Simple. The code for winevdm (Win16 layer implementation) traces it's existance back to the days before windows 95 (!) It implements a function called WOWCallback16Ex which executes 16-bit code passed in an array parameter. Normally you can't do stuff like that in linux, but winevdm uses the special features of 32-bit x86 processors to put the process in vm86 mode where you can do pretty much anything. This was used to implement a lot of the callbacks in Wine's 16-bit GDI layer... support for 16-bit printer drivers in Wine was top notch:-P. Anyway, the WMF file interpreter, when it finds this SETABORTPROC, (correctly) ends up calling WOWCallback16Ex with stuff fed in from the WMF file when it calls the EndOfPage function.
Three notes:
1) It's difficult to "break out" of winevdm and do stuff outside of the wine 16/32-bit APIs unless you know this WMF is going to be running in wine. Code that would work in windows to break into 32-bit mode in that context and do bad stuff to the system will fail spectactularly (read: Segfault)
2) It doesn't work at all on Opteron/EMT64. There is no vm86, thus no winevdm, thus no 16-bit GDI support.
3) They fixed the bug. Which was to not allow WMF read from the disk to ever contain anything that can eventually be fed to a calback.
Just two seperate bits of code written long ago, following the MS required behavior to the letter, that were never imagined to be joined.
There's no such thing as an unintentional backdoor. A backdoor is something you purposefully build into your software, like you purposefully build a back door into your house. An accidental backdoor would be like a hole in the wall. You know, a SECURITY HOLE. Steve is just making shit up as he goes along, convienently redefining words.
Sure, keyboards are dirty. Now, we don't want to go nuts and spray lysol all over it because you're just giving the more hardy bacteria hiding under the keycaps a chance to take over and make your incessant spraying worthless.
Instead, you should put it in the dishwasher. The heat will kill everything uniformly and it will come out clean and unstickified.
1) Disassemble your keyboard. This means unscrewing the back. Be careful when seperating the front and back halves to not have keys fly all over the place or plastic tabs to snap.
2) Remove any electronics. Usually this sits in the upper right by your Num Lock LEDs and has a cord that runs out of it towards the middle between the halves, or through the bottom half. On every keyboard I've disassembled this board is simply snapped into place and can be easily removed from the front half...
3) Most keyboards either have a rubber membrane with contact switches embedded, a plastic sheet with traces in it, or both, attached by a ribbon cable to the electronics. Definitely emove these. Set aside the rubber membrane if you have one. This will melt in the dishwasher. Wash this by hand, maybe with a little bleach. Don't attempt to clean the plastic sheet... it's not worth it and it can be easily damaged, destroying your keyboard.
4) If the keys can be easily removed, do so. Place these in the dishwasher in the utencil basket if you have one. Otherwise place all the plastic parts like so many plates in your dishwasher.
5) Perform a full cycle with heated dry with a bit of dish soap. Do not wash your plates in this same load... you'll get food stuck in the crevices of the keyboard.:-)
6) During the dry cycle, check on the keyboard every once in a while to make sure it isn't intolerant of the heat (this can vary from keyboard to keyboard). Some will deform after 5 minutes, others will hold up just fine.
7) Remove the keyboard at your discretion during the dry cycle. Wrap the components in some towels to draw the water out the nooks and crannies. Follow up with a hair dryer on the "cool" setting and/or with an air duster.
I just didn't like the analogy. It was a little grandiose. You could have made the same point by talking about getting a new car/coffee maker/whatever if they issue a recall w/free repairs on some part or something.
Sexual Asspussy has been around before here you figured out how to type this site name into the address bar properly. I think u are the one who needs to take ur ass elsewhere to a board where someone gives a shit. On second thought, maybe you should report him to AOL.
I think switching OSs is a less difficult proposition for someone who has time to read slashdot than picking up your family and moving is for someone who can barely feed his or her own kids.
You want the Microsoft Management Console: runas/user:AdminUser mmc
You can get all the snap-ins that cover nearly all the Control Panel stuff from inside there. And if you must run a control panel: runas/user:AdminUser "control name.cpl"
You can find all of your Control Panels in your %SystemRoot%/System32 (C:\windows\system32) folder... they have.cpl extensions (sort by Type, look for "Control Panel extensions" -- also look at their Properties and read the description under the "version" tab to identify them)
Considering the fact that scientists cannot explain how adding water to a seed will cause life to enter the seed and it will grow into a plant, (again completely defying thermodynamic entropy) I venture to say we are extemely ignorant of the true inner workings of even a bacteria.
Oh really? They do. You don't, and you don't seem curious enough to find out.
The seed contains enough internal energy in the form of sugars to allow it to germinate. The metabolic processes are activated by the presence of water (the chemistry doesn't work without it). It's an _exothermic_ process that is actually increasing in entropy, not decreasing. Once the seed germinates and sprouts, it needs the additional energy from the sun to continue growing. (This is where you might argue the system is now decreasing in entropy, the plant is growing without the pre-existing sugars to metabolize, where does it come from? The sun.). You can reverse entropy by taking energy from outside the system. Of course, the efficiency is never better than 100% so the overall system (plant AND sun) actually increases in entropy. But if you narrow your scope to say just the seed/plant, then it looks like it's decreasing.
What you have described is filtering a quality until it's more pure, not creating something new, and certainly not more complex.
*shakes head*
The original example, you know, the superbacteria? Yeah, none of the old bacteria had any of the qualities of the superbacteria. There was no refining going on. You are assuming that the bacteria initially had all the potential to become the superbacteria. If that was the case, then it would have taken much fewer human to human infections for the superbacteria to overcome all the other bacteria (and probably kill any human it infected). This is because that specific bacteria would surely thrive, regardless of whether a person took an antibiotic or not. No, the bacteria from one generation to the next was, on average, just a tiny bit different, even in a control group. But the bacteria cultured from the specific condition (repeated partial applications of an antibiotic) resulted in a new group that was nearly invulnerable to said toxin, while the control group could be _completely_ killed by a similar dosage. So... where are the poison surviving members of the original colony? How come after applying the full-dosage antibiotic to the control group, you didn't have a few stragglers which would re-colonize the growth media?
This seems to be like one of those things were you don't quite grasp that thermodynamic law of increasing entrophy... assuming it supports this idea that everything is universally headed to chaos and nothingness as an opposite to Gods' intial creation.
Sure, it states that overall, the entropy of a system increases. However, for arbitrary large stretches of time, it can decrease. It just has to tend to increased entropy over time (we only can show that limit -> inf as time -> inf). Also, it depends on how you define your boundaries of a "system", whether entropy is really increasing or decreasing in any specific circumstances. This can be very confusing.
But I assure you there is nothing counterintuitive about bacteria seeming spontaneously building an immunity to a toxin it didn't already have. It (the "lucky" mutation) just has to happen once in all those random DNA exchanges going on in that petri dish before you see the effects. It gets magnifed by the application of the toxin, by increasing the chance that the mutation will catch on.
That is what evolution is about. Forget about dinosaurs and apes and men. This is biology and medical science stuff we're talking about. Current research. Important stuff to know for your health even!
How is this _any_ different than "I am nothing like my great, great, great.....great grandfather"?
It is when I can't successfully mate and produce offspring with him if we were living at the same time. You know, speciation.
Selective breeding is _not_ evolution.
But that's exactly what evolutionary theory states. It _is_ selective breeding. Only it's your current niche, your environment that's doing the selection for you.
Natural ingredients have no bearing on the effects when used unnaturally or in unnatural quanities.
Now we're getting to the nitty gritty of saying: what's natural, and what's not. I postulate that nature can create conditions on its own that we might consider wholly "unnatural" in any specific metric you choose to define, given sufficient time. I also postulate that the behavior of humans as a whole (society) is entirely a natural phenomenon, as it lacks intent and exhibits unexpected, emergent behaviors.
And they obsess about Google pagerank. It's a bit of a science, nay, an arcane art, getting your term bumped up in Google search results.
They use it to farm ad impressions, amazon and eBay referrals. And they sell this service to whomever has the most change to spare.
*sigh*
It's just that Yahoo isn't hot right now for search, nor do they have that nifty SOAP API to check the results of your SEO efforts, so they aren't targeted by these internet hustlers as much.
No. It can be shown that the bacteria collected in the 100th generation is in no way similar to the "normal" bacteria in the original culture. PS - Most antibiotics are natural. Pencillin is natural.
We didn't attempt to make the rats poison resistant, nor the bacteria antibiotic resistant. Those are unintended consequences (wholly undesirably in fact) that required us to find the evolutionary pressures for. Once we identified what we thought were the evolutionary pressures, we could devise experiements to test to see if these evolutionary pressures could recreate these adaptations. We could. Superbactieral strains are caused by patients taking incomplete courses of antibiotics, just enough to kill off most of the population in a person while leaving enough to infect someone else, with the offspring that survived the longest with the antibiotic in that person's system. You can repeat these tests in laboratory conditions, starting from "common" strains, and get penicillin resistant strains within a hundred generations, IIRC. So now medical professionals recommend people take _all_ their antibiotics when given a course, and not to request them when they have a cold, for example. That was only because we determined it was the social behavior of patients taking antibiotics that ultimately was to blame for creating superbacterial strains. And we only knew how to find out why this was happening because we have this evolutionary theory that we can refer to and use as guidance in such investigations.
You're in science class. You're there to learn science. It doesn't matter what you believe. Ergo, ID has no place there. ID vs. Evolution (capital 'E', mind you) is a philosophical debate. Little-e evolution is the only theory we have, right now, that can be used in a scientific fashion to explain biodiversity. It gives us models and clues as to why species adapt and change _right now_. It is the basis that lets us draw conclusions about one species by studying another. (Operating on a pig to understand a human body). So if you are in biology class, where (we hope), you are going to be taught things that help you in the field of Biology, then you better damn well be taught the theory of evolution because that's all we got. Learning ID in that same class is not going to give you _any_ tools to help you in life. It's just there, almost like a disclaimer, to make the parents of certain children feel better. Putting in the curriculum almost certainly guarantees at least two wasted class periods with the teacher answer pointeless questions from the student re: this debate. The teacher should just be like: all further questions should be directed to your parents, or sign up for Philisophy or Comp. Religion next year. Christ on crutches... We don't learn Alchemy in Chemsitry class either. There are people that still believe in it though.
You might want to change it. It's wrong from an evolution-ist's perspective. It doesn't help when articles like this come up and debate ensues.
1) Man didn't evolve from apes. Apes and Humans share (distant) ancestors. 2) "Evolution" is never claimed to be something that happens simultaneously for a whole species. Real quick ape/human evolutionary scenario: (FYI) Apes and humans do not share the same habitat. Some precursor could have dabbled in both habitats. Eventually the population would split, wherein one population would adapt to the savannah (human ancestors), while the other the tropical rainforest (ape ancestors). Geographic seperation provides the first interbreeding barrier, and as the species slowly mutate, they couldn't interbreed even if they wanted to. And so the two pre-human/pre-ape ancestors would spiral off unto their ultimate current culminations, taking on further attributes that make them better suited to the environment.
It sounds like I would have enjoyed taking a class like that. It disappoints me to hear the reactions of the other students however. "Should we do genetic engineering or not." Almost as if they wanted to know whether it was okay... If you're going to forge ahead in fields of a potentially politically charged nature, you've got to be prepared to defend your position and hold your ground. Not to say there aren't ethics courses out there that give you interesting arguments, allowing you to jump start your ability to form an opinion when it comes to such issues... but the students seemed to want to be told what to think or how to act. Yuck. I hope I'm not overgeneralizing or mischaracterizing your classmates.
Whenever this comes up, all the science teachers are on the side for continuing to teach Evolution. But no one seems to think they know what they're doing. Well why the hell do they hire them?
It's the PTAs. Directly elected school board members. In small towns that want God back in public school lest their kids become children of Satan.
...but I'm pretty sure that, as a matter of principle, evolutionary theorists assume that locally suboptimal paths are never taken.
While the rest of your post is interesting, this isn't true. Suboptimal paths are important, even if it's just for implementing that "popping on the other side of the valley" phenom. Sometimes a tolerated suboptimal condition can carry you close enough to a local extrema that you jump across and hill climb on the other side. And it depends on what you mean by suboptimal. In a large population, all the elements which didn't score as well post-mutation than the one that was "the best" are suboptimal. Yet you keep some large subset of the population. Implictly you are taking locally suboptimal paths in a gigantic minimization/maximization problem along with some point which is following its gradient (to the best that the underlying function can be approximated by this monte carlo-ish method). Certainly you wouldn't just keep the best one. You've got to have some method of picking other not so good ones to ensure you don't end up stuck in a local extrema. And this is just simple computer modeling theory. I would expect evolutionary theorists to have even more refined statistical/generational models than that...
Because then you would have bone and tooth fragments all at the bottom from the animals at the top. We don't see that currently... bits that are clearly from the same animal tend to "stay together" (some lateral deflection is to be expected... imagine an animal dying in a stream or bones moved by a glacier).
I doubt it. Surely there will be more sophisticated audio distribution methods in the future... But a vacuum cleaner is an entirely different thing... a product that started as a service industry and was revolutionized by turning it into a portable appliance for home use. Vacuums for the removal of particulate matter from air are a revolution in fluid dynamics and basic application of scientific principles. Podcasts are... FUCKING AUDIO FILES ON A WEBLOG. Durrrrrr....
Slashdot Mirror
Simple. :-P.
The code for winevdm (Win16 layer implementation) traces it's existance back to the days before windows 95 (!)
It implements a function called WOWCallback16Ex which executes 16-bit code passed in an array parameter. Normally you can't do stuff like that in linux, but winevdm uses the special features of 32-bit x86 processors to put the process in vm86 mode where you can do pretty much anything.
This was used to implement a lot of the callbacks in Wine's 16-bit GDI layer... support for 16-bit printer drivers in Wine was top notch
Anyway, the WMF file interpreter, when it finds this SETABORTPROC, (correctly) ends up calling WOWCallback16Ex with stuff fed in from the WMF file when it calls the EndOfPage function.
Three notes:
1) It's difficult to "break out" of winevdm and do stuff outside of the wine 16/32-bit APIs unless you know this WMF is going to be running in wine. Code that would work in windows to break into 32-bit mode in that context and do bad stuff to the system will fail spectactularly (read: Segfault)
2) It doesn't work at all on Opteron/EMT64. There is no vm86, thus no winevdm, thus no 16-bit GDI support.
3) They fixed the bug. Which was to not allow WMF read from the disk to ever contain anything that can eventually be fed to a calback.
Just two seperate bits of code written long ago, following the MS required behavior to the letter, that were never imagined to be joined.
There's no such thing as an unintentional backdoor.
A backdoor is something you purposefully build into your software, like you purposefully build a back door into your house. An accidental backdoor would be like a hole in the wall. You know, a SECURITY HOLE. Steve is just making shit up as he goes along, convienently redefining words.
Sure, keyboards are dirty.
:-)
Now, we don't want to go nuts and spray lysol all over it because you're just giving the more hardy bacteria hiding under the keycaps a chance to take over and make your incessant spraying worthless.
Instead, you should put it in the dishwasher. The heat will kill everything uniformly and it will come out clean and unstickified.
1) Disassemble your keyboard. This means unscrewing the back. Be careful when seperating the front and back halves to not have keys fly all over the place or plastic tabs to snap.
2) Remove any electronics. Usually this sits in the upper right by your Num Lock LEDs and has a cord that runs out of it towards the middle between the halves, or through the bottom half. On every keyboard I've disassembled this board is simply snapped into place and can be easily removed from the front half...
3) Most keyboards either have a rubber membrane with contact switches embedded, a plastic sheet with traces in it, or both, attached by a ribbon cable to the electronics. Definitely emove these.
Set aside the rubber membrane if you have one. This will melt in the dishwasher. Wash this by hand, maybe with a little bleach. Don't attempt to clean the plastic sheet... it's not worth it and it can be easily damaged, destroying your keyboard.
4) If the keys can be easily removed, do so. Place these in the dishwasher in the utencil basket if you have one. Otherwise place all the plastic parts like so many plates in your dishwasher.
5) Perform a full cycle with heated dry with a bit of dish soap. Do not wash your plates in this same load... you'll get food stuck in the crevices of the keyboard.
6) During the dry cycle, check on the keyboard every once in a while to make sure it isn't intolerant of the heat (this can vary from keyboard to keyboard). Some will deform after 5 minutes, others will hold up just fine.
7) Remove the keyboard at your discretion during the dry cycle. Wrap the components in some towels to draw the water out the nooks and crannies. Follow up with a hair dryer on the "cool" setting and/or with an air duster.
8) Reassemble.
9) Test, and enjoy.
Is that like "commercial grade"?
Sounds like NEET.
I just didn't like the analogy. It was a little grandiose.
You could have made the same point by talking about getting a new car/coffee maker/whatever if they issue a recall w/free repairs on some part or something.
You win it!
PS - what happened to your sig? I liked the hiragana.
Sexual Asspussy has been around before here you figured out how to type this site name into the address bar properly.
I think u are the one who needs to take ur ass elsewhere to a board where someone gives a shit.
On second thought, maybe you should report him to AOL.
I think switching OSs is a less difficult proposition for someone who has time to read slashdot than picking up your family and moving is for someone who can barely feed his or her own kids.
You want the Microsoft Management Console:
/user:AdminUser mmc
/user:AdminUser "control name.cpl"
.cpl extensions (sort by Type, look for "Control Panel extensions" -- also look at their Properties and read the description under the "version" tab to identify them)
runas
You can get all the snap-ins that cover nearly all the Control Panel stuff from inside there.
And if you must run a control panel:
runas
You can find all of your Control Panels in your %SystemRoot%/System32 (C:\windows\system32) folder... they have
Considering the fact that scientists cannot explain how adding water to a seed will cause life to enter the seed and it will grow into a plant, (again completely defying thermodynamic entropy) I venture to say we are extemely ignorant of the true inner workings of even a bacteria.
Oh really?
They do. You don't, and you don't seem curious enough to find out.
The seed contains enough internal energy in the form of sugars to allow it to germinate. The metabolic processes are activated by the presence of water (the chemistry doesn't work without it). It's an _exothermic_ process that is actually increasing in entropy, not decreasing. Once the seed germinates and sprouts, it needs the additional energy from the sun to continue growing. (This is where you might argue the system is now decreasing in entropy, the plant is growing without the pre-existing sugars to metabolize, where does it come from? The sun.). You can reverse entropy by taking energy from outside the system. Of course, the efficiency is never better than 100% so the overall system (plant AND sun) actually increases in entropy. But if you narrow your scope to say just the seed/plant, then it looks like it's decreasing.
What you have described is filtering a quality until it's more pure, not creating something new, and certainly not more complex.
*shakes head*
The original example, you know, the superbacteria? Yeah, none of the old bacteria had any of the qualities of the superbacteria. There was no refining going on.
You are assuming that the bacteria initially had all the potential to become the superbacteria. If that was the case, then it would have taken much fewer human to human infections for the superbacteria to overcome all the other bacteria (and probably kill any human it infected). This is because that specific bacteria would surely thrive, regardless of whether a person took an antibiotic or not.
No, the bacteria from one generation to the next was, on average, just a tiny bit different, even in a control group. But the bacteria cultured from the specific condition (repeated partial applications of an antibiotic) resulted in a new group that was nearly invulnerable to said toxin, while the control group could be _completely_ killed by a similar dosage.
So... where are the poison surviving members of the original colony? How come after applying the full-dosage antibiotic to the control group, you didn't have a few stragglers which would re-colonize the growth media?
This seems to be like one of those things were you don't quite grasp that thermodynamic law of increasing entrophy... assuming it supports this idea that everything is universally headed to chaos and nothingness as an opposite to Gods' intial creation.
Sure, it states that overall, the entropy of a system increases. However, for arbitrary large stretches of time, it can decrease. It just has to tend to increased entropy over time (we only can show that limit -> inf as time -> inf). Also, it depends on how you define your boundaries of a "system", whether entropy is really increasing or decreasing in any specific circumstances. This can be very confusing.
But I assure you there is nothing counterintuitive about bacteria seeming spontaneously building an immunity to a toxin it didn't already have. It (the "lucky" mutation) just has to happen once in all those random DNA exchanges going on in that petri dish before you see the effects. It gets magnifed by the application of the toxin, by increasing the chance that the mutation will catch on.
That is what evolution is about. Forget about dinosaurs and apes and men. This is biology and medical science stuff we're talking about. Current research. Important stuff to know for your health even!
How is this _any_ different than "I am nothing like my great, great, great.....great grandfather"?
It is when I can't successfully mate and produce offspring with him if we were living at the same time. You know, speciation.
Selective breeding is _not_ evolution.
But that's exactly what evolutionary theory states. It _is_ selective breeding. Only it's your current niche, your environment that's doing the selection for you.
Natural ingredients have no bearing on the effects when used unnaturally or in unnatural quanities.
Now we're getting to the nitty gritty of saying: what's natural, and what's not.
I postulate that nature can create conditions on its own that we might consider wholly "unnatural" in any specific metric you choose to define, given sufficient time.
I also postulate that the behavior of humans as a whole (society) is entirely a natural phenomenon, as it lacks intent and exhibits unexpected, emergent behaviors.
They're called SEOs.
And they obsess about Google pagerank. It's a bit of a science, nay, an arcane art, getting your term bumped up in Google search results.
They use it to farm ad impressions, amazon and eBay referrals. And they sell this service to whomever has the most change to spare.
*sigh*
It's just that Yahoo isn't hot right now for search, nor do they have that nifty SOAP API to check the results of your SEO efforts, so they aren't targeted by these internet hustlers as much.
No.
It can be shown that the bacteria collected in the 100th generation is in no way similar to the "normal" bacteria in the original culture.
PS - Most antibiotics are natural. Pencillin is natural.
We didn't attempt to make the rats poison resistant, nor the bacteria antibiotic resistant. Those are unintended consequences (wholly undesirably in fact) that required us to find the evolutionary pressures for. Once we identified what we thought were the evolutionary pressures, we could devise experiements to test to see if these evolutionary pressures could recreate these adaptations.
We could.
Superbactieral strains are caused by patients taking incomplete courses of antibiotics, just enough to kill off most of the population in a person while leaving enough to infect someone else, with the offspring that survived the longest with the antibiotic in that person's system. You can repeat these tests in laboratory conditions, starting from "common" strains, and get penicillin resistant strains within a hundred generations, IIRC.
So now medical professionals recommend people take _all_ their antibiotics when given a course, and not to request them when they have a cold, for example.
That was only because we determined it was the social behavior of patients taking antibiotics that ultimately was to blame for creating superbacterial strains.
And we only knew how to find out why this was happening because we have this evolutionary theory that we can refer to and use as guidance in such investigations.
You're in science class.
You're there to learn science.
It doesn't matter what you believe.
Ergo, ID has no place there. ID vs. Evolution (capital 'E', mind you) is a philosophical debate.
Little-e evolution is the only theory we have, right now, that can be used in a scientific fashion to explain biodiversity. It gives us models and clues as to why species adapt and change _right now_. It is the basis that lets us draw conclusions about one species by studying another. (Operating on a pig to understand a human body).
So if you are in biology class, where (we hope), you are going to be taught things that help you in the field of Biology, then you better damn well be taught the theory of evolution because that's all we got.
Learning ID in that same class is not going to give you _any_ tools to help you in life. It's just there, almost like a disclaimer, to make the parents of certain children feel better.
Putting in the curriculum almost certainly guarantees at least two wasted class periods with the teacher answer pointeless questions from the student re: this debate.
The teacher should just be like: all further questions should be directed to your parents, or sign up for Philisophy or Comp. Religion next year.
Christ on crutches...
We don't learn Alchemy in Chemsitry class either. There are people that still believe in it though.
You might want to change it. It's wrong from an evolution-ist's perspective.
It doesn't help when articles like this come up and debate ensues.
1) Man didn't evolve from apes.
Apes and Humans share (distant) ancestors.
2) "Evolution" is never claimed to be something that happens simultaneously for a whole species.
Real quick ape/human evolutionary scenario: (FYI)
Apes and humans do not share the same habitat. Some precursor could have dabbled in both habitats. Eventually the population would split, wherein one population would adapt to the savannah (human ancestors), while the other the tropical rainforest (ape ancestors). Geographic seperation provides the first interbreeding barrier, and as the species slowly mutate, they couldn't interbreed even if they wanted to. And so the two pre-human/pre-ape ancestors would spiral off unto their ultimate current culminations, taking on further attributes that make them better suited to the environment.
It sounds like I would have enjoyed taking a class like that. It disappoints me to hear the reactions of the other students however. "Should we do genetic engineering or not." Almost as if they wanted to know whether it was okay... If you're going to forge ahead in fields of a potentially politically charged nature, you've got to be prepared to defend your position and hold your ground. Not to say there aren't ethics courses out there that give you interesting arguments, allowing you to jump start your ability to form an opinion when it comes to such issues... but the students seemed to want to be told what to think or how to act.
Yuck.
I hope I'm not overgeneralizing or mischaracterizing your classmates.
Whenever this comes up, all the science teachers are on the side for continuing to teach Evolution. But no one seems to think they know what they're doing. Well why the hell do they hire them?
It's the PTAs. Directly elected school board members. In small towns that want God back in public school lest their kids become children of Satan.
I'm serious.
...but I'm pretty sure that, as a matter of principle, evolutionary theorists assume that locally suboptimal paths are never taken.
While the rest of your post is interesting, this isn't true. Suboptimal paths are important, even if it's just for implementing that "popping on the other side of the valley" phenom. Sometimes a tolerated suboptimal condition can carry you close enough to a local extrema that you jump across and hill climb on the other side.
And it depends on what you mean by suboptimal. In a large population, all the elements which didn't score as well post-mutation than the one that was "the best" are suboptimal. Yet you keep some large subset of the population. Implictly you are taking locally suboptimal paths in a gigantic minimization/maximization problem along with some point which is following its gradient (to the best that the underlying function can be approximated by this monte carlo-ish method). Certainly you wouldn't just keep the best one. You've got to have some method of picking other not so good ones to ensure you don't end up stuck in a local extrema. And this is just simple computer modeling theory.
I would expect evolutionary theorists to have even more refined statistical/generational models than that...
Because then you would have bone and tooth fragments all at the bottom from the animals at the top. We don't see that currently... bits that are clearly from the same animal tend to "stay together" (some lateral deflection is to be expected... imagine an animal dying in a stream or bones moved by a glacier).
http://yro.slashdot.org/index.pl?issue=20051119
They were posted back to back, by two different editors, in the same section.
\(_o)/
Where`s mod "+1, Redundant" when you need it? :)
I doubt it.
Surely there will be more sophisticated audio distribution methods in the future...
But a vacuum cleaner is an entirely different thing... a product that started as a service industry and was revolutionized by turning it into a portable appliance for home use.
Vacuums for the removal of particulate matter from air are a revolution in fluid dynamics and basic application of scientific principles.
Podcasts are... FUCKING AUDIO FILES ON A WEBLOG.
Durrrrrr....