He's a liar and flip-flopper just like the rest of them.
Actually, you're the liar. Ron Paul's votes on this issue are consistent with his stated position: he votes against federal funding for abortion (since he votes against federal funding for anything not authorized by the constitution), and he votes to allow the states to set their own policy on the matter. Here's the summary:
12/06/2006 Abortion Pain Bill NV 05/25/2005 Overseas Military Facilities Abortion Amendment N 04/27/2005 Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act N 10/02/2003 Prohibit Partial-Birth Abortion bill Y 06/04/2003 Prohibit Partial-Birth Abortion bill Y 07/20/2000 Abortion Funding Amendment N 07/13/2000 Family Planning Assistance Funding amendment N 06/22/2000 Prison Abortion Funding Amendment N 05/18/2000 Oversea Military Abortions Amendment N 04/05/2000 Partial Birth Abortion Act Y 07/29/1999 Abortion Funding Amendment N 06/30/1999 Child Custody Protection Act N 06/09/1999 Overseas Military Abortion Amendment N 06/08/1999 Prohibition of Chemically Induced Abortion Amendment Y 10/08/1998 Contraceptive Amendment Y 08/06/1998 Abortion Funding Amendment N 07/23/1998 Partial-Birth Abortion bill Y 07/15/1998 Child Custody Protection Act N 06/24/1998 Chemical Inducement of Abortion Amendment Y 05/20/1998 Abortion Private Funding Restoration Amendment N 10/08/1997 Partial-Birth Abortion bill Y 09/04/1997 International Family Planning amendment Y 03/20/1997 Partial-Birth Abortion bill Y 02/13/1997 Population Planning bill N Here's the summary:
Yes, some are bans against funding, which is consistent with his position, but I'm going to cull to show the ones that specifically go to my point:
10/02/2003 Prohibit Partial-Birth Abortion bill Y 06/04/2003 Prohibit Partial-Birth Abortion bill Y 04/05/2000 Partial Birth Abortion Act Y 07/23/1998 Partial-Birth Abortion bill Y 10/08/1997 Partial-Birth Abortion bill Y 03/20/1997 Partial-Birth Abortion bill Y Note that during these votes, the Roe v. Wade decision was in effect as the supreme law of the land due to the Supreme Court, rendering all of these yes votes a violation of the U.S. Constitution. Yes, they later upheld the most recent vote, but he knew he wouldn't get the votes until Bush's stacking of the Supreme Court happened.
So then the question comes up -- when is it OK to violate the Constitution? Is the Constitution interpreted by people or by the Supreme Court?
I'm truly impressed with the way you derived Paul's philosophical position on the full implications of tens of thousands of pages of legalese from fewer than 20 characters restricted to Y or N./snark I'll respond to your other point to the post above, but on this particular point, it's not true that I've used only those characters. I actually looked at what the bills were. As to the truth of that, my reply to the post above will show that.
Just take the first item on the list, abortion. He's stated time and time again that abortion policy should be left up to the states to get a wider appeal, but as you can see, he continuously voted to have the federal government intervene in abortion policy.
He's a liar and flip-flopper just like the rest of them.
Maybe what we need is airborn cellphone stations that can orbit over disaster areas. (Feel free to suggest something better). kinda like a satellite phone?
Except of course that it isn't. A more accurate, if less mnemonic mnemonic, would be "A pint is a pound in the US and exactly nowhere else."
Outside of the states, we know that "A pint of pure water weighs a pound and a quarter." Because, you know, a proper pint is 20 fl oz. Not sure why you Americans have such funny little pints.
We're also the same people that came up with a kilobyte being 1024 bytes -- a power of two.
Don't you think it's natural we would move all our units to powers of two when the opportunity arose?
I think the actual reason was to avoid your heavy stamp taxes by confusing you with our units.
I wrote:
Unfortunately, the French (and now the rest of the world) think a counting system based off the count of the digits on their hands and feet using Greek prefixes is somehow better. you wrote:
Typo on my part, but you should get your facts straight, the metric system was not invented by the French, but rather by the British. "John Wilkins, founder of the Royal Society, first published his ideas for a metric measure in 1668 - 120 years before the French adopted the metric system." Wilkins doesn't represent "the British". The British didn't think it was better before the French did it, otherwise they (as a whole) would have adopted it first. I don't see how my fact is disputed by your additional fact.
And metric is far, far superior. Again, what's an ounce? Avoirdupois ounce? Troy ounce? Which fluid ounce, US or UK? An Imperial fluid ounce is 1/20th of an Imperial pint, whereas a US fluid ounce is 1/16th of a US pint. And in the US, you'd better know if that pint is wet or dry! It's a difference of 78 mL!
That's not at all intuitive! The rest of the world has no problem with using base 10 measure, but for some reason people insist on clinging to their old measures. If you're going to use those, you'd better go all the way and use stones, drams, furlongs, chains, rods, etc. Quick, how many gills are in a barrel?! US gills or UK gills?;) To be honest, I'd simply prefer to use a base 2 metric system (kibi/mebi, etc.) The SI supports such a measurement system, but even you guys don't use it yet. Thanks to the metric system, though, drive manufacturers were able to get away with mis-labeling their drive speeds until somebody sued them.
a pint is a *pound* the world around is the mnemonic that a liquid pint is ounce equivalent to weight pounds. 16 fl oz = pint, 16 oz = pound, so you know that 2oz is a quarter cup, 4oz is a half cup, 8oz is a cup, 16oz is a pint, and 32 oz is a quart, and 64 oz is a half and 128 oz is a gallon. Some people just have a hard time remembering where a pint fits into the system.
I think powers of two are quite a natural system of measurement. Unfortunately, the French (and now the rest of the world) think a counting system based off the count of the digits on their hands and feet using Greek prefixes is somehow better.
(as posted in another post, but up here, it'll get more coverage... here goes my karma, watch it slide!)
advice for moderators: offtopic or overrated?
on
OOXML's 662 Resolutions
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
if you don't like somebody's reply to an offtopic/hijacking/flamebait post, the best thing to do is to rate it "overrated", that way it doesn't go into moderation as an offtopic post, because, well, it was on the hijacked topic. That's the beauty of threading, isn't it -- topics can change.
Overrated simply means, relative to its current score, it's not something somebody browsing at what it's currently scored at would expect.
I "think" that's what the offtopic moderator wanted to say. Or they just got confused because my reply showed up underneath another topic such that the only way you can tell it's really a reply to a different topic was that there were double angle-lines that are easy to miss.
You can also choose not to read it instead of moderating. Perhaps there should be an option to hide all children modded-down topics in slashcode.
...due to a lack of genetic biodiversity... Why the PC terms? It's called inbreeding. I should know, I'm from another people that was almost wiped by European diseases that we couldn't handle. They weren't trying to in-breed, unlike your bunch;-). They just never had contact with any new migrations after the land bridge closed up (three or four waves of migration from 40k to 10k years ago are represented in their mitochondrial DNA). With a 28% chance of having a near identical immune system as somebody else, versus 2% for Europeans, the virulence was unheard of, even by European standards.
Though, they main reason they're around today in some form is due to hybridization with the new visitors from Europe. I guess that's a positive way of looking at it.
OK, ok. I won't be so P.C...
They were raped by the conquistadors, their new lords and masters.
Considering they (well, they weren't speaking Spanish, at the time, obviously) invented the zero long before the Arabs (who also weren't Anglo-tongued), had a unique numeric form of writing tied to binary patterns in knots, amassed large centrally-managed empires based on such accounting, and as well developed the "long count" calendar, I wasn't all that surprised.
That was, until 90-97% (depending on who you ask) died of disease their immune systems couldn't handle (due to a lack of genetic biodiversity in their t-cell structures) and were conquered by the Spanish as a result of the ensuing mass death (guns and steel didn't help much more than the horses -- the native's slings were more lethal than guns alone, and Cortez' men abandoned the metal armor for cotton armor the locals developed as soon as they saw the craftmanship). Moreover, the inhabitants of the Andes developed built-up civilization long before Sumer. The Yucatan Indians also developed Maize through hybridization and selection pressure, which combined with beans and squash, provided self-replenishing soil and fed (at heights) millions of inhabitants, going back thousands of years.
How quaint, yes. Somehow related to being now Spanish speaking? Not really.
Given that, atheists should get together and decide that they're going to tell all the religious people that if they keep believing in religion, they'll send them all to an eternal hellfire where they keep their brains going indefinitely with a new drug that prolongs life indefinitely. The hellfire will be a pain amplifier. No, you will not be given mercy if you later renounce your religion.
None of it has to be true, but if they can come up with a _secular_ hellfire, then maybe they can be effective converters given the kinds of people that fall to the illogical wager of Blaise Pascal.
Because, after all, the religious seem to mostly want to scare you _after_ death, when it doesn't matter anymore. What's more of a wager -- a religion that has to wait until after you can no longer change your mind before presenting hellfire, or... one that threatens you even before death?!
Perhaps not. It'd only start an arms race where the religious now feel the need, as happens all too often, to punish people in this lifetime, not just the next...
What I wonder is why people need to try to convert people when the religion is supposed to be personally revealed? Every time I use logic to destroy people's arguments about religion, I get told that it's just personally revealed to them. I guess they think that I'll miss his attempts to directly communicate with me, so if they don't properly prepare me, I might miss out on my chance to see the gastronomic halluciniations^W^Wproof they all have.
In the same vein, Copernicus greatly simplified the accurate charting of the motion of bodies in the solar system as described by the Ptolemaic model. The calculations were a lot more complex, but they worked out to similar conclusions. They also didn't allow one to easily predict the types of calculations one would have to do. Copernicus' theory was better because it dismissed with extra inputs -- the retrogrades of the motion of the planets, for example. His theory was also corroborated, but modified, by gravitational theory. Copernicus' model didn't take into account the differential mass of the sun versus the earth because he wasn't aware of it. Gravity greatly simplified and explained why the Copernican model was "pretty good". Furthermore, Kepler came along and said -- they aren't perfect spheres, they are elliptical, and if you use this new, cool technique later to be called calculus, you can see that the speed of the orbit changes along its path as well such that the area bound by the arc and the segments to and from the begin of the arc and the sun and the end of the arc and the sun are constant given consistent periods of time.
Science is gradually, simply doing better at explaining things. Sometimes it adds information (elliptical orbits), sometimes it removes it (retrograde theories of planetary motions), but each time, as its theories are judged by Occam's Razor, it gains better explanatory power and elegance through simplicity.
That's the beauty of Evolution by Natural Selection. It's such a simple, and elegant explanation for the origin and varieties of species, that it will never be completely shaken from its position... only refined, as you point out. Even reformers of Evolutionary Theory like the late Stephen J. Gould, who published with Niles Eldredge, Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, which refined the concept of gradualism, by showing why sometimes it doesn't seem so gradual (in fact, jumps in the fossil record are illusions caused by small gradualisms isolated by biogeography), showed that sometimes the predictions aren't always correct. It turns out it that small catastrophisms when looking at singular strata out of context are entirely predicted by a evolution by natural selection, not continuous gradualism, even though gradualism did take place at some location in the geographic context of the strata you may be looking at.
Evolution by Natural Selection just happens to fit the facts so much better than any religion has ever offered, that one must now look at the religions of the world: are they not also artifacts of the evolution of a mind looking for visibly-important patterns and not having enough available evidence? What's easier to believe, that gods made men, or that men made gods in a temporary mistake in the pathways of cultural and biological evolution?
Lamarck and Darwin both had different meme sets. The meme which Lamarck is known for is the inheritance of acquired characteristics, but he believed in other beliefs, like the great progressive chain of being.
Darwin actually believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, since it was commonly accepted in his day. It wasn't until Gregor Mendel's experiments were applied to evolutionary theory that people definitively realized that "genes" were the main pathway by which characteristics were acquired. Up until then there was always debate. Turns out the non-inheritance of unfit genetic code was the main driver of the qualities of inheritance.
Darwin didn't know about genetics. The Modern Synthesis is the combination of the ideas of natural selection and inheritance by genes, but that happened well after Darwin's passing.
This is always my response to the Pascal's Wager crowd.
They think that you might as well bastardize your intelligence and believe because there's no risk to believe, but there's a huge risk to not believe (potential hell). I point out that there's no way to know if the risk is the _other_ way, that all people who believe without reason will experience the greatest suffering, and if they follow that line, I continue until I get to something like your response.
Not only the problem of _which_ god is supposed to be the correct one to wager on. Some people think it's just safe to believe in a "general god". That doesn't make sense for another reason: all major religions that preach hellfire also preach exclusivity. So if you don't believe in exclusivity, there's no reason to even participate in the wager, because there's no reason to believe in hell, either. You could of course create your own possibility where you have to believe in a "general" god in order not to go to a wonderfully contrived punishment, but then that falls to your equally-validly-contrived example.
I think most people in modern times (where we can observe the diversity of reliigous opinion -- in the old days everybody you knew were of the same religion) are secretly religious -- and raise their kids religiously, due to the illogic of Pascal's Wager. If more people knew how unsound it was -- coupled with the wonderful explanatory power of evolutionary and biological thinking, more and more people would find no more need for religion.
And perhaps, just perhaps, people would stop being religious. As Christopher Hitchens says -- religion (god-ones as well as Marxist-Maoist-Leninist or NAZI dogmas) are the major ways to make a good person act truly evil. We'll never truly get world peace without an end to _all_ dogmas. Think of it as a call to arms against dogma.
You're probably just trolling, but in case you aren't, seeing the rampant crime that is institutionalized in modern prisons, I think your argument falls flat on its face.
Liberty doesn't have security as its price. Liberty and Security are often correlated, not directly correlated inversely as you assume.
As more people are free to do things that don't infringe on others' security, security often goes up as the people who would be breaking security systems for their own benefit have plenty of other "acceptable" ways to reap goods, with much fewer risks to boot.
It's incredible how well the Slashdot comment preferences really help cull the chaff from the comments. In this case, since I'd already marked you as a foe, you got a -5 modification and I didn't have to read your comment until I'd read other, more insightful comments, thus not wasting time I hadn't already scheduled for wasting. This way, I don't have to read the baseless opinions of mindless tools for large, self-interested corporations until after I've informed myself of other, more knowledgeable fact-based opinions and research.
Take your comment here. You assert that it's not newsworthy. Yes, the type of article is not newsworthy, but the newsworthiness of the content of the article was based on who said it and the links it gave to some pretty disappointing behavior with a potential acquisition, its AdWords bugginess, and its inability to tune its own algorithms when they don't match empirical reality. I'll quote the main point:
At the heart of this problem is a flawed computer architecture that makes Google's customer service responses so slow. Google likes to pretend that its distributed architecture can handle anything, but that appears not to be the case here. I have some expertise in distributed systems and am also familiar with Google's architecture -- I think that he's got a point that you can't just ignore.
If you don't want people to be informed of problems with large corporations, go write for (un)Reason magazine or its ilk, where you can collectively stick your heads in the sand together with your kind. That would be much better than telling the Slashdot editors to not publish articles you simply, and reflexively, disagree with.
No point in forking. The codebase is a mess of security vulnerabilities already. A few years back somebody contracted me to break into their site and they had wordpress. I found a zero-day vulnerability in fifteen minutes and had it exploited in under an hour. I contacted wordpress, provided a way to patch it, and then a couple years later they reintroduced the same exact vulnerability when they refactored the code to add templates.
Please, don't fork it unless you plan on completely rewriting the entire SQL backend. It's a horrid mess. We don't need _more_ b2/wordpress forks around.
I would though suggest if you do fork it, do it well. Matt's done a lot of idiotic things (check the slashdot archives) with wordpress and he's a rabid commercializer, regardless of the cost. That his code absolutely sucks is the only reason he hasn't been able to make it big even with selling out at every opportunity.
Religious people often think that repeating things they cannot prove so that others may believe it is somehow not proselytizing. - You
I hope that one day you'll educate yourself enough on the matter to overcome your religious ideology. - You
At no point did I assume that you're religious. - You
Why shold I bother to go through the rest of your crap? You really thought you could lie like that when the proof is only two posts up? Seriously? Good luck with life, homey. As I pointed out, you have a religious ideology (absolutist moral conception), and religious behaviors (asserting without evidence). The idea "you are religious" means that you have an actual religion (i.e., you're Christian, Muslim, Baha'i, etc). I didn't assume the latter, while I said you do have the former. To be clear, a noun phrase with an adjective used on one word is different than a noun phrase with the same adjective used on another word.
But, as I said before, your reading comprehension is not a strong point.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you're the liar. Ron Paul's votes on this issue are consistent with his stated position: he votes against federal funding for abortion (since he votes against federal funding for anything not authorized by the constitution), and he votes to allow the states to set their own policy on the matter. Here's the summary: 12/06/2006 Abortion Pain Bill NV
05/25/2005 Overseas Military Facilities Abortion Amendment N
04/27/2005 Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act N
10/02/2003 Prohibit Partial-Birth Abortion bill Y
06/04/2003 Prohibit Partial-Birth Abortion bill Y
07/20/2000 Abortion Funding Amendment N
07/13/2000 Family Planning Assistance Funding amendment N
06/22/2000 Prison Abortion Funding Amendment N
05/18/2000 Oversea Military Abortions Amendment N
04/05/2000 Partial Birth Abortion Act Y
07/29/1999 Abortion Funding Amendment N
06/30/1999 Child Custody Protection Act N
06/09/1999 Overseas Military Abortion Amendment N
06/08/1999 Prohibition of Chemically Induced Abortion Amendment Y
10/08/1998 Contraceptive Amendment Y
08/06/1998 Abortion Funding Amendment N
07/23/1998 Partial-Birth Abortion bill Y
07/15/1998 Child Custody Protection Act N
06/24/1998 Chemical Inducement of Abortion Amendment Y
05/20/1998 Abortion Private Funding Restoration Amendment N
10/08/1997 Partial-Birth Abortion bill Y
09/04/1997 International Family Planning amendment Y
03/20/1997 Partial-Birth Abortion bill Y
02/13/1997 Population Planning bill N Here's the summary:
Yes, some are bans against funding, which is consistent with his position, but I'm going to cull to show the ones that specifically go to my point: 10/02/2003 Prohibit Partial-Birth Abortion bill Y
06/04/2003 Prohibit Partial-Birth Abortion bill Y
04/05/2000 Partial Birth Abortion Act Y
07/23/1998 Partial-Birth Abortion bill Y
10/08/1997 Partial-Birth Abortion bill Y
03/20/1997 Partial-Birth Abortion bill Y Note that during these votes, the Roe v. Wade decision was in effect as the supreme law of the land due to the Supreme Court, rendering all of these yes votes a violation of the U.S. Constitution. Yes, they later upheld the most recent vote, but he knew he wouldn't get the votes until Bush's stacking of the Supreme Court happened.
So then the question comes up -- when is it OK to violate the Constitution? Is the Constitution interpreted by people or by the Supreme Court?
-jcr If you actually look at his voting record:
http://www.vote-smart.org/voting_category.php?can_id=296
Just take the first item on the list, abortion. He's stated time and time again that abortion policy should be left up to the states to get a wider appeal, but as you can see, he continuously voted to have the federal government intervene in abortion policy.
He's a liar and flip-flopper just like the rest of them.
Except of course that it isn't. A more accurate, if less mnemonic mnemonic, would be "A pint is a pound in the US and exactly nowhere else."
Outside of the states, we know that "A pint of pure water weighs a pound and a quarter." Because, you know, a proper pint is 20 fl oz. Not sure why you Americans have such funny little pints.
We're also the same people that came up with a kilobyte being 1024 bytes -- a power of two.Don't you think it's natural we would move all our units to powers of two when the opportunity arose?
I think the actual reason was to avoid your heavy stamp taxes by confusing you with our units.
That's not at all intuitive! The rest of the world has no problem with using base 10 measure, but for some reason people insist on clinging to their old measures. If you're going to use those, you'd better go all the way and use stones, drams, furlongs, chains, rods, etc. Quick, how many gills are in a barrel?! US gills or UK gills?
The US does have TMC-RDS (Traffic Message Channel Radio Data Systems) (or RDS-TMC) already.
My employer even ships the technology for the US market. How hard have you looked?
They add fake roads so that if somebody copies their maps, they can catch them for having a fake road.
I'm sure that's what they did in your situation, don'tcha' think?
it's not "a pint is a pint the world around".
a pint is a *pound* the world around is the mnemonic that a liquid pint is ounce equivalent to weight pounds. 16 fl oz = pint, 16 oz = pound, so you know that 2oz is a quarter cup, 4oz is a half cup, 8oz is a cup, 16oz is a pint, and 32 oz is a quart, and 64 oz is a half and 128 oz is a gallon. Some people just have a hard time remembering where a pint fits into the system.
I think powers of two are quite a natural system of measurement. Unfortunately, the French (and now the rest of the world) think a counting system based off the count of the digits on their hands and feet using Greek prefixes is somehow better.
How anthropocentric.
I'd do a mass sign-up of the secret list:
http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/wpcyberstalking
(as posted in another post, but up here, it'll get more coverage... here goes my karma, watch it slide!)
if you don't like somebody's reply to an offtopic/hijacking/flamebait post, the best thing to do is to rate it "overrated", that way it doesn't go into moderation as an offtopic post, because, well, it was on the hijacked topic. That's the beauty of threading, isn't it -- topics can change.
Overrated simply means, relative to its current score, it's not something somebody browsing at what it's currently scored at would expect.
I "think" that's what the offtopic moderator wanted to say. Or they just got confused because my reply showed up underneath another topic such that the only way you can tell it's really a reply to a different topic was that there were double angle-lines that are easy to miss.
You can also choose not to read it instead of moderating. Perhaps there should be an option to hide all children modded-down topics in slashcode.
...due to a lack of genetic biodiversity... Why the PC terms? It's called inbreeding. I should know, I'm from another people that was almost wiped by European diseases that we couldn't handle. They weren't trying to in-breed, unlike your bunchThough, they main reason they're around today in some form is due to hybridization with the new visitors from Europe. I guess that's a positive way of looking at it.
OK, ok. I won't be so P.C...
They were raped by the conquistadors, their new lords and masters.
Considering they (well, they weren't speaking Spanish, at the time, obviously) invented the zero long before the Arabs (who also weren't Anglo-tongued), had a unique numeric form of writing tied to binary patterns in knots, amassed large centrally-managed empires based on such accounting, and as well developed the "long count" calendar, I wasn't all that surprised.
That was, until 90-97% (depending on who you ask) died of disease their immune systems couldn't handle (due to a lack of genetic biodiversity in their t-cell structures) and were conquered by the Spanish as a result of the ensuing mass death (guns and steel didn't help much more than the horses -- the native's slings were more lethal than guns alone, and Cortez' men abandoned the metal armor for cotton armor the locals developed as soon as they saw the craftmanship). Moreover, the inhabitants of the Andes developed built-up civilization long before Sumer. The Yucatan Indians also developed Maize through hybridization and selection pressure, which combined with beans and squash, provided self-replenishing soil and fed (at heights) millions of inhabitants, going back thousands of years.
How quaint, yes. Somehow related to being now Spanish speaking? Not really.
Note the number of comments submitted by the smaller countries that have taken up open source efforts. Colombia, Venezuela, etc.
Goes to show a few people CAN make a difference.
the one with the worst hellfire, of course.
... one that threatens you even before death?!
Given that, atheists should get together and decide that they're going to tell all the religious people that if they keep believing in religion, they'll send them all to an eternal hellfire where they keep their brains going indefinitely with a new drug that prolongs life indefinitely. The hellfire will be a pain amplifier. No, you will not be given mercy if you later renounce your religion.
None of it has to be true, but if they can come up with a _secular_ hellfire, then maybe they can be effective converters given the kinds of people that fall to the illogical wager of Blaise Pascal.
Because, after all, the religious seem to mostly want to scare you _after_ death, when it doesn't matter anymore. What's more of a wager -- a religion that has to wait until after you can no longer change your mind before presenting hellfire, or
Perhaps not. It'd only start an arms race where the religious now feel the need, as happens all too often, to punish people in this lifetime, not just the next...
What I wonder is why people need to try to convert people when the religion is supposed to be personally revealed? Every time I use logic to destroy people's arguments about religion, I get told that it's just personally revealed to them. I guess they think that I'll miss his attempts to directly communicate with me, so if they don't properly prepare me, I might miss out on my chance to see the gastronomic halluciniations^W^Wproof they all have.
In the same vein, Copernicus greatly simplified the accurate charting of the motion of bodies in the solar system as described by the Ptolemaic model. The calculations were a lot more complex, but they worked out to similar conclusions. They also didn't allow one to easily predict the types of calculations one would have to do. Copernicus' theory was better because it dismissed with extra inputs -- the retrogrades of the motion of the planets, for example. His theory was also corroborated, but modified, by gravitational theory. Copernicus' model didn't take into account the differential mass of the sun versus the earth because he wasn't aware of it. Gravity greatly simplified and explained why the Copernican model was "pretty good". Furthermore, Kepler came along and said -- they aren't perfect spheres, they are elliptical, and if you use this new, cool technique later to be called calculus, you can see that the speed of the orbit changes along its path as well such that the area bound by the arc and the segments to and from the begin of the arc and the sun and the end of the arc and the sun are constant given consistent periods of time.
Science is gradually, simply doing better at explaining things. Sometimes it adds information (elliptical orbits), sometimes it removes it (retrograde theories of planetary motions), but each time, as its theories are judged by Occam's Razor, it gains better explanatory power and elegance through simplicity.
That's the beauty of Evolution by Natural Selection. It's such a simple, and elegant explanation for the origin and varieties of species, that it will never be completely shaken from its position... only refined, as you point out. Even reformers of Evolutionary Theory like the late Stephen J. Gould, who published with Niles Eldredge, Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, which refined the concept of gradualism, by showing why sometimes it doesn't seem so gradual (in fact, jumps in the fossil record are illusions caused by small gradualisms isolated by biogeography), showed that sometimes the predictions aren't always correct. It turns out it that small catastrophisms when looking at singular strata out of context are entirely predicted by a evolution by natural selection, not continuous gradualism, even though gradualism did take place at some location in the geographic context of the strata you may be looking at.
Evolution by Natural Selection just happens to fit the facts so much better than any religion has ever offered, that one must now look at the religions of the world: are they not also artifacts of the evolution of a mind looking for visibly-important patterns and not having enough available evidence? What's easier to believe, that gods made men, or that men made gods in a temporary mistake in the pathways of cultural and biological evolution?
Let's just hope it was temporary, at least.
Lamarck and Darwin both had different meme sets. The meme which Lamarck is known for is the inheritance of acquired characteristics, but he believed in other beliefs, like the great progressive chain of being.
Darwin actually believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, since it was commonly accepted in his day. It wasn't until Gregor Mendel's experiments were applied to evolutionary theory that people definitively realized that "genes" were the main pathway by which characteristics were acquired. Up until then there was always debate. Turns out the non-inheritance of unfit genetic code was the main driver of the qualities of inheritance.
Darwin didn't know about genetics. The Modern Synthesis is the combination of the ideas of natural selection and inheritance by genes, but that happened well after Darwin's passing.
This is always my response to the Pascal's Wager crowd.
They think that you might as well bastardize your intelligence and believe because there's no risk to believe, but there's a huge risk to not believe (potential hell). I point out that there's no way to know if the risk is the _other_ way, that all people who believe without reason will experience the greatest suffering, and if they follow that line, I continue until I get to something like your response.
Not only the problem of _which_ god is supposed to be the correct one to wager on. Some people think it's just safe to believe in a "general god". That doesn't make sense for another reason: all major religions that preach hellfire also preach exclusivity. So if you don't believe in exclusivity, there's no reason to even participate in the wager, because there's no reason to believe in hell, either. You could of course create your own possibility where you have to believe in a "general" god in order not to go to a wonderfully contrived punishment, but then that falls to your equally-validly-contrived example.
I think most people in modern times (where we can observe the diversity of reliigous opinion -- in the old days everybody you knew were of the same religion) are secretly religious -- and raise their kids religiously, due to the illogic of Pascal's Wager. If more people knew how unsound it was -- coupled with the wonderful explanatory power of evolutionary and biological thinking, more and more people would find no more need for religion.
And perhaps, just perhaps, people would stop being religious. As Christopher Hitchens says -- religion (god-ones as well as Marxist-Maoist-Leninist or NAZI dogmas) are the major ways to make a good person act truly evil. We'll never truly get world peace without an end to _all_ dogmas. Think of it as a call to arms against dogma.
You're probably just trolling, but in case you aren't, seeing the rampant crime that is institutionalized in modern prisons, I think your argument falls flat on its face.
Liberty doesn't have security as its price. Liberty and Security are often correlated, not directly correlated inversely as you assume.
As more people are free to do things that don't infringe on others' security, security often goes up as the people who would be breaking security systems for their own benefit have plenty of other "acceptable" ways to reap goods, with much fewer risks to boot.
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
that's the more fundamental question.
Take your comment here. You assert that it's not newsworthy. Yes, the type of article is not newsworthy, but the newsworthiness of the content of the article was based on who said it and the links it gave to some pretty disappointing behavior with a potential acquisition, its AdWords bugginess, and its inability to tune its own algorithms when they don't match empirical reality. I'll quote the main point: At the heart of this problem is a flawed computer architecture that makes Google's customer service responses so slow. Google likes to pretend that its distributed architecture can handle anything, but that appears not to be the case here. I have some expertise in distributed systems and am also familiar with Google's architecture -- I think that he's got a point that you can't just ignore.
If you don't want people to be informed of problems with large corporations, go write for (un)Reason magazine or its ilk, where you can collectively stick your heads in the sand together with your kind. That would be much better than telling the Slashdot editors to not publish articles you simply, and reflexively, disagree with.
Bloxsom is the best blog tool available:
http://www.blosxom.com/
But I've written my own.
Seth
No point in forking. The codebase is a mess of security vulnerabilities already. A few years back somebody contracted me to break into their site and they had wordpress. I found a zero-day vulnerability in fifteen minutes and had it exploited in under an hour. I contacted wordpress, provided a way to patch it, and then a couple years later they reintroduced the same exact vulnerability when they refactored the code to add templates.
Please, don't fork it unless you plan on completely rewriting the entire SQL backend. It's a horrid mess. We don't need _more_ b2/wordpress forks around.
I would though suggest if you do fork it, do it well. Matt's done a lot of idiotic things (check the slashdot archives) with wordpress and he's a rabid commercializer, regardless of the cost. That his code absolutely sucks is the only reason he hasn't been able to make it big even with selling out at every opportunity.
I hope that one day you'll educate yourself enough on the matter to overcome your religious ideology. - You
At no point did I assume that you're religious. - You
Why shold I bother to go through the rest of your crap? You really thought you could lie like that when the proof is only two posts up? Seriously? Good luck with life, homey. As I pointed out, you have a religious ideology (absolutist moral conception), and religious behaviors (asserting without evidence). The idea "you are religious" means that you have an actual religion (i.e., you're Christian, Muslim, Baha'i, etc). I didn't assume the latter, while I said you do have the former. To be clear, a noun phrase with an adjective used on one word is different than a noun phrase with the same adjective used on another word.
But, as I said before, your reading comprehension is not a strong point.