PBS pays for the creation of their shows with tax dollars
PBS doesn't produce NOVA, WGBH Boston does. According to their annual report, only about 11% of WGBH's funding is from government grants and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which could vaguely be called "tax dollars." 21% comes from corporations, 12% comes from individuals, and 21% comes from other PBS stations.
I'm a poor student who does 90% of my programming work using a command shell and VI
You do realize that Mac OS X has vi, various command shells, perl, etc., included, as well gcc included? I.e., it's still not clear what advantage you get using Linux over Mac OS X.
As far as your critique of me picking and choosing sentences and formulas, I must have over estimated your technical background, because I having spent years studying the subject matter, assumed you also have done the same. With this inference, I assumed we would have the same scientific relationship that you describe:
I think what you have been doing is finding scientific-sounding web pages that take a wide range of views, and trying to synthesize a world view out of these.
I read your description of your educational background, and I admire your ambition to learn about scientific topics, and I've tried to respect your efforts. But I must say I am quite offended by your suggestion that I need "spoon feeding." I've got a Ph.D. from a major research university. I've published articles in actual peer-reviewed journals. I attended many talks where the top researchers in the field present their cutting-edge findings, and it doesn't resemble at all what you cut-and-paste.
What I don't have a complete knowledge of are random crackpots you drag out of the far corners of the web. Hubert Yockey is not, in my mind, a major figure in the scientific world. "White hole theory" is not a mainstream cosmological view. And scaling Hubble's constant by the speed of light is ABSOLUTELY IRRELEVANT to the physics involved. It's like painting new numbers on your car's speedometer. Call it 55 miles per hour or 88 kilometers per hour or 8.196 * 10^-8, it's still the same damn thing.
The general consensus among cosmologists today is that the universe is near the critical density, i.e., nearly flat geometry, that the Hubble constant corresponds to an age for the Universe of something like 15 billion years, and that an inflationary scenario is needed to explain the features seen in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Universe with "and edge and a center" is absolutely opposite the current consensus, and "white-hole model" is not a term I've seen used in any research of which I was previously aware.
Now, I don't know what other crazy shit you believe in, but I'm sure you'll post an additional weird theory in response to my post.
"I don't understand what you mean when you mention "Adam and Eve" in a scientific context"
My point exactly, you brought it up and teachers and professors bring it up in classes, why?
You misunderstand. I don't understand what YOU mean by the three words "Adam and Eve." For instance: do you mean two actual humans who lived in an actual Garden, who heard God and an actual serpent speak to them, and ate actual fruit from a physically real forbidden tree on a particular day in history? Or characters in a *story* in which those events are used to symbolize the human relationship to sin, but without having literal, historic truth? I think only the second interpretation is compatible with the historical and scientific evidence.
Your statement about Longair's description of the redshift does not equate to his denial of the big bang cosmology or General Relativity. It is just clearing up the terms of discourse to avoid confusion. If some people might use that to claim that the big bang is "controversial," they are misusing or misunderstanding the quote.
One thing you have to understand is that scientists talking to other scientists have a huge background of common understanding, which lets them take short cuts in describing their work. Part of understanding science is understanding the unstated context that underlies the current discussion. Picking single sentences or formulas out of scientific papers without taking along the context is not the same as understanding.
That kind of probability argument is totally inaccurate. It just proves that creationists can't do math either.
Consider the probability that you were born. There are about 3 billion men and women on the earth. Your father probably ejaculated billions of sperm in the process of impregnating your mother.
That means that there was only a one in 3*10^9*3*10^9*10^9 = 9 x 10^27 chance that you would be born. Except that your father and mother had to be born as well, and each of them only had a 9 x 10^27 chance to be born, so now the odds against are 7.29 x 10^83 against. And think of *their* parents...
Oh my goodness, you can't possibly exist! How can you be posting on slashdot?
THERE IS ALSO NO SCIENTIFIC PROOF AGAINST ADAM AND EVE
I don't understand your point anymore. I don't understand what your criterion for scientific proof is, I don't understand what you mean when you mention "Adam and Eve" in a scientific context, I don't understand what you mean by "Hubble's law" as fact but "expanding universe" as theory. I don't understand how you can believe that science today and science in 1800 are not radically different things.
I don't know what "facts" or "theories" you have put together like a jigsaw puzzle to form a picture of the world and how it works, but it sure doesn't look anything like mine. I don't seem to be able to communicate to you at all. Sorry.
Right now it seam to be ok to teach there is no God and there was no Adam and Eve in school
You are completely missing the point. It is OK to teach that there is NO SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE FOR ADAM AND EVE, which is different from "there was no Adam and Eve."
One is a scientific statement, the other is not.
Also, the fact that there is not yet scientific consensus in a field DOES NOT MEAN that it is not science. Science is about the PROCESS of acquiring knowledge and developing theories, which is always inherently INCOMPLETE. We might not know how to cure the common cold yet, but that doesn't mean we can't talk about the germ theory of disease as a scientific fact, or should give equal time to the idea that prayer is an alternative way to cure the sniffles.
Not everything has to be 100% settled and conclusively proven before it is scientific and taught in science class.
SG&A would *never* go away. That's $13 billion/yr.
"cost of revenue" (i.e. directly associated with making the actual stuff they sell) would be zero, as opposed to $6.7 billion/yr, but the sales guy is probably still going out to convince customers that MS would have "lower TCO" even if they aren't selling anything, and Bill & Steve & their administrative minions, still would get paid.
Yes, the sales guy is going to get hit on commissions, but he still has some base salary and travel expenses. Marketing will still be needed.
Yes, but that article is mainly harping on huge growth in camera phones, but only a vague statement that still cameras are "running out of steam" and "seems demand for camera phones could hit demand for digital cameras" and "will find growth harder to achieve."
There are *already* 4x as many camera phones as digital still cameras being sold, but that doesn't mean that the DSC lost 80% of its market. They are still chugging along just fine. Those extra 4x dinky cameras were mostly sold to people who were buying phones to make phone calls and got a camera thrown in. We're not yet to the point where people are going on vacation, and buy a new phone before they leave so they'll be able to take pictures.
Any recent hard numbers on still camera growth rates?
"growth harder to achieve" does not equate to me as "getting killed" unless that growth rate is going negative. Losing 15% of their potential market by 2010 is just a prediction, and still isn't a big percentage.
Just like phone cameras are killing the point and click digital camera market,
Do you have any information to back this up? I'm truly skeptical because most phone cameras lack flash, have very poor resolution, are blurry as hell unless you hold it rock-steady, and lock their photos up so that you have to pay the phone company to get them on a computer.
Now, I could believe that the 3 megapixel P&S cameras satisfy people enough that there is not a big market for upgrading to 5+ megapixel P&S cameras, but phone cameras seem like something thats being forced down our throats by the phone companies by eliminating all other models, rather than something that people have been throwing away their P&S cameras for.
bull shit that our schools teach abiogenesis and evolution of non like species; for example, fish evolving into dogs.
Look, schools have science classes, and science shows that evolution happened, and hasn't settled on a particularly clear picture of abiogenesis. That's not bullshit, that's simply how things are here in the 21st century. Back in 1800, you would have had a valid point, but science has discovered a lot since then, and you have to deal with it.
If you have some psychological problem dealing with that reality, I don't have time to fix it. *That* is why I was trying to end the conversation by giving you some guidance to understand the broad scientific basis for this understanding, a summary of why not everything you read on the Web is true or scientific, and wishing you good luck.
I suppose you have a verse in Genesis to "prove" "scientifically" that dogs did not evolve from wolves and other earlier mammals. As opposed to a simple declaration "I think it is bullshit"?
God because there was no Adam because of abiogenesis, prove it before you teach it
On the other hand, "Adam and Eve" is unique to Hebrew scriptures, and belongs in Sunday School, not the public school classroom.
"Adam in the Garden of Eden" is not a scientific concept, and has nothing like scientific evidence to back it up, and has no business being in a science class or a scientific discussion.
First off, I was trying to end the conversation about evolution, by which *I* mean species developing into new species over time. By the way, I don't understand what you mean by non-related vs. related species, which seems paradoxical to me.
That conversation seemed to be expanding into a huge number of different directions in your discussion, and I don't have the patience to deal with a conversation that is going 100 ways at once. I have a day job.
I suggest you realize a dialogue on slashdot with a guy calling himself "sickofthissthit" is not the way to exhaustively research the case for evolution.
You've now brought abiogenesis up as the main issue; most of what I have said is relevant to evolution, not abiogenesis. I will freely admit that abiogenesis is a much less mature field than evolutionary biology. I'm not familiar with Yockey's work. However, your argument basically boils down to: we observe C-13/C-12 fractionation in rocks barely after the Earth cooled enough for abiogenesis, therefore God exists. That's giving up on naturalistic explanations pretty easily.
Yockey appears, based on a random quote found by Google, to have an extremist view: that we must look at the geological evidence without ANY preconception before we can even begin to theorize about abiogenetic mechanisms. Very little science has ever been done without *some* preconceptions, even if they turned out to be wrong. The key thing is to be flexible about them when they are just preconceptions used to *generate* theories, rather than to rule theories out. I'm also generally skeptical about anyone using "Information Theory" in a biological context. It is *extremely* tricky to use information theory accurately, MUCH harder than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the creationists LOVE to use the Second Law of Thermodynamics incorrectly, so they are even more likely to like to use information theory incorrectly.
There appear to be several assumptions made in his argument
1) that the tarry material from *simulations* must also appear in the historical generation of the soup. Obviously, the simulations are possibly happening millions of times faster than the natural mechanism, so this residue is by no means guaranteed to happen in nature.
2) I'll concede that most evidence now indicates the atmosphere was probably not reducing enough to generate the kind of soup that Miller&Urey generated, but this is still an assumption.
3) That the only mechanism to fractionate the C-13 was biological, and was similar to the photosynthetic fractionation that is observed today.
4) That the fractionation is an accurate representation of the composition 3.8 billion years ago; i.e. nothing has disturbed its composition since original deposition.
5) That the inorganic fraction observed today is equal to the inorganic fraction that existed on Earth billions of years ago; I must admit I don't know how accurately we know the Solar system C-13 fraction, for instance. The present-day carbon cycle is complex; the primitive one may have been complex in a much different way, or simpler.
Evaluating the quality of these assumptions requires much more organic and geochemistry than I know. Scientists appear to be still investigating these issues from multiple angles, so there is probably much yet to be learned and thought of in this field.
Still, a God who *might have* created microbial mats 4 billion years ago seems far from proving the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, who reportedly was much more recently and actively involved.
I don't have time to critique every possible source. I will just say that those who believe that evolution is sufficient explanation for the reality of life on Earth are saying so because they are closely familiar with the facts, and have a deep understanding of the principles underlying evolution and the evidence for it, and take an honest approach to their thinking about the issues.
Those who argue against evolution are almost all using fundamentally dishonest intellectual approaches, where they set up straw man arguments which parody the evolutionary arguments, selectively quote, cherry pick data, make misleading or inappropriate statistical arguments, or create irrelevant criteria that they claim must be satisified for evolution to be possible.
I think to be fair, one has to study carefully what evolution is about, and really understand it, before you can evaluate the criticisms of it. If all you know about evolution is what the ID folks want you to know, you'll get a very limited, skewed, and unfair portrayal. In contrast, the evolutionary folks almost always understand accurately what the ID arguments are based on.
The personal story you linked to is certainly an emotionally stirring declaration, but I think the medical professionals involved were more concerned with helping him than with gathering scientific data on his condition to determine how miraculous his recovery was. Medicine, like paleontology, is almost always dealing with a very scarce amount of data. No one really knows why some people's hearts stop, and why they start again, and we don't have measurements that can recontruct what happened to that guy. But I have to say my guess is that the medics who got him to the hospital were a pretty indispensable part of his survival, while the prayer was optional. I don't think anyone was deceiving or paid off, just that medicine is not a 100% repeatable scientific phenomenon.
Buying the package containing commercial software does not give you unlimited rights to use the software
It does unless otherwise stated before purchasing the software. Most commercial software has the use restrictions printed on the box.
You've just proved my point. By your original logic, if you closed your eyes while looking at the box, or that part of the box off and toss it in the trash, you won't see the terms, and won't be bound by them. The EULA is incorporated by reference from the terms described in the box (or other "wrapper" for delivery), and forms part of that agreement. You can't wilfully modify the code to disable the EULA, then claim you've modified the license terms.
Buying the package containing commercial software does not give you unlimited rights to use the software. Buying a video in the store does not give you broadcast rights; buying a book in the store does not give you republication or translation rights; buying a computer does not give you a right to reproduce the firmware or circuits inside. Having a gas or electric meter installed in your house does not give you the right to bypass it to get unlimited gas or electricity. Believe it or not, laws limit what you are allowed to do in the privacy of your home with your own property.
Courts look very harshly at this kind of juvenile avoidance: "well, I had my fingers crossed when I signed the contract, so it doesn't count." Terms that are not clearly displayed cannot form a contract, but DELIBERATELY AND WILFULLY ALTERING the software to avoid seeing something you don't want to see is ACTING IN BAD FAITH. You can't get out of contracts that way. Without that contract, the software company will refuse you the right to use the code, regardless of who owns the computer.
Editing a binary to remove the EULA by no means frees you from the terms of the license.
The rights granted by the license which is expressed by the EULA are not offered to you under other licensing terms.
In any contract, you can't arbitrarily scribble out sections you don't like, sign it, and expect your modified terms to apply without the express agreement of the other party. The two parties have to agree to substantially the same terms in order to have a contractual agreement. Without that agreeement, the software publisher doesn't grant you the right to install or use the software.
Uh, do you understand what the word "quantum" means?
Proteins are far too large, and have too many degrees of freedom to be in pure quantum states: the level spacing is far lower than the uncertainty limit for the time period under which they evolve. No quantum coherence is possible there.
Bose-Einstein condensation? At body temperature, with protein-sized molecules? Give me a break.
Yes, maybe there is something very funky about the proteomics of brain function. But don't put a quantum label on there unless you've got an h-bar right up front in the theory.
Instead of trying to learn about things by reading in this forum, I would instead rely on a good scientific library.
All of Darwin's major works are available online: http://www.darwin-literature.com/. I would absolutely avoid the Google ads linked to at this site, because it seems to have been targeted by creationists. Darwin's particular examples, of course, were not always accurate, because he lacked the knowledge of modern genetics; his racial theories were an example of this.
One particularly interesting work is "The Formation of Vegetable Mould." It shows Darwin as a painstaking observer of Nature.
If you want a single book on evolution, consider John Maynard Smith's book, _The Theory of Evolution._ Or Dawkin's _The Blind Watchmaker._
Stephen Jay Gould wrote many essays on evolutionary topics. They are an excellent and fascinating collection of examples of the natural world. His _Structure of Evolutionary Theory_ is highly technical, and perhaps not well-edited.
But for God's sake. Don't try to learn anything by reading Slashdot postings!
An Apple high-level executive should be arranging meetings with KHTML core to sort this out
Sorry, I don't follow you. Apple has Microsoft to worry about day and night, but some "high-level" executive is supposed to spare his presumably valuable time to soothe some pissed-off open source programmers who don't care about the Mac OS platform anyway?
All I hear from the KDE folks is that Apple doesn't spend time tracking all their cleaning and refactoring because Apple is too busy adding features. Pardon me if I don't condemn Apple for actually delivering functionality to their paying customers, while open-source programmers evidently have enough spare time to just make things neat for developers.
Yes, I sympathise with the developers getting pissed that Apple fanboys are slobbering about Apple's non-existent cooperation. But clueless fanboys are not Apple's responsibility.
Einstein was speaking specifically about quantum mechanics, which is unrelated to the fundamental question of randomness in the macroscopic world. Einstein was quite aware of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, which both admit it is impossible to predict the exact behavior of large systems made up of innumerable smaller parts.
Also, he was apparently wrong in this belief with respect to quantum mechanics. But again, that is immaterial.
Nobody except ID advocates are "coming to the conclusion macro evolution is impossible." Maintream biologists still believe very much in the idea that current species were descended from very different species. The only alternative is special creation for each individual species, at various times throughout the past 3 billion years, without any particular regard for preserving species that became extinct over the same period.
There is no convincing explanation for how birds arose, for instance, except from pretty clearly reptilian precursors.
As far as bacteria, what we see today is the result of 3 billion years of bacterial evolution, so it is not clear how much todays bacteria resemble the earliest bacteria. Bacteria do commonly exchange genetic material with each other.
Our inability to figure out the historical record of how organisms arose out of a long-disappeared "protocell" is by no means "proof" that evolution could not have happened. It could just mean we don't have enough information to know how it happened. I don't know who my great-great-great-grandfather was, but that doesn't mean he could not have existed. Just that peasants didn't keep detailed genealogical records.
One particular point to understand about "irreducible complexity" is that it is an artificial concept, not related to "able to evolve from earlier forms."
Consider a building or a bridge. Most buildings and bridges are constructed with scaffolding around them, and then the scaffolding is taken away after the building or bridge is complete, because it is not needed to hold up the structure.
Similarly, current cellular mechanisms may be *simplified* from earlier versions, and those *earlier* versions might *not* be "irreducibly complex" because they still had the scaffolding. The scaffolding gets eliminated through evolution, and suddenly, there aren't any more redundant parts that can be taken away.
Your standard of "proof" of macroevolution is also artifically high. How about you "prove" you are descended from Adam, by reproducing *that* in a laboratory?
Darwin was exceedingly careful in his observations. He in fact was planning an absolutely huge work, several times the size of Origin of Species; in fact, Origin of Species was, in his thinking, simply "an abstract" of the larger work.
It is true that he spent only two years at medical school in Edinborough; however, that leaves out his subsequent studies at another school, of which you may have heard, Christ's College at Cambridge, at which he studied science for four years. One of the interests which distracted him from his studies was also collecting beetles. In his preliminary exams, he did relatively well on the Gospels and Paley's "Evidences for Christianity." In his finals, he placed 10th out of 178 passing students, including good marks in moral and political philosphy. He did become ill during his voyage, but was healthy enough to spend two more years finishing his circumnavigation, after leaving South America. He collected lots of specimins, of plants, animals, and fossils, sending them to the best experts.
He spent years considering his field observations, studied barnacles for eight years, and with the observations published from the Beagle voyage, got the Royal Medal of the Royal Society *BEFORE* his theories on evolution had been published. That is, he was recognized as an accomplished naturalist before his theory became public. He experimented with seeds and asked many questions of animal breeders and sailors to understand various issues of inheritance and how animals and plants get to islands. He bred pigeons. In all, he did a *tremendous* amount of careful, scientific work, with the best training that England could provide, which at that time was probably the best in the world.
Yes, he had doubts; that's why he spent over twenty years developing his theory. But he also did not have the benefit of knowing about DNA or even basic rules of genetic inheritance, which were discovered after his death.
Random House Encyclopedia evidently does a very poor job of describing Darwin. Perhaps you should look at more thorough sources.
Slashdot Mirror
PBS pays for the creation of their shows with tax dollars
PBS doesn't produce NOVA, WGBH Boston does. According to their annual report, only about 11% of WGBH's funding is from government grants and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which could vaguely be called "tax dollars." 21% comes from corporations, 12% comes from individuals, and 21% comes from other PBS stations.
I'm a poor student who does 90% of my programming work using a command shell and VI
You do realize that Mac OS X has vi, various command shells, perl, etc., included, as well gcc included? I.e., it's still not clear what advantage you get using Linux over Mac OS X.
As far as your critique of me picking and choosing sentences and formulas, I must have over estimated your technical background, because I having spent years studying the subject matter, assumed you also have done the same. With this inference, I assumed we would have the same scientific relationship that you describe:
I think what you have been doing is finding scientific-sounding web pages that take a wide range of views, and trying to synthesize a world view out of these.
I read your description of your educational background, and I admire your ambition to learn about scientific topics, and I've tried to respect your efforts. But I must say I am quite offended by your suggestion that I need "spoon feeding." I've got a Ph.D. from a major research university. I've published articles in actual peer-reviewed journals. I attended many talks where the top researchers in the field present their cutting-edge findings, and it doesn't resemble at all what you cut-and-paste.
What I don't have a complete knowledge of are random crackpots you drag out of the far corners of the web. Hubert Yockey is not, in my mind, a major figure in the scientific world. "White hole theory" is not a mainstream cosmological view. And scaling Hubble's constant by the speed of light is ABSOLUTELY IRRELEVANT to the physics involved. It's like painting new numbers on your car's speedometer. Call it 55 miles per hour or 88 kilometers per hour or 8.196 * 10^-8, it's still the same damn thing.
The general consensus among cosmologists today is that the universe is near the critical density, i.e., nearly flat geometry, that the Hubble constant corresponds to an age for the Universe of something like 15 billion years, and that an inflationary scenario is needed to explain the features seen in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Universe with "and edge and a center" is absolutely opposite the current consensus, and "white-hole model" is not a term I've seen used in any research of which I was previously aware.
Now, I don't know what other crazy shit you believe in, but I'm sure you'll post an additional weird theory in response to my post.
Actually, THE US MILITARY is working to determine the alignment of the Earth's terrestrial reference frame.
It is just a matter of time before the Dr. Strangeloves at the Pentagon start realigning the Earth to suit their purposes!!!
"I don't understand what you mean when you mention "Adam and Eve" in a scientific context"
My point exactly, you brought it up and teachers and professors bring it up in classes, why?
You misunderstand. I don't understand what YOU mean by the three words "Adam and Eve." For instance: do you mean two actual humans who lived in an actual Garden, who heard God and an actual serpent speak to them, and ate actual fruit from a physically real forbidden tree on a particular day in history? Or characters in a *story* in which those events are used to symbolize the human relationship to sin, but without having literal, historic truth? I think only the second interpretation is compatible with the historical and scientific evidence.
Your statement about Longair's description of the redshift does not equate to his denial of the big bang cosmology or General Relativity. It is just clearing up the terms of discourse to avoid confusion. If some people might use that to claim that the big bang is "controversial," they are misusing or misunderstanding the quote.
One thing you have to understand is that scientists talking to other scientists have a huge background of common understanding, which lets them take short cuts in describing their work. Part of understanding science is understanding the unstated context that underlies the current discussion. Picking single sentences or formulas out of scientific papers without taking along the context is not the same as understanding.
I don't know if you satisfied Loundry, but you have amazing patience to write all that out just because some slashbot doesn't believe in HIV.
Plus, that line of reasoning is just kick-ass cool.
That kind of probability argument is totally inaccurate. It just proves that creationists can't do math either.
Consider the probability that you were born. There are about 3 billion men and women on the earth. Your father probably ejaculated billions of sperm in the process of impregnating your mother.
That means that there was only a one in 3*10^9*3*10^9*10^9 = 9 x 10^27 chance that you would be born. Except that your father and mother had to be born as well, and each of them only had a 9 x 10^27 chance to be born, so now the odds against are 7.29 x 10^83 against. And think of *their* parents...
Oh my goodness, you can't possibly exist! How can you be posting on slashdot?
THERE IS ALSO NO SCIENTIFIC PROOF AGAINST ADAM AND EVE
I don't understand your point anymore. I don't understand what your criterion for scientific proof is, I don't understand what you mean when you mention "Adam and Eve" in a scientific context, I don't understand what you mean by "Hubble's law" as fact but "expanding universe" as theory. I don't understand how you can believe that science today and science in 1800 are not radically different things.
I don't know what "facts" or "theories" you have put together like a jigsaw puzzle to form a picture of the world and how it works, but it sure doesn't look anything like mine. I don't seem to be able to communicate to you at all. Sorry.
Right now it seam to be ok to teach there is no God and there was no Adam and Eve in school
You are completely missing the point. It is OK to teach that there is NO SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE FOR ADAM AND EVE, which is different from "there was no Adam and Eve."
One is a scientific statement, the other is not.
Also, the fact that there is not yet scientific consensus in a field DOES NOT MEAN that it is not science. Science is about the PROCESS of acquiring knowledge and developing theories, which is always inherently INCOMPLETE. We might not know how to cure the common cold yet, but that doesn't mean we can't talk about the germ theory of disease as a scientific fact, or should give equal time to the idea that prayer is an alternative way to cure the sniffles.
Not everything has to be 100% settled and conclusively proven before it is scientific and taught in science class.
SG&A would *never* go away. That's $13 billion/yr.
"cost of revenue" (i.e. directly associated with making the actual stuff they sell) would be zero,
as opposed to $6.7 billion/yr, but the sales guy is probably still going out to convince customers that MS would have "lower TCO" even if they aren't selling anything, and Bill & Steve & their administrative minions, still would get paid.
Yes, the sales guy is going to get hit on commissions, but he still has some base salary and travel expenses. Marketing will still be needed.
Yes, but that article is mainly harping on huge growth in camera phones, but only a vague statement that still cameras are "running out of steam" and "seems demand for camera phones could hit demand for digital cameras" and "will find growth harder to achieve."
There are *already* 4x as many camera phones as digital still cameras being sold, but that doesn't mean that the DSC lost 80% of its market. They are still chugging along just fine. Those extra 4x dinky cameras were mostly sold to people who were buying phones to make phone calls and got a camera thrown in. We're not yet to the point where people are going on vacation, and buy a new phone before they leave so they'll be able to take pictures.
Any recent hard numbers on still camera growth rates?
"growth harder to achieve" does not equate to me as "getting killed" unless that growth rate is going negative. Losing 15% of their potential market by 2010 is just a prediction, and still isn't a big percentage.
Just like phone cameras are killing the point and click digital camera market,
Do you have any information to back this up? I'm truly skeptical because most phone cameras lack flash, have very poor resolution, are blurry as hell unless you hold it rock-steady, and lock their photos up so that you have to pay the phone company to get them on a computer.
Now, I could believe that the 3 megapixel P&S cameras satisfy people enough that there is not a big market for upgrading to 5+ megapixel P&S cameras, but phone cameras seem like something thats being forced down our throats by the phone companies by eliminating all other models, rather than something that people have been throwing away their P&S cameras for.
bull shit that our schools teach abiogenesis and evolution of non like species; for example, fish evolving into dogs.
Look, schools have science classes, and science shows that evolution happened, and hasn't settled on a particularly clear picture of abiogenesis. That's not bullshit, that's simply how things are here in the 21st century. Back in 1800, you would have had a valid point, but science has discovered a lot since then, and you have to deal with it.
If you have some psychological problem dealing with that reality, I don't have time to fix it. *That* is why I was trying to end the conversation by giving you some guidance to understand the broad scientific basis for this understanding, a summary of why not everything you read on the Web is true or scientific, and wishing you good luck.
I suppose you have a verse in Genesis to "prove" "scientifically" that dogs did not evolve from wolves and other earlier mammals. As opposed to a simple declaration "I think it is bullshit"?
God because there was no Adam because of abiogenesis, prove it before you teach it
On the other hand, "Adam and Eve" is unique to Hebrew scriptures, and belongs in Sunday School, not the public school classroom.
"Adam in the Garden of Eden" is not a scientific concept, and has nothing like scientific evidence to back it up, and has no business being in a science class or a scientific discussion.
First off, I was trying to end the conversation about evolution, by which *I* mean species developing into new species over time. By the way, I don't understand what you mean by non-related vs. related species, which seems paradoxical to me.
That conversation seemed to be expanding into a huge number of different directions in your discussion, and I don't have the patience to deal with a conversation that is going 100 ways at once. I have a day job.
I suggest you realize a dialogue on slashdot with a guy calling himself "sickofthissthit" is not the way to exhaustively research the case for evolution.
You've now brought abiogenesis up as the main issue; most of what I have said is relevant to evolution, not abiogenesis. I will freely admit that abiogenesis is a much less mature field than evolutionary biology. I'm not familiar with Yockey's work. However, your argument basically boils down to: we observe C-13/C-12 fractionation in rocks barely after the Earth cooled enough for abiogenesis, therefore God exists. That's giving up on naturalistic explanations pretty easily.
Yockey appears, based on a random quote found by Google, to have an extremist view: that we must look at the geological evidence without ANY preconception before we can even begin to theorize about abiogenetic mechanisms. Very little science has ever been done without *some* preconceptions, even if they turned out to be wrong. The key thing is to be flexible about them when they are just preconceptions used to *generate* theories, rather than to rule theories out. I'm also generally skeptical about anyone using "Information Theory" in a biological context. It is *extremely* tricky to use information theory accurately, MUCH harder than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the creationists LOVE to use the Second Law of Thermodynamics incorrectly, so they are even more likely to like to use information theory incorrectly.
There appear to be several assumptions made in his argument
1) that the tarry material from *simulations* must also appear in the historical generation of the soup. Obviously, the simulations are possibly happening millions of times faster than the natural mechanism, so this residue is by no means guaranteed to happen in nature.
2) I'll concede that most evidence now indicates the atmosphere was probably not reducing enough to generate the kind of soup that Miller&Urey generated, but this is still an assumption.
3) That the only mechanism to fractionate the C-13 was biological, and was similar to the photosynthetic fractionation that is observed today.
4) That the fractionation is an accurate representation of the composition 3.8 billion years ago; i.e. nothing has disturbed its composition since original deposition.
5) That the inorganic fraction observed today is equal to the inorganic fraction that existed on Earth billions of years ago; I must admit I don't know how accurately we know the Solar system C-13 fraction, for instance. The present-day carbon cycle is complex; the primitive one may have been complex in a much different way, or simpler.
Evaluating the quality of these assumptions requires much more organic and geochemistry than I know. Scientists appear to be still investigating these issues from multiple angles, so there is probably much yet to be learned and thought of in this field.
Still, a God who *might have* created microbial mats 4 billion years ago seems far from proving the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, who reportedly was much more recently and actively involved.
I don't have time to critique every possible source. I will just say that those who believe that evolution is sufficient explanation for the reality of life on Earth are saying so because they are closely familiar with the facts, and have a deep understanding of the principles underlying evolution and the evidence for it, and take an honest approach to their thinking about the issues.
Those who argue against evolution are almost all using fundamentally dishonest intellectual approaches, where they set up straw man arguments which parody the evolutionary arguments, selectively quote, cherry pick data, make misleading or inappropriate statistical arguments, or create irrelevant criteria that they claim must be satisified for evolution to be possible.
I think to be fair, one has to study carefully what evolution is about, and really understand it, before you can evaluate the criticisms of it. If all you know about evolution is what the ID folks want you to know, you'll get a very limited, skewed, and unfair portrayal. In contrast, the evolutionary folks almost always understand accurately what the ID arguments are based on.
The personal story you linked to is certainly an emotionally stirring declaration, but I think the medical professionals involved were more concerned with helping him than with gathering scientific data on his condition to determine how miraculous his recovery was. Medicine, like paleontology, is almost always dealing with a very scarce amount of data. No one really knows why some people's hearts stop, and why they start again, and we don't have measurements that can recontruct what happened to that guy. But I have to say my guess is that the medics who got him to the hospital were a pretty indispensable part of his survival, while the prayer was optional. I don't think anyone was deceiving or paid off, just that medicine is not a 100% repeatable scientific phenomenon.
Buying the package containing commercial software does not give you unlimited rights to use the software
It does unless otherwise stated before purchasing the software. Most commercial software has the use restrictions printed on the box.
You've just proved my point. By your original logic, if you closed your eyes while looking at the box, or that part of the box off and toss it in the trash, you won't see the terms, and won't be bound by them. The EULA is incorporated by reference from the terms described in the box (or other "wrapper" for delivery), and forms part of that agreement. You can't wilfully modify the code to disable the EULA, then claim you've modified the license terms.
Buying the package containing commercial software does not give you unlimited rights to use the software. Buying a video in the store does not give you broadcast rights; buying a book in the store does not give you republication or translation rights; buying a computer does not give you a right to reproduce the firmware or circuits inside. Having a gas or electric meter installed in your house does not give you the right to bypass it to get unlimited gas or electricity. Believe it or not, laws limit what you are allowed to do in the privacy of your home with your own property.
Courts look very harshly at this kind of juvenile avoidance: "well, I had my fingers crossed when I signed the contract, so it doesn't count." Terms that are not clearly displayed cannot form a contract, but DELIBERATELY AND WILFULLY ALTERING the software to avoid seeing something you don't want to see is ACTING IN BAD FAITH. You can't get out of contracts that way. Without that contract, the software company will refuse you the right to use the code, regardless of who owns the computer.
Editing a binary to remove the EULA by no means frees you from the terms of the license.
The rights granted by the license which is expressed by the EULA are not offered to you under other licensing terms.
In any contract, you can't arbitrarily scribble out sections you don't like, sign it, and expect your modified terms to apply without the express agreement of the other party. The two parties have to agree to substantially the same terms in order to have a contractual agreement. Without that agreeement, the software publisher doesn't grant you the right to install or use the software.
Uh, do you understand what the word "quantum" means?
Proteins are far too large, and have too many degrees of freedom to be in pure quantum states: the level spacing is far lower than the uncertainty limit for the time period under which they evolve. No quantum coherence is possible there.
Bose-Einstein condensation? At body temperature, with protein-sized molecules? Give me a break.
Yes, maybe there is something very funky about the proteomics of brain function. But don't put a quantum label on there unless you've got an h-bar right up front in the theory.
Instead of trying to learn about things by reading in this forum, I would instead rely on a good scientific library.
All of Darwin's major works are available online: http://www.darwin-literature.com/. I would absolutely avoid the Google ads linked to at this site, because it seems to have been targeted by creationists. Darwin's particular examples, of course, were not always accurate, because he lacked the knowledge of modern genetics; his racial theories were an example of this.
One particularly interesting work is "The Formation of Vegetable Mould." It shows Darwin as a painstaking observer of Nature.
If you want a single book on evolution, consider John Maynard Smith's book, _The Theory of Evolution._ Or Dawkin's _The Blind Watchmaker._
Stephen Jay Gould wrote many essays on evolutionary topics. They are an excellent and fascinating collection of examples of the natural world. His _Structure of Evolutionary Theory_ is highly technical, and perhaps not well-edited.
But for God's sake. Don't try to learn anything by reading Slashdot postings!
An Apple high-level executive should be arranging meetings with KHTML core to sort this out
Sorry, I don't follow you. Apple has Microsoft to worry about day and night, but some "high-level" executive is supposed to spare his presumably valuable time to soothe some pissed-off open source programmers who don't care about the Mac OS platform anyway?
All I hear from the KDE folks is that Apple doesn't spend time tracking all their cleaning and refactoring because Apple is too busy adding features. Pardon me if I don't condemn Apple for actually delivering functionality to their paying customers, while open-source programmers evidently have enough spare time to just make things neat for developers.
Yes, I sympathise with the developers getting pissed that Apple fanboys are slobbering about Apple's non-existent cooperation. But clueless fanboys are not Apple's responsibility.
"Einstein's Gulf" appears to be totally nonsensical. Your formal education in physics does not seem to have been effective.
I suppose you have a name-by-name family tree extending back to Japheth to support your claim?
God help you. You seem to need quite a bit of help to get by in the real world.
Also, you should at least acknowledge that your description of Charles Darwin was slanderously inaccurate.
Einstein was speaking specifically about quantum mechanics, which is unrelated to the fundamental question of randomness in the macroscopic world. Einstein was quite aware of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, which both admit it is impossible to predict the exact behavior of large systems made up of innumerable smaller parts.
Also, he was apparently wrong in this belief with respect to quantum mechanics. But again, that is immaterial.
Nobody except ID advocates are "coming to the conclusion macro evolution is impossible." Maintream biologists still believe very much in the idea that current species were descended from very different species. The only alternative is special creation for each individual species, at various times throughout the past 3 billion years, without any particular regard for preserving species that became extinct over the same period.
There is no convincing explanation for how birds arose, for instance, except from pretty clearly reptilian precursors.
As far as bacteria, what we see today is the result of 3 billion years of bacterial evolution, so it is not clear how much todays bacteria resemble the earliest bacteria. Bacteria do commonly exchange genetic material with each other.
Our inability to figure out the historical record of how organisms arose out of a long-disappeared "protocell" is by no means "proof" that evolution could not have happened. It could just mean we don't have enough information to know how it happened. I don't know who my great-great-great-grandfather was, but that doesn't mean he could not have existed. Just that peasants didn't keep detailed genealogical records.
One particular point to understand about "irreducible complexity" is that it is an artificial concept, not related to "able to evolve from earlier forms."
Consider a building or a bridge. Most buildings and bridges are constructed with scaffolding around them, and then the scaffolding is taken away after the building or bridge is complete, because it is not needed to hold up the structure.
Similarly, current cellular mechanisms may be *simplified* from earlier versions, and those *earlier* versions might *not* be "irreducibly complex" because they still had the scaffolding. The scaffolding gets eliminated through evolution, and suddenly, there aren't any more redundant parts that can be taken away.
Your standard of "proof" of macroevolution is also artifically high. How about you "prove" you are descended from Adam, by reproducing *that* in a laboratory?
Darwin was exceedingly careful in his observations. He in fact was planning an absolutely huge work, several times the size of Origin of Species; in fact, Origin of Species was, in his thinking, simply "an abstract" of the larger work.
It is true that he spent only two years at medical school in Edinborough; however, that leaves out his subsequent studies at another school, of which you may have heard, Christ's College at Cambridge, at which he studied science for four years. One of the interests which distracted him from his studies was also collecting beetles. In his preliminary exams, he did relatively well on the Gospels and Paley's "Evidences for Christianity." In his finals, he placed 10th out of 178 passing students, including good marks in moral and political philosphy. He did become ill during his voyage, but was healthy enough to spend two more years finishing his circumnavigation, after leaving South America. He collected lots of specimins, of plants, animals, and fossils, sending them to the best experts.
He spent years considering his field observations, studied barnacles for eight years, and with the observations published from the Beagle voyage, got the Royal Medal of the Royal Society *BEFORE* his theories on evolution had been published. That is, he was recognized as an accomplished naturalist before his theory became public. He experimented with seeds and asked many questions of animal breeders and sailors to understand various issues of inheritance and how animals and plants get to islands. He bred pigeons. In all, he did a *tremendous* amount of careful, scientific work, with the best training that England could provide, which at that time was probably the best in the world.
Yes, he had doubts; that's why he spent over twenty years developing his theory. But he also did not have the benefit of knowing about DNA or even basic rules of genetic inheritance, which were discovered after his death.
Random House Encyclopedia evidently does a very poor job of describing Darwin. Perhaps you should look at more thorough sources.