Bulletin: Easy programs are easy to write. Hard programs are hard to write.
Meaningless tautology.
Language doesn't matter at all.
Baseless assertion.
There's difference in functionality between one language and another, true. That's because different languages were built to different specifications and purposes:
And here you contradict your own baseless assertion.
no first-person shooters written in assembly,
Ok, here is a good example. Lets say all you had was assembly language and perhaps FORTRAN to perform some "high level" math operations. Lets say someone asked you to create an FPS. Now, it could probably be done. You'd have to figure out how to interact with the graphics hardware at the register level. You'd have to write almost every single function by hand from aside from whatever math functions you can utilize from FORTRAN. So 6 months into development someone comes along an says, "Hey, here is this new language called C and a library called OpenGL. These will make your FPS development a whole lot easier. It solves the really hard problems of dealing with hardware and makes your code work on many different kinds of graphics cards." Are you saying that you would run screaming from this offer because it couldn't possibly make your work easier? Unless you are some really f'ing hardcore assembly programmer, I bet you coudl cut your development time by an order of magitude at least. You could probably even afford to complete dump that previous 6 months of development in the trash and STILL come out ahead because you found a new tool/language which makes a perviously hard program relatively easier.
Contrary to your initial baseless assertion, language DOES matter. Frameworks matter. Libraries matter. There are, in fact, all kinds of things that can make a particular project easier.
but most will end up with the same cookie-cutter projects for which these frameworks are always tailored (look to scaffolding in Ruby on Rails for an example of the omnipresent "database browser").
And what is wrong with a "database browser" web application? If you have a perfectly good database model that you want people to interact with, why not use a database oriented framework? Why should anyone have to reinvent a framework every time they want to write a database driven web application? I'll tell you what, going from brain dead PHP to Rails was a huge boost in productivity.
I suppose this is just the next step in the constant progression toward appeasing laziness;
I wholeheartedly disagree. It is a step in the contant progressio towards more complex applications using higher level development tools. What would be least "lazy" in you opinion? Developing a web application in assembly language? C? FORTRAN??? I know that is an exageration, but the fact is that people are expecting more and more out of the web and the only way to deliver in a reasonable amount of time is to use the "rapid" development tools.
What is "lazy" is refusing to learn new tools and frameworks.
I think it would be appropriate for MS to send out "recall" notices to users, but I wouldn't expect any user to voluntarily read a specific website to get such info.
but I also think we need to evaluate how much of what they discover is really factual enough to base wars, regulations and restrictions on. I understand that science is constantly finding new theories to fix their old ones, and I have no problem with continued research -- just as long as I don't pay for it involuntarily and as long as no one makes laws and restrictions based on non-facts. That doesn't seem to be the case, though.
I agree that it is dumb to base laws on regulations on scientific theories that are likely to change next year (and not necessarily for the better). I think regulations should be based on the basic principal of conservation, on the principal of working as efficiently as possible, on the principal of erring on the side of caution. Do you really think anyone is going to look back 50 years from now and say something like "If only they hadn't increased fuel economy and regulated polution." Did we need scientific theories to tell us that child/slave labor was wrong? No. We enacted labor laws because it was the right thing to do. At the time, businesses thought it would destroy the economy. Not only did it not destroy the economy, but the US grew to become one of the biggest economic superpowers in the world. I see environmental regulation as the modern day equivelent to labor regulation. We don't do it because scientists tell us we should. We do it because it is the right thing to do. Business WILL adapt.
I think perhaps you might not give conservation and environmental regulation enough credit. If you have ever visited urban areas in developing countries (I've traveled around South/Central America, for example) one of the first things you will notice in the cities is how aweful the air quality is. I'm not talking about a little haze. I'm talking about virtually unbreathable. Try visiting Mexico City some time. Every time I travel, I am so grateful for the environmental regulations we have in the US. And i would like to see more. I think it is disgraceful that it is, to this day, unhealthy to eat fish from the Mississippi river, for example. While I think it is great that we have relatively breathable air, we (as in all humans) have a long way to go yet.
The poor farmers are in other countries that cannot afford to subsidize farming like we do here in the US. The poor farmers are in countries where they have been lured into buying into GM crops and are stuck paying Monsanto for their seeds every year which serves as a drain on the local economy. It is like the whole baby formula scandal where companies like Nestle' convice poor people that infant formula is better (and easier) than breast milk. But by the time the poor people realize that they can't really afford the formula in the long run, they find that they HAVE to buy th eforumla because the mother isn't producing milk any more. Sometimes they resort to cow's milk and really mess up the infant nutritionally.
I'm sorry, but it is sick. They export their perfectly good food and labor, and we give them "Burger King" in return.
I find it ironic that to argue against supposed "unscientific" hypotheses, one needs to bring up other unscientific hypotheses. Oh, and isn't it interesting how this is not really and issue in other branches of science, like astronomy. There seems to be a whole lot more breathing room in other branches of science. Which, in my opinion, is a good thing.
Heh, nice try at turning this around, but I wans't arguing against the Big Bang. Nor did I say that it is unscientific. You may want to recalibrate your irony meter.
The problem with this statement is that it is a purely negative argument.
Let's turn this around. What evidence is there that purely random unguided processes were responsible for the variety of life that we see around us? The fossil record? No. That establishes that evolution took place. But it certainly does not establish that it was unguided random processes which caused it. Genetic DNA analysis? Again, that shows the evolutionary relationships between creatures, but does not prove that it was random processes that governed it.
Like I said, a purely negative argument. Clearly you have nothing positive to contribute to the scientific process.
Recombinant DNA? This only produces variation within a species. It has never been shown that recombination is sufficient to create a new species from an old one. And besides, research is showing that the previously considered "random" activity of DNA recombination is no longer as random as it seemed. This activity appears to be very precise and is controlled by special enzymes that break the chromosomes, exchange the pieces, and rejoin the free ends. Recombination also needs certain special structures in the cell to make it work. The activities of recombination are not just haphazard events. Special pieces of DNA jump around in the chromosome to allow these activities to happen. Recombination has been found to be a very complex process. And we still don't know the half of it. But fewer people are calling it purely "random".
*sigh* More negative arguments.
So where is the irrefutable evidence that the "Origin of Species" is truly governed by an unguided random process?
Ya got me. I don't know that anyone is trying to prove anyting about an "unguided random process." Evolution is not random. It is guided by any number of natural contraints, as you pointed out. The only people calling evolution a purely random unguided process are people who a) don't understand it (at all), and b) wish to discredit it.
BTW, I agree with you that ID is weak on the counter argument side. And that's where the political argument raises its ugly head. With the continual slapdown of any attempts to scientifically discuss alternatives to Neo-Darwinism, the scientific exploration of these alternatives is basically at a standstill. Any time a paper slips through, the reaction is tsunamic
Oh that's clever. Blame the other side for your lack of substance. And i suppose the reason we don't have perpetual motion machines is because the brilliant scientists working on them are viciously supressed by a thermodynamic cabal?
Yes, but having the same structures is not what makes them work. It's having different complementary structures which makes them work. And evolving these different but complimentary structures randomly is quite a trick.
So is pulling a rabit out of a hat until you figure out the processes and mechanisms behind it.
The alternative being what, exactly?
The observation is that some biological mechanisms appear to have the characteristics of being designed. Since there is precious little understanding of how these mechanisms actually did evolve, the first step -- if it were allowed -- would be to try and identify and understand the evolutionary processes which produced these mechanisms. But according to Genamics JournalSeek, there are 0 (zero) journals dedicated to the study of cellular evolution (in fact, there appea
Regarding the first part of your response (I'd usually quote, but there is a lot there):
I am uncomfortable with your implication that evolutionary theory is necessarily flawed because of the politics (not the science) involved. Yes, it gets nasty. But that doesn't mean the theory is flawed or that the alternative that is being presented is automatically valid. In the bigger picture, there is nothing particular special about nasty politics in science. It happens any time a well established theory or idea is challenged. If the challenge has substance, what happens is that the current crop of scientists continue to cling to the old ideas until a new crop of scientists takes over.
There was once a time when scientists thought that the universe never began and will never end. Many scientists found it distasteful to believe that the universe had a beginning. The idea itself was too suggestive that there might be a God. In fact, in opposition to the then-new Big Bang Theory, some scientists even suggested that matter was constantly being created, and in that way we could avoid the Big Bang Theory altogether. That's how far they were willing to go to avoid the Big Bang Theory. However, the facts have caught up with us and we now know with a high degree of certainty that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old. The universe had a very specific starting point.
That isn't exactly true. The Big Bang could turn out to be a starting point, not the starting point... part of a continual cycle of expansion and contraction. While the age of the observable universe may be established, that doesn't necessarily mean there was an ultimate temporal beginning, pe se. This may not even be the only universe that exists...
Likewise, there is evidence today to suggest that it would be very difficult if not impossible for certain biological structures to have been created by random processes.
The problem with this statement is that it is a purely negative argument. What makes this different than the Big Bang challenge you talked about previously is that there is no positive argument to go along with it. Big Bang is an actual theory with its own predictions and mechanisms. You can go on and on about how "random" processes can't do such and such until you are blue in the face, but without an alternative "non-random" mechanism, you don't have much to go on and it is difficult to take seriously. And I do mean mechanism, not an attribution. Saying that an intelligent designer did it is a attribution, not a mechanism. If I asked how a rabit is pulled out of a hat and you said "a magician does it," I would have to ask you again because you didn't answer the question. If you kept answering with "a magician does it," I would probably start to get pretty annoyed with you. Kinda like scientists are annoyed with ID "theorists."
Just like you would look at a mouse trap and conclude that it was not created by random processes, you can look at various biological structures and come to the same conclusion. Have you ever thought how two completely different reproductive systems (male and female) came to evolve simultaneously?
Actually, they aren't completely different. They share many, if not most, of the same basic structures. They're just arranged differently. One can observe this in a developing fetus.
How two of them evolved through random processes is anyone's guess. And that's all we have right now -- is guesses. There is no direct evidence to show that they evolved through random processes. There is only wishful speculation. And science is not normally built on wishful speculation.
In science it is called a hypothesis. ID theorists might want to give it a try some time. Maybe one day they might actually come up with a substantial theory of their own.
But as I have shown above, we seem to live in a time where the chilling effects of oppression seem to be replacing the normal activities of science. So any alternative ideas are vicio
I started my first real Rails project with generated scaffolding, but after a few days there was almost nothing left of it. And I almost wish I had never generated the scaffolding because I had to spend time cleaning up tons of files and method stubs that I was never going to use.
I do, however, use the basic "scripts/generate " scripts. They save me a minute or two of creating files and directories and class definitons. Handy, I suppose, but I am not sure if this is considered "generated code." The only "code" that Rails really generates for me is HTML and SQL (Tag Helpers and ActiveRecord) which is pretty nice, actually. The less HTML and SQL i have to write and more I can focus on the actual code, the better.
Re: code generation replacing OO model:
I have no idea what the OP is talking about. RoR is pure OO.
Probably the only thing that I find a little frustrating about RoR is the shear volumn of files involved in a project. Navigating through them gets gradually more time consuming.
Heh, nice little word substitution there. *I* was talking about ID and you just switched to Creationism. I don't suppose you were an editor for "Of Pandas and People."
The greatest scientific advance of the last 1,000 years was providing the evidence to prove that human beings are independent agents whose lives on earth are neither conferred nor controlled by celestial forces. Although it may be more conventional to measure scientific progress in terms of specific technological developments, nothing was more important than providing the means to release men and women from the hegemony of the supernatural.
Sounds a lot like philosophy to me.
My response is that when they remove their atheistic materialism from the science room, I will remove my faith. But not one moment sooner.
And I am not going to buy a new car until they remove all that darn atheistic materialism from the owners manual! Is baseball atheistic materialism because the rules don't mention God and none of the outcomes are attributed to supernatural forces? Then why is science atheistic materialism because none of its rules involve God?
There is nothing wrong with maintaining faith in a science classroom, but you're going to get an F if you can't apply the decidedly materialistic rules of science to produce verifiable results. Saying "God did it" is not a scientific answer. To drive a car, you still need to push on the gas pedal and stear the wheel. You can't drive by faith. To play baseball, you still have to swing the bat and throw the ball. Faith won't do it for you. In science you still have to apply those materialistic rules. Faith won't do it for you.
BTW, that statement came from the scientific journal Cell. If you are not astounded, then you have probably already been assimilated.
I guess it depends on the context. Was it an opinion/commentary column or part of a research article? Do you care?
No, creation myths are at the *beginning* (where else would you put them?) of most mythologies. The *basis* of mythology lies in culture and psychology (just ask C. G. Jung). Creationism is a literal interpretation of particular creation myths misunderstood as historical and scientific fact and set in opposition to scientific theories. You are essentially equating Creationism with mythology, and that is just wrong. Creationism is a perversion of mythology as well as an embarassment to many modern Christian sects.
I am opposed to #4 because it a) is not very specific and b) doesn't apply to atheism in general. At best, it applies to particular radical or "active" atheists.
That is just not true. THe idea that living things are designed goes back a long way. It is only very recently that ID has become an active movement associated with (neo)Creationism. It happened somewhere in the 1980's, i believe. See the wikipedia article.
Note that it is the definiton #4. FYI, they are usually listed in order of significance. If #4 was used as the only criteria, far too many things would also be included as religions.
Actually, ID (before it was hijacked by Creationism) technically belongs in a philosophy course. Creationism belongs in a sociology course. And the book of Genesis belongs in a mythology course.
I don't think it makes sense to compare the fines to how much it costs to handle a complaint. The question is, how much does it cost DirectTV to make the telemarketing calls in the first place? And how much do they stand to make from it? I can see $5.4M seriously damaging their net profit in such a way that it would be been better to have followed the rules. And that is what matters.
I know companies such as DirecTV move a lot of money, but $5.4M seems it would be a lot more than a drop in the bucket of what they might have made through the tactics.
Hmm, I thought the reason Engineering degrees took so long was because there was just that much more to learn. Well, general eduction + the technical stuff. Isn't 5 years pretty much standard for EE's? Do the private schools cut corners on the general education or something?
Slashdot Mirror
Meaningless tautology.
Language doesn't matter at all.
Baseless assertion.
There's difference in functionality between one language and another, true. That's because different languages were built to different specifications and purposes:
And here you contradict your own baseless assertion.
no first-person shooters written in assembly,
Ok, here is a good example. Lets say all you had was assembly language and perhaps FORTRAN to perform some "high level" math operations. Lets say someone asked you to create an FPS. Now, it could probably be done. You'd have to figure out how to interact with the graphics hardware at the register level. You'd have to write almost every single function by hand from aside from whatever math functions you can utilize from FORTRAN. So 6 months into development someone comes along an says, "Hey, here is this new language called C and a library called OpenGL. These will make your FPS development a whole lot easier. It solves the really hard problems of dealing with hardware and makes your code work on many different kinds of graphics cards." Are you saying that you would run screaming from this offer because it couldn't possibly make your work easier? Unless you are some really f'ing hardcore assembly programmer, I bet you coudl cut your development time by an order of magitude at least. You could probably even afford to complete dump that previous 6 months of development in the trash and STILL come out ahead because you found a new tool/language which makes a perviously hard program relatively easier.
Contrary to your initial baseless assertion, language DOES matter. Frameworks matter. Libraries matter. There are, in fact, all kinds of things that can make a particular project easier.
-matthew
And what is wrong with a "database browser" web application? If you have a perfectly good database model that you want people to interact with, why not use a database oriented framework? Why should anyone have to reinvent a framework every time they want to write a database driven web application? I'll tell you what, going from brain dead PHP to Rails was a huge boost in productivity.
I suppose this is just the next step in the constant progression toward appeasing laziness;
I wholeheartedly disagree. It is a step in the contant progressio towards more complex applications using higher level development tools. What would be least "lazy" in you opinion? Developing a web application in assembly language? C? FORTRAN??? I know that is an exageration, but the fact is that people are expecting more and more out of the web and the only way to deliver in a reasonable amount of time is to use the "rapid" development tools.
What is "lazy" is refusing to learn new tools and frameworks.
-matthew
I think it would be appropriate for MS to send out "recall" notices to users, but I wouldn't expect any user to voluntarily read a specific website to get such info.
-matthew
Given the potential volcanic activity, it is strange that what everyone around here (Portland) freaks out about most is 1 inch of snow.
-matthew
I agree that it is dumb to base laws on regulations on scientific theories that are likely to change next year (and not necessarily for the better). I think regulations should be based on the basic principal of conservation, on the principal of working as efficiently as possible, on the principal of erring on the side of caution. Do you really think anyone is going to look back 50 years from now and say something like "If only they hadn't increased fuel economy and regulated polution." Did we need scientific theories to tell us that child/slave labor was wrong? No. We enacted labor laws because it was the right thing to do. At the time, businesses thought it would destroy the economy. Not only did it not destroy the economy, but the US grew to become one of the biggest economic superpowers in the world. I see environmental regulation as the modern day equivelent to labor regulation. We don't do it because scientists tell us we should. We do it because it is the right thing to do. Business WILL adapt.
I think perhaps you might not give conservation and environmental regulation enough credit. If you have ever visited urban areas in developing countries (I've traveled around South/Central America, for example) one of the first things you will notice in the cities is how aweful the air quality is. I'm not talking about a little haze. I'm talking about virtually unbreathable. Try visiting Mexico City some time. Every time I travel, I am so grateful for the environmental regulations we have in the US. And i would like to see more. I think it is disgraceful that it is, to this day, unhealthy to eat fish from the Mississippi river, for example. While I think it is great that we have relatively breathable air, we (as in all humans) have a long way to go yet.
-matthew
The poor farmers are in other countries that cannot afford to subsidize farming like we do here in the US. The poor farmers are in countries where they have been lured into buying into GM crops and are stuck paying Monsanto for their seeds every year which serves as a drain on the local economy. It is like the whole baby formula scandal where companies like Nestle' convice poor people that infant formula is better (and easier) than breast milk. But by the time the poor people realize that they can't really afford the formula in the long run, they find that they HAVE to buy th eforumla because the mother isn't producing milk any more. Sometimes they resort to cow's milk and really mess up the infant nutritionally.
I'm sorry, but it is sick. They export their perfectly good food and labor, and we give them "Burger King" in return.
-matthew
Heh, nice try at turning this around, but I wans't arguing against the Big Bang. Nor did I say that it is unscientific. You may want to recalibrate your irony meter.
The problem with this statement is that it is a purely negative argument.
Let's turn this around. What evidence is there that purely random unguided processes were responsible for the variety of life that we see around us? The fossil record? No. That establishes that evolution took place. But it certainly does not establish that it was unguided random processes which caused it. Genetic DNA analysis? Again, that shows the evolutionary relationships between creatures, but does not prove that it was random processes that governed it.
Like I said, a purely negative argument. Clearly you have nothing positive to contribute to the scientific process.
Recombinant DNA? This only produces variation within a species. It has never been shown that recombination is sufficient to create a new species from an old one. And besides, research is showing that the previously considered "random" activity of DNA recombination is no longer as random as it seemed. This activity appears to be very precise and is controlled by special enzymes that break the chromosomes, exchange the pieces, and rejoin the free ends. Recombination also needs certain special structures in the cell to make it work. The activities of recombination are not just haphazard events. Special pieces of DNA jump around in the chromosome to allow these activities to happen. Recombination has been found to be a very complex process. And we still don't know the half of it. But fewer people are calling it purely "random".
*sigh* More negative arguments.
So where is the irrefutable evidence that the "Origin of Species" is truly governed by an unguided random process?
Ya got me. I don't know that anyone is trying to prove anyting about an "unguided random process." Evolution is not random. It is guided by any number of natural contraints, as you pointed out. The only people calling evolution a purely random unguided process are people who a) don't understand it (at all), and b) wish to discredit it.
BTW, I agree with you that ID is weak on the counter argument side. And that's where the political argument raises its ugly head. With the continual slapdown of any attempts to scientifically discuss alternatives to Neo-Darwinism, the scientific exploration of these alternatives is basically at a standstill. Any time a paper slips through, the reaction is tsunamic
Oh that's clever. Blame the other side for your lack of substance. And i suppose the reason we don't have perpetual motion machines is because the brilliant scientists working on them are viciously supressed by a thermodynamic cabal?
Yes, but having the same structures is not what makes them work. It's having different complementary structures which makes them work. And evolving these different but complimentary structures randomly is quite a trick.
So is pulling a rabit out of a hat until you figure out the processes and mechanisms behind it.
The alternative being what, exactly?
The observation is that some biological mechanisms appear to have the characteristics of being designed. Since there is precious little understanding of how these mechanisms actually did evolve, the first step -- if it were allowed -- would be to try and identify and understand the evolutionary processes which produced these mechanisms. But according to Genamics JournalSeek, there are 0 (zero) journals dedicated to the study of cellular evolution (in fact, there appea
I am uncomfortable with your implication that evolutionary theory is necessarily flawed because of the politics (not the science) involved. Yes, it gets nasty. But that doesn't mean the theory is flawed or that the alternative that is being presented is automatically valid. In the bigger picture, there is nothing particular special about nasty politics in science. It happens any time a well established theory or idea is challenged. If the challenge has substance, what happens is that the current crop of scientists continue to cling to the old ideas until a new crop of scientists takes over.
There was once a time when scientists thought that the universe never began and will never end. Many scientists found it distasteful to believe that the universe had a beginning. The idea itself was too suggestive that there might be a God. In fact, in opposition to the then-new Big Bang Theory, some scientists even suggested that matter was constantly being created, and in that way we could avoid the Big Bang Theory altogether. That's how far they were willing to go to avoid the Big Bang Theory. However, the facts have caught up with us and we now know with a high degree of certainty that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old. The universe had a very specific starting point.
That isn't exactly true. The Big Bang could turn out to be a starting point, not the starting point... part of a continual cycle of expansion and contraction. While the age of the observable universe may be established, that doesn't necessarily mean there was an ultimate temporal beginning, pe se. This may not even be the only universe that exists...
Likewise, there is evidence today to suggest that it would be very difficult if not impossible for certain biological structures to have been created by random processes.
The problem with this statement is that it is a purely negative argument. What makes this different than the Big Bang challenge you talked about previously is that there is no positive argument to go along with it. Big Bang is an actual theory with its own predictions and mechanisms. You can go on and on about how "random" processes can't do such and such until you are blue in the face, but without an alternative "non-random" mechanism, you don't have much to go on and it is difficult to take seriously. And I do mean mechanism, not an attribution. Saying that an intelligent designer did it is a attribution, not a mechanism. If I asked how a rabit is pulled out of a hat and you said "a magician does it," I would have to ask you again because you didn't answer the question. If you kept answering with "a magician does it," I would probably start to get pretty annoyed with you. Kinda like scientists are annoyed with ID "theorists."
Just like you would look at a mouse trap and conclude that it was not created by random processes, you can look at various biological structures and come to the same conclusion. Have you ever thought how two completely different reproductive systems (male and female) came to evolve simultaneously?
Actually, they aren't completely different. They share many, if not most, of the same basic structures. They're just arranged differently. One can observe this in a developing fetus.
How two of them evolved through random processes is anyone's guess. And that's all we have right now -- is guesses. There is no direct evidence to show that they evolved through random processes. There is only wishful speculation. And science is not normally built on wishful speculation.
In science it is called a hypothesis. ID theorists might want to give it a try some time. Maybe one day they might actually come up with a substantial theory of their own.
But as I have shown above, we seem to live in a time where the chilling effects of oppression seem to be replacing the normal activities of science. So any alternative ideas are vicio
I started my first real Rails project with generated scaffolding, but after a few days there was almost nothing left of it. And I almost wish I had never generated the scaffolding because I had to spend time cleaning up tons of files and method stubs that I was never going to use.
I do, however, use the basic "scripts/generate " scripts. They save me a minute or two of creating files and directories and class definitons. Handy, I suppose, but I am not sure if this is considered "generated code." The only "code" that Rails really generates for me is HTML and SQL (Tag Helpers and ActiveRecord) which is pretty nice, actually. The less HTML and SQL i have to write and more I can focus on the actual code, the better.
Re: code generation replacing OO model:
I have no idea what the OP is talking about. RoR is pure OO.
Probably the only thing that I find a little frustrating about RoR is the shear volumn of files involved in a project. Navigating through them gets gradually more time consuming.
-matthew
Heh, nice little word substitution there. *I* was talking about ID and you just switched to Creationism. I don't suppose you were an editor for "Of Pandas and People."
-matthew
The greatest scientific advance of the last 1,000 years was providing the evidence to prove that human beings are independent agents whose lives on earth are neither conferred nor controlled by celestial forces. Although it may be more conventional to measure scientific progress in terms of specific technological developments, nothing was more important than providing the means to release men and women from the hegemony of the supernatural.
Sounds a lot like philosophy to me.
My response is that when they remove their atheistic materialism from the science room, I will remove my faith. But not one moment sooner.
And I am not going to buy a new car until they remove all that darn atheistic materialism from the owners manual! Is baseball atheistic materialism because the rules don't mention God and none of the outcomes are attributed to supernatural forces? Then why is science atheistic materialism because none of its rules involve God?
There is nothing wrong with maintaining faith in a science classroom, but you're going to get an F if you can't apply the decidedly materialistic rules of science to produce verifiable results. Saying "God did it" is not a scientific answer. To drive a car, you still need to push on the gas pedal and stear the wheel. You can't drive by faith. To play baseball, you still have to swing the bat and throw the ball. Faith won't do it for you. In science you still have to apply those materialistic rules. Faith won't do it for you.
BTW, that statement came from the scientific journal Cell. If you are not astounded, then you have probably already been assimilated.
I guess it depends on the context. Was it an opinion/commentary column or part of a research article? Do you care?
-matthew
No, creation myths are at the *beginning* (where else would you put them?) of most mythologies. The *basis* of mythology lies in culture and psychology (just ask C. G. Jung). Creationism is a literal interpretation of particular creation myths misunderstood as historical and scientific fact and set in opposition to scientific theories. You are essentially equating Creationism with mythology, and that is just wrong. Creationism is a perversion of mythology as well as an embarassment to many modern Christian sects.
-matthew
So do many other superstitions. So what?
So... what you said is false. ID has only very recently been associated with Christian creationism.
-matthew
Right. Isn't that what I said, just not in so many words?
-matthew
I am opposed to #4 because it a) is not very specific and b) doesn't apply to atheism in general. At best, it applies to particular radical or "active" atheists.
-matthew
That is just not true. THe idea that living things are designed goes back a long way. It is only very recently that ID has become an active movement associated with (neo)Creationism. It happened somewhere in the 1980's, i believe. See the wikipedia article.
-matthew
Note that it is the definiton #4. FYI, they are usually listed in order of significance. If #4 was used as the only criteria, far too many things would also be included as religions.
-matthew
Actually, ID (before it was hijacked by Creationism) technically belongs in a philosophy course. Creationism belongs in a sociology course. And the book of Genesis belongs in a mythology course.
-matthew
Pretty much no on all counts. Linux may be cool on a Treo like it is on other things but it isn't useful.
You're not much of a hacker, are you?
-matthew
make love
...not.
Democrats in the US are a whole lot like socialists.
-matthew
I don't think it makes sense to compare the fines to how much it costs to handle a complaint. The question is, how much does it cost DirectTV to make the telemarketing calls in the first place? And how much do they stand to make from it? I can see $5.4M seriously damaging their net profit in such a way that it would be been better to have followed the rules. And that is what matters.
-matthew
I know companies such as DirecTV move a lot of money, but $5.4M seems it would be a lot more than a drop in the bucket of what they might have made through the tactics.
-matthew
Hmm, I thought the reason Engineering degrees took so long was because there was just that much more to learn. Well, general eduction + the technical stuff. Isn't 5 years pretty much standard for EE's? Do the private schools cut corners on the general education or something?
-matthew