The report may originally have been intended for GA Sullivan, who are quite obviously lovestruck with Microsoft at the moment, or initiated by Greg Sullivan, an MS product manager wishing hard that XP had been more successful.
...and took that as `writing on the wall' - to wit, `your kingdom has been judged, and found wanting.' Since MS have fiddled their retirement plans, their lackeys have little to lose by being honest.
Since everything technical on the site (except for the actual hosting) sings rapt praises of Microsoft, it's pretty difficult to avoid the conclusion that MS don't so much sponsor as own AdTI.
There is a lot more strangeness tucked away in that document than ever men dreamed of. For example, it was produced from a Microsoft Word document named `sullivan' - who is Sullivan?
Now that it is for sale (!), if anyone wants to see the very last free revision (with some fixed figures etc) with a view to mirroring and linking from here, please email me and ask.
Within a few days (work commitments), an updated and more detailed version of this analysis will be up, including commentary on the diffs. A word-by-word diff is most enlightening. An incomplete summary of the diffs is up here for the curious-but-lazy.
It does look very much like AdTI simply ran the controversy up in order to raise hits, which they are now converting into sales.
I run Linux. I forwarded a copy of a virus message to a (Linux) mailing list one day - the text was amusing - and forgot to strip off the infected attachments. Needless to say, the fact that the message `originated' from a non-virus-running Linux box didn't help the 4 or 5 Windows users who didn't have up-to-date virus scanners running at the time.
And if these things which have been upheld as taking aeons took minutes or months, what of other measures?
You're trying to make blanket rules from a single or a few events. It doesn't work that way.
I agree so much, and we're probably also agreed that extrapolation in general is a risky business?
The reason that agreement here is important is because the original assignments of dates to indicator fossils and rock types was entirely arbitrary, and the methods used to `cross-check' these assignments - extrapolatory in nature - have repeatedly been demonstrated to be unreliable, often producing bizarre dates (by anyone's standards) or conflicting with each other.
What this means is that on one hand we have many events/processes known to have been rapid and/or recent, and on the other hand many similar events/processes assumed to be slow and/or ancient. While the burden of convention lies with the known-rapid instances, the burden of actual proof still rests with the assumed-gradual instances. In many cases the rapidity/recency is even derived from direct observation, rather than deduced.
There is nothing - nothing! in geology that says that things cannot happen quickly.
The forests weren't flattened, that's the whole point, and the surrounding rock is alluvial
I will note however, that I can think of decade or less timespan processes that could have covered up the trees the way you describe. Ash falls, for instance.
P'raps I'd better describe some more, then. The trees are based on a number of levels, and have had their roots and branches stripped. Presumably before they were emplaced. Most are vertical.
I'd like to know what the compression ratio of the surrounding rock to the tree material was.
It's all around you. You are proof, too. Every feature of you, but for the existence of God, is at the end of a very long chain of water-flowing-uphill-style materialistic miracles. Occam's Razor says: the simplest explanation wins. The God Hypothesis requires many orders of magnitude fewer miracles than the No God Hypothesis, so it is much more reasonable to accept it.
What you are basically saying is that since I exist, and reality exists, and it's unlikely and against the odds that this would happen, therefore the fact that it DID happen must mean that the universe was created
Interesting that you should use relative terms like `unlikely' when referring to the observations - but absolute, unreasonable terms when referring to the conclusions. In practice it's the other way around.
It is literally impossible to get from goo to you gradually. Each of gazillions of gradual steps along the way has to be independently viable, and the prospective evolvee often faces paradoxes like: if a change is large enough to be selected for and not against, it requires a stupendous number of very specific helpful things to have happened at once, and no bad ones, to a single organism's genes - and be genetically dominant each time - and to drive competing genes from the race each time..
Often the helpful things are mutually exclusive. For a simple example, water is essential to life, but quickly destroys most precursors. For a more complex example, the entire blood-clotting cascade has to have been emplaced in one go, because if any part is missing or defective, the organism either bleeds to death on the first cut, or solidifies. Half-done structures are ecologically expensive, so are selected aganst fairly swiftly.
Many otherwise sober scientists go on imaginitive hypothetical romps when faced with problems like this, but I presume that fairy tales are not the stuff of which rational conclusions are made.
Each impossibility, each miracle, has to have happened in different ways many millions of times on the path from rocks to rambutans. One impossibility is impossible, so what is a million of them?
Now we turn to evidence of a creator. Sensible but otherwise impossible arrangements are exactly the situation which creatorship would be expected to produce.
We can be more specific than this. Since many biological systems are imperfect, we can deduce that their creator was either imperfect, or has let them be damaged.
It so happens that the God of scripture is recorded as having cursed his creation, so if this candidate was the right one, we would expect to find damaged biosystems in his world.
And so on. How much detail do you want to go into? I invokes Occam because this is in principle and practice the most straightforward explanation, sans a requirement for strict materialism.
BTW, if./ freezes this thread before we finish, email me so we can rant at each other in convenience.
The header reflects their mod of Apache. AdTI probably have no clue what powers their site. I base this conclusion on their fairly complete lack of a clue in any other technical area.
I can make an infinite number of balls. You can play with one provided that you are also willing to clone and hand it on. If you nail my balls to something you own, you must do the same with the entire object. Putting my balls in a ziplock bag with other people's balls is philosophically safe, I won't speak to the health issues.
Still deficient, because it makes no distinction between source and binary, but better.
Run a Linux or BSD box in bridge mode and it can be an invisible network link, monitoring or altering through traffic and the only external symptom is that it's slightly slower than a piece of wire.
I'm not sure how GPL would help a missile-tracking system, but Open Sourcing certain missile _guidance_ systems in the hope that your enemy adopted them would be a useful cold-war tactic. )-:
When I'm sitting on a large Airbus over many kilometers of thin air, it would cheers me to know that the code flying it had been `randomly' audited in an open source fashion in addition to the normal checks. It wouldn't be accessible to crackers (nobody would be twit enough to put an airliner's control systems anywhere near the internet), but finding a suitable platform to run it up on in your shed might be a hassle.
`Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.' Hmmm. So in AdeT's view, restricting Gummint to OSS is socialist, but OSS itself is democratic in nature?
He as a word to Microsft as well: `Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.' (-:
Not at 2GHz. But a modular design with different components in the grunt stage (ie `switch' with an SMD iron). Also, a 10W 2GHz-capable RF power transistor is going to run you a little, so don't blow the sucker up! If you're throwing that many watts, have you considered a phased array of Milo tins? You could probably get near 40dB...
We have 35km to cover, so will probably need carefully-adjusted tins at both ends or a relay hop.
I politely told them they were being silly before the release, and why, and some of their caveats bear a suspicious similarity to some of my points. I haven't been paid anything for trimming back their embarrassment.
Perhaps Microsoft own Saab? Some Saabs carry a sticker saying `made by trolls in trollhagen'.
That's nothing compared to the cost of a single panorama from the Venera probe series. Considering the number of probes they vapourised under testing here on Earth and killed on the way down to Venus, probably in the tens of megabucks per bit, for a few thousand bits.
They also sent back most of the first picture from the Moon after several failures and had the sender die partway through the image, using earlier, perhaps therefore costlier technology, but OTOH also had a bathtub rover (Lunakhod) up there running around for years taking holiday snaps.
Either project covers a lot of goats, a lot of sex, or both.
I don't know how you bitify handwriting, but the Yanks spent a bazillion dollars developing a pen that worked in vacuum at any temperature. The Russians used a pencil.
Slashdot Mirror
The report may originally have been intended for GA Sullivan, who are quite obviously lovestruck with Microsoft at the moment, or initiated by Greg Sullivan, an MS product manager wishing hard that XP had been more successful.
...and took that as `writing on the wall' - to wit, `your kingdom has been judged, and found wanting.' Since MS have fiddled their retirement plans, their lackeys have little to lose by being honest.
/ME picks up his jaw from the floor. Mozilla? Light? Is this some kind of antonym game?
Try Galeon or SkipStone - still Gecko, but much lighter - and be amazed.
As to W3C, she ain't what she used to be...
...you can't read text, and pr0n sites are how you got that way...
Since everything technical on the site (except for the actual hosting) sings rapt praises of Microsoft, it's pretty difficult to avoid the conclusion that MS don't so much sponsor as own AdTI.
There is a lot more strangeness tucked away in that document than ever men dreamed of. For example, it was produced from a Microsoft Word document named `sullivan' - who is Sullivan?
Now that it is for sale (!), if anyone wants to see the very last free revision (with some fixed figures etc) with a view to mirroring and linking from here, please email me and ask.
Within a few days (work commitments), an updated and more detailed version of this analysis will be up, including commentary on the diffs. A word-by-word diff is most enlightening. An incomplete summary of the diffs is up here for the curious-but-lazy.
It does look very much like AdTI simply ran the controversy up in order to raise hits, which they are now converting into sales.
LindowsOS runs as root and is now being sold with some WalMart computers. Oops.
I run Linux. I forwarded a copy of a virus message to a (Linux) mailing list one day - the text was amusing - and forgot to strip off the infected attachments. Needless to say, the fact that the message `originated' from a non-virus-running Linux box didn't help the 4 or 5 Windows users who didn't have up-to-date virus scanners running at the time.
...and much more effective than any certification.
...is that nobody ever does anything about it... (-:
I agree so much, and we're probably also agreed that extrapolation in general is a risky business?
The reason that agreement here is important is because the original assignments of dates to indicator fossils and rock types was entirely arbitrary, and the methods used to `cross-check' these assignments - extrapolatory in nature - have repeatedly been demonstrated to be unreliable, often producing bizarre dates (by anyone's standards) or conflicting with each other.
What this means is that on one hand we have many events/processes known to have been rapid and/or recent, and on the other hand many similar events/processes assumed to be slow and/or ancient. While the burden of convention lies with the known-rapid instances, the burden of actual proof still rests with the assumed-gradual instances. In many cases the rapidity/recency is even derived from direct observation, rather than deduced.
Good. (-:
P'raps I'd better describe some more, then. The trees are based on a number of levels, and have had their roots and branches stripped. Presumably before they were emplaced. Most are vertical.
Don't have that to hand, but some Googling on "yellowstone dendrochronology" shows a few likely candied dates.
Interesting that you should use relative terms like `unlikely' when referring to the observations - but absolute, unreasonable terms when referring to the conclusions. In practice it's the other way around.
It is literally impossible to get from goo to you gradually. Each of gazillions of gradual steps along the way has to be independently viable, and the prospective evolvee often faces paradoxes like: if a change is large enough to be selected for and not against, it requires a stupendous number of very specific helpful things to have happened at once, and no bad ones, to a single organism's genes - and be genetically dominant each time - and to drive competing genes from the race each time..
Often the helpful things are mutually exclusive. For a simple example, water is essential to life, but quickly destroys most precursors. For a more complex example, the entire blood-clotting cascade has to have been emplaced in one go, because if any part is missing or defective, the organism either bleeds to death on the first cut, or solidifies. Half-done structures are ecologically expensive, so are selected aganst fairly swiftly.
Many otherwise sober scientists go on imaginitive hypothetical romps when faced with problems like this, but I presume that fairy tales are not the stuff of which rational conclusions are made.
Each impossibility, each miracle, has to have happened in different ways many millions of times on the path from rocks to rambutans. One impossibility is impossible, so what is a million of them?
Now we turn to evidence of a creator. Sensible but otherwise impossible arrangements are exactly the situation which creatorship would be expected to produce.
We can be more specific than this. Since many biological systems are imperfect, we can deduce that their creator was either imperfect, or has let them be damaged.
It so happens that the God of scripture is recorded as having cursed his creation, so if this candidate was the right one, we would expect to find damaged biosystems in his world.
And so on. How much detail do you want to go into? I invokes Occam because this is in principle and practice the most straightforward explanation, sans a requirement for strict materialism.
BTW, if
The header reflects their mod of Apache. AdTI probably have no clue what powers their site. I base this conclusion on their fairly complete lack of a clue in any other technical area.
I do appreciate the lack of hidden agendae. (-:
I can make an infinite number of balls. You can play with one provided that you are also willing to clone and hand it on. If you nail my balls to something you own, you must do the same with the entire object. Putting my balls in a ziplock bag with other people's balls is philosophically safe, I won't speak to the health issues.
Still deficient, because it makes no distinction between source and binary, but better.
Throw the rebuttal URLs at every journo and talkback you can find. And the MITRE study in particular, it has immense credibility.
And don't forget mine, either! (-:
...you should switch back now (please mirror this under the FDL) blow by blow.
Run a Linux or BSD box in bridge mode and it can be an invisible network link, monitoring or altering through traffic and the only external symptom is that it's slightly slower than a piece of wire.
I'm not sure how GPL would help a missile-tracking system, but Open Sourcing certain missile _guidance_ systems in the hope that your enemy adopted them would be a useful cold-war tactic. )-:
When I'm sitting on a large Airbus over many kilometers of thin air, it would cheers me to know that the code flying it had been `randomly' audited in an open source fashion in addition to the normal checks. It wouldn't be accessible to crackers (nobody would be twit enough to put an airliner's control systems anywhere near the internet), but finding a suitable platform to run it up on in your shed might be a hassle.
Purveyors of `hard' science like physics, geology and biology are as prone to opinionitis as anybody.
Whenever someone says `think tank' I always associate it with `drunk tank'. Not sure why, but it works reasonably well in practice. (-:
Too late. He died in 1859, got a weejie board? (-:
Google, 0.27 seconds. Slack.
Several from here
`Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.' Hmmm. So in AdeT's view, restricting Gummint to OSS is socialist, but OSS itself is democratic in nature?
He as a word to Microsft as well: `Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.' (-:
Not at 2GHz. But a modular design with different components in the grunt stage (ie `switch' with an SMD iron). Also, a 10W 2GHz-capable RF power transistor is going to run you a little, so don't blow the sucker up! If you're throwing that many watts, have you considered a phased array of Milo tins? You could probably get near 40dB...
We have 35km to cover, so will probably need carefully-adjusted tins at both ends or a relay hop.
I politely told them they were being silly before the release, and why, and some of their caveats bear a suspicious similarity to some of my points. I haven't been paid anything for trimming back their embarrassment.
Perhaps Microsoft own Saab? Some Saabs carry a sticker saying `made by trolls in trollhagen'.
That's nothing compared to the cost of a single panorama from the Venera probe series. Considering the number of probes they vapourised under testing here on Earth and killed on the way down to Venus, probably in the tens of megabucks per bit, for a few thousand bits.
They also sent back most of the first picture from the Moon after several failures and had the sender die partway through the image, using earlier, perhaps therefore costlier technology, but OTOH also had a bathtub rover (Lunakhod) up there running around for years taking holiday snaps.
Either project covers a lot of goats, a lot of sex, or both.
I don't know how you bitify handwriting, but the Yanks spent a bazillion dollars developing a pen that worked in vacuum at any temperature. The Russians used a pencil.