Where in science or nature have you seen any phenomena that is "spontaneous"? It is generally understood that any phenomena is preceded by a "cause". So "spontaneous" is unscientific because it presupposes that there is NO preceding cause. Which is just a sleight of hand, or terminology, if you will, for saying "we don't know how it began", "we don't know what the first cause is" so therefore we will say there is none.
That is even worse dogma than the creationists dogma. It explains nothing, which is not what science is supposed to do. Science is supposed to make the distinction between the "cause" and "effect" while describing the "process". Might it not be more scientific to say that the "creation" process is "evolution", but we don't know, or want to know, what the "first cause" of that is.
How long did it take to see the obviousness of this? How many years of fruitless arguement and debate? Evolution is the "how" of creation, the grand modus operandi if you will.
So the follow up question is not so much is there or is there not a first cause, but if there is, what might its nature be?
Human thought is limited to the relativeness of things, and must have borders or boundaries to work within. Hence the problem of comprehension of the infinitely large and the infinitely small, the infinitely long time and the infinitely short time. That is probably why the disposition toward the creation dogma.
"contributing to a nation's lead in the world." And in that concept lies the the root of the whole fallacy. That any nation can prosper without the whole world prospering. If other nations do not prosper then who do you sell your products to? Prosperity is about free trade between all regions of the world.
Through the WTO the US is trying to sell Americanism to the rest of the world. But the rest of the world is saying "hold it" this may not be the best way. China seems to be prospering, and will soon surpass the US economy, and they don't have any tight patent or copyright laws. Why should certain industries or countries have protection and privilege in a free world economy?
Yes you are missing a whole lot. The patents that RIM paid $615M for were eventually overturned as not valid patents. These had been invented in Europe, and being used two years before NTP had even filed.
It's all about legal judgements by 12 people not smart enough to get out of jury duty. A great system, where the inmates run the asylum. Why should anyone have exclusive rights to an idea? If someone independently comes up with the same idea, like they inevitably do, they are then deprived of their human rights to use their own idea in any way they see fit. So who does the patent system really benefit? The consumers or the lawyers? Because someone at the bottom of the heap eventually pays for all the blackmail crap.
Our buddies at MS have to be careful, the Open Source Patent commons could counter sue for patents that Ms is infringing. This is a two way street, MS did not invent everything software, and they might find that out the hard way, like they have before.
I don't think that any of this is about free speech. In a ideal world businesses would financially compete for market share in a fair market environment. If something upsets that balance such as a monopoly, that can in some way because of market position, extort money from others, or otherwise tilt the playing field, in real terms how different is this from kidnapping and blackmail. It does not have to be overt in appearance, it can be covert in appearance, but the result is the same.
Is the purpose of a corporation to (1) make money for the shareholders, or to (2) produce high quality competitively prices goods and services in the consumer marketplace? No. (2) is the only real benefit to the world at large. But don't you think that if corporations could achieve No. (1) without having to make the effort for No. (2), that they would not do that.
It is about time someone woke up to this reality, even so called patents are just legal license to extort and blackmail, and if they make patents "first to file" instead of "first to invent" like it is now, then they have upped the extort capability by disabling challenge under "prior art". Maybe RICO is supposed to stop some of this madness.
Yep, I have both MS 2003 and OO 2.0.2 on the same machine, and OO actually opens faster than MS. But then I keep the HD defragged, and file optimized, and keep all the other crap shut down, that should not be opening and hogging memory in the first place.
But how is any one supposed to tell the difference between "unnecessarily" or "unexpectedly" hot, and "unnecessarily" and "unexpectedly" dumb. The point that I have been trying to make, is that this is Lawyer double speak, and the courts make rulings on this double speak as if these were credible concepts. When in reality they are only spin, you can spin a story any way, to avoid the personal responsibility issue. Look at the spin that the Nazis put on their treatment of Jews to avoid the ultimate personal responsibility issue at the Nuremberg trials, "I was just complying with the law", or "I was just following orders".
There needs to be defined standards for personal responsibility, if they can do it for Corporations they can do it for the Legal System. Personal responsibility needs to become an integral part of the culture and the governing infrastructure and systems.
And yes I really cannot understand "unnecessarily" or "unexpectedly" hot, because when I bring home McDonalds, Starbucks or any other coffee, my wife puts hers in the microwave, to a temperature where I could not drink it.
For this to become a reality requires some fundamental changes in human nature, and also in what is recognized and rewarded. If there is a method developed for the recognition and monetary reward of people who make contributions to the fast advancement of human knowledge and the resulting benefits, using the collaborative model, including corporations, then the process outlined in the article might be in our future.
Currently the model is not collaborate and cooperate, but compete, compete, compete. Publish, patent and copyright, and all the other impediments to the articles vision. Scientists today only get recognized, by government grants, and by their peers, if they work in secrecy and publish as individuals. An entirely different model than outlined in the article.
Now the Open Source software development, has a model similar to that outlined in the article, but they still need to work out the recognition and reward model, that will promote and sustain the collaborative environment. It is no different than kindergarten, for adults and corporations, it is about the behaviours that get recognized and rewarded or penalized. MS still has not figured what behaviours will be rewarded and what behaviours will be penalized, because they still believe that it is they, and not the officially elected bodies that make the rules. They spout about communism on the one hand, without really knowing what democracy is, but they don't talk about Fascism, Hitler and the concept of world domination, because that is just too close to home.
Society and world economics would work perfectly well without the patent or copyright systems. It would just work differently that's all. Every citizen would have equal rights to their own ideas and to how they use those ideas, without having to figure out if someone had a similar idea before them, and has been granted exclusive rights to it, thereby diminishing all others rights to the use of that idea.
It might even be something approaching a real democracy instead of the special interests pretend democracy we have today. Because does free speech, and freedom in general, not originate in the absolutely unrestricted ideas of the citizens? Patents and copyright are a subtle way of removing this freedom, and imposing restrictions, to the point where it is no different than Fascism.
The $600.00 graphics cards along with almost exclusively reaction time type games, also sidelined me as even thinking about being a mainstream gamer. The games that run on the $150.00 graphics cards, are pretty well the only ones that I play, and these graphics cards of course run about 99% of the other software, except maybe for 3D CAD or something graphics processing intensive like that.
A trend that I have noticed, is that a lot of construction equipment manufacturers (like CAT Komatsu etc) including the enormous stuff such as hydraulic shovels, and maybe even fighter planes are using almost the standard gamer joystick as the primary equipment controller. Gamers or ex-gamers adapt to operating this stuff like fish to water. So this could probably be considered the upside of the game development trends, and the core development of leading edge controller ergonomics.
You perspective is reasonable, but I never said that some of the court rulings that I have seen are reasonable or consistent. Personable responsibility should always be personal responsibility, everyone is primarily responsible for their own safety. (in cars or computers) So how was McDonalds responsible when the woman spilled the hot coffee in her lap, and M got sued for $1.0M. So now McDonalds have to put hot warnings on their coffee. Is is not reasonable to assume that unless someone is really "stupid", they would know that coffee is served hot.
The systems that set cultural norms such as the schools, the government, the legal system, are not consistently presenting the personal responsibility message. When a drunk driver kills someone, the personal responsibility for that gets blurred, by the "I have an illness, and I couldn't help it" factor. Or the "bartender should have known that I was drunk and stopped serving me alcohol" factor. Never mind that if the bartender had "I would have gone to the liquor store and got more anyway" factor.
AH! but in the auto industry "stupid" results in a class action suits against the manufacturers. Pinto's are not supposed to explode when you drive into the back of them, but "stupid" is not supposed to drive into the back of cars in the first place. The principle is the same, it is just because the results are different, that there is a different treatment.
There should be class action suits against MS too for producing the crappy software, where your data is at risk. Or else Auto Manufacturers should be able to make their customers sign the same kind of restrictive "we make a crappy product, but who cares" USER AGREEMENTS. Think the government would go for that?
If you read the history of the last days of the Roman Empire, it does not read a lot different than this. It was basically power struggles, greed and corruption from within. The foundational requirements of any society is conformance to some agreed minimal ethical and moral standards. When the foundation crumbles the building collapses.
Thanks, this perspective is very informative, you must be an IT guy, (person) or at least a very involved user. I have not been able to ditch Windows yet, probably until I make the next round of hardware upgrades, it's the Linux driver availability thing for some of the older hardware. But KDE 4 and this Kororaa stuff, just might be "must have", and the "just works" approach might even reduce driver issues. It might also be a plus for the PC gamers, and their quest for "frame rate", if any programs ever get written to it.
I guess you must only play your IPod through the standard hearing loss ear buds. But if you want to play the IPod downloaded music on other devices, and in other places, here are a few links where you can buy crap to do that.
The point that the French are making is consumers should not have to do this, and I for one agree, they shouldn't. That is just like MS trying to foist the WMA crap on us, and then only provide a one way convertor, MP3 to WMA of course.
Can you imagine what it would be like if the TV signals were like the IPod, with no government regulated mandates and standards. HD TV would never get off the ground, and the sets would still cost $20K, much like the IPod. And no long term assurance that it will still be around tomorrow.
In the end it is all about "intention", and a hundred different people can interpret a hundred different intentions, from single behaviour by anyone else.
But only the person who exhibits the behaviour knows for sure what the intention behind it was, and only time will tell if it's results are positive or negative.
Also a hundred different people will have a hundred different opinions on the nature of "evil". But one thing is for sure, unless something is a stated intention, it can't be linked to a resulting behaviour. "Do no evil". I will also continue to use Google, unless they really break my trust at a personal level.
"It is just another propriety format issue" This is the going in statement. Now there just might be a chance that you have some of that IPod stored music 20 years from now, but the fad has passed, or Apple and the IPod are a thing of the past, and now you don't have anything to play it on. That is what I mean by "consumer friendly" and "monopolistic."
You think this has not been a problem for consumers and the content businesses in the past, or that it is still not a problem? Well then I have about 400 LPs in the basement that I have not played in about 20 years. Because my tastes have changed and I no longer like the music? I don't think so, no because there used to be things called turntables, do you remember these, they were the IPods a couple of decades ago.
The most durable format that I have seen, in the long succession of formats, is MP3. It has been around since the first CD era and now CDs are on the way out, but I can still play my MP3 music, very universal and very portable. On computer, car, and personal devices etc. etc. Got to buy new crap if you want this to happen with IPod, now that's consumer friendly? Why should the consumer have to buy new crap to get this level of universality? That's what the French are on about, maybe their consumers are not as gullible to chic fads and trends. They just want practicality.
It is just another propriety format issue, which of course if majority market share can be established, always leads to monopoly. That is the Apple way, but when they could not make a dent in the PC market with their Power PC they went with Intel. But they try and keep Windows or Linux off their PC, because if they let this happen then they would be competing against the likes of Dell, with just another indistinguishable PC.
Propriety worked for them this time, but their business model is closed and not consumer rights friendly. The French Government issue is essentially a consumer rights issue, which will quickly spread to the EU attention, and that is not 2% of world market, it is a bigger market than the US. Personally I use the MP3 format, much more universal and many more and less expensive players. Oh but aren't these consumer friendly market traits, and the antithesis of monopoly?
The point that you are missing is the air of absolute certainty about something when it is just not that absolute or certain. All of the known evidence does leave room for other interpretations. When I mean certainty I mean something where there can be absolutely no dispute. Then a "yes" or a "no" answer is appropriate. But not for the level of uncertainty about some aspects of the evolutionary "theory".
Will the sun rise somewhere tomorrow, that is a "yes" answer, and the odds are pretty astronomically small that it won't. My issue is with your unsupported level of certainty (the "no" answer) and not with any theory, because in reality there are relatively few questions to which a "yes" or "no" answer is appropriate. I call it Dogma because it was this level of certainty about the sun revolving around the earth, that almost got Galileo burned.
But that is the whole point here, have you checked into what is happening with cold fusion recently? There are even private companies trying to commercialize cold fusion products. So Pons and Fleichman were not "WRONG" the phenomenon does exist, I'm not sure that they know what the mechanism is yet. But they have used fire in the past, even before they scientifically understood how it works.
The tokamak crowd saw their funding dollars slipping away, the gravy train was coming off the tracks. So they did some back stabbing and character assassination. But did they ever apologize to Pons and Fleichman? I don't think so.
But I do understand that "no" is the result of a closed mind that is open to no other possibilities. Fixed in the flat earth Dogma.
There is recent evidence of organic life forms that have fallen from space recently. If this is so then is it not possible that so called "evolution" mat have happened quite differently than the current Dogma.
Could this mechanism not have somehow involved with prehistoric epidemics, infections and mutations? And before the big "no" comes up again, where is the evidence that it wasn't? And for that matter what is the scientific explanation for the millions of year old fossils being identical to the present day live species? An answer that stands the test of reason is required here which is not "no".
There are characteristics that are learned from the environment and characteristics with which seem to be a predisposition. But is that predisposition genetic? They would have to prove that one to me. There are people who have a predisposition say to be musical, or artistic, so which is the music or artistic gene?
Genetic presupposes that the gene is passed on to subsequent generations, but then musical talent pops up in families without any seeming musical genetic lineage. Or same family members have very different dispositions and abilities.
The question is not about extinction rates, the last ice age was only supposed to have ended 12K years ago, not millions. The question is that if something that is supposed to be millions of years old is identical to something alive today, which is what I believe is implied. Then where is the so called evolutionary change?
Slashdot Mirror
Where in science or nature have you seen any phenomena that is "spontaneous"? It is generally understood that any phenomena is preceded by a "cause". So "spontaneous" is unscientific because it presupposes that there is NO preceding cause. Which is just a sleight of hand, or terminology, if you will, for saying "we don't know how it began", "we don't know what the first cause is" so therefore we will say there is none.
That is even worse dogma than the creationists dogma. It explains nothing, which is not what science is supposed to do. Science is supposed to make the distinction between the "cause" and "effect" while describing the "process". Might it not be more scientific to say that the "creation" process is "evolution", but we don't know, or want to know, what the "first cause" of that is.
How long did it take to see the obviousness of this? How many years of fruitless arguement and debate? Evolution is the "how" of creation, the grand modus operandi if you will.
So the follow up question is not so much is there or is there not a first cause, but if there is, what might its nature be?
Human thought is limited to the relativeness of things, and must have borders or boundaries to work within. Hence the problem of comprehension of the infinitely large and the infinitely small, the infinitely long time and the infinitely short time. That is probably why the disposition toward the creation dogma.
"contributing to a nation's lead in the world." And in that concept lies the the root of the whole fallacy. That any nation can prosper without the whole world prospering. If other nations do not prosper then who do you sell your products to? Prosperity is about free trade between all regions of the world.
Through the WTO the US is trying to sell Americanism to the rest of the world. But the rest of the world is saying "hold it" this may not be the best way. China seems to be prospering, and will soon surpass the US economy, and they don't have any tight patent or copyright laws. Why should certain industries or countries have protection and privilege in a free world economy?
Yes you are missing a whole lot. The patents that RIM paid $615M for were eventually overturned as not valid patents. These had been invented in Europe, and being used two years before NTP had even filed.
It's all about legal judgements by 12 people not smart enough to get out of jury duty. A great system, where the inmates run the asylum. Why should anyone have exclusive rights to an idea? If someone independently comes up with the same idea, like they inevitably do, they are then deprived of their human rights to use their own idea in any way they see fit. So who does the patent system really benefit? The consumers or the lawyers? Because someone at the bottom of the heap eventually pays for all the blackmail crap.
Our buddies at MS have to be careful, the Open Source Patent commons could counter sue for patents that Ms is infringing. This is a two way street, MS did not invent everything software, and they might find that out the hard way, like they have before.
I don't think that any of this is about free speech. In a ideal world businesses would financially compete for market share in a fair market environment. If something upsets that balance such as a monopoly, that can in some way because of market position, extort money from others, or otherwise tilt the playing field, in real terms how different is this from kidnapping and blackmail. It does not have to be overt in appearance, it can be covert in appearance, but the result is the same.
Is the purpose of a corporation to (1) make money for the shareholders, or to (2) produce high quality competitively prices goods and services in the consumer marketplace? No. (2) is the only real benefit to the world at large. But don't you think that if corporations could achieve No. (1) without having to make the effort for No. (2), that they would not do that.
It is about time someone woke up to this reality, even so called patents are just legal license to extort and blackmail, and if they make patents "first to file" instead of "first to invent" like it is now, then they have upped the extort capability by disabling challenge under "prior art". Maybe RICO is supposed to stop some of this madness.
Yep, I have both MS 2003 and OO 2.0.2 on the same machine, and OO actually opens faster than MS. But then I keep the HD defragged, and file optimized, and keep all the other crap shut down, that should not be opening and hogging memory in the first place.
But how is any one supposed to tell the difference between "unnecessarily" or "unexpectedly" hot, and "unnecessarily" and "unexpectedly" dumb. The point that I have been trying to make, is that this is Lawyer double speak, and the courts make rulings on this double speak as if these were credible concepts. When in reality they are only spin, you can spin a story any way, to avoid the personal responsibility issue. Look at the spin that the Nazis put on their treatment of Jews to avoid the ultimate personal responsibility issue at the Nuremberg trials, "I was just complying with the law", or "I was just following orders".
There needs to be defined standards for personal responsibility, if they can do it for Corporations they can do it for the Legal System. Personal responsibility needs to become an integral part of the culture and the governing infrastructure and systems.
And yes I really cannot understand "unnecessarily" or "unexpectedly" hot, because when I bring home McDonalds, Starbucks or any other coffee, my wife puts hers in the microwave, to a temperature where I could not drink it.
For this to become a reality requires some fundamental changes in human nature, and also in what is recognized and rewarded. If there is a method developed for the recognition and monetary reward of people who make contributions to the fast advancement of human knowledge and the resulting benefits, using the collaborative model, including corporations, then the process outlined in the article might be in our future.
Currently the model is not collaborate and cooperate, but compete, compete, compete. Publish, patent and copyright, and all the other impediments to the articles vision. Scientists today only get recognized, by government grants, and by their peers, if they work in secrecy and publish as individuals. An entirely different model than outlined in the article.
Now the Open Source software development, has a model similar to that outlined in the article, but they still need to work out the recognition and reward model, that will promote and sustain the collaborative environment. It is no different than kindergarten, for adults and corporations, it is about the behaviours that get recognized and rewarded or penalized. MS still has not figured what behaviours will be rewarded and what behaviours will be penalized, because they still believe that it is they, and not the officially elected bodies that make the rules. They spout about communism on the one hand, without really knowing what democracy is, but they don't talk about Fascism, Hitler and the concept of world domination, because that is just too close to home.
Society and world economics would work perfectly well without the patent or copyright systems. It would just work differently that's all. Every citizen would have equal rights to their own ideas and to how they use those ideas, without having to figure out if someone had a similar idea before them, and has been granted exclusive rights to it, thereby diminishing all others rights to the use of that idea.
It might even be something approaching a real democracy instead of the special interests pretend democracy we have today. Because does free speech, and freedom in general, not originate in the absolutely unrestricted ideas of the citizens? Patents and copyright are a subtle way of removing this freedom, and imposing restrictions, to the point where it is no different than Fascism.
The $600.00 graphics cards along with almost exclusively reaction time type games, also sidelined me as even thinking about being a mainstream gamer. The games that run on the $150.00 graphics cards, are pretty well the only ones that I play, and these graphics cards of course run about 99% of the other software, except maybe for 3D CAD or something graphics processing intensive like that.
A trend that I have noticed, is that a lot of construction equipment manufacturers (like CAT Komatsu etc) including the enormous stuff such as hydraulic shovels, and maybe even fighter planes are using almost the standard gamer joystick as the primary equipment controller. Gamers or ex-gamers adapt to operating this stuff like fish to water. So this could probably be considered the upside of the game development trends, and the core development of leading edge controller ergonomics.
You perspective is reasonable, but I never said that some of the court rulings that I have seen are reasonable or consistent. Personable responsibility should always be personal responsibility, everyone is primarily responsible for their own safety. (in cars or computers) So how was McDonalds responsible when the woman spilled the hot coffee in her lap, and M got sued for $1.0M. So now McDonalds have to put hot warnings on their coffee. Is is not reasonable to assume that unless someone is really "stupid", they would know that coffee is served hot.
The systems that set cultural norms such as the schools, the government, the legal system, are not consistently presenting the personal responsibility message. When a drunk driver kills someone, the personal responsibility for that gets blurred, by the "I have an illness, and I couldn't help it" factor. Or the "bartender should have known that I was drunk and stopped serving me alcohol" factor. Never mind that if the bartender had "I would have gone to the liquor store and got more anyway" factor.
AH! but in the auto industry "stupid" results in a class action suits against the manufacturers. Pinto's are not supposed to explode when you drive into the back of them, but "stupid" is not supposed to drive into the back of cars in the first place. The principle is the same, it is just because the results are different, that there is a different treatment.
There should be class action suits against MS too for producing the crappy software, where your data is at risk. Or else Auto Manufacturers should be able to make their customers sign the same kind of restrictive "we make a crappy product, but who cares" USER AGREEMENTS. Think the government would go for that?
If you read the history of the last days of the Roman Empire, it does not read a lot different than this. It was basically power struggles, greed and corruption from within. The foundational requirements of any society is conformance to some agreed minimal ethical and moral standards. When the foundation crumbles the building collapses.
Thanks, this perspective is very informative, you must be an IT guy, (person) or at least a very involved user. I have not been able to ditch Windows yet, probably until I make the next round of hardware upgrades, it's the Linux driver availability thing for some of the older hardware. But KDE 4 and this Kororaa stuff, just might be "must have", and the "just works" approach might even reduce driver issues. It might also be a plus for the PC gamers, and their quest for "frame rate", if any programs ever get written to it.
I guess you must only play your IPod through the standard hearing loss ear buds. But if you want to play the IPod downloaded music on other devices, and in other places, here are a few links where you can buy crap to do that.
_ to_ipod_converter.htms p
The point that the French are making is consumers should not have to do this, and I for one agree, they shouldn't. That is just like MS trying to foist the WMA crap on us, and then only provide a one way convertor, MP3 to WMA of course.
Can you imagine what it would be like if the TV signals were like the IPod, with no government regulated mandates and standards. HD TV would never get off the ground, and the sets would still cost $20K, much like the IPod. And no long term assurance that it will still be around tomorrow.
http://ipod.hackaday.com/
http://www.tomdownload.com/dvd_software/super_dvd
http://www.m2convert.com/ipod-converter.htm
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1866732,00.a
Was that just Steve's promise not to sue the folks who have already taken a shot at running other OSes on Apple?
In the end it is all about "intention", and a hundred different people can interpret a hundred different intentions, from single behaviour by anyone else.
But only the person who exhibits the behaviour knows for sure what the intention behind it was, and only time will tell if it's results are positive or negative.
Also a hundred different people will have a hundred different opinions on the nature of "evil". But one thing is for sure, unless something is a stated intention, it can't be linked to a resulting behaviour. "Do no evil". I will also continue to use Google, unless they really break my trust at a personal level.
"It is just another propriety format issue" This is the going in statement.
Now there just might be a chance that you have some of that IPod stored music 20 years from now, but the fad has passed, or Apple and the IPod are a thing of the past, and now you don't have anything to play it on. That is what I mean by "consumer friendly" and "monopolistic."
You think this has not been a problem for consumers and the content businesses in the past, or that it is still not a problem? Well then I have about 400 LPs in the basement that I have not played in about 20 years. Because my tastes have changed and I no longer like the music? I don't think so, no because there used to be things called turntables, do you remember these, they were the IPods a couple of decades ago.
The most durable format that I have seen, in the long succession of formats, is MP3. It has been around since the first CD era and now CDs are on the way out, but I can still play my MP3 music, very universal and very portable. On computer, car, and personal devices etc. etc. Got to buy new crap if you want this to happen with IPod, now that's consumer friendly? Why should the consumer have to buy new crap to get this level of universality? That's what the French are on about, maybe their consumers are not as gullible to chic fads and trends. They just want practicality.
It is just another propriety format issue, which of course if majority market share can be established, always leads to monopoly. That is the Apple way, but when they could not make a dent in the PC market with their Power PC they went with Intel. But they try and keep Windows or Linux off their PC, because if they let this happen then they would be competing against the likes of Dell, with just another indistinguishable PC.
Propriety worked for them this time, but their business model is closed and not consumer rights friendly. The French Government issue is essentially a consumer rights issue, which will quickly spread to the EU attention, and that is not 2% of world market, it is a bigger market than the US. Personally I use the MP3 format, much more universal and many more and less expensive players. Oh but aren't these consumer friendly market traits, and the antithesis of monopoly?
The point that you are missing is the air of absolute certainty about something when it is just not that absolute or certain. All of the known evidence does leave room for other interpretations. When I mean certainty I mean something where there can be absolutely no dispute. Then a "yes" or a "no" answer is appropriate. But not for the level of uncertainty about some aspects of the evolutionary "theory".
Will the sun rise somewhere tomorrow, that is a "yes" answer, and the odds are pretty astronomically small that it won't. My issue is with your unsupported level of certainty (the "no" answer) and not with any theory, because in reality there are relatively few questions to which a "yes" or "no" answer is appropriate. I call it Dogma because it was this level of certainty about the sun revolving around the earth, that almost got Galileo burned.
But that is the whole point here, have you checked into what is happening with cold fusion recently? There are even private companies trying to commercialize cold fusion products. So Pons and Fleichman were not "WRONG" the phenomenon does exist, I'm not sure that they know what the mechanism is yet. But they have used fire in the past, even before they scientifically understood how it works.
The tokamak crowd saw their funding dollars slipping away, the gravy train was coming off the tracks. So they did some back stabbing and character assassination. But did they ever apologize to Pons and Fleichman? I don't think so.
But I do understand that "no" is the result of a closed mind that is open to no other possibilities. Fixed in the flat earth Dogma.
There is recent evidence of organic life forms that have fallen from space recently. If this is so then is it not possible that so called "evolution" mat have happened quite differently than the current Dogma.
Could this mechanism not have somehow involved with prehistoric epidemics, infections and mutations? And before the big "no" comes up again, where is the evidence that it wasn't? And for that matter what is the scientific explanation for the millions of year old fossils being identical to the present day live species? An answer that stands the test of reason is required here which is not "no".
There are characteristics that are learned from the environment and characteristics with which seem to be a predisposition. But is that predisposition genetic? They would have to prove that one to me. There are people who have a predisposition say to be musical, or artistic, so which is the music or artistic gene?
Genetic presupposes that the gene is passed on to subsequent generations, but then musical talent pops up in families without any seeming musical genetic lineage. Or same family members have very different dispositions and abilities.
The question is not about extinction rates, the last ice age was only supposed to have ended 12K years ago, not millions. The question is that if something that is supposed to be millions of years old is identical to something alive today, which is what I believe is implied. Then where is the so called evolutionary change?