Unfortunately, if you, as in independent inventor, do come up with something worth a billion dollars, a big company will come along and take your toy away. The classic example is Edwin Armstrong (the inventor of FM radio), as detailed in Free Culture (starts 1/4 of the way down the page). The big radio companies ignored his patents, bankrupted him in court and otherwise drove him to suicide.
Given that small players are probably screwed if they land up on someone else's "turf" anyway, why should we have legislation to make it even harder?
The Ministers (nominated by their countries) form a Council. This Council produces directives which are then passed to the Parliament (made up of elected MEPs) for ratification (or whatever else they choose to do with them). A directive is, if I understand correctly, roughly equivalent to a US "Bill" - it's a chunk of suggested legislation, which all countries in the EU would then be required to implement in their legislation.
In this particular case, the Council drafted a universally-loathed directive to legalise software patents. The Parliament made changes and sent it back. The Council stripped out the changes. A rapporteur (negotiator) was appointed; the Council ignored his suggestions completely. The Council refused to actually discuss it despite being legally required to (some of the members of the Council had been told off by their national parliaments and required to change it). Eventually the Parliament threw it out completely.
I've been thinking about this and I've realised that trying to imitate Windows in at least some open-source projects does have an advantage for techies. The reasoning goes something like this:
1) Windows started off with more functionality than Linux (no shit, it had a head-start).
2) In some areas (userfriendliness and graphical stuff in particular) Linux is still catching up with Windows
3) It's generally impossible to compare two completely different software projects - it's not easy to notice subtle yet cool ideas.
4) By creating versions of Linux that are very close to Windows, we get a chance to spot this stuff, which we can then implement in Linux
5) This has the added bonus of making conversion to Linux easier, which indirectly increases its rate of development.
I would strongly agree that having all Linux distros acting as Windows wannabes is a bad thing, but having a Windows-like configuration as a subset of all possible Linuxes, rather than something outside our grasp, can only be good.
As a member of the 'deviant' demographic of complete geeks, I'd like to point out that there is no right to never be offended. If there was then the 'moral' people would have problems of their own, what with the whole anti-gay thing.
I come from a country (Britain) that for centuries has taken pretty much all comers. We did bloody well out of it too. As long as people don't screw life up for the rest of us, penalising them for what they do in the comfort of their own homes doesn't do anyone any good. Monocultures are never healthy anyway. Alloys are stronger than pure metals.
Oh, you already use Linux? Then what the fuck are you bitching about anyways?
I've been avoiding mouthing off for precisely the reason you're getting at here, but those who have failed to forbear have a few good points behind them.
Let's consider email. Now, what operating system do you think is r00ted fastest if it's left unpatched? Hmm, could the answer possibly be MS Windows? Why, I do believe it is (I can locate the research stating average time to infection if you're unconvinced). And are rooted computers a major source of the spam that fucks up my inbox? Yes, I think that could be the case. And is Microsoft's withdrawal of updates for pirated systems going to improve this situation? For some reason I can't see that happening, can't think why.
On a similar note, I can no longer run snort (the IDS) on my computer when it's plugged into the university network because of the quite ridiculous number of probes coming in. We're talking 1000 a day minimum. And you know what? They're almost all from unpatched Windows boxen. Fancy that!
After a couple of years running Linux, I can finally see why, when SCO or some other bottom-feeder talks about the Linux community writing Windows worms, they might possibly have a point. Not because members of said community hate MS (they might, but that's a different issue). Certainly not because we like fiddling with Windows APIs. But because every Windows box that gets knocked off the 'net is one fewer Windows box fucking everyone else over.
Rant over. Apologies for venting, I just spent about an hour fiddling with snort and psad config files, getting it to ignore all the many and varied Windows-based probes it keeps picking up on.
FOSS and commercial software bring completely different attributes to the table. FOSS tends to be better quality from a code perspective, so more stable. It improves as it matures - more bugtracking and less feature creep is the order of the day.
The closed source community, by contrast, is great at blazing trails. The Cathedral model means that an innovative project doesn't have to worry so much about gaining "critical mass". In fast-moving fields such as games, closed source should have no trouble staying ahead of FOSS. It's only when closed source tries to rest on its laurels that it gets scalped by FOSS.
Open source needs closed source to show it where it risks losing market share. And closed source needs open source to keep it motivated. Neither side of this equation can be expected to be very happy about it, but the resulting balance is great for the consumer.
As far as which god to believe in -- again, a subnote. If we've not established that there is a God then a discussion of which is skipping a step.
I know, I was just indicating that there are many more hurdles to my possible acceptance of any given religion than just whether He is out there.
The existence of Israel today as a nation is unique in the history of the world and that culture is seeking hard to fulfill its own history as laid out in their Torah.
Five years ago I'd have pointed out the Taliban as a counter-example of Israel's uniqueness. A couple of hundred years ago I'd have pointed out the Aztecs. Problem is that, until comparatively recently, countries united under one national religion were the norm, not the exception. Israel is just the one that's survived longest, is all, and even it supposedly has a secular government (I think).
Lewis, a scholar of world myth, brought his scholarship to the New Testament and in rebuttal pointed out the three Greek words, "en de nux" or "it was night." Here, an author nearly 2000 years ago, goes to the trouble of mentioning a detail not pertinent to the telling of the story. This is done by writers when: A. They are writing modern fiction to make the story seem real or B. when the truth is being told.
It's interesting that you bring up this particular quote. The fact that it only appears in one Gospel (or possibly the gospels originating from a particular source, I can't remember) always seemed to me to be a major argument against the inerrancy of the New Testament. You've got this one guy talking about night falling in the middle of the day, and the dead walking in the street, and the curtains in the Temple tearing, and iirc none of the other writers bother to mention these momentous occurrences. To me, that very strongly suggests that someone was exaggerating somewhat.
I'd further add that the tendency to elaborate on stories to make them sound more interesting/important/realistic is in no way a modern phenomenon - look at the legends of King Arthur for a start.
All psychology aside, your description of seeking the perfect father figure is good, but only seems to be another definition of the existing appetite. Whether we like it or not, we hunger for knowledge which ultimately gets back to the "who am I?" and the question of the existence of God....
Yeah, I'd agree that there is a tendency, at least among those who think about things like that, to eventually come up against the question of "who am I?" On the other hand, without another intelligent species to talk to it's impossible to tell whether this is some manifestation of inner hunger, as you suggest, or whether it's a side-effect of intelligence. I'd tend to go with the latter - it seems to me to be a fairly obvious question to ask once you've started philosophising.
Off the cuff, I would say that we move from theory to belief in some fashion. The first time I tried snorkling (sic?) I was told how it all worked. I had the theory in my head, but did not fully believe until after I had sucked down some water and then successfully used the thing.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I do karate, and it's perfectly possible to know exactly how something's supposed to go and still trip over your own feet when you try it because you're not completely sure it'll work. I guess it's the difference between knowing it in your head and knowing it in your bones. I'm not sure I would class the latter as belief in the religious sense though - it's just a more biological class of knowledge rather than an act of faith.
As to the "case closed" statement: I respect that. Although, I have the growing itch to respond, "made ya look!":P
Hehe:) I'm generally willing to look on the offchance that someone says something or points out something that's interesting enough to reopen the case.
No, this doesn't make sense. If two tubes is supreme to one tube, then it doesn't make sense that the one-tube variant became the norm - the two-tubes should have merrily bred while the one-tubes choked on their food. If, on the other hand, one tube is the supreme design, then it can't be considered a screwup, making it completely useless as an argument against ID.
The point here is that, considering the space of possible attributes, evolution can be expected to choose the local optimum, whereas ID can be expected to choose the global optimum. What I mean is that using one tube instead of two was what software programmers call a dirty hack - it was probably the best use of resources at the time, but it had its problems and there were almost certainly better ways of doing it if you were prepared to modify a lot of stuff all at once. An intelligent designer could do that; evolution, however, is far more capable of painting itself into a corner.
The single-tube system would probably have developed when the first fish learned to breathe air. These fish would have suddenly realised that they could get at a whole 13% of the globe that no creature bigger than an insect had tried to exploit before. The resulting population explosion would have more than compensated for the occasional death from choking. Only once the land was completely colonised would evolutionary pressure have increased significantly, and by that point the bug that is the single-tube system would have become so relied upon that the Amphibians Formerly Known As Fish would have had no choice but to treat it as a feature. And that concludes today's Just So story.
I'm assuming, based on the meaning of "cutting corners", that two-tubed variant preceded the one-tubed one. This may be incorrect, I'm no scientist.
My understanding is that, at the point that lungs were being developed, a single-tube system was just the first to emerge. There's rarely only one way of doing things, and evolution's first choice isn't necessarily the best one. Read up on diploblasts vs. triploblasts and the Burgess Shale if you're interested in how it could have gone.
What about Newton's Second Law of Thermodynamics,"everything moves from entropy to distropy," order to diorder. Evolution doesnt go by that law. How would you explain that one? Since Newton's law is excepted evolution can't be.
Get a bunch of soil, stick a seed in it, stick it in a jar (preferably one otherwise filled with air), place it in the sunlight and watch a low-entropy system (a plant) emerge from a high-entropy system (the soil).
Saying that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics refutes evolution is like saying Newton's Law of Gravity refutes high-rise buildings. Obviously there's no way the average human body can be strong enough to jump from the ground to one of the higher storeys, so having any building with more than, say, two floors is completely pointless.
In the real world, of course, we have stairs. And, in the real world, biological systems can utilise the extremely high rate at which the sun gains entropy as a springboard to enable their continued development, via the well-known process of photosynthesis. This is possible because you've horribly misstated the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which actually states "The entropy of a closed system always increases". No biological system qualifies as a closed system, and neither does the Earth.
It's possible that you were alluding to the slightly more interesting question of: how does a bunch of random mutations result in improvements in an organism? There's a very good and thorough answer here, which I'd recommend reading if you're really interested. The short explanation is that the mutations stop being arbitrary data when they're passed on to an offspring. Once they're passed on, they now have a little metaphorical label that reads "This mutation won't kill you". And eventually enough non-lethal mutations build up for something interesting to happen. The really short explanation is that information is data with a context. A mutation on its own is data, but put it in the context of a biological system and it becomes possibly-useful information.
Pascal's premise was the famous: since we can't be sure, let's go ahead and believe just in case he does.
Yeah, I've come across that one. I don't really agree tho - if it turns out God doesn't exist then you've wasted a large portion of your life in church or praying. The other issue is: believe in what? Do you believe that Jesus died on the cross to save us, or do you believe that Nanahuatzin threw himself into the fire to give birth to a new Sun? There are millions of religions out there, and a major tenet of most of them is that believing in the others is a sure way to mess up your afterlife.
I will say that C.S. Lewis' argument that appetite is evidence is quite compelling.
I'd say that what the majority of Christians I've met are really after is a father-figure. We discover our parents are fallible, so we seek authority figures who aren't fallible to protect us from the world. A better analogy than hunger, then, would be the gourmet's lust for the most delicious food possible. The gourmet seeks perfection without knowing whether there is indeed a perfect dish out there for him to taste (there probably isn't, for a sufficiently strict value of "perfect"). The religious person seeks out the perfect authority figure, without knowing whether He exists.
We have a belief regarding him even if it is to say, "I don't believe" or "I have no evidence."
I'd agree with most of the rest of this paragraph, but I think that you're twisting the definition of "belief" slightly. Is it a belief if it's made without faith, based on nothing more than application of scientific principles? I'd say not - apart from anything else, the question of whether someone has belief in God then becomes a tautology. And I'd disagree that everyone is driven to seek God out - in my case, I've filed the whole issue away in a folder labelled "case closed pending further evidence". God is an immensely powerful meme, but it is still possible not to be sucked into it.
Quaint is a good word - it's a bit of a dirty hack, but it's the only way I can figure out to test Intelligent Design by looking at the biology of today. If our world was created by an intelligent designer, you'd expect it to be... intelligently designed.
The airtube redundancy thing's a fair point, although I'm not 100% sure it's a fair tradeoff for the whole choking+hiccups issue. A better example would probably be the fact that human eyes have blind spots. It's blatantly not necessary - octopus eyes are very similar to ours but without the blind spot. You'd have thought that God would have remembered how to do it right, given that He did all the sea creatures the day before He did humans.
I'm pretty sure I don't hate God, I just don't have any hard evidence as to His existence. Apply Occam's razor ("It slices! It dices! It removes superfluous supernatural entities!") and I'm drawn to the conclusion that there's no God out there to hate.
I'd note that there's a large number of animals (pretty much all non-cetaceous mammals for a start) who mostly couldn't care less about communication and who still have the adaptation.
The evolutionary explanation, by contrast, is that somewhere along the line one of our ancestors cut corners by only having one big tube, and that a feature like that, once implemented, is a bugger to get rid of. This seems a little more elegant than "well, there might be a good explanation for it that we're not intelligent enough to understand", which I believe is the standard Creationist response.
Re:The Dumbing-Down of America...part XXVII
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VoIP Security
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· Score: 1
I note that the AC who submitted the story also abuses the apostrophe. Same person maybe?
Given that your audience has a range of technical ability, just showing them software isn't going to cut it. One idea would be to grab a bunch of customised knoppix distros. For example, there's a Linux Audio LiveCD which, if topped up with lots of Creative Commons samples, would probably allow you to have a pretty good attempt at some on-the-spot DJing (disclaimer: I haven't tried the CD, I have no idea if it's any good). I don't know if there's an equivalent for video, but that would also be cool. And, of course, there's always Games Knoppix. Burn a bunch of each type and pile 'em up on the table so people can grab whatever they want on the way out.
Two important caveats: firstly, make sure the CDs run properly on the demonstration computer - I know that Knoppix has some trouble with my mum's new LCD monitor. Secondly, if you want to demo more than one LiveCD, you'll probably want to have more than one machine rather than waiting for each Knoppix instance to shut down and the next one to boot up.
Except that there is so little chance of life occuring the way it is today through Intelligent Design alone. I suppose I developed an 'evolution' belief, but there are WAY too many screwups in nature to support Intelligent Design alone.
You are right, in that it is mostly a political debate, not a scientific debate. He adverted the political side by making us decide for ourselves. Questions rose in my mind on how the complexity of modern life could have possibly been created 'by intelligence' or appeared at the level it's at today. This is the point i'm trying to get at.
(if anyone wishes to debate on why I think we are here because of evolution alone, think of all the physiological idiocies of the human body. the crossover between the windpipe and the oesophagus, and the apparently useless appendix. the remarkable tendency to get back pains due to our badly-designed spinal curvature, and how genetic diversity is comparatively minimal - everything we see around us seems to at least belong to the same family tree. Try to convince me that all of that -- and a ton more -- was produced by a supposedly intelligent Creator (who somehow sprung fully-formed and with high IQ from nowhere, that's another discussion))
Fair point, but I'd note that, whereas skipping the $1000 engine recall upgrade is unlikely to cause inconvenience to anyone but yourself, not patching a Windows PC means that you're likely to be aiding in DDOSes and the distribution of spam and viruses in fairly short order.
A more accurate analogy would be: they later came to GM with their stolen car and asked for the free 5-mile-blast-radius explosion prevention upgrade. Of course, in this case there would probably be a bit of a public outcry if GM refused to service said cars, as any attempt to validate the owner would result in car theives not getting their cars repaired and hence putting everyone at risk.
Sure, the resulting explosions wouldn't really be GM's fault, but I can't imagine it'd win them much in the way of good PR.
If you doubt my analogy, at some point I'd recommend hooking a box running psad or snort up to the open internet (or just a box running unpatched XP). You'll soon see where I'm getting the explosion metaphor from.
I remember trying to use the same logic to demonstrate that a 20-minute registration period at the start of class was too fucking long. The math went something like:
15 (you probably do need 5 mins) / 60 (mins in hour) * 1500 (people in school) * 200 (approx) school days in year * 7 (years in school) * 2 (morning and afternoon reg) = 350,000 hours = 15000 days (approx) = 40 years of someone's life - a fairly decent lifespan til comparatively recently
Sadly my teachers didn't buy it and I still got detention for turning up late to registration.
But AT&T was humiliated???? They stole more code from BSD! Tons of it!
But by that time the FUD had already hit the fan, and BSD didn't manage to duck. This is all IIRC - I wasn't alive then and my memory is crap at the best of times.
There's already a campaign in the UK to try to prevent systems of this order being set up. I recommend signing up for it if you're interested in preventing an inept government stranglehold on the very concept of identity. Or if you don't fancy paying £90 for a completely useless piece of plastic.
Re:It's my choice
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Why FreeBSD
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· Score: 4, Informative
IIRC, there was just enough controversy over the sealed agreement in the Berkely vs. AT&T kerfuffle that developers were a teensy bit nervous about working on BSD. By the time that was all properly dealt with, Linux was already gaining speed, and had the additional advantage of riding the back of a wave of MS hatred.
A reminder: the UK is still a monarchy. We still have an "unwritten" (i.e. nonexistent) constitution. And we don't have rights, we have privileges that haven't been revoked yet.
True, most of the time we behave as if that isn't the case. Maybe one day we'll even abolish the monarchy and repeal all those dodgy laws. Sadly, the majority of britons actually seem proud of our bizarre and repressive heritage, so that probably won't ever happen:(
Wake up man. Microsoft isn't evil. Micrsoft CAN'T be evil. Its a corporation not a person. It's amoral. It's only restrictions are the laws of countries. Same goes for all corporations no matter what bs they tell you: everyone is trying to maximize profit, even Google.
To paraphrase: People CAN'T be evil. They're amoral. Their only restrictions are the laws of countries. Same goes for all people no matter what bs they tell you: everyone is trying to maximise personal happiness, even you.
By their fruits shall ye know them. If a corporation generally behaves like an asshole, I'll consider them to be evil. If a corporation generally behaves in a way which I consider ethical, I'll consider them to be good.
Otherwise a good post apart from: Infact he holds THEIR ideas in his hands, and I don't think they would want their work stolen either.
This is why we have trade secret and patent law. No evil employment clauses required.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, if you, as in independent inventor, do come up with something worth a billion dollars, a big company will come along and take your toy away. The classic example is Edwin Armstrong (the inventor of FM radio), as detailed in Free Culture (starts 1/4 of the way down the page). The big radio companies ignored his patents, bankrupted him in court and otherwise drove him to suicide.
Given that small players are probably screwed if they land up on someone else's "turf" anyway, why should we have legislation to make it even harder?
The Ministers (nominated by their countries) form a Council. This Council produces directives which are then passed to the Parliament (made up of elected MEPs) for ratification (or whatever else they choose to do with them). A directive is, if I understand correctly, roughly equivalent to a US "Bill" - it's a chunk of suggested legislation, which all countries in the EU would then be required to implement in their legislation.
In this particular case, the Council drafted a universally-loathed directive to legalise software patents. The Parliament made changes and sent it back. The Council stripped out the changes. A rapporteur (negotiator) was appointed; the Council ignored his suggestions completely. The Council refused to actually discuss it despite being legally required to (some of the members of the Council had been told off by their national parliaments and required to change it). Eventually the Parliament threw it out completely.
I've been thinking about this and I've realised that trying to imitate Windows in at least some open-source projects does have an advantage for techies. The reasoning goes something like this:
1) Windows started off with more functionality than Linux (no shit, it had a head-start).
2) In some areas (userfriendliness and graphical stuff in particular) Linux is still catching up with Windows
3) It's generally impossible to compare two completely different software projects - it's not easy to notice subtle yet cool ideas.
4) By creating versions of Linux that are very close to Windows, we get a chance to spot this stuff, which we can then implement in Linux
5) This has the added bonus of making conversion to Linux easier, which indirectly increases its rate of development.
I would strongly agree that having all Linux distros acting as Windows wannabes is a bad thing, but having a Windows-like configuration as a subset of all possible Linuxes, rather than something outside our grasp, can only be good.
And here was me thinking that it was the US who put all that effort into arming the Taliban back in the Cold War days...
As a member of the 'deviant' demographic of complete geeks, I'd like to point out that there is no right to never be offended. If there was then the 'moral' people would have problems of their own, what with the whole anti-gay thing.
I come from a country (Britain) that for centuries has taken pretty much all comers. We did bloody well out of it too. As long as people don't screw life up for the rest of us, penalising them for what they do in the comfort of their own homes doesn't do anyone any good. Monocultures are never healthy anyway. Alloys are stronger than pure metals.
Oh, you already use Linux? Then what the fuck are you bitching about anyways?
I've been avoiding mouthing off for precisely the reason you're getting at here, but those who have failed to forbear have a few good points behind them.
Let's consider email. Now, what operating system do you think is r00ted fastest if it's left unpatched? Hmm, could the answer possibly be MS Windows? Why, I do believe it is (I can locate the research stating average time to infection if you're unconvinced). And are rooted computers a major source of the spam that fucks up my inbox? Yes, I think that could be the case. And is Microsoft's withdrawal of updates for pirated systems going to improve this situation? For some reason I can't see that happening, can't think why.
On a similar note, I can no longer run snort (the IDS) on my computer when it's plugged into the university network because of the quite ridiculous number of probes coming in. We're talking 1000 a day minimum. And you know what? They're almost all from unpatched Windows boxen. Fancy that!
After a couple of years running Linux, I can finally see why, when SCO or some other bottom-feeder talks about the Linux community writing Windows worms, they might possibly have a point. Not because members of said community hate MS (they might, but that's a different issue). Certainly not because we like fiddling with Windows APIs. But because every Windows box that gets knocked off the 'net is one fewer Windows box fucking everyone else over.
Rant over. Apologies for venting, I just spent about an hour fiddling with snort and psad config files, getting it to ignore all the many and varied Windows-based probes it keeps picking up on.
FOSS and commercial software bring completely different attributes to the table. FOSS tends to be better quality from a code perspective, so more stable. It improves as it matures - more bugtracking and less feature creep is the order of the day.
The closed source community, by contrast, is great at blazing trails. The Cathedral model means that an innovative project doesn't have to worry so much about gaining "critical mass". In fast-moving fields such as games, closed source should have no trouble staying ahead of FOSS. It's only when closed source tries to rest on its laurels that it gets scalped by FOSS.
Open source needs closed source to show it where it risks losing market share. And closed source needs open source to keep it motivated. Neither side of this equation can be expected to be very happy about it, but the resulting balance is great for the consumer.
As far as which god to believe in -- again, a subnote. If we've not established that there is a God then a discussion of which is skipping a step.
:P
:) I'm generally willing to look on the offchance that someone says something or points out something that's interesting enough to reopen the case.
I know, I was just indicating that there are many more hurdles to my possible acceptance of any given religion than just whether He is out there.
The existence of Israel today as a nation is unique in the history of the world and that culture is seeking hard to fulfill its own history as laid out in their Torah.
Five years ago I'd have pointed out the Taliban as a counter-example of Israel's uniqueness. A couple of hundred years ago I'd have pointed out the Aztecs. Problem is that, until comparatively recently, countries united under one national religion were the norm, not the exception. Israel is just the one that's survived longest, is all, and even it supposedly has a secular government (I think).
Lewis, a scholar of world myth, brought his scholarship to the New Testament and in rebuttal pointed out the three Greek words, "en de nux" or "it was night." Here, an author nearly 2000 years ago, goes to the trouble of mentioning a detail not pertinent to the telling of the story. This is done by writers when: A. They are writing modern fiction to make the story seem real or B. when the truth is being told.
It's interesting that you bring up this particular quote. The fact that it only appears in one Gospel (or possibly the gospels originating from a particular source, I can't remember) always seemed to me to be a major argument against the inerrancy of the New Testament. You've got this one guy talking about night falling in the middle of the day, and the dead walking in the street, and the curtains in the Temple tearing, and iirc none of the other writers bother to mention these momentous occurrences. To me, that very strongly suggests that someone was exaggerating somewhat.
I'd further add that the tendency to elaborate on stories to make them sound more interesting/important/realistic is in no way a modern phenomenon - look at the legends of King Arthur for a start.
All psychology aside, your description of seeking the perfect father figure is good, but only seems to be another definition of the existing appetite. Whether we like it or not, we hunger for knowledge which ultimately gets back to the "who am I?" and the question of the existence of God....
Yeah, I'd agree that there is a tendency, at least among those who think about things like that, to eventually come up against the question of "who am I?" On the other hand, without another intelligent species to talk to it's impossible to tell whether this is some manifestation of inner hunger, as you suggest, or whether it's a side-effect of intelligence. I'd tend to go with the latter - it seems to me to be a fairly obvious question to ask once you've started philosophising.
Off the cuff, I would say that we move from theory to belief in some fashion. The first time I tried snorkling (sic?) I was told how it all worked. I had the theory in my head, but did not fully believe until after I had sucked down some water and then successfully used the thing.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I do karate, and it's perfectly possible to know exactly how something's supposed to go and still trip over your own feet when you try it because you're not completely sure it'll work. I guess it's the difference between knowing it in your head and knowing it in your bones. I'm not sure I would class the latter as belief in the religious sense though - it's just a more biological class of knowledge rather than an act of faith.
As to the "case closed" statement: I respect that. Although, I have the growing itch to respond, "made ya look!"
Hehe
No, this doesn't make sense. If two tubes is supreme to one tube, then it doesn't make sense that the one-tube variant became the norm - the two-tubes should have merrily bred while the one-tubes choked on their food. If, on the other hand, one tube is the supreme design, then it can't be considered a screwup, making it completely useless as an argument against ID.
The point here is that, considering the space of possible attributes, evolution can be expected to choose the local optimum, whereas ID can be expected to choose the global optimum. What I mean is that using one tube instead of two was what software programmers call a dirty hack - it was probably the best use of resources at the time, but it had its problems and there were almost certainly better ways of doing it if you were prepared to modify a lot of stuff all at once. An intelligent designer could do that; evolution, however, is far more capable of painting itself into a corner. The single-tube system would probably have developed when the first fish learned to breathe air. These fish would have suddenly realised that they could get at a whole 13% of the globe that no creature bigger than an insect had tried to exploit before. The resulting population explosion would have more than compensated for the occasional death from choking. Only once the land was completely colonised would evolutionary pressure have increased significantly, and by that point the bug that is the single-tube system would have become so relied upon that the Amphibians Formerly Known As Fish would have had no choice but to treat it as a feature. And that concludes today's Just So story. I'm assuming, based on the meaning of "cutting corners", that two-tubed variant preceded the one-tubed one. This may be incorrect, I'm no scientist.
My understanding is that, at the point that lungs were being developed, a single-tube system was just the first to emerge. There's rarely only one way of doing things, and evolution's first choice isn't necessarily the best one. Read up on diploblasts vs. triploblasts and the Burgess Shale if you're interested in how it could have gone.
What about Newton's Second Law of Thermodynamics,"everything moves from entropy to distropy," order to diorder. Evolution doesnt go by that law. How would you explain that one? Since Newton's law is excepted evolution can't be.
Get a bunch of soil, stick a seed in it, stick it in a jar (preferably one otherwise filled with air), place it in the sunlight and watch a low-entropy system (a plant) emerge from a high-entropy system (the soil).
Saying that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics refutes evolution is like saying Newton's Law of Gravity refutes high-rise buildings. Obviously there's no way the average human body can be strong enough to jump from the ground to one of the higher storeys, so having any building with more than, say, two floors is completely pointless.
In the real world, of course, we have stairs. And, in the real world, biological systems can utilise the extremely high rate at which the sun gains entropy as a springboard to enable their continued development, via the well-known process of photosynthesis. This is possible because you've horribly misstated the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which actually states "The entropy of a closed system always increases". No biological system qualifies as a closed system, and neither does the Earth.
It's possible that you were alluding to the slightly more interesting question of: how does a bunch of random mutations result in improvements in an organism? There's a very good and thorough answer here, which I'd recommend reading if you're really interested. The short explanation is that the mutations stop being arbitrary data when they're passed on to an offspring. Once they're passed on, they now have a little metaphorical label that reads "This mutation won't kill you". And eventually enough non-lethal mutations build up for something interesting to happen. The really short explanation is that information is data with a context. A mutation on its own is data, but put it in the context of a biological system and it becomes possibly-useful information.
Pascal's premise was the famous: since we can't be sure, let's go ahead and believe just in case he does.
Yeah, I've come across that one. I don't really agree tho - if it turns out God doesn't exist then you've wasted a large portion of your life in church or praying. The other issue is: believe in what? Do you believe that Jesus died on the cross to save us, or do you believe that Nanahuatzin threw himself into the fire to give birth to a new Sun? There are millions of religions out there, and a major tenet of most of them is that believing in the others is a sure way to mess up your afterlife.
I will say that C.S. Lewis' argument that appetite is evidence is quite compelling.
I'd say that what the majority of Christians I've met are really after is a father-figure. We discover our parents are fallible, so we seek authority figures who aren't fallible to protect us from the world. A better analogy than hunger, then, would be the gourmet's lust for the most delicious food possible. The gourmet seeks perfection without knowing whether there is indeed a perfect dish out there for him to taste (there probably isn't, for a sufficiently strict value of "perfect"). The religious person seeks out the perfect authority figure, without knowing whether He exists.
We have a belief regarding him even if it is to say, "I don't believe" or "I have no evidence."
I'd agree with most of the rest of this paragraph, but I think that you're twisting the definition of "belief" slightly. Is it a belief if it's made without faith, based on nothing more than application of scientific principles? I'd say not - apart from anything else, the question of whether someone has belief in God then becomes a tautology. And I'd disagree that everyone is driven to seek God out - in my case, I've filed the whole issue away in a folder labelled "case closed pending further evidence". God is an immensely powerful meme, but it is still possible not to be sucked into it.
Quaint is a good word - it's a bit of a dirty hack, but it's the only way I can figure out to test Intelligent Design by looking at the biology of today. If our world was created by an intelligent designer, you'd expect it to be... intelligently designed.
The airtube redundancy thing's a fair point, although I'm not 100% sure it's a fair tradeoff for the whole choking+hiccups issue. A better example would probably be the fact that human eyes have blind spots. It's blatantly not necessary - octopus eyes are very similar to ours but without the blind spot. You'd have thought that God would have remembered how to do it right, given that He did all the sea creatures the day before He did humans.
I'm pretty sure I don't hate God, I just don't have any hard evidence as to His existence. Apply Occam's razor ("It slices! It dices! It removes superfluous supernatural entities!") and I'm drawn to the conclusion that there's no God out there to hate.
I'd note that there's a large number of animals (pretty much all non-cetaceous mammals for a start) who mostly couldn't care less about communication and who still have the adaptation.
The evolutionary explanation, by contrast, is that somewhere along the line one of our ancestors cut corners by only having one big tube, and that a feature like that, once implemented, is a bugger to get rid of. This seems a little more elegant than "well, there might be a good explanation for it that we're not intelligent enough to understand", which I believe is the standard Creationist response.
I note that the AC who submitted the story also abuses the apostrophe. Same person maybe?
Given that your audience has a range of technical ability, just showing them software isn't going to cut it. One idea would be to grab a bunch of customised knoppix distros. For example, there's a Linux Audio LiveCD which, if topped up with lots of Creative Commons samples, would probably allow you to have a pretty good attempt at some on-the-spot DJing (disclaimer: I haven't tried the CD, I have no idea if it's any good). I don't know if there's an equivalent for video, but that would also be cool. And, of course, there's always Games Knoppix. Burn a bunch of each type and pile 'em up on the table so people can grab whatever they want on the way out.
Two important caveats: firstly, make sure the CDs run properly on the demonstration computer - I know that Knoppix has some trouble with my mum's new LCD monitor. Secondly, if you want to demo more than one LiveCD, you'll probably want to have more than one machine rather than waiting for each Knoppix instance to shut down and the next one to boot up.
Except that there is so little chance of life occuring the way it is today through Intelligent Design alone. I suppose I developed an 'evolution' belief, but there are WAY too many screwups in nature to support Intelligent Design alone.
You are right, in that it is mostly a political debate, not a scientific debate. He adverted the political side by making us decide for ourselves. Questions rose in my mind on how the complexity of modern life could have possibly been created 'by intelligence' or appeared at the level it's at today. This is the point i'm trying to get at.
(if anyone wishes to debate on why I think we are here because of evolution alone, think of all the physiological idiocies of the human body. the crossover between the windpipe and the oesophagus, and the apparently useless appendix. the remarkable tendency to get back pains due to our badly-designed spinal curvature, and how genetic diversity is comparatively minimal - everything we see around us seems to at least belong to the same family tree. Try to convince me that all of that -- and a ton more -- was produced by a supposedly intelligent Creator (who somehow sprung fully-formed and with high IQ from nowhere, that's another discussion))
Fair point, but I'd note that, whereas skipping the $1000 engine recall upgrade is unlikely to cause inconvenience to anyone but yourself, not patching a Windows PC means that you're likely to be aiding in DDOSes and the distribution of spam and viruses in fairly short order.
A more accurate analogy would be: they later came to GM with their stolen car and asked for the free 5-mile-blast-radius explosion prevention upgrade. Of course, in this case there would probably be a bit of a public outcry if GM refused to service said cars, as any attempt to validate the owner would result in car theives not getting their cars repaired and hence putting everyone at risk.
Sure, the resulting explosions wouldn't really be GM's fault, but I can't imagine it'd win them much in the way of good PR.
If you doubt my analogy, at some point I'd recommend hooking a box running psad or snort up to the open internet (or just a box running unpatched XP). You'll soon see where I'm getting the explosion metaphor from.
I remember trying to use the same logic to demonstrate that a 20-minute registration period at the start of class was too fucking long. The math went something like:
15 (you probably do need 5 mins) / 60 (mins in hour) * 1500 (people in school) * 200 (approx) school days in year * 7 (years in school) * 2 (morning and afternoon reg)
= 350,000 hours
= 15000 days (approx)
= 40 years of someone's life - a fairly decent lifespan til comparatively recently
Sadly my teachers didn't buy it and I still got detention for turning up late to registration.
But AT&T was humiliated???? They stole more code from BSD! Tons of it!
But by that time the FUD had already hit the fan, and BSD didn't manage to duck. This is all IIRC - I wasn't alive then and my memory is crap at the best of times.
There's already a campaign in the UK to try to prevent systems of this order being set up. I recommend signing up for it if you're interested in preventing an inept government stranglehold on the very concept of identity. Or if you don't fancy paying £90 for a completely useless piece of plastic.
IIRC, there was just enough controversy over the sealed agreement in the Berkely vs. AT&T kerfuffle that developers were a teensy bit nervous about working on BSD. By the time that was all properly dealt with, Linux was already gaining speed, and had the additional advantage of riding the back of a wave of MS hatred.
A reminder: the UK is still a monarchy. We still have an "unwritten" (i.e. nonexistent) constitution. And we don't have rights, we have privileges that haven't been revoked yet.
:(
True, most of the time we behave as if that isn't the case. Maybe one day we'll even abolish the monarchy and repeal all those dodgy laws. Sadly, the majority of britons actually seem proud of our bizarre and repressive heritage, so that probably won't ever happen
No but, given the current political climate, the govt would probably "repatriate" you to Syria given half a chance.
Wake up man. Microsoft isn't evil. Micrsoft CAN'T be evil. Its a corporation not a person. It's amoral. It's only restrictions are the laws of countries. Same goes for all corporations no matter what bs they tell you: everyone is trying to maximize profit, even Google.
To paraphrase: People CAN'T be evil. They're amoral. Their only restrictions are the laws of countries. Same goes for all people no matter what bs they tell you: everyone is trying to maximise personal happiness, even you.
By their fruits shall ye know them. If a corporation generally behaves like an asshole, I'll consider them to be evil. If a corporation generally behaves in a way which I consider ethical, I'll consider them to be good.
Otherwise a good post apart from: Infact he holds THEIR ideas in his hands, and I don't think they would want their work stolen either.
This is why we have trade secret and patent law. No evil employment clauses required.
+1 insightful, cheers.
I still can't see a judge buying the distribution of an entire book as being necessary, but there probably would be a way to get it to work.