You clearly do not understand what evolution is. You are basically playing buzzword bingo. By your logic, you cannot discuss history because you are not familiar with every event, and do not understand the mechanisms of time. And quite frankly, claiming that someone needs to know the history of a subject to understand the subject itself is dumb. Really, think about it. You just said that to understand a scientific idea, you need to know discredited theories. That is wanna be intellectualism at it's worst.
Of course, maybe it is just that you don't understand English. After all, you don't know the etymology of every word you typed, and you are also missing information on all of the spelling and reading mistakes that people have made since it's inception. So, I can come to the conclusion that either you don't understand what evolution is, or you don't understand English. Either way, your posts end up being pseudo-intellectual babble.
I don't recommend running cable to every place that you MIGHT need it. When I do remodeling, I run 'smurf tubing' down the wall in every room. It isn't really any more expensive than running 'just in case' wire. The benefit is that you don't have to worry about what kind of cable you might need in the future. I did this on my last house. When I remodeled each room, I put in a 2" tube from the attic to a face plate in the wall. I didn't pull a single wire until the place was done. After the house was done, I just fed the coax, phone and cat 5e cable to each of the places I needed it.
Wow, listen to you trying to sound smart. Unfortunately you failed. You don't even need to know what DNA is to understand evolution. DNA wasn't first isolated until 1869. It wasn't until 1928 that it was figured out that heredity was related to DNA, and that wasn't confirmed until 1952. Charles Darwin wrote "The Origin Of Species" in 1858. I think it is safe to say that Darwin understood the idea of evolution. By your claim, he did not.
One does not need to know every detail to understand a concept. Just as you do not need to know the specific details of your processors design, the mining and processing techniques for the materials that it is made from, or the history of it's design to claim that you understand computers, one does not need to know TATA Boxes or punctuated equilibrium to understand evolution. As for lamarkian... That is a discredited theory. If your trying to sound smart, you should avoid suggestion that discredited theories are needed to understand it.
Given that there is no subject known to man that we have full information on, or for that matter, even most of the information, EVERYTHING we know is a simple model, so it's great that you think you understand more than a simple model of evolution, but please don't confuse a person with a reasonable understanding of a subject with a intellectual wanna be.
I applaud your early introduction of these concepts and I hope your child is gifted or your teaching better than that of the average school teacher
I do believe that my child won the genetic lottery, but even if we consider him to be some kind of mutant super genius, and say that a normal humans cannot be expected to understand concepts at as early an age, I don't think it it too much to expect an average 8 year old to understand concepts that he gets at 4. I certainly don't think it is too much to expect an adult to be able to comprehend concepts that he understands at 4. That being said, I would have to say that I am teaching better than the average school teacher. I have no doubt that there are some very good teachers out there, but my experience has been that they are a very small minority.
To truly understand evolution you have to understand random mutations, recessive genes, inheritance of genes, environmental pressures and how they affect survival and chances of procreation, and be able to envision all of this taking place through millions of generations of birth and death.
Really, which of those concepts are difficult for a small child to understand?
Inheritance? They hear about that from the day they are born.
Environmental pressures? Sure, death is hidden from most kids, but they find out about it anyway.
Chances of procreation? Kids understand that there are people they do and do not want to be around. Once they know where they came from, chance of procreation is simple.
Multiple generations? Kids understand repetition very well.
The two most complex ideas in there are recessive genes and random mutation. They are not really all that difficult. Once the kid understands DNA, the idea that not every instruction is expressed, and that pieces can get jumbled are not very difficult. Actually, recessive genes are not really all that important to explain evolution.
To explain evolution to my son, I made several "creatures" out of cups filled with pennies. I would mix the "DNA", when the mom and dad had a baby. I would do this over and over. Every few mixes, I would throw in a nickle or a dime. Creatures with dime traits don't survive long enough to have babies. Creatures with nickles do. Eventually, you don't have penny creatures, you have nickle creatures. I might have to review it after a few months to make sure that it is still there, but he understood it when I explained it. How do I know? Because I caught him playing evolution with some boxes of hot wheels to imbue his cars with extra features.
but I'm much more pessimistic about these things. Maybe it's just that I've spent too much time reading the absurd assertions of religious fundamentalists of late.
Your pessimism is based empirical evidence. The problem is you haven't really asked why people don't understand these concepts. It isn't because they are complex. It is because they don't have to understand them to survive, and being smart isn't cool.
theory of evolution is and it is a complex concept for children
I totally disagree with this. Evolution is an extremely simple concept for children if you humble yourself enough to accept that it is simple. It took all of 15 minutes with a few cups and ~$5 in coins to bring my 4 year old up to speed on the concept. He might not have a great grasp on what the statistical odds are of any particular mutation, but that will be easy to take care of once he gets a little more advanced in his math.
Eh... Not to call you out or anything, but George is the turtles middle name, and it is theorized by a small but loyal splinter sect that the turtle PREFERS to go by its middle name George. This bit of confusion will definitely require an extra week of the grade school kids time to cover.
I would disagree on the price though. CDs should cost $10 when I buy them in the store. An album where I have to do the manufacturing myself should be closer to $5. A single song should be closer to $.50. A cool feature to add would be to pay $15 to get the full album downloaded, with a professionally manufactured CD in the mail a few days later.
Other than the selection, there is only one thing that I think Magnatune has wrong. They should offer a high quality, suitable for printing cover art. I keep my music on CD as an archive. Even when I listen to my music from XBMC, I will often thumb through my CDs to decide what I want to listen to.
From day one, the GPL was a political document, and at no time has it ever been expressed not to be. The v3 isn't about making it more about politics and making it more restrictive. It is about plugging the loopholes that various entities have found in the wording of the origin document. Like it or hate it, claiming that the GPLs very purpose for being isn't political is just fooling yourself.
I know this is mostly off topic because the article is about free software, buy if you want to see local schools wasting money, you should come to my town. While still complaining about lack of funds for education, one of the PUBLIC high schools here not only has enough money for a pool, but they have a freaking WATERSLIDE! Not a, 'hey this 6 foot slide points into the pool' water slide. This is a two and a half story amusement park waterslide.
Speaking of LPs, I was always disappointed that during the 80s when LPs were still viable, and there weren't enough devils to go around, that nobody produced an LP with concentric spirals so that depending on which spiral you landed, you would get a different audio track. If spaced properly, you could create a record that had something like a 1 in 100 chance of playing some kind of evil message. Heck, if you did it right, you could have made it so that it would only play the second track if you started at a particular point in the middle. This could make it so that there was something like 1 in a 10000 chance of hearing that Satan was coming for your soul. And without the internet, it could take a very long time for the joke to get out.
I've always hated the term "pop culture". It's basically redundant. For something to be culture, it has to be popular. Otherwise it is just some random anomaly. I do have to admit though that "pop culture" is easier to say than "parts of modern culture that I don't respect".
I don't get all the hate over noisy toys. Being noisy is part of being a kid.
I don't know if you all should love me or hate me. Given that I welcome noisy toys for my 4 year old son, either I give people an outlet to buy cool toys that they don't want in their own house (because they are noisy, or they don't have kids), or I confirm to them that noisy toys are not inherently evil.
Oddly enough, that is why I don't buy Lego for my kid. They are no longer generic building blocks. They are now poor resolution models. When I want him to do models, I will buy him models. For 'creative' building, there are still Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, and Playdough.
I wish people would be more practical in their viewpoint. I want my hardware to work not just today, but also when it is no longer bringing profit in to the manufacturer. Why won't people stop being so ideological and just USE the damn hardware if it works past the profit life of the manufacture.
Seriously, you are confusing practicality with shortsightedness. But then, I also don't charge my credit card to their limit just because I can do that NOW either. I like to look at how my actions will affect me in the long run.
Oh, I rely on someone else to fix my Free software. The difference anybody with the skill and inclination can fix it. With closed source, only a specific person with the skill and inclination can fix it. My chances with a bunch of people are much, MUCH better than my chances with a specific person to have the inclination.
Craze is right. Toshiba was making sub-notebooks over a decade ago. The OLPC is just a con job to make people think that they are donating to charity when all they are really doing is paying for someone else's R&D. At the end of the day, the OLPC is too expensive for an inferior machine.
Oh, and did you even read the link you gave? That thing claims that we were promised a $100 laptop with a high res color display and a cool Star Trek keyboard. It claims we were promised this on a computer that was solar powered. It also claims that the OLPCs were going to be donated, but as far as I have ever heard, they were in fact be sold to poor countries. If you want to convince people of your way of thinking, you might not want to link to articles that argue against your point.
Your pointing out of a couple of typos is an acknowledgment that you have no VALID issues with the content.
As for the awkwardness of gal, speak for yourself. I like it just fine, and none of my gal friends complain about it.
Hence the the word "rarely". As you show, there are some people who do not feel the word is awkward. That would be why it is still a word.
Bitch is a feminine noun. It means female dog.
Bzzt. There is a small group of people that use the word bitch to mean female dog. That usage is all but depreciated from the English language. The current meaning of the word bitch is a woman who is mean. Unless you are at the Kennel Club, anyone you talk to is going to understand bitch to mean a mean female. Just try it out. Walk into work work on Monday, and start complaining that there was a bitch wandering around your neighborhood over the weekend. If you don't give any other hints that you are talking about a dog, you will likely be in a sexual harassment meeting before the day is done. Heck, if you do make it clear that you are talking about a dog, you STILL might end up with a sexual harassment complaint. Why? Because bitch does not mean female dog in modern English.
An asshole can be any gender, as both have them.
Who has one is is irrelevant. It is almost exclusively used as a male gender equivalent for bitch. Yes, prick would also be an equivalent, but that does not change the fact that asshole is almost exclusively used to refer to males that are mean. Case in point, both prick and pussy would be used to describe a male. Your trying to apply too much logic to the words that people use. Even worse, you are are trying to apply too much logic to the slang that people use. That isn't how language works.
Slut or whore ("ho") would most likely be the feminine counterpart to "gigolo".
No, the word gigolo is used specifically for someone who trades sex for money. While whore, the root of ho, started out to mean someone who exchanges sex for money, it is in transition to mean someone who has lots of sex with many different partners. Of course that is also what slut and stud mean.
Like what? You can't say as a hurricane, unless the hurricane is going 24/7/365. You definitely cannot say in more extreme cold, as that would require even more energy to be accounted for.
I find this comment funny. It is an indication of how telephones have changed at least for some demographics. I was expecting the comment to be "pick it up every few seconds".
So, where has all this heat energy gone? We know that energy is neither created nor destroyed, so it must be stored somewhere. If GLOBAL temperatures are down this year, the energy must have left the planet, been stored somewhere, or converted to some other energy or matter. Where is the energy? The deep unmonitored ocean? Increased wind velocity? increased air pressure?
Sorry dude, the feminine form of the word to "chick" is "dude". The famine form of the word "guy" is "gal", which is rarely used because "gal" sounds akward. The feminine form of the word "bitch" is "asshole". The feminine form of the word "beefcake" is "cheesecake", and the feminine form of the word "stud" is "slut" or "ho".
It would be nice if people would learn a language before whining about it.
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You clearly do not understand what evolution is. You are basically playing buzzword bingo. By your logic, you cannot discuss history because you are not familiar with every event, and do not understand the mechanisms of time. And quite frankly, claiming that someone needs to know the history of a subject to understand the subject itself is dumb. Really, think about it. You just said that to understand a scientific idea, you need to know discredited theories. That is wanna be intellectualism at it's worst.
Of course, maybe it is just that you don't understand English. After all, you don't know the etymology of every word you typed, and you are also missing information on all of the spelling and reading mistakes that people have made since it's inception. So, I can come to the conclusion that either you don't understand what evolution is, or you don't understand English. Either way, your posts end up being pseudo-intellectual babble.
I don't recommend running cable to every place that you MIGHT need it. When I do remodeling, I run 'smurf tubing' down the wall in every room. It isn't really any more expensive than running 'just in case' wire. The benefit is that you don't have to worry about what kind of cable you might need in the future. I did this on my last house. When I remodeled each room, I put in a 2" tube from the attic to a face plate in the wall. I didn't pull a single wire until the place was done. After the house was done, I just fed the coax, phone and cat 5e cable to each of the places I needed it.
And that physical limit can be overcome by pulling more wires. Yes, more bandwidth can be allocated for wireless, but RF is already pretty crowded.
Wow, listen to you trying to sound smart. Unfortunately you failed. You don't even need to know what DNA is to understand evolution. DNA wasn't first isolated until 1869. It wasn't until 1928 that it was figured out that heredity was related to DNA, and that wasn't confirmed until 1952. Charles Darwin wrote "The Origin Of Species" in 1858. I think it is safe to say that Darwin understood the idea of evolution. By your claim, he did not. One does not need to know every detail to understand a concept. Just as you do not need to know the specific details of your processors design, the mining and processing techniques for the materials that it is made from, or the history of it's design to claim that you understand computers, one does not need to know TATA Boxes or punctuated equilibrium to understand evolution. As for lamarkian... That is a discredited theory. If your trying to sound smart, you should avoid suggestion that discredited theories are needed to understand it.
Given that there is no subject known to man that we have full information on, or for that matter, even most of the information, EVERYTHING we know is a simple model, so it's great that you think you understand more than a simple model of evolution, but please don't confuse a person with a reasonable understanding of a subject with a intellectual wanna be.
I applaud your early introduction of these concepts and I hope your child is gifted or your teaching better than that of the average school teacher
I do believe that my child won the genetic lottery, but even if we consider him to be some kind of mutant super genius, and say that a normal humans cannot be expected to understand concepts at as early an age, I don't think it it too much to expect an average 8 year old to understand concepts that he gets at 4. I certainly don't think it is too much to expect an adult to be able to comprehend concepts that he understands at 4. That being said, I would have to say that I am teaching better than the average school teacher. I have no doubt that there are some very good teachers out there, but my experience has been that they are a very small minority.
To truly understand evolution you have to understand random mutations, recessive genes, inheritance of genes, environmental pressures and how they affect survival and chances of procreation, and be able to envision all of this taking place through millions of generations of birth and death.
Really, which of those concepts are difficult for a small child to understand?
Inheritance? They hear about that from the day they are born.
Environmental pressures? Sure, death is hidden from most kids, but they find out about it anyway.
Chances of procreation? Kids understand that there are people they do and do not want to be around. Once they know where they came from, chance of procreation is simple.
Multiple generations? Kids understand repetition very well.
The two most complex ideas in there are recessive genes and random mutation. They are not really all that difficult. Once the kid understands DNA, the idea that not every instruction is expressed, and that pieces can get jumbled are not very difficult. Actually, recessive genes are not really all that important to explain evolution.
To explain evolution to my son, I made several "creatures" out of cups filled with pennies. I would mix the "DNA", when the mom and dad had a baby. I would do this over and over. Every few mixes, I would throw in a nickle or a dime. Creatures with dime traits don't survive long enough to have babies. Creatures with nickles do. Eventually, you don't have penny creatures, you have nickle creatures. I might have to review it after a few months to make sure that it is still there, but he understood it when I explained it. How do I know? Because I caught him playing evolution with some boxes of hot wheels to imbue his cars with extra features.
but I'm much more pessimistic about these things. Maybe it's just that I've spent too much time reading the absurd assertions of religious fundamentalists of late.
Your pessimism is based empirical evidence. The problem is you haven't really asked why people don't understand these concepts. It isn't because they are complex. It is because they don't have to understand them to survive, and being smart isn't cool.
theory of evolution is and it is a complex concept for children
I totally disagree with this. Evolution is an extremely simple concept for children if you humble yourself enough to accept that it is simple. It took all of 15 minutes with a few cups and ~$5 in coins to bring my 4 year old up to speed on the concept. He might not have a great grasp on what the statistical odds are of any particular mutation, but that will be easy to take care of once he gets a little more advanced in his math.
Eh... Not to call you out or anything, but George is the turtles middle name, and it is theorized by a small but loyal splinter sect that the turtle PREFERS to go by its middle name George. This bit of confusion will definitely require an extra week of the grade school kids time to cover.
7. Downloadable cover art.
I would disagree on the price though. CDs should cost $10 when I buy them in the store. An album where I have to do the manufacturing myself should be closer to $5. A single song should be closer to $.50. A cool feature to add would be to pay $15 to get the full album downloaded, with a professionally manufactured CD in the mail a few days later.
Other than the selection, there is only one thing that I think Magnatune has wrong. They should offer a high quality, suitable for printing cover art. I keep my music on CD as an archive. Even when I listen to my music from XBMC, I will often thumb through my CDs to decide what I want to listen to.
From day one, the GPL was a political document, and at no time has it ever been expressed not to be. The v3 isn't about making it more about politics and making it more restrictive. It is about plugging the loopholes that various entities have found in the wording of the origin document. Like it or hate it, claiming that the GPLs very purpose for being isn't political is just fooling yourself.
I know this is mostly off topic because the article is about free software, buy if you want to see local schools wasting money, you should come to my town. While still complaining about lack of funds for education, one of the PUBLIC high schools here not only has enough money for a pool, but they have a freaking WATERSLIDE! Not a, 'hey this 6 foot slide points into the pool' water slide. This is a two and a half story amusement park waterslide.
Speaking of LPs, I was always disappointed that during the 80s when LPs were still viable, and there weren't enough devils to go around, that nobody produced an LP with concentric spirals so that depending on which spiral you landed, you would get a different audio track. If spaced properly, you could create a record that had something like a 1 in 100 chance of playing some kind of evil message. Heck, if you did it right, you could have made it so that it would only play the second track if you started at a particular point in the middle. This could make it so that there was something like 1 in a 10000 chance of hearing that Satan was coming for your soul. And without the internet, it could take a very long time for the joke to get out.
Sure, and us Americans speak English!!!
Actually, I don't know how close French Canadian is to actual French, but I do know that American is not exactly English.
I've always hated the term "pop culture". It's basically redundant. For something to be culture, it has to be popular. Otherwise it is just some random anomaly. I do have to admit though that "pop culture" is easier to say than "parts of modern culture that I don't respect".
I don't get all the hate over noisy toys. Being noisy is part of being a kid.
I don't know if you all should love me or hate me. Given that I welcome noisy toys for my 4 year old son, either I give people an outlet to buy cool toys that they don't want in their own house (because they are noisy, or they don't have kids), or I confirm to them that noisy toys are not inherently evil.
Oddly enough, that is why I don't buy Lego for my kid. They are no longer generic building blocks. They are now poor resolution models. When I want him to do models, I will buy him models. For 'creative' building, there are still Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, and Playdough.
I wish people would be more practical in their viewpoint. I want my hardware to work not just today, but also when it is no longer bringing profit in to the manufacturer. Why won't people stop being so ideological and just USE the damn hardware if it works past the profit life of the manufacture.
Seriously, you are confusing practicality with shortsightedness. But then, I also don't charge my credit card to their limit just because I can do that NOW either. I like to look at how my actions will affect me in the long run.
Oh, I rely on someone else to fix my Free software. The difference anybody with the skill and inclination can fix it. With closed source, only a specific person with the skill and inclination can fix it. My chances with a bunch of people are much, MUCH better than my chances with a specific person to have the inclination.
Craze is right. Toshiba was making sub-notebooks over a decade ago. The OLPC is just a con job to make people think that they are donating to charity when all they are really doing is paying for someone else's R&D. At the end of the day, the OLPC is too expensive for an inferior machine.
Oh, and did you even read the link you gave? That thing claims that we were promised a $100 laptop with a high res color display and a cool Star Trek keyboard. It claims we were promised this on a computer that was solar powered. It also claims that the OLPCs were going to be donated, but as far as I have ever heard, they were in fact be sold to poor countries. If you want to convince people of your way of thinking, you might not want to link to articles that argue against your point.
If you need a kit to know if your getting your moneys worth, you probably wouldn't be getting your money's worth, even it you get the real stuff.
"famine"? "akward"?"
Your pointing out of a couple of typos is an acknowledgment that you have no VALID issues with the content.
As for the awkwardness of gal, speak for yourself. I like it just fine, and none of my gal friends complain about it.
Hence the the word "rarely". As you show, there are some people who do not feel the word is awkward. That would be why it is still a word.
Bitch is a feminine noun. It means female dog.
Bzzt. There is a small group of people that use the word bitch to mean female dog. That usage is all but depreciated from the English language. The current meaning of the word bitch is a woman who is mean. Unless you are at the Kennel Club, anyone you talk to is going to understand bitch to mean a mean female. Just try it out. Walk into work work on Monday, and start complaining that there was a bitch wandering around your neighborhood over the weekend. If you don't give any other hints that you are talking about a dog, you will likely be in a sexual harassment meeting before the day is done. Heck, if you do make it clear that you are talking about a dog, you STILL might end up with a sexual harassment complaint. Why? Because bitch does not mean female dog in modern English.
An asshole can be any gender, as both have them.
Who has one is is irrelevant. It is almost exclusively used as a male gender equivalent for bitch. Yes, prick would also be an equivalent, but that does not change the fact that asshole is almost exclusively used to refer to males that are mean. Case in point, both prick and pussy would be used to describe a male. Your trying to apply too much logic to the words that people use. Even worse, you are are trying to apply too much logic to the slang that people use. That isn't how language works.
Slut or whore ("ho") would most likely be the feminine counterpart to "gigolo".
No, the word gigolo is used specifically for someone who trades sex for money. While whore, the root of ho, started out to mean someone who exchanges sex for money, it is in transition to mean someone who has lots of sex with many different partners. Of course that is also what slut and stud mean.
Words to live by; too bad you don't.
Irony.
Like what? You can't say as a hurricane, unless the hurricane is going 24/7/365. You definitely cannot say in more extreme cold, as that would require even more energy to be accounted for.
"you'd have to pull it out of your pocket"
I find this comment funny. It is an indication of how telephones have changed at least for some demographics. I was expecting the comment to be "pick it up every few seconds".
So, where has all this heat energy gone? We know that energy is neither created nor destroyed, so it must be stored somewhere. If GLOBAL temperatures are down this year, the energy must have left the planet, been stored somewhere, or converted to some other energy or matter. Where is the energy? The deep unmonitored ocean? Increased wind velocity? increased air pressure?
Sorry dude, the feminine form of the word to "chick" is "dude". The famine form of the word "guy" is "gal", which is rarely used because "gal" sounds akward. The feminine form of the word "bitch" is "asshole". The feminine form of the word "beefcake" is "cheesecake", and the feminine form of the word "stud" is "slut" or "ho".
It would be nice if people would learn a language before whining about it.