Atheism is equivalently irrational to theism. When someone postulates the existence of an unprovable being, claiming you know that being doesn't exist is the same as claiming you know it does: "knowledge" based on faith.
Agnosticism makes perfect sense, since God as proposed by all major religions is defined as beyond proof (hence faith). Under those circumstances, saying "I don't know" is the only purely rational response.
Atheism, however, is a religion. Its adherents cling to the unprovable belief that there is no God just as vehemently as the religious cling to the unprovable belief that there is.
You are misrepresenting Christianity. I say this as a Catholic who accepts science wholeheartedly.
Your first point, that one cannot be "born" Christian is, technically, true. After all, a newborn can't meaningfully be anything in terms of philosophy or religion. However, if one has been raised Christian for one's entire life, "lifelong" Christian is a perfectly good description of it. In Catholicism, at least, you are expected to make a conscious choice after reaching adulthood (or some reasonable facsimile thereof) to continue being Catholic, but that doesn't mean you weren't Catholic growing up. This is similar in the other Christian faiths with which I am familiar, and I assume in most, if not all, of them.
I don't mean to give offense, but had your second point not been surrounded by what seems to be reasoned text, I would call troll. Your statement that Christianity and Evolution are fundamentally incompatible is simply ridiculous. You are equating "Christianity" with "literal belief in the Bible as written," which is, quite plainly, false. There are Christian faiths, of course, which do subscribe to a strict-to-the-word belief in the Bible, but most do not.
The belief that man is fundamentally flawed and therefore can (and does) succumb to temptation does not rest upon the (patently false - after all, who did Cain marry?) strictest interpretation of the Bible. It rests solely upon the observation that man is flawed, and does sin. To reconcile this with a perfect creator (the "problem of evil") is a non-trivial philosophical task, but that's a different issue, and doesn't conflict with evolution whatsoever.
At its root, Christianity is simply the belief that there is a God who created everything (one way or another), and that His son, Jesus, died to redeem man of his sins after explaining how people should behave.
Everything else is added trappings and expansions (and, as a Catholic, let me tell you that various flavors add a lot of trappings and expansions). Some of those, such as strict intepretation of the Bible, do conflict directly with macro evolution. Others, such as the Assumption, don't.
In any event, in no way is Christianity fundamentally opposed to macro evolution. Strict interpretation is, but not Christianity.
But CD copying and music downloading has moved into the mainstream: every PC sold as a unit has at least a CD burner, quite often a DVD burner. CD burners have been commonplace technology for years, and a material portion of the population knows how to and can use P2P software to download music at will.
Yet somehow, stores still sell CDs.
We've had easy and available duplication of text ever since the copy machine became commonplace, but plenty of books are still sold. Hell, baen.com gives away a significant number of novels in a variety of electronic formats, yet they're not in danger of going out of business. They bundled CDs full of books into several of their major releases, even, explicitly telling the buyers they were allowed to copy and distribute the CD (albeit only non-commercially).
This is anecdotal, but I know I, at least, bought literally three dozen books from them based on reading authors from their website and their CDs, including books I already had in electronic, printable format.
*shrug*
All the market data suggest that people are willing to pay for content if you provide content they want. No matter how counterintuitive it may seem, there's no denying the numbers.
Admittedly, I only base that statement on the fact that people, historically, have paid for content, and continue to pay for content today.
Movie theaters still sell tickets despite DVDs, DVDs still get bought despite HBO, HBO still gets bought despite cable, cable still gets bought despite OTA TV, OTA TV still gets watched despite newspapers, newspapers still get bought despite the web, etc.
In point of fact, I have no idea where you get the idea that people aren't willing to pay for content.
Given Napster, Limewire, Kazaa, Shareaza, eDonkey, Bittorrent and suprnova, stores still sell CDs, video games, and applications.
So, admittedly, by "fact" I only mean "assertion supported by all available empirical data."
This is an intuitively appealing, but false, argument. The fact of the matter is that people are willing to pay for content, whether or not copyright law exists. Your argument is the same one made against VCRs: if people can tape movies, why will they ever buy them? It's the argument that was made against player pianos (who'll buy sheet music?) and against TV (who will go to the movies?).
Each of those occurrences similarly highlighted the same thing: people are willing to pay for content, particularly if it is made convenient and useful to them.
Similarly, plenty of music, art and literature was created prior to the institionalization of modern copyright. Modern technology lowers the barriers to entry into the content-creation world; even without imposing artificial scarcity, if content was created absent such protection while it was harder to make, by what rationale is it predicted that less will be made when it's easier to make, even without that protection?
Zero Point Energy obviously has none of those problems, and research into it is drastically underfunded. If the government funded a research program on 1/10 the scale of the Manhattan project into ZPE I'm convinced it would become a viable power source and overshadow any of the other alternative energy sources being talked about.
(And, notably, there has been a metric fuckton of money poured into fusion research by the government. It's why we have two- and three-stage nuclear weapons. Research into fission bombs led directly to fission bombs and fission power generation, research into fusion bombs has led directly to fusion bombs.)
Please do. If there was a way for me to vote to build a nuclear power plant in the nearest place possible to my house, I would.
Unfortunately, blatant fear-mongering by the environmental movement have resulted in even those of us who would be more than happy to live near a nuclear plant being unable to.
I'd much rather have a nuclear plant in my neighborhood than a coal plant or a garbage dump, yet we've got plenty of both of those.
Yes, it is because someone else did the hard work. But from my POV, that's the same thing as "easy," isn't it?;) If companies routinely provided Linux drivers with their hardware, I'd say that Linux had reached hardware compatibility parity with Windows, and through no effort of any Linux developers.
Doom III is an interesting example, but note that it's software, not hardware. And while you can certainly find counterexamples, if you step back and look at the situation, it's not even reasonably debatable that my odds of buying Random Item in a store and having it Just Work with Windows are greater than with Linux. If you factor in the kind of things people are likely to buy, the difference becomes even more extreme.
I'm not defending MS, here - there's no doubt this is because the entire industry has capitulated to the need to be Windows-compatible, so MS has managed to offload all the work to other people. Nonetheless, from my POV, it's Just Easier.
Of course, when you ask which OS I'm fighting, I find myself without a snappy reply. Touche, sir, touche!
Because the rocket isn't used to launch vehicles, for one thing. It can be carted up as well-packaged components.
Because breakup/burnup/explosion on accidental re-entry will disperse radioactive material over a wide area. Which sounds bad, until you recognize that the additional radiation will get completely lost against the constant background radiation cranked out by the Earth all the time.
Frankly, I'd be more worried about inhaling the heavy metals than I would about the radiation, and that's a risk we already run with everything we send into space.
Please do not lump Project Orion and the Nicaraguan Canal together with nuclear power generation.
Nuclear power generation is self-contained, and only problematic in case of catastrophic failure. The other two are problematic when functioning as designed. Associating the three is precisely what has prevented the use of nuclear power generation.
You of course scare-monger by mentioning nuclear power plant failures, but you'll notice that the world has (shock!) survived just fine. While the death toll from an event like Chernobyl is certainly tragic, there are risks associated with developing any technology. Beyond which, I have the sneaking suspicion that more people have died from the effects of air pollution caused by fossil-fuel power generation than have died due to nuclear reactor failure by orders of magnitude.
I also suspect (based on broad stereotyping, admittedly, so feel free to tell me I'm wrong) that you also buy into global warming as a result of mankind's CO2 production, in which case the death toll from fossil fuel plants will be yet more orders of magnitude higher than would be caused by the occasional nuclear plant failure.
You're completely right - every time I've played with Linux, whatever it was preventing me from sticking with it the previous time was fixed.
Hopefully, things will progress to the point where the "hot new hardware" isn't something I particularly care about for whatever box I'm setting up at the moment.
But until Linux either has out-of-the-box support for everything you can get at Best Buy, and/or a painless way to install drivers, it will continue to be behind Windows in hardware support.
Because in Windows, while you have to install all the drivers yourself, doing so is easy.
In Linux, you may have to install fewer drivers, but the ones that you do have to install are difficult to do so with. This is what prevented me from making the switch to Linux a couple years ago: I couldn't get my wireless NIC running.
It's easy to say that I should buy hardware more carefully, or (as another poster said) it works on everything except "those shitty winprinters," but that avoids the problem. I need it to run on the hardware I've got already, or it becomes cheaper (and easier) for me to go buy a Windows upgrade.
I'm hardly a computer guru, but I'm definitely more competent than most people I know when it comes to them. Nonetheless, every time I've tried to switch to Linux (on average, once every year or two since '96), I've been put off by a piece of hardware I couldn't make work.
First it was sound, then it was printing, then it was a NIC, then it was a video card, then it was a wireless NIC.
*shrug*
I'm sure I could learn how to do it, but I already spend 50+ hours a week fighting with computers at work, I don't want to struggle when I get home.
So, 5%-(95% x 5%) leaves only a 0.25% chance that both will miss it.
Er
Isn't that what I said? Or am I missing a subtle distinction between your statement and mine?
(Bear in mind I freely admit that all my statistics knowledge is based on two semesters in college, I could easily be wrong)
Re: interesting but it's not really true
on
Murphy's Law Rules NASA
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I was being overly simplistic, admittedly, but I think the "model" (to put on airs) I used illustrated my point adequately: as long as there is a percent chance of an error being made at every step of the process, an error will eventually be made.
Obviously, the trick is to minimize the odds, but you can't eliminate them.
No, it is true. It's the "almost always" in your statement that's the key. It's simple statistics, really. Assume that a well-trained, expert engineer has a 5% chance of making a material error. This implies that 5% of the things s/he designs have flaws.
Now suppose this output is double-checked by another engineer, who also has a 5% chance of error. 95% of the first engineer's errors will be caught, but that still leaves a.25% chance of an error getting through both engineers.
No matter what the percentages, no matter how many eyes are involved, the only way to guarantee perfection is to have someone with a zero percent chance of error...and the chances of that happening are zero percent. Any other numbers mean that mistakes will occur. Period.
I remember reading a story somewhere about a commercial jet liner that took off with almost no fuel. There are plenty of people whose job it is to check that every plane has fuel...but each of them has a probability of forgetting. Chain enough "I forgots" together, and you have a plane taking off without gas. At the level of complexity we're dealing with in our attempts to throw darts at objects xE7 kilometers away, it is guaranteed that mistakes will propagate all the way through the process.
Re:Transport latency and TCP
on
Replacing TCP?
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· Score: 1
Forgive my ignorance, I'm not trying to ask a stupid or offensive question, I really do want to know: doesn't a TCP connection scale its window size over the life of the connection to resolve this exact problem?
Or do I misremember that from my one semester of networking?
Or are you discussing a completely different problem and I'm just dumb?
Yeah, like me. I don't particularly feel like replacing all my existing hardware and software, thanks. Even if I could, which would imply millions of developer hours spent on porting.
True, though the distance between home and Apollo 13 was a lot less than the distance between home and halfway to Mars, thereby allowing the communication that potentially made the difference between life and death.
Regardless, my point was that the chance of catastrophic failure in an off-board propulsion system is not significantly different than the chance of catastrophic failure in an on-board propulsion system. It's not comparable to most Earth-bound modes of transportation, where if something goes wrong, the ability of humans to intervene makes an orders-of-magnitude difference in the chances of survival. In this sort of endeavor, the difference is much smaller, so the additional risk of "outsourcing" the braking thrust, as it were, is relatively minor.
You are, of course, right. This is more dangerous. On the other hand, we don't have much in the way of in-transit fixing possible, but we have far more in the way of pre-mission know-how, which tend to balance each other out.
A change in velocity is a result of acceleration. Acceleration as a measurement is a rate of change in velocity.
The cars, assuming lack of friction, did not have a deltaV. They had a V of 60 mph. They had a deltaV if they were turning, slowing down or speeding up, each of which is a result of acceleration.
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Agnosticism makes perfect sense, since God as proposed by all major religions is defined as beyond proof (hence faith). Under those circumstances, saying "I don't know" is the only purely rational response.
Atheism, however, is a religion. Its adherents cling to the unprovable belief that there is no God just as vehemently as the religious cling to the unprovable belief that there is.
Your first point, that one cannot be "born" Christian is, technically, true. After all, a newborn can't meaningfully be anything in terms of philosophy or religion. However, if one has been raised Christian for one's entire life, "lifelong" Christian is a perfectly good description of it. In Catholicism, at least, you are expected to make a conscious choice after reaching adulthood (or some reasonable facsimile thereof) to continue being Catholic, but that doesn't mean you weren't Catholic growing up. This is similar in the other Christian faiths with which I am familiar, and I assume in most, if not all, of them.
I don't mean to give offense, but had your second point not been surrounded by what seems to be reasoned text, I would call troll. Your statement that Christianity and Evolution are fundamentally incompatible is simply ridiculous. You are equating "Christianity" with "literal belief in the Bible as written," which is, quite plainly, false. There are Christian faiths, of course, which do subscribe to a strict-to-the-word belief in the Bible, but most do not.
The belief that man is fundamentally flawed and therefore can (and does) succumb to temptation does not rest upon the (patently false - after all, who did Cain marry?) strictest interpretation of the Bible. It rests solely upon the observation that man is flawed, and does sin. To reconcile this with a perfect creator (the "problem of evil") is a non-trivial philosophical task, but that's a different issue, and doesn't conflict with evolution whatsoever.
At its root, Christianity is simply the belief that there is a God who created everything (one way or another), and that His son, Jesus, died to redeem man of his sins after explaining how people should behave.
Everything else is added trappings and expansions (and, as a Catholic, let me tell you that various flavors add a lot of trappings and expansions). Some of those, such as strict intepretation of the Bible, do conflict directly with macro evolution. Others, such as the Assumption, don't.
In any event, in no way is Christianity fundamentally opposed to macro evolution. Strict interpretation is, but not Christianity.
Yet somehow, stores still sell CDs.
We've had easy and available duplication of text ever since the copy machine became commonplace, but plenty of books are still sold. Hell, baen.com gives away a significant number of novels in a variety of electronic formats, yet they're not in danger of going out of business. They bundled CDs full of books into several of their major releases, even, explicitly telling the buyers they were allowed to copy and distribute the CD (albeit only non-commercially).
This is anecdotal, but I know I, at least, bought literally three dozen books from them based on reading authors from their website and their CDs, including books I already had in electronic, printable format.
*shrug*
All the market data suggest that people are willing to pay for content if you provide content they want. No matter how counterintuitive it may seem, there's no denying the numbers.
Admittedly, I only base that statement on the fact that people, historically, have paid for content, and continue to pay for content today.
Movie theaters still sell tickets despite DVDs, DVDs still get bought despite HBO, HBO still gets bought despite cable, cable still gets bought despite OTA TV, OTA TV still gets watched despite newspapers, newspapers still get bought despite the web, etc.
In point of fact, I have no idea where you get the idea that people aren't willing to pay for content.
Given Napster, Limewire, Kazaa, Shareaza, eDonkey, Bittorrent and suprnova, stores still sell CDs, video games, and applications.
So, admittedly, by "fact" I only mean "assertion supported by all available empirical data."
Each of those occurrences similarly highlighted the same thing: people are willing to pay for content, particularly if it is made convenient and useful to them.
Similarly, plenty of music, art and literature was created prior to the institionalization of modern copyright. Modern technology lowers the barriers to entry into the content-creation world; even without imposing artificial scarcity, if content was created absent such protection while it was harder to make, by what rationale is it predicted that less will be made when it's easier to make, even without that protection?
True, but it does accomplish decoupling the power source from the reaction mass, which is definitely a step in the right direction.
I'm not sure whether you're ignorant, illiterate, or just a dumbfuck, but please fix whichever it is before posting again.
But damn, that's the best "in Soviet Russia" joke I've ever seen on here, and it didn't say anything about Soviet Russia.
And if you'll just provide a billing address, I'll send you an invoice for post-nasal soda removal from my keyboard.
(And, notably, there has been a metric fuckton of money poured into fusion research by the government. It's why we have two- and three-stage nuclear weapons. Research into fission bombs led directly to fission bombs and fission power generation, research into fusion bombs has led directly to fusion bombs.)
Unfortunately, blatant fear-mongering by the environmental movement have resulted in even those of us who would be more than happy to live near a nuclear plant being unable to.
I'd much rather have a nuclear plant in my neighborhood than a coal plant or a garbage dump, yet we've got plenty of both of those.
Doom III is an interesting example, but note that it's software, not hardware. And while you can certainly find counterexamples, if you step back and look at the situation, it's not even reasonably debatable that my odds of buying Random Item in a store and having it Just Work with Windows are greater than with Linux. If you factor in the kind of things people are likely to buy, the difference becomes even more extreme.
I'm not defending MS, here - there's no doubt this is because the entire industry has capitulated to the need to be Windows-compatible, so MS has managed to offload all the work to other people. Nonetheless, from my POV, it's Just Easier.
Of course, when you ask which OS I'm fighting, I find myself without a snappy reply. Touche, sir, touche!
Because breakup/burnup/explosion on accidental re-entry will disperse radioactive material over a wide area. Which sounds bad, until you recognize that the additional radiation will get completely lost against the constant background radiation cranked out by the Earth all the time.
Frankly, I'd be more worried about inhaling the heavy metals than I would about the radiation, and that's a risk we already run with everything we send into space.
Nuclear power generation is self-contained, and only problematic in case of catastrophic failure. The other two are problematic when functioning as designed. Associating the three is precisely what has prevented the use of nuclear power generation.
You of course scare-monger by mentioning nuclear power plant failures, but you'll notice that the world has (shock!) survived just fine. While the death toll from an event like Chernobyl is certainly tragic, there are risks associated with developing any technology. Beyond which, I have the sneaking suspicion that more people have died from the effects of air pollution caused by fossil-fuel power generation than have died due to nuclear reactor failure by orders of magnitude.
I also suspect (based on broad stereotyping, admittedly, so feel free to tell me I'm wrong) that you also buy into global warming as a result of mankind's CO2 production, in which case the death toll from fossil fuel plants will be yet more orders of magnitude higher than would be caused by the occasional nuclear plant failure.
Hopefully, things will progress to the point where the "hot new hardware" isn't something I particularly care about for whatever box I'm setting up at the moment.
But until Linux either has out-of-the-box support for everything you can get at Best Buy, and/or a painless way to install drivers, it will continue to be behind Windows in hardware support.
In Linux, you may have to install fewer drivers, but the ones that you do have to install are difficult to do so with. This is what prevented me from making the switch to Linux a couple years ago: I couldn't get my wireless NIC running.
It's easy to say that I should buy hardware more carefully, or (as another poster said) it works on everything except "those shitty winprinters," but that avoids the problem. I need it to run on the hardware I've got already, or it becomes cheaper (and easier) for me to go buy a Windows upgrade.
I'm hardly a computer guru, but I'm definitely more competent than most people I know when it comes to them. Nonetheless, every time I've tried to switch to Linux (on average, once every year or two since '96), I've been put off by a piece of hardware I couldn't make work.
First it was sound, then it was printing, then it was a NIC, then it was a video card, then it was a wireless NIC.
*shrug*
I'm sure I could learn how to do it, but I already spend 50+ hours a week fighting with computers at work, I don't want to struggle when I get home.
Er
Isn't that what I said? Or am I missing a subtle distinction between your statement and mine?
(Bear in mind I freely admit that all my statistics knowledge is based on two semesters in college, I could easily be wrong)
Obviously, the trick is to minimize the odds, but you can't eliminate them.
Nah. Humans are very predictable in sufficiently large groups.
Now suppose this output is double-checked by another engineer, who also has a 5% chance of error. 95% of the first engineer's errors will be caught, but that still leaves a .25% chance of an error getting through both engineers.
No matter what the percentages, no matter how many eyes are involved, the only way to guarantee perfection is to have someone with a zero percent chance of error...and the chances of that happening are zero percent. Any other numbers mean that mistakes will occur. Period.
I remember reading a story somewhere about a commercial jet liner that took off with almost no fuel. There are plenty of people whose job it is to check that every plane has fuel...but each of them has a probability of forgetting. Chain enough "I forgots" together, and you have a plane taking off without gas. At the level of complexity we're dealing with in our attempts to throw darts at objects xE7 kilometers away, it is guaranteed that mistakes will propagate all the way through the process.
Or do I misremember that from my one semester of networking?
Or are you discussing a completely different problem and I'm just dumb?
Yeah, like me. I don't particularly feel like replacing all my existing hardware and software, thanks. Even if I could, which would imply millions of developer hours spent on porting.
You're not dreaming, you're having a nightmare.
Regardless, my point was that the chance of catastrophic failure in an off-board propulsion system is not significantly different than the chance of catastrophic failure in an on-board propulsion system. It's not comparable to most Earth-bound modes of transportation, where if something goes wrong, the ability of humans to intervene makes an orders-of-magnitude difference in the chances of survival. In this sort of endeavor, the difference is much smaller, so the additional risk of "outsourcing" the braking thrust, as it were, is relatively minor.
The kinetic energy still has to go somewhere, even if the item carrying it is vaporized.
You are, of course, right. This is more dangerous. On the other hand, we don't have much in the way of in-transit fixing possible, but we have far more in the way of pre-mission know-how, which tend to balance each other out.
A change in velocity is a result of acceleration. Acceleration as a measurement is a rate of change in velocity.
The cars, assuming lack of friction, did not have a deltaV. They had a V of 60 mph. They had a deltaV if they were turning, slowing down or speeding up, each of which is a result of acceleration.