Assuming there were other homo genus species still around, and we couldn't actually product offspring with them, do you think there would still be sexual activity between them? Or was there back when there were multiple species from the homo genus?
My guess is there would be sexual contact. It may be futile from an evolutionary perspective, but that has never stopped humans from trying.
If they were still around, would be be a taboo? How different would it be from something like bestiality?
It'd be different in that they're human. The taboo wouldn't be much bigger than sex between people of different ethnic backgrounds, which means it could be considerable or completely absent.
Anyone who's seen a neanderthal skull knows that something different was going on there. Humans just don't look like that. The bone structures are all quite different.
Parts of Neanderthal bone structure do show up in modern humans. Heavy brow ridges, low forehead, stocky build, receding chin, it's all present in modern humans. Just usually not in one person.
Now, obviously it's going to be close, closer than us and the chimpanzees, but there will be some differences there. If there weren't, it wouldn't disprove evolution, it would disprove genetics.
It's going to be a lot closer than chimp DNA. I hear our DNA differs 3% from that of chimps, from whom we separated 5-8 million years ago. We separated from Neanderthal 300,000 years ago, so expect a difference of about 0.1%. But it's going to be a very interesting 0.1%.
That said, assuming you don't bite somebody or have some kind of crazy infectious disease, you'd probably be better off not being classified as human. Sure, you could be considered property like a slave, but you wouldn't have to pay taxes or be responsible for a whole variety of crimes. Heck, PETA would probably make sure you had more rights than humans.
You mean you want to get shot if you misbehave without even the faintest semblance of a trial?
Also, you won't pay taxes because you can't own stuff.
Some people do, actually. Some people claim he's the greatest thinker ever, launched the most revolutionary idea ever entirely on his own, etc.
Of course those people are wrong. Darwin didn't work in a vaccuum. Darwin's grandfather had already published the idea that all animals might have a common ancestor. Several others were working towards the exact same theory that Darwin ended up publishing. When Alfred Russell Wallace wrote Darwin about this new theory he was working on, Darwin suddenly got in a hurry to get his published first. If he hadn't we could have been celebrating a Wallace-year instead of a Darwin-year.
Darwin was merely a good scientist who was the first to publish an important theory that turned out to be true. But a lot of people make more out of him than that.
This isn't the first time I've heard about developed traits being inherited. And it's obvious that this should be possible: children receive a lot more from their mother than just nuclear DNA. The ovum contains mitochondria and various other organelles and proteins. Furthermore, during pregnancy the mother provides lots of stuff to the child.
You can inherit viruses, genetic defects caused by viruses, but in some cases apparently also anti-bodies to some diseases, and who knows what else.
Lamarck may not have been correct, he wasn't entirely wrong either. (Although this is not exactly how he imagined it.)
19th century Europe and US saw similar unhuman exploitation of workers. That too was capitalism gone wild. The difference is that our workers had enough freedom to protest, unionise and vote, and that was our way out. Chinese workers don't have that.
Sad that this stuff is so common; let's see if it changes over time as the country develops
I'm not sure how big that chance is, as long as union protest run the risk of being overrun with tanks. Let's face it, one of the reasons we've got it better is because workers have the right to vote and the freedom to unionise.
A dictatorship may call itself socialist, but as long as the common worker has no power or freedom, the people in power have no incentive to do anything for them.
I find many websites prohibitively slow, but it has less to do with rendering performance than bad design. Few things are more annoying than staring at a blank page saying "439 of 440 files loaded".
I forgot which browser it was, but there's one browser that, when it encounters an empty src attribute, it tries to load something that doesn't exist, which never finishes.
If Firefox ran faster in Wine than in native Windows, that would be great news. As it is, it's undoubtedly because Firefox's code is optimized for Windows, rather than Linux.
If it runs faster in Wine than either native on Windows or native on Linux, that'd be really cool. Or funny. Or sad. I'm not yet sure which.
As far as I know, profiles are unique to each build: you can't create a profile under the Windows image and reuse it on the Mac or Linux builds.
Are we talking regular firefox user profiles here? Because I've got a few old ones that I still intend to import on a new machine. It would suck if that wouldn't work.
Although a browser that's optimised for my demanding usage would be kinda cool.
Rat Terriers will go into holes. For that matter so will daschunds. And they are naturally aggressive. Miniature daschunds were even bread for fighting that size of prey in its hole.
That reminds me of a story I once read about a house that had rats in the walls where cats couldn't get at them. So they bred miniature cats which killed all the rats, but they had cats living in the walls. So they had to breed miniature dogs...
Reusing traps doesn't work anyway. If a mouse died in the trap, it smells like dead mouse, and living mice will rather chew through concrete than go near it.
Most pest control people want to use poisons, because they know it's the only way that works,
No, they like it because it can be controlled, unlike cats. Poison doesn't really work all that well, but in small dosages it's more effective than traps. Traps only work if you cover the entire floor with them.
I don't think cats care about whether its a small rodent or a large one. They still left the remains of the ground squirrel dinners at my door when they were done. Ground squirrels are about the same size as rats.
Depends on the cat. Some cats eat everything that moves, others don't even kill a mouse.
My cat loved to play with mice, but eventually let them get away again. He was very fond of pigeon, though. He was a very scared, timid, cautious cat, but for pigeon he'd overcome any fear.
Rats and mice are also different problems. If you have mice, cats are very effective. Mice will not even approach anywhere they think a cat lives. If you have rats, you will need a larger predator. At least a big cat, that you know will take out rats. Rats are much larger than mice.
I agree. Cats are extremely effective against mice. Not every cat is actually a good mouse catcher (I had one who played with the mouse and then released it again), but mice simply don't dare to enter a cat's territory (unless they have toxoplasmosis, apparently). That's also a limitation of cats: they have a territory. If your building is too big, you need enough cats that their territories cover the entire building.
I have no experience with rats fortunately. Apparently they're also scared of cats, but possibly not as much. And it wouldn't surprise me if some cats are just as scared of rats. But there are cats that eat absolutely everything that moves, so if you can find one of those, he'll solve your problems for you.
Mousetraps barely work in my experience. Many mice are simply too smart to fall for a trap. The only way to catch them is to block their entire route with traps. That works, but you'll need a lot of traps, and shouldn't be walking around on bare feet.
It's really no different than ripping a CD to a mp3 and then loading it on your MP3 player.
Which is unlawful in the UK.
Does that mean Macs come with crippled software in the UK? Because as far as I can tell, ripping and putting on your iPod happens practiclaly automatically when you put a CD into a Mac.
Fortunately living in Netherland, I've already paid a copyright fee on all my empty media (not sure if that includes regular harddisks already, but that's definitely what They want), so I can now legally copy anything anywhere. It's already paid for, after all. Right?
For Dutch customers, there's an excellent and highly piblicised example why open source is better than closed proprietary algorithms: the new public transit chip card (OV chipkaart).
This new chip card, is meant to become the new univeral standard for paying for public transit in Netherland. Big project, and needed to be secure, to they hired a company with their own, secret, proprietary encryption system to handle it.
Anyone who knows anything about encryption can see the next step coming: as soon as it became big and the first chip cards became available, real expert started testing the security, and it was quickly broken. Several times, by different people, in different ways.
There's lots of other problems with this new chip card, they went way over budget, there are privacy issues, detection gates behave erratically etc, but this single issue, using private amateur encryption instead of an established and well tested system, is just really amazingly stupid.
It's already in production in Rotterdam. You have to use the card, no other option. And everybody knows it's insecure.
I still can't figure out how bruce perens manages to get himself onto the front page of slashdot. I can't think of a single thing he's ever had to say of any relevance or interest.
Wasn't he the rational voice in that BitKeeper debacle that led to the creation of git?
There exist open source projects with thriving communities of contributors which include individuals and companies. Those tend to be BSD or MIT licensed, however, so perhaps they are not relevant to this current discussion.
Or Apache. Most Apache top-level projects have a mix of companies and individuals involved in them, and they all contribute freely. I don't know the legal details of the license, but it works very well in practice. And considering Apache projects are mostly frameworks and libraries, it wouldn't surprise me if it was one of the best open source licenses for those kind of things.
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Assuming there were other homo genus species still around, and we couldn't actually product offspring with them, do you think there would still be sexual activity between them? Or was there back when there were multiple species from the homo genus?
My guess is there would be sexual contact. It may be futile from an evolutionary perspective, but that has never stopped humans from trying.
If they were still around, would be be a taboo? How different would it be from something like bestiality?
It'd be different in that they're human. The taboo wouldn't be much bigger than sex between people of different ethnic backgrounds, which means it could be considerable or completely absent.
Anyone who's seen a neanderthal skull knows that something different was going on there. Humans just don't look like that. The bone structures are all quite different.
Parts of Neanderthal bone structure do show up in modern humans. Heavy brow ridges, low forehead, stocky build, receding chin, it's all present in modern humans. Just usually not in one person.
Now, obviously it's going to be close, closer than us and the chimpanzees, but there will be some differences there. If there weren't, it wouldn't disprove evolution, it would disprove genetics.
It's going to be a lot closer than chimp DNA. I hear our DNA differs 3% from that of chimps, from whom we separated 5-8 million years ago. We separated from Neanderthal 300,000 years ago, so expect a difference of about 0.1%. But it's going to be a very interesting 0.1%.
You will lose your "Human" Rights. And therea ano No "Neanderthal" Rights in the Constitution.
Neanderthals are humans. Just not modern ones.
That said, assuming you don't bite somebody or have some kind of crazy infectious disease, you'd probably be better off not being classified as human. Sure, you could be considered property like a slave, but you wouldn't have to pay taxes or be responsible for a whole variety of crimes. Heck, PETA would probably make sure you had more rights than humans.
You mean you want to get shot if you misbehave without even the faintest semblance of a trial?
Also, you won't pay taxes because you can't own stuff.
First, no one "deifies Darwin".
Some people do, actually. Some people claim he's the greatest thinker ever, launched the most revolutionary idea ever entirely on his own, etc.
Of course those people are wrong. Darwin didn't work in a vaccuum. Darwin's grandfather had already published the idea that all animals might have a common ancestor. Several others were working towards the exact same theory that Darwin ended up publishing. When Alfred Russell Wallace wrote Darwin about this new theory he was working on, Darwin suddenly got in a hurry to get his published first. If he hadn't we could have been celebrating a Wallace-year instead of a Darwin-year.
Darwin was merely a good scientist who was the first to publish an important theory that turned out to be true. But a lot of people make more out of him than that.
This isn't the first time I've heard about developed traits being inherited. And it's obvious that this should be possible: children receive a lot more from their mother than just nuclear DNA. The ovum contains mitochondria and various other organelles and proteins. Furthermore, during pregnancy the mother provides lots of stuff to the child.
You can inherit viruses, genetic defects caused by viruses, but in some cases apparently also anti-bodies to some diseases, and who knows what else.
Lamarck may not have been correct, he wasn't entirely wrong either. (Although this is not exactly how he imagined it.)
The US is perhaps the only country in the world that does not commemorate the Chicago Martyrs the 1st of May....
It's not. Netherland doesn't do it either, but a lot of other European countries do.
I suppose it's kind of ironic that Russia does commemorate the death of Americans and the US doesn't.
No, you're seeing totalitarianism gone wild.
19th century Europe and US saw similar unhuman exploitation of workers. That too was capitalism gone wild. The difference is that our workers had enough freedom to protest, unionise and vote, and that was our way out. Chinese workers don't have that.
Sad that this stuff is so common; let's see if it changes over time as the country develops
I'm not sure how big that chance is, as long as union protest run the risk of being overrun with tanks. Let's face it, one of the reasons we've got it better is because workers have the right to vote and the freedom to unionise.
A dictatorship may call itself socialist, but as long as the common worker has no power or freedom, the people in power have no incentive to do anything for them.
But those benchmarks are done by a f'n noob! How can you possibly trust them?
I find many websites prohibitively slow, but it has less to do with rendering performance than bad design. Few things are more annoying than staring at a blank page saying "439 of 440 files loaded".
I forgot which browser it was, but there's one browser that, when it encounters an empty src attribute, it tries to load something that doesn't exist, which never finishes.
All browsers are prohobitively slow at times. Not to mention their memory footprint.
If Firefox ran faster in Wine than in native Windows, that would be great news. As it is, it's undoubtedly because Firefox's code is optimized for Windows, rather than Linux.
If it runs faster in Wine than either native on Windows or native on Linux, that'd be really cool. Or funny. Or sad. I'm not yet sure which.
As far as I know, profiles are unique to each build: you can't create a profile under the Windows image and reuse it on the Mac or Linux builds.
Are we talking regular firefox user profiles here? Because I've got a few old ones that I still intend to import on a new machine. It would suck if that wouldn't work.
Although a browser that's optimised for my demanding usage would be kinda cool.
Rat Terriers will go into holes. For that matter so will daschunds. And they are naturally aggressive. Miniature daschunds were even bread for fighting that size of prey in its hole.
That reminds me of a story I once read about a house that had rats in the walls where cats couldn't get at them. So they bred miniature cats which killed all the rats, but they had cats living in the walls. So they had to breed miniature dogs...
Reusing traps doesn't work anyway. If a mouse died in the trap, it smells like dead mouse, and living mice will rather chew through concrete than go near it.
Most pest control people want to use poisons, because they know it's the only way that works,
No, they like it because it can be controlled, unlike cats. Poison doesn't really work all that well, but in small dosages it's more effective than traps. Traps only work if you cover the entire floor with them.
a siamese, psycho little shit
All Siamese are psycho.
They say (I don't know who they are) that any hole/gap that you can fit a pencil through a mouse can get through as well.
I haven't tested that exactly, but mice can get through ridiculously small openings. It's as if they have no bones at all. Like octopi or something.
I don't think cats care about whether its a small rodent or a large one. They still left the remains of the ground squirrel dinners at my door when they were done. Ground squirrels are about the same size as rats.
Depends on the cat. Some cats eat everything that moves, others don't even kill a mouse.
My cat loved to play with mice, but eventually let them get away again. He was very fond of pigeon, though. He was a very scared, timid, cautious cat, but for pigeon he'd overcome any fear.
Rats and mice are also different problems. If you have mice, cats are very effective. Mice will not even approach anywhere they think a cat lives. If you have rats, you will need a larger predator. At least a big cat, that you know will take out rats. Rats are much larger than mice.
I agree. Cats are extremely effective against mice. Not every cat is actually a good mouse catcher (I had one who played with the mouse and then released it again), but mice simply don't dare to enter a cat's territory (unless they have toxoplasmosis, apparently). That's also a limitation of cats: they have a territory. If your building is too big, you need enough cats that their territories cover the entire building.
I have no experience with rats fortunately. Apparently they're also scared of cats, but possibly not as much. And it wouldn't surprise me if some cats are just as scared of rats. But there are cats that eat absolutely everything that moves, so if you can find one of those, he'll solve your problems for you.
Mousetraps barely work in my experience. Many mice are simply too smart to fall for a trap. The only way to catch them is to block their entire route with traps. That works, but you'll need a lot of traps, and shouldn't be walking around on bare feet.
It's really no different than ripping a CD to a mp3 and then loading it on your MP3 player.
Which is unlawful in the UK.
Does that mean Macs come with crippled software in the UK? Because as far as I can tell, ripping and putting on your iPod happens practiclaly automatically when you put a CD into a Mac.
Fortunately living in Netherland, I've already paid a copyright fee on all my empty media (not sure if that includes regular harddisks already, but that's definitely what They want), so I can now legally copy anything anywhere. It's already paid for, after all. Right?
For Dutch customers, there's an excellent and highly piblicised example why open source is better than closed proprietary algorithms: the new public transit chip card (OV chipkaart).
This new chip card, is meant to become the new univeral standard for paying for public transit in Netherland. Big project, and needed to be secure, to they hired a company with their own, secret, proprietary encryption system to handle it.
Anyone who knows anything about encryption can see the next step coming: as soon as it became big and the first chip cards became available, real expert started testing the security, and it was quickly broken. Several times, by different people, in different ways.
There's lots of other problems with this new chip card, they went way over budget, there are privacy issues, detection gates behave erratically etc, but this single issue, using private amateur encryption instead of an established and well tested system, is just really amazingly stupid.
It's already in production in Rotterdam. You have to use the card, no other option. And everybody knows it's insecure.
I still can't figure out how bruce perens manages to get himself onto the front page of slashdot. I can't think of a single thing he's ever had to say of any relevance or interest.
Wasn't he the rational voice in that BitKeeper debacle that led to the creation of git?
There exist open source projects with thriving communities of contributors which include individuals and companies. Those tend to be BSD or MIT licensed, however, so perhaps they are not relevant to this current discussion.
Or Apache. Most Apache top-level projects have a mix of companies and individuals involved in them, and they all contribute freely. I don't know the legal details of the license, but it works very well in practice. And considering Apache projects are mostly frameworks and libraries, it wouldn't surprise me if it was one of the best open source licenses for those kind of things.