I'm guessing you have no idea what "Parliament Hill" actually is (hint: our equivalent of the US Capitol Bldg). Do a little research next time and you won't get modded as "Flamebait".
You may be lazy, but I bet you can build a system yourself. A lot of gamers can't, as a group they don't neccessarily overlap 100% with "modders" or even "hardware savvy". And a lot have the $ to pay extra for the Dell sticker...
... in the same sense that if I broke into your house and vigorously cornholed you, but did it while wearing a clown suit, it would constitute "humour".
I'm still hiding behind a pair of armor plates suspended ahead of my eyes on metal frames...
Now THAT'S an advantage of glasses that people often forget. It's nice to always have a layer of tough polycarbonate (or whatever glasses are made from now) protecting your squishy, delicate visual system at all times.
...that he thinks HE looks smarter with glasses. I think I look *better* with glasses (possibly smarter too but who knows?), but I have worn glasses for so long I may just be used to them. And, I really like my frames:-)
What pissed me off about it (and the new Battlestar Galactica did this, too) is that the space scenes were filmed with, what appeared to be, a man holding a steadicam. That makes no damned sense. Why is someone filming this with a steadicam? Where are they standing?
I imagine this was done for purely aesthetic reasons - Joss & co. liked the way it looked, and thought we would too. I didn't find it odd or distracting at all. Then again, I don't consider "following" shots to be an attempt to simulate the viewer literally following the character. A closer idea might be the "ghost mode" from a game like Counterstrike - you are viewing the action from a dynamic but disembodied point in space.
Yeah, and the Iraqis raped my sister, on her way to school! Oh... wait, I don't have a sister, it was some other little girl, in Okinawa, and it was US soldiers not Iraqis. Sorry, I got confused for a sec there...
I see Black Parrot's reply covers these points (perhaps his bedtime is later than mine:-) but to reiterate:
If one wants precedence for what a similar genetic makeup means, one should look at what humans have created - it demonstrates a common designer, not a common ancestor.
Car features aren't homologous in the same way genes are, and don't have "ancestors". You can't chart specific mutations between models to show that a Civic is descended from an Accord - because it's not. They DO have a common creator (in the larger sense, ie. humans) and there's no way for cars to produce more cars. Also in this case, we have DIRECT proof of "Creation" - we *know* humans make cars in car factories and can go watch it happen right now if we like. If a completely new species were created in Times Square in a flash of light, with eyewitnesses, that'd be a similar type of proof for Creation.
And how, exactly, would one falsify the claim that all living things share a common ancestor? Normally falsifiability requires a repeatable, empirical experiment.
Actually, an excellent way to refute common ancestry would be to discover an organism with genes completely unrelated to those of any other living thing we've studied. I'm not talking "highly divergent" (as many extremophilic bacteria can often be), but "every gene shares no significant homology to anything else" type difference. That'd be an earthshattering discovery and would certainly force biologists to rethink the idea of common ancestry.
Since you bring creation/intelligent design into the argument, I do hasten to add that even such a discovery would not be evidence for creation by God. It would be evidence of something extremely unlikely: either the organism's ancestors developed in complete isolation from the entire rest of the biosphere for billions of years (this is difficult for bacteria, they have a tendency to get everywhere, and share genes pretty promiscuously), or it came from outer space (or maybe something else, but it wouldn't automatically prove Creation).
I know I'm unlikely to convince you of the validity of evolutionary theory here, but I thought I'd let you know that we (the biologists of the world) aren't just taking this thing on some kind of faith. We have standards of proof, and evolution continues to to live up to those standards, time and time again. When we interpret new findings in the light of evolution, and disregard a possible "creationist" explanation, it's not because we're part of a big conspiracy, or that we want to convert everyone to atheism. It's because we have countless pieces of solid evidence telling us that evolution is a valid theory, but we have none which supports creation by God. I personally know a number of scientists who believe in God, but they would be the first to tell you that for them, that's a separate matter from science - it's faith and requires no proof to them except what they feel.
Evolution is the same. This both means changes in allele frequencies over time (proven), and common ancestry of all living things (unproven)....However, the claim of common ancestry predicts nothing - and that was what I was referring to.
Actually, common ancestry predicts that when we discover a new species (whether it be goat or bacterium), we should find that if we sequence its DNA, it shares a certain degree of similarity to that of known organisms. There are genes in bacteria, plants and fungi which are strikingly homologous to those in mammals, including humans. When we sequence genes from known species, we find that they are in fact similar to their relatives (grouped together by visible traits - phenotypic similarities). The evolutionary trees constructed from gene sequence mirror those constructed by observing phenotypes.
Your "eyes" analogy is flawed because there is no evidence of any glow-producing mechanism in modern human eyes (ok, I know it's just an amusing analogy but it does not accurately describe what you're arguing against). Religion H would be making the claim of past glowing-eye ability based solely on conservation of an unrelated trait (greenness), with nothing to back up the claim. If scientists discovered a human gene for a glowing protein, which was no longer functional but had a promoter similar to those of genes expressed in the eye, that would be evidence. Not conclusive to be sure, but it would provide some support for the glowing-eye theory.
Evolution is not a religion, it is a scientific theory. The difference is falsifiability (a prediction must be made which it is theoretically possible to disprove), and the requirement of testable evidence to back up the theory. An example of an untestable theory would be "Angels are all around us all the time, but they're invisible and can't be detected by any physical methods". There's no way I could disprove that, because the claim itself specifically excludes any possibility of an experiment to test its validity. However, macroevolutionary theory makes numerous predictions about the relatedness of living things, which are all testable and falsifiable using scientific methods. And relatedness ultimately goes back to a common ancestor.
Walking on only two legs is great, but perhaps more effort should be spent on matters such as irreducible complexity.
Complexity is not irreducible, as long as you don't fall too far into the "watch/Boeing 747" analogy. Unlike a watch or a 747, a biological system is flexible and components can interact with sub-optimal degrees of efficiency. Since evolution acts on all components of the system (all genes are subject to random mutation), the whole system can change slowly over time until it seems that if you yank out one component, it will cease to function. The trick is realizing that the components didn't (necessarily) appear "suddenly", but were adapted from other functions or modes of control, and we only see the results that worked, because the ones that didn't, were selected against and disappeared.
Evolution that teaches common ancestry of all living things is a theory that explains everything and predicts nothing.
Not strictly true. It predicts many things, especially in the short term and in limited, controlled experiments. Take a population of bacteria, some of which have an antibiotic-resistance gene, and add the antibiotic to their medium (even at sub-lethal concentration). You'll see the percentage of bacteria with the resistance gene increase, I guarantee it. At its most basic level, that's all evolution really is - changes in gene frequency over time (including the appearance of new genes through mutation).
Evolutionary theory can't prophetically predict future speciation or adaptation, because there are so many random or chaotic factors in play, namely unpredictable environmental changes and the inherent randomness of mutation. If a mutation doesn't arise by chance, it can't be selected for, no matter how advantageous it would be for that organism.
I seriously doubt that $20 will be a price point for decent digital cameras any time soon. There are extremely trashy point-and-shoot film cameras for that now, but they are truly garbage - I wouldn't even keep one in my glove box to take pictures of accidents. I suspect that a decent consumer camera will come down to $200 CD (maybe $125-150 US) in the near future, but why go lower when consumers will pay that much, and will view cheap goods with suspicion?
Not all porn is John Hugecock and Jane Boobjob having violent sex with a plunger up her ass.
God you're ignorant. Jane Boobjob said in her recent AVN interview that she considers the plunger scene "her best work". And I would hardly characterize that scene as "violent", it was more... assertive.
Funny thing is, it seems like these dialer scams missed the boat. They should have come out in the early 1990s, when modems where the hot tech item, and no phone companies (much less victims) were at all ready to deal with something like this.
Yeah, but the "hot tech item" is also more likely to be owned by expert users. Nowadays, "lowly" modem users are often families and casual users with little technical knowledge. Which group will be easier to prey upon via technological means? They didn't miss the boat, the scam merely wasn't worth doing until they could target the right demographic.
... how big was 2fort4 anyway? Did you design a 250 mile map to test maximum range? I did, but when I loaded it, for some reason the rail projectiles moved very sloooowly and I got bored waiting for them to hit the other end.
Normally, I'm far from being Ayn Rand's biggest fan, or hell, a fan at all, but I did think that quote was relevant here. And she was correct, the most benign way of seeing it is that laws are how the gov't guides societal development, and only if you break a law can the police step in to correct your behaviour and/or protect others from you. The less benign way of seeing it is that if the gov't (or an individual with legal power) doesn't like you, they can always find some law you've broken and use it as a pretext to harrass or imprison you. The second case depends on selective enforcement of the law, which unfortunately happens far too often even in "free" societies with the Rule of Law in place.
The government reserves the right to know who exactly is in the country. You're a citizen, you have certain responsibilities to the state if you don't want to get arrested - or you're an alien, and you have even more if you don't want to get evicted.
They get to know when we pay our taxes and fill out the census. There's no reason why I should be compelled to identify myself to a police officer any time I'm walking down the street. "Reasonable suspicion" is a pretty weak argument too - it could be anything from me walking like a drunk, to me being an ethnic group that the cop doesn't like. If they think I'm a criminal, they should arrest me (and be prepared for a wrongful arrest lawsuit if the reasons were weak). Goes for "aliens" too, after all, how would the officer know I'm a citizen or not without asking who I am? Ergo, unless you want to set up police checkpoints on street corners and ask EVERYONE to identify themselves, you have yet another law which can be used capriciously to harass (some) innocent citizens.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." - Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"
Also, a number of Philip K. Dick's books addressed the power of the drug war to instantly criminalize somebody, a power which oculd be used selectively against dissenters and political troublemakers. This is another example of a law which can be used selectively - the police choose who to ask, thus biasing the pool of possible arrestees. Demanding identification under duress - from people you know will be unwilling to provide it - has the benefit that it's all above board, and the ensuing arrests are in the interests of "security".
"One's identity is, by definition, unique; yet it is, in another sense, a universal characteristic," writes Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority. "Answering a request to disclose a name is likely to be so insignificant in the scheme of things as to be incriminating only in unusual circumstances."
Incriminating, no, but it could be intimidating. This is, IMO, dangerously close to saying "if you're innocent, you should have nothing to hide".
"Personally, I think it is ethical to terraform a planet which is not presently inhabited (by life of any kind.) Harm is, even in the most general sense, something you do to living things, so bringing life to a dead planet is harmless by definition."
Ann Clayborne would not like you, no she wouldn't...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing you have no idea what "Parliament Hill" actually is (hint: our equivalent of the US Capitol Bldg). Do a little research next time and you won't get modded as "Flamebait".
You may be lazy, but I bet you can build a system yourself. A lot of gamers can't, as a group they don't neccessarily overlap 100% with "modders" or even "hardware savvy". And a lot have the $ to pay extra for the Dell sticker...
You mean:
.mog, half .mpg, half .ogg, I'm a Slashdotter's best friend."
"I'm a
(yes, I know you were quoting Spaceballs...)
... in the same sense that if I broke into your house and vigorously cornholed you, but did it while wearing a clown suit, it would constitute "humour".
Even rudimentary filters can make a huge difference to water quality in the developing world. Just 8 layers of sari cloth reduced cholera cases by HALF. And even the lowest-tech of high-tech filtration systems would improve on that. The other guy's right though, this isn't neccessarily "cheap".
I'm still hiding behind a pair of armor plates suspended ahead of my eyes on metal frames...
Now THAT'S an advantage of glasses that people often forget. It's nice to always have a layer of tough polycarbonate (or whatever glasses are made from now) protecting your squishy, delicate visual system at all times.
...that he thinks HE looks smarter with glasses. I think I look *better* with glasses (possibly smarter too but who knows?), but I have worn glasses for so long I may just be used to them. And, I really like my frames :-)
What pissed me off about it (and the new Battlestar Galactica did this, too) is that the space scenes were filmed with, what appeared to be, a man holding a steadicam. That makes no damned sense. Why is someone filming this with a steadicam? Where are they standing?
I imagine this was done for purely aesthetic reasons - Joss & co. liked the way it looked, and thought we would too. I didn't find it odd or distracting at all. Then again, I don't consider "following" shots to be an attempt to simulate the viewer literally following the character. A closer idea might be the "ghost mode" from a game like Counterstrike - you are viewing the action from a dynamic but disembodied point in space.
Yeah, and the Iraqis raped my sister, on her way to school! Oh... wait, I don't have a sister, it was some other little girl, in Okinawa, and it was US soldiers not Iraqis. Sorry, I got confused for a sec there...
I see Black Parrot's reply covers these points (perhaps his bedtime is later than mine :-) but to reiterate:
If one wants precedence for what a similar genetic makeup means, one should look at what humans have created - it demonstrates a common designer, not a common ancestor.
Car features aren't homologous in the same way genes are, and don't have "ancestors". You can't chart specific mutations between models to show that a Civic is descended from an Accord - because it's not. They DO have a common creator (in the larger sense, ie. humans) and there's no way for cars to produce more cars. Also in this case, we have DIRECT proof of "Creation" - we *know* humans make cars in car factories and can go watch it happen right now if we like. If a completely new species were created in Times Square in a flash of light, with eyewitnesses, that'd be a similar type of proof for Creation.
And how, exactly, would one falsify the claim that all living things share a common ancestor? Normally falsifiability requires a repeatable, empirical experiment.
Actually, an excellent way to refute common ancestry would be to discover an organism with genes completely unrelated to those of any other living thing we've studied. I'm not talking "highly divergent" (as many extremophilic bacteria can often be), but "every gene shares no significant homology to anything else" type difference. That'd be an earthshattering discovery and would certainly force biologists to rethink the idea of common ancestry.
Since you bring creation/intelligent design into the argument, I do hasten to add that even such a discovery would not be evidence for creation by God. It would be evidence of something extremely unlikely: either the organism's ancestors developed in complete isolation from the entire rest of the biosphere for billions of years (this is difficult for bacteria, they have a tendency to get everywhere, and share genes pretty promiscuously), or it came from outer space (or maybe something else, but it wouldn't automatically prove Creation).
I know I'm unlikely to convince you of the validity of evolutionary theory here, but I thought I'd let you know that we (the biologists of the world) aren't just taking this thing on some kind of faith. We have standards of proof, and evolution continues to to live up to those standards, time and time again. When we interpret new findings in the light of evolution, and disregard a possible "creationist" explanation, it's not because we're part of a big conspiracy, or that we want to convert everyone to atheism. It's because we have countless pieces of solid evidence telling us that evolution is a valid theory, but we have none which supports creation by God. I personally know a number of scientists who believe in God, but they would be the first to tell you that for them, that's a separate matter from science - it's faith and requires no proof to them except what they feel.
Evolution is the same. This both means changes in allele frequencies over time (proven), and common ancestry of all living things (unproven). ...However, the claim of common ancestry predicts nothing - and that was what I was referring to.
Actually, common ancestry predicts that when we discover a new species (whether it be goat or bacterium), we should find that if we sequence its DNA, it shares a certain degree of similarity to that of known organisms. There are genes in bacteria, plants and fungi which are strikingly homologous to those in mammals, including humans. When we sequence genes from known species, we find that they are in fact similar to their relatives (grouped together by visible traits - phenotypic similarities). The evolutionary trees constructed from gene sequence mirror those constructed by observing phenotypes.
Your "eyes" analogy is flawed because there is no evidence of any glow-producing mechanism in modern human eyes (ok, I know it's just an amusing analogy but it does not accurately describe what you're arguing against). Religion H would be making the claim of past glowing-eye ability based solely on conservation of an unrelated trait (greenness), with nothing to back up the claim. If scientists discovered a human gene for a glowing protein, which was no longer functional but had a promoter similar to those of genes expressed in the eye, that would be evidence. Not conclusive to be sure, but it would provide some support for the glowing-eye theory.
Evolution is not a religion, it is a scientific theory. The difference is falsifiability (a prediction must be made which it is theoretically possible to disprove), and the requirement of testable evidence to back up the theory. An example of an untestable theory would be "Angels are all around us all the time, but they're invisible and can't be detected by any physical methods". There's no way I could disprove that, because the claim itself specifically excludes any possibility of an experiment to test its validity. However, macroevolutionary theory makes numerous predictions about the relatedness of living things, which are all testable and falsifiable using scientific methods. And relatedness ultimately goes back to a common ancestor.
Walking on only two legs is great, but perhaps more effort should be spent on matters such as irreducible complexity.
Complexity is not irreducible, as long as you don't fall too far into the "watch/Boeing 747" analogy. Unlike a watch or a 747, a biological system is flexible and components can interact with sub-optimal degrees of efficiency. Since evolution acts on all components of the system (all genes are subject to random mutation), the whole system can change slowly over time until it seems that if you yank out one component, it will cease to function. The trick is realizing that the components didn't (necessarily) appear "suddenly", but were adapted from other functions or modes of control, and we only see the results that worked, because the ones that didn't, were selected against and disappeared.
Evolution that teaches common ancestry of all living things is a theory that explains everything and predicts nothing.
Not strictly true. It predicts many things, especially in the short term and in limited, controlled experiments. Take a population of bacteria, some of which have an antibiotic-resistance gene, and add the antibiotic to their medium (even at sub-lethal concentration). You'll see the percentage of bacteria with the resistance gene increase, I guarantee it. At its most basic level, that's all evolution really is - changes in gene frequency over time (including the appearance of new genes through mutation).
Evolutionary theory can't prophetically predict future speciation or adaptation, because there are so many random or chaotic factors in play, namely unpredictable environmental changes and the inherent randomness of mutation. If a mutation doesn't arise by chance, it can't be selected for, no matter how advantageous it would be for that organism.
I was with you up until "cat-girl".
$20
I seriously doubt that $20 will be a price point for decent digital cameras any time soon. There are extremely trashy point-and-shoot film cameras for that now, but they are truly garbage - I wouldn't even keep one in my glove box to take pictures of accidents. I suspect that a decent consumer camera will come down to $200 CD (maybe $125-150 US) in the near future, but why go lower when consumers will pay that much, and will view cheap goods with suspicion?
Not all porn is John Hugecock and Jane Boobjob having violent sex with a plunger up her ass.
God you're ignorant. Jane Boobjob said in her recent AVN interview that she considers the plunger scene "her best work". And I would hardly characterize that scene as "violent", it was more... assertive.
Funny thing is, it seems like these dialer scams missed the boat. They should have come out in the early 1990s, when modems where the hot tech item, and no phone companies (much less victims) were at all ready to deal with something like this.
Yeah, but the "hot tech item" is also more likely to be owned by expert users. Nowadays, "lowly" modem users are often families and casual users with little technical knowledge. Which group will be easier to prey upon via technological means? They didn't miss the boat, the scam merely wasn't worth doing until they could target the right demographic.
... how big was 2fort4 anyway? Did you design a 250 mile map to test maximum range? I did, but when I loaded it, for some reason the rail projectiles moved very sloooowly and I got bored waiting for them to hit the other end.
Hmm... half the time, the "foes" in places like Haiti and liberia are *sponsored by* the US. Not sure how well US weapons will protect against that...
Normally, I'm far from being Ayn Rand's biggest fan, or hell, a fan at all, but I did think that quote was relevant here. And she was correct, the most benign way of seeing it is that laws are how the gov't guides societal development, and only if you break a law can the police step in to correct your behaviour and/or protect others from you. The less benign way of seeing it is that if the gov't (or an individual with legal power) doesn't like you, they can always find some law you've broken and use it as a pretext to harrass or imprison you. The second case depends on selective enforcement of the law, which unfortunately happens far too often even in "free" societies with the Rule of Law in place.
The government reserves the right to know who exactly is in the country. You're a citizen, you have certain responsibilities to the state if you don't want to get arrested - or you're an alien, and you have even more if you don't want to get evicted.
They get to know when we pay our taxes and fill out the census. There's no reason why I should be compelled to identify myself to a police officer any time I'm walking down the street. "Reasonable suspicion" is a pretty weak argument too - it could be anything from me walking like a drunk, to me being an ethnic group that the cop doesn't like. If they think I'm a criminal, they should arrest me (and be prepared for a wrongful arrest lawsuit if the reasons were weak). Goes for "aliens" too, after all, how would the officer know I'm a citizen or not without asking who I am? Ergo, unless you want to set up police checkpoints on street corners and ask EVERYONE to identify themselves, you have yet another law which can be used capriciously to harass (some) innocent citizens.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."
- Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"
Also, a number of Philip K. Dick's books addressed the power of the drug war to instantly criminalize somebody, a power which oculd be used selectively against dissenters and political troublemakers. This is another example of a law which can be used selectively - the police choose who to ask, thus biasing the pool of possible arrestees. Demanding identification under duress - from people you know will be unwilling to provide it - has the benefit that it's all above board, and the ensuing arrests are in the interests of "security".
"One's identity is, by definition, unique; yet it is, in another sense, a universal characteristic," writes Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority. "Answering a request to disclose a name is likely to be so insignificant in the scheme of things as to be incriminating only in unusual circumstances."
Incriminating, no, but it could be intimidating. This is, IMO, dangerously close to saying "if you're innocent, you should have nothing to hide".
The AC is right. Eugenics does NOT mean "sterilizing single mothers and the mentally handicapped". The dictionary definition is:
a science that deals with the improvement (as by control of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed
That is all it says.
"Purposefully altering humans/human physiology does not yet have a word accosiated with it, I think."
I believe the word is "Eugenics".
"Personally, I think it is ethical to terraform a planet which is not presently inhabited (by life of any kind.) Harm is, even in the most general sense, something you do to living things, so bringing life to a dead planet is harmless by definition."
Ann Clayborne would not like you, no she wouldn't...