Yes it is -- it's akin to trying to draw strong conclusions from the weak anthropic principle. How many "trials" have there been in the history of the whole universe? On an astronomical scale, rare events are relatively common, if you see what I mean. Since the presence and nature of our moon appears to be a great benefit to the development of advanced life forms, it's hardly surprising at all that we happen to be on one of the (possibly very many) planets with a moon like ours.
That would be hard to accomplish on purpose - saying an accident did it is beyond belief.
That's a fundamental (but common) statistical error. Any specific outcome would be a priori almost impossible, but one specific outcome a posteriori is a certainty.
* getting video running has been HELL : with only 1 out of 3 I managed to get the nvidia blob to run after reading days and days of forums, trying out every single trick they propose. The two others still run in 'software' mode, which is fine for firefox/thunderbird or GCompris (more or less), but has cost me several days trying anyway.
Somebody mod that insightful or informative, please.
* wifi wasn't always (properlty) recognized : pcmcia went mostly fine, usb was hell. Finally got it working via ndiswrapper
Somebody else mod that insightful or informative, please.
* each time there is an upGRade something breaks and I'm back in the 'problem-chasing' game
If I could get even Ubuntu to work satisfactorily I'd make the switch today, but I can't. Linug geeks just don't grok how hard it is for somebody coming to it cold. (FWIW, Ubuntu 8.04 installs ok and works fine -- except for WiFi -- until I restart the system, at which point X insists there are no screens and drops me back to the command line).
If we could travel between them then they would become part of the same world for Many Worlds purposes. The Many Worlds interpretation depends on interaction between the worlds being impossible. Don't believe everything you see on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Then they would be the Copenhagen and Many Worlds hypotheses. It's actually written into the Many Worlds interpretation that it's not falsifiable, so the very act of showing it to be falsifiable would falify it! I'm pretty sure the same applies to the Copenhagen interpretation, because it hinges on what happens when there's no observation; falsifying that is more than a question of the technology!
No. In scientific terminology religion would be an "interpretation", in the way that the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Many Worlds interpretation are interpretations of QM. It's non-falsifiable, but helps some people cope.
We all should. Rubbish or not (I'm with you on that, FWIW), Macca does "shift" a lot of "product", and if he makes this model work then the labels are going to take notice. Sure, Macca's target demographic isn't the one doing most of the downloading, (I'm too old to be happy without physical media but too young to be in Macca's target fanbase) but it's still a significant move (one of many, of course) pushing the industry towards a 21st century business model.
One of the key points of natural selection is that attractive and/or successful individuals will get more, and by getting more will produce more off-spring. Nowadays successful individuals get more, but beget less.
There are two definitions of "success" going on here. You're looking at success in social terms. That's not the measure of success that's relevant to evolution. In evolutionary terms the poor who are out-reproducing the rich are far more successful. There's nothing in natural selection about "attractive" or (socially) "successful", only "fitness". You might not like the way evolution is going, but it is still going on and is ignoring our value system (as it is bound to, being impersonal).
I'm saying that just as this "evolution" involved comparing the intermediate phases with the final form (a Mona Lisa painting), perhaps humans are "evolving" and each time we do we're compared with the final form (only god knows what that is).
There's no place for a "final form" in evolution, the process simply adapts to the prevailing environmant, and no form is any more final than the environment it is in.
Here's a question, people always assume that DNA will change into a form that makes it better able to reproduce.
What people assume that? Nobody who has the first clue about evolution would produce such nonsense. DNA changes at random, with no drive whatsoever towards being a form that is better able to reproduce. It happens that those forms that are better able to reproduce are likely to be present in higher proportion in the next generation, simply by virtue of being better able to reproduce, but the mutation in the DNA wasn't directed towards that.
Why must living things always be driven by the need to reproduce?
By definition of "life"?
We're on a ball of rock, heat, gas and liquid that revolves around a ball of fusion energy. Why must life propel itself into existing?
Who says it "must". Evolution says that if it ever does then it can be self-sustaining, but there's no "must" about it.
So perhaps there is a god, and it's chosen (b), but on a much larger scale. Rather then caring for a single person, it's caring for the entire race and is having us evolve into a particular form. Just as the person did in the article.
And I say you take too wider view of it. I mean, you could just describe eugenics as natural selection, where the environment happens to include psychotic scientists with delusions of grandeur.
Yes, the environment should include that. After all eugenics take place in "nature" too. Evolution is a strong enough theory to include that -- there's no reason to exclude it unless for political or religious reasons you want to argue that humans are not part of nature.
Since we developed medicine. It is very rare now that humans as individuals are eliminated from the gene pool due to poor adaptation to their environments.
They are eliminated as often as they ever were. What you're missing is that their environment includes the availability of medicine, so a dependency on medicint is not poor adaptation to the environment.
Birth control means that being succesfully sexually doesn't necessitate being successfully reproductively.
But that doesn't change the evolutionary effect, it's just another environmental factor. After all, mules can be "successful" sexually but not reproductively. It's just part of the evolutionary equation, not an evolution-killer.
The human gene pool is not being filtered by adaptiveness to the environment anymore.
You just take too narrow a view of environment. Anything we do is part of it.
It's not that close to real evolution, as it's driven towards a target "species" -- the Mona Lisa -- which has already been designed. It's more the sort of thing that ID proponents could leap on to say that individual steps that look evolutionary are not incompatible with a designer setting the target of evolution. Real evolution would be constantly changing to an ever changing environment, with no preconceived notion of what the outcomes will look like.
That's also the problem with your conception of our "final" form. Apart from the fact that it assumes there will be just one final form -- if we colonise space it's quite conceivable that humanity might diverge into different species -- the "final" form of an evolutionary process isn't the fittest form, it's the first form to fail totally to adapt to its changing environment, leading to the extermination of that evolutionary line. Our final form(s) will be, by definition, our least successful, worst adapted form(s). Perhaps you need to clarify what you mean by "become gods"?
It has never existed, and hopefully never will. Its only advantage is doctrinal purity for some economists who don't like dealing with the messiness of the real world. There would be no advantages for any society that implemented it, and significant disadvantages because it has no effective way of managing the many cases where the cost of an action is not borne by those who benefit from the action. Mixed economies are the only pragmatic economies; the real debate is just over what the precise mix should be.
If the enforcement agencies can prove that they received stolen copper. I would have thought that was already the case anyway -- what's the law on receipt of stolen goods in the USA?
first off, i highly doubt that the average copper thief is going to have access to a metal foundry where they can melt their stolen copper.
But the message I was referring to related to the scrap metal dealer, not the theif. The scrap metal dealer is almost certain to have direct or indirect access to a foundry and is likely to be handling much higher volumes. What's more, if he's crooked he can tell the thief to come in just before a batch is shipped.
secondly, if law enforcement can use metallurgic analysis to determine the exact batch of bullets a particular round came from, then i'm sure they could apply the same techniques to other metals. so even if the copper thieves had an underground metal foundry to melt down the copper they stole, there'd still be evidence of where it came from.
Even after it's been melted down with a pile of copper from other sources?
My experience is in the UK -- it was post-11, if that makes any difference. Otherwise, perhaps you have some idea why a teacher would phone to ask us not to send our daughter into an exam because she "might fail"? The subject was music, FWIW.
Maybe, but there's a big difference between you not using it and telling others 'don't use any CC licence'. And maybe people who use CC licences means that they 'don't know what "rights" [they're] giving up', but the "unacceptable" example given was about rights being retained.
So let's see. I produce something that I don't expect to be worth more than pin-money. What are my choices?
Go to law school to learn enough about law to judge between licences or write my own;
Hire a lawyer, which will cost out of any proportion to the value of the work;
Don't explicitly protect the work in any way, in which case it may gain a measure of statutory protection by default which I really don't understand and which is likely to vary more between administrations than any CC license will;
Give up all rights by putting the work into the public domain; or
Use a ready-rolled license such as a CC one which may not be exactly what I want but which is likely to be near enough for what I need for a low-value use.
Only the last two seem to make any sense at all to me; both seem to be reasonable choices for the author, depending on what the author wants to achieve.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering that the rest of the world has made it abundantly clear that they hate us
No, only some of you.
They didn't exactly surge after me like a pride of lions.
You might think that. Just wait until you discover the sort of sites that the police now trace to your IP address.
Yes it is -- it's akin to trying to draw strong conclusions from the weak anthropic principle. How many "trials" have there been in the history of the whole universe? On an astronomical scale, rare events are relatively common, if you see what I mean. Since the presence and nature of our moon appears to be a great benefit to the development of advanced life forms, it's hardly surprising at all that we happen to be on one of the (possibly very many) planets with a moon like ours.
In fact, the UK is the only European country to do it differently
Yes, we had to change over -- we kept getting short-changed when we sold Big Ben to passing Americans.
That would be hard to accomplish on purpose - saying an accident did it is beyond belief.
That's a fundamental (but common) statistical error. Any specific outcome would be a priori almost impossible, but one specific outcome a posteriori is a certainty.
* getting video running has been HELL : with only 1 out of 3 I managed to get the nvidia blob to run after reading days and days of forums, trying out every single trick they propose. The two others still run in 'software' mode, which is fine for firefox/thunderbird or GCompris (more or less), but has cost me several days trying anyway.
Somebody mod that insightful or informative, please.
* wifi wasn't always (properlty) recognized : pcmcia went mostly fine, usb was hell. Finally got it working via ndiswrapper
Somebody else mod that insightful or informative, please.
* each time there is an upGRade something breaks and I'm back in the 'problem-chasing' game
And somebody else...
If I could get even Ubuntu to work satisfactorily I'd make the switch today, but I can't. Linug geeks just don't grok how hard it is for somebody coming to it cold. (FWIW, Ubuntu 8.04 installs ok and works fine -- except for WiFi -- until I restart the system, at which point X insists there are no screens and drops me back to the command line).
If we could travel between them then they would become part of the same world for Many Worlds purposes. The Many Worlds interpretation depends on interaction between the worlds being impossible. Don't believe everything you see on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Then they would be the Copenhagen and Many Worlds hypotheses. It's actually written into the Many Worlds interpretation that it's not falsifiable, so the very act of showing it to be falsifiable would falify it! I'm pretty sure the same applies to the Copenhagen interpretation, because it hinges on what happens when there's no observation; falsifying that is more than a question of the technology!
No. In scientific terminology religion would be an "interpretation", in the way that the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Many Worlds interpretation are interpretations of QM. It's non-falsifiable, but helps some people cope.
We all should. Rubbish or not (I'm with you on that, FWIW), Macca does "shift" a lot of "product", and if he makes this model work then the labels are going to take notice. Sure, Macca's target demographic isn't the one doing most of the downloading, (I'm too old to be happy without physical media but too young to be in Macca's target fanbase) but it's still a significant move (one of many, of course) pushing the industry towards a 21st century business model.
But the Mona Lisa is still a static and designed goal, and so the process is closer to ID than Darwinian evolution.
One of the key points of natural selection is that attractive and/or successful individuals will get more, and by getting more will produce more off-spring. Nowadays successful individuals get more, but beget less.
There are two definitions of "success" going on here. You're looking at success in social terms. That's not the measure of success that's relevant to evolution. In evolutionary terms the poor who are out-reproducing the rich are far more successful. There's nothing in natural selection about "attractive" or (socially) "successful", only "fitness". You might not like the way evolution is going, but it is still going on and is ignoring our value system (as it is bound to, being impersonal).
I'm saying that just as this "evolution" involved comparing the intermediate phases with the final form (a Mona Lisa painting), perhaps humans are "evolving" and each time we do we're compared with the final form (only god knows what that is).
There's no place for a "final form" in evolution, the process simply adapts to the prevailing environmant, and no form is any more final than the environment it is in.
Here's a question, people always assume that DNA will change into a form that makes it better able to reproduce.
What people assume that? Nobody who has the first clue about evolution would produce such nonsense. DNA changes at random, with no drive whatsoever towards being a form that is better able to reproduce. It happens that those forms that are better able to reproduce are likely to be present in higher proportion in the next generation, simply by virtue of being better able to reproduce, but the mutation in the DNA wasn't directed towards that.
Why must living things always be driven by the need to reproduce?
By definition of "life"?
We're on a ball of rock, heat, gas and liquid that revolves around a ball of fusion energy. Why must life propel itself into existing?
Who says it "must". Evolution says that if it ever does then it can be self-sustaining, but there's no "must" about it.
So perhaps there is a god, and it's chosen (b), but on a much larger scale. Rather then caring for a single person, it's caring for the entire race and is having us evolve into a particular form. Just as the person did in the article.
Perhaps there is. And your evidence would be?
And I say you take too wider view of it. I mean, you could just describe eugenics as natural selection, where the environment happens to include psychotic scientists with delusions of grandeur.
Yes, the environment should include that. After all eugenics take place in "nature" too. Evolution is a strong enough theory to include that -- there's no reason to exclude it unless for political or religious reasons you want to argue that humans are not part of nature.
Since we developed medicine. It is very rare now that humans as individuals are eliminated from the gene pool due to poor adaptation to their environments.
They are eliminated as often as they ever were. What you're missing is that their environment includes the availability of medicine, so a dependency on medicint is not poor adaptation to the environment.
Birth control means that being succesfully sexually doesn't necessitate being successfully reproductively.
But that doesn't change the evolutionary effect, it's just another environmental factor. After all, mules can be "successful" sexually but not reproductively. It's just part of the evolutionary equation, not an evolution-killer.
The human gene pool is not being filtered by adaptiveness to the environment anymore.
You just take too narrow a view of environment. Anything we do is part of it.
It's not that close to real evolution, as it's driven towards a target "species" -- the Mona Lisa -- which has already been designed. It's more the sort of thing that ID proponents could leap on to say that individual steps that look evolutionary are not incompatible with a designer setting the target of evolution. Real evolution would be constantly changing to an ever changing environment, with no preconceived notion of what the outcomes will look like.
That's also the problem with your conception of our "final" form. Apart from the fact that it assumes there will be just one final form -- if we colonise space it's quite conceivable that humanity might diverge into different species -- the "final" form of an evolutionary process isn't the fittest form, it's the first form to fail totally to adapt to its changing environment, leading to the extermination of that evolutionary line. Our final form(s) will be, by definition, our least successful, worst adapted form(s). Perhaps you need to clarify what you mean by "become gods"?
And remember, it's the older males that have the decent sized tackle, folks!
No. To be a valid analogy on /. it has to have a car in it. A bicycle just isn't good enough.
The free market that is...
It has never existed, and hopefully never will. Its only advantage is doctrinal purity for some economists who don't like dealing with the messiness of the real world. There would be no advantages for any society that implemented it, and significant disadvantages because it has no effective way of managing the many cases where the cost of an action is not borne by those who benefit from the action. Mixed economies are the only pragmatic economies; the real debate is just over what the precise mix should be.
If the enforcement agencies can prove that they received stolen copper. I would have thought that was already the case anyway -- what's the law on receipt of stolen goods in the USA?
first off, i highly doubt that the average copper thief is going to have access to a metal foundry where they can melt their stolen copper.
But the message I was referring to related to the scrap metal dealer, not the theif. The scrap metal dealer is almost certain to have direct or indirect access to a foundry and is likely to be handling much higher volumes. What's more, if he's crooked he can tell the thief to come in just before a batch is shipped.
secondly, if law enforcement can use metallurgic analysis to determine the exact batch of bullets a particular round came from, then i'm sure they could apply the same techniques to other metals. so even if the copper thieves had an underground metal foundry to melt down the copper they stole, there'd still be evidence of where it came from.
Even after it's been melted down with a pile of copper from other sources?
You make them track all metals that come in, and record the seller. They do it with pawn shops here in Portland.
Something comes up missing, check with the buyers. Don't hold them responsible just get their records and take the copper back.
Yes, that's really easy once the copper has been melted down for re-use because each copper atom has a unique fingerprint ... oh, wait, no it doesn't.
My experience is in the UK -- it was post-11, if that makes any difference. Otherwise, perhaps you have some idea why a teacher would phone to ask us not to send our daughter into an exam because she "might fail"? The subject was music, FWIW.
Maybe, but there's a big difference between you not using it and telling others 'don't use any CC licence'. And maybe people who use CC licences means that they 'don't know what "rights" [they're] giving up', but the "unacceptable" example given was about rights being retained.
So let's see. I produce something that I don't expect to be worth more than pin-money. What are my choices?
Only the last two seem to make any sense at all to me; both seem to be reasonable choices for the author, depending on what the author wants to achieve.