The cost to produce (in gross terms) is the same with or without subsidies. In net profit terms your costs are offset by subsidies, but you still have to spend the time and money planting corn before you get the subsidy. (Well, except for the "farmers" in NYC collecting checks for land they own, but that's another story.)
But there's a fundamental difference between breeding different varieties of corn to produce something that is drought resistant and creating a chimera. Human intervention in the genome via traditional breeding has produced some good things (like drought resistant corn), but it has also created some headaches such as killer bees.
One issue that I don't really hear anyone asking is if it's really a net benefit overall. There's already a plethora of naturally occurring life forms containing probably everything we already need. Would a better approach be to retrofit our current processes and infrastructure to find and accommodate for these rather than potentially screwing up the planet?
Theories and laws are different, and a theory can never become a law. It can become more and more accepted as it stands up to the test of time, but it'll still be a theory. I hear you, but you're making my case.
A law is a consistent pattern of observations... A theory is an explanation for those observations... The theory can be disproved if we observe something that contradicts those predictions, but it can never really be proved... Precisely my point. But what laws are the theory of evolution attempting to explain? From what I've seen, Evolution is attempting to explain the origin of species and observations such as the overwhelming similarities between species. It is widely accepted, and as such should be learned and taught. But it should never be presented as "incontrovertible fact". It's still just a theory and as such, always subject to being disproved.
I've never seen a poodle give birth to a dachshund, but does that mean they aren't related? No, but I've seen a poodle give birth to a cockerpoo. We named her "Frenchie". Scientists have come up with all kinds of definitions for a species. Actually "folk species" is a fairly strict definition as the two subjects have to produce fertile offspring to be considered the same. So in my example, a female poodle mated with a cocker spaniel and gave birth to cockerpoos (fertile offspring). Thus, the poodle and the cocker spaniel are the same species (albeit different varieties).
"folk species" definitions fail to answer important questions like "are all bacteria the same species?" or "is a mule the same species as a horse or a donkey?" These questions just do not keep me up at night. Perhaps bacteria are all different varieties of the same species. Maybe there are 10 different bacteria species with 8 billion varieties. A mule cannot even reproduce so is it even a species? But more fundamentally, it is really worth concocting the theory of evolution, bashing the Bible, ostracizing those who differ (with emotional, non-scientific arguments) simply in order to answer them?
It's actually far more complicated. If a dog ever gave birth to a cat, it would mark the very first time true speciation was observed, creating cheering crowds of evolutionists clamoring how they were truly right all along. A technicality such as falsification, would not get in the way of newspaper headlines and that "final piece of solid truth".
Of course there is that issue of reproducing the stunt so evolution could finally become a scientific law. But I doubt they'd let that get in the way.
since I am not an expert in the subject... This seems rather obvious by the scientifically incorrect assertion, "I think it is important to present the overwhelming body of evidence on the subject as incontrovertible fact". Evolution is still technically a scientific theory. A theory (scientifically speaking) is only a theory, (despite how widely accepted it is) until it is *proven* as fact (i.e.: consistently reproducible). At that point it becomes a scientific law. The fact that evolution is so widely accepted, does not make it scientific law. It just means it's widely accepted. (It was once widely accepted that the world was flat.)
In the court of law in the United States, a person can be convicted if they are found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That is what's known as "legal guilt" and differs from actual guilt. A mountain of circumstantial evidence can constitute guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But it doesn't mean the defendant's actually guilty. It simply means all 13 jurors (rationally) think they are.
The creationist vs. evolution debate will never end for one simple reason: just like you cannot prove or disprove the existence of God, you also cannot prove or disprove that something occurred billions of years ago. You can only postulate that the aftermath we observe in the present was caused by XYZ. Until we can jump into a time machine to go back and observe, we have to... ahem... trust the men in white coats (sounds a lot like faith?).
One case in point is while genetic mutations, natural selection and the like (i.e.: microevolution) have been observed in the wild as fact, never has anyone ever observed speciation of one folk species into another. In other words, we have lots of varieties of dogs, cats and other animals, but no one has ever seen a dog give birth to a cat. The so-called "observations" of speciation reported in scientific journals typically use a less strict definition of species (like when apple maggot fly offspring eat something besides apples) or postulate on species observed on remote islands.
If a presidential candidate actually has the courage to stop following the herd and the intelligence to stand up against the theory of evolution, then, while he/she may not get my vote, they will certainly earn my respect.
Notice the first time it's *publicized* that CIPAV was used is in a case like this where a school bomb threat is foiled. I wonder how many other times CIPAV has been used that have *not* been publicized.
You seem to be a pretty level-headed individual judging from your post (atheist, agnostic(, believer) or otherwise). We need more level-headed folks on both sides. The old proverb that the squeaky wheel gets the oil is really true here, but the "squeaky ones" seem to also be the most extreme.
Believing the bible is actually a relatively complex issue. While the miracles proclaimed in scripture seem lofty, we cannot really prove or disprove that they happened, only that they seem strange, bizarre and again, lofty. Some might stop there and proclaim that because of this loftiness, the bible is therefor false.
But there are two things to rationally consider: 1) There very well could be natural explanations for these events. For example, God may well have simply blown a strong wind over a shallow part of the Red Sea that allowed the Israelites to cross over on relatively dry ground. Events like this have actually been observed in the area from time to time. It is not impossible. Just simply bizarre to think about.
2) There is a lot more to scripture than just miraculous, hard to believe stories. In fact, those stories are actually few & far between inside "the Book". A lot of things in scripture are checking out scientifically. For example, the distinction between clean & unclean meats in Leviticus 11 must have perplexed people for centuries. But if you look at the animals considered clean and compare them to the ones considered unclean, you'll notice an interesting trend. The clean animals are almost all vegetarian. The unclean animals listed are almost all scavengers or meat-eaters. The rabbit is an interesting exception. But as recent science has discovered, rabbits have almost zero fat, which is needed by humans to digest protein. Many survivalists will tell you if you eat rabbits, you can actually starve yourself to death. Some people in the U.S. starved themselves in this very manner during the Great Depression.
There are literally thousands of things like this that check out with recent scientific findings. Thus, I think you have to look at the Bible as a whole before you judge it.
It isn't so much the runtime difference between parsing XML vs using JSON as much as the development time involved. If you use XML, you have to spend time coding the XML generation on the server side and then code the XML parsing on the client. Even if you use a hidden element with XML as you suggested, you still have to then create custom code to pull out the needed data.
If you use JSON, all you have to do on the server side is retrieve the object/collection (DTO/Value Object) from your business logic and call a library function to convert that into a JSON construct that is streamed to the browser. On the client side, you simply have JavaScript eval() the XmlHTTPRequest.responseText and you instantly have the same object/collection to work with as a JavaScript object.
That's why it makes so much more sense to use JSON vs. XML.
The ONLY advantage that something like AJAX has is that most people now have browsers that can support it.
Uhm... That's a pretty huge advantage.
Sure, supposedly Web browsers are supposed to all be conforming to a standard that can be used, but we all know they aren't.
They pretty much are these days. The differences today between IE and Gecko/Mozilla-based browsers are rather miniscule and much more manageable than the headaches we had in the old days of Netscape & IE versions 4. And they're certainly nothing like the differences between the various versions of Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, etc....
Web development, especially when doing something like this, is no less expensive, and can easily be much more expensive, than creating a classical application.
Development-wise you're right. Maintenance-wise, web applications are a heck of a lot easier.
If you want cross platform, it would make much more sense to do such development to another platform which most people have, which is Java.
I don't think so. Applets take forever to load while AJAX apps are lightening fast. Plus, you don't know if the user already has a JRE installed if your app is on the internet (not to mention the potential versioning issues). I use Java on the server side. I love Java. I'm SCJP certified. I drink java for breakfast. But it doesn't belong in anyone's browser window.
The school board is teaching a science class and is teaching the fact of evolution. Evolution has a tonne of evidence supporting it - evidence that continues to grow, not shrink. "Intelligent Design", on the other hand, has NO evidence supporting it and is simply the latest incarnation of Creationism...
This statement was birthed in ignorance. Firstly, evolution is not a fact (scientifically speaking). If it was, it would then cease to be called the theory of evolution, and become the law of evolution. (How do you prove "billions and billions of years ago"? You can't.)
Ultimately what you are saying is that you cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. On the flip side, you also cannot prove or disprove the evolutionary theory. Hence the debate. (If you could prove evolution it would no longer be a scientific theory -- would then be a scientific law.)
One's opinion on the issue ultimately depends on how the individual views the world and little else -- no matter how in depth you study the issue.
While Sophocles wrote over 120 plays, only 7 have been uncovered in their entirety. Missing texts may be a common theme for classical Greek literature (??), but is really not very common for Christian texts.
There are literally thousands upon thousands of ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Hundreds of copies of writings of the church fathers exist as well. In short, no one's really looking for any *new* gospels or epistles since there really aren't any indicators that they exist like with Sophocles plays.
That being said, this still could potentially be profound for Christianity in other ways. For example, while we have thousands of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, the originals from (or anything copied during) the First Century are scant at best.
Couple that with many scholars' theory that several books of the New Testament were orginally written in Hebrew or Aramaic (many Oxyrhynchus Papyri are in Hebrew & Aramaic), then you could potentially uncover a copy the Gospel of Matthew in it's orginial, First Century Hebrew.
The potential for "get[ting] the Bible-thumpers in a rage" is there, but only from the perspective of realizing how Jewish and Old Testament law-upholding Jesus/Yeshua really was.
Also consistently, people I talk to who use PHP after having used another language are universally scornful of PHP.
Hmmm... I code J2EE (WebSphere) and I must say PHP is much more graceful than Java. I can send an email in one line of PHP code, but with Java, if I'm not using J2EE, I have to make sure I have the JavaMail and JAF libraries manually installed and then regardless, write or download a wrapper class (with prolly 100+ lines of code) to do something that any language ought to be able to do with a native library.
I've messed with Perl a little, but after using languages like Java, C, C++ and PHP, Perl is just gross to look at. I know that can be chocked up as a personal preference, but I've heard many other programmers say the same.
Not to knock Perl -- I know that it has some quick 'n dirty, get the job done capabilities. But then so does PHP. And PHP looks and feels more like a real programming language.
..."a username and password is sent to the registrant a few hours after submission." A few hours after submission? Seriously, that's probably your biggest problem.
Despite the/. rants about not wanting to input one's email address, most people will give that up if they feel they are going to get something of value in return. However, one of the beauties of the web is that it's instantaneous. If you make people wait hours to download trial software, especially after they've given you all their info, you will lose them.
By the time their email from you arrives, they have gone to your competitors sites, downloaded their software trials and have forgotten all about you.
You just need to grab the bf-something Woody install. It's the one with the 2.4.18 kernel. During the partitioning part of the install you select Linux extended. Then when configuring each partition, the installation asks you if you want it to be ext2 or ext3. Just select ext3. It's really that simple.
Actually, to the contrary there are lots of reasons why dpkg is still superior to rpm:
dpkg has configuration options that, when needed, will prompt the user and ask how he/she would like the package to behave. With RPM, you don't have that option.
dpkg and apt on Debian work very nicely together to provide more official packages than any other distrobution (3,900+ on Potato). Sure, you can type 'up2date --nox packageName' and get RH to install a package with dependencies taken care of, but only the relatively few packages that RH officially includes in their distro. And if you download RPMs from contrib.redhat.com you're really taking your chances since those are packages uploaded by Joe Shmoe and not officially support or tested by RH.
With up2date, you're also stuck using the RHN. If you want to use it for more than one machine you either have to pay RH or go to their website each time and switch to another machine. With Debian, you can apt-get update|install|upgrade on however many machines you want, using whatever mirror you want from an endless list. Now there's nothing wrong with RH charging for this. They are a company and they have to make money. Plenty of other companies would save a lot of money if they bought a RH CD install kit, wiped Windows off their servers and purchased RHN licenses for all the boxes. It's just that with Debian, they wouldn't have to go through that hassle.
If you want to upgrade your whole entire system to the next Debian release, all you do is edit your/etc/apt/sources.list file to grab the new distro (i.e.: change instances of 'potato' to 'woody'), then type 'apt-get update;apt-get upgrade'. After it downloads, installs and configures your new packages... you have the latest version. And you dont' even have to reboot unless you separately upgrade the kernel (and want to use it).
Just go to Tools, Configure User Tools... and set up java.exe and javac.exe to run/compile the file when you hit ctrl+1 or whatever key you want. It works great. You just have to have a JDK installed on your machine for EditPlus to use it.
Here's a screenshot for it: http://www.editplus.com/ss/java.gif
...how much more of this crap will have to happen before people finally ditch the instability and insecurity of Micro$oft products?
*nix is not that hard to learn and quite frankly has a lot more abilities than the MS equivalents. And it's mainly all free. In light of what's been going on lately it's almost unpatriotic to run MS servers anymore because they are so vulnerable to attacks. IMHO.
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The cost to produce (in gross terms) is the same with or without subsidies. In net profit terms your costs are offset by subsidies, but you still have to spend the time and money planting corn before you get the subsidy. (Well, except for the "farmers" in NYC collecting checks for land they own, but that's another story.)
But there's a fundamental difference between breeding different varieties of corn to produce something that is drought resistant and creating a chimera. Human intervention in the genome via traditional breeding has produced some good things (like drought resistant corn), but it has also created some headaches such as killer bees.
One issue that I don't really hear anyone asking is if it's really a net benefit overall. There's already a plethora of naturally occurring life forms containing probably everything we already need. Would a better approach be to retrofit our current processes and infrastructure to find and accommodate for these rather than potentially screwing up the planet?
It's actually far more complicated. If a dog ever gave birth to a cat, it would mark the very first time true speciation was observed, creating cheering crowds of evolutionists clamoring how they were truly right all along. A technicality such as falsification, would not get in the way of newspaper headlines and that "final piece of solid truth".
Of course there is that issue of reproducing the stunt so evolution could finally become a scientific law. But I doubt they'd let that get in the way.
Sorry... I meant 12 jurors.
since I am not an expert in the subject...
This seems rather obvious by the scientifically incorrect assertion, "I think it is important to present the overwhelming body of evidence on the subject as incontrovertible fact". Evolution is still technically a scientific theory. A theory (scientifically speaking) is only a theory, (despite how widely accepted it is) until it is *proven* as fact (i.e.: consistently reproducible). At that point it becomes a scientific law. The fact that evolution is so widely accepted, does not make it scientific law. It just means it's widely accepted. (It was once widely accepted that the world was flat.)
In the court of law in the United States, a person can be convicted if they are found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That is what's known as "legal guilt" and differs from actual guilt. A mountain of circumstantial evidence can constitute guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But it doesn't mean the defendant's actually guilty. It simply means all 13 jurors (rationally) think they are.
The creationist vs. evolution debate will never end for one simple reason: just like you cannot prove or disprove the existence of God, you also cannot prove or disprove that something occurred billions of years ago. You can only postulate that the aftermath we observe in the present was caused by XYZ. Until we can jump into a time machine to go back and observe, we have to... ahem... trust the men in white coats (sounds a lot like faith?).
One case in point is while genetic mutations, natural selection and the like (i.e.: microevolution) have been observed in the wild as fact, never has anyone ever observed speciation of one folk species into another. In other words, we have lots of varieties of dogs, cats and other animals, but no one has ever seen a dog give birth to a cat. The so-called "observations" of speciation reported in scientific journals typically use a less strict definition of species (like when apple maggot fly offspring eat something besides apples) or postulate on species observed on remote islands.
If a presidential candidate actually has the courage to stop following the herd and the intelligence to stand up against the theory of evolution, then, while he/she may not get my vote, they will certainly earn my respect.
Notice the first time it's *publicized* that CIPAV was used is in a case like this where a school bomb threat is foiled. I wonder how many other times CIPAV has been used that have *not* been publicized.
You seem to be a pretty level-headed individual judging from your post (atheist, agnostic(, believer) or otherwise). We need more level-headed folks on both sides. The old proverb that the squeaky wheel gets the oil is really true here, but the "squeaky ones" seem to also be the most extreme.
Believing the bible is actually a relatively complex issue. While the miracles proclaimed in scripture seem lofty, we cannot really prove or disprove that they happened, only that they seem strange, bizarre and again, lofty. Some might stop there and proclaim that because of this loftiness, the bible is therefor false.
But there are two things to rationally consider:
1) There very well could be natural explanations for these events. For example, God may well have simply blown a strong wind over a shallow part of the Red Sea that allowed the Israelites to cross over on relatively dry ground. Events like this have actually been observed in the area from time to time. It is not impossible. Just simply bizarre to think about.
2) There is a lot more to scripture than just miraculous, hard to believe stories. In fact, those stories are actually few & far between inside "the Book". A lot of things in scripture are checking out scientifically. For example, the distinction between clean & unclean meats in Leviticus 11 must have perplexed people for centuries. But if you look at the animals considered clean and compare them to the ones considered unclean, you'll notice an interesting trend. The clean animals are almost all vegetarian. The unclean animals listed are almost all scavengers or meat-eaters. The rabbit is an interesting exception. But as recent science has discovered, rabbits have almost zero fat, which is needed by humans to digest protein. Many survivalists will tell you if you eat rabbits, you can actually starve yourself to death. Some people in the U.S. starved themselves in this very manner during the Great Depression.
There are literally thousands of things like this that check out with recent scientific findings. Thus, I think you have to look at the Bible as a whole before you judge it.
It isn't so much the runtime difference between parsing XML vs using JSON as much as the development time involved. If you use XML, you have to spend time coding the XML generation on the server side and then code the XML parsing on the client. Even if you use a hidden element with XML as you suggested, you still have to then create custom code to pull out the needed data.
If you use JSON, all you have to do on the server side is retrieve the object/collection (DTO/Value Object) from your business logic and call a library function to convert that into a JSON construct that is streamed to the browser. On the client side, you simply have JavaScript eval() the XmlHTTPRequest.responseText and you instantly have the same object/collection to work with as a JavaScript object.
That's why it makes so much more sense to use JSON vs. XML.
But now these languages are getting bigger and bigger, causing bigger and bigger problems.
If I wasn't still waiting for my coffee's caffeine to kick in, I'd swear you were talking about Java.
The ONLY advantage that something like AJAX has is that most people now have browsers that can support it.
Uhm... That's a pretty huge advantage.
Sure, supposedly Web browsers are supposed to all be conforming to a standard that can be used, but we all know they aren't.
They pretty much are these days. The differences today between IE and Gecko/Mozilla-based browsers are rather miniscule and much more manageable than the headaches we had in the old days of Netscape & IE versions 4. And they're certainly nothing like the differences between the various versions of Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, etc....
Web development, especially when doing something like this, is no less expensive, and can easily be much more expensive, than creating a classical application.
Development-wise you're right. Maintenance-wise, web applications are a heck of a lot easier.
If you want cross platform, it would make much more sense to do such development to another platform which most people have, which is Java.
I don't think so. Applets take forever to load while AJAX apps are lightening fast. Plus, you don't know if the user already has a JRE installed if your app is on the internet (not to mention the potential versioning issues). I use Java on the server side. I love Java. I'm SCJP certified. I drink java for breakfast. But it doesn't belong in anyone's browser window.
This statement was birthed in ignorance. Firstly, evolution is not a fact (scientifically speaking). If it was, it would then cease to be called the theory of evolution, and become the law of evolution. (How do you prove "billions and billions of years ago"? You can't.)
Secondly, there is an array of evidence for creationism. (Start here: http://www.google.com/search?q=creation+science&so urceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe= utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:offic ial)
You are basically stating unproven theories as facts which is what got you so uptight to begin with.
Ultimately what you are saying is that you cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. On the flip side, you also cannot prove or disprove the evolutionary theory. Hence the debate. (If you could prove evolution it would no longer be a scientific theory -- would then be a scientific law.)
One's opinion on the issue ultimately depends on how the individual views the world and little else -- no matter how in depth you study the issue.
Consider:
While Sophocles wrote over 120 plays, only 7 have been uncovered in their entirety. Missing texts may be a common theme for classical Greek literature (??), but is really not very common for Christian texts.
There are literally thousands upon thousands of ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Hundreds of copies of writings of the church fathers exist as well. In short, no one's really looking for any *new* gospels or epistles since there really aren't any indicators that they exist like with Sophocles plays.
That being said, this still could potentially be profound for Christianity in other ways. For example, while we have thousands of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, the originals from (or anything copied during) the First Century are scant at best.
Couple that with many scholars' theory that several books of the New Testament were orginally written in Hebrew or Aramaic (many Oxyrhynchus Papyri are in Hebrew & Aramaic), then you could potentially uncover a copy the Gospel of Matthew in it's orginial, First Century Hebrew.
The potential for "get[ting] the Bible-thumpers in a rage" is there, but only from the perspective of realizing how Jewish and Old Testament law-upholding Jesus/Yeshua really was.
But the article is not talking about Finnish bees. It's referring to tropical bees.
Also consistently, people I talk to who use PHP after having used another language are universally scornful of PHP.
Hmmm... I code J2EE (WebSphere) and I must say PHP is much more graceful than Java. I can send an email in one line of PHP code, but with Java, if I'm not using J2EE, I have to make sure I have the JavaMail and JAF libraries manually installed and then regardless, write or download a wrapper class (with prolly 100+ lines of code) to do something that any language ought to be able to do with a native library.
I've messed with Perl a little, but after using languages like Java, C, C++ and PHP, Perl is just gross to look at. I know that can be chocked up as a personal preference, but I've heard many other programmers say the same.
Not to knock Perl -- I know that it has some quick 'n dirty, get the job done capabilities. But then so does PHP. And PHP looks and feels more like a real programming language.
It's too bad Diebold didn't read this before launching electronic voting machines in Florida.
...the Microsoft Scroll Wheel Mouse is the best in it's class. They're durable, work great and are reasonably priced. I highly recommend them.
As far as software goes, I'd have to give M$ a pretty bad review.
But their mice rock.
The moment I see cuss words I do assume they really don't have anything legitimate to say.
..."a username and password is sent to the registrant a few hours after submission." A few hours after submission? Seriously, that's probably your biggest problem.
/. rants about not wanting to input one's email address, most people will give that up if they feel they are going to get something of value in return. However, one of the beauties of the web is that it's instantaneous. If you make people wait hours to download trial software, especially after they've given you all their info, you will lose them.
Despite the
By the time their email from you arrives, they have gone to your competitors sites, downloaded their software trials and have forgotten all about you.
So I must ask... 'ta heck are you talking about?!
You just need to grab the bf-something Woody install. It's the one with the 2.4.18 kernel. During the partitioning part of the install you select Linux extended. Then when configuring each partition, the installation asks you if you want it to be ext2 or ext3. Just select ext3. It's really that simple.
Just go to Tools, Configure User Tools... and set up java.exe and javac.exe to run/compile the file when you hit ctrl+1 or whatever key you want. It works great. You just have to have a JDK installed on your machine for EditPlus to use it.
Here's a screenshot for it: http://www.editplus.com/ss/java.gif
*nix is not that hard to learn and quite frankly has a lot more abilities than the MS equivalents. And it's mainly all free. In light of what's been going on lately it's almost unpatriotic to run MS servers anymore because they are so vulnerable to attacks. IMHO.
Time to put down the keyboard and grab a rifle.