You're ignoring the opportunity cost... would they have been better off making a couple of PG-13 films?
Possibly. On the other hand, sometimes you've got to toss some money into experimenting with other niches. If "Watchmen" had done well, it would have opened up an entirely new market. As it stands, they probably won't be doing that for a while... but just think how many "Slumdog Millionaire" copycats there will be in a few months.
Saw it in Imax, and I'm sure it'll be on my xmas list in Blu-ray. I honestly don't know how it would play to someone who hasn't read the original, but I enjoyed it with relatively minor quibbles. I'm kind of curious about the stuff that didn't make it in.
Care to post the list? That would be quite helpful for me and others as well.
I suspect that the specific things that work for me wouldn't work for everyone. I have Crystal Method, Mozart, Beethoven, a little Alan Parsons Project & Art Of Noise, some MIDIs, & MODs, and plenty of soundtracks.
The main thing for me is no vocals. It steals processing time from the verbal parts of my brain that are working on translating ideas into code. Even just chanting in languages I don't understand frequently doesn't work - my brain wants to process human voices. For general stuff, debugging and the like, it's not critical - but for peak coding, I gotta have music but can't handle vocals.
the film is actually a somewhat clever satire of the original
No... what satire there was, was really bad, ham-fisted, moronic satire. Example: In one scene, a trooper asks why they are training with knives when the military has nukes.
In the book, the instructor explains that the "Mobile Infantry" is designed to apply force in a controlled manner, to 'spank' an opponent when feasible rather than 'cut their heads off'. (Whether or not the invasion of Iraq was a good idea, it would have been an even worse idea to nuke Bagdhad.)
In the movie, the instructor throws a knife and pins the questioner's hand to a wall, and says, "Hard to push a nuke button now, eh?"
And, as others have pointed out... it wasn't meant to be a satire anyway. That stuff was shoehorned in later.
Unfortunately, my girlfriend is one of these people, and I've asked her several times to stop...all she does is point out that it's on the lowest brightness setting.
Sorry, but you INTENTIONALLY went and PAID to see 'Fly Me To The Moon'?
So I work, see, and my wife runs this bakery, y'know, and we've got four kids, with one very young, so the times we can arrange childcare for the baby and get the rest of the family out to see a movie are limited, and sometimes you have to work with what's available. But I'm glad I could help your self-esteem a little! You rock with your bad self!
Stereoscopic movies are a fad that crops up every 20 years or so. Rediscovered, lost. Rediscovered, lost. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Technical limitations - and the economic limitations that spring from them - have limited 3D's usage to gimmicks before. They've done red-green 3D... but that can't do color. They've done vertical and horizontal polarization... but that requires you to keep your head almost perfectly vertical, or else the 3D effect vanishes.
These days they're using circularly polarized light with opposite signs. Clockwise in one eye, counterclockwise in the other. That way the 3D effect can be maintained even if the viewer's head is quite a bit further off vertical, making the whole experience a lot more comfortable. In the future, framerates can be made high enough, and LCD shutters can be made cheap enough, that alternating frames to allow 3D may well be economical.
Economics actually argues for 3D now, instead of against - movie theaters need a draw that's hard to duplicate at home. I already wait to see most movies on DVD, or Blu-ray at most, 'cause I've got a decent-sized flat-panel and good speakers.
The past can be a good guide to the future... but it's not an infallible guide.
They're still learning how to use 3D. Look at the first silent movies - they were basically set up like theater stages. People then started to experiment, develop a 'visual vocabulary', and learn how to use the new capabilities. 3D's like that now, still a bit gimmicky but getting better. It's certainly not as obtrusive as it's been, and can help immersion.
(One thing that does not translate from 2D to 3D - at least for me - is a cross-fade. That just breaks my brain. In 2D, everything's in one focal plane. In a 3D crossfade, I can't figure out where to focus as things are appearing and disappearing and it's all a confused blur until the fade's over.)
The other issue is that 3D can't make a bad movie good. My youngest kids enjoyed "Fly Me To The Moon", but my wife and I... well, at least I had my PDA with me.
Bitch all you want about the fact the console fails, the fact it inconveniences you for maybe a few days in 2 to 3 years is really not a big deal when it keeps you coming back the rest of the time.
Well, Microsoft's never really competed on quality before. They just work on being the lowest-cost provider, and it's worked out pretty well. You might be right. For me, $200 is a bit more than I want to pay for something 'disposable', but there's no denying they've sold a bunch of 360s.
the 360 is... increasing it's lead week on week on the PS3 quite well right now
When you look at the actual sales slopes, and count the fact that a significant number of 360 sales are people buying a new console 'cause their old one died out of warranty or for issues that aren't covered by the warranty extension, that doesn't seem to be the case. The 360 has a significant head start, but it seems to basically be maintaining its lead rather than pulling further ahead.
Those replacement sales are good for MS, of course. Not so good for 360 users, though. But the business model seems to be working; we'll see if that's good for consumers down the road.
A viewpoint held by a large number of people in society, is that homosexuality is not a good lifestyle choice.
A whole lot of people think that the Earth is 6,000 years old, or that Obama's not like all the other politicians. The question is, are the people correct or not?
Looking at things from an evolutionary perspective, repressing homosexuality is the worst possible thing to do if it's biologically-based. Assume it's maladaptive - that there's something wrong with it in some objective sense that has real-world consequences that outweigh any possible advantages. (Sickle-cell anemia has bad consequences if you have two genes for it, but if you only have one copy, it helps protect you from malaria. Go look up what populations have a prevalence of sickle-cell, and whether malaria was common where they originated. Go ahead, I'll wait.)
If homosexuality really is bad, then it will evolve away after a while. Any effort to force homosexuals to breed will just preserve the 'bad' genes longer. (Even if it's only neutral, it'll most likely go away just through genetic drift). So laws against homosexuality are a bad idea in direct proportion to how bad you assume homosexuality is.
But if we assume the converse, that homosexuality is objectively neutral - or perhaps even has net advantages for the population that contains it - then laws against homosexuality are also obviously a bad idea.
If it's not biologically-based - and I can't see how anyone could really argue this, if sex and sexual orientation don't have a biological basis, then what the hell does? - then it's something that consenting adults choose to do. As long as nobody's being hurt involuntarily, what possible (non-religious) justification could a law against homosexuality possibly have in that case?
So, no matter what position you take on the subject, laws against homosexuality are stupid.
The Obama administration might be better than the Bush one on torture, but it's way too early to say, and they certainly haven't done the strong and immediate disavowal I was hoping for.
I save coffee for when I need a serious pick me up - I think it's been three years now. I was up to two cups of tea a day for a while there, but our last kid has been sleeping through the night for many months and I'm back down to one cup in the morning. I'm still on black tea in the morning but soon I'll be switching to green tea. Even on those low doses, I notice headaches and such if I'm not gentle on my caffeine withdrawal.
I never drank anything caffeinated at all until late in college. (Never liked soda or coffee, hadn't learned to like tea.) Then I woke up sick the day of a final exam. I got some triple-mocha-something-or-other, and felt fine all through the test. Then, on the bus ride home, I realized I wasn't turning my head to look at things, I was jerking my head around like a bird.
I installed a new Videocard. Windows detected it and I installed the drivers. Worked great. I then booted Linux. Linux detected the card and I installed the drivers. Linux couldn't figure out what resolution my monitor supported.
My experience has been decidedly the opposite. I've had Windows refuse to boot when I added a new video card, but Linux ran fine. Not long ago, I had a SATA error on my motherboard. Windows refused to boot, Linux (Ubuntu 8.08, to be specific) ran just fine. The fact that it was only Windows that failed kept me from suspecting the hardware, though clearing the CMOS eventually fixed the problem.
Linux does haveproblems, but the thing is, they aren't being ignored.
Linux FAILS on the desktop except in specific cases where a user has it installed by someone technically proficient or is technically proficient themselves.
The same is true for Windows and Macs. Dare you deny it? My wife got me a t-shirt to wear to family gatherings that says, "No, I will not fix your computer." because of all the questions anyone 'technically proficient' gets. Macs are better than Windows, but what do they call those people at the Apple stores? "Geniuses"?
Your other complaints have nothing to do with Linux per se and apply more to the environment it finds itself in. Frankly, I haven't run into the need for commercial Linux software so far (aside from some games), the FOSS stuff works for me. As to Linux games, you have half a point - but as Sturgeon's Law says, "Ninety percent of everything is crap." Therearegoodgames for Linux (and those are just commercial ones) but how much shovelware do you see for Windows? Even in the FOSS games, there are good ones, too. My kids love playing plenty of them, and even I enjoy a good game of bzflag now and then.
In all honesty, a spinal tap is not that bad of a procedure, provided that the patient relaxes and doesn't try to use their back for a bit after the tap is done.
A whole lotta women get it done during childbirth, too, and do just fine. (Men are real wimps sometimes. If I had to carry the babies we'd probably have zero kids. Certainly no more than one.)
Well, okay, an epidural isn't quite as deep as a spinal tap, but the difference is millimeters. Accidentally puncturing the dura is pretty common. My wife had a c-section for our third kid, and she got the headache afterward that happens when you get a puncture in the dura leaking spinal fluid.
She's delivered the natural way, and the headache was worse. She wanted to do a VBAC because she was scared of getting that headache again for our fourth.
Still, I'd probably do it if I had the chance. Either way, I'd want to know. If it were negative, I'd be overjoyed. If it were positive, well, at least I could plan ahead.
I'm going to have a hard time translating something like Entropy into an equation...
The link I provided before does so, using the actual thermodynamic definitions of entropy. Here it is again (PDF paper it links to, costs money though). Even by a major overestimate of the amount of entropy in living things, the sun puts in over a trillion times more energy available to decrease entropy than all living things on Earth produce.
The main problem is that Entropy is not "disorder". The other problem is that entropy can and does decrease on Earth, all over the place... though the total entropy in the Universe does go up. If the naive understanding of entropy were correct, snowflakes couldn't form. Here's a discussion that addresses your 'broken glass' example pretty well, noting that "order" and "design" are two quite different things still. It also addresses something else you say:
I argue that what can't happen with an individual is impossible to take place within a population, because a population can always be split ad infinitum until it is a population of one.
You didn't cover semiconductors in your electrical engineering classes? They did in mine. Holes, doping, band gaps, etc. - such phenomena can't be observed in single atoms, only in collections thereof. (BTW, entirely unrelated aside: I once ran it through an anagram generator and discovered that "electrical engineering" could be rearranged to "rectilinear negligence".:-> ) What about convection? How about dipolar bonding in water - of no import in an individual molecule, but leads to anomalously high surface tension in liquid water, and the paradoxical expansion of solid vs. liquid water at Earthly temperatures and pressures?
Ponder for a moment how you'd measure the behavior of shear-thickening liquids in a single molecule. How would you make a quasicrystal out of one atom?
Early on, a blastula is composed of identical cells, but patterns of chemical reactions make "standing waves" around those cells, and start differentiation. You don't get that behavior from the individual cells - indeed, if you split those cells up, they form new blastulas, which then differentiate and develop. (One way identical twins are formed.)
Those are just the simplest examples I came up with off the top of my head. I'm going to ask a few buddies to come up with more examples of behavior seen only in populations, not individuals. It's actually a fun puzzle, thanks.
If there's a way to PM on/. please send me (geotopia) your email and we can take this offline.
Next to my name is a (slightly mangled) version of my email address. If you click on my nickname, my email's there, and you can find my home site with a "contact" page.
I reckon from your last statement that the argument for
speciation is crumbling from being supported by empirical evidence and
observed phenomena to being induced from the "fossil
record"...
I'm, er, at a loss to understand how you got that from what I said. The
links I gave you are to speciation events that have happened entirely in
line with the theory I've attempted to outline for you, (and no, not all
or even most of them are 'in the lab'). And how, exactly, are the
'fossil record' or genetic sequences not 'empirical evidence and
observed phenomena'?
We've got a ton of geologic evidence indicating that continental plates can and have moved. It's normally too slow a process observe on a human scale, but we have observed GPS measurements and radar ranging data in some places on Earth that show regular, progressive offsets entirely consistent with continental drift. Those offsets haven't added up to moving a continent between hemispheres while we've been looking, but the theory doesn't predict rates that fast. Still, it's really weird that all this stuff adds up so consistently, if plate tectonics is really wrong.
That's what I'm getting at by bringing up fossil and molecular evidence. We see real, honest-to-goodness transitions: I linked to one in my previous response, one you can even partially observe on your own body. Lay your fingers on the side of your jaw. Now, trace along the edge up to the very top of the jawbone. Notice how close your fingers are to your ear canal? Inside the inner ear are three bones, the ossicles: malleus, incus, and stapes. They are carefully arranged to transfer sound energy from the eardrum to the cochlea as efficiently as possible. How could such an amazing mechanism arise? (One that's been cited, even, as 'irreducibly complex'
- just Google around a bit.)
It turns out that a classification of dinosaur called the therapsids had
two jaw joints. The therapsids are known (by several independent lines
of evidence) to be ancestral to modern mammals... and we have a
basically complete fossil record of the gradual transition of one of
those jaw joints into the modern bones of the inner ear. Fossils
representing over 11 separate stages have been found, in the predicted
order. Note that intermediate steps were all advantageous, though not as
efficient or optimized. Some transitional forms did help amplify sound
energy but didn't work while the animal was chewing. We still have
problems with that under some circumstances (try to listen to someone
while eating celery) but the separation is far more developed now.
And another item I linked to, the molecular evidence. This one is
seriously a slam dunk. We've built a 'tree of life' based on animal
morphology over centuries, a nested hierarchy of traits. You never find
lizards with nipples, or animals with chloroplasts, etc. (Linnaeus
started this. It's a little-known fact that he tried to make such
trees for minerals and such too, but they failed miserably... since
minerals don't arise from descent with modification.) And now we've got
a new tree - that of DNA. And, with very very few surprises, it's the
same tree that was derived from looking at physical traits. It
didn't have to be that way. Even very critical genes for life - like
that of cytochrome C - have a few neutral variations, minor mutations
that don't affect it. (Genetic sequences for cytochrome C differ by up to
60% across species.) Wheat engineered to use the mouse form of
cytochrome C grows just fine. But we find a tree of mutations that fits
evolution precisely, instead of some other tree. Instead of one of the
trillions of trillions of possible alternate trees. (Imagine if a
tree derived from bookbinding technology - "this guy used this kind of
glue, but this other bookbinder used a different glue..." - conflicted
with a tree that was derived from typos in the text of the books. We'd
know at least one tree and maybe both were wrong.)
It took me only 2 minutes to Google over five independent sites listing the recorded interbreeding of said gulls, with successful offspring...
Um, horses and donkeys can interbreed, but the mules produced are sterile. Hence they are separate species. It would help if you would cite some sources or at least list the search terms you used - makes it hard to check your results. Hybrid gulls have been noted (even the wikipedia article I linked you to said they "do not normally hybridize"), but viable populations of hybrids have not.
There are plenty of other ring species (I pointed you to some). And then there's speciation observed in the lab. (See particularly 5.7 in the latter, and all the plant examples in both.)
You keep alluding to a non event where something happens over time, but can't be identified at any point in time...
What's the exact femtosecond day becomes night? Is it when the sun goes below the horizon? (Just the actual disc, or the corona too? What if the corona goes below the horizon for a moment, then there's a flare that peeks back up?) Is there a period called 'twilight' that can't exactly be called day or night?
I do see that part of my statement wasn't phrased very well. Instead of "there's no point where you can conclusively say, 'Okay, at this point we're at a new species.'", I should have said, "there's no point where you can conclusively say, 'Here's the exact line where we went from one species to another.'" Is my meaning a little more clear?
in order for there to be a new species there has to be a moment in time where a member that can no longer mate with the rest of his species is born
Again, that's the problem. You're insisting that 'hopeful monsters' are required, when they are not. It may be possible that an individual is born with a mutation that makes them unable to mate with some of the rest of their species, though even then, it's far more common that they are just less likely to be able to successfully mate with some other individuals in the species. There will be other individuals in the same species that they can breed with just fine.
Then, in some other individual - a descendent of the one with the first mutation - a different mutation happens. This makes them less likely still to be able successfully produce fertile offspring with other members of the species that don't have both mutations, but they can still breed well enough with the ones with only the first mutation. (Genes are discrete, but there are a lot of them, with complicated and interlocking effects. The colors on your monitor are discrete, too, but that doesn't mean you can't display something that's awfully hard to tell from a continuous spectrum.)
Enough of these mutations accumulate, and the likelihood of successful interbreeding of these subpopulations falls to zero. Bob's your uncle, new species. At no point in the transition was there an individual who could "no longer mate with the rest of his species". There were collections of individuals that bred poorly with other collections of individuals, though they could breed successfully within the collections, and quite possibly with intermediate subpopulations.
Now, you can claim that you're not convinced by the evidence that this does happen. But there's no way to claim that this logically can't happen. When we see ring species in the wild, and records of transitions in the fossil record, though, I find the evidence pretty darn conclusive. Then you add the genetic evidence - undreamed of in Darwin's time, but
If it's unlikely that an individual could mutate, survive, retain the power to pro-create, yet not with the larger population, yet be more robust and prone to survive than the population at large
I've highlighted the problem. That's it right there. Evolution doesn't predict hopeful monsters. A new species doesn't arrive in one mutation. Individual mutations arise in individuals, yes. But they don't produce reproductive isolation in one shot. They spread if they are beneficial (or even neutral, often enough). The American Gull population only has a few mutations relative to the Herring Gull population, enough to be a subspecies but not enough to cause reproductive isolation. A few more have accumulated in the the Vega, and so forth.
Eventually, we get to the Lesser Black-Backed Gull. Multiple mutations have accumulated (over distance, in this case), to the point where they're not cross-fertile with the Herring Gull. The entire point of the example, though, is that there's no sharp dividing line. (There are, of course, more examples.) The sub-populations can breed with each other, there's no point where you can conclusively say, "Okay, at this point we're at a new species."
Now, explain to me why mutations can't accumulate exactly this way in time? Especially if two sub-populations get separated by whatever means - a new river, a new mountain, a forest burning down, whatever?
I can understand why you have such problems with evolution if you have a saltationist misconception like that. But, seriously, check out that book I recommended. It'll help. You might also want to look at this, which may help you understand why so many people - including creationists in the 18th century who started finding things that just didn't fit - came to accept common descent and the rest.
Slashdot Mirror
Possibly. On the other hand, sometimes you've got to toss some money into experimenting with other niches. If "Watchmen" had done well, it would have opened up an entirely new market. As it stands, they probably won't be doing that for a while... but just think how many "Slumdog Millionaire" copycats there will be in a few months.
We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.
Saw it in Imax, and I'm sure it'll be on my xmas list in Blu-ray. I honestly don't know how it would play to someone who hasn't read the original, but I enjoyed it with relatively minor quibbles. I'm kind of curious about the stuff that didn't make it in.
I suspect that the specific things that work for me wouldn't work for everyone. I have Crystal Method, Mozart, Beethoven, a little Alan Parsons Project & Art Of Noise, some MIDIs, & MODs, and plenty of soundtracks.
The main thing for me is no vocals. It steals processing time from the verbal parts of my brain that are working on translating ideas into code. Even just chanting in languages I don't understand frequently doesn't work - my brain wants to process human voices. For general stuff, debugging and the like, it's not critical - but for peak coding, I gotta have music but can't handle vocals.
I need music with no vocals - mostly classical and techno. I have a special playlist called "coding" for those times when I really need to be focused.
No... what satire there was, was really bad, ham-fisted, moronic satire. Example: In one scene, a trooper asks why they are training with knives when the military has nukes.
And, as others have pointed out... it wasn't meant to be a satire anyway. That stuff was shoehorned in later.
What if you're not sitting right next to them?
So I work, see, and my wife runs this bakery, y'know, and we've got four kids, with one very young, so the times we can arrange childcare for the baby and get the rest of the family out to see a movie are limited, and sometimes you have to work with what's available. But I'm glad I could help your self-esteem a little! You rock with your bad self!
Technical limitations - and the economic limitations that spring from them - have limited 3D's usage to gimmicks before. They've done red-green 3D... but that can't do color. They've done vertical and horizontal polarization... but that requires you to keep your head almost perfectly vertical, or else the 3D effect vanishes.
These days they're using circularly polarized light with opposite signs. Clockwise in one eye, counterclockwise in the other. That way the 3D effect can be maintained even if the viewer's head is quite a bit further off vertical, making the whole experience a lot more comfortable. In the future, framerates can be made high enough, and LCD shutters can be made cheap enough, that alternating frames to allow 3D may well be economical.
Economics actually argues for 3D now, instead of against - movie theaters need a draw that's hard to duplicate at home. I already wait to see most movies on DVD, or Blu-ray at most, 'cause I've got a decent-sized flat-panel and good speakers.
The past can be a good guide to the future... but it's not an infallible guide.
I sprung for one of the fancy models that lets you adjust the brightness of the screen.
(One thing that does not translate from 2D to 3D - at least for me - is a cross-fade. That just breaks my brain. In 2D, everything's in one focal plane. In a 3D crossfade, I can't figure out where to focus as things are appearing and disappearing and it's all a confused blur until the fade's over.)
The other issue is that 3D can't make a bad movie good. My youngest kids enjoyed "Fly Me To The Moon", but my wife and I... well, at least I had my PDA with me.
Well, Microsoft's never really competed on quality before. They just work on being the lowest-cost provider, and it's worked out pretty well. You might be right. For me, $200 is a bit more than I want to pay for something 'disposable', but there's no denying they've sold a bunch of 360s.
When you look at the actual sales slopes, and count the fact that a significant number of 360 sales are people buying a new console 'cause their old one died out of warranty or for issues that aren't covered by the warranty extension, that doesn't seem to be the case. The 360 has a significant head start, but it seems to basically be maintaining its lead rather than pulling further ahead.
Those replacement sales are good for MS, of course. Not so good for 360 users, though. But the business model seems to be working; we'll see if that's good for consumers down the road.
A whole lot of people think that the Earth is 6,000 years old, or that Obama's not like all the other politicians. The question is, are the people correct or not?
Looking at things from an evolutionary perspective, repressing homosexuality is the worst possible thing to do if it's biologically-based. Assume it's maladaptive - that there's something wrong with it in some objective sense that has real-world consequences that outweigh any possible advantages. (Sickle-cell anemia has bad consequences if you have two genes for it, but if you only have one copy, it helps protect you from malaria. Go look up what populations have a prevalence of sickle-cell, and whether malaria was common where they originated. Go ahead, I'll wait.)
If homosexuality really is bad, then it will evolve away after a while. Any effort to force homosexuals to breed will just preserve the 'bad' genes longer. (Even if it's only neutral, it'll most likely go away just through genetic drift). So laws against homosexuality are a bad idea in direct proportion to how bad you assume homosexuality is.
But if we assume the converse, that homosexuality is objectively neutral - or perhaps even has net advantages for the population that contains it - then laws against homosexuality are also obviously a bad idea.
If it's not biologically-based - and I can't see how anyone could really argue this, if sex and sexual orientation don't have a biological basis, then what the hell does? - then it's something that consenting adults choose to do. As long as nobody's being hurt involuntarily, what possible (non-religious) justification could a law against homosexuality possibly have in that case?
So, no matter what position you take on the subject, laws against homosexuality are stupid.
If only. In a hearing on Capitol Hill Thursday, the man nominated to be the director of intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, said the government would look at revising the Army Field Manual on interrogation rules, which leaves open the possibility that different techniques can be added for use by intelligence officers and not be publicized.
The Obama administration might be better than the Bush one on torture, but it's way too early to say, and they certainly haven't done the strong and immediate disavowal I was hoping for.
I never drank anything caffeinated at all until late in college. (Never liked soda or coffee, hadn't learned to like tea.) Then I woke up sick the day of a final exam. I got some triple-mocha-something-or-other, and felt fine all through the test. Then, on the bus ride home, I realized I wasn't turning my head to look at things, I was jerking my head around like a bird.
Given the current voting structure, that is a risk. There are other ways to do it, but until those are actually in practice, you need to be a bit more clever. Use vote pairing to prevent worst-case scenarios while still increasing the visibility and viability of third-party candidates.
The problem with voting for the "lesser of two evils" is you're still voting for evil.
Name three. I'm only aware of a reversal on experimentation with stem cells.
...and contributing to the EFF, the ones actually pushing this issue.
Funny, when I argue libertarian positions on conservative sites, I get called "fringe left".
"Before 9-11 I was a conservative. After 9-11 I'm a radical liberal... and my opinions haven't changed." - Jeffery McLean
My experience has been decidedly the opposite. I've had Windows refuse to boot when I added a new video card, but Linux ran fine. Not long ago, I had a SATA error on my motherboard. Windows refused to boot, Linux (Ubuntu 8.08, to be specific) ran just fine. The fact that it was only Windows that failed kept me from suspecting the hardware, though clearing the CMOS eventually fixed the problem.
Linux does have problems, but the thing is, they aren't being ignored.
The same is true for Windows and Macs. Dare you deny it? My wife got me a t-shirt to wear to family gatherings that says, "No, I will not fix your computer." because of all the questions anyone 'technically proficient' gets. Macs are better than Windows, but what do they call those people at the Apple stores? "Geniuses"?
Your other complaints have nothing to do with Linux per se and apply more to the environment it finds itself in. Frankly, I haven't run into the need for commercial Linux software so far (aside from some games), the FOSS stuff works for me. As to Linux games, you have half a point - but as Sturgeon's Law says, "Ninety percent of everything is crap." There are good games for Linux (and those are just commercial ones) but how much shovelware do you see for Windows? Even in the FOSS games, there are good ones, too. My kids love playing plenty of them, and even I enjoy a good game of bzflag now and then.
A whole lotta women get it done during childbirth, too, and do just fine. (Men are real wimps sometimes. If I had to carry the babies we'd probably have zero kids. Certainly no more than one.)
Well, okay, an epidural isn't quite as deep as a spinal tap, but the difference is millimeters. Accidentally puncturing the dura is pretty common. My wife had a c-section for our third kid, and she got the headache afterward that happens when you get a puncture in the dura leaking spinal fluid.
She's delivered the natural way, and the headache was worse. She wanted to do a VBAC because she was scared of getting that headache again for our fourth.
Still, I'd probably do it if I had the chance. Either way, I'd want to know. If it were negative, I'd be overjoyed. If it were positive, well, at least I could plan ahead.
Gee, thanks, "chump"! :->
The link I provided before does so, using the actual thermodynamic definitions of entropy. Here it is again (PDF paper it links to, costs money though). Even by a major overestimate of the amount of entropy in living things, the sun puts in over a trillion times more energy available to decrease entropy than all living things on Earth produce.
The main problem is that Entropy is not "disorder". The other problem is that entropy can and does decrease on Earth, all over the place... though the total entropy in the Universe does go up. If the naive understanding of entropy were correct, snowflakes couldn't form. Here's a discussion that addresses your 'broken glass' example pretty well, noting that "order" and "design" are two quite different things still. It also addresses something else you say:
You didn't cover semiconductors in your electrical engineering classes? They did in mine. Holes, doping, band gaps, etc. - such phenomena can't be observed in single atoms, only in collections thereof. (BTW, entirely unrelated aside: I once ran it through an anagram generator and discovered that "electrical engineering" could be rearranged to "rectilinear negligence". :-> ) What about convection? How about dipolar bonding in water - of no import in an individual molecule, but leads to anomalously high surface tension in liquid water, and the paradoxical expansion of solid vs. liquid water at Earthly temperatures and pressures?
Ponder for a moment how you'd measure the behavior of shear-thickening liquids in a single molecule. How would you make a quasicrystal out of one atom?
Early on, a blastula is composed of identical cells, but patterns of chemical reactions make "standing waves" around those cells, and start differentiation. You don't get that behavior from the individual cells - indeed, if you split those cells up, they form new blastulas, which then differentiate and develop. (One way identical twins are formed.)
Those are just the simplest examples I came up with off the top of my head. I'm going to ask a few buddies to come up with more examples of behavior seen only in populations, not individuals. It's actually a fun puzzle, thanks.
Next to my name is a (slightly mangled) version of my email address. If you click on my nickname, my email's there, and you can find my home site with a "contact" page.
I'm, er, at a loss to understand how you got that from what I said. The links I gave you are to speciation events that have happened entirely in line with the theory I've attempted to outline for you, (and no, not all or even most of them are 'in the lab'). And how, exactly, are the 'fossil record' or genetic sequences not 'empirical evidence and observed phenomena'?
We've got a ton of geologic evidence indicating that continental plates can and have moved. It's normally too slow a process observe on a human scale, but we have observed GPS measurements and radar ranging data in some places on Earth that show regular, progressive offsets entirely consistent with continental drift. Those offsets haven't added up to moving a continent between hemispheres while we've been looking, but the theory doesn't predict rates that fast. Still, it's really weird that all this stuff adds up so consistently, if plate tectonics is really wrong.
That's what I'm getting at by bringing up fossil and molecular evidence. We see real, honest-to-goodness transitions: I linked to one in my previous response, one you can even partially observe on your own body. Lay your fingers on the side of your jaw. Now, trace along the edge up to the very top of the jawbone. Notice how close your fingers are to your ear canal? Inside the inner ear are three bones, the ossicles: malleus, incus, and stapes. They are carefully arranged to transfer sound energy from the eardrum to the cochlea as efficiently as possible. How could such an amazing mechanism arise? (One that's been cited, even, as 'irreducibly complex' - just Google around a bit.)
It turns out that a classification of dinosaur called the therapsids had two jaw joints. The therapsids are known (by several independent lines of evidence) to be ancestral to modern mammals... and we have a basically complete fossil record of the gradual transition of one of those jaw joints into the modern bones of the inner ear. Fossils representing over 11 separate stages have been found, in the predicted order. Note that intermediate steps were all advantageous, though not as efficient or optimized. Some transitional forms did help amplify sound energy but didn't work while the animal was chewing. We still have problems with that under some circumstances (try to listen to someone while eating celery) but the separation is far more developed now.
And another item I linked to, the molecular evidence. This one is seriously a slam dunk. We've built a 'tree of life' based on animal morphology over centuries, a nested hierarchy of traits. You never find lizards with nipples, or animals with chloroplasts, etc. (Linnaeus started this. It's a little-known fact that he tried to make such trees for minerals and such too, but they failed miserably... since minerals don't arise from descent with modification.) And now we've got a new tree - that of DNA. And, with very very few surprises, it's the same tree that was derived from looking at physical traits. It didn't have to be that way. Even very critical genes for life - like that of cytochrome C - have a few neutral variations, minor mutations that don't affect it. (Genetic sequences for cytochrome C differ by up to 60% across species.) Wheat engineered to use the mouse form of cytochrome C grows just fine. But we find a tree of mutations that fits evolution precisely, instead of some other tree. Instead of one of the trillions of trillions of possible alternate trees. (Imagine if a tree derived from bookbinding technology - "this guy used this kind of glue, but this other bookbinder used a different glue..." - conflicted with a tree that was derived from typos in the text of the books. We'd know at least one tree and maybe both were wrong.)
Now, when you add up things like this,
Um, horses and donkeys can interbreed, but the mules produced are sterile. Hence they are separate species. It would help if you would cite some sources or at least list the search terms you used - makes it hard to check your results. Hybrid gulls have been noted (even the wikipedia article I linked you to said they "do not normally hybridize"), but viable populations of hybrids have not.
There are plenty of other ring species (I pointed you to some). And then there's speciation observed in the lab. (See particularly 5.7 in the latter, and all the plant examples in both.)
What's the exact femtosecond day becomes night? Is it when the sun goes below the horizon? (Just the actual disc, or the corona too? What if the corona goes below the horizon for a moment, then there's a flare that peeks back up?) Is there a period called 'twilight' that can't exactly be called day or night?
I do see that part of my statement wasn't phrased very well. Instead of "there's no point where you can conclusively say, 'Okay, at this point we're at a new species.'", I should have said, "there's no point where you can conclusively say, 'Here's the exact line where we went from one species to another.'" Is my meaning a little more clear?
Again, that's the problem. You're insisting that 'hopeful monsters' are required, when they are not. It may be possible that an individual is born with a mutation that makes them unable to mate with some of the rest of their species, though even then, it's far more common that they are just less likely to be able to successfully mate with some other individuals in the species. There will be other individuals in the same species that they can breed with just fine.
Then, in some other individual - a descendent of the one with the first mutation - a different mutation happens. This makes them less likely still to be able successfully produce fertile offspring with other members of the species that don't have both mutations, but they can still breed well enough with the ones with only the first mutation. (Genes are discrete, but there are a lot of them, with complicated and interlocking effects. The colors on your monitor are discrete, too, but that doesn't mean you can't display something that's awfully hard to tell from a continuous spectrum.)
Enough of these mutations accumulate, and the likelihood of successful interbreeding of these subpopulations falls to zero. Bob's your uncle, new species. At no point in the transition was there an individual who could "no longer mate with the rest of his species". There were collections of individuals that bred poorly with other collections of individuals, though they could breed successfully within the collections, and quite possibly with intermediate subpopulations.
Now, you can claim that you're not convinced by the evidence that this does happen. But there's no way to claim that this logically can't happen. When we see ring species in the wild, and records of transitions in the fossil record, though, I find the evidence pretty darn conclusive. Then you add the genetic evidence - undreamed of in Darwin's time, but
I've highlighted the problem. That's it right there. Evolution doesn't predict hopeful monsters. A new species doesn't arrive in one mutation. Individual mutations arise in individuals, yes. But they don't produce reproductive isolation in one shot. They spread if they are beneficial (or even neutral, often enough). The American Gull population only has a few mutations relative to the Herring Gull population, enough to be a subspecies but not enough to cause reproductive isolation. A few more have accumulated in the the Vega, and so forth.
Eventually, we get to the Lesser Black-Backed Gull. Multiple mutations have accumulated (over distance, in this case), to the point where they're not cross-fertile with the Herring Gull. The entire point of the example, though, is that there's no sharp dividing line. (There are, of course, more examples.) The sub-populations can breed with each other, there's no point where you can conclusively say, "Okay, at this point we're at a new species."
Now, explain to me why mutations can't accumulate exactly this way in time? Especially if two sub-populations get separated by whatever means - a new river, a new mountain, a forest burning down, whatever?
I can understand why you have such problems with evolution if you have a saltationist misconception like that. But, seriously, check out that book I recommended. It'll help. You might also want to look at this, which may help you understand why so many people - including creationists in the 18th century who started finding things that just didn't fit - came to accept common descent and the rest.