Dried chiltepins can be swallowed whole without any burning sensation. Chewing them is more fun, though, and would help to build a tolerance without lasting discomfort.
See online journals of the Royal Society -- it can be found under Proceedings of the Royal Society B:Biological Sciences titled "The absence of sharks from abyssal regions of the world's oceans".
We propose that they are excluded from the abyss by high-energy demand, including an oil-rich liver for buoyancy, which cannot be sustained in extreme oligotrophic conditions. . . . All populations are therefore within reach of human fisheries, and there is no hidden reserve of chondrichthyan biomass or biodiversity in the deep sea.
I've heard that charge many times from many people, but the only one I'm certain of is that they would charge soldiers for donated candy bars. No big deal in itself, but I suspect that little things like that may make enough of an impression that the rumors simply seem more believable.
No, but it does suggest that "edible" is a bit too broad and should be refined, especially if "food is edible" is asserted to show that X is food because it is edible.
If games should be considered art because they evoke an emotional response, then many other things could be considered art for the same reason: terrorism, funerals, weddings....
I don't dispute that art is evocative (or even that some games are "art"), but I would hope that isn't regarded as a sufficient condition.
Art is evocative. It produces an emotional reaction.
So does terrorism. Is that, then, art?
Re:Volunteerism and private enterprise win again
on
Blender 2.40 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Socialism and capitalism are about who owns/controls capital goods, not who benefits from their use, and supporters of either system claim to benefit the public. Corporate sponsorships and charitable giving benefit the public, too, but are not "socialist" -- good PR opportunities are worth a lot.
Best Buy and CompUSA a free to kill their physical stores and go with the online-only distribution model like Amazon.com, but they CHOOSE not too.
Why should there be additional incentives to do that, though? As a consumer, I prefer not to pay extra taxes if I can avoid it, so naturally I'd want to buy online if I can save the 8% (assuming no extra charge for shipping). But then I consider the perspective of my spouse, who is in sales and is really ticked at the fact that people come into the store, try out the instruments and gain the benefit of the sales staff (mostly working musicians themselves) to make a selection, then buy online. The sales price isn't necessarily better, but they aren't compelled to tack on the 8% -- a large savings, especially on high-end equipment. It's not just the state and local governments that are losing money on that deal.
I don't see anything wrong with charging sales tax as appropriate to a given state. Of course, that will motivate vendors to move their operations to a state without sales tax, but that's competition!
Putting aside the constitutional problem, a scheme to collect a flat rate on all interstate purchases and distribute them to the states in proportion to the taxes they collect in-state would neutralize the advantage of a no-sales-tax state. They'd still have to collect the taxes for those sales, it just wouldn't go to their state. But it *would* shortly after the state's next legislative session. It would also encourage policies helpful to businesses with a physical retail presence in the state and hostile to those targetting sales outside the state, in order to increase those in-state collections and minimize out-of-state sales. The cutthroat competition between the states would be fun to watch.
Personally, I think damn near everything should be based on property tax, esp. school, fire, et cetera. Renters will pay it in the rent...
True, and it also makes ownership just like renting...from the gov't.
If you had read the next sentence, you would see that I went on to discuss the original term, itself. To wit: ``It wouldn't be too hard to prove that any of the magical properties they're supposed to have are impossible; that's all you'd need to prove that they mythical variety of unicorn doesn't exist.'' I really don't appreciate people lying about my own words.
That's funny, since I was speaking specifically about your comment regarding one-horned gazelles as unicorns, made in response to another poster who was clearly referring to the common, lexical definition. Further, "magical properties" aren't essential to that definition, either. The point was that it isn't possible to prove they don't exist, although I disagree -- it's a matter of probability (and what is technologically feasible) rather than possibility, in my view.
Just because humans have limits doesn't mean that they're incapable of understanding the unlimited.
Who shall be the judge of that? You? That would be rather arrogant. This isn't a subject that can be settled with word games. Thousands of years and the greatest minds in human history has been thrown at this puzzle and it still stands. If you would claim to have done so, I would like to see your proof, not a bunch of irrelevant bs that makes you look like a school boy who, by his own misunderstanding, thinks he's come to some brilliant insight and wants to show off. I mean wow, you figured out that not only can you not find the greatest prime number, you can't divide by zero, either. I'm so impressed. *Of course* that proves God doesn't exist, simply because dividing nothing into multiple sets of nothing makes no sense. Mystery solved./SAIC
Omnipotence might be compared to the infinity, but not the arbitrary limit you'd like to impose on it.
No. ``Omnipotence'' can only have one meaning: able to do anything. Come up with even one thing that can't be done--name a ``y'' for which y=1/0, for example--and the limit becomes quite real, not arbitrary.
How is that "limit" real, much less "quite real"? It's an abstract representation of "nothing". y!=1/0 simply because y*0=0. That's it. Nothing awesome or especially perplexing, just common sense. Whether you have 1 set of zero, no sets of zero or a billion sets of zero, it's still zero. Any number of sets would be arbitrary and infinitely interchangeable. (However, if you want to divide 1 into zero sets of whatever arbitrary number anyway, you can. You'll just have 1/0 left over, so you can try again. Forever. Have fun!)
And I believe that anybody who tosses out logic for dogmatic reasons is an idiot. And if you really think that every mathematician, logician, theoretician, and scientist since before Plato is a fool, then I think you're an anti-intellectual asshole.
Tosses out logic? Anti-intellectual? Hm. That's a new one. You do realize I was referring to proofs for/against the existence of God, don't you? Well, maybe not.
It does no such thing, for you are begging the question by assuming that your god exists in the first place, and that it's not subject to the most elementary limits of logic in the second.
When did I do that? Do you assume that anyone who doesn't accept your reasoning must be a theist? As I stated, the "assumption that you could limit God rather than the other way around [is] at least as controversial as that which you intend to prove." Premises need to be supported, too, even when they're hypotheticals.
All I'm saying is that it's impossible to know everything. And I'm backing that statement up with the well-worn technique of saying, ``If you were right, that would lead inevitably to a contradiction; therefore, you're worng.''
The "contradiction" you speak of is unfortunately wrapped in a bundle of "equivocation", much like your earlier post about unicorns as one-horned gazelles (i.e., you shifted the meaning and then applied what would be true in that case to the original term). It's impossible for *you* to be omniscient, but you aren't claiming to be God, are you? You are finite, mortal, limited. God, supposedly, is not. So what makes you think that God must fit into your (limited grasp of) logic in order to exist? There's a word for that...hubris? Chutzpah?
An omnipotent god is not impossible because I have defined it thus. It is impossible because omnipotence itself is impossible, for much the same reason that there is no such thing as a largest prime number. Both premises lead quite quickly, and most inexorably, to irresolvable contradiction.
It seems quite a different matter to me. The "largest prime number" is a limitation on what is conceived of as infinite. The limitation leads to the contradiction, not the infinity. Omnipotence might be compared to the infinity, but not the arbitrary limit you'd like to impose on it. So for you to say that omnipotence is impossible "for much the same reason that there is no such thing as a largest prime number" is like saying that infinity is impossible and therefore there must be a largest prime number. You're contradicting yourself, in other words. Interesting.
Would you accuse me of being an irrational fool for pointing out that there's no such thing as the largest prime number? No? So, why am I an irrational fool for pointing out that there's no most-powerful being?
I believe I stated that the greatest fool is the one who thinks he has a 'proof'. That goes both ways, but it has nothing to do with what anyone believes is actually the case, only what he thinks he can prove.
You could also foil a supposedly-omniscient god just by asking it to tell you what you'll do next. Whatever the god tells you, do something else.
That begs the question, as it requires an assumption that you could limit God rather than the other way around -- an assumption at least as controversial as that which you intend to prove. Same with the statement, "All but God can prove this sentence true", the assumption being the claim itself. (In any case, if you ever had the opportunity for the conversation, God might use fuzzy logic, or smite you, or respond in any number of ways you would be incapable of anticipating because you're a puny mortal.) Verbal "paradoxes" are fun to play with, but they don't make good arguments. They prove nothing but that people are easily confused (see St. Anselm's ontological argument for an example).
"The Fool says in his heart, 'There is no God'."
"The greater Fool says, 'There is no God but mine'." (para. Joseph Campbell)
And I say, "The greatest Fool thinks he has a 'proof'." (Note: an atheist doesn't need to be a fool, either.)
You might as well define ``God'' as a married bachelor and be done with it.
Which is exactly what you're doing, declaring an omnipotent God to be impossible merely by defining it as impossible. Do you think that is rational?
If there is money to be made by "selling" access to lyrics, I think they'll try to get all other sites ruled as "illegal" because they are "unlicensed".
I think they're still focused on getting every last cent they can from the public, in any fashion, for the music / lyrics / art / whatever.
I suspect they're sniffing for a way to establish a racket for print licensing somewhat similar to performance licensing. At first, I was surprised by the statement, "legitimate web sites with accurate lyrics must not be undermined by unlicensed web sites", because it seems to me that in order to extract the maximum revenue, they shouldn't license *any* sites/tools for that kind of service unless fees can be collected for each use, or at least for each user. Many hands need many pockets, and there are a lot of hands vying for those pockets in the industry.
Or, put another way, the pockets of the many outweigh the pockets of the few (or the one), so they need to get the money from the end users rather than the distributors.
But publishers have been complaining for a long time about lost revenues due to photocopiers, and it's nearly impossible to stamp that out. Now those aren't even needed to spread the material. I see a parallel of sorts with the problems performance rights orgs had back when they actually tried to go after musicians covering songs to collect royalties. Eventually they realized that they were trying to stick their hands in pockets that were much too shallow and hard to track, so they turned to the venues instead, under the theory that they receive the "ultimate benefit from the performance". The system they've worked out is hardly accurate or fair to many of those they represent, but the organization is still getting money from many pockets, and that's what counts (for them). It also helps to limit the control of that licensing to just a few entities, forcing artists into the difficult position on which the parasites of the industry thrive: either accept an unfair deal or nothing at all.
Major music publishers, though, haven't been able to stamp out the competition and achieve that level of control (yet), as artists can still administer those rights themselves if they want without too much difficulty. To make that less feasible, publishers need to offer something that would be too impractical for most artists to collect on their own, but (ideally) would have a larger payoff than what this licensing usually generates. The internet just might offer a way to get that kind of leverage for a change, especially if there isn't a practical and fair way to sort out who should get what royalties from the use of web services. If a publisher can engineer that situation, the artists can then grovel for crumbs from their hands, too.
It is not unusual to see cases of fraud involving data that are tangential to the main point of a research paper, as is alleged in some of Van Parijs's work, according to C.K. Gunsalus, a special counsel at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and specialist on research integrity.
''It is very common, and there is also a common defense, which is 'I have a PhD and I wouldn't have done something so stupid,' " said Gunsalus. Often, she said, this defense is successful. She also said that it was common to see a pattern of escalation, with small infractions building over time to larger ones.
So it would seem that these individuals start out with "mild" cheating -- rationalizing, perhaps, that it saves time without any "real" harm to the research. Getting away with that would then make subsequent cheating more attractive and more easily rationalized. Maybe it is the "inability to handle that pressure [to publish]" that precipitates the actual misconduct, but I suspect the dishonesty is there from the start, including the self-deception that it isn't significant or that he won't be caught.
I don't know if that applies to Dr. Hwang, but I think greater scrutiny is in order all around. As faking research, even minor details, is itself irrational, that the perceived benefit would be irrational shouldn't suffice to dismiss the allegations (assuming there is some basis for the allegations). But accepting the "common defense" cited above would be an example of doing just that.
You know, it sounds like you're right, but it seems anymore that the whole medical profession's advice is simply "Diet, exercize, get some sun but not too much, drink plenty of water". It sounds redundant every time you hear it, and some of us get pissed that there's not simply a pill we can take to fix us, but the truth is simply we weren't built to live the way we are today. We were hunter gatherers, we were used to being outside all the time, we were used to plenty of clean water, we were used to getting plenty of exercize just to find food, and the foods we ate were lean.
Yet we still manage to survive and reproduce in our current environment, the one for which, as you say, we simply weren't built. It's a shame that with all this surviving and reproducing going on outside of the hunter-gatherer societies within which we were meant to live, we can't just 'adapt', too.
Now, I caveat that I am not speaking for every woman - a really fit guy in a loin cloth could be attractive in context... but crotch grabbing and wobbling penises? That would just be funny at best and threatening at worst. You can't just translate behaviour from one gender to another and have it work. Men find sexual behaviour and dress in a woman attractive because it indicates availability. Women don't need a man to demonstrate availability however - it's a given. A man is attractive based on whether he appears a suitable partner, not on whether he is feeling horny or not. So in that sense, dressing nice and appearing friendly and confident is more interesting than pleasegodno wearing a snug loincloth.
An attractive personality is hard to render. But snug pockets revealing sensuous, wobbling wallets would work, right?
In this sense, and it is much weaker is FSM relevant because FSM can be defined to be the god of the gaps in the same sense that any other creator but again that is not what ID is arguing, what they are arguing is that the god of the gaps argument is legitimate not *what* the god of the gaps is.
But that isn't exactly the point of FSM, either, is it? It's an amusing counterexample that highlights some of the flaws (absurdity) in the rationale for including ID (Dont-Ask/Don't-Tell Creationism) in a science curriculum, and it does that quite well. Specifically, if ID meets the standard for inclusion, then what couldn't meet that standard? The prophet has stated that FSM is "based on science, not on faith", which provides just as much rational support for concluding that it *is* a matter of science, not faith, as ID has. (I feel moved by the Noodly Spirit to state that it has much more.)
For the record, I looked at Protista and Volvocines. Volvocines form slightly fancy colonies, it seems. Nothing really resembling a true multi-celled individual.
Protista and the volvocine algae are categories (the latter a subsection of the former) that contain the examples to look at, from the unicellular, to the colonial, to the multicellular, not a claim that they are all closely related. Some scientists even consider a volvox colony, for instance, to actually be a multicellular organism. (The "No True Scotsman" argument is unfortunate.) And while yes, I do believe that it is possible life could form independently numerous times, couldn't and must are not terms that apply to probabilities.
Regarding the "astronomical odds": if we look at one point in time and space, and attempt to calculate the odds that life, even at its most primitive, would develop at that time and in that place, the probability is infinitesimal, sure. But if we take into consideration the time and space available, at a minimum, then it would be the lack of such development which would then seem improbable. Once that step successfully occurs -- and given a set of conditions that would facilitate it in the first place, a repetition wouldn't be surprising -- the rest is gravy. Compare this to a state lottery: it's highly unlikely that any given individual will win, but it is even more unlikely that no one at all will win over time.
And that is why I want to puke whenever I hear evolution 'fundie-types' talk about their beliefs as though they were Gospel Fact.
Facts are contingent on what is or is not the case in the material world, not what someone would like to believe *must* be true, and thus can't be 100% certain. Observations, after all, could be mistaken, data may be incomplete, and conditions can change, no matter how remote that possibility may seem. Confusing improbable and impossible is an error, as is moving the goalposts, which makes discussion difficult. I appreciate your having taken the time to respond, though.
the fact that (IMO) most Americans think our economy is completely built around serving them and that all Indians are tech support people for Dell. Not only is this incorrect but it is insulting and I just took advantage of this topic to let off steam.
Remarks about what most Americans think, usually based on shallow, stereotyped views of Americans as egocentric dullards (a view which even some Americans hold, egocentric dullards that they are), can also be taken as incorrect and insulting.
There seems to be equivocation in your use of the term "spontaneous". It would of course be an essential idea behind evolution if the meaning is stipulated as "natural", or as you put it, "without any sort of direction at all". And I assume by that you mean intelligent direction or "design", rather than what we may term "natural forces", chemical processes and the like, or (later) self-direction and other selective pressures. This is very different from "spontaneous" interpreted as abrupt or without cause. Natural processes are frequently incremental (instead of one great leap from state A to state Z, moving through a gradual series of smaller steps) and causal, where a set of conditions will lead to A, which together can lead to B, to C, etc. That we are not certain of the first conditions, and that there are gaps in our current knowledge of details between certain steps, however, doesn't invalidate the steps we can describe, and certainly doesn't support replacing those explanations with an appeal to ID, for which there is no evidence of any kind.
As for a leap between unicellular and multicellular organisms, just look at Protista and the volvocine algae for an example of how that can progress.
...and this is where most evolutionists really have no scientific basis for their ideas: there is NO scientific explanation for how non-living matter came to acquire the ability to self-reproduce.
Please explain how that serves as the "scientific basis for their ideas". I shouldn't need to ask my "nearest evolutionist" to explain your comments. How would I even know he would represent "most evolutionists", anyway? And why use that qualifier, which suggests that some evolutionists do have a scientific basis for their ideas? Why not address those ideas instead?
Slashdot Mirror
Boo can also be added to the party for an amusing twist.
Dried chiltepins can be swallowed whole without any burning sensation. Chewing them is more fun, though, and would help to build a tolerance without lasting discomfort.
See online journals of the Royal Society -- it can be found under Proceedings of the Royal Society B:Biological Sciences titled "The absence of sharks from abyssal regions of the world's oceans".
I've heard that charge many times from many people, but the only one I'm certain of is that they would charge soldiers for donated candy bars. No big deal in itself, but I suspect that little things like that may make enough of an impression that the rumors simply seem more believable.
And my heart still pounds as I press the keys with all the force I can muster, as if this will make my planeteer go faster.
Does any of this disprove that food is edible?
No, but it does suggest that "edible" is a bit too broad and should be refined, especially if "food is edible" is asserted to show that X is food because it is edible.
If games should be considered art because they evoke an emotional response, then many other things could be considered art for the same reason: terrorism, funerals, weddings....
I don't dispute that art is evocative (or even that some games are "art"), but I would hope that isn't regarded as a sufficient condition.
Art is evocative. It produces an emotional reaction.
So does terrorism. Is that, then, art?
Socialism and capitalism are about who owns/controls capital goods, not who benefits from their use, and supporters of either system claim to benefit the public. Corporate sponsorships and charitable giving benefit the public, too, but are not "socialist" -- good PR opportunities are worth a lot.
Best Buy and CompUSA a free to kill their physical stores and go with the online-only distribution model like Amazon.com, but they CHOOSE not too.
Why should there be additional incentives to do that, though? As a consumer, I prefer not to pay extra taxes if I can avoid it, so naturally I'd want to buy online if I can save the 8% (assuming no extra charge for shipping). But then I consider the perspective of my spouse, who is in sales and is really ticked at the fact that people come into the store, try out the instruments and gain the benefit of the sales staff (mostly working musicians themselves) to make a selection, then buy online. The sales price isn't necessarily better, but they aren't compelled to tack on the 8% -- a large savings, especially on high-end equipment. It's not just the state and local governments that are losing money on that deal.
I don't see anything wrong with charging sales tax as appropriate to a given state. Of course, that will motivate vendors to move their operations to a state without sales tax, but that's competition!
Putting aside the constitutional problem, a scheme to collect a flat rate on all interstate purchases and distribute them to the states in proportion to the taxes they collect in-state would neutralize the advantage of a no-sales-tax state. They'd still have to collect the taxes for those sales, it just wouldn't go to their state. But it *would* shortly after the state's next legislative session. It would also encourage policies helpful to businesses with a physical retail presence in the state and hostile to those targetting sales outside the state, in order to increase those in-state collections and minimize out-of-state sales. The cutthroat competition between the states would be fun to watch.
Personally, I think damn near everything should be based on property tax, esp. school, fire, et cetera. Renters will pay it in the rent...
True, and it also makes ownership just like renting...from the gov't.
If you had read the next sentence, you would see that I went on to discuss the original term, itself. To wit: ``It wouldn't be too hard to prove that any of the magical properties they're supposed to have are impossible; that's all you'd need to prove that they mythical variety of unicorn doesn't exist.'' I really don't appreciate people lying about my own words.
That's funny, since I was speaking specifically about your comment regarding one-horned gazelles as unicorns, made in response to another poster who was clearly referring to the common, lexical definition. Further, "magical properties" aren't essential to that definition, either. The point was that it isn't possible to prove they don't exist, although I disagree -- it's a matter of probability (and what is technologically feasible) rather than possibility, in my view.
Just because humans have limits doesn't mean that they're incapable of understanding the unlimited.
Who shall be the judge of that? You? That would be rather arrogant. This isn't a subject that can be settled with word games. Thousands of years and the greatest minds in human history has been thrown at this puzzle and it still stands. If you would claim to have done so, I would like to see your proof, not a bunch of irrelevant bs that makes you look like a school boy who, by his own misunderstanding, thinks he's come to some brilliant insight and wants to show off. I mean wow, you figured out that not only can you not find the greatest prime number, you can't divide by zero, either. I'm so impressed. *Of course* that proves God doesn't exist, simply because dividing nothing into multiple sets of nothing makes no sense. Mystery solved./SAIC
No. ``Omnipotence'' can only have one meaning: able to do anything. Come up with even one thing that can't be done--name a ``y'' for which y=1/0, for example--and the limit becomes quite real, not arbitrary.
How is that "limit" real, much less "quite real"? It's an abstract representation of "nothing". y!=1/0 simply because y*0=0. That's it. Nothing awesome or especially perplexing, just common sense. Whether you have 1 set of zero, no sets of zero or a billion sets of zero, it's still zero. Any number of sets would be arbitrary and infinitely interchangeable. (However, if you want to divide 1 into zero sets of whatever arbitrary number anyway, you can. You'll just have 1/0 left over, so you can try again. Forever. Have fun!)
And I believe that anybody who tosses out logic for dogmatic reasons is an idiot. And if you really think that every mathematician, logician, theoretician, and scientist since before Plato is a fool, then I think you're an anti-intellectual asshole.
Tosses out logic? Anti-intellectual? Hm. That's a new one. You do realize I was referring to proofs for/against the existence of God, don't you? Well, maybe not.
It does no such thing, for you are begging the question by assuming that your god exists in the first place, and that it's not subject to the most elementary limits of logic in the second.
When did I do that? Do you assume that anyone who doesn't accept your reasoning must be a theist? As I stated, the "assumption that you could limit God rather than the other way around [is] at least as controversial as that which you intend to prove." Premises need to be supported, too, even when they're hypotheticals.
All I'm saying is that it's impossible to know everything. And I'm backing that statement up with the well-worn technique of saying, ``If you were right, that would lead inevitably to a contradiction; therefore, you're worng.''
The "contradiction" you speak of is unfortunately wrapped in a bundle of "equivocation", much like your earlier post about unicorns as one-horned gazelles (i.e., you shifted the meaning and then applied what would be true in that case to the original term). It's impossible for *you* to be omniscient, but you aren't claiming to be God, are you? You are finite, mortal, limited. God, supposedly, is not. So what makes you think that God must fit into your (limited grasp of) logic in order to exist? There's a word for that...hubris? Chutzpah?
An omnipotent god is not impossible because I have defined it thus. It is impossible because omnipotence itself is impossible, for much the same reason that there is no such thing as a largest prime number. Both premises lead quite quickly, and most inexorably, to irresolvable contradiction.
It seems quite a different matter to me. The "largest prime number" is a limitation on what is conceived of as infinite. The limitation leads to the contradiction, not the infinity. Omnipotence might be compared to the infinity, but not the arbitrary limit you'd like to impose on it. So for you to say that omnipotence is impossible "for much the same reason that there is no such thing as a largest prime number" is like saying that infinity is impossible and therefore there must be a largest prime number. You're contradicting yourself, in other words. Interesting.
Would you accuse me of being an irrational fool for pointing out that there's no such thing as the largest prime number? No? So, why am I an irrational fool for pointing out that there's no most-powerful being?
I believe I stated that the greatest fool is the one who thinks he has a 'proof'. That goes both ways, but it has nothing to do with what anyone believes is actually the case, only what he thinks he can prove.
You could also foil a supposedly-omniscient god just by asking it to tell you what you'll do next. Whatever the god tells you, do something else.
That begs the question, as it requires an assumption that you could limit God rather than the other way around -- an assumption at least as controversial as that which you intend to prove. Same with the statement, "All but God can prove this sentence true", the assumption being the claim itself. (In any case, if you ever had the opportunity for the conversation, God might use fuzzy logic, or smite you, or respond in any number of ways you would be incapable of anticipating because you're a puny mortal.) Verbal "paradoxes" are fun to play with, but they don't make good arguments. They prove nothing but that people are easily confused (see St. Anselm's ontological argument for an example).
"The Fool says in his heart, 'There is no God'."
"The greater Fool says, 'There is no God but mine'." (para. Joseph Campbell)
And I say, "The greatest Fool thinks he has a 'proof'." (Note: an atheist doesn't need to be a fool, either.)
You might as well define ``God'' as a married bachelor and be done with it.
Which is exactly what you're doing, declaring an omnipotent God to be impossible merely by defining it as impossible. Do you think that is rational?
If there is money to be made by "selling" access to lyrics, I think they'll try to get all other sites ruled as "illegal" because they are "unlicensed".
I think they're still focused on getting every last cent they can from the public, in any fashion, for the music / lyrics / art / whatever.
I suspect they're sniffing for a way to establish a racket for print licensing somewhat similar to performance licensing. At first, I was surprised by the statement, "legitimate web sites with accurate lyrics must not be undermined by unlicensed web sites", because it seems to me that in order to extract the maximum revenue, they shouldn't license *any* sites/tools for that kind of service unless fees can be collected for each use, or at least for each user. Many hands need many pockets, and there are a lot of hands vying for those pockets in the industry.
Or, put another way, the pockets of the many outweigh the pockets of the few (or the one), so they need to get the money from the end users rather than the distributors.
But publishers have been complaining for a long time about lost revenues due to photocopiers, and it's nearly impossible to stamp that out. Now those aren't even needed to spread the material. I see a parallel of sorts with the problems performance rights orgs had back when they actually tried to go after musicians covering songs to collect royalties. Eventually they realized that they were trying to stick their hands in pockets that were much too shallow and hard to track, so they turned to the venues instead, under the theory that they receive the "ultimate benefit from the performance". The system they've worked out is hardly accurate or fair to many of those they represent, but the organization is still getting money from many pockets, and that's what counts (for them). It also helps to limit the control of that licensing to just a few entities, forcing artists into the difficult position on which the parasites of the industry thrive: either accept an unfair deal or nothing at all.
Major music publishers, though, haven't been able to stamp out the competition and achieve that level of control (yet), as artists can still administer those rights themselves if they want without too much difficulty. To make that less feasible, publishers need to offer something that would be too impractical for most artists to collect on their own, but (ideally) would have a larger payoff than what this licensing usually generates. The internet just might offer a way to get that kind of leverage for a change, especially if there isn't a practical and fair way to sort out who should get what royalties from the use of web services. If a publisher can engineer that situation, the artists can then grovel for crumbs from their hands, too.
Or maybe I'm too cynical.
Good questions, but maybe the fact they'd even be asked sheds some light on the (possible) answers?
An AP article, Allegations of fake research hit new high, circulated this summer detailing the misconduct of Dr. Andrew Friedman (and attributing it to stress). In late October, Luk Van Parijs was fired over research fraud. More doubts raised on fired MIT professor:
So it would seem that these individuals start out with "mild" cheating -- rationalizing, perhaps, that it saves time without any "real" harm to the research. Getting away with that would then make subsequent cheating more attractive and more easily rationalized. Maybe it is the "inability to handle that pressure [to publish]" that precipitates the actual misconduct, but I suspect the dishonesty is there from the start, including the self-deception that it isn't significant or that he won't be caught.
I don't know if that applies to Dr. Hwang, but I think greater scrutiny is in order all around. As faking research, even minor details, is itself irrational, that the perceived benefit would be irrational shouldn't suffice to dismiss the allegations (assuming there is some basis for the allegations). But accepting the "common defense" cited above would be an example of doing just that.
Like many of nature's snacks, they are crepuscular.
You know, it sounds like you're right, but it seems anymore that the whole medical profession's advice is simply "Diet, exercize, get some sun but not too much, drink plenty of water". It sounds redundant every time you hear it, and some of us get pissed that there's not simply a pill we can take to fix us, but the truth is simply we weren't built to live the way we are today. We were hunter gatherers, we were used to being outside all the time, we were used to plenty of clean water, we were used to getting plenty of exercize just to find food, and the foods we ate were lean.
Yet we still manage to survive and reproduce in our current environment, the one for which, as you say, we simply weren't built. It's a shame that with all this surviving and reproducing going on outside of the hunter-gatherer societies within which we were meant to live, we can't just 'adapt', too.
Now, I caveat that I am not speaking for every woman - a really fit guy in a loin cloth could be attractive in context... but crotch grabbing and wobbling penises? That would just be funny at best and threatening at worst. You can't just translate behaviour from one gender to another and have it work. Men find sexual behaviour and dress in a woman attractive because it indicates availability. Women don't need a man to demonstrate availability however - it's a given. A man is attractive based on whether he appears a suitable partner, not on whether he is feeling horny or not. So in that sense, dressing nice and appearing friendly and confident is more interesting than pleasegodno wearing a snug loincloth.
An attractive personality is hard to render. But snug pockets revealing sensuous, wobbling wallets would work, right?
In this sense, and it is much weaker is FSM relevant because FSM can be defined to be the god of the gaps in the same sense that any other creator but again that is not what ID is arguing, what they are arguing is that the god of the gaps argument is legitimate not *what* the god of the gaps is.
But that isn't exactly the point of FSM, either, is it? It's an amusing counterexample that highlights some of the flaws (absurdity) in the rationale for including ID (Dont-Ask/Don't-Tell Creationism) in a science curriculum, and it does that quite well. Specifically, if ID meets the standard for inclusion, then what couldn't meet that standard? The prophet has stated that FSM is "based on science, not on faith", which provides just as much rational support for concluding that it *is* a matter of science, not faith, as ID has. (I feel moved by the Noodly Spirit to state that it has much more.)
For the record, I looked at Protista and Volvocines. Volvocines form slightly fancy colonies, it seems. Nothing really resembling a true multi-celled individual.
Protista and the volvocine algae are categories (the latter a subsection of the former) that contain the examples to look at, from the unicellular, to the colonial, to the multicellular, not a claim that they are all closely related. Some scientists even consider a volvox colony, for instance, to actually be a multicellular organism. (The "No True Scotsman" argument is unfortunate.) And while yes, I do believe that it is possible life could form independently numerous times, couldn't and must are not terms that apply to probabilities.
Regarding the "astronomical odds": if we look at one point in time and space, and attempt to calculate the odds that life, even at its most primitive, would develop at that time and in that place, the probability is infinitesimal, sure. But if we take into consideration the time and space available, at a minimum, then it would be the lack of such development which would then seem improbable. Once that step successfully occurs -- and given a set of conditions that would facilitate it in the first place, a repetition wouldn't be surprising -- the rest is gravy. Compare this to a state lottery: it's highly unlikely that any given individual will win, but it is even more unlikely that no one at all will win over time.
And that is why I want to puke whenever I hear evolution 'fundie-types' talk about their beliefs as though they were Gospel Fact.
Facts are contingent on what is or is not the case in the material world, not what someone would like to believe *must* be true, and thus can't be 100% certain. Observations, after all, could be mistaken, data may be incomplete, and conditions can change, no matter how remote that possibility may seem. Confusing improbable and impossible is an error, as is moving the goalposts, which makes discussion difficult. I appreciate your having taken the time to respond, though.
Note: The sending of the $100 technically is supposed to "delay" court proceedings. Which means means at no point was the citation ever upheld.
Actually, an admission of guilt (or nolo contendere) is one of the requirements for dismissing the ticket with the driving safety course in Texas.
the fact that (IMO) most Americans think our economy is completely built around serving them and that all Indians are tech support people for Dell. Not only is this incorrect but it is insulting and I just took advantage of this topic to let off steam.
Remarks about what most Americans think, usually based on shallow, stereotyped views of Americans as egocentric dullards (a view which even some Americans hold, egocentric dullards that they are), can also be taken as incorrect and insulting.
There seems to be equivocation in your use of the term "spontaneous". It would of course be an essential idea behind evolution if the meaning is stipulated as "natural", or as you put it, "without any sort of direction at all". And I assume by that you mean intelligent direction or "design", rather than what we may term "natural forces", chemical processes and the like, or (later) self-direction and other selective pressures. This is very different from "spontaneous" interpreted as abrupt or without cause. Natural processes are frequently incremental (instead of one great leap from state A to state Z, moving through a gradual series of smaller steps) and causal, where a set of conditions will lead to A, which together can lead to B, to C, etc. That we are not certain of the first conditions, and that there are gaps in our current knowledge of details between certain steps, however, doesn't invalidate the steps we can describe, and certainly doesn't support replacing those explanations with an appeal to ID, for which there is no evidence of any kind.
As for a leap between unicellular and multicellular organisms, just look at Protista and the volvocine algae for an example of how that can progress.
Please explain how that serves as the "scientific basis for their ideas". I shouldn't need to ask my "nearest evolutionist" to explain your comments. How would I even know he would represent "most evolutionists", anyway? And why use that qualifier, which suggests that some evolutionists do have a scientific basis for their ideas? Why not address those ideas instead?
If the "big chunk of metal" could reproduce, the odds would jump dramatically.