by Roblimo (357) FYI - none of these videos are paid ads.
It doesn't much matter - from the reader's point of view it's indistinguishable from a paid advertizement. Your readers are seriously put off by this article. That in itself is enough to establish that you blew it here
And note that the grandparent post said "Responsible journalists do their damnedest to make sure their work looks nothing like the ads that appear on their sites" - pretty well acknowledging that it may not be a paid advertizement, and that you blew it even if it wasn't paid.
Also FYI: America's elected president wasn't born in Kenya and little blue men don't truck the sun around the earth on an invisible track every day.
It looks like a paid ad, it's hardly surprising people are going to suspect it's a paid ad, particularly when there was no statement to the contrary at the time. That's hardly some loony conspiracy theory. You blew it, it was a bad article, simply answer that it wasn't a paid ad and move on and avoid the appearance of paid ads in the future. Calling your readers loony birthers only compounds the problem.
MY bigger issue is that you knew this company was pushing a Trusted Computing scheme. (He directly mentioned the Trusted Platform Module during the interview). I, and a lot of people here, find that far more offensive than the idea of a paid article. At least a paid article I can begrudgingly understand - Slashdot is a business and sometimes parts of a revenue model can be annoying but understandable. But knowingly getting in bed with Trusted Computing - promoting it - that's just plain villain terrain. This stuff is fucking evil, and a large percentage of your readership views it as fucking evil. And I assume you're well aware that the large majority of us view is as fucking evil. It is the single greatest threat to Open Source, it's a direct assault against the fundamental ownership and control of your own computer, it's an ideology to "fix" general purpose computers so they are not general purpose computers. It redefines "security" to mean glorified DRM schemes. It is the single greatest threat to lockdown/exterminate innovation and new technology.
CPU cycles isn't much of an issue here. They are selling a Trusted Computing scheme with a Trusted Platform Module preforming the core functions.
From one of their FAQ's: StrongAuthKey Appliance: Cryptographic hardware (TPM or HSM) included in appliance StrongKey: Cryptographic hardware must be integrated separately (This refers to a TPM built into your PC)
It's bad enough Slashdot has basically dumped an ADVERTIZEMENT here as a front page story, but it's particularly disgusting that they did it for a goddamn motherforking TRUSTED COMPUTING piece of crap. Don't let this shit anywhere near your computer.
I certainly agree that the responses to the White House Petitions pages are laughably empty. However I strongly suspect that the petition system has been significantly influential in indirect ways. I think the subjects of some of those petitions have been seeping into Washington-insider chatter. I believe they have been raising public awareness and motivation and organization on a number of subjects. Occasionally some of the petitions are directly raised in media coverage, and I believe in some cases create or influence media coverage of their subjects.
Consider the Marijuana issue. Just a few years ago virtually no politician would go anywhere near the subject, except to rant on how All Evilz Teh Drugz Are, and utter some inane comment that marijuana money was somehow all going to fund Teh Terrorists.
And then the Whitehouse Petition system started, and the number one thing anyone ever knew or said about it was that the system was just a big joke because the top three petitions at any given time were ALL about marijuana. Marijuana petitions made the system a joke, it was just that crazy internet stuff and just a bunch of stupid kids and potheads constantly harassing the Whitehouse with a stream of "junk" petitions. And it got people talking about it... even if only to complain about the annoyance of "gag" marijuana petitions.... and it just didn't go away. Politicians started to notice that there were a LOT of people who really supported this. And the media ran stories on it.... and at first the news stories were ridiculing the petition system for being clogged with all these ridiculous marijuana petitions. And all the people joining these petitions were amazed and delighted to find themselves supported by over hundred thousand voices.
Not long ago it was considered political suicide for any politician to publicity say anything tolerant of marijuana. Even comment like as "I didn't inhale" was considered national scandal or epic proportions. Now, relatively suddenly, pot has gone from political leprosy to acceptable and even kinda hip. For the first time national polling shows majority support for marijuana legalization.
Maaaaaaaybe all this still would have happened without the Whitehouse petitions system. But I doubt it. At least, I can't imagine could have happened anywhere near as fast as it did.
So yeah, I think the petition system is having an effect. The responses to them are completely lame, but that's not really the point. The politicos are hearing about the petitions, gossiping about them, sometimes mocking them, and the ideas are seeping into the atmosphere. Major media reporters are reading them, even when they don't cover them directly. And the people participating in the petitions are thinking about this stuff and talking about this stuff and acting on this stuff.
Petitions accomplish jack-squat directly, but they are a focal point having a real influence on the political thought, media thought, and public thought.
a top secret biological warfare project aimed at certain ethnicity... won't be detected by these NLP mechanisms.
Absolutely correct. Their focus is on real-world cases of countries that have had death squads roaming the streets with guns and machetes. They are not-so-much concerned with paranoid conspiracy theories.
Actually stormfront.org is valuable as a huge negative data point.
The purpose of their project, as I understand it, is to detect when a population is in the early stages of an actual developing genocide situation. Stormfront.org is a sample of the sort of speech that occurs in a group which is grossly failing to to get anywhere. The stormfronters have all sorts of grand fantasies of what they want and believe, but at least on some level they know damn well that they don't have general public support for it. Stormfront.org's rhetoric is filled with an attitude that they are persecuted victims, the feel frustrated and powerless. I expect that is about the last thing you'd find in a genuine developing genocide situation. In a genuine genocide situation the hate speech agitators are not feeling powerless - they are feeling supported and powerful and emboldened... that they can boldly go out there without hiding their intent, without fear or shame, to seize control, to just plain engage in flagrant public violence.
The stormfronters feel like powerless victims. They may sneak around in the dark and commit pointless vandalism like spiteful children, but they are not anywhere in the same universe as a situation where people go out in broad daylight committing mass violence and inviting their police-buddies to come along with their cop-cars and heavy weapon supplies.
Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme. It's not. People still want to argue about it. We canâ(TM)t be any clearer - it's not. Period.
Fuck you. I can't be any clearer - you're not getting my money. Period.
Wow, that hypothetical argument was really out there.
No, it's not. And the technology to make it a reality is arriving rapidly.
I take a high-resolution photograph of a car, and I use my 3D printer and I print out my own car using my own materials and I and drive cross country in it.... and you say that's fine...
I take a high resolution photograph of a GameOfThrones DVD, and I use my 3D printer and I print out my own disk using my own materials and I and stick it in a DVD player and watch it.... and you scream bloody murder.
In both cases I'm taking a picture of a physical object, and using my own materials to build my own identical item.
When..... not *if* but *when* people can download and print a car..... do you seriously doubt that the car industry - and every other industry - isn't going to have the same financial incentive as the copyright lobby, and the exact same economic arguments as the copyright lobby, to lobby congress to make printing out a car criminal? Downloading and printing cars is piracy, and who's going to make cars in the first place if anyone can just pirate a car.
And as 3D-printers advance with nanotech, the exact same issue is going to come up with a ham sandwich. Anyone can download and print out a ham sandwich. Or a pizza. Dominoes Pizza cooked a pizza, and then someone scanned it and posted it on ThePirateBay, and everyone can just pirate that pizza, download it print it out and eat it. It's THEFT.... and every pizza parlor is going to be driven out of business if anyone can simply download and print out a pirate copy of one of their pizzas.
Just imagine how many billions of dollars of theft would be involved if welfare mothers could simply go on ThePirateBay and download and print out gourmet meals copied.... STOLEN.... from the most expensive restaurants in the country. Just imagine what it would do to our economy if one pirate could buy one meal from a classy restaurant and upload that data to ThePirateBay for millions of people to print out their own pirated meals.
Whether it is a music CD, GameOfThrones DVD, a book, a car, or a nutritious meal, the argument is identical. Someone created the item in the first place, they want to be paid for it, and it's "piracy" if people upload/download the item data to print out their own copies. The only difference is what date the typical household is going to have the hardware-tech to print out a particular item.
Music... movies... cars... food . Physically, technologically, morally, there really is no meaningful difference. The tech is on the way, we're going to have to deal with it, and the law is going to have to face this reality. Food and DVDs are going to have to be treated the same. Either printing food is piracy, or printing DVDs isn't piracy.
And just a reminder, those Brain Surgeons Hollywood executives ran a particularly instructive publicity campaign. For a while, one of the pre-movie trailers they were running in theaters was one of those piracy-is-theft messages, with key line asking "You wouldn't download a car, would you?". And same answer was shouted out by viewers in theaters across the country... theater after theater everyone was shouting out "HELL YEAH! I would if I could!"
Note that our copyright laws have literally been getting drafted by industry layers, and they have been slipping lawyerly "gotchyas" into the text. Specifically, in the No Electronic Theft Act (N.E.T. Act) theyredefined "financial gain:
17 U.S.C. Â 101 - Definitions The term âoefinancial gainâ includes receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works.
And from the U.S. Department of Justice: It is a common misconception that if infringers fail to charge subscribers a monetary fee for infringing copies, they cannot be held to have engaged in criminal copyright infringement. It is the position of the Department that the term "for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain" does not require the payment in money for the infringing works, but includes payment by trading anything of value for them. Thus, when "bartering" (i.e., the practice of exchanging infringing works for other infringing works) results in the unauthorized dissemination of substantial amounts of infringing product without recompense to the copyright holders, prosecution appears to be fully consistent with the purposes of the criminal copyright statute.
In other words, they they slipped a redefinition into the law to take essentially any use of P2P and magically shove it under the criminal copyright code which was originally intended only to target serious commercial piracy operations.
Virtually everyone who has ever used any P2P is guilty of a felony, subject to one, three, or up to five years in prison. Double that - up to ten years in prison - for a second offense of downloading some music from P2P. Because, someone who download music twicewould attempt to actually enforce that law. If they attempted to round up tens of millions of random Americans - mostly people's kids - for felony copyright infringement charged with several years in prison, there would literally be a hundred million people storming the streets with torches and pitchforks. If they actually attempted to enforce this law the general public would overthrow the entire U.S. government in under 48 hours. And somehow I suspect the new government wouldn't be quite so friendly to any of the other batshit-insane demands coming from the copyright lobby.
ya, the police here are like totally knuckleheads them moonites are da bomb and they should have totally left them up instead of harrazing regular kids like us
oh heay do yaz have teh address for tonights house concert my bff isnt answering her mobile phone and i cant read the address she faxed me kthanxbai i appreciate the 411 loveya oxoxoxox
Can someone PLEASE let me know where this whole "God testing us" crap came from? I'm sure someone somewhere said it, and I'm sure that someone somewhere believes it...but the rest of us are of the persuasion that much of the fossil record is in much of the state it's in due to the Genesis Flood
Most people are of the common-knowledge "persuasion" that 1600's Salem Witch trials burned people at the stake. That doesn't mean it has the slightest basis in reality. Burning was forbidden by Colonial Massachusetts law, and those convicted in the Witch trials were all hanged. (With one being crushed to death while refusing to enter a plea.)
People who believe a particular literalist interpretation pass a round a "common knowledge" belief that the Genesis Flood explains the fossil record, and that "obviously" that there's some legitimate controversy over it in the scientific community. That doesn't have the slightest basis in reality. You can certainly find crackpots who have put together arguments that the fossil record was produced by Genesis-Flood-Geology, but scientifically they are on par with the websites laying out the case that the moon-landing-hoax case. They are trivially debunked. Even the most casual examination of the geological and fossil evidence shows that it is not remotely compatible with any sort of Flood-Geology-theory.
Just to point out one simple point, you can simply grab a shovel and head off to the north pole and start digging. You'll find that the summer-winter cycle leaves distinctly visible layers in the snow. You can simply dig down counting the clearly visibly yearly layers. If you keep digging you'll find that there are well over a HUNDRED THOUSAND clearly visible yearly layers. (Actually there's more than a million years worth, but the stuff buried more than a hundred-thousand years deep gets squeezed thinner and blurs to the point that individual layers are no longer visible or countable.) Any Global Genesis Flood in that time would obviously melted the snow it flooded over... an even if it somehow didn't melt the underlying snow layers such a flood would have dumped a mud-layer at that point. A mud layer which doesn't exist. At this point some people try to creatively interpret that evidence to fit what they want to believe... they'll simply make up some idea that the blatantly yearly layers aren't really yearly layers, that well... maybe there was some sort of freaky weather stuff going on after a Genesis Flood that rapidly created lots of snow layers that resemble yearly layers. (This is exactly the sort of wildly creative "interpretation" behind all "Flood-Geology".) That explanation is great if that is what you really really want to believe, and you don't bother looking any further. However it's trivially debunked. You can, for example, start looking at the layers under a microscope. Aside from a yearly cycle of pollens being blown in, you will occasionally find faint traces of volcanic dust in the layers. In fact for every major volcanic eruption in recorded history you can count down to the matching snow layer for that year and find the matching traces of volcanic dust. Well, if you grab a microscope and start examining the hundred-thousand-plus of prehistoric visible snow layers, guess what you'll find? Every couple of years you'll find a layer with volcanic dust, exactly as you'd expect from a hundred-thousand-plus years of prehistoric volcanic eruptions. Then of course the Flood-appologist will simply grab for the idea that maybe there were a whole lot of rapid volcanic eruptions after the flood, and it only looks like a hundred thousand years worth of eruptions. Except that it takes six months to a year or more for this sort of ultra-fine fine volcanic dust to settle out of the atmosphere, and all of the in-between snow layers are completely free of this dust. At this point any remotely reasonable person will note that the Flood-apologists are nothing but a handful of crackpots ma
... and the second guy says "No, but if you help me find my keys, we can drive out." Then a third guy walks up and says "I've got my keys, and my car's right over there, but it's no good. I don't have GPS."
You missed a very important word in the sentence. Not "species". "New species".
No, I didn't miss anything. Your definition of new species is ridiculous. News species (almost) never originate from the union of two different species. New species (nearly always) arise from a single population which splits into two (or more sub-populations which cease interbreeding for any reason.
A single original species called mammal splits, developing into a rodent population, a whale population, a primate population, a carnivore population, and others. That single original carnivore species splits into a feline population, an ursine (bear) population, and a canine population. That original canine species splits into a fox population, a jackal population, a coyote population, and a wolf population. That original (ancient)wolf species splits into a (modern)wolf population and a dog population. That original dog population splits into a multitude of modern breeds. The exact same process, every step of the way. The only difference is how much time has passed since animals shared a common ancestor, how much time there has been for differences to accumulate. If every breed of dog except great danes and chihuahuas were to drop dead today, great danes and chihuahuas would be two separate species. The size difference alone is enough to make (natural)mating between them physically impossible. They would have two completely separate gene pools, making them two separate species. With no possibility for geneflow between them, their genetics will inevitably and increasingly diverge over time. Given 50 million years - the same time since the canine-feline split, great danes and chihuahuas would become as physically and genetically different as cats and dogs.
Saying your teacher (if you had one) should be shot is a rather obviously a figure of speech. Whinging about "murder" is a rather weak diversion from the fact that evolution-denialists typically little or no understanding of biology and what evolution actually says. It's like someone arguing "Relativity is wrong, I drove my car in reverse and my watch didn't run backwards".
Your definition of species made no sense, it had no resemblance to biology. Defining speciation as the "outcome of interbreeding of two different species" sounds like you have some bizzaro-cartoon image that evolution says something like a fish and a lizard have sex and a new species amphibian pops out.
Has anyone, however, observed this selection effect going on for a long enough time for the emergence of new species?
Yes. Try googling: observed speciation.
Has anyone seen mutations arise that weren't in the gene pool of an organism and seen the mutated form "take over" a population because the mutation conferred a survival advantage, in other words, a Hopeful Monster in the lingo of evolutionary biology?
Yes. Try googling: evolution nylonase, for just one of many examples.
So in the Arthur C Clarke sense of any tech beyond current knowledge takes on the appearance of magic, evolution is and remains magic.
Just because you haven't studied Evolution, or Quantum Mechanics, or Relativity, or Chemistry, or whatever other field of science, and you don't understand it, and you know exactly ZERO of the experiments and evidence and observations that does exist in that field.... it may seem like magic... to you.... however is absurd of you to ignore the scientists that have studied it... absurd of you to assume that the evidence doesn't exist when you obviously haven't bothered to look for what does exist.... and WILDLY ABSURD of you to assert any of those fields of science "is and remains magic" simply because you never bothered learning anything about it.
There are a variety of hypothesized ways to generate entirely new species, but they have not been observed directly.
Yes, they have. As I said above, try googling: observed speciation.
Or better yet, find a good highschool biology textbook or a good website on evolution. Evolution doesn't seem at all "magical" if you read up enough to really understand it, and you check out the iron-clad scientific evidence that's out there.
I Kings 11:42: "And the time(yom) that Solomon reigned in Jerusalem over all Israel was forty years." Yom = a period of 40 years.
Isaiah 30:8: "Now go, write it before them in a table, and note it in a book, that it may be for the time(yom) to come for ever and ever." Yom = a FOREVER period of time.
YOU are the one providing an incorrect translation, you are the one insisting it means what you want it to mean.
The Hebrew word "yom" means "period of time". It may be used to mean 12 hours, may be used to mean 24 hours, and it may be used longer periods of time. For example Genesis 4:3: "And in process of time(yom) it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord." In that case "yom" means "one growing season". That is a several month period of time.
To quote Lewis Black:
He believes that the earth was created in seven days. Whew! Takes my breath away. And why does he believe that? Because he read it in the Old Testament, which is the book of my people - the Jewish people. And that book wasn't good enough for you Christians, was it? You went, "No, we've got a better book, with a better character, you're going to LOVE him!" And you called your book NEW, and said our book was OLD!
And yet every Sunday I turn on the television set, and there's a priest or a pastor reading from my book, and interpreting it, and their interpretations, I have to tell you, are usually wrong. It's not their fault, because it's not their book. You never see a rabbi on the TV interpreting the New Testament, do you? If you want to truly understand the Old Testament, if there is something you don't quite get, there are Jews who walk among you, and THEY - I promise you this - will take TIME out of their VERY JEWY, JEWY DAY, and interpret for you anything that you're having trouble understanding. And we will do that, if, of course, the price is right.
The next time you want to argue Old Testament translation and interpretation, try asking someone who speaks the language. I don't claim to be fluent in the Hebrew, but I rather suspect I've spent more time in Hebrew School than you have.
Definition of new species is "outcome of interbreeding of two different species that can interbreed among themselves and produce offspring that can also breed to produce more of the same kind".
Your biology teacher needs to be SHOT. Or more likely, you never had one.
This sort of thing can easily be that fast when it's simple selection within the range of pre-existing variation. My quickie calculations indicate it would only take about a 4% to 5% percent annual mortality rate among longer winged birds to produce the 30-year observed results.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you misspelled 'Satan'.
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Or porn.
Or anyone using it.
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by Roblimo (357)
FYI - none of these videos are paid ads.
It doesn't much matter - from the reader's point of view it's indistinguishable from a paid advertizement. Your readers are seriously put off by this article. That in itself is enough to establish that you blew it here
And note that the grandparent post said "Responsible journalists do their damnedest to make sure their work looks nothing like the ads that appear on their sites" - pretty well acknowledging that it may not be a paid advertizement, and that you blew it even if it wasn't paid.
Also FYI: America's elected president wasn't born in Kenya and little blue men don't truck the sun around the earth on an invisible track every day.
It looks like a paid ad, it's hardly surprising people are going to suspect it's a paid ad, particularly when there was no statement to the contrary at the time. That's hardly some loony conspiracy theory. You blew it, it was a bad article, simply answer that it wasn't a paid ad and move on and avoid the appearance of paid ads in the future. Calling your readers loony birthers only compounds the problem.
MY bigger issue is that you knew this company was pushing a Trusted Computing scheme. (He directly mentioned the Trusted Platform Module during the interview). I, and a lot of people here, find that far more offensive than the idea of a paid article. At least a paid article I can begrudgingly understand - Slashdot is a business and sometimes parts of a revenue model can be annoying but understandable. But knowingly getting in bed with Trusted Computing - promoting it - that's just plain villain terrain. This stuff is fucking evil, and a large percentage of your readership views it as fucking evil. And I assume you're well aware that the large majority of us view is as fucking evil. It is the single greatest threat to Open Source, it's a direct assault against the fundamental ownership and control of your own computer, it's an ideology to "fix" general purpose computers so they are not general purpose computers. It redefines "security" to mean glorified DRM schemes. It is the single greatest threat to lockdown/exterminate innovation and new technology.
WTF were you thinking?!?!
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CPU cycles isn't much of an issue here. They are selling a Trusted Computing scheme with a Trusted Platform Module preforming the core functions.
From one of their FAQ's:
StrongAuthKey Appliance: Cryptographic hardware (TPM or HSM) included in appliance
StrongKey: Cryptographic hardware must be integrated separately (This refers to a TPM built into your PC)
It's bad enough Slashdot has basically dumped an ADVERTIZEMENT here as a front page story, but it's particularly disgusting that they did it for a goddamn motherforking TRUSTED COMPUTING piece of crap. Don't let this shit anywhere near your computer.
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I certainly agree that the responses to the White House Petitions pages are laughably empty. However I strongly suspect that the petition system has been significantly influential in indirect ways. I think the subjects of some of those petitions have been seeping into Washington-insider chatter. I believe they have been raising public awareness and motivation and organization on a number of subjects. Occasionally some of the petitions are directly raised in media coverage, and I believe in some cases create or influence media coverage of their subjects.
Consider the Marijuana issue. Just a few years ago virtually no politician would go anywhere near the subject, except to rant on how All Evilz Teh Drugz Are, and utter some inane comment that marijuana money was somehow all going to fund Teh Terrorists.
And then the Whitehouse Petition system started, and the number one thing anyone ever knew or said about it was that the system was just a big joke because the top three petitions at any given time were ALL about marijuana. Marijuana petitions made the system a joke, it was just that crazy internet stuff and just a bunch of stupid kids and potheads constantly harassing the Whitehouse with a stream of "junk" petitions. And it got people talking about it... even if only to complain about the annoyance of "gag" marijuana petitions.... and it just didn't go away. Politicians started to notice that there were a LOT of people who really supported this. And the media ran stories on it.... and at first the news stories were ridiculing the petition system for being clogged with all these ridiculous marijuana petitions. And all the people joining these petitions were amazed and delighted to find themselves supported by over hundred thousand voices.
Not long ago it was considered political suicide for any politician to publicity say anything tolerant of marijuana. Even comment like as "I didn't inhale" was considered national scandal or epic proportions. Now, relatively suddenly, pot has gone from political leprosy to acceptable and even kinda hip. For the first time national polling shows majority support for marijuana legalization.
Maaaaaaaybe all this still would have happened without the Whitehouse petitions system. But I doubt it. At least, I can't imagine could have happened anywhere near as fast as it did.
So yeah, I think the petition system is having an effect. The responses to them are completely lame, but that's not really the point. The politicos are hearing about the petitions, gossiping about them, sometimes mocking them, and the ideas are seeping into the atmosphere. Major media reporters are reading them, even when they don't cover them directly. And the people participating in the petitions are thinking about this stuff and talking about this stuff and acting on this stuff.
Petitions accomplish jack-squat directly, but they are a focal point having a real influence on the political thought, media thought, and public thought.
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a top secret biological warfare project aimed at certain ethnicity... won't be detected by these NLP mechanisms.
Absolutely correct. Their focus is on real-world cases of countries that have had death squads roaming the streets with guns and machetes.
They are not-so-much concerned with paranoid conspiracy theories.
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YOU are obviously ONE OF THEM!
Burn the witch!
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Actually stormfront.org is valuable as a huge negative data point.
The purpose of their project, as I understand it, is to detect when a population is in the early stages of an actual developing genocide situation. Stormfront.org is a sample of the sort of speech that occurs in a group which is grossly failing to to get anywhere. The stormfronters have all sorts of grand fantasies of what they want and believe, but at least on some level they know damn well that they don't have general public support for it. Stormfront.org's rhetoric is filled with an attitude that they are persecuted victims, the feel frustrated and powerless. I expect that is about the last thing you'd find in a genuine developing genocide situation. In a genuine genocide situation the hate speech agitators are not feeling powerless - they are feeling supported and powerful and emboldened... that they can boldly go out there without hiding their intent, without fear or shame, to seize control, to just plain engage in flagrant public violence.
The stormfronters feel like powerless victims. They may sneak around in the dark and commit pointless vandalism like spiteful children, but they are not anywhere in the same universe as a situation where people go out in broad daylight committing mass violence and inviting their police-buddies to come along with their cop-cars and heavy weapon supplies.
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Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme. It's not. People still want to argue about it. We canâ(TM)t be any clearer - it's not. Period.
Fuck you.
I can't be any clearer - you're not getting my money. Period.
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Wow, that hypothetical argument was really out there.
No, it's not. And the technology to make it a reality is arriving rapidly.
I take a high-resolution photograph of a car, and I use my 3D printer and I print out my own car using my own materials and I and drive cross country in it.... and you say that's fine...
I take a high resolution photograph of a GameOfThrones DVD, and I use my 3D printer and I print out my own disk using my own materials and I and stick it in a DVD player and watch it.... and you scream bloody murder.
In both cases I'm taking a picture of a physical object, and using my own materials to build my own identical item.
When..... not *if* but *when* people can download and print a car..... do you seriously doubt that the car industry - and every other industry - isn't going to have the same financial incentive as the copyright lobby, and the exact same economic arguments as the copyright lobby, to lobby congress to make printing out a car criminal? Downloading and printing cars is piracy, and who's going to make cars in the first place if anyone can just pirate a car.
And as 3D-printers advance with nanotech, the exact same issue is going to come up with a ham sandwich. Anyone can download and print out a ham sandwich. Or a pizza. Dominoes Pizza cooked a pizza, and then someone scanned it and posted it on ThePirateBay, and everyone can just pirate that pizza, download it print it out and eat it. It's THEFT.... and every pizza parlor is going to be driven out of business if anyone can simply download and print out a pirate copy of one of their pizzas.
Just imagine how many billions of dollars of theft would be involved if welfare mothers could simply go on ThePirateBay and download and print out gourmet meals copied.... STOLEN.... from the most expensive restaurants in the country. Just imagine what it would do to our economy if one pirate could buy one meal from a classy restaurant and upload that data to ThePirateBay for millions of people to print out their own pirated meals.
Whether it is a music CD, GameOfThrones DVD, a book, a car, or a nutritious meal, the argument is identical. Someone created the item in the first place, they want to be paid for it, and it's "piracy" if people upload/download the item data to print out their own copies. The only difference is what date the typical household is going to have the hardware-tech to print out a particular item.
Music... movies... cars... food . Physically, technologically, morally, there really is no meaningful difference. The tech is on the way, we're going to have to deal with it, and the law is going to have to face this reality. Food and DVDs are going to have to be treated the same. Either printing food is piracy, or printing DVDs isn't piracy.
And just a reminder, those Brain Surgeons Hollywood executives ran a particularly instructive publicity campaign. For a while, one of the pre-movie trailers they were running in theaters was one of those piracy-is-theft messages, with key line asking "You wouldn't download a car, would you?". And same answer was shouted out by viewers in theaters across the country... theater after theater everyone was shouting out "HELL YEAH! I would if I could!"
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Did you really just compare copyright infringement to rape?
Yeah, he did. That is a form of terrorism.
And only a pedophile would deny it's terrorism.
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Note that our copyright laws have literally been getting drafted by industry layers, and they have been slipping lawyerly "gotchyas" into the text. Specifically, in the No Electronic Theft Act (N.E.T. Act) theyredefined "financial gain:
17 U.S.C. Â 101 - Definitions
The term âoefinancial gainâ includes receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works.
And from the U.S. Department of Justice:
It is a common misconception that if infringers fail to charge subscribers a monetary fee for infringing copies, they cannot be held to have engaged in criminal copyright infringement. It is the position of the Department that the term "for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain" does not require the payment in money for the infringing works, but includes payment by trading anything of value for them. Thus, when "bartering" (i.e., the practice of exchanging infringing works for other infringing works) results in the unauthorized dissemination of substantial amounts of infringing product without recompense to the copyright holders, prosecution appears to be fully consistent with the purposes of the criminal copyright statute.
In other words, they they slipped a redefinition into the law to take essentially any use of P2P and magically shove it under the criminal copyright code which was originally intended only to target serious commercial piracy operations.
Virtually everyone who has ever used any P2P is guilty of a felony, subject to one, three, or up to five years in prison. Double that - up to ten years in prison - for a second offense of downloading some music from P2P. Because, someone who download music twicewould attempt to actually enforce that law. If they attempted to round up tens of millions of random Americans - mostly people's kids - for felony copyright infringement charged with several years in prison, there would literally be a hundred million people storming the streets with torches and pitchforks. If they actually attempted to enforce this law the general public would overthrow the entire U.S. government in under 48 hours. And somehow I suspect the new government wouldn't be quite so friendly to any of the other batshit-insane demands coming from the copyright lobby.
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ya, the police here are like totally knuckleheads them moonites are da bomb and they should have totally left them up instead of harrazing regular kids like us
oh heay do yaz have teh address for tonights house concert my bff isnt answering her mobile phone and i cant read the address she faxed me kthanxbai i appreciate the 411 loveya oxoxoxox
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Can someone PLEASE let me know where this whole "God testing us" crap came from? I'm sure someone somewhere said it, and I'm sure that someone somewhere believes it...but the rest of us are of the persuasion that much of the fossil record is in much of the state it's in due to the Genesis Flood
Most people are of the common-knowledge "persuasion" that 1600's Salem Witch trials burned people at the stake. That doesn't mean it has the slightest basis in reality. Burning was forbidden by Colonial Massachusetts law, and those convicted in the Witch trials were all hanged. (With one being crushed to death while refusing to enter a plea.)
People who believe a particular literalist interpretation pass a round a "common knowledge" belief that the Genesis Flood explains the fossil record, and that "obviously" that there's some legitimate controversy over it in the scientific community. That doesn't have the slightest basis in reality. You can certainly find crackpots who have put together arguments that the fossil record was produced by Genesis-Flood-Geology, but scientifically they are on par with the websites laying out the case that the moon-landing-hoax case. They are trivially debunked. Even the most casual examination of the geological and fossil evidence shows that it is not remotely compatible with any sort of Flood-Geology-theory.
Just to point out one simple point, you can simply grab a shovel and head off to the north pole and start digging. You'll find that the summer-winter cycle leaves distinctly visible layers in the snow. You can simply dig down counting the clearly visibly yearly layers. If you keep digging you'll find that there are well over a HUNDRED THOUSAND clearly visible yearly layers. (Actually there's more than a million years worth, but the stuff buried more than a hundred-thousand years deep gets squeezed thinner and blurs to the point that individual layers are no longer visible or countable.) Any Global Genesis Flood in that time would obviously melted the snow it flooded over... an even if it somehow didn't melt the underlying snow layers such a flood would have dumped a mud-layer at that point. A mud layer which doesn't exist. At this point some people try to creatively interpret that evidence to fit what they want to believe... they'll simply make up some idea that the blatantly yearly layers aren't really yearly layers, that well... maybe there was some sort of freaky weather stuff going on after a Genesis Flood that rapidly created lots of snow layers that resemble yearly layers. (This is exactly the sort of wildly creative "interpretation" behind all "Flood-Geology".) That explanation is great if that is what you really really want to believe, and you don't bother looking any further. However it's trivially debunked. You can, for example, start looking at the layers under a microscope. Aside from a yearly cycle of pollens being blown in, you will occasionally find faint traces of volcanic dust in the layers. In fact for every major volcanic eruption in recorded history you can count down to the matching snow layer for that year and find the matching traces of volcanic dust. Well, if you grab a microscope and start examining the hundred-thousand-plus of prehistoric visible snow layers, guess what you'll find? Every couple of years you'll find a layer with volcanic dust, exactly as you'd expect from a hundred-thousand-plus years of prehistoric volcanic eruptions. Then of course the Flood-appologist will simply grab for the idea that maybe there were a whole lot of rapid volcanic eruptions after the flood, and it only looks like a hundred thousand years worth of eruptions. Except that it takes six months to a year or more for this sort of ultra-fine fine volcanic dust to settle out of the atmosphere, and all of the in-between snow layers are completely free of this dust. At this point any remotely reasonable person will note that the Flood-apologists are nothing but a handful of crackpots ma
Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
Lucky bastard.
Been there, done that too, the only souvenir I ever got from them was a headache.
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Calvinist doctrine in a nutshell: "God set us up, but he's God, so he's entitled."
God set us up the bomb, but he's God, so move zig.
For great justiiiiiiiiice.
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... and the second guy says "No, but if you help me find my keys, we can drive out."
Then a third guy walks up and says "I've got my keys, and my car's right over there, but it's no good. I don't have GPS."
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The universe is 100,006,000 years old!
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You missed a very important word in the sentence. Not "species". "New species".
No, I didn't miss anything. Your definition of new species is ridiculous. News species (almost) never originate from the union of two different species. New species (nearly always) arise from a single population which splits into two (or more sub-populations which cease interbreeding for any reason.
A single original species called mammal splits, developing into a rodent population, a whale population, a primate population, a carnivore population, and others. That single original carnivore species splits into a feline population, an ursine (bear) population, and a canine population. That original canine species splits into a fox population, a jackal population, a coyote population, and a wolf population. That original (ancient)wolf species splits into a (modern)wolf population and a dog population. That original dog population splits into a multitude of modern breeds. The exact same process, every step of the way. The only difference is how much time has passed since animals shared a common ancestor, how much time there has been for differences to accumulate. If every breed of dog except great danes and chihuahuas were to drop dead today, great danes and chihuahuas would be two separate species. The size difference alone is enough to make (natural)mating between them physically impossible. They would have two completely separate gene pools, making them two separate species. With no possibility for geneflow between them, their genetics will inevitably and increasingly diverge over time. Given 50 million years - the same time since the canine-feline split, great danes and chihuahuas would become as physically and genetically different as cats and dogs.
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Saying your teacher (if you had one) should be shot is a rather obviously a figure of speech. Whinging about "murder" is a rather weak diversion from the fact that evolution-denialists typically little or no understanding of biology and what evolution actually says. It's like someone arguing "Relativity is wrong, I drove my car in reverse and my watch didn't run backwards".
Your definition of species made no sense, it had no resemblance to biology. Defining speciation as the "outcome of interbreeding of two different species" sounds like you have some bizzaro-cartoon image that evolution says something like a fish and a lizard have sex and a new species amphibian pops out.
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Has anyone, however, observed this selection effect going on for a long enough time for the emergence of new species?
Yes.
Try googling: observed speciation.
Has anyone seen mutations arise that weren't in the gene pool of an organism and seen the mutated form "take over" a population because the mutation conferred a survival advantage, in other words, a Hopeful Monster in the lingo of evolutionary biology?
Yes.
Try googling: evolution nylonase, for just one of many examples.
So in the Arthur C Clarke sense of any tech beyond current knowledge takes on the appearance of magic, evolution is and remains magic.
Just because you haven't studied Evolution, or Quantum Mechanics, or Relativity, or Chemistry, or whatever other field of science, and you don't understand it, and you know exactly ZERO of the experiments and evidence and observations that does exist in that field .... it may seem like magic... to you.... however is absurd of you to ignore the scientists that have studied it... absurd of you to assume that the evidence doesn't exist when you obviously haven't bothered to look for what does exist.... and WILDLY ABSURD of you to assert any of those fields of science "is and remains magic" simply because you never bothered learning anything about it.
There are a variety of hypothesized ways to generate entirely new species, but they have not been observed directly.
Yes, they have.
As I said above, try googling: observed speciation.
Or better yet, find a good highschool biology textbook or a good website on evolution. Evolution doesn't seem at all "magical" if you read up enough to really understand it, and you check out the iron-clad scientific evidence that's out there.
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P.S.
I Kings 11:42: "And the time(yom) that Solomon reigned in Jerusalem over all Israel was forty years."
Yom = a period of 40 years.
Isaiah 30:8: "Now go, write it before them in a table, and note it in a book, that it may be for the time(yom) to come for ever and ever."
Yom = a FOREVER period of time.
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YOU are the one providing an incorrect translation, you are the one insisting it means what you want it to mean.
The Hebrew word "yom" means "period of time". It may be used to mean 12 hours, may be used to mean 24 hours, and it may be used longer periods of time. For example Genesis 4:3: "And in process of time(yom) it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord." In that case "yom" means "one growing season". That is a several month period of time.
To quote Lewis Black:
He believes that the earth was created in seven days. Whew! Takes my breath away. And why does he believe that? Because he read it in the Old Testament, which is the book of my people - the Jewish people. And that book wasn't good enough for you Christians, was it? You went, "No, we've got a better book, with a better character, you're going to LOVE him!" And you called your book NEW, and said our book was OLD!
And yet every Sunday I turn on the television set, and there's a priest or a pastor reading from my book, and interpreting it, and their interpretations, I have to tell you, are usually wrong. It's not their fault, because it's not their book. You never see a rabbi on the TV interpreting the New Testament, do you? If you want to truly understand the Old Testament, if there is something you don't quite get, there are Jews who walk among you, and THEY - I promise you this - will take TIME out of their VERY JEWY, JEWY DAY, and interpret for you anything that you're having trouble understanding. And we will do that, if, of course, the price is right.
The next time you want to argue Old Testament translation and interpretation, try asking someone who speaks the language. I don't claim to be fluent in the Hebrew, but I rather suspect I've spent more time in Hebrew School than you have.
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Definition of new species is "outcome of interbreeding of two different species that can interbreed among themselves and produce offspring that can also breed to produce more of the same kind".
Your biology teacher needs to be SHOT.
Or more likely, you never had one.
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This sort of thing can easily be that fast when it's simple selection within the range of pre-existing variation. My quickie calculations indicate it would only take about a 4% to 5% percent annual mortality rate among longer winged birds to produce the 30-year observed results.
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