You miss my point. That you posted on this forum indicates that you believe your sense of sight and touch to be fairly reliable, and that you believe your own words to be coherent.
Dr. Robert Baker appears to cling to a handful of incidences where intelligent people made some progress in the field of paleontology and somehow that alleviates all the other problems organized religions have presented to science.
In other words, your handful is superior to his handful.
Yeah. Yeah, that's really depressing to know that someone can have a doctorate from Yale and Harvard and cling to this idea that science owes its existence to religion. It's even more disgusting that you restrict your examples specifically to Christianity and not Hindi or Muslim contributions.
You have completely missed what he was saying. He was not making an exhaustive list, and he was not saying that science owed its existence to religion-- perhaps re-read this part: Whom do we thank for over two thousand years of scientific advancement? Aristotle and his translators. University founders. Museum builders. Field surveyors employed by governments. Did religious folks help? Of course ... and then explain how youre going from that to "hes clinging to an idea of religion as progenitor of science".
Atheists are all superior moralists who can do no wrong. -- This message has been approved by Stalin, Pol Pot, and Chairman Mao.
I would gladly take all of the "poisonous forms" of religion and stack them up against those of atheist, and try to see which is more virulent. Your problem is thinking that the root of the "poison" is an idea, rather than the people themselves.
Baloney. You cannot apply the scientific method to something historical-- it is neither "repeatable" or "testable"; you have the evidence that you have and must draw conclusions from it based on other pools of knowledge. You cannot run a test to try to falsify your conclusion that Julius Caesar was in a particular place at a particular time; you can simply hope for more evidence to be found which supports or does not support that conclusion.
There are many things we consider science that involve gathering evidence outside of the scientific method. In the course of your study you may USE the scientific method in an attempt to clarify, prove, or disprove, but science itself is a broad field, while the "scientific method" is, as the name implies, just a method used in the pursuit of science.
At some point in the past the leader of a particular religious group acted in a particularly foolish and oppressive way. Therefore all religions obstruct reason and science.
Well gee, I might flip that on its head, point to several repressive and backward atheist regimes in the 20th century that twisted science to support an agenda, and remark that being atheist also seems to obstruct science. Guess everyone obstructs science then?
The idea that some idea can't be disproved in no way serves to validate that idea.
There are a great many ideas that are not provable or disprovable that we assume.
For example, you could not disprove the idea that you alone exist, dreaming the entirety of existance. Such an idea is neither provable nor disprovable, yet we assume that we actually do exist. Likewise, in order for any kind of scientific method to function, you have to assume that some things in the universe are constant-- if you did not assume constant gravitational constant, decay rate of various particles, speed of light, etc, you could make no valid observations about the past. History relies on the assumptions about weathering rates, that landmasses tend to stay where they are (so a tablet found in egypt is likely egyptian), that sediment and rock builds up at predictable rates, etc.
Everyone makes assumptions, including the most particular of scientists. The only way to do otherwise would be to to doubt existence itself, as your own senses may be unreliable. Descarte's "I think therefore I am" itself relies on assumptions about the basic reliability of reason. If you think that you are different and have found some solid bedrock of fact that requires no assumption, I would invite you to share it.
I think theres a substantial difference between having to trade your euros for drachmas, and being told that your euros dont actually exist anymore because the euro blockchain was forked and unfortunately everyone else agreed that you had less money and they had more.
So are there any databases out there which could scale to handling every transaction for the general population? USD has been running for 200+ years now with no issues. If BTC is hitting scaling issues now at ~5 years and 0.5% of the population, that doesnt bode terribly well.
Its only fascinating in a train-wreck sort of way. Every 6 months we get a story about how the value of BTC has dropped 25% again and theres been a hacking incident at some exchange or something, but its OK because its mathematically proveable and thus a viable currency.
At some point bitcoin went from an interesting idea to an an example of pigheaded wishful thinking.
Either the part of the country you live in is drastically different than where I live (Metro DC), or else you are grossly exagerating how big of a problem this is. Yes, some lights have very short yellows. Yes, sometimes you dont know ahead of time. No, it doesnt substantially change my point; you still prepare as you approach an intersection.
If youre getting caught because the light went yellow in that very brief moment when you go from "I can still stop" to " I should proceed", and you get ticketed, then you can address it with that defense. The vast vast majority of cases are not that, theyre people who are truly running the light, and a lot of the time its because they just dont care.
Parking enforcement does the same thing, and it can be ridiculously difficult to appeal even blatantly false tickets-- if the cop claims you were parked in front of a hydrant, how can you possibly disprove him?
I would hope your car's speed is not fluctuating wildly enough that you need to give that much attention to it. If it does, perhaps you should acquaint yourself with this new tech called "cruise control".
I had always understood speed trap to mean changing the speed limit drastically with no warning / at the bottom of the hill in an attempt to generate revenue.
Theres no mention that the speed limit even changes here. "The speed limit is lower than I want to drive" does not constitute a speed trap. Maybe you should stop speeding.
You're talking about corner cases. There are lights where it may literally be impossible to get thru in under an hour without breaking some law because of gridlock or ridiculously short lights. I have seen that once im my time in the DC metro area. I have seen two other lights which have sufficiently short greens that you need to floor it as soon as the light goes green, as it is literally a 10 second green and will go yellow when you are halfway across the intersection.
The rest of the thousands of lights I've seen are varying degrees of good / bad, but have not seen any of these lights where its not possible to know what to do. If it turns yellow, you stop as quick as possible. If you cant do that because you will skid, then you were going too fast. Yes, in ice this may mean that you approach the intersection @ 25 mph, and leave a few feet to start accelerating before the light turns green. Yes, its a little more work than simply trying to play the jackrabbit at every intersection.
You take your foot off of the gas as you approach an intersection and start deciding ahead of time whether you will stop or proceed if the light changes. Bonus points, it allows you to be prepared if someone does something really stupid like trying to run the light crossways to you.
That may indeed be a problem, but people not planning to stop + no safety margin is ALSO a problem. In the real world, it is possible that both the drivers AND the city need to improve, but from what I've seen the far bigger need is on the driver's side.
The simple fact is that all constitutional issues aside, drivers want to do what they want to do, and they dont want a ticket for it. Sometimes that involves thinking they have the right to continue going thru a red left turn signal 3-4 cars after it has gone red, simply because they think its too short (it is, but still). Sometimes that involves metrobusses blocking an intersection because theyve determined that its the only way they're getting thru rush hour. Millions of excuses can be made, but at the end of the day if people werent so susceptible to awful driving that breaks the law and causes traffic jams, the traffic cameras wouldnt be worth installing and we wouldnt be having this discussion.
Let me get this straight, you are able to figure out how fast to go / when to break so as to avoid sliding into the intersection, but somehow you cant figure out how to break early enough so as not to cross that line?
Just so you know, cops can and will ticket you for crossing that white line; its not just cameras. And just so you know, most cameras (at least around here) are set so as to avoid false positives -- red light cameras wont trigger till you really enter the intersection, speed cameras wont trigger till 11mph over, etc. If youre getting caught by them, you werent just "kind of" breaking the rules.
Whenever Ive gotten a cam ticket, they put what appears to be sufficient information to deduce from the image whether you were actually speeding-- the lines on the road appear in both images, the images are timestamped, and the distance between lines is given.
Of course it is possible that the clock resolution is off in the cameras, but im going to go out on a limb and say that its more likely that there were 6000 instances of speeding, and that the reality is that people dont like the current speed limits but cant be bothered to change the law.
I do think the judge is right that there are some fundamental problems with a machine enforcing the law and acting as a de facto judge / jury. Sure, you can appeal, but the system is heavily weighted against you.
You can already try to do that with the cellular signals.
Just because we can now audibly hear the signals, doesnt make it any more "broadcast" than cell / wifi, or any less secure. Security will entirely depend on whether and how they encrypt the signal, and as always has remarkably little to do with the medium used.
Slashdot Mirror
You miss my point. That you posted on this forum indicates that you believe your sense of sight and touch to be fairly reliable, and that you believe your own words to be coherent.
Have you any evidence for that?
Everything they oppose, such as taxes and universal health care
TIL Jesus had a stance on government healthcare.
When the situation comes up of some researcher asking to experiment on humans ala Mengele, we'll worry about it
Ok, how about Dr Mengele? Unit 731? Tuskeegee Syphilis study?
The situation has come up and continues to come up; if you didnt realize that, you havent been paying attention.
Dr. Robert Baker appears to cling to a handful of incidences where intelligent people made some progress in the field of paleontology and somehow that alleviates all the other problems organized religions have presented to science.
In other words, your handful is superior to his handful.
Yeah. Yeah, that's really depressing to know that someone can have a doctorate from Yale and Harvard and cling to this idea that science owes its existence to religion. It's even more disgusting that you restrict your examples specifically to Christianity and not Hindi or Muslim contributions.
You have completely missed what he was saying. He was not making an exhaustive list, and he was not saying that science owed its existence to religion-- perhaps re-read this part:
... and then explain how youre going from that to "hes clinging to an idea of religion as progenitor of science".
Whom do we thank for over two thousand years of scientific advancement? Aristotle and his translators. University founders. Museum builders. Field surveyors employed by governments. Did religious folks help? Of course
Sure is a nice log scale youre using there, and it still looks crazy volatile.
True, but I think a better argument for you is the fact that despite these periodic "corrections" the price is still continuing to rise precipitously
Oh, I see, thats reassuring. Say, would you like a loan for 100BTC? You can just pay me back after the price has risen 500%.
See why volatility-- even when upwards-- is not terribly good for a currency?
Atheists are all superior moralists who can do no wrong.
-- This message has been approved by Stalin, Pol Pot, and Chairman Mao.
I would gladly take all of the "poisonous forms" of religion and stack them up against those of atheist, and try to see which is more virulent. Your problem is thinking that the root of the "poison" is an idea, rather than the people themselves.
Baloney. You cannot apply the scientific method to something historical-- it is neither "repeatable" or "testable"; you have the evidence that you have and must draw conclusions from it based on other pools of knowledge. You cannot run a test to try to falsify your conclusion that Julius Caesar was in a particular place at a particular time; you can simply hope for more evidence to be found which supports or does not support that conclusion.
There are many things we consider science that involve gathering evidence outside of the scientific method. In the course of your study you may USE the scientific method in an attempt to clarify, prove, or disprove, but science itself is a broad field, while the "scientific method" is, as the name implies, just a method used in the pursuit of science.
Have you any evidence in the basic reliability of your own senses and reason? Or do you take them on some kind of "faith"?
Let me see if I get your argument right.
At some point in the past the leader of a particular religious group acted in a particularly foolish and oppressive way. Therefore all religions obstruct reason and science.
Well gee, I might flip that on its head, point to several repressive and backward atheist regimes in the 20th century that twisted science to support an agenda, and remark that being atheist also seems to obstruct science. Guess everyone obstructs science then?
The idea that some idea can't be disproved in no way serves to validate that idea.
There are a great many ideas that are not provable or disprovable that we assume.
For example, you could not disprove the idea that you alone exist, dreaming the entirety of existance. Such an idea is neither provable nor disprovable, yet we assume that we actually do exist. Likewise, in order for any kind of scientific method to function, you have to assume that some things in the universe are constant-- if you did not assume constant gravitational constant, decay rate of various particles, speed of light, etc, you could make no valid observations about the past. History relies on the assumptions about weathering rates, that landmasses tend to stay where they are (so a tablet found in egypt is likely egyptian), that sediment and rock builds up at predictable rates, etc.
Everyone makes assumptions, including the most particular of scientists. The only way to do otherwise would be to to doubt existence itself, as your own senses may be unreliable. Descarte's "I think therefore I am" itself relies on assumptions about the basic reliability of reason. If you think that you are different and have found some solid bedrock of fact that requires no assumption, I would invite you to share it.
I think theres a substantial difference between having to trade your euros for drachmas, and being told that your euros dont actually exist anymore because the euro blockchain was forked and unfortunately everyone else agreed that you had less money and they had more.
So are there any databases out there which could scale to handling every transaction for the general population? USD has been running for 200+ years now with no issues. If BTC is hitting scaling issues now at ~5 years and 0.5% of the population, that doesnt bode terribly well.
Its only fascinating in a train-wreck sort of way. Every 6 months we get a story about how the value of BTC has dropped 25% again and theres been a hacking incident at some exchange or something, but its OK because its mathematically proveable and thus a viable currency.
At some point bitcoin went from an interesting idea to an an example of pigheaded wishful thinking.
If you look at the history of the USD vs the history of Bitcoin, I think you might learn something regarding which is actually more volatile.
Hint, the USD does a dip like this every couple of decades. Bitcoin seems to have a record of doing it every 9 months or so.
Either the part of the country you live in is drastically different than where I live (Metro DC), or else you are grossly exagerating how big of a problem this is. Yes, some lights have very short yellows. Yes, sometimes you dont know ahead of time. No, it doesnt substantially change my point; you still prepare as you approach an intersection.
If youre getting caught because the light went yellow in that very brief moment when you go from "I can still stop" to " I should proceed", and you get ticketed, then you can address it with that defense. The vast vast majority of cases are not that, theyre people who are truly running the light, and a lot of the time its because they just dont care.
Parking enforcement does the same thing, and it can be ridiculously difficult to appeal even blatantly false tickets-- if the cop claims you were parked in front of a hydrant, how can you possibly disprove him?
I would hope your car's speed is not fluctuating wildly enough that you need to give that much attention to it. If it does, perhaps you should acquaint yourself with this new tech called "cruise control".
I hate those towns. They are built as speed traps
I had always understood speed trap to mean changing the speed limit drastically with no warning / at the bottom of the hill in an attempt to generate revenue.
Theres no mention that the speed limit even changes here. "The speed limit is lower than I want to drive" does not constitute a speed trap. Maybe you should stop speeding.
You're talking about corner cases. There are lights where it may literally be impossible to get thru in under an hour without breaking some law because of gridlock or ridiculously short lights. I have seen that once im my time in the DC metro area. I have seen two other lights which have sufficiently short greens that you need to floor it as soon as the light goes green, as it is literally a 10 second green and will go yellow when you are halfway across the intersection.
The rest of the thousands of lights I've seen are varying degrees of good / bad, but have not seen any of these lights where its not possible to know what to do. If it turns yellow, you stop as quick as possible. If you cant do that because you will skid, then you were going too fast. Yes, in ice this may mean that you approach the intersection @ 25 mph, and leave a few feet to start accelerating before the light turns green. Yes, its a little more work than simply trying to play the jackrabbit at every intersection.
You take your foot off of the gas as you approach an intersection and start deciding ahead of time whether you will stop or proceed if the light changes. Bonus points, it allows you to be prepared if someone does something really stupid like trying to run the light crossways to you.
Problem solved.
That may indeed be a problem, but people not planning to stop + no safety margin is ALSO a problem. In the real world, it is possible that both the drivers AND the city need to improve, but from what I've seen the far bigger need is on the driver's side.
The simple fact is that all constitutional issues aside, drivers want to do what they want to do, and they dont want a ticket for it. Sometimes that involves thinking they have the right to continue going thru a red left turn signal 3-4 cars after it has gone red, simply because they think its too short (it is, but still). Sometimes that involves metrobusses blocking an intersection because theyve determined that its the only way they're getting thru rush hour. Millions of excuses can be made, but at the end of the day if people werent so susceptible to awful driving that breaks the law and causes traffic jams, the traffic cameras wouldnt be worth installing and we wouldnt be having this discussion.
Let me get this straight, you are able to figure out how fast to go / when to break so as to avoid sliding into the intersection, but somehow you cant figure out how to break early enough so as not to cross that line?
Just so you know, cops can and will ticket you for crossing that white line; its not just cameras. And just so you know, most cameras (at least around here) are set so as to avoid false positives -- red light cameras wont trigger till you really enter the intersection, speed cameras wont trigger till 11mph over, etc. If youre getting caught by them, you werent just "kind of" breaking the rules.
Whenever Ive gotten a cam ticket, they put what appears to be sufficient information to deduce from the image whether you were actually speeding-- the lines on the road appear in both images, the images are timestamped, and the distance between lines is given.
Of course it is possible that the clock resolution is off in the cameras, but im going to go out on a limb and say that its more likely that there were 6000 instances of speeding, and that the reality is that people dont like the current speed limits but cant be bothered to change the law.
I do think the judge is right that there are some fundamental problems with a machine enforcing the law and acting as a de facto judge / jury. Sure, you can appeal, but the system is heavily weighted against you.
You can already try to do that with the cellular signals.
Just because we can now audibly hear the signals, doesnt make it any more "broadcast" than cell / wifi, or any less secure. Security will entirely depend on whether and how they encrypt the signal, and as always has remarkably little to do with the medium used.