> I haven't read nearly enough articles to say for sure on this. But, before all this public jousting did SCO try and privately/sanely/calmly explain their point of view to IBM?
Explaining their POV would require deciding on a POV first, i.e. is it a copyright violation, a patent violation, or a breach of contract?
And if it were a copyright violation, explaining their POV would require pointing to the code in question, which they have been at some trouble to avoid.
> >... but have not indicated any evidence of that (except for the general thought that if they knew they'd pirated it, they wouldn't be stupid enough to bring it to everyone's attention
> You would think so wouldnâ(TM)t you, but it is possible that they did. They were pissed at IBM and they seem to have this unshakable belief that Linux was developing too fast to be done legally. So some manager has a suspicion that their precious code is being copied & orders an audit. Someone else come up with some 'copied' code. Both are completely clueless as to who copied the code from whom.
I wonder whether any SCO techies are trying to tell management that they are about to shoot both legs off, and being completely ignored by management since they're mere techies.
> Well, there sure are a lot of chemical/rad suits in a country that's free of such weaponry....
Yeah, it broke my irony meter when the war coverage made so much of all the protective gear the US troops were discovering, then in the next segment showed US troops trying on their own protective gear.
> Kevin Rose from TechTV has built a 20,000-volt shocking Xbox controller. Imagine playing your friends in Mortal Kombat now... you can actually feel the pain.
Whatever happened to the good old days, when you and your friends just threw dirt clods at each other?
> As I remember from high school biology, doesn't only a small percentage of our DNA code for useful information? The reset was just junk that is cut out during protein synthesis (introns? extrons? I forget the terms...)
> It seems that they optimize each application individually at thieir labs. But an average of 50% compression on already compressed binary files seems to be too good to be true. Anyone familiar with how someone may be able to achieve this?
Maybe they're just removing the bloat. I've read on comp.risks about a guy who disassembled Windows regedit and found embedded strings and even images, which were not actually used in the application program.
But the link is not at all clear about what they are actually doing. For that matter their basic claim about how much compression they're getting vis-a-vis ordinary methods is very vaguely worded.
> How can Bill Gates be connected to the BSA? (Boy Scouts of America) Is Bill... trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent? I think not!
> The coincidental 6k years for MTeve and same approx date from biblical records is merely that, a coincidence. Some people though don't reject that big a coincidence as lightly.
The "coincidence" is irrelevant, because (a) it is now known that the site in question is not appropriate for calibrating a biological clock, and (b) the "mitochondrial Eve", regardless of the dating, does not indicate when the species originated.
And then there's the date of the "y Adam", which sadly does not support your coincidence-based thinking.
You do understand what "mitochondrial Eve" and "y Adam" are all about, don't you? Why they represent a terminus ante quem for the origin of the species rather than a date for the origin of the species? And why their lifetimes could have been many millenia apart? And that the labels of "Adam" and "Eve" were good ways of catching the public's imagination, but are actually very misleading?
>... funny; studies have shown there were more than 7x more bug fixes/patches for Linux last year than for Windows.
And that's precisely the problem I was referring to.
You don't evaluate a system's security by the number of fixes it has; you evaluate it by the number of things that need fixes.
> I know my Linux box at work has 3 or 4 updates every day.
Could you be bothered to list the 93 to 124 updates you got during the past month? I subscribe to my distro's update announcement list, and I don't think I average even 3 or 4 announcements per week, even if you count updates for all the applictations in the distro, including stuff I haven't got installed and stuff that doesn't apply to the OS version or hardware platform that I'm running on.
For example, if I count correctly there have been a total of 115 updates for Red Hat 7.3 in the past 13 months, an average of only about 2 per week, including both security fixes and non-security bugfixes, and including all the applications in the distribution as well as the operating system.
RH9 has a higher rate to date, being a recent major release, but if I count correctly it is still less than one per day, including both security fixes and non-security bug fixes, and including all the applications in the distribution as well as the operating system.
After filtering out the stuff that doesn't actually apply to me (special hardware, uninstalled software), I would guess that on average I actually apply about two updates per month.
> > It's sure starting to look like Syria is queued up for the next liberation. s/Syria/Iran/
>...wouldn't that mean Iran is replacing Syria?
Yes... and that's the way I intended it. At first it looked like Syria would be next, but after I wrote that original.sig it looks like the Administration has shifted its attention to Iran, so I modified it.
> Giving the benefit of the doubt that the bible simply didn't count women, you have 9 breeding pairs. (Noah, his wife, 8 sons, 8 wives.)
Actually, the standard version of the story says 3 sons and 3 wives; thus only three breeding pairs. The story in Genesis clearly states that the three sons repopulated the whole earth, so Noah and his wife cannot be counted as a fourth breeding pair.
And of course you get a genetic bottleneck of a mere 5 people (Noah, Mrs. Noah, and the three daughters in law) unless Mrs. Noah screwed around, in which case the three sons could each have 50% of their DNA from outsiders and 50% from Noah, giving 5 people plus three halves, or 6.5 "virtual people" if you want to do the math that way. (And notice that the 6.5 goes beyond biblical literalism, since the Genesis story plainly states, at least twice, that the three boys were the sons of Noah.)
The flood myth really doesn't match this news story very well, offering a maximum of 6.5 people at 4000-5000 years ago instead of ~2000 people at 70,000 years ago. Those would be very different genetic bottlenecks, in terms of the genetic diversity that would be seen in the species today.
But this pales with respect to the problems for the "unclean" species, which would have all been winnowed down to a single breeding pair at the 4000-5000 year ago horizon....to say nothing of the problems for trees and freshwater fish, but that's a completely different discussion.
BTW, notice that we have human bodies from hundreds or even thousands of years ago, which is to say a great fraction of the way back to the purported date of the purported flood. Does anyone who believes the flood myth want to make a clear, unambiguous statement about what we should find regarding the genetic diversity of those bodies?
> Graph the data, It's remarkable how immediately after the flood, lifespans dropped like that!
Which of course makes your claim completely useless as an explanation of how the species survived after the flood - even if it were true. You have apparently forgotten the context in which you first brought it up.
> On a related note, mitochondrial DNA seems to indicate that our common mother (mitochondrial eve) existed ~6000 years ago, less than the 70,000 years proposed here. It was originally thought that mitochondrial eve existed ~200-250,000 years ago. However, new research in 1997 (off memory) indicated that mutations in mtDNA occurred far more rapidly than assumed (assumptions were based on evolutionary expectations for mitochondrial eve). This resulted in the new date. Take note: I've had many evolutionists come back and quote the original article saying "See! It says 200,000 years, not the 6,000 creationists quote. Just another example of creationist lies". However, they failed to look at the top of the article which was dated (Again, off memory) 1996, a year before the new research was discovered. I thought I'd mention that to save potential embarrasment.
Actually, the Loewe and Sherer letter cited by your favorite creationist Web site does not argue for a 6,000 year old mitochondiral eve; they merely mention in passing that that would be the untenable effect of basing a molecular clock on one specific mDNA site that has come under investigation. They spend the rest of their letter proposing ways of understanding the mutation rates that would naively yield the date that they themselves reject.
If you search for "mitochondrial eve" at PubMed and read the abstracts of more recent papers you will see other papers cautioning the use of mDNA for calibrating biological clocks.
Also, very recent articles are still dating the y-Adam to 50,000-170,000 years ago. This is somewhat problematic for people who misunderstand "mitochondrial eve" to be the female founder of the species and think she lived a mere 6,000 years ago, as she would have had to get bonked by a 44,000-164,000 year old man. [cite: Howard JM, '"Mitochondrial Eve", "Y Chromosome Adam", testosterone, and human evolution', Riv Biol. 2002 May-Aug;95(2):319-25 - though I have only seen the abstract, which is available on PubMed.]
> Swim? I thought we were the only primates who canâ(TM)t swim instinctively.
Supposedly chimps have so little body fat that they sink like a rock in the water, and zoos have to be careful about using moat in their chimp displays like they do with so many other animals.
> Could the biblical story of Noah's ark explain this, as a worldwide flood leaving only a single family of eight alive will achieve this effect of everyone having similar genes.
No. As others have already pointed out, (a) the biblical flood supposedly happened 4000-5000 years ago, not 70,000 years ago, and (b) geology soundly refutes any and all claims of a global flood (this being realized by the parsons who invented geology, already by 1820), and (c) all animals would also have to have genetic bottlenecks at the same time (or more recent, due to other causes), and (d) there are a very large number of additional problems with the flood yarn, which we can go into if you wish.
Of course, you could always sweep everything under the rug by claiming that God patched everything up with miracles afterward, to make it look like the flood never happened. But theology is no more capable of investigating such bizarre claims than science is.
> Before you mod me down into oblivion for sounding like a self-righteous Creationist, do note that other cultures have references to a catastrophical flood
And lots of cultures have references to multiple gods. Do you put the same weight on those traditions, or do you just pick the ones that you think supports your own position?
> (such as the Chinese, apparently the character for ship is that story).
I think that particular claim is that the character is the composition of the characters for "8" and "mouth". Extraordinarily weak evidence for a flood, even if the claim about the symbols is true. Basically someone has noticed that out of all the writing systems in the world they can find one symbol that has a very weak association with one story in their favorite mythology. This is nothing more than a posteriori data scumming.[*] Given the amount of data they have to work with, the only surprise is that they haven't found a better match with the target mythology.
[*] I use the roguelike term "scumming", since the obvious "data mining" has a very different connotation.
> I'm surprised that article didn't pick up on the theory that the bottleneck in the genetic line about 70K years ago might well have been due to the eruption of the Toba supervolcano that was regarded as one of the most significant eruptions in the last 2 million years.
Yeah, this "news" is pretty old. I've heard the exact hypothesis that you suggest scores of times on talk.origins over the past several years.
Slashdot Mirror
> I haven't read nearly enough articles to say for sure on this. But, before all this public jousting did SCO try and privately/sanely/calmly explain their point of view to IBM?
Explaining their POV would require deciding on a POV first, i.e. is it a copyright violation, a patent violation, or a breach of contract?
And if it were a copyright violation, explaining their POV would require pointing to the code in question, which they have been at some trouble to avoid.
> You know what would be even cooler? If they took it to court, and they did have the evidence to prove it, and they won.
Problem is, SCO isn't acting like a corporation that has the facts on its side.
If they did, they wouldn't need deadlines like this; they'd be overjoyed to let it go to court, or to let IBM approach them with an offer.
> Does anyone have any ideas for projects or activities which would be worthwhile?
Change the name of the club, hide the computers away, clean up the place, and invite some girls over.
> >
> You would think so wouldnâ(TM)t you, but it is possible that they did. They were pissed at IBM and they seem to have this unshakable belief that Linux was developing too fast to be done legally. So some manager has a suspicion that their precious code is being copied & orders an audit. Someone else come up with some 'copied' code. Both are completely clueless as to who copied the code from whom.
I wonder whether any SCO techies are trying to tell management that they are about to shoot both legs off, and being completely ignored by management since they're mere techies.
> Well, there sure are a lot of chemical/rad suits in a country that's free of such weaponry....
Yeah, it broke my irony meter when the war coverage made so much of all the protective gear the US troops were discovering, then in the next segment showed US troops trying on their own protective gear.
"Spin control", I think they call it.
> Kevin Rose from TechTV has built a 20,000-volt shocking Xbox controller. Imagine playing your friends in Mortal Kombat now... you can actually feel the pain.
Whatever happened to the good old days, when you and your friends just threw dirt clods at each other?
> As I remember from high school biology, doesn't only a small percentage of our DNA code for useful information? The reset was just junk that is cut out during protein synthesis (introns? extrons? I forget the terms...)
I think they call the junk "enrons".
> It seems that they optimize each application individually at thieir labs. But an average of 50% compression on already compressed binary files seems to be too good to be true. Anyone familiar with how someone may be able to achieve this?
Maybe they're just removing the bloat. I've read on comp.risks about a guy who disassembled Windows regedit and found embedded strings and even images, which were not actually used in the application program.
But the link is not at all clear about what they are actually doing. For that matter their basic claim about how much compression they're getting vis-a-vis ordinary methods is very vaguely worded.
> How can Bill Gates be connected to the BSA? (Boy Scouts of America) Is Bill... trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent? I think not!
But he's not Gay, so they let him in anyway.
I thought you were serious until I got the the argument that Clinton would have to be a liar before your opponent could be correct.
> By the way, I'm German (remember that country that was against starting that war that ended up being groundless.. yeah)
Ah, but W has assured us that the evidence will eventually turn up.
> Who Opposes Open Source Software In Government?
To a first approximation I'd guess it as "those who've been paid to do so by companies who view FOSS as competition".
> Similar things could be done for other file types: Removing quotes [...]
When I have files with lots of quotes in them I reduce the size by using single quotes instead of double quotes.
> The coincidental 6k years for MTeve and same approx date from biblical records is merely that, a coincidence. Some people though don't reject that big a coincidence as lightly.
The "coincidence" is irrelevant, because (a) it is now known that the site in question is not appropriate for calibrating a biological clock, and (b) the "mitochondrial Eve", regardless of the dating, does not indicate when the species originated.
And then there's the date of the "y Adam", which sadly does not support your coincidence-based thinking.
You do understand what "mitochondrial Eve" and "y Adam" are all about, don't you? Why they represent a terminus ante quem for the origin of the species rather than a date for the origin of the species? And why their lifetimes could have been many millenia apart? And that the labels of "Adam" and "Eve" were good ways of catching the public's imagination, but are actually very misleading?
> My alarm was a few minutes early; can't set an alarm for 1:58 PM
You just gave away that you're not a dyed-in-the-wool geek.
>
And that's precisely the problem I was referring to.
You don't evaluate a system's security by the number of fixes it has; you evaluate it by the number of things that need fixes.
> I know my Linux box at work has 3 or 4 updates every day.
Could you be bothered to list the 93 to 124 updates you got during the past month? I subscribe to my distro's update announcement list, and I don't think I average even 3 or 4 announcements per week, even if you count updates for all the applictations in the distro, including stuff I haven't got installed and stuff that doesn't apply to the OS version or hardware platform that I'm running on.
For example, if I count correctly there have been a total of 115 updates for Red Hat 7.3 in the past 13 months, an average of only about 2 per week, including both security fixes and non-security bugfixes, and including all the applications in the distribution as well as the operating system.
RH9 has a higher rate to date, being a recent major release, but if I count correctly it is still less than one per day, including both security fixes and non-security bug fixes, and including all the applications in the distribution as well as the operating system.
After filtering out the stuff that doesn't actually apply to me (special hardware, uninstalled software), I would guess that on average I actually apply about two updates per month.
> > It's sure starting to look like Syria is queued up for the next liberation. s/Syria/Iran/
>
Yes... and that's the way I intended it. At first it looked like Syria would be next, but after I wrote that original
So has MS decided that it's easier to chase the horse down after it escapes of the barn, rather than just closing the barn door?
> Giving the benefit of the doubt that the bible simply didn't count women, you have 9 breeding pairs. (Noah, his wife, 8 sons, 8 wives.)
Actually, the standard version of the story says 3 sons and 3 wives; thus only three breeding pairs. The story in Genesis clearly states that the three sons repopulated the whole earth, so Noah and his wife cannot be counted as a fourth breeding pair.
And of course you get a genetic bottleneck of a mere 5 people (Noah, Mrs. Noah, and the three daughters in law) unless Mrs. Noah screwed around, in which case the three sons could each have 50% of their DNA from outsiders and 50% from Noah, giving 5 people plus three halves, or 6.5 "virtual people" if you want to do the math that way. (And notice that the 6.5 goes beyond biblical literalism, since the Genesis story plainly states, at least twice, that the three boys were the sons of Noah.)
The flood myth really doesn't match this news story very well, offering a maximum of 6.5 people at 4000-5000 years ago instead of ~2000 people at 70,000 years ago. Those would be very different genetic bottlenecks, in terms of the genetic diversity that would be seen in the species today.
But this pales with respect to the problems for the "unclean" species, which would have all been winnowed down to a single breeding pair at the 4000-5000 year ago horizon.
BTW, notice that we have human bodies from hundreds or even thousands of years ago, which is to say a great fraction of the way back to the purported date of the purported flood. Does anyone who believes the flood myth want to make a clear, unambiguous statement about what we should find regarding the genetic diversity of those bodies?
> Graph the data, It's remarkable how immediately after the flood, lifespans dropped like that!
Which of course makes your claim completely useless as an explanation of how the species survived after the flood - even if it were true. You have apparently forgotten the context in which you first brought it up.
> On a related note, mitochondrial DNA seems to indicate that our common mother (mitochondrial eve) existed ~6000 years ago, less than the 70,000 years proposed here. It was originally thought that mitochondrial eve existed ~200-250,000 years ago. However, new research in 1997 (off memory) indicated that mutations in mtDNA occurred far more rapidly than assumed (assumptions were based on evolutionary expectations for mitochondrial eve). This resulted in the new date. Take note: I've had many evolutionists come back and quote the original article saying "See! It says 200,000 years, not the 6,000 creationists quote. Just another example of creationist lies". However, they failed to look at the top of the article which was dated (Again, off memory) 1996, a year before the new research was discovered. I thought I'd mention that to save potential embarrasment.
Actually, the Loewe and Sherer letter cited by your favorite creationist Web site does not argue for a 6,000 year old mitochondiral eve; they merely mention in passing that that would be the untenable effect of basing a molecular clock on one specific mDNA site that has come under investigation. They spend the rest of their letter proposing ways of understanding the mutation rates that would naively yield the date that they themselves reject.
If you search for "mitochondrial eve" at PubMed and read the abstracts of more recent papers you will see other papers cautioning the use of mDNA for calibrating biological clocks.
Also, very recent articles are still dating the y-Adam to 50,000-170,000 years ago. This is somewhat problematic for people who misunderstand "mitochondrial eve" to be the female founder of the species and think she lived a mere 6,000 years ago, as she would have had to get bonked by a 44,000-164,000 year old man. [cite: Howard JM, '"Mitochondrial Eve", "Y Chromosome Adam", testosterone, and human evolution', Riv Biol. 2002 May-Aug;95(2):319-25 - though I have only seen the abstract, which is available on PubMed.]
> Swim? I thought we were the only primates who canâ(TM)t swim instinctively.
Supposedly chimps have so little body fat that they sink like a rock in the water, and zoos have to be careful about using moat in their chimp displays like they do with so many other animals.
> > "Lose our virginity."
> Riight...
He seems to be arguing that geeks aren't humans.
> Could the biblical story of Noah's ark explain this, as a worldwide flood leaving only a single family of eight alive will achieve this effect of everyone having similar genes.
No. As others have already pointed out, (a) the biblical flood supposedly happened 4000-5000 years ago, not 70,000 years ago, and (b) geology soundly refutes any and all claims of a global flood (this being realized by the parsons who invented geology, already by 1820), and (c) all animals would also have to have genetic bottlenecks at the same time (or more recent, due to other causes), and (d) there are a very large number of additional problems with the flood yarn, which we can go into if you wish.
Of course, you could always sweep everything under the rug by claiming that God patched everything up with miracles afterward, to make it look like the flood never happened. But theology is no more capable of investigating such bizarre claims than science is.
> Before you mod me down into oblivion for sounding like a self-righteous Creationist, do note that other cultures have references to a catastrophical flood
And lots of cultures have references to multiple gods. Do you put the same weight on those traditions, or do you just pick the ones that you think supports your own position?
> (such as the Chinese, apparently the character for ship is that story).
I think that particular claim is that the character is the composition of the characters for "8" and "mouth". Extraordinarily weak evidence for a flood, even if the claim about the symbols is true. Basically someone has noticed that out of all the writing systems in the world they can find one symbol that has a very weak association with one story in their favorite mythology. This is nothing more than a posteriori data scumming.[*] Given the amount of data they have to work with, the only surprise is that they haven't found a better match with the target mythology.
[*] I use the roguelike term "scumming", since the obvious "data mining" has a very different connotation.
> I'm surprised that article didn't pick up on the theory that the bottleneck in the genetic line about 70K years ago might well have been due to the eruption of the Toba supervolcano that was regarded as one of the most significant eruptions in the last 2 million years.
Yeah, this "news" is pretty old. I've heard the exact hypothesis that you suggest scores of times on talk.origins over the past several years.