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Indeed. There is a word to describe that line of reasoning, and that word is sophistry.

According to wiktionary: The SI unit of time, defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of caesium-133 in a ground state at a temperature of absolute zero and at rest; one-sixtieth of a minute. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/second#Noun_2

It's on wiktionary, can't put it here thanks to slashdot's handling of unicode...

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/postulate

Postulates form the basis for many other scientific theories, and a good chunk of math.

Many models just can't exist without them.

Dark matter largely started as a postulate, though we are gathering more evidence to suggest it does in fact exist.

However, if we never started with accepting it as a postulate to begin with, then it prevents us from examining other things.

You study the origin of species, and the origin of the universe. You continue to test for answers. And with all the evidence you find, you ask yourself, "what does this mean if there is a Creator, and what does this mean if there isn't a Creator?"

Frankly, right now the concept of a big bang is prety silly if and of itself. The concept that someone may have created what preceded the big bang is one postulate. You could contend that right now, only that beliefs enables the realistic belief in the big bang.

How does a finite universe with finite mass work? What exists at the boundary of the universe? What holds that mass in? What exists beyond the boundary of all mass?

We won't be able to reach the boundary of the universe in our lifetimes, nor in any forseeable future. Should we then not explore these questions?

You suggest there is no means to test for a Creator, and yet a few years back one could have suggested there was no means to test what the universe was like at the time of creation, and super-colliders are somewhat giving us that opportunity now. If you never look for answers, you won't find them.

I think you're all confusing emotions with containers. Emotions don't have fixed boundaries. As such from varying perspectives frustration is or isn't a part of a challenge. However I think it can be agreed that the definition of a challenge is something that is hard to accomplish and requires personal effort. It can also be accepted that things are frustrating when they are too hard. Essentially they're both areas on an emotional continuum with overlap (with frustrating events being covering those which are challenging and those which are impossible).
The developers want to toe the line before frustration. ie: balance. Tight-rope walkers don't walk on just one half of the rope. In the same vein developers that stay purely below 'frustration' aren't achieving the level of challenge that they could.

So, a score of 1 on SlashDot is a good thing?

:P

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/virii

Guess what, English is not a dead language. If you want a dead language, you have plenty to choose from.

No they don't. Append != Prepend.

I was more annoyed at the clumsy parenthetical aside explaining what it meant.

"I fixed your post for you"

From http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/IFYPFY

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/most#Synonyms

"mst, IPA: /most/
Synonyms
        * almost all"

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

No, he's wrong. I know the definition of mean, so feel free to forgo any further mathematical definitions in your postings. For your own education, see here.

Mean is an average. But average includes mean, median and mode. It is correct to use it in this way, and people like you are often misled by people who use the term properly but know that most people assume average and mean are synonymous. They aren't. Such distinctions are often taught in university level philosophy and critical thinking courses.

Hrm. Wikipedia or OED. That's a difficult one...(sarcasm).

Well, no. Given that the word "atheist" itself contains the meaning "non-theism", it's obvious that Wikipedia got it right. Here's the urban dictionary and the wiktionary.

As far as I can tell, only religious nuts pretend that atheism is some kind of belief system. Why they do that I don't quite understand; seems to me trying to denounce somebody else by pretending that they believe something when you yourself define yourself through your faith is borderline insane.

I would think that would elicit a unique affect from both involved. Further reading.

You know have noticed the internet acronym "IMHO" in my post. Not exactly a common internet acronym i guess, though you see it fairly often on slashdot etc. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/imho (in short, in my humble opinion). Emphasis on the opinion. I'd be fascinated by any statistics, but I don't have any. I'll google around a little bit, but it's hard to track this kind of thing.

Anecdotally, a friend of mine works for the Democratic Party in NC, and a number of years ago they briefly stopped selling bumper stickers, only to face a lot of popular discontent from people who were big fans of the bumper stickers (and reversed their decision). ~shrug~

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find many people who are "pro-abortion." Not wanting the government to be in charge of such a personal matter is a far cry from jumping for joy each time a poor girl in a terrible situation walks into a clinic.

That's true to a degree, but ultimately, whether you consider yourself "pro-choice," "pro-life," whatever, you're arguing over one action--aborting a fetus. And those on one side want that to be legal, and the other want it to be illegal. The rest is just semantics.

"Not wanting the government to be in charge of such a personal matter" seems to me a bit disingenuous. I don't see many (and I'll bow to your preferences and use the term "pro-choice") pro-choice people arguing against the government's vital role in funding Planned Parenthood for instance. If you're really taking a libertarian view, one should probably argue against planned parenthood's dependent relationship. Not trying to put words in your mouth here, maybe you're consistent in your position, but most people I've met haven't made that argument.

Viola
Voilà

Viola
Voilà

It's nothing sinister.

sinister

Etymology : From Latin sinister ("left hand") via Old French Sinistra ("left"), Middle English Sinistre ("unlucky").

As a Lefty, I'd like to say: get some new material. ;)

Why not?

They hired Bodgitt, Quick and Scarper to build Vista =)

Bodge*
Scarper*

Why not?

They hired Bodgitt, Quick and Scarper to build Vista =)

Bodge*
Scarper*

hacking (uncountable)

1. (computing) Unauthorized attempts to bypass the security mechanisms of an information system or network.

Hack

...4b: to gain access to a computer illegally

You may prefer to use other definitions yourself, but the usage here is perfectly correct.

Let me remind you, my friend, that evolution means SUCCESSFUL ADAPTATION to an environment.

Umm, A gradual process of development, formation, or growth.

Maybe they should cuil their results to actually provide useful hits?

Someone should have told those venture capitalists that cuil sounds a lot like caill. "Caill" would not be a good name for a search engine ;-)

"There is nothing wrong with being a skeptic. I am skeptical as well that there is proof of man made global warming."

Skepticisim is at the core of the scientific method, it is a skill that is easily taught, often abused, and never fully mastered. I have been proud to label myself as such since "discovering" James Randi and Carl Sagan in the seventies. Sagan went on to write what I would consider a modern "bible" on the virtues of scepticisim - Demon Haunted World. However science provides evidence for concepts in the form of repeatable demonstrations, never proof.

"Australia uses coal because Australia has a lot of coal."

Yep and it's mostly the dirty brown stuff, it's all over the place - we even sent coals to Newcastle during the Thatcher years. Consequently there is a very powerfull coal lobby in Australia.

"I will simply state that I fail to understand is how standing stubbornly by the US has anything to do with your choice in energy?"

Our powerfull coal lobbyists are barely distinguishable from your powerfull coal lobbyists, so much so that at the most influential levels they are often the same people. They have very successfully moved the public argument to oil and rising oceans when the major threat is to food and it's coming first and foremost from coal. Blind support for the US stance on Kyoto and it's successor was a large part of John Howard's downfall in the last election, his blind support for TWOT was an even larger part of the battering his party took at the polls. From what I saw of UK politics I belive at least some of Tony Blair's unpopularity at home was also due to his emabrassingly obvious body language when he was kissing Bush's arse in public. These three leaders (two right-wingers and a lefty) dragged the world into Iraq and had no choice but to stick together on TWOT, simarly Howard got sticky with George on GW for other reasons.

During the last decade in particular, both the US and Australian government sponsered scientific institutions such as NOAA and CSIRO have contributed an enourmous wealth of knowledge on the subject despite political interference. At the same time Howard and Bush were calling for "more research" (in perfect mass media, trans-pacific synconisity) they were eliminating all refrences to "our home planet" in NASA's mission statement and gutting the budgets that had, for decades, been providing the research they were calling for.

"The problem is that unless China and India get on board and NO I am not willing to pay them off it really will make little difference."

True, however the UN climate summit at Bali demonstrated the only country that is still not on board is the US. The deal that US finally agreed to discuss after being deserted by Australia, shamed by PNG and boo'ed by the rest of the planet is known as the Brazilian proposal (the top link is to Melbourne Uni, a highly respected university in my home town).

As far as the fairness of obligations goes the general idea is a cap and trade system that attempts to allocate the same amount of GHG on a per-captia basis to each person on Earth between (IIRC) 1960-2060 this creates different emmision curves for different nations but the curves are planned to merge together ~2030. Having said that I am not a fan of everything in the proposal (in particular offsets based on land use), I also recognise that no treaty will please everyone or be immune from creative accounting.

"At the same time I am all for cutting CO2 just because I don't think that it can hurt and it may hel

He was not a customer; he did not purhase the ad he placed.

Just because no money changes hands does not mean you are not a customer. You are simply a customer that received something at a cost of zero.

At my old school, there was a bagel place that gave a "one free bagel" coupon with all school bookstore receipts. You take the coupon to the bagel shop and get a bagel. You are then a customer of that business.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/customer

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Snarkyness

sigh

If you're unaware of a Devil's Advocate argument, I'll fill you in. (You seem to have completely missed the point of my argument. Maybe you're just deliberately misunderstanding. No matter, I'll explain it again.) In a nutshell, I was not trying to demonstrate that evolution was false; I was pointing out the fact that you fundamentally contradict yourself because you don't accept logical conclusions drawn from its premises. To review:

A domesticated human race is, therefore, disadvantaged in evolutionary terms [...] If we really believed evolution to be true, we wouldn't be America. "All men are created equal" is quite a contrast from "the fit will survive, the unfit will die". No... we'd be Sparta...

No, only in your misunderstanding of evolutionary terms.

No, they are. As soon as the newest biggest evolutionary breakthrough occurs, we fat complacent blobs of semi-intelligent flesh will the way of the dodo.

Appeal to Consequences again? However, someone with as poor understanding of Evolution as you should perhaps refrain from making bold statements about what Evolution means for humanity.

At this point, I merely illustrated how my statement was entirely valid as a Devil's Advocate argument and you were falling into the Appeal to Consequence fallacy yourself. In hindsight, the only real flaw in my argument was that I accidentally omitted the word "go"... you understood what I meant, though.

Anyway, as I said before, the point wasn't "evolution is wrong". The point was, and still is, "you don't even believe evolution yourself, you just like certain parts".

As for humans and Evolution, I simply pointed out your poor understanding of Evolution

Words are cheap; I'll take what he had... "No, YOU don't understand evolution." There, now we're both ignorant bigots.

I'm getting tired of this argument... it basically consists of me saying "xzy because abc" and you saying "nu-huh". Want to support anything you've claimed?

The English language also has no word for the day after tomorrow. Many other languages do. It's not that English doesn't have any use for this word. The concept exists in English culture. However, creating a new word for a concept rather than stringing already existing words together to portray the same concept seems to be a matter of how important and often used the word might be.

It's never going to happen, for technical, social and licensing reasons, so it can't possibly be a priority. A priority is something you set first. Putting never first is never a good idea. Pipe dream, perhaps. Certainly stupid. I can't believe someone with a UID below a million would even suggest it.

I still fail to understand how you make that jump(and it is quite a large jump). Its a nice theory that proprietry formats=subjugation of the 3rd world, but it does not make sense (at least to me). Are you implying that the 3rd world has less of a choice? Sure there is more piracy - both options are "free", but I know people who use OOo out of preference, and because of the nice PDF export function(newer versions of MSoffice with this feature are not prevalent yet) and I use LyX exclusively for word processing. We still have choice here. Same as you. In fact PDF seems more widely accepted since you can't open MSOffice 2007 documents in 2000/2003 unless a converter (rare here) is installed.

Why would you think we have no choices? I think you underestimate the 3rd world.

Burglarize instead of burgle, on the other hand, is retarded.

Then you can take heart: "burglarize" did not replace "burgle"; rather, the opposite happened, with "burgle" being a "back-formation". In other words, when the word "burglar" (from Latin "burgare") came into common use, people thought that the "-ar" ending was equivalent to the "-er" ending in "teacher" (someone who "teaches") etc., and so they created the word "burgle" to mean "burglarize". Generally used by the Brits to demonstrate how superior their English skills are to their American counterparts, without realizing the etymological embarrassment they're inflicting on themselves.

Sort of like how "aluminum" is also called "aluminium" by people unfamiliar with the etymology, etc.

Burglarize instead of burgle, on the other hand, is retarded.

Then you can take heart: "burglarize" did not replace "burgle"; rather, the opposite happened, with "burgle" being a "back-formation". In other words, when the word "burglar" (from Latin "burgare") came into common use, people thought that the "-ar" ending was equivalent to the "-er" ending in "teacher" (someone who "teaches") etc., and so they created the word "burgle" to mean "burglarize". Generally used by the Brits to demonstrate how superior their English skills are to their American counterparts, without realizing the etymological embarrassment they're inflicting on themselves.

Sort of like how "aluminum" is also called "aluminium" by people unfamiliar with the etymology, etc.

Burglarize instead of burgle, on the other hand, is retarded.

Then you can take heart: "burglarize" did not replace "burgle"; rather, the opposite happened, with "burgle" being a "back-formation". In other words, when the word "burglar" (from Latin "burgare") came into common use, people thought that the "-ar" ending was equivalent to the "-er" ending in "teacher" (someone who "teaches") etc., and so they created the word "burgle" to mean "burglarize". Generally used by the Brits to demonstrate how superior their English skills are to their American counterparts, without realizing the etymological embarrassment they're inflicting on themselves.

Sort of like how "aluminum" is also called "aluminium" by people unfamiliar with the etymology, etc.

Burglarize instead of burgle, on the other hand, is retarded.

Then you can take heart: "burglarize" did not replace "burgle"; rather, the opposite happened, with "burgle" being a "back-formation". In other words, when the word "burglar" (from Latin "burgare") came into common use, people thought that the "-ar" ending was equivalent to the "-er" ending in "teacher" (someone who "teaches") etc., and so they created the word "burgle" to mean "burglarize". Generally used by the Brits to demonstrate how superior their English skills are to their American counterparts, without realizing the etymological embarrassment they're inflicting on themselves.

Sort of like how "aluminum" is also called "aluminium" by people unfamiliar with the etymology, etc.

Yea but can you still see your gardening equipment from there?

out of principal

What does the head of a school have to do with that?

Hint: principle vs. principal

out of principal

What does the head of a school have to do with that?

Hint: principle vs. principal

See "borken" or swedish chef, perhaps.

If people are still using Internet Explorer, it can only be explained as ignorance or complacency.

I don't care because I have my browsing experience the way I want it and that's all I really care about.

So you are part of the group feeling complacency, just as he was referring to. :-P

complacency - A feeling of fulfillment or contentment with respect to one's own accomplishments or situation.

If want us to clean, dammit, you'll have to learn how to say things in our language: rain gutter = eavestrough.

There is no such verb as "to sublimate". The verb is "to sublime" -

On the contrary. In fact, being a grammar pedant on slashdot is a poor way to sublimate (third meaning, verb transitive) your desire for perfection.

There are around six billion instances of such algorithms in production today. We know they exist.

I've got some news for you, the A in 'AI' stands for 'Artificial'.

Burn.

...Hairy Jacksy!

Wiktionary has an entry for it.

Huh. I never read the book, but I saw the movie. I thought that they were saying a Russian word that I can't spell out on Slashdot because it doesn't support UTF-8.

I don't know them personally, but I think you're being a bit harsh on them. Well, apart from Stroustrup.