Well, if you look at specifics, and ignore the big fat claims made generally, you can start to piece together why it would work, or at least better than it is now. Consider several types of people:
1. Penniless student.
2. OCD* Hacker.
3. Rich mamma's boy (or girl)
4. Regular folks with jobs, cars, families
Right now, tunes are available for download legitimately at $.99 a pop. Kids with money simply click on them and they own them. It's even more true with Adults who probably already have their CD collection filled out and just want a few rare tracks, but have no time to spend scouring P2P or Torrent sites. So that's your paying customer. You want to protect this market, both by good will to the patron and by NOT cannibalizing the market. They'll pay extra to quickly find the tune and for slightly better quality.
The starving student wants the latest tunes, but can't afford them. Life is always a toss up between time and money, so students spend their time finding the tunes illegally. Assuming they aren't little computer geniuses or CompSci majors, they rely on the whatever is out there while conscience takes a back seat to convenience. They'll take what they can get in terms of quality.
The hacker is rewarded not by having the music to listen to, but by building the library of pirated tunes. For him, it's not a matter of money, but of collecting the songs and sharing them. It's like the little dots on PacMan, he's wired to hunt and gather and show off his warez. Of course, I'm ignoring the black market in Asia that's got CD presses running 24/7 producing contra band, but American lawyers aren't going after these folks anyway.
Now, let's say that the labels plaster the internet with easy access low quality MP3s. The student will simply go to the fan sites and grab a copy to listen. He will probably grab new tunes and try them out. They get "air play", and no revenue was lost or cannibalized. Sure the rich kid might also download the freebie, but if iTunes is the pay-to-listen model (70% of online sales), he's still likely to pay for his music, buying directly from his music interface instead of his browser. He's also got the expensive Sennheiser headphones so 128bit music is only good enough to try out the tune, not add it to his collection.
The big question is how does this affect the hacker or OCD collector? There's no longer any reward in having rare tunes, because no tunes are rare and there's no reward for sharing because he's no longer a critical intermediary in the sharing process. Even without prosecuting the pirates, with free music in the stream, you've marginalized their efforts. Now the only pirates you have to worry about are on the high seas in and around Somalia.
So you haven't really lost anything, but what you did gain is that the rich kids, the actual customers, are hearing more tunes through the free play and are more likely to seek out new music to buy from their one click musical interface. It plays out well on regular PCs, Cell phones, and in the near future from the living room set top box. You're spending less on distribution, less on legal, and the labels can start realizing the tangible benefit of happy customers who aren't treated like criminals before they've even done anything wrong.
If the labels aren't winning right now (and they aren't, or these articles on/. wouldn't attract so much participation), then they should try something new and different. Setting aside the trial lawyers for a moment, their real adversary is the black market, so taking out that market should be central to their strategy. So, applying a bit of market kung fu by embracing the model instead of fighting a losing battle against it would go a long way in disabling their opponent.
"The concept sounds good but as with the bad files, some will still work around it."
The key is to recognize and work WITH human nature. If the labels stuff the pipe with bad files, they don't encourage anything positive. People would find ways to detect and flag them. On the other hand, if they flooded the P2P pipe with low quality, but genuine files, the need for pirated files would dry up over night. It would be too easy to get the GENUINE files, albeit low res, from ANYWHERE. The incentive to pirate disappears. Conceivably you could do the same with movies, standard def for free, high def for a cost.
Then, you capture all your real customers (high def) and treat your FUTURE customers well. Also on the upside is you can both advertise and control the releases. The Pirates lose ALL their power over the situation. Leaches slowly convert into customers. Good will abounds! Fire all your attorneys because you don't need them anymore.
BTW, don't think for a moment that even if they win a lawsuit against a single mother with three kids for $1M that they'll collect a penny. They'll just force the person into Bankruptcy. Which makes me wonder why they're doing the legal dance AT ALL!? Now that I think about it, they're nuts! Spend thousands, hundreds of thousands suing, get shafted through the bankruptcy, and poison their market along the way. In the mean time miss out on the biggest, most efficient distribution channel to ever present itself. Now I think I know where all the money went... Straight to the lawyers. Hatch should wise up, he's getting played a fool!
"Well, I'm not sure if that is a local (state) precedence or if that carry across the country. Anyways, that's true that they can't show a loss until you set up hit squads who change the model of business from offering quality entertainment for a fee to suing anyone you think isn't paying then settling for another large fee. That shows a loss as in a loss of sales because all of those who settled more or less agreed that they would have normally purchased the material if they hadn't pirated it."
First, for in-state litigation, local cases are going to take precedence, but where none exist, or nothing very similar exists, out-of-state cases may be used. Federal cases are preferred. Supreme Court cases always trump Appellate cases always trump lower court cases. And these days, Judges easily ignore the law, which means that statutory fines can be reduced (or increased). Commenting on this last issue, I hate to think that we are at the mercy of today's courts for application of the law.
To set aside legalize for a bit though, it's just a big extortion racket, and one that will eventually implode. Congress passed the Copyright Act early on in this country's history to make sure that there was incentive for artists, writers, musicians, to produce. That's probably a false conclusion because there's no shortage of "starving artists", but nonetheless, this fiat "monopoly" (the exclusive right to copy) is actually counter productive, because if you can't copy or perform works of others, they lose their ability to "advertise" their works and the artists end up with worthless, underutilized monopolies to keep all to themselves. That's why congress later introduced "compulsory licensing" to the Copyright Act. It gave radio and then television access to copyrighted materials without having to negotiate prices or get explicit permission.
My main contention with Lawyers that represent the labels is that the artists' remuneration is not their true agenda, but rather the survival of the cartel which was never the intent of the Copyright Act. I predict it will someday in the near future unravel because not only are the cartels disenfranchising their paying customers, but disaffecting their suppliers (musicians and movie studios). When the benefit of a label is outweighed by the burdensome cost, a new format or structure will rise to replace the rotting RIAA and MPIG.
For flooding the pipe, you suggested that it failed, but it was probably more the approach. Give people 128bit and those that want 256 bit will hear it, like it, and buy it while those that are satisfied with 128 bit never were their paying customers. Indistinguishable from AM radio's usefulness in promoting music. Don't give them bad files, that just perpetuates the toxic approach of suing your customers.
Good comments! These are real legal concepts and deserve examination. I believe what you're referring to is "Unjust Enrichment". There are two ways of looking at it. The first, is pure enrichment, for which you've given some really good examples. One example of this that is frequently used is where we combine our Lincolns and buy a $10 lottery ticket. I hold the ticket and it turns out to be a winner. I pay you back the $5 I "owe" you, and you only discover later when you see my BMW that I won the lottery. You can either rely upon a constructive trust as your argument, or you can use the Doctrine of Unjust Enrichment. Because there was no explicit agreement between us, you can't use the Statute of Frauds, and must rely upon Common Law to seek relief.
HOWEVER, this is NOT the case with copyright infringement. (C) infringement involves "Statutory" and "Provable" damages. Statutory damages are stated as say, $1,000 per incident (it's actually MUCH higher, but just for argument's sake, let's use $1000). No material evidence backing the claim, just it being written up in the statutes of the Copyright Act. Provable damages might involve an industry loss like those stated by Hatch. These are bogus and untenable claims because they aren't based on actual sales. They use obtuse and vague metrics and if every industry totaled their annual losses to this or that, it would be more than the entire planet makes or consumes in the same time period. As a judge, the only claim I would accept is demonstrable changes that could be directly attributed to a factor. For example, the RIAA shows it made $x in one year and $y the next. It coincides with server logs at Napster showing n files downloaded. ($x - $y)/n is the amount lost per download. But there must be some evidence and testimony that it wasn't because RIAA introduced crappy music or put rootkit on the CDs, or some other negligence on their part. Now, if they can prove Jane or Grandma Doe UPloaded 200 songs, they can calculate the actual damages or statistically valid anecdotal damages.
Going back to "Unjust Enrichment", the North Dakota Supreme Court came up with a 5 point test for the case. 1. Enrichment by Defendant, 2. Impoverishment by Plaintiff, and I forget 3 ad 4, but they were basically a requirement to prove that 1 and 2 were connected and 5 is that the claim cannot proceed based on Statute. But demonstrating IMPOVERISHMENT was part of the weight of the claim.
So, with that definition, unless you can prove the "impoverishment" (actual damages), you have no case. You have "conceptual" losses, but that's only compared against "conceptual enrichment". If people are selling bootleg CDs, that's one thing, but listening to music has no direct tangible benefit. It may actually have a cost if you are using local storage.
RIAA's best bet, with Music, is to flood the black market channels with low bit rate versions of the songs, with embedded adverts, get exposure for their artists, treat their patrons (customers) nicely, and then watch the sales tick back up to normal and fire those fargin' attorneys that are burying the industry. Matter of fact, I'm betting that if a single one of the labels broke ranks and started doing this, they'd propel their artists into such fame and success that the rest of the labels would abandon their current whiny bully tactics.
Anyway, I used to like Hatch, but I don't like Hatch's stance on any of this, he's really scraping the bottom of the barrel with his lies, damn lies, and statistics. If the economy lost 300,000 jobs and $16B, then where did it go? Nowhere you hack! People pay what they're willing to pay after they bought what was most important to them. Pirates don't buy software, music, and movies! Stop them from pirating, they still won't buy it.
The RIAA and MPIG needs to stop treating their customers like criminals and come to the realization that their sales go up when they make good products that entice people to crack open their wallets, not when they crack down on people and compel their wallets open. If anything has cost these trade groups and the industries they represent, it's the ill will of their potential customers. That in a nutshell is where the $16B and the 300,000 jobs went!
This is like GHWBush going to Japan and throwing up on the Prime Minister because the Japanese don't want our useless cars with the steering wheels on the wrong side. I can't even muster up a fake sob for these groups and it's shameful for Hatch to get sucked into their rhetoric for a crappy $7K rental feel.
I like the way this guy thinks. I recommend, however, that he rename his post "Motivating the Userbase" and this particular thread "Involve the Userbase". Later, I'm going to come back and rename my article, and start a new thread for which I'll recommend another name. That will give me 5 or 6 points towards a Chili's GC, right?
Strangely, I've worked within a mile of everyone of these companies. I worked across the street from SGI at Adobe when Adobe was in Mountain View. I worked across I-17 from SCO when I was at Starfish (Borland). And today, my company is HQ'd about a mile away from SCO/Caldera. Something strange about these companies. The CEO of SGI was alleged to be living high off the hog, throwing lavish parties, getting drunk, harassing his female staff, and at the same time building a new Corporate Plaza. Perhaps to the drunken sailors, it wasn't obvious the ship was sinking, but at least to me, the combination of extravagances and the distraction of constructing buildings instead of products spelled their eventual demise. In fact, it did mark their peak of relevance before a rapid plunge as they spent through all their fortunes amassed up to that time (in 1999, they actually posted a profit, but said profit came from subletting their office space).
For SCO, there wasn't as much money, but there was the distraction of law suits. The companies that have avoided this (MSFT, AAPL, ORCL, ADBE) have only succeeded by maintaining discipline and keeping focused on what they do that actually makes them money. It's hard to put a price on SGI's assets, and while IRIX must be worth something, it will eventually be worth nothing. Is SGI's name brand worth anything? Maybe to old-timers from ILM and some of the FX shops in Hollywood, but no more than Apple or Sun. I really wonder what Rackable benefits from that brand name?! To those that know enough of the inside story it's more a liability than an asset.
I don't have time right now for a lengthy response to each issue raised, though I wouldn't mind continuing the debate with you later - you refrain from pejoratives and hyperbole indicating if not a temporal maturity, at least an intellectual one and I appreciate that. I also appreciate that you provide some background and references rather than the standard everything-I-read-on-the-web-must-be-true bupkes that constantly pops up on blogs.
At any rate, I'll just address "entropy". Now I'm not a mathematician and certainly not a theoretical mathematician, so I'm going to have a hard time translating something like Entropy into an equation, but I do have 3/4s of an Electrical Engineering degree under my belt (don't ask why I dropped out in the 4th year, though it does have something to do with non-linear algebra) so I'm a bit better than a schlub when it comes to comprehending math, and I don't use the word "entropy" loosely. I'm specifically using it in the context of Newtonian physics and second law of thermodynamics (with credit to Joule and Carnot), where as a compliment to matter and energy, you can't move from an entropic state to one of less entropy without investing some energy, or as Newton's third law of motion put it, every action has an equal and opposite reaction and thus bodies in motion tend toward releasing kinetic energy rather than absorbing it and moving to a higher potential energy.
Quick example of entropy in action, drop a glass from a counter, it breaks (bonds broken, sound energy released, minor heat generated, glass chips scatter, etc.). Now pick up the glass shards, all of them if you can find them, raise the "pile" of glass 10 or 100 times higher than the original counter top to increase the available potential energy, drop them again. You can even put the pieces back in their original spots and do it again. Not one single bond will reform. It may seem obvious that it won't, but that's the point. The only way to pull entropy out of the given system is to meticulously re-assemble the glass and if there was a good bonding solvent, you could glue it back together. But you've transferred energy and organization from another system to achieve that.
I took enough chemistry to understand some quantum physics and know that moving to outer oribtals and creating long covalent bonds takes a molecule to a discrete state of higher potential energy (didn't this thread originally started with a discussion of forming fossil fuels under heat and pressure over time?). As it applies to speciation, evolution, and genetic mutations, I believe it is consistent with Newtonian physics that without an infusion of directed energy, molecular chains are going to tend towards breaking down rather than building up. That rather than moving towards complexity, objects, structures, and organisms tend toward simplicity or even chaos. That rather than self-composing, life decomposes. So whenever presented with a scientific conclusion that requires that disorder spontaneously move towards order without fully explaining the source of the energy or the intervention of an organizer, I'm going to immediately assume it's a premature conclusion and in the context of the scientific method, relegate it to a theory that still needs some work. I'll want to see some proof other than just anecdotes.
I'm also going to be suspicious of models that assume linear behavior outside of the observable linear range. This is why inductive reasoning is such a dangerous tool in the hands of science. The Challenger crew that died in 1986 can pretty much lay the blame for their deaths on this failure - the engineers (with the exception of the whistle blower, Roger Boisjoly, that got railroaded) assumed a linear behavior in the fuel tank seals success rate across ambient temperature ranges and failed to consider that even in Florida you can have a frosty morning (for an analysis http://www.onlineethics.org/cms/13470.aspx). In their risk calculations, they neglected to draw o
Now, you can claim that you're not convinced by the evidence that this does happen. But there's no way to claim that this logically can't happen.
Geotopia:
I reckon from your last statement that the argument for speciation is crumbling from being supported by empirical evidence and observed phenomena to being induced from the "fossil record" and extrapolated from genetic experiments in the laboratory, which actually isn't very conclusive, at least not in support of Darwin's THEORY. Furthermore, you're shifting the burden of proof from evidence that it has happened, to the doubter to prove that it can't happen. I'm not discrediting the observations, the data collected, or the societal benefit that the ongoing search has produced, but I assert that Darwin's theory rather than solidifying, is either stagnantly dependent on a dogmatic faith, or is in fact diminishing in credibility and is in dire need of an overhaul or wholesale replacement.
Let me comment on the evidence you propound in the case of horses, donkeys, and mules...
Dr. Manhattan:
Horses and donkeys can interbreed, but the mules produced are sterile. Hence they are separate species. It would help if you would cite some sources or at least list the search terms you used - makes it hard to check your results. Hybrid gulls have been noted (even the wikipedia article I linked you to said they "do not normally hybridize"), but viable populations of hybrids have not.
Geotopia:
Let's be careful with our statements here. "The mules produced are USUALLY sterile". There's an important distinction here. Since 1527 there have been more than 60 documented cases of foals born to female mules around the world, the most recent case in 2007 in Colorado with a foal named "Kate". This would actually work towards your argument, that a new species can be created, except that there is yet to be found any male mules that can reproduce, which means that the fertile mare mule was re-introduced into the horse and pony population, able to mate therein.
In essence, mules are not a new sustainable species, but a brief genetic anomaly that is only sustained in a domesticated environment and perpetuated by human breeders. While it demonstrates that there can be drastic differences in the genetic makeup of members of sub species even to the number of chromosomes, it isn't a witness of the creation of a new species and doesn't support the most significant premise of Darwin's theory that the diversity and advancement of higher order species arises from survival of the fittest.
However, even though it's patently obvious, let's explicitly expand the stated definition of a species to include that it has to have some hope of propagating. In other words, extinction within a generation does not a new species make, and so sterile offspring are not a species of themselves and provide no support to Darwin's explanation of life as we know it.
In the broader picture, it wouldn't have taken millions or 100s of millions of years, but trillions of years to obtain the diversity, complexity, and robustness of life we have on the earth if all we can come up with are false starts like the sterile mule or the hybrid gull and it's thin shelled eggs (here's a citation - http://sites.google.com/site/appledorelbbg/). These would seem more to be examples of de-evolution (D-E-V-O) and don't fit into Darwin's theory by any stretch.
It might be easier to cast this in the light of a human genetic disorder because it's obvious that a Trisomy 21 (Down Syndrome) person is still of the human species. While there have been accounts that a carrier of an extra 21st chromosome pair has successfully had offspring (Journal of Medical Genetics, 1989, Vol. 26, 294-298), it's near universal that they have no prospect of offspring.
Remember, we're not just looking for genetic mutations, but in the spirit of Darwin, we're looking for mutations which improve the subjects' chanc
"Although this proposal, and the people behind it, are certifiable, the idea that a theory of evolution holds some special uncriticizable position because of the 'preponderance of evidence' is just as stifling to scientific progress as the dogmatic fervor with which academia held to Newton's theory of gravitation. A theory should always be accepted as necessarily conjectural, and all efforts should be made to falsify the accepted 'best' theory and replace it with a better theory."
Maybe Dr. McLeroy is really just an evolutionary apologist trying to mess up the biblical numbers. Next time around he'll be throwing around bigger numbers like 11,000 or 12,000...
I wonder why we care what Dr. McLeroy believes anyway. Are we trying to reach consensus? Maybe if we all just pick a number and agree on that we can put this entire wedge issue to rest.
Okay, chump! It took me only 2 minutes to Google over five independent sites listing the recorded interbreeding of said gulls, with successful offspring. It appears that they don't LIKE to breed together, but apparently still do sometimes. They ARE cross-fertile and had our methodology for observing these birds been better we wouldn't have been chasing down a dead end alley over several decades trying to support Darwin. So this anecdotal evidence doesn't even hold water in itself let alone establish any credibility to parapatric speciation on the whole. Nice try! The most definitive finding was on January 28th of this year, which is why you can't take a hundred or even a couple hundred years of faulty observation of bird colonies and make that your evidence, especially when you rely upon "Millions" of years for speciation to take place or you're sure to be disappointed. Face it, asserting Speciation as more than a wishful theory to support the leap of faith necessary to follow Darwin is a losing proposition. Any other "new species" that demonstrate REAL speciation?
You keep alluding to a non event where something happens over time, but can't be identified at any point in time (gee, this is starting to sound more mysterious than the Nicean Creed, are you sure it's science?) Maybe we'd get somewhere if the Darwinists hadn't been so quick to toss Goldschmidt under the bus. Given the discrete nature of genetic traits, and given that individuals don't evolve in themselves (they are born with their genetic makeup and it doesn't change after the first division from one to two cells), in order for there to be a new species there has to be a moment in time where a member that can no longer mate with the rest of his species is born. It can't just be that they can't mate because of preference or separation, but there has to be a physical incompatibility to comprise a new species. I mean, this is pretty simple logic where "you need a new species for there to be a NEW species." Speciation is a split of a source population into two species, the original species and a NEW species. You have to have some point where you indeed conclude, "Okay, we're at a new species", otherwise you just have a sub species or just the same old species that doesn't get along or doesn't share the same proximity in which case we've observed nothing.
TG, you'll argue this with whatever you got, I can tell you right now truth be damned, you can't be convinced if Adam and Eve were to knock on your door in the middle of the night. I'm only engaging you because others will read this and in time Evolution or more accurately, "Speciation through Evolution" will be put back in its place as a novel theory akin to the junk science of the coming ice age, global warming, and the "energy crisis". Vive les moutons!
TGIBBS:
No, you are still limited by thinking about individuals rather than populations. Genetic drift is not about drifting "away" from something; it is more like the way the molecules in a gas expand to fill a volume. You really have to think of it in terms of the collective behavior of populations of molecules or individuals.
RESPONSE:
Yes, I am limited to thinking about individuals within a population. If there's a population, there are individual members. It's not a clump that has collective properties, it's a physically non-cohesive group of individual entities. Perhaps a single organism is a clump (of cells) with collective properties, but a population is just a loosely knit group of organisms without the interdependence to which you refer. So, are we even talking about the same thing?! We don't seem to agree as to when collective properties apply. I'm assuming that each member of the population is an individual which behaves individually, and more importantly exists independently, even when in the group.
Also, I'm not sure if you are using "drift" to describe actual behavior or as an analogy to visualize the behavior, but I've been using "drift" and the word "tide" as a metaphor. I prefer "tide" because it more accurately describes flexible, often reversible genetic morphisms. It's not the physical movement like molecules in a gas, but the genetic change that is "drifting" or changing like the "tide".
TGIBBS:
They do, it just happens over multiple generations. The genetic process is known as recombination.
RESPONSE:
No, I'm not going to let you get away with getting all fuzzy and covering up discrete events with "multiple generations". Genetic traits are discrete. You either have blue eyes, brown eyes, or red eyes. Setting aside subtle variations that are developmental or dietary, it's observed and verifiable that grandpa's blue eyes don't fade to green by the time grandson has a kid. This is NOT what is meant by genetic drift. Every genetic trait discovered to date is binary and they don't blend. This is about the first thing you learn in BIO 101. It's extremely odd that a proponent of [speciation through] evolution which relies upon genetic mutations would check the only thing we know for certain about genetics at the door to cling to the doctrines of the Church of Darwin.
TGIBBS:
That's a cop-out. The "intelligence" in this case extends solely to copying the processes of natural selection that are observed in nature. Genetic algorithms solve problems that the programmer does not even know the solution to, and so obviously could not have programmed the solution into the algorithm. In particular, the programmer does not need to include the kind of "in concert genetic drift" that you believe to be necessary.
RESPONSE:
Okay maybe my response was inadequate, but I'm not sure what you're talking about here. If you mean to assert that the product of a computer simulation is proof of something, you don't understand the concept of a model. The model doesn't prove anything, it simulates a behavior, a behavior which now needs to be verified through observation of the real thing. The only time I'm going to give you a pass and take your word for how a model works is when it's a choice between a simulation on a computer and a thermal-nuclear explosion upwind from me. But if you insist on using a computer generated model as proof, I'm going to come right back at you with my original statement because of what I just said, it doesn't prove anything and is only a tool for drawing cogent guesses.
Well, just about every god fearing man and woman I've ever met accepts science as long as it doesn't get dogmatic. Evolutionists are ideologues and cling to their beliefs tighter than a church lady with her bible, as they check logic and reason at the door. If empirical evidence disagrees with their hero Darwin, they ignore it or explain it away. So maybe the religious folk are just exhibiting that natural tendency to get defensive.
As for me and most of my friends, I'm religious but have no problem with evolution. The statement above that "God used evolution or whatever physical laws at his disposal to create this fine planet and its inhabitants" fits into my scope of understanding without any conflict whatsoever. I can embrace all of science and truth wherever I may find it, in the scriptures, in text books, in my secret laboratory. But I do get tired of the junk science that people like Al Gore are peddling. I'm sure there are lots of Gore worshippers here on/., but c'mon the guy can't even reconcile his movement with the most basic physical laws of thermodynamics. If "O" wasn't such a prolific campaigner (not much of a commander), I'd declare Gore the Joseph Goebbels of the 21st century. You know, if you repeat a lie enough times, people start to believe it.
Anyway, revisiting the original issue of teaching the various theories in school, I'd prefer that both [Speciation through] Evolution and Creationism be taught in their respective churches or at most, both be taught as adverse theories, and let the kids debate it. Both theories require faith, although objectively, I'd have to say that [Speciation through] Evolution requires me to actively suspend logic and reason and accept arbitrary and unobserved phenomena without even a claim to declaratory authority.
I'm going to just cut to the chase. I have no problem with evolution and I'm sure that most "bible hugging" Christians, Jews and Muslims don't either (before anyone gets offended, I didn't capitalize "bible" and I am using it in it's near-Latin form for "Book" or more precisely "Sacred Cannon" (not to be confused with my sacred Canon 1Ds Mark III) to describe Old/New Testament, Torah, or Koran).
It's patently obvious that genes mutate, genetic codes adapt, and that there are drifts (I call them "tides" because they often are observed to be reversible). What is also obvious, meaning it is readily observable, is that genetic characteristics are discreet and at least with complex multi-celled organisms, the genetic codes are permanent within an individual (okay, okay, I enjoy X-Men just as much as the next guy, but it's just a movie) and cannot be "rubbed" off or passed between members of a population in some cases can't even be transferred to offspring. An individual's genetic makeup doesn't change other than under unnatural circumstances (like that episode of X-Men...).
What I don't accept is the circular argument of "gradual" drift. Your statement that "individuals don't evolve, populations do" is true within the context of my prior statement, that genetic characteristics are set at conception and once set aren't subject to "evolving", but if you are saying that evolution doesn't begin with individuals or doesn't occur at the individual level wherein a trait that did not exist in the population shows up "spontaneously" in a single individual, you are patently wrong. Not only do they commence with a single individual, but they commence within a single cell. No matter how large the population or how many years two segments have been separated, it still comes down to a mutation occurring within a single or a pair* in single moment of mitosis. You simply can't escape that; it is truth self-evident. If a portion of a population experiences a mutation, then logic dictates that an individual did as well, or more accurately, it commenced with an individual:
If A is part of B and B = C, then A = C
or
Framed in the current argument, if individual A is part of population B, and B has a genetic characteristic C, then before B is identified, A as an individual must also have said characteristic C. So, where did it commence within the population? It had to start somewhere. If it's unlikely that an individual could mutate, survive, retain the power to pro-create, yet not with the larger population, yet be more robust and prone to survive than the population at large, it's even less likely that it occurred simultaneously within the entire population, or within all of the new offspring of the population simultaneously.
While I don't necessarily agree with the proposed Texas Curriculum (haven't read it yet), what I disagree with is Evolutionism v Creationism being hauled around as a thumping stick or wedge issue. I firstly object to the mischaracterization that occurs with the semantically lazy truncation of the theory of [speciation through] evolution. This is what Darwin purported and what most people mean when they reference "evolution". As a single word, "evolution" connotes, but does not adequately describe the belief of the "evolutionists", namely that new species evolved from older species.
The point of contention though falls on the untenable and improbable stretch that extrapolates the concept of a new species from the process of evolution. It's not observable, it's not logical, it's not remotely probable. I object to it being taught to my children under the pretense of "science" because it's no more proven and verifiable than the Biblical accounts of the creation. The only thing different is that the guy (Moses) that recounts the story of the creation has an older claim and since [Speciation through] Evolutionists rely almost wholly on large vague expanses of time, it puts Moses closer to observing the phenomena, or at least closer to the commencement of (an) evolutionary cycle. In t
This is mere sophistry. The base unit of a gas is a single molecule, but gasses have properties such as density, temperature, and pressure that individual molecules do not have. Similarly, populations of organisms have properties such as genetic diversity that individuals do not have.
RESPONSE
What you are suggesting then is that a single individual (or pair for sexually reproducing species) is not a large enough sample because it is the diversity that brings about the genetic drift. Well, I guess you have to drift away from something, so for the sake of comparison you need the larger population. But the behavior of a gas as the many molecules interact, is not parallel because genetic traits don't "Rub off" from one member to another. Short of fatal bursts of radiation, genetic traits are commenced in mitosis and in rare events in a very young zygote, not in fully developed members of a population. Show me a single instance and I will grant you some credibility on this.
TGIBBS
Computerized genetic algorithms are quite successful in solving problems without any such mechanism.
RESPONSE
Computers are created by [mostly] intelligent entities, so claiming that an intelligence can solve the problem doesn't provide any support for the assumption of spontaneous speciation.
TGIBBS
I am using "preference" because separation of populations does not require complete incompatibility--it can occur by the gradual accumulation of variations that enhance within group mating preference relative to outgroup. In such a situation, genetic drift will eventually begin to impair outgroup reproductive success. There is no point at which there needs to be two individuals that are only compatible with each other, and completely incompatible with everybody else.
RESPONSE
Says you. Seriously, the definition of a species is a group of organisms separate from others that they cannot breed. Can we agree that the definition of a species is that one of it's members cannot mate with a member of another species, not by "preference", but by physical incompatibility? Let's get that hammered down because if you are talking about breeds of dogs as if they were species, they you and I are not even talking about the same thing. You might as well be talking baseball and me golf and arguing over who won based on high or low score.
TGIBBS
But if you insist on looking only at tiny finite elements, you can easily convince yourself that there are no such things as curves--which seems to be pretty much the error you are making in thinking about speciation.
RESPONSE
I don't have to convince myself there's no such thing as a curve. Curves only exist in theory. Magnify any curve and you'll eventually see dots. A curve is a handy mechanism, useful for resolution independent rendering like PostScript or for describing a behavior visually, but eventually you'll have finite elements and the relationship between them approximates a curve. But that's another theory for another time and if you don't find the analogy useful, I'm certainly not going to compel or convince you otherwise.
CONCLUSION
You obviously subscribe to the blob theory of non-empirical evidence, which is "given enough time, enough samples, anything can happen". While I believe that space and time are infinite, I also believe and have no contrary evidence, that the infinite is constructed of finite elements. What cannot occur in the finite, can neither occur in the infinite, or in any superset of the finite. I stand firm that if speciation cannot occur in one or two members of a population, it can't transpire on the whole, no matter how much time granted or how big the population gets, WITHOUT intervention. That is intelligent design. You don't have to declare the source of the intelligence, leave that for Sunday School, but don't create a blob theory to cram down the kiddies' throats to support an otherwise untenable dogma that spontaneously (yet over time) creates new species where none existed pre
Hyperbole and pejorative are not an adequate substitute for arguing the substance, and hardly an exhibit of evidence makes. You don't win an argument just because you hurt the feelings of your opponent.
Let's assume the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Where did the oil come from? Was it created in the ground with the rest of the Earth? If so, is there a way to predict where it might be found? Or perhaps it really did form from plants and dinosaurs, but about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could? Any way you look at it, a young Earth and a Flood would imply some very interesting scientific questions to ask, some interesting (and potentially extremely valuable) research programs to start. How come nobody's actually pursuing such research programs?
Response:
So, because you haven't observed Oil form in less than a thousand years, it can't possibly form in such a short time frame?
I imagine you'll balk at my suggestion that it can because "it's crazy" and "no one has ever seen it".
To which I respond, have you ever observed a member of a species born with a mutation, sexually incompatible with the rest of the species, yet robust enough to survive, and actually better adapted than the rest of the species so that it outlives and out reproduces the remainder of the population? No? Then I taunt you, "you're crazy! no one has ever seen it!"
This neither supports the theory of [Speciation through] Evolution, nor the theory of Creation, just that you can't draw empirical proof from anecdotes.
Sometimes evolutionists (let's call them ANTI creationists because a creationist can still believe in evolution) refer to laboratory experiments where single cell organisms can be observed to not just mutate, but sexually speciate, but I think you have to parallel that with a creation event and not a spontaneous event, because assuming that the scientists neuro-receptors are firing off, there's intelligence at the helm. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principal supports that you cannot measure the results of a phenomena without affecting the results, so without being too pedantic, you can't observe an evolutionary phenomena without introducing the element you were trying to disprove which is intelligence. Kind of like the primary objective in Star Trek.
Another misplaced proof is that of using astoundingly large numbers. The old "ten-thousand-monkeys-typing-on-ten-thousand-typewriters-over-ten-thousand-years can eventually produce a sonnet from Shakespeare". Given enough time, anything can happen, right? Well, not so fast, first, let's get it out of the way that the ten thousand monkeys aren't going to "evolve" into a higher life form because that would create a circular proof. The question isn't can 10,000 monkeys type, it's can ONE monkey type. Can the monkey hit the keys and avoid the strikers from getting tangled, can they insert the next piece of paper, can they return the carriage? But, oh, you're drawing the analogy too far! No, because you have to ask the same question of a population of a given species. In order for a large number of the species to embark on an alternative speciatic journey, first ONE member has to be able to mutate, survive, and breed. Giving more time and more members doesn't solve the problem. Just ask the guys at Norton Thiocol who thought that 3 bad O-Rings would compensate for a flawed design for O-Rings.
Another way to look at it is a scatter diagram. You can make your own. Drop you wife's best vase (or your mother's if you're a blogger still living at home with "mom") and measure the distance of each broken piece from the center of impact. You'll have a few in the center, some in the near vicinity and even some strangely falling 4 or 5 feet away. Depending on angle of incidence, velocity, ambient temperature, lead content in the crystal (we're going to use a really good vase for this experiment), you may even have some pieces land 15 or 20 feet away. Well, you say, then couldn't we have some that fall 30 or 50 feet away? What about 100 or 1000 feet? Surely if it breaks in a million pieces, one of those tiny pieces can fall and bounce and end up on the other side of the city given the right circumstances. So, to prove that, you break a hundred vases. Is it going to happen? No, but you'll really piss off your wife (or "mommy").
It doesn't matter how many vases you break, only one piece has to prove the theory that it can bounce 1000 feet away, the piece that fell a thousand feet away. So, the question to ask a physicist isn't "from a million pieces could some fall 1000 feet away?", but "Can ONE piece fall that far away?". Back to Spontaneous Speciation, it's not "can a new species randomly generate given a million years and a large enough population", but "can a SINGLE member (or two members for sexually reproducing species) of a population, with no outside stimulus, survive a genetic mutation that would render him/her/pat sexually incompatible, yet robust enough to survive, and (to accommodate Darwin's theory) better able to survive than the balance of the population?"
No, you are mistaken in your distinction between populations and individuals. The base unit of a population IS an individual (that's also the basis of integral calculus - you can always subdivide until you have a single slice, which slice once reverse expanded fulfills the equation or defines the population). Genetic drift (mutations) occurs or more succinctly STARTS on an individual basis and not in concert (with one exception which I'll explain at the end). It may appear to be a group phenomena if you could somehow look at a vertical descent, but there's no horizontal expansion of the same genetic mutation simultaneously occurring in multiple members of the same population of a species, except for possibly within multiples (e.g. twins and triplets) where there is an abnormal split of the genome AFTER fertilization and differentiation. Not only is this rare to have genetically identical multiples, but with the survival rate of aberrations being skewed low, it is extremely unlikely that you'd have a robust AND sexually incompatible (you use the word "preference" so I want to be clear that "compatibility" does not infer preference, but physical interoperability) pair AND they have to be sexually compatible with EACH OTHER. At some point, you have to toss in the towel and in spite of asserting a domain of thousands or millions of years and billions of subjects to sample, admit that genetic drift happens through discrete mutations in individuals in a moment in time. "Drift" is really a misnomer except for the flexible changes in the genetic designs of individual species such as that British moth that can change color over generations (and change back again), but that's hardly speciation and maybe "tide" is a better term than "drift" because of it's demonstrable ability to reverse to fit the situtuation.
I mentioned the one exception to "in concert" genetic drift. That would be the basis of "Intelligent Design", where a controlled event changes the story of a species. You can call it God, Space Aliens, or the Big Bang, but as soon as you introduce an outside event as your deux et machina, you have now conceded to "Creationism" or the "Existence of a Creator", and we become "creatures".
If you look at basic integral calculus, you'll see that what appears to be a curve (gradual) can only be solved by looking at the finite elements, which in the case of Evolution, are individuals at distinct moments in time. Although you can't prove science anecdotally (Evolutionists, pay attention!) you need only apply Occam's razor to particle physics to give you pause to consider setting aside your Ape-to-Man-from-bacterial-sludge-over-a-gazillion-years dogma, at least for a season to re-evaluate your postulations.
Though the argument gets dumbed down to a debate between Evolution and Creationism, it's really about whether spontaneous speciation is probable or even possible. The useful definition of speciation is that from a single species, two or more species spontaneously generate, the new specie or species unable to mate and produce offspring with members of the foundation species. What hard core evolutionists tend to do is use thousands or millions (or in the case of Carl Sagan, Billions) of years as a time span, but in reality speciation has to happen spontaneously, in the fraction of a second during the first cell division of mytosis.
The problem with this requirement is that (single cell or monosex organisms aside), you have to have the spontaneous generation of a pair, or at least a single individual member that 1) cannot mate with other members of the [old] species, but can create more members of his/her [new] species, which, when you get to higher life forms, requires a spontaneously generated mate. and 2) the [new] species has to be robust enough to survive long enough to mate and reproduce, and 3) has to be more adept at survival to satisfy the theory of natural selection. I'm willing to set aside requisite #3 because it was just the theory of a madman, but chances of #1 and #2 occurring spontaneously are pretty slim.
There are arguments for parapatric and allopatric speciation, but they are just smoke screens because separation of population is immaterial with spontaneous speciation which occurs sympatrically. Another way to look at it is even with a slow "drift", there still has to be measurable movement. Even within a million year time scale, you still have to have a single moment in time where there are members of a NEW species that can no longer mate with the original species. The larger time frame becomes irrelevant when you consider that the two members (one old and one new) are no longer sexually compatible but co-exist. You don't need millions of years and you don't need geographic separation, because the subdivision of the population is simply the new species existing within the original species from which they originate. The scientific name for this phenomena is "punctuated equilibrium", but simply put, it eliminates the need for a long stretch of time, because it again comes down to the simultaneous "birth" of two inter-compatible members that are strangely incompatible with the balance of the population of the original species. No getting around it.
Ironically, every observable example of alleged speciation does not actually involve sexually incompatible species, or at best only alleges that the two separate species were at one time sexually compatible. Most of these are classified as "island genetics" and do not evidence speciation (there is no actual observation - Darwin didn't observe anything but a snapshot of the creature populations on Galapagos, no actual division of a species into separate species), just genetic drift resulting in modified traits, but not genetic incompatibilities.
But, alas, the creationists cling to their bibles and throw out evolution (genetic drifts) with the repulsive idea that man descended from the apes of the jungle, and the "evolutionists" attach speciation to their dogma in order to protect their priestcraft and justify an existence that denies a creator. Both are wrong, and the argument from both sides fall on deaf ears. It becomes a wedge issue dumbed down so that newspapers and magazines can print fantastical articles about educational curriculums giving fodder to the housewives and hippies who take up the extreme sides of the issue.
BUT, "Catholic"in this context means "Universal". So, the creed either doesn't hold at all because of divisions in the church, or only one of the splinters is true and everyone else is reciting the creed in vain. So, who's right and wrong, the Protestants or Catholics? What about the Eastern Orthodox, the Coptics, and others? It doesn't make sense that one Christ should have several different warring sects, so maybe they're all wrong?
Only the Catholics and Protestants accept the final form of the Nicene Creed, or the creed that commenced in the 1st Ecumenical Council held in Nicaea (Present Day Turkey), convened by Emperor Constantine I in A.D. 325 and was finalized in the 7th. By the Fourth Council, the Oriental Orthodox Church separated. By the Eighth, the Greek (Eastern) Church separated because there were a few points of doctrine (Filalopean Controversy) with which they disagreed, including the Papacy (the Eastern Patriarch and Roman Pope excommunicated each other), which authority was eventually rejected by the Protestants as well. The writeup on Wikipedia is pretty objective and accurate.
HOWEVER, the most significant group of Christians that don't accept the Nicene Creed are the early Christians, namely the Apostles and those that followed Christ from A.D. 30 to A.D. 325. The Nicene Creed is a consensus agreement on an interpretation of the God Head (arising from the Arian Controversy) and appears nowhere in the Scriptures (New Testament or Old Testament). There's no claim to divine origin of the pronouncements that came from the Ecumenical Councils, and it's pretty much fact that there were dissenting opinions. Only later were the Ecumenical Councils declared "authoritative".
Among modern Christians that don't accept the Nicene Creed are Jehovah's Witnesses, Latter-Day Saints, and some very small fundamentalist Christian groups. MOST Christians, however, don't know about the Ecumenical councils and among those that have recited the Creed, a common practice in more formal Catholic and Protestant congregations, most couldn't articulate what the creed actually means with respect to the relationship between Jesus and God.
As for the Apostle's Creed, it was originally memorized and recited, so the earliest documented version is around A.D. 714, but it's believed by scholars to come from Gaul in the 5th Century. It's basically a recitation of the three members of the God Head, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, probably inspired by Matthew 28:19 and corroborated in the account of the Baptism of Jesus in the Gospels. It's probably less cryptic than the Nicene Creed and I imagine most Christians, including Mormons, accept the content even if they don't by practice RECITE the creed (which I imagine is the definition of a creed, that you recite it). "Creed" comes from latin "Credo" which means you believe it ("give credence to it").
In summary, most Christians that adamantly believe that Latter-Day Saints aren't Christians base it upon the LDS rejection of the authority of the Nicene Creed. It's a rather subtle argument that escapes the understanding of most lay people, and most who reject the Mormons do so mostly at the word of their pastors or priests without understanding the actual theological differences or from whence they arise.
In closing, the Nicene Creed has nothing to do with the Utah Legislature's push to restrict keyword advertising, or specifically the open sale of copyrighted trademarks, though I imagine Latter-Day Saints are pretty sensitive to opponents buying keywords related specifically to the LDS Church. Businesses probably don't like competitors buying their copyrighted names and trademarks, but the religious opponents of the Mormon Church are often not just competing, but are somewhat deceptive in their links and mean spirited in their content.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you look at specifics, and ignore the big fat claims made generally, you can start to piece together why it would work, or at least better than it is now.
Consider several types of people:
1. Penniless student.
2. OCD* Hacker.
3. Rich mamma's boy (or girl)
4. Regular folks with jobs, cars, families
Right now, tunes are available for download legitimately at $.99 a pop. Kids with money simply click on them and they own them. It's even more true with Adults who probably already have their CD collection filled out and just want a few rare tracks, but have no time to spend scouring P2P or Torrent sites. So that's your paying customer. You want to protect this market, both by good will to the patron and by NOT cannibalizing the market. They'll pay extra to quickly find the tune and for slightly better quality.
The starving student wants the latest tunes, but can't afford them. Life is always a toss up between time and money, so students spend their time finding the tunes illegally. Assuming they aren't little computer geniuses or CompSci majors, they rely on the whatever is out there while conscience takes a back seat to convenience. They'll take what they can get in terms of quality.
The hacker is rewarded not by having the music to listen to, but by building the library of pirated tunes. For him, it's not a matter of money, but of collecting the songs and sharing them. It's like the little dots on PacMan, he's wired to hunt and gather and show off his warez. Of course, I'm ignoring the black market in Asia that's got CD presses running 24/7 producing contra band, but American lawyers aren't going after these folks anyway.
Now, let's say that the labels plaster the internet with easy access low quality MP3s. The student will simply go to the fan sites and grab a copy to listen. He will probably grab new tunes and try them out. They get "air play", and no revenue was lost or cannibalized. Sure the rich kid might also download the freebie, but if iTunes is the pay-to-listen model (70% of online sales), he's still likely to pay for his music, buying directly from his music interface instead of his browser. He's also got the expensive Sennheiser headphones so 128bit music is only good enough to try out the tune, not add it to his collection.
The big question is how does this affect the hacker or OCD collector? There's no longer any reward in having rare tunes, because no tunes are rare and there's no reward for sharing because he's no longer a critical intermediary in the sharing process. Even without prosecuting the pirates, with free music in the stream, you've marginalized their efforts. Now the only pirates you have to worry about are on the high seas in and around Somalia.
So you haven't really lost anything, but what you did gain is that the rich kids, the actual customers, are hearing more tunes through the free play and are more likely to seek out new music to buy from their one click musical interface. It plays out well on regular PCs, Cell phones, and in the near future from the living room set top box. You're spending less on distribution, less on legal, and the labels can start realizing the tangible benefit of happy customers who aren't treated like criminals before they've even done anything wrong.
If the labels aren't winning right now (and they aren't, or these articles on /. wouldn't attract so much participation), then they should try something new and different. Setting aside the trial lawyers for a moment, their real adversary is the black market, so taking out that market should be central to their strategy. So, applying a bit of market kung fu by embracing the model instead of fighting a losing battle against it would go a long way in disabling their opponent.
* Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
"The concept sounds good but as with the bad files, some will still work around it."
The key is to recognize and work WITH human nature. If the labels stuff the pipe with bad files, they don't encourage anything positive. People would find ways to detect and flag them. On the other hand, if they flooded the P2P pipe with low quality, but genuine files, the need for pirated files would dry up over night. It would be too easy to get the GENUINE files, albeit low res, from ANYWHERE. The incentive to pirate disappears. Conceivably you could do the same with movies, standard def for free, high def for a cost.
Then, you capture all your real customers (high def) and treat your FUTURE customers well. Also on the upside is you can both advertise and control the releases. The Pirates lose ALL their power over the situation. Leaches slowly convert into customers. Good will abounds! Fire all your attorneys because you don't need them anymore.
BTW, don't think for a moment that even if they win a lawsuit against a single mother with three kids for $1M that they'll collect a penny. They'll just force the person into Bankruptcy. Which makes me wonder why they're doing the legal dance AT ALL!? Now that I think about it, they're nuts! Spend thousands, hundreds of thousands suing, get shafted through the bankruptcy, and poison their market along the way. In the mean time miss out on the biggest, most efficient distribution channel to ever present itself. Now I think I know where all the money went... Straight to the lawyers. Hatch should wise up, he's getting played a fool!
"Well, I'm not sure if that is a local (state) precedence or if that carry across the country. Anyways, that's true that they can't show a loss until you set up hit squads who change the model of business from offering quality entertainment for a fee to suing anyone you think isn't paying then settling for another large fee. That shows a loss as in a loss of sales because all of those who settled more or less agreed that they would have normally purchased the material if they hadn't pirated it."
First, for in-state litigation, local cases are going to take precedence, but where none exist, or nothing very similar exists, out-of-state cases may be used. Federal cases are preferred. Supreme Court cases always trump Appellate cases always trump lower court cases. And these days, Judges easily ignore the law, which means that statutory fines can be reduced (or increased). Commenting on this last issue, I hate to think that we are at the mercy of today's courts for application of the law.
To set aside legalize for a bit though, it's just a big extortion racket, and one that will eventually implode. Congress passed the Copyright Act early on in this country's history to make sure that there was incentive for artists, writers, musicians, to produce. That's probably a false conclusion because there's no shortage of "starving artists", but nonetheless, this fiat "monopoly" (the exclusive right to copy) is actually counter productive, because if you can't copy or perform works of others, they lose their ability to "advertise" their works and the artists end up with worthless, underutilized monopolies to keep all to themselves. That's why congress later introduced "compulsory licensing" to the Copyright Act. It gave radio and then television access to copyrighted materials without having to negotiate prices or get explicit permission.
My main contention with Lawyers that represent the labels is that the artists' remuneration is not their true agenda, but rather the survival of the cartel which was never the intent of the Copyright Act. I predict it will someday in the near future unravel because not only are the cartels disenfranchising their paying customers, but disaffecting their suppliers (musicians and movie studios). When the benefit of a label is outweighed by the burdensome cost, a new format or structure will rise to replace the rotting RIAA and MPIG.
For flooding the pipe, you suggested that it failed, but it was probably more the approach. Give people 128bit and those that want 256 bit will hear it, like it, and buy it while those that are satisfied with 128 bit never were their paying customers. Indistinguishable from AM radio's usefulness in promoting music. Don't give them bad files, that just perpetuates the toxic approach of suing your customers.
Good comments! These are real legal concepts and deserve examination. I believe what you're referring to is "Unjust Enrichment". There are two ways of looking at it. The first, is pure enrichment, for which you've given some really good examples. One example of this that is frequently used is where we combine our Lincolns and buy a $10 lottery ticket. I hold the ticket and it turns out to be a winner. I pay you back the $5 I "owe" you, and you only discover later when you see my BMW that I won the lottery. You can either rely upon a constructive trust as your argument, or you can use the Doctrine of Unjust Enrichment. Because there was no explicit agreement between us, you can't use the Statute of Frauds, and must rely upon Common Law to seek relief.
HOWEVER, this is NOT the case with copyright infringement. (C) infringement involves "Statutory" and "Provable" damages. Statutory damages are stated as say, $1,000 per incident (it's actually MUCH higher, but just for argument's sake, let's use $1000). No material evidence backing the claim, just it being written up in the statutes of the Copyright Act. Provable damages might involve an industry loss like those stated by Hatch. These are bogus and untenable claims because they aren't based on actual sales. They use obtuse and vague metrics and if every industry totaled their annual losses to this or that, it would be more than the entire planet makes or consumes in the same time period. As a judge, the only claim I would accept is demonstrable changes that could be directly attributed to a factor. For example, the RIAA shows it made $x in one year and $y the next. It coincides with server logs at Napster showing n files downloaded. ($x - $y)/n is the amount lost per download. But there must be some evidence and testimony that it wasn't because RIAA introduced crappy music or put rootkit on the CDs, or some other negligence on their part. Now, if they can prove Jane or Grandma Doe UPloaded 200 songs, they can calculate the actual damages or statistically valid anecdotal damages.
Going back to "Unjust Enrichment", the North Dakota Supreme Court came up with a 5 point test for the case. 1. Enrichment by Defendant, 2. Impoverishment by Plaintiff, and I forget 3 ad 4, but they were basically a requirement to prove that 1 and 2 were connected and 5 is that the claim cannot proceed based on Statute. But demonstrating IMPOVERISHMENT was part of the weight of the claim.
So, with that definition, unless you can prove the "impoverishment" (actual damages), you have no case. You have "conceptual" losses, but that's only compared against "conceptual enrichment". If people are selling bootleg CDs, that's one thing, but listening to music has no direct tangible benefit. It may actually have a cost if you are using local storage.
RIAA's best bet, with Music, is to flood the black market channels with low bit rate versions of the songs, with embedded adverts, get exposure for their artists, treat their patrons (customers) nicely, and then watch the sales tick back up to normal and fire those fargin' attorneys that are burying the industry. Matter of fact, I'm betting that if a single one of the labels broke ranks and started doing this, they'd propel their artists into such fame and success that the rest of the labels would abandon their current whiny bully tactics.
C'mon, waterboarding is a sport, not torture.
Anyway, I used to like Hatch, but I don't like Hatch's stance on any of this, he's really scraping the bottom of the barrel with his lies, damn lies, and statistics. If the economy lost 300,000 jobs and $16B, then where did it go? Nowhere you hack! People pay what they're willing to pay after they bought what was most important to them. Pirates don't buy software, music, and movies! Stop them from pirating, they still won't buy it.
The RIAA and MPIG needs to stop treating their customers like criminals and come to the realization that their sales go up when they make good products that entice people to crack open their wallets, not when they crack down on people and compel their wallets open. If anything has cost these trade groups and the industries they represent, it's the ill will of their potential customers. That in a nutshell is where the $16B and the 300,000 jobs went!
This is like GHWBush going to Japan and throwing up on the Prime Minister because the Japanese don't want our useless cars with the steering wheels on the wrong side. I can't even muster up a fake sob for these groups and it's shameful for Hatch to get sucked into their rhetoric for a crappy $7K rental feel.
I like the way this guy thinks. I recommend, however, that he rename his post "Motivating the Userbase" and this particular thread "Involve the Userbase". Later, I'm going to come back and rename my article, and start a new thread for which I'll recommend another name. That will give me 5 or 6 points towards a Chili's GC, right?
Strangely, I've worked within a mile of everyone of these companies. I worked across the street from SGI at Adobe when Adobe was in Mountain View. I worked across I-17 from SCO when I was at Starfish (Borland). And today, my company is HQ'd about a mile away from SCO/Caldera. Something strange about these companies. The CEO of SGI was alleged to be living high off the hog, throwing lavish parties, getting drunk, harassing his female staff, and at the same time building a new Corporate Plaza. Perhaps to the drunken sailors, it wasn't obvious the ship was sinking, but at least to me, the combination of extravagances and the distraction of constructing buildings instead of products spelled their eventual demise. In fact, it did mark their peak of relevance before a rapid plunge as they spent through all their fortunes amassed up to that time (in 1999, they actually posted a profit, but said profit came from subletting their office space).
For SCO, there wasn't as much money, but there was the distraction of law suits. The companies that have avoided this (MSFT, AAPL, ORCL, ADBE) have only succeeded by maintaining discipline and keeping focused on what they do that actually makes them money. It's hard to put a price on SGI's assets, and while IRIX must be worth something, it will eventually be worth nothing. Is SGI's name brand worth anything? Maybe to old-timers from ILM and some of the FX shops in Hollywood, but no more than Apple or Sun. I really wonder what Rackable benefits from that brand name?! To those that know enough of the inside story it's more a liability than an asset.
Then we should consider making toner out of that toxic sludge instead of edible soy beans...
I don't have time right now for a lengthy response to each issue raised, though I wouldn't mind continuing the debate with you later - you refrain from pejoratives and hyperbole indicating if not a temporal maturity, at least an intellectual one and I appreciate that. I also appreciate that you provide some background and references rather than the standard everything-I-read-on-the-web-must-be-true bupkes that constantly pops up on blogs.
At any rate, I'll just address "entropy". Now I'm not a mathematician and certainly not a theoretical mathematician, so I'm going to have a hard time translating something like Entropy into an equation, but I do have 3/4s of an Electrical Engineering degree under my belt (don't ask why I dropped out in the 4th year, though it does have something to do with non-linear algebra) so I'm a bit better than a schlub when it comes to comprehending math, and I don't use the word "entropy" loosely. I'm specifically using it in the context of Newtonian physics and second law of thermodynamics (with credit to Joule and Carnot), where as a compliment to matter and energy, you can't move from an entropic state to one of less entropy without investing some energy, or as Newton's third law of motion put it, every action has an equal and opposite reaction and thus bodies in motion tend toward releasing kinetic energy rather than absorbing it and moving to a higher potential energy.
Quick example of entropy in action, drop a glass from a counter, it breaks (bonds broken, sound energy released, minor heat generated, glass chips scatter, etc.). Now pick up the glass shards, all of them if you can find them, raise the "pile" of glass 10 or 100 times higher than the original counter top to increase the available potential energy, drop them again. You can even put the pieces back in their original spots and do it again. Not one single bond will reform. It may seem obvious that it won't, but that's the point. The only way to pull entropy out of the given system is to meticulously re-assemble the glass and if there was a good bonding solvent, you could glue it back together. But you've transferred energy and organization from another system to achieve that.
I took enough chemistry to understand some quantum physics and know that moving to outer oribtals and creating long covalent bonds takes a molecule to a discrete state of higher potential energy (didn't this thread originally started with a discussion of forming fossil fuels under heat and pressure over time?). As it applies to speciation, evolution, and genetic mutations, I believe it is consistent with Newtonian physics that without an infusion of directed energy, molecular chains are going to tend towards breaking down rather than building up. That rather than moving towards complexity, objects, structures, and organisms tend toward simplicity or even chaos. That rather than self-composing, life decomposes. So whenever presented with a scientific conclusion that requires that disorder spontaneously move towards order without fully explaining the source of the energy or the intervention of an organizer, I'm going to immediately assume it's a premature conclusion and in the context of the scientific method, relegate it to a theory that still needs some work. I'll want to see some proof other than just anecdotes.
I'm also going to be suspicious of models that assume linear behavior outside of the observable linear range. This is why inductive reasoning is such a dangerous tool in the hands of science. The Challenger crew that died in 1986 can pretty much lay the blame for their deaths on this failure - the engineers (with the exception of the whistle blower, Roger Boisjoly, that got railroaded) assumed a linear behavior in the fuel tank seals success rate across ambient temperature ranges and failed to consider that even in Florida you can have a frosty morning (for an analysis http://www.onlineethics.org/cms/13470.aspx). In their risk calculations, they neglected to draw o
Dr. Manhattan:
Now, you can claim that you're not convinced by the evidence that this does happen. But there's no way to claim that this logically can't happen.
Geotopia:
I reckon from your last statement that the argument for speciation is crumbling from being supported by empirical evidence and observed phenomena to being induced from the "fossil record" and extrapolated from genetic experiments in the laboratory, which actually isn't very conclusive, at least not in support of Darwin's THEORY. Furthermore, you're shifting the burden of proof from evidence that it has happened, to the doubter to prove that it can't happen. I'm not discrediting the observations, the data collected, or the societal benefit that the ongoing search has produced, but I assert that Darwin's theory rather than solidifying, is either stagnantly dependent on a dogmatic faith, or is in fact diminishing in credibility and is in dire need of an overhaul or wholesale replacement.
Let me comment on the evidence you propound in the case of horses, donkeys, and mules...
Dr. Manhattan:
Horses and donkeys can interbreed, but the mules produced are sterile. Hence they are separate species. It would help if you would cite some sources or at least list the search terms you used - makes it hard to check your results. Hybrid gulls have been noted (even the wikipedia article I linked you to said they "do not normally hybridize"), but viable populations of hybrids have not.
Geotopia:
Let's be careful with our statements here. "The mules produced are USUALLY sterile". There's an important distinction here. Since 1527 there have been more than 60 documented cases of foals born to female mules around the world, the most recent case in 2007 in Colorado with a foal named "Kate". This would actually work towards your argument, that a new species can be created, except that there is yet to be found any male mules that can reproduce, which means that the fertile mare mule was re-introduced into the horse and pony population, able to mate therein.
In essence, mules are not a new sustainable species, but a brief genetic anomaly that is only sustained in a domesticated environment and perpetuated by human breeders. While it demonstrates that there can be drastic differences in the genetic makeup of members of sub species even to the number of chromosomes, it isn't a witness of the creation of a new species and doesn't support the most significant premise of Darwin's theory that the diversity and advancement of higher order species arises from survival of the fittest.
However, even though it's patently obvious, let's explicitly expand the stated definition of a species to include that it has to have some hope of propagating. In other words, extinction within a generation does not a new species make, and so sterile offspring are not a species of themselves and provide no support to Darwin's explanation of life as we know it.
In the broader picture, it wouldn't have taken millions or 100s of millions of years, but trillions of years to obtain the diversity, complexity, and robustness of life we have on the earth if all we can come up with are false starts like the sterile mule or the hybrid gull and it's thin shelled eggs (here's a citation - http://sites.google.com/site/appledorelbbg/). These would seem more to be examples of de-evolution (D-E-V-O) and don't fit into Darwin's theory by any stretch.
It might be easier to cast this in the light of a human genetic disorder because it's obvious that a Trisomy 21 (Down Syndrome) person is still of the human species. While there have been accounts that a carrier of an extra 21st chromosome pair has successfully had offspring (Journal of Medical Genetics, 1989, Vol. 26, 294-298), it's near universal that they have no prospect of offspring.
Remember, we're not just looking for genetic mutations, but in the spirit of Darwin, we're looking for mutations which improve the subjects' chanc
"Although this proposal, and the people behind it, are certifiable, the idea that a theory of evolution holds some special uncriticizable position because of the 'preponderance of evidence' is just as stifling to scientific progress as the dogmatic fervor with which academia held to Newton's theory of gravitation. A theory should always be accepted as necessarily conjectural, and all efforts should be made to falsify the accepted 'best' theory and replace it with a better theory."
Spot on Arthur!
Maybe Dr. McLeroy is really just an evolutionary apologist trying to mess up the biblical numbers. Next time around he'll be throwing around bigger numbers like 11,000 or 12,000...
I wonder why we care what Dr. McLeroy believes anyway. Are we trying to reach consensus? Maybe if we all just pick a number and agree on that we can put this entire wedge issue to rest.
Okay, chump! It took me only 2 minutes to Google over five independent sites listing the recorded interbreeding of said gulls, with successful offspring. It appears that they don't LIKE to breed together, but apparently still do sometimes. They ARE cross-fertile and had our methodology for observing these birds been better we wouldn't have been chasing down a dead end alley over several decades trying to support Darwin. So this anecdotal evidence doesn't even hold water in itself let alone establish any credibility to parapatric speciation on the whole. Nice try! The most definitive finding was on January 28th of this year, which is why you can't take a hundred or even a couple hundred years of faulty observation of bird colonies and make that your evidence, especially when you rely upon "Millions" of years for speciation to take place or you're sure to be disappointed. Face it, asserting Speciation as more than a wishful theory to support the leap of faith necessary to follow Darwin is a losing proposition. Any other "new species" that demonstrate REAL speciation?
You keep alluding to a non event where something happens over time, but can't be identified at any point in time (gee, this is starting to sound more mysterious than the Nicean Creed, are you sure it's science?) Maybe we'd get somewhere if the Darwinists hadn't been so quick to toss Goldschmidt under the bus. Given the discrete nature of genetic traits, and given that individuals don't evolve in themselves (they are born with their genetic makeup and it doesn't change after the first division from one to two cells), in order for there to be a new species there has to be a moment in time where a member that can no longer mate with the rest of his species is born. It can't just be that they can't mate because of preference or separation, but there has to be a physical incompatibility to comprise a new species. I mean, this is pretty simple logic where "you need a new species for there to be a NEW species." Speciation is a split of a source population into two species, the original species and a NEW species. You have to have some point where you indeed conclude, "Okay, we're at a new species", otherwise you just have a sub species or just the same old species that doesn't get along or doesn't share the same proximity in which case we've observed nothing.
TG, you'll argue this with whatever you got, I can tell you right now truth be damned, you can't be convinced if Adam and Eve were to knock on your door in the middle of the night. I'm only engaging you because others will read this and in time Evolution or more accurately, "Speciation through Evolution" will be put back in its place as a novel theory akin to the junk science of the coming ice age, global warming, and the "energy crisis". Vive les moutons!
TGIBBS:
No, you are still limited by thinking about individuals rather than populations. Genetic drift is not about drifting "away" from something; it is more like the way the molecules in a gas expand to fill a volume. You really have to think of it in terms of the collective behavior of populations of molecules or individuals.
RESPONSE:
Yes, I am limited to thinking about individuals within a population. If there's a population, there are individual members. It's not a clump that has collective properties, it's a physically non-cohesive group of individual entities. Perhaps a single organism is a clump (of cells) with collective properties, but a population is just a loosely knit group of organisms without the interdependence to which you refer. So, are we even talking about the same thing?! We don't seem to agree as to when collective properties apply. I'm assuming that each member of the population is an individual which behaves individually, and more importantly exists independently, even when in the group.
Also, I'm not sure if you are using "drift" to describe actual behavior or as an analogy to visualize the behavior, but I've been using "drift" and the word "tide" as a metaphor. I prefer "tide" because it more accurately describes flexible, often reversible genetic morphisms. It's not the physical movement like molecules in a gas, but the genetic change that is "drifting" or changing like the "tide".
TGIBBS:
They do, it just happens over multiple generations. The genetic process is known as recombination.
RESPONSE:
No, I'm not going to let you get away with getting all fuzzy and covering up discrete events with "multiple generations". Genetic traits are discrete. You either have blue eyes, brown eyes, or red eyes. Setting aside subtle variations that are developmental or dietary, it's observed and verifiable that grandpa's blue eyes don't fade to green by the time grandson has a kid. This is NOT what is meant by genetic drift. Every genetic trait discovered to date is binary and they don't blend. This is about the first thing you learn in BIO 101. It's extremely odd that a proponent of [speciation through] evolution which relies upon genetic mutations would check the only thing we know for certain about genetics at the door to cling to the doctrines of the Church of Darwin.
TGIBBS:
That's a cop-out. The "intelligence" in this case extends solely to copying the processes of natural selection that are observed in nature. Genetic algorithms solve problems that the programmer does not even know the solution to, and so obviously could not have programmed the solution into the algorithm. In particular, the programmer does not need to include the kind of "in concert genetic drift" that you believe to be necessary.
RESPONSE:
Okay maybe my response was inadequate, but I'm not sure what you're talking about here. If you mean to assert that the product of a computer simulation is proof of something, you don't understand the concept of a model. The model doesn't prove anything, it simulates a behavior, a behavior which now needs to be verified through observation of the real thing. The only time I'm going to give you a pass and take your word for how a model works is when it's a choice between a simulation on a computer and a thermal-nuclear explosion upwind from me. But if you insist on using a computer generated model as proof, I'm going to come right back at you with my original statement because of what I just said, it doesn't prove anything and is only a tool for drawing cogent guesses.
Well, just about every god fearing man and woman I've ever met accepts science as long as it doesn't get dogmatic. Evolutionists are ideologues and cling to their beliefs tighter than a church lady with her bible, as they check logic and reason at the door. If empirical evidence disagrees with their hero Darwin, they ignore it or explain it away. So maybe the religious folk are just exhibiting that natural tendency to get defensive.
As for me and most of my friends, I'm religious but have no problem with evolution. The statement above that "God used evolution or whatever physical laws at his disposal to create this fine planet and its inhabitants" fits into my scope of understanding without any conflict whatsoever. I can embrace all of science and truth wherever I may find it, in the scriptures, in text books, in my secret laboratory. But I do get tired of the junk science that people like Al Gore are peddling. I'm sure there are lots of Gore worshippers here on /., but c'mon the guy can't even reconcile his movement with the most basic physical laws of thermodynamics. If "O" wasn't such a prolific campaigner (not much of a commander), I'd declare Gore the Joseph Goebbels of the 21st century. You know, if you repeat a lie enough times, people start to believe it.
Anyway, revisiting the original issue of teaching the various theories in school, I'd prefer that both [Speciation through] Evolution and Creationism be taught in their respective churches or at most, both be taught as adverse theories, and let the kids debate it. Both theories require faith, although objectively, I'd have to say that [Speciation through] Evolution requires me to actively suspend logic and reason and accept arbitrary and unobserved phenomena without even a claim to declaratory authority.
I'm going to just cut to the chase. I have no problem with evolution and I'm sure that most "bible hugging" Christians, Jews and Muslims don't either (before anyone gets offended, I didn't capitalize "bible" and I am using it in it's near-Latin form for "Book" or more precisely "Sacred Cannon" (not to be confused with my sacred Canon 1Ds Mark III) to describe Old/New Testament, Torah, or Koran).
It's patently obvious that genes mutate, genetic codes adapt, and that there are drifts (I call them "tides" because they often are observed to be reversible). What is also obvious, meaning it is readily observable, is that genetic characteristics are discreet and at least with complex multi-celled organisms, the genetic codes are permanent within an individual (okay, okay, I enjoy X-Men just as much as the next guy, but it's just a movie) and cannot be "rubbed" off or passed between members of a population in some cases can't even be transferred to offspring. An individual's genetic makeup doesn't change other than under unnatural circumstances (like that episode of X-Men...).
What I don't accept is the circular argument of "gradual" drift. Your statement that "individuals don't evolve, populations do" is true within the context of my prior statement, that genetic characteristics are set at conception and once set aren't subject to "evolving", but if you are saying that evolution doesn't begin with individuals or doesn't occur at the individual level wherein a trait that did not exist in the population shows up "spontaneously" in a single individual, you are patently wrong. Not only do they commence with a single individual, but they commence within a single cell. No matter how large the population or how many years two segments have been separated, it still comes down to a mutation occurring within a single or a pair* in single moment of mitosis. You simply can't escape that; it is truth self-evident. If a portion of a population experiences a mutation, then logic dictates that an individual did as well, or more accurately, it commenced with an individual:
If A is part of B and B = C, then A = C
or
Framed in the current argument, if individual A is part of population B, and B has a genetic characteristic C, then before B is identified, A as an individual must also have said characteristic C. So, where did it commence within the population? It had to start somewhere. If it's unlikely that an individual could mutate, survive, retain the power to pro-create, yet not with the larger population, yet be more robust and prone to survive than the population at large, it's even less likely that it occurred simultaneously within the entire population, or within all of the new offspring of the population simultaneously.
While I don't necessarily agree with the proposed Texas Curriculum (haven't read it yet), what I disagree with is Evolutionism v Creationism being hauled around as a thumping stick or wedge issue. I firstly object to the mischaracterization that occurs with the semantically lazy truncation of the theory of [speciation through] evolution. This is what Darwin purported and what most people mean when they reference "evolution". As a single word, "evolution" connotes, but does not adequately describe the belief of the "evolutionists", namely that new species evolved from older species.
The point of contention though falls on the untenable and improbable stretch that extrapolates the concept of a new species from the process of evolution. It's not observable, it's not logical, it's not remotely probable. I object to it being taught to my children under the pretense of "science" because it's no more proven and verifiable than the Biblical accounts of the creation. The only thing different is that the guy (Moses) that recounts the story of the creation has an older claim and since [Speciation through] Evolutionists rely almost wholly on large vague expanses of time, it puts Moses closer to observing the phenomena, or at least closer to the commencement of (an) evolutionary cycle. In t
TGIBBS
This is mere sophistry. The base unit of a gas is a single molecule, but gasses have properties such as density, temperature, and pressure that individual molecules do not have. Similarly, populations of organisms have properties such as genetic diversity that individuals do not have.
RESPONSE
What you are suggesting then is that a single individual (or pair for sexually reproducing species) is not a large enough sample because it is the diversity that brings about the genetic drift. Well, I guess you have to drift away from something, so for the sake of comparison you need the larger population. But the behavior of a gas as the many molecules interact, is not parallel because genetic traits don't "Rub off" from one member to another. Short of fatal bursts of radiation, genetic traits are commenced in mitosis and in rare events in a very young zygote, not in fully developed members of a population. Show me a single instance and I will grant you some credibility on this.
TGIBBS
Computerized genetic algorithms are quite successful in solving problems without any such mechanism.
RESPONSE
Computers are created by [mostly] intelligent entities, so claiming that an intelligence can solve the problem doesn't provide any support for the assumption of spontaneous speciation.
TGIBBS
I am using "preference" because separation of populations does not require complete incompatibility--it can occur by the gradual accumulation of variations that enhance within group mating preference relative to outgroup. In such a situation, genetic drift will eventually begin to impair outgroup reproductive success. There is no point at which there needs to be two individuals that are only compatible with each other, and completely incompatible with everybody else.
RESPONSE
Says you. Seriously, the definition of a species is a group of organisms separate from others that they cannot breed. Can we agree that the definition of a species is that one of it's members cannot mate with a member of another species, not by "preference", but by physical incompatibility? Let's get that hammered down because if you are talking about breeds of dogs as if they were species, they you and I are not even talking about the same thing. You might as well be talking baseball and me golf and arguing over who won based on high or low score.
TGIBBS
But if you insist on looking only at tiny finite elements, you can easily convince yourself that there are no such things as curves--which seems to be pretty much the error you are making in thinking about speciation.
RESPONSE
I don't have to convince myself there's no such thing as a curve. Curves only exist in theory. Magnify any curve and you'll eventually see dots. A curve is a handy mechanism, useful for resolution independent rendering like PostScript or for describing a behavior visually, but eventually you'll have finite elements and the relationship between them approximates a curve. But that's another theory for another time and if you don't find the analogy useful, I'm certainly not going to compel or convince you otherwise.
CONCLUSION
You obviously subscribe to the blob theory of non-empirical evidence, which is "given enough time, enough samples, anything can happen". While I believe that space and time are infinite, I also believe and have no contrary evidence, that the infinite is constructed of finite elements. What cannot occur in the finite, can neither occur in the infinite, or in any superset of the finite. I stand firm that if speciation cannot occur in one or two members of a population, it can't transpire on the whole, no matter how much time granted or how big the population gets, WITHOUT intervention. That is intelligent design. You don't have to declare the source of the intelligence, leave that for Sunday School, but don't create a blob theory to cram down the kiddies' throats to support an otherwise untenable dogma that spontaneously (yet over time) creates new species where none existed pre
Exhibit 'B'.
Hyperbole and pejorative are not an adequate substitute for arguing the substance, and hardly an exhibit of evidence makes. You don't win an argument just because you hurt the feelings of your opponent.
From Dr. Manhattan:
Let's assume the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Where did the oil come from? Was it created in the ground with the rest of the Earth? If so, is there a way to predict where it might be found? Or perhaps it really did form from plants and dinosaurs, but about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could? Any way you look at it, a young Earth and a Flood would imply some very interesting scientific questions to ask, some interesting (and potentially extremely valuable) research programs to start. How come nobody's actually pursuing such research programs?
Response:
So, because you haven't observed Oil form in less than a thousand years, it can't possibly form in such a short time frame?
I imagine you'll balk at my suggestion that it can because "it's crazy" and "no one has ever seen it".
To which I respond, have you ever observed a member of a species born with a mutation, sexually incompatible with the rest of the species, yet robust enough to survive, and actually better adapted than the rest of the species so that it outlives and out reproduces the remainder of the population? No? Then I taunt you, "you're crazy! no one has ever seen it!"
This neither supports the theory of [Speciation through] Evolution, nor the theory of Creation, just that you can't draw empirical proof from anecdotes.
Ummm, I believe that would be 6,000 years ago, not 10,000. Get your numbers straight.
Sometimes evolutionists (let's call them ANTI creationists because a creationist can still believe in evolution) refer to laboratory experiments where single cell organisms can be observed to not just mutate, but sexually speciate, but I think you have to parallel that with a creation event and not a spontaneous event, because assuming that the scientists neuro-receptors are firing off, there's intelligence at the helm. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principal supports that you cannot measure the results of a phenomena without affecting the results, so without being too pedantic, you can't observe an evolutionary phenomena without introducing the element you were trying to disprove which is intelligence. Kind of like the primary objective in Star Trek.
Another misplaced proof is that of using astoundingly large numbers. The old "ten-thousand-monkeys-typing-on-ten-thousand-typewriters-over-ten-thousand-years can eventually produce a sonnet from Shakespeare". Given enough time, anything can happen, right? Well, not so fast, first, let's get it out of the way that the ten thousand monkeys aren't going to "evolve" into a higher life form because that would create a circular proof. The question isn't can 10,000 monkeys type, it's can ONE monkey type. Can the monkey hit the keys and avoid the strikers from getting tangled, can they insert the next piece of paper, can they return the carriage? But, oh, you're drawing the analogy too far! No, because you have to ask the same question of a population of a given species. In order for a large number of the species to embark on an alternative speciatic journey, first ONE member has to be able to mutate, survive, and breed. Giving more time and more members doesn't solve the problem. Just ask the guys at Norton Thiocol who thought that 3 bad O-Rings would compensate for a flawed design for O-Rings.
Another way to look at it is a scatter diagram. You can make your own. Drop you wife's best vase (or your mother's if you're a blogger still living at home with "mom") and measure the distance of each broken piece from the center of impact. You'll have a few in the center, some in the near vicinity and even some strangely falling 4 or 5 feet away. Depending on angle of incidence, velocity, ambient temperature, lead content in the crystal (we're going to use a really good vase for this experiment), you may even have some pieces land 15 or 20 feet away. Well, you say, then couldn't we have some that fall 30 or 50 feet away? What about 100 or 1000 feet? Surely if it breaks in a million pieces, one of those tiny pieces can fall and bounce and end up on the other side of the city given the right circumstances. So, to prove that, you break a hundred vases. Is it going to happen? No, but you'll really piss off your wife (or "mommy").
It doesn't matter how many vases you break, only one piece has to prove the theory that it can bounce 1000 feet away, the piece that fell a thousand feet away. So, the question to ask a physicist isn't "from a million pieces could some fall 1000 feet away?", but "Can ONE piece fall that far away?". Back to Spontaneous Speciation, it's not "can a new species randomly generate given a million years and a large enough population", but "can a SINGLE member (or two members for sexually reproducing species) of a population, with no outside stimulus, survive a genetic mutation that would render him/her/pat sexually incompatible, yet robust enough to survive, and (to accommodate Darwin's theory) better able to survive than the balance of the population?"
No, you are mistaken in your distinction between populations and individuals. The base unit of a population IS an individual (that's also the basis of integral calculus - you can always subdivide until you have a single slice, which slice once reverse expanded fulfills the equation or defines the population). Genetic drift (mutations) occurs or more succinctly STARTS on an individual basis and not in concert (with one exception which I'll explain at the end). It may appear to be a group phenomena if you could somehow look at a vertical descent, but there's no horizontal expansion of the same genetic mutation simultaneously occurring in multiple members of the same population of a species, except for possibly within multiples (e.g. twins and triplets) where there is an abnormal split of the genome AFTER fertilization and differentiation. Not only is this rare to have genetically identical multiples, but with the survival rate of aberrations being skewed low, it is extremely unlikely that you'd have a robust AND sexually incompatible (you use the word "preference" so I want to be clear that "compatibility" does not infer preference, but physical interoperability) pair AND they have to be sexually compatible with EACH OTHER. At some point, you have to toss in the towel and in spite of asserting a domain of thousands or millions of years and billions of subjects to sample, admit that genetic drift happens through discrete mutations in individuals in a moment in time. "Drift" is really a misnomer except for the flexible changes in the genetic designs of individual species such as that British moth that can change color over generations (and change back again), but that's hardly speciation and maybe "tide" is a better term than "drift" because of it's demonstrable ability to reverse to fit the situtuation.
I mentioned the one exception to "in concert" genetic drift. That would be the basis of "Intelligent Design", where a controlled event changes the story of a species. You can call it God, Space Aliens, or the Big Bang, but as soon as you introduce an outside event as your deux et machina, you have now conceded to "Creationism" or the "Existence of a Creator", and we become "creatures".
If you look at basic integral calculus, you'll see that what appears to be a curve (gradual) can only be solved by looking at the finite elements, which in the case of Evolution, are individuals at distinct moments in time. Although you can't prove science anecdotally (Evolutionists, pay attention!) you need only apply Occam's razor to particle physics to give you pause to consider setting aside your Ape-to-Man-from-bacterial-sludge-over-a-gazillion-years dogma, at least for a season to re-evaluate your postulations.
Though the argument gets dumbed down to a debate between Evolution and Creationism, it's really about whether spontaneous speciation is probable or even possible. The useful definition of speciation is that from a single species, two or more species spontaneously generate, the new specie or species unable to mate and produce offspring with members of the foundation species. What hard core evolutionists tend to do is use thousands or millions (or in the case of Carl Sagan, Billions) of years as a time span, but in reality speciation has to happen spontaneously, in the fraction of a second during the first cell division of mytosis.
The problem with this requirement is that (single cell or monosex organisms aside), you have to have the spontaneous generation of a pair, or at least a single individual member that 1) cannot mate with other members of the [old] species, but can create more members of his/her [new] species, which, when you get to higher life forms, requires a spontaneously generated mate. and 2) the [new] species has to be robust enough to survive long enough to mate and reproduce, and 3) has to be more adept at survival to satisfy the theory of natural selection. I'm willing to set aside requisite #3 because it was just the theory of a madman, but chances of #1 and #2 occurring spontaneously are pretty slim.
There are arguments for parapatric and allopatric speciation, but they are just smoke screens because separation of population is immaterial with spontaneous speciation which occurs sympatrically. Another way to look at it is even with a slow "drift", there still has to be measurable movement. Even within a million year time scale, you still have to have a single moment in time where there are members of a NEW species that can no longer mate with the original species. The larger time frame becomes irrelevant when you consider that the two members (one old and one new) are no longer sexually compatible but co-exist. You don't need millions of years and you don't need geographic separation, because the subdivision of the population is simply the new species existing within the original species from which they originate. The scientific name for this phenomena is "punctuated equilibrium", but simply put, it eliminates the need for a long stretch of time, because it again comes down to the simultaneous "birth" of two inter-compatible members that are strangely incompatible with the balance of the population of the original species. No getting around it.
Ironically, every observable example of alleged speciation does not actually involve sexually incompatible species, or at best only alleges that the two separate species were at one time sexually compatible. Most of these are classified as "island genetics" and do not evidence speciation (there is no actual observation - Darwin didn't observe anything but a snapshot of the creature populations on Galapagos, no actual division of a species into separate species), just genetic drift resulting in modified traits, but not genetic incompatibilities.
But, alas, the creationists cling to their bibles and throw out evolution (genetic drifts) with the repulsive idea that man descended from the apes of the jungle, and the "evolutionists" attach speciation to their dogma in order to protect their priestcraft and justify an existence that denies a creator. Both are wrong, and the argument from both sides fall on deaf ears. It becomes a wedge issue dumbed down so that newspapers and magazines can print fantastical articles about educational curriculums giving fodder to the housewives and hippies who take up the extreme sides of the issue.
BUT, "Catholic"in this context means "Universal". So, the creed either doesn't hold at all because of divisions in the church, or only one of the splinters is true and everyone else is reciting the creed in vain. So, who's right and wrong, the Protestants or Catholics? What about the Eastern Orthodox, the Coptics, and others? It doesn't make sense that one Christ should have several different warring sects, so maybe they're all wrong?
Only the Catholics and Protestants accept the final form of the Nicene Creed, or the creed that commenced in the 1st Ecumenical Council held in Nicaea (Present Day Turkey), convened by Emperor Constantine I in A.D. 325 and was finalized in the 7th. By the Fourth Council, the Oriental Orthodox Church separated. By the Eighth, the Greek (Eastern) Church separated because there were a few points of doctrine (Filalopean Controversy) with which they disagreed, including the Papacy (the Eastern Patriarch and Roman Pope excommunicated each other), which authority was eventually rejected by the Protestants as well. The writeup on Wikipedia is pretty objective and accurate. HOWEVER, the most significant group of Christians that don't accept the Nicene Creed are the early Christians, namely the Apostles and those that followed Christ from A.D. 30 to A.D. 325. The Nicene Creed is a consensus agreement on an interpretation of the God Head (arising from the Arian Controversy) and appears nowhere in the Scriptures (New Testament or Old Testament). There's no claim to divine origin of the pronouncements that came from the Ecumenical Councils, and it's pretty much fact that there were dissenting opinions. Only later were the Ecumenical Councils declared "authoritative". Among modern Christians that don't accept the Nicene Creed are Jehovah's Witnesses, Latter-Day Saints, and some very small fundamentalist Christian groups. MOST Christians, however, don't know about the Ecumenical councils and among those that have recited the Creed, a common practice in more formal Catholic and Protestant congregations, most couldn't articulate what the creed actually means with respect to the relationship between Jesus and God. As for the Apostle's Creed, it was originally memorized and recited, so the earliest documented version is around A.D. 714, but it's believed by scholars to come from Gaul in the 5th Century. It's basically a recitation of the three members of the God Head, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, probably inspired by Matthew 28:19 and corroborated in the account of the Baptism of Jesus in the Gospels. It's probably less cryptic than the Nicene Creed and I imagine most Christians, including Mormons, accept the content even if they don't by practice RECITE the creed (which I imagine is the definition of a creed, that you recite it). "Creed" comes from latin "Credo" which means you believe it ("give credence to it"). In summary, most Christians that adamantly believe that Latter-Day Saints aren't Christians base it upon the LDS rejection of the authority of the Nicene Creed. It's a rather subtle argument that escapes the understanding of most lay people, and most who reject the Mormons do so mostly at the word of their pastors or priests without understanding the actual theological differences or from whence they arise. In closing, the Nicene Creed has nothing to do with the Utah Legislature's push to restrict keyword advertising, or specifically the open sale of copyrighted trademarks, though I imagine Latter-Day Saints are pretty sensitive to opponents buying keywords related specifically to the LDS Church. Businesses probably don't like competitors buying their copyrighted names and trademarks, but the religious opponents of the Mormon Church are often not just competing, but are somewhat deceptive in their links and mean spirited in their content.