The USB stick wouldn't just store the key, it would also handle all the encryption and authentication too, so the private key would never leave the USB stick and there would be no way to access it.
The stick could additionally verify that you are really talking to the server you mean to and not to a man-in-the-middle and on top of that the encryption could be protected by a pin, entered on the USB stick itself, to secure against theft and keyloggers.
Such an encryption scheme could be made pretty much rock solid.
but what about if this starts a trend and all online games start to require such?
Maybe secure login will then become a common practice and devices will be standardized and we will live in a bright shiny future where login is no longer done by the most primitive system imaginable.
I mean seriously, passwords are among the weakest chain when it comes to security today and not something that can be fixed by 'educating the user' (last time I counted I had around 100 password), it wouldn't hurt to replace them with something that is more secure and more comfortable to use, even if it might be a bit painful at first.
The good old joystick is slowly dying out on the PC and even gamepad support is still lacking or non-existant in quite a few games. I doubt that some crazy motion technology has any change to becoming a wide enough success to actually be used in more then a handful of techdemos.
Games aren't about pure reactions, they are also about terrain traversal and following objects and those get a hell of a lot easier the more FPS you got, as the difference between frames just gets way to large to perform actions or predictions with any amount of accuracy when you are trotting around at something as low as 15fps.
Associating game mechanics and input processing to framerate is a poor argument as well,
Its not the way todays games are written or should be, but it used to be the way to do things on earlier consoles and those consoles managed to give you very fluent and very low latency gameplay that 20 years later todays games have a very hard time to match or even get close to, as everything is delayed and buffered multiple times before it makes it to the screen.
I bet most people are well aware that fanart is on sketchy legal grounds, but they don't care for a simple reason: Basing your work on popular commercial IP allows you not only to recycle ideas, but more importantly it lets you recycle the fan community. You get the social connection (forums, chat, etc), maybe costumes, maybe music and all that kind of stuff for free.
If you would start with something totally original on the other side, you would have a hard time finding anybody interested enough in it to contribute and you would have no place to go to find contributors.
How about dogs vs cats, elephants vs giraffes, Falcons vs crocodiles and on and on and on? You can make your own list. None of these creatures are able to breed together.
I want a complete list of all known species and the way you classify them, not just some stuff made up on the spot. Science has created such a long list. If evolution is so wrong, creationist "scientist" surly have created one of their own to prove their point and explain all the hard things like ring species or the hypbrids mentioned earlier.
alligator becoming an eagle.
Finally, Crocoduck *facepalm*, thats not how evolution works.
How about you visit this nice page or the hundreds of others that explain evolution, before making such bullshit claims.
There is, but it's not always what we call species.
I know. What I want from you is a list of those distinct groups that where created by God without a chance of intermixing.
You dodged the question of how you would make a fossil.
I already gave you an example, want more, just google a bit.
That was a sudden catastrophe,
Thats the point, you need a sudden event that covers the body and protects it from regular decay. The processes that follow the covering can take a long time, the covering itself can't or the body would decompose before anything can get done. Thats why we find so few fossils of a given species, most of them aren't covered up and those never fossilize as already mentioned.
A sudden worldwide water catastrophe, such as described in the Bible in the flood of Noah, is much more plausible, given the evidence we have.
There is no evidence that a single big flood ever happened. In fact we have evidence for quite the opposite, its all gradualism buildup of geologic formations with a few mud slides, volcanic eruptions and all that other sudden stuff to give you the fossils.
Just because ignorant humans cannot discern God's purposes, doesn't mean there isn't any purpose.
Yeah, but if you want me to believe your claims you better should have good evidence to support it. Just claiming the flying spaggeti monster did it isn't evidence. A good explanation why the he did it or at least what the benefit of that way of doing it is would be a start, but the blind spot still just looks like a big fucking in the design of humans.
Which is all based on the assumption (belief by faith) that the clock by which we measure this has never changed in all of time.
It is a theory, not absolute truth, yes, thats how the scientific method works. That doesn't change the fact that science has build up a pretty damn good and detailed explanation of how things work in nature, which can be used to predict things, explain things, engineer technologies, etc. Do you have an alternative theory that works on clock changing and earth being suddenly 6000 years old that is anywhere near as good as what science has? Or an experiment that shows that science got is wrong?
Even if you assume that science didn't get every detail right, which might very well be the case in some edge cases, that doesn't change the fact that science so far as provide us with by far the best explanation we have.
I happen to know some of them.
The point isn't how widespread Christianity is, which is easily explained by how information and people travel around the world, but that Christianity doesn't spontaneously arise in areas where it wasn't brought by mass indoctrination. If the Native American or African people believed in Jesus and God before missionaries came there and indoctrinated them, that would be a pretty solid point for the stories having some truth, but that has never happened. Scientific theories on the other side have often been form by multiple people completly independently in the past.
I suppose the others, such as the Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists etc. don't indoctrinate their children?
Of course they do, thats how culture spreads.
How does flying airplanes into buildings or blowing themselves and others up, help the survival of the human species?
The point with spreading ideas is not the survival of the human carrier, but the "survival" of the ideas themselves. Flying planes into buildings has killed the pilots, it however had an enormous impact in spreading the ideas behind it.
The Biblical teaching of God, human sin and rebellion with resultant selfishness, but also the idea of helping others, are much b
Neither I nor anybody else draws these lines. There are certain categories within which living creatures can interbreed, but these categories are fixed and completely outside of our control.
You are dodging the question. If there are God-made animals that fall into distinct categories, it should be possible to clearly classify those categories by observation. If there is no such list of classification I have to assume that your theory of how God created the earth void of all evidence and like just wrong. See ring species for an example of how the clean seperation into kinds of animals just doesn't work in nature.
How many times do such anecdotal observations have to be made before you consider them valid?
The number of anecdotal observation doesn't count, the important part is that they are repeatable. If I find a fossil, somebody else can look at it and analyse it. It is even possible for somebody else to go digging for his own evidence, completly independed of mine. Which is why fossils are pretty good evidence.
No fossils are being made today, because normally organic matter such as dead animals and plants are broken down into elementary parts by microorganisms.
Well, yeah, thats the reason why fossils are extremely rare (i.e. only a few dozens fossils of a species which might have had millions or even billions of creatures). They only form in rare circumstances where the normal decomposition doesn't take place. For a recent example of fossil formation see Pompeii, where the humans where covered in vulcanic asshes and thus preserved, see Wikipedia for an overview of other ways fossils can form.
How do you know that this is a design mistake?
Because it would be trivial to fix and because it servers exactly no purpose. It is simply an area in your eye that doesn't work.
The 6000 years and billions of years are both based on belief.
The 6000 years are believe, the billions of years are *observation*, big difference there. And its not just one observation pointing at the number, but lots of it. The life of stars, the microwave background, geology, atomic decay, all that stuff points to that 13.7 billion years number.
That is patently false. There are Christians in every part of the world today.
Aehm, no. Religion is quite strictly coupled with location, see this nice map.
Christians took their faith to every continent
That just further proofs my point, unless you indoctrinate people with it, there is not much that they will switch to Christianity on their own.
Evolution supposedly is driven by the mechanism of the survival of the fittest. How does the expending of vital life resources on religious shrines, cathedrals or offerings help survival?
Resources wasted on religion aren't that big of a deal when it comes to survival and quite a few of them would be spend on social interactions anyway, no matter if those interactions are religious in nature or not. And of course ideas spread independed of reproduction and survival, so even harmful ideas could spread quite far, just likes germs do. Time of course also plays a role, you won't change brain patterns with just a 100 generations.
I am not much good at Falcon either, it is however a good demonstration how realism can make (some parts) of the game a lot more fun. I for example spend hours in that game and other flightsims doing just landings. Landings in EF2000 with a damaged plane are a lot of fun, since they can turn out in old kind of fun ways, as there are so many ways things can go wrong in interesting ways.
In most arcade flight games on the other side landings and starts are completly automated, the game thus loses a lot of what makes flying interesting and more importantly, they drastically reduce the number of ways you can fail in an interesting way. Instead of having a nerve wreaking task of flying a damaged plane home, you get a two second explosion and be done with it, which is no fun at all.
I would also love to have more realistic violence in video games, but the thing to realize is that is that it just wouldn't work in current day games, as those games are from their in their very core extremely unrealistic, not just what the violence is concerned. On average you kill like what, 200-300 people in a single play through of a shooter, maybe even more in some games. Reality just doesn't work that way, unless you drop bombs from a plane you just don't get to kill that many people without getting yourself killed, a lot.
I think a sensible way to introduce realistic violence would be to tackle it in a basically non-violent game. See Mirrors Edge for example, that style of game has some huge potential in that area, as its core is not about killing people but about traversing terrain. You don't shoot people, but instead you get shot. Of course the game kind of butchers its own core mechanic by introducing level design that basically forces you to shoot at other people and its extremely terrible at presenting the shooting in a realistic manner (everybody is a clone, small girl survives more bullets then armored police man, etc.), but its a type of game where you could introduce realistic violence and get away with it. In fact it would even make the game better when you for example had a choice between shooting somebody in the leg, along with consequences, instead of just having him rackdoll himself to the ground. I would much prefer it to have the game show realistically that death of the opponent is something that should be avoided, not something that should be done on a casual basis. Another thing the game misses is in-game character interaction, you get kind of a glimpse at it here and there, but you don't really see much of it in the game, which is again kind of a bummer, as realism doesn't start with violence and death, but with having non-violent ways to interact with NPCs.
The one big issue of course remains player death. It is really hard to get away from rapid respawn. You could Sands-Of-Time your way out of it, but even that is just a cheat to avoid consequences of player death. Another issue is that such instant-kill kind of gameplay leads to lots of trial&error gameplay, which doesn't seem to be all that popular with todays audiences.
Another way to do realistic violence is of course to make it all story based, like in an adventure game, where its not something the player does, but something done by other people to the player or friends of him. Heavy Rain might have some interesting stuff to show in that area, but if it really works or will be panned as a series of QTEs we have to wait and see.
If they are both 100% cats I would expect that they can perfectly interbreed, but they can't. Only some combination produce offsprings and often the offsprings are infertile. How do you explain that? Evolution can plain that quite easily.
And anyway, where do you draw the line? Are all cat-like animals "cats"? Can I interbreed a domesticated house cat with a Tiger?
Nobody was there to observe it,
If somebody would have been there to observe it that would merely be anecdotal evidence, better then nothing, but rather useless in the scientific world. With fossils you have actual evidence that you can analyze today and even better, you don't even have to trust the scientist, you can go digging for yourself. Its not that hard to find fossils. And if you would find something that evolution can't explain, you certainly would have some good evidence to doubt evolution, but so far, even with all the creationists around, nobody as found something that crushes evolution, quite the opposite, the finding confirm it.
And anyway, how can you argue with the Cambrian Explosion on one side and on the other side doubt the very science that uncovered it?
but they were still basically the same kind of bacteria,
Wrong, the whole point of the thing is that they weren't. They had new abilties not presented in the original bacteria. It wasn't recombination of existing abilites, but the creation of completly new ones.
If you think there is such a clear separation between species, somebody of all the creationist "scientist" surely must have put a list of them together that can be tested? Right? Where can I find that?
Humans tend to believe, because of our extremely short existence here...
What has anything of that to do with things like the blind spot just being fuck-ups in the design of human beings? If God is perfect, how could he screw up so badly that even a child would notice how obviously bad the design is. A design mistake by the way that isn't repeated in the very similar Octopus eye.
What difference does it make whether it was 6000 years ago or billions of years?
Everything, the later is explained and observed by science. The former falls into the land of ferry tales. If you could find proof for the 6000 years, you might be a pretty damn good step closer to proving God.
His tomb is empty.
There isn't really much evidence for the tomb being real, could as well just be part of a fictional story. And anyway, even if it would be true, an empty tomb doesn't really proof anything beside that the tomb is empty, for all we know somebody could have stolen the body through the backdoor.
Or to put it another way: How come that the location where people live is so closely related with the religion they have? If God would be real wouldn't you expect a much more random distribution? Instead we see what we would expect when religion is merly a culture thing, carried over from generation to generation, thus never getting much traction in parts of the world that weren't indoctrinated with it as childs.
(And for the record, I think many of Wikipedia's policies are braindead, but the "my farts deserve their own wiki page" mentality on Slashdot is maddening.)
There is hardly anyone that is arguing for that. The point is simply that the current notability rules are insane. When I search for a video game I don't care if it was ported to at least three platforms before 1995 or that is has at least two sequels, I just want to find information about the game. Yet the German Wikipedia has those exact rules and will delete good articles that don't fit them.
In a perfect world I would expect Wikipedia to simply use hierachies. If you have [[Metal Gear]], what would be so wrong about having [[Metal Gear/FAQ]] and [[Metal Gear/Walkthrough]] too? Of course we don't life in a perfect world, so for the time being I would already be happy enough when they relax their notability critieria so much that I don't run into deleted articles and a daily basis.
Anything that has seen a decent amount of public exposure should be notable enough for Wikipedia anything that happend in your own home of course doesn't fit that.
Fragmentation : huh ? Sorry ? Ever heard of the concept of hypertext ? and hyperlinks ? which are supposed to be the very basis of the Internet ?
Yep, and Wikipedia does not allow them in the core of article, but only as references. Also user accounts, article history, preferences and all that stuff does not transfer over hyperlinks. Also many custom Wikis are for example littered with advertisment, why should I accept that when Wikipedia has more then enough money to host all the custom Wikis around?
No duplication of work.
A lot of articles get duplicated in custom wikis, thus you get lots of duplicated work.
In fact, the same criticism could be held against the languages in wikipedia, because each different language is as separate wiki with separate log-in.
Yes, thats a perfect valid criticism. One that I think was addressed a few month ago (not perfectly, as it didn't provide a good way to resolve name conflicts I think).
Unless you are some weird type of geek who is somewhat simultaneously specialised in every type of sub-culture know to humanity, you won't need log-in on every single other wiki.
You see it from the wrong point of view. The issue is that because I am not a specialist everywhere, that I will not bother to create and account on another Wiki and in turn I might not bother to contribute to that Wiki.
That argument misses the issue with the current rules. Most people *do* agree that some rules are needed, thats not what the argument is about. The issue is that the current rules are *far* to strict, even well sourced and well written articles get destroyed due to some arbitary notability criteria.
The rules should be there to keep the junk and vandalism out, the current rules on the other side also keep the good articles out (along with their authors who get pissed off and never contribute again).
And thats your problem right there. The high inclusion barrier in Wikipedia leads to numerous specialized Wikis, which leads to fragmentation of the namespace and needless duplication of work. It also means that there is no sharing of infrastructure, so as a user you need to have new accounts in every Wiki. And of course you have no guarantee that the infrastructure running the special-topic Wiki is as solid as Wikipedia. Its could have a harddisk crash tomorrow and all work could be lost and less well known or small topics won't get their special Wiki to begin with.
You may be able to mate the lion and a tiger, but not a horse and a hippopotamus to get a horsapottamous or whatever.
Yes, but what is that an argument for? Thats exactly what you would expect from evolution. The point is that a tiger is not a lion and yet they can mate and produce offsprings. How do you explain that if not with evolution?
immense quantities of time is what evolutionists always resort to when their theories cannot be verified by observation.
It *is* observation. Sure it would be nice to have a video tape of three billion years of evolution, but we don't. We have to work with what we got and that is fossile evidence, currently living species and DNA. And so far, all of that is explained or even predicted just fine by evolution.
Scientists have desperately tried for decades now already to experimentally make evolution happen.
And they have succeeded in the lab, see my earlier E.coli link. I mean what do you actually expect? Crocoduck?
Have you ever heard of something called The Cambrian Explosion? How the fossil record shows a SUDDEN explosive increase in the number and diversity of fossilized organisms?
Yes, and there are plenty of theories around that try to explain it. The most basic one is of course that before the Cambrian Explosion you simply didn't have enough hard parts in the animals to get fossils. It might of course not be the right explanation or a complete explanation, but Cambrian Explosion really doesn't go against evolution, its for large part basically just a lack of data. Not that unexpected given that it happened hundred of million years ago.
Anyway, even if we accept that we just don't know enough of the Cambrian Explosion to make an conclusion (hey, could have been space aliens seeding the earth with life). There are still millions of years following that for which we *do* have a decent fossil record and for which evolution is currently the by far best theory to explain it.
but the teaching that birds come from reptiles and men come from monkeys is absurd.
Thats not absurd, thats what the fossil and DNA evidence shows. Where do you think birds and men come from?
Such evolution does not happen today
Evolution takes millions of years. What is so hard to understand about that? Do you also observe a human for a day and then conclude that there is no way that a child can grow into an adult? After all no real change happen in the day you observed.
I believe in an intelligent Creator God, all powerful and all knowing, who designed the universe and the laws by which it operates.
If you think God did it, care to elaborate on a few questions? When did he do it (6000 years ago, 3.5 billion years ago, etc) and what is your evidence for that? What exactly did he do? Did he create the Tiger and the Lion? Why are offsprings of those to infertile? Why did God hate the dinosaurs and all the other exting animals so much that he had to kill them all? How do you explain that an all knowing creator has managed to let so many bugs slip into his construction, such as wisdom teeth which we have to fix so that they don't cause trouble? Or the blind spot in the eye, which could have been easily avoided. Did God create the whole universe? Why did you create so much empty space for no reason?
My faith is however not big enough to believe something like the human brain or a 747 airplane can come into existence without careful thought and planning.
When you actually observe how a brain and a 747 is build, you will quickly find out that their process of construction is completly different. The 747 for example, like most other intelligent designed things in the world, doesn't feature a way to reproduce itself. So in turn it doesn't have a direct way to submit changes to its offsprings. The brain or
That is absolutely true, but the bacteria were still E. coli and always will be.
E. coli is a man made term. Species in general are man made classification. Nature doesn't really care about species. Look at the tiger and lion, are they two species? How come that you can have a tigeon or a liger? What about a donkey and a horse? Is mule even a "species" and is it a horse or a donkey? How come the mule species in infertile? What about a Zebra?
Small changes over millions or even billions of years lead to big changes, I don't really see what is so hard about that concept.
The evolution I am thinking of is the nonsense that teaches that birds were once reptiles or that men come from monkeys or apes.
Thats not nonsense, but scientific research backed up by fossile evidence and sometimes DNA evidence.
If Evolution where so completly wrong, it would be quite easy to disprove: Just find a fossible which doesn't fit into the fossil record. Like a real horse back in the time of the dinosaurs or something like that.
Which alternative theory do you suggest that explains all the observations?
The notability is put in there so that Wikipedia wouldn't get filled with crap made up by bored teenagers during the school break.
That is what they should be for, but that is not what they are used for. The rules, especially in the German Wikipedia, are far stronger and far more arbitrary. In fact even after month of reading the public discussion of the topic of notability (which has made it into major newspapers and such), I have not *once* heard an understandable argument what the friggen goal of the current rules is.
The whole notability guidelines seem to be a case of the Standford prison experiment, you have a page with rules, so people all end up playing asshole and will it with as much strict rules as they can, for no other reason then being able to play badguy.
The notability bar is not that that even high.
In the German Wikipedia almost every new article is greated with a deletion request due to lack of notability.
The reason for higher "quality" is that the german Wikipedia deletes each and every article that isn't near perfect on day one of insertion. Which of course increases the average quality, but makes the thing close to useless, as you very often hit pages that where deleted. This of course also scares away new users, which in turn is used as an argument(!) for more deletions: "We have not enough personal to maintain so many articles...".
When it comes to video games for example there are pretty huge holes in the available articles, for example Katamari Damacy doesn't have an article, most of the time every title of a franchise is crammed into a single gigantic page and plenty of other stuff that is just plain bullshit.
My fur hat, made from fox that I hunted down and killed personally, caused less death than your cotton jacket.
That is very likely completly wrong. We don't do farming because we like being cruel to animals, but because its highly effective and the only way we can produce enough goods for all the people out there. If all the millions of people out there would go out into the wild and start respectfully killing foxes you would very soon have a completly extinct all foxes out there. And having them all drive into the wild with their SUV would also soon end up being far worse then shipping stuff around with a big truck, as that truck will carry hundreds or thousands of items, not just one fox hat.
I hunt in a sustainable way.
Its only sustainable when very few people do it, it doesn't scale up.
Hundreds of millions of generations of E. coli have still only produced more E. coli
That has been done in a lab and it has lead to the evolution of abilities not present in the original E.coli strand. That is actual observed evolution in a lab right there.
You are telling me that entropy doesn't apply outside of the Earth in the known universe, simply because we have a Sun?
You missed the point. Entrophy applies to closed systems, earth is not a closed system, not even close, as you have shitloads of energie coming from the sun. And guess what, that energie can be used to counteract entrophy buildup and thats what is happening with evolution.
I hear they recently leaked a few Emails....and I hear he had to step down.
You should watch less Fox News. The whole email thing is so far a total a non-issue as far as actual science is concerned, as so far there has been no sign of fraud. But hey, a few quotes out of context and you can steer up a big fat controversy where there really is none.
Certain ideas about them being seperate species are about to shatter some of the ideas of evolutionary theory,
How is that an argument against evolution? One of the points of evolution is that there are no clear cut boundaries between species. Sometimes you have animals that are close enough related that they can bread and produce offsprings and sometimes they are not and thus can't. And well, sometimes they are somewhere in the middle and they can only produce infertile offsprings (tiger+lion, mule+horse, etc.).
Secondly, it is not clear even from a biological point of view how a new complex system can arise by random chance
Its not random chance, its the selection process that does the work.
Third and finally, there are certain things about the theory that the laws of thermodynamics seem to be in violation, particularly entropy which states systems move from complexity to simplicity, not the other way around.
Thats only true for closed systems, earth is not a closed system (hint: big glowing day-star is shining plenty of energy on us).
Some words have become almost unsearchable because search engines keep "generalizing" them to words so generic that they hardly filter anything anymore
Quote the words (i.e. "foobar" instead of just foobar), that disables the generalization and spelling fixes, at least for Google.
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The USB stick wouldn't just store the key, it would also handle all the encryption and authentication too, so the private key would never leave the USB stick and there would be no way to access it.
The stick could additionally verify that you are really talking to the server you mean to and not to a man-in-the-middle and on top of that the encryption could be protected by a pin, entered on the USB stick itself, to secure against theft and keyloggers.
Such an encryption scheme could be made pretty much rock solid.
but what about if this starts a trend and all online games start to require such?
Maybe secure login will then become a common practice and devices will be standardized and we will live in a bright shiny future where login is no longer done by the most primitive system imaginable.
I mean seriously, passwords are among the weakest chain when it comes to security today and not something that can be fixed by 'educating the user' (last time I counted I had around 100 password), it wouldn't hurt to replace them with something that is more secure and more comfortable to use, even if it might be a bit painful at first.
The good old joystick is slowly dying out on the PC and even gamepad support is still lacking or non-existant in quite a few games. I doubt that some crazy motion technology has any change to becoming a wide enough success to actually be used in more then a handful of techdemos.
Games aren't about pure reactions, they are also about terrain traversal and following objects and those get a hell of a lot easier the more FPS you got, as the difference between frames just gets way to large to perform actions or predictions with any amount of accuracy when you are trotting around at something as low as 15fps.
Associating game mechanics and input processing to framerate is a poor argument as well,
Its not the way todays games are written or should be, but it used to be the way to do things on earlier consoles and those consoles managed to give you very fluent and very low latency gameplay that 20 years later todays games have a very hard time to match or even get close to, as everything is delayed and buffered multiple times before it makes it to the screen.
I bet most people are well aware that fanart is on sketchy legal grounds, but they don't care for a simple reason: Basing your work on popular commercial IP allows you not only to recycle ideas, but more importantly it lets you recycle the fan community. You get the social connection (forums, chat, etc), maybe costumes, maybe music and all that kind of stuff for free.
If you would start with something totally original on the other side, you would have a hard time finding anybody interested enough in it to contribute and you would have no place to go to find contributors.
How about dogs vs cats, elephants vs giraffes, Falcons vs crocodiles and on and on and on? You can make your own list. None of these creatures are able to breed together.
I want a complete list of all known species and the way you classify them, not just some stuff made up on the spot. Science has created such a long list. If evolution is so wrong, creationist "scientist" surly have created one of their own to prove their point and explain all the hard things like ring species or the hypbrids mentioned earlier.
alligator becoming an eagle.
Finally, Crocoduck *facepalm*, thats not how evolution works.
How about you visit this nice page or the hundreds of others that explain evolution, before making such bullshit claims.
There is, but it's not always what we call species.
I know. What I want from you is a list of those distinct groups that where created by God without a chance of intermixing.
You dodged the question of how you would make a fossil.
I already gave you an example, want more, just google a bit.
That was a sudden catastrophe,
Thats the point, you need a sudden event that covers the body and protects it from regular decay. The processes that follow the covering can take a long time, the covering itself can't or the body would decompose before anything can get done. Thats why we find so few fossils of a given species, most of them aren't covered up and those never fossilize as already mentioned.
A sudden worldwide water catastrophe, such as described in the Bible in the flood of Noah, is much more plausible, given the evidence we have.
There is no evidence that a single big flood ever happened. In fact we have evidence for quite the opposite, its all gradualism buildup of geologic formations with a few mud slides, volcanic eruptions and all that other sudden stuff to give you the fossils.
Just because ignorant humans cannot discern God's purposes, doesn't mean there isn't any purpose.
Yeah, but if you want me to believe your claims you better should have good evidence to support it. Just claiming the flying spaggeti monster did it isn't evidence. A good explanation why the he did it or at least what the benefit of that way of doing it is would be a start, but the blind spot still just looks like a big fucking in the design of humans.
Which is all based on the assumption (belief by faith) that the clock by which we measure this has never changed in all of time.
It is a theory, not absolute truth, yes, thats how the scientific method works. That doesn't change the fact that science has build up a pretty damn good and detailed explanation of how things work in nature, which can be used to predict things, explain things, engineer technologies, etc. Do you have an alternative theory that works on clock changing and earth being suddenly 6000 years old that is anywhere near as good as what science has? Or an experiment that shows that science got is wrong?
Even if you assume that science didn't get every detail right, which might very well be the case in some edge cases, that doesn't change the fact that science so far as provide us with by far the best explanation we have.
I happen to know some of them.
The point isn't how widespread Christianity is, which is easily explained by how information and people travel around the world, but that Christianity doesn't spontaneously arise in areas where it wasn't brought by mass indoctrination. If the Native American or African people believed in Jesus and God before missionaries came there and indoctrinated them, that would be a pretty solid point for the stories having some truth, but that has never happened. Scientific theories on the other side have often been form by multiple people completly independently in the past.
I suppose the others, such as the Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists etc. don't indoctrinate their children?
Of course they do, thats how culture spreads.
How does flying airplanes into buildings or blowing themselves and others up, help the survival of the human species?
The point with spreading ideas is not the survival of the human carrier, but the "survival" of the ideas themselves. Flying planes into buildings has killed the pilots, it however had an enormous impact in spreading the ideas behind it.
The Biblical teaching of God, human sin and rebellion with resultant selfishness, but also the idea of helping others, are much b
Neither I nor anybody else draws these lines. There are certain categories within which living creatures can interbreed, but these categories are fixed and completely outside of our control.
You are dodging the question. If there are God-made animals that fall into distinct categories, it should be possible to clearly classify those categories by observation. If there is no such list of classification I have to assume that your theory of how God created the earth void of all evidence and like just wrong. See ring species for an example of how the clean seperation into kinds of animals just doesn't work in nature.
How many times do such anecdotal observations have to be made before you consider them valid?
The number of anecdotal observation doesn't count, the important part is that they are repeatable. If I find a fossil, somebody else can look at it and analyse it. It is even possible for somebody else to go digging for his own evidence, completly independed of mine. Which is why fossils are pretty good evidence.
No fossils are being made today, because normally organic matter such as dead animals and plants are broken down into elementary parts by microorganisms.
Well, yeah, thats the reason why fossils are extremely rare (i.e. only a few dozens fossils of a species which might have had millions or even billions of creatures). They only form in rare circumstances where the normal decomposition doesn't take place.
For a recent example of fossil formation see Pompeii, where the humans where covered in vulcanic asshes and thus preserved, see Wikipedia for an overview of other ways fossils can form.
How do you know that this is a design mistake?
Because it would be trivial to fix and because it servers exactly no purpose. It is simply an area in your eye that doesn't work.
The 6000 years and billions of years are both based on belief.
The 6000 years are believe, the billions of years are *observation*, big difference there. And its not just one observation pointing at the number, but lots of it. The life of stars, the microwave background, geology, atomic decay, all that stuff points to that 13.7 billion years number.
That is patently false. There are Christians in every part of the world today.
Aehm, no. Religion is quite strictly coupled with location, see this nice map.
Christians took their faith to every continent
That just further proofs my point, unless you indoctrinate people with it, there is not much that they will switch to Christianity on their own.
Evolution supposedly is driven by the mechanism of the survival of the fittest. How does the expending of vital life resources on religious shrines, cathedrals or offerings help survival?
Resources wasted on religion aren't that big of a deal when it comes to survival and quite a few of them would be spend on social interactions anyway, no matter if those interactions are religious in nature or not. And of course ideas spread independed of reproduction and survival, so even harmful ideas could spread quite far, just likes germs do. Time of course also plays a role, you won't change brain patterns with just a 100 generations.
I am not much good at Falcon either, it is however a good demonstration how realism can make (some parts) of the game a lot more fun. I for example spend hours in that game and other flightsims doing just landings. Landings in EF2000 with a damaged plane are a lot of fun, since they can turn out in old kind of fun ways, as there are so many ways things can go wrong in interesting ways.
In most arcade flight games on the other side landings and starts are completly automated, the game thus loses a lot of what makes flying interesting and more importantly, they drastically reduce the number of ways you can fail in an interesting way. Instead of having a nerve wreaking task of flying a damaged plane home, you get a two second explosion and be done with it, which is no fun at all.
I would also love to have more realistic violence in video games, but the thing to realize is that is that it just wouldn't work in current day games, as those games are from their in their very core extremely unrealistic, not just what the violence is concerned. On average you kill like what, 200-300 people in a single play through of a shooter, maybe even more in some games. Reality just doesn't work that way, unless you drop bombs from a plane you just don't get to kill that many people without getting yourself killed, a lot.
I think a sensible way to introduce realistic violence would be to tackle it in a basically non-violent game. See Mirrors Edge for example, that style of game has some huge potential in that area, as its core is not about killing people but about traversing terrain. You don't shoot people, but instead you get shot. Of course the game kind of butchers its own core mechanic by introducing level design that basically forces you to shoot at other people and its extremely terrible at presenting the shooting in a realistic manner (everybody is a clone, small girl survives more bullets then armored police man, etc.), but its a type of game where you could introduce realistic violence and get away with it. In fact it would even make the game better when you for example had a choice between shooting somebody in the leg, along with consequences, instead of just having him rackdoll himself to the ground. I would much prefer it to have the game show realistically that death of the opponent is something that should be avoided, not something that should be done on a casual basis. Another thing the game misses is in-game character interaction, you get kind of a glimpse at it here and there, but you don't really see much of it in the game, which is again kind of a bummer, as realism doesn't start with violence and death, but with having non-violent ways to interact with NPCs.
The one big issue of course remains player death. It is really hard to get away from rapid respawn. You could Sands-Of-Time your way out of it, but even that is just a cheat to avoid consequences of player death. Another issue is that such instant-kill kind of gameplay leads to lots of trial&error gameplay, which doesn't seem to be all that popular with todays audiences.
Another way to do realistic violence is of course to make it all story based, like in an adventure game, where its not something the player does, but something done by other people to the player or friends of him. Heavy Rain might have some interesting stuff to show in that area, but if it really works or will be panned as a series of QTEs we have to wait and see.
But they are both large cats, the cat kind.
If they are both 100% cats I would expect that they can perfectly interbreed, but they can't. Only some combination produce offsprings and often the offsprings are infertile. How do you explain that? Evolution can plain that quite easily.
And anyway, where do you draw the line? Are all cat-like animals "cats"? Can I interbreed a domesticated house cat with a Tiger?
Nobody was there to observe it,
If somebody would have been there to observe it that would merely be anecdotal evidence, better then nothing, but rather useless in the scientific world. With fossils you have actual evidence that you can analyze today and even better, you don't even have to trust the scientist, you can go digging for yourself. Its not that hard to find fossils. And if you would find something that evolution can't explain, you certainly would have some good evidence to doubt evolution, but so far, even with all the creationists around, nobody as found something that crushes evolution, quite the opposite, the finding confirm it.
And anyway, how can you argue with the Cambrian Explosion on one side and on the other side doubt the very science that uncovered it?
but they were still basically the same kind of bacteria,
Wrong, the whole point of the thing is that they weren't. They had new abilties not presented in the original bacteria. It wasn't recombination of existing abilites, but the creation of completly new ones.
If you think there is such a clear separation between species, somebody of all the creationist "scientist" surely must have put a list of them together that can be tested? Right? Where can I find that?
Humans tend to believe, because of our extremely short existence here...
What has anything of that to do with things like the blind spot just being fuck-ups in the design of human beings? If God is perfect, how could he screw up so badly that even a child would notice how obviously bad the design is. A design mistake by the way that isn't repeated in the very similar Octopus eye.
What difference does it make whether it was 6000 years ago or billions of years?
Everything, the later is explained and observed by science. The former falls into the land of ferry tales. If you could find proof for the 6000 years, you might be a pretty damn good step closer to proving God.
His tomb is empty.
There isn't really much evidence for the tomb being real, could as well just be part of a fictional story. And anyway, even if it would be true, an empty tomb doesn't really proof anything beside that the tomb is empty, for all we know somebody could have stolen the body through the backdoor.
Or to put it another way: How come that the location where people live is so closely related with the religion they have? If God would be real wouldn't you expect a much more random distribution? Instead we see what we would expect when religion is merly a culture thing, carried over from generation to generation, thus never getting much traction in parts of the world that weren't indoctrinated with it as childs.
(And for the record, I think many of Wikipedia's policies are braindead, but the "my farts deserve their own wiki page" mentality on Slashdot is maddening.)
There is hardly anyone that is arguing for that. The point is simply that the current notability rules are insane. When I search for a video game I don't care if it was ported to at least three platforms before 1995 or that is has at least two sequels, I just want to find information about the game. Yet the German Wikipedia has those exact rules and will delete good articles that don't fit them.
In a perfect world I would expect Wikipedia to simply use hierachies. If you have [[Metal Gear]], what would be so wrong about having [[Metal Gear/FAQ]] and [[Metal Gear/Walkthrough]] too? Of course we don't life in a perfect world, so for the time being I would already be happy enough when they relax their notability critieria so much that I don't run into deleted articles and a daily basis.
Anything that has seen a decent amount of public exposure should be notable enough for Wikipedia anything that happend in your own home of course doesn't fit that.
Fragmentation : huh ? Sorry ? Ever heard of the concept of hypertext ? and hyperlinks ? which are supposed to be the very basis of the Internet ?
Yep, and Wikipedia does not allow them in the core of article, but only as references. Also user accounts, article history, preferences and all that stuff does not transfer over hyperlinks. Also many custom Wikis are for example littered with advertisment, why should I accept that when Wikipedia has more then enough money to host all the custom Wikis around?
No duplication of work.
A lot of articles get duplicated in custom wikis, thus you get lots of duplicated work.
In fact, the same criticism could be held against the languages in wikipedia, because each different language is as separate wiki with separate log-in.
Yes, thats a perfect valid criticism. One that I think was addressed a few month ago (not perfectly, as it didn't provide a good way to resolve name conflicts I think).
Unless you are some weird type of geek who is somewhat simultaneously specialised in every type of sub-culture know to humanity, you won't need log-in on every single other wiki.
You see it from the wrong point of view. The issue is that because I am not a specialist everywhere, that I will not bother to create and account on another Wiki and in turn I might not bother to contribute to that Wiki.
On the other hand, some rules are still needed
That argument misses the issue with the current rules. Most people *do* agree that some rules are needed, thats not what the argument is about. The issue is that the current rules are *far* to strict, even well sourced and well written articles get destroyed due to some arbitary notability criteria.
The rules should be there to keep the junk and vandalism out, the current rules on the other side also keep the good articles out (along with their authors who get pissed off and never contribute again).
There are like 8 different Trekkie wikis
And thats your problem right there. The high inclusion barrier in Wikipedia leads to numerous specialized Wikis, which leads to fragmentation of the namespace and needless duplication of work. It also means that there is no sharing of infrastructure, so as a user you need to have new accounts in every Wiki. And of course you have no guarantee that the infrastructure running the special-topic Wiki is as solid as Wikipedia. Its could have a harddisk crash tomorrow and all work could be lost and less well known or small topics won't get their special Wiki to begin with.
You may be able to mate the lion and a tiger, but not a horse and a hippopotamus to get a horsapottamous or whatever.
Yes, but what is that an argument for? Thats exactly what you would expect from evolution. The point is that a tiger is not a lion and yet they can mate and produce offsprings. How do you explain that if not with evolution?
immense quantities of time is what evolutionists always resort to when their theories cannot be verified by observation.
It *is* observation. Sure it would be nice to have a video tape of three billion years of evolution, but we don't. We have to work with what we got and that is fossile evidence, currently living species and DNA. And so far, all of that is explained or even predicted just fine by evolution.
Scientists have desperately tried for decades now already to experimentally make evolution happen.
And they have succeeded in the lab, see my earlier E.coli link. I mean what do you actually expect? Crocoduck?
Have you ever heard of something called The Cambrian Explosion? How the fossil record shows a SUDDEN explosive increase in the number and diversity of fossilized organisms?
Yes, and there are plenty of theories around that try to explain it. The most basic one is of course that before the Cambrian Explosion you simply didn't have enough hard parts in the animals to get fossils. It might of course not be the right explanation or a complete explanation, but Cambrian Explosion really doesn't go against evolution, its for large part basically just a lack of data. Not that unexpected given that it happened hundred of million years ago.
Anyway, even if we accept that we just don't know enough of the Cambrian Explosion to make an conclusion (hey, could have been space aliens seeding the earth with life). There are still millions of years following that for which we *do* have a decent fossil record and for which evolution is currently the by far best theory to explain it.
but the teaching that birds come from reptiles and men come from monkeys is absurd.
Thats not absurd, thats what the fossil and DNA evidence shows. Where do you think birds and men come from?
Such evolution does not happen today
Evolution takes millions of years. What is so hard to understand about that? Do you also observe a human for a day and then conclude that there is no way that a child can grow into an adult? After all no real change happen in the day you observed.
I believe in an intelligent Creator God, all powerful and all knowing, who designed the universe and the laws by which it operates.
If you think God did it, care to elaborate on a few questions? When did he do it (6000 years ago, 3.5 billion years ago, etc) and what is your evidence for that? What exactly did he do? Did he create the Tiger and the Lion? Why are offsprings of those to infertile? Why did God hate the dinosaurs and all the other exting animals so much that he had to kill them all? How do you explain that an all knowing creator has managed to let so many bugs slip into his construction, such as wisdom teeth which we have to fix so that they don't cause trouble? Or the blind spot in the eye, which could have been easily avoided. Did God create the whole universe? Why did you create so much empty space for no reason?
My faith is however not big enough to believe something like the human brain or a 747 airplane can come into existence without careful thought and planning.
When you actually observe how a brain and a 747 is build, you will quickly find out that their process of construction is completly different. The 747 for example, like most other intelligent designed things in the world, doesn't feature a way to reproduce itself. So in turn it doesn't have a direct way to submit changes to its offsprings. The brain or
That is absolutely true, but the bacteria were still E. coli and always will be.
E. coli is a man made term. Species in general are man made classification. Nature doesn't really care about species. Look at the tiger and lion, are they two species? How come that you can have a tigeon or a liger? What about a donkey and a horse? Is mule even a "species" and is it a horse or a donkey? How come the mule species in infertile? What about a Zebra?
Small changes over millions or even billions of years lead to big changes, I don't really see what is so hard about that concept.
The evolution I am thinking of is the nonsense that teaches that birds were once reptiles or that men come from monkeys or apes.
Thats not nonsense, but scientific research backed up by fossile evidence and sometimes DNA evidence.
If Evolution where so completly wrong, it would be quite easy to disprove: Just find a fossible which doesn't fit into the fossil record. Like a real horse back in the time of the dinosaurs or something like that.
Which alternative theory do you suggest that explains all the observations?
The notability is put in there so that Wikipedia wouldn't get filled with crap made up by bored teenagers during the school break.
That is what they should be for, but that is not what they are used for. The rules, especially in the German Wikipedia, are far stronger and far more arbitrary. In fact even after month of reading the public discussion of the topic of notability (which has made it into major newspapers and such), I have not *once* heard an understandable argument what the friggen goal of the current rules is.
The whole notability guidelines seem to be a case of the Standford prison experiment, you have a page with rules, so people all end up playing asshole and will it with as much strict rules as they can, for no other reason then being able to play badguy.
The notability bar is not that that even high.
In the German Wikipedia almost every new article is greated with a deletion request due to lack of notability.
The reason for higher "quality" is that the german Wikipedia deletes each and every article that isn't near perfect on day one of insertion. Which of course increases the average quality, but makes the thing close to useless, as you very often hit pages that where deleted. This of course also scares away new users, which in turn is used as an argument(!) for more deletions: "We have not enough personal to maintain so many articles...".
When it comes to video games for example there are pretty huge holes in the available articles, for example Katamari Damacy doesn't have an article, most of the time every title of a franchise is crammed into a single gigantic page and plenty of other stuff that is just plain bullshit.
My fur hat, made from fox that I hunted down and killed personally, caused less death than your cotton jacket.
That is very likely completly wrong. We don't do farming because we like being cruel to animals, but because its highly effective and the only way we can produce enough goods for all the people out there. If all the millions of people out there would go out into the wild and start respectfully killing foxes you would very soon have a completly extinct all foxes out there. And having them all drive into the wild with their SUV would also soon end up being far worse then shipping stuff around with a big truck, as that truck will carry hundreds or thousands of items, not just one fox hat.
I hunt in a sustainable way.
Its only sustainable when very few people do it, it doesn't scale up.
Hundreds of millions of generations of E. coli have still only produced more E. coli
That has been done in a lab and it has lead to the evolution of abilities not present in the original E.coli strand. That is actual observed evolution in a lab right there.
You are telling me that entropy doesn't apply outside of the Earth in the known universe, simply because we have a Sun?
You missed the point. Entrophy applies to closed systems, earth is not a closed system, not even close, as you have shitloads of energie coming from the sun. And guess what, that energie can be used to counteract entrophy buildup and thats what is happening with evolution.
I hear they recently leaked a few Emails....and I hear he had to step down.
You should watch less Fox News. The whole email thing is so far a total a non-issue as far as actual science is concerned, as so far there has been no sign of fraud. But hey, a few quotes out of context and you can steer up a big fat controversy where there really is none.
Certain ideas about them being seperate species are about to shatter some of the ideas of evolutionary theory,
How is that an argument against evolution? One of the points of evolution is that there are no clear cut boundaries between species. Sometimes you have animals that are close enough related that they can bread and produce offsprings and sometimes they are not and thus can't. And well, sometimes they are somewhere in the middle and they can only produce infertile offsprings (tiger+lion, mule+horse, etc.).
Secondly, it is not clear even from a biological point of view how a new complex system can arise by random chance
Its not random chance, its the selection process that does the work.
Third and finally, there are certain things about the theory that the laws of thermodynamics seem to be in violation, particularly entropy which states systems move from complexity to simplicity, not the other way around.
Thats only true for closed systems, earth is not a closed system (hint: big glowing day-star is shining plenty of energy on us).
Some words have become almost unsearchable because search engines keep "generalizing" them to words so generic that they hardly filter anything anymore
Quote the words (i.e. "foobar" instead of just foobar), that disables the generalization and spelling fixes, at least for Google.
Features such as implementing the separate directory levels in a path as buttons, splitting the directory view pane in the same window, ...
NextSTEP had that kind of stuff ages ago.