Even lacking a land bridge, during the ice age there was no need for a long distance sea voyage. If these populations moved along the edge of the ice, they probably lived their entire lives along the edge of the ice. I doubt the entire voyage to America was accomplished even within it a single generation. It may have taken centuries, as population pressure slowly pushed people farther along the ice's edge in search of virgin hunting grounds. Their camps probably moved at most a few miles at a time, as all of their supplies and family would have to be moved. The weather and sea conditions are too unpredictable for more than a short voyage when your entire family is in the boat.
I think the idea that humans can only travel long distances over land should have been disproved by the population of Australia and the Pacific islands. There is no need for a land bridge to explain the population of the Americas.
There is now more than enough evidence to support the idea of a pre-clovis population in America. Due to the timing of glaciation, this requires these populations to have traveled via the ocean, either along the glaciated Alaskan coast, or along the edge of the arctic ice cap from Europe. Possibly both.
Though modern humans find this environment so impossibly inhospitable they cannot imagine how anyone could possibly survive there long enough to allow a population to migrate several thousand miles, they are thinking only of the glacial desert of ice. The sea however was rich with food. Humans have always followed the food. There are Inuit populations that until recently, fed themselves quite nicely hunting in seas full of pack ice, in boats made of whale bone and seal skin. I see no reason there why self-sustaining populations of humans couldn't have lived on the ice, feeding on the ocean, and slowly spreading along the coast until they found land (America).
"Isn't this usually called consensus science? Hence peer-review, etc. etc? Last I checked the overwhelming majority, no wait, the entire scientific community is in agreement on "global warming". Read this as 2,500+ scientists from over 130 countries agreeing over the basis of the IPCC. Note that the opposition is comprised of a lot of the same crack team of "scientists" that defended the tobacco industry in the '70s. Their integrity notwithstanding, their arguments are still just about as transparent as their lives."
There are scientists who disagree and claim that this 'consensus' group has not proven that CO2 is the cause of our recent warming trend. I have look at the evidence, and I agree with these scientists. The correlation has not been proven to be causation.
There are scientists who make the claim that there are good reasons to question the temperature trend data that underlies the global warming hypothesis. I have read their arguments, read the counter-arguments, and find myself agreeing that there are good reasons to question the data.
There are scientists make the point that climate is inherently non-linear, and thus not amenable to computer modeling. They also point out that such models have been unable to reliably reproduce past climate trends with known data sets. Additionally they point out the fact that these models have many input parameters that are essentially unknown. The modelers take a best guess and see what happens - these parameters are thus subject to the bias of the modeler - don't like the results, tweak the unknown parameters until you get something you like. Having written computer models myself, I find this argument to be compelling.
I do not find these arguments transparent. I've read the counterarguments, and still think that proponents of the Global Warming hypothesis have a lot of work to do to prove their case. Also, are you seriously claiming that the people who are making these arguments were paid scientific shills for the tobacco industry in the 70s? Care to back that up with some evidence?
'Consensus' has nothing whatsoever to do with science. The fact that thousands of experts, or the majority of experts agree on one thing should play zero role in whether or not you agree as well. There are just too many examples in the past where such consensus was wrong. Helio-centrism, and continental drift come to mind as good examples of theories that were once opposed by the vast majority of scientists.
Consensus is political. Consensus actively suppresses debate on opposing theories. Consensus opinions can, and do, change over very short periods of time.
I see that there is some basis for your concerns, but also realize that an uncomfortable, stressed, unhappy animal is not a healthy animal. I doubt that an animal that is in constant pain due to some hidden internal physiological mutation would be highly productive, whether that product is meat or milk.
Sure, one can imagine a nightmare scenario in which suffering animals which are so inbred they can no longer support their own weight are put in pods from birth and tube feed nutrients and antibiotics, but I think at that point you are going to see some serious public backlash. I love meat. I don't have much love for the industrial processes currently used to bring meat to my table at a low price, but for the most part, I don't see these processes as any less humane than what they replaced.
"Pod raising" cattle would however cross a line, for me, and I'd imagine, for many meat consumers. If the meat producers can't show healthy animals contentedly chewing their cud in a feed lot, they will lose the PR battle for their methods.
The idea is to replicate a particularly desireable trait without the constraint inposed by traditional breeding. Currently your best bet at that is to breed the desired animal with another high quality animal, and hope the trait is not lost. With cloning you can create a larger breeding pool of animals all with the same desireable trait. This dramatically increases your chances of creating a strain in which the desired trait breeds true.
I don't think the point is to create an entire herd of clones. That will be prohibitively expensive for the forseeable future and would have some severe implication for disease resistance. But if Bessy produces 10% more milk than any of your other cows, and only 25% of her offspring have that trait, it's going to take you awhile to produce a herd with this trait. Wouldn't it be nice to have two or three clones of Bessys?
Look, designing a lunar base in not outside of our current engineering capabilities. I also have no idea what building a zero-G space station has to do with designing a 1/6 G habitat on large-ish moon you can burrow into.
Certainly we have to build to higher tolerances these days. But we know what those tolerances are, and we are building nothing, doing nothing, but going in circles in low earth orbit running experiments drempt up by school children.
The space station serves no purpose. None. There is no new science being conducted there, and the platform has no utility for staging other missions or building space craft in orbit.
NASA, you want excitement? Establish a permanent international colony on the moon. You'll never get more positive press than when the first baby is born on the moon.
So can anyone tell me, what, if any real and important science is taking place on our beloved space station? And please don't tell me 'research on long term effects of zero-G'. We're only confirming finding from 20 years ago.
Absolutely nothing interesting has happened in the manned space program since we first repaired Hubble in orbit. Since then we've done nada, nothing, zilch, zero, bupkiss of interest to much of anyone, be they John Q iPod, or a PhD in astrophysics.
The manned space program has become utterly irrelevant. NASA can spend as much money as they want trying to get people excited about 'crystals' grown in microgravity, but we have heard it all before.
Do something new and different. Send people someplace they haven't been before. Or maybe let's get people living, I mean really living, on the moon. It is not impossible with today's technology. It just takes more imagination and political will than NASA currently possesses.
It was a joke. Lotus Notes has always had an extremely non-standard interface and is an absolute bear to install and configure. Once installed it ignores almost all standard windows services and APIs, in favor or it's own bizarre little universe. In places where I was force to use it, I considered the Windows OS to be little more than the Lotus Notes bootloader.
I am in awe of the intellect required to punctuate an utterly incompetent and irrelevant analogy with that crowning achievement of proof by assertion: "Dickhead".
Pray tell, if everyone downloaded music, movies and TV shows without paying for it, where would the money come from to pay the actors, musicians, recording studio techs, camera men, directors, etc...?
I imagine all the good actors and actresses would just do it for free, like Linus does. Because, well, software is exactly like music, movies and TV.
I get a byte from a file. I need to add it to another byte from the file. I need the bytes to be treated as unsigned, otherwise arithmetic operations on them are not going to proceed as expected.
This requires upcasting the byte to an int and doing a bitwise & with 0xFF to wipe out the sign. Then you do your arithmetic with the ints and then downcast back to a byte if need be.
If you think this rare, realize that there are all sorts of byte streams out there that were not created by Java applications, that intend every 8-bits to be interpretted as an unsigned byte.
In other people's code, I quite frequently see interfaces with only one implementation.
Yes, I imagine, sometime in the far future, someone *might* possibly think about a different implementation. It happens rarely. In the meantime I have two pieces of code to update every time there is a change to a method signature.
Gosling has never apparently seen the hoops you have to jump through to emulate unsigned arithmetic with signed types. Yes I am sure the compiler supporting unsigned int's would have been much confusing for us poor inellectually challenged Java devs.
Because we don't want to get sued, we enjoy the convenience and speed of the iTunes stores, and we realize that if everybody did what you are doing, there wouldn't be any good content out there.
"I guess we should "run screaming" away from the distinction between manslaughter and murder too?"
In either case, a person died, harm was caused. There is absolutely no question of that - the content of the killer's mind doesn't determine whether or not the person died, whether or not harm was caused. The intentionality of the alleged killer is used to determine what crime his acts can be classified as, and set punishment for the harm he caused.
In these online stings, no harm was caused to a minor. There is no question of that. The question is whether or not the perpetrator believed the recipient of his IMs or emails was a minor. The perpetrator's intent is the sole determiner of whether or not a crime was committed. In the case of a murder, intent and actions are weighed. I have to have killed someone (causing harm) and have had the intent to kill them to be charged with murder. In this case we have intent, and actions that cause no actual harm (sending naughty pictures or chat to an FBI agent). No minors were sent objectionable materials, no minors were harmed.
"IANAL, but it seems there is a difference between THOUGHTS that are kept in one's head, and ACTIONS that convey or act upon those formerly private thoughts. If you commit a crime, you may not be forced to actively testify against yourself, but your "private" journals are fair game."
Actually as the statute is written, the determination of whether or not a crime occurred rests solely on the contents of the perpetrators head. If he did not believe the fake minor was a minor, he sent objectionably materials to an adult - no crime. If he did believe the fake minor was a minor, he is guilty of violating the statute. Certainly, in this instance the intent and beliefs of this individual are quite clear to any reasonable observer. He thought he was corresponding with a minor, but that doesn't change the fact that these beliefs, not his actions, make the crime. Without the belief, his actions were not criminal. Thus thought crime.
As to your second para, I could not agree more. I think people would be utterly surprised at how many lonely men could be enticed into such a situation by an online sting given the right circumstances. I think law enforcement is on a pedophile witch hunt, and is manufacturing predators who most likely would have remained utterly harmless had they not encountered a willing FBI agent, or at the worst would have had consensual sex with a willing teenager if they had never been caught. I think there are much worse crimes for our law enforcement officers (and Dateline) to be focusing on.
Actually, your last point is incorrect, and helps make my case. They use real drugs in drug busts, because it is not a crime to purchase baking soda, even if you believe it to be cocaine (not to mention the fact that purchasers often like to test the goods). And that I think is a sensible law.
As to whether or not he would have nailed a real 13 year old, I have no idea. I imagine real 13 year olds behave much differently than a sheriff who is trying to entice adults. I have serious doubts of the prevalence of online predators that prey on real 13 year olds. Most real 13 year olds would respond "eww icky!" and delete the email, and not say "oh wow, when can you come across state lines to meet me! I am so hot for you".
I am not defending this man, or his behavior. In reality this guy may be an utter perv who has a long history or molestation and abuse, or he may be someone who would have never considered doing these acts if it weren't for the enticement of the sting operation.
That actually wasn't the statute in question, but it reads similarly. The crime was sending offensive materials, to a person he believed was a minor. As far as the statute goes, sure, it certainly looks like he is guilty. I personally think this is very bad law. In reality the guy sent dirty pictures to an adult and harmed no one. If they have evidence that he did in fact send such materials to an actual minor - fine - I am all for some sort of punishment for this behavior.
Punishing people who have not in fact been proven to have harmed anyone, because they have thoughts that appear to show the intent to harm, is thought crime.
The crime is not "purchasing drugs from someone you believe is a dealer" - the crime is "purchasing drugs". Doesn't matter who you buy them from, or who you think they are, it is illegal to purchase drugs. The analogous situation in a drug bust would be to use fake drugs, which they don't do, because the laws don't say it's illegal to buy fake drugs.
But here we have a case where the laws say it is illegal to send these offensive materials to a fake minor, as long as the sender believes the person is a minor. The sole determining factor of the crime the the contents of the sender's mind. That is thought crime.
Ok, this guy needs help, but he has been convicted of thought crime, not an actual crime.
Note, that in other types of stings, the person trapped by the sting actually did something illegal. They paid money for real drugs, they paid money for guns, they paid bribes to a real politician and were caught on tape/video.
In these cases we have the novel situation where all the object of the sting actually did was transmit objectionable material to an adult, posing to be a child. But because the perpetrator held in his mind the belief that the recipient was a minor, this is a crime, according to the FL statue. The belief, his thoughts, make the crime. That's thought crime, and we should run, screaming, away from these sorts of laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Even lacking a land bridge, during the ice age there was no need for a long distance sea voyage. If these populations moved along the edge of the ice, they probably lived their entire lives along the edge of the ice. I doubt the entire voyage to America was accomplished even within it a single generation. It may have taken centuries, as population pressure slowly pushed people farther along the ice's edge in search of virgin hunting grounds. Their camps probably moved at most a few miles at a time, as all of their supplies and family would have to be moved. The weather and sea conditions are too unpredictable for more than a short voyage when your entire family is in the boat.
I think the idea that humans can only travel long distances over land should have been disproved by the population of Australia and the Pacific islands. There is no need for a land bridge to explain the population of the Americas.
There is now more than enough evidence to support the idea of a pre-clovis population in America. Due to the timing of glaciation, this requires these populations to have traveled via the ocean, either along the glaciated Alaskan coast, or along the edge of the arctic ice cap from Europe. Possibly both.
Though modern humans find this environment so impossibly inhospitable they cannot imagine how anyone could possibly survive there long enough to allow a population to migrate several thousand miles, they are thinking only of the glacial desert of ice. The sea however was rich with food. Humans have always followed the food. There are Inuit populations that until recently, fed themselves quite nicely hunting in seas full of pack ice, in boats made of whale bone and seal skin. I see no reason there why self-sustaining populations of humans couldn't have lived on the ice, feeding on the ocean, and slowly spreading along the coast until they found land (America).
I was being facetious. As this very thread so deliciously illustrates, there is a decided lack of intelligent commentary.
Throw in Wired, OSNews, the NY Times, and Arstechnica - you'll get about 95% of slashdot articles, days in advance.
I just come here for the intelligent discussions.
"Isn't this usually called consensus science? Hence peer-review, etc. etc? Last I checked the overwhelming majority, no wait, the entire scientific community is in agreement on "global warming". Read this as 2,500+ scientists from over 130 countries agreeing over the basis of the IPCC. Note that the opposition is comprised of a lot of the same crack team of "scientists" that defended the tobacco industry in the '70s. Their integrity notwithstanding, their arguments are still just about as transparent as their lives."
There are scientists who disagree and claim that this 'consensus' group has not proven that CO2 is the cause of our recent warming trend. I have look at the evidence, and I agree with these scientists. The correlation has not been proven to be causation.
There are scientists who make the claim that there are good reasons to question the temperature trend data that underlies the global warming hypothesis. I have read their arguments, read the counter-arguments, and find myself agreeing that there are good reasons to question the data.
There are scientists make the point that climate is inherently non-linear, and thus not amenable to computer modeling. They also point out that such models have been unable to reliably reproduce past climate trends with known data sets. Additionally they point out the fact that these models have many input parameters that are essentially unknown. The modelers take a best guess and see what happens - these parameters are thus subject to the bias of the modeler - don't like the results, tweak the unknown parameters until you get something you like. Having written computer models myself, I find this argument to be compelling.
I do not find these arguments transparent. I've read the counterarguments, and still think that proponents of the Global Warming hypothesis have a lot of work to do to prove their case. Also, are you seriously claiming that the people who are making these arguments were paid scientific shills for the tobacco industry in the 70s? Care to back that up with some evidence?
'Consensus' has nothing whatsoever to do with science. The fact that thousands of experts, or the majority of experts agree on one thing should play zero role in whether or not you agree as well. There are just too many examples in the past where such consensus was wrong. Helio-centrism, and continental drift come to mind as good examples of theories that were once opposed by the vast majority of scientists.
Consensus is political. Consensus actively suppresses debate on opposing theories. Consensus opinions can, and do, change over very short periods of time.
My uid is smaller than your uid! nya!
I see that there is some basis for your concerns, but also realize that an uncomfortable, stressed, unhappy animal is not a healthy animal. I doubt that an animal that is in constant pain due to some hidden internal physiological mutation would be highly productive, whether that product is meat or milk.
Sure, one can imagine a nightmare scenario in which suffering animals which are so inbred they can no longer support their own weight are put in pods from birth and tube feed nutrients and antibiotics, but I think at that point you are going to see some serious public backlash. I love meat. I don't have much love for the industrial processes currently used to bring meat to my table at a low price, but for the most part, I don't see these processes as any less humane than what they replaced.
"Pod raising" cattle would however cross a line, for me, and I'd imagine, for many meat consumers. If the meat producers can't show healthy animals contentedly chewing their cud in a feed lot, they will lose the PR battle for their methods.
The idea is to replicate a particularly desireable trait without the constraint inposed by traditional breeding. Currently your best bet at that is to breed the desired animal with another high quality animal, and hope the trait is not lost. With cloning you can create a larger breeding pool of animals all with the same desireable trait. This dramatically increases your chances of creating a strain in which the desired trait breeds true.
I don't think the point is to create an entire herd of clones. That will be prohibitively expensive for the forseeable future and would have some severe implication for disease resistance. But if Bessy produces 10% more milk than any of your other cows, and only 25% of her offspring have that trait, it's going to take you awhile to produce a herd with this trait. Wouldn't it be nice to have two or three clones of Bessys?
Look, designing a lunar base in not outside of our current engineering capabilities. I also have no idea what building a zero-G space station has to do with designing a 1/6 G habitat on large-ish moon you can burrow into.
Certainly we have to build to higher tolerances these days. But we know what those tolerances are, and we are building nothing, doing nothing, but going in circles in low earth orbit running experiments drempt up by school children.
The space station serves no purpose. None. There is no new science being conducted there, and the platform has no utility for staging other missions or building space craft in orbit.
NASA, you want excitement? Establish a permanent international colony on the moon. You'll never get more positive press than when the first baby is born on the moon.
So can anyone tell me, what, if any real and important science is taking place on our beloved space station? And please don't tell me 'research on long term effects of zero-G'. We're only confirming finding from 20 years ago.
Absolutely nothing interesting has happened in the manned space program since we first repaired Hubble in orbit. Since then we've done nada, nothing, zilch, zero, bupkiss of interest to much of anyone, be they John Q iPod, or a PhD in astrophysics.
The manned space program has become utterly irrelevant. NASA can spend as much money as they want trying to get people excited about 'crystals' grown in microgravity, but we have heard it all before.
Do something new and different. Send people someplace they haven't been before. Or maybe let's get people living, I mean really living, on the moon. It is not impossible with today's technology. It just takes more imagination and political will than NASA currently possesses.
It was a joke. Lotus Notes has always had an extremely non-standard interface and is an absolute bear to install and configure. Once installed it ignores almost all standard windows services and APIs, in favor or it's own bizarre little universe. In places where I was force to use it, I considered the Windows OS to be little more than the Lotus Notes bootloader.
Since when has Lotus Notes ever been compatible with windows?
"treeves writes"... No, actually Mitch Jacoby of Chemical and Engineering News wrote that copy. Treeves merely copied it.
I am in awe of the intellect required to punctuate an utterly incompetent and irrelevant analogy with that crowning achievement of proof by assertion: "Dickhead".
Pray tell, if everyone downloaded music, movies and TV shows without paying for it, where would the money come from to pay the actors, musicians, recording studio techs, camera men, directors, etc...?
I imagine all the good actors and actresses would just do it for free, like Linus does. Because, well, software is exactly like music, movies and TV.
I get a byte from a file. I need to add it to another byte from the file. I need the bytes to be treated as unsigned, otherwise arithmetic operations on them are not going to proceed as expected.
This requires upcasting the byte to an int and doing a bitwise & with 0xFF to wipe out the sign. Then you do your arithmetic with the ints and then downcast back to a byte if need be.
If you think this rare, realize that there are all sorts of byte streams out there that were not created by Java applications, that intend every 8-bits to be interpretted as an unsigned byte.
In other people's code, I quite frequently see interfaces with only one implementation.
Yes, I imagine, sometime in the far future, someone *might* possibly think about a different implementation. It happens rarely. In the meantime I have two pieces of code to update every time there is a change to a method signature.
Gosling has never apparently seen the hoops you have to jump through to emulate unsigned arithmetic with signed types. Yes I am sure the compiler supporting unsigned int's would have been much confusing for us poor inellectually challenged Java devs.
Because we don't want to get sued, we enjoy the convenience and speed of the iTunes stores, and we realize that if everybody did what you are doing, there wouldn't be any good content out there.
"I guess we should "run screaming" away from the distinction between manslaughter and murder too?"
In either case, a person died, harm was caused. There is absolutely no question of that - the content of the killer's mind doesn't determine whether or not the person died, whether or not harm was caused. The intentionality of the alleged killer is used to determine what crime his acts can be classified as, and set punishment for the harm he caused.
In these online stings, no harm was caused to a minor. There is no question of that. The question is whether or not the perpetrator believed the recipient of his IMs or emails was a minor. The perpetrator's intent is the sole determiner of whether or not a crime was committed. In the case of a murder, intent and actions are weighed. I have to have killed someone (causing harm) and have had the intent to kill them to be charged with murder. In this case we have intent, and actions that cause no actual harm (sending naughty pictures or chat to an FBI agent). No minors were sent objectionable materials, no minors were harmed.
"IANAL, but it seems there is a difference between THOUGHTS that are kept in one's head, and ACTIONS that convey or act upon those formerly private thoughts. If you commit a crime, you may not be forced to actively testify against yourself, but your "private" journals are fair game."
Actually as the statute is written, the determination of whether or not a crime occurred rests solely on the contents of the perpetrators head. If he did not believe the fake minor was a minor, he sent objectionably materials to an adult - no crime. If he did believe the fake minor was a minor, he is guilty of violating the statute. Certainly, in this instance the intent and beliefs of this individual are quite clear to any reasonable observer. He thought he was corresponding with a minor, but that doesn't change the fact that these beliefs, not his actions, make the crime. Without the belief, his actions were not criminal. Thus thought crime.
As to your second para, I could not agree more. I think people would be utterly surprised at how many lonely men could be enticed into such a situation by an online sting given the right circumstances. I think law enforcement is on a pedophile witch hunt, and is manufacturing predators who most likely would have remained utterly harmless had they not encountered a willing FBI agent, or at the worst would have had consensual sex with a willing teenager if they had never been caught. I think there are much worse crimes for our law enforcement officers (and Dateline) to be focusing on.
Actually, your last point is incorrect, and helps make my case. They use real drugs in drug busts, because it is not a crime to purchase baking soda, even if you believe it to be cocaine (not to mention the fact that purchasers often like to test the goods). And that I think is a sensible law.
As to whether or not he would have nailed a real 13 year old, I have no idea. I imagine real 13 year olds behave much differently than a sheriff who is trying to entice adults. I have serious doubts of the prevalence of online predators that prey on real 13 year olds. Most real 13 year olds would respond "eww icky!" and delete the email, and not say "oh wow, when can you come across state lines to meet me! I am so hot for you".
I am not defending this man, or his behavior. In reality this guy may be an utter perv who has a long history or molestation and abuse, or he may be someone who would have never considered doing these acts if it weren't for the enticement of the sting operation.
That actually wasn't the statute in question, but it reads similarly. The crime was sending offensive materials, to a person he believed was a minor. As far as the statute goes, sure, it certainly looks like he is guilty. I personally think this is very bad law. In reality the guy sent dirty pictures to an adult and harmed no one. If they have evidence that he did in fact send such materials to an actual minor - fine - I am all for some sort of punishment for this behavior.
Punishing people who have not in fact been proven to have harmed anyone, because they have thoughts that appear to show the intent to harm, is thought crime.
The crime is not "purchasing drugs from someone you believe is a dealer" - the crime is "purchasing drugs". Doesn't matter who you buy them from, or who you think they are, it is illegal to purchase drugs. The analogous situation in a drug bust would be to use fake drugs, which they don't do, because the laws don't say it's illegal to buy fake drugs.
But here we have a case where the laws say it is illegal to send these offensive materials to a fake minor, as long as the sender believes the person is a minor. The sole determining factor of the crime the the contents of the sender's mind. That is thought crime.
Ok, this guy needs help, but he has been convicted of thought crime, not an actual crime.
Note, that in other types of stings, the person trapped by the sting actually did something illegal. They paid money for real drugs, they paid money for guns, they paid bribes to a real politician and were caught on tape/video.
In these cases we have the novel situation where all the object of the sting actually did was transmit objectionable material to an adult, posing to be a child. But because the perpetrator held in his mind the belief that the recipient was a minor, this is a crime, according to the FL statue. The belief, his thoughts, make the crime. That's thought crime, and we should run, screaming, away from these sorts of laws.
Really? Are you suggesting they made it up. I was there, it happened.