On one hand we try to teach our children that its important to exercise critical thinking. Then parents / teachers etc. turn around an claim silly stories written by ignorant men 2K or 1.4K years ago should be believed on Faith.
Well, several flies, actually.
First of all, the `silly stories' in question include instruction to test things out for yourself, and only keep the bits that work.
Secondly, the archaeology in the silly stories is better than outside them, and has been for nigh on 2k years.
Thirdly, said silly stories happen to frequently predict the future (from the writers' POV) with pinpoint accuracy, and also record fulfilments of some earlier predictions.
Fourthly, physical copies of texts from before 2k years ago have been found, and despite claims of babelfishing, they're still accurate.
Fifthly, to believe in evolution, you have to lay aside critical thinking. Really! Ask Steve Gould and the other punkeekers to show you why Darwinian evolution doesn't work, and he will. Ask their Darwinian opponents to show you why punkeek doesn't work, and they will. End of story. No Creationism, `silly stories' or even Intelligent Design, required so far.
Now: get a life to replace your broken opinion! (-:
insisting on darwinian evolution as the only modifying force on biological structure is a common fallacy.
No coprolites? (-:
If you were to read Kauffman, "The Origins of Order" (Oxford University Press, 1993), you'd get a fairly solid mathematical treatment of how chaos and order combine on the boundary between them to self-modify.
You have no idea how refreshing it is to get a sensible response! (-:
Unfortunately for the actual argument, which is a shame because it would be such an elegant solution and open up whole new areas of science if it were plausible, Kauffman gets short shrift from Michael Behe: `Kauffman discusses his ideas in a chapter [of The Origins of Order] titled "The Origin of A Connected Metabolism," but if you read the chapter from start to finish you will not find the name of single chemical - no AMP, no aspartic acid, no nothing. In fact, if you scan the entire subject index of the book, you will not find a chemical name there either. John Maynard Smith, Kauffman's old mentor, has accused him of practicing "fact-free science."' This is amid a lot of railing about how mathematics is disconnected from practice. If you read the linked page, you'll shortcut a significant amount of objecting. (-:
Happy licencing issues, and don't tell the BSA (98's licence isn't transferable).
Try KOffice or AmiPro under FluxBox on a cut-down Linux kernel, it'll fly on those boxes - and keep OpenOffice.org around for compatibility reasons, even if it runs like a 3-legged centipede in 32M. Alternatively, run them LTSP off a single decent server.
IMESHO, the right question should be `Are scientists perfectly correct, unbiassed and 100% trustworthy?'
The survey answer, however stuffed and rounded, answered `no' and for a change got the answer right (-: still IMESHO:-).
Scientists are as human as the rest of us and have pressures like job security, tenure, avoidance of boat-rocking and peer pressure driving them.
So... if you turn up something embarrassing, unless you're a rare individual (find `Missoula'), you either don't publish it, or waffle around the consequences in the hope of getting credit for the work and not damnation for where it leads.
MS-Word 97 sometimes won't read docs from (for example) MS-Word 2000 or MS-Word XP. In those circumstances I've used StarOffice 5.2 to reprocess the document and make it work. OpenOffice.org would probably do an even better job of it.
Come to think of it, why bother keeping MS-Office? It's only another invitation for the BSA (BSAA in Oz) to bitchslap you for not having a matching holo-sticker.
Also, if office work is all that the machine is doing, upgrade it to Linux. Mandrake 8.2 even comes with OO. Let's see the BSA fine you for that. Buy a decent scanner for each office cluster out of the savings, and SANE it so all can play.
No, he's building new boxes. Even if he wasn't, no MS OS licence has allowed `recycling' after Windows 95, so changing the CPU would axe the licence.
Mandrake Linux's licence allows you to recycle an installation. Come to think of it, you're also allowed to copy an existing installation, install as amny times as you like from the Download CD set, benchmark it against other things, use an unlimited number of seats, and comes with OpenOffice.org 641D. Oh, and even if you spot Mandrake $50 a machine, that works out at around 1/10 of the cost of MS-Windows+MS-Office, and no free viruses.
...at least, it's a 450MHz Celeron, running Mandrake Linux 8.2 which came with OpenOffice.org 641d. It does all I ask of it, even OCR and stuff, without complaining. Not sure why you would want a P4 sace heater when a fast P3 gets 90% of the work done for 50% of the power. The reduction in the dotcom's power bill would probably pay for a second processor over a couple of years.
Sorry, but the second that you add supernatural, you make the following to be meaningful:
Explain the data
Be falsifiable
Make predictions.
Errr, I couldn't agree more...? (-: I think you meant to say `meaningless'. Pressing on with that assumption:
Creationism.
Explain the data
Goddoneit
Be falsifiable
Goddoneit, and then made it look different (think of the "Flood").
Predictions
Godwilldoitagain
This seems to be your favourite strawman.
I don't see why you expect God to make a special and unprovoked exception in, for example, whether your car starts on a given day or not. Cars have run for very long distances without petrol in response to prayer, but I don't expect that this is an experiment which would work very well for someone in your frame of mind.
Before we look for some realistic answers for you, let's phrase your response after the same pattern, but from an evolutionary perspective - just to see how it looks.
Explain the data
Chance done it. Who can explain chance?
Be falsifiable
It had to be chance because no other forces are at work, we excluded them by definition. Who needs falsifiable?
Predictions
We're all going to die.
...or, on a slightly more serious note...
Explain the data
It's mostly missing, but we think chance done it, otherwise we risk having to submit to an external authority, and we wouldn't like that
Be falsifiable
Since we can be bent to fit any shape, twisted to explain anything - in the absence of observation - we can explain it away even if we can't be falsified
Predictions
Completely random formation of characteristics, little stability of characteristics, little if any speciation, gobs of transitional forms in the fossil record... oops.
Now a more realistic Creationist perspective (Creationism and Materialism aren't the only possible perspectives):
Explain the data
The earth was created de novo, ex nihilo, kiloyears ago, and then totally inundated some centuries later.
Be falsifiable
Continents have not had time to wear down, rivers have not had time to cut long beds or deposit more than several thousand annual layers of silt, helium, salt and other environmental substances have not had time to reach equilibrium. If they have, the theory is false.
Predictions
Large numbers of well speciated fossils will be found within alluvial and volcanic rock, usually buried with signs of great violence and/or speed. Alluvial rock layers will often be found to be thin, relatively homogeneous, and widespread. Layers will follow a general order which varies gradually with location, but occasionally will be found disordered, even reversed. Occasional rock formations will be hairpinned. Strata will occasionally exhibit Z-shaped seams. Etc ad nauseum...
Nick off, you're scaring the crows...
BTW, I think/. character-per-line counting sucks, not to mention that you can fool it, kinda, and that it leads to padding, rather than to concise, direct reasoning and expression. The only reason for this paragraph's existence is to bump that CPL figure up past 35 from about 24. Waffle, waffle, waffle. The internet regards all blockages (such as censorship and pointless rules for posting comments) as errors and routes around them, don't'cha know? So if/. will kindly nudge the limt down to about 20, everyone can get on with their lives with no loss of functionality to this accursed weblog. Type, type, type, yawn, yawn, yawn, 35.7 and counting, type type type type type type type type yadda yadda yadda drone drone drone drone waffle waffle jaw jaw rabbit on gibber gibber. 37.6 blah blah blah and on and on and on, sigh. 38.0 blah blah blah and on and on and on, blah blah blah and on and on and on some more. Steadily the annoying counter is nudged upwards. Nudge, nudge, push I think I'll switch to kuro5hin now. Yay, we topped 40.
Sorry, a certain lame weblog which shall remain nameless elected to archive the discussion between my second-last and last post to it. You offer no email address. Shall we continue?
biological evolution has certain prerequisites, and these prerequisites can be eliminated by examining geology.
Geology indicates that the earh is very old, about 4 1/2 Billion years old.
Even if you accept that extrapolation, and there's countless good reasons for not doing so (and yes, I'll post on that if you like), geology's findings are hostile to any reasonable (or even unreasonable) approximation of a pre-biotic environment in which chemical evolution could possibly operate. So you must invoke Hoyle and Wickramasingh's aliens - or some similar mechanism - in order to get biological evolution even a chance at starting.
And I leave you with a qute from no less than Francis Crick:
If a particular amino sequence was selected by chance, how rare an event would this be? [...] This is an easy exercise in combinatorials. Suppose that the chain is about 200 amino acids long; this is, if anything rather less than the average length of proteins of all types. Since we have just 20 possibilities at each place, the number of possibilities is 20 multiplied by itself some 200 times. This is conveniently written as 20 to the 200th power, and is approximately equal to 10 to the 260th power[...]. moreover, we have only considered a polypeptide chain of rather modest length. Had we considered longer ones as well, the figure would have been even more immense [...] The great majority of sequences can never have been synthesized at all, at any time." --
Life Itself: Its' origin and Nature, 1981, pp. 51-52.
Note that Francis hasn't addressed things like the onservation that most amino-amino bonds are not peptide. Oh, well. Is Francis Crick a Creationist?
Just in case the scale eludes you, the universe has about 10E81 atoms in it, and has existed (in theory) for roughly 10E17 seconds. If you combined every atom in the universe with every other atom, every second, you'd still be shy roughly 10E150 universe lifetimes of enough time to get even odds.
You mean by the Noah's worldwide flood, disproven 200 years ago by Christian geologists?
You keep spouting on about the Christian geologists. Link?
And no, I mean the worldwide flood showing up more and more in well-known geological features. Harlan Bretz' 50-meter-high sand ripples are but one symptom. Turbidites left and right are another. The Lewis Overthrust (amongst others) has not been explained (yes, link to t.o if you like, I can shred that one as well - and I'm just Joe Random, not a geologist; geologists can go on at some length about the impossibilities in the Lewis overthrust). Polystratic fossils. Widely distributed thin strata. `Dinosaur graveyards' (yah, sure, fifty or so dinosaurs trip over each other and drown at the same spot in a local flash flood, clumsy buggers, pull the other one). Erosion rates (e.g. at Niagara Falls). Rivermouth sedimentation records. Contemporaneous rootless fossil trees at widely disparate levels (e.g. Yellowstone). And so on. They all point to a massive, aqueous catastrophe followed by a short (kiloyears) relatively stable period for accumulation of debris.
Geology has no time for evolution, so neither do I.
Hey, you are the one claiming that a 19th century miners hammer is millions of years old. And even some of Baughs supporters believe that it is at the most 700 years old.
Heads I win, tails you lose: if the hammer is antedeluvian, evolutionary ideas about technology are completely, er, up the creek. If it managed to get a thick stone encrustation in a few hundred years or less (if it's less than 700 years old, how old is it? 200 years?) without rusting, then evolutionary ideas about rock formation are completly up the duff.
Your call. (-:
Turtles: where's the evolution
on
e-Denounce
·
· Score: 2
Scutosaurus and other pareiasaurs [...] Several genera had bony plates in the skin, possibly the first signs of a turtle shell.
`Possibly' - but turtles fossilise very well. Anything like/b> a turtle would also fossilise very well, and there are lots of turtle fossils. They haven't. Darwinian evolution fails to explain this. Punkeek has a better chance of explaining it, but is still reasoning from silence. Do you support Darwinian Evolution or Punctuated Equilibrium? They are incompatible, so have you chosen one, or are you begging the question?
Deltavjatia vjatkensis [...] numerous turtle-like skull features
Oh, yay. I know people with numerous turtle-like skull features. And still no suitable plates.
Proganochelys [...] fully turtle-like skull, beak, and shell, but with some primitive traits such as rows of little palatal teeth, a still-recognizable clavicle, a simple captorhinid-type jaw musculature, a primitive captorhinid- type ear, a non-retractable neck
What ho? Suddenly, 210Ma ago, we have a completed turtle! Chelys == turtle, no? Quoth the American Museum of Natural History (go on, accuse them of Creationist bias, I dare you!) `a normal-looking turtle shell'. Hmm. `the fossil record provides no clues about how the shell evolved'. Hmm.
Teeth? And so...? Archaeopteryx is basically a Hoatzin with teeth, and `modern' bird fossils were found in "older" (stratigraphically lower) strata (and that's another evolutionarily inexplicable situation, with many parallels). Oh... and AMNH says `It has no teeth -- turtles lost their teeth very early in their history'. Who do you trust, t.o or AMNH?
Jaw musculature in a fossil? Even if it has significance, it's still interpolation and not evidence. Non-retractable neck? How long is its neck? Look at the picture - it doesn't need to be retractable!
There's another interesting quote there too, `Its limbs are sprawling, as in all turtles, and in contrast to later vertebrates like dinosaurs.' - say what? Turtles essentially haven't changed structurally since before dinosaur times? We're talking, like, at least a 100Ma here, if not 200Ma. Where's the evolution? How can turtles stay `frozen' for over ten times as long as the entire Cambrian explosion, when over fifty different body structures were laid down in under 10Ma? This is not adding up!
In short, evolution fails to explain it. It is a contradiction in evolutionary terms. Unless you restrict the discussion to a few favoured traits in a few selected fossils, this happens everywhere you look. Put the argument in context, and the evolution evapourates. Wake up and smell the ediacaria! (-:
I seem to remember something about prompt justice being a right. BE Inc (their shareholders, employees, directors and other companies too) have died waiting for justice. Is that prompt?
One reason only. They tried to do it with people instead of angels. The rest is window-dressing.
Oh, except in the case of the USSR, the revolution apparently got a big whack of funding and political help from the Roman Catholic Church to help them wipe out the Russian Orthodox Church (which is why the Russian Communists were so heavily Atheist) - only they buggered it up big time and lost practically all of the gold they invested in that little enterprise until they snuck it back via Germany during WW2. That initial help kind of skewed the situation a bit.
Capitalism at least has a shorter feedback loop, although in practical there's not much else going for it. If the people in a political system are hardworking and altruistically inclined, almost any political system will work. Which is why the top-down political approach always fails.
Back on topic, Microsoft corporately inherited Bill's personality. Bill's greedy, an overachiever - comes of being nicknamed `Trey' as in WHG3, I reckon - to whom the prize is all, the methods and fallout nothing. That's not a sustainable approach. Here and there, people pay more attention to that, and pragmatic issues, and less to Microsoft hype. The USA seems to be collectively less aware of these undercurrents than most societies.
Like China, Mexico is fundamentally different to the USA. Until you grok the society, a lot of things that happen there don't seem logical and reasonable. If OSS succeeds in Mexico, it will be for political reasons; finance and freedom have almost nothing to do with it at the political levels that matter. Red Flag Linux will do well in China for social-political reasons, not for technical merit, cost or copyright reasons. How Red Escolar will go in Mexico, I can't predict. I don't know enough about who is paying/doing what to whom.
China (one billion). India (800 million). Russia (some hundreds of millions). Indonesia. Thailand. Korea. Phillipines (typical `pisspot' country, that, roughly the same population as the USA). Germany. France. Italy. Sooner or later, it starts to add up. (-:
Redneck detected! You can fit seven of Texas in our backyard. The shire of Meekatharra is larger than Texas. Jindalee OTH radar can watch planes taking off and landing in Los Angeles from here. What we don't have is enough resources to bury Sydney under warships.
Yes, that would be hilarious, wouldn't it? `Damn, the CD didn't auto-run. Where's the registry editor...? Oh, well, I'll just have to open a DOS box and do it there. Umm... are we still in Kansas?'
I want to see someone successfully argue that since the RIAA taxes every CD-writer that's sold (at least in the USA), that tax comprises permission to copy any RIAA-owned works you please (with that CD-writer).
Would we be talking technical here, or practical? If practical, whatever goes into the Federal Register effectively becomes law. And that's <ghasp> pages a day of fine print.
Why sue? Just walk up to the next 9-plus-rated cutie you see and confiscate their pants because they weren't carrying a receipt for them.
If they contest your ownership of their pants, reply that they're evidence anyway, regardless of how it's settled. It would help to own a clothing store, but sheer effrontery would probably get you over a lot of hurdles... or maybe slapped about like you've never been slapped about before... (-;
much to the surprise of the prosecuting attorney, he produced an Extra class ham radio licence.
I can top that. The first person to be pulled over at a radar speed trap in Western Australia was the then Postmaster General. He promptly took the operator of the radar gun to court for operating an unlicenced transmitter, and won, which made any evidence gained by this illegal act (to wit, said PMG's alleged velocity) inadmissable in court.
In theory, applying a radar gun to your person (through the windscreen of your car) could be named assault with your choice of `harmful radiation' or `electric rays' under our Criminal Code. I don't think anyone's paid a QC to ram this one through yet.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, the `silly stories' in question include instruction to test things out for yourself, and only keep the bits that work.
Secondly, the archaeology in the silly stories is better than outside them, and has been for nigh on 2k years.
Thirdly, said silly stories happen to frequently predict the future (from the writers' POV) with pinpoint accuracy, and also record fulfilments of some earlier predictions.
Fourthly, physical copies of texts from before 2k years ago have been found, and despite claims of babelfishing, they're still accurate.
Fifthly, to believe in evolution, you have to lay aside critical thinking. Really! Ask Steve Gould and the other punkeekers to show you why Darwinian evolution doesn't work, and he will. Ask their Darwinian opponents to show you why punkeek doesn't work, and they will. End of story. No Creationism, `silly stories' or even Intelligent Design, required so far.
Now: get a life to replace your broken opinion! (-:
You have no idea how refreshing it is to get a sensible response! (-:
Unfortunately for the actual argument, which is a shame because it would be such an elegant solution and open up whole new areas of science if it were plausible, Kauffman gets short shrift from Michael Behe: `Kauffman discusses his ideas in a chapter [of The Origins of Order] titled "The Origin of A Connected Metabolism," but if you read the chapter from start to finish you will not find the name of single chemical - no AMP, no aspartic acid, no nothing. In fact, if you scan the entire subject index of the book, you will not find a chemical name there either. John Maynard Smith, Kauffman's old mentor, has accused him of practicing "fact-free science."' This is amid a lot of railing about how mathematics is disconnected from practice. If you read the linked page, you'll shortcut a significant amount of objecting. (-:
Try KOffice or AmiPro under FluxBox on a cut-down Linux kernel, it'll fly on those boxes - and keep OpenOffice.org around for compatibility reasons, even if it runs like a 3-legged centipede in 32M. Alternatively, run them LTSP off a single decent server.
IMESHO, the right question should be `Are scientists perfectly correct, unbiassed and 100% trustworthy?'
The survey answer, however stuffed and rounded, answered `no' and for a change got the answer right (-: still IMESHO
Scientists are as human as the rest of us and have pressures like job security, tenure, avoidance of boat-rocking and peer pressure driving them.
So... if you turn up something embarrassing, unless you're a rare individual (find `Missoula'), you either don't publish it, or waffle around the consequences in the hope of getting credit for the work and not damnation for where it leads.
MS-Word 97 sometimes won't read docs from (for example) MS-Word 2000 or MS-Word XP. In those circumstances I've used StarOffice 5.2 to reprocess the document and make it work. OpenOffice.org would probably do an even better job of it.
Come to think of it, why bother keeping MS-Office? It's only another invitation for the BSA (BSAA in Oz) to bitchslap you for not having a matching holo-sticker.
Also, if office work is all that the machine is doing, upgrade it to Linux. Mandrake 8.2 even comes with OO. Let's see the BSA fine you for that. Buy a decent scanner for each office cluster out of the savings, and SANE it so all can play.
No, he's building new boxes. Even if he wasn't, no MS OS licence has allowed `recycling' after Windows 95, so changing the CPU would axe the licence.
Mandrake Linux's licence allows you to recycle an installation. Come to think of it, you're also allowed to copy an existing installation, install as amny times as you like from the Download CD set, benchmark it against other things, use an unlimited number of seats, and comes with OpenOffice.org 641D. Oh, and even if you spot Mandrake $50 a machine, that works out at around 1/10 of the cost of MS-Windows+MS-Office, and no free viruses.
...at least, it's a 450MHz Celeron, running Mandrake Linux 8.2 which came with OpenOffice.org 641d. It does all I ask of it, even OCR and stuff, without complaining. Not sure why you would want a P4 sace heater when a fast P3 gets 90% of the work done for 50% of the power. The reduction in the dotcom's power bill would probably pay for a second processor over a couple of years.
This seems to be your favourite strawman.
I don't see why you expect God to make a special and unprovoked exception in, for example, whether your car starts on a given day or not. Cars have run for very long distances without petrol in response to prayer, but I don't expect that this is an experiment which would work very well for someone in your frame of mind.
Before we look for some realistic answers for you, let's phrase your response after the same pattern, but from an evolutionary perspective - just to see how it looks.
Chance done it. Who can explain chance?
It had to be chance because no other forces are at work, we excluded them by definition. Who needs falsifiable?
We're all going to die.
...or, on a slightly more serious note...
It's mostly missing, but we think chance done it, otherwise we risk having to submit to an external authority, and we wouldn't like that
Since we can be bent to fit any shape, twisted to explain anything - in the absence of observation - we can explain it away even if we can't be falsified
Completely random formation of characteristics, little stability of characteristics, little if any speciation, gobs of transitional forms in the fossil record... oops.
Now a more realistic Creationist perspective (Creationism and Materialism aren't the only possible perspectives):
The earth was created de novo, ex nihilo, kiloyears ago, and then totally inundated some centuries later.
Continents have not had time to wear down, rivers have not had time to cut long beds or deposit more than several thousand annual layers of silt, helium, salt and other environmental substances have not had time to reach equilibrium. If they have, the theory is false.
Large numbers of well speciated fossils will be found within alluvial and volcanic rock, usually buried with signs of great violence and/or speed. Alluvial rock layers will often be found to be thin, relatively homogeneous, and widespread. Layers will follow a general order which varies gradually with location, but occasionally will be found disordered, even reversed. Occasional rock formations will be hairpinned. Strata will occasionally exhibit Z-shaped seams. Etc ad nauseum...
Nick off, you're scaring the crows...
BTW, I think /. character-per-line counting sucks, not to mention that you can fool it, kinda, and that it leads to padding, rather than to concise, direct reasoning and expression. The only reason for this paragraph's existence is to bump that CPL figure up past 35 from about 24. Waffle, waffle, waffle. The internet regards all blockages (such as censorship and pointless rules for posting comments) as errors and routes around them, don't'cha know? So if /. will kindly nudge the limt down to about 20, everyone can get on with their lives with no loss of functionality to this accursed weblog. Type, type, type, yawn, yawn, yawn, 35.7 and counting, type type type type type type type type yadda yadda yadda drone drone drone drone waffle waffle jaw jaw rabbit on gibber gibber. 37.6 blah blah blah and on and on and on, sigh. 38.0 blah blah blah and on and on and on, blah blah blah and on and on and on some more. Steadily the annoying counter is nudged upwards. Nudge, nudge, push I think I'll switch to kuro5hin now. Yay, we topped 40.
Even if you accept that extrapolation, and there's countless good reasons for not doing so (and yes, I'll post on that if you like), geology's findings are hostile to any reasonable (or even unreasonable) approximation of a pre-biotic environment in which chemical evolution could possibly operate. So you must invoke Hoyle and Wickramasingh's aliens - or some similar mechanism - in order to get biological evolution even a chance at starting.
And I leave you with a qute from no less than Francis Crick:
Note that Francis hasn't addressed things like the onservation that most amino-amino bonds are not peptide. Oh, well. Is Francis Crick a Creationist?
Just in case the scale eludes you, the universe has about 10E81 atoms in it, and has existed (in theory) for roughly 10E17 seconds. If you combined every atom in the universe with every other atom, every second, you'd still be shy roughly 10E150 universe lifetimes of enough time to get even odds.
My, isn't it quiet here in this little sub-topic...?
You did read the details of Patterson's speech, no? Is convergence everywhere, or not?
You keep spouting on about the Christian geologists. Link?
And no, I mean the worldwide flood showing up more and more in well-known geological features. Harlan Bretz' 50-meter-high sand ripples are but one symptom. Turbidites left and right are another. The Lewis Overthrust (amongst others) has not been explained (yes, link to t.o if you like, I can shred that one as well - and I'm just Joe Random, not a geologist; geologists can go on at some length about the impossibilities in the Lewis overthrust). Polystratic fossils. Widely distributed thin strata. `Dinosaur graveyards' (yah, sure, fifty or so dinosaurs trip over each other and drown at the same spot in a local flash flood, clumsy buggers, pull the other one). Erosion rates (e.g. at Niagara Falls). Rivermouth sedimentation records. Contemporaneous rootless fossil trees at widely disparate levels (e.g. Yellowstone). And so on. They all point to a massive, aqueous catastrophe followed by a short (kiloyears) relatively stable period for accumulation of debris.
Geology has no time for evolution, so neither do I.
Heads I win, tails you lose: if the hammer is antedeluvian, evolutionary ideas about technology are completely, er, up the creek. If it managed to get a thick stone encrustation in a few hundred years or less (if it's less than 700 years old, how old is it? 200 years?) without rusting, then evolutionary ideas about rock formation are completly up the duff.
Your call. (-:
`Possibly' - but turtles fossilise very well. Anything like/b> a turtle would also fossilise very well, and there are lots of turtle fossils. They haven't. Darwinian evolution fails to explain this. Punkeek has a better chance of explaining it, but is still reasoning from silence. Do you support Darwinian Evolution or Punctuated Equilibrium? They are incompatible, so have you chosen one, or are you begging the question?
Oh, yay. I know people with numerous turtle-like skull features. And still no suitable plates.
What ho? Suddenly, 210Ma ago, we have a completed turtle! Chelys == turtle, no? Quoth the American Museum of Natural History (go on, accuse them of Creationist bias, I dare you!) `a normal-looking turtle shell'. Hmm. `the fossil record provides no clues about how the shell evolved'. Hmm.
Teeth? And so...? Archaeopteryx is basically a Hoatzin with teeth, and `modern' bird fossils were found in "older" (stratigraphically lower) strata (and that's another evolutionarily inexplicable situation, with many parallels). Oh... and AMNH says `It has no teeth -- turtles lost their teeth very early in their history'. Who do you trust, t.o or AMNH?
Jaw musculature in a fossil? Even if it has significance, it's still interpolation and not evidence. Non-retractable neck? How long is its neck? Look at the picture - it doesn't need to be retractable!
There's another interesting quote there too, `Its limbs are sprawling, as in all turtles, and in contrast to later vertebrates like dinosaurs.' - say what? Turtles essentially haven't changed structurally since before dinosaur times? We're talking, like, at least a 100Ma here, if not 200Ma. Where's the evolution? How can turtles stay `frozen' for over ten times as long as the entire Cambrian explosion, when over fifty different body structures were laid down in under 10Ma? This is not adding up!
In short, evolution fails to explain it. It is a contradiction in evolutionary terms. Unless you restrict the discussion to a few favoured traits in a few selected fossils, this happens everywhere you look. Put the argument in context, and the evolution evapourates. Wake up and smell the ediacaria! (-:
...fine the organisation for not having docco for the copy of Windows that they just installed over the top of an actual useful OS.
Aye, too true.
And cue conspiracy theory thread here.
I seem to remember something about prompt justice being a right. BE Inc (their shareholders, employees, directors and other companies too) have died waiting for justice. Is that prompt?
One reason only. They tried to do it with people instead of angels. The rest is window-dressing.
Oh, except in the case of the USSR, the revolution apparently got a big whack of funding and political help from the Roman Catholic Church to help them wipe out the Russian Orthodox Church (which is why the Russian Communists were so heavily Atheist) - only they buggered it up big time and lost practically all of the gold they invested in that little enterprise until they snuck it back via Germany during WW2. That initial help kind of skewed the situation a bit.
Capitalism at least has a shorter feedback loop, although in practical there's not much else going for it. If the people in a political system are hardworking and altruistically inclined, almost any political system will work. Which is why the top-down political approach always fails.
Back on topic, Microsoft corporately inherited Bill's personality. Bill's greedy, an overachiever - comes of being nicknamed `Trey' as in WHG3, I reckon - to whom the prize is all, the methods and fallout nothing. That's not a sustainable approach. Here and there, people pay more attention to that, and pragmatic issues, and less to Microsoft hype. The USA seems to be collectively less aware of these undercurrents than most societies.
Like China, Mexico is fundamentally different to the USA. Until you grok the society, a lot of things that happen there don't seem logical and reasonable. If OSS succeeds in Mexico, it will be for political reasons; finance and freedom have almost nothing to do with it at the political levels that matter. Red Flag Linux will do well in China for social-political reasons, not for technical merit, cost or copyright reasons. How Red Escolar will go in Mexico, I can't predict. I don't know enough about who is paying/doing what to whom.
China (one billion). India (800 million). Russia (some hundreds of millions). Indonesia. Thailand. Korea. Phillipines (typical `pisspot' country, that, roughly the same population as the USA). Germany. France. Italy. Sooner or later, it starts to add up. (-:
Redneck detected! You can fit seven of Texas in our backyard. The shire of Meekatharra is larger than Texas. Jindalee OTH radar can watch planes taking off and landing in Los Angeles from here. What we don't have is enough resources to bury Sydney under warships.
There's more to the world than the USA.
Now bugger off.
Yes, that would be hilarious, wouldn't it? `Damn, the CD didn't auto-run. Where's the registry editor...? Oh, well, I'll just have to open a DOS box and do it there. Umm... are we still in Kansas?'
I want to see someone successfully argue that since the RIAA taxes every CD-writer that's sold (at least in the USA), that tax comprises permission to copy any RIAA-owned works you please (with that CD-writer).
Greedy scumbags need a reality check. (-:
Would we be talking technical here, or practical? If practical, whatever goes into the Federal Register effectively becomes law. And that's <ghasp> pages a day of fine print.
Yes, there is. Buy only MIPS-based server and workstation hardware. Nothing that Microsoft sells runs on MIPS except PDAs. (-:
If a group as large as a uni did that, it would rapidly make things like StarOffice more portable.
Oh, and they'd slice a significant amount off their electricity bills. (-:
Why sue? Just walk up to the next 9-plus-rated cutie you see and confiscate their pants because they weren't carrying a receipt for them.
If they contest your ownership of their pants, reply that they're evidence anyway, regardless of how it's settled. It would help to own a clothing store, but sheer effrontery would probably get you over a lot of hurdles... or maybe slapped about like you've never been slapped about before... (-;
I can top that. The first person to be pulled over at a radar speed trap in Western Australia was the then Postmaster General. He promptly took the operator of the radar gun to court for operating an unlicenced transmitter, and won, which made any evidence gained by this illegal act (to wit, said PMG's alleged velocity) inadmissable in court.
In theory, applying a radar gun to your person (through the windscreen of your car) could be named assault with your choice of `harmful radiation' or `electric rays' under our Criminal Code. I don't think anyone's paid a QC to ram this one through yet.