You can of course water down the "intelligent design" claims until they don't mean that much anymore, but originally the term was used in contrast to natural evolution (including natural selection). "intelligent design" implies that someone had a specific design in mind when he/she/it started designing. Such a property however has not even been postulated in the religious books as far as I can recall.
Therefore, what you really want to call such an argument is called "directed evolution", not "ID".
Epigenetics does in general not change or mutate genes(*). At least the most common examples for epigenetics are cases where a gene's activity has been increased or decreased, which can be explained by molecules attaching to the DNA. The study is talking about evolution, hence mutation, and not about epigenetics.
(*)Of course, someday someone will find a rare example where epigenetics actually changes the mutation rates of genes.
My understanding of the slashdot summary is that what you are saying is exactly the point of the study or at least the point that the author of the slashdot blurb wanted to make. No idea why someone labelled this with "intelligent design" as that means no evolution at all.
Brillant people are more prone to be independent thinkers, because they have experienced being smarter than others and thus having to think for themselves..
I know the US patent office has given up on this, but they are supposed to not grant obvious patents, and doing anything on pc/internet/touchpad that has been done on paper/pc/touchscreen(yes, they existed before Apple) before most of the time sounds pretty obvious, especially when you consider that patents are usually formulated in legal language designed to stake a claim as broad as possible and as devoid of technical information as legal.
On one hand, if you read claim 1 (the base claim), Apple actually spent effort on designing their own jack, which apparently has a special connector that creates a second circuit that is used for detection.
On the other hand, the technical contribution seems to be a bit on the easy side, considering that the actual detecting circuit in figure 3 shows a circuit that is probably obvious to anyone schooled in designing circuits, though not to me.
Considering that it is very unlikely that someone swiping a finger across a touchscreen achieves a movement that is 100% horizontal and 0% vertical, it is obvious that any solution of the problem would tolerate a certain amount of vertical movement, and this is what that patent claim is about.
Also, the invention of input gestures is not as novel as you seem to believe, because the patent was filed 2008, while for example the video game Black and White had gestures in 2001. Okay, it was mouse gestures, but there is no big difference to a touch screen regarding movement.
"My (48-year old Thai) girlfriend starts work at 6am and gets off at 6pm. She insists that means she works thirteen hours a day. It is amazing how incredibly dumb the average person is. "
Evidently I'm too dumb to follow a thread on slashdot.
What I really wonder about is the reason that the pigeons don't move elsewhere.
Is hygiene so important for them? Have they become oblivious to dangers by constantly exposing themselves to them (just look how close they come to humans in the city)?
Or do pigeons who became smart by escaping (there is one such in the video) lead the other unknowing pigeons there for sport?
Is it a mating ritual where the brave get all the girls?
Well in Java, there is RuntimeExceptions (meant to propagate up to the user, who can give it to support) and Exceptions.
You can handle Exceptions you can't handle by rethrowing them as a RuntimeException. RuntimeExceptions also do not need to be declared in the function signature.
Not that I do that often, I'm busy with PHP, where the exception handling is usually done like "Hey, you broke it!".
So, reading the article, a simulation lattice imposes a limit on the amount of energy that can be simulated.
Now some physicists wonder whether there is such a limit.
Well, look no more, we already know the limit because there are black holes, which effectively are a set of nodes in the lattice that are overworked and slow down time near themselves.
The only question is whether it applies to all kinds of energy, but since it applies to light, I guess the answer is yes.
There are many applications and games written in C/C++ that I love.
I also occasionally code in C - sometimes it is fun to use pointers and read/write files without chaining two or three objects.
There are however huge drawbacks to using C/C++. There is surely a full list somewhere, but for me currently the not-buying-point is the preprocessor.
The preprocessor allows conditional compilation of any file. Sometimes the file might do that, sometimes something different.
This means that it isn't practical to have pre-compiled modules (although I guess you could go the route of splitting your project into dozens of libraries). Thus, a very small file can require Gigabytes of memory to compile, because all the dependencies have to be pulled in, and represented in memory.
C is cool for learning how things work, but not good for making things work.
Slashdot Mirror
You can of course water down the "intelligent design" claims until they don't mean that much anymore, but originally the term was used in contrast to natural evolution (including natural selection). "intelligent design" implies that someone had a specific design in mind when he/she/it started designing. Such a property however has not even been postulated in the religious books as far as I can recall. Therefore, what you really want to call such an argument is called "directed evolution", not "ID".
Epigenetics does in general not change or mutate genes(*).
At least the most common examples for epigenetics are cases where a gene's activity has been increased or decreased, which can be explained by molecules attaching to the DNA. The study is talking about evolution, hence mutation, and not about epigenetics.
(*)Of course, someday someone will find a rare example where epigenetics actually changes the mutation rates of genes.
My understanding of the slashdot summary is that what you are saying is exactly the point of the study or at least the point that the author of the slashdot blurb wanted to make. No idea why someone labelled this with "intelligent design" as that means no evolution at all.
1. build reactor 2. decommision reactor 3. profit
Brillant people are more prone to be independent thinkers, because they have experienced being smarter than others and thus having to think for themselves..
It affects the male "valve" for peeing and can be benign although it is getting in the way after some years.
.. of a lower incidence of prostrate cancer in anyone drinking more of anything, including coffee? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23702886
I know the US patent office has given up on this, but they are supposed to not grant obvious patents, and doing anything on pc/internet/touchpad that has been done on paper/pc/touchscreen(yes, they existed before Apple) before most of the time sounds pretty obvious, especially when you consider that patents are usually formulated in legal language designed to stake a claim as broad as possible and as devoid of technical information as legal.
On one hand, if you read claim 1 (the base claim), Apple actually spent effort on designing their own jack, which apparently has a special connector that creates a second circuit that is used for detection. On the other hand, the technical contribution seems to be a bit on the easy side, considering that the actual detecting circuit in figure 3 shows a circuit that is probably obvious to anyone schooled in designing circuits, though not to me.
As you can read in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patentability
the US patent office pretends that one of the conditions for granting a US patent is non-obviousness.
Considering that it is very unlikely that someone swiping a finger across a touchscreen achieves a movement that is 100% horizontal and 0% vertical, it is obvious that any solution of the problem would tolerate a certain amount of vertical movement, and this is what that patent claim is about.
US american companies are promoting politicians with a kindergarten understanding of science, so that they can profit from that bullshit:
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/13/07/12/1645228/google-raises-campaign-funds-for-climate-change-denier
Also, the invention of input gestures is not as novel as you seem to believe, because the patent was filed 2008, while for example the video game Black and White had gestures in 2001. Okay, it was mouse gestures, but there is no big difference to a touch screen regarding movement.
.. because you forgot us slashdotters.
Sorry, was meant as a reply to:
"My (48-year old Thai) girlfriend starts work at 6am and gets off at 6pm. She insists that means she works thirteen hours a day. It is amazing how incredibly dumb the average person is. "
Evidently I'm too dumb to follow a thread on slashdot.
Come on, it is just a off-by-one error, which is common even in software written by above-average-smarts-persons.
And it is definitely smarter to write a bill for one hour of work when you worked from 6am to 6am than to go for no compensation.
Climate change also affects rotational speed, because it would move water in the form of ice on mountaintops down to sea level.
And strangely enough, it has 6*6*6 customer reviews right now ..
They are there every day, either the catfish are not as dangerous as the video makes them out to be, or I don't know.
You don't give toys to soldiers just to make them win their battles, but also to raise their morale and make them move into dangerous areas.
What I really wonder about is the reason that the pigeons don't move elsewhere.
Is hygiene so important for them?
Have they become oblivious to dangers by constantly exposing themselves to them (just look how close they come to humans in the city)?
Or do pigeons who became smart by escaping (there is one such in the video) lead the other unknowing pigeons there for sport?
Is it a mating ritual where the brave get all the girls?
see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt
Well in Java, there is RuntimeExceptions (meant to propagate up to the user, who can give it to support) and Exceptions.
You can handle Exceptions you can't handle by rethrowing them as a RuntimeException. RuntimeExceptions also do not need to be declared in the function signature.
Not that I do that often, I'm busy with PHP, where the exception handling is usually done like "Hey, you broke it!".
Ravensburger is a German company, so any English word is considered to be sufficiently exotic to be trademarked.
Remember that when the USA pushes next time for harmonization and enforcement of trademark laws in other countries.
.. enough said ..
Well, that is what happened in Fukushima Daichi 1.
All reactors switched off in reaction to the Earthquake.
Then the tsunami took the diesels out.
If they had a reactor that was up, and that was rigged to supply energy to the others, no meltdowns would have happened.
So, reading the article, a simulation lattice imposes a limit on the amount of energy that can be simulated.
Now some physicists wonder whether there is such a limit.
Well, look no more, we already know the limit because there are black holes, which effectively are a set of nodes in the lattice that are overworked and slow down time near themselves.
The only question is whether it applies to all kinds of energy, but since it applies to light, I guess the answer is yes.
There are many applications and games written in C/C++ that I love.
I also occasionally code in C - sometimes it is fun to use pointers and read/write files without chaining two or three objects.
There are however huge drawbacks to using C/C++.
There is surely a full list somewhere, but for me currently the not-buying-point is the preprocessor.
The preprocessor allows conditional compilation of any file. Sometimes the file might do that, sometimes something different.
This means that it isn't practical to have pre-compiled modules (although I guess you could go the route of splitting your project into dozens of libraries).
Thus, a very small file can require Gigabytes of memory to compile, because all the dependencies have to be pulled in, and represented in memory.
C is cool for learning how things work, but not good for making things work.