Had he shut up after "I don't know," he would have gained some respect from me. "I don't know" is a very good answer.
Then again, any minister running for the presidency would not have gotten my vote regardless, but at least he believes the lies he spouts. The rest of the candidates have no such excuse for theirs.
When I heard about it this morning, it suddenly made sense why Comcast would want to kill off bittorrent: competition! Well, that, and they also wouldn't be able to provide the bandwidth claimed in the contract with their customers.
It's obvious the technicians and scientists responsible for the rovers were interested in only one thing: keeping their jobs (and fame). So, they claimed the mission was only for 90 days, but made the rovers so tough and resilient as to give them (and their creators' careers) indefinite lifespans. Right as NASA is about to cut the budget, there will surely be some major discovery on Mars, and later one of the rovers will get into some difficult situation that will be overcome heroically by staff 10 days shy of being let go.
A lot can change in 10 years. Sure, education, the economy, health insurance, all of that will still be in the shitter, but at least we'll have forced everyone to get vaccinated against a drug they weren't necessarily ever going to take.
Following reason is just like a religion, except it's backed up by evidence and rationale. Reason provides the explanation for why it is probable that doing X will result in Y, but for a person to actually act on this rationale requires a leap. This is just a restatement of Hume's is-ought problem.
Great, if outsourcing wasn't enough, now we have to worry about the boss randomly firing you to hire someone with no experience whatsoever. Next in Ask Slashdot: Are You Hiring?
"Seriously, though, how do those cretins sleep at night? "
They've already lost all hope in their artists making good music. The last hope they have is to get more money. They see the highly-inaccurate but appealling projections made by their staff as to how much more money they could be making, and with nothing left to cling to, they sleep at night with the hope of a new day and a new fortune.
How does this apply to me? I make it a point whenever entering my credit card number and personal information into an order form, to do a Google search first to make sure someone else doesn't have the same information, so they don't get confused and send my order to them instead.
Nobody with at least two brain cells to rub together still believes the Jews built the pyramids, and few still believe the builders were slaves, although they may have been slaves to their religious beliefs. In any case, the Biblical fairy tale has never held water.
The article you linked is simply a hypothesis, not backed up by any actual evidence other than conjecture. The article in the story actually tests this hypothesis. Nothing was "known" until now.
It sounds like the creator of Think Secrets is pissed off but trying to act otherwise. He alludes to being "pleased" with the result, saying that he is now able to focus on his "college studies". Had college studies been important to him in the first place, he wouldn't have spent so much time on other projects like this. Most likely this statement is just a weak attempt to save face.
All the more enticing! Imagine having to buy your spouse a new capsule of this stuff every year. After all, you don't want her snooty friends making fun of her for wearing scorpion venom circa 2004.
Considering that a gallon of gold is about 1/20th the cost of scorpion venom, I'm surprised we don't start wearing little capsules of the stuff around our necks.
"So, what do you call non-belief, despite the evidence?"
As the other responder said: doubt. I don't accept your "evidence", because your evidence is not compelling on its own, and certainly not compelling when lumped together with all the other stories - religious and otherwise - that have existed over the millennia.
I don't think you really understood what you were doing. What you saw were 3D projections of these objects, as parts of them rotated in and out of our dimensions. Or you saw what they looked like unfolded into 3 dimensions. You did not see them in your brain. That is not possible.
"Certainly the characters who wrote in and were described by the Bible would not consider religious faith to be "belief without evidence.""
Your belief in the reality of these characters' existence, let alone of their accounts or beliefs, is what can be characterized as "belief without evidence". All religious stories contain characters with first-hand accounts. The problem is that people can also make up stories containing characters with first-hand accounts.
"do the so-called "laws of nature" work because that's how the universe "IS", or is the universe the way it is because that's how the "laws of nature" were designed?"
Our laws are wrong. We might never know what laws would most accurately describe the universe.
"would it make sense for a designer (AKA a God) to organize/make a universe that doesn't follow comprehensible rules?"
Why should the rules be comprehensible? Sure, we've comprehended some of it, but there's really no guarantee that our brains will figure it all out. Our brains certainly can't grasp more than 3 spatial dimensions.
Also, why do you believe the actions of a deity have to make sense? A lot of things in the real world don't make sense to us. Common sense has been a regular failure at analyzing more than the most basic scenarios.
"or that this group of sentient beings known as humans can't set about on a centuries long search to understand what those rules are?"
Yes, I could see it being true that our brains - originally developed for hunting strategy and making weapons - would not be able to handle revealing the fundamental laws of nature. Then again, as I said, common sense regularly fails.
"Because what I reject is the limitation imposed by atheistic scientists that the answer to that first argued question must be presupposed towards randomness, not design."
I don't think the word "randomness" means what you think it means. If you are talking about evolution, it certainly does not progress at random. It is indeed nearly impossible for a bunch of particles to fly together and form a 747. But then, that is not what evolution is.
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Had he shut up after "I don't know," he would have gained some respect from me. "I don't know" is a very good answer.
Then again, any minister running for the presidency would not have gotten my vote regardless, but at least he believes the lies he spouts. The rest of the candidates have no such excuse for theirs.
When I heard about it this morning, it suddenly made sense why Comcast would want to kill off bittorrent: competition! Well, that, and they also wouldn't be able to provide the bandwidth claimed in the contract with their customers.
Yeesh... nobody can take a joke when the rovers are involved...
It's obvious the technicians and scientists responsible for the rovers were interested in only one thing: keeping their jobs (and fame). So, they claimed the mission was only for 90 days, but made the rovers so tough and resilient as to give them (and their creators' careers) indefinite lifespans. Right as NASA is about to cut the budget, there will surely be some major discovery on Mars, and later one of the rovers will get into some difficult situation that will be overcome heroically by staff 10 days shy of being let go.
It's the only movie where you'll see Mel Gibson portray a character named "Jerry".
A lot can change in 10 years. Sure, education, the economy, health insurance, all of that will still be in the shitter, but at least we'll have forced everyone to get vaccinated against a drug they weren't necessarily ever going to take.
Following reason is just like a religion, except it's backed up by evidence and rationale. Reason provides the explanation for why it is probable that doing X will result in Y, but for a person to actually act on this rationale requires a leap. This is just a restatement of Hume's is-ought problem.
Should Slashdot just redirect to digg and get it over with? How is this news?
"I realized that far too many people let emotion get in the way of logic."
Your emotional urge to follow logic no matter where it goes is something you should examine more closely.
-- A fellow atheist.
Great, if outsourcing wasn't enough, now we have to worry about the boss randomly firing you to hire someone with no experience whatsoever. Next in Ask Slashdot: Are You Hiring?
"Seriously, though, how do those cretins sleep at night? "
They've already lost all hope in their artists making good music. The last hope they have is to get more money. They see the highly-inaccurate but appealling projections made by their staff as to how much more money they could be making, and with nothing left to cling to, they sleep at night with the hope of a new day and a new fortune.
How does this apply to me? I make it a point whenever entering my credit card number and personal information into an order form, to do a Google search first to make sure someone else doesn't have the same information, so they don't get confused and send my order to them instead.
From the article: "Chen in effect sued his own Web site"
There seems to be some residual effect from being in the proximity to former Soviet Russia.
"How much would it cost to fill an iPod with songs from used CDs?"
I think they calculated that figure based on the average content of a computer geek's iPod - namely, exactly 42 million copies of Wilhelmscream.mp3
Nobody with at least two brain cells to rub together still believes the Jews built the pyramids, and few still believe the builders were slaves, although they may have been slaves to their religious beliefs. In any case, the Biblical fairy tale has never held water.
The article you linked is simply a hypothesis, not backed up by any actual evidence other than conjecture. The article in the story actually tests this hypothesis. Nothing was "known" until now.
It sounds like the creator of Think Secrets is pissed off but trying to act otherwise. He alludes to being "pleased" with the result, saying that he is now able to focus on his "college studies". Had college studies been important to him in the first place, he wouldn't have spent so much time on other projects like this. Most likely this statement is just a weak attempt to save face.
All the more enticing! Imagine having to buy your spouse a new capsule of this stuff every year. After all, you don't want her snooty friends making fun of her for wearing scorpion venom circa 2004.
Considering that a gallon of gold is about 1/20th the cost of scorpion venom, I'm surprised we don't start wearing little capsules of the stuff around our necks.
"So, what do you call non-belief, despite the evidence?"
As the other responder said: doubt. I don't accept your "evidence", because your evidence is not compelling on its own, and certainly not compelling when lumped together with all the other stories - religious and otherwise - that have existed over the millennia.
I don't think you really understood what you were doing. What you saw were 3D projections of these objects, as parts of them rotated in and out of our dimensions. Or you saw what they looked like unfolded into 3 dimensions. You did not see them in your brain. That is not possible.
"Certainly the characters who wrote in and were described by the Bible would not consider religious faith to be "belief without evidence.""
Your belief in the reality of these characters' existence, let alone of their accounts or beliefs, is what can be characterized as "belief without evidence". All religious stories contain characters with first-hand accounts. The problem is that people can also make up stories containing characters with first-hand accounts.
"do the so-called "laws of nature" work because that's how the universe "IS", or is the universe the way it is because that's how the "laws of nature" were designed?"
Our laws are wrong. We might never know what laws would most accurately describe the universe.
"would it make sense for a designer (AKA a God) to organize/make a universe that doesn't follow comprehensible rules?"
Why should the rules be comprehensible? Sure, we've comprehended some of it, but there's really no guarantee that our brains will figure it all out. Our brains certainly can't grasp more than 3 spatial dimensions.
Also, why do you believe the actions of a deity have to make sense? A lot of things in the real world don't make sense to us. Common sense has been a regular failure at analyzing more than the most basic scenarios.
"or that this group of sentient beings known as humans can't set about on a centuries long search to understand what those rules are?"
Yes, I could see it being true that our brains - originally developed for hunting strategy and making weapons - would not be able to handle revealing the fundamental laws of nature. Then again, as I said, common sense regularly fails.
"Because what I reject is the limitation imposed by atheistic scientists that the answer to that first argued question must be presupposed towards randomness, not design."
I don't think the word "randomness" means what you think it means. If you are talking about evolution, it certainly does not progress at random. It is indeed nearly impossible for a bunch of particles to fly together and form a 747. But then, that is not what evolution is.
"No science is advanced enough for any but the most deluded scientist to think they can answer that question."
...or the most elementary philosopher or theologian.
Four different forces, superstrings, antineutrinos, strange quarks, neutralinos, gluons, and 26 dimensions.
The laws of physics are clearly the result of a bureaucracy.