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Slashback: Retroaction, Breakeven, Kansas
Pardon me sir, are you going to finish that Apple? Marco van de Voort writes: "MkLinux now has official support for these much sold first Nubus based PowerMac generation, that is rotting away in basements. These machines make excellent X-Terms." And the same models can naturally run NetBSD, too. [Updated 6:26GMT by timothy] Reader vkulkarn corrects me here. Mea culpa, you're right -- only some of the old Nubus PowerMac models actually run NetBSD. But I bet someone, somewhere is plotting to change that.
Garage sales can now support Linux.GigsVT writes "Coollogic has released a new set-top box, this one with Linux already installed. Sounds like ripe hacking material to me. Blurb: The Internet Ready 7200 uses a National Semiconductor MediaGX processor, 16MB of flash memory instead of a hard disk, 32MB of RAM and has the ability to connect to the Internet via DSL, Ethernet or a modem. It uses a TV instead of a monitor and comes with Netscape's Web browser." And MrRobahtsu writes "Want a 64MB diskless 200MHz Linux box cheap? Try egghead. With IDE, USB, 10/100 ethernet, and Linux and Netscape in flash ram, it looks pretty cool. Even says "can be upgraded to a pc." Not bad for $129."
Toto, I don't think we're in the Pleistocene anymore! Claudius writes: "This cnn.com article reports that Kansas voters now support the teaching of evolution in their public schools, as evidenced by recent election results. They have voted to remove two incumbents to the Kansas Board of Education who have supported standards diminishing the importance of evolution, and a third, anti-evolution candidate was unable to defeat an opponent who opposes the current standards. The issue is still far from settled, however, since five of the ten seats on the board remain to be filled in November." For a refresher on the sticky state of evolution in Kansas education, see Hemos' story on it from a while ago.
Ha ha fooled ya good. TeacherReviews.com writes "Gervase just got voted off the Survivor island, meaning that RealWorldBlows discussed in a past story produced a false result and the actual winner of Survivor is still unknown." True enough. What was going through the collective CBS head when they failed to follow the directive of their own Web site?!
Still horrifying after all these days. chaidawg writes: "According to this article in the New York Times (free registration req.), author Stephen King's experiment with payment for e-publishing seems to be working. After the first of three promised chapters he has made back all but $10,000 of the more than $100,000 he spent on advertising." This still doesn't mean Jamie is wrong -- yet.
grappler, I thought you were dead... maybe a mining accident.
2 1337 4 u!
I am having trouble deciding whether to be scared or to laugh at your ignorance or close mindedness. For those of us who have had a scientific background at the University level your claim that evolution is correct in every way is moronic. Evolution is far from confirmed, and has many, many flaws. 150 years ago, many things in physics were 'confirmed', now many of these ideas are looked at and laughed at. Even the theory of gravity is undergoing changes at this very time. You are welcome to have your own beliefs, however please think and do the research before you you defend them with ignorance.
btw, while I don't believe in a literal version of creationism, I am a Christian.(don't moderate me down because of my beliefs.From the irony dept. the Flat Earth Society announced in 1995 that their membership was global.
ha!
2 1337 4 u!
It deals with models of the world at various levels of confirmation.
The theory of evolution is not "proven fact", philosophers long ago proved that to be an unattainable goal. However an intelligent person today who is familiar with the facts can no more reasonably deny evolution than an educated scientist of the 1700's could deny that the Earth was round.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
You're missing out on two very important pieces of the puzzle here, plus a drop of statistics.
Let's do the statistics first: "Any event with a positive probability, no matter how small, when given enough time, must eventually happen"
So to use your watch example, if one assumes that there is a process by which your analogue watch could be transformed into a digital watch, then, given enough time, that result MUST happen. That's not evolution, just math.
So it therefore follows that in order for your watch to transform, it must be proven that there is a process that would achieve the transformation with positive probibility.
In order for the transformation to occur within a reasonable amount of time, the process must have a sufficiently large probability, in order to escape fates with larger-order probabilities. For instance, if left alone for aeons, it is possible that your watch could be discovered by an analogue watch upgrader person, a man who wanders the earth looking for watches to transform. This is a positive-probability postulation, but the probability is a very, very small number, whereas the probability that the watch would simply corrode away is very high.
So much for math.
Now, here's the first bit of biology, broken into 4 pieces:
1) Our biological structure is controlled by bits of information-storing molecules called DNA
2) DNA is sometimes changed by random chance
3) Mutated DNA sometimes results in changes to the DNA_controlled physical structure of an organism
4) Some DNA-based mutations are inheritable
All four of these little bits of biology are well proven and well established facts. We know that DNA determines structure for a fact. We know that DNA can be made to mutate for a fact. (and, incidently, you don't need gamma rays to mutate DNA. Sex does a perfectly acceptable job sometimes) We know that sometimes mutated DNA changes physical structure for a fact, and we know that sometimes that mutated DNA is inheritable for a fact.
Taken together, this means that it is possible for a mutation to occur that breeds true - positive probability.
The second missing piece is "natural selection" which simply states that organisms that are well suited to their environment will be more likely to survive, and so more likely to breed. This is a positive feedback loop - the better you are at surviving, the more you breed, the more well-adapted offspring you have, who will in turn produce well-adapted offspring, and so on. Well proven, well established fact.
Now couple the two together, and you get "If a mutation that breeds true and produces a structural change provides the mutated organism with a survival advantage, then that organism is more likely to breed and produce similarly altered offspring" Bingo! We have our process! Not to get your watch from analogue to digital, but certainly how to go from single-celled life to Humanity.
All you need now to make the process a near-certainty is time, lots and lots of time - and guess what? We've had several BILLION years for this process to work.
There you go, can't get much more logical than that.
I'm afraid the only failing here is your failing to understand the level of rigour in the logic here - not to mention the physical evidence. Go back and look at your textbooks. Start with the single-celled organisms and work your way up. We all work the same way! We all burn sugar for energy, we all have the same molecule (DNA) that determines our structure, all our cellular biology is nearly identical, and as you progress up the ladder, we all have pretty much the same design in our organs, skeletal structure - even our senses! We all have sex, all our sex organs work pretty much the same, we all breathe, we all pump blood with a single pump.... The evidence is enormous!
Evolution, my friend, as as factual as it gets. All you have to do to see it is pay attention.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Sorry to shout, but some of us actually want the ending to BE A SURPRISE!!! So for god's sake, TELL US IT'S A SPOILER!
Walt
You said: "The Theory of Evolution is not fact. That is why we say theory of evolution" When will people stop spouting this drivel ? The word theory does not mean something is unproven, for example, I spent 2 years at university studying "Number Theory", including large slabs of mathematical proofs that what we were studying was _known_to_be_true_, and you don't get anyone more finicky about 'proof' than a pure mathematician. In fact, when mathematicians want to make it clear that something is unproven, they usually call it a conjecture. In general, most things in science are called theories, including such well established and uncontroversial things as "the earth revolves around the sun" (Copernican Theory). I went to a debate between a Scientist and Creationist on Evolution, and when the Creationist said "evolution is only a theory" the scientist produced a car-battery and set of jumper leads and said "wanna test the theory of electricity ?"
Hrmmm, if you look at it in the proper light this guy is a religious nut.
I mean come on, how can you prove to me that 2 + 2 is 4? What the hell is a 2? And what's a 4? Someone told him that 2+2 was 4 and he believed them. Talk about gullible. And if 2/2 = 1, and 0/2 = 0, why does 0/0 = undefined instead of 1? or 0? Math is just as much specious religious raving as any OTHER religion. It's all a matter of perspective. Micro-Evolution can be demonstrated and is obviously factual. However Macro-Evolution has no such proof. No one has yet been able to change one species into another, no one has been able to demonstrate Macro-Evolution in any fashion, hence it's still bullshit.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
You said: "The Theory of Evolution is not fact. That is why we say theory of evolution" When will people stop spouting this drivel ? The word theory does not mean something is unproven, for example, I spent 2 years at university studying "Number Theory", including large slabs of mathematical proofs that what we were studying was _known_to_be_true_, and you don't get anyone more finicky about 'proof' than a pure mathematician. In fact, when mathematicians want to make it clear that something is unproven, they usually call it a conjecture. In general, most things in science are called theories, including such well established and uncontroversial things as "the earth revolves around the sun" (Copernican Theory). I went to a debate between a Scientist and Creationist on Evolution, and when the Creationist said "evolution is only a theory" the scientist produced a car-battery and set of jumper leads and said "wanna test the theory of electricity ?"
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Funny how only the CBS affiliates in my area covered the story on TV though.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
No X! I was thinking of console Linux that somehow made use of the stuff in the ROM anyway- yes this would be a _totally_ different display subsystem than Linux would normally have, but that's kind of the idea- what could use as much built into the Plus as possible, and still act like the Linux command line with a good amount of available programs like rm, vi or whatever? (Maybe there'd only be room for ed ;) ) X is right out- no way would it fit in the typical Plus. I realise that I'm talking extreme Franken-hacking but I simply don't care because the notion of a Mac Plus cheerfully booting to a white-on-black console Linux prompt is too cool to miss. Three-button mouse? Who needs a mouse? *g* leave it unplugged! The keyboard will suffice! If you _reverse_ the leads on a telephone wire you get a Mac Plus keyboard wire, and can extend it much farther than the little stock wire. (If you don't reverse the wires, the Mac is shorted out into permanent death :) )
Bethe's whole argument comes down to this:
"The basic micro-processes of cellular biology are so complex that there's no way I can believe they're the product of random chance"
At its very root, the argument depends on Bethe's belief of the suitability of evolution and natural selection to produce complex systems. There's no evidence there to support the position, just Bethe's stubborn refusal to accept what he sees before him.
Evolution is complexity-neutral - all you need is more time, and you develop more complexity.
What Bethe really misses is that, thanks to heredity, future organisms don't have to re-invent the wheel. Instead, they build upon the work of what has gone before them. It's a kind of code reuse.
The evidence is right there in front of you. You and Bethe may choose to deny it, but it doesn't change it being there.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
You are right o quite a lot of things but you forget one thing: We haven't observed macro evolution (the kind that gives birth to new species) so it is still a theory (or rather a collection of theories given the number of schools in this theory). And to help you have another view on science, math and religion you should ponder this saying:
If a `religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Godel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.
-- John Barrow
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
Um....it is named for Gutenberg the man, who invented (sort of) the printing press.
It should be noted that the performa support in MkLinux is close but not quite there yet, there's still some issues with slot interrupts that need to be resolved before it can be considered useable.
David Gatwood and I (Tony Mantler - no slash login) are working on getting it all fixed up, hopefully it should be done very soon. (David is doing all the real work, I'm just providing background and insight into how these oddball machines work - some of it is pretty weird)
When all is said and done, though, it's pretty damn cool watching the linux boot messages scroll by on my 5200, knowing that it's likely the first 5200 in the world to ever do so. 8)
Cheers - Tony :)
Just as some movies are filmed with more than one ending, not only to fool the previewers but to see which ending gets the best reaction, I wonder if they filmed several different endings. I would offhand guess it unlikely, but by no means impossible.
--
Infuriate left and right
I'm not arguing with you. All I'm saying is, let those who disagree have their vote. "God made it so" does a nice job of explaining all that and more, doesn't it? It answers the questions. not in a manner satisfactory to me, but for some unknown reason it is satisfactory to others. As I pointed out in a response above, and should have said in the original post, the best argument for science (and perhaps the only one that doesn't depend on science) is that it offers everyone, including those who disagree with it, substantial improvements in quality of life, by any measure. But let those who don't want that have their vote.
---
It's true that by current definitions of science, most religious teachings are pure and unadulterated bullshit. On the other hand, I don't think that taking science as the One True Source(tm) of knowledge about the world is such a good thing either.
Aside from all the tree-hugging and new-age philosophy, there are things that we will never understand, and things that we will always be in awe of.
Yet if you define science strictly, as a scientist defines it, then yes, religion must confine itself to being philosophy, and not science.
I know this is hard for many people to understand but the confusion and ignorance bugs me:
Evolutionary theory and Big Bang Theory are not identical!!!
Everytime the subject of evolution comes up somebody brings up the big bang. Why? They refer to two separate ideas: The idea that the Universe was created about 15 billion years agoThey were were developed separately: Origin of the Species was published in 1859, Big Bang cosmology got started in the 1920's with Edwin Hubble's work but really didn't start to catch on until the 1950's. They are logically separate: One could accept a particular inflationary big bang model but still think that God created each species seperately, or one could think that the universe was divinely created (or partake of an alternate materialistic cosmological theory) but still believe that evolution is the correct explanation for the diversity of life on Earth.
Thinking the Big bang Theory is incorrect is insufficient grounds for thinking that all extant and extinct species did not evolve from a common
ancestor. Talking about cosmology is superfluous when discussing evolution. It's like discussing fruit preference and being told that someone doesn't like plums because they think that Francis Bacon was the real author of Shakespeare's plays and poetry. Evolutionary biology and Big Bang Cosmology are two different areas of study,each with its own models, methods, and evidence that should command thoughtful study, not glibly dismissed when you can't even differentiate between the two.
Pull your head out of your ass and stop listening to the english department.
Tell me, the computer you are looking at: does it work by electricity, or by magic? Would this change if some idiot with a book and a PAC came along and said it worked by magic?
Evolution is correct in the same sense that the moon orbiting the earth is correct. The evidence absolutely, positively cannot be explained via any explaination other than evolution. Evolution has been observed. Speciation has not been observed, but it is in principle impossible to observe unless you are watching for geologic time scales.
Evolution is true in the same sense that if you are travelling faster, or if the ground is wet, it will take longer to stop. Should we fail to teach this in drivers' ed classes if some wacko with beads and an incense stick says, "believe in me, and the car will stop whenever you want it to"?
There is no debate as to the fact of evolution among those who are qualified to have an opinion (which does not include me -- I can only evaluate stuff second hand). There are no "significant disagreements" that prophets for profit like to latch on to. There are disagreements along the lines of "is it a shorted wire, or a warn fuel pump", but the creationists are claiming "they can't even agree whether the car is running".
There are objective facts. Evolution is one of them. The earth being round is one of them. There is better evidence for evolution than there is Julius Caesar being murdered. The latter is taught in schools, why not the former?
And no, we have no obligation to listen to those who say creationism should be taught. The constitution is a contract between me and the government. The government has an obligation to uphold it. If you don't like separation of church and state, you're always free to move to Iraq.
Before this debate goes any further, everyone read the
Charles Miller
--
The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
The Theory of Gravity is quite provable every single time. Pick something up. Let it go. It falls to the ground. Every single time.
You call that proof? 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime. Thus I have proven all uneven numbers are prime.
You are totally wrong. The theory of evolution is not a fact, it is just very likely to be true. You are confusing the mathematical, deductive reasoning of Number 'theory' with the inductive reasoning of science. (Event A has always been observed to occur under these conditions, B. Therefore it will always continue to occur under those conditions, regardless when or where those conditions occur. This is the central assumption of science) Go and read Karl Popper. BTW, the Copernican theory is wrong - the Earth does not revolve around the Sun, they both revolve around their common centre of mass.
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is"
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Is it just me, or was removing the middle-leech supposed to bring down the cost of things like novels?
Looking over the FAQ for this King story, I see that it's $1 a pop (a mere few thousand words each time) for the first three installments, and $2.50 an ep after that, up to seven or eight payments total. That's $13-15.50 US for an approximately 350 page novel (being generous with his wordcount estimates, since King has tended to try and make up for lack of creativity with verbosity in the past, much as I'm doing right now). Plus you have to read the thing in installments (knowing at any point the author might pull the plug), forgo the possession of a nice compact paperback to take on vacation with you, and either bear the costs of printing it yourself (figure $2-10 US more) or make it through an entire novel on Acrobat Reader (meaning you'll probably be buying new corrective lenses later ;).
I do like the concept of electronic distribution and micropayments, but what's "micro" about these? Seems like the reader is paying a lot, and King makes out like a bandit since he no longer has to pay a publisher. If the cost of advertising is the issue, then the experiment is already a failure, since only this precise sort of mediocre bestseller author could ever afford it (King is surely not hurting for cash), and ending the overpopularity of middle-of-the-road crap is supposed to be one of the main benefits ascribed to direct distribution.
Even if it were an author I liked and respected, I can't see why anyone would want to pay these rates. I think this one is just capitalising on the brief novelty most people see here.
-- Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. ~ Robert Doisneau
While I agree, it won't happen. I used to think that if anyone were given the facts, clearly and simply, they'd 'get it'. I thought that these folks were just not too bright, or just hadn't spent any time thinking about what they actually do 'believe' or better yet what they know.
For a variety of reasons, I don't think that anymore.
The book that changed my mind was Why People Believe Weird Things By Michael Shermer. He talks about his early life as a not-so-skeptical person, and how that ties into some very whacked out points of view such as the anti-evolutionists. It's not a promising read on the likelyhood that these folks will all the sudden get a clue. It is a very good and entertaining read, though.
On that note, here's a good quote, I can't remember the source;
Don't expect to reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themseves into.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Canar dun said:
To be honest, on reading this I'm smelling a furry critter with horns who lives under bridges and has a strange craving for Cuban cabra sandwiches :). If so, good job. You got me. :)
If this is NOT a troll, though...well, it seems someone has never been to a farm or a livestock show. :)
There is an entire class of mammals--the Arctiodactylia or "even-hooved" animals--that has lost one, and sometimes three, of the original five toes mammals had. Probably the most common member of the order in the US right now is the common cow; just to to a farm or a petting zoo, and count the number of toes on a cow. (Or deer, or any such critters. It's only the largest order of herbivorous animals on the planet; I'm sure you can find a member or two.)
For that matter, the second-largest order of herbivorous mammals has a large family that actually has lost two to four toes in its history. (I'm talking about the equines. In fact, we have one of the better fossil records that detail how they've lost toes throughout their evolution--they went from five to three to one toe. In fact, you occasionally have the rare "throwback" horse born with three toes; the loss of the last two toes occured fairly late in horse evolution. At least one "cousin" of the equines, the tapir, has three toes, and rhinos have five. If you want to see examples, just look at a zoo or at a horse-farm or go down to the track. Heck, watch the Kentucky Derby if you want. :)
For that matter, the entire "felid" branch of the Carnivora (which includes cats, "civet cats" and "genet cats", hyenas, and some older forms like Smilodon) has lost the fifth toe on its hind feet, and their front first toe is reduced to a dewclaw (which is the state of fifth toes in canids such as wolves, dogs and foxes, too; expect them to lose the hind dewclaws in a few million years). The main reason cats still have dewclaws on their front toes is that kitties can use them fairly well as thumbs, especially if not declawed (if you want them to demonstrate, get a can of cat-treats and let kitty fetch her own out). I will leave out the obvious joke about what will happen when cats evolve opposable thumbs and thus no longer need humans as their thralls for world dominance. :)
For that matter...we'll take it beyond mammals. The other major group besides the synapsids (one of the two great lineages of land animals besides amphibians; synapsids include mammals, theraspids or "proto-mammals", and "mammal-like reptiles" like Dimetrodon) happens to be the same group that reptiles and archosaurs belong to, including birds. They, too, have a fairly extensive history of digit-loss:
Last toe digit (our equivalent of our pinkies) lost sometime near when archosaurs first evolved; even modern crocs, which are the modern representatives of one of two branches of the archosaurs (the other being the bird/dino branch), only have four toes
Fourth toe (rough equivalent of ring finger turns non-functional in theropod dinosaurs during early evolution (about the time they separated from hererrasaurs, in the late Triassic)
Fourth finger lost in most theropod dinosaurs around evolution of the Maniraptora (the subclass of theropods that includes birds, as well as most of the meat-eating cast of the Jurassic Park movies besides dilophosaurs and compys), around early-mid Jurassic
Third finger (equivalent to the "flip the bird" finger) lost in tyrannosaurs
Fourth toe lost entirely in ornithomimosaurs
Sometime during development of powered flight (late Jurassic-early Cretaceous) finger claws lost and second and third fingers fuse while thumb develops as alula
In surviving theropod dinosaurs (aka birds) all have lost except thumb and first two fingers on front limbs and first two fingers were fused (there may have been a reversal in phorusracoid birds, which largely hunted as large land predators in the Americas until 2 million BC to 100,000 years ago); many, if not most, ground-running birds have lost the fourth toe entirely, in most birds it is a dewclaw, and only a very few birds (perching birds) use the fourth toe at all as a functional digit
I won't get into snakes. There is recent evidence they evolved from mosasaurs (a type of swimming reptile), and they not only lost digits but limbs altogether (the only snakes with limbs today are boids, which have claws used for mating attached to very tiny legs; early snakes have more substantial limbs, but nothing huge).
But perhaps, well, mere synapsid/reptilian split critters aren't enough. Let's throw amphibians in, too. :)
At least one sub-branch of amphibians has lost limbs as well (caecilans); there are several branches of frogs that have reduced digits to four per limb, too.
For that matter...the main reason most animals have five limbs is that five limbs is an incredibly ancient structure--literally coming about before land animals (we are now starting to find fossils of animals at around this time--we now know they evolved as swimmers first and evolved limbs to scoot about on bottom, and early "tetrapods" had varying numbers of digits per limb (some with five, some with seven or even eight digits per limb).
For more info on this, including some good lineages, you might want to go here or here.
As for Pascal's Wager...well, the wager relies on five very big assumptions:
that such a thing as God exists
that such a thing as Hell exists
that a God would be enough of a ratbastard as to throw someone into a place of eternal torment just because the poor sot hadn't ever heard of aforementioned God and/or disagreed with the "official" account based on empirical evidence
that what folks see as God might not be the processes of Nature, or that God may well have created stuff by evolution
that people are meant to blindly follow a leader instead of use the brains that God and/or evolution gave them in the first place so as to better understand the mysteries of life :)
Myself, well...if there is a God (which...if there is one, I think it might be Nature, but that's only my viewpoint) Sie either honestly doesn't give a damn one way or the other (in which case God is basically Nature, and the whole idea of appealing to a God is moot unless you mean something like apologising to cows before you eat them), or isn't enough of a ratbastard to chuck someone into a pit because the fossils pretty much show not only that horses evolved from tapir-like critters but that birds evolved from very close cousins of Deinonychus and we all came eventually from fishy-looking critters. If Sie is such a ratbastard, I'm not afraid to say that not only would I gladly burn in Hell in such a case, but such a ratbastard neither deserves my worship nor my respect. :) (And no, I don't buy the whole "Fossils were there to test us" crap, either...that makes God out not only to be a complete ratbastard, but a troll and a cruel ratbastard who gets his jollies off sending people to Hell for basically his idea of a practical joke. In which case, He can go straight to Hell, if you pardon the expression.)
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
Jamie pointed out to me via private e-mail that the crux of his prediction is that King will never have to finish his novel under the terms of his agreement -- 75% of people have to pay for each section. The possible stopping point, as best as I can tell, was the 3rd section. But the site confuses me, to be honest.
Anyhow, I stand by my comment that that particular portion of Jamie's prediction was wrong. But I was viewing his comment too narrowly. Jamie meant that people simply won't continue to pay over all 10 sections. I agree, I don't think that they will. By that logic, as he produces each section, the average percentage of people paying will go down until, eventually, it may hover around Jamie's predicted 15%-30%. Making Jamie right.
-Waldo
-------------------
I think that Stephen King should have voted for the set-top PowerMac to stay on the island, despite its theological heresay.
Folks may not necessarily want to... however, if King only offers that option, whatcha gonna do? Also, what if you enjoy reading stuff that publishing houses won't touch?
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Great - a Slashback that's gonna need another Slashback to correct the mistakes...
MkLinux has run on the first-generation Power Macs (6100, 7100, 8100) from Day 1. NetBSD, on the other hand, has never run on these; indeed, a quick check of the NetBSD site will show you that they are looking for someone to do the port.
On top of that, the MkLinux announcement was about the Performa series (6200, 6300, etc.), which came out well after the first generation. What were you guys smoking?!?
This it wonderful, now i can put a terminal in the kitchen, and use a network drive to store recipies an stuff. then once i get dsl i can run an eggdrop on it, ang setup a totaly 1337 channel!
The SCovery looks nice, but it's not $129.
There's a minimum shipping of $19.95 from Egghead, for UPS ground, so it's $148.95.
I didn't see the disk option priced.
I, for one am glad to see that the Constitution means something. It's time that all this talk of "school prayer" and "equal time" gets taken out of the picture. Do I get equal time on the pulpit at a xitian church to teach evolution? Then why are they invading the minds of children to teach them religious rubbish? Evolution is a confirmed, Objective fact. Religion, and creation "science" is pure fantasy.
Personally, I'd like to see someone shut down these religious hoaxsters for good. Take these fundies out of the school system and out of our government. Religion, the crutch that it is, has no place in public life, mine or anyone elses.
-- Floyd
-- Floyd
National Semiconductor MediaGX
I used to have a Cyrix MediaGX processor. I hope they haven't done a die shrink, I'd like to get 2 of these set top boxes and make a waffle iron.
Damn those things put out a lot of heat.
--Shoeboy
I demand the right to a solid platform upon which I can support my dignity. How can I feel good about myself if I am reminded that I share common ancestry with ape-brutes? I've been to the zoo, and I decline to write of the horrid, disgusting things I have seen the creatures do.
With our sense of self-worth at stake, supporters of science will talk of 'empirical evidence', 'facts', and 'logic'. Take a moment and reflect on the innocence lost the day our world left it's prominent spot at the center of the universe. And now they would have us force feed this, their evil-ution, to our kids.
Does a man who is doing his utmost to get into heaven benefit from filling his head with theories? Do we want our teachers questioning all that is good and decent, twisting things around with their fancy words? We must shift our focus back to something which is never used in an evil fashion: religion.
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is"
Vidi, Vici, Veni
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is"
Vidi, Vici, Veni
They would make the ideal little dumb terminal or CLI-based unix toystation, and only pull about as much power as a 60 watt lightbulb :) Mac Pluses rule! I have about six, and one day I _will_ run Linux on 'em- or something much like it. The ROM contains much useful stuff like drivers and the Chicago font (I forget if it also contains Geneva 9 and Monaco 9). You can fit a terminal in _MacOS_ onto one on a floppy complete with MacOS itself (like sys6 or earlier)- it has got to be possible to get one working like a linux terminal, if you use the stuff in ROM and don't bother loading MacOS.
Ideally I'd like to see it run gcc or some ancestor of emacs off a floppy :) however, vi or bash or sh are not to be scorned. The important thing is to get the recognisable environment in there- something that 'speaks Linux'- because it would be ultimately cool, and the cost would be basically nil. There are _so_ _many_ of these little buggers around, most still work fine and the ones that are borken, EVERY failure mode has been mapped out by now and books written on 'em.
I have to wonder, how fatal is the Mac Plus's flaw of not having an MMU? Did the original PDP that unix was written for have an MMU? How far back would you have to go to get a Unix that expected no more hardware than what a Plus has to offer? It'd be a weird combination of ancient code smallness and crudity, and very non-Unix focus on using the contents of the Plus ROM wherever possible.
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and I'm leaning toward the latter. They didn't just let everyone get misled by their website (which they went as far as to take down for a few days after the story broke), they also intentionally mislead the public in at least two other ways. Someone leaked that Gervase would win to MSNBC even before the website thing. Furthurmore, a scene in the introduction shows four people sitting at the tribal council, Gervase among them. CBS now claims that was intentional. So either CBS lucked out and had a number of coincidences fall perfectly into place, or they are master con-artists. They fooled us, didn't they?
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." -Richard Feynman
As for the Kansas Board of Education, we had a similar situation in Northern Virginia when a bunch of ppl ran on a creationist platform for my County BoE. They loss big-time. Pleistocene? That's too old. The earth was created on 22nd October, 4004 BC at 6 p.m. (James Ussher, Archibishop of Armagh).
"If 50 million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing" --- Bertrand Russel
Also, to quote from a proof that Hell is exothermic (don't ask):
"Many religions have a belief that if you do not belong to that religion, you will go to hell. The number of these religions is greater than one, and, as someone cannot belong to more than one religion, all souls go to hell."
Until systems like the Rocket eBook come down in price, and until a wide base of content is available cheaply in a format that can be read by any eBook AND any computer with the correct software, this method of distribution will NOT catch on.
Sorry Mr. King, but you're moving too fast.
How about this:
When you get a bacterial infection and treat it with antibiotics, there is a chance that a few of these bacteria (the one with greatest resistance to the antibiotic) survive. Those bacteria that have survived reproduce, and their progeny (if you can say that about life forms that reproduce asexually) will also be resistant to the same antibiotics. That bacteria goes on to infect someone else. They take the same antibiotic that was given to you, but it has no effect, so a different class of antibiotics has to be used. Eventually a strain of bacteria remains that is resistant to all known antibiotics, and people infected with it die.
This has happened in our lifetimes. Its not a theory, it can be demonstrated. This is natural selection.
This is what Darwin theorized, based significantly on the variety of species of finches found on the Galapagos islands, all aparently 'evolved' from a common ancestor. Darwin didn't know about DNA, and even today we can only work with an incomplete fossil record, but applying the proven fact of natural selection to what we do know from the fossil record and the similarity of DNA from one species to another that seems to correlate with that record, the most reasonable explanation is over hundreds of millions of years the variety of species on earth today evolved from simpler organisms.
Help
Work for Change & GET PAID!
No, that'd be VMS. Can't beat that good old big grey wall of DEC documentation...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Kansas voters now support the teaching of evolution in their public schools, as evidenced by recent election results.
FUCK! i figured if one state, out of all our glorious fifty, could hold on their illusions about life on this planet...it was going to be Kansas!
damn this rationality! That state is going to burn in hell with all their new fangled scientific idears! Next they'll probably remove all board members who belong to the flat earth society! (yeah right...like the earth is ROUND?!?!) that's when the whores and the crack move in!
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Thinking that the process of small changes cannot add up to big ones is a classic mistake of creationists. Sorry, there isn't a line in the sand. You don't want to believe that small changes from population to population cannot add up to a change in species? Well keep your head in the sand if you want, but you are wrong.
Regards,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
The distinction between micro and macro evolution is a line in the sand invented by creationists who realized that micro-evolution was absolutely provably.
However nobody has ever come up with any decent reason why gradual changes cannot add up to big ones. In fact we have excellent documentation that they can and do. And to top it off, the predicted rates of small changes combined with the independently measured timescales are in agreement with the large scale changes predicted.
In short claiming that there is a distinction is an intellectually dishonest attempt to redefine the debate in terms where people can be left with the impression that you proved something.
Regards,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
The 78+% figure includes people who "promise" to pay.
We don't know how many already paid nor how many people will go back to the site to pay for what they have already downloaded.
Evolution is the process of ongoing modification in existing life. We know a fair amount about it.
Abiogenesis is how the ball got rolling in the first place, and we have large areas of ignorance about that.
In short I would say that we have good reason for believing that we know the basic cause of the the changes believed to have occurred over the last few hundred million years. Before that we have a lot of basic open questions.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
This was my point. It would be prohibitively costly and problematic to change the ending, but not impossible.
I'm leaning towards a creative webhead, but the general rule is to never explain with creativity what can be best mapped by stupidity and bullheadedness. How important to the network was their image of not being ignorant and have the finale of a tv show exposed? Enough to reshoot, say, 5-6 episodes? I doubt it, but...
I'm sure in a few years (5-10) if it was reshot, some novel will be written and the truth revealed. and the author sued, but hey.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Most of the American Indian versions were translated from English. Most of the very rare lanage editions where also translated from English or a closly related langauge.
The last bozo I meet that did translations didn't have much of a clue about Greek or Hewbrew and he was working for one of the largest bible pushers in Lynchburg VA.
smarty man survivor is good
That other fellow who replied to you saying that evolution is an incontrovertable fact is full of shit. But then those who purport creation to be the same are more so full of shit.
This is simple scientific method stuff, folks!!!
You ARE correct in that evolution should be called a hypothesis and not a theory. But you seem to have no idea what a theory *IS*.
>Calling it theory implies proven fact,
Which is absurdly false.
What a theory implies is that you have a conducted a repeatable (that's VERY important) experiment whose results support your hypothesis.
Now, what be "proven facts" would be things like:
"This skeleton (A) I dug out of the ground has X amount of Carbon 14 isotopes in it"
"This other skeleton (B) I dug out of the ground has a similar bone structure, but a larger braincase and has Y carbon 14 isotopes in it, making it Z million years more recent than the first skeleton"
Now, a hypothesis is a logical premise that fits all the known facts: "Well, it appears that, given A and B are closely related, B is more advanced than A, and B is Z million years younger than A, A evolved over time to become B"
For evolution to be a THEORY, someone would have to have conducted an (REPEATABLE!!!) experiment, subject to peer review, that offers support to the hypothesis. This has, to my knowledge, not happened for evolution (tho I COULD be wrong).
Now, for evolution to be a "proven fact", or a law, there's an entire array of headache inducing proofs, where you'd have to demonstrate mathmetically that there is NO other POSSIBLE explination for the known facts. There are very few scientific LAWS compared to the number of theories.
Unfortunately for the bible thumping crowd, creationism doesn't even have enough going for it to be considered a hypothesis, much less a theory.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
I love kings writing and I'd like to get it in online form.
I don't really understand why people want to get a book online. After you've downloaded it, you've got two choses, either you print it, or you read it on your computer. Printing it seems like a bit too much work, and sitting there reading 200 A4 sized papers isn't that fun. The other alternative (reading it on your computer) isn't that great either. Reading long texts on a computer is really horrible, and this would really spoil a good "book".
The only real bonus I see with books online, especially the Gutenberg project, is that it's searchable. If you're looking for a quote from a book, then enter a key word, and you've got it...
Timothy wrote:
:)
This still doesn't mean Jamie is wrong -- yet.
Jamie wrote:
I predict King's return rate will be something like 15%. Maybe it will go as much as twice as high, thanks to his deal with Amazon to let people use credit cards -- much more convenient.
Looks to me like Jamie *was* wrong. See Monday's news on Stephen King's site, in which he reports 76.38% payment. Now, 19.8% of the 116,200 that he counts as having paid have actually just promised to pay, but haven't actually paid. 80.2% of them paid via credit card. That means that at least 61.3% of downloads have been paid for, which is more than twice Jamie's most optimistic estimate.
King goes on. In response to the question "Are you go for Part 3 in September?", he replies, simply, "Yes."
Sorry, Jamie.
-Waldo
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NetBSD does NOT support the 5200/5300/6200/6300 (except for the 6300/160 and the 6360 which used differant motherboards). These are the old school Apple systems that didn't use PCI, or Nubus for that matter... According to http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/m odels.html NetBSD does not support these machines.
If I am blind how do I read a printed book? I don't, but I could get my PC to read a text file to me, or I can wait until someone releases a recording (I have yet to see ESR reads the Cathedral and the Bazaar, never mind the poerty of Jim Morrision or ...). How pleasurable this is is down to your software, but the real point is that receiving a book in an electronic format is about freedom (speech not beer) because now you have a choice about how you read the book, you are not just stuck with some patchily marked pages.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
First off they didn't replace evolution with creationism, they gave school districts the right to choose to teach it or not and removed it from state testing standards. I believe they also pulled the terminology too. No, I don't think that's right, in fact I think its very wrong and there is a not-so hidden fundamentalist agenda here but lets not boil this down to the typical hackneyed science vs. religion rhetoric.
What is going on here is political activism vs. political apathy. These fundamentalists were organized and spent *years* getting into the school board to change policy. The same way any special interest group can gain some power, whether you agree with their politics or not.
The lesson learned here is that small municipal and state elections serve an important purpose and can have a very powerful effect on society. Its your job to keep an eye on your politicians, see what happens when you don't?
The CSICOP-style paranoia that the world is under attack by religious people is about as believable as most conspiracy theories. There are people both religious and secular who will do their best to push their agendas when you're not looking. People do it all the time, we just get angry when the resulting legislation isn't to our liking.
. Religion, the crutch that it is, has no place in public life, mine or anyone elses.
I strongly disagree with this, we have very public laws and traditions to regulate non-profits like Churches and Mosques. Not to mention put limits on what some brands of religious philosphy dictate (xtian scientists, animal sacrifice etc).
Personally, I don't like the reactionary tone of your post as I'd rather make my own decisions based on open-discourse and freedom of information than being force fed "facts" from either fundies or hard-core materialists, both calling for the censorship of the other.
If you want smart kids teach them the history and philosophy of science and religion and let them make decisions on their own, not just reciting whatever party-line you most agree with.
But it's chock full of errors, contradictions, and lunacies.
"Why me, Lord? Where have I gone wrong? I've always been nice to people. I don't drink or dance or swear. I've even kept Kosher just to be on the safe side. I've done everything the bible says, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff."
-Ned Flanders in The Simpsons episode 4F07
then you simply don't understand what the theory of evolution says.
'nuff said.
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Hey,
This is flamebait. I personally don't want to get into a big fight of creationist vs evolutionist fight. Such a debate belongs somewhere else, like talk.origins newsgroup. So take this fight elsewhere.
As far as I am concerned, both creationists and evolutionists can be nerds.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
'Moral guidance' (and those that tried to counter it) brought us such heavenly moments as the Crusades, forced conversion of Christians to Islam in Spain and south France, the Salem witchhunt, the house-arrest of Galileo, the decimation of American Indian culture, and our current little squabble in the Mideast.
The house arrest of Galileo. An interesting tale. Just in case you have no history of science knowledge at all, Galileo's observations of the planets and his subsequent conclusions arguing for the Copernican view of the world over Ptolemic thinking in his discourse "Dialogues of the Two Chief Systems of the World" lead to his trial by the Catholic Inquisition in 1633.
Galileo was persecuted even after his death - he was buried without rites, epitaph or marker. But he did eventually have his revenge as I discovered in Florence.
Galileo was eventually re-buried in a decent memorial. But not all of him. His middle finger bones from one hand were placed vertically in Catholic relic, which can be seen in the Science Museum in Florence, forever raised in salute ...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
"Monitor not included."
For a cool thin panel monitor picture it's all fake! There's no monitor attached to that 129$ box. Which makes it a 'reasonable', but certainly not a good deal. Keep your money people!
Joseph Elwell.
And giving people choice is wrong?? A person should not have to have creationism shoved down his or throat, just like a person should not have to the (the theory of) evolution shoved down his or her throat.
Letting people mistakenly believe that they can pick and choose what to call facts and calling the result still science is wrong. It is a disservice to students to cut science at a politically convenient point.
Truth is not a matter to be decided in the court of public opinion. The truth is that evolution is part and parcel of the scientific world-view. You can legitimately not teach science, or you can teach science and also teach evolution. But saying that you can validly teach one without the other is a pure and simple lie.
Regards,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht