They are just guessing about "harsh environmental factors". The DNA evidence just says they split up and came back together. In fact, there is a story in Genesis about a similar scenario. Population is reduced to 8 via global catastrophe. Increases to several thousand near Tigris and Euphrates. God then changes the language into 70 different variants, and these language groups then scatter over the earth, and gradually come together again. Even if you regard the story as Myth, Myth comes from racial memory.
If you don't like Genesis, there is a Hungarian Myth that tells the story of the Huns (one of the language groups) beginning with the tower of Babel (the Genesis story above). The best telling, IMO, is The White Stag, by Kate Seredy.
I used to get a very honest and insightful ecology magazine called "Garbage" edited by Patricia Poore. It did well for a year or so, then started getting angry letter campaign and boycotts because they didn't follow the party line on various issues. For instance, they actually did a life cycle analysis of disposable vs cloth diapers, and found that life cycle costs were less for cloth in areas with hydro power (New England) and plentiful water, less for disposable in arid areas (Arizona, California), and about the same everywhere else. That didn't sit well.
I use C/C++, Java, and Python. Java is not "slow as hell". The language itself is fairly close to C. What makes certain applications slow with the Sun VM is things like the default GC using twice as much memory, and very bloated environments like EJB. Even the startup time is reasonable beginning with Java 5 (the standard library is precompiled, and you can add your own libs).
GNU Java compiles to native and uses a C++ compatible conservative collector (Boehm). It is fast. I loved Sun JDK 1.1 - I could run a network daemon in 256K. Even in 1.1, lowlevel benchmarks showed Java nearly as fast as C. Slowness was caused by the environments built on top of it (EJB). The modern JVMs are so bloated in comparison to 1.1 - good thing 2G is entry level memory. But their performance in incrementally better given enough memory.
The fastest language for many problems seems to be Lisp, not C. I could never handle all those parens, and alternate syntaxes (Lisp is very flexible that way) just get me sneered at by the Lisp experts.
I do most of my work in Python and Java now. However, I often need to write in C/C++ to create JNI modules for Java or extension modules for Python. Wrapping low level (use 3rd party library) and performance intensive stuff for control via a higher level language is very productive. (C++ is handy for JNI, C is better for Python.) Furthermore, I even occasionally write small functions in assembler for C - usually to utilize a specialized instruction.
While being open to the judicious use of proprietary software like Flash is a reasonable position for an open source advocate, it is always suicide to acquiesce to any Microsoft offering (other than the rare open and unencumbered M$ spec like SOAP). This is because, like AlQaida doesn't just want schools and bridges, M$ doesn't just want your business. They want you "dead" (figuratively, of course). M$ isn't content to beat competitors (some say that can't). They must destroy them. This has been the case for 15 years, and won't even begin to change until Gates and Balmer are completely gone.
I've seen company after company get burned trying to deal with M$ over the last 15 years, from IBM to DrDOS to... to Sun to probably Novell. When will they ever learn? The best you can hope for when dealing with M$ is for M$ to buy you out before they destroy the company (at least the founders get some money that way).
Even since decent filesystems were invented, a law of computing has been, "Data expands to fill the space available". Now a client is pestering me to use S3 for backup.
Google for "lorton va incinerator", and there are number of articles (most of which require you to pay a scientific journal). They told us that the temperature was high enough to break down nasty stuff like dioxins. That is apparently true, and the exhaust scrubbers are pretty good - but there is lots of ash for researchers to find new nasties in.
Here in Fairfax, VA we have an incinerator. It burns the trash to make electricity, and separates out glass and metals for resale, and traps and separates gases in the exhaust for resale. All the separation is run by its own electricity - and it sells the excess of that also. It is a highly successful installation. They are digging up landfills for more trash to feed it.
The only drawback is that the landfills are being refilled with ash, and eventually will run out of room again.
He was suggesting tunneling to intermediate destinations to defeat destination IP discrimination and encrypted tunneling to defeat port discrimination - among other brainstorming ideas. The main point was that you can't trust corrupt government any more than you can trust corrupt ISPs.
Awesome, remind me to hack all your programs to add this stupid tag idea.. You wouldn't do it in any programs, but in iptables, or a dedicated router. In fact, you can also do this in iptables - but most ISPs ignore it.
" . ..it seems so incredibly unlikely that one day a cell just "plopped" into existence"
What if God did that?
That is the hypothesis put forward by Michael Behe. He envisions the first cell not as the very simple one envisioned by most evolutionists, but as a very complex one containing DNA for all the irreducibly complex mechanisms of life. That cell then began reproducing, and adapting to all the varied environments of earth via natural selection , with descendants losing DNA in the process (and gaining adaptive mechanisms that are not irreducibly complex).
"Going to heaven" is very different than most people think. If your entire personality ceases to exist and only an animating spirit/soul sans personality goes to heaven, then most people would view that as the same as death. So most people really don't believe christianity anyway... they engage in a mental kung-fu and think that if some part of them survives completely sans their personality then that's okay... heck, let me clone their bloody cells and keep those alive forever-- would that be immortal life? Christianity is always portrayed in the media as if the people's personality survives.
Your conclusions match those of orthodox Christians. As Paul puts it, "If Christ be not risen, our faith is in vain." That is why the resurrection of the body is a key Christian doctrine. Without that, the whole thing is rather pointless.
At the time of Christ, Greek philosophy put a lot of stock in "ideals" (think Plato's cave). Hence, many early Christians rejected the resurrection of the body in favor of the more Greek idea of losing all that messy matter, leaving only the ideal essence. Some went so far as to claim that Jesus didn't actually exist physically, but was only an illusion to show us the ideal. These were called "Gnostics", and much of the new testament is aimed at refuting their ideas. As John says in his first epistle, "That which our eyes have seen, our ears have heard, and our hands have handled...".
So the media depiction of "Christianity" is actually Gnosticism - and I am always shocked by how many Church members are actually Gnostics. But orthodox Christianity promises a resurrection of the body (and Christ is called the "first fruits" of that resurrection), *and* a new heavens and a new *earth*. I.e. life after death is supposed to have trees, animals, flowers, hugs, etc. For modern Christians, it implies a new universe.
There are some strange aspects mentioned. For instance, Jesus says that "in the resurrection, they are neither married nor given in marriage". Which could either mean no sex, or sex no longer morally limited by marriage, or something even better than sex. Another strange mention: "there shall be no more sea". That one dismays me more than the no marriage - I love the ocean. I can only hope that the Designer knows what He's doing...
I hadn't noticed before how cleverly, yet ethically Red Hat leverages the community by exercising enterprise features in Fedora before springing them on enterprise customers. Not only is playing with the latest LVM features in a low risk setting fun, but it helps Red Hat sell to big business when I discover breakage. (I really have to try out Zumastor...)
Applying the standard birthday paradox math, the probability that at least 2 of 50 cuts in a year fall on the same day is 97%. So the weird part is why these particular same day cuts were news. The odds of two cuts on the same day affecting the same country group are lower. It is harder to quantify "country group", however.
M$XML was accepted sight unseen. Although only a fraction of NB issues were addressed, there were a flurry of changes at the last meeting. The final result was required to be published within 30 days. As of the expiration of the vote changing period, it still hadn't been published, and is still unpublished the last I checked.
Wouldn't it be funny if when the OOXML standard finally gets actually published - it looks like ODF with M$ compatibility extensions?
Congratulations! That straw man is history! If I had said anything about entropy increasing on Earth, I'd sure be embarrassed. Now I will say something: over the long term, entropy *will* increase on Earth according to thermodynamics - it is an inexorable as 2 + 2. The sun can only hold it at bay for a few billion years.
You can be as proud as you want of Human accomplishments, but it is all destined for the cosmic heat death and ultimately meaningless - no matter how many meta-universes you propose to rejuvenate this one. Thermodynamics applies to any universe or system of universes - as inexorable as 2 + 2. The only escape from entropy would be if there was some kind of infinite source of creative complexity...
In the realm of specified complexity, sure, you can copy a message like Moby Dick or the Bible. But copies are not guaranteed to be perfect, and have a non-zero chance of degrading the original - even with computers.
we only have to know that nature neither thinks nor organizes. But nature apparently does organize on occasion, because we are here. (Or else something or someone else did the organizing.) So you are looking for signals that are different from most signals in the same way that we are different from most of the products of nature.
Your logic is faulty because there is no rule which states that extremely complex systems have to be created by even more complex systems. This is the same logical fallacy which creationists often advance in order to "prove" the existence of God. You are correct when talking strictly about complexity. Intelligent Design people, however, are talking about "chosen" or "specified" complexity. For instance, the number Boggle arrangements is its complexity, but when a person selects a particular arrangement (as opposed to tossing the cubes), that is specified complexity. If an arrangement forms an English sentence, then your judgment of the likelyhood that this was a random roll or selected by an English speaking person would revolve around the Total English Boggle Combinations / Total Boggle Combinations.
This kind of specified complexity is the mirror of entropy - it can only decrease (the message is gradually eroded), with a proof similar to the laws of thermodynamics. No amount of chance plus natural selection will expand the message to reveal more of what the author intended to say.
The philosophical problem comes with detecting design by non-human intelligence, possibly not even part of this universe. There are a ton of presuppositions as to how to recognize a message vs noise. The SETI project has to assume that the hoped for aliens think like us in certain aspects. And you run smack against the anthropic principal as an all purpose alternative for the philosophical materialist.
The materialist basically says that the Boggle cubes all come up in English because the universe has an English filter that is more likely to destroy combinations that are less like English. It is not surprising to the materialist that the universe has this property (that survival would produce intelligence). It is just the nature of the universe. And if it wasn't that way, we wouldn't be here to talk about it.
And once you assume that the universe selects for intelligence, it is no longer surprising that the low level systems supporting that intelligence (cell biology) also appear to be designed. A materialist scientist would even act like an ID scientist and look for "evolutionary strategies" as if there were a Designer, because a universe that selects for intelligence is effectively that.
In fact, textbooks talk about how Evolution did this and Evolution did that, and Evolution found an amazing solution to this problem. (Without actually detailing the step by step evolution of this or that.) The text is just as informative if "Flying Spaghetti Monster" or "God" is substituted for "Evolution".
The war between philosophical materialism and and intelligent design is essentially a religious war, and has very little to do with science.
US Patent Law prohibits patenting ideas. The US Supreme Court has upheld this 3 times. The bad case law involving patents on ideas implemented in software has effectively modified the law to say, "you can patent an idea - provided an automatic machine can implement your idea". So by simply providing a machine that implements them, business methods can be patented - and both manual and automatic implementations of the idea monopolized.
While this seems a great windfall for the unscrupulous, the capabilities of machines keep advancing at a great pace. As soon as machines can reliably walk, styles of walking can be patented. As soon as machines have reason to breathe - sniffers, for example - breathing methods can be patented. As soon as machines can think, forms of thought can be patented.
The lawyers who created this bad case law in the '90s simply didn't understand the potential of general purpose computers. They envisioned screens, keyboards, and printouts - and thought the genie they created was pretty well contained. They were wrong.
... And this will work for days until someone cracks open the source to $TORRENT_CLIENT and gets it to mark all torrent traffic as "guarantee bandwidth" and the whole system grinds to a halt, there's no bandwidth for legitimate real time applications, and we're back to where we were.
They are welcome to do that. It will cost them through the nose, but if they can afford it... Maybe you missed the part about charging for QoS. VoIP tagged data bandwidth would sell for something similar to cell phone calls.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't like Genesis, there is a Hungarian Myth that tells the story of the Huns (one of the language groups) beginning with the tower of Babel (the Genesis story above). The best telling, IMO, is The White Stag, by Kate Seredy.
I used to get a very honest and insightful ecology magazine called "Garbage" edited by Patricia Poore. It did well for a year or so, then started getting angry letter campaign and boycotts because they didn't follow the party line on various issues. For instance, they actually did a life cycle analysis of disposable vs cloth diapers, and found that life cycle costs were less for cloth in areas with hydro power (New England) and plentiful water, less for disposable in arid areas (Arizona, California), and about the same everywhere else. That didn't sit well.
I use C/C++, Java, and Python. Java is not "slow as hell". The language itself is fairly close to C. What makes certain applications slow with the Sun VM is things like the default GC using twice as much memory, and very bloated environments like EJB. Even the startup time is reasonable beginning with Java 5 (the standard library is precompiled, and you can add your own libs).
GNU Java compiles to native and uses a C++ compatible conservative collector (Boehm). It is fast. I loved Sun JDK 1.1 - I could run a network daemon in 256K. Even in 1.1, lowlevel benchmarks showed Java nearly as fast as C. Slowness was caused by the environments built on top of it (EJB). The modern JVMs are so bloated in comparison to 1.1 - good thing 2G is entry level memory. But their performance in incrementally better given enough memory.
The fastest language for many problems seems to be Lisp, not C. I could never handle all those parens, and alternate syntaxes (Lisp is very flexible that way) just get me sneered at by the Lisp experts.
I do most of my work in Python and Java now. However, I often need to write in C/C++ to create JNI modules for Java or extension modules for Python. Wrapping low level (use 3rd party library) and performance intensive stuff for control via a higher level language is very productive. (C++ is handy for JNI, C is better for Python.) Furthermore, I even occasionally write small functions in assembler for C - usually to utilize a specialized instruction.
I've seen company after company get burned trying to deal with M$ over the last 15 years, from IBM to DrDOS to
Even since decent filesystems were invented, a law of computing has been, "Data expands to fill the space available". Now a client is pestering me to use S3 for backup.
Google for "lorton va incinerator", and there are number of articles (most of which require you to pay a scientific journal). They told us that the temperature was high enough to break down nasty stuff like dioxins. That is apparently true, and the exhaust scrubbers are pretty good - but there is lots of ash for researchers to find new nasties in.
The only drawback is that the landfills are being refilled with ash, and eventually will run out of room again.
He was suggesting tunneling to intermediate destinations to defeat destination IP discrimination and encrypted tunneling to defeat port discrimination - among other brainstorming ideas. The main point was that you can't trust corrupt government any more than you can trust corrupt ISPs.
Just ignore the leading insult - it is irrelevant to the following excellent points.
What is it that you're seeing that indicates otherwise to you?
People keep emailing me files with 'docx' extension, and expect me to be able to read them.
What if God did that?
That is the hypothesis put forward by Michael Behe. He envisions the first cell not as the very simple one envisioned by most evolutionists, but as a very complex one containing DNA for all the irreducibly complex mechanisms of life. That cell then began reproducing, and adapting to all the varied environments of earth via natural selection , with descendants losing DNA in the process (and gaining adaptive mechanisms that are not irreducibly complex).
personality ceases to exist and only an animating spirit/soul sans personality
goes to heaven, then most people would view that as the same as death. So most
people really don't believe christianity anyway... they engage in a mental
kung-fu and think that if some part of them survives completely sans their
personality then that's okay... heck, let me clone their bloody cells and keep
those alive forever-- would that be immortal life? Christianity is always
portrayed in the media as if the people's personality survives.
Your conclusions match those of orthodox Christians. As Paul puts it, "If
Christ be not risen, our faith is in vain." That is why the resurrection of
the body is a key Christian doctrine. Without that, the whole thing is
rather pointless.
At the time of Christ, Greek philosophy put a lot of stock in "ideals" (think
Plato's cave). Hence, many early Christians rejected the resurrection of
the body in favor of the more Greek idea of losing all that messy matter,
leaving only the ideal essence. Some went so far as to claim that Jesus
didn't actually exist physically, but was only an illusion to show us the
ideal. These were called "Gnostics", and much of the new testament is aimed at refuting their ideas. As John says in his first epistle, "That which our eyes
have seen, our ears have heard, and our hands have handled...".
So the media depiction of "Christianity" is actually Gnosticism - and I am
always shocked by how many Church members are actually Gnostics. But
orthodox Christianity promises a resurrection of the body (and Christ
is called the "first fruits" of that resurrection), *and* a new heavens
and a new *earth*. I.e. life after death is supposed to have trees, animals,
flowers, hugs, etc. For modern Christians, it implies a new universe.
There are some strange aspects mentioned. For instance,
Jesus says that "in the resurrection, they are neither married nor
given in marriage". Which could either mean no sex, or sex no longer morally
limited by marriage, or something even better than sex. Another strange
mention: "there shall be no more sea". That one dismays me more than
the no marriage - I love the ocean. I can only hope that the Designer knows
what He's doing...
Or a really, really sloppy lawyer.
I hadn't noticed before how cleverly, yet ethically Red Hat leverages the community by exercising enterprise features in Fedora before springing them on enterprise customers. Not only is playing with the latest LVM features in a low risk setting fun, but it helps Red Hat sell to big business when I discover breakage. (I really have to try out Zumastor...)
Why do you think commercials have those guys in white coats and glasses? Why is "will it blend" so funny?
Applying the standard birthday paradox math, the probability that at least 2 of 50 cuts in a year fall on the same day is 97%. So the weird part is why these particular same day cuts were news. The odds of two cuts on the same day affecting the same country group are lower. It is harder to quantify "country group", however.
Wouldn't it be funny if when the OOXML standard finally gets actually published - it looks like ODF with M$ compatibility extensions?
You can be as proud as you want of Human accomplishments, but it is all destined for the cosmic heat death and ultimately meaningless - no matter how many meta-universes you propose to rejuvenate this one. Thermodynamics applies to any universe or system of universes - as inexorable as 2 + 2. The only escape from entropy would be if there was some kind of infinite source of creative complexity...
In the realm of specified complexity, sure, you can copy a message like Moby Dick or the Bible. But copies are not guaranteed to be perfect, and have a non-zero chance of degrading the original - even with computers.
This kind of specified complexity is the mirror of entropy - it can only decrease (the message is gradually eroded), with a proof similar to the laws of thermodynamics. No amount of chance plus natural selection will expand the message to reveal more of what the author intended to say.
The philosophical problem comes with detecting design by non-human intelligence, possibly not even part of this universe. There are a ton of presuppositions as to how to recognize a message vs noise. The SETI project has to assume that the hoped for aliens think like us in certain aspects. And you run smack against the anthropic principal as an all purpose alternative for the philosophical materialist.
The materialist basically says that the Boggle cubes all come up in English because the universe has an English filter that is more likely to destroy combinations that are less like English. It is not surprising to the materialist that the universe has this property (that survival would produce intelligence). It is just the nature of the universe. And if it wasn't that way, we wouldn't be here to talk about it.
And once you assume that the universe selects for intelligence, it is no longer surprising that the low level systems supporting that intelligence (cell biology) also appear to be designed. A materialist scientist would even act like an ID scientist and look for "evolutionary strategies" as if there were a Designer, because a universe that selects for intelligence is effectively that.
In fact, textbooks talk about how Evolution did this and Evolution did that, and Evolution found an amazing solution to this problem. (Without actually detailing the step by step evolution of this or that.) The text is just as informative if "Flying Spaghetti Monster" or "God" is substituted for "Evolution".
The war between philosophical materialism and and intelligent design is essentially a religious war, and has very little to do with science.
If it's anything like the 6000 pages of OOXML (final version yet to be released, despite being ratified - go figure), I'll pass.
While this seems a great windfall for the unscrupulous, the capabilities of machines keep advancing at a great pace. As soon as machines can reliably walk, styles of walking can be patented. As soon as machines have reason to breathe - sniffers, for example - breathing methods can be patented. As soon as machines can think, forms of thought can be patented.
The lawyers who created this bad case law in the '90s simply didn't understand the potential of general purpose computers. They envisioned screens, keyboards, and printouts - and thought the genie they created was pretty well contained. They were wrong.
They are welcome to do that. It will cost them through the nose, but if they can afford it... Maybe you missed the part about charging for QoS. VoIP tagged data bandwidth would sell for something similar to cell phone calls.