Think a little harder. Removing choice can increase freedom. You are not "free" to murder or own slaves. Your choices are therefore reduced. Are you more or less free because of this?
It's the Apple fans who are saying "I should be free to choose slavery!"
DRM reduces freedom. Removing the freedom to remove freedom is not Orwellian.
It's not defective, RMS et al: it's a CHOICE. You purport to like choice, but no one believes you anymore.
I don't think I've heard anything more ridiculous this week.
RMS isn't trying to PREVENT you from exercising choice. He's trying to inform you why the iPad is a BAD choice. You are still free to CHOOSE to lock yourself into a situation where you LACK choice, but that's kinda silly and there's nothing wrong with pointing that out.
On the other hand, if you CHOOSE to buy the iPad, Apple WILL try to prevent you from exercising choice on that device.
Anyone who is in favor of choice as a principle would be against DRM. If you CHOOSE not to favor choice, that's your choice. But it doesn't mean RMS is not in favor of choice.
Basically your argument is equivalent to "You claim to be for freedom, but you don't approve of me choosing to be a slave! What a hypocrite!"
If you want to discuss evolution with me, you must accept that I understand it just as well as you do.
Every thing you say demonstrates that this is simply not true. Every misconception, every "simply because this doesn't mean that" strawman, every misstatement of what has and has not actually been observed, belies what you actually understand about evolution.
Yet by declaring it to be the case that you know everything about evolution already, you indicate that you do not wish to actually learn about the reality of evolutionary science.
But that's okay. Science presses on without need of your impossible-to-earn approval. Just do us all a favor and don't run for office.
Say we have it all wrong, and the dinosaur ends up being just fluffy chicks while the image we have had a long time evolves to be a fantastical or almost mythical beast. That'd be such a dissapointment, yet it's science!
I can't really think of any way in which T-Rex or Brachiosaurus or for that matter Utahraptor -- a species I think is already a possibility for being a feathered dinosaur -- could be disappointing. It's not like this would change the fossil record. Large birds like eagles or condors are already pretty damn impressive. Now imagine seeing one that was 40 feet long and instead of a beak had a giant maw filled with 6" long teeth.
I just can't imagine anyone saying "Aw, how disappointing!" in that circumstance.:)
I can see where they'd think modern birds are descendants of velociraptors, or even the T-Rex to some extent. But what about dinosaurs like Brontosaurus or Triceratops? Do we really think those guys were bird ancestors?
No, birds are only descendants of the raptor family of dinosaurs. "Family" not used in the specific scientific sense; I'm terrible at taxonomy to begin with, and I have no idea how narrowly they've narrowed down the possible bird-progenitor species.
Well yes, those are the people for whom the question of whether birds evolved from dinosaurs is ridiculous on its face because nothing "evolves" and dinosaur fossils were just put there by God to test our faith*.
The question is, is there anyone who actually believes in evolution who doubts the evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs?
I don't really think there's anyone in that camp anymore though I could be wrong.
* Ob Hicks: Dude, I think you were put here to test my faith.
Plus the color blue in birds isn't the result of pigment at all, but light refraction. Though that is due to the microscopic structure of the feathers, so maybe we could find fossil evidence for it, I don't know.
The evidence and reasoning for birds being the modern descendants of the raptor-like dinosaurs is already pretty damn compelling. If that line of reasoning could have led us astray, then it's just as likely that this is just a case of parallel evolution where feathers and feather pigmentation were evolved separately by both dinosaurs and whatever the hell birds' actual ancestor's were.
I guess what I'm saying is that this is more about answering the question of how bird-like were the dinosaurs already or how early did bird-like features evolve, rather than piling more evidence on the dinosaur-bird connection.
Though I'll admit I'm biased, since that connection means my bird watching is a little less nerdy since it's actually dinosaur watching!
Indeed they do. The idea, though, is that by being able to pass the genes throughout the population without having to have one organism's offspring come to dominate and all others die out it allowed early life to find optimal organizations of genes much more rapidly. So Darwinian evolution was still happening, but this horizontal evolution was the dominant force.
However, I've always read Darwinian evolution as "survival of the fittest", with no qualifier as to how you go about surviving.
"Survival of the fittest" aka Natural Selection was half of Darwinian evolution. This was the half about how traits were selected for in the environment.
The other half was how an organism's traits came about, and his theory was that traits were passed from parents to offspring in the reproductive cells via some biological mechanism that allowed for combination and mutation. Eventually we discovered DNA, the very biological mechanism in question that had traits like Darwin predicted (though Mendel was the one who really nailed down the probably behavior of this then-unknown mechanism).
"Horizontal" evolution doesn't fall into that category, though. So it's not "Darwinian". Even though natural selection (obviously) still applies to what gene transfers result in successful organisms.
As the summary mentions, this is well known in micro-organisms. In fact as far as I can tell they aren't arguing that it applies to anything but microorganisms. The argument seems more like that because these are the most common life forms on earth and also the oldest, Darwinian evolution is not the most common or dominant form of evolution.
Which is a good point. Though really, as far as what affects us and other sexually reproducing creatures, Darwinian evolution is still 'it' more or less. The real importance of this breakthrough is in studying how the evolutionary mechanisms themselves evolved -- evolution is of course not immune to evolution.;) This is going to be a powerful way of thinking about how early aspects of DNA came to be.
But just to be clear -- if someone says that this proves Darwin was wrong, evolution is a sham, and therefore their beliefs are probably right, go ahead and slap them.:) All this means is that evolution is even more complicated and powerful than previously thought.
90 days had nothing to do with design specs or the engineer's pessimistic estimates of how long components would last.
90 days was how long before they thought the solar panels would be too covered in dust for the rover to function.
That's it. That was why the 90 day limit. It's the only reason. Everything was designed to last as long as physically possible within the weight requirements, as one would expect to be sure they work at all on Mars. "I can be sure this will last 90 days on Mars, but past that all bets are off" is not a sentence any engineer said about any component.
I wouldn't call it 'cutting corners', but actually, they did make some design decisions with the assumption that it only needed to last for 90 days. One example, off the top of my head: there was discussion about a mechanism to clear dust off the solar panels, but it was felt that the extra weight was not a good tradeoff, since NASA expected that the solar panels would not become completely dust-covered within the 90 days.
Uh... That's backwards.
NASA expected that the solar panels would become completely dust-covered in a little over 90 days, which is WHY the mission was limited to 90 days in the first place.
The discussions about the cleaning mechanism were in the context of having one and extending the mission, or not having one and being limited to 90 days.
They did not feel the extra weight (and possibility for mechanism failure) was a good tradeoff in the context of a possible much-longer mission.
So no, they did choose to go without a cleaning mechanism because it was a 90 day mission. It was a 90 day mission because they chose to go without a cleaning mechanism. That's the proper cause and effect.
Indeed you were being too clever by far, as you were trying to use putative ironically but it is literally correct at describing how you came about your belief that thermodynamics is wrong.
Radioactive decay does not contradict thermodynamics. That they didn't know how to account for it at the time no more means thermodynamics is wrong than the change to the kinetic energy equation in Special Relativity means it is wrong. You can wax philosophical about the existential nature of physics all you want, fact is you say "it's empirically wrong", but that statement is what is empirically wrong.
Plate tectonics is only obvious in hindsight. Yes it sometimes takes time for new theories to be accepted on the strength of their evidence. No your epistemological argument is not such an example. Philosophy is not evidence, certainly not empirical evidence.
Every scrap of actual evidence acquired has pointed toward thermodynamics being correct. Maybe it's time for you to come to accept the obvious?
oh sure, most successful theory in physics, but it just takes one counter example to falsify.
True! And the lack of any such example is why it's still considered the most successful theory in physics.:P
If there was such an example, the person who discovered it would become a famous name in the history of physics. The notion that there's an obvious example that physicists just ignore because it's inconvenient is ridiculous.
i think it fair to treat both all the data on where it works and the one putative counter example as being of the methodology "emperical".
Uh-huh. The humans only become 'transhumanist' once they've already discovered Hyperspace and are colonizing the galaxy. The transhumanism/immortality is used as a device to explore the fact that even "immortal" humans must die along with the universe. It's a brilliant way to consider entropy and heat death and a cyclical universe and even what it means to be God...... not endorse that Kurzweil slop. Sorry you can't see past that.
Slashdot Mirror
Think a little harder. Removing choice can increase freedom. You are not "free" to murder or own slaves. Your choices are therefore reduced. Are you more or less free because of this?
It's the Apple fans who are saying "I should be free to choose slavery!"
DRM reduces freedom. Removing the freedom to remove freedom is not Orwellian.
It's not defective, RMS et al: it's a CHOICE. You purport to like choice, but no one believes you anymore.
I don't think I've heard anything more ridiculous this week.
RMS isn't trying to PREVENT you from exercising choice. He's trying to inform you why the iPad is a BAD choice. You are still free to CHOOSE to lock yourself into a situation where you LACK choice, but that's kinda silly and there's nothing wrong with pointing that out.
On the other hand, if you CHOOSE to buy the iPad, Apple WILL try to prevent you from exercising choice on that device.
Anyone who is in favor of choice as a principle would be against DRM. If you CHOOSE not to favor choice, that's your choice. But it doesn't mean RMS is not in favor of choice.
Basically your argument is equivalent to "You claim to be for freedom, but you don't approve of me choosing to be a slave! What a hypocrite!"
If you want to discuss evolution with me, you must accept that I understand it just as well as you do.
Every thing you say demonstrates that this is simply not true. Every misconception, every "simply because this doesn't mean that" strawman, every misstatement of what has and has not actually been observed, belies what you actually understand about evolution.
Yet by declaring it to be the case that you know everything about evolution already, you indicate that you do not wish to actually learn about the reality of evolutionary science.
But that's okay. Science presses on without need of your impossible-to-earn approval. Just do us all a favor and don't run for office.
Say we have it all wrong, and the dinosaur ends up being just fluffy chicks while the image we have had a long time evolves to be a fantastical or almost mythical beast. That'd be such a dissapointment, yet it's science!
I can't really think of any way in which T-Rex or Brachiosaurus or for that matter Utahraptor -- a species I think is already a possibility for being a feathered dinosaur -- could be disappointing. It's not like this would change the fossil record. Large birds like eagles or condors are already pretty damn impressive. Now imagine seeing one that was 40 feet long and instead of a beak had a giant maw filled with 6" long teeth.
I just can't imagine anyone saying "Aw, how disappointing!" in that circumstance. :)
Lithium-air is, IMHO, one of the least promising upcoming battery techs.
Uh-huh. But between this and all the alternatives you mention, which would Michael Jordan endorse?
That's right.
It's called "Not having anything to say worth censoring". It's foolproof!
I can see where they'd think modern birds are descendants of velociraptors, or even the T-Rex to some extent. But what about dinosaurs like Brontosaurus or Triceratops? Do we really think those guys were bird ancestors?
No, birds are only descendants of the raptor family of dinosaurs. "Family" not used in the specific scientific sense; I'm terrible at taxonomy to begin with, and I have no idea how narrowly they've narrowed down the possible bird-progenitor species.
Don't worry, they tore out his teeth and nails and then hopped him up on prozac.
A gentleman doesn't kiss and tell. And I'm not sure, but I think that applies to wild furniture-breaking monkey sex too. So I won't say!
Well yes, those are the people for whom the question of whether birds evolved from dinosaurs is ridiculous on its face because nothing "evolves" and dinosaur fossils were just put there by God to test our faith*.
The question is, is there anyone who actually believes in evolution who doubts the evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs?
I don't really think there's anyone in that camp anymore though I could be wrong.
* Ob Hicks: Dude, I think you were put here to test my faith.
Plus the color blue in birds isn't the result of pigment at all, but light refraction. Though that is due to the microscopic structure of the feathers, so maybe we could find fossil evidence for it, I don't know.
The evidence and reasoning for birds being the modern descendants of the raptor-like dinosaurs is already pretty damn compelling. If that line of reasoning could have led us astray, then it's just as likely that this is just a case of parallel evolution where feathers and feather pigmentation were evolved separately by both dinosaurs and whatever the hell birds' actual ancestor's were.
I guess what I'm saying is that this is more about answering the question of how bird-like were the dinosaurs already or how early did bird-like features evolve, rather than piling more evidence on the dinosaur-bird connection.
Though I'll admit I'm biased, since that connection means my bird watching is a little less nerdy since it's actually dinosaur watching!
Wait... no, it's still just as nerdy.
Indeed they do. The idea, though, is that by being able to pass the genes throughout the population without having to have one organism's offspring come to dominate and all others die out it allowed early life to find optimal organizations of genes much more rapidly. So Darwinian evolution was still happening, but this horizontal evolution was the dominant force.
Of course there are no fjords on mars... that's why it's pining. :)
However, I've always read Darwinian evolution as "survival of the fittest", with no qualifier as to how you go about surviving.
"Survival of the fittest" aka Natural Selection was half of Darwinian evolution. This was the half about how traits were selected for in the environment.
The other half was how an organism's traits came about, and his theory was that traits were passed from parents to offspring in the reproductive cells via some biological mechanism that allowed for combination and mutation. Eventually we discovered DNA, the very biological mechanism in question that had traits like Darwin predicted (though Mendel was the one who really nailed down the probably behavior of this then-unknown mechanism).
"Horizontal" evolution doesn't fall into that category, though. So it's not "Darwinian". Even though natural selection (obviously) still applies to what gene transfers result in successful organisms.
As the summary mentions, this is well known in micro-organisms. In fact as far as I can tell they aren't arguing that it applies to anything but microorganisms. The argument seems more like that because these are the most common life forms on earth and also the oldest, Darwinian evolution is not the most common or dominant form of evolution.
Which is a good point. Though really, as far as what affects us and other sexually reproducing creatures, Darwinian evolution is still 'it' more or less. The real importance of this breakthrough is in studying how the evolutionary mechanisms themselves evolved -- evolution is of course not immune to evolution. ;) This is going to be a powerful way of thinking about how early aspects of DNA came to be.
But just to be clear -- if someone says that this proves Darwin was wrong, evolution is a sham, and therefore their beliefs are probably right, go ahead and slap them. :) All this means is that evolution is even more complicated and powerful than previously thought.
Worse, it's transmissible (though usually only by cannibalism, which is kind of funny in a scary sort of way.)
I think it's hilarious in my black-humor way.
It turns out you really can eat the brain of your enemy to gain their power... but only if their "power" was a debilitating brain disease!
One stationary experiment Spirit has begun studies tiny wobbles in the rotation of Mars to gain insight about the planet's core.
That's frickin' awesome.
90 days had nothing to do with design specs or the engineer's pessimistic estimates of how long components would last.
90 days was how long before they thought the solar panels would be too covered in dust for the rover to function.
That's it. That was why the 90 day limit. It's the only reason. Everything was designed to last as long as physically possible within the weight requirements, as one would expect to be sure they work at all on Mars. "I can be sure this will last 90 days on Mars, but past that all bets are off" is not a sentence any engineer said about any component.
I wouldn't call it 'cutting corners', but actually, they did make some design decisions with the assumption that it only needed to last for 90 days. One example, off the top of my head: there was discussion about a mechanism to clear dust off the solar panels, but it was felt that the extra weight was not a good tradeoff, since NASA expected that the solar panels would not become completely dust-covered within the 90 days.
Uh... That's backwards.
NASA expected that the solar panels would become completely dust-covered in a little over 90 days, which is WHY the mission was limited to 90 days in the first place.
The discussions about the cleaning mechanism were in the context of having one and extending the mission, or not having one and being limited to 90 days.
They did not feel the extra weight (and possibility for mechanism failure) was a good tradeoff in the context of a possible much-longer mission.
So no, they did choose to go without a cleaning mechanism because it was a 90 day mission. It was a 90 day mission because they chose to go without a cleaning mechanism. That's the proper cause and effect.
Indeed you were being too clever by far, as you were trying to use putative ironically but it is literally correct at describing how you came about your belief that thermodynamics is wrong.
Radioactive decay does not contradict thermodynamics. That they didn't know how to account for it at the time no more means thermodynamics is wrong than the change to the kinetic energy equation in Special Relativity means it is wrong. You can wax philosophical about the existential nature of physics all you want, fact is you say "it's empirically wrong", but that statement is what is empirically wrong.
Plate tectonics is only obvious in hindsight. Yes it sometimes takes time for new theories to be accepted on the strength of their evidence. No your epistemological argument is not such an example. Philosophy is not evidence, certainly not empirical evidence.
Every scrap of actual evidence acquired has pointed toward thermodynamics being correct. Maybe it's time for you to come to accept the obvious?
Spirit isn't dead. It's just resting. And possibly pining for the fjords.
Wouldn't that be a composite made up of every other material?
oh sure, most successful theory in physics, but it just takes one counter example to falsify.
True! And the lack of any such example is why it's still considered the most successful theory in physics. :P
If there was such an example, the person who discovered it would become a famous name in the history of physics. The notion that there's an obvious example that physicists just ignore because it's inconvenient is ridiculous.
i think it fair to treat both all the data on where it works and the one putative counter example as being of the methodology "emperical".
No, actual data counts as "empirical", and a putative -- meaning "accepted by supposition rather than as a result of proof" (by people who don't understand what they're talking about) -- example does not count as "empirical".
emperically, thermodynamics is fundamentally wrong.
Why do people say dumb shit like this? There's probably nothing more empirically right.
Uh-huh. The humans only become 'transhumanist' once they've already discovered Hyperspace and are colonizing the galaxy. The transhumanism/immortality is used as a device to explore the fact that even "immortal" humans must die along with the universe. It's a brilliant way to consider entropy and heat death and a cyclical universe and even what it means to be God... ... not endorse that Kurzweil slop. Sorry you can't see past that.