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While there may be changes in evolutionary theory in the future due to us not currently understanding how it all works, no one who has honestly researched it can deny the fact of common descent.

The Short Proof of Evolution
Human Chromosome 2 fusion
Endogenous Retroviruses

Thinking back to that, I could conclude that LOGO is sort of lame, but for little kids who don't have the typing and language skills of middle school or high school students, I guess it's a better entry into programming than BASIC.

My first contact with programming about around 1986 was with Logo. My parents subscribed me to a private computer course and for us the small kids (I was 5 years old!) the teacher used Logo, for older guys he used Basic and even COBOL and FORTRAN. But It was Logo what made me really *understand* computers in the sense of how the famous Hacker's Manifesto explains, it is a very interesting machine which *you* can manipulate to do EVERYTHING!

However, when you are referring at LOGO in your comment you are surely referring to the turtle-guided drawing interpreter of the language, which yeah can not compare with what BASIC was at that time. However, there are *plenty* of interpreters and other programs that use Logo as its underlying language. Lots of them are actively used in research for agent-based modeling such as NetLogo, StarLogo, or about StarLogo TNG which tries to go a step further to teach the basic concepts of programming by using building blocks.

I think Logo is one of the *best* programs to begin computer programming for kids because it is very easy to make the computer *do* things, and with these new implementations it does not need to be as "boring" as just drawing lines.

But while we're discussing Nietzsche, why not read his Genealology of Morals:

But let's go back: the problem with the other origin of the "good," of the good as the man of resentment has imagined it for himself, demands some conclusion. That lambs are annoyed at the great predatory birds is not a strange thing, and it provides no reason for holding anything against these large birds of prey, because they snatch away small lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves "These predatory birds are evil—and whoever is least like a predatory bird—and especially who is like its opposite, a lamb—shouldn't that animal be good?" there is nothing to find fault with in this setting up of an ideal, except for the fact that the birds of prey might look down with a little mockery and perhaps say to themselves "We are not at all annoyed with these good lambs—we even love them. Nothing is tastier than a tender lamb."

To demand that strength does not express itself as strength, that it must not consist of a will to overpower, a will to throw down, a will to rule, a thirst for enemies and opposition and triumph—that is as unreasonable as to demand that weakness express itself as strength. A quantum of force is just such a quantum of drive, will, action--indeed, it is nothing but these drives, willing, and actions in themselves—and it cannot appear as anything else except through the seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason petrified in it), which understands and misunderstands all action as conditioned by something which causes actions, by a "Subject."

In fact, in just the same way as people separate lightning from its flash and take the latter as an action, as the effect of a subject, which is called lightning, so popular morality separates strength from the manifestations of that strength, as if behind the strong person there is an indifferent substrate, which is free to manifest strength or not. But there is no such substrate, there is no "being" behind the doing, acting, becoming. "The doer" is merely invented after the fact—the act is everything. People basically duplicate the event: when they see lightning, well, that is an action of an action: they set up the same event first as the cause and then again as its effect.

Natural scientists are no better when they say "Force moves, force causes" and so on—our entire scientific knowledge, for all its coolness, its freedom from feelings, still remains exposed to the seductions of language and has not gotten rid of the changelings foisted on it, the "Subject" (the atom, for example, is such a changeling, like the Kantian "Thing in itself"): it's no wonder that the repressed, secretly smouldering feelings of rage and hate use this belief for themselves and, in fact, maintain a faith in nothing more strongly than in the idea that the strong are free to be weak and predatory birds are free to be lambs—and in so doing, they arrogate to themselves the right to blame the birds of prey for being birds of prey...

When the oppressed, the downtrodden, the conquered say to each other, with the vengeful cunning of the powerless, "Let us be different from evil people, namely, good! And that man is good who does not overpower, who hurts no one, who does not attack, who does not retaliate, who hands revenge over to God, who keeps himself hidden, as we do, who avoids all evil and demands little from life in general—like us, the patient, humble, and upright"—what that amounts to, coolly expressed and without bias, is essentially nothing more than "We weak people are merely weak. It's good if we do nothing, because we are not strong enough."

But this bitter state, this shrewdness of the lowest ranks, which even insects possess (for in great danger they stand as if they were dead in order not to do "too much"), has, thanks to the counterfeiting and self-deception of powerlessness, dressed

I wasn't really trying to be rhetorical. I was pointing out you missed the point of the original comment. However darwin was the single most commonly deployed Unix; and throwing in binary compatibility its an order of magnitude larger than anything else.

In other words.
1) If # of users of Darwin is A
# of users of any other unix is B
where A > B.

2) If we define two people to be using the same Unix if and only if their systems are binary compatible with each other (rather than source compatible) then
If # of users of Darwin is A
# of users of any other unix is B
where A > 10B.

The main point was never about the difficulty of binary compatibility but rather a statement about the popularity of Darwin. Further the discussion wasn't technical it was political I was arguing why something was good in the sense of being moral not good in the sense of being effective. Those two meanings of good are often opposites of one another.

Now your 2nd reply is clearly technical about why binary compatibility isn't so difficult to achieve. I'm not sure what you believe yourself to be debating We were talking about the workload of binary compatibility compared to the workload for other parts of operating system maintenance . When? I am kind of at a loss to know what you want me to respond to since I think you may be mixing threads up in your mind. I'll respond to the technical points but I don't know the context

_______________

Most of what you wrote I agree with.

However...

The number billions came from Microsoft. They indicated their cost for compatibility work (that included: testing, assisting other vendors, old hardware which mean writing drivers, writing custom applications specific patch code... for the XP transition was (mainly getting Win98->XP) was $8.4b. They may be lying but that's my source.

Sun had said that they believe Linux will need to get binary compatibility to compete in the enterprise space and that this will cost IBM and HP billions.

2) I think you are limiting the definition of binary compatibility in a way that most end users wouldn't accept. For them libraries and even commonly available applications would be included in the "call gate" (I like that term BTW).

OK I'll let you respond from here since....

Quote from the hackers manifesto:
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~soules/media112/hacker.htm.
It's also quoted in the movie Hackers, by the actor Marc Anthony

We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias...

It's a very sad day when we move the hatred that many of us tried to escape to our online playgrounds.

This seems to conclude that only Hawaii will be devastated.

Apparently a good part of Mauna Loa did collapse and the resulting tsunami was a few hundred meters high.

Bad news is that if it happened again, it would decimate Hawaii, but the good news (if you can call it that) is that this sort of tsunami would attenuate before reaching the mainland.

http://www.mala.bc.ca/~earles/kohala-tsunami-sep04 .htm

I was curious and googled for this guy's name. Here is what I found:

During a vicious electrical storm in his hometown of Dayton, Tennessee, he went out to fix a blown transformer. Lightning hit the transformer and burned both of his arms off to the shoulders.

I guess you can blame the guy for going outside during a storm, but then again, he was just trying to do his difficult and risky job.

The linked page also has some amazing images, including this one

I was curious and googled for this guy's name. Here is what I found:

During a vicious electrical storm in his hometown of Dayton, Tennessee, he went out to fix a blown transformer. Lightning hit the transformer and burned both of his arms off to the shoulders.

I guess you can blame the guy for going outside during a storm, but then again, he was just trying to do his difficult and risky job.

The linked page also has some amazing images, including this one

Here are some more pictures of Jessie Sullivan that show what the prosthetics look like.

http://www.mala.bc.ca/~soules/medi402/brown/cyborg .htm

I hardly see how that's applicable, unless it's meant as a cop-out. Maybe you don't like it, but not enough to do something about it?

I don't know how to respond to that. As I see it every word is emminently applicable. I posted the Thoreau because he's much more articulate than I, I simply don't know how to say it any better.

It certainly isn't the case that "the State has provided no way", and neither was it the case for Thoreau. The Constitution does provide a mechanism by which it can be ammended.

The key phrase is "They take too much time, and a man's life will be gone." For another take on it read this parable by Franz Kafka.

I notice, however, that you are "cavilling" and not addressing the point of the definition of the word (geothermal), about which we were having a discussion.

Oh, that's classy. You deviate from the discussion to make pointless remarks about the definition of "generate." Then when I go reel you back in, you accuse me of getting off the point. You argue like a right winger. Throw in everything but the kitchen sink, bring lots of heat and no light, head-in-the-clouds delusion and hypocrisy with your fingers stuck firmly in your ears.

Further, your arguments are all mere contradiction, without addressing any salient features of the actual issue.

Holy cow. The delusion it takes to see yourself as the one bringing nothing but truth and facts to the debate is hilarious. Please go back and read this thread -- oh, I forgot -- right wingers are congenitally unable to examine their own actions. You can only see the errors of others people's ways. I love arguing with you, though. It's great practice because, normally, people argue logically. Learning to argue with illogical people gives me more tools to bring to the debate. I'm a daily Rush listener for the same reason.

Geothermal energy is heat from the earth, with no regard given to the means by which that heat was introduced.

Here you show your extreme stubbornness and blindness to the points I've been making this entire thread. Geothermal heat was not "introduced." I don't know why I'm making this point again since you didn't absorb it the first several times I made it. Geothermal heat is generated by geological processes from other forces (using definition three above.) If you can't understand what "generated" means then I can't help you much more than the dictionary definition. If you want to think that "generated" is equivalent to magic that's your problem.

If you have any source you would like to cite, that states this is not so, please reference it posthaste.

Righty-O, guv'nor. Prithee accept this linkage for thyne rightly perusal. :)
(Sorry, I don't mean to laugh. I know you were trying to sound intelligent, there.)

Science 403
Wherein it states:
"In fact, shallow groundwater heat is not geothermal heat at all. The shallow groundwater is warmed by the rock, soil, surface water and surface air in the vicinity, and those bodies are warmed by the sun."

An IRS ruling agrees:
"Thus, the heat pump is not using energy derived from a geothermal deposit as defined in the regulations and it is not geothermal energy property."

Will there be anything else, M'Lud?

It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me...

i always thought sofa was british and couch was american

Take for example when Galileo proposed the (previously mentioned) model of the earth revolving around the sun. Contrary to popular belief, the church was not particularly strong against the idea.

Bwahahahaha!

He was fucking excommunicated you moron!

He was SENT TO HELL, and was only allowed to live because he was forced to retract his blasphemous theories.

Contrary to popular belief...jeez, you retard creationists are all the same, spewing false claims strewn together with faulty logic, wanting so very hard to be taken seriously despite it all. This is why I called you a moron and would not continue the discussion on feminine violence with you. Stating your creationist viewpoint indicates that you are going to use invalid arguments and will hold on to them with the awsome power of your faith no matter how much proof to the contrary is presented to you.

Creationism is not science. It is not based on observation, experimentation, or any other tool of science. It is a faith, an irrational belief. You're free to believe it, but stop trying to pass it off as something that it is not.

I am neither a child nor 14

But you sound and think like one.

I don't actually believe in evolution

I'll take that as proof that you're a moron.

1. You do not even know what you mean when you say "evolution".
   
2. Your creationism stories are so convoluted that you need to have long, drawn out discussions to explain them. Conversations that give you ample room to hide the glaring holes in your logic that you need to have to sustain a steady disbelief of actuall scientific evidence, as opposed to your "thought about it a lot" rationalisations.

Another way technology plays into poetry is Aleatory Poetry. I experimented with this a bit in this dynamic poem, revelation to pi.

Not since the fence--which allowed the human race to change from wandering predatory animals to stable civilizations--has a tool ever had the potential to change things the way computer have.

The fence is more about "property" and marking divisions between people than it is about domesticating animals. Animal husbandry does not in and of itself require fences. The neolithic revolution owes more to cultivation of plants than it does to anything else. Horticulture precedes and feeds the growth in population that makes structures like fences feasible and worthwhile. Here is a concise chronology of a Neolithic site in Jordan.

Oh, and as for the predatory ways of our ancestors, that's pretty much debunked and debunked and just plain abandoned in favor of more scientific, less sexist views of early humans.

Stone tools, fire, language, agriculture, writing, the computer?--What about the cotton jinny? Where does the cotton jinny fit in? I'm all for having computers in schools and having kids learn to do programming, but I am also wary of hype.

Benjamin Woolley, "The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron's Daughter"

Betty A. Toole "Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers : A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron's Daughter and Her Description of the First Computer"

Here's more books about her.

Apparently, women are trending away from computer science careers, so a book about Ada in the library might be a good influence on some young minds.

We can forgive her for introducing the idea of using punchcards! ;-)