Or we could be the first in our neck of the woods to make it this far. Or, everyone else is afraid of Berserkers. Or they've been extinct for a million years already. People forget the time issue with Drake's equation: it's not just how many other intelligent species might be out there, it's how many intelligent species might exist right now.
"I'm not an anti-semite, I'm just anti-Israel" ranks up with "I'm not a racist, some of my best friends are (black, hispanic, asian, etc)" on the bullshit-o-meter, buddy. I'm going to have to call bullshit on this one. I can be against the actions of the Israeli government and not be an anti-Semite just as I can be against the actions of any country in Africa and not be racially bigoted towards blacks.
I'm sorry you lack the capacity to separate the actions of a government from the ethnicity of the majority population of the nation that it governs.
So far, I've never seen anyone predict a new species before it occurred. Because that's not how it works. You can't predict when a new species will arise because that's not how evolution works. Evolution doesn't say that on March 15, 2009 a new species of wombat will suddenly appear. Just like the theory of gravity does not say that on January 1, 2015 a man will drop his duck.
I'd even accept as proof the prediction of an animal species in the fossil record before one is dug up. How many do you want? We've found tons of them. Evolution predicts that we should find ancient fish with fins adapted to walking on land. And we have. Evolution predicts that we should find fossils of ancient hominids with features of humans and apes. And we've found many examples of this.
A valid question. That evolution happens is a known fact. That animals adapt over the generations and change to the point that disparate isolated populations can no longer interbreed is a fact. What is constantly being reevaluated is the actual mechanisms that drive this change. Early assumptions are reexamined when they don't hold up to scrutiny. Theories are revised when we discover that things are more complex than we thought. Natural selection (higher survival potential) does not explain creatures like Peacocks and birds of paradise. We examine what is going on and discover that sexual selection (breeding age members choosing mates for particular reasons) is also at work. While the Peacock's tail is an impediment to personal survival, the extravagance of it tells females that the male is healthy, strong, has good genes and would make a good choice as a father to their offspring.
And then there is the subject of this article: which is not the whys and wherefores, but the histories of evolution. They are not reevaluating the means of evolution, just the details of the timetables of when things happened. Much like a police officer looking at a crime scene and sorting out what happened when, discovering a new piece of evidence or talking to a new witness and adjusting the description to fit the facts.
And the problem is what? It's NOT a child. It's a machine. If it's sentient then it is, for all intents and purposes, a living being. If it is not, then it's just a machine. Why not take out your darker fantasies on a machine? It's safer, for all concerned, than taking them out on a living person.
Right now people write stories, draw pictures, render images, etc... of their fantasies. The sickest things you can imagine. Should those be illegal? Why?
The bottom line is that people will have their fantasies whether they hide them in their heads or express them in art or act them out in role-playing (or farking dolls). You can't stop that. What you can do is give these people a safe place to vent their feelings.
However, do we really expect science to explain everything? Is there a scientific method that provides proof for the meaning of life?
Who says there's a meaning to life? We want there to be one. Doesn't mean there is one. The fundamental purpose in life can be summed up thusly: "Successfully reproduce before something eats you". Do that and you've done what you are here for. Now, we as human beings can add more to that. We can, because of our intelligence, give our lives a "greater" purpose. What that purpose is is up to each of us as individuals. If you want your life to be spent helping those less fortunate than yourself do it. If you want your life to be spent eating as many donuts as you can go for it. It's your life to fritter away im whatever way suits you best.
To me, the chances of everything being as they are now by cosmic chance seems just as plausible as a God in heaven. So in the meantime I am currently undecided, a fact for which my Christian friends tell me I am undoubtedly going to hell for.
The chances are better for random chance than for God. We have proof the universe exists. We can see it, smell it, measure it, predict its behavior, etc... We can do none of these things for God. Add to this the fact that all previous religions and gods in history are mere myths and the chances of God being real drops even lower. Why is the current myth any more real than the previous ones? Other than you were raised to believe in this one?
I was gravely disapointed by Were Rabbit (there goes my "friend" status with MsGeek:( ). It was well made, technically, but I could have done without all of the Benny Hill-esque jokes in it. It felt like they were trying too hard to make it adult enough for the parents in the audiance.
More like fascist Italy. Except for teh whole "trains on time" thing. Bush isn't smart enough to be a new Hitler. More like el Duce's idiot cousin. But otherwise you are pretty on target.
What I want to know is what are they really looking for? Does anyine think that terrorists, and by that I mean the ones smart enough to plan and carry out an attack of substance, are going to buy that 1,000 tons of fertalizer on their credit cards? A truck rental, sure, they have no choice, but explosives, ammunition and whatnot? No. Terrorsim, like the drug trade, is a cash and cary environment.
So, if terrorists are not their real target, who is? What are they looking for? What do they really want to know? How much data mining are they going to employ and to what purpose? These are the questions that make me uneasy.
Sure, some of you argue, this isan't all that big of a deal. Your records aren't really private. How about stepping back and looking at the big picture. Look at all of the other "non-private" records they want access to sans warrant: telephone records, email exchanges, web logs, library records, bookstore purchases, etc... This is just another in a long line of data mining projects.
At the risk of Godwinning my post, my government is starting to remind me of foul, loathesome, corrupt Evil Empire we spend decades toppling in the Cold War. The though of teh KGB being reborn in my country sickens me.
First evolution came on the scene, and science was used not only to oppose the beliefs of religious authorities, but to try to disprove God. Galileo and his followers never tried to disprove God - the evolutionists do - many upon many are atheist and use the theory of evolution to try to prove there is no God.
Talk about an agenda. Oh, boy.
Galileo's ideas were heavily supressed by the Church of the day because they showed that the universe was not as described in the Bible. He was forced to recant his theories because they were a direct threat to the power of the Church.
"Evolutionists" are not athiests and are not out to prove God does not exist. Darwin himself was a devout Christian who beleived that he was discovering the means that God was employing to make life functional on this world. He never tried to say that God does not exist. Evolution does not prove that God does not exist. At worst all it can prove is that the creation stories in Genesis are allagory and not litteral truth. But most reasonable Christians already know that.
As for athiests using evolution to prove God does not exist - some try. But so what? People use God to justify mass murder. Does that make God wrong? No, it just shows that people will use whatever tools they can find for whatever purposes they need.
The ability to make choices is freewill. We have known for a long time that circumstances of our place of birth, life experiences, brain structure, etc... impose limits on the choices we can make (A person born in Ancient Greece could no more choose to take a vacation in Miami than you or I could choose to ski Mons Olympus) we still can make choices among the available options present in our lives. And that is all that freewill is: the ability to choose going to work on the last weekday before Christmas (like I did) or take the day off (like the my coworker did).
Value? That movie was unending crap from the first frame to the last. The story was the worst gibberish I've seen outside of a Troma picture (and they are trying to be stupid). All it had was special effects and over-choriographed sword fights. Those do not make a good movie. What those make is eye-candy. Distraction from the fact that there is nothing below the surface.
The fact of the matter is that Lucas got lucky with Star Wars (the first one). The rest of movies introduced every newer plot holes that invalidated the first film. And the prequals? Garbage.
Let's take a look at the Lucas track record, shall we?
THX-1138 - Not a great movie. Good ideas. No budget. Kinda boring. But worth seeing.
American Graffiti - His best movie. Based on his life in Fresno, CA.
Star Wars - His most popular movie. Good for its day. Has not aged well, however. (Not a good idea to go ten years between viewings. You start to notice the weak points.)
The 'Star Wars' Holiday Special - A portant of things to come. The horror! The horror!
Empire Strikes Back - Some argue that it's the best of the originals. I disagree due to the contradictions with Star Wars that were introduced. Technically it's better than Star Wars.
Raiders Of The Lost Ark - My favorite of his, and the best movie he made with Spielberg.
Return of The Jedi - Could have been great. Took the easy (and incestiously revolting) way out of the love triangle he setup in Empire. Loses major points for Vader being such a Nancy.
Temple of Doom - Well, he only wrote the story, so he only gets half the demerits for this steaming pile of garbage.
Ewok (anything) - Why does Lucas hate us?
Willow - Jesus, Mary and Joseph. I can't tell who should be more ashamed by this turd, Lucas for writing it or Ron Howard for directing it.
Last Crusade - Not really his movie, but it could have been great. Instead it's just okay.
Episode 1 - The man has lost his mind. Hundreds of millions of dollars for what amounts to a bedtime story he told to his kids. A bucket of vomit splashed across all that was Star Wars.
Episode 2 - For a brief moment there was hope of a good story in there. But just for a moment. It was pissed away on lame dialog, over-done special effects and the worst love story ever written.
Episode 3 - This movie did have one positive thing going for it: after it was done the pain was over. The patient was dead and we can all go home and have punch and pie and try to forget about it.
You'll note that I left out Howard The Duck and everything else that he was only the producer or executive producer on. all he did with those is write the checks to get them made.
I live in a popular tourist destination in America and one thing I've learned is that most of my counrtymen are complete morons. Wait. That's an insult to morons. People ask me, and I'm not making this up, "Do you'all take American money?" Or say assinine things like "You'all speak really good English!" No shit, asshole. This is the USA!
Now, imagine these knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers scared out of their puny, defective little minds and you have some idea of the average American. Too scared and stupid to think straight.
More than just juice is heat. AC/DC converters create a lot of heat. That heat needs to be removed from the server farm. Air conditioning can cost as much as the server farm to run. Move to a single AC/DC converter located in a vented part of the building (or an external unit like those industrial air conditioning units)and you reduce your heat management costs by a large factor.
Libertarianism is unworkable and deeply flawed. It, like Communism, relies on something that does not exist: the perfect human being. In order for Libertariansim to work all people must work towards their own elightened self interest. The problem is that's not how humans work. We (and I'm speaking in terms of populations more than particular people) are selfish, needy, dishonest and mean.
Libtertarianism also relies on corporations acting in their own best, long-term self interest. We've all see that modern corporations don't look any further down the road than their next quaterly statement and in every place where there is not sufficient regulations they abuse the system and their employees to the limits of human endurance. That chemical spill in India was the result of an American chemical company locating a plant in a country with lax environmental and safety laws and operating their plant at those minimum specs in order to save money.
To blindly trust businesses is folly at best and suicide at worst. The only time businesses care about you is when you spend your money on their products and services. Never forget that.
I grew up in a Libertarian household. None of them remain Libertarians.
I don't have anything positive to contribute, but I'd like to just say that that is a facinating post. To see your brain coming back online must be an unsettling and intense experience.
On my new AMD PC is a 15-year old IBM Model M PC/AT keyboard. I bought it at the local state surplus office. It's had a very hard life. It has outlived four PCs while in my posession. And if it weren't for all new system being USB, it would probably outlast the next four PCs I buy.
That keyboard is the best $50.00 I ever spent on computer parts.
Or how about our libraries revealing what books we check out?
Actually, most libraries go out of their way to destroy your checkout history. One common library checkout systems only keeps track of the person who has that particular copy at that moment. The only way to look up the book is by its inventory number. Searching by patron name returns no result. Once the book is checked in the record is modified saying that the library has it. The result is that there is no history of who had what books or what books you have read.
Libraries are notorously at odds with the PATRIOT Act and have risked loss of federal funds to do what they can to protect patron privacy.
Disclosure: My wife works for a local public library.
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You assume that they can cure diseases of an alien species and / or that they have conquered death. Why would either of these be true?
Why do people have this need to elevate aliens to near godlike status.
Or we could be the first in our neck of the woods to make it this far. Or, everyone else is afraid of Berserkers. Or they've been extinct for a million years already. People forget the time issue with Drake's equation: it's not just how many other intelligent species might be out there, it's how many intelligent species might exist right now.
There aren't that many ways to perceive the world around you. There are a limited number of information vectors out there.
And SETI is searching a narrow range because the frequencies outside that range get garbled in the interstellar noise.
I'm sorry you lack the capacity to separate the actions of a government from the ethnicity of the majority population of the nation that it governs.
Yeah, well, uh, just keep your Power Gloves off her, pal, huh?
I have a battered copy of that in my server room.
And then there is the subject of this article: which is not the whys and wherefores, but the histories of evolution. They are not reevaluating the means of evolution, just the details of the timetables of when things happened. Much like a police officer looking at a crime scene and sorting out what happened when, discovering a new piece of evidence or talking to a new witness and adjusting the description to fit the facts.
And the problem is what? It's NOT a child. It's a machine. If it's sentient then it is, for all intents and purposes, a living being. If it is not, then it's just a machine. Why not take out your darker fantasies on a machine? It's safer, for all concerned, than taking them out on a living person.
Right now people write stories, draw pictures, render images, etc... of their fantasies. The sickest things you can imagine. Should those be illegal? Why?
The bottom line is that people will have their fantasies whether they hide them in their heads or express them in art or act them out in role-playing (or farking dolls). You can't stop that. What you can do is give these people a safe place to vent their feelings.
Who says there's a meaning to life? We want there to be one. Doesn't mean there is one. The fundamental purpose in life can be summed up thusly: "Successfully reproduce before something eats you". Do that and you've done what you are here for. Now, we as human beings can add more to that. We can, because of our intelligence, give our lives a "greater" purpose. What that purpose is is up to each of us as individuals. If you want your life to be spent helping those less fortunate than yourself do it. If you want your life to be spent eating as many donuts as you can go for it. It's your life to fritter away im whatever way suits you best.
The chances are better for random chance than for God. We have proof the universe exists. We can see it, smell it, measure it, predict its behavior, etc... We can do none of these things for God. Add to this the fact that all previous religions and gods in history are mere myths and the chances of God being real drops even lower. Why is the current myth any more real than the previous ones? Other than you were raised to believe in this one?
I was gravely disapointed by Were Rabbit (there goes my "friend" status with MsGeek :( ). It was well made, technically, but I could have done without all of the Benny Hill-esque jokes in it. It felt like they were trying too hard to make it adult enough for the parents in the audiance.
More like fascist Italy. Except for teh whole "trains on time" thing. Bush isn't smart enough to be a new Hitler. More like el Duce's idiot cousin. But otherwise you are pretty on target.
What I want to know is what are they really looking for? Does anyine think that terrorists, and by that I mean the ones smart enough to plan and carry out an attack of substance, are going to buy that 1,000 tons of fertalizer on their credit cards? A truck rental, sure, they have no choice, but explosives, ammunition and whatnot? No. Terrorsim, like the drug trade, is a cash and cary environment.
So, if terrorists are not their real target, who is? What are they looking for? What do they really want to know? How much data mining are they going to employ and to what purpose? These are the questions that make me uneasy.
Sure, some of you argue, this isan't all that big of a deal. Your records aren't really private. How about stepping back and looking at the big picture. Look at all of the other "non-private" records they want access to sans warrant: telephone records, email exchanges, web logs, library records, bookstore purchases, etc... This is just another in a long line of data mining projects.
At the risk of Godwinning my post, my government is starting to remind me of foul, loathesome, corrupt Evil Empire we spend decades toppling in the Cold War. The though of teh KGB being reborn in my country sickens me.
Talk about an agenda. Oh, boy.
Galileo's ideas were heavily supressed by the Church of the day because they showed that the universe was not as described in the Bible. He was forced to recant his theories because they were a direct threat to the power of the Church.
"Evolutionists" are not athiests and are not out to prove God does not exist. Darwin himself was a devout Christian who beleived that he was discovering the means that God was employing to make life functional on this world. He never tried to say that God does not exist. Evolution does not prove that God does not exist. At worst all it can prove is that the creation stories in Genesis are allagory and not litteral truth. But most reasonable Christians already know that.
As for athiests using evolution to prove God does not exist - some try. But so what? People use God to justify mass murder. Does that make God wrong? No, it just shows that people will use whatever tools they can find for whatever purposes they need.
The ability to make choices is freewill. We have known for a long time that circumstances of our place of birth, life experiences, brain structure, etc... impose limits on the choices we can make (A person born in Ancient Greece could no more choose to take a vacation in Miami than you or I could choose to ski Mons Olympus) we still can make choices among the available options present in our lives. And that is all that freewill is: the ability to choose going to work on the last weekday before Christmas (like I did) or take the day off (like the my coworker did).
*blink* ... *blink*
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA *gasp* HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA *gasp* HAHAHAHAHA
Value? That movie was unending crap from the first frame to the last. The story was the worst gibberish I've seen outside of a Troma picture (and they are trying to be stupid). All it had was special effects and over-choriographed sword fights. Those do not make a good movie. What those make is eye-candy. Distraction from the fact that there is nothing below the surface.
The fact of the matter is that Lucas got lucky with Star Wars (the first one). The rest of movies introduced every newer plot holes that invalidated the first film. And the prequals? Garbage.
Let's take a look at the Lucas track record, shall we?
- THX-1138 - Not a great movie. Good ideas. No budget. Kinda boring. But worth seeing.
- American Graffiti - His best movie. Based on his life in Fresno, CA.
- Star Wars - His most popular movie. Good for its day. Has not aged well, however. (Not a good idea to go ten years between viewings. You start to notice the weak points.)
- The 'Star Wars' Holiday Special - A portant of things to come. The horror! The horror!
- Empire Strikes Back - Some argue that it's the best of the originals. I disagree due to the contradictions with Star Wars that were introduced. Technically it's better than Star Wars.
- Raiders Of The Lost Ark - My favorite of his, and the best movie he made with Spielberg.
- Return of The Jedi - Could have been great. Took the easy (and incestiously revolting) way out of the love triangle he setup in Empire. Loses major points for Vader being such a Nancy.
- Temple of Doom - Well, he only wrote the story, so he only gets half the demerits for this steaming pile of garbage.
- Ewok (anything) - Why does Lucas hate us?
- Willow - Jesus, Mary and Joseph. I can't tell who should be more ashamed by this turd, Lucas for writing it or Ron Howard for directing it.
- Last Crusade - Not really his movie, but it could have been great. Instead it's just okay.
- Episode 1 - The man has lost his mind. Hundreds of millions of dollars for what amounts to a bedtime story he told to his kids. A bucket of vomit splashed across all that was Star Wars.
- Episode 2 - For a brief moment there was hope of a good story in there. But just for a moment. It was pissed away on lame dialog, over-done special effects and the worst love story ever written.
- Episode 3 - This movie did have one positive thing going for it: after it was done the pain was over. The patient was dead and we can all go home and have punch and pie and try to forget about it.
You'll note that I left out Howard The Duck and everything else that he was only the producer or executive producer on. all he did with those is write the checks to get them made.I live in a popular tourist destination in America and one thing I've learned is that most of my counrtymen are complete morons. Wait. That's an insult to morons. People ask me, and I'm not making this up, "Do you'all take American money?" Or say assinine things like "You'all speak really good English!" No shit, asshole. This is the USA!
Now, imagine these knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers scared out of their puny, defective little minds and you have some idea of the average American. Too scared and stupid to think straight.
Makes me want to vomit.
More than just juice is heat. AC/DC converters create a lot of heat. That heat needs to be removed from the server farm. Air conditioning can cost as much as the server farm to run. Move to a single AC/DC converter located in a vented part of the building (or an external unit like those industrial air conditioning units)and you reduce your heat management costs by a large factor.
What scares me is that I know what everything in your post is except Parrot.
Libertarianism is unworkable and deeply flawed. It, like Communism, relies on something that does not exist: the perfect human being. In order for Libertariansim to work all people must work towards their own elightened self interest. The problem is that's not how humans work. We (and I'm speaking in terms of populations more than particular people) are selfish, needy, dishonest and mean.
Libtertarianism also relies on corporations acting in their own best, long-term self interest. We've all see that modern corporations don't look any further down the road than their next quaterly statement and in every place where there is not sufficient regulations they abuse the system and their employees to the limits of human endurance. That chemical spill in India was the result of an American chemical company locating a plant in a country with lax environmental and safety laws and operating their plant at those minimum specs in order to save money.
To blindly trust businesses is folly at best and suicide at worst. The only time businesses care about you is when you spend your money on their products and services. Never forget that.
I grew up in a Libertarian household. None of them remain Libertarians.
Bugs Bunny: And so, having re-redisposed of the monster, exit our hero through the front door, stage right.
I don't have anything positive to contribute, but I'd like to just say that that is a facinating post. To see your brain coming back online must be an unsettling and intense experience.
Thank you for sharing this.
My number is lower than yours, newbie!
On my new AMD PC is a 15-year old IBM Model M PC/AT keyboard. I bought it at the local state surplus office. It's had a very hard life. It has outlived four PCs while in my posession. And if it weren't for all new system being USB, it would probably outlast the next four PCs I buy.
That keyboard is the best $50.00 I ever spent on computer parts.
Actually, most libraries go out of their way to destroy your checkout history. One common library checkout systems only keeps track of the person who has that particular copy at that moment. The only way to look up the book is by its inventory number. Searching by patron name returns no result. Once the book is checked in the record is modified saying that the library has it. The result is that there is no history of who had what books or what books you have read.
Libraries are notorously at odds with the PATRIOT Act and have risked loss of federal funds to do what they can to protect patron privacy.
Disclosure: My wife works for a local public library.