"but to provide additional value to Gold subscribers"
The problem is that no actual value was added. A gold subscripion pre-update is exactly the same as one post-update. No features were added, and nothing was changed. Demos are available at the same time they were before.
Actually it can be seen as adding value.
1. relative worth, merit, or importance: the value of a college education; the value of a queen in chess.
So relative to a silver subscription, it has increased in value. Before if you were looking at purchasing a gold subscription, you would not have received the bonus. Now if you look at purchasing it you will receive that extra value. It's kinda like diamonds and precious metals are valuable for their scarcity.
Madsen wrote in her declaration, "I do not recall anyone in the negotation teams ever saying, or suggesting, that Novell would retain any UNIX copyrights. The negotiation team for Santa Cruz never discussed the possibility, as far as I am aware, that Novell sought to retain any UNIX copyright."
Several declarations say this same thing. "I understood that the copyrights would be transferred. I don't remember anyone saying they wouldn't be transferred." The problem is though that no one remembers anyone ever saying that they would be transferred. It seems to have been an unspoken understanding that doesn't carry any weight in a courtroom. It seems that SCO cannot find a single person that remembers hearing or saying that copyrights would be transferred. That's pretty damning when the contract specifically excludes them and the only people that remember having any discussions on copyrights remember the reasons that they were NOT being transferred.
Chatlos also testified that there was no discussion about excluding or including copyrights because he believes it was implicit in the deal that the copyrights would be transferred.
Duff Thompson, a former Novell executive who now chairs SCO's litigation committee, testified that testified that his recollection of the deal was the initial direction from Frankenberg to sell the whole business. Decl. Mark James Ex. 10 ("Thompson Decl.") at 4. Thompson did not recall "any specific discussions around copyrights" or any "discussion with SCO about the excluded asset schedule" during negotiation of the deal.
Burt Levine, a former Novell in-house attorney who went to work for Santa Cruz after the APA, testified that he worked on some early drafts of the APA but cannot remember which specific provisions. Levine did testify, however, that during APA negotiations, he reviewed and marked up drafts of Schedules 1.1(a) and (b). Decl. Mark James Ex. 14 ("Levine Dep.") at 72- 74. He revised the list of included assets but did not add copyrights. [...] However, he testified that he would have been surprised to hear that Novell retained the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights. Assuming, however, that the copyrights were excluded from the APA, he testified that SCO would have an inherent license to use those copyrights in the business.
William Broderick, a contract manager and member of the Novell APA transition team who is now the Director of Software Licensing for SCO, testified that his understanding of the sale of assets was that the UNIX copyrights were transferred. Decl. Mark James Ex. 15 ("Broderick Decl.") 1, 6, 11. Although SCO claims that Broderick testified that his understanding was based on Novell's explanation of the transaction during company-wide meetings and meetings of the transition team, he testified in his deposition that he did not recall any specific discussion about the transfer of copyrights.
Jim Wilt, a business development executive at Santa Cruz, testified that it was his understanding and intent during the negotiations that SCO would acquire Novell's entire UNIX and UnixWare business, including the copyrights. Decl. Mark James Ex. 19 ("Wilt Decl.") 8. He viewed the copyrights as essential to the acquisition of a software company. Id. Ex. 20 ("Wilt Dep.") at 76-80. Although SCO refers to Wilt as the lead negotiator for Santa Cruz, Ed Chatlos testified that Wilt "dropped out" in the latter half of the negotiations of the Santa Cruz- Novell deal and Wilt, himself, concurred that he was less active at the end of the negotiations when the APA was being drafted. Chatlos IBM Dep. at 184-185; Wilt Dep. at 20-21. He also testified that the lawyers did the drafting of the APA. Wilt testified that he did not recall anyone from Novell stating that copyrights were being transferred.
The author apparently doesn't understand contract law. If the writing in the contract is unambiguous, then parole evidence (witness testimony) can not be taken into account. Even if everyone on both sides agrees that they meant something else, that is too bad because the contract is unambiguous. That is the case here. The assets transferred have their own schedule and specifically exclude anything in another schedule of excluded assets. Under "Intellecutal Property", only these assets are included:
V. Intellectual property - Trademarks UNIX and UnixWare as and to the
extent held by Seller (excluding any compensation Seller receives with
respect of the license granted to X/Open regarding the UNIX trademark).
Under "Excluded Assets" we have the following:
V. Intellectual Property:
A. All copyrights and trademarks, except for the trademarks UNIX and
UnixWare.
B. All Patents
So the only "IP" included are certain trademarks. Copyrights, patents, and all trademarks except "UNIX" and "UnixWare" are specifically excluded. There is no way to read the contract that would transfer copyrights. It doesn't matter what anyone thought they were doing, they should have read the contract (let that be a lesson to you). However, the person that wrote the contract remembers exactly why they didn't transfer the copyrights and why they weren't needed to conduct the business. He discussed it with the board of directors (they run the company, not the CEO) and together decided that copyrights wouldn't transfer because they were worried about Santa Cruz's solvency. Even SCO admits it doesn't have the patents, but that never affected UnixWare licensing. Their own statements (that they bought "all" of UNIX) would logically mean they must own the patents too, but they don't even claim that.
The contract was amended later so that schedule 1.1(b) V. now says:
A. All copyrights and trademarks, except for the [...] copyrights and trademarks owned by Novell as of the date of the Agreement required for SCO to exercise its rights with respect to the acquisition of UNIX and UnixWare technologies. However, in no event shall Novell be liable to SCO for any claim brought by any third party pertaining to said copyrights and trademarks.
This was done after the sale, and copyright law doesn't allow copyrights to be transferred in this way. STILL no where in "included assets" even under "intellectual property" are copyrights included in the transfer, therefore they are excluded by default. This only modifies the exclusion so there is no way to read it that would legally transfer copyrights. The copyrights to transfer are not included, and are not "required for SCO to exercise its rights". Telling is the fact that Santa Cruz wanted much stronger wording and to have the copyrights transferred, but Novell only agreed to this wording for the amendment. Telling also is the fact that SCO wrote Novell multiple times in 2002 and 2003 to attempt to get them to actually transfer the copyrights and Novell declined.
I never said scale didn't matter. The parent I replied to claimed there were two different things, macro evolution and micro evolution. In reality the difference is between a camp fire and a forest fire, not the difference between chemical burning and nuclear fusion. There is no difference between the claimed micro and macro evolutions. So-called macro evolution is merely many steps of micro evolution occurring after each other in order to effect a large enough change in the genome for us to see the effects. That is like saying I know that gravity makes the planets revolve around the sun, but it would be impossible for that to happen more than 100 times. If it happens 101 times, then God just moved the planets where he liked them to be, gravity didn't cause them to move there. You can see that ID fanaticists don't actually believe in "micro-evolution" even though it has been observed in the lab, but that they just switch the conversation to "macro-evolution" to confuse the issue.
It's like me dropping an apple 100 times in front of an ID believer, and him saying "Whatever, even if gravity does exist, I'll believe it only when you drop that 5 ton boulder over there." It's like me pedaling a bicycle and showing them that if I pedal 5 times the bike will move 10 meters, but they don't believe that I can keep pedaling the bike all the way to my father's house 45 miles away. God created my father over there and me here, etc...
It's just a salamander from the garden of eden. Back then everything lived a lot longer and grew a lot bigger, man was over 20 feet tall. I demand they put my theory in their scientific papers!
</sarcasm>
The key to science, by its very foundations, is admitting that you can observe the centimeters but only make theories on the kilometers (however confident you are of experimental data). I wrote an entire term paper in high school on how the dinosaurs went extinct from an asteroid impact, and listed so much evidence that I came away from the experience completely confident of the theory. Recently I was reading some science news on the extinction event, and was amazed to find that scientists are actually less confident of that theory then they were when I wrote my paper. In other words, my confidence in the current scientific theory was misplaced. It was a valuable lesson - question everything that science teaches us. I now consider myself much more informed about scientific theories; by educating myself about opposing views, I can argue about the issue much more effectively.
As far as I'm concerned, a scientist claiming that he *knows* what happens at the kilometer level as *fact* is wrong - almost in the same category as Christians who "know" how the Universe formed because a book told them. Both display ignorance of how science works.
But it's better than claiming you know for a fact that a group of aliens stole the dinosaurs and put them in a zoo on the far side of the moon because you read it in a book written thousands of years ago. It couldn't possibly have been an asteroid impact because I personally know an asteroid that big never hit the earth. And I know that was just 6,000 years ago in the garden of eden when salamanders grew to 50' tall before the only man on earth ate an apple from the wrong tree because a snake spoke and made the only woman do it first.
So in your story, the stupid people are the ones who figure out the truth first, and the smart ones are the ones who get it last?:-)
Well, it's not necessarily the truth. People that believe in God, but also talking snakes and that the earth is 6,000 years old... And how smart are they when they believe in these things their whole life and end up going to hell?
Jews can't pretend to be Christian (or vice versa), in spite of torture, because God said so. Protestants can't pretend to be Catholic (or vice versa), in spite of torture, because God said so. What's pushing an atheist to not keep their head down and their mouth shut?
I hate people that think you must be religious to have morals, like that youtube kid that says "If you believe we come from monkeys then why not act like one?" It's not courage to kill yourself if you believe that will lead to eternal happiness, that's selfishness. If you require the threat of an angry God to be an honorable person then you are weak. Why are religious fanatics the ones to bomb abortion clinics and send death threats to people that don't want ID taught in schools? Not very Christ-like...
They rightfully argue that there is a big difference; micro-evolution is a population changing (e.g. a bacteria becoming resistant to a drug), whereas macro evolution is a species branching off from another.
There's not really that big of a difference, only in scale. That's like saying gravity is different when it applies to an apple falling on Newton's head and the planets orbiting the sun. You may wonder why humans have 23 chromosomes and other primates have 24. Well, chromosomes have special DNA on their ends called telomeres. When we look at chromosome 2 from a human, we see that it not only has telomeres at the end, but in the middle as well. There is also special DNA in the center of chromosomes that we can detect, and there are two copies at 1/4th the way from either end on chromosome 2. The point is so obvious that I shouldn't have to say it, but it appears that sometime in our genetic history we had 24 chromosomes and two of them merged into one.
Christians still believe that God breathes life into each human embryo, giving us a soul. But does he do that to animals and bacteria as well? We know the biological process that goes into replication. A human is created from a single egg cell containing half the mother's DNA and a sperm cell containing half the father's DNA. This single cell multiplies and forms all the different cell types in our body. Other creatures work the same, and similar organisms replicate themselves. We also see evidence of chromosomes combining, it's not too difficult to imagine them separating either. We know DNA can be added to chromosomes and that they contain multiple copies of many genes. We know that they can mutate, and that a single letter change can make a gene start at a new location and produce a completely different protein.
So we know that all of this can happen. We can also create a map of mutations, additions, etc. to completely transform C. Elegans DNA into our own. I don't see how they can claim that "Macro" evolution is impossible when it is a logical result of multiple repetitions of "Micro" evolution. That's like saying "Of course an apple would fall from a tree and hit the ground, but I doubt an apple that fell from a cloud would ever hit the ground."
The problem is that ID closes down scientific inquiry, it doesn't expand upon it. It is a proposition unto itself with no scientific proof and even no way to research it. The Theory of Evolution came about by looking at the natural world and noticing something peculiar, then trying to reason why this occurred. ID simply says "We don't understand how this occurred, so a supernatural force must have done it." If ID were really trying to be a scientific theory, it would try to explain what the designer is, why it did what it did, when this occurred, and how the designer implemented his designs.
1 - What designed us? What scientific methods would you use to research this? The only theories I know of are religious and come from books written thousands of years ago with no evidence to support them. This exposes ID as a religious theory and not science.
2 - Why did the designer make us? Well, without any evidence that there is a designer or knowledge of it existing, how do we learn anything about its motivations? This exposes ID as a religious theory and not science.
3 - When did this occur? They don't attempt to explain the fossil record or use the scientific methods of radioactive dating (or come up with their own) to show when this happened. They don't explain why there are fossils in the record that are so much different than our own. Did the designer make some mistakes and kill off those creatures? The only thing proponents of intelligent design say here are religious quotes from the Bible. This exposes ID as a religious theory and not science.
4 - How did the designer implement his designs? ID proponents don't even attempt to explain the scientific origin of the designer's designs. The designer couldn't have just "designed" them, they had to actually be created some how. Oh wait, we can't say that word because that exposes intelligent design as being the same thing as creationism. Any scientific inquiry into ID would try to explain the forces at play that made the first molecules come together into the first human being though. Did the designer use magnetic forces to draw atoms together? Did it it use a laser? Here again we have nothing from ID proponents on the issue except for quoting from the Bible. This exposes ID as a religious theory and not science.
THESE are the four areas of research that ID "scientists" should be focusing on. If they could come up with a single published scientific paper showing actual research into any of these four questions, maybe ID could start to be seen as a scientific theory. Meanwhile there has been vast amounts of research over the last 150 years into evolution and natural selection. THAT is what scientists do. They come up with questions and research them, they don't just posit logical theories and rest on their laurels.
To be perfectly blunt, Neo-conservatism is the all American version of Islamic fascism. The only real difference is Neocons use immense political and economic influence to push their agenda while the Islamic fascists use direct violence. Neocons have also been a lot more successful at it.
This is exactly the case. There's a reason that the judge and plaintiff's lawyers received death threats and not the other side, and it's not because the neocons were acting more Christ-like. It amazes me how the people that profess to be the most religious are often the ones who follow religious teachings the least.
1. You should look up "revocation" in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then look up "aluminium". Check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it.
Maybe you should look up the proper spelling, "aluminum".
As it is, trying to convince you would be like convincing a blind man that some colors go together more than others. You could take it on faith, or not at all.
You could try explaining it using the wavelengths of light, or with statistical preferences of sighted people. It depends on what you mean "goes together" and if it is even provable. It might just depend on one's own opinion.
So, why do you take any expression of belief and demand extraordinary proofs, on pain of being declared a crackpot?
I think it's because you claimed you had "proof", when all you really have is personal feelings and beliefs. Those are not one in the same.
Interesting. There was a story not too long ago about how science teaching in England was getting dumbed down. Instead of focusing on hard questions on tests, there would be questions like "How do cell phones make you feel?" I wish I could find the link...
I don't think it's likely that any state is going to allow people to just download stuff for free without consequence.
Why not? Nobody is being hurt. Copyright is actually the curtailing of the public's inherent rights. Government doesn't create rights, it curtails them. I see the need for copyright, the author should be the one to benefit financially from their work as a reward for creating it or incentive to create new works. However there is no harm in one who copies the work without financial reward. Originally the copyright lasted for 14 years, now it lasts for 75 years after the author dies. I am not willing to give up my rights that easily, and you shouldn't be willing to either. I think we need another amendment to the constitution, saying that absent financial motive, the rights of the people to exchange information shall not be infringed.
Pray tell, what makes the theory that macroevolutionary changes are caused by random mutations "science", and the theory that macroevolutionary changes are driven by some non-random intelligence "not science"?
Let us look at the theory of Intelligent Design. It states that creatures are created with their features intact and for a purpose. That's how they define "design". Logically then you can disprove intelligent design by finding a single instance of a feature present in any organism that does not serve a purpose. Whales have vestigial leg bones buried inside their body. Why would a designer place them there? They have no purpose, therefore the basis for intelligent design is false. There are MANY other examples, but I just had to find one.
I certainly agree that the supernatural cannot be a subject of what we normally consider "science." However, the work in ID that I've seen, such as that attempting to show "irreducible complexity," is an attempt to show the impossibility of the neodarwinist mechanism of macroevolution. That is certainly a legitimate goal of science. Saying that falsifying the neodarwinist mechanism is unscientific is saying that the neodarwinist mechanism is unscientific.
Yes, and every time that a system has been put forth as irreducibly complex, real scientists have found that the system can work with reduced complexity. Anyway, that would be legitimate scientific inquiry in the field of evolution. Intelligent Design posits that there is a designer, then closes the door on scientific inquiry. It's an unprovable statement, not a theory.
Pray tell, what makes the theory that macroevolutionary changes are caused by random mutations "science", and the theory that macroevolutionary changes are driven by some non-random intelligence "not science"?
The fact that there is no way to inquire into how the non-random intelligence performed their actions. If you have to take a proposition by faith and have no hope of finding evidence other than by prayer, that isn't science. There is no "evidence" of design. The only "evidence" are some logical arguments that belong in a philosophy class. There is no blueprint the designer used. There is no evidence of the act of creating. There are no proposed tests to prove that ID is right or wrong. There is no way for someone that wants to do research in the field of Intelligent Design. Every aspect of Intelligent Design that has been brought forth has been disproven by actual evidence. If that happened to any other theory in science that didn't come from the mouth of 'God' himself, it would be abandoned, much like the Ether theory. BeHe admitted that astrology would fit his definition of science, I don't want my kids learning that as an alternative to real science either.
ID is at least as falsifiable as the neodarwinist mechanism that it disputes.
And it has been done already. The premise of ID is certain structures contain components that serve no purpose by themselves. In the Dover trial the bacterial flagellum was brought up so often that the court made jokes about it. This is the prime example (at least it used to be) that ID proponents put forward for a system that is irreducibly complex. It is basically a large slender projection from a cell that rotates, causing the cell to move. It consists of 40 some proteins, and ID claims that if a single protein is left out that it will not work and the system would serve no purpose, a basic falsifiable claim made by ID. However there is something called a "Type III Secretory System" that looks similar. It consists of about 10 of the same proteins as the flagellum, and it is like a needle that bacteria use to inject materials into cells. So you can remove 30 of the proteins used in the flagellum and still have a system that performs a task for the cell. ID falsified!
ID doesn't make ANY true predictions. Science is about explaining how the natural world works. ID doesn't have a word to say about "who" the designer is, "how" they designed things, "how" the things were made, "when" this occurred or "why" it occurred. There is no knowledge to be gained from ID, it just isn't science. If you want to believe it, go ahead. Just don't bring it into the science classroom because it doesn't belong there. It really belongs in the religion or philosophy secion.
Speciation is an arbitrary concept. It does not imply an increase of complexity. We have never seen an increase of complexity, the addition of a new organ or system, or an existing species with a new organ or system being in the process of being formed.
We have seen an increase in complexity. We have seen bacteria adding information to genes in their host. We have seen them exchanging DNA. We have seen a mutation that changed DNA and added information. We know (and you don't argue I hope) that organisms' genes do mutate randomly and organisms do reproduce passing these mutations to their offspring. We are robust organisms with multiple copies of most genes. If one has a mutation, it doesn't even need to be used. Sometimes genes are copied to another part of a chromosome, producing these multiple copies. That allows one to mutate with no adverse affect on the organism since it still has the original gene, it just has the extra around also. Are you saying that two different genes are not more complex than one single gene? Still you produce no explanation from ID about how, when, who or why the designer designed all the species. We know closely relates species have mostly the same genes. So the "designer" didn't start from scratch. He said "let's put spots on this one and stripes on this one", where actually he didn't paint them with a brush but instead made subtle changes to MANY genes to make the difference. Only you're saying he didn't make changes, he designed them himself. The key to understanding evolution is that 1) random changes occur 2) they are passed to the offspring and 3) beneficial changes are more likely to be passed on. This is a video of a simulation that may help you understand. I can't find a link now, but they've actually seen where the change in one letter (that happens all the time) caused a gene to instantly change into another mostly by changing the starting point for the encoding.
I don't follow how a 10% survival advantage is a net benefit if 20% of the women are dying in childbirth.
I think I was wrong here, I was thinking the same number of people would survive to adulthood because only the women die on one hand, but that's the limiting factor for reproduction. It depends on if she dies having her first child I guess, th
First, I doubt this would get into widespread use, it would instantly generate high return targets for terrorists. Dig one up and blow it up and you would spread the radioactive uranium across a wide area and into the atmosphere.
It might be useful at the south pole research stations. Currently they operate on generators running off JP-8 jet fuel I believe and produce 1 megawatt of electricity. With 27 megawatts of thermal output, you could get a lot more electrical output and keep more of an area warm. This leads to another place where it may be useful, as a power plant and heat source for a lunar or martian base.
ID arguments fall apart under their own theory. Their theory basically states that some things in nature are too complex to have come about randomly, therefore someone must have designed them. It's notable that this is a logical argument, not a scientific one. There is no testable statement here. The only valid test would be to put an empty jar in a room and wait for "the designer" to place a new form of life in it. I haven't heard of any successful experiments of this type:).
Their current argument though would look at a tree's cells and all of the complexities that go on and say that there is no way it could have evolved. ID just says evolution is false, it doesn't try to explain anything itself. Take just the leaf of a tree though. If you just look at it, you would say someone designed it, placed everything exactly where it was and made this beautiful design. If you know anything about biology, or if you just watch a leaf grow from spring to summer, you will see that it wasn't placed there, it grew out of the tree. ID proponents would say that is hogwash. There's no way that a seed could turn into a tree. Just look at them, the seed is so small and the tree is a complex structure with many types of cells. Someone had to design each leaf and place it there, there's no way a single seed could become a whole tree with all the different leaves.
ID proponents don't claim this that I know of because they can see it happen. Everyone can observe a tree growing and we know that it ends up the way it is because of a natural process that begins with the DNA encoded in the seed and that is modified by the environment the tree grows in. They can't 'see' evolution occur so they dismiss it in favor of something written in a book thousands of years ago with no proof that most of the world's population doesn't even believe. In reality, we've observed DNA mutations and even speciation events. They can't comprehend the size of the Earth and the billions of years that it has existed, so they claim evolutionists just "throw billions of years at the problem" to explain it.
My favorite is when an atheist in a debate claimed that our large brain size was proof of evolution because prior to modern medicine, 20% of women died in childbirth due to the size of the babies' heads. The "true believers" claimed this was proof that natural selection was false because it caused the woman to die. If a larger brain gave even a 10% advantage to survival though, it would prove to be a total benefit to the species, and we can see now it has worked since we've become the dominant species on the planet due largely to our intelligence. If you look at it from a designer's perspective though, there is no plausible reason not to just make the woman's hips a little wider. From an evolutionist's perspective, the change just hasn't happened yet. Now of course there is little selective pressure since we have modern medicine and C-Sections available.
I know it's been said before by many, but Greedo shooting first doesn't make sense. The reason though isn't just that "Han is a bad boy who would shoot first if his life is in danger", but that the scene is totally unbelievable that way. You have a trained bounty hunter sitting about three feet away from Han with a gun pointed right at him. If he had intended to kill Han, why not just shoot him to start with? How does he miss him over his shoulder? Even if you had never seen the original Star Wars, you would have to ask yourself "What just happened?" Then you have Jabba the Hut, who can't even move in Return of the Jedi so he has his platform move in and out from the wall, meeting Han personally in a busy spaceport. He doesn't take Han in though, instead he lets Han step on him. You also have all the digital creations added to make the space port look busy, like the guy on the motorbike that swerves to avoid the dinosaur thing, causing the digital guy to fall off and hang on by the reigns. Lucas said he always intended Mos Eisley to be a bustling space port, but why? Tatooine was chosen to hide Luke specifically because it was a backwater planet with little interstellar travel. Having all of this digital crap on the screen distracts from the story. It's like he forgot anything he learned in film school about drawing attention to things that are important to tell the story.
The three "prequels" are all about special effects. Now Tatooine is a busy planet with thousands turning out for a spectacular race all the time. Anakin's boss is a ridiculous digital flying creature that could never fly in real life because 1) he's fat, 2) his wings are too flimsy and 3) he has no chest muscles to flap those wings. The story is about some "trade federation" blockading a planet for no other reason it seems than they like to take orders from a shadowy figure over holographic communications. I don't even remember the plots from the other two really, they are just forgettable.
The article is pretty vague about it's findings. It found 2 to 4 systems that look like a collision like the one that is thought to have created our moon took place. They don't say exactly why it must be at that time and not sooner. The ones they found are at 100 million and 400 million years after the star formed, when I think most of the planetary formation and therefore dust should have been gone (50 million years is what they say). I assume they looked at 40 stars, that gives the 5% and 10% figures. Did they take into account how long it would take for that dust to be cleared by the planets? If planet formation and the dust should be done by 50 million years, there could be many more that have already happened. They looked at a 400 million year old star that seems to have had it happen, what if they looked at another 400 million year old star that had it happen at 30 million years like our system. All the dust would have been gone by 370 million years later.
It's 5-10% of planetary systems? What's the ratio? It may seem like stars are very spread out, we usually only hear about our nearest neighbor that is less than 5 light-years away. If you pull back to 20 light-years though, you'll see 109 stars! Considering about 30% of stars have planetary systems, and 5% of those would have a collision that could produce a moon like ours, that's 1.5%. IF you take into account that our galaxy alone has between 200 and 400 billion starts, that's 3-6 billion moons like ours in our galaxy alone. If you take into account the middle numbers for star count and the percentages here, you get 6 billion. That's one moon like ours in our galaxy for nearly every man, woman and child on earth.
The designers behind "Portal" were brilliant. This game actually made me feel closer to an inanimate cube that never moves or makes a sound than any character in a game that I can remember.
***** SPOILER ALERT!!! *****
Part of it was the isolation of Portal. You don't know where you are or why you're there. A computer lies to you and threatens you with "android hell". You have to incinerate a "faithful companion cube" with hearts on it that just helped you get through a level which you couldn't have gotten through without it. The computer then congratulates you on euthenizing your "faithful companion cube" faster than any test subject on record. At the end the computer AI says you incinerated your companion cube, the only friend you've ever had.
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Actually it can be seen as adding value.
So relative to a silver subscription, it has increased in value. Before if you were looking at purchasing a gold subscription, you would not have received the bonus. Now if you look at purchasing it you will receive that extra value. It's kinda like diamonds and precious metals are valuable for their scarcity.
Several declarations say this same thing. "I understood that the copyrights would be transferred. I don't remember anyone saying they wouldn't be transferred." The problem is though that no one remembers anyone ever saying that they would be transferred. It seems to have been an unspoken understanding that doesn't carry any weight in a courtroom. It seems that SCO cannot find a single person that remembers hearing or saying that copyrights would be transferred. That's pretty damning when the contract specifically excludes them and the only people that remember having any discussions on copyrights remember the reasons that they were NOT being transferred.
So it's like me
The author apparently doesn't understand contract law. If the writing in the contract is unambiguous, then parole evidence (witness testimony) can not be taken into account. Even if everyone on both sides agrees that they meant something else, that is too bad because the contract is unambiguous. That is the case here. The assets transferred have their own schedule and specifically exclude anything in another schedule of excluded assets. Under "Intellecutal Property", only these assets are included:
Under "Excluded Assets" we have the following:
So the only "IP" included are certain trademarks. Copyrights, patents, and all trademarks except "UNIX" and "UnixWare" are specifically excluded. There is no way to read the contract that would transfer copyrights. It doesn't matter what anyone thought they were doing, they should have read the contract (let that be a lesson to you). However, the person that wrote the contract remembers exactly why they didn't transfer the copyrights and why they weren't needed to conduct the business. He discussed it with the board of directors (they run the company, not the CEO) and together decided that copyrights wouldn't transfer because they were worried about Santa Cruz's solvency. Even SCO admits it doesn't have the patents, but that never affected UnixWare licensing. Their own statements (that they bought "all" of UNIX) would logically mean they must own the patents too, but they don't even claim that.
The contract was amended later so that schedule 1.1(b) V. now says:
This was done after the sale, and copyright law doesn't allow copyrights to be transferred in this way. STILL no where in "included assets" even under "intellectual property" are copyrights included in the transfer, therefore they are excluded by default. This only modifies the exclusion so there is no way to read it that would legally transfer copyrights. The copyrights to transfer are not included, and are not "required for SCO to exercise its rights". Telling is the fact that Santa Cruz wanted much stronger wording and to have the copyrights transferred, but Novell only agreed to this wording for the amendment. Telling also is the fact that SCO wrote Novell multiple times in 2002 and 2003 to attempt to get them to actually transfer the copyrights and Novell declined.
I never said scale didn't matter. The parent I replied to claimed there were two different things, macro evolution and micro evolution. In reality the difference is between a camp fire and a forest fire, not the difference between chemical burning and nuclear fusion. There is no difference between the claimed micro and macro evolutions. So-called macro evolution is merely many steps of micro evolution occurring after each other in order to effect a large enough change in the genome for us to see the effects. That is like saying I know that gravity makes the planets revolve around the sun, but it would be impossible for that to happen more than 100 times. If it happens 101 times, then God just moved the planets where he liked them to be, gravity didn't cause them to move there. You can see that ID fanaticists don't actually believe in "micro-evolution" even though it has been observed in the lab, but that they just switch the conversation to "macro-evolution" to confuse the issue.
It's like me dropping an apple 100 times in front of an ID believer, and him saying "Whatever, even if gravity does exist, I'll believe it only when you drop that 5 ton boulder over there." It's like me pedaling a bicycle and showing them that if I pedal 5 times the bike will move 10 meters, but they don't believe that I can keep pedaling the bike all the way to my father's house 45 miles away. God created my father over there and me here, etc...
It's just a salamander from the garden of eden. Back then everything lived a lot longer and grew a lot bigger, man was over 20 feet tall. I demand they put my theory in their scientific papers!
</sarcasm>
But it's better than claiming you know for a fact that a group of aliens stole the dinosaurs and put them in a zoo on the far side of the moon because you read it in a book written thousands of years ago. It couldn't possibly have been an asteroid impact because I personally know an asteroid that big never hit the earth. And I know that was just 6,000 years ago in the garden of eden when salamanders grew to 50' tall before the only man on earth ate an apple from the wrong tree because a snake spoke and made the only woman do it first.
Well, it's not necessarily the truth. People that believe in God, but also talking snakes and that the earth is 6,000 years old... And how smart are they when they believe in these things their whole life and end up going to hell?
I hate people that think you must be religious to have morals, like that youtube kid that says "If you believe we come from monkeys then why not act like one?" It's not courage to kill yourself if you believe that will lead to eternal happiness, that's selfishness. If you require the threat of an angry God to be an honorable person then you are weak. Why are religious fanatics the ones to bomb abortion clinics and send death threats to people that don't want ID taught in schools? Not very Christ-like...
There's not really that big of a difference, only in scale. That's like saying gravity is different when it applies to an apple falling on Newton's head and the planets orbiting the sun. You may wonder why humans have 23 chromosomes and other primates have 24. Well, chromosomes have special DNA on their ends called telomeres. When we look at chromosome 2 from a human, we see that it not only has telomeres at the end, but in the middle as well. There is also special DNA in the center of chromosomes that we can detect, and there are two copies at 1/4th the way from either end on chromosome 2. The point is so obvious that I shouldn't have to say it, but it appears that sometime in our genetic history we had 24 chromosomes and two of them merged into one.
Christians still believe that God breathes life into each human embryo, giving us a soul. But does he do that to animals and bacteria as well? We know the biological process that goes into replication. A human is created from a single egg cell containing half the mother's DNA and a sperm cell containing half the father's DNA. This single cell multiplies and forms all the different cell types in our body. Other creatures work the same, and similar organisms replicate themselves. We also see evidence of chromosomes combining, it's not too difficult to imagine them separating either. We know DNA can be added to chromosomes and that they contain multiple copies of many genes. We know that they can mutate, and that a single letter change can make a gene start at a new location and produce a completely different protein.
So we know that all of this can happen. We can also create a map of mutations, additions, etc. to completely transform C. Elegans DNA into our own. I don't see how they can claim that "Macro" evolution is impossible when it is a logical result of multiple repetitions of "Micro" evolution. That's like saying "Of course an apple would fall from a tree and hit the ground, but I doubt an apple that fell from a cloud would ever hit the ground."
The problem is that ID closes down scientific inquiry, it doesn't expand upon it. It is a proposition unto itself with no scientific proof and even no way to research it. The Theory of Evolution came about by looking at the natural world and noticing something peculiar, then trying to reason why this occurred. ID simply says "We don't understand how this occurred, so a supernatural force must have done it." If ID were really trying to be a scientific theory, it would try to explain what the designer is, why it did what it did, when this occurred, and how the designer implemented his designs.
1 - What designed us? What scientific methods would you use to research this? The only theories I know of are religious and come from books written thousands of years ago with no evidence to support them. This exposes ID as a religious theory and not science.
2 - Why did the designer make us? Well, without any evidence that there is a designer or knowledge of it existing, how do we learn anything about its motivations? This exposes ID as a religious theory and not science.
3 - When did this occur? They don't attempt to explain the fossil record or use the scientific methods of radioactive dating (or come up with their own) to show when this happened. They don't explain why there are fossils in the record that are so much different than our own. Did the designer make some mistakes and kill off those creatures? The only thing proponents of intelligent design say here are religious quotes from the Bible. This exposes ID as a religious theory and not science.
4 - How did the designer implement his designs? ID proponents don't even attempt to explain the scientific origin of the designer's designs. The designer couldn't have just "designed" them, they had to actually be created some how. Oh wait, we can't say that word because that exposes intelligent design as being the same thing as creationism. Any scientific inquiry into ID would try to explain the forces at play that made the first molecules come together into the first human being though. Did the designer use magnetic forces to draw atoms together? Did it it use a laser? Here again we have nothing from ID proponents on the issue except for quoting from the Bible. This exposes ID as a religious theory and not science.
THESE are the four areas of research that ID "scientists" should be focusing on. If they could come up with a single published scientific paper showing actual research into any of these four questions, maybe ID could start to be seen as a scientific theory. Meanwhile there has been vast amounts of research over the last 150 years into evolution and natural selection. THAT is what scientists do. They come up with questions and research them, they don't just posit logical theories and rest on their laurels.
This is exactly the case. There's a reason that the judge and plaintiff's lawyers received death threats and not the other side, and it's not because the neocons were acting more Christ-like. It amazes me how the people that profess to be the most religious are often the ones who follow religious teachings the least.
Maybe you should look up the proper spelling, "aluminum".
You could try explaining it using the wavelengths of light, or with statistical preferences of sighted people. It depends on what you mean "goes together" and if it is even provable. It might just depend on one's own opinion.
I think it's because you claimed you had "proof", when all you really have is personal feelings and beliefs. Those are not one in the same.
Interesting. There was a story not too long ago about how science teaching in England was getting dumbed down. Instead of focusing on hard questions on tests, there would be questions like "How do cell phones make you feel?" I wish I could find the link...
Why not? Nobody is being hurt. Copyright is actually the curtailing of the public's inherent rights. Government doesn't create rights, it curtails them. I see the need for copyright, the author should be the one to benefit financially from their work as a reward for creating it or incentive to create new works. However there is no harm in one who copies the work without financial reward. Originally the copyright lasted for 14 years, now it lasts for 75 years after the author dies. I am not willing to give up my rights that easily, and you shouldn't be willing to either. I think we need another amendment to the constitution, saying that absent financial motive, the rights of the people to exchange information shall not be infringed.
Let us look at the theory of Intelligent Design. It states that creatures are created with their features intact and for a purpose. That's how they define "design". Logically then you can disprove intelligent design by finding a single instance of a feature present in any organism that does not serve a purpose. Whales have vestigial leg bones buried inside their body. Why would a designer place them there? They have no purpose, therefore the basis for intelligent design is false. There are MANY other examples, but I just had to find one.
Yes, and every time that a system has been put forth as irreducibly complex, real scientists have found that the system can work with reduced complexity. Anyway, that would be legitimate scientific inquiry in the field of evolution. Intelligent Design posits that there is a designer, then closes the door on scientific inquiry. It's an unprovable statement, not a theory.
The fact that there is no way to inquire into how the non-random intelligence performed their actions. If you have to take a proposition by faith and have no hope of finding evidence other than by prayer, that isn't science. There is no "evidence" of design. The only "evidence" are some logical arguments that belong in a philosophy class. There is no blueprint the designer used. There is no evidence of the act of creating. There are no proposed tests to prove that ID is right or wrong. There is no way for someone that wants to do research in the field of Intelligent Design. Every aspect of Intelligent Design that has been brought forth has been disproven by actual evidence. If that happened to any other theory in science that didn't come from the mouth of 'God' himself, it would be abandoned, much like the Ether theory. BeHe admitted that astrology would fit his definition of science, I don't want my kids learning that as an alternative to real science either.
Isn't that what it is?
And it has been done already. The premise of ID is certain structures contain components that serve no purpose by themselves. In the Dover trial the bacterial flagellum was brought up so often that the court made jokes about it. This is the prime example (at least it used to be) that ID proponents put forward for a system that is irreducibly complex. It is basically a large slender projection from a cell that rotates, causing the cell to move. It consists of 40 some proteins, and ID claims that if a single protein is left out that it will not work and the system would serve no purpose, a basic falsifiable claim made by ID. However there is something called a "Type III Secretory System" that looks similar. It consists of about 10 of the same proteins as the flagellum, and it is like a needle that bacteria use to inject materials into cells. So you can remove 30 of the proteins used in the flagellum and still have a system that performs a task for the cell. ID falsified!
ID doesn't make ANY true predictions. Science is about explaining how the natural world works. ID doesn't have a word to say about "who" the designer is, "how" they designed things, "how" the things were made, "when" this occurred or "why" it occurred. There is no knowledge to be gained from ID, it just isn't science. If you want to believe it, go ahead. Just don't bring it into the science classroom because it doesn't belong there. It really belongs in the religion or philosophy secion.
We have seen an increase in complexity. We have seen bacteria adding information to genes in their host. We have seen them exchanging DNA. We have seen a mutation that changed DNA and added information. We know (and you don't argue I hope) that organisms' genes do mutate randomly and organisms do reproduce passing these mutations to their offspring. We are robust organisms with multiple copies of most genes. If one has a mutation, it doesn't even need to be used. Sometimes genes are copied to another part of a chromosome, producing these multiple copies. That allows one to mutate with no adverse affect on the organism since it still has the original gene, it just has the extra around also. Are you saying that two different genes are not more complex than one single gene? Still you produce no explanation from ID about how, when, who or why the designer designed all the species. We know closely relates species have mostly the same genes. So the "designer" didn't start from scratch. He said "let's put spots on this one and stripes on this one", where actually he didn't paint them with a brush but instead made subtle changes to MANY genes to make the difference. Only you're saying he didn't make changes, he designed them himself. The key to understanding evolution is that 1) random changes occur 2) they are passed to the offspring and 3) beneficial changes are more likely to be passed on. This is a video of a simulation that may help you understand. I can't find a link now, but they've actually seen where the change in one letter (that happens all the time) caused a gene to instantly change into another mostly by changing the starting point for the encoding.
I think I was wrong here, I was thinking the same number of people would survive to adulthood because only the women die on one hand, but that's the limiting factor for reproduction. It depends on if she dies having her first child I guess, th
Is that the right terminology? What is the "interstellar medium"? Surely it's not stationary with regards to the sun or earth, is it?
First, I doubt this would get into widespread use, it would instantly generate high return targets for terrorists. Dig one up and blow it up and you would spread the radioactive uranium across a wide area and into the atmosphere.
It might be useful at the south pole research stations. Currently they operate on generators running off JP-8 jet fuel I believe and produce 1 megawatt of electricity. With 27 megawatts of thermal output, you could get a lot more electrical output and keep more of an area warm. This leads to another place where it may be useful, as a power plant and heat source for a lunar or martian base.
ID arguments fall apart under their own theory. Their theory basically states that some things in nature are too complex to have come about randomly, therefore someone must have designed them. It's notable that this is a logical argument, not a scientific one. There is no testable statement here. The only valid test would be to put an empty jar in a room and wait for "the designer" to place a new form of life in it. I haven't heard of any successful experiments of this type :).
Their current argument though would look at a tree's cells and all of the complexities that go on and say that there is no way it could have evolved. ID just says evolution is false, it doesn't try to explain anything itself. Take just the leaf of a tree though. If you just look at it, you would say someone designed it, placed everything exactly where it was and made this beautiful design. If you know anything about biology, or if you just watch a leaf grow from spring to summer, you will see that it wasn't placed there, it grew out of the tree. ID proponents would say that is hogwash. There's no way that a seed could turn into a tree. Just look at them, the seed is so small and the tree is a complex structure with many types of cells. Someone had to design each leaf and place it there, there's no way a single seed could become a whole tree with all the different leaves.
ID proponents don't claim this that I know of because they can see it happen. Everyone can observe a tree growing and we know that it ends up the way it is because of a natural process that begins with the DNA encoded in the seed and that is modified by the environment the tree grows in. They can't 'see' evolution occur so they dismiss it in favor of something written in a book thousands of years ago with no proof that most of the world's population doesn't even believe. In reality, we've observed DNA mutations and even speciation events. They can't comprehend the size of the Earth and the billions of years that it has existed, so they claim evolutionists just "throw billions of years at the problem" to explain it.
My favorite is when an atheist in a debate claimed that our large brain size was proof of evolution because prior to modern medicine, 20% of women died in childbirth due to the size of the babies' heads. The "true believers" claimed this was proof that natural selection was false because it caused the woman to die. If a larger brain gave even a 10% advantage to survival though, it would prove to be a total benefit to the species, and we can see now it has worked since we've become the dominant species on the planet due largely to our intelligence. If you look at it from a designer's perspective though, there is no plausible reason not to just make the woman's hips a little wider. From an evolutionist's perspective, the change just hasn't happened yet. Now of course there is little selective pressure since we have modern medicine and C-Sections available.
I know it's been said before by many, but Greedo shooting first doesn't make sense. The reason though isn't just that "Han is a bad boy who would shoot first if his life is in danger", but that the scene is totally unbelievable that way. You have a trained bounty hunter sitting about three feet away from Han with a gun pointed right at him. If he had intended to kill Han, why not just shoot him to start with? How does he miss him over his shoulder? Even if you had never seen the original Star Wars, you would have to ask yourself "What just happened?" Then you have Jabba the Hut, who can't even move in Return of the Jedi so he has his platform move in and out from the wall, meeting Han personally in a busy spaceport. He doesn't take Han in though, instead he lets Han step on him. You also have all the digital creations added to make the space port look busy, like the guy on the motorbike that swerves to avoid the dinosaur thing, causing the digital guy to fall off and hang on by the reigns. Lucas said he always intended Mos Eisley to be a bustling space port, but why? Tatooine was chosen to hide Luke specifically because it was a backwater planet with little interstellar travel. Having all of this digital crap on the screen distracts from the story. It's like he forgot anything he learned in film school about drawing attention to things that are important to tell the story.
The three "prequels" are all about special effects. Now Tatooine is a busy planet with thousands turning out for a spectacular race all the time. Anakin's boss is a ridiculous digital flying creature that could never fly in real life because 1) he's fat, 2) his wings are too flimsy and 3) he has no chest muscles to flap those wings. The story is about some "trade federation" blockading a planet for no other reason it seems than they like to take orders from a shadowy figure over holographic communications. I don't even remember the plots from the other two really, they are just forgettable.
The article is pretty vague about it's findings. It found 2 to 4 systems that look like a collision like the one that is thought to have created our moon took place. They don't say exactly why it must be at that time and not sooner. The ones they found are at 100 million and 400 million years after the star formed, when I think most of the planetary formation and therefore dust should have been gone (50 million years is what they say). I assume they looked at 40 stars, that gives the 5% and 10% figures. Did they take into account how long it would take for that dust to be cleared by the planets? If planet formation and the dust should be done by 50 million years, there could be many more that have already happened. They looked at a 400 million year old star that seems to have had it happen, what if they looked at another 400 million year old star that had it happen at 30 million years like our system. All the dust would have been gone by 370 million years later.
It's 5-10% of planetary systems? What's the ratio? It may seem like stars are very spread out, we usually only hear about our nearest neighbor that is less than 5 light-years away. If you pull back to 20 light-years though, you'll see 109 stars! Considering about 30% of stars have planetary systems, and 5% of those would have a collision that could produce a moon like ours, that's 1.5%. IF you take into account that our galaxy alone has between 200 and 400 billion starts, that's 3-6 billion moons like ours in our galaxy alone. If you take into account the middle numbers for star count and the percentages here, you get 6 billion. That's one moon like ours in our galaxy for nearly every man, woman and child on earth.
The designers behind "Portal" were brilliant. This game actually made me feel closer to an inanimate cube that never moves or makes a sound than any character in a game that I can remember.
***** SPOILER ALERT!!! *****
Part of it was the isolation of Portal. You don't know where you are or why you're there. A computer lies to you and threatens you with "android hell". You have to incinerate a "faithful companion cube" with hearts on it that just helped you get through a level which you couldn't have gotten through without it. The computer then congratulates you on euthenizing your "faithful companion cube" faster than any test subject on record. At the end the computer AI says you incinerated your companion cube, the only friend you've ever had.