The new definition for the word "addiction" is the same as the old word for "habituation".
No. You can have a habit for something that does no objective harm to you. But when YOU yourself realize that something is bad for you (like, apparently, you noticed that smoking is bad for you) and yet you STILL choose to continue the practice -- then you're addicted.
OK, what is the new word for physical addiction, like with heroin or alcohol, where you can die from not getting your drug?
It's not a "new word" -- this effect has always been called "chemical dependence". I don't know what vocabulary the unwashed masses use, but in all the years of my medscape subscription (15 now? wow.) I've never heard chemical dependence referred to as "physical addiction".
Of course every slashdotter knows that joe sixpack tends to mis-use jargon. Quite horribly, in fact. And when you correct him, he'll insist that "it was always called that way".
I've watched more people wate more time on "an addiction" to collegiate sports, celebrity gossip, cricket, football, or just shopping than online anything. And yet these folks are considered normal for spending hours every night researching their fantasy sports teams (not just online, magazines, books, go to Amazon.com and look it up) and solid hours every weekend watching games. But that's normal. They're seeing their fair share of ads for Budweiser, so it's all good. But if you spend a few hours nights and weekends online playing games with friends, well, you're not seeing your share of advertisements, so that's obviously an addiction.
The distinction is fairly simple, really: is there someone who objectively admits that watching college football is bad for them? That it hurts them? That they're starting to lose sleep or jeopardizing their employment over it?
And how many WOW players say just that?
That's the very meaning of "addiction": that there's something that you'd judge objectively to be bad for you but that you do not want to stop or curtail even though you judge it as bad for you. All those smokers who say "yeah, it kills you" and in the same breath claim "I can stop any time I want"? Addicted. Because they do not want to stop an activity that they themselves judge as bad for them.
Addiction does NOT mean "someone/something somehow forces me to do this". It means "I, myself, am continuing to choose to do this even though I, myself, understand this to be harmful for myself". Every addict is always in the drivers seat. They can always choose to stop whatever it is they're doing. For every addict it is true that "they can stop any time they want". But they don't want to. Which is exactly what addiction is all about.
So why do the republicans continue to claim that there is a social security problem? That claim is based on a prediction of declining numbers of taxpayers in the productive age bracket forty years out.
They claim to predict not only how many people there will be 10 years down the road but also how many children those people will have such that they can make a statement about the number of 30-year-olds in 2045. And half of slashdot swallows it hook, line and sinker. And yet the same people tell us that there's unchecked population growth. Somewhere there's a disconnect here...
just because it can pass the turing test does not mean the machine demonstrates real intelligence! in fact, just what is intelligence / conciousness? if we can't define it, how can we hope to produce it?
Those of us who are actually capable of passing a Turing test ourselves (we're a minority amongst humanity) have no problem defining our terms and no problem allowing a machine to either meet or fail to meet any one particular definition. It ain't terribly difficult.
Claiming that you are unable to define the term "intelligence" but then turning around and asking whether someone who meets a certain, particular, well-understood definition of that term is "really" intelligent shows a lack of grasp what definitions are FOR. And is certainly not buying you points in your attempt to pass the Turing test yourself...
As memory cells become smaller they WILL become sensitive to ionizing radiation.
I have heard this claim before and I have yet to see any kind of credible argument for this. The ionization energy loss of a charged particle penetrating matter is proportional to the distance travelled -- so a smaller memory cell may need less energy to "flip" it, but it will also receive less energy by a passing particle. Thus if the aspect ratio (thickness to length) doesn't change, I see no particular reason why smaller transistors should be "more sensitive" to cosmics. To the contrary: a smaller area means they're harder to hit by a passing particle.
As far as I can tell, cosmic rays deposit so-much energy, with such-much probability, per time, per area, for a given slab of silicon -- and making the slab thinner only reduces the energy deposit.
If we keep the thickness constant, we just hit smaller targets. So instead of one bit-flip per week on our 1MB chip, we now get one bit-flip per week on our 1GB chip (which has the same area as the 1MB chip but smaller transistors).
Is there some kind of credible source for the claim that smaller transistors somehow lead to greates sensitivity to cosmics? (And no, I do not consider any kind of claim by anybody in any kind of journal to be "a credible source" if it is merely regurgitating the same claim without somehow backing it up).
But in each case, you will need to have control of at least $100M to get the ideas to market.
A modern oil rig costs a billion dollars. $100M is certainly available as venture capital in various places in the US -- IF you have a real product to show. Which you don't. As can be easily seen in your next sentence:
(100 fold return of investment no problem - over 10 years).
If you had ever talked to ONE venture capitalist in your life, you'd know that you don't have to show profit -- if you can break even in year three or four and show that there's a healthy growth potential under the hood, you can get VC money. If the $100M buys a $50M company and provides the operating capital for a couple years after which the company grows until it is a $250M company at year five then the VCer sells his share and has made his money back and then some; even if the company never actually shows a profit on the books.
That is the problem. The financial world wants a return next quarter, not in five years.
If you had ever talked to ONE VCer in your whole life, you'd know that five years is the typical time span they operate on. Seven is stretching it, but if you can convince a VC firm of high likelihood of payoff in year seven, this kind of money is still available.
If you had any kind of product to bring to the market you'd have talked, at least talked to one, at least one VC firm at some point in your life, ever. Once. But of course like half of slashdot you have nothing whatsoever to offer -- you suffer from tertiary engineers syndrome and you will spend the rest of your life feeling smugly superior to those of us out here who are actually studying the fields in which we're actually making contributions to actual progress because of some imagined fantasy-progress you imagine being able to make.
The viewpoint is going to come, most likely, from where you grew up. I live on the eastern coast of the US, and *nobody* has a basement. The likelihood of flooding is so high that a basement is a pure waste.
We do, however, have attics, and often they get finished off.
When i lived in Kansas i noticed the opposite of all of this. Most places have a basement, almost nobody has a finished attic.
The reasons why seem pretty obvious.
...and in much of California, where there are Earthquakes to contend with, neither basements nor attics are particularly popular as they're a bit of a hazard (or otherwise quite expensive to do such that they aren't.).
On the other hand, there's little enough rain that we tend to leave our cars at the curb and store our junk in the garage instead. So it all works out in the end.
The above, btw, comes from someone who actually likes patents as a general idea. I'm all for rewarding people who research new stuff, create new technologies, and/or invent new products. By all means, we need more of that stuff, and it's only fair to reward the people who invested massive money and manpower into researching it.
Up to here, I agree. If you put in a good day's worth of work, you should get a good day's worth of pay out of it. Heck, if you can negotiate a decent deal, you can get two or even three days pay out of your one day's work.
But if you want to get paid next year, you should have to work next year. My plumber has to. My dentist has to. My lawyer has to. My barber has to. Why should YOU get to retire on the one good day of work you put in ten years ago?
In fact, at the risk of allienating a good chunk of slashdotters, I'm even for more of that in software. If that's what it takes to get more people into researching brand new stuff, I'm all for it.
As we can see in the real world, the opposite happens: If people can have one clever idea in their entire life and then expect never to have to work again because of that one clever idea, then they are expressly NOT interested in ever having a second clever idea. Ever.
99.9% of patents[1] are granted not to people who think of it as a reward for contributing to the good of society, but to lazy parasites who imagine they should get paid in perpetuity because they figured out one trivial and obvious thing that they managed to obscure enough to squeeze it through the patent system.
Thereby not only removing themselves from the innovative pool, but also everybody else who is working anywhere in the vicinity of the same field (and who cannot innovate in this direction any more because it's now patented). Patents are the greatest impediment to human innovation ever invented.
[1] You are hereby challenged to sift through the ~two hundred thousand (and rising) patents issued in the US alone every year and produce ONE per year for the last five years that actually protects some truly new, innovative technology that actually improves humanity in some fashion as to warrant paying the inventor for the rest of his life (which is what a patent amounts to, these days) -- as opposed to being yet another utter triviality with the term "on the internet" slapped onto the end.
Now we have two claims. Yours and mine. They cannot both be true. This raises the question whether you're able to support you claim in any way, shape and form. Evidence? Reasoning? Something?
(Hint: "everybody I know has one" is neither evidence nor reasoning.)
Say what? That's ri-damn-diculous. The "bread and butter of science" IS finding things that deviate with our predictions.
No, it is not. What distinguishes science from all other endeavors is that we put what we think we know to the test. That we go out of our way to make a new tool to look for the subtle little effect nobody has ever seen that should be there if our understanding is right.
Finding new and unexpected things is cool -- but it is not science. No science is needed to find stuff you never expected. As a matter of fact it happens all the time to all kinda people.
Sure, we do other experiments to see if what learn, and think is true from a new novel result is correct, but that's not the exciting part.
The bread and butter of any endeavor is rarely "the exciting part".
If all we did was poke at things and record how they behave in accordance with our expectations, we might as well close up shop, write everything down in a book (call it, oh, a Bible maybe), and do something else.
The diametrical opposite is actually true. If all you care about is finding new and unexpected things, you merely need to limit your expectations by what can be found in some kind of book (call it, oh, a Bible maybe) and you'll be surprised all day long. If you want to do science, you'll have to be willing to take the contents of your book, test each and every prediction against what you see in reality, and change the book whenever you find disagreement.
I'm just trying to think of how I would react, knowing that a computer was going to take 3 years to finish a task.
Can you imagine staring at the status bar for that?
Now given that the speed of computers supposedly doubles every 18 months, instead of building a computer now and let it number-crunch for three years, you could wait 18 months while letting your money earn interest; then buy the then biggest computer and do the same computation in half the time...
I for one am hoping they find something totally unexpected with the LHC.
As cool as that would be (and I think it is actually quite likely) I tend to be more impressed by a new observational tool that finds exactly what was predicted then one that is used to "look at new weird stuff". Serendipitous discovery is good, but observational confirmation of what you think you know is the bread and butter of science.
It is not retarded to believe in something that cannot be proven.
Evolution is an absolute, 100% uncontrovertible certainty. "Believing" in something that is absolutely certain is retarded.
YOU are retarded.
Mathematics [...]
...does not play a role here anywhere. Stop trying to distract from YOUR absurd lie that evolution is "just a theory". We're not talking about mathematics here, we're talking about (capital R) Reality.
Hell, the existence of anybody outside my own head is impossible to prove.
And with these words, you have proven conclusively that you are a brainless, mindless automaton. Mentally retarded, as I've said all along.
You talk to any scientist worth his salt and ask him what he knows to be absolutely certain and i highly doubt he'll say much at all.
Everything you believe is based off huge assumptions
I do not "believe" in anything whatsoever. Contrary to lying pigs like you I am entirely comfortable to say "I know" when I know and "I don't know" when I don't. In the first case there's no room for any kind of "belief" because there is knowledge and in the other case holding true something not known to me as true would be a lie.
Which is of course your standard (and only) mode of operation.
That line doesn't even touch on the subject of mutation and the creation of new species from an already existing one.
Nobody has said a word about "the creation of new species" or any such nonsense. People were talking about evolution.
Calling evolution a "theory" is a lie, plain and simple. Just as it is a lie to call gravity a theory. It isn't. It is an absolute 100% uncontrovertible FACT. To be sure, there is such a thing as a "theory of gravity" (as a matter of fact there have been several in human history) but even if that theory were found to be false tomorrow, gravity would still be a FACT. An absolute certainty. And this paragraph remains valid if the word "evolution" is substituted for "gravity".
I do believe in evolution,
Then you are mentally retarded. Just like someone who says "I believe in gravity".
though it still cannot be proven.
This is a lie.
You are a liar.
Thats why science is constantly evolving.
Science cannot possibly be evolving when you retarded lying pigs keep denying the existence of evolution itself.
Evolution is not a fact (at least, not according to science) because it is untestable at this time.
This is a lie.
Every human is capable of observing for themselves, by themselves that mutations exist. Every human is capable of observing for themselves, by themselves that selection happens.
Mutation+Selection=Evolution -- that's all there is to it. There's nothing else left that needs to be tested.
Evolution is an absolute, 100% uncontrovertable certainty, beyond any past, present or future doubt because it is a tautology: Whatever survives, survives; whatever dies, dies.
That's it. That's all there is to it.
Only absurd, insulting liars like yourself would try to deny a tautology.
all college students, faculty and staff had.edu addresses, as do many other indidivuals that work for places like Hospitals or Doctors offices that are actually owned by a university. Just in the town I work for there are 3 colleges, and two hospitals that are owned by one of those colleges. That's literally thousands of people with.edu email addresses that are not professors.
...which immediately brings us back to the problem of identity on the net. Forget.edu emails -- there is currently no mechanism whatsoever for me to demonstrate that I am actually myself. That I did go to Caltech that I do have a PhD and that I can in fact speak on rocket science. As opposed to the lazy highschooler over there who imagines he cam make up stuff and should have the exact same voice in the internet.
The net as a whole (and wikipedia in particular) have often been called "democratic", since they do give everybody a voice. But that's not by design -- it is by complete lack of any kind of design. Even if we all agreed tomorrow that all physics content on the net (or at least on wikipedia) should be generated by people which physics PhDs, there's no mechanism in place, no mechanism proposed, no mechanism even suggested anywhere that would allow us to actually verify someone's credentials.
Heck, there's no such mechanism IRL anywhere: you meet a guy at a party and he says he's an expert on civil-war history. How do you test that claim? I can ask him to prove his age by showing me his driver's license but there's no such thing as a "I have published peer-reviewed articles" license. Forget for a moment about the obvious possibility of faking and forging any one credential and misreading it and all the wonderful problems we all understand about driver's licenses -- they still exist and they can still be used to show my name and date-of-birth. Absolute no comparable ID exists to show any kind of qualification in any one field. I have a pretty piece of paper somewhere in the closet that says "...bestowed upon..." and "...by the regents of the University of..." but that ain't an ID in that I cannot carry it around, I cannot give anybody access to it, it is not even possible to verify it in any obvious way. My employer made a copy of the paper, but there's no mechanism for them to contact my university and ask "hey, did such-n-such dude ever study there?".
If the ID problem can ever be solved Knol or online-encyclopedias are a miniscule, trivial side-aspect of the whole thing. [sorry for the ramble -- pet pevee]
Slashdot Mirror
No. You can have a habit for something that does no objective harm to you. But when YOU yourself realize that something is bad for you (like, apparently, you noticed that smoking is bad for you) and yet you STILL choose to continue the practice -- then you're addicted.
OK, what is the new word for physical addiction, like with heroin or alcohol, where you can die from not getting your drug?It's not a "new word" -- this effect has always been called "chemical dependence". I don't know what vocabulary the unwashed masses use, but in all the years of my medscape subscription (15 now? wow.) I've never heard chemical dependence referred to as "physical addiction".
Of course every slashdotter knows that joe sixpack tends to mis-use jargon. Quite horribly, in fact. And when you correct him, he'll insist that "it was always called that way".
The distinction is fairly simple, really: is there someone who objectively admits that watching college football is bad for them? That it hurts them? That they're starting to lose sleep or jeopardizing their employment over it?
And how many WOW players say just that?
That's the very meaning of "addiction": that there's something that you'd judge objectively to be bad for you but that you do not want to stop or curtail even though you judge it as bad for you. All those smokers who say "yeah, it kills you" and in the same breath claim "I can stop any time I want"? Addicted. Because they do not want to stop an activity that they themselves judge as bad for them.
Addiction does NOT mean "someone/something somehow forces me to do this". It means "I, myself, am continuing to choose to do this even though I, myself, understand this to be harmful for myself". Every addict is always in the drivers seat. They can always choose to stop whatever it is they're doing. For every addict it is true that "they can stop any time they want". But they don't want to. Which is exactly what addiction is all about.
Actually, according to Wikipedia the number has tripled in the last six months.
If the laser energy was spread over 50cm+ it wouldn't do a whole lot of damage.
Future: Way too many.
So why do the republicans continue to claim that there is a social security problem? That claim is based on a prediction of declining numbers of taxpayers in the productive age bracket forty years out.
They claim to predict not only how many people there will be 10 years down the road but also how many children those people will have such that they can make a statement about the number of 30-year-olds in 2045. And half of slashdot swallows it hook, line and sinker. And yet the same people tell us that there's unchecked population growth. Somewhere there's a disconnect here...
Those of us who are actually capable of passing a Turing test ourselves (we're a minority amongst humanity) have no problem defining our terms and no problem allowing a machine to either meet or fail to meet any one particular definition. It ain't terribly difficult.
Claiming that you are unable to define the term "intelligence" but then turning around and asking whether someone who meets a certain, particular, well-understood definition of that term is "really" intelligent shows a lack of grasp what definitions are FOR. And is certainly not buying you points in your attempt to pass the Turing test yourself...
I have heard this claim before and I have yet to see any kind of credible argument for this. The ionization energy loss of a charged particle penetrating matter is proportional to the distance travelled -- so a smaller memory cell may need less energy to "flip" it, but it will also receive less energy by a passing particle. Thus if the aspect ratio (thickness to length) doesn't change, I see no particular reason why smaller transistors should be "more sensitive" to cosmics. To the contrary: a smaller area means they're harder to hit by a passing particle.
As far as I can tell, cosmic rays deposit so-much energy, with such-much probability, per time, per area, for a given slab of silicon -- and making the slab thinner only reduces the energy deposit.
If we keep the thickness constant, we just hit smaller targets. So instead of one bit-flip per week on our 1MB chip, we now get one bit-flip per week on our 1GB chip (which has the same area as the 1MB chip but smaller transistors).
Is there some kind of credible source for the claim that smaller transistors somehow lead to greates sensitivity to cosmics? (And no, I do not consider any kind of claim by anybody in any kind of journal to be "a credible source" if it is merely regurgitating the same claim without somehow backing it up).
But in each case, you will need to have control of at least $100M to get the ideas to market.
A modern oil rig costs a billion dollars. $100M is certainly available as venture capital in various places in the US -- IF you have a real product to show. Which you don't. As can be easily seen in your next sentence:
(100 fold return of investment no problem - over 10 years).If you had ever talked to ONE venture capitalist in your life, you'd know that you don't have to show profit -- if you can break even in year three or four and show that there's a healthy growth potential under the hood, you can get VC money. If the $100M buys a $50M company and provides the operating capital for a couple years after which the company grows until it is a $250M company at year five then the VCer sells his share and has made his money back and then some; even if the company never actually shows a profit on the books.
That is the problem. The financial world wants a return next quarter, not in five years.If you had ever talked to ONE VCer in your whole life, you'd know that five years is the typical time span they operate on. Seven is stretching it, but if you can convince a VC firm of high likelihood of payoff in year seven, this kind of money is still available.
If you had any kind of product to bring to the market you'd have talked, at least talked to one, at least one VC firm at some point in your life, ever. Once. But of course like half of slashdot you have nothing whatsoever to offer -- you suffer from tertiary engineers syndrome and you will spend the rest of your life feeling smugly superior to those of us out here who are actually studying the fields in which we're actually making contributions to actual progress because of some imagined fantasy-progress you imagine being able to make.
...and in much of California, where there are Earthquakes to contend with, neither basements nor attics are particularly popular as they're a bit of a hazard (or otherwise quite expensive to do such that they aren't.). On the other hand, there's little enough rain that we tend to leave our cars at the curb and store our junk in the garage instead. So it all works out in the end.
Unfortunately, /. prohibits the uploading of pictures...
Up to here, I agree. If you put in a good day's worth of work, you should get a good day's worth of pay out of it. Heck, if you can negotiate a decent deal, you can get two or even three days pay out of your one day's work.
But if you want to get paid next year, you should have to work next year. My plumber has to. My dentist has to. My lawyer has to. My barber has to. Why should YOU get to retire on the one good day of work you put in ten years ago?
In fact, at the risk of allienating a good chunk of slashdotters, I'm even for more of that in software. If that's what it takes to get more people into researching brand new stuff, I'm all for it.As we can see in the real world, the opposite happens: If people can have one clever idea in their entire life and then expect never to have to work again because of that one clever idea, then they are expressly NOT interested in ever having a second clever idea. Ever.
99.9% of patents[1] are granted not to people who think of it as a reward for contributing to the good of society, but to lazy parasites who imagine they should get paid in perpetuity because they figured out one trivial and obvious thing that they managed to obscure enough to squeeze it through the patent system.
Thereby not only removing themselves from the innovative pool, but also everybody else who is working anywhere in the vicinity of the same field (and who cannot innovate in this direction any more because it's now patented). Patents are the greatest impediment to human innovation ever invented.
[1] You are hereby challenged to sift through the ~two hundred thousand (and rising) patents issued in the US alone every year and produce ONE per year for the last five years that actually protects some truly new, innovative technology that actually improves humanity in some fashion as to warrant paying the inventor for the rest of his life (which is what a patent amounts to, these days) -- as opposed to being yet another utter triviality with the term "on the internet" slapped onto the end.
...You realize that most houses have basements, [..]
No, they don't.
Now we have two claims. Yours and mine. They cannot both be true. This raises the question whether you're able to support you claim in any way, shape and form. Evidence? Reasoning? Something?
(Hint: "everybody I know has one" is neither evidence nor reasoning.)
No, it is not. What distinguishes science from all other endeavors is that we put what we think we know to the test. That we go out of our way to make a new tool to look for the subtle little effect nobody has ever seen that should be there if our understanding is right.
Finding new and unexpected things is cool -- but it is not science. No science is needed to find stuff you never expected. As a matter of fact it happens all the time to all kinda people.
Sure, we do other experiments to see if what learn, and think is true from a new novel result is correct, but that's not the exciting part.The bread and butter of any endeavor is rarely "the exciting part".
If all we did was poke at things and record how they behave in accordance with our expectations, we might as well close up shop, write everything down in a book (call it, oh, a Bible maybe), and do something else.The diametrical opposite is actually true. If all you care about is finding new and unexpected things, you merely need to limit your expectations by what can be found in some kind of book (call it, oh, a Bible maybe) and you'll be surprised all day long. If you want to do science, you'll have to be willing to take the contents of your book, test each and every prediction against what you see in reality, and change the book whenever you find disagreement.
Now given that the speed of computers supposedly doubles every 18 months, instead of building a computer now and let it number-crunch for three years, you could wait 18 months while letting your money earn interest; then buy the then biggest computer and do the same computation in half the time...
As cool as that would be (and I think it is actually quite likely) I tend to be more impressed by a new observational tool that finds exactly what was predicted then one that is used to "look at new weird stuff". Serendipitous discovery is good, but observational confirmation of what you think you know is the bread and butter of science.
Evolution is an absolute, 100% uncontrovertible certainty. "Believing" in something that is absolutely certain is retarded.
YOU are retarded.
Mathematics [...]...does not play a role here anywhere. Stop trying to distract from YOUR absurd lie that evolution is "just a theory". We're not talking about mathematics here, we're talking about (capital R) Reality.
Hell, the existence of anybody outside my own head is impossible to prove.And with these words, you have proven conclusively that you are a brainless, mindless automaton. Mentally retarded, as I've said all along.
You talk to any scientist worth his salt and ask him what he knows to be absolutely certain and i highly doubt he'll say much at all.And like all brainless, mindless automata, you imagine that all other people are just as brainless and mindless as you.
Everything you believe is based off huge assumptionsI do not "believe" in anything whatsoever. Contrary to lying pigs like you I am entirely comfortable to say "I know" when I know and "I don't know" when I don't. In the first case there's no room for any kind of "belief" because there is knowledge and in the other case holding true something not known to me as true would be a lie.
Which is of course your standard (and only) mode of operation.
A mode, that I don't engage in.
Nobody has said a word about "the creation of new species" or any such nonsense. People were talking about evolution.
Calling evolution a "theory" is a lie, plain and simple. Just as it is a lie to call gravity a theory. It isn't. It is an absolute 100% uncontrovertible FACT. To be sure, there is such a thing as a "theory of gravity" (as a matter of fact there have been several in human history) but even if that theory were found to be false tomorrow, gravity would still be a FACT. An absolute certainty. And this paragraph remains valid if the word "evolution" is substituted for "gravity".
I do believe in evolution,Then you are mentally retarded. Just like someone who says "I believe in gravity". though it still cannot be proven.
This is a lie.
You are a liar.
Thats why science is constantly evolving.Science cannot possibly be evolving when you retarded lying pigs keep denying the existence of evolution itself.
Of course you won't, since I'm proving my point and thus proving you to be a liar.
See what I did there?You avoided the post of someone pointing out the absurdity of your lies.
Rather typical, I'd say.
Whatever survives, survives. Whatever dies out, dies out.
The previous line presents a tautology.
The line also summarizes evolution.
Evolution is an absolute certainty because it is a tautology. Calling it a "theory" makes the speaker a liar.
EVERY description of how things work in science is a theory.
I am a scientist. Contrary to you, I know exactly what the words at my disposal mean.
Only an absurd, insulting liar like yourself would call a tautology a "theory".
This is a lie.
You are a liar.
This is a lie.
You are a liar.
Evolution is not a fact (at least, not according to science) because it is untestable at this time.This is a lie.
Every human is capable of observing for themselves, by themselves that mutations exist. Every human is capable of observing for themselves, by themselves that selection happens.
Mutation+Selection=Evolution -- that's all there is to it. There's nothing else left that needs to be tested.
Evolution is an absolute, 100% uncontrovertable certainty, beyond any past, present or future doubt because it is a tautology:
Whatever survives, survives; whatever dies, dies.
That's it. That's all there is to it.
Only absurd, insulting liars like yourself would try to deny a tautology.
Yes, there is. It is called General Relativity.
You are advised not to post about things you lack the basics of.
This is a lie.
You are a liar.
without being able to see the process in natureEverybody with eyes in their head can see evolution at work, all the time, many times a day. Just like gravity.
...which immediately brings us back to the problem of identity on the net. Forget .edu emails -- there is currently no mechanism whatsoever for me to demonstrate that I am actually myself. That I did go to Caltech that I do have a PhD and that I can in fact speak on rocket science. As opposed to the lazy highschooler over there who imagines he cam make up stuff and should have the exact same voice in the internet.
The net as a whole (and wikipedia in particular) have often been called "democratic", since they do give everybody a voice. But that's not by design -- it is by complete lack of any kind of design. Even if we all agreed tomorrow that all physics content on the net (or at least on wikipedia) should be generated by people which physics PhDs, there's no mechanism in place, no mechanism proposed, no mechanism even suggested anywhere that would allow us to actually verify someone's credentials.
Heck, there's no such mechanism IRL anywhere: you meet a guy at a party and he says he's an expert on civil-war history. How do you test that claim? I can ask him to prove his age by showing me his driver's license but there's no such thing as a "I have published peer-reviewed articles" license. Forget for a moment about the obvious possibility of faking and forging any one credential and misreading it and all the wonderful problems we all understand about driver's licenses -- they still exist and they can still be used to show my name and date-of-birth. Absolute no comparable ID exists to show any kind of qualification in any one field. I have a pretty piece of paper somewhere in the closet that says "...bestowed upon..." and "...by the regents of the University of..." but that ain't an ID in that I cannot carry it around, I cannot give anybody access to it, it is not even possible to verify it in any obvious way. My employer made a copy of the paper, but there's no mechanism for them to contact my university and ask "hey, did such-n-such dude ever study there?".
If the ID problem can ever be solved Knol or online-encyclopedias are a miniscule, trivial side-aspect of the whole thing. [sorry for the ramble -- pet pevee]