Many Indians - so I am told by my oft-resident expert - use mobile 'phones because it is reasonable to expect them to work, which is more than can usually be said for the landlines.
If this dude is at all right (he's been on that particular bandwagon for years and scored a few wins with it), Steve needs it to buy his own personal well-fortified remotely-located tropical island retreat.
Despite the fraud 'n' stuff, I think now is probably optimax selling time for Steve anyway. Even if Microsoft still exists and prospers in 10 years (doubt it), he's planning to retire, and on top of that Microsoft pretty much seems to have stonewalled in terms of the radical new market expasion which has kept it fed and happy since birth. Like any huge animal, it may not realise that it's dead yet, but the wave it rode to power has definitely splashed up on the beach and is receding.
Keep an eye out for an article entitled The Late Great Planet Microsoft.
I think he still drives an old beat up car and lives in the same tiny house he bought in the 1950's.
We had a local little old lady who trundled about the place in rags with a shopping trolly, doing stuff like picking up cans and generally acting like a bag lady. One day she died, and a friend of mine who does a lot of stuff for the local Catholic church was one of two people tasked with sorting out her estate (she'd left everything to the local Catholic church).
She'd lived in a very old house in the middle of what is now very expensive real estate (but probably would have been twenty pounds a block when she bought). In the course of going through the house, these two men stumbled across caches of money here and there adding up to thirteen million dollars (AUD) in cash. This does not count any other assets at all. Evidently she continually felt poor, and continually responded by accumulating money.
I guess her house and land was worth an additional million or two, and a lot of her chattels were well-kept antiques which probably brought in another few million for their age value alone. Nothing was said about jewelery or investments. You and I might have trouble understanding why she or Ballmer act this way instead of hitting Phuket, DisneyWorld or Vegas, but a surprising number of people are like that, and a surprising percentage of those use that most cursed of justifications for whatever they do: "the end justfies the means" - or, to quote Daffy Duck, "Consequences? Schmonsequences! As long as I'm rich!"
In a way, I can relate to the "same tiny house" - if a house works for me, I see no reason to have to learn new paths to blunder through in the dark (e.g. when a child wakes up or nature calls), new dance steps to organise a meal in the kitchen, and so on. New for new's sake doesn't ring any bells for me. OTOH, my wife just froths at the mouth for "new" all the time. Between us, we strike a reasonable balance.
Instead of paying tax, the upper few percent pay accountants - except for a few honest ones who pay full rate and get rich anyway. It's a factor that tax law ignores almost entirely, except for sliding income scales. These tend to compensate somewhat for richer peoples' ability to afford skilled accountants. However, the compensation is somewhat uneven, and breaks down completely at a certain level.
For exmaple, Alan Bond, a local convicted thief, liar, embezzler, name it, got to live in "his wife's" house and drive around in "his wife's" car, having had a divorce-of-convenience just before the pooh hit his personal fan. The only actual penalty he suffered beyond having other peoples' money taken back off him (9% in the $ for his main company) was some time (a year? two?) on Woorooloo Prison Farm, which is pretty much like a low-budget holiday resort compared to what you and I think of as prison. If we did the same things with far lesser amounts, we'd be spending somewhere between 5 and 20 years in a real prison, and have nothing left. He's still got squillions of other people's dollar squirrelled away in overseas accounts and other rorts.
Another local example is Mark Povey of Povey Petroleum; slightly lower scale of cheating, underpaid and mistreated his staff too, but he didn't lose his house or anything, and keeps rematerialising with new rorts (ABC123 Cleaning did people's houses in more ways than one) about every year or two, each one going bankrupt and each one being a drain on the public purse (not to mention financially shafting his employees at every opportunity). And the Poveys get indignant if anyone queries this behaviour. Human nature at its best.
Being so dark, odds against us seeing it would be pretty low (it would be the closest superdense object). Or perhaps we haven't got there? We don't have any Belters yet, after all. Perhaps we should fund Rutan to build SpaceShips Two and Three to get things moving before Psstpok arrives?
Read the GPL. If you integrate GPLed code into yours and distribute it, your are obliged to distribute the source for all of it, not just the bit you stole. And that serves you right.
If SCO code made it into GPLed software without SCO's knowledge and consent, that's a perfectly ordinary copyright violation, it gets ripped out pronto (and presumably replaced - unless it's obsolete anyway), whoever put it there is liable, otherwise business as usual. Except that if it was Microsoft's code, expect yourself to vanish under a pile of lawyers which makes the Burly Brawl look like a one-on-one.
As an aside (on-topic warning?:-) SCO continued to knowingly publish the code they are now complaining about (with source) for two months after they laid the complaint. That's implicitly acknowledging that it's OK to distribute it, and effectively gives ownership to the offending code to the nominal author(s) of it anyway (and accedes to the GPL, if the "program" in question was indeed GPLed).
OpenTV haven't distributed source for their stuff - any of it - and haven't removed or rewritten what they stole, so they have been in continuous violation for two years. It seems to me that it's necessary for the FSF to sue them.
It took Microsoft more than a decade, but they eventually acknowledged the BSD authors whose software got incorporated into Windows. So far, OpenTV are worse than Microsoft. An enviable reputation?
If The SCO Group become aware that they have their "valuable IP" on FTP servers and heading out the door on CDs and do nothing to stop that (which is exactly what happened for several weeks), then it is either The SCO Group's fault that this happened, or the fault of every SCO employee who was in a position to stop the bleed and did not. I can't think of a court that wouldn't come down on the side of the former.
Now that they're aware and have taken some measures to stop the bleeding, any further bleeding is entirely The SCO Group's own corporate fault. So "existing customers" that they continue to support by shipping stuff to - including the Linux kernel source with their "valuable IP" - represent a deliberate "dilution" of the "valuable IP" by The SCO Group.
But it's worse than that: even presuming that there is some merit to their claims of IP theft (ha!), it no longer matters who "placed" the code under the GPL, because SCO have continued to ship (ie, "disclose") the source to that code themselves without removing it from the GPL, which is a clear statement that they accept the terms under which it is distributed.
But wait! It's worse than even that! (-:
In continuing to ship the code under someone else's copyright (call him/her/them/it Q) after they became aware of it they are acknowledging Q's ownership of that code... so Q now has some grounds for suing SCO for restricting distribution (of what SCO have acknowledged Q owns) contrary to the terms of the GPL which SCO have also implicitly accepted by "republishing" the code.
It's a kind of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose situation, so SCO are in the unenviable position of their best option being pressing on blindly and hoping the coin lands on its edge or the toss is cancelled.
Had the atmosphere at the time been oxidizing (basically oxygen rich), these deposits could not have formed since iron would have combined with the oxygen in the atmosphere to form rust basically (hematite, Fe2O3).
This has been addressed elsewhere in this/. story and/. already has sufficient dupes, so I won't address it again.
what hardcore rock solid evidence do YOU have that YOUR ideas are not just like every other fairy tale?
First, let's make sure that we're reading from the same page: you're asking me to compare my brand of Christianity with other religions, which you call "fairy tales". Since Materialism is as much a religious PoV as Buddhism or Jainism, not only is it a "fairy tale" but I'm also going to include that in the comparison. Also, nobody was there with a video camera, so all evidence is going to be more or less indirect. But more on that point later.
On the question of origins, there are four basic approaches (modulo some mind-bending fringe philosophies which make The Matrix look simple and tame):
No creation ("we have always been here"); herein perennialism (note: I don't know if there is any such word, nor do I care, it only needs to be obvious and unique within context);
Creation not addressed (e.g. Pantheon sprang one way or another from previously existing material/gods); herein indeterminatism;
Creation happened long ago ("once upon a time"); herein gradualism;
Creation happened recently; herein catastrophism.
While the steady-state and cyclic camps within Materialism do represent perennialism, I'm going to guess that you don't suport them, and not bother to address them (other than to say that there are many indicators which should be showing up if the universe truly were that old, and they aren't, and that some Materialist scientists are ruling out the cyclic theories).
Indeterminatism is by its nature not addressable. This simply leaves many religions out of the debate, which IMESHO is a valuable distinguishing point that disqualifies those religions due to lack of necessary authority. It should be noted that "I know we're here and I can't see any evidence of God but think evolution is a blind alley so I don't know how we got here but Creationism ain't it" perspective is a dilute form of indeterminatism. A stronger form of my invented term would be "cop out".
Gradualism is easy to speak against in many ways, but I'll keep it brief because this is not the interesting section.
One simple example: the continents. These would wear down absolutely flat within about 10 million years, leaving us a few kilometers underwater (see, the dolphins do win in the end!); if you propose to make up the difference with orogeny, first off there ain't nearly enough of it to make a difference, and second off you also need to explain why the contients, having been completely recycled at least 400 times since the formation of Earth, aren't almost entirely homogeneous instead of being, as they are, possessed of a significant amount of internal structure. AFAIK there is no suitable sorting mechanism or anything resembling a candidate. The homogeneity, by the way, is a de novo piece of reasoning; if it appears anywhere else it's a coincidence.
Another by-the-way, examples of large-scale rapid erosion like the Grand Canyon or Washington Badlands don't need to happen very often throughout history to provide a drastic shortening of that ten gigayears, and even given that timescale we should see evidence of a lot more of these features than we do, probably a handful for every hypothetical ice age.
Catastrophism splits into two camps, naturalistic (a la Velikovsky) and supernaturalisti
At least the scientific theories are dependent on the evidence.
In principle. In practice they gloss over an enormous range of inconvenient facts, pander to the personal biasses of the experimenters, and sneak in teleology at every opportunity. In short, they implicity appeal to magic as well, the only serious difference being that thier proponents are not being as honest (starting with themselves) about it.
Meanwhile, the attitude "they invoke magic, so they're not useful" is at best a bloody silly one. Materialist scientists and engineers regularly deal with factors which they don't understand or can't accurately measure, and these investigators don't throw their hands up in despair (mock despair, in your case, since if you suck people in with that attitude, it saves you having to confront those inconvenient facts), they simply apply standard error mesaurement techniques.
Creationism doesn't consist of "goddunnit, amen" any more than your Materialism consists of "time-and-chance dunnit, amen". It consists of doing perfectly ordinary science, taking as axiomatic the scientific parameters outlined in various parts of the Bible instead of taking as axiomatic the holy canticles of Materialism.
Many if not most of the scientists who defined and laid the foundations of modern, western science were Creationists, and several of the leaders in their fields today are Creationists. Serious business. You don't have to agree that Creationism is the best approach to science, but please don't be daft enough to rubbish it so childishly.
And of course, when creationist do give a scientific source for their claim the gurus at talk.origins usually only take a matter of minutes to point out that its a misquote or a misrepresented context.
Said gurus couldn't even tell the difference between Darwin and Hitler when pressed to do so by one of their opponents, why trust them for more subtle reasoning? (-:
But perhaps more important, throw Apollos, the baloney detector at any one of their pages and see what happens. Apollos is a good deal more specific and exemplified than Carl's more, er, primordial detector. G'wan, print it out and go do a few pages, you know you want to!
Look at you set of hands, one is racemic "left" and the other is racemic "right". You have a completely racemized mixture of hands. This does not deny you use of your left hand.
Your analogy is broken, or possibly just incomplete. Think of using ordinary scissors with your left hand, to get some idea. In nature, a wrong-handed molecule can, by binding incorrectly, bollox up an otherwise useful organic molecule. It is essentially operating as a poison. For a relatively harmless example, invertase binds to sites normally reserved for substances like sucrose. This provides exactly the same taste as sucrose, but the resulting combination will not digest. Harmless examples are relatively rare.
These days, his contribution is regarded as being the first of a series of studies showing that the fundamental building blocks of life are readily formed under a wide variety of conditions.
True.
Many basic blocks are still missing, and you can't do much with a pile of blocks anyway.
Most people think in terms of building a Lego lifeform, now that the blocks are available, but even building a "simple" lifeform from these bricks is somewhat akin to building a Gibraltar Bridge out of Lego (with all of the long ones missing and half of the existing pieces having the dots and dents the wrong way out, just to add insult to injury). Many others think that if you build DNA, you build life, but this is kind of like thinking that if you can just fab a raw Athlon wafer (by accident, out of sand) you've got a super-computing cluster on your hands. On top of this, life is dynamic.
A big jolt of required perspective is almost always absent when describing putative "building blocks of life". It would be fairer to say that Miller has discovered how to put some of the dimples on building blocks naturally, or perhaps that he's shown how some of the plastics of which those bluidling blocks are made could form under natural conditions.
What variations of the Fox-Miller experiment PROVE is that amino acids could have been produced by mechinisms present in the prebiotic earth.
Not quite. What they prove is that some of the simpler aminos could have been formed in conditions then presumed to have been extant early in Earth's history. Subsequent research has shown (links in other people's answers above) that the presumed conditions never existed. It also turns out that many aminos are likely to form because they represent a local energy minimum. Taking the next step is more than a little harder, as is coming up with a source for those necessary aminos which don't ever form under simple conditions.
Note that once Amino Acids from proteins, they become more stable.
Even given that this extra stability is significant (e.g., that the conditions destructive of aminos are somehow not as destructive of proteins) how is this to be achieved? In real life, the vast majority of proteins are naturally assembled only by living organisms.
You Creationist wacos realy piss me off. Who are you to define what mechinisms, the Most High God, is allowed to use in accomplishing His works.
I think you meant "whackos"; Waco is a place in Texas.
I don't think it's fair to say that Creationists define any divine mechanisms, let alone set limits on what God could use in carrying out His creative work. However, this passage...
as by one man [Adam] sin entered into the world, and death by sin (Romans 5:12)
...doesn't leave room for any death (at least human death) before Adam, which neatly eliminates evolution as a prospect. There are many other passages confirming both that principle and other principles which are exclusive of various parameters upon which evolutionary theory depends. What it comes down to is this:
Do you believe that man is cleverer than God? If so, man made God and can dictate the terms under which He operates; if not, why take the prognostications of men before the pronouncements of God?
Even if you reject all of the above, relying on an initial miracle (of conditions) or many small miracles (tweaking evolution) makes no more sense from a materialist perspective (which is what you're trying to adapt your supernaturalist faith to) than relying on an obviously interventionist miracle along the lines of "God spoke... and it was."
an obvious 'trap' is "life", e.g. if some of the AAs were incorporated into some kind of primitive self-replicator.
Just to make sure I understood you: in order to get self-replicators we need to conserve amino acids as they form. How do we do this? Why, of course! We use self-replicators.
The universe is really really big and 4 billion years is a long long time.
Not big enough and not long enough by many thousands of orders of magnitude. Also, Miller demonstrated an imperfect part of one small but necessary step; the many other steps required have not been demonstrated, most of them have not even been hypothetically explained.
If something can happen, given that much time and space you'd have a hard time convincing me that it won't happen.
No, don't tell me, let me guess... that's got more to do with your preconceptions than with the actual calculations involved?
In other words, you want it to be so, and in that light rational analysis doesn't stand a chance. Sounds like religion to me.
Porosities in clay have been proposed (and again later in the theoretical process as prosthetic "cell walls"), but they don't close the gap to any significant extent.
Aside from the reducing atmosphere, and racemisation, there's also the concentration of chemicals needed and the intrusion of pollutants. Anything like UV radiation or lightning would be pretty disruptive as well. The list goes on.
What does this mean? [...] as more amino acids were created an equal number broke down
Something like that.
(not much of a criticism?)
Actually, an essential criticism. If the conditions under which they form also destroy them, there is little chance for them to aggregate into more complex forms. And as it turns out, amino acids sit in something of a binding-energy local minimum, which would tend firstly to preserve them and secondly to mitigate against the formation of (say) proteins. DNA or even RNA are still a very, very long way up that particular energy mountain.
Carl Sagan aside, didn't Millers experiment rise above the level of fairy tale at the very least?
Miller had the guts to actually go out and try it to see what happened. That's actual hard science rather than just pontification. You've gotta salute the man for that.
However, he did that original experiment - and many followup experiments - to prove a specific ideological point. Not only did he fail to prove the point<1>, he's steadily establishing with ever greater precision and completeness that even under the most optimistic of assumptions and with the most carefully crafted of experimental rigs, life does not form spontaneously, and nor do any significant precursors to it. It would be significant if he could even establish a substantially homochiral collection of organic molecules using only bulk chemicals and believable conditions, but his work has steadfastly shown that to not be at all achievable. Rationally, Miller now needs to let go of his ideology, and won't.
<1> the original sense of the word "prove" meant "test to destruction", and in that sense Miller did "prove" his point.
Yea, like that crazy thing about men landing on the moon.
Actually, they didn't. A capsule named Eagle did. (-:
Speaking to your point, and not to your snide remark, go do some actual research on what Miller and co have been doing for the last few decades, and you'll discover that they have been steadily proving abiogenesis to be increasingly less possible. Which is exactly the oposite of what they set out to do. Oh, well.
...broke down as fast as they were made (in a carefully customised device, not in the wild), and were completely racemised at formation? Or that no evidence of a reducing atmosphere exists?
Just like every other fairy tale: exciting, adventurous, believable, and wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Many Indians - so I am told by my oft-resident expert - use mobile 'phones because it is reasonable to expect them to work, which is more than can usually be said for the landlines.
Despite the fraud 'n' stuff, I think now is probably optimax selling time for Steve anyway. Even if Microsoft still exists and prospers in 10 years (doubt it), he's planning to retire, and on top of that Microsoft pretty much seems to have stonewalled in terms of the radical new market expasion which has kept it fed and happy since birth. Like any huge animal, it may not realise that it's dead yet, but the wave it rode to power has definitely splashed up on the beach and is receding.
Keep an eye out for an article entitled The Late Great Planet Microsoft.
You become a legend in your own mind.
In everyone else's minds you become a navigation hazard.
We had a local little old lady who trundled about the place in rags with a shopping trolly, doing stuff like picking up cans and generally acting like a bag lady. One day she died, and a friend of mine who does a lot of stuff for the local Catholic church was one of two people tasked with sorting out her estate (she'd left everything to the local Catholic church).
She'd lived in a very old house in the middle of what is now very expensive real estate (but probably would have been twenty pounds a block when she bought). In the course of going through the house, these two men stumbled across caches of money here and there adding up to thirteen million dollars (AUD) in cash. This does not count any other assets at all. Evidently she continually felt poor, and continually responded by accumulating money.
I guess her house and land was worth an additional million or two, and a lot of her chattels were well-kept antiques which probably brought in another few million for their age value alone. Nothing was said about jewelery or investments. You and I might have trouble understanding why she or Ballmer act this way instead of hitting Phuket, DisneyWorld or Vegas, but a surprising number of people are like that, and a surprising percentage of those use that most cursed of justifications for whatever they do: "the end justfies the means" - or, to quote Daffy Duck, "Consequences? Schmonsequences! As long as I'm rich!"
In a way, I can relate to the "same tiny house" - if a house works for me, I see no reason to have to learn new paths to blunder through in the dark (e.g. when a child wakes up or nature calls), new dance steps to organise a meal in the kitchen, and so on. New for new's sake doesn't ring any bells for me. OTOH, my wife just froths at the mouth for "new" all the time. Between us, we strike a reasonable balance.
"Life's been good to me so far..."
Instead of paying tax, the upper few percent pay accountants - except for a few honest ones who pay full rate and get rich anyway. It's a factor that tax law ignores almost entirely, except for sliding income scales. These tend to compensate somewhat for richer peoples' ability to afford skilled accountants. However, the compensation is somewhat uneven, and breaks down completely at a certain level.
For exmaple, Alan Bond, a local convicted thief, liar, embezzler, name it, got to live in "his wife's" house and drive around in "his wife's" car, having had a divorce-of-convenience just before the pooh hit his personal fan. The only actual penalty he suffered beyond having other peoples' money taken back off him (9% in the $ for his main company) was some time (a year? two?) on Woorooloo Prison Farm, which is pretty much like a low-budget holiday resort compared to what you and I think of as prison. If we did the same things with far lesser amounts, we'd be spending somewhere between 5 and 20 years in a real prison, and have nothing left. He's still got squillions of other people's dollar squirrelled away in overseas accounts and other rorts.
Another local example is Mark Povey of Povey Petroleum; slightly lower scale of cheating, underpaid and mistreated his staff too, but he didn't lose his house or anything, and keeps rematerialising with new rorts (ABC123 Cleaning did people's houses in more ways than one) about every year or two, each one going bankrupt and each one being a drain on the public purse (not to mention financially shafting his employees at every opportunity). And the Poveys get indignant if anyone queries this behaviour. Human nature at its best.
Being so dark, odds against us seeing it would be pretty low (it would be the closest superdense object). Or perhaps we haven't got there? We don't have any Belters yet, after all. Perhaps we should fund Rutan to build SpaceShips Two and Three to get things moving before Psstpok arrives?
RPG-II, assembly, hex/octal, flyleads, soldering iron, rocks? A heirarchy of sorts? (-:
Read the GPL. If you integrate GPLed code into yours and distribute it, your are obliged to distribute the source for all of it, not just the bit you stole. And that serves you right.
:-) SCO continued to knowingly publish the code they are now complaining about (with source) for two months after they laid the complaint. That's implicitly acknowledging that it's OK to distribute it, and effectively gives ownership to the offending code to the nominal author(s) of it anyway (and accedes to the GPL, if the "program" in question was indeed GPLed).
If SCO code made it into GPLed software without SCO's knowledge and consent, that's a perfectly ordinary copyright violation, it gets ripped out pronto (and presumably replaced - unless it's obsolete anyway), whoever put it there is liable, otherwise business as usual. Except that if it was Microsoft's code, expect yourself to vanish under a pile of lawyers which makes the Burly Brawl look like a one-on-one.
As an aside (on-topic warning?
OpenTV haven't distributed source for their stuff - any of it - and haven't removed or rewritten what they stole, so they have been in continuous violation for two years. It seems to me that it's necessary for the FSF to sue them.
It took Microsoft more than a decade, but they eventually acknowledged the BSD authors whose software got incorporated into Windows. So far, OpenTV are worse than Microsoft. An enviable reputation?
If The SCO Group become aware that they have their "valuable IP" on FTP servers and heading out the door on CDs and do nothing to stop that (which is exactly what happened for several weeks), then it is either The SCO Group's fault that this happened, or the fault of every SCO employee who was in a position to stop the bleed and did not. I can't think of a court that wouldn't come down on the side of the former.
Now that they're aware and have taken some measures to stop the bleeding, any further bleeding is entirely The SCO Group's own corporate fault. So "existing customers" that they continue to support by shipping stuff to - including the Linux kernel source with their "valuable IP" - represent a deliberate "dilution" of the "valuable IP" by The SCO Group.
But it's worse than that: even presuming that there is some merit to their claims of IP theft (ha!), it no longer matters who "placed" the code under the GPL, because SCO have continued to ship (ie, "disclose") the source to that code themselves without removing it from the GPL, which is a clear statement that they accept the terms under which it is distributed.
But wait! It's worse than even that! (-:
In continuing to ship the code under someone else's copyright (call him/her/them/it Q) after they became aware of it they are acknowledging Q's ownership of that code... so Q now has some grounds for suing SCO for restricting distribution (of what SCO have acknowledged Q owns) contrary to the terms of the GPL which SCO have also implicitly accepted by "republishing" the code.
It's a kind of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose situation, so SCO are in the unenviable position of their best option being pressing on blindly and hoping the coin lands on its edge or the toss is cancelled.
Much smoke and brilliant flashes.
This has been addressed elsewhere in this /. story and /. already has sufficient dupes, so I won't address it again.
First, let's make sure that we're reading from the same page: you're asking me to compare my brand of Christianity with other religions, which you call "fairy tales". Since Materialism is as much a religious PoV as Buddhism or Jainism, not only is it a "fairy tale" but I'm also going to include that in the comparison. Also, nobody was there with a video camera, so all evidence is going to be more or less indirect. But more on that point later.
On the question of origins, there are four basic approaches (modulo some mind-bending fringe philosophies which make The Matrix look simple and tame):
While the steady-state and cyclic camps within Materialism do represent perennialism, I'm going to guess that you don't suport them, and not bother to address them (other than to say that there are many indicators which should be showing up if the universe truly were that old, and they aren't, and that some Materialist scientists are ruling out the cyclic theories).
Indeterminatism is by its nature not addressable. This simply leaves many religions out of the debate, which IMESHO is a valuable distinguishing point that disqualifies those religions due to lack of necessary authority. It should be noted that "I know we're here and I can't see any evidence of God but think evolution is a blind alley so I don't know how we got here but Creationism ain't it" perspective is a dilute form of indeterminatism. A stronger form of my invented term would be "cop out".
Gradualism is easy to speak against in many ways, but I'll keep it brief because this is not the interesting section.
One simple example: the continents. These would wear down absolutely flat within about 10 million years, leaving us a few kilometers underwater (see, the dolphins do win in the end!); if you propose to make up the difference with orogeny, first off there ain't nearly enough of it to make a difference, and second off you also need to explain why the contients, having been completely recycled at least 400 times since the formation of Earth, aren't almost entirely homogeneous instead of being, as they are, possessed of a significant amount of internal structure. AFAIK there is no suitable sorting mechanism or anything resembling a candidate. The homogeneity, by the way, is a de novo piece of reasoning; if it appears anywhere else it's a coincidence.
Another by-the-way, examples of large-scale rapid erosion like the Grand Canyon or Washington Badlands don't need to happen very often throughout history to provide a drastic shortening of that ten gigayears, and even given that timescale we should see evidence of a lot more of these features than we do, probably a handful for every hypothetical ice age.
Catastrophism splits into two camps, naturalistic (a la Velikovsky) and supernaturalisti
In principle. In practice they gloss over an enormous range of inconvenient facts, pander to the personal biasses of the experimenters, and sneak in teleology at every opportunity. In short, they implicity appeal to magic as well, the only serious difference being that thier proponents are not being as honest (starting with themselves) about it.
Meanwhile, the attitude "they invoke magic, so they're not useful" is at best a bloody silly one. Materialist scientists and engineers regularly deal with factors which they don't understand or can't accurately measure, and these investigators don't throw their hands up in despair (mock despair, in your case, since if you suck people in with that attitude, it saves you having to confront those inconvenient facts), they simply apply standard error mesaurement techniques.
Creationism doesn't consist of "goddunnit, amen" any more than your Materialism consists of "time-and-chance dunnit, amen". It consists of doing perfectly ordinary science, taking as axiomatic the scientific parameters outlined in various parts of the Bible instead of taking as axiomatic the holy canticles of Materialism.
Many if not most of the scientists who defined and laid the foundations of modern, western science were Creationists, and several of the leaders in their fields today are Creationists. Serious business. You don't have to agree that Creationism is the best approach to science, but please don't be daft enough to rubbish it so childishly.
Cop out.
If it doesn't follow, you need to specify at least one more alternative.
Said gurus couldn't even tell the difference between Darwin and Hitler when pressed to do so by one of their opponents, why trust them for more subtle reasoning? (-:
But perhaps more important, throw Apollos, the baloney detector at any one of their pages and see what happens. Apollos is a good deal more specific and exemplified than Carl's more, er, primordial detector. G'wan, print it out and go do a few pages, you know you want to!
Your analogy is broken, or possibly just incomplete. Think of using ordinary scissors with your left hand, to get some idea. In nature, a wrong-handed molecule can, by binding incorrectly, bollox up an otherwise useful organic molecule. It is essentially operating as a poison. For a relatively harmless example, invertase binds to sites normally reserved for substances like sucrose. This provides exactly the same taste as sucrose, but the resulting combination will not digest. Harmless examples are relatively rare.
True.
Many basic blocks are still missing, and you can't do much with a pile of blocks anyway.
Most people think in terms of building a Lego lifeform, now that the blocks are available, but even building a "simple" lifeform from these bricks is somewhat akin to building a Gibraltar Bridge out of Lego (with all of the long ones missing and half of the existing pieces having the dots and dents the wrong way out, just to add insult to injury). Many others think that if you build DNA, you build life, but this is kind of like thinking that if you can just fab a raw Athlon wafer (by accident, out of sand) you've got a super-computing cluster on your hands. On top of this, life is dynamic.
A big jolt of required perspective is almost always absent when describing putative "building blocks of life". It would be fairer to say that Miller has discovered how to put some of the dimples on building blocks naturally, or perhaps that he's shown how some of the plastics of which those bluidling blocks are made could form under natural conditions.
Not quite. What they prove is that some of the simpler aminos could have been formed in conditions then presumed to have been extant early in Earth's history. Subsequent research has shown (links in other people's answers above) that the presumed conditions never existed. It also turns out that many aminos are likely to form because they represent a local energy minimum. Taking the next step is more than a little harder, as is coming up with a source for those necessary aminos which don't ever form under simple conditions.
Even given that this extra stability is significant (e.g., that the conditions destructive of aminos are somehow not as destructive of proteins) how is this to be achieved? In real life, the vast majority of proteins are naturally assembled only by living organisms.
I think you meant "whackos"; Waco is a place in Texas.
I don't think it's fair to say that Creationists define any divine mechanisms, let alone set limits on what God could use in carrying out His creative work. However, this passage...
...doesn't leave room for any death (at least human death) before Adam, which neatly eliminates evolution as a prospect. There are many other passages confirming both that principle and other principles which are exclusive of various parameters upon which evolutionary theory depends. What it comes down to is this:
Do you believe that man is cleverer than God? If so, man made God and can dictate the terms under which He operates; if not, why take the prognostications of men before the pronouncements of God?
Even if you reject all of the above, relying on an initial miracle (of conditions) or many small miracles (tweaking evolution) makes no more sense from a materialist perspective (which is what you're trying to adapt your supernaturalist faith to) than relying on an obviously interventionist miracle along the lines of "God spoke... and it was."
Just to make sure I understood you: in order to get self-replicators we need to conserve amino acids as they form. How do we do this? Why, of course! We use self-replicators.
What can I say? "D'oh" seems to cover it all. (-:
Not big enough and not long enough by many thousands of orders of magnitude. Also, Miller demonstrated an imperfect part of one small but necessary step; the many other steps required have not been demonstrated, most of them have not even been hypothetically explained.
No, don't tell me, let me guess... that's got more to do with your preconceptions than with the actual calculations involved?
In other words, you want it to be so, and in that light rational analysis doesn't stand a chance. Sounds like religion to me.
Porosities in clay have been proposed (and again later in the theoretical process as prosthetic "cell walls"), but they don't close the gap to any significant extent.
Aside from the reducing atmosphere, and racemisation, there's also the concentration of chemicals needed and the intrusion of pollutants. Anything like UV radiation or lightning would be pretty disruptive as well. The list goes on.
And unfortunately also the last.
Something like that.
Actually, an essential criticism. If the conditions under which they form also destroy them, there is little chance for them to aggregate into more complex forms. And as it turns out, amino acids sit in something of a binding-energy local minimum, which would tend firstly to preserve them and secondly to mitigate against the formation of (say) proteins. DNA or even RNA are still a very, very long way up that particular energy mountain.
Miller had the guts to actually go out and try it to see what happened. That's actual hard science rather than just pontification. You've gotta salute the man for that.
However, he did that original experiment - and many followup experiments - to prove a specific ideological point. Not only did he fail to prove the point<1>, he's steadily establishing with ever greater precision and completeness that even under the most optimistic of assumptions and with the most carefully crafted of experimental rigs, life does not form spontaneously, and nor do any significant precursors to it. It would be significant if he could even establish a substantially homochiral collection of organic molecules using only bulk chemicals and believable conditions, but his work has steadfastly shown that to not be at all achievable. Rationally, Miller now needs to let go of his ideology, and won't.
<1> the original sense of the word "prove" meant "test to destruction", and in that sense Miller did "prove" his point.
Actually, they didn't. A capsule named Eagle did. (-:
Speaking to your point, and not to your snide remark, go do some actual research on what Miller and co have been doing for the last few decades, and you'll discover that they have been steadily proving abiogenesis to be increasingly less possible. Which is exactly the oposite of what they set out to do. Oh, well.
...broke down as fast as they were made (in a carefully customised device, not in the wild), and were completely racemised at formation? Or that no evidence of a reducing atmosphere exists?
Just like every other fairy tale: exciting, adventurous, believable, and wrong.