I dislike Katz's ramblings as much as anyone, and wish he would go away, but I don't think voting is the way to do it.
Wonderful - so the majority of people who care think Jon should stay, but because you ****ing elitist morons think he should go, you are going try try to annoy him and Rob so badly he leaves anyway. Great.
Do you have any idea what an arsehole this makes you look ?
I can and have refuted him, and those reposting permutations of his argument. Earth is an open system, and therefore not subject to the second law in itself. The universe is probably a closed system - therefore evolution has a limited lifespam. There is nothing dogmatic about this - its just the law as it is usually understood.
In addition to claim that life is constantly improving, I ask you where the object of your faith lies. I have yet to see clinical or reasonable evidence proving otherwise.
No modern scientist believes that evolution is progress. It is only change and adaptation.
I am glad to see you have faith in your God. I have faith in mine too, but I do not have faith in evolution. It is not an object of faith, it is a theory. Why you need to doubt it when it contradicts scripture, when scripture is quite capable of contradicting itself, I have no idea.
You will believe whatever your bias allows you to believe. Your Objectivity is subject to your bias.
Of course it is, as is yours, so get down off your high horse. However, I take exception to your first statement, as I imagine does the first poster. It is the duty of every man who endeavours to follow the scientific method to lean over backwards to disprove what he would prefer to believe. I have personally trawled through the tripe creationists try to pass off as scientific literature, looking for even an ounce of merit, and have gone to the lengths of doing considerable research on particular points.
This is precisely what scientists find so objectionable about "creation science". You have already decided what is true. It is a matter of faith. You then go out looking for scientific foundations, and of course you find some, or rather you succeed in finding plausible reasons to cast doubt on the theory of evolution.
Macro Evolution or increased complexity of a species, is one of those "Concepts" that have yet to be proved and has NOT been observed.
What is an increse in complexity then ? I can demonstrate non-organic 'increase in complexity' to you till I am blue in the face. For example - if you take a mixture of suitable simple gases and pass huge currents through them you get a small number of organic molecules. The sequence of events required to produce one molecule is tremendously improbable, but given enough energy time and matter it will happen.
If this is possible outside of an organism, what makes it so hard inside of one ? I could argue that in having this argument I am increasing in complexity by refining my arguments.
What is 'macro evolution' then ? Anything that happened long enough ago you can raise doubts as to the evidence ?
Evolution, as currently conceived, requires 2 steps, mutation and selection. The current examples involving bacteria, fruit flies, etc, involve both. The pepper moth example *may* involve only selection, but the accounts I have heard cast doubt on your claims here.
Bzzt. Wrong. The moths spend much of their time on birch trees. The original population *benefitted* from being light, and was therefore very likely almost entirely light. The post-industrialisation population benefitted from being darker in colour. The change required is small, and the population *may* have has a darker minority, which is why it happened so fast.
"To create any kind of upward, complex organization in a closed system requires outside energy and outside information. Evolutionists maintain that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics does not prevent Evolution on Earth, since this planet receives outside energy from the Sun. Thus, they suggest that the Sun's energy helped create the life of our beautiful planet. However, is the simple addition of energy all that is needed to accomplish this great feat?
If this is the best 'proof' of your misinterpretation of the seconf law you can supply , I suggest you examine it carefully. It is not kind of proof at all. The author describes the 'claims' of 'evolutionists' (I love these rhetorical terms) concerning life on 'this beautiful planet'. He does not contradict them, he asks a question which is deliberately design to mislead, whether the addition of energy is *all* that is required to create life on a planet. The answer is 'no', but the author intends you to infer 'evolutionists' believe that shining a table lamp on a rock will bring ti to life.
Of course noone beleives energy is all that is needed for life. You need a lot of chemical goop as well, and a few million years. The chemical reactions required to start the process have already been conducted in the laboratory. So assuming the 'suchlike' in your rhetorical question can include these - the answer is 'yes'.
If anyone knows a thing about the 2nd law of thermodynamics they wouldn't believe in evolution.
Oh god I love this one. The second law applies to *closed* systems. The Earth is not a closed system, it gets heat from the the Sun. It is this that allows order to increase. I recommend you read a book on physics before presuming to understand it.
Any careful study of evolution THEORY...
Yes evolution is a theory. Nothing *scientific* can ever be anything else. Belief in creation relies on faith. The desperate attempts to cast doubt on the theories which do not match the creation story given in the bible show nothing but insecurity. If you have faith, just get on with it.
shows the inaccuracies, the falsifications, that are believed even after disproved. It has been the single largest source of fraud in the scientific community.
If you can 'disprove' the theory of evolution, I would be amazed. The dearth of contrary evidence is staggering, as the bullsh*t that fills the creationist pamphlets you get your best ideas from demonstrates.
Going back slightly towards the topic, an AI would know exactly how it came into the world. Evolution would therefore be a rather less pressing subject for it. Would you accept it as impartial enough to adjudicate this, or would you ignore it as well ?
If the improvement of Linux is its death it is dead already. We have to set our sights a little higher than replicating commercial Unix functionality. Take those config files - now text config files have many plus points, but their adhoc (and often bizarre) formats do not. Config file parsing takes valuable programmer time and effort, and it is very hard to, for instance, create usable GUIs for 1000 different config file formats.
Slashdot Mirror
I dislike Katz's ramblings as much as anyone, and wish he would go away, but I don't think voting is the way to do it.
Wonderful - so the majority of people who care think Jon should stay, but because you ****ing elitist morons think he should go, you are going try try to annoy him and Rob so badly he leaves anyway. Great.
Do you have any idea what an arsehole this makes you look ?
I can and have refuted him, and those reposting permutations of his argument. Earth is an open system, and therefore not subject to the second law in itself. The universe is probably a closed system - therefore evolution has a limited lifespam. There is nothing dogmatic about this - its just the law as it is usually understood.
In addition to claim that life is constantly improving, I ask you where the object of your faith lies. I have yet to see clinical or reasonable evidence proving otherwise.
No modern scientist believes that evolution is progress. It is only change and adaptation.
I am glad to see you have faith in your God. I have faith in mine too, but I do not have faith in evolution. It is not an object of faith, it is a theory. Why you need to doubt it when it contradicts scripture, when scripture is quite capable of contradicting itself, I have no idea.
You will believe whatever your bias allows you to believe. Your Objectivity is subject to your bias.
Of course it is, as is yours, so get down off your high horse. However, I take exception to your first statement, as I imagine does the first poster. It is the duty of every man who endeavours to follow the scientific method to lean over backwards to disprove what he would prefer to believe. I have personally trawled through the tripe creationists try to pass off as scientific literature, looking for even an ounce of merit, and have gone to the lengths of doing considerable research on particular points.
This is precisely what scientists find so objectionable about "creation science". You have already decided what is true. It is a matter of faith. You then go out looking for scientific foundations, and of course you find some, or rather you succeed in finding plausible reasons to cast doubt on the theory of evolution.
Macro Evolution or increased complexity of a species, is one of those "Concepts" that have yet to be proved and has NOT been observed.
What is an increse in complexity then ? I can demonstrate non-organic 'increase in complexity' to you till I am blue in the face. For example - if you take a mixture of suitable simple gases and pass huge currents through them you get a small number of organic molecules. The sequence of events required to produce one molecule is tremendously improbable, but given enough energy time and matter it will happen.
If this is possible outside of an organism, what makes it so hard inside of one ? I could argue that in having this argument I am increasing in complexity by refining my arguments.
What is 'macro evolution' then ? Anything that happened long enough ago you can raise doubts as to the evidence ?
Evolution, as currently conceived, requires 2 steps, mutation and selection. The current examples involving bacteria, fruit flies, etc, involve both. The pepper moth example *may* involve only selection, but the accounts I have heard cast doubt on your claims here.
Bzzt. Wrong. The moths spend much of their time on birch trees. The original population *benefitted* from being light, and was therefore very likely almost entirely light. The post-industrialisation population benefitted from being darker in colour. The change required is small, and the population *may* have has a darker minority, which is why it happened so fast.
"To create any kind of upward, complex organization in a closed system requires outside energy and outside information. Evolutionists maintain that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics does not prevent Evolution on Earth, since this planet receives outside energy from the Sun. Thus, they suggest that the Sun's energy helped create the life of our beautiful planet. However, is the simple addition of energy all that is needed to accomplish this great feat?
If this is the best 'proof' of your misinterpretation of the seconf law you can supply , I suggest you examine it carefully. It is not kind of proof at all. The author describes the 'claims' of 'evolutionists' (I love these rhetorical terms) concerning life on 'this beautiful planet'. He does not contradict them, he asks a question which is deliberately design to mislead, whether the addition of energy is *all* that is required to create life on a planet. The answer is 'no', but the author intends you to infer 'evolutionists' believe that shining a table lamp on a rock will bring ti to life.
Of course noone beleives energy is all that is needed for life. You need a lot of chemical goop as well, and a few million years. The chemical reactions required to start the process have already been conducted in the laboratory. So assuming the 'suchlike' in your rhetorical question can include these - the answer is 'yes'.
If anyone knows a thing about the 2nd law of thermodynamics they wouldn't believe in evolution.
Oh god I love this one. The second law applies to *closed* systems. The Earth is not a closed system, it gets heat from the the Sun. It is this that allows order to increase. I recommend you read a book on physics before presuming to understand it.
Any careful study of evolution THEORY ...
Yes evolution is a theory. Nothing *scientific* can ever be anything else. Belief in creation relies on faith. The desperate attempts to cast doubt on the theories which do not match the creation story given in the bible show nothing but insecurity. If you have faith, just get on with it.
shows the inaccuracies, the falsifications, that are believed even after disproved. It has been the single largest source of fraud in the scientific community.
If you can 'disprove' the theory of evolution, I would be amazed. The dearth of contrary evidence is staggering, as the bullsh*t that fills the creationist pamphlets you get your best ideas from demonstrates.
Going back slightly towards the topic, an AI would know exactly how it came into the world. Evolution would therefore be a rather less pressing subject for it. Would you accept it as impartial enough to adjudicate this, or would you ignore it as well ?
Regrettably, many of the things some Linux users are convinced are garbage, have their benefits.
COM, for instance, is lighter than any existing stable CORBA implementation at the expense of a little language dependency.
Config files in standard formats, are another bugbear.
If the improvement of Linux is its death it is dead already. We have to set our sights a little higher than replicating commercial Unix functionality. Take those config files - now text config files have many plus points, but their adhoc (and often bizarre) formats do not. Config file parsing takes valuable programmer time and effort, and it is very hard to, for instance, create usable GUIs for 1000 different config file formats.