'm surprised no-one (that I'm aware of) has proposed a 'bundled' portable HTML file format... All it would take (IMHO) is an extended HTML document which contained each individual HTML page in < PAGE > </PAGE > sections, as well as < MEDIA > </MEDIA> wrappers around text-encoded graphics file. Fonts could possibly also be shipped within the document.
Only last week did I find out there's already a solution that does exactly this: HTMLDOC (See http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc/) It's free as in beer, but not totally free as in speech, since it's GPL'd, limiting your rights much more than a BSD license would.:-)
It's not a replacement for PDFs at all though: in fact, one of the things it can do is make beautifully formatted PDFs (or PS) from HTML files. It even has some fairly useful formatting options to support books and such.
This is a very nice program - I am VERY impressed, so much so that I'd like to see full HTML editors that understand the HTMLDOC extended tags in Konqueror, Mozilla, Netscape 6.next, etc., and also see that these and other browsers implement the HTMLDOC filter as a checkbox option when printing an HTML file.
HTMLDOC supports HTML 3.2 and some 4.0, and is supposed to support type 1 & 2 CSS in the next release.
Highly recommended. It's clearly not the right format for everything, and it's clearly not a page layout program, but it is applicable in a great many situations. It seems to bridge the gap between web/dynamic, page, and distribution formats quite well. It's even rich enough that a simple word processor could be built using it - perhaps a bit more like "HTMLroff" than Word, but then that's not a bad thing...
PC has run amok. There is NO reason to change that quote. The truly scary thing is that academic freedom has been compromised to such a degree that no one dares utter it in its original form.
This is even worse than the current flap over changing the races of the firefighters that raised the flag Iwo Jima-like over the WTC remains, in order to present a more "diverse" picture, history and accuracy be damned...
San Mehat would say a good BIOS *is* Linux: he developed a micro-Linux as the BIOS for the late Netwinder before CCC went down the Rebel tubes and he joined VA. Now that VA has axed the hardware business, I suppose he's moved elsewhere, but I haven't heard where he is...
I don't know if the Linux bios he srote there is any kin to the LinuxBIOS project, or even if it's available anywhere. Anybody know?
Microsoft didn't stop shipping the MIPS version of NT until EVERY SINGLE maker of MIPS clones stopped production (Netpower was one of the last holdouts).
There's actually a very good reason for this that has nothing to do with the MIPS market (or lack thereof): The simple fact is that NT was *developed* on MIPS, and then ported to x86, alpha and the rest. This continued until relatively recently, when the unavailabilty of reasonably performing MIPS hardware forced them to move development to x86, not too long before W2K came out.
There never was enough of a MIPS market to justify it if a port had been required - it's just that since it was the master, they already had it lying around to sell...
Come ON. Microsoft will not start artificially limiting what hardware it's product will run on. Why would they? That would be like throwing away customers!
If that's true, they've been doing it for years. God od your homework before you post: Microsoft already has almost total control over the way that PCs work, right down to specifying in their hardware standards what the behavior of the power switch should be.
They've used the PC9x (I don't know what they're calling them now) stndards to bludgeon all the major computer makers into building hardware the Microsoft way, and guess what? Pretty much all the clones and motherboards then follow suit, so that they're capable of running Windows with some degree of stability, too.
If you don't think Microsoft has what amounts to 100% control of low-level PC hardware, just take the time to go to their WinHEC conference and notice that nearly every BIOS designer and many of the hardware engineering staff of all the computer and motherboard makers are there, dutifully taking pages of notes on what amounts to their orders for the year.
Not only is this not far fetched, you don't even realize they've been doing it for years now. And there's a simple reason why it's about 100% effective: Comply or die - if those companies want to avoid paying several times more for the OS on the machines they sell (which obliterates the margin on a modern PC and puts them upside down), they must comply withthe Windows hardware standards as part of their OS purchase contract with MS. If you don't believe this strategy works, take a look around and try to find an AST computer these days - they tried to stand up to MS a few years back, refusing to let MS design their hardware, and MS nearly bankrupted them: I've been told that it was cheaper for them to go into a store and buy the OS than accept the terms MS offered them under "non-compliance".
If you care at all about the future of the PC, go to WinHEC (they are starting to have to listen somewhat to the backlash) to find out understand what they're trying to do, and learn what you and others can do about it. Knowledge is power here - so far, only trivial numbers of us have refused to buy poisoned hardware. (The last time I checked they were trying to *eliminate* the BIOS, replacing it with a simpler set of lookup tables for resources, which of course would have to be "secured" at some point in the future, but I've been out of this for a couple of years now...)
Re:Don't forget mars_nwe - the NetWare emu
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At this point I am afraid it is too late for the "Big Red N".
I'm afraid so, even Eric Schmidt couldn't turn the place around - he recently left as CEO of Netscape to be CEO of Google. For those that don't know, Eric is the brilliant former CTO of Sun who was the internal champion behind Java and many other cool things we now enjoy...
I just had a look at the HTMLDOC docs (if that's not too redundant.)
This is absolutely killer. I've wanted something like this for years. HTML is not a layout format, but will do fine for most documents, but was lacking a few simple things to let it be a reasonable printable document format. HTMLDOC intelligently filters HTML into very presentable PS or PDF documents. (Look at the online docs for good examples...)
HTMLDOC adds the missing pieces! Margins, page breaks, duplexing, headers and footers, even the ability to define the order and options for each chapter in a book and be able to process them all at once.
This looks VERY good. If it works as advertised, I may be buying the supported version RSN. I'm impressed, and it takes a lot for software to impress me.
The fact that it's free and open source, too, is just icing on the cake...
Oops, posted too soon. I was going to add that although you can do complex documets in Word, doing so for documents of over a couple of dozen pages is risky, and sooner or later, espcially as your document gets longer, Word will corrupt the file, so you are forced to keep each chapter in a separate file. For this reason alone, Word is not the best choice for documentation.
Also, there are those maddening times when the demons of Redmond take over and you just *can't* make it format things the way it should, or worse, you wind up with a document like one I have, which corrupted the Table of Contents along the way - any attempt to get word to refresh the TOC wil botch it completely, so I now have a TOC in which I have to place the page numbers manually. This takes time, but not as much as re-creating the document template or trying to fix the problem, which I've already wasted hours on.
Word is reasonably capable in some respects, but way too flaky in others.
I have a love-hate relationship with Word, and in many ways, I really don't like it much, but it's clear from your comments that you haven't invested the time to learn how to drive it very well.
Word does not force you to deal with formatting issues as you compose - it's not as transparent as troff here, of course, but it can be made to present the text without much of the formatting, and can be told not to attempt things that obviously annoy you, like grammar checking and spelling autocorrection. (I agree the grammar engine is junk and doesn't understand proper sentence structure or the proper use of commas in any non-trivial sentence.)
Word is a pain, but I've also created staggeringly complex documents in it - in fact, last year I helped a good friend prepare his dissertation, which was already partly in Word, but needed a lot of formatting work.
Dissertation? More like a phone book, really - it's 650 pages of extremely complex text and diagrams involving some extremely complex annotated text diagrams and bizzarre fonts for ancient Hebrew (over 75 pages of this alone, annotated and color-coded to reveal complex patterns) as well as a number of strange pheonetic marks. (My friend is a brilliant and innovative linguist.)
In addition, I recently tried to build some new marcom (ad) materials in PageMaker, but gave up in disgust after spending nearly two days wrestling with the tool. Other than the lack of a full color palette for text in Word 97 (which may be fixed in later releases), I was able to build what I wanted (which was fairly complex) in three hours in Word. The really cool thing is that this document will be usable in StarOffice when they fix the textbox bug - other than that, it imports just fine.
Word is really a farily decent product, probably the best thing in the MS portfolio, other than Visio, which they bought...
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PIRATE-PROOF DIGITAL MEDIA!
As someone who works now and then on next-gen TV jobs, I can tell you that A) there IS such a thing as pirate-proof digital media (you just haven't seen anything done by people who understand crypto and security yet - but you will), and B) if such systems are embedded directly in the same silicon that has to process and display the image, it's close enough to impossible to hack to count.
Realistically, any system that requires ion-beam implanters to hack is one that will be realtively effective at deterring "piracy".
This too has solutions, of course, like embedding copy control systems into the output device (= monitor). By using a crypto handshake between all the devices, from disc reader to monitor, it can be the monitor itself which refuses to display the watermarked data.
I've wondered about this for a while, and if the MPAA/Studios/whoever else are really convinced they're losing as much money as they say they are, a fix is realtively easy: They simply commission several big-name consumer electronics companies to build a really nice flatscreen display with copy-protection embedded in the monitor's silicon, then subsidize the heck out of them in the marketplace.
Think about it: How many people wouldn't jump at the chance to get a nice 42" HD plasma screen for $500? Not many. (In the volumes we're talking about, those prices wouldn't even need all that much subsidizing - big flat screens are expensive now at least partly because volumes are low.) People would suddenly decide they didn't care very much about that little poison pill embedded in the product, and once enough of the market is seeded, then rights managment is a de facto reality.
The interesting thing is that this could work quite well right now, but there is a limited window in which there is a tasty enough piece of bait (flat screens) that people want, but don't have. It works for the content owners because they now know that the screen owners will have to obtain thier content legitimately in order to view it.
Perhaps I should write this up and let them pay me for building such an initiative...
ust some electricity and water - think of the threat that poses to the oil hegemony...
You couldn't be more wrong: Hydrogen is stupid, but the oil companies would benefit most if it were to gain ground:
In case it has somehow escaped your attention, pretty much all the hydrogen that's "all around us" has the distressing property of being bound up in water. Water is an incredibly stable molecule that's notoriously difficult to tear apart, so it's not a practical source of hydrogen, because of the energy input required.
The simple fact is that Natural Gas is the ONLY large-scale source of hydrogen that's economically feasible with present technology. (Almost all hydrogen commercially available today is produced from natural gas.)
But there are two big problems even to this approach: 1) converting natural gas (methane, CH) to hydrogen is still expensive and inefficient and 2) Natural Gas is already one of the cleanest-burning fuels known, so why not just burn it directly? NG is considerably better in terms of storage and transport as well, and existing engines can be easily modified to run on it. In short it has almost all the benefits of hydrogen, with almost none of the drawbacks. (Keep in mind that hydrogen still creates pollutants such as oxides of nitrogen when burned in air rather than pure oxygen.)
add up the costs in shipping oil around the planet. not cheap. the real benefit is that oil is portable once extracted.
Actually, shipping anything (including oil) on a large scale is incredibly cheap. Shipping oil, or even gasoline, is oconsiderably cheaper than shipping equivalent energy densities of hydrogen. (Not to mention that when shipping crude oil, you're shipping much more than energy - you're shipping everything that can be made from oil, too: Asphalt, plastics, petrochemicals and all their derivatives, etc. Look around your desk - much of what you see was sloshing around in an oil tanker not long ago.)
To sum it up: Using hydrogen as a large-scale fuel is just flat stupid, but there are enough idiots that believe the propaganda that it's "the perfect fuel" that we'll be fighting off their ignorance (or worse yet, paying for it) for years.
Re:Don't forget mars_nwe - the NetWare emu
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although it has used DOS as a poor man's boot loader
A friend of mine used to say, "DOS isn't really an operating system, but it's a damn fine program loader!" Pretty accurate, really.
(Program loaders were common back in the early minicomputer days before many computers had the resources to afford luxuries like an OS.)
Re:Don't forget mars_nwe - the NetWare emu
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Although few people here know it, Novell's file sharing protocol, NCP, kicks serious butt. It is probably by far the best file-sharing protocol on the planet for serious production use. (there's some interesting stuff in the works, but at present development rates, it'll be years before its as robust and fast as NCP.
The architecture of NCP is vastly superior to SMB or even NFS - NFSv4 will finally have some of the killer WAN features that NCP had in 1993. The protocol, is lean, elegant, performance-optimized, and engineered to work in the real world in ways others haven't ever bothered to think through. It pretty much had to be that way, considering it was designed to run on '286s.
Case in point: NetWare won a shootout I conducted in 1994 to pick the best file-sharing system on which to deploy an emergency oil spill response system (be in full communication with Houston from anywhere in the world within 15 minutes of hitting the ground, with no computer guys for hundreds of miles!) The data link was over an Inmarsat satellite telephone - horrible latency with the bird in geosynchronous orbit. Everything was on PCs, and file sharing was mandatory to support Microsoft Mail and I included NetWare just for political reasons, expecting it to get creamed by one of the NFSes from NetManage, FTP Software, or Sun.
Readers' Digest Version: NetWare smoked everyone so bad, I thought it must just be that all PC NFSs were bad - but the same thing happened with a Unix box over such a high latency link. I dug into it, talking with some of the Novel protocol jocks, and we identified several things that made it even faster, which they added in the next release. NetWare flat flew, NFS was unusable. I was sold on the superiority of NCP, and I think that's still true today.
Good engineering still wins. As a longtime Unix bigot, I even developed a respect for NetWare, and how little server resources it needed to support a serious number of clients. NetWare is arguably not a real OS, but there's nothing faster for serving up files and printing, and sometimes, that's all the job is. (Sadly, I haven't worked with NetWare in several years. Its only problem back then was that it was an order of magnitude more difficult to manage than it had any right to be. Much like Linux in that regard...)
For Linux/Unix/BSD, something better than NFS is really required - NFS sucks (security? etc.)
While I couldn't agree more that something better is required, NFS is quite good (esp, v3 and v4).
It's also important to remember (or learn) that authentication is NOT a function of NFS - that is done elsewhere. Most people just use garden-variety NIS, which is totally insecure, but ubiquitous and interoperable. NFS can operate securely (Kerberos or whatever else you want, it's pluggable), but most people choose not to, either out of laziness or ignorance. (Although Sun hasn't made secure operation as easy as it should have, either...)
I think NIS is the best open source solution for Linux. NIS+ server code for Linux doesn't exist yet, but the client code does...
NIS+ is a truly elegant architecture, in many ways, what AD should have been. It's far superior to AD, LDAP, or any other X.500-derived directory - that ISO/OSI brain damage is just too deep to let X.500's ilk be easily used in the real world.
Unfortuantely, Sun really botched its attempt to get NIS+ accepted, for several very good reasons:
1) Although the directory itself was incredibly impressive, and worked very well, there were NO administrative tools usable by mere mortals. I was a "Network Ambassador" at Sun at the time NIS+ was attempting to make inroads, and I can tell you that even amongst that elite group, not 1 in 50 was capable of setting up and properly administering NIS+ in a configuration suitable for enterprise use. Some things were just impossible, like recovering from a lost root key: You just had to rebuild everything from scratch. Secure, but hardly practical. This inordiante complexity may well be why there's still no Linux NIS+ server (besides the fact that one would be pointless now...)
2) There was no good migration plan from NIS to NIS+, and no way to keep the two in sync: it was pretty much an all-or-nothing scenario, at least for the Unix boxes. Not surprisingly, lacking Microsoft's arm-twisting ability, all but a handful of Sun's customers chose to pass NIS+ by, no matter how good it was.
3) Sun tried hard, but didn't make adopting NIS+ sweet enough for IBM and HP, who at one time had "committed" to putting NIS+ into their Unix OSes. Unfortunately, the combination of NIS+ being perceived as "Sun's" and its underwhelming adoption even solid Sun accounts (due to reason #1 above) led to its not being considered a serious contender.
4) If you really know what you're doing, it's possible to build a hierarchical multi-domain name/directory service using NIS, although I only know of one company (a Fortune 20 former employer) that's ever actually put this in production enterprise-wide. All the capabilities are there, it's just that very few people bother to figure out how NIS really works. We eventually wound up replacing regular NIS with a security-enhanced superset NIS (and appropriately modified utilities) of our own design, where all appropriate changes at a higher level filtered down to the lower domains, and each domain only had to administer its own portion of the namespace.
Sad, but I'd say NIS+ is pretty much completely irrelevant now.
Microsoft and AD have won this battle so far, but it may once again be the unlikely knight Samba that will save the day and turn the tide. We'll see.
P.S.: Side note to comment 1 above: This is just one in a long line of times Sun has developed extremely impressive core architectures and failed in the marketplace. (NIS+, SunNet Manager, Jini, Jiro, and even Java itself, to some degree...) The fallacious assumption is that the elegant core is all that's required, and that dealing with pesky details like administration, management, or writing apps that take advantage of the elegant plumbing can be left as an excercise for the customer, not something worthy of Sun's time and attention. When will they learn?!
Novell's ConsoleOne is probably the best thing on the market today, although iPlanet has some very good stuff, too. Actually, Microsoft's ActiveDirectory is quite a nice directory, but of course, poisoned in such a way as to pretty much ensure that if you use it at all, your master servers will be AD, and all your administration will have to be done from AD, preventing you from using open standards effectively and marginalizing truly open systems. (This is "embrace and extend" at its sleaziest.)
Also, don't forget the metadirectory approach as a valid one for trying to manage LDAP and other directories: Ganymede is the only open source project in this space that's much good, and it's starting to look fairly capable.
Still, you get what you pay for: If you're making directory services a core part of your IT strategy (not a bad idea, but realize there are other approaches now, with Java, XML, etc.), it's worth buying the real stuff from Novell or iPlanet. Unfortunately, there's been little open source work in this area: if the open source products work at all (many don't), they don't scale and lack important features.
That's too bad, because tying together things like MSWallet,.NET, and AD is one powerful way MS is going to continue to shove competitors off into the ditch. (...and a big reason why I and many others think the.GNU project is a BAD idea. Never play to your enemies strength.)
GEOS *was* cool - I still think it's the most impressive single hack I've ever seen. The 286 version was a much later derivative: the original version put a whole GUI/Windowing environment and a decent set of basic apps (Word processor, spreadsheet, etc.) on a Commodore 64!
That's right, a window system/OS analog and apps all in 64 KILObytes of main memory. Damn impressive hack.
It wasn't just for show, either: I actually used it to turn out all the papers, reports, etc. I wrote my senior year in college. (Now I'm dating myself...;-) )
MS didn't give IE away they just made it part of the windows tax.
That's NOT what they said under oath in court: For those of you doing the Internet long enough to remember, you may recall that MS wasn't up to writing a browser of their own to challenge Netscape: So instead, they decided to buy one (or actually, steal one, as you'll see in a moment.)
The only thing that was even close to being a Netscape competitor in those days was the original NCSA Mosaic code, which was spun off for commercialization by UIUC(.edu) as a company called Spyglass. Spyglass tried unsuccessfully for a while to land big buyers in hopes of competing with Netscape, but their code wasn't nearly so good as the Mozilla crowds' (back before Mozillla meant open source...) Finally, they landed the biggest fish of them all, Microsoft: They struck a deal with Microsoft to be the Microsoft browser: with backing and volume like that, they couldn't lose! Spyglass poured millions into develpoment and features that Microsoft wanted in the product - they knew they'd get their money back because the contract with Microsoft guaranteed them a percentage cut of every copy sold.
But Microsoft NEVER SOLD A BROWSER! Instead, it simply became "part of the operating system" (avoiding having to pay Spyglass was one of the biggest reasons BillG wanted to claim this.)
There was, of course, a law suit about this, which Microsoft won by swearing that since IE was an integral part of the OS, and not something that was even possible to buy separately, they owed Spyglass nothing for the millions of copies of their code that they distributed: Since they had'nt sold any IE they owed no royalties! Microsoft won leaving Spyglass with nothing for all its hard work and destitute to the point that they finally had to sell out to OpenTV in the hopes of becoming a niche browser for set-top boxes...
Re:But the REAL questions are....
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Apple PDA?
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None of this pay as you stuff or Apple proprietary crap. I want to ba able to connect it to my networks at home and work - seamlessly.
>heh. Tell Linksys, Lucent (or whatever company they've spun their wireless stuff into), Dell, etc. that 802.11 is Apple Proprietary. They'll tell you it isn't. AirPort(tm) may be Apple's trademark, and all the nifty Mac Gui stuff to configure it is proprietary, but I assure you that Macs with AirPort can use normal 802.11x access points, and PC's with cards can use AirPort Acess points, both with a minimum of fuss.
The Apple, Dell, Lucent, Cisco Aironet, Buffalo, and possibly others are exactly the same units, all built by the same company and OEM'ed under the different names. They all interoperate flawlessly.
I will be brief, because I really don't have the time to fully address the truckload of logical fallacies in your post:
There are scientists who are creationists,but this is not reasonable basis for assuming that Creationism is valid.
Of *course* Creationism is a valid theory, both as science and human thought about the realities of the universe. But Creation cannot be circumscribed by science, for the Creator encompasses science, not the other way around. Creation even fits all the available evidence far better than evolution. (It is despised by many, though, because it implies that naturalism is not the measure of all things.) Niether theory can be proved or disproved by scientific means - there are some things that science can not tell us. Sorry to break that harsh reality to you, but "Evolutionism" is a religious worldview with a far higher percentage of "unreasonable fundamentalists" than any religion that believes in a Creator...
Next Mistake:Straw Man... In other words, that in the distant past, there once existed an original life form and that this life form gave rise to all subsequent life forms
This is a convenient, but wholly unacceptable dodge used over and over by evolutionists. This is NOT a straw man - it strikes at the very heart of the debate: Since Evolutionists flatly reject the notion that life was "created", the only alternative then left to them is that life somehow spontaneously generated on its own. Evolutionists (such as yourself) now routinely try to limit the scope of evolution to what happened on Earth *after* life somehow magically appeared, ignoring the inconvenient fact that this logic requires it to have, in fact, originated somehow, somewhere, at some point in the past. The reason this is happening is that even evolutionary scientists recognize the folly of claiming life came from non-life, especially in a universe that's not nearly old enough, even using the most generous estimates. This is why many evolutionists now claim life on Earth had to come from elsewhere (the ridiculous panspermia argument) - the Earth simply isn't nearly old enough (niether is anywhere else, but that's beside the point...) This is a cowardly and disingenuous dodge, because it still doesn't address that crucial development of the first living thing, it simply attempts to shift it offstage under the cover of smoke and mirrors, declaring any discussion about the real origin of life "off-limits".
That's funny.I guess they never heard about these. [gate.net]In fact, they must not be very aware of modern medical and bilogical sciences in general.
Not at all true. Spend a little time doing reading up even on your own evolutionary sources, and you'll find there are a number of very substantial and very fundamental problems with this idea. Most particularly, there is the fundamental problem that mutations result in a *decrease* in the amount of information present, not the creation of new information, which is what evolutionary theory requires. The site you reference in essence gapes in awe at the changes that can be wrought in morphology by twiddling the genetic knobs, while leaving entirely unanswered the foundational question of the mechanism that could have created the knobs in order for them to be available to twiddle. Another aspect that evolutionists conveniently gloss over is that DNA/genome mapping produces relationships between organisms that *simply cannot be* if the fossil record is granted any validity at all. A great many scientists would throw up an incredible ruckus if DNA were used as an ironclad determiner of evolutionary relationships...
A great example of this can indeed be found at Do-While Jones Science Against Evolution web site: I could recommend several, but one article that gives a good high-level overview and hits to the point here is "Stoneage Mutant Mammal Turtles", discussing some of the difficulties that evolution would have to overcome in order for reptiles to grow breasts and make the transition to mammals. The number of significant, non-trivial morphological and *functional* changes that have to be made *simultaneously* in order to even pretend this could happen should be enough to convince even the most closed-minded evolutionist that perhaps he should entertain the possibility that perhaps evolution cannot produce what we see around us.
Next Mistake:A revisiting of the first fallacious statement by citing John Ashton's book, In Six Days.
Your argument seems to be that faith and origins cannot be related, except by the truly ridiculous leap of faith necessary to belive life spontaneously derived from dead stuff. This is ridiculous. The fact that some of the 50 scientists whose essays are in "In Six Days" find their evolutionary views in line with their views of faith should not be surprising, except to those that summarily dismiss both anything outside the natural world and the existence of any spiritual dimension to man. The quote you slam is dead-on: Some people choose to extend a little faith in the unseen as an alternative to the inevitable alternative that life is indeed meaningless. If you believe (or even want to believe) in the very concept of "good", then you are ultimately forced to recognize God. The 20th century was filled with dreary philosophers that all started with the premise that God could not exist and then (correctly) reached the only logical conclusion they could from that starting point: the same one Dostoevsky stated as, "If God does not exist, then everything is permitted."
Next Mistake:Behe of all people?Is this a reference or a joke?
Not at all. Evolutionists don't *like* Behe, but that doesn't affect the fact that his observations are correct, and supported by the data. Irreducible complexity is a serious problem for evolutionists, one they try to ignore or ridicule, rather than address. The chances against any single aspect of an irreducibly complex system arising is astronomical, the chances against them all arising at the same time, in the same place, in the only possible correct arrangement for function, advantage, and the sustenance of life, (not to mention adaptive advantage) is well and truly ZERO.
Odd that Behe has never published a single technical paper for peer review....
I was not aware that was a requirement for truth... Seriously, this is an ad hominem attack on Behe and his credibility. His academic credentials are not in question, he is quite well-qualified to do all the things he has done. The simple fact that he is a Fellow at the prestigious Discovery Institute should carry some weight relative to his academic standing. Behe could well have chosen to publish his findings in places where they would have been peer-reviewed. He chose not to because he's smart enough to know that no challenge to evolutionary dogma is permitted by the Church of Evolution. (I think it's telling that in your link to a review of his book, the author of the review lets his bias show so freely by dismissing Behe simply because his book was published by the same house that published "The Bell Curve". That book was universally hated by PC academia, but the science on which it is based holds up well under any objective evaluation, and the authors' motives are clearly (if one bothers to read the book) anti-racist. This is the whole problem with today's emasculated Politically Correct academia: NO deviation from the official party line is EVER tolerated. The only absolute allowed is that there is no absolute but that one. Funny how "tolerance" works in academia today...)
and as far as his book goes, well, Behe offers no general laws, models, or explanations for how design happens, no testable predictions, and no possible way to falsify his hybrid evolution/ID hypothesis. He is simply claiming that design is a fact that is easily detectable in biochemical systems.
You don't seem to get it, do you? There is a fundamental difference in *worldview* at issue here. Yours states that *all things* must be explainable by science. Behe's (and mine) is that there is ample evidence for intelligent design in the Creation we see all around us. The irreducible complexity of biochemical interactions is just one example of many millions. (The clear implication (to those of us that refuse to wear blinders) is that there *is* something beyond what science can tell us, and that the evidence points to the existence of a Creator. A bit more thoughtful reflection on that point will convince one that this must be an omnipotent and omniscient Creator ("Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise", to quote the hymnist...)
As THE ONLY POSSIBLE objective standard of Truth, God cannot be modeled, falsified, or explained by laws other than His own. But not all will open their eyes: Pilate asked his famous question, "What is Truth?" with Truth standing right in front of him...
All in all, this post did not address the original question,which was (to paraphrase) Why is it that,when discussing anything even vaguely related to evolution,Creationists feel the need to spout their psuedo-science?
First of all, it's not pseudo-science. There is some very bad "Creationist" science. There is some equally bad "Evolutionist" scince, much of which is sadly now taken as dogma rather than open to question. Niether kind is defensible. There is a vast array of fast-growing sceince that support the Creationist perspective. Open your mind.
Real science argues for Creation far more forcefully than it argues for evolution. In the not too distant future, evolution will be relgated to the dustbin of history and laughed at as the prime example of how science can go so far astray from anything even remotely supported by the evidence.
Evolution is a self-admittedly anti-supernatural worldview, rather than a valid theory of origins.
Science is one way of getting at truth, but it is the height of hubris to think that all truth is circumscribed by science.
At least one firm in the World Trade Center had what they thought was a very safe backup procedure: Their data center in one tower was backed up to the second. In their minds anything that would take out *both* towers would obliterate Manhattan, and therefore was considered too remote to worry about...
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'm surprised no-one (that I'm aware of) has proposed a 'bundled' portable HTML file format... All it would take (IMHO) is an extended HTML document which contained each individual HTML page in < PAGE > < /PAGE > sections, as well as < MEDIA > < /MEDIA> wrappers around text-encoded graphics file. Fonts could possibly also be shipped within the document.
:-)
Only last week did I find out there's already a solution that does exactly this: HTMLDOC (See http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc/) It's free as in beer, but not totally free as in speech, since it's GPL'd, limiting your rights much more than a BSD license would.
It's not a replacement for PDFs at all though: in fact, one of the things it can do is make beautifully formatted PDFs (or PS) from HTML files. It even has some fairly useful formatting options to support books and such.
This is a very nice program - I am VERY impressed, so much so that I'd like to see full HTML editors that understand the HTMLDOC extended tags in Konqueror, Mozilla, Netscape 6.next, etc., and also see that these and other browsers implement the HTMLDOC filter as a checkbox option when printing an HTML file.
HTMLDOC supports HTML 3.2 and some 4.0, and is supposed to support type 1 & 2 CSS in the next release.
Highly recommended. It's clearly not the right format for everything, and it's clearly not a page layout program, but it is applicable in a great many situations. It seems to bridge the gap between web/dynamic, page, and distribution formats quite well. It's even rich enough that a simple word processor could be built using it - perhaps a bit more like "HTMLroff" than Word, but then that's not a bad thing...
PC has run amok. There is NO reason to change that quote. The truly scary thing is that academic freedom has been compromised to such a degree that no one dares utter it in its original form.
This is even worse than the current flap over changing the races of the firefighters that raised the flag Iwo Jima-like over the WTC remains, in order to present a more "diverse" picture, history and accuracy be damned...
San Mehat would say a good BIOS *is* Linux: he developed a micro-Linux as the BIOS for the late Netwinder before CCC went down the Rebel tubes and he joined VA. Now that VA has axed the hardware business, I suppose he's moved elsewhere, but I haven't heard where he is...
I don't know if the Linux bios he srote there is any kin to the LinuxBIOS project, or even if it's available anywhere. Anybody know?
Microsoft didn't stop shipping the MIPS version of NT until EVERY SINGLE maker of MIPS clones stopped production (Netpower was one of the last holdouts).
There's actually a very good reason for this that has nothing to do with the MIPS market (or lack thereof): The simple fact is that NT was *developed* on MIPS, and then ported to x86, alpha and the rest. This continued until relatively recently, when the unavailabilty of reasonably performing MIPS hardware forced them to move development to x86, not too long before W2K came out.
There never was enough of a MIPS market to justify it if a port had been required - it's just that since it was the master, they already had it lying around to sell...
Come ON. Microsoft will not start artificially limiting what hardware it's product will run on. Why would they? That would be like throwing away customers!
If that's true, they've been doing it for years. God od your homework before you post: Microsoft already has almost total control over the way that PCs work, right down to specifying in their hardware standards what the behavior of the power switch should be.
They've used the PC9x (I don't know what they're calling them now) stndards to bludgeon all the major computer makers into building hardware the Microsoft way, and guess what? Pretty much all the clones and motherboards then follow suit, so that they're capable of running Windows with some degree of stability, too.
If you don't think Microsoft has what amounts to 100% control of low-level PC hardware, just take the time to go to their WinHEC conference and notice that nearly every BIOS designer and many of the hardware engineering staff of all the computer and motherboard makers are there, dutifully taking pages of notes on what amounts to their orders for the year.
Not only is this not far fetched, you don't even realize they've been doing it for years now. And there's a simple reason why it's about 100% effective: Comply or die - if those companies want to avoid paying several times more for the OS on the machines they sell (which obliterates the margin on a modern PC and puts them upside down), they must comply withthe Windows hardware standards as part of their OS purchase contract with MS. If you don't believe this strategy works, take a look around and try to find an AST computer these days - they tried to stand up to MS a few years back, refusing to let MS design their hardware, and MS nearly bankrupted them: I've been told that it was cheaper for them to go into a store and buy the OS than accept the terms MS offered them under "non-compliance".
If you care at all about the future of the PC, go to WinHEC (they are starting to have to listen somewhat to the backlash) to find out understand what they're trying to do, and learn what you and others can do about it. Knowledge is power here - so far, only trivial numbers of us have refused to buy poisoned hardware. (The last time I checked they were trying to *eliminate* the BIOS, replacing it with a simpler set of lookup tables for resources, which of course would have to be "secured" at some point in the future, but I've been out of this for a couple of years now...)
At this point I am afraid it is too late for the "Big Red N".
I'm afraid so, even Eric Schmidt couldn't turn the place around - he recently left as CEO of Netscape to be CEO of Google. For those that don't know, Eric is the brilliant former CTO of Sun who was the internal champion behind Java and many other cool things we now enjoy...
I just had a look at the HTMLDOC docs (if that's not too redundant.)
This is absolutely killer. I've wanted something like this for years. HTML is not a layout format, but will do fine for most documents, but was lacking a few simple things to let it be a reasonable printable document format. HTMLDOC intelligently filters HTML into very presentable PS or PDF documents. (Look at the online docs for good examples...)
HTMLDOC adds the missing pieces! Margins, page breaks, duplexing, headers and footers, even the ability to define the order and options for each chapter in a book and be able to process them all at once.
This looks VERY good. If it works as advertised, I may be buying the supported version RSN. I'm impressed, and it takes a lot for software to impress me.
The fact that it's free and open source, too, is just icing on the cake...
Oops, posted too soon. I was going to add that although you can do complex documets in Word, doing so for documents of over a couple of dozen pages is risky, and sooner or later, espcially as your document gets longer, Word will corrupt the file, so you are forced to keep each chapter in a separate file. For this reason alone, Word is not the best choice for documentation.
Also, there are those maddening times when the demons of Redmond take over and you just *can't* make it format things the way it should, or worse, you wind up with a document like one I have, which corrupted the Table of Contents along the way - any attempt to get word to refresh the TOC wil botch it completely, so I now have a TOC in which I have to place the page numbers manually. This takes time, but not as much as re-creating the document template or trying to fix the problem, which I've already wasted hours on.
Word is reasonably capable in some respects, but way too flaky in others.
I have a love-hate relationship with Word, and in many ways, I really don't like it much, but it's clear from your comments that you haven't invested the time to learn how to drive it very well.
Word does not force you to deal with formatting issues as you compose - it's not as transparent as troff here, of course, but it can be made to present the text without much of the formatting, and can be told not to attempt things that obviously annoy you, like grammar checking and spelling autocorrection. (I agree the grammar engine is junk and doesn't understand proper sentence structure or the proper use of commas in any non-trivial sentence.)
Word is a pain, but I've also created staggeringly complex documents in it - in fact, last year I helped a good friend prepare his dissertation, which was already partly in Word, but needed a lot of formatting work.
Dissertation? More like a phone book, really - it's 650 pages of extremely complex text and diagrams involving some extremely complex annotated text diagrams and bizzarre fonts for ancient Hebrew (over 75 pages of this alone, annotated and color-coded to reveal complex patterns) as well as a number of strange pheonetic marks. (My friend is a brilliant and innovative linguist.)
In addition, I recently tried to build some new marcom (ad) materials in PageMaker, but gave up in disgust after spending nearly two days wrestling with the tool. Other than the lack of a full color palette for text in Word 97 (which may be fixed in later releases), I was able to build what I wanted (which was fairly complex) in three hours in Word. The really cool thing is that this document will be usable in StarOffice when they fix the textbox bug - other than that, it imports just fine.
Word is really a farily decent product, probably the best thing in the MS portfolio, other than Visio, which they bought...
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PIRATE-PROOF DIGITAL MEDIA!
As someone who works now and then on next-gen TV jobs, I can tell you that A) there IS such a thing as pirate-proof digital media (you just haven't seen anything done by people who understand crypto and security yet - but you will), and B) if such systems are embedded directly in the same silicon that has to process and display the image, it's close enough to impossible to hack to count.
Realistically, any system that requires ion-beam implanters to hack is one that will be realtively effective at deterring "piracy".
This too has solutions, of course, like embedding copy control systems into the output device (= monitor). By using a crypto handshake between all the devices, from disc reader to monitor, it can be the monitor itself which refuses to display the watermarked data.
I've wondered about this for a while, and if the MPAA/Studios/whoever else are really convinced they're losing as much money as they say they are, a fix is realtively easy: They simply commission several big-name consumer electronics companies to build a really nice flatscreen display with copy-protection embedded in the monitor's silicon, then subsidize the heck out of them in the marketplace.
Think about it: How many people wouldn't jump at the chance to get a nice 42" HD plasma screen for $500? Not many. (In the volumes we're talking about, those prices wouldn't even need all that much subsidizing - big flat screens are expensive now at least partly because volumes are low.) People would suddenly decide they didn't care very much about that little poison pill embedded in the product, and once enough of the market is seeded, then rights managment is a de facto reality.
The interesting thing is that this could work quite well right now, but there is a limited window in which there is a tasty enough piece of bait (flat screens) that people want, but don't have. It works for the content owners because they now know that the screen owners will have to obtain thier content legitimately in order to view it.
Perhaps I should write this up and let them pay me for building such an initiative...
ust some electricity and water - think of the threat that poses to the oil hegemony...
You couldn't be more wrong: Hydrogen is stupid, but the oil companies would benefit most if it were to gain ground:
In case it has somehow escaped your attention, pretty much all the hydrogen that's "all around us" has the distressing property of being bound up in water. Water is an incredibly stable molecule that's notoriously difficult to tear apart, so it's not a practical source of hydrogen, because of the energy input required.
The simple fact is that Natural Gas is the ONLY large-scale source of hydrogen that's economically feasible with present technology. (Almost all hydrogen commercially available today is produced from natural gas.)
But there are two big problems even to this approach: 1) converting natural gas (methane, CH) to hydrogen is still expensive and inefficient and 2) Natural Gas is already one of the cleanest-burning fuels known, so why not just burn it directly? NG is considerably better in terms of storage and transport as well, and existing engines can be easily modified to run on it. In short it has almost all the benefits of hydrogen, with almost none of the drawbacks. (Keep in mind that hydrogen still creates pollutants such as oxides of nitrogen when burned in air rather than pure oxygen.)
add up the costs in shipping oil around the planet. not cheap. the real benefit is that oil is portable once extracted.
Actually, shipping anything (including oil) on a large scale is incredibly cheap. Shipping oil, or even gasoline, is oconsiderably cheaper than shipping equivalent energy densities of hydrogen. (Not to mention that when shipping crude oil, you're shipping much more than energy - you're shipping everything that can be made from oil, too: Asphalt, plastics, petrochemicals and all their derivatives, etc. Look around your desk - much of what you see was sloshing around in an oil tanker not long ago.)
To sum it up: Using hydrogen as a large-scale fuel is just flat stupid, but there are enough idiots that believe the propaganda that it's "the perfect fuel" that we'll be fighting off their ignorance (or worse yet, paying for it) for years.
although it has used DOS as a poor man's boot loader
A friend of mine used to say, "DOS isn't really an operating system, but it's a damn fine program loader!" Pretty accurate, really.
(Program loaders were common back in the early minicomputer days before many computers had the resources to afford luxuries like an OS.)
Although few people here know it, Novell's file sharing protocol, NCP, kicks serious butt. It is probably by far the best file-sharing protocol on the planet for serious production use. (there's some interesting stuff in the works, but at present development rates, it'll be years before its as robust and fast as NCP.
The architecture of NCP is vastly superior to SMB or even NFS - NFSv4 will finally have some of the killer WAN features that NCP had in 1993. The protocol, is lean, elegant, performance-optimized, and engineered to work in the real world in ways others haven't ever bothered to think through. It pretty much had to be that way, considering it was designed to run on '286s.
Case in point: NetWare won a shootout I conducted in 1994 to pick the best file-sharing system on which to deploy an emergency oil spill response system (be in full communication with Houston from anywhere in the world within 15 minutes of hitting the ground, with no computer guys for hundreds of miles!) The data link was over an Inmarsat satellite telephone - horrible latency with the bird in geosynchronous orbit. Everything was on PCs, and file sharing was mandatory to support Microsoft Mail and I included NetWare just for political reasons, expecting it to get creamed by one of the NFSes from NetManage, FTP Software, or Sun.
Readers' Digest Version: NetWare smoked everyone so bad, I thought it must just be that all PC NFSs were bad - but the same thing happened with a Unix box over such a high latency link. I dug into it, talking with some of the Novel protocol jocks, and we identified several things that made it even faster, which they added in the next release. NetWare flat flew, NFS was unusable. I was sold on the superiority of NCP, and I think that's still true today.
Good engineering still wins. As a longtime Unix bigot, I even developed a respect for NetWare, and how little server resources it needed to support a serious number of clients. NetWare is arguably not a real OS, but there's nothing faster for serving up files and printing, and sometimes, that's all the job is. (Sadly, I haven't worked with NetWare in several years. Its only problem back then was that it was an order of magnitude more difficult to manage than it had any right to be. Much like Linux in that regard...)
Services for Unix's Gateway for NFS is going to make me a happy man this year.
At least until you realize what colossal Microsoft single points of failure you've introduced into your environment with SFU and/or Microsoft DFS....
(This may have changed with XP, I haven't checked, but I doubt it. It was definitely true with W2K.)
For Linux/Unix/BSD, something better than NFS is really required - NFS sucks (security? etc.)
While I couldn't agree more that something better is required, NFS is quite good (esp, v3 and v4).
It's also important to remember (or learn) that authentication is NOT a function of NFS - that is done elsewhere. Most people just use garden-variety NIS, which is totally insecure, but ubiquitous and interoperable. NFS can operate securely (Kerberos or whatever else you want, it's pluggable), but most people choose not to, either out of laziness or ignorance. (Although Sun hasn't made secure operation as easy as it should have, either...)
I think NIS is the best open source solution for Linux. NIS+ server code for Linux doesn't exist yet, but the client code does...
NIS+ is a truly elegant architecture, in many ways, what AD should have been. It's far superior to AD, LDAP, or any other X.500-derived directory - that ISO/OSI brain damage is just too deep to let X.500's ilk be easily used in the real world.
Unfortuantely, Sun really botched its attempt to get NIS+ accepted, for several very good reasons:
1) Although the directory itself was incredibly impressive, and worked very well, there were NO administrative tools usable by mere mortals. I was a "Network Ambassador" at Sun at the time NIS+ was attempting to make inroads, and I can tell you that even amongst that elite group, not 1 in 50 was capable of setting up and properly administering NIS+ in a configuration suitable for enterprise use. Some things were just impossible, like recovering from a lost root key: You just had to rebuild everything from scratch. Secure, but hardly practical. This inordiante complexity may well be why there's still no Linux NIS+ server (besides the fact that one would be pointless now...)
2) There was no good migration plan from NIS to NIS+, and no way to keep the two in sync: it was pretty much an all-or-nothing scenario, at least for the Unix boxes. Not surprisingly, lacking Microsoft's arm-twisting ability, all but a handful of Sun's customers chose to pass NIS+ by, no matter how good it was.
3) Sun tried hard, but didn't make adopting NIS+ sweet enough for IBM and HP, who at one time had "committed" to putting NIS+ into their Unix OSes. Unfortunately, the combination of NIS+ being perceived as "Sun's" and its underwhelming adoption even solid Sun accounts (due to reason #1 above) led to its not being considered a serious contender.
4) If you really know what you're doing, it's possible to build a hierarchical multi-domain name/directory service using NIS, although I only know of one company (a Fortune 20 former employer) that's ever actually put this in production enterprise-wide. All the capabilities are there, it's just that very few people bother to figure out how NIS really works. We eventually wound up replacing regular NIS with a security-enhanced superset NIS (and appropriately modified utilities) of our own design, where all appropriate changes at a higher level filtered down to the lower domains, and each domain only had to administer its own portion of the namespace.
Sad, but I'd say NIS+ is pretty much completely irrelevant now.
Microsoft and AD have won this battle so far, but it may once again be the unlikely knight Samba that will save the day and turn the tide. We'll see.
P.S.: Side note to comment 1 above: This is just one in a long line of times Sun has developed extremely impressive core architectures and failed in the marketplace. (NIS+, SunNet Manager, Jini, Jiro, and even Java itself, to some degree...) The fallacious assumption is that the elegant core is all that's required, and that dealing with pesky details like administration, management, or writing apps that take advantage of the elegant plumbing can be left as an excercise for the customer, not something worthy of Sun's time and attention. When will they learn?!
Novell's ConsoleOne is probably the best thing on the market today, although iPlanet has some very good stuff, too. Actually, Microsoft's ActiveDirectory is quite a nice directory, but of course, poisoned in such a way as to pretty much ensure that if you use it at all, your master servers will be AD, and all your administration will have to be done from AD, preventing you from using open standards effectively and marginalizing truly open systems. (This is "embrace and extend" at its sleaziest.)
.NET, and AD is one powerful way MS is going to continue to shove competitors off into the ditch. (...and a big reason why I and many others think the .GNU project is a BAD idea. Never play to your enemies strength.)
Also, don't forget the metadirectory approach as a valid one for trying to manage LDAP and other directories: Ganymede is the only open source project in this space that's much good, and it's starting to look fairly capable.
Still, you get what you pay for: If you're making directory services a core part of your IT strategy (not a bad idea, but realize there are other approaches now, with Java, XML, etc.), it's worth buying the real stuff from Novell or iPlanet. Unfortunately, there's been little open source work in this area: if the open source products work at all (many don't), they don't scale and lack important features.
That's too bad, because tying together things like MSWallet,
GEOS *was* cool - I still think it's the most impressive single hack I've ever seen. The 286 version was a much later derivative: the original version put a whole GUI/Windowing environment and a decent set of basic apps (Word processor, spreadsheet, etc.) on a Commodore 64!
;-) )
That's right, a window system/OS analog and apps all in 64 KILObytes of main memory. Damn impressive hack.
It wasn't just for show, either: I actually used it to turn out all the papers, reports, etc. I wrote my senior year in college. (Now I'm dating myself...
MS didn't give IE away they just made it part of the windows tax.
That's NOT what they said under oath in court: For those of you doing the Internet long enough to remember, you may recall that MS wasn't up to writing a browser of their own to challenge Netscape: So instead, they decided to buy one (or actually, steal one, as you'll see in a moment.)
The only thing that was even close to being a Netscape competitor in those days was the original NCSA Mosaic code, which was spun off for commercialization by UIUC(.edu) as a company called Spyglass. Spyglass tried unsuccessfully for a while to land big buyers in hopes of competing with Netscape, but their code wasn't nearly so good as the Mozilla crowds' (back before Mozillla meant open source...) Finally, they landed the biggest fish of them all, Microsoft: They struck a deal with Microsoft to be the Microsoft browser: with backing and volume like that, they couldn't lose! Spyglass poured millions into develpoment and features that Microsoft wanted in the product - they knew they'd get their money back because the contract with Microsoft guaranteed them a percentage cut of every copy sold.
But Microsoft NEVER SOLD A BROWSER! Instead, it simply became "part of the operating system" (avoiding having to pay Spyglass was one of the biggest reasons BillG wanted to claim this.)
There was, of course, a law suit about this, which Microsoft won by swearing that since IE was an integral part of the OS, and not something that was even possible to buy separately, they owed Spyglass nothing for the millions of copies of their code that they distributed: Since they had'nt sold any IE they owed no royalties! Microsoft won leaving Spyglass with nothing for all its hard work and destitute to the point that they finally had to sell out to OpenTV in the hopes of becoming a niche browser for set-top boxes...
None of this pay as you stuff or Apple proprietary crap. I want to ba able to connect it to my networks at home and work - seamlessly.
>heh. Tell Linksys, Lucent (or whatever company they've spun their wireless stuff into), Dell, etc. that 802.11 is Apple Proprietary. They'll tell you it isn't. AirPort(tm) may be Apple's trademark, and all the nifty Mac Gui stuff to configure it is proprietary, but I assure you that Macs with AirPort can use normal 802.11x access points, and PC's with cards can use AirPort Acess points, both with a minimum of fuss.
The Apple, Dell, Lucent, Cisco Aironet, Buffalo, and possibly others are exactly the same units, all built by the same company and OEM'ed under the different names. They all interoperate flawlessly.
If L > 0, the data will be copied. ;)
> Perhaps you could define L?
In other words, whether or not the data will be copied has nothing whatever to do with the formula. That sounds about right.
I'm not surprised - "In Six Days" was available in Oz for well over a year before I could get a copy here. Apparently, this one is embargoed too...
I will be brief, because I really don't have the time to fully address the truckload of logical fallacies in your post:
... In other words, that in the distant past, there once existed an original life form and that this life form gave rise to all subsequent life forms
There are scientists who are creationists,but this is not reasonable basis for assuming that Creationism is valid.
Of *course* Creationism is a valid theory, both as science and human thought about the realities of the universe. But Creation cannot be circumscribed by science, for the Creator encompasses science, not the other way around. Creation even fits all the available evidence far better than evolution. (It is despised by many, though, because it implies that naturalism is not the measure of all things.) Niether theory can be proved or disproved by scientific means - there are some things that science can not tell us. Sorry to break that harsh reality to you, but "Evolutionism" is a religious worldview with a far higher percentage of "unreasonable fundamentalists" than any religion that believes in a Creator...
Next Mistake:Straw Man
This is a convenient, but wholly unacceptable dodge used over and over by evolutionists. This is NOT a straw man - it strikes at the very heart of the debate: Since Evolutionists flatly reject the notion that life was "created", the only alternative then left to them is that life somehow spontaneously generated on its own. Evolutionists (such as yourself) now routinely try to limit the scope of evolution to what happened on Earth *after* life somehow magically appeared, ignoring the inconvenient fact that this logic requires it to have, in fact, originated somehow, somewhere, at some point in the past. The reason this is happening is that even evolutionary scientists recognize the folly of claiming life came from non-life, especially in a universe that's not nearly old enough, even using the most generous estimates. This is why many evolutionists now claim life on Earth had to come from elsewhere (the ridiculous panspermia argument) - the Earth simply isn't nearly old enough (niether is anywhere else, but that's beside the point...) This is a cowardly and disingenuous dodge, because it still doesn't address that crucial development of the first living thing, it simply attempts to shift it offstage under the cover of smoke and mirrors, declaring any discussion about the real origin of life "off-limits".
That's funny.I guess they never heard about these. [gate.net]In fact, they must not be very aware of modern medical and bilogical sciences in general.
Not at all true. Spend a little time doing reading up even on your own evolutionary sources, and you'll find there are a number of very substantial and very fundamental problems with this idea. Most particularly, there is the fundamental problem that mutations result in a *decrease* in the amount of information present, not the creation of new information, which is what evolutionary theory requires. The site you reference in essence gapes in awe at the changes that can be wrought in morphology by twiddling the genetic knobs, while leaving entirely unanswered the foundational question of the mechanism that could have created the knobs in order for them to be available to twiddle. Another aspect that evolutionists conveniently gloss over is that DNA/genome mapping produces relationships between organisms that *simply cannot be* if the fossil record is granted any validity at all. A great many scientists would throw up an incredible ruckus if DNA were used as an ironclad determiner of evolutionary relationships...
A great example of this can indeed be found at Do-While Jones Science Against Evolution web site: I could recommend several, but one article that gives a good high-level overview and hits to the point here is "Stoneage Mutant Mammal Turtles", discussing some of the difficulties that evolution would have to overcome in order for reptiles to grow breasts and make the transition to mammals. The number of significant, non-trivial morphological and *functional* changes that have to be made *simultaneously* in order to even pretend this could happen should be enough to convince even the most closed-minded evolutionist that perhaps he should entertain the possibility that perhaps evolution cannot produce what we see around us.
Next Mistake:A revisiting of the first fallacious statement by citing John Ashton's book, In Six Days.
Your argument seems to be that faith and origins cannot be related, except by the truly ridiculous leap of faith necessary to belive life spontaneously derived from dead stuff. This is ridiculous. The fact that some of the 50 scientists whose essays are in "In Six Days" find their evolutionary views in line with their views of faith should not be surprising, except to those that summarily dismiss both anything outside the natural world and the existence of any spiritual dimension to man. The quote you slam is dead-on: Some people choose to extend a little faith in the unseen as an alternative to the inevitable alternative that life is indeed meaningless. If you believe (or even want to believe) in the very concept of "good", then you are ultimately forced to recognize God. The 20th century was filled with dreary philosophers that all started with the premise that God could not exist and then (correctly) reached the only logical conclusion they could from that starting point: the same one Dostoevsky stated as, "If God does not exist, then everything is permitted."
Next Mistake:Behe of all people?Is this a reference or a joke?
Not at all. Evolutionists don't *like* Behe, but that doesn't affect the fact that his observations are correct, and supported by the data. Irreducible complexity is a serious problem for evolutionists, one they try to ignore or ridicule, rather than address. The chances against any single aspect of an irreducibly complex system arising is astronomical, the chances against them all arising at the same time, in the same place, in the only possible correct arrangement for function, advantage, and the sustenance of life, (not to mention adaptive advantage) is well and truly ZERO.
Odd that Behe has never published a single technical paper for peer review....
I was not aware that was a requirement for truth... Seriously, this is an ad hominem attack on Behe and his credibility. His academic credentials are not in question, he is quite well-qualified to do all the things he has done. The simple fact that he is a Fellow at the prestigious Discovery Institute should carry some weight relative to his academic standing. Behe could well have chosen to publish his findings in places where they would have been peer-reviewed. He chose not to because he's smart enough to know that no challenge to evolutionary dogma is permitted by the Church of Evolution. (I think it's telling that in your link to a review of his book, the author of the review lets his bias show so freely by dismissing Behe simply because his book was published by the same house that published "The Bell Curve". That book was universally hated by PC academia, but the science on which it is based holds up well under any objective evaluation, and the authors' motives are clearly (if one bothers to read the book) anti-racist. This is the whole problem with today's emasculated Politically Correct academia: NO deviation from the official party line is EVER tolerated. The only absolute allowed is that there is no absolute but that one. Funny how "tolerance" works in academia today...)
and as far as his book goes, well, Behe offers no general laws, models, or explanations for how design happens, no testable predictions, and no possible way to falsify his hybrid evolution/ID hypothesis. He is simply claiming that design is a fact that is easily detectable in biochemical systems.
You don't seem to get it, do you? There is a fundamental difference in *worldview* at issue here. Yours states that *all things* must be explainable by science. Behe's (and mine) is that there is ample evidence for intelligent design in the Creation we see all around us. The irreducible complexity of biochemical interactions is just one example of many millions. (The clear implication (to those of us that refuse to wear blinders) is that there *is* something beyond what science can tell us, and that the evidence points to the existence of a Creator. A bit more thoughtful reflection on that point will convince one that this must be an omnipotent and omniscient Creator ("Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise", to quote the hymnist...)
As THE ONLY POSSIBLE objective standard of Truth, God cannot be modeled, falsified, or explained by laws other than His own. But not all will open their eyes: Pilate asked his famous question, "What is Truth?" with Truth standing right in front of him...
All in all, this post did not address the original question,which was (to paraphrase) Why is it that,when discussing anything even vaguely related to evolution,Creationists feel the need to spout their psuedo-science?
First of all, it's not pseudo-science. There is some very bad "Creationist" science. There is some equally bad "Evolutionist" scince, much of which is sadly now taken as dogma rather than open to question. Niether kind is defensible. There is a vast array of fast-growing sceince that support the Creationist perspective. Open your mind.
Real science argues for Creation far more forcefully than it argues for evolution. In the not too distant future, evolution will be relgated to the dustbin of history and laughed at as the prime example of how science can go so far astray from anything even remotely supported by the evidence.
Evolution is a self-admittedly anti-supernatural worldview, rather than a valid theory of origins.
Science is one way of getting at truth, but it is the height of hubris to think that all truth is circumscribed by science.
It matters *where* your redundancy is.
At least one firm in the World Trade Center had what they thought was a very safe backup procedure: Their data center in one tower was backed up to the second. In their minds anything that would take out *both* towers would obliterate Manhattan, and therefore was considered too remote to worry about...