And note that the EC still hasn't had its accounts signed off - and the gravy train of expenses and other payments probably means we will never get open accountability from them.
A common cry of the Eurosceptics -- for some reason missing out the fact that most UK government departments haven't had their accounts signed off in many years either, and the gravy train of expenses and other payments probably means we will never get open accountability from them. But hey, at least it's honest-to-goodness British corruption, not like that nasty foreign sort, eh?
Which raises the question: Why should Microsoft continue to choose Dublin as their main European base of operations if this is the kind of price hikes they will be forced to impose on perhaps their single largest European market?
Why on Earth would the UK be Microsoft's single largest European market? What do you think they use in France, Germany, the Netherlands and so on?
Wrong. This is an example of setting boundaries. It is generally inappropriate for students and teachers to have social relationships. Ethics 101.
Why? It's only a problem if you make it a problem. I knew some of my teachers socially because we were part of the same community. Try watching Être et avoir before seeing wrong where there is none.
How odd, is there something significantly different about your computer?
Not that I'm aware of.
That's part one. I then late last week, installed 12.04 via update. Flawless. Typically in a Windows update, stuff gets broken. I've lost video drivers, lost peripherals, had desktop settings bollixed, and changing them back to their original setting doesn't survive a reboot.
It's many years since I did a Windows update (not counting service packs), so I've no comparison. But I've never managed a Linux upgrade without trashing the system and needing to reinstall from scratch. Case in point: I upgraded from KUbuntu Oneiric to Precise overnight last night, and now X won't start; all I can get is a terminal console. That's better than my usual experience -- at least I can try to fix things from a console.
Well, since Microsoft seem to be abandoning the desktop (based on the Windows 8 consumer preview) I'm going to have to go somewhere. It's an 8+ year-old desktop I can't get working, not a laptop.
Case in point: A colleagues old desktop machine. He recently installed Ubuntu 11.10. USB ports would not pick up any USB mass storage devices. Couple of people had found the problem but it had not been fixed.
Still there in 12.04.
It's little random bugs like this that keep cropping up that play a part in steering people away from Linux. I myself am an avid linux user, but I have been waiting for that 'perfect desktop' and it never came. I have even gone so far as to *not* wipe Win7 on my latest laptop...
That's my experience too. I want to use Linux, and I keep trying to get a Linux installation on which everything works (I've just posted a couple of forum messages for help getting the USB mouse to work and to get sound to work properly). Whenever I want to fiddle about to get another thing working I boot Linux. When I want to get something done I heave a sigh and boot MS Windows.
say for a drug that can save lives but which is administered in private clinics so as to keep competing pharmaceuticals from gaining direct access to the drug
There would be nothing keeping competitors from acquiring and selling the drug, as in a true free market, patents and copyright wouldn't exist.
Presumably there would be a measure of security through obscurity. The pharmaceutical companies could presumably put some complicated passive compounds in with the active one (obfustication!) so those wanting to clone it would have to either isolate the active ingredient or work out how to fabricate a whole raft of ingredients, either of which could be a significant research task. After all, in a truly free market there would be no need to declare the active ingredient (or, indeed, for there to even be an active ingredient).
That's the beauty in this: it's like the "Won't someone please think of the children?!" bullshit fallacies got turned right back around and used for good. If they want to pursue this (which I doubt), they have to go after a 92 year old vet that's spent $30,000 out of pocket sending DVDs to our troops. In what universe could that possibly have a positive result for them?
Presumably one in which the Taliban wins the war and takes over the USA. Granted, that's not the most likely of scenarios...
All perceptions of reality are based on assumptions, such as one that you aren't really just a brain in a jar being fed images and sounds through your sensory nerves.
This is why I made the qualification at the end of my 'truth' definition.
If you are going to belabor this point then there is nothing to talk about because you are not real.
Ok, so your assumptions are obvious and anybody who disagrees with them is obviously stupid. Oddly, that's just what the fundamentalist Christians keep saying too, but of different assumptions. By the way, rejection of solipsism is far from the only assumption that science has to make.
They just don't agree with you over what comprises evidence and how to interpret it.
The scientific standards for evidence have yielded advances in knowledge that have allowed us to make technology that has improved the lives of billions of people.
The religious standards for evidence have yielded innumerable incompatible religions that all claim to be true.
Who has the most useful standard for evidence?
I didn't say anything about standards of evidence. And I notice that you didn't say anything about all the people whose lives have been ruined (or ended) by technology (the victims of Nagasaki, for example) or the people whose lives have been improved by religion (in the UK at least the drive to abolish slavery was pretty much entirely religious).
One day I'm determined to get myself a T-shirt that reads "Actually, it's rather more complicated than that". Some religious people believe without evidence. Some don't. Some atheists disbelieve without evidence. Some don't. The real world doesn't fit into your tidy categories; it's not even clear what the "scientific standards for evidence" are, and if you think it is then you have a lot to learn about science.
Yes, after all, there's no value in confirming your preconceived ideas with experimental evidence, is there?
Experimental evidence is always welcome, but to me this article's title sounds a lot like a tautology.
It's only a tautology if you define religious belief to be contrary to analytic thinking, in which case you are still left with the problem of showing that it then has anything to do with what everybody else means by religious belief.
Because a lot of engineers don't have an analytical mind, they have an engineering degree. I used to work with a lot of very religious engineers as well, and I found out more often than not they were good at math, not solving actual problems.
A lot of engineers? What do you mean by "a lot"?
He means that experimental observation contradicts his existing beliefs, and he prefers to discredit the evidence rather than change his beliefs. Some might call that "religious".
And you clearly don't understand logic. Logic dictates a need for a reason to believe something. Religion has no reason beyond 'that guy told me it was like that' or 'that book told me it was like that' or 'you can't show it's not true' - none of which are valid.
You clearly don't understand logic or religion. Logic does no such thing as dictate a need for a reason to believe something. Logic takes you from premises to conclusions. In other words, it gives you a reason to believe something given that you already believe something else. And although some religion has no "reason beyond 'that guy told me it was like that' or 'that book told me it was like that' or 'you can't show it's not true'" but it's a hasty generalisation to say that all religion is like that.
I suspect that analytical thinking reduces belief in everything. I'd be interested to see an equivalent study done on belief in strong statements of atheism, or of belief in political claims (from any political position). That it was religion that the scientists chose to study rather supports the claims made by some post-modernists that science is socially constructed, not because it's conclusions are but because of the topics it chooses to examine. Presumably those doing the research didn't think that the sorts of belief that they had needed examination.
Thats the religion of "science" - that everything needs evidence.
Actually, no. There are two main religions of science. One is that science is solely evidence based -- that it doesn't believe anything without evidence (which is false). The other is that the things that it believes without evidence are so obvious that every sensible person should accept them (which is debatable). Then there are those who don't believe either of those things and get on with science non-religiously. Being aware of the uncertainty of their own metaphysical assumptions, though, the latter group tends to be somewhat less critical of those who make different metaphysical assumptions.
Devout religious belief is about much more than taking the religion's documents literally.
You're right. It's about believing things to be true without evidence.
Define it that way if you like. But then many (most?) people who would identify themselves as religious wouldn't be under that definition, because they put great emphasis on evidence. They just don't agree with you over what comprises evidence and how to interpret it.
Rather the opposite, in fact. The "no true Scotsman" argument would be a possible (fallacious) objection to that poster's comment: "Well, those orthodox Jews who don't take all the stories in the bible as literal are not really religious". The poster's argument was in fact correctly pointing out a logical fallacy: hasty generalisation.
The love of a mother is at least potentially falsifiable. Everything we know about the mind indicates that it is entirely comprised of patterns of neural activity in the brain.
Actually, that's a highly controversial claim. Everything we know about the mind indicates that the patterns of neural activity in the brain (or maybe equivalent patterns in some other medium such as a computer) are a necessary condition for the existence of a mind, but that's not the same as saying that those patterns are the mind. This is a big field of philosophical argument. and it's one on which science has less to say than many neuroscientists think (because "mind" is a subjective experience, and science deals only with what it classifies as objective).
With sophisticated enough technology, it's entirely possible in principle to observe those patterns and determine whether love is being experienced.
Or you could argue that emotions have no physical basis and that my mother could be a philosophical zombie. This is entirely possible, but since it's empirically indistinguishable from "actual" love the distinction is meaningless. I don't actually care wihch is true, and I'm not even sure it's cromulent to assign a truth value to either.
Which was rather the parent poster's point. Science probably can't assign a truth value to whether a particular human mother loves her offspring, but it's rather a key concept for getting on with everyday life. Strictly the scientist should stay agnostic on the issue, but I reckon most would be believing agnostics!
I'd like to punch you in the nose and ask YOU if there is an objective reality. It still hurts either way doesn't it?
Yes, if I have the subjective experience of somebody punching me on the nose, I expect there would be a subjective experience of pain. What does that prove about objective reality?
Measure it, verify it, believe it. Is the sun real or matrix flow? What does it matter? It is still going to appear to be there. You form beliefs starting from the most basic belief that you exist. I think, therefore, I am. The existence of X is verifiable.
You do realise that Descartes was only able to get from "I think, therefore, I am" to his equivalent of "The existence of X is verifiable" by invoking God (an unverifiable metaphysical assumption), don't you? And that many modern scientists consider thought to be an illusion?
The non-falsifiable part is that the cucumber on mars made it all happen.
One of very many unfalsifiable parts. Try catching up with why logical positivism collapsed in the 20th century. You could start with finding out what Popper's idea of falsifiability was really about, and his argument that the boundary between what is objective and what is subjective is nothing but a social convention. The approach you describe is good enough for the simple cases but it collapses -- badly -- on the tricky cases. Most scientists don't have to worry about that because they're not dealing with those edge cases, which is why they're rarely taught the philosophy of science and can still do the job perfectly well. But when they pontificate on the edge cases or the philosophy of science they tend to embarrass themselves, as with Stephen Hawking's nonsense claim that "Any sound scientific theory, whether of time or of any other concept, should in my opinion be based on the most workable philosophy of science: the positivist approach put forward by Karl Popper and others" (nonsense because Karl Popper vehemently opposed the positivist approach).
Slashdot Mirror
So unless Microsoft has been running prices 30% too low for 3 years the reason they gave was fallacious.
No. For it to be fallacious it would at least have to be plausible.
And note that the EC still hasn't had its accounts signed off - and the gravy train of expenses and other payments probably means we will never get open accountability from them.
A common cry of the Eurosceptics -- for some reason missing out the fact that most UK government departments haven't had their accounts signed off in many years either, and the gravy train of expenses and other payments probably means we will never get open accountability from them. But hey, at least it's honest-to-goodness British corruption, not like that nasty foreign sort, eh?
Today's exchange rate: 1 Euro = 1.31 US dollars. Pretty much where it has always been.
What that tells the rest of us is that the US$ has problems too.
Which raises the question: Why should Microsoft continue to choose Dublin as their main European base of operations if this is the kind of price hikes they will be forced to impose on perhaps their single largest European market?
Why on Earth would the UK be Microsoft's single largest European market? What do you think they use in France, Germany, the Netherlands and so on?
Wrong. This is an example of setting boundaries. It is generally inappropriate for students and teachers to have social relationships. Ethics 101.
Why? It's only a problem if you make it a problem. I knew some of my teachers socially because we were part of the same community. Try watching Être et avoir before seeing wrong where there is none.
How odd, is there something significantly different about your computer?
Not that I'm aware of.
That's part one. I then late last week, installed 12.04 via update. Flawless. Typically in a Windows update, stuff gets broken. I've lost video drivers, lost peripherals, had desktop settings bollixed, and changing them back to their original setting doesn't survive a reboot.
It's many years since I did a Windows update (not counting service packs), so I've no comparison. But I've never managed a Linux upgrade without trashing the system and needing to reinstall from scratch. Case in point: I upgraded from KUbuntu Oneiric to Precise overnight last night, and now X won't start; all I can get is a terminal console. That's better than my usual experience -- at least I can try to fix things from a console.
Well, since Microsoft seem to be abandoning the desktop (based on the Windows 8 consumer preview) I'm going to have to go somewhere. It's an 8+ year-old desktop I can't get working, not a laptop.
Case in point: A colleagues old desktop machine. He recently installed Ubuntu 11.10. USB ports would not pick up any USB mass storage devices. Couple of people had found the problem but it had not been fixed.
Still there in 12.04.
It's little random bugs like this that keep cropping up that play a part in steering people away from Linux. I myself am an avid linux user, but I have been waiting for that 'perfect desktop' and it never came. I have even gone so far as to *not* wipe Win7 on my latest laptop...
That's my experience too. I want to use Linux, and I keep trying to get a Linux installation on which everything works (I've just posted a couple of forum messages for help getting the USB mouse to work and to get sound to work properly). Whenever I want to fiddle about to get another thing working I boot Linux. When I want to get something done I heave a sigh and boot MS Windows.
Yes, but that's not why.
say for a drug that can save lives but which is administered in private clinics so as to keep competing pharmaceuticals from gaining direct access to the drug
There would be nothing keeping competitors from acquiring and selling the drug, as in a true free market, patents and copyright wouldn't exist.
Presumably there would be a measure of security through obscurity. The pharmaceutical companies could presumably put some complicated passive compounds in with the active one (obfustication!) so those wanting to clone it would have to either isolate the active ingredient or work out how to fabricate a whole raft of ingredients, either of which could be a significant research task. After all, in a truly free market there would be no need to declare the active ingredient (or, indeed, for there to even be an active ingredient).
That's the beauty in this: it's like the "Won't someone please think of the children?!" bullshit fallacies got turned right back around and used for good. If they want to pursue this (which I doubt), they have to go after a 92 year old vet that's spent $30,000 out of pocket sending DVDs to our troops. In what universe could that possibly have a positive result for them?
Presumably one in which the Taliban wins the war and takes over the USA. Granted, that's not the most likely of scenarios...
All perceptions of reality are based on assumptions, such as one that you aren't really just a brain in a jar being fed images and sounds through your sensory nerves.
This is why I made the qualification at the end of my 'truth' definition.
If you are going to belabor this point then there is nothing to talk about because you are not real.
Ok, so your assumptions are obvious and anybody who disagrees with them is obviously stupid. Oddly, that's just what the fundamentalist Christians keep saying too, but of different assumptions. By the way, rejection of solipsism is far from the only assumption that science has to make.
They just don't agree with you over what comprises evidence and how to interpret it.
The scientific standards for evidence have yielded advances in knowledge that have allowed us to make technology that has improved the lives of billions of people.
The religious standards for evidence have yielded innumerable incompatible religions that all claim to be true.
Who has the most useful standard for evidence?
I didn't say anything about standards of evidence. And I notice that you didn't say anything about all the people whose lives have been ruined (or ended) by technology (the victims of Nagasaki, for example) or the people whose lives have been improved by religion (in the UK at least the drive to abolish slavery was pretty much entirely religious).
One day I'm determined to get myself a T-shirt that reads "Actually, it's rather more complicated than that". Some religious people believe without evidence. Some don't. Some atheists disbelieve without evidence. Some don't. The real world doesn't fit into your tidy categories; it's not even clear what the "scientific standards for evidence" are, and if you think it is then you have a lot to learn about science.
Experimental evidence is always welcome, but to me this article's title sounds a lot like a tautology.
It's only a tautology if you define religious belief to be contrary to analytic thinking, in which case you are still left with the problem of showing that it then has anything to do with what everybody else means by religious belief.
Because a lot of engineers don't have an analytical mind, they have an engineering degree. I used to work with a lot of very religious engineers as well, and I found out more often than not they were good at math, not solving actual problems.
A lot of engineers? What do you mean by "a lot"?
He means that experimental observation contradicts his existing beliefs, and he prefers to discredit the evidence rather than change his beliefs. Some might call that "religious".
Yes, after all, there's no value in confirming your preconceived ideas with experimental evidence, is there? Er...
And you clearly don't understand logic. Logic dictates a need for a reason to believe something. Religion has no reason beyond 'that guy told me it was like that' or 'that book told me it was like that' or 'you can't show it's not true' - none of which are valid.
You clearly don't understand logic or religion. Logic does no such thing as dictate a need for a reason to believe something. Logic takes you from premises to conclusions. In other words, it gives you a reason to believe something given that you already believe something else. And although some religion has no "reason beyond 'that guy told me it was like that' or 'that book told me it was like that' or 'you can't show it's not true'" but it's a hasty generalisation to say that all religion is like that.
Truth is not a judgement. It is something that can be demonstrated with facts that can be verified.
Inevitably based on assumptions that cannot be...
I suspect that analytical thinking reduces belief in everything. I'd be interested to see an equivalent study done on belief in strong statements of atheism, or of belief in political claims (from any political position). That it was religion that the scientists chose to study rather supports the claims made by some post-modernists that science is socially constructed, not because it's conclusions are but because of the topics it chooses to examine. Presumably those doing the research didn't think that the sorts of belief that they had needed examination.
Thats the religion of "science" - that everything needs evidence.
Actually, no. There are two main religions of science. One is that science is solely evidence based -- that it doesn't believe anything without evidence (which is false). The other is that the things that it believes without evidence are so obvious that every sensible person should accept them (which is debatable). Then there are those who don't believe either of those things and get on with science non-religiously. Being aware of the uncertainty of their own metaphysical assumptions, though, the latter group tends to be somewhat less critical of those who make different metaphysical assumptions.
Devout religious belief is about much more than taking the religion's documents literally.
You're right. It's about believing things to be true without evidence.
Define it that way if you like. But then many (most?) people who would identify themselves as religious wouldn't be under that definition, because they put great emphasis on evidence. They just don't agree with you over what comprises evidence and how to interpret it.
Rather the opposite, in fact. The "no true Scotsman" argument would be a possible (fallacious) objection to that poster's comment: "Well, those orthodox Jews who don't take all the stories in the bible as literal are not really religious". The poster's argument was in fact correctly pointing out a logical fallacy: hasty generalisation.
The love of a mother is at least potentially falsifiable. Everything we know about the mind indicates that it is entirely comprised of patterns of neural activity in the brain.
Actually, that's a highly controversial claim. Everything we know about the mind indicates that the patterns of neural activity in the brain (or maybe equivalent patterns in some other medium such as a computer) are a necessary condition for the existence of a mind, but that's not the same as saying that those patterns are the mind. This is a big field of philosophical argument. and it's one on which science has less to say than many neuroscientists think (because "mind" is a subjective experience, and science deals only with what it classifies as objective).
With sophisticated enough technology, it's entirely possible in principle to observe those patterns and determine whether love is being experienced.
Or you could argue that emotions have no physical basis and that my mother could be a philosophical zombie. This is entirely possible, but since it's empirically indistinguishable from "actual" love the distinction is meaningless. I don't actually care wihch is true, and I'm not even sure it's cromulent to assign a truth value to either.
Which was rather the parent poster's point. Science probably can't assign a truth value to whether a particular human mother loves her offspring, but it's rather a key concept for getting on with everyday life. Strictly the scientist should stay agnostic on the issue, but I reckon most would be believing agnostics!
I'd like to punch you in the nose and ask YOU if there is an objective reality. It still hurts either way doesn't it?
Yes, if I have the subjective experience of somebody punching me on the nose, I expect there would be a subjective experience of pain. What does that prove about objective reality?
Measure it, verify it, believe it. Is the sun real or matrix flow? What does it matter? It is still going to appear to be there. You form beliefs starting from the most basic belief that you exist. I think, therefore, I am. The existence of X is verifiable.
You do realise that Descartes was only able to get from "I think, therefore, I am" to his equivalent of "The existence of X is verifiable" by invoking God (an unverifiable metaphysical assumption), don't you? And that many modern scientists consider thought to be an illusion?
The non-falsifiable part is that the cucumber on mars made it all happen.
One of very many unfalsifiable parts. Try catching up with why logical positivism collapsed in the 20th century. You could start with finding out what Popper's idea of falsifiability was really about, and his argument that the boundary between what is objective and what is subjective is nothing but a social convention. The approach you describe is good enough for the simple cases but it collapses -- badly -- on the tricky cases. Most scientists don't have to worry about that because they're not dealing with those edge cases, which is why they're rarely taught the philosophy of science and can still do the job perfectly well. But when they pontificate on the edge cases or the philosophy of science they tend to embarrass themselves, as with Stephen Hawking's nonsense claim that "Any sound scientific theory, whether of time or of any other concept, should in my opinion be based on the most workable philosophy of science: the positivist approach put forward by Karl Popper and others" (nonsense because Karl Popper vehemently opposed the positivist approach).
"Have you ever lived in a house you thought was haunted?"
Wait, which is the right answer?
"No, because ghosts are afraid of the invisible goblins that follow me everywhere."