If you live in northern california, or oregon, and have any sense of reality whatsoever, you realize it's being majorly abused by dope dealers and drug addicts. It also causes lung cancer.
... but go on living in fantasy land, I'll never convince you.
Which is why I brought up the constitutional right of the government to search and seizure. You seem to think that the government has no power at all. Nowhere does it say that citizens have a right to privacy, freedom is not the same as privacy, as the point has been made. The constitution gives the benefit of a doubt to citizens, but it also outlines many rights of citizens that NEED to be outlined. The founding fathers knew better than to grant everybody a right to secrecy, if they had intended that to be the case they would surely have included it in the bill of rights.
For some reason it has always occurred to me that the people who argue for better privacy have something to hide, like they are growing marijuana in their closet, or are dealing child pornography. The biggest publicized cases for privacy are medical marijuana and abortion, two things I feel have a devastating effect on society, and really shouldn't fall under the jurisdiction of the constitution as there is no right to privacy in it. The presumed right to privacy is only an illusion created to enact this type of ill-begotten, unwritten law. If you look at these two cases, you will find that the real thing to worry about is judicial power grabs, those are a much greater threat to freedom than a presumed right to privacy. The constitution does say that the government has the right to search/seize your property with due process of law. If you don't have something to hide then you have no reason to support the right to privacy, other than simply being in defiance of the democratically enacted laws enabling intrusive investigation when conditions are met.
So what happens is a helicopter can fly over your house, your property that you OWN, and take pictures of your backyard to find out if you're growing Marijuana, or for science, or paparazzi even. People like Barbara Streisand think this is an outrage (go figure). Jennifer Aniston apparently walks around topless in broad daylight and she will suffer the consequences, she mistakenly assumed she had a right to privacy when she showed her breasts to the sun gods. I don't see how telephone calls or internet transmissions are much different. If I really had something to hide (like credit card info) I would encrypt it, lets see the government beat 1024 bit encryption in my lifetime. I think so long as terrorists are only sending encrypted messages back and forth the investigating authorities have no reason to suspect anything. It's when there is a $1,000,000 wire transfer or an unidentified boat arrival (with bombs, drugs, slaves, whatever) or pictures of rape and incest flowing on the internet that will require investigation. But I say if it's unencrypted, sure, use all the high-tech surveilance you can afford to try and prevent any harm at all.
Read the constitution if you don't believe me. There is nothing in there about privacy. It's an illusion, created by certain Judiciaries who have overstepped their bounds. As for the parent, I think you aren't looking at the bigger picture. This isn't the American Revolution. For one, the American revolutionaries were way out of bounds, if everyone thought like them today we'd all still be killing each other, not that what they did was a bad thing, just that their time has come and gone. The same gung-ho attitude lead us into the civil war. You know those slave owners would have loved to maintain ultimate privacy. These days we fight for other people's freedoms, and that in turn SHOULD lead to a more peaceful world. We'll see I guess.
Yeah I was going to post something about how much I hate Experian. They are the worst of the three credit agencies. I had 6 credit cards a couple months back, I closed 2 of them because I thought I had too many, not knowing that this can lower your credit score (closing accounts). One of my other credit cards, Bank One, was recently bought out by chase, another unethical corporation, and I already had a chase continental airlines card. They sent me a new terms of service around august for both cards, I didn't bother to read it. In november they jacked up my APR to 27.9% and 30% respectively, I didn't even know it was legal to bring it so high. I called them to find out why, they said its because THEY GOT A MESSAGE FROM EXPERIAN (note that they did not pull my credit), Experian says my credit had been checked too many times in the past few months, and because of the closed accounts. I don't have a high debt to income ratio, I've never made a late payment for anything, and my accounts aren't maxed out. God, I am sure glad Experian is keeping an eye on my credit score! None of the other cards have raised my interest rate.
I went to my bank and got a loan to pay off the chase cards. I'm just waiting for the next thing they do to screw me, because now I know better than to close the @#$@#'n accounts!!! I think credit agencies need an overhaul. Credit reports aught to say more about how much you're worth, and whether or not you can make payments on time, and less about how many times your credit has been pulled, or how many accounts you've closed in the last few months. Can anyone explain that to me? Why closing an account is a good indicator of someone's financial stability? It seems it's only in the interest of the credit reporting entity to keep accounts open.
I thought about this too, a marriage of emacs and some sort of GUI element. I decided the best thing to have would be a simple class tree-view and a code navigator utility for getting info on a variable name, could even be separate from emacs itself. I still prefer to use a web browser separately for documentation/testing. I mainly just want the class tree-view to navigate around my project visually, rather than having to keep track of all the filenames in my head. You could do the tree-view in emacs but I think I would prefer to have it as a GTK app.
How much longer until they start creating artificial cells in laboratories, you think? I give it 10 years at this point. Most people don't know how quickly the genetics research is progressing, but you can expect most of the major achievements to all come at once. Artificial, universal red blood cells should be pretty easy to create, nerve cells seems more custom but still doable. Creating an entire human being from scratch, now that will take some time!
To make matters worse, most heart donors and stuff are brain dead from a head injury, massive head trauma would most likely injur the face as well as the brain, often a brain injury is accompanied by massive swelling of the head and face, but that's not to say there aren't plenty of donors. A young donor may be hard to come buy. Maybe if the head trauma was only to the back of the skull, or a bullet wound, stroke/heart attack is pretty rare in young people. I dont think there are many illnesses which would cause one to be "near deceased" that would qualify for a transplant, given that most are communicable through the blood. These days when people die suddenly, in a car accident or something, and it is obvious that they died on impact, they are flown to the hospital in a helicopter just to get them on life support in time so that their organs can be used. If you ever know anybody who had to be flown to the hospital after a car accident, it was probably clear that they were already dead, even if it's not presented to you that way.
Hah, preach on brother. I never liked star wars, they weren't hard-core sci-fi at all, it was all crap. I'm still waiting for the next big blockbuster sci-fi movie. I think a deepness in the sky, by vernor vinge, would make a great box office hit. Hell you could even tie the plot into some sort of real world political conspiracy, which would pump up the controversy factor. Great book for those who haven't read it, although I would read a fire upon the deep first, for maximum effect.
It's called test driven development, some people do it without even thinking about it, everyone else is a bad programmer. By documenting your thought process, you help other programmers mature. That's the jist of it.
In addition to everything others have mentioned, for web development you need a good deployment system to compliment subversion or CVS or whatever you use for version control. As far as planning goes, always start with the data model, that is my best advise. Come up with the most versatile data model you can, try to plan for everything, don't just add columns to your existing tables as you go along (or try not to at least). Using a program like inkscape, omnigraffle, or visio can be handy for this, although it takes a bit of practice to come up with useful diagrams.
Usually the data model is the easiest part of the application to convey visually and will lead to the quickest understanding by newcomers. It's usually the first thing I start with when I'm familiarizing myself with something new, whether or not there is good documentation, I'll look in the database first.
What is your point with that? You are probably correct that it has happened before, I hear about the debate often enough... but yeah like the grandparent said it's definately unpopular as hell, people in America think the UN is ridiculous, and this internet ownership thing is fuel for the fire. Using international law as justification for a ruling is like a police beating a citizen because they do it in other countries, judges weren't granted the power to do something like that.
I think it's the only point you made that actually had substance, although I can't tell where you're going with it. I think your comment about American victories being few is also pretty ridiculous, you call the Iraq war (and the UN battle that preceded it) a non-victory I take it? I think you're delusional.
Maybe the internet will turn in to the callback situation. Other countries cut off links to the internet, private companies take over and provide access to the US internet for a hefty fee, a company in the US comes up with a way to circumvent their expensive services, international governments get involved and block private companies in the US from doing what they do best...
I was thinking along the same lines. This may just be the best purchase they ever made, I heard Urchin sold for 30 million, which is nothing compared to what they will make with this product.
Looks like google is the one with all the great ideas, Bill needs to start drinkin coffee.
I agree with the grandparent, not the parent. If whats at stake is the lives of millions of Africans afflicted with AIDS I say strap him to a table, steal his damn blood, and kick him out the damn door. Damn ingrate of a human being.
Michael Behe, THE ONE OF THE FOUNDERS OF ID, acknowledged on the stand that based on the law of probability, this is a very easy possibility. And he IS THE ONE who proposed irreducible complexity argument in the first place!
Michael Behe didn't propose irreducible complexity, idiot. He presented one specific example of irreducible complexity at the molecular level, as an argument, and acknowledged that this was not an end all proof against evolution. Again, this does not address the question of how life began in the first place. Click parent until you find the first post I made here, and you will see my argument in one short sentence, evolution doesn't answer the more important question of where life came from in the first place. I never made the claim that god created mankind, and neither does Behe. I also never in my life felt that there was much reason to disagree with the theory of evolution.
So now that your philosophical argument has been chewed to pieces, will you admit that ID is wrong? Because that is what a real scientists would do when their hypothesis is proven to be wrong.
First, you haven't chewed my argument to pieces, you haven't even presented your own argument against mine. Second, a real scientist doesn't just give up and go home, they come back stronger than before, with a bigger and better proof, until none can be made. I sense from your attitude that you're about ready to give up and go home.
Really, that is the whole problem, isn't it. What you "think" doesn't mean JACK SHIT. It is what you can prove. If you can't prove it, what you "think" makes as much sense as Flying Spagetti Monster. Sorry, to break it to ya, the world does not evolve around what you "think".
This is my opinion, that is why I prefixed it with "I think". If my opinions are too much for you to handle, perhaps you should ignore them. The world revolves around what I think, as far as I can tell, and the foundations of knowledge are based on ideas and impressions of individuals. This point has been made by many philosophers, David Hume is one you may find to your liking.
Yes, I've seen creationist calculations of "the odds of life forming". They always assume that a chain of molecules must fall into place simultaneously in a single specific order. The problems with that reasoning are that there's no reason that the molecules could slowly build up over time (since the chemical properties would create bonds even if they weren't all together at once) and there's more than one possible viable configuration. Creationists ignore those two facts so that they can create a bogus statistic to "prove" the impossibility of abiogenesis, without ever mentioning that their premises are bogus because the real required quantities are unknowns to begin with.
So you come up with a model as a foundation for abiogenesis. The proof for abiogenesis is not there. Read the theories and you will see that they rely heavily on chance, the odds of which may be incomprehensible, but can be agreeably slim. The main thing in any calculation is that so far, nobody has demonstrated there is any inherent symmetry in DNA that would facilitate it's random occurance, and DNA cannot be broken down into simpler structures, come up with the simplest self-reproducing life form that may have evolved into DNA based life forms and demonstrate how it can occur on a lifeless planet. Primordial goo completely skips over this. There is no argument for primordial goo, it is only a hypothesis, so any proof against it is just going to be a one-up on the competition.
Please stop tossing up red herrings.
I suppose you incorrectly assumed I was argueing for the existence of god. Please pay closer attention;) If anyone is tossing up red herrings, it's you, as this is an argument that I started, so far as I can tell.
You have no idea what you're talking about. The incredibly improbable odds that life would happen at random don't have much to do with irreducible complexity, which is an argument against evolution. You don't want to acknowledge that you don't know where life came from, do you game boy?
Furthermore I don't accept a transcript of some cross-examination of scientific proof of anything. It's silly that this is even being brought up. I think there could be certain traits in nature that couldn't have evolved on their own, and some other things that evolution doesn't explain about the nature of life, like why we never evolved the immortality gene.
This is radical skepticism, and if we applied your reasoning to every scientific argument, we would be nowhere. Probability theory is the basis for many of our advancements in science.
The article in question isn't making an argument for or against evolution, merely pointing out that evolution doesn't answer the big question of where we really came from.
Furthermore, a few days ago there was an article posted by some leading catholic figure that claimed evolution can coexist with creationism. I feel the same way, I've always assumed evolution was a fact. Origins is what I'm more skeptical about. The fact that you think ID is foolish stems from somewhere deep inside you, there is no reason everybody should feel that way.
Why does it matter so much to you? I'm not assuming the creator has control over you, or even CARES for that matter, as the Christians do. That is hearsay.
Why would indirect creation be less probably than direct abiogenesis? If the odds are so slim of abiogenesis, then all that means is that it happens less in the vast space of the universe, however once life starts, it spreads exponentially fast throughout the universe. Right?
Besides that, if abiogenesis is as likely to happen as you're suggesting, then it would seem the universe facilitates life, which raises more questions. I'm going on the assumption that there is "no special symmetry about life forming DNA" which would cause it to happen on its own very often.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why I brought up the constitutional right of the government to search and seizure. You seem to think that the government has no power at all. Nowhere does it say that citizens have a right to privacy, freedom is not the same as privacy, as the point has been made. The constitution gives the benefit of a doubt to citizens, but it also outlines many rights of citizens that NEED to be outlined. The founding fathers knew better than to grant everybody a right to secrecy, if they had intended that to be the case they would surely have included it in the bill of rights.
So what happens is a helicopter can fly over your house, your property that you OWN, and take pictures of your backyard to find out if you're growing Marijuana, or for science, or paparazzi even. People like Barbara Streisand think this is an outrage (go figure). Jennifer Aniston apparently walks around topless in broad daylight and she will suffer the consequences, she mistakenly assumed she had a right to privacy when she showed her breasts to the sun gods. I don't see how telephone calls or internet transmissions are much different. If I really had something to hide (like credit card info) I would encrypt it, lets see the government beat 1024 bit encryption in my lifetime. I think so long as terrorists are only sending encrypted messages back and forth the investigating authorities have no reason to suspect anything. It's when there is a $1,000,000 wire transfer or an unidentified boat arrival (with bombs, drugs, slaves, whatever) or pictures of rape and incest flowing on the internet that will require investigation. But I say if it's unencrypted, sure, use all the high-tech surveilance you can afford to try and prevent any harm at all.
Read the constitution if you don't believe me. There is nothing in there about privacy. It's an illusion, created by certain Judiciaries who have overstepped their bounds. As for the parent, I think you aren't looking at the bigger picture. This isn't the American Revolution. For one, the American revolutionaries were way out of bounds, if everyone thought like them today we'd all still be killing each other, not that what they did was a bad thing, just that their time has come and gone. The same gung-ho attitude lead us into the civil war. You know those slave owners would have loved to maintain ultimate privacy. These days we fight for other people's freedoms, and that in turn SHOULD lead to a more peaceful world. We'll see I guess.
I went to my bank and got a loan to pay off the chase cards. I'm just waiting for the next thing they do to screw me, because now I know better than to close the @#$@#'n accounts!!! I think credit agencies need an overhaul. Credit reports aught to say more about how much you're worth, and whether or not you can make payments on time, and less about how many times your credit has been pulled, or how many accounts you've closed in the last few months. Can anyone explain that to me? Why closing an account is a good indicator of someone's financial stability? It seems it's only in the interest of the credit reporting entity to keep accounts open.
Are you the troll who trolls this troll? The anti-anti-kde troll?
I thought about this too, a marriage of emacs and some sort of GUI element. I decided the best thing to have would be a simple class tree-view and a code navigator utility for getting info on a variable name, could even be separate from emacs itself. I still prefer to use a web browser separately for documentation/testing. I mainly just want the class tree-view to navigate around my project visually, rather than having to keep track of all the filenames in my head. You could do the tree-view in emacs but I think I would prefer to have it as a GTK app.
How much longer until they start creating artificial cells in laboratories, you think? I give it 10 years at this point. Most people don't know how quickly the genetics research is progressing, but you can expect most of the major achievements to all come at once. Artificial, universal red blood cells should be pretty easy to create, nerve cells seems more custom but still doable. Creating an entire human being from scratch, now that will take some time!
To make matters worse, most heart donors and stuff are brain dead from a head injury, massive head trauma would most likely injur the face as well as the brain, often a brain injury is accompanied by massive swelling of the head and face, but that's not to say there aren't plenty of donors. A young donor may be hard to come buy. Maybe if the head trauma was only to the back of the skull, or a bullet wound, stroke/heart attack is pretty rare in young people. I dont think there are many illnesses which would cause one to be "near deceased" that would qualify for a transplant, given that most are communicable through the blood. These days when people die suddenly, in a car accident or something, and it is obvious that they died on impact, they are flown to the hospital in a helicopter just to get them on life support in time so that their organs can be used. If you ever know anybody who had to be flown to the hospital after a car accident, it was probably clear that they were already dead, even if it's not presented to you that way.
Hah, preach on brother. I never liked star wars, they weren't hard-core sci-fi at all, it was all crap. I'm still waiting for the next big blockbuster sci-fi movie. I think a deepness in the sky, by vernor vinge, would make a great box office hit. Hell you could even tie the plot into some sort of real world political conspiracy, which would pump up the controversy factor. Great book for those who haven't read it, although I would read a fire upon the deep first, for maximum effect.
They need and ice cream flavor called the 4-dimensional swirl.
Postgres is a really nice database, but I think it's popularity is hindered by its crappy name. I propose a new name, like NuclearSQL or something.
In addition to everything others have mentioned, for web development you need a good deployment system to compliment subversion or CVS or whatever you use for version control. As far as planning goes, always start with the data model, that is my best advise. Come up with the most versatile data model you can, try to plan for everything, don't just add columns to your existing tables as you go along (or try not to at least). Using a program like inkscape, omnigraffle, or visio can be handy for this, although it takes a bit of practice to come up with useful diagrams.
Usually the data model is the easiest part of the application to convey visually and will lead to the quickest understanding by newcomers. It's usually the first thing I start with when I'm familiarizing myself with something new, whether or not there is good documentation, I'll look in the database first.
I think it's the only point you made that actually had substance, although I can't tell where you're going with it. I think your comment about American victories being few is also pretty ridiculous, you call the Iraq war (and the UN battle that preceded it) a non-victory I take it? I think you're delusional.
Maybe the internet will turn in to the callback situation. Other countries cut off links to the internet, private companies take over and provide access to the US internet for a hefty fee, a company in the US comes up with a way to circumvent their expensive services, international governments get involved and block private companies in the US from doing what they do best...
Looks like google is the one with all the great ideas, Bill needs to start drinkin coffee.
I just talked this over with a friend, we think he is holding out for money. I surely would. $1,000,000 per mL.
I agree with the grandparent, not the parent. If whats at stake is the lives of millions of Africans afflicted with AIDS I say strap him to a table, steal his damn blood, and kick him out the damn door. Damn ingrate of a human being.
Okay, genius. Care to provide the comprehensive irreducible complexity argument? Or are you just parroting something you heard?
Answer: The Watchmaker Analogy. Again, that's straying from my original post. Again, click parent until you figure out what we're talking about here.
I'm done argueing with you. You're immature and uninteresting. Keep playing those video games. ;)
Michael Behe, THE ONE OF THE FOUNDERS OF ID, acknowledged on the stand that based on the law of probability, this is a very easy possibility. And he IS THE ONE who proposed irreducible complexity argument in the first place!
Michael Behe didn't propose irreducible complexity, idiot. He presented one specific example of irreducible complexity at the molecular level, as an argument, and acknowledged that this was not an end all proof against evolution. Again, this does not address the question of how life began in the first place. Click parent until you find the first post I made here, and you will see my argument in one short sentence, evolution doesn't answer the more important question of where life came from in the first place. I never made the claim that god created mankind, and neither does Behe. I also never in my life felt that there was much reason to disagree with the theory of evolution.
So now that your philosophical argument has been chewed to pieces, will you admit that ID is wrong? Because that is what a real scientists would do when their hypothesis is proven to be wrong.
First, you haven't chewed my argument to pieces, you haven't even presented your own argument against mine. Second, a real scientist doesn't just give up and go home, they come back stronger than before, with a bigger and better proof, until none can be made. I sense from your attitude that you're about ready to give up and go home.
Really, that is the whole problem, isn't it. What you "think" doesn't mean JACK SHIT. It is what you can prove. If you can't prove it, what you "think" makes as much sense as Flying Spagetti Monster. Sorry, to break it to ya, the world does not evolve around what you "think".
This is my opinion, that is why I prefixed it with "I think". If my opinions are too much for you to handle, perhaps you should ignore them. The world revolves around what I think, as far as I can tell, and the foundations of knowledge are based on ideas and impressions of individuals. This point has been made by many philosophers, David Hume is one you may find to your liking.
Yes, I've seen creationist calculations of "the odds of life forming". They always assume that a chain of molecules must fall into place simultaneously in a single specific order. The problems with that reasoning are that there's no reason that the molecules could slowly build up over time (since the chemical properties would create bonds even if they weren't all together at once) and there's more than one possible viable configuration. Creationists ignore those two facts so that they can create a bogus statistic to "prove" the impossibility of abiogenesis, without ever mentioning that their premises are bogus because the real required quantities are unknowns to begin with.
So you come up with a model as a foundation for abiogenesis. The proof for abiogenesis is not there. Read the theories and you will see that they rely heavily on chance, the odds of which may be incomprehensible, but can be agreeably slim. The main thing in any calculation is that so far, nobody has demonstrated there is any inherent symmetry in DNA that would facilitate it's random occurance, and DNA cannot be broken down into simpler structures, come up with the simplest self-reproducing life form that may have evolved into DNA based life forms and demonstrate how it can occur on a lifeless planet. Primordial goo completely skips over this. There is no argument for primordial goo, it is only a hypothesis, so any proof against it is just going to be a one-up on the competition.
Please stop tossing up red herrings.
I suppose you incorrectly assumed I was argueing for the existence of god. Please pay closer attention ;) If anyone is tossing up red herrings, it's you, as this is an argument that I started, so far as I can tell.
Furthermore I don't accept a transcript of some cross-examination of scientific proof of anything. It's silly that this is even being brought up. I think there could be certain traits in nature that couldn't have evolved on their own, and some other things that evolution doesn't explain about the nature of life, like why we never evolved the immortality gene.
The article in question isn't making an argument for or against evolution, merely pointing out that evolution doesn't answer the big question of where we really came from.
Furthermore, a few days ago there was an article posted by some leading catholic figure that claimed evolution can coexist with creationism. I feel the same way, I've always assumed evolution was a fact. Origins is what I'm more skeptical about. The fact that you think ID is foolish stems from somewhere deep inside you, there is no reason everybody should feel that way.
Why would indirect creation be less probably than direct abiogenesis? If the odds are so slim of abiogenesis, then all that means is that it happens less in the vast space of the universe, however once life starts, it spreads exponentially fast throughout the universe. Right?
Besides that, if abiogenesis is as likely to happen as you're suggesting, then it would seem the universe facilitates life, which raises more questions. I'm going on the assumption that there is "no special symmetry about life forming DNA" which would cause it to happen on its own very often.
Very well said.