Why do you assume that people at seminary don't do that?
Because they still believe in the Bible. Anybody that applied serious scientific thinking to it wouldn't take it any more seriously than they do Greek mythology.
1) theory 2) You never heard of the bible, did you? Since you can't prove your "theory" of evolution, you must accept that the bible proposes a possible alternative . . . that is, unless you're like most slashdotters - ignorant.
I freely accept that any and every fact I perceive may be wrong. I might actually be a mental patient locked in a padded room, imagining I'm typing a message on Slashdot. I might be a butterfly dreaming I'm a computer programmer. I might be a brain in a vat, being fed neural impulses from a simulation of an artificial reality. Or, even more unlikely, the Bible might actually be true.
And....? Did you have some actual point to make? And for bonus points: are you a troll, or simply ignorant?
This is an old, tired anti-evolutionary argument. The answer is that every single fossil we find is a transitional species. Unfortunately fossilization is an incredibly unlikely event, and a fossil surviving for tens of millions of years and then happening to be uncovered even more incredibly unlikely, so the fossil record simply doesn't contain every species that ever existed. We may never find the real ancestor of all modern birds, just cousins of it like Archaeopteryx. So what? The fact that birds evolved from dinosaurs is irrefutable.
The problem is the date for feathers keeps getting pushed back and there have even been early lizards found with what appear to be feathers.
I assume you're referring to Longisquama. There is good reason to doubt that those structures were even real, let alone feathers.
One massive gap is if birds evolved from dinosaurs where are all the tree dwelling dinos?
What are you talking about? First, the division between "bird" and "dinosaur" is entirely arbitrary. Birds, in a very real sense, ARE dinosaurs. We just draw an arbitrary line in the sand and say the things on one side are dinosaurs and the things on the other side are birds, but there's no hard and fast reason to draw the line at any particular spot. Archaeopteryx really doesn't look all that different from the raptors that came before it, and still has a very dinosaur-like head and no beak. Is it a bird?
Early birds were likely ground dwellers, just like the raptors they evolved from. We don't know precisely when tree-dwelling evolved, because we don't have enough fossils to be able to tell. I fail to see how this is a "massive gap"; it's a minor question at best.
Odds are birds branched off very early on and were a separate line of evolution so saying birds evolved from dinosaurs is kind of like saying we evolved from chimpanzee.s
Nonsense. Saying birds evolved from Archaeopteryx would be like saying we evolved from chimps -- not all that far wrong, but wrong. Saying birds evolved from dinosaurs is like saying we evolved from primates. Dinosaurs are a very, very big group, and there is absolutely no doubt that birds evolved from them.
While I wholeheartedly agree with your overall sentiment, I am compelled to point out that science does require faith in the basic assumption that the behavior of the universe is governed by laws.
For instance, if I perform ten billion trials where I drop an object and it falls to the surface of the earth, and the next time I drop it and it remains hanging in midair, science posits that there must be a REASON why the object did not fall. The law of gravity is not arbitrary, and if we find it to have been seemingly violated then either our theory is wrong (the real law of gravity differs from our imperfect understanding of gravity in a way that allows this behavior to happen) or our understanding of the situation is wrong (gravity was still in effect, but some other effect such as a strong updraft held the object aloft).
Religion permits this situation to be described as a miracle -- essentially, an arbitrary violation of the laws of the universe. Science doesn't, and requires us to seek a naturalistic explanation.
Now, I firmly side with the "we need to seek an alternate explanation for supposed miracles" side of things -- so far, the score is something along the lines of Science: 100000000000000, Religion: 0. However, it is important to understand that science does require the (very reasonable and thoroughly supported) assumption that the laws of the universe are not arbitrary and are never violated.
I'm curious. If we were discussing the existence of, say... leprechauns, would you be saying "Exactly! The existence of leprechauns can neither be proved nor disproved. Anyone that claims otherwise.. better have some proof!" Or <insert fictional entity here>? Do we have to have proof of them not existing too?
I take issue with the "you can't prove he's not real!" argument. I agree, I can't prove that God doesn't exist. I also can't prove that leprechauns aren't real, or that Santa Claus wasn't really bringing me presents when I was little. Hell, I can't even prove that there aren't dinosaurs living in the middle of some unexplored jungle somewhere. But "you can't prove otherwise!" doesn't mean that the idea actually merits consideration.
The correct -- and only sensible -- stance is to assume that such fantastic claims as God or leprechauns or Santa Claus are false. That doesn't mean you can't change your mind. Obviously if somebody in Ireland catches one of the little buggers, I'm perfectly prepared to adjust my default "leprechauns don't exist" stance. Likewise if there's a booming voice from the heavens telling us to start behaving or we'll go to hell, I'm willing to revisit the "God doesn't exist" theory. But in the complete absence of any evidence, claiming God exists is NO DIFFERENT than claiming any other fictional character exists. You don't give Harry Potter the benefit of the doubt and assume he might actually be real; you don't believe that dragons might once have really roamed the English countryside despite a lack of evidence. So why does God -- a fictional character far more unlikely than all of the rest put together -- merit such special consideration? Why is he the one character that you have to give the benefit of the doubt to?
Unless you're referring to a 3rd-party app or a beta firmware or something like that, you're smoking crack. The Maps application built into the iPhone does not automatically recalculate directions when you go off-course.
I was in Russia recently, and while the vast majority of Russians were extremely nice to me, some random guy on the subway cussed me the fuck out.
I was just standing there minding my own business and idly chatting with a coworker when this guy just starts laying into me. I don't speak Russian so I have no idea what he was actually saying, but it's not hard to tell when somebody is saying something extremely unpleasant to you even if you don't speak the language. Plus there were liberal sprinklings of "Americano" and mock spitting. I was half expecting him to throw a punch.
So yes, most people most places are pretty nice, but I've run into more than one asshole who hates me for no other reason than my nationality.
So why can't we imagine a world where every computer can run software written by anyone? Is that not also clearly the best alternative for consumers? If not, why not?
Because, as an iPhone developer, I am acutely aware that 99% of the people jailbreaking phones do so in order to steal software. And no, letting consumers freely steal whatever they want is not the best alternative for anyone in the long run... because eventually nobody will be developing software anymore, and the very consumers doing the stealing will lose out in the long run.
Part of the reason the iPhone market is so thriving and healthy compared to the PC / Mac market is that it's so much harder to steal software there. I have little interest in porting my app to the desktop, because everybody would just pirate the thing.
You are wrong on both counts (as grammar nazis often are).
A) I am aware that "data" was originally the plural of "datum", but its use as a plural is largely antiquated. Its current most common usage is as an uncountable quantity just like "water". It sounds just as weird to say that you have "five data" as to say you have "five waters". You instead have "10GB of data" or "1L of water".
B) Saying that your data is a bunch of ones and zeroes is absolutely correct. "The animals in the zoo are mammals and reptiles" makes more sense than "mammals or reptiles", doesn't it? " Mammals or reptiles" sounds like it's one or the other and you aren't sure which.
Wait.... what? First off, I don't recall a single boss which didn't have a save right before him. I played through the game like five times and I'm pretty sure about that. Second, I don't recall ever ending up in the boss chamber without just having saved. The save rooms were all really obvious and generally marked on your map.
Unless you can name a boss with no adjacent save room, I call bullshit.
Nonsense. Where did he say it was "solely on the grounds that it is not a Logitech mouse"? All he said was that it was unfortunate he had to use it and that he wanted to replace it. Maybe it's unfortunate that he has to use it because... he's unhappy with it?
You are incorrect. The click detection is indeed done by detecting the capacitance of your fingers. I accept that there may be more than one physical microswitch inside the device, but that has nothing to do with left/right-click determination. The only thing that matters is whether your finger is resting on the left half of the device or not.
Seconded. I had never handed my 9-month old a toy weapon. He had never seen one on TV. At only 9 months old, his play experience with other children was highly limited and had been mostly with a friend's daughter.
So what does he do when handed a paper towel tube? He immediately starts swinging it around like a sword and chasing after the dog, trying to hit it. Aforementioned little girl had absolutely no interest in such and continued stroking her doll's hair.
Boys and girls are, in general, different. Sure it's wrong to assume that EVERY boy or girl will develop stereotypical male or female behaviors, or that society and culture don't have a major impact, but it's equally wrong to assume that boys and girls are exactly the same. They aren't.
Memory is the only thing that is measured in binary units. Hard disks, transfer rates... everywhere other than memory is using metric prefixes, as well they should -- the idea that "tera" == 1,099,511,627,776 is asinine. Computer geeks complaining about using tera to mean a trillion is really asinine.
I don't get how saying that a 1.5TB drive holds 1,500,000,000,000 bytes makes it appear "bigger than it really is". Who, other than a computer geek, wouldn't expect it to hold 1,500,000,000,000 bytes?
Plus you can't exactly say that they're going "against convention" to say that "mega" == 1,000,000, now can you? The metric conventions are far older and better established than the binary prefixes, so if anybody is going against convention it's the memory manufacturers.
...but they are advertising this drive as 1.5TB when it's actiually 1500TB. That's 36GB missing.
I am sick of this stupid fucking argument. A 1.5TB drive storing 1,500,000,000,000 bytes is a lot more sensible than a 1.5TB drive storing 1,649,267,441,664 bytes (actually 1.5TiB).
Do you really CARE about the exact number of bytes on the drive? Do you lovingly count each and every one of them? Or do you just care "1.5TB holds 50% more than 1TB, let me buy that one". Since all of the drive manufacturers use the same units and all of the units are consistent with the metric prefixes, why are you complaining?
Oh, it's because your stupid operating system reports your 1.5TB drive as a 1.36TB drive? Let me spell this out for you: all that means is that the operating system is wrong. Seriously, if the entire hard drive industry has accepted that 1TB = 10^12 bytes, why on earth is your operating system persisting in using an obsolete and incorrect definition of the unit? If it suddenly started reporting it as a 1.5TB drive, would that make you happy? The number of bytes on the drive doesn't change either way, of course.
You can't possibly tell me that you really NEED those extra bytes a 1.5TiB drive would have compared to a 1.5TB drive, so really you're just bitching about the OS not reporting the same number that the manufacturer does. And that's the OS's fault for being stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you should actually try USING one before deciding how intuitive or nonintuitive it is. It's actually a really fantastic mouse.
Why do you assume that people at seminary don't do that?
Because they still believe in the Bible. Anybody that applied serious scientific thinking to it wouldn't take it any more seriously than they do Greek mythology.
1) theory
2) You never heard of the bible, did you? Since you can't prove your "theory" of evolution, you must accept that the bible proposes a possible alternative . . . that is, unless you're like most slashdotters - ignorant.
I freely accept that any and every fact I perceive may be wrong. I might actually be a mental patient locked in a padded room, imagining I'm typing a message on Slashdot. I might be a butterfly dreaming I'm a computer programmer. I might be a brain in a vat, being fed neural impulses from a simulation of an artificial reality. Or, even more unlikely, the Bible might actually be true.
And....? Did you have some actual point to make? And for bonus points: are you a troll, or simply ignorant?
Where are all the transitional species?
This is an old, tired anti-evolutionary argument. The answer is that every single fossil we find is a transitional species. Unfortunately fossilization is an incredibly unlikely event, and a fossil surviving for tens of millions of years and then happening to be uncovered even more incredibly unlikely, so the fossil record simply doesn't contain every species that ever existed. We may never find the real ancestor of all modern birds, just cousins of it like Archaeopteryx. So what? The fact that birds evolved from dinosaurs is irrefutable.
The problem is the date for feathers keeps getting pushed back and there have even been early lizards found with what appear to be feathers.
I assume you're referring to Longisquama. There is good reason to doubt that those structures were even real, let alone feathers.
One massive gap is if birds evolved from dinosaurs where are all the tree dwelling dinos?
What are you talking about? First, the division between "bird" and "dinosaur" is entirely arbitrary. Birds, in a very real sense, ARE dinosaurs. We just draw an arbitrary line in the sand and say the things on one side are dinosaurs and the things on the other side are birds, but there's no hard and fast reason to draw the line at any particular spot. Archaeopteryx really doesn't look all that different from the raptors that came before it, and still has a very dinosaur-like head and no beak. Is it a bird?
Early birds were likely ground dwellers, just like the raptors they evolved from. We don't know precisely when tree-dwelling evolved, because we don't have enough fossils to be able to tell. I fail to see how this is a "massive gap"; it's a minor question at best.
Odds are birds branched off very early on and were a separate line of evolution so saying birds evolved from dinosaurs is kind of like saying we evolved from chimpanzee.s
Nonsense. Saying birds evolved from Archaeopteryx would be like saying we evolved from chimps -- not all that far wrong, but wrong. Saying birds evolved from dinosaurs is like saying we evolved from primates. Dinosaurs are a very, very big group, and there is absolutely no doubt that birds evolved from them.
While I wholeheartedly agree with your overall sentiment, I am compelled to point out that science does require faith in the basic assumption that the behavior of the universe is governed by laws.
For instance, if I perform ten billion trials where I drop an object and it falls to the surface of the earth, and the next time I drop it and it remains hanging in midair, science posits that there must be a REASON why the object did not fall. The law of gravity is not arbitrary, and if we find it to have been seemingly violated then either our theory is wrong (the real law of gravity differs from our imperfect understanding of gravity in a way that allows this behavior to happen) or our understanding of the situation is wrong (gravity was still in effect, but some other effect such as a strong updraft held the object aloft).
Religion permits this situation to be described as a miracle -- essentially, an arbitrary violation of the laws of the universe. Science doesn't, and requires us to seek a naturalistic explanation.
Now, I firmly side with the "we need to seek an alternate explanation for supposed miracles" side of things -- so far, the score is something along the lines of Science: 100000000000000, Religion: 0. However, it is important to understand that science does require the (very reasonable and thoroughly supported) assumption that the laws of the universe are not arbitrary and are never violated.
I'm curious. If we were discussing the existence of, say... leprechauns, would you be saying "Exactly! The existence of leprechauns can neither be proved nor disproved. Anyone that claims otherwise.. better have some proof!" Or <insert fictional entity here>? Do we have to have proof of them not existing too?
I take issue with the "you can't prove he's not real!" argument. I agree, I can't prove that God doesn't exist. I also can't prove that leprechauns aren't real, or that Santa Claus wasn't really bringing me presents when I was little. Hell, I can't even prove that there aren't dinosaurs living in the middle of some unexplored jungle somewhere. But "you can't prove otherwise!" doesn't mean that the idea actually merits consideration.
The correct -- and only sensible -- stance is to assume that such fantastic claims as God or leprechauns or Santa Claus are false. That doesn't mean you can't change your mind. Obviously if somebody in Ireland catches one of the little buggers, I'm perfectly prepared to adjust my default "leprechauns don't exist" stance. Likewise if there's a booming voice from the heavens telling us to start behaving or we'll go to hell, I'm willing to revisit the "God doesn't exist" theory. But in the complete absence of any evidence, claiming God exists is NO DIFFERENT than claiming any other fictional character exists. You don't give Harry Potter the benefit of the doubt and assume he might actually be real; you don't believe that dragons might once have really roamed the English countryside despite a lack of evidence. So why does God -- a fictional character far more unlikely than all of the rest put together -- merit such special consideration? Why is he the one character that you have to give the benefit of the doubt to?
Unless you're referring to a 3rd-party app or a beta firmware or something like that, you're smoking crack. The Maps application built into the iPhone does not automatically recalculate directions when you go off-course.
I was in Russia recently, and while the vast majority of Russians were extremely nice to me, some random guy on the subway cussed me the fuck out.
I was just standing there minding my own business and idly chatting with a coworker when this guy just starts laying into me. I don't speak Russian so I have no idea what he was actually saying, but it's not hard to tell when somebody is saying something extremely unpleasant to you even if you don't speak the language. Plus there were liberal sprinklings of "Americano" and mock spitting. I was half expecting him to throw a punch.
So yes, most people most places are pretty nice, but I've run into more than one asshole who hates me for no other reason than my nationality.
So why can't we imagine a world where every computer can run software written by anyone? Is that not also clearly the best alternative for consumers? If not, why not?
Because, as an iPhone developer, I am acutely aware that 99% of the people jailbreaking phones do so in order to steal software. And no, letting consumers freely steal whatever they want is not the best alternative for anyone in the long run... because eventually nobody will be developing software anymore, and the very consumers doing the stealing will lose out in the long run.
Part of the reason the iPhone market is so thriving and healthy compared to the PC / Mac market is that it's so much harder to steal software there. I have little interest in porting my app to the desktop, because everybody would just pirate the thing.
You are wrong on both counts (as grammar nazis often are).
A) I am aware that "data" was originally the plural of "datum", but its use as a plural is largely antiquated. Its current most common usage is as an uncountable quantity just like "water". It sounds just as weird to say that you have "five data" as to say you have "five waters". You instead have "10GB of data" or "1L of water".
B) Saying that your data is a bunch of ones and zeroes is absolutely correct. "The animals in the zoo are mammals and reptiles" makes more sense than "mammals or reptiles", doesn't it? " Mammals or reptiles" sounds like it's one or the other and you aren't sure which.
Close, but they're actually blue LEDs with a yellow phosphor.
Wait.... what? First off, I don't recall a single boss which didn't have a save right before him. I played through the game like five times and I'm pretty sure about that. Second, I don't recall ever ending up in the boss chamber without just having saved. The save rooms were all really obvious and generally marked on your map.
Unless you can name a boss with no adjacent save room, I call bullshit.
No, you can demonstrate that there is a checkbox which claims to disable roaming. The whole point of this article is that it doesn't actually do so.
Just FYI, the conductor is Clive Wearing, and it was caused by Herpes Encephalitis rather than whiplash.
Nonsense. Where did he say it was "solely on the grounds that it is not a Logitech mouse"? All he said was that it was unfortunate he had to use it and that he wanted to replace it. Maybe it's unfortunate that he has to use it because... he's unhappy with it?
You are incorrect. The click detection is indeed done by detecting the capacitance of your fingers. I accept that there may be more than one physical microswitch inside the device, but that has nothing to do with left/right-click determination. The only thing that matters is whether your finger is resting on the left half of the device or not.
It's Ctrl-Cmd-D. It will define the word under the cursor.
Actually for hard science you find more women scientists than men.
[citation needed]
Seconded. I had never handed my 9-month old a toy weapon. He had never seen one on TV. At only 9 months old, his play experience with other children was highly limited and had been mostly with a friend's daughter.
So what does he do when handed a paper towel tube? He immediately starts swinging it around like a sword and chasing after the dog, trying to hit it. Aforementioned little girl had absolutely no interest in such and continued stroking her doll's hair.
Boys and girls are, in general, different. Sure it's wrong to assume that EVERY boy or girl will develop stereotypical male or female behaviors, or that society and culture don't have a major impact, but it's equally wrong to assume that boys and girls are exactly the same. They aren't.
Ummm... you realize you can format HFS+ case sensitive, right?
You said it better than I ever could have. Mod parent up, and listen to him!
Memory is the only thing that is measured in binary units.
Hard disks, transfer rates... everywhere other than memory is using metric prefixes, as well they should -- the idea that "tera" == 1,099,511,627,776 is asinine. Computer geeks complaining about using tera to mean a trillion is really asinine.
I don't get how saying that a 1.5TB drive holds 1,500,000,000,000 bytes makes it appear "bigger than it really is". Who, other than a computer geek, wouldn't expect it to hold 1,500,000,000,000 bytes?
Plus you can't exactly say that they're going "against convention" to say that "mega" == 1,000,000, now can you? The metric conventions are far older and better established than the binary prefixes, so if anybody is going against convention it's the memory manufacturers.
...but they are advertising this drive as 1.5TB when it's actiually 1500TB. That's 36GB missing.
I am sick of this stupid fucking argument. A 1.5TB drive storing 1,500,000,000,000 bytes is a lot more sensible than a 1.5TB drive storing 1,649,267,441,664 bytes (actually 1.5TiB).
Do you really CARE about the exact number of bytes on the drive? Do you lovingly count each and every one of them? Or do you just care "1.5TB holds 50% more than 1TB, let me buy that one". Since all of the drive manufacturers use the same units and all of the units are consistent with the metric prefixes, why are you complaining?
Oh, it's because your stupid operating system reports your 1.5TB drive as a 1.36TB drive? Let me spell this out for you: all that means is that the operating system is wrong. Seriously, if the entire hard drive industry has accepted that 1TB = 10^12 bytes, why on earth is your operating system persisting in using an obsolete and incorrect definition of the unit? If it suddenly started reporting it as a 1.5TB drive, would that make you happy? The number of bytes on the drive doesn't change either way, of course.
You can't possibly tell me that you really NEED those extra bytes a 1.5TiB drive would have compared to a 1.5TB drive, so really you're just bitching about the OS not reporting the same number that the manufacturer does. And that's the OS's fault for being stupid.
I'm guessing it's a reference to "an in-depth look". That's supposed to be the binary stored on the platters.