Well, the point is that those humans probably wouldn't suffer in the gravest sense of the word even though they'd be forced to get some other job to replace the species-killing one. I sure as hell wouldn't torture people because of a dolphin species. Fortunately, that's not a scenario that could actually happen, unless there was to be some weird environmentalist-fascist form of government. Since it's an unrealistic scenario, I'll leave it at that.
As for my values, I value life. And 20 mill. years of life sure is more than a 60 year span of life, where you, as a human being, can actually make decisions and have choices. Human lives wouldn't have ended because of saving this dolphin species. Also, it's not like the extinction of the dolphin was a deterministic event. In your opinion, how many species can we lose without feeling a little bad about it? Can we always shrug it off with a little "oh well, at least those people got to keep their jobs"? That, in my opinion, is just as abhorrent, egoistic and extremely, extremely short-sighted.
I honestly must say I don't give a rats ass if somebody loses his/her job now because we have to protect a unique species from going extinct. Sheesh, 20 million years of succesful living as a species, and now you're dead because of someone who lives for, say, 60 years. Sad. We are indeed a pathetic species.
Bats do, of course, count as mammals, but we are speaking ground-dwelling mammals here. New Zealand supposedly never had those before the human invasion. No we know they had, once.
Still, I don't see this that hard a fact to reconcile with the traditional view of NZ as a Kingdom of Birds. The animal was still only a small critter. Sure, critters as small as rats are known to have exterminated ground-dwelling bird species from isolated island ecosystems. But NZ is much bigger than Hawaii, Mauritius, Galápagos and other famous examples of island extinction. This would mean its bird-dominated ecosystems and bird species would have been much more robust and resistant to a mammalian threat. Why, there were large, flightless predatory birds on the island continent of South Africa before the Great American Interchange. And how about the ostrich, emu & co.?
This new fossil mammal also appears to represent a very ancient lineage dating back to early Cretaceous mammals. We know for fact these critters were not necessarily some übermammal bird-pwners: after the KT extinction (the one that killed the dinosaurs, y'know), for a short while birds were among the top predators, and there were many other flightless birds, too, all over the world. This seems to indicate that early mammals were not the bird menace modern placental mammals like rats, pigs, and cats (and us) are. Nothing mysterious going on here, methinks. You simply cannot compare an advanced Neogene placental to a primitive Cretaceous type of proto-shrew in terms of predatory efficiency.
And how about this possibility: NZ only became a bird paradise after this critter and its relatives went the way of the dodo, for some reason or another?
I used Win98 until a year ago. Or was it two? Anyway, I didn't see anything in XP that would have prompted me to upgrade (more shininess? duh), and XP sure would have been heavier on my 2001 Athlon box (even though it was a higher-end buy at that time). Well, then, er, got hold of XP and made the jump (had to buy more RAM to make it run smoothly with all the anti-virus, firewall etc.).
And then I bought a Mac.
Anyhoo, Win98 is still ran by people who
a) Don't see a reason to upgrade to XP (seriously, what are the major benefits? Well now there are since 98 isn't supported as widely as before)
b) Have older computers too weak for XP, but perfect for text editing and websurfing.
A very heavy 'almost'. It never gets completely dark (as in 'night') here even during the winter. But still you probably wouldn't see anything in satellite photos, since it's very, very cloudy here during this time of the year. Hell, I don't remember when I saw proper sunshine the last time. Day in, day out of dull greyness. It isn't even snowing, all we get is water. Oh, sorry for rambling on. But the weather truly sucks here right now.
I know ID is careful not to mention the supernatural creator it in practice assumes. Anyways I haven't heard anything about a scientifically testable creator.
Yes, the creator of life on Earth could be a space alien for all what I know, and I know ID as an idea includes this scenario as one possibility. However, the overwhelming majority of people advocating ID do so because they want to further their religious creationist cause. (And assuming an extraterrestrial creator only pushes the original problem of the birth of life further away.)
So, de jure ID does not assume a supernatural creator. De facto it does.
The age-old "evolution is merely a theory, not a fact" argument still does not hold water. A scientific theory isn't an educated guess. Evolution does happen, that is the fact of evolution. *How* it happens is explained by the scientific *theory* of evolution. Arguments including supernatural creators are not competing scientific theories, but pseudoscience by definition.
And no, I don't have or need to assume eternal matter or anything else to accept the fact that biological entities become different thru time. Strictly speaking I don't even need to touch the subject of the origin of life (abiogenesis) to accept evolution, since evolution only deals with how creatures evolve once life has begun.
How did it begin? We don't know, thus far all we have is hypotheses. And it is quite possible we will never know. Still, that doesn't automatically mean there's a supernatural creator who started it all. Until we can create life from scratch in a lab or observe it happening somewhere, the only honest answer is "we don't know". (But hypothesising is, of course, needed if we are ever going to try to find a positive answer.)
It is "biased" only if you use the word in the Faux News sense, i.e. it makes a factual statement you take offence from. It's no wonder people's view of reality is getting muddier by the day, we can't even talk about facts without some newspeak PC crap. And no, I'm not going to define (or, alas, re-define) science here. All I have to say is that anything that somehow involves a supernatural creator is pseudoscience by definition. If you cannot accept that, it's exclusively your problem.
Don't want to be an asshat nitpicker, but this just seemed funny to me:
"This has gone largely unnoticed, but Microsoft has started a hell of a holiday XBOX 360 campaign..."
If it has gone largely unnoticed, can we really call it "a hell of a campaign"? On the other hand, if there's anybody in the world able to pull off such a thing (a largely unnoticed hell of a campaign, that is), it's probably Micro"Zuma"soft.
It's not up to Apple to decide whether there is or isn't DRM in the iTunes Store files. Had Apple taken a zero tolerance stance to begin with concerning DRM, there would be no iTunes Store. It's really that simple. And the only way to legally download music would be files that'd be more seriously DRM-crippled WMA's.
So Apple's preferences are really aligned with those of the customers. They'd be more than happy to sell you DRM-free music, but they possibly just can't, because of the opposition of Big Music. Ergo, they negotiated the obligatory DRM as non-restrictive and intrusive as they could.
I, for one, despise DRM. However, I also despise black&white thinking. Sometimes the lesser evil (Apple's Fairplay DRM'd files, in this case) can be tolerated if the alternative is more evil (MS Doesn't-Play-For-Sure & Zuma's will-self-destruct-in-3-days) DRM or nothing at all.
It has more. It's just that some Mac users (like me, a Mac convert since the introduction of MacBooks) prefer Firefox over Safari. I, for one, can't stand the way Safari handles RSS feeds, Firefox's drop-down menus are superior.
"I can't be the only one that thought of the british band, "Muse" =D"
Nope, you aren't. Me and my GF had a laugh when we saw the headline. "Glaciers melting in the dead of night
and the superstars sucked into the supermassive..."
Good:
-Feels faster than 1.5.7. But then again, this is just a feeling.
-Close Tab buttons now in each individual tab
Bad:
-Popups not blocked by default. Well, not necessarily bad, rather an annoyance. And maybe this doesn't make people confused like if they were blocked by default and people expect some certain popup to actually pop up.
-Cannot separately block cookies coming from other servers than the wbsite I'm visiting. Now it's all or nothing in cookie blocking in Firefox.
-Spellcheck on by default. The annoyance, the annoyance.
Ugly:
-My RSS feeds and bookmarks are WIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIDE now. Yet still the GUI in RSS feeds and bookmarks manages to waste valuable screen estate at the left edges of the dropdown menu. You could almost fit two of those little RSS symbols there between the edge and the symbol (which takes up some space in its own right).
I actually tried switching to Safari, but the way it manages RSS is horrendous. I want my RSS feeds in neat dropdown menus, dammit.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the point is that those humans probably wouldn't suffer in the gravest sense of the word even though they'd be forced to get some other job to replace the species-killing one. I sure as hell wouldn't torture people because of a dolphin species. Fortunately, that's not a scenario that could actually happen, unless there was to be some weird environmentalist-fascist form of government. Since it's an unrealistic scenario, I'll leave it at that.
As for my values, I value life. And 20 mill. years of life sure is more than a 60 year span of life, where you, as a human being, can actually make decisions and have choices. Human lives wouldn't have ended because of saving this dolphin species. Also, it's not like the extinction of the dolphin was a deterministic event. In your opinion, how many species can we lose without feeling a little bad about it? Can we always shrug it off with a little "oh well, at least those people got to keep their jobs"? That, in my opinion, is just as abhorrent, egoistic and extremely, extremely short-sighted.
No, I won't, because buildings aren't living beings. But sure, it is a heavily weighted argument.
I honestly must say I don't give a rats ass if somebody loses his/her job now because we have to protect a unique species from going extinct. Sheesh, 20 million years of succesful living as a species, and now you're dead because of someone who lives for, say, 60 years. Sad. We are indeed a pathetic species.
Bats do, of course, count as mammals, but we are speaking ground-dwelling mammals here. New Zealand supposedly never had those before the human invasion. No we know they had, once.
Still, I don't see this that hard a fact to reconcile with the traditional view of NZ as a Kingdom of Birds. The animal was still only a small critter. Sure, critters as small as rats are known to have exterminated ground-dwelling bird species from isolated island ecosystems. But NZ is much bigger than Hawaii, Mauritius, Galápagos and other famous examples of island extinction. This would mean its bird-dominated ecosystems and bird species would have been much more robust and resistant to a mammalian threat. Why, there were large, flightless predatory birds on the island continent of South Africa before the Great American Interchange. And how about the ostrich, emu & co.?
This new fossil mammal also appears to represent a very ancient lineage dating back to early Cretaceous mammals. We know for fact these critters were not necessarily some übermammal bird-pwners: after the KT extinction (the one that killed the dinosaurs, y'know), for a short while birds were among the top predators, and there were many other flightless birds, too, all over the world. This seems to indicate that early mammals were not the bird menace modern placental mammals like rats, pigs, and cats (and us) are. Nothing mysterious going on here, methinks. You simply cannot compare an advanced Neogene placental to a primitive Cretaceous type of proto-shrew in terms of predatory efficiency.
And how about this possibility: NZ only became a bird paradise after this critter and its relatives went the way of the dodo, for some reason or another?
I used Win98 until a year ago. Or was it two? Anyway, I didn't see anything in XP that would have prompted me to upgrade (more shininess? duh), and XP sure would have been heavier on my 2001 Athlon box (even though it was a higher-end buy at that time). Well, then, er, got hold of XP and made the jump (had to buy more RAM to make it run smoothly with all the anti-virus, firewall etc.).
And then I bought a Mac.
Anyhoo, Win98 is still ran by people who
a) Don't see a reason to upgrade to XP (seriously, what are the major benefits? Well now there are since 98 isn't supported as widely as before)
b) Have older computers too weak for XP, but perfect for text editing and websurfing.
That, and /or die from hypothermia or become a king-size shish kebab.
My MacBook wakes up in one or two seconds. Booyah!
But the problem of long start-up time is coming to your livingroom, too. Those LCD panels are much slower than traditional big box TVs.
He's called Geeko-Man. Oh, is SuSE/Novell gonna sue me now?
A very heavy 'almost'. It never gets completely dark (as in 'night') here even during the winter. But still you probably wouldn't see anything in satellite photos, since it's very, very cloudy here during this time of the year. Hell, I don't remember when I saw proper sunshine the last time. Day in, day out of dull greyness. It isn't even snowing, all we get is water. Oh, sorry for rambling on. But the weather truly sucks here right now.
How 'bout dem oceans instead of deserts? Floating Beowulf clusters of these (just had to say it that way) wouldn't harm the environment.
I know ID is careful not to mention the supernatural creator it in practice assumes. Anyways I haven't heard anything about a scientifically testable creator.
Yes, the creator of life on Earth could be a space alien for all what I know, and I know ID as an idea includes this scenario as one possibility. However, the overwhelming majority of people advocating ID do so because they want to further their religious creationist cause. (And assuming an extraterrestrial creator only pushes the original problem of the birth of life further away.)
So, de jure ID does not assume a supernatural creator. De facto it does.
The age-old "evolution is merely a theory, not a fact" argument still does not hold water. A scientific theory isn't an educated guess. Evolution does happen, that is the fact of evolution. *How* it happens is explained by the scientific *theory* of evolution. Arguments including supernatural creators are not competing scientific theories, but pseudoscience by definition.
And no, I don't have or need to assume eternal matter or anything else to accept the fact that biological entities become different thru time. Strictly speaking I don't even need to touch the subject of the origin of life (abiogenesis) to accept evolution, since evolution only deals with how creatures evolve once life has begun.
How did it begin? We don't know, thus far all we have is hypotheses. And it is quite possible we will never know. Still, that doesn't automatically mean there's a supernatural creator who started it all. Until we can create life from scratch in a lab or observe it happening somewhere, the only honest answer is "we don't know". (But hypothesising is, of course, needed if we are ever going to try to find a positive answer.)
It is "biased" only if you use the word in the Faux News sense, i.e. it makes a factual statement you take offence from. It's no wonder people's view of reality is getting muddier by the day, we can't even talk about facts without some newspeak PC crap. And no, I'm not going to define (or, alas, re-define) science here. All I have to say is that anything that somehow involves a supernatural creator is pseudoscience by definition. If you cannot accept that, it's exclusively your problem.
They Report. You Decide.(TM)
Don't want to be an asshat nitpicker, but this just seemed funny to me:
"This has gone largely unnoticed, but Microsoft has started a hell of a holiday XBOX 360 campaign..."
If it has gone largely unnoticed, can we really call it "a hell of a campaign"? On the other hand, if there's anybody in the world able to pull off such a thing (a largely unnoticed hell of a campaign, that is), it's probably Micro"Zuma"soft.
There should always be mod points available for innovative Ballmer/chair jokes. Thanks man.
"Could you imagine if Microsoft made this robot?"
Yes, I can. Instead of shooting bullets it would throw chairs and f-bombs.
"The submitter calls the Zune an "iPod wannabe-killer".
That would make it something that kills iPod wannabe's, like Creative or Rio or Sandisk players."
Maybe it's just my pidgin English, but I'd see "iPod-wannabe killer" as something that kills iPod wannabes. Those hyphens...
It's not up to Apple to decide whether there is or isn't DRM in the iTunes Store files. Had Apple taken a zero tolerance stance to begin with concerning DRM, there would be no iTunes Store. It's really that simple. And the only way to legally download music would be files that'd be more seriously DRM-crippled WMA's.
So Apple's preferences are really aligned with those of the customers. They'd be more than happy to sell you DRM-free music, but they possibly just can't, because of the opposition of Big Music. Ergo, they negotiated the obligatory DRM as non-restrictive and intrusive as they could.
I, for one, despise DRM. However, I also despise black&white thinking. Sometimes the lesser evil (Apple's Fairplay DRM'd files, in this case) can be tolerated if the alternative is more evil (MS Doesn't-Play-For-Sure & Zuma's will-self-destruct-in-3-days) DRM or nothing at all.
Does that mean "My Documents" are now "Windows's Documents" in Vista? How typical of Redmond. "All My Documents are belong to us", eh?
...welcome our new American overlords. Er, waitaminnit...
It has more. It's just that some Mac users (like me, a Mac convert since the introduction of MacBooks) prefer Firefox over Safari. I, for one, can't stand the way Safari handles RSS feeds, Firefox's drop-down menus are superior.
But is it supermassive?
"I can't be the only one that thought of the british band, "Muse" =D"
Nope, you aren't. Me and my GF had a laugh when we saw the headline. "Glaciers melting in the dead of night and the superstars sucked into the supermassive..."
Good: -Feels faster than 1.5.7. But then again, this is just a feeling. -Close Tab buttons now in each individual tab Bad: -Popups not blocked by default. Well, not necessarily bad, rather an annoyance. And maybe this doesn't make people confused like if they were blocked by default and people expect some certain popup to actually pop up. -Cannot separately block cookies coming from other servers than the wbsite I'm visiting. Now it's all or nothing in cookie blocking in Firefox. -Spellcheck on by default. The annoyance, the annoyance. Ugly: -My RSS feeds and bookmarks are WIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIDE now. Yet still the GUI in RSS feeds and bookmarks manages to waste valuable screen estate at the left edges of the dropdown menu. You could almost fit two of those little RSS symbols there between the edge and the symbol (which takes up some space in its own right). I actually tried switching to Safari, but the way it manages RSS is horrendous. I want my RSS feeds in neat dropdown menus, dammit.