Posts by Vladimir Plouzhnikov

@Jim 59

You forgot to mention Cuba.

"There was no effort involved really, we are merely the product of a complex evolutionary process."

How can there be a complex evolutionary process without effort? Dinosaurs and prehistoric forests toiling for 100s of millions of years, storing sunlight energy inside their bodies, plants making oxygene so that Khaptain could breathe, animals storing nutrients so that Khaptain could eat, bacteria breaking down Khaptain's waste products so that he would not sink in his own shit...

"Since we know of no other intelligent lifeform anywhere other than our own planet"

Not knowing about them is not a proof of their absence.

"Can you think of any other species capable of so much destruction just for personal satisfaction."

I know that each species acts for its personal satisfaction, because that's how evolution feedback works - If a wolf will ignore its hunger it will die and so will its species. If a chicken who outgrew the egg will not act for his satisfaction and hatch it will die and so will its species.

Now, you accept that humans are a product of the evolution. However, somehow all other species produced by the same evolution have turned out to be beautiful, peace-loving cuties who poop rainbows on regular basis but we, the ugly humans, producing hairless, crying, crawling, revolting babies who grow into greedy, promiscuous, regularly drunk monsters are the one exception?

Isn't it more logical to assume that the humankind, with its thirst for resources and inability to live "sustainably" was produced by that same evolutionary process specifically to be thirsty for resources and not being able to live "sustainably"?

Has it ever occurred to you that the evolution, having moved from pre-cellular to single-cell to multi-cell organisms to plants to animals to Khaptain, must not necessarily stop at the latter?

And if the evolution is to continue then, eventually, whether Khaptain or a post-Khaptain will run out of resources on this particular planet?

And when that happens, who will take the process of evolution beyond the planet?

Hint: that will be Khaptain's job.

But how will Khaptain know what he is supposed to do? There are no evolutionary manuals and leaflets printed in stone, lying on top of a mountain, as far as we know, at least.

That is actually simple - he will do things to achieve personal satisfaction and they will guide him to do the right thing even if he himself will not be capable of understanding why or what for.

"The extinction of the human race from the planet earth will probaby have "Zero" consequences in relation to the earths existence, well except for the polution that is."

It will just mean the complete failure of this planet to produce life capable of competing even on intrasystem scale, let alone on galactic or universal scale. Seven billion years of efforts with bugger all results. Other that that - no consequences at all...

Sad

"So you're either doing it because you don't know the value of children, or because you haven't managed to have any."

I think it's a simple fear of responsibility, which is then rationalised and hidden beyond the self-delusion of "having made a free decision"...

@Khaptain

"I have taken the liberal and freeminded decision not to have children." Thank you, Khaptain! Very nice of you. My kids won't need to worry about bumping into your offspring in the future.

@Sean Baggaley 1

You seem to be confusing filtering as a commercial service which helps to separate the wheat from the chaff (making your choice easier but not precluding you from accessing unfiltered information) and filtering applied as a brute-force blanket censorship (where the choice is made by somebody else and is forced upon you).

You think you are defending one but in fact you are giving support (hopefully unwittingly) to the other.

And before anyone asks - no, I don't think bomb threats are acceptable means of making your point in any argument. Whoever sent those messages is an idiot.

@Inachu

"That is an investment lost."

No. There was no investment in the first place.

When you invest you exchange your money for ownership of an asset. With Steam and the like you do not own anything. You pay for a "licence" which is a temporary permission to do something with someone else's assets. Ownership stays with the company behind Steam. If it goes bust you have no claim on "your" game collection whatsoever.

In fact, the receivers (or at any time Steam itself, for that matter) can decide that the old permission is no longer valid and demand you to pay more if you want continuing access to the games they "licensed" you in the past. Again, there will be nothing you can do about it - pay or forget about those games.

Even they must realise it is nonsense

"Fox were so agitated about the leaking of Wolverine because it cost them millions of dollars from people who would have gone to see it, but did not because reviews of the leaked workprint"

Only complete movie nuts would have troubled themselves to DL and then *watch* an unfinished copy of a movie which sole appeal was supposed to be in the CGI and the CGI was exactly what was missing from the leaked copy!

Those movie nuts have all probably watched the movies when it was leaked, watched it when it came out, bought DVDs, bought merchandise etc.

For the rest of the population, the whole schebang was just an extra bit of publicity, so probably more people have actually watched the movie as the result of the "leak".

Re: Teh bad

"But a lock-in to a propriety format and single retailer is totally "teh bad"."

I will vote for any politician who will undertake to make DRMs illegal as a concept. A vendor must not be allowed to have any control over the product he gives to the customer from the moment the money changed hands.

Reasons for crying

Realisation of what she has been missing all these years?

Careful approach

"and having a careful approach to things like Windows Update"

You mean like turning the bloody thing off? :-)

@Matt Bryant

You raise multiple points, some of which I agree with, some not, but they can all more or less be boiled down to the main thing: will they or won't they use the nukes if they had them?

I think the answer to that is already in your post: "we are talking a large number of the people in power in Iran"

People in power do not want martyrdom. Period. Otherwise they would not have been in power in the first place.

And another: "the Iranian rulers think constant confrontation with the West is going to unite Iran and prop up their unpopular regime"

If they wanted to be blown up in the blaze of glory there would be no point for them to try tp prop up their regime.

And a corollary: all the current US and EU sanctions do is propping up the Iranian regime.

@Richard Wharram

"Local entropy you mean ? Total entropy always increases."

Yes and yes.

"Local entropy could be decreased by freezing the planet and pumping the heat into space."

Or by adding heat from the Sun.

Mechanism

Firstly you need a criterion for movement, secondly you need to choose which way is good and which is bad. Movement - change in entropy, good - entropy decreases, bad - entropy increases. How about that?

This way a "system" forms which is the total aggregate of all subsystems (i.e. every living organism in that system, from virus up to the top of food chain) and whose "good" is the collective "good" of all of its subsystems, just like your body is a collection of individual cells, yet is in itself an entity with identifiable interest in the overall result of its components' activity.

Direction?

Increased complexity, decreased entropy.

@Richard Wharram

All it can show are the limitations of the mathematical model and data collection...

Just the fact that we are here today means that there is more that 50% probability that disequilibrium in ecosystems will cause changes which will benefit the system rather than being detrimental.

Not so sky-fairy

I came to conclusion for myself that Earth must be a complex self-regulating and evolving entity long time ago, before I even heard of Lovelock, Margulis and their "Gaia theory".

I don't have a theory, mine is only a hypothesis and I can't be arsed to develop theoretical backing for it. Someone else please do it, it's not my field.

What I see in earth is a kind of acorn - it has a shell (atmosphere), nutrient rich kernel (biosphere) and embrio/seed (humans). As it matures, and in the right conditions, the embryo starts to germinate, first using the stores of nutrients in the kernel, then rooting into the soil (the rest of the Solar system). Our role as the seeds is to spread the Earth version of life to other planetary bodies, just like the role of the acorn embryo is spread the DNA of its parent oaks by becoming a new oak tree and so on.

For all this to appear there is no need for divine intervention. Once you accept the idea that life evolves, you cannot escape the fact that it evolves in a particular direction and not completely at random. That vector of evolution must be scaleable from single cell organisms to planet-wide and may be star system-wide structures. I believe that this is a fundamental property of the physical world, just like charge parity violation, which rid the universe of much of the primordial anti-matter.

As far as Gaia theory is concerned - for reasons inconceivable to me they stop short of recognising that humans are an integral part of their Gaia and not just a bunch of extraneous parasites sucking on good Gaia's resources.

OK I correct myself...

Let it be CoM instead of CoG.

Re: Fail yourself

"then there's no reason it can't be in different directions in different parts of the ship, so there's no reason for it to be in one constant direction that could be called "up""

Yes, it can be in different directions in a ship designed by a drug abusing fashion designer. In an interstellar battleship you want your crew to know where their up and down are. You also don't need the extra stresses due to gravity gradients between different parts of the ship when you have to think about dealing with photon torpedo impacts.

RTFA

Or is "a vast, light-bedecked mothership" not mention enough?

"There are many theories that require not only a habitable environment, but a sequence of ‘luck’ events to kick start life in the first place."

I think "luck" is required for life not to appear where it remotely can.