I'm not misunderstanding you, you're just drawing a conclusion that's unsupportable. Quantum behavior having no underlying cause could just be God creating a universe in which quantum particles behave randomly, by design.
My point is that this completely negates intelligent design and creationism, as it means God creates a universe in which He no longer has any influence, so evolution is purely by natural selection and not by intervention.
This point, however, does not bode well for Intelligent Design as the theory itself is in conflict with God's desire for us to have faith that he exists. That's my point.
The punctuated equilibrium debate is an old one, and largely irrelevant to modern evolutionary theory. It is now generally accepted that all evolution is gradual (Darwin-style), but it can simply seem like evolution proceeds in jumps because of the naturally sparse fossil record and the immense times involved. Punctuated equilibrium is no longer considered to be in contradiction with Darwinist gradualism.
Then there is no disagreement between creation and evolution, especially as a creationist (Mendel) came up with the idea of alleles and the way that they vary anyway.
No surprise that Mendel was a creationist as he had not been exposed to the then new discoveries of the great age of the Earth and the so the possibility that natural selection had millions if not billions of years to work.
It depends which process you are talking about. Nature is chaotic. Random mutations to the DNA are random (ish), which is what you talk about when you consider it as a signal.
The question is, on what basis you are trying to consider it a signal. What DNA does is very well understood. There is little or no basis for considering it a signal.
"No. If you understood anything about physics you would know that the evolution of the universe involves a considerable amount of chaos and quantum effects. "
Either that, or maybe it's that God created the universe INCLUDING chaos and quantum effects... and so on. DER....
No, that doesn't work (and shows the misunderstanding I was talking about), as quantum effects can be shown (by the Bell Inequality) to have no underlying cause. They are random even if God started things off.
Here we have Paul Davies himself writing enthusiastically about the possibility of discovering new natural laws to govern complexity, and one of this arguments is that the threshold where these laws might suddenly pop into effect coincides perfectly with the point where abiogenesis research is currently stuck trying to produce useful macromolecules through chance and selection.
I have a problem with Paul Davies - he is not a biologist. He is a physicist who is drifting into subjects in which he is not an expert.
This, I find, is a glaring double standard. (I also find it an amusing statement of faith. =)
Me too.
Blink, blink. Umm. Since you are probably not Christian, I think you'll have to take my word for it. In the experience of myself, most of the Christians I know, most of the Christans I know of, and all of the Christians I teach, evolution has been used as an explicit challenge and as peer or superior pressure (of the "you must be an idiot" variety).
The only way it could be a battleground is if Christians choose to make it so by denying it.
A common misconception, but this is getting offtopic. Short answer: the majority of "contradictions" trivially disappear in context; many more are resolved by cultural and historical data; and the difficulties that remain have steadily declined in number over time. So, it doesn't bother me. Yes, there is some faith involved here, but it is similar to the faith in a scientific model with difficulties that steadily decline in number over time.
Actually, the difficulties have increased with increasing analysis. The point is that the bible has problems as a source of authority because of the contradictions.
If God created the big bang, all of the above was created by him.
No. If you understood anything about physics you would know that the evolution of the universe involves a considerable amount of chaos and quantum effects. The future is not entirely determined by the past. You could create exactly the same universe many times and end up with completely different results.
That said, your statement is idealistic. Many hold evolution as dogma just as strongly as any religious belief. No dissent is permitted -- at least, not on the public stage.
This is obviously not true. There have been major public debates about evolution over the decades. (The Dawkins/Gould spat is a good example).
Consider, if evolution were not the favorite weapon against Christianity, there might be much less of this mouth-frothing resistance to it.
Evolution is not a weapon against Christianity. It the the other way around - religions are choosing evolution as a battleground against science.
Not to say that Lewontin speaks for the scientific community, but he is certainly being honest about motives that many are unwilling to state outright. And I would argue that such dogma impedes the study of science very nearly as much as any religious dogma.
No. Sticking to materialistic explanations is done because it is the only want that science can progress. As soon as you start to involve Divine influences debate and explanation stops.
There is no conflict between the Bible and science. Truth cannot contradict truth.
Science doesn't need to conflict with the Bible. It conflicts with itself enough - there are so many contradicting passages in the bible that to call it 'truth' is to misuse the word.
I've raised my kids to know they are Created, not simply overevolved pond scum. The how of our getting here is not so important as the why of it.
I never understand why Creationists keep insisting that they know how God did things.
How do you know that evolution by natural selection was not God's intended way of creating life? If God designed us as 'overevolved pond scum' who are you do disagree?
I don't believe that God was involved, but if He was, it seems incredibly arrogant to insist that you have special knowledge as to how he did it.
Also, If your children know this, why put them into science classes where there is supposed to be debate and discussion of alternatives?
We're here to do the right thing and to help those around us.
And this relates to the debate how? Anyone with a reasonable understanding of evolution knows that altruistic behaviour does not conflict with natural selection in any way.
They know that their children and their ideas are how they will be judged. Independent thought is a requirement, and can't be trained out of a person anyway.
Independent thought? You mean like them knowing that they are Created? How independent is that?
So take care when spouting off about things you don't understand.
Intelligent design's criticism of evolution is that Darwin's gradual change over time doesn't seem to match the fossil record very well.
No, it isn't. The criticism is that there are certain aspects of biological and biochemical system that could not have evolved.
Any criticism that is based on the fossil record is hard to accept, because the fossil record is not a good sample of past life forms and never will be - with a few exceptions fossilisation is a very rare event. We are lucky to find anything at all.
All religious issues aside (which is hard for most people, so bear with me), ID is falsifiable if someone can demonstrate a creature evolving through chance with no intervention from intelligent beings.
No, it isn't. First of all, evolution is not just a matter of chance. There is a designer in evolution - natural selection. Chance simply gives the range of options which can be selected from. Secondly, there have been plenty of examples and explanations of complex features evolving, but ID proponents simply refuse to accept the evidence. I heard ID supporters still say things like "the eye is too complex to have evolved in steps" when the mechanisms by which this can happen have been understood for years.
Gradual evolution can be falsified if one can show a creature rapidly evolve. In fact, given the large number of species on the planet, even given the long time scale for evolution, odds are pretty high that evolution in action will be caught on tape, so to speak, at some point, and then the question resolved. (And no, I'm not talking about microevolution.)
All evolution is microevolution. All evolution is gradual. What looks like 'macro' or rapid is simply microevolution taking place over a relatively short time.
To give an example of how things can appear 'macro', it would be possible for a mouse to evolve to the size of an elephant in steps far to small to be seen even over several human lifetimes, but this would still happen in a period too small to be seen in the fossil record! I find this astonishing, but it is true.
Anyone who thinks that the fossil record is any evidence for 'macroevolution' does not understand the incredible timescales involved.
If you can demonstrate that random processes and death can create higher order signals, then ID is false since ID's basic premise is that it is impossible for a complex singal to arise spontaneously.
Again, this irrelevant. Evolution is not a random process. It involves selection. For example, the peacock's tail did not evolve at random - females actively selected the bigger tails.
If you want evidence for order appearing spontaneously out of random processes, I suggest you take a look at chaos theory, and things like the development of vortices in flows, or magnetic domain formation. There is plenty of evidence of order spontaneously arising, but the IDer/Creationists seem to be either ignorant or deliberately ignoring this.
I seriously get aggravated at the editorializing on Slashdot sometimes. It amazes me how people can post while being ignorant of the actual debate.
I would suggest that coming up suggestions that evolution is a random process is a sign of being ignorant about important aspects of the debate. This is a common and understandable ignorance (as evolution is taught so badly), but does not put someone in a position to be critical of others.
The new curriculum mentions that theories of life arising from similar building-block molecules through purely random processes can be challenged by recent findings in the fossil record and by molecular biology.
If this is what it says, it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how evolution works. The evolution of life is not random. It involves selection (hence the term 'Natural Selection'). It is selection by various mechanisms of the best-surviving variation from a set of random changes from an original. That is not the same thing at all.
Two, the topic was solaris not opensolaris, which I see is only a subset of the former.
It depends how you define subset. It is like comparing Linux distributions with the Linux kernel. Solaris + Sun packages would be analagous to OpenSolaris + GNU packages. Future releases of Solaris will be build on OpenSolaris code.
Three, I stand by my initial posting. Sun will open source something when it is in their interest
Well, it would not make much sense for them to open source something when it is not in their interest, would it?
but they do not support open software wholeheartedly, and certainly not free software.
I believe that the evidence suggests otherwise. There have been contributions to GNOME, and of course the 'killer' application of desktop Linux - OpenOffice. OpenOffice is available under the LGPL. That is certainly free and open source.
Re:Java puzzles? I do them everyday
on
Java Puzzlers
·
· Score: 1
It sounds like you need a new job. Or a new field.
Maybe I just haven't burnt out yet, but I find most [i]coding[/i] problems interesting.
Ah, but I said most coding jobs. I am lucky to a range of interesting coding things, but I realise I am in a minority.
Interesting comment--considering that they are teaching Intelligent Design alongside Evolutionary Theory. Your comment seems to indicate that, by teaching ONLY Evolution, that's how we develop Independent Thinking? Tell one side of a story? Somehow, that seems more like indoctrination to me.
You are missing the point. These classes are supposed to be science lessons, not philosophy or religion. There are plenty of alternatives ideas to evolution that can be discussed in biology classes, such as the ideas that fossils aren't old and the Earth was created recently. These areas are testable, and examining the data that suggests they are false can be highly educational - students learn about rock strata and radioactive dating.
Intelligent design is not testable. It is nothing more than a series of statements of incredulity - that because we don't yet understand everything about the evolution of life then there must have been intervention by a 'designer'. This isn't science. Intelligent design might be science if there was some sort of valid consistent test for the existence of a designer, but there isn't. Also, because it is likely there there will always be some area of evolution or of biology that is not fully understood, there will always be some room for someone to say 'that must be designed'. This means that Intelligent Design is never refutable; again, making it meaningless in the context of science.
Science teaching should include the idea that we are simply currently ignorant about some things. Coming up with untestable, irrefutable explanations to cover that ignorance is dishonest and should not be part of the process.
Imagine this sort of approach being used in other areas of science (e.g. 'We don't yet fully understand the origin of comets, so aliens or gods must have made them') and the results are silly in the extreme.
Re:Java puzzles? I do them everyday
on
Java Puzzlers
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Unfortunately, real-life java problems are never very interesting.
Virtually all real-life coding problems are uninteresting. It is nothing to do with Java.
Of course C# has all of the same advantages, and even though it's more recent there are some areas where its performance beats Java. I'd love to see all the Microsoft reasearchers vs. all the Sun researchers coming up with increasingly brilliant ways to take advantage of the late binding to turn a performance hindrance into a benefit.
The beauty of the Java situation is that it is not just the Sun researchers doing this. It is also the IBM researchers, the HP researchers, the BEA researchers and the open source researchers.
Perhaps Sun should try to add more languages to the Java Platform (more official ones, AFAIK there are a few unofficial compilers).
Sun is doing exactly that. There is now a JSR (Java Specification Request) for a scripting language interface to Java that is going to be part of the next Java release. There are also two JSRs for scripting languages: Groovy and BeanShell.
What I don't understand is exactly what advantage is Java providing on the server-side. Do you really need cross-platform bytecode at that level?
Yes. It is a real advantage. I can build a J2EE application package (a WAR) file and deploy on an application server such as Tomcat and not care what the server OS is at all. This is great for things like mixed-OS clusters, as all you need a single codebase and a single binary deployment.
Is it just because of the extensive Java API's? That seems unfortunate because you could have the same API's in a native compiled language and get much better performance.
The better performance argument is a myth. Java performs extremely well server-side.
Native compiled languages are just as portable (or even more portable) as Java.
No they aren't - at least not in my experience. There are major issues such as word endian-ness and size to be taken account.
The main problem is having to recompile for each platform, but on a static server that is no big deal.
It is a big deal. Cross-compiling a large program can take a while, then each version has to be tested on each platform. Compare to Java where developers routinely code and test on Windows or Linux/Unix and then deploy on the other platform with no problems.
To me it just seems like a huge waste to have the massive Java environment running bytecode on a static platform.
Java environments generally don't run bytecode. They run mostly native code. The pure bytecode is there at the deployment stage. As the program runs the JVM generates optimised native code based on profiling of the application. This can in principle be more efficient that one-shot compiling. The only benefit of pre-compiled applications is quick start-up time, but that does not matter server-side when code on application servers (unlike code in CGI scripts) can be continually running for days or even weeks.
2) macro-evolution: this is your... virus -> ??? -> monkey!!! type of evolution. this is also the type of evolution that makes unbelievably complex eyeballs from nothing.
Macro-evolution is a myth. Sometimes very large changes can appear (such as extra limbs or fingers), but these are always due to simple ('micro'!) changes in the DNA, and they don't contribute to evolution, as large changes in structure are virtually always disadvantageous.
Complex organs like eyeballs don't appear from nothing. They appear in very small steps. We can see examples of what these steps look like in living organisms. For example, the last fews steps in this process involve the sealing over of an eye-pit and the formation of a lens. There is a living animal that has an eye that is before this stage - the Nautilus.
at what point did the multi cell organisms develop eyeballs? any examples?
Sure. Look back at fossils from the 'Cambrian explosion' (about 540 million years ago). A range of eye types can be seen, and their evolution from simple beginnings followed.
As for 'eyeballs', this has happened so many times it is hard to say there is a single 'point'. For example, Cephalopods have eyeballs and so do fish, but they are completely different in structure.
"There is no Windows box that lets you run IE5 and IE6 side by side."
Sure there is. It's called VMWare. Or Microsoft Virtual PC if you prefer.
Having to emulate an entire PC is obviously not the same as running the two applications side by side on the same operating system.
Re:Faster than light?
on
Deep in the Core
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If a black hole can create a gravitational force so powerful it can suck in light, doesn't that mean that when the light is being sucked in it is travelling faster than light towards the black hole?
No, as light doesn't speed up and slow down in empty space. Instead, it changes frequency. Light travelling towards a black hole (or any other gravitating object) gets blue-shifted.
Slashdot Mirror
What I've never understood about that theory, though, is how the life forms got off their home planet and onto an interstellar-bound rock.
Asteroid strikes. They can 'splash' up a lot of material, which can easily reach escape velocity.
I'm not misunderstanding you, you're just drawing a conclusion that's unsupportable. Quantum behavior having no underlying cause could just be God creating a universe in which quantum particles behave randomly, by design.
My point is that this completely negates intelligent design and creationism, as it means God creates a universe in which He no longer has any influence, so evolution is purely by natural selection and not by intervention.
This point, however, does not bode well for Intelligent Design as the theory itself is in conflict with God's desire for us to have faith that he exists. That's my point.
And it is a good one.
Research punctuated equilibrium then.
I think you need to!
The punctuated equilibrium debate is an old one, and largely irrelevant to modern evolutionary theory. It is now generally accepted that all evolution is gradual (Darwin-style), but it can simply seem like evolution proceeds in jumps because of the naturally sparse fossil record and the immense times involved. Punctuated equilibrium is no longer considered to be in contradiction with Darwinist gradualism.
Then there is no disagreement between creation and evolution, especially as a creationist (Mendel) came up with the idea of alleles and the way that they vary anyway.
No surprise that Mendel was a creationist as he had not been exposed to the then new discoveries of the great age of the Earth and the so the possibility that natural selection had millions if not billions of years to work.
Modern creationists have no such excuse.
It depends which process you are talking about. Nature is chaotic. Random mutations to the DNA are random (ish), which is what you talk about when you consider it as a signal.
The question is, on what basis you are trying to consider it a signal. What DNA does is very well understood. There is little or no basis for considering it a signal.
Did you even bother to read what I wrote? It's a random process with a selection pressure applied to it
No you didn't. You wrote:
"ID is falsifiable if someone can demonstrate a creature evolving through chance with no intervention from intelligent beings"
and
" If you can demonstrate that random processes and death can create higher order signals"
No mention of selection pressure there that I can see.
You can stick your fingers in your ears and pretend I said that it's fully random, but it doesn't make you sound very intelligent.
Not responding to the other points I made does not help your case.
"No. If you understood anything about physics you would know that the evolution of the universe involves a considerable amount of chaos and quantum effects. "
Either that, or maybe it's that God created the universe INCLUDING chaos and quantum effects... and so on. DER....
No, that doesn't work (and shows the misunderstanding I was talking about), as quantum effects can be shown (by the Bell Inequality) to have no underlying cause. They are random even if God started things off.
The reason that it is not incredibly arrogant is because the book of Genesis recounts exactly how God did it.
And is contradicted by what we see all around us in rocks and in the stars. So you either believe the book, or evidence of your own eyes.
Here we have Paul Davies himself writing enthusiastically about the possibility of discovering new natural laws to govern complexity, and one of this arguments is that the threshold where these laws might suddenly pop into effect coincides perfectly with the point where abiogenesis research is currently stuck trying to produce useful macromolecules through chance and selection.
I have a problem with Paul Davies - he is not a biologist. He is a physicist who is drifting into subjects in which he is not an expert.
This, I find, is a glaring double standard. (I also find it an amusing statement of faith. =)
Me too.
Blink, blink. Umm. Since you are probably not Christian, I think you'll have to take my word for it. In the experience of myself, most of the Christians I know, most of the Christans I know of, and all of the Christians I teach, evolution has been used as an explicit challenge and as peer or superior pressure (of the "you must be an idiot" variety).
The only way it could be a battleground is if Christians choose to make it so by denying it.
A common misconception, but this is getting offtopic. Short answer: the majority of "contradictions" trivially disappear in context; many more are resolved by cultural and historical data; and the difficulties that remain have steadily declined in number over time. So, it doesn't bother me. Yes, there is some faith involved here, but it is similar to the faith in a scientific model with difficulties that steadily decline in number over time.
Actually, the difficulties have increased with increasing analysis. The point is that the bible has problems as a source of authority because of the contradictions.
If God created the big bang, all of the above was created by him.
No. If you understood anything about physics you would know that the evolution of the universe involves a considerable amount of chaos and quantum effects. The future is not entirely determined by the past. You could create exactly the same universe many times and end up with completely different results.
That said, your statement is idealistic. Many hold evolution as dogma just as strongly as any religious belief. No dissent is permitted -- at least, not on the public stage.
This is obviously not true. There have been major public debates about evolution over the decades. (The Dawkins/Gould spat is a good example).
Consider, if evolution were not the favorite weapon against Christianity, there might be much less of this mouth-frothing resistance to it.
Evolution is not a weapon against Christianity. It the the other way around - religions are choosing evolution as a battleground against science.
Not to say that Lewontin speaks for the scientific community, but he is certainly being honest about motives that many are unwilling to state outright. And I would argue that such dogma impedes the study of science very nearly as much as any religious dogma.
No. Sticking to materialistic explanations is done because it is the only want that science can progress. As soon as you start to involve Divine influences debate and explanation stops.
There is no conflict between the Bible and science. Truth cannot contradict truth.
Science doesn't need to conflict with the Bible. It conflicts with itself enough - there are so many contradicting passages in the bible that to call it 'truth' is to misuse the word.
I've raised my kids to know they are Created, not simply overevolved pond scum. The how of our getting here is not so important as the why of it.
I never understand why Creationists keep insisting that they know how God did things.
How do you know that evolution by natural selection was not God's intended way of creating life? If God designed us as 'overevolved pond scum' who are you do disagree?
I don't believe that God was involved, but if He was, it seems incredibly arrogant to insist that you have special knowledge as to how he did it.
Also, If your children know this, why put them into science classes where there is supposed to be debate and discussion of alternatives?
We're here to do the right thing and to help those around us.
And this relates to the debate how? Anyone with a reasonable understanding of evolution knows that altruistic behaviour does not conflict with natural selection in any way.
They know that their children and their ideas are how they will be judged. Independent thought is a requirement, and can't be trained out of a person anyway.
Independent thought? You mean like them knowing that they are Created? How independent is that?
So take care when spouting off about things you don't understand.
Indeed.
Intelligent design's criticism of evolution is that Darwin's gradual change over time doesn't seem to match the fossil record very well.
h tml
No, it isn't. The criticism is that there are certain aspects of biological and biochemical system that could not have evolved.
Any criticism that is based on the fossil record is hard to accept, because the fossil record is not a good sample of past life forms and never will be - with a few exceptions fossilisation is a very rare event. We are lucky to find anything at all.
All religious issues aside (which is hard for most people, so bear with me), ID is falsifiable if someone can demonstrate a creature evolving through chance with no intervention from intelligent beings.
No, it isn't. First of all, evolution is not just a matter of chance. There is a designer in evolution - natural selection. Chance simply gives the range of options which can be selected from. Secondly, there have been plenty of examples and explanations of complex features evolving, but ID proponents simply refuse to accept the evidence. I heard ID supporters still say things like "the eye is too complex to have evolved in steps" when the mechanisms by which this can happen have been understood for years.
Gradual evolution can be falsified if one can show a creature rapidly evolve. In fact, given the large number of species on the planet, even given the long time scale for evolution, odds are pretty high that evolution in action will be caught on tape, so to speak, at some point, and then the question resolved. (And no, I'm not talking about microevolution.)
It has been. The question IS resolved. There has been recent observation of changes in finch beak lengths:
http://www.indiana.edu/~ensiweb/lessons/vid.wdns.
All evolution is microevolution. All evolution is gradual. What looks like 'macro' or rapid is simply microevolution taking place over a relatively short time.
To give an example of how things can appear 'macro', it would be possible for a mouse to evolve to the size of an elephant in steps far to small to be seen even over several human lifetimes, but this would still happen in a period too small to be seen in the fossil record! I find this astonishing, but it is true.
Anyone who thinks that the fossil record is any evidence for 'macroevolution' does not understand the incredible timescales involved.
If you can demonstrate that random processes and death can create higher order signals, then ID is false since ID's basic premise is that it is impossible for a complex singal to arise spontaneously.
Again, this irrelevant. Evolution is not a random process. It involves selection. For example, the peacock's tail did not evolve at random - females actively selected the bigger tails.
If you want evidence for order appearing spontaneously out of random processes, I suggest you take a look at chaos theory, and things like the development of vortices in flows, or magnetic domain formation. There is plenty of evidence of order spontaneously arising, but the IDer/Creationists seem to be either ignorant or deliberately ignoring this.
I seriously get aggravated at the editorializing on Slashdot sometimes. It amazes me how people can post while being ignorant of the actual debate.
I would suggest that coming up suggestions that evolution is a random process is a sign of being ignorant about important aspects of the debate. This is a common and understandable ignorance (as evolution is taught so badly), but does not put someone in a position to be critical of others.
The new curriculum mentions that theories of life arising from similar building-block molecules through purely random processes can be challenged by recent findings in the fossil record and by molecular biology.
If this is what it says, it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how evolution works. The evolution of life is not random. It involves selection (hence the term 'Natural Selection'). It is selection by various mechanisms of the best-surviving variation from a set of random changes from an original. That is not the same thing at all.
Two, the topic was solaris not opensolaris, which I see is only a subset of the former.
It depends how you define subset. It is like comparing Linux distributions with the Linux kernel. Solaris + Sun packages would be analagous to OpenSolaris + GNU packages. Future releases of Solaris will be build on OpenSolaris code.
Three, I stand by my initial posting. Sun will open source something when it is in their interest
Well, it would not make much sense for them to open source something when it is not in their interest, would it?
but they do not support open software wholeheartedly, and certainly not free software.
I believe that the evidence suggests otherwise. There have been contributions to GNOME, and of course the 'killer' application of desktop Linux - OpenOffice. OpenOffice is available under the LGPL. That is certainly free and open source.
It sounds like you need a new job. Or a new field.
Maybe I just haven't burnt out yet, but I find most [i]coding[/i] problems interesting.
Ah, but I said most coding jobs. I am lucky to a range of interesting coding things, but I realise I am in a minority.
Interesting comment--considering that they are teaching Intelligent Design alongside Evolutionary Theory. Your comment seems to indicate that, by teaching ONLY Evolution, that's how we develop Independent Thinking? Tell one side of a story? Somehow, that seems more like indoctrination to me.
You are missing the point. These classes are supposed to be science lessons, not philosophy or religion. There are plenty of alternatives ideas to evolution that can be discussed in biology classes, such as the ideas that fossils aren't old and the Earth was created recently. These areas are testable, and examining the data that suggests they are false can be highly educational - students learn about rock strata and radioactive dating.
Intelligent design is not testable. It is nothing more than a series of statements of incredulity - that because we don't yet understand everything about the evolution of life then there must have been intervention by a 'designer'. This isn't science. Intelligent design might be science if there was some sort of valid consistent test for the existence of a designer, but there isn't. Also, because it is likely there there will always be some area of evolution or of biology that is not fully understood, there will always be some room for someone to say 'that must be designed'. This means that Intelligent Design is never refutable; again, making it meaningless in the context of science.
Science teaching should include the idea that we are simply currently ignorant about some things. Coming up with untestable, irrefutable explanations to cover that ignorance is dishonest and should not be part of the process.
Imagine this sort of approach being used in other areas of science (e.g. 'We don't yet fully understand the origin of comets, so aliens or gods must have made them') and the results are silly in the extreme.
Unfortunately, real-life java problems are never very interesting.
Virtually all real-life coding problems are uninteresting. It is nothing to do with Java.
By Sun's definition of 'open' it is.
Stop spreading FUD.
Solaris is open by the Open Source Initiative's definition. OpenSolaris is released under their definition of open, not Sun's.
Of course C# has all of the same advantages, and even though it's more recent there are some areas where its performance beats Java. I'd love to see all the Microsoft reasearchers vs. all the Sun researchers coming up with increasingly brilliant ways to take advantage of the late binding to turn a performance hindrance into a benefit.
The beauty of the Java situation is that it is not just the Sun researchers doing this. It is also the IBM researchers, the HP researchers, the BEA researchers and the open source researchers.
Perhaps Sun should try to add more languages to the Java Platform (more official ones, AFAIK there are a few unofficial compilers).
Sun is doing exactly that. There is now a JSR (Java Specification Request) for a scripting language interface to Java that is going to be part of the next Java release. There are also two JSRs for scripting languages: Groovy and BeanShell.
What I don't understand is exactly what advantage is Java providing on the server-side. Do you really need cross-platform bytecode at that level?
Yes. It is a real advantage. I can build a J2EE application package (a WAR) file and deploy on an application server such as Tomcat and not care what the server OS is at all. This is great for things like mixed-OS clusters, as all you need a single codebase and a single binary deployment.
Is it just because of the extensive Java API's? That seems unfortunate because you could have the same API's in a native compiled language and get much better performance.
The better performance argument is a myth. Java performs extremely well server-side.
Native compiled languages are just as portable (or even more portable) as Java.
No they aren't - at least not in my experience. There are major issues such as word endian-ness and size to be taken account.
The main problem is having to recompile for each platform, but on a static server that is no big deal.
It is a big deal. Cross-compiling a large program can take a while, then each version has to be tested on each platform. Compare to Java where developers routinely code and test on Windows or Linux/Unix and then deploy on the other platform with no problems.
To me it just seems like a huge waste to have the massive Java environment running bytecode on a static platform.
Java environments generally don't run bytecode. They run mostly native code. The pure bytecode is there at the deployment stage. As the program runs the JVM generates optimised native code based on profiling of the application. This can in principle be more efficient that one-shot compiling. The only benefit of pre-compiled applications is quick start-up time, but that does not matter server-side when code on application servers (unlike code in CGI scripts) can be continually running for days or even weeks.
2) macro-evolution: this is your... virus -> ??? -> monkey!!! type of evolution. this is also the type of evolution that makes unbelievably complex eyeballs from nothing.
Macro-evolution is a myth. Sometimes very large changes can appear (such as extra limbs or fingers), but these are always due to simple ('micro'!) changes in the DNA, and they don't contribute to evolution, as large changes in structure are virtually always disadvantageous.
Complex organs like eyeballs don't appear from nothing. They appear in very small steps. We can see examples of what these steps look like in living organisms. For example, the last fews steps in this process involve the sealing over of an eye-pit and the formation of a lens. There is a living animal that has an eye that is before this stage - the Nautilus.
at what point did the multi cell organisms develop eyeballs? any examples?
Sure. Look back at fossils from the 'Cambrian explosion' (about 540 million years ago). A range of eye types can be seen, and their evolution from simple beginnings followed.
As for 'eyeballs', this has happened so many times it is hard to say there is a single 'point'. For example, Cephalopods have eyeballs and so do fish, but they are completely different in structure.
"There is no Windows box that lets you run IE5 and IE6 side by side."
Sure there is. It's called VMWare. Or Microsoft Virtual PC if you prefer.
Having to emulate an entire PC is obviously not the same as running the two applications side by side on the same operating system.
If a black hole can create a gravitational force so powerful it can suck in light, doesn't that mean that when the light is being sucked in it is travelling faster than light towards the black hole?
No, as light doesn't speed up and slow down in empty space. Instead, it changes frequency. Light travelling towards a black hole (or any other gravitating object) gets blue-shifted.