We have tons of skeletons of humanidae much older than 6,000 years.
That's assuming the dating methods are accurate. If the flood hypothesis is correct, then that would have removed a great deal of C12 from the biosphere, making the C14 from the atmosphere much more prominent in the biosphere, and giving much older dates to everything before that point. Given that the flood occurred about 4,500 years ago, that fits the recorded dating very well.
Among these issues were women's suffrage, direct election of U.S. senators, monetary/trade (tariff) policy, America's role in world peacekeeping, direct income tax, civil and worker/s rights.
Is this a joke? Completely implausible in the context of the time and place.
Maybe you should read what Gould had to say on the subject. He agreed both that they were teaching racism as science and that Bryan's opposition was to a large extent on racial grounds.
You continue to abuse logic. There is no logical connection between the truth of a theory and the morals of its propounders.
I agree with your statement as you formulated it. However, there _is_ a connection between how you view the world and how you view morality. It is inescapable. Notice that I was not criticizing Darwin's morality per se, but the fact that he codified his morality as scientific fact.
You make a false dichotomy between religious belief and accepting evolutionary theory. The Pope, the Anglican Church and the majority of other Christian denominations disagree with you.
I stopped caring what the Anglican church had to say when they started promoting Ashera worship on their homepage. The Catholic Church actually isn't officially evolutionist, though they do not regard evolution as heresy. Personally, I don't care much about establishment, and more about the meaning of the scriptures.
You snip my criticism of your misunderstanding of the title of The Origin of Species. Nobody who had read the book could have made such a mistake.
You are partially correct. When you read the follow-on works, however, it is obvious that he applied the same ideas to the human races.
Are you a troll, or just regurgitating material third hand?
Why do you insist on pretending that people who disagree with you are disingenuous or stupid?
The wikipedia article does nothing against what I said except to give a different date for the genetic bottleneck.
Note that the Wikipedia entry assumes the existence of precursors to Mitochondrial eve, but that is only resting on the assumption of evolution. Mitochondrial Eve would look the same whether or not Eve herself had ancestors or not, or whether or not she was the only person alive when she was born/made. The existence of her ancestors and contemporaries flows from the theory of evolution only, and not from data.
As for the date, we've found that human mitochondria mutates faster than previously thought, throwing previous molecular clocks off, and putting mitochondrial even at about 6,000 to 6,500 years.
While the existence of mitochondrial eve was predicted by both theories, the existence of a recent mitochondrial Eve was predicted by the Bible and came as a surprise to evolutionary theory.
"The idea that the Scopes trial was about a law opposing racism is hilarious."
Why do you think Clarence Darrow was interested? Racial and sexual equality were his main fights.
"In case it has escaped your notice, racism and segregation were entrenched in Tennessee at the time and for forty years after (at least)."
You don't think perhaps the legislators were trying to slowly remove racism, perhaps by first removing it from the biology textbooks? Remember, the only part of evolution it forbid teaching was the evolution of man.
"The idea that the roots of racism lie in the theory of evolution is completely ahistorical."
I did not say that. What I did say is that evolution firmed up the idea of biological roots of racism. It made it part of biology rather than ideology, which made it very difficult to remove from the public mind.
"Even if Darwin was an appalling racist and his ideas were supported by racists, this would have no bearing on the evidence for/against evolution."
My point was not on the general theory of evolution, but specifically on Darwin's idea of evolution. It's amusing that the "completely sure" arguments used in the scopes trial are now almost all completely discreditted, but it still remains for many as a show of why the Bible is wrong and evolution is right. My point was that the Bible was correct against Darwin's ideas and it will also eventually prove out to be correct against this generation's ideas. It's when man believes that his ideas are better than God's that we tend to have problems. In fact, this is one of Jesus's main points.
"If you are open-minded, I'd urge you to read these more critically in future."
I have read them critically, investigated their claims, and debated with others to thoroughly make sure that I'm on good ground, and I think I am, though I am open to correction. So far, your argument has simply been "I don't think so, racism was already there", which doesn't answer the argument at all.
Since we're on the topic of races, I thought I'd point out a few things (these are very offtopic, but when I learned them I found them interesting):
1) the original concept of races was what we would presently consider cultures -- the Irish race, the French race, etc. 2) the evolutionists were the primary ones who taught race as a biological concept. The Origin of the Species was subtitled something likeThe Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for life. 3) eventually Darwin and others classified a few major "races" of man: australoid, mongoloid, negroid, and caucasoid, each being a varied amount of evolved from our simian ancestors, with the australoids most like animals and caucasoid being the highest evolved creature. 4) The law which was in contest during the scopes monkey trial DID NOT outlaw teaching evolution. The only thing it outlawed was teaching the evolution OF MAN (which was, as you can see, very racist). The specific book that was in contention taught those races, AND taught that white people (caucasoids) were the highest evolved of them. 5) If you ever wonder why our parents and especially our grandparent's generations were so entrenched in racism, it was it was taught as part of evolution in their biology textbooks. In fact, the Bronx zoo even had a Pygmy from Africa on display in a cage with a monkey to demonstrate "primitive" ancestry. Likewise, Australian aborigines were often hunted for their skulls to be sold to museums. 6) It turns out that the Bible is right, and that human ancestry can be traced back to a biological bottleneck about 6,000 years ago, known as mitochondrial Eve.
It's too bad that many people, including many in the Church, decided to believe man over the Bible in this area (which teaches we are all relatives), and to see how much destruction this has caused to lives worldwide.
On the subject of Torah's, I always thought that the way that they were made was cool -- you often had three different people writing it: one writes the consonants, one writes the vowels, and a third writes the margin notes (called the masura). Sometimes this is done by one individual, but I just think it's interesting how the different layers are laid down.
"In three years you will have to buy all new software."
Not really. I imagine that Mac developers will be writing primarily to PPC up to 5 years out.
"What about all your Altavec code?"
Most Altivec code is done conditionally. Likewise, gcc's vector extensions and it's auto-vectorization is vector-processor independent (now we know why Apple put so much behind that). In addition, many Altivec users actually just use libraries that make use of the Altivec.
I think the problem has been trying to ramp higher and higher clockspeeds from the PowerPC line. It just wasn't happening. Meanwhile, AMD/Intel have been having their speed pissing contest, and x86-64 is now on the table, and all of the improvements have been the results of AMD and Intel duking it out.
My guess is that this decision is mostly based on the perceived future advancements of the PPC platform.
Now, what would be really funny is if the Xbox ran on PPCs because Steve Jobs told Ballmer that PPCs were the future:)
"It doesn't shock me too much that it only took 2 hours to port Mathematica. I mean, the API for OS X on Intel is probably exactly the same as for OS X on PPC. Probably only very, very small parts (if any at all) of Mathematica are written in assembly code. You fix those parts and anything that relies on specific processor behavior then do a recompile."
You also have to remember that Mathematica is VERY PORTABLE ANYWAY. It's available for pretty much every UNIX, including wierd ones, even wierd Linux ones (like Linux/Alpha and Linux/PPC). It doesn't take much to port Mathematica to a new architecture. In fact, I believe that the original Linux/PPC port was done by a SysAdmin just so that he could run it on his Powerbook running Linux.
Does Linux not support the airport extreme? Does it have specific problems? What are they? I ask because I have been planning on purchasing a dual-boot system from YDL or just buying a regular Mac and making it dual-boot.
"RAM isn't equal on ANY platform! There is cheap stuff being sold and bought everyday on the Macs too you know. People don't want to overpay Apple for RAM, so they try to get something cheap and WHAM, they end up with problems."
The difference is that cheap RAM is the default for consumers on Windows. Apple tends to use better-quality RAM.
"Last I checked, Apple used the same type of Hard disks as everyone else out there. I could take a HD out of an Apple and put it in my PC and vice-versa. So how is this a "windows" problem?"
First of all, he wasn't bashing Windows, but the WinTel mindset, culture, and marketplace.
He wasn't ragging on the interfaces -- of course you can put an Apple hard drive into a PC.
I think the point is manufacturing quality. Apple's products are a step above what you get in the PC world. They are probably even from the same vendors as the PC products, but manufactured to a higher specification. I don't know this for sure, but it certainly seems to be the case from my experience.
Likewise, you are more likely to get something that is well thought out for use from Apple. Apple desktops were the first ones to have a case which made sense from a maintenance perspective. Macs were the first to include, by default, ethernet cards which autosensed whether it was connected to a hub or another PC. Macs were the first mainstream computer to include a superdrive.
When you buy a Mac, you don't have to ask yourself, "is this going to work reliably?" or "is this going to work like I expect it to?" They have high engineering standards which really shine through on the final product. It's all the little things added up which turns your computer from a hassle to a productivity tool.
"I do use a 2003 Server at home and at work and I have yet to have a single virus or malware infection. I do apply patches, run a firewall etc."
I think this is part of the point -- why on earth do we have to keep applying patches, running firewalls, and running anti-virus software just to keep our computers running?
If you have to install a patch every six months to a year because of something truly awful, that's not so bad. But to have the current patch-mill is just insane. Why do you have to have a firewall and an anti-virus to be safe? Why not just run safe software?
Likewise, the article wasn't just about security, it's also about quality. Are there decent PC's out there that don't start breaking within 9 months? If there are, they certainly aren't being sold to consumers. In our office, we have laptops from several vendors. Some of them have lost use of their ethernet ports, some have lost use of their PCMCIA slots, and some have lost use of their USB ports. But the Mac ones, even the older iBooks and Powerbooks, are still running fine. We have the same situation with our desktops, though not to the same degree.
The basic point is that, to use WinTel, you have to spend a LOT of time and effort just keeping the stupid thing alive. With Mac, you spend your time actually working.
Most people here, at least who argue for GPL/FOSS, agree with OBEYING copyright. They disagree with evil companies ABUSING copyright.
The RIAA, for example, is:
stupid - for not recognizing the ability to make money from P2P
greedy - because, well, they are
arrogant - because they think that they should be working against, rather than with, their customers
abusive - even this week there was an instance of the RIAA suing someone for downloading music they already owned
All of these make the RIAA objects of wrath and disgust and much blogging against them. None of this means "therefore we should make unauthorized copies".
I actually think that if you really look into it, you find much less hypocrasy in the F/OSS world than in the proprietary world. F/OSS came about because people wanted a legal way to share with each other. People in the proprietary world often steal software and music because they don't care if it's legal or not. That's the fundamental difference -- F/OSS was wanting the freedom and wanting to do so within a legal framework.
I have a friend who is a business owner, who uses unauthorized copies of software. When I pointed to the fact it was illegal, he didn't care. He didn't want to use F/OSS software because he didn't care about the legality. If he had cared, then his choice would either be to pay (but he didn't have the money) or use F/OSS. F/OSS thrives because it is a legal and ethical way to do what we always wanted to do with software -- share.
"Particle size does not produce the layering seen in the geologic record. (if it did we wouldn't see millions of layers with similar structure, but a few dozen layers with radically different composition)."
"2) The is huge evidence that oil is made over a period of millions of year in nature. It is true that by using a process discovered in the last decade one can produce oil in hours. There is *zero* evidence that this is how nature did it."
"3) No one is saying that it always takes a long time to petrify something. In fact, it is commonly known that under the right circumstances it is trivial to petrify things. One example of "the right circumstances" would be a global flood. If that had actually happened there would be millions of times more fossils than are actually found in the geologic record."
How many would there be?
"5) The uranus prediction is utter nonesense since it seems to predict any field. Plus, it's very amusing that he brags about being published in a "peer reviewed creation journal". Oh well, I suppose that's what you do with your memo after it's rejected by actual journals."
Well, Humphreys gave a number range, and it was _within_ his, and it was NOT IN the range given by others. His ranges did not overlap theirs.
"It's very amusing that the creationists think *they* understand science but that the entire scientific community has missed the boat"
Except that you are separating creationists from scientists. There are many creationists who are scientists. One of the more influential in biology was Mendel, who showed that the genetic traits he discovered disproved evolution.
The scientists you are referring to are going off of a priori assumptions of naturalism, and for naturalism to be true, there must have been long ages that have passed. But when you remove that assumption, you find that the interpretations of the data that give long ages were more a product of the assumption of naturalism than the only reasonable method of interpretation.
"It's very funny to think that the neo conservatives go to war over oil - the compressed remains of million year old creatures, yet believes the world is young."
There is no evidence that oil is made over millions of years. In the lab it is produced quickly, just as coal, opal, petrified objects, fossils, stalagtites and stalagmites are formed.
There is a museum that has a petrified ham, which was petrified in only one year. Likewise, stalagtites and stalagmites can grow in just 50 years. Layered sedimentation is actually based on particle size of flowing material, and not of millions of years of layering. An entire layered sediment canyon was created in 3 hours by the Mt. St. Helen's eruption.
Also note that a young earth creationist correctly predicted Uranus's electromagnetic field, while those believing in millions of years were incorrect.
"Honestly, just what is the deal with these fundamentalists?"
Actually, Intelligent Design is not the fundamentalist movement -- that's Direct Creationism (btw, I am a Direct Creationist).
The Intelligent Design movement consists largely of theistic evolutionists. One of the most prominent, Behe, believes in Universal Common Ancestry and many evolutionary ideas. He simply rejects Darwinian evolution as the source of _all_ biological systems.
"Two, regarding the wider scope of Intellegent Design, why does that necessarily have to conflict with the established theory of evolution?"
It does not. Most of the people opposing evolution are opposed simply because it removes the atheistic assumption from evolution. The charge of fundamentalism is actually a cover for the real objections. Most fundamentalist organizations -- AiG, ICR, CRS, distance themselves from Intelligent Design because ID does not assume a Biblical outlook.
As to your questions about us fundies:
"One, if a literal interpretation of the Bible is correct, what about all these fossils?"
What would you expect if the world were covered by a large deluge? In the words of Ken Ham, you would expect "billions of dead things, covered in rocks, laid down by water, all over the earth."
What about fossil succession?
(1) It is not as clear as evolutionists claim (2) Most of the succession can be accounted for by ecological zonation (3) Many of the species that the evolutionary interpretation of rocks show as being extinct for 70 million years have shown up living and unchanged.
Another issue is convergent evolution. This is the Darwinian epicycle. And when you have entire groups of "convergently evolved" species (see the placental/marsupial convergence), you see that these are not the results of random mutations.
What about radiometric dating?
The funny thing is that C14 dating supports young earth creationism. All living things have C14 in them, which should disappear entirely in about 100,000 years. However, all fossils which have been tested still have C14 remaining in them. This was supposed to have been caused by other factors, such as penetration by bacteria or the creation of new C14. However, this has also been shown to be true in diamonds, which date to 50,000 years to 70,000 years (the labs can detect up to 90,000 years). If the flood is true, then the adjusted C14 date would be 5,000 - 6,000 years. This is true of many diamonds tested.
Likewise, coal and oil, stalagtites and stalagmites, and even opal can be formed quickly. AiG is actually opening a Creation Museum which they will have a cave made of real rock, and then they are going to have you calculate how many millions of years the museum has been open based on stalagtite length:)
Why is it ethical to do this with sheep/humans, but not ethical to do this with humans (and if you don't think this is coming, people have proposed created brainless humans for the purpose of harvesting organs).
At what point is a chimera no longer human?
I find it really amusing that people on this board are so willing to go for it. I'm cynically guessing this is the same crowd that is morally outraged because people send unwanted email without looking at the consequences on our network infrastructures.
Actually, it takes a lot less time to setup a Linux server than a Windows server -- at least to set it up right.
A typical Windows server requires a huge amount of work making sure that everything is properly disabled, and that permissions are set up right.
Linux usually consists of saying chkconfig XXXX off a number of times, for everything that doesn't need to be running.
Then you get the security issues. With Windows, you need to update quite often, while with Linux you can get away with about once a month. Plus, on Linux, you get your updates in pieces, so you only have to update what you are actually vulnerable for.
The maintenance cost of a Linux _server_ is much less than that of Windows. The cost of a Linux desktop is smaller if used as a thin client, and greater otherwise.
If you are using the plain telephone service, you can map an extension to ZapScan and listen to the outgoing/incoming calls, but not interoffice calls.
We have ours so that if you dial 8000 first, your call will be recorded.
You can also set it up to attempt to dial long distance via VoIP, but then go land line if the network is down.
What's really cool, though, is the idea of just sticking an Asterisk box next to your webserver, and giving it a 1-800 number to have dial-in status updates.
You forgot that there aren't any conservatives anymore. "Neo-Cons" are anything but conservative. They are all the bad things that people say about traditional conservatives all wrapped into one, without actually having any of the qualities of conservatism.
As a followup, for those of you who think that George Bush himself is a totalitarian dictator, don't you think you should be packing heat in case he decides to stay there for life? It seems reckless to say both "our leader is evil" and "let's let our leader be the only one with the guns".
You forget the point of the second amendment -- it is to keep for the citizens the power to overthrow their government should it become corrupt.
In most totalitarian regimes, before they took away the rights, first they took away the guns. The purpose of the second amendment is to keep someone from doing that.
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We have tons of skeletons of humanidae much older than 6,000 years.
That's assuming the dating methods are accurate. If the flood hypothesis is correct, then that would have removed a great deal of C12 from the biosphere, making the C14 from the atmosphere much more prominent in the biosphere, and giving much older dates to everything before that point. Given that the flood occurred about 4,500 years ago, that fits the recorded dating very well.
Sorry, I meant William Jennings Bryan. From here
Is this a joke? Completely implausible in the context of the time and place.
Maybe you should read what Gould had to say on the subject. He agreed both that they were teaching racism as science and that Bryan's opposition was to a large extent on racial grounds.
You continue to abuse logic. There is no logical connection between the truth of a theory and the morals of its propounders.
I agree with your statement as you formulated it. However, there _is_ a connection between how you view the world and how you view morality. It is inescapable. Notice that I was not criticizing Darwin's morality per se, but the fact that he codified his morality as scientific fact.
You make a false dichotomy between religious belief and accepting evolutionary theory. The Pope, the Anglican Church and the majority of other Christian denominations disagree with you.
I stopped caring what the Anglican church had to say when they started promoting Ashera worship on their homepage. The Catholic Church actually isn't officially evolutionist, though they do not regard evolution as heresy. Personally, I don't care much about establishment, and more about the meaning of the scriptures.
You snip my criticism of your misunderstanding of the title of The Origin of Species. Nobody who had read the book could have made such a mistake.
You are partially correct. When you read the follow-on works, however, it is obvious that he applied the same ideas to the human races.
Are you a troll, or just regurgitating material third hand?
Why do you insist on pretending that people who disagree with you are disingenuous or stupid?
The wikipedia article does nothing against what I said except to give a different date for the genetic bottleneck.
Note that the Wikipedia entry assumes the existence of precursors to Mitochondrial eve, but that is only resting on the assumption of evolution. Mitochondrial Eve would look the same whether or not Eve herself had ancestors or not, or whether or not she was the only person alive when she was born/made. The existence of her ancestors and contemporaries flows from the theory of evolution only, and not from data.
As for the date, we've found that human mitochondria mutates faster than previously thought, throwing previous molecular clocks off, and putting mitochondrial even at about 6,000 to 6,500 years.
While the existence of mitochondrial eve was predicted by both theories, the existence of a recent mitochondrial Eve was predicted by the Bible and came as a surprise to evolutionary theory.
"The idea that the Scopes trial was about a law opposing racism is hilarious."
Why do you think Clarence Darrow was interested? Racial and sexual equality were his main fights.
"In case it has escaped your notice, racism and segregation were entrenched in Tennessee at the time and for forty years after (at least)."
You don't think perhaps the legislators were trying to slowly remove racism, perhaps by first removing it from the biology textbooks? Remember, the only part of evolution it forbid teaching was the evolution of man.
"The idea that the roots of racism lie in the theory of evolution is completely ahistorical."
I did not say that. What I did say is that evolution firmed up the idea of biological roots of racism. It made it part of biology rather than ideology, which made it very difficult to remove from the public mind.
"Even if Darwin was an appalling racist and his ideas were supported by racists, this would have no bearing on the evidence for/against evolution."
My point was not on the general theory of evolution, but specifically on Darwin's idea of evolution. It's amusing that the "completely sure" arguments used in the scopes trial are now almost all completely discreditted, but it still remains for many as a show of why the Bible is wrong and evolution is right. My point was that the Bible was correct against Darwin's ideas and it will also eventually prove out to be correct against this generation's ideas. It's when man believes that his ideas are better than God's that we tend to have problems. In fact, this is one of Jesus's main points.
"If you are open-minded, I'd urge you to read these more critically in future."
I have read them critically, investigated their claims, and debated with others to thoroughly make sure that I'm on good ground, and I think I am, though I am open to correction. So far, your argument has simply been "I don't think so, racism was already there", which doesn't answer the argument at all.
Since we're on the topic of races, I thought I'd point out a few things (these are very offtopic, but when I learned them I found them interesting):
1) the original concept of races was what we would presently consider cultures -- the Irish race, the French race, etc.
2) the evolutionists were the primary ones who taught race as a biological concept. The Origin of the Species was subtitled something likeThe Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for life.
3) eventually Darwin and others classified a few major "races" of man: australoid, mongoloid, negroid, and caucasoid, each being a varied amount of evolved from our simian ancestors, with the australoids most like animals and caucasoid being the highest evolved creature.
4) The law which was in contest during the scopes monkey trial DID NOT outlaw teaching evolution. The only thing it outlawed was teaching the evolution OF MAN (which was, as you can see, very racist). The specific book that was in contention taught those races, AND taught that white people (caucasoids) were the highest evolved of them.
5) If you ever wonder why our parents and especially our grandparent's generations were so entrenched in racism, it was it was taught as part of evolution in their biology textbooks. In fact, the Bronx zoo even had a Pygmy from Africa on display in a cage with a monkey to demonstrate "primitive" ancestry. Likewise, Australian aborigines were often hunted for their skulls to be sold to museums.
6) It turns out that the Bible is right, and that human ancestry can be traced back to a biological bottleneck about 6,000 years ago, known as mitochondrial Eve.
It's too bad that many people, including many in the Church, decided to believe man over the Bible in this area (which teaches we are all relatives), and to see how much destruction this has caused to lives worldwide.
On the subject of Torah's, I always thought that the way that they were made was cool -- you often had three different people writing it: one writes the consonants, one writes the vowels, and a third writes the margin notes (called the masura). Sometimes this is done by one individual, but I just think it's interesting how the different layers are laid down.
I've always wondered if it really exists. Perhaps what Fermat had in mind wasn't a valid proof.
"In three years you will have to buy all new software."
Not really. I imagine that Mac developers will be writing primarily to PPC up to 5 years out.
"What about all your Altavec code?"
Most Altivec code is done conditionally. Likewise, gcc's vector extensions and it's auto-vectorization is vector-processor independent (now we know why Apple put so much behind that). In addition, many Altivec users actually just use libraries that make use of the Altivec.
I think the problem has been trying to ramp higher and higher clockspeeds from the PowerPC line. It just wasn't happening. Meanwhile, AMD/Intel have been having their speed pissing contest, and x86-64 is now on the table, and all of the improvements have been the results of AMD and Intel duking it out.
:)
My guess is that this decision is mostly based on the perceived future advancements of the PPC platform.
Now, what would be really funny is if the Xbox ran on PPCs because Steve Jobs told Ballmer that PPCs were the future
"It doesn't shock me too much that it only took 2 hours to port Mathematica. I mean, the API for OS X on Intel is probably exactly the same as for OS X on PPC. Probably only very, very small parts (if any at all) of Mathematica are written in assembly code. You fix those parts and anything that relies on specific processor behavior then do a recompile."
You also have to remember that Mathematica is VERY PORTABLE ANYWAY. It's available for pretty much every UNIX, including wierd ones, even wierd Linux ones (like Linux/Alpha and Linux/PPC). It doesn't take much to port Mathematica to a new architecture. In fact, I believe that the original Linux/PPC port was done by a SysAdmin just so that he could run it on his Powerbook running Linux.
Are you from Tulsa?
Does Linux not support the airport extreme? Does it have specific problems? What are they? I ask because I have been planning on purchasing a dual-boot system from YDL or just buying a regular Mac and making it dual-boot.
"RAM isn't equal on ANY platform! There is cheap stuff being sold and bought everyday on the Macs too you know. People don't want to overpay Apple for RAM, so they try to get something cheap and WHAM, they end up with problems."
The difference is that cheap RAM is the default for consumers on Windows. Apple tends to use better-quality RAM.
"Last I checked, Apple used the same type of Hard disks as everyone else out there. I could take a HD out of an Apple and put it in my PC and vice-versa. So how is this a "windows" problem?"
First of all, he wasn't bashing Windows, but the WinTel mindset, culture, and marketplace.
He wasn't ragging on the interfaces -- of course you can put an Apple hard drive into a PC.
I think the point is manufacturing quality. Apple's products are a step above what you get in the PC world. They are probably even from the same vendors as the PC products, but manufactured to a higher specification. I don't know this for sure, but it certainly seems to be the case from my experience.
Likewise, you are more likely to get something that is well thought out for use from Apple. Apple desktops were the first ones to have a case which made sense from a maintenance perspective. Macs were the first to include, by default, ethernet cards which autosensed whether it was connected to a hub or another PC. Macs were the first mainstream computer to include a superdrive.
When you buy a Mac, you don't have to ask yourself, "is this going to work reliably?" or "is this going to work like I expect it to?" They have high engineering standards which really shine through on the final product. It's all the little things added up which turns your computer from a hassle to a productivity tool.
"I do use a 2003 Server at home and at work and I have yet to have a single virus or malware infection. I do apply patches, run a firewall etc."
I think this is part of the point -- why on earth do we have to keep applying patches, running firewalls, and running anti-virus software just to keep our computers running?
If you have to install a patch every six months to a year because of something truly awful, that's not so bad. But to have the current patch-mill is just insane. Why do you have to have a firewall and an anti-virus to be safe? Why not just run safe software?
Likewise, the article wasn't just about security, it's also about quality. Are there decent PC's out there that don't start breaking within 9 months? If there are, they certainly aren't being sold to consumers. In our office, we have laptops from several vendors. Some of them have lost use of their ethernet ports, some have lost use of their PCMCIA slots, and some have lost use of their USB ports. But the Mac ones, even the older iBooks and Powerbooks, are still running fine. We have the same situation with our desktops, though not to the same degree.
The basic point is that, to use WinTel, you have to spend a LOT of time and effort just keeping the stupid thing alive. With Mac, you spend your time actually working.
Most people here, at least who argue for GPL/FOSS, agree with OBEYING copyright. They disagree with evil companies ABUSING copyright.
The RIAA, for example, is:
All of these make the RIAA objects of wrath and disgust and much blogging against them. None of this means "therefore we should make unauthorized copies".
I actually think that if you really look into it, you find much less hypocrasy in the F/OSS world than in the proprietary world. F/OSS came about because people wanted a legal way to share with each other. People in the proprietary world often steal software and music because they don't care if it's legal or not. That's the fundamental difference -- F/OSS was wanting the freedom and wanting to do so within a legal framework.
I have a friend who is a business owner, who uses unauthorized copies of software. When I pointed to the fact it was illegal, he didn't care. He didn't want to use F/OSS software because he didn't care about the legality. If he had cared, then his choice would either be to pay (but he didn't have the money) or use F/OSS. F/OSS thrives because it is a legal and ethical way to do what we always wanted to do with software -- share.
"Particle size does not produce the layering seen in the geologic record. (if it did we wouldn't see millions of layers with similar structure, but a few dozen layers with radically different composition)."
o n.asp
Why not look at the experiments?
http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v3/i1/laminati
"2) The is huge evidence that oil is made over a period of millions of year in nature. It is true that by using a process discovered in the last decade one can produce oil in hours. There is *zero* evidence that this is how nature did it."
"3) No one is saying that it always takes a long time to petrify something. In fact, it is commonly known that under the right circumstances it is trivial to petrify things. One example of "the right circumstances" would be a global flood. If that had actually happened there would be millions of times more fossils than are actually found in the geologic record."
How many would there be?
"5) The uranus prediction is utter nonesense since it seems to predict any field. Plus, it's very amusing that he brags about being published in a "peer reviewed creation journal". Oh well, I suppose that's what you do with your memo after it's rejected by actual journals."
Well, Humphreys gave a number range, and it was _within_ his, and it was NOT IN the range given by others. His ranges did not overlap theirs.
"It's very amusing that the creationists think *they* understand science but that the entire scientific community has missed the boat"
Except that you are separating creationists from scientists. There are many creationists who are scientists. One of the more influential in biology was Mendel, who showed that the genetic traits he discovered disproved evolution.
The scientists you are referring to are going off of a priori assumptions of naturalism, and for naturalism to be true, there must have been long ages that have passed. But when you remove that assumption, you find that the interpretations of the data that give long ages were more a product of the assumption of naturalism than the only reasonable method of interpretation.
"It's very funny to think that the neo conservatives go to war over oil - the compressed remains of million year old creatures, yet believes the world is young."
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There is no evidence that oil is made over millions of years. In the lab it is produced quickly, just as coal, opal, petrified objects, fossils, stalagtites and stalagmites are formed.
There is a museum that has a petrified ham, which was petrified in only one year. Likewise, stalagtites and stalagmites can grow in just 50 years. Layered sedimentation is actually based on particle size of flowing material, and not of millions of years of layering. An entire layered sediment canyon was created in 3 hours by the Mt. St. Helen's eruption.
http://www.creationism.org/sthelens/MSH1b_7wonder
Some other interesting links:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v24/i4/c
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2003/1209miss
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v17/i2/s
http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-155.htm
http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-157.htm
Also note that a young earth creationist correctly predicted Uranus's electromagnetic field, while those believing in millions of years were incorrect.
http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-203.htm
"Honestly, just what is the deal with these fundamentalists?"
:)
Actually, Intelligent Design is not the fundamentalist movement -- that's Direct Creationism (btw, I am a Direct Creationist).
The Intelligent Design movement consists largely of theistic evolutionists. One of the most prominent, Behe, believes in Universal Common Ancestry and many evolutionary ideas. He simply rejects Darwinian evolution as the source of _all_ biological systems.
"Two, regarding the wider scope of Intellegent Design, why does that necessarily have to conflict with the established theory of evolution?"
It does not. Most of the people opposing evolution are opposed simply because it removes the atheistic assumption from evolution. The charge of fundamentalism is actually a cover for the real objections. Most fundamentalist organizations -- AiG, ICR, CRS, distance themselves from Intelligent Design because ID does not assume a Biblical outlook.
As to your questions about us fundies:
"One, if a literal interpretation of the Bible is correct, what about all these fossils?"
What would you expect if the world were covered by a large deluge? In the words of Ken Ham, you would expect "billions of dead things, covered in rocks, laid down by water, all over the earth."
What about fossil succession?
(1) It is not as clear as evolutionists claim
(2) Most of the succession can be accounted for by ecological zonation
(3) Many of the species that the evolutionary interpretation of rocks show as being extinct for 70 million years have shown up living and unchanged.
Another issue is convergent evolution. This is the Darwinian epicycle. And when you have entire groups of "convergently evolved" species (see the placental/marsupial convergence), you see that these are not the results of random mutations.
What about radiometric dating?
The funny thing is that C14 dating supports young earth creationism. All living things have C14 in them, which should disappear entirely in about 100,000 years. However, all fossils which have been tested still have C14 remaining in them. This was supposed to have been caused by other factors, such as penetration by bacteria or the creation of new C14. However, this has also been shown to be true in diamonds, which date to 50,000 years to 70,000 years (the labs can detect up to 90,000 years). If the flood is true, then the adjusted C14 date would be 5,000 - 6,000 years. This is true of many diamonds tested.
Likewise, coal and oil, stalagtites and stalagmites, and even opal can be formed quickly. AiG is actually opening a Creation Museum which they will have a cave made of real rock, and then they are going to have you calculate how many millions of years the museum has been open based on stalagtite length
"In the balance of life, they're sheep."
Based on what exactly?
Why is it ethical to do this with sheep/humans, but not ethical to do this with humans (and if you don't think this is coming, people have proposed created brainless humans for the purpose of harvesting organs).
At what point is a chimera no longer human?
I find it really amusing that people on this board are so willing to go for it. I'm cynically guessing this is the same crowd that is morally outraged because people send unwanted email without looking at the consequences on our network infrastructures.
Oracle applications is the worst system I've ever run across. I'd rather run accounting systems using an abacus.
Actually, it takes a lot less time to setup a Linux server than a Windows server -- at least to set it up right.
A typical Windows server requires a huge amount of work making sure that everything is properly disabled, and that permissions are set up right.
Linux usually consists of saying chkconfig XXXX off a number of times, for everything that doesn't need to be running.
Then you get the security issues. With Windows, you need to update quite often, while with Linux you can get away with about once a month. Plus, on Linux, you get your updates in pieces, so you only have to update what you are actually vulnerable for.
The maintenance cost of a Linux _server_ is much less than that of Windows. The cost of a Linux desktop is smaller if used as a thin client, and greater otherwise.
If you are using the plain telephone service, you can map an extension to ZapScan and listen to the outgoing/incoming calls, but not interoffice calls.
We have ours so that if you dial 8000 first, your call will be recorded.
You can also set it up to attempt to dial long distance via VoIP, but then go land line if the network is down.
What's really cool, though, is the idea of just sticking an Asterisk box next to your webserver, and giving it a 1-800 number to have dial-in status updates.
You forgot that there aren't any conservatives anymore. "Neo-Cons" are anything but conservative. They are all the bad things that people say about traditional conservatives all wrapped into one, without actually having any of the qualities of conservatism.
As a followup, for those of you who think that George Bush himself is a totalitarian dictator, don't you think you should be packing heat in case he decides to stay there for life? It seems reckless to say both "our leader is evil" and "let's let our leader be the only one with the guns".
You forget the point of the second amendment -- it is to keep for the citizens the power to overthrow their government should it become corrupt.
In most totalitarian regimes, before they took away the rights, first they took away the guns. The purpose of the second amendment is to keep someone from doing that.
Except that the author claims the material as historical fact.