If you want to defend evolution against evidence, you have to come up with specific evidence of your own.
I'm not defending evolution "against evidence", I'm saying you don't have any evidence. You're saying that this migratory behavior represents irreducible complexity, but the complexity is clearly reducible because every behavior and trait of this bird exists in lots of other birds in many different combinations. Even if these birds had a new trait, you'd still have to show that it couldn't be explained by the explanations that have been found in thousands of other cases and that it couldn't have evolved gradually. Until you do all of that, you don't have "evidence against evolution".
(In addition, the spontaneous appearance of irreducible complexity would require the spontaneous appearance of DNA encoding such complexity, and there is none.)
No, evolution doesn't have a hard time with this at all. Each of the mechanisms contributing to migration is useful in its own right, and so they evolved separately for other purposes. Once the collection of these mechanisms is available, the birds then just took advantage of it. Once those mechanisms are combined to help with migration, then they are refined for that purpose. If any one mechanism had been missing, the birds simply wouldn't be migrating (but they might be doing something else amazing).
The birds, incidentally, don't specifically fly to Hawaii; they just fly north-south, so if they go north from Hawaii and then back south again, they end up in Hawaii again. They also don't need to be very accurate about it; once they have flown for the set number of days, they just head for the nearest land. And there are pretty high losses as well.
that a lot of people do have medium-sized (say 5GB-500GB) datasets that they would like to query, visualize and analyze in an iterative, real-time fashion, something that existing solutions won't allow you to do
Yeah, they actually do. For in-memory queries, analysis, and visualization, people use statistical and numerical languages like R, Matlab, Python, and others (as well as tools with nice graphics frontends). And they have full GPU support available these days. In many cases, the GPU support parallelizes large array operations, in addition to implementing many additional special-purpose operations as well.
So, it sounds like you're implementing SQL as a data analytics language for in-memory data (plus a bunch of potentially useful algorithms), but apparently without the features that usually make a database a "database", like persistence, transactions, rollbacks, etc. It's those other features that make real databases slow, which is why you can't claim huge speedups over "databases" since you're not implementing the same thing.
Data analytics on GPUs is a great thing, which is why tons of people are doing it. SQL isn't usually the language of choice because it isn't a good match and you have to build everything from scratch. GPU support in languages like R and Matlab gives you all the analytics features of SQL with a nicer syntax and really fast performance. Those languages also have tons of useful libraries for GIS, text analysis and visualization built in already.
It sounds like he's doing standard GPU computations, loading everything into memory, and then calling it a "database", even though it really isn't a "database" in any traditional sense.
Yes, I agree, that would be good. However, keep in mind that the people doing this stuff have been pushing hard for having it considered "science" in the first place, precisely in order to have the solid foundations and truth of regular science rub off on them. In Europe, even literature and history are suffixed with "-science" and their practitioners view themselves as scientists, ridiculous as that is.
If intelligent design is a theoretical possibility, why is it false?
Because it doesn't explain what we observe in nature, while evolution does.
Creatures that don't use sex are well able to multiply
There are very few multicellular organisms that don't use sex, and they usually die out quickly. In part, the reasons are similar to why inbreeding and incest are genetically bad.
I think many of the explanations that sociobiologists give are fun and plausible, but there is very little evidence that they are actually true. As long as people keep that in mind, it's fine. Once they start deriving policy from it, we're in trouble.
All this does is make payment unavoidable by burdening the red tape and collection on the sellers.
That seems like a good thing if you think "Amazon". It doesn't seem like such a good thing if you think "mom-and-pop business" or "part-time open source hardware hacker". They now need to deal with dozens of different states' tax laws and regulations.
The fact that Amazon backs this tax shows you that they view it as a great way of protecting them from competition by creating barriers to entry.
Sociobiology is theories about how observed human behavior and social structures have arise from evolution. Where does cooperation come from? Where does homosexuality come from? How are these traits beneficial for animals and humans, and why haven't they been selected against? Sociobiologists come up with plausible and reasonable sounding theories for many of these, but most of them remain just guesswork if there isn't hard data and hard mathematical modeling (many remain just guesswork even with data and models). Wilson is right that you don't need to be proficient at math to succeed at science. But that's perhaps more a testament to the poor criteria by which some areas of science measure success than to what a scientist actually needs.
I don't see what you're complaining about. I've developed software under MIT licenses and got paid for it. Apple or someone pays LLVM developers as well. I don't like the proprietary products Apple is creating with open source software, but the solution to that is just not to buy their products and tell others not to buy their products.
The real silliness is that educational opportunities are assigned by some central authority. We need much more of a free market in education. Give vouchers to people who can't afford it, but let parents make choices for their kids and let schools specialize in lots of different kinds of kids and programs as parents demand.
For small businesses, that's not a problem at all: restaurants, florists, hairdressers, carpenters, small manufacturers, etc. already use a lot of cloud services, and they couldn't do anything more reliable or secure than what Google offers. Large businesses will likely be able to license Google's software and run it on their own internal servers, or Google might even run their services on their own hardware for them as a service (similar to the way IBM used to offer mainframe services).
You could, if you're mobile and healthy, if you have 20ft ceilings and can do a little carpentry, or if you want the experience of slowly and painfully suffocating. There are lots of other ways too and gun control won't lower the suicide rate. But preventing people from committing suicide with guns will mainly result in a lot more botched suicides and suffering.
Even if you were an anomally and it's not about race for you, then the fact you generalise 1.3bn people as all being the same still doesn't exactly paint you in any better a light
Islam is a religion, not a race; membership in Islam is a choice, and it proclaims itself to be a single, unified community with no divisions. Islam has a specific set of moral, religious, and legal teachings. One of these teachings is that I should be killed because I reject Allah. You think people aren't justified in criticizing Islam?
They simply found people with bulging black backpacks matching the leftovers after the explosion, people who weren't carrying those backpacks after the explosions anymore. The idea that they were specifically looking for dark-skinned people or had any racist motives is something you are making up.
You're blaming optional things that you don't have to participate in on your reason for not being able to save.
But I'm forced to bail out banks, speculators, and homebuyers through taxes; they are effectively gambling with my money. And return on my bank savings is low because of the irresponsible behavior of others. I can (and do) save, but I'm being penalized stiffly for being prudent.
Smart phones & Tablets: everyone who only used a pc for web and email no longer needs a pc.
But Windows 8 is OK for that; if they beat iOS on price, they're probably OK.
Visual Studio inst cheap, and it sucks for developing anything except Windows software..
XCode sucks even worse than VisualStudio and its cross platform support is just as poor. And although I like developing on Linux, most people seem to want more handholding than that.
Business Users: As business users move to phones and tablets, they want spreasheets/presentations/etc (office docs) that work on phones and tables, and no they don't want the Windows phone
Right now, they are getting bulky laptops with obsolete versions of Windows and loaded down by corporate Windows crap and Blackberry phones. Heck, even I'd prefer a Windows RT tablet and Windows 8 phone to that.
Windows might be in trouble, but who is going to replace them? Android and iOS are pretty limited platforms and not exactly fun to program. OS X is getting very long in the tooth, has very limited hardware offerings, and Objective-C is less pleasant to develop for than C#. And just as Gnome/X11 looked like it was going to provide a fairly stable desktop platform, the Gnome, Wayland, and Ubuntu developers have screwed things up big time again. Much as I loathe Windows 8, I think it's still going to win by default on the desktop.
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I'm not defending evolution "against evidence", I'm saying you don't have any evidence. You're saying that this migratory behavior represents irreducible complexity, but the complexity is clearly reducible because every behavior and trait of this bird exists in lots of other birds in many different combinations. Even if these birds had a new trait, you'd still have to show that it couldn't be explained by the explanations that have been found in thousands of other cases and that it couldn't have evolved gradually. Until you do all of that, you don't have "evidence against evolution".
(In addition, the spontaneous appearance of irreducible complexity would require the spontaneous appearance of DNA encoding such complexity, and there is none.)
No, evolution doesn't have a hard time with this at all. Each of the mechanisms contributing to migration is useful in its own right, and so they evolved separately for other purposes. Once the collection of these mechanisms is available, the birds then just took advantage of it. Once those mechanisms are combined to help with migration, then they are refined for that purpose. If any one mechanism had been missing, the birds simply wouldn't be migrating (but they might be doing something else amazing).
The birds, incidentally, don't specifically fly to Hawaii; they just fly north-south, so if they go north from Hawaii and then back south again, they end up in Hawaii again. They also don't need to be very accurate about it; once they have flown for the set number of days, they just head for the nearest land. And there are pretty high losses as well.
Yeah, they actually do. For in-memory queries, analysis, and visualization, people use statistical and numerical languages like R, Matlab, Python, and others (as well as tools with nice graphics frontends). And they have full GPU support available these days. In many cases, the GPU support parallelizes large array operations, in addition to implementing many additional special-purpose operations as well.
So, it sounds like you're implementing SQL as a data analytics language for in-memory data (plus a bunch of potentially useful algorithms), but apparently without the features that usually make a database a "database", like persistence, transactions, rollbacks, etc. It's those other features that make real databases slow, which is why you can't claim huge speedups over "databases" since you're not implementing the same thing.
Data analytics on GPUs is a great thing, which is why tons of people are doing it. SQL isn't usually the language of choice because it isn't a good match and you have to build everything from scratch. GPU support in languages like R and Matlab gives you all the analytics features of SQL with a nicer syntax and really fast performance. Those languages also have tons of useful libraries for GIS, text analysis and visualization built in already.
It sounds like he's doing standard GPU computations, loading everything into memory, and then calling it a "database", even though it really isn't a "database" in any traditional sense.
Yes, I agree, that would be good. However, keep in mind that the people doing this stuff have been pushing hard for having it considered "science" in the first place, precisely in order to have the solid foundations and truth of regular science rub off on them. In Europe, even literature and history are suffixed with "-science" and their practitioners view themselves as scientists, ridiculous as that is.
Because you want to be able to play in a limited space; if you have a large space to walk around in, you don't need the treadmill.
Because it doesn't explain what we observe in nature, while evolution does.
There are very few multicellular organisms that don't use sex, and they usually die out quickly. In part, the reasons are similar to why inbreeding and incest are genetically bad.
The idea isn't unscientific; intelligent design is a theoretical possibility, it is just false.
Sex, unlike sociobiology, is pretty well understood. Almost all animals have sex.
The majority of mammals even have homosexual sex.
I think many of the explanations that sociobiologists give are fun and plausible, but there is very little evidence that they are actually true. As long as people keep that in mind, it's fine. Once they start deriving policy from it, we're in trouble.
That seems like a good thing if you think "Amazon". It doesn't seem like such a good thing if you think "mom-and-pop business" or "part-time open source hardware hacker". They now need to deal with dozens of different states' tax laws and regulations.
The fact that Amazon backs this tax shows you that they view it as a great way of protecting them from competition by creating barriers to entry.
And the evidence that these CDC sociologists are doing any good is... what?
Sociobiology is theories about how observed human behavior and social structures have arise from evolution. Where does cooperation come from? Where does homosexuality come from? How are these traits beneficial for animals and humans, and why haven't they been selected against? Sociobiologists come up with plausible and reasonable sounding theories for many of these, but most of them remain just guesswork if there isn't hard data and hard mathematical modeling (many remain just guesswork even with data and models). Wilson is right that you don't need to be proficient at math to succeed at science. But that's perhaps more a testament to the poor criteria by which some areas of science measure success than to what a scientist actually needs.
Banditry? How is it "banditry"? People offer you software under some license. It's your choice whether you use it or not.
I don't see what you're complaining about. I've developed software under MIT licenses and got paid for it. Apple or someone pays LLVM developers as well. I don't like the proprietary products Apple is creating with open source software, but the solution to that is just not to buy their products and tell others not to buy their products.
The real silliness is that educational opportunities are assigned by some central authority. We need much more of a free market in education. Give vouchers to people who can't afford it, but let parents make choices for their kids and let schools specialize in lots of different kinds of kids and programs as parents demand.
For small businesses, that's not a problem at all: restaurants, florists, hairdressers, carpenters, small manufacturers, etc. already use a lot of cloud services, and they couldn't do anything more reliable or secure than what Google offers. Large businesses will likely be able to license Google's software and run it on their own internal servers, or Google might even run their services on their own hardware for them as a service (similar to the way IBM used to offer mainframe services).
You could, if you're mobile and healthy, if you have 20ft ceilings and can do a little carpentry, or if you want the experience of slowly and painfully suffocating. There are lots of other ways too and gun control won't lower the suicide rate. But preventing people from committing suicide with guns will mainly result in a lot more botched suicides and suffering.
Islam is a religion, not a race; membership in Islam is a choice, and it proclaims itself to be a single, unified community with no divisions. Islam has a specific set of moral, religious, and legal teachings. One of these teachings is that I should be killed because I reject Allah. You think people aren't justified in criticizing Islam?
Yes, that is one of the reasons I oppose gun control.
They simply found people with bulging black backpacks matching the leftovers after the explosion, people who weren't carrying those backpacks after the explosions anymore. The idea that they were specifically looking for dark-skinned people or had any racist motives is something you are making up.
But I'm forced to bail out banks, speculators, and homebuyers through taxes; they are effectively gambling with my money. And return on my bank savings is low because of the irresponsible behavior of others. I can (and do) save, but I'm being penalized stiffly for being prudent.
You should read up on German hyperinflation. First world currencies are just one bad political decision away from being worthless.
But Windows 8 is OK for that; if they beat iOS on price, they're probably OK.
XCode sucks even worse than VisualStudio and its cross platform support is just as poor. And although I like developing on Linux, most people seem to want more handholding than that.
Right now, they are getting bulky laptops with obsolete versions of Windows and loaded down by corporate Windows crap and Blackberry phones. Heck, even I'd prefer a Windows RT tablet and Windows 8 phone to that.
Windows might be in trouble, but who is going to replace them? Android and iOS are pretty limited platforms and not exactly fun to program. OS X is getting very long in the tooth, has very limited hardware offerings, and Objective-C is less pleasant to develop for than C#. And just as Gnome/X11 looked like it was going to provide a fairly stable desktop platform, the Gnome, Wayland, and Ubuntu developers have screwed things up big time again. Much as I loathe Windows 8, I think it's still going to win by default on the desktop.