If we all just disappeared today (like the rapture believers say will happen I suppose), a thousand years from now those ruins might still be there, along with the ancient Greek and Egyptian ruins as well. But New York City will be flat.
It has to do with the integrity of the materials: concrete, rebar and wood versus solid stone and mortar. Granted, we were driven towards modern architectural methods in part because of the need to cram more people into a single square meter of real estate, but the direct reason for those ancient buildings' strength is the fact that they were built from solid stone blocks.
The problem is that the USPTO doesn't care about such places and isn't going to seek them out while examining someone else's patent application. So Snipey McPatent Troll ends up with a patent, and then goes about making people's lives miserable. You doing something about it requires going to court with your forum printout or whatever and pitting it against their real live patent.
As others have said in this thread, they'll even ignore respected well-established research journals. So merely publishing anywhere that you see fit might not do the trick. If it's a serious journal, or you can prove very clearly that you were actually using the invention after you published, then maybe. But it's a lot of risk to take. Someone loses comparatively little if they try to patent your invention and fail, and the system is set up such that it's not in their best interests to look for prior art themselves.
I have not actually had to do this but it seems like a "statutory registration" with the patent office is the way to go.
Part of what you did say was that going to a notary public could cost a lot of money if the guy basically holds it for ransom. That's not even possible to do. Every bank that you've ever seen has a notary working there in some capacity. They might ask you for a couple of bucks.
Becoming a new notary public might cost you a few hundred depending on the state you're in, but renewing it is not that bad. My father's a notary public just for the hell of it and I've never seen him charge anyone. It's something that you do because you know a lot of people who might need those services and it makes life easier. It's not a profit-making venture.
I once heard someone say that creation is not an isolated instant but something that happens in every instant. When I was religious that was a pretty good summary of my thoughts as well.
Of course, it pretty much turns God into something too conceptual for a proper Christian, since it doesn't really leave room for prayer or miracles. The story of Jesus is a story of divine intervention, and it is a story about a man, not a story about subatomic particles (and I figure Jesus has to be a real human man for salvation to make sense).
But you actually were talking about divine intervention, in addition to God creating laws of physics and so on. It's interesting and I'm sure there are a lot of people who believe a variation on that. Catholics especially. I personally hit a wall trying to reconcile the idea of divine intervention with God's foreknowledge/omniscience.
But anyway, no, that's not really ID. ID is about circumventing peer review and going straight to the textbooks with the writings of the IRC and other groups. Normally it goes: idea > research > review > publication > consensus > textbook. ID is about taking Creationist tenets and going idea > school board > textbook. Believing in a God who (intelligently) designed life with the capacity for evolution doesn't really fit their agenda.
It's just convenient for the movement that they chose a name that sounds like what most Christians believe or acknowledge while not actually being what most Christians believe or acknowledge.
They were actively courted. And the movers and shakers of the evangelical movement allied with conservative politicians. I'm not exactly sure why but I'm guessing Roe v. Wade played a part. According to Wikipedia the end of segregation had something to do with it as well.
I can't say I've ever heard any politician spout anything that comes close to an anti-Christian sentiment, which would be a death sentence for a political career in this country. The Democrats have not pandered to the evangelical movement in the last thirty or so years in the way that the Republicans have, but I think it's an exaggeration to interpret that as anti-Christian.
Here's where I take issue with the logic of the article: who's it suicidal *for*? I mean, who's going to starve if the linux desktop market doesn't resemble the linux server & embedded market by such-and-such date?
You say that many people do care, and I agree with you. But linux's strength is in its usefulness and its FOSS roots and not in anybody's marketing efforts. It'd be silly to say that the coders hold linux back when they are in fact the heart and soul of it.
Re:Nope, it's the putative new users problem
on
Linux Needs Critics
·
· Score: 1
In short, people don't understand the FOSS model.
Linux has plenty of critics. What it needs are people who understand that no one has to listen to their criticisms.
Nobody is going to starve if Linux desktop adoption doesn't grow at a certain rate (and yet, it does grow). All of the logic in the article and thread hangs on this idea that "linux needs to do X if it wants Y". Linux is free to the world. It doesn't want anything. The Linux Foundation and Red Hat could disappear tomorrow and we'd still have the code.
I don't understand why you will fight tooth and nail to insist that global warming is real and exists in the way all the hype is claiming
It's not that disagree with you about the reasoning behind Kyoto, or the effectiveness of selling carbon credits. But neither of those things have anything to do with what is presently happening. That you fear the political implications does not suddenly transform good science into hype and FUD. It would be better for me if I contented myself with the idea that AGW is some "vast left-wing conspiracy". I have too much to worry about in my own life. But that's not how it works.
I suspect that you are going with your gut on this one rather than looking at the empirical evidence, which very clearly shows warming. There are decades of measurements from weather stations, satellites, weather balloons as high as the stratosphere, ocean temperatures both from the surface and the depths, rising water levels, loss of sea ice, increased hurricane activity, melting permafrost, expanding lakes, changing ocean currents and jet streams, and tropical life moving away from the equator. People live out in the middle of nowhere so that every day they can gather this data. So who do I trust on whether the earth is warming? Not Gore, not Rumsfeld, not you, not me. Them.
If someone came to me and showed that data to be wrong, then I'd concede that it was "brainwashing". But that's a tall order. Dyson's a smart guy, and his main beef is with the accuracy of the models that are showing/predicting global warming. Sounds reasonable enough. But here are a few things that he likes to leave out:
- No one has come up with a model that accurately predicts past and current climate trends without accounting for human CO2 production. That includes Dyson. It's not that these other models don't exist, it's that they're not as accurate. - James Hansen and others have been able to predict the last 20 years of climate changes for the various layers of atmosphere with amazing accuracy. - The models tend to be conservative, and where they get it wrong, it's because they fail to predict just how much the warming is capable of accelerating.
Science deals with the physical world. I don't even know what the hell politics deals with. But I know that when you mix the two, bad things happen. So if you want to know the truth, go straight to the source. I'm not the source, though, and either way I'm done with this. Done with the name-calling, as if desperately calling someone brainwashed has the power to change reality. I'd say, "let's wait and see" but I have a feeling you're just going to continue to interpret things in whatever way you please.
Who said that what they're doing is scientific scrutiny? They're making changes to science curricula through *politics*, the whole point of which is to avoid going the scientific scrutiny route.
Why should everyone be represented minimally in one system, when they can be represented totally in another?
The way you solve that question is by showing it to be useless. The way you do that is by separating church and state.
This way, everyone has the right to worship, but no one argues over who gets to use government institutions as an evangelical tool.
Which is not to say that real life, with its Ten-Commandments-bearing courtrooms doesn't stand in opposition to that...but it's nice to dream, isn't it?
You're damned right evolution has nothing to do with the origin of life! It's not supposed to, though.
As for the rest of it, why do I care what Darwin himself said? If Darwin had never been born, we'd just talk about Alfred Russel Wallace. And so on. His specific ideas were a slight variation on similar ones. He focused heavily on natural selection (a notion pioneered by Malthus), for instance. The modern theory of evolution is not word-for-word what Darwin wrote. And just as he differed somewhat from his contemporaries' take on common descent, so we have upgraded and amended what he gave us.
As far as his morality...it wouldn't matter if the guy was responsible for the Third Reich, it's the *model* that we're concerned with. Specifically, how well what we observe in the natural world is explained and predicted by that model. This is something that often doesn't click with non-scientists right away—the ideally watertight barrier between what was said and who said it. Things like double-blind tests are designed to eliminate the link between the observed and the observer. This is just one way that good science strives to eliminate bias.
Oh yeah...it's a complete lie anyway. Darwin was an abolitionist. Evolution actually stands in stark contrast to the "scientific racism" of the 1800s which sought to find scientific proof for the superiority of one race over another. (Common descent does away with that idea quite cleanly.) Please check your sources next time.
Science has a built in check for legitimacy, which is something that differentiates it from other forms of inquiry. This check is "evidence", combined with the notions that the burden of proof is on the person making the point, and that the more extraordinary the claim, the more evidence you will need. (The latter is sort of a logical extension of Occam's Razor...the more out there you get, the more likely it is that someone's already explained your phenomena in a simpler way.)
Anyway, this isn't about one group saying who's qualified. It's about a system of inquiry that has developed built-in checks against quackery. No one's excluding their work on principle. But it doesn't stand up to peer review. So they head science off at the pass, since with them it was never about scientific integrity to begin with. Specifically, they set up political roadblocks before the science can be distilled and taught in schools.
Politics is easier to game than science. It's an older system. Less empirical. Science limits itself to the physical world, by necessity. These people can't get published in the journals so they get themselves on the school boards instead. It's a case of picking the low-hanging fruit.
We are all suffering as a nation because of this. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is. Intellectual bigots do not need or deserve your sympathy.
Your earlier post actually doesn't work: theological doctrine doesn't depend on physical evidence. So it actually doesn't work both ways. The standard of proof is different, and it is quite alright for a group of scientists to ignore someone if what they are doing is not science (not dealing solely with the physical world is a pretty good way to fail at being science).
That's already been done, and the results are summarized quite well in any mainstream science textbook you can pick up.
However, in this case the scrutiny will be done by non-scientists with an axe to grind.
Peer review is great but this is about pitting peer-reviewed science against non-peer-reviewed vague FUD.
I mean, I thought all this was obvious. Hasn't it been going on for the better part of a century? With the tactics largely unchanged? Or did I just hallucinate all of those school board conflicts?
I'd like to point out that believing in a creator or designer (that is responsible for evolution) is not the same as believing in intelligent design. Intelligent Design was a movement aimed at presenting Creationism in a new light, and avoid precedent that may have been set by courts ruling against Creationism.
Actually the ruling in that case is very instructive on this whole thing, for what I mentioned the relevant quote is "The evidence at trial demonstrates that ID is nothing less than the progeny of creationism." Part of the evidence was the comparisons of different revisions of _Of Pandas and People_, where they essentially used a find+replace to switch Creationism to ID.
I guess what I am trying to say is that Intelligent Design is sort of like a trademark...it has a specific meaning and purpose which is separate from what the actual words in the phrase would lead you to think (gee, I wonder why) and by calling what I have to assume is a combination of belief in God and acknowledgment of evolution "a variant of ID" you are doing yourself a disservice and might give people the wrong impression.
Ideally, yes. But I suspect a lot of shops are in the same situation as mine. I don't need new hardware, and I can't even tell you the last time I spoke to someone from IBM, not counting some issues with a UPS of theirs that we had.
It follows the same pattern: you have a big project, need some hardware, and after the order you end up with a vendor rep calling you every week just to check in. After a few months you stop hearing from him. After a year you need something else, so it starts over.
"Does brain rot set in after 27? Depends how you measure"
"Press reports have focused on a paper that argues that age related cognitive declines begin in the late 20s. Unfortunately, these stories ignore the fact that several papers appearing in the same issue of the journal as the original report contest these findings."
Slashdot Mirror
Ron Paul's on Slashdot!?
If we all just disappeared today (like the rapture believers say will happen I suppose), a thousand years from now those ruins might still be there, along with the ancient Greek and Egyptian ruins as well. But New York City will be flat.
It has to do with the integrity of the materials: concrete, rebar and wood versus solid stone and mortar. Granted, we were driven towards modern architectural methods in part because of the need to cram more people into a single square meter of real estate, but the direct reason for those ancient buildings' strength is the fact that they were built from solid stone blocks.
The problem is that the USPTO doesn't care about such places and isn't going to seek them out while examining someone else's patent application. So Snipey McPatent Troll ends up with a patent, and then goes about making people's lives miserable. You doing something about it requires going to court with your forum printout or whatever and pitting it against their real live patent.
As others have said in this thread, they'll even ignore respected well-established research journals. So merely publishing anywhere that you see fit might not do the trick. If it's a serious journal, or you can prove very clearly that you were actually using the invention after you published, then maybe. But it's a lot of risk to take. Someone loses comparatively little if they try to patent your invention and fail, and the system is set up such that it's not in their best interests to look for prior art themselves.
I have not actually had to do this but it seems like a "statutory registration" with the patent office is the way to go.
Part of what you did say was that going to a notary public could cost a lot of money if the guy basically holds it for ransom. That's not even possible to do. Every bank that you've ever seen has a notary working there in some capacity. They might ask you for a couple of bucks.
Becoming a new notary public might cost you a few hundred depending on the state you're in, but renewing it is not that bad. My father's a notary public just for the hell of it and I've never seen him charge anyone. It's something that you do because you know a lot of people who might need those services and it makes life easier. It's not a profit-making venture.
Well, I wouldn't say the science is settled but I'm still gonna stick with the NOAA...
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/03/02/whats-up-with-that/
Do you mean the increase in hurricane activity? That actually is caused in part by rising water surface temperatures.
I once heard someone say that creation is not an isolated instant but something that happens in every instant. When I was religious that was a pretty good summary of my thoughts as well.
Of course, it pretty much turns God into something too conceptual for a proper Christian, since it doesn't really leave room for prayer or miracles. The story of Jesus is a story of divine intervention, and it is a story about a man, not a story about subatomic particles (and I figure Jesus has to be a real human man for salvation to make sense).
But you actually were talking about divine intervention, in addition to God creating laws of physics and so on. It's interesting and I'm sure there are a lot of people who believe a variation on that. Catholics especially. I personally hit a wall trying to reconcile the idea of divine intervention with God's foreknowledge/omniscience.
But anyway, no, that's not really ID. ID is about circumventing peer review and going straight to the textbooks with the writings of the IRC and other groups. Normally it goes: idea > research > review > publication > consensus > textbook. ID is about taking Creationist tenets and going idea > school board > textbook. Believing in a God who (intelligently) designed life with the capacity for evolution doesn't really fit their agenda.
It's just convenient for the movement that they chose a name that sounds like what most Christians believe or acknowledge while not actually being what most Christians believe or acknowledge.
They were actively courted. And the movers and shakers of the evangelical movement allied with conservative politicians. I'm not exactly sure why but I'm guessing Roe v. Wade played a part. According to Wikipedia the end of segregation had something to do with it as well.
I can't say I've ever heard any politician spout anything that comes close to an anti-Christian sentiment, which would be a death sentence for a political career in this country. The Democrats have not pandered to the evangelical movement in the last thirty or so years in the way that the Republicans have, but I think it's an exaggeration to interpret that as anti-Christian.
Sometimes the shiny stuff is, as you say, the best tool for the job.
Here's where I take issue with the logic of the article: who's it suicidal *for*? I mean, who's going to starve if the linux desktop market doesn't resemble the linux server & embedded market by such-and-such date?
You say that many people do care, and I agree with you. But linux's strength is in its usefulness and its FOSS roots and not in anybody's marketing efforts. It'd be silly to say that the coders hold linux back when they are in fact the heart and soul of it.
In short, people don't understand the FOSS model.
Linux has plenty of critics. What it needs are people who understand that no one has to listen to their criticisms.
Nobody is going to starve if Linux desktop adoption doesn't grow at a certain rate (and yet, it does grow). All of the logic in the article and thread hangs on this idea that "linux needs to do X if it wants Y". Linux is free to the world. It doesn't want anything. The Linux Foundation and Red Hat could disappear tomorrow and we'd still have the code.
So you fell for an April Fool's joke...that's sort of the point :)
Try using Office for Mac. You will become capable of murder.
I don't understand why you will fight tooth and nail to insist that global warming is real and exists in the way all the hype is claiming
It's not that disagree with you about the reasoning behind Kyoto, or the effectiveness of selling carbon credits. But neither of those things have anything to do with what is presently happening. That you fear the political implications does not suddenly transform good science into hype and FUD. It would be better for me if I contented myself with the idea that AGW is some "vast left-wing conspiracy". I have too much to worry about in my own life. But that's not how it works.
I suspect that you are going with your gut on this one rather than looking at the empirical evidence, which very clearly shows warming. There are decades of measurements from weather stations, satellites, weather balloons as high as the stratosphere, ocean temperatures both from the surface and the depths, rising water levels, loss of sea ice, increased hurricane activity, melting permafrost, expanding lakes, changing ocean currents and jet streams, and tropical life moving away from the equator. People live out in the middle of nowhere so that every day they can gather this data. So who do I trust on whether the earth is warming? Not Gore, not Rumsfeld, not you, not me. Them.
If someone came to me and showed that data to be wrong, then I'd concede that it was "brainwashing". But that's a tall order. Dyson's a smart guy, and his main beef is with the accuracy of the models that are showing/predicting global warming. Sounds reasonable enough. But here are a few things that he likes to leave out:
- No one has come up with a model that accurately predicts past and current climate trends without accounting for human CO2 production. That includes Dyson. It's not that these other models don't exist, it's that they're not as accurate.
- James Hansen and others have been able to predict the last 20 years of climate changes for the various layers of atmosphere with amazing accuracy.
- The models tend to be conservative, and where they get it wrong, it's because they fail to predict just how much the warming is capable of accelerating.
Science deals with the physical world. I don't even know what the hell politics deals with. But I know that when you mix the two, bad things happen. So if you want to know the truth, go straight to the source. I'm not the source, though, and either way I'm done with this. Done with the name-calling, as if desperately calling someone brainwashed has the power to change reality. I'd say, "let's wait and see" but I have a feeling you're just going to continue to interpret things in whatever way you please.
Who said that what they're doing is scientific scrutiny? They're making changes to science curricula through *politics*, the whole point of which is to avoid going the scientific scrutiny route.
Why should everyone be represented minimally in one system, when they can be represented totally in another?
The way you solve that question is by showing it to be useless. The way you do that is by separating church and state.
This way, everyone has the right to worship, but no one argues over who gets to use government institutions as an evangelical tool.
Which is not to say that real life, with its Ten-Commandments-bearing courtrooms doesn't stand in opposition to that...but it's nice to dream, isn't it?
That calling mainstream science "evangelism" whenever you don't like the implications is demagogy.
Shush now, grownups are talking.
You're damned right evolution has nothing to do with the origin of life! It's not supposed to, though.
As for the rest of it, why do I care what Darwin himself said? If Darwin had never been born, we'd just talk about Alfred Russel Wallace. And so on. His specific ideas were a slight variation on similar ones. He focused heavily on natural selection (a notion pioneered by Malthus), for instance. The modern theory of evolution is not word-for-word what Darwin wrote. And just as he differed somewhat from his contemporaries' take on common descent, so we have upgraded and amended what he gave us.
As far as his morality...it wouldn't matter if the guy was responsible for the Third Reich, it's the *model* that we're concerned with. Specifically, how well what we observe in the natural world is explained and predicted by that model. This is something that often doesn't click with non-scientists right away—the ideally watertight barrier between what was said and who said it. Things like double-blind tests are designed to eliminate the link between the observed and the observer. This is just one way that good science strives to eliminate bias.
Oh yeah...it's a complete lie anyway. Darwin was an abolitionist. Evolution actually stands in stark contrast to the "scientific racism" of the 1800s which sought to find scientific proof for the superiority of one race over another. (Common descent does away with that idea quite cleanly.) Please check your sources next time.
Science has a built in check for legitimacy, which is something that differentiates it from other forms of inquiry. This check is "evidence", combined with the notions that the burden of proof is on the person making the point, and that the more extraordinary the claim, the more evidence you will need. (The latter is sort of a logical extension of Occam's Razor...the more out there you get, the more likely it is that someone's already explained your phenomena in a simpler way.)
Anyway, this isn't about one group saying who's qualified. It's about a system of inquiry that has developed built-in checks against quackery. No one's excluding their work on principle. But it doesn't stand up to peer review. So they head science off at the pass, since with them it was never about scientific integrity to begin with. Specifically, they set up political roadblocks before the science can be distilled and taught in schools.
Politics is easier to game than science. It's an older system. Less empirical. Science limits itself to the physical world, by necessity. These people can't get published in the journals so they get themselves on the school boards instead. It's a case of picking the low-hanging fruit.
We are all suffering as a nation because of this. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is. Intellectual bigots do not need or deserve your sympathy.
Your earlier post actually doesn't work: theological doctrine doesn't depend on physical evidence. So it actually doesn't work both ways. The standard of proof is different, and it is quite alright for a group of scientists to ignore someone if what they are doing is not science (not dealing solely with the physical world is a pretty good way to fail at being science).
That's already been done, and the results are summarized quite well in any mainstream science textbook you can pick up.
However, in this case the scrutiny will be done by non-scientists with an axe to grind.
Peer review is great but this is about pitting peer-reviewed science against non-peer-reviewed vague FUD.
I mean, I thought all this was obvious. Hasn't it been going on for the better part of a century? With the tactics largely unchanged? Or did I just hallucinate all of those school board conflicts?
I'd like to point out that believing in a creator or designer (that is responsible for evolution) is not the same as believing in intelligent design. Intelligent Design was a movement aimed at presenting Creationism in a new light, and avoid precedent that may have been set by courts ruling against Creationism.
"Ken Miller on Intelligent Design" (he's Catholic but he testified on the side of scientists in Kitzmiller v. Dover)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVRsWAjvQSg
Actually the ruling in that case is very instructive on this whole thing, for what I mentioned the relevant quote is "The evidence at trial demonstrates that ID is nothing less than the progeny of creationism." Part of the evidence was the comparisons of different revisions of _Of Pandas and People_, where they essentially used a find+replace to switch Creationism to ID.
I guess what I am trying to say is that Intelligent Design is sort of like a trademark...it has a specific meaning and purpose which is separate from what the actual words in the phrase would lead you to think (gee, I wonder why) and by calling what I have to assume is a combination of belief in God and acknowledgment of evolution "a variant of ID" you are doing yourself a disservice and might give people the wrong impression.
Ideally, yes. But I suspect a lot of shops are in the same situation as mine. I don't need new hardware, and I can't even tell you the last time I spoke to someone from IBM, not counting some issues with a UPS of theirs that we had.
It follows the same pattern: you have a big project, need some hardware, and after the order you end up with a vendor rep calling you every week just to check in. After a few months you stop hearing from him. After a year you need something else, so it starts over.
Supply and demand, then?
And the follow-up that no one seems to be mentioning:
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/03/cognitive-declines-affecting-science-reporting.ars
"Does brain rot set in after 27? Depends how you measure"
"Press reports have focused on a paper that argues that age related cognitive declines begin in the late 20s. Unfortunately, these stories ignore the fact that several papers appearing in the same issue of the journal as the original report contest these findings."