As far as I'm aware, the vendor is able to cap the number of groupons offered. A popular local restaurant groupon a while back was limited to 750 (which went so fast it was too late for me by the time I noticed).
Again, you are positing a scientific investigation of the physical universe in your hypothesis about the testability of religion. You assume that "correct religion" involves miracles and smitings, i.e. physical phenomena, where religious believer does X which generates result Y. Do you always get Y when you do X with a human being? No, of course not, we're not programmed robots. So it would be silly to view God has some repeatable phenomena or universal rule, for one religious example.
I would posit there are spiritual laws, just like their are physical laws. God is an engineer, of course. So different religions might get similar results for some sorts of actions, regardless of the non-spiritual trappings they tossed on them. But that's just a hypothesis/speculation. As a Christian I believe the universe has an active, personal creator who remains fully engaged with his creation, so things can be modified as necessary.
There has also been a high amount of agreement at various times in history on very incorrect scientific beliefs. Again, more or less correct is more important than how many opinions there are.
The basic tool for determining truth is logic (Greeks etc, i.e. philosophy - "the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, esp. when considered as an academic discipline."). Thus we reason and debate to find the truth. "Science" is a particular application of logic in the form of the scientific method for investigating the physical universe.
As an aside, according to the Bible, human beings are spiritually dead because of sin. I posit this means our ability to perceive the supernatural/spiritual universe is very limited. Our inability to see the spiritual universe accurately does not invalidate it one way or the other, and we are left dependent on logic as a tool and what can be inferred indirectly from how the non-physical manifests to us as human beings. The anti-religious wants to believe that science will eventually map out the human biological entity to show that every action we take is predictable by physical laws, thus reducing us to "mere machines". This is a faith belief, just like my belief that we each have a spiritual soul as well as our physical spirit and body.
The correct answer in that case is that while there's no evidence, the question is not answerable.
You are trying to be right by avoiding properly qualifying your answer. You meant was that since there is no scientific physical evidence, the question is not answerable by science. I'm glad we agree.
Actually there's a lot of agreement on that.
If scientists disagreed as much as religious people, it wouldn't mean "somebody is more or less right", it would mean nobody knows what they're talking about.
Maybe, maybe not. It depends on whether or not you're about to under go a paradigm shift or not. If you plot scientific agreement versus the timeline of history, you see lots of disagreement by scientists. And any case, arguments that "x% majority of scientists believes Y" has no value. The truth is the truth, and how many people believe or don't believe in it doesn't change what the truth is.
No, it means someone is more or less right. The universe is what it is, we are trying to determine what the truth is. Our understanding may contain elements of the actual set of truth, and it may contain elements not in that set. So our current understanding is not the total set of truth. Those with more actual truth in their understanding are more right, those with less are less right (by empirical weight, I'm sure you could try to make an argument on another basis by trying to assigning different weighted values to each truth or subset of truth).
Religion is man's attempt to answer that question, i.e. why am I here? Science can't address it. So either you go with total ignorance and avoiding the question, or you engage in religion (or call it philosophy or whatever floats your boat, the name can change, what you are doing doesn't - it is an important question that science can't directly address as it deals with aspects of the universe and existence that exist outside the physical universe, though how interconnected the two are has a lot of room for debate).
.
Ask three different physicists how the universe came into existence (the mechanism) and you can get three different answers. So? Somebody is more or less right, that's all it means.
"...ology" is "the study of", nothing more or less. It doesn't make something scientific to be an ology, though if applicable, you most certainly can use the scientific method. Or logic, etc. It is something that exists that can be studied.
Amazing how few people apparently went and read Haught's letter.
No, this is a very good thing. We actually should want these companies to start suing the living daylights out of each other, killing product introductions with actions like this, etc. That will hopefully drive the pain threshold high enough for big companies to the point they will get behind serious patent reform. As they have the money and own the politicians, once they start backing it we should see it get done.
Given the product life-cycles in this market, the scheduling of the case would appear to be tantamount to a ruling for Apple. By that time next year we'll be looking at a whole new generation of hardware, either on the market or on the way to the market.
I grew up in Oregon, were voters are used to enforcing their will upon the state government by directly passing laws which can be submitted to a vote by all registered voters with the appropriate number of signatures and once vetted by the state attorney and presuming the resulting law passes any state supreme court challenges. So if the legislators do something the voters don't like, they can expect to see it overturned at the next state wide election. The voters forced tax increase limits on the state government using this method back in the 80s. I am always amazed in other states were people do not have abililty of direct democratic intervention, how passive and sheep-like the voters can be.
.
In this case, apparently laws passed by the California state legislation can be brought up to a referendum of the voters of the state to see if they stay or go, and the state legislation is trying to repass the law the originally passed in a new form that would remove the right of the voters of California of putting the law to a referendum so the voters, and not the PAC-bought legislators, could decide this crucial state issue.
I do not know if the voters in California have the same ability to pass laws directly as in Oregon. If not, then what the legislation is doing will prevent the voters, and as we know government's must be under incredible pressures to ever reduce tax income (absolute income, i.e. they may reduce the tax rate in good times as the economic growth will still result in an increase in the money they can spend). This is why state governments like to diversify the ways they collect taxes, death by a thousand nibbles instead of one big gulp, and the tax payer becomes the frog being heated slowly in a beaker.
A fetus isn't brain-dead in the same meaning. We are talking about two different conditions.
The difference between the various things you list (fetus, pinky, eggs) is that the normal course of biological behavior with no outside intervention is for a pinky to remain a pinky (well, of course you see the original cells totally replaced by new cells, but one does not spontaneously sprout a baby off one's finger as a normal biological process), an egg to eventually be discharged and die, and a fetus to grow into an adult human being. The woman's actions would be deliberate actions to alter the normal course of biological development.
So time displacement is in affect, because the fetus will become a human being. It takes a deliberate intervention (or a statistically small chance for miscarriage etc) to halt that process. It will happen unless you abort, don't eat right, etc. If you do not feed and take care of a person in a coma, they will die. Your action (and in-action is an action) results in their death. So it is not a perfect analogy in a one-for-one correspondence, but an excellent analogy for time displacement and the nature of a human being. If you quantify a fetus as non-human based on lack of consciousness/brain activity and inability to sustain itself outside the womb, then a person in a coma is an excellent comparable analogy. And yet you would not rule them to be merely biological flesh that can be terminated as wished, you would argue they are still a human being with rights. They might one day come out of their coma and resume full function as a human being. The fetus will grow and develop into a fully functional human being. This is not some special process that takes external intervention (as per your pinky example), this is a normal human biological process.
The status is not the same. The brain dead person will not develop a new brain and begin functioning as a normal biological process. The baby/fetus will.
You can disagree all you want, and are entitled to your opinion. The vast majority of all crimes go unpunished - should we get rid of laws against murder, rape and arson? I think (or perhaps unfortunately hope) that you are stereotyping the pro-life position to see it as putting women in prison. But then again, I have no idea how much my pro-life beliefs concur or disagree with any more formal or universal expression. I think we make murder illegal, and I think we make sure kids are properly educated as age appropriate to all legal aspects of sexuality, have access to birth control, etc. You must carrot with stick, otherwise the stick loses some of its justice. Sure ignorance of the law is no excuse, but ignorance should be weighed at least as to intent in deciding an appropriate punishment. There are other punishments or costs that could be weighed.
The baby did not commit a crime against his mother. There are many things in life that are unfair, some horribly unfair. These are not excuses for something unfair to be done to another party. Should we kill children with Down's Syndrome because they are a greater expense for society, have a reduced life span and a quality of life perceived as lesser? Should we kill a baby because a monster attacked and deeply hurt their mother? My stand on it is that society and government steps up, that financial and other necessary support is given to the mother so that she can carry the baby to term without more than the loss of the nine months (i.e. still going to college, smacking people who would attach stigma, etc - I realize it is a complex subject not treatable in a few sentences here). Then after delivery, she can either choose to keep the baby or give it up to the state (adoption/foster care/etc). Incest is just another form of rape, differing only in that the monster doubles the hurt by being someone who should have protected.
There are always chances of situations beyond the norm and scope of understanding - that's why we have judges and juries - the system requires active human intervention.
A brain-dead person isn't coming back - the brain they need to function is gone. Now their soul might still be present, but their mind is gone. A fetus will become a baby. They are not a warm corpse, i.e. a body with no chance of being considered a human being ever again. Again, time displacement is applicable. This person's status has to be considered in total. We make these quantitative judgments all the time - like you said, when a person is asleep we still see them as a human even though all sentient behavior has ceased. Yes, there are small odds of miscarriage etc, and the person in a coma could die of some natural cause as well - but still irrelevant because your action makes any future impossible. Yes, the person I just bludgeoned to death might have been hit by a car in five minutes and died then. Still doesn't mean I didn't commit murder.
Your reply is a demonstration of the ignorance I was referring to. Of course, ignorance is often confused with stupidity. I haven't accused anyone of being stupid. Ignorance is a lack of knowledge. I am personally ignorant on many topics. Most people are. And of course the use of ignorant is actually a sliding scale but the word use generally carries an emotional weight associated with the far end of the spectrum.
.
It's not too convoluted. Would movement in six dimensions be convoluted to a creature that has senses and can move in six directions? No more complicated than walking is for you. But your walking in three dimensions would baffle a "flatlander". It's mostly about perspective. Since we don't have the same perspective as God, its perhaps overly presumptuous to try and make claims about just what God has and hasn't done. He does indicate that it will make sense in Heaven when we know in full, versus the knowing only in part that we do now.
I've disproved to myself every claim I'm encountered of the Bible supposedly contradicting itself. I would agree that it is possible to misuse the Bible through a number of different techniques to justify many things that it in actuality does not. The Bible's claim is that it's primary author is God, who created the universe. If true, one might see it as having a lot of relevance to science and many other human pursuits beyond reading for pleasure.
I suggest it is ignorant to label Christianity by their ignorance. Label it for what it says. The man in question is more than a Christian. If someone grew up in Germany and was ignorant, would you state that Germans are ignorant?
No, it would be more relevant, especially as for clues. You are correct in that its not a science primer nor was it intended to be such. But it is speaking about the universe and its nature indirectly at the very least, which would make it a rich source of clues. If someone who grew up in Germany wrote an auto-biography, you would reasonably suspect that one would learn a great deal about Germany indirectly.
You misunderstand. It is the same answer, both are seeking the law, the rule, the science that governs the physical universe. The Christian sees that rule as created by God (how God did it), the non-Christian thinks whatever he thinks is the cause (random chance, Buddha, Allah, take your pick). But they seek the same answer, and that answer holds usable value because they employ the scientific methodology in determining their guess at the answer.
It also totally ignores the Biblical mandate that we are to be good stewards of the earth. But of course, the man speaking is clearly ignorant and some of the people automatically jumping on the anti-Christian bandwagon as a result of his comments are also ignorant. Nothing precludes a person of strong Christian faith from being a scientist. A non-christian scientist asks "how does it work?" - a christian scientist asks "how did God make it work?" They are both seeking the same answer.
That is a poor argument. You are merely trying to "hide" what you are doing by time-displacement. This clump of cells "right now" is not a person. Therefore it is okay to kill it. Unfortunately, if you did not kill it now it would become a person, so you have effectively killed that person. I make use of "kill" in the sense of causing someone to cease to exist as a functional human being. I would equate it with turning off the life-support machinery of a person in a coma. Conceptually similar to arguments involving time machines - if I go back and interrupt your parents the particular night you are being conceived, I can cause you to cease to exist without having killed anyone, right? They might still get pregnant, but statistically you are unlikely to occur. So effectively I have killed you - you no longer exist.
I'm not sure why this story wasn't tagged as troll, it seems to merit it. As the RTFAers have noted, it misstates the actual results. I presume this "exaggeration" is to spark a bunch of posts by others for whatever jollies the author gets from such, which seems trollish to me. Sadly, one of the few thoughtful posts gets smacked by "you're stupid" replies, even though it comes for a person with a pro-evolution belief (person wondering about a good source of facts to support teaching her daughter the theory). She has a good point, one I've often had as well, that just because a bunch of people believe something to be true doesn't make it so, no matter how well educated or respected they may be. So better to demonstrate the facts and then explain why the theory is the best explanation. If you have the facts as a basis and are teaching students how to think for themselves, then by all means go ahead and also teach every theory or major notion in current circulation - critical thinking is what you want to stimulate, not turning out regurgitating puppets. Those here touting the line that we need to educate students so they know evolution is the truth - really? That's how you want to phrase it? Evolutionary Religion 101 perhaps? We'll teach you what is the "truth" as we see it and make sure you get educated so well no one can tell you otherwise. Now who have I heard accusing who of doing just that on a related subject?
In which case everyone will move their business to Verizon etc who do not require this on their android phones. AT&T opened the bottle with the iPhone, for which I thank them, but now they will reap the resulting storm - there is no locking it down, eventually it will be wide open as competition drives the market to new features and lower costs. My hope is that T Mobile and Sprint can compete and thrive so the market doesn't end up being a Verizon/AT&T monopoly that realizes it can take us back to the bad old days if they work together...
.
Droid X on Verizon, and I have a beta copy of Firefox installed. Buggy and not my main browser, but it only took 2 extra steps that weren't too hard to figure out (enabling apps not from market in settings and using a file browser to find the downloaded file and click to execute it and install the program).
This may have already been noted before but I couldn't find it - Verizon users that may have wanted an iPhone may already have an Android phone, so it will be some time before they have the option to switch to an iPhone. I would be surprised if there were 13 million Verizon subscribers eager to have a smart phone who have waited several years without getting an Android phone instead.
Your comment, while thoughtful, is illustrative of the jump in rational. "Science builds our understanding of the universe..." is only partially true - science cannot address the non-physical universe. Logic can try and help us address this part of the universe, but the scientific method is generally restricted to the physical universe where experimentation can be done and observed through the five senses. "Science" is also not a time machine - it can make educated guesses based on present data about what may have occurred in the past. I agree with reasonable confidence, but sometimes I wonder how much reasonable confidence is more Inspector Lestrade than Sherlock Holmes.
You think the tools safe guard the process, when the very nature of humanity argues the opposite, that man will find ways to bend everything to his own purposes. Perhaps better to say that eventually the process, if not thoroughly fettered, will find out, presuming someone is interested and looks and has a venue to be heard with the results. Just as the religious institutions tried to stop the teaching of evolutionary thought, so too now we have raised up an educational and societal institution to teach "evolution" as "science". "Science" is full of institutions that are self-serving and centered around money as strongly as anything else, i.e. funding, tenure, publication. Pure science may be a noble goal, but you also want to be loved, respected, be able to eat and clothe yourself and pursue what is fun and enjoyable.
I think we would both agree that kids need to be taught how to use logic, how to apply the scientific method and process, and how to in general use their brain. But unfortunately part of learning is forming an understanding of the nature of the universe, life, etc - and education tries to do that as well (as do parents, friends, society and the individual themselves). But science cannot tell you what is right and wrong, what is good and bad. It doesn't explain bullies, puppy love or grief (it can describe chemical processes that happen related to those events, but it cannot explain the experience of living those events - there is a vast difference between having read about being a parent and actually being a parent - there is little difference between the particles that make up the Mona Lisa and my son's most recent crayon drawing, but clearly there is a world of value attached and experience that has nothing to do with the materials used).
And again, to give thought, the theories produced are very specific, and we intermingle pure speculation with hypothesis and theory and data on a regular basis. So when an evolutionist tells me, we are the result of random processes acting over vast ages with no "god" present and science proves this, you may perhaps forgive and understand better my vast skepticism. "Science" shows us an organized universe, that order is necessary for life, that life is dependent on a large number of variables being very specific values. We declare chaos unpredictable and then generate it with seven lines of code. We declare or not, but live by if not stated, values and precepts we struggle to reconcile with that viewpoint. In fact we bend all to show that they are merely products of an evolutionary process. Which again, is tantamount to saying "science describes the universe".
But I see you grasp that with the clear understanding that science is a tool we use to our benefit in engineering and science, but that it does not generate absolute truth. Science cannot tell you why you are here, or what your purpose is. It can tell you the biological and chemical processes that happen during the formation and operation of your physical shell, but it is mute when asked if we have a soul or what happens to "me" after my physical shell stops operating. It cannot tell us reality, but it can help us manipulate reality.
Yes and no on your thoughts on scientists. To get tenure, you need to be published. To be published you must do research, and it must be peer-reviewed and accep
"...a stone was cut out, but not by human hands. It struck the statue on its iron and clay feet, breaking them in pieces. Then the iron, clay, bronze, silver, and gold were broken in pieces without distinction and became like chaff from the summer threshing floors that the wind carries away. Not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the statue became a large mountain that filled the entire earth."
If one studies the nature of human beings and their societies, much becomes clear. The scientific process is only a tool, a good one for attempting to understand the observable physical universe. But it is no better or worse than any other tool, and only how it is used, by who, to what ends and what is created carries actual value. Theories are hypothesis that have undergone extensive attempts to disprove without success through the scientific process, but they are not absolute because our knowledge of the universe is incomplete. Every posit thus comes with an extensive and often partially or mostly unstated list of assumptions and presumptions and conditionals and limitations. Understanding all this allows one great latitude in just how applicable "science" is in determining truth. That is, take it with a large grain of salt. It may be far better to realize how much we rely on others as "experts", how driven they are by other forces, how colored our beliefs and perceptions become and leech over into our perception of truth, etc.
An assumption has been that radioactive rates of decay are constant, or constant over the observable universe, and have been constant over the extant life of the observable universe. That a purely random process of radioactive decay have very constant average rates over long periods of time. I'm curious if this is the very first time someone has observed that radioactive rates of decay are modified by other forces present in the universe. If it is, and this is substantiated, and not disproved by additional application of the scientific process, then an assumption has been proven invalid. An assumption resting at the core of the "how old is the universe" and so forth. But this should come as no surprise, though I'm sure it will. But when we teach "science" as "truth", we must anticipate the day when a rock smashes our statue to bits and our world crumbles around us. I find it interesting how cautious scientists are, so I would hazard the majority of them are fully aware of the nature of the platform upon which they stand. But it is not the scientists here, is it? Who is it here, speaking in derision, speaking to counter? Are we being addressed by geologists, evolutionary biologists, micro-biologists, physicists, logicians, etc?
"Science" does not deal with the non-physical non-observable universe. It can not tell us anything outside of that very limited realm. I have spent forty-plus years observing human beings and their societies as a layman, and what I have observed leads me to be very cautious of just how much "truth" can be derived from our popular "science". How much establishments and agendas can influence what is researched, what is believed and thus not challenged, and so forth. I have observed magic and illusion, and know the human brain can be easily tricked, and the extended lesson is that just because what we can observe appears to derive from one effect, does not preclude the strong possibility that our lack of information has led us to misunderstand the reality. So the possibility that an unobserved force has operated upon the extent physical universe and that the effects of such being done can be misinterpreted as what we observe coupled with the human desire to feel good about oneself and to rationalize our behavior as "good" and the nature of scientific funding, publishing, tenure, etc - well, it is not so hard to believe and think beyond the flock, eh? The careful thinker must ponder that an inverse is possible - how and why can very intelligent, reasoned and observable of having "good" character human beings reach a d
Sigh... Forgot to log in for this as well... Not rare here, but very expensive to put into orbit. If that asteroid also has anything that could be used as a propellant then we put a bunch of small ships with huge motors that can use that propellant and have them land and coordinate their efforts to slowly alter its course to put it into a nearer earth orbit. Doesn't have to be fast, if we do this with several hundred near earth orbit objects we could over several decades move a lot of potential building material to where we could use it.
Whoops, forgot to log in...
Above a certain side it really doesn't matter where it hits, if it throws enough stuff back up into the atmosphere you get the nuclear winter effect and most of humanity dies of starvation. Not sure who much difference it hitting an ocean makes as that would probably put a ton of water vapor up there, but I suspect water might do the opposite, i.e. create a hothouse effect which would be bad in a different way (greatly elevated temperatures = drought and plants dying because to hot / wrong temperate zone => starvation also?).
Others have it right, now that we have a way to see them early we need to tag and track and start dumping some healthy spending into the research and development to get some long-slow-propulsion systems that would allow us to give problem bodies the little push now that would have decades to alter their trajectory at of the danger zone. After all, any of the scenarios on the matter indicate we have no current capacity to drop enough energy on an extinction size body in order to alter its course sufficiently if it's only a couple of days away.
I see this on newegg.com (only place I shop that has this) with the noscript block in firefox, they redirect you to the visa site which then sends you right back to the newegg site and your transaction goes through. So the technology is so broken it works when it doesn't work at all.
A 20/20 episode (one of those John Stossel bits) earlier this year noted that the average income for teachers is roughly $61,000. That's pretty decent pay for only having to work roughly 9-10 months out of the year.
That's cow poo to say that cutting the cost of government wouldn't be enough, that's the excuse used every time they need an excuse to not cut gov't spending while increasing taxes to compensate for reduced tax income. You said it, the gov't keeps on building a bigger and bigger debt, so why exactly should we give them more money to spend? Have you seen a tax increase that went to pay down debt? I never have, usually the tax increase is to keep from cutting gov't programs, and the tax increase doesn't go away when times get better, but gov't spending goes up as the tax income increases.
The only gov't entity I know of that is even semi-responsive to voters being unhappy about high taxes is my local township, where getting re-elected can hing around keeping taxes flat (as much as possible, the state gov't in NJ enables school districts to keep on spending whatever they want without voter approval - local voters said no to a local school budget and the state stepped in and forced through the spending increase). So the mayor makes a big deal about keeping his part of the property tax flat and sends out a flyer every year to break it down so people can see the increase is not due to him. We get emails all the time about various measures he's taking to make less dollars do more work. They actually laid off a bunch of city employees two years ago.
You'll never see that at the state level. Those politicians need every special interest group they can get on their side, and that takes spending money and lots of it on this and that and the other thing. It only gets worse at the national level were senators need an average of $9 million to get re-elected - do you think they can raise that based on donations from individuals?
Slashdot Mirror
Most groupons I see for my area are generally around a 50% discount, not 60-80%.
As far as I'm aware, the vendor is able to cap the number of groupons offered. A popular local restaurant groupon a while back was limited to 750 (which went so fast it was too late for me by the time I noticed).
Again, you are positing a scientific investigation of the physical universe in your hypothesis about the testability of religion. You assume that "correct religion" involves miracles and smitings, i.e. physical phenomena, where religious believer does X which generates result Y. Do you always get Y when you do X with a human being? No, of course not, we're not programmed robots. So it would be silly to view God has some repeatable phenomena or universal rule, for one religious example.
I would posit there are spiritual laws, just like their are physical laws. God is an engineer, of course. So different religions might get similar results for some sorts of actions, regardless of the non-spiritual trappings they tossed on them. But that's just a hypothesis/speculation. As a Christian I believe the universe has an active, personal creator who remains fully engaged with his creation, so things can be modified as necessary.
There has also been a high amount of agreement at various times in history on very incorrect scientific beliefs. Again, more or less correct is more important than how many opinions there are.
The basic tool for determining truth is logic (Greeks etc, i.e. philosophy - "the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, esp. when considered as an academic discipline."). Thus we reason and debate to find the truth. "Science" is a particular application of logic in the form of the scientific method for investigating the physical universe.
As an aside, according to the Bible, human beings are spiritually dead because of sin. I posit this means our ability to perceive the supernatural/spiritual universe is very limited. Our inability to see the spiritual universe accurately does not invalidate it one way or the other, and we are left dependent on logic as a tool and what can be inferred indirectly from how the non-physical manifests to us as human beings. The anti-religious wants to believe that science will eventually map out the human biological entity to show that every action we take is predictable by physical laws, thus reducing us to "mere machines". This is a faith belief, just like my belief that we each have a spiritual soul as well as our physical spirit and body.
You are trying to be right by avoiding properly qualifying your answer. You meant was that since there is no scientific physical evidence, the question is not answerable by science. I'm glad we agree.
Maybe, maybe not. It depends on whether or not you're about to under go a paradigm shift or not. If you plot scientific agreement versus the timeline of history, you see lots of disagreement by scientists. And any case, arguments that "x% majority of scientists believes Y" has no value. The truth is the truth, and how many people believe or don't believe in it doesn't change what the truth is.
No, it means someone is more or less right. The universe is what it is, we are trying to determine what the truth is. Our understanding may contain elements of the actual set of truth, and it may contain elements not in that set. So our current understanding is not the total set of truth. Those with more actual truth in their understanding are more right, those with less are less right (by empirical weight, I'm sure you could try to make an argument on another basis by trying to assigning different weighted values to each truth or subset of truth).
Not yet, but clearly this Siri board member thinks it will be...
Yup, take a look at many of the posts here, which make it abundantly clear that very few people took the time to read Haught's reply either.
.
Ask three different physicists how the universe came into existence (the mechanism) and you can get three different answers. So? Somebody is more or less right, that's all it means.
"...ology" is "the study of", nothing more or less. It doesn't make something scientific to be an ology, though if applicable, you most certainly can use the scientific method. Or logic, etc. It is something that exists that can be studied.
Amazing how few people apparently went and read Haught's letter.
No, this is a very good thing. We actually should want these companies to start suing the living daylights out of each other, killing product introductions with actions like this, etc. That will hopefully drive the pain threshold high enough for big companies to the point they will get behind serious patent reform. As they have the money and own the politicians, once they start backing it we should see it get done.
Given the product life-cycles in this market, the scheduling of the case would appear to be tantamount to a ruling for Apple. By that time next year we'll be looking at a whole new generation of hardware, either on the market or on the way to the market.
In this case, apparently laws passed by the California state legislation can be brought up to a referendum of the voters of the state to see if they stay or go, and the state legislation is trying to repass the law the originally passed in a new form that would remove the right of the voters of California of putting the law to a referendum so the voters, and not the PAC-bought legislators, could decide this crucial state issue.
I do not know if the voters in California have the same ability to pass laws directly as in Oregon. If not, then what the legislation is doing will prevent the voters, and as we know government's must be under incredible pressures to ever reduce tax income (absolute income, i.e. they may reduce the tax rate in good times as the economic growth will still result in an increase in the money they can spend). This is why state governments like to diversify the ways they collect taxes, death by a thousand nibbles instead of one big gulp, and the tax payer becomes the frog being heated slowly in a beaker.
It's nice to see a state government working so hard to remove the right of their voters to have any say in the matter...
The difference between the various things you list (fetus, pinky, eggs) is that the normal course of biological behavior with no outside intervention is for a pinky to remain a pinky (well, of course you see the original cells totally replaced by new cells, but one does not spontaneously sprout a baby off one's finger as a normal biological process), an egg to eventually be discharged and die, and a fetus to grow into an adult human being. The woman's actions would be deliberate actions to alter the normal course of biological development. So time displacement is in affect, because the fetus will become a human being. It takes a deliberate intervention (or a statistically small chance for miscarriage etc) to halt that process. It will happen unless you abort, don't eat right, etc. If you do not feed and take care of a person in a coma, they will die. Your action (and in-action is an action) results in their death. So it is not a perfect analogy in a one-for-one correspondence, but an excellent analogy for time displacement and the nature of a human being. If you quantify a fetus as non-human based on lack of consciousness/brain activity and inability to sustain itself outside the womb, then a person in a coma is an excellent comparable analogy. And yet you would not rule them to be merely biological flesh that can be terminated as wished, you would argue they are still a human being with rights. They might one day come out of their coma and resume full function as a human being. The fetus will grow and develop into a fully functional human being. This is not some special process that takes external intervention (as per your pinky example), this is a normal human biological process.
The status is not the same. The brain dead person will not develop a new brain and begin functioning as a normal biological process. The baby/fetus will.
You can disagree all you want, and are entitled to your opinion. The vast majority of all crimes go unpunished - should we get rid of laws against murder, rape and arson? I think (or perhaps unfortunately hope) that you are stereotyping the pro-life position to see it as putting women in prison. But then again, I have no idea how much my pro-life beliefs concur or disagree with any more formal or universal expression. I think we make murder illegal, and I think we make sure kids are properly educated as age appropriate to all legal aspects of sexuality, have access to birth control, etc. You must carrot with stick, otherwise the stick loses some of its justice. Sure ignorance of the law is no excuse, but ignorance should be weighed at least as to intent in deciding an appropriate punishment. There are other punishments or costs that could be weighed.
The baby did not commit a crime against his mother. There are many things in life that are unfair, some horribly unfair. These are not excuses for something unfair to be done to another party. Should we kill children with Down's Syndrome because they are a greater expense for society, have a reduced life span and a quality of life perceived as lesser? Should we kill a baby because a monster attacked and deeply hurt their mother? My stand on it is that society and government steps up, that financial and other necessary support is given to the mother so that she can carry the baby to term without more than the loss of the nine months (i.e. still going to college, smacking people who would attach stigma, etc - I realize it is a complex subject not treatable in a few sentences here). Then after delivery, she can either choose to keep the baby or give it up to the state (adoption/foster care/etc). Incest is just another form of rape, differing only in that the monster doubles the hurt by being someone who should have protected.
There are always chances of situations beyond the norm and scope of understanding - that's why we have judges and juries - the system requires active human intervention.
A brain-dead person isn't coming back - the brain they need to function is gone. Now their soul might still be present, but their mind is gone. A fetus will become a baby. They are not a warm corpse, i.e. a body with no chance of being considered a human being ever again. Again, time displacement is applicable. This person's status has to be considered in total. We make these quantitative judgments all the time - like you said, when a person is asleep we still see them as a human even though all sentient behavior has ceased. Yes, there are small odds of miscarriage etc, and the person in a coma could die of some natural cause as well - but still irrelevant because your action makes any future impossible. Yes, the person I just bludgeoned to death might have been hit by a car in five minutes and died then. Still doesn't mean I didn't commit murder.
It's not too convoluted. Would movement in six dimensions be convoluted to a creature that has senses and can move in six directions? No more complicated than walking is for you. But your walking in three dimensions would baffle a "flatlander". It's mostly about perspective. Since we don't have the same perspective as God, its perhaps overly presumptuous to try and make claims about just what God has and hasn't done. He does indicate that it will make sense in Heaven when we know in full, versus the knowing only in part that we do now.
I've disproved to myself every claim I'm encountered of the Bible supposedly contradicting itself. I would agree that it is possible to misuse the Bible through a number of different techniques to justify many things that it in actuality does not. The Bible's claim is that it's primary author is God, who created the universe. If true, one might see it as having a lot of relevance to science and many other human pursuits beyond reading for pleasure.
I suggest it is ignorant to label Christianity by their ignorance. Label it for what it says. The man in question is more than a Christian. If someone grew up in Germany and was ignorant, would you state that Germans are ignorant?
No, it would be more relevant, especially as for clues. You are correct in that its not a science primer nor was it intended to be such. But it is speaking about the universe and its nature indirectly at the very least, which would make it a rich source of clues. If someone who grew up in Germany wrote an auto-biography, you would reasonably suspect that one would learn a great deal about Germany indirectly.
You misunderstand. It is the same answer, both are seeking the law, the rule, the science that governs the physical universe. The Christian sees that rule as created by God (how God did it), the non-Christian thinks whatever he thinks is the cause (random chance, Buddha, Allah, take your pick). But they seek the same answer, and that answer holds usable value because they employ the scientific methodology in determining their guess at the answer.
It also totally ignores the Biblical mandate that we are to be good stewards of the earth. But of course, the man speaking is clearly ignorant and some of the people automatically jumping on the anti-Christian bandwagon as a result of his comments are also ignorant. Nothing precludes a person of strong Christian faith from being a scientist. A non-christian scientist asks "how does it work?" - a christian scientist asks "how did God make it work?" They are both seeking the same answer.
That is a poor argument. You are merely trying to "hide" what you are doing by time-displacement. This clump of cells "right now" is not a person. Therefore it is okay to kill it. Unfortunately, if you did not kill it now it would become a person, so you have effectively killed that person. I make use of "kill" in the sense of causing someone to cease to exist as a functional human being. I would equate it with turning off the life-support machinery of a person in a coma. Conceptually similar to arguments involving time machines - if I go back and interrupt your parents the particular night you are being conceived, I can cause you to cease to exist without having killed anyone, right? They might still get pregnant, but statistically you are unlikely to occur. So effectively I have killed you - you no longer exist.
I'm not sure why this story wasn't tagged as troll, it seems to merit it. As the RTFAers have noted, it misstates the actual results. I presume this "exaggeration" is to spark a bunch of posts by others for whatever jollies the author gets from such, which seems trollish to me. Sadly, one of the few thoughtful posts gets smacked by "you're stupid" replies, even though it comes for a person with a pro-evolution belief (person wondering about a good source of facts to support teaching her daughter the theory). She has a good point, one I've often had as well, that just because a bunch of people believe something to be true doesn't make it so, no matter how well educated or respected they may be. So better to demonstrate the facts and then explain why the theory is the best explanation. If you have the facts as a basis and are teaching students how to think for themselves, then by all means go ahead and also teach every theory or major notion in current circulation - critical thinking is what you want to stimulate, not turning out regurgitating puppets. Those here touting the line that we need to educate students so they know evolution is the truth - really? That's how you want to phrase it? Evolutionary Religion 101 perhaps? We'll teach you what is the "truth" as we see it and make sure you get educated so well no one can tell you otherwise. Now who have I heard accusing who of doing just that on a related subject?
Droid X on Verizon, and I have a beta copy of Firefox installed. Buggy and not my main browser, but it only took 2 extra steps that weren't too hard to figure out (enabling apps not from market in settings and using a file browser to find the downloaded file and click to execute it and install the program).
This may have already been noted before but I couldn't find it - Verizon users that may have wanted an iPhone may already have an Android phone, so it will be some time before they have the option to switch to an iPhone. I would be surprised if there were 13 million Verizon subscribers eager to have a smart phone who have waited several years without getting an Android phone instead.
Your comment, while thoughtful, is illustrative of the jump in rational. "Science builds our understanding of the universe..." is only partially true - science cannot address the non-physical universe. Logic can try and help us address this part of the universe, but the scientific method is generally restricted to the physical universe where experimentation can be done and observed through the five senses. "Science" is also not a time machine - it can make educated guesses based on present data about what may have occurred in the past. I agree with reasonable confidence, but sometimes I wonder how much reasonable confidence is more Inspector Lestrade than Sherlock Holmes.
You think the tools safe guard the process, when the very nature of humanity argues the opposite, that man will find ways to bend everything to his own purposes. Perhaps better to say that eventually the process, if not thoroughly fettered, will find out, presuming someone is interested and looks and has a venue to be heard with the results. Just as the religious institutions tried to stop the teaching of evolutionary thought, so too now we have raised up an educational and societal institution to teach "evolution" as "science". "Science" is full of institutions that are self-serving and centered around money as strongly as anything else, i.e. funding, tenure, publication. Pure science may be a noble goal, but you also want to be loved, respected, be able to eat and clothe yourself and pursue what is fun and enjoyable.
I think we would both agree that kids need to be taught how to use logic, how to apply the scientific method and process, and how to in general use their brain. But unfortunately part of learning is forming an understanding of the nature of the universe, life, etc - and education tries to do that as well (as do parents, friends, society and the individual themselves). But science cannot tell you what is right and wrong, what is good and bad. It doesn't explain bullies, puppy love or grief (it can describe chemical processes that happen related to those events, but it cannot explain the experience of living those events - there is a vast difference between having read about being a parent and actually being a parent - there is little difference between the particles that make up the Mona Lisa and my son's most recent crayon drawing, but clearly there is a world of value attached and experience that has nothing to do with the materials used).
And again, to give thought, the theories produced are very specific, and we intermingle pure speculation with hypothesis and theory and data on a regular basis. So when an evolutionist tells me, we are the result of random processes acting over vast ages with no "god" present and science proves this, you may perhaps forgive and understand better my vast skepticism. "Science" shows us an organized universe, that order is necessary for life, that life is dependent on a large number of variables being very specific values. We declare chaos unpredictable and then generate it with seven lines of code. We declare or not, but live by if not stated, values and precepts we struggle to reconcile with that viewpoint. In fact we bend all to show that they are merely products of an evolutionary process. Which again, is tantamount to saying "science describes the universe".
But I see you grasp that with the clear understanding that science is a tool we use to our benefit in engineering and science, but that it does not generate absolute truth. Science cannot tell you why you are here, or what your purpose is. It can tell you the biological and chemical processes that happen during the formation and operation of your physical shell, but it is mute when asked if we have a soul or what happens to "me" after my physical shell stops operating. It cannot tell us reality, but it can help us manipulate reality.
Yes and no on your thoughts on scientists. To get tenure, you need to be published. To be published you must do research, and it must be peer-reviewed and accep
"...a stone was cut out, but not by human hands. It struck the statue on its iron and clay feet, breaking them in pieces. Then the iron, clay, bronze, silver, and gold were broken in pieces without distinction and became like chaff from the summer threshing floors that the wind carries away. Not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the statue became a large mountain that filled the entire earth."
If one studies the nature of human beings and their societies, much becomes clear. The scientific process is only a tool, a good one for attempting to understand the observable physical universe. But it is no better or worse than any other tool, and only how it is used, by who, to what ends and what is created carries actual value. Theories are hypothesis that have undergone extensive attempts to disprove without success through the scientific process, but they are not absolute because our knowledge of the universe is incomplete. Every posit thus comes with an extensive and often partially or mostly unstated list of assumptions and presumptions and conditionals and limitations. Understanding all this allows one great latitude in just how applicable "science" is in determining truth. That is, take it with a large grain of salt. It may be far better to realize how much we rely on others as "experts", how driven they are by other forces, how colored our beliefs and perceptions become and leech over into our perception of truth, etc.
An assumption has been that radioactive rates of decay are constant, or constant over the observable universe, and have been constant over the extant life of the observable universe. That a purely random process of radioactive decay have very constant average rates over long periods of time. I'm curious if this is the very first time someone has observed that radioactive rates of decay are modified by other forces present in the universe. If it is, and this is substantiated, and not disproved by additional application of the scientific process, then an assumption has been proven invalid. An assumption resting at the core of the "how old is the universe" and so forth. But this should come as no surprise, though I'm sure it will. But when we teach "science" as "truth", we must anticipate the day when a rock smashes our statue to bits and our world crumbles around us. I find it interesting how cautious scientists are, so I would hazard the majority of them are fully aware of the nature of the platform upon which they stand. But it is not the scientists here, is it? Who is it here, speaking in derision, speaking to counter? Are we being addressed by geologists, evolutionary biologists, micro-biologists, physicists, logicians, etc?
"Science" does not deal with the non-physical non-observable universe. It can not tell us anything outside of that very limited realm. I have spent forty-plus years observing human beings and their societies as a layman, and what I have observed leads me to be very cautious of just how much "truth" can be derived from our popular "science". How much establishments and agendas can influence what is researched, what is believed and thus not challenged, and so forth. I have observed magic and illusion, and know the human brain can be easily tricked, and the extended lesson is that just because what we can observe appears to derive from one effect, does not preclude the strong possibility that our lack of information has led us to misunderstand the reality. So the possibility that an unobserved force has operated upon the extent physical universe and that the effects of such being done can be misinterpreted as what we observe coupled with the human desire to feel good about oneself and to rationalize our behavior as "good" and the nature of scientific funding, publishing, tenure, etc - well, it is not so hard to believe and think beyond the flock, eh? The careful thinker must ponder that an inverse is possible - how and why can very intelligent, reasoned and observable of having "good" character human beings reach a d
Sigh... Forgot to log in for this as well... Not rare here, but very expensive to put into orbit. If that asteroid also has anything that could be used as a propellant then we put a bunch of small ships with huge motors that can use that propellant and have them land and coordinate their efforts to slowly alter its course to put it into a nearer earth orbit. Doesn't have to be fast, if we do this with several hundred near earth orbit objects we could over several decades move a lot of potential building material to where we could use it.
Whoops, forgot to log in... Above a certain side it really doesn't matter where it hits, if it throws enough stuff back up into the atmosphere you get the nuclear winter effect and most of humanity dies of starvation. Not sure who much difference it hitting an ocean makes as that would probably put a ton of water vapor up there, but I suspect water might do the opposite, i.e. create a hothouse effect which would be bad in a different way (greatly elevated temperatures = drought and plants dying because to hot / wrong temperate zone => starvation also?). Others have it right, now that we have a way to see them early we need to tag and track and start dumping some healthy spending into the research and development to get some long-slow-propulsion systems that would allow us to give problem bodies the little push now that would have decades to alter their trajectory at of the danger zone. After all, any of the scenarios on the matter indicate we have no current capacity to drop enough energy on an extinction size body in order to alter its course sufficiently if it's only a couple of days away.
I see this on newegg.com (only place I shop that has this) with the noscript block in firefox, they redirect you to the visa site which then sends you right back to the newegg site and your transaction goes through. So the technology is so broken it works when it doesn't work at all.
A 20/20 episode (one of those John Stossel bits) earlier this year noted that the average income for teachers is roughly $61,000. That's pretty decent pay for only having to work roughly 9-10 months out of the year.
That's cow poo to say that cutting the cost of government wouldn't be enough, that's the excuse used every time they need an excuse to not cut gov't spending while increasing taxes to compensate for reduced tax income. You said it, the gov't keeps on building a bigger and bigger debt, so why exactly should we give them more money to spend? Have you seen a tax increase that went to pay down debt? I never have, usually the tax increase is to keep from cutting gov't programs, and the tax increase doesn't go away when times get better, but gov't spending goes up as the tax income increases.
The only gov't entity I know of that is even semi-responsive to voters being unhappy about high taxes is my local township, where getting re-elected can hing around keeping taxes flat (as much as possible, the state gov't in NJ enables school districts to keep on spending whatever they want without voter approval - local voters said no to a local school budget and the state stepped in and forced through the spending increase). So the mayor makes a big deal about keeping his part of the property tax flat and sends out a flyer every year to break it down so people can see the increase is not due to him. We get emails all the time about various measures he's taking to make less dollars do more work. They actually laid off a bunch of city employees two years ago.
You'll never see that at the state level. Those politicians need every special interest group they can get on their side, and that takes spending money and lots of it on this and that and the other thing. It only gets worse at the national level were senators need an average of $9 million to get re-elected - do you think they can raise that based on donations from individuals?