Multiprocessing and clustering are not competing technologies. If I want to have a highly active robust commerce website I would want to use both clustering and multiprocessing together. Multiprocessing allows all those web server, app server and database threads to run a high speed. Clustering means that if one of my multiprocessor machines fails, my website continues to operate, and I can bring individual machines up and down for support and maintenance.
Yes there is. The point is that there is no air in space, so that things can carry on in orbit without being slowed by air resistance.
In space, this Enterprise model would work fine. If you threw it out the window of the space station it would carry on in orbit... just like the real thing!!
A few thoughts on your response; another long post, then I'm done. We've both made the error of simply asserting without citing.
No - you made that error, not me. I provided citations. I don't, and never have, simply just assert anything. I have given argument and example and explanation, you haven't.
Regarding the quotes: fair enough. Quoting someone else's opinion on a subject is not proof of anything. We could both come up with quotes all day long that support our respective positions.
Yes, but you haven't. That is the point. The best you could do is come up with a quote that was demonstrably mistaken. You can't get out of that with 'we could both...' etc.
If you are going to argue, you need to do better. You make some good points - the macro/micro evolution is an very interesting one, and raises important questions about the mechanism of evolution, but almost no-one (sane) uses it to question whether evolution occurred. You are getting confused, and assuming that the gradualist/punctuated evolution argument (now accepted as being a mistaken distinction) questions evolution itself.
Sorry, this is long, but your post requires it, I believe.
Evolution is not scientific because it has never been observed or reproduced. A great deal of evolutionary theory is dedicated to making excuses why there are NO intermediate forms of any organism.
Simply wrong. There are plenty of intermediate forms preserved in the fossil record. To name but a few; there are some beautifully preserved fossils of ammonites that show a progression of structures (the curved shells unwinding over millions of years), there are clear stages preserved in the development of flowers, and best of all, there is the evolution of mankind over the past few millions years - plenty of clear intermediate stages. A good website for the convinced skeptic is http://home.entouch.net/dmd/transit.htm, which shows the transition from fish to amphibian.
Bacteria recovered from the bodies of the members of the Franklin expedition, frozen in the Canadian arctic in 1845 have been found to be resistant to modern antibiotics.[...]New features apparently don't evolve.
Sorry, but the evolution of new features has actually been seen in bacteria, such as the appearance of a totally new metabolic pathway for sugar metabolism in the genus Klebsiella. Also, evolution of antibiotic resistance can easily arise spontaneously, in some cases through a random single mutations in several bacterial genes. Its no surprise to find this.
An offspring of a plant or animal has characteristics that vary, often in subtle ways, from its "parents." [..]Therefore, an organism?s gene pool is actually constantly decreasing by means of natural selection.
No, the gene pool is not decreasing. In each generation there are a large number of DNA changes resulting from copying errors, and faulty repair of DNA damage. In addition to mutation there is a huge amount of DNA transfer between individuals, through sex. This recombination of DNA provides a huge number of new variations and combinations of genes.
Notice, natural selection cannot produce new genes; it only selects among preexisting characteristics. As the word "selection" implies, variations are reduced, not increased. While natural selection occurs, nothing evolves and, in fact, some biological diversity is lost.
Natural selection does not produce new genes; mutation and sexual reproduction can. The reason why species change (why there is no statis) is because of two factors: competition between species (fox hunts rabbit, so both keep adapting) and change of evironment (climate change etc.).
While natural selection sometimes explains the survival of the fittest, it does not explain the origin of the fittest. Today, some people think that because natural selection occurs, evolution must be correct. Actually, natural selection prevents major evolutionary changes by reducing genetic diversity.
There is no 'origin of the fittest', simply an on-going competition between species for resources. Natural Selection simply means that organisms that have an advantage at the momement will tend to breed more.
In 1980, the "Macroevolution Conference" was held in Chicago. Roger Lewin, writing for Science, described it as a "turning point in the history of evolutionary theory."
Well, he would wouldn't he?
"In a generous admission Francisco Ayala, a major figure in propounding the Modern Synthesis [neo-Darwinism] in the United States, said 'We would not have predicted stasis [the stability of species over time] from population genetics, but I am now convinced from what the paleontologists say that small changes do not accumulate.'"
No he did not say that. In a subsequent letter, Alya says, and I quote: "I don't know how Roger Lewin could have gotten in his notes the quotation he attributes to me. I presented a paper/lecture and spoke at various times from the floor, but I could not possibly have said (at least as a complete sentence) what Le
Response from a certain well-known software company....
1. Describe the components of an operating system, besides the central component, the kernel. Media player, browser, Word processor, Spreadsheet, database, demo games, Clippy, special virus/worm susceptibility modules.
2. What do programmers usually develop first, the compiler or the kernel? Neither - you buy them off someone else and re-badge.
3. Does this sequence impact the OS at all? Not if you have enough money.
4. What's more complicated, the kernel or the compiler? The compiler, obviously. It as to cope with all the different versions of our OS.
5. Why does operating system development take as long as it does? What are the three key things in operating system development that take the longest to perfect? The colours and shapes of the buttons and the start-up music takes a lot of time to design. (1) Thinking of the name ('XP' took a lot of effort). (2) Researching all the bits of other systems we want to copy. (3) Finding a rock group to perform at the launch.
6. Do you need operating systems familiarity to write a kernel? Yes / no? Elaborate please. Not at all; its irrelevant. We have known for decades about how good operating systems should work, it hasn't stopped us providing BSODs.
7. In your opinion, why aren't there more operating systems on the market? Nothing to do with us.... you didn't see us trying to sabotage DR-DOS. It was someone else who just looked like us.
Re:Another blow to the creationist argument
on
Nanobacteria Discovered?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Oh well, I know I am going to regret this, but here goes.
Evolutionary theory is superior in argument because:
(1) It is simpler (all you need is simple life + mutations + time, against big pre-formed superintelligence in the sky) (2) It conforms to Occams Razor. If life looks like it has evolved (true), and there are easy to understand mechanisms by which it could have evolved (true), the simplest explanation is that it has evolved. (3) It is not sacreligious. If you are religious and you don't believe in evolution, the only alternative is that someone has put a lot of effort into trying to fool us into believing it happened. That is hardly the behaviour of a nice deity, is it?
Just for the record, the Big Bang theory is becoming as accepted in cosmology as the theory of evolution is in Biology.
I'm being pedantic but.... Its the idea that there was a Big Bang that is accepted by almost everyone, but there is no single universally accepted theory of how the Bing Bang banged and what happened afterwards. Did inflation happen? Did the speed of light change? Was the Bing Bang a singularity? Was there one Big Bang, or several? All these are subject to debate.
And for me, I've seen the reasons why whale fossils are thought to demonstrate darwinism, and it simply doesn't.
No - it doesn't to you. You are stating your personal opinion as fact.
This portion of the conversation though can go no further till we start pointing to evidence.
There is no point, as you disagree what is evidence.
That (common ancestry) is also not a scientific claim - it is not something that can be empirically tested, repeated, and at the moment cannot be falsified.
Of course it can be tested, and falsified. Suppose I find a bacterium on Mars. I propose it has common ancestry with that on Earth. So what do we do? We look for DNA, and we look for common sequences. If we find DNA at all, that is a good suggestion of common origin. The more conserved sequences (such as ribosome structure) the more likely that it is common.
DNA sequences can be examined and easily arranged in a tree of similarity. The tree of similarity is either damn good evidence of common ancestry or the most mind-numbingly astronomically unlikely coincidence.
Darwinism is a theory that explains everything and predicts nothing - and is therefore useless.
Complete nonsense. Darwinism predicts that species will adapt to change through evolution.
Darwinism predicted what Gregor Mendel found. Darwinism predicted the nature of genetic material. It was realised from the structure of DNA that it must be the genetic material because it would allow Darwinian evolution.
We can actually see that in action. There have been cases (such as beak shape in birds on an island) where such adaptations have arisen and spread through populations within a few human lifetimes!
We have seen the DNA of species change and adapt: Resistance to pesticides for example. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics. These aren't just examples of some existing resistant organisms becoming more numerous - these are the creation of new strains through the selection of naturally occurring mutations - Darwinism.
Does anyone else think that the cutting edge of physics is starting to resemble Ptolemy's system of astronomy? With all this 'dark' energy, and 'dark' matter, it's beginning to look like a lot of hand-waving.
Absolutely right! The problem is that there seems to be a reluctance to say 'We don't have a clue what is going on', and instead this month's latest fashionable theory is proclaimed as what is actually going on.
Its not just in cosmology.... the handwaving is a problem in many areas of physics:
1. Quantum Mechanics: Parallel Worlds and Observers collapsing wavefunctions. Talk about combining over-interpreting and excessive imagination.
2. Particle physics. String theory replaces point particles with.. infinitely thin entities which have length, experience tension, and oscillate in lots and lots of dimensions. This is supposed to be a simplification!
3. General Relativity. Does not agree with Quantum Mechanics, and has singularities. (Get a clue people - a singularity means your math isn't good enough: it doesn't mean there is a hole in reality).
Do you mean that such cyanobacteria (the "ruggedized" type) still exists? Genuine quiestion here.
Absolutely - they exist as colourful slime in hot springs, especially in Yellowstone National Park.
There is even a species of fly that lays eggs in some of these hot springs, and its larvae live in what is basically a warm sulphuric acid solution, and eat some of the algae.
(but if the Earth turns out to be like Venus, I'll be promptly contacting you with a "I told you so!":o))))
The appearance of this pheonmenon has stabilized the climate on Earth, and the process IS reversible.
No its not. You would have to kill off all photosynthesis. Photosynthesis was at first nothing at all to do with multi-cellular organisms - it was blue-green algae (bacteria). Some of these can live in close-to-boiling water. Even if the whole damn ocean was heated to 90 degrees C, you would still get carbon fixing and oxygen production. Certain photosynthetic bacteria would consider this to be ideal conditions.
The carbon that has been slowly but steadily captured and stored away (in the form of coal and mineral oil) is now bein quickly and steadily released into the atmosphere.
Yes, and we should stop this, but in terms of pollution its absolutely nothing compared to what was pumped out into the atmosphere by the lava flows of the Deccan Traps and the vaporisation of sulphur-containing strata by the Chicxulub meteor 65 million years ago. The sky went dark for years, the seas were acidified, and (note this) virtually all phytoplankton died. What happened? Was this an irreversible disaster? No, of course not. Rich and complex life survived and adapted.
Arrogant is rather the attitude that we can do whatever we want to the place where we live, with disregard to it's other inhabitants and, duh, with disregard to our children and their children, who will inherit the crap we do today.
I totally agree with you. I think we should do everything we can to help prevent global warming and cut pollution. But misleading scare stories about 'Earth like Venus' don't help, in my view.
The whale fossils in question do not show a direct sequence, and are not even similar.
Wrong. They show a very clear and simple sequence, illustrating at every stage how adaptations to aquatic life appear and are selected for.
The point is simple - the fossil record provides no support for darwinism
Complete nonsense. Darwinism was arrived at because of the fossil record.
one must see proof
Galapagos finches. Australian flora and fauna. New and Old world monkeys. Madagascar species. There are plenty of examples of how species arise because of isolation.
There is proof for those who choose to look, and not follow blind and ignorant dogma.
No need to use future tense: it's happening now, and evidence exists.
There is evidence that in some areas, plankton is thriving due to increased warmth (as in the Artic. Global warming (and cooling) has happened very frequently. Life adapts and thrives.
True, but what I was trying to say is that it will resemble Venus moree than it does now.
You might as well say that a few degrees of temperature rise makes the Earth more like the surface of the Sun. Its technically correct, but not a useful comparison.
You mentioned effects that would cause negative feedback, but unfortunately the great majority of scientists agree that the positive feedback seems to be more significant.
Yes, but my point is that its not all positive feedback - its certainly not a huge runaway process that will destroy all multicellular life on Earth - that's crazy talk. Complex life has survived vast meteor impacts and the effect of continent-wide million-year-long lava flows. Global warming by humankind is feeble and totally insignificant by comparison.
There is an arrogant, and mistaken, attitude that humankind can 'destroy the world', or 'wipe out all life'. What we can do is make the Earth a very unpleasant place for ourselves.
With increase of temperature, already now many white areas have disappeared. Not only at the poles but also on mountains like the Alps. This decrease of albedo will cause further warming, as more energy is absorbed, hence increasing the rate of warming.
And increased temperature leads to increased evaporation of water, so increased clouds and desert areas, both of which increase albedo and reflect heat. Its not necessarily a runaway system.
There is another positive feedback: with the increase of temperature, many of the plancton that is responsible for the conversion of CO2 into oxygen is not able to survive, causing a higher percentage of CO2 in the air, hence further increasing the rate of warming.
There is no evidence that warming will destroy plankton.
So, the Earth may be stable, but there is a tipping point after which it will start to resamble Venus for a while.
No - the Earth will not resemble Venus at all. The surface of the Earth will not get up to several hundred degrees C, and we will not be swamped by clouds of sulphuric acid.
After that, things wil come back to normal, but not many of the existing multicellular organisms will survive. It will be much worse than the runaway glaciation of the Earth.
Not at all. For life on Earth as a whole, global warming will have little long-term effect. A different range of animals and plants may prefer the changed conditions, but that is all.
What matters is that it will make things pretty bad for us!
Not quite. MS has been trying to break into the server room since forever. Waaaaayyy back in the late '80s they even developed a version of Unix, which they called Xenix.
Yeah, it was neat - I have used it, and even written device drivers for it.
So MS has been competing with Unix for a long time.
Again, I disagree. Just because MS tried to position a UNIX for the small server market does not mean that they were competing with other UNIXen for this market. UNIX server sales have always been strong: NT largely displaced (or rather, grew faster than) Netware and Vines and others. There is a good proof of this: Unix boxes rarely if ever tried to provide file or print services for DOS or Windows. (There were some awful attempts, like PC-NFS). The main services for Windows and DOS used NETBIOS or IPX.
and they're still trying to push that door open a little wider each year. Successfully, so far.
The workgroup server market, sure, and that is where they are really very scared of Linux. Microsoft has had little impact at all at the large scale, enterprise-level server level. There are (probably) no 'Windows Mainframes'. As for successful; their server section was in deficit last year.....
It is exactly this sort of shit that nearly killed UNIX in the 1980s and allowed Microsoft the opportunity to supplant technically superior systems with their shoddy software and then leverage that toehold into a desktop monopoly.
Microsoft was never competing with UNIX. Microsoft is primarily an office desktop system and workgroup networking environment. UNIX was specialist technical workstation system and (these days) high-end server. The competitors to Microsoft were GEM and Deskview on the client side, and Netware and Vines on the server side. On the other hand, it was good marketing for MS to say that they were competing with UNIX...
Fragmentation is bad for everyone. Sun, HP, et. al. made this mistake before. If they insist on repeating it (and I believe Sun is perfectly capable of repeating acts of inane stupidity perpetually, as they really do seem to have difficulty learning from past mistakes -- remember sunview, openwindows, etc.) they will meet the same fate as before, this time with no one to rescue them.
Sun is not fragmenting Linux. Java Desktop is stuff that runs on standard Linux. You can assemble your own 'Java Desktop' by putting all the bits together yourself, assuming you don't want support.
SunView was before X-Windows. It was certainly not a mistake or an attempt to fragement anything - there were no standards then. When X-Windows came along, Sun provided OpenWindows, a GUI toolset for X. What is mistaken about that?
The earth and life are robust, but we aren't. Most of human civilisation has occurred within a 10,000 year period since the last glaciation in which ice sheets covered much of the Northern hemisphere. The climate has been particularly and unusually stable for the past millenium. This is not going to last. If (as is very likely) the ice returns, or if global warming stirs up the climate, millions could die and many more will be forced to migrate. In terms of life as a whole on our planet, what we do matters little in the long term, but we could, and probably will, make things very unpleasant for ourselves.
The majority of people with a higher education believe in some God. Those with an education in science may follow the tendancy to not believe that there is a higher being, but they are definitely not the majority.
The majority of people, even those who are educated, have virtually no understanding of physics or biology. These sciences encompass the areas of human understanding that were, until very recently, assumed to require divine intervention.
All your statement indicates is that people trained to understand the world tend to have a lot less belief in a supreme being who intervenes in that world.
Religion is about suppressing your own ego and having compassion for those around you, which is something that a lot of scientists could sorely use.
That is a shameful thing to say. There is no evidence that scientists have any less compassion than other people, religious or not. In many areas scientists have shown far more compassion and respect for others. Scientists generally aim to increase human knowledge and educate rather than indoctrinate.
Unlike religion, science shows respect for the human intellect and assumes that people have the courage, dignity, and lack of ego, to accept their place in the universe, whatever that is revealed to be, and does not attempt to comfort with cosy stories of personal gods and paradise. It is religion that encourages an egotistical belief that humankind is special.
Slashdot Mirror
Multiprocessing and clustering are not competing technologies. If I want to have a highly active robust commerce website I would want to use both clustering and multiprocessing together. Multiprocessing allows all those web server, app server and database threads to run a high speed. Clustering means that if one of my multiprocessor machines fails, my website continues to operate, and I can bring individual machines up and down for support and maintenance.
Yes, I had forgotten the Star Trek phenomenon known as the inexplicable Decaying Orbit (tm).
...because there is no gravity in space
Yes there is. The point is that there is no air in space, so that things can carry on in orbit without being slowed by air resistance.
In space, this Enterprise model would work fine. If you threw it out the window of the space station it would carry on in orbit... just like the real thing!!
A few thoughts on your response; another long post, then I'm done. We've both made the error of simply asserting without citing.
No - you made that error, not me. I provided citations. I don't, and never have, simply just assert anything. I have given argument and
example and explanation, you haven't.
Regarding the quotes: fair enough. Quoting someone else's opinion on a subject is not proof of anything. We could both come up with quotes all day long that support our respective positions.
Yes, but you haven't. That is the point. The best you could do is come up with a quote that was demonstrably mistaken. You can't get out of that with 'we could both...' etc.
If you are going to argue, you need to do better. You make some good points - the macro/micro evolution is an very interesting one, and raises important questions about the mechanism of evolution, but almost no-one (sane) uses it to question whether evolution occurred. You are getting confused, and assuming that the gradualist/punctuated evolution argument (now accepted as being a mistaken distinction) questions evolution itself.
Sorry, this is long, but your post requires it, I believe.
Evolution is not scientific because it has never been observed or reproduced. A great deal of evolutionary theory is dedicated to making excuses why there are NO intermediate forms of any organism.
Simply wrong. There are plenty of intermediate forms preserved in the fossil record. To name but a few; there are some beautifully preserved fossils of ammonites that show a progression of structures (the curved shells unwinding over millions of years), there are clear stages preserved in the development of flowers, and best of all, there is the evolution of mankind over the past few millions years - plenty of clear intermediate stages. A good website for the convinced skeptic is http://home.entouch.net/dmd/transit.htm, which shows the transition
from fish to amphibian.
Bacteria recovered from the bodies of the members of the Franklin expedition, frozen in the Canadian arctic in 1845 have been found to be resistant to modern antibiotics.[...]New features apparently don't evolve.
Sorry, but the evolution of new features has actually been seen in bacteria, such as the appearance of a totally new metabolic pathway for sugar metabolism in the genus Klebsiella. Also, evolution of antibiotic
resistance can easily arise spontaneously, in some cases through a random single mutations in several bacterial
genes. Its no surprise to find this.
An offspring of a plant or animal has characteristics that vary, often in subtle ways, from its "parents."
[..]Therefore, an organism?s gene pool is actually constantly decreasing by means of natural selection.
No, the gene pool is not decreasing. In each generation there are a large number of DNA changes resulting
from copying errors, and faulty repair of DNA damage. In addition to mutation there is a huge amount of DNA transfer between individuals, through sex. This recombination of DNA provides a huge number of new variations and combinations of genes.
Notice, natural selection cannot produce new genes; it only selects among preexisting characteristics. As the word "selection" implies, variations are reduced, not increased. While natural selection occurs, nothing evolves and, in fact, some biological diversity is lost.
Natural selection does not produce new genes; mutation and sexual reproduction can. The reason why species change (why there is no statis) is because of two factors: competition between species (fox hunts rabbit, so both keep adapting) and change of evironment (climate change etc.).
While natural selection sometimes explains the survival of the fittest, it does not explain the origin of the fittest. Today, some people think that because natural selection occurs, evolution must be correct. Actually, natural selection prevents major evolutionary changes by reducing genetic diversity.
There is no 'origin of the fittest', simply an on-going competition between species for resources. Natural
Selection simply means that organisms that have an advantage at the momement will tend to breed more.
In 1980, the "Macroevolution Conference" was held in Chicago. Roger Lewin, writing for Science, described it as a "turning point in the history of evolutionary theory."
Well, he would wouldn't he?
"In a generous admission Francisco Ayala, a major figure in propounding the Modern Synthesis [neo-Darwinism] in the United States, said 'We would not have predicted stasis [the stability of species over time] from population genetics, but I am now convinced from what the paleontologists say that small changes do not accumulate.'"
No he did not say that. In a subsequent letter, Alya says, and I quote:
"I don't know how Roger Lewin could have gotten in his notes the quotation he attributes to me. I presented a paper/lecture and spoke at various times from the floor, but I could not possibly have said (at least as a complete sentence) what Le
Response from a certain well-known software company....
1. Describe the components of an operating system, besides the central
component, the kernel.
Media player, browser, Word processor, Spreadsheet, database, demo games, Clippy, special virus/worm susceptibility modules.
2. What do programmers usually develop first, the compiler or the kernel?
Neither - you buy them off someone else and re-badge.
3. Does this sequence impact the OS at all?
Not if you have enough money.
4. What's more complicated, the kernel or the compiler?
The compiler, obviously. It as to cope with all the different versions of our OS.
5. Why does operating system development take as long as it does? What are the three key things in operating system development that take the longest to perfect?
The colours and shapes of the buttons and the start-up music takes a lot of time to design.
(1) Thinking of the name ('XP' took a lot of effort). (2) Researching all the bits of other systems we want to copy. (3) Finding a rock group to perform at the launch.
6. Do you need operating systems familiarity to write a kernel? Yes / no? Elaborate please.
Not at all; its irrelevant. We have known for decades about how good operating systems should work, it hasn't stopped us providing BSODs.
7. In your opinion, why aren't there more operating systems on the market?
Nothing to do with us.... you didn't see us trying to sabotage DR-DOS. It was someone else who just looked like us.
Oh well, I know I am going to regret this, but here goes.
Evolutionary theory is superior in argument because:
(1) It is simpler (all you need is simple life + mutations + time, against big pre-formed superintelligence in the sky)
(2) It conforms to Occams Razor. If life looks like it has evolved (true), and there are easy to understand mechanisms by which it could have evolved (true), the simplest explanation is that it has evolved.
(3) It is not sacreligious. If you are religious and you don't believe in evolution, the only alternative is that someone has put a lot of effort into trying to fool us into believing it happened. That is hardly the behaviour of a nice deity, is it?
Just for the record, the Big Bang theory is becoming as accepted in cosmology as the theory of evolution is in Biology.
I'm being pedantic but....
Its the idea that there was a Big Bang that is accepted by almost everyone, but there is no single universally accepted theory of how the Bing Bang banged and what happened afterwards. Did inflation happen? Did the speed of light change? Was the Bing Bang a singularity? Was there one Big Bang, or several? All these are subject to debate.
And for me, I've seen the reasons why whale fossils are thought to demonstrate darwinism, and it simply doesn't.
No - it doesn't to you. You are stating your personal opinion as fact.
This portion of the conversation though can go no further till we start pointing to evidence.
There is no point, as you disagree what is evidence.
That (common ancestry) is also not a scientific claim - it is not something that can be empirically tested, repeated, and at the moment cannot be falsified.
Of course it can be tested, and falsified. Suppose I find a bacterium on Mars. I propose it has common ancestry with that on Earth. So what do we do? We look for DNA, and we look for common sequences. If we find DNA at all, that is a good suggestion of common origin. The more conserved sequences (such as ribosome structure) the more likely that it is common.
DNA sequences can be examined and easily arranged in a tree of similarity. The tree of similarity is either damn good evidence of common ancestry or the most mind-numbingly astronomically unlikely coincidence.
Darwinism is a theory that explains everything and predicts nothing - and is therefore useless.
Complete nonsense. Darwinism predicts that species will adapt to change through evolution.
Darwinism predicted what Gregor Mendel found. Darwinism predicted the nature of genetic material. It was realised from the structure of DNA that it must be the genetic material because it would allow Darwinian evolution.
We can actually see that in action. There have been cases (such as beak shape in birds on an island) where such adaptations have arisen and spread through populations within a few human lifetimes!
We have seen the DNA of species change and adapt: Resistance to pesticides for example. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics. These aren't just examples of some existing resistant organisms becoming more numerous - these are the creation of new strains through the selection of naturally occurring mutations - Darwinism.
Does anyone else think that the cutting edge of physics is starting to resemble Ptolemy's system of astronomy? With all this 'dark' energy, and 'dark' matter, it's beginning to look like a lot of hand-waving.
Absolutely right! The problem is that there seems to be a reluctance to say 'We don't have a clue what is going on', and instead this month's latest fashionable theory is proclaimed as what is actually going on.
Its not just in cosmology.... the handwaving is a problem in many areas of physics:
1. Quantum Mechanics: Parallel Worlds and Observers collapsing wavefunctions. Talk about combining over-interpreting and excessive imagination.
2. Particle physics. String theory replaces point particles with.. infinitely thin entities which have length, experience tension, and oscillate in lots and lots of dimensions. This is supposed to be a simplification!
3. General Relativity. Does not agree with Quantum Mechanics, and has singularities. (Get a clue people - a singularity means your math isn't good enough: it doesn't mean there is a hole in reality).
If it sounds strange enough, you can probably bet there are real physicists who see it that way...
Do you mean that such cyanobacteria (the "ruggedized" type) still exists? Genuine quiestion here.
:o))))
Absolutely - they exist as colourful slime in hot springs, especially in Yellowstone National Park.
There is even a species of fly that lays eggs in some of these hot springs, and its larvae live in what is basically a warm sulphuric acid solution, and eat some of the algae.
(but if the Earth turns out to be like Venus, I'll be promptly contacting you with a "I told you so!"
Heh, OK.
The appearance of this pheonmenon has stabilized the climate on Earth, and the process IS reversible.
No its not. You would have to kill off all photosynthesis. Photosynthesis was at first nothing at all to do with multi-cellular organisms - it was blue-green algae (bacteria). Some of these can live in close-to-boiling water. Even if the whole damn ocean was heated to 90 degrees C, you would still get carbon fixing and oxygen production. Certain photosynthetic bacteria would consider this to be ideal conditions.
The carbon that has been slowly but steadily captured and stored away (in the form of coal and mineral oil) is now bein quickly and steadily released into the atmosphere.
Yes, and we should stop this, but in terms of pollution its absolutely nothing compared to what was pumped out into the atmosphere by the lava flows of the Deccan Traps and the vaporisation of sulphur-containing strata by the
Chicxulub meteor 65 million years ago. The sky went dark for years, the seas were acidified, and (note this) virtually all phytoplankton died. What happened? Was this an irreversible disaster? No, of course not. Rich and complex life survived and adapted.
Arrogant is rather the attitude that we can do whatever we want to the place where we live, with disregard to it's other inhabitants and, duh, with disregard to our children and their children, who will inherit the crap we do today.
I totally agree with you. I think we should do everything we can to help prevent global warming and cut pollution. But misleading scare stories about 'Earth like Venus' don't help, in my view.
I'm not out there oppressing anyone, in fact my beliefs call me to not just tolerate everyone, but to embrace them. So, why bash them?
Firstly, because its healthy to bash all beliefs. All ideas should be challenged and subject to debate.
Secondly, because faith is a very dangerous thing, as you can (and many people have) justify anything based on faith.
The whale fossils in question do not show a direct sequence, and are not even similar.
Wrong. They show a very clear and simple sequence, illustrating at every stage how adaptations to aquatic life appear and are selected for.
The point is simple - the fossil record provides no support for darwinism
Complete nonsense. Darwinism was arrived at because of the fossil record.
one must see proof
Galapagos finches. Australian flora and fauna. New and Old world monkeys. Madagascar species. There are plenty of examples of how species arise because of isolation.
There is proof for those who choose to look, and not follow blind and ignorant dogma.
No need to use future tense: it's happening now, and evidence exists.
There is evidence that in some areas, plankton is thriving due to increased warmth (as in the Artic. Global warming (and cooling) has happened very frequently. Life adapts and thrives.
True, but what I was trying to say is that it will resemble Venus moree than it does now.
You might as well say that a few degrees of temperature rise makes the Earth more like the surface of the Sun. Its technically correct, but not a useful comparison.
You mentioned effects that would cause negative feedback, but unfortunately the great majority of scientists agree that the positive feedback seems to be more significant.
Yes, but my point is that its not all positive feedback - its certainly not a huge runaway process that will destroy all multicellular life on Earth - that's crazy talk. Complex life has survived vast meteor impacts and the effect of continent-wide million-year-long lava flows. Global warming by humankind is feeble and totally insignificant by comparison.
There is an arrogant, and mistaken, attitude that humankind can 'destroy the world', or 'wipe out all life'. What we can do is make the Earth a very unpleasant place for ourselves.
Well... as people survive in both desert and arctic conditions, massive climate change certainly won't mean the end of humankind.
Maybe we should define "life as we know it" as "lifestyle as we know it"......
With increase of temperature, already now many white areas have disappeared. Not only at the poles but also on mountains like the Alps. This decrease of albedo will cause further warming, as more energy is absorbed, hence increasing the rate of warming.
And increased temperature leads to increased evaporation of water, so increased clouds and desert areas, both of which increase albedo and reflect heat. Its not necessarily a runaway system.
There is another positive feedback: with the increase of temperature, many of the plancton that is responsible for the conversion of CO2 into oxygen is not able to survive, causing a higher percentage of CO2 in the air, hence further increasing the rate of warming.
There is no evidence that warming will destroy plankton.
So, the Earth may be stable, but there is a tipping point after which it will start to resamble Venus for a while.
No - the Earth will not resemble Venus at all. The surface of the Earth will not get up to several hundred degrees C, and we will not be swamped by clouds of sulphuric acid.
After that, things wil come back to normal, but not many of the existing multicellular organisms will survive. It will be much worse than the runaway glaciation of the Earth.
Not at all. For life on Earth as a whole, global warming will have little long-term effect. A different range of animals and plants may prefer the changed conditions, but that is all.
What matters is that it will make things pretty bad for us!
Not quite. MS has been trying to break into the server room since forever. Waaaaayyy back in the late '80s they even developed a version of Unix, which they called Xenix.
Yeah, it was neat - I have used it, and even written device drivers for it.
So MS has been competing with Unix for a long time.
Again, I disagree. Just because MS tried to position a UNIX for the small server market does not mean that they were competing with other UNIXen for this market. UNIX server sales have always been strong: NT largely displaced (or rather, grew faster than) Netware and Vines and others. There is a good proof of this: Unix boxes rarely if ever tried to provide file or print services for DOS or Windows. (There were some awful attempts, like PC-NFS). The main services for Windows and DOS used NETBIOS or IPX.
and they're still trying to push that door open a little wider each year. Successfully, so far.
The workgroup server market, sure, and that is where they are really very scared of Linux. Microsoft has had little impact at all at the large scale, enterprise-level server level. There are (probably) no 'Windows Mainframes'. As for successful; their server section was in deficit last year.....
It is exactly this sort of shit that nearly killed UNIX in the 1980s and allowed Microsoft the opportunity to supplant technically superior systems with their shoddy software and then leverage that toehold into a desktop monopoly.
Microsoft was never competing with UNIX. Microsoft is primarily an office desktop system and workgroup networking environment. UNIX was specialist technical workstation system and (these days) high-end server. The competitors to Microsoft were GEM and Deskview on the client side, and Netware and Vines on the server side.
On the other hand, it was good marketing for MS to say that they were competing with UNIX...
Fragmentation is bad for everyone. Sun, HP, et. al. made this mistake before. If they insist on repeating it (and I believe Sun is perfectly capable of repeating acts of inane stupidity perpetually, as they really do seem to have difficulty learning from past mistakes -- remember sunview, openwindows, etc.) they will meet the same fate as before, this time with no one to rescue them.
Sun is not fragmenting Linux. Java Desktop is stuff that runs on standard Linux. You can assemble your own 'Java Desktop' by putting all the bits together yourself, assuming you don't want support.
SunView was before X-Windows. It was certainly not a mistake or an attempt to fragement anything - there were no standards then. When X-Windows came along, Sun provided OpenWindows, a GUI toolset for X. What is mistaken about that?
No. Science is about questioning the rules.
The earth and life are robust, but we aren't. Most of human civilisation has occurred within a 10,000 year period since the last glaciation in which ice sheets covered much of the Northern hemisphere. The climate has been particularly and unusually stable for the past millenium. This is not going to last. If (as is very likely) the ice returns, or if global warming stirs up the climate, millions could die and many more will be forced to migrate. In terms of life as a whole on our planet, what we do matters little in the long term, but we could, and probably will, make things very unpleasant for ourselves.
"science is also a religion"
Religion:
"a strong belief in a supernatural power or powers that control human destiny."
Science:
"The study of the natural world through observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanations."
Belief != Study
The majority of people with a higher education believe in some God. Those with an education in science may follow the tendancy to not believe that there is a higher being, but they are definitely not the majority.
The majority of people, even those who are educated, have virtually no understanding of physics or biology. These sciences encompass the areas of human understanding that were, until very recently, assumed to require divine intervention.
All your statement indicates is that people trained to understand the world tend to have a lot less belief in a supreme being who intervenes in that world.
Religion is about suppressing your own ego and having compassion for those around you, which is something that a lot of scientists could sorely use.
That is a shameful thing to say. There is no evidence that scientists have any less compassion than other people, religious or not. In many areas scientists have shown far more compassion and respect for others. Scientists generally aim to increase human knowledge and educate rather than indoctrinate.
Unlike religion, science shows respect for the human intellect and assumes that people have the courage, dignity, and lack of ego, to accept their place in the universe, whatever that is revealed to be, and does not attempt to comfort with cosy stories of personal gods and paradise. It is religion that encourages an egotistical belief that humankind is special.
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