The biopiracy they're talking about is big companies coming in, finding traditional remedies that work, patenting the use of herb X as part of said remedy and then attempting to charge the locals for the privilege of using their own traditional medicines. The aim is not to keep control of the IP but to stop anyone else claiming it in a harmful fashion.
You fail to acknowledge words in common usage because they don't suit your view of things, apparently. And you get modded up for it. Interesting.
Thanks for the dictionary links. I genuinely hadn't realised that these words had that long a pedigree. I've only ever seen them used as part of the aforementioned straw man attack (for example in the great-grandparent's post, which was definitely referring to philosophical naturalism rather than acceptance of the theory of evolution). I imagine I got modded up due to sufficient slashdotters having noted the same abuse of language.
I'm still not entirely comfortable with the word "Darwinism" - probably no-one in the field of evolutionary biology believes exactly what Darwin believed about evolution, and the field is certainly much larger than his original assertions. Certainly his words aren't taken as necessarily being true, but instead are put to the same tests that any scientific hypothesis labours under.
Only once they've been through the white-hot flame of detailed scientific enquiry are they referred to as theories.
All hail science, discriminator of all truth, peerless in its discernment. Amen.
Well, science has done a pretty good job in other fields such as chemistry (beats alchemy hands down), biology (the four humours are so pass) and physics (no, the Sun is not pushed by a dung beetle). Why should it do any worse in the field of evolutionary biology?
If the use of scientific methodology bothers you, why not point to the particular issues you have with it? Most of it is, in fact, pretty much common sense. Or, if you have problems with a given scientist's data or the conclusions he draws from these, I'm sure the relevant journal will be happy to consider your submission. Of course, if you're just spouting sarcasm on the basis of absolutely no understanding of scientific methodology or the field in question, said journal will almost certainly tell you to take a hike. That's the power of science at work.
Had the most hellish time with a wireless dongle trying to get it to run under anything but Windows. Turned out, of course, that it was one of those lovely products that used about three different chipsets in the "same" model, along with a range of other gotchas. Even ndiswrapper couldn't handle it. And of course the chance of Belkin actually assisting in any way are nil.
If there's any Belkin employees reading this: please tell your management that at least one person will start buying your products when you start releasing your hardware interfaces.
ID proponents don't have a theory. They don't even have a hypothesis. They barely qualify as having a conjecture. As someone who's spent some time reading ID literature, I can definitively state that their arguments consist entirely of the idea that somewhere, somehow, there's a biological feature that evolution can't explain. Sadly their mathematical arguments have been debunked by proper mathematicians and, every time they suggest a feature that "must" have been intelligently designed, someone points out either how it could have evolved or how its design isn't particularly intelligent. Sometimes both.
OK, that time it was definitely slashdot's fault - I set it to "Plain text" and previewed before submitting. Third time lucky:
1) A fossil being found way outside its stratum, preferably in an area with no breaks in the strata (i.e. it couldn't have been forced downwards by a tree root or something).
2) For bonus points, it should be possible to apply dating techniques to it that also indicate that it existed millions of years before it was supposed to
3) An animal, preferably one alive today, that is apparently a hybrid of one or more completely distinct families of animals. For example, a species of bat with feathered, instead of leathery, wings, or a species of horse with catlike claws. If evolution is false, we should be seeing weird pokemon-like creatures that resist placement in the big family tree that is common descent. We don't.
4) A dinosaur holding an "end nuclear testing" placard or similar absurdity.
Note that we'd have to see quite a few of these, otherwise we'd probably assume they came about through error or hoax.
Regards your other comments:
1) "There are already tons of examples of complex organisms appearing out of nowhere in the fossil record."
Not completely out of nowhere, or at least not to an unexpected extent. It's not surprising that we don't always catch animals in every possible intermediate stage of development. Consider that we've only ever unearthed 30 Tyrannosaurus Rex skeletons, and that's a (relatively) recent species compared to, say, those that appeared during the Cambrian explosion. And, even in the case of species that just suddenly start to crop up, we can normally place them in the family tree with no great difficulty.
You'd be right to say that this falsified a particular variant of the theory of evolution - specifically, the one stating that evolution would occur at a fairly steady rate. This has been replaced with the "punctured equilibrium" subtheory, which points out that animals won't tend to evolve much unless the ecosystem they're in gets destabilised. This shouldn't be considered a disproof of the ToE as a whole, in the same way that the disproof of Newtonian gravity in no way suggested that we should accept Intelligent Falling.
The new variant explains "jumps" in evolution by pointing out that, for example, the Cambrian explosion occurred immediately after the Earth got snowballed by a sudden glaciation. The creatures that appeared afterwards had far more potential than the ones around before, but they had never had room to grow - the less fundamentally well-designed but more evolutionarily "honed" species had previously been able to hold their own against the incursion. But, after the big freeze, there were enough resources (primarily unoccupied land) available that odd mutations and less efficient species could survive for longer, giving a chance for a whole bunch of new approaches to appear.
Mostly evolutionary changes only occur in tiny steps, each of which has to be more immediately efficient than the last. After a big die-off, though, it's possible for species to take a "backwards" step without being wiped out. This massively increased the range of new biological techniques that could be discovered.
2) "The largest animals today are smaller than in the Jurassic period."
That's no surprise, really. Firstly, when disaster strikes (such as whatever killed the dinosaurs), large creatures are at a disadvantage - they need more food to stay alive. If a few hundred tiny dinosaurs can survive off the same food as one tyrannosaurus then a reduction in the food supply will kill the T Rex but will only reduce the population of the tiny dinos. Being large isn't always a good thing, so we shouldn't be terribly surprised that it doesn't always develop as a strategy.
Secondly, at least one large creature managed to escape the most recent ice age - the woolly mammoth. Then we killed it. Large animals today don't tend to have much of a life expectancy these days - look at what's happeni
Apologies for the double post, but version 1 really wasn't legible)
Here goes nothing:
1) A fossil being found way outside its stratum, preferably in an area with no breaks in the strata (i.e. it couldn't have been forced downwards by a tree root or something).
2) For bonus points, it should be possible to apply dating techniques to it that also indicate that it existed millions of years before it was supposed to
3) An animal, preferably one alive today, that is apparently a hybrid of one or more completely distinct families of animals. For example, a species of bat with feathered, instead of leathery, wings, or a species of horse with catlike claws. If evolution is false, we should be seeing weird pokemon-like creatures that resist placement in the big family tree that is common descent. We don't.
4) A dinosaur holding an "end nuclear testing" placard or similar absurdity.
Note that we'd have to see quite a few of these, otherwise we'd probably assume they came about through error or hoax.
Regards your other comments:
1) "There are already tons of examples of complex organisms appearing out of nowhere in the fossil record."
Not completely out of nowhere, or at least not to an unexpected extent. It's not surprising that we don't always catch animals in every possible intermediate stage of development. Consider that we've only ever unearthed 30 Tyrannosaurus Rex skeletons, and that's a (relatively) recent species compared to, say, those that appeared during the Cambrian explosion. And, even in the case of species that just suddenly start to crop up, we can normally place them in the family tree with no great difficulty.
You'd be right to say that this falsified a particular variant of the theory of evolution - specifically, the one stating that evolution would occur at a fairly steady rate. This has been replaced with the "punctured equilibrium" subtheory, which points out that animals won't tend to evolve much unless the ecosystem they're in gets destabilised. This shouldn't be considered a disproof of the ToE as a whole, in the same way that the disproof of Newtonian gravity in no way suggested that we should accept Intelligent Falling.
The new variant explains "jumps" in evolution by pointing out that, for example, the Cambrian explosion occurred immediately after the Earth got snowballed by a sudden glaciation. The creatures that appeared afterwards had far more potential than the ones around before, but they had never had room to grow - the less fundamentally well-designed but more evolutionarily "honed" species had previously been able to hold their own against the incursion. But, after the big freeze, there were enough resources (primarily unoccupied land) available that odd mutations and less efficient species could survive for longer, giving a chance for a whole bunch of new approaches to appear.
Mostly evolutionary changes only occur in tiny steps, each of which has to be more immediately efficient than the last. After a big die-off, though, it's possible for species to take a "backwards" step without being wiped out. This massively increased the range of new biological techniques that could be discovered.
2) "The largest animals today are smaller than in the Jurassic period."
That's no surprise, really. Firstly, when disaster strikes (such as whatever killed the dinosaurs), large creatures are at a disadvantage - they need more food to stay alive. If a few hundred tiny dinosaurs can survive off the same food as one tyrannosaurus then a reduction in the food supply will kill the T Rex but will only reduce the population of the tiny dinos. Being large isn't always a good thing, so we shouldn't be terribly surprised that it doesn't always develop as a strategy.
Secondly, at least one large creature managed to escape the most recent ice age - the woolly mammoth. Then we killed it. Large animals today don't tend to have much of a life expectancy these days - look at what's happening to the whales and the elephants.
Incidentally, your premise is slightly wrong - iirc, the blue whale is substantially b
Here goes nothing:
1) A fossil being found way outside its stratum, preferably in an area with no breaks in the strata (i.e. it couldn't have been forced downwards by a tree root or something).
2) For bonus points, it should be possible to apply dating techniques to it that also indicate that it existed millions of years before it was supposed to
3) An animal, preferably one alive today, that is apparently a hybrid of one or more completely distinct families of animals. For example, a species of bat with feathered, instead of leathery, wings, or a species of horse with catlike claws. If evolution is false, we should be seeing weird pokemon-like creatures that resist placement in the big family tree that is common descent. We don't.
4) A dinosaur holding an "end nuclear testing" placard or similar absurdity.
Note that we'd have to see quite a few of these, otherwise we'd probably assume they came about through error or hoax.
Regards your other comments:
1) "There are already tons of examples of complex organisms appearing out of nowhere in the fossil record."
Not completely out of nowhere, or at least not to an unexpected extent. It's not surprising that we don't always catch animals in every possible intermediate stage of development. Consider that we've only ever unearthed 30 dinosaur skeletons, and that's a (relatively) recent species compared to, say, those that appeared during the Cambrian explosion. And, even in the case of species that just suddenly start to crop up, we can normally place them in the family tree with no great difficulty.
You'd be right to say that this falsified a particular variant of the theory of evolution - specifically, the one stating that evolution would occur at a fairly steady rate. This has been replaced with the "punctured equilibrium" subtheory, which points out that animals won't tend to evolve much unless the ecosystem they're in gets destabilised. This shouldn't be considered a disproof of the ToE as a whole, in the same way that the disproof of Newtonian gravity in no way suggested that we should accept Intelligent Falling.
The new variant explains "jumps" in evolution by pointing out that, for example, the Cambrian explosion occurred immediately after the Earth got snowballed by a sudden glaciation. The creatures that appeared afterwards had far more potential than the ones around before, but they had never had room to grow - the less fundamentally well-designed but more evolutionarily "honed" species had previously been able to hold their own against the incursion. But, after the big freeze, there were enough resources (primarily unoccupied land) available that odd mutations and less efficient species could survive for longer, giving a chance for a whole bunch of new approaches to appear.
Mostly evolutionary changes only occur in tiny steps, each of which has to be more immediately efficient than the last. After a big die-off, though, it's possible for species to take a "backwards" step without being wiped out. This massively increased the range of new biological techniques that could be discovered.
2) "The largest animals today are smaller than in the Jurassic period."
That's no surprise, really. Firstly, when disaster strikes (such as whatever killed the dinosaurs), large creatures are at a disadvantage - they need more food to stay alive. If a few hundred tiny dinosaurs can survive off the same food as one tyrannosaurus then a reduction in the food supply will kill the T Rex but will only reduce the population of the tiny dinos. Being large isn't always a good thing, so we shouldn't be terribly surprised that it doesn't always develop as a strategy.
Secondly, at least one large creature managed to escape the most recent ice age - the woolly mammoth. Then we killed it. Large animals today don't tend to have much of a life expectancy these days - look at what's happening to the whales and the elephants.
Incidentally, your premise is slightly wrong - iirc, the blue whale is substantially bigger than any dinosaur.
3) "Even the length of DNA for a small bacterium is
It's true that the theory of evolution assumes that things will look undesigned (that's methodological naturalism for you). On the other hand, it does not assume that things will look undirected (the difference being that directedness does not imply a designer). The ToE in no way states that life is going to be structurally similar to the results of a hurricane passing through a junkyard, or similar bad metaphor of your choice.
Most reasonably efficient structures, taken without context, are consistent with directedness - the structure is "directed" towards high efficiency by dint of the fact that organisms containing the inefficient versions tend to have fewer surviving offspring. About the only thing I can think of that would be consistent with design but not directedness is a message buried deep in DNA saying "God was here". So far no such signature has been found.
Fortunately for the ToE's scientific status, there are a large number of other ways it could be falsified, and it has repeatedly failed to be disproven by any of them. Compare and contrast with the conjecture of "intelligent design".
There is a reason Chinese scientists don't protest much and that's because those who are still alive are those who kept their mouths sufficiently shut last time.
Apologies for the angry tone of the following post, it just got my goat somewhat.
There has been no concrete explanation for the forming of the universe by evolutionists
Firstly, there's no such word as "evolutionist". The correct term, if you're talking about someone who studies the scientific discipline in question, is "evolutionary biologist". If you're talking about someone who accepts evolution as the most likely explanation for our being here, the term is atheist or agnostic (depending on details).
And thus to my second point. The theory of evolution and associated bioscience have nothing to do with how the universe started. None. Nada. Zip. They have nothing to do with stellar evolution, despite the name. They have nothing to do with how the Earth was formed. They don't even have anything to do with how life began - the correct term for that is abiogenesis and it's closer to chemistry than biology. The only reason anyone bothers to conflate the scientific discipline of evolutionary biology with this vast range of related subjects is so they can bundle them all together, slap a label saying "ATHEIST" (or, more likely, "ATHIEST") on them and then whine loudly about people teaching this pile of "dogma" in schools. Wonderful straw man there.
Similarly, there is no such thing as Darwinism. The only people who advocate "Darwin: right or wrong?" as a valid ideological choice are those who wish to set up a false dichotomy. Which historically has been proponents of creationism or intelligent design.
Extreme evolutionism is more fanatical than based on science, with many varied beliefs and varied "scientific" explanations for the same things.
On the whole, these "beliefs" are falsifiable. When a conjecture as to how things work/worked is falsifiable (and preferably meets a couple of other standards), we call it a scientific hypothesis. You may have heard the term? It's that thing that Intelligent Design isn't until it demonstrates a method by which it can be falsified. In the same vein, "God did it" can never be a hypothesis if God is assumed to be infinitely powerful, as such a God can do whatever the heck he wants. Now, this may even be the way the universe works. There may be an all-powerful God who takes great pleasure in planting random dinosaur skeletons and tinkering with bacterial flagella. But that conjecture sure as hell isn't scientific and hence shouldn't be taught in a science class.
Incidentally, there's nothing wrong with there being several different explanations for the same data. But until they're falsifiable they're called conjectures, and until we have sufficient examples of them dramatically failing to be falsified they're called hypotheses. Only once they've been through the white-hot flame of detailed scientific enquiry are they referred to as theories.
The teachers could present, say, the top 3 worldwide views on the subject, and allow the students to choose.
I have no problem with that. As long as they do it in a Religious Studies class. If they try to do it in a science class, they've completely misunderstood the nature of science and need to be sacked for the children's sake - it'd be like getting a Holocaust denyer to teach 20th century history. Science isn't about "choosing" what's right. It's about suggesting what might be right, then scrutinising it, poking holes in it, looking high and low for contradictory data (and there must be the potential for contradictory data, otherwise your conjecture is scientifically nihilistic) and then, when you've given up in despair of ever disproving the damn thing, accepting that it might conceivably be an accurate reflection of reality.
Is there a single religion in the world willing to go through that baptism of fire? If it did, and passed, wouldn't that rather destroy the idea of "having faith", anyway? Answers of "No" or "Yes" respectively indicate that religions have no place in the science classroom.
Yeah, it sucks. The basic problem is that Microsoft has vendors lining up to write Windows drivers for their products, whereas Linux developers are lucky if the company doesn't try to sue them for reverse-engineering, let alone provide any sort of help. This makes hardware support somewhat tricky.
The Environmental Protection Act (1990), Chapter 43, section 79(1)(a), describes Statutory Nuisances as including "noise emitted from premises so as to be prejudicial to health or a nuisance". This would certainly cover the Mosquito - it's specifically designed to be, and marketed as, an annoying noise producer. The other pertinent subsections (particularly (9)) boil down to "unless we've specifically said you can do this".
I'd strongly disagree. My experience has been that, whilst older people may on average be less idiotic than younger people, the rate of accumulation of smarts varies massively from person to person. Once you get past a certain age, there is absolutely no guarantee that you'll be more clueful than those ten years younger than you. Beyond this point, brain development is a non-issue and personality development comes to the fore. And that can go either way.
I'm 20, and I've met:
A) Teenagers who are great, intelligent, mature human beings
B) Adults who are idiotic, arrogant assholes
Any store driving away the former in the interests of retaining the latter is presumably run by members of type B. I wouldn't be interested in shopping there. I can fully understand them wanting to drive away dickheads of whatever age, but this is probably not the best way to do it. I quite like the playing-classical-music idea - loathing of Bach in my (fairly limited) experience correlates almost perfectly with being a complete chav, almost regardless of age.
Incidentally, is this device even legal in the UK? I thought we had quite strict noise pollution laws. For which I am eternally grateful - I have excellent hearing in the higher frequencies and have great trouble even walking down a street where everyone has those bloody cat scarers.
What I'd really love is for this to be implemented for backgrounds. Currently there's no way to make a CSS-defined background for a DIV tag stretch to cover the necessary area without a hell of a lot of evil javascript or whatever. This is not cool.
Who were the CIOs and industry analysts who helped determine the metrics? Were they more experienced with Windows or Linux on average? If there was a clear slant towards Windows-oriented participants, they'd tend to produce realistic scenarios in a way that would be soluble on a Windows box. If you needed a daemon doing task A, and this tended to be accomplished on a Windows system by a work-around that involved program B, you might find that the requirements were closer to "implement program B" than "implement a program performing task A".
Of the four or so high-content-rate sites I frequent, none of them had anything happening in the last 10 hours. Would you prefer that Slashdot lower their content standards even further? Is that even possible?
I mean that, if they license their code under the GPL, they are also free to separately license their code under any other system they like. It's written into the license.
But even one segment of code from an outside author, released to them under GPL, would require the release of their SW's source under the included code's GPL.
That's what I was talking about before. Apparently they didn't get enough contributions that they couldn't easily write them out. This almost total lack of outside contributions in the open-source version was the reason why they apparently gave up on that codebase and reengineered it based on the code that was absolutely 100% theirs.
They wrote effectively all of V2, they can do with it as they wish (the GPL is a nonexclusive license, hence the success of dual-licensing). The only hairy issue is patches from the FOSS community, but apparently those were few enough to be handled on an individual basis or something.
P.S. All Satanists are really Christians. You do realise this, don't you?
Actually a decent chunk of satanists see Lucifer as being solely a metaphor for life, or a "force" equivalent to the Christian (C.S. Lewis et al) view of God as an underlying moral force to the universe. There's a comparatively small proportion of "literal" satanists (the sort that could indeed be considered left-handed Christians), who are more correctly termed Diabolists. Less abridged summary here
Why do so many people act like scientific consensus is infallible?
It's not. However, the consensus of the scientific community tends to be the best guess available on scientific issues from information available at the time.
Climate models are only useful if they can predict the future accurately. When they fail to predict the future accurately, they aren't useful. When they're falsified the parameters are changed, and the process starts over again. Pretending that they are correct when they don't perform useful predictions is just as foolish as misusing Newtonian physics.
Which climate models are you thinking of? Of course, the scientific community is continually coming up with better ones - that's the nature of the game. But it's my understanding that for some time now the climate models have been giving rather painful warnings.
One of the largest problems with the current scientific consensus about global warming is that it comes to its conclusion in a manner that is not convincing in an intellectually honest manner. It attempts to short-circuit the process in order create political influence to solve any number of problems and non-problems.
I'm not sure what part of this you think is intellectually dishonest. From the raw data available from the ice cores in the article, we can conclude that: a) the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased massively; b) so has the amount of methane. Both of these are potent greenhouse gases (this can be measured in the lab, in case you're wonderering how they know), so it makes a great deal of sense, going by these findings, to predict a rise in temperature. The political influence in this case is tangential to the science - it's just caused by lots of scientists looking at their data and/or reading their journals and going "holy cow! My grandchildren are going to be screwed!"
If the data was being faked or the models were being fudged to support these conclusions, then it'd be dishonest, but I've seen absolutely no evidence that this is the case.
In 200 years, whether humans were warming the planet or not, this will all be looked upon with scorn as pseudo-science.
In 200 years the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will be even higher. At some level they will cause the temperature to skyrocket - firstly due to the basic thermodynamics of "planet retains more heat => planet gets hotter" and secondly due to the side-effects of reduced (reflective) ice caps and increased water vapour (also a potent greenhouse gas). This is all fairly solid science - no pseudoscience required. If it happens significantly before the end of the next 200 years, our descendents will be stuck at the top of an ex-mountain somewhere hoping the rain will stop before the water reaches the summit.
Yes, it's possible that, by some deus ex machina that scientists haven't noticed, the climate finds a way to maintain acceptable temperatures and sea levels. But a) historically scientists have had a better idea of scientifically-analysable phenomena than politicians; b) do you really want politicians betting your great-great-grandchildren's lives on this; and c) do you really think they're making decisions because they think it'll all work out, or because they're getting vast campaign funds from the oil industry and couldn't care less about the future of the human race?
...what's happening here is the consensus of a vocal part of the scientific community...
That's one of the better features of the scientific community - it's comparatively hard for people to be verbose without also being correct, as they will be slated by all the clueful people around them. No amount of mouthing off can get a paper published.
Actually, that was pretty much random stuff off the top of my head. Thanks for the compliment tho:P
As I think a couple of people have mentioned, if you find that sort of stuff interesting then the Ender series by Orson Scott Card is excellent. In particular, "Ender's Shadow" for space warfare and "Shadow of the Hegemon" for ground warfare, although you'd probably want to read the original "Ender's Game" first.
But, even in trench warfare, there were multiple rows of trenches, right?
Yes. But only a few miles thickness of trench was manned, iirc. See my earlier comment about this. There's no point manning a trench 200 miles away from the actual warzone.
There were also troops and hospitals and such behind the trenches.
Yes. But their prevalence was a function of the area of the trenches, not of the area the trenches were protecting. And, as I already mentioned, the area of the trenches was approximately a linear function of the length of the defended area's perimeter.
There were occupation forces inside cities in there. Couldn't one view planets as being equivalent to such cities, only stragegically far more important because of the difficulty of the intelligence task of analyzing a planet's stragetic stance?
There's no good short-term military reason to hold cities. The main short-term reasons for attempting to hold them are a) it makes for bad PR to lose them and b) it's a bitch to win them back (city warfare 0wns). Neither of these reasons apply to dead planets (no-one cares even if you do nuke the bastards). Planets with a large population will be able to support their own defence force. The only slight complication is lines of supply, but planets would tend to be far more self-sustaining than cities. Obviously in the long term cities are essential sources of high-tech products, but shipping raw materials to, and finished goods from, another planet is not terribly plausible (and unnecessary if the planet is dead) so this reason evaporates.
Planets are not the cities of space, they're the lush valleys. Wonderful places to live, but relatively indefensible and not worth fighting over if they're not occupied.
At that point, you'd have to argue that your occupation expands as a band across your holdings, or am I still missing something here?
On the whole, the concept of "holdings" in space isn't very useful. Yes, you could build bases on asteroids and the like but, if you made it too difficult for enemies to drive you off, they could just nuke the hell out of you with no real repercussions.
Given the cost and time lag of transporting stuff in space (assuming no warp drives, which would open up an entirely different tactical bag of weasels), the areas you'd be defending would be a limited number of high-density, almost entirely self-sufficient population centres which would be extremely remote from each other. Rather than defending these as a group (i.e. trying to protect the entire solar system) it makes much more sense to defend them individually, in which case the problem reduces to the 2D defence previously discussed.
The only exception I can think of to this approach is stuff like asteroid belt mining and so on. With these, you'd effectively just have to accept that your operation was indefensible and attempt to move with extreme stealth, relying on the massive volume of the belts to protect you.
Slashdot Mirror
The biopiracy they're talking about is big companies coming in, finding traditional remedies that work, patenting the use of herb X as part of said remedy and then attempting to charge the locals for the privilege of using their own traditional medicines. The aim is not to keep control of the IP but to stop anyone else claiming it in a harmful fashion.
I'm still not entirely comfortable with the word "Darwinism" - probably no-one in the field of evolutionary biology believes exactly what Darwin believed about evolution, and the field is certainly much larger than his original assertions. Certainly his words aren't taken as necessarily being true, but instead are put to the same tests that any scientific hypothesis labours under. Well, science has done a pretty good job in other fields such as chemistry (beats alchemy hands down), biology (the four humours are so pass) and physics (no, the Sun is not pushed by a dung beetle). Why should it do any worse in the field of evolutionary biology?
If the use of scientific methodology bothers you, why not point to the particular issues you have with it? Most of it is, in fact, pretty much common sense. Or, if you have problems with a given scientist's data or the conclusions he draws from these, I'm sure the relevant journal will be happy to consider your submission. Of course, if you're just spouting sarcasm on the basis of absolutely no understanding of scientific methodology or the field in question, said journal will almost certainly tell you to take a hike. That's the power of science at work.
Had the most hellish time with a wireless dongle trying to get it to run under anything but Windows. Turned out, of course, that it was one of those lovely products that used about three different chipsets in the "same" model, along with a range of other gotchas. Even ndiswrapper couldn't handle it. And of course the chance of Belkin actually assisting in any way are nil.
If there's any Belkin employees reading this: please tell your management that at least one person will start buying your products when you start releasing your hardware interfaces.
ID proponents don't have a theory. They don't even have a hypothesis. They barely qualify as having a conjecture. As someone who's spent some time reading ID literature, I can definitively state that their arguments consist entirely of the idea that somewhere, somehow, there's a biological feature that evolution can't explain. Sadly their mathematical arguments have been debunked by proper mathematicians and, every time they suggest a feature that "must" have been intelligently designed, someone points out either how it could have evolved or how its design isn't particularly intelligent. Sometimes both.
OK, that time it was definitely slashdot's fault - I set it to "Plain text" and previewed before submitting. Third time lucky:
1) A fossil being found way outside its stratum, preferably in an area with no breaks in the strata (i.e. it couldn't have been forced downwards by a tree root or something).
2) For bonus points, it should be possible to apply dating techniques to it that also indicate that it existed millions of years before it was supposed to
3) An animal, preferably one alive today, that is apparently a hybrid of one or more completely distinct families of animals. For example, a species of bat with feathered, instead of leathery, wings, or a species of horse with catlike claws. If evolution is false, we should be seeing weird pokemon-like creatures that resist placement in the big family tree that is common descent. We don't.
4) A dinosaur holding an "end nuclear testing" placard or similar absurdity.
Note that we'd have to see quite a few of these, otherwise we'd probably assume they came about through error or hoax.
Regards your other comments:
1) "There are already tons of examples of complex organisms appearing out of nowhere in the fossil record."
Not completely out of nowhere, or at least not to an unexpected extent. It's not surprising that we don't always catch animals in every possible intermediate stage of development. Consider that we've only ever unearthed 30 Tyrannosaurus Rex skeletons, and that's a (relatively) recent species compared to, say, those that appeared during the Cambrian explosion. And, even in the case of species that just suddenly start to crop up, we can normally place them in the family tree with no great difficulty.
You'd be right to say that this falsified a particular variant of the theory of evolution - specifically, the one stating that evolution would occur at a fairly steady rate. This has been replaced with the "punctured equilibrium" subtheory, which points out that animals won't tend to evolve much unless the ecosystem they're in gets destabilised. This shouldn't be considered a disproof of the ToE as a whole, in the same way that the disproof of Newtonian gravity in no way suggested that we should accept Intelligent Falling.
The new variant explains "jumps" in evolution by pointing out that, for example, the Cambrian explosion occurred immediately after the Earth got snowballed by a sudden glaciation. The creatures that appeared afterwards had far more potential than the ones around before, but they had never had room to grow - the less fundamentally well-designed but more evolutionarily "honed" species had previously been able to hold their own against the incursion. But, after the big freeze, there were enough resources (primarily unoccupied land) available that odd mutations and less efficient species could survive for longer, giving a chance for a whole bunch of new approaches to appear.
Mostly evolutionary changes only occur in tiny steps, each of which has to be more immediately efficient than the last. After a big die-off, though, it's possible for species to take a "backwards" step without being wiped out. This massively increased the range of new biological techniques that could be discovered.
2) "The largest animals today are smaller than in the Jurassic period."
That's no surprise, really. Firstly, when disaster strikes (such as whatever killed the dinosaurs), large creatures are at a disadvantage - they need more food to stay alive. If a few hundred tiny dinosaurs can survive off the same food as one tyrannosaurus then a reduction in the food supply will kill the T Rex but will only reduce the population of the tiny dinos. Being large isn't always a good thing, so we shouldn't be terribly surprised that it doesn't always develop as a strategy.
Secondly, at least one large creature managed to escape the most recent ice age - the woolly mammoth. Then we killed it. Large animals today don't tend to have much of a life expectancy these days - look at what's happeni
Apologies for the double post, but version 1 really wasn't legible) Here goes nothing: 1) A fossil being found way outside its stratum, preferably in an area with no breaks in the strata (i.e. it couldn't have been forced downwards by a tree root or something). 2) For bonus points, it should be possible to apply dating techniques to it that also indicate that it existed millions of years before it was supposed to 3) An animal, preferably one alive today, that is apparently a hybrid of one or more completely distinct families of animals. For example, a species of bat with feathered, instead of leathery, wings, or a species of horse with catlike claws. If evolution is false, we should be seeing weird pokemon-like creatures that resist placement in the big family tree that is common descent. We don't. 4) A dinosaur holding an "end nuclear testing" placard or similar absurdity. Note that we'd have to see quite a few of these, otherwise we'd probably assume they came about through error or hoax. Regards your other comments: 1) "There are already tons of examples of complex organisms appearing out of nowhere in the fossil record." Not completely out of nowhere, or at least not to an unexpected extent. It's not surprising that we don't always catch animals in every possible intermediate stage of development. Consider that we've only ever unearthed 30 Tyrannosaurus Rex skeletons, and that's a (relatively) recent species compared to, say, those that appeared during the Cambrian explosion. And, even in the case of species that just suddenly start to crop up, we can normally place them in the family tree with no great difficulty. You'd be right to say that this falsified a particular variant of the theory of evolution - specifically, the one stating that evolution would occur at a fairly steady rate. This has been replaced with the "punctured equilibrium" subtheory, which points out that animals won't tend to evolve much unless the ecosystem they're in gets destabilised. This shouldn't be considered a disproof of the ToE as a whole, in the same way that the disproof of Newtonian gravity in no way suggested that we should accept Intelligent Falling. The new variant explains "jumps" in evolution by pointing out that, for example, the Cambrian explosion occurred immediately after the Earth got snowballed by a sudden glaciation. The creatures that appeared afterwards had far more potential than the ones around before, but they had never had room to grow - the less fundamentally well-designed but more evolutionarily "honed" species had previously been able to hold their own against the incursion. But, after the big freeze, there were enough resources (primarily unoccupied land) available that odd mutations and less efficient species could survive for longer, giving a chance for a whole bunch of new approaches to appear. Mostly evolutionary changes only occur in tiny steps, each of which has to be more immediately efficient than the last. After a big die-off, though, it's possible for species to take a "backwards" step without being wiped out. This massively increased the range of new biological techniques that could be discovered. 2) "The largest animals today are smaller than in the Jurassic period." That's no surprise, really. Firstly, when disaster strikes (such as whatever killed the dinosaurs), large creatures are at a disadvantage - they need more food to stay alive. If a few hundred tiny dinosaurs can survive off the same food as one tyrannosaurus then a reduction in the food supply will kill the T Rex but will only reduce the population of the tiny dinos. Being large isn't always a good thing, so we shouldn't be terribly surprised that it doesn't always develop as a strategy. Secondly, at least one large creature managed to escape the most recent ice age - the woolly mammoth. Then we killed it. Large animals today don't tend to have much of a life expectancy these days - look at what's happening to the whales and the elephants. Incidentally, your premise is slightly wrong - iirc, the blue whale is substantially b
Here goes nothing: 1) A fossil being found way outside its stratum, preferably in an area with no breaks in the strata (i.e. it couldn't have been forced downwards by a tree root or something). 2) For bonus points, it should be possible to apply dating techniques to it that also indicate that it existed millions of years before it was supposed to 3) An animal, preferably one alive today, that is apparently a hybrid of one or more completely distinct families of animals. For example, a species of bat with feathered, instead of leathery, wings, or a species of horse with catlike claws. If evolution is false, we should be seeing weird pokemon-like creatures that resist placement in the big family tree that is common descent. We don't. 4) A dinosaur holding an "end nuclear testing" placard or similar absurdity. Note that we'd have to see quite a few of these, otherwise we'd probably assume they came about through error or hoax. Regards your other comments: 1) "There are already tons of examples of complex organisms appearing out of nowhere in the fossil record." Not completely out of nowhere, or at least not to an unexpected extent. It's not surprising that we don't always catch animals in every possible intermediate stage of development. Consider that we've only ever unearthed 30 dinosaur skeletons, and that's a (relatively) recent species compared to, say, those that appeared during the Cambrian explosion. And, even in the case of species that just suddenly start to crop up, we can normally place them in the family tree with no great difficulty. You'd be right to say that this falsified a particular variant of the theory of evolution - specifically, the one stating that evolution would occur at a fairly steady rate. This has been replaced with the "punctured equilibrium" subtheory, which points out that animals won't tend to evolve much unless the ecosystem they're in gets destabilised. This shouldn't be considered a disproof of the ToE as a whole, in the same way that the disproof of Newtonian gravity in no way suggested that we should accept Intelligent Falling. The new variant explains "jumps" in evolution by pointing out that, for example, the Cambrian explosion occurred immediately after the Earth got snowballed by a sudden glaciation. The creatures that appeared afterwards had far more potential than the ones around before, but they had never had room to grow - the less fundamentally well-designed but more evolutionarily "honed" species had previously been able to hold their own against the incursion. But, after the big freeze, there were enough resources (primarily unoccupied land) available that odd mutations and less efficient species could survive for longer, giving a chance for a whole bunch of new approaches to appear. Mostly evolutionary changes only occur in tiny steps, each of which has to be more immediately efficient than the last. After a big die-off, though, it's possible for species to take a "backwards" step without being wiped out. This massively increased the range of new biological techniques that could be discovered. 2) "The largest animals today are smaller than in the Jurassic period." That's no surprise, really. Firstly, when disaster strikes (such as whatever killed the dinosaurs), large creatures are at a disadvantage - they need more food to stay alive. If a few hundred tiny dinosaurs can survive off the same food as one tyrannosaurus then a reduction in the food supply will kill the T Rex but will only reduce the population of the tiny dinos. Being large isn't always a good thing, so we shouldn't be terribly surprised that it doesn't always develop as a strategy. Secondly, at least one large creature managed to escape the most recent ice age - the woolly mammoth. Then we killed it. Large animals today don't tend to have much of a life expectancy these days - look at what's happening to the whales and the elephants. Incidentally, your premise is slightly wrong - iirc, the blue whale is substantially bigger than any dinosaur. 3) "Even the length of DNA for a small bacterium is
It's true that the theory of evolution assumes that things will look undesigned (that's methodological naturalism for you). On the other hand, it does not assume that things will look undirected (the difference being that directedness does not imply a designer). The ToE in no way states that life is going to be structurally similar to the results of a hurricane passing through a junkyard, or similar bad metaphor of your choice.
Most reasonably efficient structures, taken without context, are consistent with directedness - the structure is "directed" towards high efficiency by dint of the fact that organisms containing the inefficient versions tend to have fewer surviving offspring. About the only thing I can think of that would be consistent with design but not directedness is a message buried deep in DNA saying "God was here". So far no such signature has been found.
Fortunately for the ToE's scientific status, there are a large number of other ways it could be falsified, and it has repeatedly failed to be disproven by any of them. Compare and contrast with the conjecture of "intelligent design".
There is a reason Chinese scientists don't protest much and that's because those who are still alive are those who kept their mouths sufficiently shut last time.
Apologies for the angry tone of the following post, it just got my goat somewhat.
There has been no concrete explanation for the forming of the universe by evolutionists
Firstly, there's no such word as "evolutionist". The correct term, if you're talking about someone who studies the scientific discipline in question, is "evolutionary biologist". If you're talking about someone who accepts evolution as the most likely explanation for our being here, the term is atheist or agnostic (depending on details).
And thus to my second point. The theory of evolution and associated bioscience have nothing to do with how the universe started. None. Nada. Zip. They have nothing to do with stellar evolution, despite the name. They have nothing to do with how the Earth was formed. They don't even have anything to do with how life began - the correct term for that is abiogenesis and it's closer to chemistry than biology. The only reason anyone bothers to conflate the scientific discipline of evolutionary biology with this vast range of related subjects is so they can bundle them all together, slap a label saying "ATHEIST" (or, more likely, "ATHIEST") on them and then whine loudly about people teaching this pile of "dogma" in schools. Wonderful straw man there.
Similarly, there is no such thing as Darwinism. The only people who advocate "Darwin: right or wrong?" as a valid ideological choice are those who wish to set up a false dichotomy. Which historically has been proponents of creationism or intelligent design.
Extreme evolutionism is more fanatical than based on science, with many varied beliefs and varied "scientific" explanations for the same things.
On the whole, these "beliefs" are falsifiable. When a conjecture as to how things work/worked is falsifiable (and preferably meets a couple of other standards), we call it a scientific hypothesis. You may have heard the term? It's that thing that Intelligent Design isn't until it demonstrates a method by which it can be falsified. In the same vein, "God did it" can never be a hypothesis if God is assumed to be infinitely powerful, as such a God can do whatever the heck he wants. Now, this may even be the way the universe works. There may be an all-powerful God who takes great pleasure in planting random dinosaur skeletons and tinkering with bacterial flagella. But that conjecture sure as hell isn't scientific and hence shouldn't be taught in a science class.
Incidentally, there's nothing wrong with there being several different explanations for the same data. But until they're falsifiable they're called conjectures, and until we have sufficient examples of them dramatically failing to be falsified they're called hypotheses. Only once they've been through the white-hot flame of detailed scientific enquiry are they referred to as theories.
The teachers could present, say, the top 3 worldwide views on the subject, and allow the students to choose.
I have no problem with that. As long as they do it in a Religious Studies class. If they try to do it in a science class, they've completely misunderstood the nature of science and need to be sacked for the children's sake - it'd be like getting a Holocaust denyer to teach 20th century history. Science isn't about "choosing" what's right. It's about suggesting what might be right, then scrutinising it, poking holes in it, looking high and low for contradictory data (and there must be the potential for contradictory data, otherwise your conjecture is scientifically nihilistic) and then, when you've given up in despair of ever disproving the damn thing, accepting that it might conceivably be an accurate reflection of reality.
Is there a single religion in the world willing to go through that baptism of fire? If it did, and passed, wouldn't that rather destroy the idea of "having faith", anyway? Answers of "No" or "Yes" respectively indicate that religions have no place in the science classroom.
It's because of the driver support
Yeah, it sucks. The basic problem is that Microsoft has vendors lining up to write Windows drivers for their products, whereas Linux developers are lucky if the company doesn't try to sue them for reverse-engineering, let alone provide any sort of help. This makes hardware support somewhat tricky.
The Environmental Protection Act (1990), Chapter 43, section 79(1)(a), describes Statutory Nuisances as including "noise emitted from premises so as to be prejudicial to health or a nuisance". This would certainly cover the Mosquito - it's specifically designed to be, and marketed as, an annoying noise producer. The other pertinent subsections (particularly (9)) boil down to "unless we've specifically said you can do this".
I'd strongly disagree. My experience has been that, whilst older people may on average be less idiotic than younger people, the rate of accumulation of smarts varies massively from person to person. Once you get past a certain age, there is absolutely no guarantee that you'll be more clueful than those ten years younger than you. Beyond this point, brain development is a non-issue and personality development comes to the fore. And that can go either way.
I'm 20, and I've met:
A) Teenagers who are great, intelligent, mature human beings
B) Adults who are idiotic, arrogant assholes
Any store driving away the former in the interests of retaining the latter is presumably run by members of type B. I wouldn't be interested in shopping there. I can fully understand them wanting to drive away dickheads of whatever age, but this is probably not the best way to do it. I quite like the playing-classical-music idea - loathing of Bach in my (fairly limited) experience correlates almost perfectly with being a complete chav, almost regardless of age.
Incidentally, is this device even legal in the UK? I thought we had quite strict noise pollution laws. For which I am eternally grateful - I have excellent hearing in the higher frequencies and have great trouble even walking down a street where everyone has those bloody cat scarers.
Everyone knows that ED is the one true editor!
What I'd really love is for this to be implemented for backgrounds. Currently there's no way to make a CSS-defined background for a DIV tag stretch to cover the necessary area without a hell of a lot of evil javascript or whatever. This is not cool.
Who were the CIOs and industry analysts who helped determine the metrics? Were they more experienced with Windows or Linux on average? If there was a clear slant towards Windows-oriented participants, they'd tend to produce realistic scenarios in a way that would be soluble on a Windows box. If you needed a daemon doing task A, and this tended to be accomplished on a Windows system by a work-around that involved program B, you might find that the requirements were closer to "implement program B" than "implement a program performing task A".
Of the four or so high-content-rate sites I frequent, none of them had anything happening in the last 10 hours. Would you prefer that Slashdot lower their content standards even further? Is that even possible?
It is entirely bottoms-up
So much for sobriety in the workplace...
They wrote effectively all of V2, they can do with it as they wish (the GPL is a nonexclusive license, hence the success of dual-licensing). The only hairy issue is patches from the FOSS community, but apparently those were few enough to be handled on an individual basis or something.
P.S. All Satanists are really Christians. You do realise this, don't you?
Actually a decent chunk of satanists see Lucifer as being solely a metaphor for life, or a "force" equivalent to the Christian (C.S. Lewis et al) view of God as an underlying moral force to the universe. There's a comparatively small proportion of "literal" satanists (the sort that could indeed be considered left-handed Christians), who are more correctly termed Diabolists. Less abridged summary here
Why do so many people act like scientific consensus is infallible?
It's not. However, the consensus of the scientific community tends to be the best guess available on scientific issues from information available at the time.
Climate models are only useful if they can predict the future accurately. When they fail to predict the future accurately, they aren't useful. When they're falsified the parameters are changed, and the process starts over again. Pretending that they are correct when they don't perform useful predictions is just as foolish as misusing Newtonian physics.
Which climate models are you thinking of? Of course, the scientific community is continually coming up with better ones - that's the nature of the game. But it's my understanding that for some time now the climate models have been giving rather painful warnings.
One of the largest problems with the current scientific consensus about global warming is that it comes to its conclusion in a manner that is not convincing in an intellectually honest manner. It attempts to short-circuit the process in order create political influence to solve any number of problems and non-problems.
I'm not sure what part of this you think is intellectually dishonest. From the raw data available from the ice cores in the article, we can conclude that: a) the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased massively; b) so has the amount of methane. Both of these are potent greenhouse gases (this can be measured in the lab, in case you're wonderering how they know), so it makes a great deal of sense, going by these findings, to predict a rise in temperature. The political influence in this case is tangential to the science - it's just caused by lots of scientists looking at their data and/or reading their journals and going "holy cow! My grandchildren are going to be screwed!"
If the data was being faked or the models were being fudged to support these conclusions, then it'd be dishonest, but I've seen absolutely no evidence that this is the case.
In 200 years, whether humans were warming the planet or not, this will all be looked upon with scorn as pseudo-science.
In 200 years the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will be even higher. At some level they will cause the temperature to skyrocket - firstly due to the basic thermodynamics of "planet retains more heat => planet gets hotter" and secondly due to the side-effects of reduced (reflective) ice caps and increased water vapour (also a potent greenhouse gas). This is all fairly solid science - no pseudoscience required. If it happens significantly before the end of the next 200 years, our descendents will be stuck at the top of an ex-mountain somewhere hoping the rain will stop before the water reaches the summit.
Yes, it's possible that, by some deus ex machina that scientists haven't noticed, the climate finds a way to maintain acceptable temperatures and sea levels. But a) historically scientists have had a better idea of scientifically-analysable phenomena than politicians; b) do you really want politicians betting your great-great-grandchildren's lives on this; and c) do you really think they're making decisions because they think it'll all work out, or because they're getting vast campaign funds from the oil industry and couldn't care less about the future of the human race?
...what's happening here is the consensus of a vocal part of the scientific community ...
That's one of the better features of the scientific community - it's comparatively hard for people to be verbose without also being correct, as they will be slated by all the clueful people around them. No amount of mouthing off can get a paper published.
Or at least that's the theory...
Wow, you've really thought this out. Good points.
:P
Actually, that was pretty much random stuff off the top of my head. Thanks for the compliment tho
As I think a couple of people have mentioned, if you find that sort of stuff interesting then the Ender series by Orson Scott Card is excellent. In particular, "Ender's Shadow" for space warfare and "Shadow of the Hegemon" for ground warfare, although you'd probably want to read the original "Ender's Game" first.
But, even in trench warfare, there were multiple rows of trenches, right?
Yes. But only a few miles thickness of trench was manned, iirc. See my earlier comment about this. There's no point manning a trench 200 miles away from the actual warzone.
There were also troops and hospitals and such behind the trenches.
Yes. But their prevalence was a function of the area of the trenches, not of the area the trenches were protecting. And, as I already mentioned, the area of the trenches was approximately a linear function of the length of the defended area's perimeter. There were occupation forces inside cities in there. Couldn't one view planets as being equivalent to such cities, only stragegically far more important because of the difficulty of the intelligence task of analyzing a planet's stragetic stance?
There's no good short-term military reason to hold cities. The main short-term reasons for attempting to hold them are a) it makes for bad PR to lose them and b) it's a bitch to win them back (city warfare 0wns). Neither of these reasons apply to dead planets (no-one cares even if you do nuke the bastards). Planets with a large population will be able to support their own defence force. The only slight complication is lines of supply, but planets would tend to be far more self-sustaining than cities. Obviously in the long term cities are essential sources of high-tech products, but shipping raw materials to, and finished goods from, another planet is not terribly plausible (and unnecessary if the planet is dead) so this reason evaporates.
Planets are not the cities of space, they're the lush valleys. Wonderful places to live, but relatively indefensible and not worth fighting over if they're not occupied.
At that point, you'd have to argue that your occupation expands as a band across your holdings, or am I still missing something here?
On the whole, the concept of "holdings" in space isn't very useful. Yes, you could build bases on asteroids and the like but, if you made it too difficult for enemies to drive you off, they could just nuke the hell out of you with no real repercussions.
Given the cost and time lag of transporting stuff in space (assuming no warp drives, which would open up an entirely different tactical bag of weasels), the areas you'd be defending would be a limited number of high-density, almost entirely self-sufficient population centres which would be extremely remote from each other. Rather than defending these as a group (i.e. trying to protect the entire solar system) it makes much more sense to defend them individually, in which case the problem reduces to the 2D defence previously discussed.
The only exception I can think of to this approach is stuff like asteroid belt mining and so on. With these, you'd effectively just have to accept that your operation was indefensible and attempt to move with extreme stealth, relying on the massive volume of the belts to protect you.