Then the reviews would show up on my machine as a blank box with a message reading "click to install plugin". I'd click, and it would say "no compatible plugins found". The problem with Flash is that it's proprietary, not open. HTML is a standard. The one can't substitute for the other. Get Macromedia to open-source Flash, then we'll talk.
What if the collision, via a quantum anomaly, creates a microscopic black hole, which will fall to the center of the moon, and oscillate back and forth, finally eating up the entire moon?
Spacecraft can't afford to vent matter to keep cool, otherwise for example you could run a nice efficient liquid cooling system which just continually vents liquid into space.
In the case of Venus, we have the luxury of actually wanting to get rid of a large amount of the atmosphere. That's the physics taken care of - the rest is just technology. And don't bother me with implementation details, I just do the big thinking!
I'm not the OP, but Joker went down twice in December, on the 11th and the 21st/22nd, IIRC. On the 21st, they were down for over 4 hours. A support ticket about the issue went unanswered, except for the automated confirmation of receipt. When this latest DDoS hit, I moved all my domains away and advised all my clients to move away, too. There are much more professional registrars and domain hosts out there, and these days some of them have better prices, too.
If we needed to communicate securely with Alpha Centauri it'd be excellent.
I'm not so sure about that. First, you've got the time difference between here and Alpha Centauri (AC) to worry about, plus the issue of identifying the quasar to be used, which will have a different relative position in the sky from AC. Once we've resolved that - which needs to be done secretly, to avoid giving away the one-time pad - then when AC receives the message, the "pad" it was encrypted was transmitted from the quasar four years ago, so they better have been keeping good records.
Finally, the mechanism for translating quasar radio bursts into data would have to be designed so as not to be affected by any change in the relativistic red- or blueshift caused by the differences between our respective velocity vectors and that of the quasar. In short, "excellent" might be an overstatement.
However, faking a blog shutdown in a way that mimics dozens of real shutdowns, then screaming 'ha ha! fooled you you dumb free speech westerners' [...]
This is a great characterization of what happened, and shows that the real problem here is that the people doing this don't understand free speech. Free speech is not perfect speech, and that's the point. No-one's speech is perfect all the time. But by allowing free speech, mistakes are much more likely to be corrected, and abuses much less likely to remain undetected.
People living under a speech-restricting regime have a hard time understanding the natural chaos in a society with free speech. Heck, people who live in free speech societies often have difficulties with that chaos. People like to have sure sources of information that they can always rely on - the problem is that such sources don't exist.
OK, if that was just some weird kind of troll, more power to you, I guess. But otherwise, I'm afraid you have to turn in your/. uid and be reissued with a 6-digit one, which is the standard procedure for the poster of a -9, Clueless post.
I think what we're dealing with here is that six weeks is an appreciable fraction of the lifespan so far of the article poster. Assuming it's a he, and that he is 12, then six weeks is nearly one whole percent of his lifespan so far. To an adult, it's like having to wait an entire quarter, which is the maximum timespan that even those paragons of patience, corporate CEOs, are capable of waiting.
I find reading and sending emails on the blackberry while driving does wonders to prep you for working the navi . (kidding, kidding)
Someone I know crashed on the highway (rear-ended someone else) because he was trying to operate his Palm Pilot for some reason (it didn't even have an email capability). I was also once rear-ended by someone reading a paper map. Apparently for some people, it's have distractions, will crash.
I suppose it may be natures way to clean up the gene pool.
Pity the rest of us have to watch out for the fallout... I think I'm going to start pre-emptive strikes!
In the Russian space program, a person becomes a cosmonaut upon having had a successful space flight. In the U.S. space program, an astronaut is someone who has flown above 50 miles in altitude. So paying a bunch of money is a valid way to become either.
There's a valid association in this case, though. South Africa issues "ID books" to all its citizens, a practice which started way back in the apartheid days, to be able to better keep track of who should be considered a first-class citizen and who shouldn't. By the late '80s, they were fingerprinting everyone and keeping that on file. It's not a coincidence that the most draconian regimes love to maintain detailed databases on their citizens - it helps them maintain control in all the wrong ways.
When legitimate, democratic governments start wanting such tools of control, no matter how noble the alleged purpose, it's worth examining all the ways in which they can be abused, and the regimes which have abused them in the past. All it takes for abuse to start is a few bad people.
The truth is that if you're serious, and you get the funding you'll need to set up a business that'll be taken seriously by the kind of companies that buy stuff like this, you could do well. It's not as if companies like EMC or NetApp are unassailable, in theory. However, all those questions you're asking: they already know the answer to them, know what the market will bear, have the infrastructure in place to sell and support them, and so on and so on. It sounds as though you're looking at, essentially, the cost of parts, but that's not really what businesses care about. They don't want someone to dump a bunch of parts on their doorstep, they want something that they know they can rely on, and that will be maintained for them. They know that the premium over the cost of parts that they pay is generating profits for the company they're paying them to, but they don't mind that, because they get what they need in return. You can make some of those profits too, but you won't do it just by being a glorified drop-ship artist.
How convenient; in other words, there is no need to investigate the information I provided because it conflicts with your pre-determined outcome of what you believe science should prove in the future.
You have not provided any relevant information. You provided a link to the fundamentalist Christian equivalent of a PBS video, "Unlocking the Mystery of Life", but that's not a scientific reference, and I doubt you'd be satisfied if I in turn pointed you to a PBS video on evolution.
You claim that I'm "refusing to investigate" and claimed that this leads to a contradiction, but you're wrong: I have investigated, and I'm having difficulty finding relevant scientific work, which is why I'm asking for your help. Kenyon's 1969 book seems not particularly relevant -- his theory failed, but that's not a sufficient logical basis for an affirmative conclusion that "there must have been an intelligent designer". If there's a scientific basis for that conclusion, I assume there must be more recent scientific work which covers it -- in fact, I would expect a whole body of work. Where is it?
I don't, as you believe, have a pre-determined outcome in this, except for an expectation about what constitutes science. I've watched scientific theories change in my lifetime, and I've seen suspect or weak theories be replaced. I welcome that, because it means that we're learning, and are open to change. I'm not invested in some particular theory, I'm interested in theories that best fit the reality that we perceive.
Your continued arguing against Neo-Darwinism is strange, since as I've mentioned multiple times, I'm not defending it, and am certainly aware of the weaknesses in such theories. Are you actually reading my posts?
Individual scientists may not like it, but criticism of science is good. If serious questions are raised about current evolutionary theories, the result will in the end be stronger theories. But that criticism is not going to do you a bit of good when it comes to proving or even supporting your faith. When there are gaps in scientific theories -- and there are always gaps -- that doesn't mean that we can scientifically conclude "there must have been an intelligent designer". So at best, what you're trying to do is poke holes in scientific theories to create enough gaps in which your faith can live without being flatly contradicted by evidence and theory.
Let me just say, good luck with that! That's such a famous and doomed endeavour that it's got a name: God of the Gaps. The major religions long ago abandoned that approach, recognizing the theological and philosophical problems with it. But it's fascinating to watch history being repeated, it's almost as though I were alive in the time of Galileo.
I have provided you with a starting point to discover the true scientific argumants against "Neo-Darwinian" evolution, yet you refuse to expolre the possibilities.
On the contrary, I've asked for references to scientific works, but all you've provided are references to non-technical work. The scientific basis for that work seems hard to discern, to the point where I question its existence. Regarding condemnation before investigation, one can only investigate if there's something to investigate. You appear to have a strong faith in things that are at odds with the evidence in the world around us, and your explanation for this discrepancy is a supernatural one, based on faith. That's fine, many people have such beliefs, but they shouldn't be confused with science.
Speaking of closed minds, I notice that you persist in assuming that I am a blind follower of some particular form of Darwinism. That's not the case. As I've already pointed out, I objected to the unwarranted leap you described from the failure of some experiments, to the conclusion that an intelligent creator is the only possible explanation. That's a logical criticism of your & Kenyon's position, and has nothing to do with Darwinism in any form.
As for Darwinism in all its forms, having studied philosophy of science, I am very aware of both the strengths and weaknesses of those theories, and of the limitations of all scientific theories. I am also aware of the extent to which such theories impinge on religious belief - namely, not at all, unless your religious beliefs are at odds with the evidence we find in the world around us. The latter case requires belief in a trickster deity, whose goal is to fool humans for some unknowable purpose of its own. If that's the case, then we may as well abandon science, since there is no part of the evidence of our senses that we can trust. That might fit well with your beliefs, but many others would disagree.
It is logical and scientific, if you understand the science behind the statement.
No, that's silly. Science cannot prove the existence of an intelligent designer from the kind of evidence we're discussing, and if it could, we wouldn't be having this discussion in the backwaters of Slashdot, it would be major news, not just imagined to be major news by religious extremists. (I'm choosing that term carefully: after all, the Catholic Church, which has a long history of resisting scientific advances, has rejected Intelligent Design and indicated its support for evolution to the extent that it doesn't deny the possibility of a creator, which of course it never has.)
Many other possibilities exist, and many of them are much more likely.
Please provide scientific references to back up your assertion.
You misunderstand me: I'm making a simple logical argument. There's literally an infinite variety of possible conditions that could have led to the generation of life on the early earth, with chemical reactions possibly having been spurred by things like lightning, volcanic eruption, meteor strikes, high pressure beneath the surface of the earth, activity near volcanic vents under the sea, etc. The wikipedia article on the Origin of Life gives some idea of the range of possibilites. The idea that a single scientist could rule out all of these possibilities even in a lifetime of work is ludicrous. Therefore, I conclude that your Kenyon has made a leap of faith, if the conclusion he's come to is that this "must have been" the work of an intelligent designer.
Kenyon has backed up his assertions with scientific data and experimentation; if you believe his competency as a scientist is in question please provide proof with references.
Please refer me to Kenyon's peer-reviewed scientific work, then, since watching religious promo videos doesn't really cut it for me.
Since you brought up the subject "geological time", you probably will not be happy to know that scientist are challenging radioisotope dating methods; in other words, "Neo-Darwinian" evolution my not have had the billions of years required to pull off random evolution.
http://www.icr.org/store/index.php?main_page=produ ct_info&products_id=2650/
Again, please refer me to the original peer-reviewed scientific work -- I have no plans to buy a video intended as a companion to a "non-technical" book. I'm perfectly capable of assessing the original work. If there truly is legitimate science questioning some aspect of dating methods, I think that's great news, because the goal of science is to find out more about the universe around us.
However, what you are referring to sounds to me not very much like science, but rather like people who are intent on convincing themselves of something, i.e. they're looking to prove their pre-conceived notions. Unfortunately, everything we know about science indicates that when people try to do that, they often succeed; but the result isn't science, because when someone tries to repeat that work more objectively, they usually fail.
One thing that distinguishes science from religion is that science's theories and knowledge of the world change, often quite dramatically, over time, as new information is discovered. Religions don't change to the same degree, and as such, you are forced to reject science that's at odds with your religion, which itself is highly unscientific.
You're currently attempting to reject dating techniques for that exact reason. Who should I believe: people who have no particular reason to lie about the work they've done, and no particular reason to prefer one outcome over
Slashdot Mirror
...but average global intelligence certainly appears to be falling, if pHatidic is any indication. Or did Slashdot acquire MIT while I wasn't looking?
Then the reviews would show up on my machine as a blank box with a message reading "click to install plugin". I'd click, and it would say "no compatible plugins found". The problem with Flash is that it's proprietary, not open. HTML is a standard. The one can't substitute for the other. Get Macromedia to open-source Flash, then we'll talk.
That about sums it up.
I can easily disprove his claim, since I am God. Don't test my wrath!
What if the collision, via a quantum anomaly, creates a microscopic black hole, which will fall to the center of the moon, and oscillate back and forth, finally eating up the entire moon?
People get jobs doing plumbing, too, but that doesn't make them developers either.
...that "VB.Net" and "developer" don't belong in the same sentence together.
Spacecraft can't afford to vent matter to keep cool, otherwise for example you could run a nice efficient liquid cooling system which just continually vents liquid into space.
In the case of Venus, we have the luxury of actually wanting to get rid of a large amount of the atmosphere. That's the physics taken care of - the rest is just technology. And don't bother me with implementation details, I just do the big thinking!
n/t
It sounds as though you've ripped off my "Pensive Dude". Expect to hear from my lawyers!
I'm not the OP, but Joker went down twice in December, on the 11th and the 21st/22nd, IIRC. On the 21st, they were down for over 4 hours. A support ticket about the issue went unanswered, except for the automated confirmation of receipt. When this latest DDoS hit, I moved all my domains away and advised all my clients to move away, too. There are much more professional registrars and domain hosts out there, and these days some of them have better prices, too.
This is a great characterization of what happened, and shows that the real problem here is that the people doing this don't understand free speech. Free speech is not perfect speech, and that's the point. No-one's speech is perfect all the time. But by allowing free speech, mistakes are much more likely to be corrected, and abuses much less likely to remain undetected.
People living under a speech-restricting regime have a hard time understanding the natural chaos in a society with free speech. Heck, people who live in free speech societies often have difficulties with that chaos. People like to have sure sources of information that they can always rely on - the problem is that such sources don't exist.
That's pretty sobering: a Slashdot uid difference of 856730 represents an entire human generation...
OK, if that was just some weird kind of troll, more power to you, I guess. But otherwise, I'm afraid you have to turn in your /. uid and be reissued with a 6-digit one, which is the standard procedure for the poster of a -9, Clueless post.
I think what we're dealing with here is that six weeks is an appreciable fraction of the lifespan so far of the article poster. Assuming it's a he, and that he is 12, then six weeks is nearly one whole percent of his lifespan so far. To an adult, it's like having to wait an entire quarter, which is the maximum timespan that even those paragons of patience, corporate CEOs, are capable of waiting.
In the Russian space program, a person becomes a cosmonaut upon having had a successful space flight. In the U.S. space program, an astronaut is someone who has flown above 50 miles in altitude. So paying a bunch of money is a valid way to become either.
There's a valid association in this case, though. South Africa issues "ID books" to all its citizens, a practice which started way back in the apartheid days, to be able to better keep track of who should be considered a first-class citizen and who shouldn't. By the late '80s, they were fingerprinting everyone and keeping that on file. It's not a coincidence that the most draconian regimes love to maintain detailed databases on their citizens - it helps them maintain control in all the wrong ways.
When legitimate, democratic governments start wanting such tools of control, no matter how noble the alleged purpose, it's worth examining all the ways in which they can be abused, and the regimes which have abused them in the past. All it takes for abuse to start is a few bad people.
The truth is that if you're serious, and you get the funding you'll need to set up a business that'll be taken seriously by the kind of companies that buy stuff like this, you could do well. It's not as if companies like EMC or NetApp are unassailable, in theory. However, all those questions you're asking: they already know the answer to them, know what the market will bear, have the infrastructure in place to sell and support them, and so on and so on. It sounds as though you're looking at, essentially, the cost of parts, but that's not really what businesses care about. They don't want someone to dump a bunch of parts on their doorstep, they want something that they know they can rely on, and that will be maintained for them. They know that the premium over the cost of parts that they pay is generating profits for the company they're paying them to, but they don't mind that, because they get what they need in return. You can make some of those profits too, but you won't do it just by being a glorified drop-ship artist.
You have not provided any relevant information. You provided a link to the fundamentalist Christian equivalent of a PBS video, "Unlocking the Mystery of Life", but that's not a scientific reference, and I doubt you'd be satisfied if I in turn pointed you to a PBS video on evolution.
You claim that I'm "refusing to investigate" and claimed that this leads to a contradiction, but you're wrong: I have investigated, and I'm having difficulty finding relevant scientific work, which is why I'm asking for your help. Kenyon's 1969 book seems not particularly relevant -- his theory failed, but that's not a sufficient logical basis for an affirmative conclusion that "there must have been an intelligent designer". If there's a scientific basis for that conclusion, I assume there must be more recent scientific work which covers it -- in fact, I would expect a whole body of work. Where is it?
I don't, as you believe, have a pre-determined outcome in this, except for an expectation about what constitutes science. I've watched scientific theories change in my lifetime, and I've seen suspect or weak theories be replaced. I welcome that, because it means that we're learning, and are open to change. I'm not invested in some particular theory, I'm interested in theories that best fit the reality that we perceive.
Your continued arguing against Neo-Darwinism is strange, since as I've mentioned multiple times, I'm not defending it, and am certainly aware of the weaknesses in such theories. Are you actually reading my posts?
Individual scientists may not like it, but criticism of science is good. If serious questions are raised about current evolutionary theories, the result will in the end be stronger theories. But that criticism is not going to do you a bit of good when it comes to proving or even supporting your faith. When there are gaps in scientific theories -- and there are always gaps -- that doesn't mean that we can scientifically conclude "there must have been an intelligent designer". So at best, what you're trying to do is poke holes in scientific theories to create enough gaps in which your faith can live without being flatly contradicted by evidence and theory.
Let me just say, good luck with that! That's such a famous and doomed endeavour that it's got a name: God of the Gaps. The major religions long ago abandoned that approach, recognizing the theological and philosophical problems with it. But it's fascinating to watch history being repeated, it's almost as though I were alive in the time of Galileo.
On the contrary, I've asked for references to scientific works, but all you've provided are references to non-technical work. The scientific basis for that work seems hard to discern, to the point where I question its existence. Regarding condemnation before investigation, one can only investigate if there's something to investigate. You appear to have a strong faith in things that are at odds with the evidence in the world around us, and your explanation for this discrepancy is a supernatural one, based on faith. That's fine, many people have such beliefs, but they shouldn't be confused with science.
Speaking of closed minds, I notice that you persist in assuming that I am a blind follower of some particular form of Darwinism. That's not the case. As I've already pointed out, I objected to the unwarranted leap you described from the failure of some experiments, to the conclusion that an intelligent creator is the only possible explanation. That's a logical criticism of your & Kenyon's position, and has nothing to do with Darwinism in any form.
As for Darwinism in all its forms, having studied philosophy of science, I am very aware of both the strengths and weaknesses of those theories, and of the limitations of all scientific theories. I am also aware of the extent to which such theories impinge on religious belief - namely, not at all, unless your religious beliefs are at odds with the evidence we find in the world around us. The latter case requires belief in a trickster deity, whose goal is to fool humans for some unknowable purpose of its own. If that's the case, then we may as well abandon science, since there is no part of the evidence of our senses that we can trust. That might fit well with your beliefs, but many others would disagree.
No, that's silly. Science cannot prove the existence of an intelligent designer from the kind of evidence we're discussing, and if it could, we wouldn't be having this discussion in the backwaters of Slashdot, it would be major news, not just imagined to be major news by religious extremists. (I'm choosing that term carefully: after all, the Catholic Church, which has a long history of resisting scientific advances, has rejected Intelligent Design and indicated its support for evolution to the extent that it doesn't deny the possibility of a creator, which of course it never has.)
You misunderstand me: I'm making a simple logical argument. There's literally an infinite variety of possible conditions that could have led to the generation of life on the early earth, with chemical reactions possibly having been spurred by things like lightning, volcanic eruption, meteor strikes, high pressure beneath the surface of the earth, activity near volcanic vents under the sea, etc. The wikipedia article on the Origin of Life gives some idea of the range of possibilites. The idea that a single scientist could rule out all of these possibilities even in a lifetime of work is ludicrous. Therefore, I conclude that your Kenyon has made a leap of faith, if the conclusion he's come to is that this "must have been" the work of an intelligent designer.
Please refer me to Kenyon's peer-reviewed scientific work, then, since watching religious promo videos doesn't really cut it for me.
Again, please refer me to the original peer-reviewed scientific work -- I have no plans to buy a video intended as a companion to a "non-technical" book. I'm perfectly capable of assessing the original work. If there truly is legitimate science questioning some aspect of dating methods, I think that's great news, because the goal of science is to find out more about the universe around us.
However, what you are referring to sounds to me not very much like science, but rather like people who are intent on convincing themselves of something, i.e. they're looking to prove their pre-conceived notions. Unfortunately, everything we know about science indicates that when people try to do that, they often succeed; but the result isn't science, because when someone tries to repeat that work more objectively, they usually fail.
One thing that distinguishes science from religion is that science's theories and knowledge of the world change, often quite dramatically, over time, as new information is discovered. Religions don't change to the same degree, and as such, you are forced to reject science that's at odds with your religion, which itself is highly unscientific.
You're currently attempting to reject dating techniques for that exact reason. Who should I believe: people who have no particular reason to lie about the work they've done, and no particular reason to prefer one outcome over