I believe the idea is more like, the NSTA is saying "either everything with the NSTA's name on it will be good science, or there will be nothing from the NSTA at all".
Instead of getting mostly science with a bit of creationism thrown it, now it's no science at all.
If we go with the second option, then this is only a problem for the people of Kansas. If we go with the first option though, then in addition to being a problem for the people of Kansas then this is a problem for the NSTA, because the NSTA has placed their material support and endorsement on bad science. If the NSTA endorses bad science, this is a direct bad reflection on their reputation and authority. The NSTA is in the end a private organization, and they have a reasonable basis here on which to choose the option which acts in their own interests, over the option which is wholly and unconditionally altruistic toward the people of Kansas.
Good job denying the young people a science education and punishing the people not responsible.
In the end, the voters are the ones responsible. The Kansas school board is elected directly. If the voters of Kansas wish to keep their children from science education this is hardly the NSTA's fault.
For every action, there will be an equal and opposite reaction. This goes for business ethics just as much as it goes for momentum.
Unfortunately companies don't seem to be learning the right lesson about what that opposite reaction is. I assume, right, that with your sig you're trying to point out that if companies don't like people complaining about their actions on the internet, then the correct response would be to stop taking actions worthy of complaining about? No, according to Forbes, the correct response is:
BASH BACK. If you get attacked, dig up dirt on your assailant and feed it to sympathetic bloggers. Discredit him.
This might have meant something coming from some other source, but Forbes is hardly the height of objective and level-headed reporting itself.
I mean, if nothing else, look at this article. This article is essentially made up entirely of brand-bashing, personal attacks, and smear campaign, and then it goes on to complain about "brand-bashing, personal attacks, and smear campaigns". Hmm.
But iPods and PSPs can only be used as media storage/retrieval devices, right? Last I heard you can't use an external storage device like the iPod or the PSP as a memory card or a replacement for the XBox HD.
So it seems to me like the XBox 360 is only open in a very limited sense.
But if you charge them for it instead, then you've gotten a tiny amount of cash, they've lost (~)months of their savings, and they STILL lack the expertise to use it!
Which in my experience, really, is exactly what happens in the first world...
If he can actually do that. I mean, he's made the offer, you make this game I give $10,000 to charity. I kind of wonder if he actually has the legal ability to just go "ha ha only kidding" at this point and back out.
I mean, the feeble "it's satire... really" identifier in the title doesn't change the fact that what follows is several pages of Mr. Thompson very personally fantasizing about violently killing his enemies. And I think the feeble attempts to pretend he was writing satire would mean even less from a legal perspective. Is "gotcha... it was just a joke!" a recognized defense in contract law?
I mean, I am not a lawyer, but then, Jack Thompson appears to only be a lawyer in the most superficial sense. So I would be very curious to see whether Thompson has stumbled into some kind of self-constructed legal trap by putting the offer to donate to charity into his work of "satire". If you post a public notice promising to donate $10,000 to charity if someone does thing X, are you in any way committing to this? Like, those public notices saying "$1000 reward for information leading to the capture of the kidnapper of Media Heartthrob". Are those public notices legally binding to the person who put them up? If so, I'd be very, very interested to see what happens if that group of GTA modders, or the people working on the sprite flash game, actually complete something. Since both of those games entered production before Thompson issued his retraction, is there any chance they could go to court and try to claim Thompson's offer legally binding or his retraction legally invalid?
The reason the evolution theory is never accepted by the creationists is because of the sheer impossibility. The best explanation of the sheer chance involved I ever saw was by Michael Cremo. Check the link here http://www.mcremo.com/writing.html. Personally, I am convinced.
The "impossibility" and "sheer chance" thing flogged by creationist is based on a drastic misunderstanding of evolutionary theory; the version of evolutionary theory such statistical arguments are invariably based on is one which no one in the scientific community has ever advocated. In other words, it is a straw man. The link you offer, based on ancient and extremely deceptive analyses by Fred Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, is no exception.
If you wish to sling links, here is a simple attempt to explain the problem with the "chance" argument, here is a more in-depth one which addresses Mr. Hoyle specifically. The short version is, the thing which Hoyle and Wickramasinghe debunk is not evolution. The thing which all those silly improbable-looking numbers in Mr. Cremo's link are derived from is not actual evolutionary theory. It's just a straw man.
Perhaps you should make an effort to actually understand these things yourself instead of blindly accepting the authority of creationists.
The only "controversy" on the subject of the evolution of the eye is that which creationists have attempted to manufacture. Do you have specific problems with any of the published research on this subject since 1994? If not, then what is the problem, exactly?
Or perhaps what you mean by "controversy" is that scientists are still researching the specifics of the mechanisms by which the eye might have evolved, and thus we have multiple papers on the subject? If so, I think you are mischaracterizing as "controversy" what scientists would call "discussion".
For example, you'd expect to see animals with 1 arm, 2 arms, 3 arms, 10 arms, no arms, half an arm, round arms, and so on for every part of the body while evolution is fine tuning this stuff.
Why on earth would you expect this? Perhaps you just have strange expectations.
And last I checked, the arthropod phylum even today offers a wide variation among its members in number of legs. If you are interested in the evolutionary paths that lead to a specific number of limbs, perhaps the phylogeny of the arthropods would be a good place to start looking?
One thing I can say with certainty is to keep an open mind. Evolutionary fanatics clinging to this one theory need to realize how history repeats itself. Our beliefs can and have been turned on their head surprisingly in the past. The world is round.
So let us say someone comes in and says that we should, with certainty, keep an open mind about the idea that maybe the earth is flat after all. "Round earth" fanatics clinging to the theory that the earth is sort of roundish need to realize how history repeats itself; our beliefs can and have been turned on their head surprisingly in the past. Yes, of course all available, non-discredited data and theory we have with which to explain the world around us suggests the earth is a slightly lumpy sphere. But maybe we've just fundamentally misunderstood things about the shape of the earth; there could be possibilities we haven't considered yet.
Do we bother to give this person the time of day?
Or do we just say, screw that, we're going to stay with the round earth theory-- as well as the theory of evolution-- because it explains all the data we have, and no competing theories for that data exist.
Saying "maybe your theory is wrong" is effectively meaningless to someone working in the field of science unless you can immediately answer the question "then what is right?". Theories aren't overturned by "I don't like that theory, give me another". They're overturned only by alternate theories. And no, half a post on slashdot about how maybe space is a looping 3-manifold, and the space photos showing a round earth are an elaborate optical illusion, and we can figure out the details of why this is some other time, don't mean you have an alternate theory. If you cannot form your ideas in terms of falsifiable, rigorously defined models with predictive power, you do not have anything scientists can do anything with.
Microsoft is in talks to combine with AOL. Similarly, Google is in talks with AOL, possibly to buy some kind of stake in AOL just to keep Microsoft from getting it. Nothing is yet finalized. Microsoft may combine with AOL, but it's not certain yet. Microsoft IM has combined with Yahoo Messenger; maybe that's what you're thinking of.
Just because Google has bought the main Gaim developer does not mean work on Gaim will terminate. For one thing, there is no reason why the Gaim developer cannot continue work on Gaim while working for Google. Since Google has shown willingness to some degree to finance open source projects, it is quite likely this is exactly what they want him to do. Most likely what we will see is that Gaim will have support for GTalk added to it. For another thing, Gaim is open source, so even if the main developer quit all work on Gaim, Gaim will continue to be available and continue to proceed in development.
The story was probably submitted before any of that stuff had become known to the public. If you were watching other sites during the press conference, the news about the iPod Video and its specs managed to get out and around the internet what must have been a good 20 minutes before Apple updated their website.
The apple website is only loading itermittently, but I'm pretty sure I saw on there that they have "for the birds".
Something I'm seriously wondering about is, will we start to see tv companies doing video podcasts? Like, the daily show. They already put segments from their show up on their website as video. At this point it wouldn't be so surprising to see them start putting these into some kind of iPod-friendly format, or almost even just putting up entire episodes and financing this by leaving the commercials in.
The entire idea is that the U.S. going back on its years-old promise to turn DNS over to ICANN is being seen, by itself, as abusing its position as internet governor.
I've been suggesting for years that "dark matter" is an unnecessary idea which only exists as a transitional kludge until we can uncover some more fundamental error in the theory of gravity, like planetary epicycles or what not. I have made this suggestion both on the internet and in person to some people I hang around with from my college's physics department.
While generally people have not agreed with me, I have never encountered what I would call "dogmatic" resistence; I never felt that people were upset at my suggestion or disrespected my opinion that this was a possibility.
Perhaps the reason why you have met with poor results expressing the same idea have more to do with the way in which you expressed the idea?
I find a lot of people seem to believe that if people disagree with them, it is automatically because of dogmatic resistence. Not necessarily, maybe it's just because you've not made your case very well, or because there are other factors to the discussion you aren't considering (for example, that asking a physicist to abandon the idea of dark matter would-- in the absence of a better explanation for anomolies in gravitational theory-- effectively require them to accept the idea that the galaxy is the wrong shape for no reason whatsoever).
The article summary has an odd little sentence suddenly announcing that one of the issues relevant to Google's lobbying is the U.S. "shielding" "companies" from "multilateralism". But the article doesn't mention the U.N. at all, or anything related to them or the EU or the DNS internationalization dispute, and while Google News has lots of stories about Google hiring this lobbyist, searches for "google U.N." or "google EU" turn up nothing whatsoever relevant. The only specific thing Google says in the linked article about their motivations in hiring this lobbyist:
"Google believes in protecting copyrights while maintaining strong, viable fair use rights in this digital age," McLaughlin wrote.
Looks like somebody was trying to use the slashdot front page as a soapbox for their belief that evil "multilateralism" is something U.S. companies need to be "shielded" from, and then subtly imply that Google agrees with them?
Interesting, because it seems to me that the only thing the U.S. government is "shielding" from the international community is its own power. It also seems to me that if instead of demanding government control over the root servers and touching off this spat with the EU/UN, the Administration had just handed control of the DNS servers over to ICANN like it originally promised, U.S. companies would be the primary beneficiaries. ICANN is certainly an entity with problems, but right now it is nothing if not an industry body.
Yeah OK Microsoft is the Evil empire, but remember the Evil Empire brought you Home PC's Free Internet browsers, Human Friendly Operating systems etc..
Microsoft would certainly like you to think so.
However anyone who was actually around when these things first appeared remember things more like this:
People other than Microsoft brought us home PCs, free internet browsers, human friendly operating systems etc; and then Microsoft hijacked these things, and made it impossible for anyone else to become powerful in those markets.
I am quite confident that if Microsoft ever does defeat google, ten years later people will be ardently insisting Microsoft invented the search engine.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the idea is more like, the NSTA is saying "either everything with the NSTA's name on it will be good science, or there will be nothing from the NSTA at all".
Instead of getting mostly science with a bit of creationism thrown it, now it's no science at all.
If we go with the second option, then this is only a problem for the people of Kansas. If we go with the first option though, then in addition to being a problem for the people of Kansas then this is a problem for the NSTA, because the NSTA has placed their material support and endorsement on bad science. If the NSTA endorses bad science, this is a direct bad reflection on their reputation and authority. The NSTA is in the end a private organization, and they have a reasonable basis here on which to choose the option which acts in their own interests, over the option which is wholly and unconditionally altruistic toward the people of Kansas.
Good job denying the young people a science education and punishing the people not responsible.
In the end, the voters are the ones responsible. The Kansas school board is elected directly. If the voters of Kansas wish to keep their children from science education this is hardly the NSTA's fault.
Neat, thanks.
I don't know about anyone else. But give me the opportunity to buy Get Smart episodes on the internet*, and I will take it.
* As long as it doesn't require Windows to do so.
Unfortunately companies don't seem to be learning the right lesson about what that opposite reaction is. I assume, right, that with your sig you're trying to point out that if companies don't like people complaining about their actions on the internet, then the correct response would be to stop taking actions worthy of complaining about? No, according to Forbes, the correct response is:Uhm.
This might have meant something coming from some other source, but Forbes is hardly the height of objective and level-headed reporting itself.
I mean, if nothing else, look at this article. This article is essentially made up entirely of brand-bashing, personal attacks, and smear campaign, and then it goes on to complain about "brand-bashing, personal attacks, and smear campaigns". Hmm.
But iPods and PSPs can only be used as media storage/retrieval devices, right? Last I heard you can't use an external storage device like the iPod or the PSP as a memory card or a replacement for the XBox HD.
So it seems to me like the XBox 360 is only open in a very limited sense.
But if you charge them for it instead, then you've gotten a tiny amount of cash, they've lost (~)months of their savings, and they STILL lack the expertise to use it!
Which in my experience, really, is exactly what happens in the first world...
If he can actually do that. I mean, he's made the offer, you make this game I give $10,000 to charity. I kind of wonder if he actually has the legal ability to just go "ha ha only kidding" at this point and back out.
I mean, the feeble "it's satire... really" identifier in the title doesn't change the fact that what follows is several pages of Mr. Thompson very personally fantasizing about violently killing his enemies. And I think the feeble attempts to pretend he was writing satire would mean even less from a legal perspective. Is "gotcha... it was just a joke!" a recognized defense in contract law?
I mean, I am not a lawyer, but then, Jack Thompson appears to only be a lawyer in the most superficial sense. So I would be very curious to see whether Thompson has stumbled into some kind of self-constructed legal trap by putting the offer to donate to charity into his work of "satire". If you post a public notice promising to donate $10,000 to charity if someone does thing X, are you in any way committing to this? Like, those public notices saying "$1000 reward for information leading to the capture of the kidnapper of Media Heartthrob". Are those public notices legally binding to the person who put them up? If so, I'd be very, very interested to see what happens if that group of GTA modders, or the people working on the sprite flash game, actually complete something. Since both of those games entered production before Thompson issued his retraction, is there any chance they could go to court and try to claim Thompson's offer legally binding or his retraction legally invalid?
So between this and the PSP's already-announced "virtual boy" addon, do you think we're starting to see a trend here?
Whole thing about stopped clocks being right twice a day and all that, I guess.
And have you ever had a damaged/dirty VCR "eat" your tape? Impossible with DVDs.
With Microsoft, all things are possible.
Oct. 14 is World Standards Day except in the United States, where it is observed on October 17
The reason the evolution theory is never accepted by the creationists is because of the sheer impossibility. The best explanation of the sheer chance involved I ever saw was by Michael Cremo. Check the link here http://www.mcremo.com/writing.html. Personally, I am convinced.
The "impossibility" and "sheer chance" thing flogged by creationist is based on a drastic misunderstanding of evolutionary theory; the version of evolutionary theory such statistical arguments are invariably based on is one which no one in the scientific community has ever advocated. In other words, it is a straw man. The link you offer, based on ancient and extremely deceptive analyses by Fred Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, is no exception.
If you wish to sling links, here is a simple attempt to explain the problem with the "chance" argument, here is a more in-depth one which addresses Mr. Hoyle specifically. The short version is, the thing which Hoyle and Wickramasinghe debunk is not evolution. The thing which all those silly improbable-looking numbers in Mr. Cremo's link are derived from is not actual evolutionary theory. It's just a straw man.
Perhaps you should make an effort to actually understand these things yourself instead of blindly accepting the authority of creationists.
Surely as video games become more mainstream, Halo will be the first to suffer
The only "controversy" on the subject of the evolution of the eye is that which creationists have attempted to manufacture. Do you have specific problems with any of the published research on this subject since 1994? If not, then what is the problem, exactly?
Or perhaps what you mean by "controversy" is that scientists are still researching the specifics of the mechanisms by which the eye might have evolved, and thus we have multiple papers on the subject? If so, I think you are mischaracterizing as "controversy" what scientists would call "discussion".Why on earth would you expect this? Perhaps you just have strange expectations.
And last I checked, the arthropod phylum even today offers a wide variation among its members in number of legs. If you are interested in the evolutionary paths that lead to a specific number of limbs, perhaps the phylogeny of the arthropods would be a good place to start looking?So let us say someone comes in and says that we should, with certainty, keep an open mind about the idea that maybe the earth is flat after all. "Round earth" fanatics clinging to the theory that the earth is sort of roundish need to realize how history repeats itself; our beliefs can and have been turned on their head surprisingly in the past. Yes, of course all available, non-discredited data and theory we have with which to explain the world around us suggests the earth is a slightly lumpy sphere. But maybe we've just fundamentally misunderstood things about the shape of the earth; there could be possibilities we haven't considered yet.
Do we bother to give this person the time of day?
Or do we just say, screw that, we're going to stay with the round earth theory-- as well as the theory of evolution-- because it explains all the data we have, and no competing theories for that data exist.
Saying "maybe your theory is wrong" is effectively meaningless to someone working in the field of science unless you can immediately answer the question "then what is right?". Theories aren't overturned by "I don't like that theory, give me another". They're overturned only by alternate theories. And no, half a post on slashdot about how maybe space is a looping 3-manifold, and the space photos showing a round earth are an elaborate optical illusion, and we can figure out the details of why this is some other time, don't mean you have an alternate theory. If you cannot form your ideas in terms of falsifiable, rigorously defined models with predictive power, you do not have anything scientists can do anything with.
P.S.: If IHBT then my hat goes off to you.
Microsoft is in talks to combine with AOL. Similarly, Google is in talks with AOL, possibly to buy some kind of stake in AOL just to keep Microsoft from getting it. Nothing is yet finalized. Microsoft may combine with AOL, but it's not certain yet. Microsoft IM has combined with Yahoo Messenger; maybe that's what you're thinking of.
Just because Google has bought the main Gaim developer does not mean work on Gaim will terminate. For one thing, there is no reason why the Gaim developer cannot continue work on Gaim while working for Google. Since Google has shown willingness to some degree to finance open source projects, it is quite likely this is exactly what they want him to do. Most likely what we will see is that Gaim will have support for GTalk added to it. For another thing, Gaim is open source, so even if the main developer quit all work on Gaim, Gaim will continue to be available and continue to proceed in development.
The story was probably submitted before any of that stuff had become known to the public. If you were watching other sites during the press conference, the news about the iPod Video and its specs managed to get out and around the internet what must have been a good 20 minutes before Apple updated their website.
The apple website is only loading itermittently, but I'm pretty sure I saw on there that they have "for the birds".
Something I'm seriously wondering about is, will we start to see tv companies doing video podcasts? Like, the daily show. They already put segments from their show up on their website as video. At this point it wouldn't be so surprising to see them start putting these into some kind of iPod-friendly format, or almost even just putting up entire episodes and financing this by leaving the commercials in.
The entire idea is that the U.S. going back on its years-old promise to turn DNS over to ICANN is being seen, by itself, as abusing its position as internet governor.
So now that that's dealt with, can the rest of us sue RealPlayer and demand a settlement that they stop sucking?
I've been suggesting for years that "dark matter" is an unnecessary idea which only exists as a transitional kludge until we can uncover some more fundamental error in the theory of gravity, like planetary epicycles or what not. I have made this suggestion both on the internet and in person to some people I hang around with from my college's physics department.
While generally people have not agreed with me, I have never encountered what I would call "dogmatic" resistence; I never felt that people were upset at my suggestion or disrespected my opinion that this was a possibility.
Perhaps the reason why you have met with poor results expressing the same idea have more to do with the way in which you expressed the idea?
I find a lot of people seem to believe that if people disagree with them, it is automatically because of dogmatic resistence. Not necessarily, maybe it's just because you've not made your case very well, or because there are other factors to the discussion you aren't considering (for example, that asking a physicist to abandon the idea of dark matter would-- in the absence of a better explanation for anomolies in gravitational theory-- effectively require them to accept the idea that the galaxy is the wrong shape for no reason whatsoever).
Didn't you read the article summary? This robot is going to be used to help "elderly and disabled people walk, climb stairs, and carry things around".
Therefore, clearly the movie one ought to be referencing here is "Roujin Z".
WE'RE GOING TO THE BEEEEEEAAAAAAAACHHHHHHH!!!!
Interesting, because it seems to me that the only thing the U.S. government is "shielding" from the international community is its own power. It also seems to me that if instead of demanding government control over the root servers and touching off this spat with the EU/UN, the Administration had just handed control of the DNS servers over to ICANN like it originally promised, U.S. companies would be the primary beneficiaries. ICANN is certainly an entity with problems, but right now it is nothing if not an industry body.
Oh, I wasn't trying to imply they did.
Yeah OK Microsoft is the Evil empire, but remember the Evil Empire brought you Home PC's Free Internet browsers, Human Friendly Operating systems etc..
Microsoft would certainly like you to think so.
However anyone who was actually around when these things first appeared remember things more like this:
People other than Microsoft brought us home PCs, free internet browsers, human friendly operating systems etc; and then Microsoft hijacked these things, and made it impossible for anyone else to become powerful in those markets.
I am quite confident that if Microsoft ever does defeat google, ten years later people will be ardently insisting Microsoft invented the search engine.