... to get some recognition for my ungodly half-man-half-ape mutant creation, the prototype of the human-animal hybrid super-army which will set me on the road to world conquest. But Bush pretty much put the kibosh on that a little while back.
Damn you, inconveniently timed State of the Union address! DAMN YOU!
Ah, well, no matter. I shall simply toil in obscurity a little while longer -- and then when the day comes, let the planet tremble at my name! You laughed at me! You called me mad! I'll show you! I'LL SHOW YOU ALL!
There are plenty observations made "each day" that contradict evolutionary theories.
Name some. Before you post, please check talk.origins and the NCSE website to see debunkings of your claims; I can almost guarantee that any of the observations you're thinking of do not contradict evolution in the slightest, and have already been explained in short, simple sentences and words of few syllables so that even creationists can understand them.
There are also many established scientists who don't support it too.
No, there aren't. There are very, very few, and almost none of them are biologists. And their arguments are the same easily debunked nonsense, repeated over and over in increasingly obfuscatory language; they haven't brought anything new to the table in decades.
The theory of evolution is an attempt to find an absolute in a relativistic universe, it doesn't exist. It is based off age-old beliefs in simple cause and effect, and projecting those flawed beliefs over the span of millions of years. The universe does not operate this way. With our modern knowledge of relativism and quantum mechanics, evolution should be debunked.
Congratulations, you've managed to combine two of the most common types pseudo-scientific quackery (creationism and profound misinterpretation of quantum physics) into a single post! I suggest you stick to fare like "What the Bleep Do We Know?" -- it should be more at your level.
There is no such thing as "macro-evolution" as a separate category of evolution. There just isn't. It's a distinction that doesn't exist. There is only evolution, the effects of which accumulate over time. Darwin understood this perfectly well, and so does everybody who makes even the slightest effort to understand biology; that you don't speaks of nothing so much as willful blindness on your part. The claims of "intelligent design" are those of divine intervention at specific, multiple points during the evolutionary process, and are simply unnecessary to explain any observed features of life on earth today.
The difference between zero internet access and some internet access (i.e. dial-up) is enormous. This also costs about $5 per month.
Plus whatever you pay for your phone line. I know several people who have cheap cell phone plans that actually cost less per month than a landline, and have no landline, so for them it would be more like $35/mo. to get dial-up.
Bingo. Bullying turns people into depressed loners -- wow, that's news.
I was bullied incessantly in elementary school and junior high, and acted, well, pretty much like the "normal" mice. In high school, this changed, but it wasn't because of a knockout gene. It was because I learned to fight back -- a knockout punch instead of a gene, you might say. We don't need more and better antidepressants. We need more instructors who know how to take scared, depressed geeks and turn them into fighters. And more bullies lying bleeding in school hallways spitting out their own teeth.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't public companies supposed to archive all their corporate e-mails anyway, under Sarbanes-Oxley? Megacorps aren't going to use this service anyway, of course, but I can see it being useful for a mid-sized company to be able to say, "Yeah, Google has all of it."
You don't think making the rounds and posing for pictures should be part of the Mayor's job?
Honestly, no, I don't. I mean, if he's running for re-election, then it's obviously part of how he keeps his job, but it's not an integral part of the job itself. I'm all for face-to-face contact for business reasons, but handshaking and photo ops aren't doing business. Does your boss cruise around the halls of your company shaking people's hands just for the hell of it?
All of what you say is true, but none of it has anything to do with the fact that by claiming their service is unlimited, Netflix is lying. Do you not understand that? If a company would go out of business by doing what it claims to do, then it shouldn't be making those claims; it's really that simple.
Your "welfare state" crack makes it pretty easy to guess your politics, so I'll add this: it's bizarre, but not at all surprising, that those who will defend just about any corporate atrocity in the name of "maximizing value for the shareholders" are the first to jump on customers and/or workers of those corporations when they try to maximize value for themselves. It's a two-way street, folks. If corporations are going to act like amoral predators, why shouldn't Average Joes act the same way in dealing with them?
Office assistant Edward Greenwood IX was going over some papers at his desk as Bloomberg made the rounds with his photographer, greeting workers and posing for pictures. When the mayor reached him, Greenwood stood, they shook hands and the photographer snapped a photo.
-- and --
"I expect all city workers, including myself, to work hard," the mayor said. "There's nothing wrong with taking a break, but during the business day, at your desk, that's not appropriate behavior."
No they aren't. Any patent on an algorithm is, by definition, a patent on a mathematical expression -- which shouldn't be allowed, but is. Copyright may be theoretically limited, but as long as Congress keeps passing extensions every time Steamboat Willie comes close to entering the public domain, it's effectively infinite. And as the fate of Mike Rowe Soft and the recent Red Cross case show, big organizations (even supposedly humanitarian ones, in the latter case) have free rein to go after anyone, anywhere, who might portray anything that looks their trademark, whether or not a reasonable person would have any chance of confusion.
This is definitely not "it". The surveillance of every single out-of-country phone call might have been "it". Some of the dozens of things the government has/hasn't gotten in trouble for doing illegally might have been "it". But this is, seriously, nothing.
You make an important point, but probably not the way you intended.
There is no "it." There is no one big, dramatic thing the government does that says, "This is the point where we're no longer free." France did not tumble overnight into the Reign of Terror. Russia did not go in a day from Revolution to purges and gulags. Germany did not start building death camps as soon as the swastika flew over the Reichstag. Cuba was as free as any country on Earth the day Castro took power.
Etc. Tyranny doesn't happen in an instant. It happens steadily, insidiously, and at every point there are people saying, "Oh, this isn't so bad, and it's for our own good..." It's only at the end of the process that you wake up, look around, and ask, "Where did freedom go?"
You are assuming that technology growth is linear. I don't think it is.
I don't think it is either, but to say, "the pace of innovation is slower now than it was then" when "now" and "then" are two different lengths of time is simply a bad comparison. If I had to guess at a good functional description, I'd say it's either stochastic-exponential or stochastic-logistic; obviously I'd prefer to think it's the former, but there's always the possibility that it's the latter, and we're reaching the point where the curve flattens out.
The problem with this idea is that there's no real incentive for the corporations to go along with reforming the system, no matter how bad it gets, because it's a tragedy-of-the-commons situation. Is this kind of IP absurdity bad for everyone in the long term? Yes. Is it good, in the short term, for AT&T (or whichever bunch of jerks is claiming ownership over mathematics this week?) Also yes. The only way it's going to change, as much as I hate to say it, is from above -- i.e., patent (and other IP) reform by law, not by behavior. Specifically, what needs to happen is that governments need to say:
No, you cannot patent math;
No, you cannot keep copyright indefinitely, nor can you keep re-patenting trivial re-implementations;
No, you cannot sue everyone who mentions you or your trademark in any context whatsoever, especially if there is no way any reasonable person could be confuse them for you; and
No, you cannot park on what you consider to be a particularly valuable piece of IP and wait for it to become popular and then start suing people when you should have known all along that they were using it.
Of course, that would require that the people making the rules for the USPTO and similar bodies not be under the thumb of the same people who are causing the problem in the first place. Good luck with that.
To be fair, you should compare equivalent stretches of time; 1960 was 46 years ago, so look at 1860-1906, and you'll see that more than half your list goes away. And some of the changes that have taken place since 1960 are, I think, just as important -- as far as computers go, they're so much smaller and faster (and, just as importantly, cheaper) than I think you're looking at a difference in kind, not just degree.
But overall, I agree with you. The suits have thoroughly bought into, and convinced judges and politicians (including the US Supreme Court) of, the fundamentally wrong idea that money is the driving force behind scientific and technological progress. The simple fact is that the kind of person who is capable of creating something genuinely new is also usually -- not always, but usually -- also the kind of person who wants to see that "something" widely available much, much more than he wants to get rich off it. Scientists and engineers don't, as a rule, expect to get rich; if that were their primary motivation, they wouldn't be scientists or engineers. This is something the suits will never, ever understand... but then, if they understood such things, they wouldn't be suits, either. And so the world is run by people who don't actually understand much of anything except the rules of their own made-up game.
Yes, I have. Eight years active duty, 1989-1997. How about you?
I started out as an infantryman in the reserves, but went active duty as a medic, which was a job that didn't create any moral conflicts for me. But I knew a lot of people who weren't so lucky. Being a whistleblower in any environment is hard; in the service it's one of the most wrenching conflicts anyone can ever have to deal with.
It is very strongly in the nature of career military personnel to shut up and follow orders, even when you're pretty sure those orders are wrong. The longer you're in and the harder you've worked at it -- and you don't get an eagle without being in a good long time and working very hard -- the stronger this impulse becomes. It takes time and accumulated outrage to overcome this.
Not communism, but capitalist oligarchism. "Enterprise sector" is the Fortune 500 that can buy politicians to manipulate the market to their ends. "Private sector" is everyone else, competing on an increasingly tilted playing field. Hope this clears things up.
How long before people will stop citing Crichton and other pseudo-scientific fear-mongering fiction as a reason to interfere with science and technology?
I can't help thinking that Tut's death was the JFK assassination of his day. "It was the Mafia with a stone club to the back of his head! No, the Cubans with a sword to the knee! No, the CIA gave him the plague! I've got a witness who saw an archer on the grassy knoll!"
It rotates yearly from dome to dome for some strange reason. Not the rotating, the dome part. Every year the highlights of greatest Super Bowls shows three or four of the top games outside in snow and the cold, yet they feel compelled to play the game inside now.
... which makes a pretty good metaphor for America in general, when you think about it.
The person making the argument is a completely irrelevant aspect of the argument itself.
That's true only in a very limited sense. Logicians love to quote clear examples of logical and then claim that their examples apply to real arguments (ironically, this is itself an example of fallacious argumentation -- it's a straw man.) In the real world, the relationship between the argument and the person making the argument is a lot more complex. If the person making the argument has a known bias or pattern of behavior which may be affected by the outcome of the debate, it is entirely logical, and not at all fallacious, to take this into account when interpreting his words.
No hand-waving needed: the kids born with the really serious abnormalities die off before they have a chance to reproduce. It only takes a couple of generations of that sort of selective pressure to eliminate the seriously bad alleles, or at least reduce their occurrence to the level found in the general population.
The law in question is FISA, modified but not repealed by the PATRIOT Act. There was no constitutional amendment, because none was needed. I suspect you know this perfectly well, and are just trolling, but on the off-chance you're honestly as pig-ignorant as you appear to be -- well, now you're not, and have no excuse.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn you, inconveniently timed State of the Union address! DAMN YOU!
Ah, well, no matter. I shall simply toil in obscurity a little while longer -- and then when the day comes, let the planet tremble at my name! You laughed at me! You called me mad! I'll show you! I'LL SHOW YOU ALL!
There are plenty observations made "each day" that contradict evolutionary theories.
Name some. Before you post, please check talk.origins and the NCSE website to see debunkings of your claims; I can almost guarantee that any of the observations you're thinking of do not contradict evolution in the slightest, and have already been explained in short, simple sentences and words of few syllables so that even creationists can understand them.
There are also many established scientists who don't support it too.
No, there aren't. There are very, very few, and almost none of them are biologists. And their arguments are the same easily debunked nonsense, repeated over and over in increasingly obfuscatory language; they haven't brought anything new to the table in decades.
The theory of evolution is an attempt to find an absolute in a relativistic universe, it doesn't exist. It is based off age-old beliefs in simple cause and effect, and projecting those flawed beliefs over the span of millions of years. The universe does not operate this way. With our modern knowledge of relativism and quantum mechanics, evolution should be debunked.
Congratulations, you've managed to combine two of the most common types pseudo-scientific quackery (creationism and profound misinterpretation of quantum physics) into a single post! I suggest you stick to fare like "What the Bleep Do We Know?" -- it should be more at your level.
There is no such thing as "macro-evolution" as a separate category of evolution. There just isn't. It's a distinction that doesn't exist. There is only evolution, the effects of which accumulate over time. Darwin understood this perfectly well, and so does everybody who makes even the slightest effort to understand biology; that you don't speaks of nothing so much as willful blindness on your part. The claims of "intelligent design" are those of divine intervention at specific, multiple points during the evolutionary process, and are simply unnecessary to explain any observed features of life on earth today.
The difference between zero internet access and some internet access (i.e. dial-up) is enormous. This also costs about $5 per month.
Plus whatever you pay for your phone line. I know several people who have cheap cell phone plans that actually cost less per month than a landline, and have no landline, so for them it would be more like $35/mo. to get dial-up.
Bingo. Bullying turns people into depressed loners -- wow, that's news.
I was bullied incessantly in elementary school and junior high, and acted, well, pretty much like the "normal" mice. In high school, this changed, but it wasn't because of a knockout gene. It was because I learned to fight back -- a knockout punch instead of a gene, you might say. We don't need more and better antidepressants. We need more instructors who know how to take scared, depressed geeks and turn them into fighters. And more bullies lying bleeding in school hallways spitting out their own teeth.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't public companies supposed to archive all their corporate e-mails anyway, under Sarbanes-Oxley? Megacorps aren't going to use this service anyway, of course, but I can see it being useful for a mid-sized company to be able to say, "Yeah, Google has all of it."
You don't think making the rounds and posing for pictures should be part of the Mayor's job?
Honestly, no, I don't. I mean, if he's running for re-election, then it's obviously part of how he keeps his job, but it's not an integral part of the job itself. I'm all for face-to-face contact for business reasons, but handshaking and photo ops aren't doing business. Does your boss cruise around the halls of your company shaking people's hands just for the hell of it?
All of what you say is true, but none of it has anything to do with the fact that by claiming their service is unlimited, Netflix is lying. Do you not understand that? If a company would go out of business by doing what it claims to do, then it shouldn't be making those claims; it's really that simple.
Your "welfare state" crack makes it pretty easy to guess your politics, so I'll add this: it's bizarre, but not at all surprising, that those who will defend just about any corporate atrocity in the name of "maximizing value for the shareholders" are the first to jump on customers and/or workers of those corporations when they try to maximize value for themselves. It's a two-way street, folks. If corporations are going to act like amoral predators, why shouldn't Average Joes act the same way in dealing with them?
Office assistant Edward Greenwood IX was going over some papers at his desk as Bloomberg made the rounds with his photographer, greeting workers and posing for pictures. When the mayor reached him, Greenwood stood, they shook hands and the photographer snapped a photo.
-- and --
"I expect all city workers, including myself, to work hard," the mayor said. "There's nothing wrong with taking a break, but during the business day, at your desk, that's not appropriate behavior."
Yep, workin' hard there, Mr. Mayor. Workin' hard.
The first three are already true.
No they aren't. Any patent on an algorithm is, by definition, a patent on a mathematical expression -- which shouldn't be allowed, but is. Copyright may be theoretically limited, but as long as Congress keeps passing extensions every time Steamboat Willie comes close to entering the public domain, it's effectively infinite. And as the fate of Mike Rowe Soft and the recent Red Cross case show, big organizations (even supposedly humanitarian ones, in the latter case) have free rein to go after anyone, anywhere, who might portray anything that looks their trademark, whether or not a reasonable person would have any chance of confusion.
This is definitely not "it". The surveillance of every single out-of-country phone call might have been "it". Some of the dozens of things the government has/hasn't gotten in trouble for doing illegally might have been "it". But this is, seriously, nothing.
..." It's only at the end of the process that you wake up, look around, and ask, "Where did freedom go?"
You make an important point, but probably not the way you intended.
There is no "it." There is no one big, dramatic thing the government does that says, "This is the point where we're no longer free." France did not tumble overnight into the Reign of Terror. Russia did not go in a day from Revolution to purges and gulags. Germany did not start building death camps as soon as the swastika flew over the Reichstag. Cuba was as free as any country on Earth the day Castro took power.
Etc. Tyranny doesn't happen in an instant. It happens steadily, insidiously, and at every point there are people saying, "Oh, this isn't so bad, and it's for our own good
You are assuming that technology growth is linear. I don't think it is.
I don't think it is either, but to say, "the pace of innovation is slower now than it was then" when "now" and "then" are two different lengths of time is simply a bad comparison. If I had to guess at a good functional description, I'd say it's either stochastic-exponential or stochastic-logistic; obviously I'd prefer to think it's the former, but there's always the possibility that it's the latter, and we're reaching the point where the curve flattens out.
Of course, that would require that the people making the rules for the USPTO and similar bodies not be under the thumb of the same people who are causing the problem in the first place. Good luck with that.
that read like and are about as specific as Nostradamus predictions, he predicted Hister you know!
;)
Ah, a fine example of Gorflin's Law!
To be fair, you should compare equivalent stretches of time; 1960 was 46 years ago, so look at 1860-1906, and you'll see that more than half your list goes away. And some of the changes that have taken place since 1960 are, I think, just as important -- as far as computers go, they're so much smaller and faster (and, just as importantly, cheaper) than I think you're looking at a difference in kind, not just degree.
... but then, if they understood such things, they wouldn't be suits, either. And so the world is run by people who don't actually understand much of anything except the rules of their own made-up game.
But overall, I agree with you. The suits have thoroughly bought into, and convinced judges and politicians (including the US Supreme Court) of, the fundamentally wrong idea that money is the driving force behind scientific and technological progress. The simple fact is that the kind of person who is capable of creating something genuinely new is also usually -- not always, but usually -- also the kind of person who wants to see that "something" widely available much, much more than he wants to get rich off it. Scientists and engineers don't, as a rule, expect to get rich; if that were their primary motivation, they wouldn't be scientists or engineers. This is something the suits will never, ever understand
Yes, I have. Eight years active duty, 1989-1997. How about you?
I started out as an infantryman in the reserves, but went active duty as a medic, which was a job that didn't create any moral conflicts for me. But I knew a lot of people who weren't so lucky. Being a whistleblower in any environment is hard; in the service it's one of the most wrenching conflicts anyone can ever have to deal with.
Because the fact that he finally decided to speak up at all, ever, is in and of itself an admirable thing. Believe me, most never do.
It is very strongly in the nature of career military personnel to shut up and follow orders, even when you're pretty sure those orders are wrong. The longer you're in and the harder you've worked at it -- and you don't get an eagle without being in a good long time and working very hard -- the stronger this impulse becomes. It takes time and accumulated outrage to overcome this.
Not communism, but capitalist oligarchism. "Enterprise sector" is the Fortune 500 that can buy politicians to manipulate the market to their ends. "Private sector" is everyone else, competing on an increasingly tilted playing field. Hope this clears things up.
How long before people will stop citing Crichton and other pseudo-scientific fear-mongering fiction as a reason to interfere with science and technology?
"Forever," probably.
I can't help thinking that Tut's death was the JFK assassination of his day. "It was the Mafia with a stone club to the back of his head! No, the Cubans with a sword to the knee! No, the CIA gave him the plague! I've got a witness who saw an archer on the grassy knoll!"
It rotates yearly from dome to dome for some strange reason. Not the rotating, the dome part. Every year the highlights of greatest Super Bowls shows three or four of the top games outside in snow and the cold, yet they feel compelled to play the game inside now.
... which makes a pretty good metaphor for America in general, when you think about it.
The person making the argument is a completely irrelevant aspect of the argument itself.
That's true only in a very limited sense. Logicians love to quote clear examples of logical and then claim that their examples apply to real arguments (ironically, this is itself an example of fallacious argumentation -- it's a straw man.) In the real world, the relationship between the argument and the person making the argument is a lot more complex. If the person making the argument has a known bias or pattern of behavior which may be affected by the outcome of the debate, it is entirely logical, and not at all fallacious, to take this into account when interpreting his words.
No hand-waving needed: the kids born with the really serious abnormalities die off before they have a chance to reproduce. It only takes a couple of generations of that sort of selective pressure to eliminate the seriously bad alleles, or at least reduce their occurrence to the level found in the general population.
The law in question is FISA, modified but not repealed by the PATRIOT Act. There was no constitutional amendment, because none was needed. I suspect you know this perfectly well, and are just trolling, but on the off-chance you're honestly as pig-ignorant as you appear to be -- well, now you're not, and have no excuse.