It is not illegal to run OS X on generic PCs. It is a violation of the license, but the license does not carry the force of law.
If you mean that you won't be thrown in jail for it, that is correct. It is, nevertheless, a violation of a contract, and you could be liable for damages. However, there is little benefit to Apple in suing end users, even if they are legally entitled to do so.
Since the definition of "Macintosh" is a computer built/branded/sold by Apple, and no-one else, this statement is nonsensical. It could say "Psystar is accusing Apple of bricking generic PCs that are attempting to illegally run OS X", but, like it or not, I would have thought they are entitled to do so.
Depends upon what is meant by "bricking." If Apple was intentionally causing permanent damage to PCs that attempt to run Mac OS X, they would probably be liable. On the other hand, if it just means that the PC won't work with Apple's OS, then Apple would have no liability. There is not difference between Apple using software measures to prevent OS X from running on non-Apple hardware and Microsoft using software measures to prevent XBox games from running on non-XBox hardware.
Yes, it's clearly not a big deal, because even if correct, it applies only to that version of the OS. Apple will soon be releasing a new version of their OS, and who wants to buy a computer that will not be eligible for upgrades?
It sounds like Psystar is expecting to lose and is trying to limit the damages that Apple will receive.
A real question is whether Psystar ever expected to get away with this. Perhaps they are working on a homegrown Apple-like OS, and the whole thing is just a publicity stunt.
Of course they do! When they SELL a retail copy of OS X, they are OBLIGATED to license it to whoever buys it! And that's REGARDLESS of what the new owner wants to do with it, whether it be using the disk for target practice, printing out the code and wiping their ass with it, or yes, even installing it on a non-Apple computer!
Please provide a reference to court decisions supporting your claim that there can be no license restrictions on the use of a purchased product.
Sure would've been simple for them to put the word "upgrade" on the box somewhere.
It includes a license stating that the software is only licensed for use on Apple computers. Since all Apple computers are sold with a copy of the OS, that means that a purchased copy can only be used as an upgrade or replacement of an OS provided by Apple.
Apple was hardly the first to use a touch screen, any more than they were the first to use a mouse or a windows operating system.
They did the same thing in all three cases--figured out how to make it usable and consistent.
Look at all of the reviews of the iPhone wannabees. In the end, after pointing out all of the extra features, the reviewer ends up conceding, "nevertheless, the touch screen interface does not work as smoothly or as intuitively as the iPhone's."
I think that Macworld is a victim of Apple's success and diversification. Basically, Apple has broken out--it is no longer a company that makes cult computers, in fact, it is no longer just a computer company, so a specialized show just for Macs sends the wrong message.
Moreover, the Macworld keynote had come to be perceived as critical--if Apple didn't announce a major product or upgrade at the keynote, their stock took a hit. But Apple no longer needs Macworld for exposure. Apple is now big enough that now get major press coverage for their solo marketing events, with timing selected by Apple instead of being tied to an event that they do not control.
It would certainly be possible. It's just a small enough market segment that it would not be surprising if it never happened. Most of the market doesn't really need or want a desktop computer to do double duty as an entertainment center console, at a cost that would probably be not much different from buying separate PC and game console. So it will be one of those "It's a picture frame AND an iPhone dock!" products. Not a great deal of profit for the PC manufacturer, and probably additional headaches for everybody involved (who handles support calls? are all the console peripherals compatible? etc.)
I could certainly imagine console makers doing as suggested, and sell the right to build an XBox on PS into a computer. But if it happens, I expect that it will be a small part of the market, not a "merger" of consoles and PCs.
The big selling point of consoles, is, after all, that they are cheap. My XBox 360 or PS3 already does nearly everything that I want to do with my entertainment center--streams video from my computer or from Netflix, stores or streams music, plays DVDs, plays games, does light-duty web browsing. Why should I pay extra for a PC? There are always going to be a few people who would like to be able to play keyboard/mouse-style games in their entertainment room rather than at their desk, but I doubt if they'll ever be a big market segment.
Yes, but most of the construction of a person, including their brains, is regulated with hormones, which tells what to happen when.
Not really. Most of that seems to be regulated by contacts between cell surface receptors and short-range trophic factors, which mostly do not resemble hormones chemically. Hormones are necessarily limited because all cells are exposed to them via the circulation. Hormones do provide a degree of regulation, but they are hardly the dominant factor determining what happens where and when. Of course, all of these nonhormonal factors, as well as the intracellular signaling and gene regulation cascades that they link to, are potentially subject to disruption by environmental chemicals.
A 10% difference is still a difference. 55% fructose and 45% glucose vs. 50% fructose and 50% glucose might not seem like much, but considering we eat a hell of a lot of it, who knows.
It is pretty hard to come up with biological mechanisms in which a 10% difference in an input makes a very large difference in outcome. Basically, the binding kinetics that underlie processes such as binding to receptors and enzymatic activity impose a certain slope to the concentration dependence. It is possible to get a dramatic effect of a small percentage change in concentration, but it requires involves specialized biochemical and receptor mechanisms that confer a high degree of nonlinear amplification. When one finds this in biological systems, there is usually a clear biological reason for cells to go to all of this extra trouble--some types of biological signaling for example. Most of the time, it is more advantageous to biological systems to be tolerant to modest percentage changes in inputs.
The bottom line is that a big effect from a 10% change in the amount of a nutrient is a fairly extraordinary claim, and would require extraordinary evidence.
On the other hand, it could well be that total intake of simple sugars by some segments of the population is several fold larger than it once was. It is much easier to imagine that having a large impact
It's worth pointing out when people say 'genetic', they usually really mean 'hormonal'. Genes are things that do things that make hormones that do other things and trigger other genes and so on. Our genes are our personnel department, and our hormones are the workers it hires. Hiring crazy people who mess up the production is basically the same as having crazy people wander in from outside via milk or whatever and mess up the production.
No, that's not the way it works. If you want to stick with your office metaphor, the genes are the company's standard operating procedures and hormones are one form of communication--perhaps interoffice mail--but the office also has phones, intercom, postal mail, email, and conversation.
Biologically speaking, hormones can regulate gene expression, but they are only one of many types of biological signals that do this.
But genetics could render people susceptible to an environmental factor that is, at this point, ever-present in the environment, and wasn't earlier in history.
Certainly a possibility. There are obviously thousands of substances in our environment that weren't around years ago. But it is hard to know where to start, particularly when it is questionable whether there actually has been a real increase. Perhaps once the genes are better understood, it will provide a clue as to possible environmental culprits--if there are any.
Of course, something that is present at all moments is dietary changes, like corn syrup. I wasn't actually kidding with that one...I personally suspect that 'corn syrup' instead of sugar is partially the cause of the obesity epidemic because we process it differently than sugar.
Actually, this is another myth. Corn syrup is composed of glucose and fructose, same as table sugar (sucrose). Same molecules, same processing (sucrose has to be split to release glucose and fructose, but this is the first thing that happens; the enzyme is present in saliva). There have been some worries raised that fructose may not suppress appetite as well as glucose, but in fact the ratio of fructose to glucose in the most widely used corn syrup is not much different than in sucrose. It's also about the same as you encounter in fruit. So it might be that glucose (dextrose) would be better for you, but substitution of corn syrup for table sugar probably makes no difference.
More likely, people are getting fat because they are just consuming a lot more sugar in all forms.
You all seem to think that people who are against vaccines are some sort of Luddite. You go on lamely repeating myths about 'herd immunity'. You don't know what you are talking about. There is no such thing as 'herd immunity'.
This is nonsense. Herd immunity is well established and is a mathematical inevitability for a contagious disease--if there is not a sufficient density of vulnerable individuals in a population, a disease cannot propagate.
s a biologist, I am not against immunization which occurs through natural routes, (nose, tear ducts, digestive system.) I am VERY much against injecting foreign proteins into he skin. That's just asking for immune system trouble. People need to do some research and stop mealy-mouthing repetitious Old Doctor Tales.
And if you do your research, you'll discover that there is no evidence that the route of administration matters. Everybody is exposed to an immense number of foreign proteins from infections and bacteria normally present in the body. The few antigens from immunization are a drop in the bucket.
The really nasty thing about mercury is that it doesn't leave your system.
That would be worrisome if it were true. Except, of course that it's not. In fact, thimerosal (the form of mercury that has now been eliminated from most vaccines, despite the absence of any evidence that it is harmful) is excreted more rapidly than other forms of organic mercury.
The real issue for concern out of the childhood vaccines is the suspension solution they are delivered in. This contains preservatives to provide shelf-life and enhance the vaccine's effectiveness since we don't have Just-In-Time medical vaccination infrastructure. Some of the happy ingredients you'll find in common vaccines are formaldehyde (poison) and thimerosal (poison) which breaks down into ethylmercury (poison) and also raw mercury (poison).
This is a good illustration of the level of stupidity that one encounters from the antivaccine crowd. "Oh my god! FORMALDEHYDE! It's poison!"
Well, let's apply just a little bit of basic common sense. Almost anything is toxic at a high enough dose. People have died from drinking too much water. A whole lot of formaldehyde is certainly bad for you. But just how poisonous is the stuff? Well let's google it and see what it looks like. Wow, that's a really simple molecule--CH2O. That sort of structure is part of all sorts of molecules. I wonder if our bodies make the stuff? Back to Google. Sure enough, it's a normal metabolite. There's quite a bit of it in blood, in fact--normal blood levels are 2.5 mg per liter. How much formaldehyde could possibly be in a shot of vaccine? There can't be that much in the small volume of a shot. Let's google it just to check. The highest vaccine dose of formaldehyde is less than 0.2 mg. So even in an infant, a vaccine dose would increase blood formaldehyde by less than 20%, and that only briefly. It's volatile, so you breathe it right out--it's half-life in blood is only 2.5 minutes (see previous links).
All it took was five minutes with Google to figure out that you don't need to worry about formaldehyde in vaccines. Yet these antivaccine nuts have been repeating this "Ohmigod FORMALDEHYDE" canard for months. Just how stupid are they? Or how stupid do they think we are?
And no, there is no appreciable amount of "raw" mercury, either (which has comparatively low toxicity anyway). And organic mercury (thimerosal) has now been removed from most vaccines, greatly reducing mercury exposure--with zero impact on autism incidence. So much for mercury.
How about the researchers do some actual SCIENCE for a change and look at those other causes?
Actually, there is a great deal of research going on. The evidence seems to be pointing in the direction of a genetic cause. That doesn't eliminate environmental factors entirely, but it does suggest that any environmental trigger would have to be fairly ubiquitous--the concordance of autism in twin studies is very high.
Regarding mercury: One theory I've read was that the mercury is not necessarily from vaccines but from the environment as a result of a breakdown of the process that capture mercury in the body. In normal healthy people, environmental mercury is bound to special proteins in the surface of the small intestine, and shed into your stool. Perhaps this process is/was broken/damaged in Autistic individuals?
Two problems: Nobody has ever actually been able to measure increased mercury levels in autistic people, and while mercury can be neurotoxic, the symptoms of autism actually do not resemble what has been observed in verified cases of environmental contamination by mercury.
There is a great deal of evidence that most of the rise in autism is due to a change in diagnosis patterns: at the lower functioning end, people who would have previously been diagnosed as mentally retarded are now being diagnosed as autistic (which often affords better access to services). At the high end, people who would once just have been thought of as weird, nerdy kids are now being diagnosed as Asperger's. If you talk to autism professionals, there is general agreement that this is the dominant factor in the apparent rise, but nobody is willing to dismiss the possibility that there might be a genuine increase in incidence, albeit not nearly so large as the overall numbers.
In fact, there are many examples of unvaccinated kids developing autistic symptoms around the time that the would have received their vaccines. A survey by Generation Rescue, an antivaccine advocacy group that was trying to prove that vaccines were harmful, actually found the opposite--unvaccinated kids were significantly more likely to have autism.
Not quite. This was the first vaccine scare, which was not about mercury, but about the combined measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine (which has never contained mercury).
But you are close: Wakefield had a patent on a supposedly safer measles-only vaccine, as well as making hundreds of thousands of dollars testifying in vaccine-injury cases. His claims were based on a scientifically ridiculous hypothesis, and other labs without a financial interest were unable to reproduce the "evidence" supporting his claims.
Your underlying premise is foolish. Shuffling a deck of cards is either complex beyond human understanding, or a relatively simple probability exercise simply based upon the outcome your are interpreting.
The simplicity of the statistical exercise of card shuffling is what makes it possible to demonstrate how easy it is to mislead yourself when you try to calculate the probability of an event after it has already happened, even when the statistics are simple.
So when somebody claims to be able to estimate the likelihood that a particular structure could have evolved via the complex dynamics of natural selection, you know immediately that they are either fooling themselves or trying to fool you.
For example, even if we leave aside all the other intricate parts of the human vision system, the relationship between the retina and the brain would be a good example. The retina does a lot of signal processing in order to the obtain 12 separate versions of a visual scene which are passed on to the brain (one is mainly a line drawing of edges, some deal with motion in a particular direction, some deal with shadows and highlights, etc.) The brain then integrates and processes all of these in order to give us a coherent perception. The retina's processing makes no sense without the capacity of the brain to make sense of it all - but the brain having the capacity to interpret this data makes no sense without the retina's abilities in place.
This does not constitute irreducible complexity. Irreducible complexity would mean that vision was absolutely useless, providing no selective advantage, unless all of these systems are in place. This is obviously false. Merely being able to distinguish light from dark provides obvious advantages, such as direction-finding based upon the position of the sun--for which a retina is not even required. Each incremental improvement in vision would provide additional selective advantages. For example, if a light-sensitive patch is recessed into a pit, it will acquire improved direction-selectivity. More about evolution of the eye may be found here
I don't understand what you mean by calling it an oxymoron. To say something is "truly complex" is not concise (concise means brief, but comprehensive), it is merely vague.
In fact, there are accepted coherent mathematical descriptions of complexity. Kolmogorov complexity is measured by the number of bits of the shortest algorithm required to describe something. So something can be said to be "truly complex" if the most concise possible description is the thing itself. A random number, for example, is truly complex; there is no shorter description than the number itself. Other things, such as the chaotic patterns of the Mandelbot set, appear complex, but are algorithmically simple, being specified by short mathematical algorithms.
Natural processes produce either regularity (reoccurring and predictable), or randomness (vastly unpredictable).
I can only presume that this is written by somebody who has never looked closely at a snowflake. As every scientist well knows, natural processes may produce everything from perfect regularity (crystal structure) to complete randomness (Brownian motion) and everything in between.
The heads on Mt. Rushmore are not a regular pattern, each part is unique and not the next step in a predictable series of events. Nor are they random at all. They are the result of an intention to depict faces
However, there are many examples of natural structures that look enough like faces to have been mistaken for human sculpture. And this is in spite of the fact that we identify a sculpture as being of human design, not based upon any abstract characteristics such as degree of regularity/randomness, but also taking advantage our extensive knowledge of what human beings look like and what kinds of sculptures have been produced by human beings in the past.
Considering life from an entropic viewpoint is actually highly useful. Not only does creating locally decreased entropy mean life is the result of some non-random process, but it also means that life tends to collect, store and concentrate energy.
That does not really follow. Crystalization results in a local entropy decrease, yet it does not result from a non-random process (unless you want to argue that the laws of nature are non-random, in which case random natural processes do not exist). Neither is storage and concentration of energy required for a local entropy decrease. Frankly, I don't think that considering life overall from an entropic viewpoint is particularly illuminating. All it really tells you is that energy input is required for life, which is hardly a deep insight. On the other hand, a thermodynamic viewpoint is extremely valuable for understanding the biochemical processes that are fundamental to life.
I don't think it's particularly interesting to try to figure out what the probability of coming up with a particular DNA sequence is. Nobody's really interested in that. Not only do both sides stipulate that coming up with any particular DNA sequence is extremely unlikely, but it's ALSO extremely unlikely that you'd come up with anything resembling complex lifeforms at all... if things were merely random chance.... Both sides recognize that some non-random, anti-entropy mechanism must exist. That is, the deck must be stacked. The difference between evolutionists and IDers boils down to what that mechanism is. Who (or what) stacked the deck.
Natural selection includes a random process, mutation, but it is filtered by selection. Selection introduces correlations between genomic information and information about the environment. The difference between biologists and ID/creationists is that ID/creationists imagine that the randomness of mutation somehow contaminates the entire process and makes it equivalent to random shuffling, like shuffling the deck in poker. Of course, this is nonsense; numerous simulations have proved that randomization/selection genetic algorithms are capable of design without the mutational "deck" itself being stacked.
I think that it is somewhat misleading to talk about a nonrandom anti-entropy mechanism, because the overall process of evolution, like all biological processes, increases net entropy, even though like many natural process it is capable of generating localized pockets of reduced entropy (i.e. living organisms).
I should also point out that your card example is flawed: you're attempting to make a conclusion about probability based on one experiment. You can't. But, if you deal ten poker hands, shuffling the deck between each or from ten different decks, and you end up dealing two or more identical hands, then you're very justified in thinking something shady is going on.
You'd have to deal a lot more than 10 hands, because the probability of getting any of those 10 hands is still essentially negligible. But you are on the right track. The solution the paradox of reverse probability is not to consider the probability of getting a particular hand, but rather the probability of getting some hand. To do this, you have to consider, not just a few hands, but every possible hand. It turns out that even though the probability of any particular shuffle is vanishingly small, the number of possible hands is reciprocally large, so when you take the ratio to calculate the probability of getting some hand, the answer is 1.
Similarly, under evolutionary theory, the current form of life is not unique. Just as you will get completely different sequences every time you shuffle the cards, evolutionary theory predicts that you would get different forms of life, with different sequences of whatever information-carrying molecules they happen to use, if you were to repeat the entire process of evolution. So to calculate the probability of evolution, it is meaningless to talk about the probability of any particular DNA sequence--you have to consider all possible molecular sequences and structures that could have arisen if evolution were repeated an infinite number of times. Unfortunately, while it is possible to calculate exactly how many different ways a card shuffle can come out, nobody is even close to being able to calculate how many possible ways evolution could come out. But any attempt to calculate a "probability" of an evolutionary outcome without doing this is meaningless--it is exactly the same as trying to calculate the probability of being able to shuffle a deck of cards based upon the probability of getting any individual card sequence.
There are other objective reasoning at issue too where we plant crops and build roads in generally straight lines, and so on. Nature doesn't do that quite often
"Irreducibly complex" is Intelligent Design jargon for "something that couldn't have evolved because its individual components are individually without value to the organism except as components of the complete structure." So far, there is no evidence that anything in biology is irreducibly complex, and all of the suggested examples of irreducible complexity in biology (e.g. the bacterial flagella, the immune system cascade) have been shown not to be irreducibly complex (i.e. partial structures have been identified that have useful biological functions).
"Specified complexity" is another bit of Intelligent Design jargon, but they've never managed to come up with a coherent definition, probably because it is an oxymoron. A "specification" generally means a concise description of something, and truly complex things have no more concise description.
There are other objective reasoning at issue too where we plant crops and build roads in generally straight lines, and so on. Nature doesn't do that quite often
And yet nature does produce straight lines in many other contexts--crystal planes, for example. So we only see it as evidence of intelligence when we see it in the landscape because we happen to know from experience that the physical processes of geology and erosion operative here on earth do not normally do that. One could not, however, draw the general conclusion that straight lines are evidence of intelligence.
Slashdot Mirror
If you mean that you won't be thrown in jail for it, that is correct. It is, nevertheless, a violation of a contract, and you could be liable for damages. However, there is little benefit to Apple in suing end users, even if they are legally entitled to do so.
Depends upon what is meant by "bricking." If Apple was intentionally causing permanent damage to PCs that attempt to run Mac OS X, they would probably be liable. On the other hand, if it just means that the PC won't work with Apple's OS, then Apple would have no liability. There is not difference between Apple using software measures to prevent OS X from running on non-Apple hardware and Microsoft using software measures to prevent XBox games from running on non-XBox hardware.
Yes, it's clearly not a big deal, because even if correct, it applies only to that version of the OS. Apple will soon be releasing a new version of their OS, and who wants to buy a computer that will not be eligible for upgrades?
It sounds like Psystar is expecting to lose and is trying to limit the damages that Apple will receive.
A real question is whether Psystar ever expected to get away with this. Perhaps they are working on a homegrown Apple-like OS, and the whole thing is just a publicity stunt.
Of course they do! When they SELL a retail copy of OS X, they are OBLIGATED to license it to whoever buys it! And that's REGARDLESS of what the new owner wants to do with it, whether it be using the disk for target practice, printing out the code and wiping their ass with it, or yes, even installing it on a non-Apple computer!
Please provide a reference to court decisions supporting your claim that there can be no license restrictions on the use of a purchased product.
It includes a license stating that the software is only licensed for use on Apple computers. Since all Apple computers are sold with a copy of the OS, that means that a purchased copy can only be used as an upgrade or replacement of an OS provided by Apple.
Apple was hardly the first to use a touch screen, any more than they were the first to use a mouse or a windows operating system.
They did the same thing in all three cases--figured out how to make it usable and consistent.
Look at all of the reviews of the iPhone wannabees. In the end, after pointing out all of the extra features, the reviewer ends up conceding, "nevertheless, the touch screen interface does not work as smoothly or as intuitively as the iPhone's."
I think that Macworld is a victim of Apple's success and diversification. Basically, Apple has broken out--it is no longer a company that makes cult computers, in fact, it is no longer just a computer company, so a specialized show just for Macs sends the wrong message.
Moreover, the Macworld keynote had come to be perceived as critical--if Apple didn't announce a major product or upgrade at the keynote, their stock took a hit. But Apple no longer needs Macworld for exposure. Apple is now big enough that now get major press coverage for their solo marketing events, with timing selected by Apple instead of being tied to an event that they do not control.
It would certainly be possible. It's just a small enough market segment that it would not be surprising if it never happened. Most of the market doesn't really need or want a desktop computer to do double duty as an entertainment center console, at a cost that would probably be not much different from buying separate PC and game console. So it will be one of those "It's a picture frame AND an iPhone dock!" products. Not a great deal of profit for the PC manufacturer, and probably additional headaches for everybody involved (who handles support calls? are all the console peripherals compatible? etc.)
I could certainly imagine console makers doing as suggested, and sell the right to build an XBox on PS into a computer. But if it happens, I expect that it will be a small part of the market, not a "merger" of consoles and PCs.
The big selling point of consoles, is, after all, that they are cheap. My XBox 360 or PS3 already does nearly everything that I want to do with my entertainment center--streams video from my computer or from Netflix, stores or streams music, plays DVDs, plays games, does light-duty web browsing. Why should I pay extra for a PC? There are always going to be a few people who would like to be able to play keyboard/mouse-style games in their entertainment room rather than at their desk, but I doubt if they'll ever be a big market segment.
Not really. Most of that seems to be regulated by contacts between cell surface receptors and short-range trophic factors, which mostly do not resemble hormones chemically. Hormones are necessarily limited because all cells are exposed to them via the circulation. Hormones do provide a degree of regulation, but they are hardly the dominant factor determining what happens where and when. Of course, all of these nonhormonal factors, as well as the intracellular signaling and gene regulation cascades that they link to, are potentially subject to disruption by environmental chemicals.
It is pretty hard to come up with biological mechanisms in which a 10% difference in an input makes a very large difference in outcome. Basically, the binding kinetics that underlie processes such as binding to receptors and enzymatic activity impose a certain slope to the concentration dependence. It is possible to get a dramatic effect of a small percentage change in concentration, but it requires involves specialized biochemical and receptor mechanisms that confer a high degree of nonlinear amplification. When one finds this in biological systems, there is usually a clear biological reason for cells to go to all of this extra trouble--some types of biological signaling for example. Most of the time, it is more advantageous to biological systems to be tolerant to modest percentage changes in inputs.
The bottom line is that a big effect from a 10% change in the amount of a nutrient is a fairly extraordinary claim, and would require extraordinary evidence.
On the other hand, it could well be that total intake of simple sugars by some segments of the population is several fold larger than it once was. It is much easier to imagine that having a large impact
No, that's not the way it works. If you want to stick with your office metaphor, the genes are the company's standard operating procedures and hormones are one form of communication--perhaps interoffice mail--but the office also has phones, intercom, postal mail, email, and conversation.
Biologically speaking, hormones can regulate gene expression, but they are only one of many types of biological signals that do this.
Certainly a possibility. There are obviously thousands of substances in our environment that weren't around years ago. But it is hard to know where to start, particularly when it is questionable whether there actually has been a real increase. Perhaps once the genes are better understood, it will provide a clue as to possible environmental culprits--if there are any.
Actually, this is another myth. Corn syrup is composed of glucose and fructose, same as table sugar (sucrose). Same molecules, same processing (sucrose has to be split to release glucose and fructose, but this is the first thing that happens; the enzyme is present in saliva). There have been some worries raised that fructose may not suppress appetite as well as glucose, but in fact the ratio of fructose to glucose in the most widely used corn syrup is not much different than in sucrose. It's also about the same as you encounter in fruit. So it might be that glucose (dextrose) would be better for you, but substitution of corn syrup for table sugar probably makes no difference.
More likely, people are getting fat because they are just consuming a lot more sugar in all forms.
This is nonsense. Herd immunity is well established and is a mathematical inevitability for a contagious disease--if there is not a sufficient density of vulnerable individuals in a population, a disease cannot propagate.
And if you do your research, you'll discover that there is no evidence that the route of administration matters. Everybody is exposed to an immense number of foreign proteins from infections and bacteria normally present in the body. The few antigens from immunization are a drop in the bucket.
That would be worrisome if it were true. Except, of course that it's not. In fact, thimerosal (the form of mercury that has now been eliminated from most vaccines, despite the absence of any evidence that it is harmful) is excreted more rapidly than other forms of organic mercury.
This is a good illustration of the level of stupidity that one encounters from the antivaccine crowd. "Oh my god! FORMALDEHYDE! It's poison!"
Well, let's apply just a little bit of basic common sense. Almost anything is toxic at a high enough dose. People have died from drinking too much water. A whole lot of formaldehyde is certainly bad for you. But just how poisonous is the stuff? Well let's google it and see what it looks like. Wow, that's a really simple molecule--CH2O. That sort of structure is part of all sorts of molecules. I wonder if our bodies make the stuff? Back to Google. Sure enough, it's a normal metabolite. There's quite a bit of it in blood, in fact--normal blood levels are 2.5 mg per liter. How much formaldehyde could possibly be in a shot of vaccine? There can't be that much in the small volume of a shot. Let's google it just to check. The highest vaccine dose of formaldehyde is less than 0.2 mg.
So even in an infant, a vaccine dose would increase blood formaldehyde by less than 20%, and that only briefly. It's volatile, so you breathe it right out--it's half-life in blood is only 2.5 minutes (see previous links).
All it took was five minutes with Google to figure out that you don't need to worry about formaldehyde in vaccines.
Yet these antivaccine nuts have been repeating this "Ohmigod FORMALDEHYDE" canard for months. Just how stupid are they? Or how stupid do they think we are?
And no, there is no appreciable amount of "raw" mercury, either (which has comparatively low toxicity anyway). And organic mercury (thimerosal) has now been removed from most vaccines, greatly reducing mercury exposure--with zero impact on autism incidence. So much for mercury.
Actually, there is a great deal of research going on. The evidence seems to be pointing in the direction of a genetic cause. That doesn't eliminate environmental factors entirely, but it does suggest that any environmental trigger would have to be fairly ubiquitous--the concordance of autism in twin studies is very high.
Two problems: Nobody has ever actually been able to measure increased mercury levels in autistic people, and while mercury can be neurotoxic, the symptoms of autism actually do not resemble what has been observed in verified cases of environmental contamination by mercury.
There is a great deal of evidence that most of the rise in autism is due to a change in diagnosis patterns: at the lower functioning end, people who would have previously been diagnosed as mentally retarded are now being diagnosed as autistic (which often affords better access to services). At the high end, people who would once just have been thought of as weird, nerdy kids are now being diagnosed as Asperger's. If you talk to autism professionals, there is general agreement that this is the dominant factor in the apparent rise, but nobody is willing to dismiss the possibility that there might be a genuine increase in incidence, albeit not nearly so large as the overall numbers.
In fact, there are many examples of unvaccinated kids developing autistic symptoms around the time that the would have received their vaccines. A survey by Generation Rescue, an antivaccine advocacy group that was trying to prove that vaccines were harmful, actually found the opposite--unvaccinated kids were significantly more likely to have autism.
Not quite. This was the first vaccine scare, which was not about mercury, but about the combined measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine (which has never contained mercury).
But you are close: Wakefield had a patent on a supposedly safer measles-only vaccine, as well as making hundreds of thousands of dollars testifying in vaccine-injury cases. His claims were based on a scientifically ridiculous hypothesis, and other labs without a financial interest were unable to reproduce the "evidence" supporting his claims.
The simplicity of the statistical exercise of card shuffling is what makes it possible to demonstrate how easy it is to mislead yourself when you try to calculate the probability of an event after it has already happened, even when the statistics are simple.
So when somebody claims to be able to estimate the likelihood that a particular structure could have evolved via the complex dynamics of natural selection, you know immediately that they are either fooling themselves or trying to fool you.
This does not constitute irreducible complexity. Irreducible complexity would mean that vision was absolutely useless, providing no selective advantage, unless all of these systems are in place. This is obviously false. Merely being able to distinguish light from dark provides obvious advantages, such as direction-finding based upon the position of the sun--for which a retina is not even required. Each incremental improvement in vision would provide additional selective advantages. For example, if a light-sensitive patch is recessed into a pit, it will acquire improved direction-selectivity. More about evolution of the eye may be found here
In fact, there are accepted coherent mathematical descriptions of complexity. Kolmogorov complexity is measured by the number of bits of the shortest algorithm required to describe something. So something can be said to be "truly complex" if the most concise possible description is the thing itself. A random number, for example, is truly complex; there is no shorter description than the number itself. Other things, such as the chaotic patterns of the Mandelbot set, appear complex, but are algorithmically simple, being specified by short mathematical algorithms.
I can only presume that this is written by somebody who has never looked closely at a snowflake. As every scientist well knows, natural processes may produce everything from perfect regularity (crystal structure) to complete randomness (Brownian motion) and everything in between.
However, there are many examples of natural structures that look enough like faces to have been mistaken for human sculpture. And this is in spite of the fact that we identify a sculpture as being of human design, not based upon any abstract characteristics such as degree of regularity/randomness, but also taking advantage our extensive knowledge of what human beings look like and what kinds of sculptures have been produced by human beings in the past.
That does not really follow. Crystalization results in a local entropy decrease, yet it does not result from a non-random process (unless you want to argue that the laws of nature are non-random, in which case random natural processes do not exist). Neither is storage and concentration of energy required for a local entropy decrease. Frankly, I don't think that considering life overall from an entropic viewpoint is particularly illuminating. All it really tells you is that energy input is required for life, which is hardly a deep insight. On the other hand, a thermodynamic viewpoint is extremely valuable for understanding the biochemical processes that are fundamental to life.
Natural selection includes a random process, mutation, but it is filtered by selection. Selection introduces correlations between genomic information and information about the environment.
The difference between biologists and ID/creationists is that ID/creationists imagine that the randomness of mutation somehow contaminates the entire process and makes it equivalent to random shuffling, like shuffling the deck in poker. Of course, this is nonsense; numerous simulations have proved that randomization/selection genetic algorithms are capable of design without the mutational "deck" itself being stacked.
I think that it is somewhat misleading to talk about a nonrandom anti-entropy mechanism, because the overall process of evolution, like all biological processes, increases net entropy, even though like many natural process it is capable of generating localized pockets of reduced entropy (i.e. living organisms).
You'd have to deal a lot more than 10 hands, because the probability of getting any of those 10 hands is still essentially negligible. But you are on the right track. The solution the paradox of reverse probability is not to consider the probability of getting a particular hand, but rather the probability of getting some hand. To do this, you have to consider, not just a few hands, but every possible hand. It turns out that even though the probability of any particular shuffle is vanishingly small, the number of possible hands is reciprocally large, so when you take the ratio to calculate the probability of getting some hand, the answer is 1.
Similarly, under evolutionary theory, the current form of life is not unique. Just as you will get completely different sequences every time you shuffle the cards, evolutionary theory predicts that you would get different forms of life, with different sequences of whatever information-carrying molecules they happen to use, if you were to repeat the entire process of evolution. So to calculate the probability of evolution, it is meaningless to talk about the probability of any particular DNA sequence--you have to consider all possible molecular sequences and structures that could have arisen if evolution were repeated an infinite number of times. Unfortunately, while it is possible to calculate exactly how many different ways a card shuffle can come out, nobody is even close to being able to calculate how many possible ways evolution could come out. But any attempt to calculate a "probability" of an evolutionary outcome without doing this is meaningless--it is exactly the same as trying to calculate the probability of being able to shuffle a deck of cards based upon the probability of getting any individual card sequence.
"Irreducibly complex" is Intelligent Design jargon for "something that couldn't have evolved because its individual components are individually without value to the organism except as components of the complete structure." So far, there is no evidence that anything in biology is irreducibly complex, and all of the suggested examples of irreducible complexity in biology (e.g. the bacterial flagella, the immune system cascade) have been shown not to be irreducibly complex (i.e. partial structures have been identified that have useful biological functions).
"Specified complexity" is another bit of Intelligent Design jargon, but they've never managed to come up with a coherent definition, probably because it is an oxymoron. A "specification" generally means a concise description of something, and truly complex things have no more concise description.
And yet nature does produce straight lines in many other contexts--crystal planes, for example. So we only see it as evidence of intelligence when we see it in the landscape because we happen to know from experience that the physical processes of geology and erosion operative here on earth do not normally do that. One could not, however, draw the general conclusion that straight lines are evidence of intelligence.