>... something like Apple's lame Switch ads. I want to see some former cleancut Windows drone become a greasy hairy Linux hippy. I want to see a former bowtie-wearing AIX admin pull on shorts, sandals, and a Tux tshirt.
Shouldn't be any problem. Take a greasy hairy Linux hippy like... most of us... and film the second half of the commercial, then give him a shower a trim and a girdle, and dress him up to film the first half of the commercial.
> This just in. Another stupid theory regarding evolution. Yeah those scientists won't have to follow biblical law now; they have another theory to approve of evolution. Even know all they did was contradicted themselves, they have to keep evolution moving along somehow.
Hope you're a firkin' troll, 'cause otherwise you're a firkin' idiot.
> As to Stephen Jay Gould's statement that you quoted, a theory isn't a fact until it is proven. He might want it to be a fact and he might call it a fact, but no one has presented proof of a new species by evolution yet.
You really don't understand science.
A theory is just a model that explains some facts. "Evolution", the theory, explains "evolution", the fact. The basic fact is that the collection of species that make up the earth's population has been in continual change over time. (There're lots of other relevant facts too, but that's the biggie.) The theory, the modern version of which goes by the name "neo-darwinian synthesis", is our best model for explaining those facts.
Cf. "gravity", the fact, and "gravity", the theory that explains it (the latter usually called "relativity" these days).
Notice in passing that if someone shows a theory to be wrong, the facts that the theory attempted to explain don't automatically disappear along with the theory.
> Proof by the same scientific rules that are universally accepted for scientific discovery.
The ToE does play by the universally accepted rules for scientific discovery. That you think those rules can be described as 'proof' tells the science-literate how ill-informed you are about what science is and how it works.
> The trouble is now they're driving down the fastlane of the interstate 15 mph slower than the prevailing traffic in their rusty old black Corvettes forcing others to pass them on the right while they yack away in total oblivion of everything around them. True story.
> It does not surprise me that this is a well written book. Truth be told, books by Microsoft Press tend to be well written. "Debugging The Development Process" by Steve Maguire is an excellent book both in content and in structure.
That must explain Microsoft's track record for stable, secure, and bug-free programs.
> Hopefully, no executives from New York dressed in black will come into my innocent house in northern Sweden to punish me to the maximum extent of the law.
Supposedly they can't cross flowing water, so you may be able to defend yourself even if they do.
Oh, wait - I thought you were talking about the Ringwraiths.
> As a complete and total aside, I think the Quake III bots do become smarter, until you reset them. Take a map that wasn't built by id, import a couple of medium skill level bots into it, and then watch them run around for a while. If there's a really difficult area to get into, that they don't find on their own, but they see YOU run into it, or rocket jump into it, or whatever, then they learn to do it. It's pretty cool. Kinda like my cat that learned to jump over the gate seperating the living room and the dining room, because the other cat was obsessed with my foot one morning, and followed me as i walked over it.
Shucks, I thought you were about to say your cat figured it out by watching you play Quake.
> Which is the exact reason behind my.sig;). Basically to steal the thunder of any would be beowulf cluster posters. I've noticed a significant decrease in the time I started using it. It makes you wonder. > -- > Stonent > Imagine a Beowulf cluster of whatever this story is about!
If your.sig is actually cutting down on the number of lame jokes, just think what we could do with a beowulf cluster of.sigs like that!
>...That should produce some interesting lawsuits!
Something that would be fun, and that Slashdot probably could probably furnish enough readers to make work, would be to set up a simple program that generated music from a list of numbers, seed it with a population of lists of random numbers, supply an option that would play one list from the population whenever a page was loaded and pop up a box to let the listener score it, and see whether the system would eventually converge on something recognizable as music.
> Many large companys can't change that easily. My employer has many custom programs, and excel sheets that just won't work on anything else.
And sadly, many bosses will use that logic to justify digging themselves even deeper into the pit. But where will they be in 10 years, when Microsoft is really desperate for cash?
> When are they going to send the US Ambassador to have a little... armtwisting^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdiscussion (yeah, that's the ticket, discussion!) session with Venezuelan honchos?
More interesting will be when it's Columbia's turn... I wonder which of their governments it will be? If the regulars switch to Linux and the rebels stay with Microsoft, will the USA change sides? Or will we get a real international crisis, with one side using Linux and the other using BSD, and the USA having to visit both in order to get them back in line? Will the CIA have to start buying its dope in Afghanistan when Columbia can't read their Word documents anymore? This is terrible! Why all the push for a war in Iraq when the very fabric of society is coming unravelled in South America?
Nothing could better illustrate the fact that creationism is the "science" of ignorance. Creationists like to argue about missing fossils, but scientists like to try to explain the fossils we have.
Rather than asking about missing fossils, why don't you tell us how Genesis I explains all the fossils we do have.
> Before replying, consider that a "theory" is not some wild-assed notion that someone pulled out of their *ss. It's not conjecture or wild speculation.
Today, nearly all biologists acknowledge that evolution is a fact. The term THEORY is no longer appropriate except when referring to the various models that attempt to explain HOW life evolves... it is important to understand that the current questions about how life evolves in no way implies any disagreement over the fact of evolution.
Alas, the typical creationist is so ignorant of science - to say nothing of the history of science - that they think they can validate their beliefs by nitpicking at various aspects of the theory of evolution.
The fact is, basic geology had already done irreparable damage to biblical literalism by the time Darwin set foot on Beagle. Creationists tend to combat the theory of evolution as if it were a rival religious sect in competition with their own for membership recruitment, when in fact it is merely an attempt to explain all the stuff we've discovered that the bible can't comfortably be stretched to cover anymore. The theory of evolution didn't displace creationism; it merely filled the void after creationism had already been shown to be contrafactual. Creationists are charging the wrong windmill.
> Maybe this is just an American phenomenon; maybe other countries are more at ease with the scientific theory of evolution and the whens and hows of it all.
AFAICT, most countries don't have quite the curious patchwork of fundamentalist sects that the USA has, and don't have to deal with the political clout the members of those sects flourish when stirred up by their leadership.
> I just find it odd that for a theory that claims to have so much science backing it up, it needs to keep reminding everyone of its validity. One begins to wonder if the scientists doth protest too much.
No, the curious thing is how much money goes into the evolution-denial movement and how much hot air comes out, compared to the level of denial associated with any other branch of science. You're seeing something and projecting it as a problem with science, whereas in fact it is merely a curious sociological phenomenon. (In the abstract it's a really interesting sociological phenomenon, but unfortunately I have to think of it as a concrete problem rather than as as an abstract phenomenon, since creationists are wielding so much money and political clout in an effort to disrupt or destroy scientific research and science education in the USA.)
> Yeah, your basic fundie doesn't have the time to read those opening chapters of Behe, in which he concedes macroevolution in all its guises, for humans too...
>...a whole lot of the yahoos who love "Black Box." Sometimes it doesn't seem like they've even read it.
For this you have to understand something deeply ingrained in the Fundamentalist mentality. Basically, it's a desire to "find an expert that supports my position". It doesn't matter how badly the expert's point is taken out of context, let alone how many other experts disagree entirely; it's sufficient to find any support, and throw away the rest as chaff.
The reason I say that this is deeply ingrained in the Fundamentalist mentality is that it doesn't just apply to evolution bashing. They use exactly the same methodology when quote-mining the bible to "prove" that their sect is correct and the rival sect meeting two blocks down the street is wrong.
I was taken to a fundie church three times a week as a kid, and about 95% of what I heard from the pulpit was exactly this style of super-shallow rhetoric that serves no purpose other than to draw a line in the sand separating "us" from "them", and to give the members of "us" a jukebox mantra to recite whenever their beliefs were challenged. It's about as intellectually bankrupt as rhetoric can get, but it's not intended to promote understanding of {the bible, nature} - it's purpose is purely sociological. And it works for lots of people, as you may have noticed.
Re:Well, I guess that's how Fascism takes root....
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
> Let me say this clearly: Bush sucks. He's a dangerous, arrogant man who's brother stole the election for him, and who's flushing our democracy down the toilet as fast as we will let him.
Personally, I prefer to think of him as an idiot who was selected to serve as a cypher for interests far more extreme than himself. (Look how fast he accumulated a $70,000,000 war chest when he announced his candidacy.)
The most dangerous people in the USA right now are Rumsfeld and Ashcroft, not Mr. Bush.
Slashdot Mirror
> rolling on the floor busting a gut laughing
The girdle should help with that kind of thing too.
>
Shouldn't be any problem. Take a greasy hairy Linux hippy like... most of us... and film the second half of the commercial, then give him a shower a trim and a girdle, and dress him up to film the first half of the commercial.
> This just in. Another stupid theory regarding evolution. Yeah those scientists won't have to follow biblical law now; they have another theory to approve of evolution. Even know all they did was contradicted themselves, they have to keep evolution moving along somehow.
Hope you're a firkin' troll, 'cause otherwise you're a firkin' idiot.
> As to Stephen Jay Gould's statement that you quoted, a theory isn't a fact until it is proven. He might want it to be a fact and he might call it a fact, but no one has presented proof of a new species by evolution yet.
You really don't understand science.
A theory is just a model that explains some facts. "Evolution", the theory, explains "evolution", the fact. The basic fact is that the collection of species that make up the earth's population has been in continual change over time. (There're lots of other relevant facts too, but that's the biggie.) The theory, the modern version of which goes by the name "neo-darwinian synthesis", is our best model for explaining those facts.
Cf. "gravity", the fact, and "gravity", the theory that explains it (the latter usually called "relativity" these days).
Notice in passing that if someone shows a theory to be wrong, the facts that the theory attempted to explain don't automatically disappear along with the theory.
> Proof by the same scientific rules that are universally accepted for scientific discovery.
The ToE does play by the universally accepted rules for scientific discovery. That you think those rules can be described as 'proof' tells the science-literate how ill-informed you are about what science is and how it works.
> The trouble is now they're driving down the fastlane of the interstate 15 mph slower than the prevailing traffic in their rusty old black Corvettes forcing others to pass them on the right while they yack away in total oblivion of everything around them. True story.
Rusty Corvettes? True story?
> PS: Any of you assholes want to point out spelling/grammar mistakes to attack what I've said you can do one thing: KISS MY ASS!
That should be "any of you assholes who want to point out spelling/grammar mistakes..."
> It does not surprise me that this is a well written book. Truth be told, books by Microsoft Press tend to be well written. "Debugging The Development Process" by Steve Maguire is an excellent book both in content and in structure.
That must explain Microsoft's track record for stable, secure, and bug-free programs.
> This is a maligned language.
Is it byte maligned, or word maligned?
> Hopefully, no executives from New York dressed in black will come into my innocent house in northern Sweden to punish me to the maximum extent of the law.
Supposedly they can't cross flowing water, so you may be able to defend yourself even if they do.
Oh, wait - I thought you were talking about the Ringwraiths.
> As a complete and total aside, I think the Quake III bots do become smarter, until you reset them. Take a map that wasn't built by id, import a couple of medium skill level bots into it, and then watch them run around for a while. If there's a really difficult area to get into, that they don't find on their own, but they see YOU run into it, or rocket jump into it, or whatever, then they learn to do it. It's pretty cool. Kinda like my cat that learned to jump over the gate seperating the living room and the dining room, because the other cat was obsessed with my foot one morning, and followed me as i walked over it.
Shucks, I thought you were about to say your cat figured it out by watching you play Quake.
> Which is the exact reason behind my
> --
> Stonent
> Imagine a Beowulf cluster of whatever this story is about!
If your
>
Something that would be fun, and that Slashdot probably could probably furnish enough readers to make work, would be to set up a simple program that generated music from a list of numbers, seed it with a population of lists of random numbers, supply an option that would play one list from the population whenever a page was loaded and pop up a box to let the listener score it, and see whether the system would eventually converge on something recognizable as music.
> lunar eclipses dont prove that the earth is round. it is merely a special case of the flat earth theory.
They do show that it's "round", just not that it's spherical.
(Or oblate-spheroidal, for the anal-retentive.)
> The same guy who was responsible for VMS is responsible for Windows NT. You can think of NT as an attempt of a next generation VMS
Except that Windows clustering still hasn't caught up to where VMS was 15 years ago.
> Many large companys can't change that easily. My employer has many custom programs, and excel sheets that just won't work on anything else.
And sadly, many bosses will use that logic to justify digging themselves even deeper into the pit. But where will they be in 10 years, when Microsoft is really desperate for cash?
> When are they going to send the US Ambassador to have a little... armtwisting^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdiscussion (yeah, that's the ticket, discussion!) session with Venezuelan honchos?
More interesting will be when it's Columbia's turn... I wonder which of their governments it will be? If the regulars switch to Linux and the rebels stay with Microsoft, will the USA change sides? Or will we get a real international crisis, with one side using Linux and the other using BSD, and the USA having to visit both in order to get them back in line? Will the CIA have to start buying its dope in Afghanistan when Columbia can't read their Word documents anymore? This is terrible! Why all the push for a war in Iraq when the very fabric of society is coming unravelled in South America?
> The title is misleading. Venezuela is going GPL, not open source.
If Venezuela is going GPL, does that mean I can copy it and modify it for my own use, so long as I license my OpenVenezuela under the GPL as well?
> Hopefully this isn't just a stunt to draw microsoft attention, so they can get some free s/w
Maybe someone in Venezuela figured out that they win either way?
> 1) Where are all of the transitional fossils?
Nothing could better illustrate the fact that creationism is the "science" of ignorance. Creationists like to argue about missing fossils, but scientists like to try to explain the fossils we have.
Rather than asking about missing fossils, why don't you tell us how Genesis I explains all the fossils we do have.
> The theory of evolution is almost entirely irrelevant to the fields of philosophy and theology.
Philosophy and theology aren't too damn important to the study of evolution either, you know.
Alas, the typical creationist is so ignorant of science - to say nothing of the history of science - that they think they can validate their beliefs by nitpicking at various aspects of the theory of evolution.> Before replying, consider that a "theory" is not some wild-assed notion that someone pulled out of their *ss. It's not conjecture or wild speculation.
The fact is, basic geology had already done irreparable damage to biblical literalism by the time Darwin set foot on Beagle. Creationists tend to combat the theory of evolution as if it were a rival religious sect in competition with their own for membership recruitment, when in fact it is merely an attempt to explain all the stuff we've discovered that the bible can't comfortably be stretched to cover anymore. The theory of evolution didn't displace creationism; it merely filled the void after creationism had already been shown to be contrafactual. Creationists are charging the wrong windmill.
> Maybe this is just an American phenomenon; maybe other countries are more at ease with the scientific theory of evolution and the whens and hows of it all.
AFAICT, most countries don't have quite the curious patchwork of fundamentalist sects that the USA has, and don't have to deal with the political clout the members of those sects flourish when stirred up by their leadership.
> I just find it odd that for a theory that claims to have so much science backing it up, it needs to keep reminding everyone of its validity. One begins to wonder if the scientists doth protest too much.
No, the curious thing is how much money goes into the evolution-denial movement and how much hot air comes out, compared to the level of denial associated with any other branch of science. You're seeing something and projecting it as a problem with science, whereas in fact it is merely a curious sociological phenomenon. (In the abstract it's a really interesting sociological phenomenon, but unfortunately I have to think of it as a concrete problem rather than as as an abstract phenomenon, since creationists are wielding so much money and political clout in an effort to disrupt or destroy scientific research and science education in the USA.)
> Yeah, your basic fundie doesn't have the time to read those opening chapters of Behe, in which he concedes macroevolution in all its guises, for humans too...
>
For this you have to understand something deeply ingrained in the Fundamentalist mentality. Basically, it's a desire to "find an expert that supports my position". It doesn't matter how badly the expert's point is taken out of context, let alone how many other experts disagree entirely; it's sufficient to find any support, and throw away the rest as chaff.
The reason I say that this is deeply ingrained in the Fundamentalist mentality is that it doesn't just apply to evolution bashing. They use exactly the same methodology when quote-mining the bible to "prove" that their sect is correct and the rival sect meeting two blocks down the street is wrong.
I was taken to a fundie church three times a week as a kid, and about 95% of what I heard from the pulpit was exactly this style of super-shallow rhetoric that serves no purpose other than to draw a line in the sand separating "us" from "them", and to give the members of "us" a jukebox mantra to recite whenever their beliefs were challenged. It's about as intellectually bankrupt as rhetoric can get, but it's not intended to promote understanding of {the bible, nature} - it's purpose is purely sociological. And it works for lots of people, as you may have noticed.
> Let me say this clearly: Bush sucks. He's a dangerous, arrogant man who's brother stole the election for him, and who's flushing our democracy down the toilet as fast as we will let him.
Personally, I prefer to think of him as an idiot who was selected to serve as a cypher for interests far more extreme than himself. (Look how fast he accumulated a $70,000,000 war chest when he announced his candidacy.)
The most dangerous people in the USA right now are Rumsfeld and Ashcroft, not Mr. Bush.
> I'm glad someone else got around to reading those amendments that follow the first ten.
Now about Moses's third tablet...