>>If you do have to believe in reincarnation, then you clearly have to believe in something that does not make sense.
Why does reincarnation not make sense?
You were born once, weren't you? Why do you claim it's nonsensical to say you can't be born again (either in heaven or on this earth again)? Do you understand the process of existing so well?
>>>Hello, I'm no nuculear specialist or anything, so I want to know if there is any chance of PC parts with japanese components (capacitors and stuff) shipping with radioactive particles on them from now on. >>I want all those extra FPS's...but i don't want my PC to be something to DIE for!
But... gamma particles are all the latest craze in overclocking! Why be lame with those commodity blue LED lights on your box when you could have the "real" soothing blue of Cherenkov radiation?
>>That sentence seems to assume human beings as not a part of nature.
As I said, it is a matter of semantics. Since the question is over "Intelligent" design and not "Natural" design, the point is moot.
>>Mutation rates are not constant and RNA and DNA molecules are not eternal so it would probably quite difficult to find surviving traces of purposeful manipulation say, from a single hominid population from 4 million years ago.
Any minor influence would be undetectable, sure. But remember, the claims of IDers is that "interesting" evolution can only occur with substantial interference, so such interference ought to be detectable.
>>The scholarly class negatively perceived maltreatment of the scholarly class? Holy shit! That's a revelation
Nice way of dismissing the issue. If persecution and locking down of thought was a Chinese norm, they wouldn't have reacted to it in such a way in the Grand Histories.
>>Do you have any frame of reference for what life was like before the Legalist reforms in the various states of the Zhongguo?
Oddly enough, the Chinese had a tradition of academic openness called "The 100 Schools of Thought" before the Qin unified China and executed everyone who wasn't a legalist, and burned all their books.
>>...the people would rise up against that authority which perpetrated it. That did not happen in Qin society, so how can you say it was as great or greater an outrage? >>People knew better than to stand up in a Legalist state.
This is the same Qin society that rebelled and overthrew the Qin dynasty after only 15 years? Oh. Right. That one. And the killing of the Confucians was one of the major reasons why the people rebelled against the Qin.
It would really help if you had your facts straight before drawing conclusions from them about how the Chinese people love authoritarianism and have no sense of their natural rights. They do put up with more than Americans, but they do stand up for themselves when their rulers become too tyrannical. The history of China is filled with revolutions against dictatorial regimes. Look up "losing the mandate of heaven."
>>Egypt and Tunisia were both already 'democracies'
It's not a democracy when you haven't had a contested election in 30 years, sorry. Might as well call Saddam's Iraq a democracy.
>>Did you miss the part about how the KMT was as much an authoritarian party as the CCP?
I dismissed it because you obviously have been sipping Chomsky's wine a little too hard, and let it get to your head. The CCP were so much worse than the KMT, in every aspect, that to equate the two is insane.
>>Where was this theoretical resistance during the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution?
They left China. Or tried to. A lot got killed by the CCP trying to flee. More than a million ended up in Vietnam.
>>In nature "peaking" means that the lifeform has run out of space
Believe it or not, there's differences between humans and other "lifeforms".
>>. Bacteria in a petri dish multiply until the food is exhausted and then die off until the population is stable for whatever is left; larger animals behave the same way by stripping available resources before migrating. If the numbers get too large then they end up squabbling over territory (war) or exhausting supply and dying back.
Humans have things called "education" and "birth control". We're not mindless bacteria.
>>Does strong ID make any predictions which can be tested
Yes.
>>and, if strong ID is wrong, the results would differ from predictions?
Yes.
That's my entire point. When you formulate ID as intelligent interference in the normal evolutionary process, it will show a different distribution of mutations.
>>Actions of people (the invasive species), asteroids, changes in the sun and tectonic activity are all parts of naturally occurring selective pressure.
I wouldn't call actions of people naturally occurring selective pressure, and neither should you. But you're focusing more on the word choice than the meaning.
It's obvious interference in the natural evolutionary process, but if you want to say that's "natural", too, then invent some new word, like "naturifical" to describe intelligent life interfering with non-intelligent evolution. And that's what we'd be developing a statistical test for.
>>I worry if it will be because of careful planning of fertility and resources, or by running out of resources.
The estimates base the decline on lowered fertility rates, not resources.
>>Agriculture is fed by energy, mostly oil, and that's ever harder to extract from the ground. >>But I guess I am a fucktard for even worrying about it.
From what I understand, it's a mix of both managerial reviews and more objective scores, like doing documentation and so forth. So if you want to level up quickly, you need to make sure you hit up all the categories.
>>Their engineers may be treated relatively well, but I bet they don't earn nearly as much as the managers do. They most probably have less secondary benefits as well.
From what I understand from my friends working for the evil empire, you have a RPG-esque "level" when you work at Microsoft. Collect enough "XP" among each of your rated categories, and you level up. Gain a pay raise, and later on, a promotion. You can either stay as a senior developer (or higher level titled developers) or branch into management at some point. From what I understand, in a general sense, your level controls your salary, but past a certain point it may be easier to level up as a manager instead of a developer.
>>Welcome to Slashdot, where contentless posts that contribute nothing to the discussion are rewarded with +5 insightful.
Perhaps the moderators were as tired as I was of hearing about how all corporations are evil, and only large governments can save us from the unmitigated greed of capitalism.
And yet, oddly enough, America prospered and had more freedoms than the USSR, communist China, or socialist France.
It's funny in the same way as trying to watch a Republican say something nice about Obama. He hates corporations, but has to bend over backwards before saying something nice about one.
>>From the burning books and burying scholars of the Qin dynasty and the destruction of the hundred schools of thought through to the literary purges of the Qing, censorship by no less than immediate death was completely normal in dynastic China.
Completely normal? No.
If you've actually read any of the various Chinese historical accounts (which I doubt), you'll see the writers excoriating the emperors that executed scholars and tried to influence the writing of the histories.
It was as much an outrage then as it would be in modern society, perhaps more so (since scholars were accorded especial status).
>>China has always been autocratic, which is why its flirtation with democracy in the first half of the 20th century was doomed to failure
I always hate it when people make statements like these. The recent events in the middle east kind of show how wrong you are when you claim a people are incapable of democracy. The KMT could have easily won the Chinese Civil War.
The Chinese people have always formed resistance groups to autocracies when the abuses grew out of hand. Contrawise, they tend to accept autocracies when they benefit the people. That's why the Communist party in China right now is actually quite popular with the people - as long as China's economy is growing by leaps and bounds, they're willing to overlook the lack of freedoms.
>>Falsification of ID could be simply performed by assuming a hidden variable outside of naturally occurring selective pressure.
Yes.
>>Since such a variable can not be a part of natural environment as all the parts of the natural environment are creating naturally occurring selective pressure
No. There are non-supernatural causes for such a variable outside outside of naturally occurring selective pressure.
I mean, just think about it for more than a second. People have been interfering with naturally occurring selective pressure for thousands of years. Compare modern corn to maize, for example.
If we had a test that could reveal outside interference (i.e. just as you say, a hidden variable outside of selective pressure) it would be very valuable for these sorts of questions outside of the whole ID debate.
>>it must be a supernatural one. Therefore ID is a religious concept.
Science can investigate religious claims if they have an impact on the natural world.
Besides, some people believe in ID due to aliens or whatever.
>>The real problem is that developing nations lack a functional economy. We need to be providing assistance for economic development in those countries
The real problem is often the fact that they live under dictatorships with no Rule of Law to speak of.
Zimbabwe had a perfectly functioning economy, as a net exporter of food, until a Slashdot-esque anti-corporate type came to power, took away the land from the white farmers that had been there for a hundred years, and proceeded to plunge his entire country into starvation and economic ruin.
There's no point to giving money to a country where the leadership will just steal it all. The Rule of Law and a functioning infrastructure must come before anything else.
I think the AC was rightly responding to your rant about "mega-corp monopolies" and how they're behind everything.
All you anti-corporate types have a giant fucking blind spot when it comes to actual sources of evil in the world. And these were all in communist countries (the same anti-corporate utopia you idiots want to create), that starved people for political purposes (the holodomor) or from utopian anti-corporate thinking (collectivization).
>>How can you say genocide is not greed at some level?
Dance for me, communist-boy, dance.
Stalin was going after the Kulaks, who were (he thought) his political enemies (see "class enemy"). It had nothing to do with money or economics, other than the fact that he hated that they were still vaguely capitalistic and that they were being economically successful after he'd destroyed the rest of the USSR's economy through collectivization.
GM wheat that is resistant to the wheat rust that is threatening crops around the world would certainly be welcomed by the people starving as a result of it.
Most of our foods are GM anyway - you think modern corn looks anything like ancient maize?
You're right that we have more than enough food right now, and the only reason we have starvation in the world at all right now is due to political and logistical reasons, but having a food supply that is resistant to being wiped out by a fungus is A Good Thing.
There's plenty of bad things to go along with it (especially the crap Monsanto has been pulling, suing farmers that had seeds from their GM plants blow into their fields, for example), and allergen / health issues, but in and of itself GM food is not a bad thing.
Which means that even with all the extra humans, our agricultural output has increased even faster. Malthus, and the fucktarded article, are wrong.
Given that the human population is estimated to peak in the next 40 years, I don't think there's much to worry about. Though humans are always capable of unprecedented stupidity. If we detect a single radioactive particle in our California rice and burn our entire yield as a result, then, ok, we'll probably have food shortages.
Edison: "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."
Tesla: "If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor."
>>Trademarks have the concept of a domain in which they are valid. P
Yes, but Trademarks also have to be distinctive. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_distinctiveness)
That's why you see all those annoying misspellings in trademarks (Kwik-E-Mart, you know), because a Quick Market is a description of what it is, which doesn't get much protection from trademark law.
Apple's App Store and Subway's Footlong (tm) are both examples of trademarks that really should be knocked down under challenge.
Slashdot Mirror
>>If you do have to believe in reincarnation, then you clearly have to believe in something that does not make sense.
Why does reincarnation not make sense?
You were born once, weren't you? Why do you claim it's nonsensical to say you can't be born again (either in heaven or on this earth again)? Do you understand the process of existing so well?
>>On top of that Intel only sold Itaniums to enterprise, screeching compiler development for it to a hault.
I had experience working with the preproduction Intel compilers for it, and it was very, very good.
One of the best things about the platform, really. Kind of like the Tera.
>>>Hello, I'm no nuculear specialist or anything, so I want to know if there is any chance of PC parts with japanese components (capacitors and stuff) shipping with radioactive particles on them from now on.
>>I want all those extra FPS's...but i don't want my PC to be something to DIE for!
But... gamma particles are all the latest craze in overclocking! Why be lame with those commodity blue LED lights on your box when you could have the "real" soothing blue of Cherenkov radiation?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Advanced_Test_Reactor.jpg (Hmm, actually looks like a lot of cases I've seen...)
>>That sentence seems to assume human beings as not a part of nature.
As I said, it is a matter of semantics. Since the question is over "Intelligent" design and not "Natural" design, the point is moot.
>>Mutation rates are not constant and RNA and DNA molecules are not eternal so it would probably quite difficult to find surviving traces of purposeful manipulation say, from a single hominid population from 4 million years ago.
Any minor influence would be undetectable, sure. But remember, the claims of IDers is that "interesting" evolution can only occur with substantial interference, so such interference ought to be detectable.
>>The scholarly class negatively perceived maltreatment of the scholarly class? Holy shit! That's a revelation
Nice way of dismissing the issue. If persecution and locking down of thought was a Chinese norm, they wouldn't have reacted to it in such a way in the Grand Histories.
>>Do you have any frame of reference for what life was like before the Legalist reforms in the various states of the Zhongguo?
Oddly enough, the Chinese had a tradition of academic openness called "The 100 Schools of Thought" before the Qin unified China and executed everyone who wasn't a legalist, and burned all their books.
>>...the people would rise up against that authority which perpetrated it. That did not happen in Qin society, so how can you say it was as great or greater an outrage?
>>People knew better than to stand up in a Legalist state.
This is the same Qin society that rebelled and overthrew the Qin dynasty after only 15 years? Oh. Right. That one. And the killing of the Confucians was one of the major reasons why the people rebelled against the Qin.
It would really help if you had your facts straight before drawing conclusions from them about how the Chinese people love authoritarianism and have no sense of their natural rights. They do put up with more than Americans, but they do stand up for themselves when their rulers become too tyrannical. The history of China is filled with revolutions against dictatorial regimes. Look up "losing the mandate of heaven."
>>Egypt and Tunisia were both already 'democracies'
It's not a democracy when you haven't had a contested election in 30 years, sorry. Might as well call Saddam's Iraq a democracy.
>>Did you miss the part about how the KMT was as much an authoritarian party as the CCP?
I dismissed it because you obviously have been sipping Chomsky's wine a little too hard, and let it get to your head. The CCP were so much worse than the KMT, in every aspect, that to equate the two is insane.
>>Where was this theoretical resistance during the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution?
They left China. Or tried to. A lot got killed by the CCP trying to flee. More than a million ended up in Vietnam.
http://www.un.org/popin/wdtrends.htm
There ya go.
>>In nature "peaking" means that the lifeform has run out of space
Believe it or not, there's differences between humans and other "lifeforms".
>>. Bacteria in a petri dish multiply until the food is exhausted and then die off until the population is stable for whatever is left; larger animals behave the same way by stripping available resources before migrating. If the numbers get too large then they end up squabbling over territory (war) or exhausting supply and dying back.
Humans have things called "education" and "birth control". We're not mindless bacteria.
>>Does strong ID make any predictions which can be tested
Yes.
>>and, if strong ID is wrong, the results would differ from predictions?
Yes.
That's my entire point. When you formulate ID as intelligent interference in the normal evolutionary process, it will show a different distribution of mutations.
>>Actions of people (the invasive species), asteroids, changes in the sun and tectonic activity are all parts of naturally occurring selective pressure.
I wouldn't call actions of people naturally occurring selective pressure, and neither should you. But you're focusing more on the word choice than the meaning.
It's obvious interference in the natural evolutionary process, but if you want to say that's "natural", too, then invent some new word, like "naturifical" to describe intelligent life interfering with non-intelligent evolution. And that's what we'd be developing a statistical test for.
>>I worry if it will be because of careful planning of fertility and resources, or by running out of resources.
The estimates base the decline on lowered fertility rates, not resources.
>>Agriculture is fed by energy, mostly oil, and that's ever harder to extract from the ground.
>>But I guess I am a fucktard for even worrying about it.
Yeah, pretty much.
From what I understand, it's a mix of both managerial reviews and more objective scores, like doing documentation and so forth. So if you want to level up quickly, you need to make sure you hit up all the categories.
>>Their engineers may be treated relatively well, but I bet they don't earn nearly as much as the managers do. They most probably have less secondary benefits as well.
From what I understand from my friends working for the evil empire, you have a RPG-esque "level" when you work at Microsoft. Collect enough "XP" among each of your rated categories, and you level up. Gain a pay raise, and later on, a promotion. You can either stay as a senior developer (or higher level titled developers) or branch into management at some point. From what I understand, in a general sense, your level controls your salary, but past a certain point it may be easier to level up as a manager instead of a developer.
>>Welcome to Slashdot, where contentless posts that contribute nothing to the discussion are rewarded with +5 insightful.
Perhaps the moderators were as tired as I was of hearing about how all corporations are evil, and only large governments can save us from the unmitigated greed of capitalism.
And yet, oddly enough, America prospered and had more freedoms than the USSR, communist China, or socialist France.
>>Management hates this sort of thing.
Yeah, because I'm sure the IE dev team sent the cake behind management's back. Err... again.
Those tricksy engineers! Got to keep them in their place.
Believe it or not, Microsoft treating their engineers like shit is a good way to get them to go work for Google. So they don't.
>>What's funny about it?
It's funny in the same way as trying to watch a Republican say something nice about Obama. He hates corporations, but has to bend over backwards before saying something nice about one.
>>From the burning books and burying scholars of the Qin dynasty and the destruction of the hundred schools of thought through to the literary purges of the Qing, censorship by no less than immediate death was completely normal in dynastic China.
Completely normal? No.
If you've actually read any of the various Chinese historical accounts (which I doubt), you'll see the writers excoriating the emperors that executed scholars and tried to influence the writing of the histories.
It was as much an outrage then as it would be in modern society, perhaps more so (since scholars were accorded especial status).
>>China has always been autocratic, which is why its flirtation with democracy in the first half of the 20th century was doomed to failure
I always hate it when people make statements like these. The recent events in the middle east kind of show how wrong you are when you claim a people are incapable of democracy. The KMT could have easily won the Chinese Civil War.
The Chinese people have always formed resistance groups to autocracies when the abuses grew out of hand. Contrawise, they tend to accept autocracies when they benefit the people. That's why the Communist party in China right now is actually quite popular with the people - as long as China's economy is growing by leaps and bounds, they're willing to overlook the lack of freedoms.
It's always funny to watch an anti-corporate person trying to pay a compliment to a corporation without appearing hypocritical.
>>Falsification of ID could be simply performed by assuming a hidden variable outside of naturally occurring selective pressure.
Yes.
>>Since such a variable can not be a part of natural environment as all the parts of the natural environment are creating naturally occurring selective pressure
No. There are non-supernatural causes for such a variable outside outside of naturally occurring selective pressure.
I mean, just think about it for more than a second. People have been interfering with naturally occurring selective pressure for thousands of years. Compare modern corn to maize, for example.
If we had a test that could reveal outside interference (i.e. just as you say, a hidden variable outside of selective pressure) it would be very valuable for these sorts of questions outside of the whole ID debate.
>>it must be a supernatural one. Therefore ID is a religious concept.
Science can investigate religious claims if they have an impact on the natural world.
Besides, some people believe in ID due to aliens or whatever.
>>9 billion mouths x 15 fold = 135 billion people fed.
I'll keep that in mind the next time the Earth's population hits 135 billion.
Given that the population is estimated to peak at 8B or 9B, we've got not much to worry about at the high level.
>>The real problem is that developing nations lack a functional economy. We need to be providing assistance for economic development in those countries
The real problem is often the fact that they live under dictatorships with no Rule of Law to speak of.
Zimbabwe had a perfectly functioning economy, as a net exporter of food, until a Slashdot-esque anti-corporate type came to power, took away the land from the white farmers that had been there for a hundred years, and proceeded to plunge his entire country into starvation and economic ruin.
There's no point to giving money to a country where the leadership will just steal it all. The Rule of Law and a functioning infrastructure must come before anything else.
I think the AC was rightly responding to your rant about "mega-corp monopolies" and how they're behind everything.
All you anti-corporate types have a giant fucking blind spot when it comes to actual sources of evil in the world. And these were all in communist countries (the same anti-corporate utopia you idiots want to create), that starved people for political purposes (the holodomor) or from utopian anti-corporate thinking (collectivization).
>>How can you say genocide is not greed at some level?
Dance for me, communist-boy, dance.
Stalin was going after the Kulaks, who were (he thought) his political enemies (see "class enemy"). It had nothing to do with money or economics, other than the fact that he hated that they were still vaguely capitalistic and that they were being economically successful after he'd destroyed the rest of the USSR's economy through collectivization.
>>The answer is not GM foods
The answer to which question?
GM wheat that is resistant to the wheat rust that is threatening crops around the world would certainly be welcomed by the people starving as a result of it.
Most of our foods are GM anyway - you think modern corn looks anything like ancient maize?
You're right that we have more than enough food right now, and the only reason we have starvation in the world at all right now is due to political and logistical reasons, but having a food supply that is resistant to being wiped out by a fungus is A Good Thing.
There's plenty of bad things to go along with it (especially the crap Monsanto has been pulling, suing farmers that had seeds from their GM plants blow into their fields, for example), and allergen / health issues, but in and of itself GM food is not a bad thing.
Per capita food production has been rising:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Food_production_per_capita_1961-2005.png
Which means that even with all the extra humans, our agricultural output has increased even faster. Malthus, and the fucktarded article, are wrong.
Given that the human population is estimated to peak in the next 40 years, I don't think there's much to worry about. Though humans are always capable of unprecedented stupidity. If we detect a single radioactive particle in our California rice and burn our entire yield as a result, then, ok, we'll probably have food shortages.
Edison: "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."
Tesla: "If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor."
>>Trademarks have the concept of a domain in which they are valid. P
Yes, but Trademarks also have to be distinctive. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_distinctiveness)
That's why you see all those annoying misspellings in trademarks (Kwik-E-Mart, you know), because a Quick Market is a description of what it is, which doesn't get much protection from trademark law.
Apple's App Store and Subway's Footlong (tm) are both examples of trademarks that really should be knocked down under challenge.