It's no cop out, it's a fact. That's why they call it "Random Mutation." Selection is directed by fitness criteria, yes, but these criteria are random, because the particular environment a species finds itself in is random and changing. For instance, a crustacean is not likely to evolve wings (in one simple step, anyway) because it lives underwater and the selection criteria for it are different than those of say, a tree dwelling mammal. If the environment were to change sufficiently, that crustacean might face selection criteria that favored wings. Whether it developed them or not still depends on random mutation, but at least it would be possible.
So humans developed the traits you think of as unique to us because we happened to be in a random environment that favored those traits and because random mutation produced those traits.
You aren't understanding what I said at all, and I'm beginning to suspect that others have pointed out the same ideas to you before, and you didn't understand them then, either. Not understanding an answer is not the same thing as not getting an answer.
Let me try again. Fitness criteria do not apply across the board to all species equally. What makes a human fit for a human's niche is not what makes an ant fit for an ant's niche. Different niches, different criteria.
I'll ask you a question again, why don't humans have wings?
Another thought, the best of the best don't care about making more money, they care about being the best, and go where there are the resources to allow them to be the best. Where else but NASA are aerospace engineers going to go to get access to the best resources and the coolest projects? And remember that in your reply to my other comment, you admited that corporations aren't meritocracies, either. Which means you think the best of the best are going to go work for some startup, or for themselves. Yeah, they sure will be doing some cool projects with tons of resources there!
I think you have a misconception of what "the fittest" means. There is no direction to evolution, and the criteria for judging fitness changes as the environment (including other species) changes. So evolution isn't a progression at all, it is just change. Humans aren't more evolved than other animals.
Every animal has special traits. Asking why one animal developed a set of traits and another didn't just shows that you don't understand what evolution means. Wings are a great survival trait, why don't humans have wings? That's just as (in)valid a question as asking why ants don't have culture and language.
Ants didn't evolve those things because they are very well adapted to their niche. Intelligence, culture and language would provide them with no benefits. Only animals that are not particularly well adapted to their environment need to develop intelligence to survive. Intelligence takes a huge amount of resources that could be better spent on other adaptations. Your brain uses a huge percentage of your caloric intake.
There is nothing particularly unique about humans. Dolphins have culture and language, so do chimps, and probably grey parrots. When an animal is what I like to call a "scrounge-avore," that is, it eats whatever it can get its mouth around, it needs more felxibility, adaptability, and intelligence than something specialized for a particular food source and lifestyle.
I think a lot of this confusion comes from thinking that evolution is somehow directed, or that it leads from worse to better in some absolute sense. It isn't, and it doesn't. Things just happen. If they just happen to provide an advantage, they are selected for.
Nothing is unique about humans except for our unique combination of traits, and the degree to which some of those traits are expressed. The same could be said for any other animal on the planet.
LOL! Wish it worked like that, I'd love to find a meritocracy in industry. From what I see, it's who you know that determines how far you go. That whole "Work hard and you'll make more money!" idea is just a scam perpetuated by rich knobs so they can make more money off of you. Look at corporate CEOs. They run a company into the ground, fire all the employees and scuttle off with their "golden parachutes," only to get hired by their buddies on the board of a different scam-poration where they do it all again. I guess it is a meritocracy, those who are better at screwing over their fellow man get ahead.
People who believe in meritocracies are just holding on to the idea in order to prop up their sense of self worth, and to keep from having to feel empathy for those who are less lucky. "OOhh, look at me! I got where I am through hard work. Forget that daddy got me into an Ivy league school and my chums there got me a job I don't deserve and can't do well. I did it on my own! Anyone who isn't successful is obviously a lazy git who deserves nothing."
How about some references to back that up? I find no mention of Danaher being a contributor to the Democrats. In fact, the news I read said that the way these machines were configured favored Bush. Also, I recall reading quite a bit more about problems with Diebold than Danaher.
Danaher used to be known as Shooptronics, and I found searching on Shooptronics to be more relevant, as there are evidently several companies called Danaher that have nothing to do with voting. I suspect Faux News (or wherever you got this information) disengenously noted that "Danaher" donated to the Democrats, without noting that it was a different Danaher.
Verizon came out and said that "the NSA program" is highly classified and so it can't comment on it. BUT we are not giving them phone records. OK, what ARE you giving them?
They're giving the NSA little origami swans that, coincidentally, have copies of phone records printed on them.
Or perhaps they have the phone records in an FTP repository. They aren't giving them, the NSA is taking them.
Or, more likely, they aren't giving them at all, they are selling them.
It all depends on what your definition of "is" is.
Movie theaters don't make any money on the movie for the opening weekend and perhaps one or two weekends after that for a big blockbuster. Beyond that they take in a percentage of the box office, which gets larger as time goes by.
As for the rest of your comment, I remember when movie theaters didn't show ad shorts at the beginning of movies. I also remember the price of movies back then. If your argument held water, the price would have dropped when they started advertising.
Not everyone is a home user. Corporations far more than 26TB of backup tapes, you should see some of the tape libraries I've worked with. Whole rooms full of tapes with automated robots that load and unload them from banks of machines. As for backup speed, tape is not so slow anymore. LTO3 can do over 100MB/second.
No, you are both wrong, you have no idea how far down the rabbit hole we already are. These disks contain tiny nanomachines that embed themselves in your skin and change your DNA so that you will only bear Republican children. Of course, the Republicans aren't the Final Masters here, they are nothing more than patsies of the Rand Corporation, who are of course controlled by the Boy Scouts of America, who are under the dominion of the Reverse Vampires. We're through the looking glass, people.
When they first started playing real ads in addition to previews at movies, I took to screaming "Hey! We didn't pay to see ads here!" which usually drew applause from the rest of the audience. I don't do it anymore because no one seems to care now.
In a game, it would depend on how the ad was done. Seeing a can of Coke on a table? Absolutely ok. Seeing a big billboard for Coca Cola? Bearable. Having a Coca Cola "bug" in the corner of the screen constantly? Bordering on annoying. Being forced to watch an ad before I play? Unnacceptable in a game I paid for. Having the game stop every ten minutes for two minutes of ads? Rage... building... Urge to kill... RISING! Hehe, I have tivo, I don't even put up with that shit on TV anymore.
Plugging modules into the kernel without a recompile has been a feature of Linux since... nearly forever. And they have always been a security hole. But you can only insert modules into a running kernel as root, and you can only overwrite module files as root. If you are already root, what's the point, except maybe to make a rootkit undetectable or break out of a virtual machine (is that possible through a module?) or something. Still, some people compile the kernel without loadable module support for that very reason.
Oh god, I said I didn't believe the theory, but your counter-argument shows you don't know what I was saying at all. Listwashing is the process of differentiating good emails from bad. The spammer who attacked Bluetooth used this technique to determine who was using the service. But please note I was making a joke, poking fun at the tinfoil hat crowd, as I clearly stated
This wasn't their business model. They were a front for spammers, helping them listwash. The whole DDoS thing was just a way to get publicity, get more addresses and an excuse to get out before they were caught.
No, I don't really believe that, but who's to say?
Is a Mercanary a canary with the bottom half of a fish? Damn. If I was attacked by a flock of angry fish-birds I would sure think twice about spamming.
I couldn't agree more. I will usually sit through Geico commericals. The Fed Ex one just got me rolling on the floor when I first saw it. Then there is the
Hehehe, yeah, that fnord commercial is the funniest, too bad most people never see it.
My mom does this to me when I visit. "OOOhhh! Look at this one, a dancing baby elephant! Isn't that cute!" She and I have very different opinions about some things.
Catchall accounts are so much fun when a spammer decides to phonebook your site. Abby@yoursite.com, Abby.Adams@ yoursite.com, Abby.Alda@yoursite.com, Adelaide@yoursite.com, Adelaide.Adams@yoursite.com, and so forth, just send email to every-name-in-the-phonebook@yoursite.com and some are bound to get through, right? One of my clients got 40-50 thousand emails in one day this way.
The United Nations? Surely you jest. They are the least likely to get into a region and fix the infrastructure let alone have any effect on the socio-political structures in place. If anything they will exaggerate the problem.
I worked as a tech writer for a civil engineering firm called Lyon Associates in Honolulu that did a brisk business with the UN going in to regions and fixing the infrastructure. We built dams, water treatment plants, sewer systems, highways, hospitals, ports, and airports mostly. The UN does a lot of good around the world, despite what you hear from Faux News propaganda.
Completely off topic, one of the civil engineers there told me this joke: A mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, and a civil engineer are sitting around discussing God. They all agree he must have been an engineer, but what kind? The mechanical engineer says, "look at the human body, a marvel of mechanical perfection. Obviously God was a mechanical engineer." The electrical engineer says, "Mechanics? Bah! Look at the human brain and nervous system. God was an electrical angineer." The civil engineer says, "Okay, you want to talk about God's design of humans? Who else but a civil engineer would put the sewage outflow in the middle of the entertainment district?"
Slashdot Mirror
It's no cop out, it's a fact. That's why they call it "Random Mutation." Selection is directed by fitness criteria, yes, but these criteria are random, because the particular environment a species finds itself in is random and changing. For instance, a crustacean is not likely to evolve wings (in one simple step, anyway) because it lives underwater and the selection criteria for it are different than those of say, a tree dwelling mammal. If the environment were to change sufficiently, that crustacean might face selection criteria that favored wings. Whether it developed them or not still depends on random mutation, but at least it would be possible.
So humans developed the traits you think of as unique to us because we happened to be in a random environment that favored those traits and because random mutation produced those traits.
You aren't understanding what I said at all, and I'm beginning to suspect that others have pointed out the same ideas to you before, and you didn't understand them then, either. Not understanding an answer is not the same thing as not getting an answer.
Let me try again. Fitness criteria do not apply across the board to all species equally. What makes a human fit for a human's niche is not what makes an ant fit for an ant's niche. Different niches, different criteria.
I'll ask you a question again, why don't humans have wings?
Another thought, the best of the best don't care about making more money, they care about being the best, and go where there are the resources to allow them to be the best. Where else but NASA are aerospace engineers going to go to get access to the best resources and the coolest projects? And remember that in your reply to my other comment, you admited that corporations aren't meritocracies, either. Which means you think the best of the best are going to go work for some startup, or for themselves. Yeah, they sure will be doing some cool projects with tons of resources there!
I think you have a misconception of what "the fittest" means. There is no direction to evolution, and the criteria for judging fitness changes as the environment (including other species) changes. So evolution isn't a progression at all, it is just change. Humans aren't more evolved than other animals.
Every animal has special traits. Asking why one animal developed a set of traits and another didn't just shows that you don't understand what evolution means. Wings are a great survival trait, why don't humans have wings? That's just as (in)valid a question as asking why ants don't have culture and language.
Ants didn't evolve those things because they are very well adapted to their niche. Intelligence, culture and language would provide them with no benefits. Only animals that are not particularly well adapted to their environment need to develop intelligence to survive. Intelligence takes a huge amount of resources that could be better spent on other adaptations. Your brain uses a huge percentage of your caloric intake.
There is nothing particularly unique about humans. Dolphins have culture and language, so do chimps, and probably grey parrots. When an animal is what I like to call a "scrounge-avore," that is, it eats whatever it can get its mouth around, it needs more felxibility, adaptability, and intelligence than something specialized for a particular food source and lifestyle.
I think a lot of this confusion comes from thinking that evolution is somehow directed, or that it leads from worse to better in some absolute sense. It isn't, and it doesn't. Things just happen. If they just happen to provide an advantage, they are selected for.
Nothing is unique about humans except for our unique combination of traits, and the degree to which some of those traits are expressed. The same could be said for any other animal on the planet.
LOL! Wish it worked like that, I'd love to find a meritocracy in industry. From what I see, it's who you know that determines how far you go. That whole "Work hard and you'll make more money!" idea is just a scam perpetuated by rich knobs so they can make more money off of you. Look at corporate CEOs. They run a company into the ground, fire all the employees and scuttle off with their "golden parachutes," only to get hired by their buddies on the board of a different scam-poration where they do it all again. I guess it is a meritocracy, those who are better at screwing over their fellow man get ahead.
People who believe in meritocracies are just holding on to the idea in order to prop up their sense of self worth, and to keep from having to feel empathy for those who are less lucky. "OOhh, look at me! I got where I am through hard work. Forget that daddy got me into an Ivy league school and my chums there got me a job I don't deserve and can't do well. I did it on my own! Anyone who isn't successful is obviously a lazy git who deserves nothing."
How about some references to back that up? I find no mention of Danaher being a contributor to the Democrats. In fact, the news I read said that the way these machines were configured favored Bush. Also, I recall reading quite a bit more about problems with Diebold than Danaher.
Danaher used to be known as Shooptronics, and I found searching on Shooptronics to be more relevant, as there are evidently several companies called Danaher that have nothing to do with voting. I suspect Faux News (or wherever you got this information) disengenously noted that "Danaher" donated to the Democrats, without noting that it was a different Danaher.
Verizon came out and said that "the NSA program" is highly classified and so it can't comment on it. BUT we are not giving them phone records. OK, what ARE you giving them?
They're giving the NSA little origami swans that, coincidentally, have copies of phone records printed on them.
Or perhaps they have the phone records in an FTP repository. They aren't giving them, the NSA is taking them.
Or, more likely, they aren't giving them at all, they are selling them.
It all depends on what your definition of "is" is.
From what I've seen most of the world does things quarter or one tenth assed. I do things two thirds assed and I look good by comparison. ;-)
Movie theaters don't make any money on the movie for the opening weekend and perhaps one or two weekends after that for a big blockbuster. Beyond that they take in a percentage of the box office, which gets larger as time goes by.
As for the rest of your comment, I remember when movie theaters didn't show ad shorts at the beginning of movies. I also remember the price of movies back then. If your argument held water, the price would have dropped when they started advertising.
Not everyone is a home user. Corporations far more than 26TB of backup tapes, you should see some of the tape libraries I've worked with. Whole rooms full of tapes with automated robots that load and unload them from banks of machines. As for backup speed, tape is not so slow anymore. LTO3 can do over 100MB/second.
You know the dairy council is gonna sue you for defamation now, right?
I, for one, welcome our new yoctotech underlords.
Regulations could cause problems, therefore we should regulate regulations!
No, you are both wrong, you have no idea how far down the rabbit hole we already are. These disks contain tiny nanomachines that embed themselves in your skin and change your DNA so that you will only bear Republican children. Of course, the Republicans aren't the Final Masters here, they are nothing more than patsies of the Rand Corporation, who are of course controlled by the Boy Scouts of America, who are under the dominion of the Reverse Vampires. We're through the looking glass, people.
When they first started playing real ads in addition to previews at movies, I took to screaming "Hey! We didn't pay to see ads here!" which usually drew applause from the rest of the audience. I don't do it anymore because no one seems to care now.
In a game, it would depend on how the ad was done. Seeing a can of Coke on a table? Absolutely ok. Seeing a big billboard for Coca Cola? Bearable. Having a Coca Cola "bug" in the corner of the screen constantly? Bordering on annoying. Being forced to watch an ad before I play? Unnacceptable in a game I paid for. Having the game stop every ten minutes for two minutes of ads? Rage... building... Urge to kill... RISING! Hehe, I have tivo, I don't even put up with that shit on TV anymore.
Plugging modules into the kernel without a recompile has been a feature of Linux since... nearly forever. And they have always been a security hole. But you can only insert modules into a running kernel as root, and you can only overwrite module files as root. If you are already root, what's the point, except maybe to make a rootkit undetectable or break out of a virtual machine (is that possible through a module?) or something. Still, some people compile the kernel without loadable module support for that very reason.
Oh god, I said I didn't believe the theory, but your counter-argument shows you don't know what I was saying at all. Listwashing is the process of differentiating good emails from bad. The spammer who attacked Bluetooth used this technique to determine who was using the service. But please note I was making a joke, poking fun at the tinfoil hat crowd, as I clearly stated
It's real simple. They're not the only ones caught in this bind. There are too many people on this planet, and not enough useful to do.
Right. There's not enough useful to do.
He did the "take a shit/leave a shit" routine years ago. Can't remember all of it, only:
"I've gotta go take a shit."
"Yeah, well don't take one of mine, I've only got two left and I'm saving them for the weekend!"
This wasn't their business model. They were a front for spammers, helping them listwash. The whole DDoS thing was just a way to get publicity, get more addresses and an excuse to get out before they were caught.
No, I don't really believe that, but who's to say?
Is a Mercanary a canary with the bottom half of a fish? Damn. If I was attacked by a flock of angry fish-birds I would sure think twice about spamming.
I couldn't agree more. I will usually sit through Geico commericals. The Fed Ex one just got me rolling on the floor when I first saw it. Then there is the
Hehehe, yeah, that fnord commercial is the funniest, too bad most people never see it.
My mom does this to me when I visit. "OOOhhh! Look at this one, a dancing baby elephant! Isn't that cute!" She and I have very different opinions about some things.
Catchall accounts are so much fun when a spammer decides to phonebook your site. Abby@yoursite.com, Abby.Adams@ yoursite.com, Abby.Alda@yoursite.com, Adelaide@yoursite.com, Adelaide.Adams@yoursite.com, and so forth, just send email to every-name-in-the-phonebook@yoursite.com and some are bound to get through, right? One of my clients got 40-50 thousand emails in one day this way.
The United Nations? Surely you jest. They are the least likely to get into a region and fix the infrastructure let alone have any effect on the socio-political structures in place. If anything they will exaggerate the problem.
I worked as a tech writer for a civil engineering firm called Lyon Associates in Honolulu that did a brisk business with the UN going in to regions and fixing the infrastructure. We built dams, water treatment plants, sewer systems, highways, hospitals, ports, and airports mostly. The UN does a lot of good around the world, despite what you hear from Faux News propaganda.
Completely off topic, one of the civil engineers there told me this joke: A mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, and a civil engineer are sitting around discussing God. They all agree he must have been an engineer, but what kind? The mechanical engineer says, "look at the human body, a marvel of mechanical perfection. Obviously God was a mechanical engineer." The electrical engineer says, "Mechanics? Bah! Look at the human brain and nervous system. God was an electrical angineer." The civil engineer says, "Okay, you want to talk about God's design of humans? Who else but a civil engineer would put the sewage outflow in the middle of the entertainment district?"