perhaps consideration could be made to include digitalisation of all Literary works which have fallen into the public domain.
Excellent idea, which is why quite a few of us are doing just that. If you'd like to help Project Gutenberg's effort to digitise the public domain, then join our Distributed Proofreading site and get to work! Over 6000 books turned into electronic text form so far.
Recently, one of the Safari developers announced that Safari (the HTML parsing part of which is Webcore, which is derived from KDE's KHTML component) now passed the Acid 2 test. This led to a lot of comment, on Slashdot and elsewhere, asking when Konqueror (KDE's web browser) would pass Acid 2. This led to a post by a KDE developer saying that Webcore and KHTML had diverged significantly, and this is turn led to a lot of badly informed comment (mostly on Slashdot), slagging of KDE, Apple, or both.
Happily KDE and Apple seem to be working relatively well together, and this current announcement indicates that the KHTML developers have worked through all Apple's Webcore patches related to Acid 2, using the ones they can, and rewriting the ones they can't. Konqueror now becomes the second mainstream browser to pass the Acid 2 test.
There are whole fields devoted to the study of the neat progressions.
I know -- I work in one (mathematical analysis of phylogenetic trees, to be precise). And what seems neat on the surface becomes more and more complex the more you look. In fact, just about the last thing anyone who has studied the field would say is that it's full of neat progressions:). Just to take the first of your arrows: DNA->Cells. *No one* properly understands exactly how this works, although we're getting closer all the time. Even something supposedly simple like being able to tell how a particular protein will fold is right on the forefront of our current knowledge. It's a beautiful field, but it's not a neat one.
But I'm sure you mean something besides "easily quantifiable changes" when you say neat progressions
Actually, yes, I did. I wanted to give some impression of the pure randomness of the process. If we could wind the clock back a few million years, and start the process again, there's very little reason to think that we'd end up with the same species as we have now. Our evolutionary history is full of accidents, misfortunes, and calamaties. The further back in time you wind the clock, the more divergent the alternate-reality would look -- particularly if you go past one of the mass-extinction events (there are several periods in the history of the Earth where it seems that a significant proportion of the extant species have been wiped out -- those that remain rapidly move out and claim the spaces which less fortunate species once ruled). There is *no* reason why humans should have evolved, and that's one of the things that makes it so wonderful that we *have*.
That's actually quite an interesting point. If I had to conjecture, I'd say that our very lack of specialisation makes it possible for us to survive, as although there are few places that we survive optimally in, there are also few places where we can't survive at all. One of the best things we gain from our oversized brain (and we would have to gain something significant from a survival point of view, because developing and maintaining our brains takes a lot of energy) is an ability to adapt.
On a long-term timescale (millions of years), it's unlikely that we'll stay so unspecialised. We're quite 'young', as far as species go. As soon as we specialise, and get stuck in our ways, we've signed our long-term death warrant. See the panda for an example of what can happen if you specialise on a particular type of food; indeed, see the dodo for what can happen if you *do* find yourself in a paradise for a long period of time -- your ability to defend yourself atrophies away, and you get eaten by the next predator to wash ashore (in the dodo's case, that predator was us).
Let me just stick to evolution here. We as a species have been unable to cause evolution to happen. We cannot make a more advanced life form from a less advanced life form via mutation and natural selection. All we can do is make a life form that is the same species have more useful traits (that were previously recessive, or at least seldom seen, though still part of the genes).
First, you need to stop talking in terms of 'more' or 'less advanced'. The idea of a 'ladder of life' is a very Victorian one -- our evolutionary history has few neat progressions, and our position on the tree is nowhere the top:).
Second, you don't seem to realise the timescales involved even to make quite small macro changes through selection pressure. To take a simplistic view, our species has been capable of influencing the destiny of others (through selective breeding, for example) for no more than around 50,000 years -- on a geological timescale this is nothing at all. Even a million years (20 times longer than the maximum range of human activity) is nothing compared to the age of the planet we all live on.
Third, I'd argue that even in the small time we've had, we've influenced many species in a very significant fashion. Like many things in life, species boundaries are not hard-and-fast binary things -- and you could argue that, for example, our selection pressure on dogs is well on the way to splitting them into incompatible groups. There are already breeds of dogs that would find it very difficult to mate without outside assistance -- if nothing else, because of the height difference:). We know that one of the major causes of speciation is lack of interbreeding.
Nothing went wrong with the monkeys. To take a more extreme example, there are examples of species which found an evolutionary stable niche hundreds of millions of years ago, and so from your perspective are 'less evolved' -- but that's not the right term to use. Everything that's currently living on this planet has an evolutionary history of exactly the same length as everything else. We just have different degrees, and areas, of specialisation.
if you believe that you can take all of the parts of a Rolex, put them in a box, shake them up for a billion years, and then open up the box to find a perfectly functional watch, then you, too can believe in evolution.
This is not even a *bad* analogy for the evolutionary process.
I have no problem with Darwinian concepts like survival of the fittest, or the adaptability of species. I have a problem with attempting to make them explain the Origin of life.
Natural selection makes no attempt to explain the origin of life. One life arrives, evolutionary processes start.
Things produce "after their kind", as Scripture states. Mate two dogs, they make a dog, not a cat.
This works very well in the 'macro' world of dogs, cats, and caterpillars. Go down an order of magnitude or two, though, into the world of bacteria and viruses, and things get a lot more interesting. Species barriers break down, and you begin to see a much higher instance of horizontal gene transfer (where genes can be passed from one individual to another with no familial relationship).
"Evolution does not disprove the existence of God."
You can say that again.
And, conversely, God, were she to exist, would not disprove the existence of evolution.
Teach the kids the conflicting theories, let them use thier own intellect to sort it out.
That may be acceptable if they *were* conflicting theories, but they're not. Intelligent Design doesn't even make a good hypothesis. It's a doctrine, a superstition, a faith... not a theory.
And don't start saying 'they're both just theories'. I can't just think something up off the top of my head, and call it a theorem, just like I can't call any random mathematical statement a theorem. Science has standards, and ID doesn't meet them.
Quite right. Both humans and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor, neither human nor monkey, a few million years ago.
And if we *are* made in God's image, then either we're a pretty shoddy copy, or God's image is very inefficient -- ask someone who knows about the wiring of the eye why that blind-spot is necessary.
Nope, no Christian-bashing is implied. If you move outside the USA, you'll find that the majority of Christians are quite happy to accept that modern science is not antithetical to religion. There are many Christian biologists -- and working in biology without accepting that evolution is an inescapable *fact* is like working as an architect without believing in gravity.
Dismissing Intelligent Design as not being science is the same as dismissing theories of a round world revolving around the sun as heresy.
No, it isn't. One of the key factors (or, according to some people, the only key factor) which distinguishes a scientific theory from a superstition is the notion of testability and falsifiability. How can you test the doctrine of intelligent design? Don't say that it's not important -- if you can't test it, then it doesn't belong in science.
PDF and DjVu address slightly different neads. DjVu is 'just' a fancy bitmap image format, specifically designed to give great results on multi-page documents. It's used for this purpose by Archive.org to display their collection of public domain books.
While some places do you PDF purely as an image container, it has a much wider scope.
While your rephrasing is an example of standard American usage, the standard English usage these days is for the sentence punctuation to go outside the quotes. This allows you to distinguish punctuation which forms part of the quote from punctuation that is introduced from the sentence context.
I know the site you mean, as I'm also a member, and I'm glad you're enjoying the content! The feel is very different to your typical 'suprnova'-style site, in that it forbids the posting of any commercially-available (on DVD or VHS) material. If the TV companies had their heads screwed on correctly, they would *encourage* this sort of behaviour, as all it does is spread interest in the shows. I know for a fact that I'd now buy a DVD-collection of 'The Mary Whitehouse Experience', after recently watching the VHS-rips that someone posted. Sadly, these sensible arguments were exactly those used by proponents of Napster and other early music-sharing networks -- we can probably expect things to get much worse for consumers before they get better.
Except for 'Big natural disaster', this applies equally well to the USA's own cinema-style terrorist attack on 11/9/2001 -- would you have been happy if the rest of the world had shrugged their shoulders and carried on as normal? And that was less than 4000 people. The tsunami has *killed* over 100,000, with many times more injured both physically and mentally.
It's the biggest natural disaster for many years. If it had killed on US soil we'd be hearing about it continuously for *decades*.
No 'Only Fools and Horses' this Christmas, happily -- although I'm sure the rest of the programmes will lower their standards enough to make up for this one piece of good news.
Yep -- in all versions of Word you can create a macro which will run an external program. It's one of the ways I managed to get around the attempted lockdown of the Windows machines at my university, a few years back.
Oh yes, I'd forgotten about my.sig. I imagine that particular thread's been archived for several years not. It was an example of auto-troll rating on an incredibly large scale: hundreds of people who replied to an (admittedly off-topic) posting were being modded down, even when the individual posts were on-topic.
That's one of the reasons I don't moderate any more...
Unlike the situation when the EU increased copyright terms for most of its member nations from life+50 to life+70, the copyright term increase in Australia will not be retroactive. Everything currently public domain will remain public domain -- they'll just have a 20 year hiatus where nothing new loses copy restrictions.
So Gone With The Wind, together with all other materials written by people who died more than 50 years ago, will continue to be copy restriction free in Australia.
"The Bono copyright extension was merely to bring the duration of a US copyright up to the same length of time as the European Union's copyrights."
This is misleading at best. The US pressured the EU, which was in the process of 'harmonising' the copyright laws of the individual EU nations, into using the *longest* copyright term of any of the EU nations (Germany, with a life+70 term). This meant people in the UK, for example, which was life+50, losing 20 years' worth of public domain material (losing is the correct term, as they made the copyright term extension retroactive -- material which was already public domain was instantly regranted copy restrictions.). After the EU increased the copyright terms of every EU country except Germany, the US, through the Disney Copyright Term Extension Act, used this as an excuse to extend *their* copyright terms.
Indeed, the US copyright terms are even more crazy that those of the rest of the world, because for no good reason they give works published by a corporate entity a copyright term 25 years longer than works published by an individual.
Slashdot Mirror
perhaps consideration could be made to include digitalisation of all Literary works which have fallen into the public domain.
Excellent idea, which is why quite a few of us are doing just that. If you'd like to help Project Gutenberg's effort to digitise the public domain, then join our Distributed Proofreading site and get to work! Over 6000 books turned into electronic text form so far.
Acid2 is a test page, written to help browser vendors ensure proper support for web standards in their products.
Recently, one of the Safari developers announced that Safari (the HTML parsing part of which is Webcore, which is derived from KDE's KHTML component) now passed the Acid 2 test. This led to a lot of comment, on Slashdot and elsewhere, asking when Konqueror (KDE's web browser) would pass Acid 2. This led to a post by a KDE developer saying that Webcore and KHTML had diverged significantly, and this is turn led to a lot of badly informed comment (mostly on Slashdot), slagging of KDE, Apple, or both.
Happily KDE and Apple seem to be working relatively well together, and this current announcement indicates that the KHTML developers have worked through all Apple's Webcore patches related to Acid 2, using the ones they can, and rewriting the ones they can't. Konqueror now becomes the second mainstream browser to pass the Acid 2 test.
So the 'invisible pink unicorn' meme is still alive? That was being used back in talk.origins when I was active on it in 1994/5...
There are whole fields devoted to the study of the neat progressions.
:). Just to take the first of your arrows: DNA->Cells. *No one* properly understands exactly how this works, although we're getting closer all the time. Even something supposedly simple like being able to tell how a particular protein will fold is right on the forefront of our current knowledge. It's a beautiful field, but it's not a neat one.
I know -- I work in one (mathematical analysis of phylogenetic trees, to be precise). And what seems neat on the surface becomes more and more complex the more you look. In fact, just about the last thing anyone who has studied the field would say is that it's full of neat progressions
But I'm sure you mean something besides "easily quantifiable changes" when you say neat progressions
Actually, yes, I did. I wanted to give some impression of the pure randomness of the process. If we could wind the clock back a few million years, and start the process again, there's very little reason to think that we'd end up with the same species as we have now. Our evolutionary history is full of accidents, misfortunes, and calamaties. The further back in time you wind the clock, the more divergent the alternate-reality would look -- particularly if you go past one of the mass-extinction events (there are several periods in the history of the Earth where it seems that a significant proportion of the extant species have been wiped out -- those that remain rapidly move out and claim the spaces which less fortunate species once ruled). There is *no* reason why humans should have evolved, and that's one of the things that makes it so wonderful that we *have*.
That's actually quite an interesting point. If I had to conjecture, I'd say that our very lack of specialisation makes it possible for us to survive, as although there are few places that we survive optimally in, there are also few places where we can't survive at all. One of the best things we gain from our oversized brain (and we would have to gain something significant from a survival point of view, because developing and maintaining our brains takes a lot of energy) is an ability to adapt.
On a long-term timescale (millions of years), it's unlikely that we'll stay so unspecialised. We're quite 'young', as far as species go. As soon as we specialise, and get stuck in our ways, we've signed our long-term death warrant. See the panda for an example of what can happen if you specialise on a particular type of food; indeed, see the dodo for what can happen if you *do* find yourself in a paradise for a long period of time -- your ability to defend yourself atrophies away, and you get eaten by the next predator to wash ashore (in the dodo's case, that predator was us).
Let me just stick to evolution here. We as a species have been unable to cause evolution to happen. We cannot make a more advanced life form from a less advanced life form via mutation and natural selection. All we can do is make a life form that is the same species have more useful traits (that were previously recessive, or at least seldom seen, though still part of the genes).
:).
:). We know that one of the major causes of speciation is lack of interbreeding.
First, you need to stop talking in terms of 'more' or 'less advanced'. The idea of a 'ladder of life' is a very Victorian one -- our evolutionary history has few neat progressions, and our position on the tree is nowhere the top
Second, you don't seem to realise the timescales involved even to make quite small macro changes through selection pressure. To take a simplistic view, our species has been capable of influencing the destiny of others (through selective breeding, for example) for no more than around 50,000 years -- on a geological timescale this is nothing at all. Even a million years (20 times longer than the maximum range of human activity) is nothing compared to the age of the planet we all live on.
Third, I'd argue that even in the small time we've had, we've influenced many species in a very significant fashion. Like many things in life, species boundaries are not hard-and-fast binary things -- and you could argue that, for example, our selection pressure on dogs is well on the way to splitting them into incompatible groups. There are already breeds of dogs that would find it very difficult to mate without outside assistance -- if nothing else, because of the height difference
Nothing went wrong with the monkeys. To take a more extreme example, there are examples of species which found an evolutionary stable niche hundreds of millions of years ago, and so from your perspective are 'less evolved' -- but that's not the right term to use. Everything that's currently living on this planet has an evolutionary history of exactly the same length as everything else. We just have different degrees, and areas, of specialisation.
ID's not even a hypothesis. It's a remark, a commentary, a doctrine, a faith -- but it's nothing to do with science.
if you believe that you can take all of the parts of a Rolex, put them in a box, shake them up for a billion years, and then open up the box to find a perfectly functional watch, then you, too can believe in evolution.
This is not even a *bad* analogy for the evolutionary process.
I have no problem with Darwinian concepts like survival of the fittest, or the adaptability of species. I have a problem with attempting to make them explain the Origin of life.
Natural selection makes no attempt to explain the origin of life. One life arrives, evolutionary processes start.
Things produce "after their kind", as Scripture states. Mate two dogs, they make a dog, not a cat.
This works very well in the 'macro' world of dogs, cats, and caterpillars. Go down an order of magnitude or two, though, into the world of bacteria and viruses, and things get a lot more interesting. Species barriers break down, and you begin to see a much higher instance of horizontal gene transfer (where genes can be passed from one individual to another with no familial relationship).
"Evolution does not disprove the existence of God."
You can say that again.
And, conversely, God, were she to exist, would not disprove the existence of evolution.
Teach the kids the conflicting theories, let them use thier own intellect to sort it out.
That may be acceptable if they *were* conflicting theories, but they're not. Intelligent Design doesn't even make a good hypothesis. It's a doctrine, a superstition, a faith... not a theory.
And don't start saying 'they're both just theories'. I can't just think something up off the top of my head, and call it a theorem, just like I can't call any random mathematical statement a theorem. Science has standards, and ID doesn't meet them.
therefore we did not evolve from monkeys
Quite right. Both humans and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor, neither human nor monkey, a few million years ago.
And if we *are* made in God's image, then either we're a pretty shoddy copy, or God's image is very inefficient -- ask someone who knows about the wiring of the eye why that blind-spot is necessary.
Nope, no Christian-bashing is implied. If you move outside the USA, you'll find that the majority of Christians are quite happy to accept that modern science is not antithetical to religion. There are many Christian biologists -- and working in biology without accepting that evolution is an inescapable *fact* is like working as an architect without believing in gravity.
Dismissing Intelligent Design as not being science is the same as dismissing theories of a round world revolving around the sun as heresy.
No, it isn't. One of the key factors (or, according to some people, the only key factor) which distinguishes a scientific theory from a superstition is the notion of testability and falsifiability. How can you test the doctrine of intelligent design? Don't say that it's not important -- if you can't test it, then it doesn't belong in science.
That would be 'do *use*', not 'do you'. Sigh.
PDF and DjVu address slightly different neads. DjVu is 'just' a fancy bitmap image format, specifically designed to give great results on multi-page documents. It's used for this purpose by Archive.org to display their collection of public domain books.
While some places do you PDF purely as an image container, it has a much wider scope.
Mozilla *was* completely rewritten from the Netscape 4 codebase, which was basically completely scrapped after being open-sourced.
While your rephrasing is an example of standard American usage, the standard English usage these days is for the sentence punctuation to go outside the quotes. This allows you to distinguish punctuation which forms part of the quote from punctuation that is introduced from the sentence context.
Otherwise, great post.
I know the site you mean, as I'm also a member, and I'm glad you're enjoying the content! The feel is very different to your typical 'suprnova'-style site, in that it forbids the posting of any commercially-available (on DVD or VHS) material. If the TV companies had their heads screwed on correctly, they would *encourage* this sort of behaviour, as all it does is spread interest in the shows. I know for a fact that I'd now buy a DVD-collection of 'The Mary Whitehouse Experience', after recently watching the VHS-rips that someone posted. Sadly, these sensible arguments were exactly those used by proponents of Napster and other early music-sharing networks -- we can probably expect things to get much worse for consumers before they get better.
Except for 'Big natural disaster', this applies equally well to the USA's own cinema-style terrorist attack on 11/9/2001 -- would you have been happy if the rest of the world had shrugged their shoulders and carried on as normal? And that was less than 4000 people. The tsunami has *killed* over 100,000, with many times more injured both physically and mentally.
It's the biggest natural disaster for many years. If it had killed on US soil we'd be hearing about it continuously for *decades*.
No 'Only Fools and Horses' this Christmas, happily -- although I'm sure the rest of the programmes will lower their standards enough to make up for this one piece of good news.
Yep -- in all versions of Word you can create a macro which will run an external program. It's one of the ways I managed to get around the attempted lockdown of the Windows machines at my university, a few years back.
Oh yes, I'd forgotten about my .sig. I imagine that particular thread's been archived for several years not. It was an example of auto-troll rating on an incredibly large scale: hundreds of people who replied to an (admittedly off-topic) posting were being modded down, even when the individual posts were on-topic.
That's one of the reasons I don't moderate any more...
Unlike the situation when the EU increased copyright terms for most of its member nations from life+50 to life+70, the copyright term increase in Australia will not be retroactive. Everything currently public domain will remain public domain -- they'll just have a 20 year hiatus where nothing new loses copy restrictions.
So Gone With The Wind, together with all other materials written by people who died more than 50 years ago, will continue to be copy restriction free in Australia.
"The Bono copyright extension was merely to bring the duration of a US copyright up to the same length of time as the European Union's copyrights."
This is misleading at best. The US pressured the EU, which was in the process of 'harmonising' the copyright laws of the individual EU nations, into using the *longest* copyright term of any of the EU nations (Germany, with a life+70 term). This meant people in the UK, for example, which was life+50, losing 20 years' worth of public domain material (losing is the correct term, as they made the copyright term extension retroactive -- material which was already public domain was instantly regranted copy restrictions.). After the EU increased the copyright terms of every EU country except Germany, the US, through the Disney Copyright Term Extension Act, used this as an excuse to extend *their* copyright terms.
Indeed, the US copyright terms are even more crazy that those of the rest of the world, because for no good reason they give works published by a corporate entity a copyright term 25 years longer than works published by an individual.