The only change between the slashdot intro and the K5 intro is the sentance, "An article over at Kuro5hin discusses the controvery over the Intelligent Design movement." While not a gross error, unless Mime Narrator and benna are the same people, it should have been in quotes. Such inflamatory writing and unattributed quoting indicates incestuous propegation of problematic ideas.
The quote, "a theory that has been shown to explain the origins of life time and time again" is an interjection of commentary in the reporter's passive third person voice and is not accurate. Surely it is a queue to illicit the contemtuous responses such as such as (Score 5: Insightful):
Honestly, just what is the deal with these fundamentalists?
If the author was wishing to be non-inflammatory, or better yet honest, they would have said, "a theory that has been accepted as an explaination of the origins of life time and time again." Many explanations are accepted in science that are unable to produce repeatable results (even one-off results) because as a framework they explain a lot of what we do see. The unverifiability is overlooked and clearly acknowledged to students. There is no shame in promoting a theory we still lack the ability to ultimately verify. For instance many aspects of Einstein's theory of relativity remain unverified.
However, one may see in this dishonest attempt to reach beyond being "accepted" to being "shown" a peek at the motivation for the piece. It is also pretty indicative of the same mental gymnastics he attemps throughout the piece.
Another example is the ommision of a mechanism for origin of life in the the next paragraph in the K5 article:
To understand the problems with Intelligent Design, first it is important to understand the theory it is attempting to oppose, evolution by natural selection. The theory is this: If organisms reproduce, offspring inherit traits from their progenitor(s), a variability of traits exists, and the environment cannot sustain all the members of an increasingly large population, then those members of the population that have poorly-adapted traits (to their environment) will die out, and those with well-adapted traits (to their environment) will prosper (Darwin 459). Over a long period of time, this process leads to extreme complexity, and adaptedness.
One would think this is a crucial item to develop after reading the inherent outrage against the situation "that high school science teachers teaching evolution tell their students that evolutionary theory [sic] is flawed, and that intelligent design is a valid alternative." Where "flawed" simply means it has many unverified elements as does Intelligent Design.
Indeed, if all the author thinks of evolution is the ability for orgamisms/species to change traits over generations then there is no conflict. There is also no mechanism proposed to explain the origin of life with evolution either.
So while outraged at the mear co-habitation of ID and evolution, the contradiction offered is abandoned so quickly? All that is left is just competition. The author chooses not to compete over verified applications of the two theories. Evidence is also skipped. The author instead chooses to make evolution and ID compete in clearly unverifiable ways. The author awkwardly chooses "complexity" as his chosen arena, and chooses mathematical theory as his weaponry.
The rest of the article invokes its own pseudo-science in the use of highly specific mathematical models of statistcal theory as models of natural behaviour and law. At issue is "complexity" and he makes the mistake of using the complexity of a mathematical system to represent the complexity of a natural system, and they are not the same thing at all.
Further damning the piece as a pseudo-intellectual work is his overly constrained focus on "complexity" i
I once turned down a job because I could tell the company was less than honest from the boot. I was brought in through an agency, then told I wouldn't be needed. Two weeks later they called me back for a simular job. Since I had the sneaky suspicion that they were trying to avoid the finder's fee, I dumped the deal.
Then turned out to be the local Enron and filed for bankruptcy about a year later. I just had come from a company that went bankrupt, and had hired their CTO through the same chicanery. Once bitten twice shy.
Instead I went with a company that has done quite a bit to re-instill my faith (after the whole tech bubble burst) that some people want to be good upright businessmen. That company (a startup) and I are doing very, very well now.
It would be interesting to catch the differences between the two, Open Xchange has a few more collaboration engines in it, namely a project manager and bulletin board.
In full disclosure we plan on releasing OX in the office sometime soon after their.8 release. Especially now that it looks like they integrate with any IMAP server (freeing us from having to switch to Cyrus).
there is a reason corporate users prefer Debian stable with the 2.4 kernel for their production boxes.
Oh, is that what you think...
Let me tell you, trust is a terrible and wonderful thing. It is earned, sought, but in reality only can be produced with practice, trial and error. Its a decision we "corporate users" make all the time. When something works we stick with it. When something looks like it works better we try it out, accumulating into years of experience.
As for my experience, we moved over to our first Gentoo production server before Gentoo hit 1.0. We've used RedHat here at work, and I used Debian personally for many years. And until recently what we were doing in Gentoo back in those early days couldn't be in RedHat and Debian in any reasonable or stable manor.
But now they can (enough for our purposes) and I'm the one who wonders why we would even try to do that considering how well Gentoo has performed for us.
And that, my Billy Gates gruff friend, is experience.
While that was nice, my favorite feature of EROS (besides the name) was the idea that instead of a filesystem a disk was simply non-volitile memory cache. That facilitated my next favorite idea, orthogonal persistance, the somewhat like a persistant software suspend.
I'd be interested in finding out (while the home page does not say) if these were the shortcomings of EROS it was alluding to.
I don't see ANY mention of Solaris at all other than a vendor Lunch and Learn
You got me there. And you won't see much mention of Solaris either because we *don't* run it any more -- except for some legacy workstations. If you do want some cheap Sun Hardware we have a pile of it in our office that you'd be doing us a service to take it off our hands.
And running a 500GB DB on Oracle 9i running on a pair of dual proc P4s is NOT big iron.
Which is good because I don't believe I said it was. From what I understand they use Linux on Dell servers because it outperforms Sun "big iron" in the testing they did in developing their facility.
RPMs aren't good enough either? How much flamebait can you add to one post?
Oh how I miss the good old days when a post like mine would be considered arrogant or concieted. In today's drippingly sarcastic world its only considered 'flaimbait'.
RPMs and Debs are fine. Better than package-manager if you ask me. But I don't wish to go back to them either.
Waiting for X, Gnome, KDE or OOo to compile can be like watching grass grow, and together take more than a day's worth of awake time on high end computers. But for your services, its rare for them to take longer than half an hour. But, c'est vrai, one shouldn't update live servers (binary or compiled) without testing it first.
for a minute there, I thought you were *promoting* Gentoo.
Such is the state of craftsmanship in the world today. As Steve Jobs said about Bill Gates and their Windows product, "my biggest complaint is that they simply have no taste".
Gentoo's not the kind of thing you run on production servers, Solaris is.
You knew such a statement would be countered with real life people. Allow me to be the first (if I post this fast enough).
Our company runs Gentoo on our domain controllers, which handle everything from Directory Services to Email. For a while our file servers ran Gentoo kernels, until Marcello added XFS and a few other items to the main 2.4 kernel.
In that example you have a very crafted and complex server, running some of the latest features Open Source has materialized. I go to a promotional lunch at a Sun vendor occasionaly, and the fellow moochers are constantly amazed at not only what services we provide, but the volume we provide them at.
If that is not enough big iron experience with Solaris, I happen to know that Sony's online game division does not run Solaris -- they run RedHat. Even compared to deep-pocket heavy hardware, they get better Oracle performance on Linux with Dell servers.
While there are many things I like about Solaris, (I still administer our legacy Solaris *workstations*) I have to say that the "Solaris is for production" mantra is not something this decade will say very much at all. Though I admit pkg-add is good, it is only as good as a binary package manager can be.
The question, what can't adult stem cells do? I've done a weekend of research and that question remains. I now know that adult stem cells are used in accepted medical practices, but I haven't seen a limitation discussed yet.;
Setting aside a report I have that adults may create pluripotent cells, I've yet to see someone really come out and say what multipotent cells can't do. I see reports of adult stem cells making nerve cells, even dopamine producing nerve tissue for treating patients with Alzheimer's. Then there are treatments which use adult stem cells for growing heart, liver, and bone marrow tissue.
Other interesting tidbits I learned, embryonic stem cells were patented in 1998, and as I suspected the promise of patenting a cloning process for harvesting them looms large on the horizon. Special wording was included into Prop 71 to make sure that such cloning was not outlawed, and certain protections to the patent holder were re-enforced.
Also of interest, embryonic stem cells not only form cancerous masses when injected into adults, but there is evidence that they are a natural cause of cancer (especially breast cancer in mothers).
I assume a sharp person such as yourself is probably asking, "Isn't adult stem cells patentable also?" Sure, extratcting and growing adult stem cells not only is patentable, it is patented. Unfortunately as research on these germ-cells have been going on since 1902, these patents have long since expired.
Indeed, the pro-choice movement seems to be an ox yoked to the applecart of the health-care industry. Parting shot: It is a dangerous abuse of the Hippocratic Oath when the health care industry finds an economy in promoting human death -- in order to save it.
You seem smarter than the average bear, lemme run some things by you then... (some of this is for the sake of the other posters)
The key is in the details, and one of the first distinctions made in this discussion is a particular kind of stem cell research -- embryonic. I'm unaware of any party that is against stem cell research, but then I don't belong to a political party either. You caught that distinction better than most, and I thank you for it.
Even further lost in the other responses in this discussion is a recognition that the issue is not about research per-se but the acquisition of these cells to experiment on.
With the Medicare benefit program on its way in 2006, there is no reason why the GOP shouldn't be the leader in overall contributions by the pharmaceuticals. But your throwing the bath water in with the baby here. Better to look at California Prop 71 funding in particular.
No here's where you can really help me out...
Having made the distinction between stem cell research in general and embryonic stem cell research, where is this unique track? What makes embryonic stem cells more plausible than any other? From what I've read they have a tenancy to ball up in a cancerous mass before ever doing any good, something that adult stem cells don't seem to suffer from.
Another poster said that they have "saved" lives. I'll admit that anyone has been benefited would be news to me. Welcome news, but still news. In fact, not to openly display ignorance here but I know of no accepted medical procedure even based on stem cells, adult or embryonic.
Its hard to find very straight talk on this subject, but from where I stand much of the political tectonics right now are riding on a lot of bio-tech speculation. And the winner seems to be the most patentable, and not necessarily the best.
Following the debate on stem cell research in California (which we decided to go billions more in debt to fund) I learned some interesting things, though I admit the sources were more political than anything else.
I've always wondered why the excitement over embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cells seem to be safer, and umbilical chords and liposuction seem to be a plenty good source for these little wonders.
Well had I hung my hat on the theory that it justified abortion (and that may have much to do with it) until I learned about cloning embryos (listed above as one of the top 10 scientific advancements). And cloning embryos is a patentable process.
So here in California we have the distinct honor of going in debt to fund yet another health-care industry attempt to corner an emerging market with patents?
So I can get blown up (or just become terminally ill) from a terrorist attack, starve or freeze to death in radical climate change, or become a slave in a new world order.
Why two hundred years ago people were crossing the prairie listening to wolves and bears while burying their family members to the incurable flu. I wonder if they were as conscious of their mortality as we are. Probably were, and more so, but they left the cities non-the-less. I wonder why I imagine them so well adjusted compared to the/. frenzy of bad science and foreshadowed doom.
I suppose the real difference is that a wooden wagon and log cabin were within their reach, but alas a spaceship is not. Then again, even Christopher Columbus needed government assistance. I've been getting into the space cowboy/space pirate memes of the 70's. The space bureaucracy operas of late (Bab5, ST:TNG, Star Wars prequels, etc) just don't have the same flair.
I was lucky enough to have worked in a startup record company headed by one of the major players in the Emmy awards. I remember one company meeting where the twenty five year old CEO of the company announced some good news... (I paraphrase)
...and three of our bands have made it. We feel pretty good that they were accepted
even before we started working on the awards promoters
Wow, the behind the scenes politics were a real revelation about awards shows. Now, more cynical and jaded I watch them as contests of politics among some of the shmooziest that the good ol' USA has to offer. Its a contest of promoters and record companies.
This could be, as Zonk points out, a real ticket to the mainstream zone. But as for myself, I echo the comments of a member of the Who during an MTV music awards 'Rock and Roll has really grown up. Here we are in tuxedos and ties. What a bummer'.
Slashdot Mirror
The only change between the slashdot intro and the K5 intro is the sentance, "An article over at Kuro5hin discusses the controvery over the Intelligent Design movement." While not a gross error, unless Mime Narrator and benna are the same people, it should have been in quotes. Such inflamatory writing and unattributed quoting indicates incestuous propegation of problematic ideas.
The quote, "a theory that has been shown to explain the origins of life time and time again" is an interjection of commentary in the reporter's passive third person voice and is not accurate. Surely it is a queue to illicit the contemtuous responses such as such as (Score 5: Insightful):
If the author was wishing to be non-inflammatory, or better yet honest, they would have said, "a theory that has been accepted as an explaination of the origins of life time and time again." Many explanations are accepted in science that are unable to produce repeatable results (even one-off results) because as a framework they explain a lot of what we do see. The unverifiability is overlooked and clearly acknowledged to students. There is no shame in promoting a theory we still lack the ability to ultimately verify. For instance many aspects of Einstein's theory of relativity remain unverified.
However, one may see in this dishonest attempt to reach beyond being "accepted" to being "shown" a peek at the motivation for the piece. It is also pretty indicative of the same mental gymnastics he attemps throughout the piece.
Another example is the ommision of a mechanism for origin of life in the the next paragraph in the K5 article:
One would think this is a crucial item to develop after reading the inherent outrage against the situation "that high school science teachers teaching evolution tell their students that evolutionary theory [sic] is flawed, and that intelligent design is a valid alternative." Where "flawed" simply means it has many unverified elements as does Intelligent Design.
Indeed, if all the author thinks of evolution is the ability for orgamisms/species to change traits over generations then there is no conflict. There is also no mechanism proposed to explain the origin of life with evolution either.
So while outraged at the mear co-habitation of ID and evolution, the contradiction offered is abandoned so quickly? All that is left is just competition. The author chooses not to compete over verified applications of the two theories. Evidence is also skipped. The author instead chooses to make evolution and ID compete in clearly unverifiable ways. The author awkwardly chooses "complexity" as his chosen arena, and chooses mathematical theory as his weaponry.
The rest of the article invokes its own pseudo-science in the use of highly specific mathematical models of statistcal theory as models of natural behaviour and law. At issue is "complexity" and he makes the mistake of using the complexity of a mathematical system to represent the complexity of a natural system, and they are not the same thing at all.
Further damning the piece as a pseudo-intellectual work is his overly constrained focus on "complexity" i
Then turned out to be the local Enron and filed for bankruptcy about a year later. I just had come from a company that went bankrupt, and had hired their CTO through the same chicanery. Once bitten twice shy.
Instead I went with a company that has done quite a bit to re-instill my faith (after the whole tech bubble burst) that some people want to be good upright businessmen. That company (a startup) and I are doing very, very well now.
He might be alluding to the SLOX->NOX migration.
It would be interesting to catch the differences between the two, Open Xchange has a few more collaboration engines in it, namely a project manager and bulletin board.
In full disclosure we plan on releasing OX in the office sometime soon after their .8 release. Especially now that it looks like they integrate with any IMAP server (freeing us from having to switch to Cyrus).
there is a reason corporate users prefer Debian stable with the 2.4 kernel for their production boxes. Oh, is that what you think... Let me tell you, trust is a terrible and wonderful thing. It is earned, sought, but in reality only can be produced with practice, trial and error. Its a decision we "corporate users" make all the time. When something works we stick with it. When something looks like it works better we try it out, accumulating into years of experience. As for my experience, we moved over to our first Gentoo production server before Gentoo hit 1.0. We've used RedHat here at work, and I used Debian personally for many years. And until recently what we were doing in Gentoo back in those early days couldn't be in RedHat and Debian in any reasonable or stable manor. But now they can (enough for our purposes) and I'm the one who wonders why we would even try to do that considering how well Gentoo has performed for us. And that, my Billy Gates gruff friend, is experience.
While that was nice, my favorite feature of EROS (besides the name) was the idea that instead of a filesystem a disk was simply non-volitile memory cache. That facilitated my next favorite idea, orthogonal persistance, the somewhat like a persistant software suspend. I'd be interested in finding out (while the home page does not say) if these were the shortcomings of EROS it was alluding to.
Well, if that is your choice...
Yes, but you will.
You got me there. And you won't see much mention of Solaris either because we *don't* run it any more -- except for some legacy workstations. If you do want some cheap Sun Hardware we have a pile of it in our office that you'd be doing us a service to take it off our hands.
And running a 500GB DB on Oracle 9i running on a pair of dual proc P4s is NOT big iron.
Which is good because I don't believe I said it was. From what I understand they use Linux on Dell servers because it outperforms Sun "big iron" in the testing they did in developing their facility.
RPMs aren't good enough either? How much flamebait can you add to one post?
Oh how I miss the good old days when a post like mine would be considered arrogant or concieted. In today's drippingly sarcastic world its only considered 'flaimbait'.
RPMs and Debs are fine. Better than package-manager if you ask me. But I don't wish to go back to them either.
Waiting for X, Gnome, KDE or OOo to compile can be like watching grass grow, and together take more than a day's worth of awake time on high end computers. But for your services, its rare for them to take longer than half an hour. But, c'est vrai, one shouldn't update live servers (binary or compiled) without testing it first.
for a minute there, I thought you were *promoting* Gentoo. Such is the state of craftsmanship in the world today. As Steve Jobs said about Bill Gates and their Windows product, "my biggest complaint is that they simply have no taste".
You knew such a statement would be countered with real life people. Allow me to be the first (if I post this fast enough).
Our company runs Gentoo on our domain controllers, which handle everything from Directory Services to Email. For a while our file servers ran Gentoo kernels, until Marcello added XFS and a few other items to the main 2.4 kernel.
In that example you have a very crafted and complex server, running some of the latest features Open Source has materialized. I go to a promotional lunch at a Sun vendor occasionaly, and the fellow moochers are constantly amazed at not only what services we provide, but the volume we provide them at.
If that is not enough big iron experience with Solaris, I happen to know that Sony's online game division does not run Solaris -- they run RedHat. Even compared to deep-pocket heavy hardware, they get better Oracle performance on Linux with Dell servers.
While there are many things I like about Solaris, (I still administer our legacy Solaris *workstations*) I have to say that the "Solaris is for production" mantra is not something this decade will say very much at all. Though I admit pkg-add is good, it is only as good as a binary package manager can be.
There remain cell types (allbeit uncommon ones) that Adult Stem Cells are unable to replicate.
So you know no more than what I've been able to find out.
Thank you for your time, this has been most informative.
The question, what can't adult stem cells do? I've done a weekend of research and that question remains. I now know that adult stem cells are used in accepted medical practices, but I haven't seen a limitation discussed yet.;
Setting aside a report I have that adults may create pluripotent cells, I've yet to see someone really come out and say what multipotent cells can't do. I see reports of adult stem cells making nerve cells, even dopamine producing nerve tissue for treating patients with Alzheimer's. Then there are treatments which use adult stem cells for growing heart, liver, and bone marrow tissue.
Other interesting tidbits I learned, embryonic stem cells were patented in 1998, and as I suspected the promise of patenting a cloning process for harvesting them looms large on the horizon. Special wording was included into Prop 71 to make sure that such cloning was not outlawed, and certain protections to the patent holder were re-enforced.
Also of interest, embryonic stem cells not only form cancerous masses when injected into adults, but there is evidence that they are a natural cause of cancer (especially breast cancer in mothers).
I assume a sharp person such as yourself is probably asking, "Isn't adult stem cells patentable also?" Sure, extratcting and growing adult stem cells not only is patentable, it is patented. Unfortunately as research on these germ-cells have been going on since 1902, these patents have long since expired.
Indeed, the pro-choice movement seems to be an ox yoked to the applecart of the health-care industry. Parting shot: It is a dangerous abuse of the Hippocratic Oath when the health care industry finds an economy in promoting human death -- in order to save it.
The key is in the details, and one of the first distinctions made in this discussion is a particular kind of stem cell research -- embryonic. I'm unaware of any party that is against stem cell research, but then I don't belong to a political party either. You caught that distinction better than most, and I thank you for it.
Even further lost in the other responses in this discussion is a recognition that the issue is not about research per-se but the acquisition of these cells to experiment on.
With the Medicare benefit program on its way in 2006, there is no reason why the GOP shouldn't be the leader in overall contributions by the pharmaceuticals. But your throwing the bath water in with the baby here. Better to look at California Prop 71 funding in particular.
No here's where you can really help me out...
Having made the distinction between stem cell research in general and embryonic stem cell research, where is this unique track? What makes embryonic stem cells more plausible than any other? From what I've read they have a tenancy to ball up in a cancerous mass before ever doing any good, something that adult stem cells don't seem to suffer from.
Another poster said that they have "saved" lives. I'll admit that anyone has been benefited would be news to me. Welcome news, but still news. In fact, not to openly display ignorance here but I know of no accepted medical procedure even based on stem cells, adult or embryonic.
Its hard to find very straight talk on this subject, but from where I stand much of the political tectonics right now are riding on a lot of bio-tech speculation. And the winner seems to be the most patentable, and not necessarily the best.
I've always wondered why the excitement over embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cells seem to be safer, and umbilical chords and liposuction seem to be a plenty good source for these little wonders.
Well had I hung my hat on the theory that it justified abortion (and that may have much to do with it) until I learned about cloning embryos (listed above as one of the top 10 scientific advancements). And cloning embryos is a patentable process.
So here in California we have the distinct honor of going in debt to fund yet another health-care industry attempt to corner an emerging market with patents?
If it were only not true...
So I can get blown up (or just become terminally ill) from a terrorist attack, starve or freeze to death in radical climate change, or become a slave in a new world order.
/. frenzy of bad science and foreshadowed doom.
Why two hundred years ago people were crossing the prairie listening to wolves and bears while burying their family members to the incurable flu. I wonder if they were as conscious of their mortality as we are. Probably were, and more so, but they left the cities non-the-less. I wonder why I imagine them so well adjusted compared to the
I suppose the real difference is that a wooden wagon and log cabin were within their reach, but alas a spaceship is not. Then again, even Christopher Columbus needed government assistance. I've been getting into the space cowboy/space pirate memes of the 70's. The space bureaucracy operas of late (Bab5, ST:TNG, Star Wars prequels, etc) just don't have the same flair.
And the GNU people have run to Arch with the usual zealot flair. A good comparison can be found here.