don't mix up the client and whatever they use to generate the torrent file. obviously whatever generates the torrent file is compatible enough to produce output that works in other torrent clients. this says nothing about what the blizzard client does with that compatible data. as i said i could write a client that reads a valid torrent file and just opens a connection to the tracker and sends spurious garbage, and looking at the torrent file would not enable you to figure out what my client did.
well, the torrent file is obviously compliant, but Blizzard's implementation of the protocol isn't.
the contents of a torrent file are pretty trivial, i could write a program that reads the contents of a torrent file, and then use that data inside my own implementation of the "torrent protocol" that just bombards the tracker's IP address with packets containing the string "this is a shit implementation of the torrent protocol".
that wouldn't stop people taking that perfectly valid torrent file and actually loading it in to a real bittorrent client and using it to actually download stuff.
so, in short, the fact it is a valid torrent file says nothing about the compatibility of blizzard's downloading protocol
you're missing the point. they're not talking about it being a place we could colonise, they're talking about it being a place where life may have been able to evolve, and the exciting prospects that holds in the future of research in this area.
If there are more people aware of free software, then perhaps there would be more pressure to produce free alternatives to proprietary drives and codecs.
ubuntu is making vast progress in the arena of raising awareness and usage of free software in the general public. In what way is it parasitic? Ubuntu runs at a loss, held up by shuttleworth's own money. For the first time ever, because of the work ubuntu have put in, I now feel the slightest twinges of comfort in recommending the use of linux to a non technical person.
Fair enough if the FSF want to be purist about their approach, but no one else is obliged to, and no one who is obeying the licensing terms of the software they distribute can ever be accused of being underhanded or parasitic.
it'd be a sickening waste if the first person on mars only went there for the personal glory. doesnt the prospect of simply going to mars vastly dwarf the triviality of fame?
yeah, i often think, if they ever changed the licence of apache, i'll just fork it, and devote every minute of my spare time learning how to maintain the codebase of a fully featured webserver. That should be really practical.
-being mugged on the way to the store
-getting run over crossing the road
-developing a brain haemorrhage, but not realising
-when you get home being so angry that your brain explodes
-pooing your pants
and any of number of horrible things that have fuck all to do with having a defective DVD, just like in your list.
If we have any eminent authorities here who want to show me to be some uninformed jackass, please answer for me this one single question.
See, the thing is, if your theory wasn't bunk, you wouldn't require an eminent authority to back it up. You would simply be able to present us with some links to credible science sources on the web.
Invoking a global conspiracy to explain the lack of acceptance for your theory, and just resorting to "prove me wrong" when backed into a corner is like having a giant neon "CRACKPOT" sign mounted on your head.
I have never denied evolution, but merely stated that it is incomplete and certain aspects of it are based on assumptions which are unprovable.
Yes but you are being disingenuous; you are insinuating that scientists only subscribe to an old earth because of dogma. You are basically casting unjustified doubt on evolutionary theory because it doesn't explain every single anomaly, and saying all scientists who don't acknowledge this conclusion are being dogmatic. Basically you are engaging in FUD.
What you don't seem to grasp is that there is much much more to the story than your handful of anomalous findings. You are ignoring all the evidence FOR an old earth, which grossly outweighs the one or two phenomena that seem to disagree (for which there are perfectly plausible explanations which can be explored scientifically to confirm or refute their validity, such as the Oort Cloud in regard to your comet complaint).
These crippling holes you think you understand in the theory of evolution simply DON'T EXIST. You are just parroting tired creationist falsehoods that have been debunked over and over.
We observe many things which Darwinian evolution can adequately account for, but there are also others which contradict it at worst or at best have it severely lacking
Completely untrue. Provide an example of what you think contradicts Darwinian Evolution.
First of all, Darwin's version of evolution was confined to the development of life once it exists
Yes, that's right. That is not a hole in the theory that is the scope of the theory. Darwin didn't sit down one day and decide "i know, i'll concoct a baseless hypothesis about where life came from, then spend the rest of my life looking for reasons to believe it". Without any kind of agenda, he made masses of empirical observations about the ancestry or certain animals and devised the theory of evolution to explain what he found. Darwinian Evolution is an explanation of the relationships between various life forms. That's it. The natural generation of life from lifelessness (abiogenensis) is an entirely different field, and none of the criticism levelled at abiogenesis can be used to discredit Darwinian Evolution because Darwinian Evolution does not rely on it. It relies on the evidence gathered by Darwin and every biologist since, which is an unimaginable mountain. Every creature on the earth descended from a common ancestor. Given the collosal amount of evidence that is considered an undisputable fact, much like the earth not being flat. Questions about the origin of that common ancestor are outside the realm of the theory of Evolution.
You seem to want the theory of evolution to be more than it is, just so that you can knock it down for failing at something it isn't trying to accomplish.
If a longer, bushier tail gives a squirrel a survival advantage, then squirrels with bushier tails will predominate in only a few generations. It doesn't have to take millions of years. However, if there is no tail at all and the tailless creature has been surviving just fine without one, there is no advantage to grow one for no reason whatsoever.
Only provided the circumstances of the creature didn't change. And you're assuming that being tailless is the starting state. And also you're making the mistake of think that changes have to be selected FOR. They only have to not be selected AGAINST.
Ants and other insects for example, are essentially unchanged since the first ants
Oh really? What "first ants?" There are thousands of different kinds of ants around today. Were they all around whenever you think life began? What evidence do you have to back this up?
Every human activity has certain underlying, often undefined or poorly defined assumptions. Some of these, such as Darwin's natural selection can be demonstrated, but others go against actual scientific knowledge based on observation and experiment.
All of these should have evaporated into space by now. To get around this never found birthplace of comets, something called the Oort Cloud has been theorized.
"get around". You are talking as if scientists started with a preconceived notion of the history of the universe and are busy cherry picking evidence to fit it, whilst rationalising away inconvenient evidence. ask yourself why would they do this? why would one day, some guy say, "i know, i'll decide the universe is 13billion years old for no particular reason and spend the rest of my life finding reasons to believe this".
the irony is that it is you that is cherry picking evidence to support your preconceived ideas. the reason scientists expect to find the oort cloud is because there is no viable alternative explanation. The explanation that the solar system is only a few thousand years old simply cant be right. This is because of all the other myriad evidence that you simply mustn't have bothered to acquaint yourself with.
You can hop around from one apparently anomaly to the next picking here and there without making yourself aware of the big picture, and compile yourself a nice list of reasons not to accept an old earth/evolution but if you do genuinely want to understand the reality of the situation you HAVE to read more than just creationist "refutations".
Evolution of course does have certain evidences, but by itself doesn't explain many facts of science.
You've got it totally backwards. Evolution explains MANY MANY MANY facts of science, and like every mature well established theory there is a proportionately tinier collection of as yet unexplained anomalies, which serve only a indicators for directions of refinement and progress. If all you do is acquaint yourself with the anomalies, then it's no wonder you have such a skewed perception of the reality of the situation.
Besides time-space and matter-energy, the universe, especially living things, contain vast amounts of information.
Information has never been demonstrated to arise from any combination of the above. Information is non-physical and distinct from the physical universe. There is NO other known source of information besides a mind or intelligence. Information interacts with the physical, in order to control physical entities, but is itself not subject to the constraints of physical quantities. Evolution falsely asserts that matter and energy give rise to information. This has never been demonstrated. The laws of physics are information and had to exist before time-space matter-energy did.
That is just a stream of gobbledegook. Do you even know what you are talking about? Where did you get this junk from? It's like saying there's no such thing as electricity because electrons have natural rhythm are made of cheese. It's just a mixture of gibberish and falsehoods. Don't you want to understand your own arguments?
Evolution is a reasonable way of interpreting many of these interactions. It is however insufficient by itself to account for all of the observations we make about the physical universe.
Well it isn't supposed to. It's supposed to account for the observations within its scope. You can't expect an explanation of biology to explain what causes gravity can you? That's what the theory of gravity and all the other theories are for. I assume you are making the standard creationist misrepresentation of calling the entire development of the universe "evolution" when at the same time, everyone else is talking purely about the common descent of all life on earth, thus muddying the issue and allowing you to lump in unresolved issues in other scientific disciplines with the handful of anomalies that constitute your entire understanding of biological evolution.
I notice that you haven't addressed any of the points in my previous post. All you've done is completely ignored everything i've said and hopped over to the next trinket on your store-bought charm bracelet of "damning refutations" thus totally proving my point.
hate to break it to you but the scientific determination of the age of the earth does not hinge solely on radiometric dating.
That's how we know radioactive decay has not changed rates in the past. The other factors used to determine the age of the earth all back it up. i suggest you just read the talkorigins website if want to actually be aware of the scientific basis for an old earth.
That's why scientists are so "dogmatic" about the validity of the theory of evolution. The mountains and mountains of independent corroborating evidence from many sources that all paint a picture of what happened. You seem to be living in a bubble of abject ignorance of what evidence actually exists for and old earth/evolution.
Please for Baal's sake try to comprehend how science works: the theories are constructed to fit the evidence, then refined or possibly rejected in the face of further evidence. To reject a theory outright, the further evidence would have to totally trump all the preceding evidence. If you were aware of the stupendous abundance of independent evidence for evolution and an old earth, you would finally understand why scientists react "dogmatically" to evolution denial. In order to discredit evolution, you would have to produce evidence of such an unimaginably revolutionary and devastating magnitude that i defy anyone to even imagine what such evidence could consist of.
It's like thinking that one day we might find evidence that the earth is flat. It's just utterly inane.
These nitpicky little snipes at minor details that evolution deniers come out with are like finding a flake of loose plaster in a house and then deciding the house is about to fall down any second.
If you genuinely care about science and truth, please educate yourself. PLEASE.
Slashdot Mirror
foul stench, disgusting creatures....
no, that's the size of the installer. now run that installer and read how much disk space it says is required. "dude".
don't mix up the client and whatever they use to generate the torrent file. obviously whatever generates the torrent file is compatible enough to produce output that works in other torrent clients. this says nothing about what the blizzard client does with that compatible data. as i said i could write a client that reads a valid torrent file and just opens a connection to the tracker and sends spurious garbage, and looking at the torrent file would not enable you to figure out what my client did.
the contents of a torrent file are pretty trivial, i could write a program that reads the contents of a torrent file, and then use that data inside my own implementation of the "torrent protocol" that just bombards the tracker's IP address with packets containing the string "this is a shit implementation of the torrent protocol".
that wouldn't stop people taking that perfectly valid torrent file and actually loading it in to a real bittorrent client and using it to actually download stuff.
so, in short, the fact it is a valid torrent file says nothing about the compatibility of blizzard's downloading protocol
and i don't understand how that is on-topic
you can just copy what you want out of the profiles folder/mail store folder and paste it back in if you need to.
finally, someone with some actual insight.
also, you're a sneering prick.
i wonder if they are Cthu/Lunux Clutists?
name a package that is included on the CD that is not free software. all the non free stuff has to be downloaded through apt-get.
ubuntu is making vast progress in the arena of raising awareness and usage of free software in the general public. In what way is it parasitic? Ubuntu runs at a loss, held up by shuttleworth's own money. For the first time ever, because of the work ubuntu have put in, I now feel the slightest twinges of comfort in recommending the use of linux to a non technical person.
Fair enough if the FSF want to be purist about their approach, but no one else is obliged to, and no one who is obeying the licensing terms of the software they distribute can ever be accused of being underhanded or parasitic.
only if you file the patent first
it'd be a sickening waste if the first person on mars only went there for the personal glory. doesnt the prospect of simply going to mars vastly dwarf the triviality of fame?
given the number of people still running NT and 2k, i think you might be over dramatising some possible headaches.
yeah, i often think, if they ever changed the licence of apache, i'll just fork it, and devote every minute of my spare time learning how to maintain the codebase of a fully featured webserver. That should be really practical.
-being mugged on the way to the store -getting run over crossing the road -developing a brain haemorrhage, but not realising -when you get home being so angry that your brain explodes -pooing your pants
and any of number of horrible things that have fuck all to do with having a defective DVD, just like in your list.
See, the thing is, if your theory wasn't bunk, you wouldn't require an eminent authority to back it up. You would simply be able to present us with some links to credible science sources on the web.
Invoking a global conspiracy to explain the lack of acceptance for your theory, and just resorting to "prove me wrong" when backed into a corner is like having a giant neon "CRACKPOT" sign mounted on your head.
Yes but you are being disingenuous; you are insinuating that scientists only subscribe to an old earth because of dogma. You are basically casting unjustified doubt on evolutionary theory because it doesn't explain every single anomaly, and saying all scientists who don't acknowledge this conclusion are being dogmatic. Basically you are engaging in FUD.
What you don't seem to grasp is that there is much much more to the story than your handful of anomalous findings. You are ignoring all the evidence FOR an old earth, which grossly outweighs the one or two phenomena that seem to disagree (for which there are perfectly plausible explanations which can be explored scientifically to confirm or refute their validity, such as the Oort Cloud in regard to your comet complaint).
These crippling holes you think you understand in the theory of evolution simply DON'T EXIST. You are just parroting tired creationist falsehoods that have been debunked over and over.
We observe many things which Darwinian evolution can adequately account for, but there are also others which contradict it at worst or at best have it severely lacking
Completely untrue. Provide an example of what you think contradicts Darwinian Evolution.
First of all, Darwin's version of evolution was confined to the development of life once it exists
Yes, that's right. That is not a hole in the theory that is the scope of the theory. Darwin didn't sit down one day and decide "i know, i'll concoct a baseless hypothesis about where life came from, then spend the rest of my life looking for reasons to believe it". Without any kind of agenda, he made masses of empirical observations about the ancestry or certain animals and devised the theory of evolution to explain what he found. Darwinian Evolution is an explanation of the relationships between various life forms. That's it. The natural generation of life from lifelessness (abiogenensis) is an entirely different field, and none of the criticism levelled at abiogenesis can be used to discredit Darwinian Evolution because Darwinian Evolution does not rely on it. It relies on the evidence gathered by Darwin and every biologist since, which is an unimaginable mountain. Every creature on the earth descended from a common ancestor. Given the collosal amount of evidence that is considered an undisputable fact, much like the earth not being flat. Questions about the origin of that common ancestor are outside the realm of the theory of Evolution.
You seem to want the theory of evolution to be more than it is, just so that you can knock it down for failing at something it isn't trying to accomplish.
If a longer, bushier tail gives a squirrel a survival advantage, then squirrels with bushier tails will predominate in only a few generations. It doesn't have to take millions of years. However, if there is no tail at all and the tailless creature has been surviving just fine without one, there is no advantage to grow one for no reason whatsoever.
Only provided the circumstances of the creature didn't change. And you're assuming that being tailless is the starting state. And also you're making the mistake of think that changes have to be selected FOR. They only have to not be selected AGAINST.
Ants and other insects for example, are essentially unchanged since the first ants
Oh really? What "first ants?" There are thousands of different kinds of ants around today. Were they all around whenever you think life began? What evidence do you have to back this up?
Every human activity has certain underlying, often undefined or poorly defined assumptions. Some of these, such as Darwin's natural selection can be demonstrated, but others go against actual scientific knowledge based on observation and experiment.
Yeah like the idea that the unive
"get around". You are talking as if scientists started with a preconceived notion of the history of the universe and are busy cherry picking evidence to fit it, whilst rationalising away inconvenient evidence. ask yourself why would they do this? why would one day, some guy say, "i know, i'll decide the universe is 13billion years old for no particular reason and spend the rest of my life finding reasons to believe this".
the irony is that it is you that is cherry picking evidence to support your preconceived ideas. the reason scientists expect to find the oort cloud is because there is no viable alternative explanation. The explanation that the solar system is only a few thousand years old simply cant be right. This is because of all the other myriad evidence that you simply mustn't have bothered to acquaint yourself with.
You can hop around from one apparently anomaly to the next picking here and there without making yourself aware of the big picture, and compile yourself a nice list of reasons not to accept an old earth/evolution but if you do genuinely want to understand the reality of the situation you HAVE to read more than just creationist "refutations".
Evolution of course does have certain evidences, but by itself doesn't explain many facts of science.
You've got it totally backwards. Evolution explains MANY MANY MANY facts of science, and like every mature well established theory there is a proportionately tinier collection of as yet unexplained anomalies, which serve only a indicators for directions of refinement and progress. If all you do is acquaint yourself with the anomalies, then it's no wonder you have such a skewed perception of the reality of the situation.
Besides time-space and matter-energy, the universe, especially living things, contain vast amounts of information. Information has never been demonstrated to arise from any combination of the above. Information is non-physical and distinct from the physical universe. There is NO other known source of information besides a mind or intelligence. Information interacts with the physical, in order to control physical entities, but is itself not subject to the constraints of physical quantities. Evolution falsely asserts that matter and energy give rise to information. This has never been demonstrated. The laws of physics are information and had to exist before time-space matter-energy did.
That is just a stream of gobbledegook. Do you even know what you are talking about? Where did you get this junk from? It's like saying there's no such thing as electricity because electrons have natural rhythm are made of cheese. It's just a mixture of gibberish and falsehoods. Don't you want to understand your own arguments?
Evolution is a reasonable way of interpreting many of these interactions. It is however insufficient by itself to account for all of the observations we make about the physical universe.
Well it isn't supposed to. It's supposed to account for the observations within its scope. You can't expect an explanation of biology to explain what causes gravity can you? That's what the theory of gravity and all the other theories are for. I assume you are making the standard creationist misrepresentation of calling the entire development of the universe "evolution" when at the same time, everyone else is talking purely about the common descent of all life on earth, thus muddying the issue and allowing you to lump in unresolved issues in other scientific disciplines with the handful of anomalies that constitute your entire understanding of biological evolution.
I notice that you haven't addressed any of the points in my previous post. All you've done is completely ignored everything i've said and hopped over to the next trinket on your store-bought charm bracelet of "damning refutations" thus totally proving my point.
That's how we know radioactive decay has not changed rates in the past. The other factors used to determine the age of the earth all back it up. i suggest you just read the talkorigins website if want to actually be aware of the scientific basis for an old earth.
That's why scientists are so "dogmatic" about the validity of the theory of evolution. The mountains and mountains of independent corroborating evidence from many sources that all paint a picture of what happened. You seem to be living in a bubble of abject ignorance of what evidence actually exists for and old earth/evolution.
Please for Baal's sake try to comprehend how science works: the theories are constructed to fit the evidence, then refined or possibly rejected in the face of further evidence. To reject a theory outright, the further evidence would have to totally trump all the preceding evidence. If you were aware of the stupendous abundance of independent evidence for evolution and an old earth, you would finally understand why scientists react "dogmatically" to evolution denial. In order to discredit evolution, you would have to produce evidence of such an unimaginably revolutionary and devastating magnitude that i defy anyone to even imagine what such evidence could consist of.
It's like thinking that one day we might find evidence that the earth is flat. It's just utterly inane.
These nitpicky little snipes at minor details that evolution deniers come out with are like finding a flake of loose plaster in a house and then deciding the house is about to fall down any second.
If you genuinely care about science and truth, please educate yourself. PLEASE.
"Fine, decide it's not worth it, either dispense with the service or graciously move to a different service."
that's what i did.
"But why be petty about it and call them names?" becuase i feel like it, what are you my mother?
well, i'm sure they'd rather i give them £12, but in any case i moved to avoid the fee, rather than just to spite yahoo.
i do work for free actually. asshole!
assholes.
sorry, i mean "only one metric"