FWIW, a lot of the anti-evolution arguments I see trotted around have to do with taxonomic minutiae.
The real reason not zto teach the controversy in science class, as you say right in the beginning, is that it's not a scientific controversy. It's a really sad attempt at trying to use science class to shoehorn religion into public schools by people. Some of these people are downright evil, some are just misinformed. But it could easily be phonics class, as long as it suited their goals of bringing more religion into the classroom.
No, that's part of skepticism. Skepticism is built into the scientific method. But science is all about the evidence. And for evolution, there's a whole freakin' lot of it.
There's no point in analyzing the measurements of sizes, ages, or whatever, in the Bible to that degree. They don't line up. Pointing that out to someone with strong beliefs is not going to result in some sort of "victory", because that's not why they believe in God. They believe for much more important reasons than the size of a cubit.
There's a lot of writing from men like Augustine and Aquinas where logical rigor is applied to the writing of the Bible. These men were brilliant and even they could not mix the oil of logic with the water of belief. And that's to say nothing about empirical claims.
You may as well try and count how many angels could fit on the head of a pin.
It doesn't matter. These are people that think morality is doing what you're told, either by book or by pontiff.
You don't have to see evolution as somehow at odds with morality. In fact, there's nothing in there that would allow you to do that. Evolution has a lot more to do with the pattern of spots on a butterfly than with human free will. So people choose to vilify evolution that because they need something to rail against. They need to feel threatened so that they can rationalize forcing their beliefs on others.
The big bang is so-called because people thought it was a ridiculous theory. Even scientists thought that the universe couldn't possibly have started that way. And yet, we have evidence to support that theory now. Guess what? We don't know everything. So people choose to believe that they do...don't expect me to give a crap about that. They have the power to be ignorant. They have to power to lie and say that somehow makes them a good person. What they should not do, is expect any compassion from me or those people who look at the world and see real, tangible problems that need solving, rather than souls that need "saving".
Some of them. The Evangelicals make sure they vote and lobby, and they get heard. People moan, but it's still a representative government, and a lot of the blame belongs to the people for not participating.
Yeah...where exactly in there did you explain capitalism? The economic system where the means of production belong to individuals in a free market, as opposed to the state, in a command economy?
Whether or not the market rewards increased efforts depends on the product, and the market. The sad reality is that, if something is better but costs more then people don't bother with it. We want our stuff cheap, consequences be damned.
Also, I don't know if you realize this, but the people who watch TV aren't the studios' customers. They are the product. And they love crappy reality shows.
Should have responded to the journeyman thing...I agree with you there. I think in those cases it's more about people protecting their own jobs. I do know some folks who *still* needed more time in the field before they became licensed. Intelligent people are always going to be held back by restrictions put in place to protect us from morons.
I fully agree with you but would like to point out that there is another reason the codes are very detailed...have you ever seen what a bad electrician is capable of? Spiderwebs of half-working circuits, lines going nowhere but not terminated. Things that leave you wondering how any sane person would think it was good, or finished. There are a lot of morons out there. There are a lot of intelligent people that feel constrained by those intricacies, but damn there are a lot of morons out there. Anything you leave to someone to figure out, someone will figure out completely wrong.
Creating these trade groups around standards and charging for access to the information is sick enough. Lobbying the government to turn it into law is even sicker. But c'mon...do they really need to profit off of both at once? That's like strip mining...with babies.
We all no google beta isn't realllllly beta. BUT this is actually Google beta beta, i know how this can be confusing. Really they should come up with a word to distinguish release products alpha products and beta products but that would be too simple.
Also so you know, google's labeling things beta is not to get away with things, its so they can say 'man we are still in beta and our product is 10x better than yours, god you suck microsoft'.
Damn, someone with modpoints was trying to eat greasy fried chicken and hold the mouse again.
The OP said "don't go where the work is, do something *cool*". The reply was Erlang. I thought it was brilliant, if you must know. At the very least, it was on-topic.
In terms of risk assessment, I think it is better, even if it's slight.
People create a false dichotomy when they point out that the user isn't necessarily reading the code. Published source code you didn't read is not the same as unpublished code. There's varying levels of trust, and I'd say it's not unreasonable to trust the FOSS app a little more. The concept is so simple ("here's the code" vs black box) that I wonder if people read into it too much.
If/when Google publishes a Linux version, the package maintainers for the various distros will be looking at it. You don't have to write the program yourself with electricity you generated from the running of hamsters that you also bred yourself. You can just say, "it's open, and it's popular, so I trust this a little more". Even though you can't really trust the compiler, or the hardware, or the network, etc.
As a user, I think that's a good thing. Let the W3C sort it out. I know the developers would like to see things keep getting more advanced, but I'm sick of going to pages with crappy JS that doesn't work right in Firefox. It's 2008 and I see no reason why the web can't be a haven for proven, stable, mature standards. I would like to see the sort of culture where having pages that don't validate correctly is unthinkable. And I'm sick of "innovation" that breaks the back button.
What's their completely new approach? All I noticed about was the screenshots of favorites (Opera / speed dial), private browsing (IE8 beta), and separate processes for tabs.
I think the scripting engine was written from scratch. The rendering is WebKit. And maybe we do want more of the same for browsers. For the same reason that only having one dominant browser is bad. Speak for yourself.
I think you should be more worried about the opposite scenario. The more browsers are out there (that are heavily used), the less any particular vendor has to deviate from the published standards.
I'm from the USA, presumably the same one the AC's talking about, and I've never seen a company referred to as "it". They are collections of people, after all.
Can we stop equating open source to closed source just because not everyone is a coder? There *is* a difference, and people *are* looking at the code. This isn't some one-man tic-tac-toe game that got abandoned in a dark corner of Sourceforge. It's Webkit, and has Google's name on it.
CT has to redo hundreds of storm drains on I-84 because the contractors who built the drains didn't connect them anywhere, just filled them with sand and put empty pipes at the end so they'd look done. I laugh when I think about, unless I'm in the car, then I cry.
FWIW, a lot of the anti-evolution arguments I see trotted around have to do with taxonomic minutiae.
The real reason not zto teach the controversy in science class, as you say right in the beginning, is that it's not a scientific controversy. It's a really sad attempt at trying to use science class to shoehorn religion into public schools by people. Some of these people are downright evil, some are just misinformed. But it could easily be phonics class, as long as it suited their goals of bringing more religion into the classroom.
No, that's part of skepticism. Skepticism is built into the scientific method. But science is all about the evidence. And for evolution, there's a whole freakin' lot of it.
Thank you for putting it more succinctly than I ever could.
Can't argue with unfalsifiable claims. It resembles the problem of criterion.
There's no point in analyzing the measurements of sizes, ages, or whatever, in the Bible to that degree. They don't line up. Pointing that out to someone with strong beliefs is not going to result in some sort of "victory", because that's not why they believe in God. They believe for much more important reasons than the size of a cubit.
There's a lot of writing from men like Augustine and Aquinas where logical rigor is applied to the writing of the Bible. These men were brilliant and even they could not mix the oil of logic with the water of belief. And that's to say nothing about empirical claims.
You may as well try and count how many angels could fit on the head of a pin.
It doesn't matter. These are people that think morality is doing what you're told, either by book or by pontiff.
You don't have to see evolution as somehow at odds with morality. In fact, there's nothing in there that would allow you to do that. Evolution has a lot more to do with the pattern of spots on a butterfly than with human free will. So people choose to vilify evolution that because they need something to rail against. They need to feel threatened so that they can rationalize forcing their beliefs on others.
The big bang is so-called because people thought it was a ridiculous theory. Even scientists thought that the universe couldn't possibly have started that way. And yet, we have evidence to support that theory now. Guess what? We don't know everything. So people choose to believe that they do...don't expect me to give a crap about that. They have the power to be ignorant. They have to power to lie and say that somehow makes them a good person. What they should not do, is expect any compassion from me or those people who look at the world and see real, tangible problems that need solving, rather than souls that need "saving".
Those sorts of people generally don't run for office.
Some of them. The Evangelicals make sure they vote and lobby, and they get heard. People moan, but it's still a representative government, and a lot of the blame belongs to the people for not participating.
Nah, he's probably just not an OS zealot.
Yeah...where exactly in there did you explain capitalism? The economic system where the means of production belong to individuals in a free market, as opposed to the state, in a command economy?
Whether or not the market rewards increased efforts depends on the product, and the market. The sad reality is that, if something is better but costs more then people don't bother with it. We want our stuff cheap, consequences be damned.
Also, I don't know if you realize this, but the people who watch TV aren't the studios' customers. They are the product. And they love crappy reality shows.
Or you could, you know, read the comments and go do something productive when you're done.
Should have responded to the journeyman thing...I agree with you there. I think in those cases it's more about people protecting their own jobs. I do know some folks who *still* needed more time in the field before they became licensed. Intelligent people are always going to be held back by restrictions put in place to protect us from morons.
I fully agree with you but would like to point out that there is another reason the codes are very detailed...have you ever seen what a bad electrician is capable of? Spiderwebs of half-working circuits, lines going nowhere but not terminated. Things that leave you wondering how any sane person would think it was good, or finished. There are a lot of morons out there. There are a lot of intelligent people that feel constrained by those intricacies, but damn there are a lot of morons out there. Anything you leave to someone to figure out, someone will figure out completely wrong.
Creating these trade groups around standards and charging for access to the information is sick enough. Lobbying the government to turn it into law is even sicker. But c'mon...do they really need to profit off of both at once? That's like strip mining...with babies.
Your what does what to an American?
I'll...keep that in mind.
Correct.
Damn, someone with modpoints was trying to eat greasy fried chicken and hold the mouse again.
The OP said "don't go where the work is, do something *cool*". The reply was Erlang. I thought it was brilliant, if you must know. At the very least, it was on-topic.
In terms of risk assessment, I think it is better, even if it's slight. People create a false dichotomy when they point out that the user isn't necessarily reading the code. Published source code you didn't read is not the same as unpublished code. There's varying levels of trust, and I'd say it's not unreasonable to trust the FOSS app a little more. The concept is so simple ("here's the code" vs black box) that I wonder if people read into it too much.
If/when Google publishes a Linux version, the package maintainers for the various distros will be looking at it. You don't have to write the program yourself with electricity you generated from the running of hamsters that you also bred yourself. You can just say, "it's open, and it's popular, so I trust this a little more". Even though you can't really trust the compiler, or the hardware, or the network, etc.
As a user, I think that's a good thing. Let the W3C sort it out. I know the developers would like to see things keep getting more advanced, but I'm sick of going to pages with crappy JS that doesn't work right in Firefox. It's 2008 and I see no reason why the web can't be a haven for proven, stable, mature standards. I would like to see the sort of culture where having pages that don't validate correctly is unthinkable. And I'm sick of "innovation" that breaks the back button.
What's their completely new approach? All I noticed about was the screenshots of favorites (Opera / speed dial), private browsing (IE8 beta), and separate processes for tabs.
I think the scripting engine was written from scratch. The rendering is WebKit. And maybe we do want more of the same for browsers. For the same reason that only having one dominant browser is bad. Speak for yourself.
I think you should be more worried about the opposite scenario. The more browsers are out there (that are heavily used), the less any particular vendor has to deviate from the published standards.
I'm from the USA, presumably the same one the AC's talking about, and I've never seen a company referred to as "it". They are collections of people, after all.
Can we stop equating open source to closed source just because not everyone is a coder? There *is* a difference, and people *are* looking at the code. This isn't some one-man tic-tac-toe game that got abandoned in a dark corner of Sourceforge. It's Webkit, and has Google's name on it.
Well, once you take any sort of altruism out of the picture, then yeah, nothing.
CT has to redo hundreds of storm drains on I-84 because the contractors who built the drains didn't connect them anywhere, just filled them with sand and put empty pipes at the end so they'd look done. I laugh when I think about, unless I'm in the car, then I cry.