> That means you'd have to try approximately 40,000
> combonations every second
How about hunderds of qintillions of combinations every second? That's more like chemicals in the wild on a planetary scale.
On a universal scale, it would be even more grand. There's good evidence that life may have started on another planet and jump, planet to planet, star to star, over millions of years as single-celled life, or simpler, gets knocked off in large-scale collisions. That need not be the case though. Only one planet need get it "right", and we might be that planet. Even your 40,000 combinations per second PER PLANET, multiplied by the universe by fifteen billion years adds up quickly.
But that's beside the point. You have to be very careful when presuming that every single combination is equally likely chemically, or that sub-combinations might be reproduceable in ways that we haven't predicted. Life might have started out as a chemical that catalyzed copies of itself. It's well known that the cell as we know it is most likely an evolved combination of other cells that happened to find symbiosis or parasitism (initially) as beneficial. The mitochondria, with their own DNA, were most likely captured cells that learned to live in another cell. The nucleus itself might have been a separate cell, so to other structures. Even the necessity of such a complex cell wall might be a thousand times greater than what was originally needed, if anything was needed at all. (The technical definition of a cell as membrane containing stuff is nice for a biology textbook, but doesn't have any bearing on a group of reproducing chemicals.) The current cells you see are the polished product of billions of years of evolution before multicellular colonies started.
And as for Bible quotes, you'll have to prove the Bible before I'd accept it as authority. Even if it is authority, my questioning of the wisdom of Yahweh creating male and female still stands. He knew what He was doing. He knew they would stray. Therefore, the universe is just one bizarre, pointless experiment by God.
It's my understainding an island has to be natural and above the water level year-round. (Japan dumped tons of rock onto some partially-submerged mini islands to get them above water year-round so they could claim them and, more to the point, get the 200-mile internation rights to fish there.)
Wouldn't this old oil rig just be like a ship? It could, certainly, renounce being a ship of any particular nation, and being outside all territorial waters, do what it will, but a country?
> Even if you don't believe that we have souls, then
> at least consider that every embryo has the
> potential to become a fully-developed human being.
I do acknowledge that. However, if my arm gets cut off, I don't lose part of my soul (presumably.)
I would argue a tiny clump of undifferentiated cells is like a cut off arm in that it simply has not yet developed the biological portions required to have a soul.
No, no one should be forced to use tax dollars on things they don't believe in, certainly. But try to get a politician to let you not pay taxes for the military, or welfare, or social security, or what have you. Nahh, they all have to worship at the other false god of Democracy. Vox populi, Vox dei and all that.
> For example, note that the Universe exhibits
> intelligent design. Explain how you can get
> complex life and thought from time + chance. The
> law of entropy states otherwise
"Violating entropy" is an old saw shot down by physicists time and again. "Overall entropy" says nothing about local entropy. To see another violation of entropy in exactly the same manner as life, take a look at your air conditioner. And no, that an AC unit is "intelligently designed" doesn't make the principal invalid.
> Why do we have [sexual reproduction] then? Just for pr0n?
Thank goodness! Moreover, if God were creating the universe, why make a male and a female? Why not an androgynous, peaceful, asexual society where men won't rage around fighting natural temptation to be the alpha male, leaving trails of orphans everywhere. Good one, God.
(Would Trout pr0n consist of masturbating to pictures of laid eggs? Discuss.)
Evolution is so powerful that if God were to create the universe as-is, we know enough that evolution would commence immediately on the then-existing species. God would have to take an active role in stopping evolution (which would then be detectable by science, BTW.)
Anyway, evolution is not at odds with religion except in the more fundamental sects (including TV preachers.) The older religions simply throw up their hands and say evolution is how God guided development. No more house-arrests for Galileo for them. If the Bible contradicts science, all the worse for the Bibie. (If you want to continue to believe in it, you must ascribe ever-larger portions to being allegory rather than actual description.)
> When she found out it was a software company, she
> thought that giving them a charge account wasn't a
> bright move, as she said "computers are just a
> flash in the pan".
Evidently she was right, for Dyna-mix, at least.
That's the funniest pronunciation I have seen since SCSI drive maker for Sun (among other things) named Andataco, supposed to be An-data-co, or something, but much funnier as And-a-taco.
All I know is my P II 450 with Voodoo 3 is within their minimum config and I have to turn all the graphics options down to minimum (including resolution and view depth, ugh) to be able to even mildly play a heavy on D. Offense? Forget about it.
> Science at one point in history did believe those
> things [earth flat, etc.], science changed at
> another point, but it was too "radical" for society
Actually, the Greeks knew the earth was round because that was the only shape that could always produce a round shadow on the moon, regardless of its orientation.
Then they calculated how big the earth was, and got the right answer to within a few percent. (The angles of shadows in different places on the same day at the same time.)
Knowing that, they then could calculate how big the moon was based on the size of earth's shadow on it.
Knowing how big the moon was, they then calculated how far away the moon was, and again got the right answer.
THEN came Christianity, and Europe went into a thousand year dark age because of that before the Greek tradition saw rebirth.
Like the lightning rods on all buildings except church steeples, when the Pope is the only one dying from lack of stem-cell produced organs or clone organs, that doesn't look so good for his business.
Or shortly will, right down to plugging atoms together to create life. Life is just an engineering problem. There is no spark of life, nor a soul, plugged into this or that conglomeration of atoms to make it "human".
Are there fascinating questions left? Certainly. What is the nature of the subjective perceptual experience, the "I" in "I think, therefore I am." But we should no more ascribe supernatural to that than we would think that the earth is flat because it seems so when you look at it. (And, as I always point out, the supernatural world has it's own physics that would fall prey to scientific analysis. "Supernatural" as synonym for "magical" is an intellectual cop-out meaning "I don't know how it happens.")
Isaac Asimov once pointed out how religions cave in once the massive benefit of science overwhelms religious objection.
In the first case, the use of lightning rods started saving many a barn. Preachers preached, "How dare you thwart the will of Zeus, I mean God?!?!? Thunderbolts are God's punishment on the wicked!"
Soon, the only buildings with lightning rods were church steeples. Well, when the only buildings being hit by God's Punishment is the church you preach from, that's not so good for business.
The second case was the use of pain killers in childbirth. "How dare you thwart the will of God?!?! It says right in The Bible that 'in pain shall ye labor' ye wicked woman." Then a queen had painkillers during childbirth and no one dared speak up. Now it's just viewed as silly.
So, when The Rich, including Politicians and Preachers start going overseas to get spare organs from their acephalous clones, or organs grown from stem cells from fresh embryos, the US and the religious will cave or simply be evolved out of society.
It's just too bad we have to go through this silly step. Does anyone think a God is sitting up there (if he even exists) wringing his hands, thinking "They'd better not do that!"
No. If such a god exists, then it certainly knew this situation would come up, indeed, he must have planned it. It is wrong to kowtow to such a god and deliberately hinder our survival just to jump through a purely academic ethical hoop, an artificial situation created by that god.
> Now what happens if it is the case that only
> embryonic(sp) stem cells can be used for these
> cures? Do we start paying women to make embryos to
> use as cures?
Sounds good to me.
> Do we start requiring or at least expecting
> women to do this when possible?
Requiring? When did this turn into a fascist dictatorship, or a socialist one? As for expecting, I heartily endorse using the bully pulpit of the presidency to shift public thought to encourage women to do this.
It's bad enough my tax dollars are not going towards a balls-out effort in stem cell research because of anachronistic beliefs in Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy and Souls Imbued Into Tissue At Conception.
> And would there be money to find an easier cure if there are these available sources?
A cure is a cure. Knowing something can be done is half the battle. Salk's polio vaccine was used for only a year or so before better solutions came on the market.
> Since there is no legal usage of guns, because
> killing is always illegal (other than in a war
> decided upon supposedly by your democratically
> elected governmental representatives)
Well, self-defence is acceptable, especially when the government fails in that area (riots, crim-ridden cities, etc.) So too, hunting.
However, your entire post is an ironic, backwards view of the world.
The real, important reason for the second ammendment is for the people to be able to put the government down and to death the hard way, if necessary, even if democratically elected.
In that sense, the one, true, proper use of guns will by definition be illegal because that government will (unless completely collapsed) define the seige and killing of government officials as murder or treason rather than a revolution to freedom.
And the individual can sign contracts to reproduce this. No problem here. They know they can earn more with a large company, especially if they are unknown, and the large company takes a risk.
> Limited.
It still is limited. To the extent it seems less limited by infringing on the ability to easily produce exact copies of entire large works and distribute them to millions, all at the push of a button, well, that is because (99.9999% of the use, remember) such ease of use completely eviscerates:
> 1: I buy a cd, make a tape recording of it, and
> give you the tape so you can listen to it. You
> don't pay me. No money exchanges hands.
That's rather bizarre. It seems a trade has still occurred (money need not be one of the exchanged items.) Indeed, that you don't charge anything for it, providing not only no cash for the company, but also devaluing the product produced by the company itself seems like it should be illegal (not that people don't swap copies of tapes all the time.)
It's good to remind people of "medium"'s origins. It has been bastardized into being synonymous with "physical recording material" by way of that being one of the methods of transfer, and altered still further by "multimedia", aka moving pictures with sound, which really has nothing to do with being a medium at all.
> Napster provided a general service for sharing
> audio files. They were not the getaway car. They
> were the bus that passes in front of the bank.
And if the busses running in front of the bank carried 99,999 bank robbers to and from the bank for every 1 legitimate bank customer, don't you think the government should do something about it?
Don't you think the bus company knows, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, that they're business model depends heavily on illegal activity?
How is your freedom eroding? It's been pointed out in these court cases that you can get your (slightly degraded) fair use copies by piping analog audio out back into the audio in and.waving it.
It hasn't been very long at all, historically, that that's exactly how you did it! You recorded the song on your tape over the radio.
All this is doing is stopping mass-copying and distribution of perfect, complete copies.
Where is the problem here? Fair use is in no worse shape than it was 10 years ago.
Not only that, distribution of the physical CD's isn't cheap, either. Also, the store has to get a cut, and a lot of these CD's sit on the shelves for months, and that money invested in manufacturing and distribution is dripping away with inflation.
Most people are shocked to find out the price of a loaf of bread at the store is only about 10% farmer, if that much. Shortages that quadruple the price of grain don't add all that much.
So to, with gasoline and the price of a barrel of oil. The skyrocketting prices earlier this summer, and last summer, were not tied to oil at all.
> Not everybody has the ability or the time to rip
> CDDA and convert it to wave files just so they can
> convert it to MP3s in bulk.
Uhhhhh there are some hypothetical people out there who are now mad that they can't instantaneously "fair use" a part of a CD with the push of a button, and golly, they have to go through some extra steps of actually recording it imperfectly?
But I don't understand. How do you "fair use" a perfect copy of a portion of a CD easily without allowing massive theft of perfect copies of entire songs and CD's, thus destroying reward for work?
For every fair-user, there are 10^^8 pirates out there. Something tells me this worrying about "fair use" is hiding some massive fraud.
They aren't more intelligent. They just waste their free time on the Internet instead of hanging out in parking lots late at night with their buddies who can drive.
You spend half a dozen hours a day, or a dozen a day in summer, in front of the screen, you learn a thing or two.
Slashdot Mirror
> That means you'd have to try approximately 40,000
> combonations every second
How about hunderds of qintillions of combinations every second? That's more like chemicals in the wild on a planetary scale.
On a universal scale, it would be even more grand. There's good evidence that life may have started on another planet and jump, planet to planet, star to star, over millions of years as single-celled life, or simpler, gets knocked off in large-scale collisions. That need not be the case though. Only one planet need get it "right", and we might be that planet. Even your 40,000 combinations per second PER PLANET, multiplied by the universe by fifteen billion years adds up quickly.
But that's beside the point. You have to be very careful when presuming that every single combination is equally likely chemically, or that sub-combinations might be reproduceable in ways that we haven't predicted. Life might have started out as a chemical that catalyzed copies of itself. It's well known that the cell as we know it is most likely an evolved combination of other cells that happened to find symbiosis or parasitism (initially) as beneficial. The mitochondria, with their own DNA, were most likely captured cells that learned to live in another cell. The nucleus itself might have been a separate cell, so to other structures. Even the necessity of such a complex cell wall might be a thousand times greater than what was originally needed, if anything was needed at all. (The technical definition of a cell as membrane containing stuff is nice for a biology textbook, but doesn't have any bearing on a group of reproducing chemicals.) The current cells you see are the polished product of billions of years of evolution before multicellular colonies started.
And as for Bible quotes, you'll have to prove the Bible before I'd accept it as authority. Even if it is authority, my questioning of the wisdom of Yahweh creating male and female still stands. He knew what He was doing. He knew they would stray. Therefore, the universe is just one bizarre, pointless experiment by God.
It's my understainding an island has to be natural and above the water level year-round. (Japan dumped tons of rock onto some partially-submerged mini islands to get them above water year-round so they could claim them and, more to the point, get the 200-mile internation rights to fish there.)
Wouldn't this old oil rig just be like a ship? It could, certainly, renounce being a ship of any particular nation, and being outside all territorial waters, do what it will, but a country?
> Even if you don't believe that we have souls, then
> at least consider that every embryo has the
> potential to become a fully-developed human being.
I do acknowledge that. However, if my arm gets cut off, I don't lose part of my soul (presumably.)
I would argue a tiny clump of undifferentiated cells is like a cut off arm in that it simply has not yet developed the biological portions required to have a soul.
No, no one should be forced to use tax dollars on things they don't believe in, certainly. But try to get a politician to let you not pay taxes for the military, or welfare, or social security, or what have you. Nahh, they all have to worship at the other false god of Democracy. Vox populi, Vox dei and all that.
> For example, note that the Universe exhibits
> intelligent design. Explain how you can get
> complex life and thought from time + chance. The
> law of entropy states otherwise
"Violating entropy" is an old saw shot down by physicists time and again. "Overall entropy" says nothing about local entropy. To see another violation of entropy in exactly the same manner as life, take a look at your air conditioner. And no, that an AC unit is "intelligently designed" doesn't make the principal invalid.
> Why do we have [sexual reproduction] then? Just for pr0n?
Thank goodness! Moreover, if God were creating the universe, why make a male and a female? Why not an androgynous, peaceful, asexual society where men won't rage around fighting natural temptation to be the alpha male, leaving trails of orphans everywhere. Good one, God.
(Would Trout pr0n consist of masturbating to pictures of laid eggs? Discuss.)
Evolution is so powerful that if God were to create the universe as-is, we know enough that evolution would commence immediately on the then-existing species. God would have to take an active role in stopping evolution (which would then be detectable by science, BTW.)
Anyway, evolution is not at odds with religion except in the more fundamental sects (including TV preachers.) The older religions simply throw up their hands and say evolution is how God guided development. No more house-arrests for Galileo for them. If the Bible contradicts science, all the worse for the Bibie. (If you want to continue to believe in it, you must ascribe ever-larger portions to being allegory rather than actual description.)
Rock and Roll may still turn out to be a "flash in the pan", my friend, on the relative geologic scale of human endeavour.
The Incredible Machine was a kid's game that I played because of the puzzles. What a waste.
> When she found out it was a software company, she
> thought that giving them a charge account wasn't a
> bright move, as she said "computers are just a
> flash in the pan".
Evidently she was right, for Dyna-mix, at least.
That's the funniest pronunciation I have seen since SCSI drive maker for Sun (among other things) named Andataco, supposed to be An-data-co, or something, but much funnier as And-a-taco.
All I know is my P II 450 with Voodoo 3 is within their minimum config and I have to turn all the graphics options down to minimum (including resolution and view depth, ugh) to be able to even mildly play a heavy on D. Offense? Forget about it.
Dr. Adams: "Welcome to the Silicon Graphics Tantalus V Itanium research campus."
Stan: "Why did you call it 'Itanium'?"
Dr. Adams: "I have a rare marketing disease that prevents me from pronouncing the first 'T' in 'itanium.'"
> Science at one point in history did believe those
> things [earth flat, etc.], science changed at
> another point, but it was too "radical" for society
Actually, the Greeks knew the earth was round because that was the only shape that could always produce a round shadow on the moon, regardless of its orientation.
Then they calculated how big the earth was, and got the right answer to within a few percent. (The angles of shadows in different places on the same day at the same time.)
Knowing that, they then could calculate how big the moon was based on the size of earth's shadow on it.
Knowing how big the moon was, they then calculated how far away the moon was, and again got the right answer.
THEN came Christianity, and Europe went into a thousand year dark age because of that before the Greek tradition saw rebirth.
> Pope to President: Cherish Life.
Like the lightning rods on all buildings except church steeples, when the Pope is the only one dying from lack of stem-cell produced organs or clone organs, that doesn't look so good for his business.
Or shortly will, right down to plugging atoms together to create life. Life is just an engineering problem. There is no spark of life, nor a soul, plugged into this or that conglomeration of atoms to make it "human".
Are there fascinating questions left? Certainly. What is the nature of the subjective perceptual experience, the "I" in "I think, therefore I am." But we should no more ascribe supernatural to that than we would think that the earth is flat because it seems so when you look at it. (And, as I always point out, the supernatural world has it's own physics that would fall prey to scientific analysis. "Supernatural" as synonym for "magical" is an intellectual cop-out meaning "I don't know how it happens.")
Isaac Asimov once pointed out how religions cave in once the massive benefit of science overwhelms religious objection.
In the first case, the use of lightning rods started saving many a barn. Preachers preached, "How dare you thwart the will of Zeus, I mean God?!?!? Thunderbolts are God's punishment on the wicked!"
Soon, the only buildings with lightning rods were church steeples. Well, when the only buildings being hit by God's Punishment is the church you preach from, that's not so good for business.
The second case was the use of pain killers in childbirth. "How dare you thwart the will of God?!?! It says right in The Bible that 'in pain shall ye labor' ye wicked woman." Then a queen had painkillers during childbirth and no one dared speak up. Now it's just viewed as silly.
So, when The Rich, including Politicians and Preachers start going overseas to get spare organs from their acephalous clones, or organs grown from stem cells from fresh embryos, the US and the religious will cave or simply be evolved out of society.
It's just too bad we have to go through this silly step. Does anyone think a God is sitting up there (if he even exists) wringing his hands, thinking "They'd better not do that!"
No. If such a god exists, then it certainly knew this situation would come up, indeed, he must have planned it. It is wrong to kowtow to such a god and deliberately hinder our survival just to jump through a purely academic ethical hoop, an artificial situation created by that god.
Nah, we programmers have our own battles to fight with the government in the future over what AI constitutes "life".
> Now what happens if it is the case that only
> embryonic(sp) stem cells can be used for these
> cures? Do we start paying women to make embryos to
> use as cures?
Sounds good to me.
> Do we start requiring or at least expecting
> women to do this when possible?
Requiring? When did this turn into a fascist dictatorship, or a socialist one? As for expecting, I heartily endorse using the bully pulpit of the presidency to shift public thought to encourage women to do this.
It's bad enough my tax dollars are not going towards a balls-out effort in stem cell research because of anachronistic beliefs in Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy and Souls Imbued Into Tissue At Conception.
> And would there be money to find an easier cure if there are these available sources?
A cure is a cure. Knowing something can be done is half the battle. Salk's polio vaccine was used for only a year or so before better solutions came on the market.
> Since there is no legal usage of guns, because
> killing is always illegal (other than in a war
> decided upon supposedly by your democratically
> elected governmental representatives)
Well, self-defence is acceptable, especially when the government fails in that area (riots, crim-ridden cities, etc.) So too, hunting.
However, your entire post is an ironic, backwards view of the world.
The real, important reason for the second ammendment is for the people to be able to put the government down and to death the hard way, if necessary, even if democratically elected.
In that sense, the one, true, proper use of guns will by definition be illegal because that government will (unless completely collapsed) define the seige and killing of government officials as murder or treason rather than a revolution to freedom.
> Individual.
And the individual can sign contracts to reproduce this. No problem here. They know they can earn more with a large company, especially if they are unknown, and the large company takes a risk.
> Limited.
It still is limited. To the extent it seems less limited by infringing on the ability to easily produce exact copies of entire large works and distribute them to millions, all at the push of a button, well, that is because (99.9999% of the use, remember) such ease of use completely eviscerates:
> It was to encourage innovation.
> 1: I buy a cd, make a tape recording of it, and
> give you the tape so you can listen to it. You
> don't pay me. No money exchanges hands.
That's rather bizarre. It seems a trade has still occurred (money need not be one of the exchanged items.) Indeed, that you don't charge anything for it, providing not only no cash for the company, but also devaluing the product produced by the company itself seems like it should be illegal (not that people don't swap copies of tapes all the time.)
It's good to remind people of "medium"'s origins. It has been bastardized into being synonymous with "physical recording material" by way of that being one of the methods of transfer, and altered still further by "multimedia", aka moving pictures with sound, which really has nothing to do with being a medium at all.
their, their, THEIR business model. Damn!
> Napster provided a general service for sharing
> audio files. They were not the getaway car. They
> were the bus that passes in front of the bank.
And if the busses running in front of the bank carried 99,999 bank robbers to and from the bank for every 1 legitimate bank customer, don't you think the government should do something about it?
Don't you think the bus company knows, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, that they're business model depends heavily on illegal activity?
How is your freedom eroding? It's been pointed out in these court cases that you can get your (slightly degraded) fair use copies by piping analog audio out back into the audio in and .waving it.
It hasn't been very long at all, historically, that that's exactly how you did it! You recorded the song on your tape over the radio.
All this is doing is stopping mass-copying and distribution of perfect, complete copies.
Where is the problem here? Fair use is in no worse shape than it was 10 years ago.
Not only that, distribution of the physical CD's isn't cheap, either. Also, the store has to get a cut, and a lot of these CD's sit on the shelves for months, and that money invested in manufacturing and distribution is dripping away with inflation.
Most people are shocked to find out the price of a loaf of bread at the store is only about 10% farmer, if that much. Shortages that quadruple the price of grain don't add all that much.
So to, with gasoline and the price of a barrel of oil. The skyrocketting prices earlier this summer, and last summer, were not tied to oil at all.
> Not everybody has the ability or the time to rip
> CDDA and convert it to wave files just so they can
> convert it to MP3s in bulk.
Uhhhhh there are some hypothetical people out there who are now mad that they can't instantaneously "fair use" a part of a CD with the push of a button, and golly, they have to go through some extra steps of actually recording it imperfectly?
But I don't understand. How do you "fair use" a perfect copy of a portion of a CD easily without allowing massive theft of perfect copies of entire songs and CD's, thus destroying reward for work?
For every fair-user, there are 10^^8 pirates out there. Something tells me this worrying about "fair use" is hiding some massive fraud.
They aren't more intelligent. They just waste their free time on the Internet instead of hanging out in parking lots late at night with their buddies who can drive.
You spend half a dozen hours a day, or a dozen a day in summer, in front of the screen, you learn a thing or two.