I don't bother denying Evolution. I just say that it is an opinion (it is) and not scientific Fact. If it were a "fact", then it would not be called Theory.
No, you're wrong about that. In science, theories don't get promoted to facts. Theories are what *explain* facts. We knew about evolution for decades before Darwin published his hypothesis, which is the essential basis of the modern theory.
Or Music Theory.
Or Color theory (art)
or...
Atomic theory? Theory of electromagnetism? I guess those aren't facts either.
I've also come to the conclusion that the reason there is such an obsession with intellectual property is because people subconsciously know that nobody needs us.
Perhaps, but I think the main reason is that it lets people spend a bit of money to acquire something that will make them a whole lot of money, without any need for further work or creativity on the part of the new owner.
When a computer game has an exploit, people use it. All the more so when it's the economy.
That's right, blame it on religion instead of harder targets like teacher's unions that have protected terrible and under-performing teachers.
Maybe you'd like to make us a list of other jobs that pay the same as what we pay the people we entrust the next generation's education to.
Most teachers work long hours and put up with endless amounts of crap, for low wages and people like you wanting to crap on them as the cause for all our ills.
Despite the negative financial impact regulation in and of itself isn't necessarily bad.
It was de-regulation that allowed the banks to trigger our current Great Recession.
From after the Great Depression until recently there were rules that prevented the behaviors that led to it. But politicians bowed to pressure from people who wanted the 'right' to MAKE MONEY FAST, and you're living the consequences.
i've lived in the US since 1981 and it's always been like this. in the 1980's it was Japan was going to rule us. now it's china.
I think Japan was a bit earlier than that. We've been through "Made in X" for a lot of countries since it was a joke about the quality of Japanese products.
What's different now is that you could always easily buy stuff that *wasn't* "Made in X". But these days damn near everything you buy is Made in China.
And utter crap to boot. But still costs more than you used to pay for good quality stuff.
While we all like to bag on lawyers and financial types, if their jobs were truly worthless they wouldn't exist.
Worthless to WHOM?
Making sh*tgobs of mone is *always* worthwhile to someone. Whether it's worthwhile to society is another matter.
I recognize that we need lawyers, salesmen, middle managers, etc. But the relative rewards of doing those things vs. you know, actually doing something that increases the GDP, drains talent from the areas that make an economy strong.
Phishers and bank robbers also exist because somebody expects to benefit from those activities.
2: Lack of interest in R&D. Companies here either license new stuff, buy the company that has it, or litigate the company that has something they want out of existence.
Also, companies are under such pressure to produce a good quarterly report that it's hard to justify investing money in anything that won't pay off right away.
We're screwing ourselves for the long term by emphasizing short-term returns.
1: The view that engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists are "nerds" and deserve contempt,
I don't know many people who hold them in contempt, but the simple fact is that there's less economic gain in creating something useful than there is in being a manager in the company that makes it or the salesman who peddles it. Or a shareholder.
It's hard to maintain a work ethic in a society where knocking yourself out only makes the leeches rich.
I generally agree with you, but I've been alive long enough to call bullshit on "Rise of religious fundamentalism" - America is simply moving in a direction more and more in conflict with religious fundamentalism, which itself shows the decline in power of the fundamentalists.
The USA is moving in two directions. About 2/3 of us are trying to move into the 21st Century, and the other 1/3 are trying to move back to the Middle Ages.
And I'm not sure the power of the fundamentalists has declined significantly. Sure, they've made missteps and misplayed their hand a few times. But they've still got a clique of religious nutters in Congress. Look at the recent games with John Ensign, and the support of a corrupt "Christian" in the Ivory Coast over the Muslim who actually won the election.
And they continue to erode the legality of abortion and public money for family planning. ("religious right" is a euphemism for "sex-obsessed control freaks")
Wrong. The wealthy managers, board members, and CEO's made the decision to transfer all the jobs overseas. If you don't have a job, you can't afford expensive things so you buy things cheaper. The person that just took your job in China is now selling the cheap shit to you, bleeding the money out of the states while keeping an ungodly massive portion for the super-rich. http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110408/ts_yblog_thelookout/off-the-charts-income-gains-for-super-rich
If one company offshores, it's a smart business move. When everyone offshores, it's economic suicide. The well-to-do consumer class is disappearing, and that person in China isn't making *nearly* enough money to buy goods at the prices traditionally charged in the USA.
The rich are getting richer at the price of cannibalizing the economy. When it's gone, they'll be screwed too. But short-term interests prevail.
You can see here that the tax rates on top earners dropped significantly in the '80's. Previous to that, why pay someone a lot of money? They would only benefit from a small portion of it, the rest would go to taxes. I find myself thinking that money now going into executive pocketbooks used to be invested in the corporate structure. Maybe in R&D, maybe elsewhere.
The 1980s brought us the sentiment that "greed is good", and we've increasingly run the country as a cream-skimming operation for the rich since then.
Not just "for the benefit of the rich", but "for the short term benefit of the rich". Everyone expects to MAKE MONEY FAST.
Actually, they just want a fossil that we can point to and say, "This species evolved into that species." For example we keep finding primate fossils that are very close relatives to man. Unfortunately, we have never found a fossil that is a direct ancestor of man.
Someone has already responded to that last faux pas. As for the rest, consider how sparse the fossil record must be. If you went looking for the skeletons of your ancestors, what percentage of them could you find from two generations ago? From ten generations ago? A hundred generations? A thousand?
And that's a species that likes to put its dead where they can be found again.
Now consider what are the odds of any individual (dinosaur) that lived at least 65,000,000 years ago would be preserved to start with, remain undestroyed for all those years, and then be found by us. It's no surprise that some species are represented by only a single partial skeleton: Most species probably aren't represented in our collections at all.
Also, there's not necessarily a notable change in morphology when a new species arises. Biologists generally think of species in therms of interbreeding; when a population splits into two new populations due to some barrier to breeding, you may not be able to see any difference by looking at skeletons - sometimes it's purely a matter of behavior. The morphological differentiation is able to set in because of the lack of interbreeding, but it might take many, many generations before it is significant enough to identify a skeleton as belonging to one or the other.
According to Wikipedia, the familiar T. rex ranged over most of western North America for a million and a half years, and we've only got a bit over 30 specimens. "some of which are nearly complete skeletons". And then the article goes on to call this an abundance - most species are not nearly so well represented. But this "abundance" is about one full or partial skeleton from the entire species every 50,000 years - for a species numerous enough to sustain a breeding population across almost half a continent.
So go figure the odds of any species being represented at all, let alone a record that shows a single recognizable evolutionary step.
Looking for examples of "this species evolved into that" is basically a fool's errand, arising from ignorance and/or lack of critical thinking about both biology and taphonomy. Science can only find what's there to find, not any and every arbitrary demand. IMO we're lucky to be able to learn as much about our universe as we have.
It is too bad that they didn't define "much later" in the article. 230 million years ago and 205 million years ago is only about 10% difference in gap from now. If much later is 65 million years ago, then I'm not sure if this really fills a gap.
When people express interest in a "missing link", it's not the chronological gap that interests them. It's the gap in the record of the evolutionary development of features - usually morphology, when talking about dinosaurs.
Cos they get on our school boards and tell our kids what to think.
Of course, if the rest of us weren't so complacent when it's time to vote for the school board, that problem might go away.
The Texas State School Board pulled some of its usual idiocy not too many years ago, and actually motivated people to get out and vote some more sensible people in. But by the next election complacency had set in again, so the kooks got their seats back.
It's the key idea of "The Bisection of the Species", a book written by Darwin's lesser-known great-great-great-grandson who studied computer science.
A classic binary search...
Incidently, they both had similar beards.
Well I don't know about Pappy Darwin, but the Younger Darwin surely knew that he'd never get any respect as a computer scientist if he didn't have a big bushy beard.
On Monday, a three-judge appeals court panel sided with the lower court, noting that the Winklevoss twins have actually fared quite well since the settlement was hammered out
How they made out ought to be irrelevant. Either they got cheated or they didn't. If they did, they would have made out even better.
The court's statement is like saying, "sure, someone stole your money. but you have lots of other money, so it's ok".
Slashdot Mirror
What kind of sane organization rewards ineptness with a salary?
Every place I've ever worked.
I don't bother denying Evolution. I just say that it is an opinion (it is) and not scientific Fact. If it were a "fact", then it would not be called Theory.
No, you're wrong about that. In science, theories don't get promoted to facts. Theories are what *explain* facts. We knew about evolution for decades before Darwin published his hypothesis, which is the essential basis of the modern theory.
Or Music Theory.
Or Color theory (art)
or ...
Atomic theory? Theory of electromagnetism? I guess those aren't facts either.
I've also come to the conclusion that the reason there is such an obsession with intellectual property is because people subconsciously know that nobody needs us.
Perhaps, but I think the main reason is that it lets people spend a bit of money to acquire something that will make them a whole lot of money, without any need for further work or creativity on the part of the new owner.
When a computer game has an exploit, people use it. All the more so when it's the economy.
That's right, blame it on religion instead of harder targets like teacher's unions that have protected terrible and under-performing teachers.
Maybe you'd like to make us a list of other jobs that pay the same as what we pay the people we entrust the next generation's education to.
Most teachers work long hours and put up with endless amounts of crap, for low wages and people like you wanting to crap on them as the cause for all our ills.
Despite the negative financial impact regulation in and of itself isn't necessarily bad.
It was de-regulation that allowed the banks to trigger our current Great Recession.
From after the Great Depression until recently there were rules that prevented the behaviors that led to it. But politicians bowed to pressure from people who wanted the 'right' to MAKE MONEY FAST, and you're living the consequences.
That is exactly what brought it to this point ... everyone is waiting for "our leaders have done anything to address it"
Americans need to get off their fat lazy asses as take grab that ol' bull by the horns.
Maybe, but we also need to elect leaders who won't reward behavior that screws us over the longer term.
i've lived in the US since 1981 and it's always been like this. in the 1980's it was Japan was going to rule us. now it's china.
I think Japan was a bit earlier than that. We've been through "Made in X" for a lot of countries since it was a joke about the quality of Japanese products.
What's different now is that you could always easily buy stuff that *wasn't* "Made in X". But these days damn near everything you buy is Made in China.
And utter crap to boot. But still costs more than you used to pay for good quality stuff.
While we all like to bag on lawyers and financial types, if their jobs were truly worthless they wouldn't exist.
Worthless to WHOM?
Making sh*tgobs of mone is *always* worthwhile to someone. Whether it's worthwhile to society is another matter.
I recognize that we need lawyers, salesmen, middle managers, etc. But the relative rewards of doing those things vs. you know, actually doing something that increases the GDP, drains talent from the areas that make an economy strong.
Phishers and bank robbers also exist because somebody expects to benefit from those activities.
2: Lack of interest in R&D. Companies here either license new stuff, buy the company that has it, or litigate the company that has something they want out of existence.
Also, companies are under such pressure to produce a good quarterly report that it's hard to justify investing money in anything that won't pay off right away.
We're screwing ourselves for the long term by emphasizing short-term returns.
1: The view that engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists are "nerds" and deserve contempt,
I don't know many people who hold them in contempt, but the simple fact is that there's less economic gain in creating something useful than there is in being a manager in the company that makes it or the salesman who peddles it. Or a shareholder.
It's hard to maintain a work ethic in a society where knocking yourself out only makes the leeches rich.
I generally agree with you, but I've been alive long enough to call bullshit on "Rise of religious fundamentalism" - America is simply moving in a direction more and more in conflict with religious fundamentalism, which itself shows the decline in power of the fundamentalists.
The USA is moving in two directions. About 2/3 of us are trying to move into the 21st Century, and the other 1/3 are trying to move back to the Middle Ages.
And I'm not sure the power of the fundamentalists has declined significantly. Sure, they've made missteps and misplayed their hand a few times. But they've still got a clique of religious nutters in Congress. Look at the recent games with John Ensign, and the support of a corrupt "Christian" in the Ivory Coast over the Muslim who actually won the election.
And they continue to erode the legality of abortion and public money for family planning. ("religious right" is a euphemism for "sex-obsessed control freaks")
Wrong. The wealthy managers, board members, and CEO's made the decision to transfer all the jobs overseas. If you don't have a job, you can't afford expensive things so you buy things cheaper. The person that just took your job in China is now selling the cheap shit to you, bleeding the money out of the states while keeping an ungodly massive portion for the super-rich. http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110408/ts_yblog_thelookout/off-the-charts-income-gains-for-super-rich
If one company offshores, it's a smart business move. When everyone offshores, it's economic suicide. The well-to-do consumer class is disappearing, and that person in China isn't making *nearly* enough money to buy goods at the prices traditionally charged in the USA.
The rich are getting richer at the price of cannibalizing the economy. When it's gone, they'll be screwed too. But short-term interests prevail.
You can see here that the tax rates on top earners dropped significantly in the '80's. Previous to that, why pay someone a lot of money? They would only benefit from a small portion of it, the rest would go to taxes. I find myself thinking that money now going into executive pocketbooks used to be invested in the corporate structure. Maybe in R&D, maybe elsewhere.
The 1980s brought us the sentiment that "greed is good", and we've increasingly run the country as a cream-skimming operation for the rich since then.
Not just "for the benefit of the rich", but "for the short term benefit of the rich". Everyone expects to MAKE MONEY FAST.
This is the second article about evolution in four hours!
Actually, they just want a fossil that we can point to and say, "This species evolved into that species." For example we keep finding primate fossils that are very close relatives to man. Unfortunately, we have never found a fossil that is a direct ancestor of man.
Someone has already responded to that last faux pas. As for the rest, consider how sparse the fossil record must be. If you went looking for the skeletons of your ancestors, what percentage of them could you find from two generations ago? From ten generations ago? A hundred generations? A thousand?
And that's a species that likes to put its dead where they can be found again.
Now consider what are the odds of any individual (dinosaur) that lived at least 65,000,000 years ago would be preserved to start with, remain undestroyed for all those years, and then be found by us. It's no surprise that some species are represented by only a single partial skeleton: Most species probably aren't represented in our collections at all.
Also, there's not necessarily a notable change in morphology when a new species arises. Biologists generally think of species in therms of interbreeding; when a population splits into two new populations due to some barrier to breeding, you may not be able to see any difference by looking at skeletons - sometimes it's purely a matter of behavior. The morphological differentiation is able to set in because of the lack of interbreeding, but it might take many, many generations before it is significant enough to identify a skeleton as belonging to one or the other.
According to Wikipedia, the familiar T. rex ranged over most of western North America for a million and a half years, and we've only got a bit over 30 specimens. "some of which are nearly complete skeletons". And then the article goes on to call this an abundance - most species are not nearly so well represented. But this "abundance" is about one full or partial skeleton from the entire species every 50,000 years - for a species numerous enough to sustain a breeding population across almost half a continent.
So go figure the odds of any species being represented at all, let alone a record that shows a single recognizable evolutionary step.
Looking for examples of "this species evolved into that" is basically a fool's errand, arising from ignorance and/or lack of critical thinking about both biology and taphonomy. Science can only find what's there to find, not any and every arbitrary demand. IMO we're lucky to be able to learn as much about our universe as we have.
It is too bad that they didn't define "much later" in the article. 230 million years ago and 205 million years ago is only about 10% difference in gap from now. If much later is 65 million years ago, then I'm not sure if this really fills a gap.
When people express interest in a "missing link", it's not the chronological gap that interests them. It's the gap in the record of the evolutionary development of features - usually morphology, when talking about dinosaurs.
Cos they get on our school boards and tell our kids what to think.
Of course, if the rest of us weren't so complacent when it's time to vote for the school board, that problem might go away.
The Texas State School Board pulled some of its usual idiocy not too many years ago, and actually motivated people to get out and vote some more sensible people in. But by the next election complacency had set in again, so the kooks got their seats back.
But then of course, Netcraft confirms that FreeBSD is dead.
And so are the dinosaurs - I think you're on to something!
It's the key idea of "The Bisection of the Species", a book written by Darwin's lesser-known great-great-great-grandson who studied computer science.
A classic binary search...
Incidently, they both had similar beards.
Well I don't know about Pappy Darwin, but the Younger Darwin surely knew that he'd never get any respect as a computer scientist if he didn't have a big bushy beard.
At least if he used UNIX...
Note, for reference, that since the Democrats took over the Congress again, we've added another $4.5 trillion.
In annual shortfall, or total debt?
We continue to bleed for a recreational war, a mismanaged war, and tax cuts for billionaires.
Do you have any idea how much our funding shortfall grew during the Bush + Republican Congress years?
You should learn to look at what politicians actually do, rather than believing what they say.
A Democrat in favor of increased taxes - is there a person on the planet who's actually surprised by this?
Nope. We've got tax-and-spend Democrats, and don't-tax-and-spend-more Republicans.
I think there's a constitutional issue that forbids it.
On Monday, a three-judge appeals court panel sided with the lower court, noting that the Winklevoss twins have actually fared quite well since the settlement was hammered out
How they made out ought to be irrelevant. Either they got cheated or they didn't. If they did, they would have made out even better.
The court's statement is like saying, "sure, someone stole your money. but you have lots of other money, so it's ok".
Also, that is a major MAJOR headline fail.
You're new around here, aren't you.