When I was an auditor I spent my working days at a different company every week. Even while at a company I often didn't have a desk to call my own, or one with a phone. My cellphone meant my wife or friends didn't have to call my office to find out my contact number for the day. Now that I am at the same desk a lot of the time, my cellphone is less essential, but now I travel a fair bit doing presentations, so it still has its uses. And when we go out at night I feel better knowing the babysitter can phone us if there is a problem. Plus, my ISP sends me SMS whenever I get email on my home account; the message includes the first few lines of the email, which I can read on the cellphone. So my cellphone doubles as an uptime pager. I don't carry my PalmPilot around all the time, but a paper diary doesn't have an alarm reminder and can't transfer all the phone numbers, notes and to-do lists automatically from diary to diary (unless you have one of those huge filofaxes that I can never find cheap refills for). Not to mention the docs, calcs and other apps.
The analogy is simply predicated on the complexity of 747-type structures and the likelihood of their being assembled from building blocks by a random force, and the complexity of living cells and the likelihood of their being assembled from building blocks by a random force. Analogies do not need to correspond at every level to be valid: a complete correspondence would not be an analogy but an identity. I concede that you have proved your contention that you are uninformed.
Excellent proof of what one feels intuitively to be the case. Incidentally, wasn't the monkeys-typing-shakespeare thought experiment intended to prove the viability of the "primordial soup" theory of the origin of life? IE, with all those amino acids floating around they simply had to combine in the right way sooner or later to create life, right? As someone else said, about as likely as a hurricane blowing through a junkyard and assembling a 747. It always amuses me that the extent to which some scientists will go to exclude God from the universe puts religious fanatics to shame.
A little while ago I had the problem of X11amp skipping on my RH5.2 box (P200MMX, 64mb RAM). I had earlier in the day logged in as root a few times to install some packages, and I discovered (on running top) that I had three instances of control panel running, even though I was now logged in as myself. Each instance was using about 30% of available CPU. When I killed them x11amp stopped skipping.
I realise that a certain amount of info about The Phantom Menace is necessary to build demand, but I'm getting a little worried that too much will be given away before release, leading to an anti-climax. I think the first trailer is just right - I'm afraid to watch the five-minute trailer. As for the crawl text, I want to read it in the moviehouse for the first time just as I did all those years ago for A New Hope. I want the film to have the maximum possible impact for me.
The lamer who wrote the book Jon is obsessing about is attached to the London School of Economics, well-known not for clear thinking about economics but for recycling tired socialist bullshit attacks on capitalism. What these idiots always overlook is that if things were as bad as they say they are the market would take corrective action; and the implicit subtext is always that society (read government) should do something about the disgusting state the world is in. When was the last time the government did something that made people's lives better? (as opposed to politician's lives better)
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When I was an auditor I spent my working days at a different company every week. Even while at a company I often didn't have a desk to call my own, or one with a phone. My cellphone meant my wife or friends didn't have to call my office to find out my contact number for the day. Now that I am at the same desk a lot of the time, my cellphone is less essential, but now I travel a fair bit doing presentations, so it still has its uses. And when we go out at night I feel better knowing the babysitter can phone us if there is a problem. Plus, my ISP sends me SMS whenever I get email on my home account; the message includes the first few lines of the email, which I can read on the cellphone. So my cellphone doubles as an uptime pager. I don't carry my PalmPilot around all the time, but a paper diary doesn't have an alarm reminder and can't transfer all the phone numbers, notes and to-do lists automatically from diary to diary (unless you have one of those huge filofaxes that I can never find cheap refills for). Not to mention the docs, calcs and other apps.
The analogy is simply predicated on the complexity of 747-type structures and the likelihood of their being assembled from building blocks by a random force, and the complexity of living cells and the likelihood of their being assembled from building blocks by a random force. Analogies do not need to correspond at every level to be valid: a complete correspondence would not be an analogy but an identity. I concede that you have proved your contention that you are uninformed.
Excellent proof of what one feels intuitively to be the case. Incidentally, wasn't the monkeys-typing-shakespeare thought experiment intended to prove the viability of the "primordial soup" theory of the origin of life? IE, with all those amino acids floating around they simply had to combine in the right way sooner or later to create life, right? As someone else said, about as likely as a hurricane blowing through a junkyard and assembling a 747. It always amuses me that the extent to which some scientists will go to exclude God from the universe puts religious fanatics to shame.
A little while ago I had the problem of X11amp skipping on my RH5.2 box (P200MMX, 64mb RAM). I had earlier in the day logged in as root a few times to install some packages, and I discovered (on running top) that I had three instances of control panel running, even though I was now logged in as myself. Each instance was using about 30% of available CPU. When I killed them x11amp stopped skipping.
I told them I was Bill Gates!
I realise that a certain amount of info about The Phantom Menace is necessary to build demand, but I'm getting a little worried that too much will be given away before release, leading to an anti-climax. I think the first trailer is just right - I'm afraid to watch the five-minute trailer. As for the crawl text, I want to read it in the moviehouse for the first time just as I did all those years ago for A New Hope. I want the film to have the maximum possible impact for me.
The lamer who wrote the book Jon is obsessing about is attached to the London School of Economics, well-known not for clear thinking about economics but for recycling tired socialist bullshit attacks on capitalism. What these idiots always overlook is that if things were as bad as they say they are the market would take corrective action; and the implicit subtext is always that society (read government) should do something about the disgusting state the world is in. When was the last time the government did something that made people's lives better? (as opposed to politician's lives better)