Lets say a feature evolves, and then is adapted for another use later on (feathered wings for catching insects, probably later evolved to aid in flight). Some of those insect-catching genes are now useless, so they either disappear or are simply turned off. Having a few extra genes doesn't hurt the host, so they don't disappear in later generations.
Another hypothesis is that much of the "junk" is actually left-over DNA from all the retroviruses our ancestors became immune to (and made it into their reproductive cells). Lots of these retroviruses are now extinct, making the DNA "junk".
There is good reason for us to theorize that large portions ARE junk. We have useless vestigial organs (appendix, in-vitro gills and tails etc), because there is harmless genetic code for these things even though they're useless. It is an educated hypothesis that much of our DNA is similarly useless but harmless enough not to be selected against evolutionarily.
But agreed - a lot of it is just an "I don't know what this does". Lots of it WILL be found to be functional.
I sure see a lot of lying on the Republican side too (Obama raising taxes, when he clearly plans to reduce them for 85% of the population, Mrs. Obama being a black panther etc.)
The thing is, I don't think that anyone who is a republican necessarily endorses lies, nor do I endorse lies on the "left", even though I lean that way.
Don't overgeneralize. It makes you sound like a douchbag and a radical.
Analogies are perfectly valid unless you can identify a difference between them that makes the analogy break down. FE does not have to equal creationism, it just has to be equivalent for the purposes of the analogy.
Well come now, its not like there was a formal standard to aspire to back then (HTML 3 was just sort of a guideline/collected list of browser-specific tags). They didn't really start fucking the dog until IE5, and then of course the long stagnation of IE6.
We're all talking out of our asses here, but a) This is a beta, so there is probably a ton of debugging code in there increasing the memory footprint, and b) this is a beta, so there could be some sort of debugging framework attached to the process, spawning threads to monitor other threads. Or, c) this is a beta, and there is a bad call to fork() some place.
I really wish people wouldn't criticise a freaking BETA for performance... save that for the RCs. You, I, and every programmer here knows that optimization comes last. Of course, this is Slashdot so what can I expect? *sigh*
Sounds like he's been getting with THOSE girls - you know the ones. I think they loose it in the womb or something.
I see what you did there, but seriously you gotta think; 147, all not first-timers? Come on, dude! Get some quality into that mix! Bar sluts are so whatever.
If life is commonplace, there are probably at least some chemical commonalities (carbon, for example). It may be that the formation of DNA or DNA-like molecules is simply inevitable in an organic chemical soup... we really should be checking the composition of organics on asteroids, I think.
If the test is robust enough to detect DNA-like structures (DNA/RNA/etc with maybe different base pairs, but the same general structure) or complex proteins, i would make a semi-educated guess that we'd be able to identify life.
If life is really exotic, then we might have to meet it face-to-face, and STILL not recognize it as such.
I think they should bury a copy of "Planet Earth", so that future generations can see all the extinct animals. We should also blast or beam a copy off into space. Fuck the bible.
Look, something crooked DEFINITELY went on, but it wasn't in how the buildings were brought down. It's in how the government knew exactly who was responsible, the minute it happened, and flew them the hell out of the country. WE KNOW THIS. Why doesn't anyone focus on it?? Seems important to me. The conspiracy theorist in me believes it is perfectly possible the government hired these men to do it. But I still believe the planes took the buildings down.
Educated world. Western world. It seems half of America has more of less decided to ignore unpleasant science as "liberal propaganda" (evolution isn't seriously questioned elsewhere in the western world either). Case in point: Rephrasing climate change theory as the simplified view of an polarizing liberal politician. WHO CARES what your ex vice president thinks global warming is; I'd like to discuss science on science's terms.
Yeah, China should get on board. How about you guys grow up and show some leadership?
But its not that they don't care! They actively, vehemenently deny that it is happening! This suggests to me that the idea of us destroying our only home (and individually being powerless to stop it) is simply too traumatic for people to consider, so when they hear that there might be some dissent (however sparse), they cling to it like a blanket.
Blind faith? A conclusion based on thousands of man-hours of research by scientists from all sorts of different disciplines? That's your definition of blind faith? Sure, I haven't read it all (no human could), but I do trust scientific consensus. If I didn't, I'd have to dismiss a lot more than just global warming.
By your definition I have blind faith in general relativity, too.
That's a straw person and you know it - no scientist of any repute is saying that we're the ONLY cause of climate change.
And most of the world isn't tied up in your silly american bipartisanship, where any cause on the left has an equal and opposite anti-cause on the right. Not coincidentally, most of the world accepts this science as well.
Oh man, I am going to try and resist checking this thread later on...
Climate change denial has got to be the (second) largest example of cognitive dissonance and self-deception in history. Let's hope reason and logic come back into fashion soon.
Okay, you can't program Lego with Python. But you can't program a blu-ray player with C++, only Java. If you're going to get that fine-grained with the word "portable", then nothing is really portable.
Python runs on ~100% of what we'd call "computers", but you're right; it isn't going to work everywhere. Neither will C++.
What I didn't like about EQ2 (and I did play it for quite some time) was how you could screw yourself over by leveling too quickly. I'm a completionist by nature, and I want to go back and do quests, even if they're greyed out! Also, it was neigh-impossible to play without a group, and so you end up missing a lot of content just because you couldn't find a group while in the correct level range.
I play LoTRO now. It's quite similar (EQ2, WoW and LoTRO are all very similar) but it is impossible to shoot your character in the foot with this one. If I want to complete group quests solo, I can just go back and do them once they're greyed-out.
Also, I agree - they kept changing the gameplay drastically, like they realized large portions of the game were inherently flawed. Some of those changes seemed to make it worse (I don't remember specifics, I just remember the frustration). Pretty game though, and a blast to play for the first few months.
Everytime there is a 3.x in a fucking version #, some asshole thinks this joke will be funny. IT NEVER IS. Slashdot, I love you, but you are NOT COMEDIANS. STOP TRYING.
The words weren't directly written by God, but were rather "inspired" by him and written by another. Why then wouldn't the illustration be similarly "inspired"?
And yes, big bang is completely incompatible with the bible. "Let there be light" takes about 2 seconds to say, 2 seconds which didn't exist until the "light" happened. "Before time began" is also, I might add, a logical contradiction.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets say a feature evolves, and then is adapted for another use later on (feathered wings for catching insects, probably later evolved to aid in flight). Some of those insect-catching genes are now useless, so they either disappear or are simply turned off. Having a few extra genes doesn't hurt the host, so they don't disappear in later generations.
Another hypothesis is that much of the "junk" is actually left-over DNA from all the retroviruses our ancestors became immune to (and made it into their reproductive cells). Lots of these retroviruses are now extinct, making the DNA "junk".
There is good reason for us to theorize that large portions ARE junk. We have useless vestigial organs (appendix, in-vitro gills and tails etc), because there is harmless genetic code for these things even though they're useless. It is an educated hypothesis that much of our DNA is similarly useless but harmless enough not to be selected against evolutionarily.
But agreed - a lot of it is just an "I don't know what this does". Lots of it WILL be found to be functional.
I sure see a lot of lying on the Republican side too (Obama raising taxes, when he clearly plans to reduce them for 85% of the population, Mrs. Obama being a black panther etc.)
The thing is, I don't think that anyone who is a republican necessarily endorses lies, nor do I endorse lies on the "left", even though I lean that way.
Don't overgeneralize. It makes you sound like a douchbag and a radical.
Analogies are perfectly valid unless you can identify a difference between them that makes the analogy break down. FE does not have to equal creationism, it just has to be equivalent for the purposes of the analogy.
Well come now, its not like there was a formal standard to aspire to back then (HTML 3 was just sort of a guideline/collected list of browser-specific tags). They didn't really start fucking the dog until IE5, and then of course the long stagnation of IE6.
We're all talking out of our asses here, but a) This is a beta, so there is probably a ton of debugging code in there increasing the memory footprint, and b) this is a beta, so there could be some sort of debugging framework attached to the process, spawning threads to monitor other threads. Or, c) this is a beta, and there is a bad call to fork() some place.
I really wish people wouldn't criticise a freaking BETA for performance... save that for the RCs. You, I, and every programmer here knows that optimization comes last. Of course, this is Slashdot so what can I expect? *sigh*
Sounds like he's been getting with THOSE girls - you know the ones. I think they loose it in the womb or something.
I see what you did there, but seriously you gotta think; 147, all not first-timers? Come on, dude! Get some quality into that mix! Bar sluts are so whatever.
If life is commonplace, there are probably at least some chemical commonalities (carbon, for example). It may be that the formation of DNA or DNA-like molecules is simply inevitable in an organic chemical soup... we really should be checking the composition of organics on asteroids, I think.
If the test is robust enough to detect DNA-like structures (DNA/RNA/etc with maybe different base pairs, but the same general structure) or complex proteins, i would make a semi-educated guess that we'd be able to identify life.
If life is really exotic, then we might have to meet it face-to-face, and STILL not recognize it as such.
I think they should bury a copy of "Planet Earth", so that future generations can see all the extinct animals. We should also blast or beam a copy off into space. Fuck the bible.
Look, something crooked DEFINITELY went on, but it wasn't in how the buildings were brought down. It's in how the government knew exactly who was responsible, the minute it happened, and flew them the hell out of the country. WE KNOW THIS. Why doesn't anyone focus on it?? Seems important to me. The conspiracy theorist in me believes it is perfectly possible the government hired these men to do it. But I still believe the planes took the buildings down.
Sociopath much?
Anyhoo, if we hold our breath, then we'll die, releasing CO2 and CH4 (an even bigger greenhouse gas).
Yes, that one. Those numbers are scary to me as well, but they're less scary than anyplace else.
Educated world. Western world. It seems half of America has more of less decided to ignore unpleasant science as "liberal propaganda" (evolution isn't seriously questioned elsewhere in the western world either). Case in point: Rephrasing climate change theory as the simplified view of an polarizing liberal politician. WHO CARES what your ex vice president thinks global warming is; I'd like to discuss science on science's terms.
Yeah, China should get on board. How about you guys grow up and show some leadership?
Well, the vast majority of the research indicates that no, the trend is towards accelerated warming. But +1 for hopefull thinking, I guess.
But its not that they don't care! They actively, vehemenently deny that it is happening! This suggests to me that the idea of us destroying our only home (and individually being powerless to stop it) is simply too traumatic for people to consider, so when they hear that there might be some dissent (however sparse), they cling to it like a blanket.
Blind faith? A conclusion based on thousands of man-hours of research by scientists from all sorts of different disciplines? That's your definition of blind faith? Sure, I haven't read it all (no human could), but I do trust scientific consensus. If I didn't, I'd have to dismiss a lot more than just global warming.
By your definition I have blind faith in general relativity, too.
That's a straw person and you know it - no scientist of any repute is saying that we're the ONLY cause of climate change.
And most of the world isn't tied up in your silly american bipartisanship, where any cause on the left has an equal and opposite anti-cause on the right. Not coincidentally, most of the world accepts this science as well.
Oh man, I am going to try and resist checking this thread later on...
Climate change denial has got to be the (second) largest example of cognitive dissonance and self-deception in history. Let's hope reason and logic come back into fashion soon.
Okay, you can't program Lego with Python. But you can't program a blu-ray player with C++, only Java. If you're going to get that fine-grained with the word "portable", then nothing is really portable.
Python runs on ~100% of what we'd call "computers", but you're right; it isn't going to work everywhere. Neither will C++.
What I didn't like about EQ2 (and I did play it for quite some time) was how you could screw yourself over by leveling too quickly. I'm a completionist by nature, and I want to go back and do quests, even if they're greyed out! Also, it was neigh-impossible to play without a group, and so you end up missing a lot of content just because you couldn't find a group while in the correct level range.
I play LoTRO now. It's quite similar (EQ2, WoW and LoTRO are all very similar) but it is impossible to shoot your character in the foot with this one. If I want to complete group quests solo, I can just go back and do them once they're greyed-out.
Also, I agree - they kept changing the gameplay drastically, like they realized large portions of the game were inherently flawed. Some of those changes seemed to make it worse (I don't remember specifics, I just remember the frustration). Pretty game though, and a blast to play for the first few months.
Everytime there is a 3.x in a fucking version #, some asshole thinks this joke will be funny. IT NEVER IS. Slashdot, I love you, but you are NOT COMEDIANS. STOP TRYING.
Nope! Sounds like you live in imagination land.
Yeah, I hear you and agree.
That's a nice tautology you got going there... doing ANYTHING, if you don't do it in an area where it is common, is unusual :)
The words weren't directly written by God, but were rather "inspired" by him and written by another. Why then wouldn't the illustration be similarly "inspired"?
And yes, big bang is completely incompatible with the bible. "Let there be light" takes about 2 seconds to say, 2 seconds which didn't exist until the "light" happened. "Before time began" is also, I might add, a logical contradiction.