I doubt that it'll rid us of the controversy... because by the time that becomes possible, cloning or genetic modification of some other sort will also have also become possible, and that'll just pick up where the stem cell controversy left off, probably with many of the same arguments on both sides.
In many cases, I think it would end up being that this kind of evidence is one out of many things that point to guilt.
Example: a hypothetical AKA totally-made-up-by-me-for-the-sake-of-example case where someone detonates a bomb at Thirty West Seventh street, at 4:00 AM on a Wednesday night.
The police find a suspect - Joe Schmoe, whose car was seen by a bored insomniac to be slowly driving in the area at around 3:30 AM. Is the fact that somebody saw a car with his license plate driving past the area enough to convict? Of course not!
Then, looking further, police find that somebody else living nearby saw a stranger carrying around a big package, around 3:45 AM. The stranger's height and build matches Joe Schmoe's, though the stranger wasn't visible well enough for more identification. Also, asking Joe Schmoe's neighbors, they find that he is generally punctual about going to sleep early, or at least they never remember seeing is lights on past 1:00. His coworkers report that he generally arrives at work at 7:00, and often does look like he just woke up - there seems to be no reason to believe that he has any sort of habit of being up and around at nights, though of course it's hard to say for sure.
Investigating his computer, the police find that over the past couple of weeks, Joe Schmoe had done searches on how to build a homemade bomb; they then find that he had used his credit card to buy something from a company that sells chemicals, including ones necessary to make that sort of bomb.
Finally, they find out by looking at saved email messages that a year ago, Joe Schmoe had gotten into a very bitter argument with Jack Jillian, who has since moved out of the country but whose ex-girlfriend lives at Thirty West Seventh street. The exact content of the argument is difficult to divulge, since many email messages were deleted and since Jack was unavailable for comment (being out of the country and suchlike), but the few that were found indicate that there were threats exchanged.
Okay, that's my example. There could be more circumstansial evidence than that - more things that kind of maybe sort of point to Joe Schmoe. Search results would be one of them. Of the ones presented above, no individual piece of evidence obviously points to Joe's guilt - there could be perfectly legitimate explanations for many of them. Indeed, with the things I've presented so far, it's not even clear whether Joe would be convicted or not - it would depend on Joe's testimony as well. It would depend on whether there are more random facts that could be dug up that also point in the general direction of his guilt, and whether he could find other facts to point at his innocence.
My point is that, used in conjunction with other evidence, search results can add to a pile of evidence. They clearly can't stand alone, and indeed it's very difficult to come up with pieces of evidence which could cause a conviction standing alone; but nor should they be discounted just because, taken in isolation, they wouldn't be enough to cause a conviction....all of
Just a comment about econ - money isn't really backed by gold or anything of the sort, at least here in the US.
The reason money is worth something is because you know that other people will accept that it is worth something and will accept it as payment. It really isn't backed by anything but trust in the system.
But get real. If you paid ONCE for your anti-virus software and expected it to work flawlessly and capture all viruses, worms etc without having to pay extra every year to maintain that reliability you're just out of your mind.
Which is why the author of the article pointed out AntiVirus software as a GOOD example of software where renewed-licenses MAKE SENSE. Where there's updated content being delivered.
What he is arguing AGAINST is the idea that any old sofware can be transformed into a subscription service. He is saying that while some, like AntiVirus services, make sense as subscription services, other software does not fit into that mold. For example, something like MS Office - you buy it once, it does all that you need it to do, and so there seems to be no reason why you should pay the company over and over for the "privelege" to continue using the exact same thing (when your continuing usage of it costs nothing the company.)
On the contrary. We got to the moon by telling other people to do it.
So, the President and/or his office decides that "we really should beat the Russians to the moon."
So, they pass on the money for it to another agency - NASA - who has expertise in this kind of thing. They don't do it themselves.
NASA finds physicists (who have spent their entire lives doing this stuff) to calculate how it needs to be done; computer programmers (who have spent their entire lives learning how to best do computer programs) to write the necessary code; experienced engineers to design the rockets, contractors to build it, and so on and so forth.
Everyone did what they were best at.
I see no problem with, say, a musician NOT wanting to spend the time to figure out how to write code to add in options to their favorite application. I'm an undergraduate student, probably majoring in computer science, and I have a relatively good background in programming, various languages; I know that for me, figuring out how to add significant functionality to an existing program would be quite a bit of work. It would be significantly, significantly more difficult for somebody with no techincal background whatsoever to learn to program and learn well enough to be able to do some sort of modification to a working application. I would much think that it is much more efficient to find somebody that DOES know what they're doing, instead of personally reinventing the wheel whenever something needs to be done.
I'd just like to bring up a country where something of the sort is on the verge of being the case - Russia.
That's why some Russians are quite frightened by the Yukos case, involving Khodarkovsky. Basically, the story behind it is (apparently) that he tried to get involved in some political things he shouldn't have - so the government slapped him intto jail for Tax evasion.
According to the tax code, he was most definitely guilty of that.
The thing that worried people is that the laws were unreasonable, pretty commonly ignored (and these infractions ignored by the government), effectively making EVERYONE guilty and thus suspect to prosecution whenever the government felt like it.
Not necessarily that hard pressed.
All you have to do is explode a reasonably sized bomb in the enormous line of people in the airport that is waiting to get through security.
The difference between you making money on it and them making money on it -
YOU spend 500 million dollars developing the drug, testing it for safety, tweaking it to make it usable, doing more testing.
To "Make Money" on it, you have to recoup those 500 million.
THEY copy it, spend ten or so thousand dollars basically looking at what you did.
To "Make Money" on it, THEY have to recoup 1000 times less money than you to turn a profit.
Since it's a free market society, and it cost them less to make the product than it does you, they can afford to sell it for a lower price.
So of course, if they can do that, nobody is ever going to buy the original developer's product, since it'll be more expensive because that much more work went into making it.
So effectively, all that development work that was done doesn't benefit the company that does it.
THAT's why they claim that it's hard to make money without a patent.
The difference between you making money on it and them making money on it -
YOU spend 500 million dollars developing the drug, testing it for safety, tweaking it to make it usable, doing more testing.
To "Make Money" on it, you have to recoup those 500 million.
THEY copy it, spend ten or so thousand dollars basically looking at what you did.
To "Make Money" on it, THEY have to recoup 1000 times less money than you to turn a profit.
Since it's a free market society, and it cost them less to make the product than it does you, they can afford to sell it for a lower price.
So of course, if they can do that, nobody is ever going to buy the original developer's product, since it'll be more expensive because that much more work went into making it.
So effectively, all that development work that was done doesn't benefit the company that does it.
THAT's why they claim that it's hard to make money without a patent.
Well, there's certainly more than money. I don't blame them for being much more interested in science than in those other things;-)
But if there was no money in science, I also wouldn't blame them for keeping it at a level of a hobby and finding another profession.
I'm not going to argue with your "points against evolution" at the moment - talkorigins.org has plenty, if you're curious.
(BWW, the point of the original poster was not necessarily to say that it's equally supported, but that they're both theories so that saying "evolution is just a theory" is pretty worthless)
But I *am* going to dispute your claim of how well we know gravity...
Firstly, you say that "anyone can observe gravity acting on an object by throwing it up in the air..."
Which is actually a bit of a tautology. We can see that objects that we throw come down. We pretty much define gravity to be the force that makes them come down, and then find out its properties... If you look at it from this perspective, then really, all we know well about gravity is its strength - proportional to the mass of an object, though we have no clue why.
There are many major questions science has about gravity. For example, why do objects with more inertial mass also exert more of a gravitational pull?
One of the things that scientists would say we "know pretty well" about gravity is how it travels - it's conveyed by particles called gravitons, with certain properties.
Except - nobody's ever observed a graviton, in any way shape or form, I don't think. That's just the way we think it should be based on the other particles we know. Totally speculation, isn't it?
Of course, there's also a totally, totally different way of looking at gravity. Einstein's general relativity dictates that gravity is just the distortion of space-time. Which has made pretty darn good predictions (though we still have never observed gravitational waves). Which isn't the same view as the particle-transmitted-force... but still has similar questions - there's no particular reason for gravitational mass to be equal to inertial mass, it seems fundamental but on the other hand it could just be coincidence.
Basically - we have the big picture. The details, when we look, turn out to be not-that-well known. We can even be pretty sure that somewhere along the line we've got some concept horribly wrong, since General Relativity is totally incompatible with Quantum Mechanics, though in their scopes they fit well...
With evolution, it's a similar story, though of course it isn't as well-known.
We can get the big picture pretty well. Observe that fossils that come from different periods of time show different species. Observe that, as far as we can tell, the only way for animals to come into existence is through the reproduction of existing animals. We know this has to be violated in some conditions and in some ways, but in all situations that we can simulate so far, that's been the case. Hence, the conclusion that the current species must have descended from the previous ones, with the exception of the first one(s), the ones that were earliest in time.
That's the big picture.
Then the details - how did they evolve? why? what drove this process? - those are in much dispute and being changed and modified.
They're both theories.
Remember, just about every creature goes through just as dramatic a metamorphosis over the course of its life - except for most, all this is complete before the creature leaves the womb/egg.
Suppose you have a species which breeds only once in its lifetime, during a certain part of the year. Not that hard to imagine - it's easy to see why breeding-in-only-a-certain-part-of-the-year could be beneficial, and easily selected for.
Then, you have an egg that is laid, and it needs to go about a year until it mates. Development of features not necessary until next spring gets slowly pushed further and further back - getting to the point where the development that used to be done inside the egg gets postponed months and months, leading to some sort of not-fully-formed creature wandering around for half a year.
So, in effect, the life cycle becomes -
1) egg
2) larva that hatches, and grows to a caterpillar
3) which then reverts to being basically an egg again to complete the development
4) hatching again into the final form
Pretty simple. Any change in genetic makeup that's not due to simple recombination of the dna of the parents is a mutation.
With Down's Syndrome routinely viewed as a mutation (defined as a defect),
A mutation is not defined to be positive or negative. Downs can be viewed as a detrimental mutation because it decreases the ability of those that have it to be successful.
what is going to happen to all the 'science' that exists now when we find out that DS is really a pre-cursor to the next generation of mankind, and not a genetic malfunction (defect) at all?
Nothing will happen to the science that exists.
Your two alternatives are not mutually exclusive, by the way. For example, if an animal has a mutation that makes its fingers/toes connected by skin, this would be pretty detrimental - but if there's climate change that happens soon after, such as a flood or something, this animal will be much more likely to be a good swimmer.
I say DS is simply one of many prototypes on the table, and not some code gone awry.
One is the same as the other. If code goes awry, it's a different enough creature so that it can be considered a "prototype on the table." And if it's a prototype on the table, then this most likely came about through code gone awry. That's the entire point.
Um, I don't think I've ever had it lock up on me, as far as I remember. And I waste lots of time looking at tennis draws in pdf format.;-)
I use firefox on windows, I don't have any sort of problems.
On the flip side, the institution reports say that over 75% of of patients in mental institutions were diagnosed correctly... and considering how hard life would have been for that 75% if they'd been told that they just need to "take responsibility," 25% false positives seems like a payable price.
Well, according to the way this is described:
1) It would take no longer than one day
2) A prerequisite of participating is either a "monthly pass" or a "day pass," so basically the entire cost of playing is either a couple of dollars (day pass, estimated cost from experience in US) or nothing (for the people that already use public transportation enough to have a monthly pass).
"When you pick a fight and lose"
However, the entire reason for this discussion, is that the bomb kills people that were never part of the fight - it kills CIVILIANS, who did not pick the fight at all but merely happened to live in a country whose leaders did. If the Bomb merely destroyed those that picked the fight - the military and the politicians - then this discussion probably wouldn't be happening.
Slashdot Mirror
:) I use pine. I like pine. Pine is not elm.
I doubt that it'll rid us of the controversy... because by the time that becomes possible, cloning or genetic modification of some other sort will also have also become possible, and that'll just pick up where the stem cell controversy left off, probably with many of the same arguments on both sides.
In many cases, I think it would end up being that this kind of evidence is one out of many things that point to guilt.
...all of
Example: a hypothetical AKA totally-made-up-by-me-for-the-sake-of-example case where someone detonates a bomb at Thirty West Seventh street, at 4:00 AM on a Wednesday night.
The police find a suspect - Joe Schmoe, whose car was seen by a bored insomniac to be slowly driving in the area at around 3:30 AM. Is the fact that somebody saw a car with his license plate driving past the area enough to convict? Of course not!
Then, looking further, police find that somebody else living nearby saw a stranger carrying around a big package, around 3:45 AM. The stranger's height and build matches Joe Schmoe's, though the stranger wasn't visible well enough for more identification.
Also, asking Joe Schmoe's neighbors, they find that he is generally punctual about going to sleep early, or at least they never remember seeing is lights on past 1:00. His coworkers report that he generally arrives at work at 7:00, and often does look like he just woke up - there seems to be no reason to believe that he has any sort of habit of being up and around at nights, though of course it's hard to say for sure.
Investigating his computer, the police find that over the past couple of weeks, Joe Schmoe had done searches on how to build a homemade bomb; they then find that he had used his credit card to buy something from a company that sells chemicals, including ones necessary to make that sort of bomb.
Finally, they find out by looking at saved email messages that a year ago, Joe Schmoe had gotten into a very bitter argument with Jack Jillian, who has since moved out of the country but whose ex-girlfriend lives at Thirty West Seventh street. The exact content of the argument is difficult to divulge, since many email messages were deleted and since Jack was unavailable for comment (being out of the country and suchlike), but the few that were found indicate that there were threats exchanged.
Okay, that's my example. There could be more circumstansial evidence than that - more things that kind of maybe sort of point to Joe Schmoe. Search results would be one of them. Of the ones presented above, no individual piece of evidence obviously points to Joe's guilt - there could be perfectly legitimate explanations for many of them. Indeed, with the things I've presented so far, it's not even clear whether Joe would be convicted or not - it would depend on Joe's testimony as well. It would depend on whether there are more random facts that could be dug up that also point in the general direction of his guilt, and whether he could find other facts to point at his innocence.
My point is that, used in conjunction with other evidence, search results can add to a pile of evidence. They clearly can't stand alone, and indeed it's very difficult to come up with pieces of evidence which could cause a conviction standing alone; but nor should they be discounted just because, taken in isolation, they wouldn't be enough to cause a conviction.
Just a comment about econ - money isn't really backed by gold or anything of the sort, at least here in the US.
The reason money is worth something is because you know that other people will accept that it is worth something and will accept it as payment. It really isn't backed by anything but trust in the system.
That's an oxy-moronic-phrase.
But get real. If you paid ONCE for your anti-virus software and expected it to work flawlessly and capture all viruses, worms etc without having to pay extra every year to maintain that reliability you're just out of your mind.
Which is why the author of the article pointed out AntiVirus software as a GOOD example of software where renewed-licenses MAKE SENSE. Where there's updated content being delivered.
What he is arguing AGAINST is the idea that any old sofware can be transformed into a subscription service. He is saying that while some, like AntiVirus services, make sense as subscription services, other software does not fit into that mold. For example, something like MS Office - you buy it once, it does all that you need it to do, and so there seems to be no reason why you should pay the company over and over for the "privelege" to continue using the exact same thing (when your continuing usage of it costs nothing the company.)
Not at all.
On the contrary. We got to the moon by telling other people to do it.
So, the President and/or his office decides that "we really should beat the Russians to the moon."
So, they pass on the money for it to another agency - NASA - who has expertise in this kind of thing. They don't do it themselves.
NASA finds physicists (who have spent their entire lives doing this stuff) to calculate how it needs to be done; computer programmers (who have spent their entire lives learning how to best do computer programs) to write the necessary code; experienced engineers to design the rockets, contractors to build it, and so on and so forth.
Everyone did what they were best at.
I see no problem with, say, a musician NOT wanting to spend the time to figure out how to write code to add in options to their favorite application. I'm an undergraduate student, probably majoring in computer science, and I have a relatively good background in programming, various languages; I know that for me, figuring out how to add significant functionality to an existing program would be quite a bit of work. It would be significantly, significantly more difficult for somebody with no techincal background whatsoever to learn to program and learn well enough to be able to do some sort of modification to a working application. I would much think that it is much more efficient to find somebody that DOES know what they're doing, instead of personally reinventing the wheel whenever something needs to be done.
I'd just like to bring up a country where something of the sort is on the verge of being the case - Russia. That's why some Russians are quite frightened by the Yukos case, involving Khodarkovsky. Basically, the story behind it is (apparently) that he tried to get involved in some political things he shouldn't have - so the government slapped him intto jail for Tax evasion. According to the tax code, he was most definitely guilty of that. The thing that worried people is that the laws were unreasonable, pretty commonly ignored (and these infractions ignored by the government), effectively making EVERYONE guilty and thus suspect to prosecution whenever the government felt like it.
Not necessarily that hard pressed. All you have to do is explode a reasonably sized bomb in the enormous line of people in the airport that is waiting to get through security.
The difference between you making money on it and them making money on it -
YOU spend 500 million dollars developing the drug, testing it for safety, tweaking it to make it usable, doing more testing.
To "Make Money" on it, you have to recoup those 500 million.
THEY copy it, spend ten or so thousand dollars basically looking at what you did.
To "Make Money" on it, THEY have to recoup 1000 times less money than you to turn a profit.
Since it's a free market society, and it cost them less to make the product than it does you, they can afford to sell it for a lower price.
So of course, if they can do that, nobody is ever going to buy the original developer's product, since it'll be more expensive because that much more work went into making it.
So effectively, all that development work that was done doesn't benefit the company that does it.
THAT's why they claim that it's hard to make money without a patent.
The difference between you making money on it and them making money on it - YOU spend 500 million dollars developing the drug, testing it for safety, tweaking it to make it usable, doing more testing. To "Make Money" on it, you have to recoup those 500 million. THEY copy it, spend ten or so thousand dollars basically looking at what you did. To "Make Money" on it, THEY have to recoup 1000 times less money than you to turn a profit. Since it's a free market society, and it cost them less to make the product than it does you, they can afford to sell it for a lower price. So of course, if they can do that, nobody is ever going to buy the original developer's product, since it'll be more expensive because that much more work went into making it. So effectively, all that development work that was done doesn't benefit the company that does it. THAT's why they claim that it's hard to make money without a patent.
Well, there's certainly more than money. I don't blame them for being much more interested in science than in those other things ;-)
But if there was no money in science, I also wouldn't blame them for keeping it at a level of a hobby and finding another profession.
OMG! You must have excellent hindsight!
I'm not going to argue with your "points against evolution" at the moment - talkorigins.org has plenty, if you're curious.
(BWW, the point of the original poster was not necessarily to say that it's equally supported, but that they're both theories so that saying "evolution is just a theory" is pretty worthless)
But I *am* going to dispute your claim of how well we know gravity...
Firstly, you say that "anyone can observe gravity acting on an object by throwing it up in the air..."
Which is actually a bit of a tautology. We can see that objects that we throw come down. We pretty much define gravity to be the force that makes them come down, and then find out its properties... If you look at it from this perspective, then really, all we know well about gravity is its strength - proportional to the mass of an object, though we have no clue why.
There are many major questions science has about gravity. For example, why do objects with more inertial mass also exert more of a gravitational pull?
One of the things that scientists would say we "know pretty well" about gravity is how it travels - it's conveyed by particles called gravitons, with certain properties.
Except - nobody's ever observed a graviton, in any way shape or form, I don't think. That's just the way we think it should be based on the other particles we know. Totally speculation, isn't it?
Of course, there's also a totally, totally different way of looking at gravity. Einstein's general relativity dictates that gravity is just the distortion of space-time. Which has made pretty darn good predictions (though we still have never observed gravitational waves). Which isn't the same view as the particle-transmitted-force... but still has similar questions - there's no particular reason for gravitational mass to be equal to inertial mass, it seems fundamental but on the other hand it could just be coincidence.
Basically - we have the big picture. The details, when we look, turn out to be not-that-well known. We can even be pretty sure that somewhere along the line we've got some concept horribly wrong, since General Relativity is totally incompatible with Quantum Mechanics, though in their scopes they fit well...
With evolution, it's a similar story, though of course it isn't as well-known.
We can get the big picture pretty well. Observe that fossils that come from different periods of time show different species. Observe that, as far as we can tell, the only way for animals to come into existence is through the reproduction of existing animals. We know this has to be violated in some conditions and in some ways, but in all situations that we can simulate so far, that's been the case. Hence, the conclusion that the current species must have descended from the previous ones, with the exception of the first one(s), the ones that were earliest in time.
That's the big picture.
Then the details - how did they evolve? why? what drove this process? - those are in much dispute and being changed and modified.
They're both theories.
Remember, just about every creature goes through just as dramatic a metamorphosis over the course of its life - except for most, all this is complete before the creature leaves the womb/egg. Suppose you have a species which breeds only once in its lifetime, during a certain part of the year. Not that hard to imagine - it's easy to see why breeding-in-only-a-certain-part-of-the-year could be beneficial, and easily selected for. Then, you have an egg that is laid, and it needs to go about a year until it mates. Development of features not necessary until next spring gets slowly pushed further and further back - getting to the point where the development that used to be done inside the egg gets postponed months and months, leading to some sort of not-fully-formed creature wandering around for half a year. So, in effect, the life cycle becomes - 1) egg 2) larva that hatches, and grows to a caterpillar 3) which then reverts to being basically an egg again to complete the development 4) hatching again into the final form
Who's to say what is and isn't a 'mutation'?
Pretty simple. Any change in genetic makeup that's not due to simple recombination of the dna of the parents is a mutation.
With Down's Syndrome routinely viewed as a mutation (defined as a defect),
A mutation is not defined to be positive or negative. Downs can be viewed as a detrimental mutation because it decreases the ability of those that have it to be successful.
what is going to happen to all the 'science' that exists now when we find out that DS is really a pre-cursor to the next generation of mankind, and not a genetic malfunction (defect) at all?
Nothing will happen to the science that exists.
Your two alternatives are not mutually exclusive, by the way. For example, if an animal has a mutation that makes its fingers/toes connected by skin, this would be pretty detrimental - but if there's climate change that happens soon after, such as a flood or something, this animal will be much more likely to be a good swimmer.
I say DS is simply one of many prototypes on the table, and not some code gone awry.
One is the same as the other. If code goes awry, it's a different enough creature so that it can be considered a "prototype on the table." And if it's a prototype on the table, then this most likely came about through code gone awry. That's the entire point.
Despair.com already promotes it's business with it's :( emoticon. And has for a while now.
Um, I don't think I've ever had it lock up on me, as far as I remember. And I waste lots of time looking at tennis draws in pdf format. ;-)
I use firefox on windows, I don't have any sort of problems.
On the flip side, the institution reports say that over 75% of of patients in mental institutions were diagnosed correctly... and considering how hard life would have been for that 75% if they'd been told that they just need to "take responsibility," 25% false positives seems like a payable price.
Well, according to the way this is described: 1) It would take no longer than one day 2) A prerequisite of participating is either a "monthly pass" or a "day pass," so basically the entire cost of playing is either a couple of dollars (day pass, estimated cost from experience in US) or nothing (for the people that already use public transportation enough to have a monthly pass).
"When you pick a fight and lose" However, the entire reason for this discussion, is that the bomb kills people that were never part of the fight - it kills CIVILIANS, who did not pick the fight at all but merely happened to live in a country whose leaders did. If the Bomb merely destroyed those that picked the fight - the military and the politicians - then this discussion probably wouldn't be happening.