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Comment Re:What's the legitimate topic here? (Score 1) 795

There is no axiom accepted by science that forbids scientific inquiry into origin questions.

In your zeal to declare science all-powerful, you neglect to account for an infinitesimal fact wedged between existence and "Truth".

You can prove that there are at least the two distinct areas of study which are applicable to the nature of existence, but you cannot prove that they will find ultimate answers which are "TRUE" for any and all 'geometries' or frames of reference, or whatever relativism might be invoked. That is the ultimate difference between science, as a means of learning, and faith as a means of determining "TRUTH". They intertwine in fascinating and unexpected ways, and often in uncomfortable and undesirable ways, but neither exists in a vacuum. For "SCIENCE" to be something of value you must eschew "TRUTH" and remain agnostic about validity of theories, and this is a seemingly transitive equality, to accept faith, one must eschew relativism in some domains.

The really interesting element for all of this is, how does this zero-sum-game between objectivism and absolutism affect the human condition?

Comment Re:Science is... (Score 1) 795

Mod this up, not just interesting but incredibly precise. I had never considered looking at Bayes applicability to P=1 and P=0 concepts, but if you follow this math, its just as illuminating as Godel's theorms of incompleteness. Godel attempts to prove that a finite mathematic system or language is also finite, AND requires a-priori statements which are entirely outside of (neither provable, nor dis-provable) from within the finite mathematics. Also see how these statements are consistent with modern physics (Fermi et. al.).

Compare these structural statements and tell me they don't tend to re-enforce one another:

    Godel - A finite language can only describe a finite system.
    Bayes - A probability of 1 (guaranteed to occur) event cannot be predicted by statistical methods
    Fermi - It is impossible to predict any quantum event based solely upon finite observations.

This suggests the human neurological operation has a common observation/understanding limitation which repeats within any area of scientific research - when faced with infinite values [ example: f(x)=(1/X) ] the mind must use a finite substitute ("infinity").

Comment Re:So educational! (Score 3, Insightful) 795

Excellent trolling, refute the summary of an article about poor understanding of the meaning of science with a Popperian negative-proof masquerading as a strawman. Either you are a grand-master of hyperbole, or you don't bother to read to comprehension before declaring something invalid. Irony, since that's pretty much exactly the OP - many humans really love to declare themselves aligned with SCIENCE! Yet few are actually consistently able to operate scientifically.

Submission + - IT Jobs Take Summer Swan Dive 1

snydeq writes: The IT job hiring bump earlier this year wasn't sustained in July and August, when numbers slumped considerably, InfoWorld reports. 'So much for the light at the end of the IT jobs tunnel. According to job data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as analyzed by Janco Associates, the IT professional job market has all but lost the head of steam it built up earlier this year. A mere 3,400 IT jobs were added in August, down from 4,600 added for July and way down from the 13,800 added in April of this year. Overall, IT hiring in 2014 got off to a weak start, then surged, only to stumble again.' Anybody out there finding the IT job market discouraging of late and care to share their experiences?

Submission + - Alibaba Seeks $21.1 Billion in U.S. IPO (businessweek.com)

mpicpp writes: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is seeking to raise as much as $21.1 billion in its initial public offering, in what could be the largest sale of new stock in the U.S. ever.

The Chinese company and shareholders including Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO:US) plan to sell 320.1 million American depositary shares for $60 to $66 apiece, according to a regulatory filing today (BABA:US). At the high end of that range, the offering would surpass Visa Inc.’s $19.7 billion IPO in March 2008 and give the company a market value of $162.7 billion.

Alibaba’s executives are now able to meet fund managers to build demand for the IPO and they plan to begin the roadshow in New York next week, people with knowledge of the matter have said. The Hangzhou-based company has garnered years of attention for its scale — with 279 million active buyers in the year through June — and its exposure to a growing Internet consumer base in China.

Submission + - Army can't track spending on $4 billion system to track spending

schwit1 writes: Our government in action: An inspector general has found that the Army was unable to track the spending on a project designed to help the Army track spending.

As of this February, the Army had spent $725.7 million on the system, which is ultimately expected to cost about $4.3 billion. The problem, according to the IG, is that the Army has failed to comply with a variety of federal laws that require agencies to standardize reporting and prepare auditable financial statements. “This occurred because DOD and Army management did not have adequate controls, including procedures and annual reviews, in place to ensure GCSS-Army compliance with Treasury and DOD guidance,” the IG report concludes.

Submission + - Should Cyborgs Have the Same Privacy Rights as Humans?

Jason Koebler writes: When someone with an e-tattoo or an implanted biochip inevitably commits a crime, and evidence of that crime exists on that device within them, do they have a legal right to protect that evidence? Do cyborgs have the same rights as humans?
"The more you take a thing with no rights and integrate it indelibly into a thing that we invest with rights, the more you inevitably confront the question: Do you give the thing with no rights rights, or do you take those rights away from the thing with rights?," Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who just released a paper exploring the subject, said.

Submission + - Mozilla 1024-Bit Cert Deprecation Leaves 107,000 Sites Untrusted (threatpost.com)

msm1267 writes: Mozilla has deprecated 1024-bit RSA certificate authority certificates in Firefox 32 and Thunderbird. While there are pluses to the move such as a requirement for longer, stronger keys, at least 107,000 websites will no longer be trusted by Mozilla.

Data from HD Moore's Project Sonar, which indexes more than 20 million websites, found 107,535 sites using a cert signed by what will soon be an untrusted CA certificate. Grouping those 107,000-plus sites by certificate expiration date, the results show that 76,185 certificates had expired as of Aug. 25; of the 65 million certificates in the total scan, 845,599 had expired but were still in use as of Aug. 25, Moore said.

Submission + - Social networks and crowdsourcing threatening Wall Street?

Seaz writes: Social media has become such an integral part of our lives that it is now also changing the way people invest in stocks. The WSJ touches on the idea of utilizing the wisdom of the crowds to democratize markets. For years, individual investors have relied on analysts to help them distill through all the noise in the markets. But nowadays startups such as Tip'd Off are making investing more social and transparent. On Tip'd Off trading enthusiasts can not only share and discuss stock ideas, but also share their holdings and actual buying and selling moves – no more just taking the word from shady brokers! These social communities allow users to follow their friends and expert investors to learn from and mimic their stock moves.

According to the WSJ: “Ultimately, technology [and crowdsourcing] is making possible what hasn’t been [...] free discussion, access and analysis of information. Some may see it as a threat to Wall Street, which has always charged for expert analysis. Really, though, these efforts are good for markets, which pride themselves on being fair and transparent”

Submission + - Space Station's 'Cubesat Cannon' has Gone Rogue (discovery.com)

astroengine writes: Last night (Thursday), two more of Planet Lab’s shoebox-sized Earth imaging satellites launched themselves from aboard the International Space Station, the latest in a series of technical mysteries involving a commercially owned CubeSat deployer located outside Japan’s Kibo laboratory module. Station commander Steve Swanson was storing some blood samples in one of the station’s freezers Friday morning when he noticed that the doors on NanoRack’s cubesat deployer were open, said NASA mission commentator Pat Ryan. Flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston determined that two CubeSats had been inadvertently released. “No crew members or ground controllers saw the deployment. They reviewed all the camera footage and there was no views of it there either,” Ryan said.

Submission + - Intel Discloses Core M Broadwell Speeds, Feeds And Performance Expectations (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: Intel's next-generation Broadwell Y (now known as the Core M processor) is set to ship on schedule for the end of the year. The company, occasionally flagged with criticism of its delays on the chip and with its IDF show ramping-up next week, is sharing more detail on the upcoming speeds, feeds, features and performance characteristics of its new 14nm mobile platform. Intel's Broadwell-Y lineup initially consists of three chips with apparently very little difference, except for clock speed. Base idle frequencies tip-toe along at 800MHz to 1.1GHz, with max turbo frequencies up to 2.6GHz for the dual-core chips that Intel is announcing today. All parts are able to hit a very low 4.5 Watt TDP (Thermal Design Power) power envelope. Intel is also claiming clock-for-clock gains at the CPU level but also a 40 percent gain in graphics performance, versus the previous generation low power Haswell architecture. Larger, premium tablets and 2-in-1 devices are expect to start shipping at a trickle in Q4, with a larger volume ramp in Q1.

Submission + - LLVM 3.5 Brings C++1y Improvements, Unified 64-bit ARM Backend (phoronix.com)

An anonymous reader writes: LLVM 3.5 along with Clang 3.5 are now available for download. LLVM 3.5 offers many compiler advancements including a unified 64-bit ARM back-end from the merging of the Apple and community AArch64 back-ends, C++1y/C++1z language additions, self-hosting support of Clang on SPARC64, and various other compiler improvements.

Submission + - Amazon acquires Twitch for $970 million

rtoz writes: Amazon has agreed to buy the massively popular video game streaming website Twitch in an all-cash deal of around $970 million.

This deal came just months after numerous reports that Google had a deal to acquire Twitch.

According to the CEO ( Emmett Shear) of Twitch, Amazon plans to let Twitch operate independently, out of its offices in San Francisco. It seems Twitch decides to choose Amazon over Google because of this reason.

Twitch did not exist a little over three years ago, and it now has 55 million unique viewers a month globally.

Twitch specializes in live videos of the people playing games.

Submission + - The Evolution of Diet

An anonymous reader writes: Here's a story from National Geographic that looks at the historical diets of people from around the world and what that diet might look like in the future. From the article: "So far studies of foragers like the Tsimane, Arctic Inuit, and Hadza have found that these peoples traditionally didn’t develop high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, or cardiovascular disease. 'A lot of people believe there is a discordance between what we eat today and what our ancestors evolved to eat,' says paleoanthropologist Peter Ungar of the University of Arkansas. The notion that we’re trapped in Stone Age bodies in a fast-food world is driving the current craze for Paleolithic diets. The popularity of these so-called caveman or Stone Age diets is based on the idea that modern humans evolved to eat the way hunter-gatherers did during the Paleolithic—the period from about 2.6 million years ago to the start of the agricultural revolution—and that our genes haven’t had enough time to adapt to farmed foods."

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