The difference between computer science and what is nowadays referred to as CS is very straightforward, but it is often confused due to the fact that computation has evolved from being a theory to being an industry based on a theory, where various engineering and techy skills are needed. Take relational databases and SQL. Coming up with the concept of storing information based on predicates concerning relationships between data: Science. Writing some SQL queries/designing a database: Engineering.
In short, if you can express the results of the research in a form that is mathematically verifiable, you research is in the domain of the science of computation.
And while at it's heart CS is purely mathematical, we often see today a mixup in universities where informatics(theories concerning how computational frameworks should be, e.g systems design..etc)is referred to as CS. This is simply wrong - technology is not science, even if it develops on scientific basis. I personally think neither is going to "die" soon, although the true theorists will have a harder time justifying their existence (coming up with new mathematics) than the informatics/soft.engs, who will always have some room to expand and design new technology and technological frameworks. CS is not physics - the science is purely conceptual and the main theory is established with mathematical certainty because, in fact, it is mathematics. To stay alive we need to find more questions to ask, and there are a few left I think.
I meant the sentence: We should not ascribe more evil than is necessary
It is so understanding of slashdot spirit, so wierd in it's usage of words.. putting mature limits on the ascribing of evil is almost comical in the techy world. Or maybe I needed sleep. Anyway, sorry for putting you through all that. Feel really guilty now:)
It's a good point but you're wrong there, I think. From my understanding, rigid objects aquire enough "rest mass" to take the natural spheroid/near-spherical form at a critical point which varies with the matter/energy density of each body (a black hole could have a really small radius). This would mean that the continuum has a natural "sharpness" in it that can be determined by visual inspection, and not convention.
I'm only starting off with gravitation though, so someone more experienced could be of great help here. To the wonderful non-essjay physicists on slashdot:
He is talking about objects that are large enough in rest(invariant) mass to have gravitationally forced themselves into spheriod shapes. It's a very interesting idea, actually, coupled with orbital considerations. Can't think of any counter-example to this conjecture.
Focusing more on ideas than the clear conveyance of ideas would indicate that maybe you should have been a philosophy professor. Accuracy and precision are our best tools to make ourselves understood.
You are correct, but both the philosopher and the linguist are interested in the idea getting across. It would be no good having accurate, precise statements that only convey part of the intended set of ideas. If the statements are grammatically correct but unsatisfactory/underdeveloped, the conveyance of the set of thoughts fails - far more damaging than having a surmountable error in one small part of the "ideas". For this reason the English prof is probably as lax about the typos as the philosopher. Epistemology and language: recursion at its finest.
Dude, you could have just said "you must be new here". Also, grammar Nazis don't represent slashdot. They are looked upon both with minor appreciation and general disdain, because some things are taken too far. Our identity shouldn't be that we obsess ourselves with meaningless endeavors.
You'd think someone talking about one world government to defeat the sure-to-come Mars attack would at least use his real nickname. I'm dissapointed, to say the least.
If you really want to understand this(time dilation), you must read some notes on special relativity, keeping in mind 2 things:
1) Light moves at a constant speed no matter where it originates from/what frame it is in 2) Our appreciation of "speed" is only terms of information/light reaching us from from other frames
Think of this: You have a metre long ruler with a laser source attached to one end, and identical clocks at both ends. If the ruler is now made to move at a constant speed along some visible x-axis, the laser/light beam STILL moves with the same speed c along the x-axis with the ruler. It is not "pushed" along with the ruler at all. This means that it will take more time for the light to reach the other end, even though the light is moving with the ruler which moving with speed v with respect to the axis.
Of course, if the ruler was sliding in the negative x-axis, the light will still have the same speed (i.e it wont get "pulled" in the new direction) meaning that it will complete the "metre" distance in less time as measured by the clocks.
And that is where the story begins. If you really want to know, and it is indeed worth knowing, try:
Speaking here for Christianity, the point is for God to be worshipped
It's the same for the Muslims, but their scripture maintains that God does not need to prove his existence in a continuous, non-stop fashion to get humanity to submit. He could have simply taken the choice away altogether. The (indirect) "proof" comes in terms of the natural argument(look around you) and the fact that the prophets were sent with "miracles"(to prove they were from God, not necessarily that God exists). People are expected to believe in Jesus and Moses if they encountered the red sea being split in two and the dead being raised, but if you merely "hear" about these things thousands of years later, it is no miracle. For this reason the Muslim posits that God sends messengers to a particular time/space/people, whereas the final messenger is blessed with an unltimate miracle to surpass time and space: a book. The Book, coming from an illiterate arab, is the only piece of literature that has withstood the test of time and remains deviod of both stark logical fallacy and editorial meddling. It was a challenge to the arabs - the great desert poets - in much the same way Jesus's miracles addressed the Jews(Nazareth, knowledge of medicine) and Moses was to the Egyptians(the priests were experts in illusionary magic). It's God's way of beating them at their game to drive the message home.. or at least that's how the Muslim sees it.
Paul's suggestion concerning Jesus is not relevent because historically, Jesus is vague. Vague enough to be mythical to some historians. Even if some aspect of his life can be proven, the remainder of the theology is simply year upon year of human input, and the resulting "gospels" have erred enough in so many ways to cause the rise of atheism as it is today. If that is all you have to go on, then yes, you are to be pitied above all men.
Should one manage to establish the monotheist God's existence, there are not many theological options that can be followed. But the philosophical counter-arguments to religion are strong, very strong, and the people who understand them have not even posted comments to this story.
Indeed. Most issues will probably arise out of the fact that "intent" to perform an action is not exclusive as mental activity that excites certain cortical regions. What you said about *imagining* an activity makes perfect sense. In fact, the "intent" to add or subtract in the future probably falls in line with imagination more than volitonal activity.
I've only studied this at the undergrad level (then independently afterwards), but I also would regard this with extreme suspicion. Some people believe that practically all our conceptual reasoning (no pre-motor cortex here) is a matter of manipulating memory. We recognize and understand concepts only in terms of others, until you get down to very early stage developmental associations that are visual in nature. This would mean that adding, intending to add, asking someone else to add or thinking about addition in general should produce similar activity and thus mappings. The "circuitry" as you call it is complex enough to make the biology almost impossible to attempt, until we are able to understand (and detect)how exactly thoughts are formulated on a case-by-case basis. I'm willing to bet that won't happen in the next 100 years at least.
The grand scheme, the grand "purpose" is to do what must be done - whatever that happens to be for me at any moment.I'm not sure how we live in vain either. I had a beautiful meal, I created a marvel of engineering, I was moved by a beautiful landscape, I changed the world, I learnt many things, I triumphed, I fulfilled my dreams, would those things be living in vain?
Yes. These are not matters of purpose, just short-term, instinct driven desires that you mention. You satisfied your desire for food with a meal, fed your ego by using your knowledge of the world to create an engineering marvel, engaged your innate curiosity by learning, you "truimphed" and "fulfilled your dreams" in a similar manner in that you recieved emotional pleasure from completing a certain activity. There is nothing there that is "correct" to pursue, per se. You do it because you are made to do it for reasons outside the realm of logic. Reasons that enable you to pass on your genes to another generation, nothing more. It is a grim, dreary kind of thing to understand, but it is true for the atheist even if we (again, instinctively) detest that truth.
But there are things like the regard for beauty you mentioned - things that cannot be wholly explained by evolution/survivability. Why is it that you feel good when looking at various natural landscapes, including ones that do not have greenery/imply useful resources? Why are we mesmerized by the horizons, and by the beauty of various unrelated living things, and extremely subtle elements of our own human form? I have a hard time believing that these things are just another cosmic accident incorporated in our genetic code, and this is partially why I remain agnostic.
You do not understand - it is not about hope for what is "better". You are describing yet another set of emotions which are probably hard-coded into our DNA for the benefit of our survival. But purpose is not about emotion, it is about correctness, i.e what is logically correct for you as a human being to pursue.
The religious answer (monotheism) is that we exist to acknowledge the divinity of God (worship..etc) even though this does not benefit him in any way. It is merely correct to do so, given that he exists. A wonderful premise, if only one could believe in God.
The consequence of atheism and an atheist understanding of human psychology is that everything you feel, including what prompted you to reply to me, is nothing but a an instinctive release of chemicals that is programmed into your DNA as a result of meaningless mutations that happened to facilitate your survival. You want to see a better world because you have innate feelings about general human well being. A beautiful child; a happy family having a picnic; a woman shrieking madly as she is chopped up into pieces.. all the emotions you have regarding the previous do not exist in you because they "make sense". They exist because of the way the nucleotides in human DNA mutated, leading to better chances of survival in the specimens involved. And survival has no meaning of course. It is just a physical process, like the millions of others at work in the universe. There is no "purpose". We live in vain.
Thinking about this too much can cause mental problems, but it is important for the human being to contemplate his existence. After all, we are the only organisms who can, and this cognitive ability should not be forsaken. I hope (and I recognize the emotion in my hope) that God exists and that he will give us reason to believe in Him.
Racism is "wrong", we all agree, because we feel that discriminatory action towards people is "wrong", because we have this thing for "justice" apparently hardwired in us. Similarly we have emotions that cause us to hate the infliction of pain on ourselves and other human beings, particularly weaker ones..etc..etc But you know what? The reasons those feelings exist is exactly the same as the reasons for the existence of racism if it is a genetic identity/exclusion mechanism as you suggest. It is non-sensible to favor one mutation over the other simply because your social development pits you in that direction. Our entire human experience is generally not logical, mathematically speaking. Survival is not "right"... it just happens.
Sweden also has one of the world's highest suicide rates.
As many have already pointed out, there is a possible benefit for human beings to have a concept of the deity (particularly the monotheist God of Islam, Christianity and Judaism) because human beings do not merely eat, sleep and procreate. The human self-awareness, particularly our recognition of our own thoughts and desires, drives us to find meaning for our existence, purpose for our daily endeavors that goes beyond the simple instinctive drives that have neither meaning nor purpose. It is in God that people find this shelter of sanity, as funny as that may seem in this day and age. I hate to say this as an agnostic, but without God there is no real reason to stay alive. It is a fact, and many athiests will agree strongly, though there is no real reason to go through the terrible ordeal of suicide either, and so people will usually still "go through life" trying to find meaning in things like emotions and "causes" (which in fact result from emotions). Still, it is far easier for someone to attempt taking their own life if they looked at existence from the completely athiest viewpoint.
How exactly this is determined by biology is not going to be clear, and it is defintely not simple enough to be a inheritable trait that is visible in some but not others. If this *is* hardwired in humans as a whole, then the readiness to observe "religiousness" may be triggered by other events that alter the physiology/psychology of the individiual human subject at some point. Needless to say, all this does not serve to disprove religion any more than it strengthens monothiest claims.
In fact, monotheist theology (embodied most heftily by Islam in my opinion) will never be proved objectively because a "proof" sort of defeats the whole point. The proofs are supposed to be subjective, i.e how exactly one convinces oneself changes slightly from one person to the next, even if they all follow the same pattern of natural-beauty-is-probablistically-impossible-enou gh-to-warrant-God. At the same time, science cannot account for itself because physics cannot explain the origin of the material world without incorporating everything in a model that is mathematically *necessary*, and doing that is exceedingly difficult because mathematics is conceptual whereas the cosmos are real. It is not sufficient to go back to the big bang, or to use infinite bang-crunch cycles to defer the question of why everything became, why energy and matter exist with their given properties. The divine answer alleviates this in a manner that is very conclusive yet very vague, so it is likely that the argument will not be resolved soon.
The summary says "Computer science employment". What exactly is computer science employment? A computer science degree is not meant to produce someone who can merely program and use a few technologies to produce solutions for companies. That is only a side-effect, a by product. There are tons of programmers and system engineers who never went to school, and instead get their know-how from certificate programs and self-teaching. The system works because software engineering is unlike any other engineering discipline - it is a lot more "hackable", as despisable as this may seem.
My objection is to the notion that a computer scientist is a programmer. That is not true. A comptational science, computing, even a lowly "information science" degree may by purposedly prepare someone for work in the industry, but Computer Science is not about the industry - not directly anyway. It is about the Science in much the same way that physics is about Science, and not particle accelerators. At the end of the day the scientist should belong in a lab with a whiteboard. His purpose is the pursuit of knowledge, not solutions that are particular instances of the application of that knowledge.
If America wants an edge, it shouldn't worry about competition in industry. The current laws(equal pay..etc) suffice. H-1bs do not threaten us because H-1bs do not threaten our ability to participate in science, our real advantage. Our lack of appreciation for knowledge does however, and it is this "techie" culture that we should fight.
I apologize in advance for offending millions of slashdotters, but please try to see the logic in what I wrote.
Yes but if I undertand correctly, the new processing keys (selected just so that the "bad" player can't derive them) need to be provided on all future media in order for this to work. It is not easy to replace every single retail disc in existence(in response to a revokation), and the likely situation will be that you will have a mingled bunch of discs , some of which are playable on "bad" players and others which have new keys, and hence are not. The industry will have to go through a million complete production cycles to truly wipe out a million offending players, if the offending keys are published at the right times.
I think you've already said this, but the point needs emphasis so forgive me.
PS: Why the hell do they have the extra layers of encryption? Media key + title key.. why not just have the data encrypted with the "processing keys", since they are the only real secret??
Funniest thread I've read in a long time. You have to love the moderators. They either have a great sense of humor (they modded him informative instead of funny) or they totally misunderstand. Kudos to all of you, especialy the faithful slashdotter who responded to the OP. Have a great day:D
Do you know what drove him? Why did he do this. Why did he drop out of everything. More importantly, why did he find this branch of mathematics to be fascinating? Was there any philosophy behind it?
Please tell us what you know about him personally, it is infuriating that little or nothing is known of such people. It is also a matter that affects me personally, so your reply is much appreciated...
Al Ghazali was indeed a very influential philosopher who brought in umpteen damage to the scientific inquiry of the Islamic world. But the real damage was done by another person called Ahmed Sirhindi. In simple words, what he has said was that human brain is futile. Any effort to understand nature/God through reasoning and thought is a waste of time.
Sirhindi was a mystic, actually, and you raise an important point. The pure, tolerant Mohammed-era Islam did not have these reservations against science, although the early Caliphates were preoccupied with the spread of Islam more than scientific advance. The philosophical/mystic reasons for dumping the pursuit of human knowledge are due to this strange coupling between what can be known of nature and what can be known about God. The mystics tend to unite the two under the premise of ignorance, while traditional Islam views the unity as heresy - God is God, nothing can be likened to him and knowledge about him cannot be obtained except from what he chooses to communicate about himself. This is philosophically correct if one is to believe in the monotheist God. Anything else would be logically incompatible by definition.
Nature (that is, the cosmos/existence) is a different story. There is no prohibition in the pursuit of knowledge in ANY particular aspect of life, including the fundemental physics/mathematics that describe physical existence, because the pursuit of that knowledge is NOT futile. It is, in fact, seen as possible (and indeed history has shown this), though a complete and self-sufficient description of the universe's existence may be difficult to achive. It is a very interesting distinction, because it clashes with the claim that traditionalist Islam lead to the downfall of knowledge. Ghazali and Sirhindi were not traditionalists, although they had elements of that thought. The damage they did was their own fault entirely: they overestimated their ability to judge human knowledge, due to their own ignorance.
This is my understanding as someone who has lived and interacted with various Muslims in almost all contemporary "groups". Religious belief is either correct at it's absolute source, or it is not. Human "addons" are utterly meaningless.
I refer to "randomness" because the manner in which we come up with algorithms in general is not distinct/cannot be expressed as an algorithm. That is, if I were to approach a human mind with a problem stated in words, the work done leading to the final set of instructions is slightly different in each instance even for the same mind, problem and final outcome.
Genetic algorithms..etc can indeed come up with new algorithms, but the set of algorithms that can be produced is defined by the algorithm itself. This limitation does not exist in humans because of the way the brain goes about solving problems. To explain this I would have to be able to describe human imagination, epistemology..etc and I don't believe that is understood well enough right now by cognitive psychologists.
The past 50 years have mostly taught us how complex intelligence really is, and that we still have no good definition of the concept. And as long as we don't know what intelligence in humans really is, how can we create it in computers?
Yeah, AOL did indeed set us back a bit:)
Serious side: human intelligence is complicated because cognitive psychology is still a very very primitive field. There is a lot of randomness invloved in the way thoughts occur in the human mind, which is why with a little focus we are able to "create algorithms" to suit various situations. This is something that a Turing Machine will never be able to do by definition, not because of hardware capabilities (or lack thereof). A TM cannot produce, at runtime, another TM.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference between computer science and what is nowadays referred to as CS is very straightforward, but it is often confused due to the fact that computation has evolved from being a theory to being an industry based on a theory, where various engineering and techy skills are needed.
Take relational databases and SQL. Coming up with the concept of storing information based on predicates concerning relationships between data: Science. Writing some SQL queries/designing a database: Engineering.
In short, if you can express the results of the research in a form that is mathematically verifiable, you research is in the domain of the science of computation.
And while at it's heart CS is purely mathematical, we often see today a mixup in universities where informatics(theories concerning how computational frameworks should be, e.g systems design..etc)is referred to as CS. This is simply wrong - technology is not science, even if it develops on scientific basis. I personally think neither is going to "die" soon, although the true theorists will have a harder time justifying their existence (coming up with new mathematics) than the informatics/soft.engs, who will always have some room to expand and design new technology and technological frameworks. CS is not physics - the science is purely conceptual and the main theory is established with mathematical certainty because, in fact, it is mathematics. To stay alive we need to find more questions to ask, and there are a few left I think.
I meant the sentence:
:)
We should not ascribe more evil than is necessary
It is so understanding of slashdot spirit, so wierd in it's usage of words.. putting mature limits on the ascribing of evil is almost comical in the techy world. Or maybe I needed sleep. Anyway, sorry for putting you through all that. Feel really guilty now
But "spheroidness" is also a continuum
It's a good point but you're wrong there, I think. From my understanding, rigid objects aquire enough "rest mass" to take the natural spheroid/near-spherical form at a critical point which varies with the matter/energy density of each body (a black hole could have a really small radius). This would mean that the continuum has a natural "sharpness" in it that can be determined by visual inspection, and not convention.
I'm only starting off with gravitation though, so someone more experienced could be of great help here. To the wonderful non-essjay physicists on slashdot:
1) We love you
2) Say something
He is talking about objects that are large enough in rest(invariant) mass to have gravitationally forced themselves into spheriod shapes. It's a very interesting idea, actually, coupled with orbital considerations. Can't think of any counter-example to this conjecture.
Something about that sentence is beautiful.
Anyone have an idea of how much bandwidth it provides?
Enough for all your pr0n needs, and a little more.
Focusing more on ideas than the clear conveyance of ideas would indicate that maybe you should have been a philosophy professor. Accuracy and precision are our best tools to make ourselves understood.
You are correct, but both the philosopher and the linguist are interested in the idea getting across. It would be no good having accurate, precise statements that only convey part of the intended set of ideas. If the statements are grammatically correct but unsatisfactory/underdeveloped, the conveyance of the set of thoughts fails - far more damaging than having a surmountable error in one small part of the "ideas". For this reason the English prof is probably as lax about the typos as the philosopher. Epistemology and language: recursion at its finest.
Dude, you could have just said "you must be new here". Also, grammar Nazis don't represent slashdot. They are looked upon both with minor appreciation and general disdain, because some things are taken too far. Our identity shouldn't be that we obsess ourselves with meaningless endeavors.
You'd think someone talking about one world government to defeat the sure-to-come Mars attack would at least use his real nickname. I'm dissapointed, to say the least.
If you really want to understand this(time dilation), you must read some notes on special relativity, keeping in mind 2 things:
f f_geom/tc.html
1) Light moves at a constant speed no matter where it originates from/what frame it is in
2) Our appreciation of "speed" is only terms of information/light reaching us from from other frames
Think of this: You have a metre long ruler with a laser source attached to one end, and identical clocks at both ends. If the ruler is now made to move at a constant speed along some visible x-axis, the laser/light beam STILL moves with the same speed c along the x-axis with the ruler. It is not "pushed" along with the ruler at all. This means that it will take more time for the light to reach the other end, even though the light is moving with the ruler which moving with speed v with respect to the axis.
Of course, if the ruler was sliding in the negative x-axis, the light will still have the same speed (i.e it wont get "pulled" in the new direction) meaning that it will complete the "metre" distance in less time as measured by the clocks.
And that is where the story begins. If you really want to know, and it is indeed worth knowing, try:
http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/notes/
http://people.hofstra.edu/faculty/Stefan_Waner/di
Speaking here for Christianity, the point is for God to be worshipped
It's the same for the Muslims, but their scripture maintains that God does not need to prove his existence in a continuous, non-stop fashion to get humanity to submit. He could have simply taken the choice away altogether. The (indirect) "proof" comes in terms of the natural argument(look around you) and the fact that the prophets were sent with "miracles"(to prove they were from God, not necessarily that God exists). People are expected to believe in Jesus and Moses if they encountered the red sea being split in two and the dead being raised, but if you merely "hear" about these things thousands of years later, it is no miracle. For this reason the Muslim posits that God sends messengers to a particular time/space/people, whereas the final messenger is blessed with an unltimate miracle to surpass time and space: a book. The Book, coming from an illiterate arab, is the only piece of literature that has withstood the test of time and remains deviod of both stark logical fallacy and editorial meddling. It was a challenge to the arabs - the great desert poets - in much the same way Jesus's miracles addressed the Jews(Nazareth, knowledge of medicine) and Moses was to the Egyptians(the priests were experts in illusionary magic). It's God's way of beating them at their game to drive the message home.. or at least that's how the Muslim sees it.
Paul's suggestion concerning Jesus is not relevent because historically, Jesus is vague. Vague enough to be mythical to some historians. Even if some aspect of his life can be proven, the remainder of the theology is simply year upon year of human input, and the resulting "gospels" have erred enough in so many ways to cause the rise of atheism as it is today. If that is all you have to go on, then yes, you are to be pitied above all men.
Should one manage to establish the monotheist God's existence, there are not many theological options that can be followed. But the philosophical counter-arguments to religion are strong, very strong, and the people who understand them have not even posted comments to this story.
Indeed. Most issues will probably arise out of the fact that "intent" to perform an action is not exclusive as mental activity that excites certain cortical regions. What you said about *imagining* an activity makes perfect sense. In fact, the "intent" to add or subtract in the future probably falls in line with imagination more than volitonal activity.
I've only studied this at the undergrad level (then independently afterwards), but I also would regard this with extreme suspicion. Some people believe that practically all our conceptual reasoning (no pre-motor cortex here) is a matter of manipulating memory. We recognize and understand concepts only in terms of others, until you get down to very early stage developmental associations that are visual in nature. This would mean that adding, intending to add, asking someone else to add or thinking about addition in general should produce similar activity and thus mappings. The "circuitry" as you call it is complex enough to make the biology almost impossible to attempt, until we are able to understand (and detect)how exactly thoughts are formulated on a case-by-case basis. I'm willing to bet that won't happen in the next 100 years at least.
Yes. These are not matters of purpose, just short-term, instinct driven desires that you mention. You satisfied your desire for food with a meal, fed your ego by using your knowledge of the world to create an engineering marvel, engaged your innate curiosity by learning, you "truimphed" and "fulfilled your dreams" in a similar manner in that you recieved emotional pleasure from completing a certain activity. There is nothing there that is "correct" to pursue, per se. You do it because you are made to do it for reasons outside the realm of logic. Reasons that enable you to pass on your genes to another generation, nothing more. It is a grim, dreary kind of thing to understand, but it is true for the atheist even if we (again, instinctively) detest that truth.
But there are things like the regard for beauty you mentioned - things that cannot be wholly explained by evolution/survivability. Why is it that you feel good when looking at various natural landscapes, including ones that do not have greenery/imply useful resources? Why are we mesmerized by the horizons, and by the beauty of various unrelated living things, and extremely subtle elements of our own human form? I have a hard time believing that these things are just another cosmic accident incorporated in our genetic code, and this is partially why I remain agnostic.
You do not understand - it is not about hope for what is "better". You are describing yet another set of emotions which are probably hard-coded into our DNA for the benefit of our survival. But purpose is not about emotion, it is about correctness, i.e what is logically correct for you as a human being to pursue.
The religious answer (monotheism) is that we exist to acknowledge the divinity of God (worship..etc) even though this does not benefit him in any way. It is merely correct to do so, given that he exists. A wonderful premise, if only one could believe in God.
The consequence of atheism and an atheist understanding of human psychology is that everything you feel, including what prompted you to reply to me, is nothing but a an instinctive release of chemicals that is programmed into your DNA as a result of meaningless mutations that happened to facilitate your survival. You want to see a better world because you have innate feelings about general human well being. A beautiful child; a happy family having a picnic; a woman shrieking madly as she is chopped up into pieces.. all the emotions you have regarding the previous do not exist in you because they "make sense". They exist because of the way the nucleotides in human DNA mutated, leading to better chances of survival in the specimens involved. And survival has no meaning of course. It is just a physical process, like the millions of others at work in the universe. There is no "purpose". We live in vain.
Thinking about this too much can cause mental problems, but it is important for the human being to contemplate his existence. After all, we are the only organisms who can, and this cognitive ability should not be forsaken. I hope (and I recognize the emotion in my hope) that God exists and that he will give us reason to believe in Him.
Here's a scary thought for you:
..etc..etc But you know what? The reasons those feelings exist is exactly the same as the reasons for the existence of racism if it is a genetic identity/exclusion mechanism as you suggest. It is non-sensible to favor one mutation over the other simply because your social development pits you in that direction. Our entire human experience is generally not logical, mathematically speaking. Survival is not "right"... it just happens.
Racism is "wrong", we all agree, because we feel that discriminatory action towards people is "wrong", because we have this thing for "justice" apparently hardwired in us. Similarly we have emotions that cause us to hate the infliction of pain on ourselves and other human beings, particularly weaker ones
Sweden also has one of the world's highest suicide rates.
u gh-to-warrant-God. At the same time, science cannot account for itself because physics cannot explain the origin of the material world without incorporating everything in a model that is mathematically *necessary*, and doing that is exceedingly difficult because mathematics is conceptual whereas the cosmos are real. It is not sufficient to go back to the big bang, or to use infinite bang-crunch cycles to defer the question of why everything became, why energy and matter exist with their given properties. The divine answer alleviates this in a manner that is very conclusive yet very vague, so it is likely that the argument will not be resolved soon.
As many have already pointed out, there is a possible benefit for human beings to have a concept of the deity (particularly the monotheist God of Islam, Christianity and Judaism) because human beings do not merely eat, sleep and procreate. The human self-awareness, particularly our recognition of our own thoughts and desires, drives us to find meaning for our existence, purpose for our daily endeavors that goes beyond the simple instinctive drives that have neither meaning nor purpose. It is in God that people find this shelter of sanity, as funny as that may seem in this day and age. I hate to say this as an agnostic, but without God there is no real reason to stay alive. It is a fact, and many athiests will agree strongly, though there is no real reason to go through the terrible ordeal of suicide either, and so people will usually still "go through life" trying to find meaning in things like emotions and "causes" (which in fact result from emotions). Still, it is far easier for someone to attempt taking their own life if they looked at existence from the completely athiest viewpoint.
How exactly this is determined by biology is not going to be clear, and it is defintely not simple enough to be a inheritable trait that is visible in some but not others. If this *is* hardwired in humans as a whole, then the readiness to observe "religiousness" may be triggered by other events that alter the physiology/psychology of the individiual human subject at some point. Needless to say, all this does not serve to disprove religion any more than it strengthens monothiest claims.
In fact, monotheist theology (embodied most heftily by Islam in my opinion) will never be proved objectively because a "proof" sort of defeats the whole point. The proofs are supposed to be subjective, i.e how exactly one convinces oneself changes slightly from one person to the next, even if they all follow the same pattern of natural-beauty-is-probablistically-impossible-eno
Awesome. Now tell me: why lie about having gone to college?
The summary says "Computer science employment". What exactly is computer science employment? A computer science degree is not meant to produce someone who can merely program and use a few technologies to produce solutions for companies. That is only a side-effect, a by product. There are tons of programmers and system engineers who never went to school, and instead get their know-how from certificate programs and self-teaching. The system works because software engineering is unlike any other engineering discipline - it is a lot more "hackable", as despisable as this may seem.
My objection is to the notion that a computer scientist is a programmer. That is not true. A comptational science, computing, even a lowly "information science" degree may by purposedly prepare someone for work in the industry, but Computer Science is not about the industry - not directly anyway. It is about the Science in much the same way that physics is about Science, and not particle accelerators. At the end of the day the scientist should belong in a lab with a whiteboard. His purpose is the pursuit of knowledge, not solutions that are particular instances of the application of that knowledge.
If America wants an edge, it shouldn't worry about competition in industry. The current laws(equal pay..etc) suffice. H-1bs do not threaten us because H-1bs do not threaten our ability to participate in science, our real advantage. Our lack of appreciation for knowledge does however, and it is this "techie" culture that we should fight.
I apologize in advance for offending millions of slashdotters, but please try to see the logic in what I wrote.
Yes but if I undertand correctly, the new processing keys (selected just so that the "bad" player can't derive them) need to be provided on all future media in order for this to work. It is not easy to replace every single retail disc in existence(in response to a revokation), and the likely situation will be that you will have a mingled bunch of discs , some of which are playable on "bad" players and others which have new keys, and hence are not. The industry will have to go through a million complete production cycles to truly wipe out a million offending players, if the offending keys are published at the right times.
I think you've already said this, but the point needs emphasis so forgive me.
PS: Why the hell do they have the extra layers of encryption? Media key + title key.. why not just have the data encrypted with the "processing keys", since they are the only real secret??
Funniest thread I've read in a long time. You have to love the moderators. They either have a great sense of humor (they modded him informative instead of funny) or they totally misunderstand. Kudos to all of you, especialy the faithful slashdotter who responded to the OP. Have a great day :D
Do you know what drove him? Why did he do this. Why did he drop out of everything. More importantly, why did he find this branch of mathematics to be fascinating? Was there any philosophy behind it?
Please tell us what you know about him personally, it is infuriating that little or nothing is known of such people. It is also a matter that affects me personally, so your reply is much appreciated...
Sirhindi was a mystic, actually, and you raise an important point. The pure, tolerant Mohammed-era Islam did not have these reservations against science, although the early Caliphates were preoccupied with the spread of Islam more than scientific advance. The philosophical/mystic reasons for dumping the pursuit of human knowledge are due to this strange coupling between what can be known of nature and what can be known about God. The mystics tend to unite the two under the premise of ignorance, while traditional Islam views the unity as heresy - God is God, nothing can be likened to him and knowledge about him cannot be obtained except from what he chooses to communicate about himself. This is philosophically correct if one is to believe in the monotheist God. Anything else would be logically incompatible by definition.
Nature (that is, the cosmos/existence) is a different story. There is no prohibition in the pursuit of knowledge in ANY particular aspect of life, including the fundemental physics/mathematics that describe physical existence, because the pursuit of that knowledge is NOT futile. It is, in fact, seen as possible (and indeed history has shown this), though a complete and self-sufficient description of the universe's existence may be difficult to achive. It is a very interesting distinction, because it clashes with the claim that traditionalist Islam lead to the downfall of knowledge. Ghazali and Sirhindi were not traditionalists, although they had elements of that thought. The damage they did was their own fault entirely: they overestimated their ability to judge human knowledge, due to their own ignorance.
This is my understanding as someone who has lived and interacted with various Muslims in almost all contemporary "groups". Religious belief is either correct at it's absolute source, or it is not. Human "addons" are utterly meaningless.
If you have root priviliges, chroot is pointless. You can easily break out.
I refer to "randomness" because the manner in which we come up with algorithms in general is not distinct/cannot be expressed as an algorithm. That is, if I were to approach a human mind with a problem stated in words, the work done leading to the final set of instructions is slightly different in each instance even for the same mind, problem and final outcome.
Genetic algorithms..etc can indeed come up with new algorithms, but the set of algorithms that can be produced is defined by the algorithm itself. This limitation does not exist in humans because of the way the brain goes about solving problems. To explain this I would have to be able to describe human imagination, epistemology..etc and I don't believe that is understood well enough right now by cognitive psychologists.
Yeah, AOL did indeed set us back a bit
Serious side: human intelligence is complicated because cognitive psychology is still a very very primitive field. There is a lot of randomness invloved in the way thoughts occur in the human mind, which is why with a little focus we are able to "create algorithms" to suit various situations. This is something that a Turing Machine will never be able to do by definition, not because of hardware capabilities (or lack thereof). A TM cannot produce, at runtime, another TM.