I can say with a fair amount of certainty that there is no country in Asia that has a Phd program on par with the average US Phd program. In fact, that statement is true for most of the world, England being the closest to America. Education inside the states and outside of the states are two vastly different things and have vastly different requirements. If you become educated in America, you will typically be more well rounded than getting an education from any other country, as a result you can typically apply your skills and knowledge to new areas because you are familiar with many different fields.In many other countries it is pretty much, this is what you will be doing in life so this is what you will learn... very few countries push learning for the sake of learning like America does (despite its sometimes bad reputation, America's higher education system *on average* is by far the best in the world). Learning for the sake of learning may seem useless to some until you realize that this is typically where innovation comes from. Many other countries inflate their numbers too, i.e. many Asian countries starting at a certain year begin to take out the bottom 10% of students and put them into the workforce or training for the workforce. This happens year after year so by the time highschool or college level education is reached, only round the top 15% are even allowed to participate. So when you read that high school students from have scores in some subject that are 3 times the average american high school student... it only takes into account the top 15% of the country versus the average American student. Regards, Steve
Hmm... maybe if the GP restated it as widespread law breaking of victimless crimes implies that said law is too oppressive, essentially turning law abiding citizens into victims. It severely narrows down the number and types of crimes covered. And no, copyright theft does not have a victim, noone loses anything. Regards, Steve
On the site it says that they have spam filtering, all data has an expiration date, and some other forms of quality control. Looks like they are prepared for this. Regards, Steve
I've had more success with usb and audio under linux than on windows. Sounds to me like you don't know what you are talking about. Use a distro designed for the desktop like Fedora, Ubuntu, or Mandriva. Regards, Steve
Except that Red Hat has been around for 12 years and already had its bubble back during the dotcom. At one point Red Hat was worth around $125 a share. Any company that survived the bubble can survive anything. Regards, Steve
They named a new board member that investors have yet to see proven. This happens everytime any company makes some kind of change like that. Look at their 6 month stock history...they are doing excellent, a lot better than Novell, and most tech companies. Anyone who judges a stock based on one day's values and one downgrade does not understand the stock market... Regards, Steve
Red Hat's support wins awards year over year. I'm not sure what you're talking about. The only other company I've ever seen have as good support as Red Hat, is Veritas. Regards, Steve
You read the bible based on assumptions. You can not prove those assumptions. I am the second coming of god, disprove it... thats right, you can't. And just like Jesus did in the bible, if you test me I'll tell you not to test the lord. So I can make all the claims I want and tell you that you aren't allowed to test them... your only choice is to hope that what your parents have told you your whole life is right. If someone gave me a bible and changed around a few names, I'd think it was another epic poem by Homer. I made no claims about my intellignece, I simply implied that those who believe simply because they are told to believe don't deserve their brain. You cannot read the bible and come to a conclusion about its legitimacy. In order to prove something, it has to be proven using something else, disconnected. I can say all humans are 6 ft. tall, then look at myself and consider that a proof... but I'd be dead wrong. The way religion is set up, you can never prove or disprove its basis. It is like Santa or the Easter Bunny... you can never prove they don't exist, you just assume that based on popular oppinion they don't. Anything that you could say to try and prove that Santa doesn't exist can be refuted, maybe he's tired and taking a break, maybe he delivers presents to everyone except to you while the rest of the world is in on a giant conspiracy to lie to you about it... it could go on forever. People want more to life than there is, they want to be special, they want a purpose. People have the balls to claim that they are designed in the form of God, what kind of self-serving bullshit is that? That claim requires alot of balls. Anyway... considering how often the bible has been translated and edited and modified by various authorities who felt it necessary to make it fit their views, not to mention a few of the languages originally written in no longer exist, I'd read that book with a grain of salt. One example of horrific editorializing by the church is with the book of St. Thomas. It is one of the few books that depicts Jesus in his teens, it would of helped fill in the gap between his childhood and manhood. The church disallowed it because it showed Jesus abusing his powers, which considering Jesus is part human and a teen seems completely natural to me, but the church thought people would use it to justify doing misdeeds because even Jesus got away with at some parts in his life. The bible was put together with the intention of control in mind. The church wants people to fear, because then the church can control. Context is everything, and the bible lacks it. You only see what the church wants you to see. Regards, Steve
WTF?! Did God tell you he wrote the bible or had any role in it whatsoever? Oh wait... you only assume that because you've been told it your whole life. Regards, Steve
Everyone compares APT to RPM, you are wrong. Compare apt to yum, apt handles dependencies for deb and yum handles dependencies for rpm. If you go grab a random DEB off the net, you'll have dependency hell too. The problems you speak of haven't existed for years. Red Hat is also more free than Ubuntu, which infringes on several patents. Red Hat has better hardware support, it has the support base, the community and the ease of use. Not to mention Red Hat gave 2 million dollars in funding to the charity making these laptops. The more I hear people complain about Red Hat, the more I realize they either listen to FUD too much or haven't used it in years. In case folks forgot, Debian had plenty of its own problems a half decade to a decade ago, and even today. Ubunutu is currently the flavor of the day, just like Gentoo was 12 months ago. Red Hat has shown consistency. When you've been around as long as Red Hat, its assumed a mistake will be made here or there,but they've always more than made up for it and considering all they provide for the community (They don't just package up other people's code and call it a distro, they actually code large portions of it themselves and then give it away) they deserve more slack from/.
Here is an excerpt from a previous post of mine, maybe this will help:
For some examples of living transitional species, look at dogs and wolves (which can be interbred), modern agriculture, and a few species of squirrels( On different sides of the Grand Canyon you'll find nearly identical squirrels, the difference being that on the side of the canyon that is higher, it is colder and you see that over time they've developed traits suited more for the climate and eventually became an individual species. Also if you take certain species of squirrels from say Pennsylvania and mate them with that same species from Ohio, they can mate fine, but try to mate it with a squirrel of the same species from California and it will most likely fail or be extremely hard to get to work because this species is on the verge of speciation where they form into two separate species that can no longer breed together.)
Anyone who claims that there is no evidence of transistional fossils or species is just plain and simple repeating non-sense, but no matter how much you say, it isn't true. Here is the known cladogram for just dinosauria, look at all transitions, and these are just the ones that have been found and proven, there are still large parts of the earth left to search, not to mention under the thousands of miles of ice at the poles which are currently unreachable but in the age of the dinosaurs were most liklely prolific with life. You kind find similar diagrams for *every* single species. When combined, it is huge, one of the biggest and best documented diagrams in all of man's history.
Hereis a very truncated version of the cladogram for modern killer whales, the full cladogram contains significantly more detail. The things I present here are just the beginning, actually look at the science in depth and realize what a well founded and proven theory evolution is.
The "Godzilla" croc doesn't go against evolution. Read this for one example of convergent evolution, which is what happened with this croc (having fish like and carnivorous features due to the niche it lived in). I have a feeling that certain aspects of the findings are being sensationalized by the media for headlines, i.e. the "Godzilla" nickname implies certain things about the croc that just aren't true, and the media is paying too much attention to the nickname. The species btw did not appear out of nowhere:) It was similar enough to previous species that it already was in a Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, and Sub-Family. It only was given a genus and species, implying that it has more similarities than differences with already found fossils. Keep in mind though that paleontology is under 200 years old, so there still is alot to be uncovered... finding a brand new never before seen animal isn't that far fetched, further research and explanation usually fills in the holes if there are any. Regards, Steve
Nice response, its good to see people still think out responses on/.:-) Microevolution *is* undisputed though. You are the combination of DNA with a chance of minor mutations. You are a new combination, if this new combination turns out to be neutral or positive you will most likely go on to reproduce and spread those good genes. If this new mutation is negative, you will in many cases die (often before you are even born, sometimes after you are born but with severe deformaties, either mentally or phsyically) before ever reproducing thus not spreading those bad genes on. Your birth was microevolution in work. If you don't like that, then go to any university and sign up for a curriculum that will let you force the evolution of flys in a lab. You can observe many species of flys evolving in real time, or even easier is bacteria. Microevolution is just the combination of DNA with random mutations and typically from two distinct sources. Those random mutations are few, and only about 5% turn out to be negative. 90% are neutral and 5% are positive (Those numbers are very rough figures +-2-3%). I have yet to see any truly scientific work take a theory from evolution and show that it is wrong, most use a straw man argument or some other weak basis. I am a practicing Roman Catholic, I believe in God, I go to church, but this intelligent design stuff is nonsense. It upsets me to see people blinded by faith. Regards, Steve
Wow systemimager seems pretty nice, thanks for the link.
Fedora does have some pretty excellent QA. As you can see from their schedule, in about two days they start development freezes and the next 3 months is pure testing and bug fixing (divided into 3 stages). I've never had any problems upgrading. Officially you are supposed to use the CDs but you can use yum too. If you're used to Debian, it may take a little before you get used to the Fedora way of doing things, which was frustrating for me at first, but its really not bad.
I probably did just get burned by a bad package, but it left a pretty bad taste in my mouth:) #debian can be a rough place.
Not sure about enlightenment, I've only used it to see what new neat effects rasterman added, then go back to a regular DE. But as far as 3rd party repos go, DAG and FreshRPMS, are excellent places. For legal reasons, Red Hat can't host certain programs, so using a 3rd party repo is pretty typical under Fedora. That is one thing you'll notice that is different, but the default repos have tons of software too.
Saying Ubuntu doesnt take security serious enough was a little too harsh, but they do seem to have quite an abundance of security notifications and are a little behind getting out patches. I'm just used to Fedora getting out patches right away, there was an article a few months back on/. that showed Red Hat typically gets patches out fastest, followed by Novell who is sometimes 2-3 days later (in most cases its much closer though), and then followed by the others. As long as they all get patched in the end, I dont care:) But Fedora comes standard with SELinux and a great default policy, they also compile all major public facing services with code fortifying options, running with exec-shield and randomized memory mappings. This makes most of the security notices for Fedora meaningless anyway because often the problem cant be exploited. All of this is implemented without stepping on the user. Fedora takes security extremely serious which I like, and they implement it in a way that stays out of your way. I just find it wierd that a desktop distro like Ubunutu that claims to be a good desktop OS with ease of use doesn't implement certain security features for users, like SELinux, and then allow easy configuration of it like is done in Fedora. Ubunutu's security track record isn't bad though.
There are certainly things I don't like about Fedora, but its always worked well for me, nothing really worth complaining about. If you do give it a shot, just keep in mind that Fedora and Debian do certain things differently, it can be frustrating at first;) Fedora has some neat things like the directory server and virtualization, you should check out their website. And yea I agree, distro wars are silly. Regards, Steve
You are comparing apt to RPM, you should be comparing apt to yum. They both do the same thing. RPM is like DEB, and they both suffer from dependency hell without their associated apt or yum:) (yum handles RPM dependencies and downloads the packages automatically, apt handles DEB dependencies and downloads the packages automatically)
Also, a server install of RHEL can take up under 100 megs. Not sure when the last time you tried it was, but if it hasnt been for 3 or 4 years I recommend it. You can either say "Give me everything including the kitchen sink" or "Give me the bare minimum, I only have the first cd, I'll install the other stuff through yum". Both distros though definitly have their place. Regards, Steve
Its funny how you just assume Debian provides a "better system". I used to run Fedora and Debian side by side, but anything other than Debian stable would break my system monthly. I had a lot of things installed on it, but nothing too exotic. I got sick of going to #debian and getting blasted for expecting stability if I'm not running Debian Stable, and than being told to fix it myself or that I should have read < insert link > before I went updating. The truth is that the Debian community is a bunch of elitists. My Fedora server just runs nice and silent without me having to do anything, updates itself and things don't break because the packages are well tested. Debian has reported several times that they are running short on help, they don't have the resources to put quality into their 10,000 packages. Fedora comes with a standard yum repository that has thousands of apps, and adding a second repo, like DAG's or the soon to released RPMForge, puts the number of available apps on par, if not above, that of Debian. As it stands right now, all my servers and laptop run Fedora. Debian doesn't cut it anymore, and Ubuntu isn't server oriented, but even on the desktop side of things Ubuntu doesn't take security serious enough. Also, you can praise apt all you want, but as anyone who has any experience with it knows, the second apt breaks it breaks like hell and does not want to be fixed. Its crazy that some users in #debian told me they've spent weeks figuring out what was wrong and fixing apt and that I should just do the same if it breaks. Screw that, things like that don't happen on Fedora. And as far as installing goes... Ubunutu is not easier and is severly lacking. To install than Red Hat is easy as hell even if you're installing it on a few hundred machines at once, the gui, text mode, or kickstart are all easy to work with. Regards, Steve
Sounds like more data that evolution can't really explain.
The quote said "don't yet know". They are still examining its environment and surrounding areas, hypothesizing and testing. This is what intelligent folk do, they don't just assume that since they don't understand the answer that some magical entity did it.
Oooohh, "sophisticated software." I trust we'll hear more about the science of how they "determined its lineage". I'm a software engineer and "sophisticated software" doesn't impress me... I want to know what this software actually did.
The sophisticated software they used is probably more complex than anything you've ever written. Bones and features essentially make a "fingerprint" of sorts. A skull in particular requires more than enough information to identify a species based on things like antoribital/portorbital fenestrae, anapsid, diapsid features, bone structure, jaw structure (herbivores chew flat, carnivores tend to chew like scissors, but within species it become even more detailed), arches, etc... These features are enough to classify a species according to modern cladistics. The software used, assists in comparing bone features with the hundreds of thousands of other fossils in the database, which also proves consistency.
Still interested in how they concluded that based on the skull. Well this is actually the 3rd fossil they've found in the past decade. This one had the most complete skull. Regardless, even if all you had was the skull and it was classified, using statistics you can get a good idea of the size of the animal. This has been proven to be accurate hundreds of thousands of times. Statistics are very useful for many things, there is also a function of the size an animal determined by the size of the landmass it lived on, and the general intelligence of an animal based on its skull size to rest of body. I am only barely touching the surface of the many techniques used in modern paleontology though. It is a quite complete and understood thing.
So this thing basically contradicts everything we think we know about crocs, but dang it, evolution is right so this is just amazing, isn't it? No actually they asked someone who is familiar with crocs how they would improve it, essentially they asked an intelligent designer what they would improve and the intelligent designer implied that it would not have been this. Therefore further giving credibility that evolution is not an intelligent process, but rather random and "bad" mutations die off. So far nothing contradicts this.
And as far as the unpredictable comment goes, I couldn't find it in the articles, but I may have simply missed it. Whoever said that, I'm not sure what the context was, but either they were blatantly wrong, misquoted, or trying to make this finding seem mystical in some fashion. Evolution has been used to predict literally millions of results, all of which have been accurate.
You can deny it all you want, but you'd be wrong. Some people find ignorance bliss, and if that is how you want to live life, whatever. But Evolution in an undisputed theory, I would put the my life and the life of my loved ones on it. You are a direct result of microevolution, this is undisputed. But many microevolutions over a period of time result in large changes. If you take the sum of any number greater than 0, regardless of how small it is, to infinity or some arbitraily large number, you will get another arbitraily large number. These evolutionary changes happened on a scale too large for many humans to comprehend. Also most humans are selfish and ignorant beings who have enough balls to claim that they were designed in the form of God. You are not as special as you think you are, you are the result of a series of random, yet directed, mutations. Get over it, you are not as important in the scheme of things as you want to be. Regards, Steve
While this isn't an interesting find because of its size, it does add to the credibility of evolution. This species is similar to ancient crocodiles, which also had more features in common with fish, i.e. their tails, but (in addition to some other changes) this fossil has a unique skull. This is a great example of another transitional fossil to add to the record, and this find follows what evolution predicted to the "T". This fossil is exactly what one form of evolution predicts, specifically convergent evolution.
For those who don't know, evolution encompasses three basic principles, or "subgroups" for lack of a better word, of evolution that further refine, explain, and predict various mutations. The other two are divergent evolution and what is often referred to as coevolution (a parasite and a host, predator and prey, or animals and flowers that depend on each other for pollination or other things often evolve in response to each other over millions of years). Granted Evolution encompasses much more than the tiny fraction of a percent mentioned here.
Evolution is such a well studied and useful science, its ashame that so many ignorant people don't understand it like they claim they do. They don't know about the 10's of thousands of transitional fossils, they haven't seen the proof, yet alone understand it. At this point in the game, there really is no arguing against evolution in any place where real science is practiced, its like arguing against gravity. These I.D. people don't realize how stupid they are making themselves look. This isn't meant to be inflammatory, its just some people need to wake the hell up. Regards, Steve
In case you hadn't heard... several US companies already have working quantum computers. They are all very simple, but I know IBM has like a 5-bit quantum computer that can factor very small numbers (I believe they factored the number 15 with it). There are other startups that have quantum computers of a few more bits that can do simple things like addition. It is not a matter of "if" anymore, but "when". There are only a few hurdles left to come over, mainly stability. Foreign countries are also doing research into QC, but kind of like the atom bomb the U.S. is slightly ahead of the competition. For all we know, some DARPA project already has working quantum computers and that is why the NSA doesn't care about exporting public key crypto anymore. It took 50 years for the stealth bomber to be made public, I'd imagine something like quantum computing would be held secret as long as possible. Regards, Steve
Its the same in America, this is why EULAs would never hold up if taken to court. In a worst case scenario, claim that you were drunk while clicking the button, a contract is not enforcable if you are intoxicated while agreeing to it. Read this. Regards, Steve
Everyone in America does have pretty much the same chance of success, the system is designed that way. If you are motivated enough you can become rich, or at least well off. I live in Philadelphia and there are plenty of stories of homeless people or folks who were on welfare and became motivated enough to start there own business, even if its just a corner store. There are plenty of people who grew up in the lower-middle class, and now are millionaires. And this is just from my one city that I've lived in my whole life. One friend of mine is doing okay financially, in the past few years he's gotten into real estate, now he is going in on a hotel with 2 other guys for about 3.5 million dollars. That is a lot of money for a middle class guy, but he has a plan that the banks like and is getting full support from them. Of course there are plenty of folks that I grew up with that are doing miserable too. I've had kids I went to highschool with dry my car years later as I pulled out of a carwash, or put my groceries in a bag when I went food shopping. Plenty of them became drug addicts, or settled for mediocre jobs. It really comes down to the fact of whether or not you want to succeed. Most people are lazy and not willing to put in the effort. In America all you have to do is think of a good idea and put in 10% more effort than everyone else and you'll set yourself far apart from them, usually catching the eye of a few investors along the way. If you want the education, the U.S. will give it you, or you can teach yourself by going to a local library. In America, you have access to everything you need even if you dont have it right now, you can get the knowledge and there is always somebody willing to throw money at just about any idea. The deciding factor is really some people put in the effort, and some don't. I've seen the results of this hundreds of times. Unfortunately it isn't necessarily the same situation in many European countries, but I'd venture to guess that if you tried hard enough you could pull it off just as well, its just European governments tend to get in your way or lower your motivation by giving you just enough money to no longer be motivated. Regards, Steve
Slashdot Mirror
I can say with a fair amount of certainty that there is no country in Asia that has a Phd program on par with the average US Phd program. In fact, that statement is true for most of the world, England being the closest to America. Education inside the states and outside of the states are two vastly different things and have vastly different requirements. If you become educated in America, you will typically be more well rounded than getting an education from any other country, as a result you can typically apply your skills and knowledge to new areas because you are familiar with many different fields.In many other countries it is pretty much, this is what you will be doing in life so this is what you will learn... very few countries push learning for the sake of learning like America does (despite its sometimes bad reputation, America's higher education system *on average* is by far the best in the world). Learning for the sake of learning may seem useless to some until you realize that this is typically where innovation comes from. Many other countries inflate their numbers too, i.e. many Asian countries starting at a certain year begin to take out the bottom 10% of students and put them into the workforce or training for the workforce. This happens year after year so by the time highschool or college level education is reached, only round the top 15% are even allowed to participate. So when you read that high school students from have scores in some subject that are 3 times the average american high school student... it only takes into account the top 15% of the country versus the average American student.
Regards,
Steve
Hmm... maybe if the GP restated it as widespread law breaking of victimless crimes implies that said law is too oppressive, essentially turning law abiding citizens into victims. It severely narrows down the number and types of crimes covered. And no, copyright theft does not have a victim, noone loses anything.
Regards,
Steve
Last I checked, Britain was trying to outlaw religious jokes because they can be interpreted as terroristic threats.
Regards,
Steve
On the site it says that they have spam filtering, all data has an expiration date, and some other forms of quality control. Looks like they are prepared for this.
Regards,
Steve
Don't forget attempting to outlaw religious jokes, as they can be taken as terroristic or hate inspired threats.
Regards,
Steve
I've had more success with usb and audio under linux than on windows. Sounds to me like you don't know what you are talking about. Use a distro designed for the desktop like Fedora, Ubuntu, or Mandriva.
Regards,
Steve
Except that Red Hat has been around for 12 years and already had its bubble back during the dotcom. At one point Red Hat was worth around $125 a share. Any company that survived the bubble can survive anything.
Regards,
Steve
They named a new board member that investors have yet to see proven. This happens everytime any company makes some kind of change like that. Look at their 6 month stock history...they are doing excellent, a lot better than Novell, and most tech companies. Anyone who judges a stock based on one day's values and one downgrade does not understand the stock market...
Regards,
Steve
Red Hat's support wins awards year over year. I'm not sure what you're talking about. The only other company I've ever seen have as good support as Red Hat, is Veritas.
Regards,
Steve
You read the bible based on assumptions. You can not prove those assumptions. I am the second coming of god, disprove it... thats right, you can't. And just like Jesus did in the bible, if you test me I'll tell you not to test the lord. So I can make all the claims I want and tell you that you aren't allowed to test them... your only choice is to hope that what your parents have told you your whole life is right. If someone gave me a bible and changed around a few names, I'd think it was another epic poem by Homer. I made no claims about my intellignece, I simply implied that those who believe simply because they are told to believe don't deserve their brain. You cannot read the bible and come to a conclusion about its legitimacy. In order to prove something, it has to be proven using something else, disconnected. I can say all humans are 6 ft. tall, then look at myself and consider that a proof... but I'd be dead wrong. The way religion is set up, you can never prove or disprove its basis. It is like Santa or the Easter Bunny... you can never prove they don't exist, you just assume that based on popular oppinion they don't. Anything that you could say to try and prove that Santa doesn't exist can be refuted, maybe he's tired and taking a break, maybe he delivers presents to everyone except to you while the rest of the world is in on a giant conspiracy to lie to you about it... it could go on forever. People want more to life than there is, they want to be special, they want a purpose. People have the balls to claim that they are designed in the form of God, what kind of self-serving bullshit is that? That claim requires alot of balls. Anyway... considering how often the bible has been translated and edited and modified by various authorities who felt it necessary to make it fit their views, not to mention a few of the languages originally written in no longer exist, I'd read that book with a grain of salt. One example of horrific editorializing by the church is with the book of St. Thomas. It is one of the few books that depicts Jesus in his teens, it would of helped fill in the gap between his childhood and manhood. The church disallowed it because it showed Jesus abusing his powers, which considering Jesus is part human and a teen seems completely natural to me, but the church thought people would use it to justify doing misdeeds because even Jesus got away with at some parts in his life. The bible was put together with the intention of control in mind. The church wants people to fear, because then the church can control. Context is everything, and the bible lacks it. You only see what the church wants you to see.
Regards,
Steve
WTF?! Did God tell you he wrote the bible or had any role in it whatsoever? Oh wait... you only assume that because you've been told it your whole life.
Regards,
Steve
Everyone compares APT to RPM, you are wrong. Compare apt to yum, apt handles dependencies for deb and yum handles dependencies for rpm. If you go grab a random DEB off the net, you'll have dependency hell too. The problems you speak of haven't existed for years. Red Hat is also more free than Ubuntu, which infringes on several patents. Red Hat has better hardware support, it has the support base, the community and the ease of use. Not to mention Red Hat gave 2 million dollars in funding to the charity making these laptops. The more I hear people complain about Red Hat, the more I realize they either listen to FUD too much or haven't used it in years. In case folks forgot, Debian had plenty of its own problems a half decade to a decade ago, and even today. Ubunutu is currently the flavor of the day, just like Gentoo was 12 months ago. Red Hat has shown consistency. When you've been around as long as Red Hat, its assumed a mistake will be made here or there,but they've always more than made up for it and considering all they provide for the community (They don't just package up other people's code and call it a distro, they actually code large portions of it themselves and then give it away) they deserve more slack from /.
Regards,
Steve
Here is an excerpt from a previous post of mine, maybe this will help:
:) It was similar enough to previous species that it already was in a Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, and Sub-Family. It only was given a genus and species, implying that it has more similarities than differences with already found fossils. Keep in mind though that paleontology is under 200 years old, so there still is alot to be uncovered... finding a brand new never before seen animal isn't that far fetched, further research and explanation usually fills in the holes if there are any.
For some examples of living transitional species, look at dogs and wolves (which can be interbred), modern agriculture, and a few species of squirrels( On different sides of the Grand Canyon you'll find nearly identical squirrels, the difference being that on the side of the canyon that is higher, it is colder and you see that over time they've developed traits suited more for the climate and eventually became an individual species. Also if you take certain species of squirrels from say Pennsylvania and mate them with that same species from Ohio, they can mate fine, but try to mate it with a squirrel of the same species from California and it will most likely fail or be extremely hard to get to work because this species is on the verge of speciation where they form into two separate species that can no longer breed together.)
Anyone who claims that there is no evidence of transistional fossils or species is just plain and simple repeating non-sense, but no matter how much you say, it isn't true. Here is the known cladogram for just dinosauria, look at all transitions, and these are just the ones that have been found and proven, there are still large parts of the earth left to search, not to mention under the thousands of miles of ice at the poles which are currently unreachable but in the age of the dinosaurs were most liklely prolific with life. You kind find similar diagrams for *every* single species. When combined, it is huge, one of the biggest and best documented diagrams in all of man's history.
Hereis a very truncated version of the cladogram for modern killer whales, the full cladogram contains significantly more detail. The things I present here are just the beginning, actually look at the science in depth and realize what a well founded and proven theory evolution is.
The "Godzilla" croc doesn't go against evolution. Read this for one example of convergent evolution, which is what happened with this croc (having fish like and carnivorous features due to the niche it lived in). I have a feeling that certain aspects of the findings are being sensationalized by the media for headlines, i.e. the "Godzilla" nickname implies certain things about the croc that just aren't true, and the media is paying too much attention to the nickname. The species btw did not appear out of nowhere
Regards,
Steve
Nice response, its good to see people still think out responses on /. :-) Microevolution *is* undisputed though. You are the combination of DNA with a chance of minor mutations. You are a new combination, if this new combination turns out to be neutral or positive you will most likely go on to reproduce and spread those good genes. If this new mutation is negative, you will in many cases die (often before you are even born, sometimes after you are born but with severe deformaties, either mentally or phsyically) before ever reproducing thus not spreading those bad genes on. Your birth was microevolution in work. If you don't like that, then go to any university and sign up for a curriculum that will let you force the evolution of flys in a lab. You can observe many species of flys evolving in real time, or even easier is bacteria. Microevolution is just the combination of DNA with random mutations and typically from two distinct sources. Those random mutations are few, and only about 5% turn out to be negative. 90% are neutral and 5% are positive (Those numbers are very rough figures +-2-3%). I have yet to see any truly scientific work take a theory from evolution and show that it is wrong, most use a straw man argument or some other weak basis. I am a practicing Roman Catholic, I believe in God, I go to church, but this intelligent design stuff is nonsense. It upsets me to see people blinded by faith.
Regards,
Steve
Wow systemimager seems pretty nice, thanks for the link.
:) #debian can be a rough place.
/. that showed Red Hat typically gets patches out fastest, followed by Novell who is sometimes 2-3 days later (in most cases its much closer though), and then followed by the others. As long as they all get patched in the end, I dont care :) But Fedora comes standard with SELinux and a great default policy, they also compile all major public facing services with code fortifying options, running with exec-shield and randomized memory mappings. This makes most of the security notices for Fedora meaningless anyway because often the problem cant be exploited. All of this is implemented without stepping on the user. Fedora takes security extremely serious which I like, and they implement it in a way that stays out of your way. I just find it wierd that a desktop distro like Ubunutu that claims to be a good desktop OS with ease of use doesn't implement certain security features for users, like SELinux, and then allow easy configuration of it like is done in Fedora. Ubunutu's security track record isn't bad though.
;) Fedora has some neat things like the directory server and virtualization, you should check out their website. And yea I agree, distro wars are silly.
Fedora does have some pretty excellent QA. As you can see from their schedule, in about two days they start development freezes and the next 3 months is pure testing and bug fixing (divided into 3 stages). I've never had any problems upgrading. Officially you are supposed to use the CDs but you can use yum too. If you're used to Debian, it may take a little before you get used to the Fedora way of doing things, which was frustrating for me at first, but its really not bad.
I probably did just get burned by a bad package, but it left a pretty bad taste in my mouth
Not sure about enlightenment, I've only used it to see what new neat effects rasterman added, then go back to a regular DE. But as far as 3rd party repos go, DAG and FreshRPMS, are excellent places. For legal reasons, Red Hat can't host certain programs, so using a 3rd party repo is pretty typical under Fedora. That is one thing you'll notice that is different, but the default repos have tons of software too.
Saying Ubuntu doesnt take security serious enough was a little too harsh, but they do seem to have quite an abundance of security notifications and are a little behind getting out patches. I'm just used to Fedora getting out patches right away, there was an article a few months back on
There are certainly things I don't like about Fedora, but its always worked well for me, nothing really worth complaining about. If you do give it a shot, just keep in mind that Fedora and Debian do certain things differently, it can be frustrating at first
Regards,
Steve
You are comparing apt to RPM, you should be comparing apt to yum. They both do the same thing. RPM is like DEB, and they both suffer from dependency hell without their associated apt or yum :) (yum handles RPM dependencies and downloads the packages automatically, apt handles DEB dependencies and downloads the packages automatically)
Also, a server install of RHEL can take up under 100 megs. Not sure when the last time you tried it was, but if it hasnt been for 3 or 4 years I recommend it. You can either say "Give me everything including the kitchen sink" or "Give me the bare minimum, I only have the first cd, I'll install the other stuff through yum". Both distros though definitly have their place.
Regards,
Steve
Its funny how you just assume Debian provides a "better system". I used to run Fedora and Debian side by side, but anything other than Debian stable would break my system monthly. I had a lot of things installed on it, but nothing too exotic. I got sick of going to #debian and getting blasted for expecting stability if I'm not running Debian Stable, and than being told to fix it myself or that I should have read < insert link > before I went updating. The truth is that the Debian community is a bunch of elitists. My Fedora server just runs nice and silent without me having to do anything, updates itself and things don't break because the packages are well tested. Debian has reported several times that they are running short on help, they don't have the resources to put quality into their 10,000 packages. Fedora comes with a standard yum repository that has thousands of apps, and adding a second repo, like DAG's or the soon to released RPMForge, puts the number of available apps on par, if not above, that of Debian. As it stands right now, all my servers and laptop run Fedora. Debian doesn't cut it anymore, and Ubuntu isn't server oriented, but even on the desktop side of things Ubuntu doesn't take security serious enough. Also, you can praise apt all you want, but as anyone who has any experience with it knows, the second apt breaks it breaks like hell and does not want to be fixed. Its crazy that some users in #debian told me they've spent weeks figuring out what was wrong and fixing apt and that I should just do the same if it breaks. Screw that, things like that don't happen on Fedora. And as far as installing goes... Ubunutu is not easier and is severly lacking. To install than Red Hat is easy as hell even if you're installing it on a few hundred machines at once, the gui, text mode, or kickstart are all easy to work with.
Regards,
Steve
Sounds like more data that evolution can't really explain.
The quote said "don't yet know". They are still examining its environment and surrounding areas, hypothesizing and testing. This is what intelligent folk do, they don't just assume that since they don't understand the answer that some magical entity did it.
Oooohh, "sophisticated software." I trust we'll hear more about the science of how they "determined its lineage". I'm a software engineer and "sophisticated software" doesn't impress me... I want to know what this software actually did.
The sophisticated software they used is probably more complex than anything you've ever written. Bones and features essentially make a "fingerprint" of sorts. A skull in particular requires more than enough information to identify a species based on things like antoribital/portorbital fenestrae, anapsid, diapsid features, bone structure, jaw structure (herbivores chew flat, carnivores tend to chew like scissors, but within species it become even more detailed), arches, etc... These features are enough to classify a species according to modern cladistics. The software used, assists in comparing bone features with the hundreds of thousands of other fossils in the database, which also proves consistency.
Still interested in how they concluded that based on the skull. Well this is actually the 3rd fossil they've found in the past decade. This one had the most complete skull. Regardless, even if all you had was the skull and it was classified, using statistics you can get a good idea of the size of the animal. This has been proven to be accurate hundreds of thousands of times. Statistics are very useful for many things, there is also a function of the size an animal determined by the size of the landmass it lived on, and the general intelligence of an animal based on its skull size to rest of body. I am only barely touching the surface of the many techniques used in modern paleontology though. It is a quite complete and understood thing.
So this thing basically contradicts everything we think we know about crocs, but dang it, evolution is right so this is just amazing, isn't it? No actually they asked someone who is familiar with crocs how they would improve it, essentially they asked an intelligent designer what they would improve and the intelligent designer implied that it would not have been this. Therefore further giving credibility that evolution is not an intelligent process, but rather random and "bad" mutations die off. So far nothing contradicts this.
And as far as the unpredictable comment goes, I couldn't find it in the articles, but I may have simply missed it. Whoever said that, I'm not sure what the context was, but either they were blatantly wrong, misquoted, or trying to make this finding seem mystical in some fashion. Evolution has been used to predict literally millions of results, all of which have been accurate.
You can deny it all you want, but you'd be wrong. Some people find ignorance bliss, and if that is how you want to live life, whatever. But Evolution in an undisputed theory, I would put the my life and the life of my loved ones on it. You are a direct result of microevolution, this is undisputed. But many microevolutions over a period of time result in large changes. If you take the sum of any number greater than 0, regardless of how small it is, to infinity or some arbitraily large number, you will get another arbitraily large number. These evolutionary changes happened on a scale too large for many humans to comprehend. Also most humans are selfish and ignorant beings who have enough balls to claim that they were designed in the form of God. You are not as special as you think you are, you are the result of a series of random, yet directed, mutations. Get over it, you are not as important in the scheme of things as you want to be.
Regards,
Steve
I know you were joking but...
While this isn't an interesting find because of its size, it does add to the credibility of evolution. This species is similar to ancient crocodiles, which also had more features in common with fish, i.e. their tails, but (in addition to some other changes) this fossil has a unique skull. This is a great example of another transitional fossil to add to the record, and this find follows what evolution predicted to the "T". This fossil is exactly what one form of evolution predicts, specifically convergent evolution.
For those who don't know, evolution encompasses three basic principles, or "subgroups" for lack of a better word, of evolution that further refine, explain, and predict various mutations. The other two are divergent evolution and what is often referred to as coevolution (a parasite and a host, predator and prey, or animals and flowers that depend on each other for pollination or other things often evolve in response to each other over millions of years). Granted Evolution encompasses much more than the tiny fraction of a percent mentioned here.
Evolution is such a well studied and useful science, its ashame that so many ignorant people don't understand it like they claim they do. They don't know about the 10's of thousands of transitional fossils, they haven't seen the proof, yet alone understand it. At this point in the game, there really is no arguing against evolution in any place where real science is practiced, its like arguing against gravity. These I.D. people don't realize how stupid they are making themselves look. This isn't meant to be inflammatory, its just some people need to wake the hell up.
Regards,
Steve
If you have to ask then its not for you.
Regards,
Steve
In case you hadn't heard... several US companies already have working quantum computers. They are all very simple, but I know IBM has like a 5-bit quantum computer that can factor very small numbers (I believe they factored the number 15 with it). There are other startups that have quantum computers of a few more bits that can do simple things like addition. It is not a matter of "if" anymore, but "when". There are only a few hurdles left to come over, mainly stability. Foreign countries are also doing research into QC, but kind of like the atom bomb the U.S. is slightly ahead of the competition. For all we know, some DARPA project already has working quantum computers and that is why the NSA doesn't care about exporting public key crypto anymore. It took 50 years for the stealth bomber to be made public, I'd imagine something like quantum computing would be held secret as long as possible.
Regards,
Steve
It is the same in America. Read this.
Regards,
Steve
Its the same in America, this is why EULAs would never hold up if taken to court. In a worst case scenario, claim that you were drunk while clicking the button, a contract is not enforcable if you are intoxicated while agreeing to it. Read this.
Regards,
Steve
Everyone in America does have pretty much the same chance of success, the system is designed that way. If you are motivated enough you can become rich, or at least well off. I live in Philadelphia and there are plenty of stories of homeless people or folks who were on welfare and became motivated enough to start there own business, even if its just a corner store. There are plenty of people who grew up in the lower-middle class, and now are millionaires. And this is just from my one city that I've lived in my whole life. One friend of mine is doing okay financially, in the past few years he's gotten into real estate, now he is going in on a hotel with 2 other guys for about 3.5 million dollars. That is a lot of money for a middle class guy, but he has a plan that the banks like and is getting full support from them. Of course there are plenty of folks that I grew up with that are doing miserable too. I've had kids I went to highschool with dry my car years later as I pulled out of a carwash, or put my groceries in a bag when I went food shopping. Plenty of them became drug addicts, or settled for mediocre jobs. It really comes down to the fact of whether or not you want to succeed. Most people are lazy and not willing to put in the effort. In America all you have to do is think of a good idea and put in 10% more effort than everyone else and you'll set yourself far apart from them, usually catching the eye of a few investors along the way. If you want the education, the U.S. will give it you, or you can teach yourself by going to a local library. In America, you have access to everything you need even if you dont have it right now, you can get the knowledge and there is always somebody willing to throw money at just about any idea. The deciding factor is really some people put in the effort, and some don't. I've seen the results of this hundreds of times. Unfortunately it isn't necessarily the same situation in many European countries, but I'd venture to guess that if you tried hard enough you could pull it off just as well, its just European governments tend to get in your way or lower your motivation by giving you just enough money to no longer be motivated.
Regards,
Steve
You have to be married to register a new born child in Germany? Or did I read that wrong.
Regards,
Steve