You won't be able to find insurance in a few years, even if you wanted to buy it. The government has just killed the Insurance Industry, Medical Industry and enhanced the Government Industry. If I can get the same coverage paying a small fine as I do buying insurance, the hell if I am gonna buy insurance.
That is what Obama Care is all about.
Requiring everyone to have health insurance just killed the health insurance industry?
Do a little research on Blackwater/XE and you'll see just how much the law actually applies to private defense contractors.
I'm 99.999999% certain that if a private citizen hired Blackwater/XE to kill someone, or initiate some sort of military action that both would be in serious trouble with the law. Hiring someone to do something illegal is illegal. Not sure why everyone is conflating this with the government (the entity that makes the laws) hiring private contractors to do it's bidding...
Um, there is no evidence of intelligent design. There is evidence of billions of years of random mutations and natural selection. You should be able to google that, if not, delete all your cookies and try again.
If I'm wrong, I loose nothing. If I'm right, you lose everything.
Pascal's wager is bullshit. What if you happen to believe in the wrong god, and the true god happens to be a different vindictive psychopath than the one you believe in?
FTFY
And to carry that further, what if the real God hates people that believe stuff without evidence and rewards rational thinkers with eternal paradise?
I don't think so. I think when I find a pocket watch on the ground, it is less complex for me to believe that it was intelligently designed than to believe that it came about through a mathematical (not necessarily random) process.
In any case, it doesn't matter if you're a theist or atheist; at some point you have to believe in the absurd notion that everything came from an uncreated something.
Not true. An atheist can say, "I don't know." Which is the truth.
I personally like the label Ignostic which I over-simplify to "I don't know and I don't care."
That said, I think atheism is the absence of belief that any Gods exist. Some people may claim to know there are not Gods, but even Richard Dawkins says something like he is "98.6% sure there are no Gods." That seems pretty rational to me. I know what annoys me about many theists is that they claim:
There is a God (or Gods)
The holy books about said Gods trump observable reality.
They know what the Gods want.
Society should acknowledge and follow their beliefs about the Gods.
People that don't acknowledge and follow their specific beliefs are bad.
People that don't believe in any Gods are really bad and evil.
I think the onus of proof is on the theists, not the atheists. A the expression goes, if atheism is a religion then not collecting stamps is a hobby.
In my experience, it's the most reliable way. The purpose of FUD is deception. Why would you trust people who engage in deception? This is why there are so many skeptics out there. It's not that they are unwilling to believe in science, it's that all the FUD has resulted in a boy-crying-wolf effect.
Methinks it's the anti-AGW group that's using FUD to the greatest extent. Like saying that the carbon tax will destroy the economy, which sounds like hyperbolic "the sky is falling" FUD to me. And making up crazy conspiracies that make no sense (like scientist getting rich on AGW research, or it's all meant to be some sort of crazy wealth redistribution scheme, or a plan to create a one world government.) More FUD. And pretending there isn't a scientific consensus, when there really is. Yet more FUD. And if all else fails, throwing around terms like socialism, communism, enviro-terrorist, etc. What the hell does ANY of that have to do with the science?
So some non-scientist nut jobs oversell AGW and that's FUD, ergo not valid. But other non-scientists nut jobs oversell anti-AGW and they get a pass?
Would suggest money is better spent curing cancer then finding intelligent life in the proverbial haystack that is the the galaxy.
Must we spend all our money on one thing?
While I would be fascinated by the idea we are not alone in the universe, ultimately I really don't care.
So if you cared would it be OK for private citizens to spend money on SETI?
While other "pure" scientific investigation might yield off-shoot technologies, having radio scanners record and computers process Fourier transforms trying to find some pattern to space noise pretty much has yielded about all the scientific discovery that is going to come out of the project. Nothing is going to be cured, improved, or evolve out of a continued dumping of money into Seti.
So people interested in SETI are wrong to invest in it, because you know it won't yield any meaningful results?
While I would love to live in a society that has the luxury of spending money on esoteric concepts like asking if we are alone in the universe, with the current crumbling of financial markets, looming crisis in Global Warming and loss of fossil fuel, and an increase in disease and cancer with an ageing and forever expanding world population suggests that wasting money scanning the heavens for alien life makes you an asshat.
Ah, now I'm an asshat because I donate some money to SETI. I'd hate to be an asshat, I'll ask for my money back and spend it on something you find worthwhile. Do you yell at people driving nicer cars, wearing more expensive clothes, drinking better alcohol and eating better food "than necessary" as well?
Solve real problems today so we can sit back and paint pictures, weave baskets, and listen to white noise without guilt tomorrow.
I don't feel guilty for pursuing my interest and curiosity, I feel for you it you do.
... But some people never grow up. They never gain an appreciation of the scale of the universe, the limitations that Einsteinian physics places on communication and exploration of it, the incredible odds of finding coincidental intelligent life in close proximity to us on the kind of time scale and size scale of a 14 billion year old, 14 billion light year diameter universe....
You really think that SETI scientists, astronomers and astro physicists, don't understand the scale of the universe?
They don't realize the odds of finding that life at the EXACT RIGHT MOMENT when it happens to be using radio waves for communications. They have no appreciation of just how vast and empty the universe is,...
Again, you don't think astronomers appreciate how vast and empty the universe is?
... how a probe that takes 9 years to get to Pluto would take over 100,000 years to get to even the next nearest solar system to us--a mere 4.2 light years away.
What does SETI, listening for signals, have to do with space travel?
They think you can just hop in the old Enterprise, say "Warp 9, Mr. Sulu" and find life everywhere out there. They're big children.
Who the hell are you talking about that thinks this?
And being a big child is fine, being a hopelessly unrealistic dreamer is fine. And if people want to be big kids on this issue and waste their time and money on it, more power to them. Just don't waste my tax dollars on them. And don't try to sell me on it as some sort of noble dream, when it's essentially just a time sink for big children.
Well, you're in luck. If you RTFA, you'd know that no federal funds have been used since 1993, so your $0.03/year is yours to keep and invest as you see fit (yes, that's a totally made up number that I pulled out of my ass.)
I personally am pretty pessimistic about there being intelligent life out there, partly because of SETI, partly because of how long it took intelligent life to occur on the only place we know it has occurred. After all our planet only has a lifespan of about 8 billion years or so and it took 4.5 billion for it to happen. If it was somehow inevitable you'd have thought it would have happened a lot sooner.
I think that the only conclusion we can come to based on a sample of one is that given the right conditions, it is possible for intelligent life to evolve on a planet in this universe. Maybe it took longer than average, maybe not. It does not seem likely it's inevitable, but we really have no clue what the odds are nor how long it usually takes...
Wikipedia comes up in almost every search query on Google. Chrome heavily inflates their numbers too.
I'm confused, how does this make the numbers less valid or interesting when looking into browser usage? Bing also returns wikipedia results near the top of it's results, so searches in IE that use Bing by default would seem to be counted as well.
You can have a tyranny of the majority or a tyranny of the minority. It's a binary choice, don't fool yourself. Should a minority be allowed to override the majority's will or not?
What makes it binary? Is this some force of nature I'm aware of? I mean, the US has it's problems, but it's constitution was an improvement over most of what came before. Sure, it gets gamed, money talks, etc. But seriously, we (humans) can't learn and do better?
Ammo box - well.... hate to say it, but here we are, this is all that is left.....
Who the hell are you going to shoot so that things get better? Cops? Judges? The military? Politicians you don't like? The citizens that don't vote the way you like? Seriously, explain to me, how guns are going to solve this.
If only it were so benign. It's actually a case of sabotage and infiltration of the Church by Satanists and Freemasons....
Are you implying that the child molesters are not "real Catholic Priests," but rather Satanists and Freemasons that have specifically infiltrated the church? Seems a bit unlikely. A more likely explanation is that it's not "normal" for an 18 year-old male to choose a life of celibacy and some of the people that do so may actually have issues with their sexual impulses and may decide that serving God and abstaining from sex completely might be best. Until one day, they don't control the urges and then the church covers it up because we can't have people realizing that priests are just fallible people and not some sort of magical God conduit.
The Church will heal only once it acknowledges...
... that it's all based on the writings and traditions of humans, not the divine word of God.
I can type almost as fast as i can talk and I prefer using a mouse and keyboard than talking to a machine, not to mind the problem of other people listening in....
You have a mouse on your phone? That's pretty hardcore...
Looks like he was 66 years old when he died. Please fix the headline.
Out of curiosity, which processor are you using? Methinks it suffers from the intermittent borrow bit bug. Unless mine is lacking the humor detection unit...
Vlingo Plus Personal Assistant for iOS, Android, and Blackberry.
Interesting, I didn't know about Vlingo (or Siri) before the Apple announcement. Vlingo looks pretty powerful, as I haven't used either I can't compare them. I think Apple including this as a standard part of the phone's functionality out of the box is a big deal. Maybe Google will more tightly integrate Google Voice into Android itself, or maybe they'll buy Vlingo to counter Apple's purchase and integration of Siri.
The only comments I've seen regarding Siri claim that Android has had it for 2 years now. If they are talking about about voice recognition to dial numbers and play songs, then Apple has had that for years as well. If Android has had conversational, contextual voice recognition that seamlessly integrates all the core apps plus external information sources allowing the user to speak naturally, then a lot of marketing dweebs in several companies should be fired because I've never heard of it.
Anyway, I can't wait to see how Siri works in the real world. If it works even half as well as the demo, it seems like a big deal to me. As in "killer app" big. Truthfully I was confused by the audience's staid reaction, I don't think understood how awesome the potential of it is.
Despite all the nerd rage that Apple did not deliver on all the random rumors posted by those not in the know, it's a good phone and they'll sell like freakin' hotcakes.
I'm sorry, but racing those kinds of planes at those speeds with the G forces involved is not something to be done by a 80 or a 74 year old so getting his exact age right is a bit pointless. This is not a sedate, formulaic air display he was taking part in and you need to be exceptionally fit with reaction times as good as you can have. There is every likelihood that he could have passed out as a result of the forces involved during the problem.
All evidence is that there was a mechanical failure [1] which subjected the pilot to in excess of 10 Gs. A 16 year old would pass out if subjected to 10 Gs.
[1] The elevator trim tab ripped off while the plane was flying at around 500 miles an hour causing the plane to pitch suddenly.
Slashdot Mirror
I just got an email from corporate HR stating that my cost for health insurance is going up over the next two years because of this ruling. ...
Sounds like your HR department is engaging in a politically motivated propaganda campaign...
You won't be able to find insurance in a few years, even if you wanted to buy it. The government has just killed the Insurance Industry, Medical Industry and enhanced the Government Industry. If I can get the same coverage paying a small fine as I do buying insurance, the hell if I am gonna buy insurance.
That is what Obama Care is all about.
Requiring everyone to have health insurance just killed the health insurance industry?
Do a little research on Blackwater/XE and you'll see just how much the law actually applies to private defense contractors.
I'm 99.999999% certain that if a private citizen hired Blackwater/XE to kill someone, or initiate some sort of military action that both would be in serious trouble with the law. Hiring someone to do something illegal is illegal. Not sure why everyone is conflating this with the government (the entity that makes the laws) hiring private contractors to do it's bidding...
and where did the quantum soup come from?
Satan?
There is no evidence to support the idea of a divine creator.
Your opinion suggests that you haven't discovered Google (Or at least didn't use it before posting this...)
Um, there is no evidence of intelligent design. There is evidence of billions of years of random mutations and natural selection. You should be able to google that, if not, delete all your cookies and try again.
Pascal's wager is bullshit. What if you happen to believe in the wrong god, and the true god happens to be a different vindictive psychopath than the one you believe in?
FTFY
And to carry that further, what if the real God hates people that believe stuff without evidence and rewards rational thinkers with eternal paradise?
I don't think so. I think when I find a pocket watch on the ground, it is less complex for me to believe that it was intelligently designed than to believe that it came about through a mathematical (not necessarily random) process.
Perhaps you should read The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design
In any case, it doesn't matter if you're a theist or atheist; at some point you have to believe in the absurd notion that everything came from an uncreated something.
Not true. An atheist can say, "I don't know." Which is the truth.
I personally like the label Ignostic which I over-simplify to "I don't know and I don't care."
That said, I think atheism is the absence of belief that any Gods exist. Some people may claim to know there are not Gods, but even Richard Dawkins says something like he is "98.6% sure there are no Gods." That seems pretty rational to me. I know what annoys me about many theists is that they claim:
I think the onus of proof is on the theists, not the atheists. A the expression goes, if atheism is a religion then not collecting stamps is a hobby.
In my experience, it's the most reliable way. The purpose of FUD is deception. Why would you trust people who engage in deception? This is why there are so many skeptics out there. It's not that they are unwilling to believe in science, it's that all the FUD has resulted in a boy-crying-wolf effect.
Methinks it's the anti-AGW group that's using FUD to the greatest extent. Like saying that the carbon tax will destroy the economy, which sounds like hyperbolic "the sky is falling" FUD to me. And making up crazy conspiracies that make no sense (like scientist getting rich on AGW research, or it's all meant to be some sort of crazy wealth redistribution scheme, or a plan to create a one world government.) More FUD. And pretending there isn't a scientific consensus, when there really is. Yet more FUD. And if all else fails, throwing around terms like socialism, communism, enviro-terrorist, etc. What the hell does ANY of that have to do with the science?
So some non-scientist nut jobs oversell AGW and that's FUD, ergo not valid. But other non-scientists nut jobs oversell anti-AGW and they get a pass?
Would suggest money is better spent curing cancer then finding intelligent life in the proverbial haystack that is the the galaxy.
Must we spend all our money on one thing?
While I would be fascinated by the idea we are not alone in the universe, ultimately I really don't care.
So if you cared would it be OK for private citizens to spend money on SETI?
While other "pure" scientific investigation might yield off-shoot technologies, having radio scanners record and computers process Fourier transforms trying to find some pattern to space noise pretty much has yielded about all the scientific discovery that is going to come out of the project. Nothing is going to be cured, improved, or evolve out of a continued dumping of money into Seti.
So people interested in SETI are wrong to invest in it, because you know it won't yield any meaningful results?
While I would love to live in a society that has the luxury of spending money on esoteric concepts like asking if we are alone in the universe, with the current crumbling of financial markets, looming crisis in Global Warming and loss of fossil fuel, and an increase in disease and cancer with an ageing and forever expanding world population suggests that wasting money scanning the heavens for alien life makes you an asshat.
Ah, now I'm an asshat because I donate some money to SETI. I'd hate to be an asshat, I'll ask for my money back and spend it on something you find worthwhile. Do you yell at people driving nicer cars, wearing more expensive clothes, drinking better alcohol and eating better food "than necessary" as well?
Solve real problems today so we can sit back and paint pictures, weave baskets, and listen to white noise without guilt tomorrow.
I don't feel guilty for pursuing my interest and curiosity, I feel for you it you do.
... But some people never grow up. They never gain an appreciation of the scale of the universe, the limitations that Einsteinian physics places on communication and exploration of it, the incredible odds of finding coincidental intelligent life in close proximity to us on the kind of time scale and size scale of a 14 billion year old, 14 billion light year diameter universe. ...
You really think that SETI scientists, astronomers and astro physicists, don't understand the scale of the universe?
They don't realize the odds of finding that life at the EXACT RIGHT MOMENT when it happens to be using radio waves for communications. They have no appreciation of just how vast and empty the universe is, ...
Again, you don't think astronomers appreciate how vast and empty the universe is?
... how a probe that takes 9 years to get to Pluto would take over 100,000 years to get to even the next nearest solar system to us--a mere 4.2 light years away.
What does SETI, listening for signals, have to do with space travel?
They think you can just hop in the old Enterprise, say "Warp 9, Mr. Sulu" and find life everywhere out there. They're big children.
Who the hell are you talking about that thinks this?
And being a big child is fine, being a hopelessly unrealistic dreamer is fine. And if people want to be big kids on this issue and waste their time and money on it, more power to them. Just don't waste my tax dollars on them. And don't try to sell me on it as some sort of noble dream, when it's essentially just a time sink for big children.
Well, you're in luck. If you RTFA, you'd know that no federal funds have been used since 1993, so your $0.03/year is yours to keep and invest as you see fit (yes, that's a totally made up number that I pulled out of my ass.)
I personally am pretty pessimistic about there being intelligent life out there, partly because of SETI, partly because of how long it took intelligent life to occur on the only place we know it has occurred. After all our planet only has a lifespan of about 8 billion years or so and it took 4.5 billion for it to happen. If it was somehow inevitable you'd have thought it would have happened a lot sooner.
I think that the only conclusion we can come to based on a sample of one is that given the right conditions, it is possible for intelligent life to evolve on a planet in this universe. Maybe it took longer than average, maybe not. It does not seem likely it's inevitable, but we really have no clue what the odds are nor how long it usually takes...
Wikipedia comes up in almost every search query on Google. Chrome heavily inflates their numbers too.
I'm confused, how does this make the numbers less valid or interesting when looking into browser usage? Bing also returns wikipedia results near the top of it's results, so searches in IE that use Bing by default would seem to be counted as well.
Insightful? Interesting? It's Funny FFS
It may be funny, but it's also true.
You can have a tyranny of the majority or a tyranny of the minority. It's a binary choice, don't fool yourself. Should a minority be allowed to override the majority's will or not?
What makes it binary? Is this some force of nature I'm aware of? I mean, the US has it's problems, but it's constitution was an improvement over most of what came before. Sure, it gets gamed, money talks, etc. But seriously, we (humans) can't learn and do better?
Ammo box - well.... hate to say it, but here we are, this is all that is left.....
Who the hell are you going to shoot so that things get better? Cops? Judges? The military? Politicians you don't like? The citizens that don't vote the way you like? Seriously, explain to me, how guns are going to solve this.
Why is slashdot ignoring the blackout? With so many links to questionable content, this illegal news source seems like a hive of crime.
From the summary:
Note: This will be the last story we post today until 6pm EST in protest of SOPA.
If only it were so benign. It's actually a case of sabotage and infiltration of the Church by Satanists and Freemasons. ...
Are you implying that the child molesters are not "real Catholic Priests," but rather Satanists and Freemasons that have specifically infiltrated the church? Seems a bit unlikely. A more likely explanation is that it's not "normal" for an 18 year-old male to choose a life of celibacy and some of the people that do so may actually have issues with their sexual impulses and may decide that serving God and abstaining from sex completely might be best. Until one day, they don't control the urges and then the church covers it up because we can't have people realizing that priests are just fallible people and not some sort of magical God conduit.
The Church will heal only once it acknowledges ...
... that it's all based on the writings and traditions of humans, not the divine word of God.
I can type almost as fast as i can talk and I prefer using a mouse and keyboard than talking to a machine, not to mind the problem of other people listening in. ...
You have a mouse on your phone? That's pretty hardcore...
Looks like he was 66 years old when he died. Please fix the headline.
Out of curiosity, which processor are you using? Methinks it suffers from the intermittent borrow bit bug. Unless mine is lacking the humor detection unit...
Vlingo Plus Personal Assistant for iOS, Android, and Blackberry.
Interesting, I didn't know about Vlingo (or Siri) before the Apple announcement. Vlingo looks pretty powerful, as I haven't used either I can't compare them. I think Apple including this as a standard part of the phone's functionality out of the box is a big deal. Maybe Google will more tightly integrate Google Voice into Android itself, or maybe they'll buy Vlingo to counter Apple's purchase and integration of Siri.
The only comments I've seen regarding Siri claim that Android has had it for 2 years now. If they are talking about about voice recognition to dial numbers and play songs, then Apple has had that for years as well. If Android has had conversational, contextual voice recognition that seamlessly integrates all the core apps plus external information sources allowing the user to speak naturally, then a lot of marketing dweebs in several companies should be fired because I've never heard of it.
Anyway, I can't wait to see how Siri works in the real world. If it works even half as well as the demo, it seems like a big deal to me. As in "killer app" big. Truthfully I was confused by the audience's staid reaction, I don't think understood how awesome the potential of it is.
Yeah, I sound like a fanboy.
Despite all the nerd rage that Apple did not deliver on all the random rumors posted by those not in the know, it's a good phone and they'll sell like freakin' hotcakes.
I'm sorry, but racing those kinds of planes at those speeds with the G forces involved is not something to be done by a 80 or a 74 year old so getting his exact age right is a bit pointless. This is not a sedate, formulaic air display he was taking part in and you need to be exceptionally fit with reaction times as good as you can have. There is every likelihood that he could have passed out as a result of the forces involved during the problem.
All evidence is that there was a mechanical failure [1] which subjected the pilot to in excess of 10 Gs. A 16 year old would pass out if subjected to 10 Gs.
[1] The elevator trim tab ripped off while the plane was flying at around 500 miles an hour causing the plane to pitch suddenly.