Comment Re:Spying on neighbors is illegal (Score 1) 733
Did that drone sneak onto that private property?
Mark my words, it's only a matter of time before someone discovers that what were previously thought to be imperfections in the design of the eyes of vertebrates actually make it far superior to the octopus eye...
Excuse me if I don't hold my breath. I'm not an octopus, mind you
I respect science and research but some of this stuff is just the opinion of arrogant men who are obsessed with their own ideas of how things should be (i.e. they are delusional). Remember Fred Hoyle?
What would you need to not consider it "just the opinion of arrogant men"? Actually, I think that considering the human/mammal eye to be suboptimal shows more humbleness than arrogance, at least if you consider the millennia during which humans have asserted their being at the cusp of everything. And then it was discovered that the Earth wasn't the center of the solar system, that the solar system wasn't the center of the universe... I really think that finding out that the human is inherently suboptimal is quite humble. But that's just my opinion.
...unsubstantiated claim that our retinas are turned inside out...
What would you call a retina that has the photoreceptors hidden behind the axons and the blood vessels so the blood vessels and the axons are inside the sphere area corresponding to the photoreceptors? Compare it to the octopus eye which has no extra layers between the light and the photoreceptors.
...are flawed and could be better designed - isn't what's "right" or "correct" here also subjective by your own argument?
They are flawed since they could be much more efficient "just" by having the layers in the right order, as in cephalopods. It just happens that evolution didn't have a plan at all (that's what evolution does, anyway) and, when animals needed better night sight, patches like reflective areas in the front of the eye had to be evolved, because turning back and redoing it all again wasn't an option any more.
If anything, an evolutionist should argue that the best design to gaurantee our survival is what we currently have because all the other randomly generated attempts failed.
It is the least worst that survived, not the best. If it was the best we would copy it down to the details, and I know of no artificial camera that puts anything between the lens and the photosensible material that isn't really needed there. At least, I don't know of any camera with a blind spot designed into it.
What can I say, you're either easily impressed or helplessly delusional. Even the article presents the same argument and tries to justify their work to make it seem less vain
I'm sure qualifying people so easily that helps your arguments a lot. Anyway, I find it impressive because it certainly isn't easy: otherwise someone would have probably done it decades ago. And, if the article tries to make it less vain, please tell me, why on Earth did the previous AC (I can't tell whether it was you) write this?:
Now we're invited to celebrate the achievement/intelligence of these ones who managed to fold a simple protein that would have folded itself into something far complex and useful, given enough time to "evolve"?
Either the article is celebrating an achievement and the quote is right, or it isn't as you write now and the quote was wrong, your choice
Now we're invited to celebrate the achievement/intelligence of these ones who managed to fold a simple protein that would have folded itself into something far complex and useful, given enough time to "evolve"? Am I the only one who sees the vanity in this reasoning?
What vanity is there in doing it right in the first try? It is a very interesting achievement, one that relies not on the blind luck of evolution but on the application of a limited set of rules.
If evoultion worked like this, perhaps our retinas wouldn't be turned inside out as the currently are (for example).
How about we stay quiet until we can create a living thing from scratch that's more impressive than the life-forms the random unintelligent process of evolution has come up with.
Impressive is a subjective quality: while you may only find a whale-size elephant impressive, I find it quite impressive that someone has managed to do from scratch what evolution might only do after a relatively long time and probably with lots of inefficiencies and side-effects.
That's not a loss. If someone writes new code, you don't lose anything. You always retain the BSD code. You've just extended the base of people using BSD code, and may well get future contributions back from them.
Yes, you have... as long the new code keeps being BSD.
Actually I think you can't have both kinds of freedom at the same time: the freedom to do whatever you want with the code (and its license) allows you to limit the freedom of your users to do the same. This can be considered a minor problem (as BSD does) or a major one (as GPL does).
Let say you release a part of your software under GPL and "draw a line" for the rest, I'm entitled to ask you to release the whole thing under GPL, unless you're able to prove that the part you put on the other side of the line is not a derivative work of GPL'd part. In other word, you cannot release half of a software as GPL.
You can ask me to release the source code. But there is a problem: if everything we are talking about was completely made by me, then I own the rights to it. It doesn't matter whether I create new versions of it and don't publish the source code to them: it is my code. GPL applies to people who don't own the copyright to the work (that is you and everyone else in this case). So you can ask until you are blue in the face and I may ignore you as it suits me. Nothing personal to it, mind you.
Of course, if I try to close my version of someone else's source code which is licensed under the GPL, then you would be entitled to obtain it from me if you bought a copy of my binaries... and I should comply.
I'd suggest reassessing that, but it doesn't sound like your empathy is going to be engaged when you do.
You are asking him to apply logic, not empathy, so it is a self-fulfilling prophecy
Getting back to the point, not automatically trusting new people doesn't mean automatically distrusting them. You may just have a wait-and-see attitude. But perhaps I'm overanalyzing this and go with your hunch
I hope this helps you understand that massive water extraction acted as a catalyst for the impending (for some values of impending) earthquake and as a magnifier of its destructive power by bringing it nearer to populated areas.
Crazee Edeee, his prices are INSANE!!!
