I have no problem with, say, the Amish. They looked at the dehumanizing aspects of technoloy and said 'Hrm, maybe not.'. I don't even have a problem with them taking advantage of modern medicine and whatnot...they pay taxes, too, and medical bills. It's not like I personally discovered penicillin.
If they want to say 'The people who choose to live in this community don't want to veg out in front of the TV and wake up at 7 in the morning to fill up on coffee while they drop their kids off at school all day', I actually have to admire that a bit. I couldn't live without a computer, but, hey, that's me.
The religion right, OTOH, want to have their cake, eat it to, and shov eit down everyone else's throat, which doesn't really work as an analogy, but there you go.
Where is the fossil record the the "partial wing"--the one that was growing but had yet to produce results?
Um, seen a 'flying' squirrel lately?
Dumbass. I could think of that off the top of my head.
In case you're honestly ignorant, instead of stupid, flying squirrels have a flap of skin between their front and back legs that allow them to glide. given enought time, they could easily evolve into actual flying mammals, like bats did. It's easy logic...gliding==not killing yourself when you fall.
Flying fish have much the same surface area, this time in the form of a fin, that allows them to escape danger in the water by leaping into the sky and glide for quite a ways. Although obviously they're unlikely learn to fly without figuring out how to breathe air.
The evolution of animals is a fact. We've observed animals adapting to their enviroment, and we can see it in the fossil record. Animals changing over time is a fact.
What is a theory is natural selection, aka, that this happens due to poorer-equipped-for-the-enviroment animals breeding less than better-equiped ones.
Science doesn't need to prove those three things true, because that is the job of religion and philosophy. They can come up with whatever theories they want about that, and science won't say anything.
Science doesn't attempt to explain anything past 'the world we live in', which include things like 'do we actually live here' and 'is the past just a fiction to account for the difference differences between my preent surroundings and my memories'. Science has no position on those topics at all. They assume the same thing we do, that the universe is 'real', but only because there is no other way to function in the universe.
The only reason religion's under attack by science is because religion keeps presenting itself as an alternative to science. Which is, of course, an attack on the scientific method itself.
Which is possibly a sillier and more absurd thing to do than to, say, challenge 'atoms' or 'gravity'. The scientific method is the underpinning of everything.
See, we used to not use it. And people would sit in their studies and 'deduce' how the universe worked, which resulted in lots of nice theories about 'multiple sphere of the universe' and 'platonic ideals' and 'the four elements' and the 'five humors' and all sort of interesting concepts that someone has probably already made sci-fi movies out of.
What it didn't produce, however, were any actual results. Aristotle, I believe, is actually the guy who came up with 'Hey, we should do an experiment to see if what I just thought up made sense, and if it doesn't, or I can't do the experiment at all, maybe we shouldn't claim it's true.'
Some people advocating ID don't understand what pisses scientists off so much about this. It's because that is how science (called 'philosophy' back then), used to work, you came up with a premise and said it was true, and that never managed to learn anything at all. Sure, think of your answer, but don't claim it's true without proof.
And science didn't start this fight. Religion didn't either. A very very small group of wackjob religious people started it.
According to game theory, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you', is, in fact a functional way to live your life. If the world is zero sum, it works 'best' if no one cheats.
Only religion and philosophy, however, can tell us what 'best' is. Why should we care if other people do well? (Note I'm not saying you can't have ethics if you don't believe in God, I'm saying you can't have a system of ethics many people ascribe to without at least philosophy behind it.)
And science has made some interesting strides in things various religions have been saying all the time, like 'everything's connected' and 'people's health is effected by their beliefs'. On the whole, religion is 'winning'...science is saying 'Yeah, that was a good idea, here's the math'.
This is one of the two battles that religion is fighting that it shouldn't be. It should be all excited about how science is bringing us closer to understand the universe God gave us, but instead it's decided to take some metaphors and stories too literally and attack.
The other battle it shouldn't be fighting is against 'the left', when, honestly...you know who would be for universal health care? Jesus would be, assuming it could work in any useful manner. (The argument it can't work is a valid one, but, oddly, the actual arguments against it seem to boil down to 'poor people using my tax money'.) Sure, fight abortion if you want, although I think that's just failure to understand the issue.
But there's a lot of stuff on 'the left' that religion should be saying 'Yeah, do that'. In fact, the progressive moment happened because of religion. (Which, yes, can lead to some dumb places, like Prohibition, but whatever. That, dispite what people think, was an honest attempt to help alcoholics and their families.)
Sadly, organized religion in this country has been hijacked by the Puritans (Or, at least, it's allowing the Puritans to speak for it.) and the right has, in turned, been hijacked by them. (Although that is their own fault.)
You pegged it. Supernatural is just a way to say 'The scientists don't believe us.'.
If, for example, we proved that people could receive visions from the future, perhaps using some sort of quantum interconnectedness, psychic powers would immediately stop being 'supernatural' and would just be really cool.
As you can't receive visions from the future, however, it is supernatural.
Ayn Rand managed to arrive at a 'useful philosophy', one arrived at many times before, that everyone is completely in charge of themselves, and has the right to do whatever they want as long as they don't initiate violence against others.
Logically, that does lead to complete anarchy. You can have a 'government', but it can, ethically, only enforce laws against people who have harmed others, and it's hard to see who would pay for it. I'm not saying that's bad, I'm just saying it is. It's certainly a valid philosophy, and, like I said, it's been invented at least a dozen times through history.
What makes her so special, however, is that she then manages to justify exactly the opposite of what it leads to. The topper came for me when I learned she'd used 'don't initiate violence' to argue for intellectual property rights. Intellectual property, of course, being a way of saying 'using the threat of force to stop people from doing things with their own property'.
I'm not getting in a discussion if the various forms of 'intellectual property' make any sense or are a good idea, but they're absolute gibberish under Ayn Rand's stated philosophy. Likewise, real estate ownership is gibberish, yet she comes out in favor of it.
The gag is, 'the liberals' (Which is not the term I'd use to group people opposed to Bush's insanity, but it's what the neocons call it.) could have been right even if Saddam had weapons, because they didn't say he didn't have WMDs.
'The left', myself included, thought Saddam might, indeed, be hiding WMDs. We also, however, thought we shouldn't violate international law and invade Iraq when the UN inspections, for the first time in a decade, actually seemed to be going okay.
Sure, they might find a bunch of crap and have Saddam deny it and, hey, maybe time for a war. Maybe we'd even go to war if they had tons of forbidden stuff and kept saying 'oops, ha, you can destroy that, sorry, but that's the last thing we have, honest' over and over. Or if he kicked the inspectors out again.
Those of us who thought this war was wrong couldn't imagine he was being honest and was complying with the UN 99.999% of the way. We thought he'd be proven to have some WMDs, but that we'd just destroy them or go to war, which is why, I guess, we didn't protest as much as we should have...we kinda assumed he'd be stubborn and we'd have to invade anyway.
Both 'the left' and the neocons fell for it. The left thought they were arguing 'follow the law to convict the criminal' vs. 'do anything you need to do to convinct him', when it turns out he was innocent.
Now 'the left' has fallen for the trick of defending 'We all thought he had WMDs', but that wasn't the issue in the first place. We did all think that to some extent. That doesn't matter.
Of course, that lie has been overtaken by the 'It was a war of liberation'. I hope all those people arguing that have fun when someone invades the US to 'liberate' us.
A low-speed long-distance one. Like I said, local ISPs can't compete, and unlike all you people living in cities that can call half the state for free, I can call...three counties. Each with maybe five thousand people. (This, of course, is assuming Alltel hasn't decended into illegality by blocking my phone calls to competing ISPs.)
However, it's not just censorship if it's 'impossible' to get the information...it can just be fairly hard. Obviously I could technically get any information I wanted at all, as Alltel does not control the post office and public highways, or even the newspaper, althogh I will qualify that last with a 'yet'.
Um, I didn't say a thing about them rate-limiting bittorrent ports. Sure, they could do that.
I was just pointing out they aren't breaking DNS when you use bittorrent, because that's frankly idiotic of them and makes no sense, as bittorrent doesn't use DNS during operation, anymore than you could stop large FTP downloads by breaking DNS when they start, or stop car thieves disabling the ignition ten minutes after the car is stolen.
DNS breaks solely because it uses UDP, and is more succeptible to lossage due to high bandwidth. (Or bandwidth being artifically lowered due to rate-limiting, although I would assume that's on certain ports only which don't include the DNS one.)
And it's much more likely to be losing packets on the outgoing trip. If you only have 20k up, and it's being sucked up by bittorrent, your 'what IP is example.com' packet can easily vanish, causing a wait of several seconds for a reply, followed by another packet, which does the same thing, etc, etc.
That's okay. The US can design parts in Japan, manufacture parts in China, write drivers for them in India, assemble them in China, write software for them in India, and ship them to Europe, because everyone in American is inexplicably out of work and can't afford computers. Everyone wins! (By 'everyone', I mean 'Rich Americans', which I believe is the legal definition.)
We just hope that no one catches on that, you know, America didn't actually do any work in that process, so it's rather stupid to keep paying us any money, when they could just do it all themselves.
Yeah, some people don't understand many of us deal with monopoly communcation systems.
Here, for example, there are exactly three internet options. Satellite, which really sucks (There's only one, DirectPC, and accounts are capped to a few hundred megs a day.), dialup to the phone company, named Alltel, or DSL via the phone company.
There are no competing phone services, there are no other local ISPs. I know some of you people live in cities where you can call several million people for free, but here I can barely call 5,000.
Alltel's probably not illegally using its telephone business to lock out competitors, but we've had quite a few local ISPs show up and run for a few months and then fold, because competing is just too hard. The phone company already has buildings in hundreds of counties, and billing systems set up, and they only have to run a T3 to 'themselves', which I'm sure is entirely aboveboard and legal, but, of course, only five feet instead of a mile, they already have support staff, etc, etc. Unless an ISP can show up and bring along a few hunderd customers, Alltel automatically underprices them, so none of them last.
And we've never had DSL competition. I don't know if that's because Alltel 'can't' provide DSL access to third parties, or if the DSL companies look at the dialup stats and just shake their heads.
Of course, someday we could get cable modems...no, wait, I forgot, the phone company owns the cable company. With no competition.
If the phone company decided to start censoring information on the net, we'd be fucked.
Thinking Rogers monitors a connection and drops, of all things, DNS, when it detect bittorrent traffic (When bittorrent doesn't have anything to do with DNS...you need it to download the.torrent, and then you use IPs.) is just silly.
What's actually happening is that he's flooding his pipe, and the UDP packets that DNS uses do not get through.
How the FUCK are people reading anything negative into the article summary?
Instead of demonstrating that/. will alway put a negative spin on MS news, it actually appears to demonstrate that a certain set of people will read MS stuff in a negative way in no matter what it says.
The most common way to control large collections of zombies is to have them log into a private IRC channel, and listen for commands.
Sometimes they stay connected, and sometimes they can be in a 'hidden' mode, where they just connect for a few seconds each day to see if they need to do something. (Which could obviously include 'don't disconnect'.) Which makes for a longer planning requirement, but is harder to track.
Andromeda was worth watching for like a season. Rather like Earth: Final Conflict, actually.
Roddenberry had some good ideas, and they always start out great. At some point, however, they realize they can shovel out crap and sci-fi fans will take it, so they start doing that, as it's easier, and they put plenty of T&A and explosions in it, in hopes non-sci-fi fans will watch also.
The premise of Andromeda is still quite good. The execution royally sucks, however.
Yes, and he'd probably agree. He does, after all, say that sci-fi TV is in college now instead of high-school.
It's just that he thinks, and I tend to agree, that Trek is much, much, poorer written than, well, any modern sci-fi. Yes, poorer than Smallville. Hell, Andromeda started off better than Trek. TOS can be excused because TV was all poorly written in the 70s, but it's inexcusable for, say, Enterprise, which was turning out crap last year.
Trek ended up, thanks to a weird set of circumstances, as being able to hand out crap instead of stories, because some people would watch it, period, and thus it did so as long as it was profitable.
Trek has seriously harmed sci-fi in the last decade or so, partially because all other sci-fi has to be at least ten times better than Trek to become popular (Which a few have managed, witness Buffy.), and because it lowers expectations of sci-fi where crap does as good as good sci-fi, none of which does as good as Trek. It's created this surreal universe with good sci-fi, which sci-fi fans watch, bad sci-fi, which sci-fi fans watch, and Trek, which sci-fi fans watch.
It's hard for me to say, because I liked this season of Enterprise, but, for God's sake...let it die. Don't allow this money machine to keep churning out stuff. Get the good writers for Trek, and the good ieas, and give them another show.
Did you miss the line: The later spinoffs were much better performed, but the content continued to be stuck in Roddenberry's rut.
He's right. Star Trek has often fallen back on stories that would acceptable in TOS era, but not now. In fact, when they leave their rut, like DS9, fans call it 'not Star Trek enough' and they have to come back.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no problem with, say, the Amish. They looked at the dehumanizing aspects of technoloy and said 'Hrm, maybe not.'. I don't even have a problem with them taking advantage of modern medicine and whatnot...they pay taxes, too, and medical bills. It's not like I personally discovered penicillin.
If they want to say 'The people who choose to live in this community don't want to veg out in front of the TV and wake up at 7 in the morning to fill up on coffee while they drop their kids off at school all day', I actually have to admire that a bit. I couldn't live without a computer, but, hey, that's me.
The religion right, OTOH, want to have their cake, eat it to, and shov eit down everyone else's throat, which doesn't really work as an analogy, but there you go.
There are no scientific theories that oppose evolution.
Um, seen a 'flying' squirrel lately?
Dumbass. I could think of that off the top of my head.
In case you're honestly ignorant, instead of stupid, flying squirrels have a flap of skin between their front and back legs that allow them to glide. given enought time, they could easily evolve into actual flying mammals, like bats did. It's easy logic...gliding==not killing yourself when you fall.
Flying fish have much the same surface area, this time in the form of a fin, that allows them to escape danger in the water by leaping into the sky and glide for quite a ways. Although obviously they're unlikely learn to fly without figuring out how to breathe air.
What is a theory is natural selection, aka, that this happens due to poorer-equipped-for-the-enviroment animals breeding less than better-equiped ones.
I'm sure the bible mentions gravity. The walls of Jericho, for example, 'fall'.
Science doesn't attempt to explain anything past 'the world we live in', which include things like 'do we actually live here' and 'is the past just a fiction to account for the difference differences between my preent surroundings and my memories'. Science has no position on those topics at all. They assume the same thing we do, that the universe is 'real', but only because there is no other way to function in the universe.
Which is possibly a sillier and more absurd thing to do than to, say, challenge 'atoms' or 'gravity'. The scientific method is the underpinning of everything.
See, we used to not use it. And people would sit in their studies and 'deduce' how the universe worked, which resulted in lots of nice theories about 'multiple sphere of the universe' and 'platonic ideals' and 'the four elements' and the 'five humors' and all sort of interesting concepts that someone has probably already made sci-fi movies out of.
What it didn't produce, however, were any actual results. Aristotle, I believe, is actually the guy who came up with 'Hey, we should do an experiment to see if what I just thought up made sense, and if it doesn't, or I can't do the experiment at all, maybe we shouldn't claim it's true.'
Some people advocating ID don't understand what pisses scientists off so much about this. It's because that is how science (called 'philosophy' back then), used to work, you came up with a premise and said it was true, and that never managed to learn anything at all. Sure, think of your answer, but don't claim it's true without proof.
And science didn't start this fight. Religion didn't either. A very very small group of wackjob religious people started it.
Only religion and philosophy, however, can tell us what 'best' is. Why should we care if other people do well? (Note I'm not saying you can't have ethics if you don't believe in God, I'm saying you can't have a system of ethics many people ascribe to without at least philosophy behind it.)
And science has made some interesting strides in things various religions have been saying all the time, like 'everything's connected' and 'people's health is effected by their beliefs'. On the whole, religion is 'winning'...science is saying 'Yeah, that was a good idea, here's the math'.
This is one of the two battles that religion is fighting that it shouldn't be. It should be all excited about how science is bringing us closer to understand the universe God gave us, but instead it's decided to take some metaphors and stories too literally and attack.
The other battle it shouldn't be fighting is against 'the left', when, honestly...you know who would be for universal health care? Jesus would be, assuming it could work in any useful manner. (The argument it can't work is a valid one, but, oddly, the actual arguments against it seem to boil down to 'poor people using my tax money'.) Sure, fight abortion if you want, although I think that's just failure to understand the issue.
But there's a lot of stuff on 'the left' that religion should be saying 'Yeah, do that'. In fact, the progressive moment happened because of religion. (Which, yes, can lead to some dumb places, like Prohibition, but whatever. That, dispite what people think, was an honest attempt to help alcoholics and their families.)
Sadly, organized religion in this country has been hijacked by the Puritans (Or, at least, it's allowing the Puritans to speak for it.) and the right has, in turned, been hijacked by them. (Although that is their own fault.)
If, for example, we proved that people could receive visions from the future, perhaps using some sort of quantum interconnectedness, psychic powers would immediately stop being 'supernatural' and would just be really cool.
As you can't receive visions from the future, however, it is supernatural.
So bigger countries couldn't push smaller ones around. That was the entire point.
Anyone who thinks the UN is now our enemy is right. The UN, however, exactly reflects the thought of the US no more than two decades ago.
We are fighting the entity we created to keep a check on empire building, because we are now empire building.
We have met the enemy, and he is us.
Logically, that does lead to complete anarchy. You can have a 'government', but it can, ethically, only enforce laws against people who have harmed others, and it's hard to see who would pay for it. I'm not saying that's bad, I'm just saying it is. It's certainly a valid philosophy, and, like I said, it's been invented at least a dozen times through history.
What makes her so special, however, is that she then manages to justify exactly the opposite of what it leads to. The topper came for me when I learned she'd used 'don't initiate violence' to argue for intellectual property rights. Intellectual property, of course, being a way of saying 'using the threat of force to stop people from doing things with their own property'.
I'm not getting in a discussion if the various forms of 'intellectual property' make any sense or are a good idea, but they're absolute gibberish under Ayn Rand's stated philosophy. Likewise, real estate ownership is gibberish, yet she comes out in favor of it.
'The left', myself included, thought Saddam might, indeed, be hiding WMDs. We also, however, thought we shouldn't violate international law and invade Iraq when the UN inspections, for the first time in a decade, actually seemed to be going okay.
Sure, they might find a bunch of crap and have Saddam deny it and, hey, maybe time for a war. Maybe we'd even go to war if they had tons of forbidden stuff and kept saying 'oops, ha, you can destroy that, sorry, but that's the last thing we have, honest' over and over. Or if he kicked the inspectors out again.
Those of us who thought this war was wrong couldn't imagine he was being honest and was complying with the UN 99.999% of the way. We thought he'd be proven to have some WMDs, but that we'd just destroy them or go to war, which is why, I guess, we didn't protest as much as we should have...we kinda assumed he'd be stubborn and we'd have to invade anyway.
Both 'the left' and the neocons fell for it. The left thought they were arguing 'follow the law to convict the criminal' vs. 'do anything you need to do to convinct him', when it turns out he was innocent.
Now 'the left' has fallen for the trick of defending 'We all thought he had WMDs', but that wasn't the issue in the first place. We did all think that to some extent. That doesn't matter.
Of course, that lie has been overtaken by the 'It was a war of liberation'. I hope all those people arguing that have fun when someone invades the US to 'liberate' us.
However, it's not just censorship if it's 'impossible' to get the information...it can just be fairly hard. Obviously I could technically get any information I wanted at all, as Alltel does not control the post office and public highways, or even the newspaper, althogh I will qualify that last with a 'yet'.
I was just pointing out they aren't breaking DNS when you use bittorrent, because that's frankly idiotic of them and makes no sense, as bittorrent doesn't use DNS during operation, anymore than you could stop large FTP downloads by breaking DNS when they start, or stop car thieves disabling the ignition ten minutes after the car is stolen.
DNS breaks solely because it uses UDP, and is more succeptible to lossage due to high bandwidth. (Or bandwidth being artifically lowered due to rate-limiting, although I would assume that's on certain ports only which don't include the DNS one.)
And it's much more likely to be losing packets on the outgoing trip. If you only have 20k up, and it's being sucked up by bittorrent, your 'what IP is example.com' packet can easily vanish, causing a wait of several seconds for a reply, followed by another packet, which does the same thing, etc, etc.
We just hope that no one catches on that, you know, America didn't actually do any work in that process, so it's rather stupid to keep paying us any money, when they could just do it all themselves.
Here, for example, there are exactly three internet options. Satellite, which really sucks (There's only one, DirectPC, and accounts are capped to a few hundred megs a day.), dialup to the phone company, named Alltel, or DSL via the phone company.
There are no competing phone services, there are no other local ISPs. I know some of you people live in cities where you can call several million people for free, but here I can barely call 5,000.
Alltel's probably not illegally using its telephone business to lock out competitors, but we've had quite a few local ISPs show up and run for a few months and then fold, because competing is just too hard. The phone company already has buildings in hundreds of counties, and billing systems set up, and they only have to run a T3 to 'themselves', which I'm sure is entirely aboveboard and legal, but, of course, only five feet instead of a mile, they already have support staff, etc, etc. Unless an ISP can show up and bring along a few hunderd customers, Alltel automatically underprices them, so none of them last.
And we've never had DSL competition. I don't know if that's because Alltel 'can't' provide DSL access to third parties, or if the DSL companies look at the dialup stats and just shake their heads.
Of course, someday we could get cable modems...no, wait, I forgot, the phone company owns the cable company. With no competition.
If the phone company decided to start censoring information on the net, we'd be fucked.
What's actually happening is that he's flooding his pipe, and the UDP packets that DNS uses do not get through.
Well, no, because, you see, they passed it without reading it.
Instead of demonstrating that /. will alway put a negative spin on MS news, it actually appears to demonstrate that a certain set of people will read MS stuff in a negative way in no matter what it says.
Um, local businesses?
Sometimes they stay connected, and sometimes they can be in a 'hidden' mode, where they just connect for a few seconds each day to see if they need to do something. (Which could obviously include 'don't disconnect'.) Which makes for a longer planning requirement, but is harder to track.
Roddenberry had some good ideas, and they always start out great. At some point, however, they realize they can shovel out crap and sci-fi fans will take it, so they start doing that, as it's easier, and they put plenty of T&A and explosions in it, in hopes non-sci-fi fans will watch also.
The premise of Andromeda is still quite good. The execution royally sucks, however.
Yeah, those hardcore sci-fi shows like Buffy. What a snob.
It's just that he thinks, and I tend to agree, that Trek is much, much, poorer written than, well, any modern sci-fi. Yes, poorer than Smallville. Hell, Andromeda started off better than Trek. TOS can be excused because TV was all poorly written in the 70s, but it's inexcusable for, say, Enterprise, which was turning out crap last year.
Trek ended up, thanks to a weird set of circumstances, as being able to hand out crap instead of stories, because some people would watch it, period, and thus it did so as long as it was profitable.
Trek has seriously harmed sci-fi in the last decade or so, partially because all other sci-fi has to be at least ten times better than Trek to become popular (Which a few have managed, witness Buffy.), and because it lowers expectations of sci-fi where crap does as good as good sci-fi, none of which does as good as Trek. It's created this surreal universe with good sci-fi, which sci-fi fans watch, bad sci-fi, which sci-fi fans watch, and Trek, which sci-fi fans watch.
It's hard for me to say, because I liked this season of Enterprise, but, for God's sake...let it die. Don't allow this money machine to keep churning out stuff. Get the good writers for Trek, and the good ieas, and give them another show.
He's right. Star Trek has often fallen back on stories that would acceptable in TOS era, but not now. In fact, when they leave their rut, like DS9, fans call it 'not Star Trek enough' and they have to come back.