I didn't grossly misstate anything. The point is that there are alternatives to the standard model, that the framers of these alternatives are not crackpots who lack publication, data, models, simulation or mathematics, especially Alfven. The assertion of the OP was simply wrong. All kinds of publications and data can, probably must, contain errors. That includes the standard model. The other point is that the standard models is beginning to embarass Occam due to its increasingly unshaven state.
When you then consider that modern science is a constant battle for funding and that even well meaning reviewers are likely to back "orthodox" uses of the money that IS available, it is more or less predictable that either data or conclusions are going to be shoe-horned to fit orthodoxy and that observations such as Arp's will be preferentially sidelined. No one can help it. It is simply part of the sociology of modern science. Which, BTW is where Lerner actually does a good job.
I have to point out that the logic you offer regarding the cosmological redshift is a fallacy. Among other things it assumes that there can only be one cause of the redshift, relativistic acceleration - i.e. it assumes we know a lot more than we do.
As regards homgeneous background radiation and light element abundance. The absence of a homogeneous background radiation was used as an argument against a steady state universe by George Gamow among others. The standard model had to be adjusted to account for it, then readjusted to account for the surprising lack of homogeneity. As evidence goes, the BGR has to be regarded as neutral at best, certainly not confirmatory of anything. It was never predicted by the standard model until after it was found. Then model was "adjusted." It could just as easily be regarded as confirming the steady state.
As far as light elements go, you only need to be concerned with their origins IF you take the route of St. Augustine and reject an infinite age for the universe because you can't imagine it. Light elements - any elements in fact - only need to be explained if you postulate a beginning to things. Otherwise, they are merely a given until you come up with ideas about process within a steady state that might need testing.
So the final point is simply that science doesn't, can't in fact, deal in "truth," only empirical facts and explanations. We can make up any number of explanations that fit those facts and any number of mathematical models that will more or less model some subset of them. But no science can progress effectively as long as some "explanations" are treated as dogmatic truths rather than what they are.
I don't think there is necessarily anything wrong with developing the standard model, nor in tweaking it to better match observation. But, treating it as an established truth is indistinguishable from the thought processes of religious dogmatism. Cutting off the development of alternatives is not only bad science; it betrays science into the hands of bureaucrats and policy into the hands of people like our potatoe head of state. If a scientist's behaviour is indistinguishable from the behaviour of a religious zealot, the zealot must be excused from misunderstanding and thinking that creationism must be just as good as science. Because in that kind of mentation it is.
Well, untill they get some propper science background (calculations, simulations and predictions to back up the explanations), they'll remain crackpots.
You might want to look at the work of Hannes Alfven who is credited with some very important work that is critical to current aerospace engineering , e.g "Alfven mach number,"Alven shock," and "Alfven velocity." These are referenced in "Introduction to the Space Environment, 2nd ed." by T. F. Tascione.
Then too, there is Halton Arp who put together the Catalog of Peculiar Galaxies, which is an important reference in astronomy. He has noted that red shifts occur in "quanta" and are not smoothly distributed as theory calls for. Also, he has noted pairs of quasars that seem to tied to "parent" galaxies by filaments of matter. The "parent" galaxies do not have the same red shifts as the quasars, thereby potentially dropping a spanner in the works as far as estimating distance and age in the universe is concerned.
You might also look at the work of Eric Lerner, another astronomer who doesn't even accept the "big bang." He mostly seems to follow Alfven's approach.
In fact, as Lerner argues, the disputes arising since the 1970s seem to parallel the conflicts between the Ptolemaic model and the Copernican model. Both models fit or can be made to fit observed phenomena. However, the empirical Copernican model is far more efficient in explanation than the Ptolemaic model, which requires epicycle upon epicycle in order to match observation. The Big Bang theory, which is the least disliked by religions such as the Catholic Church because it implicitly leaves room for a creator, has needed repeated "adjustments" including "inflation," "dark matter," and "dark energy" in order to match empirical data.
Alfven argued that plasma physics scaled upward without serious complication and without need for many of the theoretical constructs that the "standard model" require to approach a successful match to empirical data. Alfven's ideas were modeled on computers at Los Alamos by Peratt and Green in the '80s with remarkable success since they managed to use plasma physics to model the development of all or almost all known types of galaxies.
The fact is that Alfven, Arp, Lerner and others have argued and demonstrated that the standard model is far from being the most efficient model available for explanation. Some observations such as the "quantized red shift" are problems don't have any neat theories as yet.
The interesting thing is, if you research the issue of cosmological explanatory models there are numerous ones out there. Each of them addresses some aspects of empirical observational data that standard model requires "adjustments" to deal with. And they are not necessarily compatible with each other. The only rational conclusion is that we are very far from understanding the universe, how big it is, or how old it is, or how it works. The present cosmology consists of a standard doctrine and it's priesthood of faithful and numerous doctrines lead heretical priests who have left the "faith" to strike out on their own.
These days instead of being burnt at the stake like Bruno, heretics are ostracized, cut off from funding and computer time, and are then challenged with demands about where their calculations, predictions and simulations are. Since these are already published and well documented, the "challenges" can only be due the faithful exercising a refusal to broaden their education, and having faith in the assertions of the their own high priests.
It's like trying to conduct a rational conversation about evolution with a fundamentalist. The problem is that the fundamentalist doesn't KNOW what evolution is, nor is he conversant with science or its methodology or basic premises. He has relied on his "priests" to tell him about evolution rather than going out and getting informed about it from the works people who accept and use the theory. Blissfully ignorant, he then hurls devastating arguments at a straw man.
First, sanitation, sewers and such do help longevity but the two important operators are better dentistry and improved birthing sanitation. Better dentistry is the single most important factor affecting adult longevity. "Natural" human populations have typical average life spans of between 30 and 40 years, during which decade their teeth wear out and malnutrition, absesses, brain infections and number of other really nasty diseases take them down. Through better dentistry adults now live long enough to die of cancers, the ill effects of a diet of abundance on a phyiosology evolved to deal with periodic starvation, and the neurological problems of Alzheimers, senility and such things.
Better birthing sanitation means more children survive and more mothers do as well, meaning that each surving woman can have more children. So populations will increase on two fronts, more living kids and live moms, and more living oldsters.
The bad news, if you look forward to longevity, is that we are evolving strains of bacteria that are resistant to the best modern medicine can come up with, and doing so faster than medicine can come up with its best. That of course is when we aren't simply giving the barn away using antibiotics to produce chunkier chickens and stockier steers. Also, the huge surpluses of agriculture are dependent upon energy inputs from oil.
As oil prices increase and resistant bacteria proliferate, you will probably find it unnecessary to make many choices about who lives and who dies.
I don't know when you started building systems, but it used to be (and may be still) that when you bought a mother board with an Intel CPU, you paid an MS tariff. They assumed that you would run DOS purchased or pirated. Of course, if you bought it, you paid for it twice. A lot of garage-based PC Builders never bothered to give out a copy of the DOS you were paying for with the CPU either. MS still had the brazen cojones to complain about "piracy".
One of the curious blindnesses of the "creationist" camp is that the "theory of evolution" is and always has been an argument about the long range effects of an interaction that is a part of empirical reality. Darwin and Wallace argued that the origin of species is the result of selection acting on breeding populations.
Simply, if selection can produce tomatoes and maize, a thousand varieties of dog, thoroughbred horses and prize cattle, what would stop it from producing the Galapagos finches, or given time, cats, dogs, bears and racoons, apes, monkeys and hominids from common ancestors? The theory of natural selection is essentially an argument from analogy that argues that a known property of living populations can account for all natural variation given time enough. What men can do with dogs in 10,000 years, maize in 5,000, nature can do with any population over geological time.
It's pointless to argue "belief" since the only counter to the theory for a creationist must necessarily be a demonstration of how selection is somehow prevented from producing higher order (family level and up) splits. We KNOW that selection can be used to produce new species and genuses because we have already done so. It's unnecessary to "believe amazing things." They are amazing enough without belief.
Actually, there are a lot of real culprits out there and I think that the government is pretty low on that list. There are all those information management types in all their variety of titles - an MS sales rep buys them a deli sandwich and a coke and they turn to putty. There are also a bunch of admin types that are as bad or worse - they often believe they know things. They usually get a better meal from the sales rep, but that's just sloppy sales technique on the rep's part.
The biggest culprits are lazy computer buyers. It comes with Windows, use Windows. It comes with Office, why use Wordperfect (unless, of course, you are a lawyer). Buyer inertia is the biggest problem. If you bought a computer and just left it as it was configured because you never bothered to even WONDER about an alternative (not Apple - much too spendy), never experimented with an alternative to word or Wordperfect - there were some really fine ones around for a while - and just went with AOL because it set itself up and you never had to ask for the gateway, and primary and secondary DNS IP numbers from your ISP, then you have met the chief culprit, every morning in your mirror.
DST is a stupid, utterly assinine idea and is Ben Franklin's major evidence of being human and prone to occasional, stunning attacks of stupid. Why set the frigging clock ahead or back when all you have to do is designate earlier times: "our summer business hours are 7am to 4pm" would accomplish the same thing without having solar noon arrive at 1:00pm by the clock. Arizona has the right idea.
... has lost any specificity over the years. The OS movement now extends well beyond any attempt at a narrower view and includes in most consciousnesses any license that guarantees open access to the source code to users of a piece of software. That is simply one of the realities of language. If you want to be more specific, then you need to offer your definition as what the term means to YOU. There is no guarantee that any particular individual will know what you mean without that extra effort and no universal understanding that you can rely on.
The corporations are the ones who dragged their feet. One the greatest handicaps the US faces in maintaining any kind of technological parity with Europe and Japan is just that. Corporations seek a profit and presumably they reckoned that they couldn't amortize the cost of installing broadband efficiently. The local citizens regarded the availablity of broadband as critical to their social and economic well being.
Since the FCC has seen fit to tell the various cable companies that they don't have to permit access to their infrastructure by competitors, there is now actually far less benefit to be gained from new infrastructure construction. They can continue to charge high rates and by reducing infrastructure construction and maintenance costs, boost their profit margin significantly. They thought they had become immune to some competition.
They also made the rather glaring error of mistaking their "market" for sheep to be shorn. While it is rarely obvious, the "market," "local busniesses" and the "citizens" and the "local government" are not XOR sets. They contain a great deal of intersecting interests and members. One of the tenets of free enterprise is that where there is a demand, there is a market, and some party can move to serve that demand. In this case, the result ammounts to a coop solution. Merely because it's labeled "government" doesn't mean that it wasn't an appropriate market response.
Under good circumstances the new local public service will be able to provide broadband at least as cheaply as "private" enterprise could and probably far more cheaply since it doesn't require any profit margin beyond a small one.
Government becomes more expensive and less efficient as it begins to cater to the "needs" of enterprise. Corruption begins to increase costs dramatically without offering additional benefit. So, when you consider the "private" vs. "government" equation, you also need to very carefully consider just who the government is serving. Big business is the single greatest corrupting factor in modern government. The voting citizens on the other hand are the real, principal "clients" of government, as well as being the actual source of government. Forgetting this leads to revoluions.
Conceptually, this is one of those ideas that ought to work, but, when push comes to shove, more often seems to be a test of adherence to current orthodoxy rather than merit. Too often the reviewers seem to read the title in order to form their opinions rather than reading through the work and, if necessary, replicating the experiment. Eddington's response to Chandrasekar's work comes to mind.
When Gates first grabbed up QDOS, he peddled it to IBM as an OS for the PC. Up to that time MS was a fairly boring company that published a dialect of BASIC. MS was a bit player. IBM's introduction of the PC and the open standard for the machine MADE MS what it is. The Intel alliance certainly didn't hurt, but without the IBM PC and the clones, there's no telling just how Intel would have made out.
Just when I don't have moderator points. I would give you an "Insightful."
Some of what you say is biased, but probably no more than debate tactics would ask in replying to the stupidity of the grandparent post. Islam is no more piratical than Christianity or Buddhism, and no religion that seeks converts looks for anything less than the removal of the cultural bases of the people it converts. Religions purport to offer the "truth" or the "good" or the "right." As such they are all inherently destructive to the cultures they proseltize to. Just keep this in perspective Bush seems to be unable to keep religion out of his comments and just recently Rice was quoted as saying that US would be supporting _missionary_ efforts in Africa to oppose Islamic influence there.
The poster clearly expected linux to be no more than a free windows. Also programs that didn't work would have been windows programs. The poster plainly doesn't know the difference between hardware and software, much less what an OS is. My gosh, they expected tech support at an ISP to help with Linux.
I once had a tech support conversation of substantially the following gist:
TS: We don't support linux.
Me: Darn. BTW, what do you servers run?
TS: Linux.
Me: ????
Me: O--K, but anyway, I just need the DNS and default gateway addresses.
TS: Why do you want those?
Me: So I can set up my system?
TS: Oh.
Tech support is almost pointless these days anyway. Basically, they talk you through screen a decent manual could explain. Especially in Windows you need competent tech support because user like that probably own their own network.
I would also think that the author probably somehow installed an enormous amount of software from the cds the complaints about confusion. Windows doesn't do this to you since you have to reinstall each proprietary program from its own cds.
MACs were frequently dying from heat problems. They did not come with a fan and often were being opereated in conditions where the passive cooling simply was inadequate. It wasn't just computer labs that had problems. Starving students who were economizing on electricity by leaving the air-conditioning off had problems too occasionally.
You can't just wave your hands and say "oh yeah, others have repeated it, others have reviewed it, we're done here." Who are these others? What exactly did they find, and how closely did everything match the original inputs & outputs? What kind of "review" did they do? We're still just dealing with anecdotes and hearsay, not scientific analysis.
One could read it as a subtle hint to do some literature research. The CS article offers no published sources at all. The article is simply reportage (who, what, where), not a scientific article or report. In fact however, were one to simply follow up the complaints about "dupes" here on/. one would find this with a little searching. Doubtless further inquiry would result in additional information.
According to Professor George Edward Challenger, who conducted a drilling probe prior to World War I, the earth's crust is exactly "...fourteen thousand four hundred and forty-two yards..." in thickness.
Yes, I read the article, but even though I did not mark it as such, the conclusion is meant to be humour. Note for instance that my version lacks any mention of the case. Second, no where does it mention linux that I noticed. Also, I don't know whether you use linux, or have ever installed a major distro such as SuSE. However, there are a LOT of encryption utilities available on some distros as well as specifically steganographic ones - which made a splash a while back when our illustrious leaders were claiming that middle eastern bad guys were using such programs to communicate.
Consequently, during an install, a newby just getting impatient and checking everything can flood their harddisk with such programs without having a clue as to what they are or how to use them. I expect that the prosecutor just decided to take the omnibus approach to evidence and argue that only the guilty flee and the presence of PGP must imply guilt. Lazy, sloppy prosecutor.
Regarding the actual case, another possibility is that the alleged pictures never were on that drive.
This case could be more analagous with the following added components:
FBI: You Tried to launder money to the Soviets, didn't you?
Person: No. I didn't.
FBI: We caught you exchanging money with operatives in soviet russia.
Person: When?
FBI: You know when.
Person: I do?
FBI: Just answer the question.
Person: What question?
FBI: Uh. Encryption! You have encryption software on your computer, don't you?
Person: Yep.
FBI: So, you have something to hide.
Person: Sure, my credit card numbers that I use on line, personal data that could be used for identity theft, business correspondence I don't want my competitors to read, accounting data, that kind of stuff.
FBI: So, you could use this program for illicit purposes.
Person: What's 'illicit?'
FBI: You also have steganographic programs on your system.
Person: Stegano- what?
[Jury member takes note: "Linux newby. Doesn't know just what the vast majority of the software that came with his distro is or does, yet."]
I follow your arguments, however, cars aren't "intellectual property" protected by copyright. They are "real" property, and at present, can't be readily duplicated. The materials alone cost more than $25, so while I like the irony, the example really isn't relevant. I also agree about your three issues. However, I also know musicians that are eagerly working without any "marketing" but their own. My point about "middle men" and the RIAA applies to MP3.com just as much as it does to the members of the RIAA. They were would-be middle-men who hope to dip into the cash flow between listeners and musicians. The internet makes these kind of middle men in this kind of industry redundant. My musician friends make their living playing gigs. They also record and publish their own cds, but they look to the cds as marketing rather than a critical cash flow device. I have heard that this is true of many of the big well known groups as well. They tour to make a living because very little if any of the selling price of a cd comes to them.
Commercial CD prices are the result of an artificial scarcity imposed by the publisher rather than a real one. The only real limits on availability are the willingness of the publisher to meet demand, so instead of a case where "supply and demand" together set a fair market price, they can name a price that they like. Since the source is actually duplicated and is in no way limited by any physical or economic factor that creates a scarcity, copyright violation becomes a means of filling the demand that the publishers refuse to, and remember that many pirated works are quite likely not available publicly at all. They are out of print and while there is a demand, the legitimate publisher simply isn't addressing it.
...selection does not harm humanity; if anything it broadens the gene pool and increases the chance of beneficial mutations...
A good post but you don't seem understand either the sources of genetic diversity or how selection would effect it. Selection when it acts reduces the potential for some genotypes to successfully replicate. Some selective processes might actively provide an advantage to others under specific circumstances. Generally speaking though, selection can be regarded as a force that reduces genetic diversity.
Genetic diversity arises through mutation and recombinant events. Mutation introduces new traits while recombinant events remix existing ones. This is vastly over simplified, but in general you can regard evolutionary adaptation as a dynamically adjusting balance between selective processes that tend to reduce diversity in the gene pool upon which the selection acts, and the exisiting diversity within the genepool with which it can adapt to the selective pressure.
So, your argument about the difficulty of identifying "lesser beings" is perfectly correct from an evolutionary view point. Since the selective environment can change from day to day there is no fixed measure by which "superior" can be idenified. Evolution does not connote progress, even though it is cumulative. "Highly evolved" is an oxymoron that racists, politicians, theosophists and other spiritual types are fond of. It should be understood as "highly adapted to very specific conditions."
When those conditions change, the "pinnacle" of evolution at that point can quite suddenly become mal-adapted and no longer "highly evolved." If there is suffcient diversity in the affected gene pool, then through altered rates of reprodcutive success, some portions of the affected gene pool may survive. So, traits like sickle-cell, thalassemia, and diabetes, while generally appearing harmful, are not only maintained in the gene pool, but under specific conditions can become both beneficial and environmentally favoured.
In fact, as you seem to suggest, under stressed conditions, higher reproductive rates may be a means of surviving as a breeding population. Within the confines of a civilization, the poor and socially disadvantaged are perpetually under potentially selective environmental stress. Due to the inability to pay for medicine, contrary to some views, the average lifespan is shorter, offering a reduced period in which to reproduce, and expectably, younger and younger parents. Because of chronically poor diets, there is a also a continuing selective dietary stress that should be selecting for those most able to tolerate what is generally considered an inadequate diet. Plainly, as H. G. Wells suggested in The Time Machine there are many venues where evolution is active, even within the "safe" confines of civilization.
You need to read the article and think through the implications of facts it discusses. The most pertinent is that viewership evidently increased, possibly by orders of magnitude because of the "piracy." Now think about this, most people who subscribe to cable don't just subscribe to one channel. So, they exercise a choice about what they are going to watch. Therefore, from the SciFi channel's management's view point, "piracy" had an effect upon the decisions of paying viewers. In effect, "piracy" increased their revenue stream, possibly by orders of magnitude. Where is the loss that the use of "theft" implies?
This same effect has been shown in the case of music CDs as well. The real issue of the RIAA is not "piracy," since it is easily shown that there IS NO FINANCIAL LOSS to any of their members. The issue lies in the fact that the RIAA represents middle-men, not artists. The potential ability of the artists - who are in effect the RIAA's cash cows - to go independent and cut out the middlemen entirely by using the internet as the artist's primary distribution channel scares the "pigs" out of the RIAA's membership.
Also, the use of the terms "piracy" and "stealing" and "theft" are confusing and erroneous language. Nothing has been stolen. What has happened can best be described - if you insist trying to think in terms of a crime - as "dilution" of the nominal value of the "property." On a per-copy basis, the "legitimate owner" has to sell more copies, less expensively to clear the same amount they would if market forces permitted them to continue to peddle legal copies at the inflated prices they would prefer. The very fact that "piracy" occurs indicates that their product is both over-priced and demonstrably less available than it should be for the best sales. The RIAA could easily end their own priacy worries by reducing prices and increasing production.
If the article's author is correct, BBC may well have quietly encouraged the "piracy" of the new Doctor Who to take advantage of the same effects that SciFi observed. Nearly 17% of the population of Great Britain tuned in to the first official broadcast of the new show. If that number was weighted to reflect that actual probable segment of the British population from which viewers are likely drawn for a show such as Doctor Who, that fraction has to be nearly 100% of the probable potential viewers, maybe even more than that. They can't have anticipated anywhere near that kind initial response to a new show, not even a new Doctor Who. Once more, you have ask where is the loss that the use of words like "stealing" and "theft" implies?
Lastly, the article's author argues that the behaviour we observe is nothing more than what generations of broadcast radio and TV have lead the public to expect and how to behave. Payment is made indicrectly through the purcahse of products that have been advertised on the show, or over the radio between songs. This behaviour has been modified by the enabling technologies of computers and the internet. Never the less, it is what the industry has lead their consumers to expect.
The gist of the article is that far from reducing viewership, your behaviour and that of the parent and many others like you, actually hugely increased the number of viewing eyeballs at the time of the later official broadcast. So, you can wear that eyepatch if you want and even that messy parrot, but the PTB at SciFi, if they have even two neurons to rub together - a dubious assumption, I know - realize that the world is different and "pirates" might well be some of their best friends,
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I didn't grossly misstate anything. The point is that there are alternatives to the standard model, that the framers of these alternatives are not crackpots who lack publication, data, models, simulation or mathematics, especially Alfven. The assertion of the OP was simply wrong. All kinds of publications and data can, probably must, contain errors. That includes the standard model. The other point is that the standard models is beginning to embarass Occam due to its increasingly unshaven state.
When you then consider that modern science is a constant battle for funding and that even well meaning reviewers are likely to back "orthodox" uses of the money that IS available, it is more or less predictable that either data or conclusions are going to be shoe-horned to fit orthodoxy and that observations such as Arp's will be preferentially sidelined. No one can help it. It is simply part of the sociology of modern science. Which, BTW is where Lerner actually does a good job.
I have to point out that the logic you offer regarding the cosmological redshift is a fallacy. Among other things it assumes that there can only be one cause of the redshift, relativistic acceleration - i.e. it assumes we know a lot more than we do.
As regards homgeneous background radiation and light element abundance. The absence of a homogeneous background radiation was used as an argument against a steady state universe by George Gamow among others. The standard model had to be adjusted to account for it, then readjusted to account for the surprising lack of homogeneity. As evidence goes, the BGR has to be regarded as neutral at best, certainly not confirmatory of anything. It was never predicted by the standard model until after it was found. Then model was "adjusted." It could just as easily be regarded as confirming the steady state.
As far as light elements go, you only need to be concerned with their origins IF you take the route of St. Augustine and reject an infinite age for the universe because you can't imagine it. Light elements - any elements in fact - only need to be explained if you postulate a beginning to things. Otherwise, they are merely a given until you come up with ideas about process within a steady state that might need testing.
So the final point is simply that science doesn't, can't in fact, deal in "truth," only empirical facts and explanations. We can make up any number of explanations that fit those facts and any number of mathematical models that will more or less model some subset of them. But no science can progress effectively as long as some "explanations" are treated as dogmatic truths rather than what they are.
I don't think there is necessarily anything wrong with developing the standard model, nor in tweaking it to better match observation. But, treating it as an established truth is indistinguishable from the thought processes of religious dogmatism. Cutting off the development of alternatives is not only bad science; it betrays science into the hands of bureaucrats and policy into the hands of people like our potatoe head of state. If a scientist's behaviour is indistinguishable from the behaviour of a religious zealot, the zealot must be excused from misunderstanding and thinking that creationism must be just as good as science. Because in that kind of mentation it is.
Well, untill they get some propper science background (calculations, simulations and predictions to back up the explanations), they'll remain crackpots.
You might want to look at the work of Hannes Alfven who is credited with some very important work that is critical to current aerospace engineering , e.g "Alfven mach number,"Alven shock," and "Alfven velocity." These are referenced in "Introduction to the Space Environment, 2nd ed." by T. F. Tascione.
Then too, there is Halton Arp who put together the Catalog of Peculiar Galaxies, which is an important reference in astronomy. He has noted that red shifts occur in "quanta" and are not smoothly distributed as theory calls for. Also, he has noted pairs of quasars that seem to tied to "parent" galaxies by filaments of matter. The "parent" galaxies do not have the same red shifts as the quasars, thereby potentially dropping a spanner in the works as far as estimating distance and age in the universe is concerned.
You might also look at the work of Eric Lerner, another astronomer who doesn't even accept the "big bang." He mostly seems to follow Alfven's approach.
In fact, as Lerner argues, the disputes arising since the 1970s seem to parallel the conflicts between the Ptolemaic model and the Copernican model. Both models fit or can be made to fit observed phenomena. However, the empirical Copernican model is far more efficient in explanation than the Ptolemaic model, which requires epicycle upon epicycle in order to match observation. The Big Bang theory, which is the least disliked by religions such as the Catholic Church because it implicitly leaves room for a creator, has needed repeated "adjustments" including "inflation," "dark matter," and "dark energy" in order to match empirical data.
Alfven argued that plasma physics scaled upward without serious complication and without need for many of the theoretical constructs that the "standard model" require to approach a successful match to empirical data. Alfven's ideas were modeled on computers at Los Alamos by Peratt and Green in the '80s with remarkable success since they managed to use plasma physics to model the development of all or almost all known types of galaxies.
The fact is that Alfven, Arp, Lerner and others have argued and demonstrated that the standard model is far from being the most efficient model available for explanation. Some observations such as the "quantized red shift" are problems don't have any neat theories as yet.
The interesting thing is, if you research the issue of cosmological explanatory models there are numerous ones out there. Each of them addresses some aspects of empirical observational data that standard model requires "adjustments" to deal with. And they are not necessarily compatible with each other. The only rational conclusion is that we are very far from understanding the universe, how big it is, or how old it is, or how it works. The present cosmology consists of a standard doctrine and it's priesthood of faithful and numerous doctrines lead heretical priests who have left the "faith" to strike out on their own.
These days instead of being burnt at the stake like Bruno, heretics are ostracized, cut off from funding and computer time, and are then challenged with demands about where their calculations, predictions and simulations are. Since these are already published and well documented, the "challenges" can only be due the faithful exercising a refusal to broaden their education, and having faith in the assertions of the their own high priests.
It's like trying to conduct a rational conversation about evolution with a fundamentalist. The problem is that the fundamentalist doesn't KNOW what evolution is, nor is he conversant with science or its methodology or basic premises. He has relied on his "priests" to tell him about evolution rather than going out and getting informed about it from the works people who accept and use the theory. Blissfully ignorant, he then hurls devastating arguments at a straw man.
First, sanitation, sewers and such do help longevity but the two important operators are better dentistry and improved birthing sanitation. Better dentistry is the single most important factor affecting adult longevity. "Natural" human populations have typical average life spans of between 30 and 40 years, during which decade their teeth wear out and malnutrition, absesses, brain infections and number of other really nasty diseases take them down. Through better dentistry adults now live long enough to die of cancers, the ill effects of a diet of abundance on a phyiosology evolved to deal with periodic starvation, and the neurological problems of Alzheimers, senility and such things.
Better birthing sanitation means more children survive and more mothers do as well, meaning that each surving woman can have more children. So populations will increase on two fronts, more living kids and live moms, and more living oldsters.
The bad news, if you look forward to longevity, is that we are evolving strains of bacteria that are resistant to the best modern medicine can come up with, and doing so faster than medicine can come up with its best. That of course is when we aren't simply giving the barn away using antibiotics to produce chunkier chickens and stockier steers. Also, the huge surpluses of agriculture are dependent upon energy inputs from oil.
As oil prices increase and resistant bacteria proliferate, you will probably find it unnecessary to make many choices about who lives and who dies.
I was thinking of just two words.
I don't know when you started building systems, but it used to be (and may be still) that when you bought a mother board with an Intel CPU, you paid an MS tariff. They assumed that you would run DOS purchased or pirated. Of course, if you bought it, you paid for it twice. A lot of garage-based PC Builders never bothered to give out a copy of the DOS you were paying for with the CPU either. MS still had the brazen cojones to complain about "piracy".
One of the curious blindnesses of the "creationist" camp is that the "theory of evolution" is and always has been an argument about the long range effects of an interaction that is a part of empirical reality. Darwin and Wallace argued that the origin of species is the result of selection acting on breeding populations.
Simply, if selection can produce tomatoes and maize, a thousand varieties of dog, thoroughbred horses and prize cattle, what would stop it from producing the Galapagos finches, or given time, cats, dogs, bears and racoons, apes, monkeys and hominids from common ancestors? The theory of natural selection is essentially an argument from analogy that argues that a known property of living populations can account for all natural variation given time enough. What men can do with dogs in 10,000 years, maize in 5,000, nature can do with any population over geological time.
It's pointless to argue "belief" since the only counter to the theory for a creationist must necessarily be a demonstration of how selection is somehow prevented from producing higher order (family level and up) splits. We KNOW that selection can be used to produce new species and genuses because we have already done so. It's unnecessary to "believe amazing things." They are amazing enough without belief.
Actually, there are a lot of real culprits out there and I think that the government is pretty low on that list. There are all those information management types in all their variety of titles - an MS sales rep buys them a deli sandwich and a coke and they turn to putty. There are also a bunch of admin types that are as bad or worse - they often believe they know things. They usually get a better meal from the sales rep, but that's just sloppy sales technique on the rep's part.
The biggest culprits are lazy computer buyers. It comes with Windows, use Windows. It comes with Office, why use Wordperfect (unless, of course, you are a lawyer). Buyer inertia is the biggest problem. If you bought a computer and just left it as it was configured because you never bothered to even WONDER about an alternative (not Apple - much too spendy), never experimented with an alternative to word or Wordperfect - there were some really fine ones around for a while - and just went with AOL because it set itself up and you never had to ask for the gateway, and primary and secondary DNS IP numbers from your ISP, then you have met the chief culprit, every morning in your mirror.
DST is a stupid, utterly assinine idea and is Ben Franklin's major evidence of being human and prone to occasional, stunning attacks of stupid. Why set the frigging clock ahead or back when all you have to do is designate earlier times: "our summer business hours are 7am to 4pm" would accomplish the same thing without having solar noon arrive at 1:00pm by the clock. Arizona has the right idea.
... has lost any specificity over the years. The OS movement now extends well beyond any attempt at a narrower view and includes in most consciousnesses any license that guarantees open access to the source code to users of a piece of software. That is simply one of the realities of language. If you want to be more specific, then you need to offer your definition as what the term means to YOU. There is no guarantee that any particular individual will know what you mean without that extra effort and no universal understanding that you can rely on.
The corporations are the ones who dragged their feet. One the greatest handicaps the US faces in maintaining any kind of technological parity with Europe and Japan is just that. Corporations seek a profit and presumably they reckoned that they couldn't amortize the cost of installing broadband efficiently. The local citizens regarded the availablity of broadband as critical to their social and economic well being.
Since the FCC has seen fit to tell the various cable companies that they don't have to permit access to their infrastructure by competitors, there is now actually far less benefit to be gained from new infrastructure construction. They can continue to charge high rates and by reducing infrastructure construction and maintenance costs, boost their profit margin significantly. They thought they had become immune to some competition.
They also made the rather glaring error of mistaking their "market" for sheep to be shorn. While it is rarely obvious, the "market," "local busniesses" and the "citizens" and the "local government" are not XOR sets. They contain a great deal of intersecting interests and members. One of the tenets of free enterprise is that where there is a demand, there is a market, and some party can move to serve that demand. In this case, the result ammounts to a coop solution. Merely because it's labeled "government" doesn't mean that it wasn't an appropriate market response.
Under good circumstances the new local public service will be able to provide broadband at least as cheaply as "private" enterprise could and probably far more cheaply since it doesn't require any profit margin beyond a small one.
Government becomes more expensive and less efficient as it begins to cater to the "needs" of enterprise. Corruption begins to increase costs dramatically without offering additional benefit. So, when you consider the "private" vs. "government" equation, you also need to very carefully consider just who the government is serving. Big business is the single greatest corrupting factor in modern government. The voting citizens on the other hand are the real, principal "clients" of government, as well as being the actual source of government. Forgetting this leads to revoluions.
Conceptually, this is one of those ideas that ought to work, but, when push comes to shove, more often seems to be a test of adherence to current orthodoxy rather than merit. Too often the reviewers seem to read the title in order to form their opinions rather than reading through the work and, if necessary, replicating the experiment. Eddington's response to Chandrasekar's work comes to mind.
When Gates first grabbed up QDOS, he peddled it to IBM as an OS for the PC. Up to that time MS was a fairly boring company that published a dialect of BASIC. MS was a bit player. IBM's introduction of the PC and the open standard for the machine MADE MS what it is. The Intel alliance certainly didn't hurt, but without the IBM PC and the clones, there's no telling just how Intel would have made out.
Just when I don't have moderator points. I would give you an "Insightful."
Some of what you say is biased, but probably no more than debate tactics would ask in replying to the stupidity of the grandparent post. Islam is no more piratical than Christianity or Buddhism, and no religion that seeks converts looks for anything less than the removal of the cultural bases of the people it converts. Religions purport to offer the "truth" or the "good" or the "right." As such they are all inherently destructive to the cultures they proseltize to. Just keep this in perspective Bush seems to be unable to keep religion out of his comments and just recently Rice was quoted as saying that US would be supporting _missionary_ efforts in Africa to oppose Islamic influence there.
To my mind there is no good religion.
The poster clearly expected linux to be no more than a free windows. Also programs that didn't work would have been windows programs. The poster plainly doesn't know the difference between hardware and software, much less what an OS is. My gosh, they expected tech support at an ISP to help with Linux.
I once had a tech support conversation of substantially the following gist:
TS: We don't support linux.
Me: Darn. BTW, what do you servers run?
TS: Linux.
Me: ????
Me: O--K, but anyway, I just need the DNS and default gateway addresses.
TS: Why do you want those?
Me: So I can set up my system?
TS: Oh.
Tech support is almost pointless these days anyway. Basically, they talk you through screen a decent manual could explain. Especially in Windows you need competent tech support because user like that probably own their own network.
I would also think that the author probably somehow installed an enormous amount of software from the cds the complaints about confusion. Windows doesn't do this to you since you have to reinstall each proprietary program from its own cds.
MACs were frequently dying from heat problems. They did not come with a fan and often were being opereated in conditions where the passive cooling simply was inadequate. It wasn't just computer labs that had problems. Starving students who were economizing on electricity by leaving the air-conditioning off had problems too occasionally.
You can't just wave your hands and say "oh yeah, others have repeated it, others have reviewed it, we're done here." Who are these others? What exactly did they find, and how closely did everything match the original inputs & outputs? What kind of "review" did they do? We're still just dealing with anecdotes and hearsay, not scientific analysis.
/. one would find this with a little searching. Doubtless further inquiry would result in additional information.
One could read it as a subtle hint to do some literature research. The CS article offers no published sources at all. The article is simply reportage (who, what, where), not a scientific article or report. In fact however, were one to simply follow up the complaints about "dupes" here on
According to Professor George Edward Challenger, who conducted a drilling probe prior to World War I, the earth's crust is exactly "...fourteen thousand four hundred and forty-two yards..." in thickness.
Yes, I read the article, but even though I did not mark it as such, the conclusion is meant to be humour. Note for instance that my version lacks any mention of the case. Second, no where does it mention linux that I noticed. Also, I don't know whether you use linux, or have ever installed a major distro such as SuSE. However, there are a LOT of encryption utilities available on some distros as well as specifically steganographic ones - which made a splash a while back when our illustrious leaders were claiming that middle eastern bad guys were using such programs to communicate.
Consequently, during an install, a newby just getting impatient and checking everything can flood their harddisk with such programs without having a clue as to what they are or how to use them. I expect that the prosecutor just decided to take the omnibus approach to evidence and argue that only the guilty flee and the presence of PGP must imply guilt. Lazy, sloppy prosecutor.
Regarding the actual case, another possibility is that the alleged pictures never were on that drive.
Yep, my very point.
This case could be more analagous with the following added components:
FBI: You Tried to launder money to the Soviets, didn't you?
Person: No. I didn't.
FBI: We caught you exchanging money with operatives in soviet russia.
Person: When?
FBI: You know when.
Person: I do?
FBI: Just answer the question.
Person: What question?
FBI: Uh. Encryption! You have encryption software on your computer, don't you?
Person: Yep.
FBI: So, you have something to hide.
Person: Sure, my credit card numbers that I use on line, personal data that could be used for identity theft, business correspondence I don't want my competitors to read, accounting data, that kind of stuff.
FBI: So, you could use this program for illicit purposes.
Person: What's 'illicit?'
FBI: You also have steganographic programs on your system.
Person: Stegano- what?
[Jury member takes note: "Linux newby. Doesn't know just what the vast majority of the software that came with his distro is or does, yet."]
n/t
I follow your arguments, however, cars aren't "intellectual property" protected by copyright. They are "real" property, and at present, can't be readily duplicated. The materials alone cost more than $25, so while I like the irony, the example really isn't relevant. I also agree about your three issues. However, I also know musicians that are eagerly working without any "marketing" but their own. My point about "middle men" and the RIAA applies to MP3.com just as much as it does to the members of the RIAA. They were would-be middle-men who hope to dip into the cash flow between listeners and musicians. The internet makes these kind of middle men in this kind of industry redundant. My musician friends make their living playing gigs. They also record and publish their own cds, but they look to the cds as marketing rather than a critical cash flow device. I have heard that this is true of many of the big well known groups as well. They tour to make a living because very little if any of the selling price of a cd comes to them.
Commercial CD prices are the result of an artificial scarcity imposed by the publisher rather than a real one. The only real limits on availability are the willingness of the publisher to meet demand, so instead of a case where "supply and demand" together set a fair market price, they can name a price that they like. Since the source is actually duplicated and is in no way limited by any physical or economic factor that creates a scarcity, copyright violation becomes a means of filling the demand that the publishers refuse to, and remember that many pirated works are quite likely not available publicly at all. They are out of print and while there is a demand, the legitimate publisher simply isn't addressing it.
A good post but you don't seem understand either the sources of genetic diversity or how selection would effect it. Selection when it acts reduces the potential for some genotypes to successfully replicate. Some selective processes might actively provide an advantage to others under specific circumstances. Generally speaking though, selection can be regarded as a force that reduces genetic diversity.
Genetic diversity arises through mutation and recombinant events. Mutation introduces new traits while recombinant events remix existing ones. This is vastly over simplified, but in general you can regard evolutionary adaptation as a dynamically adjusting balance between selective processes that tend to reduce diversity in the gene pool upon which the selection acts, and the exisiting diversity within the genepool with which it can adapt to the selective pressure.
So, your argument about the difficulty of identifying "lesser beings" is perfectly correct from an evolutionary view point. Since the selective environment can change from day to day there is no fixed measure by which "superior" can be idenified. Evolution does not connote progress, even though it is cumulative. "Highly evolved" is an oxymoron that racists, politicians, theosophists and other spiritual types are fond of. It should be understood as "highly adapted to very specific conditions."
When those conditions change, the "pinnacle" of evolution at that point can quite suddenly become mal-adapted and no longer "highly evolved." If there is suffcient diversity in the affected gene pool, then through altered rates of reprodcutive success, some portions of the affected gene pool may survive. So, traits like sickle-cell, thalassemia, and diabetes, while generally appearing harmful, are not only maintained in the gene pool, but under specific conditions can become both beneficial and environmentally favoured.
In fact, as you seem to suggest, under stressed conditions, higher reproductive rates may be a means of surviving as a breeding population. Within the confines of a civilization, the poor and socially disadvantaged are perpetually under potentially selective environmental stress. Due to the inability to pay for medicine, contrary to some views, the average lifespan is shorter, offering a reduced period in which to reproduce, and expectably, younger and younger parents. Because of chronically poor diets, there is a also a continuing selective dietary stress that should be selecting for those most able to tolerate what is generally considered an inadequate diet. Plainly, as H. G. Wells suggested in The Time Machine there are many venues where evolution is active, even within the "safe" confines of civilization.
You need to read the article and think through the implications of facts it discusses. The most pertinent is that viewership evidently increased, possibly by orders of magnitude because of the "piracy." Now think about this, most people who subscribe to cable don't just subscribe to one channel. So, they exercise a choice about what they are going to watch. Therefore, from the SciFi channel's management's view point, "piracy" had an effect upon the decisions of paying viewers. In effect, "piracy" increased their revenue stream, possibly by orders of magnitude. Where is the loss that the use of "theft" implies?
This same effect has been shown in the case of music CDs as well. The real issue of the RIAA is not "piracy," since it is easily shown that there IS NO FINANCIAL LOSS to any of their members. The issue lies in the fact that the RIAA represents middle-men, not artists. The potential ability of the artists - who are in effect the RIAA's cash cows - to go independent and cut out the middlemen entirely by using the internet as the artist's primary distribution channel scares the "pigs" out of the RIAA's membership.
Also, the use of the terms "piracy" and "stealing" and "theft" are confusing and erroneous language. Nothing has been stolen. What has happened can best be described - if you insist trying to think in terms of a crime - as "dilution" of the nominal value of the "property." On a per-copy basis, the "legitimate owner" has to sell more copies, less expensively to clear the same amount they would if market forces permitted them to continue to peddle legal copies at the inflated prices they would prefer. The very fact that "piracy" occurs indicates that their product is both over-priced and demonstrably less available than it should be for the best sales. The RIAA could easily end their own priacy worries by reducing prices and increasing production.
If the article's author is correct, BBC may well have quietly encouraged the "piracy" of the new Doctor Who to take advantage of the same effects that SciFi observed. Nearly 17% of the population of Great Britain tuned in to the first official broadcast of the new show. If that number was weighted to reflect that actual probable segment of the British population from which viewers are likely drawn for a show such as Doctor Who, that fraction has to be nearly 100% of the probable potential viewers, maybe even more than that. They can't have anticipated anywhere near that kind initial response to a new show, not even a new Doctor Who. Once more, you have ask where is the loss that the use of words like "stealing" and "theft" implies?
Lastly, the article's author argues that the behaviour we observe is nothing more than what generations of broadcast radio and TV have lead the public to expect and how to behave. Payment is made indicrectly through the purcahse of products that have been advertised on the show, or over the radio between songs. This behaviour has been modified by the enabling technologies of computers and the internet. Never the less, it is what the industry has lead their consumers to expect.
The gist of the article is that far from reducing viewership, your behaviour and that of the parent and many others like you, actually hugely increased the number of viewing eyeballs at the time of the later official broadcast. So, you can wear that eyepatch if you want and even that messy parrot, but the PTB at SciFi, if they have even two neurons to rub together - a dubious assumption, I know - realize that the world is different and "pirates" might well be some of their best friends,