>The cell. For one.
Anything in existence could have come about through unintelligent natural processes. The only way to support the idea that it was caused intelligently is to demonstrate an intelligent entity that is more likely than any unintelligent systems to have made it. Do you know of anything intelligent which could have made the first cells? Oohh..don't say "God", because you haven't observed God to show that God exists and is intelligent. The ID movement is dead out the gate.
we know that evolution happens, we even know that natural selection can cause evolution.
Natural selection is evolution. Evolution is a change in the frequency of alleles within a population. Mutation and natural selection are both forms of evolution.
a scientific theory is an explanatory model to account for some law or observation. it isn't the same as "theory" in every day speech, like "a hunch". furthermore, a fact is not "mathematical proof", otherwise we couldn't say that it's a fact that adolf hitler lived. it is confirmed to such a degree of certainty that there is not a reasonable doubt about it.
the general idea that all life on earth arose through a progression of self-replicating chemical systems due to the preservation of random mutations over billions of years, is most certainly a fact.
explain why it is that when someone just mentions "intelligent design", they are immediately labeled as a radical, or anti-science, or with some other derogatory label.
"intelligent design" advocates are labeled as utter lunatics, because they don't have any support for their beliefs. they might as well be teaching kids about santa claus and leprechauns. the only intelligent designers we know of are humans, and i think we can all agree that humans didn't make ourselves and all other life on the planet. until creationists ("intelligent design" people included) can demonstrate the existence of some intelligence that is consistent with the creation of life as we know it, there is no argument to be made for intelligent design.
natural selection is one part of evolution. evolution is "a change in the frequency of alleles within a population". it is comprised both of mutation and natural selection. so it's not really incorrect to say that natural selection is evolution. it's an enormous part of it.
>how about pointing me to these "anti-religion atheists"
>that are saying science has disproved god.
i'm an anti-religion atheist. let's remember here, science is just the application of logic to the analysis of the empirical. since a god, by most people's definition, has the requisite traits of being all-powerful and intelligent, we can be more than confident that one does not exist, simply using probability.
an all-powerful being, were it to exist, could only be one in number, because not more than one being could be all-powerful. i think that stands to logical reasoning quite nicely.
now whatever the odds are that an all-powerful being might exist, even if it did, the odds that it would be intelligent out of all possible algorithmic behaviors, are exceptionally low. in fact intelligence is inherently improbable in its very definition. intelligence, which can only be evaluated with respect to some specified outcome, is ultimately just a measure of the fraction of contingencies through which a system would produce that outcome.
think about playing chess for instance. if your goal is to win a chess game, you can only do so by selecting the very few "correct" moves out of all possible moves. depending on the skill level of your opponent, the swath of moves which could potentially lead to your success might be greater or lesser. in fact were you opponent to be stupid enough, it is distinctly possible that totally random moves might lead to a win. simply put, chess player a is better (or more "chess-intelligent") than player b if there is a greater number of potential board states through which he could successfully act to win.
when speaking in terms of intelligence as it applies in every day language (like your act score) we talk of a generalized aggregate of intelligences at different tasks, brought about in terms of our general facilties for memory, computation, and rapid reprogramming to take on new challenges. this doesn't always mean much though. it's just a general concept. i got an exceptional act score, while a friend of mine who got a mere 29 understands the dynamics of basketball much better than me. try as i might, i can't figure out who to pass to and when to do what moves. it seems very complicated and confusing to me. and this is not for wont of effort and experience. so am i more or less intelligent than him? it's really only a poignant question if we specify what "goal" we're speaking with respect to.
the generalized intelligence that life exhibits came about because of the selective pressure in nature that kills things which cannot survive. were there to be limitless natural resources, no organism would likely have evolved much intelligence, because there simply wouldn't be anything killing off beings that lacked memory and computational ability. intelligence exists because if you walk around in a random path in the african plains, a lion will eat your ass. if you thrash around randomly, you'll likely never get food into your mouth. out of all possible algorithmic behaviors your brain could exhibit, only an extremely narrow range of them would cause you to survive and make it to procreation stage.
now take this concept to the realm of a god. if some being is all-powerful and invincible (and this is just granting and assuming for the sake of argument that an all-powerful being exists at all) there would be no reason to expect it to exhibit intelligent behavior. what are the odds that you stumble upon a random system in nature, and it exhibits what you consider to be intelligence? think about computer programming; what ratio of random strings of bits will produce a computer program that intelligently? what if i crack open your skull and rearrange your neurons into some random new positions..do you think that would make you still intelligent?
say we were to find an all-powerful being out in space, and ask it a question like "what is 2 + 2?" an intelligent being could answer, "4". but a being we have no prior knowledge about would be most likely not to produce any kin
The secure real time protocol, with MIKEY key exchange, can use Diffie-Hellman key generation. This standard is already available on some hardware sip phones, and the government can't stop you from using it with software, like Minisip.
Sorry Big Brother. You're fucked. And good thing too.
I'd call human genes a part of public domain.
I'll be suing if anyone tries to patent the gene that gives me my trademark snorty laugh that the ladies love so much.
The only VoIP "solution" than really matters in the long run is SIP. It will eventually win out because it's an open standard, and already supported by the popular Gizmo Project (http://gizmoproject.com./
I'm currently using an analog telephone to SIP adapter, and calls to other SIP users directly over the net are clearer than PSTN-to-PSTN calls by a great margin.
To handle dialing sip addresses like brokenladder@iptel.org, you just register with a free ENUM number at enum2go.com (uses the standard e164.arpa) or get one at e164.org for instance.
Then you can go to brokenladder.com and look at the contact page to call me and test out your equipment;)
Hell not it doesn't inspire confidence. It just breaks and breaks and breaks, and their customer support department is the worst thing ever.
If you are one of the unfortunate souls who bought one, and you are having these problems, just skip the middle-man. You can call the head of their customer support department at 254.299.2743
You can use this unit with the ethernet connection and the Java interface. It works just fine in Linux. The problem is just that it's a piece of junk and breaks all the time.
I'm here to be the voice of reason and sanity in this discussion. I bought a Karma on June 5th of 2004, for many of the same reasons listed here: great battery life, ogg vorbis support, and good price (if you buy it on-line). Though I loved the unit while it worked, it did work for long. I'm finally getting a refund for mine after the first one broke, and then the replacement broke in a week, and then the next replacement broke in a week again! Since then, my experience with Rio customer support has shown me that it is the worst customer support department that I have ever dealt with! I've spent probably 25-30 hours on the phone with them (mostly on hold) in the past three months. I'm so tired of speaking to the ebonics-speaking idiots they hire. And they will never return support request messages or emails. I mean never! Is my experience unusual? NO! The Karma has a reputation for this, as the user reviews at cnet show.
While reviewers give the Karma high marks for its impressive array of features, they don't keep the unit around long enough to see things get ugly..and they do. So consider what the users have to say in the cnet user reviews section. Here are the percentages of positive and negative reviews for the top five 20GB models reviewed.
MODEL / % POSITIVE / % NEGATIVE / # OF REVIEWS
Rio Karma 63%/37%/649
20GB iPod 73%/27%/627
iAudio M3 (vorbis) 76%/24%/190
iRiver H120 (vorbis) 88%/12%/981
Creative Zen Touch 77%/23%/254
That's right folks, the Karma has the worst customer reviews of all of five leading models. Now consider some of the bright explanations some have offered.
"DO NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING THIS COMPANY SAYS ABOUT THEIR DEVICE. I will never buy from them again."
"Typical poor Rio product quality. Frequently hangs up. You need to always have a paper clip to reset. It died completely after 3 weeks."
"hard drive keeps dying. I've had two of these for less than 60 days and both hard drives died."
"Customer service is the worst i have ever seen from any company."
In my personal experience, my scroll wheel broke after five or six weeks. So I paid to ship the unit in. About ten days later I get a new Karma, and treat it like a delicate flower. About a week later, the hard drive completely locks up and it won't restart. So I make numerous calls to support, spending hours on the phone, and finally I get to send it in again.
After a week or so, I call to check on the status of my replacement, and I'm told they still have not received it. So I send an email to the customer support person who emailed me about where to send it in. She never replies back, which isn't surprising anymore, because Rio customer service has never returned any email, on-line support request, or voice message support request that I've ever left. So I call back five days later to check on the status of my second replacement, to learn that they still have not received it. So finally they ask where I sent the return to, and then the guy makes the observation that I was given the wrong address. I was given their old out-dated address. So he assures me that he'll check into it and get right back to me. But he never does. So then I call and call some more, until finally I convince these morons to replace my unit. What I receive a week later is a "refurbished" unit that is all scratched up and has white pasty stuff on it, like dried up milk or glue..or..well, let's not go there.
So now I have my third Karma. And what do you know--a week later it dies as I'm walking down the sidewalk holding it in my hands. So this time I'm furious. So I've spent about 15 hours in the past 10 days on the phone, and finally reached the head of R
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Some of those causes, like sexual selection, have survived the test of time
sexual selection is natural selection. it is selection by a natural phenomenon: another self-replicating chemical system.
>> Name them.
>The cell. For one.
Anything in existence could have come about through unintelligent natural processes. The only way to support the idea that it was caused intelligently is to demonstrate an intelligent entity that is more likely than any unintelligent systems to have made it. Do you know of anything intelligent which could have made the first cells? Oohh..don't say "God", because you haven't observed God to show that God exists and is intelligent. The ID movement is dead out the gate.
we know that evolution happens, we even know that natural selection can cause evolution. Natural selection is evolution. Evolution is a change in the frequency of alleles within a population. Mutation and natural selection are both forms of evolution.
> How about the simple fact that the theory of evolution is taught as fact in many
m l
evolution is a fact: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.ht
a scientific theory is an explanatory model to account for some law or observation. it isn't the same as "theory" in every day speech, like "a hunch". furthermore, a fact is not "mathematical proof", otherwise we couldn't say that it's a fact that adolf hitler lived. it is confirmed to such a degree of certainty that there is not a reasonable doubt about it.
the general idea that all life on earth arose through a progression of self-replicating chemical systems due to the preservation of random mutations over billions of years, is most certainly a fact.
explain why it is that when someone just mentions "intelligent design", they are immediately labeled as a radical, or anti-science, or with some other derogatory label.
"intelligent design" advocates are labeled as utter lunatics, because they don't have any support for their beliefs. they might as well be teaching kids about santa claus and leprechauns. the only intelligent designers we know of are humans, and i think we can all agree that humans didn't make ourselves and all other life on the planet. until creationists ("intelligent design" people included) can demonstrate the existence of some intelligence that is consistent with the creation of life as we know it, there is no argument to be made for intelligent design.
natural selection is one part of evolution. evolution is "a change in the frequency of alleles within a population". it is comprised both of mutation and natural selection. so it's not really incorrect to say that natural selection is evolution. it's an enormous part of it.
does this freakin comment system require html to make it appear the way you type it?
for the love of god slashdot, fix this, and GET RID OF THE TERRIBLE UGLY GREEN STYLE on your site. you look like something out of 1985.
>how about pointing me to these "anti-religion atheists" >that are saying science has disproved god. i'm an anti-religion atheist. let's remember here, science is just the application of logic to the analysis of the empirical. since a god, by most people's definition, has the requisite traits of being all-powerful and intelligent, we can be more than confident that one does not exist, simply using probability. an all-powerful being, were it to exist, could only be one in number, because not more than one being could be all-powerful. i think that stands to logical reasoning quite nicely. now whatever the odds are that an all-powerful being might exist, even if it did, the odds that it would be intelligent out of all possible algorithmic behaviors, are exceptionally low. in fact intelligence is inherently improbable in its very definition. intelligence, which can only be evaluated with respect to some specified outcome, is ultimately just a measure of the fraction of contingencies through which a system would produce that outcome. think about playing chess for instance. if your goal is to win a chess game, you can only do so by selecting the very few "correct" moves out of all possible moves. depending on the skill level of your opponent, the swath of moves which could potentially lead to your success might be greater or lesser. in fact were you opponent to be stupid enough, it is distinctly possible that totally random moves might lead to a win. simply put, chess player a is better (or more "chess-intelligent") than player b if there is a greater number of potential board states through which he could successfully act to win. when speaking in terms of intelligence as it applies in every day language (like your act score) we talk of a generalized aggregate of intelligences at different tasks, brought about in terms of our general facilties for memory, computation, and rapid reprogramming to take on new challenges. this doesn't always mean much though. it's just a general concept. i got an exceptional act score, while a friend of mine who got a mere 29 understands the dynamics of basketball much better than me. try as i might, i can't figure out who to pass to and when to do what moves. it seems very complicated and confusing to me. and this is not for wont of effort and experience. so am i more or less intelligent than him? it's really only a poignant question if we specify what "goal" we're speaking with respect to. the generalized intelligence that life exhibits came about because of the selective pressure in nature that kills things which cannot survive. were there to be limitless natural resources, no organism would likely have evolved much intelligence, because there simply wouldn't be anything killing off beings that lacked memory and computational ability. intelligence exists because if you walk around in a random path in the african plains, a lion will eat your ass. if you thrash around randomly, you'll likely never get food into your mouth. out of all possible algorithmic behaviors your brain could exhibit, only an extremely narrow range of them would cause you to survive and make it to procreation stage. now take this concept to the realm of a god. if some being is all-powerful and invincible (and this is just granting and assuming for the sake of argument that an all-powerful being exists at all) there would be no reason to expect it to exhibit intelligent behavior. what are the odds that you stumble upon a random system in nature, and it exhibits what you consider to be intelligence? think about computer programming; what ratio of random strings of bits will produce a computer program that intelligently? what if i crack open your skull and rearrange your neurons into some random new positions..do you think that would make you still intelligent? say we were to find an all-powerful being out in space, and ask it a question like "what is 2 + 2?" an intelligent being could answer, "4". but a being we have no prior knowledge about would be most likely not to produce any kin
The secure real time protocol, with MIKEY key exchange, can use Diffie-Hellman key generation. This standard is already available on some hardware sip phones, and the government can't stop you from using it with software, like Minisip. Sorry Big Brother. You're fucked. And good thing too.
So I'll be selling via on off-shore account. Great.
I'd call human genes a part of public domain. I'll be suing if anyone tries to patent the gene that gives me my trademark snorty laugh that the ladies love so much.
The only VoIP "solution" than really matters in the long run is SIP. It will eventually win out because it's an open standard, and already supported by the popular Gizmo Project (http://gizmoproject.com./ I'm currently using an analog telephone to SIP adapter, and calls to other SIP users directly over the net are clearer than PSTN-to-PSTN calls by a great margin. To handle dialing sip addresses like brokenladder@iptel.org, you just register with a free ENUM number at enum2go.com (uses the standard e164.arpa) or get one at e164.org for instance. Then you can go to brokenladder.com and look at the contact page to call me and test out your equipment ;)
Hell not it doesn't inspire confidence. It just breaks and breaks and breaks, and their customer support department is the worst thing ever.
If you are one of the unfortunate souls who bought one, and you are having these problems, just skip the middle-man. You can call the head of their customer support department at 254.299.2743
You can use this unit with the ethernet connection and the Java interface. It works just fine in Linux. The problem is just that it's a piece of junk and breaks all the time.
I'm here to be the voice of reason and sanity in this discussion. I bought a Karma on June 5th of 2004, for many of the same reasons listed here: great battery life, ogg vorbis support, and good price (if you buy it on-line). Though I loved the unit while it worked, it did work for long. I'm finally getting a refund for mine after the first one broke, and then the replacement broke in a week, and then the next replacement broke in a week again! Since then, my experience with Rio customer support has shown me that it is the worst customer support department that I have ever dealt with! I've spent probably 25-30 hours on the phone with them (mostly on hold) in the past three months. I'm so tired of speaking to the ebonics-speaking idiots they hire. And they will never return support request messages or emails. I mean never! Is my experience unusual? NO! The Karma has a reputation for this, as the user reviews at cnet show.
While reviewers give the Karma high marks for its impressive array of features, they don't keep the unit around long enough to see things get ugly..and they do. So consider what the users have to say in the cnet user reviews section. Here are the percentages of positive and negative reviews for the top five 20GB models reviewed.
MODEL / % POSITIVE / % NEGATIVE / # OF REVIEWS
Rio Karma 63%/37%/649
20GB iPod 73%/27%/627
iAudio M3 (vorbis) 76%/24%/190
iRiver H120 (vorbis) 88%/12%/981
Creative Zen Touch 77%/23%/254
That's right folks, the Karma has the worst customer reviews of all of five leading models. Now consider some of the bright explanations some have offered.
"DO NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING THIS COMPANY SAYS ABOUT THEIR DEVICE. I will never buy from them again."
"Typical poor Rio product quality. Frequently hangs up. You need to always have a paper clip to reset. It died completely after 3 weeks."
"hard drive keeps dying. I've had two of these for less than 60 days and both hard drives died."
"Customer service is the worst i have ever seen from any company."
Check out http://reviews.cnet.com/Rio_Karma__20GB_/4852-6490 _7-30474134.html?tag=top&pn=1&fb=2&ob= 0 for more.
In my personal experience, my scroll wheel broke after five or six weeks. So I paid to ship the unit in. About ten days later I get a new Karma, and treat it like a delicate flower. About a week later, the hard drive completely locks up and it won't restart. So I make numerous calls to support, spending hours on the phone, and finally I get to send it in again.
After a week or so, I call to check on the status of my replacement, and I'm told they still have not received it. So I send an email to the customer support person who emailed me about where to send it in. She never replies back, which isn't surprising anymore, because Rio customer service has never returned any email, on-line support request, or voice message support request that I've ever left. So I call back five days later to check on the status of my second replacement, to learn that they still have not received it. So finally they ask where I sent the return to, and then the guy makes the observation that I was given the wrong address. I was given their old out-dated address. So he assures me that he'll check into it and get right back to me. But he never does. So then I call and call some more, until finally I convince these morons to replace my unit. What I receive a week later is a "refurbished" unit that is all scratched up and has white pasty stuff on it, like dried up milk or glue..or..well, let's not go there.
So now I have my third Karma. And what do you know--a week later it dies as I'm walking down the sidewalk holding it in my hands. So this time I'm furious. So I've spent about 15 hours in the past 10 days on the phone, and finally reached the head of R