i really don't know of a better example of how deeply a 2 hour scifi movie can really get to you in a deep way I saw BR in the theater, and also have the director's cut DVD. I like both, and don't want to choose sides. That said, speaking of sci-fi flicks that can get to you in a deep way:
I saw The Fountain recently on DVD, and was quite excited by it. I didn't know a lot coming into it, and it wasn't at all like it was "sold" during its theatrical release. The concept and execution of the 'Tree-ship' is excellent. Also it's not preachy, and pretty inspiring when it comes to questions about mortality/immortality, reincarnation(?!), companionship (or is it spiritual union?). Lots of good questions, and I had some fun discussions with my wife afterwards. I highly recommend it.
Anyhow, lots of food for thought, and since afaik it's not based on a book there's no debates about how 'faithful' it is, or whether Hollywood screwed it up.:-D
(I also want to chime in as some other siblings did about my approval of Gattaca. Oh, and I liked A Scanner Darkly, too. Just remembered that I really liked Children of Men, too! That one had a great ending that I know some of my friends hated for its abruptness/ambiguity -- like certain other movies I've just mentioned.)
There's been some good sci-fi movies in the last 25 years, huh?
The issue that I find really fascinating, and that we haven't covered at all, is abandonware - what happens when the copyright owner goes missing? I don't know if it should go directly into the public domain (I mean, copyright is sort of pointless if, for example, the software is owned by a company that went out of business five years ago, and never moved the copyrights on - there's no owner to enforce the law for), as the owner could appear again under certain circumstances. But, at the same time, if a creative work is abandoned by its owner, you actually do get the problems that the abolitionists are complaining about, where a creative work has functionally been removed because nobody can get the permissions to publish it.
Obviously this problem is solved by getting rid of copyright completely.:) But are there any good ways of getting around the issue even with some sort of copyright? I think mandatory registration for copyrights (as there once were) might help solve the problem; then you could allow anyone to "ping" the registered copyright holder, and if say five years go by without a response, the work falls into the public domain. Or, like the sandbox idea you mention, duplicating a work after doing some due diligence to find the copyright owner (and failing) could be made a fair use provision.
I think the solution here is, as you mention, registration of copyrights as a provision for extention or protection. "Pinging" the creator wouldn't be necessary if the copyright term wasn't so indefinite and works were registered (you'd be able to bank on the date they become PD and that date wouldn't be 120 years away). Further, the 'sandbox idea' isn't reasonable as long as the current litigation regime is still in place, i.e., you'd still be infringing until found not-infringing (as with Fair Use). Worse, you might be responsible for unimaginable damages if your copying had gone on for years before a rights-holder stood up to make a claim (and then sued you). That situation would be reminiscent of submarine patents, and so is best avoided.
The best solution to 'abandonware' in either definition (the rights-holder really is gone or the rights-holder is just sitting on a monopoly they don't intend to use) is to use a very short initial term, of say 14 years, with mandatory registration along with a small fee (even a token fee of $1) for an extension of any length. First the short initial term (if it must be Berne-style "copyrighted by default") allows for the commercially biased to extract nearly all its wealth. Second, registration for extention prevents all the stupid posts on the Internet, and every other utterance, 4-note whistle, and napkin drawing from being copyrighted forever (or as long as lobbyists can buy term-extension legislation), but also allows for works with any value at all to continue to extract wealth at the expense of the public domain. Finally, the small registration fee forces rights-holders to make a cost-benefit analysis before extending the protection on a work. If the fee is X for a Y year extention, can I squeeze X out of this one work in the next Y years? This question allows the long-tail to be a completely new free market, competing on quality, price, value-add, etc. for all the material that is "abandoned" by rights-holders. Additionally, large holding companies would have to determine which is more profitable: extending all of their copyrights or letting some pass into the PD. Finally, the registry permits creators and businesses to know with certainty when a work enters the public domain, as the date is on file with the USCO.
I think adding this externality back into "expression monopolies" would go a long way towards growing the public domain and as a result fostering the creation of new derivative works (progress in science and useful arts) as well as new markets in authentic reproductions of PD material and new markets in derivatives. E.g.
These works should have moved into the public domain, where new artists could freely use them to create even newer works to enrich society. Instead, the content creation industry got Congress to enrich them by extending unreasonably the time of protection. Congress did not represent the people at large that day.
As a creative artist on a professional, I find that statement incredibly funny. You really have no idea of how we work, do you? You also have no idea of how copyright works - here's a hint: you CAN'T copyright an idea. You never could.
You've never heard of derivative works? We aren't talking about ideas.
I can see why you made that assumption though. I can unstand that you're biased. You believe that copyrights are rights, you've said it elsewhere. Just like any other monopolist you're of course going to feel threatened when people talk about weakening your artificial lifetime monopoly on a particular expression fixed in a tangible medium. You're only human, and humans jump to conclussions and make all sorts of irrational arguments when they're threatened. (Hence, the hyperbole and accusations of groupthink.)
Don't fret, people will still like writers and musicians even when we don't have lifetime monopolies. You'd still write if you only had to renew your copyrights every 28 years, right, like everyone that was writing 40 years ago? I bet you might have been OK with the Founders' 14 years and a 14 year renewal that protected the thousands of works between 1790 and the Berne Convention 100 years later! Good chance you could make a living at it (even with short monopolies!), like everyone else has in the past.
In my opinion the status quo is indefensible. If you're interested, see my journal, I seem to comment about this stuff frequently.
Yes. Chance did play a big role in it, and "supernatural forces" played none, but to trivialize the conditions that led to the formation of the universe, Earth-like planets and life as "it just happened by chance" is so simplistic as to be intellectually weak. I guess this is what I'm having trouble with: If, as you concede, chance did play a big role in it, what played the other roles?
Now, back off-topic: regarding the fantastic exercise in probability, 2^-2M still is not zero. Arguing whether or not a number will be expressed seems rather pointless though. Will the universe exist for 2^2M nanoseconds? I could be looking dumb as you put it, but I accept it will. (The big crunch is off the table at this point, isn't it?) What it looks like to me though is that it's quite a bit more likely than "a million monkeys writing the complete works of Shakespeare".:-D (a string of 4 million or so letters and punctuation, etc.)
Anyhow, I obviously don't know as much as you do about biology, so I look forward to your answer to my first question.
Oh, I also wanted to mention the rhetorical about ego wasn't a stab at you in particular. Generally, man has often been resistant to ideas that diminish his central importance to life, the universe, and everything. Hence, there has been great strife and controversy at the introduction of such ideas, e.g. heliocentrism, naturalism, cosmology, evolution, atheism, etc. I had just assumed that you took issue to the dumb luck of "the absurd universe" (as Paul Davies' put it), that will be moot in a moment though when you mention/explain the other roles responsible for life. I know, I'm an ass for assuming.
Re:30,000 Microsofties go to work for Nintendo
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WiiHelms Go on Sale
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From the article linked above:
Rob Enderle, principle analyst of the Rob Enderle Total Analysis Research Division, was unavailable for comment. Also unavailable were TechNewsWorld and MacNewsWorld, two web news sites that frequently cite the RETARD's analysis on Microsoft. Enderle formerly wrote columns on the sites, which now return 404 errors in Spanish. Emphasis added. This is pure comedy gold. Thanks for making the Innertubularnets worth reading today. Also:
And claiming that "it just happened by chance" in evolutionary molecular biology is absurdly simplistic. But is it wrong? Regardless of how infinitesimally small the probability of even each stage, it seems pretty clear that in a universe as unimaginiably vast and an amount of time unimaginably long that these events do occur. The fact that we sit here today though is that evolution is essentially exponential in its growth of complexity. Right? On a logarithmic graph successful mutations over time go in a straight line back to this 'random' (though inevitable) event.
But to humor you, let's say there are only as many atoms in the universe as there are bits in the image of your favorite Linux kernel. If these atoms could only occupy one of two places, and momentarily and randomly oscillated (or not) since the beginning, then at some time the probability of a working kernel image did at some point is certain (or will be, assuming time has no end or the oscillations suitably quick). Fortunately, the evolution of life from its precursor reactions is much more likely since it's "compounding" over time. Anyway, the Linux kernel can conceivably be obtained by streaming/dev/urandom into a file, that's the whole point of the distinction between improbable and impossible. I do not equate improbable with impossible. Other non-ID, non-creationist theories like, say panspermia or whatever really aren't any better as far as I can tell. If life came to Earth from somewhere else in the universe, how did it start there?
Until there's evidence to the contrary, like God popping out and saying 'life started here!', I don't see any other conclusion beyond "it just happened by chance". That's where the evidence as I understand it rests. Of course that's kinda disparaging, and not at all grandiose, but it is true. Or rather, I accept it to be true.
I could be wrong. I don't mind. There could be a supernatural force that made life happen, but again, that's beyond our scope as actors in the natural world. God willed those molecules to self-replicate in a vast universe with little competition, if you like.
Or is your real gripe that saying 'it just happened' undermines the human ego? Or wait, where you just chiming in to say, "I know more about it than you do"? Either way, thanks for taking the time. Finally, if it's just about getting the last word, go ahead, I won't reply again.
That's great. But it's still addressing a different question as to whether there is a God at the beginning of all of that 'soup' to say go. If there is a God who created everything, then He is outside of it all. The only way we could 'discover' Him would be for Him to somehow let us know. That question wasn't raised, was it? I missed it if it was. My apologies.
Obviously, I'm not describing how God created the universe from outside of the universe. I'm describing how it is possible that life originates without God's direct manipulation and the difference between improbability and impossibility.
The supernatural is just that.
Also, I apologize for making a distinction between the creation of the universe and the origination of life. I guess for me those are two separate events. (And two seperate cosmological and philosophical questsions!)
The origin of the earliest forms of "life" (simple single "cells", pre-DNA, pre_RNA) is surely one of the easiet things to answer - this is nothing more than self-sustaining chemical reactions occuring in a lipid bubble (maybe naturally occuring - oily froth by the sea shore, or maybe the fatty polymers being a product of the chemical reactions that occured inside them). I
Ahh, no its not. [...] The simplest organism [has] millions and millions of base pairs of DNA, which could not come randomly together by chance.
'Could not'? Could not come together or did you really mean could improbably come together (even as a result of a chain of improbable events)? The great thing about the uncomprehensible vastness of both time and the universe is that improbable events still happen. I think this is the 'real' problem people have with non-supernatural origins. For some improbability is equivalent with impossibility, and they have no problem with that. To those people, I suggest this: imagine the odds of winning a 6-49 lottery (i.e. your odds of winning are better than 49*49*49*49*49*49, but still a really huge number, right?). Now, why is it that it makes the news when someone DOESN'T win the lottery in Florida in any given week? It's mostly because even though the chance that you will win is small, the chance that someone will win is pretty good! Now, if you can, expand this idea to the whole giant incredible hugeness of the universe and time*. Even though the chance that some particular random winning "mutation" (used loosely to cover abiological reactions as well) is small those "mutations" still win.
Improbable events still happen!
*I apologize for our lack of words to convey the quanities involved here. How do we even talk about the number of chemical reactions that happened in the whole of the universe for the billions of years that these pre-life reactions where taking place in the millions of billions of planets that could sustain them? What this all means to me is that life in the universe is not all that unlikely. Life like us is, but life isn't.
So the defense that a sizable portion of Americans is ignorant (or answered ignorantly) is that... a sizable portion of Americans can't be bothered to read or comprehend what they are asked?
You'll get no argument from me, but either case is damning. Full disclosure: My wife teaches reading to high-schoolers.
Is it any wonder that "the straightforward question, 'Is evolution well-supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community?'" would be hard to answer correctly when education in the U.S. (though not for lack of trying!) stops before high-school? Another explanation is that the Creationists really have 'won' and evolution wasn't taught to nearly half of Americans. Maybe it was taught in such a diminished and castrated way that it immediately slipped the mind of half of those asked. Now I'm just rambling. Sheesh.
"4 - If you complain to the police that someone stole your paper bag of money containing $50,000 dollars that you left on some street corner, they will laugh at you and tell you that you are stupid."
Oh, brilliant . You know what the equivalent of locking up movie files is, right? You just made the argument for DRM. Think about this a little more critically... Consider if you left your impenetrably-locked-briefcase containing $50,000 cash on some random street corner and then complained to the police that it was stolen. Would they treat you any differently? Thankfully, picking locks is illegal, so as soon as someone gets into that briefcase and gets all that delicious money the police can nab them for something!!
It would seem that being in the business of giving away locked briefcases full of money was... retarded. And yet, some businesses insist this model is viable. (Despite shipping the briefcases with keys and lobbying the government to make lockpicking evermore illegal-er, sheesh.)
And a fond welcome to you both?! I love when these threads start.
But Steve up there was right. In essence, you don't know anything if you don't know anything about the words you use -- what you 'know' is suspect, and what you communicate to others is unreliable. I can't believe no one has to take Latin in school anymore. At the same time, it's a wonder that many kids can read at all by the time they are in high school (disclosure: I took 3 years of Latin in high school and my wife teaches high school reading). Sorry for being kinda epistemological.
Again, Photoshopped or actual product photograph, anyone own one? It seems if nothing else that Voipsupply is more responsive to Cisco's product photo updates. I wonder why Amazon couldn't be bothered to play ball.
The above page at Linksys has links at "where to buy" for Amazon... None of the nine products that come up use the word iPhone! So, Cisco is pimping their minion Linksys, and Linksys is pimping their "iPhone", but they aren't selling a product that has "iPhone" anywhere in its name and doesn't appear on any of the product shots -- except for the user photo linked to in the parent post. When did the word 'iPhone' first appear on a shipped Linksys product? Can anyone that's actually bought one give me a date? Is the December user-photo a forgery?
Paradroid is an absolute classic (and the first game I ever bought on diskette). The "battle for control" of other droids brains is one of the most fun action-puzzles I've ever played. The smooth scrolling 'hi-res' graphics were a class above at the time. And finally, one of the robots you could take over was a Dalek in all but name! Mmmm Daleks. The control felt great, the tension and challenge are also superb -- this is from back when games weren't soothingly easy. And the flavor and illustration of the wide variety of droids is also fun.
Everyone else, if you haven't played Paradroid, find it and run it under emulation (or download it for Wii if it ever makes it). It's definitely one of those games that has aged well and is still both challenging and fun.
This is particularly ironic since the article referred to the discovery of light pressure earlier. Everyone knows those little bulbs with white and black fans that "demonstrate" this effect. What most people don't know is that it isn't a perfect vacuum in there and, gosh, the dark side gets slightly hotter than the white side. That means the gas heats up on one side, expanding, you know the rest. IIRC they spin leading with the white side. It should be the other way since you have twice as much momentum transfer to reflect light (white) than to simply absorb it (black).
This apparatus is a Radiometer. And it's not really working by the expansion of gas on 'hotter black side' -- the pressure throughout is essentially constant. The effect is caused by the movement of the rareified gas at the edges of the vein due to the temperature gradient.
When the apparatus is refined, by using a much better vacuum, suspending the 'blades' in a way with less resistance, and coating them in inert material the light pressure can be observed directly -- it will spin with the dark side leading. The link above says this was first achieved in 1901.
(sibling:) When I listened to weird al, we called them "tapes".
I bought my first Weird Al record on vinyl. Back then we called them "albums". (By Even Worse I was buying tapes. Then I had to re-buy it all on CD. It's a conspiracy.)
So, even though I have them all on CD... checking my ipod, I'm only carrying around: Alapalooza, Dare to Be Stupid, Even Worse, In 3-D, Off the Deep End, Poodle Hat, Running With Scissors, and (the legit downloadable tracks from) Straight Outta Lynnwood.
I gotta say that 3-D and Dare to be Stupid have some of my all time favorites though... "Nature Trail to Hell"?!! Hell Yeah! "Yoda"? A classic! I'm not saying that some of his later stuff isn't pure genius, "Hardware Store" most certainly is. (oooh, let me not forget "One More Minute", or "Trigger Happy", or "eBay", or "The Brady Bunch", or "All About the Pentiums", or "Couch Potato", or "I Think I'm a Clone Now", or "Like a Surgeon"... omg I can't stop... I even did a sketch with a friend to "Like a Surgeon" for a school talent show. It's so nerdy.)
Anyway, sorry for going fanboy on you all -- but if not on Slashdot, WHERE?!
Ok, last thing, this is how nerdy I am: when I do karaoke -- I choose songs that Al has parodied and sing his lyric! Take that America!
Damn. I didn't post soon enough to stop you from repeating the same myopic definition again! Torturing means "To bring great physical or mental pain upon (another)." It is fair to say that a man beating a dog is torturing it. It's fair to say that pulling the toenails off an ape (for Science!) is also toruting it. These same actions repeated while an animal is anesthetized are pretty creepy, but not torture (in any common sense of the word). Tying anesthetized apes and dogs in knots is torture in a different sense (vis. their tortured forms).:p
Wow, I didn't know they made dictionaries with only one definition per term! Here's what you forgot to mention when you were making the semantic argument against torturing animals (using just def 1 for the noun form that wasn't even used, sheesh):
noun- 2. Excruciating physical or mental pain; agony: the torture of waiting in suspense. 3. Something causing severe pain or anguish. verb- 1. To subject (a person or an animal) to torture. 2. To bring great physical or mental pain upon (another). See synonyms at afflict. 3. To twist or turn abnormally; distort: torture a rule to make it fit a case. (cite: online AHD)
So when the GP said (quoting) "torturing monkeys" -- a valid moral concern, assuming that afflicting physical or mental pain to sensate/sentient beings is, you know, undesirable -- your entire post could have been just this: "Also, primates in these studies are under anesthesia, so they don't feel pain." That would have been sufficient to rebut his claim with out all the pandering bullshit.
So -- when I got all my wisdom teeth out and had stiches in my jaw-muscles I'll honestly say the next few weeks of trying to eat were... torture. I agree though, having some warts removed might not be torture.
In short, you can torture people and animals without punishment, coercion or sadism in mind! Cheers!
Haha, only serious. If trusted computing is an eventuality the argument "don't like proprietary software? write your own" is soon to be obsolete.
Of course this line of reasoning goes straight to hell pretty quickly. Vis.: Don't like trusted sound cards? Build your own; Don't like trusted video cards? Build your own; Don't like trusted computers? Build your own. Which inevitablely leads to, "Don't like trusted chipsets and CPUs? Fabricate your own." Now, at this moment writing your own software is viable -- it make take many man-years to produce a product like Firefox on your own, but the roadblocks are pretty small. If Free software proponents continue to lose the policy war it's going to be a lot harder to "build your own" computers, especially when 'non trusted' components aren't available (possibly due to legislation). At which point, the barriers to entry for producing your own microprocessors are pretty high (at least for the forseeable future, again if it's even legal).
The DMCA is the first step down that slope. Yay. But, yeah that doesn't undermine your point: you are free not to use a computer. Wait, was I just trolled?
This is not mere grandstanding it is also an interesting twist on the ever-raging debate on full disclosure of security vulnerabilities. Eschewed were the two classic positions usually assumed by professionals in the field:
* disclose in public sufficient detail to demonstrate and reproduce (and sometimes fix) the vulnerability, which might or might not include sample exploit code, and
* disclose those details in secret to the vendor). [...] OK, that's entirely too much like something I would say. To Win the Game, WWBS, enter something succinct and pity.
Bruce Schneier doesn't need full vulnerability disclosure because he already knows.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw The Fountain recently on DVD, and was quite excited by it. I didn't know a lot coming into it, and it wasn't at all like it was "sold" during its theatrical release. The concept and execution of the 'Tree-ship' is excellent. Also it's not preachy, and pretty inspiring when it comes to questions about mortality/immortality, reincarnation(?!), companionship (or is it spiritual union?). Lots of good questions, and I had some fun discussions with my wife afterwards. I highly recommend it.
Anyhow, lots of food for thought, and since afaik it's not based on a book there's no debates about how 'faithful' it is, or whether Hollywood screwed it up.
(I also want to chime in as some other siblings did about my approval of Gattaca. Oh, and I liked A Scanner Darkly, too. Just remembered that I really liked Children of Men, too! That one had a great ending that I know some of my friends hated for its abruptness/ambiguity -- like certain other movies I've just mentioned.)
There's been some good sci-fi movies in the last 25 years, huh?
I think the solution here is, as you mention, registration of copyrights as a provision for extention or protection. "Pinging" the creator wouldn't be necessary if the copyright term wasn't so indefinite and works were registered (you'd be able to bank on the date they become PD and that date wouldn't be 120 years away). Further, the 'sandbox idea' isn't reasonable as long as the current litigation regime is still in place, i.e., you'd still be infringing until found not-infringing (as with Fair Use). Worse, you might be responsible for unimaginable damages if your copying had gone on for years before a rights-holder stood up to make a claim (and then sued you). That situation would be reminiscent of submarine patents, and so is best avoided.
The best solution to 'abandonware' in either definition (the rights-holder really is gone or the rights-holder is just sitting on a monopoly they don't intend to use) is to use a very short initial term, of say 14 years, with mandatory registration along with a small fee (even a token fee of $1) for an extension of any length. First the short initial term (if it must be Berne-style "copyrighted by default") allows for the commercially biased to extract nearly all its wealth. Second, registration for extention prevents all the stupid posts on the Internet, and every other utterance, 4-note whistle, and napkin drawing from being copyrighted forever (or as long as lobbyists can buy term-extension legislation), but also allows for works with any value at all to continue to extract wealth at the expense of the public domain. Finally, the small registration fee forces rights-holders to make a cost-benefit analysis before extending the protection on a work. If the fee is X for a Y year extention, can I squeeze X out of this one work in the next Y years? This question allows the long-tail to be a completely new free market, competing on quality, price, value-add, etc. for all the material that is "abandoned" by rights-holders. Additionally, large holding companies would have to determine which is more profitable: extending all of their copyrights or letting some pass into the PD. Finally, the registry permits creators and businesses to know with certainty when a work enters the public domain, as the date is on file with the USCO.
I think adding this externality back into "expression monopolies" would go a long way towards growing the public domain and as a result fostering the creation of new derivative works (progress in science and useful arts) as well as new markets in authentic reproductions of PD material and new markets in derivatives. E.g.
You've never heard of derivative works? We aren't talking about ideas.
I can see why you made that assumption though. I can unstand that you're biased. You believe that copyrights are rights, you've said it elsewhere. Just like any other monopolist you're of course going to feel threatened when people talk about weakening your artificial lifetime monopoly on a particular expression fixed in a tangible medium. You're only human, and humans jump to conclussions and make all sorts of irrational arguments when they're threatened. (Hence, the hyperbole and accusations of groupthink.)
Don't fret, people will still like writers and musicians even when we don't have lifetime monopolies. You'd still write if you only had to renew your copyrights every 28 years, right, like everyone that was writing 40 years ago? I bet you might have been OK with the Founders' 14 years and a 14 year renewal that protected the thousands of works between 1790 and the Berne Convention 100 years later! Good chance you could make a living at it (even with short monopolies!), like everyone else has in the past.
In my opinion the status quo is indefensible. If you're interested, see my journal, I seem to comment about this stuff frequently.
Cheers.
You recall correctly, he was one of 66 nays in the House. And only Feingold had the balls to vote against the USAPATRIOT Act in the Senate.
a triot
http://www.google.com/search?q=russ+feingold+usap
(Captcha was succinct -- neat.)
Yes. Chance did play a big role in it, and "supernatural forces" played none, but to trivialize the conditions that led to the formation of the universe, Earth-like planets and life as "it just happened by chance" is so simplistic as to be intellectually weak. I guess this is what I'm having trouble with: If, as you concede, chance did play a big role in it, what played the other roles?
Now, back off-topic: regarding the fantastic exercise in probability, 2^-2M still is not zero. Arguing whether or not a number will be expressed seems rather pointless though. Will the universe exist for 2^2M nanoseconds? I could be looking dumb as you put it, but I accept it will. (The big crunch is off the table at this point, isn't it?) What it looks like to me though is that it's quite a bit more likely than "a million monkeys writing the complete works of Shakespeare".
Anyhow, I obviously don't know as much as you do about biology, so I look forward to your answer to my first question.
Oh, I also wanted to mention the rhetorical about ego wasn't a stab at you in particular. Generally, man has often been resistant to ideas that diminish his central importance to life, the universe, and everything. Hence, there has been great strife and controversy at the introduction of such ideas, e.g. heliocentrism, naturalism, cosmology, evolution, atheism, etc. I had just assumed that you took issue to the dumb luck of "the absurd universe" (as Paul Davies' put it), that will be moot in a moment though when you mention/explain the other roles responsible for life. I know, I'm an ass for assuming.
8-bit tie is YES!
But to humor you, let's say there are only as many atoms in the universe as there are bits in the image of your favorite Linux kernel. If these atoms could only occupy one of two places, and momentarily and randomly oscillated (or not) since the beginning, then at some time the probability of a working kernel image did at some point is certain (or will be, assuming time has no end or the oscillations suitably quick). Fortunately, the evolution of life from its precursor reactions is much more likely since it's "compounding" over time. Anyway, the Linux kernel can conceivably be obtained by streaming
Until there's evidence to the contrary, like God popping out and saying 'life started here!', I don't see any other conclusion beyond "it just happened by chance". That's where the evidence as I understand it rests. Of course that's kinda disparaging, and not at all grandiose, but it is true. Or rather, I accept it to be true.
I could be wrong. I don't mind. There could be a supernatural force that made life happen, but again, that's beyond our scope as actors in the natural world. God willed those molecules to self-replicate in a vast universe with little competition, if you like.
Or is your real gripe that saying 'it just happened' undermines the human ego? Or wait, where you just chiming in to say, "I know more about it than you do"? Either way, thanks for taking the time. Finally, if it's just about getting the last word, go ahead, I won't reply again.
Obviously, I'm not describing how God created the universe from outside of the universe. I'm describing how it is possible that life originates without God's direct manipulation and the difference between improbability and impossibility.
The supernatural is just that.
Also, I apologize for making a distinction between the creation of the universe and the origination of life. I guess for me those are two separate events. (And two seperate cosmological and philosophical questsions!)
Thanks for the response.
Ahh, no its not. [...] The simplest organism [has] millions and millions of base pairs of DNA, which could not come randomly together by chance.
'Could not'? Could not come together or did you really mean could improbably come together (even as a result of a chain of improbable events)? The great thing about the uncomprehensible vastness of both time and the universe is that improbable events still happen. I think this is the 'real' problem people have with non-supernatural origins. For some improbability is equivalent with impossibility, and they have no problem with that. To those people, I suggest this: imagine the odds of winning a 6-49 lottery (i.e. your odds of winning are better than 49*49*49*49*49*49, but still a really huge number, right?). Now, why is it that it makes the news when someone DOESN'T win the lottery in Florida in any given week? It's mostly because even though the chance that you will win is small, the chance that someone will win is pretty good! Now, if you can, expand this idea to the whole giant incredible hugeness of the universe and time*. Even though the chance that some particular random winning "mutation" (used loosely to cover abiological reactions as well) is small those "mutations" still win.Improbable events still happen!
*I apologize for our lack of words to convey the quanities involved here. How do we even talk about the number of chemical reactions that happened in the whole of the universe for the billions of years that these pre-life reactions where taking place in the millions of billions of planets that could sustain them? What this all means to me is that life in the universe is not all that unlikely. Life like us is, but life isn't.
So the defense that a sizable portion of Americans is ignorant (or answered ignorantly) is that... a sizable portion of Americans can't be bothered to read or comprehend what they are asked?
You'll get no argument from me, but either case is damning. Full disclosure: My wife teaches reading to high-schoolers.
Is it any wonder that "the straightforward question, 'Is evolution well-supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community?'" would be hard to answer correctly when education in the U.S. (though not for lack of trying!) stops before high-school? Another explanation is that the Creationists really have 'won' and evolution wasn't taught to nearly half of Americans. Maybe it was taught in such a diminished and castrated way that it immediately slipped the mind of half of those asked. Now I'm just rambling. Sheesh.
Sigh.
Oh, brilliant . You know what the equivalent of locking up movie files is, right? You just made the argument for DRM. Think about this a little more critically... Consider if you left your impenetrably-locked-briefcase containing $50,000 cash on some random street corner and then complained to the police that it was stolen. Would they treat you any differently? Thankfully, picking locks is illegal, so as soon as someone gets into that briefcase and gets all that delicious money the police can nab them for something!!
It would seem that being in the business of giving away locked briefcases full of money was
And a fond welcome to you both?! I love when these threads start.
But Steve up there was right. In essence, you don't know anything if you don't know anything about the words you use -- what you 'know' is suspect, and what you communicate to others is unreliable. I can't believe no one has to take Latin in school anymore. At the same time, it's a wonder that many kids can read at all by the time they are in high school (disclosure: I took 3 years of Latin in high school and my wife teaches high school reading). Sorry for being kinda epistemological.
(Wish I'd had to take Greek too.)
In addition, Tempest even has a couple posts on Digg to help one spot the copying.
k _from_my_buddy#c4713693 and http://digg.com/music/Timbaland_ripped_off_a_track _from_my_buddy#c4718195
k _from_my_buddy#c4724084 asking for contact info. Time to get the hush money flowing!)
Read: http://digg.com/music/Timbaland_ripped_off_a_trac
(Also food for discussion, a post from a Timbaland web intern http://digg.com/music/Timbaland_ripped_off_a_trac
Also, compare the product image here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000JI75GU/ref=pd _cp_e_title/002-3832442-2513669
t s_id=2248
To this one here: http://www.voipsupply.com/product_info.php?produc
Again, Photoshopped or actual product photograph, anyone own one? It seems if nothing else that Voipsupply is more responsive to Cisco's product photo updates. I wonder why Amazon couldn't be bothered to play ball.
Also related to this, and similarly amusing:
o tion_C2&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=116563331864 0&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper
http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Prom
The above page at Linksys has links at "where to buy" for Amazon... None of the nine products that come up use the word iPhone! So, Cisco is pimping their minion Linksys, and Linksys is pimping their "iPhone", but they aren't selling a product that has "iPhone" anywhere in its name and doesn't appear on any of the product shots -- except for the user photo linked to in the parent post. When did the word 'iPhone' first appear on a shipped Linksys product? Can anyone that's actually bought one give me a date? Is the December user-photo a forgery?
Paradroid is an absolute classic (and the first game I ever bought on diskette). The "battle for control" of other droids brains is one of the most fun action-puzzles I've ever played. The smooth scrolling 'hi-res' graphics were a class above at the time. And finally, one of the robots you could take over was a Dalek in all but name! Mmmm Daleks. The control felt great, the tension and challenge are also superb -- this is from back when games weren't soothingly easy. And the flavor and illustration of the wide variety of droids is also fun.
Everyone else, if you haven't played Paradroid, find it and run it under emulation (or download it for Wii if it ever makes it). It's definitely one of those games that has aged well and is still both challenging and fun.
Or... try one of these remakes for some flavor:
http://freedroid.sourceforge.net/
http://www.jpct.net/paradroidz/paradroidz.html
http://www.paradroid.ovine.net/
This apparatus is a Radiometer. And it's not really working by the expansion of gas on 'hotter black side' -- the pressure throughout is essentially constant. The effect is caused by the movement of the rareified gas at the edges of the vein due to the temperature gradient.
Better explanation (and historical context): http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/Lig
When the apparatus is refined, by using a much better vacuum, suspending the 'blades' in a way with less resistance, and coating them in inert material the light pressure can be observed directly -- it will spin with the dark side leading. The link above says this was first achieved in 1901.
Double true.
Yes... that video is a true Jem.
I bought my first Weird Al record on vinyl. Back then we called them "albums". (By Even Worse I was buying tapes. Then I had to re-buy it all on CD. It's a conspiracy.)
So, even though I have them all on CD... checking my ipod, I'm only carrying around: Alapalooza, Dare to Be Stupid, Even Worse, In 3-D, Off the Deep End, Poodle Hat, Running With Scissors, and (the legit downloadable tracks from) Straight Outta Lynnwood.
I gotta say that 3-D and Dare to be Stupid have some of my all time favorites though
Anyway, sorry for going fanboy on you all -- but if not on Slashdot, WHERE?!
Ok, last thing, this is how nerdy I am: when I do karaoke -- I choose songs that Al has parodied and sing his lyric! Take that America!
Damn. I didn't post soon enough to stop you from repeating the same myopic definition again! Torturing means "To bring great physical or mental pain upon (another)." It is fair to say that a man beating a dog is torturing it. It's fair to say that pulling the toenails off an ape (for Science!) is also toruting it. These same actions repeated while an animal is anesthetized are pretty creepy, but not torture (in any common sense of the word). Tying anesthetized apes and dogs in knots is torture in a different sense (vis. their tortured forms). :p
7 &cid=15988113
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=19510
You're doing a good job making your other points, you don't have to rely on semantics (sense three of the word in the online AHD). It's not worth it!
Wow, I didn't know they made dictionaries with only one definition per term! Here's what you forgot to mention when you were making the semantic argument against torturing animals (using just def 1 for the noun form that wasn't even used, sheesh):
noun-
2. Excruciating physical or mental pain; agony: the torture of waiting in suspense.
3. Something causing severe pain or anguish.
verb-
1. To subject (a person or an animal) to torture.
2. To bring great physical or mental pain upon (another). See synonyms at afflict.
3. To twist or turn abnormally; distort: torture a rule to make it fit a case. (cite: online AHD)
So when the GP said (quoting) "torturing monkeys" -- a valid moral concern, assuming that afflicting physical or mental pain to sensate/sentient beings is, you know, undesirable -- your entire post could have been just this: "Also, primates in these studies are under anesthesia, so they don't feel pain." That would have been sufficient to rebut his claim with out all the pandering bullshit.
So -- when I got all my wisdom teeth out and had stiches in my jaw-muscles I'll honestly say the next few weeks of trying to eat were... torture. I agree though, having some warts removed might not be torture.
In short, you can torture people and animals without punishment, coercion or sadism in mind! Cheers!
For now.
Haha, only serious. If trusted computing is an eventuality the argument "don't like proprietary software? write your own" is soon to be obsolete.
Of course this line of reasoning goes straight to hell pretty quickly. Vis.: Don't like trusted sound cards? Build your own; Don't like trusted video cards? Build your own; Don't like trusted computers? Build your own. Which inevitablely leads to, "Don't like trusted chipsets and CPUs? Fabricate your own." Now, at this moment writing your own software is viable -- it make take many man-years to produce a product like Firefox on your own, but the roadblocks are pretty small. If Free software proponents continue to lose the policy war it's going to be a lot harder to "build your own" computers, especially when 'non trusted' components aren't available (possibly due to legislation). At which point, the barriers to entry for producing your own microprocessors are pretty high (at least for the forseeable future, again if it's even legal).
The DMCA is the first step down that slope. Yay. But, yeah that doesn't undermine your point: you are free not to use a computer. Wait, was I just trolled?
Bruce Schneier's secure handshake is so strong, you won't be able to exchange keys with anyone else for days.
(From http://geekz.co.uk/schneierfacts/fact/26)
Bruce Schneier doesn't need full vulnerability disclosure because he already knows.
(I better submit that to the facts site above.)