And just to be even clearer on the mechanism, the body only keeps changes that help in reproduction. Darwinian evolution is like a random number generator hitched to a filter that only selects the combinations that would go in your little black book.
Darwinian evolution is not so good at explaining changes with little obvious reproductive impact. Perhaps there is some other mechanism at work in addition to natural selection.
What evolution wouldn't do is favor a mistake that had an effect on reproduction.
I don't think it's safe to just assume that any improvement you can think of would automatically give one an advantage in a natural selection match-up.
(Caveat: I'm working off a year-old memory of Phillip's book here, so I might get things a bit muddled.)
Re: the "no change" argument, I believe his point is that a great many species show very little sign of change, in spite of large-scale changes in the geological record. Evolution has poor "predictive" powers, he would argue.
Re: the "unwarranted" argument, his point would be that the ability to select from a known state is not at all the same as creating something entirely new. Selection has insufficient "creative" powers, he would argue.
Anyway, I thought the book was worth reading, regardless of how one comes down on the question.
Personally, I believe we haven't truly hit upon the right theory yet. There is clearly something going on with self-organization of systems, not just self-selection. The world doesn't feel "random" at all, in fact, just the opposite.
Whatever this self-organizing principle may turn out to be, of course it would be a "natural" feature. There's absolutely no need to bring supernaturalism into the discussion at all.
There certainly are other realms of inquiry beyond science, and they can be perfectly legitimate. But science is self-restricted to only that which can be tested, which means the natural world. So please, yes, let's not try to pass of philosophical evidence as science.
"Academic freedom is a great thing," says Josh Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California. "But if you look at the American Association of University Professors' definition of academic freedom, it refers to the ability to do research and publish." This, he points out, is different to the job high-school teachers are supposed to do. "In high school, you're teaching mainstream science so students can go on to college or medical school, where you need that freedom to explore cutting-edge ideas. To apply 'academic freedom' to high school is a misuse of the term."
Man, I'm sure glad I didn't go to a high school where such an idea held any sway.
Well, as a logical proposition, evolution has this problem, too. As pointed out by Philip Johnson in his book, Darwin on Trial, as a theory, Darwinian evolution has four problems:
As a tautology: "those organisms that leave the most offspring, leave the most offspring."
As a deductive argument: If there are reproducing organisms, and offspring vary, and the variation can be inherited, and some variations are advantageous for survival, and competition exists, and overpopulation exists, then organisms will improve. However, since many organisms do not change for millions of years there is something wrong with the argument; moreover, improvement is only in success at reproduction and does not mean "improvement" as humans measure it.
As a scientific hypothesis: Natural selection of local fluctuations of genotypes (moth coloring, beak length, etc.) is a proposition that has been throroughly tested and confirmed by the evidence, but extrapolation to macroevolution or even permanent microevolution is unwarranted.
As a philosophical necessity: Complexity exists; science is characterized by naturalistic explanations; natural selection is the only respectable naturalistic explanation of complexity; therefore, natural selection must be true.
These are all valid points of logic, and scientists should be prepared to counter them.
See, here's the thing: telcos do not have a "right" to compete for these services. Rights belong to the people, not to private businesses.
The people, through their various branches of government, decide what are the rules and laws under which business can operate. The people, through taxes, fees, and bonds, provides the funding. The people, through our elected representatives, entirely owns the "public" sphere and everything that operates within it.
We are our own sovereign entity. No private enterprise can legitimately claim to "compete" with us; there is no government other than what we have established.
The whole foundation of the telco's argument is built on sand. Something to think about...
Re:support for automated offsite backup?
on
What NAS To Buy?
·
· Score: 1
Synology as a NAS "platform"
on
What NAS To Buy?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
One aspect of the Synology product line that separates it from the competition is their software strategy.
The only differences between any two Synology products is the hardware. The firmware is the same for all products. You get the same platform, the same services, and applications, but they just handle more data or run faster, depending on the hardware choice. I really like that I just pay for scale. There are no "kiddie" versions of the software.
The OS is Linux (busybox), so it's very familiar. Busybox cannot be extended as endlessly as a traditional distro, but the company includes a pretty complete set of utilities, a full LAMP stack, and an impressive collection of applications. Documentation is good, including a nice integration guide for integrating your own apps with the device (http://www.synology.com/enu/support/3rd-party_application_integration.php )
All in all, it was their vision of a NAS device as a no-excuses, true server platform for my content that won me over.
there really are people out there... that feel safer with minimum wage employees bossing them around, confiscating their water, and smugly apprehending their deodorant.
How true! I recently went to my local Court to get a business permit, and was greeted with an absurd level of security that included the following exchange:
Guard: Sir, please remove your belt Me: My BELT? Guard: Yes, your belt. Me: Me: You want me to remove my BELT? Guard: Yes, sir. Me: Ok (removes belt, passes it around the metal detector to Guard) Guard: (Speaking brightly) See? This way you don't set off any alarms! Me: (Oy....)
We have in this headline yet another obnoxiously-worded headline that appears to serve no purpose other than inciting verbal riot.
There is nothing remotely "anti-evolution" in the text of the law. Go read it and see for yourself (it's only a single page).
I call foul on this headline. I'm so tired of people shouting about how terrible all "those people" are, and I'm especially tired of people putting things in the worst possible light all the time.
Reading these kinds of slashdot articles is like listening to talk radio.
I wouldn't have so much trouble with letting other people keep their own beliefs if they didn't make public policy decisions based on those beliefs. Any public policy decisions not based on MY beliefs are automatically wrong.
... but, really, you are making accusations you simply cannot support. You say, for instance, that these Supreme Court justices
... violate their offices repeatedly, consistently, and in coordinated discussion with each other,... There's simply no way you can know any such thing, unless you yourself are one of the Supreme Court justices in question. How do you know what the justices have "coordinated" among themselves? In what possible way is a dissenting justice "violating" their office?
There's a line between being "mad as hell and not taking it any more", and accusing other people of things you cannot possibly prove. If you cross it, people will call you out on it.
I think infoq.com has some wonderful resources on "general principles of good software design". In particular, I recommend reading Jean Jacques Dubray's terrific mini-book on composite software construction, which will definitely give you some serious food for thought.
Speaking for myself, I think perhaps the most important principle is to keep thinking until it's really right.
I've been around some extremely intelligent people in my time, and none of them ever got it right on the first pass. You think of solution "A", which leads you to think of solution "B", which finally lands you on solution "C", the right one. The point is, the only way you COULD have gotten to solution "C" is by way of "B", and so on.
Naturally, this means one has to spend enough time upfront to come up with the right idea. It is a mistake to think that EVERYTHING needs to be documented up front (the classic "waterfall" method), but you've really got to have the essential idea and its approach before you even touch that code.
To me, UML has become an increasingly important design tool for expressing the essence of a system before we get down into the trenches.
These people [4 dissenting Supreme Court justices] are part of a blatantly, flagrantly anti-American conspiracy among themselves to destroy America and everything it stands for. If I had moderator points, I probably wouldn't have modded you down, but only becuase modding down is something I very rarely do; I'm more interested in promoting good arguments rather than suppressing bad ones. Nevertheless, your quote is really over the top, and I can easily see a person who is not so reluctant to give negative mod points doing so.
What makes your quote over the top is its very negative, accusative tone; the impossibility of proving your statement about conspiracy one way or another (a "conspiracy among themselves"), and the fact that you are talking about Supreme Court justices, and they are due at least some modicum of respect because of their office.
Other than this little bit, I would say your article is both insightful and interesting, and well-deserving of the plus points.
Your line of argument is very similar to an article I wrote about the rules of war that Americans must impose on themselves: How America Fights. Even though I suspect we come from rather different political camps, there can be a lot of agreement on issues of principle.
One small quibble I would have with your argument, however, is that you have not fully represented the the dissenting opinion in this case. What the dissenters are most objecting to isn't about the issue of habeas corpus itself, but about the separation of powers between the courts and the other two branches of government. The supreme court is now placing itself above the other branches by requiring the military to justify it's decisions to a federal judge.
... because audio CDs are not a random-access medium. They are designed for sequential access, and presume that synchronization may be lost for very brief periods of time. When sync is lost, the missing data can sometimes be recreated on-the-fly from other data.
The point of a CD is to create the impression of continuous sound, not to faithfully transfer binary information. See the CDDA Paranoia FAQ for a better explanation than mine.
The new class of UMPCs have specialized hardware that is much closer to the user space than the more general-purpose machines we use today. The XO-1, for example, has dedicated keys on the keyboard for context switching, mesh networking hardware that interacts with application to let the user to co-editing, and other innovations.
A lot of the infrastructure needed to drive this level of hardware interaction simply doesn't exist on general-purpose machines. There's no generic ISO for the XO-1, there's only the ISO that runs on the XO-1 hardware.
You can, of course, take the non-hardware-dependent software and run it on other boxes, and you can emulate the hardware, and run the OS like that. But a purpose-built machine will use purpose-built software.
This, actually, is the great strength of Linux, that it can be reassembled in so many different ways. We shouldn't then be surprised when it gets reconfigured so extensively that it can no longer work on our generic boxes.
I think your point about perspective is well taken. While it may be true that even a small group of people can pull off something like the 9/11 attack, the fact is they can't sustain it, so the long-term threat is actually much lower.
9/11 was the first major asymmetric attack on US soil, and people really didn't have any experience to help them judge the true severity (or non-severity) of the attack. People thought there was an attacker behind every bush and tree.
There's no question that Bush took advantage of the situation, but at the time, people wanted him to respond forcefully. In hindsight, I think Bush could have been a lot more selective in our response, and we lost a huge amount of credibility by not being smarter.
Nevertheless, the idea of a dictator playing coy with WMDs was really just unsupportable at the time, and I think no matter who was in office, we would have made some kind of military action against Iraq.
It's not true that no Americans had been killed before the current Iraq conflict, as others have pointed out. The conflict had been going on for decades before.
The big one, though, is Iraq weapons of mass destruction. Although no Americans died from these, 5,000 people died from the Chemical Warfare attack on Halabja. Throughout the 1990s, the UN found and destroyed large quantities of WMD in Iraq. Everyone certainly thought they had even more, but this turned out not to be the case.
I remember the time immediately before the current war very well. The 9/11 attack had put everyone on edge. No one knew for sure what the Iraqis did or didn't have because Saddam was not letting the inspectors do their jobs fully. Lots of people believed that the Iraqis must have these weapons because they've used them before, they're hiding everything, and no one can find any evidence of their destruction.
Personally, I believe that Saddam was the primary reason for the unrest in Iraq (both inside Iraq and with its neighbors). He never believed the US would ever truly invade (in spite of the Gulf War -- go figure!), and decided to play a game of cat and mouse with the whole international community over WMDs. He failed to take into account the effect that 9/11 would have on public opinion in the US, and lost.
The report from NY has a more thorough treatment of the issues than the report from MN. It makes a strong case for openness as a policy, not a technical choice; shows how it is just one of many such choices, not all of which can be equally satisfied in every situation; and then very ably lays out a recommendation for making sure that openness gets pushed down into the state agencies.
The report from MN is focused on relating the wide variety of opinion that exists in this area, and not on making a specific recommendation (other than the commonsense one that the market is in flux and that the legislature shouldn't be picking market winners and losers.) The report gave me a much better understanding of just how confusing it can be when people try to talk about this issue. Like many complex topics, one needs to almost insist on agreements about terminology and scope even before engaging in the real discussion.
Ignore the slashdot headline. Read Mary Lou Jepsen's blog, http://www.pixelqi.com/ for the technical vision.
Mary Lou's vision of the next generation of display technology is:
- Daylight readable - Color - Fast enough for video - Embedded Wireless - Touchscreen - Embedded solid-state storage - Extremely low power (1 watt) - Embedded battery - Battery life measured in days, not hours - Embedded processor
Mary Lou's point is that with a machine like this, who needs a heavy-weight OS? Just about everything one needs on the OS side would already be in the hardware.
These are clearly the ideas behind what Nicholas is describing.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the issue? The first page of a Google search for "hd radio output jack" lists
HD Pulse with "Stereo Output"
Sony XDR with 3.5mm stereo output jack
JVC KT-HDP with a stereo out
Just plug the line out to your recording device of choice (digital or otherwise) and go to town.
And just to be even clearer on the mechanism, the body only keeps changes that help in reproduction. Darwinian evolution is like a random number generator hitched to a filter that only selects the combinations that would go in your little black book.
Darwinian evolution is not so good at explaining changes with little obvious reproductive impact. Perhaps there is some other mechanism at work in addition to natural selection.
What evolution wouldn't do is favor a mistake that had an effect on reproduction.
I don't think it's safe to just assume that any improvement you can think of would automatically give one an advantage in a natural selection match-up.
(Caveat: I'm working off a year-old memory of Phillip's book here, so I might get things a bit muddled.)
Re: the "no change" argument, I believe his point is that a great many species show very little sign of change, in spite of large-scale changes in the geological record. Evolution has poor "predictive" powers, he would argue.
Re: the "unwarranted" argument, his point would be that the ability to select from a known state is not at all the same as creating something entirely new. Selection has insufficient "creative" powers, he would argue.
Anyway, I thought the book was worth reading, regardless of how one comes down on the question.
Personally, I believe we haven't truly hit upon the right theory yet. There is clearly something going on with self-organization of systems, not just self-selection. The world doesn't feel "random" at all, in fact, just the opposite.
Whatever this self-organizing principle may turn out to be, of course it would be a "natural" feature. There's absolutely no need to bring supernaturalism into the discussion at all.
There certainly are other realms of inquiry beyond science, and they can be perfectly legitimate. But science is self-restricted to only that which can be tested, which means the natural world. So please, yes, let's not try to pass of philosophical evidence as science.
From TFA, here is a truly scary argument:
"Academic freedom is a great thing," says Josh Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California. "But if you look at the American Association of University Professors' definition of academic freedom, it refers to the ability to do research and publish." This, he points out, is different to the job high-school teachers are supposed to do. "In high school, you're teaching mainstream science so students can go on to college or medical school, where you need that freedom to explore cutting-edge ideas. To apply 'academic freedom' to high school is a misuse of the term."
Man, I'm sure glad I didn't go to a high school where such an idea held any sway.
What I can do is immediately tell anyone who tells me that they know what God wants, or what God was thinking, that they can go fuck themselves.
Your own little piece of dogma, right there...
The problem is that ID can't be proven false.
Well, as a logical proposition, evolution has this problem, too. As pointed out by Philip Johnson in his book, Darwin on Trial, as a theory, Darwinian evolution has four problems:
These are all valid points of logic, and scientists should be prepared to counter them.
See, here's the thing: telcos do not have a "right" to compete for these services. Rights belong to the people, not to private businesses.
The people, through their various branches of government, decide what are the rules and laws under which business can operate. The people, through taxes, fees, and bonds, provides the funding. The people, through our elected representatives, entirely owns the "public" sphere and everything that operates within it.
We are our own sovereign entity. No private enterprise can legitimately claim to "compete" with us; there is no government other than what we have established.
The whole foundation of the telco's argument is built on sand. Something to think about ...
Any of the Synology products can do this. See
http://www.synology.com/enu/solutions/bkp_remote.php
One aspect of the Synology product line that separates it from the competition is their software strategy.
The only differences between any two Synology products is the hardware. The firmware is the same for all products. You get the same platform, the same services, and applications, but they just handle more data or run faster, depending on the hardware choice. I really like that I just pay for scale. There are no "kiddie" versions of the software.
The OS is Linux (busybox), so it's very familiar. Busybox cannot be extended as endlessly as a traditional distro, but the company includes a pretty complete set of utilities, a full LAMP stack, and an impressive collection of applications. Documentation is good, including a nice integration guide for integrating your own apps with the device (http://www.synology.com/enu/support/3rd-party_application_integration.php )
All in all, it was their vision of a NAS device as a no-excuses, true server platform for my content that won me over.
I love this line:
there really are people out there ... that feel safer with minimum wage employees bossing them around, confiscating their water, and smugly apprehending their deodorant.
How true! I recently went to my local Court to get a business permit, and was greeted with an absurd level of security that included the following exchange:
Guard: Sir, please remove your belt
Me: My BELT?
Guard: Yes, your belt.
Me:
Me: You want me to remove my BELT?
Guard: Yes, sir.
Me: Ok (removes belt, passes it around the metal detector to Guard)
Guard: (Speaking brightly) See? This way you don't set off any alarms!
Me: (Oy....)
We have in this headline yet another obnoxiously-worded headline that appears to serve no purpose other than inciting verbal riot.
There is nothing remotely "anti-evolution" in the text of the law. Go read it and see for yourself (it's only a single page).
I call foul on this headline. I'm so tired of people shouting about how terrible all "those people" are, and I'm especially tired of people putting things in the worst possible light all the time.
Reading these kinds of slashdot articles is like listening to talk radio.
I wouldn't have so much trouble with letting other people keep their own beliefs if they didn't make public policy decisions based on those beliefs. Any public policy decisions not based on MY beliefs are automatically wrong.
There, fixed that for ya.
... violate their offices repeatedly, consistently, and in coordinated discussion with each other,... There's simply no way you can know any such thing, unless you yourself are one of the Supreme Court justices in question. How do you know what the justices have "coordinated" among themselves? In what possible way is a dissenting justice "violating" their office?There's a line between being "mad as hell and not taking it any more", and accusing other people of things you cannot possibly prove. If you cross it, people will call you out on it.
I think infoq.com has some wonderful resources on "general principles of good software design". In particular, I recommend reading Jean Jacques Dubray's terrific mini-book on composite software construction, which will definitely give you some serious food for thought.
Speaking for myself, I think perhaps the most important principle is to keep thinking until it's really right.
I've been around some extremely intelligent people in my time, and none of them ever got it right on the first pass. You think of solution "A", which leads you to think of solution "B", which finally lands you on solution "C", the right one. The point is, the only way you COULD have gotten to solution "C" is by way of "B", and so on.
Naturally, this means one has to spend enough time upfront to come up with the right idea. It is a mistake to think that EVERYTHING needs to be documented up front (the classic "waterfall" method), but you've really got to have the essential idea and its approach before you even touch that code.
To me, UML has become an increasingly important design tool for expressing the essence of a system before we get down into the trenches.
What makes your quote over the top is its very negative, accusative tone; the impossibility of proving your statement about conspiracy one way or another (a "conspiracy among themselves"), and the fact that you are talking about Supreme Court justices, and they are due at least some modicum of respect because of their office.
Other than this little bit, I would say your article is both insightful and interesting, and well-deserving of the plus points.
Your line of argument is very similar to an article I wrote about the rules of war that Americans must impose on themselves: How America Fights. Even though I suspect we come from rather different political camps, there can be a lot of agreement on issues of principle.
One small quibble I would have with your argument, however, is that you have not fully represented the the dissenting opinion in this case. What the dissenters are most objecting to isn't about the issue of habeas corpus itself, but about the separation of powers between the courts and the other two branches of government. The supreme court is now placing itself above the other branches by requiring the military to justify it's decisions to a federal judge.
... because audio CDs are not a random-access medium. They are designed for sequential access, and presume that synchronization may be lost for very brief periods of time. When sync is lost, the missing data can sometimes be recreated on-the-fly from other data.
The point of a CD is to create the impression of continuous sound, not to faithfully transfer binary information. See the CDDA Paranoia FAQ for a better explanation than mine.
The new class of UMPCs have specialized hardware that is much closer to the user space than the more general-purpose machines we use today. The XO-1, for example, has dedicated keys on the keyboard for context switching, mesh networking hardware that interacts with application to let the user to co-editing, and other innovations.
A lot of the infrastructure needed to drive this level of hardware interaction simply doesn't exist on general-purpose machines. There's no generic ISO for the XO-1, there's only the ISO that runs on the XO-1 hardware.
You can, of course, take the non-hardware-dependent software and run it on other boxes, and you can emulate the hardware, and run the OS like that. But a purpose-built machine will use purpose-built software.
This, actually, is the great strength of Linux, that it can be reassembled in so many different ways. We shouldn't then be surprised when it gets reconfigured so extensively that it can no longer work on our generic boxes.
I think your point about perspective is well taken. While it may be true that even a small group of people can pull off something like the 9/11 attack, the fact is they can't sustain it, so the long-term threat is actually much lower.
9/11 was the first major asymmetric attack on US soil, and people really didn't have any experience to help them judge the true severity (or non-severity) of the attack. People thought there was an attacker behind every bush and tree.
There's no question that Bush took advantage of the situation, but at the time, people wanted him to respond forcefully. In hindsight, I think Bush could have been a lot more selective in our response, and we lost a huge amount of credibility by not being smarter.
Nevertheless, the idea of a dictator playing coy with WMDs was really just unsupportable at the time, and I think no matter who was in office, we would have made some kind of military action against Iraq.
That's my two cents worth, at any rate.
It's not true that no Americans had been killed before the current Iraq conflict, as others have pointed out. The conflict had been going on for decades before.
The big one, though, is Iraq weapons of mass destruction. Although no Americans died from these, 5,000 people died from the Chemical Warfare attack on Halabja. Throughout the 1990s, the UN found and destroyed large quantities of WMD in Iraq. Everyone certainly thought they had even more, but this turned out not to be the case.
I remember the time immediately before the current war very well. The 9/11 attack had put everyone on edge. No one knew for sure what the Iraqis did or didn't have because Saddam was not letting the inspectors do their jobs fully. Lots of people believed that the Iraqis must have these weapons because they've used them before, they're hiding everything, and no one can find any evidence of their destruction.
Personally, I believe that Saddam was the primary reason for the unrest in Iraq (both inside Iraq and with its neighbors). He never believed the US would ever truly invade (in spite of the Gulf War -- go figure!), and decided to play a game of cat and mouse with the whole international community over WMDs. He failed to take into account the effect that 9/11 would have on public opinion in the US, and lost.
The report from NY has a more thorough treatment of the issues than the report from MN. It makes a strong case for openness as a policy, not a technical choice; shows how it is just one of many such choices, not all of which can be equally satisfied in every situation; and then very ably lays out a recommendation for making sure that openness gets pushed down into the state agencies.
The report from MN is focused on relating the wide variety of opinion that exists in this area, and not on making a specific recommendation (other than the commonsense one that the market is in flux and that the legislature shouldn't be picking market winners and losers.) The report gave me a much better understanding of just how confusing it can be when people try to talk about this issue. Like many complex topics, one needs to almost insist on agreements about terminology and scope even before engaging in the real discussion.
Ignore the slashdot headline. Read Mary Lou Jepsen's blog, http://www.pixelqi.com/ for the technical vision.
Mary Lou's vision of the next generation of display technology is:
- Daylight readable
- Color
- Fast enough for video
- Embedded Wireless
- Touchscreen
- Embedded solid-state storage
- Extremely low power (1 watt)
- Embedded battery
- Battery life measured in days, not hours
- Embedded processor
Mary Lou's point is that with a machine like this, who needs a heavy-weight OS? Just about everything one needs on the OS side would already be in the hardware.
These are clearly the ideas behind what Nicholas is describing.
... that the only way to fight a network is with another network. Do they really have any other choice?