Yes, and 63% of Americans saw Elvis last year. So what? This is the "wishing makes it so" implicit in all polling and reporting on polls. Quite apart from the fact that this is a "study" from the lobbying organization that Microsoft founded when it began having Justice Department problems, there is the basic fact that what a large cross-section of America thinks about anything probably has no connection with the truth.
You see, the question of whether or not breaking up Microsoft would be "good" or "bad" is an unanswerable question. Two people you ask will not only have a different idea of what is "good," but will also have totally different levels of knowledge about the issues behind the question.
Taking a complex question and putting a precise-seeming number on doesn't mean a damned thing.
I remember a poll during the Gulf War that reported something like "72% of Americans approve of Bush's handling of the Gulf Crisis." My reaction was, who the hell cares? More interesting would have been a series of poll results:
What percentage of: Mothers of American Soldiers American Military Leaders Iraqui citizens Iraqui Military Leaders Kuwaiti citizens Kuwaiti Military Leaders Families of Killed American Soldiers Oil company executives VFW members etc. approved of Bush's handling of the Gulf Crisis?
I would bet you would get radically different numbers. When you try to reduce a complex question to a single simple number, it looks like information, but it is not.
As a student of history, I would have to say that the question of whether the Gulf War was a "good" thing or not will be open for quite some time.
I'm not taking a position here, I tend to think all the parties involved did what they felt they had to do for reasons that seemed good at the time. You can't ask them to do anything more than that. But that 72% approval number doesn't mean a thing. Futhermore, if the number had been 12% or 85% it would not have changed anything about the real effect of the war on the people, the region, or the outcome (except to the extent that the American government must respond to the popular will -- the war would not have happened in quite the same way if the American people were so against it that it would have brought down the government).
In fact, my parenthesized point is perhaps the central point. We are so used to polls affecting decisions that we now mistake our collective will as collective power. The problem is that if 87% of Americans don't believe in gravity, we still remain earthbound. Some things are not governed by the popular will.
Some things are only influenced by the popular will.
Some things are totally determined by the popular will.
Until we learn to tell these cases apart, we will continue to over-simplify, misunderstand, and make poor decisions.
I hate jumping into a thread that consists largely of petty bickering aimed at individuals instead of a debate about the merits of an idea, but I'm going to do it anyways and I'm going to do it here.
While it may be unfair to compare UCITA to the rise of facism in Europe, just as it may be overstated to compare Stallman's creation of the GPL to Constantine's conversion to Christianity, but this last post has, IMHO, got to the nub of the gist.
Stallman is, as far as I can tell, calling for legal political opposition to a proposed piece of legislation. I think that it is clear that the anti-reverse engineering provisions of UCITA represent an unacceptable limitation on personal liberty. Current intellectual property law already adequately protects the interests of proprietary software vendors, many of whom have made their products by reverse engineering the work of others.
Stallman takes the position that a program, as a symbolic representation of thoughts and ideas, is equivalent in every respect to speech. Thus it can be copyrighted and sold, but it cannot be limited. You may disagree with this position.
The provisions that forbid reverse engineering would be like saying that because an idea has been expressed, no one else is allowed to think of the idea themselves and elborate on it or state it in a new way. Copyright law prevents me from publishing "I have a dream" as if I had said it, but it does not prevent me from talking about civil liberty, racial justice, or social inequity. (Note that I am not suggesting Stallman is comparable to Dr. King).
Who cares if a young man overstates the case? Firey overenthusiasm is a privledge of youth. Even older and more sage heads should mind the substance and not the form of the argument. Opposition to UCITA does not mean opposition to intellectual property. As I get tired of pointing out, Stallman's own GPL depends on intellectual property law.
UCITA is more than an extension of copyright, it amounts to a gag order on algorithms. While I don't see anyone progressing from this to censorship of thought directly, it is still something to be opposed.
I do agree with those who think civil disobedience of a bill (not a law) is putting the cart before the horse, but again, can't you see that this is the fervor of youth? Let passion spend. Wisdom comes with age and age is inevitable. Give him his head and he will tire. I hope never again to see the insightful phrase "shut up" in this forum.
This is very intersting stuff, and I do care about these questions, but virtually none of this enters into my selection of a language for a task.
When you are writing a routine that reads single keystrokes and puts them in a buffer, you really don't care much how optomized the loop is unless it takes more time than elapses between the user's keystrokes.
In other words, I'm very glad people are working on smarter compilers and Java optomizations, but I select Java for one reason alone:
It is easier to write more code more quickly with fewer bugs in Java than in C or C++.
Most of us in MIS find ourselves in situations where we can throw more hardware at things much more cheaply than we can pay people to write and debug code.
Certainly there are situations where we are prcoessor-bound, or where data comes from a high volume network source and then we must consider performance, but since in many cases even a slow language is "fast enough" for the maximum throughput, the ease and reliability of development come to the fore.
So, if I want a fairly portable device driver, I write in C. If I want a stable application, I choose Java. For me it is this feature of the language, not its speed (or lack), not its "write once, run anywhere," but rather the ease with which stable code may be written that draws me to Java. After that, I am concerned more with the footprint of the VM and its impact on non-Java system components than I am with the optomization of Java byte codes.
I say this not to disparage this discussion, which I really do find enormously interesting, but I must say that for many of us, this is the computing equivalent of counting angels on pinheads.
You know, I'm tired of hearing this. Every technologist in the world tells the story of poor Xerox PARC and how everyone ripped them off, Apple with the GUI, Everyone and their brother with ethernet, now 3com with Graffiti, as if they were the only ones who know the real story.
Bull. Just about everyone in technology knows about the fine work of Xerox PARC. This is old news to all of us in the information industry.
Xerox corporate management is to blame for letting these patents lie fallow and trying to enforce them too late.
They tried to sue Apple long after the fact and they failed. They will probably fail here, too.
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center is praised constantly by engineers and programmers day after day in cubicles all over corporate America. They get the credit. Don't blame the "evil" corporations who take an idea that has been ignored by Xerox management and make a successful product out of it. Blame Xerox for sitting on the invention in the first place.
Now, if 3com actually stole a specific invention, they should have to pay. I don't dispute that. But let's stop shedding tears for "poor" Xerox PARC. They get credit. It's not their fault their corporate sponsor doesn't have the guts to risk money on new inventions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes saw it coming...
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Live or Memorex?
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I remember reading a brilliant essay by Oliver Wendell Holmes about photography and the way it can "skin the world" and be used to make a "currency" of images and how it divorces image from reality and so on and so on.
He rather brilliantly foresaw many of the issues that would arise from this and none of his prescience is diminished by our ever increasing faculties for making the real false and the false seem real.
Does anyone here know the essay I'm talking about? I cannot remember the title, so I'm finding it hard to locate. In particular, if anyone knows of an on-line source and can provide a link, that would be great. You simply would not believe how "on the money" he was, and he wrote it over 100 years ago now.
I hate to be pedantic in the face of your pedantry, but "schizophrenic" is a word that does not mean "having schizophrenia." The word came from the mental illness of the same name, and does represent a misunderstanding of the nature of schizophrenia, but the word has moved beyond its medical meaning. It is not an error to describe something that logically contradictory as "schizophrenic."
As someone whose family contains a victim of schizophrenia (and, while we are at it, manic depression) I am well aware of what schizophrenia is not. We no more mean when we say something is "schizophrenic" that it has schizophrenia than we mean when we say someone is "quixotic" that that person is mentioned in Cervantes' book.
I hate to be pedantic in the face of your pedantry, but "schizophrenic" is a word that does not mean "having schizophrenia." The word came from the mental illness of the same name, and does represent a misunderstanding of the nature of schizophrenia, but the word has moved beyond its medical meaning. It is not an error to describe something that logically contradictory as "schizophrenic."
As someone whose family contains a victim of schizophrenia (and, while we are at it, manic depression) I am well aware of what schizophrenia is not. When no more mean when we say something is "schizophrenic" that it has schizophrenia than we mean when we say someone is "quixotic" that that person is mentioned in Cervantes' book.
I don't think Larry Wall would hold perl up as a paradigm for language design. What he would do is to hold it up as a very useful language for doing what you need done right now as opposed to what you done right now.
It's much eaiser to do C-like things in a bug free manner in perl. Add to this that perl is a "scripting" tool, as opposed to a compiler (yes, the language is "compiled," but not in the same sense as with a true compiler) so you don't have (well, mostly don't have) the make complexities; editing code is also building code, so rapid toolmaking is facilitated.
Sure bad perl is hard to debug, but nowhere nearly as hard as debugging bad C.
There are "purer" languages that are very well designed. Java is certainly easier to write bug free programs in than any other language I personally use, but it isn't all that well suited to the kinds of applications I use perl for: what I lovingly call "suck and puke" applications.
I know that people use perl for end-user applications, but with the exception perhaps of CGI, I wouldn't ever do that.
I also would use Java to write a filter.
I get kind of tired of the search for the "one true language" or the "one true tool," or even "the one true design method."
A rich palette of tools, designs, and methodologies of managable complexity gives you the greatest ability to confront any situation.
That was the version Larry was talking about. He started that ball rolling. He was talknig about how they decided to have someone make a commercial version.
I'm an amateur radio operator and Ramsey makes kits for that hobby. As far as I know, Ramsey is a hobbyist-oriented radio electronics company. Most of the employees are probably radio amateurs who are just happy to be making a living tinkering with transceivers.
I'm not familiar with the product in question, but my guess is that it complies with all FCC regulations and is intended for use as a small, short range transmitter. I can think of thousands of legitimate uses, from baby monitors to short range telemetry.
I wonder if their device has been showing up in cases of bugging like that State Department conference room incident in the news a few weeks ago.
Low power VHF/UHF radio is a tricky thing. If the transmitter and the receiver are in the right place and the weather is just so such a device might be heard from miles away. At the same time, a receiver 50 feet away might be totally unable to hear the signal from the transmitter.
As I said, I'd like to know more. I really doubt Rmasey made this thing with the intent (or even the inkling) that it would be used for illegal purposes. The DA (or was it a Federal Attorney?) could probably have contacted the company and told them about misuse of the product and I'd be willing to bet they would have discontinued or made modifications to the design to address those concerns.
I would only go after a company like this if I could find that they were owned or operated by persons directly engaged in the illegal uses of the devices (like finding out the KGB was a shareholder or somesuch).
Law enforcement should have the power to search and sieze. They can only do so with a warrant, which means they had to convince a judge that this was a good idea. I'd like to know how the judge arrived at his or her decision to grant this warrant.
An aside: I find some of the Slashdot response interesting. We're a bit schizophrenic. We are bananas about privacy issues and here is the state taking aciton against a company that makes a device that is used to illegally violate privacy and we, er, go bananas!
I am deeply worried that the business response to OSHA setting telecommuting workplace standards will be to forbid telecommuting. If I ran a business, I would.
As a telecommuter, do I really want to have some portion of my home retooled every time I change employers or move from contract to contract (when I work for a consulting company) to bring my workstation in line with each employer's standards?
They simply should not do this unless the employer REQUIRES teclommuting. So long as telecommuting is comething I want (and believe me, I consider a day or more telecommuting to be an enormous benefit, ENORMOUS [I can't overstate this -- it is really, really ENORMOUS]) and is permitted but not required by the employer, I should be able to specifically idemnify the employer from any responsibility for workplace injury, so long as the workplace my employer provides meets specifications.
I see this as potentially the death of telecommuting.
Let me start out by saying that I respect Jon Katz. I disagree with him a lot, but he is out there saying what is on his mind and standing up for that in which he believes. That said, I find it hard to believe that the man who claims to be in harmony with the outcast geek can manage to so totally misunderstand Andy Kaufman.
With all due respect to Jim Carrey, he hasn't a fraction of Kaufman's talent. Katz makes the capital mistake of equating popularity with talent. This is rank hypocrisy from the man who defends the unpopular geek. Apparently that's easy when you're posting on a web site dedicated to the interests of nerds and geeks. It makes him popular here.
Milos Forman has, it seems to me, been exploring what it means to be a rebel. From Amadeus through The People vs. Larry Flynt he seems to be looking for the stories of people who are standing proudly and self-conciously outside the current of their times.
Andy Kaufman is held in awe by comics. This awe is not given him because of his success, but because of his daring. Not because he was always successful, but because he didn't merely make new material, he kept exploding the boundaries of what comedy is.
In a world where you can't tell one comic's airline jokes from another comic's rush hour traffic jokes from yet another comic's relationship jokes, Kaufman kept walking on to the stage and doing material that most comics wouldn't dare to imagine, let alone perform.
Practicing comics know that there is the safe way, which will keep you comfortably nestled in the audience's love, getting easy laughs from the amusing foibles of suburban middle-class life, and then there is the dangerous way where you cut through the assumptions, you pierce our neat ideas of order, you diassemble the human condition and make see ourselves anew. This is what great art in all its manifestations does for us. Sometimes it makes us uncomfortable and afraid.
Most comics are hungry for the laugh, for the audience to like them and to think they are clever. I've dome some stand-up in my time and I must admit that I fall firmly in this category. What Andy Kaufman did may not have always succeeded, but it was done for some other reason. Some deeper reason than winning mere praise. He was driven to find some deeper knowledge of that place in us where laughter comes from.
Now, I would not claim to know Jim Carrey's inner heart, but from watching his work over the years, I would say that he, like many comics of greater or lesser talent, works for the laugh, works for the love. He also, like many others, knows that that is a rather shallow use of the attention given the stage. I think he leapt at the chance to play Kaufman because it was an opportunity to move beyond the self-gratification and to do it from the safety of playing someone else.
I have done both stand-up and stage acting (only semi-professionally, mind, I'm not "somebody.") and they are quite different. Being trapped in a written character actually liberates your behavior. Your free display of emotion is okay because it isn't you. It's the character; it's the writer.
When you do stand-up, it is you, naked and alone before that hungry thing we call an audience. That's why most of us fall into the safe stuff. Andy Kaufman did something much riskier and much more dangerous. He didn't make laughs, he made art.
Open systems and Open source are not the same thing. McNealy has always advocated Open systems (meaning systems based on open standards), but he never went so far as to say that companies should give away their source code or the right to modify it and give it away modified.
McNealy was ahead of the curve on networking and open standards, but he is very much behind the curve on Open source. He was truly commited to "open" he would not have withdrawn Java from the standards process. He still wants control. He hasn't picked up that last piece of the puzzle...
Don't be disgusted. McNealy does not embrace Open source.
To me, there's a heirarchy of technology worlds I want to work in:
1) Open source -- the software is free, programmers are not.
2) Open systems -- the standards are free, the software is not, and programmers are the drudges of the business world.
3) Proprietary systems -- there are only de facto standards, software is expensive, and programmers are serfs of the dominant technology company. This was IBM in the past. This is Microsoft today.
McNealy had the vision to aim at level 2. In the early 80's, this was radical indeed. He has not figured out the advantages of level 1. He's partway there, but he has missed the last step -- that the code belongs to the world, not to the originator. That assurance, that the code is yours, that the benefit you get for giving away your mods is the absolute assurance that anyone else who improves it must share his/her mods with you is the payment you receive for giving away your mods. It works. McNealy doesn't see this yet. He thinks programmers will give their mods to him, with no assurance that Sun's further improvements will go back to those programmers. The Sun version is a one way street.
If I read the lead article correctly, the defaced web page was done by someone else after a back-door had been installed by someone who wrote a PPC exploit of the proftp hole. In other words, FrontPage boy had to be let in by someone who knew how to do something... Mind you, I'm just interpreting the lead story -- I do not have firsthand knowledge.
You know, I've never really looked into the RFCs on SSL and https. Is anyone following Mozilla closely enough to know how hard it is going to be to get crypto into Mozilla after the fact, either by licensed RSA implementation "plugin" (ugh) or by use of some compatible, patent-free, open source library developed outside the United States and thus not subject to our boneheaded crypto export restrictions?
I don't disagree with you that it is something to be concerned about, but so long as the code is GPL'ed it simply cannot go far. They can't take it under. Period. Sure they can write proprietary extensions, but how many open source developers will use a closed interface? I know I won't do so.
I think the concern is overstated.
"Branding" is fine (well, not really -- Intels campaign suggesting that a Pentium III will miraculously energize your 33.6 kbps Internet connection springs to mind), but I do not see how adding closed extensions to RedHat could possibly be perceived as an advatage in the marketplace. Let's say you're a closed source ISV (like an Intuit) who decides to port your product to Linux. Do you do it in a way that ensures you can market to the largest possible number of computers, or do you do it in a way that narrows the market?
Microsoft did not get to be the lion's share of the desktop market by fragmenting the market; they did it by consolidating the market. Developers started writing apps exclusively for Windows after Windows controlled the market. Many ISVs still develop Mac versions, and those that don't took a look at the cost of porting their code to gain a small market share and decided it wasn't worth it. If RedHat amounts to 50% of the Linux market, and Linux comes to be, say, 20% of the PC market, then ISVs might well port to Linux, but are unlikely to port to RedHat exclusive extensions.
As for anyone dumb enough to buy RedHat stock at current prices, you get what you deserve. By now, it should be obvious to anyone that there is a bit of a bubble in the technology stocks, esp. the linux and.com stocks.
If you bought 'em cheap, swell. Hold 'em. If not, I'd take my profit before it evaporates.
When the source is open, I just can't see this happening. This has been touted time and time again, and it just keeps not happening.
It does hilight the importance of educating those consumers now thinking about Linux in what free software is, what the various licenses mean, and why it matters that the source be now and forever free/open, even if the consumer is not a programmer and never intends to be. We need to make sure people understand how the source protects consumer interests.
I have seen no signs of efforts to create incompatbility, although I have seen potential for incompatibility arising out of sheer complexity. That's why I think the LSB project remains important.
Re:How does this mock religion?
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Can I just leap in here and congratulate myself and everyone else writing on this thread? The posts in here could be a conversation in any of my philosophy, history of science, or philosophy of science classes back in college.
We've heard from the theists, the deists, the logical positivists. This thread states the questions well, raises points on both sides, and has completely failed to fall into a flamewar or name calling. It is a delight to see that people out there wish to wrestle with the questions of life, existence, faith, purpose, origin, and evolution. Maybe we all have our minds made up, but it heartens me no end to see people discussing it rationally and openly, with open minds.
There is indeed hope for this world if people of faith and science can discuss these issues calmly and without rancour.
For myself, I have never had a problem on this front. I have a faith, a Christian faith, but I have never found it at odds with science, even when science suggests the universe did not require God to exist. I reconcile this with the simple recognition that science is empirical. Knowledge of God is non-empirical (at least to me, it is something I know in my heart alone) and that is knowledge that science, in effect, cannot see. When people of faith feel their belief is somehow inferior simply because it is non-empirical, that's when people of faith become book-burning bigots. Be secure in your knowledge of God. It's invisibility to science doesn't make any less true to you. I passed an Assembly of God church the other day and the sign outside read "Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has" and I thought, "how sad that they think so."
If you have to hate science, feel that it is inferior because it cannot see past its empiricism to the insubstantial and spiritual evidence. I don't see science so, however. I see science as powerful tool for discovering truth about nature. People of faith should not be threatened because science cannot see God.
Science may one day arrive at empirical answers for the whole of creation and the meaning of life and the nature of conciousness. I doubt it, but it may. If it does, it will have found God, or I will be proved to have been wrong. But so long as I, in being wrong, acted for the good of my fellow human beings, what evil have I done in being wrong? It is only when my belief makes me think I should coerce, control, mandate to people that my faith leads me to evil acts. When my faith leads me to tolerance, love, and the gentle persuasion of my sincere belief, well, those who listen to me are free to choose. I do not condemn them. The whole thing is about choice.
Whether you see Genesis as myth, "true" metaphor, or literal absolute truth, what eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge gave us was the choice. The choice changes us from innocents, blameless in all our actions, to moral beings, aware of the effects of our actions for good or evil. Being human is, therefore, in this theology, having the power of choice. When you seek to control or dominate, you seek to reduce a moral being with a choice to an animal. I can think of no greater evil.
I believe in evolution. I believe that life arose on its own. And I believe in God. Wierd, huh? More than that, I believe in the fundmental (and yes, God-given) right of each of us to make the choice.
Anyways, back to the main point. It is great to see open discussion of these issues.
Re:How does this mock religion?
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Can I just leap in here and congratulate myself and everyone else writing on this thread? The posts in here could be a conversation in any of my philosophy, history of science, or philosophy of science classes back in college.
We've heard from the theists, the deists, the logical positivists. This thread states the questions well, raises points on both sides, and has completely failed to fall into a flamewar or name calling. It is a delight to see that people out there wish to wrestle with the questions of life, existence, faith, purpose, origin, and evolution. Maybe we all have our minds made up, but it heartens me no end to see people discussing it rationally and openly, with open minds.
There is indeed hope for this world if people of faith and science can discuss these issues calmly and without rancour.
For myself, I have never had a problem on this front. I have a faith, a Christian faith, but I have never found it at odds with science, even when science suggests the universe did not require God to exist. I reconcile this with the simple recognition that science is empirical. Knowledge of God is non-empirical (at least to me, it is something I know in my heart alone) and that is knowledge that science, in effect, cannot see. When people of faith feel their belief is somehow inferior simply because it is non-empirical, that's when people of faith become book-burning bigots. Be secure in your knowledge of God. It's invisibility to science doesn't make any less true to you. I passed an Assembly of God church the other day and the sign outside read "Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has" and I thought, "how sad that they think so."
If you have to hate science, feel that it is inferior because it cannot see past its empiricism to the insubstantial and spiritual evidence. I don't see science so, however. I see science as powerful tool for discovering truth about nature. People of faith should not be threatened because science cannot see God.
Science may one day arrive at empirical answers for the whole of creation and the meaning of life and the nature of conciousness. I doubt it, but it may. If it does, it will have found God, or I will be proved to have been wrong. But so long as I, in being wrong, acted for the good of my fellow human beings, what evil have I done in being wrong? It is only when my belief makes me think I should coerce, control, mandate to people that my faith leads me to evil acts. When my faith leads me to tolerance, love, and the gentle persuasion of my sincere belief, well, those who listen to me are free to choose. I do not condemn them. The whole thing is about choice.
Whether you see Genesis as myth, "true" metaphor, or literal absolute truth, what eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge gave us was the choice. The choice changes us from innocents, blameless in all our actions, to moral beings, aware of the effects of our actions for good or evil. Being human is, therefore, in this theology, having the power of choice. When you seek to control or dominate, you seek to reduce a moral being with a choice to an animal. I can think of no greater evil.
I believe in evolution. I believe that life arose on its own. And I believe in God. Wierd, huh? More than that, I believe in the fundmental (and yes, God-given) right of each of us to make the choice.
Anyways, back to the main point. It is great to see open discussion of these issues.
I hate to do an "amen to that, brother" post, but I'm going to do so.
Any reasonable search term is likely to present results like "Search returned 417,373 hits. Hits 1-10 displayed." You have to then winnow by adding include and exclude words until you get it down to a manageable 7,422 hits, then you browse them.
The truth is, I turn to wide searches quite rarely. I tend to find and "bookmark" authoritative sites I find on a given topic and return to those over and over again. It is only when a site grows noticably stale or I have to research a new topic that I turn, reluctantly, to search engines. As for indexing database sites, I like the idea of extending the robot hack. Slightly less appealing would be to have a new HTML tag to include "bot content" in any page, including dynamic pages. An XML solution is a good idea, but I wonder how long before every extant site gets XML-aware? That plus XML is almost too flexible, making it likely that a hundred competing methods for indexing dynamic pages will appear and no one will know which one to cling to.
Re:How does this mock religion?
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This is the "a watch implies a watchmaker" argument. Or, as Spinoza stated it, every action has a cause, the universe exists, therefore it has a cause, therefore God exists. God as Prime Mover.
It's elegant, it's intuitive, but it is not proof. This is what logic choppers like to call "post hoc ergo propter hoc," or mistaking sequence for logical connection. It is possible that universe has no time boundary, even though it appears to have a first event. It is also possible that the Biblical account of creation is literally true, word for word. I wasn't there and neither were you.
The watchmaker argument holds that the evolution of complex living beings by purely "mechanical" natural processes is contradicted by everyday experience. Watches do not evolve from, say, church-tower clocks. It is the assumption that complexity implies design, design implies intent, and intent implies a mind, and a first mind implies a god.
Even so, I can think of things that show complexity spontaneously emerging from simplicity. Water molecules have a fixed angle between the two hydrogen atoms. When water freezes, the molecules line up with one another with this fixed angle preserved. In other words, everything in there is the exact same size and shape. Do you live in a cold climate? Pour water on your windshield and watch it freeze. It forms little sections that freeze outward, creating complex crystalline "trees" that grow until they meet the edge of another frozen zone. You end up with juxtaposed frosty forests of great complexity. Pour water on it again and it will happen again, but it will look nothing like it did the last time.
Living systems are a bit more complex than freezing water, but it is made out of molcules that are amost infintely flexible in shape and that can reproduce. It is the constant tug of war between reproduction and resources that drives the changes in the shape of the molecules of life. It tends towards complexity on its own.
We can argue all we'd like about whether or not God assembled the first genetic molecules, but they can and do spontaneously self-assemble after that. The watch does not imply a watchmaker any more than an icy widshield implies a little crystalline forester. The icy windshield could imply a guy pouring water on a windwshield, but it could also imply the mere presence of water and a smooth surface.
Argument, but not proof...
Re:How does this mock religion?
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This is a total misunderstanding of gene expression in living organisms. Nature generally does NOT eliminate unneeded genes. Most of your genes go unused and unexpressed. You have genetic structures in your DNA that are identical to those found in primitive bacteria. Nature does not "edit," it just keeps accumulating stuff. Deletion occurs only through extinction, so there is a lot of old stuff in our genes.
As for the "it's not creating life because it is just using what is already there" argument, well that can be extended back to the universe itself. By you standard the only way to create life would be to create the universe. That's a perfectly valid semantic view, but not ethically very useful.
Oh, one more thing. I never meant to say that you, specifically, are an atheist. When I said "Even if you are an atheist..." I meant a rhetorical "you," not any specific person. I would more properly have said "Even if one is an atheist..." but writing that way in a casual forum like this always comes across as obnoxiously pedantic.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and 63% of Americans saw Elvis last year. So what? This is the "wishing makes it so" implicit in all polling and reporting on polls. Quite apart from the fact that this is a "study" from the lobbying organization that Microsoft founded when it began having Justice Department problems, there is the basic fact that what a large cross-section of America thinks about anything probably has no connection with the truth.
You see, the question of whether or not breaking up Microsoft would be "good" or "bad" is an unanswerable question. Two people you ask will not only have a different idea of what is "good," but will also have totally different levels of knowledge about the issues behind the question.
Taking a complex question and putting a precise-seeming number on doesn't mean a damned thing.
I remember a poll during the Gulf War that reported something like "72% of Americans approve of Bush's handling of the Gulf Crisis." My reaction was, who the hell cares? More interesting would have been a series of poll results:
What percentage of:
Mothers of American Soldiers
American Military Leaders
Iraqui citizens
Iraqui Military Leaders
Kuwaiti citizens
Kuwaiti Military Leaders
Families of Killed American Soldiers
Oil company executives
VFW members
etc.
approved of Bush's handling of the Gulf Crisis?
I would bet you would get radically different numbers. When you try to reduce a complex question to a single simple number, it looks like information, but it is not.
As a student of history, I would have to say that the question of whether the Gulf War was a "good" thing or not will be open for quite some time.
I'm not taking a position here, I tend to think all the parties involved did what they felt they had to do for reasons that seemed good at the time. You can't ask them to do anything more than that. But that 72% approval number doesn't mean a thing. Futhermore, if the number had been 12% or 85% it would not have changed anything about the real effect of the war on the people, the region, or the outcome (except to the extent that the American government must respond to the popular will -- the war would not have happened in quite the same way if the American people were so against it that it would have brought down the government).
In fact, my parenthesized point is perhaps the central point. We are so used to polls affecting decisions that we now mistake our collective will as collective power. The problem is that if 87% of Americans don't believe in gravity, we still remain earthbound. Some things are not governed by the popular will.
Some things are only influenced by the popular will.
Some things are totally determined by the popular will.
Until we learn to tell these cases apart, we will continue to over-simplify, misunderstand, and make poor decisions.
Wishing does not always make it so.
I hate jumping into a thread that consists largely of petty bickering aimed at individuals instead of a debate about the merits of an idea, but I'm going to do it anyways and I'm going to do it here.
While it may be unfair to compare UCITA to the rise of facism in Europe, just as it may be overstated to compare Stallman's creation of the GPL to Constantine's conversion to Christianity, but this last post has, IMHO, got to the nub of the gist.
Stallman is, as far as I can tell, calling for legal political opposition to a proposed piece of legislation. I think that it is clear that the anti-reverse engineering provisions of UCITA represent an unacceptable limitation on personal liberty. Current intellectual property law already adequately protects the interests of proprietary software vendors, many of whom have made their products by reverse engineering the work of others.
Stallman takes the position that a program, as a symbolic representation of thoughts and ideas, is equivalent in every respect to speech. Thus it can be copyrighted and sold, but it cannot be limited. You may disagree with this position.
The provisions that forbid reverse engineering would be like saying that because an idea has been expressed, no one else is allowed to think of the idea themselves and elborate on it or state it in a new way. Copyright law prevents me from publishing "I have a dream" as if I had said it, but it does not prevent me from talking about civil liberty, racial justice, or social inequity. (Note that I am not suggesting Stallman is comparable to Dr. King).
Who cares if a young man overstates the case? Firey overenthusiasm is a privledge of youth. Even older and more sage heads should mind the substance and not the form of the argument. Opposition to UCITA does not mean opposition to intellectual property. As I get tired of pointing out, Stallman's own GPL depends on intellectual property law.
UCITA is more than an extension of copyright, it amounts to a gag order on algorithms. While I don't see anyone progressing from this to censorship of thought directly, it is still something to be opposed.
I do agree with those who think civil disobedience of a bill (not a law) is putting the cart before the horse, but again, can't you see that this is the fervor of youth? Let passion spend. Wisdom comes with age and age is inevitable. Give him his head and he will tire. I hope never again to see the insightful phrase "shut up" in this forum.
This is very intersting stuff, and I do care about these questions, but virtually none of this enters into my selection of a language for a task.
When you are writing a routine that reads single keystrokes and puts them in a buffer, you really don't care much how optomized the loop is unless it takes more time than elapses between the user's keystrokes.
In other words, I'm very glad people are working on smarter compilers and Java optomizations, but I select Java for one reason alone:
It is easier to write more code more quickly with fewer bugs in Java than in C or C++.
Most of us in MIS find ourselves in situations where we can throw more hardware at things much more cheaply than we can pay people to write and debug code.
Certainly there are situations where we are prcoessor-bound, or where data comes from a high volume network source and then we must consider performance, but since in many cases even a slow language is "fast enough" for the maximum throughput, the ease and reliability of development come to the fore.
So, if I want a fairly portable device driver, I write in C. If I want a stable application, I choose Java. For me it is this feature of the language, not its speed (or lack), not its "write once, run anywhere," but rather the ease with which stable code may be written that draws me to Java. After that, I am concerned more with the footprint of the VM and its impact on non-Java system components than I am with the optomization of Java byte codes.
I say this not to disparage this discussion, which I really do find enormously interesting, but I must say that for many of us, this is the computing equivalent of counting angels on pinheads.
You know, I'm tired of hearing this. Every technologist in the world tells the story of poor Xerox PARC and how everyone ripped them off, Apple with the GUI, Everyone and their brother with ethernet, now 3com with Graffiti, as if they were the only ones who know the real story.
Bull. Just about everyone in technology knows about the fine work of Xerox PARC. This is old news to all of us in the information industry.
Xerox corporate management is to blame for letting these patents lie fallow and trying to enforce them too late.
They tried to sue Apple long after the fact and they failed. They will probably fail here, too.
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center is praised constantly by engineers and programmers day after day in cubicles all over corporate America. They get the credit. Don't blame the "evil" corporations who take an idea that has been ignored by Xerox management and make a successful product out of it. Blame Xerox for sitting on the invention in the first place.
Now, if 3com actually stole a specific invention, they should have to pay. I don't dispute that. But let's stop shedding tears for "poor" Xerox PARC. They get credit. It's not their fault their corporate sponsor doesn't have the guts to risk money on new inventions.
I remember reading a brilliant essay by Oliver Wendell Holmes about photography and the way it can "skin the world" and be used to make a "currency" of images and how it divorces image from reality and so on and so on.
He rather brilliantly foresaw many of the issues that would arise from this and none of his prescience is diminished by our ever increasing faculties for making the real false and the false seem real.
Does anyone here know the essay I'm talking about? I cannot remember the title, so I'm finding it hard to locate. In particular, if anyone knows of an on-line source and can provide a link, that would be great. You simply would not believe how "on the money" he was, and he wrote it over 100 years ago now.
I hate to be pedantic in the face of your pedantry, but "schizophrenic" is a word that does not mean "having schizophrenia." The word came from the mental illness of the same name, and does represent a misunderstanding of the nature of schizophrenia, but the word has moved beyond its medical meaning. It is not an error to describe something that logically contradictory as "schizophrenic."
As someone whose family contains a victim of schizophrenia (and, while we are at it, manic depression) I am well aware of what schizophrenia is not. We no more mean when we say something is "schizophrenic" that it has schizophrenia than we mean when we say someone is "quixotic" that that person is mentioned in Cervantes' book.
I hate to be pedantic in the face of your pedantry, but "schizophrenic" is a word that does not mean "having schizophrenia." The word came from the mental illness of the same name, and does represent a misunderstanding of the nature of schizophrenia, but the word has moved beyond its medical meaning. It is not an error to describe something that logically contradictory as "schizophrenic."
As someone whose family contains a victim of schizophrenia (and, while we are at it, manic depression) I am well aware of what schizophrenia is not. When no more mean when we say something is "schizophrenic" that it has schizophrenia than we mean when we say someone is "quixotic" that that person is mentioned in Cervantes' book.
Oh, and I meant that i would NOT use Java to write a filter. Sometimes I think faster than I type. Not often, but sometimes...
I don't think Larry Wall would hold perl up as a paradigm for language design. What he would do is to hold it up as a very useful language for doing what you need done right now as opposed to what you done right now.
It's much eaiser to do C-like things in a bug free manner in perl. Add to this that perl is a "scripting" tool, as opposed to a compiler (yes, the language is "compiled," but not in the same sense as with a true compiler) so you don't have (well, mostly don't have) the make complexities; editing code is also building code, so rapid toolmaking is facilitated.
Sure bad perl is hard to debug, but nowhere nearly as hard as debugging bad C.
There are "purer" languages that are very well designed. Java is certainly easier to write bug free programs in than any other language I personally use, but it isn't all that well suited to the kinds of applications I use perl for: what I lovingly call "suck and puke" applications.
I know that people use perl for end-user applications, but with the exception perhaps of CGI, I wouldn't ever do that.
I also would use Java to write a filter.
I get kind of tired of the search for the "one true language" or the "one true tool," or even "the one true design method."
A rich palette of tools, designs, and methodologies of managable complexity gives you the greatest ability to confront any situation.
That was the version Larry was talking about. He started that ball rolling. He was talknig about how they decided to have someone make a commercial version.
I'm an amateur radio operator and Ramsey makes kits for that hobby. As far as I know, Ramsey is a hobbyist-oriented radio electronics company. Most of the employees are probably radio amateurs who are just happy to be making a living tinkering with transceivers.
I'm not familiar with the product in question, but my guess is that it complies with all FCC regulations and is intended for use as a small, short range transmitter. I can think of thousands of legitimate uses, from baby monitors to short range telemetry.
I wonder if their device has been showing up in cases of bugging like that State Department conference room incident in the news a few weeks ago.
Low power VHF/UHF radio is a tricky thing. If the transmitter and the receiver are in the right place and the weather is just so such a device might be heard from miles away. At the same time, a receiver 50 feet away might be totally unable to hear the signal from the transmitter.
As I said, I'd like to know more. I really doubt Rmasey made this thing with the intent (or even the inkling) that it would be used for illegal purposes. The DA (or was it a Federal Attorney?) could probably have contacted the company and told them about misuse of the product and I'd be willing to bet they would have discontinued or made modifications to the design to address those concerns.
I would only go after a company like this if I could find that they were owned or operated by persons directly engaged in the illegal uses of the devices (like finding out the KGB was a shareholder or somesuch).
Law enforcement should have the power to search and sieze. They can only do so with a warrant, which means they had to convince a judge that this was a good idea. I'd like to know how the judge arrived at his or her decision to grant this warrant.
An aside: I find some of the Slashdot response interesting. We're a bit schizophrenic. We are bananas about privacy issues and here is the state taking aciton against a company that makes a device that is used to illegally violate privacy and we, er, go bananas!
How can we get more information?
I am not a lawyer, but:
I am deeply worried that the business response to OSHA setting telecommuting workplace standards will be to forbid telecommuting. If I ran a business, I would.
As a telecommuter, do I really want to have some portion of my home retooled every time I change employers or move from contract to contract (when I work for a consulting company) to bring my workstation in line with each employer's standards?
They simply should not do this unless the employer REQUIRES teclommuting. So long as telecommuting is comething I want (and believe me, I consider a day or more telecommuting to be an enormous benefit, ENORMOUS [I can't overstate this -- it is really, really ENORMOUS ]) and is permitted but not required by the employer, I should be able to specifically idemnify the employer from any responsibility for workplace injury, so long as the workplace my employer provides meets specifications.
I see this as potentially the death of telecommuting.
What word on this waiver possibility?
Let me start out by saying that I respect Jon Katz. I disagree with him a lot, but he is out there saying what is on his mind and standing up for that in which he believes. That said, I find it hard to believe that the man who claims to be in harmony with the outcast geek can manage to so totally misunderstand Andy Kaufman.
With all due respect to Jim Carrey, he hasn't a fraction of Kaufman's talent. Katz makes the capital mistake of equating popularity with talent. This is rank hypocrisy from the man who defends the unpopular geek. Apparently that's easy when you're posting on a web site dedicated to the interests of nerds and geeks. It makes him popular here.
Milos Forman has, it seems to me, been exploring what it means to be a rebel. From Amadeus through The People vs. Larry Flynt he seems to be looking for the stories of people who are standing proudly and self-conciously outside the current of their times.
Andy Kaufman is held in awe by comics. This awe is not given him because of his success, but because of his daring. Not because he was always successful, but because he didn't merely make new material, he kept exploding the boundaries of what comedy is.
In a world where you can't tell one comic's airline jokes from another comic's rush hour traffic jokes from yet another comic's relationship jokes, Kaufman kept walking on to the stage and doing material that most comics wouldn't dare to imagine, let alone perform.
Practicing comics know that there is the safe way, which will keep you comfortably nestled in the audience's love, getting easy laughs from the amusing foibles of suburban middle-class life, and then there is the dangerous way where you cut through the assumptions, you pierce our neat ideas of order, you diassemble the human condition and make see ourselves anew. This is what great art in all its manifestations does for us. Sometimes it makes us uncomfortable and afraid.
Most comics are hungry for the laugh, for the audience to like them and to think they are clever. I've dome some stand-up in my time and I must admit that I fall firmly in this category. What Andy Kaufman did may not have always succeeded, but it was done for some other reason. Some deeper reason than winning mere praise. He was driven to find some deeper knowledge of that place in us where laughter comes from.
Now, I would not claim to know Jim Carrey's inner heart, but from watching his work over the years, I would say that he, like many comics of greater or lesser talent, works for the laugh, works for the love. He also, like many others, knows that that is a rather shallow use of the attention given the stage. I think he leapt at the chance to play Kaufman because it was an opportunity to move beyond the self-gratification and to do it from the safety of playing someone else.
I have done both stand-up and stage acting (only semi-professionally, mind, I'm not "somebody.") and they are quite different. Being trapped in a written character actually liberates your behavior. Your free display of emotion is okay because it isn't you. It's the character; it's the writer.
When you do stand-up, it is you, naked and alone before that hungry thing we call an audience. That's why most of us fall into the safe stuff. Andy Kaufman did something much riskier and much more dangerous. He didn't make laughs, he made art.
Love the outsider.
Dammit, it's not "open source sex," it's "free love!" ;-)
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Open systems and Open source are not the same thing. McNealy has always advocated Open systems (meaning systems based on open standards), but he never went so far as to say that companies should give away their source code or the right to modify it and give it away modified.
McNealy was ahead of the curve on networking and open standards, but he is very much behind the curve on Open source. He was truly commited to "open" he would not have withdrawn Java from the standards process. He still wants control. He hasn't picked up that last piece of the puzzle...
Don't be disgusted. McNealy does not embrace Open source.
To me, there's a heirarchy of technology worlds I want to work in:
1) Open source -- the software is free, programmers are not.
2) Open systems -- the standards are free, the software is not, and programmers are the drudges of the business world.
3) Proprietary systems -- there are only de facto standards, software is expensive, and programmers are serfs of the dominant technology company. This was IBM in the past. This is Microsoft today.
McNealy had the vision to aim at level 2. In the early 80's, this was radical indeed. He has not figured out the advantages of level 1. He's partway there, but he has missed the last step -- that the code belongs to the world, not to the originator. That assurance, that the code is yours, that the benefit you get for giving away your mods is the absolute assurance that anyone else who improves it must share his/her mods with you is the payment you receive for giving away your mods. It works. McNealy doesn't see this yet. He thinks programmers will give their mods to him, with no assurance that Sun's further improvements will go back to those programmers. The Sun version is a one way street.
No, I do not weep for Scott McNealy.
If I read the lead article correctly, the defaced web page was done by someone else after a back-door had been installed by someone who wrote a PPC exploit of the proftp hole. In other words, FrontPage boy had to be let in by someone who knew how to do something... Mind you, I'm just interpreting the lead story -- I do not have firsthand knowledge.
You know, I've never really looked into the RFCs on SSL and https. Is anyone following Mozilla closely enough to know how hard it is going to be to get crypto into Mozilla after the fact, either by licensed RSA implementation "plugin" (ugh) or by use of some compatible, patent-free, open source library developed outside the United States and thus not subject to our boneheaded crypto export restrictions?
I realize that this is a complex question...
I don't disagree with you that it is something to be concerned about, but so long as the code is GPL'ed it simply cannot go far. They can't take it under. Period. Sure they can write proprietary extensions, but how many open source developers will use a closed interface? I know I won't do so.
.com stocks.
I think the concern is overstated.
"Branding" is fine (well, not really -- Intels campaign suggesting that a Pentium III will miraculously energize your 33.6 kbps Internet connection springs to mind), but I do not see how adding closed extensions to RedHat could possibly be perceived as an advatage in the marketplace. Let's say you're a closed source ISV (like an Intuit) who decides to port your product to Linux. Do you do it in a way that ensures you can market to the largest possible number of computers, or do you do it in a way that narrows the market?
Microsoft did not get to be the lion's share of the desktop market by fragmenting the market; they did it by consolidating the market. Developers started writing apps exclusively for Windows after Windows controlled the market. Many ISVs still develop Mac versions, and those that don't took a look at the cost of porting their code to gain a small market share and decided it wasn't worth it. If RedHat amounts to 50% of the Linux market, and Linux comes to be, say, 20% of the PC market, then ISVs might well port to Linux, but are unlikely to port to RedHat exclusive extensions.
As for anyone dumb enough to buy RedHat stock at current prices, you get what you deserve. By now, it should be obvious to anyone that there is a bit of a bubble in the technology stocks, esp. the linux and
If you bought 'em cheap, swell. Hold 'em. If not, I'd take my profit before it evaporates.
When the source is open, I just can't see this happening. This has been touted time and time again, and it just keeps not happening.
It does hilight the importance of educating those consumers now thinking about Linux in what free software is, what the various licenses mean, and why it matters that the source be now and forever free/open, even if the consumer is not a programmer and never intends to be. We need to make sure people understand how the source protects consumer interests.
I have seen no signs of efforts to create incompatbility, although I have seen potential for incompatibility arising out of sheer complexity. That's why I think the LSB project remains important.
Can I just leap in here and congratulate myself and everyone else writing on this thread? The posts in here could be a conversation in any of my philosophy, history of science, or philosophy of science classes back in college.
We've heard from the theists, the deists, the logical positivists. This thread states the questions well, raises points on both sides, and has completely failed to fall into a flamewar or name calling. It is a delight to see that people out there wish to wrestle with the questions of life, existence, faith, purpose, origin, and evolution. Maybe we all have our minds made up, but it heartens me no end to see people discussing it rationally and openly, with open minds.
There is indeed hope for this world if people of faith and science can discuss these issues calmly and without rancour.
For myself, I have never had a problem on this front. I have a faith, a Christian faith, but I have never found it at odds with science, even when science suggests the universe did not require God to exist. I reconcile this with the simple recognition that science is empirical. Knowledge of God is non-empirical (at least to me, it is something I know in my heart alone) and that is knowledge that science, in effect, cannot see. When people of faith feel their belief is somehow inferior simply because it is non-empirical, that's when people of faith become book-burning bigots. Be secure in your knowledge of God. It's invisibility to science doesn't make any less true to you. I passed an Assembly of God church the other day and the sign outside read "Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has" and I thought, "how sad that they think so."
If you have to hate science, feel that it is inferior because it cannot see past its empiricism to the insubstantial and spiritual evidence. I don't see science so, however. I see science as powerful tool for discovering truth about nature. People of faith should not be threatened because science cannot see God.
Science may one day arrive at empirical answers for the whole of creation and the meaning of life and the nature of conciousness. I doubt it, but it may. If it does, it will have found God, or I will be proved to have been wrong. But so long as I, in being wrong, acted for the good of my fellow human beings, what evil have I done in being wrong? It is only when my belief makes me think I should coerce, control, mandate to people that my faith leads me to evil acts. When my faith leads me to tolerance, love, and the gentle persuasion of my sincere belief, well, those who listen to me are free to choose. I do not condemn them. The whole thing is about choice.
Whether you see Genesis as myth, "true" metaphor, or literal absolute truth, what eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge gave us was the choice. The choice changes us from innocents, blameless in all our actions, to moral beings, aware of the effects of our actions for good or evil. Being human is, therefore, in this theology, having the power of choice. When you seek to control or dominate, you seek to reduce a moral being with a choice to an animal. I can think of no greater evil.
I believe in evolution. I believe that life arose on its own. And I believe in God. Wierd, huh? More than that, I believe in the fundmental (and yes, God-given) right of each of us to make the choice.
Anyways, back to the main point. It is great to see open discussion of these issues.
Can I just leap in here and congratulate myself and everyone else writing on this thread? The posts in here could be a conversation in any of my philosophy, history of science, or philosophy of science classes back in college.
We've heard from the theists, the deists, the logical positivists. This thread states the questions well, raises points on both sides, and has completely failed to fall into a flamewar or name calling. It is a delight to see that people out there wish to wrestle with the questions of life, existence, faith, purpose, origin, and evolution. Maybe we all have our minds made up, but it heartens me no end to see people discussing it rationally and openly, with open minds.
There is indeed hope for this world if people of faith and science can discuss these issues calmly and without rancour.
For myself, I have never had a problem on this front. I have a faith, a Christian faith, but I have never found it at odds with science, even when science suggests the universe did not require God to exist. I reconcile this with the simple recognition that science is empirical. Knowledge of God is non-empirical (at least to me, it is something I know in my heart alone) and that is knowledge that science, in effect, cannot see. When people of faith feel their belief is somehow inferior simply because it is non-empirical, that's when people of faith become book-burning bigots. Be secure in your knowledge of God. It's invisibility to science doesn't make any less true to you. I passed an Assembly of God church the other day and the sign outside read "Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has" and I thought, "how sad that they think so."
If you have to hate science, feel that it is inferior because it cannot see past its empiricism to the insubstantial and spiritual evidence. I don't see science so, however. I see science as powerful tool for discovering truth about nature. People of faith should not be threatened because science cannot see God.
Science may one day arrive at empirical answers for the whole of creation and the meaning of life and the nature of conciousness. I doubt it, but it may. If it does, it will have found God, or I will be proved to have been wrong. But so long as I, in being wrong, acted for the good of my fellow human beings, what evil have I done in being wrong? It is only when my belief makes me think I should coerce, control, mandate to people that my faith leads me to evil acts. When my faith leads me to tolerance, love, and the gentle persuasion of my sincere belief, well, those who listen to me are free to choose. I do not condemn them. The whole thing is about choice.
Whether you see Genesis as myth, "true" metaphor, or literal absolute truth, what eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge gave us was the choice. The choice changes us from innocents, blameless in all our actions, to moral beings, aware of the effects of our actions for good or evil. Being human is, therefore, in this theology, having the power of choice. When you seek to control or dominate, you seek to reduce a moral being with a choice to an animal. I can think of no greater evil.
I believe in evolution. I believe that life arose on its own. And I believe in God. Wierd, huh? More than that, I believe in the fundmental (and yes, God-given) right of each of us to make the choice.
Anyways, back to the main point. It is great to see open discussion of these issues.
I hate to do an "amen to that, brother" post, but I'm going to do so.
Any reasonable search term is likely to present results like "Search returned 417,373 hits. Hits 1-10 displayed." You have to then winnow by adding include and exclude words until you get it down to a manageable 7,422 hits, then you browse them.
The truth is, I turn to wide searches quite rarely. I tend to find and "bookmark" authoritative sites I find on a given topic and return to those over and over again. It is only when a site grows noticably stale or I have to research a new topic that I turn, reluctantly, to search engines. As for indexing database sites, I like the idea of extending the robot hack. Slightly less appealing would be to have a new HTML tag to include "bot content" in any page, including dynamic pages. An XML solution is a good idea, but I wonder how long before every extant site gets XML-aware? That plus XML is almost too flexible, making it likely that a hundred competing methods for indexing dynamic pages will appear and no one will know which one to cling to.
This is the "a watch implies a watchmaker" argument. Or, as Spinoza stated it, every action has a cause, the universe exists, therefore it has a cause, therefore God exists. God as Prime Mover.
It's elegant, it's intuitive, but it is not proof. This is what logic choppers like to call "post hoc ergo propter hoc," or mistaking sequence for logical connection. It is possible that universe has no time boundary, even though it appears to have a first event. It is also possible that the Biblical account of creation is literally true, word for word. I wasn't there and neither were you.
The watchmaker argument holds that the evolution of complex living beings by purely "mechanical" natural processes is contradicted by everyday experience. Watches do not evolve from, say, church-tower clocks. It is the assumption that complexity implies design, design implies intent, and intent implies a mind, and a first mind implies a god.
Even so, I can think of things that show complexity spontaneously emerging from simplicity. Water molecules have a fixed angle between the two hydrogen atoms. When water freezes, the molecules line up with one another with this fixed angle preserved. In other words, everything in there is the exact same size and shape. Do you live in a cold climate? Pour water on your windshield and watch it freeze. It forms little sections that freeze outward, creating complex crystalline "trees" that grow until they meet the edge of another frozen zone. You end up with juxtaposed frosty forests of great complexity. Pour water on it again and it will happen again, but it will look nothing like it did the last time.
Living systems are a bit more complex than freezing water, but it is made out of molcules that are amost infintely flexible in shape and that can reproduce. It is the constant tug of war between reproduction and resources that drives the changes in the shape of the molecules of life. It tends towards complexity on its own.
We can argue all we'd like about whether or not God assembled the first genetic molecules, but they can and do spontaneously self-assemble after that. The watch does not imply a watchmaker any more than an icy widshield implies a little crystalline forester. The icy windshield could imply a guy pouring water on a windwshield, but it could also imply the mere presence of water and a smooth surface.
Argument, but not proof...
This is a total misunderstanding of gene expression in living organisms. Nature generally does NOT eliminate unneeded genes. Most of your genes go unused and unexpressed. You have genetic structures in your DNA that are identical to those found in primitive bacteria. Nature does not "edit," it just keeps accumulating stuff. Deletion occurs only through extinction, so there is a lot of old stuff in our genes.
As for the "it's not creating life because it is just using what is already there" argument, well that can be extended back to the universe itself. By you standard the only way to create life would be to create the universe. That's a perfectly valid semantic view, but not ethically very useful.
Oh, one more thing. I never meant to say that you, specifically, are an atheist. When I said "Even if you are an atheist..." I meant a rhetorical "you," not any specific person. I would more properly have said "Even if one is an atheist..." but writing that way in a casual forum like this always comes across as obnoxiously pedantic.