OK, so you - by one measure - artificially magnify the winning margin (it that really a positive?!), but :
1) Who needs it - other countries do just fine allowing the public to vote directly for their leaders
2) It disenfranchises a massive portion of the US public. Unless you live in a swing state it's pointless to vote since it's not going to make any difference. A democrat living in a republican majority state (or vice versa) effectively has zero say in the national elections; there was a time (taxation without representation) when American actually cared about stuff like that!
No - what I's saying is this is a non-story. It's mildly amusing, but it tells us nothing about WikiPedia that WikiPedia hasn't already extremely explicity told us about itself.
The way the story is presented is as-if this circularly self-referential "verification" exposes a flaw in WikiPedia, but it doesn't. WikiPedia is just applying their usual standard of verifyable rather than truthful, which has always been the case - hardly "news for nerds".
If anything this exposes a flaw in the regular media who likely would claim to shoot for the truth but have been caught copying from a source that explicity says it does not!
***
Of course it would be nice if WikiPedia did strive for the truth, but I'm not sure that's really possible. Does something like the Encyclopedia Britannica actually do any better? Do they actually dig up the guy's birth certificate to check his legal name, or do they in fact just get the information from some other source. Maybe they got it from the guy himself who decided to adopt some middle name without it actually being on his birth certificate - what's the truth about his name, then? If you havn't fact checked it on his birth certificate then how can you say that's his legal name rather than a nom-de-plume, or some crap someone found on the internet for that matter?
I think WikiPedia's verifyable basis of admission is actually a strength rather than a weakness - they don't claim to be authoritive unlike other sources that do but really arn't. At least with WikiPedia the correction cycle is extremely fast so if there is evidence of anything being false it can be corrected rather than being frozen in print for 10 years.
Not only that, but I guess they think it's criminal to read your child a bedtime story.
Maybe they should add warning labels on the covers of books, especially childrens books that are liable to be read aloud.
"This book may not be read aloud."
Of course there's that inconvenient "fair use" aspect of copyright law, which one might hope would cover things like actually reading books you've bought, or having someone else read them to you.
It's been pointed out on/. a number of times before, so I'm not going to dig up the link, but WikiPedia explicitly states that their standard of inclusion is not truthfulness but verifiability - and they are acknowledging the difference. Of course it's rather amusing when the truthless but verifyable (i.e. printed elsewhere) fact originated on WikiPedia itself, but it doesn't reflect a weakness in WikiPedia that you may interpret it to; this is the way that WikiPedia is meant to work (presumably for the simple reason that verifyability as defined is objective, whereas the absolute truth is much harder to nail down - who determines it?!).
I on the other hand worry about why my teacher couldn't supply me with anything thing other than a "trust us this works."
You expect too much of a high school teacher... I've heard horror tales of teachers teaching Lamarckian ideas like giraffes necks getting longer because they were stretching for high-up leaves, then these long necks getting passed on to their young.... WRONG!
If you really cared about the subject you'd not live your whole life in ignorance because of a crappy high school teacher who couldn't answer your questions.
Just because two animals have similar DNA doesn't make them related. Just because Firefox and Internet Explorer have similar code in certain areas doesn't mean that they have a common ancestor. They both have for loops, if loops, while loops, etc. but they are not descended from the same code base.
Sure, and two novels by different authors are bound to have a whole lot of words, probably word pairs and triplets for that matter, in common. However, if two books, whose authors claimed never to have seen each others work had a whole paragraph that was identical, what would you think? What if a whole chapter was identical - would you still believe they were not related?
This is what we're talking about with DNA... chapters, not individual words or for loops. For example, you may not like to believe we're related to chimpanzees, but given that our DNA (some billions of nucleotides) is 96% the same, the likelyhood of us not being extrememly closely/recently related is essentially zero. For you to assert that we're not related to chimps would be like buying two 100 page books, whose first 96 pages are identical, and asserting that the books are unrelated, or if your prefer comparing the many gigabytes of source code for one browser and another and finding that 96% of the functions are identical, yet you still believing that they were developed independently!
When it comes down to it, science is really just a serious of guesses that lead to a logical conclusion. The more things we find that support those guesses, the more we believe them. And then when something challenges those guesses, we ignore the challenge.
I doubt too many scientific theories came from sheer guesswork (not the most productive way to come up with working theories - sweat and research work better!), not that it really matters...
Where you are wrong - and this is **THE** key to the scientific method - is what happens when a experimental outcome doesn't match that predicted by a theory. The "challenge" is never ignored - the theory is either abandoned as wrong or fixed if it can be. This "theorize then verify" is the heart of the scientific method, and what differentiates science from non-science. Anyone can come up with theories, but unless you are willing to make predictions based on your theory, and abandon the theory if you are wrong, then you are NOT a scientist, nor would your work be accepted by any other scientist.
That works for elevators (lifts to you limeys) too.
Got a buddy at work that way - better yet he was in the elevator with me, and I ripped a huge one equisitely timed as I was stepping out smiling at him and the doors closing behind me.
I can recall him shouting "you bastard! I'll get you for this!" - but in a tone that implicitly acknowledged he'd been pwned.:-)
Evolution tends to add complexity, not remove it. Life evolved single cellular life first, then (a VERY long time later) multi-cellular life, then the higher order species. You can prove this by looking at the fossil record - the further you go back in time the simpler species become.
I'm not sure where you get the impression that animals have gotten less complex with time/macroevolution, rather than more complex! Not only does it fly in the face of the facts, but it goes against reason... an incremental change could in general be an addition or a change/removal of something that is already there, and in the most general case adding or changing something is more likely to be beneficial or non-detrimental than making a random change to something that ia already working.
I wouldn't be so sure about your assertion that dogs don't have any DNA for gills (not that Walrus's have them - you do realize they are an air-breathing mammal, right?) - do you realize what ears evolved from in the first place... gills! This is the way evolution works... things that are useful evolve to become more useful. A gill on an animal that is living a semi-aquatic life (mud crawlers etc - the type of life that first emerged from the oceans) has an useful side effect as a structural appendage that necessarily picks up air pressure variations (sound)... Since there's no more evolutionary pressure for a gill on a land animal to extract oxygen from air, it's free to evolve in the next-most beneficial/non-detrimental direction of being an auditory predator/prey detector.
For your information the fossil record shows whales (also deep divers) having made the land-water transition, and back again, more than once!
You misunderstood what I was saying about DNA verifying common ancestors indicated by the fossil record... To clarify, what I meant was that the fossil record may indicate two modern day species to have a common ancestor (e.g. horse and elephant have an certain common ancestor - I think they're related - too lazy to check), so you can then verify that by checking the DNA of these modern species and would expect to find they have a comon portion representing this common ancestry (and you could then estimate how long ago they diverged based on assumptions of typical rates of mutations).
You don't have a clue what you are talking about with bacteria "breeding with bacteria of the same species"... bacteria are asexual - they don't breed with each other! Doh!
The distinction between there being no god, with nature functioning according to it's own mechanical laws, and there being a god who set up those laws but is otherwise hands-off is rather moot. That is more like philosophy.
I'm not sure that science will ever discover the true "origin" of the universe (and any precursors) since a) it may not have one ("origin" only makes sense in the context of time, yet space-time itself is getting created and destroyed), and b) it would seem to have to be an infinite regress of "and what came before THAT?...". Maybe we will come to a more profound understanding, or maybe one day we'll just have to say that some basic universe-spawning laws of nature are timeless and have always existed, and you may as well call them the creation of god if that pleases you to do so!
The evidence of macro evolution is all around us, but before getting into that let's just note that micro evolution and macro evolution (notwithstanding the distinction - speciation - you're attempting to make) are the same thing.
It makes no sense to say that you believe in microevolution (i.e. that a species may evolve to become bigger/smaller, faster, furrier, or whatever, but that there is some magical force that prevents microevolution very specifically from affecting anything related to the reproductive process (from mundane issues of what you're attracted to all the way to DNA compatability - two DNA varieties still being similar enough to allow fertilization and produce a viable baby/adult)..
Say we have two islands, each with a population of dogs, but with very different conditions that cause them - via "microevolution" to evolve differntly on each island. If you believe in microevolution then presumably you have no problem in accepting than in the right circumstances the dogs on one (snowy/cold) island might evolve into something similar to say a husky, while on the other island (where the major foodsource lives in narrow underground burrows) they evolve into something similar to, say a bald daschund. But these are still the same species, right, so no problem...
The trouble is that speciation (a divergence of one species into two or more) is caused by nothing more profound than not being able to interbreed... If two populations (such as those populations of dogs on islands A & B) are able to interbreed then their partially-diverged DNA can intermix and they are still on the same branch of the evolutionary tree. If, however, those subpopulations have genetically diverged enough that they can no longer sucessfully interbreed this means there will be no more intermixing of their DNA and each population has therefore now become a seperate branch on the evolutionary tree... one species of dogs may eventually lose it's legs altogether (the daschund already almost did) and end up with vestigal legs like a snake, while the other may increasingly take to the water and eventually develop an ability to deep dive like a walrus. Whatever - the point being that there is no going back after losing the ability to inderbreed - it is a point of genetic divergence - a branch on the evolutionary tree - the point of creation of new species, however close they will intially appear at that point.
So all you need for speciation, aka macro evolution, is to lose the ability to interbreed, which just means that genetic changes have been accumulating in one population to genes that affect compatability with respect to breeding as opposed to affecting genes that affect size, hair, or anything else. Random changes of course are not selective, so there is nothing stopping this from happening, so it does. Subpopulations DO drift apart and lose the ability to interbreed.
The process of macroevolution - speciation at every possible stage of pre and post speciation divergence is all around us! Look at current single species that have evolved sub-populations that hardly ever interbreed (or that are geographically isolated and therefore never can) : forest elephants vs plains elephants, lions vs tigers (historically classified as seperate species, but can in fact still interbreed but rarely do in the wild), different human races for that matter, or how about species that have only just genetically diverged (as we can prove via DNA analysis) like horses and donkies due to *just* having lost the ability to interbreed (horse+donkey offspring is a mule, which is sterile - no more DNA mixing for him!) , or ones - varieties of apes, say - that are slightly more distantly diverged. Look also at the fossil record - the tree of life - where we can trace modern species back to common ancestors via the fossil record then PROVE the shared heritage via DNA analysis!
If you want to see macroevolution on a faster timescale as opposed to the "snapshot in time" of slow-breeding species, then look at populations of bacteria in the laboratory.
If you're rational then you don't even need any proof (not that it isn't abundantly plentiful) of evolution -- it's just a logical consequence of DNA and natural variation. Similarly if you accept that bodies attract each other due to gravitational force, then it'd be a bit absurd to demand proof that a dropped apple will fall (not that you really need that either), or if you accept the axioms of mathematics then to require proof that if you add 2 apples to 3 apples you really will have the predicted 5!
If you want proof of evolution and can't find it, then I have to ask where you are looking or what you are looking for! In every conceivable place you look for evidence of evolution you will find it, from the fossil record, from comparing DNA of any species, from the variety of species around us at every stage of speciation (about to diverge, just-diverged, long-diverged), from applying the same mindless "make random changes, throw away the losers" "algorithm" in areas such as aircraft wing design or playing checkers...
I really have to ask - what does evolution predict you will see in the past, present or future (experimental outcome) that you in fact do not see?! Where are you looking for evidence of evolution and not finding it?!!
Sure, science isn't in a position to say what can happen, just what is expected to happen given past observation (and accordingly distilled scientific theories), but given that current scientific theories (by way of being current) are compatible with all scientific observation to date, that at least rules out anything other than natural law having bee en responsible for anything reliably observed to date... Of course it *could* all change tomorrow!
The trouble with this line of thought if you're religious and want to keep alive (and compatible with science) the idea of a non-impotent god, is that most religions don't just believe in a supernatural god that may occasionally intervene in a back alley miracle when science wasn't watching.. they also believe in the dualistic mind/spirit-body with a mind/spirit that can overcome the laws of nature to exercise "free will". Unfortunately the action of neurons and motor control is no once-in-a-blue-moon occurence that science could plausibly have missed - it's an everyday occurence occuring 24x7 in the head/body of every scientist (and everyone else) as well as under the microscope of every researcher. The problem of course of that neurons react accordingly to our biochemical understanding and do not have a mind of their own. There is no "science may have missed it" plausible-deniability option if your belief is that it's some dualistic "you" rather than biochemistry that is in control every time you raise a finger or do anything else... Of course you could ever more refine your notion of what might be outside of the laws of nature (e.g. accept that day to day we're biochemical machines, but that once in a blue moon - when science isn't watching - we may be able to overide that), but in doing so you've already lost the battle.
Science and Religion are different bodies of knowledge, but not mutually exclusive
That's a politically correct lie used to avoid alienating religious folk (maybe even to avoid the cognitive dissonance of alientating yourself if you're a religious pseudo-scientist!).
The fact is that science and religion really are, in at least one very core area, mutually exclusive.
If something happens then it's either happening according to the laws of nature or it's not (maybe it's happening due to the intervention of god, or the flying spaghetti monster). It can't be both. Given that scientists believe that the laws of nature (as revealed by the scientific method) govern EVERYTHING that happens (with major reason - there's never, by definition, been any exception to any scientifically accepted theory), it means that science is incompatible with any notion of god other than a totally impotent one that can have no influence on your life, or anything else.
So, science may be compatible with going to church, living the ten commandments, or whatever else you like to do, but it's not compatible with belief in a god that has any power in any domain covered by a scientific theory.
DNA (which wasn't known at the time that Darwin THEORIZED that something like it must exist) is a FACT.
Given DNA (and natural variation, which goes hand-in-hand with sexual reproduction and a number of other variety-producing mechanisms) you're going to have each generation being similar to, but slightly different from, the preceding one.
One might as well stop there and realize that the discovery of DNA equals the FACT of evolution, but for any creationist numskulls who can't take it the final step, let's note that when my kids (or rather my population's kids) compete with yours then there'll be winners and losers, and we dub the winners to have been "fitter" (better suited to thrive given the prevailing environmental and competetive landscape), as in (preferential) "survival of the fittest".
Maybe the real problem creationists have in accepting evolution as a fact is some PC rejection of the fact that there are winners and losers - those who's genetics give them a leg-up in life? Nah... they are just sore losers who are hung up on the 19thC "Theory of Evolution" tag that was superceded in reality by the discovery of DNA.
Postulating an hereditory method of trait selection, subject to natural variation (as Darwin did) is a THEORY.
The subsequent discovery of the mechanism via which this is achieved, DNA, is a FACT.
So, unless you're still living in the 19th century (as creationists are), science has rather overtaken the "theory" label on this one, notwithstanding that for historical reasons it's still used, just as is Newton's "theory" of gravity.
Dunno about Progress, or the Soyuz for that matter, being low performance... They are dependable workhorses that do the job 10x cheaper and more reliably than the Shuttle. What will replace the Shuttle, and whether it's any better remains to be seem. The new NASA launch vehicle, Ares, sounds like a complete cluster-fuck (simulations show it susceptible to shaking itself apart on the launch pad), so hopfully it'll either be replaced by the skunkworks alternate, or by Obama letting NASA use a DOD rocket instead. Ditto for a crew module - hard to say whether it's as reliable/safe as Soyuz until it actually exists!
Your notion of Progress being obsolete, but European or US alternatesd being better is a bunch of crap. For a start the Eupoean ATV's most critical component, the docking procedure, is based on the Soviet design, and more importantly Progress does the job reliably. The US seems incapable of utilizing the incremental improvement approach of the Japanese or Russia - it's always a matter of redesigning from scratch every time, then wondering why each time the brand new design is full of design problems and overran it's cost estimate due to unforseen problems. By the time the US makes it back to the moon, I'd not be surprised if the Japanese already have a moon buggly production plant up there, and probably a space sex hotel that the Russian's have been ferrying tourists to for a decade before the "innovative" Americans arrive with their own state-of-the-art buggy that craps out after a day.
Ah - right! I'd forgetten that it's already had a successful mission! But let's note how proud Europe is of it, and US comments about it demonstrating a first-rate space capability. Any country capable of developing such a thing (Progress or Jules Verne) obviously isn't overly technically challenged!
Eastern european programmers do tend to dominate things like the Top Coder and Google Code Jam competitions (although a Chinese guy won the latter last year), so there's certainly plenty of talent there. Let's not also forget that they've got things like the unmanned Progress ISS supply ship that we're totally dependent on - something that neither the US, Europe nor anywhere else has to offer.
I wouldn't say Putin was lashing out - the bulk of his response wasn't that Russia doesn't need IT help, it was that help might be better directed to the third world or developing economies that do need it. Of course Dell - being a public company - isn't actually interested in charity - he wants a big paid-for order of computers (maybe at a "helpful" discount. I'm sure Dell's not about to start gifting IT tech to the third world.
Putin wasn't reacting to Dell offering computers so much as Dell suggesting that Russia had a problem with technical talent that needed addressing, which *is* obviously absurd! Even if Russia did have a problem developing IT talent, the solution isn't a big order of Dell computers, even if Dell honestly thinks it is.
I'm all for computers, having started programming back in '77 when a highcool math teacher took the private initiative to take some of us to an after school adult education class to learn programming, then building my own NASCOM-1 Z-80 kit in '78, and so on... I've been a professional programmer for over 25 years, and practically live on the computer at home doing hobbyist programming... So, I couldn't be a stronger advocate for the use and fun of using computers...
That all said, I'd have to go with the traditional computer lab model, preferably not just as a resource for homework research etc, but as a place for schedules hands-on computer lessons as part of the curriculum whether it be programming or even general computer use. I don't really see a useful place for computers in the classroom as part of other lessons, as it seems it would only be a distraction. The "enriched interactive multimedia experience" story-line may sound good at some level, but all it's really going to mean is that time that could have been spent covering and explaining core lesson material is instead spent faffing around with computers, watching videos, dealign with computer probolems etc.
If you want to have some cross-over between computer/programming classes and other lessons, then why not just encourage use of the internet as a research tool for homework assignments, maybe accept (or occasionally require) printed assignments as well as hand writen ones. This sort of approach would give the kids a useful introduction to preactical use of computers, an exposure to programming, but not do so at the expense of turning the core curruculum into am extended multimedia click-fest, and taking attention away from the teacher.
If you do take the opposite approach and bring computers into the classroom, then consider the scale of effort requires to develop computer based courses that are the equal of the textbook based material you currently teach. This sounds more like a mult-year national level effort, rather than something that a few teachers are going to be able to hack together in your own school.
I'd also echo what another poster wrote - don't go it alone! Reseach how other schools are using computers and what actually WORKS. Which schools have seen grades increase rather than decrease as a result of use of computers, and how does that correlate to the way they are using them?
For all effective purposes C++ really *is* a superset of C. The difference between C++ and C is really no more than that between one variant of C and another (C99 vs ANSI C or K&R C), and updating a C code base to use a C++ compiler is also no more of an effort than having to switch from one vendors C compiler to another - just a matter of minor fix-ups and thorough re-testing.
In practical terms C is just as future-proof as C++ since the jump from C to C++ is so minor.
It's not really much different in terms of the #1 and #2 places. TFA seems to lump C & C++ together and gives them 47% vs 28% for Java, whereas that Tiobi list gives a total of 16+10% to C/C++ and 19% to Java.
IOW, in both lists C/C++ is #1, and Java in #2. In one list the C/Java ratio is 47/28 = 1.67, and in the other (16+10)/19 = 1.36.
The big picture is therefore pretty much the same in either case.
Slashdot Mirror
That's got to be the most pathetic incentive scheme I've ever heard of! A chance at a raffle ticket?!!!
How about a scheme where:
1) The employee actually benefits (radical, huh?) if their new product idea is adopted and,
2) The employee doesn't lose out by suggesting new product ideas that the company isn't willing to adopt
So, for example:
1) Large cash bonus or stock options for any new product idea the company wants to develop, and
2) Company reverts rights to undeveloped product ideas back to employee
OK, so you - by one measure - artificially magnify the winning margin (it that really a positive?!), but :
1) Who needs it - other countries do just fine allowing the public to vote directly for their leaders
2) It disenfranchises a massive portion of the US public. Unless you live in a swing state it's pointless to vote since it's not going to make any difference. A democrat living in a republican majority state (or vice versa) effectively has zero say in the national elections; there was a time (taxation without representation) when American actually cared about stuff like that!
No - what I's saying is this is a non-story. It's mildly amusing, but it tells us nothing about WikiPedia that WikiPedia hasn't already extremely explicity told us about itself.
The way the story is presented is as-if this circularly self-referential "verification" exposes a flaw in WikiPedia, but it doesn't. WikiPedia is just applying their usual standard of verifyable rather than truthful, which has always been the case - hardly "news for nerds".
If anything this exposes a flaw in the regular media who likely would claim to shoot for the truth but have been caught copying from a source that explicity says it does not!
***
Of course it would be nice if WikiPedia did strive for the truth, but I'm not sure that's really possible. Does something like the Encyclopedia Britannica actually do any better? Do they actually dig up the guy's birth certificate to check his legal name, or do they in fact just get the information from some other source. Maybe they got it from the guy himself who decided to adopt some middle name without it actually being on his birth certificate - what's the truth about his name, then? If you havn't fact checked it on his birth certificate then how can you say that's his legal name rather than a nom-de-plume, or some crap someone found on the internet for that matter?
I think WikiPedia's verifyable basis of admission is actually a strength rather than a weakness - they don't claim to be authoritive unlike other sources that do but really arn't. At least with WikiPedia the correction cycle is extremely fast so if there is evidence of anything being false it can be corrected rather than being frozen in print for 10 years.
Not only that, but I guess they think it's criminal to read your child a bedtime story.
Maybe they should add warning labels on the covers of books, especially childrens books that are liable to be read aloud.
"This book may not be read aloud."
Of course there's that inconvenient "fair use" aspect of copyright law, which one might hope would cover things like actually reading books you've bought, or having someone else read them to you.
It's been pointed out on /. a number of times before, so I'm not going to dig up the link, but WikiPedia explicitly states that their standard of inclusion is not truthfulness but verifiability - and they are acknowledging the difference. Of course it's rather amusing when the truthless but verifyable (i.e. printed elsewhere) fact originated on WikiPedia itself, but it doesn't reflect a weakness in WikiPedia that you may interpret it to; this is the way that WikiPedia is meant to work (presumably for the simple reason that verifyability as defined is objective, whereas the absolute truth is much harder to nail down - who determines it?!).
I on the other hand worry about why my teacher couldn't supply me with anything thing other than a "trust us this works."
You expect too much of a high school teacher... I've heard horror tales of teachers teaching Lamarckian ideas like giraffes necks getting longer because they were stretching for high-up leaves, then these long necks getting passed on to their young.... WRONG!
If you really cared about the subject you'd not live your whole life in ignorance because of a crappy high school teacher who couldn't answer your questions.
Just because two animals have similar DNA doesn't make them related. Just because Firefox and Internet Explorer have similar code in certain areas doesn't mean that they have a common ancestor. They both have for loops, if loops, while loops, etc. but they are not descended from the same code base.
Sure, and two novels by different authors are bound to have a whole lot of words, probably word pairs and triplets for that matter, in common. However, if two books, whose authors claimed never to have seen each others work had a whole paragraph that was identical, what would you think? What if a whole chapter was identical - would you still believe they were not related?
This is what we're talking about with DNA... chapters, not individual words or for loops. For example, you may not like to believe we're related to chimpanzees, but given that our DNA (some billions of nucleotides) is 96% the same, the likelyhood of us not being extrememly closely/recently related is essentially zero. For you to assert that we're not related to chimps would be like buying two 100 page books, whose first 96 pages are identical, and asserting that the books are unrelated, or if your prefer comparing the many gigabytes of source code for one browser and another and finding that 96% of the functions are identical, yet you still believing that they were developed independently!
When it comes down to it, science is really just a serious of guesses that lead to a logical conclusion. The more things we find that support those guesses, the more we believe them. And then when something challenges those guesses, we ignore the challenge.
I doubt too many scientific theories came from sheer guesswork (not the most productive way to come up with working theories - sweat and research work better!), not that it really matters...
Where you are wrong - and this is **THE** key to the scientific method - is what happens when a experimental outcome doesn't match that predicted by a theory. The "challenge" is never ignored - the theory is either abandoned as wrong or fixed if it can be. This "theorize then verify" is the heart of the scientific method, and what differentiates science from non-science. Anyone can come up with theories, but unless you are willing to make predictions based on your theory, and abandon the theory if you are wrong, then you are NOT a scientist, nor would your work be accepted by any other scientist.
That works for elevators (lifts to you limeys) too.
Got a buddy at work that way - better yet he was in the elevator with me, and I ripped a huge one equisitely timed as I was stepping out smiling at him and the doors closing behind me.
I can recall him shouting "you bastard! I'll get you for this!" - but in a tone that implicitly acknowledged he'd been pwned. :-)
Evolution tends to add complexity, not remove it. Life evolved single cellular life first, then (a VERY long time later) multi-cellular life, then the higher order species. You can prove this by looking at the fossil record - the further you go back in time the simpler species become.
I'm not sure where you get the impression that animals have gotten less complex with time/macroevolution, rather than more complex! Not only does it fly in the face of the facts, but it goes against reason... an incremental change could in general be an addition or a change/removal of something that is already there, and in the most general case adding or changing something is more likely to be beneficial or non-detrimental than making a random change to something that ia already working.
I wouldn't be so sure about your assertion that dogs don't have any DNA for gills (not that Walrus's have them - you do realize they are an air-breathing mammal, right?) - do you realize what ears evolved from in the first place... gills! This is the way evolution works... things that are useful evolve to become more useful. A gill on an animal that is living a semi-aquatic life (mud crawlers etc - the type of life that first emerged from the oceans) has an useful side effect as a structural appendage that necessarily picks up air pressure variations (sound)... Since there's no more evolutionary pressure for a gill on a land animal to extract oxygen from air, it's free to evolve in the next-most beneficial/non-detrimental direction of being an auditory predator/prey detector.
For your information the fossil record shows whales (also deep divers) having made the land-water transition, and back again, more than once!
You misunderstood what I was saying about DNA verifying common ancestors indicated by the fossil record... To clarify, what I meant was that the fossil record may indicate two modern day species to have a common ancestor (e.g. horse and elephant have an certain common ancestor - I think they're related - too lazy to check), so you can then verify that by checking the DNA of these modern species and would expect to find they have a comon portion representing this common ancestry (and you could then estimate how long ago they diverged based on assumptions of typical rates of mutations).
You don't have a clue what you are talking about with bacteria "breeding with bacteria of the same species"... bacteria are asexual - they don't breed with each other! Doh!
The distinction between there being no god, with nature functioning according to it's own mechanical laws, and there being a god who set up those laws but is otherwise hands-off is rather moot. That is more like philosophy.
I'm not sure that science will ever discover the true "origin" of the universe (and any precursors) since a) it may not have one ("origin" only makes sense in the context of time, yet space-time itself is getting created and destroyed), and b) it would seem to have to be an infinite regress of "and what came before THAT? ...". Maybe we will come to a more profound understanding, or maybe one day we'll just have to say that some basic universe-spawning laws of nature are timeless and have always existed, and you may as well call them the creation of god if that pleases you to do so!
The evidence of macro evolution is all around us, but before getting into that let's just note that micro evolution and macro evolution (notwithstanding the distinction - speciation - you're attempting to make) are the same thing.
It makes no sense to say that you believe in microevolution (i.e. that a species may evolve to become bigger/smaller, faster, furrier, or whatever, but that there is some magical force that prevents microevolution very specifically from affecting anything related to the reproductive process (from mundane issues of what you're attracted to all the way to DNA compatability - two DNA varieties still being similar enough to allow fertilization and produce a viable baby/adult)..
Say we have two islands, each with a population of dogs, but with very different conditions that cause them - via "microevolution" to evolve differntly on each island. If you believe in microevolution then presumably you have no problem in accepting than in the right circumstances the dogs on one (snowy/cold) island might evolve into something similar to say a husky, while on the other island (where the major foodsource lives in narrow underground burrows) they evolve into something similar to, say a bald daschund. But these are still the same species, right, so no problem...
The trouble is that speciation (a divergence of one species into two or more) is caused by nothing more profound than not being able to interbreed... If two populations (such as those populations of dogs on islands A & B) are able to interbreed then their partially-diverged DNA can intermix and they are still on the same branch of the evolutionary tree. If, however, those subpopulations have genetically diverged enough that they can no longer sucessfully interbreed this means there will be no more intermixing of their DNA and each population has therefore now become a seperate branch on the evolutionary tree... one species of dogs may eventually lose it's legs altogether (the daschund already almost did) and end up with vestigal legs like a snake, while the other may increasingly take to the water and eventually develop an ability to deep dive like a walrus. Whatever - the point being that there is no going back after losing the ability to inderbreed - it is a point of genetic divergence - a branch on the evolutionary tree - the point of creation of new species, however close they will intially appear at that point.
So all you need for speciation, aka macro evolution, is to lose the ability to interbreed, which just means that genetic changes have been accumulating in one population to genes that affect compatability with respect to breeding as opposed to affecting genes that affect size, hair, or anything else. Random changes of course are not selective, so there is nothing stopping this from happening, so it does. Subpopulations DO drift apart and lose the ability to interbreed.
The process of macroevolution - speciation at every possible stage of pre and post speciation divergence is all around us! Look at current single species that have evolved sub-populations that hardly ever interbreed (or that are geographically isolated and therefore never can) : forest elephants vs plains elephants, lions vs tigers (historically classified as seperate species, but can in fact still interbreed but rarely do in the wild), different human races for that matter, or how about species that have only just genetically diverged (as we can prove via DNA analysis) like horses and donkies due to *just* having lost the ability to interbreed (horse+donkey offspring is a mule, which is sterile - no more DNA mixing for him!) , or ones - varieties of apes, say - that are slightly more distantly diverged. Look also at the fossil record - the tree of life - where we can trace modern species back to common ancestors via the fossil record then PROVE the shared heritage via DNA analysis!
If you want to see macroevolution on a faster timescale as opposed to the "snapshot in time" of slow-breeding species, then look at populations of bacteria in the laboratory.
If you're rational then you don't even need any proof (not that it isn't abundantly plentiful) of evolution -- it's just a logical consequence of DNA and natural variation. Similarly if you accept that bodies attract each other due to gravitational force, then it'd be a bit absurd to demand proof that a dropped apple will fall (not that you really need that either), or if you accept the axioms of mathematics then to require proof that if you add 2 apples to 3 apples you really will have the predicted 5!
If you want proof of evolution and can't find it, then I have to ask where you are looking or what you are looking for! In every conceivable place you look for evidence of evolution you will find it, from the fossil record, from comparing DNA of any species, from the variety of species around us at every stage of speciation (about to diverge, just-diverged, long-diverged), from applying the same mindless "make random changes, throw away the losers" "algorithm" in areas such as aircraft wing design or playing checkers...
I really have to ask - what does evolution predict you will see in the past, present or future (experimental outcome) that you in fact do not see?! Where are you looking for evidence of evolution and not finding it?!!
Sure, science isn't in a position to say what can happen, just what is expected to happen given past observation (and accordingly distilled scientific theories), but given that current scientific theories (by way of being current) are compatible with all scientific observation to date, that at least rules out anything other than natural law having bee
en responsible for anything reliably observed to date... Of course it *could* all change tomorrow!
The trouble with this line of thought if you're religious and want to keep alive (and compatible with science) the idea of a non-impotent god, is that most religions don't just believe in a supernatural god that may occasionally intervene in a back alley miracle when science wasn't watching.. they also believe in the dualistic mind/spirit-body with a mind/spirit that can overcome the laws of nature to exercise "free will". Unfortunately the action of neurons and motor control is no once-in-a-blue-moon occurence that science could plausibly have missed - it's an everyday occurence occuring 24x7 in the head/body of every scientist (and everyone else) as well as under the microscope of every researcher. The problem of course of that neurons react accordingly to our biochemical understanding and do not have a mind of their own. There is no "science may have missed it" plausible-deniability option if your belief is that it's some dualistic "you" rather than biochemistry that is in control every time you raise a finger or do anything else... Of course you could ever more refine your notion of what might be outside of the laws of nature (e.g. accept that day to day we're biochemical machines, but that once in a blue moon - when science isn't watching - we may be able to overide that), but in doing so you've already lost the battle.
Science and Religion are different bodies of knowledge, but not mutually exclusive
That's a politically correct lie used to avoid alienating religious folk (maybe even to avoid the cognitive dissonance of alientating yourself if you're a religious pseudo-scientist!).
The fact is that science and religion really are, in at least one very core area, mutually exclusive.
If something happens then it's either happening according to the laws of nature or it's not (maybe it's happening due to the intervention of god, or the flying spaghetti monster). It can't be both. Given that scientists believe that the laws of nature (as revealed by the scientific method) govern EVERYTHING that happens (with major reason - there's never, by definition, been any exception to any scientifically accepted theory), it means that science is incompatible with any notion of god other than a totally impotent one that can have no influence on your life, or anything else.
So, science may be compatible with going to church, living the ten commandments, or whatever else you like to do, but it's not compatible with belief in a god that has any power in any domain covered by a scientific theory.
DNA (which wasn't known at the time that Darwin THEORIZED that something like it must exist) is a FACT.
Given DNA (and natural variation, which goes hand-in-hand with sexual reproduction and a number of other variety-producing mechanisms) you're going to have each generation being similar to, but slightly different from, the preceding one.
One might as well stop there and realize that the discovery of DNA equals the FACT of evolution, but for any creationist numskulls who can't take it the final step, let's note that when my kids (or rather my population's kids) compete with yours then there'll be winners and losers, and we dub the winners to have been "fitter" (better suited to thrive given the prevailing environmental and competetive landscape), as in (preferential) "survival of the fittest".
Maybe the real problem creationists have in accepting evolution as a fact is some PC rejection of the fact that there are winners and losers - those who's genetics give them a leg-up in life? Nah... they are just sore losers who are hung up on the 19thC "Theory of Evolution" tag that was superceded in reality by the discovery of DNA.
Postulating an hereditory method of trait selection, subject to natural variation (as Darwin did) is a THEORY.
The subsequent discovery of the mechanism via which this is achieved, DNA, is a FACT.
So, unless you're still living in the 19th century (as creationists are), science has rather overtaken the "theory" label on this one, notwithstanding that for historical reasons it's still used, just as is Newton's "theory" of gravity.
Either way, it's gonna be ugly.
Gotta watch it.
Dunno about Progress, or the Soyuz for that matter, being low performance... They are dependable workhorses that do the job 10x cheaper and more reliably than the Shuttle. What will replace the Shuttle, and whether it's any better remains to be seem. The new NASA launch vehicle, Ares, sounds like a complete cluster-fuck (simulations show it susceptible to shaking itself apart on the launch pad), so hopfully it'll either be replaced by the skunkworks alternate, or by Obama letting NASA use a DOD rocket instead. Ditto for a crew module - hard to say whether it's as reliable/safe as Soyuz until it actually exists!
Your notion of Progress being obsolete, but European or US alternatesd being better is a bunch of crap. For a start the Eupoean ATV's most critical component, the docking procedure, is based on the Soviet design, and more importantly Progress does the job reliably. The US seems incapable of utilizing the incremental improvement approach of the Japanese or Russia - it's always a matter of redesigning from scratch every time, then wondering why each time the brand new design is full of design problems and overran it's cost estimate due to unforseen problems. By the time the US makes it back to the moon, I'd not be surprised if the Japanese already have a moon buggly production plant up there, and probably a space sex hotel that the Russian's have been ferrying tourists to for a decade before the "innovative" Americans arrive with their own state-of-the-art buggy that craps out after a day.
Ah - right! I'd forgetten that it's already had a successful mission! But let's note how proud Europe is of it, and US comments about it demonstrating a first-rate space capability. Any country capable of developing such a thing (Progress or Jules Verne) obviously isn't overly technically challenged!
Eastern european programmers do tend to dominate things like the Top Coder and Google Code Jam competitions (although a Chinese guy won the latter last year), so there's certainly plenty of talent there. Let's not also forget that they've got things like the unmanned Progress ISS supply ship that we're totally dependent on - something that neither the US, Europe nor anywhere else has to offer.
I wouldn't say Putin was lashing out - the bulk of his response wasn't that Russia doesn't need IT help, it was that help might be better directed to the third world or developing economies that do need it. Of course Dell - being a public company - isn't actually interested in charity - he wants a big paid-for order of computers (maybe at a "helpful" discount. I'm sure Dell's not about to start gifting IT tech to the third world.
Putin wasn't reacting to Dell offering computers so much as Dell suggesting that Russia had a problem with technical talent that needed addressing, which *is* obviously absurd! Even if Russia did have a problem developing IT talent, the solution isn't a big order of Dell computers, even if Dell honestly thinks it is.
I'm all for computers, having started programming back in '77 when a highcool math teacher took the private initiative to take some of us to an after school adult education class to learn programming, then building my own NASCOM-1 Z-80 kit in '78, and so on... I've been a professional programmer for over 25 years, and practically live on the computer at home doing hobbyist programming... So, I couldn't be a stronger advocate for the use and fun of using computers...
That all said, I'd have to go with the traditional computer lab model, preferably not just as a resource for homework research etc, but as a place for schedules hands-on computer lessons as part of the curriculum whether it be programming or even general computer use. I don't really see a useful place for computers in the classroom as part of other lessons, as it seems it would only be a distraction. The "enriched interactive multimedia experience" story-line may sound good at some level, but all it's really going to mean is that time that could have been spent covering and explaining core lesson material is instead spent faffing around with computers, watching videos, dealign with computer probolems etc.
If you want to have some cross-over between computer/programming classes and other lessons, then why not just encourage use of the internet as a research tool for homework assignments, maybe accept (or occasionally require) printed assignments as well as hand writen ones. This sort of approach would give the kids a useful introduction to preactical use of computers, an exposure to programming, but not do so at the expense of turning the core curruculum into am extended multimedia click-fest, and taking attention away from the teacher.
If you do take the opposite approach and bring computers into the classroom, then consider the scale of effort requires to develop computer based courses that are the equal of the textbook based material you currently teach. This sounds more like a mult-year national level effort, rather than something that a few teachers are going to be able to hack together in your own school.
I'd also echo what another poster wrote - don't go it alone! Reseach how other schools are using computers and what actually WORKS. Which schools have seen grades increase rather than decrease as a result of use of computers, and how does that correlate to the way they are using them?
For all effective purposes C++ really *is* a superset of C. The difference between C++ and C is really no more than that between one variant of C and another (C99 vs ANSI C or K&R C), and updating a C code base to use a C++ compiler is also no more of an effort than having to switch from one vendors C compiler to another - just a matter of minor fix-ups and thorough re-testing.
In practical terms C is just as future-proof as C++ since the jump from C to C++ is so minor.
It's not really much different in terms of the #1 and #2 places. TFA seems to lump C & C++ together and gives them 47% vs 28% for Java, whereas that Tiobi list gives a total of 16+10% to C/C++ and 19% to Java.
IOW, in both lists C/C++ is #1, and Java in #2. In one list the C/Java ratio is 47/28 = 1.67, and in the other (16+10)/19 = 1.36.
The big picture is therefore pretty much the same in either case.