Theres no reason to believe that genetically modified organisms might go on to evolve, not that such organisms wern't closely based on something that evolved.
I see no god here. I am just throwing it out there as a possibility that might even be testable, nothing more.
Somehow religion gets involved, science sure is different in some peoples parts of the world.
"Even if Intelligent Design is 100% correct, it would STILL be unscientific-- it would just show that science is unable to explain everything."
uh excuse me? How would 'intelligent design' show that science is unable to explain everything?
I would imagine that the 'intelligent design' would be the *result* of science.
We know for a fact that we can intelligently design organisms (or that at least it is not impossible for us to do so with sufficient practise).
So whats so bizarre and unimaginable about organisms in our world, on planet Earth, which we take to be naturally ocurring actually having been genetically manipulated by some intelligence at some time in the past?
Its similar to the archeologist trying to determine whether or not something is natural or artificial. There was a case here in NZ not long ago where a rock formation in the bush was taken for a man-made wall. Sure you can tell if its intelligent design or not; look to the surrounding geology.
Sure, you may not be able to tell for sure 100% one way or the other, but that doesn't make the question any less interesting to ask, now does it?
You only get problems when you put god in the picture (or aliens with godlike powers but they are just a god substitute). Only god can cause so much sand to be shoved up so many vaginas.
People who dismiss concepts like 'intelligent design' out of hand may often like to refer to themselves as scientific, but in fact dismissing something like that out of hand is the very reverse of scientific.
At the very least there exists the possibility of a test; as we learn more about genetics and actually perform large scale genetic engineering it is possible that we may find that we can 'detect' GMO's which we create ourselves.
Once that happens, its a legitimate project to apply such a test to organisms which we believe to be of natural origin and, of course, to ourselves.
Unfortunately, many people (many of them calling themselves scientists) would argue that 'its a waste of time' because 'obviously intelligent design is just wrong'. Not very scientific eh.
Perhaps a redefinition of science is in order, something closer to the definition of religion... 'Thou shalt not challenge the orthodoxy.'
IMO, the true scientist witholds judgement until the experiments have been done and the data is in front of them.
(I am not a deist nor an atheist nor agnostic. I am a non-dualist. There is no difference between what we think of as god and what we think of as anything other than god: its all one big thing).
For the radioactive cobalt isotopes to work its way through the various ecosystems killing everything that takes it up. It might take a while.
And its going to kill things long after the half-life is up; remember that its half as radioactive once the half life is up. That doesn't mean that its no longer harmful, just half as harmful as before...
"Okay, the reason why your pain lessened or disappeard is because you changed your typing behavior"
Forgive me but, well Duh!
Typing almost exclusively on the home row *is* changing your typing behavior. And until you understand what I mean by that you will just be hypothesising.
You do know what I mean by 'home row' right?
Its a lot easier in that the fingers tend to *roll* across the keyboard rather than contort from one series of stretches to another.
"Dvorak keyboards have only won in tests administered by Dvorak himself.. The truth is that he was looking to make money off of his patented configuration."
While this may or may not be true, my personal experiences seem to indicate that dvorak keyboard *is* good for your wrists.
I had a *lot* of 10,000+ word essays to write, my hands and wrists were getting so painful I could barely type, yet the deadlines couldn't be put off.
I switched to dvorak and the pain vanished within about a week of using it.
The vast majority of the keys you use to type the vast majority of words you type are all on the home row.
(If you don't know what 'home row' means then you have NO business criticising the dvorak keyboard, but I digress).
One thing that certainly helped was not just the fact that my fingers no longer had unnatural stretches to perform in typing, but the slowdown I had to endure in getting used to the dvorak layout.
You are thinking of the huge tower SMP box. Sure, that was different. It had a very whacky looking case too.
But all of the 'SGI' boxes on our render wall were stock standard x86 hardware running stock standard Redhat Linux. Most of the desktop machines were the same.
There were only a very few of those special NT boxes in use, some were in storage, disused, because it was such a huge pain to get Linux on them.
"The decision shortly after the O2 systems were introduced to start selling vastly overpriced PC-compatible Intel hardware was the nail in that coffin."
That 'SGI' Intel hardware was such a rip; I had the opportunity to work with it, including opening up the boxes to work inside them.
Guess what components were SGI?
The logo on the front. Thats all. The rest was stock standard Intel compatible hardware right down to the graphics card.
And the O2 was total shite; even the enlightenment window manager was enough to bring it to its knees when you turned on all of the pretty-fying graphical eyecandy. At lease the so-called SGI Intel hardware could cope with that...
"And as has been pointed out many times in these comments, the idea that violence is somehow less bad than sex is quite ridiculous"
At least its consistent.
Apparently its perfectly acceptable to hire and pay people to commit acts of violence (the military) yet it is typically frowned upon to hire and pay people to commit acts of sex (porno and prostitutes).
Its not a good consistency, but consistent it is.
Personally, I'd rather spend quality time with a trained sexpot than a trained killer...
RPM is superior to deb in one important way that saved my ass once.
I had managed to delete all of the symlinks under/etc Don't ask how, I just did, ok?
*Fortunately* the RPM database contained all of the information I needed to reconstruct the symlinks which were created by the packages.
I work with debian systems, so it occurred to me to see how I would achieve the same success on debian systems.
So far as I can tell, symlinks are not listed in any debian 'database' on the system where the package is installed, unlike RPM where the info is right at your fingertips.
The closest I could find for debian would be to troll through the install scripts looking for where they create symlinks.
If anyone has a one-liner which will deliver a list of symlinks that should exist on a debian system I'd like to see it. Yes, one-liner. Thats what I used on RPM.
Slashdot Mirror
"When are we going to finally grow up and realize that not everyone is cut out for college."
Maybe there should be a college for nerds and a seperate 'college' for jocks?
Note the use of quote marks...
"whether it really can't be done by EDS or someone else accustomed to dealing with ancient data files"
'Eds computer barn'? That'd be like having the space shuttle maintained by Joes Garage. At least get someone competent do do it!
ah fuck that was a typo. I meant to write
"Theres no reason to believe that genetically modified organisms might *not* go on to evolve"
I also believe in evolution.
Theres no reason to believe that genetically modified organisms might go on to evolve, not that such organisms wern't closely based on something that evolved.
I see no god here. I am just throwing it out there as a possibility that might even be testable, nothing more.
Somehow religion gets involved, science sure is different in some peoples parts of the world.
"an engineer will design the simplest and most reliable thing possible that fulfills the specifications given to him"
*sigh*
If only.
"Even if Intelligent Design is 100% correct, it would STILL be unscientific-- it would just show that science is unable to explain everything."
uh excuse me? How would 'intelligent design' show that science is unable to explain everything?
I would imagine that the 'intelligent design' would be the *result* of science.
We know for a fact that we can intelligently design organisms (or that at least it is not impossible for us to do so with sufficient practise).
So whats so bizarre and unimaginable about organisms in our world, on planet Earth, which we take to be naturally ocurring actually having been genetically manipulated by some intelligence at some time in the past?
Its similar to the archeologist trying to determine whether or not something is natural or artificial. There was a case here in NZ not long ago where a rock formation in the bush was taken for a man-made wall. Sure you can tell if its intelligent design or not; look to the surrounding geology.
Sure, you may not be able to tell for sure 100% one way or the other, but that doesn't make the question any less interesting to ask, now does it?
You only get problems when you put god in the picture (or aliens with godlike powers but they are just a god substitute). Only god can cause so much sand to be shoved up so many vaginas.
People who dismiss concepts like 'intelligent design' out of hand may often like to refer to themselves as scientific, but in fact dismissing something like that out of hand is the very reverse of scientific.
At the very least there exists the possibility of a test; as we learn more about genetics and actually perform large scale genetic engineering it is possible that we may find that we can 'detect' GMO's which we create ourselves.
Once that happens, its a legitimate project to apply such a test to organisms which we believe to be of natural origin and, of course, to ourselves.
Unfortunately, many people (many of them calling themselves scientists) would argue that 'its a waste of time' because 'obviously intelligent design is just wrong'. Not very scientific eh.
Perhaps a redefinition of science is in order, something closer to the definition of religion... 'Thou shalt not challenge the orthodoxy.'
IMO, the true scientist witholds judgement until the experiments have been done and the data is in front of them.
(I am not a deist nor an atheist nor agnostic. I am a non-dualist. There is no difference between what we think of as god and what we think of as anything other than god: its all one big thing).
Damn, and heres me hoping it'd be something to do with the V series of the '80s.
Watching Natalie Portman swallow whole, live rodents would certainly be worth it!
ha ha ha haaa haahahahahahaaaaaa hahahahaha!
hilarious.
Will this thing ever fly again? Or is it going the way of the Concorde?
For the radioactive cobalt isotopes to work its way through the various ecosystems killing everything that takes it up. It might take a while.
And its going to kill things long after the half-life is up; remember that its half as radioactive once the half life is up. That doesn't mean that its no longer harmful, just half as harmful as before...
"I believe it was the first DMG by EGG who wrote that all rules were optional."
Its axiomatic:
The more rules you have, the less roleplaying you get done.
"Okay, the reason why your pain lessened or disappeard is because you changed your typing behavior"
Forgive me but, well Duh!
Typing almost exclusively on the home row *is* changing your typing behavior. And until you understand what I mean by that you will just be hypothesising.
You do know what I mean by 'home row' right?
Its a lot easier in that the fingers tend to *roll* across the keyboard rather than contort from one series of stretches to another.
It certainly helps but at the core is the way the fingers flex over the home row.
"Dvorak keyboards have only won in tests administered by Dvorak himself.. The truth is that he was looking to make money off of his patented configuration."
While this may or may not be true, my personal experiences seem to indicate that dvorak keyboard *is* good for your wrists.
I had a *lot* of 10,000+ word essays to write, my hands and wrists were getting so painful I could barely type, yet the deadlines couldn't be put off.
I switched to dvorak and the pain vanished within about a week of using it.
The vast majority of the keys you use to type the vast majority of words you type are all on the home row.
(If you don't know what 'home row' means then you have NO business criticising the dvorak keyboard, but I digress).
One thing that certainly helped was not just the fact that my fingers no longer had unnatural stretches to perform in typing, but the slowdown I had to endure in getting used to the dvorak layout.
But the home-row layout made things a lot easier.
You are thinking of the huge tower SMP box. Sure, that was different. It had a very whacky looking case too.
But all of the 'SGI' boxes on our render wall were stock standard x86 hardware running stock standard Redhat Linux. Most of the desktop machines were the same.
There were only a very few of those special NT boxes in use, some were in storage, disused, because it was such a huge pain to get Linux on them.
but on the other hand, this will be a great opportunity for eye-ball phishing...
"In 1997 Enlightenment sucked ass, it was enough to bring ANY system to its knees."
This was in 2001.
" Cobalt shells are overrated. You'd still need hundreds (if not thousands) of the things"
Depends how long you are prepared to wait.
"Currently I own an Indigo, Indigo2, and an O2. They are very capable and suprisingly rounded machines."
The O2 was rounded. The Indy was still fairly square and boxy.
"The decision shortly after the O2 systems were introduced to start selling vastly overpriced PC-compatible Intel hardware was the nail in that coffin."
That 'SGI' Intel hardware was such a rip; I had the opportunity to work with it, including opening up the boxes to work inside them.
Guess what components were SGI?
The logo on the front. Thats all. The rest was stock standard Intel compatible hardware right down to the graphics card.
And the O2 was total shite; even the enlightenment window manager was enough to bring it to its knees when you turned on all of the pretty-fying graphical eyecandy. At lease the so-called SGI Intel hardware could cope with that...
cover a 'Tsar Bomba' with a cobalt shell *then* we can talk about destroying all life on Earth...
"And as has been pointed out many times in these comments, the idea that violence is somehow less bad than sex is quite ridiculous"
At least its consistent.
Apparently its perfectly acceptable to hire and pay people to commit acts of violence (the military) yet it is typically frowned upon to hire and pay people to commit acts of sex (porno and prostitutes).
Its not a good consistency, but consistent it is.
Personally, I'd rather spend quality time with a trained sexpot than a trained killer...
RPM is superior to deb in one important way that saved my ass once.
/etc Don't ask how, I just did, ok?
I had managed to delete all of the symlinks under
*Fortunately* the RPM database contained all of the information I needed to reconstruct the symlinks which were created by the packages.
I work with debian systems, so it occurred to me to see how I would achieve the same success on debian systems.
So far as I can tell, symlinks are not listed in any debian 'database' on the system where the package is installed, unlike RPM where the info is right at your fingertips.
The closest I could find for debian would be to troll through the install scripts looking for where they create symlinks.
If anyone has a one-liner which will deliver a list of symlinks that should exist on a debian system I'd like to see it. Yes, one-liner. Thats what I used on RPM.
From the RPM man page;
--dump Dump file information as follows:
path size mtime md5sum mode owner group isconfig isdoc rdev symlink
So with rpm -qa --dump
if the last field isn't an X its a symlink. Easily extracted and processed.
Ok NOW someone tell me deb is superior.
Must be the biggest phishing opportunity in history...
I, for one, welcome our new guitar playing overlords.
Oh wait.. wasn't that Jimmy Hendrix?