I disagree. Parents should be able to raise their kids as they see fit, provided they aren't abusing them. Why is it any business of the state if I want to shield my kids from a lifestyle that I may not approve of?
You can. Just not in *PUBLIC* school. Want to shelter them from things that you find offensive then home school them. Don't complain if they have a hard time fitting into society later.
I disagree with the "Parents should be able to raise their kids as they see fit." The big problem here is the "their". They are not your property. They are supposed to independent human beings but they can't manage that initially and wouldn't know where to begin so you as parent get to take care of them and raise them. This does not mean mold them to be exactly the same as you. Don't push your beliefs or biases on them. Teach them to think critically on their own and they can decide what they believe.
Seems like there are plenty of ways to make money from last.fm users without charging them directly.
- a craigslist/ebay style setup to buy/sell/trade music/show tickets/whatever - take a cut from the ads/transaction fee - there are forums but these are token and there isn't a Buy/Sell section anywhere AFAIK.
- use music recommendations to sell people music directly rather than linking to amazon/itunes whatever. Particularly for smaller bands that can't get recording contracts - work to hook them up with gigs and sell merchandise through the site and take a cut - essentially cut out the record labels as middle men and still provide a service that makes it easy to find smaller bands.
- they have recommendations for events in the local area but I never see them handle ticket sales at all - well why the heck not - local shows are much smaller scale than giant stadium shows and they could get a larger turnout and
Of course setting up this kind of infrastructure costs money, particularly to do it globally, but use your user base to add events in the region and use them to review and categorize bands and just make it easy for bands to offer goods through the site. Charging users directly is a good way to lose them because there are plenty of free alternatives and we've all gotten used to not paying for radio. Music fans are among the most passionate - give them services they can actually use and take a reasonable cut and they'll probably embrace it in droves.
I dislike using god and a hokey religion as an explanation for anything. I couldn't stand the last few episodes with Baltar babbling on about his angels. The show has always had a religious theme but I held out for a reasonable rational explanation of the head characters (something to do with cylon projection) and Kara.
Instead pooft she magically disappears into thin air, after magically entering the coordinates of a single magic planet in all of space from a magic song that her magically disappearing dad taught her when she was young and that Hera magically happens to know as well. How? What? Why?
I disliked the get rid of all our technology and live like the natives bit. Both the god explanation and the luddite attitude seem to me to be a diservice to many science fiction fans who overwhelmingly like science and technology and reject hokey explanations for things like flying spaghetti monsters. Seriously, what happens the next time someone needs to get a tooth pulled now that all their technology is gone.
I disliked the Cavil suicide bit because it seemed out of character along with actually listening to Baltar's stupid little speech on coexistence and angels. I'd like Boomer's redemption to not have been followed with her getting shot in the gut again. I didn't need to see Adama puking.
And finally, Tyrol is an idiot for not realizing that killing Cally was the nicest thing Tory or anyone else in the entire fleet did for him.
So Ogg is free. Even if the manufacturers got $5 for each machine they shipped Ogg on, most would not do it because it would not increase sales by any measurable amount, and it would force them to pay more for hardware. MP3 decoders are mass produced and very very cheap.
Except a lot of manufacturers DO support Ogg/Vorbis (hereafter ogg because we are all sick of the container vs codec posts). http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware
That list is in fact out of date already because the Archos 5 I have very definitely supports ogg.
The elephant in the corner that refuses to join the party is the ipod. It can already decode ogg with Rockbox and there isn't any terribly good reason they couldn't support ogg natively.
Right now I can rip music from CDs to ogg and not have any issues except if someone else wants that music (which is illegal anyway right...) and has an ipod. Then one of us has to transcode it to something they can use.
If Apple did add native ogg support I imagine the format's adoption would increase substantially. You'd just be able to find a lot more (illegal or otherwise) ogg files floating around that you could toss on your ipod and have it Just Work.
The Cowons are excellent - I've had both the M3L and the X5L from petty much right after their release. Excellent sound, battery life, and support for just about every audio format I could throw at it and both took daily abuse for years (the X5s video support is a bit of a joke). The M3L was stolen in NYC (why I got the X5L) and the X5L now stays at work. Unfortunately, they haven't really come out with a successor with larger capacity, which is why I move to the Archos 5 but it annoys me with the number of codecs and extras one has to get to use features that ought to be standard (FM tuner, aac, m4a, hi def video, battery dock...) but it also plays Ogg and FLAC out the box with the current firmware. I imagine all of them are readily available in Italy.
I remember playing it when it first came out and the bloody three tentacles and having to crawl around and toss grenades to distract the thing. Still have my unreal (gorgeous levels and I think the first game with decent AI for the baddies but really rubbish story and the series went dead with II) and quake II (kill lots of things, get key, open door, shoot boss much like the first one except with an actual boss at the end) discs from that time too but the original HL was the game that stood out simply because of the tight scripted story that made the game interesting. Didn't hurt that they developed the multiple PoVs with the other games, something I really wish they'd do with HL2.
Except he was not really on the streets here exactly now was he. And if you'd actually RTFA you'd realize he still isn't. He didn't fall for it. He has been further indicted in another case for developing malware. Currently, he is on probation for the Valve network hack in Germany and it isn't clear if he will be extradited or not. Extraditing him is a good way of doing it. Enticing him here with a job interview with an intent to arrest him reeks of entrapment.
I'm not American and couldn't vote but I've spent all my adult life here and the last eight years have affected my life in much the same ways it affected yours. I'm very glad there were record turnouts, whoever you voted for.
I think its good to recognize this as a historic and important moment. I stayed up all night working and listening to the coverage. It is a night I'll remember and I'm admittedly quite happy. Certainly, there is hope, a word I haven't heard much off since 2001. I'm very glad that he acknowledged that the real work lies ahead and that it will take a spirit of service and sacrifice and both of them talked about coming together and bridging the gaps that have cut this nation.
Bridging gaps is a hugely critical message today. There is an interesting discordant note between all the commentators speaking about how this marks the end of slavery and the fruition of the civil rights movement and the change of a generation, and what looks like a yes vote on Proposition 8 in California. When the dust has settled, there is going to be much talk about the way different demographics voted and the gaps that represents. I hope it will not take 40 years for all of us to recognize that in the end, beyond nationality, skin colour, sexual orientation, religious beliefs or background, we are all just human beings.
Eventually I gave up and picked up the battle chest and did play diablo again and it was boring because the levels were incredibly repetitive. They were procedurally generated - what did anyone expect? That adding lava was suddenly going to make the environment more interesting? It was behind par for the time too mind - several 2D and FPS games had better level design and came out before Diablo. The crusader games comes to mind.
It isn't cartoonish or anime - the idea is to create a fantasy world. Diablo didn't have a world - it had a town with a plain boring dungeon that was pretty much exactly the same all the way down. D2 made the first effort where you had some more variety in the character classes and that there were distinct areas each with a different feel but within each you still had dungeons that were essentially the same. From what I can tell with the screenshots for this world they are actually trying to create more of a world this time around, and hopefully give it more of an RPG feel than a pure hack/slash.
To stick with the car analogy, it'd be like selling a tiny little car with a Bugatti Veyron engine and advertising it on that basis. Bugatti would (probably quite rightly) complain that the cooling systems etc simply weren't designed to work with a small car, and the engine would probably break down, damaging their reputation in the process.
Except Mac hardware isn't so much Bugatti Veyron as it is an overpriced Suzuki Liana with a pretty exterior. The hardware isn't special at all (take a look at the diversity on OSx86) - Apple is mad not because people can run their software on non-Apple hardware but because Psystar could potentially allow them to do it *easily*.
Excuse me but real men use butterflies. You see the change in system state as the output is calculated creates temperature differences which in turn create pockets of higher pressure air to form near the computer. Such a small change in the distribution of heat near the earth's surface creates minute, immeasurable, changes in atmospheric circulation. Fortunately it also annoys butterflies which come around flapping their wings outside my window and I've learnt how to read the output from the number of butterflies and the individual and group flapping patterns. I even use the reverse technique to program on occasion but its faster to use a vi shortcut ->:dwit for do what I think. Emacs is useless and has no such feature but you can still use the butterflies.
Most Bible Thumpers have it totally wrong. IF they actually read the bible, they would have found that the earth was NOT actually created in 6 or 7 days. YES YES That is the GENESIS account, BUT, the original hebrew/aramaic translations describe a day as a period or era (really undetermined period of time) Psalms describes that a day with God is as a thousand years (let you look it up for yourself). this does not mean day with God IS a thousand years. It really just means a day is a long long time. hence AS a thousand years and not IS a thousand years. SO it is plausible he created the universe AND still have the big bang theory still be in harmony. Except that Scientists don't want to accept that and Zealot, fundamentalist religionsists do not want to acknoledge this.
Make no mistake, what I am saying here is that an open mind be kept on BOTH sides. It is entirely possible our universe was created by a supreme being. There seems to be too much order in the small and larger details for that to be considered a "random" accident of the universe. On the other hand it coule be random which also seems possible as well. The answer is not conclusivly known for either or, and only human arrogance would presume otherwise. One day we WILL know the absolute truth of it. But at this time there is too much bickering and closed minded ness on both sides to actually try to figure this out.
Hundreds or thousands of years from now our decsendents (assuming we don't blow ourselves up before then) will look at us much the way we look at our ancestors or we will be living life the way the Bible says things will happen. Right now we have "the earth is flat" mentality about all this religion AND science. We know very little about space especially since we have not been out there exploring it. And no being just outside our atmostphere does not count. It gives alot of info, but until we can explore our own Solar System fully, we have very little data to go on other than what we can see with the limits of a telescope.
SO it is plausible he created the universe AND still have the big bang theory still be in harmony. Except that Scientists don't want to accept that and Zealot, fundamentalist religionsists do not want to acknoledge this.
Even if we accept your apologist argument there is the small problem of the rest of it - water to wine, virgin births, randomly creating zombies from the dead and sticking them in heaven, burning cities or flooding the planet willy nilly, turning staves into snakes and people into pillars of salt. There is plenty of good science to say that these things don't happen and remarkably we haven't seen them happen since the group of chaps that penned the Bible wrote that it did. And if it did happen science would try to find an explanation for it. Its a very different theory than there is a someone atop a cloud with a big flowing white beard that makes things happen.
Scientists don't generally accept unicorns or leprechauns or the existence of Odin and his two ravens or for that matter claims of cold fusion either and we don't call them close minded because they don't. Why is your fairy story any different? And even if you ignore the fact that all these miracles aren't possible and believe they happened maybe people don't accept your god because they think its a nasty little piece of work and not exactly a good role model. And why the heck should I keep an open mind to just BOTH sides - why not have the universe created by a three headed chap named Brahma. Or how about Allah. Why not teach school kids in Ohio about Allah's intelligent design. Why not "One nation under Allah." Why should our descendants just live life the way the Bible says as the alternative - your argument reeks with your prejudices.
When you claim that there seems to be too much order in the small and larger details for it to be considered random is this based on your extensive study of Field Theory and General relativity? There are more general books on the subject t
I've been very lucky to see this project from alpha to present because one of friends interned with the group and introduced me to them - its gone through some amazing development - I remember seeing this I think early 2007 - it looked more like Stellarium than anything else but just plane black with solid circles for stars and galaxies. It took forever to load images when you zoomed in. Must have crashed about 30 times in a five minute demo.
Jonathan Fay (of MaximDL fame) showed it off at Table Mountain Star Party last year and they'd moved from that sky to a synthetic pre-rendered sky that would transition to real images from Hubble or other sources as you zoomed in.
Saw it again at the American Astronomical Society Meeting this January in Austin and really got to play with it since they were right alongside the Harvard IIC booth. It was the first time they were using real imagery for the entire sky and it looked amazing and Jonathan was touting the tour facility.
Its biggest trick in my mind though you didn't see in the video - one little slider that takes you from the Optical to the Infrared and Microwave and X-Ray sky. Simply blew me away.
It already supports VOTable and FITS images and dozens of other formats that astronomers use and are becoming standards for enthusiastic hobbyists. You can take your own images and put them up on the same sky as data from Chandra or Swift or the best ground based data from MMT or Magellan or Keck. Now it starts to get really useful. The CfA at Harvard has been digitizing its old plates of sky images, Pan-STARRS will start operating sooner rather than later, SDSS has a ton of data already and LSST will be up in a few years imaging the entire sky every few nights. This is a monstrous amount of data and the system really gives you a way to search through it all very intuitively. I'd love the ability to click on a star in the sky and have all known spectra of it pop up along with references. Not quite there yet but it will be.
This also makes it the best educational tool. There are projects like Las Cumbres and several schools and colleges have access to telescopes so this gives you a great tool with which to look at data and take your own data and do it in a way that doesn't require you learning how to use NED and SIMBAD and looking for papers on ADS. But I think the biggest thing it does is just blow you away with a sense of how large everything is, or perhaps how small you are in relation and I think that is a very powerful idea. I remember the first time I saw the Eames Power of Ten video - this takes that to a different level and is genuinely thought provoking.
Quite simply the best thing I've ever seen out of Microsoft.
At the same time though lots of people under 30 love the latest summer blockbuster based on some superhero. So weekly/monthly comics may not be popular but comic book characters in latex suits sure. There is more merchandising than ever before and a lot of it sells pretty well - I saw a kid throwing a tantrum over some batman toy in a Walgreens. I've also seen a lot of people under 30 read graphic novels (Neil Gaiman's Sandman a couple of years ago, Sin City, after that, and funnily enough Watchmen these days which has been out for ages)- weekly or monthly comics not so much but the comics industry is by no means dead.
RTFA
Technology allowing constant monitoring of workers was previously limited to pilots, firefighters and Nasa astronauts. This is believed to be the first time a company has proposed developing such software for mainstream workplaces (emphasis mine). Of course people are going to overreact and rightly so - it is a privacy nightmare. I don't think it will ever actually be implemented but that never stops a company from patenting something does it.
Always what will happen is the rate at which new works are produced will drop (significantly, most likely) but never cease. And there's no reason for this drop to be forced. 5 years ago there was no flickr, youtube, garageband... Compare how much work there is out there now compared to five years ago and you will see that the rate hasn't significantly dropped - its grown at a rate where I have the opposite problem - there is just too much stuff out there and more than I can ever see is very, very good.
Yep, I know that I can see the stats, or 'credits', for my account :
* SETI@home member since 8 Jul 1999
* Total credit 95,887
* Recent average credit 198.56
and the stats for the 'top participants', 'top computers' and 'top teams', but for me the emphasis on earning 'credits' is making it into a toy competition for overclockers (no offense meant). Yes but you can also see your setiathome classic credits - for example http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_user.php?userid=78964 SETI@home member since 15 Dec 2000 Total credit 227,639 Recent average credit 379.47 SETI@home classic workunits 4,111 What is a 'credit' anyway, in real terms like cpu hours or floating point operations ? http://www.boinc-wiki.info/Computation_of_Credit
What have gone are the stats for the project as a whole.
* Total cpu time (in years) for the project
* Total cpu time (in years) for the last 24 hrs
* Current processing capability (TFlop/s average for the last 24hrs) http://boincstats.com/stats/project_graph.php?pr=sah
Total Active Users 745,285 191,218 Hosts 1,725,623 1,715,680 Teams 51,493 19,422 Countries 234 219
Total Credit 21,989,922,367 Recent average credit 36,291,316 Average floating point operations per second 362,913.2 GigaFLOPS / 362.913 TeraFLOPS
I know there are several different sites that produce stats, so these might be available somewhere, but they aren't on the main site any more. Yeah wish it was on the main site as well - but then again I remember the main site being down all the time too.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. Parents should be able to raise their kids as they see fit, provided they aren't abusing them. Why is it any business of the state if I want to shield my kids from a lifestyle that I may not approve of?
You can. Just not in *PUBLIC* school. Want to shelter them from things that you find offensive then home school them. Don't complain if they have a hard time fitting into society later.
I disagree with the "Parents should be able to raise their kids as they see fit." The big problem here is the "their". They are not your property. They are supposed to independent human beings but they can't manage that initially and wouldn't know where to begin so you as parent get to take care of them and raise them. This does not mean mold them to be exactly the same as you. Don't push your beliefs or biases on them. Teach them to think critically on their own and they can decide what they believe.
http://exit1.org/dvdrip/
Never had a problem with it.
Seems like there are plenty of ways to make money from last.fm users without charging them directly.
- a craigslist/ebay style setup to buy/sell/trade music/show tickets/whatever - take a cut from the ads/transaction fee - there are forums but these are token and there isn't a Buy/Sell section anywhere AFAIK.
- use music recommendations to sell people music directly rather than linking to amazon/itunes whatever. Particularly for smaller bands that can't get recording contracts - work to hook them up with gigs and sell merchandise through the site and take a cut - essentially cut out the record labels as middle men and still provide a service that makes it easy to find smaller bands.
- they have recommendations for events in the local area but I never see them handle ticket sales at all - well why the heck not - local shows are much smaller scale than giant stadium shows and they could get a larger turnout and
Of course setting up this kind of infrastructure costs money, particularly to do it globally, but use your user base to add events in the region and use them to review and categorize bands and just make it easy for bands to offer goods through the site. Charging users directly is a good way to lose them because there are plenty of free alternatives and we've all gotten used to not paying for radio. Music fans are among the most passionate - give them services they can actually use and take a reasonable cut and they'll probably embrace it in droves.
They just do not get social networking at all.
I dislike using god and a hokey religion as an explanation for anything. I couldn't stand the last few episodes with Baltar babbling on about his angels. The show has always had a religious theme but I held out for a reasonable rational explanation of the head characters (something to do with cylon projection) and Kara.
Instead pooft she magically disappears into thin air, after magically entering the coordinates of a single magic planet in all of space from a magic song that her magically disappearing dad taught her when she was young and that Hera magically happens to know as well. How? What? Why?
I disliked the get rid of all our technology and live like the natives bit. Both the god explanation and the luddite attitude seem to me to be a diservice to many science fiction fans who overwhelmingly like science and technology and reject hokey explanations for things like flying spaghetti monsters. Seriously, what happens the next time someone needs to get a tooth pulled now that all their technology is gone.
I disliked the Cavil suicide bit because it seemed out of character along with actually listening to Baltar's stupid little speech on coexistence and angels. I'd like Boomer's redemption to not have been followed with her getting shot in the gut again. I didn't need to see Adama puking.
And finally, Tyrol is an idiot for not realizing that killing Cally was the nicest thing Tory or anyone else in the entire fleet did for him.
So Ogg is free. Even if the manufacturers got $5 for each machine they shipped Ogg on, most would not do it because it would not increase sales by any measurable amount, and it would force them to pay more for hardware. MP3 decoders are mass produced and very very cheap.
Except a lot of manufacturers DO support Ogg/Vorbis (hereafter ogg because we are all sick of the container vs codec posts).
http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware
That list is in fact out of date already because the Archos 5 I have very definitely supports ogg.
The elephant in the corner that refuses to join the party is the ipod. It can already decode ogg with Rockbox and there isn't any terribly good reason they couldn't support ogg natively.
Right now I can rip music from CDs to ogg and not have any issues except if someone else wants that music (which is illegal anyway right...) and has an ipod. Then one of us has to transcode it to something they can use.
If Apple did add native ogg support I imagine the format's adoption would increase substantially. You'd just be able to find a lot more (illegal or otherwise) ogg files floating around that you could toss on your ipod and have it Just Work.
It's called fanaticism. If it wasn't countries or religions it'd just be something else.
The Cowons are excellent - I've had both the M3L and the X5L from petty much right after their release. Excellent sound, battery life, and support for just about every audio format I could throw at it and both took daily abuse for years (the X5s video support is a bit of a joke). The M3L was stolen in NYC (why I got the X5L) and the X5L now stays at work. Unfortunately, they haven't really come out with a successor with larger capacity, which is why I move to the Archos 5 but it annoys me with the number of codecs and extras one has to get to use features that ought to be standard (FM tuner, aac, m4a, hi def video, battery dock...) but it also plays Ogg and FLAC out the box with the current firmware. I imagine all of them are readily available in Italy.
I remember playing it when it first came out and the bloody three tentacles and having to crawl around and toss grenades to distract the thing. Still have my unreal (gorgeous levels and I think the first game with decent AI for the baddies but really rubbish story and the series went dead with II) and quake II (kill lots of things, get key, open door, shoot boss much like the first one except with an actual boss at the end) discs from that time too but the original HL was the game that stood out simply because of the tight scripted story that made the game interesting. Didn't hurt that they developed the multiple PoVs with the other games, something I really wish they'd do with HL2.
We could use less criminals on the streets.
Except he was not really on the streets here exactly now was he. And if you'd actually RTFA you'd realize he still isn't. He didn't fall for it. He has been further indicted in another case for developing malware. Currently, he is on probation for the Valve network hack in Germany and it isn't clear if he will be extradited or not. Extraditing him is a good way of doing it. Enticing him here with a job interview with an intent to arrest him reeks of entrapment.
er ctrl-w-w
(forgot about tags)
:sp to split the screen
to toggle between
made my life a lot easier
I'm not American and couldn't vote but I've spent all my adult life here and the last eight years have affected my life in much the same ways it affected yours. I'm very glad there were record turnouts, whoever you voted for.
I think its good to recognize this as a historic and important moment. I stayed up all night working and listening to the coverage. It is a night I'll remember and I'm admittedly quite happy. Certainly, there is hope, a word I haven't heard much off since 2001. I'm very glad that he acknowledged that the real work lies ahead and that it will take a spirit of service and sacrifice and both of them talked about coming together and bridging the gaps that have cut this nation.
Bridging gaps is a hugely critical message today. There is an interesting discordant note between all the commentators speaking about how this marks the end of slavery and the fruition of the civil rights movement and the change of a generation, and what looks like a yes vote on Proposition 8 in California. When the dust has settled, there is going to be much talk about the way different demographics voted and the gaps that represents. I hope it will not take 40 years for all of us to recognize that in the end, beyond nationality, skin colour, sexual orientation, religious beliefs or background, we are all just human beings.
the same thing that happens to some of my old game CDs that have developed CRC errors - look on the abandonware sites. In other words pirate it.
It'd be decent of publishers to release their games to abandonware sites say 5-6 years after initial release. Some do.
Not that it proves anything but this was something I posted two years ago.
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195474&cid=16020768
Eventually I gave up and picked up the battle chest and did play diablo again and it was boring because the levels were incredibly repetitive. They were procedurally generated - what did anyone expect? That adding lava was suddenly going to make the environment more interesting? It was behind par for the time too mind - several 2D and FPS games had better level design and came out before Diablo. The crusader games comes to mind.
It isn't cartoonish or anime - the idea is to create a fantasy world. Diablo didn't have a world - it had a town with a plain boring dungeon that was pretty much exactly the same all the way down. D2 made the first effort where you had some more variety in the character classes and that there were distinct areas each with a different feel but within each you still had dungeons that were essentially the same. From what I can tell with the screenshots for this world they are actually trying to create more of a world this time around, and hopefully give it more of an RPG feel than a pure hack/slash.
To stick with the car analogy, it'd be like selling a tiny little car with a Bugatti Veyron engine and advertising it on that basis. Bugatti would (probably quite rightly) complain that the cooling systems etc simply weren't designed to work with a small car, and the engine would probably break down, damaging their reputation in the process.
Except Mac hardware isn't so much Bugatti Veyron as it is an overpriced Suzuki Liana with a pretty exterior. The hardware isn't special at all (take a look at the diversity on OSx86) - Apple is mad not because people can run their software on non-Apple hardware but because Psystar could potentially allow them to do it *easily*.
Ooh thats a bit too cruel even for them - I mean can you imagine sitting across from Darl McBride for all eternity.
Excuse me but real men use butterflies. You see the change in system state as the output is calculated creates temperature differences which in turn create pockets of higher pressure air to form near the computer. Such a small change in the distribution of heat near the earth's surface creates minute, immeasurable, changes in atmospheric circulation. Fortunately it also annoys butterflies which come around flapping their wings outside my window and I've learnt how to read the output from the number of butterflies and the individual and group flapping patterns. I even use the reverse technique to program on occasion but its faster to use a vi shortcut -> :dwit for do what I think. Emacs is useless and has no such feature but you can still use the butterflies.
http://www.xkcd.com/378/
Most Bible Thumpers have it totally wrong. IF they actually read the bible, they would have found that the earth was NOT actually created in 6 or 7 days. YES YES That is the GENESIS account, BUT, the original hebrew/aramaic translations describe a day as a period or era (really undetermined period of time) Psalms describes that a day with God is as a thousand years (let you look it up for yourself). this does not mean day with God IS a thousand years. It really just means a day is a long long time. hence AS a thousand years and not IS a thousand years. SO it is plausible he created the universe AND still have the big bang theory still be in harmony. Except that Scientists don't want to accept that and Zealot, fundamentalist religionsists do not want to acknoledge this.
Make no mistake, what I am saying here is that an open mind be kept on BOTH sides. It is entirely possible our universe was created by a supreme being. There seems to be too much order in the small and larger details for that to be considered a "random" accident of the universe. On the other hand it coule be random which also seems possible as well. The answer is not conclusivly known for either or, and only human arrogance would presume otherwise. One day we WILL know the absolute truth of it. But at this time there is too much bickering and closed minded ness on both sides to actually try to figure this out.
Hundreds or thousands of years from now our decsendents (assuming we don't blow ourselves up before then) will look at us much the way we look at our ancestors or we will be living life the way the Bible says things will happen. Right now we have "the earth is flat" mentality about all this religion AND science. We know very little about space especially since we have not been out there exploring it. And no being just outside our atmostphere does not count. It gives alot of info, but until we can explore our own Solar System fully, we have very little data to go on other than what we can see with the limits of a telescope.
SO it is plausible he created the universe AND still have the big bang theory still be in harmony. Except that Scientists don't want to accept that and Zealot, fundamentalist religionsists do not want to acknoledge this.
Even if we accept your apologist argument there is the small problem of the rest of it - water to wine, virgin births, randomly creating zombies from the dead and sticking them in heaven, burning cities or flooding the planet willy nilly, turning staves into snakes and people into pillars of salt. There is plenty of good science to say that these things don't happen and remarkably we haven't seen them happen since the group of chaps that penned the Bible wrote that it did. And if it did happen science would try to find an explanation for it. Its a very different theory than there is a someone atop a cloud with a big flowing white beard that makes things happen.
Scientists don't generally accept unicorns or leprechauns or the existence of Odin and his two ravens or for that matter claims of cold fusion either and we don't call them close minded because they don't. Why is your fairy story any different? And even if you ignore the fact that all these miracles aren't possible and believe they happened maybe people don't accept your god because they think its a nasty little piece of work and not exactly a good role model. And why the heck should I keep an open mind to just BOTH sides - why not have the universe created by a three headed chap named Brahma. Or how about Allah. Why not teach school kids in Ohio about Allah's intelligent design. Why not "One nation under Allah." Why should our descendants just live life the way the Bible says as the alternative - your argument reeks with your prejudices.
When you claim that there seems to be too much order in the small and larger details for it to be considered random is this based on your extensive study of Field Theory and General relativity? There are more general books on the subject t
I've been very lucky to see this project from alpha to present because one of friends interned with the group and introduced me to them - its gone through some amazing development - I remember seeing this I think early 2007 - it looked more like Stellarium than anything else but just plane black with solid circles for stars and galaxies. It took forever to load images when you zoomed in. Must have crashed about 30 times in a five minute demo.
Jonathan Fay (of MaximDL fame) showed it off at Table Mountain Star Party last year and they'd moved from that sky to a synthetic pre-rendered sky that would transition to real images from Hubble or other sources as you zoomed in.
Saw it again at the American Astronomical Society Meeting this January in Austin and really got to play with it since they were right alongside the Harvard IIC booth. It was the first time they were using real imagery for the entire sky and it looked amazing and Jonathan was touting the tour facility.
Its biggest trick in my mind though you didn't see in the video - one little slider that takes you from the Optical to the Infrared and Microwave and X-Ray sky. Simply blew me away.
It already supports VOTable and FITS images and dozens of other formats that astronomers use and are becoming standards for enthusiastic hobbyists. You can take your own images and put them up on the same sky as data from Chandra or Swift or the best ground based data from MMT or Magellan or Keck. Now it starts to get really useful. The CfA at Harvard has been digitizing its old plates of sky images, Pan-STARRS will start operating sooner rather than later, SDSS has a ton of data already and LSST will be up in a few years imaging the entire sky every few nights. This is a monstrous amount of data and the system really gives you a way to search through it all very intuitively. I'd love the ability to click on a star in the sky and have all known spectra of it pop up along with references. Not quite there yet but it will be.
This also makes it the best educational tool. There are projects like Las Cumbres and several schools and colleges have access to telescopes so this gives you a great tool with which to look at data and take your own data and do it in a way that doesn't require you learning how to use NED and SIMBAD and looking for papers on ADS. But I think the biggest thing it does is just blow you away with a sense of how large everything is, or perhaps how small you are in relation and I think that is a very powerful idea. I remember the first time I saw the Eames Power of Ten video - this takes that to a different level and is genuinely thought provoking.
Quite simply the best thing I've ever seen out of Microsoft.
Yes clearly Jack Thompson isn't a person.
At the same time though lots of people under 30 love the latest summer blockbuster based on some superhero. So weekly/monthly comics may not be popular but comic book characters in latex suits sure. There is more merchandising than ever before and a lot of it sells pretty well - I saw a kid throwing a tantrum over some batman toy in a Walgreens. I've also seen a lot of people under 30 read graphic novels (Neil Gaiman's Sandman a couple of years ago, Sin City, after that, and funnily enough Watchmen these days which has been out for ages)- weekly or monthly comics not so much but the comics industry is by no means dead.
Compare how much work there is out there now compared to five years ago and you will see that the rate hasn't significantly dropped - its grown at a rate where I have the opposite problem - there is just too much stuff out there and more than I can ever see is very, very good.
* SETI@home member since 8 Jul 1999
* Total credit 95,887
* Recent average credit 198.56
and the stats for the 'top participants', 'top computers' and 'top teams', but for me the emphasis on earning 'credits' is making it into a toy competition for overclockers (no offense meant). Yes but you can also see your setiathome classic credits - for example
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_user.php?userid=78964
SETI@home member since 15 Dec 2000
Total credit 227,639
Recent average credit 379.47
SETI@home classic workunits 4,111 What is a 'credit' anyway, in real terms like cpu hours or floating point operations ? http://www.boinc-wiki.info/Computation_of_Credit What have gone are the stats for the project as a whole.
* Total cpu time (in years) for the project
* Total cpu time (in years) for the last 24 hrs
* Current processing capability (TFlop/s average for the last 24hrs) http://boincstats.com/stats/project_graph.php?pr=sah
Total Active
Users 745,285 191,218
Hosts 1,725,623 1,715,680
Teams 51,493 19,422
Countries 234 219
Total Credit 21,989,922,367
Recent average credit 36,291,316
Average floating point operations per second 362,913.2 GigaFLOPS / 362.913 TeraFLOPS I know there are several different sites that produce stats, so these might be available somewhere, but they aren't on the main site any more. Yeah wish it was on the main site as well - but then again I remember the main site being down all the time too.