For measured data, you have an arbitrary precision that is always less than infinity. In which case 1.4999[...] will always round to 1, not 2. This doesn't change the mathematics.
Hah! Didn't you even learn the ceiling function? 1.4999... (as well a 1.000000...1) always *rounds to 2.
*Using the round function I'm referring to, which might be a different method than you are discussing.
Duh. Facebook IPOed. Literally nothing else matters to society anymore.
Though, GP could have jumped to the point and just said "Facebook, facebook, face book. Facebook" and left out the stuff about the cat. Who cares about a feline?
What do you even think genetically defective even means? Here's a hint, it's not what you think it means. Sure, this might mean that more people are born with asthma and survive to reproduce. But, just because asthma is generally maladaptive, doesn't make it a bad evolutionary route to traverse. Perhaps, there is a protein that is required for people to evolve better cancer fighting, and the most direct evolutionary path is one that includes asthma.
What's really happening isn't Idiocracy so much as the total gene pool is given an opportunity to widen. In the short term, we have a lot of people with poor vision, in the long term, who knows!
Not totally true. I think Apple's prices are pretty comparable to say Lenovo for the normal price. However, Apple almost never offers significant discounts, and between the 5-8 laptop sellers you might consider buying from, at least one of them is almost always offering a major discount.
If you have to buy now, and you only like HP, then the comparable Apple is pretty close. But if you don't care about manufacturer (or do care and have 8 months to kill), then there's every chance you can find something that beats the Apple comp by 25%+.
Now, I fully understand that paying money to save time makes perfect sense, but that's because I value my leisure, not because it makes economical sense.
That's exactly what "economic sense" is. If I can specialize in X, I can produce Xes in 20% the time other people can. So I make 5 Xes, and sell four and use the proceeds to buy one Y, Z, A, B. That's economics.
Anytime someone wants to mickey mouse something together like this laptop replacement, they are forgoing all economic benefits (at least on the first ones). They might have other reasons to do it, like "the joy of the ride", but that's another story.
I'm worried about society if most people think like you.
The way almost all real innovation occurs is when somebody(s) combine information/processes/expertise/whatever from seemingly unrelated fields. That's the keystone of why education is so valuable to a society. It puts a bunch of unrelated facts in front of people and gives them a chance to do something amazing with them.
There is real value in general education. And, I'm glad my degree included studies that are useless to my immediate needs.
Those jobs still exists. Go to your local McDonalds, and they will hire you as is and give you all the training necessary. What changed wasn't companies willingness to spend a week or month training new hires. The difference is that jobs you can be trained in so quickly have diminished. At my employer, when you make a move within divisions it can sometimes take months to get up to just 80% efficiency, just due to the specialized knowledge in different domains. If you came in not knowing anything about software development, and required 2 years basic education plus 3 months domain expertise...well what kind of employer would pay for that? Especially when you are hired at will and could take all that education someplace else at the drop of a hat.
I believe the biggest costs for college are staff and facilities. If you can cut one or both of these expenditures and keep the same level of quality, you'll go a long way towards fixing the problem of education costs.
Suppose a professor at some U makes $100k a year and teaches 5 courses in that time. As a student, the research is nice, but not really what you're there for, so for just the purpose of class time, you're tuition needs to get $20k a course to the instructor. Pretend a class has 20 students in it on average and the students will need to pay $1k a course just for tuition.
Now, say there's a program where the instructors materials are prepared for him/her so they have little prep time. Throw in that tests will be designed and proctored by some third party (and provided somewhere around free). Suddenly, all you need is someone familiar enough with the material to answer questions at the end of the lecture and assist students during office hours. There are probably plenty of people who wouldn't mind sitting in on a 40 minute video lecture and then answering questions about the material for 10-15 minutes. Someone with a Master's Degree or a BS + relevant experience could do that. And if that person demands only $70k a year and can sit in on 5 lectures a day (for three quarters) plus office hours (6 hours a day and summers off for $70k is not bad!) the lecture costs would drop to less than $5k a course. Put the same 20 students in each course, and their costs drop to $250.
This doesn't solve the facilities costs, but it's pretty obvious that such a change could save students thousands to tens of thousands over a 4 year BA/BS. Imagine cutting $10k off of the average 25 y/o's student loans, and you can see what kind of impact programs like these can make...if they do the job well enough.
People vote for who they think will benefit them the most.
No they don't. People are thinking all sorts of things when they cast their vote, but to pretend it is some kind of economic maximizing proposition is clearly false. In my experience, very few people actually vote such a way. The people I know vote based on concepts like freedom (libertarians), helping others (social liberals), religious views (social conservatives), etc.
Thinking about it, if someone told me that they voted solely based on which party would push the most money towards them, do you know what party I would associate that person with? I'd think of them as being in the Sociopath Party.
You would prefer that Google support every little project for perpetuity?
It's funny to me that/. can be so libertarian and yet so completely misunderstand why unsuccessful projects must be killed. Google tries a lot of stuff out. Most of it will not make the cut. The SMARTEST thing they can do is give each project a chance to catch hold and if it fails then stop dumping resources into it.
Granted, they might do a better job of announcing things prior to killing them. Also, in most cases they should simply release the project to the community rather than kill it. Of course, releasing isn't always an option. Especially if the project runs on a server somewhere and has deep ties into proprietary technology that you don't want to release.
Really? Because I was done with Blizzard before this. And I haven't bought (or played) Starcraft 2 or Diablo 3, nor do I intend to. I never played WoW either, but that was just because I dislike such games.
That said, it doesn't really matter. They are doing well enough without my money I guess.
Its hillarious that you were modded insightful when there are millions of middle income republicans out there who are republican NOT because it somehow helps a rich buddy of theirs
That is hilarious, since that's really all their vote is accomplishing.
I am far from wealthy, and yet am libertarian. I spent years perusing the various ideologies offered by, well, everyone; with each of them, I perform a test to see if what they were selling was true. Granted, it is a painstaking endeavor, as you have to actually read the treatises and materials from these ideologies, which for the lesser of minds can be quite frightening and true objectivity is something difficult to measure.
Huh? That's a lot of sanctimony about how all ideologies (religious? economic? political? scientific??) are lies except LIBERTARIANISM. I am totally amazed how you could come to that conclusion.
Look, I kind of like libertarians. I know several. Almost all of them seem to be truly earnest (as opposed to being opportunists). Sometimes the libertarian perspective is actually pragmatic, and even when it's nutso they still provide a good radical position to help keep balance with say the communists (if there are any today). But the thing about libertarianism is that deep down, it's all lies.
Why? Our species evolved and grew to dominate the globe not because we were distinct individuals who each claimed our own patch of land and seized all liberties inherit in that. We beat out the other hominids because we are social. We had tribes where people would do stupid things like risk their own lives for everyone else. Where the healthy would "give back to the community" because when they were old or infirm they might need the same. Of course, libertarians believe in that kind of behavior at the tribal level (if there's trouble, they will share with those in their neighborhood), but they don't seem to recognize (or is it like) that the way we scale that to the national level is through taxes and governance. But why do we do that? Not because it's fun. We do it because it works. Having larger political entities has turned out to be generally better for people.
So, why is libertarianism a lie? Simple. IT DOES NOT WORK. At least, not as well as several alternatives. What does work appears to be some messy combination of regulated free market capitalism within nation-states providing some level of socialism for public goods and personal safety nets. It's a terrible mess. It doesn't fit nicely into any one ideology. Yet, it works.
All taxes are ultimately passed to the consumer. Personal income tax, too - since the company has to pay higher to its employees to entice them to work for it, and of course it also needs to raise prices for compensate.
I agree with your sentiment, but did you just argue that personal income taxes (on the consumer) are passed back to the consumer? Recursive redundancy?
[rolling eyes]. No such thing. Your choices are tax and spend (democrats) or spend spend spend (republican). Starve the beast is just a term the republicans invented so they could spend irresponsibly and pretend to be the grownups in the room.
Evolutionists reject what is essentially the Prime Directive of Biology: Life cannot come from nonlife.
Funny, I was never taught that prime directive in Biology class. Maybe that's because it's COMPLETELY MADE UP DRIVEL? The prime directive for life is to replicate. Your statement sounds like the kind of thing that would be written by someone who rejects science.
It is not that we reject science. We don't think that macro-evolution has been experimentally proven. We expect that when someone makes a statement of science, that it have actually been tested using the methods of science.
There is no such thing as macro evolution. It's just evolution. The only difference between macro evolution and micro evolution is that you will consider anything demonstrable over your lifetime to be micro evolution and any evolutionary process that takes longer to be "macro". Micro evolution used to just be things like gray moths turning black, now I'm sure it includes scientifically proven changes like a microbe developing the ability to consume. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria_and_creationism
IDK, upon inspection, it does seem like you reject those parts of science that do not match your a priori beliefs.
The explanation is that in Christianity, sin and death are directly linked. You do not have one without the other. It is usually claimed that even carnivorous animals ate fruits/vegetables prior to the first sin. Of course, this ignores that the fruit had to die, but that is a different nut. So anyways, if nothing died before the first sin, it's pretty clear that we couldn't have evolution. Within the first 15 seconds of hearing about evolution, it becomes clear to most people that it requires a lot of death for it to work.
The second issue is that in early Christianity (and indeed Judaism) sin was something that was passed down through inheritance. Children pay for the sins of the father to the 4th generation and all that. Today, we read that as meaning if you have the sin of alcoholism, your son will be abused and that's how he pays for the sin, but back then it was a more literal deal where God would seek you out and punish you for what your great great grandfather had done. In that manner, all have sinned because Adam and Eve did, and all are descended from them. If evolution were true, perhaps there would have been no fewer than 2,000 living humans at any time. Just because two of them sinned wouldn't make the rest sinners in the cosmic sense. And so you see the need for two ancestors who all humans share common descent from.
I'm pretty sure we have good evidence that is far older than that; BUT absent a time machine, I can't rule out that evidence being created as is 10,000 years ago.
I sincerely believe that the world is 150 years old and was created midway through the American Civil War. All people alive at the time were created in one instant, some of them in the middle of combat (tragically to be cut down moments later). Any paintings or builds that seem to be antebellum were also created in their original 1862 state divinely to appear to be a different age. Fossilized remains are obviously plants, but so are carcasses of more modern fake species like the Dodo bird. Also created on June 9th 1862, were all the human beliefs up to that point; ironically this includes the belief that the world was created approximately 9,850 years earlier.
You might think my claims ridiculous, but absent a time machine you cannot rule out that the evidence we have was divinely created just as I stated. You'll just have to give my position equal time in the classroom, in the media, and in all future discussions.
I think those are the same thing (atheist/rejecting religion). You are strategically excluding Agnosticism, i.e. people who try to remain neutral/skeptical rather than get into the religion war on either side.
I don't really think the GP is excluding agnosticism. While on a semantic level the two are clearly different, in the practical sense of how they are used, both terms clearly refer to the same general believe, albeit to different degrees.
An agnostic in most people's definition is essentially the same as an 18th century deist, but with a little more uncertainty. A "deist?" instead of a "deist". They don't buy the religious beliefs that are out there, but they don't exactly buy the "no god" hypothesis either. Now go look into what the most ardent atheists are preaching. They all clearly reject every religion currently known on earth. They also reject the idea that certain categories of god could exist (E.g. a kind and just god who doesn't want to allow suffering but could think of no better way to provide free will than to allow fill in the blank travesty). At the same token, I think even Dawkins admits that some kind of chaotic neutral god may exist but the likelihood of such an entity mattering to us (or our prayer altering it's behavior) is so miniscule that we are better off discarding the notion than we are holding onto it.
In short, of course atheism and agnosticism aren't the same thing, but they are close enough that it's a waste of everyone's already wasted time when people have to interject the nitpicking whenever someone doesn't explicitly call out agnosticism. That would be like the Catholics complaining they don't get enough air time in the "War On Christmas".
Some lack of control is the price we pay for a functional society. One that people like you are fortunate to have even if you don't deserve it. Break down what you seem to be asking for. Every sentient entity should be able to do whatever it wants. E.g. if I own my property and want to pave over a wetland habitat I should be able to (something few right-wingers would disagree with). But then ownership (other than the possession kind) is only a claim you can make in a functioning society. So, when you leave to get bread, why can't I come onto your property and remove the lumber in your house to build something I want someplace else? Of course, I've seceded from letting others tell me what to do, so I'll do as I like. And if I decide while I'm there that I want to dump toxic waste into your wetlands, well who's society gets to tell me that's a bad idea.
There's a tension here that needs to be maintained between my rights and societies. This is an important conversation we should be having. But this fanatical libertarian wing doesn't want to have a mature conversation. They just want to be angry instead.
??? What kind of atheists do you spend your time talking to?
"Alright Mr. Snapping Turtle, do you believe in god? Divinely say yes if you do, or sit there silently in your box if you do not"
SILENCE
"Good. Now that we've established your position. Please explain to me all you understand of science, or remain silent to convey that you know nothing."
SILENCE
"Well I rest my case. Another clueless atheist."
- - - - - -
FYI, thinking you can prove something doesn't exist isn't so much a failure to understand science as a failure to understand logic. There might be some overlap, but they are not the same. And it's not as if atheists are the only people who are at least some of the time illogical. I'd say that applies to LITERALLY every person who has ever lived.
Yes, of course. Because, while the human body is simply unprepared for this unnaturally refined corn sugar, it is totally primed for unnaturally refined cane sugar.
Do the people who rail against HFCS and for sugar have any freaking clue what the actual difference between them is?
Here's the details on HFCS from, where else, wikipedia.
According to the USDA, HFCS consists of 24% water, and the rest sugars. The most widely used varieties of high-fructose corn syrup are: HFCS 55 (mostly used in soft drinks), approximately 55% fructose and 42% glucose; and HFCS 42 (used in beverages, processed foods, cereals and baked goods), approximately 42% fructose and 53% glucose.
Meanwhile, granulated white sugar is 100% sucrose. What's the difference? Your body has an enzyme (sucrase) that breaks sucrose into fructose and glucose. So, HFCS can be absorbed modestly more quickly, but otherwise they are just the same. Another fun fact. Honey, which everyone knows is a much healthier option (it's made by busy bees after all) is 50% fructose, 44% glucose, which makes it almost identical to HFCS.
The real problem with these sugars is that we evolved to eat our sugars in a package with fiber and vitamins as well. Apples are high in fructose, glucose, and sucrose, but you're much healthier eating an apple than a spoon full of HFCS with white sugar mixed in.
Slashdot Mirror
For measured data, you have an arbitrary precision that is always less than infinity. In which case 1.4999[...] will always round to 1, not 2. This doesn't change the mathematics.
Hah! Didn't you even learn the ceiling function? 1.4999... (as well a 1.000000...1) always *rounds to 2.
*Using the round function I'm referring to, which might be a different method than you are discussing.
Duh. Facebook IPOed. Literally nothing else matters to society anymore.
Though, GP could have jumped to the point and just said "Facebook, facebook, face book. Facebook" and left out the stuff about the cat. Who cares about a feline?
Ye Gads I hate seeing this argument.
What do you even think genetically defective even means? Here's a hint, it's not what you think it means. Sure, this might mean that more people are born with asthma and survive to reproduce. But, just because asthma is generally maladaptive, doesn't make it a bad evolutionary route to traverse. Perhaps, there is a protein that is required for people to evolve better cancer fighting, and the most direct evolutionary path is one that includes asthma.
What's really happening isn't Idiocracy so much as the total gene pool is given an opportunity to widen. In the short term, we have a lot of people with poor vision, in the long term, who knows!
Not totally true. I think Apple's prices are pretty comparable to say Lenovo for the normal price. However, Apple almost never offers significant discounts, and between the 5-8 laptop sellers you might consider buying from, at least one of them is almost always offering a major discount.
If you have to buy now, and you only like HP, then the comparable Apple is pretty close. But if you don't care about manufacturer (or do care and have 8 months to kill), then there's every chance you can find something that beats the Apple comp by 25%+.
Mod me down fanboys, I care not and I have karma to burn.
Quite sporting of you Mr. Anonymous Coward.
Now, I fully understand that paying money to save time makes perfect sense, but that's because I value my leisure, not because it makes economical sense.
That's exactly what "economic sense" is. If I can specialize in X, I can produce Xes in 20% the time other people can. So I make 5 Xes, and sell four and use the proceeds to buy one Y, Z, A, B. That's economics.
Anytime someone wants to mickey mouse something together like this laptop replacement, they are forgoing all economic benefits (at least on the first ones). They might have other reasons to do it, like "the joy of the ride", but that's another story.
I'm worried about society if most people think like you.
The way almost all real innovation occurs is when somebody(s) combine information/processes/expertise/whatever from seemingly unrelated fields. That's the keystone of why education is so valuable to a society. It puts a bunch of unrelated facts in front of people and gives them a chance to do something amazing with them.
There is real value in general education. And, I'm glad my degree included studies that are useless to my immediate needs.
Those jobs still exists. Go to your local McDonalds, and they will hire you as is and give you all the training necessary. What changed wasn't companies willingness to spend a week or month training new hires. The difference is that jobs you can be trained in so quickly have diminished. At my employer, when you make a move within divisions it can sometimes take months to get up to just 80% efficiency, just due to the specialized knowledge in different domains. If you came in not knowing anything about software development, and required 2 years basic education plus 3 months domain expertise...well what kind of employer would pay for that? Especially when you are hired at will and could take all that education someplace else at the drop of a hat.
I believe the biggest costs for college are staff and facilities. If you can cut one or both of these expenditures and keep the same level of quality, you'll go a long way towards fixing the problem of education costs.
Suppose a professor at some U makes $100k a year and teaches 5 courses in that time. As a student, the research is nice, but not really what you're there for, so for just the purpose of class time, you're tuition needs to get $20k a course to the instructor. Pretend a class has 20 students in it on average and the students will need to pay $1k a course just for tuition.
Now, say there's a program where the instructors materials are prepared for him/her so they have little prep time. Throw in that tests will be designed and proctored by some third party (and provided somewhere around free). Suddenly, all you need is someone familiar enough with the material to answer questions at the end of the lecture and assist students during office hours. There are probably plenty of people who wouldn't mind sitting in on a 40 minute video lecture and then answering questions about the material for 10-15 minutes. Someone with a Master's Degree or a BS + relevant experience could do that. And if that person demands only $70k a year and can sit in on 5 lectures a day (for three quarters) plus office hours (6 hours a day and summers off for $70k is not bad!) the lecture costs would drop to less than $5k a course. Put the same 20 students in each course, and their costs drop to $250.
This doesn't solve the facilities costs, but it's pretty obvious that such a change could save students thousands to tens of thousands over a 4 year BA/BS. Imagine cutting $10k off of the average 25 y/o's student loans, and you can see what kind of impact programs like these can make...if they do the job well enough.
People vote for who they think will benefit them the most.
No they don't. People are thinking all sorts of things when they cast their vote, but to pretend it is some kind of economic maximizing proposition is clearly false. In my experience, very few people actually vote such a way. The people I know vote based on concepts like freedom (libertarians), helping others (social liberals), religious views (social conservatives), etc.
Thinking about it, if someone told me that they voted solely based on which party would push the most money towards them, do you know what party I would associate that person with? I'd think of them as being in the Sociopath Party.
This.
You would prefer that Google support every little project for perpetuity?
It's funny to me that /. can be so libertarian and yet so completely misunderstand why unsuccessful projects must be killed. Google tries a lot of stuff out. Most of it will not make the cut. The SMARTEST thing they can do is give each project a chance to catch hold and if it fails then stop dumping resources into it.
Granted, they might do a better job of announcing things prior to killing them. Also, in most cases they should simply release the project to the community rather than kill it. Of course, releasing isn't always an option. Especially if the project runs on a server somewhere and has deep ties into proprietary technology that you don't want to release.
Really? Because I was done with Blizzard before this. And I haven't bought (or played) Starcraft 2 or Diablo 3, nor do I intend to. I never played WoW either, but that was just because I dislike such games.
That said, it doesn't really matter. They are doing well enough without my money I guess.
Its hillarious that you were modded insightful when there are millions of middle income republicans out there who are republican NOT because it somehow helps a rich buddy of theirs
That is hilarious, since that's really all their vote is accomplishing.
I am far from wealthy, and yet am libertarian. I spent years perusing the various ideologies offered by, well, everyone; with each of them, I perform a test to see if what they were selling was true. Granted, it is a painstaking endeavor, as you have to actually read the treatises and materials from these ideologies, which for the lesser of minds can be quite frightening and true objectivity is something difficult to measure.
Huh? That's a lot of sanctimony about how all ideologies (religious? economic? political? scientific??) are lies except LIBERTARIANISM. I am totally amazed how you could come to that conclusion.
Look, I kind of like libertarians. I know several. Almost all of them seem to be truly earnest (as opposed to being opportunists). Sometimes the libertarian perspective is actually pragmatic, and even when it's nutso they still provide a good radical position to help keep balance with say the communists (if there are any today). But the thing about libertarianism is that deep down, it's all lies.
Why? Our species evolved and grew to dominate the globe not because we were distinct individuals who each claimed our own patch of land and seized all liberties inherit in that. We beat out the other hominids because we are social. We had tribes where people would do stupid things like risk their own lives for everyone else. Where the healthy would "give back to the community" because when they were old or infirm they might need the same. Of course, libertarians believe in that kind of behavior at the tribal level (if there's trouble, they will share with those in their neighborhood), but they don't seem to recognize (or is it like) that the way we scale that to the national level is through taxes and governance. But why do we do that? Not because it's fun. We do it because it works. Having larger political entities has turned out to be generally better for people.
So, why is libertarianism a lie? Simple. IT DOES NOT WORK. At least, not as well as several alternatives. What does work appears to be some messy combination of regulated free market capitalism within nation-states providing some level of socialism for public goods and personal safety nets. It's a terrible mess. It doesn't fit nicely into any one ideology. Yet, it works.
It's a silly argument.
All taxes are ultimately passed to the consumer. Personal income tax, too - since the company has to pay higher to its employees to entice them to work for it, and of course it also needs to raise prices for compensate.
I agree with your sentiment, but did you just argue that personal income taxes (on the consumer) are passed back to the consumer? Recursive redundancy?
And if you're the one who is shot?
There is no difference between the 5 y/o and the 20 y/o except for the societal perception of guilt applied to each.
[rolling eyes]. No such thing. Your choices are tax and spend (democrats) or spend spend spend (republican). Starve the beast is just a term the republicans invented so they could spend irresponsibly and pretend to be the grownups in the room.
Evolutionists reject what is essentially the Prime Directive of Biology: Life cannot come from nonlife.
Funny, I was never taught that prime directive in Biology class. Maybe that's because it's COMPLETELY MADE UP DRIVEL? The prime directive for life is to replicate. Your statement sounds like the kind of thing that would be written by someone who rejects science.
It is not that we reject science. We don't think that macro-evolution has been experimentally proven. We expect that when someone makes a statement of science, that it have actually been tested using the methods of science.
There is no such thing as macro evolution. It's just evolution. The only difference between macro evolution and micro evolution is that you will consider anything demonstrable over your lifetime to be micro evolution and any evolutionary process that takes longer to be "macro". Micro evolution used to just be things like gray moths turning black, now I'm sure it includes scientifically proven changes like a microbe developing the ability to consume. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria_and_creationism
IDK, upon inspection, it does seem like you reject those parts of science that do not match your a priori beliefs.
The explanation is that in Christianity, sin and death are directly linked. You do not have one without the other. It is usually claimed that even carnivorous animals ate fruits/vegetables prior to the first sin. Of course, this ignores that the fruit had to die, but that is a different nut. So anyways, if nothing died before the first sin, it's pretty clear that we couldn't have evolution. Within the first 15 seconds of hearing about evolution, it becomes clear to most people that it requires a lot of death for it to work.
The second issue is that in early Christianity (and indeed Judaism) sin was something that was passed down through inheritance. Children pay for the sins of the father to the 4th generation and all that. Today, we read that as meaning if you have the sin of alcoholism, your son will be abused and that's how he pays for the sin, but back then it was a more literal deal where God would seek you out and punish you for what your great great grandfather had done. In that manner, all have sinned because Adam and Eve did, and all are descended from them. If evolution were true, perhaps there would have been no fewer than 2,000 living humans at any time. Just because two of them sinned wouldn't make the rest sinners in the cosmic sense. And so you see the need for two ancestors who all humans share common descent from.
I'm pretty sure we have good evidence that is far older than that; BUT absent a time machine, I can't rule out that evidence being created as is 10,000 years ago.
I sincerely believe that the world is 150 years old and was created midway through the American Civil War. All people alive at the time were created in one instant, some of them in the middle of combat (tragically to be cut down moments later). Any paintings or builds that seem to be antebellum were also created in their original 1862 state divinely to appear to be a different age. Fossilized remains are obviously plants, but so are carcasses of more modern fake species like the Dodo bird. Also created on June 9th 1862, were all the human beliefs up to that point; ironically this includes the belief that the world was created approximately 9,850 years earlier.
You might think my claims ridiculous, but absent a time machine you cannot rule out that the evidence we have was divinely created just as I stated. You'll just have to give my position equal time in the classroom, in the media, and in all future discussions.
I think those are the same thing (atheist/rejecting religion). You are strategically excluding Agnosticism, i.e. people who try to remain neutral/skeptical rather than get into the religion war on either side.
I don't really think the GP is excluding agnosticism. While on a semantic level the two are clearly different, in the practical sense of how they are used, both terms clearly refer to the same general believe, albeit to different degrees.
An agnostic in most people's definition is essentially the same as an 18th century deist, but with a little more uncertainty. A "deist?" instead of a "deist". They don't buy the religious beliefs that are out there, but they don't exactly buy the "no god" hypothesis either. Now go look into what the most ardent atheists are preaching. They all clearly reject every religion currently known on earth. They also reject the idea that certain categories of god could exist (E.g. a kind and just god who doesn't want to allow suffering but could think of no better way to provide free will than to allow fill in the blank travesty). At the same token, I think even Dawkins admits that some kind of chaotic neutral god may exist but the likelihood of such an entity mattering to us (or our prayer altering it's behavior) is so miniscule that we are better off discarding the notion than we are holding onto it.
In short, of course atheism and agnosticism aren't the same thing, but they are close enough that it's a waste of everyone's already wasted time when people have to interject the nitpicking whenever someone doesn't explicitly call out agnosticism. That would be like the Catholics complaining they don't get enough air time in the "War On Christmas".
But hey, at least you're really angry about it.
Some lack of control is the price we pay for a functional society. One that people like you are fortunate to have even if you don't deserve it. Break down what you seem to be asking for. Every sentient entity should be able to do whatever it wants. E.g. if I own my property and want to pave over a wetland habitat I should be able to (something few right-wingers would disagree with). But then ownership (other than the possession kind) is only a claim you can make in a functioning society. So, when you leave to get bread, why can't I come onto your property and remove the lumber in your house to build something I want someplace else? Of course, I've seceded from letting others tell me what to do, so I'll do as I like. And if I decide while I'm there that I want to dump toxic waste into your wetlands, well who's society gets to tell me that's a bad idea.
There's a tension here that needs to be maintained between my rights and societies. This is an important conversation we should be having. But this fanatical libertarian wing doesn't want to have a mature conversation. They just want to be angry instead.
??? What kind of atheists do you spend your time talking to?
"Alright Mr. Snapping Turtle, do you believe in god? Divinely say yes if you do, or sit there silently in your box if you do not"
SILENCE
"Good. Now that we've established your position. Please explain to me all you understand of science, or remain silent to convey that you know nothing."
SILENCE
"Well I rest my case. Another clueless atheist."
- - - - - -
FYI, thinking you can prove something doesn't exist isn't so much a failure to understand science as a failure to understand logic. There might be some overlap, but they are not the same. And it's not as if atheists are the only people who are at least some of the time illogical. I'd say that applies to LITERALLY every person who has ever lived.
Yes, of course. Because, while the human body is simply unprepared for this unnaturally refined corn sugar, it is totally primed for unnaturally refined cane sugar.
Do the people who rail against HFCS and for sugar have any freaking clue what the actual difference between them is?
Here's the details on HFCS from, where else, wikipedia.
Meanwhile, granulated white sugar is 100% sucrose. What's the difference? Your body has an enzyme (sucrase) that breaks sucrose into fructose and glucose. So, HFCS can be absorbed modestly more quickly, but otherwise they are just the same. Another fun fact. Honey, which everyone knows is a much healthier option (it's made by busy bees after all) is 50% fructose, 44% glucose, which makes it almost identical to HFCS.
The real problem with these sugars is that we evolved to eat our sugars in a package with fiber and vitamins as well. Apples are high in fructose, glucose, and sucrose, but you're much healthier eating an apple than a spoon full of HFCS with white sugar mixed in.