Verisign lawyers are really good. They managed to convince the judge of the original case that domain names are somehow "intangible" and Verisign can not be held responsible for the very service they sell. So I can send them a letter authorising the transfer of "slashdot.org" to Mr. William Gates III and Verisign will happily comply.
Maybe it is all for a greater good. If it holds maybe other intangible goods like future contracts and stock options can be so tranfered without much fuzz. We can them start redistributing Enron executives fortunes to Enron employees, for instance...
If its velocity is constant, when it dies in 2020 Voyager will have travelled less than a light-day from Earth. In the grand scheme of things, unless it really collides with something there is very little chance it will ever be noticed.
What I was saying is that there should be one instaler, downloadable as freenet.zip, freenet.rpm and freenet.tgz that would install everything needed for Freenet access and configure the user browser to use it.
I think that to leave the development stage and enter the userbase sphere, Freenet will need to be not only stable, fast and secure, it will need to be easy to install and use too.
I believe what it lacks most is some kind of "FreeZilla" browser - an all-encompassing package with a friendly, known interface. The package should install Freenet infrastructure and all tools necessary for publication and browsing.
I believe that something like this is in place Freenet would be ready for a population explosion...
Such an unbelivable display of ignorance on energising the synergies while leveraging the brand-awareness among the propesct client base shouldn't go unpunished.
It is always good to hear from fellow warriors in the the ancient and bloody crusade agaisnt the NIH syndrome.
People are so quick to dismiss money and effort already expended, specially by others. Marketing and technology people, in one of the few issues they fight side by side, also seem to like the sense of power and control a in-house development project gives you. So any defect in a piece of technology is enlarged, all good points forgotten when you want to sell you petty adventure to the board.
One year down the road, when the board is in everybody's necks about ROI and other little corporate details, you can almost believe all that blood and fear will teach people a lesson. But no, in the next project or in the next company you will see the same people adapting their reasons to the new scenario.
Even if Gould is far from uncontroversial, I am certainly prepared to concede to his (and your) ideas seriousness and importance. From all I (we) know, it all may well have happened the way he describes, all of a sudden (beware, kids, when reading this - "all of sudden" here is not what you may think).
But even punctuated equilibrium will usually require time to occur (in the same way winning in the lotery may require one, many or an infinite number of trials). So my insistence that time should be important.
Anyway, you probably know I was not exactly arguing against Gould. As I said elsewhere, a scientific theory is as good as the amount of undertanding it gives us about the past, present and future state of world. If a present theory is wrong no serious scientist should never hesitate to adapt, rework or throw it away, as the case may be.
Please notice I never stated the amount of time necessary for a monkey to produce Hamlet. I never even stated how many monkeys I would employ in the task. Nor do I care. I said "given enough time", whatever it may be.
But also notice that typing monkeys and evolving molecules organisms are completely different phenomenon. Your final jump from "proving" you would need 72 times the age of the Universe for a monkey to type a string to concluding that evolution could not have happened is amusing but false and logically wrong. Unless of course you can come with exact figures on the possibilities involved in eveolving from nothing to human (and, naturally, have this figures peer-reviewed and accepted by the scientific community).
The fact that the visible evolution is there to be seem, no matter the amount of time you and I think necessary for it to occur. Unless you are willing to give room for extra-scientific data (gods, alliens). These may well have happened, but while we have no proff of those I prefer to keep trying with the data in hand.
Look, parameters of a theory, any theory, are not a matter dogma. There is no sitting evolution pope who now and then will speak ex-cathedra about the new evolutionary truths.
The "right" age of the Universe is as subjected to change as everything else in science. And when I say everything I mean everything. No principle, no equation, no inference is free from facing the hard evidence.
That is why scientists do not use expressions like "never make" and "never will".
As for your specific claim, there are so many other factors involved in making a monkey into a man that I believe you should study the "evil" scientific texts involved before we can discuss this matters in a meaninful way.
"Chaos" here means just that the temperature in every point of the system is the same. It is the physical equivalent of Fukyoama's "End of History".
But you point to the right direction. Entropy cannot be analised locally. The presence or absence of Earth and its warring primates means nothing in the cosmological scale.
If we agree this is a side-issue in respect to planetary evolution, having all existing mass concentrated in a singular abstract point seems pretty ordered to me.
We don't know why it would explode into what we see. No scientist ever claimed to know, either. It may have been a god, it may have been some factor we can't know, it may be that things are just thus. But from a second after the explosion onwards to now we have a jolly good working picture.
Necessary conditions and causal factors
on
Genome
·
· Score: 2
No. A vast quantity of time is a necessary conditon for an evolutionary process to produce meaningful results. It does not cause evolution, it only allows it to exist given the right factors (the same way, for instance, that the existence of a fertile female body does not "cause" a baby to be born - it is just a necessary condition).
What I mean is that given an evolutionary quantity of time, all factors will eventually have the opportunity to combine themselves in the ways necessary for evolution to occur, no matter how "improbable" the requested configuration is.
Fear not, the closed system in question is going relentlessly into chaos. It will take billions upon billions of years, but the Universe will eventually manage to fullfil the theory...
Entropy can not apply to small subsets of the closed system. In the case of evolution, the System is the whole Universe, as cosmological events can and do affect us everyday (and this discussion assumes we can call this mess we are "order").
The final origin does not need to enter this discussion right now, because while local evolution was in some way "caused" by the Big Bang, the facts are so far apart in time and space that it would be the same as trying to analyse the human digestion in terms of the atoms composing the granparents of the human in question (in other words, I am discussing evolution, not the ultimate possibility of the existence of an extra-physical cause somewhere in the far past).
"total leap of faith that random chance could produce beings with even the complexity of a bacterium"
There is no faith involved and very little randomness. Statistics is a harsh mistress. Given enough time anything that can happen, will happen. People will cross steel walls. Monkeys will write Hamlet. Pigs will fly.
When you consider the magnitude of the time involved, it is absolutely not surprising that evolution took place. It is also not surprinsing that the brain of the short-lived creatures developed under this evolutionary process is utterly unprepared to deal with the quantities involved. Hence some of us will always find it "impossible".
Do we really want the digital Babel fish?
on
Speaking in Tongues
·
· Score: 2
Do you remember what the Guide says? I quote: "Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation".
Do we really want Pierre Parisian to be able communicate his exact feelings to Lin Chinese?
I usually leave whatever sharing program I am using on all the time. Gnucleus, for instance, is extremelly well-behaved, but unfortunately too few people have been using it lately.
But I can't afford to let WinMX slow down my machine while I am working on it. So I will probably follow your advice and let it run alone during the lonely RIIA-less winter nights of the southern hemisphere...:)
Is it my machine (PIII 900 - 256 MB) or is WinMX is major memory/CPU eater? Or should I configure it in some other way than the default?
But are the flights free as in freedom and beer?
on
Penguin Airlines
·
· Score: 2
Can I take one of their flights, remake the flight plan and have it deliver me elsewhere? Or still better, can I take one of their planes and just fly it myself wherever I want? What about the ticket source? Can I print my own ticket? Can I print tickets to anyyone who wants it? Do they give away free beer during th flight?
If the answer to these questions is a Yes, then I can believe "Tux' is more than just a name for this new air taxi service which brings convenient, economical, time-saving air travel via the shortest route between home and destination.".
But how do you prove that your address is on the opt-out list?
That one is simple. A (many) trusted third party may mantain the database and reply to inquires. The spammer is required to buy this service (the spammer pays for queries). Anyone can freely add his/her email to the database. We gain the added benefit of adding cost to the spam business.
Slashdot Mirror
Verisign lawyers are really good. They managed to convince the judge of the original case that domain names are somehow "intangible" and Verisign can not be held responsible for the very service they sell. So I can send them a letter authorising the transfer of "slashdot.org" to Mr. William Gates III and Verisign will happily comply.
Maybe it is all for a greater good. If it holds maybe other intangible goods like future contracts and stock options can be so tranfered without much fuzz. We can them start redistributing Enron executives fortunes to Enron employees, for instance...
If its velocity is constant, when it dies in 2020 Voyager will have travelled less than a light-day from Earth. In the grand scheme of things, unless it really collides with something there is very little chance it will ever be noticed.
What I was saying is that there should be one instaler, downloadable as freenet.zip, freenet.rpm and freenet.tgz that would install everything needed for Freenet access and configure the user browser to use it.
I think that to leave the development stage and enter the userbase sphere, Freenet will need to be not only stable, fast and secure, it will need to be easy to install and use too.
You can call the operator and hear the fightening truth: dUd3, w3 0wN j00...
I believe what it lacks most is some kind of "FreeZilla" browser - an all-encompassing package with a friendly, known interface. The package should install Freenet infrastructure and all tools necessary for publication and browsing.
I believe that something like this is in place Freenet would be ready for a population explosion...
A whole-arm Beowulf cluster of those...
Such an unbelivable display of ignorance on energising the synergies while leveraging the brand-awareness among the propesct client base shouldn't go unpunished.
It is always good to hear from fellow warriors in the the ancient and bloody crusade agaisnt the NIH syndrome.
People are so quick to dismiss money and effort already expended, specially by others. Marketing and technology people, in one of the few issues they fight side by side, also seem to like the sense of power and control a in-house development project gives you. So any defect in a piece of technology is enlarged, all good points forgotten when you want to sell you petty adventure to the board.
One year down the road, when the board is in everybody's necks about ROI and other little corporate details, you can almost believe all that blood and fear will teach people a lesson. But no, in the next project or in the next company you will see the same people adapting their reasons to the new scenario.
Even if Gould is far from uncontroversial, I am certainly prepared to concede to his (and your) ideas seriousness and importance. From all I (we) know, it all may well have happened the way he describes, all of a sudden (beware, kids, when reading this - "all of sudden" here is not what you may think).
But even punctuated equilibrium will usually require time to occur (in the same way winning in the lotery may require one, many or an infinite number of trials). So my insistence that time should be important.
Anyway, you probably know I was not exactly arguing against Gould. As I said elsewhere, a scientific theory is as good as the amount of undertanding it gives us about the past, present and future state of world. If a present theory is wrong no serious scientist should never hesitate to adapt, rework or throw it away, as the case may be.
Please notice I never stated the amount of time necessary for a monkey to produce Hamlet. I never even stated how many monkeys I would employ in the task. Nor do I care. I said "given enough time", whatever it may be.
But also notice that typing monkeys and evolving molecules organisms are completely different phenomenon. Your final jump from "proving" you would need 72 times the age of the Universe for a monkey to type a string to concluding that evolution could not have happened is amusing but false and logically wrong. Unless of course you can come with exact figures on the possibilities involved in eveolving from nothing to human (and, naturally, have this figures peer-reviewed and accepted by the scientific community).
The fact that the visible evolution is there to be seem, no matter the amount of time you and I think necessary for it to occur. Unless you are willing to give room for extra-scientific data (gods, alliens). These may well have happened, but while we have no proff of those I prefer to keep trying with the data in hand.
Look, parameters of a theory, any theory, are not a matter dogma. There is no sitting evolution pope who now and then will speak ex-cathedra about the new evolutionary truths.
The "right" age of the Universe is as subjected to change as everything else in science. And when I say everything I mean everything. No principle, no equation, no inference is free from facing the hard evidence.
That is why scientists do not use expressions like "never make" and "never will".
As for your specific claim, there are so many other factors involved in making a monkey into a man that I believe you should study the "evil" scientific texts involved before we can discuss this matters in a meaninful way.
"Chaos" here means just that the temperature in every point of the system is the same. It is the physical equivalent of Fukyoama's "End of History".
But you point to the right direction. Entropy cannot be analised locally. The presence or absence of Earth and its warring primates means nothing in the cosmological scale.
If we agree this is a side-issue in respect to planetary evolution, having all existing mass concentrated in a singular abstract point seems pretty ordered to me.
We don't know why it would explode into what we see. No scientist ever claimed to know, either. It may have been a god, it may have been some factor we can't know, it may be that things are just thus. But from a second after the explosion onwards to now we have a jolly good working picture.
No. A vast quantity of time is a necessary conditon for an evolutionary process to produce meaningful results. It does not cause evolution, it only allows it to exist given the right factors (the same way, for instance, that the existence of a fertile female body does not "cause" a baby to be born - it is just a necessary condition).
What I mean is that given an evolutionary quantity of time, all factors will eventually have the opportunity to combine themselves in the ways necessary for evolution to occur, no matter how "improbable" the requested configuration is.
Fear not, the closed system in question is going relentlessly into chaos. It will take billions upon billions of years, but the Universe will eventually manage to fullfil the theory...
Entropy can not apply to small subsets of the closed system. In the case of evolution, the System is the whole Universe, as cosmological events can and do affect us everyday (and this discussion assumes we can call this mess we are "order").
The final origin does not need to enter this discussion right now, because while local evolution was in some way "caused" by the Big Bang, the facts are so far apart in time and space that it would be the same as trying to analyse the human digestion in terms of the atoms composing the granparents of the human in question (in other words, I am discussing evolution, not the ultimate possibility of the existence of an extra-physical cause somewhere in the far past).
"total leap of faith that random chance could produce beings with even the complexity of a bacterium"
There is no faith involved and very little randomness. Statistics is a harsh mistress. Given enough time anything that can happen, will happen. People will cross steel walls. Monkeys will write Hamlet. Pigs will fly.
When you consider the magnitude of the time involved, it is absolutely not surprising that evolution took place. It is also not surprinsing that the brain of the short-lived creatures developed under this evolutionary process is utterly unprepared to deal with the quantities involved. Hence some of us will always find it "impossible".
Do you remember what the Guide says? I quote: "Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation".
Do we really want Pierre Parisian to be able communicate his exact feelings to Lin Chinese?
I usually leave whatever sharing program I am using on all the time. Gnucleus, for instance, is extremelly well-behaved, but unfortunately too few people have been using it lately.
But I can't afford to let WinMX slow down my machine while I am working on it. So I will probably follow your advice and let it run alone during the lonely RIIA-less winter nights of the southern hemisphere...:)
Is it my machine (PIII 900 - 256 MB) or is WinMX is major memory/CPU eater? Or should I configure it in some other way than the default?
Can I take one of their flights, remake the flight plan and have it deliver me elsewhere? Or still better, can I take one of their planes and just fly it myself wherever I want? What about the ticket source? Can I print my own ticket? Can I print tickets to anyyone who wants it? Do they give away free beer during th flight?
If the answer to these questions is a Yes, then I can believe "Tux' is more than just a name for this new air taxi service which brings convenient, economical, time-saving air travel via the shortest route between home and destination.".
Maybe be they are aware of something you are not telling us...
But how do you prove that your address is on the opt-out list?
That one is simple. A (many) trusted third party may mantain the database and reply to inquires. The spammer is required to buy this service (the spammer pays for queries). Anyone can freely add his/her email to the database. We gain the added benefit of adding cost to the spam business.
I checked it. No luck.
He takes it into consideration. It is silly even so.