I would say rather that you don't *want* your religion to be falsified. In science, if you have your theory falsified, then that's a cause for celebration. (Or at least it's supposed to be.) It means you learned something. But religion (whether theistic or atheistic, or somewhere in between) is the very foundation of our lives, the foundation of our worldview. Falsifiying a religion is a cause for despair. Falsifying a religion, for the devout, would be something like falsifying the theory "my wife is not cheating on me".
If I were making a religion, I'd try to make it as unfalsifible *as possible*, with "as possible" meaning that it's still a satisfying worldview.
Amen! I'm not much of a comic book geek (they being too expensive for too little material, IMO, I'd rather get a paperback scifi novel), but of the lineup on Justice League Unlimited, Green Latern is my fave - because it's his *job* to be a superhero - he's a member of an intergalactic police force. If he screws up, he'll get arrested. Which happened in one episode. If Superman screws up, who can arrest him? Batman is an outright criminal.
I understand why the fictional US government is so nervous about the Justice League. Remember, they've wargammed scenarios where the US military goes up against the Justice League - and the US military gets its butt kicked every time. The US (at least in our universe) spends almost as much on military as the rest of the world does combined.
No matter what you think about the current leaders of the US, they *were* elected - Superman wasn't.
Am I the only one who wonders why the Batmobile never gets stuck in traffic? Fat lot of good a jet turbine engine is going to do you in real-world Gotham during rush hour!
It's called the tragedy of the commons. If everybody is responsible for something, nobody is. The purpose of government is pretty much to take care of the commons so we don't have to. Actually, the government exists to tax, but that's why we let it tax us.
Truth is, individual end users don't have the resources to buy the coding time they would need to fix what they want fixed. OSS happens because there are some coders who have an itch they want to scratch, either just for fun or because they have a problem that they can afford the time to take care of, but can't afford to get someone else to do it. That and corporations who can afford to hire programers to solve their programs for them.
If individual end users want some OSS done, they either have to wait for somebody else to do it, or they have to pool their resources together. And there isn't really a good way to do that yet. Unless I'm missing something?
If I understand this "prime mover" idea, you're saying that every event has a cause, and that only God could have started the ball rolling by causing the first event.
If time is infinite, then there is no need for a first event. The Big Bang is not the beginning of the universe or the beginning of time. It is simply where our current theories come to a halt. The Big Bang theory was developed by tracing the trend of the expanding universe backwards through time. If one assumes that there were no changes in this trend, then we arrive at time in the finite past where every thing in the universe was at a single point. This point had infinite density and temperature.
Our current physical theories aren't capable of coping with infinite densities and temperatures. They produce a divide-by-zero error, a singularity. The Big Bang isn't the beginning of the universe, but rather the end of our theories.
There is one theory that the Big Bang was caused by our universe colliding with our universe. There was never a singularity, a point of infinite density and temperature. Instead, our two universes crumpled and only intersected at certain locations. At those intersections, the vacuum energies of the two universes combined, producing areas of very high, but not infinite, density and temperature.
The theory also states that this collision might not have been the first one. Or the last one.
Whether or not this theory is true doesn't matter. It is enough to know that it shows that time isn't neccessarily finite. If time stretches back infinitely into the past, there is no need for a first event.
Likewise, time might be finite but boundless, looped in on itself. The last effect becomes the first cause.
Lastly, if every event requires a cause, and God caused the first event, what caused God?
I don't think any assumption can be proven by reason alone, but only with evidence. We can't disprove the existence of God, but we haven't been able to prove His existence either. It is most difficult to prove a negative. But that's where Occam's Razor comes in. All things being equal, God is not the simplest explanation for the world we see around us. According to Occam's Razor, we should not assume that God exists, at least until more evidence comes in.
It's possible that R2's jets just got damaged somewhere in the 18+ years between Eps III and IV. Rebellions aren't noted for having large repair budgets, and I somehow suspect R2 might have had his warranty voided somewhere along the line...
I don't remember if C3PO knew everything. I'm just guessing.
Padme did look pregnant, but I don't think it was part of a deception. IANAD, but I think it takes a little while for a woman to go back to normal after giving birth. I also haven't had personal experience on the matter either, so I'm just guessing here.
I did find myself wondering why OWK didn't just kill DV on the lava slope. Not because DV is a Bad Guy, but because OWK's former friend and comrade is lying there, still alive, on fire, short all four limbs. Why not just walk down 10 feet, shove your lightsaber into his brainpan and wiggle it around a little? He'd probably thank you. I could see OWK bugging out because some burning debris was falling down or something, but no. OWK just leaves his evil former friend still alive, burning to death.
The scenes on the Wookie planet were to establish Yoda being offplanet and give fans the chance to see Chewie. They did go on a little long just for that though.
The romantic scenes were kind of weak.
The reason C3PO's memory was wiped is because he knew the identity of Luke & Leia, and where they were headed. The question is why R2D2's memory wasn't also wiped. Maybe because he can't actually talk, and is pretty dependable?
General Greivous's part is covered in the Clone Wars cartoons. He's a tie-in character, kind of like The Kid from the Matrix sequals. The Clone Wars go up to about three minutes before Ep III begins. The reason Grevious is wheezing at the beginning of the movie is because Mace Windu used force powers to crush Grevious's chest as Grevious and Palpatine were taking off from Corusant. Grevious kicks ass at lightsabers, but is vulnerable to force powers. Something you think the Jedi would have figured out a while back...
Even with the Clone Wars, Anakin's fall to the Dark Side is too abrupt. The Clone Wars should have covered more of Anakin's relationship with Palpatine. But then parts of Ep III would be missing.
Maybe what should have been done was to make Attack of the Clones Ep I, and cover the events of Phantom Menace in flashbacks. No annoying kid, no JarJar, you can present Anakin as a strong character with a darkside. It would also make Anakin and Padme's romance more believable, since Padme wouldn't remember him as "Lil' Anny". Make Clone Wars Ep II, with greater coverage of Anakin's relationship with Palpatine, setting up a set of dual loyalties. Then lead into Ep III.
YY doesn't produce viable offspring. There is a heck of a lot of genes on the X chromosome, which are rather needed. XXY does produce viable offspring - the result is a male who is generally infertile and, IIRC, has severe mood disorders. I think XXYY is also viable, but is very rare and also produces a fairly infertile and generally screwed up human being.
The lack of recombination or replacement of genes on the X chromosome for males is already happening. If anything, it helps out on one bit where asexual reproduction is better than sexual reproduction - in sexual reproduction, you tend to accumulate nonlethal but harmful mutations. (Or so the popsci mags tell me.)
Because Y-chromosome carrying sperm are lighter than X-chromosome ones, more boys are concieved than girls. But because flaws on the X chromosome (as well as on the Y chromosome) aren't masked in males, boys have a much higher rate of miscarriage than girls. So by the time the babies are actually born, the ratio is almost back to 50/50.
Human males are the beta testers for the X chromosome.
I think it's more likely that male humans will survive, just the Y chromosome will go extinct. (Although you mention a gene on the X chromosome, this is the first I've heard of it.) Muller's ratchet predicts that the Y chromosome will loose functionality, because there isn't a second Y chromosome for it to swap genes with.
When you have two copies of the same chromosome, the two chromosomes can swap genes, replacing genes that have been damaged. The Y chromosome has several palindromes (sections of DNA that are spelled the same forwards as backwards) - it's been swapping genes with itself. Despite this, the Y chromosome will probably still loose functionality over the millenia.
I think that eventually humans will go to a XX XO method of determining sex - if you get one copy of the X chromosome, you're a guy, if you have two, you're a girl.
Who says God is super-natural? If He exists, He is part of nature, and (in theory) could be studied by science - provided that He was kind enough to actually leave evidence behind.
God might be a force outside of our universe, but so is that one M-brane theory (our universe colliding with another univerese caused the Big Bang).
The Genesis account could be considered as a hypothesis, but it doesn't match up with the evidence as well as orthodox theory. So it has to be rejected.
The old definition *was* flawed because it didn't mention testing hypotheses. But the new one isn't exactly an improvement.
Heh. I just remember a story about people in pre-WWII Germany using 100-Deutsh Mark bills for wallpaper because they were really big. Inflation was so bad that they were cheaper than wallpaper.
Yep, Americans seem to be more traditional than Europeans. Maybe because our history is shorter, we value it more? Or because we didn't have to bootstrap ourselves out of feudalism into democracy? Feudalism didn't make the trip across the Pond, democracy developed by default. The American Revolution was just a war of independence, we didn't have to overthrow our gentry. We never had to make a break with the past. Things have changed since the days of the Founding Fathers, but it's been an evolution, not a revolution, with the possible exception of the Civil War. We've never had to learn to make a radical change in how we do things, only gradual changes.
We do have a style, but it's subdued. Missionary, not baroque. That monopoly money is too flashy, too much like a fad. Who wants their money to be a fad? Grandpa's money was good enough for him, and it's good enough for me! You can have my pennies when you pry them from my cold dead hand!
The Sacajawea actually seems to be having some success, IMO. The main reason is that vending machines are handing them out, but aren't handing out dollar bills. They also take them. Eventually, they might hit a saturation point, and people might start using them like dollar bills. It'll take a while though.
But I think the real reason that the Sacajawea is having more success than previous dollar coins is that they're gold. They're getting around American conservatism by appealing to an even older tradition. Our "racial memory" still remembers gold coins, and the Sacajawea appeals to that memory.
Give us a break, we're still working on the freakin' metric system. It's essentially a bootstrap problem. Nobody is using the coins because nobody is really setup to take them, nobody takes them because nobody uses them.
Of course places *have* to take them, them being legal tender and all, but it's a pain in the ass because the cashier isn't going to be used to dealing with dollar coins, so they're going to be slow. Do the cash registers even have a dollar coin bin? Older vending machines won't take them, so you have to have bills around anyway. Newer vending machines do take them, but they also still take bills.
When there are enough new vending machines handing out dollar coins that everybody has them rattling around in their pockets, and the old vending machines have been taken out of the market, then dollar coins will be used. Until then, it's too much of a hastle.
Things that are traditional don't make sense - until you realize that they are that way *because* they are traditional.
Oh - and bills are cheaper to make. But coins are sturdier and stay in circulation longer, so they're cheaper in the long run.
That's the ten million dollar for biologists these days. Nobody really knows. RNA world, aka, the "naked gene" idea is one idea. It is also thought that something resembling a primative cell membrane can develop out of abiotic chemical processes, just like strands of RNA can.
According to the RNA world idea, early Earth had these strands of RNA floating around that served as self-replicating genes/proteins. But the environment is very hostile to such critters. So they take up squatting in these proto-cell membranes for shelter. Over time, they developed the ability to do some housekeeping, do repairs on the proto-membrane and generally modify it to their own needs. Eventually the naked genes became "owners" instead of "renters".
There's some problems with this idea - the big one being that if there isn't anyway of getting nutrients in and waste out of the proto-cell membrane, these proto-cells would be deadly traps, not shelters. Getting food in and crap out of a membrane is still a big gap to cross, unless the problem can be broken down further. But at least we're better of than "toss a bunch of amino acids into a box, and shake it until a cell comes out".
In short, they're working on it. Intelligent design is a possibility, but it isn't the simplest one, so it gets sliced out by Occam's Razor, unless Occam gets trumped by fresh evidence. The Intelligent Design idea doesn't explain where this designer came from, so it isn't any simpler, it just push the problem further back. The hypothesis doesn't make any predictions that the naturalistic hypothesis doesn't, so, in general, it isn't falsifiable. Maybe specific variants of the intelligent design theory can make falsifiable predictions, but the general theory doesn't. Any the promoters of ID are very careful not to make falsifiable predictions...
Think about it this way - one scenario of intelligent design is that the designer was a time travelling human. We know that humans, who are capable of intelligent design, exist. We can't exactly say the same about God. We aren't very far away from being able to create very primitive life, and from there, evolution would do the rest. The only thing we are missing is time travel, but that could change next week.
Which would you prefer to assume: that life was created by a time travelling human, or that "naked genes" managed to eventually figure out the care and feeding of cell membranes, even if we don't know how they did it quite yet?
Intelligent design is a possibility, but it isn't the simplest one. Until we find evidence suggesting intelligent design - like finding a 2016 US quarter buried in 4 billion year old rock - it best to assume some naturalistic scenario took place, even if we don't know what that scenario is just yet.
At least with OSS, piracy is done by corps who can be profitably sued without destroying them. The plantif can get back their legal fees, plus a bit for their trouble, teach the criminal a lesson, but still leave them standing. With music piracy, the plantif has to go after 14 year olds, and each lawsuit costs them money. They can't afford to go after each one, so they have to bankrupt each offender who "wins" the legal lottery in order to make an example. The music companies have the *right* to do so, but it costs them a lot in PR.
That and the corp OSS pirates are actually making money with their crimes, music pirates aren't. Ain't right either way, but still.
I would like to see proprietary software developers having to register their source code with the Library of Congress in order to get full copyright protection. That should make finding pirated code a bit easier. I would also like to see copyright protection for software limited to ten years, or perhaps fifteen to allow for the development time. While we're at it, bring copyright terms for everything else down to 40 years.
If the copyright terms were brought down to 40 years, some of the Beatles catalog would be entering the public domain right about now. The rights to about half the catalog is owned by Michael Jackson and the proceeds are funding his legal defense...
Seems to me that the tagging just gives the ISP's VoIP traffic higher QoS. It does slightly lower third-party VoIP's (and all other internet traffic's) QoS a bit, but that should be minimal. A bit of shadenfreud for the Telcom/ISPs, but minimal shadenfreud. It can't hurt third party VoIP too much, because it will hurt other forms of internet traffic too. Surely someone would notice? On the other hand, what other apps besides VoIP need such high QoS? Most other apps can deal with best-effort, VoIP needs to be real-time. What other apps need real-time?
If the reason there isn't is enough demand is that everyone already has everything we can consume or use, then that would be a post-scarcity utopia. But this scenario has already happened many times (the last being the dotcom bust), and it has never happened for that reason yet.
What happened in the dotcom boom and bust (and the boom of the 1920s and the Great Depression, for that matter) is that business were expanding, causing them to invest in goods and services, causing the business that made those goods and services to expand, causing... another kind of postive feedback loop.
What happened was that the market got oversaturated. You had business starting up that had no realistic business plan, but were still attracting investment.
As long as there were investors willing to invest in such schemes, the process could continue. But one day, a few investors woke up, and stopped investing in some of the more outlandish outfits. Which caused those stocks to slump.
Which caused other investors to re-evaluate their strategy, which caused other stocks to slump, which caused those business to stop expanding or to collapse entirely, which caused the business who were providing goods and services to those expanding business to build up inventory, causing them to layoff workers, who cut their own spending, causing... the dotcom bust.
Ideas are infinite, but good ones are scarce. So are the brains that produce them. Anybody can fart on a snare drum, but not many people can write a great song. And great songs are worth something. If you aren't one of those few creative people that can churn on good ideas, or if you aren't one of the people who can act as middle men and leech off those who are creative, then a post-industrial economy is pretty grim. Sure, everything is cheap, but that doesn't matter to you, because you *still* can't afford it.
True enough. But it does present a problem - will a darwinian produced design still work if you changes the conditions it's operating under? There is a danger that the design will over-optimize, become "inbred", and will simply not function under the changed conditions.
Hell with capitalists - too much supply and not enough demand makes *me* nervous! When you have excess supply, and not enough demand, you get a depression. Businesses have too much inventory, so they layoff employees who are no longer needed to make more stuff. The employees stop buying stuff, so even less demand, causing more inventory build up, causing more unemployment, causing... a positive feedback loop.
In the long run, it all works out. The economy restabilizes and we find new toys to make with the excess manufacturing capabilites. But, like the man said, in the long run, we're all dead.
Even if we had infinite manufacturing capabilities, we would still leave in a scarcity economy - because ideas of what to make are scarce.
We're already headed that way without replicators. Manufacturing is getting more and more efficent (or being outsourced to regions with cheaper labor). The only jobs left behind are ones that require the human touch. Figuring out what to make. Figuring out how to sell it. And, of course, "Want fries with that?"
Replicators will just speed up the process a tick.
Didn't somebody disprove the grey goo problem, even for nanoassemblers? Something about the scarcity of energy and rare needed materials? Plus there's the bit about it having to compete with all the existing organic replicators.
We use all of our brain, just not at the same time usually (that would probably cause a seizure). The "we only use 10% of our brain" meme got started because, at the time, we only knew what 10% of it did. Brains are energy-hungry organs, and evolution would pretty quickly take care of any bit we don't use.
I remember another story about darwinian-produced circuits. Seems somebody was selecting for a circuit that produced a sine wave. They got one. Then they took it to a different lab or something and it stopped working. Turns out it was using a radio wave to make the sine wave.
First thing about darwinian produced artifacts - the buggers cheat!
Slashdot Mirror
>>Religion is by definition not falsifiable.
I would say rather that you don't *want* your religion to be falsified. In science, if you have your theory falsified, then that's a cause for celebration. (Or at least it's supposed to be.) It means you learned something. But religion (whether theistic or atheistic, or somewhere in between) is the very foundation of our lives, the foundation of our worldview. Falsifiying a religion is a cause for despair. Falsifying a religion, for the devout, would be something like falsifying the theory "my wife is not cheating on me".
If I were making a religion, I'd try to make it as unfalsifible *as possible*, with "as possible" meaning that it's still a satisfying worldview.
Amen! I'm not much of a comic book geek (they being too expensive for too little material, IMO, I'd rather get a paperback scifi novel), but of the lineup on Justice League Unlimited, Green Latern is my fave - because it's his *job* to be a superhero - he's a member of an intergalactic police force. If he screws up, he'll get arrested. Which happened in one episode. If Superman screws up, who can arrest him? Batman is an outright criminal.
I understand why the fictional US government is so nervous about the Justice League. Remember, they've wargammed scenarios where the US military goes up against the Justice League - and the US military gets its butt kicked every time. The US (at least in our universe) spends almost as much on military as the rest of the world does combined.
No matter what you think about the current leaders of the US, they *were* elected - Superman wasn't.
Am I the only one who wonders why the Batmobile never gets stuck in traffic? Fat lot of good a jet turbine engine is going to do you in real-world Gotham during rush hour!
It's called the tragedy of the commons. If everybody is responsible for something, nobody is. The purpose of government is pretty much to take care of the commons so we don't have to. Actually, the government exists to tax, but that's why we let it tax us.
Truth is, individual end users don't have the resources to buy the coding time they would need to fix what they want fixed. OSS happens because there are some coders who have an itch they want to scratch, either just for fun or because they have a problem that they can afford the time to take care of, but can't afford to get someone else to do it. That and corporations who can afford to hire programers to solve their programs for them.
If individual end users want some OSS done, they either have to wait for somebody else to do it, or they have to pool their resources together. And there isn't really a good way to do that yet. Unless I'm missing something?
If I understand this "prime mover" idea, you're saying that every event has a cause, and that only God could have started the ball rolling by causing the first event.
If time is infinite, then there is no need for a first event. The Big Bang is not the beginning of the universe or the beginning of time. It is simply where our current theories come to a halt. The Big Bang theory was developed by tracing the trend of the expanding universe backwards through time. If one assumes that there were no changes in this trend, then we arrive at time in the finite past where every thing in the universe was at a single point. This point had infinite density and temperature.
Our current physical theories aren't capable of coping with infinite densities and temperatures. They produce a divide-by-zero error, a singularity. The Big Bang isn't the beginning of the universe, but rather the end of our theories.
There is one theory that the Big Bang was caused by our universe colliding with our universe. There was never a singularity, a point of infinite density and temperature. Instead, our two universes crumpled and only intersected at certain locations. At those intersections, the vacuum energies of the two universes combined, producing areas of very high, but not infinite, density and temperature.
The theory also states that this collision might not have been the first one. Or the last one.
Whether or not this theory is true doesn't matter. It is enough to know that it shows that time isn't neccessarily finite. If time stretches back infinitely into the past, there is no need for a first event.
Likewise, time might be finite but boundless, looped in on itself. The last effect becomes the first cause.
Lastly, if every event requires a cause, and God caused the first event, what caused God?
I don't think any assumption can be proven by reason alone, but only with evidence. We can't disprove the existence of God, but we haven't been able to prove His existence either. It is most difficult to prove a negative. But that's where Occam's Razor comes in. All things being equal, God is not the simplest explanation for the world we see around us. According to Occam's Razor, we should not assume that God exists, at least until more evidence comes in.
It's possible that R2's jets just got damaged somewhere in the 18+ years between Eps III and IV. Rebellions aren't noted for having large repair budgets, and I somehow suspect R2 might have had his warranty voided somewhere along the line...
I don't remember if C3PO knew everything. I'm just guessing.
Padme did look pregnant, but I don't think it was part of a deception. IANAD, but I think it takes a little while for a woman to go back to normal after giving birth. I also haven't had personal experience on the matter either, so I'm just guessing here.
I did find myself wondering why OWK didn't just kill DV on the lava slope. Not because DV is a Bad Guy, but because OWK's former friend and comrade is lying there, still alive, on fire, short all four limbs. Why not just walk down 10 feet, shove your lightsaber into his brainpan and wiggle it around a little? He'd probably thank you. I could see OWK bugging out because some burning debris was falling down or something, but no. OWK just leaves his evil former friend still alive, burning to death.
The scenes on the Wookie planet were to establish Yoda being offplanet and give fans the chance to see Chewie. They did go on a little long just for that though.
The romantic scenes were kind of weak.
The reason C3PO's memory was wiped is because he knew the identity of Luke & Leia, and where they were headed. The question is why R2D2's memory wasn't also wiped. Maybe because he can't actually talk, and is pretty dependable?
General Greivous's part is covered in the Clone Wars cartoons. He's a tie-in character, kind of like The Kid from the Matrix sequals. The Clone Wars go up to about three minutes before Ep III begins. The reason Grevious is wheezing at the beginning of the movie is because Mace Windu used force powers to crush Grevious's chest as Grevious and Palpatine were taking off from Corusant. Grevious kicks ass at lightsabers, but is vulnerable to force powers. Something you think the Jedi would have figured out a while back...
Even with the Clone Wars, Anakin's fall to the Dark Side is too abrupt. The Clone Wars should have covered more of Anakin's relationship with Palpatine. But then parts of Ep III would be missing.
Maybe what should have been done was to make Attack of the Clones Ep I, and cover the events of Phantom Menace in flashbacks. No annoying kid, no JarJar, you can present Anakin as a strong character with a darkside. It would also make Anakin and Padme's romance more believable, since Padme wouldn't remember him as "Lil' Anny". Make Clone Wars Ep II, with greater coverage of Anakin's relationship with Palpatine, setting up a set of dual loyalties. Then lead into Ep III.
YY doesn't produce viable offspring. There is a heck of a lot of genes on the X chromosome, which are rather needed. XXY does produce viable offspring - the result is a male who is generally infertile and, IIRC, has severe mood disorders. I think XXYY is also viable, but is very rare and also produces a fairly infertile and generally screwed up human being.
The lack of recombination or replacement of genes on the X chromosome for males is already happening. If anything, it helps out on one bit where asexual reproduction is better than sexual reproduction - in sexual reproduction, you tend to accumulate nonlethal but harmful mutations. (Or so the popsci mags tell me.)
Because Y-chromosome carrying sperm are lighter than X-chromosome ones, more boys are concieved than girls. But because flaws on the X chromosome (as well as on the Y chromosome) aren't masked in males, boys have a much higher rate of miscarriage than girls. So by the time the babies are actually born, the ratio is almost back to 50/50.
Human males are the beta testers for the X chromosome.
I think it's more likely that male humans will survive, just the Y chromosome will go extinct. (Although you mention a gene on the X chromosome, this is the first I've heard of it.) Muller's ratchet predicts that the Y chromosome will loose functionality, because there isn't a second Y chromosome for it to swap genes with.
When you have two copies of the same chromosome, the two chromosomes can swap genes, replacing genes that have been damaged. The Y chromosome has several palindromes (sections of DNA that are spelled the same forwards as backwards) - it's been swapping genes with itself. Despite this, the Y chromosome will probably still loose functionality over the millenia.
I think that eventually humans will go to a XX XO method of determining sex - if you get one copy of the X chromosome, you're a guy, if you have two, you're a girl.
Who says God is super-natural? If He exists, He is part of nature, and (in theory) could be studied by science - provided that He was kind enough to actually leave evidence behind.
God might be a force outside of our universe, but so is that one M-brane theory (our universe colliding with another univerese caused the Big Bang).
The Genesis account could be considered as a hypothesis, but it doesn't match up with the evidence as well as orthodox theory. So it has to be rejected.
The old definition *was* flawed because it didn't mention testing hypotheses. But the new one isn't exactly an improvement.
Heh. I just remember a story about people in pre-WWII Germany using 100-Deutsh Mark bills for wallpaper because they were really big. Inflation was so bad that they were cheaper than wallpaper.
Yep, Americans seem to be more traditional than Europeans. Maybe because our history is shorter, we value it more? Or because we didn't have to bootstrap ourselves out of feudalism into democracy? Feudalism didn't make the trip across the Pond, democracy developed by default. The American Revolution was just a war of independence, we didn't have to overthrow our gentry. We never had to make a break with the past. Things have changed since the days of the Founding Fathers, but it's been an evolution, not a revolution, with the possible exception of the Civil War. We've never had to learn to make a radical change in how we do things, only gradual changes.
We do have a style, but it's subdued. Missionary, not baroque. That monopoly money is too flashy, too much like a fad. Who wants their money to be a fad? Grandpa's money was good enough for him, and it's good enough for me! You can have my pennies when you pry them from my cold dead hand!
The Sacajawea actually seems to be having some success, IMO. The main reason is that vending machines are handing them out, but aren't handing out dollar bills. They also take them. Eventually, they might hit a saturation point, and people might start using them like dollar bills. It'll take a while though.
But I think the real reason that the Sacajawea is having more success than previous dollar coins is that they're gold. They're getting around American conservatism by appealing to an even older tradition. Our "racial memory" still remembers gold coins, and the Sacajawea appeals to that memory.
Except for the problem of incriminating coupons in your pocket...
Give us a break, we're still working on the freakin' metric system. It's essentially a bootstrap problem. Nobody is using the coins because nobody is really setup to take them, nobody takes them because nobody uses them.
Of course places *have* to take them, them being legal tender and all, but it's a pain in the ass because the cashier isn't going to be used to dealing with dollar coins, so they're going to be slow. Do the cash registers even have a dollar coin bin? Older vending machines won't take them, so you have to have bills around anyway. Newer vending machines do take them, but they also still take bills.
When there are enough new vending machines handing out dollar coins that everybody has them rattling around in their pockets, and the old vending machines have been taken out of the market, then dollar coins will be used. Until then, it's too much of a hastle.
Things that are traditional don't make sense - until you realize that they are that way *because* they are traditional.
Oh - and bills are cheaper to make. But coins are sturdier and stay in circulation longer, so they're cheaper in the long run.
That's the ten million dollar for biologists these days. Nobody really knows. RNA world, aka, the "naked gene" idea is one idea. It is also thought that something resembling a primative cell membrane can develop out of abiotic chemical processes, just like strands of RNA can.
According to the RNA world idea, early Earth had these strands of RNA floating around that served as self-replicating genes/proteins. But the environment is very hostile to such critters. So they take up squatting in these proto-cell membranes for shelter. Over time, they developed the ability to do some housekeeping, do repairs on the proto-membrane and generally modify it to their own needs. Eventually the naked genes became "owners" instead of "renters".
There's some problems with this idea - the big one being that if there isn't anyway of getting nutrients in and waste out of the proto-cell membrane, these proto-cells would be deadly traps, not shelters. Getting food in and crap out of a membrane is still a big gap to cross, unless the problem can be broken down further. But at least we're better of than "toss a bunch of amino acids into a box, and shake it until a cell comes out".
In short, they're working on it. Intelligent design is a possibility, but it isn't the simplest one, so it gets sliced out by Occam's Razor, unless Occam gets trumped by fresh evidence. The Intelligent Design idea doesn't explain where this designer came from, so it isn't any simpler, it just push the problem further back. The hypothesis doesn't make any predictions that the naturalistic hypothesis doesn't, so, in general, it isn't falsifiable. Maybe specific variants of the intelligent design theory can make falsifiable predictions, but the general theory doesn't. Any the promoters of ID are very careful not to make falsifiable predictions...
Think about it this way - one scenario of intelligent design is that the designer was a time travelling human. We know that humans, who are capable of intelligent design, exist. We can't exactly say the same about God. We aren't very far away from being able to create very primitive life, and from there, evolution would do the rest. The only thing we are missing is time travel, but that could change next week.
Which would you prefer to assume: that life was created by a time travelling human, or that "naked genes" managed to eventually figure out the care and feeding of cell membranes, even if we don't know how they did it quite yet?
Intelligent design is a possibility, but it isn't the simplest one. Until we find evidence suggesting intelligent design - like finding a 2016 US quarter buried in 4 billion year old rock - it best to assume some naturalistic scenario took place, even if we don't know what that scenario is just yet.
At least with OSS, piracy is done by corps who can be profitably sued without destroying them. The plantif can get back their legal fees, plus a bit for their trouble, teach the criminal a lesson, but still leave them standing. With music piracy, the plantif has to go after 14 year olds, and each lawsuit costs them money. They can't afford to go after each one, so they have to bankrupt each offender who "wins" the legal lottery in order to make an example. The music companies have the *right* to do so, but it costs them a lot in PR.
That and the corp OSS pirates are actually making money with their crimes, music pirates aren't. Ain't right either way, but still.
I would like to see proprietary software developers having to register their source code with the Library of Congress in order to get full copyright protection. That should make finding pirated code a bit easier. I would also like to see copyright protection for software limited to ten years, or perhaps fifteen to allow for the development time. While we're at it, bring copyright terms for everything else down to 40 years.
If the copyright terms were brought down to 40 years, some of the Beatles catalog would be entering the public domain right about now. The rights to about half the catalog is owned by Michael Jackson and the proceeds are funding his legal defense...
Seems to me that the tagging just gives the ISP's VoIP traffic higher QoS. It does slightly lower third-party VoIP's (and all other internet traffic's) QoS a bit, but that should be minimal. A bit of shadenfreud for the Telcom/ISPs, but minimal shadenfreud. It can't hurt third party VoIP too much, because it will hurt other forms of internet traffic too. Surely someone would notice? On the other hand, what other apps besides VoIP need such high QoS? Most other apps can deal with best-effort, VoIP needs to be real-time. What other apps need real-time?
If the reason there isn't is enough demand is that everyone already has everything we can consume or use, then that would be a post-scarcity utopia. But this scenario has already happened many times (the last being the dotcom bust), and it has never happened for that reason yet.
What happened in the dotcom boom and bust (and the boom of the 1920s and the Great Depression, for that matter) is that business were expanding, causing them to invest in goods and services, causing the business that made those goods and services to expand, causing... another kind of postive feedback loop.
What happened was that the market got oversaturated. You had business starting up that had no realistic business plan, but were still attracting investment.
As long as there were investors willing to invest in such schemes, the process could continue. But one day, a few investors woke up, and stopped investing in some of the more outlandish outfits. Which caused those stocks to slump.
Which caused other investors to re-evaluate their strategy, which caused other stocks to slump, which caused those business to stop expanding or to collapse entirely, which caused the business who were providing goods and services to those expanding business to build up inventory, causing them to layoff workers, who cut their own spending, causing... the dotcom bust.
Ideas are infinite, but good ones are scarce. So are the brains that produce them. Anybody can fart on a snare drum, but not many people can write a great song. And great songs are worth something. If you aren't one of those few creative people that can churn on good ideas, or if you aren't one of the people who can act as middle men and leech off those who are creative, then a post-industrial economy is pretty grim. Sure, everything is cheap, but that doesn't matter to you, because you *still* can't afford it.
True enough. But it does present a problem - will a darwinian produced design still work if you changes the conditions it's operating under? There is a danger that the design will over-optimize, become "inbred", and will simply not function under the changed conditions.
As one of the salesmen we talked to told us: "We make the money on the material not the printer".
Crap. Give away razors to sell razorblades? It really *is* a printer!
Hell with capitalists - too much supply and not enough demand makes *me* nervous! When you have excess supply, and not enough demand, you get a depression. Businesses have too much inventory, so they layoff employees who are no longer needed to make more stuff. The employees stop buying stuff, so even less demand, causing more inventory build up, causing more unemployment, causing... a positive feedback loop.
In the long run, it all works out. The economy restabilizes and we find new toys to make with the excess manufacturing capabilites. But, like the man said, in the long run, we're all dead.
Even if we had infinite manufacturing capabilities, we would still leave in a scarcity economy - because ideas of what to make are scarce.
We're already headed that way without replicators. Manufacturing is getting more and more efficent (or being outsourced to regions with cheaper labor). The only jobs left behind are ones that require the human touch. Figuring out what to make. Figuring out how to sell it. And, of course, "Want fries with that?"
Replicators will just speed up the process a tick.
Didn't somebody disprove the grey goo problem, even for nanoassemblers? Something about the scarcity of energy and rare needed materials? Plus there's the bit about it having to compete with all the existing organic replicators.
We use all of our brain, just not at the same time usually (that would probably cause a seizure). The "we only use 10% of our brain" meme got started because, at the time, we only knew what 10% of it did. Brains are energy-hungry organs, and evolution would pretty quickly take care of any bit we don't use.
I remember another story about darwinian-produced circuits. Seems somebody was selecting for a circuit that produced a sine wave. They got one. Then they took it to a different lab or something and it stopped working. Turns out it was using a radio wave to make the sine wave.
First thing about darwinian produced artifacts - the buggers cheat!