Who said the netbook cost $150? I would guess that the bulk purchases and low requirements could allow them to cut that down to sub $40 within four or five years. And even if the netbooks had decent hardware, look at the number of servers Google runs to provide free and paid services... now what if you had idle processes on netbooks using up spare Atom (or whatever is out there) CPU time? Think about it, it could be the user footing part of your server energy bill.
+1 insightful
That might actually be what this is all about... getting users to pay for the electricity to run a grid. Especially if the netbook doesn't end up being free but just low enough to cover (most of) the cost of making it.
>>Private utilities are not beholden to their customers; only to their stockholders. It's not like you can take your business elsewhere. Publically owned utilities are beholden to their customers; bad electric service loses an election for the Mayor. He IS accountable, Amerin's CEO is not.
If only we could get the quality customer service of government workers in our private corporations!
>>If by 'good' you mean 'incredibly poor,' then yes. The response that game theory would dictate to that kind of attack would be a similar (or greater) response.
Given that aliens might be friendly, or might be hostile, with some unknown percentage, and you have the option of destroying them before they discover the 15th ubnotz principle... then yeah.
It might also explain why we've never found signals with SETI - anyone getting to the electronic age gets a relativistic chunk of rock dropped on their planet.
>>But if they do figure it out, we'll get a message a century from now: "Delicious! Do you have any other recipes?"
Sadly, people rarely stop to wonder if the messages we're sending into outer space are a good idea. Aliens with a good grasp of game theory might just very well decide to drop a meteor onto any planet they find broadcasting into outer space. You know... just to be sure.
I actually find it sort of thoughtless that people like this are taking the entire fate of the world into their hands. Dramatic? Not so much, if you really stop to think about it.
>>We generally overexploit all fish stocks and should declare large areas of the oceans at no-fishing zones to recover fish populations and become sustainable in the long run.
True, there should be better management of the fish stocks in the ocean.
However, this article doesn't explain why accidentally eating an endangered deliciousfish is "dangerous to my health". I'm not an eco-hippie that will kill myself if I accidentally get some illegal maguro. Hell, I was just in Japan last week, and my wife went hunting around to see if they actually sold dolphin and whale sushi - we were curious after watching that recent South Park episode.
Moby Dick was a terrible book. Not because it threw a wall of terminology at the reader, but because Melville tried to write a documentary on the whaling industry side by side with a book of fiction (alternating chapters between fiction and non-fiction) which really didn't work. He also couldn't maintain plot tension for the whole novel, leaving it a horribly boring mess.
I read pretty much exclusively fantasy and sci-fi these days, so I'm used to having new concepts and terms thrown at me, but Anathem was simply too much to take.
>>Thus proving you didn't understand it. None of the invented words was used casually, as a "smeerp".
How does that prove I didn't understand it? I actually had up the Anathem wiki while I read the book, looking up the different words. I didn't say they were meaningless, just bad writing to throw so many new words at the reader at once.
Satellite temperatures are better for climate purposes because ground stations temperatures also pick up heat radiated from the ground and other buildings. Indeed, one of the great points of criticism made about global climate is weather or not the current level state of ground measuring statements is both consistent and accurate. I'd assume that they are not.
Indeed - the Heat Island Effect. Interestingly enough, this was the major premise of State of Fear, that the Heat Island Effect was causing much of the measured temperature gain - that it was being underestimated by climatologists, therefore resulting in perceived global warming.
Real Climate.org did a long blast on State of Fear, but interestingly enough, their response on the HIE was real weak, which essentially said "We know about it and are already compensating for it". Well, yes... he said so. Why not just ignore stations within heat islands entirely (like he did in several charts)? RC.org's response? Silence. And moderation of comments asking that question, too, interestingly enough. They like a little bit of criticism on the site, but not a lot. (Even if you ask it as nicely as I just did.)
Michael Crichton also theorizes there is peer pressure in the field to keep global warming dissent out of peer reviewed journals. ("Preposterous!" Real Climate.org claimed.) Of course, with the Climategate emails leaked out, we now see compelling proof that Crichton was actually right on the money with this - with a climate journal which promoted a single GW skeptic to the editorial board being pressured to fire him, and lacking that, for everyone to boycott the journal, take their papers elsewhere, and to refuse to cite any articles in that journal.
It's all very interesting. I find RC.org informative, though obviously biased - when a British judge ruled that An Inconvenient Truth could be shown in classrooms, but only with a teacher guide explaining that it is a polemic, NOT a documentary, RC.org conveniently left out this latter bit, making it appear Al Gore was completely vindicated in the courtroom.
I'm giving a guest lecture on global warming next week, and used mainly RC.org, in conjunction with a mix of Green and government information sources to prepare the lecture.
>>As a software engineer you should love the approval process. In fact you should love all development processes, you live and die by the process.
Is this one of those "And Winston realized he loved Big Brother" things?
The approval process is not the same as the development process, although it might affect the platform(s) the development process targets. I've dealt with both good and bad ones in the past, so if the market share were equal, I'd prefer to write apps for Android over the iPhone.
>>Nonsense. This is only true if it's a linear relationship. Given that the greenhouse effect involves a complex feedback cycle, that is not a valid assumption.
Yes, as we all know from Al Gore's memorable definition of what a "non-linear system" is: "It's a fancy way they have of saying that the changes are not all just gradual. Some of them come suddenly in big jumps."
I used to work doing modeling of both ocean seawater and other things (like heart cells or full cardiac cycles) which attempted to accurately simulate whatever ODE or whatever it was we were simulating. These models were incredibly sensitive to the various constants used, and what the starting assumptions were. They'd fly off into incoherent-land if these values were not very precise, or if the constants didn't match each other. The only way we could calibrate or test our simulation was by, say, pulling out a rabbit's heart, wiring it up, flooding it with some solution, and having the severed heart beat for us when driven by impulses at different frequencies and amplitude. Testing and experimentation is the only way to truly know something, as Feynman said. If we just relied on the models without doing followup experimentation with them, we'd have gotten wildly inaccurate results.
Climatology, on the other hand, is "science-y", but not really science. It wants to be science, it really does - and goes through the window dressings of having peer reviewed journals and conferences and all of that - but ultimately it is not science. There is no experimentation involved (or if you will, there is one large experiment running all the time), and there is no control for the experiment. Forgive me if I do not allow your models to substitute for actual experimentation, for the reasons listed above.
As one of my professors once said, never listen to anyone who claims to be really accurate over the sample data set. It's real easy to be accurate on a sample data set. Hell, you can always just spit back out the original numbers if you want - for my neural net spam filter, we could have just returned the classifications of each email and claimed 100% accuracy, for example. If you don't think that climate researchers actually make bullshit claims like this, check out the wikipedia page on global climate modeling, and look at, say, this graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GCM_temp_anomalies_3_2000.jpg There's charts like that everywhere on wikipedia, showing how accurate the climate models are, even back in 1930, decades before the models were created.
What is important is the accuracy going forward into new data, and as they do, they've found numerous glaring problems with the predictive ability of climate models (such as rainfall changes being 25% of what is expected). (For some fun laughs, read predictions of what life would be like in 2010 written 10, 20 or 30 years ago.)
The simple fact of the matter is, I don't believe any (self-described) scientist who claims he knows how much temperature will move in the next 100 years, unless he says it will range somewhere between absolute zero and the temperature of the sun.
And if it sounds like I'm picking on climate "scientists", well, I am, but I had a number of friends who worked in the field at SIO, and they're generally smart and nice guys, and think there's a serious problem. Their problem lies in claiming more knowledge than they actually know. (Again, this is not how actual science works.) And it's not like other fields have looked enviously at the tremendous success of real scientific fields, like physics, over the last hundred years. Psychology, sociology, hell even scientology and philosophy have tried to co-opt the patina of science for themselves. (Nearly every modern philosopher since Wittgenstein calls themselves an analytic philosopher, which was a movement to directly make philosophy more "scientific" and less heads-in-the-cloudsy.)
Not true. The real reason longbows were so devestating was because the men would train with them from birth. People in other countries simply couldn't draw them. You can tell when you find an archer's skeleton, since their spine is deformed from the massive amount of stress put on their skeletal structure. Othrer countries hated and feared the longbow.
Crossbows, as you say, were easy to use and slow firing, but they weren't necessarily superior to the longbow. In some battles the longbows outranged even heavy crossbows.
Seriously. If you can tell which of your remote users arw pirates, WHY THE HELL ARE YOU PROVIDING THEM WITH REMOTE SERVICES? This is as stupid as Blizzard complaining that 60% of its accounts are pirated and not doing anything about it.
Maybe it is a consistent world, but the wall of terminology Stephenson throws at the reader at the start of Anathem is just plain bad writing. Opposite of his openings in other books, really.
Charlie Strauss seems to be begging for attention with this. His books are so ridiculously out there - Accelerando, I'm looking at you - that it seems like he bases his novels on nothing more than a misunderstood issue of Pop Sci. Doing things like hand-waving the problem of qualia and the nature of consciousness really turned me off on him.
Perhaps they're leaving because there's 100,000 apps in the store, so many of which are out and out horrible that it drowns out any possible quality product unless you have a large marketing budget or can get lucky enough to crack one of the top 10 lists.
Or they might just prefer working in a more open enviroment, which is what it sounds like. As a software engineer, things like the iPhone approval process make me very nervous about investing quite a bit of time and money into a project, especially if the process is overly opaque. I've worked with large corporations on getting software approved before, and usually it is more of a cooperative process.
" This is definitely not intended as a complete history, but a brief summary and generalization. Still, the main point is that among other things, the bow and arrow drove the change from mail to plate armor, and then, with the development of the longbow, made that obsolete as well."
Uh, no. If anything, the price of plate mail, combined with gunpowder, made it obsolete. At Agincourt, the longbow shots were used to bog down the French knights in plate mail (and to score the occasional hit through an eye slit and on the mounts).
Longbows could sometimes penetrate plate, but only at close range and it also depended a lot on the quality of the plate mail and of the arrow.
Plate stayed around well into the gunpowder era, though not the full plate suits, but more the breastplate, helmet, demi-greaves (full plate on just the front of the legs), etc.
Breastplates during the English Civil War were "proven" by having a musket fired at them from 10 paces - you can see the dents on breastplates from this era in the Tower of London. (Hence the term bullet-proof.)
Various bits of full plate have been used all the way through the Napoleonic Wars and WWII, and is still rather effective against small arms fire, though the various modern kevlar and ceramic inserts are generally superior.
With the same rationale, evolution is impossible to falsify as well, since like most things in science, it happened (or didn't) and we have imperfect knowledge of past events. It's the best match for the data, but the premise of Strong ID is that while evolution happened, some entity interfered in the process. If this happened, then there should be some evidence of the interference that should show up statistically.
Likewise, if intercessionary prayer works (frequently enough to be detected), then statistical measures can reveal it. There's interesting results both ways in this area, but the results are (as one could expect) disputed quite heavily.
>>How is intelligent design testable? I really am curious. Keep in mind that 'testable' is equivalent to 'falsifiable.'
Suppose Jurassic Park was real, and you could get a complete DNA record of every generation of an animal going back however many millions of years. You examine the mutation pattern and see if it corresponds to how mutations should occur, and see if there's any bias in the distribution pattern. That's the simplest way, I'd imagine.
It's to blame anytime anywhere something in the vaguest sense weird happens. WE NEVER HAD ANYTHING WEIRD HAPPEN BEFORE GLOBAL WARMING. EVER.
Call Al Gore - him staring pensively at great whites will make a great opening to Inconvenient Truth 2 - Revenge of the Evil People Who Didn't Buy Hybrids
>>Like for example, causing the temperature of the planet to drop for a period of time to nerf cold-blooded animals?
Yeah, God took out Velociraptors in the 1.2 patch. They were too OP.
Reptile players kind of bitched about it on the forums, but the introduction of flying units in 1.3 gave them a strong advantage that only late game mammal players can counter.
>>Despite how you try to slant it, ID only exists as a facade that the creationists put up to try and present a "theory" to throw at evolution. It is of little use except as an example of quackery.
While I agree it is probably often used as a facade, it is a testable (and therefore a scientific theory) that someone rigged the dice during evolution. You can make statistical tests for loaded dice - gaming commissions do this sort of testing all the time, in fact.
Of course, it's not really very popular to say as such here on Slashdot, where everyone is supposed to just go along with the atheist-anarchist sheeple and be followers who are so proud of themselves for their individuality.
>>Bold mine. The -only- people who use that phrase are those who, for some reason, have a bone to pick with those who oppose creationism and fight against attempts to introduce ID into schools.
I use the term 'evolutionist' only to describe people who, for some reason, have a bone to pick with Christians who propose God could have had anything at all to do with evolution. Usually because they can't handle the notion if it was true.
Read up on Hoyle and the development of the big bang theory. You might find it illuminating. People like Hoyle rejected the big bang theory out of what you might call an atheistic faith, because he couldn't handle the notion of a finite universe, because it would imply God was real. These 1940s versions of Richard Dawkins attacked the theory as 'closet creationism' and spewed quite a fair amount of vitriol in the process.
There's a close parallel between it and the modern evolutionists. If you want to watch a temper tantrum, propose testing ID as a scientific theory to your average Slashdot Dawkins clone.
>>In 1987, in Edwards v. Aguillard, the US Supreme Court ruled that "creation science" was the same thing as "creationism"
Yes, because the supreme court is the ultimate source of definitions in America. Is it chaired by Emanuel Lewis, too? Do they carry a golden dictionary from which they make pronouncements from upon high? These are the same people that ruled the obscene is that which is without any redeeming social value.
And I agree, by and large the ID movement is, as I said, YEC's using it as a disguise, even though it is completely contradictory to YEC. And yeah, Intelligent Design (the notion that God or whoever influenced evolution) is completely incompatible with the notion that the earth is only 20 years old, or whatever.
If you'd like to propose a new term to encompass the variety of theories about guided evolution, I'd like to hear it. Actually... I like that term. GE.
>>It doesn't take a "hypersensitive evolutionist" to see that this argument is incredibly weak. If an intelligent designer was constructing clever solutions and using them for life then it seems incredibly strange that solutions don't get used multiple times.
Besides, intelligent design is not creationism (though creationists tend to use it as a sort of disguise, hence the confusion). ID simply says that an intelligent wossname helped guide evolution. Depending on how you formulate it, it's either the weak form: a nice thought but not really provable either way (the approach the Vatican takes, FWIW), or the strong form, which says evolution couldn't happen without a guiding hand.
I do find it interesting though that even the strongest evolutionists can't get away from the design mentality. I remember a fierce evolutionist sitting in front of me during a bio lecture, and the professor was lecturing about how things pass through the intestine walls... essentially the whatever would get packed, then unpacked, then packed again. The guy in front of me wrote this down, then wrote "WTF" and circled it, since it didn't make sense to him for the process to work that way. (He later asked the professor why, and there was actually a reasonable explanation for it.)
BTW, don't let the normal Slashdot flamers get you down, man. The community really needed a site like yours.
Even though people like Blizzard have been using bittorrent for years to distribute patches and such, many ISPs (not to mention idiots like the *IAA orgs) are still stuck in the bittorrent = piracy mindset.
Slashdot Mirror
Who said the netbook cost $150? I would guess that the bulk purchases and low requirements could allow them to cut that down to sub $40 within four or five years. And even if the netbooks had decent hardware, look at the number of servers Google runs to provide free and paid services ... now what if you had idle processes on netbooks using up spare Atom (or whatever is out there) CPU time? Think about it, it could be the user footing part of your server energy bill.
+1 insightful
That might actually be what this is all about... getting users to pay for the electricity to run a grid. Especially if the netbook doesn't end up being free but just low enough to cover (most of) the cost of making it.
>>Private utilities are not beholden to their customers; only to their stockholders. It's not like you can take your business elsewhere. Publically owned utilities are beholden to their customers; bad electric service loses an election for the Mayor. He IS accountable, Amerin's CEO is not.
If only we could get the quality customer service of government workers in our private corporations!
Oh, how I long for the day!
>>If by 'good' you mean 'incredibly poor,' then yes. The response that game theory would dictate to that kind of attack would be a similar (or greater) response.
Given that aliens might be friendly, or might be hostile, with some unknown percentage, and you have the option of destroying them before they discover the 15th ubnotz principle... then yeah.
It might also explain why we've never found signals with SETI - anyone getting to the electronic age gets a relativistic chunk of rock dropped on their planet.
Right, meaning that aliens that might lack the ability to detect the omnidirectional signal might be able to receive this.
>>But if they do figure it out, we'll get a message a century from now: "Delicious! Do you have any other recipes?"
Sadly, people rarely stop to wonder if the messages we're sending into outer space are a good idea. Aliens with a good grasp of game theory might just very well decide to drop a meteor onto any planet they find broadcasting into outer space. You know... just to be sure.
I actually find it sort of thoughtless that people like this are taking the entire fate of the world into their hands. Dramatic? Not so much, if you really stop to think about it.
>>We generally overexploit all fish stocks and should declare large areas of the oceans at no-fishing zones to recover fish populations and become sustainable in the long run.
True, there should be better management of the fish stocks in the ocean.
However, this article doesn't explain why accidentally eating an endangered deliciousfish is "dangerous to my health". I'm not an eco-hippie that will kill myself if I accidentally get some illegal maguro. Hell, I was just in Japan last week, and my wife went hunting around to see if they actually sold dolphin and whale sushi - we were curious after watching that recent South Park episode.
Moby Dick was a terrible book. Not because it threw a wall of terminology at the reader, but because Melville tried to write a documentary on the whaling industry side by side with a book of fiction (alternating chapters between fiction and non-fiction) which really didn't work. He also couldn't maintain plot tension for the whole novel, leaving it a horribly boring mess.
I read pretty much exclusively fantasy and sci-fi these days, so I'm used to having new concepts and terms thrown at me, but Anathem was simply too much to take.
>>Thus proving you didn't understand it. None of the invented words was used casually, as a "smeerp".
How does that prove I didn't understand it? I actually had up the Anathem wiki while I read the book, looking up the different words. I didn't say they were meaningless, just bad writing to throw so many new words at the reader at once.
Satellite temperatures are better for climate purposes because ground stations temperatures also pick up heat radiated from the ground and other buildings. Indeed, one of the great points of criticism made about global climate is weather or not the current level state of ground measuring statements is both consistent and accurate. I'd assume that they are not.
Indeed - the Heat Island Effect. Interestingly enough, this was the major premise of State of Fear, that the Heat Island Effect was causing much of the measured temperature gain - that it was being underestimated by climatologists, therefore resulting in perceived global warming.
Real Climate.org did a long blast on State of Fear, but interestingly enough, their response on the HIE was real weak, which essentially said "We know about it and are already compensating for it". Well, yes... he said so. Why not just ignore stations within heat islands entirely (like he did in several charts)? RC.org's response? Silence. And moderation of comments asking that question, too, interestingly enough. They like a little bit of criticism on the site, but not a lot. (Even if you ask it as nicely as I just did.)
Michael Crichton also theorizes there is peer pressure in the field to keep global warming dissent out of peer reviewed journals. ("Preposterous!" Real Climate.org claimed.) Of course, with the Climategate emails leaked out, we now see compelling proof that Crichton was actually right on the money with this - with a climate journal which promoted a single GW skeptic to the editorial board being pressured to fire him, and lacking that, for everyone to boycott the journal, take their papers elsewhere, and to refuse to cite any articles in that journal.
It's all very interesting. I find RC.org informative, though obviously biased - when a British judge ruled that An Inconvenient Truth could be shown in classrooms, but only with a teacher guide explaining that it is a polemic, NOT a documentary, RC.org conveniently left out this latter bit, making it appear Al Gore was completely vindicated in the courtroom.
I'm giving a guest lecture on global warming next week, and used mainly RC.org, in conjunction with a mix of Green and government information sources to prepare the lecture.
>>As a software engineer you should love the approval process. In fact you should love all development processes, you live and die by the process.
Is this one of those "And Winston realized he loved Big Brother" things?
The approval process is not the same as the development process, although it might affect the platform(s) the development process targets. I've dealt with both good and bad ones in the past, so if the market share were equal, I'd prefer to write apps for Android over the iPhone.
>>Nonsense. This is only true if it's a linear relationship. Given that the greenhouse effect involves a complex feedback cycle, that is not a valid assumption.
Yes, as we all know from Al Gore's memorable definition of what a "non-linear system" is: "It's a fancy way they have of saying that the changes are not all just gradual. Some of them come suddenly in big jumps."
I used to work doing modeling of both ocean seawater and other things (like heart cells or full cardiac cycles) which attempted to accurately simulate whatever ODE or whatever it was we were simulating. These models were incredibly sensitive to the various constants used, and what the starting assumptions were. They'd fly off into incoherent-land if these values were not very precise, or if the constants didn't match each other. The only way we could calibrate or test our simulation was by, say, pulling out a rabbit's heart, wiring it up, flooding it with some solution, and having the severed heart beat for us when driven by impulses at different frequencies and amplitude. Testing and experimentation is the only way to truly know something, as Feynman said. If we just relied on the models without doing followup experimentation with them, we'd have gotten wildly inaccurate results.
Climatology, on the other hand, is "science-y", but not really science. It wants to be science, it really does - and goes through the window dressings of having peer reviewed journals and conferences and all of that - but ultimately it is not science. There is no experimentation involved (or if you will, there is one large experiment running all the time), and there is no control for the experiment. Forgive me if I do not allow your models to substitute for actual experimentation, for the reasons listed above.
As one of my professors once said, never listen to anyone who claims to be really accurate over the sample data set. It's real easy to be accurate on a sample data set. Hell, you can always just spit back out the original numbers if you want - for my neural net spam filter, we could have just returned the classifications of each email and claimed 100% accuracy, for example. If you don't think that climate researchers actually make bullshit claims like this, check out the wikipedia page on global climate modeling, and look at, say, this graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GCM_temp_anomalies_3_2000.jpg There's charts like that everywhere on wikipedia, showing how accurate the climate models are, even back in 1930, decades before the models were created.
What is important is the accuracy going forward into new data, and as they do, they've found numerous glaring problems with the predictive ability of climate models (such as rainfall changes being 25% of what is expected). (For some fun laughs, read predictions of what life would be like in 2010 written 10, 20 or 30 years ago.)
The simple fact of the matter is, I don't believe any (self-described) scientist who claims he knows how much temperature will move in the next 100 years, unless he says it will range somewhere between absolute zero and the temperature of the sun.
And if it sounds like I'm picking on climate "scientists", well, I am, but I had a number of friends who worked in the field at SIO, and they're generally smart and nice guys, and think there's a serious problem. Their problem lies in claiming more knowledge than they actually know. (Again, this is not how actual science works.) And it's not like other fields have looked enviously at the tremendous success of real scientific fields, like physics, over the last hundred years. Psychology, sociology, hell even scientology and philosophy have tried to co-opt the patina of science for themselves. (Nearly every modern philosopher since Wittgenstein calls themselves an analytic philosopher, which was a movement to directly make philosophy more "scientific" and less heads-in-the-cloudsy.)
Not true. The real reason longbows were so devestating was because the men would train with them from birth. People in other countries simply couldn't draw them. You can tell when you find an archer's skeleton, since their spine is deformed from the massive amount of stress put on their skeletal structure. Othrer countries hated and feared the longbow.
Crossbows, as you say, were easy to use and slow firing, but they weren't necessarily superior to the longbow. In some battles the longbows outranged even heavy crossbows.
Seriously. If you can tell which of your remote users arw pirates, WHY THE HELL ARE YOU PROVIDING THEM WITH REMOTE SERVICES? This is as stupid as Blizzard complaining that 60% of its accounts are pirated and not doing anything about it.
Maybe it is a consistent world, but the wall of terminology Stephenson throws at the reader at the start of Anathem is just plain bad writing. Opposite of his openings in other books, really.
Charlie Strauss seems to be begging for attention with this. His books are so ridiculously out there - Accelerando, I'm looking at you - that it seems like he bases his novels on nothing more than a misunderstood issue of Pop Sci. Doing things like hand-waving the problem of qualia and the nature of consciousness really turned me off on him.
Perhaps they're leaving because there's 100,000 apps in the store, so many of which are out and out horrible that it drowns out any possible quality product unless you have a large marketing budget or can get lucky enough to crack one of the top 10 lists.
Or they might just prefer working in a more open enviroment, which is what it sounds like. As a software engineer, things like the iPhone approval process make me very nervous about investing quite a bit of time and money into a project, especially if the process is overly opaque. I've worked with large corporations on getting software approved before, and usually it is more of a cooperative process.
"
This is definitely not intended as a complete history, but a brief summary and generalization. Still, the main point is that among other things, the bow and arrow drove the change from mail to plate armor, and then, with the development of the longbow, made that obsolete as well."
Uh, no. If anything, the price of plate mail, combined with gunpowder, made it obsolete. At Agincourt, the longbow shots were used to bog down the French knights in plate mail (and to score the occasional hit through an eye slit and on the mounts).
Longbows could sometimes penetrate plate, but only at close range and it also depended a lot on the quality of the plate mail and of the arrow.
Plate stayed around well into the gunpowder era, though not the full plate suits, but more the breastplate, helmet, demi-greaves (full plate on just the front of the legs), etc.
Breastplates during the English Civil War were "proven" by having a musket fired at them from 10 paces - you can see the dents on breastplates from this era in the Tower of London. (Hence the term bullet-proof.)
Various bits of full plate have been used all the way through the Napoleonic Wars and WWII, and is still rather effective against small arms fire, though the various modern kevlar and ceramic inserts are generally superior.
Fresno.
It's not exciting, but it has no natural disasters worse than the occasional dust storm blowing up farmland over the city in high winds.
With the same rationale, evolution is impossible to falsify as well, since like most things in science, it happened (or didn't) and we have imperfect knowledge of past events. It's the best match for the data, but the premise of Strong ID is that while evolution happened, some entity interfered in the process. If this happened, then there should be some evidence of the interference that should show up statistically.
Likewise, if intercessionary prayer works (frequently enough to be detected), then statistical measures can reveal it. There's interesting results both ways in this area, but the results are (as one could expect) disputed quite heavily.
>>How is intelligent design testable? I really am curious. Keep in mind that 'testable' is equivalent to 'falsifiable.'
Suppose Jurassic Park was real, and you could get a complete DNA record of every generation of an animal going back however many millions of years. You examine the mutation pattern and see if it corresponds to how mutations should occur, and see if there's any bias in the distribution pattern. That's the simplest way, I'd imagine.
Quick... someone blame global warming!
It's to blame anytime anywhere something in the vaguest sense weird happens. WE NEVER HAD ANYTHING WEIRD HAPPEN BEFORE GLOBAL WARMING. EVER.
Call Al Gore - him staring pensively at great whites will make a great opening to Inconvenient Truth 2 - Revenge of the Evil People Who Didn't Buy Hybrids
>>Like for example, causing the temperature of the planet to drop for a period of time to nerf cold-blooded animals?
Yeah, God took out Velociraptors in the 1.2 patch. They were too OP.
Reptile players kind of bitched about it on the forums, but the introduction of flying units in 1.3 gave them a strong advantage that only late game mammal players can counter.
>>Despite how you try to slant it, ID only exists as a facade that the creationists put up to try and present a "theory" to throw at evolution. It is of little use except as an example of quackery.
While I agree it is probably often used as a facade, it is a testable (and therefore a scientific theory) that someone rigged the dice during evolution. You can make statistical tests for loaded dice - gaming commissions do this sort of testing all the time, in fact.
Of course, it's not really very popular to say as such here on Slashdot, where everyone is supposed to just go along with the atheist-anarchist sheeple and be followers who are so proud of themselves for their individuality.
>>Bold mine. The -only- people who use that phrase are those who, for some reason, have a bone to pick with those who oppose creationism and fight against attempts to introduce ID into schools.
I use the term 'evolutionist' only to describe people who, for some reason, have a bone to pick with Christians who propose God could have had anything at all to do with evolution. Usually because they can't handle the notion if it was true.
Read up on Hoyle and the development of the big bang theory. You might find it illuminating. People like Hoyle rejected the big bang theory out of what you might call an atheistic faith, because he couldn't handle the notion of a finite universe, because it would imply God was real. These 1940s versions of Richard Dawkins attacked the theory as 'closet creationism' and spewed quite a fair amount of vitriol in the process.
There's a close parallel between it and the modern evolutionists. If you want to watch a temper tantrum, propose testing ID as a scientific theory to your average Slashdot Dawkins clone.
>>In 1987, in Edwards v. Aguillard, the US Supreme Court ruled that "creation science" was the same thing as "creationism"
Yes, because the supreme court is the ultimate source of definitions in America. Is it chaired by Emanuel Lewis, too? Do they carry a golden dictionary from which they make pronouncements from upon high? These are the same people that ruled the obscene is that which is without any redeeming social value.
And I agree, by and large the ID movement is, as I said, YEC's using it as a disguise, even though it is completely contradictory to YEC. And yeah, Intelligent Design (the notion that God or whoever influenced evolution) is completely incompatible with the notion that the earth is only 20 years old, or whatever.
If you'd like to propose a new term to encompass the variety of theories about guided evolution, I'd like to hear it. Actually... I like that term. GE.
>>It doesn't take a "hypersensitive evolutionist" to see that this argument is incredibly weak. If an intelligent designer was constructing clever solutions and using them for life then it seems incredibly strange that solutions don't get used multiple times.
Good thing birds and bats evolved from the same lineage, or you'd have a problem with your argument, eh? (You may want to start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_examples_of_convergent_evolution)
Besides, intelligent design is not creationism (though creationists tend to use it as a sort of disguise, hence the confusion). ID simply says that an intelligent wossname helped guide evolution. Depending on how you formulate it, it's either the weak form: a nice thought but not really provable either way (the approach the Vatican takes, FWIW), or the strong form, which says evolution couldn't happen without a guiding hand.
I do find it interesting though that even the strongest evolutionists can't get away from the design mentality. I remember a fierce evolutionist sitting in front of me during a bio lecture, and the professor was lecturing about how things pass through the intestine walls... essentially the whatever would get packed, then unpacked, then packed again. The guy in front of me wrote this down, then wrote "WTF" and circled it, since it didn't make sense to him for the process to work that way. (He later asked the professor why, and there was actually a reasonable explanation for it.)
BTW, don't let the normal Slashdot flamers get you down, man. The community really needed a site like yours.
Even though people like Blizzard have been using bittorrent for years to distribute patches and such, many ISPs (not to mention idiots like the *IAA orgs) are still stuck in the bittorrent = piracy mindset.