What you have to understand is that nobody selects. I mean, an insect is really less evolved than a human, not to say an amoeba, and they are not marked for extintion per se.
Actually an insect is arguably more evolved than us, since it's generation time (and that of it's ancestors) is much smaller. An amoeba is incredibly more evolved, in the sense of total change since it's last common ancestor with mammals.
Selection is not an invisible hand striving for perfection, there's not a biologist on the planet worth his weight in salt who'll say that. Selection is a instantaneous direction, a random walk through the fitness landscape. At every given moment, the selection pressure is for what would most benifit a population (not individual) right now, with no consideration for the future or perfection. There's no appeal to a nature-god, no inferior or superior (let alone perfection), just a constant changing of directions for the immediate survival.
Because deregulation has worked *so* well in other places such as airlines, energy, and telecommunications, as well as the expected success of massive media mergers.
We should be returning to a simpler time without regulations. Oh how I long for the days of the robber barons, Standard Oil, and US Steel. Damn those muckrakers and progressives of the late 19th and early 20th century that destroyed our pure libertarian utopia and cast us from our industrial slavery paradise into the modern distopia of job safety requirements, anti-monopolistic laws, and a higher standard of living.
Or perhaps we should realize that they are natural monopolies and stop pretending that they are anything else. Deregulation has been a huge failure. Look at the manufactured California energy crisis.
Look at the airlines. If they only reason they exist at all is because the federal government keeps pumping billions of dollars into them, why should we pretend that they should be private industry?
Some things just make more sense to be handled by the federal government.
Depends upon how much you want to pay Microsoft. You can get a site licence by paying for every computer you have, but if you only need a few copies of XP, then you have no choice but to do the product activation... which is a *load* of fun when your office has 10 test copies and will deliver the machines to a customer who has their own copies. Try to recover those licenses without sacrificing something on an altar.
Personally, I think it's just a glorified fallacy of composition.
Re:I've used genetic algorithms
on
Digital Darwin
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"We discover a new virus all the time, but one thing remains the same, it's still a virus."
Except this is a purely linguistic definition, not corresponding to anything in nature, and explicitely shows the flaw in the majority of creationist thinking: The name *is* the thing. "Kind" is a completely useless word. I've seen it equated to "species", and then I've seen a creatist backed so far into a corner that there was a "bacteria kind", "plant kind", and "fungus kind". The only common definition for "kind" is that humans must occupy an excusive niche, it seems.
There is more diversity in viruses than there is between a human and any other mammal, yet they're all the same "kind" to because it's convenient and removed from daily experience.
1) Dr Dini did not change his requirement in any appreciable way:
Original:
"How do you think the human species originated?
If you cannot truthfully and forthrightly affirm a scientific answer to this question, then you should not seek my recommendation for admittance to further education in the biomedical sciences"
New: "How do you account for the scientific origin of the human species? If you will not give a scientific answer to this question, then you should not seek my recommendation."
Read the statement: http://www2.tltc.ttu.edu/dini/Personal/letters.htm
He explains his requirement and *still* says that he will not recommend people who reject evolution.
2) Professors have the right to choose who they will and will not write a recommendation for. Should they be required to put their recommendation behind anyone who asks them?
3) The student in question never asked Dr Dini for a recommendation at all.
4) Dini also requires the student to have earned and "A" in one of his classes. Spradling had not done this.
5) Dini requires that "I should know you fairly well." Dini says he had no idea who Spradling was.
Basically the whole situation is a publicity stunt dreamed up by a creationists. The Spradling didn't meet *any* of Dini's criteria for recommendation.
The great thing about objective standards is that there's so many to choose from. Do you want the Fred Phelps brand of biblical objectivity, the Jerry Farwell brand of biblical objectivity, or the liberal brand of bibilical objectivity that allows for gay ministers?
Just because Christians *claim* it's objective doesn't mean it is.
Wealth distribution is pretty much always going to follow a power-law distribution. You can't add area under the curve (total world wealth) without boosting the left side more than the right (rich get richer, poor get poorer). The best you can do is stretch the curve as much as possible.
Talking about the wealth gap is nice rhetoric, but doesn't solve any problems
All technically true, but science implicitly requires empirical objectivism. From a scientific perspective, faith is an act in contrary to empirical knowledge.
You also seem to be mistaken (along with many people) in that science says god does not exist. Empirically, there has never been the need for a god hypothesis. It's not a matter of saying he doesn't exist, that would require proof by science's own standards, but rather that nothing needs god as an explanation.
Irrelavent. He wants the organization to change its name. It is confusing (in a legal sense), and there's no reason why OpenSSH can't change to OpenSecureShell and abbreviate it OSSH, thus removing the trademark problems. Probably wouldn't be a bad idea to change the name of the command to ossh too. Symlink 'em together if you don't have ssh. No legal confusion then.
To use a beowulf cluster, you'd have to rewrite it using MPI or PVM. I've seen some systems that use distributed memory, basically adding code to the VM that queries the network on a page fault. When I was looking at it, it used gigabit range bandwidth, and was still kinda slow. Either way, you'd have to make the task paralelizable (sp wrong, don't care), which is easier said than done (think rewrite).
What this *would* help with, is if you have an office of machines (sun/linux remember) and you have many models to run, or you can split the models you have into multiple independant models. You wouldn't have to change too much in that case.
That was the point. Otherwise, you're only running 1 thread of the build at a time, and the other processor is sitting on its thumb. I'm surprised at the amount of surprise over the -j3. I've always heard that when you're doing a build on linux, and you don't need the machine for anything else, you do a 'make -jn' where n=num processors+1. Something about the way that the kernel does its scheduling. Irix and solaris don't seem to benefit from the +1. Of course, between hardware and OS differences, it's kinda hard to isolate the variable.
They do not fall under Fair Use.
Exactly. They don't fall under fair use because they're an original work. The fact that it's about a work that someone else did is irrelevant.
> I'm going to get flamed for this, of course,
> because the vast majority of atheists get
> unbelievably upset when they're told that they
> take things on faith. But that's too bad,
> because it's one hundred percent true.
The definition of faith you seem to be using is "beleiving what someone else tells me that I can't/won't/haven't proven for myself". How many people beleive word for word what their religeous leaders tell them. Scientists are not a homogenized front of belief either. It's a matter of trust rather than faith that you're talking about. Who do you trust to tell you things that you don't know? I think the key is what were looking for as an answer.
Science has the implicit assumption that there is *NO* final answer. Yeah, the current model is the big bang, but that's because it fits a lot of evidence. By no means is it conclusive however. Religeon makes the assumption that there is an absolute answer, we can understand the absolute answer, and we have it *RIGHT NOW*. "I don't know where the universe comes from, God must have made it."
You say atheists are angered by you claiming they take stuff on faith. I say they're angered by your assumption that there has to be an answer we can figure out during the course of this argument, and any viewpoints must reflect the complete and unblemished structure of the universe.
Interesting way for the executive branch to twist congress's arm. What I'm really interested in comes when one of these treaties forces a law to be passed that is obviously not constitutional, and the supreme court throws it out. From the sketchy details in the article, this one may be along those lines (speech and due process come to mind).
Kinda puts the government in an interesting bind, the treaty requires them to support these laws, where the foundation for our government effectively says they can't do it.
Slashdot Mirror
What you have to understand is that nobody selects. I mean, an insect is really less evolved than a human, not to say an amoeba, and they are not marked for extintion per se.
Actually an insect is arguably more evolved than us, since it's generation time (and that of it's ancestors) is much smaller. An amoeba is incredibly more evolved, in the sense of total change since it's last common ancestor with mammals.
Selection is not an invisible hand striving for perfection, there's not a biologist on the planet worth his weight in salt who'll say that. Selection is a instantaneous direction, a random walk through the fitness landscape. At every given moment, the selection pressure is for what would most benifit a population (not individual) right now, with no consideration for the future or perfection. There's no appeal to a nature-god, no inferior or superior (let alone perfection), just a constant changing of directions for the immediate survival.
China will win. They're more willing to sacrifice life than we are right now.
Did the article say that they were the *same* 33%?
Because deregulation has worked *so* well in other places such as airlines, energy, and telecommunications, as well as the expected success of massive media mergers.
We should be returning to a simpler time without regulations. Oh how I long for the days of the robber barons, Standard Oil, and US Steel. Damn those muckrakers and progressives of the late 19th and early 20th century that destroyed our pure libertarian utopia and cast us from our industrial slavery paradise into the modern distopia of job safety requirements, anti-monopolistic laws, and a higher standard of living.
Or perhaps we should realize that they are natural monopolies and stop pretending that they are anything else. Deregulation has been a huge failure. Look at the manufactured California energy crisis.
Look at the airlines. If they only reason they exist at all is because the federal government keeps pumping billions of dollars into them, why should we pretend that they should be private industry?
Some things just make more sense to be handled by the federal government.
The network stack itself is encrypted on a connection basis, thus "tactical Internet".
Depends upon how much you want to pay Microsoft. You can get a site licence by paying for every computer you have, but if you only need a few copies of XP, then you have no choice but to do the product activation... which is a *load* of fun when your office has 10 test copies and will deliver the machines to a customer who has their own copies. Try to recover those licenses without sacrificing something on an altar.
I suggest reading Searle's thought expirement "The Chinese Room", and more pointedly, criticisms of it.
Here is a good balanced approach to it.
Personally, I think it's just a glorified fallacy of composition.
"We discover a new virus all the time, but one thing remains the same, it's still a virus."
Except this is a purely linguistic definition, not corresponding to anything in nature, and explicitely shows the flaw in the majority of creationist thinking: The name *is* the thing. "Kind" is a completely useless word. I've seen it equated to "species", and then I've seen a creatist backed so far into a corner that there was a "bacteria kind", "plant kind", and "fungus kind". The only common definition for "kind" is that humans must occupy an excusive niche, it seems.
There is more diversity in viruses than there is between a human and any other mammal, yet they're all the same "kind" to because it's convenient and removed from daily experience.
1) Dr Dini did not change his requirement in any appreciable way:
m
Original:
"How do you think the human species originated?
If you cannot truthfully and forthrightly affirm a scientific answer to this question, then you should not seek my recommendation for admittance to further education in the biomedical sciences"
New:
"How do you account for the scientific origin of the human species? If you will not give a scientific answer to this question, then you should not seek my recommendation."
Read the statement: http://www2.tltc.ttu.edu/dini/Personal/letters.ht
He explains his requirement and *still* says that he will not recommend people who reject evolution.
2) Professors have the right to choose who they will and will not write a recommendation for. Should they be required to put their recommendation behind anyone who asks them?
3) The student in question never asked Dr Dini for a recommendation at all.
4) Dini also requires the student to have earned and "A" in one of his classes. Spradling had not done this.
5) Dini requires that "I should know you fairly well." Dini says he had no idea who Spradling was.
Basically the whole situation is a publicity stunt dreamed up by a creationists. The Spradling didn't meet *any* of Dini's criteria for recommendation.
"Of late"??
The great thing about objective standards is that there's so many to choose from. Do you want the Fred Phelps brand of biblical objectivity, the Jerry Farwell brand of biblical objectivity, or the liberal brand of bibilical objectivity that allows for gay ministers?
Just because Christians *claim* it's objective doesn't mean it is.
Wealth distribution is pretty much always going to follow a power-law distribution. You can't add area under the curve (total world wealth) without boosting the left side more than the right (rich get richer, poor get poorer). The best you can do is stretch the curve as much as possible.
Talking about the wealth gap is nice rhetoric, but doesn't solve any problems
All technically true, but science implicitly requires empirical objectivism. From a scientific perspective, faith is an act in contrary to empirical knowledge. You also seem to be mistaken (along with many people) in that science says god does not exist. Empirically, there has never been the need for a god hypothesis. It's not a matter of saying he doesn't exist, that would require proof by science's own standards, but rather that nothing needs god as an explanation.
Irrelavent. He wants the organization to change its name. It is confusing (in a legal sense), and there's no reason why OpenSSH can't change to OpenSecureShell and abbreviate it OSSH, thus removing the trademark problems. Probably wouldn't be a bad idea to change the name of the command to ossh too. Symlink 'em together if you don't have ssh. No legal confusion then.
To use a beowulf cluster, you'd have to rewrite it using MPI or PVM. I've seen some systems that use distributed memory, basically adding code to the VM that queries the network on a page fault. When I was looking at it, it used gigabit range bandwidth, and was still kinda slow. Either way, you'd have to make the task paralelizable (sp wrong, don't care), which is easier said than done (think rewrite). What this *would* help with, is if you have an office of machines (sun/linux remember) and you have many models to run, or you can split the models you have into multiple independant models. You wouldn't have to change too much in that case.
That was the point. Otherwise, you're only running 1 thread of the build at a time, and the other processor is sitting on its thumb. I'm surprised at the amount of surprise over the -j3. I've always heard that when you're doing a build on linux, and you don't need the machine for anything else, you do a 'make -jn' where n=num processors+1. Something about the way that the kernel does its scheduling. Irix and solaris don't seem to benefit from the +1. Of course, between hardware and OS differences, it's kinda hard to isolate the variable.
They do not fall under Fair Use. Exactly. They don't fall under fair use because they're an original work. The fact that it's about a work that someone else did is irrelevant.
> I'm going to get flamed for this, of course,
> because the vast majority of atheists get
> unbelievably upset when they're told that they
> take things on faith. But that's too bad,
> because it's one hundred percent true.
The definition of faith you seem to be using is "beleiving what someone else tells me that I can't/won't/haven't proven for myself". How many people beleive word for word what their religeous leaders tell them. Scientists are not a homogenized front of belief either. It's a matter of trust rather than faith that you're talking about. Who do you trust to tell you things that you don't know? I think the key is what were looking for as an answer.
Science has the implicit assumption that there is *NO* final answer. Yeah, the current model is the big bang, but that's because it fits a lot of evidence. By no means is it conclusive however. Religeon makes the assumption that there is an absolute answer, we can understand the absolute answer, and we have it *RIGHT NOW*. "I don't know where the universe comes from, God must have made it."
You say atheists are angered by you claiming they take stuff on faith. I say they're angered by your assumption that there has to be an answer we can figure out during the course of this argument, and any viewpoints must reflect the complete and unblemished structure of the universe.
Interesting way for the executive branch to twist congress's arm. What I'm really interested in comes when one of these treaties forces a law to be passed that is obviously not constitutional, and the supreme court throws it out. From the sketchy details in the article, this one may be along those lines (speech and due process come to mind).
Kinda puts the government in an interesting bind, the treaty requires them to support these laws, where the foundation for our government effectively says they can't do it.