I'm not opposed to the idea of a young earth, but some of the arguments in that first link have been disproved.
"There is no known method of removing 27 billion tons of sediment in a year."
I thought they get compressed into sedimentary rock? Or dissolved in seawater and deposited on the seafloor like the minerals that form in the shower if you have hard water.
"At the rate at which technology is increasing and has increased over recorded history, how can you justify the approximately 993,000 years of utter stupidity where humans could not even develop one single written langauge?"
I can easily justify that. We're still utterly stupid. It only takes a few abnormally smart people to come up with an idea and the rest of us copy it. Standing on the shoulders of giants. The increase in literacy over the past 1000 years - that's how I justify it.
"The current rate of decay is at 26 nanoteslas a year."
Averaged over the past century, sure. However, that decay all happened between 1900 and 1960, then it stopped. Besides that, there's a whole lot of evidence that says the magnetic field flips, not decays.
"Small, ice filled comets enter the earth's atmosphere at a rate of approximately one in every twenty seconds. Each comet releases about 100 tons of water into the atmosphere as it vaporizes. If the earth was indeed billions of years old, the earth's oceans would contain several times the volume of water that they hold today."
Who says the rate of comets hitting the earth is anything like constant? We'd need to watch them over a period of about 500 million years to really see long-term patterns.
"The rings orbiting Saturn, Uranus, Jupiter, and Neptune are being rapidly bombarded by meteoroids. Saturn's rings, for example, should be pulverized and dispersed in about 10,000 years. Since this has not happened, planetary rings are probably quite young."
Why not bring up the spokes in Saturn's rings? Or the braided rings, or the moons that trade orbits, or the elliptical rings... nobody knows what's up with the Saturn system. That place is weird. I wish people would help the astronomers instead of criticizing them.
Also, I don't buy the shrinking sun idea. We happen to know that the sun has gotten 1% brighter over the past century. Going back through the weather record, it seems the earth was cold about 300 years ago, hot about 1000 years ago, and colder before then, until about 6000 years ago when it was really warm, then 10000 years ago, ice age. That's a whole lot of variability. Even if the sun were shrinking, which I don't believe, how could we tell a long term pattern from just a century or two of data?
"Helium leaks through the earth's crust and most of which is contained within the earth's atmosphere. If the earth were as old as Darwinists claim it to be, there should be thousands of times more helium in the atmosphere than there is."
I thought the helium floats to the top of the atmosphere and is stripped away by tides.
"The Earth's rate of rotation is slowly but measurably declining. Based on this, Lord Kelvin, the nineteenth century physicist who introduced the Kelvin temperature scale, argued against an old planet. His point: if the Earth were billions of years old, its centrifugal force would have been so great during its alleged molten state that the equatorial regions would have bulged out. This would have given the Earth a different shape, since it would have retained much of the bulging as it cooled and consolidated."
Take a look at the Great African Rift Valley. Or the perpendicular lines radiating away from the mid-atlantic sea rift. Or other similar formations. It sure looks to me like the Earth has changed shape. I guess the Earth's crust is thinner than Lord Kelvin thought. Maybe the Earth has sagged in a little.
Re: the Population Problem
Humanity may be old or young, but human civilization is quite young. Between 6-150 millenia old, depending on who you ask. Before civilization, we would have struck a balance with nature instead of overpopulating like we do now. Without civilization, humans die off very quickly. The overpopulation argument doesn't bother me.
Don't get me wrong, I think the earth might be young. It also might be old. I don't know. However, you Young Earth people need to get some new arguments - a lot of your current ones have been disproven.
Now *there* I agree with you totally. First thing we'd need is a way to translate our languages. Second, both sides would need to train experts in the other's many cultures and values.
Harm... well, that is tough. Like you say, even humans can't agree on that one. From abortion to animal rights to the war on drugs, there are many opinions. How about this: anything that makes the other side angry is defined as harm. That might work as long as both sides are honest with each other.
Well, they say there's no such thing as a sure bet, but that right there was a garunteed failure.:)
Apologize and make up... humble oneself, admit to wrongdoing, offer favors for free in return. That seemed quite a bit easier than harm.
> > If someone isn't hurting anyone, no one has the right to restrict them from walking free.
> Tell that to the White cop pointing a gun at you just because you are Black or Chicano. Are you gonna argue with him and take the risk of getting shot or are you just going to submit quietly?
I'd submit quietly. The cop in question would still be scum, and still wronging me, though. I didn't mean that it doesn't happen, I was saying it shouldn't happen. AFAIK, we agree completely.
I was referring to the moral right to restrict others, not the legal right. The legal right goes to those who most people fear the most for the longest period of time.
"The only way the general public can protect their rights is to shun any of these new technologies."
And I would add, shun the RIAA members, too. Don't buy cds from the big labels, don't buy cds from Best Buy, Walmart, Circuit City, or any of them. Buy used cds, or borrow from the library, or trade with friends.
Yeah, the selection isn't so great, but it's cheaper and it doesn't give the RIAA more more money with which to mess us over again and again.
Good point. Anyone who has bought cds, tapes, or records from the big labels has paid for this. I've been buying only used for a long time, and I'm really happy that I decided to back then, not now.
So don't put up with it. Don't give the RIAA money. I'm not sure whether using Napster and it's like are immoral or not, but I know that for me, giving the RIAA any money at all is immoral. No, I'm not saying people should steal, I'm saying they should buy used music or from independent labels, or just listen to cds from the library. Maybe even violate some copyrights, if you feel there's nothing wrong with that.
I know it won't stop the RIAA, but I feel better because I'm not helping them.
I would call America an empire, personally. A rather well-behaved one, but still an empire. America hasn't invaded as many foreign countries as, say, the Romans, Persians, or Spartans. America seems to be to be a modern-day Roman Empire. Rome started out as a republic, too.
Oddly enough, James Burke believes that the plow was what allowed europeans to have time to think and invent. Since they didn't have to make food all the time, they had spare time, most of which was wasted but some of which was used. In a way, plenty was the mother of invention... or maybe it's the mysterious father.
Dude! Maybe you should count to ten before hitting submit next time?:)
One, you were awfully nasty with him and there was no reason to be.
Two, I don't consider genomics to be an innovation. I consider Polymerase Chain Reaction to be an innovation, but seqencing the genome has been known to be possible for a long time. Now proteinomics, on the other hand, that'll take some doing.
But many forms of intellectual property are just numbers. For example, take the copyrighted lyrics to a song. The lyrics themselves are a series of letters, spaces, and punctuation, that encoded as ASCII text, becomes an integer. However, anyone can post that or equivelant integers on the web and get cease-and-desisted because that text, and numbers that can be interpreted as that text, are intellectual property.
The same goes for books, merely scaled up. Any computer software or source code is also a number. Similar comparisons work for audio and video. If the movie on a DVD could no be represented by a number, the movie could not have been digitized in the first place. Is just the movie IP of the MPAA? If the movie is, then so are the numbers that represent that movie.
For that matter, there was a guy in scientific american a few years back who patented a couple numbers that make division easier.
The only negative impact I can think of is the salting of a large amount of land. That would make it unusable for conventional farming, but desert coastlines are already unfarmable. We might also have to preserve some desert species from extiction if the earth starts to run out of desert...
I heard about a project awhile back to see if it was possible to feed people with just seaweed, rainwater, and fish. The idea was to colonize the oceans. Do you know what became of that? I would be very interested to know.
If it didn't pan out because of a nutrient deficiency, maybe this salt-tolerant plant might help fill the gaps. With a diet that high in salt, I wonder how the blood pressure would react?
"Let's say that 99% of your patrons turn out to be using your service to break the law. What's your moral obligation? Well, if you know about it, your moral obligation is to either stop the service, or fix it up so it's more legal."
No. That's only the case if the law being broken happens to be right. Illegal != immoral. There is significant overlap, but the two are not the same.
If 99% of your patrons are using your service to hurt someone, then you have a moral obligation to do something about it. In this case, what you do depends on whether or not you happen to believe trading mp3s hurts anyone. That's not nearly as clear, either way.
No, people who do things like that and then sue the one who gave them the instructions for not being specific enough, they are the reason they have to put disclaimers and warning labels on everything.
Re:Backdoor challenge for you hackers...
on
NSA Linux In Depth
·
· Score: 1
Ah, but the NSA has an even easier job than that... just release a distribution, and people start using the compromised compilers. How many of us use package managers that install binaries? Enough to get the NSA's little Easter Egg well established... Muahahahaha... *rubbing hands together evilly*
*Ahem* scuze me, I should go take my pills now.
Re:Backdoor challenge for you hackers...
on
NSA Linux In Depth
·
· Score: 1
The NSA might have made lots of tiny little changes that improve the system in little ways. What if there are major differences? They have the brains to do something like that. We'd have to test that source mighty well to find any easter eggs.
Not to mention the fact that the easter eggs might not be in the source, but in the binaries, particularly GCC, so that any new compilings include the NSA's improvements.
Someone should diff the NSA's source, and find out what they did. Sadly, I don't know C and don't have the time...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not opposed to the idea of a young earth, but some of the arguments in that first link have been disproved.
"There is no known method of removing 27 billion tons of sediment in a year."
I thought they get compressed into sedimentary rock? Or dissolved in seawater and deposited on the seafloor like the minerals that form in the shower if you have hard water.
"At the rate at which technology is increasing and has increased over recorded history, how can you justify the approximately 993,000 years of utter stupidity where humans could not even develop one single written langauge?"
I can easily justify that. We're still utterly stupid. It only takes a few abnormally smart people to come up with an idea and the rest of us copy it. Standing on the shoulders of giants. The increase in literacy over the past 1000 years - that's how I justify it.
"The current rate of decay is at 26 nanoteslas a year."
Averaged over the past century, sure. However, that decay all happened between 1900 and 1960, then it stopped. Besides that, there's a whole lot of evidence that says the magnetic field flips, not decays.
"Small, ice filled comets enter the earth's atmosphere at a rate of approximately one in every twenty seconds. Each comet releases about 100 tons of water into the atmosphere as it vaporizes. If the earth was indeed billions of years old, the earth's oceans would contain several times the volume of water that they hold today."
Who says the rate of comets hitting the earth is anything like constant? We'd need to watch them over a period of about 500 million years to really see long-term patterns.
"The rings orbiting Saturn, Uranus, Jupiter, and Neptune are being rapidly bombarded by meteoroids. Saturn's rings, for example, should be pulverized and dispersed in about 10,000 years. Since this has not happened, planetary rings are probably quite young."
Why not bring up the spokes in Saturn's rings? Or the braided rings, or the moons that trade orbits, or the elliptical rings... nobody knows what's up with the Saturn system. That place is weird. I wish people would help the astronomers instead of criticizing them.
Also, I don't buy the shrinking sun idea. We happen to know that the sun has gotten 1% brighter over the past century. Going back through the weather record, it seems the earth was cold about 300 years ago, hot about 1000 years ago, and colder before then, until about 6000 years ago when it was really warm, then 10000 years ago, ice age. That's a whole lot of variability. Even if the sun were shrinking, which I don't believe, how could we tell a long term pattern from just a century or two of data?
"Helium leaks through the earth's crust and most of which is contained within the earth's atmosphere. If the earth were as old as Darwinists claim it to be, there should be thousands of times more helium in the atmosphere than there is."
I thought the helium floats to the top of the atmosphere and is stripped away by tides.
"The Earth's rate of rotation is slowly but measurably declining. Based on this, Lord Kelvin, the nineteenth century physicist who introduced the Kelvin temperature scale, argued against an old planet. His point: if the Earth were billions of years old, its centrifugal force would have been so great during its alleged molten state that the equatorial regions would have bulged out. This would have given the Earth a different shape, since it would have retained much of the bulging as it cooled and consolidated."
Take a look at the Great African Rift Valley. Or the perpendicular lines radiating away from the mid-atlantic sea rift. Or other similar formations. It sure looks to me like the Earth has changed shape. I guess the Earth's crust is thinner than Lord Kelvin thought. Maybe the Earth has sagged in a little.
Re: the Population Problem
Humanity may be old or young, but human civilization is quite young. Between 6-150 millenia old, depending on who you ask. Before civilization, we would have struck a balance with nature instead of overpopulating like we do now. Without civilization, humans die off very quickly. The overpopulation argument doesn't bother me.
Don't get me wrong, I think the earth might be young. It also might be old. I don't know. However, you Young Earth people need to get some new arguments - a lot of your current ones have been disproven.
Now *there* I agree with you totally. First thing we'd need is a way to translate our languages. Second, both sides would need to train experts in the other's many cultures and values.
:)
Harm... well, that is tough. Like you say, even humans can't agree on that one. From abortion to animal rights to the war on drugs, there are many opinions. How about this: anything that makes the other side angry is defined as harm. That might work as long as both sides are honest with each other.
Well, they say there's no such thing as a sure bet, but that right there was a garunteed failure.
Apologize and make up... humble oneself, admit to wrongdoing, offer favors for free in return. That seemed quite a bit easier than harm.
> > If someone isn't hurting anyone, no one has the right to restrict them from walking free.
> Tell that to the White cop pointing a gun at you just because you are Black or Chicano. Are you gonna argue with him and take the risk of getting shot or are you just going to submit quietly?
I'd submit quietly. The cop in question would still be scum, and still wronging me, though. I didn't mean that it doesn't happen, I was saying it shouldn't happen. AFAIK, we agree completely.
I was referring to the moral right to restrict others, not the legal right. The legal right goes to those who most people fear the most for the longest period of time.
Well, maybe you're right. I wouldn't know. I don't use Windows or the Mac. :)
LOL
"Today, the person is taken off the streets where he won't be a danger to society."
Danger to society? Don't you actually have to be a convict or a child to be "taken off the streets" as you say?
"Back then, he was allowed to walk free"
No kidding. If someone isn't hurting anyone, no one has the right to restrict them from walking free. We should all be treated like that.
"There's no such thing as an universal bill of rights. And the concept is pretty stupid too. Not to say useless."
1: Do no harm.
2: When you do harm, apologize and make up.
3: Turn off your cellphone before entering the theater.
Reality Master, I remember you. Are you the guy I talked to a year ago who didn't think Linux had any good applications, right?
"The only way the general public can protect their rights is to shun any of these new technologies."
And I would add, shun the RIAA members, too. Don't buy cds from the big labels, don't buy cds from Best Buy, Walmart, Circuit City, or any of them. Buy used cds, or borrow from the library, or trade with friends.
Yeah, the selection isn't so great, but it's cheaper and it doesn't give the RIAA more more money with which to mess us over again and again.
Good point. Anyone who has bought cds, tapes, or records from the big labels has paid for this. I've been buying only used for a long time, and I'm really happy that I decided to back then, not now.
So don't put up with it. Don't give the RIAA money. I'm not sure whether using Napster and it's like are immoral or not, but I know that for me, giving the RIAA any money at all is immoral. No, I'm not saying people should steal, I'm saying they should buy used music or from independent labels, or just listen to cds from the library. Maybe even violate some copyrights, if you feel there's nothing wrong with that.
I know it won't stop the RIAA, but I feel better because I'm not helping them.
Mighty brave of you to speak your mind so openly, especially even telling us who you are. :)
I would call America an empire, personally. A rather well-behaved one, but still an empire. America hasn't invaded as many foreign countries as, say, the Romans, Persians, or Spartans. America seems to be to be a modern-day Roman Empire. Rome started out as a republic, too.
We have a vaccine for AIDS now.
Trouble is, it's more lethal than the virus.
Oddly enough, James Burke believes that the plow was what allowed europeans to have time to think and invent. Since they didn't have to make food all the time, they had spare time, most of which was wasted but some of which was used. In a way, plenty was the mother of invention... or maybe it's the mysterious father.
Dude! Maybe you should count to ten before hitting submit next time? :)
One, you were awfully nasty with him and there was no reason to be.
Two, I don't consider genomics to be an innovation. I consider Polymerase Chain Reaction to be an innovation, but seqencing the genome has been known to be possible for a long time. Now proteinomics, on the other hand, that'll take some doing.
But many forms of intellectual property are just numbers. For example, take the copyrighted lyrics to a song. The lyrics themselves are a series of letters, spaces, and punctuation, that encoded as ASCII text, becomes an integer. However, anyone can post that or equivelant integers on the web and get cease-and-desisted because that text, and numbers that can be interpreted as that text, are intellectual property.
The same goes for books, merely scaled up. Any computer software or source code is also a number. Similar comparisons work for audio and video. If the movie on a DVD could no be represented by a number, the movie could not have been digitized in the first place. Is just the movie IP of the MPAA? If the movie is, then so are the numbers that represent that movie.
For that matter, there was a guy in scientific american a few years back who patented a couple numbers that make division easier.
The only negative impact I can think of is the salting of a large amount of land. That would make it unusable for conventional farming, but desert coastlines are already unfarmable. We might also have to preserve some desert species from extiction if the earth starts to run out of desert...
I heard about a project awhile back to see if it was possible to feed people with just seaweed, rainwater, and fish. The idea was to colonize the oceans. Do you know what became of that? I would be very interested to know.
If it didn't pan out because of a nutrient deficiency, maybe this salt-tolerant plant might help fill the gaps. With a diet that high in salt, I wonder how the blood pressure would react?
Why? What possible purpose could violence serve? If you disagree with the citizens of Sealand, please tell us why.
You're equating illegal transmission of radio signals with murder? Please clarify what you mean.
"Let's say that 99% of your patrons turn out to be using your service to break the law. What's your moral obligation? Well, if you know about it, your moral obligation is to either stop the service, or fix it up so it's more legal."
No. That's only the case if the law being broken happens to be right. Illegal != immoral. There is significant overlap, but the two are not the same.
If 99% of your patrons are using your service to hurt someone, then you have a moral obligation to do something about it. In this case, what you do depends on whether or not you happen to believe trading mp3s hurts anyone. That's not nearly as clear, either way.
My dad has two of those books. They were wonderful. I never got the chance to actually build Buster or Rodney, though...
No, people who do things like that and then sue the one who gave them the instructions for not being specific enough, they are the reason they have to put disclaimers and warning labels on everything.
Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson.
:)
Just a thought.
Ah, but the NSA has an even easier job than that... just release a distribution, and people start using the compromised compilers. How many of us use package managers that install binaries? Enough to get the NSA's little Easter Egg well established... Muahahahaha... *rubbing hands together evilly*
*Ahem* scuze me, I should go take my pills now.
The NSA might have made lots of tiny little changes that improve the system in little ways. What if there are major differences? They have the brains to do something like that. We'd have to test that source mighty well to find any easter eggs.
Not to mention the fact that the easter eggs might not be in the source, but in the binaries, particularly GCC, so that any new compilings include the NSA's improvements.
Someone should diff the NSA's source, and find out what they did. Sadly, I don't know C and don't have the time...