"I will not make any deals with you. I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own. I resign. " - The Prisoner
This is Japan after all. Clearly, they will be building a secret base where they will build an army of giant robots to either a) defend against extra-terrestrial attacks, b) attack Microsoft.
That's pretty funny. On the one hand, you say that private corporations are better at running nuke plants. Then you point to France and China as the example of countries that are heavily invested in nuclear.
So did you realize that most nuclear power plants in France are owned by EdF, the primarily state-owned corporation with a monopoly on electrical power distribution in France? Somehow I doubt that the situation is significantly more private/market-oriented in China.
However, in case you haven't been paying attention in the last 15 years, company executives for public corporations have often concentrated on short term profit at the expense of sustainability, because a major portion of that executive's (often excessive) compensation is tied to (relatively short term increases) in the stock price. Enron, Worldcom, and the like have only been the most egregious examples where fraudulent behaviour was used to inflate the stock price. However there are many more public companies where more legal means were used that sacrificed long term sustainability for short term profits. For an easy example, look at all the fiascos over poor-quality outsourced tech support in the tech industry.
I can't see the nuclear power industry being immune to that disease. And I have suspicions that there will be few private capital firms interested in the huge investments required for building nuclear power plants. Private investors want growth potential whereas nuclear plants are built for a certain capacity.
And of course you can count on the American people to elect a competent executive that will appoint competent administrators to oversee the department with those government inspectors. An executive that won't cut the budget for those oversight bodies on the grounds that the market should decide. An executive that won't have secret meetings where industry corporations get to solely set energy policy.
An elected executive like George W Bush and Richard Cheney, that hires qualified people like ex-FEMA director Mike Brown to oversee critical functions.
Uh-huh. You go ahead and look at your car's computer. At home many wires are coming out of it. Then let me know how much fun that is. Finally! A use for all those old salvaged wrap-around keyboard/mouse ferrite cores.
Nope, it's worse than that. The RIAA companies realize that their lawsuit strategy isn't working. First they are starting to encounter some real push back because they've been very sloppy and it's only a matter of time before somebody sets a precedent in court that they won't be happy with. Second, it's a lot harder to sue the government for malicious prosecution, and the government has even more tools at its disposal for information gathering with carnivore and the PATRIOT act.
i, for one, welcome our new extra terrestrial plant based overlords.
so i can eat them, silly.
In Niven's Known Space series, the Pierson's puppeteers are a race of herbivore traders. They also are one of the species with the most advanced levels of technology in our Galactic arm and most smart species don't want to frighten them or upset them - it's suspected that their response (and how they became dominant on their home worlds) is to wipe out species they consider a risk to themselves.
Eating other sentients is the one act of barbarism another space-faring civilisation might think disqualify a planet-bound species from contact. I don't think having to stop because a taste for bush meat and exotic sushi resulted in us wiping out other primates and large whales would earn us any points in that regard either.
Given the increase in obesity across the population, I expect average North American life expectancy to decrease. However, for the subgroup that can maintain a healthy diet and a good exercise balance, I think average life expectancy will go up to the range you are talking about.
If you want to live longer with a good quality of life, eat a healthy balanced diet, make sure you don't let your body fat percentage get too high, and find a low-impact aerobic exercise that you enjoy and can continue to do as you get older. It will keep your heart healthy and your mind active. Swimming, walking, hiking, dancing, that sort of thing.
Heh. Since a lot of the calculations are floating point, I think you're at least as likely to have numerical analysis errors that make the data come out of that loop be dominated by precision errors. But I think in a lot of cases, they do use optimized libraries (i.e. LINPACK) that do most of the math properly and limit the options for really dumb code.
Yep. It almost makes you wish that nobody had done anything about 2-digit dates so that January 1,2000 could have been a serious problem. That way you wouldn't have revisionist people denigrating the efforts put in to avoid the Y2K problem as a waste of resources. I think a lot more people would be willing to appreciate the potential risks of Global Warming if, among other glitches, their company's payroll systems had made it hard for them to get a paycheck in the first few months of 2000.
Something to keep in mind is that (as the article I linked to mentions) the Finns are the country with the third highest per-capita gun ownership. Now part of the reason why shootings happen more in the US than in Germany is the relative population size. However it should be pretty obvious that gun availability in general, and to students in particular, is a huge factor in the overall risk.
China doesn't seem to have the same problems. While it's possible Chinese shootings could have occurred and been hushed up to avoid loss of face for responsible officials, I think some word or rumours would still have gotten out. It's hard to hush up something like that when there are so many witnesses.
On the other hand, I'm surprised India's class system hasn't lead to more shootings, but I guess they probably effectively still have class segregated schools. Also, potential troublesome lower class citizens with grudges deemed too dangerous due to access to weapons probably just have accidents or deadly muggings happen to them. For all of Ghandi's barb that Western civilization would be a good idea, life as an untouchable in India was pretty cheap as recently as the 80's. While that may have improved in some big cities, I doubt it's improved as much in rural areas.
"..and that the system can be set up to limit access to doors for certain people at certain times, including shutting the main doors of a school to pupils during classtime." I think that must be one of the best arguments for this kind of thing. Or at least for the United States of America where this kind of thing happens! FYI killing sprees in schools is not an issue in Europe.
Nor for the most part in Canada (with the borderline exception of Marc Lepine, who was an adult ex-student). In both cases, you have sensible gun laws that limit the number of guns easily available to kids and lunatics.
As for the school bullies, you really think they won't find Johnny Victim without it?
Well that wasn't totally serious since a bully isn't as likely to have the forethought or resources to arrange access to the proper equipment. I might say drug dealers who attract police attention if they hang around schools, but it's probably easier for them to get some junkies to help them out in exchange for a hit. Electronics don't squeal if they're caught though.
And child predators hardly need the RFID to identify school children. Just to point out the obvious, school age children don't walk home at night in their school uniforms. They change as quickly as they can because they want to wear more fashionable clothes and because they don't want to wear down their expensive uniforms.
Well, I've seen kids take the bus home in their catholic school uniforms around here. And you don't have to go too far north so that the sun sets pretty early in the winter months. It only takes a one hour, after-school, extra-curricular activity or detention for the same students to be going home in the dark. And yeah, child predators don't need RFID to find kids, but the ones that figure it out will be a lot harder to catch.
Sociopaths who want to go on killing sprees in schools shouldn't have to search in each classroom to find people to kill! We should have RFIDs attached to all the students so that the psychos can carry a detector along with lots of guns and can skip the empty classrooms to concentrate on those with the most kids. They can also make sure they don't miss anyone hiding in a closet. Heck, even regular bullies could benefit and use it to find out which entrance Johnny Victim is trying to use, thus making sure he doesn't sneak through with his lunch money intact.
These are presumably passive RFIDs so that they can last a long time without needing batteries changed, right? That way child predators can passively scan the school to find out the carrier frequency used and then put matching activator/detector devices in alleys or wooded parks so that they can know from afar when a child is walking home late at night and they can snatch it with less fear of being observed in the act or while lying in wait.
Gotta love how modern technology empowers people. </sarcasm&irony>
Originally Facebook started with, and was restricted to, the university/college student population. It was started by people from that environment and initially probably would have hired within those ranks. While there are a lot of serious people in universities, there's also a lot of frat-boy/sorority-girl puerile mentality as well. Is it really surprising that a socially-oriented organization developed in that environment would be at least as likely to inherit from the puerile side as from the serious work ethic prevalent in a post-secondary environment?
Anyway, the excesses of the Bush administration are going to be cured by the next Republican President. Sure, the liberals whine about lost liberties, but (sadly) only the Republicans have the spine to actually step up and do something about it.
That eliminates any of the Republican candidates for 2008, doesn't it? Because they're bending over backwards to please the corporate and religious fundamentalist special interest groups, so no spine there. And frankly I think you're whistling in the wind. Without a thorough bloodletting in the Republican Party, any nominee is going to be beholden to corporate and religious fundamentalist special interests. Most of them don't have a problem with anything but the most egregious excesses of the Bush administration since the Republican-controlled Congress rubber stamped most Bush-sponsored legislation in 2000-2006. It took a Democratic takeover to eventually get rid of the worst offenders - Rumsfeld and Gonzales - fighting mostly complicit Republican congressmen along the way.
The only tools the Democrats have at their disposal to stop the excesses of the Bush administration are Congressional investigations and impeachment. An impeachment of Bush and Cheney would never get enough Republican support in a Senate trial even after all they've done (making it a symbolic but inflammatory and divisive gesture). The Democrats therefore are using the one power they can wield to effect: to shine light in all the dirty crevices they can find.
Sure, some of the Democrats are also greedy and will like the power that they'll inherit, but you're more likely to find salvation on that side of the aisle than from the people who raped your constitution in the first place.
Either way, you can take decades old technology and discover novel, patentable ways to use it. A number of people would dispute whether that's an appropriate use of the patent system. For drugs that may only be approved by the FDA for a particular use and that need to go through significant additional testing for new uses, it's debatable that those new uses should be patentable to support the costs of the additional testing required by government regulation.
But with most patentable items it's the creation of the tools and the refinement of a manufacturing technique that takes all the work. If somebody creates a manufacturing process for a novel variation for a tip on an AFM that provides new functionality, then they should be able to get a patent on it. If somebody finds a novel use for a stock OTS atomic force microscope (say writing things by moving xenon atoms around at temperatures near absolute zero), I don't see why they should be granted a patent for that use. But if they use an AFM to build a molecular scale structure to extrude arbitrary length nanotubes, they should be allowed to patent the tube-extrusion process.
That may not be the way patents work now of course, but it's the way they should work. It shouldn't be possible to patent a novel method of using an existing tool.
I'll amend that your answering machine message should be something like:
"Hello, you have reached the phone line for . If you're calling to harass me or sell me something - this includes moving my domain name to your registrar - save your time and mine and hang up now because your message will get deleted. If you're calling because of a connectivity or legal issue with respect to this domain, please leave a message with your problem, your name, a contact phone number where you can be reached at after the tone. Thank you."
Even better is if you have a good answering system and can give them a choice: press 1) if you are offering a service or have a complaint about the content and press 2) if you have a technical or legal issue about the domain.
Then automatically delete everything that goes into mailbox 1.:)
Have a second line with an automatic answering machine that takes messages and monitor the results. If you can afford to run a website, you can afford the second line.
Yes, I think that similar processes and completely different scales can be comparable.
And, clearly, so do I or I wouldn't have brought it up.:-) However, I think that, despite the similarities, when there are significant differences those differences need to be explained through a plausible mechanism. If you are extrapolating from one process to a similar process, especially where there are significant differences in scale, you need to make sure that the differences don't risk invalidating the parallel being established.
Joseph Stalin is the one who said "Quantity has a quality all its own". Perhaps not the best proponent for an idea,:-) but the idea itself has some merit, particularly when you consider that complexity is often predicated on a certain minimal quantity. There are some behaviours that arise in increasingly complex systems that are not apparent in simpler systems. I guess my point is that the complexity of the human brain involved in the design of the microprocessor in evolution could have a non-analogous replacement in the complexity of the genetic code of all life on Earth. This would also explain why early stages of evolution would have been much slower; they would have involved much less genetic variation and complexity.
However, I wouldn't object to the completely natural explanation that there is some unknown mechanism that ties a life form's "aspirations," for lack of a better word, to directional DNA mutations. So fish that continuously wriggles up on the land to eat bugs, doesn't grow legs because every possible mutation was tried, and the all the leg-direction mutations were beneficial and accumulated, but because there is some mechanism that ties the fish's struggling on land to a pro-leg mutation directionality, that over time, with the help of with natural selection, finds morphological expression. I guess I really don't understand why what you want cannot be explained by a combination of very large scale problem spaces in genetic variation, time, and natural selection. For instance, my (admittedly limited) understanding of computer chess playing programs is that a major part of the problem can be expressed as decision path pruning. The deeper you can look down all the possible decision paths, the better your solution. Deep Blue won against Kasparov because it was able to look more moves ahead with a better decision function than previous chess playing programs due its faster computing capabilities. By doing so however, it produced results that mimicked what humans interpret as a directionality in the chess playing of an International Grandmaster and World Champion like Kasparov.
This is a perfectly God-free theory, but science would reject it because it is incomplete. I think that is the biggest source of irrationality in science today, that it prefers complete theories that are improbable, irrational, or fanciful, to incomplete theories that are otherwise simple and probable. It is the same problem in quantum physics. Without getting into details, I find that it is only the fact that we must assume that things are no more complex than we imagine, that ultimately dictates that we must conclude that a particle can be spread indeterminately over a region, and then collapse to a point when observed. Well part of the reason is that you could fabricate a theory where most steps are simple except for the missing step where "a miracle happens". In the long run, perhaps somebody will find a way to make that "miracle" happen through relatively simple means as well. It does happen every now and then. The theory of continental drift was quite controversial because it didn't really provide a mechanism for the separation of continents until it was refined into the theory of plate tectonics. But generally, it's a good litmus test for weeding out crackpot theories that are poorly supported by (often selective) evidence.
Ignoring all the randomly-driven systems to observe in nature, just look at random
If you were going to go DVD, you would also want to record at a higher sampling rate and resolution than current CDs to get finer resolution and fewer encoding artifacts at the high end of the hearing range. At least you would if you have taken care of your hearing and haven't trashed it at raves, bars, or work sites.
We see parallels to biological evolution in all sorts of things like the ones above, and in every one of these parallels there is a directional drive, not a random one, that is driving change (combined with a mechanism for survival of the fittest). There are no parallels to be found driven by random mutations.
In every one of the categories that you listed, things of amazing complexity were created by less than a few thousand people in a few hundred years or less. Evolution has taken quadrillions or more organisms, and billions of years to arrive at the complexity of our modern ecosystems and the human species. And yet you insist that they are comparable! If you don't think that directed intelligence vs. random mutation accounts for the difference in time taken, how do you account for the time discrepancy if you expect a directed intelligence to have been involved in human evolution? Is God a directionless slacker pot-head or heroin addict? Is his omnipotence and omnipresence just too busy guiding evolution on other planets in the universe? Nope, can't be the last one since God is omnipotent, can it? It's got to be a motivational issue.
Or put another way, if you want an example of another evolutionary process that uses a completely random process, you're going to have to travel to another planet, because every organism on this planet is already too busy involved with the one that produced us. The problem is that totally random evolutionary processes take thousands to millions of years to show any progress and I don't see either you or me being patient enough to wait for the result. Besides, nobody's going to start the research because they'd have a hard time getting enough data to publish papers at a sufficiently high frequency to get tenure. Well, except maybe for an immortal God working at Immortal God University.
Slashdot Mirror
"I will not make any deals with you. I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own. I resign. " - The Prisoner
This is Japan after all. Clearly, they will be building a secret base where they will build an army of giant robots to either
a) defend against extra-terrestrial attacks,
b) attack Microsoft.
That's pretty funny. On the one hand, you say that private corporations are better at running nuke plants. Then you point to France and China as the example of countries that are heavily invested in nuclear.
So did you realize that most nuclear power plants in France are owned by EdF, the primarily state-owned corporation with a monopoly on electrical power distribution in France? Somehow I doubt that the situation is significantly more private/market-oriented in China.
So your examples belie your assumptions.
With privately held corporations, maybe.
However, in case you haven't been paying attention in the last 15 years, company executives for public corporations have often concentrated on short term profit at the expense of sustainability, because a major portion of that executive's (often excessive) compensation is tied to (relatively short term increases) in the stock price. Enron, Worldcom, and the like have only been the most egregious examples where fraudulent behaviour was used to inflate the stock price. However there are many more public companies where more legal means were used that sacrificed long term sustainability for short term profits. For an easy example, look at all the fiascos over poor-quality outsourced tech support in the tech industry.
I can't see the nuclear power industry being immune to that disease. And I have suspicions that there will be few private capital firms interested in the huge investments required for building nuclear power plants. Private investors want growth potential whereas nuclear plants are built for a certain capacity.
And of course you can count on the American people to elect a competent executive that will appoint competent administrators to oversee the department with those government inspectors. An executive that won't cut the budget for those oversight bodies on the grounds that the market should decide. An executive that won't have secret meetings where industry corporations get to solely set energy policy.
An elected executive like George W Bush and Richard Cheney, that hires qualified people like ex-FEMA director Mike Brown to oversee critical functions.
Uh-huh. You go ahead and look at your car's computer. At home many wires are coming out of it. Then let me know how much fun that is.
Finally! A use for all those old salvaged wrap-around keyboard/mouse ferrite cores.
Nope, it's worse than that. The RIAA companies realize that their lawsuit strategy isn't working. First they are starting to encounter some real push back because they've been very sloppy and it's only a matter of time before somebody sets a precedent in court that they won't be happy with. Second, it's a lot harder to sue the government for malicious prosecution, and the government has even more tools at its disposal for information gathering with carnivore and the PATRIOT act.
In Niven's Known Space series, the Pierson's puppeteers are a race of herbivore traders. They also are one of the species with the most advanced levels of technology in our Galactic arm and most smart species don't want to frighten them or upset them - it's suspected that their response (and how they became dominant on their home worlds) is to wipe out species they consider a risk to themselves.
Eating other sentients is the one act of barbarism another space-faring civilisation might think disqualify a planet-bound species from contact.
I don't think having to stop because a taste for bush meat and exotic sushi resulted in us wiping out other primates and large whales would earn us any points in that regard either.
Given the increase in obesity across the population, I expect average North American life expectancy to decrease. However, for the subgroup that can maintain a healthy diet and a good exercise balance, I think average life expectancy will go up to the range you are talking about.
If you want to live longer with a good quality of life, eat a healthy balanced diet, make sure you don't let your body fat percentage get too high, and find a low-impact aerobic exercise that you enjoy and can continue to do as you get older. It will keep your heart healthy and your mind active. Swimming, walking, hiking, dancing, that sort of thing.
Ahem: Imagine a Beowulf----
cluster of animated Angelina Jolie-lizards?
Heh. Since a lot of the calculations are floating point, I think you're at least as likely to have numerical analysis errors that make the data come out of that loop be dominated by precision errors. But I think in a lot of cases, they do use optimized libraries (i.e. LINPACK) that do most of the math properly and limit the options for really dumb code.
Yep. It almost makes you wish that nobody had done anything about 2-digit dates so that January 1,2000 could have been a serious problem. That way you wouldn't have revisionist people denigrating the efforts put in to avoid the Y2K problem as a waste of resources. I think a lot more people would be willing to appreciate the potential risks of Global Warming if, among other glitches, their company's payroll systems had made it hard for them to get a paycheck in the first few months of 2000.
Something to keep in mind is that (as the article I linked to mentions) the Finns are the country with the third highest per-capita gun ownership. Now part of the reason why shootings happen more in the US than in Germany is the relative population size. However it should be pretty obvious that gun availability in general, and to students in particular, is a huge factor in the overall risk.
China doesn't seem to have the same problems. While it's possible Chinese shootings could have occurred and been hushed up to avoid loss of face for responsible officials, I think some word or rumours would still have gotten out. It's hard to hush up something like that when there are so many witnesses.
On the other hand, I'm surprised India's class system hasn't lead to more shootings, but I guess they probably effectively still have class segregated schools. Also, potential troublesome lower class citizens with grudges deemed too dangerous due to access to weapons probably just have accidents or deadly muggings happen to them. For all of Ghandi's barb that Western civilization would be a good idea, life as an untouchable in India was pretty cheap as recently as the 80's. While that may have improved in some big cities, I doubt it's improved as much in rural areas.
FYI killing sprees in schools is not an issue in Europe.
Mayhaps we spoke too soon. I would say it still happens a lot more frequently in the US.
Nor for the most part in Canada (with the borderline exception of Marc Lepine, who was an adult ex-student). In both cases, you have sensible gun laws that limit the number of guns easily available to kids and lunatics. Well that wasn't totally serious since a bully isn't as likely to have the forethought or resources to arrange access to the proper equipment. I might say drug dealers who attract police attention if they hang around schools, but it's probably easier for them to get some junkies to help them out in exchange for a hit. Electronics don't squeal if they're caught though. Well, I've seen kids take the bus home in their catholic school uniforms around here. And you don't have to go too far north so that the sun sets pretty early in the winter months. It only takes a one hour, after-school, extra-curricular activity or detention for the same students to be going home in the dark. And yeah, child predators don't need RFID to find kids, but the ones that figure it out will be a lot harder to catch.
Sociopaths who want to go on killing sprees in schools shouldn't have to search in each classroom to find people to kill! We should have RFIDs attached to all the students so that the psychos can carry a detector along with lots of guns and can skip the empty classrooms to concentrate on those with the most kids. They can also make sure they don't miss anyone hiding in a closet. Heck, even regular bullies could benefit and use it to find out which entrance Johnny Victim is trying to use, thus making sure he doesn't sneak through with his lunch money intact.
These are presumably passive RFIDs so that they can last a long time without needing batteries changed, right? That way child predators can passively scan the school to find out the carrier frequency used and then put matching activator/detector devices in alleys or wooded parks so that they can know from afar when a child is walking home late at night and they can snatch it with less fear of being observed in the act or while lying in wait.
Gotta love how modern technology empowers people.
</sarcasm&irony>
Originally Facebook started with, and was restricted to, the university/college student population. It was started by people from that environment and initially probably would have hired within those ranks. While there are a lot of serious people in universities, there's also a lot of frat-boy/sorority-girl puerile mentality as well. Is it really surprising that a socially-oriented organization developed in that environment would be at least as likely to inherit from the puerile side as from the serious work ethic prevalent in a post-secondary environment?
Anyway, the excesses of the Bush administration are going to be cured by the next Republican President. Sure, the liberals whine about lost liberties, but (sadly) only the Republicans have the spine to actually step up and do something about it.
That eliminates any of the Republican candidates for 2008, doesn't it? Because they're bending over backwards to please the corporate and religious fundamentalist special interest groups, so no spine there. And frankly I think you're whistling in the wind. Without a thorough bloodletting in the Republican Party, any nominee is going to be beholden to corporate and religious fundamentalist special interests. Most of them don't have a problem with anything but the most egregious excesses of the Bush administration since the Republican-controlled Congress rubber stamped most Bush-sponsored legislation in 2000-2006. It took a Democratic takeover to eventually get rid of the worst offenders - Rumsfeld and Gonzales - fighting mostly complicit Republican congressmen along the way.
The only tools the Democrats have at their disposal to stop the excesses of the Bush administration are Congressional investigations and impeachment. An impeachment of Bush and Cheney would never get enough Republican support in a Senate trial even after all they've done (making it a symbolic but inflammatory and divisive gesture). The Democrats therefore are using the one power they can wield to effect: to shine light in all the dirty crevices they can find.
Sure, some of the Democrats are also greedy and will like the power that they'll inherit, but you're more likely to find salvation on that side of the aisle than from the people who raped your constitution in the first place.
Yep. It was introduced 6 months before the transcontinental telegraph line was completed. Turns out the horses couldn't keep up...
That's only because they hadn't invented magnetic tape yet.
Either way, you can take decades old technology and discover novel, patentable ways to use it.
A number of people would dispute whether that's an appropriate use of the patent system. For drugs that may only be approved by the FDA for a particular use and that need to go through significant additional testing for new uses, it's debatable that those new uses should be patentable to support the costs of the additional testing required by government regulation.
But with most patentable items it's the creation of the tools and the refinement of a manufacturing technique that takes all the work. If somebody creates a manufacturing process for a novel variation for a tip on an AFM that provides new functionality, then they should be able to get a patent on it. If somebody finds a novel use for a stock OTS atomic force microscope (say writing things by moving xenon atoms around at temperatures near absolute zero), I don't see why they should be granted a patent for that use. But if they use an AFM to build a molecular scale structure to extrude arbitrary length nanotubes, they should be allowed to patent the tube-extrusion process.
That may not be the way patents work now of course, but it's the way they should work. It shouldn't be possible to patent a novel method of using an existing tool.
I'll amend that your answering machine message should be something like:
:)
"Hello, you have reached the phone line for . If you're calling to harass me or sell me something - this includes moving my domain name to your registrar - save your time and mine and hang up now because your message will get deleted. If you're calling because of a connectivity or legal issue with respect to this domain, please leave a message with your problem, your name, a contact phone number where you can be reached at after the tone. Thank you."
Even better is if you have a good answering system and can give them a choice: press 1) if you are offering a service or have a complaint about the content and press 2) if you have a technical or legal issue about the domain.
Then automatically delete everything that goes into mailbox 1.
Have a second line with an automatic answering machine that takes messages and monitor the results. If you can afford to run a website, you can afford the second line.
Yes, I think that similar processes and completely different scales can be comparable. :-) However, I think that, despite the similarities, when there are significant differences those differences need to be explained through a plausible mechanism. If you are extrapolating from one process to a similar process, especially where there are significant differences in scale, you need to make sure that the differences don't risk invalidating the parallel being established.
:-) but the idea itself has some merit, particularly when you consider that complexity is often predicated on a certain minimal quantity. There are some behaviours that arise in increasingly complex systems that are not apparent in simpler systems. I guess my point is that the complexity of the human brain involved in the design of the microprocessor in evolution could have a non-analogous replacement in the complexity of the genetic code of all life on Earth. This would also explain why early stages of evolution would have been much slower; they would have involved much less genetic variation and complexity.
And, clearly, so do I or I wouldn't have brought it up.
Joseph Stalin is the one who said "Quantity has a quality all its own". Perhaps not the best proponent for an idea,
However, I wouldn't object to the completely natural explanation that there is some unknown mechanism that ties a life form's "aspirations," for lack of a better word, to directional DNA mutations. So fish that continuously wriggles up on the land to eat bugs, doesn't grow legs because every possible mutation was tried, and the all the leg-direction mutations were beneficial and accumulated, but because there is some mechanism that ties the fish's struggling on land to a pro-leg mutation directionality, that over time, with the help of with natural selection, finds morphological expression.
I guess I really don't understand why what you want cannot be explained by a combination of very large scale problem spaces in genetic variation, time, and natural selection. For instance, my (admittedly limited) understanding of computer chess playing programs is that a major part of the problem can be expressed as decision path pruning. The deeper you can look down all the possible decision paths, the better your solution. Deep Blue won against Kasparov because it was able to look more moves ahead with a better decision function than previous chess playing programs due its faster computing capabilities. By doing so however, it produced results that mimicked what humans interpret as a directionality in the chess playing of an International Grandmaster and World Champion like Kasparov.
This is a perfectly God-free theory, but science would reject it because it is incomplete. I think that is the biggest source of irrationality in science today, that it prefers complete theories that are improbable, irrational, or fanciful, to incomplete theories that are otherwise simple and probable. It is the same problem in quantum physics. Without getting into details, I find that it is only the fact that we must assume that things are no more complex than we imagine, that ultimately dictates that we must conclude that a particle can be spread indeterminately over a region, and then collapse to a point when observed.
Well part of the reason is that you could fabricate a theory where most steps are simple except for the missing step where "a miracle happens". In the long run, perhaps somebody will find a way to make that "miracle" happen through relatively simple means as well. It does happen every now and then. The theory of continental drift was quite controversial because it didn't really provide a mechanism for the separation of continents until it was refined into the theory of plate tectonics. But generally, it's a good litmus test for weeding out crackpot theories that are poorly supported by (often selective) evidence.
Ignoring all the randomly-driven systems to observe in nature, just look at random
If you were going to go DVD, you would also want to record at a higher sampling rate and resolution than current CDs to get finer resolution and fewer encoding artifacts at the high end of the hearing range. At least you would if you have taken care of your hearing and haven't trashed it at raves, bars, or work sites.
We see parallels to biological evolution in all sorts of things like the ones above, and in every one of these parallels there is a directional drive, not a random one, that is driving change (combined with a mechanism for survival of the fittest). There are no parallels to be found driven by random mutations.
In every one of the categories that you listed, things of amazing complexity were created by less than a few thousand people in a few hundred years or less. Evolution has taken quadrillions or more organisms, and billions of years to arrive at the complexity of our modern ecosystems and the human species. And yet you insist that they are comparable! If you don't think that directed intelligence vs. random mutation accounts for the difference in time taken, how do you account for the time discrepancy if you expect a directed intelligence to have been involved in human evolution? Is God a directionless slacker pot-head or heroin addict? Is his omnipotence and omnipresence just too busy guiding evolution on other planets in the universe? Nope, can't be the last one since God is omnipotent, can it? It's got to be a motivational issue.
Or put another way, if you want an example of another evolutionary process that uses a completely random process, you're going to have to travel to another planet, because every organism on this planet is already too busy involved with the one that produced us. The problem is that totally random evolutionary processes take thousands to millions of years to show any progress and I don't see either you or me being patient enough to wait for the result. Besides, nobody's going to start the research because they'd have a hard time getting enough data to publish papers at a sufficiently high frequency to get tenure. Well, except maybe for an immortal God working at Immortal God University.