there was what? A spotty fossil record that suggested that probably evolution was what happened. Mol.bio. has provide a mechanistic explanation of the the probability of speciation and adaptation happening. You speak disparagingly of "crackpots" and "nobody questions", yet at the same time you are prepared to retail naive narratives like:
Modern forms didn't exist in lower (and certainly older) fossil strata, but other things did. They further observed that the forms in between (in depth and age) more closely resembled the ones closer than those farther away; there was a progression in features over time. As some forms disappeared from the record, others branched off from forms existing before that.
A progression of features over time - forsooth!
molecular biology came along and backed up the tree of descent almost 100% Well, which tree of descent would that be? Do you realize that since the RNA sequencing revolution of the '70s the whole basis of taxonomy has shifted from 5 Kingdoms to 3 Domains? (Whittaker to Woese). Molecular biology has rocked our world dude!
There are two main things that I question in your postings:
1. You claim that the poster (paRcat, I think), that likened the claims being made in the article as being analogous in their illogicality to a claim that because evolution could have happened it must have happened, is wrong in this assertion. I see the two forms as being definitely analogous. They are assumptions that possibility is equivalent to probability. What is interesting is to examine the relative probabilities of theories. Evolution is the most probable on the evidence.
2. You claim that the fossil record is strong proof of evolution. It's not, look at the claims made by comparative morphologist prior to molecular biology and then look at the drastic revisions made as a result of phylogeny - molec.biol. has truly changed our picture. The fossil record on it's own is as I said, suggestive and contributes, but it has also been misleading. The claim that you make that the overall broad picture has not been in doubt for a century is meaningless, sure everyone is talking about evolution - but then so was Lamarck, so was Geoffroi de Ste.Hilaire - "evolution" in the debased sense that you use it just means change. The rest of your post is just an appeal to authority. You're fighting a straw man of the ignorant creationist that doesn't believe in evolution. Things are a lot more complicated than that and it doesn't help to have supposed advocates of evolution insisting that it is rock-solid. It is merely reasonably probable to a reasonable person that has examined the evidence. Science ain't about certainty.
Oh, and by the way Punc.Eq. is considered to be a "crackpot" theory by many and Gould has a good story about how he and other grad students booed down an early exponent of plate tectonics.
Glad there was some information there. Part of the problem is that "evolution" is such a broad, all-encompassing term. It includes many things that I am reasonably happy with as an approximation to reality, but it also contains a lot of very dodgy speculation - I'm thinking especially of naive adaptationism as opposed to neutrality. It's a broad church and I'm disturbed by how often it's championed uncritically just because it's the visible opposition to fundamental christianity.
I don't like the way that skeptics are immediately jumped on for questioning something and assigned as being "enemies" immediately.
This is especially true in evolutionary debates - the fervor and belief that investigators assign to their theories can only be described as religious.
In fact, I've wondered about the religious mindset of a lot of "scientific" people, it seems that many people have substituted for God and believe uncritically in other things instead of trying true science - constant skepticism, theory testing and open-mindedness. Much more fun and emotionally satisfying to belong to a group that excludes the "stupid", "uneducated", "Christian" etc.
how can a techie community browbeat the media into reporting with a clue?
I don't know that we can browbeat them. Most of the paranoia on the part of the public about science is due to the fact that our education systems produce a mandarin-like elite which even within itself contains specialized disciplines that are separated by vast gulfs of ignorance from each other. What we're looking at is a democratic defecit that is created by not educating everyone from birth onwards. Not enough attention is paid to kindergarten and primary schools and the early formative period of children's life. Hell - not enough attention is paid to them in childhood and adolesence. Our society has low expectations of its citizens and indeed for the upper-classes this ignorance is necessary to keep the peasants toiling away for them. We're caught in the contradiction of a non-democratic operational structure underlying a democratic constitution. Education requires resources, requires that the money comes from somewhere - taxes anyone? Who's first?
Dead right. Gardeners have been "cloning" for a long time. Every time someone takes a cutting, dips the end into a plant-hormone to make it grow roots and stuffs it in a pot they've been cloning away like a mad Frankenstein;) Not to mention the number of insane plants that do it naturally - stands of alder trees, raspberries etc. It's a conspiracy!
..to your link, is attached to the bottom of your link. I think you fail to appreciate that the fossil record is not good proof. Sure, it's suggestive and contributes factually to the support of the theory, but it has been badly mis-handled on both sides. There has been extremely naive extrapolationism practiced by fossil record "evolutionists" who are every bit as uncritical and dogmatic as creationists.
Are there any single-cell bacteria that have converted themselves into multi-cell versions?
>Depends if you count slime-molds or not; they go back and forth! Your question makes no sense in scientific terms; according to evolution, multi-cellularity only has to arise once, and from there it is "variations on a theme".
slime-molds are not bacteria. They are myxomycota fungi - eukaryotes! they're our close relatives!. For a picture click here
and for more information about taxonomy click here
and scroll to the bottom of the page. The latter is a cool page. You should also be aware that there is considerable controversy about the classifaction of any of these things and that these ones rely upon the use of 18S large-subunit rRNA.
My general point is that nothing in evolution and its study is as certain and as solid as you are making out, and further, that most of the support for evolution comes from molecular genetics, not from the fossil record which can be interpreted in all sorts of ways.
You are being too dogmatic - especially with regard to your horse example. This was one of the most embarrasing examples of "evolution", it was always presented as a succession of smaller to larger through intermediate forms. This linear pattern was seized on by creationists and debunked. Embarrassing and uneccessary, there is no need for regular "trends" in evolution to obtain.
There is controversy here and you are doing rationality and science no favours by trivializing and ignoring objections. Regards, Crush
Modern forms didn't exist in lower (and certainly older) fossil strata, but other things did
Actually fossil coelocanths existed that look the same as the "modern" living ones, also sharks show little change in their fossil record and certainly no clear patterns. Other problems include the molluscs (which tend to leave only shell morphology behind). The fossil record is spotty and stimulated the thinking that you describe (which I believe to be roughly true), but it is highly problematic and is not proof on its own.
We observe evolution working; what do you think pesticide resistance in insects comes from? Speciation has been observed a number of times in just the last century.
It is necessary to realize that there is a distinction between speciation (there are several definitions of this, but I'll assume you mean the Biological Species Definition=inability to interbreed), and evolution. The former depends on the latter as a mechanism, but the latter can happen without the former, and in fact for the case of pesiticide resistance this gives hope. We may be able to re-populate the gene-pool of resistant pests with susceptible genes at the same time as removing the selection conditions (pesticides) and then be able to use pesticides again at a later date.
The fossil record on its own proves nothing, Creationists are very adept at explaining it away. I'm interested in your "many observations of speciation" in the last century. COuld you list them? I should once again issue a disclaimer that I believe that evolution happens, it's just not so simple as you imply, there are lots of ingenious creationists out there.
Sorry about the tags. The point of displacing the origin of life to outside the earth is supposed to be that it increases the amount of time that life has had to evolve. From the little that I know, it seems that the idea is that Mars was around before the earth, perhaps someone can correct me on that. Thus, it is supposed that the improbable event - origin of life - has had more spins at the roulette wheel of fate.
AH84001 was supposed to be the point of origin of which Earth life forms, exactly? Hint: the title of this piece is "Yet Another Are We Martians?"
So it is not necessarily being claimed that there is a link demonstrated between the life-forms in the meteorite ALH84001 and any particular life-form on earth. It's like showing that there are micro-fossils of cyanobacteria and fossilized stromatolites that go back to 3.4 b.y.a. So, the timeframe in which life evolved has been expanded. For some people, not me as you seem to think!, this makes it more plausible that life could have evolved rather than been created.
Hint: the title of the article may be misleading! Don't believe sensational headlines contain all that you need to know;P
We now have a company that can deliver CNN to more than a billion people, yet almost half the world's population still have no access to a telephone. The information gap between rich and poor is already intolerable and now may be made much worse with a greater concentration of technology and information resources in rich, northern countries."
Cool!. That means that the propagandistic crap that CNN spews out won't reach the malcontented billions. Could this be the internal contradiction of capitalism that leads to its downfall?
Not to mention that the "democracy" that the IFJ espouses is questionable, what sort of democracy do they want? A large part of the article is a jeremiad against their declining labour conditions. I feel for them, but how many of them are really trying to kick the systems ass? I suspect that much of this sort of moaning is from people that previously felt themselves protected from down-sizing and now realize that it's a bad world that they supported up till now. Aargh...maybe I don't really mean that...things are not going well today.
This gives the impression that the author thinks the original rocks from Mars, some billions of years old, are still sitting around somewhere waiting to be examined. HELLO! They've long since weathered into clay, been pressed into shale, and been hung as blackboards and roof tiles - in the Cretaceous Untrue, the ALH84001, (can't remember themeteorite that was found in the Antarctic in, I think, 1997 contained what were argued to be evidence of life by David McKay et al.. Among the supposed evidence was the presence of micro-fossils that may/may not have been bacteria. Associated with the bacteria was a deposit of ferrous material (Iron-sulfide?) normally only associated in such high concentrations with bacteria. Many other meteorites have been found also proposed to be of ancient origin, among them another "Martian" meteorite" Nakhla, described by McKay in March,1999. There is a lot of skpeticism about this - contamination is one of the main ones.
I appreciate your sarcasm! But there is even more at stake here than just flakey reporting and cluelessness
This is part of a reaction against the idea that life could have evolved here. It a displacing of the location of the improbable event in order to attempt to make it more palatable. It's the same sort of argument that Bertrand Russell attacked when he queried the "First Cause" arguments for God. If there is an improbable event and we keep on putting off it's cause, further and further back down a chain of events then that leads to infinite regress - we may as well bite the bullet and accept that it may have happened here on earth. To be fair, many of the early life theorists seem to feel that extra-terran origin would buy extra time for life to evolve, but I think that many in the evolution community would feel that there was enough time for it to happen on earth. The idea of life originating off earth and drifting around in space waiting to seed earth came, I think originally from Arrhenius in the 1920's and then was taken up by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe who called it Panspermia.
just about anything "could" survive interstellar space, under the right conditions
Sure, given the right conditions! But the fact remains that the right conditions for most organic life are not likely to be there! The problem for most of these things is ionizing radiation, which is why they are proposing that it would be carried within a meteorite. Once one makes that suppostion then the maximum radius that the life could have come from is limited by the maximum speed of travel of matter. Hence one is restricted to "potentially life bearing" planets near us. A more recent development of this idea has been that DNA or RNA coated in dust would be light enough to be blown on the solar wind over great distances. The dust would protect the particles. A paper in Science seemed to prove that this would mean that the particles would be able to disperse from a much greater radius to earth. I'll check the reference on that now if anyone is interested.
You say that this is not bad science [...] just good marketing , well I feel that there is a problem with that: it makes the public at first excited and gullible and then disillusioned and skeptical of all science. They are muddying the waters, not clarifying them. That's bad science. I don't blame them for wanting fame, funding but I think that it is short-sighted. Probably they are already being flamed by their more sober colleagues!
I really have to ask, does anyone know is SPAM profitable? Are these just un-informed idiots that really don't know that they're wasting their time? Does anyone have information on this?
Furthermore has anyone even _heard_ of someone that bought something because of SPAM?
Are these people just the deranged/hopeful side of the net?
if the UDP has the desired effect, then it's an example of anarchism actually working
the UDP FAQ certainly claims a large number of successes, among them:
Erols.com had been a thorn in the side of usenet for a long time. With a change in policy after discussion of a UDP against them, they now have a very high reputation among both the usenet and email community.
Bell Atlantic, near the end of July, 1997, was a major spamhaus. Word got to them that they were being considered for a UDP. Spam dropped dramatically almost instantly, to their credit. No UDP was necessary.
UUnet, which was the largest single spam producer around the beginning of August, 1997, [...]announced and apparently instituted a much tougher AUP against spamming, and nuked a couple of the most persistent spammers that usenet has ever seen. Numbers again have fallen dramatically, and we all hope that UUnet continues with this policy.
October, 1997, Compuserve
In December, 1997, TIAC appeared absolutely unwilling to deal with any of their ongoing spam [...] UDP was announced with the 5 business day waiting period before institution. Although their owner continued to make excuses and argue about their culpability as well as bluster and threaten legal action, by the time the deadline had arrived, they had "cleaned up their act" to the point that the UDP was no longer necessary, and the deadline was extended for another 5 days to watch the numbers. After that additional 5 day period, the stats had stayed low, and the UDP deadline was lifted.
About 10 others between these dates.
In December of 1999, a simultaneous UDP of VSNL and SILNET, the two main carriers in India, was instituted for their failure to even begin to control the usenet terrorist who calls himself "HipCrime" and who forges, cancels, floods, and supercedes thousands of articles on a nearly daily basis in an attempt to blackmail the entire world into doing things his way - his way being a usenet without spam cancels. Currently, VNSL and SILET have enabled port 119 (news)blocks on all outgoing connections from their services with the exception of their own servers.
So, it looks like there is good evidence that this will work, given the past history of success.
...to want the Government [...to] keep its sticky fingers out of Big Buiness on the one hand and yet to simultaneously wish for ome good legeslation that prevents this consolodation of power isn't it?
I do agree with you that there should be preventative legislation that creates an environment which discourages the formation of monopolies, but like everything in life, need will find a way. No matter what legislative systems are in place there will be unintended and undesirable consequence which will have to be addressed by emergency fire-stomping measures. That requires that government intervene at the behest of the people. I know that that happens relatively rarely, that most of the time it is intervening on behalf of big business, but that is just because "We the People" are not taking our democratic duties as citizens very seriously. How many people vote? The system of democracy and freedom in this country is, on paper, one of the best in the world. It provides for representation of our opinions and protection from the special interest power groups. All it requires to make it work is an educated, active citizenry - something that is sadly lacking.
It would be nice if there were some community support for the Freetype project . Fonts, are a vital part of the user interface and freetype has been active in developing a reverse-engineered TrueType font engine. They have discovered that Apple has patents on their TT fonts and are currently in negotiation with them....please, let's support them!
So, was this one of the older widget cans or one of the new "Floating Widget" cans? I think that they are actually the same widget but they discovered that allowing it to ride down freely as the can emptied rather than keeping it fixed led to a better head on the beer (wonder why they didn't use that in their ad campaigns "Guinness Gives (a) Good Head".
... you are attempting to take the mystery and beauty out of one of mankind's profoundest experiences. Your base, materialism fails to explain the dark loveliness of a blonde and tan tankard of voluptuous thirst-sating porter. The following is set as your penance (it also contains some excellent advice for students:
'The Workmans Friend - Flann O'Brien/Myles na gCopaleen
This page has good references and an explanation that includes the following:
On 2 January 1882 the Standard Oil Trust was formed. Attorney Samuel Dodd of Standard Oil came up with the idea of a Trust. A Board of Trustees was set up and all the Standard properties were placed in its hands. Every stockholder received 20 Trust certificates for each share of Standard Oil stock and all the profits of the component companies were sent to the nine trustees who determined the dividends. The nine Trustees elected the directors and officers of all the component companies. This allowed the Standard Oil to function as a monopoly since the nine Trustees ran all the component companies. Later, Standard pioneered the Holding Company which had the same effect as a board of trustees.
As an example of the aggressive acts of monopolies and the tactics used by those with a large market share to drive smaller competitors, that can't be subsumed out of business, how about undercutting:
"the industries accused of becoming monopolies during the congressional debates on the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act all dropped their prices more rapidly than the general price level fell during the 10 years before the Sherman Act.(6)". Amusingly this piece of evidence comes from the Cato Institute in a paper which purports to show the opposite .
I see that it was necessary to break up Bell into smaller companies,
Bell was a government-created and government-protected monopoly.
So, you only object to being enslaved and oppressed and denied choice if it's by the government? I think this is where I disagree with many libertarians. As far as I'm concerned, being screwed by big business is just as painful as by the government. So the question is how to stop both. I'm probably even less tolerant of interference in my life than you are by what you say, but in your visceral reaction to the word "government" you are embracing an evil just as, if not worse. Cheers, Crush
First off, thanks for your response and your generous defence of a dissenting opinion. Now, to your points:
retail, airlines, securities, internet. Virtually anywhere you live, you have choices of stores and products, you can fly on a variety of airlines, you can get increasingly better fees on trades, and you have a choice of ISP's. I could even throw banking in there, all it takes is a little work
Well, actually not. As an example: where I lived for 5 years I witnessed the emergence of a large number of independent coffee shops, most of which were great. Along came one of the largest chains, opened stores sometimes right _beside_ these low budget operations. They ended up closing a few of them and those that survive find times tighter than they were. Yeah, I choose, but the large chain was trying to shut them down. A choice that allows me to take it or leave it is no choice.
Banks - banks have been gradually merging in many parts of the world. Canada certainly has fewer banks now than it once did. These institutions occupy a unique place in our society - we want large stable institutions, we don't want entrepeneurial risk taking. So it's not a good venue for competition - let the government run it. Otherwise we get what....? Junk bonds?, lost savings, people thinking that they understood enough to make an informed decision. You may be one of the few people with enough time, intelligence and expertise to research this area, but I submit that you are in a minority.
Your proposal that we all go out and research everything individually appeals to the arrogant side of me (I'm quite lopsided) strongly, but consider the inefficiency - we could all theoretically do without any FDA rules, FCC rules etc...you ate the burger? didn't you check up on E.coli 0157?..there was a paper in Microbiology Reviews just the other year on its prevalence in ground beef. Regulation on our behalf in the hands of an elected, re-callable ombudsperson is more workable.
If the larger company tenders an offer and the smaller accepts and goes to Aruba, well God bless 'em.
Amen to that as far as those being bought goes - but how is that going to affect the other small competitors? They probably can't match the tender. So, what happens if they're left with a useful, cutting-edge technology, which, like most things, needs other technologies to interact with? If those other technologies are all owned by a potential rival, they're screwed.
Size is not necessarily bad. In Smith's time, size and lack of size was much more of an encumberance than today, due to lack of communication and transport options. A large company can be efficient today in a way that it could not before, and a small company can compete over a geographically large area in a way that it could not before. Size is becoming less relevant
So, large companies become more efficient, offsetting the advantage of small companies in increased geographical distribution in the struggle for marketplace dominance. Seems like a net gain of zero for smaller companies.
new telecom options are emerging, and are emerging slowly.
hmm....sometime in the future? Sounds good, the future is going to be magical.
CLEC's are emerging to take advantage of the existing POTS network through colocation
I'm ignorant of what these acronyms mean. Perhaps your argument would be more convincing if I knew what they were.
With regard to the customer taking his business elsewhere, I can only say once again that a take-it-or-leave-it choice is no choice. Nor, to my mind is being offered a choice between two unacceptable alternative, or three. The free-market with its attendant court-cases, lack of planning and inefficiency is thankfully not something that has operated unchecked in the US and the first world for the last 50 years. The evidence of the success of a highly regulated, government controlled economy is there for all to see: Germany, Japan, the US , France to some extent. All these nations funnel huge amounts of tax-payers money into the manufacturing industries through, for example, the Pentagon budget. This drives research in technology which it would be unprofitable for entrepeneurial companies to do. Examples of countries that adopt true free market policies are Thailand, Brazil and Malaysia.
With regard to capitalism being around for 1000s versus 100s of years, true in a weak sense. Yet the ideas of interest rates and banks dates only from about 1600 and it is these financial tools that allow capital to flow freely. And it is only during the last century and a half that this system developed internationally.
Flamebait? I think not!
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 1
Whoever moderated this as flamebait is merely interested in suppressing dissent. I can only assume that it is someone that has NO idea what libertarianism is about. Certainly their actions are at complete odds with the tenets of open debate. My post attempt to expose flaws in commonly held assumptions about markets being self-regulating, whereas one of the foremost philosophers of the free-market argued that this was not so, in his often quoted, rarely read works.
Nope. A corporation is a physical entity - very different from an idea. An idea like information has very different modes of reproduction and dissemination. Isn't that what all the cyber-libertarians/OSS folks would claim? It is one of the central points that ESR makes at any rate.
The larger the biological entity [...] the more it suffers when a major change takes place inside that environment.
Again, not so. Consider how much a human suffers compared to a bacterium if the ground they are both located on becomes too hot. The human using his extra resources is able to change his immediate environment but the bacterium can't. Bacteria tend to be more specialized than humans as regards their metabolisms - hence they may be more susceptible to changes.
I take your point about immortality though, it was a foolish thing to say. I should have said "have a shockingly long generational span compared to other things". And, I would guess, though perhaps you can correct me on this that larger corporations tend to stay around longer? Expand or die would seem to be the motto for business.
So, with regards to a startup (they, the entrepeneurs have my warmest admiration and best wishes), I can imagine that being small is a terrible problem. I have seen it happen to friends companies...sure they're remunerated well, but there's the feeling of "we could have been great". Beamingly, and with cordial interest, Crush
the specs are out there and you have the tools to hand. What you need to do is to take the Sugar-app and pipe some of it's output to the Latte-app. Then you need to re-direct the whole thing into your mouth. If you think it's too complicated then probably there's a Latte-Mini-HOWTO. Of course, a true Free Software advocate would recommend getting the beans and grinding them at home.
I see that it was necessary to break up Bell into smaller companies, which are now re-combining like mad, because that way they can squeeze suppliers and the work-force and negotiate from a much stronger position than small independent contractors. I look forward to seeing what happens with AOL/TW despite Case's assurances.
computer
I remember the good old days of Big Blue. I remember that before the Asian cloners got going Intel were over-priced.
automotive
I look at the fact that the automotive industry is so powerful that they have effectively wiped out public transport.
fast food industries
Ugh. Crap food at high prices. They cut out smaller business that provide tasty, interesting food. This is probably the most offensive example of big business. I am glad to say that I have eaten mass-chain-food only 6 times in the last 13 years. I much prefer the food that's available to me in several small places. Further (and this goes back to the automotive point especially) I note that once companies get to be large enough that it is a fraction of their income to lobby aggresively at Congress, contribute to the PACs, fund "think-tanks" etc., then they get to influence the legislation passed. They set the agenda. You say that there are a number of competing ISPs. Well, I'd argue that this is early days yet....there were large numbers of other oil companies before the Standard Oil Trust, but they were subsumed. Prior to this they competed fiercely on price grounds. Finally, the point isn't necessarily that they are ONLY big - it's how many of them are there? Would you worry if there were 2,3,....1? Wouldn't you rather that they were lean, mean and desperate to please? I know I would.
Was Xerox actually using their patent in any prodcut that they manufactured? It seems a bit hard on 3Com that they produce one of the best handhelds, are responsible for invigorating this market by it and then get slammed by this. So does anyone know of a Xerox product that is being harmed by the entry of 3Com to the market.
Slashdot Mirror
Modern forms didn't exist in lower (and certainly older) fossil strata, but other things did. They further observed that the forms in between (in depth and age) more closely resembled the ones closer than those farther away; there was a progression in features over time. As some forms disappeared from the record, others branched off from forms existing before that.
A progression of features over time - forsooth!
molecular biology came along and backed up the tree of descent almost 100% Well, which tree of descent would that be? Do you realize that since the RNA sequencing revolution of the '70s the whole basis of taxonomy has shifted from 5 Kingdoms to 3 Domains? (Whittaker to Woese). Molecular biology has rocked our world dude!
There are two main things that I question in your postings:
1. You claim that the poster (paRcat, I think), that likened the claims being made in the article as being analogous in their illogicality to a claim that because evolution could have happened it must have happened, is wrong in this assertion. I see the two forms as being definitely analogous. They are assumptions that possibility is equivalent to probability. What is interesting is to examine the relative probabilities of theories. Evolution is the most probable on the evidence.
2. You claim that the fossil record is strong proof of evolution. It's not, look at the claims made by comparative morphologist prior to molecular biology and then look at the drastic revisions made as a result of phylogeny - molec.biol. has truly changed our picture. The fossil record on it's own is as I said, suggestive and contributes, but it has also been misleading. The claim that you make that the overall broad picture has not been in doubt for a century is meaningless, sure everyone is talking about evolution - but then so was Lamarck, so was Geoffroi de Ste.Hilaire - "evolution" in the debased sense that you use it just means change. The rest of your post is just an appeal to authority. You're fighting a straw man of the ignorant creationist that doesn't believe in evolution. Things are a lot more complicated than that and it doesn't help to have supposed advocates of evolution insisting that it is rock-solid. It is merely reasonably probable to a reasonable person that has examined the evidence. Science ain't about certainty.
Oh, and by the way Punc.Eq. is considered to be a "crackpot" theory by many and Gould has a good story about how he and other grad students booed down an early exponent of plate tectonics.
I don't like the way that skeptics are immediately jumped on for questioning something and assigned as being "enemies" immediately.
This is especially true in evolutionary debates - the fervor and belief that investigators assign to their theories can only be described as religious.
In fact, I've wondered about the religious mindset of a lot of "scientific" people, it seems that many people have substituted for God and believe uncritically in other things instead of trying true science - constant skepticism, theory testing and open-mindedness. Much more fun and emotionally satisfying to belong to a group that excludes the "stupid", "uneducated", "Christian" etc.
Sort of like the zeal of the true atheist really.
how can a techie community browbeat the media into reporting with a clue?
I don't know that we can browbeat them. Most of the paranoia on the part of the public about science is due to the fact that our education systems produce a mandarin-like elite which even within itself contains specialized disciplines that are separated by vast gulfs of ignorance from each other. What we're looking at is a democratic defecit that is created by not educating everyone from birth onwards. Not enough attention is paid to kindergarten and primary schools and the early formative period of children's life. Hell - not enough attention is paid to them in childhood and adolesence. Our society has low expectations of its citizens and indeed for the upper-classes this ignorance is necessary to keep the peasants toiling away for them. We're caught in the contradiction of a non-democratic operational structure underlying a democratic constitution. Education requires resources, requires that the money comes from somewhere - taxes anyone? Who's first?
Dead right. Gardeners have been "cloning" for a long time. Every time someone takes a cutting, dips the end into a plant-hormone to make it grow roots and stuffs it in a pot they've been cloning away like a mad Frankenstein ;) Not to mention the number of insane plants that do it naturally - stands of alder trees, raspberries etc. It's a conspiracy!
..to your link, is attached to the bottom of your link. I think you fail to appreciate that the fossil record is not good proof. Sure, it's suggestive and contributes factually to the support of the theory, but it has been badly mis-handled on both sides. There has been extremely naive extrapolationism practiced by fossil record "evolutionists" who are every bit as uncritical and dogmatic as creationists.
Are there any single-cell bacteria that have converted themselves into multi-cell versions?
>Depends if you count slime-molds or not; they go back and forth! Your question makes no sense in scientific terms; according to evolution, multi-cellularity only has to arise once, and from there it is "variations on a theme".
slime-molds are not bacteria. They are myxomycota fungi - eukaryotes! they're our close relatives!. For a picture click here
and for more information about taxonomy click here
and scroll to the bottom of the page. The latter is a cool page. You should also be aware that there is considerable controversy about the classifaction of any of these things and that these ones rely upon the use of 18S large-subunit rRNA.
My general point is that nothing in evolution and its study is as certain and as solid as you are making out, and further, that most of the support for evolution comes from molecular genetics, not from the fossil record which can be interpreted in all sorts of ways.
You are being too dogmatic - especially with regard to your horse example. This was one of the most embarrasing examples of "evolution", it was always presented as a succession of smaller to larger through intermediate forms. This linear pattern was seized on by creationists and debunked. Embarrassing and uneccessary, there is no need for regular "trends" in evolution to obtain.
There is controversy here and you are doing rationality and science no favours by trivializing and ignoring objections. Regards, Crush
Modern forms didn't exist in lower (and certainly older) fossil strata, but other things did
Actually fossil coelocanths existed that look the same as the "modern" living ones, also sharks show little change in their fossil record and certainly no clear patterns. Other problems include the molluscs (which tend to leave only shell morphology behind). The fossil record is spotty and stimulated the thinking that you describe (which I believe to be roughly true), but it is highly problematic and is not proof on its own.
We observe evolution working; what do you think pesticide resistance in insects comes from? Speciation has been observed a number of times in just the last century.
It is necessary to realize that there is a distinction between speciation (there are several definitions of this, but I'll assume you mean the Biological Species Definition=inability to interbreed), and evolution. The former depends on the latter as a mechanism, but the latter can happen without the former, and in fact for the case of pesiticide resistance this gives hope. We may be able to re-populate the gene-pool of resistant pests with susceptible genes at the same time as removing the selection conditions (pesticides) and then be able to use pesticides again at a later date.
The fossil record on its own proves nothing, Creationists are very adept at explaining it away. I'm interested in your "many observations of speciation" in the last century. COuld you list them? I should once again issue a disclaimer that I believe that evolution happens, it's just not so simple as you imply, there are lots of ingenious creationists out there.
AH84001 was supposed to be the point of origin of which Earth life forms, exactly? Hint: the title of this piece is "Yet Another Are We Martians?"
So it is not necessarily being claimed that there is a link demonstrated between the life-forms in the meteorite ALH84001 and any particular life-form on earth. It's like showing that there are micro-fossils of cyanobacteria and fossilized stromatolites that go back to 3.4 b.y.a. So, the timeframe in which life evolved has been expanded. For some people, not me as you seem to think!, this makes it more plausible that life could have evolved rather than been created.
Hint: the title of the article may be misleading! Don't believe sensational headlines contain all that you need to know ;P
We now have a company that can deliver CNN to more than a billion people, yet almost half the world's population still have no access to a telephone. The information gap between rich and poor is already intolerable and now may be made much worse with a greater concentration of technology and information resources in rich, northern countries."
Cool!. That means that the propagandistic crap that CNN spews out won't reach the malcontented billions. Could this be the internal contradiction of capitalism that leads to its downfall?
Not to mention that the "democracy" that the IFJ espouses is questionable, what sort of democracy do they want? A large part of the article is a jeremiad against their declining labour conditions. I feel for them, but how many of them are really trying to kick the systems ass? I suspect that much of this sort of moaning is from people that previously felt themselves protected from down-sizing and now realize that it's a bad world that they supported up till now. Aargh...maybe I don't really mean that...things are not going well today.
This gives the impression that the author thinks the original rocks from Mars, some billions of years old, are still sitting around somewhere waiting to be examined. HELLO! They've long since weathered into clay, been pressed into shale, and been hung as blackboards and roof tiles - in the Cretaceous Untrue, the ALH84001, (can't remember themeteorite that was found in the Antarctic in, I think, 1997 contained what were argued to be evidence of life by David McKay et al.. Among the supposed evidence was the presence of micro-fossils that may/may not have been bacteria. Associated with the bacteria was a deposit of ferrous material (Iron-sulfide?) normally only associated in such high concentrations with bacteria. Many other meteorites have been found also proposed to be of ancient origin, among them another "Martian" meteorite" Nakhla, described by McKay in March,1999. There is a lot of skpeticism about this - contamination is one of the main ones.
I appreciate your sarcasm! But there is even more at stake here than just flakey reporting and cluelessness
This is part of a reaction against the idea that life could have evolved here. It a displacing of the location of the improbable event in order to attempt to make it more palatable. It's the same sort of argument that Bertrand Russell attacked when he queried the "First Cause" arguments for God. If there is an improbable event and we keep on putting off it's cause, further and further back down a chain of events then that leads to infinite regress - we may as well bite the bullet and accept that it may have happened here on earth. To be fair, many of the early life theorists seem to feel that extra-terran origin would buy extra time for life to evolve, but I think that many in the evolution community would feel that there was enough time for it to happen on earth. The idea of life originating off earth and drifting around in space waiting to seed earth came, I think originally from Arrhenius in the 1920's and then was taken up by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe who called it Panspermia.
just about anything "could" survive interstellar space, under the right conditions
Sure, given the right conditions! But the fact remains that the right conditions for most organic life are not likely to be there! The problem for most of these things is ionizing radiation, which is why they are proposing that it would be carried within a meteorite. Once one makes that suppostion then the maximum radius that the life could have come from is limited by the maximum speed of travel of matter. Hence one is restricted to "potentially life bearing" planets near us. A more recent development of this idea has been that DNA or RNA coated in dust would be light enough to be blown on the solar wind over great distances. The dust would protect the particles. A paper in Science seemed to prove that this would mean that the particles would be able to disperse from a much greater radius to earth. I'll check the reference on that now if anyone is interested.
You say that this is not bad science [...] just good marketing , well I feel that there is a problem with that: it makes the public at first excited and gullible and then disillusioned and skeptical of all science. They are muddying the waters, not clarifying them. That's bad science. I don't blame them for wanting fame, funding but I think that it is short-sighted. Probably they are already being flamed by their more sober colleagues!
Never used Winamp myself...does it run on Linux? ;-)
I really have to ask, does anyone know is SPAM profitable? Are these just un-informed idiots that really don't know that they're wasting their time? Does anyone have information on this?
Furthermore has anyone even _heard_ of someone that bought something because of SPAM?
Are these people just the deranged/hopeful side of the net?
if the UDP has the desired effect, then it's an example of anarchism actually working
the UDP FAQ certainly claims a large number of successes, among them:
Erols.com had been a thorn in the side of usenet for a long time. With a change in policy after discussion of a UDP against them, they now have a very high reputation among both the usenet and email community.
Bell Atlantic, near the end of July, 1997, was a major spamhaus. Word got to them that they were being considered for a UDP. Spam dropped dramatically almost instantly, to their credit. No UDP was necessary.
UUnet, which was the largest single spam producer around the beginning of August, 1997, [...]announced and apparently instituted a much tougher AUP against spamming, and nuked a couple of the most persistent spammers that usenet has ever seen. Numbers again have fallen dramatically, and we all hope that UUnet continues with this policy.
October, 1997, Compuserve
In December, 1997, TIAC appeared absolutely unwilling to deal with any of their ongoing spam [...] UDP was announced with the 5 business day waiting period before institution. Although their owner continued to make excuses and argue about their culpability as well as bluster and threaten legal action, by the time the deadline had arrived, they had "cleaned up their act" to the point that the UDP was no longer necessary, and the deadline was extended for another 5 days to watch the numbers. After that additional 5 day period, the stats had stayed low, and the UDP deadline was lifted.
About 10 others between these dates.
In December of 1999, a simultaneous UDP of VSNL and SILNET, the two main carriers in India, was instituted for their failure to even begin to control the usenet terrorist who calls himself "HipCrime" and who forges, cancels, floods, and supercedes thousands of articles on a nearly daily basis in an attempt to blackmail the entire world into doing things his way - his way being a usenet without spam cancels. Currently, VNSL and SILET have enabled port 119 (news)blocks on all outgoing connections from their services with the exception of their own servers.
So, it looks like there is good evidence that this will work, given the past history of success.
My Mum told me to hit them!
I do agree with you that there should be preventative legislation that creates an environment which discourages the formation of monopolies, but like everything in life, need will find a way. No matter what legislative systems are in place there will be unintended and undesirable consequence which will have to be addressed by emergency fire-stomping measures. That requires that government intervene at the behest of the people. I know that that happens relatively rarely, that most of the time it is intervening on behalf of big business, but that is just because "We the People" are not taking our democratic duties as citizens very seriously. How many people vote? The system of democracy and freedom in this country is, on paper, one of the best in the world. It provides for representation of our opinions and protection from the special interest power groups. All it requires to make it work is an educated, active citizenry - something that is sadly lacking.
It would be nice if there were some community support for the Freetype project . Fonts, are a vital part of the user interface and freetype has been active in developing a reverse-engineered TrueType font engine. They have discovered that Apple has patents on their TT fonts and are currently in negotiation with them....please, let's support them!
So, was this one of the older widget cans or one of the new "Floating Widget" cans? I think that they are actually the same widget but they discovered that allowing it to ride down freely as the can emptied rather than keeping it fixed led to a better head on the beer (wonder why they didn't use that in their ad campaigns "Guinness Gives (a) Good Head".
'The Workmans Friend - Flann O'Brien/Myles na gCopaleen
When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
When money's tight and hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
When health is bad and your heart feels strange,
And your face is pale and wan,
When doctors say you need a change,
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
When food is scarce and your larder bare
And no rashers grease your pan,
When hunger grows as your meals are rare -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
In time of trouble and lousey strife,
You have still got a darlint plan
You still can turn to a brighter life -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
On 2 January 1882 the Standard Oil Trust was formed. Attorney Samuel Dodd of Standard Oil came up with the idea of a Trust. A Board of Trustees was set up and all the Standard properties were placed in its hands. Every stockholder received 20 Trust certificates for each share of Standard Oil stock and all the profits of the component companies were sent to the nine trustees who determined the dividends. The nine Trustees elected the directors and officers of all the component companies. This allowed the Standard Oil to function as a monopoly since the nine Trustees ran all the component companies. Later, Standard pioneered the Holding Company which had the same effect as a board of trustees.
As an example of the aggressive acts of monopolies and the tactics used by those with a large market share to drive smaller competitors, that can't be subsumed out of business, how about undercutting:
"the industries accused of becoming monopolies during the congressional debates on the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act all dropped their prices more rapidly than the general price level fell during the 10 years before the Sherman Act.(6)". Amusingly this piece of evidence comes from the Cato Institute in a paper which purports to show the opposite .
I see that it was necessary to break up Bell into smaller companies,
Bell was a government-created and government-protected monopoly.
So, you only object to being enslaved and oppressed and denied choice if it's by the government? I think this is where I disagree with many libertarians. As far as I'm concerned, being screwed by big business is just as painful as by the government. So the question is how to stop both. I'm probably even less tolerant of interference in my life than you are by what you say, but in your visceral reaction to the word "government" you are embracing an evil just as, if not worse. Cheers, Crush
retail, airlines, securities, internet. Virtually anywhere you live, you have choices of stores and products, you can fly on a variety of airlines, you can get increasingly better fees on trades, and you have a choice of ISP's. I could even throw banking in there, all it takes is a little work
Well, actually not. As an example: where I lived for 5 years I witnessed the emergence of a large number of independent coffee shops, most of which were great. Along came one of the largest chains, opened stores sometimes right _beside_ these low budget operations. They ended up closing a few of them and those that survive find times tighter than they were. Yeah, I choose, but the large chain was trying to shut them down. A choice that allows me to take it or leave it is no choice.
Banks - banks have been gradually merging in many parts of the world. Canada certainly has fewer banks now than it once did. These institutions occupy a unique place in our society - we want large stable institutions, we don't want entrepeneurial risk taking. So it's not a good venue for competition - let the government run it. Otherwise we get what....? Junk bonds?, lost savings, people thinking that they understood enough to make an informed decision. You may be one of the few people with enough time, intelligence and expertise to research this area, but I submit that you are in a minority.
Your proposal that we all go out and research everything individually appeals to the arrogant side of me (I'm quite lopsided) strongly, but consider the inefficiency - we could all theoretically do without any FDA rules, FCC rules etc...you ate the burger? didn't you check up on E.coli 0157?..there was a paper in Microbiology Reviews just the other year on its prevalence in ground beef. Regulation on our behalf in the hands of an elected, re-callable ombudsperson is more workable.
If the larger company tenders an offer and the smaller accepts and goes to Aruba, well God bless 'em.
Amen to that as far as those being bought goes - but how is that going to affect the other small competitors? They probably can't match the tender. So, what happens if they're left with a useful, cutting-edge technology, which, like most things, needs other technologies to interact with? If those other technologies are all owned by a potential rival, they're screwed.
Size is not necessarily bad. In Smith's time, size and lack of size was much more of an encumberance than today, due to lack of communication and transport options. A large company can be efficient today in a way that it could not before, and a small company can compete over a geographically large area in a way that it could not before. Size is becoming less relevant
So, large companies become more efficient, offsetting the advantage of small companies in increased geographical distribution in the struggle for marketplace dominance. Seems like a net gain of zero for smaller companies.
new telecom options are emerging, and are emerging slowly.
hmm....sometime in the future? Sounds good, the future is going to be magical.
CLEC's are emerging to take advantage of the existing POTS network through colocation
I'm ignorant of what these acronyms mean. Perhaps your argument would be more convincing if I knew what they were.
With regard to the customer taking his business elsewhere, I can only say once again that a take-it-or-leave-it choice is no choice. Nor, to my mind is being offered a choice between two unacceptable alternative, or three. The free-market with its attendant court-cases, lack of planning and inefficiency is thankfully not something that has operated unchecked in the US and the first world for the last 50 years. The evidence of the success of a highly regulated, government controlled economy is there for all to see: Germany, Japan, the US , France to some extent. All these nations funnel huge amounts of tax-payers money into the manufacturing industries through, for example, the Pentagon budget. This drives research in technology which it would be unprofitable for entrepeneurial companies to do. Examples of countries that adopt true free market policies are Thailand, Brazil and Malaysia.
With regard to capitalism being around for 1000s versus 100s of years, true in a weak sense. Yet the ideas of interest rates and banks dates only from about 1600 and it is these financial tools that allow capital to flow freely. And it is only during the last century and a half that this system developed internationally.
Whoever moderated this as flamebait is merely interested in suppressing dissent. I can only assume that it is someone that has NO idea what libertarianism is about. Certainly their actions are at complete odds with the tenets of open debate. My post attempt to expose flaws in commonly held assumptions about markets being self-regulating, whereas one of the foremost philosophers of the free-market argued that this was not so, in his often quoted, rarely read works.
Nope. A corporation is a physical entity - very different from an idea. An idea like information has very different modes of reproduction and dissemination. Isn't that what all the cyber-libertarians/OSS folks would claim? It is one of the central points that ESR makes at any rate.
The larger the biological entity [...] the more it suffers when a major change takes place inside that environment.
Again, not so. Consider how much a human suffers compared to a bacterium if the ground they are both located on becomes too hot. The human using his extra resources is able to change his immediate environment but the bacterium can't. Bacteria tend to be more specialized than humans as regards their metabolisms - hence they may be more susceptible to changes.
I take your point about immortality though, it was a foolish thing to say. I should have said "have a shockingly long generational span compared to other things". And, I would guess, though perhaps you can correct me on this that larger corporations tend to stay around longer? Expand or die would seem to be the motto for business.
So, with regards to a startup (they, the entrepeneurs have my warmest admiration and best wishes), I can imagine that being small is a terrible problem. I have seen it happen to friends companies...sure they're remunerated well, but there's the feeling of "we could have been great". Beamingly, and with cordial interest, Crush
was it a commodity device, or just an internal company prototype?
the specs are out there and you have the tools to hand. What you need to do is to take the Sugar-app and pipe some of it's output to the Latte-app. Then you need to re-direct the whole thing into your mouth. If you think it's too complicated then probably there's a Latte-Mini-HOWTO. Of course, a true Free Software advocate would recommend getting the beans and grinding them at home.
Look at the telecom industry
I see that it was necessary to break up Bell into smaller companies, which are now re-combining like mad, because that way they can squeeze suppliers and the work-force and negotiate from a much stronger position than small independent contractors. I look forward to seeing what happens with AOL/TW despite Case's assurances.
computer
I remember the good old days of Big Blue. I remember that before the Asian cloners got going Intel were over-priced.
automotive
I look at the fact that the automotive industry is so powerful that they have effectively wiped out public transport.
fast food industries
Ugh. Crap food at high prices. They cut out smaller business that provide tasty, interesting food. This is probably the most offensive example of big business. I am glad to say that I have eaten mass-chain-food only 6 times in the last 13 years. I much prefer the food that's available to me in several small places. Further (and this goes back to the automotive point especially) I note that once companies get to be large enough that it is a fraction of their income to lobby aggresively at Congress, contribute to the PACs, fund "think-tanks" etc., then they get to influence the legislation passed. They set the agenda. You say that there are a number of competing ISPs. Well, I'd argue that this is early days yet....there were large numbers of other oil companies before the Standard Oil Trust, but they were subsumed. Prior to this they competed fiercely on price grounds. Finally, the point isn't necessarily that they are ONLY big - it's how many of them are there? Would you worry if there were 2,3,....1? Wouldn't you rather that they were lean, mean and desperate to please? I know I would.