> The default wording is "Under the terms of the GPL version X or later." So the author or a fork can keep using GPL2 or switch to GPL3 with no fuss.
Hmmm... What about the other way around? If a project is switched to GPL3, will the hereditary nature of the GPL mean it's still also under GPL2, whether they want it to be or not?
> Does this mean that people are willing to acknowledge that fertilization is the start of life for individuals in a species that reproduces via sperm and egg?
Weren't the sperm and egg already alive?
For test tube babies, is it ok to throw away the egg and sperm just before you put them together, but wrong a half-second later? A few chemical reactions make all the difference?
> On the other hand, human life exhibits some characteristics that are currently beyond all scientific explanation.
Everything we have a scientific explanation for was once "beyond all scientific explanation". Did that make any of it "special" in some way? Was it supernatural until we investigated it, at which point it became natural?
> In particular, I am thinking of free will
How do you know you've got free will?
> conciousness, and self-awareness
Are you sure those attributes are restricted to humans?
> No one has the slightest idea how these characteristics arise in a human
A hundred years ago we didn't know the mechanism of inheritance. Was it magic back then?
> While this doesn't necessarily imply that humans have "souls", it does leave the question very much up in the air.
It also leaves the questions of whether we have psi power and invisible tentacles up in the air.
> Therefore, it is entirely possible that your personal pile of goo is home to some extremely unusual processes.
It's possible that your personal pile of poo is home to some extremely unusual processes, but there's equally little evidence for it.
How do you know you're not destroying some transcendental being every time you flush the toilet? Shouldn't you pile that poo around in your room, just in case?
> Some have speculated, for example, that quantum mechanical uncertainity is at the heart of free will.
So, it's actually the sub-atomic particles that have the free will?
> In this sense, the difference between "human" and "a bunch of cells" is an immense one.
Well, if anyone happens to think your appeals to the supernatural and pop pseudoscience are convincing, perhaps they'll agree with you.
> while it's rather alarming to see that the "best and brightest" can be a bunch of cheating bastards
According to an Assistant Dean at my alma mater, a very large fraction of the people who get busted for cheating are pre-meds.
> if someone were to use sufficiently intimidating / esoteric math (especially if it were reasonably plausible math), they could probably fake a paper in some of the top journals and get away with it for several years.
Check out the Bogdanov Affair. A couple of French brothers wrote dissertations so abstruse that their thesis advisors couldn't understand them, but agreed to grant them PhDs anyway, conditional on the publication of three peer-reviewed papers in respectable journals. Some physicists are now arguing that the papers are nothing more than technobabble.
> If we are speaking of old civilizations...then it seems pertinent to discuss the Romans...who were permiscuous as all hell...and were pretty damn successful. The religious aspect is bunk!
I think the average Roman was as circumspect as the average American is today. The follies of the dubiously sane Ceasars makes the juiciest reading, but probably doesn't reflect the behavior or professed values of the ordinary folk.
(Of course, also like the USA and probably every other society that has ever existed, there was almost certainly a gap between said behaviors and said professed values.)
> While it is somewhat of a rarity on the grand scale of things other species practice monogamy.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monogamy
They should remove penguins from that list, since they are only monogamous for a single mating cycle (a year). They do a bit of "swapping" from year to year.
> Religion goes back as far as human history has been documented. Being that the basic tenants of religion build on each other, I often wonder if promiscuity is shunned in almost all of oldest civilizations because it comes from an implicit form of survival.
Given that some of the oldest known religions practiced temple prostitution, I think your otherwise interesting speculation may be based on a false premise.
> The people pushing "Intelligent Design" are claiming that it is "science" and should be offered as an alternative TAUGHT IN SCIENCE CLASSES to "Darwinism".
And they're lying out their asses when they claim that it's science.
Ok, only the leaders of the movement are lying; the rank and file probably make the claim out of ignorance, since our school systems are already failing miserably at teaching evolution. (The evolution deniers would probably do better if they just left the status quo in place, because most of their children would probably remain comfortably ignornant anyway, and there wouldn't be nearly so much public discussion about evolution and the weaknesses of anti-evolution claims.)
> Believe it or not, but there are a lot of people reading/. who are happy to defend Intelligent Design as "science".
I think you meant "assert that it is" rather than "defend" the idea. We see the assertion all the time, but not much by way of defending it.
When pressed in the "where's the science?" issue, the proponents of ID almost always start talking about perceived flaws in our understanding of evolution rather than addressing the very real flaws in their own claims.
> There needs to be more discussion of the possibility that natural selection is not the only driving factor in evolution.
There probably isn't a biologist alive who believes that now.
> What if some fundamental principle of life is guiding evolution? Much like how a tree grows from a seed, perhaps the entire tree of species adheres to a pattern as well. It can be partially random, but it also follows a "path of least resistance", like a ripple in water.
Good idea. All that's needed ist to pin down the details and reconcile it with the available evidence (or find new evidence). Unfortunately, ID hasn't done either, and its proponents are in the habit of making excuses whenever anyone points out that huge gap on the 'science' side of their effort.
> He doesn't make a testable statement? Neither did Darwin. Actually, Darwin did - that, as we found more fossils, we would start to find the transition forms between species. That didn't happen.
I don't know whether Darwin actually said that, but we've found zillions of fossils of transitional forms in the past 150 years.
Why is that ID only thrives where ignorance prevails? (Cue joke about mushrooms.)
> Intelligent design? As far as I know, nobody has actually refuted "Darwin's Black Box" by Michael Behe. The man is not an idiot
If you had read his testimony in the Dover case you wouldn't be saying that. Editorials have been comparing his testimony to a Monte Python skit and describing him as having "a Homer Simpson moment".
At any rate, what case do you think he makes in DBB that hasn't been refuted? His claims about irreducibly complexity being impossible for evolution has been refuted repeatedly, and his claim that a failure of evolution would be evidence for intelligent design ways a non sequitur to begin with.
Yes, under the name Ares he bonked Venus (aka Aphrodite), the wife of Vulcan (Hephaestos), who, having his suspicions, set up a trap and caught them at it in bed with a net, and then called all the other Olympians in to see his catch, and -
Ok, I guess porn wasn't read for the quality of the plots way back then either.
> Locking neck collars and cuffs.....check......whips, chains and guns........check.........rag-tag goon squad........check.........Mad Max-style vehicles.........check. Alright, I.m prepared for the after math of whatever economical, physical and enviromental damage this may cause.
> This is just so the demons can use those teleport pads to beam themselves to Earth. Here's hoping that by the time they arrive, we've figured out how to hold a flashlight AND a gun!
> People are underestimating what Microsoft is doing with search technology, says Bill Gates. The head of the software giant told the BBC that its ambition is to be bigger than Google in search.
"Whoops, here's another hot application that we didn't see coming."
Slashdot Mirror
> The default wording is "Under the terms of the GPL version X or later." So the author or a fork can keep using GPL2 or switch to GPL3 with no fuss.
Hmmm... What about the other way around? If a project is switched to GPL3, will the hereditary nature of the GPL mean it's still also under GPL2, whether they want it to be or not?
> For the sake of truly free programming, we have to tear down the zealots speaking on our behalf.
We wouldn't even be having this discussion if not for those zealots.
> Animals are not a moral standard (look up naturalistic fallacy). More generally, facts do not form a moral standard.
Nor do misstatements of fact.
But shouldn't you have directed your reply to the GP post, where some A/C argued:
>>> I have a parallel for you. How many animals in nature actively kill their young when there is no need to?
> ...but then again, why must God be unknowable or even mysterious? Maybe we're just getting closer.
Because everytime we get close to knowing Him, He turns out to be just another boring old natural process.
> Does this mean that people are willing to acknowledge that fertilization is the start of life for individuals in a species that reproduces via sperm and egg?
Weren't the sperm and egg already alive?
For test tube babies, is it ok to throw away the egg and sperm just before you put them together, but wrong a half-second later? A few chemical reactions make all the difference?
> Why mess with, quite simply, perfection?
Yes, but what about the rest of us?
> On the other hand, human life exhibits some characteristics that are currently beyond all scientific explanation.
Everything we have a scientific explanation for was once "beyond all scientific explanation". Did that make any of it "special" in some way? Was it supernatural until we investigated it, at which point it became natural?
> In particular, I am thinking of free will
How do you know you've got free will?
> conciousness, and self-awareness
Are you sure those attributes are restricted to humans?
> No one has the slightest idea how these characteristics arise in a human
A hundred years ago we didn't know the mechanism of inheritance. Was it magic back then?
> While this doesn't necessarily imply that humans have "souls", it does leave the question very much up in the air.
It also leaves the questions of whether we have psi power and invisible tentacles up in the air.
> Therefore, it is entirely possible that your personal pile of goo is home to some extremely unusual processes.
It's possible that your personal pile of poo is home to some extremely unusual processes, but there's equally little evidence for it.
How do you know you're not destroying some transcendental being every time you flush the toilet? Shouldn't you pile that poo around in your room, just in case?
> Some have speculated, for example, that quantum mechanical uncertainity is at the heart of free will.
So, it's actually the sub-atomic particles that have the free will?
> In this sense, the difference between "human" and "a bunch of cells" is an immense one.
Well, if anyone happens to think your appeals to the supernatural and pop pseudoscience are convincing, perhaps they'll agree with you.
> I have a parallel for you. How many animals in nature actively kill their young when there is no need to?
Lots of male mammals kill the children of any female they court.
(I doubt that many pro-lifers would approve that behaviour in humans.)
> Are we supposed to believe this stupid story?
It sounds like some A/C really doesn't like Chinese and Iranians.
Possibly because he couldn't compete with them in grad school, but that's just speculation.
> while it's rather alarming to see that the "best and brightest" can be a bunch of cheating bastards
According to an Assistant Dean at my alma mater, a very large fraction of the people who get busted for cheating are pre-meds.
> if someone were to use sufficiently intimidating / esoteric math (especially if it were reasonably plausible math), they could probably fake a paper in some of the top journals and get away with it for several years.
Check out the Bogdanov Affair. A couple of French brothers wrote dissertations so abstruse that their thesis advisors couldn't understand them, but agreed to grant them PhDs anyway, conditional on the publication of three peer-reviewed papers in respectable journals. Some physicists are now arguing that the papers are nothing more than technobabble.
> Hey, what's with the flamebait mod? All my post contains is a statement of fact; there's no value judgement attached.
You're new here, aren't you.
Here's a useful key:
flamebait = "some moderator disagrees with what I said"
troll = "some moderator disagrees with what I said"
overrated = "some moderator disagrees with what I said"
The other mods can usually be taken at face value, though there are exceptions.
> If we are speaking of old civilizations...then it seems pertinent to discuss the Romans...who were permiscuous as all hell...and were pretty damn successful. The religious aspect is bunk!
I think the average Roman was as circumspect as the average American is today. The follies of the dubiously sane Ceasars makes the juiciest reading, but probably doesn't reflect the behavior or professed values of the ordinary folk.
(Of course, also like the USA and probably every other society that has ever existed, there was almost certainly a gap between said behaviors and said professed values.)
> While it is somewhat of a rarity on the grand scale of things other species practice monogamy.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monogamy
They should remove penguins from that list, since they are only monogamous for a single mating cycle (a year). They do a bit of "swapping" from year to year.
> Religion goes back as far as human history has been documented. Being that the basic tenants of religion build on each other, I often wonder if promiscuity is shunned in almost all of oldest civilizations because it comes from an implicit form of survival.
Given that some of the oldest known religions practiced temple prostitution, I think your otherwise interesting speculation may be based on a false premise.
> There are people who believe that a fertilized egg is a human being.
Perhaps one of those people will step forward and explain why a fertilized egg is a human being but a sperm and an unfertilized egg aren't?
> The people pushing "Intelligent Design" are claiming that it is "science" and should be offered as an alternative TAUGHT IN SCIENCE CLASSES to "Darwinism".
And they're lying out their asses when they claim that it's science.
Ok, only the leaders of the movement are lying; the rank and file probably make the claim out of ignorance, since our school systems are already failing miserably at teaching evolution. (The evolution deniers would probably do better if they just left the status quo in place, because most of their children would probably remain comfortably ignornant anyway, and there wouldn't be nearly so much public discussion about evolution and the weaknesses of anti-evolution claims.)
> Believe it or not, but there are a lot of people reading /. who are happy to defend Intelligent Design as "science".
I think you meant "assert that it is" rather than "defend" the idea. We see the assertion all the time, but not much by way of defending it.
When pressed in the "where's the science?" issue, the proponents of ID almost always start talking about perceived flaws in our understanding of evolution rather than addressing the very real flaws in their own claims.
> There needs to be more discussion of the possibility that natural selection is not the only driving factor in evolution.
There probably isn't a biologist alive who believes that now.
> What if some fundamental principle of life is guiding evolution? Much like how a tree grows from a seed, perhaps the entire tree of species adheres to a pattern as well. It can be partially random, but it also follows a "path of least resistance", like a ripple in water.
Good idea. All that's needed ist to pin down the details and reconcile it with the available evidence (or find new evidence). Unfortunately, ID hasn't done either, and its proponents are in the habit of making excuses whenever anyone points out that huge gap on the 'science' side of their effort.
> He doesn't make a testable statement? Neither did Darwin. Actually, Darwin did - that, as we found more fossils, we would start to find the transition forms between species. That didn't happen.
I don't know whether Darwin actually said that, but we've found zillions of fossils of transitional forms in the past 150 years.
Why is that ID only thrives where ignorance prevails? (Cue joke about mushrooms.)
> Intelligent design? As far as I know, nobody has actually refuted "Darwin's Black Box" by Michael Behe. The man is not an idiot
If you had read his testimony in the Dover case you wouldn't be saying that. Editorials have been comparing his testimony to a Monte Python skit and describing him as having "a Homer Simpson moment".
At any rate, what case do you think he makes in DBB that hasn't been refuted? His claims about irreducibly complexity being impossible for evolution has been refuted repeatedly, and his claim that a failure of evolution would be evidence for intelligent design ways a non sequitur to begin with.
Turn on television, flip channels, find nothing but crap, turn it off and read a book.
Turn on radio, flip channels, find nothing but crap, turn it off and play my musical instrument.
It's kind of like:
Go to a burger stand, eat burger and shake, get sick, live off soup and water for a week.
Yes, under the name Ares he bonked Venus (aka Aphrodite), the wife of Vulcan (Hephaestos), who, having his suspicions, set up a trap and caught them at it in bed with a net, and then called all the other Olympians in to see his catch, and -
Ok, I guess porn wasn't read for the quality of the plots way back then either.
> Locking neck collars and cuffs.....check......whips, chains and guns........check.........rag-tag goon squad........check.........Mad Max-style vehicles.........check. Alright, I.m prepared for the after math of whatever economical, physical and enviromental damage this may cause.
You'll still need your inflatable doll, too.
> This is just so the demons can use those teleport pads to beam themselves to Earth. Here's hoping that by the time they arrive, we've figured out how to hold a flashlight AND a gun!
No problem, I always shoot with my eyes closed.
> People are underestimating what Microsoft is doing with search technology, says Bill Gates. The head of the software giant told the BBC that its ambition is to be bigger than Google in search.
"Whoops, here's another hot application that we didn't see coming."