Posts by The Badger 105 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Dec 2007
[Yirrell as predicted: read the Bible (again), God did and does it all (again), here comes the misrepresentation of various scientific theories as a perverse Yirrell 2.0 mash-up (again)]
"As I said a long while ago, you folk do not understand Evolution or Christianity."
I'll happily wear the badge "Martin Yirrell says I don't understand evolution or Christianity", knowing what I now know about where this criticism is coming from.
"I'm afraid you won't understand the Bible unless you read it for yourself. Do us all a favour by keeping your ignorance on the subject to yourself."
Says the person who in response to the statement that, of the Bible, "there are several versions that don't agree" said, "Really? Are you sure about that? Have you ever read it."
Your use of contradiction as an arguing strategy wears thin. If you went to any serious venue of Bible study - in other words, not some Sunday School or whatever loud-but-uninformed sect you appear to have signed up for - and said that there isn't more than one version of the Bible out there, you'd be laughed off campus. I mean, are you even aware of why it was controversial that people translated the Bible to other languages? Did the whole Reformation business pass you by as well? And we're not even touching on all the source materials, the stuff which was discarded by various authorities, and the accepted view that the gospels were written up centuries after the events they were supposed to describe.
All this "just read the Bible and you will understand" stuff is like some kind of paranormal practitioner pretending to get messages from the dead or aliens by meditating or handling supposedly sacred objects. And yes, I did have to read the Bible many times over the course of my primary and secondary education - plenty of time I won't be getting back - but at least my educators did the honest thing and pointed out what a patchwork of different, contradictory works it is, particularly the New Testament. You're going to claim that "they are wrong" but at this point even the biggest Bible-literalist of all of those people has more credibility than you have on the matter.
"Then why can you not demonstrate it?"
Just read the actual literature, why don't you? I'm certainly not going to start regurgitating the literature in a comment box to someone who is just going to come back with some "oh but it isn't, according to me, that is" retort. Inform yourself on the matter, read articles on the subject, actually engage your brain and consider how it is that people can attempt to reason about organisms, diseases and so on. And not in the "ooh, God let them" sense, but in the sense that they can actually look at the details, consider the available knowledge on the subject, draw conclusions, predict outcomes.
It's as I noted in response to your "random events resulting in your mind" assertion, and I note that you won't go anywhere near that topic, would it not be interesting to understand how the mind works and the origin of cognitive disorders? Or is playing the God card the easy way out, even if it would make you look like a cruel person? To which I'm sure you'll parrot the "it's God's plan" line, meaning that any intellectual effort is unlikely to be forthcoming on reconciling the contradictions in your own belief system.
"Why would you think that the Pope was a Christian at all, let alone a mainstream one?"
Yeah, take a look at his CV. How did he get that job? Do you have a separate definition of "mainstream" as well, in your own personal English dictionary to complement your own special edition of the Bible?
"If you have any involvement in IT you would know that errors destroy information and a lot of effort goes into combating errors and if you knew anything about biology you'd know that mutations are errors."
You assume that genetic information is some kind of predefined message whose value is lost if it changes, but this is both a conveniently narrow definition of information *and* a misrepresentation of the science. In effect, you've provided a convenient set of erroneous definitions or analogues from which you then build up a "proof" which misrepresents what is actually being said. Only in your own little world does it make no sense. In fact, the triggering of mutations through a variety of methods which don't involve "intelligent input" have been used in plant cultivation to great success, but I expect some pantomime-level response from you which only serves to sustain your delusional worldview as it floats further away from observed reality.
But as I said before, you take the honest hard work of others, clip out some choice bits, assemble some distorted montage and then use it to trash the work you've plundered. Upon being personally dissatisfied with the most potent and detailed explanation of the biological world, you promote ignorance, intellectual and physical poverty. You surf atop the achievements of civilisation whilst condemning those achievements and the people who made them possible. What indeed would Jesus say about that?
"Then perhaps you ought to go back and read what I wrote."
Well, first you wrote this:
"Heaven does not equate to sky."
Then you wrote this:
"So in your vast knowledge of such you will be aware that the Bible talks of more than one heaven, the one where God dwells is the abode of spirits, not physical beings, and hence is equally not in a physical place."
Contrary to what you believe, the Bible is a compendium of a lot of different writings by a lot of different people, many of whom contradict each other, but various scriptures focus on the singular heaven and the very word for heaven in various languages corresponds exactly to that of the word for sky, even today. Now, you might argue that this was just a way to "sell" the religion to unbelievers (one of the nice ways, if you consider the catalogue of atrocities performed in the name of the religion), but for many people the correspondence was firmly established. Even today, the notion that God is located "up above" as we hear all the time in badly written popular music lyrics is still reflected in practices of worship and related behaviour.
Still, I'm not really that interested in reading what a bunch of people tens of hundreds of years ago (or somewhat less, given the translations that most people are reading) have to say on various matters related to the structure of the universe given the scientific knowledge actually available at the time but unknown to or ignored by such people, and given what we've learned, thanks to scientific advances, in the last few hundred years.
"You might want to consider that ToE postulates a series of random events resulting in your mind."
And why not? And would it not be interesting to know how the mind works, what the structure is, whether other organisms have similar structure in the brain, how that structure might have come about? Rather than to say that it has been "divinely designed" or whatever under-the-carpet nonsense that "creationism reloaded" might suggest. Would it also not be interesting to understand why people suffer from various disorders in brain function and how those disorders come about? Or would you rather suggest that the otherwise benevolent creator deliberately inflicts such things on people for whatever perverse reason conveniently invented by the clique of believers to project whatever arbitrary and frequently cruel "morality" they subscribe to?
"So demonstrate Evolution. That should help you understand how it happens."
There's a huge body of scientific work constantly documenting evolution. On the other side of the "debate" are people pushing their pretend science, putting on the white lab coat and mimicking their favourite stereotype of actual scientists.
"The fundementalists are the mainstream Christians."
Hardly, unless the Pope's masses are filmed against a green screen.
"As for flaws in Evolution, it has one massive flaw. There is no mechanism by which new information can be introduced to the genome."
This is just the usual quote-mining going on, combined with the classic creationist's misuse of the laws of thermodynamics. Look up MC Hawking if you promise not to get upset by the rude words.
"Errors destroy information and mutations are errors."
Yet another misrepresentation of the science, but then skimming off and misrepresenting the results of other people's hard work is what creationism is all about.
"The only thing that increases information is intelligent input."
Turtles all the way down again, or maybe up into heaven.
"If you really apply science to Evolution you will see that Evolution just cannot happen."
On the basis of what you consider to be science or on the basis of actual science? Yet more material showing why creationists should leave science and the science curriculum to the scientists.
"For what?"
Your refutation that "heaven" and "sky" weren't meant interchangeably in various scriptures.
"I see you know nothing about the history of science either."
Says the man who wrote, "If it weren't for Christians and their belief in a logical creation created by a logical God you wouldn't have science." The Christians you're presumably referring to merely advanced scientific understanding, albeit in significant ways, but that's what science is all about: building on the knowledge gained by those who came before. Darwin and friends weren't exactly the sole founders of science, but it's nice to see you recognise their contribution. Obviously, it's a shame that you more or less advocate overprinting all that knowledge with the single word "God" in all the textbooks.
"Ah, so you admit that people who aren't atheists can also be scientists."
Naturally. But those scientists don't let preconceived notions of the universe, written up from tribal knowledge, dominate their critical inquiries.
"Could it be that those Christians who are also scientists and who have looked at ToE and found it implausible will find your acceptance."
Here's the thing about science, Martin: it's not about which badge you're wearing or whether you support the same football team, prophet, spiritual leader, deity or whatever; it's not about "he's a Christian, too, so I believe in his work"; it's all about the results and whether those results stand up to cold, hard, objective scrutiny by people who say, "Yes, that helps us understand why that thing happens, and it helps us reason about when and how it might happen again."
Sadly for mainstream Christians (because their reputation gets soiled by a bunch of pig-ignorant fundamentalists) and for everyone else, the people doing all the shouting about supposed "killer flaws" in evolution - which itself indicates that they don't understand how science is done - are people whose "review" of evolution starts with quote-mining exercises and always has to end with some sweeping away of any kind of detail under God's carpet. You and Sideshow Bob Hitchen might regard such stuff as science, but it's pseudo-science if we're being extremely charitable. From what you've written, I don't think you're able to distinguish between the two.
"Ah, the modest Badger who knows it all."
Still waiting, Yirrell! Or could it be that you're yet another in a long line of people who likes to show off his bible without having much of a clue about the content?
"Time takes away information from the genome, it never adds it."
I know where you're going on this one, and at the end of this little cherry-picking excursion there are a few choice words from MC Hawking.
"If it weren't for Christians and their belief in a logical creation created by a logical God you wouldn't have science."
As science reveals more of how the universe works, the label which reads "it's God's work, don't worry about it" gets stuck to something else mankind wouldn't have known anything about had it been up to the creationists. But for the creationists it's turtles all the way down, each one claiming to represent the deity of choice.
Oh, and don't forget the scientific work done by people who just happened to be born into various other religions or belief systems, particularly the ones who actually provided much of the basis of what we actually regard as science. Or don't their contributions count?
"You've heard of the Bible? That is where God has told you."
I presume you're reading the original signed copy from your private collection, although since we're still waiting for that refutation of the whole heaven vs. sky correspondence, perhaps you only ever leaf through it for the pictures.
"Remember, theories come and go and science proves only one thing - that we know very little and understand even less."
And the neo-creationists want us to understand nothing at all. Exactly why their delusions should be kept as far away from the science curriculum as possible. Indeed, as far away from the classroom as possible, given the level of critical thinking on display here:
"When you stand before Him and He asks you what you have done with what He has given you, what will you tell Him?"
Surely any omnipotent deity wouldn't need to ask, but I imagine that any such entity, if bothered to consider such matters, would be more favourably disposed to people who tried to understand the universe than people who just chanted the same nonsense over and over again as if it meant something.
P.S. Amusing that "God" posting as an anonymous coward spells out the mainstream Christian view to the neo-creationists. Classy comment title, too.
"Imagine a lifetime spent in foolish denial of the only real truth whilst searching for answers only to find inconsistency and emptiness in half answers which only leads to more fruitless searching for a way to further deny the inevitable."
What is this? Some kind of retrospective of creationism?
This "their minds will be opened so that they will see what can be the only truth" nonsense is precisely why people don't want creationists and their friends anywhere near the science curriculum, because it's quite obvious that creationism, particularly the neo-creationism popular amongst the less serious sects of today, is all about telling people not to ask questions and to elevate ignorance to some kind of virtue - they'd be ripping pages out of textbooks (if not burning them) in no time in order to preserve the veneer of their "real truth".
P.S. It's hilarious to get a lecture about "half answers" given that creationists would have Jesus riding a dinosaur into Jerusalem if it were the only way to "stay in the game".
"The answer to the addendum question is genetics."
Which is *proper* science, Bob. But I suppose you'll now contradict yourself and insist that all the knowledge we have on that subject is peripheral and that "designers" (clearly your favourite word) actually don't take their clues from a scientific pursuit at all. As I said, if you're going to keep moving the goalposts, get some hints from the professionals - the grown-ups in the pantheon of religious groups - who have no problem squaring evolution with their religious beliefs.
"Sorry, but it is plain you do not have the faintest idea about either Evolution or Christianity."
If you're going to make claims like this, it looks better if you don't say things like "Creation destroys the argument for Evolution" since the grown-up Christian groups have been quite able to accept evolution alongside whatever creation beliefs they may have for quite some time. Indeed, I think I could probably name at least one vicar who could give you advice on the matter, should you be interested. ;-)
"At to God, no He doesn't grant wishes and no, Heaven does not equate to sky."
Actually, the whole "heaven" and "sky" correspondence is quite obvious in scripture translated to a number of languages. Feel free to cite the original to back up your assertion, though.
"The design answer covers both."
Nope, the "design answer" is just a label that covers up the hole in your knowledge, indicating that not only do you have no idea about what went on, but also that you have no intention of finding out.
"Only bigots I know are those who pretend to know things but in reality a 5 year old can expose the depth in short order."
Having your "answers" crack under the scrutiny of five year olds is clearly something you have a lot of experience with.
"A doctor needs to know sod all about the historic nature of all the forms of life that have existed only what works today and what doesn't."
And what works today, Bob, and how do we know it works? Angels whispering the answers into people's ears? Perhaps they can get you up to speed on all the other topics you've touched upon while they're in a talkative mood.
"Your first paragraph is way outside evolution and yes it is amusing to watch theoretical physicists jump through hoops trying to explain the inexplicable."
Yes, it's all magic isn't it, Bob? Others have issued appropriate responses to your pantomime-level argumentation, but your idea of what science is and how it contributes to your comfortable lifestyle seems to be stuck at the dress-up box. But then for creationists and neo-creationists, it's all about trying to redefine science as some kind of "science light" where you take away all the bits that give scientific pursuit any value or meaning and replace them with meaningless made-up filler that gives its practitioners that happy, warm feeling, letting them bask in their own ignorance, pretending that their special supernatural knowledge gives them the same level of insight as everyone else.
Watching the usual creationist's rejection of science is a bit like watching a Hollywood movie or series set in medieval times and having someone say, "But everyone had nice and clean white teeth, blemish-free skin, and great hair back then! Wouldn't it be cool to have been living back in that period?"
P.S. The arguably sad thing about this whole affair is that the spokesman in question may have been a run-of-the-mill Anglican, quite able to keep science and the spiritual domain separate, knowing that evolution doesn't threaten his own beliefs. In contrast, the simpletons who promote various brands of neo-creationism feel threatened by every new scientific announcement because their unsophisticated belief systems just can't adapt to any new information. Indeed, those people should just leave the heavy religious pontification to the Anglicans, who at least have a bit of experience in moving the goalposts without looking like foolish amateurs.
"scientific basis for creationism"
Science is all about attempting to not only describe the universe but also to use that knowledge to predict the behaviour of things in the universe. Looking at nature and saying, "Ooh! Deity XYZ made all this! Isn't it all wonderful stuff?" does not meaningfully describe nature, nor does it help us predict any subsequent events which may happen to the "wonderful stuff". If you start delegating everything to Deity XYZ then you lose all ability to rationalise about anything. You end up in a situation where if it rains and you roll around in the mud for a couple of hours and get sick, then shaking your fist at the sky and passing the buck on to Deity XYZ who was obviously angry at your "immoral" behaviour (so you pass it right back to yourself) is all you've got left.
"neither have much relevance to modern life"
Understanding biology beyond nursery school sing-alongs pretty much requires an exposure to evolution at some point. To reject perhaps the most powerful tool available to biological science means rejecting any chance of understanding how a range of biological mechanisms work and ultimately giving up on detecting, curing or treating a huge range of medical conditions. So we're quite clear on evolution's relevance.
Meanwhile, the relevance of creationism in modern life is limited strictly to understanding why anyone would seek to emit the kind of idiocy which dresses creationism up as science in the way that small children may dress up as doctors but are not, obviously, trained medical professionals, and which talks about "modern life" - enjoying all the scientific benefits of such, too - whilst advocating a pseudo-scientific toolbox that is so flimsy that had our societies adhered to such a backward set of beliefs, it wouldn't just have taken away the tools that permit such idiocy to propagate - it would have condemned us to medieval levels of misery.
But thanks for the BS, Bob. Don't forget to thank those generous scientists whose work let you live such a lifestyle of unhurried contemplation and let you share the fruits of that with the rest of the planet.
"I don't think anyone wants creationism taught in school science classes, but I do have to wonder at why we want to teach evolution in science classes."
Because it provides a useful understanding of the natural world and is highly relevant to anyone wanting to go on and have a career in the biological sciences. The mechanisms at work around evolution by natural selection are becoming increasingly important in the medical domain - it's not all about "drink this chemical and you get better" any more. Children who go on to pursue such careers will have their work cut out in higher education if exposed to an impoverished evolution-free school curriculum, and their contemporaries will hardly be able to make the rational decisions about scientific policy required of them as fully involved members of the electorate.
"Why not teach kids some useful maths, physics, biology or more recent history instead? Regardless of the truth, what is to be gained by telling children that they are an accident?"
With the latter question, it's hard to know whether you're betraying your own insecurity when confronted with a universe without some kind of "executive director", or whether you've reduced the outcomes to an oversimplistic "all or nothing" picture of the universe's behaviour where if no such "executive director" exists then everything must be just a orgy of randomness. What's wrong with the children seeking meaning in who and what they actually are?
"I can see why Christians get upset over evolution being taught in schools - they wouldn't want their children to miss out on living forever because some of some theory, but what are the evolutionists getting all het up about?"
The concern is that if people start to insist that stuff in nature takes place because of some magic or other whose workings shouldn't be open to inspection - that people should just accept it as a matter of faith and not dare to question it - then aside from the devastating effects on critical fields of endeavour like medicine with all the horrifying consequences on public health, life quality, mortality, and so on, it opens the door for lots of other things to be sealed off and stamped with some inscrutable magic incantation, with the end result being that instead of understanding the natural world, everyone ends up parroting nonsense to each other over countless generations and wondering why "the spirits are angry" at them.
"Then when the clarification came the next day, that he didn't mean teach creationism, but to explain the difference between it and science, I felt that it was a good idea."
I think most people were upset by a representative of the Royal Society entertaining the idea that creationism be discussed in science class (even if it is to explain why it has nothing to do with science), mostly because junior creationists might interpret that message as a green light to pester science teachers with frequent, intellectually-challenged interruptions about what various pieces of religious literature have to say on various subjects.
In other words, there are the guidelines for the teachers which tell them how to deal with the Genesis-botherers, and there's the message that one sends to the wider public. I think people were annoyed that the former message went out to a less discerning audience - the latter - with all the resulting potential for misunderstanding and manipulation with people with an axe to grind.
"As evidence, consider all the people who sought to create a society based on "scientific" principles: Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot -- 200 million dead in the last 100 years as a result of their evolutionary views."
Aside from the fact that the ideologies of the above dictators had nothing to do with science, it's historical fact that all of the above frequently promoted pseudo-scientific policy instead of scientific policy, leading to disastrous unintended consequences (for example, widespread famine and environmental damage in the Soviet Union and China) as well as bizarre Indiana Jones-style expeditions (Nazis heading off to Antarctica looking for magical oases). If any science got done, it was actually despite the respective regimes in numerous cases, although I don't doubt that people in all kinds of professions looked the other way in furthering their careers and not considering the applications of their work.
Of course, I don't expect anything better than the despicable mud-slinging as quoted above from creationists in their treatment of science and their lack of insight into what science is and what pseudo-science is. Meanwhile, it might be best to disregard things like film footage of priests blessing various Axis armoured vehicles during the Second World War, might it not?
"As a hard-core scientist I have no issue with presenting the evidence for each side and letting the kids decide."
Yes, but in a science class you should be presenting *scientific* evidence, not "my preacher/book says so" assertions which haven't had (and indeed, thanks to their goalpost-moving proponents, actively evade) any decent level of critical scrutiny. As I noted in the discussion around the Royal Society vicar resignation controversy, creationism in its most vocal, "reloaded" form seems to be about taking the hard work of scientists who genuinely want to understand the mechanisms in the universe, cherry-picking quotes which misrepresent the findings, and then telling everyone that they shouldn't bother because "it's all God's domain".
If you tell science pupils that science is all about giving up if something is too complicated to explain and sticking a "God" label on the whole thing instead, then you're not teaching science any more. That said, I wouldn't have a problem with people using creationism and its variants as non-examples of science in a kind of introduction to science, just as long as everyone understood that religion-fueled interruptions to the class would not be tolerated once the rest of the course got underway.
"The hardcore FOSS crowd want you to buy into their ideology, so they give you free stuff, MS want your dollars, so they give you free stuff. So what's the difference ? We get to choose between extortion or brainwashing, if you choose frame it in such extreme terms."
What nonsense! Nobody is asking for any ideological devotion when you download Free Software (to use the most ideologically loaded term of them all) - you can even produce proprietary software with Free Software developer tools. The only restrictions, when those tools are made available under a copyleft-style licence, are that you make the sources available when sharing the software with others. When did Microsoft last let anyone share the bulk of their software catalogue?
It's pure distortion to label as "brainwashing" a particular choice of licensing on the part of developers, especially when it actually encourages awareness of software licensing amongst users so that they know that it isn't as simple as "I got it without paying anything from [the man/my mates/bloke down the pub] - delete where necessary". If anything the brainwashing comes from those organisations who indiscriminately label content redistribution as "piracy" and who would rather Free Software went away.
"Dr Williams is clearly a deep-thinking man of considerable intelligence and learning, and polite to a fault, but Dawkins denounced Christ's miracles as "cheap parlour tricks" right to his face."
I wish I'd seen that. You should read Craig Brown's column in the Telegraph where he occasionally does parodies of the Archbishop of Canterbury's speeches/writings. Read "The Sun Has Got His Hat On: A Summer Commentary by Dr Rowan Williams" - it's hilarious!
To all the idiots writing that Debian only supplies GPL-licensed software, please get a clue and read the Debian licensing guidelines: http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
The reason why a special Debian-incompatible EULA for an application would be undesirable is that it would limit each recipient's ability to change and redistribute the application. Unless you're in the "shiny new gadget running something to look cool for a few weeks" demographic, the whole possibility of changing, fixing and sharing software is the main reason why you'd want to run a Debian-derived distribution in the first place. And if people thought it clever to put such an EULA on lots of other things, suddenly you'd have a plague of click-through dialogues containing lots of non-standard terms that you'd have to read through if you didn't trust the distributor or feel that you were somehow on the same page as them with regard to what you can and cannot do with the software.
A special note to the Theo de Raadt agitator who wrote about "linux whinners": the taking code from BSD/Solaris incident, as I recall, involved various kernel contributors who didn't follow acceptable practices around preserving the copyright statements and explicitly following the terms of the original licences. That, of course, was contrary to what Debian and the rest of the GNU scene stands for, but it didn't stop De Raadt subsequently seeing the business end of his favourite permissive licensing and moaning about it to one and all.
And is "whinning" like that noise horses make? Is the Linux kernel maintained by horses?
Fixed width? Boo! I now have probably a quarter of the screen width filled with "RISC OS 2 desktop grey" on my modestly sized monitor. Some of the layout also behaves oddly in Firefox 2.x such that "Your email address is never published" runs over the edge of the box.
There's not much else to complain about. Apart from the sanitised icons, of course. ;-)
...from that bloke who keeps writing articles for the The Register about how the markets and trading are great and how they lubricate the wheels of business, fight climate change, and so on. This might even be true if the trading floor wasn't continuously emulating the dining room at Hogwarts on the occasion of someone letting a dragon out at lunchtime...
The dragon's lunchtime, that is.
"Interesting to watch the pavlovian reflexes at work here. Patent/Copyright holder equals bad automatically"
Nope, you're buying into the whole monolithic intellectual property propaganda. There shouldn't be patents on the mechanisms underlying MP3 because the details are mathematical/algorithmic in nature, plus there are a lot of good economic arguments for disallowing software and user interface patents, anyway. Whether the physical mechanisms underlying DVD technologies should be patentable is another matter, although I'm sure that particular road has a toll booth every fifty centimetres, making it look like Philips and friends want to be paid forever for their efforts.
Having law enforcement people march in to confiscate stuff, presumably so that their corporate paymasters on this particular job can dismantle it all and take notes (or a bunch of people get a bunch of free gear) seems at the very least hypocritical ("How dare you steal our ideas! Ooh, what does this thing do?") and at worst like state-sponsored industrial espionage. Keep the latter thought in mind as you consider idiot European Commission member thinking on economic competitiveness.
"multi-billion taiwanese conglomerate Teco is the poor underdog."
And not multi-billion (Euro) conglomerate Philips and their pals.
"And that mostly from people right out of europes leading police state, good ol blighty, thats rich mates."
Ah, the schadenfreude comes out to play. Don't let it distract you from what's going on in your own country.
"Exactly who didn't know this was a bubble?"
This is an interesting question given all the backslapping about inflation being at a manageable level while house prices soared. According to "Consumer Prices Index and Retail Prices Index: The 2008 Basket of Goods and Services" from the Office for National Statistics, "mortgage interest payments... are excluded from the CPI", although they feature in the RPI, but given the usual amount of political spin involved in any policy matter this surely makes it very easy to apparently meet those inflation targets and keep interest rates conveniently low.
- "Google App Engine launched with great fanfare from the Python community."
I think the fanfare was heard coming from the Google code/beta people and their blogger audience, not the Python community in general. The main attractions for the Python people are that App Engine is yet another deployment possibility (if you can be bothered to rework your application), and it exposes yet more people to Python.
- "Finally," they said, "somebody has figured out how to make Python scale."
I doubt anyone actually said that - there's quite a bit of Python out there scaling well enough already. Having a stripped-down Python environment plugged into Google's proprietary infrastructure with a Google kill-switch attached isn't what most people are looking for. Meanwhile, I've seen plenty of evidence of worthwhile applications running on EC2.
Talking about worthwhile applications, your own Internet venture doesn't seem particularly performant: I typed "Google" into the search box and after a few of minutes loading I get a proxy error. Perhaps you need to join the cloud, or just move into opinion pieces full time and lose the veneer of supposedly knowing much better.
"Awefull (sic) hypocrisy comming (sic) from anyonme (sic) in the UK or USA"
Yes, because everyone in the UK and USA obviously agrees implicitly with state-sponsored censorship, even those people who didn't vote for the policies of the current administrations or previous ones, and especially those who protest against such things.
Fair criticism of unjust behaviour should not be governed by the extension of idiotic "they're all the same" and "the people are in one mind with the glorious leader" labelling to every nation from those whose propaganda machines deliver and provoke such messages and responses with enthusiasm, in such a way that no-one can point the finger at anyone without the kind of whining about "hypocrisy" that we see here. In fact, fair criticism and mature debate are all about eliminating such intellectually lazy generalisations, seeing the diversity of opinion everywhere, and recognising that a valid complaint is still valid regardless of where it came from.
Living in the same country as a bunch of people who want to censor lots of stuff of legitimate interest to the general public shouldn't undermine one's right to criticise that behaviour wherever one sees it. Unless, of course, you subscribe to the one-dimensional "political situations for idiots" (or "how to think of world politics as a bunch of sports teams") worldview mentioned above.
So did Nathan Barley steal the guy's code or not?
The "explanation" is that they looked at his code but then decided to "code a theme [...] from scratch" whilst keeping the folder name intact. I wonder how much staring, copying and pasting went on.
And is claiming that one was merely inspired by some work, casually mentioning your solicitor to the guy who provided the "inspiration", the missing second stage in the notorious three stage profit plan?
"I don't think DRM was an issue here, and I don't understand why folks think it is."
Here's a quick primer on DRM, then.
"Most likely the problem was the beta of U2 had an expiry of 12 Aug and some fool didn't remove that code during the final build."
Having "an expiry" on something you've licensed from someone is a restriction, or if you buy into "R == rights" then it's something which supposedly protects the "right" of the vendor to deny you use of the software. Consequently, the users experience DRM because those "rights" are being managed (or mismanaged) at their expense: you have the vendor telling you exactly which software to use at any given time with no flexibility or trust placed in you, the paying customer.
"That's all, move along."
To DRM 101 in your case, I guess.
...if what people have been writing is true. Yet another reason for not infecting one's computer with the plague that is Flash, or at least coercing browser developers to provide decent control over Flash utilisation, rather than having it enabled for all sites, all irritating animated adverts, and all potential exploits associated with trusting the binary payload of a proprietary software vendor.
Flash isn't "the Web" despite what the fanboys and "embedded multimedia" idiots would have you believe.
"Presently VirtualBox is available for free under a personal use license."
It is in fact available as an "open source edition" under the GPL, as well as under a proprietary licence with a few extras. For those comparing it to QEMU, the technology involved is actually based on QEMU, although they've taken certain concepts beyond what vanilla QEMU does, I believe.
"We have vaccines which can stop you from getting some viral diseases, all of which have been private sector created."
Don't confuse the name on the packet with the origins of the development because in many cases the work most likely had public money spent on it.
It's interesting to read complaints about lack of investor interest in private sector organisations in the drugs business - not happy with the various instruments offering a variety of monopolies to drugs producers (some kinds of patents being more unethical than others, of course), the public sector and its regulatory cousin seemingly has to sweeten the deal still further. And while certain private sector producers don't see the benefit of providing decently priced treatments to the people who need them the most, preferring to sell "vanity products" to rich westerners, it's the public sector who has to step up and help out, once again.
Vladimir Plouzhnikov: "You describe a cartel"
Funny that: what do you think OPEC is?
Steven Raith: "You don't think that, say, America or Russia wouldn't roll the tanks in if OPEC started *properly* taking the piss"
I'm not convinced that Russia would need to be rolling its tanks anywhere in such circumstances. As for America, I think its recent foreign policy achievements speak for themselves.
Of course, effects of "the market" need not manifest themselves in a nice, gradual fashion: downturns can be sudden and harsh. Timely incentives from governments can arguably soften the impact and provide the means for industries and the wider population to adapt.
Sometimes the tail ends up wagging the dog, however, as is evident with certain energy-intensive industries and heavily subsidised power generation projects (some nuclear, some hydroelectric), where one has to suspect brown envelope involvement at the "regulatory" level.
I have to admit that the ranting started to blur into itself by the third page, but on the subject of the market regulating itself, prices being fair, oil being sold at a realistic price, and so on, what's to stop the vested interests (ie. people selling oil) from just consolidating their position and selling very expensive commodities to only those who can afford them? Sure, the economic theory says that the market will eventually innovate to produce alternatives, but what if the vested interests are able to obstruct such outcomes? In other words: you can have your "green energy" once rich people are done with spending big money on each new barrel of oil.
It seems to me that such deference to the market as a perfect instrument of policy and strategy is, as always, misguided. But since the message can usually be summarised as "don't do anything, it'll all sort itself out in the end", I can see the appeal to all those armchair politicians out there.
"The only real answer is fission, until such times as fusion can be harnessed (if ever)."
Yes, that shiny thing in the sky will never be harnessed, nor anything like it! Sheesh! It's a good job that the people working on such stuff don't have the 1950s outlook that pervades the typical collection of comments on these kinds of articles.
Of course, if any kind of institution is planning on communicating what it does to the public, it should try and do so effectively. However, JB's old visitor centre was pretty good, and if you'd studied any astronomy then a lot more of it made sense. Sure, some of the stuff was old - not a problem, given its *historical* importance.
The big problem with Royston Vasey, erm, Great Britain these days is that it's all about image. Instead of actually doing stuff, it's all about standing in front of a blue screen flailing one's arms and legs and shouting, "Whoosh! I'm off into outer space!" Instead of actually going there or sending stuff there.
Great Britain: rapidly becoming the superfluous marketing department of Planet Earth.
"Taking on Ubuntu, Mandrive, openSuSE, Fedora and CentOS with this will be fatal to Sun if it doesnt knock it off."
vs.
"Lots of legacy applications dont run on openSolaris, and there is a heavy bias towards GNU/Crap"
How about joining the dots? Using the archaic Solaris tools got tiresome at some point in the 1990s, and what started to define the Unix experience? Irony of ironies: the GNU stuff that you obviously love. GNU's not Unix, indeed!
"Frankly, Ian Murdoch is a lucky-idiot."
You're right about this being fatal to Sun if they can't take on the Linux distributions because those distributions are eating Sun's lunch. And a lot of the credit belongs to Murdoch and friends. Yes, welcome to the 21st century!
"Supermarkets like packaging fresh food so much because it greatly reduces wastage. Where apples, for example, are displayed loose, customers pick only the best ones, leaving a great many second-rate apples for the supermarket to throw away."
Yes, the punters are forced to take home items which are often mouldy because they can't properly inspect the produce. That's what happens when the supermarkets have a bunch of people pack the produce into black plastic boxes. I don't have a problem with putting stuff in lightweight transparent plastic bags, and I'll always choose stuff packaged in that way over pretty, "value added", "nanny teach you that A is for apple" boxed produce which the supermarkets seem to love.
"When the apples are packaged, not only do they keep fresh for longer, but also customers are forced to take away the 2nd rate apples in a pack along with the best ones."
Indeed. I don't object to lightweight packaging; I do object to excessive packaging.
"There's an environmental angle as well as the cost issue- packaging prevents huge quantities of food from being produced and transported to stores only to be thrown away."
So you make a load of synthetic materials and because this takes up more space in your truck, it's good for the environment? I suppose if you make your logistics as oil-intensive as possible, you might be more frugal when the oil price goes up, but I'm not sure that this is a great sustainability policy. Maybe it makes sense to people in Britain where instead of trying to understand supply and demand, people picket oil refineries when oil gets expensive.
"As for plastic bags being a major issue- DO piss off."
One major issue was the observation that wild animals happen to ingest plastic bags or are immobilised by them. Maybe this isn't an issue for you, but that doesn't mean that others haven't learned to join the dots.
"Your computer's electricity requirements have probably produced more CO2 while you've been reading this than a fortnight's supply of Sainsburys bags. Anyway, didn't plastic consumption for supermarket bags actually increase in Ireland after they eliminated disposables?"
Total plastic consumption may have increased, probably because people presumably decided that they needed to encase everything in yet another layer of heavier plastic.
david: "They collapse into a small pile of crumbs within months. I'm guessing this is UV breaking the polymers."
I've stored the lightweight Tesco bags in clean, dark places and in months they've disintegrated into small pieces reminiscent of candle wax, so I doubt that it's UV at work. There are, of course, different kinds of plastic bags, and I doubt that this kind is the one that causes all the problems.
max allan: "So, why is nobody whingeing about the hundreds of times more tons of plastic that is used as packaging?"
Indeed. There's an obscene obsession amongst the supermarkets to take a small quantity of fresh produce and to box it up in fairly heavy plastic. Most of this plastic probably ends up in landfills in the name of convenience and fancy presentation (with patronising spend-happy consumer prose on the labels in Britain, too). Somewhere there must be a tax loophole (or opportunity, depending on which side you're on) which lets people continually churn out tons of plastic for short lifespan purposes, all in the name of a "healthy economy", nice cars, big houses and knighthoods, the CBI, "vote Tory/Tony", and so on.
I remember RM's kit from back in the 1980s: overpriced not-quite-IBM-compatible PCs sold at a premium, even compared to the proprietary Acorns, Apples, Amigas and Ataris (and less proprietary Amstrads), running early versions of Windows and other DOS-based programs using dodgy graphics emulation to make the de-facto standard graphics output work with the bizarre non-standard graphics support in the Nimbus. Another British success story, I'm sure!
"Taking into account the difficulties involved in providing meaningful and clear information to customers"
vs.
"having been told by BT he most likely had a spyware infection."
Seems like they might have provided meaningful and clear information at that very point instead of deliberately trying to cover up what they were doing - it wouldn't have been very difficult. It's about time BT had some proper scrutiny, anyway, being yet another private monopoly from the Thatcher/Major era that the country has been saddled with. Had the executives only been slightly less incompetent, I'm sure they'd have a virtual monopoly on mobile services, too, by now.
"Mr Pepper and Mr Wium Lie are accusing all naysayers of corruption and what is worse. They'd better have some good "evidence"."
Yes, it would be interesting to dig a bit deeper. I think we'd find quite a bit more evidence than you'd be willing to accept, however. After all, various Norwegian big shots routinely brush aside claims of corruption, and I think that quite a lot of Norwegians believe the myth that corruption is the rest of the world's problem, despite a number of high profile "trophy" cases (and convictions). I'd imagine that corruption goes a lot deeper than whether big name businessmen bribe minor officials to get their boat certificates.
It's fascinating to see someone slinging the dirt by using terms like "Mr Pepper and his henchman from Opera" when Messrs Pepper and Wium Lie have visibly done a great deal for the cause of standardisation over the years. Yes, you get to call people liars and accuse them of "unprofessionalism", but I think it's quite clear who have been the liars and have gamed the system: hug your buddies from Microsoft and take a look in the mirror.
Choice of icon: once again, the man puts his coat down on the astroturf because any discussion of OOXML's lack of merit is immediately met with personal attacks on dissenters. (Of course it's conceivable from what you've written that you might claim that you don't like OOXML yourself and don't think it should be standardised. I can't see how attacking the people who did actually bother to do something about it is in any way constructive. I'm more inclined to think you're astroturfing.)
"What is wrong with another standard."
So writes someone (in all apparent sincerity) who must clearly be ignorant of the Tanenbaum quote on "the nice thing about standards", thus undermining any confidence in your expertise on this or any other matter of relevance.
"I for one have not found a vendor so strongly promoting openness and interoperability as MS does."
The man in the icon is putting his jacket down so that he can sit on the astroturf. Thanks for the Microsoft perspective!
"At destination accept tagged item back from handler at door of plane"
This kind of thing has been done by BA for baggage on smaller aircraft. They call it "Valet Service", which sounds very Jeeves and Wooster, but it just means that the hand luggage is too big for the cabin and gets loaded into the hold. One hopes that the "valet", in retrieving the bags presumably from a special location in the hold, doesn't employ the usual kind of rugby antics visible from the plane when normal hold baggage gets loaded/offloaded.
I note that the BBC graph conveniently excludes the cost of decommissioning nuclear power stations, supposedly because that's outside the "lifespan" of the plant and (from the article) "is difficult to budget for when no definite solution has yet been established" - sort of like saying, "Our children will pay the bill, so it's free!" Together with the spent fuel, there's quite a long "zombie period" for which, of course, Britain has no strategy.
Power generation from nuclear fission has had quite enough government pork. It's time to invest properly in the alternatives.
"FFS I can't believe the amount of people justifying this with the fact that the BBC doesn't own the copyright to these programs. What exactly are they doing with the 135 quid a year that every household in the country pays them."
This hits the nail precisely on the head. It seems to me that there's a nice little industry going on down in London where friends of Nathan Barley at the BBC pay handsomely for Mr Barley's production company to make programmes, only to not insist that the BBC actually get to own any of it. Then, they appear to license the programmes in the narrowest sense (giving them excuses why they can't just let people download the stuff without stupid digital restrictions management), presumably handing over yet more money to Mr Barley in the process. And again, if the BBC want to put their brand on the DVD.
I'd certainly like to see if there's any money "leaking" in the other direction in some of these transactions, or whether there's any "overlap" between the executives of such companies and the BBC.
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