After all, I have at least a couple pennies invested in those two rovers. And I should have a right to know what they have found.
Easy there, cowboy. Be careful with your reasoning. You have quite a few pennies invested in government-funded academic research, and you will eventually get to find out what the results are. If, however, you applied an "as-fast-as-possible" policy to data release - or, worse, used the Freedom of Information Act to force data sharing - you would destroy the scientific community.
I'm a little worried about this; could the FOIA be used to force NIH-funded investigators to disclose their work? Alternately, many of my colleagues do some of their work at national labs (DOE-run) and are thus more directly under the government - are they vulnerable? Molecular biology is a cutthroat field; people are already nervous about presenting anything that isn't already in press.
The way things work now, scientists are always given the discretion to set their own schedule and decide when to publish their results. Those who never publish or share their data won't last long in academia, and won't get their grants renewed; publications are the single most important measure of productivity.
A print publication has what, a two-three month (minimum) leadtime?
Yow. Usually much longer than that - only the absolutely highest profile papers (like Nobel prize material) get into press that quickly. This might, of course, but they don't have any competition so they can take their time getting the details and analysis exactly right.
Anyway, science by press release usually isn't a good idea, but I'd make some exception for NASA. Even if they get this wrong, the mission has still been a spectacular success, and if they're right, more people will notice now than six months from now when it appears in Science or Nature.
Gates is just the newest generation, and others will come after. If all it takes to get money for facilities is to slap somebody's name on it - then I'm all for that.
I grew up in Seattle, and Gates' mother is rememebered quite fondly; there's a Mary Gates drive not far from my parents' house and the university. I think she was very involved in assorted philanthropic causes. So if Gates wants to name stuff after his mom, good for him. And, more generally, if he wants to donate to university CS departments, more power to them. Any quality university - or at least one with gobs of money already, like Harvard or MIT - will continue to make its own decisions, and not let big donors tell them what software to use. (No, really - Yale notoriously turned down or returned large donations because the donors wanted too much control over how it was spent. This was before Yale was quite as rich as it is now.)
People do need to remember, however, that Gates isn't exactly a self-made man; he had pretty big helping hand from mommy and daddy, and went to the nicest private school in Washington state.
Joking aside, the information he's unhappy about being listed for him included a.ca.gov site (which lists disciplinary proceedings). So it's already a matter of public record. I think he's suing because this is the first hit, which he claims is misleading. Well, it's in a public database - I actually think Google is doing us a service.
Any competent judge will throw this out right away, same as happened to that Search King dickwad.
Take away their supercomputers and the government won't stop research, they'll just return to blowing up actual bombs.
You missed my point: take away their supercomputers, and a lot of other valuable civilian research programs will take it in the ass too. A large fraction of the science faculty at Berkeley have joint appointments at LBL, or significant collaborations with the scientists there.
Biological research? Hey, mister, guess what the 'B' in 'NBC weapons' stands for...
All of the people I know who are affiliated with LBL or NERSC in any way are doing research aimed at (ultimately) preventing disease, not creating ones. Some of them aren't even doing work with medical applications - just evolutionary biology. They are all academics and all of the work they do is published in peer-reviewed journals. And this isn't some locked-down facility; I've been up to LBL several times and will probably spend quite a bit of time there in the near future. Classmates of mine actually work there full time in labs. You know, this information is all published on the web. ..
My point stands: work going on at NERSC is almost certainly unclassified, especially the biology. I can't speak for LLNL, but there are definitely a lot of people there doing similar (NON-WEAPONS) bioresearch, some of them quite prominent. Just because the DOE is funding something does not automatically make it evil. In aggregate, the research going on at these labs has the potential to save far more lives than it destroys, and their reach extends far beyond the government - every large university in the country (public or private) uses their facilities.
Re:easy ... root for the feds ...
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SCO Aims For The Feds
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And the NERSC is not just used for weapons simulations - I know people who've used the facilities for biological research. It's also located at LBL, which if I recall correctly does entirely unclassified work (I know many biologists who work there too). Looks like they're doing a lot of applied physics, including fusion power research.
The DOE national labs do a wide variety of fantastic research, relatively little of it focused on blowing shit up. In fact, I'd argue that their most important role is in biochemistry, due to their synchrotron facilities (used for protein structure determination). Even Livermore, which doesn't have a synchrotron (LBL is right nearby), is doing biology too now.
I don't think any terrorist group has the expertise, materials or facilities to build a nuclear device, much less deliver it, unless Pakistan helps.
Unfortunately, this is exactly what many people are afraid will happen. It's been obvious for a long time that some members of the Pakistani intelligence services are more or less operating on their own, and it's even worse now that their chief scientist has been caught passing technology out.
You're also forgetting the Russian nuclear stockpiles, although I think that none of them are left in central Asia.
However it kills me to see the so called scientist that say that evolution is fact. I wouldn't mind so much if they at least said "To the best of our knowledge now..." this is what we believe.
Oh, but macroevolution most certainly is established fact. However, the complete evolutionary lineage of every modern organism is not as well established, and there are a number of questions that evolutionary biology has yet to answer conclusively or at all. Among these:
- Origin of cellular life - Origin of protein-based cells - Origin of eukaryotic cells - Origin of multicellularity
These are all topics that are essentially impossible to address via the fossil record, and which are difficult to explain in general. However, biologists are working on these questions, which you can't say about creationists; I know someone working on the last question, and there's good models for the third - and extant organisms that may represent intermediates for each.
I think that evolution by natural selection did cause all of these things, but I admit that I can't provide any evidence for it. I think scientists are a little dishonest when they lump together abiogenesis (origin of life - about which we know virtually nothing) and hominid origins (which are very well described). It confuses the issue, and leaves them open to attack. However, evolution does explain perfectly the diversity of modern life forms.
In other words, if you believe that God created life, I can't (and won't) argue with that, because I don't have any better ideas - although I suspect we'll find some eventually. And I think schools should be honest and say, yeah, we have no clue about that stuff. None of this negates anything about evolutionary theory, however.
but the required elements are the two rRNA pieces of the ribosome, forty-five tRNA fragments, forty-five enzymes that bind the ameno acids to the tRNA strands, and a stabalizing protein within the ribosome.
Unless all 93 pieces are in place, the system does not work at all.
This is not entirely correct. To begin with you've left out some pieces: there are a number of other proteins which are required for translation, including a number of initiation factors. Loss of any one of these factors is lethal. However. ..
Search on pubmed.gov for "IRES", which stands for "Internal ribosome entry site." These are RNA sequences (typically intronic regions in a gene) which can initiate protein translation by the ribosome in the absence of some or all of the initiation factors. The most advanced IRESes are in viruses which attack eukartoyes, but there are some in eukaryotes themselves as well.
Until these RNAs were discovered, the initiation machinery could have been called "irreducably complex". This is now demonstrably not the case. In fact, one could reasonably hypothesize that early organisms lacked all initiation factors, and that initiation was mediated entirely by intronic RNAs. (Which would fit well with other observations about the changing roles of RNA and protein.)
The human species as a whole has apparently decided that everyone, no matter how stupid or disease ridden, needs to be kept alive and allowed to not only survive but to reproduce.
Yeah, it just makes me furious when I see poor or sick people having kids. How dare they pass on their faulty genes! And how dare our government let this happen! People with genetic defects should be sterilized, if not put to a merciful death. And next, if you're a Charles Murray fan, sterilize black people.
What cave did you crawl out of? Have you been smoking pot and reading Peter Singer or something?
It seems that we as a species are devolving.
On the contrary, I would argue that the modern shared social understanding that all human lives are of equal value, deserving of dignity, and entitled to maintain control of their own destiny, represents the high point of our evolution. Except in your case, of course.
I once saw Kenneth Miller (among others) debate a group of creationists on "Firing Line". One of the creationists kept saying "show me the fossil record!" and Miller kept pulling out more and more charts illustrating how a prior evolutionary hypothesis had been borne out by newer fossil discoveries. Eventually the creationist just said he wouldn't accept evolution until he could see complete fossil intermediates for every single stage.**
Anyway, that's just what this thread brought to mind. I admire you for trying, though.:)
** Which is a good illustration of why creationists aren't scientists at all, because if we applied the same standard to the rest of biology nobody would ever publish anything. Science depends on proposing hypotheses from limited data, which further work will prove or negate - and so far, no new evidence has negated evolutionary theory, only presented more questions to answer later on.
What I have yet to see is a good example of macro evolution. Please show me evidence where one species has evolved into another, species.
A lot of creationists seem to share this confusion over terminology and the mechanics of evolution. (I'm going to be charitable, and assume that it's confusion and not a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the issue.)
Macroevolution is simply the long-term effect of microevolution. You seem to be viewing speciation as a sudden event, where half the apes in a given area suddenly lose most of their body hair, walk erect, start making tools, and build houses - pow! a new species! In fact, what happens is that a tribe of apes is split into reproductively isolated groups, and the combined genetic drift over many millennia renders them into separate species. (Which, by the simplest definition, means that they do not mate with each other, although this is not an iron rule.)
I'm honestly not sure whether we've directly observed enough genetic drift to yield separate species, although I suspect the answer is yes. It would almost certainly be possible to simulate this in the short term by means of artificial mutagenesis applied to separate lab stocks. However, the mechanisms of genetic drift in distinct populations is well established - as you admit. All that is needed for dog breeds to become distinct species is thousands of years of reproductive isolation. It really doesn't take all that much mutation. . . in dogs, the changes are very superficial so they can still breed.
So, the counter-question for you is: since you admit that natural selection and genetic drift yields distinct varieties of dogs or finches, why do you think this same process cannot yield distinct species? There's really no hard cutoff between the two.
On the molecular level, one need only look at the genomes of very closely related species. This is being done on a very large scale; much of the effort in publicly funded genome sequencing is directed towards evolutionary genomics. I know of a number of people who are doing comparisons of very closely related organisms which diverged recently and are morphologically distinct and nonbreeding but whose genomes are nearly identical. (Usually fruit flies, yeast, and other model organisms - and we'll have the chimp genome soon.) Reconstructing the evolutionary history of these families will be a significant research project, but is entirely feasible.
Within the next decade, the link between micro- and macro-evolution will be absolutely ironclad thanks to genomics work. I don't expect this to end the debate, however; the creationists have never been interested in science anyway.
but we cannot say with absolute certainty that humans evolved from apes.
Two points:
- All of the available evidence supports this model. The fact that we can't conclusively prove the hypothesis does not make it any less compelling. Furthermore, no null hypothesis which fits the data well or better has been presented, much less proven.
- Careful with your terminology here; what you really meant to say was ". . . that humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor." We do not expect chimps to evolve into humans; these species are diverged from a more primitive ape. One branch became fully bipedal and sentient, the other did not.
There's one modern (orchestral) piece called "Tikal" (or something like that) which has been used in at least 12 trailers, including the one for Pirates of the Carribean. It sounds a lot like Orff's Carmina Burana, which has also been used many times (as well as ripped off by many film score "composers"). It's sort of generic epic thriller music, with loud choral accompaniment, but it doesn't sound very thrilling after about the third hearing.
The problem with this reuse is that people will notice it after a while. "K-19" used the Gladiator soundtrack in trailers and other promotional material, and it was pretty obvious. I immediately noticed the Stargate music - although I couldn't remember where I'd heard it, it was very familiar.
Of course, I'm a classical musician, so most movie soundtracks (for this type of movie, at least) already sound like they've been recycled from pieces by far better composers - Holst's "The Planets" being the most egregious example.
Are you too stupid or just too lazy to check the archives?
The biggest military in the world, and yet many of my fellow citizens are so fragile and insecure that they start whining at the first hint of criticism of the country.
Bullshit. The problem with the complaints I read on Slashdot is that most of them sound like they were dredged up from Democratic Underground. Incoherent, childish, and utterly divorced from reality. People here don't actually think, they just post their gut reaction. This is tolerable when it's just another MS vs. Linux thread or something equally irrelevant, but for so many people to be simultaneously polarized and deluded about national politics and world affairs is genuinely frightening. Nobody bothers to put forth a detailed case why, say, the Iraq war or the PATRIOT ACT were bad ideas (and there are many, many good arguments against both!), they just say "IT'S ALL ABOUT OOOOIIIIILLLLL!" or "THIS IS LIKE GERMANY IN THE 1930S".
Crap like FreeRepublic I can just shrug off, but I'm truly dismayed to find the same quality of discussion on a forum I actually enjoy reading (or used to). (By the way, I'm absolutely not responsible for our current president, and I'll vote for Kerry in November. I shouldn't have to make this disclaimer, but whenever I defend any aspect of Bush or US policy I'm accused of being a Republican, a neo-con, or a brainwashing victim. Or some combination of the three.)
But it looks like Slashdot also has become a place where criticism of the United States is unpatriotic.
Where the fuck have you been? Any thread that touches on politics or world affairs will inevitably have several hundred replies comparing the US to Nazi Germany or calling it fascist (or calling Americans stupid, Bush stupid, Bush Hitler, and so on), many of them moderated quite highly, with only a few people willing to defend the US and be flamed. And as far as patriotism goes, half of these flames will usually be from non-US-citizens.
I imagine some people are pretty sick of hearing this stuff by now; why are you so shocked that you got modded down? The other one was an AC post, so it started at 0 anyway.
There are two kinds of communism. The first is the one you know well, everybody gets one dictator and what he says goes. The second was only practiced by the ancient greeks. A pure democracy where everyone was a part of the goverment.
Neither of these is communism. Go read Marx. Communism is a system where private capital is abolished, where the entire economy is managed by the government and is essentially based on continual redistribution of wealth downwards. Private property beyond a subsistence level is outlawed. Dictatorship and totalitarianism are not explicitly part and parcel of communism, but in practice they're always necessary, and based on my reading of "The Communist Manifesto" I don't believe that such a system can be constructed without totalitarian government. People always desire upward economic mobility, which communism essentially prohibits. (I don't believe communism can be sustained either, but that's another issue entirely.)
Ancient Greece was not communist in any sense of the word. In fact, most states were probably much closer to free-market economies than any modern nation. The requirement for greater citizen involvement in government has nothing to do with economic systems. You could also have a direct democracy without the requirement for participation; this might be a libertarian dream state.
He appears to live in some utopian world where politicians are actually honest, laws aren't bought by large corporations and the government really does support the individual.
Actually, he lives in Europe, where government regulation of everything has become more and more a way of life - far more so than in the US. More importantly, he works from the BBC, a publicly funded entity accountable to no one, especially not its customers, paid for by taxing people for watching TV, which sends vans around to make sure that people are paying their TV tax.
That really says all I need to know about his credentials and his views on government regulation.
So, the problem is that there's no way to film the War of Wrath without making it look ridiculous. Tolkein compresses it all into a few paragraphs, and you have dragons so big they blot out the sky and shatter the earth, a flying ship, the gods digging Morgoth out of Angband, the sinking of Beleriand. . . it's just unfilmable. The fall of Gondolin would make a magnificent movie scene (the Illustrated Tolekin Encyclopedia has a good painting of it), but everything that happens after that is sort of vague.
You could argue that given the structure and style of Tolkein's work, the reason the War of Wrath is given such short notice is that it's essentially beyond human comprehension.
There is that flashback. However, I don't think it would be too great a blow to consistency to show a younger-looking Bilbo instead, using a different actor. As long as McKellen returns (and Agent Elrond), it's all good.
My nomination for Bilbo: Kenneth Branagh. He has the acting chops, he doesn't look too different from Ian Holm, and I can really see him as a hobbit with the right makeup and hair. In fact, of all the potential actors I can think of, he's the most hobbit-like.
I'm trying to figure out who they'd use for Thorin, Beorn, Thranduil, and the archer guy (Bard? can't remember. ..). And, of course, the voice of Smaug. Too bad Vincent Price is dead.
I was trying to say that if NSA wants to modify Windows, Microsoft has shown that they are happy to do it.
And if the NSA wanted to widely deploy the modified version of Windows, outside the NSA? I bet Bill would be just wild about that. (Alternately, even if Microsoft let them do this, nobody outside the NSA would touch it because it would be impossible to verify that those binaries *didn't* have any backdoors.)
On another note, not to troll, but I was wondering if you had any references to substantiate your argument on Microsoft lobbying against NSA Linux (just out of curiosity!).
This has been discussed here many times. Do a Google search, and you'll find CNet stories about it. MS basically thought it was inappropriate for the US government to be, in essence, funding development of one of their competitors, and apparently whined to the government about it. (Disregarding the fact that Microsoft's licenses make it impossible for the NSA to do anything else.)
As far as I know, NO algorithm where the key is shorter than the encrypted message, has been proven to be "unbreakable". At best, they have been shown empirically to (possibly) be "secure". That just means that brute force is the only known practical method of attempting to decode the message (ie. nothing quicker has been found, so the secrecy of the key, and its length, are enough to keep the message secret)
*sigh* Okay, my terminology sucks. My point remains the same, though: the fact that a message can be decoded by brute force is irrelevant if you use 1024-bit keys.
In reality, I'd be very, very surprised to learn that the NSA can break all or, frankly, any of the major ciphers that exist now.
They can't. DES (56-bit) can be brute forced in a reasonable amount of time with specialized hardware; the EFF wrote a book on this. 64-bit encryption can be brute forced in a much longer time using distributed processing. 128-bit encryption, which is pretty standard for many apps, is many orders of magnitude larger than anything current computers can tackle.
And if they truly have computers that are trillions of times faster than anything available to the rest of the world
Unlikely. Our government isn't that efficient with our tax dollars.:) And the NSA really doesn't have the type of facilities necessary to outdevelop Intel (among others). I would guess that much of what they do is really specialized data mining and surveillance (of unencrypted communications), rather than decryption.
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After all, I have at least a couple pennies invested in those two rovers. And I should have a right to know what they have found.
Easy there, cowboy. Be careful with your reasoning. You have quite a few pennies invested in government-funded academic research, and you will eventually get to find out what the results are. If, however, you applied an "as-fast-as-possible" policy to data release - or, worse, used the Freedom of Information Act to force data sharing - you would destroy the scientific community.
I'm a little worried about this; could the FOIA be used to force NIH-funded investigators to disclose their work? Alternately, many of my colleagues do some of their work at national labs (DOE-run) and are thus more directly under the government - are they vulnerable? Molecular biology is a cutthroat field; people are already nervous about presenting anything that isn't already in press.
The way things work now, scientists are always given the discretion to set their own schedule and decide when to publish their results. Those who never publish or share their data won't last long in academia, and won't get their grants renewed; publications are the single most important measure of productivity.
A print publication has what, a two-three month (minimum) leadtime?
Yow. Usually much longer than that - only the absolutely highest profile papers (like Nobel prize material) get into press that quickly. This might, of course, but they don't have any competition so they can take their time getting the details and analysis exactly right.
Anyway, science by press release usually isn't a good idea, but I'd make some exception for NASA. Even if they get this wrong, the mission has still been a spectacular success, and if they're right, more people will notice now than six months from now when it appears in Science or Nature.
Gates is just the newest generation, and others will come after. If all it takes to get money for facilities is to slap somebody's name on it - then I'm all for that.
I grew up in Seattle, and Gates' mother is rememebered quite fondly; there's a Mary Gates drive not far from my parents' house and the university. I think she was very involved in assorted philanthropic causes. So if Gates wants to name stuff after his mom, good for him. And, more generally, if he wants to donate to university CS departments, more power to them. Any quality university - or at least one with gobs of money already, like Harvard or MIT - will continue to make its own decisions, and not let big donors tell them what software to use. (No, really - Yale notoriously turned down or returned large donations because the donors wanted too much control over how it was spent. This was before Yale was quite as rich as it is now.)
People do need to remember, however, that Gates isn't exactly a self-made man; he had pretty big helping hand from mommy and daddy, and went to the nicest private school in Washington state.
Joking aside, the information he's unhappy about being listed for him included a .ca.gov site (which lists disciplinary proceedings). So it's already a matter of public record. I think he's suing because this is the first hit, which he claims is misleading. Well, it's in a public database - I actually think Google is doing us a service.
Any competent judge will throw this out right away, same as happened to that Search King dickwad.
Take away their supercomputers and the government won't stop research, they'll just return to blowing up actual bombs.
You missed my point: take away their supercomputers, and a lot of other valuable civilian research programs will take it in the ass too. A large fraction of the science faculty at Berkeley have joint appointments at LBL, or significant collaborations with the scientists there.
Biological research? Hey, mister, guess what the 'B' in 'NBC weapons' stands for...
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All of the people I know who are affiliated with LBL or NERSC in any way are doing research aimed at (ultimately) preventing disease, not creating ones. Some of them aren't even doing work with medical applications - just evolutionary biology. They are all academics and all of the work they do is published in peer-reviewed journals. And this isn't some locked-down facility; I've been up to LBL several times and will probably spend quite a bit of time there in the near future. Classmates of mine actually work there full time in labs. You know, this information is all published on the web. .
My point stands: work going on at NERSC is almost certainly unclassified, especially the biology. I can't speak for LLNL, but there are definitely a lot of people there doing similar (NON-WEAPONS) bioresearch, some of them quite prominent. Just because the DOE is funding something does not automatically make it evil. In aggregate, the research going on at these labs has the potential to save far more lives than it destroys, and their reach extends far beyond the government - every large university in the country (public or private) uses their facilities.
And the NERSC is not just used for weapons simulations - I know people who've used the facilities for biological research. It's also located at LBL, which if I recall correctly does entirely unclassified work (I know many biologists who work there too). Looks like they're doing a lot of applied physics, including fusion power research.
The DOE national labs do a wide variety of fantastic research, relatively little of it focused on blowing shit up. In fact, I'd argue that their most important role is in biochemistry, due to their synchrotron facilities (used for protein structure determination). Even Livermore, which doesn't have a synchrotron (LBL is right nearby), is doing biology too now.
I don't think any terrorist group has the expertise, materials or facilities to build a nuclear device, much less deliver it, unless Pakistan helps.
Unfortunately, this is exactly what many people are afraid will happen. It's been obvious for a long time that some members of the Pakistani intelligence services are more or less operating on their own, and it's even worse now that their chief scientist has been caught passing technology out.
You're also forgetting the Russian nuclear stockpiles, although I think that none of them are left in central Asia.
However it kills me to see the so called scientist that say that evolution is fact. I wouldn't mind so much if they at least said "To the best of our knowledge now..." this is what we believe.
Oh, but macroevolution most certainly is established fact. However, the complete evolutionary lineage of every modern organism is not as well established, and there are a number of questions that evolutionary biology has yet to answer conclusively or at all. Among these:
- Origin of cellular life
- Origin of protein-based cells
- Origin of eukaryotic cells
- Origin of multicellularity
These are all topics that are essentially impossible to address via the fossil record, and which are difficult to explain in general. However, biologists are working on these questions, which you can't say about creationists; I know someone working on the last question, and there's good models for the third - and extant organisms that may represent intermediates for each.
I think that evolution by natural selection did cause all of these things, but I admit that I can't provide any evidence for it. I think scientists are a little dishonest when they lump together abiogenesis (origin of life - about which we know virtually nothing) and hominid origins (which are very well described). It confuses the issue, and leaves them open to attack. However, evolution does explain perfectly the diversity of modern life forms.
In other words, if you believe that God created life, I can't (and won't) argue with that, because I don't have any better ideas - although I suspect we'll find some eventually. And I think schools should be honest and say, yeah, we have no clue about that stuff. None of this negates anything about evolutionary theory, however.
but the required elements are the two rRNA pieces of the ribosome, forty-five tRNA fragments, forty-five enzymes that bind the ameno acids to the tRNA strands, and a stabalizing protein within the ribosome.
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Unless all 93 pieces are in place, the system does not work at all.
This is not entirely correct. To begin with you've left out some pieces: there are a number of other proteins which are required for translation, including a number of initiation factors. Loss of any one of these factors is lethal. However. .
Search on pubmed.gov for "IRES", which stands for "Internal ribosome entry site." These are RNA sequences (typically intronic regions in a gene) which can initiate protein translation by the ribosome in the absence of some or all of the initiation factors. The most advanced IRESes are in viruses which attack eukartoyes, but there are some in eukaryotes themselves as well.
Until these RNAs were discovered, the initiation machinery could have been called "irreducably complex". This is now demonstrably not the case. In fact, one could reasonably hypothesize that early organisms lacked all initiation factors, and that initiation was mediated entirely by intronic RNAs. (Which would fit well with other observations about the changing roles of RNA and protein.)
The human species as a whole has apparently decided that everyone, no matter how stupid or disease ridden, needs to be kept alive and allowed to not only survive but to reproduce.
Yeah, it just makes me furious when I see poor or sick people having kids. How dare they pass on their faulty genes! And how dare our government let this happen! People with genetic defects should be sterilized, if not put to a merciful death. And next, if you're a Charles Murray fan, sterilize black people.
What cave did you crawl out of? Have you been smoking pot and reading Peter Singer or something?
It seems that we as a species are devolving.
On the contrary, I would argue that the modern shared social understanding that all human lives are of equal value, deserving of dignity, and entitled to maintain control of their own destiny, represents the high point of our evolution. Except in your case, of course.
I once saw Kenneth Miller (among others) debate a group of creationists on "Firing Line". One of the creationists kept saying "show me the fossil record!" and Miller kept pulling out more and more charts illustrating how a prior evolutionary hypothesis had been borne out by newer fossil discoveries. Eventually the creationist just said he wouldn't accept evolution until he could see complete fossil intermediates for every single stage.**
:)
Anyway, that's just what this thread brought to mind. I admire you for trying, though.
** Which is a good illustration of why creationists aren't scientists at all, because if we applied the same standard to the rest of biology nobody would ever publish anything. Science depends on proposing hypotheses from limited data, which further work will prove or negate - and so far, no new evidence has negated evolutionary theory, only presented more questions to answer later on.
What I have yet to see is a good example of macro evolution. Please show me evidence where one species has evolved into another, species.
A lot of creationists seem to share this confusion over terminology and the mechanics of evolution. (I'm going to be charitable, and assume that it's confusion and not a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the issue.)
Macroevolution is simply the long-term effect of microevolution. You seem to be viewing speciation as a sudden event, where half the apes in a given area suddenly lose most of their body hair, walk erect, start making tools, and build houses - pow! a new species! In fact, what happens is that a tribe of apes is split into reproductively isolated groups, and the combined genetic drift over many millennia renders them into separate species. (Which, by the simplest definition, means that they do not mate with each other, although this is not an iron rule.)
I'm honestly not sure whether we've directly observed enough genetic drift to yield separate species, although I suspect the answer is yes. It would almost certainly be possible to simulate this in the short term by means of artificial mutagenesis applied to separate lab stocks. However, the mechanisms of genetic drift in distinct populations is well established - as you admit. All that is needed for dog breeds to become distinct species is thousands of years of reproductive isolation. It really doesn't take all that much mutation. . . in dogs, the changes are very superficial so they can still breed.
So, the counter-question for you is: since you admit that natural selection and genetic drift yields distinct varieties of dogs or finches, why do you think this same process cannot yield distinct species? There's really no hard cutoff between the two.
On the molecular level, one need only look at the genomes of very closely related species. This is being done on a very large scale; much of the effort in publicly funded genome sequencing is directed towards evolutionary genomics. I know of a number of people who are doing comparisons of very closely related organisms which diverged recently and are morphologically distinct and nonbreeding but whose genomes are nearly identical. (Usually fruit flies, yeast, and other model organisms - and we'll have the chimp genome soon.) Reconstructing the evolutionary history of these families will be a significant research project, but is entirely feasible.
Within the next decade, the link between micro- and macro-evolution will be absolutely ironclad thanks to genomics work. I don't expect this to end the debate, however; the creationists have never been interested in science anyway.
but we cannot say with absolute certainty that humans evolved from apes.
Two points:
- All of the available evidence supports this model. The fact that we can't conclusively prove the hypothesis does not make it any less compelling. Furthermore, no null hypothesis which fits the data well or better has been presented, much less proven.
- Careful with your terminology here; what you really meant to say was ". . . that humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor." We do not expect chimps to evolve into humans; these species are diverged from a more primitive ape. One branch became fully bipedal and sentient, the other did not.
There's one modern (orchestral) piece called "Tikal" (or something like that) which has been used in at least 12 trailers, including the one for Pirates of the Carribean. It sounds a lot like Orff's Carmina Burana, which has also been used many times (as well as ripped off by many film score "composers"). It's sort of generic epic thriller music, with loud choral accompaniment, but it doesn't sound very thrilling after about the third hearing.
The problem with this reuse is that people will notice it after a while. "K-19" used the Gladiator soundtrack in trailers and other promotional material, and it was pretty obvious. I immediately noticed the Stargate music - although I couldn't remember where I'd heard it, it was very familiar.
Of course, I'm a classical musician, so most movie soundtracks (for this type of movie, at least) already sound like they've been recycled from pieces by far better composers - Holst's "The Planets" being the most egregious example.
Cite an example or STFU, moron.
Are you too stupid or just too lazy to check the archives?
The biggest military in the world, and yet many of my fellow citizens are so fragile and insecure that they start whining at the first hint of criticism of the country.
Bullshit. The problem with the complaints I read on Slashdot is that most of them sound like they were dredged up from Democratic Underground. Incoherent, childish, and utterly divorced from reality. People here don't actually think, they just post their gut reaction. This is tolerable when it's just another MS vs. Linux thread or something equally irrelevant, but for so many people to be simultaneously polarized and deluded about national politics and world affairs is genuinely frightening. Nobody bothers to put forth a detailed case why, say, the Iraq war or the PATRIOT ACT were bad ideas (and there are many, many good arguments against both!), they just say "IT'S ALL ABOUT OOOOIIIIILLLLL!" or "THIS IS LIKE GERMANY IN THE 1930S".
Crap like FreeRepublic I can just shrug off, but I'm truly dismayed to find the same quality of discussion on a forum I actually enjoy reading (or used to). (By the way, I'm absolutely not responsible for our current president, and I'll vote for Kerry in November. I shouldn't have to make this disclaimer, but whenever I defend any aspect of Bush or US policy I'm accused of being a Republican, a neo-con, or a brainwashing victim. Or some combination of the three.)
But it looks like Slashdot also has become a place where criticism of the United States is unpatriotic.
Where the fuck have you been? Any thread that touches on politics or world affairs will inevitably have several hundred replies comparing the US to Nazi Germany or calling it fascist (or calling Americans stupid, Bush stupid, Bush Hitler, and so on), many of them moderated quite highly, with only a few people willing to defend the US and be flamed. And as far as patriotism goes, half of these flames will usually be from non-US-citizens.
I imagine some people are pretty sick of hearing this stuff by now; why are you so shocked that you got modded down? The other one was an AC post, so it started at 0 anyway.
There are two kinds of communism. The first is the one you know well, everybody gets one dictator and what he says goes. The second was only practiced by the ancient greeks. A pure democracy where everyone was a part of the goverment.
Neither of these is communism. Go read Marx. Communism is a system where private capital is abolished, where the entire economy is managed by the government and is essentially based on continual redistribution of wealth downwards. Private property beyond a subsistence level is outlawed. Dictatorship and totalitarianism are not explicitly part and parcel of communism, but in practice they're always necessary, and based on my reading of "The Communist Manifesto" I don't believe that such a system can be constructed without totalitarian government. People always desire upward economic mobility, which communism essentially prohibits. (I don't believe communism can be sustained either, but that's another issue entirely.)
Ancient Greece was not communist in any sense of the word. In fact, most states were probably much closer to free-market economies than any modern nation. The requirement for greater citizen involvement in government has nothing to do with economic systems. You could also have a direct democracy without the requirement for participation; this might be a libertarian dream state.
He appears to live in some utopian world where politicians are actually honest, laws aren't bought by large corporations and the government really does support the individual.
Actually, he lives in Europe, where government regulation of everything has become more and more a way of life - far more so than in the US. More importantly, he works from the BBC, a publicly funded entity accountable to no one, especially not its customers, paid for by taxing people for watching TV, which sends vans around to make sure that people are paying their TV tax.
That really says all I need to know about his credentials and his views on government regulation.
So, the problem is that there's no way to film the War of Wrath without making it look ridiculous. Tolkein compresses it all into a few paragraphs, and you have dragons so big they blot out the sky and shatter the earth, a flying ship, the gods digging Morgoth out of Angband, the sinking of Beleriand. . . it's just unfilmable. The fall of Gondolin would make a magnificent movie scene (the Illustrated Tolekin Encyclopedia has a good painting of it), but everything that happens after that is sort of vague.
You could argue that given the structure and style of Tolkein's work, the reason the War of Wrath is given such short notice is that it's essentially beyond human comprehension.
There is that flashback. However, I don't think it would be too great a blow to consistency to show a younger-looking Bilbo instead, using a different actor. As long as McKellen returns (and Agent Elrond), it's all good.
.). And, of course, the voice of Smaug. Too bad Vincent Price is dead.
My nomination for Bilbo: Kenneth Branagh. He has the acting chops, he doesn't look too different from Ian Holm, and I can really see him as a hobbit with the right makeup and hair. In fact, of all the potential actors I can think of, he's the most hobbit-like.
I'm trying to figure out who they'd use for Thorin, Beorn, Thranduil, and the archer guy (Bard? can't remember. .
I was trying to say that if NSA wants to modify Windows, Microsoft has shown that they are happy to do it.
And if the NSA wanted to widely deploy the modified version of Windows, outside the NSA? I bet Bill would be just wild about that. (Alternately, even if Microsoft let them do this, nobody outside the NSA would touch it because it would be impossible to verify that those binaries *didn't* have any backdoors.)
On another note, not to troll, but I was wondering if you had any references to substantiate your argument on Microsoft lobbying against NSA Linux (just out of curiosity!).
This has been discussed here many times. Do a Google search, and you'll find CNet stories about it. MS basically thought it was inappropriate for the US government to be, in essence, funding development of one of their competitors, and apparently whined to the government about it. (Disregarding the fact that Microsoft's licenses make it impossible for the NSA to do anything else.)
As far as I know, NO algorithm where the key is shorter than the encrypted message, has been proven to be "unbreakable". At best, they have been shown empirically to (possibly) be "secure". That just means that brute force is the only known practical method of attempting to decode the message (ie. nothing quicker has been found, so the secrecy of the key, and its length, are enough to keep the message secret)
*sigh* Okay, my terminology sucks. My point remains the same, though: the fact that a message can be decoded by brute force is irrelevant if you use 1024-bit keys.
In reality, I'd be very, very surprised to learn that the NSA can break all or, frankly, any of the major ciphers that exist now.
:) And the NSA really doesn't have the type of facilities necessary to outdevelop Intel (among others). I would guess that much of what they do is really specialized data mining and surveillance (of unencrypted communications), rather than decryption.
They can't. DES (56-bit) can be brute forced in a reasonable amount of time with specialized hardware; the EFF wrote a book on this. 64-bit encryption can be brute forced in a much longer time using distributed processing. 128-bit encryption, which is pretty standard for many apps, is many orders of magnitude larger than anything current computers can tackle.
And if they truly have computers that are trillions of times faster than anything available to the rest of the world
Unlikely. Our government isn't that efficient with our tax dollars.