On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 9:56 AM, Murray Hogg <muzhogg@netspace.net.au>wrote:
> Hi Bernie,
>
> Sorry to report, but your microcode analogy isn't quite on the money.
> Remember we're not talking about God A copying the work of God B - but
> rather the one God engaging in two creative acts.
>
> So a better analogy would be Code A from company A, vs Code B from company
> A - in which instance we'd probably expect shared code when the two programs
> are seeking to do the same thing.
>
> I think I might have some better examples. Avanti Corporation was founded
by Taiwanese ex-pat Gerry Hsu. They did place and route software. Many of
the employees were former employees of Cadence Corporation. Cadence got
suspicious that Avanti was copying Cadence software but couldn't prove it.
That was until they got a breakthrough from Philips who was a customer of
both Cadence and Avanti. When they did a "strings" command on the respective
executables they found that the English messages were identical including
the grammatical errors which were a result of the engineers being Taiwanese.
A number of the engineers ended up in jail while Mr. Hsu skipped the
country. Synopsys ended up buying the company, hired a bunch of high-priced
lawyers and made it all go away.
IBM thought that Hitachi was stealing their microcode on their mainframes in
the 1980s. So they put deliberate errors in the test tape (this is the
program that blesses the instruction set) which they believed Hitachi was
stealing. It was enough for the FBI to get involved. Hitachi and 11 of its
employees were indicted on charges of stealing confidential design secrets
from IBM in 1982. When I talked with the IBM manager involved he was
beaming. "They didn't even copy the latest version!"
A similar case can be made with the Book of Mormon. There are extended
passages that are word for word copies of the KJV including the translation
errors.
Net net. If you see the same pattern including errors it's evidence of some
kind of copying process and not some de novo creation. This is the case even
if there is only one party. In the Avanti example above the engineers were
copying their own code. One of the ways that the lawsuit went away was
future versions of the P&R software were done in clean rooms where the
engineers never ever saw the old code. So, if you can show that living
things cannot copy themselves -- *cough* reproduction *cough* -- then you
are going to have a hard time denying macroevolution.
Rich Blinne
Member ASA
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Received on Wed Nov 18 15:46:34 2009
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