1) The US has a lot of crazy religious fundamentalists who think that their religion should govern all aspects of their (and everyone else's) lives. They are not content to teach their children about it and go to church on Sunday. They want all aspects of society to aid them in religiously indoctrinating their children, especially school. Evolution runs contrary to their beliefs and rather than put their children into a different school, they wish to change the school that everyone goes to.
2) The US has weak voter turnout and a nearly 50/50 split between the two big parties. This gives small but vocal and politically active groups such as this a disproportionately large influence on government, as it's considerably more difficult to win any sort of office without their support.
I'm sorry, gravity is a fact? Show it to me. I say that things fall down because they like the Earth and want to be happy.
Atomic interactions are fact? Have you ever seen an atom? Show one to me, then maybe I'll believe it's a fact.
Optics? Binoculars work because God shows you a clearer, larger image. Telescopes show lies about the Universe because they are the Devil's devices.
Plate tectonics are obviously not facts. The Earth was created only 6000 years ago, don't you know. Plate tectonics would have no time to function over such a short period.
Go on, tell me why I should take all of those as "fact" but evolution is "just a theory". I can't wait.
When I'm a decade or two older, the young people who will be affected by these decisions today will just be entering the workforce, bringing their bright new ideas into focus, and beginning to drive the next round of scientific and technological advances.
I do not want these people to believe that one of the most successful, important, and useful scientific theories in history is a lie. I do not want these people to believe that "God did it" is any kind of reasonable scientific answer. I don't want the doctors and medical researchers who determine the length and quality of my old age to be spouting off about "irreducible complexity" and other such nonsense.
You're wrong about losing the battle. Here we are conversing on a globe-spanning information network using unimaginably powerful computing machines. We've always won, and we'll keep on winning, because in the end we're right and they're wrong. But it won't be thanks to people like you.
Regardless of those two examples, the entire concept of irreducible complexity is complete bullshit.
Evolution does not simply add parts. It also removes them. And indeed there is a great incentive for this to happen, as every unnecessary part is an added metabolic cost to the organism which contains it.
So let's say for a moment that some structure was discovered that were irreducibly complex. Does that disprove evolution? Absolutely not! It just means that the structure evolved from something more complex, not less.
Ah, but the beauty of YEC is that it really can't be disproven. Any time you have evidence that the Earth is older, all they need to say is that God created it to look older.
This is fundamentally why YEC should not be taught in a science classroom. It is not disprovable and thus not science.
It's not a fair assessment. They don't write comments because, they believe, everybody sucks at writing them and keeping them up to date. While what you said is true it is woefully incomplete.
That comment might make sense if i ever did count it as such, but I did not.
The story was a stronger version of the situation. A guy making a whole lot of money with a really terrible computer, such that the ROI for something better would come in literally days. In the case of the midrange computer versus a high-end one, the ROI may be weeks or months, but the net result is the same: an overall savings in money.
Didn't the Republicans have a majority in Congress as well as a sitting President during many of the last eight years? How did the Democrats block them?
Shit happens. 9/11 was, sorry to say, a very minor event when examined objectively. It was merely a criminal act, albeit one on an unusually large scale.
It's not possible to stop 100% of crime. The population is smart enough to know this, and they do not demand that their politicians do this. But for some reason when you slap the label "terrorism" on the crime, all rationality goes out the window.
So he wouldn't have stopped 9/11, big deal. Maybe he would have reacted sanely to it instead of plunging the country into a pointless and expensive war and destroying our credibility on the world stage.
The Democrats voted for it because Bush and the Republicans had managed to create an environment where nobody wanted to do anything that even slightly resembled being "soft on terror".
This is not to say that the Democrats were without fault or anything. When you have an evil man pushing a bunch of wimps to go along with him, the wimps are certainly just as much at fault for not standing up to the evil guy. But that doesn't mean that the same thing would have happened if the wimps had been in charge. Indeed maybe they wouldn't have been so wimpy.
I agree that we need some major change to break the party duopoly we have now. But I also think that we would have been a lot better off, even if still in a really crappy situation, with a Gore win in 2000.
Why is it we always praise wars for bringing full employment?
Because people are totally nuts.
Imagine this scenario. You mobilize the workforce for war production. You get the population into great factories which you convert or build all over the country. You produce an amazing number of fighters, bombers, tanks, guns, ammunition, food, gasoline, and all the other requirements of a modern army. You ship it all to the coasts, to the great port cities. You load them into containers, load the containers onto great ships built just for this purpose. The ships leave port, move offshore, and shove everything into the sea.
Then they come back for more.
This scenario is, domestically, equivalent to a major overseas war such as the World War II. Does concentrating our capital and labor on producing items which just get thrown into the sea A) Increase or B) Decrease our country's wealth and well-being? I should hope that the answer would be obvious to anyone, but apparently it isn't!
MS set back the state of the art in software far more than hardware. I can't fault them too much for causing x86 to become the de facto standard, but I can certainly fault them for Windows becoming the de facto standard.
We want interoperability and standards. We got there by way of co-opting the IBM PC and a Microsoft monopoly. (And what we ended up weren't really interoperability or standards, but rather a "you can have any OS and computer as long as it's Microsoft Windows running on an x86 PC".) Why assume that's the only way we could get there? I see no reason why a uniform PC architecture and OS, something along the lines of x86 and POSIX except not so shitty, could not have emerged out of the competition of the 80s.
If you're going to damn them based on the technical details then you'd better have them right. The OP's entire technical condemnation is based on something they're not going to do, so it's stupid.
Having your number "sold on the black market" is irrelevant. Either your number was used fraudulently or it wasn't. If it was, you get it replaced. If it wasn't, nothing bad happened.
I'm pretty sure that you have the same protections on debit cards as on credit cards. It's more difficult because the money in your bank account goes away, but you do get it back on fraudulent charges.
However, it's bad to have the money leave in the first place and it moves power from me to the card company, so this is why I never use debit cards.
Stolen cards may cost the global economy but that's hardly a reason for me to get deeply upset when mine get stolen. The card companies generally have good anti-fraud measures and when they don't my personal cost is very low. It's reasonable to take basic safeguards against having the number stolen but there's no reason to get upset about the possibility.
I'm pretty sure that's only if your actual signature is on a receipt somewhere, which is fairly difficult to arrange when your number gets stolen over the internet.
What you do is you see an unknown charge on your credit card, call the company, cancel the card, and get a new one. Total cost to you: 15 minutes and zero dollars.
Honestly, why are people so afraid of having their credit card numbers stolen? Unless you're utterly negligent and don't report fraudulent purchases, you have no liability!
The first quote is also from the article, so it's not the summary's fault. The article is vague and self-contradictory, so I'm calling bullshit until and unless further details are given.
On Slashdot we expect you to be able to use the Internet. Since you're already there and everything.
Jack Thompson. Hard to see how you could be a slashdot reader with such a low UID and not know who he is, given that stories about him are posted constantly.
Disbarment. Hard to see how you could be aware of the legal profession at all and speak English and not know what this term means.
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Two reasons.
1) The US has a lot of crazy religious fundamentalists who think that their religion should govern all aspects of their (and everyone else's) lives. They are not content to teach their children about it and go to church on Sunday. They want all aspects of society to aid them in religiously indoctrinating their children, especially school. Evolution runs contrary to their beliefs and rather than put their children into a different school, they wish to change the school that everyone goes to.
2) The US has weak voter turnout and a nearly 50/50 split between the two big parties. This gives small but vocal and politically active groups such as this a disproportionately large influence on government, as it's considerably more difficult to win any sort of office without their support.
I'm sorry, gravity is a fact? Show it to me. I say that things fall down because they like the Earth and want to be happy.
Atomic interactions are fact? Have you ever seen an atom? Show one to me, then maybe I'll believe it's a fact.
Optics? Binoculars work because God shows you a clearer, larger image. Telescopes show lies about the Universe because they are the Devil's devices.
Plate tectonics are obviously not facts. The Earth was created only 6000 years ago, don't you know. Plate tectonics would have no time to function over such a short period.
Go on, tell me why I should take all of those as "fact" but evolution is "just a theory". I can't wait.
When I'm a decade or two older, the young people who will be affected by these decisions today will just be entering the workforce, bringing their bright new ideas into focus, and beginning to drive the next round of scientific and technological advances.
I do not want these people to believe that one of the most successful, important, and useful scientific theories in history is a lie. I do not want these people to believe that "God did it" is any kind of reasonable scientific answer. I don't want the doctors and medical researchers who determine the length and quality of my old age to be spouting off about "irreducible complexity" and other such nonsense.
You're wrong about losing the battle. Here we are conversing on a globe-spanning information network using unimaginably powerful computing machines. We've always won, and we'll keep on winning, because in the end we're right and they're wrong. But it won't be thanks to people like you.
Regardless of those two examples, the entire concept of irreducible complexity is complete bullshit.
Evolution does not simply add parts. It also removes them. And indeed there is a great incentive for this to happen, as every unnecessary part is an added metabolic cost to the organism which contains it.
So let's say for a moment that some structure was discovered that were irreducibly complex. Does that disprove evolution? Absolutely not! It just means that the structure evolved from something more complex, not less.
Ah, but the beauty of YEC is that it really can't be disproven. Any time you have evidence that the Earth is older, all they need to say is that God created it to look older.
This is fundamentally why YEC should not be taught in a science classroom. It is not disprovable and thus not science.
It's not a fair assessment. They don't write comments because, they believe, everybody sucks at writing them and keeping them up to date. While what you said is true it is woefully incomplete.
I started doing BASIC on a C-64 at age 6 or 7. Although I sucked really hard for a really long time after that.
That comment might make sense if i ever did count it as such, but I did not.
The story was a stronger version of the situation. A guy making a whole lot of money with a really terrible computer, such that the ROI for something better would come in literally days. In the case of the midrange computer versus a high-end one, the ROI may be weeks or months, but the net result is the same: an overall savings in money.
Didn't the Republicans have a majority in Congress as well as a sitting President during many of the last eight years? How did the Democrats block them?
One must wonder why this is important.
Shit happens. 9/11 was, sorry to say, a very minor event when examined objectively. It was merely a criminal act, albeit one on an unusually large scale.
It's not possible to stop 100% of crime. The population is smart enough to know this, and they do not demand that their politicians do this. But for some reason when you slap the label "terrorism" on the crime, all rationality goes out the window.
So he wouldn't have stopped 9/11, big deal. Maybe he would have reacted sanely to it instead of plunging the country into a pointless and expensive war and destroying our credibility on the world stage.
The Democrats voted for it because Bush and the Republicans had managed to create an environment where nobody wanted to do anything that even slightly resembled being "soft on terror".
This is not to say that the Democrats were without fault or anything. When you have an evil man pushing a bunch of wimps to go along with him, the wimps are certainly just as much at fault for not standing up to the evil guy. But that doesn't mean that the same thing would have happened if the wimps had been in charge. Indeed maybe they wouldn't have been so wimpy.
I agree that we need some major change to break the party duopoly we have now. But I also think that we would have been a lot better off, even if still in a really crappy situation, with a Gore win in 2000.
Why is it we always praise wars for bringing full employment?
Because people are totally nuts.
Imagine this scenario. You mobilize the workforce for war production. You get the population into great factories which you convert or build all over the country. You produce an amazing number of fighters, bombers, tanks, guns, ammunition, food, gasoline, and all the other requirements of a modern army. You ship it all to the coasts, to the great port cities. You load them into containers, load the containers onto great ships built just for this purpose. The ships leave port, move offshore, and shove everything into the sea.
Then they come back for more.
This scenario is, domestically, equivalent to a major overseas war such as the World War II. Does concentrating our capital and labor on producing items which just get thrown into the sea A) Increase or B) Decrease our country's wealth and well-being? I should hope that the answer would be obvious to anyone, but apparently it isn't!
Your post makes no sense. Cutting funding doesn't require passing a veto-proof bill. It requires not passing a bill. That only requires 50%.
Sorry, what successes has he had, exactly?
MS set back the state of the art in software far more than hardware. I can't fault them too much for causing x86 to become the de facto standard, but I can certainly fault them for Windows becoming the de facto standard.
We want interoperability and standards. We got there by way of co-opting the IBM PC and a Microsoft monopoly. (And what we ended up weren't really interoperability or standards, but rather a "you can have any OS and computer as long as it's Microsoft Windows running on an x86 PC".) Why assume that's the only way we could get there? I see no reason why a uniform PC architecture and OS, something along the lines of x86 and POSIX except not so shitty, could not have emerged out of the competition of the 80s.
If you're going to damn them based on the technical details then you'd better have them right. The OP's entire technical condemnation is based on something they're not going to do, so it's stupid.
Having your number "sold on the black market" is irrelevant. Either your number was used fraudulently or it wasn't. If it was, you get it replaced. If it wasn't, nothing bad happened.
I'm pretty sure that you have the same protections on debit cards as on credit cards. It's more difficult because the money in your bank account goes away, but you do get it back on fraudulent charges.
However, it's bad to have the money leave in the first place and it moves power from me to the card company, so this is why I never use debit cards.
Stolen cards may cost the global economy but that's hardly a reason for me to get deeply upset when mine get stolen. The card companies generally have good anti-fraud measures and when they don't my personal cost is very low. It's reasonable to take basic safeguards against having the number stolen but there's no reason to get upset about the possibility.
I'm pretty sure that's only if your actual signature is on a receipt somewhere, which is fairly difficult to arrange when your number gets stolen over the internet.
What you do is you see an unknown charge on your credit card, call the company, cancel the card, and get a new one. Total cost to you: 15 minutes and zero dollars.
Honestly, why are people so afraid of having their credit card numbers stolen? Unless you're utterly negligent and don't report fraudulent purchases, you have no liability!
Makes sense, thank you for explaining that.
I thought "DHTML" was just a term for manipulating the DOM on the fly using JavaScript. How do you do DHTML without JavaScript?
The first quote is also from the article, so it's not the summary's fault. The article is vague and self-contradictory, so I'm calling bullshit until and unless further details are given.
On Slashdot we expect you to be able to use the Internet. Since you're already there and everything.
Jack Thompson. Hard to see how you could be a slashdot reader with such a low UID and not know who he is, given that stories about him are posted constantly.
Disbarment. Hard to see how you could be aware of the legal profession at all and speak English and not know what this term means.
Sounds fine to me, but I would never describe that as being glad that MS won. I'm never glad when the lesser evil wins.