Given the full article implies the chimp exhibited this behavior regularly, I would say it's a simpler assumption that he gathered the rocks with the intention of throwing them.
It's not simpler at all. The chimp may just have two behaviors that happen to overlap: 1) gathering rocks for fun, and 2) throwing rocks at people. Where is the evidence that the two behaviors are linked?
Honestly, I was about to post something like this myself about my own post.:) I don't know why I said correlation. I think I'm feeling jet lagged from the changeover to DST.
Coincidence is not causation might be a better way to put it.
Correlation is not causation. It's entirely possible he was making a pile of rocks to amuse himself, and then later on, he was pissed off looking at the people, saw his rock collection, and took the opportunity.
That's far more likely than some entirely new behavior that's NEVER been observed in the hundreds of years of observing various simians.
you completely missed the point that if I don't have 50K in cash to file 40 patents a year, then its pointless for me to become an inventor, as companies will just steal my ideas.
Well, first of all, it doesn't cost that much to file a patent, and you certainly don't need to file 40 patents a year (?).
Second, think about what you're saying. You're saying that it's pointless to become an inventory, because you can't afford to file patents. And since you can't file patents, then companies will steal your ideas. Therefore, the world is better without patents, because then somehow companies *won't* steal your inventions?? What the hell is your point again?
In other words, yes, you are correct. Without patents, big companies WILL STEAL YOUR INVENTIONS. Congratulations, you've got the idea. Now just learn how to file a patent.
Patents dont encourage innovation. The only make the first person to file it rich. Which discourages the sharing of ideas and information for fear that some rich jerk like edison or Bell will come along and patent your idea first.
You're completely contradicting yourself. Ones of the major *points* of patents is to encourage sharing of ideas. Without patents, everyone would hoard their ideas, because there would be no legal protection -- the second any rich person heard your idea, they would start mass-producing it, leaving you out in the cold.
The example here shows what happens when you share without a patent -- someone beats you to the patent office! But note that once the small investor gets there, he can share all he wants with legal protection.
Now this is the cue for anti-patent people to start listing a litany of cases where patents didn't protect some little guy. But that doesn't change the millions of cases where it does, that doesn't get the publicity.
Considering our reliance on computing in every single industry, in our personal lives -- fuck it, literally EVERYWHERE...
You can say that out about a lot of things.
"Considering our reliance on roads, everyone should know how to lay asphalt."
"Considering our reliance on refrigeration, everyone should understand Freon gas."
"Considering our reliance on integrated circuits, everyone should learn chip fabrication."
"Considering our reliance on knives and forks, everyone should know how to forge metal."
The fact of the matter is that everyone doesn't have to know how to do every micro-skill. School should give you the skills to function in society, NOT to teach you trade skills that can be picked up anywhere.
There is no reason a introductory programming course shouldn't be a mandatory part of a curriculum. Giving more students exposure to it would certainly not be a negative thing. Go take your nerd rage elsewhere.
No reason, other than there is a finite amount of time. Teaching someone programming takes away from something else, such as history, math and science. Programming is a trade skill, like learning to arrange flowers. But most people would say that there are more important things to learn than arranging flowers.
Actually, "Not everyone is interested in $X" is a true statement for all values of X. Are you proposing not to teach kids anything?
No, as I said in my post, I'm advocating teach *broad* knowledge. Math, science, art, history, etc. Programming is a specific trade skill, utterly and completely useless to anyone who won't be doing it for a living. There are an infinite number of trade skills we can teach kids. How about how to change chemicals in a pool? That's a skill that's actually more useful than programming.
If kids had an infinite amount of time to learn, then it makes sense to teach them every random skill. Since we don't have an infinite amount of time, we need to devote it to broad learning, and allow people to learn specific skills based on their own interest.
Not everyone is interested in programming, or any sort of engineering. Get over it. Forcing every kid to take programming (and "forcing" is the right word) is like forcing every kid to learn how to build an engine for their car (and NOT something useful, like changing the oil).
With all the cutbacks in arts and general sciences that take a broad approach to education, why are you wasting their precious school time and especially-precious-now school money on such a specific skill?
It's like someone who is passionate about embroidery insisting that every kid should learn embroidery for their own good ("Think about the problem solving skills they'll learn by figuring out what stitches they need to get to the pattern they want!") Whatever general skills they learn in this class, they can learn better by studying a more general subject.
Re:One word - ads
on
Why TV Lost
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I like ads. Let me repeat that... I like ads. If it comes down to a choice between having to shell out real money for entertainment (or more money, in case of certain entertainment types) and viewing ads, I'll take viewing a few ads every time. Somebody has to pay the bills, and I'd rather have that somebody be a company hawking their product.
Are you telling people that they should believe in a particular interpretation of a book when you don't believe in that book at all? I call that real hypocrisy.
No, I'm saying that if someone is going to believe in the word of a God, then they should believe in every single word of that God, otherwise they are a hypocrite and don't really believe in that God.
Please quote me the passage in the Christian bible where it says that Christians can pick and choose which passages of the bible to "interpret"?
Can you provide some quotes from the Bible regarding this? I've never heard of such a thing. I know Catholic tradition had something to that effect, but I don't believe it's in the Bible itself.
Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and I Chronicles 16:30 state that "the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved." Psalm 104:5 says, "[the Lord] set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved." Ecclesiastes 1:5 states that "the sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises."
Not to say that the authors of the bible were heliocentrists, but the church in the time of Copernicus and Galileo rejected heliocentrism for scientific reasons: it contradicted Aristotelian mechanics, and was not predictively superior to geocentrism.
Sorry, but this is just wrong. Wikipedia actually has a pretty good article about it. See the quotes by contemporary religious leaders, as well as the biblical quotes.
The Bible never actually says anything about how long it took to create the world (unless, of course, you take a literal look at the Bible, and then it's 6 days).
The problem isn't the six days, it's the Adam and Eve mythology. The Bible clearly states that God created man, and all people were descended from Adam and Eve. That directly contradicts evolution, which states that man descended directly from animals.
Now, I realize that you can mangle the bible into fitting evolution if you accept that the bible is allegory, but unfortunately, too many Christians can't accept that. And truthfully, they *shouldn't* accept that the bible is allegory. It says what it says, right down to killing anyone who works on the Sabbath. Christians should accept ALL of the bible, from advocacy of slavery on down -- or none of it (as would be my preference). Most Christians are total hypocrites when it comes to accepting the word of God.
is it really such a big deal that people want something to believe in, even if you don't particularly want or need that?
It wouldn't be a big deal if people would keep their beliefs to themselves. Astrology is relatively harmless, because people don't generally want it taught to students as an "alternative theory" to astronomy. But when you have wackos who want prayer in schools, or who will never vote for an atheist into public office, then religion has very real consequences.
Of course, I shouldn't have to mention religiously-motivated terrorism.
There have been no experiments much less independent repeatable experiments showing evolution. Natural selection leads to evolution is simply our best hypothesis at the moment.
Well, no experiments other than those pesky observations of new species being created (Google for "observed instances of speciation") and the literally thousands of experiments on cellular life.
How on Earth do you think it could be possible to prove the non-existence of an omnipotent entity?
I didn't say "prove", I said, "prove beyond a reasonable doubt." You can't prove it beyond all doubt. You can only continue to remove all the superstitious nonsense and hope that when people see that absolutely nothing is left that they decide for themselves that it's most rational to conclude that nothing was ever there.
We don't have "proof" that the Egyptian god Ra never existed, or that Zeus was never real, but most people accept those. Someday (hopefully) people will accept that the Abrahamic God was every bit as real as Ra and Zeus -- not real at all.
Dawkins holds that to be an intelligent scientific thinker you must hold to both strict naturalism and evolution apriori, which is not so subtly implying that all of the other 53-ish percent of humans living in the United states are basically drooling morons.
No. You don't have to be a drooling moron to be Just Plain Wrong. Sometimes intelligent, honest people are Just Plain Wrong. Hundreds of years ago, the religious also honestly believed based on biblical evidence that the Sun revolved around the Earth. They deluded themselves, just as people today delude themselves about evolution, which is as absolutely factual as the Earth going around the Sun.
And hopefully someday people will realize they are Just Plain Wrong about the existence of God, but unfortunately that's not as easily proven beyond a reasonable doubt as evolution.
In short, why this ever got this far is beyond me... The standards of evidence have slipped quite a bit.
I'm not fan of the tactics of the RIAA, but posts like yours drive me insane. Why do computer geeks seemingly have so much trouble with the concept of "guilty beyond a *reasonable* doubt?" The quote is NOT "guilty beyond all doubt".
Yes, it's theoretically possible that someone broke in and used your computer to download MP3s. However, that's not reasonable.
Yes, it's theoretically possible that someone stole your bandwidth to download the songs that just happened to be on your computer, but that's not reasonable.
Why is "reasonable doubt" so hard to understand? VERY few criminal cases meet the standard of "guilty beyond all doubt". If that was the standard, no criminal would ever be convicted.
These days, you yell "computer!" in a crowded court room and bring in an "expert" in a suit, and the judge and jury will believe just about anything.
And that cuts both ways. Computer geeks believe that all they have to do is yell "BANDWIDTH THEFT!" in a crowded room and they think it's an airtight defense for just about anything.
Yeah, yeah, and Usenet was the ultimate discussion group and everything's been downhill from there, right? And 25x80 column monitors were plenty (who needs proportional fonts?) and color is way overrated, and...
Why is it that we always need the previous generation twho remembers "what it was like before all this newfangled nonsense" to die off before we can make progress?
Just because you're looking for the web to look like a static newspaper doesn't mean the rest of the world wants the same thing.
Again, the answer to the question "who does that" is: every single P2P user who also understands and implements strong security measures.
And once again, over and over, WHO CARES? No one said it wasn't possible to construct scenarios where P2P is secure. The point is that when you do that, it's annoying and much less useful, hence the reason VERY FEW PEOPLE DO THAT (or, to put it colloquially, "NO ONE DOES THAT").
NOW do you get it?? I suspect not. But if not, PLEASE keep it to yourself and your analyst in the asylum.
Right, because one could never keep those in a separate limewire account. It would just never work!
I should just let you stew in your insanity, but I just can't help myself. This sentence by itself is just so -- amazing. You keep arguing against points that no one is making. I'm not even sure what point you think I'm making -- that securing Limewire is impossible? Was that the point you're debating against?
Ah, forget it. Apparently I can help myself. Please, turn up the craziness knob to 11 and carry on.
Other phones (that support J2ME) have Opera Mini [opera.com], which was released in a much-improved version 4 shortly after the iPhone was announced.
I haven't used Opera Mini, but keep in mind that it's not just about the browser software. I think a very underrated part of the iPhone experience that people don't appreciate is the multi-touch screen and the integration with it.
What makes the browser so reasonable to use is the fact that you can instantly pan with one finger and adjust the zoom with two fingers in a very intuitive way (note the iPhone can scale the whole browser image to any width). This is critical when you're dealing with a small form factor. And don't underestimate things like double-tapping a part of the screen, which makes it instantly scale the window to the size of the screen. It's just the whole experience is incredibly well done.
Why not just say "I originally thought that the idea was absurd, but now someone handed me a clue and I see that this is the only right way to do it?
What is wrong with you? You are jumping up and down like a hyena declaring that I'm "Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!" about a point I was never making. Here's another idea!!!! I could set up an entirely separate computer to hold my P2P program and burn all the files onto CD-ROM to transfer to my main computer. OMG! I just proved myself wrong that it was impossible to secure a P2P program!!!! OMG!! Except I was never making that point!! OMG!! Here are some more exclamation points for you, just to get you more excited: !!!!!
Maybe what you're missing here is that people don't install P2P programs just to download their songs, they also intend to share their own music library, which is why I said that was the point of a file-sharing app.
But I know, I know, I'm just "backtracking". Feel free to declare victory, since it seems to be so important to you. I live to make people happy.
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Given the full article implies the chimp exhibited this behavior regularly, I would say it's a simpler assumption that he gathered the rocks with the intention of throwing them.
It's not simpler at all. The chimp may just have two behaviors that happen to overlap: 1) gathering rocks for fun, and 2) throwing rocks at people. Where is the evidence that the two behaviors are linked?
Honestly, I was about to post something like this myself about my own post. :) I don't know why I said correlation. I think I'm feeling jet lagged from the changeover to DST.
Coincidence is not causation might be a better way to put it.
Correlation is not causation. It's entirely possible he was making a pile of rocks to amuse himself, and then later on, he was pissed off looking at the people, saw his rock collection, and took the opportunity.
That's far more likely than some entirely new behavior that's NEVER been observed in the hundreds of years of observing various simians.
you completely missed the point that if I don't have 50K in cash to file 40 patents a year, then its pointless for me to become an inventor, as companies will just steal my ideas.
Well, first of all, it doesn't cost that much to file a patent, and you certainly don't need to file 40 patents a year (?).
Second, think about what you're saying. You're saying that it's pointless to become an inventory, because you can't afford to file patents. And since you can't file patents, then companies will steal your ideas. Therefore, the world is better without patents, because then somehow companies *won't* steal your inventions?? What the hell is your point again?
In other words, yes, you are correct. Without patents, big companies WILL STEAL YOUR INVENTIONS. Congratulations, you've got the idea. Now just learn how to file a patent.
Patents dont encourage innovation. The only make the first person to file it rich. Which discourages the sharing of ideas and information for fear that some rich jerk like edison or Bell will come along and patent your idea first.
You're completely contradicting yourself. Ones of the major *points* of patents is to encourage sharing of ideas. Without patents, everyone would hoard their ideas, because there would be no legal protection -- the second any rich person heard your idea, they would start mass-producing it, leaving you out in the cold.
The example here shows what happens when you share without a patent -- someone beats you to the patent office! But note that once the small investor gets there, he can share all he wants with legal protection.
Now this is the cue for anti-patent people to start listing a litany of cases where patents didn't protect some little guy. But that doesn't change the millions of cases where it does, that doesn't get the publicity.
Not everyone is interested in reading/writing, or any sort of English.
If you can't figure out the difference between learning to read and write, and learning a trade skill, then I'm afraid I can't help you.
Considering our reliance on computing in every single industry, in our personal lives -- fuck it, literally EVERYWHERE...
You can say that out about a lot of things.
"Considering our reliance on roads, everyone should know how to lay asphalt."
"Considering our reliance on refrigeration, everyone should understand Freon gas."
"Considering our reliance on integrated circuits, everyone should learn chip fabrication."
"Considering our reliance on knives and forks, everyone should know how to forge metal."
The fact of the matter is that everyone doesn't have to know how to do every micro-skill. School should give you the skills to function in society, NOT to teach you trade skills that can be picked up anywhere.
There is no reason a introductory programming course shouldn't be a mandatory part of a curriculum. Giving more students exposure to it would certainly not be a negative thing. Go take your nerd rage elsewhere.
No reason, other than there is a finite amount of time. Teaching someone programming takes away from something else, such as history, math and science. Programming is a trade skill, like learning to arrange flowers. But most people would say that there are more important things to learn than arranging flowers.
Actually, "Not everyone is interested in $X" is a true statement for all values of X. Are you proposing not to teach kids anything?
No, as I said in my post, I'm advocating teach *broad* knowledge. Math, science, art, history, etc. Programming is a specific trade skill, utterly and completely useless to anyone who won't be doing it for a living. There are an infinite number of trade skills we can teach kids. How about how to change chemicals in a pool? That's a skill that's actually more useful than programming.
If kids had an infinite amount of time to learn, then it makes sense to teach them every random skill. Since we don't have an infinite amount of time, we need to devote it to broad learning, and allow people to learn specific skills based on their own interest.
Not everyone is interested in programming, or any sort of engineering. Get over it. Forcing every kid to take programming (and "forcing" is the right word) is like forcing every kid to learn how to build an engine for their car (and NOT something useful, like changing the oil).
With all the cutbacks in arts and general sciences that take a broad approach to education, why are you wasting their precious school time and especially-precious-now school money on such a specific skill?
It's like someone who is passionate about embroidery insisting that every kid should learn embroidery for their own good ("Think about the problem solving skills they'll learn by figuring out what stitches they need to get to the pattern they want!") Whatever general skills they learn in this class, they can learn better by studying a more general subject.
I like ads. Let me repeat that... I like ads. If it comes down to a choice between having to shell out real money for entertainment (or more money, in case of certain entertainment types) and viewing ads, I'll take viewing a few ads every time. Somebody has to pay the bills, and I'd rather have that somebody be a company hawking their product.
Are you telling people that they should believe in a particular interpretation of a book when you don't believe in that book at all? I call that real hypocrisy.
No, I'm saying that if someone is going to believe in the word of a God, then they should believe in every single word of that God, otherwise they are a hypocrite and don't really believe in that God.
Please quote me the passage in the Christian bible where it says that Christians can pick and choose which passages of the bible to "interpret"?
Can you provide some quotes from the Bible regarding this? I've never heard of such a thing. I know Catholic tradition had something to that effect, but I don't believe it's in the Bible itself.
From the pretty good Wikipedia article on the subject:
Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and I Chronicles 16:30 state that "the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved." Psalm 104:5 says, "[the Lord] set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved." Ecclesiastes 1:5 states that "the sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises."
Not to say that the authors of the bible were heliocentrists, but the church in the time of Copernicus and Galileo rejected heliocentrism for scientific reasons: it contradicted Aristotelian mechanics, and was not predictively superior to geocentrism.
Sorry, but this is just wrong. Wikipedia actually has a pretty good article about it. See the quotes by contemporary religious leaders, as well as the biblical quotes.
Once you've actually experienced an elephant, you can no longer disbelieve in the existance of elephants.
On this point, all atheists agree completely.
The Bible never actually says anything about how long it took to create the world (unless, of course, you take a literal look at the Bible, and then it's 6 days).
The problem isn't the six days, it's the Adam and Eve mythology. The Bible clearly states that God created man, and all people were descended from Adam and Eve. That directly contradicts evolution, which states that man descended directly from animals.
Now, I realize that you can mangle the bible into fitting evolution if you accept that the bible is allegory, but unfortunately, too many Christians can't accept that. And truthfully, they *shouldn't* accept that the bible is allegory. It says what it says, right down to killing anyone who works on the Sabbath. Christians should accept ALL of the bible, from advocacy of slavery on down -- or none of it (as would be my preference). Most Christians are total hypocrites when it comes to accepting the word of God.
is it really such a big deal that people want something to believe in, even if you don't particularly want or need that?
It wouldn't be a big deal if people would keep their beliefs to themselves. Astrology is relatively harmless, because people don't generally want it taught to students as an "alternative theory" to astronomy. But when you have wackos who want prayer in schools, or who will never vote for an atheist into public office, then religion has very real consequences.
Of course, I shouldn't have to mention religiously-motivated terrorism.
There have been no experiments much less independent repeatable experiments showing evolution. Natural selection leads to evolution is simply our best hypothesis at the moment.
Well, no experiments other than those pesky observations of new species being created (Google for "observed instances of speciation") and the literally thousands of experiments on cellular life.
How on Earth do you think it could be possible to prove the non-existence of an omnipotent entity?
I didn't say "prove", I said, "prove beyond a reasonable doubt." You can't prove it beyond all doubt. You can only continue to remove all the superstitious nonsense and hope that when people see that absolutely nothing is left that they decide for themselves that it's most rational to conclude that nothing was ever there.
We don't have "proof" that the Egyptian god Ra never existed, or that Zeus was never real, but most people accept those. Someday (hopefully) people will accept that the Abrahamic God was every bit as real as Ra and Zeus -- not real at all.
Dawkins holds that to be an intelligent scientific thinker you must hold to both strict naturalism and evolution apriori, which is not so subtly implying that all of the other 53-ish percent of humans living in the United states are basically drooling morons.
No. You don't have to be a drooling moron to be Just Plain Wrong. Sometimes intelligent, honest people are Just Plain Wrong. Hundreds of years ago, the religious also honestly believed based on biblical evidence that the Sun revolved around the Earth. They deluded themselves, just as people today delude themselves about evolution, which is as absolutely factual as the Earth going around the Sun.
And hopefully someday people will realize they are Just Plain Wrong about the existence of God, but unfortunately that's not as easily proven beyond a reasonable doubt as evolution.
In short, why this ever got this far is beyond me... The standards of evidence have slipped quite a bit.
I'm not fan of the tactics of the RIAA, but posts like yours drive me insane. Why do computer geeks seemingly have so much trouble with the concept of "guilty beyond a *reasonable* doubt?" The quote is NOT "guilty beyond all doubt".
Yes, it's theoretically possible that someone broke in and used your computer to download MP3s. However, that's not reasonable.
Yes, it's theoretically possible that someone stole your bandwidth to download the songs that just happened to be on your computer, but that's not reasonable.
Why is "reasonable doubt" so hard to understand? VERY few criminal cases meet the standard of "guilty beyond all doubt". If that was the standard, no criminal would ever be convicted.
These days, you yell "computer!" in a crowded court room and bring in an "expert" in a suit, and the judge and jury will believe just about anything.
And that cuts both ways. Computer geeks believe that all they have to do is yell "BANDWIDTH THEFT!" in a crowded room and they think it's an airtight defense for just about anything.
Yeah, yeah, and Usenet was the ultimate discussion group and everything's been downhill from there, right? And 25x80 column monitors were plenty (who needs proportional fonts?) and color is way overrated, and...
Why is it that we always need the previous generation twho remembers "what it was like before all this newfangled nonsense" to die off before we can make progress?
Just because you're looking for the web to look like a static newspaper doesn't mean the rest of the world wants the same thing.
Again, the answer to the question "who does that" is: every single P2P user who also understands and implements strong security measures.
And once again, over and over, WHO CARES? No one said it wasn't possible to construct scenarios where P2P is secure. The point is that when you do that, it's annoying and much less useful, hence the reason VERY FEW PEOPLE DO THAT (or, to put it colloquially, "NO ONE DOES THAT").
NOW do you get it?? I suspect not. But if not, PLEASE keep it to yourself and your analyst in the asylum.
Right, because one could never keep those in a separate limewire account. It would just never work!
I should just let you stew in your insanity, but I just can't help myself. This sentence by itself is just so -- amazing. You keep arguing against points that no one is making. I'm not even sure what point you think I'm making -- that securing Limewire is impossible? Was that the point you're debating against?
Ah, forget it. Apparently I can help myself. Please, turn up the craziness knob to 11 and carry on.
Other phones (that support J2ME) have Opera Mini [opera.com], which was released in a much-improved version 4 shortly after the iPhone was announced.
I haven't used Opera Mini, but keep in mind that it's not just about the browser software. I think a very underrated part of the iPhone experience that people don't appreciate is the multi-touch screen and the integration with it.
What makes the browser so reasonable to use is the fact that you can instantly pan with one finger and adjust the zoom with two fingers in a very intuitive way (note the iPhone can scale the whole browser image to any width). This is critical when you're dealing with a small form factor. And don't underestimate things like double-tapping a part of the screen, which makes it instantly scale the window to the size of the screen. It's just the whole experience is incredibly well done.
Why not just say "I originally thought that the idea was absurd, but now someone handed me a clue and I see that this is the only right way to do it?
What is wrong with you? You are jumping up and down like a hyena declaring that I'm "Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!" about a point I was never making. Here's another idea!!!! I could set up an entirely separate computer to hold my P2P program and burn all the files onto CD-ROM to transfer to my main computer. OMG! I just proved myself wrong that it was impossible to secure a P2P program!!!! OMG!! Except I was never making that point!! OMG!! Here are some more exclamation points for you, just to get you more excited: !!!!!
Maybe what you're missing here is that people don't install P2P programs just to download their songs, they also intend to share their own music library, which is why I said that was the point of a file-sharing app.
But I know, I know, I'm just "backtracking". Feel free to declare victory, since it seems to be so important to you. I live to make people happy.