It's obvious that by the number of posts you've made on this thread (for a technology you have no interest in)
I have an interest in all IT technologies, as does any decent professional programmer who wants to keep their job.
that you are absolutely infuriated that Java is dead on the desktop and that.NET is being embraced by many in the Gnome community.
I'm not infuriated. Why should I be? I don't develop much for the desktop, and what I do is for Linux (well, actually for Windows as well, as I use Java). I'm only stating simple business facts. Strange that you should get so worked up about it.
Hilarious.
What is the joke?
I can't wait to see you furiously pounding on the keyboard on the next.NET/Mono/dotGNU thread.
Well, unless you have a webcam, you won't see!
Perhaps some debate involving facts that counter my arguments would be more constructive than insults..
"Nuclear Fusion has always been 15 years away, and always will be"
This glib statement seriously underestimates the achievements in this area in the past few years. We have gone from doubts as to whether controlled fusion could ever be achieved to a point where we are working on stabilising the reaction to the level where it produces commercial results.
And by the way, the classic quote was '50' years, not 15!
Plus the fact that if you do not live in the windows world, there already is a well-established cross-platform language, with the associated runtime, called Java. Well supported by major vendors like IBM, who basically told Microsoft to shove.NET in a warm, dark hole.
The thing I find it hard to get across to many Windows developers is that Java does Windows too! It may not do things as elegantly as.Net in terms of the client side, but the full functionality is there: There are plenty of tools that allow ActiveX/COM integration with both SWT and Swing Java clients for example, and the new Native Desktop APIs are superb. Java works fine in the Windows world!
There is a very big difference between.Net and the OSS implementations - one is supported by Microsoft and the other's aren't. One meets a full (and possibly changing) spec, including libraries, the others don't.
But if you don't want to use.NET,Mono, or dotGNU then fine. But don't think you can influence anybody else to not use them.
Oh, I not only think I can influence people not to use.Net, I already successfully have. I manage development that HAS to be successfully cross-platform. Not partially cross-platform, but where a rich and full-featured deployed application can be switched between different operating systems at short notice, with no porting required for GUI aspects or enterprise features. Using.Net was out of the question. Just look at the notes on the Mono website:
Unsupported technologies
Some technologies are very hard to implement or are being phased out by components in the Longhorn time frame. In some cases, we feel that they are not crucial to the future of the open source desktop.
With all respect to the Mono developers (who have done a great job), I don't want to rely on a system which has missing ('hard to implement') features. This is proof that.Net is NOT cross-platform, only selected parts. When you are developing critical business applications, you really can't trust a 'cross-platform' technology that is incomplete, no matter how much you may like that technology.
Except for the fact that.Net code already runs on other platforms
No. only some.Net code runs on other platforms.
The difference with Java is that if you have a J2EE or J2SE implementation on a platform you get all of it. Every last API and libary. Guaranteed and tested. There aren't half-implemented bits or enterprise features that aren't supplied.
What you have to keep in mind is that the CLI (the virtual machine in a sense) is an ISO standard (Java still isnt)
I would rather have a non-ISO standard from a company (Sun) that has had a solid reputation for decades for upholding standards, than an ISO standard from Microsoft, which has a solid reputation for dumping standards on a whim.
The ISO standard for the CLI will be of no use at all if Microsoft decides in a few years that an entirely new technology is better and relegates.Net to legacy (look at how it has treated Visual Basic 6 developers, for example).
For many of us, it's not a case of being pro- or anti-Microsoft, it's a matter of simple business sense: Having only a single supplier for a technology has never been considered a sensible strategy in any area of business - with the strange exception of IT. Perhaps there is a mistaken sense that much software is always short-term and temporary, so it doesn't matter if the neat and friendly development system you use comes from only one company, and runs on only one platform.
Well, I was using Turbo Pascal on Windows a decade ago. Now I'm developing for companies which have rolled out Linux desktops!
Exactly how is.Net supposed to be a way to achieve cross platform applications? Microsoft have no intention of porting.Net to anything other than Windows, and have not provided assistance in the development of.Net clones (such as Mono). Full.Net is likely to remain Windows-only long-term.
Those prions were from a species that has had a common evolutionary ancestry with us for billions of years. The chances of a native martian organism not only having proteins, but having proteins with compatible amino acids, and being able to specifically interact with our proteins is very, very, very unlikely indeed.
Sorry, other explanations have to be studied in order to make the claim most likely explanation. That claim is much stronger than saying there is merely a "statistical link"
Of course. And you are right. I see what your objection is. I should have not used the phrase 'most likely'. A better way to have phrased it was that to say that human activity is a 'very likely' explanation, not the 'most likely'.
But - I think the point is still valid - if you have found a strong statistical link between global warming and carbon dioxide levels, and we are the main producers of carbon dioxide....
I can show there is a statistical link between the drift of continents and the evolution of mammals. That doesn't mean I can claim the evolution of mammals is the most likely explanation for the drift of the continents.
Yes, but is anyone seriously going to suggest that global warming is the cause of our increased CO2 production, and not the other way around?
Back to tobacco! This is yet another example of how the tobacco lobby put its case: they suggested that a correlation was not evidence of causuality. It might have been that people who had a tendency to lung cancer where the same people with a tendency to smoke. However, when you have enough co-incidences and correlation, the implication is definitely that there is a strong link. I would suggest that we are getting to that situation now with global warming.
I have to admit I did not believe the link until recently: After all, the most potent greenhouse gas is not CO2, but water! Also, there may be strong effects due to solar activity cycles. However, I now think the evidence is so strong...
No it doesn't, as they did not study other possible explanations. RTFA.
You don't get evidence of a statistical link by studying other explanations. You set up a hypothesis (a link by one factor) and then use the statistics to see if that hypothesis is likely. If you want to study other explanations, you do that in separate experiments.
It's like the link with tobacco and lung cancer. You run the stats on the hypothesis that they are linked. If you find a very high correlation that then suggests a strong link. Such a statistical link is not made any less because the researchers had not simultaneously tested a link between lung cancer and, say, burgers! (There may turn out to be a link with burgers too, but that does not make the first finding any less important).
A much more accurate parallel with your cancer analogy (which is no where even close to being accurate, I hope you are not about to take the SATs) is saying John got cancer...
You aren't understanding this. The point (like with the tobacco/cancer analogy) is that, like the research, its about statistics. The parallel with tobacco was (obviously) that the 'it can't be proved' argument was used. Well, you can't prove climate change is linked to our CO2 production, but we are getting enough statistical evidence to show that it's very likely.
I wouldn't like the Earth to end up with the climate of Venus.
Nothing we can do is likely to make the Earth anything like venus - far more CO2 has been dumped into the atmosphere in the past by things such as vast magma flows. Also, there have been several asteroid/comet strikes that have almost totally devastated the planet, but did little long-term harm. What is likely to happen is simply that we get a period (several millenia at least) of extreme weather.
it simply may mean that all of the reviewers share the same bad assumption. In fact, that would seem to be the likely case, instead of the other way around.
Reviews are not based on 'assumptions'. Review is based on analysis and critical study of the procedures. Was the technique used appropriate? Are the statistical analyses meaningful? There are many cases where often outlandish ideas have been accepted for publication because the science behind them has been good, even though the ideas and results are controversial.
Should I have knowledge of every detailed area of science in order to form an opinion that science, in general, follows a herd mentality?
Absolutely. I would be very interested to hear of a single area of science in which this is true! I can't think of one. In almost all areas I have been involved in or have an interest in there has been major ongoing disputes about both detail and generalities.
Therefore, it is the norm rather than the exception that the "common sense" of science is dramatically wrong
By definition, this is meaningless. What do you mean by 'dramatically wrong' or 'common sense', or 'norm'?
The most usual case is that in most areas the accepted opinion in science is correct, with later amendments or changes for extreme cases. Even in physics, Newton is still 'right' - good enought for us to use his ideas with spacecraft.
Scientific consensus is the result of a huge amount of debate and experiment. This is generally a good way to get things right!
The study does not prove human activity was the culprit (in fact they say it is possible it was not), but merely offers an explanation in which human activity was the cause.
No. It suggests that human activity is the most likely explanation, not just an explanation.
There is a parallel here with the tobacco industry, repeatedly saying that it can't be proved that tobacco causes cancer. This is true, but there comes a point where the evidence is so overwhelming that any rational person accepts that tobacco is very likely to be a significant cause of lung cancer.
I'd say that scientists aren't falsifying or misinterpreting their results; but are coming in with a preconceived notion. Having a preconceived notion of what they want the end goal to believe (intentional or not) they will tend to achieve that belief.
That is why we should be skeptical of research unless its published in a peer-reviewed journal (as this was). Research is investigated by highly competitive fellow scientists who are rigorous in seeking out bias.
It's the equivalent of Microsoft funding a report against linux, there may not be anything misrepresented or false in a report, but you have a pretty good idea that if the study expanded their parameters to also look at data inconsistent with the preconceived goals instead of ignoring it the report would have a good chance of being different.
With peer-reviewed research its not like this at all. Its as if Microsoft prepared a report, then insisted that Linux geeks reviewed it and even had a veto over its publication.
There is a free market at work here. Science that scares people gets more money than science that doesn't.
No it doesn't. Science that gets money is science that is judged by the money awarding institutions to have the potential to advance knowledge. The results of that science may scare people, but that comes long after the award of money.
Science is a political activity. Time to acknowledge it as such. It works on the free market
I see no reason to believe this. Science is based on either a general interest in advancing knowledge or in producing information that is useful. There may be general areas of increased financial or political interest, where funding is more likely (such as climate research), but any science which can't be reproduced by peer groups or does not pass the quality filter of review will just fade away. Science is self-correcting.
This research has some serious flaws. It is essentially based on information for a single summer, the other information presented even contradicts the conclusions it draws.
Its not - it simulates possible outcomes over one summer from models which are based on readings over a long period.
The estimations on temperature growth are not really supported by anything - I think it was written to grab headlines.
Nature is one of the most rigorously peer-reviewed journals - it does not publish research which is not 'supported by anything' or 'written to grab headlines'. It may not be a perfect journal by any means, but it does have certain standards.
This is what can happen, and is a good way to spread HIV....
Re:"Could this be it?" NO.
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 1
Though it has been practiced for much longer it was never so widespread or so promiscuous.
I have to disagree. Just look at the problems with venereal diseases before the introduction of antibiotics - syphillis was a major killer, and this was a definite sign of widepread non-monogamy.
That men can identify as heterosexual and monogamous and yet secretly engage in promiscuous sex with other men is testament to the ability of the human mind to lie to itself.
I think we have to get over this obsession with male/male sex as the main method for spreading HIV. This has not been the situation for a long time (although it is still significant). The main method is now heterosexual intercourse.
The problem is men who have sex with other women and aren't honest about it to their main partner! A lot of the time this is men who go to HIV+ female prostitutes.
For example, the UN has suggested in the last few weeks that a major problem which needs to be addressed to check HIV is making sure that women have the ability to say "no" to sex.
Or at least "no" to unprotected sex, which would be a dramatic step forward.
Its not a few! There are millions of women in Africa who have AIDS because of unprotected sex with men who have contracted the virus. Why do they do this? It's often wives who are totally dependent on their husbands. It can be a choice between having unprotected sex or being kicked out of the house with no means of support.
You really need to find out the facts before you make a statement like 'with the exception of a few'.
Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence to the contrary.
True, but as Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I could just as easily say that all life on Earth originated on Jupiter! (and considering the cloud chemistry and temperature range, that is vastly more likely than Titan).
There was no evidence that life would exist around hydrothermal vents either, and most biologists would have considered the idea preposterous until it was actually found: after all, people thought they had lots of good reasons to think that enzymes couldn't possibly work at those temperatures.
Not really - they already knew of thermophiles in hot springs. (Although I admit that the presence of annelid worms at 80C is pretty awesome!)
But as I said, these situations are about a difference in degree, not a fundamental change in type, of life.
Quite to the contrary: biochemistry happens a lot in non-polar environments; water just makes up most of the mass of a cell because there happens to be a lot of it around.
On the contrary - biochemistry is very rare indeed in non-polar environments. Almost all of it either in aqueous solution or on polar/non-polar boundaries; on or embedded in lipid membranes. Water is not only vital to the chemistry of almost all biochemical reactions, it's also a key factor in determining and maintaining the structure of almost all biological macromolecular structures.
It's so vital that some organisms (spore-forming bacteria and tardigrades) successfully stop all reactions in their cells by removing water or almost completely drying out!
And, in fact, there is evidence that bacteria can live in hydrocarbon lakes and break down long, saturated hydrocarbons into methane.
Well, I'm glad you have it all worked out by ESP; NASA should just hire you instead of sending useless probes to moons just because they have the completely mistaken belief that doing so tells them something about the composition about the original solar system.
Well, I admit I have been over-arguing my case! (I kind of enjoy the debate). NASA has a long history of exaggerating the benefits of missions! I certainly don't think the probes are useless - on the contrary I think these missions are scientifically stunning and exciting. What they are not likely to do is tell us fantastic new stuff about the whole 'solar system'. Titan is an unusual moon, and its certainly not unchanged from the origin of the solar system - its been hit by lots of UV light, for example, generating weird chemistry in the atmosphere.
I guess I would rather NASA said 'Titan is a neat place to go to', as against the usual media-friendly statements: 'It will help us understand how the solar system formed' (Well, it might, a bit, but so does almost any exploration off the Earth). As for 'it's like the early Earth'... well, unless we had ice continents, I think not!
I'm not sure we will agree, but thanks for the debate - it's been interesting.
Well, then we obviously have to conclude that life around hydrothermal vents must have evolved independently from other life on earth because the temperature and chemical environment there would kill other life, right?
Life around hydrothermal vents has a common biochemistry with other life. DNA. Lipid cell membranes. Mitochondria. Its all water-based! The discovery that life can exist, and thrive, at temperatures a few tens of degrees celcius higher than we thought is awesome, but does not mean that carbon-based life can even exist, let alone grow, at -200C. Its like finding an athlete who can jump a foot or two higher than anyone else: This does not mean you will find anyone who can jump a mile!
There is no justification for the "was never like Titan life" assertion.
Of course there is. There is not the slightest evidence that Earth-based life was ever in any way adapted to living at -200C in hydrocarbon lakes. There is no common factor in the environments. Earth life would undergo a combination of freezing and dissolving on Titan, and life adapted to Titan would melt and be poisoned on Earth.....and individual properties...
Exactly! That is why Titan is not going to reveal that much about the Solar System as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
It's obvious that by the number of posts you've made on this thread (for a technology you have no interest in)
.NET is being embraced by many in the Gnome community.
.NET/Mono/dotGNU thread.
I have an interest in all IT technologies, as does any decent professional programmer who wants to keep their job.
that you are absolutely infuriated that Java is dead on the desktop and that
I'm not infuriated. Why should I be? I don't develop much for the desktop, and what I do is for Linux (well, actually for Windows as well, as I use Java). I'm only stating simple business facts. Strange that you should get so worked up about it.
Hilarious.
What is the joke?
I can't wait to see you furiously pounding on the keyboard on the next
Well, unless you have a webcam, you won't see!
Perhaps some debate involving facts that counter my arguments would be more constructive than insults..
It would be interse
"Nuclear Fusion has always been 15 years away, and always will be"
This glib statement seriously underestimates the achievements in this area in the past few years. We have gone from doubts as to whether controlled fusion could ever be achieved to a point where we are working on stabilising the reaction to the level where it produces commercial results.
And by the way, the classic quote was '50' years, not 15!
Plus the fact that if you do not live in the windows world, there already is a well-established cross-platform language, with the associated runtime, called Java. Well supported by major vendors like IBM, who basically told Microsoft to shove .NET in a warm, dark hole.
.Net in terms of the client side, but the full functionality is there: There are plenty of tools that allow ActiveX/COM integration with both SWT and Swing Java clients for example, and the new Native Desktop APIs are superb. Java works fine in the Windows world!
The thing I find it hard to get across to many Windows developers is that Java does Windows too! It may not do things as elegantly as
There is a very big difference between .Net and the OSS implementations - one is supported by Microsoft and the other's aren't. One meets a full (and possibly changing) spec, including libraries, the others don't.
.NET,Mono, or dotGNU then fine. But don't think you can influence anybody else to not use them.
.Net, I already successfully have. I manage development that HAS to be successfully cross-platform. Not partially cross-platform, but where a rich and full-featured deployed application can be switched between different operating systems at short notice, with no porting required for GUI aspects or enterprise features. Using .Net was out of the question. Just look at the notes on the Mono website:
.Net is NOT cross-platform, only selected parts. When you are developing critical business applications, you really can't trust a 'cross-platform' technology that is incomplete, no matter how much you may like that technology.
But if you don't want to use
Oh, I not only think I can influence people not to use
Unsupported technologies
Some technologies are very hard to implement or are being phased out by components in the Longhorn time frame. In some cases, we feel that they are not crucial to the future of the open source desktop.
With all respect to the Mono developers (who have done a great job), I don't want to rely on a system which has missing ('hard to implement') features. This is proof that
My point is made by another quote from that site:
.Net is always likely to have significant sections with are 'not currently implemented'
Question 50: Can mono run the WebMatrix?
No. That requires System.Windows.Forms support which is not currently implemented.
A non-Microsoft
Except for the fact that .Net code already runs on other platforms
.Net code runs on other platforms.
No. only some
The difference with Java is that if you have a J2EE or J2SE implementation on a platform you get all of it. Every last API and libary. Guaranteed and tested. There aren't half-implemented bits or enterprise features that aren't supplied.
What you have to keep in mind is that the CLI (the virtual machine in a sense) is an ISO standard (Java still isnt)
.Net to legacy (look at how it has treated Visual Basic 6 developers, for example).
I would rather have a non-ISO standard from a company (Sun) that has had a solid reputation for decades for upholding standards, than an ISO standard from Microsoft, which has a solid reputation for dumping standards on a whim.
The ISO standard for the CLI will be of no use at all if Microsoft decides in a few years that an entirely new technology is better and relegates
For many of us, it's not a case of being pro- or anti-Microsoft, it's a matter of simple business sense: Having only a single supplier for a technology has never been considered a sensible strategy in any area of business - with the strange exception of IT. Perhaps there is a mistaken sense that much software is always short-term and temporary, so it doesn't matter if the neat and friendly development system you use comes from only one company, and runs on only one platform.
.Net seems very short-sighted to me.
Well, I was using Turbo Pascal on Windows a decade ago. Now I'm developing for companies which have rolled out Linux desktops!
Using
Exactly how is .Net supposed to be a way to achieve cross platform applications? Microsoft have no intention of porting .Net to anything other than Windows, and have not provided assistance in the development of .Net clones (such as Mono). Full .Net is likely to remain Windows-only long-term.
What I find pretty amusing is that it looks like this: UNIX, a system intended (or at least that made its name) to run big-iron machines
UNIX has only recently become a big-iron machine. It was designed to be a small, portable multi-tasking system from the start.
Look how prions (of Mad Cow fame) snuck up on us.
Those prions were from a species that has had a common evolutionary ancestry with us for billions of years. The chances of a native martian organism not only having proteins, but having proteins with compatible amino acids, and being able to specifically interact with our proteins is very, very, very unlikely indeed.
Sorry, other explanations have to be studied in order to make the claim most likely explanation. That claim is much stronger than saying there is merely a "statistical link"
Of course. And you are right. I see what your objection is. I should have not used the phrase 'most likely'. A better way to have phrased it was that to say that human activity is a 'very likely' explanation, not the 'most likely'.
But - I think the point is still valid - if you have found a strong statistical link between global warming and carbon dioxide levels, and we are the main producers of carbon dioxide....
I can show there is a statistical link between the drift of continents and the evolution of mammals. That doesn't mean I can claim the evolution of mammals is the most likely explanation for the drift of the continents.
Yes, but is anyone seriously going to suggest that global warming is the cause of our increased CO2 production, and not the other way around?
Back to tobacco! This is yet another example of how the tobacco lobby put its case: they suggested that a correlation was not evidence of causuality. It might have been that people who had a tendency to lung cancer where the same people with a tendency to smoke. However, when you have enough co-incidences and correlation, the implication is definitely that there is a strong link. I would suggest that we are getting to that situation now with global warming.
I have to admit I did not believe the link until recently: After all, the most potent greenhouse gas is not CO2, but water! Also, there may be strong effects due to solar activity cycles. However, I now think the evidence is so strong...
No it doesn't, as they did not study other possible explanations. RTFA.
You don't get evidence of a statistical link by studying other explanations. You set up a hypothesis (a link by one factor) and then use the statistics to see if that hypothesis is likely. If you want to study other explanations, you do that in separate experiments.
It's like the link with tobacco and lung cancer. You run the stats on the hypothesis that they are linked. If you find a very high correlation that then suggests a strong link. Such a statistical link is not made any less because the researchers had not simultaneously tested a link between lung cancer and, say, burgers! (There may turn out to be a link with burgers too, but that does not make the first finding any less important).
A much more accurate parallel with your cancer analogy (which is no where even close to being accurate, I hope you are not about to take the SATs) is saying John got cancer...
You aren't understanding this. The point (like with the tobacco/cancer analogy) is that, like the research, its about statistics. The parallel with tobacco was (obviously) that the 'it can't be proved' argument was used. Well, you can't prove climate change is linked to our CO2 production, but we are getting enough statistical evidence to show that it's very likely.
I wouldn't like the Earth to end up with the climate of Venus.
Nothing we can do is likely to make the Earth anything like venus - far more CO2 has been dumped into the atmosphere in the past by things such as vast magma flows. Also, there have been several asteroid/comet strikes that have almost totally devastated the planet, but did little long-term harm. What is likely to happen is simply that we get a period (several millenia at least) of extreme weather.
it simply may mean that all of the reviewers share the same bad assumption. In fact, that would seem to be the likely case, instead of the other way around.
Reviews are not based on 'assumptions'. Review is based on analysis and critical study of the procedures. Was the technique used appropriate? Are the statistical analyses meaningful? There are many cases where often outlandish ideas have been accepted for publication because the science behind them has been good, even though the ideas and results are controversial.
Should I have knowledge of every detailed area of science in order to form an opinion that science, in general, follows a herd mentality?
Absolutely. I would be very interested to hear of a single area of science in which this is true! I can't think of one. In almost all areas I have been involved in or have an interest in there has been major ongoing disputes about both detail and generalities.
Therefore, it is the norm rather than the exception that the "common sense" of science is dramatically wrong
By definition, this is meaningless. What do you mean by 'dramatically wrong' or 'common sense', or 'norm'?
The most usual case is that in most areas the accepted opinion in science is correct, with later amendments or changes for extreme cases. Even in physics, Newton is still 'right' - good enought for us to use his ideas with spacecraft.
Scientific consensus is the result of a huge amount of debate and experiment. This is generally a good way to get things right!
The study does not prove human activity was the culprit (in fact they say it is possible it was not), but merely offers an explanation in which human activity was the cause.
No. It suggests that human activity is the most likely explanation, not just an explanation.
There is a parallel here with the tobacco industry, repeatedly saying that it can't be proved that tobacco causes cancer. This is true, but there comes a point where the evidence is so overwhelming that any rational person accepts that tobacco is very likely to be a significant cause of lung cancer.
I'd say that scientists aren't falsifying or misinterpreting their results; but are coming in with a preconceived notion. Having a preconceived notion of what they want the end goal to believe (intentional or not) they will tend to achieve that belief.
That is why we should be skeptical of research unless its published in a peer-reviewed journal (as this was). Research is investigated by highly competitive fellow scientists who are rigorous in seeking out bias.
It's the equivalent of Microsoft funding a report against linux, there may not be anything misrepresented or false in a report, but you have a pretty good idea that if the study expanded their parameters to also look at data inconsistent with the preconceived goals instead of ignoring it the report would have a good chance of being different.
With peer-reviewed research its not like this at all. Its as if Microsoft prepared a report, then insisted that Linux geeks reviewed it and even had a veto over its publication.
There is a free market at work here. Science that scares people gets more money than science that doesn't.
No it doesn't. Science that gets money is science that is judged by the money awarding institutions to have the potential to advance knowledge. The results of that science may scare people, but that comes long after the award of money.
Science is a political activity. Time to acknowledge it as such. It works on the free market
I see no reason to believe this. Science is based on either a general interest in advancing knowledge or in producing information that is useful. There may be general areas of increased financial or political interest, where funding is more likely (such as climate research), but any science which can't be reproduced by peer groups or does not pass the quality filter of review will just fade away. Science is self-correcting.
This research has some serious flaws. It is essentially based on information for a single summer, the other information presented even contradicts the conclusions it draws.
Its not - it simulates possible outcomes over one summer from models which are based on readings over a long period.
The estimations on temperature growth are not really supported by anything - I think it was written to grab headlines.
Nature is one of the most rigorously peer-reviewed journals - it does not publish research which is not 'supported by anything' or 'written to grab headlines'. It may not be a perfect journal by any means, but it does have certain standards.
If she says no the husband should rape her.
This is what can happen, and is a good way to spread HIV....
Though it has been practiced for much longer it was never so widespread or so promiscuous.
I have to disagree. Just look at the problems with venereal diseases before the introduction of antibiotics - syphillis was a major killer, and this was a definite sign of widepread non-monogamy.
That men can identify as heterosexual and monogamous and yet secretly engage in promiscuous sex with other men is testament to the ability of the human mind to lie to itself.
I think we have to get over this obsession with male/male sex as the main method for spreading HIV. This has not been the situation for a long time (although it is still significant). The main method is now heterosexual intercourse.
The problem is men who have sex with other women and aren't honest about it to their main partner! A lot of the time this is men who go to HIV+ female prostitutes.
For example, the UN has suggested in the last few weeks that a major problem which needs to be addressed to check HIV is making sure that women have the ability to say "no" to sex.
Or at least "no" to unprotected sex, which would be a dramatic step forward.
Its not a few! There are millions of women in Africa who have AIDS because of unprotected sex with men who have contracted the virus. Why do they do this? It's often wives who are totally dependent on their husbands. It can be a choice between having unprotected sex or being kicked out of the house with no means of support.
You really need to find out the facts before you make a statement like 'with the exception of a few'.
Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence to the contrary.
True, but as Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I could just as easily say that all life on Earth originated on Jupiter! (and considering the cloud chemistry and temperature range, that is vastly more likely than Titan).
There was no evidence that life would exist around hydrothermal vents either, and most biologists would have considered the idea preposterous until it was actually found: after all, people thought they had lots of good reasons to think that enzymes couldn't possibly work at those temperatures.
Not really - they already knew of thermophiles in hot springs. (Although I admit that the presence of annelid worms at 80C is pretty awesome!)
But as I said, these situations are about a difference in degree, not a fundamental change in type, of life.
Quite to the contrary: biochemistry happens a lot in non-polar environments; water just makes up most of the mass of a cell because there happens to be a lot of it around.
On the contrary - biochemistry is very rare indeed in non-polar environments. Almost all of it either in aqueous solution or on polar/non-polar boundaries; on or embedded in lipid membranes. Water is not only vital to the chemistry of almost all biochemical reactions, it's also a key factor in determining and maintaining the structure of almost all biological macromolecular structures.
It's so vital that some organisms (spore-forming bacteria and tardigrades) successfully stop all reactions in their cells by removing water or almost completely drying out!
And, in fact, there is evidence that bacteria can live in hydrocarbon lakes and break down long, saturated hydrocarbons into methane.
Well, I'm glad you have it all worked out by ESP; NASA should just hire you instead of sending useless probes to moons just because they have the completely mistaken belief that doing so tells them something about the composition about the original solar system.
Well, I admit I have been over-arguing my case! (I kind of enjoy the debate). NASA has a long history of exaggerating the benefits of missions! I certainly don't think the probes are useless - on the contrary I think these missions are scientifically stunning and exciting. What they are not likely to do is tell us fantastic new stuff about the whole 'solar system'. Titan is an unusual moon, and its certainly not unchanged from the origin of the solar system - its been hit by lots of UV light, for example, generating weird chemistry in the atmosphere.
I guess I would rather NASA said 'Titan is a neat place to go to', as against the usual media-friendly statements: 'It will help us understand how the solar system formed' (Well, it might, a bit, but so does almost any exploration off the Earth). As for 'it's like the early Earth'... well, unless we had ice continents, I think not!
I'm not sure we will agree, but thanks for the debate - it's been interesting.
Well, then we obviously have to conclude that life around hydrothermal vents must have evolved independently from other life on earth because the temperature and chemical environment there would kill other life, right?
....and individual properties...
Life around hydrothermal vents has a common biochemistry with other life. DNA. Lipid cell membranes. Mitochondria. Its all water-based! The discovery that life can exist, and thrive, at temperatures a few tens of degrees celcius higher than we thought is awesome, but does not mean that carbon-based life can even exist, let alone grow, at -200C. Its like finding an athlete who can jump a foot or two higher than anyone else: This does not mean you will find anyone who can jump a mile!
There is no justification for the "was never like Titan life" assertion.
Of course there is. There is not the slightest evidence that Earth-based life was ever in any way adapted to living at -200C in hydrocarbon lakes. There is no common factor in the environments. Earth life would undergo a combination of freezing and dissolving on Titan, and life adapted to Titan would melt and be poisoned on Earth.
Exactly! That is why Titan is not going to reveal that much about the Solar System as a whole.