First off, ID isn't a collection of holes in evolution. That's all you hear from IDers/Creationists because thats really all they have to say. "Evolution is broken because of ___ so God/Guiding Power did it all!" That's not science.
It isn't even a decent argument. Maybe the "Intelligent Designer" didn't understand non sequitur:)
It's terms like "Scientific Facts" that muddy the waters and make the ID proponents look like they're winning debates on TV (at least to people who don't really understand the scientific process) when in fact they're just spouting out jibberish left and right.
Not even jibberish conected to biology. Phrases like "Evolution is a theory not a fact" are about playing games with the semantics of the words in question. Pushing the idea of theory meaning "opinion", when it also means "supposition to explain group of phenomena" and "underlying principles of body of facts".
Many also seem to think that if they can find a tiny little hole in the evolution of a species then Evolution can't be correct because it can't account for the hole.
Again not understanding that a tiny hole would imply that a small amendment is more likely than a radical rethink. Even if a radical rethink were needed there is no reason that this would automatically support ID type ideas.
The students need to know the difference between hypothesis, theory, and fact (something that creationists like to manipulate in the media). If the teacher says "evolution is a scientific theory that we have evidence of but can not prove enough to raise it to the level of scientific fact" then the teacher also needs to say "gravity is a scientific theory that we have evidence of but can not prove enough to raise it to the level of scientific fact".
The idea of raising a "theory" to a "fact" is nonsense. Something obvious through consulting a dictionary.
Yep, and I'd stake money that "thousand" is actually shepherd-speak for "a hugely vast number that my training has not prepared me to comprehend":
As well as being a difficult number to represent with the numbering systems around in Europe and West Asia at the time. It wasn't until much more recently that the "Arabic" system of positional notation was introduced.
I don't believe the issue is whether agents can emerge from "random processes" or whether they require intelligent design. I believe the issue is what that intelligent 'thing' is. The Creationists believe that 'thing' is their (emphasis is important) God. The scientists believe that 'thing' is nature itself.
It's perfectly possible that this may be just the same 'thing' described differently. Assuming all scientists are interestin the 'thing' in the first place.
The biggest problem with ID is that it doesn't follow the scientific method. The result for these unfortuante schoolkids is that they take the first 3 weeks of class to learn about the scientific method and how wonderful it is and how it's the foundation of all science, then you throw it away and say "well, except for the origin of species stuff, in that case A Wizard Did It(tm)".
But the ID crowd do not kick up anything like the same amount of fuss when it comes to "origin of the universe" or "origin of the planet"...
This is not only true for christians, but for all religions. There are always very vocal minorities that misuse religion and give it a bad name.
One problem is that only the extremists tend to have the dedication to push their point of view. Not only do moderates not tend to want enforce their beliefs on everyone they also tend to view having a life as being more important than political lobbying.
Be it extreme muslim fundamentalism, christian fundamentalism or whatever.
Christianity, Islam and Judaism are very much 3 variations on the same religion. So it wouldn't be that suprising if they looked very similar when perverted.
Teaching somebody long division is quite different from taking somebody's recently published article about their research of using long divison and handing out copies to those third graders.
Twenty odd years is hardly reacent. It's not even unknown for students to study events from a few decades past as "History".
Should the professor have bought only one 23 year old text book, and make photocopies for every student in the class, do you think that somehow WOULDN'T be violating copyright just because his intent was to teach?
The vast majority of 20 odd year old books are out of print anyway
Customer: No, I'm really concerned. What if the owner of MySQL, Samba, etc. comes after me and says that I don't have a license for their intellectual property? What if they want to charge me a licensing fee (say $699)? Will SCO indemnify me?...
SCO Sales: Don't worry, it they come after anyone it will be us. That's the way the law works...
The GPL is a LICENC/SE. Which is a conditional permission granted by a copyright holder for a third party to distribute, copies of, copyright works. Whereas a contract requires exchange of "consideration". N.B. The GPL is not an EULA. Whilst the GPL is about Copyright law, EULAs claim to be contracts. In some cases attempting to intermix copyright and contract law...
There is no 'al-Qaeda' as I understand it, it's like closing down warez sites; there is no 'Organization of Warez' run by one mastermind.
The problem is do the "intelligence" people actually understand this? This is neither the "cold war", nor some global conspiracy from the plot of a cheap thriller.
Yeah but there is no 'we', you are not participating in the decision. Remember Bliar sees other issues as a slippery slope; notably criticism of the US and Israel. So who will be next ?
Placing any state above critique is a bad idea. Even one with sane and rational leaders.
It never ceases to amaze me the conclusions people jump to, despite having no evidence of their conspiracy theories, and having access to information contrary to the idiocy they're spouting.
One of the most popular of these conspiracy theories involves a global terror network, with a very boring name, lead by a Saudi exile. This "base" appears to be assumed responsible for just about every act of terrorism in the 21st century. Even in the absence of any (credible) evidence or where evidence pointing to other entities is present.
There is a real shortage of Arabic translators in U.S. and British Intelligence so maybe to be safe you better just start shutting down all Arabic web sites.
Maybe they should either learn Arabic or employ people who know it. It's not as if they had this problem with Russian or German...
Bottomline is I fall in the camp that if they were really Al Qaeda website you would have been way better off cracking their codes and reading their mail.
Then moving on to infiltartion and subversion.
Starting a wave of censorship, based on unproven suspicion is just one of the classic signs of a government under attack by insurgents turning in to a repressive police state in a futile effort to counter the insurgency.
Such an action by a government could create an environment where a fair number of citizens want to overthrow the government:)
Communication is a military neccessity--removing your enemy's ability to talk amongst themselves makes your job easier, and theirs alot harder.
Removing one communication channel isn't a good way to go about this. Indeed cutting a communication channel isn't likely to be effective since even if you have disrupted an important channel they know to "switch to backup". If you've disrupted an unimportant channel then you havn't even caused them too many problems. The smaller and less organised the entity in question the easier a radical, but secure, change in communication is likely to be.
One minor little detail that you "conveniently" left out of your definitions - terrorists intentionally target innocents, soldiers don't.
In the real world things are a lot less black and white. Not only are plenty of weapons so indiscriminate that they can hardly be called "targeted". It isn't hard to find cases of "terrorists" specifically targeting police, soldiers or even other terrorists. Nor is it hard to find examples of "soldiers" deliberatly killing civilians. Then you have "special forces", who are soldiers who's job can include killing civilian political leaders. Then you have militiamen acting against an occupying army...
Well, I do not know if the European convention on human rights has stipulations on what is and what is not protected speech, but Web sites used for communication between terrorists for terrorist activities is not protected speech according to U.S. law.
In practice it would probably depend on if the US Government supported the terrorists and/or their aims. It would be suprising if the UK Government were any less hypocritical. Even with the "war on terror" it isn't hard find terrorists which are apparently ignored. Often combined with a reluctance on the part of the MSM to apply the term "terrorist" to people who arn't either Arab or Moslem. (Wonder if any websites supporting Dr Baruch Goldstein are hosted in the US or UK.)
How useful would such planning and organising be to terrorists if the government was observing their communication?
Depends if said government is interested in doing anything to stop then. It's not uncommon for governments to sponsor terrorists or to see to use terrorist attacks for their own ends.
Absolutely!... if he's a walrus. Other species, including human, find they get an advantage from staying mostly monogamus.
Monogamy isn't actually that common at all. Especially amongst mammals, even more so amongst those closely related to humans. Which is probably why when people in the past looked for animal examples to show that monogamy was "natural" the results were avian...
Evolutionary advantages of monogamy include males that protect and teach offspring as well as allowing one of the sexes to search for food while the other sex watches out for the kids.
In quite a few bird species it turns out that the genetic father may not be the the mother's partner. Anyway social animals, which includes humans, often live together in far larger groups...
The human species has never been strictly monogamus that I can tell.
There is the problem that there is a lot of social preasure, including blatant propaganda, pushing human monogamy. If humans were highly inclined to be monogamous this would be redundant.
But it also never mated like walruses.
But behaving like Bonobos (Pan paniscus) is a distinct possibility.
I think M$ will open-source Windows. The base system, that is, not necessarily libraries and very likely not applications. They will open-source Windows because they learned that it is not possible to defeat Linux. It can't be bought out. It can't be stopped. But when they open-source Windows, a lot of development talent will flow from Linux to Windows. One of the selling points of linux will be extinguished.
Open sourcing previously proprietary programs is not always easy. Not only does the source tend to be in a poor format there is also the issue of having to check for anything which might have been "accidentally" pirated.
Open-sourcing Windows will ensure that Windows becomes entrenched as the dominant operating system forever.
Actually it would be a big risk to Microsoft. Not only would there be possible lawsuits, if what they released wasn't in a fit state to be built it could be cherry picked for WINE.
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First off, ID isn't a collection of holes in evolution. That's all you hear from IDers/Creationists because thats really all they have to say. "Evolution is broken because of ___ so God/Guiding Power did it all!" That's not science.
:)
It isn't even a decent argument. Maybe the "Intelligent Designer" didn't understand non sequitur
It's terms like "Scientific Facts" that muddy the waters and make the ID proponents look like they're winning debates on TV (at least to people who don't really understand the scientific process) when in fact they're just spouting out jibberish left and right.
Not even jibberish conected to biology. Phrases like "Evolution is a theory not a fact" are about playing games with the semantics of the words in question. Pushing the idea of theory meaning "opinion", when it also means "supposition to explain group of phenomena" and "underlying principles of body of facts".
Many also seem to think that if they can find a tiny little hole in the evolution of a species then Evolution can't be correct because it can't account for the hole.
Again not understanding that a tiny hole would imply that a small amendment is more likely than a radical rethink. Even if a radical rethink were needed there is no reason that this would automatically support ID type ideas.
The students need to know the difference between hypothesis, theory, and fact (something that creationists like to manipulate in the media). If the teacher says "evolution is a scientific theory that we have evidence of but can not prove enough to raise it to the level of scientific fact" then the teacher also needs to say "gravity is a scientific theory that we have evidence of but can not prove enough to raise it to the level of scientific fact".
The idea of raising a "theory" to a "fact" is nonsense. Something obvious through consulting a dictionary.
Yep, and I'd stake money that "thousand" is actually shepherd-speak for "a hugely vast number that my training has not prepared me to comprehend":
As well as being a difficult number to represent with the numbering systems around in Europe and West Asia at the time. It wasn't until much more recently that the "Arabic" system of positional notation was introduced.
I don't believe the issue is whether agents can emerge from "random processes" or whether they require intelligent design. I believe the issue is what that intelligent 'thing' is. The Creationists believe that 'thing' is their (emphasis is important) God. The scientists believe that 'thing' is nature itself.
It's perfectly possible that this may be just the same 'thing' described differently.
Assuming all scientists are interestin the 'thing' in the first place.
The biggest problem with ID is that it doesn't follow the scientific method. The result for these unfortuante schoolkids is that they take the first 3 weeks of class to learn about the scientific method and how wonderful it is and how it's the foundation of all science, then you throw it away and say "well, except for the origin of species stuff, in that case A Wizard Did It(tm)".
But the ID crowd do not kick up anything like the same amount of fuss when it comes to "origin of the universe" or "origin of the planet"...
This is not only true for christians, but for all religions. There are always very vocal minorities that misuse religion and give it a bad name.
One problem is that only the extremists tend to have the dedication to push their point of view. Not only do moderates not tend to want enforce their beliefs on everyone they also tend to view having a life as being more important than political lobbying.
Be it extreme muslim fundamentalism, christian fundamentalism or whatever.
Christianity, Islam and Judaism are very much 3 variations on the same religion. So it wouldn't be that suprising if they looked very similar when perverted.
Teaching somebody long division is quite different from taking somebody's recently published article about their research of using long divison and handing out copies to those third graders.
Twenty odd years is hardly reacent. It's not even unknown for students to study events from a few decades past as "History".
Should the professor have bought only one 23 year old text book, and make photocopies for every student in the class, do you think that somehow WOULDN'T be violating copyright just because his intent was to teach?
The vast majority of 20 odd year old books are out of print anyway
Should my grade 3 math teacher have paid somebody for teaching us long division?
The way things are going it wouldn't suprise me if a textbook publisher were to try and argue that textbooks should be Pay-Per-View...
Yes, there is a problem of 'eminent domain' where we have already seen Connecticut landowners stripped of their property because a business wanted it.
The way this appears to be going any judge who approves such an order is likely to find the whole town ready to kick him or her out of their house.
Customer: No, I'm really concerned. What if the owner of MySQL, Samba, etc. comes after me and says that I don't have a license for their intellectual property? What if they want to charge me a licensing fee (say $699)? Will SCO indemnify me?...
SCO Sales: Don't worry, it they come after anyone it will be us. That's the way the law works...
The GPL is a contract just like any other.
The GPL is a LICENC/SE. Which is a conditional permission granted by a copyright holder for a third party to distribute, copies of, copyright works.
Whereas a contract requires exchange of "consideration".
N.B. The GPL is not an EULA. Whilst the GPL is about Copyright law, EULAs claim to be contracts. In some cases attempting to intermix copyright and contract law...
There is no 'al-Qaeda' as I understand it, it's like closing down warez sites; there is no 'Organization of Warez' run by one mastermind.
The problem is do the "intelligence" people actually understand this? This is neither the "cold war", nor some global conspiracy from the plot of a cheap thriller.
Yeah but there is no 'we', you are not participating in the decision. Remember Bliar sees other issues as a slippery slope; notably criticism of the US and Israel. So who will be next ?
Placing any state above critique is a bad idea. Even one with sane and rational leaders.
It never ceases to amaze me the conclusions people jump to, despite having no evidence of their conspiracy theories, and having access to information contrary to the idiocy they're spouting.
One of the most popular of these conspiracy theories involves a global terror network, with a very boring name, lead by a Saudi exile. This "base" appears to be assumed responsible for just about every act of terrorism in the 21st century. Even in the absence of any (credible) evidence or where evidence pointing to other entities is present.
There is a real shortage of Arabic translators in U.S. and British Intelligence so maybe to be safe you better just start shutting down all Arabic web sites.
:)
Maybe they should either learn Arabic or employ people who know it. It's not as if they had this problem with Russian or German...
Bottomline is I fall in the camp that if they were really Al Qaeda website you would have been way better off cracking their codes and reading their mail.
Then moving on to infiltartion and subversion.
Starting a wave of censorship, based on unproven suspicion is just one of the classic signs of a government under attack by insurgents turning in to a repressive police state in a futile effort to counter the insurgency.
Such an action by a government could create an environment where a fair number of citizens want to overthrow the government
Communication is a military neccessity--removing your enemy's ability to talk amongst themselves makes your job easier, and theirs alot harder.
Removing one communication channel isn't a good way to go about this. Indeed cutting a communication channel isn't likely to be effective since even if you have disrupted an important channel they know to "switch to backup". If you've disrupted an unimportant channel then you havn't even caused them too many problems.
The smaller and less organised the entity in question the easier a radical, but secure, change in communication is likely to be.
One minor little detail that you "conveniently" left out of your definitions - terrorists intentionally target innocents, soldiers don't.
In the real world things are a lot less black and white. Not only are plenty of weapons so indiscriminate that they can hardly be called "targeted". It isn't hard to find cases of "terrorists" specifically targeting police, soldiers or even other terrorists. Nor is it hard to find examples of "soldiers" deliberatly killing civilians. Then you have "special forces", who are soldiers who's job can include killing civilian political leaders. Then you have militiamen acting against an occupying army...
Well, I do not know if the European convention on human rights has stipulations on what is and what is not protected speech, but Web sites used for communication between terrorists for terrorist activities is not protected speech according to U.S. law.
In practice it would probably depend on if the US Government supported the terrorists and/or their aims. It would be suprising if the UK Government were any less hypocritical.
Even with the "war on terror" it isn't hard find terrorists which are apparently ignored. Often combined with a reluctance on the part of the MSM to apply the term "terrorist" to people who arn't either Arab or Moslem. (Wonder if any websites supporting Dr Baruch Goldstein are hosted in the US or UK.)
How useful would such planning and organising be to terrorists if the government was observing their communication?
Depends if said government is interested in doing anything to stop then. It's not uncommon for governments to sponsor terrorists or to see to use terrorist attacks for their own ends.
Catholics? Anti-Sex? I was under the impression that they encouraged breeding like rabbits.
Thus against non procreational sex. Which includes porn as much as contraception.
Absolutely! ... if he's a walrus. Other species, including human, find they get an advantage from staying mostly monogamus.
Monogamy isn't actually that common at all. Especially amongst mammals, even more so amongst those closely related to humans. Which is probably why when people in the past looked for animal examples to show that monogamy was "natural" the results were avian...
Evolutionary advantages of monogamy include males that protect and teach offspring as well as allowing one of the sexes to search for food while the other sex watches out for the kids.
In quite a few bird species it turns out that the genetic father may not be the the mother's partner.
Anyway social animals, which includes humans, often live together in far larger groups...
The human species has never been strictly monogamus that I can tell.
There is the problem that there is a lot of social preasure, including blatant propaganda, pushing human monogamy. If humans were highly inclined to be monogamous this would be redundant.
But it also never mated like walruses.
But behaving like Bonobos (Pan paniscus) is a distinct possibility.
Don't let the label of being a Democrat fool you. Many are more conservative than liberal. They are just less conservative than most Republicans.
Though "neocons" arguably can't be called "conservative".
I think M$ will open-source Windows. The base system, that is, not necessarily libraries and very likely not applications. They will open-source Windows because they learned that it is not possible to defeat Linux. It can't be bought out. It can't be stopped. But when they open-source Windows, a lot of development talent will flow from Linux to Windows. One of the selling points of linux will be extinguished.
Open sourcing previously proprietary programs is not always easy. Not only does the source tend to be in a poor format there is also the issue of having to check for anything which might have been "accidentally" pirated.
Open-sourcing Windows will ensure that Windows becomes entrenched as the dominant operating system forever.
Actually it would be a big risk to Microsoft. Not only would there be possible lawsuits, if what they released wasn't in a fit state to be built it could be cherry picked for WINE.
Sourceforge is littered with the remains of OSS projects that were fun to code and get working, but that nobody wants to maintain anymore.
There's plenty of similar proprietary software projects. Just that there isn't any kind of central repository for them.
We need to vote into office people who understand the issues, not those that are in the back pocket of the corporations.
Assuming you can first get suitable people standing for election.