> We all saw what good a paper trail did in Florida in the 2000 USA presidential campaign.
The sad thing about the 2000 Florida vote is that the problem was thoroughly preventable. The same problem showed up in the previous election and an investigative commission determined that the way to fix it was to switch to a different kind of voting machine without the established history of problems.
Unfortunately, public officials didn't think getting those people's votes was important enough for the money it would have cost to replace the machines, and the rest is history.
> The problems run much deeper than just a paper trail in the USA. When people are cut off from voting by police roadblocks, and thousands of ballots are thrown away, or arranged in a confusing way to try to get people to vote for someone that they don't want to, there's more than just a paper trail problem.
Yeah, and that bit of silliness going on in Texas right now is all about gerrymandering. Lots of politicians simply aren't interested in the electorate's will, which is why closed systems such as the electronic voting machines everyone is rushing of to buy are a completely intolerable solution.
Where corruption is possible, corruption will be found. We need to demand as much opportunity for oversight as technology will allow, and paper trails are the least we can do.
> "Commercial software is built by carefully selected and screened teams of programmers working to build proprietary, secure software. This process is designed to monitor the security and ownership of intellectual property rights associated with the code."
"...so that vultures can buy it up and use it for litigation-based marketing when the company owning it goes bust."
> Think about it. You have one of the top five largest corporations in the WORLD (market cap). Let me repeat that: in the world. That company is worth $275 billion as of today. Cash reserves on-hand are $46 billion.
And what do you suppose will happen to that wonderful company's share prices when their income drops by 20, 50, or 80% ?
And what's going to happen to that big pile of gold when their stock certificates are at their greatest value when used for discount toilet paper?
You'll see $46,000,000,000 in golden parachutes, and the company will disappear off the face of the earth.
> I once offered to mow the lawn of my neighbor for 50 cents less than whatever she normally pays the usual kid and I ended up spending 6 months in prison for it.
Leave the gun at home when you want to make an old lady an offer she can't refuse.
> It seemed that they would do anything not to lose to Linux
They're crapola software engineers, but they do understand the concept of a landslide. If cutting over to Linux ever becomes the 'in' thing to do - for whatever reason, good or bad - then Microsoft stock will share a spot in the bathroom beside SCO's. Unlike IBM, Microsoft can't adopt free software and live off hardware sales and technical services.
This is raw survival for Microsoft. If it were almost anyone else I'd feel sorry for them.
> it's a grim picture when you're showing a spam-doubling every 42 days.
Oh, dear! When we reach the point where there isn't enough bandwidth to deliver all the spam and all the 208 KB viral e-messages posing as Microsoft security updates, will we get to choose which ones have priority for our mailboxes?
> I want to avoid a complicated mess, so I will restrict myself to the presentation of irreducible complexity.
You could save yourself some trouble if you knew how often the IC argument has been refuted, though I don't suppose it will hurt anyone if we go through it yet again...
> I knew I was getting myself into trouble without explaining this better. First of all I didn't intend to separate the two sentances. Parenthesis are intended to supplement an idea in the previous sentence, so don't treat them as separate thoughts. Let me break what I meant down for you: 1. Either the supernatural intervened in the origin of things, or it didn't. 2. Evolution in its strictest sense, the way it is treated by mainstream scientists in the technical literature, is completely unguided and godless. 3. Creation can be defined as the origin of things from a guided process. 4. By definition, either 2 and 3 make up the entire universe of what is possible and they are mutually exclusive possibilities.
And there's the non sequitur. Going by your definitions they are in fact mutually exclusive, but they are notjointly exhaustive. For example, there could be some other completely unguided/godless process that put the world in its current form. Refuting evolution wouldn't prove God any more than refuting God would prove evolution.
> Next question then. All these theories are based on the known speed of a process. How do you know this process has been operating at that speed for all of history? Eg, potassium half-life. How do you know that has always decayed at the same constant rate the last millions of years?
Because unlike the fantasy world inhabited by evolution deniers, scientists live in a world where claims have consequences. E.g., if radioactive decay rates are not constant within a very small margin, the universe would be a very different place. Ditto with the speed of light and all the other natural processes that creationists think they can diddle without any consequences other than changing the age of the earth.
And learn a bit about science before you go on a crusade of refuting it.
> Oh, you think your position is so secure. "Every test designed to disprove the theory has failed". What are you talking about? Evolution is not scientific.
All you're doing is showing the better-informed part of the public that your denial of evolution is based on complete ignorance of what it is all about.
If you understood the theory of evolution at the "read one book on it" level you would be able to make a long list of conceivable falsifying observations.
> Tell me how you know the earth is so old (4.5 billion last time I heard). This is not a rhetorical question, I want an answer - and not about space. I'm talking about the earth
Try talkorigins.org for an introductory-level answer. Notice also that it was the first thing to pop up when I typed "age of the earth" into google and clicked the submit submit button.
> No one with any sense debates that living things evolve. What some people debate is the theory that evolution is what guided life from single-celled organisms to, say, mammals. Going from evolution to the latter is a huge jump.
Actually, it's merely the concatenation of a whole lot of little jumps.
> Debating it doesn't mean you're a creationist, just that it takes a lot of simpleminded faith to cling to *any* kind of theory that explains hugely complex results in a few sentences.
That's the goal of all the scientists. The basic laws of nature tend to be very simple statements with enormously rich consequences.
> When the pro "life evolved from single celled organisms" people go ballistic arguing with creationists, it makes me wonder why the former are so single-mindedly fervent.
Here's the answer in my case: creationists are using pseudo-science to subvert science education and substitute religious mythology for it in the public school curriculum. I am vehemently against that, so I try to publicly refute any public bogus claim that I see a creationist make, for the sole purpose of ensuring that others who read it aren't beguiled by the bunkum.
> > Why is it that Christian "logic" dictates that God is real even though you can't see Him, yet it does not follow that alien life must be real even though we can't see it?
> It doesn't say that. It says that the ways of seeing God are not always the same as the ways of seeing, say, a brick...and leaves us wondering whether God is real in the same way, say, a brick is real.
> Things really appear- to many people- to be designed.
And the sun appears - to almost everyone - to go around the earth.
[snip good stuff]
> The fact is though, Christians have a vested interest in learning as much about the universe as possible, because they believe it to be created by the same Creator that created them.
Some Christians do. Others conclude that they should despise knowledge of the universe.
> I give the SETI people credit for the attempt; but, I don't believe that their project, because of it's limited scope, will bear fruit. They are only looking within the near 50-150 light years or so. Beyond that, the signals are too weak and the time-lag would make communication impossible beyond "Hey, we're over here."
It may also be the case that species that are foolish enough to broadcast their existence to the void have a shorter life expectancy than those that don't, as a direct result of those broadcasts.
Given how well we humans get along here at home, how well should we expect unrelated intelligent species to treat each other?
> You're whining that the odds are too big, but it's guys like Stanley Miller that are trying to figure out exactly how big those odds are.
One of creationists' biggest misunderstanding about science is the idea that scientists believe that stuff like abiogenesis "just happens" at some zillion-to-one odds. In reality, scientists are just like creationists in that when they see something that they intuitively recognize as improbable in a completely random universe, they want to know how the odds were beat. But creationists and scientists immediately part ways at that point, with the creationists immediately jumping to the "goddidit" conclusion, and the scientists examining the phenomenon (like Miller did) to discover how things actually work.
> Excuse me? Do you think that we do not chemestry? Biological Anthropology is a biological discipline, and, I am not sure how it is in the United States, or wherever you're hailing from, but here biologists take chemestry as compulsory.
So, exactly how many semesters (quarters, whatever) of chemistry have you taken?
> > A google for "stanley miller" racemized gives 5 results, all for Creationists' pages.
> Dude it's in the scientific literature too. Creationists pick up on it and put it on their sites.
Perhaps so, though in such a case it should be easy for you to go to your favorite creationist site, fetch the citation for the original claim, and post it for us.
But in my experience what usually happens is that creationist sites quote each other in endless circles, and no one knows where a claim originally came from. I find very frequently that when I'm trying to track down a claim a creationist makes I can find scores of creationist Web sites that make the same claim, all in exactly the same words, and none of which give the slightest hint of who originated the claim.
And of course, when creationist do give a scientific source for their claim the gurus at talk.origins usually only take a matter of minutes to point out that its a misquote or a misrepresented context.
Creationists don't do too well in the area of supporting a case with citations... just as they don't do too well in any of the other things that make science work.
> It is a far leap from amino acids to life. I am still baffled by those who think that life just happens.
Most of us actually think that it happens as a result of the laws of the universe that give us interesting stuff like gravity and chemistry, which draw atoms together in large masses and do interesting things with them.
> The Earth's atmosphere today is much more hospitable to life but we still do not see amino acids coming together and organizing into complex proteins or anything resembling life.
Our present atmosphere would immediately oxidize any primitive precursor to life. (And if the atmosphere happened to miss it, existing life would eat it.)
> This can't even be done in the laboratory.
Neither can volcanos, cold fronts, and continental drift, but they still happen anyway.
> It is contrary to the 2nd law of thrmodynamics.
You have no clue what the 2LoT says.
> I don't believe in spontaneous generation.
Neither do scientist. Though I suspect you actually meant to say "abiogenesis", which is something else altogether, and which both scientists and creationists believe in (their only dispute being over the mechanism).
> The odds of it happening are beyond astronomical.
And we've got a beyond-astronomical universe full of places to roll the dice.
> Would the experimentor claim intellectual property rights to the amino acids he found? "Sorry you can't use those drugs, I own the rights to all life on this planet."
That's how we'll finally get rock-solid proof as to whether or not God exists. When Dr. Frankenstein has his monster stitched together and reaches for the switch, either a lawyer will rush in with a cease-and-desist or else not, and we will be able to determine the existence of an omniscient Creator from that fact alone.
Slashdot Mirror
> We all saw what good a paper trail did in Florida in the 2000 USA presidential campaign.
The sad thing about the 2000 Florida vote is that the problem was thoroughly preventable. The same problem showed up in the previous election and an investigative commission determined that the way to fix it was to switch to a different kind of voting machine without the established history of problems.
Unfortunately, public officials didn't think getting those people's votes was important enough for the money it would have cost to replace the machines, and the rest is history.
> The problems run much deeper than just a paper trail in the USA. When people are cut off from voting by police roadblocks, and thousands of ballots are thrown away, or arranged in a confusing way to try to get people to vote for someone that they don't want to, there's more than just a paper trail problem.
Yeah, and that bit of silliness going on in Texas right now is all about gerrymandering. Lots of politicians simply aren't interested in the electorate's will, which is why closed systems such as the electronic voting machines everyone is rushing of to buy are a completely intolerable solution.
Where corruption is possible, corruption will be found. We need to demand as much opportunity for oversight as technology will allow, and paper trails are the least we can do.
History will eventually show electronic voting to be the most excellent means for subverting democracy ever invented.
> I believe there are remote root exploits for each of those packages listed.
Are you suggesting that we should break in and steal some of their code?
> "Commercial software is built by carefully selected and screened teams of programmers working to build proprietary, secure software. This process is designed to monitor the security and ownership of intellectual property rights associated with the code."
"...so that vultures can buy it up and use it for litigation-based marketing when the company owning it goes bust."
> Think about it. You have one of the top five largest corporations in the WORLD (market cap). Let me repeat that: in the world. That company is worth $275 billion as of today. Cash reserves on-hand are $46 billion.
And what do you suppose will happen to that wonderful company's share prices when their income drops by 20, 50, or 80% ?
And what's going to happen to that big pile of gold when their stock certificates are at their greatest value when used for discount toilet paper?
You'll see $46,000,000,000 in golden parachutes, and the company will disappear off the face of the earth.
> A lot of people in the US have Microsoft stock options as part of their pension plan. Don't you have any sympathy towards the elderly ?
I feel sorry for anyone whose retirement depends on the vagaries of the stock market.
> Well, it's Microsoft's own fault for basing their entire business off of commodity software products.
It was a great plan in 1981, and might still be a great plan today if Linus had decided to go to art school instead of doing what he did.
Irom the bigger picture, Bill just caught an excellent wave, rode it for what it was worth, and now finds himself approaching the shore line.
> I once offered to mow the lawn of my neighbor for 50 cents less than whatever she normally pays the usual kid and I ended up spending 6 months in prison for it.
Leave the gun at home when you want to make an old lady an offer she can't refuse.
> Isn't this illegal? Here we have a convicted monopoly selling it's products at a loss to shut out a smaller competitor. Isn't that illegal?
Not under Republican administrations.
> It seemed that they would do anything not to lose to Linux
They're crapola software engineers, but they do understand the concept of a landslide. If cutting over to Linux ever becomes the 'in' thing to do - for whatever reason, good or bad - then Microsoft stock will share a spot in the bathroom beside SCO's. Unlike IBM, Microsoft can't adopt free software and live off hardware sales and technical services.
This is raw survival for Microsoft. If it were almost anyone else I'd feel sorry for them.
> "Under NO circumstances lose against Linux," Ayala said.
Saying that makes it sound like the penguins have already won.
> "Baked beans are off, all we have is SPAM!"
Almost makes you wish we had internet spam back in '67, when the Who released their Sell-Out" album. (See album cover at upper right on that page.)
> it's a grim picture when you're showing a spam-doubling every 42 days.
Oh, dear! When we reach the point where there isn't enough bandwidth to deliver all the spam and all the 208 KB viral e-messages posing as Microsoft security updates, will we get to choose which ones have priority for our mailboxes?
> I want to avoid a complicated mess, so I will restrict myself to the presentation of irreducible complexity.
You could save yourself some trouble if you knew how often the IC argument has been refuted, though I don't suppose it will hurt anyone if we go through it yet again...
> I knew I was getting myself into trouble without explaining this better. First of all I didn't intend to separate the two sentances. Parenthesis are intended to supplement an idea in the previous sentence, so don't treat them as separate thoughts. Let me break what I meant down for you:
1. Either the supernatural intervened in the origin of things, or it didn't.
2. Evolution in its strictest sense, the way it is treated by mainstream scientists in the technical literature, is completely unguided and godless.
3. Creation can be defined as the origin of things from a guided process.
4. By definition, either 2 and 3 make up the entire universe of what is possible and they are mutually exclusive possibilities.
And there's the non sequitur. Going by your definitions they are in fact mutually exclusive, but they are not jointly exhaustive. For example, there could be some other completely unguided/godless process that put the world in its current form. Refuting evolution wouldn't prove God any more than refuting God would prove evolution.
> > They do not understand that these observations are explained equally well, or better, under the creationist model.
> Okay, what is "the creationist model"?
It's "Whatever we observe, the explanation is that God wanted it that way for reason's we'll never understand."
Two species have similar DNA? God wanted it that way! Two species have unsimilar DNA? God wanted it that way!
Creationism isn't so much "wrong" as "inane".
> Next question then. All these theories are based on the known speed of a process. How do you know this process has been operating at that speed for all of history? Eg, potassium half-life. How do you know that has always decayed at the same constant rate the last millions of years?
Because unlike the fantasy world inhabited by evolution deniers, scientists live in a world where claims have consequences. E.g., if radioactive decay rates are not constant within a very small margin, the universe would be a very different place. Ditto with the speed of light and all the other natural processes that creationists think they can diddle without any consequences other than changing the age of the earth.
And learn a bit about science before you go on a crusade of refuting it.
> Oh, you think your position is so secure. "Every test designed to disprove the theory has failed". What are you talking about? Evolution is not scientific.
All you're doing is showing the better-informed part of the public that your denial of evolution is based on complete ignorance of what it is all about.
If you understood the theory of evolution at the "read one book on it" level you would be able to make a long list of conceivable falsifying observations.
> Tell me how you know the earth is so old (4.5 billion last time I heard). This is not a rhetorical question, I want an answer - and not about space. I'm talking about the earth
Try talkorigins.org for an introductory-level answer. Notice also that it was the first thing to pop up when I typed "age of the earth" into google and clicked the submit submit button.
> No one with any sense debates that living things evolve. What some people debate is the theory that evolution is what guided life from single-celled organisms to, say, mammals. Going from evolution to the latter is a huge jump.
Actually, it's merely the concatenation of a whole lot of little jumps.
> Debating it doesn't mean you're a creationist, just that it takes a lot of simpleminded faith to cling to *any* kind of theory that explains hugely complex results in a few sentences.
That's the goal of all the scientists. The basic laws of nature tend to be very simple statements with enormously rich consequences.
> When the pro "life evolved from single celled organisms" people go ballistic arguing with creationists, it makes me wonder why the former are so single-mindedly fervent.
Here's the answer in my case: creationists are using pseudo-science to subvert science education and substitute religious mythology for it in the public school curriculum. I am vehemently against that, so I try to publicly refute any public bogus claim that I see a creationist make, for the sole purpose of ensuring that others who read it aren't beguiled by the bunkum.
> > Why is it that Christian "logic" dictates that God is real even though you can't see Him, yet it does not follow that alien life must be real even though we can't see it?
> It doesn't say that. It says that the ways of seeing God are not always the same as the ways of seeing, say, a brick.
> Things really appear- to many people- to be designed.
And the sun appears - to almost everyone - to go around the earth.
[snip good stuff]
> The fact is though, Christians have a vested interest in learning as much about the universe as possible, because they believe it to be created by the same Creator that created them.
Some Christians do. Others conclude that they should despise knowledge of the universe.
> I give the SETI people credit for the attempt; but, I don't believe that their project, because of it's limited scope, will bear fruit. They are only looking within the near 50-150 light years or so. Beyond that, the signals are too weak and the time-lag would make communication impossible beyond "Hey, we're over here."
It may also be the case that species that are foolish enough to broadcast their existence to the void have a shorter life expectancy than those that don't, as a direct result of those broadcasts.
Given how well we humans get along here at home, how well should we expect unrelated intelligent species to treat each other?
> You're whining that the odds are too big, but it's guys like Stanley Miller that are trying to figure out exactly how big those odds are.
One of creationists' biggest misunderstanding about science is the idea that scientists believe that stuff like abiogenesis "just happens" at some zillion-to-one odds. In reality, scientists are just like creationists in that when they see something that they intuitively recognize as improbable in a completely random universe, they want to know how the odds were beat. But creationists and scientists immediately part ways at that point, with the creationists immediately jumping to the "goddidit" conclusion, and the scientists examining the phenomenon (like Miller did) to discover how things actually work.
> Excuse me? Do you think that we do not chemestry? Biological Anthropology is a biological discipline, and, I am not sure how it is in the United States, or wherever you're hailing from, but here biologists take chemestry as compulsory.
So, exactly how many semesters (quarters, whatever) of chemistry have you taken?
> > A google for "stanley miller" racemized gives 5 results, all for Creationists' pages.
> Dude it's in the scientific literature too. Creationists pick up on it and put it on their sites.
Perhaps so, though in such a case it should be easy for you to go to your favorite creationist site, fetch the citation for the original claim, and post it for us.
But in my experience what usually happens is that creationist sites quote each other in endless circles, and no one knows where a claim originally came from. I find very frequently that when I'm trying to track down a claim a creationist makes I can find scores of creationist Web sites that make the same claim, all in exactly the same words, and none of which give the slightest hint of who originated the claim.
And of course, when creationist do give a scientific source for their claim the gurus at talk.origins usually only take a matter of minutes to point out that its a misquote or a misrepresented context.
Creationists don't do too well in the area of supporting a case with citations... just as they don't do too well in any of the other things that make science work.
> It is a far leap from amino acids to life. I am still baffled by those who think that life just happens.
Most of us actually think that it happens as a result of the laws of the universe that give us interesting stuff like gravity and chemistry, which draw atoms together in large masses and do interesting things with them.
> The Earth's atmosphere today is much more hospitable to life but we still do not see amino acids coming together and organizing into complex proteins or anything resembling life.
Our present atmosphere would immediately oxidize any primitive precursor to life. (And if the atmosphere happened to miss it, existing life would eat it.)
> This can't even be done in the laboratory.
Neither can volcanos, cold fronts, and continental drift, but they still happen anyway.
> It is contrary to the 2nd law of thrmodynamics.
You have no clue what the 2LoT says.
> I don't believe in spontaneous generation.
Neither do scientist. Though I suspect you actually meant to say "abiogenesis", which is something else altogether, and which both scientists and creationists believe in (their only dispute being over the mechanism).
> The odds of it happening are beyond astronomical.
And we've got a beyond-astronomical universe full of places to roll the dice.
> Would the experimentor claim intellectual property rights to the amino acids he found? "Sorry you can't use those drugs, I own the rights to all life on this planet."
That's how we'll finally get rock-solid proof as to whether or not God exists. When Dr. Frankenstein has his monster stitched together and reaches for the switch, either a lawyer will rush in with a cease-and-desist or else not, and we will be able to determine the existence of an omniscient Creator from that fact alone.