There is no such thing as devolution, because evolution has no goal (and hence can't go backwards). We did not "evolve to be smarter." We just evolved (by living and reproducing), and the consequence was that we became smarter (because it helped us survive). If it became advantageous to be more stupid then we would become more stupid because of evolution.
It's important to realise that our ideas of "direction", "goal" and "purpose" don't exist in the real world. We are not "more evolved" than chimps, and evolution certainly won't end with Homo Sapiens.
Good song lyric: "some sell their bodies for dimes, others marry for the houses and the jewelery. It's a real fine line, what you charge for your time." -Janis Ian
interesting. I recently got a lenovo n200 for work with XP. I installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron on top of it. It was a breeze, right down to the simple graphical slide-bar for resizing (and preserving) the windows partition. I think I had the complete Ubuntu install working perfectly in about 25 minutes (with all hardware/drivers working perfectly right from the install).
To be honest, I was surprised it went so well, even as an experienced Linux user. It contrasted markedly with our attempts to install MS Small Business Server onto another PC, which was an absolute nightmare.
After you have used Linux for a while, you realise how frail and primitive Windows is.
and furthermore (this is directed at GP), how the hell did you manage to trash your graphics and network just from installing KDE? And even if you did change them, how did it trash the system? You're not running a bleeding-edge X server and kernel as well as KDE are you?!?
(to be honest, GP sounds like a troll to me, but I'll give the benefit of the doubt)
"Atheists require faith to believe that there is no God," That is simply not true, and it relates back to the quote "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" I'm an atheist and I don't believe in god because there's no evidence of there being a god. Similarly I don't believe in a flying spaghetti monster (cue humourous comments) or santa claus. Of course, I could be wrong: I know I don't know everything.
For contrast, agnosticism means believing that god vs no-god are approx equally likely.
"if you put as much effort into not collecting stamps as most of the atheists on slashdot put into not believing in god" Strawman. I don't put effort into not believing in god, but I am atheist and religion just isn't important to me (my wife is Catholic, and we get along fine). The only time religion bothers me is when religious nutters (usually fundamentalists) say and/or do stupid, selfish, hypocritical and/or violent things. I hope this has cleared things up for you, and that you won't go sprouting these ridiculous statements again.
Not wanting to start a flamewar, but I think one could argue that Microsoft does the same thing with Windows. Win2k, WinXP and (apparently) Vista were all crap on release, and required several service packs to make them usable. (Hopefully this will be retrospectively true for Vista)
I've never, in all the years I've used linux, had to install an anti-spyware/virus/etc program. I've never had a virus, or been hacked. I've never had to reinstall because the registry got 'cluttered' (is that how you got around editing the registry?).
As I've said in another post, we're simply not yet in a position to know whether cell phones cause cancer, because the difference between the rate of cancer in a cell-phone-using population and a non-cell-phone-using population will be vary small (the inter-group variance) and the variance in each population (the intra-group variance) will be vary large (think of it as 2 normal curves with 99.5% overlap). We're not going to have a reliable answer for many years.
How many people died because of the Chernobyl disaster? It might have affected 500 000 000 people (to some minor degree), many of whom would have died of cancer anyway. Biological systems exhibit massive variation, so it's very very difficult to attribute some of those cancers to a specific cause.
In the same way, we will probably not reliably know whether cell phones cause cancer for decades.
>> Does he have ANY justification, other than "there *might* be a risk"? Depends how strong that might is. As I've already said, few things in medicine are simple.
That's a ridiculous idea. Where are the songs downloaded from? Who keeps track of it all, does the calculations, processes the money and distributes it? Is it all from one place? What administration fee do they charge? (Of course, if everything is downloaded from one place, you can expect the admin fee to quickly increase..)
"Greenies don't... like any form of power generation." Really? I haven't heard many people advocating that. Sounds like a load of crap to me, most likely written by someone who hasn't got the faintest idea what they're talking about.
As someone who considers themselves a 'greenie', I'll list the power generation methods in my preferred order.
1. A tie between solar and wind. Both can be diffuse, and can be built right where they're needed, reducing transmission costs and inefficiencies. 2. Tidal. Can be used to supply base-load, and add consistency. 3. Hydro. yeah, you lose a valley, but it's better than those lower in the list. You at least get reliable power as long as you continue to get rain. 4. Nuclear. There is a case to be made for _some_ nuclear power plants. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to think it's a silver bullet that will solve all our problems, conveniently forgetting that it still needs to be mined, refined, distributed. disposal of nuclear waste remains an unsolved problem, and it is linked with weapons production capacity. 5. Fossil. We're not yet ready to put these completely behind us, but we need to very soon.
Of course, this list represents my own views only. I wouldn't do something as stupid as try to speak for all greenies.
It seems to me that there's a more prominent move towards cross-platform compatibility. From Microsoft's perspective, this is a dropped-ball, because it lowers the barrier to shifting platform.
I wouldn't recommend giving Gizmo your money. I've sent them money (two weeks ago) and am yet to receive any credit. A check on their website (http://forum.gizmo5.com/viewforum.php?f=26&sid=a017ebef79d1fed2787c5d0b244f4245) shows me that this is not an isolated problem.
So... you're saying that Linux is worse than MacOS and Windows, _because_ users can fix something that they don't like? To my mind, this is an example of the exact opposite - why Linux and Free Software will ultimately win - because it's made with the user in mind: the developers who 'think they know better than the end-users' are gonna lose this, and will be replaced with developers who do care.
'Nobody uses that on Windows and Mac OS X).' I've used it on both. I prefer it to every other IM client I've tried. Thank you for asking;-)
'Posted as AC because of Linux and OSS zealots.' More like so you can mod your own comment up;-)
So, you think you have evidence for god, because you have _a few_ formulae that look nice and simple, huh?
What about pi and e - two fundamental constants, both of which appear to require limitless precision to describe. Kinda blows your theory out of the water don't you think? (or will you just class it as something inconvenient, and therefore to be ignored -- a common practice for IDers, I believe..)
"eating animals... is a compulsion, hard wired into us" Care to provide some evidence of that? I've never seen anything to back up that statement. I can accept that eating is hard wired - look at a baby's instinct to suckle. Eating meat is certainly not a biological necessity for humans (in fact, I expect that on average that Western vegetarians are healthier than Western meat-eaters).
"but you are really insane if you think a nice morality lecture will stop people from eating meat just because its cruel." This I agree with. It's like cars - you can point out that they pollute, weaken the country, waste money, destroy cities and turn drivers into fat slobs with high blood pressure, but if people want to drive you cannot apply a reasonable arguement to get them to change. That's largely because this quote:
"because we evolved higher mental faculties like empathy, morality" is not as true as you think it is.
"My point is that China gets a lot of criticism from people who accept bad behavior from their own country."
Hmm. It seems to me that people should assess any government on the basis of what it does, not on what people say. There are plenty of people who criticise China who also (rightly) criticise other governments too. Why do you focus on the few hypocrites who have double-standards?
Let me turn it around: Suppose there are people who accept bad behaviour from China, but criticise the USA (I'm sure there are some). Does their hypocrisy mean that the bad things the USA does are ok? Hell no!
[as an aside: I have friends from China. I have friends from the USA. I dislike both governments (ironically, for similar reasons), but don't dislike the people.]
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yeah. I remember running Return to Castle Wolfenstein on my P3 667, 384MB RAM. The windows version was faster running under Wine than in windows! :)
"We're devolving"
There is no such thing as devolution, because evolution has no goal (and hence can't go backwards). We did not "evolve to be smarter." We just evolved (by living and reproducing), and the consequence was that we became smarter (because it helped us survive). If it became advantageous to be more stupid then we would become more stupid because of evolution.
It's important to realise that our ideas of "direction", "goal" and "purpose" don't exist in the real world. We are not "more evolved" than chimps, and evolution certainly won't end with Homo Sapiens.
Britney Spears is not an artist. She is an entertainer.
The world is full of guys with huge egos - some of them do good things, some of them do bad things.
Good song lyric:
"some sell their bodies for dimes, others marry for the houses and the jewelery. It's a real fine line, what you charge for your time."
-Janis Ian
interesting. I recently got a lenovo n200 for work with XP. I installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron on top of it. It was a breeze, right down to the simple graphical slide-bar for resizing (and preserving) the windows partition. I think I had the complete Ubuntu install working perfectly in about 25 minutes (with all hardware/drivers working perfectly right from the install).
To be honest, I was surprised it went so well, even as an experienced Linux user. It contrasted markedly with our attempts to install MS Small Business Server onto another PC, which was an absolute nightmare.
After you have used Linux for a while, you realise how frail and primitive Windows is.
and furthermore (this is directed at GP), how the hell did you manage to trash your graphics and network just from installing KDE? And even if you did change them, how did it trash the system? You're not running a bleeding-edge X server and kernel as well as KDE are you?!?
(to be honest, GP sounds like a troll to me, but I'll give the benefit of the doubt)
"Atheists require faith to believe that there is no God,"
That is simply not true, and it relates back to the quote
"absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"
I'm an atheist and I don't believe in god because there's no evidence of there being a god. Similarly I don't believe in a flying spaghetti monster (cue humourous comments) or santa claus. Of course, I could be wrong: I know I don't know everything.
For contrast, agnosticism means believing that god vs no-god are approx equally likely.
It makes perfect sense - I think you're mistaken.
"if you put as much effort into not collecting stamps as most of the atheists on slashdot put into not believing in god"
Strawman. I don't put effort into not believing in god, but I am atheist and religion just isn't important to me (my wife is Catholic, and we get along fine). The only time religion bothers me is when religious nutters (usually fundamentalists) say and/or do stupid, selfish, hypocritical and/or violent things.
I hope this has cleared things up for you, and that you won't go sprouting these ridiculous statements again.
Maybe this will provide the missing incentive for people to choose the laptop thin-client model, like the EEE PC...
Not wanting to start a flamewar, but I think one could argue that Microsoft does the same thing with Windows. Win2k, WinXP and (apparently) Vista were all crap on release, and required several service packs to make them usable. (Hopefully this will be retrospectively true for Vista)
I've never, in all the years I've used linux, had to install an anti-spyware/virus/etc program. I've never had a virus, or been hacked. I've never had to reinstall because the registry got 'cluttered' (is that how you got around editing the registry?).
As I've said in another post, we're simply not yet in a position to know whether cell phones cause cancer, because the difference between the rate of cancer in a cell-phone-using population and a non-cell-phone-using population will be vary small (the inter-group variance) and the variance in each population (the intra-group variance) will be vary large (think of it as 2 normal curves with 99.5% overlap). We're not going to have a reliable answer for many years.
How many people died because of the Chernobyl disaster? It might have affected 500 000 000 people (to some minor degree), many of whom would have died of cancer anyway. Biological systems exhibit massive variation, so it's very very difficult to attribute some of those cancers to a specific cause.
In the same way, we will probably not reliably know whether cell phones cause cancer for decades.
>> Does he have ANY justification, other than "there *might* be a risk"?
Depends how strong that might is. As I've already said, few things in medicine are simple.
That's a ridiculous idea. Where are the songs downloaded from? Who keeps track of it all, does the calculations, processes the money and distributes it? Is it all from one place? What administration fee do they charge? (Of course, if everything is downloaded from one place, you can expect the admin fee to quickly increase..)
"If the money went directly to artists..."
How would you determine which artists received the money, and in what proportion?
I'd heard that Be* (who are my ISP too, and with whom I'm happy) have been bought by Orange - does anyone know about this?
"Greenies don't ... like any form of power generation."
Really? I haven't heard many people advocating that. Sounds like a load of crap to me, most likely written by someone who hasn't got the faintest idea what they're talking about.
As someone who considers themselves a 'greenie', I'll list the power generation methods in my preferred order.
1. A tie between solar and wind. Both can be diffuse, and can be built right where they're needed, reducing transmission costs and inefficiencies.
2. Tidal. Can be used to supply base-load, and add consistency.
3. Hydro. yeah, you lose a valley, but it's better than those lower in the list. You at least get reliable power as long as you continue to get rain.
4. Nuclear. There is a case to be made for _some_ nuclear power plants. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to think it's a silver bullet that will solve all our problems, conveniently forgetting that it still needs to be mined, refined, distributed. disposal of nuclear waste remains an unsolved problem, and it is linked with weapons production capacity.
5. Fossil. We're not yet ready to put these completely behind us, but we need to very soon.
Of course, this list represents my own views only. I wouldn't do something as stupid as try to speak for all greenies.
You're absolutely right. Also -- if they don't have bread, why don't they eat cake?
It seems to me that there's a more prominent move towards cross-platform compatibility. From Microsoft's perspective, this is a dropped-ball, because it lowers the barrier to shifting platform.
I wouldn't recommend giving Gizmo your money. I've sent them money (two weeks ago) and am yet to receive any credit. A check on their website (http://forum.gizmo5.com/viewforum.php?f=26&sid=a017ebef79d1fed2787c5d0b244f4245) shows me that this is not an isolated problem.
So... you're saying that Linux is worse than MacOS and Windows, _because_ users can fix something that they don't like? To my mind, this is an example of the exact opposite - why Linux and Free Software will ultimately win - because it's made with the user in mind: the developers who 'think they know better than the end-users' are gonna lose this, and will be replaced with developers who do care.
;-)
;-)
'Nobody uses that on Windows and Mac OS X).'
I've used it on both. I prefer it to every other IM client I've tried. Thank you for asking
'Posted as AC because of Linux and OSS zealots.'
More like so you can mod your own comment up
So, you think you have evidence for god, because you have _a few_ formulae that look nice and simple, huh?
What about pi and e - two fundamental constants, both of which appear to require limitless precision to describe. Kinda blows your theory out of the water don't you think? (or will you just class it as something inconvenient, and therefore to be ignored -- a common practice for IDers, I believe..)
"eating animals ... is a compulsion, hard wired into us"
Care to provide some evidence of that? I've never seen anything to back up that statement. I can accept that eating is hard wired - look at a baby's instinct to suckle.
Eating meat is certainly not a biological necessity for humans (in fact, I expect that on average that Western vegetarians are healthier than Western meat-eaters).
"but you are really insane if you think a nice morality lecture will stop people from eating meat just because its cruel."
This I agree with. It's like cars - you can point out that they pollute, weaken the country, waste money, destroy cities and turn drivers into fat slobs with high blood pressure, but if people want to drive you cannot apply a reasonable arguement to get them to change. That's largely because this quote:
"because we evolved higher mental faculties like empathy, morality"
is not as true as you think it is.
"My point is that China gets a lot of criticism from people who accept bad behavior from their own country."
Hmm. It seems to me that people should assess any government on the basis of what it does, not on what people say. There are plenty of people who criticise China who also (rightly) criticise other governments too. Why do you focus on the few hypocrites who have double-standards?
Let me turn it around: Suppose there are people who accept bad behaviour from China, but criticise the USA (I'm sure there are some). Does their hypocrisy mean that the bad things the USA does are ok? Hell no!
[as an aside: I have friends from China. I have friends from the USA. I dislike both governments (ironically, for similar reasons), but don't dislike the people.]