It hasn't taken long [for human beings to learn the techniques of genetic manipulation] at all. We have developed the ability to directly modify genes in less than 500 years. This is certainly an eyeblink in terms of geological time. One might suppose that in the next 5000 years we might be able to create custom genomes of our own. Again, in an eyeblink.
From where do you get 500 years? It's my understanding that human beings have been around for tens of thousands of years. Which is still not long geologically, but a long time in human terms, which is what I meant. I apologise for not making it clearer; I thought the paragraph break would show what I meant, but on subsequent reading it does seem that it can be read wrongly.
Are you arguing that because I can walk into the room and reassemble the flowerpot back together (maybe it was made of lego blocks), that it can reassemble without outside help if given enough time?
Well, I'm not discounting outside help; only intelligent outside help. It's clear that, quantum phenomena notwithstanding, the components of life are going to need some input of kinetic energy if they are to move in relation to one another. The forces of the weather, and the Moon's gravitational pull on the primordial soup, might well have been responsible for the origin of life on Earth; but they are not applied with any intelligence.
But I'll run with your idea of a plant pot made out of Lego bricks. Let us first assume that there is a finite number of bricks, which therefore can only be arranged in a finite number of possible combinations. If you take these bricks and arrange them in every single possible combination in turn {here you are acting as an external influence but not applying any intelligence -- you are merely following a set of rules without question}, then it is a mathematical certainty that one of those combinations must exactly match the original configuration of the pot. Yes, it would take you a long, long time to go through all the combinations. That's the point -- the universe is very, very, very old. Being only Lego bricks {which are human-made and intended to be assembled by an intelligent operator} they do not have an inherent mechanism for maintaining a viable configuration. Still, it doesn't take intelligence to apply a rule which says "stop rearranging when it looks like the picture". And if you had many identical sets of bricks, and kept fully-assembled constructions for as long as possible before dismantling and rearranging them {again, a rule that can be applied without intelligence}, then that would at least maximise the lifetime of a viable construction. Also, a real living creature would be able to get out of the way of the dismantling-and-rearranging vortex which you are simulating.
If the plant pot exhibited symmetry then there is more than one viable combination. And if you don't care about the colour or even too much about the shape, as long as it will do approximately the job of a flower pot, then there are even more viable combinations.
..... in order to demonstrate random generation of meaningful code you have to dumb your instruction set way down. If you use an even moderately complex instruction set, the set of possible instructions becomes staggeringly huge while the set of working instructions is comparatively miniscule.
Whoa there, you're getting ahead of yourself. Who said anything about dumbing down the instruction set? You don't actually need that many instructions to achieve completeness. {A somewhat lengthy digression follows:}
Here's a simple instruction set for you. You need a word length of at least 16 bits: 4 {highest} bits for order, 12 or more bits for data {which may well mean address of data}. One accumulator, one instruction pointer and three status flags: carry, zero {= 1 if all bits of accumulator a
My point is that sometimes, if you don't put up fences, you will attract fewer unwelcome visitors than if you do. We are hard-wired to "push the envelope", to attempt the unthinkable, however it may manifest itself. This is an instinctive behaviour, as much a natural function as having sex or going to the toilet, and any attempt to pretend the contrary will surely be doomed to abject failure.
The genes for light and dark moths already existed in the genome, they were merely expressed in differing ratios based on the survival benefits of one over the other. This example did not involve the "evolution" of new genes.
It's possible -- though very hard to prove -- that moths carrying only the "dark" genes could have produced offspring containing the "light" genes {or vice-versa} by simple random mutation. This probably would have been insignificant, though, compared to the number carrying both genes.
Remember also that the dirtying and subsequent cleaning took only about 100 years which, even though it corresponds to many generations of moths, is barely the wink of an eye on the evolutionary timescale.
You also said: *****"The fact that it is possible to create genetically modified organisms in the laboratory indicates that evolution is possible in theory".***** I would say that this proves that ID is possible (in theory) since it is a example of an intelligence (us) doing design work.
Yes, it proves it's possible; however, it does nothing to change the fact that it's improbable. In fact, seeing as how it's taken us this long just to get together the wherewithal to do it, I think that might be construed as evidence for how improbable ID might be. Especially given that Nature can, and does, change genes a little bit all the time -- although most of the changes are swallowed up because of the inherent error-tolerance in DNA {which nature had long before we came up with the idea of a parity bit, let alone Reed-Solomon and Hamming codes!} and so never see the light of day.
I have a hard time believing that modifying something in the lab proves that it can be generated spontaneously through random chance.
If something can be done deliberately, then -- unless we can prove that whatever would trigger it cannot occur randomly -- it can happen randomly. A plant pot will fall if it is pushed off a windowsill by hand. Do you have a hard time believing that it will also fall if it is pushed off a windowsill by a curtain blowing in the wind? If there is a curtain within range, the window is open and it is windy out, then we have a plausible mechanism by which the pot might be caused to fall without intervention.
Now, if we find the flower pot on the floor, the curtain flapping in the breeze and the door locked, should we assume that someone unlocked the door, deliberately knocked off the pot, covered their traces and left, re-locking the door..... or that the wind blew it?
I can open my computer up and make mods, but I don't expect one to come into existence through random shuffling of computer parts.
But computer parts were designed so as to require an intelligent mind to assemble them together in the first place, so your analogy is not valid. Nature's components obey rather inflexible rules about what will stick to what and what will repel what if they are shaken up together. One carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms can only ever make methane, or two hydrogen molecules and a carbon atom.
I modify code, but a random character generator will not create a working program.
I beg to differ. If you consider a simple enough instruction set, it is easy to generate valid programs randomly. If every possible value for the order field represents a valid operation, then there can never be an invalid order and hence the validity of a program only depends upon it not producing an overflow condition {a jump to unpopulated memory is valid: unpopulated memory will read as all ones, and we know that 0xffffffff constitutes a valid instruction}. If your "randomness" is further constrained, as it is in Nature, then some of these programs might even do something useful. I suggest you perform some simple experiments to satisfy
The sad thing is that this "DRM" doesn't actually accomplish anything except false description, trespass to chattels bordering on criminal damage, misuse of a computer and aiding and abetting criminal damage and misuse of a computer. And it only manages to rack up that charge sheet under Windows!
Quick way to get around it: boot up a copy of Slax using the cheatcode slax copy2ram, swap the CD, cd into your hard disk {it'll be under/mnt somewhere} and you can then use # cdparanoia -B to rip off the audio tracks with no problem. You can even go
# for i in *wav; do lame -h $i; done or # for i in *wav; do lame -h $i && rm $i; done if you don't care about keeping the wav files.
Evolution is a demonstrable fact. Around the time of the Industrial Revolution, white butterflies turned dark because it gave them better camouflage against the trunks of silver birch trees {which were now sooty from all the factory chimbleys chuffing out smoke}. When Thatcher closed down all the factories, the butterflies turned white again. {There are better explanations out there so do not be afraid to Google for them.} The fact that it is possible to create genetically modified organisms in the laboratory indicates that evolution is possible in theory, and the fact that DNA replication is not 100% perfect everytime suggests a practical mechanism by which this may happen without intervention.
What is in dispute is whether or not evolution an conjunction with Natural Selection is sufficient to account for the diversity of life that we see on Earth today.
The "Intelligent Design" fantasy is based around the argument that living things are irreducibly complex and could not have arisen by incremental changes, therefore must have been designed by an intelligent designer. This is patently false, as nothing in nature actually demonstrates this "irreducible complexity" of which ID proponents speak; however, an intelligent designer would by definition be irreducibly complex. This leads to a circular argument when discussing the origin of such an intelligent designer {and so is regarded by some as a reductio ad absurdum}.
Science by strict definition limits itself to natural explanations for natural phenomena. Supernatural phenomena are nothing to do with science.
I remember the Rubik's Cube from first time around. I knew a few different "complete solutions" -- depending on the initial state, one might be significantly faster than the others. I rarely needed longer than a minute. My friend and I built a fake "cube solving machine" from an old washing machine box, with a hatch tor loading the "scrambled" cube, a drawer for removing the "solved" cube -- and me inside with a bicycle lamp, and a cassette recorder for sound effects!
Obviously you cannot have just five faces "solved", but it is also not possible to have just four faces "solved". You can render a cube insoluble by reversing one of the two-sided pieces, or rotating one of the three-sided pieces. The easiest way to split a cube apart is to rotate one side by 45 degrees, and push the protruding corner piece until its latch pops out. Reassembly is done by inserting one of the two-sided pieces last. I have also seen evidence of very bad sticker-peeling, where one of the two-sided pieces carried the colours of opposite centres and one of the three-sided pieces carried the same colour on each face!
Rubik's Snake was boring: all you could really make with it was a dog and a football.
Rubik's Magic was a little better, because there were two different puzzles on the go: arranging the eight hinged squares to create a shape {4 x 2 rectangle, 3 x 3 square with corner missing, or various solids} and orientating the components of the shape to produce a picture {three separated rings on the rectangle, or three linked rings on the 3-3-2}.
I remember Rubik's Clock best of all. I was given one of the first ones in the country, which my parents got from a toy shop in Yorkshire. It took me nearly two days to crack it -- and then I could not believe just how daft I had been in not spotting it sooner. The secret is to ghea gur pbeare onpxjneqf, ratntr vgf ohggba naq ghea rirelguvat sbejneqf gbtrgure.
You know, if you weren't an AC, and if I had mod points, I'd have mod'ed you up.
Whenever you put up a fence, you are encouraging people to try and climb it. It's just the modern-day manifestation of one of our basic, deep-rooted human survival instincts -- in fact, the very one that made us get down from the trees in the first place. If you want to see it in action, put up a sign saying "WET PAINT" and see how many people touch it to see how wet it is.
Furthermore, since software patents are invalid in many jurisdictions, this does not mean a lot anyway. Still, if you live in the USA it might be worth writing to the patent office to oppose the provisional patent.
Well, Acrobat isn't the only PDF viewer. The original XPDF is lightning-fast. KPDF and GPDF are a bit slower with the eye-candy, but they look more like your desktop.
Please answer the questions I asked. Firstly, and more importantly, if you believe that the universe was created by a creator then how do you believe that this creator came to exist? And secondly, if it is not self-evident from your answer to this question, why should the process which caused this creator to exist favour a two-stage process over a one-stage process?
It's not a strawman, it's a reductio ad absurdum. The only mechanism I can see for a creator god to come into being is by the same random chance that could more readily have created simpler life-forms. However, I may be missing something. Please explain your alternative and why a two-stage process would be favoured over a one-stage process.
Also, the more species you already have, then the more base material you have to work with for the creation of new species. So although one possible cause of mutations {which would have been more relevant in the early beginnings} is in decline, this effect is offset by there being more starting points. If the "doubling-life" of the increasing system is shorter than the half-life of the decreasing system, then the overall trend will be an upward one.
You still haven't explained how your creator came into being. Did your creator begin to exist fully-formed and ready to go, or in a rudimentary form which then evolved to the point of being able to create? And if there exists some process capable of creating a creator {which assumption is implicit within the assumption that a creator has ever existed}, why should that process not just have created simpler organisms instead?
If you are going to use probability theory to support an argument {don't fall into the Monty Hall problem trap and incorrectly assume dependent events are independent or vice versa} then you ought at least to explain why you are favouring a less probable event {indirect creation by an abiogenetically-created creator} over a more probable event {direct abiogenesis}.
If you reject that life on Earth arose by abiogenesis and assume that there was an intelligent designer involved, how did your intelligent designer come to be?
Abiogenesis of an amoeba which later evolves into what we have today surely is more likely than abiogenesis of a creator-god.
Life arose somehow by random chance and a series of natural processes occurred, according to well-established, verifiable and unchangeable laws, so that we ended up with the diversity that we enjoy today.
A creator-god arose by random chance, obtained the raw materials for the universe somehow, and created everything according to some plan.
?
Please bear in mind when considering the probability of random mutations that radioactivity -- which is known to be a good source of genetic mutations -- has been decreasing exponentially over time. For each radioactive isotope that exists, just one half-life ago there was twice as much of it. It is also possible that some radioisotopes which once existed, have been completely exhausted.
..... if you're buying this CD and you use it as Sony want you to use it.....
And therein lies the rub. How I use a CD -- or, since it violates the Red Book standard, an optical disc containing digitised audio recordings -- that I bought with my own money that I earned by my own efforts is none of Sony's business. It certainly does not give them grounds to misuse a computer, commit aggravated trespass to chattels bordering on criminal damage or conduct illegal surveillance.
Sony need to be taught a lesson. They have committed a crime and must be punished. All the stuff about how to defeat the "protection" is just rubbing it in.
Illegal and wrong are not the same thing. Smoking dope is illegal, but it is not wrong. Throwing away perfectly-edible food is not illegal, but it's wrong.
Anyway, your computer is running a pirate copy of Windows, so you're a fine one to talk. Come back when you have a clue.
Or maybe you just stopped listening to that CD on your computer. Does it phone home when you're not listening to the CD? Then maybe you got rid of that computer. Whatever. It's your computer, and the only way it's any of their business what you do with it is if you throw it through the window of their head office.
The problem with software, from a software company's point of view, is that it lasts forever.
If you sell something tangible with moving parts, then you know it will break down eventually and have to be repaired or replaced. Cars will eventually need petrol, new tyres / exhausts / brakes / clutches &c. VCRs will eventually wear out and begin chewing up tapes. Gas boilers will eventually suffer from blocked heat exchangers. It is the fate of all machinery: batteries get spent, bulbs burn out, brushes wear down, belts perish, blades blunt, bearings give out.
But software does the job it was made to do, as long as the computer upon which it is running continues to function properly. Unless you can find a way to make existing software obsolete. In practice, this means making new versions of existing software deliberately produce savefiles in a format that cannot be read by previous versions, and then disseminating the new software as widely as possible.
The only thing that keeps this working, is the fact of the source code being kept closed. And back in the days when memory was measured in kilobytes and hard disk space in megabytes, it was even feasible to examine code with a disassembler {some said only woosses needed a disassembler, real programmers knew the opcodes off by heart} to study what it did and how.
In any field besides computing, this business practice -- creating artificial obsolescence and locking out third-party spares -- would be illegal. Sure, there are some "safety critical" spare parts that you often can only get from the manufacturer, but the key thing here is that other parties are not excluded on the whim of the manufacturer but by the realities of the market. {Anybody could make a replacement circuit board for a Glow-Worm boiler, but it would have to go through mandatory testing procedures [which are not stipulated by Glow-Worm but by BSI], otherwise fitting it would invalidate the approval on the appliance and lead to Big Trouble should a gas explosion occur anywhere in the vicinity whether or not it was anything to do with the use of "pattern parts". Glow-Worm's contract with their controls manufacturer gives them exclusivity, so the manufacturer can't knock out spares on the side [well, except to employees whose homes are heated by Glow-Worm boilers:) ]. Since spare parts are necessarily a small market [if something keeps needing spares it will eventually be replaced, more often than not with a different make], and approvals testing is an expensive process, it is generally uneconomical for third parties to compete over safety-critical parts.}
If we were starting all over again, and I was Minister of I.T., then I would pass a law stating that the administrator of a computer has the right to view and, if necessary, alter the source code of any software running on it {Stallman's Freedom #1}. I have seen so many problems with closed-source software that would never have existed if the person with the problem had access to the source code, that I am convinced it does more harm than good.
What I find really depressing is that Gates wasn't dragged into the gents after that meeting, and given a Bloody Good Kicking and a couple of head-flushings.
If the Courts had ruled that software was indeed meant for sharing, things might well have turned out very differently.
Talking of things turning out differently, has there ever been a case of someone taking a software vendor to court in an attempt to get them to disclose details of the source code?
Small nitpick: they did not prove that there was no aether. They proved that if the aether existed, it would be impossible to detect.
It's Occam's Razor that suggests that the aether might just as well not exist if it can't be detected {if there was no alternative explanation for propagation of electromagnetic waves that did not depend on the existence of the aether, that would count as a method of detection in its own right}.
If you know that other people could make money supporting your buggy software, it strongly disincentivises you to make it buggy in the first place. The only time there is money to be made out of bad software is when the only people who can support that software are chosen by you. This is how the closed-source software industry works.
If there is a piece of software that people would like to be able to know does its job properly, but those people are not in a position to be able to determine for themselves how properly it does its job, then there is value in providing that assurance. As a competent programmer, you should be able to sell the service of independently auditing software that you did not write.
No. Regardless of what happens to space-time, electromagnetic radiation of any description will always travel at 299 792 458 metres a second through a vacuum {or that amount divided by the refractive index of the material when travelling through matter}. If some weird phenomenon makes a second last for a shorter amount of time than usual, then a metre will not be so long a distance either; because however far light travelled 1 / 299 792 458 m. in that time, which was not as long as a usual second, is a metre by definition, even if it is shorter than a usual metre.
Makes me wonder why we don't get, say, four "upward" mod points and only one "downward" mod point. Or three and two. That might help discourage malicious downmoderation.
The first plot hole I spotted in that book was that Dan Brown apparently seems to think that the Spanish coin is called the peseta.
There are other holes that you could drive a bus through sideways. One of those artic buses they have on the Continent, even. I'm not going to enumerate them here though because if I tried, I'd miss loads and get mod'ed down as well as corrected. Suffice it to say that I won't be reading any more Dan Brown. I enjoyed Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code in spite of nagging doubts; but if he can make such basic mistakes as the ones I spotted in D.F., then what other mistakes has he made besides the one-dimensional stereotyped characters?
Well, if the USA didn't go throwing its weight around like a big fat playground bully, and the UK didn't go around licking the USA's arse, then maybe people might not actually want to go flying planes into skyscrapers or riding on the tube with a rucksack full of dynamite. Somebody in authority must have been warned about the attacks of 11/9 and 7/7 -- you don't accomplish anything politically by just attacking someone for no reason. The attacks can only have been the "..... or else" part of an ultimatum.
I always said the IRA shouldn't have decommissioned so much as a pea-shooter until the Green, White and Gold were flying over the Six Counties. England -- more specifically, London -- set the whole thing up for basically selfish, personal reasons. Even the Church of England is the least "Protestant" of all the world's reformed churches, and probably will reunite with the Roman Catholic Church, once they get their heads down from out of their arseholes and start ordaining women priests.
And talking of getting heads down from up arses, the UK seriously needs to split up with the USA and get back to talking to our European neighbours. With specific regard to two things: (1) a total, EU-wide ban on the import of goods produced in conditions which would be illegal within the EU {we should not be exporting unhealthy, dangerous, immoral and polluting practices anywhere}; and (2) a strategy for the cessation of petroleum usage and transition to biomass fuels within the EU {when the oil runs out, we really don't want to be involved in the series of bloodier and bloodier battles for the last few drops}.
Obviously he was attempting to assert his innocence by putting as much daylight as possible between the Old Bill and himself. It's an instinctive reaction. See a copper => run like buggery. In a country where you can be born, live and die without ever coming near a real live firearm, nobody expects to be shot at.
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From where do you get 500 years? It's my understanding that human beings have been around for tens of thousands of years. Which is still not long geologically, but a long time in human terms, which is what I meant. I apologise for not making it clearer; I thought the paragraph break would show what I meant, but on subsequent reading it does seem that it can be read wrongly.
Well, I'm not discounting outside help; only intelligent outside help. It's clear that, quantum phenomena notwithstanding, the components of life are going to need some input of kinetic energy if they are to move in relation to one another. The forces of the weather, and the Moon's gravitational pull on the primordial soup, might well have been responsible for the origin of life on Earth; but they are not applied with any intelligence.
But I'll run with your idea of a plant pot made out of Lego bricks. Let us first assume that there is a finite number of bricks, which therefore can only be arranged in a finite number of possible combinations. If you take these bricks and arrange them in every single possible combination in turn {here you are acting as an external influence but not applying any intelligence -- you are merely following a set of rules without question}, then it is a mathematical certainty that one of those combinations must exactly match the original configuration of the pot. Yes, it would take you a long, long time to go through all the combinations. That's the point -- the universe is very, very, very old. Being only Lego bricks {which are human-made and intended to be assembled by an intelligent operator} they do not have an inherent mechanism for maintaining a viable configuration. Still, it doesn't take intelligence to apply a rule which says "stop rearranging when it looks like the picture". And if you had many identical sets of bricks, and kept fully-assembled constructions for as long as possible before dismantling and rearranging them {again, a rule that can be applied without intelligence}, then that would at least maximise the lifetime of a viable construction. Also, a real living creature would be able to get out of the way of the dismantling-and-rearranging vortex which you are simulating.
If the plant pot exhibited symmetry then there is more than one viable combination. And if you don't care about the colour or even too much about the shape, as long as it will do approximately the job of a flower pot, then there are even more viable combinations.
Whoa there, you're getting ahead of yourself. Who said anything about dumbing down the instruction set? You don't actually need that many instructions to achieve completeness. {A somewhat lengthy digression follows:}
My point is that sometimes, if you don't put up fences, you will attract fewer unwelcome visitors than if you do. We are hard-wired to "push the envelope", to attempt the unthinkable, however it may manifest itself. This is an instinctive behaviour, as much a natural function as having sex or going to the toilet, and any attempt to pretend the contrary will surely be doomed to abject failure.
It's possible -- though very hard to prove -- that moths carrying only the "dark" genes could have produced offspring containing the "light" genes {or vice-versa} by simple random mutation. This probably would have been insignificant, though, compared to the number carrying both genes.
Remember also that the dirtying and subsequent cleaning took only about 100 years which, even though it corresponds to many generations of moths, is barely the wink of an eye on the evolutionary timescale.
Yes, it proves it's possible; however, it does nothing to change the fact that it's improbable. In fact, seeing as how it's taken us this long just to get together the wherewithal to do it, I think that might be construed as evidence for how improbable ID might be. Especially given that Nature can, and does, change genes a little bit all the time -- although most of the changes are swallowed up because of the inherent error-tolerance in DNA {which nature had long before we came up with the idea of a parity bit, let alone Reed-Solomon and Hamming codes!} and so never see the light of day.
If something can be done deliberately, then -- unless we can prove that whatever would trigger it cannot occur randomly -- it can happen randomly. A plant pot will fall if it is pushed off a windowsill by hand. Do you have a hard time believing that it will also fall if it is pushed off a windowsill by a curtain blowing in the wind? If there is a curtain within range, the window is open and it is windy out, then we have a plausible mechanism by which the pot might be caused to fall without intervention.
..... or that the wind blew it?
Now, if we find the flower pot on the floor, the curtain flapping in the breeze and the door locked, should we assume that someone unlocked the door, deliberately knocked off the pot, covered their traces and left, re-locking the door
But computer parts were designed so as to require an intelligent mind to assemble them together in the first place, so your analogy is not valid. Nature's components obey rather inflexible rules about what will stick to what and what will repel what if they are shaken up together. One carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms can only ever make methane, or two hydrogen molecules and a carbon atom.
I beg to differ. If you consider a simple enough instruction set, it is easy to generate valid programs randomly. If every possible value for the order field represents a valid operation, then there can never be an invalid order and hence the validity of a program only depends upon it not producing an overflow condition {a jump to unpopulated memory is valid: unpopulated memory will read as all ones, and we know that 0xffffffff constitutes a valid instruction}. If your "randomness" is further constrained, as it is in Nature, then some of these programs might even do something useful. I suggest you perform some simple experiments to satisfy
The sad thing is that this "DRM" doesn't actually accomplish anything except false description, trespass to chattels bordering on criminal damage, misuse of a computer and aiding and abetting criminal damage and misuse of a computer. And it only manages to rack up that charge sheet under Windows!
/mnt somewhere} and you can then use # cdparanoia -B to rip off the audio tracks with no problem. You can even go
Quick way to get around it: boot up a copy of Slax using the cheatcode slax copy2ram, swap the CD, cd into your hard disk {it'll be under
# for i in *wav; do lame -h $i; done
or
# for i in *wav; do lame -h $i && rm $i; done
if you don't care about keeping the wav files.
Evolution is a demonstrable fact. Around the time of the Industrial Revolution, white butterflies turned dark because it gave them better camouflage against the trunks of silver birch trees {which were now sooty from all the factory chimbleys chuffing out smoke}. When Thatcher closed down all the factories, the butterflies turned white again. {There are better explanations out there so do not be afraid to Google for them.} The fact that it is possible to create genetically modified organisms in the laboratory indicates that evolution is possible in theory, and the fact that DNA replication is not 100% perfect everytime suggests a practical mechanism by which this may happen without intervention.
What is in dispute is whether or not evolution an conjunction with Natural Selection is sufficient to account for the diversity of life that we see on Earth today.
The "Intelligent Design" fantasy is based around the argument that living things are irreducibly complex and could not have arisen by incremental changes, therefore must have been designed by an intelligent designer. This is patently false, as nothing in nature actually demonstrates this "irreducible complexity" of which ID proponents speak; however, an intelligent designer would by definition be irreducibly complex. This leads to a circular argument when discussing the origin of such an intelligent designer {and so is regarded by some as a reductio ad absurdum}.
Science by strict definition limits itself to natural explanations for natural phenomena. Supernatural phenomena are nothing to do with science.
I remember the Rubik's Cube from first time around. I knew a few different "complete solutions" -- depending on the initial state, one might be significantly faster than the others. I rarely needed longer than a minute. My friend and I built a fake "cube solving machine" from an old washing machine box, with a hatch tor loading the "scrambled" cube, a drawer for removing the "solved" cube -- and me inside with a bicycle lamp, and a cassette recorder for sound effects!
Obviously you cannot have just five faces "solved", but it is also not possible to have just four faces "solved". You can render a cube insoluble by reversing one of the two-sided pieces, or rotating one of the three-sided pieces. The easiest way to split a cube apart is to rotate one side by 45 degrees, and push the protruding corner piece until its latch pops out. Reassembly is done by inserting one of the two-sided pieces last. I have also seen evidence of very bad sticker-peeling, where one of the two-sided pieces carried the colours of opposite centres and one of the three-sided pieces carried the same colour on each face!
Rubik's Snake was boring: all you could really make with it was a dog and a football.
Rubik's Magic was a little better, because there were two different puzzles on the go: arranging the eight hinged squares to create a shape {4 x 2 rectangle, 3 x 3 square with corner missing, or various solids} and orientating the components of the shape to produce a picture {three separated rings on the rectangle, or three linked rings on the 3-3-2}.
I remember Rubik's Clock best of all. I was given one of the first ones in the country, which my parents got from a toy shop in Yorkshire. It took me nearly two days to crack it -- and then I could not believe just how daft I had been in not spotting it sooner. The secret is to ghea gur pbeare onpxjneqf, ratntr vgf ohggba naq ghea rirelguvat sbejneqf gbtrgure.
You know, if you weren't an AC, and if I had mod points, I'd have mod'ed you up.
Whenever you put up a fence, you are encouraging people to try and climb it. It's just the modern-day manifestation of one of our basic, deep-rooted human survival instincts -- in fact, the very one that made us get down from the trees in the first place. If you want to see it in action, put up a sign saying "WET PAINT" and see how many people touch it to see how wet it is.
Furthermore, since software patents are invalid in many jurisdictions, this does not mean a lot anyway. Still, if you live in the USA it might be worth writing to the patent office to oppose the provisional patent.
Well, Acrobat isn't the only PDF viewer. The original XPDF is lightning-fast. KPDF and GPDF are a bit slower with the eye-candy, but they look more like your desktop.
Please answer the questions I asked. Firstly, and more importantly, if you believe that the universe was created by a creator then how do you believe that this creator came to exist? And secondly, if it is not self-evident from your answer to this question, why should the process which caused this creator to exist favour a two-stage process over a one-stage process?
It's not a strawman, it's a reductio ad absurdum. The only mechanism I can see for a creator god to come into being is by the same random chance that could more readily have created simpler life-forms. However, I may be missing something. Please explain your alternative and why a two-stage process would be favoured over a one-stage process.
Also, the more species you already have, then the more base material you have to work with for the creation of new species. So although one possible cause of mutations {which would have been more relevant in the early beginnings} is in decline, this effect is offset by there being more starting points. If the "doubling-life" of the increasing system is shorter than the half-life of the decreasing system, then the overall trend will be an upward one.
You still haven't explained how your creator came into being. Did your creator begin to exist fully-formed and ready to go, or in a rudimentary form which then evolved to the point of being able to create? And if there exists some process capable of creating a creator {which assumption is implicit within the assumption that a creator has ever existed}, why should that process not just have created simpler organisms instead?
If you are going to use probability theory to support an argument {don't fall into the Monty Hall problem trap and incorrectly assume dependent events are independent or vice versa} then you ought at least to explain why you are favouring a less probable event {indirect creation by an abiogenetically-created creator} over a more probable event {direct abiogenesis}.
If you reject that life on Earth arose by abiogenesis and assume that there was an intelligent designer involved, how did your intelligent designer come to be?
Abiogenesis of an amoeba which later evolves into what we have today surely is more likely than abiogenesis of a creator-god.
- Life arose somehow by random chance and a series of natural processes occurred, according to well-established, verifiable and unchangeable laws, so that we ended up with the diversity that we enjoy today.
- A creator-god arose by random chance, obtained the raw materials for the universe somehow, and created everything according to some plan.
?Please bear in mind when considering the probability of random mutations that radioactivity -- which is known to be a good source of genetic mutations -- has been decreasing exponentially over time. For each radioactive isotope that exists, just one half-life ago there was twice as much of it. It is also possible that some radioisotopes which once existed, have been completely exhausted.
Sony need to be taught a lesson. They have committed a crime and must be punished. All the stuff about how to defeat the "protection" is just rubbing it in.
Illegal and wrong are not the same thing. Smoking dope is illegal, but it is not wrong. Throwing away perfectly-edible food is not illegal, but it's wrong.
Anyway, your computer is running a pirate copy of Windows, so you're a fine one to talk. Come back when you have a clue.
Or maybe you just stopped listening to that CD on your computer. Does it phone home when you're not listening to the CD? Then maybe you got rid of that computer. Whatever. It's your computer, and the only way it's any of their business what you do with it is if you throw it through the window of their head office.
The problem with software, from a software company's point of view, is that it lasts forever.
:) ]. Since spare parts are necessarily a small market [if something keeps needing spares it will eventually be replaced, more often than not with a different make], and approvals testing is an expensive process, it is generally uneconomical for third parties to compete over safety-critical parts.}
If you sell something tangible with moving parts, then you know it will break down eventually and have to be repaired or replaced. Cars will eventually need petrol, new tyres / exhausts / brakes / clutches &c. VCRs will eventually wear out and begin chewing up tapes. Gas boilers will eventually suffer from blocked heat exchangers. It is the fate of all machinery: batteries get spent, bulbs burn out, brushes wear down, belts perish, blades blunt, bearings give out.
But software does the job it was made to do, as long as the computer upon which it is running continues to function properly. Unless you can find a way to make existing software obsolete. In practice, this means making new versions of existing software deliberately produce savefiles in a format that cannot be read by previous versions, and then disseminating the new software as widely as possible.
The only thing that keeps this working, is the fact of the source code being kept closed. And back in the days when memory was measured in kilobytes and hard disk space in megabytes, it was even feasible to examine code with a disassembler {some said only woosses needed a disassembler, real programmers knew the opcodes off by heart} to study what it did and how.
In any field besides computing, this business practice -- creating artificial obsolescence and locking out third-party spares -- would be illegal. Sure, there are some "safety critical" spare parts that you often can only get from the manufacturer, but the key thing here is that other parties are not excluded on the whim of the manufacturer but by the realities of the market. {Anybody could make a replacement circuit board for a Glow-Worm boiler, but it would have to go through mandatory testing procedures [which are not stipulated by Glow-Worm but by BSI], otherwise fitting it would invalidate the approval on the appliance and lead to Big Trouble should a gas explosion occur anywhere in the vicinity whether or not it was anything to do with the use of "pattern parts". Glow-Worm's contract with their controls manufacturer gives them exclusivity, so the manufacturer can't knock out spares on the side [well, except to employees whose homes are heated by Glow-Worm boilers
If we were starting all over again, and I was Minister of I.T., then I would pass a law stating that the administrator of a computer has the right to view and, if necessary, alter the source code of any software running on it {Stallman's Freedom #1}. I have seen so many problems with closed-source software that would never have existed if the person with the problem had access to the source code, that I am convinced it does more harm than good.
What I find really depressing is that Gates wasn't dragged into the gents after that meeting, and given a Bloody Good Kicking and a couple of head-flushings.
If the Courts had ruled that software was indeed meant for sharing, things might well have turned out very differently.
Talking of things turning out differently, has there ever been a case of someone taking a software vendor to court in an attempt to get them to disclose details of the source code?
Small nitpick: they did not prove that there was no aether. They proved that if the aether existed, it would be impossible to detect.
It's Occam's Razor that suggests that the aether might just as well not exist if it can't be detected {if there was no alternative explanation for propagation of electromagnetic waves that did not depend on the existence of the aether, that would count as a method of detection in its own right}.
If you know that other people could make money supporting your buggy software, it strongly disincentivises you to make it buggy in the first place. The only time there is money to be made out of bad software is when the only people who can support that software are chosen by you. This is how the closed-source software industry works.
If there is a piece of software that people would like to be able to know does its job properly, but those people are not in a position to be able to determine for themselves how properly it does its job, then there is value in providing that assurance. As a competent programmer, you should be able to sell the service of independently auditing software that you did not write.
No. Regardless of what happens to space-time, electromagnetic radiation of any description will always travel at 299 792 458 metres a second through a vacuum {or that amount divided by the refractive index of the material when travelling through matter}. If some weird phenomenon makes a second last for a shorter amount of time than usual, then a metre will not be so long a distance either; because however far light travelled 1 / 299 792 458 m. in that time, which was not as long as a usual second, is a metre by definition, even if it is shorter than a usual metre.
Makes me wonder why we don't get, say, four "upward" mod points and only one "downward" mod point. Or three and two. That might help discourage malicious downmoderation.
The first plot hole I spotted in that book was that Dan Brown apparently seems to think that the Spanish coin is called the peseta.
There are other holes that you could drive a bus through sideways. One of those artic buses they have on the Continent, even. I'm not going to enumerate them here though because if I tried, I'd miss loads and get mod'ed down as well as corrected. Suffice it to say that I won't be reading any more Dan Brown. I enjoyed Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code in spite of nagging doubts; but if he can make such basic mistakes as the ones I spotted in D.F., then what other mistakes has he made besides the one-dimensional stereotyped characters?
Well, if the USA didn't go throwing its weight around like a big fat playground bully, and the UK didn't go around licking the USA's arse, then maybe people might not actually want to go flying planes into skyscrapers or riding on the tube with a rucksack full of dynamite. Somebody in authority must have been warned about the attacks of 11/9 and 7/7 -- you don't accomplish anything politically by just attacking someone for no reason. The attacks can only have been the "..... or else" part of an ultimatum.
I always said the IRA shouldn't have decommissioned so much as a pea-shooter until the Green, White and Gold were flying over the Six Counties. England -- more specifically, London -- set the whole thing up for basically selfish, personal reasons. Even the Church of England is the least "Protestant" of all the world's reformed churches, and probably will reunite with the Roman Catholic Church, once they get their heads down from out of their arseholes and start ordaining women priests.
And talking of getting heads down from up arses, the UK seriously needs to split up with the USA and get back to talking to our European neighbours. With specific regard to two things: (1) a total, EU-wide ban on the import of goods produced in conditions which would be illegal within the EU {we should not be exporting unhealthy, dangerous, immoral and polluting practices anywhere}; and (2) a strategy for the cessation of petroleum usage and transition to biomass fuels within the EU {when the oil runs out, we really don't want to be involved in the series of bloodier and bloodier battles for the last few drops}.
Obviously he was attempting to assert his innocence by putting as much daylight as possible between the Old Bill and himself. It's an instinctive reaction. See a copper => run like buggery. In a country where you can be born, live and die without ever coming near a real live firearm, nobody expects to be shot at.