No worries. You just struck a nerve there, and my concerns, about humanity if not you specifically, remain. Your argument makes logical sense, but it doesn't take human selfishness into account. Have you seen those parents that exercise absolute control over all of their kids' activities? Scary.
No humans appear in strata associated with dinosaurs. No dinosaurs appear in strata associated with humans.
But that is exactly the "absence of evidence" that I'm talking about. The time periods you quoted for the start of humanity and the end of dinosaurs are largely supported by the fact that we've seen no overlap in these strata. If irrefutable evidence were to be found that showed dinosaurs and humans in the same strata, it would disprove those presumed time ranges (barring some alternative explanation).
Pointing to genuine transitional forms, such as archaeopteryx, sinornithosaurus or ambulocetus only produces a demand to see all the steps between compsognathus and archaeopteryx.
And that is a ridiculous demand, obviously. Then again, if you can't provide infinite evidence to support your claims, how can you expect that from a creationist, especially considering that their belief depends on supernatural intervention?
In short, when one is unwilling to look past one's preconceived ideas to actual evidence, no amount of proof will suffice.
You will never be able prove that you are right about evolution using only observable evidence. Likewise your opponents can never prove that they are right. The frustrating part (for you and all evolutionists) is that your theory could potentially be proved wrong, and theirs never can. Therefore, it behooves evolutionists to address every challenge as thoroughly as possible instead of dismissing their opponents claims. The study of evolution must be above reproach, and currently the arrogance of many of its advocates makes that impossible.
Excellent point, and I absolutely agree. And my rebuttal was, while directed at you, also for the benefit of anyone else who may be reading this. I happen to believe that most laymen who believe in evolutions are almost, if not quite, as bad about blindly accepting authority on the subject as their creationist counterparts. Understanding the issues involved is key.
Practical issues aside, I find something about your argument a bit disturbing. You describe this hypothetical child as though they were something you owned. I quote:
If I had a child, I would, once it were born, be fully responsible for its life; I would choose whether it learned French while young, or the piano, or karate, the flute...
From that, I can gather that not only have you never had a child of your own, but you also don't remember what it was like to be a child yourself. You can't "choose" for your child to learn something. They have to be willing to learn that themselves because children are their own people.
Parents can and absolutely should provide opportunities for learning and teach their children discipline to benefit from the learning opportunities. They cannot, however, decide that their kid is going to love football, or be a piano virtuoso, or become a U.S. Senator.
The ethical problem with the "choosing your child" issue is that some people, apparently including you, already view children like either property or extensions of themselves. Letting parents choose the "options" on their child only adds to this mentality, and that leads to bad parenting.
I'm generally pro-evolution in these arguments, but your argument here is flawed. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The fact that there is no tangible evidence that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time is no more convincing to creationists than gaps in the fossil record are to evolutionists. For example, provide me with a study that proves the existence of a transitional species between archaeopteryx and pure birds. You can't because that particular species has not been discovered. You may accept that the species must exist because it is "necessary" according to evolutionary theory, but how is that really different than the creationist accepting that the evidence of humans and dinosaurs co-existing is simply yet to be discovered?
I hope I don't see its name in the paper...
on
The PC Is Not Dead
·
· Score: 1
...in the obituary, 'cause that would mean that it's dead.
The PC is not dead. I'm so glad the PC's not dead.
Forget the people buying PCs at CompUSA or Best Buy. Listen to the people selling them! That's a bigger problem in my opinion, considering that the buyers often consider those store employees authorities on the subject of personal computing. I'm not bashing those employees (well, not all of them), but being "good at computers" is not always the most important skill when helping someone else pick the right computer for them.
Consider this movie the answer to a film student's exam question: "Create a film in the style of Lucas".
Extra Credit: For additional faithfulness to style, make a series of progressively flashier yet emptier films and gradually sap away all goodwill generated by the first.
Please make your marks heavy and dark, and make your dialogue heavy-handed and inane.
He didn't say that graphics and powerful game machines don't attract audiences. He said that game creators cannot rely on them to attract new audiences.
I think he's right. People who buy games will probably continue to buy them for the same reasons they always have. However, I really don't think that non-gamers are waiting around thinking "I'll start buying video games when the graphics reach a certain level of realism." Non-gamers are the untapped market (and they probably outnumber current gamers significantly). These are the "new audiences" that will be attracted not by evolutionary hardware development but by some revolutionary new title that's just too cool to pass up.
That's a very interesting observation, and I'd like to add my own thoughts:
It seems to me that the way to find the perfect price point would be to determine how many "free" songs that people download on average per month. Then determine how much money each average person spends on CDs each month. With a little statistical magic you should be able to calculate a decent price point.
As an oversimplified example: Supposed that the average completely-legal-music buyer buys one CD per month for $18. Further suppose that the average completely-nonpaying music downloader downloads 100 songs per month. Now the songs won't be free, so we have to figure that the average person will download fewer for-pay songs than free songs. That's where the statistical magic comes in, but lets just pretend that the statisticians decided people will buy 3/4 as much music at a very low price than a free price. In the end, you can figure that to get people to spend $18 per month on downloaded music, you must charge $18/(75 songs), or about $.24 per track.
It's more complicated than that, of course, due to many factors (DRMed and pirated tracks are not exactly equal, the "statistical magic", the technical expertise of the music-listening public, etc.), but I don't see anyone even trying it.
"Why not charge 10 cents, instead of 5, and double the revenue?" Please.
Buying and selling used CDs isn't unethical. When you buy a new CD, you are purchasing a recording of the music along with a license to listen to that recording under a specific set of circumstances (which happens to be quite broad). When you sell your CD to someone else, you are transferring both the recording and the license to a new buyer, which is both legal and ethical because the ratio of people with recordings and people with licenses is maintained.
The only way this would be unethical would be if the seller made copies of the CD to keep before selling the original recording. Once the original recording was transferred to the buyer, the seller would be legally and ethically required to destroy or transfer to the buyer any "backup" copies they had made.
Also interesting is the fact that he uses the game industry's own self-regulating rating system to define "violence in video games".
Yes, Thompson! Make those miserable bastards pay for displaying a bit of responsibility and warning us when games are violent! When this is over, they'll wish they'd just given everyone the finger and forced parents to actually review the content of the games themselves (which people like Thompson are obviously unable to do, since he relies on the game makers to tell him when a game is too violent).
My normal way of shopping is to load several pages and flip between them on demand. Macromedia thinks I should not be able to do this.
To be fair, it's not Macromedia who doesn't think you should be able to do that. It's the web designer who doesn't care whether or not you can do that. Flash really isn't intended to be HTML or to duplicate its functionality. It's intended to be used for multimedia and interactive presentations which are compact enough to use on a web page but sophisticated enough to offer pixel-by-pixel control over layout. As such, it's a great choice for cartoons like Homestar Runner, but a really poor choice for a shopping site.
This is the first proposal by either Clinton or Kerry that I can get completely behind.
Being a Republican (for most intents and purposes) of the opinion that the 2004 election was legitimate, I wholeheartedly support any legislation that will make the election process less succeptible to both fraud and suspicion of fraud.
Interesting article, although given the same facts, I would have drawn a different conclusion than the author. The author's conclusion (if I interpret it correctly) is that the U.S. has always been a police state, at least since the Civil War, and therefore the abuses of our people go much deeper than the current administration.
My take on it is that while there have indeed been periods of American history in which civil rights have been reduced or suspended, those periods have always been temporary, and normality has been restored after the crisis passed (although admittedly, the War on Drugs continues, so it's impossible to say how that one turned out).
Some people believe that those who accept loss of freedoms in the U.S. are stupid or blind sheep, willing to sacrifice the very core of what makes us free. I believe that those people aren't stupid, they just have faith in the U.S. system of government and the knowledge that these sacrifices will be temporary and will serve a greater good in the meantime.
I can't tell the future, so I can't say if our rights will ever be fully restored. I also think that it is appropriate to monitor our rights closely and to fight to maintain them. However, I don't interpret these restrictions as some malicious act of a controlling government. I interpret them as the good intentions of a government attempting to keep things running without everything falling apart. They may make the wrong decisions, and that's why we must be vigilant, but they aren't just evil people who want to crush us under the heel of oppression.
For anyone who is concerned about paying taxes on all of their online purchases, pay close attention to your receipts. Some online sellers charge your state's sales tax upfront, depending on what state you are in and where they have brick-and-mortar warehouses and outlets.
For example, Apple charges sales tax for my state (Indiana) for all online purchases made through them. That even includes music purchases from the iTunes music store.
Personally, I would deliberately tell my kid (if I had one) that I was spying on their computer use. The purpose of monitoring your kids' internet use is not to "catch them in the act," it's to provide motivation for them to stay on their best behavior.
Proving that my [hypthetical] son has been surfing porn sites would bring me no satisfaction. I'd rather have him not looking at porn in the first place because he knew I would probably catch him.
Just because you can find the information on the web doesn't mean that's the best way to get it for everybody. A book is a good way to present information in an organized and always-accessible way.
Books also do something that almost all websites (including ALA) lack: information presented in the order in which it's easiest to learn. I use ALA all the time. It's a great reference, but that's what it's for - reference. Learning something from scratch is a lot harder when you have to glean your knowledge from sites that have unclear assumptions about your existing skills, or if you are unfamiliar enough with the subject that you don't know what to search for.
Nonparticipation in the Kyoto treaty is not synonymous with having no interest in alternative energy technologies. Despite the prevailing PR on the subject, the United States has not vowed to continue business as usual. What they have done is reject a specific agreement which they feel is not in their best interests.
If there is an economic advantage to developing alternative energy sources, and I believe there is, U.S. corporations will be all over it. Power companies aren't oil-lovers. They're money-lovers. And they aren't stupid; they know that the world's oil supply won't last forever, so they're all going to want new business models ready to roll out when oil goes up to a million dollars a barrel. They'll either be developing the new technologies themselves or watching the Europeans very closely.
In summary, Kyoto isn't the end-all of emissions reduction, and it probably won't even be the last international emissions reduction treaty of its kind.
Slashdot Mirror
No worries. You just struck a nerve there, and my concerns, about humanity if not you specifically, remain. Your argument makes logical sense, but it doesn't take human selfishness into account. Have you seen those parents that exercise absolute control over all of their kids' activities? Scary.
No humans appear in strata associated with dinosaurs. No dinosaurs appear in strata associated with humans.
But that is exactly the "absence of evidence" that I'm talking about. The time periods you quoted for the start of humanity and the end of dinosaurs are largely supported by the fact that we've seen no overlap in these strata. If irrefutable evidence were to be found that showed dinosaurs and humans in the same strata, it would disprove those presumed time ranges (barring some alternative explanation).
Pointing to genuine transitional forms, such as archaeopteryx, sinornithosaurus or ambulocetus only produces a demand to see all the steps between compsognathus and archaeopteryx.
And that is a ridiculous demand, obviously. Then again, if you can't provide infinite evidence to support your claims, how can you expect that from a creationist, especially considering that their belief depends on supernatural intervention?
In short, when one is unwilling to look past one's preconceived ideas to actual evidence, no amount of proof will suffice.
You will never be able prove that you are right about evolution using only observable evidence. Likewise your opponents can never prove that they are right. The frustrating part (for you and all evolutionists) is that your theory could potentially be proved wrong, and theirs never can. Therefore, it behooves evolutionists to address every challenge as thoroughly as possible instead of dismissing their opponents claims. The study of evolution must be above reproach, and currently the arrogance of many of its advocates makes that impossible.
Excellent point, and I absolutely agree. And my rebuttal was, while directed at you, also for the benefit of anyone else who may be reading this. I happen to believe that most laymen who believe in evolutions are almost, if not quite, as bad about blindly accepting authority on the subject as their creationist counterparts. Understanding the issues involved is key.
From that, I can gather that not only have you never had a child of your own, but you also don't remember what it was like to be a child yourself. You can't "choose" for your child to learn something. They have to be willing to learn that themselves because children are their own people.
Parents can and absolutely should provide opportunities for learning and teach their children discipline to benefit from the learning opportunities. They cannot, however, decide that their kid is going to love football, or be a piano virtuoso, or become a U.S. Senator.
The ethical problem with the "choosing your child" issue is that some people, apparently including you, already view children like either property or extensions of themselves. Letting parents choose the "options" on their child only adds to this mentality, and that leads to bad parenting.
I'm generally pro-evolution in these arguments, but your argument here is flawed. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The fact that there is no tangible evidence that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time is no more convincing to creationists than gaps in the fossil record are to evolutionists. For example, provide me with a study that proves the existence of a transitional species between archaeopteryx and pure birds. You can't because that particular species has not been discovered. You may accept that the species must exist because it is "necessary" according to evolutionary theory, but how is that really different than the creationist accepting that the evidence of humans and dinosaurs co-existing is simply yet to be discovered?
...in the obituary,
'cause that would mean that it's dead.
The PC is not dead.
I'm so glad the PC's not dead.
Forget the people buying PCs at CompUSA or Best Buy. Listen to the people selling them! That's a bigger problem in my opinion, considering that the buyers often consider those store employees authorities on the subject of personal computing. I'm not bashing those employees (well, not all of them), but being "good at computers" is not always the most important skill when helping someone else pick the right computer for them.
Extra Credit: For additional faithfulness to style, make a series of progressively flashier yet emptier films and gradually sap away all goodwill generated by the first.
Please make your marks heavy and dark, and make your dialogue heavy-handed and inane.
He didn't say that graphics and powerful game machines don't attract audiences. He said that game creators cannot rely on them to attract new audiences.
I think he's right. People who buy games will probably continue to buy them for the same reasons they always have. However, I really don't think that non-gamers are waiting around thinking "I'll start buying video games when the graphics reach a certain level of realism." Non-gamers are the untapped market (and they probably outnumber current gamers significantly). These are the "new audiences" that will be attracted not by evolutionary hardware development but by some revolutionary new title that's just too cool to pass up.
That's a very interesting observation, and I'd like to add my own thoughts:
It seems to me that the way to find the perfect price point would be to determine how many "free" songs that people download on average per month. Then determine how much money each average person spends on CDs each month. With a little statistical magic you should be able to calculate a decent price point.
As an oversimplified example: Supposed that the average completely-legal-music buyer buys one CD per month for $18. Further suppose that the average completely-nonpaying music downloader downloads 100 songs per month. Now the songs won't be free, so we have to figure that the average person will download fewer for-pay songs than free songs. That's where the statistical magic comes in, but lets just pretend that the statisticians decided people will buy 3/4 as much music at a very low price than a free price. In the end, you can figure that to get people to spend $18 per month on downloaded music, you must charge $18/(75 songs), or about $.24 per track.
It's more complicated than that, of course, due to many factors (DRMed and pirated tracks are not exactly equal, the "statistical magic", the technical expertise of the music-listening public, etc.), but I don't see anyone even trying it.
"Why not charge 10 cents, instead of 5, and double the revenue?" Please.
Buying and selling used CDs isn't unethical. When you buy a new CD, you are purchasing a recording of the music along with a license to listen to that recording under a specific set of circumstances (which happens to be quite broad). When you sell your CD to someone else, you are transferring both the recording and the license to a new buyer, which is both legal and ethical because the ratio of people with recordings and people with licenses is maintained.
The only way this would be unethical would be if the seller made copies of the CD to keep before selling the original recording. Once the original recording was transferred to the buyer, the seller would be legally and ethically required to destroy or transfer to the buyer any "backup" copies they had made.
Also interesting is the fact that he uses the game industry's own self-regulating rating system to define "violence in video games".
Yes, Thompson! Make those miserable bastards pay for displaying a bit of responsibility and warning us when games are violent! When this is over, they'll wish they'd just given everyone the finger and forced parents to actually review the content of the games themselves (which people like Thompson are obviously unable to do, since he relies on the game makers to tell him when a game is too violent).
Seriously, this guy has his head so far up his ass, he makes Helen Lovejoy sound rational.
There's no call for that kind of language! Won't someone please think of the children?!
So does having a low IQ make you stupid, or do stupid people just tend to have low IQs? I'm thinking it's a coincidence.
To be fair, it's not Macromedia who doesn't think you should be able to do that. It's the web designer who doesn't care whether or not you can do that. Flash really isn't intended to be HTML or to duplicate its functionality. It's intended to be used for multimedia and interactive presentations which are compact enough to use on a web page but sophisticated enough to offer pixel-by-pixel control over layout. As such, it's a great choice for cartoons like Homestar Runner, but a really poor choice for a shopping site.
...but let me know when they figure out how to beam spammers into space and I'll be front row, center!
This is the first proposal by either Clinton or Kerry that I can get completely behind.
Being a Republican (for most intents and purposes) of the opinion that the 2004 election was legitimate, I wholeheartedly support any legislation that will make the election process less succeptible to both fraud and suspicion of fraud.
Bravo!
Interesting article, although given the same facts, I would have drawn a different conclusion than the author. The author's conclusion (if I interpret it correctly) is that the U.S. has always been a police state, at least since the Civil War, and therefore the abuses of our people go much deeper than the current administration.
My take on it is that while there have indeed been periods of American history in which civil rights have been reduced or suspended, those periods have always been temporary, and normality has been restored after the crisis passed (although admittedly, the War on Drugs continues, so it's impossible to say how that one turned out).
Some people believe that those who accept loss of freedoms in the U.S. are stupid or blind sheep, willing to sacrifice the very core of what makes us free. I believe that those people aren't stupid, they just have faith in the U.S. system of government and the knowledge that these sacrifices will be temporary and will serve a greater good in the meantime.
I can't tell the future, so I can't say if our rights will ever be fully restored. I also think that it is appropriate to monitor our rights closely and to fight to maintain them. However, I don't interpret these restrictions as some malicious act of a controlling government. I interpret them as the good intentions of a government attempting to keep things running without everything falling apart. They may make the wrong decisions, and that's why we must be vigilant, but they aren't just evil people who want to crush us under the heel of oppression.
The cosmic ballet...goes on!
Does anyone want to switch seats?
For anyone who is concerned about paying taxes on all of their online purchases, pay close attention to your receipts. Some online sellers charge your state's sales tax upfront, depending on what state you are in and where they have brick-and-mortar warehouses and outlets.
For example, Apple charges sales tax for my state (Indiana) for all online purchases made through them. That even includes music purchases from the iTunes music store.
Heh heh! "Learnd," boy. It's pronounced "learnd."
Personally, I would deliberately tell my kid (if I had one) that I was spying on their computer use. The purpose of monitoring your kids' internet use is not to "catch them in the act," it's to provide motivation for them to stay on their best behavior.
Proving that my [hypthetical] son has been surfing porn sites would bring me no satisfaction. I'd rather have him not looking at porn in the first place because he knew I would probably catch him.
I resent that! We choose not to speak English. Now back off before I throw this tea in the harbor!
Just because you can find the information on the web doesn't mean that's the best way to get it for everybody. A book is a good way to present information in an organized and always-accessible way.
Books also do something that almost all websites (including ALA) lack: information presented in the order in which it's easiest to learn. I use ALA all the time. It's a great reference, but that's what it's for - reference. Learning something from scratch is a lot harder when you have to glean your knowledge from sites that have unclear assumptions about your existing skills, or if you are unfamiliar enough with the subject that you don't know what to search for.
Nonparticipation in the Kyoto treaty is not synonymous with having no interest in alternative energy technologies. Despite the prevailing PR on the subject, the United States has not vowed to continue business as usual. What they have done is reject a specific agreement which they feel is not in their best interests.
If there is an economic advantage to developing alternative energy sources, and I believe there is, U.S. corporations will be all over it. Power companies aren't oil-lovers. They're money-lovers. And they aren't stupid; they know that the world's oil supply won't last forever, so they're all going to want new business models ready to roll out when oil goes up to a million dollars a barrel. They'll either be developing the new technologies themselves or watching the Europeans very closely.
In summary, Kyoto isn't the end-all of emissions reduction, and it probably won't even be the last international emissions reduction treaty of its kind.