Evolution is the least popular theory ever proposed. It has been under continuous attack ever since it was proposed. During this time, the creationists have tried every trick they can think of to get it out of the schools. They have blamed just about every evil of society on it, and they have brainwashed millions into believing that it's incompatible with their religion. They've tried to make it illegal, and they have even tried (unsuccessfully) to disprove it. And evolution has survived all of these attacks because it is true. You can always argue that the physical evidence doesn't accurately represent reality, and of course the creationists have tried that, but it's no use when they're arguing with proper scientists.
Given this, I don't think we need to worry about evolution at all. Sure, creationists would like it to be thrown away entirely, but as long as we have scientists, that simply will not happen. You just can't do useful research in any physical science if you think the Bible has greater authority than a ton of physical evidence. There are worse problems in public schools than a bunch of nutcases wanting their crazy beliefs taught as if they were science.
There is no evidence that will convince a creationist that he is wrong. If Jesus Christ personally appeared in front of John Q. Creationist and said "Hi, John. My name's Jesus, the Earth is billions of years old and evolution is basically true," then John Q. would probably crucify him for blasphemy. That's what the fundamentalists did, the last time Jesus told them they were wrong. "Everyone" knows that God couldn't have created the Universe using evolution: he's omnipotent, sure, but he's not that omnipotent. In summary, there is no point in trying to argue with these people, their beliefs are nuts even in comparison to other Christians, so let's just ignore them..
Fraud and abuse? Well, no Scientology discussion can be complete without a link to Bare Faced Messiah, the unauthorised biography of L. Ron Hubbard. It is very interesting stuff. The man lived recently enough that there are plenty of verifiable historical facts about him, and he was certainly an extraordinary guy.
Any Scientologists reading this topic have no doubt already heard about Bare Faced Messiah and the lies contained within it, invented (of course) by the Church's enemies in order to discredit Hubbard and his ideas. To you I say: what if your perception of reality is wrong? What if you have been lied to, that a sort of Matrix has been built around you by your friends and colleagues at the Church? Wouldn't you at least like to see what other people's reality looks like? No need to take any pills, the truth might be a click away...
Yeah, I don't buy it. Human-level AI in 20 years? Hmm.. where and when did I hear that before? How about every year since the invention of computers? It must be difficult for people like Kurzweil to keep turning out new predictions, and I suppose that's why they keep reheating this Asimov stuff from the 50s.
It's unfortunate, but we're not held back by a hardware problem any more. It's a software problem - we don't understand how the brain works. Unfortunately the FSM forgot to provide us with the reference manual, and there is no debugging interface. Obviously He didn't want us to steal His intellectual property.
If you are sticking up for the rights of Britain's feral children - the chavs - then you have obviously not lived amongst them. They don't need sympathy, they need a belt round the ear. The carrot solution (rewards for positive behaviour) has been tried endlessly, and all they have done is taught the chavs that they can expect something for nothing. There is only one other type of solution. But this is Britain, where smacking your own children will land you in court. Take action against chavs who try to intimidate you or damage your property, and you'll end up getting arrested. They, on the other hand, have nothing to lose. It's an asymmetric threat.
I'm not normally so right-wing, but there is definitely a big, serious problem here. And unfortunately nobody in Government has a clue how to deal with it. The solution I favour is to program the chavs with a rootkit that controls their behaviour, which has worked very successfully in the past. We could use "hellfire and brimstone" Christianity for this purpose: try enjoying your underage drinking when you're afraid of the Devil lurking behind you, ready to unleash an eternity of torment for sins like truancy and hanging around outside the shops. Religion may be wrong, but it has its uses.
Surely everyone who makes software should care about IP rights? Even the Free Software Foundation get pissed if you violate one of their IP licenses, e.g. distribute copyrighted software without adhering to the GPLv2 licensing agreement.
There's nothing wrong with you. In a few years time, most people will be thinking this, especially when the next version is released. You are ahead of your time by 2 or 3 years.
Myself, I live so far in the future that I have Linux on my desktop and I really like it.
Well, another article is entitled "Inventor Doesn't Dare Say 'Perpetual Motion Machine'", but then quotes him as saying: "What I can say with full confidence is that our system violates the law of conservation of energy". So it's just as much bollocks as any other "free energy device", it's just that he hasn't claimed that the "free energy" is sufficient to run the machine forever.
What I want to know is: why not? If you're going to try to break the laws of thermodynamics, at least try to break them properly!
I think we are talking cross purposes here: I'm talking about the UK government, who most definitely do have a plan to build a centralised database in order to reduce some of the problems you mention, such as the need to hit various different databases. (This is an on-topic reply to a question about "why don't people like ID cards?" - the answer is "the database"!)
However, I think you are wrong about the possible problems with creating such a database. Search engines are a good example of very large databases that store and process vast amounts of information: with careful design, Internet-sized quantities of data can be collected, stored and searched. It won't be cheap, and in the case of surveillance databases it might not be a good idea, but it is possible.
You are right, but it could be argued that a single primary key into a number of connected databases is the same as a single database. The anti-ID people like to talk about "the database" because that makes the issue easier to understand.
The problem with current government databases is that they need cleaning up. There are lots of duplicate or inaccurate records, even though supposedly unique keys already exist (e.g. social security numbers, passport numbers). The ID cards act in the UK is at least partly about setting up a framework to reduce that problem: the plan is to interview passport applicants and record their biometrics before assigning them their unique NIR number. The civil service hopes that this will clean up the data, making the database more useful for whatever purposes they have in mind. This process is not cheap, so the ID cards act provides the funding and the "popular mandate" required to go ahead with it. It is hard to see how the data could be cleaned up in any other way. However, some would say that the project is unnecessary, that the £20bn would be better spent elsewhere, and that the eventual goals of the project are questionable.
Because the ID card act is really about creating a centralised government database that stores all information about you in one place. Not just personal information either - this would be every electronic record that exists about you, like what you buy and where you travel. Some people think this would be overly intrusive, that it would give too much power to the authorities, and that the data might be stolen or lost. (You might remember some recent news stories about government data being lost: this happens quite often.)
However, most people do not understand about the database and do not care about the ID cards, so people who think it's a good idea are in luck. I guess we will see the consequences in twenty years time.
I think they would be better off selling (for a nominal fee) music rental services to students affiliated with universities. Get them hooked and getting the music via approved music rental systems. Once they leave university, the music will stop working after a short time (say 6 months)
Thing is, they already offer that service. Napster.com gives you access to unlimited music for $15/month. It uses Windows Media DRM (not cross platform) and you lose access as soon as you stop paying. If you don't like that idea, you can buy your music from iTunes or Amazon and keep it forever. So students are choosing not to pay for their music. Compared to the cost of a college education, $15/month is peanuts.
Chase the piracy-for-profit people, not your actual potential customers.
You mean the Pirate Bay? But how can they be attacked if not through the people who use their service?
Actually, it seems like game consoles are DRM's greatest success story. While the PC game industry founders thanks to the people who say "You can't, like, own intellectual property, man," game console makers continue to sell games and turn a profit. Why is this? Well:
There are no third-party console makers, so you can only buy your console from Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo. There are no grey-market companies selling consoles minus restrictions, as there are for DVD players. The closest you can get is a modchip: and that's too much effort for most gamers.
Console software doesn't run on a PC, so you need specialist tools to attack the DRM. DVD Jon had it easy, really.
There is no "analogue hole".
Because the hardware is standardised, manufacturers can push updates on new games to detect and disable modchips.
So DRM on consoles is very different to DRM on music or video (analogue hole!) and DRM on PC software. It actually works! It is unfortunate that we have ended up in a world where game sales are effectively controlled by the console makers, since it leads to more EA games and less innovation. But hey, this is the march of technology. Games manufacturers who aren't willing to adapt to the new conditions and sell their games through Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo will go the way of the oil lamp and the record executive.
Surprised more people haven't commented on this. Ending a summary with "3 million amps of power" is a classic Slashdotism. It would once have provoked many responses pointing out that an amp of power makes as much sense as a gallon of distance. Perhaps we can't be bothered correcting the editors any more.
Me, actually. But I never said that face recognition would work, or that it was in widespread use. I said that RFID would be needed to work around the problems with face recognition, in order to make city and nation-sized surveillance networks practical.
There are a lot of CCTV systems in the UK but some people need to look up the CC bit before spouting this sort of bollocks. There is no central repository of information. There is no face recognition (Possibly excepting airports and the like, does any state not?).
The point is that there could be a central repository of information. How hard would it be to send all CCTV recordings to a regional data centre via a network, then store all of them for months? Not difficult at all: this isn't the 80s. We already have the networking, storage and software technology. And in the UK at least, the laws exist to enable all of this - ever heard of ANPR or the National ID Register? Those are central repositories of information obtained by tracking people.
Face recognition is much harder (it doesn't work well at all), and that's exactly why RFID is useful. Using RFID data, computer programs can automatically tag the video recordings with the people who appear in them. It doesn't take any leap of imagination to see that this is possible: right now, a good percentage of the regular contributors to this site could build the centralised CCTV network, the RFID scanners, the tagging software, and the search engine required to make use of the data.
Interesting. Another piece of (mis)information about RFID is that the chips can be made very small, when miniaturisation is limited by the minimum size of an effective antenna. An earlier discussion on that topic.
However, RFID could solve a variety of problems in the surveillance business: how do you track everyone's movements without protests and objections? You can't rely on image recognition, so getting everyone to carry remotely readable electronic tags seems to be the best way. Mobile phones are good, but people might turn them off or leave them at home. So there is a reason to miniaturise RFID devices and make them readable over a distance of several metres, even if it is beyond the current state of the art.
Aside: I've been wondering if people could be tracked using their smell. Could an electronic nose be used to identify people as they walk past? People apparently have unique smells, but only very good noses (e.g. dogs) can tell the difference. This biometric could be read at a distance, in place of the fabled secret police database linked RFID reader that scans everyone's chips as they pass within range.
While Joel is certainly not crazy-ol Tom Cruise, I think his position on high-priced DVDs vs Bittorent is a poor understanding of the market. It doesn't have to be free.. but who wants to pay $10-$15 to see someone make fun of a movie? Not me.
The price is too high; we should be able to buy the movie for less than half that, then download it immediately (no DRM, of course). That would lower the costs of doing business - no discs to produce, no need to send anything by mail. Joel might even make more money doing it that way. He is relying on the Internet for marketing, as Mike Nelson has done very successfully with the help of that somethingawful guy, so why not also rely on the Internet for distribution too?
But he couldn't be expected to condone piracy. If your only way of making money is selling information, you're not going to tell people to "steal" it from you. It's not "imaginary property" - it really does cost $$$s to produce. (I bet that guy who invited everyone to pirate his book [see front page] will be publishing future books in the traditional way. If he doesn't, he's an idiot.)
We are the grey goo. The plants and the bacteria had a good go at spreading all over Earth, but we spread further and faster than any previous life. The "grey goo scenario" is limited by the assumption that energy is abundant, and indeed energy (food) shortages are all that stops us covering every inch of the world.
WISE OLD BIRD: Now listen. Our world suffered two blights. One was the blight of the robot. ARTHUR: Tried to take over did they? WISE OLD BIRD: Oh my dear fellow, no, no, no, no, no. Much worse than that. They told us they liked us. ARTHUR: No?! WISE OLD BIRD: Well, it's not their fault, poor things, they'd been programmed to. But you can imagine how we felt, or at least our ancestors. ARTHUR: Ghastly.
Eerily prescient, that. AI is "Clippy" - the computer guesses what you are trying to do and tries to help you, invariably making any task more difficult unless you can second-guess the heuristics. Don't pretend you want to help me! Give me a shell and obey my commands, that's all I ask.
Slashdot Mirror
Teaching evolution - does it really matter?
Evolution is the least popular theory ever proposed. It has been under continuous attack ever since it was proposed. During this time, the creationists have tried every trick they can think of to get it out of the schools. They have blamed just about every evil of society on it, and they have brainwashed millions into believing that it's incompatible with their religion. They've tried to make it illegal, and they have even tried (unsuccessfully) to disprove it. And evolution has survived all of these attacks because it is true. You can always argue that the physical evidence doesn't accurately represent reality, and of course the creationists have tried that, but it's no use when they're arguing with proper scientists.
Given this, I don't think we need to worry about evolution at all. Sure, creationists would like it to be thrown away entirely, but as long as we have scientists, that simply will not happen. You just can't do useful research in any physical science if you think the Bible has greater authority than a ton of physical evidence. There are worse problems in public schools than a bunch of nutcases wanting their crazy beliefs taught as if they were science.
There is no evidence that will convince a creationist that he is wrong. If Jesus Christ personally appeared in front of John Q. Creationist and said "Hi, John. My name's Jesus, the Earth is billions of years old and evolution is basically true," then John Q. would probably crucify him for blasphemy. That's what the fundamentalists did, the last time Jesus told them they were wrong. "Everyone" knows that God couldn't have created the Universe using evolution: he's omnipotent, sure, but he's not that omnipotent. In summary, there is no point in trying to argue with these people, their beliefs are nuts even in comparison to other Christians, so let's just ignore them..
Fraud and abuse? Well, no Scientology discussion can be complete without a link to Bare Faced Messiah, the unauthorised biography of L. Ron Hubbard. It is very interesting stuff. The man lived recently enough that there are plenty of verifiable historical facts about him, and he was certainly an extraordinary guy.
Any Scientologists reading this topic have no doubt already heard about Bare Faced Messiah and the lies contained within it, invented (of course) by the Church's enemies in order to discredit Hubbard and his ideas. To you I say: what if your perception of reality is wrong? What if you have been lied to, that a sort of Matrix has been built around you by your friends and colleagues at the Church? Wouldn't you at least like to see what other people's reality looks like? No need to take any pills, the truth might be a click away...
But wait! Is that stronger? Is ROT13 a group? We may never know...
No .torrent for a Swedish course? And I thought they had everything...
Yeah, I don't buy it. Human-level AI in 20 years? Hmm.. where and when did I hear that before? How about every year since the invention of computers? It must be difficult for people like Kurzweil to keep turning out new predictions, and I suppose that's why they keep reheating this Asimov stuff from the 50s.
It's unfortunate, but we're not held back by a hardware problem any more. It's a software problem - we don't understand how the brain works. Unfortunately the FSM forgot to provide us with the reference manual, and there is no debugging interface. Obviously He didn't want us to steal His intellectual property.
If you are sticking up for the rights of Britain's feral children - the chavs - then you have obviously not lived amongst them. They don't need sympathy, they need a belt round the ear. The carrot solution (rewards for positive behaviour) has been tried endlessly, and all they have done is taught the chavs that they can expect something for nothing. There is only one other type of solution. But this is Britain, where smacking your own children will land you in court. Take action against chavs who try to intimidate you or damage your property, and you'll end up getting arrested. They, on the other hand, have nothing to lose. It's an asymmetric threat.
I'm not normally so right-wing, but there is definitely a big, serious problem here. And unfortunately nobody in Government has a clue how to deal with it. The solution I favour is to program the chavs with a rootkit that controls their behaviour, which has worked very successfully in the past. We could use "hellfire and brimstone" Christianity for this purpose: try enjoying your underage drinking when you're afraid of the Devil lurking behind you, ready to unleash an eternity of torment for sins like truancy and hanging around outside the shops. Religion may be wrong, but it has its uses.
Surely everyone who makes software should care about IP rights? Even the Free Software Foundation get pissed if you violate one of their IP licenses, e.g. distribute copyrighted software without adhering to the GPLv2 licensing agreement.
There's nothing wrong with you. In a few years time, most people will be thinking this, especially when the next version is released. You are ahead of your time by 2 or 3 years.
Myself, I live so far in the future that I have Linux on my desktop and I really like it.
Well, another article is entitled "Inventor Doesn't Dare Say 'Perpetual Motion Machine'", but then quotes him as saying: "What I can say with full confidence is that our system violates the law of conservation of energy". So it's just as much bollocks as any other "free energy device", it's just that he hasn't claimed that the "free energy" is sufficient to run the machine forever.
What I want to know is: why not? If you're going to try to break the laws of thermodynamics, at least try to break them properly!
I think we are talking cross purposes here: I'm talking about the UK government, who most definitely do have a plan to build a centralised database in order to reduce some of the problems you mention, such as the need to hit various different databases. (This is an on-topic reply to a question about "why don't people like ID cards?" - the answer is "the database"!)
However, I think you are wrong about the possible problems with creating such a database. Search engines are a good example of very large databases that store and process vast amounts of information: with careful design, Internet-sized quantities of data can be collected, stored and searched. It won't be cheap, and in the case of surveillance databases it might not be a good idea, but it is possible.
You are right, but it could be argued that a single primary key into a number of connected databases is the same as a single database. The anti-ID people like to talk about "the database" because that makes the issue easier to understand.
The problem with current government databases is that they need cleaning up. There are lots of duplicate or inaccurate records, even though supposedly unique keys already exist (e.g. social security numbers, passport numbers). The ID cards act in the UK is at least partly about setting up a framework to reduce that problem: the plan is to interview passport applicants and record their biometrics before assigning them their unique NIR number. The civil service hopes that this will clean up the data, making the database more useful for whatever purposes they have in mind. This process is not cheap, so the ID cards act provides the funding and the "popular mandate" required to go ahead with it. It is hard to see how the data could be cleaned up in any other way. However, some would say that the project is unnecessary, that the £20bn would be better spent elsewhere, and that the eventual goals of the project are questionable.
Because the ID card act is really about creating a centralised government database that stores all information about you in one place. Not just personal information either - this would be every electronic record that exists about you, like what you buy and where you travel. Some people think this would be overly intrusive, that it would give too much power to the authorities, and that the data might be stolen or lost. (You might remember some recent news stories about government data being lost: this happens quite often.)
However, most people do not understand about the database and do not care about the ID cards, so people who think it's a good idea are in luck. I guess we will see the consequences in twenty years time.
I think they would be better off selling (for a nominal fee) music rental services to students affiliated with universities. Get them hooked and getting the music via approved music rental systems. Once they leave university, the music will stop working after a short time (say 6 months)
Thing is, they already offer that service. Napster.com gives you access to unlimited music for $15/month. It uses Windows Media DRM (not cross platform) and you lose access as soon as you stop paying. If you don't like that idea, you can buy your music from iTunes or Amazon and keep it forever. So students are choosing not to pay for their music. Compared to the cost of a college education, $15/month is peanuts.
Chase the piracy-for-profit people, not your actual potential customers.
You mean the Pirate Bay? But how can they be attacked if not through the people who use their service?
- There are no third-party console makers, so you can only buy your console from Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo. There are no grey-market companies selling consoles minus restrictions, as there are for DVD players. The closest you can get is a modchip: and that's too much effort for most gamers.
- Console software doesn't run on a PC, so you need specialist tools to attack the DRM. DVD Jon had it easy, really.
- There is no "analogue hole".
- Because the hardware is standardised, manufacturers can push updates on new games to detect and disable modchips.
So DRM on consoles is very different to DRM on music or video (analogue hole!) and DRM on PC software. It actually works! It is unfortunate that we have ended up in a world where game sales are effectively controlled by the console makers, since it leads to more EA games and less innovation. But hey, this is the march of technology. Games manufacturers who aren't willing to adapt to the new conditions and sell their games through Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo will go the way of the oil lamp and the record executive.Most likely :). But they should have added [sic] to indicate that the mistake came from the article.
Yours pedantically, Cheesey.
Surprised more people haven't commented on this. Ending a summary with "3 million amps of power" is a classic Slashdotism. It would once have provoked many responses pointing out that an amp of power makes as much sense as a gallon of distance. Perhaps we can't be bothered correcting the editors any more.
Where did this myth come from?
Me, actually. But I never said that face recognition would work, or that it was in widespread use. I said that RFID would be needed to work around the problems with face recognition, in order to make city and nation-sized surveillance networks practical.
There are a lot of CCTV systems in the UK but some people need to look up the CC bit before spouting this sort of bollocks. There is no central repository of information. There is no face recognition (Possibly excepting airports and the like, does any state not?).
The point is that there could be a central repository of information. How hard would it be to send all CCTV recordings to a regional data centre via a network, then store all of them for months? Not difficult at all: this isn't the 80s. We already have the networking, storage and software technology. And in the UK at least, the laws exist to enable all of this - ever heard of ANPR or the National ID Register? Those are central repositories of information obtained by tracking people.
Face recognition is much harder (it doesn't work well at all), and that's exactly why RFID is useful. Using RFID data, computer programs can automatically tag the video recordings with the people who appear in them. It doesn't take any leap of imagination to see that this is possible: right now, a good percentage of the regular contributors to this site could build the centralised CCTV network, the RFID scanners, the tagging software, and the search engine required to make use of the data.
Interesting. Another piece of (mis)information about RFID is that the chips can be made very small, when miniaturisation is limited by the minimum size of an effective antenna. An earlier discussion on that topic.
However, RFID could solve a variety of problems in the surveillance business: how do you track everyone's movements without protests and objections? You can't rely on image recognition, so getting everyone to carry remotely readable electronic tags seems to be the best way. Mobile phones are good, but people might turn them off or leave them at home. So there is a reason to miniaturise RFID devices and make them readable over a distance of several metres, even if it is beyond the current state of the art.
Aside: I've been wondering if people could be tracked using their smell. Could an electronic nose be used to identify people as they walk past? People apparently have unique smells, but only very good noses (e.g. dogs) can tell the difference. This biometric could be read at a distance, in place of the fabled secret police database linked RFID reader that scans everyone's chips as they pass within range.
Ah, thanks, I didn't see that. I hope they will offer the service soon, if only because it will make the product available worldwide.
While Joel is certainly not crazy-ol Tom Cruise, I think his position on high-priced DVDs vs Bittorent is a poor understanding of the market. It doesn't have to be free.. but who wants to pay $10-$15 to see someone make fun of a movie? Not me.
The price is too high; we should be able to buy the movie for less than half that, then download it immediately (no DRM, of course). That would lower the costs of doing business - no discs to produce, no need to send anything by mail. Joel might even make more money doing it that way. He is relying on the Internet for marketing, as Mike Nelson has done very successfully with the help of that somethingawful guy, so why not also rely on the Internet for distribution too?
But he couldn't be expected to condone piracy. If your only way of making money is selling information, you're not going to tell people to "steal" it from you. It's not "imaginary property" - it really does cost $$$s to produce. (I bet that guy who invited everyone to pirate his book [see front page] will be publishing future books in the traditional way. If he doesn't, he's an idiot.)
You forgot about all the other life on Earth.
We are the grey goo. The plants and the bacteria had a good go at spreading all over Earth, but we spread further and faster than any previous life. The "grey goo scenario" is limited by the assumption that energy is abundant, and indeed energy (food) shortages are all that stops us covering every inch of the world.
I, for one, welcome my fellow grey goo overlords.
And as for this one: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulthewineguy/2180851706/in/set-72157603619920398/
Oh noes! You have 0 nerd points! God's PC isn't i686-compatible: such an ISA could only have been created by the devil.
God actually uses a PDP-11. He is the original greybeard programmer. At least they got His username right.
Don't fuck a mounted filesystem, or you will fsck everything up! For fsck's sake, call umount before fucking.
Watch your back...