The second law of thermodynamics is a statement about closed systems. Indeed if the Earth was a closed system (eg did not get light from the Sun) then evolution would have a problem. The problems would start with everything starving to death and wouldn't improve much from that.
But lo and behold! We do have a Sun, the Earth is NOT a closed system, and so the Creationist lines about the second law of thermodynamics are complete and utter BS.
Now please get a clue before spouting off again...
I have seen a lot of creationist arguments. Not a single one held up for more than a short time against someone who knows evolution well. Many turn out to be simply wrong. (eg The Earth is an open system, exit balderdash about thermodynamics.) Others are bald-faced lies. (It is more amusing to track down quotes from those misquoted about how Creationists misquote scientists than it is to read the Creationist misquotes. Although reading the originals and comparing them with the misquotes is also fun.) Many sound reasonable until you actually know something. (eg How can you really know...scientists don't have any evidence. Um, really? But what about...)
In short, apply your brain and you may be a little less impressed with Creationist tracts.
Please find me a knowledgable biologist who believes that the differences between races and species is not a difference of degree, and not of kind. That is, there is no difference between macro and micro evolution except in the minds of people who don't know better.
Go read Eldridge and Gould (FYI the people whose paper started the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium) and read what they had to say about it.
The only people who think that it is NOT a form of Darwinian evolution are liars out to make it look like there is a debate within science about whether evolution is true (there is not), and those who have been fooled by the liars but who never bothered to go so far as to read the people whose positions were being caricatured by the liars.
It is easy to say that they should not be presented as fact when you do not know the mass of evidence.
Did you know that the process of evolution is itself observed, proven, fact? That is right folks, we have observed it happen in real life. For but one example the spread of the killer bees throughout South America, Central America, and now their continuing spread through North America is literally evolution in action!
As for the further evidence, well I don't want to write a book. Get yourself to a library and begin to look some of it up for yourself...
Seriously, I see a lot of people who say, "We don't have much evidence" but I do not see that from people who are intellectually honest and have actually investigated the subject. A good starting place if you want to look online would be the FAQS for talk.origins.
Secondly re-read Behe, he agrees with the scientific orthodoxy on the last 200 million years of evolution, which is something that the average creationist does not want to remember.
A major, constant, and heart-felt complaint about Microsoft is the way that they have constantly lowered the standards for what is acceptable quality at each level of release. Why should we let Microsoft rewrite the language? Their rewriting the rules already is what has led to final releases being incredibly instable, and we are in general just plain sick of it.
No, don't judge them by their language. Judge them by the same rules that you do everyone else. If they are delivering a product that will be competing in the server space, they should be hitting the same stability targets that everyone else does routinely. Particularly if the product is being marketed based on its stability!
The machine apparently crashed because its security logs filled up. Can the same be done as a DoS attack on any NT box? What kinds of events fill up the log? How many events are required?
If somebody can fill in the details then it should be released as an official bug report. And it can then be as a vulnerability in existing versions of NT...
And it reminds me of an idea that I once had. It would be possible to have a foundation that is specifically designed to spread money through the OSS community. The way that it could work is that people make donations through the foundation to a specific person who writes OSS software. The foundation would then pay that person, say, 1/3 of that donation, and have the other 2/3 divided up between a number of people who contributed to the success of their project.
Those people would in turn get a portion, and pass the bulk on, and divide up the pie further. And so on until the total amount in question fell down to some limit, like $50. In this way the money gets divided between all of the contributers, even though the person making the donation probably does not know who any of them are. (Oh, and if this foundation is a registered charity, there is an extremely good chance under US tax laws that all payments would be tax-free!)
I thought about it, I liked it, but I don't know whether the introduction of money in this way would lead to too many conflicts for it to be worthwhile...
Viruses mutate pretty readily. On paper your super-virus may conveniently die off when exposed to XYZ. And indeed in a small-scale test it may work. But in the real world somewhere things will slip up and you will get a mutated strain.
And lest you think that I am just a fear-monger, did you know that the majority of polio fatalities in the US today are caused by the live vaccine? The way that it works is that a child gets the shot, the virus mutates, and an adult in the same household who never had the disease (and possibly does not know it) gets the newly mutated virus.
OK, it is not common, but please think twice before turning this stuff loose on a large scale in real human populations...
Sorry that I cannot muster more enthusiasim. I am just getting over being one of those 40 million for this year and increasing the amount of influenza in the world does not seem like a priority to me right now...
2. Complete FORM-ET using Notepad or another ASCII text editor. Because E-mail filings are automatically processed, they must include specific ECFS Document Index Terms, and must be computer readable...
It seems that someone there understands why open standards matter! What a refreshing feeling after all of the requests to submit Word documents...
In Open Sources Brian made it very clear that the Apache group has been friendly to commercial interests from the beginning. In fact the project is under a BSD license and a significant portion of the key developers also own companies that sell products based on Apache. (Not that they planned things that way, but they wanted to leave the possibility open.) Therefore I have to think that when IBM came in and wanted to do the exact same thing, well they are bigger than the rest but far from the first in the Apache group with that strategy.
But in many other OSS groups I think that IBM would not have fit in nearly as well.
Another point that Brian makes which gets glossed over by some Rah, rah, OSS is great! types is that OSS works out differently in different types of areas. He made the point that open source works well for certain types of projects but not at all for others. He gave as an extreme example that it fails for software for doing surveys for finding oil.
I have seen points like this made in many ways by many people, but for me the first and best version was one that I saw made by an engineer here. The engineer compared software to engineering and pointed out that in engineering there is a spectrum in terms of secrecy. If you are engaged in designing roads, buildings, or other things that have to do with basic infrastructure, then your exact design will be open, publically reviewed, and verified by outside people. This is because people have learned (the hard way) that this is the only way to reliably get quality. At an opposite extreme the design of the latest consumer device is likely to have a design that is kept secret.
He then drew the same comparison to software, and pointed out that open source software first showed up where it made the most sense, in the infrastructure of the Internet. As it matures it has been developing into smaller and smaller niches. He saw this as a sign that software is maturing just like engineering did before. But, he maintained, there will always remain niches where open source simply does not make sense.
As I say, I have since seen the same point made many times (including in several essays in Open Sources), but the first time was the biggest eye-opener for me.
The first is that you say that peer review is no better than the peers. It is true that the effectiveness of peer review depends upon the abilities of the peers, but the net result can in fact be better than any one of the peers. (It can also be much worse - that strongly depends on the dynamics of the interaction.)
I believe that the place this has been most completely explored is in the study of financial markets. A good introductory book is, A Random Walk Down Wall Street. The long and the short of it is that the average consistently does better than the participants. Which is why very few managed funds manage to match, let alone exceed, the performance of dumb indexed ones. (The portion that do is explainable by dumb luck.) Of course this fact depends strongly on the nature of what a market is, but still
Eric Raymond's thesis that "All bugs are shallow" with OSS development is another example of the same phenomena. He has documented that it works in software development. But does it work in news? Well that is another question.
My belief is that with open discussion between relatively rational people, the initial response is meaningless but the follow up over the next several days can get into a positive feedback cycle resulting in a broad agreement on the events which are beyond the abilities of all but (possibly) a few participants. How? When it works right it is just like the OSS model! The fact is that what practically anyone notices gets communicated. Significant facts get reinforced. Insignificant facts get rebutted and disappear. Then "prominent people" come up with (and refine) statements distilling the best of the ideas. Those get communicated out, circulate, and a consensus is arrived at and generally communicated that is beyond the ability of any one person in the group to have generated.
Don't believe me? Well let me consider an important news event. Mindcraft. (Ick.) If you go back and look the initial response was disbelief, flames, the usual. However within a few days of the original tests there were official rebuttals to the tests floating around with detailed breakdowns of the things that were done wrong. Then as more tests were done, the same pattern was followed. Stop and think for a moment about everything you know about what was wrong with the final public Microsoft tests. OK, perhaps you personally could tell that the networks and servers were crazy for the need. Everybody knows that stability and uptime were ignored. But how many of us knew, or even had the resources to figure out, that Windows NT had changed their TCP-IP stack to be multi-threaded? Which of us could, as Jeremy Allison did, point out the tremendous difference for SAMBA between NT and Win9x clients? How many of us are in a position to do as ct did and run tests varying the parameters ever so slightly and really demonstrate that NT was only a clear win for serving static pages out of RAM. And so on and so forth.
In short many of us, myself certainly included, now know a summary analysis of what was wrong with the Mindcraft tests that is beyond the abilities of any individual to produce or easily verify. I call that pretty darned impressive.
Of course, that takes time and feedback, which the short life-time of posts on/. discourages. But still.
Oh, yeah. I promised two corrections. The other? A straight line from a to b is a path of minial distance from the one to the other, which by definition must be a geodesic. So non-Euclidean geometries don't change the fact that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, they merely change a lot of things that we thought we knew about straight lines.:-)
Certainly more than 10% of the code in at least some key utilities that a Linux pretty much requires is written by Americans. Start with gcc, grep and ls, and work from there. Almost certainly the rule does not care about what the programmer wants so there is not a good case for saying that the FSF code is free because they intended it that way. Even worse, the GPL works against you since it depends upon ownership having remained with the author.
My recommendation? Seek out a Linux distribution in another country that pays no attention to silly US laws and work out a deal where they buy Linux + support from there, and your product separately.
It is cheaper than it looks. You save several hundred/year on electricity, a similar amount on air-conditioning, your UPS is a bunch of batteries, and it has a great form factor.
I used to have a copy of the poster that they put out periodically with all of their books listed. They lay out all of the series sort of like a railway set-up (that is what the color refers to) with all of the animals.
Quite pretty...
Took it down because it was rather too effective at advertising to me...
The original post WAS moderated to -1. It now seems to be up to +2. Apparently moderators have been busily disagreeing with each other.:-)
The "down one" link at the top of the page is how I find posts that have been moderated away. Generally there is no point hitting it since most of the posts moderated down really did deserve it. Now what I would like is a way to know, before I click on a sub-discussion, what the moderators think of it. Something a little finer grained than, "Nobody nuked it yet!":-)
Regards, Ben
PS Is 4 the record? I haven't seen any higher than that, not that I have been looking.
Slashdot Mirror
The second law of thermodynamics is a statement about closed systems. Indeed if the Earth was a closed system (eg did not get light from the Sun) then evolution would have a problem. The problems would start with everything starving to death and wouldn't improve much from that.
But lo and behold! We do have a Sun, the Earth is NOT a closed system, and so the Creationist lines about the second law of thermodynamics are complete and utter BS.
Now please get a clue before spouting off again...
Ben
Double-check the references also.
I have seen a lot of creationist arguments. Not a single one held up for more than a short time against someone who knows evolution well. Many turn out to be simply wrong. (eg The Earth is an open system, exit balderdash about thermodynamics.) Others are bald-faced lies. (It is more amusing to track down quotes from those misquoted about how Creationists misquote scientists than it is to read the Creationist misquotes. Although reading the originals and comparing them with the misquotes is also fun.) Many sound reasonable until you actually know something. (eg How can you really know...scientists don't have any evidence. Um, really? But what about...)
In short, apply your brain and you may be a little less impressed with Creationist tracts.
Sincerely,
Ben Tilly
Please find me a knowledgable biologist who believes that the differences between races and species is not a difference of degree, and not of kind. That is, there is no difference between macro and micro evolution except in the minds of people who don't know better.
Oh, BTW, you may want to also glance at this...
Ben
Go read Eldridge and Gould (FYI the people whose paper started the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium) and read what they had to say about it.
The only people who think that it is NOT a form of Darwinian evolution are liars out to make it look like there is a debate within science about whether evolution is true (there is not), and those who have been fooled by the liars but who never bothered to go so far as to read the people whose positions were being caricatured by the liars.
*sigh*
Ben Tilly
It is easy to say that they should not be presented as fact when you do not know the mass of evidence.
Did you know that the process of evolution is itself observed, proven, fact? That is right folks, we have observed it happen in real life. For but one example the spread of the killer bees throughout South America, Central America, and now their continuing spread through North America is literally evolution in action!
As for the further evidence, well I don't want to write a book. Get yourself to a library and begin to look some of it up for yourself...
Sincerely,
Ben Tilly
Seriously, I see a lot of people who say, "We don't have much evidence" but I do not see that from people who are intellectually honest and have actually investigated the subject. A good starting place if you want to look online would be the FAQS for talk.origins.
Sincerely,
Ben Tilly
For every biased POS you can find a rebuttal.
Secondly re-read Behe, he agrees with the scientific orthodoxy on the last 200 million years of evolution, which is something that the average creationist does not want to remember.
Sincerely,
Ben Tilly
Need to re-read/A> it?
:-)
Cheers,
Ben
Since no version of NT 4.0 has ever managed to be C2 certified, are they allowed to describe a particular configuration as, "C2 certified"?
Ben
A major, constant, and heart-felt complaint about Microsoft is the way that they have constantly lowered the standards for what is acceptable quality at each level of release. Why should we let Microsoft rewrite the language? Their rewriting the rules already is what has led to final releases being incredibly instable, and we are in general just plain sick of it.
No, don't judge them by their language. Judge them by the same rules that you do everyone else. If they are delivering a product that will be competing in the server space, they should be hitting the same stability targets that everyone else does routinely. Particularly if the product is being marketed based on its stability!
Sincerely,
Ben Tilly
The machine apparently crashed because its security logs filled up. Can the same be done as a DoS attack on any NT box? What kinds of events fill up the log? How many events are required?
If somebody can fill in the details then it should be released as an official bug report. And it can then be as a vulnerability in existing versions of NT...
Cheers,
Ben Tilly
And it reminds me of an idea that I once had. It would be possible to have a foundation that is specifically designed to spread money through the OSS community. The way that it could work is that people make donations through the foundation to a specific person who writes OSS software. The foundation would then pay that person, say, 1/3 of that donation, and have the other 2/3 divided up between a number of people who contributed to the success of their project.
Those people would in turn get a portion, and pass the bulk on, and divide up the pie further. And so on until the total amount in question fell down to some limit, like $50. In this way the money gets divided between all of the contributers, even though the person making the donation probably does not know who any of them are. (Oh, and if this foundation is a registered charity, there is an extremely good chance under US tax laws that all payments would be tax-free!)
I thought about it, I liked it, but I don't know whether the introduction of money in this way would lead to too many conflicts for it to be worthwhile...
Regards,
Ben Tilly
Viruses mutate pretty readily. On paper your super-virus may conveniently die off when exposed to XYZ. And indeed in a small-scale test it may work. But in the real world somewhere things will slip up and you will get a mutated strain.
And lest you think that I am just a fear-monger, did you know that the majority of polio fatalities in the US today are caused by the live vaccine? The way that it works is that a child gets the shot, the virus mutates, and an adult in the same household who never had the disease (and possibly does not know it) gets the newly mutated virus.
OK, it is not common, but please think twice before turning this stuff loose on a large scale in real human populations...
Regards,
Ben Tilly
Sorry that I cannot muster more enthusiasim. I am just getting over being one of those 40 million for this year and increasing the amount of influenza in the world does not seem like a priority to me right now...
:-/
Ben
2. Complete FORM-ET using Notepad or another ASCII text editor. Because E-mail filings are automatically processed, they must include specific ECFS Document Index Terms, and must be computer readable...
:-)
It seems that someone there understands why open standards matter! What a refreshing feeling after all of the requests to submit Word documents...
That just made my day.
Cheers,
Ben
In Open Sources Brian made it very clear that the Apache group has been friendly to commercial interests from the beginning. In fact the project is under a BSD license and a significant portion of the key developers also own companies that sell products based on Apache. (Not that they planned things that way, but they wanted to leave the possibility open.) Therefore I have to think that when IBM came in and wanted to do the exact same thing, well they are bigger than the rest but far from the first in the Apache group with that strategy.
But in many other OSS groups I think that IBM would not have fit in nearly as well.
Another point that Brian makes which gets glossed over by some Rah, rah, OSS is great! types is that OSS works out differently in different types of areas. He made the point that open source works well for certain types of projects but not at all for others. He gave as an extreme example that it fails for software for doing surveys for finding oil.
I have seen points like this made in many ways by many people, but for me the first and best version was one that I saw made by an engineer here. The engineer compared software to engineering and pointed out that in engineering there is a spectrum in terms of secrecy. If you are engaged in designing roads, buildings, or other things that have to do with basic infrastructure, then your exact design will be open, publically reviewed, and verified by outside people. This is because people have learned (the hard way) that this is the only way to reliably get quality. At an opposite extreme the design of the latest consumer device is likely to have a design that is kept secret.
He then drew the same comparison to software, and pointed out that open source software first showed up where it made the most sense, in the infrastructure of the Internet. As it matures it has been developing into smaller and smaller niches. He saw this as a sign that software is maturing just like engineering did before. But, he maintained, there will always remain niches where open source simply does not make sense.
As I say, I have since seen the same point made many times (including in several essays in Open Sources), but the first time was the biggest eye-opener for me.
Regards,
Ben Tilly
The first is that you say that peer review is no better than the peers. It is true that the effectiveness of peer review depends upon the abilities of the peers, but the net result can in fact be better than any one of the peers. (It can also be much worse - that strongly depends on the dynamics of the interaction.)
/. discourages. But still.
:-)
I believe that the place this has been most completely explored is in the study of financial markets. A good introductory book is, A Random Walk Down Wall Street. The long and the short of it is that the average consistently does better than the participants. Which is why very few managed funds manage to match, let alone exceed, the performance of dumb indexed ones. (The portion that do is explainable by dumb luck.) Of course this fact depends strongly on the nature of what a market is, but still
Eric Raymond's thesis that "All bugs are shallow" with OSS development is another example of the same phenomena. He has documented that it works in software development. But does it work in news? Well that is another question.
My belief is that with open discussion between relatively rational people, the initial response is meaningless but the follow up over the next several days can get into a positive feedback cycle resulting in a broad agreement on the events which are beyond the abilities of all but (possibly) a few participants. How? When it works right it is just like the OSS model! The fact is that what practically anyone notices gets communicated. Significant facts get reinforced. Insignificant facts get rebutted and disappear. Then "prominent people" come up with (and refine) statements distilling the best of the ideas. Those get communicated out, circulate, and a consensus is arrived at and generally communicated that is beyond the ability of any one person in the group to have generated.
Don't believe me? Well let me consider an important news event. Mindcraft. (Ick.) If you go back and look the initial response was disbelief, flames, the usual. However within a few days of the original tests there were official rebuttals to the tests floating around with detailed breakdowns of the things that were done wrong. Then as more tests were done, the same pattern was followed. Stop and think for a moment about everything you know about what was wrong with the final public Microsoft tests. OK, perhaps you personally could tell that the networks and servers were crazy for the need. Everybody knows that stability and uptime were ignored. But how many of us knew, or even had the resources to figure out, that Windows NT had changed their TCP-IP stack to be multi-threaded? Which of us could, as Jeremy Allison did, point out the tremendous difference for SAMBA between NT and Win9x clients? How many of us are in a position to do as ct did and run tests varying the parameters ever so slightly and really demonstrate that NT was only a clear win for serving static pages out of RAM. And so on and so forth.
In short many of us, myself certainly included, now know a summary analysis of what was wrong with the Mindcraft tests that is beyond the abilities of any individual to produce or easily verify. I call that pretty darned impressive.
Of course, that takes time and feedback, which the short life-time of posts on
Oh, yeah. I promised two corrections. The other? A straight line from a to b is a path of minial distance from the one to the other, which by definition must be a geodesic. So non-Euclidean geometries don't change the fact that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, they merely change a lot of things that we thought we knew about straight lines.
Cheers,
Ben
Hard questions.
Certainly more than 10% of the code in at least some key utilities that a Linux pretty much requires is written by Americans. Start with gcc, grep and ls, and work from there. Almost certainly the rule does not care about what the programmer wants so there is not a good case for saying that the FSF code is free because they intended it that way. Even worse, the GPL works against you since it depends upon ownership having remained with the author.
My recommendation? Seek out a Linux distribution in another country that pays no attention to silly US laws and work out a deal where they buy Linux + support from there, and your product separately.
Regards,
Ben Tilly
It is cheaper than it looks. You save several hundred/year on electricity, a similar amount on air-conditioning, your UPS is a bunch of batteries, and it has a great form factor.
But it isn't a slam-dunk.
Cheers,
Ben Tilly
You can set your laptop to go into suspend mode. So you stop what you are doing, suspend, and later turn it on right back to where you were...
Cheers,
Ben Tilly
Allow people to sort either way.
That way the lucky moderators can make it easy to see what is to be moderated.
And I personally like "saving the best for last"...
Cheers,
Ben Tilly
I used to have a copy of the poster that they put out periodically with all of their books listed. They lay out all of the series sort of like a railway set-up (that is what the color refers to) with all of the animals.
Quite pretty...
Took it down because it was rather too effective at advertising to me...
Ben Tilly
Looks on this page like it is just stuff that should be moderated. In other words it looks to this user like it is working as designed.
:-)
Anyone who wants to see your first post articles can choose to see them by default. Anyone who doesn't, doesn't have to.
Me, I don't trust the moderation...
Ben
The original post WAS moderated to -1. It now seems to be up to +2. Apparently moderators have been busily disagreeing with each other. :-)
:-)
The "down one" link at the top of the page is how I find posts that have been moderated away. Generally there is no point hitting it since most of the posts moderated down really did deserve it. Now what I would like is a way to know, before I click on a sub-discussion, what the moderators think of it. Something a little finer grained than, "Nobody nuked it yet!"
Regards,
Ben
PS Is 4 the record? I haven't seen any higher than that, not that I have been looking.
You wanted a *programmable* editor?
:-)
Ben