Seriously what a piece of complete and utter rubbish. From Ancient Egypt we have an extremely limited set of information because stone tablets crack and they aren't exactly the most portable things in the world. Go through to the Romans and paper, and the Chinese and you are seeing massively more information become available down the centuries. Zoom forwards into the 14th Century and we have a massively detailed view of what life was like which becomes more and more detailed as time goes by. The key here is detail, the amount of information in Ancient Egypt was huge, probably comparable to today, but the amount that was etched onto pyramids was tiny and quite a lot of that didn't survive anyway.
One thing to keep in mind is that for the Greeks, Romans and Chinese a lot of the ancient texts we have are copies. People made them for a variety of reasons, but all of these cultures had high prestige with the cultures that followed them.
Contrast that with the Egyptians. After the Egyptians converted to Christianity in the Roman era, they stopped copying the ancient Egyptian texts (and the Muslims weren't going to do it either). So all the ancient Egyptian texts we have are at least 2000 years old. Arab, Byzantine and European scholars and monks, on the other hand, were copying classical Greek and Roman texts by hand up until the invention of the printing press.
So I think the Egyptians did pretty well, all things considered.
I'm not sure if they "got it right". After a few thousand years we have yet to agree on what they were even writing.
How is this modded insightful? There actually is substantial agreement on the Egyptians "were even writing." We know the language well, we have found and deciphered Egyptian literature, Egyptian religious texts, Egyptian historical texts, Egyptian administrative documents, and so on. It hasn't been remotely controversial for at least a hundred years.
You want to argue against the article, fine, but this ain't gonna do it.
Solar power? Bio-fuels? Petroleum? We have energy from fusion to thank for the vast majority of the energy we use. It has been sustainably making life possible for millions of years.
Yes, but that fusion source is both inconveniently large and 93 million miles away.
In this case, the MCP seems to have forgotten they signed a contract saying they would pay.
What I think people are missing here is that Microsoft is not required to enforce the provisions of the contract in all cases. Forcing the MCPs into bankruptcy is an entirely short-term business decision with long-term ramifications that may not be so good for Microsoft.
Negotiating a more favorable deal with the MCPs, for instance, may allow the MCPs to sell more licenses in the future. You know, when Iceland's economy recovers.
Please, this "how can just 4600 people represent so many" comment is something any college-educated person should know better than to say. Provided the sample was drawn randomly from a representative pool of users, 4600 people is more than adequate, giving a sampling error of about 2%.
Agreed--but the methodology could well be iffy. From Adobe's methodology page, "Panelists are recruited from multiple sources such as RDD, in-person interviews, Web partners, as well as banner ads." The "Web partners" and banner ad commponents seem particularly troubling to me.
Bad analogy. We're using these models to do something more along the lines of looking at all that standing water in somebody's backyard about three states away and saying, ah yes, it rained there last night. In other words, they're looking at something that's already happened and attempting to figure out what has already happened. I think we can do this at least reasonably well for both the weather and (to a lesser extent, I suspect) the stock market.
Sooner or later, transponders will simply get integrated into license plates, and those will be a lot harder to clone.
This will encourage a new crime, called stealing someone else's legitimate license plate.
And replacing the victim's legitimate license plate with a legitimate-looking fake one, unbeknownst to the victim.
My brother had a sort of somewhat similar problem when he lived on the edge of Detroit (and had a car, and had a job, but that's another story). People would keep stealing the sticker on his license plate (the one that indicates he's paid his licensing fees for that year). Eventually a cop told him to score it with a razor blade, enough so that it couldn't be removed easily but not enough so that it wasn't visible.
Anyway, I would be surprised if people did anything but steal the license plate (although I could see them yanking the transponder mechanism and leaving the license plate if the implementation leaves that as a possibility). A replacement license plate is too much work for most of these things.
By definition, two species are distinct if they cannot breed and produce fertile offspring. The whole point of this research is to determine whether this is true or not. So this:
The fact that there is a difference at all shows we and they were two distinct species.
misses the point entirely. You and I have different dna. Does the fact that there is a difference at all make us separate species? I very much doubt it.
The whole question being researched is precisely this: how much difference was there between neanderthals and modern humans, and was it enough of a difference that they could not have interbred. It is the inability to interbreed and produce fertile offspring, not the presence of any difference at all, that determines separate species status.
The inability to breed and produce fertile offspring can also come about because of non-genetic incompatibilities. For instance, lions and tigers can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. However, it doesn't happen in the wild (I don't think their habitats overlap, although I could be wrong). I'm sure there are other possible mechanisms depending on the species.
Presumably over time they'll presumably lose the ability to interbreed over time due to genetic drift and other changes in the genome. According to the Wikipedia article on ligers, anyway, ligers and tigons are not terribly fertile now as it is.
Huh? Since when is it evil to care about your family over someone whom you don't know? Seriously, I could give a damn about a family I don't know. I want MY friends and family to survive.
I can also argue that you're being selfish; forcing one person to get a vaccine, for which you acknowledge a risk, for their kid so YOURS isn't in risk. THAT is selfish; expecting someone else to risk their kid for yours.
The great thing is that, as more people see the wisdom of not vaccinating, the odds that their kids die from the disease that they could have vaccinated against goes up! It's win-win all around.
My point about teleology is that there is an affirmation and a denial. The affirmation is treated as some religious-based irrational non-scientific position. The denial is treated as rational and scientific. In other words, critiques of all or part of neo-Darwinism are treated as a priori non-scientific. But it is just the other side of the coin.
That's a stacked deck and an inconsistent standard.
The position I take is actually that, in order for ID to be considered scientific, is that it needst to do science. You know, experimentation, observation, all that. What you have instead is a bunch of either philosophical arguments, or arguments that evolution is impossible because of [specified complexity, irreducible complexity, blah blah blah].
" Pointing out plausible paths for that feature to have evolved defeats that particular argument."
What Darwinists do at this point is to make us prove a universal negative, which is impossible, as opposed to coming up with an actual plausible pathway. That's Darwin of the Gaps. "I know we can't figure a way, but Darwinism has to be true."
First, you don't have to prove a universal negative. You do have to show some evidence that life is designed. Find evidence for the Designer, for the Designer's tools, for the Designer's methods, etc. Otherwise, you are the one in the position of saying "I can't figure a way, but ID has to be true."
That this seems to be extraordinarily hard should probably tell you something.
Second, I'm not saying "I know we can't figure a way, but Darwinism has to be true." What I am saying is that we can come up with plausible mechanisms, and then we can look for evidence for or against them. Unless you have a time machine, in many cases there's not going to be as much evidence as either of us would like. In other cases, however, there is evidence, and it points towards evolution.
Fine, if that's your position, the mechanism of universal common descent is unfalsifiable. Your comments show what I was mentioning. There is nothing I could point out where you would say "that is outside the reach of blind natural processes."
Like I said above, what you need to do is show evidence that life is designed. ID consists entirely of negative arguments ("life is too complex, life can't evolve"). You keep telling me that the evidence for evolution is incomplete, but at the same time you don't have any positive evidence for your position.
Although admittedly, it may be a flaw that we can learn to live with, is that it fails to answer the following: what happened, exactly, that caused non-replicating molecules to become replicating, and equally importantly, what caused large collections of such molecules in a single thing to progress from having a non-living state to being a living organism?
I find it somewhat ironic that we appear to understand and know more about the origins of the universe than we do about the existence of life on this planet.
The evidence for the origin of life on earth, whatever it may be, is a lot more fragile than the evidence for the origin of the universe. A couple billion years of geology and life destroyed most of the evidence. Some of it's still there, but the vast majority of it is gone forever.
I'd like to stress, though, that evolution doesn't have anything to do with the origin of life. The first life could have formed from chemicals in the early earth's oceans, been created by the Designer, left here by aliens, or drifted in on a comet. Doesn't matter. Evolution can't happen until life can replicate itself. It would certainly be nice to know how life came about, but it's not relevant to evolution.
I need to leave aside common descent for a moment.
The problem with Darwinism, defined as descent from a universal ancestor by natural selection working on random mutations, is that there is no way to falsify the random aspect of it.
Pardon the nit-picking, but how is this leaving "aside" common descent? "Descent from a universal ancestor" is common descent.
Any Darwinist I've spoken to cannot tell me what type of structure you could find in living organisms which would falsify the random claims. They get around any structure which isn't agreeable to a step-by-step random mutation explanation by appealing to "Darwin of the Gaps" explanations.
How about a wheel? You show me a true wheel on a fish or a bird and then we'll talk.
By the way, ID proponents and creationists usually argue that such-and-such a feature could not possibly have evolved, therefore evolution is false. Pointing out plausible paths for that feature to have evolved defeats that particular argument.
No, that doesn't prove that such-and-such feature evolved in that way. It does, however, give us avenues of research to go down, things to look for and experiments to perform as we attempt to find evidence. What does ID give us? Nothing but God of the gaps arguments.
Now, this is interesting because Intelligent Design affirms teleology. And Darwinism essentially is a denial of teleology. But the affirmation is not scientific but the denial is scientific.
This leads me to conclude that Darwinists are motivated by other concerns, perhaps subconsciously, and are poor philosophers.
And ID proponents (and creationists) are not motivated by their belief in God or their opposition to evolution? Many of the ID folks (and pretty much all of the "traditional" creationists) admit that they oppose evolution for religious reasons.
For example, the purpose of the Wedge Strategy is "To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies" and "To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."
By the way, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about teleology. That seems pretty muddled to me.
If evolution be not true, the only explanation for the appearance of varied life on the planet is intelligent design.
Uh, no. There are other "theories" with just as much evidence as intelligent design.
For instance, there's my "poof" theory. In the "poof" theory, all of the life forms on earth "poofed" into place from another universe. Or universes. Doesn't matter. Anyway, my "poof" theory explains the variety of life on earth, because these alternate universes from which life is "poofing" have much more variety than Earth does. How come we don't see it happening now? We do, actually. Haven't you heard of unicorns? Not everything that poofs into place survives, and you don't always get a breeding pair, either.
What's that? Intelligent Design is better? Nope. We have exactly as much evidence for your Designer and your Designer's methods as we do for my "poof" theory. Sure, I can't show you my alternate universes, but you can's show me your Designer, His Workshop or anything else.
For that matter, there are plenty of other whackos out there who've got a theory with just about as much evidence as mine, such as Michael Cremo (author of "Forbidden Archaeology" and sort of a Hindu creationist), the late Fred Hoyle (panspermia), or Periannan Senapathy (author of "Independent Birth of Origins"). You have to show your Intelligent Design is better than them, too.
Oh, and if you want to be pedantic there's no *guarantee* that *any* computer will work correctly- it could get bombarded by enough cosmic rays to generate uncorrectable memory errors.
I just cover my computers with my used tin foil hats. Never had a problem with cosmic rays!
Which brings up the question - why aren't there more homeless people robbing banks out there?
Because robbing banks requires at least a modicum of ability, some organizational skill, and a bit of motivation. If you've got all of the above, you're unlikely to be homeless in the first place.
Gotta disagree. Homelessness doesn't correlate well with a lack of ability or organizational skill, or even lack of motivation. It does, however, correlate well with heavy addiction and mental illness, both of which make it pretty damn hard to use one's ability or organizational skills.
Actually, I'd rather Dr. Dre, Eminem and Jay-Z have guns than Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. I've read what they wrote and I've read what others have written about their lives, any man giving those people automatic weapons should be sent to jail for a long time.
Is this some kind of zombie joke? Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg have all been dead for a long time now.
The System/38, AS/400 and whatever they call it this week [...]
It's IBM i now. I think. Well, that's the operating system. The hardware they run it on is now called Power Systems--they're trying to merge the hardware product line for their mid-range offering formerly known as System p, pSeries and RS/6000.
Honestly, once you've figured out IBM's marketing, they change it on you.
"other alien races are as leery of sending out giant seedships that they themselves can't ride in"
But for this argument to work, you have to believe that every alien race declines to send out automated self-replicators.
Would we recognize an automated self-replicating probe if we saw it? It would depend on how large it is, its shape, how it behaved and when it came by (and presumably other factors I haven't listed). That's assuming they don't just land and say hello, of course.
If these things were significantly smaller than an asteroid and weren't doing anything unusual, we could have half a dozen of the things orbiting the Sun right now.
If they came by every 500 years and did something unusual but weren't visible to the naked eye, we wouldn't have noticed them prior to the invention of the telescope (and for a long time afterwards). For anything over a couple of hundred years old, a probe could have been visible to the naked eye yet still largely unnoticed.
Heck, they could have landed and said hello and depending on where and when there might not have been any coherent record of it. Anything before the invention of writing (~5000 years ago), forget it. Probably the vast majority of the time since then, too, except for the last several hundred years.
So no, they don't all have to decline sending out automated self-replicators.
Well, they do have previously discovered examples of Lower Paleolithic tools to compare this find with. I think the original finds were pretty thoroughly (and skeptically) reviewed.
I don't think the comparison to Intelligent Design is very useful. In Intelligent Design, we know nothing about the Designer, the Designer's methods or the Designer's goals. There is no real experimental work being done.
In contrast, we have a pretty good idea of who made (or who would have made) these tools, what their goals were and what their methods were. Based on this, we can do quite a bit of experimentation to figure out what we don't know (or even whether or not they're tools at all).
The company I was working for in 2006 paid me for my private options when they were acquired by a public company. The timing worked out really well for me personally, since my wife didn't work for most of the year. Having said that, the owner went out of his way to make sure that the employees were compensated. I'm sure he could have gone the other way (were he a different person) and he could have gone out of his way to ensure that we got diddly squat.
ID is a hypothesis that states that an unknown alien race that left no evidence of their visit to this planet created all life.
Ur, no. Intelligent Design purposely skirts around the issue of who the designer is. Why? Because it's really more of a political movement, a trojan horse designed to slip creationism into the classroom through the back door. If they admit that the designer is the Christian God, that can be used against them.
That isn't to say that its defenders won't admit that the designer is God. They do, believe me. However, the people that are working "seriously" in the field (e.g.,, David Behe, William Dembski, and the other folks at the Discovery Institute) generally maintain the pretense that the designer is not God for plausible deniability.
Nor is this to say that there aren't some folks who say that the designers were aliens. Those folks (and I can't think of any examples) are definitely at the fringes of the ID movement.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously what a piece of complete and utter rubbish. From Ancient Egypt we have an extremely limited set of information because stone tablets crack and they aren't exactly the most portable things in the world. Go through to the Romans and paper, and the Chinese and you are seeing massively more information become available down the centuries. Zoom forwards into the 14th Century and we have a massively detailed view of what life was like which becomes more and more detailed as time goes by. The key here is detail, the amount of information in Ancient Egypt was huge, probably comparable to today, but the amount that was etched onto pyramids was tiny and quite a lot of that didn't survive anyway.
One thing to keep in mind is that for the Greeks, Romans and Chinese a lot of the ancient texts we have are copies. People made them for a variety of reasons, but all of these cultures had high prestige with the cultures that followed them.
Contrast that with the Egyptians. After the Egyptians converted to Christianity in the Roman era, they stopped copying the ancient Egyptian texts (and the Muslims weren't going to do it either). So all the ancient Egyptian texts we have are at least 2000 years old. Arab, Byzantine and European scholars and monks, on the other hand, were copying classical Greek and Roman texts by hand up until the invention of the printing press.
So I think the Egyptians did pretty well, all things considered.
I'm not sure if they "got it right". After a few thousand years we have yet to agree on what they were even writing.
How is this modded insightful? There actually is substantial agreement on the Egyptians "were even writing." We know the language well, we have found and deciphered Egyptian literature, Egyptian religious texts, Egyptian historical texts, Egyptian administrative documents, and so on. It hasn't been remotely controversial for at least a hundred years.
You want to argue against the article, fine, but this ain't gonna do it.
Solar power? Bio-fuels? Petroleum? We have energy from fusion to thank for the vast majority of the energy we use. It has been sustainably making life possible for millions of years.
Yes, but that fusion source is both inconveniently large and 93 million miles away.
In this case, the MCP seems to have forgotten they signed a contract saying they would pay.
What I think people are missing here is that Microsoft is not required to enforce the provisions of the contract in all cases. Forcing the MCPs into bankruptcy is an entirely short-term business decision with long-term ramifications that may not be so good for Microsoft.
Negotiating a more favorable deal with the MCPs, for instance, may allow the MCPs to sell more licenses in the future. You know, when Iceland's economy recovers.
Some guys I used to work with had this "Who's on First" variation they did like this:
Help Desk Guy: What's your password?
User: Invalid
Help Desk Guy: Come on wise guy, what's your password?
User: I told you, it's Invalid!
Please, this "how can just 4600 people represent so many" comment is something any college-educated person should know better than to say. Provided the sample was drawn randomly from a representative pool of users, 4600 people is more than adequate, giving a sampling error of about 2%.
Agreed--but the methodology could well be iffy. From Adobe's methodology page, "Panelists are recruited from multiple sources such as RDD, in-person interviews, Web partners, as well as banner ads." The "Web partners" and banner ad commponents seem particularly troubling to me.
So is the weather, and the stock market.
Bad analogy. We're using these models to do something more along the lines of looking at all that standing water in somebody's backyard about three states away and saying, ah yes, it rained there last night. In other words, they're looking at something that's already happened and attempting to figure out what has already happened. I think we can do this at least reasonably well for both the weather and (to a lesser extent, I suspect) the stock market.
Sooner or later, transponders will simply get integrated into license plates, and those will be a lot harder to clone.
This will encourage a new crime, called stealing someone else's legitimate license plate.
And replacing the victim's legitimate license plate with a legitimate-looking fake one, unbeknownst to the victim.
My brother had a sort of somewhat similar problem when he lived on the edge of Detroit (and had a car, and had a job, but that's another story). People would keep stealing the sticker on his license plate (the one that indicates he's paid his licensing fees for that year). Eventually a cop told him to score it with a razor blade, enough so that it couldn't be removed easily but not enough so that it wasn't visible.
Anyway, I would be surprised if people did anything but steal the license plate (although I could see them yanking the transponder mechanism and leaving the license plate if the implementation leaves that as a possibility). A replacement license plate is too much work for most of these things.
By definition, two species are distinct if they cannot breed and produce fertile offspring. The whole point of this research is to determine whether this is true or not. So this:
The fact that there is a difference at all shows we and they were two distinct species.
misses the point entirely. You and I have different dna. Does the fact that there is a difference at all make us separate species? I very much doubt it.
The whole question being researched is precisely this: how much difference was there between neanderthals and modern humans, and was it enough of a difference that they could not have interbred. It is the inability to interbreed and produce fertile offspring, not the presence of any difference at all, that determines separate species status.
The inability to breed and produce fertile offspring can also come about because of non-genetic incompatibilities. For instance, lions and tigers can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. However, it doesn't happen in the wild (I don't think their habitats overlap, although I could be wrong). I'm sure there are other possible mechanisms depending on the species.
Presumably over time they'll presumably lose the ability to interbreed over time due to genetic drift and other changes in the genome. According to the Wikipedia article on ligers, anyway, ligers and tigons are not terribly fertile now as it is.
Huh? Since when is it evil to care about your family over someone whom you don't know? Seriously, I could give a damn about a family I don't know. I want MY friends and family to survive.
I can also argue that you're being selfish; forcing one person to get a vaccine, for which you acknowledge a risk, for their kid so YOURS isn't in risk. THAT is selfish; expecting someone else to risk their kid for yours.
The great thing is that, as more people see the wisdom of not vaccinating, the odds that their kids die from the disease that they could have vaccinated against goes up! It's win-win all around.
My point about teleology is that there is an affirmation and a denial. The affirmation is treated as some religious-based irrational non-scientific position. The denial is treated as rational and scientific. In other words, critiques of all or part of neo-Darwinism are treated as a priori non-scientific. But it is just the other side of the coin.
That's a stacked deck and an inconsistent standard.
The position I take is actually that, in order for ID to be considered scientific, is that it needst to do science. You know, experimentation, observation, all that. What you have instead is a bunch of either philosophical arguments, or arguments that evolution is impossible because of [specified complexity, irreducible complexity, blah blah blah].
" Pointing out plausible paths for that feature to have evolved defeats that particular argument."
What Darwinists do at this point is to make us prove a universal negative, which is impossible, as opposed to coming up with an actual plausible pathway. That's Darwin of the Gaps. "I know we can't figure a way, but Darwinism has to be true."
First, you don't have to prove a universal negative. You do have to show some evidence that life is designed. Find evidence for the Designer, for the Designer's tools, for the Designer's methods, etc. Otherwise, you are the one in the position of saying "I can't figure a way, but ID has to be true."
That this seems to be extraordinarily hard should probably tell you something.
Second, I'm not saying "I know we can't figure a way, but Darwinism has to be true." What I am saying is that we can come up with plausible mechanisms, and then we can look for evidence for or against them. Unless you have a time machine, in many cases there's not going to be as much evidence as either of us would like. In other cases, however, there is evidence, and it points towards evolution.
Fine, if that's your position, the mechanism of universal common descent is unfalsifiable. Your comments show what I was mentioning. There is nothing I could point out where you would say "that is outside the reach of blind natural processes."
Like I said above, what you need to do is show evidence that life is designed. ID consists entirely of negative arguments ("life is too complex, life can't evolve"). You keep telling me that the evidence for evolution is incomplete, but at the same time you don't have any positive evidence for your position.
Although admittedly, it may be a flaw that we can learn to live with, is that it fails to answer the following: what happened, exactly, that caused non-replicating molecules to become replicating, and equally importantly, what caused large collections of such molecules in a single thing to progress from having a non-living state to being a living organism?
I find it somewhat ironic that we appear to understand and know more about the origins of the universe than we do about the existence of life on this planet.
The evidence for the origin of life on earth, whatever it may be, is a lot more fragile than the evidence for the origin of the universe. A couple billion years of geology and life destroyed most of the evidence. Some of it's still there, but the vast majority of it is gone forever.
I'd like to stress, though, that evolution doesn't have anything to do with the origin of life. The first life could have formed from chemicals in the early earth's oceans, been created by the Designer, left here by aliens, or drifted in on a comet. Doesn't matter. Evolution can't happen until life can replicate itself. It would certainly be nice to know how life came about, but it's not relevant to evolution.
I need to leave aside common descent for a moment.
The problem with Darwinism, defined as descent from a universal ancestor by natural selection working on random mutations, is that there is no way to falsify the random aspect of it.
Pardon the nit-picking, but how is this leaving "aside" common descent? "Descent from a universal ancestor" is common descent.
Any Darwinist I've spoken to cannot tell me what type of structure you could find in living organisms which would falsify the random claims. They get around any structure which isn't agreeable to a step-by-step random mutation explanation by appealing to "Darwin of the Gaps" explanations.
How about a wheel? You show me a true wheel on a fish or a bird and then we'll talk.
By the way, ID proponents and creationists usually argue that such-and-such a feature could not possibly have evolved, therefore evolution is false. Pointing out plausible paths for that feature to have evolved defeats that particular argument.
No, that doesn't prove that such-and-such feature evolved in that way. It does, however, give us avenues of research to go down, things to look for and experiments to perform as we attempt to find evidence. What does ID give us? Nothing but God of the gaps arguments.
Now, this is interesting because Intelligent Design affirms teleology. And Darwinism essentially is a denial of teleology. But the affirmation is not scientific but the denial is scientific.
This leads me to conclude that Darwinists are motivated by other concerns, perhaps subconsciously, and are poor philosophers.
And ID proponents (and creationists) are not motivated by their belief in God or their opposition to evolution? Many of the ID folks (and pretty much all of the "traditional" creationists) admit that they oppose evolution for religious reasons.
For example, the purpose of the Wedge Strategy is "To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies" and "To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."
By the way, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about teleology. That seems pretty muddled to me.
If evolution be not true, the only explanation for the appearance of varied life on the planet is intelligent design.
Uh, no. There are other "theories" with just as much evidence as intelligent design.
For instance, there's my "poof" theory. In the "poof" theory, all of the life forms on earth "poofed" into place from another universe. Or universes. Doesn't matter. Anyway, my "poof" theory explains the variety of life on earth, because these alternate universes from which life is "poofing" have much more variety than Earth does. How come we don't see it happening now? We do, actually. Haven't you heard of unicorns? Not everything that poofs into place survives, and you don't always get a breeding pair, either.
What's that? Intelligent Design is better? Nope. We have exactly as much evidence for your Designer and your Designer's methods as we do for my "poof" theory. Sure, I can't show you my alternate universes, but you can's show me your Designer, His Workshop or anything else.
For that matter, there are plenty of other whackos out there who've got a theory with just about as much evidence as mine, such as Michael Cremo (author of "Forbidden Archaeology" and sort of a Hindu creationist), the late Fred Hoyle (panspermia), or Periannan Senapathy (author of "Independent Birth of Origins"). You have to show your Intelligent Design is better than them, too.
Oh, and if you want to be pedantic there's no *guarantee* that *any* computer will work correctly- it could get bombarded by enough cosmic rays to generate uncorrectable memory errors.
I just cover my computers with my used tin foil hats. Never had a problem with cosmic rays!
Because robbing banks requires at least a modicum of ability, some organizational skill, and a bit of motivation. If you've got all of the above, you're unlikely to be homeless in the first place.
Gotta disagree. Homelessness doesn't correlate well with a lack of ability or organizational skill, or even lack of motivation. It does, however, correlate well with heavy addiction and mental illness, both of which make it pretty damn hard to use one's ability or organizational skills.
Actually, I'd rather Dr. Dre, Eminem and Jay-Z have guns than Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. I've read what they wrote and I've read what others have written about their lives, any man giving those people automatic weapons should be sent to jail for a long time.
Is this some kind of zombie joke? Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg have all been dead for a long time now.
The System/38, AS/400 and whatever they call it this week [...]
It's IBM i now. I think. Well, that's the operating system. The hardware they run it on is now called Power Systems--they're trying to merge the hardware product line for their mid-range offering formerly known as System p, pSeries and RS/6000.
Honestly, once you've figured out IBM's marketing, they change it on you.
"other alien races are as leery of sending out giant seedships that they themselves can't ride in"
But for this argument to work, you have to believe that every alien race declines to send out automated self-replicators.
Would we recognize an automated self-replicating probe if we saw it? It would depend on how large it is, its shape, how it behaved and when it came by (and presumably other factors I haven't listed). That's assuming they don't just land and say hello, of course.
If these things were significantly smaller than an asteroid and weren't doing anything unusual, we could have half a dozen of the things orbiting the Sun right now.
If they came by every 500 years and did something unusual but weren't visible to the naked eye, we wouldn't have noticed them prior to the invention of the telescope (and for a long time afterwards). For anything over a couple of hundred years old, a probe could have been visible to the naked eye yet still largely unnoticed.
Heck, they could have landed and said hello and depending on where and when there might not have been any coherent record of it. Anything before the invention of writing (~5000 years ago), forget it. Probably the vast majority of the time since then, too, except for the last several hundred years.
So no, they don't all have to decline sending out automated self-replicators.
Well, they do have previously discovered examples of Lower Paleolithic tools to compare this find with. I think the original finds were pretty thoroughly (and skeptically) reviewed.
I don't think the comparison to Intelligent Design is very useful. In Intelligent Design, we know nothing about the Designer, the Designer's methods or the Designer's goals. There is no real experimental work being done.
In contrast, we have a pretty good idea of who made (or who would have made) these tools, what their goals were and what their methods were. Based on this, we can do quite a bit of experimentation to figure out what we don't know (or even whether or not they're tools at all).
Stone stools AKA coprolites are actually pretty common, human or not.
Mod parent up - all points are correct and concise.
Well, duh--do you think someone gets to be the Emperor of Canada by messing round?
The company I was working for in 2006 paid me for my private options when they were acquired by a public company. The timing worked out really well for me personally, since my wife didn't work for most of the year. Having said that, the owner went out of his way to make sure that the employees were compensated. I'm sure he could have gone the other way (were he a different person) and he could have gone out of his way to ensure that we got diddly squat.
ID is a hypothesis that states that an unknown alien race that left no evidence of their visit to this planet created all life.
Ur, no. Intelligent Design purposely skirts around the issue of who the designer is. Why? Because it's really more of a political movement, a trojan horse designed to slip creationism into the classroom through the back door. If they admit that the designer is the Christian God, that can be used against them.
That isn't to say that its defenders won't admit that the designer is God. They do, believe me. However, the people that are working "seriously" in the field (e.g.,, David Behe, William Dembski, and the other folks at the Discovery Institute) generally maintain the pretense that the designer is not God for plausible deniability.
Nor is this to say that there aren't some folks who say that the designers were aliens. Those folks (and I can't think of any examples) are definitely at the fringes of the ID movement.
Huh, I find that my CC has smarter and more helpful people than the local BB.
You gotta admit that's setting the bar pretty low.