And to echo the grandparent, people with religion are also fond of philosophical relativism and deconstructionism, although your reasons for citing Kant elude me: he concluded that we do perceive the "real world", and that scientific empiricism (although modern science is not empiricist in the philosophical sense) is far preferable to dogmatic metaphysics(i.e. religion).
As to Kuhn, the poster-child of deconstructionism, his ideas are easily refuted by the history of science itself, which has many examples of a theory's original formulators later discovering that they were collectively wrong, and completely discarding their carefully-constructed edifice because data they discovered pointed to something else entirely. This could not happen if Kuhn's theory was correct.
Same thing happened to me. Rev. A iMac G5 with the dreaded capacitor problem after about 9 months. The dealer (a specialist Apple place) fixed it in a few days, and it's working fine at the time of writing. I bought AppleCare on the spot (you can buy it while the machine is still under warranty in most countries) for sheer peace of mind.
This is however a problem with so many different pieces of electronics from a host of completely unrelated companies that I can't really lay the blame on Apple for it. Furthermore, the excellent way they've handled this (including extending warranties for equipment with this problem) has impressed me. The iMac was my first Apple purchase (although far from being my first computer), and I'd be more than happy to buy from them again because of the prompt and professional service I received.
Thanks for the link -- a very interesting article. Perhaps the greatest impact panspermia has on the ID / evolution debate is that it increases both the time scale and area available for simple organisms to initially form from organic molecules (which exist in quite large quantities in interstellar space).
We thus increase the scale for the game of life dice from a window of perhaps 500 million years over the entire surface of the earth to several billion years in an immensely wider area, thereby diminishing still further the requirement for any supernatural intervention.
As to IDers, they seem incapable of spotting the logical fallacy in their arguments. If life could not have occurred without intelligent intervention, then how did the intelligence that intervened (which by definition must be a form of life to have both intellect and the means to apply it to the physical universe) originate if there was no prior intelligence to intervene on its behalf?
Without a convincing answer to the above that does not involve circular reasoning such as "it was there from the beginning, blah blah), ID is nothing more than a piece of religious dogma masquerading as science. Any schools that insist on teaching it in what is supposed to be a science class are therefore nothing more or less than Christian madrassas.
NB: the US should take a lesson from what happened to the Islamic world when it began to replace education with religious dogma. They had a civilization that made Christian Europe look like a load of smelly, brutal barbarians; they preserved ancient Greek texts, and their universities used them as a basis for teaching mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and a host of other topics while we were struggling to calculate the number of angels that would fit on the head of a pin using Roman numerals. Yet by the 17th century, all this had been replaced by religious teaching, and the once great Islamic nations declined to the point where they were easily overrun by European powers whose technology had far surpassed theirs, largely thanks to a renaissance that owed much of its impetus to exiled Spanish Jews translating Greek and Arabic texts from former Islamic Spain into Latin.
Thanks for the links. Those finds are extremely interesting, and may indeed be evidence of much earlier art; however, as the links themselves say, there is debate as to whether they may be the result of entirely natural processes. The "face stones" are the ones I'm most skeptical about, as we are psychologically programmed to see certain configurations of features as faces, hence all those claims about the face of Jesus etc. appearing on the surface of tortillas, or the "martian face" that was the subject of so much speculation until better images showed that it was just a normal piece of rock.
Of course, it is entirely possible that art is much older than previously thought. All the great apes for example have demonstrated a definite ability to process abstract symbols and use them to communicate with both us and each-other; although we currently have to both design the symbols and teach them to the apes, the mental ability still has to be there. And Homo Erectus / Habilis was a much more sophisticated creature than any of today's apes: they used fire and crafted pretty sophisticated tools, so sculpting stone was well within their capabilities, if of course they had the desire to do so (which is I think still far from being proven).
We must also consider the fact that some forms of art do not survive for long periods. Tattoos and body painting are two very good examples, but we could also include painted animal skins and other art realized on non-permanent media. When one considers how few of our works of art would survive 200,000 years and several ice ages, the chances of finding much from a world populated by a few hundred thousand individuals are pretty remote anyway.
I've not seen any evidence of Venus carving dating back as far as 70,000 years. I'm not disputing your assertions, but the earliest ones I've heard of are around 30,000 years old, i.e. some 10,000 years after Homo Sapiens Sapiens arrived in Europe (although such carvings are not of course restricted to Europe).
I would however doubt a figure of 120,000 years, as while anatomically modern humans existed at that time, their behaviour seems to have been similar to other contemporary advanced hominids (e.g. Homo Habilis, Homo Neanderthalensis). Such behaviour is distinguished (among other things) by a lack of what we would call "art", i.e. artifacts whose purpose is other than strictly utilitarian.
In fact, up until a certain point, Neanderthal behaviour seems to have been more advanced than that of our own ancestors. For example, they buried their dead with flowers and other gifts while we simply discarded ours, and also seem to have removed their heads either before or after burial, which may indicate some form of ancestor worship.
Druids are of course much more modern than the sorts of things we're talking about here. They are particular to Celtic peoples, who migrated across Europe, both displacing and assimilating the prior inhabitants around 500BC. Their culture was based around oral traditions not because writing was dangerous, but due to the fact that they simply did not use it. For example, Ireland (one of the few Celtic cultures to survive the Roman Empire and later Germanic migrations intact) was completely illiterate until around 500AD, when St. Patrick introduced writing. This did however mean that the rich Celtic oral tradition survived there, and was later written down, while that of many other Celtic peoples was lost forever.
NB: boring as it may seem, writing seems to have originally come about because of the need to keep financial records, inventories, etc. The earliest written records we have are thus rather dull items such as lists of things in a trading ship, IOUs, contracts, etc. It was a great disappointment to many when we finally learned to read the two forms of ancient Egyptian script, and found that instead of the great mystical secrets that many had expected, the vast bulk of papyri contained the same dull financially-related stuff that was present on most mesopotamian cuneiform tablets.
"The point where ID better koshers with observations than life as a collection of random processes is how bloody well designed something the human body is. There's an unaccountably low amount of vestigal processes, especially in processes that would have no competitive advantage."
But it isn't that well-designed as a physical system, and we do have vestigial and semi-vestigial organs,
A few examples of poor design:
Our posture makes us liable to certain back and neck problems which do not affect quadrupeds.
Our retinas are 'back to front', which results in (among other things) the famous blind spot. Squid eyes on the other hand don't have this problem because their retina aren't configured in a silly way.
We are liable to cancer (i.e. cell growth gone wild), which does not affect sharks.
Our blood lacks the powerful antiseptics that crocodiles and king-crabs have, so we are more liable to infections than they.
Some vestigial organs:
The appendix.
The small toe.
Wisdom teeth, which don't fit in our mouths properly during to our jaws having become shorter.
The above argue against intelligent design because a competent engineer will incorporate the best systems possible into each model. Things like cancer-fighting systems, antiseptic blood, and properly designed eyes are present in some species, so why aren't they present in all the others if the same being designed them? And the same with vestigial organs: why would an intelligent designer have put in such troublesome things as wisdom teeth and potentially lethal, totally useless stuff like an appendix? Why wouldn't an intelligent designer equip his top-end intelligent biped with a properly designed neck and back?
So you either accept that your intelligent designer was in fact a bit of a bodge-artist who doesn't seem to have known entirely what s/he was doing most of the time, or come up some other reason for all these daft variations in the multitude of things that live on our planet, not all of which are anything like the best possible solution for the job at hand.
What we actually have are some little statues of stylized women that date back a good few thousands of years, but nothing approaching hundreds of millennia. However, it is not known whether these were goddesses, fertility-related, or simply good luck symbols, so they are anything but "well understood".
The oldest religious symbols in Europe are ritual-magic cave paintings dating back around 30,000 years. These invariably are based around animals, not human goddesses, and seem to have been a way of trying to ensure successful hunts.
Even older than these is the religion of the Australian aborigines, which appears to go back 50,000 years or more, yet is still present in their oral tradition today. They do have gods and goddesses (plural), but the male ones seem to be the bosses. Again, animals are important, especially the Rainbow Serpent, who unlike many gods and goddesses (which vary with tribe and region) seems to be universal, and may be the oldest religious figure yet discovered.
"And while the Druids performed sacrifice, it's well known that the only human sacrifices were those sentenced already to death by justice."
Nothing of the sort is "well known", because druids didn't keep written records. What we actually know from well-preserved peat burials and the like is that human sacrifice seems to have been a relatively rare occurrence (i.e. not like similar practices by some Amerindian societies, where hundreds could die in a single ceremony), and those who were sacrificed seem to have been willing participants who (by the expressions on their faces) didn't suffer much. This has led to speculation that it was something done only in time of dire need, may have been considered as an honour by the victim, and that some sort of drugs were used (possibly in ritually-consumed food).
NB: while Roman records are valuable in some ways because they are virtually the only written records we have, Romans did have a tendency to paint their enemies in the worst possible light, so their accounts of druidic awfulness need to be taken with a very large pinch of salt.
""Give me one example (besides Frankenstein) where life was created from non-life."
When you eat dead flesh or vegetables, and your body breaks it down and turns the non-living atoms and chemicals into living tissue? Or not even organic food, but synthetic drugs, or Lithium, or charcoal biscuits for indigestion?"
A much better example is the recent discovery of bacteria that live in total darkness and metabolize completely non-organic molecules. Examples are the sulphide-consuming ones that live around undersea "black smokers" and are the food base of an entire ecosystem, and two very recently discovered ones (in France and the US) that live on the interaction between water and basalt rock.
As a non-American, I can tell you that most of us think "hey, the US legal system is every bit as fucked up as ours".
The the thing that really embarrasses the US on an international level is Fox News, or "Al-Jabush" as it is more commonly known. Of course, not all Americans are aware of the fact that it is kicking around on the dials of many countries' satellite and cable systems, so they probably think that all those country singers going on about how great America is, daily Anne Coulter interviews, and a definition of "fair and balanced" that gives Republican congressmen their own shows is locked within US borders, safe from critical foreign eyes. Well, sorry guys, but they broadcast around the world, regularly telling us incredulous foreigners that they're the network most of you Americans trust for your news. And that more than Al-Jabush itself is very, very embarrassing indeed!
Agreed. Far too may installers require authentification thanks to the convention of putting various bits of global stuff in/Library (especially/Library/Frameworks). Yet in most cases this is unnecessary because (a) the majority of Macs have only one person using them anyway, and (b) in those cases where there are more (i.e. mine), many programs are of interest to only the person who installed them, not everyone else on the machine (assuming otherwise is just hubris on the part of developers).
Yet I don't think this was the way Apple intended things to be, because every user already has a Library folder in their home directory that could in most cases be used instead of/Library, yet only seems to end up being used to store user-specific data and settings, even though it even has a (usually empty) Frameworks directory. IMO this exists because Apple (like me) believed that it would serve for most pieces of software, while the root/Library folder would only be needed for stuff that really should be globally accessible.
However, Apple's intentions notwithstanding, the fact of the matter is that bad practices by software authors have socially engineered a lot of OS X users to authenticate anything that requests it without thinking. The authentication process itself therefore has very little value as a security mechanism nowadays with non-technical OS X users, i.e. the very people malware authors are most likely to target.
Even easier: select "About this Mac" from the Apple menu, and then click the "more info" button on the dialog that pops up. This launches System Profiler without having to hunt for it with Finder.
And you are setting up straw men. The point (which I have labored over and over to no avail) was that the same report said this risk _was much smaller than previous studies had indicated_, which you would realize if you were attempting to answer my points instead of making your own ones up and then knocking them down.
Furthermore, I do not smoke either, and I am also "a breather", but it does not nauseate me, so your statement about "all breathers" is, like everything you have posted, merely an attempt to present your opinions as being general ones so that you can justify treading on other people. Some dislike tobacco smoke, just like others dislike the smell of alcohol on peoples' breath, or garlic, or onions, or loud voices, or people using cell-phones, etc., etc., etc. My pet hate is walking into a room filled with mixes of strong women's perfumes, some brands of which give me uncontrollable coughing fits. I however don't go around trying to get perfume banned just because I happen to dislike it.
Finally, the fact that you automatically (and wrongly) assumed that I am a smoker because I don't support your rabidly anti-smoking position, together with your completely humorless hostility, indicates that you are simply another of the sad millions in this world who want everyone else to conform with their own narrow, prejudiced viewpoint.
Don't waste your time answering this, as I will not read it.
I never dismissed anything: saying that the risks may be lower than some have claimed is not dismissing them. Dismissing them would be saying that there are no risks, which is something I never said even once.
Secondly, nobody said that a 16% increase was "small": the report merely said that it was _smaller than they'd expected based on claims made by other studies_, and the scientists in question speculated as to why that may be the case in Europe at the time the study was made.
Thirdly, yes, one of the links I included was from a pro-smoking publication. I also made it clear that I was not vouching for either the reports or the studies they cite in any way or form. In the interests of balance however (I suggest you look that one up, as it's a useful word that I suspect you might not have come across before), I shall include a very good criticism of it from an anti-smoking publication:
Fourthly, I made it quite clear in my last post that _most of_ the available data is politically slewed in some way, not just the links you gave. If you dig deeply into the published studies, there usually ends up being somebody with an agenda somewhere, either a front organization for the tobacco industry, or somebody who started out to prove that it was harmful, and then tried to find evidence to support that idea (the global warming debate is also sadly similarly afflicted).
And finally, "especially while it nauseates me while eating or otherwise having fun in public" reveals something rather important: you believe that you have the right to abuse others by forcing them not to do things you dislike on the grounds that them doing that thing is abusing you. With that kind of logic, I'm left wondering if your real name is Peter Griffin...
Citing an anti-tobacco web site as a source is no more likely to produce unbiased information as one run by the tobacco industry. The studies with links that work all-too-predictably contain phrases such as "are estimated as being", "is thought to", "chemicals for which no exposure levels have yet been set" (meaning they have no idea whether the amounts passive smokers are exposed to present a danger), etc. Here are two news reports citing studies with more concrete figures, although I cannot personally vouch for the accuracy of either the news reporting or the studies themselves:
I do not dispute the fact that passive smoking increases the likelihood of getting various types of diseases (lung, cardio-vascular, etc), is dangerous for those with certain types of respiratory problems, and just plain unpleasant for many others. However, the level of risk for otherwise healthy individuals from differing levels of exposure (and indeed, how much exposure they actually have in different environments), and what effects other environmental factors may have, is suffering from a dearth of real, independent studies conducted by those without an agenda on statistically significant groups over long periods.
The problem with this is that "a diesel engine" isn't "diesel engines" in general, which range from well maintained little 300cc things in tiny cars that can be driven without a license in many European countries, to large badly maintained monsters in some old buses and trucks that spew huge plumes of very visible black smoke just sitting at a set of traffic lights with their engines ticking over. I wonder which of these they tested for the newspaper article (which in any case seldom permit silly things like scientific rigour stand in the way selling papers, which is what they primarily exist to do).
As an example, I have a Chieftain Mk. 12 Main Battle tank (don't ask why or how, it's a long story) whose multi-fuel compression-ignition engine (i.e. a diesel that runs on nearly everything) guzzles over three liters of whatever I put in it to go a kilometer (about a gallon per mile for American readers). I will put money on the fact that this particular "diesel engine" shoves out massively more crap in a minute than burning a single cigarette, especially as it needs another auxiliary diesel running flat out just to start the main one, and I has to rev hard when moving the 60 ton thing it lives in up a steep hill.
So I could also write a magazine article showing that "a diesel engine" produces more micro-particle pollution in a minute than three packs of cigarettes, without falsifying any data whatsoever, but simply conveniently forgetting to mention that this particular engine spews it out through twin exhausts that are wide enough to easily accommodate a child's head (not that I've tried this!).
""Witch hunt" is when people frame innocent people for nonexistent crimes to attack political enemies with fabricated mass hysteria. None of which applies to banning offensive smokers who take out your self-destructive behavior on other people until forced to stop."
But it is fabricated mass hysteria. The only large-scale, long term scientific study ever undertaken (as opposed to small-scale pieces to support political agenda on both sides of the debate) showed that the risks of dying from passive smoking are around one in a million. To put this in context, approximately 300 people per year in the US will die from second-hand tobacco smoke, and the study showed that these are without exception people who work in extremely smokey environments for many years. To put it in context, over the same period, 30,000 Americans will die from respiratory ailments caused by traffic pollution, 40,000 from car crashes, 30,000 from alcohol-related chronic liver disease, 60,000 from influenza, RSV, and complications relating thereto, and 80,000 from being shot with a firearm.
Thus, by definition, this is indeed a witch-hunt, because most anti-smoking laws are enacted within cities where you have at least 100 times more probability of being killed by traffic fumes than somebody else's cigarette smoke even if you spend a significant proportion of your life working in an extremely smokey environment.
Very few though. The UK carried out a massive study of passive smoking over a 15 year period, and concluded that around 60 people a year will die from it in that country, versus 5,000 per year who die from respiratory ailments caused by pollution from cars. Your chances of being killed by passive smoking in the UK were therefore one in a million _before_ various bits of anti-smoking legislation got enacted, and even that tiny risk was only relevant to people who work for long periods in smoky atmospheres such as pubs, clubs, etc. for a large number of years.
"I'm still going to have to disagree with you on that I think."
Fair enough. Without disagreement, debates would be very dull affairs indeed!
"The way VOIP calls are routed depends very much on DNS being alive and well, generally the people putting the call centers together do not have an accumulator stateside they send everything through as they can just have calls route directly to the center. The whole point of outsourcing a call center is to not have to deal with the phone network stuff. Also of course as I noted there's a lot of data associated with the calls, which usually means lookups back from databases in the U.S. which would require further use of a DNS that could find those servers."
Excellent point. None of these are of course insurmountable problems, but working around them could initially be both inconvenient and expensive.
"And if China is cutting themselves off our network then chinese IP addresses cannot be used when talking to the U.S. as presumably they'd do thier own allocation."
The Chinese don't as a rule outsource call centers though. That's India's thing, and India (AFAIK) are pretty happy with the way things are now. Unlike China, Iran, and the EC (the organization that is, not its member states) India is a democracy, and there would be a definite backlash if an already quite large and growing industry was damaged due what is in reality little more than political posturing.
"Absuing their own people is way different that causing ills for others outside the country though."
Hence that fact that I mentioned Tibet, which the Chinese still occupy by military force.
"At least as far as international politics goes, nations mostly look the other way and so that's why it doesn't really come up with things like Olympic selection - not to mention that China has not had any high-profile human rights abuses recently (nothing on the level of Tienamen)."
Well, I agree that they haven't had any mass demonstrations put down by tanks. But there was a pretty big international hoo-raw over their oppressing members of a new and rapidly-growing religion that they don't like (its name escapes me at the moment, but it was widely reported) not too long ago, something many IOC members must have been aware of.
"Well, that's a pretty good point and probably the best indicator that even some high level antics by the Chinese might not be enough to stop them from hosting the games now. However the games are a lot further out, at that time with the Olympics only a year away making another selection was not really practical. I believe China had the 2008 games which is a fair amount of time for some other country to ramp up."
I doubt that it would have affected anything even if this had all been taking place during the initial selection process. Firstly because few members of the IOC panel are aware that DNS, ICANN, etc. exist, let alone why they're important; and secondly, the Chinese could easily argue that (a) they are far from being alone in objecting to the US hegemony over these resources, and (b) that they aren't trying to take over the system, but are arguing for UN oversight of something that the "greedy American imperialists" want to keep for themselves. When one considers how many on the IOC panel represent countries that are either directly antagonistic to the US in general, or the Bush administration in particular, there is a pretty good chance that the US would end up being seen as the bad guy, while China successfully plays the role of poor downtrodden victim.
When companies claim they could release something amazing when they're actually making a piece of crap like Paxville, it's a pretty sure bet that they're lying. After all, not getting their clocks cleaned by AMD in terms of both performance, power consumption, and suitability for things like blade servers is a pretty good definition of something that is definitely in Intel's best interest!
NB: Apple may indeed be using Yonah for prototype Macs (although I've seen no definitive evidence for this). But there's a big difference between producing a few reference CPUs that may not operate at full clock-speed, and large production runs of finished examples. Intel have been forced to withdraw more than one new CPU model shortly after production because of insurmountable problems, and they're unlikely to want that to happen by prematurely releasing Yonah to manufacturing. Hence Paxville, an obvious kludge that they hope will stop a rising tide of corporate data-centers selecting AMD-based solutions for long enough to get a properly designed CPU out of the door.
Or perhaps IBM refused to bend over and open their cheeks to Jobs after winning big with all three next-gen console manufacturers, and he threw a hissy-fit. This is I think more probably than Intel magically producing a low wattage 64-bit multi core CPU for Apple, despite a history of marginally performant chips whose waste heat can be used to run an enameling kiln.
Rather than fading away, it seems that the Big Iron guys are simply implementing Linux on their systems. There's still significant demand for fail-over 24x365 facilities in centralized, easy-to-administer boxes, irrespective of whether one calls them "mainframes" or "blade servers", or whether they use custom CPUs or large arrays of AMD Opterons.
I think that MS will continue to have great difficulties penetrating the large corporate DP market for a very simple reason: Windows as it stands is ill-suited to the sorts of things that they want to do. Out of the box, it is basically a file and print server which includes little or no support for either batch-processing or true multi-user applications. By contrast, Linux inherits all this and more from its UNIX roots, because UNIX was specifically designed for serve corporate DP needs.
On the other hand, Windows server editions are very well suited to departmental or small/medium business IT, where the requirement is for centralized file and print services in an easy-to-administer package. Microsoft have been extremely successful with this type of installation, where the ability to get everything from a single vendor (OS, DBMS, Email services, office automation, programming tools, etc.) together with the general ease of finding people familiar with them is very attractive indeed. Linux has a much harder time competing for this sort of customer because, while it is superficially similar in what it offers, most of its constituent parts lack the high level of integration that Microsoft's solutions provide.
We're talking about UNISYS here, which has relevance to data centers, not desktops. Whether grandma can use a system for EMAIL or not has absolutely no bearing on its suitability for large corporate data centers, because Grandma would have even more trouble using OS/390, VMS, HP/UX, or indeed OS2200, which most of UNISYS' customers were using before all the Windows shenannigans began, and by and large still want now. All of these are command-line only environments, which is precisely what people in corporate data centers require, because a GUI eats precious cycles and RAM that could otherwise be used for useful work.
Linux is an easy sell in these environments because it is essentially UNIX, which was specifically designed for them. It is a DP-oriented system that has had end-user bits added, whereas Windows is an end-user system that has been extended to include some DP facilities. What Windows offers "out of the box" is basically a file and print server, while Linux combines true multi-user facilities with powerful scripting systems that can be used to control batch operations in a similar manner to mainframe Job Control Languages. That was what the people who bought computers wanted to do with them when UNIX was being developed, and Linux (and other work-alikes such as the various BSD-derived systems) have inherited this functionality.
Just because a place isn't using Linux for their data centers doesn't mean an automatic gain for MS. A large proportion of the world's corporations are running custom COBOL or RPG software written decades ago on mainframes or large minis, while others have proprietary UNIX systems, again with custom legacy software. The cost of migrating this stuff to another platform can be significant because, even if it compiles successfully, they still have to do a whole bunch of validation testing before going "live" with something that could be processing millions of transaction per day. Even a small error or a few hours' downtime could potentially cost them huge sums of money, so they won't switch to something else without being given significant support and a lot of guarantees (i.e. none of that "This software isn't warranted as being fit for any purpose" EULA garbage!).
Anybody who doubts this should take a look at the software a major bank or other financial institution is running on their Windows desktop PCs. It's likely to be a pretty front-end that sits on top of what amounts to a terminal emulator connected to a big, boring old system without either Windows or Linux on it.
This is very much a case of a "glass half full, glass half empty" situation, though. Looked at from the other side, it could also be described as follows:
Windows/NT Server was first launched in 1993 to try and extend Microsoft's desktop OS dominance into IT data centers. Yet twelve years of updates, massive publicity and FUD-spreading campaigns, and repeated attempts to prevent their desktop clients from connecting to competing servers has gained them only 30% of an increasingly large and lucrative market.
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And to echo the grandparent, people with religion are also fond of philosophical relativism and deconstructionism, although your reasons for citing Kant elude me: he concluded that we do perceive the "real world", and that scientific empiricism (although modern science is not empiricist in the philosophical sense) is far preferable to dogmatic metaphysics(i.e. religion).
As to Kuhn, the poster-child of deconstructionism, his ideas are easily refuted by the history of science itself, which has many examples of a theory's original formulators later discovering that they were collectively wrong, and completely discarding their carefully-constructed edifice because data they discovered pointed to something else entirely. This could not happen if Kuhn's theory was correct.
Same thing happened to me. Rev. A iMac G5 with the dreaded capacitor problem after about 9 months. The dealer (a specialist Apple place) fixed it in a few days, and it's working fine at the time of writing. I bought AppleCare on the spot (you can buy it while the machine is still under warranty in most countries) for sheer peace of mind.
This is however a problem with so many different pieces of electronics from a host of completely unrelated companies that I can't really lay the blame on Apple for it. Furthermore, the excellent way they've handled this (including extending warranties for equipment with this problem) has impressed me. The iMac was my first Apple purchase (although far from being my first computer), and I'd be more than happy to buy from them again because of the prompt and professional service I received.
Thanks for the link -- a very interesting article. Perhaps the greatest impact panspermia has on the ID / evolution debate is that it increases both the time scale and area available for simple organisms to initially form from organic molecules (which exist in quite large quantities in interstellar space).
We thus increase the scale for the game of life dice from a window of perhaps 500 million years over the entire surface of the earth to several billion years in an immensely wider area, thereby diminishing still further the requirement for any supernatural intervention.
As to IDers, they seem incapable of spotting the logical fallacy in their arguments. If life could not have occurred without intelligent intervention, then how did the intelligence that intervened (which by definition must be a form of life to have both intellect and the means to apply it to the physical universe) originate if there was no prior intelligence to intervene on its behalf?
Without a convincing answer to the above that does not involve circular reasoning such as "it was there from the beginning, blah blah), ID is nothing more than a piece of religious dogma masquerading as science. Any schools that insist on teaching it in what is supposed to be a science class are therefore nothing more or less than Christian madrassas.
NB: the US should take a lesson from what happened to the Islamic world when it began to replace education with religious dogma. They had a civilization that made Christian Europe look like a load of smelly, brutal barbarians; they preserved ancient Greek texts, and their universities used them as a basis for teaching mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and a host of other topics while we were struggling to calculate the number of angels that would fit on the head of a pin using Roman numerals. Yet by the 17th century, all this had been replaced by religious teaching, and the once great Islamic nations declined to the point where they were easily overrun by European powers whose technology had far surpassed theirs, largely thanks to a renaissance that owed much of its impetus to exiled Spanish Jews translating Greek and Arabic texts from former Islamic Spain into Latin.
Thanks for the links. Those finds are extremely interesting, and may indeed be evidence of much earlier art; however, as the links themselves say, there is debate as to whether they may be the result of entirely natural processes. The "face stones" are the ones I'm most skeptical about, as we are psychologically programmed to see certain configurations of features as faces, hence all those claims about the face of Jesus etc. appearing on the surface of tortillas, or the "martian face" that was the subject of so much speculation until better images showed that it was just a normal piece of rock.
Of course, it is entirely possible that art is much older than previously thought. All the great apes for example have demonstrated a definite ability to process abstract symbols and use them to communicate with both us and each-other; although we currently have to both design the symbols and teach them to the apes, the mental ability still has to be there. And Homo Erectus / Habilis was a much more sophisticated creature than any of today's apes: they used fire and crafted pretty sophisticated tools, so sculpting stone was well within their capabilities, if of course they had the desire to do so (which is I think still far from being proven).
We must also consider the fact that some forms of art do not survive for long periods. Tattoos and body painting are two very good examples, but we could also include painted animal skins and other art realized on non-permanent media. When one considers how few of our works of art would survive 200,000 years and several ice ages, the chances of finding much from a world populated by a few hundred thousand individuals are pretty remote anyway.
I've not seen any evidence of Venus carving dating back as far as 70,000 years. I'm not disputing your assertions, but the earliest ones I've heard of are around 30,000 years old, i.e. some 10,000 years after Homo Sapiens Sapiens arrived in Europe (although such carvings are not of course restricted to Europe).
I would however doubt a figure of 120,000 years, as while anatomically modern humans existed at that time, their behaviour seems to have been similar to other contemporary advanced hominids (e.g. Homo Habilis, Homo Neanderthalensis). Such behaviour is distinguished (among other things) by a lack of what we would call "art", i.e. artifacts whose purpose is other than strictly utilitarian.
In fact, up until a certain point, Neanderthal behaviour seems to have been more advanced than that of our own ancestors. For example, they buried their dead with flowers and other gifts while we simply discarded ours, and also seem to have removed their heads either before or after burial, which may indicate some form of ancestor worship.
Druids are of course much more modern than the sorts of things we're talking about here. They are particular to Celtic peoples, who migrated across Europe, both displacing and assimilating the prior inhabitants around 500BC. Their culture was based around oral traditions not because writing was dangerous, but due to the fact that they simply did not use it. For example, Ireland (one of the few Celtic cultures to survive the Roman Empire and later Germanic migrations intact) was completely illiterate until around 500AD, when St. Patrick introduced writing. This did however mean that the rich Celtic oral tradition survived there, and was later written down, while that of many other Celtic peoples was lost forever.
NB: boring as it may seem, writing seems to have originally come about because of the need to keep financial records, inventories, etc. The earliest written records we have are thus rather dull items such as lists of things in a trading ship, IOUs, contracts, etc. It was a great disappointment to many when we finally learned to read the two forms of ancient Egyptian script, and found that instead of the great mystical secrets that many had expected, the vast bulk of papyri contained the same dull financially-related stuff that was present on most mesopotamian cuneiform tablets.
"The point where ID better koshers with observations than life as a collection of random processes is how bloody well designed something the human body is. There's an unaccountably low amount of vestigal processes, especially in processes that would have no competitive advantage."
But it isn't that well-designed as a physical system, and we do have vestigial and semi-vestigial organs,
A few examples of poor design:
Our posture makes us liable to certain back and neck problems which do not affect quadrupeds.
Our retinas are 'back to front', which results in (among other things) the famous blind spot. Squid eyes on the other hand don't have this problem because their retina aren't configured in a silly way.
We are liable to cancer (i.e. cell growth gone wild), which does not affect sharks.
Our blood lacks the powerful antiseptics that crocodiles and king-crabs have, so we are more liable to infections than they.
Some vestigial organs:
The appendix.
The small toe.
Wisdom teeth, which don't fit in our mouths properly during to our jaws having become shorter.
The above argue against intelligent design because a competent engineer will incorporate the best systems possible into each model. Things like cancer-fighting systems, antiseptic blood, and properly designed eyes are present in some species, so why aren't they present in all the others if the same being designed them? And the same with vestigial organs: why would an intelligent designer have put in such troublesome things as wisdom teeth and potentially lethal, totally useless stuff like an appendix? Why wouldn't an intelligent designer equip his top-end intelligent biped with a properly designed neck and back?
So you either accept that your intelligent designer was in fact a bit of a bodge-artist who doesn't seem to have known entirely what s/he was doing most of the time, or come up some other reason for all these daft variations in the multitude of things that live on our planet, not all of which are anything like the best possible solution for the job at hand.
What we actually have are some little statues of stylized women that date back a good few thousands of years, but nothing approaching hundreds of millennia. However, it is not known whether these were goddesses, fertility-related, or simply good luck symbols, so they are anything but "well understood".
The oldest religious symbols in Europe are ritual-magic cave paintings dating back around 30,000 years. These invariably are based around animals, not human goddesses, and seem to have been a way of trying to ensure successful hunts.
Even older than these is the religion of the Australian aborigines, which appears to go back 50,000 years or more, yet is still present in their oral tradition today. They do have gods and goddesses (plural), but the male ones seem to be the bosses. Again, animals are important, especially the Rainbow Serpent, who unlike many gods and goddesses (which vary with tribe and region) seems to be universal, and may be the oldest religious figure yet discovered.
"And while the Druids performed sacrifice, it's well known that the only human sacrifices were those sentenced already to death by justice."
Nothing of the sort is "well known", because druids didn't keep written records. What we actually know from well-preserved peat burials and the like is that human sacrifice seems to have been a relatively rare occurrence (i.e. not like similar practices by some Amerindian societies, where hundreds could die in a single ceremony), and those who were sacrificed seem to have been willing participants who (by the expressions on their faces) didn't suffer much. This has led to speculation that it was something done only in time of dire need, may have been considered as an honour by the victim, and that some sort of drugs were used (possibly in ritually-consumed food).
NB: while Roman records are valuable in some ways because they are virtually the only written records we have, Romans did have a tendency to paint their enemies in the worst possible light, so their accounts of druidic awfulness need to be taken with a very large pinch of salt.
""Give me one example (besides Frankenstein) where life was created from non-life."
When you eat dead flesh or vegetables, and your body breaks it down and turns the non-living atoms and chemicals into living tissue? Or not even organic food, but synthetic drugs, or Lithium, or charcoal biscuits for indigestion?"
A much better example is the recent discovery of bacteria that live in total darkness and metabolize completely non-organic molecules. Examples are the sulphide-consuming ones that live around undersea "black smokers" and are the food base of an entire ecosystem, and two very recently discovered ones (in France and the US) that live on the interaction between water and basalt rock.
Sounds fair, as a lot of the places where Intelligent Design is extremely popular are quite famous for doing that sort of thing too.
As a non-American, I can tell you that most of us think "hey, the US legal system is every bit as fucked up as ours".
The the thing that really embarrasses the US on an international level is Fox News, or "Al-Jabush" as it is more commonly known. Of course, not all Americans are aware of the fact that it is kicking around on the dials of many countries' satellite and cable systems, so they probably think that all those country singers going on about how great America is, daily Anne Coulter interviews, and a definition of "fair and balanced" that gives Republican congressmen their own shows is locked within US borders, safe from critical foreign eyes. Well, sorry guys, but they broadcast around the world, regularly telling us incredulous foreigners that they're the network most of you Americans trust for your news. And that more than Al-Jabush itself is very, very embarrassing indeed!
Agreed. Far too may installers require authentification thanks to the convention of putting various bits of global stuff in /Library (especially /Library/Frameworks). Yet in most cases this is unnecessary because (a) the majority of Macs have only one person using them anyway, and (b) in those cases where there are more (i.e. mine), many programs are of interest to only the person who installed them, not everyone else on the machine (assuming otherwise is just hubris on the part of developers).
/Library, yet only seems to end up being used to store user-specific data and settings, even though it even has a (usually empty) Frameworks directory. IMO this exists because Apple (like me) believed that it would serve for most pieces of software, while the root /Library folder would only be needed for stuff that really should be globally accessible.
Yet I don't think this was the way Apple intended things to be, because every user already has a Library folder in their home directory that could in most cases be used instead of
However, Apple's intentions notwithstanding, the fact of the matter is that bad practices by software authors have socially engineered a lot of OS X users to authenticate anything that requests it without thinking. The authentication process itself therefore has very little value as a security mechanism nowadays with non-technical OS X users, i.e. the very people malware authors are most likely to target.
Even easier: select "About this Mac" from the Apple menu, and then click the "more info" button on the dialog that pops up. This launches System Profiler without having to hunt for it with Finder.
And you are setting up straw men. The point (which I have labored over and over to no avail) was that the same report said this risk _was much smaller than previous studies had indicated_, which you would realize if you were attempting to answer my points instead of making your own ones up and then knocking them down.
Furthermore, I do not smoke either, and I am also "a breather", but it does not nauseate me, so your statement about "all breathers" is, like everything you have posted, merely an attempt to present your opinions as being general ones so that you can justify treading on other people. Some dislike tobacco smoke, just like others dislike the smell of alcohol on peoples' breath, or garlic, or onions, or loud voices, or people using cell-phones, etc., etc., etc. My pet hate is walking into a room filled with mixes of strong women's perfumes, some brands of which give me uncontrollable coughing fits. I however don't go around trying to get perfume banned just because I happen to dislike it.
Finally, the fact that you automatically (and wrongly) assumed that I am a smoker because I don't support your rabidly anti-smoking position, together with your completely humorless hostility, indicates that you are simply another of the sad millions in this world who want everyone else to conform with their own narrow, prejudiced viewpoint.
Don't waste your time answering this, as I will not read it.
I never dismissed anything: saying that the risks may be lower than some have claimed is not dismissing them. Dismissing them would be saying that there are no risks, which is something I never said even once.
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Secondly, nobody said that a 16% increase was "small": the report merely said that it was _smaller than they'd expected based on claims made by other studies_, and the scientists in question speculated as to why that may be the case in Europe at the time the study was made.
Thirdly, yes, one of the links I included was from a pro-smoking publication. I also made it clear that I was not vouching for either the reports or the studies they cite in any way or form. In the interests of balance however (I suggest you look that one up, as it's a useful word that I suspect you might not have come across before), I shall include a very good criticism of it from an anti-smoking publication:
http://www.globalink.org/tobacco/docs/ets/Covence
Fourthly, I made it quite clear in my last post that _most of_ the available data is politically slewed in some way, not just the links you gave. If you dig deeply into the published studies, there usually ends up being somebody with an agenda somewhere, either a front organization for the tobacco industry, or somebody who started out to prove that it was harmful, and then tried to find evidence to support that idea (the global warming debate is also sadly similarly afflicted).
And finally, "especially while it nauseates me while eating or otherwise having fun in public" reveals something rather important: you believe that you have the right to abuse others by forcing them not to do things you dislike on the grounds that them doing that thing is abusing you. With that kind of logic, I'm left wondering if your real name is Peter Griffin...
Citing an anti-tobacco web site as a source is no more likely to produce unbiased information as one run by the tobacco industry. The studies with links that work all-too-predictably contain phrases such as "are estimated as being", "is thought to", "chemicals for which no exposure levels have yet been set" (meaning they have no idea whether the amounts passive smokers are exposed to present a danger), etc. Here are two news reports citing studies with more concrete figures, although I cannot personally vouch for the accuracy of either the news reporting or the studies themselves:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/188062.stm
http://www.forces.org/evidence/files/passmok2.htm
I do not dispute the fact that passive smoking increases the likelihood of getting various types of diseases (lung, cardio-vascular, etc), is dangerous for those with certain types of respiratory problems, and just plain unpleasant for many others. However, the level of risk for otherwise healthy individuals from differing levels of exposure (and indeed, how much exposure they actually have in different environments), and what effects other environmental factors may have, is suffering from a dearth of real, independent studies conducted by those without an agenda on statistically significant groups over long periods.
The problem with this is that "a diesel engine" isn't "diesel engines" in general, which range from well maintained little 300cc things in tiny cars that can be driven without a license in many European countries, to large badly maintained monsters in some old buses and trucks that spew huge plumes of very visible black smoke just sitting at a set of traffic lights with their engines ticking over. I wonder which of these they tested for the newspaper article (which in any case seldom permit silly things like scientific rigour stand in the way selling papers, which is what they primarily exist to do).
As an example, I have a Chieftain Mk. 12 Main Battle tank (don't ask why or how, it's a long story) whose multi-fuel compression-ignition engine (i.e. a diesel that runs on nearly everything) guzzles over three liters of whatever I put in it to go a kilometer (about a gallon per mile for American readers). I will put money on the fact that this particular "diesel engine" shoves out massively more crap in a minute than burning a single cigarette, especially as it needs another auxiliary diesel running flat out just to start the main one, and I has to rev hard when moving the 60 ton thing it lives in up a steep hill.
So I could also write a magazine article showing that "a diesel engine" produces more micro-particle pollution in a minute than three packs of cigarettes, without falsifying any data whatsoever, but simply conveniently forgetting to mention that this particular engine spews it out through twin exhausts that are wide enough to easily accommodate a child's head (not that I've tried this!).
""Witch hunt" is when people frame innocent people for nonexistent crimes to attack political enemies with fabricated mass hysteria. None of which applies to banning offensive smokers who take out your self-destructive behavior on other people until forced to stop."
But it is fabricated mass hysteria. The only large-scale, long term scientific study ever undertaken (as opposed to small-scale pieces to support political agenda on both sides of the debate) showed that the risks of dying from passive smoking are around one in a million. To put this in context, approximately 300 people per year in the US will die from second-hand tobacco smoke, and the study showed that these are without exception people who work in extremely smokey environments for many years. To put it in context, over the same period, 30,000 Americans will die from respiratory ailments caused by traffic pollution, 40,000 from car crashes, 30,000 from alcohol-related chronic liver disease, 60,000 from influenza, RSV, and complications relating thereto, and 80,000 from being shot with a firearm.
Thus, by definition, this is indeed a witch-hunt, because most anti-smoking laws are enacted within cities where you have at least 100 times more probability of being killed by traffic fumes than somebody else's cigarette smoke even if you spend a significant proportion of your life working in an extremely smokey environment.
Very few though. The UK carried out a massive study of passive smoking over a 15 year period, and concluded that around 60 people a year will die from it in that country, versus 5,000 per year who die from respiratory ailments caused by pollution from cars. Your chances of being killed by passive smoking in the UK were therefore one in a million _before_ various bits of anti-smoking legislation got enacted, and even that tiny risk was only relevant to people who work for long periods in smoky atmospheres such as pubs, clubs, etc. for a large number of years.
"I'm still going to have to disagree with you on that I think."
Fair enough. Without disagreement, debates would be very dull affairs indeed!
"The way VOIP calls are routed depends very much on DNS being alive and well, generally the people putting the call centers together do not have an accumulator stateside they send everything through as they can just have calls route directly to the center. The whole point of outsourcing a call center is to not have to deal with the phone network stuff. Also of course as I noted there's a lot of data associated with the calls, which usually means lookups back from databases in the U.S. which would require further use of a DNS that could find those servers."
Excellent point. None of these are of course insurmountable problems, but working around them could initially be both inconvenient and expensive.
"And if China is cutting themselves off our network then chinese IP addresses cannot be used when talking to the U.S. as presumably they'd do thier own allocation."
The Chinese don't as a rule outsource call centers though. That's India's thing, and India (AFAIK) are pretty happy with the way things are now. Unlike China, Iran, and the EC (the organization that is, not its member states) India is a democracy, and there would be a definite backlash if an already quite large and growing industry was damaged due what is in reality little more than political posturing.
"Absuing their own people is way different that causing ills for others outside the country though."
Hence that fact that I mentioned Tibet, which the Chinese still occupy by military force.
"At least as far as international politics goes, nations mostly look the other way and so that's why it doesn't really come up with things like Olympic selection - not to mention that China has not had any high-profile human rights abuses recently (nothing on the level of Tienamen)."
Well, I agree that they haven't had any mass demonstrations put down by tanks. But there was a pretty big international hoo-raw over their oppressing members of a new and rapidly-growing religion that they don't like (its name escapes me at the moment, but it was widely reported) not too long ago, something many IOC members must have been aware of.
"Well, that's a pretty good point and probably the best indicator that even some high level antics by the Chinese might not be enough to stop them from hosting the games now. However the games are a lot further out, at that time with the Olympics only a year away making another selection was not really practical. I believe China had the 2008 games which is a fair amount of time for some other country to ramp up."
I doubt that it would have affected anything even if this had all been taking place during the initial selection process. Firstly because few members of the IOC panel are aware that DNS, ICANN, etc. exist, let alone why they're important; and secondly, the Chinese could easily argue that (a) they are far from being alone in objecting to the US hegemony over these resources, and (b) that they aren't trying to take over the system, but are arguing for UN oversight of something that the "greedy American imperialists" want to keep for themselves. When one considers how many on the IOC panel represent countries that are either directly antagonistic to the US in general, or the Bush administration in particular, there is a pretty good chance that the US would end up being seen as the bad guy, while China successfully plays the role of poor downtrodden victim.
When companies claim they could release something amazing when they're actually making a piece of crap like Paxville, it's a pretty sure bet that they're lying. After all, not getting their clocks cleaned by AMD in terms of both performance, power consumption, and suitability for things like blade servers is a pretty good definition of something that is definitely in Intel's best interest!
NB: Apple may indeed be using Yonah for prototype Macs (although I've seen no definitive evidence for this). But there's a big difference between producing a few reference CPUs that may not operate at full clock-speed, and large production runs of finished examples. Intel have been forced to withdraw more than one new CPU model shortly after production because of insurmountable problems, and they're unlikely to want that to happen by prematurely releasing Yonah to manufacturing. Hence Paxville, an obvious kludge that they hope will stop a rising tide of corporate data-centers selecting AMD-based solutions for long enough to get a properly designed CPU out of the door.
Or perhaps IBM refused to bend over and open their cheeks to Jobs after winning big with all three next-gen console manufacturers, and he threw a hissy-fit. This is I think more probably than Intel magically producing a low wattage 64-bit multi core CPU for Apple, despite a history of marginally performant chips whose waste heat can be used to run an enameling kiln.
Rather than fading away, it seems that the Big Iron guys are simply implementing Linux on their systems. There's still significant demand for fail-over 24x365 facilities in centralized, easy-to-administer boxes, irrespective of whether one calls them "mainframes" or "blade servers", or whether they use custom CPUs or large arrays of AMD Opterons.
I think that MS will continue to have great difficulties penetrating the large corporate DP market for a very simple reason: Windows as it stands is ill-suited to the sorts of things that they want to do. Out of the box, it is basically a file and print server which includes little or no support for either batch-processing or true multi-user applications. By contrast, Linux inherits all this and more from its UNIX roots, because UNIX was specifically designed for serve corporate DP needs.
On the other hand, Windows server editions are very well suited to departmental or small/medium business IT, where the requirement is for centralized file and print services in an easy-to-administer package. Microsoft have been extremely successful with this type of installation, where the ability to get everything from a single vendor (OS, DBMS, Email services, office automation, programming tools, etc.) together with the general ease of finding people familiar with them is very attractive indeed. Linux has a much harder time competing for this sort of customer because, while it is superficially similar in what it offers, most of its constituent parts lack the high level of integration that Microsoft's solutions provide.
We're talking about UNISYS here, which has relevance to data centers, not desktops. Whether grandma can use a system for EMAIL or not has absolutely no bearing on its suitability for large corporate data centers, because Grandma would have even more trouble using OS/390, VMS, HP/UX, or indeed OS2200, which most of UNISYS' customers were using before all the Windows shenannigans began, and by and large still want now. All of these are command-line only environments, which is precisely what people in corporate data centers require, because a GUI eats precious cycles and RAM that could otherwise be used for useful work.
Linux is an easy sell in these environments because it is essentially UNIX, which was specifically designed for them. It is a DP-oriented system that has had end-user bits added, whereas Windows is an end-user system that has been extended to include some DP facilities. What Windows offers "out of the box" is basically a file and print server, while Linux combines true multi-user facilities with powerful scripting systems that can be used to control batch operations in a similar manner to mainframe Job Control Languages. That was what the people who bought computers wanted to do with them when UNIX was being developed, and Linux (and other work-alikes such as the various BSD-derived systems) have inherited this functionality.
Just because a place isn't using Linux for their data centers doesn't mean an automatic gain for MS. A large proportion of the world's corporations are running custom COBOL or RPG software written decades ago on mainframes or large minis, while others have proprietary UNIX systems, again with custom legacy software. The cost of migrating this stuff to another platform can be significant because, even if it compiles successfully, they still have to do a whole bunch of validation testing before going "live" with something that could be processing millions of transaction per day. Even a small error or a few hours' downtime could potentially cost them huge sums of money, so they won't switch to something else without being given significant support and a lot of guarantees (i.e. none of that "This software isn't warranted as being fit for any purpose" EULA garbage!).
Anybody who doubts this should take a look at the software a major bank or other financial institution is running on their Windows desktop PCs. It's likely to be a pretty front-end that sits on top of what amounts to a terminal emulator connected to a big, boring old system without either Windows or Linux on it.
This is very much a case of a "glass half full, glass half empty" situation, though. Looked at from the other side, it could also be described as follows:
Windows/NT Server was first launched in 1993 to try and extend Microsoft's desktop OS dominance into IT data centers. Yet twelve years of updates, massive publicity and FUD-spreading campaigns, and repeated attempts to prevent their desktop clients from connecting to competing servers has gained them only 30% of an increasingly large and lucrative market.