I'll concur with that -- the Navy certainly fell right on in with MS, with a few notable exceptions. Anybody remember SmartShip? That was initially a UNIX platform, until somebody decided at the final stage of project development that it needed to be Windows. Submarine fire control systems (incredibly vital piece of gear) run UNIX. So do the critical systems that automatically control trim and ballasting considerations. Sonar? Yeah, that's UNIX too. Basically, anything that's important is anything but Windows (did I mention that all of those systems are running different variants of UNIX?), while non-tactical stuff, the user side of the house, runs MS. Hm...
But what if you _need_ that port open, for whatever reason? What about the poor bastard that runs their exchange server on port 135, and can't change it due to security restrictions placed on them by USSTRATCOM? (Yes, this is a real-life scenario, or I would be laughing this off too... Oh, and yes, WinNT is required by STRATCOM as well, until they eventually decide to welcome the 21st century to the IT-21 program...).
Your examples happen to be one of the draws of analog photography, btw. Film-based photographers love to think about which films get them the best colors for a given situation. Shooting on a cloudy day in Ireland? Try Agfachrome -- great greens and greys! Shooting portraits? I'll recommend Kodak for their excellent rendition of skin tones! Anything with sky or water in it? Fujichrome will take those colors away with their exagerated saturation curves!
You see, that's part of the art of it. Careful matching of film to situation, processing to exposure, exposure to visualized image, and then ultimately matching the finished print to what you visualized -- all of these things are critical parts of what make photography fun for many of us, and all of that goes away when you shift to digital.
I won't say you're wrong, but I will say you're looking at comparing something different.
Find me any analog photographer who shoots 1500 frames a year and hasn't come up with at least one major optimization in the film cost cycle. Your estimate on film costs assume that you're paying retail prices for film and processing, which is a little silly, isn't it? In the last year, I've shot over 200 rolls of film, each 36 frames. I spend about $2.50/roll on the film, and can process 4 rolls for something like $.32. I only print the real winners, and those only cost the price of paper (the cost of chems is negligible, ultimately, as demonstrated with the negative processing prices). So for 1500 frames, which is only about 40 rolls of film, I'm spending a grand total of about $100. At that rate, it'll take you a lot longer to make up the cost of your $1000 camera, by which point it will have been obsolete for several years.
void Troll (int ModPoints) { If only we had a better election system, the Green Party would have won like the voters in Florida clearly wanted, and all this wouldn't be happening! }
I beg to differ! GPS is the current standard in navigation. Taking a starshot is crude, at best, and may get you within several miles -- that's assuming you're good at it, have practiced a lot, and get lucky. Moreover, celestial navigation simply isn't an option for an awful lot of seagoing vessels. It may work passably well on tankers and freighters, but imagine a submarine having to surface once a day to take a fix from the stars!
As to the other forms you mention, there are no other fix methods which work in the middle of the ocean. Near land, some places still have LORAN or OMEGA, but the few places that haven't phased them out already recognize that they do not possess the accuracy to navigate inland waters with.
You laugh, "hahaha, in inland waters, just navigate by standard piloting procedures! Take visual fixes from the land!" Easy to say for a port like Port Canaveral, or Norfolk, Virginia -- visibility is typically pretty good (though Norfolk often suffers from an afternoon fogbank that always mystified me, and P-Can suffers from haze that often obscures usable navigation aids). Try driving into the Puget Sound in 500ft visibility without GPS, however. You can't see the front of your ship, let alone the land. Other ships are totally invisible to you in the dense fog, and you won't know you're in trouble until your ship stops when you hit the shore. Were you planning on taking a celestial fix? Go ahead, you can't even see the stars, let alone do the necessary calculations in enough time to have a meaningful fix.
Please, enlighten me as to these "other" wonderful means which work so well, and are so adaptable to the circumstances.
This is actually a very common phenomenon on Navy submarines. You see, the toilets all dump into a common "sanitary tank," which periodically needs to be emptied, usually straight into the ocean. Well, pumps are both expensive and noisy, so the better alternative is to pressurize the tank with 700psi air and eject it overboard. Unfortunately, if some hapless individual attempts to flush (basically just opening the drain at the bottom of the toilet, straight into the san tank), the tank will eject straight into the people space. Horribly disgusting, happens regularly. You'd almost think that with all the funding the Navy gets, we'd install a check valve or something...
I can agree with this. As a freshman intending to major in CS, I wrote a program in my spare time that would play an incredible game of tetris. My model only looked at one piece ahead, however, and did not analyze the entire (finite) game.
The real question in my mind is that if an NP problem can be adequately solved by some snot-nosed kid who doesn't realize that he's trying to solve an impossible problem, how many other NP problems have easy solutions that are simply being overlooked?
I'm sorry you feel so close-minded about this issue. There are still a great many people using film-based cameras for really spectacular work. Alternately, most of the people I know who use digital take, well, great snapshots. 35mm, BTW, still beats out these new cameras in several areas. It may not be as easy to e-mail the pictures to your grandmother, but nothing prints like Fujichrome Velvia 50. Even after the digital cameras have achieved the resolution (though the price will be insanely high for many years to come), they will still lack the color saturation and dynamic range of good film. Have you looked at how digital cameras render B&W? Shocking, isn't it? Or perhaps you don't care, because B&W is so completely "vintage," and "old-fashioned." Digital certainly has its uses. There are a great many things for which it is very practical. My non-photographer friends enjoy the ability to e-mail pictures around. My photographer friends like the fact that they don't have to play with chemicals anymore. But some of us will still hold out for the pure art that photography once was. Sometime you should try playing with a LF camera -- compare a print from a 4x5 sheet of say, Ilford Delta 100 to the print you get from your spiffy super-whamodyne digital toy.
You people amaze me. The best severance package I can hope for from my job is to never have to return to it. The day my contract expires, I go home jobless -- and that makes me happy. If I disclose any specific information about what I do (I'm in the Navy), I could go to prison. Lawsuits are simply not an option -- ever try suing the Navy? Muahahaha! Don't go complaining about a lousy severance package (aaw, they said I couldn't sue, and wouldn't let me talk about my job, or they'd take away my $50,000 bonus! How ridiculous is that?!) until you look around and realize that you could really have it a lot worse.
I'm sorry to sound old-fashioned, but there's an alternative to your plan which worked quite well for many thousands of years. I am in a similar situation, you see, except that my wife has decided not to pursue the ideal career with her degree, but rather to be with me. She'll work part time until we have kids, at which point she'll stay home to raise them. Her excellent education will serve well in the home; I am certain our children will be better off for having a well educated mother. I know it's a crazy idea in today's world -- Double Income No Kids is so much more fun!!... But it is definitely worth some consideration.
The bottom line -- excuses define priorities. "Honey, we can't live in the same place because of our jobs" is almost like saying "My job is more important to me than being with you." (And yes, I've heard that before, too, which is why I'm married to the one who would follow me anywhere.)
It is to be expected that a loudmouthed braggart wouldn't even bother to read his own references. If you read the navy.mil link closely, you'll note that it gives the rate of change of the earth's rotation with a unit of ms/days/century, ie, a changing rate, not a constant. Granted, we're slowing at about 2.2 ms/cent right now, but if you look at the inputs to the differential equation, you'll find that it makes a lot of sense that we would slow down more slowly as we continued slowing down. Think about it, then re-read your resources, then please realize that science based on bad theology is a terrible idea.
Coincidentally, yes. I cook my own food (try my chocolate-mint brownies...), repair my own car ('95 Civic), and built the house I am living in. I am capable of reading books, absorbing knowledge, and understanding the things that I read. If that is the dividing line between the rest of society and I, it's a pretty sad world we live in. Granted, not all people who can't use a computer are idiots; only the people who are totally unaware of the big picture are idiots.
Two major notes on Yorktown (just playing DA, here): 1) It was originally supposed to be a unix platform. From the keel up, right up until the 11th hour, everything on the boat was unix. Then just before the final due date, somebody up high declared IT21 supreme and shifted the entire thing over to NT. Naturally all the unix experts walked, leaving nobody who knew anything about NT to make the project work right. Naturally, the project was a relatively impressive failure. 2) Even had the source been open, the Navy has this brilliantly illogical policy of not carrying anyone on board who actually understands what the computers are doing. In training, we are told time and time again how we are "operators," and that we do not need to understand how anything works. There are plans in the works to change this, though it probably won't come to fruition until perhaps 5 or 8 years from now; the Navy is a very slow beauracracy. Bottom line: when a computer onboard ship breaks, it's just plain broken, especially if the fix requires something difficult, like changing a piece of code and recompiling. Oooh.
I agree -- buy the CDs! I've just finished reading like 50 posts about how awesome the company is and how great the product is, followed by the completely illogical "I'm downloading the ISOs right now!" I have a fast connection, but tomorrow I'll go out and purchase the distro. Maybe two, 'coz I know someone who'd appreciate a copy of their own. Just think, for the price of a couple of take-out pizzas, you can support your favorite company, the future of Linux, American freedom, and Momma's Apple Pie. Well, maybe not the apple pie, but it's a good idea anyway.:)
My experimentation shows that if you have a girl stand close to a very large clock, her period and the period of the clock will never fall into sync. Am I doing something wrong?
Heck, I had a full professor ask me, a fresh graduate, for a little help with html. Little did I realize that he didn't even know what html was, let alone how to write it, or what it was good for. Oh, did I mention that he was part of the computer science department? Seems like his classes were data structures and programming languages.
I'll tell you right now, they're not half so smart as you think they are. These are the same people who found a farmer's old pig graveyard and heralded it as the discovery of the missing link. Oh, the embarrassment at discovering that they had re-arranged the bones incorrectly and mis-dated them by a couple million years, and that all they really had were 50 year old pig bones. This happens with fairly moderate frequency, and those are just the times they get caught. There are countless examples of "scientists" who make wild claims that sound halfway reasonable to an uneducated populous.
You see, when you devote your life to digging up little pieces of old stuff, it's fairly natural to find yourself saying really silly things from time to time. Fortunately, 99% of all people are too lost in the mumbo-jumbo big words they use to really pay attention to how absolutely inane the things they're saying are.
Next thing you know, we're teaching to our children as law a theory which has only the weakest of circumstantial evidence, mostly made up by people who have spent their lives looking at little pieces of stone and claiming that it's really a stegasaurus.
We do this kind of thing all the time in the Navy. A problem is deemed to exist, so a solution must be made apparent. Someone receives an unexpected shock while working on surprisingly energized gear, so we stop work and take a saturday to have a Safety Stand-down. Does it fix anything? Does it identify and repair problems with how we operate? Not so much. Does it make an appearance of taking action? Can we tell our superiors, "We're doing something about this problem?" Can we claim an appropriate level of concern, and that we've done something to fix the problem? Yes, that's exactly the point. We're just putting a check in the box that says, "Do something about the problem." This is exactly what I see happening at MS -- they're demonstrating an appropriate level of concern, putting checks in the "Corrective Action Completed" boxes, and moving along with their normal lives. It sure would be nice if they'd fix a few bugs, but I'm not getting my hopes up until they're done.
The first is that it assumes that the level of the isotope in the material is the same as you would find in the world today -- this gives you a starting point. In some cases, this is a valid assumption. In other cases, it's close enough. In many cases, however, it's totally wrong.
The second is the rate of decay. Granted, most people who study nuclear physics think that decay of isotopes is constant, there are other factors, including the introduction or loss of the isotope you're measuring, by artificial means. If you're judging the age of marbles in a bag knowing the rate of marble disappearance, but someone is sneaking marbles into your sack, you'll come up with wildly inaccurate ages.
To get really accurate ages on stuff, we have to rely on history as a whole, and our thinking knowledge of when other things happened. Documents, for example, are usually dated very accurately. While the carbon age gives us a range of hundreds of years, we can analyze the type of material it is written on, the location it was found in, the method of storage, the style of the script, etc., and conclude with excellent accuracy (in many cases) exactly how old a document is.
So anytime you see something dated to within 10 years or so, they almost certainly aren't using radioisotope dating, because no credible scholar would base his reputation on that kind of evidence.
If it's so easy to pass off Zeus turning into a bull as just a story, why is it so hard to accept Jesus walking on water as just a story? Could it be the social context of the believer....? Hmmmm?
Passing off the miracles of Jesus Christ as mere stories would be a lot easier if the only story we had was the eyewitness accounts of the gospel writers. If that was the only evidence, I'd have to laugh at those silly Christians too. However, the corroborative evidence is really astounding -- there are a vast number of well known secular historians (Josephus the Elder, for example) who mentioned Jesus in passing, and whose history agrees with that of the bible.
There is an excellent book by Josh McDowell entitled "The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict," chock-full of real live facts that support the scriptures. Before you claim the bible as a myth, you really ought to have a look at the evidence.
BTW, moderators, just because someone agrees with your opinion doesn't make them a (5, Insightful).
Won't you still have to switch? I mean, it isn't like you are suddenly granted more hands -- you still have to move your hands from the controller section of The Monstrosity to the keyboard section on The Monstrosity, just like you do now. Laugh quietly to yourself at all the fools who go out and purchase GameCubes and twitter inanely about how wonderful The Monstrosity is, because now you know better.
...Jesus Christ lived and walked the earth. He performed miracles, and was witnessed doing so by countless people -- documented by religious and secular historians alike. Moreover, the people who had spent their lives working with Jesus ultimately gave their lives as a testimony of their faith. So confident were they in the man (who was God) that they knew, they were not afraid to face death.
Luke Skywalker is fiction, made up by a man who is promoting a totally different set of religious ideas (mostly eastern mysticism). The history books, both of children who 'worship' Jedi's and mature adults who have no interest in the series, are mysteriously quiet on the whole phenomenon. A thousand years from now, we will remember Like Skywalker as a neat fictional story. Meanwhile, we will still remember Jesus as the Christ, the Saviour, and the Son of God.
Teaching thinking really begins long before college. If you haven't figured it out by the time you hit college, you probably never will. Learning how to think starts extremely young, and is taught (or should be taught, rather) by your parents. It is primarily their role to make you well-rounded in your foundational years.
For example -- the graduates from my college tend to be well-rounded thinkers not so much because the school trains them that way, but rather because it weeds out those who do not have the ability. (1100 inductees, 837 graduates, woohoo!) The graduates from Podunk U of South Carolina were probably hicks who were never good at thinking to begin with, so even if you sent them to Harvard or Oxford, they wouldn't somehow magically be transformed into critical thinkers with good leadership ability and an inate charisma.
Ad: One slightly used soapbox for sale, $.02, or highest bidder...
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I'll concur with that -- the Navy certainly fell right on in with MS, with a few notable exceptions. Anybody remember SmartShip? That was initially a UNIX platform, until somebody decided at the final stage of project development that it needed to be Windows. Submarine fire control systems (incredibly vital piece of gear) run UNIX. So do the critical systems that automatically control trim and ballasting considerations. Sonar? Yeah, that's UNIX too. Basically, anything that's important is anything but Windows (did I mention that all of those systems are running different variants of UNIX?), while non-tactical stuff, the user side of the house, runs MS. Hm...
But what if you _need_ that port open, for whatever reason? What about the poor bastard that runs their exchange server on port 135, and can't change it due to security restrictions placed on them by USSTRATCOM? (Yes, this is a real-life scenario, or I would be laughing this off too... Oh, and yes, WinNT is required by STRATCOM as well, until they eventually decide to welcome the 21st century to the IT-21 program...).
Your examples happen to be one of the draws of analog photography, btw. Film-based photographers love to think about which films get them the best colors for a given situation. Shooting on a cloudy day in Ireland? Try Agfachrome -- great greens and greys! Shooting portraits? I'll recommend Kodak for their excellent rendition of skin tones! Anything with sky or water in it? Fujichrome will take those colors away with their exagerated saturation curves!
You see, that's part of the art of it. Careful matching of film to situation, processing to exposure, exposure to visualized image, and then ultimately matching the finished print to what you visualized -- all of these things are critical parts of what make photography fun for many of us, and all of that goes away when you shift to digital.
I won't say you're wrong, but I will say you're looking at comparing something different.
Find me any analog photographer who shoots 1500 frames a year and hasn't come up with at least one major optimization in the film cost cycle. Your estimate on film costs assume that you're paying retail prices for film and processing, which is a little silly, isn't it? In the last year, I've shot over 200 rolls of film, each 36 frames. I spend about $2.50/roll on the film, and can process 4 rolls for something like $.32. I only print the real winners, and those only cost the price of paper (the cost of chems is negligible, ultimately, as demonstrated with the negative processing prices). So for 1500 frames, which is only about 40 rolls of film, I'm spending a grand total of about $100. At that rate, it'll take you a lot longer to make up the cost of your $1000 camera, by which point it will have been obsolete for several years.
Your call.
void Troll (int ModPoints)
{
If only we had a better election system, the Green Party would have won like the voters in Florida clearly wanted, and all this wouldn't be happening!
}
I beg to differ! GPS is the current standard in navigation. Taking a starshot is crude, at best, and may get you within several miles -- that's assuming you're good at it, have practiced a lot, and get lucky. Moreover, celestial navigation simply isn't an option for an awful lot of seagoing vessels. It may work passably well on tankers and freighters, but imagine a submarine having to surface once a day to take a fix from the stars!
As to the other forms you mention, there are no other fix methods which work in the middle of the ocean. Near land, some places still have LORAN or OMEGA, but the few places that haven't phased them out already recognize that they do not possess the accuracy to navigate inland waters with.
You laugh, "hahaha, in inland waters, just navigate by standard piloting procedures! Take visual fixes from the land!" Easy to say for a port like Port Canaveral, or Norfolk, Virginia -- visibility is typically pretty good (though Norfolk often suffers from an afternoon fogbank that always mystified me, and P-Can suffers from haze that often obscures usable navigation aids). Try driving into the Puget Sound in 500ft visibility without GPS, however. You can't see the front of your ship, let alone the land. Other ships are totally invisible to you in the dense fog, and you won't know you're in trouble until your ship stops when you hit the shore. Were you planning on taking a celestial fix? Go ahead, you can't even see the stars, let alone do the necessary calculations in enough time to have a meaningful fix.
Please, enlighten me as to these "other" wonderful means which work so well, and are so adaptable to the circumstances.
This is actually a very common phenomenon on Navy submarines. You see, the toilets all dump into a common "sanitary tank," which periodically needs to be emptied, usually straight into the ocean. Well, pumps are both expensive and noisy, so the better alternative is to pressurize the tank with 700psi air and eject it overboard. Unfortunately, if some hapless individual attempts to flush (basically just opening the drain at the bottom of the toilet, straight into the san tank), the tank will eject straight into the people space. Horribly disgusting, happens regularly. You'd almost think that with all the funding the Navy gets, we'd install a check valve or something...
I can agree with this. As a freshman intending to major in CS, I wrote a program in my spare time that would play an incredible game of tetris. My model only looked at one piece ahead, however, and did not analyze the entire (finite) game.
...just my $.02
The real question in my mind is that if an NP problem can be adequately solved by some snot-nosed kid who doesn't realize that he's trying to solve an impossible problem, how many other NP problems have easy solutions that are simply being overlooked?
I'm sorry you feel so close-minded about this issue. There are still a great many people using film-based cameras for really spectacular work. Alternately, most of the people I know who use digital take, well, great snapshots.
35mm, BTW, still beats out these new cameras in several areas. It may not be as easy to e-mail the pictures to your grandmother, but nothing prints like Fujichrome Velvia 50. Even after the digital cameras have achieved the resolution (though the price will be insanely high for many years to come), they will still lack the color saturation and dynamic range of good film. Have you looked at how digital cameras render B&W? Shocking, isn't it? Or perhaps you don't care, because B&W is so completely "vintage," and "old-fashioned."
Digital certainly has its uses. There are a great many things for which it is very practical. My non-photographer friends enjoy the ability to e-mail pictures around. My photographer friends like the fact that they don't have to play with chemicals anymore. But some of us will still hold out for the pure art that photography once was. Sometime you should try playing with a LF camera -- compare a print from a 4x5 sheet of say, Ilford Delta 100 to the print you get from your spiffy super-whamodyne digital toy.
You people amaze me. The best severance package I can hope for from my job is to never have to return to it. The day my contract expires, I go home jobless -- and that makes me happy. If I disclose any specific information about what I do (I'm in the Navy), I could go to prison. Lawsuits are simply not an option -- ever try suing the Navy? Muahahaha! Don't go complaining about a lousy severance package (aaw, they said I couldn't sue, and wouldn't let me talk about my job, or they'd take away my $50,000 bonus! How ridiculous is that?!) until you look around and realize that you could really have it a lot worse.
The bottom line -- excuses define priorities. "Honey, we can't live in the same place because of our jobs" is almost like saying "My job is more important to me than being with you." (And yes, I've heard that before, too, which is why I'm married to the one who would follow me anywhere.)
Best of luck to ya.
It is to be expected that a loudmouthed braggart wouldn't even bother to read his own references. If you read the navy.mil link closely, you'll note that it gives the rate of change of the earth's rotation with a unit of ms/days/century, ie, a changing rate, not a constant. Granted, we're slowing at about 2.2 ms/cent right now, but if you look at the inputs to the differential equation, you'll find that it makes a lot of sense that we would slow down more slowly as we continued slowing down. Think about it, then re-read your resources, then please realize that science based on bad theology is a terrible idea.
Coincidentally, yes. I cook my own food (try my chocolate-mint brownies...), repair my own car ('95 Civic), and built the house I am living in. I am capable of reading books, absorbing knowledge, and understanding the things that I read. If that is the dividing line between the rest of society and I, it's a pretty sad world we live in. Granted, not all people who can't use a computer are idiots; only the people who are totally unaware of the big picture are idiots.
No, the Pentium Pentium is from Little Caesar's Discount Computer Parts -- the first company to offer uniquely round processors...
Two major notes on Yorktown (just playing DA, here):
1) It was originally supposed to be a unix platform. From the keel up, right up until the 11th hour, everything on the boat was unix. Then just before the final due date, somebody up high declared IT21 supreme and shifted the entire thing over to NT. Naturally all the unix experts walked, leaving nobody who knew anything about NT to make the project work right. Naturally, the project was a relatively impressive failure.
2) Even had the source been open, the Navy has this brilliantly illogical policy of not carrying anyone on board who actually understands what the computers are doing. In training, we are told time and time again how we are "operators," and that we do not need to understand how anything works. There are plans in the works to change this, though it probably won't come to fruition until perhaps 5 or 8 years from now; the Navy is a very slow beauracracy. Bottom line: when a computer onboard ship breaks, it's just plain broken, especially if the fix requires something difficult, like changing a piece of code and recompiling. Oooh.
I agree -- buy the CDs! I've just finished reading like 50 posts about how awesome the company is and how great the product is, followed by the completely illogical "I'm downloading the ISOs right now!" I have a fast connection, but tomorrow I'll go out and purchase the distro. Maybe two, 'coz I know someone who'd appreciate a copy of their own. Just think, for the price of a couple of take-out pizzas, you can support your favorite company, the future of Linux, American freedom, and Momma's Apple Pie. Well, maybe not the apple pie, but it's a good idea anyway. :)
My experimentation shows that if you have a girl stand close to a very large clock, her period and the period of the clock will never fall into sync. Am I doing something wrong?
Heck, I had a full professor ask me, a fresh graduate, for a little help with html. Little did I realize that he didn't even know what html was, let alone how to write it, or what it was good for. Oh, did I mention that he was part of the computer science department? Seems like his classes were data structures and programming languages.
I'll tell you right now, they're not half so smart as you think they are. These are the same people who found a farmer's old pig graveyard and heralded it as the discovery of the missing link. Oh, the embarrassment at discovering that they had re-arranged the bones incorrectly and mis-dated them by a couple million years, and that all they really had were 50 year old pig bones. This happens with fairly moderate frequency, and those are just the times they get caught. There are countless examples of "scientists" who make wild claims that sound halfway reasonable to an uneducated populous.
You see, when you devote your life to digging up little pieces of old stuff, it's fairly natural to find yourself saying really silly things from time to time. Fortunately, 99% of all people are too lost in the mumbo-jumbo big words they use to really pay attention to how absolutely inane the things they're saying are.
Next thing you know, we're teaching to our children as law a theory which has only the weakest of circumstantial evidence, mostly made up by people who have spent their lives looking at little pieces of stone and claiming that it's really a stegasaurus.
We do this kind of thing all the time in the Navy. A problem is deemed to exist, so a solution must be made apparent. Someone receives an unexpected shock while working on surprisingly energized gear, so we stop work and take a saturday to have a Safety Stand-down. Does it fix anything? Does it identify and repair problems with how we operate? Not so much. Does it make an appearance of taking action? Can we tell our superiors, "We're doing something about this problem?" Can we claim an appropriate level of concern, and that we've done something to fix the problem? Yes, that's exactly the point. We're just putting a check in the box that says, "Do something about the problem." This is exactly what I see happening at MS -- they're demonstrating an appropriate level of concern, putting checks in the "Corrective Action Completed" boxes, and moving along with their normal lives. It sure would be nice if they'd fix a few bugs, but I'm not getting my hopes up until they're done.
The first is that it assumes that the level of the isotope in the material is the same as you would find in the world today -- this gives you a starting point. In some cases, this is a valid assumption. In other cases, it's close enough. In many cases, however, it's totally wrong.
The second is the rate of decay. Granted, most people who study nuclear physics think that decay of isotopes is constant, there are other factors, including the introduction or loss of the isotope you're measuring, by artificial means. If you're judging the age of marbles in a bag knowing the rate of marble disappearance, but someone is sneaking marbles into your sack, you'll come up with wildly inaccurate ages.
To get really accurate ages on stuff, we have to rely on history as a whole, and our thinking knowledge of when other things happened. Documents, for example, are usually dated very accurately. While the carbon age gives us a range of hundreds of years, we can analyze the type of material it is written on, the location it was found in, the method of storage, the style of the script, etc., and conclude with excellent accuracy (in many cases) exactly how old a document is.
So anytime you see something dated to within 10 years or so, they almost certainly aren't using radioisotope dating, because no credible scholar would base his reputation on that kind of evidence.
Dan
If it's so easy to pass off Zeus turning into a bull as just a story, why is it so hard to accept Jesus walking on water as just a story? Could it be the social context of the believer....? Hmmmm?
Passing off the miracles of Jesus Christ as mere stories would be a lot easier if the only story we had was the eyewitness accounts of the gospel writers. If that was the only evidence, I'd have to laugh at those silly Christians too. However, the corroborative evidence is really astounding -- there are a vast number of well known secular historians (Josephus the Elder, for example) who mentioned Jesus in passing, and whose history agrees with that of the bible.
There is an excellent book by Josh McDowell entitled "The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict," chock-full of real live facts that support the scriptures. Before you claim the bible as a myth, you really ought to have a look at the evidence.
BTW, moderators, just because someone agrees with your opinion doesn't make them a (5, Insightful).
Dan
Won't you still have to switch? I mean, it isn't like you are suddenly granted more hands -- you still have to move your hands from the controller section of The Monstrosity to the keyboard section on The Monstrosity, just like you do now. Laugh quietly to yourself at all the fools who go out and purchase GameCubes and twitter inanely about how wonderful The Monstrosity is, because now you know better.
...Jesus Christ lived and walked the earth. He performed miracles, and was witnessed doing so by countless people -- documented by religious and secular historians alike. Moreover, the people who had spent their lives working with Jesus ultimately gave their lives as a testimony of their faith. So confident were they in the man (who was God) that they knew, they were not afraid to face death.
Luke Skywalker is fiction, made up by a man who is promoting a totally different set of religious ideas (mostly eastern mysticism). The history books, both of children who 'worship' Jedi's and mature adults who have no interest in the series, are mysteriously quiet on the whole phenomenon. A thousand years from now, we will remember Like Skywalker as a neat fictional story. Meanwhile, we will still remember Jesus as the Christ, the Saviour, and the Son of God.
For example -- the graduates from my college tend to be well-rounded thinkers not so much because the school trains them that way, but rather because it weeds out those who do not have the ability. (1100 inductees, 837 graduates, woohoo!) The graduates from Podunk U of South Carolina were probably hicks who were never good at thinking to begin with, so even if you sent them to Harvard or Oxford, they wouldn't somehow magically be transformed into critical thinkers with good leadership ability and an inate charisma.
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