Better than you putting words into the mouths of others.
Or really like fantasizing.
Mmm, sarcasm is no replacement for a critical mind. Although some clearly feel that it is.
which would of course require throwing a very large part of what we know about evolution of life on this planet out the window...)
On the contrary, it merely involves educating you on the limits of our knowledge, which doesn't take long.
we have no justifiable reason assume such large discrepancies.
In flat defiance of the clear predominance of possibility pointed out by the poster you misrepresented, and which you have thus far failed to refute.
That ALL the available evidence, and constantly being unearthed, evidence paints certain picture is only too convenient. But hey, since you mention Dawkins - maybe there were giants, who knows...
You're not interested in evidence. You should, however, look up calls to authority as they were used in the medieval period. Most of us have moved on, you know.
Sigh... what you're saying is that the possibility does not exist because of the lack of a fossil record, which is the exact opposite of what the poster in question is saying. Let me spell this out for you - we probably have less than a single percent of the biodiversity of any given period stored in the fossil record. Not only is there room for the lineages you are looking for, there is room for hundreds of thousands of them.
Also, on the issue of fantasies, I'm not saying that any such civilisation has existed. I am, however, saying that you most certainly can't rule out the possibility.
I respect Dawkins and all that guff, but he's really spawned a lot of self righteous authoritarians on the internet, a plague previously seen in the middle ages before it gave way to true scientific curiosity and open mindedness.
Without evidence, there's no reason to believe it. Since there is no evidence left of any ancient civilization, there is no reason to believe one exists. That's the way science works.
The argument in question is one of whether or not such a civilisation or civilisations could have existed, and we would know nothing about it. The answer is unarguably yes. Sznupi seems to feel that a lack of fossil record leading to homonid intelligence denies the possibility of such a happening, despite that the fossil record is in all likelihood less than one percent of all the biodiversity in any particular period in time.
Lineages which follow very different paths that all the available ones - don't conveniently forget that "small" detail.
I find when presented with a response which goes against the basic reality of a situation, the element of rationality has vacated the premises. Whether simply unable to comprehend what is being said, invested in the idea that our species' civilisation is the first, dogmatism, or simply into getting the last word, interest wanes.
You are acting like our fossil sample would be totally biased to exclude that particular lineage, supposedly changing at vastly different rates and directions than the other
Nope, I'm pointing out that the fossil record is unbelievably short of the big picture at any given point. Another poster explained it fairly well:
Consider dinosaur fossils. We've found maybe, what, 50 T-Rex fossils and not a single 100% complete skeleton. Admittedly, there are probably tons more of them to find out there, but that's not the point, even though scientists are looking, they haven't found them yet. How many T-Rex actually existed in the 15 million or so years they walked the earth. If there were never more than a million alive at one time, and they lived for 100 years, that's 150 billion of them, largely swept away by the planet over the years, and traces of civilization just don't fossilize as well as bones do.
Do you see what's being said? Its not only possible that entire lineages, many of them, are absent from the fossil record, its all but guaranteed.
Well obviously we are not at the point of no return - but one other recent member of genus homo (one that I mentioned...) certainly did reach it.)
Eh so where are they now? I think you may have misread the comment, the point was that a species might have even ended up a lot more advanced than us ten million years ago and get wiped out completely.
And sure, we can go even into region of swarm intelligence if we really want to. But it's not very productive, brings you more and more into the area of science fantasy without much grounding in available facts.
That was a reference to brain to body mass ratios.
What we can say is that there doesn't appear to be even singular trace of any lineage (many species!) much older than but generally in the style of hominidae during the last 15 million years - with increasing brain sizes, high metabolism, high brain-body mass ratio, etc.. More - all the evidence points at quite gradual development of brain. Why ignore it?
I'm not ignoring it. Why are you ignoring that we have at best a tiny single digit percentage picture of all of the biodiversity at any given period? Although if you wanted to talk about graduated brain sizes, there might not have been much to distinguish mankind from many other kinds of animals even a million years ago. If mankind were to vanish today and some other species were to achieve our technological advancement in fifty million years, what evidence would remain for them to find?
Just look at us. We have high level of technological capability only for a fraction of the existence of our civilisation. We were quite static for millennia.
So what's the cutoff point beyond which an extinction level event would leave some members of a species alive and able to rebuild? We certainly haven't reached it yet.
it's not merely about not discovering any fossils of "them", those creatures of intelligence close to ours; also none possibly leading to them and their high intelligence.
Nope, I mean really, what percentage of the total biodiversity of any given age does the fossil record represent? A few percent? If they had existed, we'd probably never know. What we do know is that the earth's history is peppered with mass extinctions of varying sizes and dubious origin, more than a few, almost as if some dominant life form rose and did pretty much what we've done.
Added to which nobody can really quantify what constitutes intelligence, or what might lead up to it, and how much of the brain is dedicated to problem solving, memory and the like as opposed to mechanical control.
why would they even have high level of technological capability?
Why not?
Lack of fossil record (before our recent primate ancestors came along) suggesting trends toward intelligence comparable to ours - much better.
We have barely got the tiniest sliver of the biological diversity at any given point for the last hundreds of millions of years. There are enormous numbers of creatures we'll never know about. Couple that with burial practices, which usually don't lend themselves to fossilisation, and we would literally never know, unless they managed to land something on an asteroid or something, and even then its really unlikely that we'd find anything.
Geosynchronous orbit might be stable over the course of hundreds or even thousands of years, but millions or tens of millions? No. Even the moon is moving away from the earth. Anything further out would have long vanished into the shadows. As for fossil fuels, who says a civilisation needs to go through that stage at all? From wood burning steam to vegetable oil powered diesel is a natural step, even using ethanol, after that electric would be inevitable, assuming they wouldn't have just focused on that from the outset. Over geological time periods, even our mighty civilisation would leave basically nothing behind. There is absolutely no reason why a previous intelligent life form might not have existed and vanished at a high level of technological capability on earth.
Yup, Chrome is ass. Doesn't run half the scripts I need for work on various backends, and I get more complaints from customers about "broken websites" to do with that than anything else. It's turning rapidly into IE the second. Neither HD space nor processing power are a bottleneck these days, Chrome is a solution in search of a problem. Now if Google rolled out a real flash competitor I'd be sitting up and paying attention real quick.
No, they've had phenomenal success by rolling back a large portion of their bureaucratic interference in their economy.
Wow, really? To paraphrase another poster:
If China's state run economy has proved one thing it's that the free-market unmanaged economies of the West will time and again fail to even comprehend the forces arrayed against them. Narrow minded "Market Based" thinking is exactly what got us into this single supplier problem and naively thinking it will get us out is well... naive.
Whatever you think the "free-market" will do to get us out of this mess, the Chinese economic mega-complex has already considered three moves in advance and is working to counter it. People don't seem to understand that China-Inc is essentially the world greatest ever hyper-corporation: millions of companies, thousands of major corporations, and hundreds of banks all working under one overall direction and policy. Just about every trick you'd expect a major-corporation to pull can and has been considered, strategised and implemented by the this acutely self aware market entity.
What's really going on here is that the Chinese Communist Party has developed(invented really) a state controlled, capitalism driven, centrally managed and wholly unified economy; and it's as powerful an apparatus as you'd expect. It's one of the biggest civil and economic developments in world history. And if you expect this electric dragon--a vast, powerful and above all self aware economy under the control of a central brain--to act like your traditionally lauded free market fungus-like economies--efficient, large or small, but hopelessly undirected and prone to bottom feeding-- you are mistaken from the very outset. The Communist Party does not wait for startups, demand, financiers, or any other "market forces" to act. They order entire economic sectors to be created, dismantled and transformed overnight. And it has made them one of the richest countries in the world.
Food subsidies (most, not all) are war proofing, because you don't want to be dependent for your daily bread on some third world tinpot dictator who can employ slave labour. Its more of a strategic consideration than anything else. Dumping is inexcusable though.
Pretty much. Did your in-depth situational analysis manage to spot all the high-end cameras pointed at the situation by the way? I found that interesting.
I can accept that they are human beings that will react differently. It was your assertion that his reaction was based on his training that made me wonder why the female officer did not react in an even remotely similar fashion. Strangely, first you implied she did (her "training kicked in"), but now you seem to admit that she didn't.
You can do the strawman thing if you like, but you are still going to see situations like this over and over again, and its not going to be some power tripping dickhead. I've seen it in Ireland, the UK, the US and now Canada I guess. It wouldn't be applied to everyday situations, but intimidation as a technique for crowd control is tried and trusted. It makes no never mind to me if you believe it or not.
Haha! Did you really just call an attractive 20-something woman blowing bubble's an "ugly mob"? That's... just... I salute you my friend, your logic is astounding.
Hi there, we call that a generalisation around these parts, as in the general case.
I mean, wow, that mob was so ugly that the other officer at the scene was talking with one of the 'rioters' in question with a smile on her face. That. is. terrifying.
His 'crowd control' tactics are what cause the riots 50% of the time. Take a look at La Cross WI Halloween riots, for years there would be a violent riot every Halloween, until the police finally realized that the rioters were responding to their presence in full riot gear blocking streets. So they changed tactics, got the bars to serve out of plastic bottles, pulled the riot cops, and reassigned them to be fast responders to break up bar fights and whatnot. The result? No riots at all, not even an 'ugly mob' to be found.
Great, maybe you could get yourself elected and mandate that this procedure be used in all crowd control situations, rather than inflicting your diamond sharp responses in between web wanks on the rest of us?
Slashdot Mirror
Cute, now you put words in my mouth.
Better than you putting words into the mouths of others.
Or really like fantasizing.
Mmm, sarcasm is no replacement for a critical mind. Although some clearly feel that it is.
which would of course require throwing a very large part of what we know about evolution of life on this planet out the window...)
On the contrary, it merely involves educating you on the limits of our knowledge, which doesn't take long.
we have no justifiable reason assume such large discrepancies.
In flat defiance of the clear predominance of possibility pointed out by the poster you misrepresented, and which you have thus far failed to refute.
That ALL the available evidence, and constantly being unearthed, evidence paints certain picture is only too convenient. But hey, since you mention Dawkins - maybe there were giants, who knows...
You're not interested in evidence. You should, however, look up calls to authority as they were used in the medieval period. Most of us have moved on, you know.
Sigh... what you're saying is that the possibility does not exist because of the lack of a fossil record, which is the exact opposite of what the poster in question is saying. Let me spell this out for you - we probably have less than a single percent of the biodiversity of any given period stored in the fossil record. Not only is there room for the lineages you are looking for, there is room for hundreds of thousands of them.
Also, on the issue of fantasies, I'm not saying that any such civilisation has existed. I am, however, saying that you most certainly can't rule out the possibility.
I respect Dawkins and all that guff, but he's really spawned a lot of self righteous authoritarians on the internet, a plague previously seen in the middle ages before it gave way to true scientific curiosity and open mindedness.
Without evidence, there's no reason to believe it. Since there is no evidence left of any ancient civilization, there is no reason to believe one exists. That's the way science works.
The argument in question is one of whether or not such a civilisation or civilisations could have existed, and we would know nothing about it. The answer is unarguably yes. Sznupi seems to feel that a lack of fossil record leading to homonid intelligence denies the possibility of such a happening, despite that the fossil record is in all likelihood less than one percent of all the biodiversity in any particular period in time.
Lineages which follow very different paths that all the available ones - don't conveniently forget that "small" detail.
I find when presented with a response which goes against the basic reality of a situation, the element of rationality has vacated the premises. Whether simply unable to comprehend what is being said, invested in the idea that our species' civilisation is the first, dogmatism, or simply into getting the last word, interest wanes.
You are acting like our fossil sample would be totally biased to exclude that particular lineage, supposedly changing at vastly different rates and directions than the other
Nope, I'm pointing out that the fossil record is unbelievably short of the big picture at any given point. Another poster explained it fairly well:
Consider dinosaur fossils. We've found maybe, what, 50 T-Rex fossils and not a single 100% complete skeleton. Admittedly, there are probably tons more of them to find out there, but that's not the point, even though scientists are looking, they haven't found them yet. How many T-Rex actually existed in the 15 million or so years they walked the earth. If there were never more than a million alive at one time, and they lived for 100 years, that's 150 billion of them, largely swept away by the planet over the years, and traces of civilization just don't fossilize as well as bones do.
Do you see what's being said? Its not only possible that entire lineages, many of them, are absent from the fossil record, its all but guaranteed.
Well obviously we are not at the point of no return - but one other recent member of genus homo (one that I mentioned...) certainly did reach it.)
Eh so where are they now? I think you may have misread the comment, the point was that a species might have even ended up a lot more advanced than us ten million years ago and get wiped out completely.
And sure, we can go even into region of swarm intelligence if we really want to. But it's not very productive, brings you more and more into the area of science fantasy without much grounding in available facts.
That was a reference to brain to body mass ratios.
What we can say is that there doesn't appear to be even singular trace of any lineage (many species!) much older than but generally in the style of hominidae during the last 15 million years - with increasing brain sizes, high metabolism, high brain-body mass ratio, etc.. More - all the evidence points at quite gradual development of brain. Why ignore it?
I'm not ignoring it. Why are you ignoring that we have at best a tiny single digit percentage picture of all of the biodiversity at any given period? Although if you wanted to talk about graduated brain sizes, there might not have been much to distinguish mankind from many other kinds of animals even a million years ago. If mankind were to vanish today and some other species were to achieve our technological advancement in fifty million years, what evidence would remain for them to find?
Just look at us. We have high level of technological capability only for a fraction of the existence of our civilisation. We were quite static for millennia.
So what's the cutoff point beyond which an extinction level event would leave some members of a species alive and able to rebuild? We certainly haven't reached it yet.
it's not merely about not discovering any fossils of "them", those creatures of intelligence close to ours; also none possibly leading to them and their high intelligence.
Nope, I mean really, what percentage of the total biodiversity of any given age does the fossil record represent? A few percent? If they had existed, we'd probably never know. What we do know is that the earth's history is peppered with mass extinctions of varying sizes and dubious origin, more than a few, almost as if some dominant life form rose and did pretty much what we've done.
Added to which nobody can really quantify what constitutes intelligence, or what might lead up to it, and how much of the brain is dedicated to problem solving, memory and the like as opposed to mechanical control.
why would they even have high level of technological capability?
Why not?
Lack of fossil record (before our recent primate ancestors came along) suggesting trends toward intelligence comparable to ours - much better.
We have barely got the tiniest sliver of the biological diversity at any given point for the last hundreds of millions of years. There are enormous numbers of creatures we'll never know about. Couple that with burial practices, which usually don't lend themselves to fossilisation, and we would literally never know, unless they managed to land something on an asteroid or something, and even then its really unlikely that we'd find anything.
Geosynchronous orbit might be stable over the course of hundreds or even thousands of years, but millions or tens of millions? No. Even the moon is moving away from the earth. Anything further out would have long vanished into the shadows. As for fossil fuels, who says a civilisation needs to go through that stage at all? From wood burning steam to vegetable oil powered diesel is a natural step, even using ethanol, after that electric would be inevitable, assuming they wouldn't have just focused on that from the outset. Over geological time periods, even our mighty civilisation would leave basically nothing behind. There is absolutely no reason why a previous intelligent life form might not have existed and vanished at a high level of technological capability on earth.
Possibly you missed the point of his post...
Hear hear.
Leave a badly behaved page like facebook open (with constant ajax type updates) and you can't do anything on other pages.
Neither I nor anyone I know has noticed anything like that.
Yup, Chrome is ass. Doesn't run half the scripts I need for work on various backends, and I get more complaints from customers about "broken websites" to do with that than anything else. It's turning rapidly into IE the second. Neither HD space nor processing power are a bottleneck these days, Chrome is a solution in search of a problem. Now if Google rolled out a real flash competitor I'd be sitting up and paying attention real quick.
"they're stealing our jobs/innovations/money/women"
Forget the rest, but we can do a straight swap for the women if you like.
As I said, "To paraphrase another poster". I know this is slashdot, but at least RTFP.
No, they've had phenomenal success by rolling back a large portion of their bureaucratic interference in their economy.
Wow, really? To paraphrase another poster:
If China's state run economy has proved one thing it's that the free-market unmanaged economies of the West will time and again fail to even comprehend the forces arrayed against them. Narrow minded "Market Based" thinking is exactly what got us into this single supplier problem and naively thinking it will get us out is well... naive.
Whatever you think the "free-market" will do to get us out of this mess, the Chinese economic mega-complex has already considered three moves in advance and is working to counter it. People don't seem to understand that China-Inc is essentially the world greatest ever hyper-corporation: millions of companies, thousands of major corporations, and hundreds of banks all working under one overall direction and policy. Just about every trick you'd expect a major-corporation to pull can and has been considered, strategised and implemented by the this acutely self aware market entity.
What's really going on here is that the Chinese Communist Party has developed(invented really) a state controlled, capitalism driven, centrally managed and wholly unified economy; and it's as powerful an apparatus as you'd expect. It's one of the biggest civil and economic developments in world history. And if you expect this electric dragon--a vast, powerful and above all self aware economy under the control of a central brain--to act like your traditionally lauded free market fungus-like economies--efficient, large or small, but hopelessly undirected and prone to bottom feeding-- you are mistaken from the very outset. The Communist Party does not wait for startups, demand, financiers, or any other "market forces" to act. They order entire economic sectors to be created, dismantled and transformed overnight. And it has made them one of the richest countries in the world.
Sure they can. Ireland is self sufficient in food, or it could be if it had to be. No idea about the rest though.
Food subsidies (most, not all) are war proofing, because you don't want to be dependent for your daily bread on some third world tinpot dictator who can employ slave labour. Its more of a strategic consideration than anything else. Dumping is inexcusable though.
Pretty much. Did your in-depth situational analysis manage to spot all the high-end cameras pointed at the situation by the way? I found that interesting.
If you say so. It seems to me that you need to get a big hate-on for this officer more than you need to use common sense though.
I'm with you and I think the grandparent post is full of shit.
What, am I ruining your two minutes hate, or would you like to continue the armchair psychoanalysis?
Do you think he might buy you dinner first, or is he cheap too?
I can accept that they are human beings that will react differently. It was your assertion that his reaction was based on his training that made me wonder why the female officer did not react in an even remotely similar fashion. Strangely, first you implied she did (her "training kicked in"), but now you seem to admit that she didn't.
You can do the strawman thing if you like, but you are still going to see situations like this over and over again, and its not going to be some power tripping dickhead. I've seen it in Ireland, the UK, the US and now Canada I guess. It wouldn't be applied to everyday situations, but intimidation as a technique for crowd control is tried and trusted. It makes no never mind to me if you believe it or not.
That the rest of the officers didn't rein him in should tell you something. Zone of control...
Haha! Did you really just call an attractive 20-something woman blowing bubble's an "ugly mob"? That's... just... I salute you my friend, your logic is astounding.
Hi there, we call that a generalisation around these parts, as in the general case.
I mean, wow, that mob was so ugly that the other officer at the scene was talking with one of the 'rioters' in question with a smile on her face. That. is. terrifying.
His 'crowd control' tactics are what cause the riots 50% of the time. Take a look at La Cross WI Halloween riots, for years there would be a violent riot every Halloween, until the police finally realized that the rioters were responding to their presence in full riot gear blocking streets. So they changed tactics, got the bars to serve out of plastic bottles, pulled the riot cops, and reassigned them to be fast responders to break up bar fights and whatnot. The result? No riots at all, not even an 'ugly mob' to be found.
Great, maybe you could get yourself elected and mandate that this procedure be used in all crowd control situations, rather than inflicting your diamond sharp responses in between web wanks on the rest of us?