Einstein didn't make a distinction. He chose the bent space-time explanation because it explains more simply the other aspects of special relativity than just the simple gravitational attraction.
It is kind of like whether the Earth goes round the Sun, or the other way round. There is no distinction between the 2 situations. If body A goes round body B ; this means that at the same time body B also goes round body A. No experiment in the world can distinguish one from the other because there is no difference. But when we have to explain the movement of other bodies in the Solar System too, it is simpler to start with considering the Sun as the origin (and an approximate polar coordinate system at that, especially for rough illustrative calculations). So, it is just simplicity of further calculations by means of choosing one origin versus another that leads to the choice of Sun as the origin and not a discovery of some fundamental difference between body A going round body B and vice-versa. I repeat, there is no such difference.
(Note that for the explanation of solar and lunar eclipses, considering the Earth as the origin makes better sense.)
But if someone says that we do not know whether the Earth goes round the Sun, or vice versa - I would consider him ignorant of the basic issue at hand. Very similar to your own incorrect assumption that Einstein made a distinction - and slapping on a "reason" for making this "distinction".
My original point was that the example you considered proves that you are too ignorant of the basics of science to worry about the "general philosophical problem of trusting the scientific method...". So relax.
Philosophers produce insight. Scientists produce data.
You must be using a very special definition of insight, because neither wikiedia, nor dictionary agree with you.
Especially notable is the meaning (hinted at by both wikipedia and dictionary) : apprehending the true/inner nature of a thing.
Many scientific studies can be considered to do this. Maybe less frequently by a contemporary scientist, but scientists surely are in the insight business. All scientists produce data. But a scientist who produces insight (i.e., explain/unify/"apprehend the inner nature of" the data) is remembered for centuries. I would surely call the work of Darwin/Einstein/Tesla/Bohr/Heisenberg to be insightful.
I believe every scientist strives to produce insight, may end up producing only data.
You didn't get the point. Since I was taking (maybe) an unusual approach of discussion, I will try to describe my approach clearly here.
I was thinking from a hypothetical alien's point of view : the reasons why such an alien might think that existence of a planet like the Earth, and Earth holding life, is unlikely. Especially if his planet doesn't have things similar to the Earth's. Competence of the alien is assumed to be similar to humans' today. Hence this competence is not much to speak of - case in point is mankind's inability to figure out extent of presence of water on the Moon during ~100 years of spectral analysis.
I was comparing this (arguably incorrect) assumption of the said alien with Mindcontrolled's assumption of less likelihood of life on a planet with an eccentric orbit. Both the assumptions (the alien's and Mindcontrolled's) have the following deficiencies that they:
1. extrapolate information from a single point of observation 2. place undue trust in inadequate remote-sensing ability 3. show over-confidence in one's own ability to conceive and analyze conditions on a far-away place
Now we come to your points: 1. Hence, any peculiarity of the Earth on which complex life today is dependent - is relevant. Because such a peculiarity will be assumed by our dear (Mindcontrolled | alien | maybe yourself) to be near-impossible.
2. We have not found huge liquid water oceans on many rocks-floating-around-open-thermonuclear-plants. And from the speculations that I have read - by far the most common molecules seem to be elemental hydrogen and helium. And I was not talking about water molecule in any form but especially liquid water. And it doesn't matter either way because I just showed how unreliable human estimate of substances at far-away places is.
I generally don't like scrolling. I prefer moving a whole screen at a time - e.g. the action of page up / page down. I do this because it is much quicker and I am somewhat deficient in patience. On the other hand, I select a lot - not just for copying but looking up a word/phrase on Google/Dictionary/Wikipedia. But maybe these are peculiarities of my own, and I can almost see how general public would use scrolling "> 1000 times as often" as you put it.
But I don't understand why, in all your posts in this thread, you cite "multiple selection". What is "multiple" about selection? My whole reply was based on text-selection so maybe I misunderstood you.
If there is a huge difference, you will be so kind as to tell me of an experiment to determine whether : 1. a body X is being pulled by another body Y 2. space is pushing body X towards Y
2) Swiping is a direct form of control for scrolling, your off-screen touch area is indirect.
But it precludes using swiping for text-selection. The natural way of "selecting" text on a paper would be trace it with a marker pen / finger steeped in colour. Now we have to use other, more complicated means for selection.
Arguably, one needs more "direct form of control" for text selection because it is more intimate with the objects you are working with (text in this case) rather than the "paper". When working on a paper, a human being is not likely to focus on the paper itself. One quickly immerses into the objects/text on the paper.
But in the context of the phone, corners are just as easy to hit because of how quickly humans can move fingers to specific points in space within a small area, and your hand is cupped around the device to give your other hand positional context.
Are you talking about dragging one's finger to the corner? Or hovering over the screen until the corner, and then hit it?
If the former, Fitt's law can apply to it provided there is a physical barrier preventing the finger from overshooting the corner. Still, it applies less than in the case of mouse on a regular computer because getting your finger colliding with the barrier repeatedly is not pleasant.
If the latter, Fitt's law does not show a corner to be easy to hit. This is because the "size of target" is not infinite as in the case of mouse in a regular computer. The finger can hit anywhere, on the screen or out of it, and hitting a corner is as easy as hitting any other location on the screen, might be actually tougher if the corner is farther from the current location of the finger. In fact if you hit a specific location often enough (say, 60% down, 45% right from the top-left corner), it becomes the easiest point to hit.
You specifically talk of the "other hand", that too on a phone. Is ease of one hand operation not a concern at all?
I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
It has happened. Adi Shankara (and also Ramanuja and Madhva) converted huge parts of India from Buddhism/Jainism back to Hinduism - only by arguments and debates. They had no swords, no guns, no horses.
the writings of the Buddha were passed on by oral tradition for about 400 years before being written down.
With Buddha, it doesn't matter when his writings/speakings/thinkings were written down because Buddhism is not history-centric. So it doesn't fundamentally depend on historic events.
However, nobody that I know of believes in a God who never intervened in the world.
Then you don't know of any followers of Indic religions (more than 20% of world population). Or maybe you know of them but don't realize that their religion is not history centric and hence God need not have intervened.
I'd have just as much luck convincing a creationist that Buddha put the bones there as I would getting them to accept evolution through natural selection.
Not sure if you are aware of this, but for the record - Buddhism is not opposed to natural selection. Buddhism is not history centric so it is not fundamentally based on what has happened in the past.
We don't even know whether space "pushes" against things or mass pulls on them.
Push and pull are just words in English grammar. It doesn't mean there is a difference between "space pushing against things" and "mass pulling on them". As long as no difference is observed/proved, science doesn't even attempt to differentiate between these 2 concepts.
In another language, there may not be 2 different words to explain this same thing. If you used that language, you wouldn't have had this confusion at all.
How does science tell you how you should behave in society, for instance?
Well, just as a for-instance, games theory shows that a simple tit-for-tat algorithm is one of the most effective strategies in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma
But iterated Prisoner's Dilemma is such a small subset of "behaviour in society", that it is laughable you point this out. Even so, the only goal in iterated Prisoner's Dilemma is to minimize one's prison term. In real life, there are many other goals too. And science surely doesn't help me define those goals.
Study of social insects, as well as herd and pack animals, reveals that cooperation among members of a species is a powerful evolutionary strategy
This only tells me that cooperation with members of my species will help my species survive. But who says I must help my species survive. Science definitely doesn't. Note that cooperation with members of my species from fear of prison term is not really ethics.
In fact, it's silly to assume that ethics can or should exist in a vacuum, with no scientific basis.
Not at all. Science can tell me the reason why so-and-so ethics were formulated (say, evolutionary reasons). But once formed, science surely doesn't tell me why I should stick to those ethics. Hence once formed, ethics not only can, but definitely do exist in a vacuum.
Possibly because he actually knows something about it?
So? Just because Mindcontrolled knows something about something, other things suddenly stop to matter? How do you work that out?
According to you, a botanist could say "Football is based on botany", just because he knows something about botany?
Elements have distinctive spectral signatures, and no anomalous ones have been detected anywhere. Compounds form according to known rules, and their properties are generally predictable.
Finding any unobtanium trlithiate is pretty unlikely.
Irrelevant again. All this spectral signaturing did a fat lot of good in determining the presence of water on Moon for the last ~100 years during which the spectral patterns have been studied and observed.
Please read the whole thread and reply in context. This jumping in, and quote-commenting random statements out of context is not helping. Thanks.
Weird thing to say. Even if you look only at life as we know it, life is based on a lot more than that. Life on earth is based on thermonuclear reactions (Sun). Life on earth is based on green-house effect (temperature regulation). Life on earth is based on magnetism (protection by earth's magnetic field). Life on earth is based on physical actions (melting, condensing, evaporating etc. of water). Why you would concentrate only on chemistry is beyond me. And though these processes obey the laws of thermodynamics, thermodynamics is not the most salient feature of a lot of these processes.
Why ignore nuclear reactions, physical reactions, magnetic action, electrical action, electro-magnetic action (on a macro scale, electro magnetic behaves quite different from electrical and magnetic)? And who knows what else is yet to be discovered? What is so special about chemistry?
We can compare different environments with regard to these boundary conditions and give very rough estimates of relative probabilities for life to evolve.
Quite arrogant of humans to assume that. Human idea of water (considered extremely important in forming an opinion on possibility of life) on the Moon (closest "heavenly" body, and also easiest to study) has changed drastically within last 1 or 2 years. Humans had even started speculating on real-estate on Moon with zero knowledge of this new fact. And you claim you can not only imagine and reproduce, but also analyze all the possible environments in all the floating rocks of the universe for probabilities of life to a non-trivial degree of accuracy?
Even if we restrict ourselves to chemistry (developing a huge prejudice hereby, but you seem to be keen on chemistry) - there cannot be chemicals that humans have not yet dreamed of? Which behave unimaginably in yet unimagined conditions? If your planet did not have water, would you have dreamed of such a weird chemical?
Coming back to your original point,
planets with highly excentric/elliptical orbits are less likely to develop life than stable planets like earth
Based on the sample size of 1/unity of our observation - maybe. You say this because you suspect wild temperature swings. What if the "Sun" is not the main heat source? It is true even on the Earth at some places - within your precious sample size of unity. With what certainty can you say that such non-Sun heat source is not exceedingly common on any piece of rock even a light year away? Human remote sensing, and analysis of the goings-on at remote places ability lost all credibility after the "discovery" of water on the Moon by Chandrayaan.
Would you have any inkling that a planet with an eccentric orbit just 100 light years away, next-door in astronomical terms, which has one side always in dark, does not have a nuclear fission reaction, or another chemical reaction providing thermal stability and (hence) life to a thriving ecosystem? Do you even know what all we do not know yet? Discovering such knowledge can only follow.
planets with highly excentric/elliptical orbits are less likely to develop life than stable planets like earth. A lot of our physicochemical and biochemical knowledge speaks for that
Knowledge of likelihood? With one experiment and no control?
Once upon a time, a 10 year boy tossed a coin, it turned up heads. The boy concluded that it is less likely to get tails up rather than heads up when you toss up a coin. Given the circs, pardon me, but I would trust human ignorance more than human knowledge.
That is exactly what I pointed to. See the million coin toss experiment I referred to in this post. One may say that million coins all heads is so unlikely, and reject the possibility as a serious one. But then, one would be wrong.
Well, its just luck. You may find the secret in a few minutes. Or you may not find this secret in trillions of years. Hundreds of thousands of years is just a single instance of the above class of time-periods. Any reason why you choose "hundreds of thousands of years" ? Please don't tell me earthlings needed so much time to develop interesting things so everyone must.
Toss million coins. Probability of all heads - not much.
Try the experiment parallelly on all the rocks-floating-around-thermonuclear-device, for billions of years. Probability of all heads in one of these experiments - reasonable. I say this especially because Earth itself has a lot of incredible (to an impartial observer) coincidences. So lack of extraordinary coincidences is absolutely ruled out.
How probable is it that a planet has an ozone layer in somewhat upper atmosphere? How probable is it that the one liquid available in enormous quantity is extremely weird, compared to many other liquids:
1. Transparent - with electromagnetic energy being major source of energy, this is somewhat important. 2. Huge thermal capacity 3. Solid form insulates, and more shockingly, is lighter than liquid. So beautifully shelters life.
If it were not that I were residing on the very same planet, I would find it unthinkable that such a planet could exist. Things with low probabilities do happen, especially during billions of years and as yet uncountable floating rocks.
I have never really understood this theory. For an overwhelming majority of time, Jupiter is quite far away from Earth. So, acting like a shield is out of question. Then, its effect of gravitationally ward off evil from Earth, would not be much more than that of the real big daddy, Sun, warding off evil from Earth gravitationally.
The "life" only needs to evolve a insulation / temperature control mechanism during the time when temperature was good for it. Or, say, the "surroundings" are such that they maintain somewhat stable temperature through a negative feedback in a electro/magnetic/chemical/physical/nuclear etc. reaction.
So the wildly oscillating temperature alone cannot be the excuse of lack of life on millions of rocks-floating-around-giant-thermonuclear-devices, for billions of years.
So all they'd have to do is add an exception for GPL apps and it would be of no real detriment to Apple.
This wouldn't be enough. Suppose someone creates another license, say GPL1 with the exact same text as GPL. Such a license would have to be excluded too.
Then, someone creates another license, say GPL2, which is as different from GPL as possible except that this requirement is common between GPL and GPL2. Such a license would also have to be excluded. So it boils down to exclude all licenses which clash with App store policy "you can't distribute that same version elsewhere". But that would make this clause in the App store policy tooth-less because anyone who wants to violate it will easily release it under a license which clashes with App store policy "you can't distribute that same version elsewhere".
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone buying a ebook-reading device must be pirating the ebooks. Let's tax the sons of bitches to kingdom come.
There are several thousand self published books. How do I wade through that sick spew looking for the one I want to read.
There are several million websites, billions of webpages. How do you wade through that even sicker spew looking for the one you want to read?
Einstein didn't make a distinction. He chose the bent space-time explanation because it explains more simply the other aspects of special relativity than just the simple gravitational attraction.
It is kind of like whether the Earth goes round the Sun, or the other way round. There is no distinction between the 2 situations. If body A goes round body B ; this means that at the same time body B also goes round body A. No experiment in the world can distinguish one from the other because there is no difference. But when we have to explain the movement of other bodies in the Solar System too, it is simpler to start with considering the Sun as the origin (and an approximate polar coordinate system at that, especially for rough illustrative calculations). So, it is just simplicity of further calculations by means of choosing one origin versus another that leads to the choice of Sun as the origin and not a discovery of some fundamental difference between body A going round body B and vice-versa. I repeat, there is no such difference.
(Note that for the explanation of solar and lunar eclipses, considering the Earth as the origin makes better sense.)
But if someone says that we do not know whether the Earth goes round the Sun, or vice versa - I would consider him ignorant of the basic issue at hand. Very similar to your own incorrect assumption that Einstein made a distinction - and slapping on a "reason" for making this "distinction".
My original point was that the example you considered proves that you are too ignorant of the basics of science to worry about the "general philosophical problem of trusting the scientific method ...". So relax.
Philosophers produce insight. Scientists produce data.
You must be using a very special definition of insight, because neither wikiedia, nor dictionary agree with you.
Especially notable is the meaning (hinted at by both wikipedia and dictionary) : apprehending the true/inner nature of a thing.
Many scientific studies can be considered to do this. Maybe less frequently by a contemporary scientist, but scientists surely are in the insight business. All scientists produce data. But a scientist who produces insight (i.e., explain/unify/"apprehend the inner nature of" the data) is remembered for centuries. I would surely call the work of Darwin/Einstein/Tesla/Bohr/Heisenberg to be insightful.
I believe every scientist strives to produce insight, may end up producing only data.
You didn't get the point. Since I was taking (maybe) an unusual approach of discussion, I will try to describe my approach clearly here.
I was thinking from a hypothetical alien's point of view : the reasons why such an alien might think that existence of a planet like the Earth, and Earth holding life, is unlikely. Especially if his planet doesn't have things similar to the Earth's. Competence of the alien is assumed to be similar to humans' today. Hence this competence is not much to speak of - case in point is mankind's inability to figure out extent of presence of water on the Moon during ~100 years of spectral analysis.
I was comparing this (arguably incorrect) assumption of the said alien with Mindcontrolled's assumption of less likelihood of life on a planet with an eccentric orbit. Both the assumptions (the alien's and Mindcontrolled's) have the following deficiencies that they:
1. extrapolate information from a single point of observation
2. place undue trust in inadequate remote-sensing ability
3. show over-confidence in one's own ability to conceive and analyze conditions on a far-away place
Now we come to your points:
1. Hence, any peculiarity of the Earth on which complex life today is dependent - is relevant. Because such a peculiarity will be assumed by our dear (Mindcontrolled | alien | maybe yourself) to be near-impossible.
2. We have not found huge liquid water oceans on many rocks-floating-around-open-thermonuclear-plants. And from the speculations that I have read - by far the most common molecules seem to be elemental hydrogen and helium. And I was not talking about water molecule in any form but especially liquid water. And it doesn't matter either way because I just showed how unreliable human estimate of substances at far-away places is.
You seem to be correct.
I generally don't like scrolling. I prefer moving a whole screen at a time - e.g. the action of page up / page down. I do this because it is much quicker and I am somewhat deficient in patience. On the other hand, I select a lot - not just for copying but looking up a word/phrase on Google/Dictionary/Wikipedia. But maybe these are peculiarities of my own, and I can almost see how general public would use scrolling "> 1000 times as often" as you put it.
But I don't understand why, in all your posts in this thread, you cite "multiple selection". What is "multiple" about selection? My whole reply was based on text-selection so maybe I misunderstood you.
... itself, there is a huge difference.
If there is a huge difference, you will be so kind as to tell me of an experiment to determine whether :
1. a body X is being pulled by another body Y
2. space is pushing body X towards Y
2) Swiping is a direct form of control for scrolling, your off-screen touch area is indirect.
But it precludes using swiping for text-selection. The natural way of "selecting" text on a paper would be trace it with a marker pen / finger steeped in colour. Now we have to use other, more complicated means for selection.
Arguably, one needs more "direct form of control" for text selection because it is more intimate with the objects you are working with (text in this case) rather than the "paper". When working on a paper, a human being is not likely to focus on the paper itself. One quickly immerses into the objects/text on the paper.
But in the context of the phone, corners are just as easy to hit because of how quickly humans can move fingers to specific points in space within a small area, and your hand is cupped around the device to give your other hand positional context.
Are you talking about dragging one's finger to the corner? Or hovering over the screen until the corner, and then hit it?
If the former, Fitt's law can apply to it provided there is a physical barrier preventing the finger from overshooting the corner. Still, it applies less than in the case of mouse on a regular computer because getting your finger colliding with the barrier repeatedly is not pleasant.
If the latter, Fitt's law does not show a corner to be easy to hit. This is because the "size of target" is not infinite as in the case of mouse in a regular computer. The finger can hit anywhere, on the screen or out of it, and hitting a corner is as easy as hitting any other location on the screen, might be actually tougher if the corner is farther from the current location of the finger. In fact if you hit a specific location often enough (say, 60% down, 45% right from the top-left corner), it becomes the easiest point to hit.
You specifically talk of the "other hand", that too on a phone. Is ease of one hand operation not a concern at all?
I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
It has happened. Adi Shankara (and also Ramanuja and Madhva) converted huge parts of India from Buddhism/Jainism back to Hinduism - only by arguments and debates. They had no swords, no guns, no horses.
the writings of the Buddha were passed on by oral tradition for about 400 years before being written down.
With Buddha, it doesn't matter when his writings/speakings/thinkings were written down because Buddhism is not history-centric. So it doesn't fundamentally depend on historic events.
George Carlin put it like this :
Praying is begging for an unseen deity to alter the laws of nature for someone admittedly unworthy
However, nobody that I know of believes in a God who never intervened in the world.
Then you don't know of any followers of Indic religions (more than 20% of world population). Or maybe you know of them but don't realize that their religion is not history centric and hence God need not have intervened.
I'd have just as much luck convincing a creationist that Buddha put the bones there as I would getting them to accept evolution through natural selection.
Not sure if you are aware of this, but for the record - Buddhism is not opposed to natural selection. Buddhism is not history centric so it is not fundamentally based on what has happened in the past.
We don't even know whether space "pushes" against things or mass pulls on them.
Push and pull are just words in English grammar. It doesn't mean there is a difference between "space pushing against things" and "mass pulling on them". As long as no difference is observed/proved, science doesn't even attempt to differentiate between these 2 concepts.
In another language, there may not be 2 different words to explain this same thing. If you used that language, you wouldn't have had this confusion at all.
How does science tell you how you should behave in society, for instance?
Well, just as a for-instance, games theory shows that a simple tit-for-tat algorithm is one of the most effective strategies in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma
But iterated Prisoner's Dilemma is such a small subset of "behaviour in society", that it is laughable you point this out. Even so, the only goal in iterated Prisoner's Dilemma is to minimize one's prison term. In real life, there are many other goals too. And science surely doesn't help me define those goals.
Study of social insects, as well as herd and pack animals, reveals that cooperation among members of a species is a powerful evolutionary strategy
This only tells me that cooperation with members of my species will help my species survive. But who says I must help my species survive. Science definitely doesn't. Note that cooperation with members of my species from fear of prison term is not really ethics.
In fact, it's silly to assume that ethics can or should exist in a vacuum, with no scientific basis.
Not at all. Science can tell me the reason why so-and-so ethics were formulated (say, evolutionary reasons). But once formed, science surely doesn't tell me why I should stick to those ethics. Hence once formed, ethics not only can, but definitely do exist in a vacuum.
Possibly because he actually knows something about it?
So? Just because Mindcontrolled knows something about something, other things suddenly stop to matter? How do you work that out?
According to you, a botanist could say "Football is based on botany", just because he knows something about botany?
Elements have distinctive spectral signatures, and no anomalous ones have been detected anywhere. Compounds form according to known rules, and their properties are generally predictable.
Finding any unobtanium trlithiate is pretty unlikely.
Irrelevant again. All this spectral signaturing did a fat lot of good in determining the presence of water on Moon for the last ~100 years during which the spectral patterns have been studied and observed.
Please read the whole thread and reply in context. This jumping in, and quote-commenting random statements out of context is not helping. Thanks.
Life is based on chemistry and on thermodynamics.
Weird thing to say. Even if you look only at life as we know it, life is based on a lot more than that. Life on earth is based on thermonuclear reactions (Sun). Life on earth is based on green-house effect (temperature regulation). Life on earth is based on magnetism (protection by earth's magnetic field). Life on earth is based on physical actions (melting, condensing, evaporating etc. of water). Why you would concentrate only on chemistry is beyond me. And though these processes obey the laws of thermodynamics, thermodynamics is not the most salient feature of a lot of these processes.
Why ignore nuclear reactions, physical reactions, magnetic action, electrical action, electro-magnetic action (on a macro scale, electro magnetic behaves quite different from electrical and magnetic)? And who knows what else is yet to be discovered? What is so special about chemistry?
We can compare different environments with regard to these boundary conditions and give very rough estimates of relative probabilities for life to evolve.
Quite arrogant of humans to assume that. Human idea of water (considered extremely important in forming an opinion on possibility of life) on the Moon (closest "heavenly" body, and also easiest to study) has changed drastically within last 1 or 2 years. Humans had even started speculating on real-estate on Moon with zero knowledge of this new fact. And you claim you can not only imagine and reproduce, but also analyze all the possible environments in all the floating rocks of the universe for probabilities of life to a non-trivial degree of accuracy?
Even if we restrict ourselves to chemistry (developing a huge prejudice hereby, but you seem to be keen on chemistry) - there cannot be chemicals that humans have not yet dreamed of? Which behave unimaginably in yet unimagined conditions? If your planet did not have water, would you have dreamed of such a weird chemical?
Coming back to your original point,
planets with highly excentric/elliptical orbits are less likely to develop life than stable planets like earth
Based on the sample size of 1/unity of our observation - maybe. You say this because you suspect wild temperature swings. What if the "Sun" is not the main heat source? It is true even on the Earth at some places - within your precious sample size of unity. With what certainty can you say that such non-Sun heat source is not exceedingly common on any piece of rock even a light year away? Human remote sensing, and analysis of the goings-on at remote places ability lost all credibility after the "discovery" of water on the Moon by Chandrayaan.
Would you have any inkling that a planet with an eccentric orbit just 100 light years away, next-door in astronomical terms, which has one side always in dark, does not have a nuclear fission reaction, or another chemical reaction providing thermal stability and (hence) life to a thriving ecosystem? Do you even know what all we do not know yet? Discovering such knowledge can only follow.
planets with highly excentric/elliptical orbits are less likely to develop life than stable planets like earth. A lot of our physicochemical and biochemical knowledge speaks for that
Knowledge of likelihood? With one experiment and no control?
Once upon a time, a 10 year boy tossed a coin, it turned up heads. The boy concluded that it is less likely to get tails up rather than heads up when you toss up a coin. Given the circs, pardon me, but I would trust human ignorance more than human knowledge.
That is exactly what I pointed to. See the million coin toss experiment I referred to in this post. One may say that million coins all heads is so unlikely, and reject the possibility as a serious one. But then, one would be wrong.
Well, its just luck. You may find the secret in a few minutes. Or you may not find this secret in trillions of years. Hundreds of thousands of years is just a single instance of the above class of time-periods. Any reason why you choose "hundreds of thousands of years" ? Please don't tell me earthlings needed so much time to develop interesting things so everyone must.
Toss million coins. Probability of all heads - not much.
Try the experiment parallelly on all the rocks-floating-around-thermonuclear-device, for billions of years. Probability of all heads in one of these experiments - reasonable. I say this especially because Earth itself has a lot of incredible (to an impartial observer) coincidences. So lack of extraordinary coincidences is absolutely ruled out.
lowers the probability?
How probable is it that a planet has an ozone layer in somewhat upper atmosphere? How probable is it that the one liquid available in enormous quantity is extremely weird, compared to many other liquids:
1. Transparent - with electromagnetic energy being major source of energy, this is somewhat important.
2. Huge thermal capacity
3. Solid form insulates, and more shockingly, is lighter than liquid. So beautifully shelters life.
If it were not that I were residing on the very same planet, I would find it unthinkable that such a planet could exist. Things with low probabilities do happen, especially during billions of years and as yet uncountable floating rocks.
I have never really understood this theory. For an overwhelming majority of time, Jupiter is quite far away from Earth. So, acting like a shield is out of question. Then, its effect of gravitationally ward off evil from Earth, would not be much more than that of the real big daddy, Sun, warding off evil from Earth gravitationally.
I guess Jupiter is overrated.
Temperature range?
The "life" only needs to evolve a insulation / temperature control mechanism during the time when temperature was good for it. Or, say, the "surroundings" are such that they maintain somewhat stable temperature through a negative feedback in a electro/magnetic/chemical/physical/nuclear etc. reaction.
So the wildly oscillating temperature alone cannot be the excuse of lack of life on millions of rocks-floating-around-giant-thermonuclear-devices, for billions of years.
So all they'd have to do is add an exception for GPL apps and it would be of no real detriment to Apple.
This wouldn't be enough. Suppose someone creates another license, say GPL1 with the exact same text as GPL. Such a license would have to be excluded too.
Then, someone creates another license, say GPL2, which is as different from GPL as possible except that this requirement is common between GPL and GPL2. Such a license would also have to be excluded. So it boils down to exclude all licenses which clash with App store policy "you can't distribute that same version elsewhere". But that would make this clause in the App store policy tooth-less because anyone who wants to violate it will easily release it under a license which clashes with App store policy "you can't distribute that same version elsewhere".