where does the chemistry of more complex molecules push them, then? To break up into tiny pieces?
Yes.
Also, Miller only got about half of the required acids, and very, very small proportions of those (even the easy ones) under very artificial conditions.
...what kind of emergence explains the transition from water and bare rock to self-contained, self-replicating organic assemblies?
Miller added a generous helping of structure and presumed initial conditions which geology says never happened, and still didn't get anything better than some of the amino acids - and those swimming in poisons. It turns out that you will never get beyond these acids randomly, since the chemistry of more complex molecules pushes everything the other way. How can emergence counter this?
If you work the odds out, there are at least several hundred orders of magnitude too few planets (and/or too few seconds) for abiogenesis to get a pseudopod in the door.
We see self-replication happening in several ways. We have no real idea how it could start.
We do know that the Miller experiments showed that even in the most structured and artificial of circumstances, organic chemicals tend to turn to poisonous brown goo rather than self-replicating molecules. Miller also began with a reducing atmosphere, and everything geology has turned up points to an oxidising atmosphere. All of the other work (clays and stuff) is more or less based on that red herring.
You are probably thinking "complex" as in "complicated" rather than "complex" as in "not random". The universe is immensely random. Adding randomness to randomness gives more randomness. Leaving structure (complexity) alone also - eventually - results in more randomness. Left to themselves, things fall apart (except Big Macs, which seem to be able to last for months unchanged when left alone). This is called entropy. Another way of saying "our universe is random and getting randomer" is "our universe has high entropy, and it is increasing". It sounds more scientific, but it means the same thing.
The sand in this philosophical vaseline is that life is not random, it is complex. So in a universe of randomness, how did this complexity arise? It cannot do so by itself. The odds against a pocket of complexity big enough to produce sustainable life arising at random are astronomical or worse - and way, way beyond the statistical boundary (1E50 against) which we call "impossible".
Probably the best illustration is the monkeys and the typewriters. Typing out a play from The Bard at random is an immensly unlikely event. Getting it to happen just once if we coated every presumed planet in the known universe with very small monkeys and typewriters - stacked wall to wall and 1000 deep, even on the oceans - and hitting a billion keys a second is still well past statistically impossible in the 1E17 seconds since the big bang (if there was one). Getting just the title typed out is still statistically impossible.
We're much more complex than a sonnet. Many invidual cellular mechanisms take more than a play's worth of DNA to specify. Each.
So where did all of that complexity come from?
It is an article of faith among many scientists that it arose from randomness. Since we are a very long way from even coming up with reasonable postulates for the huge number of miracles involved in getting from a random cloud of hydrogen to the average SlashDot denizen, it has to be taken on faith. Heretics are only academically burned at the stake - as in they are refused publication in popular journals - but the principle is identical.
So how did we get that way? In a randomly generated universe with bugger-all by way of intrinsic structure, how did we get organised into a variety of specific self-reproducing self-maintaining assemblages of billions of interacting molecules?
"Against the odds" doesn't really cover it (figure them out, they whizz right past "insane" before you're really even started adding factors). If that structure turns out to be built right into the basic properties of the universe anyway, that represents a far greater miracle than anything conventionally religious.
You need an organising principle of some kind, even if it's one of the bizarre "Gaia"-style hypotheses. Materialism excludes itself; that is, if you start with materialist axioms, you quickly discover that you're many kinds of impossible.
Put a growable ReiserFS filesystem into a file and store the MailDirs in that if you're running under MS-Windows. The mind may well boggle at the concept of sort-of porting a filesystem to MS-Windows just to get decent file-op speed, but it would work. Growing the file in big slabs (megabytes at a time) would help to avoid fragmentation slowdown.
Distribution is only legal if you accept. TSG have repeatedly rejected the GPL, declared it invalid - including in court. If they lied, they're guilty of perjury, and they've also distributed any code they're claiming to own under the GPL, so GPL use of it (such as by including it in Linux) is perfectly legal. If they told the truth, they're guilty of copyright violation. As someone in the thread said, there is no outcome which is good for TSG.
This is all completely independent of the issue of whether any code used in Linux was actually tainted, of which, of course, we've seen zero lines so far.
Drop this into/usr/share/services/useragentstrings and you can conveniently select it from Konqueror's "Tools/Change Browser Identification" menu at once. In 51 different languages. (-:
If you like melting webmaster brain cells, use this instead.
My mailserver used to answer as a "Commodore 64 (with anti-spam cartridge)".
This battle Google will lose. Everyone will have Microsoft's app.
When you think about it, Microsoft is everyone's worst enemy because sooner or later they will be competing directly with you in your own field.
I know that there are mechanics and child-care workers out there who would never believe this, but if Microsoft survives, they will be facing them as competition. Sooner or later, Microsoft will get a real share of the car computer market (diplomats being locked into their vehicles etc notwithstanding: money talks, and can to a certain extent override failure to perform) and will start making devices to keep children occupied and (at least in principle) developing.
No matter how small and remote your niche, Bill will tap on your shoulder one day. So you're a rice farmer? Guess what? Bill probably already owns a bio-patent related to your crop.
As they face this issue, Google will become in increasing degree one more important enterprise with a deep vested interest in bringing Microsoft down.
Once: Tie a rope between two fixing points. This is like unto your entire hard drive, with many config files interwoven. If a thread frays out of the rope, it doesn't break.
Now tie a thread between two fixing points. This is like unto your registry. If a thread frays out... it's game over.
Again: take a pile of gravel. This is like unto a pile of small files on your hard drive.
Now, carefully stack the individual pieces of gravel one atop another to build a thin, tall pillar. This is like unto your registry on your hard drive.
Take one piece of gravel from each system. Which lasts better?
Discussion: Similar principles apply elsewhere. Microsoft have a tendency to lose the plot when faced with a choice between "robust" and "shiny". They also fall victim to their own propaganda.
A lady answered in an accent which I guess was Malaysian, but would only admit to being "somewhere in Asia". This is calling an allegedly Australian company (QANGO, really) from Australia.
Linux HALTs the CPU when it's not actively doing anything, and has done so for a lot longer than any MS-Windows derivative. I had one guy complain that his dual-boot machine wasn't working in MS-Windows but went fine in Linux (well, hey... but read on), and it turned out to be a failed CPU fan. Linux spent so much time idle (and so HALTed) that the CPU temp was reasonable even without a fan, MS-Windows constantly hammered it so it overheated and went catatonic. And who hasn't woken up at 4AM to hear the MS-Windows Disk Squirrels scampering around on their drive for no reason that you've ever been able to discover?
Win2k and XP do HALT the CPU as well, but by their very nature they don't do it as consistently.
,i>just because you are from some 3rd world hellhole or your 'religion' tells you not to control the fruit of your loins
...the people you've just named outnumber "us" about 30 to one. You may feel like king of the world, but it's a limited-term franchise.
Sorry if it ruins the tone of the post, but I now have (stuck in my head) this mental image of a rabid pineapple breaking out of someone's pants and lunging at passers-by. Thank you ever so much.
Maybe because you're Catholic or Muslim and don't believe in birth control.
Then your church or mosque should be helping you out.
Good luck. Too many of them are so busy policing their organisations rules plus an informal social pecking order that they forget the underlying compassion in the message they're supposed to be living out in their lives. The blind truly are leading the blind, and they shall all fall into a ditch (Luke 6:39, for the curious, and just as applicable right now as when it was first spoken).
As for Atheists, their attitude is usually "kill the kid" - and what did the child do to deserve that? Selfish bastards! Shame on the lot of you!
Did I miss anyone? Oh, my karma? It's over there in that fireplace. (-:
My karma's been jammed against the stops for months. I get asked to moderate about every day or two (including today). I figure that a little karma incineration won't go astray.
Browsing at -1 sometimes does turn up interesting stuff.
...but I have a memory in my head of a young couple walking along Baltimore Parade, Merriwa, just near Tenby Close one evening a few months back. They were dressed in ragged clothes, and I'm not talking trendily ragged here. Worn-out op-shop stuff, including their shoes. They did not look like they ate well at all.
He, however, was carrying a new mobile 'phone, with the red, white and blue flashing LEDs in the keypad lighting up his face in coruscating sequence as he walked and talked.
Nothing like getting your priorities straight, is there?
...the MPAA is cross-sued by the owner of the design for the T-shirt itself for trying to make money out of their T-shirt pattern without paying appropriate licence fees.
...of 1789-94, AKA "The Reign of Terror", during which one of Paris' leading prostitutes was enthroned as "The Goddess of Reason" - which, when you think about it, doesn't sound too sexually repressed - and Atheism was declared to be the national religion.
They did all manner of bizarre things, like trying a ten-day "decimal week" (monumental stuff-up that worked out to be, as you'd expect). It makes interesting if occasionally very blood-encrusted reading.
The original trigger for the worst cycle of that Revolution was the Roman Catholics, who despite overt profession to the contrary (celibacy and all that, but see 1 Timothy 3:2) were not exactly the empitome of sexual repression themselves, but the Atheist revolutionaries got a bit carried away and massacred everyone of a religious bent - including what amounted the city's entire population of talented artisans (mostly Protestants of one kind or another) which drove French industry into the ditch fairly swiftly - not to mention massacring anyone they owed money to, whose sister or daughter they wanted to screw, whose house they envied... you get the idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, Miller only got about half of the required acids, and very, very small proportions of those (even the easy ones) under very artificial conditions.
(no text)
...what kind of emergence explains the transition from water and bare rock to self-contained, self-replicating organic assemblies?
Miller added a generous helping of structure and presumed initial conditions which geology says never happened, and still didn't get anything better than some of the amino acids - and those swimming in poisons. It turns out that you will never get beyond these acids randomly, since the chemistry of more complex molecules pushes everything the other way. How can emergence counter this?
It sounds far too much like "...then a miracle occurs..." to me.
If you work the odds out, there are at least several hundred orders of magnitude too few planets (and/or too few seconds) for abiogenesis to get a pseudopod in the door.
We see self-replication happening in several ways. We have no real idea how it could start.
We do know that the Miller experiments showed that even in the most structured and artificial of circumstances, organic chemicals tend to turn to poisonous brown goo rather than self-replicating molecules. Miller also began with a reducing atmosphere, and everything geology has turned up points to an oxidising atmosphere. All of the other work (clays and stuff) is more or less based on that red herring.
Well, not exactly.
You are probably thinking "complex" as in "complicated" rather than "complex" as in "not random". The universe is immensely random. Adding randomness to randomness gives more randomness. Leaving structure (complexity) alone also - eventually - results in more randomness. Left to themselves, things fall apart (except Big Macs, which seem to be able to last for months unchanged when left alone). This is called entropy. Another way of saying "our universe is random and getting randomer" is "our universe has high entropy, and it is increasing". It sounds more scientific, but it means the same thing.
The sand in this philosophical vaseline is that life is not random, it is complex. So in a universe of randomness, how did this complexity arise? It cannot do so by itself. The odds against a pocket of complexity big enough to produce sustainable life arising at random are astronomical or worse - and way, way beyond the statistical boundary (1E50 against) which we call "impossible".
Probably the best illustration is the monkeys and the typewriters. Typing out a play from The Bard at random is an immensly unlikely event. Getting it to happen just once if we coated every presumed planet in the known universe with very small monkeys and typewriters - stacked wall to wall and 1000 deep, even on the oceans - and hitting a billion keys a second is still well past statistically impossible in the 1E17 seconds since the big bang (if there was one). Getting just the title typed out is still statistically impossible.
We're much more complex than a sonnet. Many invidual cellular mechanisms take more than a play's worth of DNA to specify. Each.
So where did all of that complexity come from?
It is an article of faith among many scientists that it arose from randomness. Since we are a very long way from even coming up with reasonable postulates for the huge number of miracles involved in getting from a random cloud of hydrogen to the average SlashDot denizen, it has to be taken on faith. Heretics are only academically burned at the stake - as in they are refused publication in popular journals - but the principle is identical.
"Against the odds" doesn't really cover it (figure them out, they whizz right past "insane" before you're really even started adding factors). If that structure turns out to be built right into the basic properties of the universe anyway, that represents a far greater miracle than anything conventionally religious.
You need an organising principle of some kind, even if it's one of the bizarre "Gaia"-style hypotheses. Materialism excludes itself; that is, if you start with materialist axioms, you quickly discover that you're many kinds of impossible.
Put a growable ReiserFS filesystem into a file and store the MailDirs in that if you're running under MS-Windows. The mind may well boggle at the concept of sort-of porting a filesystem to MS-Windows just to get decent file-op speed, but it would work. Growing the file in big slabs (megabytes at a time) would help to avoid fragmentation slowdown.
Distribution is only legal if you accept. TSG have repeatedly rejected the GPL, declared it invalid - including in court. If they lied, they're guilty of perjury, and they've also distributed any code they're claiming to own under the GPL, so GPL use of it (such as by including it in Linux) is perfectly legal. If they told the truth, they're guilty of copyright violation. As someone in the thread said, there is no outcome which is good for TSG.
This is all completely independent of the issue of whether any code used in Linux was actually tainted, of which, of course, we've seen zero lines so far.
Drop this into /usr/share/services/useragentstrings and you can conveniently select it from Konqueror's "Tools/Change Browser Identification" menu at once. In 51 different languages. (-:
If you like melting webmaster brain cells, use this instead.
My mailserver used to answer as a "Commodore 64 (with anti-spam cartridge)".
I know that there are mechanics and child-care workers out there who would never believe this, but if Microsoft survives, they will be facing them as competition. Sooner or later, Microsoft will get a real share of the car computer market (diplomats being locked into their vehicles etc notwithstanding: money talks, and can to a certain extent override failure to perform) and will start making devices to keep children occupied and (at least in principle) developing.
No matter how small and remote your niche, Bill will tap on your shoulder one day. So you're a rice farmer? Guess what? Bill probably already owns a bio-patent related to your crop.
As they face this issue, Google will become in increasing degree one more important enterprise with a deep vested interest in bringing Microsoft down.
No wonder Slash lopped your _Rod off. (-:
Once: Tie a rope between two fixing points. This is like unto your entire hard drive, with many config files interwoven. If a thread frays out of the rope, it doesn't break.
Now tie a thread between two fixing points. This is like unto your registry. If a thread frays out... it's game over.
Again: take a pile of gravel. This is like unto a pile of small files on your hard drive.
Now, carefully stack the individual pieces of gravel one atop another to build a thin, tall pillar. This is like unto your registry on your hard drive.
Take one piece of gravel from each system. Which lasts better?
Discussion: Similar principles apply elsewhere. Microsoft have a tendency to lose the plot when faced with a choice between "robust" and "shiny". They also fall victim to their own propaganda.
A lady answered in an accent which I guess was Malaysian, but would only admit to being "somewhere in Asia". This is calling an allegedly Australian company (QANGO, really) from Australia.
Linux HALTs the CPU when it's not actively doing anything, and has done so for a lot longer than any MS-Windows derivative. I had one guy complain that his dual-boot machine wasn't working in MS-Windows but went fine in Linux (well, hey... but read on), and it turned out to be a failed CPU fan. Linux spent so much time idle (and so HALTed) that the CPU temp was reasonable even without a fan, MS-Windows constantly hammered it so it overheated and went catatonic. And who hasn't woken up at 4AM to hear the MS-Windows Disk Squirrels scampering around on their drive for no reason that you've ever been able to discover?
Win2k and XP do HALT the CPU as well, but by their very nature they don't do it as consistently.
Sorry if it ruins the tone of the post, but I now have (stuck in my head) this mental image of a rabid pineapple breaking out of someone's pants and lunging at passers-by. Thank you ever so much.
As for Atheists, their attitude is usually "kill the kid" - and what did the child do to deserve that? Selfish bastards! Shame on the lot of you!
Did I miss anyone? Oh, my karma? It's over there in that fireplace. (-:
My karma's been jammed against the stops for months. I get asked to moderate about every day or two (including today). I figure that a little karma incineration won't go astray.
Browsing at -1 sometimes does turn up interesting stuff.
...but I have a memory in my head of a young couple walking along Baltimore Parade, Merriwa, just near Tenby Close one evening a few months back. They were dressed in ragged clothes, and I'm not talking trendily ragged here. Worn-out op-shop stuff, including their shoes. They did not look like they ate well at all.
He, however, was carrying a new mobile 'phone, with the red, white and blue flashing LEDs in the keypad lighting up his face in coruscating sequence as he walked and talked.
Nothing like getting your priorities straight, is there?
Playable version here.
There is an (unsupported) MS-Windows version as well, and I imagine that getting it to go under OS X would be a "./configure; make install".
C'mon! The point's been made countless times already. READ.
...the MPAA is cross-sued by the owner of the design for the T-shirt itself for trying to make money out of their T-shirt pattern without paying appropriate licence fees.
...of 1789-94, AKA "The Reign of Terror", during which one of Paris' leading prostitutes was enthroned as "The Goddess of Reason" - which, when you think about it, doesn't sound too sexually repressed - and Atheism was declared to be the national religion.
They did all manner of bizarre things, like trying a ten-day "decimal week" (monumental stuff-up that worked out to be, as you'd expect). It makes interesting if occasionally very blood-encrusted reading.
The original trigger for the worst cycle of that Revolution was the Roman Catholics, who despite overt profession to the contrary (celibacy and all that, but see 1 Timothy 3:2) were not exactly the empitome of sexual repression themselves, but the Atheist revolutionaries got a bit carried away and massacred everyone of a religious bent - including what amounted the city's entire population of talented artisans (mostly Protestants of one kind or another) which drove French industry into the ditch fairly swiftly - not to mention massacring anyone they owed money to, whose sister or daughter they wanted to screw, whose house they envied... you get the idea.
...to soften MS-Windows users up for Longhorn. (-: