Why would anyone want to use Linux as their everyday desktop (or laptop) operating system?
Why not? It simply works, I can do whatever I want.
And you can do that without having to buy (or steal) 50 expensive software packages to get the complete functionality you expect of a desktop or laptop workstation.
I only keep a Windows box around so I can play commercial games. For me, it's just a glorified game console.
Who's losing jobs? Studio musicians, recording engineers, producers, arrangers, song writers etc... Although part of this is due to other technological developments (more sophisticated softsynths, sampling, home studios with computer-based DAWs) - then again I work in the music industry (as a recording/mix engineer at a rather large Los Angeles studio)... But I do see a lot of my colleagues who had great careers no longer able to find steady work (no musician can recoup what it costs to really make a well produced album.) Obviously there will be outliers who can truly do it themselves at a high level - but to me it's sad to see my art-form decay due to lack of industry./rant
I sympathize with that, and indeed I feel a lot of nostalgia for the days of multi-track tape recorders.
But in the context of this article, how many of those job losses would you attribute to piracy?
7000-year cycle? As a Christian that thinks there is more to YEC than most people (who haven't read any of it) believe, I've never once in all my travels heard of a 7000-year-cycle.
Some millenialists think history mimics the week, with one day = 1000 years. The seventh day is the end-times, when Satan is given dominion over the earth for 1000 years.
Conveniently, when coupled with Bishop Ussher's chronology, that means that the end times are going to start any day now.
But if you're going to go all numerological on your religion, why not go with a clever observation about the zodiacal ages: We've spent the last 2000 years in the Age of Pices - and the fish is a symbol of the Christian faith. Before that we had the ages of the Ram and the Bull, mandated sacrifices in many religions during those eras. But now we're entering the Age of Aquarius - make what you will of the water bearer as a sacred symbol.
I've read the literature and seen the videos from the people who believe the word-for-word literal meaning of Genesis. It just doesn't align with science that we can touch and feel. So that limits the choices.
1. Give up on the science that I can prove.
2. Give up on the religion that I believe.
Sane people give up what the believe, when they can prove things that contradict it.
3. Accept that science is how and the Bible is why.
Except that there's not really a clean distinction between the two concepts. E.g., science tells us why the Earth is (approximately) spherical, and the Bible makes claims about how things happened. (Including things that didn't actually happen...)
There's a 4th that some suggest, that God created the Earth as in Genesis as we see it today. That millions of years of plate tectonics and erosion we see were just put there all at once for us.
Ah, yes. Omphalism: God created Adam and Eve with navals, even though they weren't born. Because, because, because... Well, it would actually have been a stupid thing for God to do, wouldn't it.
Anyways, if one can accept that the Bible is an explanation and a guide on how to live our lives, suddenly it and science start to align in really amazing ways.
But why would you accept that, even if there was nothing contrafactual in it? Why not choose some other culture's sacred precepts for your guide?
One of those is that something happened long ago that nearly wiped out the human race. Flood? Maybe. Meteor? We have geologic evidence for that. Volcano? Plague? Solar eruption? It really doesn't matter.
So if you're going to interpret the Bible as referencing something other that what it actually says, why believe it at all?
Maybe it uses the same technique to "reveal" spiritual principles. I.e., means anything you want it to mean, other than what it says?
All that matters is that God had a reason to start over from one or a very small number of humans, and did it.
Yes, he repented creating such a vile species as ourselves (so much for his purported prescience), and decided to destroy it with a Rube Goldberg mechanism that also drowned all the world's kittens, rather than just magically uncreating the evildooers. And worse, his fix didn't work: we're still as wicked as ever.
Why do you keep trying to rationalize and reinterpret a mythology that's so obviously bogus? Wouldn't it make more sense to just ditch it?
You're showing a loyalty that would be admirable, *if* it was to something that deserved your loyalty. But it's just a stupid cultural tradition, so the misplaced loyalty makes you look foolish.
Could be, my goal is to resolve my belief that Genesis is likely accurate if properly read and that scientific observations should also match up without convoluted reasoning. I do my best to try to resolve the two and it sometimes comes up with interesting conclusions that I don't know a whole lot of other people who hold, but thus far I have not found anything in way of scientific evidence that can not be incorporated to match a particular understanding of the description given in Genesis. The main area I still have issue resolving is the flood. My most likely explanation would be that for the flood to occur, it would have had to occur immediately prior to plate collisions driving up our current mountain ranges (when land mass would have been relatively flat and therefore there would have been enough water to actually cover the land), however the time scale we observe for the formation of mountains doesn't seem to gel nicely.
Also, not all mountain ranges were formed at the same time. Some are being formed today, others far, far in the past. I don't know if there has ever been a mountainless Earth, since the surface cooled enough to be solid.
Prior to that, there are a number of easy time-gaps that can be introduced (for example, man's days are not numbered prior to Genesis 3, so an alternate possibility would be some very very old people as society was developing).
FWIW, one time I worked through the numbers and came up with Methusaleh dying in the year of the flood. If my numbers were correct, it raises the question of whether he was supposed to have drowned in that flood.
Studies of mitochondrial DNA suggest that the human race was narrowed down to just several or even one female at a point in our past, possibly around 180,000 years ago.
Uhm... that not what Mitochondrial Eve means. It means that everyone now living shares a common great^n grandmother. It says nothing at all about how many other women were alive at that time.
A genetic bottleneck down to a single female would of course make her the Mito Eve, but the converse is not true.
Same narrowing with males appears with the Y-chromosome. I believe the flood of Genesis is telling the story of one or more catastrophic events that nearly killed off the human race and caused the genetic narrowing we can observe today. So I think that "flood" is a metaphor for one of any number of things that could have happened over time.
There is a genetic bottleneck in human evolution, speculatively attributed to the Mt. Toba supereruption of ~70,000 years ago. But it's not nearly as tight as you would get by reducing the population to less than 8 genotypes. (Less, because the sons' DNA was just a shuffling of Ma's and Pa's DNA, plus a few mutations. So effectively the flood story would require reducing the population to just over 5 exemplars. We'd almost certainly be extinct. Sexually reproducing species require a certain minimal population to sustain themselves.)
Also, every other species would have a similarly sharp genetic bottleneck at exactly the same time. Much worse for "unclean" animals, which were limited to two exemplars, maybe slightly less bad for "clean" animals, which got 7 pairs per species (per one of the two versions of the story).
Genetics is one of the irrefutable arguments against the possibility of the story as told in the Bible.
Folk beliefs describe him as an evil spirit who loves to wander, from midnight until dawn, sneaking into the houses where there are virgin, pregnant women or widows, as a flame or a snake to torment.
That's hard to parse. I suspect he finds lots snakes to torment, but not any "virgin, pregnant women" or "widows, as a flame".
And as a final note for now: we're in no danger from this. I normally wouldn't bother writing that, but a lot of people seem jittery due to 1) the 2012 nonsense, b) the recent (coincidental) solar flares, and Î) the asteroids (DA14 and AG5) I wrote about last week. So to proclude any fear-mongering, I'll just say this supernova is something like 400 million trillion kilometers away, and probably won't even get bright enough to see in binoculars. I hope that helps assuage any fears.
I doubt that his reassurances will actually make much difference, since anyone who knows what a kilometer is already knew that it's not a threat.
This has always hurt my brain: from our frame of reference, if this supernova is ~40Mly away, is it happening now or did it happen 40M years ago?
Well, according to the most popular view of QM, a wave function doesn't collapse until an observation is made. So unless there are alien species that live closer to it and watch the skies, it has spent the last 40My in a superposition of "went nova" and "didn't go nova". So in some sense it "happened" just now.
Or maybe 40My into the future, since it will take that long for the fact that we have observed it to propagate back to the star.
It happened ~40 million years ago. We're just now seeing it.
Not a hard concept, not even relativity really. Go outside, see a gunshot from a great distance (or, well, anything else loud). You'll see it before you hear it. At such relatively short distances, light takes very little time to reach your eye, but sound takes much longer. Now increase the distance, and light takes a long time too. Bam.
So, when will we be hearing the bang from the supernova?
I've received some nice pictures of the galaxy+SN which I just posted to the blog as well. Looks like this is a Type II, the explosion of a massive star at the end of its short life.
Is Slashdot the official discussion board for your site? Not that I mind the stories, but these days every time I see something interesting on your site, I say to myself "that will be on Slashdot tomorrow".
There is a major new type of content that was not available in the original timeframe: Video Games.
Also, in 1970 every teenager didn't have to have a cell phone and all the other portable electronics that are de rigueur these days. It's possible that the music-buying demographic spends a smaller portion of their disposable income on music. (OK, that's what you were saying.)
highlights include: Lying to me about CD price hikes in the '80s
Don't forget the early period panic-mongering, "there's only going to be one limited run of your favorite album on CD, so you'd better buy it while it's on the shelves".
Until recently, when digital distribution changed everything, singles massively outsold albums. I'm just not sure where this phantom image of millions of sad people buying entire albums just to get single tracks comes from, because it's never actually been the case.
Possibly the Slashdot demographic isn't the run-out-and-buy-the-latest-top-40-hit crowd. I probably bought one single for every 10-20 LPs I bought.
And never a Super-Dooper-Deluxe-Remaster of a single, though I'm embarrassed to admit that they suckered me into buying a lot of SDDR albums.
Ah, but don't you know, all YouTube music is pirated. Even the butterflies.
I've been wondering why YouTube apparently isn't being hammered with take-down notices. You find a published song or bootleg recording, watch it, and it's still there several years later.
Maybe the labels tacitly acknowledge that it's good advertising.
I don't recall the major labels being quite so vilified in my youth.
I dunno how old you are, but they weren't exactly popular in my youth! The Sex Pistols song "EMI" kinda embodied the way people felt about them in the 70s.
And Pink Floyd, "By the way, which one's Pink?" And others.
However, I think they became much more reviled when the technology for production and distribution made them utterly useless middle-men (compared to the LP era), who insisted on maintaining their stranglehold on the market and their profits despite changing times.
The Recording Industry Association’s website has a robust and credible database that details industry sales going back to 1973, which any researcher can access for a few bucks (and annoying as I’ve found the RIAA to be on certain occasions, I applaud them for making this data available). I used it to compare the industry’s revenues in 1999 (when Napster debuted) to 2010 (the most recent available data). Sales plunged from $14.6 billion down to $6.8 billion — a drop that I rounded to $8 billion in my talk. This number is broadly supported by other sources, and I find it to be entirely credible.
OK, you find it credible twice. Any particular reason?
Also:
Are you claiming that Napster has something to do with this? If so, how much, and how do you know?
How do you take the economic melt-down into account?
How do you account for aging Baby Boomers who are losing the ability to justify shelling out for yet another remastering of LPs they bought 40 years ago?
Why calculate on revenues rather than profits?
How much of those revenues are the inherent cost of pressing a CD and putting it in a plastic box, which was *much* more common back then?
Who's losing jobs? Are musicians giving up because they can't find a gig and a sharecropper contract? Or do executives just need to hire fewer people to count their money?
So does that darn rock music these kids listen too..look at this song, its like they want these kids breakin the law!?
Well, I'm not braggin', babe, so don't put me down But I've got the fastest set of wheels in town When something comes up to me, he don't even try 'Cause if it had a set of wings, man, I know she can fly
Just a little Deuce Coupe with a flathead mill But she'll walk a Thunderbird like it's standin' still She's ported and relieved and she's stroked and bored She'll do a hundred and forty in the top end floored
Recall that the Reagan Administration cancelled the Beach Boys for some public event, because they weren't American enough for some of the party faithful.
The facts here are not in dispute. Don't we want laws to match reality?
*We* might, but unfortunately a lot of people simply don't.
And a lot of politicians have figured out that it's a winning strategy to cater to voters who want to use law (and consequently, men with guns) to forbid any behavior that they don't approve.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would anyone want to use Linux as their everyday desktop (or laptop) operating system?
Why not? It simply works, I can do whatever I want.
And you can do that without having to buy (or steal) 50 expensive software packages to get the complete functionality you expect of a desktop or laptop workstation.
I only keep a Windows box around so I can play commercial games. For me, it's just a glorified game console.
Who's losing jobs? Studio musicians, recording engineers, producers, arrangers, song writers etc... Although part of this is due to other technological developments (more sophisticated softsynths, sampling, home studios with computer-based DAWs) - then again I work in the music industry (as a recording/mix engineer at a rather large Los Angeles studio)... But I do see a lot of my colleagues who had great careers no longer able to find steady work (no musician can recoup what it costs to really make a well produced album.) Obviously there will be outliers who can truly do it themselves at a high level - but to me it's sad to see my art-form decay due to lack of industry. /rant
I sympathize with that, and indeed I feel a lot of nostalgia for the days of multi-track tape recorders.
But in the context of this article, how many of those job losses would you attribute to piracy?
7000-year cycle? As a Christian that thinks there is more to YEC than most people (who haven't read any of it) believe, I've never once in all my travels heard of a 7000-year-cycle.
Some millenialists think history mimics the week, with one day = 1000 years. The seventh day is the end-times, when Satan is given dominion over the earth for 1000 years.
Conveniently, when coupled with Bishop Ussher's chronology, that means that the end times are going to start any day now.
But if you're going to go all numerological on your religion, why not go with a clever observation about the zodiacal ages: We've spent the last 2000 years in the Age of Pices - and the fish is a symbol of the Christian faith. Before that we had the ages of the Ram and the Bull, mandated sacrifices in many religions during those eras. But now we're entering the Age of Aquarius - make what you will of the water bearer as a sacred symbol.
I've read the literature and seen the videos from the people who believe the word-for-word literal meaning of Genesis. It just doesn't align with science that we can touch and feel. So that limits the choices.
1. Give up on the science that I can prove.
2. Give up on the religion that I believe.
Sane people give up what the believe, when they can prove things that contradict it.
3. Accept that science is how and the Bible is why.
Except that there's not really a clean distinction between the two concepts. E.g., science tells us why the Earth is (approximately) spherical, and the Bible makes claims about how things happened. (Including things that didn't actually happen...)
There's a 4th that some suggest, that God created the Earth as in Genesis as we see it today. That millions of years of plate tectonics and erosion we see were just put there all at once for us.
Ah, yes. Omphalism: God created Adam and Eve with navals, even though they weren't born. Because, because, because... Well, it would actually have been a stupid thing for God to do, wouldn't it.
Anyways, if one can accept that the Bible is an explanation and a guide on how to live our lives, suddenly it and science start to align in really amazing ways.
But why would you accept that, even if there was nothing contrafactual in it? Why not choose some other culture's sacred precepts for your guide?
One of those is that something happened long ago that nearly wiped out the human race. Flood? Maybe. Meteor? We have geologic evidence for that. Volcano? Plague? Solar eruption? It really doesn't matter.
So if you're going to interpret the Bible as referencing something other that what it actually says, why believe it at all?
Maybe it uses the same technique to "reveal" spiritual principles. I.e., means anything you want it to mean, other than what it says?
All that matters is that God had a reason to start over from one or a very small number of humans, and did it.
Yes, he repented creating such a vile species as ourselves (so much for his purported prescience), and decided to destroy it with a Rube Goldberg mechanism that also drowned all the world's kittens, rather than just magically uncreating the evildooers. And worse, his fix didn't work: we're still as wicked as ever.
Why do you keep trying to rationalize and reinterpret a mythology that's so obviously bogus? Wouldn't it make more sense to just ditch it?
You're showing a loyalty that would be admirable, *if* it was to something that deserved your loyalty. But it's just a stupid cultural tradition, so the misplaced loyalty makes you look foolish.
Could be, my goal is to resolve my belief that Genesis is likely accurate if properly read and that scientific observations should also match up without convoluted reasoning. I do my best to try to resolve the two and it sometimes comes up with interesting conclusions that I don't know a whole lot of other people who hold, but thus far I have not found anything in way of scientific evidence that can not be incorporated to match a particular understanding of the description given in Genesis. The main area I still have issue resolving is the flood. My most likely explanation would be that for the flood to occur, it would have had to occur immediately prior to plate collisions driving up our current mountain ranges (when land mass would have been relatively flat and therefore there would have been enough water to actually cover the land), however the time scale we observe for the formation of mountains doesn't seem to gel nicely.
Also, not all mountain ranges were formed at the same time. Some are being formed today, others far, far in the past. I don't know if there has ever been a mountainless Earth, since the surface cooled enough to be solid.
Prior to that, there are a number of easy time-gaps that can be introduced (for example, man's days are not numbered prior to Genesis 3, so an alternate possibility would be some very very old people as society was developing).
FWIW, one time I worked through the numbers and came up with Methusaleh dying in the year of the flood. If my numbers were correct, it raises the question of whether he was supposed to have drowned in that flood.
Studies of mitochondrial DNA suggest that the human race was narrowed down to just several or even one female at a point in our past, possibly around 180,000 years ago.
Uhm... that not what Mitochondrial Eve means. It means that everyone now living shares a common great^n grandmother. It says nothing at all about how many other women were alive at that time.
A genetic bottleneck down to a single female would of course make her the Mito Eve, but the converse is not true.
Same narrowing with males appears with the Y-chromosome. I believe the flood of Genesis is telling the story of one or more catastrophic events that nearly killed off the human race and caused the genetic narrowing we can observe today. So I think that "flood" is a metaphor for one of any number of things that could have happened over time.
There is a genetic bottleneck in human evolution, speculatively attributed to the Mt. Toba supereruption of ~70,000 years ago. But it's not nearly as tight as you would get by reducing the population to less than 8 genotypes. (Less, because the sons' DNA was just a shuffling of Ma's and Pa's DNA, plus a few mutations. So effectively the flood story would require reducing the population to just over 5 exemplars. We'd almost certainly be extinct. Sexually reproducing species require a certain minimal population to sustain themselves.)
Also, every other species would have a similarly sharp genetic bottleneck at exactly the same time. Much worse for "unclean" animals, which were limited to two exemplars, maybe slightly less bad for "clean" animals, which got 7 pairs per species (per one of the two versions of the story).
Genetics is one of the irrefutable arguments against the possibility of the story as told in the Bible.
Folk beliefs describe him as an evil spirit who loves to wander, from midnight until dawn, sneaking into the houses where there are virgin, pregnant women or widows, as a flame or a snake to torment.
That's hard to parse. I suspect he finds lots snakes to torment, but not any "virgin, pregnant women" or "widows, as a flame".
From TFA (the Bad Astronomy post):
And as a final note for now: we're in no danger from this. I normally wouldn't bother writing that, but a lot of people seem jittery due to 1) the 2012 nonsense, b) the recent (coincidental) solar flares, and Î) the asteroids (DA14 and AG5) I wrote about last week. So to proclude any fear-mongering, I'll just say this supernova is something like 400 million trillion kilometers away, and probably won't even get bright enough to see in binoculars. I hope that helps assuage any fears.
I doubt that his reassurances will actually make much difference, since anyone who knows what a kilometer is already knew that it's not a threat.
This has always hurt my brain: from our frame of reference, if this supernova is ~40Mly away, is it happening now or did it happen 40M years ago?
Well, according to the most popular view of QM, a wave function doesn't collapse until an observation is made. So unless there are alien species that live closer to it and watch the skies, it has spent the last 40My in a superposition of "went nova" and "didn't go nova". So in some sense it "happened" just now.
Or maybe 40My into the future, since it will take that long for the fact that we have observed it to propagate back to the star.
Hope that makes you brain hurt less.
Huh?
It happened ~40 million years ago. We're just now seeing it.
Not a hard concept, not even relativity really. Go outside, see a gunshot from a great distance (or, well, anything else loud). You'll see it before you hear it. At such relatively short distances, light takes very little time to reach your eye, but sound takes much longer. Now increase the distance, and light takes a long time too. Bam.
So, when will we be hearing the bang from the supernova?
I've received some nice pictures of the galaxy+SN which I just posted to the blog as well. Looks like this is a Type II, the explosion of a massive star at the end of its short life.
Is Slashdot the official discussion board for your site? Not that I mind the stories, but these days every time I see something interesting on your site, I say to myself "that will be on Slashdot tomorrow".
Hear that WOOOOSH? That's the joke flying overhead 25.5 million years too late.
Yes, but we didn't have Slashdot 25.5 million years ago, so the tardiness is excusable.
Did I miss something, or don't they even try to disguise advertisement on /. anymore? o_O
You missed the Bitcoin and Tesla product placements.
I read that as "Human Bundle for Android", and wondered if phones are buying people now.
Kind of works as a metaphor for how consumer economies work...
It has to be adjusted for total content spending.
There is a major new type of content that was not available in the original timeframe: Video Games.
Also, in 1970 every teenager didn't have to have a cell phone and all the other portable electronics that are de rigueur these days. It's possible that the music-buying demographic spends a smaller portion of their disposable income on music. (OK, that's what you were saying.)
Correlation is not causation.
Are you sure the drop in revenues didn't cause piracy?
highlights include: Lying to me about CD price hikes in the '80s
Don't forget the early period panic-mongering, "there's only going to be one limited run of your favorite album on CD, so you'd better buy it while it's on the shelves".
Until recently, when digital distribution changed everything, singles massively outsold albums. I'm just not sure where this phantom image of millions of sad people buying entire albums just to get single tracks comes from, because it's never actually been the case.
Possibly the Slashdot demographic isn't the run-out-and-buy-the-latest-top-40-hit crowd. I probably bought one single for every 10-20 LPs I bought.
And never a Super-Dooper-Deluxe-Remaster of a single, though I'm embarrassed to admit that they suckered me into buying a lot of SDDR albums.
Ah, but don't you know, all YouTube music is pirated. Even the butterflies.
I've been wondering why YouTube apparently isn't being hammered with take-down notices. You find a published song or bootleg recording, watch it, and it's still there several years later.
Maybe the labels tacitly acknowledge that it's good advertising.
I don't recall the major labels being quite so vilified in my youth.
I dunno how old you are, but they weren't exactly popular in my youth! The Sex Pistols song "EMI" kinda embodied the way people felt about them in the 70s.
And Pink Floyd, "By the way, which one's Pink?" And others.
However, I think they became much more reviled when the technology for production and distribution made them utterly useless middle-men (compared to the LP era), who insisted on maintaining their stranglehold on the market and their profits despite changing times.
The Recording Industry Association’s website has a robust and credible database that details industry sales going back to 1973, which any researcher can access for a few bucks (and annoying as I’ve found the RIAA to be on certain occasions, I applaud them for making this data available). I used it to compare the industry’s revenues in 1999 (when Napster debuted) to 2010 (the most recent available data). Sales plunged from $14.6 billion down to $6.8 billion — a drop that I rounded to $8 billion in my talk. This number is broadly supported by other sources, and I find it to be entirely credible.
OK, you find it credible twice. Any particular reason?
Also:
Are you claiming that Napster has something to do with this? If so, how much, and how do you know?
How do you take the economic melt-down into account?
How do you account for aging Baby Boomers who are losing the ability to justify shelling out for yet another remastering of LPs they bought 40 years ago?
Why calculate on revenues rather than profits?
How much of those revenues are the inherent cost of pressing a CD and putting it in a plastic box, which was *much* more common back then?
Who's losing jobs? Are musicians giving up because they can't find a gig and a sharecropper contract? Or do executives just need to hire fewer people to count their money?
These raw numbers are meaningless.
Set the whole thing in space and have them speak Chinese as a second language, and I think you might have a winner!
So.....Titan AE? Even had all the backstabbing and multiple side switching and whatnot.
I thought it was a poke at Firefly.
So does that darn rock music these kids listen too..look at this song, its like they want these kids breakin the law!?
Well, I'm not braggin', babe, so don't put me down
But I've got the fastest set of wheels in town
When something comes up to me, he don't even try
'Cause if it had a set of wings, man, I know she can fly
Just a little Deuce Coupe with a flathead mill
But she'll walk a Thunderbird like it's standin' still
She's ported and relieved and she's stroked and bored
She'll do a hundred and forty in the top end floored
Recall that the Reagan Administration cancelled the Beach Boys for some public event, because they weren't American enough for some of the party faithful.
Make a bill so pants-on-head retarded
I suppose followers of Zarathustra would approve.
The facts here are not in dispute. Don't we want laws to match reality?
*We* might, but unfortunately a lot of people simply don't.
And a lot of politicians have figured out that it's a winning strategy to cater to voters who want to use law (and consequently, men with guns) to forbid any behavior that they don't approve.