If you don't like their policies, DON'T BUY THEIR MUSIC! It's that simple. You don't need to explain why you're not buying it since you're not doing business with them anymore.
"Hey, sales are down. Must be because of all the piracy. We better push for more DRM laws!"
Carbon dating is only reliable to ~60k years because it is a naturally occuring isotope. It can be found anywhere at any time. However, living things tend to have higher levels of radioative C-14 than non living things, because of hte way carbon is recycled through living organisms.
After ~60k years, the level of C-14 in a sample can not be reliably seperated from the "background noise" of the C-14 that might just happen to be lingering around.
Potassium-argon dating can not be used on once-living things because radioactive Potassium-40 decays into Argon, a gas, which tends to escape into the environment -- unless it's in solid rock. Thus is is useful for dating lava flows. Also, the half-life of radioactive Potassium-40 is very long, about 1.3 million years (compare to C-14 at a mere 5730 years). Therefore K-Ar dating is only useful for dating "really old non-organic things" like... ancient lava flows.
It's simply a matter of using the right tool for the job. =Smidge=
Instead of saying "exactly how some problems have to be solved" it should be "one method that can be used to solve some problems". Part of what is lacking in education is the practice of giving kids nothing but a hammer and convincing them that everything is a nail. =Smidge=
Maybe, maybe not. They have your e-mail in a list somewhere, but they don't know if it's still valid. Sending a real response proves that it IS valid and IS checked actively, which increases its value when sold to advertisers or sold/traded to other spammers.
NOT replying puts a little "?" on the message, because they know the address is probably still valid (didn't bounce) but there was no reply (maybe nobody checks it)?
I think the better solution would be to send forged bounce errors back to the sender in hopes that they'll think the e-mail is dead, and remove it from their list. =Smidge=
The actual, underlying premise and plot is pretty straightforward and coherent... at least what I see. They just didn't drop it in your lap like many other stories do, and instead presented you with a "giant robot anime" facade and a lot of character development.
Spoiler warning, although this is strictly my personal interpretation of the story.
--
The underlying premise is an attempt to describe the nature of the human soul.
When you are first conceived, you have no soul. (Rei is the key to this interpretation, as this is pretty much the reason she exists IMHO)
As you grow, your soul is constructed by copying parts of the souls belonging to the people you interact with (including pre-birth interactions though the womb). Individuality and personality arises from the unique mixture of these copied portions and personal experiences. This is important to understand the ending.
The concept of the "Absolute Terror Field" is introduces as a barrier that keeps each soul separate. (Although throughout the series it is also manifested as a physical barrier). This is also important to understand the ending, as well as a few things throughout the story.
Because of the above, no single soul can ever be "complete", with the exception of the "First" - Adam and Eve (From the Genesis account of the creation of life) and, from a particular interpretation/version, Adam's first wife Lilith - Eve being the third with an unnamed second wife - who is actually the one who mankind is descended from). The creation of man caused the separation of these "perfect" souls.
Man discovers the "First Angel" - which they name Adam - In Antarctica. While trying to capture him/it, it self destructs and causes what is refereed to as "Second Impact". However, man was able to recover a portion of Adam. (And, apparently, most of Lilith)
The "Human Instrumentality Project" mentioned in the series intended to 'fix' this problem and get all of the imperfect, partial souls to recombine into a new perfect soul - and supposedly usher in the next major step in man's evolution, and becoming closer to God.
NERV and the EVAs were essentially a front for the whole operation. (I still haven't been able to pin down exactly how the Angels themselves work into it. Maybe they're pissed that man has stolen Adam and want him back?)
At the end (This is in EoE), Rei rejoins Lilith - from which she was directly created. Lilith's/Rei's soul is thus completed, and begins the "Third Impact" by neutralizing the AT fields of all life on the planet, which removed the barriers keeping the souls apart.
Rei's soul then becomes the nexus of this event, in which all souls are being recombined into a single, "perfect" soul. But Rei was created by Gendo Ikari without a soul of her own. His plan was to impress enough of his soul into Rei so he could be at the center of the event, which is why he was always so protective of and spent so much time with her. Ultimately, it was Shinji's soul who had the most influence, and so he became the center of it all.
In the end, all life on the planet was essentially destroyed and Shinji (with his now perfect, complete soul) effectively becomes God. The last two episodes are basically about him thinking about his life, having dialog with the other character's, reflecting on everything, and eventually deciding he would like to continue existing along with everyone else.
Pretentious? You bet! But the whole giant robot thing was actually very superficial to the actual story. Inserting EoE before the last two episiodes really, really helped put it all together. =Smidge=
Right now, I see three genres of anime that are on TV:
As opposed to the three major types of American TV:
1) "Reality" based shows 2) Imported and dubbed anime or worse, 'original' series in 'anime style' (Ironic?) 3) Rehashes of older shows with the same jokes updated with current cultural/political references.
Of course, a good portion of anime is exactly as you describe. Also, there are occasionally good non-anime TV shows that may not break any new ground but just do a really good job of it. "House" comes to mind as an example.
I'm sure you don't need to be told this, but some people need to realize there's more to anime than Pokémon. =Smidge=
It may not have been the intention, but I think EoE actually supplements the ending rather than replaces it. D&R was a very nice recap of the whole thing and can be skipped unless you're still very, very confused.
Spoiler warning, if anyone has managed to not see it yet and yet still wants to...
--
Basically, insert the movies between episodes 24 and 25 and it seems to fit really well. Left by itself, you end up halfway through Ep. 26 before you figure out that everyone is dead and we're just watching a lengthy existential dialog between Shinji and the collective consciousness of the rest of the cast. Because either way, everyone dies - EoE just shows it in rather explicit detail, as well as explaining a lot of what was going on behind the scenes. =Smidge=
...we could turn dried plant residues, paper garbage (the paper that already had been recycled for too many times to be still useful) or even wood sawdust into fuel in a snap! Perhaps even any sinthetic polymer fibers could be used.
The high speed of the system enables use of the most secure cipher known for ensuring the privacy of a communications channel, in which one secret key bit, known only to the communicating parties, is used only once to encrypt one video bit.
So if your "secure" stream must be used to transmit a key the same size as the actual data (bit for bit) and, being effectively a one-time pad, you should never re-use the same key (makes storing the key ahead of time basically pointless) then why not just send the actual data over the "secure" stream and do away with the public stream altogether?
I'll agree that learning "the complexity and subtleties" of *any* foreign language is a nearly impossible goal. What I challenge is your apparent attitude that it is impossible a non-native speaker to learn anything useful.
To be more than fair, English is far, far worse when it comes to obscure rules and exceptions to those rules.
And if for some reason I find myself in Japan with a food allergy, I'd make it a point to learn how to say "I'm allergic to [foodstuff]" - that kind of information strikes me as something I'd need to communicate well. It's just good learning strategy to prioritize the most important parts first. =Smidge=
Put simply: Lack of exposure. I would have to go farther out of my way to expose myself to Arabic than Japanese, both for generic media and learning material. Japan exports a lot of culture* and so it's easier to find materials.
Arabic is not necessarily harder on a technical level. Fact is I wouldn't know since I barely ever see any - that makes it harder on a practical level. Again, your results may vary.
(*It is understood that the culture that is exported has little or no resemblence to the actual culture within the country. I suspect this is pretty much the case with any country, though) =Smidge=
You, sir, are a real defeatist. You also seem to be completely ignorant about the language.
I've decided to put a 'passive effort' on learning Japanese. That is, I'm not going to drive myself nuts trying to learn it, and whatever I pick up is whatever I pick up. I decided on this because I like learning stuff, enjoy language in general, and Japanese is both reasonably learnable IMHO (as opposed to, say, Arabic or Hindi) and is NOT Latin/Germanic. I don't ever expect to be proficient at it, though. As I said, I'm learning just for the sake of learning, so proficiency is not terribly important for me.
So far I've spent about a month off-and-on listening to Pimsleur material while driving. Seems to work fairly well and it fits great into otherwise wasted time. (Your results may vary)
Even though my vocabulary is very limited, I'm already able to listen to and read (romanji only) Japanese and pick out some parts of the conversation, getting an idea of what the meaning is from context and grammar. Obviously, the language is not nearly as impossible as you make it out to be. =Smidge=
The assumed cost of support is likely to be built into the cost of the product. If it's not, then they are already losing money on support.
Having read the summary, the real issue was twofold: First, in order to deal with Wal-Mart, Snapper would have to make sacrifices in both product quality and profit margin in order to compete with the already 'disposable' equipment that Wal-Mart sells.
Second, the bulk of their business (80% independent retailers) would find themselves outgunned by Wal-Mart's cutthroat prices. You might gain 20% at first, but that extra business slowly starts to eat away at your larger market base.
Gain 20% but kill 80%
So he chose to lose a little business, maintain their higher quality product and support his largest market sector. =Smidge=
Well, technically it does cost money to *produce* the physical currency, and therefore it must have some intrinsic value... for example, I could take a thousand dolars worth of pennies, smelt the copper and zinc into ingots and sell it as scrap metal. The value of the metal is less than the coin, but it still has value.
Virtual currency doesn't even have that, unless you count the value of the physical storage the data occupies - which is so tiny it's just as good as zero. =Smidge=
-1 Troll? I'm pretty sure that's a Chinese proverb or somesuch. Unless someone can actually find a reference...
No, the version in the bible goes something like: "Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, give a man religion and he'll starve to death while praying for fish." =Smidge=
You did notice that the word "biological" was italicised in my post?
What you and SigILL are talking about is social evolution. mikeplokta and myself are talking about biological evolution. Social evolution does not effect populations in the level way as biological. By SigILL's logic, nobody should ever willingly decide to not have children since the "tendency" to not want to reproduce should have been "bred out" of the genepool by now. Clearly that is not the case.
You can't honestly think that there will come a time when everyone will want to have children because deciding not to is an evolutionary disadvantage that will be selected out. It is purely a social phenomena, not a genetic one, and that is what mikeplokta and myself are saying.
At least we agree that the two are not completely separate. While one's religious beliefs or bank account may effect how successful a breeder they are, it has absolutely no bearing on how "fit" (note the quotes) they or their offspring are in the physical environment. If that environment changes (such as the Avian Flu outbreak example) then it will only be their genetic fitness that will determine the future lineage.
You can spout B.S. about wealthy people being able to afford better medical treatment, but that is not a solution to whatever genetic trait is allowing the illness. At least not until "designer babies" are common practice... It is, however, a good example of how social (medical technology) evolution can effect biological evolution. Of course it works both ways, and that's why we have new strains of infections that are resistant to out medicine - we are not naturally immune to the bacteria, and medicine allowed otherwise "unfit" people to survive the infection and reproduce, and so we did not evolve and are still vulnerable to essentially the same threat.
You can have 10 kids and each of them have 10 kids, but if your genetics carry a high susceptibility to some form of cancer or infection (for example), having a thousand great-grandkids is a waste of resources from a biological evolution point of view. =Smidge=
No, he's saying that biological evolution only works on genetics. Anything that is not genetically influenced can't be effectively passed to the next generation.
In short, it's not about *you* - it's about your future lineage.
For example, just because you were good at managing money and managed to get wealthy enough to have extremely high reproductive success does not guarantee that your children will be equally responsible with money. (In fact, it appears that the opposite tends to be true.)
If, however, you have a genetic trait that makes you resistant or immune to the Avian Flu virus, and a massive outbreak occurs, then you will have a definite reproductive advantage (eg: not getting sick and possibly dying). Your children have a very good chance to inherit this trait. If outbreak kills off a lot of people who are not immune, it will increase the percentage of people who are and thus the percentage born in the next generation that are immune as well. The emergence of the immunity in a population is a great example of evolution at work.
Making more babies in and of itself is not necessarily evolution. Social pressure and status to have more children does not make you more "fit" to have said children, and does not guarantee the next generation is more "fit" to do so either. =Smidge=
Maybe he's like me, and prefers to teach both ideas as interpretations of as-yet unproven claims, along with some description of the reasoning behind the interpretations being taught.
That's the beauty of real science... facts come BEFORE the claims. Religious doctrine tends to be the opposite: Claim to have the answer first, then try to explain away new facts as they are discovered.
I mean, evolutionary theory's explanation of every specific characteristic is always "it arose from a random mutation, and was then selected for".
This statement highlights a gross misunderstanding on your part of exactly what evolutionary theory is. You are unknowingly posing a straw man argument (and a very common one).
This amounts to nothing more than a fictional narrative that conveniently fits the observed facts, but does not actually prove that the facts came into being in the way described in the narrative.
As opposed to a fictional narrative that doesn't fit observed facts? I'll take it.
Moreover, a real scientific theory can do something religious doctrine can't: make predictions. Evolutionary theory predicted the existence of "genetic information" nearly a century before DNA was isolated and its function understood. It predicted the appearance of poison resistant insects and medicine resistant bacteria. It predicts the result of experiments performed with microscopic organisms on an almost daily basis.
Scientific theory can be used to predict what will happen under certain conditions. That is what allows us to create things more complicated than stone hatchets and grass huts.
How this amounts to something more scientifically compelling than what I learned in Sunday School is beyond me.
Read above. Can you use the Bible to make a bridge or an airplane?
And for the record: Evolutionary theory doesn't say anything about how life began, only how life changes over time in order to survive in an ever changing environment. (That's a sweeping generalization, but probably more accurate that what you thought it was)
Don't get me wrong; I'm all for teaching the "evolutionary interpretation" of the origin of species. I just wish that Textual Criticism were also taught, in the context of scientific foundations for scriptural interpretation.
"Species" is a completely man made concept to help us categorize creatures for comparison. It is completely arbitrary! In fact, there are several definitions as to what a "species" is depending on what kind of life you're talking about. In the most common case, two creatures are said to be different "species" if they can not mate to produce viable (fertile) offspring.
Evolution deals with how so many different types of creatures came about (and why the creatures and environment are so well balanced) but not how life itself began. Something which is based on observed fact and can (and has) been used to make testable predictions. It's science.
Creationism? Doesn't explain all the facts ("God did it" is not an explanation unless you can prove God actually did it, but you have to prove God exists first) and can't be used to make testable predictions. Not science. =Smidge=
I have no problems opening the files, they're just rather large. (~7MB each)
Looking at them, they do not seem to indicate what the vote WAS, only that a vote was recorded at such a location on which machine at such a time. This data does not seem sufficient to actually show a specific bias.
But as someone else said, who actually won and if thre was any actual fraud is not the critical point at this time - the critical point is the system is broken so bad you can't even tell if there was fraud. =Smidge=
Can you really think of something if you don't have the words to describe it?
And even if you could wrap your head around a concept for which there are no words to describe, how can you communicate it to others? That's the problem. Your ability to think is strongly linked to your language skills. It's not that we wouldn't be able to understand each other, just that nobody would have anything worth saying! =Smidge=
Slashdot Mirror
"Hey, sales are down. Must be because of all the piracy. We better push for more DRM laws!"
=Smidge=
Carbon dating is only reliable to ~60k years because it is a naturally occuring isotope. It can be found anywhere at any time. However, living things tend to have higher levels of radioative C-14 than non living things, because of hte way carbon is recycled through living organisms.
After ~60k years, the level of C-14 in a sample can not be reliably seperated from the "background noise" of the C-14 that might just happen to be lingering around.
Potassium-argon dating can not be used on once-living things because radioactive Potassium-40 decays into Argon, a gas, which tends to escape into the environment -- unless it's in solid rock. Thus is is useful for dating lava flows. Also, the half-life of radioactive Potassium-40 is very long, about 1.3 million years (compare to C-14 at a mere 5730 years). Therefore K-Ar dating is only useful for dating "really old non-organic things" like... ancient lava flows.
It's simply a matter of using the right tool for the job.
=Smidge=
Instead of saying "exactly how some problems have to be solved" it should be "one method that can be used to solve some problems". Part of what is lacking in education is the practice of giving kids nothing but a hammer and convincing them that everything is a nail.
=Smidge=
1) they obviously already know your address
Maybe, maybe not. They have your e-mail in a list somewhere, but they don't know if it's still valid. Sending a real response proves that it IS valid and IS checked actively, which increases its value when sold to advertisers or sold/traded to other spammers.
NOT replying puts a little "?" on the message, because they know the address is probably still valid (didn't bounce) but there was no reply (maybe nobody checks it)?
I think the better solution would be to send forged bounce errors back to the sender in hopes that they'll think the e-mail is dead, and remove it from their list.
=Smidge=
The actual, underlying premise and plot is pretty straightforward and coherent... at least what I see. They just didn't drop it in your lap like many other stories do, and instead presented you with a "giant robot anime" facade and a lot of character development.
Spoiler warning, although this is strictly my personal interpretation of the story.
--
The underlying premise is an attempt to describe the nature of the human soul.
When you are first conceived, you have no soul. (Rei is the key to this interpretation, as this is pretty much the reason she exists IMHO)
As you grow, your soul is constructed by copying parts of the souls belonging to the people you interact with (including pre-birth interactions though the womb). Individuality and personality arises from the unique mixture of these copied portions and personal experiences. This is important to understand the ending.
The concept of the "Absolute Terror Field" is introduces as a barrier that keeps each soul separate. (Although throughout the series it is also manifested as a physical barrier). This is also important to understand the ending, as well as a few things throughout the story.
Because of the above, no single soul can ever be "complete", with the exception of the "First" - Adam and Eve (From the Genesis account of the creation of life) and, from a particular interpretation/version, Adam's first wife Lilith - Eve being the third with an unnamed second wife - who is actually the one who mankind is descended from). The creation of man caused the separation of these "perfect" souls.
Man discovers the "First Angel" - which they name Adam - In Antarctica. While trying to capture him/it, it self destructs and causes what is refereed to as "Second Impact". However, man was able to recover a portion of Adam. (And, apparently, most of Lilith)
The "Human Instrumentality Project" mentioned in the series intended to 'fix' this problem and get all of the imperfect, partial souls to recombine into a new perfect soul - and supposedly usher in the next major step in man's evolution, and becoming closer to God.
NERV and the EVAs were essentially a front for the whole operation. (I still haven't been able to pin down exactly how the Angels themselves work into it. Maybe they're pissed that man has stolen Adam and want him back?)
At the end (This is in EoE), Rei rejoins Lilith - from which she was directly created. Lilith's/Rei's soul is thus completed, and begins the "Third Impact" by neutralizing the AT fields of all life on the planet, which removed the barriers keeping the souls apart.
Rei's soul then becomes the nexus of this event, in which all souls are being recombined into a single, "perfect" soul. But Rei was created by Gendo Ikari without a soul of her own. His plan was to impress enough of his soul into Rei so he could be at the center of the event, which is why he was always so protective of and spent so much time with her. Ultimately, it was Shinji's soul who had the most influence, and so he became the center of it all.
In the end, all life on the planet was essentially destroyed and Shinji (with his now perfect, complete soul) effectively becomes God. The last two episodes are basically about him thinking about his life, having dialog with the other character's, reflecting on everything, and eventually deciding he would like to continue existing along with everyone else.
Pretentious? You bet! But the whole giant robot thing was actually very superficial to the actual story. Inserting EoE before the last two episiodes really, really helped put it all together.
=Smidge=
Right now, I see three genres of anime that are on TV:
As opposed to the three major types of American TV:
1) "Reality" based shows
2) Imported and dubbed anime or worse, 'original' series in 'anime style' (Ironic?)
3) Rehashes of older shows with the same jokes updated with current cultural/political references.
Of course, a good portion of anime is exactly as you describe. Also, there are occasionally good non-anime TV shows that may not break any new ground but just do a really good job of it. "House" comes to mind as an example.
I'm sure you don't need to be told this, but some people need to realize there's more to anime than Pokémon.
=Smidge=
It may not have been the intention, but I think EoE actually supplements the ending rather than replaces it. D&R was a very nice recap of the whole thing and can be skipped unless you're still very, very confused.
Spoiler warning, if anyone has managed to not see it yet and yet still wants to...
--
Basically, insert the movies between episodes 24 and 25 and it seems to fit really well. Left by itself, you end up halfway through Ep. 26 before you figure out that everyone is dead and we're just watching a lengthy existential dialog between Shinji and the collective consciousness of the rest of the cast. Because either way, everyone dies - EoE just shows it in rather explicit detail, as well as explaining a lot of what was going on behind the scenes.
=Smidge=
...we could turn dried plant residues, paper garbage (the paper that already had been recycled for too many times to be still useful) or even wood sawdust into fuel in a snap! Perhaps even any sinthetic polymer fibers could be used.
t ion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymeriza
=Smidge=
So if your "secure" stream must be used to transmit a key the same size as the actual data (bit for bit) and, being effectively a one-time pad, you should never re-use the same key (makes storing the key ahead of time basically pointless) then why not just send the actual data over the "secure" stream and do away with the public stream altogether?
=Smidge=
Oh and no GPU which means pixel/vertex shaders would have to run on software.
:)
Emulate the GPU using the rest of the machine.
=Smidge=
God I hope so. Given what we in "foreign countries" see of that which has been exported from the USoA makes us think you are all stupid assholes.
And 49% of us are deeply ashamed of it, I assure you.
=Smidge=
I'll agree that learning "the complexity and subtleties" of *any* foreign language is a nearly impossible goal. What I challenge is your apparent attitude that it is impossible a non-native speaker to learn anything useful.
To be more than fair, English is far, far worse when it comes to obscure rules and exceptions to those rules.
And if for some reason I find myself in Japan with a food allergy, I'd make it a point to learn how to say "I'm allergic to [foodstuff]" - that kind of information strikes me as something I'd need to communicate well. It's just good learning strategy to prioritize the most important parts first.
=Smidge=
Put simply: Lack of exposure. I would have to go farther out of my way to expose myself to Arabic than Japanese, both for generic media and learning material. Japan exports a lot of culture* and so it's easier to find materials.
Arabic is not necessarily harder on a technical level. Fact is I wouldn't know since I barely ever see any - that makes it harder on a practical level. Again, your results may vary.
(*It is understood that the culture that is exported has little or no resemblence to the actual culture within the country. I suspect this is pretty much the case with any country, though)
=Smidge=
You, sir, are a real defeatist. You also seem to be completely ignorant about the language.
I've decided to put a 'passive effort' on learning Japanese. That is, I'm not going to drive myself nuts trying to learn it, and whatever I pick up is whatever I pick up. I decided on this because I like learning stuff, enjoy language in general, and Japanese is both reasonably learnable IMHO (as opposed to, say, Arabic or Hindi) and is NOT Latin/Germanic. I don't ever expect to be proficient at it, though. As I said, I'm learning just for the sake of learning, so proficiency is not terribly important for me.
So far I've spent about a month off-and-on listening to Pimsleur material while driving. Seems to work fairly well and it fits great into otherwise wasted time. (Your results may vary)
Even though my vocabulary is very limited, I'm already able to listen to and read (romanji only) Japanese and pick out some parts of the conversation, getting an idea of what the meaning is from context and grammar. Obviously, the language is not nearly as impossible as you make it out to be.
=Smidge=
The assumed cost of support is likely to be built into the cost of the product. If it's not, then they are already losing money on support.
Having read the summary, the real issue was twofold: First, in order to deal with Wal-Mart, Snapper would have to make sacrifices in both product quality and profit margin in order to compete with the already 'disposable' equipment that Wal-Mart sells.
Second, the bulk of their business (80% independent retailers) would find themselves outgunned by Wal-Mart's cutthroat prices. You might gain 20% at first, but that extra business slowly starts to eat away at your larger market base.
Gain 20% but kill 80%
So he chose to lose a little business, maintain their higher quality product and support his largest market sector.
=Smidge=
Well, technically it does cost money to *produce* the physical currency, and therefore it must have some intrinsic value... for example, I could take a thousand dolars worth of pennies, smelt the copper and zinc into ingots and sell it as scrap metal. The value of the metal is less than the coin, but it still has value.
Virtual currency doesn't even have that, unless you count the value of the physical storage the data occupies - which is so tiny it's just as good as zero.
=Smidge=
They don't need their own e-mail addresses. They can just use yours!
=Smidge=
-1 Troll? I'm pretty sure that's a Chinese proverb or somesuch. Unless someone can actually find a reference...
No, the version in the bible goes something like: "Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, give a man religion and he'll starve to death while praying for fish."
=Smidge=
Well, from what I know of conventional thermodynamics... some quantity of mass must have been converted to energy.
The real catch is thus: "...the high temperature was achieved after the plasma's ions should have been losing energy and cooling."
I find this is exciting! Some of the best science starts with the words "Gee, that's funny..."
=Smidge=
You did notice that the word "biological" was italicised in my post?
What you and SigILL are talking about is social evolution. mikeplokta and myself are talking about biological evolution. Social evolution does not effect populations in the level way as biological. By SigILL's logic, nobody should ever willingly decide to not have children since the "tendency" to not want to reproduce should have been "bred out" of the genepool by now. Clearly that is not the case.
You can't honestly think that there will come a time when everyone will want to have children because deciding not to is an evolutionary disadvantage that will be selected out. It is purely a social phenomena, not a genetic one, and that is what mikeplokta and myself are saying.
At least we agree that the two are not completely separate. While one's religious beliefs or bank account may effect how successful a breeder they are, it has absolutely no bearing on how "fit" (note the quotes) they or their offspring are in the physical environment. If that environment changes (such as the Avian Flu outbreak example) then it will only be their genetic fitness that will determine the future lineage.
You can spout B.S. about wealthy people being able to afford better medical treatment, but that is not a solution to whatever genetic trait is allowing the illness. At least not until "designer babies" are common practice... It is, however, a good example of how social (medical technology) evolution can effect biological evolution. Of course it works both ways, and that's why we have new strains of infections that are resistant to out medicine - we are not naturally immune to the bacteria, and medicine allowed otherwise "unfit" people to survive the infection and reproduce, and so we did not evolve and are still vulnerable to essentially the same threat.
You can have 10 kids and each of them have 10 kids, but if your genetics carry a high susceptibility to some form of cancer or infection (for example), having a thousand great-grandkids is a waste of resources from a biological evolution point of view.
=Smidge=
No, he's saying that biological evolution only works on genetics. Anything that is not genetically influenced can't be effectively passed to the next generation.
In short, it's not about *you* - it's about your future lineage.
For example, just because you were good at managing money and managed to get wealthy enough to have extremely high reproductive success does not guarantee that your children will be equally responsible with money. (In fact, it appears that the opposite tends to be true.)
If, however, you have a genetic trait that makes you resistant or immune to the Avian Flu virus, and a massive outbreak occurs, then you will have a definite reproductive advantage (eg: not getting sick and possibly dying). Your children have a very good chance to inherit this trait. If outbreak kills off a lot of people who are not immune, it will increase the percentage of people who are and thus the percentage born in the next generation that are immune as well. The emergence of the immunity in a population is a great example of evolution at work.
Making more babies in and of itself is not necessarily evolution. Social pressure and status to have more children does not make you more "fit" to have said children, and does not guarantee the next generation is more "fit" to do so either.
=Smidge=
Maybe he's like me, and prefers to teach both ideas as interpretations of as-yet unproven claims, along with some description of the reasoning behind the interpretations being taught.
That's the beauty of real science... facts come BEFORE the claims. Religious doctrine tends to be the opposite: Claim to have the answer first, then try to explain away new facts as they are discovered.
I mean, evolutionary theory's explanation of every specific characteristic is always "it arose from a random mutation, and was then selected for".
This statement highlights a gross misunderstanding on your part of exactly what evolutionary theory is. You are unknowingly posing a straw man argument (and a very common one).
This amounts to nothing more than a fictional narrative that conveniently fits the observed facts, but does not actually prove that the facts came into being in the way described in the narrative.
As opposed to a fictional narrative that doesn't fit observed facts? I'll take it.
Moreover, a real scientific theory can do something religious doctrine can't: make predictions. Evolutionary theory predicted the existence of "genetic information" nearly a century before DNA was isolated and its function understood. It predicted the appearance of poison resistant insects and medicine resistant bacteria. It predicts the result of experiments performed with microscopic organisms on an almost daily basis.
Scientific theory can be used to predict what will happen under certain conditions. That is what allows us to create things more complicated than stone hatchets and grass huts.
How this amounts to something more scientifically compelling than what I learned in Sunday School is beyond me.
Read above. Can you use the Bible to make a bridge or an airplane?
And for the record: Evolutionary theory doesn't say anything about how life began, only how life changes over time in order to survive in an ever changing environment. (That's a sweeping generalization, but probably more accurate that what you thought it was)
Don't get me wrong; I'm all for teaching the "evolutionary interpretation" of the origin of species. I just wish that Textual Criticism were also taught, in the context of scientific foundations for scriptural interpretation.
"Species" is a completely man made concept to help us categorize creatures for comparison. It is completely arbitrary! In fact, there are several definitions as to what a "species" is depending on what kind of life you're talking about. In the most common case, two creatures are said to be different "species" if they can not mate to produce viable (fertile) offspring.
Evolution deals with how so many different types of creatures came about (and why the creatures and environment are so well balanced) but not how life itself began. Something which is based on observed fact and can (and has) been used to make testable predictions. It's science.
Creationism? Doesn't explain all the facts ("God did it" is not an explanation unless you can prove God actually did it, but you have to prove God exists first) and can't be used to make testable predictions. Not science.
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Something tells me he has no problems teaching kids "facts" based solely on open interpretation of 3000+ year old texts, though.
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I have no problems opening the files, they're just rather large. (~7MB each)
Looking at them, they do not seem to indicate what the vote WAS, only that a vote was recorded at such a location on which machine at such a time. This data does not seem sufficient to actually show a specific bias.
But as someone else said, who actually won and if thre was any actual fraud is not the critical point at this time - the critical point is the system is broken so bad you can't even tell if there was fraud.
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Can you really think of something if you don't have the words to describe it?
And even if you could wrap your head around a concept for which there are no words to describe, how can you communicate it to others? That's the problem. Your ability to think is strongly linked to your language skills. It's not that we wouldn't be able to understand each other, just that nobody would have anything worth saying!
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