Evolution, like any theory, is indeed open to question - this is essential to science. Currently, however, no other theory even approaches the utility of evolution.
What Creationists forget is that there are three parts to a good theory. First, a good theory must fit the data - Creationism is perfect at this, while evolution is only pretty good. This gives Creationists false hope. Second, a good theory must be testable - a major weakness of Creationism. Third, a good theory must explain the data and be able to make predictions. This is where evolution excels and Creationism completely fails.
As you said quite well, saying "God did it" stops the questioning dead in its tracks. Obviously, the theory of "God did it" can fit absolutely any data. But too many people mistake rationalization ("God made fossils to test our faith in Him.") for explanation ("It's like this because of evolution.") and prediction ("Evolution suggests these bacteria will become resistant.").
Evaluated as scientific theories, evolution is infinitely better than Creationism, which one must have faith in. Faith, in the sense of unquestioning belief, is antithetical to science, which I define as questioning belief. I'm not saying that religion doesn't have it's place, just that the formation of life lies squarely in the realm of science.
John Locke said we have the natural right to life, liberty, and property. Back then, everyone knew what life was, but now, it's not so concrete. What if we substituted "information" for "life?"
One could think of a person's conciousness as nothing more than the physical state of their brain - just like how a computer's "runningness" is nothing more than its design and the contents of its storage, memory, and registers. Since we already have intellectual property, let's make the destruction of information a crime. So killing a human is very bad, and turning of an intelligent computer is bad according to the information destroyed. For example, if the computer's state was backed up last week, you only killed a week's worth of information (similar to knocking someone out). If you shred the backup (let the brain die), that's worse.
It would also be interesting to figure out how cloning (fork(2)) affects this. This is where you have to determine when a machine becomes capable of owning information (it's own), and gets the right to keep others from messing with it.
No, I don't expect them to port iTunes to Linux, but hear me out. Will iTunes run in Wine? And if so, is there a way in Wine to capture tracks a Windows program tries to burn into.wav files? Although I really wish such hacks weren't necessary, it could make the system usable for even more people.
If anything, a slight reduction in the ease with which AOLers can share the songs increases efficiency. Now, instead of 50 rips from clueless users, there'll be 5 rips from smart ones. The internet is big enough that even if it does require analog loopback, somebody will put it up. Besides, Ogg streams have serial numbers. So by changing the serial number for each download (rudimentary watermarking), they'd also be able to reduce P2P efficiency.
To the grandparent, the biggest reason for WMA is limitation of fair use. They want to sell you a CD, and two WMAs (at different bitrates), and a SD card, and so on. Meanwhile, Microsoft is pushing WMA so it can win the format wars.
One thing you missed - "Lineo, was spun out of Caldera in 1999 and sold to Motorola last December." In other words, Lineo (who violated the GPL) used to be SCO. A bit more circumstantial evidence that SCO may be ripping off GPL code. *cough* LKP *cough*.
Certainly Microsoft has more marketing muscle than, well, everyone. But in the browser wars, that wasn't the biggest factor. The biggest factor in the desktop market is apathy. Joe User simply doesn't care. Despite the technical differences, IE and Netscape looked exactly the same to a user. But IE was pre-installed, so there was no reason ever to switch. Word of mouth, marketing, and technical merit (in that order) are only relevant when a choice is being made. In the case of browsers and operating systems, few people even try to make an informed decision - PCs come with Windows and Windows comes with IE.
True, one would presume that the people using Windows are using it because it's the best choice for them. But consider why that is.
Windows is the best choice because it's popular. That's the only reason. Because of Windows's popularity, it has more commercial software and more hardware support (counting only x86). When people buy computers, the get Windows by default because everyone else does. It's not technically superior. It's not cheaper. It's not more secure. It's just more popular.
In some cases, popularity is the result of superiority. But this wasn't the case for Windows - it's popular because Bill was smart enough to sell DOS cheaper than CP/M, which made it easier to push Windows on the desktop market. This has nothing at all to do with it's quality.
I'm tired of communist Slashbots defending outright theft. Think about it - if you told somebody KFC's 11 secret herbs and spices, they might make KFC chicken at home, and KFC wouldn't get the profits it deserves. How is that different from going to a KFC and stealing their chicken at gunpoint? Just because you used your tastebuds to reverse engineer their batter doesn't change the fact that you stole their intellectual property. And if you tell people the recipe, you're aiding and abetting the chicken piracy of others.
The American public has shown time and time again that it can't be trusted with KFC's chicken IP. The fast food chicken industry needs protection if it is to move forward. We can begin by smothering the chicken with pepper - so much that it nums the mouth, rendering illegal terrorist tools such as taste buds ineffective. In order to dissuade pirates from developing a resistance to this defense, we can infuse the chicken with a slow-acting poison, like grease, or perhaps arsenic. Don't let the terrorist chicken pirates win!
There were many weaselisms here, but the biggest is that every other sentence includes "moving forward." He comes off like Kodos: "Forwards, not backwards, upwards not forewords, and always spinning, spinning towards freedom!" Except that he sounds like Boomhauer.
Webster's tells me tangible things are "capable of being possessed or realized." In my opinion, ordinary files in an open format are tangible. DRM encumbered files are not. That's why I don't buy ebooks.
Few people in this thread seem to understand why it's different.
It's different because it's somewhat centralized - somebody runs a server which tells the peers about each other, and hosts a torrent file which includes hashes of the file. So if you trust the source of the.torrent file, you don't have to worry. Of course, you can do this (with more effort) on any P2P by comparing checksums with a trusted source.
BTW, does anyone have checksums and sizes for the files? The Linux version from the Norway mirror was truncated.
One of the things that's never ceased to amaze me is that the Civil War probably could have been won in a week with 15 guys and $500,000's worth of today's weapons technology.
Open or closed source, there's nothing foolproof, short of doing the computation yourself. It depends on the project.
If result verification is cheap, you can just do that. In some projects, cheating doesn't matter. (For example, distributed evolution environments, where cheating won't help because the organisms will still be unfit.) If it does matter, you can send out multiple units.
Palladium can help by requiring signed binaries, but even that's not foolproof - what about a dodgy processor or memory?
In general, you must simply repeat calculations, and make it impossible for users to see who else got their work units. And of course, you must ensure that a miscalculated work unit isn't the end of the world.
Actually, instead of helping random people on Slashdot, I prefer to join the Linux-related teams - maybe high rankings (and higher Linux usage stats) will convince more interesting projects to support Linux.
I misread the title as "Nokia Investigating Reported Cell Phone Exploits." I'd love to combine those - an exploit which would let you make others's cell phones explode.
A good system to let you run one well-supported client program but choose your projects is a great idea.
For example, while SETI is cool, I'm currently running ZetaGrid. For a while I was running folding, but they don't seem to be working on the screen saver as promised. Given my interests, I most want to donate my time to something related to evolution. I have tried Evolution@home, and while it does work in WINE, it's not automated enough for general use. So I'll be glad to have more choice, and to not have to configure a different client each time.
i sincerely hope you used the alt-077 keystroke to type your question mark. i've decided to not use upper case or shifted keys at all to avoid legal hassles. forgive the bad quoting, i had to use code instead of html because tags are now illegal to type.
For the past year, I've been putting the short Perl DeCSS program in my sig - a minimal form of civil disobedience. Unfortunately, that plus the rest of my sig is more than 4 lines, and I risk incurring the wrath of the standards gestapo. "To circumvent SunnComm's CD protection, hold shift while inserting the CD," or the shorter "Press shift if you hate DRM" is much better sig-fodder.
For a SCO joke, that was actualy insightful. The RIAA can now claim that any DRM-free service will be killed by piracy. Now, anyone who understands the situation can see that it's not piracy, but commercial retardedness that will kill Emusic, but some mainstream media journalist (like, oh, the former RIAA head) won't be able to see past their press releases.
It would be interesting for a filesystem to go out of it's way to track undeleted files, but automatically delete them when space is needed. It is, however, arguable as to whether the FS is the right place to put that - it could be (usually is) done as part of a GUI file manager, or it could be implemented as a LD_PRELOAD hack.
Slashdot Mirror
What Creationists forget is that there are three parts to a good theory. First, a good theory must fit the data - Creationism is perfect at this, while evolution is only pretty good. This gives Creationists false hope. Second, a good theory must be testable - a major weakness of Creationism. Third, a good theory must explain the data and be able to make predictions. This is where evolution excels and Creationism completely fails.
As you said quite well, saying "God did it" stops the questioning dead in its tracks. Obviously, the theory of "God did it" can fit absolutely any data. But too many people mistake rationalization ("God made fossils to test our faith in Him.") for explanation ("It's like this because of evolution.") and prediction ("Evolution suggests these bacteria will become resistant.").
Evaluated as scientific theories, evolution is infinitely better than Creationism, which one must have faith in. Faith, in the sense of unquestioning belief, is antithetical to science, which I define as questioning belief. I'm not saying that religion doesn't have it's place, just that the formation of life lies squarely in the realm of science.
One could think of a person's conciousness as nothing more than the physical state of their brain - just like how a computer's "runningness" is nothing more than its design and the contents of its storage, memory, and registers. Since we already have intellectual property, let's make the destruction of information a crime. So killing a human is very bad, and turning of an intelligent computer is bad according to the information destroyed. For example, if the computer's state was backed up last week, you only killed a week's worth of information (similar to knocking someone out). If you shred the backup (let the brain die), that's worse.
It would also be interesting to figure out how cloning (fork(2)) affects this. This is where you have to determine when a machine becomes capable of owning information (it's own), and gets the right to keep others from messing with it.
No, I don't expect them to port iTunes to Linux, but hear me out. Will iTunes run in Wine? And if so, is there a way in Wine to capture tracks a Windows program tries to burn into .wav files? Although I really wish such hacks weren't necessary, it could make the system usable for even more people.
It's a good thing you fixed your fan before compiling OpenOffice.
What's to stop you from pointing a dyndns address at one of anonymizer.com's IPs?
To the grandparent, the biggest reason for WMA is limitation of fair use. They want to sell you a CD, and two WMAs (at different bitrates), and a SD card, and so on. Meanwhile, Microsoft is pushing WMA so it can win the format wars.
One thing you missed - "Lineo, was spun out of Caldera in 1999 and sold to Motorola last December." In other words, Lineo (who violated the GPL) used to be SCO. A bit more circumstantial evidence that SCO may be ripping off GPL code. *cough* LKP *cough*.
Certainly Microsoft has more marketing muscle than, well, everyone. But in the browser wars, that wasn't the biggest factor. The biggest factor in the desktop market is apathy. Joe User simply doesn't care. Despite the technical differences, IE and Netscape looked exactly the same to a user. But IE was pre-installed, so there was no reason ever to switch. Word of mouth, marketing, and technical merit (in that order) are only relevant when a choice is being made. In the case of browsers and operating systems, few people even try to make an informed decision - PCs come with Windows and Windows comes with IE.
Windows is the best choice because it's popular. That's the only reason. Because of Windows's popularity, it has more commercial software and more hardware support (counting only x86). When people buy computers, the get Windows by default because everyone else does. It's not technically superior. It's not cheaper. It's not more secure. It's just more popular.
In some cases, popularity is the result of superiority. But this wasn't the case for Windows - it's popular because Bill was smart enough to sell DOS cheaper than CP/M, which made it easier to push Windows on the desktop market. This has nothing at all to do with it's quality.
The American public has shown time and time again that it can't be trusted with KFC's chicken IP. The fast food chicken industry needs protection if it is to move forward. We can begin by smothering the chicken with pepper - so much that it nums the mouth, rendering illegal terrorist tools such as taste buds ineffective. In order to dissuade pirates from developing a resistance to this defense, we can infuse the chicken with a slow-acting poison, like grease, or perhaps arsenic. Don't let the terrorist chicken pirates win!
Don't worry, that will never happen.
*cough* Palladium *cough*
So, McBride is really Dilbert!
There were many weaselisms here, but the biggest is that every other sentence includes "moving forward." He comes off like Kodos: "Forwards, not backwards, upwards not forewords, and always spinning, spinning towards freedom!" Except that he sounds like Boomhauer.
Webster's tells me tangible things are "capable of being possessed or realized." In my opinion, ordinary files in an open format are tangible. DRM encumbered files are not. That's why I don't buy ebooks.
It's different because it's somewhat centralized - somebody runs a server which tells the peers about each other, and hosts a torrent file which includes hashes of the file. So if you trust the source of the .torrent file, you don't have to worry. Of course, you can do this (with more effort) on any P2P by comparing checksums with a trusted source.
BTW, does anyone have checksums and sizes for the files? The Linux version from the Norway mirror was truncated.
BTW, you can increase response times under heavy up- and downstream bandwidth load by playing around with QoS packet scheduling.
One of the things that's never ceased to amaze me is that the Civil War probably could have been won in a week with 15 guys and $500,000's worth of today's weapons technology.
If result verification is cheap, you can just do that. In some projects, cheating doesn't matter. (For example, distributed evolution environments, where cheating won't help because the organisms will still be unfit.) If it does matter, you can send out multiple units.
Palladium can help by requiring signed binaries, but even that's not foolproof - what about a dodgy processor or memory?
In general, you must simply repeat calculations, and make it impossible for users to see who else got their work units. And of course, you must ensure that a miscalculated work unit isn't the end of the world.
Actually, instead of helping random people on Slashdot, I prefer to join the Linux-related teams - maybe high rankings (and higher Linux usage stats) will convince more interesting projects to support Linux.
What's McBride's cell phone number?
For example, while SETI is cool, I'm currently running ZetaGrid. For a while I was running folding, but they don't seem to be working on the screen saver as promised. Given my interests, I most want to donate my time to something related to evolution. I have tried Evolution@home, and while it does work in WINE, it's not automated enough for general use. So I'll be glad to have more choice, and to not have to configure a different client each time.
what has the world come to?
i sincerely hope you used the alt-077 keystroke to type your question mark. i've decided to not use upper case or shifted keys at all to avoid legal hassles. forgive the bad quoting, i had to use code instead of html because tags are now illegal to type.
For the past year, I've been putting the short Perl DeCSS program in my sig - a minimal form of civil disobedience. Unfortunately, that plus the rest of my sig is more than 4 lines, and I risk incurring the wrath of the standards gestapo. "To circumvent SunnComm's CD protection, hold shift while inserting the CD," or the shorter "Press shift if you hate DRM" is much better sig-fodder.
For a SCO joke, that was actualy insightful. The RIAA can now claim that any DRM-free service will be killed by piracy. Now, anyone who understands the situation can see that it's not piracy, but commercial retardedness that will kill Emusic, but some mainstream media journalist (like, oh, the former RIAA head) won't be able to see past their press releases.
It would be interesting for a filesystem to go out of it's way to track undeleted files, but automatically delete them when space is needed. It is, however, arguable as to whether the FS is the right place to put that - it could be (usually is) done as part of a GUI file manager, or it could be implemented as a LD_PRELOAD hack.