If copyright ends, there goes the enforceability of GNU GPL too (among other licenses). The copyright system is the framework in which it lives. If there's no copyright system, for example the Linux kernel would become another cadaver for corporations to scavenge upon, taking advantage of something they had no part in creating in the first place.
So no, it is not a good thing if copyright ends.
Also, I don't see the reason why people download movies anyway, as most movies are crap and it's just a waste of time to watch them. There's actually very few good ones (i.e. worth paying for) that you can pay for them - you don't need to warez them. If you want to see the movie with less financial risk than buying, just rent it from the local rental store, the risk is few bucks.
I'd rather see positive changes within the copyright system. For instance the "copyright exists after N years after author's death" is really unreasonable. There's more such points of course, but abolishing the system altogether would do much more harm than good.
I (so far) have not seen any reason to suppose that the difference between 'thought' and 'computing' is any different.
Why should it be, if you're talking just about the mechanism of "thought" (instead of self-awareness and consciousness)? You have sense inputs which you tie in to events (other sense inputs or inputs created internally) in a causal fashion (A follows B). Then you work your way around the environment by using these patterns to "predict" things (e.g. if you always get an electric shock after seeing a cat, and sometime don't get it, your mind might make one such event up since the event had to be there and it was expected). You learn by reinforcing certain links. You remember by travelling these paths. You forget, or rather un-remember, when certain links are too weak to follow properly. And so on... (to simplify things greatly)
To describe the "mind" which is borne - which emerges out of this massive graph of things - to describe the inner workings of such a mind with mathematical rigor, that might be impossible; first of all we do not know the entire state of the system, i.e. we can't copy the mind of you to a computer and then examine or predict the properties of that mind-copy, it will not be the same as your mind, since your mind was already altered by experiences after the copying.
Certain techniques from Buddhist and Indian philosophy allow probing into the mind, to examine it as a "third party", and those are (I think) the best tools we have at the moment for observing the movements of mind. With those techniques one can learn things about the mind through first-hand experience and observation, and generalize certain things to a larger group of people by discussing and analyzing ones findings in a scientific manner (even though the experiences are subjective, objectively looking at these things will bear fruit... think of self-administered psychoanalysis which just goes many levels deeper). There's material about these techniques dating many hundreds of years to the past. Patanjali's sutras is one such place, there are others as well which describe the mind, other texts which tell you how to examine it through meditation, and so on. You will have to examine quite a lot of those texts come up with an image that cuts through the "ceremonial ornaments" of words.
Now, to create such an artificial mind surely is not impossible: it's a mechanism and when we know the basic laws of the mechanism we can simulate it at some level, even though we might not be able to say how it works on a higher level (i.e. what is consciousness). To say how consciousness appears and what it is, how it works and so on, requires research we are not currently doing much. I seem to remember that Dalai Lama has expressed his wishes that Western and Eastern efforts would be combined to better understand the mind. It's an effort which I very much agree with.
You don't need an MRI machine at home to start your exploration about what "it" is, just patience.
PS. Sorry for typos, it was a brain-dumpish post this time.
And yes, the crux of the issue is about freedom and control about your own tools, and about not having to live at the whims of another entity, no matter how trusted the entity at the moment is.
$3-$4 billion is not really that much money. The data retention of data communications within EU will likely cost way more per year, altogether, even though the proponents say it won't. Or, to put it the other way, 4 billion dollars is about a month of the Iraq war. If I had the option of where to spend such money, I'd rather take the Galileo system.
Really, do you think the American public would be okay with not even trying to stop russia from putting nukes in cuba? Nukes aimed at us?
No, I do not think the American public would be okay with that. And no, I also do not think the government and people of Soviet Union were okay with the missiles in Turkey.
Once more, I reiterate the point: USA put nuclear weapons into Turkey first and had them aimed at the Soviet Union. Why do you think the Soviet Union should have accepted US nuclear missiles next to them, aimed at them?
Like you said: "no sane person purposely lets a potential enemy gain such a close striking position". The Soviet Union did to USA exactly what USA did to them, i.e. they positioned some nuclear missiles near the US border. The result was the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I would say that the correct action in this case would have been to exercise some common sense and NOT to position the nuclear weapons into Turkey in the first place. Eisenhower was very correct in noting that the step would be considered as "provocative".
and the Soviet sphere didn't gain a permanent nuclear strike base just off our coast
Let us discuss the Cuban Missile Crisis. The REAL reason why the Soviets went ahead to put nuclear missiles into Cuba was that the Soviet Union was merely returning a favor.
You see, the USA had already planted nuclear missiles into Turkey. Did you know that? And the location of Turkey happens to be just outside the Russian border.
So the Soviet Union was merely extending the courtesy of hauling nuclear missiles next to the other guy's border, and then having had a taste of their own medicine, USA freaked out. When the missile crisis ended, USA agreed to pull out their missiles in Turkey (a little bit delayed though, so that it wouldn't seem that it was the real reason).
The key to international security is really just common sense and respect from all parties. Hauling up nukes to someones backyard and expecting them to accept it is not common sense. Crying wolf when they do the same to you is also not common sense (since you sort of asked for it)?
I heard Pimsler language courses are pretty good to get you up to speed with the basics, and a "look and feel" of the language.
Learning a new language is a good thing. For example, talking of experience: English is not my native language, but it was really good thing to learn it, since now I can find perhaps a hundred times more books in English than in my native language... Broadens the horizons, so to speak.
I agree with you that it was not an article with high quality interviews of people with differing opinions. From your reply I got the feeling that you were somehow pro-space weapon, and I wanted to know the reasons.
Facts of some people are just opinions for some people, no matter what the other side slams to the table. Check e.g. the debate (can it be called that?) on global warming.
Objectivity is a point of view. For some the article was a fact, for some it was propaganda. And now some quick questions, if you don't mind...
You seem to accept space-based weapons of USA? Why?
Do you also accept nuclear weapons for North Korea? Why?
Would you accept North Korea's space-based weapons? Why?
I would guess you will answer "yes", "no" and "no" for the questions. I personally would answer "no", "no", "no". I'd like to hear the reasons for your answer, should it be the way I think it will be.
What technology exists currently to provide the highest speed and radius with power levels attainable to a normal household (i.e. without special permits)?
Something with 100 Mbps and 6-10 km radius without having LOS would be a dream. One could build a cellular network out of such gadgets, to create free and libré networking for urban areas.
Think: what if every television set would have a transceiver inside it, and those transceivers formed an ad-hoc network and...
I read through the first 10 words of your post before getting bored. Do you ever tell us what you wanted to say or ask?:)
Yes, the chess guy does say how good it ended up, in a way. He talks about it holding up to a three year old, but I guess that's just a small joke. I bet with some really beginner types (like myself) the system would actually win games.
What I found really interesting is the sort of "subconscious" which was built in through the adding of randomness. You get all these ideas and reject the bad ones. The process happens all the time. It sounds like something called "creativity".
I'm not saying we take steps to cool down the Earth with outlandish technology like shadowing the Earth from the Sun. I'm saying we REDUCE, as much as possible, the amount of waste we dump into nature. Bring it closer to the balance which existed before the industrial revolution.
Save energy, make less waste, and so on. That's acting too!
Next you ask: why, what's the point? One answer is that eventually you eat part of the emissions in some form or another.
The emissions made by man up till now far, far outweigh any volcanic eruptions.
Improving human life and reducing pollution are not mutually exclusive! You can change your bulb lamps to be halogen or LED lamps (cut down energy usage, you still have just as much light), you can change your SUV to a more economical car (you have less emissions, you save gasoline, and you still get from place A to place B), you can make sure your windows won't leak heat out if you live in a colder climate, you can use technology to clean up waste water and the "smoke" from chimneys before it's dumped to nature, and so forth and so on.
There's costs with this, of course, but you can think of them as investment. E.g. when your light bulbs die out, you need replacements anyway. Investing in an energy-friendly replacement saves energy and thus money for you in the long run.
Humans didn't have massive waste emissions in the past. Now we do. The climate of Earth is changing, that's a fact. We have pretty good ideas about the reasons, although they are not agreed to by all. Even without a root cause or a party to blame, it's only logical to try to reduce the waste emissions, if for nothing else than to have clean nature around you. All that trash which is dumped just "somewhere" eventually ends up in your food and water.
USA has the biggest military strength there is. Nobody can really outstrength them. Also, nobody is really threatening them. There is no more Cold War where the Evil Communists could launch a planet-killing nuke attack any second (be afraid). Instead, there is the terrorism bogeyman (be afraid), and terrorists hardly have military strength to dread.
You might notice from your argument that it is money which allows people to experiment freely. In very few parts of the research world, there is enough money to experiment with things without the short-term make-money-fast profit motive, the motive which ultimately hinders progress and innovation in all areas and takes it to wrong directions.
An example: something you can make 10 Billion dollars 20 years from now might not be worth 50 thousand dollars right now. But something where you rake in 1 Million dollars now might be worth exactly 2 dollars, 20 years from now.
Innovation and progress comes when you want to serve a definite need, you explore to learn and to know, and you don't do it to make a product you can sell for big bucks. The big bucks motive works for some cases, but it will not make the real revolutionary ideas happen (as those often have none or very little immediate profit).
Do you really think we can release carbon dioxide and other trash into the atmosphere forever, without it having any impact, ever?
If there is even the slightest chance that the Earth might be changing its climate due to man's actions, we should act NOW. The risks of not doing anything are far, far higher than the costs of acting.
If we don't believe global warming is happening, what can we lose by not doing anything? And vice versa, what can we lose by considering it real and doing something?
For the first question, we can lose the planet. For the second question, we can lose money and and some time.
I'd go for saving the planet. But it appears some people think that saving money and some time spent to work with the problem is better than having large parts of the planet become impossible to live in...
I propose a simple test for you. Give your heart and mind to Jesus and you will feel his presence as he guides your life. He is always with you, whether you deny his existence or not, and he will always love you and guide you, no matter how you try to deny him or test his existence.
Why?
I mean it, please answer that question first. Surely there must be a reason why you advice me to do that kind of thing.
You seem to imply that I would get "good things" (love and guidance) out of it. Isn't it impure to devote yourself to something spiritual only in the hope of some kind of rewards?
BTW, the evolution of behavior is NOT the same as evolution and transformation of one species into another.
Clearly not, but the same evolutionary mechanism is at work. Fruit flies are simple beings. They are not intelligent enough to build schools and teach their offspring on how to behave in a certain way. Thus their behavior has to mirror their physical abilities.
There is some variance on the physical capabilities of an individual fly. If you kill off those which are slowest (due to some reason), you end up with those which are fast. And they are likely to get more and more faster, if you always kill off the slower ones. The "fastness" as a quality comes from many things, perhaps the wing structure. Eventually the whole population would have the gene(s) which makes e.g. the wing structure suitable for very fast flight. And then this "evolution of behavior" is in fact evolution of the entire species, with a millionth of a baby-step.
As for observing the evolution into another species, unfortunately the human lifespan is a maximum of about 126 years or so, which is too little a time to spot any such evolutionary changes, i.e. to see one species starting to transform into another species, no matter how hard you look. There just isn't enough time.
You have to rely on something which lasts longer than human lifetime, i.e. recorded history. And things like fossils.
Evolution into another species is not a discrete jump, as in "today a monkey, tomorrow a human". It's a gradual, very, very, very slow process of transformation. Think of a plant growing. If you keep on staring at a young palm, you would say "it's not growing, it is as it is". But in reality it's growing all the time. If you were to compare the palm now and 30 years from now, you would clearly see the difference. Yet at first you would say that nothing is changing.
PS. If I were to devote myself fully to something, it would be the ideas expressed by a man, but not the man itself.
Evolution is with us also, even if you choose not to accept it.
I propose a simple test for you. (Once I managed to do something like this by accident) Grab a bunch of bananas, make dessert or something from the fruit and leave the peels to rot in a biowaste container. Wait for some time. Fruit flies will appear.
As they are swarming, you can easily kill off the slowest ones and those which just sit still. Do so. What you are left are the fastest ones who move in very random trajectories. Since those are not so easy to kill, leave them be.
After a little while, those fruit flies will breed. Soon you will have more fruit flies. Again, kill off the slowest ones, those which are easiest to kill.
Now, repeat this procedure a couple of times.
And guess what? Those fast-flying randomly flying ones which are hard to kill will become a majority.
If this is not evolution, what is?
Everyone is entitled to their beliefs, but matters of belief are not matters of science. If someone needs Creationism as "evidence" to justify a Divine Creator to themselves, maybe they have not found their Divine Creator after all.
I see your logic, but riddle me this: since a poll is anonymous, a certain answer will not be traced to a single participator, so where does the prestige in answering wrong come from? Nobody knows the exact answer of someone else, so what is the incentive in answering wrong?
What was the percentage of entries who had the OS information in place at all? In other words, how many entries had no OS information?
For example, I would imagine that some of the more security-conscious people (in Linux, Windows, MacOS, anything) make the operating system disappear from their UA string. Some just have it turned off by default. Why show off more information than you need to?
Also, some people read Slashdot from work, when they have some idle time, whereas at home their time might be very limited due to e.g. children, pets, hobbies, etc. And in a work setting you are much more likely to have to use Windows than MacOS or Linux.
And no, I personally don't care what operating system people reading Slashdot use. But I fail to see the correctness of the way that the whole thing was measured. You see, those numbers could also be explained as "Linux/MacOS users are less eager to follow links from Slashdot" (remember the UA was captured for those links referred from Slashdot). It gives some direction about browser/OS demographics, I agree, but I personally would not trust such a method of finding information, regardless of the outcome.
And to reiterate: I'm not disputing the numbers. I'm disputing what and how it was measured.
I suggest making a poll and asking people a simple, direct question. I think there's much much less margin of error in that case.
I was pointing out the fact that you cannot trust those numbers, whether they say Windows 0% or Windows 100%, or Linux 100% or Linux 0%.
The UA header is the only source of information that's available, and since it can be anything (given by the client, most clients have it configurable), it's untrustworthy. It will give some direction at best, but trusting it is pretty futile.
I use Konqueror under Linux myself, it's set to lie about it being MSIE for certain sites before the sites can fix themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
If copyright ends, there goes the enforceability of GNU GPL too (among other licenses). The copyright system is the framework in which it lives. If there's no copyright system, for example the Linux kernel would become another cadaver for corporations to scavenge upon, taking advantage of something they had no part in creating in the first place.
So no, it is not a good thing if copyright ends.
Also, I don't see the reason why people download movies anyway, as most movies are crap and it's just a waste of time to watch them. There's actually very few good ones (i.e. worth paying for) that you can pay for them - you don't need to warez them. If you want to see the movie with less financial risk than buying, just rent it from the local rental store, the risk is few bucks.
I'd rather see positive changes within the copyright system. For instance the "copyright exists after N years after author's death" is really unreasonable. There's more such points of course, but abolishing the system altogether would do much more harm than good.
I (so far) have not seen any reason to suppose that the difference between 'thought' and 'computing' is any different.
Why should it be, if you're talking just about the mechanism of "thought" (instead of self-awareness and consciousness)? You have sense inputs which you tie in to events (other sense inputs or inputs created internally) in a causal fashion (A follows B). Then you work your way around the environment by using these patterns to "predict" things (e.g. if you always get an electric shock after seeing a cat, and sometime don't get it, your mind might make one such event up since the event had to be there and it was expected). You learn by reinforcing certain links. You remember by travelling these paths. You forget, or rather un-remember, when certain links are too weak to follow properly. And so on... (to simplify things greatly)
To describe the "mind" which is borne - which emerges out of this massive graph of things - to describe the inner workings of such a mind with mathematical rigor, that might be impossible; first of all we do not know the entire state of the system, i.e. we can't copy the mind of you to a computer and then examine or predict the properties of that mind-copy, it will not be the same as your mind, since your mind was already altered by experiences after the copying.
Certain techniques from Buddhist and Indian philosophy allow probing into the mind, to examine it as a "third party", and those are (I think) the best tools we have at the moment for observing the movements of mind. With those techniques one can learn things about the mind through first-hand experience and observation, and generalize certain things to a larger group of people by discussing and analyzing ones findings in a scientific manner (even though the experiences are subjective, objectively looking at these things will bear fruit... think of self-administered psychoanalysis which just goes many levels deeper). There's material about these techniques dating many hundreds of years to the past. Patanjali's sutras is one such place, there are others as well which describe the mind, other texts which tell you how to examine it through meditation, and so on. You will have to examine quite a lot of those texts come up with an image that cuts through the "ceremonial ornaments" of words.
Now, to create such an artificial mind surely is not impossible: it's a mechanism and when we know the basic laws of the mechanism we can simulate it at some level, even though we might not be able to say how it works on a higher level (i.e. what is consciousness). To say how consciousness appears and what it is, how it works and so on, requires research we are not currently doing much. I seem to remember that Dalai Lama has expressed his wishes that Western and Eastern efforts would be combined to better understand the mind. It's an effort which I very much agree with.
You don't need an MRI machine at home to start your exploration about what "it" is, just patience.
PS. Sorry for typos, it was a brain-dumpish post this time.
That's because blogging is too democratic: many eyeballs can see the message written by anyone.
As such, it's uncontrollable, unlike traditional print media where certain articles can be delayed or cancelled altogether to keep them out of sight.
Therefore blogging has to be contained and controlled.
Control makes it possible to silence any dissenting voices or unwanted discussion.
The first steps toward that control have been taken.
Yes, Galileo is expensive. As for using the money on AIDS: WASHINGTON (AP) -- In an unusually candid admission, the federal chief of AIDS research says he believes drug companies don't have an incentive to create a vaccine for the HIV and are likely to wait to profit from it after the government develops one. I think you can draw your own conclusions.
And yes, the crux of the issue is about freedom and control about your own tools, and about not having to live at the whims of another entity, no matter how trusted the entity at the moment is.
$3-$4 billion is not really that much money. The data retention of data communications within EU will likely cost way more per year, altogether, even though the proponents say it won't. Or, to put it the other way, 4 billion dollars is about a month of the Iraq war. If I had the option of where to spend such money, I'd rather take the Galileo system.
Why don't you get him to release the study somewhere?
If it's too warm, the corals will die.
Go out and check out some reefs by yourself, while you still can. They're beautiful.
Really, do you think the American public would be okay with not even trying to stop russia from putting nukes in cuba? Nukes aimed at us?
No, I do not think the American public would be okay with that. And no, I also do not think the government and people of Soviet Union were okay with the missiles in Turkey.
Once more, I reiterate the point: USA put nuclear weapons into Turkey first and had them aimed at the Soviet Union. Why do you think the Soviet Union should have accepted US nuclear missiles next to them, aimed at them?
Like you said: "no sane person purposely lets a potential enemy gain such a close striking position". The Soviet Union did to USA exactly what USA did to them, i.e. they positioned some nuclear missiles near the US border. The result was the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I would say that the correct action in this case would have been to exercise some common sense and NOT to position the nuclear weapons into Turkey in the first place. Eisenhower was very correct in noting that the step would be considered as "provocative".
and the Soviet sphere didn't gain a permanent nuclear strike base just off our coast
Let us discuss the Cuban Missile Crisis. The REAL reason why the Soviets went ahead to put nuclear missiles into Cuba was that the Soviet Union was merely returning a favor.
You see, the USA had already planted nuclear missiles into Turkey. Did you know that? And the location of Turkey happens to be just outside the Russian border.
So the Soviet Union was merely extending the courtesy of hauling nuclear missiles next to the other guy's border, and then having had a taste of their own medicine, USA freaked out. When the missile crisis ended, USA agreed to pull out their missiles in Turkey (a little bit delayed though, so that it wouldn't seem that it was the real reason).
The key to international security is really just common sense and respect from all parties. Hauling up nukes to someones backyard and expecting them to accept it is not common sense. Crying wolf when they do the same to you is also not common sense (since you sort of asked for it)?
For more information, have a read.
I heard Pimsler language courses are pretty good to get you up to speed with the basics, and a "look and feel" of the language.
Learning a new language is a good thing. For example, talking of experience: English is not my native language, but it was really good thing to learn it, since now I can find perhaps a hundred times more books in English than in my native language... Broadens the horizons, so to speak.
I agree with you that it was not an article with high quality interviews of people with differing opinions. From your reply I got the feeling that you were somehow pro-space weapon, and I wanted to know the reasons.
Facts of some people are just opinions for some people, no matter what the other side slams to the table. Check e.g. the debate (can it be called that?) on global warming.
Objectivity is a point of view. For some the article was a fact, for some it was propaganda. And now some quick questions, if you don't mind...
You seem to accept space-based weapons of USA? Why?
Do you also accept nuclear weapons for North Korea? Why?
Would you accept North Korea's space-based weapons? Why?
I would guess you will answer "yes", "no" and "no" for the questions. I personally would answer "no", "no", "no". I'd like to hear the reasons for your answer, should it be the way I think it will be.
Their Javascript is broken, at least so says Konqueror.
Error:
http://www.start.com/extern/wsfw/compat/0.072605.
SyntaxError: Parse error at line 85
Error:
http://www.start.com/extern/wsfw/core/0.072605.1/
TypeError: Value undefined (result of expression window.attachEvent) is not an object. Cannot be called.
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Undefined value
Something with 100 Mbps and 6-10 km radius without having LOS would be a dream. One could build a cellular network out of such gadgets, to create free and libré networking for urban areas.
Think: what if every television set would have a transceiver inside it, and those transceivers formed an ad-hoc network and...
I read through the first 10 words of your post before getting bored. Do you ever tell us what you wanted to say or ask? :)
Yes, the chess guy does say how good it ended up, in a way. He talks about it holding up to a three year old, but I guess that's just a small joke. I bet with some really beginner types (like myself) the system would actually win games.
What I found really interesting is the sort of "subconscious" which was built in through the adding of randomness. You get all these ideas and reject the bad ones. The process happens all the time. It sounds like something called "creativity".
I'm not saying we take steps to cool down the Earth with outlandish technology like shadowing the Earth from the Sun. I'm saying we REDUCE, as much as possible, the amount of waste we dump into nature. Bring it closer to the balance which existed before the industrial revolution.
Save energy, make less waste, and so on. That's acting too!
Next you ask: why, what's the point? One answer is that eventually you eat part of the emissions in some form or another.
The emissions made by man up till now far, far outweigh any volcanic eruptions.
Improving human life and reducing pollution are not mutually exclusive! You can change your bulb lamps to be halogen or LED lamps (cut down energy usage, you still have just as much light), you can change your SUV to a more economical car (you have less emissions, you save gasoline, and you still get from place A to place B), you can make sure your windows won't leak heat out if you live in a colder climate, you can use technology to clean up waste water and the "smoke" from chimneys before it's dumped to nature, and so forth and so on.
There's costs with this, of course, but you can think of them as investment. E.g. when your light bulbs die out, you need replacements anyway. Investing in an energy-friendly replacement saves energy and thus money for you in the long run.
Humans didn't have massive waste emissions in the past. Now we do. The climate of Earth is changing, that's a fact. We have pretty good ideas about the reasons, although they are not agreed to by all. Even without a root cause or a party to blame, it's only logical to try to reduce the waste emissions, if for nothing else than to have clean nature around you. All that trash which is dumped just "somewhere" eventually ends up in your food and water.
I wonder where the ring line points to, when viewed from the side? I.e. which stars lie along the line (if the line were to be continued as it is)?
Entertain me, astronomy people :)
USA has the biggest military strength there is. Nobody can really outstrength them. Also, nobody is really threatening them. There is no more Cold War where the Evil Communists could launch a planet-killing nuke attack any second (be afraid). Instead, there is the terrorism bogeyman (be afraid), and terrorists hardly have military strength to dread.
You might notice from your argument that it is money which allows people to experiment freely. In very few parts of the research world, there is enough money to experiment with things without the short-term make-money-fast profit motive, the motive which ultimately hinders progress and innovation in all areas and takes it to wrong directions.
An example: something you can make 10 Billion dollars 20 years from now might not be worth 50 thousand dollars right now. But something where you rake in 1 Million dollars now might be worth exactly 2 dollars, 20 years from now.
Innovation and progress comes when you want to serve a definite need, you explore to learn and to know, and you don't do it to make a product you can sell for big bucks. The big bucks motive works for some cases, but it will not make the real revolutionary ideas happen (as those often have none or very little immediate profit).
Do you really think we can release carbon dioxide and other trash into the atmosphere forever, without it having any impact, ever?
If there is even the slightest chance that the Earth might be changing its climate due to man's actions, we should act NOW. The risks of not doing anything are far, far higher than the costs of acting.
If we don't believe global warming is happening, what can we lose by not doing anything? And vice versa, what can we lose by considering it real and doing something?
For the first question, we can lose the planet. For the second question, we can lose money and and some time.
I'd go for saving the planet. But it appears some people think that saving money and some time spent to work with the problem is better than having large parts of the planet become impossible to live in...
I propose a simple test for you. Give your heart and mind to Jesus and you will feel his presence as he guides your life. He is always with you, whether you deny his existence or not, and he will always love you and guide you, no matter how you try to deny him or test his existence.
Why?
I mean it, please answer that question first. Surely there must be a reason why you advice me to do that kind of thing.
You seem to imply that I would get "good things" (love and guidance) out of it. Isn't it impure to devote yourself to something spiritual only in the hope of some kind of rewards?
BTW, the evolution of behavior is NOT the same as evolution and transformation of one species into another.
Clearly not, but the same evolutionary mechanism is at work. Fruit flies are simple beings. They are not intelligent enough to build schools and teach their offspring on how to behave in a certain way. Thus their behavior has to mirror their physical abilities.
There is some variance on the physical capabilities of an individual fly. If you kill off those which are slowest (due to some reason), you end up with those which are fast. And they are likely to get more and more faster, if you always kill off the slower ones. The "fastness" as a quality comes from many things, perhaps the wing structure. Eventually the whole population would have the gene(s) which makes e.g. the wing structure suitable for very fast flight. And then this "evolution of behavior" is in fact evolution of the entire species, with a millionth of a baby-step.
As for observing the evolution into another species, unfortunately the human lifespan is a maximum of about 126 years or so, which is too little a time to spot any such evolutionary changes, i.e. to see one species starting to transform into another species, no matter how hard you look. There just isn't enough time.
You have to rely on something which lasts longer than human lifetime, i.e. recorded history. And things like fossils.
Evolution into another species is not a discrete jump, as in "today a monkey, tomorrow a human". It's a gradual, very, very, very slow process of transformation. Think of a plant growing. If you keep on staring at a young palm, you would say "it's not growing, it is as it is". But in reality it's growing all the time. If you were to compare the palm now and 30 years from now, you would clearly see the difference. Yet at first you would say that nothing is changing.
PS. If I were to devote myself fully to something, it would be the ideas expressed by a man, but not the man itself.
Evolution is with us also, even if you choose not to accept it.
I propose a simple test for you. (Once I managed to do something like this by accident) Grab a bunch of bananas, make dessert or something from the fruit and leave the peels to rot in a biowaste container. Wait for some time. Fruit flies will appear.
As they are swarming, you can easily kill off the slowest ones and those which just sit still. Do so. What you are left are the fastest ones who move in very random trajectories. Since those are not so easy to kill, leave them be.
After a little while, those fruit flies will breed. Soon you will have more fruit flies. Again, kill off the slowest ones, those which are easiest to kill.
Now, repeat this procedure a couple of times.
And guess what? Those fast-flying randomly flying ones which are hard to kill will become a majority.
If this is not evolution, what is?
Everyone is entitled to their beliefs, but matters of belief are not matters of science. If someone needs Creationism as "evidence" to justify a Divine Creator to themselves, maybe they have not found their Divine Creator after all.
I see your logic, but riddle me this: since a poll is anonymous, a certain answer will not be traced to a single participator, so where does the prestige in answering wrong come from? Nobody knows the exact answer of someone else, so what is the incentive in answering wrong?
What was the percentage of entries who had the OS information in place at all? In other words, how many entries had no OS information?
For example, I would imagine that some of the more security-conscious people (in Linux, Windows, MacOS, anything) make the operating system disappear from their UA string. Some just have it turned off by default. Why show off more information than you need to?
Also, some people read Slashdot from work, when they have some idle time, whereas at home their time might be very limited due to e.g. children, pets, hobbies, etc. And in a work setting you are much more likely to have to use Windows than MacOS or Linux.
And no, I personally don't care what operating system people reading Slashdot use. But I fail to see the correctness of the way that the whole thing was measured. You see, those numbers could also be explained as "Linux/MacOS users are less eager to follow links from Slashdot" (remember the UA was captured for those links referred from Slashdot). It gives some direction about browser/OS demographics, I agree, but I personally would not trust such a method of finding information, regardless of the outcome.
And to reiterate: I'm not disputing the numbers. I'm disputing what and how it was measured.
I suggest making a poll and asking people a simple, direct question. I think there's much much less margin of error in that case.
I was pointing out the fact that you cannot trust those numbers, whether they say Windows 0% or Windows 100%, or Linux 100% or Linux 0%.
The UA header is the only source of information that's available, and since it can be anything (given by the client, most clients have it configurable), it's untrustworthy. It will give some direction at best, but trusting it is pretty futile.
I use Konqueror under Linux myself, it's set to lie about it being MSIE for certain sites before the sites can fix themselves.