....is tantamount to the belief that, inside every cell, there exists a mechanism that prevents mutations which would give rise to offspring if that offspring could not produce fertile progeny with not just its parents' generation, but its grandparents', great-grandparents', etc,....
That is not a belief, but a scientific, experimentally established FACT.
The paper you cite says nothing about speciation, it is about the likelihood of 2 or more mutations (each alone not giving an organism an advantage, but the set of them would) happening.
Where does it get the additional genetic information to construct feathers? Incomplete, nonfunctional feathers or other structures are useless for survival and are therefore not passed on to succeeding generations.
Please continue running down the path of entropy and irreducible complexity.
Unless a feature confers a distinct advantage on an organism, it is invisible to the natural selection mechanism.
Off the top of my head: Insulation, mating displays, gliding.
(... by choosing which wolves to mate we've managed to created teacup poodles, bulldogs and Saint Bernards in a fairly short time - don't you think similar things happen in the wild?...)
The fact is that none of these things happen in the wild, because the selective breeding of dogs is accomplished by means of the application of human intelligence. In other words there is intelligent design to produce a desired result.
No. The mechanism for evolution in the wild and directed breeding is the same, the only difference is that the selection is done on different criteria.
There is no human effort to does not involve a measure of intelligence. Why is it that otherwise highly intelligent humans credit the existence of even the existence of a single living cell to processes NOT ALSO involving intelligence and thought?
Likewise, how is it that otherwise highly intelligent humans have this desire to turn their reasoning faculties off when it comes to the topic of how life came to be?
Science is not about what was thought to have taken place an unimaginably long time ago.
Might I assume that your position is that science taught in schools should only include "facts" (by your very narrow definition of facts that say that even the fossil record is not a fact but a "witness")? If that is not your position, please clarify.
From what I can remember, it was also management issues at the top.
Not to mention that the Amiga was tightly bound to the custom chips they did in-house (Paula/Agnus, etc). Commodore didn't spend (or didn't have?) enough resources on R&D to keep up with the PC, and was also too slow in changing the platform so that it could use PC components instead.
But it is really Steve Jobs which, paradoxically, is holding Apple in the position of being the MOST closed company out there.
But is this unhealthy to the commercial result of Apple corp and the satisfaction of most Apple customers? Being closed also means that Apple has vertical control of everything from their online services to operating system to hardware, and Apple has generally been very good at using that control to deliver products that work very well if you stay inside Apple's garden.
I suspect most of us on/. (me included) would be pleased if Apple opened up more, but how much would Apple gain by doing that and risk alienating those that are perfectly happy in Apple's garden?
I cant get it going faster than 10-11MB/sec when copying to/from Windows XP.
It could be something as simple as the network card in the server autoconfiguring to 100Mbps, 11MBps sounds like a saturated 100Mbps link. Check with ethtool on the server and in the management interface on the switch. Bad performance like this can also be caused by mismatched duplex on the server network card and the switch it is connected to.
Wow. I didn't think it was even possible to buy a gigabit hub.
Half Duplex is part of the GigE spec as far as I know, but I've never seen a GigE hub. WJSmythe, could you share the manufacturer and model number on this oddity?
I seem to recall that some Linux drivers try to handle this automatically (Intel gigabit chips?). They do interrupts when the traffic is below some threshold and switch to polling when things get busy. The main reason, as you say, is to avoid interrupt storms; polling becomes cheaper on CPU time than interrupts when there is a higher than x% chance of there being packets waiting. It is also more resilient to DoS or server overload - if f.ex. an Apache server receives more requests than it can handle, throttling the polling speed makes more CPU available for handling requests instead of wasting it in interrupts receiving packets that the web server is too overloaded to handle anyway.
I hate DRM too, I wish it would die. But that's orthogonal to my point: that IP has value, and the IP creator deserves to be compensated appropriately for that value, somehow. I obviously don't know how given the zero-replication-cost problem.
Is it really zero cost? While the cost is going down, and will go further down in the future with better/faster/larger/cheaper storage devices and transmission networks there is always going to be some cost in maintaining the distribution network, cataloging, indexing, making sure metadata is correct, making sure the content is malware free, updates/fixes. As such, people might find that an all-you-can-eat DRM-free subscription to a music label or software company might be preferable even if the same content is available for free on P2P.
Information goods also don't exist in a vacuum, communities form around many of them. Downloading an album from piratebay does not give the same experience as being a member of a fan club / community and interacting with the rock band. Downloading a software program from P2P is of less value than being part of a community around the author of the software. For information goods where you have a large and/or very faithful fanbase/community, it might be possible for the creator to extract sufficient income from them. (I think I once saw a paper showing that a book author or a band could get a fairly decent living out of a surprisingly small number of faithful fans)
There is also the fact that IP creators are in a rather privileged position compared to other workers. For example, the need for farmers dropped because the work they did were replaced by machines; the same thing has happened time and again, human labor replaced by machines. I don't really see how machines can replace the need for human creativity. Unless we create true AI, we will always need IP creators. We will always want music, books, better medicines, software.. If the market can't find solutions for how to compensate them, government will have to step in.
From the complaint, it looks like it is only consumer-grade products that they got when they bought Linksys. Even if they included some IOS software in some of the products, the absolute worst case scenario for Cisco would be that they would have to dual-license those particular files as GPL. It would not force Cisco to GPL the entire IOS.
My guess is that Cisco has been dragging their feet because (1) it would be expensive to get into full compliance (they would have to dig up the build environment / source code repositories for old Linksys products, some of which they might not even have anymore) (2) by providing full source to the consumer-grade products, 3rd party firmware for those could be developed that would compete with Cisco's more expensive gear, and (3) they never expected the FSF to sue.
According to the complaint: "in the Firmware for Linksysâ(TM) models EFG120, EFG250, NAS200, SPA400, WAG300N, WAP4400N, WIP300, WMA11B, WRT54GL, WRV200, WRV54G, and WVC54GC, and in the program Quick- VPN."
How about its easier to say im defending the flag. Most Americans should understand that statement to mean you are defending all the flag stands for etc. Only asshats try to make that statement into something its not. Are you an asshat?
Most AMERICANS would. But this is the Internet, with people from lots of different countries and cultures.
When an American says "defending the flag" as short-hand for what he really means by that statement, it creates opportunities for misunderstanding and confusion when people that are not American read it. This entire thread started because a non-american wanted to understand better what meaning Americans applies to their flag.
Discussions like this unfortunately tend to devolve into flamewars, and it seems other comments on this article has already gone that way. That is sad, because it would be really interesting to get to the bottom of why there is this cultural difference in how the flag is perceived in EU and US.
So what are military personnel?
I think we might be on to something here.
In America, the flag is culturally bound to the military as a whole and personal military service, right? So "disrespecting the flag" is seen as the same as disrespecting the sacrifice and service of both current and past members of the military?
In Europe, the flag does not hold that kind of position culturally, and I think it has to do with WWII. Imagine being born in Germany after 1945. Imagine what coming to terms with what your country did would do to post-war culture and the attitudes it would create towards the kind of imagery used by Germany leading up to, and during WWII. The flag was an important part of that imagery.
I think that is the reason why we see the flag so differently, but I would appreciate comments or corrections.
So, for someone with a US culture the flag is something to be proud of and a symbol of military service and personal sacrifice for the country. For someone with an EU culture, a flag is a symbol for one's country but it is also a symbol of something horrible that happened in Europe's recent past.
The SETI project is a modern manifestation of mankind's intuition that there may be or should be more to reality than our own existence here in this little corner of the vast universe.
Or it is simply a modern expression of man's need to understand the world around him. We see this behaviour in other animals, too "Curious as a cat". A need to understand the world would be a huge advantage for survival, both in early man and in other animals. I see no reason why this need should somehow vanish now that understanding the world is not that important for the immediate survival of the individual.
"the meaning of life"? Why is there this human quest for finding purpose of existence?
These questions would not arise naturally from sufficiently powerful cognitive abilities and the realisation that our mortal body is, indeed, mortal?
Why is it that the idea of sacrifice, the giving up of something valuable, often needed or at least useful for survival, is seen only in humans?
You want an explanation for the act of sacrifice in, say, agrarian societies? Put yourself in the mind of one of those farmers - one bad harvest and half the kids will starve to death. Would you not do anything and everything that you possibly could to affect the weather?
Combined with the "false positive" inclination to find agency in patterns (that would as I explained be an advantage for survival), is it really such a leap of mind to see that sacrifice to gods would seem like a good idea at that time?
In our modern world, many like to think we can look to science to explain everything
Well, they are wrong. Science can explain a lot (and it turns out, a lot more than people thought possible only 100 years ago), but there are things that are simply impossible to handle with the scientific method. If we are in a closed universe (as current models seem to show), then it will simply be impossible to test various hypotheses about the ultimate cause of the universe.
Science today explains at least some of what people looked to religion for in times past. But again, I see no chance in science explaining everything and everything with absolute certainty. What some religious people would have to do, however, is to change certain literal interpretations of their respective holy texts in order to avoid clash with science.
Science is limited to physical laws and phenomena, specifically the law of cause and effect. Science cannot, is not equipped to deal with effects where a cause cannot be established.
True. I don't think I've ever said otherwise.
"Is it possible for anyone to distinguish sufficiently advanced technology from the supernatural or miracle?"
I'm not sure I follow.. One could distinguish, I guess, based on what effort and energy would be required - at least if one posits an omnipotent god. Fiddling with the background microwave radiation of the universe seems like one, it would take an incredible amount of energy, power and control to put a message there.
...The Bible was translated and spread by humans, not by God.....
Of course God is incapable of employing humans as his agents, isn't he?
If one attributes the acts of humans to the will of God how is that any different than attributing the fact that a stone falls when I drop it to the will of God? That sounds Ash'ari to me..
Speaking of attributing agency where there is none, there is an evolutionary advantage to that behaviour. If one hears a noise in the bushes, it might be just the wind or it might be a tiger getting ready to pounce. If it is just the wind but you think it is a tiger and run away, there is not much harm done. On the other hand, if you think it is the wind while it really is a tiger... Those that are "false positive" in the meaning that they are more likely to attribute agency (even if it turns out to be wrong) have a higher chance of survival than those that are "false negative" in the meaning that they are more likely to think that there's nothing there (and hence have a higher chance of becoming a predator's meal).
I doubt that Newton, Pascal or Galileo or most of the other early scientists would be able to obtain tenure at any modern secular university of our day.
Ah, so you've seen Expelled then? Well, if you want to reinforce a persecution complex.. Is the film still only showed in closed screenings, or is it finally available to the rest of us so that we can publicly correct the factual errors in it?
(...and that rocks, fossils and the total sum of what we can test and observe are "witnesses"....)
They are witnesses, whose testimony is interpreted today with the underlying worldview that there is no God and everything these witnesses tell us is filtered through the presupposition that the entire universe is a result of probabilistic mechanical processes, not involving any thought or planning.
It is true that humans are rationalising animals, we have an in-built bias to choose explanations that confirm what we already believe. We have known this for a long time, and that is why the process of science (scientific method) has all these rules to try to eliminate bias. Just saying "goddidit!" doesn't really explain anything, it does not produce hypothesis, models and predictions that we can put to the test in any sensible way. As such, it is easy to come to the belief that science is hostile to religion or the supernatural. It really isn't, it is just a methodology that tries to eliminate *all* kinds of human bias.
All laws of nature are quite independent of the underlying beliefs or philosophies of the scientists investigating them to learn how they operate.
True. Ultimate cause is likely outside the set of problems and questions that can be processed by the scientific process. As such, our different beliefs about ultimate cause is something that we will just have to agree to disagree on - it is something that is likely not testable, so that is an area where we will just have beliefs and opinions. What one can test is specific predictions that certain religious beliefs profess (in the case of xtianity, for example global flood in recent history, or 6Ky old universe).
Is it not strange that so much of science is devoted to the past, trying to understand how things came to be as they are?
Why so? Everything we see around us are products of what happened in the past, so investigating the past is important to understanding the present and predicting the future.
All of these have to be interpreted and all interpretations are subject to the basic philosophies of the interpreter. There is no way to get around this.
That is more an argument against religion than it is against science. Science does at the very least attempt to minimise or eliminate the bias of the interpreter.
Hubble and others INTERPRETED this shift to be caused
There really is no human answer to this question, but it is to me a clear manifestation, that a higher power, specifically God, is behind this. Jesus specifically predicted that his word would be spread to all tongues and nations and once that was accomplished He will return to Earth.
The Bible was translated and spread by humans, not by God. Why do you insist on seeing divine agency where none is needed?
No. If you study of the history of early western science and scientists you would learn that most of them were Christians.
So? Most people in the western world at that time were Christian. It is not exactly a big surprise that most western scientists at that time were Christian too. Not to mention that Christian doctrine at that time was not openly hostile to science, at least not to most of the science that was being done at that time. So I fail to see what this part of your answer has to do with Ash'ria.
My comparison to Ash'ria doctrine was a comparison to *your* arguments in this discussion we've had, not a comparison to general Christian doctrine. It is *you* who say stuff like "all theory is grey" and that rocks, fossils and the total sum of what we can test and observe are "witnesses" that has no more or less value as facts than the Bible. You are putting *one book* against *observed reality*, and you choose to give the book more weight. This is far out on the shallow end of the Bell curve compared to mainstream xtians and current xtian doctrine.
You do not have to reject your belief in God in order to accept mainstream science. Lots of people manage to do that just fine.
That really is the heart of the issue. We really don't want to be held accountable for our bad behavior.
We've been down this road before. Can you provide some *facts* for the assertion above? Do you *really* believe that God is the only source of morality? Do you *really* believe that the only reason one might have for choosing not to believe in the xtian god is because one wants to avoid punishment?
It is because of this, that we humans go to such great lengths to explain the existence of this incredible universe and all the teeming life forms here on earth, by any and all means EXCEPT an intelligent creator God.
Yeah, suuure. All the scientists toiling away at trying to increase our understanding of the world are really only doing so because they want to believe they can escape the wrath of Abraham's God.
In the Bible we read: "It is appointed unto men to die once, but after that comes the judgment". The first part of this sentence cannot be disputed, but the second part is not given much credence anymore today, especially by those who read and post to this Internet/. forum
It might perhaps be that/. is exposing you to a different part of the world than you are used to? It might perhaps be that your current interpretation of the Bible is not as prevalent as you might have been led to believe?
(nor your memories mere illusions in a universe created 5 minutes ago to look older than that)
5minuteism is obviously false, my holy book clearly says that last tuesdayism is the true faith.
Still, when taken to the logical extreme we can't really be sure of anything. We might as well be biological batteries in the Matrix, or artefacts of a very detailed universe simulation running on a supercomputer in Betelgeuse 5. So even a naturalistic world view requires a small amount of faith, specifically that we live in a causal reality and that our senses do not (deliberately) lie to us.
That is a topic that belongs to philosophy and not something one should lay awake at night thin.. oh dang.
...Indeed, it should be disregarded precisely because the creation account found in the Bible is demonstrably false...
Do you say this because you or anyone else was there and saw it happen? Exactly where and when has anyone demonstrated that this account is false?
Where and when has anyone demonstrated that this account is true?
The circumstantial evidence that it (6 days 6000 years ago) is false is staggering. Everything from geology to DNA to fossil record to astronomy points at an old universe and an old earth.
We observe that the universe is here and arrogantly assume that from things present we can determine how it began. Such incredible human arrogance I cannot understand it.
You know, you could perhaps read up a bit on the history of Islam. Especially the Islamic Golden Age and the reasons for its decline. What you write below sounds eerily like the doctrines of Ash'ari, which in short said that human reason should be secondary to what was written in the scriptures.
While it certainly was not the sole reason why Islam went from a centre of science, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, engineering, and many other fields to what we can see in the middle east today, it was certainly a contributing factor.
Is it really your goal to attempt to do the same to western civilisation? Can you perhaps understand why some of us are so opposed to your ideas? It is not because we want to avoid being judged at death, it is because your path leads to decline and unreason.
That is why, unlike any other book, the Bible, which claims to be God's communication to man, has been and still is more widely distributed and translated that any other human writing.
Argument from popularity again. You accused us of doing the same once, but you do it repeatedly. Pot, kettle, black.
....Encoding a binary message in the cosmic background radiation would do the trick for me....
That assumes that you have the intelligence and the equipment to receive such a message in the first place. If the message is encrypted, and you don't have the key
*snip meanderings*
So, he had this objective truth recorded in a book. Written by humans. Translated several times. A book that this omni-everything being must have known would be internally inconsistent and a source of wildly different interpretations.
Why not *also* send modern man (who he gave intelligence, sufficient intelligence to see that this book would be unclear and open to interpretation) a clear message from the source itself? In a way that would not have the weaknesses of this book?
But no, here you come along with some story about how it would obviously be encrypted. Why on earth would he do that?!
The main problem I see with that explanation is that no other animal "evolved" any kind of behavior that could reasonably be termed "religious". No animal has ever been observed in what could be described as prayer or worship.
To get organised religion, one would need language/communication. Animals might have some sort of spirituality or religion, but absent the level of language needed to make organised religion it would have to be on the level of personal belief. So how would one detect if an animal has some sort of personal belief or not? Keep in mind that prayer and worship are human expressions of religious belief. If an animal has some sort of religious feeling or belief in a larger power outside itself, how would it show this and how would we recognize it? I think you are asking for something that would be very hard to detect. Even if we detect it, it would be inconclusive and open to interpretation.
Everything than humans do, animals have also been observed doing, of course on a vastly lower level. If you can name any other activity that man does, that is not at all found to some degree in some animals, please do so.
Humans have an abundance of language, culture, dance, creative expression in many forms, the capability of abstract thought, high self-awareness. While you also can find some of this to a small degree in animals, I believe there is a threshold one has to get above before one sees behaviour that we humans would recognize as some sort of organised religious belief.
Nobody has ever explained to me how the "wasting" of resources and energy on religious activity, collectively or individually, makes humans more "fit" to survive. If anything, NOT spending time and effort building cathedrals, churches, synagogues and mosques, as well as engaging in other religious trappings, such as embarking on long weary, dangerous pilgrimages to distant places, should be an evolutionary advantage to those groups and individuals who avoid all that.
Building expensive places of worship and going on hazardous pilgrimages is a very recent thing, on an evolutionary scale. You are talking about fairly recent displays of worship; and displays of surplus at that. More common human displays of worship and spirituality on an evolutionary relevant scale would be things like cave paintings and covering a dead tribal elder with flowers and putting a walking stick in his grave to aid him on the journey in the afterlife.
When it comes to what advantages religion would have for early man, there is lots.
Remember that most religions in those days (from what we can gather from what artefacts they left behind, and of what can be learned from isolated tribes today) were animist. As such, they attribute a "soul" or some sort of intelligence or purpose to plants, animals and natural phenomena. In short, nature becomes a person/force/deity that the human mind can attribute cause and will to. Apply some lore and an oral tradition, and you have a framework where tribes of early man can gather and remember information that is important for survival. ("When the god in the sky turn the heavens grey and the daughters of Ibis take to their wings and fly to their father Mountain, then we must travel down to the river. Ibis is alone from watching eyes, so this is when Antelope will bring his children to visit her. We will wait for them at the ford")
In short, religion fill the needs for group cohesion, enforcement of mores and collection of information useful for survival. We see lots of evidence for this even in "modern" religion; the Bible and other religious texts from the same era has a fairly small volume of text spent on genesis or creat
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....is tantamount to the belief that, inside every cell, there exists a mechanism that prevents mutations which would give rise to offspring if that offspring could not produce fertile progeny with not just its parents' generation, but its grandparents', great-grandparents', etc,....
That is not a belief, but a scientific, experimentally established FACT.
The paper you cite says nothing about speciation, it is about the likelihood of 2 or more mutations (each alone not giving an organism an advantage, but the set of them would) happening.
Besides, speciation has been observed in modern time. Here is one example - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salsify#The_rise_of_new_species
Where does it get the additional genetic information to construct feathers? Incomplete, nonfunctional feathers or other structures are useless for survival and are therefore not passed on to succeeding generations.
Please continue running down the path of entropy and irreducible complexity.
Unless a feature confers a distinct advantage on an organism, it is invisible to the natural selection mechanism.
Off the top of my head: Insulation, mating displays, gliding.
(... by choosing which wolves to mate we've managed to created teacup poodles, bulldogs and Saint Bernards in a fairly short time - don't you think similar things happen in the wild?...)
The fact is that none of these things happen in the wild, because the selective breeding of dogs is accomplished by means of the application of human intelligence. In other words there is intelligent design to produce a desired result.
No. The mechanism for evolution in the wild and directed breeding is the same, the only difference is that the selection is done on different criteria.
There is no human effort to does not involve a measure of intelligence. Why is it that otherwise highly intelligent humans credit the existence of even the existence of a single living cell to processes NOT ALSO involving intelligence and thought?
Likewise, how is it that otherwise highly intelligent humans have this desire to turn their reasoning faculties off when it comes to the topic of how life came to be?
Science is not about what was thought to have taken place an unimaginably long time ago.
Might I assume that your position is that science taught in schools should only include "facts" (by your very narrow definition of facts that say that even the fossil record is not a fact but a "witness")? If that is not your position, please clarify.
Upon which the reporter followed up with: "Are such questions much on your mind?"
From what I can remember, it was also management issues at the top.
Not to mention that the Amiga was tightly bound to the custom chips they did in-house (Paula/Agnus, etc). Commodore didn't spend (or didn't have?) enough resources on R&D to keep up with the PC, and was also too slow in changing the platform so that it could use PC components instead.
But it is really Steve Jobs which, paradoxically, is holding Apple in the position of being the MOST closed company out there.
But is this unhealthy to the commercial result of Apple corp and the satisfaction of most Apple customers? Being closed also means that Apple has vertical control of everything from their online services to operating system to hardware, and Apple has generally been very good at using that control to deliver products that work very well if you stay inside Apple's garden.
I suspect most of us on /. (me included) would be pleased if Apple opened up more, but how much would Apple gain by doing that and risk alienating those that are perfectly happy in Apple's garden?
I cant get it going faster than 10-11MB/sec when copying to/from Windows XP.
It could be something as simple as the network card in the server autoconfiguring to 100Mbps, 11MBps sounds like a saturated 100Mbps link. Check with ethtool on the server and in the management interface on the switch. Bad performance like this can also be caused by mismatched duplex on the server network card and the switch it is connected to.
Wow. I didn't think it was even possible to buy a gigabit hub.
Half Duplex is part of the GigE spec as far as I know, but I've never seen a GigE hub. WJSmythe, could you share the manufacturer and model number on this oddity?
I seem to recall that some Linux drivers try to handle this automatically (Intel gigabit chips?). They do interrupts when the traffic is below some threshold and switch to polling when things get busy. The main reason, as you say, is to avoid interrupt storms; polling becomes cheaper on CPU time than interrupts when there is a higher than x% chance of there being packets waiting. It is also more resilient to DoS or server overload - if f.ex. an Apache server receives more requests than it can handle, throttling the polling speed makes more CPU available for handling requests instead of wasting it in interrupts receiving packets that the web server is too overloaded to handle anyway.
Avi is container, not codec.
I hate DRM too, I wish it would die. But that's orthogonal to my point: that IP has value, and the IP creator deserves to be compensated appropriately for that value, somehow. I obviously don't know how given the zero-replication-cost problem.
Is it really zero cost? While the cost is going down, and will go further down in the future with better/faster/larger/cheaper storage devices and transmission networks there is always going to be some cost in maintaining the distribution network, cataloging, indexing, making sure metadata is correct, making sure the content is malware free, updates/fixes. As such, people might find that an all-you-can-eat DRM-free subscription to a music label or software company might be preferable even if the same content is available for free on P2P.
Information goods also don't exist in a vacuum, communities form around many of them. Downloading an album from piratebay does not give the same experience as being a member of a fan club / community and interacting with the rock band. Downloading a software program from P2P is of less value than being part of a community around the author of the software. For information goods where you have a large and/or very faithful fanbase/community, it might be possible for the creator to extract sufficient income from them. (I think I once saw a paper showing that a book author or a band could get a fairly decent living out of a surprisingly small number of faithful fans)
There is also the fact that IP creators are in a rather privileged position compared to other workers. For example, the need for farmers dropped because the work they did were replaced by machines; the same thing has happened time and again, human labor replaced by machines. I don't really see how machines can replace the need for human creativity. Unless we create true AI, we will always need IP creators. We will always want music, books, better medicines, software.. If the market can't find solutions for how to compensate them, government will have to step in.
From the complaint, it looks like it is only consumer-grade products that they got when they bought Linksys. Even if they included some IOS software in some of the products, the absolute worst case scenario for Cisco would be that they would have to dual-license those particular files as GPL. It would not force Cisco to GPL the entire IOS.
My guess is that Cisco has been dragging their feet because (1) it would be expensive to get into full compliance (they would have to dig up the build environment / source code repositories for old Linksys products, some of which they might not even have anymore) (2) by providing full source to the consumer-grade products, 3rd party firmware for those could be developed that would compete with Cisco's more expensive gear, and (3) they never expected the FSF to sue.
That's fine for hardware companies like Cisco [...] who mainly derive value from their hardware
I was more under the impression that Cisco's business model was more like a software company that happens to sell expensive hardware dongles.
According to the complaint: "in
the Firmware for Linksysâ(TM) models EFG120, EFG250, NAS200, SPA400, WAG300N, WAP4400N,
WIP300, WMA11B, WRT54GL, WRV200, WRV54G, and WVC54GC, and in the program Quick-
VPN."
BSD and the like are more "free" for the developer / manufacturer while GPL is more "free" for the user / recipient of the software.
Which license that is more free depends on whose freedom one is concerned about.
Very interesting. Yes, that does help a lot in understanding why the US has such an attachment to their flag.
Combine that with what history has taught Europeans about obedience to flags, and there is no wonder why misunderstandings happen all the time.
How about its easier to say im defending the flag. Most Americans should understand that statement to mean you are defending all the flag stands for etc. Only asshats try to make that statement into something its not. Are you an asshat?
Most AMERICANS would. But this is the Internet, with people from lots of different countries and cultures.
When an American says "defending the flag" as short-hand for what he really means by that statement, it creates opportunities for misunderstanding and confusion when people that are not American read it. This entire thread started because a non-american wanted to understand better what meaning Americans applies to their flag.
Discussions like this unfortunately tend to devolve into flamewars, and it seems other comments on this article has already gone that way. That is sad, because it would be really interesting to get to the bottom of why there is this cultural difference in how the flag is perceived in EU and US.
So what are military personnel?
I think we might be on to something here.
In America, the flag is culturally bound to the military as a whole and personal military service, right? So "disrespecting the flag" is seen as the same as disrespecting the sacrifice and service of both current and past members of the military?
In Europe, the flag does not hold that kind of position culturally, and I think it has to do with WWII. Imagine being born in Germany after 1945. Imagine what coming to terms with what your country did would do to post-war culture and the attitudes it would create towards the kind of imagery used by Germany leading up to, and during WWII. The flag was an important part of that imagery.
I think that is the reason why we see the flag so differently, but I would appreciate comments or corrections.
So, for someone with a US culture the flag is something to be proud of and a symbol of military service and personal sacrifice for the country. For someone with an EU culture, a flag is a symbol for one's country but it is also a symbol of something horrible that happened in Europe's recent past.
Heh, no wonder this leads to flamewars.
Ah, America and England. Divided they are by a common language. ;-p
Culture20, please chill. Who said anything about flag-burning?
The SETI project is a modern manifestation of mankind's intuition that there may be or should be more to reality than our own existence here in this little corner of the vast universe.
Or it is simply a modern expression of man's need to understand the world around him. We see this behaviour in other animals, too "Curious as a cat". A need to understand the world would be a huge advantage for survival, both in early man and in other animals. I see no reason why this need should somehow vanish now that understanding the world is not that important for the immediate survival of the individual.
"the meaning of life"? Why is there this human quest for finding purpose of existence?
These questions would not arise naturally from sufficiently powerful cognitive abilities and the realisation that our mortal body is, indeed, mortal?
Why is it that the idea of sacrifice, the giving up of something valuable, often needed or at least useful for survival, is seen only in humans?
You want an explanation for the act of sacrifice in, say, agrarian societies? Put yourself in the mind of one of those farmers - one bad harvest and half the kids will starve to death. Would you not do anything and everything that you possibly could to affect the weather?
Combined with the "false positive" inclination to find agency in patterns (that would as I explained be an advantage for survival), is it really such a leap of mind to see that sacrifice to gods would seem like a good idea at that time?
In our modern world, many like to think we can look to science to explain everything
Well, they are wrong. Science can explain a lot (and it turns out, a lot more than people thought possible only 100 years ago), but there are things that are simply impossible to handle with the scientific method. If we are in a closed universe (as current models seem to show), then it will simply be impossible to test various hypotheses about the ultimate cause of the universe.
Science today explains at least some of what people looked to religion for in times past. But again, I see no chance in science explaining everything and everything with absolute certainty. What some religious people would have to do, however, is to change certain literal interpretations of their respective holy texts in order to avoid clash with science.
Science is limited to physical laws and phenomena, specifically the law of cause and effect. Science cannot, is not equipped to deal with effects where a cause cannot be established.
True. I don't think I've ever said otherwise.
"Is it possible for anyone to distinguish sufficiently advanced technology from the supernatural or miracle?"
I'm not sure I follow.. One could distinguish, I guess, based on what effort and energy would be required - at least if one posits an omnipotent god. Fiddling with the background microwave radiation of the universe seems like one, it would take an incredible amount of energy, power and control to put a message there.
...The Bible was translated and spread by humans, not by God.....
Of course God is incapable of employing humans as his agents, isn't he?
If one attributes the acts of humans to the will of God how is that any different than attributing the fact that a stone falls when I drop it to the will of God? That sounds Ash'ari to me..
Speaking of attributing agency where there is none, there is an evolutionary advantage to that behaviour. If one hears a noise in the bushes, it might be just the wind or it might be a tiger getting ready to pounce. If it is just the wind but you think it is a tiger and run away, there is not much harm done. On the other hand, if you think it is the wind while it really is a tiger... Those that are "false positive" in the meaning that they are more likely to attribute agency (even if it turns out to be wrong) have a higher chance of survival than those that are "false negative" in the meaning that they are more likely to think that there's nothing there (and hence have a higher chance of becoming a predator's meal).
I doubt that Newton, Pascal or Galileo or most of the other early scientists would be able to obtain tenure at any modern secular university of our day.
Ah, so you've seen Expelled then? Well, if you want to reinforce a persecution complex.. Is the film still only showed in closed screenings, or is it finally available to the rest of us so that we can publicly correct the factual errors in it?
(...and that rocks, fossils and the total sum of what we can test and observe are "witnesses"....)
They are witnesses, whose testimony is interpreted today with the underlying worldview that there is no God and everything these witnesses tell us is filtered through the presupposition that the entire universe is a result of probabilistic mechanical processes, not involving any thought or planning.
It is true that humans are rationalising animals, we have an in-built bias to choose explanations that confirm what we already believe. We have known this for a long time, and that is why the process of science (scientific method) has all these rules to try to eliminate bias. Just saying "goddidit!" doesn't really explain anything, it does not produce hypothesis, models and predictions that we can put to the test in any sensible way. As such, it is easy to come to the belief that science is hostile to religion or the supernatural. It really isn't, it is just a methodology that tries to eliminate *all* kinds of human bias.
All laws of nature are quite independent of the underlying beliefs or philosophies of the scientists investigating them to learn how they operate.
True. Ultimate cause is likely outside the set of problems and questions that can be processed by the scientific process. As such, our different beliefs about ultimate cause is something that we will just have to agree to disagree on - it is something that is likely not testable, so that is an area where we will just have beliefs and opinions. What one can test is specific predictions that certain religious beliefs profess (in the case of xtianity, for example global flood in recent history, or 6Ky old universe).
Is it not strange that so much of science is devoted to the past, trying to understand how things came to be as they are?
Why so? Everything we see around us are products of what happened in the past, so investigating the past is important to understanding the present and predicting the future.
All of these have to be interpreted and all interpretations are subject to the basic philosophies of the interpreter. There is no way to get around this.
That is more an argument against religion than it is against science. Science does at the very least attempt to minimise or eliminate the bias of the interpreter.
Hubble and others INTERPRETED this shift to be caused
There really is no human answer to this question, but it is to me a clear manifestation, that a higher power, specifically God, is behind this. Jesus specifically predicted that his word would be spread to all tongues and nations and once that was accomplished He will return to Earth.
The Bible was translated and spread by humans, not by God. Why do you insist on seeing divine agency where none is needed?
No. If you study of the history of early western science and scientists you would learn that most of them were Christians.
So? Most people in the western world at that time were Christian. It is not exactly a big surprise that most western scientists at that time were Christian too. Not to mention that Christian doctrine at that time was not openly hostile to science, at least not to most of the science that was being done at that time. So I fail to see what this part of your answer has to do with Ash'ria.
My comparison to Ash'ria doctrine was a comparison to *your* arguments in this discussion we've had, not a comparison to general Christian doctrine. It is *you* who say stuff like "all theory is grey" and that rocks, fossils and the total sum of what we can test and observe are "witnesses" that has no more or less value as facts than the Bible. You are putting *one book* against *observed reality*, and you choose to give the book more weight. This is far out on the shallow end of the Bell curve compared to mainstream xtians and current xtian doctrine.
You do not have to reject your belief in God in order to accept mainstream science. Lots of people manage to do that just fine.
That really is the heart of the issue. We really don't want to be held accountable for our bad behavior.
We've been down this road before. Can you provide some *facts* for the assertion above? Do you *really* believe that God is the only source of morality? Do you *really* believe that the only reason one might have for choosing not to believe in the xtian god is because one wants to avoid punishment?
It is because of this, that we humans go to such great lengths to explain the existence of this incredible universe and all the teeming life forms here on earth, by any and all means EXCEPT an intelligent creator God.
Yeah, suuure. All the scientists toiling away at trying to increase our understanding of the world are really only doing so because they want to believe they can escape the wrath of Abraham's God.
In the Bible we read: "It is appointed unto men to die once, but after that comes the judgment". The first part of this sentence cannot be disputed, but the second part is not given much credence anymore today, especially by those who read and post to this Internet /. forum
It might perhaps be that /. is exposing you to a different part of the world than you are used to? It might perhaps be that your current interpretation of the Bible is not as prevalent as you might have been led to believe?
(nor your memories mere illusions in a universe created 5 minutes ago to look older than that)
5minuteism is obviously false, my holy book clearly says that last tuesdayism is the true faith.
Still, when taken to the logical extreme we can't really be sure of anything. We might as well be biological batteries in the Matrix, or artefacts of a very detailed universe simulation running on a supercomputer in Betelgeuse 5. So even a naturalistic world view requires a small amount of faith, specifically that we live in a causal reality and that our senses do not (deliberately) lie to us.
That is a topic that belongs to philosophy and not something one should lay awake at night thin.. oh dang.
...Indeed, it should be disregarded precisely because the creation account found in the Bible is demonstrably false...
Do you say this because you or anyone else was there and saw it happen? Exactly where and when has anyone demonstrated that this account is false?
Where and when has anyone demonstrated that this account is true?
The circumstantial evidence that it (6 days 6000 years ago) is false is staggering. Everything from geology to DNA to fossil record to astronomy points at an old universe and an old earth.
We observe that the universe is here and arrogantly assume that from things present we can determine how it began. Such incredible human arrogance I cannot understand it.
You know, you could perhaps read up a bit on the history of Islam. Especially the Islamic Golden Age and the reasons for its decline. What you write below sounds eerily like the doctrines of Ash'ari, which in short said that human reason should be secondary to what was written in the scriptures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash'ari
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasionalism
While it certainly was not the sole reason why Islam went from a centre of science, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, engineering, and many other fields to what we can see in the middle east today, it was certainly a contributing factor.
Is it really your goal to attempt to do the same to western civilisation? Can you perhaps understand why some of us are so opposed to your ideas? It is not because we want to avoid being judged at death, it is because your path leads to decline and unreason.
That is why, unlike any other book, the Bible, which claims to be God's communication to man, has been and still is more widely distributed and translated that any other human writing.
Argument from popularity again. You accused us of doing the same once, but you do it repeatedly. Pot, kettle, black.
....Encoding a binary message in the cosmic background radiation would do the trick for me....
That assumes that you have the intelligence and the equipment to receive such a message in the first place. If the message is encrypted, and you don't have the key
*snip meanderings*
So, he had this objective truth recorded in a book. Written by humans. Translated several times. A book that this omni-everything being must have known would be internally inconsistent and a source of wildly different interpretations.
Why not *also* send modern man (who he gave intelligence, sufficient intelligence to see that this book would be unclear and open to interpretation) a clear message from the source itself? In a way that would not have the weaknesses of this book?
But no, here you come along with some story about how it would obviously be encrypted. Why on earth would he do that?!
The main problem I see with that explanation is that no other animal "evolved" any kind of behavior that could reasonably be termed "religious". No animal has ever been observed in what could be described as prayer or worship.
To get organised religion, one would need language/communication. Animals might have some sort of spirituality or religion, but absent the level of language needed to make organised religion it would have to be on the level of personal belief. So how would one detect if an animal has some sort of personal belief or not? Keep in mind that prayer and worship are human expressions of religious belief. If an animal has some sort of religious feeling or belief in a larger power outside itself, how would it show this and how would we recognize it? I think you are asking for something that would be very hard to detect. Even if we detect it, it would be inconclusive and open to interpretation.
I am reminded that elephants show behaviour that looks suspiciously like mourning their dead. If this can be taken as a display of religious belief or not is obviously a question of interpretation.
Everything than humans do, animals have also been observed doing, of course on a vastly lower level. If you can name any other activity that man does, that is not at all found to some degree in some animals, please do so.
Humans have an abundance of language, culture, dance, creative expression in many forms, the capability of abstract thought, high self-awareness. While you also can find some of this to a small degree in animals, I believe there is a threshold one has to get above before one sees behaviour that we humans would recognize as some sort of organised religious belief.
Nobody has ever explained to me how the "wasting" of resources and energy on religious activity, collectively or individually, makes humans more "fit" to survive. If anything, NOT spending time and effort building cathedrals, churches, synagogues and mosques, as well as engaging in other religious trappings, such as embarking on long weary, dangerous pilgrimages to distant places, should be an evolutionary advantage to those groups and individuals who avoid all that.
Building expensive places of worship and going on hazardous pilgrimages is a very recent thing, on an evolutionary scale. You are talking about fairly recent displays of worship; and displays of surplus at that. More common human displays of worship and spirituality on an evolutionary relevant scale would be things like cave paintings and covering a dead tribal elder with flowers and putting a walking stick in his grave to aid him on the journey in the afterlife.
When it comes to what advantages religion would have for early man, there is lots.
Remember that most religions in those days (from what we can gather from what artefacts they left behind, and of what can be learned from isolated tribes today) were animist. As such, they attribute a "soul" or some sort of intelligence or purpose to plants, animals and natural phenomena. In short, nature becomes a person/force/deity that the human mind can attribute cause and will to. Apply some lore and an oral tradition, and you have a framework where tribes of early man can gather and remember information that is important for survival. ("When the god in the sky turn the heavens grey and the daughters of Ibis take to their wings and fly to their father Mountain, then we must travel down to the river. Ibis is alone from watching eyes, so this is when Antelope will bring his children to visit her. We will wait for them at the ford")
In short, religion fill the needs for group cohesion, enforcement of mores and collection of information useful for survival. We see lots of evidence for this even in "modern" religion; the Bible and other religious texts from the same era has a fairly small volume of text spent on genesis or creat