Except that there are certain systems which are irreducibly complex.
Sure, but only if "irreducibly complex" means "the result of evolutionary processes of which I cannot conceive due to a lack of imagination or insight."
The IDer (for sake of argument call Him God)
ID doesn't even get you that far. All of this trouble to grow a tiny fig-leaf for creationism, and even granted all of your own arguments you still can't honestly assert that your Intelligent Designer is the God of the Bible and not, say, the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
It seems that women prefer working with life things, rather than unresponsive machinery.
Hey, it's only unresponsive when it's broken...
I also fail to see how killing and cutting up fuzzy bunnies is really feeding into anyone's nurturing, life-loving instincts, but I guess when you're deciding to go into a field you're working from the image, not the reality.
It's more than that, though, or people would drop programmes that didn't suit their initial impressions. A friend of mine from high school started in engineering in university, but then chucked it when he realized that he hated the programme, hated the people, hated the equations...
Various disciplines no doubt develop their own cultures, possibly not really related to the subject matter as such, and the various cultures will be uncomfortable to people of different temperaments. Setting aside as obvious barriers any traditions of blatant sexism, there are still likely to be sex-correlated patterns in who feels comfortable where. As other commenters have noted, these may even change over time, though not, I would suspect, necessarily automatically for the better.
Word is worse than rinky-dink -- it's complicated and unreliable and makes you want to beat its developers with a WordPerfect 5.1 manual (they came in binders).
WordPad is more like what Dvorak seems to be asking for, since it lets you pick your font, set your margins, make a list, and paste in a picture. That's all you need in a word processor.
Word, on the other hand, has a bunch of brain-dead, hard-to-disable automation features at the rinky-dink end of things and a bunch of fussy, hard-to-use desktop publishing features at the other end. All, in my experience, can leave you with an irrevocably screwed up document if you accidentally use them.
Before flying cars become a reality, we need a way to keep a fanatic from loading the passenger seat with plastic explosives and flying it into a school building.
I agree with the rest of your comment, but this bit I think is creeping featurism. We don't have magic ground cars that prevent maniacs from blowing them up in vulnerable places, after all.
And if you use nuclear power as your primary means of generating electricity, you can make enough hydrogen that 12% efficiency from an IC engine is just fine.
He definitely needs to put down his William F. Buckley Book of Big Words. It doesn't get better:
[...] given the loveliness of these drawings and the concomitant interest the reader could have in these drawings qua drawings, they are entirely superrogatory.
Unless you've been reading ahead in your Word-a-Day calendar, you'll need, like me, to look up concomitant and superrogatory. I'm still not sure about superrogatory, because he's actually found a word that's not in my Concise Oxford.
The deal is sealed by "qua," which is generally used by people who feel that overuse has taken the annoying edge off of "per se." People who speak English and not Thesaurese say "as such".
Based mostly on Gary Groth's own telling of history, it seems to me that Mr. McCloud wrote Understanding Comics, got famous in academic circles, and now has to put up with the usual academic (or pseudo-academic) rivalry.
Others hide cowardice in a cloak of morality and relativism
He's the one saying that he'll never kill anybody, while you're the one claiming that under certain circumstances we can call it "true compassion for humanity". So that'd be a "relativism" point for you, surely, not him.
where food production is controlled by some central authority
Unless you grow it yourself, this is already effectively the case, isn't it? If you're not making a deliberate effort to the contrary, the bulk of the food you eat is likely to come from large operations and national chains.
I known darn well that it's "Antarctica", and I've been annoyed by people who pronounce it incorrectly for as long as I can remember. It's a typo, I swear. I can spel. The carp on teh Web hasnt overwelmd my prof-reading skils, honetsly...
In conclusion, the truths of penguin life are cute, safe
Where's the "cute" in slogging across Antartica, starving yourself for countless weeks, and then having to leave your offspring to die because your mate got eaten by a seal?
And the very definition of "safe", by the way, is sitting through a political spiel that you already agree with.
For example, they state that "somehow the penguins know how to all go to the same place they were born", as if this was some great mystery. I've read, and seen in other documentaries that many birds have features in their skulls which act more or less like a compass. I don't know if penguins possess this, but it seems reasonable.
The narration in the version that I saw proposed a couple of explanations, including an internal compass. Navigation by the sun was another option, as I remember.
But it's as if that sort of technical explanation would ruin the myth that the penguins follow some humanlike, almost spiritual journey
Ambling for miles across a glacier to an unmarked location didn't strike me as a "they're like us" moment.
At the very least they could have explained how to tell the males from the females, because they all looked alike to me.
<impression voice="Morgan Freeman">Somehow, they just know. Perhaps it's personal ads, or cologne. Or, maybe, a greater force: love.</impression>
I'm able to see affairs of the world from a separate point of view than any particular nationalism or culture
Is it just me, or are we all nuts from that perspective?
so I doubt that comment has the sting you meant it to when you directed it.
I'm not sure that I was holding out much hope for the sting-yield of such a cheap shot, but I do think that it sounds more than a little harsh to criminalise whole populations for being the subjects of tyrants. Surely, if it is a crime, it is its own punishment, and getting bombed is just injury upon misfortune.
If WWIII were to break out, the next Hitler of the world would not be able to mass his forces anywhere. His cities and factories could be annialated at will by an opposing side. If you cannot mass your forces, and if you cannot supply them with arms, the war is over.
You're ignoring what we've known since the advent of the Bomb: you don't mass your forces any more, you just nuke the hell out of the other guy with no warning.
Hence a certain degree of tension.
It took the world 10 years to stop tyrany in WWII. It would take 35 minutes to stop tyrany today.
You assume that the Good Guys have the Bomb and Tyranny has map co-ordinates. Even then, bombs kill civilians, so you have to rationalize things by saying that "there are no innocent civilians in war!", except, of course, you're made a pre-emptive strike, so you have to say instead that "they wouldn't have been innocent if we hadn't killed them!" or something.
Fact is, more people die and by slower and more painful methods when you pussy-foot around.
That depends entirely on your definition of pussy-footing and the quality of your planning. Iraq's a fine example of both the drawn-out unpleasantness of sanctions and the perils of misjudging "decisive" action.
...than to wither away slowly, watching those that you love wither with you.
I wonder if their hope extends to hoping that broadband-over-power-lines magically doesn't spam the radio spectrum with interference. Last we heard, it did...
People to not want to believe in ID because it puts them in a place where they have to be answerable to someone.
And I'll assert that people who want to argue from God's Law will support ID because they think it puts them in a place where they can boss others around.
If God exists and we are created by Him than we are bound to follow what he says about life and the way we live it
Assuming arguendo that the Intelligent Designer exists, and that God exists and is the Intelligent Designer, is it necessarily valid to argue along these lines: "God made the human eye, therefore humans must only look at things which please God"?
We have shootings at schools. 50% of women graduating from some colleges have STDs because of pre-marital sex. These are issues that God has allot to say about. But if God does not exist, or if he did not create us than we do not have to answer to him, and none of the above issues matter
"If there is no God, school shootings don't matter"? Sounds like a case of denying the baby if you're not granted your bathwater.
While we're asking this sort of question, where'd your intelligent designer come from?
It's God who says we are the end products. Pick up a Bible, the answer is in the first couple pages.
Intelligent Design avoids explicitly citing God or the Bible, since the jig would be up if it did. Thus, the same class of "hole" in non-Creationist biology and cosmology that ID proponents love to harp on is in fact present in the ID view of the world as well. It's just that in the case of ID, the audience is depended upon to fill in the God of the Bible (big guy who likes to play with clay, all three of him) as the supposedly inevitable Intelligent Designer.
Absent Genesis as a reference, we might as well say that single-celled (or pre-single-celled) life came first and thus might well have been the Creator's favourite child.
So who's to say we're not like the proto-humans?
Huh?
This comment, a sibling of your own, expresses the idea more succinctly.
The big issue as far as I can see is that boosters need something to kick against
If that were true, rockets wouldn't work in space. The expanding gases of the burning fuel escape one end of the engine and "kick against" the other. For the general rule, please see Newton.
While the 20-foot range that the reviewer experienced is more than a little short of the claimed 300 feet, this review doesn't provide any details on what looks like another pretty bogus claim on the product's Web page: "Quick-connect button eliminates time waiting for dialup connection."
There's a limit to how fast you can dial, and I don't see how any kind of button could reduce the time you spend waiting for the modems to sync.
everyone should be free to drive to the supermarket while I'm "free" to inhale their car exhaust.
One possible choice you might make is to tone down your obsession with minor pollution.
Minor, eh? Let's just claim that pollution is good for you. Your "how dare you make decisions for others" position is spoiled by the fact that those saintly "others" are cheerfully injuring the rest of us. Maybe we should all choose not to breathe.
Could be worse, though. They could all decide to be clever and save money by riding around on two-stroke scooters. God forbid that we should require better emissions standards, though, because that might restrict choice and some Good Thing or other.
Notice how they're all clustered around rivers, wells, etc?
Like civilizations in many places. People in rain forests live near the rivers, for pity's sake.
The situation as of at least 2000 was verifiably no different than today. One simply needs to look at the multitude of irrigation techniques that arose in the area as a necessity
Even in rainy climates, farmers still irrigate. The presence of irrigation technology doesn't rule out forests and rain.
It was overfarming, including irrigation with salt-contaminated water, that burned out the fields and led to agricultural collapse.
You've already been pointed to Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress -- it does cover this point, and other interesting stuff besides.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but only if "irreducibly complex" means "the result of evolutionary processes of which I cannot conceive due to a lack of imagination or insight."
ID doesn't even get you that far. All of this trouble to grow a tiny fig-leaf for creationism, and even granted all of your own arguments you still can't honestly assert that your Intelligent Designer is the God of the Bible and not, say, the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
How irreducibly pointless...
Don't make me stop the car, kids.
Hey, it's only unresponsive when it's broken...
I also fail to see how killing and cutting up fuzzy bunnies is really feeding into anyone's nurturing, life-loving instincts, but I guess when you're deciding to go into a field you're working from the image, not the reality.
It's more than that, though, or people would drop programmes that didn't suit their initial impressions. A friend of mine from high school started in engineering in university, but then chucked it when he realized that he hated the programme, hated the people, hated the equations...
Various disciplines no doubt develop their own cultures, possibly not really related to the subject matter as such, and the various cultures will be uncomfortable to people of different temperaments. Setting aside as obvious barriers any traditions of blatant sexism, there are still likely to be sex-correlated patterns in who feels comfortable where. As other commenters have noted, these may even change over time, though not, I would suspect, necessarily automatically for the better.
Word is worse than rinky-dink -- it's complicated and unreliable and makes you want to beat its developers with a WordPerfect 5.1 manual (they came in binders).
WordPad is more like what Dvorak seems to be asking for, since it lets you pick your font, set your margins, make a list, and paste in a picture. That's all you need in a word processor.
Word, on the other hand, has a bunch of brain-dead, hard-to-disable automation features at the rinky-dink end of things and a bunch of fussy, hard-to-use desktop publishing features at the other end. All, in my experience, can leave you with an irrevocably screwed up document if you accidentally use them.
And he should be using Paint Shop Pro, probably.
I agree with the rest of your comment, but this bit I think is creeping featurism. We don't have magic ground cars that prevent maniacs from blowing them up in vulnerable places, after all.
Why, it'll be Too Cheap to Meter!
Indeed...
He definitely needs to put down his William F. Buckley Book of Big Words. It doesn't get better:
Unless you've been reading ahead in your Word-a-Day calendar, you'll need, like me, to look up concomitant and superrogatory. I'm still not sure about superrogatory, because he's actually found a word that's not in my Concise Oxford.
The deal is sealed by "qua," which is generally used by people who feel that overuse has taken the annoying edge off of "per se." People who speak English and not Thesaurese say "as such".
Based mostly on Gary Groth's own telling of history, it seems to me that Mr. McCloud wrote Understanding Comics, got famous in academic circles, and now has to put up with the usual academic (or pseudo-academic) rivalry.
He's the one saying that he'll never kill anybody, while you're the one claiming that under certain circumstances we can call it "true compassion for humanity". So that'd be a "relativism" point for you, surely, not him.
Unless you grow it yourself, this is already effectively the case, isn't it? If you're not making a deliberate effort to the contrary, the bulk of the food you eat is likely to come from large operations and national chains.
*BLAM*
I known darn well that it's "Antarctica", and I've been annoyed by people who pronounce it incorrectly for as long as I can remember. It's a typo, I swear. I can spel. The carp on teh Web hasnt overwelmd my prof-reading skils, honetsly...
Where's the "cute" in slogging across Antartica, starving yourself for countless weeks, and then having to leave your offspring to die because your mate got eaten by a seal?
And the very definition of "safe", by the way, is sitting through a political spiel that you already agree with.
The narration in the version that I saw proposed a couple of explanations, including an internal compass. Navigation by the sun was another option, as I remember.
Ambling for miles across a glacier to an unmarked location didn't strike me as a "they're like us" moment.
<impression voice="Morgan Freeman">Somehow, they just know. Perhaps it's personal ads, or cologne. Or, maybe, a greater force: love.</impression>
Is it just me, or are we all nuts from that perspective?
I'm not sure that I was holding out much hope for the sting-yield of such a cheap shot, but I do think that it sounds more than a little harsh to criminalise whole populations for being the subjects of tyrants. Surely, if it is a crime, it is its own punishment, and getting bombed is just injury upon misfortune.
I'm not sure, but I think that Osama agrees.
The bombs, like all bombs, killed plenty of people who had nothing to do with anything horrible. One side has to be all good, and the other all bad?
No, a purely defensive approach would have been to sink their navy and stand back, I think. No comment on which is the better approach.
You're ignoring what we've known since the advent of the Bomb: you don't mass your forces any more, you just nuke the hell out of the other guy with no warning.
Hence a certain degree of tension.
You assume that the Good Guys have the Bomb and Tyranny has map co-ordinates. Even then, bombs kill civilians, so you have to rationalize things by saying that "there are no innocent civilians in war!", except, of course, you're made a pre-emptive strike, so you have to say instead that "they wouldn't have been innocent if we hadn't killed them!" or something.
That depends entirely on your definition of pussy-footing and the quality of your planning. Iraq's a fine example of both the drawn-out unpleasantness of sanctions and the perils of misjudging "decisive" action.
Radiation poisoning will do that, too.
I wonder if their hope extends to hoping that broadband-over-power-lines magically doesn't spam the radio spectrum with interference. Last we heard, it did...
And I'll assert that people who want to argue from God's Law will support ID because they think it puts them in a place where they can boss others around.
Assuming arguendo that the Intelligent Designer exists, and that God exists and is the Intelligent Designer, is it necessarily valid to argue along these lines: "God made the human eye, therefore humans must only look at things which please God"?
"If there is no God, school shootings don't matter"? Sounds like a case of denying the baby if you're not granted your bathwater.
While we're asking this sort of question, where'd your intelligent designer come from?
Intelligent Design avoids explicitly citing God or the Bible, since the jig would be up if it did. Thus, the same class of "hole" in non-Creationist biology and cosmology that ID proponents love to harp on is in fact present in the ID view of the world as well. It's just that in the case of ID, the audience is depended upon to fill in the God of the Bible (big guy who likes to play with clay, all three of him) as the supposedly inevitable Intelligent Designer.
Absent Genesis as a reference, we might as well say that single-celled (or pre-single-celled) life came first and thus might well have been the Creator's favourite child.
This comment, a sibling of your own, expresses the idea more succinctly.
If that were true, rockets wouldn't work in space. The expanding gases of the burning fuel escape one end of the engine and "kick against" the other. For the general rule, please see Newton.
While the 20-foot range that the reviewer experienced is more than a little short of the claimed 300 feet, this review doesn't provide any details on what looks like another pretty bogus claim on the product's Web page: "Quick-connect button eliminates time waiting for dialup connection."
There's a limit to how fast you can dial, and I don't see how any kind of button could reduce the time you spend waiting for the modems to sync.
Minor, eh? Let's just claim that pollution is good for you. Your "how dare you make decisions for others" position is spoiled by the fact that those saintly "others" are cheerfully injuring the rest of us. Maybe we should all choose not to breathe.
Could be worse, though. They could all decide to be clever and save money by riding around on two-stroke scooters. God forbid that we should require better emissions standards, though, because that might restrict choice and some Good Thing or other.
Like civilizations in many places. People in rain forests live near the rivers, for pity's sake.
You've already been pointed to Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress -- it does cover this point, and other interesting stuff besides.