If you think it's a bad idea feel then free to point out why it will not work. Fusion is well understood it's been demonstrated and has been used to create energy. At this point solar still cost's more than using say coal so it's just as much in the design stage as fusion. Hell it's got a much lower chace of ever making anywhere near the amount of energy we need right now let along in the 20+ years it would take to get such a system in place.
Wind is somewhat usefull in remote areas but produces so little energy it's funny. There is a tiny amount of untaped tide energy and don't get me started on BIO fuel. At this in the next 50 years it's eiter coal or fusion and that's about it.
In the past 50 years the size of the largest stable reactions has grown over 100,000x. Calling that a failure is silly.
If we had been spending anywhere near the kind of money we spent on the manhattan project and things where not working that would be one thing. But, for the most part fusion research has been ignored. ITER was going to be a working reactor as in hooked up to the power grid and producing energy but after cutting it's budget in half and waiting 5 years to decide on a location for the fucking thing well it's not been living up to that.
PS: You can own and operate an aircraft for less than the cost of a high end car. The largest problem with using them is learning how to fly and finding someplace to land.
"Learning to spell and write might be something to consider."
Yep, but I have finite time and the relative advantage gained vs. lost does not pan out well. I can make ~300$/hour writing good software but I have nowhere near the level of innate talent to make that much writing.
If someone wants to target us because they believe those lies, then so be it
Yes some of them are lies but many of them are half-truths. The US get's involved in areas that increase our risks which is fine with me but if you ignore the reasons behind some ones actions the you can't control them. Now I think the most effective method of control would be to inundate there society with cheep satellite TV's and fast food. You can make hand radio's that are powered by simple hand cranks move this into the realm of extremely cheep PSP's with access to 5 or so channels of western style TV and I think we can effectively destroy there culture.
PS: I am not saying there is no threat but if say there is a 99% chance that cars will kill 50x as many Americans as terrorists will then we should spend 10 - 50 times as much on making cars safer vs. what we spend making us safer from terrorists. I am talking about creating automated highways which are safe as an example. Once your taking billions of $ a year you could be spending that money on large projects like retrofitting airbags on cars or mandatory free defensive driving classes or whatever. Just because something might make us safer does not mean it's worth spending that kind of money.
Sorry, I was more referring to capability. I know some people that work on secured systems and are vary limited in how they can interact with other systems.
Anyway, having worked on a lot of legacy code; being able to jump through CVS and look at when where and why code was changed becomes vary useful. Like a good IDE it's not needed but CVS makes you more productive over time. Even though it has other uses being able to diff you code right before bugs show up with the code right after the bug shows up is enough to save you the few hours it's going to take to set it up and the 3-4 min a day it takes to use. Yes you can do this by hand but in that case CVS is going to save you time right off the bat as you don't need to keep lhe {}{JNK 05/05/05 - updated to fix error 2715} style logs.
When I said "cars" and "people" was not specifying "my car" or "you". Driving at high speed surrounded by other cars moving at high speeds is a dangerous to hang out. Many things from driver error to mechanical failure could result in my death, but I consider it a lower risk environment than say a shuttlecraft during takeoff.
Your car does not want to kill you.
Now we could get into a semantic argument about what threat means but there is an implication of a level of danger beyond say the random chance that all the oxygen in the room will just happen to be somewhere else long enough for you to suffocate. However, you seem to imply that things like earthquakes and floods are not threats because they're not actively trying to kill you. Which is fine but what would you call the danger from says a 5km wide rock falling from the sky and why not use the word threat?
Anyway, I think it's clear that the level of response to the rather ill defined "terror threat" is well above the relative response to the risk of me being killed in a car accident.
PS: "the U.S. is not the problem." Says what? Much of the world wants us dead because of our past actions. Actions such as the CIA fucking over many elected governments might not seem like a big deal to you there are many people that get uptight over such tings. Granted the U.S. is not the only entity involved in said threats but are past actions is part of why we have a target over our heads.
I love living in the US but a large part of this is my preference to being part of the evil empire than in its path. I am starting a business to become so I can become one of the upper class so I get to take an active role in way the US is run. Working 80 hour weeks for low pay sucks but I know of no better place to get ahead than the US. When you include SS your % of your income that is taxed goes down when you move from 90k a year to 300k and after that you can pay someone to look into the loop holes.
PPS: Heh, one of my aunts got audited by the IRS and ended up getting a check for over 2.7 million in taxes she had over paid in the last 4 years. Now is that a great country or what.
Most old manual jobs are done by machine. (Digging wells, farming, building cars ect.)
Computers are better at many "thinking" jobs than people are. (Early on Computers where people doing math by hand now days a pocket PC has more computing power than 100's of people doing basic math.)
If we where to get ok AI and slightly better machines I don't think there will be a lot of jobs for people to do.
Add to that fusion for almost unlimited energy and we may get to a point where we stuff like TV's are so cheep there basically free, With computers better at doing your taxes than people, layers are next to useless in court. Digital actors that look better and act better than real ones ect. Now what do you want people to do?
Or to put it another way, I don't care how cheep your labor costs are you don't' dig deep sea oil wells by hand and at some point most people will not have any useful skills so what life style should they live? ?
At this point the poor in the US live better than surfs did in the 1200's. Now at what point do you think the poor will live better than the middle class do today? I don't know what will society be like when automation / AI happens but I hope we don't force most people into poverty for no reason.
OOver the last 5 years " terrorists " have killed around 00.002% of Americans. Which is right up there with bee stings. Yet people think of them a "major" threat.
That's stupid. We are spending far more to fight terror than the damage they have caused so calling them an economic threat is a little overblown. If we really wanted to make America safer let's spend that money on automated highways. I mean cars are a much larger danger to my health and safety than "terror" but I still drive a car every day.
At this point we can kill every man woman a child in the Middle East inside of an hour. That's a threat. Even if they where to have hundreds of nukes they can't stop that threat. So they can't use nukes or anything to nasty or we kill them their families there friends and everyone they have ever met.
You might think of strapping a bomb to your chest is an act of insanity but the people behind the scene are far more rational. So let's deal with real problems and drop this circus down to a reasonable level.
Kill an enemy, take out 1 opponent and harden the resolve of the rest. Wound an enemy, take out 3 opponents, and weaken the resolve of the rest.
I understand the idea behind this but think in modern warfare this is an overstated idea. The goal of war is to neutralize the enemy's ability / willingness to make war. Now having a large number of wounded pilots is a detrimental, but removing most / all skilled pilots is probably more detrimental. In many cases it's a lot easer to make a new plane than to train a new pilot. So having many countries would trade 50% wounded pilots in order to keep 50% fully trained pilots.
I think we can agree that over the last 100 years war has been an important factor to the US's and the worlds manufacture of firearms and ammo. Granted, inside the US more ammo is probably used for target practice than hunting and more for hunting animals than people, but trying to call most guns benign is overstating that idea.
PS: Ok for your average foot solder blowing off a leg is more detrimental than out right killing him in most cases but when it comes to highly trained people like fighter pilots or engineers 3 months in rehab and then back into the fight or back training there replacements is not really such a great idea.
I think home schooling tends to take in a lot more of the outliers than most sample groups. You are more likely to find kids who are 140+IQ and parents who are ultra religious. Most people home school their kids because they feel they can do a better job than the US educational system. Now many of them are correct but by no means all.
Anyway, I think HS's greatest benefit is also its greatest weakness in that it tends to produce people who are a little more extreme that normal school would. You simply end up with more rough edges when you don't have the constant pressure to conform 5 days a week for 12+ years.
My mother was a teacher who knew enough about the system to work it. As soon as she got me labeled L.D. (Spelling / Grammar / Basic Arithmetic)/Exceptionally Gifted (Science, Higher Math, Reading comprehension, Social Studies, ect) they where all to willing to bend over backwards for me. At one point I was going to school 1/2 the day and home school the rest of the time. So they sent a bus take me home after lunch every day. Now think about that your helping one student but just how much did that cost? Most things like giving me an extra set of books where next to useless but everything cost some cash.
The sad part was they basically decided to ignore anything I was not good at so I could excel in most areas and move out the door as it where. Now, I think it worked out well in my case but I still feel a little guilty about those bus rides.
Still it was interesting and I have some fond memories from that, like taking an assessment test. I think it was an IQ test but they did not want to call it that. Anyway this lady hands me a puzzle and starts a timer and try's to start reading her book but in like 15 seconds I go 'yoo-hoo I am finished' she sort of shudders as she had clearly forgotten where she was then goes go 'uhh what.' She then clicks the timer looks at me the finished puzzle and then says 'how do you do that that fast?' and here I am thinking umm that's not that fast let's see what happens when I hurry.
Ahh, good times. Still some things where a little hard. They moved me from remedial English in 8th grade to Honors English in 9th. Which might not have been so bad if I had any clue what the parts of speech where. Ok I was fine with nouns, verbs, and adjectives but as soon as she started talking adverb, and the object of the preposition I was simply lost. I still passed that class by the skin of my teeth and I did end up passing the AP test but that had nothing to do with learning the rules of grammar so much as faking it well enough to pass my classes.
You can find Amino-acids on balls if ice in space so that are naturaly occuring and you could find millions of tuns of them on early earth.
PS: Live = self replication. When you simulate evolution you simulate a self replicating code segment that's randomly chaning and hampered by it's enviernment. So by simulating a life form that's randomly changing you endup with one more suted for it's enviernment.
E.Q.D. Evolution works.
PPS: If you want to debate this stop posting AC and I will go over all your points.
Millions of people died but for each of those 10-100's of rounds where shot off. In hunting its 1-3 shots a kill but in war you use suppressor fire and take shots you think might hit someone. Look at how many plane's where shot down in WWII and think of the 1,000's of rounds that where fired to get that each kill.
Hell, take Vietnam it might have been a small war as such things go but the amount of ammo shot off was just insane.
Look, I have hunted; hell most years people come to my parents place just to pick off a few dear but I said most people learn to hit people not animals. Now I know some people like to hit targets for the fun of it but everyone in the military, and police forces learn how to hit people. Add to that all the people who buy a hand gun for home protection and you start to see a lot of people who learn how to wound or kill other people but don't show up to shooting ranges much.
Many people buy a handgun shoot off 2-3 clips and never come back. Now in your area most people might learn to hunt but where I grew up it was around 10-30% if that and this was farm country. Now most people live in cities and never go hunting so if there learning how to shoot it's to defend themselves.
I think it would be a good idea if everyone over 21 would carry a handgun at all times. Ok not such a good idea when drinking but I think it would do more to stop crime than doubling our police force or building more jails. Think of this you go to rob a 7-11 and you KNOW everyone has a gun. Want to hijack a plain fin, but everyone has a gun ect ect.
I say defend the idea that you can carry a gun at all times because it's a good idea not because you might want to hunt with your handgun sometime.
I think the amount of led shot off in WWII is more than has ever used for hunting. But, in the US most people use guns to hit targets or animals and not people.
As to target's I think more people shot at targets learning how to hit people than shoot at targets learning how to hit animals.
Step2:
You take your software (DNA) and make several copies and mutate them randomly. (Using a Random Number Generator).
Step3:
You then test your code to see how fit it is. Aka does it do what you want it to and if so how fast is it ect.
Step4:
Take the best x% and go to step 2 until you run out of time or you produce some code that's acceptable.
This works, but takes time. It's best when your trying to solve problems where you can tell if it works but you don't know how to do it. Programs that hop on a pogo stick or make life like movements are much easer to test for than to design which makes them well suited for evolutionary programming.
Now at no point did I design the software, but by setting the criteria by which it's survival could be tested I created a solution to my problem without designing it.
I was chosen from the field of possible applicants do to a willingness to work for a lower wage than any other competent applicant. As the only skills text was a verbal interview the company was incapable of ascertaining my written communication skills and thus said skills played no part the said process.
Or:
Someone said, "Max will work for cheep and knows WTF he was doing so get him."
Or:
Max good Ug bad get Max.
Or:
A willingness to work for a lower wage is one of the things that helped me get my current job.
Or:
Unlike most 2002 CS graduates I got a programming job straight out of collage. Part of this was a willingness to work for low wages, but learning useful skills vs. wasting my time writing English papers also helped.
But, I like trolling on/. so I will leave said post unedited.
I said with out evidence. If you ask a 6 year old if there is a Santa they can think back and point out people talking about Santa, going to the mall and seeing Santa ect ect. But when was the last time you looked "God" in they eyes and said hi.
Now some people says there is a god and others says there is not. But, if you assume your god is the only God feel free to point you evidence to the billions people that believe in god(s) but not you God.
My father's first wife thought she could talk with god's only son. Yep, she spent years in an institution for believing the same thing many people do. Now why do I get to call her insane and people will agree with me (doctors and such) but people get upset when I call others with the same beliefs fools?
I don't think you're a fool if you think the US is going to win more medals that China at the next Olympics. I don't think you're a fool if you think the US is going to win less medals that China at the next Olympics. But, if you're a 40 year old that believes in Santa then yea I will call you a fool.
"There has not been a single observed naturally occurring mutation that had a positive life-giving effect."
False, many observed mutations give positive survival characteristics. Most don't but then again your talking about tiny time scales.
So the foundation of evolution is transitional forms,
False, every from needs to be fit or they die out. To evolve from a rat to a man all the forms in-between need to be able to survive. The study of evolution is the study of the creation and destruction of niches in the environment. Take a sea lion now why would a mammal that hunts in the ocean be able to out hunt a fish? What about the way they operate makes something like a sea lion or a killer whale able to out hunt a shark? Why is the blue whale able to become larger than the form of shark that hunts the same food source? And WTF is up with the duck billed platypus?
As to ID what does it study? Has anyone looking at ID said ahh now here is an new idea that works and evolution did not think of it? ID is the bran child of people who want to poke holes in evolution. There is no theory behind it it's just what the counter argument to evolution morphed into over time. It sounds good but until I see a paper by some ID person with a new finding I can say it's all hot air without falling back to evolution. ID does not stand on it's own to feet.
While the theory of evolution showed up BEFORE genetic testing it also agrees with genetic testing. This huge new way to compare life forms and all people did was say hmm I guess these things are a little closer together than I thought.
But, ID is a pseudo science in that it says things that sound good like spontaneous generation did but it provides no new ideas. Spontaneous generation says if you leave grain out you end up with mice so it sounds good to say grain becomes mice (and it does) but the idea said grain becomes mice with out starting with mice is makes people thing there is no point in keeping mice away from grain which is silly. So while evolution can shoot down SG, ID is stuck with no ammo trying to get what point across?
Let me get this straight your saying because we have not seen new species there is some problem?
Ok from your POV (point of view) you can and do have small mutations. Some of which get passed on to others in the gene pool but not all. Well look at dogs they are still close to wolves and we have been adapting them for long enough to show new breads of dogs. But, if you take a Great Dane and a tiny dog they're going to have trouble mating. They can still do it but it's hard. Now how far into hard does it take before it's a new species? You can take two types of trees and splice them and they keep right on growing are they the same or different. I can take DNA from me and add it to a dog at that works, but we can't bread that makes us new species?
Now take humans some of us can't mate with each other though genetic issues others just have a harder time of it how hard does it need to be before we are a different species? How about some blonds not mating with non blonds (see WWII) where they forming a new species?
If it's that important we can set up a system where by you get new species take to fast breading forms of mice and prove the point. I mean it's not that hard to demonstrate you take to large populations and set them apart for a while under different conditions and over time pop new species. And yes this was going on in isolated human populations and yes given time they would be a new species. But once again I am talking about a long time think about this each line is 2x the one above it. Now how far down there do we need to go before we find a new s my guess is 32,768 ish but which would set the upper limit on # of new s at around 2 ^ 32768 (you start with one and every 32768 years you get 2x as many hmm that seems high...)
1
2
4
8
16
32
64
128
256
512
1024
2048
4096
8192
16384
32768
65536
131072
262144
524288
1048576
2097152
4194304
8388608
16777216
33554432
67108864
134217728
268435456
536870912
1073741824
The point I am trying to get across to you is new species show up when populations are separated over time. There is no magic to this it's just over time separated populations have an increasingly difficult time mating. As to how old things are well none of these things are exact most of them produce numbers that are close as in with in an order of magnitude but it's hard to be precise which is just like... stars. Yep, some things take time and if the changes are slow it's hard to say exactly when things are going to happen but hey I guess we need ID to say that stars show up I mean some on they start as balls of dust and over time by *magic* the light up and burn for billions of years come on...
Nobody said survival of the fittest was random. Mutation is random but order is based on the idea that only systems that work can reproduce. Think of an egg if the wrong part of that egg's DNA is missing it's never going to hatch so it's never going to mate so it's never going to have kids.
He could move in a second set of time where his actions change our time but he can go back and forth at will. Think an animator who keeps fliping the pages after each change he makes to any of them.
Anyway, your wasting time if your going to argue with somone who beleaves in something with out cause and feels the need to bring others to there POV.
Nope I have never looked at 3d projections of 4d objects. But I did start by taking a box in 3d move it to make a 4d box. Now look at that it's 4d box with 16 corners. Do the same thing with a 4d box it's now got 32 courners and is a 5d box.
Granted some of this stuff get's hard but so is working with complex 3d objects. A 4d box can have a 2d, or 3d lid. But does it need a 3d lid to take a 4d sphere out of it? Nope. but I kept wanting to say yes.
The only realy odd part is 3d objects are flat in 4d space so you can stack as many of them as you want in a 4d box. Now the math guy in me goes L,W,B,A,B,C when thinking about a 6d object but I can still take a few 3d objects and stack them like cards in 4d space.
Ok, rotations in 4d+ space are hard but I can't do that well in 3d space anyway so I will give ya that one if you want...
Anyway, I don't see the big deal about it 4d+ objects is. They work like strings interchangable objects in 3d space but so do 5d objects in 2,3, or 4d space. Two 5d donuts in 5d space that are lined look like 3d donuts in 3d space but you can change the size / thickness of those 3d donuts by moving them through 5d space.
The other way of looking at a 4d box is to take a 3d box and paint it from black to red along Lenght, black to green along W, and black to blue along H, a 4d box has black to white along 4th (a) so the box can get lighter or darker by moving the 4th (a) axis.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think it's a bad idea feel then free to point out why it will not work. Fusion is well understood it's been demonstrated and has been used to create energy. At this point solar still cost's more than using say coal so it's just as much in the design stage as fusion. Hell it's got a much lower chace of ever making anywhere near the amount of energy we need right now let along in the 20+ years it would take to get such a system in place.
Wind is somewhat usefull in remote areas but produces so little energy it's funny. There is a tiny amount of untaped tide energy and don't get me started on BIO fuel. At this in the next 50 years it's eiter coal or fusion and that's about it.
In the past 50 years the size of the largest stable reactions has grown over 100,000x. Calling that a failure is silly.
If we had been spending anywhere near the kind of money we spent on the manhattan project and things where not working that would be one thing. But, for the most part fusion research has been ignored. ITER was going to be a working reactor as in hooked up to the power grid and producing energy but after cutting it's budget in half and waiting 5 years to decide on a location for the fucking thing well it's not been living up to that.
PS: You can own and operate an aircraft for less than the cost of a high end car. The largest problem with using them is learning how to fly and finding someplace to land.
Good luck with your dreams of riches.
Thanks.
"Learning to spell and write might be something to consider."
Yep, but I have finite time and the relative advantage gained vs. lost does not pan out well. I can make ~300$/hour writing good software but I have nowhere near the level of innate talent to make that much writing.
If someone wants to target us because they believe those lies, then so be it
Yes some of them are lies but many of them are half-truths. The US get's involved in areas that increase our risks which is fine with me but if you ignore the reasons behind some ones actions the you can't control them. Now I think the most effective method of control would be to inundate there society with cheep satellite TV's and fast food. You can make hand radio's that are powered by simple hand cranks move this into the realm of extremely cheep PSP's with access to 5 or so channels of western style TV and I think we can effectively destroy there culture.
PS: I am not saying there is no threat but if say there is a 99% chance that cars will kill 50x as many Americans as terrorists will then we should spend 10 - 50 times as much on making cars safer vs. what we spend making us safer from terrorists. I am talking about creating automated highways which are safe as an example. Once your taking billions of $ a year you could be spending that money on large projects like retrofitting airbags on cars or mandatory free defensive driving classes or whatever. Just because something might make us safer does not mean it's worth spending that kind of money.
Sorry, I was more referring to capability. I know some people that work on secured systems and are vary limited in how they can interact with other systems.
Anyway, having worked on a lot of legacy code; being able to jump through CVS and look at when where and why code was changed becomes vary useful. Like a good IDE it's not needed but CVS makes you more productive over time. Even though it has other uses being able to diff you code right before bugs show up with the code right after the bug shows up is enough to save you the few hours it's going to take to set it up and the 3-4 min a day it takes to use. Yes you can do this by hand but in that case CVS is going to save you time right off the bat as you don't need to keep lhe {}{JNK 05/05/05 - updated to fix error 2715} style logs.
When I said "cars" and "people" was not specifying "my car" or "you". Driving at high speed surrounded by other cars moving at high speeds is a dangerous to hang out. Many things from driver error to mechanical failure could result in my death, but I consider it a lower risk environment than say a shuttlecraft during takeoff.
Your car does not want to kill you.
Now we could get into a semantic argument about what threat means but there is an implication of a level of danger beyond say the random chance that all the oxygen in the room will just happen to be somewhere else long enough for you to suffocate. However, you seem to imply that things like earthquakes and floods are not threats because they're not actively trying to kill you. Which is fine but what would you call the danger from says a 5km wide rock falling from the sky and why not use the word threat?
Anyway, I think it's clear that the level of response to the rather ill defined "terror threat" is well above the relative response to the risk of me being killed in a car accident.
PS: "the U.S. is not the problem." Says what? Much of the world wants us dead because of our past actions. Actions such as the CIA fucking over many elected governments might not seem like a big deal to you there are many people that get uptight over such tings. Granted the U.S. is not the only entity involved in said threats but are past actions is part of why we have a target over our heads.
I love living in the US but a large part of this is my preference to being part of the evil empire than in its path. I am starting a business to become so I can become one of the upper class so I get to take an active role in way the US is run. Working 80 hour weeks for low pay sucks but I know of no better place to get ahead than the US. When you include SS your % of your income that is taxed goes down when you move from 90k a year to 300k and after that you can pay someone to look into the loop holes.
PPS: Heh, one of my aunts got audited by the IRS and ended up getting a check for over 2.7 million in taxes she had over paid in the last 4 years. Now is that a great country or what.
We are at a point where:
Most old manual jobs are done by machine. (Digging wells, farming, building cars ect.)
Computers are better at many "thinking" jobs than people are. (Early on Computers where people doing math by hand now days a pocket PC has more computing power than 100's of people doing basic math.)
If we where to get ok AI and slightly better machines I don't think there will be a lot of jobs for people to do.
Add to that fusion for almost unlimited energy and we may get to a point where we stuff like TV's are so cheep there basically free, With computers better at doing your taxes than people, layers are next to useless in court. Digital actors that look better and act better than real ones ect. Now what do you want people to do?
Or to put it another way, I don't care how cheep your labor costs are you don't' dig deep sea oil wells by hand and at some point most people will not have any useful skills so what life style should they live? ?
At this point the poor in the US live better than surfs did in the 1200's. Now at what point do you think the poor will live better than the middle class do today? I don't know what will society be like when automation / AI happens but I hope we don't force most people into poverty for no reason.
OOver the last 5 years " terrorists " have killed around 00.002% of Americans. Which is right up there with bee stings. Yet people think of them a "major" threat.
That's stupid. We are spending far more to fight terror than the damage they have caused so calling them an economic threat is a little overblown. If we really wanted to make America safer let's spend that money on automated highways. I mean cars are a much larger danger to my health and safety than "terror" but I still drive a car every day.
At this point we can kill every man woman a child in the Middle East inside of an hour. That's a threat. Even if they where to have hundreds of nukes they can't stop that threat. So they can't use nukes or anything to nasty or we kill them their families there friends and everyone they have ever met.
You might think of strapping a bomb to your chest is an act of insanity but the people behind the scene are far more rational. So let's deal with real problems and drop this circus down to a reasonable level.
Kill an enemy, take out 1 opponent and harden the resolve of the rest. Wound an enemy, take out 3 opponents, and weaken the resolve of the rest.
I understand the idea behind this but think in modern warfare this is an overstated idea. The goal of war is to neutralize the enemy's ability / willingness to make war. Now having a large number of wounded pilots is a detrimental, but removing most / all skilled pilots is probably more detrimental. In many cases it's a lot easer to make a new plane than to train a new pilot. So having many countries would trade 50% wounded pilots in order to keep 50% fully trained pilots.
I think we can agree that over the last 100 years war has been an important factor to the US's and the worlds manufacture of firearms and ammo. Granted, inside the US more ammo is probably used for target practice than hunting and more for hunting animals than people, but trying to call most guns benign is overstating that idea.
PS: Ok for your average foot solder blowing off a leg is more detrimental than out right killing him in most cases but when it comes to highly trained people like fighter pilots or engineers 3 months in rehab and then back into the fight or back training there replacements is not really such a great idea.
I think home schooling tends to take in a lot more of the outliers than most sample groups. You are more likely to find kids who are 140+IQ and parents who are ultra religious. Most people home school their kids because they feel they can do a better job than the US educational system. Now many of them are correct but by no means all.
Anyway, I think HS's greatest benefit is also its greatest weakness in that it tends to produce people who are a little more extreme that normal school would. You simply end up with more rough edges when you don't have the constant pressure to conform 5 days a week for 12+ years.
PS: Hmm, I fit 95% of what you're saying...
My mother was a teacher who knew enough about the system to work it. As soon as she got me labeled L.D. (Spelling / Grammar / Basic Arithmetic)/Exceptionally Gifted (Science, Higher Math, Reading comprehension, Social Studies, ect) they where all to willing to bend over backwards for me. At one point I was going to school 1/2 the day and home school the rest of the time. So they sent a bus take me home after lunch every day. Now think about that your helping one student but just how much did that cost? Most things like giving me an extra set of books where next to useless but everything cost some cash.
The sad part was they basically decided to ignore anything I was not good at so I could excel in most areas and move out the door as it where. Now, I think it worked out well in my case but I still feel a little guilty about those bus rides.
Still it was interesting and I have some fond memories from that, like taking an assessment test. I think it was an IQ test but they did not want to call it that. Anyway this lady hands me a puzzle and starts a timer and try's to start reading her book but in like 15 seconds I go 'yoo-hoo I am finished' she sort of shudders as she had clearly forgotten where she was then goes go 'uhh what.' She then clicks the timer looks at me the finished puzzle and then says 'how do you do that that fast?' and here I am thinking umm that's not that fast let's see what happens when I hurry.
Ahh, good times. Still some things where a little hard. They moved me from remedial English in 8th grade to Honors English in 9th. Which might not have been so bad if I had any clue what the parts of speech where. Ok I was fine with nouns, verbs, and adjectives but as soon as she started talking adverb, and the object of the preposition I was simply lost. I still passed that class by the skin of my teeth and I did end up passing the AP test but that had nothing to do with learning the rules of grammar so much as faking it well enough to pass my classes.
Nice post AC.
You can find Amino-acids on balls if ice in space so that are naturaly occuring and you could find millions of tuns of them on early earth.
PS: Live = self replication. When you simulate evolution you simulate a self replicating code segment that's randomly chaning and hampered by it's enviernment. So by simulating a life form that's randomly changing you endup with one more suted for it's enviernment.
E.Q.D. Evolution works.
PPS: If you want to debate this stop posting AC and I will go over all your points.
Look up how much ammo was produced in WWII.
Millions of people died but for each of those 10-100's of rounds where shot off. In hunting its 1-3 shots a kill but in war you use suppressor fire and take shots you think might hit someone. Look at how many plane's where shot down in WWII and think of the 1,000's of rounds that where fired to get that each kill.
Hell, take Vietnam it might have been a small war as such things go but the amount of ammo shot off was just insane.
Look, I have hunted; hell most years people come to my parents place just to pick off a few dear but I said most people learn to hit people not animals. Now I know some people like to hit targets for the fun of it but everyone in the military, and police forces learn how to hit people. Add to that all the people who buy a hand gun for home protection and you start to see a lot of people who learn how to wound or kill other people but don't show up to shooting ranges much.
Many people buy a handgun shoot off 2-3 clips and never come back. Now in your area most people might learn to hunt but where I grew up it was around 10-30% if that and this was farm country. Now most people live in cities and never go hunting so if there learning how to shoot it's to defend themselves.
I think it would be a good idea if everyone over 21 would carry a handgun at all times. Ok not such a good idea when drinking but I think it would do more to stop crime than doubling our police force or building more jails. Think of this you go to rob a 7-11 and you KNOW everyone has a gun. Want to hijack a plain fin, but everyone has a gun ect ect.
I say defend the idea that you can carry a gun at all times because it's a good idea not because you might want to hunt with your handgun sometime.
I think the amount of led shot off in WWII is more than has ever used for hunting. But, in the US most people use guns to hit targets or animals and not people.
As to target's I think more people shot at targets learning how to hit people than shoot at targets learning how to hit animals.
It's a random process that can be copied.
Step1:
Start with random code.
Step2:
You take your software (DNA) and make several copies and mutate them randomly. (Using a Random Number Generator).
Step3:
You then test your code to see how fit it is. Aka does it do what you want it to and if so how fast is it ect.
Step4:
Take the best x% and go to step 2 until you run out of time or you produce some code that's acceptable.
This works, but takes time. It's best when your trying to solve problems where you can tell if it works but you don't know how to do it. Programs that hop on a pogo stick or make life like movements are much easer to test for than to design which makes them well suited for evolutionary programming.
Now at no point did I design the software, but by setting the criteria by which it's survival could be tested I created a solution to my problem without designing it.
I could say:
/. so I will leave said post unedited.
I was chosen from the field of possible applicants do to a willingness to work for a lower wage than any other competent applicant. As the only skills text was a verbal interview the company was incapable of ascertaining my written communication skills and thus said skills played no part the said process.
Or:
Someone said, "Max will work for cheep and knows WTF he was doing so get him."
Or:
Max good Ug bad get Max.
Or:
A willingness to work for a lower wage is one of the things that helped me get my current job.
Or:
Unlike most 2002 CS graduates I got a programming job straight out of collage. Part of this was a willingness to work for low wages, but learning useful skills vs. wasting my time writing English papers also helped.
But, I like trolling on
I said with out evidence. If you ask a 6 year old if there is a Santa they can think back and point out people talking about Santa, going to the mall and seeing Santa ect ect. But when was the last time you looked "God" in they eyes and said hi.
Now some people says there is a god and others says there is not. But, if you assume your god is the only God feel free to point you evidence to the billions people that believe in god(s) but not you God.
My father's first wife thought she could talk with god's only son. Yep, she spent years in an institution for believing the same thing many people do. Now why do I get to call her insane and people will agree with me (doctors and such) but people get upset when I call others with the same beliefs fools?
I don't think you're a fool if you think the US is going to win more medals that China at the next Olympics. I don't think you're a fool if you think the US is going to win less medals that China at the next Olympics. But, if you're a 40 year old that believes in Santa then yea I will call you a fool.
"There has not been a single observed naturally occurring mutation that had a positive life-giving effect."
False, many observed mutations give positive survival characteristics. Most don't but then again your talking about tiny time scales.
So the foundation of evolution is transitional forms,
False, every from needs to be fit or they die out. To evolve from a rat to a man all the forms in-between need to be able to survive. The study of evolution is the study of the creation and destruction of niches in the environment. Take a sea lion now why would a mammal that hunts in the ocean be able to out hunt a fish? What about the way they operate makes something like a sea lion or a killer whale able to out hunt a shark? Why is the blue whale able to become larger than the form of shark that hunts the same food source? And WTF is up with the duck billed platypus?
As to ID what does it study? Has anyone looking at ID said ahh now here is an new idea that works and evolution did not think of it? ID is the bran child of people who want to poke holes in evolution. There is no theory behind it it's just what the counter argument to evolution morphed into over time. It sounds good but until I see a paper by some ID person with a new finding I can say it's all hot air without falling back to evolution. ID does not stand on it's own to feet.
While the theory of evolution showed up BEFORE genetic testing it also agrees with genetic testing. This huge new way to compare life forms and all people did was say hmm I guess these things are a little closer together than I thought.
But, ID is a pseudo science in that it says things that sound good like spontaneous generation did but it provides no new ideas. Spontaneous generation says if you leave grain out you end up with mice so it sounds good to say grain becomes mice (and it does) but the idea said grain becomes mice with out starting with mice is makes people thing there is no point in keeping mice away from grain which is silly. So while evolution can shoot down SG, ID is stuck with no ammo trying to get what point across?
Let me get this straight your saying because we have not seen new species there is some problem?
... stars. Yep, some things take time and if the changes are slow it's hard to say exactly when things are going to happen but hey I guess we need ID to say that stars show up I mean some on they start as balls of dust and over time by *magic* the light up and burn for billions of years come on...
Ok from your POV (point of view) you can and do have small mutations. Some of which get passed on to others in the gene pool but not all. Well look at dogs they are still close to wolves and we have been adapting them for long enough to show new breads of dogs. But, if you take a Great Dane and a tiny dog they're going to have trouble mating. They can still do it but it's hard. Now how far into hard does it take before it's a new species? You can take two types of trees and splice them and they keep right on growing are they the same or different. I can take DNA from me and add it to a dog at that works, but we can't bread that makes us new species?
Now take humans some of us can't mate with each other though genetic issues others just have a harder time of it how hard does it need to be before we are a different species? How about some blonds not mating with non blonds (see WWII) where they forming a new species?
If it's that important we can set up a system where by you get new species take to fast breading forms of mice and prove the point. I mean it's not that hard to demonstrate you take to large populations and set them apart for a while under different conditions and over time pop new species. And yes this was going on in isolated human populations and yes given time they would be a new species. But once again I am talking about a long time think about this each line is 2x the one above it. Now how far down there do we need to go before we find a new s my guess is 32,768 ish but which would set the upper limit on # of new s at around 2 ^ 32768 (you start with one and every 32768 years you get 2x as many hmm that seems high...) 1
2
4
8
16
32
64
128
256
512
1024
2048
4096
8192
16384
32768
65536
131072
262144
524288
1048576
2097152
4194304
8388608
16777216
33554432
67108864
134217728
268435456
536870912
1073741824
The point I am trying to get across to you is new species show up when populations are separated over time. There is no magic to this it's just over time separated populations have an increasingly difficult time mating. As to how old things are well none of these things are exact most of them produce numbers that are close as in with in an order of magnitude but it's hard to be precise which is just like
Nobody said survival of the fittest was random. Mutation is random but order is based on the idea that only systems that work can reproduce. Think of an egg if the wrong part of that egg's DNA is missing it's never going to hatch so it's never going to mate so it's never going to have kids.
He could move in a second set of time where his actions change our time but he can go back and forth at will. Think an animator who keeps fliping the pages after each change he makes to any of them.
Anyway, your wasting time if your going to argue with somone who beleaves in something with out cause and feels the need to bring others to there POV.
Nope I have never looked at 3d projections of 4d objects. But I did start by taking a box in 3d move it to make a 4d box. Now look at that it's 4d box with 16 corners. Do the same thing with a 4d box it's now got 32 courners and is a 5d box.
Granted some of this stuff get's hard but so is working with complex 3d objects. A 4d box can have a 2d, or 3d lid. But does it need a 3d lid to take a 4d sphere out of it? Nope. but I kept wanting to say yes.
The only realy odd part is 3d objects are flat in 4d space so you can stack as many of them as you want in a 4d box. Now the math guy in me goes L,W,B,A,B,C when thinking about a 6d object but I can still take a few 3d objects and stack them like cards in 4d space.
Ok, rotations in 4d+ space are hard but I can't do that well in 3d space anyway so I will give ya that one if you want...
Anyway, I don't see the big deal about it 4d+ objects is. They work like strings interchangable objects in 3d space but so do 5d objects in 2,3, or 4d space. Two 5d donuts in 5d space that are lined look like 3d donuts in 3d space but you can change the size / thickness of those 3d donuts by moving them through 5d space.
The other way of looking at a 4d box is to take a 3d box and paint it from black to red along Lenght, black to green along W, and black to blue along H, a 4d box has black to white along 4th (a) so the box can get lighter or darker by moving the 4th (a) axis.
Not in 10 hours. 5% faster in 10 hours at the compiler is worth it if you save a few grand in CPU time.
Don't forget to add in rejects I think that they play a large part into why it's that expencive.
Take an equatorial elevator Tie the cable to a boat and move it. Yea it's going to take an shit load of energy but it would still work.