft because the need to periodically reorient the dish makes it impossible to know if it is happenning at all? Or is it just that it is too difficult to study with the voyager craft?
not sure how much data they are getting from it now, but they are tracking it. there is an observed anomaly in its current trajectory that is not well understood. Unfortunately I can't find a good link on it, but the issue is this:
the craft's current rate of acceleration as it heads away from the sun is not consistent with current gravitional laws.
From what I've read, it is considered likely that the issue is just some exotic side effect of the conventional physics inside the space craft itself (like waste heat shedding off the craft's antenna exerting a small force on the craft and altering its trajectory slightly). It's possible though that it is an indication of a hole in our existing understanding of gravity.
Not sure what else the craft might be doing. Probably not much. But that little anomaly is pretty interesting.
well there are numerous examples of scientifically minded people vilifying the religious point of view in the other replies to the original article right in this thread---examples where the argument is based completely on non-scientific reasoning. Like the ones that proclaim that religion and god are a thing of the past. :-b
i /specified.complexity.html
That is not a new argument. It has been stated numerous times in one form or another ever since the reformation (i.e., once church and state started to separate from each other). Probably sooner. I get the feeling that Richard Dawkins has sometimes been guilty of the same in contemporary circles, but I can't really find a good example of that, so maybe I am mistaken there.
For my comments on the ID proponents:
Michael Behe is the sort who seems completely sincere but when you pick apart his arguments that so-called "irreducible complexity" has already been observed in known biological systems he talks in logical circles and doesn't seem to realize that he's implicitly assuming that the system is irreducibly complex as one of the premises of his argument for why it is irreducibly complex.
Background: to ID theorists, the existence of an irreducibly complex biological system is the holy grail that proves the designer. Because irreducibly complex means, essentially by definition, that the system could not have evolved to its current state. It had to have started in that state (they say), and this in turn proves the existence of the designer. Logically this is absurd because anything you don't sufficiently understand can be proclaimed irreducibly complex because there is no precise notion of what determines something to be biologically irreducible. They are essentially looking for the "prime numbers" of the biological world and think they can prove that complex biological systems that actually already serve specific functions ARE these "prime numbers". One classic example that they have given in the past is the bacterium's flagellum. I have no idea if any of them still believes that the bacterium's flagellum is irreducibly complex but they did at one point.
William Dembski is the far more insidious sort in my opinion. His attempt to build a mathematical framework for irreducible complexity is utter poppy-cock. This is going to sound harsh, but in my opinion, the man seem to be either insane, or systematically disingenuous. I'm hard pressed to believe that one could use so much obscure mathematical jargon and not secretly realize that one's logic is completely without premise. Reading his works leaves the distinct impression that he knows he is talking out of his arse, and is using the convoluted jargon and terminology in an intentional effort to confuse the reader into thinking that he's proven something that he hasn't. It seems to me that it is either that, or he actually has no idea what the heck the terminology he is using actually means. The man builds entire theses on mathematical terminology that he invented, but which he never clearly defines. To any mathematically rigorous thinker, this is the immediate red flag. If nothing else, one thing that is always true about mathematics is that mathematical reasoning always begins with precision in the definition of terms. But that is not his starting point. Instead, he defines vaguely, and then takes advantage of the vagueness in his terms to enable himself to adjust the implied definition of the terms (implied from the context in which he uses them) to suit the paragraph at hand. It's all hand waving nonsense because the definition he uses on one page is incompatible with the definition he uses for the same term in some other page. He then proclaims at the end that he has proven something momentous. But the premise of it all is this imprecisely defined terminology. His notion of "complex specified information" is a specific example of this, in my opinion. Others have disected it better than I: http://www.lecb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/paper/ev/dembsk
ID is a bunch of nonsense, and the fact that so many people seem to want/need to believe it is scientific is depressing.
That said, there is a fringe of the scientific community that bears some of the blame for making this issue into the hot-potato that it is in my opinion. It is unfortunate, but there have always (well, at least since the 18th century if not sooner) been those on the fringe in science who embrace science as the antithesis of religion and go beyond what can be scientifically proven themselves in their efforts to vilify the religious sentiments of their peers. It's not surprising that some with strong religious sentiments would be alienated by such behavior, and might turn against scientific reasoning if they feel this abuse is representative of the scientific community as a whole.
This is no defense of ID. I've read the works of the so-called scientists who advocate for ID, because I was curious to how it had elevated its way to a puplic education issue in the US. They are either woefully naive with vague non-scientific meanderings, or shamefully deceptive in their sophistic abuse of logic.
I'm not going to name any names. Most of the people I have in mind are still alive. This isn't a thesis anyway, but just an opinion.
I'm just saying that the absurdity of this apparent controversy over evolution has offenders on both sides.
I like the gold plated optical cables the best. :-)