One might ask, if this "right to privacy" is so mighty, why it has never been used to overturn federal anti-drug laws.
A right to privacy *has* been used to overturn drug convictions in Alaska. The Alaska State Constitution specifically mentions a right to privacy, and as such, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that it was not criminal to have an amount of marijuana for personal use in the privacy of your own home. Once you leave a place where privacy is expected, or once you do anything other than personal use (i.e. sale), the usual rules apply. All of this was, IIRC, before Roe v. Wade.
Now, the question of whether or not a constitutionally protected right to privacy exists is a much trickier matter, and I'm inclined to agree with you that it doesn't.
Re:Inch by inch, anything's... er, just plain sill
on
Ready, Steady, Evolve
·
· Score: 2
The following text was pasted in to bypass slashdot's braindead lameness filtering,
What irony, something braindead posted to bypass something braindead.
For example, if a person disagrees with TO on the 'fact of evolution', these people will employ a definition of evolution ["Biological evolution is a change in the genetic characteristics of a population over time"] that makes it impossible to disagree and, if one does argue, then that person comes across as being uninformed or irrational or fanatical.
That IS the definition of evolution, no matter how much you want to extend it to anything and everything under the sun.
What's more, if we are to remain exclusively within the natural (material) realm then the term 'evolution' must somehow be further extended to include life from non-life, i.e., the emergence of life itself must also be accounted for by the ever-stretching definition of evolution. There's more. The origin of the basic materials that make up all objects (living or not) must also somehow be accounted for so yet other forms of evolution enter the scene-chemical, stellar and planetary. In fact, the universe itself must also be accounted for by evolution.
This is completely idiotic. That would be like saying that quantum mechanics has to explain ballroom dancing because they are both natural phenomena. Evolution is a biological observation, nothing more. The various theories about evolution are attempts to explain the apparent diversity and progression of biological organisms, nothing more. Abiogenesis, stellar formation, and the beginning of the universe are completely independent of evolution. There is no reason for evolution to have to explain those things because evolution is still valid no matter what explanation for those things is correct.
But to take the step from 'things change' to 'and therefore, that's how it all got here' is a leap of blind, irrational faith that would send even the most fanatical snake worshipper reeling.
Yes it is, fortunately no one is making it. Rather what they are doing is going from "things change" to "this may be how and why things change" and that is not a blind leap of faith because it is based on evidence and there are competing theories, such as natural selection vs. punctuated equilibrium.
The bottom line to all this is that the fundamental concept of evolution is clearly a manifestation of a metaphysical-not a scientific-worldview
Yes, but it is a worldview that you are injecting in there as a straw man, not something inherent in the theories of evolution.
Yeah? How? It's all very well having a slowmo movie in your head of that happening, but what prompted it? What caused them to get deeper and not shallower? What drove the `deeper is good' message into the genes? What decided that deeper `was' good?
A mutation doesn't have to be "good" to stick around, it just has to be neutral. It could even be slightly harmful, as long as it wasn't harmful enough to cause it to be selected out before a mutation that was beneficial but dependent on the harmful mutation came up. Whether or not that specific mutation actually is neutral or better is a different question, and as I am not a biologist, it is a question I cannot answer.
For the entire post you seem to believe that mutations need a reason (other than the physical reason for the change in the DNA, such as radiation or whatever) to occur. I don't know how you got this ludicrous idea, but a simple examination of it shows it is obviously false. You also don't seem to understand that the proposed chain of mutations is only one of the many chains of mutations that would have been happening in the beetle population. In short, you have completely failed to understand evolution, and I don't blame you for not believing in it.
The webpage you quoted doesn't prove there was an intermediate form. It merely states a plausible and logical sequence of events that *could have* happened based on the theory of intermediate forms.
Yes, but it answers the question posed perfectly. The question was "how could the bombardier beetle have evolved", with the expected answer of "I can't think of any way it could have evolved" forcing the conclusion that evolution is wrong. This answers the "how could it have", it never said that is how it did happen.
Maybe if you are walking on shag carpet in the middle of the desert of the least humid day of the year while shuffling your feet more than Michael Jackson, but under normal circumstances absolutely not.
I bought RAM the other day, and the clerck was handling the DIMM's with his bare hands before me! I was shocked, and even though I tried to explain, he didn't give a shit:/
Handling RAM with your bare hands is NOT a big deal unless you are pulling it out of the socket while its on, or you are in an incredibly high static environment.
ESD will really only cause damage when there is a constant source of power being applied to a semiconductor. Only then can the kind of cascade effects that the article talks about happen. The amount of ESD you generate in a normal environment by normal movement will not damage unpowered semiconductors.
this is bullshit. first off, there are no lynnwood offramps from i-5. this person is confused with i-405 and is likely not from seattle.
What?! There is most definitely offramps into lynnwood from I-5. There is one southbound onto 196th, and two northbound, one onto 198th and one onto 44th. And yes, there is almost always a traffic jam at the 196th exit southbound.
I think it is you who are likely not from Seattle.
I find it astonishing that the Michaelson-Morley experiment, which was the basis for Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity didn't make the top ten list.
Actually, Einstein claimed that he was unaware of the Michaelson-Morely result when he formulated Special Relativity. He was aware of the constant speed of light predicted by Maxwell's equations though.
Re:that doesn't mean they'll produce good games
on
Microsoft Buys Rare
·
· Score: 2
I believe the game companies make between $5 and $10 on each $50 game.
The game shops only make $5 to $10 for each $50 game. The rest of the money goes to the game company, minus a piddling amount for reproduction costs. Granted, you have to take into account development costs, but those are one time fees. After the development costs are recovered (first 250,000 games or so), the company makes at *least* $30 per $50 game. This puts your 60 million games figure down to 12.5 million. That is still quite a few games, but is easily manageable if spread out over 3-5 big name games.
Play some Super Monkey Ball 1/2, Virtua Fighter 4, Sega Soccer Slam, or Sega Sports Tennis, then come back and post that comment again. I dare ya.
I'd second his comment specifically *because* of those games. Super Monkey Ball was an interesting concept, but was nearly unplayable due to camera control and the sensitivity of movement. They might have improved it with SMB2 though, I haven't played it. The Virtua Fighter series was just another fighter, with no ingenuity. As for the rest of them, I hate sports games.
Star Fox shipped yesterday in the US. I picked it up today. Comes out Friday in Japan. Dunno about the rest of the world, but US + Japan is the vast majority of the market for it.
Really? According to amazon.com it ships Friday in the US as well, which is what I was basing my statement off of. BTW, US and Japan are the only two regions for GameCube, and the GameCube is NOT a DVD-based console.
f a TV were effectively only 320x200, it wouldn't be possible to see the difference between (say) low and high resolution on the Nintendo 64. Its low resolution is 320x240, and its high resolution is 640x480.
That isn't true for the same reason that, even though humans can only hear up to 20KHz sound waves at the most, you can still hear the difference between a sound sampled at 22KHz, 44KHz, and 96KHz. The resolution in an analog TV is essentially its sample rate. Granted, there will be a law of diminishing returns, and at some point you really won't be able to tell the difference, but that point is higher than the actual resolution of the TV.
First, consoles currently run in 640x480 (4x the resolution you quote), generally with antialiasing.
Different consoles run at different resolutions. The GameCube has the ability to run at 1080p, assuming that the game is designed to do that. I don't know what the other consoles run at, but I can assure you that none of them run at 640x480. 640x480 is a computer resolution, because the pixels on a computer monitor are square, and 640x480 gives a 4:3 aspect ratio with square pixels. TV pixels are rectangular and so require resolutions like 720x480 (DVDs), which would normally be a 3:2 aspect ratio to get the 4:3 ratio.
I might be willing to give you Doom 3, but A) it's not out yet
DivX rules. a two cd (700MB each) rip of a movie is virualy indisgishable from the real thing, and thats with 5.1 chanel sound.
Right, and 128Kbit MP3s are CD quality.</sarcasm>
If you are already going to use two cds, rip it to SVCD. The artifacts are far less noticeable, and you can play it on a standalone DVD player. I know you can't do 5.1, but most DVDs don't have 5.1 audio anyway.
Maybe Netflix distributes 1,500TB a day of movies, but that's using DVD's MPEG-2 compression. Encode 'em with DivX and you're gonna slash that figure by what... 80-90%?
And you will suffer the loss of quality and the inability to play them on a real TV that goes along with it, no thanks. DivX sucks.
A car is not a copyrighted work. Your analogy is poor and misleading.
Really? You try setting up a factory and making 2003 Ford Escorts and see if you don't get sued into oblivion. Cars are most certainly copyrighted, they just aren't as easy to duplicate as most of the copyrighted work discussed on slashdot.
TiVos don't require the subscription to operate, but they are just a digital VCR without it. However, if the service ever does end I'm sure within a month or two someone will hack up some software that lets TiVos use one of the many free TV listings websites out there.
"That's fine, but I refuse to have paved roads and an automobile at the expense of not being able to dirve where I want, when I want to, free of charge."
I've got news for you buddy, there are tons and tons of toll highways in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you saying everyone on the internet is a dog?
A right to privacy *has* been used to overturn drug convictions in Alaska. The Alaska State Constitution specifically mentions a right to privacy, and as such, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that it was not criminal to have an amount of marijuana for personal use in the privacy of your own home. Once you leave a place where privacy is expected, or once you do anything other than personal use (i.e. sale), the usual rules apply. All of this was, IIRC, before Roe v. Wade.
Now, the question of whether or not a constitutionally protected right to privacy exists is a much trickier matter, and I'm inclined to agree with you that it doesn't.
What irony, something braindead posted to bypass something braindead.
For example, if a person disagrees with TO on the 'fact of evolution', these people will employ a definition of evolution ["Biological evolution is a change in the genetic characteristics of a population over time"] that makes it impossible to disagree and, if one does argue, then that person comes across as being uninformed or irrational or fanatical.
That IS the definition of evolution, no matter how much you want to extend it to anything and everything under the sun.
What's more, if we are to remain exclusively within the natural (material) realm then the term 'evolution' must somehow be further extended to include life from non-life, i.e., the emergence of life itself must also be accounted for by the ever-stretching definition of evolution. There's more. The origin of the basic materials that make up all objects (living or not) must also somehow be accounted for so yet other forms of evolution enter the scene-chemical, stellar and planetary. In fact, the universe itself must also be accounted for by evolution.
This is completely idiotic. That would be like saying that quantum mechanics has to explain ballroom dancing because they are both natural phenomena. Evolution is a biological observation, nothing more. The various theories about evolution are attempts to explain the apparent diversity and progression of biological organisms, nothing more. Abiogenesis, stellar formation, and the beginning of the universe are completely independent of evolution. There is no reason for evolution to have to explain those things because evolution is still valid no matter what explanation for those things is correct.
But to take the step from 'things change' to 'and therefore, that's how it all got here' is a leap of blind, irrational faith that would send even the most fanatical snake worshipper reeling.
Yes it is, fortunately no one is making it. Rather what they are doing is going from "things change" to "this may be how and why things change" and that is not a blind leap of faith because it is based on evidence and there are competing theories, such as natural selection vs. punctuated equilibrium.
The bottom line to all this is that the fundamental concept of evolution is clearly a manifestation of a metaphysical-not a scientific-worldview
Yes, but it is a worldview that you are injecting in there as a straw man, not something inherent in the theories of evolution.
Yeah? How? It's all very well having a slowmo movie in your head of that happening, but what prompted it? What caused them to get deeper and not shallower? What drove the `deeper is good' message into the genes? What decided that deeper `was' good?
A mutation doesn't have to be "good" to stick around, it just has to be neutral. It could even be slightly harmful, as long as it wasn't harmful enough to cause it to be selected out before a mutation that was beneficial but dependent on the harmful mutation came up. Whether or not that specific mutation actually is neutral or better is a different question, and as I am not a biologist, it is a question I cannot answer.
For the entire post you seem to believe that mutations need a reason (other than the physical reason for the change in the DNA, such as radiation or whatever) to occur. I don't know how you got this ludicrous idea, but a simple examination of it shows it is obviously false. You also don't seem to understand that the proposed chain of mutations is only one of the many chains of mutations that would have been happening in the beetle population. In short, you have completely failed to understand evolution, and I don't blame you for not believing in it.
Yes, but it answers the question posed perfectly. The question was "how could the bombardier beetle have evolved", with the expected answer of "I can't think of any way it could have evolved" forcing the conclusion that evolution is wrong. This answers the "how could it have", it never said that is how it did happen.
Maybe if you are walking on shag carpet in the middle of the desert of the least humid day of the year while shuffling your feet more than Michael Jackson, but under normal circumstances absolutely not.
So what? Good old water has a negative CTE, at least from 0 C to 4 C.
Handling RAM with your bare hands is NOT a big deal unless you are pulling it out of the socket while its on, or you are in an incredibly high static environment.
ESD will really only cause damage when there is a constant source of power being applied to a semiconductor. Only then can the kind of cascade effects that the article talks about happen. The amount of ESD you generate in a normal environment by normal movement will not damage unpowered semiconductors.
So what? Its excess current and heat that causes damage. A few hundred volts at 10 picoamps isn't going to do shit.
Neurons do NOT have electrical interconnects, they have chemical ones. All the electrical activity takes places within the neuron.
Look's like I'm the only one here that got that reference.
Warcraft 3 works perfectly fine on OS X. Every single copy sold is a copy that works on OS X.
What?! There is most definitely offramps into lynnwood from I-5. There is one southbound onto 196th, and two northbound, one onto 198th and one onto 44th. And yes, there is almost always a traffic jam at the 196th exit southbound.
I think it is you who are likely not from Seattle.
Actually, Einstein claimed that he was unaware of the Michaelson-Morely result when he formulated Special Relativity. He was aware of the constant speed of light predicted by Maxwell's equations though.
The game shops only make $5 to $10 for each $50 game. The rest of the money goes to the game company, minus a piddling amount for reproduction costs. Granted, you have to take into account development costs, but those are one time fees. After the development costs are recovered (first 250,000 games or so), the company makes at *least* $30 per $50 game. This puts your 60 million games figure down to 12.5 million. That is still quite a few games, but is easily manageable if spread out over 3-5 big name games.
I'd second his comment specifically *because* of those games. Super Monkey Ball was an interesting concept, but was nearly unplayable due to camera control and the sensitivity of movement. They might have improved it with SMB2 though, I haven't played it. The Virtua Fighter series was just another fighter, with no ingenuity. As for the rest of them, I hate sports games.
Really? According to amazon.com it ships Friday in the US as well, which is what I was basing my statement off of. BTW, US and Japan are the only two regions for GameCube, and the GameCube is NOT a DVD-based console.
That isn't true for the same reason that, even though humans can only hear up to 20KHz sound waves at the most, you can still hear the difference between a sound sampled at 22KHz, 44KHz, and 96KHz. The resolution in an analog TV is essentially its sample rate. Granted, there will be a law of diminishing returns, and at some point you really won't be able to tell the difference, but that point is higher than the actual resolution of the TV.
And I guess you are going to tell me that there are only 10 mm^3 in 1 cm^3?
I think you need to take a remedial math course.
Different consoles run at different resolutions. The GameCube has the ability to run at 1080p, assuming that the game is designed to do that. I don't know what the other consoles run at, but I can assure you that none of them run at 640x480. 640x480 is a computer resolution, because the pixels on a computer monitor are square, and 640x480 gives a 4:3 aspect ratio with square pixels. TV pixels are rectangular and so require resolutions like 720x480 (DVDs), which would normally be a 3:2 aspect ratio to get the 4:3 ratio.
I might be willing to give you Doom 3, but A) it's not out yet
Star Fox Adventures isn't out yet either.
Right, and 128Kbit MP3s are CD quality.</sarcasm>
If you are already going to use two cds, rip it to SVCD. The artifacts are far less noticeable, and you can play it on a standalone DVD player. I know you can't do 5.1, but most DVDs don't have 5.1 audio anyway.
And you will suffer the loss of quality and the inability to play them on a real TV that goes along with it, no thanks. DivX sucks.
You really work for the Discordians.
Really? You try setting up a factory and making 2003 Ford Escorts and see if you don't get sued into oblivion. Cars are most certainly copyrighted, they just aren't as easy to duplicate as most of the copyrighted work discussed on slashdot.
TiVos don't require the subscription to operate, but they are just a digital VCR without it. However, if the service ever does end I'm sure within a month or two someone will hack up some software that lets TiVos use one of the many free TV listings websites out there.
I've got news for you buddy, there are tons and tons of toll highways in the US.