Posts by cyborg

Twitterers rally round #CensoredUK - to demand more porn

Plus most of the time reproduction would *not* be the desired outcome of sexual congress.

Blighty could put a (WO)MAN on MARS by 2040, says sci minister

Re: @Zmodem

"its using power to make a motor turn, which spins the axle of a turbine, which generates 10,000x the amount of power the motor needs and has being looped back is too complex for your imagination"

Thermodynamics says no.

Feel free to gain your Nobel prize though by doing this though.

Put up or shut up.

Re: @Zmodem

"i dont need to"

Then I don't care what you have to say about any of this because so far it's nonsense.

Put up or shut up.

Re: @Zmodem

Get on and build it then.

Re: @Zmodem

" there is no gravity in space"

Wrong.

Re: inspace, there is no friction, you would go lightspeed

"perpetual generator works"

No.

I KNOW how to SAVE Microsoft. Give Windows 8 away for FREE – analyst

Re: What's te problem?

"do-dos" - a derogatory term for people who actually do things of value with computers.

It's true, the START MENU is coming BACK to Windows 8, hiss sources

Re: how about ...

"So saying "lots of servers run Linux and there's not a ton of malware on it so it's proof that Linux is malware-proof" is dubious logic."

Not really what I'm saying, just attacking the idea that somehow it isn't important if it's not on "your" machine when clearly that is not the case.

Re: how about ...

"The difference is that Linux has 1% market share on the desktop."

Yeah, because none of those servers out there on the Internet run anything that anyone might care about.

Gadget world's metals irreplaceable, say boffins

Build fusion power stations, helium is a waste product. Problem solved!

Fat-walleted execs? Nope, it's a corporate tax swerve that REALLY ticks Brits off

It's unethical when the accounting firms lobby the governments on how to write the tax law that they have the prepared loopholes for to provide for their clients.

Microsoft wields turkey knife, slices Surface to $199 for Black Friday

Re: Still $100 too much

"Whilst RT is inferior to normal Windows, its still far more functional than Maldroid or IOS..."

Yes... ok. Your argument is completely watertight.

Re: Still $100 too much

Probably a lot more once you get an ARM Linux variant on it.

Microsoft Surface slabs borked by heat-induced DIM SCREEN OF DEATH

Re: Microsofties at their *best*

"If it's a spade, call it a f()c&!ng shovel."

Don't you mean "landscape manipulation tool"?

What's wrong with Britain's computer scientists?

Re: Do you need a degree to...

@Tom Wood 100% correct - I'm always saying that any person in a process that is easily automatable between two machines is just an inefficient meat interface. To have such an interface programming machines is madness.

Gold meddler: Doctor Who is 50 years old TODAY

They'll never figure it out.

Ultimate Doctor Tom Baker REGENERATES, RETURNS to WHO

"Boo to you."

Is this man saying "boo" or "boo-urns"?

Oracle pens recipe for tweeting turkey in Raspberry Pi sauce

Re: Tweets from my Pi?

This might be useful if I need to cook a turkey on the other side of the world though and need a way of being able to access the data from anywhere. Because the liklihood that I'll be a few metres away from my cooking food is low otherwise.

Firefox reveals new look: rounded rectangles

Re: Oh brother

"The rest is attributed variously to Google, Facebook, Twitter and Stumbleupon."

It's why NoScript is the first thing I install for Firefox.

Google, Microsoft to drop child sex abuse from basic web search

Re: I give it about a month

Doesn't Disney have links to Apple through via Pixar?

Re: Its just another form of racism.

Why can I no longer think of the British Isles without the word "padeoph" in front of it?

Who’s Who: a Reg quest to find the BEST DOCTOR

Re: On the basis of yesterday

Can only agree with that. Presumably we won't be seeing any more of him during the 50th anniversary shows either.

Post-Profit Prophet RUSSELL BRAND is the HUMBLE CHRIST of STARTUPS

Russel Brand has been hitting the bong too much...

And the Bong strikes back.

How d'ya make a JPMorgan banker cry? Ask him questions on Twitter

Re: PR morons

But Twitter is hip! HIP I TELL YOU!

Also yes, never try to out troll a professional troll and I'm willing to put Ryanair in that category.

Norks EXECUTE 80 for watching DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES

Re: Hmmm

"I think we've got to give her a chance to see what she can do. It's a yes from me."

SPACE, the FINAL FRONTIER: These are the images of the star probe Cassini

Re: priorities

Especially when faking space exploration is highly cost effective and a great sign that the budget is being well balanced.

Presumably accounting for the time it took to get to Saturn to actually start what it was there to do rather than simply from launch date.

Doctor Who nicked my plot and all I got was a mention in this lousy feature

Re: They do say

Sir,

people don't want to watch that avant-garde shit,

faithfully, cyborg

Dark matter: Good news, everyone! We've found ... NOTHING AT ALL

Re: Fox News/Daily Mail version headline

" If spontaneous isn't random it has a mind and something intelligent behind it that tells it to adapt in a certain way."

So again you propose intelligent freezing?

Otherwise how could those water crystals *know* how to form those perfect cubes?

And this is why I say you don't *get* any of this. You only think of "random" as "literally anything goes!" If you applied the mathematics properly you'd get the proper results. But then if you did that you'd have to re-evaluate your beliefs. It doesn't look like you have that in you given you are regurgitating some of the classics on creationist misapplications of evidence and theory on population and evolution.

" If spontaneous isn't random it has a mind and something intelligent behind it"

And so a "mind" and "intelligence" are just things that either exist or not? There's no simpler underlying mechanism? They're fundamental building blocks of the universe? No. You can propose an infinite all-knowing being has done these things if you want but you're raising more questions than you're "answering" by saying there are magical bits of "intelligence" making things behave "just so" where they're completely black box systems that just do what they need to do - somehow.

"E.g. cancer cells are mutated cells and have gone through a spontaneous mutation. "

Which are not heritable and hence irrelevant to the evolution of species. Also does not understand the nature of the mutation nor of the cell. Cells go wrong all the time. Contrary to popular belief especially of those who see a grand-designer if there is such a thing it is a designer who only knows how to hack things together so they barely work and doesn't seem to have any overall coherent design vision.

"So yes, they all go back to that random statement, because that is what the whole evolution theory claims and builds upon. "

No. Evolution builds on selection. Randomness or its precise nature is irrelevant other than the seed for change upon which things can be selected. I know you will refuse to acknowledge this so this is just for the benefit of anyone else who may happen to be reading and gleaming something of use from this.

"If you don't understand it, maybe you need to study it more carefully."

If *you* don't understand it, maybe you need to study it more carefully. I understand it perfectly well.

"It's mindless, has no goal, nor intelligence behind it."

Yes. Exactly. And that's why things exist the way they do.

"You need to create that first life form by pure random events, else it wasn't random and therefore wasn't spontaneous."

I do not adhere to your notion of "pure random" in a universe with physical rules that are not arbitrary. It is not "pure random" that carbon atoms behave the way the do. It is not "pure random" that water behaves the way it does. It is not "pure random" that replicators that are better at replicating replicate more.

Third strike and out. Want to come up to the plate with an actual bat this time?

Re: Fox News/Daily Mail version headline

"Please do the second calculation I proposed. Let us then discuss what is plausible."

As explained if I did the second calculation you proposed then it would not be plausible that things on the planet would exists as they do by that mechanism.

Fortunately I also explained why that is not like the mechanism that is actually proposed by evolution. Hence why I called it a strawman. Hence why I dismiss it. Because it's nonsense.

"Now we know that not every child reproduced nor in the same uniform amount. But we also know that families generally has been much larger that that family over the history. So it compensates to a large amount for the lost children. Now if each generation would only reproduce at a age of 200, 3 kids that would reproduce at the age of 200 additional 3 kids. It would only take 11400 years to reach 7 billion people."

So if we ignore all the things that tend to kill people before they breed and assume perfect exponential growth we can get to 7 billion people earlier. If we don't then we have to wait until medical technology and food resource technology improve enough to allow such growth. And if we look at population trends then what do you know? When these technologies improved the population growth exploded! It's almost as if there's some sort of, I don't know, causal link or something.

I don't really understand why you expect me to just ignore important components of a calculation just so it'll fit your argument but it's not going to happen.

"That we are a result of neandertals etc that lived so long ago simply don't fit real science. "

No it doesn't but then I doubt you understand the point of "the tree of life". Not the one in the fictional garden mind.

"And i did refer to legends of non Jewish myths, true enough the story is found in the abrahamic religions to. But its by far not unique to them. I doubt that the people in Hawai had anything to do with christians or jews at all, or those in australia or in canada, etc etc."

Yeah, because when people who don't even know how to calculate the size of the Earth have a myth of a "great flood", where floods occur all over the world for a variety of reasons, we should just assume that they weren't actually ignorant of the things they were most likely ignorant and instead assume a global deluge and ignore what we have subsequently discovered. Sounds reasonable to me!

You know many cultures also have myths about storms, lightning, earthquakes, volcanic erruptions and so forth right? Am I supposed to conclude anything other than these people experienced things we know have happened and continue to happen to people living on this rock? No? I just take at face value their explanations that they'd angried up the volcano gods as well because they didn't sacrafice enough people or kill the left handers? Ok then: sounds perfectly reasonable.

Re: Fox News/Daily Mail version headline

"Everything else implies intelligence, or a plan to go from one state to the other."

So when water's structure becomes ordered when its temperature is reduced that is intelligent freezing?

"So it's all random, with a few positive results, or it's intelligent."

False dichtonomy. Also leaves huge questions around what "intelligence" is.

"If you claim anything else you don't understand it or you give the Evolution godly attributes."

I don't recognise what these "godly attributes" are.

"Or you realise that it has to be based on random events."

Why not try reading what I said? Randomness provides entropy for selection. The nature of randomness is entirely irrelevant. That's why deterministic genetic algorithms (as they must be if purely computed) are still effective. The worse the entropy - the apparent randomness - the harder it is for such an algorithm to efficiently naviagate a large solution space since the inherent bias will exclude options.

"This is though what many true evolutionists claim."

Oh, "true evolutionists".

"True evolutionists" understand that natural selection is the important point, not how the differences arise. The mere fact that there is differentation means certain things are *naturally* going to be more successful than other things. The statistical properties of the events that cause those differentations are not as important. It'd still work in an entirely deterministic universe - like the one a genetic algorithm would operate in.

Re: Fox News/Daily Mail version headline

"Science is physics. Religion is metaphysics. You can't use science to disprove metaphysics, which is what non-theists do."

Ummm, no. Religious claim about entirely testable phenomena do not get a metaphysical shielding I'm afraid just because you have proclaimed it is in a separate domain.

Although please, do feel free to just argue that "god" is just some ontological preference you have. Fine, whatever. But t.est is not pleading that one should not use science to disprove "god" so don't pretend he is. He's making some bad strawmen out of evolution and some debunked population mathematics to fit a Judeo-Christian mythos. That is entirely disprovable I'm afraid regardless of whether or not the god of the Jews exists as a metaphysical concept or a real entity that chooses to only look metaphysical.

Re: Fox News/Daily Mail version headline

"Random? What is random about it? It isnt a spontaneous adjustment but a gradual adjustment over time"

It's a pretty standard "747 being built by a hurricane" argument that he demonstrates in his "produce my text randomly" argument not understanding the radical difference between having to produce a string randomly to match a predefined pattern and only having to produce and keep correct characters from that string over a period of time. Given a character set of 70 odd characters for alphanums and some punctuation in a comment the size he provided you have an excellent probability of hitting some of those characters randomly (1 in 70 for each character in fact) and if you get to keep all the hits then it really doesn't take very long at all until you get the exact text reproduced since anyone can clearly see that the string you're actually aiming to complete is going to get shorter each time (since you don't bother re-selecting what you've already got right).

But you try explaining that and they'll go right back to the same old strawmen again in a different form.

Re: Fox News/Daily Mail version headline

"but to a large part it's a conviction of that everything has become to be by randomization, with other words based on some sort of faith."

No. Randomness provides entropy. for selection. Selection is the "faith" upon which evolution is built, not randomness. But no one argues against that because it's too obviously contrary to any sense to argue that better things aren't better so instead one argues that maximum entropy somehow doesn't provide maximum opportunities for information extraction contrary to what the mathematics says,.

"I consider math, physics, biology, etc to be forms of science. "

Then you do understand that biologists basically all agree that evolution is the underlying theory that makes sense of biological phenomena?

"If you actually did the second calculation, you would see that the belief that we being a result of million of years of random evolution is pretty non scientific"

Except for the science that's completely true.

People who get hung up on the world "random" really ought to find out what randomness is some day.

"And many of their claims can be refuted by science, if you just care enough to critically test the claims with known science forms, rather than just blindly follow."

Yeah, sure. Please follow up with some stuff about irreducible complexity to complete. Given your previous argument:

"If we would use a random text generator, to produce a text that would be identical to this comment I'm writing here now."

Doesn't understand the very basics of what evolution actually is I am not expecting much.

Re: but HOW did he create the Universe eh?@cyborg

"Err, no. The basis of the belief is that there is no God"

No, the basis is that people who believe in gods are wrong. Not that there is no "God" - because it's not exclusive to monthiestic Abrahamic concepts. It's really irrelevant as to whether or not such beings exist, it is enough that one does not have to believe the man in Oxford Circus shouting at the shoppers has any merit to his proclamations.

"The shoutiness comes in telling people they're wrong."

Um, no.

"I'd have to say your argument is a bit specious."

I'd have to say yours is a bit lacking in substance.

Just like supernatural divinities! *rimshot*

No

Just no.

Re: but HOW did he create the Universe eh?

"Whereas I've met plenty of atheists that are really very dogmatic, and get quite shouty when you question the basis of their beliefs"

The basis of the belief is that people who believe in gods are wrong. There's not really any dogma - that's just definitional. You're probably thinking of something else you're associating with that which isn't really relevant. Cat herding etc...

It's a mutated misphrasing

It should be, "in the last place you *would * look," as in "look in the unusual places," although that's probably bad advice. One should use a binary search algorithm and divde up the room into increasingly smaller places as one eliminates sections.

Coding: 'suitable for exceptionally dull weirdos'

My experience would indicate inability to code isn't necessarily a barrier to employment as a coder.

Bacteria-chomping phages could kill off HOSPITAL SUPERBUGS

Quorum chemicals?

As well as using phages to attack bacteria I recall some research into replicating the signalling quorum chemicals bacteria know so they can attack their host en masse. By signalling early the body's own defenses will be altered when the bacteria start acting too soon.

Antibiotics seem doomed to become an irrelevance simply because they cannot keep with the pace of change natural mechanisms have.

Re: "the most abundant life form in the universe"

Lifeform is probably a stretch since most definitions of life make the virus something of an amibuity but provided you accept that and a liklihood that life in the universe will probably mostly consist of microrganisms then phages which live on those microrganisms are likely to be the most abundant DNA delivery machines in the universe.

US parents proclaim 811 'Messiahs'

Re: Amusing Chinese names

Except this is a culturally mixed family... and a silly joke.

You wait until he marries a Chinese woman and their offpsring is called Fu King Joke.

Expert chat: The end of Windows XP and IE6

Re: IE 6

RTFM in this case is a sentence. Troll fail.

Re: IE 6

Indeed - *LIVE* DVDs have been a mainstay of Linux distros for awhile now. You're doing it wrong if you're formatting your hard drive.

Re: We are switching to Linux Mint XFCE

But that's unpossible! Every fool knows that you have to write in Sankrit just to boot a Linux machine! It can't possibly be better than Windows at makig things easy because as we all know Windows makes everything so easy no one has ever had any problems with it!

Re: IE 6

Buy a Linux magazine. Use live DVD of some distro that will be stuck to the front. Done. If it doesn't work properly don't use it. Couldn't be easier really.

Amazon wrapping FireTube tellybox for Christmas – reports

Re: How many

Just one media centre PC. I really can't abide all these other boxes.

Wikipedia Foundation exec: Yes, we've been wasting your money

Re: @ cyborg

"And although they are willing to work for free, why shouldn't they have first claim on the income their work produces?"

Well they gave anyway that right according to the licencing terms.

If any individual feels that is not what they wanted they are entirely free not to contribute to Wikipedia.

So really it's a problem that solves itself if you have a problem with Wikipedia:

Don't donate. Don't contribute. Done.

Besides that I disagree with the underlying assumption this is "work" and not "fun" just because someone is making money. The point being if one has already got the benefit of contributing should one really feel put out after the fact if someone else is making money off it? Some may be but then if that was a concern to you in the first place maybe pay more attention to these things? I can see why people would have a visceral reaction to this but really that doesn't fundamentally make whoever is making the money wrong. You were happy to contribute before, your happiness shouldn't be negated afterwards.

For the record I have neither contributed nor donated to Wikipedia but I have seen various things I've written of use (mainly arcania on the ZX Spectrum and Z80 and Duke Nukem 3D) pop up on various places I didn't originally put them. With no realistic expectation of ever making money off these things in the first place I can't say that I am necessarily bothered if someone else does with the caveat that they are not selling them directly to people what they can get for free. For me the joy was in the writing and the publication and the fact that people found entertainment or use from them. If I had intended to make money off them then it would be another story but I didn't so it isn't.

Android adware that MUST NOT BE NAMED threatens MILLIONS

Re: And yet....

"Does it really?"

Even then it does although I did not actually intend to infer I was talking with a lass.