FLOSS might actually turn out to be, in the long view of human existence and intellectual development, vastly ahead of its time.
FLOSS, henceforth "open source" as this term is far more linguistically charming regardless of legalistic accuracy, is a mindset and way of conducting one's life that might actually be too soon in coming. It appear at once to be imminently practical, fair, and compassionate. Who among us that wishes good for all mankind would want otherwise for their life's work? Yet this very question belies the problem inherit therein: the creators do in fact have a lifetime, temporally finite in a way which is not of their own choosing. Death is, currently, a certainty, which makes the human work-hour a unit of absolute importance if we are to value anything at all. It is from this work-hour from which our ability to support offspring comes--a topic I have heard Mr. Lunduke speak of adamantly to a certain RMS. Certainly he has the right to provide for his children and relatives, yet all would also assert society does not have the obligation to same. Whence comes the compromise? It is, of course, to be found in the production of useful work unique to said individual. A program is paid for his work sufficiently only because his work is sufficiently difficult to perform.
But what happens when it is not? This conversation is not even ongoing in our society. We are not even considering a world when humans are eclipsed by machines, automation, and computation. We are not even having the conversation of what society will look like when all but the most brilliant among us are capable of performing useful work.
Open source is a brilliant lurch toward the end state of utopia, but it does nothing to connect the dots from our current state to that promised land. These problems will be solved by thinkers greater than I or Lunduke or perhaps anyone else currently living, but they either will be solved or the human race will stagnate or regress to feudalism.
I hope for progress, efficiency, and a preservation of the human spirit manifest in expressions of beauty, art, order, and exquisitely flawed form. What philosophy guides us thus? What but Open Source, the sharing of the structure of life and the universe itself, can even prepare us for this nirvana? It isn't a question of whether open source is better than the alternatives, it is a question of whether open source is better than abject failure and darkness.
If there's no productive work left for them to do, because all the jobs have either been automated away, become so specialized and intellectual as to be out of reach, or require talents that are valuable and unique to humans but untrainable (think art), then what is left to do to earn a living? You end up with slavery going that path too because the few people with the skills to have jobs and thus an income can pay next to nothing for vast ranks of personal servants. It will be a new feudalism. It'll end the way all feudalism ends, when the serfs get fed up and rebel, usually with horrific results for everyone.
Those people will always be a tiny minority, and can be thwarted by traditional police work. What is really dangerous is when we cause legitimate grievances for some population. This gives the more cunning and cynical ones a powerful tool to recruit otherwise moderate individuals for their own violent goals. How many terrorists have we made of otherwise indifferent Arabs by bombing their sons and daughters? When a US drone kills your loved one suddenly the rantings of the extremists start to seem more sincere and reasonable.
The real problem is ultimately one of economics. A government agency, once created and staffed, is unlikely to ever be shuttered, as its employees and staff become dependent on it for their livelihood. Knowing that they'd be unable to find equal paying work in the private sector, they search with desperation for some task to give their apparatus the appearance of relevance. Finding very little credible national security threats (despite what the government would have you believe we are living in an era of peace and plenty unprecedented in all of human history, and the trajectory is more of the same), they resort to the tactic analogous to the private sector's "cold calling." Just look everywhere you can and maybe some business will turn up, it's better than sitting idle which is what you'd be doing anyway--and idle workers are usually fired in the name of efficiency. Except it's not better, when the office in question searching for business is involved in national defense, any kind of police or martial activity, espionage, etc. In these spheres of human action, the zealous drive to reduce the number of idle hands only invents more tools of the devil which we sought to avoid in the first place.
Perhaps if people weren't required to work so much for their own livings we could reduce this compulsion to create problems where there are none simply to keep all the warm bodies occupied to some task. Why has productivity skyrocketed in the 20th and 21st centuries yet working hours remain flat, and in many cases have increased with employers increasingly demanding, and indeed feeling entitled to, access to workers' off hours. Why is our society still insistent on forcing everyone to have a job to pay for their own subsistence even as our technologically sophisticated civilization is running out of useful work to which the everyman can be put? When will we accept that the busywork they end up finding for themselves actually creates more human suffering, reduces liberty, and retards economic progress more than it enables self-sufficiency and ennobles the human spirit?
There will come a time when the average man will see human technology, created by generations of his species' best and brightest each standing on the shoulders of the last, eclipse even his wildest estimate of his own personal potential in all aspects. What will be left to him when his leaders and betters, perhaps literally looking down on him from their towers lofted to the sky and stars, that he must still find some useful work to put himself in order to enjoy the material plenty which surrounds? What recourse will be left to him, but that which is common to even the lowliest of animals, the drive to fight, and kill, and take, and feed, to preserve the spark of life another moment. For this alone is certain: man does not die quietly just because he is told. He will go on fighting to the end--yours or his.
Indeed. I hate Google Glass because it's just a portal to Google's services right in front of your eye. When they combine a HUD display in a decent form factor, and Glass isn't far off in that regard, with acceptable battery life (think Kindle, not iPhone) and a true general purpose, user-programmable computer, then I'll be interested. Until then, these are just expensive toys which charge you for the pleasure of having a telescreen attached to your head siphoning off data and feeding you back commercial messages from the highest bidder.
If a basic citizen's income was instituted you wouldn't have to worry about supporting yourself while working on your art, whatever that may be. No one should have to pay for the basics of life: food, shelter, medical care. Education should also be free up to your personal ability. We have more than enough resources to accomplish this and to do so fairly. We instead choose to emphasis high relative difference in income inequality so that some people can live insanely well with respect to average people. Somehow those people have convinced enough of the rest that a miniscule chance at obscene wealth is better than a guarantee of a comfortable and moderate life.
I'd like everyone to be able to pursue their art or business and not have to worry about starving while doing so. This would lead to an explosion of human creativity and productivity. Entitlement? Yes, we are all entitled to what it takes to survive; even content creators who can't find anyone to buy their art.
Either find a way to stay relevant in a society where your product has succumbed to lack of scarcity or die. Actually, I'd rather not see you die because I am a compassionate and rational human being. I'd rather the material cost of your existence be subsumed by the welfare state until you can be retooled to do something useful and productive--unless you can't, which is probably the fate of most people, most self-styled "content creators."
Your shortsighted self-indulgent entitlement makes me weep, and only just. Barfing I reserve for legitimate affronts to my sensibilities.
The Reinheitsgebot stipulates beer have only THREE ingredients: water, barley and hops. The purity law dates to 1516. Yeast wouldn't be discovered until 1680 and even then wasn't recognized as a living organism.
where the visitor himself is the prime source of revenue.
Just never going to happen for basic services. The price the market will bear for e-mail is $0. Basic web-hosting: $0. Basic video watching: $0. News: $0. These services will simply go away for most people if you put them all behind a paywall. For better or worse (I say better), "free at point of use" is here to stay. You just don't have the customer base to make a viable business if you charge everyone for access. Very few businesses can pull it off. People don't have the money, they're already stretched too thin. They'll simply go without, or consolidate and trim down what they use.
Are we still having this conversation in 2013? You lost. It's over. Our society at large accepts and supports file sharing for non-commercial use. You can't put that toothpaste back in the tube, you can't roll back the cultural clock. You will not stop filesharing. Figure out a way to make money in this new economy or die quietly. Something as non-essential and ephemeral as the entertainment "industry" doesn't deserve a minute of face time with our government. There are important matters to be dealt with, going after filesharers doesn't even register on the importance-scale.
Is anyone really entertaining the delusions of these detached, clueless, dinosaurs? Meanwhile, our infrastructure is literally collapsing, and they want us to waste government time having a discussion about imaginary property. Grow up. Your racket is over, you had decades of a free ride, longer than you deserved, to see this coming and do something about it. You sat on your hands, so now knuckle under and let that sweet creative destruction wash over your entire industry.
Their homepage is still heavily trafficked, and it's stuffed with ads and monetization schemes. For a lot of technically unsophisticated people who first got an internet connection back in the 90s, it's synonymous with the internet. It's the familiar first thing you see when you "go online." It's mostly vapid, uninteresting, pop culture, detritus to you and I--not to mention tastelessly cluttered--but it's compelling to a lot of people. Here's a hint what I'm getting at, you'll find celebrity gossip and sports scores prominently placed on their front page. The kinds of people who care about that stuff are the kinds who don't block ads, or even know it's possible; better still (for Yahoo) they are also the type who occasionally even click ads. They are real-world NPCs, Neal Stephenson's "slines" from Anathem, proles.
I'm probably being too hard on them. Maybe some are brilliant in other areas of life and don't care one bit about technology, they're just sticking with what's familiar, and Yahoo actually was a decent company with some useful services. Back in the 90s they had a very useful directory style listing of most of the Internet that was cataloged by actual humans. Back before Gmail they were a decent, free, mail provider. Many people continue to use @yahoo.com accounts. Still, it's hard to defend users who visit a site which devotes some front page screen space for horoscopes. I should add most of these things are customizable if you log in, but I wonder how many people go that far. Tyranny of the default must reign here, too.
I believe it was episode three, but quite possibly four. I myself recently introduced my cousin to evolution an natural selection. The sense of wonder is amazing; I get to relive the fantastic sense of awe I felt when I first was exposed to these ideas. My lesson plan was a synthesis of Sagan and Dawkins. I used the method of Sacrates, asking him to explain to me why trees are so tall. By asking questions I got him to describe to me why trees pointlessly compete with each other to loft their leaves higher and higher so they can be no better off than if they all agreed somehow to be an arbitrary lower height. Most people already accept heredity, so it's not much of a step to get them to understand evolution by natural selection.
Rolling your whole body or coiling up for protection isn't the same thing as having a freely rotating wheel for transportation. There's never been an animal like the mulefa.
Mutations are random, and most aren't improvements, aren't adaptive. Natural selection then goes to work. The mutations which are better become more numerous by virtue of being better. Detrimental changes terminate the organism's lineage by killing it outright or making it less successful at reproducing. Drop a bacterium into a pond and after a billion years I'd expect to still find bacteria or something analogous in that pond. Ignore the fact that location on the Earth loses meaning at that time scale due to plate tectonics. I'd expect to find bacteria AND lots of other forms of life all over the place everywhere I looked. This demonstrates another misunderstanding ID people have with evolution. Bacteria and humans are equally evolved. We've all been evolving for the same amount of time. Bacteria are just as old as humans, all contemporary species are. No extant species is "less evolved" than any other. You can say they are "more primitive" but what does that really mean? Compared to what?
Anthropocentrism is a vice biologists are broken of early on. Religious people often find the idea that humans aren't special, that the world wasn't made just for us, positively abhorrent. Strangely these same religions often preach humility. What a contradiction.
There's a big difference between detecting the rough direction of magnetic North and being able to discern the source of radio waves, and an even bigger difference from being able to pick out specific frequencies against a noisy background. There are also some very good reasons from physics and chemistry why a "biological radio" would be impossible to evolve naturally. In short, radio is too low energy to be biologically useful.
Oh and there's an exception about my wheel analogy. Bacteria really did evolve a freely rotating axis used for propulsion. However the physics of the microscopic world is different from what we experience at our scale that our intuitions of what is possible and how matter behaves aren't applicable. The analogy holds as long as we restrict ourselves to larger organisms. No freely rotating axis has ever evolved in a macroscopic animal--the intermediary forms wouldn't work.
I'd have to doubt that. Well, not by detecting radio waves. Radio is just our term for a band of the light spectrum, so it's as old as the universe. No living thing on Earth has evolved to make use of that part of the spectrum like has been done for "visible" light, UV, and infrared. It's probably beyond the reach of natural selection, the same way no animal ever evolved something like a wheel despite being enormously more efficient for travel. The intermediary steps are too difficult and wouldn't confer benefit. There's too much "infrastructure" that, while it would pay off in the final product, wouldn't be useful along the way. Evolution has no foresight or agency and can't aim for a distant goal even if that goal would theoretically be incredibly advantageous to some descendant.
There's really no distinction. What is called macro evolution is determined by hindsight, usually because we are only able to compare fossils separated by millions of years. By definition every organism is a member of the same species as its parents. We only place them into discrete categories for taxonomical convenience. It's not a fact of nature, it's a human contrivance to make doing (some aspects) of biology easier.
It's like natural languages. I speak English, a Germanic language. I can speak to my father and mother just fine. I can speak to my grandfather, and also converse in German with him. If my great-grandfather were still alive I'd doubtless have no trouble speaking to him, too. He could speak to his parents. They could speak to their parents, and so on. Each person in the chain can speak to and understand the people directly around them. But if you go back just a few hundred years, I wouldn't be able to easily converse with my ancestors, despite the fact that there is an unbroken chain connecting them to myself linguistically. Farther back and I wouldn't even recognize the language they're speaking as English, or German. So from microevolution comes macroevolution of languages.
So to with biology. If we had access to a fossil or living specimen of every intermediary individual from single cell to human then the very idea of species would become meaningless, lost in the smooth gradient of gradual change. You could line them all up and walk down the line and see them change, almost imperceptibly from one form into another. Every individual would look so much like his parents and offspring that you wouldn't even be able to tell there was a change at all. But you could compare every 10, 100, or 1000 individuals and see that they are in fact changing. At some point they'd be so different as to need a new name, for humans have an almost pernicious compulsion to place things into discrete categories.
Some people find it impossible to break out of this mindset. Some find that their religion even compels them not to try.
...just to stay in the same place. Natural selection follows from basic principles of logic. It's so close to first principles that it always amazes me that we had to wait so long for Darwin to show up and slap humanity on the face with the simple truth of it. Living things exist because they inherited what it takes to exist from their ancestors. The ones that didn't have what it took to stay in existence...didn't. The world is full of things that exist. Protons, stars, iron, roaches, people. Natural selection acts on everything. The universe itself may even have been "selected" through some process of cosmogenesis where universes that don't have what it takes, physical laws and constant appropriate to produce stars, black holes, daughter universes, see their lineage die off. Hard to prove, probably impossible, but it is not even a new idea to think natural selection is too powerful and too basic to reality to be confined to biology.
Unless you can eradicate an entire species quickly and completely, all you do is set up a selection pressure which favors mutant individuals who have what it takes to beat your attempts to eradicate them. The ones that don't have what it takes to counter your attack, roach motel or whatever it is, don't survive, and don't pass on their genes which failed to adequately equip them for survival and reproduction.
Arthropod life cycles are very fast so it's not even surprising to see evolution like this happening in just a few decades. I'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner.
It's telling how difficult this satirical trolling is to distinguish from actual Libertarian ranting. I've heard people defend a corporation's "right" to put nicotine in food, and not even have to label it. A third party business would spring up, specializing in testing and reporting on the contents of food. This business would of course always be accurate and truthful because their reputation is on the line! If they started taking bribes from food producers to lie in their reports then ANOTHER fact-checking business would catch them.
I don't mean to be offensive, I come from this background too, but the military are not middle class on average. The military is drawn from the ranks of the poor. That's why a lot of them join, no other options. The officers might be middle class, but even then there have been times when that didn't matter. They side with their soldiers or die along with the elites.
Go find the nearest spray can. See the label which says "NO CFCS"? Chlorofluorocarbons WERE a huge concern, until we stepped up as a civilization and made the necessary changes to solve the problem. You don't hear about that problem anymore because we solved it. It didn't go away on its own. It didn't fade away like some green-fad. We recognized an environmental issue and solved it, and now the ozone layer is recovering.
Similar points can be made about the other things you mentioned. Those are all bad, we are taking steps to address them, or at least figuring out if it's feasible to use a replacement or change our industrial/ag processes to minimize those pollutants. We aren't just ignoring them. And you're right, there WILL be new environmental pollutants to worry about. That doesn't invalidate the concerns over the previous ones we've identified.
Science constantly moves forward, adjusts, corrects itself when it makes mistakes. That's not a weakness, that's its chief virtue. It's the meddlesome lay people, the politicians, and the mouth breathing ignorant masses who believe you have to stick with your story, your narrative, or be deemed unprincipled or untrustworthy.
In the United States, there's an entire political sub-party that sincerely believes "those too * to work" should be left to die, or toil in abject poverty living off the scraps of charity. They rarely come out and say so, but that's the logical conclusion of a society that completely turns it back on supporting "those too * to work". You need food to live. You need money to get food. You need a job to get money. No job, you're dead. There's a certain sad, bitter, misanthropic personality that finds pleasure in this sort of world becoming a reality. Using the internet they've all found each other, and some corporations and industrial interests have discovered that they are useful idiots that can be put to work defending the very system that will eventually impoverish themselves, too.
Slashdot Mirror
FLOSS might actually turn out to be, in the long view of human existence and intellectual development, vastly ahead of its time.
FLOSS, henceforth "open source" as this term is far more linguistically charming regardless of legalistic accuracy, is a mindset and way of conducting one's life that might actually be too soon in coming. It appear at once to be imminently practical, fair, and compassionate. Who among us that wishes good for all mankind would want otherwise for their life's work? Yet this very question belies the problem inherit therein: the creators do in fact have a lifetime, temporally finite in a way which is not of their own choosing. Death is, currently, a certainty, which makes the human work-hour a unit of absolute importance if we are to value anything at all. It is from this work-hour from which our ability to support offspring comes--a topic I have heard Mr. Lunduke speak of adamantly to a certain RMS. Certainly he has the right to provide for his children and relatives, yet all would also assert society does not have the obligation to same. Whence comes the compromise? It is, of course, to be found in the production of useful work unique to said individual. A program is paid for his work sufficiently only because his work is sufficiently difficult to perform.
But what happens when it is not? This conversation is not even ongoing in our society. We are not even considering a world when humans are eclipsed by machines, automation, and computation. We are not even having the conversation of what society will look like when all but the most brilliant among us are capable of performing useful work.
Open source is a brilliant lurch toward the end state of utopia, but it does nothing to connect the dots from our current state to that promised land. These problems will be solved by thinkers greater than I or Lunduke or perhaps anyone else currently living, but they either will be solved or the human race will stagnate or regress to feudalism.
I hope for progress, efficiency, and a preservation of the human spirit manifest in expressions of beauty, art, order, and exquisitely flawed form. What philosophy guides us thus? What but Open Source, the sharing of the structure of life and the universe itself, can even prepare us for this nirvana? It isn't a question of whether open source is better than the alternatives, it is a question of whether open source is better than abject failure and darkness.
It is.
If there's no productive work left for them to do, because all the jobs have either been automated away, become so specialized and intellectual as to be out of reach, or require talents that are valuable and unique to humans but untrainable (think art), then what is left to do to earn a living? You end up with slavery going that path too because the few people with the skills to have jobs and thus an income can pay next to nothing for vast ranks of personal servants. It will be a new feudalism. It'll end the way all feudalism ends, when the serfs get fed up and rebel, usually with horrific results for everyone.
Those people will always be a tiny minority, and can be thwarted by traditional police work. What is really dangerous is when we cause legitimate grievances for some population. This gives the more cunning and cynical ones a powerful tool to recruit otherwise moderate individuals for their own violent goals. How many terrorists have we made of otherwise indifferent Arabs by bombing their sons and daughters? When a US drone kills your loved one suddenly the rantings of the extremists start to seem more sincere and reasonable.
We fight them best by fighting them least.
The real problem is ultimately one of economics. A government agency, once created and staffed, is unlikely to ever be shuttered, as its employees and staff become dependent on it for their livelihood. Knowing that they'd be unable to find equal paying work in the private sector, they search with desperation for some task to give their apparatus the appearance of relevance. Finding very little credible national security threats (despite what the government would have you believe we are living in an era of peace and plenty unprecedented in all of human history, and the trajectory is more of the same), they resort to the tactic analogous to the private sector's "cold calling." Just look everywhere you can and maybe some business will turn up, it's better than sitting idle which is what you'd be doing anyway--and idle workers are usually fired in the name of efficiency. Except it's not better, when the office in question searching for business is involved in national defense, any kind of police or martial activity, espionage, etc. In these spheres of human action, the zealous drive to reduce the number of idle hands only invents more tools of the devil which we sought to avoid in the first place.
Perhaps if people weren't required to work so much for their own livings we could reduce this compulsion to create problems where there are none simply to keep all the warm bodies occupied to some task. Why has productivity skyrocketed in the 20th and 21st centuries yet working hours remain flat, and in many cases have increased with employers increasingly demanding, and indeed feeling entitled to, access to workers' off hours. Why is our society still insistent on forcing everyone to have a job to pay for their own subsistence even as our technologically sophisticated civilization is running out of useful work to which the everyman can be put? When will we accept that the busywork they end up finding for themselves actually creates more human suffering, reduces liberty, and retards economic progress more than it enables self-sufficiency and ennobles the human spirit?
There will come a time when the average man will see human technology, created by generations of his species' best and brightest each standing on the shoulders of the last, eclipse even his wildest estimate of his own personal potential in all aspects. What will be left to him when his leaders and betters, perhaps literally looking down on him from their towers lofted to the sky and stars, that he must still find some useful work to put himself in order to enjoy the material plenty which surrounds? What recourse will be left to him, but that which is common to even the lowliest of animals, the drive to fight, and kill, and take, and feed, to preserve the spark of life another moment. For this alone is certain: man does not die quietly just because he is told. He will go on fighting to the end--yours or his.
Indeed. I hate Google Glass because it's just a portal to Google's services right in front of your eye. When they combine a HUD display in a decent form factor, and Glass isn't far off in that regard, with acceptable battery life (think Kindle, not iPhone) and a true general purpose, user-programmable computer, then I'll be interested. Until then, these are just expensive toys which charge you for the pleasure of having a telescreen attached to your head siphoning off data and feeding you back commercial messages from the highest bidder.
If a basic citizen's income was instituted you wouldn't have to worry about supporting yourself while working on your art, whatever that may be. No one should have to pay for the basics of life: food, shelter, medical care. Education should also be free up to your personal ability. We have more than enough resources to accomplish this and to do so fairly. We instead choose to emphasis high relative difference in income inequality so that some people can live insanely well with respect to average people. Somehow those people have convinced enough of the rest that a miniscule chance at obscene wealth is better than a guarantee of a comfortable and moderate life.
I'd like everyone to be able to pursue their art or business and not have to worry about starving while doing so. This would lead to an explosion of human creativity and productivity. Entitlement? Yes, we are all entitled to what it takes to survive; even content creators who can't find anyone to buy their art.
Cry me a river, shit-heel.
Either find a way to stay relevant in a society where your product has succumbed to lack of scarcity or die. Actually, I'd rather not see you die because I am a compassionate and rational human being. I'd rather the material cost of your existence be subsumed by the welfare state until you can be retooled to do something useful and productive--unless you can't, which is probably the fate of most people, most self-styled "content creators."
Your shortsighted self-indulgent entitlement makes me weep, and only just. Barfing I reserve for legitimate affronts to my sensibilities.
The Reinheitsgebot stipulates beer have only THREE ingredients: water, barley and hops. The purity law dates to 1516. Yeast wouldn't be discovered until 1680 and even then wasn't recognized as a living organism.
where the visitor himself is the prime source of revenue.
Just never going to happen for basic services. The price the market will bear for e-mail is $0. Basic web-hosting: $0. Basic video watching: $0. News: $0. These services will simply go away for most people if you put them all behind a paywall. For better or worse (I say better), "free at point of use" is here to stay. You just don't have the customer base to make a viable business if you charge everyone for access. Very few businesses can pull it off. People don't have the money, they're already stretched too thin. They'll simply go without, or consolidate and trim down what they use.
Are we still having this conversation in 2013? You lost. It's over. Our society at large accepts and supports file sharing for non-commercial use. You can't put that toothpaste back in the tube, you can't roll back the cultural clock. You will not stop filesharing. Figure out a way to make money in this new economy or die quietly. Something as non-essential and ephemeral as the entertainment "industry" doesn't deserve a minute of face time with our government. There are important matters to be dealt with, going after filesharers doesn't even register on the importance-scale.
Is anyone really entertaining the delusions of these detached, clueless, dinosaurs? Meanwhile, our infrastructure is literally collapsing, and they want us to waste government time having a discussion about imaginary property. Grow up. Your racket is over, you had decades of a free ride, longer than you deserved, to see this coming and do something about it. You sat on your hands, so now knuckle under and let that sweet creative destruction wash over your entire industry.
Their homepage is still heavily trafficked, and it's stuffed with ads and monetization schemes. For a lot of technically unsophisticated people who first got an internet connection back in the 90s, it's synonymous with the internet. It's the familiar first thing you see when you "go online." It's mostly vapid, uninteresting, pop culture, detritus to you and I--not to mention tastelessly cluttered--but it's compelling to a lot of people. Here's a hint what I'm getting at, you'll find celebrity gossip and sports scores prominently placed on their front page. The kinds of people who care about that stuff are the kinds who don't block ads, or even know it's possible; better still (for Yahoo) they are also the type who occasionally even click ads. They are real-world NPCs, Neal Stephenson's "slines" from Anathem, proles.
I'm probably being too hard on them. Maybe some are brilliant in other areas of life and don't care one bit about technology, they're just sticking with what's familiar, and Yahoo actually was a decent company with some useful services. Back in the 90s they had a very useful directory style listing of most of the Internet that was cataloged by actual humans. Back before Gmail they were a decent, free, mail provider. Many people continue to use @yahoo.com accounts. Still, it's hard to defend users who visit a site which devotes some front page screen space for horoscopes. I should add most of these things are customizable if you log in, but I wonder how many people go that far. Tyranny of the default must reign here, too.
I believe it was episode three, but quite possibly four. I myself recently introduced my cousin to evolution an natural selection. The sense of wonder is amazing; I get to relive the fantastic sense of awe I felt when I first was exposed to these ideas. My lesson plan was a synthesis of Sagan and Dawkins. I used the method of Sacrates, asking him to explain to me why trees are so tall. By asking questions I got him to describe to me why trees pointlessly compete with each other to loft their leaves higher and higher so they can be no better off than if they all agreed somehow to be an arbitrary lower height. Most people already accept heredity, so it's not much of a step to get them to understand evolution by natural selection.
For billions of years not a single one of my ancestors failed to reach sexual maturity and then reproduce. That's axiomatic. That's why I'm here now.
I almost feel like I'm letting them all down. What a combo breaker :(
Rolling your whole body or coiling up for protection isn't the same thing as having a freely rotating wheel for transportation. There's never been an animal like the mulefa.
Mutations are random, and most aren't improvements, aren't adaptive. Natural selection then goes to work. The mutations which are better become more numerous by virtue of being better. Detrimental changes terminate the organism's lineage by killing it outright or making it less successful at reproducing. Drop a bacterium into a pond and after a billion years I'd expect to still find bacteria or something analogous in that pond. Ignore the fact that location on the Earth loses meaning at that time scale due to plate tectonics. I'd expect to find bacteria AND lots of other forms of life all over the place everywhere I looked. This demonstrates another misunderstanding ID people have with evolution. Bacteria and humans are equally evolved. We've all been evolving for the same amount of time. Bacteria are just as old as humans, all contemporary species are. No extant species is "less evolved" than any other. You can say they are "more primitive" but what does that really mean? Compared to what?
Anthropocentrism is a vice biologists are broken of early on. Religious people often find the idea that humans aren't special, that the world wasn't made just for us, positively abhorrent. Strangely these same religions often preach humility. What a contradiction.
There's a big difference between detecting the rough direction of magnetic North and being able to discern the source of radio waves, and an even bigger difference from being able to pick out specific frequencies against a noisy background. There are also some very good reasons from physics and chemistry why a "biological radio" would be impossible to evolve naturally. In short, radio is too low energy to be biologically useful.
Oh and there's an exception about my wheel analogy. Bacteria really did evolve a freely rotating axis used for propulsion. However the physics of the microscopic world is different from what we experience at our scale that our intuitions of what is possible and how matter behaves aren't applicable. The analogy holds as long as we restrict ourselves to larger organisms. No freely rotating axis has ever evolved in a macroscopic animal--the intermediary forms wouldn't work.
I'd have to doubt that. Well, not by detecting radio waves. Radio is just our term for a band of the light spectrum, so it's as old as the universe. No living thing on Earth has evolved to make use of that part of the spectrum like has been done for "visible" light, UV, and infrared. It's probably beyond the reach of natural selection, the same way no animal ever evolved something like a wheel despite being enormously more efficient for travel. The intermediary steps are too difficult and wouldn't confer benefit. There's too much "infrastructure" that, while it would pay off in the final product, wouldn't be useful along the way. Evolution has no foresight or agency and can't aim for a distant goal even if that goal would theoretically be incredibly advantageous to some descendant.
There's really no distinction. What is called macro evolution is determined by hindsight, usually because we are only able to compare fossils separated by millions of years. By definition every organism is a member of the same species as its parents. We only place them into discrete categories for taxonomical convenience. It's not a fact of nature, it's a human contrivance to make doing (some aspects) of biology easier.
It's like natural languages. I speak English, a Germanic language. I can speak to my father and mother just fine. I can speak to my grandfather, and also converse in German with him. If my great-grandfather were still alive I'd doubtless have no trouble speaking to him, too. He could speak to his parents. They could speak to their parents, and so on. Each person in the chain can speak to and understand the people directly around them. But if you go back just a few hundred years, I wouldn't be able to easily converse with my ancestors, despite the fact that there is an unbroken chain connecting them to myself linguistically. Farther back and I wouldn't even recognize the language they're speaking as English, or German. So from microevolution comes macroevolution of languages.
So to with biology. If we had access to a fossil or living specimen of every intermediary individual from single cell to human then the very idea of species would become meaningless, lost in the smooth gradient of gradual change. You could line them all up and walk down the line and see them change, almost imperceptibly from one form into another. Every individual would look so much like his parents and offspring that you wouldn't even be able to tell there was a change at all. But you could compare every 10, 100, or 1000 individuals and see that they are in fact changing. At some point they'd be so different as to need a new name, for humans have an almost pernicious compulsion to place things into discrete categories.
Some people find it impossible to break out of this mindset. Some find that their religion even compels them not to try.
...just to stay in the same place. Natural selection follows from basic principles of logic. It's so close to first principles that it always amazes me that we had to wait so long for Darwin to show up and slap humanity on the face with the simple truth of it. Living things exist because they inherited what it takes to exist from their ancestors. The ones that didn't have what it took to stay in existence...didn't. The world is full of things that exist. Protons, stars, iron, roaches, people. Natural selection acts on everything. The universe itself may even have been "selected" through some process of cosmogenesis where universes that don't have what it takes, physical laws and constant appropriate to produce stars, black holes, daughter universes, see their lineage die off. Hard to prove, probably impossible, but it is not even a new idea to think natural selection is too powerful and too basic to reality to be confined to biology.
Unless you can eradicate an entire species quickly and completely, all you do is set up a selection pressure which favors mutant individuals who have what it takes to beat your attempts to eradicate them. The ones that don't have what it takes to counter your attack, roach motel or whatever it is, don't survive, and don't pass on their genes which failed to adequately equip them for survival and reproduction.
Arthropod life cycles are very fast so it's not even surprising to see evolution like this happening in just a few decades. I'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner.
It's telling how difficult this satirical trolling is to distinguish from actual Libertarian ranting. I've heard people defend a corporation's "right" to put nicotine in food, and not even have to label it. A third party business would spring up, specializing in testing and reporting on the contents of food. This business would of course always be accurate and truthful because their reputation is on the line! If they started taking bribes from food producers to lie in their reports then ANOTHER fact-checking business would catch them.
It's libertarians all the way down...
I don't mean to be offensive, I come from this background too, but the military are not middle class on average. The military is drawn from the ranks of the poor. That's why a lot of them join, no other options. The officers might be middle class, but even then there have been times when that didn't matter. They side with their soldiers or die along with the elites.
Only Canada would be viable for transport and reprocessing, and they don't have a high demand for nuclear fuel.
There's no such thing as a legitimate software patent.
Go find the nearest spray can. See the label which says "NO CFCS"? Chlorofluorocarbons WERE a huge concern, until we stepped up as a civilization and made the necessary changes to solve the problem. You don't hear about that problem anymore because we solved it. It didn't go away on its own. It didn't fade away like some green-fad. We recognized an environmental issue and solved it, and now the ozone layer is recovering.
Similar points can be made about the other things you mentioned. Those are all bad, we are taking steps to address them, or at least figuring out if it's feasible to use a replacement or change our industrial/ag processes to minimize those pollutants. We aren't just ignoring them. And you're right, there WILL be new environmental pollutants to worry about. That doesn't invalidate the concerns over the previous ones we've identified.
Science constantly moves forward, adjusts, corrects itself when it makes mistakes. That's not a weakness, that's its chief virtue. It's the meddlesome lay people, the politicians, and the mouth breathing ignorant masses who believe you have to stick with your story, your narrative, or be deemed unprincipled or untrustworthy.
In the United States, there's an entire political sub-party that sincerely believes "those too * to work" should be left to die, or toil in abject poverty living off the scraps of charity. They rarely come out and say so, but that's the logical conclusion of a society that completely turns it back on supporting "those too * to work". You need food to live. You need money to get food. You need a job to get money. No job, you're dead. There's a certain sad, bitter, misanthropic personality that finds pleasure in this sort of world becoming a reality. Using the internet they've all found each other, and some corporations and industrial interests have discovered that they are useful idiots that can be put to work defending the very system that will eventually impoverish themselves, too.