And whats the deal with "for i in range()"? I miss "for (i;i>20;i++)", really feels good.
Surely this is a troll, right? There's a bug in your C-style loop. Should be i<20, not i>20. In fact, that's one of the reasons why I prefer the "for x in y" syntax. Fewer bugs.
Oh, and your print("Hello World.") can be simplified to print "Hello World.". The parentheses are superfluous. Just my $.02.
My right to patent my idea is granted to me by the Constitution.
No, it is not. Read the context:
"
The Congress (emphasis mine) shall have the power...
8. To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
The people are not granted rights by this clause. Congress is.
If somebody shoots 100 bullets through your head and you're just lucky enough to survive, does that mean the criminal is less guilty?
Of murder? In our system? Yes. That's why they could only be charged with attempted murder. (Maybe 100 counts, but attempted murder nonetheless.)
Re:Huygens enters atmo on Jan 14, released on Dec
on
Titan's Alien Thunder
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· Score: 1
I know some other countries celebrate on different dates, but in the US, Christmas is December 25th. So the summary is correct: The probe detaches from Cassini on Christmas (25 December 2004) for its atmospheric entry on 14 January 2005.
Re:Doesn't work. Sorry, do not collect $200.
on
Replacing TCP?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Depends on which distro. SourceMage, for instance, bzip2-compresses their ISOs to ~130MB. And that's for a 650MB image, IIRC. Knoppix 3.6, OTOH, contains a 2GB file system compressed down to 700MB, so I wouldn't expect it to compress much (if at all).
Re:Doesn't work. Sorry, do not collect $200.
on
Replacing TCP?
·
· Score: 1
Would this partially be because of scp compressing the ISO? Or does rateless also compress?
Technically, the 1991 war remained a cease-fire, a truce which Iraq violated by firing on US patrols during said cease-fire. This invoked the US's right to resume hotilities.
Actually, the "US patrols" themselves were of dubious legality. They certainly weren't part of any Security Council resolution or noted in the cease-fire.
Furthermore, Iraq was in violation of about 2 dozen UN resolutions.
So is Israel. But we don't care. If fact, we do more than "not care." We give them half our foreign aid budget. Because we don't, in the end, care about the UN or multilateralism. We ignore the UN because we, as the last remaining superpower, can.
Absurd. We are still finding Egyptian mummies and artifacts that are several millenia-old buried in the desert. We could find Saddam's weapons 250 years from now buried somewhere.
...And they will be completely unusable, as any remaining weapons which may be out there almost certainly are. These things lose potency over time and must be maintained. If they are not maintained, they are unusable, and maintenance takes facilities, and such facilities are not that hard to find, especially when you have free reign over the country.
So, if Saddam didn't have WMD, why would he throw out weapons inspectors and risk being thrown out of power? All Saddam had to do was comply with inspectors and he'd still be living in palaces built woth the Iraqi people's money, and still torturing and killing dissenters.
Sorry for the side trip to the 80's, but NOT. Saddam didn't "throw out" the inspectors. They were withdrawn for their own safety due to impending US/British invasion. Or did it escape you that the weapons inspectors were asking for more time, and everyone except for the US and Britain wanted to give it to them? The inspectors were given less than 4 months in Iraq to find weapons that we, in over 7 months since "major combat" ended, have been unable to find ourselves. That says one of two things: either we jumped the gun because we didn't really understand how hard it is to inspect Iraq, or there really aren't weapons there.
But to constantly blast anybody in the media who doesn't think like you do, or believe in what you believe is like a child throwing a tantrum.
No, it's like free speech. I don't know if you're an American, but if so, have you read the Declaration of Independence? The whole thing? After the preamble, it consists entirely of "bitching and moaning." As for "vote them out of office," how do you think that happens? One person influences another until a movement happens and someone actually gets voted out. Or a person or group buys advertising time to try and convince people to vote a certain way. The "bitching and moaning," in a republic like the US, is doing something about it - insofar as it influences whether and how people vote.
When the costs of choosing not to engage in what you call a voluntary activity are so egregious as to compel any reasonable person to comply, I would classify it as force. If all employers require you to adhere to a set of rules in order to be employed, then the consequences of not adhering to those rules are starvation. Force. Of course, the real world is much more nuanced than that, with various levels of force and various levels of volition.
As to theft, consider this: Under your definition, if I put a gun to your head and tell you "give me your wallet or I'll shoot you," your giving me your wallet is a voluntary action. But I made the consequences of choosing not to comply so enormous that any reasonable person would comply. So it's force.
Likewise, if you live in a society without a social welfare system and with land ownership, then people can literally starve you to death by refusing to trade your services for goods (i.e. employment) or land (so you could farm).
So to summarize, there are exactly 2 possible extremes of modes of human interaction. Most interactions, however, consist of a mixture of both.
Power is defined by the initiation of force. I'm sorry, but none of the examples you provide fall under the definition of power. You may not like the fact that your employer could fire you at a second's notice, but that doesn't change the fact that you and your employer entered a contract based on voluntary association, NOT FORCE.
But if there are not plenty of available jobs at similar compensation and without whatever restrictions you violated to get fired, they are applying force by firing you. They have impaired your ability to earn money (at least the kind of money you were earning), taken away economic freedom, restricted what political activities you can engage in (because you must earn enough money to live first, before engaging in politics), etc... all through economics. So there is such a thing as economic force.
Thinking of force as consisting only force of arms is naive. The federal government in the US regularly enforces regulations which it has no constitutional authority to make by tying funding to a states "voluntary" enforcement of those regulations. The 55 mph speed limit was an example (now defunct). The age limit of 21 for drinking is another. Both were conditions for receiving highway funding (which came from citizens of that and other states through the national income tax). Technically, force of arms was not applied. But there was force involved nonetheless.
Likewise, corporations apply economic force to their employees, as well as (and more importantly) governments. Especially when a large multinational corporation confronts a small bankrupt nation. They can (and have) caused changes of regime to benefit their own interests.
Corporations are probably the best example of concentrated economic force on earth, and that force *can* be bartered for the force of arms when necessary. The BSA enlists local police to raid companies for license violations. Various corporations spend millions of dollars annually to influence legislators (often giving to both parties), who then make laws which enforce the will of those corporations (DMCA & Sonny Bono copyright extension act being the ones/.ers are most familiar with).
Force, power, freedom, voluntary, involuntary, etc.... these words have far deeper and more complex meanings than you seem to acknowledge.
Not in the same way. EULAs are written to restrict the rights which you already have under copyright law. The GPL is a grant of additional rights, i.e. redistribution, creation of derived works, etc. To summarize: If the EULA were thrown out, the user/distributor would have more rights than under copyright law. If the GPL were thrown out, the user/distributor would have fewer than under copyright law.
You're right if the lawsuit is only over copyright infringement. My understanding, however, is that it's not; trade secrets are alleged to have been given by IBM to Linux. The problem with that claim, and the reason for the petition, is that a trade secret isn't a trade secret if it isn't a secret.
In fact, even if you illegally (i.e. in violation of NDA, etc.) "open" a trade secret and the owner of the trade secret doesn't defend the secret when they recognize you're in breach of the NDA, anyone can use the "secret." Trade secrets lose protected status when they're not defended. Of course, IANAL, etc.....
Map then applies whatever function we pass in to every member in the array (called a list in functional programming).
I'm not too familiar with functional programming languages (spent a month on lisp ~10 years ago plus whatever ongoing I need to known to make emacs work), but what's the advantage of this over using C++'s templates in <functional> (for_each, transform, etc.)? Seems like you could do the same thing, only with strong typing and faster execution.
Am I missing something? The author mentioned function pointers, but sidestepped the fact that the standard library handles the function pointers for you and lets you use (fairly) clean syntax to express the idea of "high-order" functions. Anyone with C++ and lisp/scheme/ML experience want to elaborate?
1. SCO discovers Unix code in the Linux kernel, meaning that Linux kernel is partly a derivative work of hundreds/thousands of open source programmers and partly a derivative work of SysV. 2. SCO decides that the GPL does not apply to the Unix code since SCO did not knowingly release it via the GPL. 3. SCO continues to distribute the (Linux+Unix) kernel for a while, indemnifying their own users against infringment.
Doesn't that mean that SCO has distributed a derivative work of the Linux kernel (Linux+Unix) without the permission of the original authors of Linux (which permission is only gained by adhering to the constraints of the GPL)? And so if the Berne Convention (with which I am unfamiliar) applies, doesn't that mean that they can be sued by whatever Joe Schmoe has had a kernel patch accepted into the trunk? Has EVER had a kernel patch accepted? How is saying "the GPL is invalid because we didn't distribute the code under the GPL" going to help? It seems like it would hurt them enormously.
But they continued to distribute their version of Linux after the lawsuit was filed. The fact that they filed suit says that they knew the infringing code was part of Linux, and by continuing to distribute the code, they implied consent to the license. At least, if I were a lawyer and not completely making this stuff up, that's how I'd argue it...
I imagine they can claim that they were previously unaware of the infringement. That's why they've now stopped selling their Linux.
But they didn't stop selling Linux until weeks after filing the lawsuit, likely months after "discovering" their IP in the source. Which means that they knowingly distributed the code under the GPL.
If SCO distributes (distributed) GNU/Linux under the GPL/LGPL/etc licenses it's required to, doesn't that mean that anyone can freely copy and redistribute it? If this is true, anything that is in Caldera Linux is free game, regardless of whether reams of source code were lifted verbatim from UNIX because SCO licensed it under the GPL when they distributed GNU/Linux. Anyone have any insight on this? Surely there must be someone at SCO who read the GPL before they released software under it! (Though it seems it took them quite a while to read the software they were releasing... sigh)
You wrote: So in other words if the fertilization doesn't work right and/or the enbryo hasn't a chance for life, the women who go there now have the option to donate that embryo for research? Am _I_ reading this right?
Not exactly. Generally, in in-vitro fertilization, a number of eggs are fertilized, and a number of (possibly undamaged) embryos are created. I believe that this has something to do with the difficulty of harvesting eggs and the desire to have a few around "just in case" the first few embryos don't implant in the uterus.
If it's an embryo, then the fertilization did work right, by definition. Generally, the excess embryos are frozen or discarded when the couple decides they have enough kids. So in that sense, perhaps the embryo "hasn't a chance for life," but it doesn't mean the embryo wouldn't do fine if there were a willing woman to carry it to term.
By the way, I haven't seen the bill (the Wired article had a link to the legislature's web page, not to the bill itself), but I'll just point out that 1) the White House never banned embryonic stem cell research - they just refused to fund it except for the listed stem cell lines, 2) embryos are not the only source of stem cells (placenta, umbilical cord, etc. are also abundant sources), and 3) the advances we've seen through stem cell research up to now have come almost exclusively from non-embryonic stem cells. There's a hope that embryonic stem cells will prove more fruitful than non-embryonic, but that has not been the case thus far.
If the Calif. bill really ALLOWS stem cell research, then it's doing nothing new -- stem cell research was already *allowed*. But it sounds safer politically than what I believe is the case, which is that California is *funding* embryonic stem cell research. But again, I haven't seen the bill.
Because Cringely doesn't have DSL service. He's piggybacking on someone else's service. So there's no traceability to Cringely unless his middleman says something.
As to reproduction, the point was not that the mutant would be genetically incapable of mating, but physically incapable of mating. (i.e. 36 legs to 6, major body plan changes, etc.) That's one reason why major evolutionary body plan changes are so rare, as compared to evolution that does not affect the body plan much.
As to the second point, yes, macro changes can happen because of a single gene mutation. But for that gene mutation to have any effect, the other genes must be "in place" before the single gene mutates. And the odds of this happening without the benefit of natural selection are far slimmer than one in a million million. Individual gene mutation is a rare occurrence, and then you raise it to the power of the number of gene mutations necessary to get all the genes in place for the control gene to have the beneficial effect (rather than giving a dead or sterile offspring). I don't have all the probabilities, or even the number of genes required to make the body plan change (they weren't in the article), but just consider if there's a 1% chance of mutation (absurdly high) of a particular gene, and 10 genes are required, not including Hox, to produce the beneficial effect. Then the overall probability would be 10^-20, or one in a hundred million million million. With a billion individuals, you'd need 100 billion generations to get these genes "lined up" for Hox, and with the lifespans of the animals described in the article, this is several times the age of the earth. And many such control gene mutations are required to evolve the complex structures we see today. There must be another mechanism at work.
There's the other problem of how the genes affected by Lox evolved without showing any changes in the phenotype at all (since they were repressed by Lox). They must have mutated randomly, since natural selection couldn't have any effect on genes that don't express themselves in the phenotype. I think that this is the real show-stopper for this particular mechanism for evolution. Note: I am not saying that another mechanism could not be theorized that handles this objection quite easily. I'm just saying that the mutation-amplifying gene Lox (and others like it) doesn't come close to solving all the problems.
for all the leg-suppressing genes to get there in the first place. It found a mechanism for one gene to suppress others (the leg-suppressing genes) which control body plan. When this one gene mutates, a gaggle of other genes activates, causing major evolutionary changes. This provides one step in the chain of things which must happen, but not all. A complete theory of speciation or macro-evolution will also provide a mechanism for:
a) ensuring that the mutated creature can reproduce, either through asexual or hermaphrodidic reproduction (most likely) or through an identical mutation in another member of the species of the opposite gender happening within the fertile lifetime of the first member, and in the same general location (Note that these can't be identical twins in a non-hermaphroditic species because you need opposite-gendered pairs to reproduce)
b) ensuring that many genes together would randomly mutate (the leg-suppressing ones), showing no evidence in the phenotype, only to be revealed at a later point in time by the single control gene's mutation.
These are not insurmountable barriers to the theory, afaik, but they must be at least addressed if you want to enter into a debate with anyone with critical thinking skills.
Watts are not energy. They are power (energy per unit time.) 4500 watts is an instantaneous measure. If your interpretation is correct, then the appropriate measure would be 4500 watt-seconds or watt-hours. This is why you are billed for electricity in kilowatt-hours, not kilowatts.
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I know some other countries celebrate on different dates, but in the US, Christmas is December 25th. So the summary is correct:
The probe detaches from Cassini on Christmas (25 December 2004) for its atmospheric entry on 14 January 2005.
Depends on which distro. SourceMage, for instance, bzip2-compresses their ISOs to ~130MB. And that's for a 650MB image, IIRC. Knoppix 3.6, OTOH, contains a 2GB file system compressed down to 700MB, so I wouldn't expect it to compress much (if at all).
Would this partially be because of scp compressing the ISO? Or does rateless also compress?
Technically, the 1991 war remained a cease-fire, a truce which Iraq violated by firing on US patrols during said cease-fire. This invoked the US's right to resume hotilities.
...And they will be completely unusable, as any remaining weapons which may be out there almost certainly are. These things lose potency over time and must be maintained. If they are not maintained, they are unusable, and maintenance takes facilities, and such facilities are not that hard to find, especially when you have free reign over the country.
Actually, the "US patrols" themselves were of dubious legality. They certainly weren't part of any Security Council resolution or noted in the cease-fire.
Furthermore, Iraq was in violation of about 2 dozen UN resolutions.
So is Israel. But we don't care. If fact, we do more than "not care." We give them half our foreign aid budget. Because we don't, in the end, care about the UN or multilateralism. We ignore the UN because we, as the last remaining superpower, can.
Absurd. We are still finding Egyptian mummies and artifacts that are several millenia-old buried in the desert. We could find Saddam's weapons 250 years from now buried somewhere.
So, if Saddam didn't have WMD, why would he throw out weapons inspectors and risk being thrown out of power? All Saddam had to do was comply with inspectors and he'd still be living in palaces built woth the Iraqi people's money, and still torturing and killing dissenters.
Sorry for the side trip to the 80's, but NOT . Saddam didn't "throw out" the inspectors. They were withdrawn for their own safety due to impending US/British invasion. Or did it escape you that the weapons inspectors were asking for more time, and everyone except for the US and Britain wanted to give it to them? The inspectors were given less than 4 months in Iraq to find weapons that we, in over 7 months since "major combat" ended, have been unable to find ourselves. That says one of two things: either we jumped the gun because we didn't really understand how hard it is to inspect Iraq, or there really aren't weapons there.
When the costs of choosing not to engage in what you call a voluntary activity are so egregious as to compel any reasonable person to comply, I would classify it as force. If all employers require you to adhere to a set of rules in order to be employed, then the consequences of not adhering to those rules are starvation. Force. Of course, the real world is much more nuanced than that, with various levels of force and various levels of volition.
As to theft, consider this: Under your definition, if I put a gun to your head and tell you "give me your wallet or I'll shoot you," your giving me your wallet is a voluntary action. But I made the consequences of choosing not to comply so enormous that any reasonable person would comply. So it's force.
Likewise, if you live in a society without a social welfare system and with land ownership, then people can literally starve you to death by refusing to trade your services for goods (i.e. employment) or land (so you could farm).
So to summarize, there are exactly 2 possible extremes of modes of human interaction. Most interactions, however, consist of a mixture of both.
Power is defined by the initiation of force. I'm sorry, but none of the examples you provide fall under the definition of power. You may not like the fact that your employer could fire you at a second's notice, but that doesn't change the fact that you and your employer entered a contract based on voluntary association, NOT FORCE.
But if there are not plenty of available jobs at similar compensation and without whatever restrictions you violated to get fired, they are applying force by firing you. They have impaired your ability to earn money (at least the kind of money you were earning), taken away economic freedom, restricted what political activities you can engage in (because you must earn enough money to live first, before engaging in politics), etc... all through economics. So there is such a thing as economic force.
Thinking of force as consisting only force of arms is naive. The federal government in the US regularly enforces regulations which it has no constitutional authority to make by tying funding to a states "voluntary" enforcement of those regulations. The 55 mph speed limit was an example (now defunct). The age limit of 21 for drinking is another. Both were conditions for receiving highway funding (which came from citizens of that and other states through the national income tax). Technically, force of arms was not applied. But there was force involved nonetheless.
Likewise, corporations apply economic force to their employees, as well as (and more importantly) governments. Especially when a large multinational corporation confronts a small bankrupt nation. They can (and have) caused changes of regime to benefit their own interests.
Corporations are probably the best example of concentrated economic force on earth, and that force *can* be bartered for the force of arms when necessary. The BSA enlists local police to raid companies for license violations. Various corporations spend millions of dollars annually to influence legislators (often giving to both parties), who then make laws which enforce the will of those corporations (DMCA & Sonny Bono copyright extension act being the ones
Force, power, freedom, voluntary, involuntary, etc.... these words have far deeper and more complex meanings than you seem to acknowledge.
Well, information-gathering except for when they're blowing up people remotely, with their Predator drones armed with Hellfire missiles, that is....
But I think you're right on the "operating inside the country"
Not in the same way. EULAs are written to restrict the rights which you already have under copyright law. The GPL is a grant of additional rights, i.e. redistribution, creation of derived works, etc. To summarize: If the EULA were thrown out, the user/distributor would have more rights than under copyright law. If the GPL were thrown out, the user/distributor would have fewer than under copyright law.
You're right if the lawsuit is only over copyright infringement. My understanding, however, is that it's not; trade secrets are alleged to have been given by IBM to Linux. The problem with that claim, and the reason for the petition, is that a trade secret isn't a trade secret if it isn't a secret.
In fact, even if you illegally (i.e. in violation of NDA, etc.) "open" a trade secret and the owner of the trade secret doesn't defend the secret when they recognize you're in breach of the NDA, anyone can use the "secret." Trade secrets lose protected status when they're not defended. Of course, IANAL, etc.....
Map then applies whatever function we pass in to every member in the array (called a list in functional programming).
I'm not too familiar with functional programming languages (spent a month on lisp ~10 years ago plus whatever ongoing I need to known to make emacs work), but what's the advantage of this over using C++'s templates in <functional> (for_each, transform, etc.)? Seems like you could do the same thing, only with strong typing and faster execution.
Am I missing something? The author mentioned function pointers, but sidestepped the fact that the standard library handles the function pointers for you and lets you use (fairly) clean syntax to express the idea of "high-order" functions. Anyone with C++ and lisp/scheme/ML experience want to elaborate?
So....
1. SCO discovers Unix code in the Linux kernel, meaning that Linux kernel is partly a derivative work of hundreds/thousands of open source programmers and partly a derivative work of SysV.
2. SCO decides that the GPL does not apply to the Unix code since SCO did not knowingly release it via the GPL.
3. SCO continues to distribute the (Linux+Unix) kernel for a while, indemnifying their own users against infringment.
Doesn't that mean that SCO has distributed a derivative work of the Linux kernel (Linux+Unix) without the permission of the original authors of Linux (which permission is only gained by adhering to the constraints of the GPL)? And so if the Berne Convention (with which I am unfamiliar) applies, doesn't that mean that they can be sued by whatever Joe Schmoe has had a kernel patch accepted into the trunk? Has EVER had a kernel patch accepted? How is saying "the GPL is invalid because we didn't distribute the code under the GPL" going to help? It seems like it would hurt them enormously.
But they continued to distribute their version of Linux after the lawsuit was filed. The fact that they filed suit says that they knew the infringing code was part of Linux, and by continuing to distribute the code, they implied consent to the license. At least, if I were a lawyer and not completely making this stuff up, that's how I'd argue it...
But they didn't stop selling Linux until weeks after filing the lawsuit, likely months after "discovering" their IP in the source. Which means that they knowingly distributed the code under the GPL.
IANAL, but....
If SCO distributes (distributed) GNU/Linux under the GPL/LGPL/etc licenses it's required to, doesn't that mean that anyone can freely copy and redistribute it? If this is true, anything that is in Caldera Linux is free game, regardless of whether reams of source code were lifted verbatim from UNIX because SCO licensed it under the GPL when they distributed GNU/Linux. Anyone have any insight on this? Surely there must be someone at SCO who read the GPL before they released software under it! (Though it seems it took them quite a while to read the software they were releasing... sigh)
You wrote:
So in other words if the fertilization doesn't work right and/or the enbryo hasn't a chance for life, the women who go there now have the option to donate that embryo for research? Am _I_ reading this right?
Not exactly. Generally, in in-vitro fertilization, a number of eggs are fertilized, and a number of (possibly undamaged) embryos are created. I believe that this has something to do with the difficulty of harvesting eggs and the desire to have a few around "just in case" the first few embryos don't implant in the uterus.
If it's an embryo, then the fertilization did work right, by definition. Generally, the excess embryos are frozen or discarded when the couple decides they have enough kids. So in that sense, perhaps the embryo "hasn't a chance for life," but it doesn't mean the embryo wouldn't do fine if there were a willing woman to carry it to term.
By the way, I haven't seen the bill (the Wired article had a link to the legislature's web page, not to the bill itself), but I'll just point out that 1) the White House never banned embryonic stem cell research - they just refused to fund it except for the listed stem cell lines, 2) embryos are not the only source of stem cells (placenta, umbilical cord, etc. are also abundant sources), and 3) the advances we've seen through stem cell research up to now have come almost exclusively from non-embryonic stem cells. There's a hope that embryonic stem cells will prove more fruitful than non-embryonic, but that has not been the case thus far.
If the Calif. bill really ALLOWS stem cell research, then it's doing nothing new -- stem cell research was already *allowed*. But it sounds safer politically than what I believe is the case, which is that California is *funding* embryonic stem cell research. But again, I haven't seen the bill.
Just my $.02
Actually, wasn't it called sequel originally? (As in Structured English QUEry Language)....
Because Cringely doesn't have DSL service. He's piggybacking on someone else's service. So there's no traceability to Cringely unless his middleman says something.
As to reproduction, the point was not that the mutant would be genetically incapable of mating, but physically incapable of mating. (i.e. 36 legs to 6, major body plan changes, etc.) That's one reason why major evolutionary body plan changes are so rare, as compared to evolution that does not affect the body plan much.
As to the second point, yes, macro changes can happen because of a single gene mutation. But for that gene mutation to have any effect, the other genes must be "in place" before the single gene mutates. And the odds of this happening without the benefit of natural selection are far slimmer than one in a million million. Individual gene mutation is a rare occurrence, and then you raise it to the power of the number of gene mutations necessary to get all the genes in place for the control gene to have the beneficial effect (rather than giving a dead or sterile offspring). I don't have all the probabilities, or even the number of genes required to make the body plan change (they weren't in the article), but just consider if there's a 1% chance of mutation (absurdly high) of a particular gene, and 10 genes are required, not including Hox, to produce the beneficial effect. Then the overall probability would be 10^-20, or one in a hundred million million million. With a billion individuals, you'd need 100 billion generations to get these genes "lined up" for Hox, and with the lifespans of the animals described in the article, this is several times the age of the earth. And many such control gene mutations are required to evolve the complex structures we see today. There must be another mechanism at work.
There's the other problem of how the genes affected by Lox evolved without showing any changes in the phenotype at all (since they were repressed by Lox). They must have mutated randomly, since natural selection couldn't have any effect on genes that don't express themselves in the phenotype. I think that this is the real show-stopper for this particular mechanism for evolution. Note: I am not saying that another mechanism could not be theorized that handles this objection quite easily. I'm just saying that the mutation-amplifying gene Lox (and others like it) doesn't come close to solving all the problems.
for all the leg-suppressing genes to get there in the first place. It found a mechanism for one gene to suppress others (the leg-suppressing genes) which control body plan. When this one gene mutates, a gaggle of other genes activates, causing major evolutionary changes. This provides one step in the chain of things which must happen, but not all. A complete theory of speciation or macro-evolution will also provide a mechanism for:
a) ensuring that the mutated creature can reproduce, either through asexual or hermaphrodidic reproduction (most likely) or through an identical mutation in another member of the species of the opposite gender happening within the fertile lifetime of the first member, and in the same general location (Note that these can't be identical twins in a non-hermaphroditic species because you need opposite-gendered pairs to reproduce)
b) ensuring that many genes together would randomly mutate (the leg-suppressing ones), showing no evidence in the phenotype, only to be revealed at a later point in time by the single control gene's mutation.
These are not insurmountable barriers to the theory, afaik, but they must be at least addressed if you want to enter into a debate with anyone with critical thinking skills.
Watts are not energy. They are power (energy per unit time.) 4500 watts is an instantaneous measure. If your interpretation is correct, then the appropriate measure would be 4500 watt-seconds or watt-hours. This is why you are billed for electricity in kilowatt-hours, not kilowatts.