[F]or the Darwinian theory of evolution to be true, it has to account for the molecular structure of life. It is the purpose of this book to show that it does not.
A theory T is generally well established, but does not give a detailed explanation of a phenomenon P. Therefore T is wrong.
This is logically ill-formed.
If Behe could produce a counter-theory showing verifiably/falsifiably and in detail how an intelligent agent arranged P, and also explaining as much as T, and not contradicting anything else, then maybe he'd be getting somewhere.
Given the enormous success of mainstream biology to date, the reasonable expectation is that it will eventually explain P, but just has not done so yet. This is what happened with the eye and the wing, previously considered irreducibly complex. And apparently this is being done for blood clotting, amongst other examples.
Well, aside from the last couple of sentences; you can keep them. Science as a whole doesn't seem to have *too* strong of an immune system. Established theories get overthrown reasonably often when there is a mass of evidence. Indeed, several creationists or fellow-travellers still have tenure at respectable universities. Of course it is hard to prove the absence of a conspiracy...
The one thing that *is* likely to get you metaphorically killfiled by anyone scientific is argument from authority: "I read it in the bible so it must be true." This is fundamentally antiscientific. (Therefore the camoflague of ID, etc.)
I do observe that most creationist writers are simply not very bright, or have something getting in the way of using their intelligence. Consider Behe, probably the poster boy of ID. Any decent highschool debater ought to be point out the gaping logical holes in, say, irreducible complexity. The fact that he is taken seriously by anyone on the creationist side says something about the quality of thinking. Obviously I am generalizing.
The X.org people seem to be making good progress on updating X11 to suit modern hardware, while maintaining backward compatibility. If we threw out all our software every time the hardware changed we'd never get anywhere.
I'm curious: how do noah-flood believers account for the Antarctic ice mass? Is it supposed that it stayed frozen under the flood, or did more than a vertical kilometer of ice form since the flood, on a continent with only a few mm of precipitation per year?
For that matter, where did all the water come from? The most dire predictions for climate change have waters rising by a matter of tens of meters if much of the ice shelf melts, which is not enough to cover mountains.
It's a shame that so much science asks the populace to take it's findings on faith, instead of showing the evidence and how they came to the conclusion.
You are not being asked to take anything on faith, and the evidence is always available if you work a little. If you read the article, you can see the researcher's name, affiliation, and the conference where the research was presented. Put those into Google and you can find the paper (maybe in a couple of weeks). Journals are available for perusal at university libraries. There is not a secret password for the science treehouse. If you think there are holes, send a polite query to the author after doing your background reading and you'll probably get a response.
Science was open source before there was open source.
Behe's book is in fact quite silly and widely recognized as such. (It may well be both compelling and silly, which makes it all the more pernicious.) See, for example, this review.
What I find particularly poignant is that one need not know anything about biology to spot the glaring holes in Behe's logic. I visited a rather beautiful natural rock arch a while ago. If any of the rocks making it up were removed, the arch would collapse. (Assembling such a delicately-balanced multi-ton construction over a void even with modern civil engineering would be difficult.) It is both aesthetic and function, and not merely random. It has irreducible specified complexity by Behe's definition. Therefore, Behe would have us conclude that the arch was assembled by gods or fairies rather than by natural processes.
(Indeed, the young-earth creationists are compelled to believe this, as it would probably be impossible to erode so many meters of granite in only a few thousand years.)
Pointing out that there are some phenomena which biology cannot explain in complete detail isn't unscientific, though it's perhaps not very helpful. Most of the things Behe questions have apparently now been handled to some extent. But of course there are things we don't completely understand yet; that doesn't mean we understand nothing or that we have to assume "goddidit".
Basically Behe states that any mutation that is not beneficial will be lost over time as the animal with the mutation will be less likely to survive to pass on its genes.
I am not a geneticist, but I don't think that statement is true. You can only say that any mutation which is *harmful* will tend to die out, but there are many possible mutations which are neither beneficial nor harmful. It is possible the mutation is in "junk" (currently unused) DNA; it may have no effect on survival (eye color); it may be a duplicate; it may not be expressed; it may have no relevance to the environment; it may be cancelled by another effect.
If Behe did say that it shows he is enormously out of touch.
When somebody using Behe's techniques designs, for example, a new antiviral drug, then I'll believe he's onto something.
Posit an interventionist, omnipotent god. Any scientific law needs to be qualified with "insh' allah" -- we can say E=mc^2 now, but maybe it'll change tomorrow. Maybe the reason for the apparent wave/particle duality is that God changed the rules in different labs. Maybe cold fusion ought to work, but God was mad with the experimenters, so he fiddled it.
It's certainly not impossible to do science under those conditions, though it would be pretty damn frustrating. You could never really conclude anything with any certainty. It also encourages a certain laziness, seen in creationist writing, of relying on scripture when you don't have evidence.
But as raodin asked: why not just neatly slice off the god with Occam's Razor? Everything else works just fine: we can explain just as much as with him, probably more, and it's certainly easier to do work.
And let's remember that mainstream science really has discovered an enormous amount about the universe, whereas creationism has basically produced nothing useful either intellectually or materially. Show me a single pharmaceutical produced by creationist biochemistry.
Even assuming the culpability of the Egyptian state, or Egyptian citizens, the children had no control over the actions of their parents.
To intentionally and avoidably slaughter thousands or millions of children is the act of a war criminal. Regardless of how much you dislike the other state.
There is evidence of (forerunners of) Chinese civilisation leading back to about 5,000BC. There are paintings from Aboriginal Australians from between before 5000BC. Of course there is a degree of uncertainty in working at such a distance.
But let's remember, the 6000-year number was originally calculated by making correlations and educated guesses between events in the bible. The "facts" on which the calculations were based include figures living for hundreds of years, etc, etc, which no serious non-Creationist historian could suggest with a straight face. Even before modern scientific discoveries about the age of the earth the 6000-year figure was considered by theologians to be very suspect.
Creationism is very much comparable to looking for invisible pink unicorns. (Intelligent design is to pretend that we're looking for invisible equines of unspecified color, nudge nudge wink wink.) The method:
1. Assume unicorns exist. (cf, assume the world was created in 7 days from water 6000 years ago.)
2. Develop a theory, however contrived, convoluted and implausible, to reconcile existence of IPUs with one scientific fact. You can safely ignore any other facts people might raise, including volcanos, glaciers, prehistoric human remains, etc etc.
3. Profit?!?!?
Given the possibilities of either the universe being billions of years old, or some special magic time-accelerating force-field, Occam's razor slashes away the second.
If you're talking about direct radiometric dating, run the samples through an AMS and try again.
I must have left my AMS at the office, so tell me: what is that supposed to prove? Radiometric dating is a well-established technique, has a good theoretical basis, and produces results consistent with other measures.
not a dumb bunny
Not dumb, exactly; more like deluded.
There is no shortage of intelligent and well-educated cranks. I used to find this sad and confusing, but now I realize that when you consider the many thousands of PhDs in the world there are bound to be some kooks.
Newton and Tesla, amongst others, were pretty much crackpots, but they produced a few gems. Fortunately science has in the long term good mechanisms to filter the wheat from the chaff. Religion, generally relying on arguments from authority, doesn't have this mechanism.
Show me ten genuinely results developed from creationism and then I'll believe it's science. By "genuinely useful", I mean giving a credible explanation of something that could not be explained before, and that has been independently verified and accepted by mainstream science. Hey, show me one creationist paper in Nature and I'll be impressed.
If you want to go back to believing in late mediaeval superstitions, why rest at 6000 years? Why not believe that heaven is a few miles about the earth and the sun orbits suspended in a crystal sphere. At the time, some people thought these facts were clearly proved by the bible. I suppose you could make an equally contrived case that the moon landings were a materialist hoax.
According to the article you link: You can have your cake by assuming there was a special magic time-dilation field around Earth during which clocks ran 10^-13 times slower than outside. No mechanism is proposed for how this might happen, or what this magic envelope is made of, or indeed why this extraordinary series of events might happen. Nor is any serious reason given for why we ought to believe the theory unless we already assume that the Earth is only six thousand years old.
That smells like Bullshit Cake to me. No thanks.
If you want to say "God did it by magic" then be my guest, but don't pretend it's scientific.
For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death. (Lev 20:9)
My, we're certainly going to be killing a lot of people. How many people have cursed their father or mother in a fit of teenage pique? Surely the mountains of hundreds of millions of corpses will have a "sweet savor to the Lord".
And the man that committeth adultery with another man's wife,... the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.
I guess that disposes of another 20% or more of the population. I'm glad the lord likes the smell of burning corpses, because there's going to be a lot of it if people ever start following the bible literally.
Is it any wonder the bible is a perenial favourite of mass-murderers? Pol Pot has nothing on this guy.
Mind you, this is the same God that supposedly killed thousands of Egyptian children in cold blood, because he disliked the policies of their monarch. Being all-powerful he could have trivially killed or punished only the monarch, so clearly this genocide was intentional.
This can only be the actions of a muderous psychopath, and I'm not at all inclined to take his advice on "Love".
If you assume that supernatural beings can make arbitrary changes to the world through mysterious mechanisms, then anything is possible. Maybe God made the world this morning, and made me think it's always been around. It's possible. It can't be scientifically disproved.
However, if you assume God can arbitrarily fiddle with anything at point, there is no room left for science at all. You can't make useful predictions or theories if everything depends on the will of an omniscient, unpredictable supernatural being. You're left living in a hut, praying for rain.
Creationists claim to use the scientific method, and try to assume the decorations of science, but they are not at all scientific. It is hard to draw an absolutely clear line around "science", but there are several guidelines that they regularly breach.
Merely making one prediction which happens to turn out true does not make you a scientist, or make your theories accurate. The person you link to is pulling a particularly long bow: that the world was created from water 6000 years ago, which is on the face of it a ridiculous assertion, given that there are continuous human civilizations older than that. He'd better substantiate that assumption before any calculations based on it can be taken seriously.
As just one example, the scientitic method requires that we (try to) judge on the evidence not on our feelings about the evidence, but you will regularly hear creationists complain that evolutionism causes e.g. teenage pregnancy and moral decline. That may or may not be true, but it is has nothing to do with whether evolution is factually correct. The basic flaw here is that they pick a theory based on whether they like the consequences rather than the evidence.
(It's OK to start with a theory you happen to like, but when the enormous preponderence of evidence is against it maybe you should think twice.)
It's certainly possible to measure supernatural effects scientifically. Scientifically, they've never been proven to exist; Occam's razor suggests that we assume there are no invisible pink unicorns until further evidence is provided.
(I guess it's not logically impossible that there is a scientific creationist: they'd keep trying out theories, then discarding them as impossible. This would be strictly scientific, though also pretty dumb.)
The post I replied to was talking about proxies, which are usually public caches. In any case, most or all browsers will not keep HTTPS content in a local private cache either.
You can run mkswap in Linux on any partition regardless of weather it is set to "Linux swap" type or not.
Yes, but Linux will only swap onto partitions that have been prepared with mkswap, which makes it somewhat less likely you'll clobber a partition you meant to keep. That's really the only point of mkswap; everything else could be done perfectly well in the kernel.
Sure, they're a different animal. Every business is different: banks from airlines from oil from mum's embroidery shop. Google are far from the only organization to be using farms of PCs, but just the most prominent, and perhaps the most ambitious.
As with everything else today, Google is designed to withstand component failures. You cannot buy hard drives/memory/processors/data centers that won't eventually fail, so you design around it. People seem to have the superstitious idea that there is something dodgy about counting on redundancy to be reliable, but it is often the only feasible design.
If their whole system went offline, Google would be as unhappy as any other company. By various estimates it takes them days or weeks to crawl the whole web, and probably some additional time to build the index. If their store catastrophically failed, they'd be gone for weeks, which would be very damaging.
If you actually read the link, you'd see there is at least as much redundancy designed into the system than in most NAS systems, and it has been very reliable to date. You are familiar with the idea of RAID, aren't you -- Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks? This is the same approach as in the IBM hardware, but at a much higher level.
For example they maintain integrity checks of every block, to catch silent corruption. This is not done by many competing systems -- it is a major selling point of Sun ZFS that they do.
The primary reason why Google don't use this for their financial systems is likely that it is custom designed for their search applications, not for whatever financial systems they use. Secondarily the volume is so small that an off-the-shelf system probably works fine.
Do I expect everyone to build their own system? No, but for some users it works well.
(Why are people happy to use the thought "fuck", but not the letters? Bizarre. And what is this loose data you speak of?)
Slashdot Mirror
...you cock-smoking teabaggers!
To show I'm not putting words in his mouth:
[F]or the Darwinian theory of evolution to be true, it has to account for the molecular structure of life. It is the purpose of this book to show that it does not.
Behe's argument is basically this:
A theory T is generally well established, but does not give a detailed explanation of a phenomenon P. Therefore T is wrong.
This is logically ill-formed.
If Behe could produce a counter-theory showing verifiably/falsifiably and in detail how an intelligent agent arranged P, and also explaining as much as T, and not contradicting anything else, then maybe he'd be getting somewhere.
Given the enormous success of mainstream biology to date, the reasonable expectation is that it will eventually explain P, but just has not done so yet. This is what happened with the eye and the wing, previously considered irreducibly complex. And apparently this is being done for blood clotting, amongst other examples.
Nature is far more fascinating than myths.
Thanks for the answer.
Well, aside from the last couple of sentences; you can keep them. Science as a whole doesn't seem to have *too* strong of an immune system. Established theories get overthrown reasonably often when there is a mass of evidence. Indeed, several creationists or fellow-travellers still have tenure at respectable universities. Of course it is hard to prove the absence of a conspiracy...
The one thing that *is* likely to get you metaphorically killfiled by anyone scientific is argument from authority: "I read it in the bible so it must be true." This is fundamentally antiscientific. (Therefore the camoflague of ID, etc.)
I do observe that most creationist writers are simply not very bright, or have something getting in the way of using their intelligence. Consider Behe, probably the poster boy of ID. Any decent highschool debater ought to be point out the gaping logical holes in, say, irreducible complexity. The fact that he is taken seriously by anyone on the creationist side says something about the quality of thinking. Obviously I am generalizing.
I suggest you go to Keith Packard's talk at the upcoming linux.conf.au: The (re)architecture of the X Window System, etc.
The X.org people seem to be making good progress on updating X11 to suit modern hardware, while maintaining backward compatibility. If we threw out all our software every time the hardware changed we'd never get anywhere.
I'm curious: how do noah-flood believers account for the Antarctic ice mass? Is it supposed that it stayed frozen under the flood, or did more than a vertical kilometer of ice form since the flood, on a continent with only a few mm of precipitation per year?
For that matter, where did all the water come from? The most dire predictions for climate change have waters rising by a matter of tens of meters if much of the ice shelf melts, which is not enough to cover mountains.
There is a shortage of good journalism period.
It's a shame that so much science asks the populace to take it's findings on faith, instead of showing the evidence and how they came to the conclusion.
You are not being asked to take anything on faith, and the evidence is always available if you work a little. If you read the article, you can see the researcher's name, affiliation, and the conference where the research was presented. Put those into Google and you can find the paper (maybe in a couple of weeks). Journals are available for perusal at university libraries. There is not a secret password for the science treehouse. If you think there are holes, send a polite query to the author after doing your background reading and you'll probably get a response.
Science was open source before there was open source.
Behe's book is in fact quite silly and widely recognized as such. (It may well be both compelling and silly, which makes it all the more pernicious.) See, for example, this review.
What I find particularly poignant is that one need not know anything about biology to spot the glaring holes in Behe's logic. I visited a rather beautiful natural rock arch a while ago. If any of the rocks making it up were removed, the arch would collapse. (Assembling such a delicately-balanced multi-ton construction over a void even with modern civil engineering would be difficult.) It is both aesthetic and function, and not merely random. It has irreducible specified complexity by Behe's definition. Therefore, Behe would have us conclude that the arch was assembled by gods or fairies rather than by natural processes.
(Indeed, the young-earth creationists are compelled to believe this, as it would probably be impossible to erode so many meters of granite in only a few thousand years.)
Pointing out that there are some phenomena which biology cannot explain in complete detail isn't unscientific, though it's perhaps not very helpful. Most of the things Behe questions have apparently now been handled to some extent. But of course there are things we don't completely understand yet; that doesn't mean we understand nothing or that we have to assume "goddidit".
Basically Behe states that any mutation that is not beneficial will be lost over time as the animal with the mutation will be less likely to survive to pass on its genes.
I am not a geneticist, but I don't think that statement is true. You can only say that any mutation which is *harmful* will tend to die out, but there are many possible mutations which are neither beneficial nor harmful. It is possible the mutation is in "junk" (currently unused) DNA; it may have no effect on survival (eye color); it may be a duplicate; it may not be expressed; it may have no relevance to the environment; it may be cancelled by another effect.
If Behe did say that it shows he is enormously out of touch.
When somebody using Behe's techniques designs, for example, a new antiviral drug, then I'll believe he's onto something.
Posit an interventionist, omnipotent god. Any scientific law needs to be qualified with "insh' allah" -- we can say E=mc^2 now, but maybe it'll change tomorrow. Maybe the reason for the apparent wave/particle duality is that God changed the rules in different labs. Maybe cold fusion ought to work, but God was mad with the experimenters, so he fiddled it.
It's certainly not impossible to do science under those conditions, though it would be pretty damn frustrating. You could never really conclude anything with any certainty. It also encourages a certain laziness, seen in creationist writing, of relying on scripture when you don't have evidence.
But as raodin asked: why not just neatly slice off the god with Occam's Razor? Everything else works just fine: we can explain just as much as with him, probably more, and it's certainly easier to do work.
And let's remember that mainstream science really has discovered an enormous amount about the universe, whereas creationism has basically produced nothing useful either intellectually or materially. Show me a single pharmaceutical produced by creationist biochemistry.
Even assuming the culpability of the Egyptian state, or Egyptian citizens, the children had no control over the actions of their parents.
To intentionally and avoidably slaughter thousands or millions of children is the act of a war criminal. Regardless of how much you dislike the other state.
If all else fails, study when and where $DIETY intervenes.
That is superstition, not science. Better cross your fingers when starting an experiment.
There is evidence of (forerunners of) Chinese civilisation leading back to about 5,000BC. There are paintings from Aboriginal Australians from between before 5000BC. Of course there is a degree of uncertainty in working at such a distance.
But let's remember, the 6000-year number was originally calculated by making correlations and educated guesses between events in the bible. The "facts" on which the calculations were based include figures living for hundreds of years, etc, etc, which no serious non-Creationist historian could suggest with a straight face. Even before modern scientific discoveries about the age of the earth the 6000-year figure was considered by theologians to be very suspect.
Creationism is very much comparable to looking for invisible pink unicorns. (Intelligent design is to pretend that we're looking for invisible equines of unspecified color, nudge nudge wink wink.) The method:
1. Assume unicorns exist. (cf, assume the world was created in 7 days from water 6000 years ago.)
2. Develop a theory, however contrived, convoluted and implausible, to reconcile existence of IPUs with one scientific fact. You can safely ignore any other facts people might raise, including volcanos, glaciers, prehistoric human remains, etc etc.
3. Profit?!?!?
Given the possibilities of either the universe being billions of years old, or some special magic time-accelerating force-field, Occam's razor slashes away the second.
If you're talking about direct radiometric dating, run the samples through an AMS and try again.
I must have left my AMS at the office, so tell me: what is that supposed to prove? Radiometric dating is a well-established technique, has a good theoretical basis, and produces results consistent with other measures.
not a dumb bunny
Not dumb, exactly; more like deluded.
There is no shortage of intelligent and well-educated cranks. I used to find this sad and confusing, but now I realize that when you consider the many thousands of PhDs in the world there are bound to be some kooks.
Newton and Tesla, amongst others, were pretty much crackpots, but they produced a few gems. Fortunately science has in the long term good mechanisms to filter the wheat from the chaff. Religion, generally relying on arguments from authority, doesn't have this mechanism.
Show me ten genuinely results developed from creationism and then I'll believe it's science. By "genuinely useful", I mean giving a credible explanation of something that could not be explained before, and that has been independently verified and accepted by mainstream science. Hey, show me one creationist paper in Nature and I'll be impressed.
If you want to go back to believing in late mediaeval superstitions, why rest at 6000 years? Why not believe that heaven is a few miles about the earth and the sun orbits suspended in a crystal sphere. At the time, some people thought these facts were clearly proved by the bible. I suppose you could make an equally contrived case that the moon landings were a materialist hoax.
According to the article you link: You can have your cake by assuming there was a special magic time-dilation field around Earth during which clocks ran 10^-13 times slower than outside. No mechanism is proposed for how this might happen, or what this magic envelope is made of, or indeed why this extraordinary series of events might happen. Nor is any serious reason given for why we ought to believe the theory unless we already assume that the Earth is only six thousand years old.
That smells like Bullshit Cake to me. No thanks.
If you want to say "God did it by magic" then be my guest, but don't pretend it's scientific.
For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death. (Lev 20:9)
... the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.
My, we're certainly going to be killing a lot of people. How many people have cursed their father or mother in a fit of teenage pique? Surely the mountains of hundreds of millions of corpses will have a "sweet savor to the Lord".
And the man that committeth adultery with another man's wife,
I guess that disposes of another 20% or more of the population. I'm glad the lord likes the smell of burning corpses, because there's going to be a lot of it if people ever start following the bible literally.
Is it any wonder the bible is a perenial favourite of mass-murderers? Pol Pot has nothing on this guy.
Mind you, this is the same God that supposedly killed thousands of Egyptian children in cold blood, because he disliked the policies of their monarch. Being all-powerful he could have trivially killed or punished only the monarch, so clearly this genocide was intentional.
This can only be the actions of a muderous psychopath, and I'm not at all inclined to take his advice on "Love".
It depends what you mean by "materialism".
If you assume that supernatural beings can make arbitrary changes to the world through mysterious mechanisms, then anything is possible. Maybe God made the world this morning, and made me think it's always been around. It's possible. It can't be scientifically disproved.
However, if you assume God can arbitrarily fiddle with anything at point, there is no room left for science at all. You can't make useful predictions or theories if everything depends on the will of an omniscient, unpredictable supernatural being. You're left living in a hut, praying for rain.
Creationists claim to use the scientific method, and try to assume the decorations of science, but they are not at all scientific. It is hard to draw an absolutely clear line around "science", but there are several guidelines that they regularly breach.
Merely making one prediction which happens to turn out true does not make you a scientist, or make your theories accurate. The person you link to is pulling a particularly long bow: that the world was created from water 6000 years ago, which is on the face of it a ridiculous assertion, given that there are continuous human civilizations older than that. He'd better substantiate that assumption before any calculations based on it can be taken seriously.
As just one example, the scientitic method requires that we (try to) judge on the evidence not on our feelings about the evidence, but you will regularly hear creationists complain that evolutionism causes e.g. teenage pregnancy and moral decline. That may or may not be true, but it is has nothing to do with whether evolution is factually correct. The basic flaw here is that they pick a theory based on whether they like the consequences rather than the evidence.
(It's OK to start with a theory you happen to like, but when the enormous preponderence of evidence is against it maybe you should think twice.)
It's certainly possible to measure supernatural effects scientifically. Scientifically, they've never been proven to exist; Occam's razor suggests that we assume there are no invisible pink unicorns until further evidence is provided.
There's really plenty of documentation of this already.
(I guess it's not logically impossible that there is a scientific creationist: they'd keep trying out theories, then discarding them as impossible. This would be strictly scientific, though also pretty dumb.)
Gods [plural] created the heaven and earth?
How do you know it wasn't Yahweh, Jesus, Buddha and Bob?
The post I replied to was talking about proxies, which are usually public caches. In any case, most or all browsers will not keep HTTPS content in a local private cache either.
Secure or sensitive information should be carried across HTTPS, where proxies can't see it.
You can run mkswap in Linux on any partition regardless of weather it is set to "Linux swap" type or not.
Yes, but Linux will only swap onto partitions that have been prepared with mkswap, which makes it somewhat less likely you'll clobber a partition you meant to keep. That's really the only point of mkswap; everything else could be done perfectly well in the kernel.
That's why I always set Option "DontZap" in XF86Config.
Sure, they're a different animal. Every business is different: banks from airlines from oil from mum's embroidery shop. Google are far from the only organization to be using farms of PCs, but just the most prominent, and perhaps the most ambitious.
As with everything else today, Google is designed to withstand component failures. You cannot buy hard drives/memory/processors/data centers that won't eventually fail, so you design around it. People seem to have the superstitious idea that there is something dodgy about counting on redundancy to be reliable, but it is often the only feasible design.
If their whole system went offline, Google would be as unhappy as any other company. By various estimates it takes them days or weeks to crawl the whole web, and probably some additional time to build the index. If their store catastrophically failed, they'd be gone for weeks, which would be very damaging.
If you actually read the link, you'd see there is at least as much redundancy designed into the system than in most NAS systems, and it has been very reliable to date. You are familiar with the idea of RAID, aren't you -- Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks? This is the same approach as in the IBM hardware, but at a much higher level.
For example they maintain integrity checks of every block, to catch silent corruption. This is not done by many competing systems -- it is a major selling point of Sun ZFS that they do.
The primary reason why Google don't use this for their financial systems is likely that it is custom designed for their search applications, not for whatever financial systems they use. Secondarily the volume is so small that an off-the-shelf system probably works fine.
Do I expect everyone to build their own system? No, but for some users it works well.
(Why are people happy to use the thought "fuck", but not the letters? Bizarre. And what is this loose data you speak of?)