bascule

MDI seems to be the biggest complaint As for me, I consider Opera's interface to be its greatest strength. It changed the way I used the Web.

I've been an Opera user since 5.x My main reasons for doing so are the cohesiveness of the UI. What takes 5 Firefox plugins that don't integrate at all is built into Opera by default. In terms of speed and resource usage I really don't notice a difference. They're both resource hogs (although Firefox 1.5 really sucks in that respect) due to their pro-active caching, but I have so much RAM I really just don't care. For information on blocking banner ads in Opera, see: http://nontroppo.org/wiki/OperaAdblock

Bingo... not to mention we've gone through so many evolutionary watershed events that we're evolving orders of magnitude faster than any other species... aah, the evolution of evolvability is insane

One American death is equivalent to the suffering of all the innocent people falsely imprisoned in Gitmo et al.? And bottom line, if they're violating our civil rights to obtain this information, then **** it... I'd rather my civil rights were honored. I think it's funny how all the Americans in imminent danger of a terrorist attack vote Democrat

I should say... Bush getting impeached for repeatedly signing his name on something that violates the Fourth Amendment plus other federal laws Cheney going down as part of the Joseph Wilson/Valerie Plame scandal... = President Hastert!!! I could live with that, at least as much as President Gerald Ford...

By that logic, we will likewise have to conclude that we are no better than terrorists...

I think the human body is truly an amazing thing and when humans make amazing recoveries or other amazing accomplishments more is owed to the immense power of evolution by natural selection to facilitate the mechanisms for such occurances than it is anything metaphysical. I mean, the placebo effect is certainly proof that mental predisposition towards healing greatly affects the outcome and that the brain possesses some sort of centralized marshalling ability for eliciting almost subconscious, involuntary control over the rest of the body's subsystems, at least to a certain extent.

Viruses involved in tandem with the cells their infection vectors proved successful for. As long as one virus is constructed in such a way that it can successfully infect one cell and thus make a multitude of copies of itself, the particular strain will continue to evolve.

I would assume that the organisms with better external defense and replication properties simply devoured the less progressively evolved descendants of their ancestors and, per the laws of natural selection, the most reslient won out. We're talking about a time of extreme "cannibalism" when the reactions which couldn't sustain themselves became food for their siblings. If what you're really asking about is abiogenesis, Dawkins (and therefore I, being an unabashed Dawkins worsipher) says the secret lies in autocatalysts. Catalysts are specially shaped molecules which suck up two other molecules and mash them together to create a product, and thus they speed up chemical reactions. Autocatalysts have the unique property that the product they create is themselves, so once an autocatalyst forms, if it's in the presence of the molecules it catalyzes then it creates a whole bunch of copies of itself. In experiments performed by Julius Rebek and his colleagues at the Scripps Institute in California, they combined amino adenosine and pentafluorophenyl ester with the autocatalyst amino adenosine triacid ester (AATE, which, being an autocatalyst, catalyzes the combination of the afforementioned chemicals into more amino adenosine triacid ester) Rebek and his team found a system in which more than one variant of the autocatalysed substance existed. Each variant catalysed the synthesis of itself, using its preferred variant of one of the ingredients. This raised the possibility of true competition in a population of entities showing true heredity, and an instructively rudimentary form of Darwinian selection. It's likely something like this happened either with collections of RNA molecules or that other autocatalyzing compounds "recruited" RNA molecules to assist in their autocatalyzing reactions, and slowly RNA started taking on the role of both a catalyst and a storage mechanism for self-replication "instructions", i.e. heredity.

Aight, just making sure. I didn't want to end up in another argument like the one I had with "phcatlantis" who alleged the recently assaulted Kansas professor who was teaching ID as mythology faked his own assault and beating just to discredit his political opponents.

Mmmmm... http://www.hillnews.com/thehill/export/TheHill/News/Frontpage/122005/patriot.html

It's more like a program running inside of a computer. The program has properties which transcend the mere electronic switching of transistors. Qualia are ultimately phenomenological objects, and phenomenological objects can be reduced to collective synaptic patterns the way objects in a computer program can be reduced to electrical impulses. I don't have an answer to that, but keep in mind that not everything you have in your body has a prespecified purpose. What is your appendix for besides getting infected and killing you? It used to house bacteria to digest cellulose, but that was too back in our evolutary lineage to be useful now.

There's also the "progenotes" which lie between the soup of the theorized "RNA world" and the common ancestor of all life on earth today. They're the ones who started harnessing the power of DNA and protein and encapsulating themselves into the first cells and were thus self-contained replicators

There's been quite a few peak oil threads since you were gone, but unlike yours they were started by peak oil alarmists who were predicting horrible disaster scenarios like the entire socioeconomic grid collapsing becase it can't evolve fast enough to adapt. And, well, there's my position... the grid basically has an immune system that works through a collective attention drawing process. When the problem of peak oil starts to hit home in the form of spiraling gas prices, people will take notice, demand a solution, and collectively we will bring it about. But for now, why worry? Is the really any reason to do anything about it now? Any preparation that if we don't perform immediately, will result in the inevitable collapse of the entire socioeconomic grid? I don't think so at all. I think current market forces are holding back the uptake of alternatives to gasoline driven vehicles and that as the market oil market becomes unfavorable it will gradually shift away to the alternatives which will be ready to take oil's place when the market demands it.

This wouldn't happen to be revprez back trolling again after being twice banned, would it?

I'm surprised to see a moveon.org-style egregiously misleading Flash animation, the sort of which has been resoundingly criticized by right-wing pundits everywhere, featured on the front page of gop.com

Yes, and according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, his approval rating is unchanged at 41% with 56% disapproving. The Washington Post poll had a margin of error of 4.5% and the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll had a margin of error of 3%. http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/?feed=TopNews&article=UPI-1-20051220-07294500-bc-us-bushpoll.xml Which one to believe? Well, I'd have to see how the questions were worded...

Hmmm... to quote the Thompson Twins... LIES LIES LIES YEAH... here's a few funny Bush quotes dealing with judicial oversight of wiretapping: http://www.vote-smart.org/speech_detail.php?speech_id=33849&keyword=wiretap&phrase=&contain= http://www.vote-smart.org/speech_detail.php?speech_id=50711&keyword=wiretap&phrase=&contain= Said long after he ordered wiretaps without judicial oversight... Anyway, liberal drivel ho! But hey, for all you New York Times haters out there AlterNet rips into them too. Woo! http://www.alternet.org/story/29826/

To be fair to O'Reilly he does seem to love the pithy and wit-filled backhanded liberal compliments. He'll let you zing him as long as you're complimenting him at the same time. And he at least tries to maintain the illusion of impartiality in his "No Ideology Zone" (LOL), whereas Hannity is just an unabashed hater of everything liberal.

Yes, that's why I qualified FAIR as a group of angsty liberals. How about Hannity calling every liberal he has on his show "You people" then making gross generalizations about the extreme left and making every moderately left-leaning person try to answer for them?

Well, you can't really build a civil rights case around the definition of science like you can the Establishment Clause. Cue the slew of IDiots to argue about the interpretation of the Establishment Clause

WTF, stupid intelligent designer, giving us inferior 2-stroke lungs and backwards retinas. What was he thinking?!@

Yes, and unicorns may prove not to be entirely fictional. Cartesian dualism is dumb.

I would include: 1. An instant runoff voting system 2. A Markov process to analyze and rank voter credentials. Not everyone deserves an equal vote because some people are poor decision makers.