Maybe it's not that people wear tin foil hats because they are paranoid, but that they turn paranoid after wearing these tin foil hats. After all, anyone who believes much of what the US government has been saying for the last few years is bound to be so paranoid they're living in a bunker by now.
Do you have any specific examples of representative French figures, like politicians, celebrities, or whatever, saying that their social policies were superior to any other country's? Do you have any survey data showing that average French people think that their social policies are superior to those of other countries? Do you have any examples of films, magazines, or popular culture from France that claim that French social policies are superior to those of other countries?
No, I didn't think so, you're just a jingoistic hick.
And the Bible advocates stoning to death children who disobey their parents, conquest of any people who are not God's 'chosen people' if it is necessary to hold onto their birthright, and plenty of raping and pillaging too. That's because they were both written in civilisations that were vastly different to the ones that currently exist. The fact that there's a tiny minority of Muslims (who have risen to some prominence in some countries) who would like to go back to that kind of society does not say anything about Islam in general, particularly what it means to the majority (who don't get much press coverage).
I understand that it was intended to be a joke, however the only possible way I can conceive of it being funny is if it was actually taking the piss out of the people who respond to any criticism of Bush by saying 'Oh yeah, EVERYTHING's Bush's fault!' as if they could dismiss it by just lumping their opponents all into the same category.
There is NOTHING funny about this idiotic 'If you're not with us you're against us' mentality.
With the Freanch constantly trumpeting the superiority of their social policies
Sorry, but when was the last time 'the French' constantly 'trumpeted' the superiority of their social policies?
Are you referring to the thousands of French movies that constantly talk about how the French way of life is superior, the movies that the French try to push down everyone's throats by lobbying against cultural protectionism at UNESCO? Or are you referring to the way that the French treasury virtually controls IMF policy making in an attempt to force the 'Paris consensus' of social policies on every country in the developing world? Or perhaps the way they immediately write off any country that has different values and social approach to their own as 'socialistic', 'old Europe', and so on?
Oh WAIT sorry that's America doing all those things, not France! But I guess that's ok since everyone knows that America is paradise on Earth and everyone else is just jealous!
When was the last time Chirac blamed his country's social problems on Bush? When was the last time Chirac was even really at odds with Bush over anything other than the Iraq war and possibly WTO trade rulings?
How can you be so blindly jingoistic that as soon as a country disagrees with ONE policy of your government, you automatically decide that they are evil?
Land is a very special kind of thing--good, useful land is in strictly limited supply, and all other economic activity depends on it. It is a very real, very necessary thing that is expensive because the kind of land needed by each particular economic activity is quite scarce (for example, the particular strip of land needed to build a road, or fertile land to grow food)
This, however, is just some bits of code created by programmers working in an office somewhere. They can, and will, create almost infinitely more. It is not scarce except that it is artificially made scarce by programmers.
I think the confusion here comes from the fact that land is the metaphor being used here, when what is really for sale is a 'game object', which is the same as if I created a big online game of marbles, and I decided to make a few really pretty marbles, and then people who played the game started selling them to each other for lots of money. It is exactly the same, it's just something some programmer made and can make infinitely more of. And in this case it's called 'virtual property' or whatever, but it's no different.
I mention genetic mutation because you say things about scientists trying to create new kinds of organisms, which of course they have successfully done. If, however, your comment about 'putting chemicals in a petri dish' was intended to suggest that evolutionary theory has anything to do with the origins of life, then of course you are completely wrong, it has nothing to do with that. Evolutionary theory does not refer to how life came about, only how it evolves, hence the name.
The main evidence which confirms evolutionary theory is the fossil record. That is why the main people who continue to collect evidence to test the claims of evolutionary theory are paleontologists.
However, evolutionary theory is also confirmed by what happens with genetic mutations we see around us, because they are cases of what evolutionary theory predicts. For example, malaria has mutated to become resistant to chloroquine, and this is precisely what evolutionary theory predicts: that organisms evolve to become more suited to their environment. Because this is in line with the predictions of evolutionary theory, it is confirming evidence.
All science is a combination of theory and empirical observation! That is the very nature of science! Theories are what systematise our observations in order to produce predictions--observations alone cannot produce predictions and are therefore not useful for searching for further knowledge.
And how do we go about testing a theory? By testing its empirical consequences. If the theory of evolution predicts that we will find such-and-such kinds of fossils, and we do, then it is confirmed, if we find something radically contradicting its predictions, then it is falsified. And of course, all of our dating methods are based on other theories as well.
But this goes for all of science. Astronomy could not exist without optical theory, because we only believe what we see on the other end of our telescope because we believe in optical theory. Microbiology also depends on optical theory--we have to trust our microscopes. Observations in physics are highly theory-laden. For example, how do we know it is really electrons we see in our cloud chamber?
I'm sorry my friend, but it appears you are completely ignorant as to science or methodology. I recommend you read up on your philosophy too.
I can't believe I'm even bothering to respond to this.
The commonly accepted definition of the word 'proof' since Kant's Critique of Pure Reason rests on analytic truths, rather than synthetic truths. If you reject this definition of 'proof', then I'm not sure what distinction you make between 'prove' and 'confirm'/'demonstrate'--which are commonly accepted in science and philosophy of science as completely different concepts.
I don't think you know anything about the definition of 'fact' as accepted by the scientific community today. Some scientists are scientific realists, i.e. they believe in the approximate truth of theoretical postulates. But this has nothing to do with 'proof'. It has to do with believing there is a legitimate epistemic grounding of the truth of theoretical entities in empirical observations.
Acceptance of a research programme in science does not mean acceptance of the truth of the theoretical entities it postulates. It only means belief that the research programme will be fruitful in the future. Again, see Popper, van Fraassen, Cartwright, Lakatos, Laudan, Feyerabend, et al.
What the hell does evolution have to do with 'an increase of genetic material'? I don't even know what you mean--do you mean a growth in the number of genes or what? That has nothing to do with the theory of evolution, which (roughly) states that over long periods of time, generations of organisms change their physical form, adapting to their changing environment. And it has nothing to do with the theory of natural selection, which is a mechanism that is supposed to explain evolution by suggesting that it takes place by random genetic mutation coupled with 'survival of the fittest'. Neither one of these requires 'an increase in genetic material'.
Genetics is being confirmed every day. A large proportion of food crops in the US (soya beans, tomatoes, etc) are today products of successful genetic modification. The mapping of the human genome has managed to isolate genes associated with certain disorders--hereditary disorders, I might add, that often arise through genetic mutation, i.e. evolution of sorts.
And I'm sorry if you're unfamiliar with the work of the scientific community, but there are literally thousands of biochemists, paleontologists, etc, who work on matters related to evolutionary theory every day.
Sorry, e=m(c^2) is not a fact, it's a theoretical claim made by Einstein's theory. The two are completely different things. Scientific theories are an attempt to systematise empirical observations in a way that produces reliable predictions. The laws and theoretical entities they postulate are not facts, they are not intended to be facts, they are theories. I refer you to Bas van Fraassen or Nancy Cartwright (or for that matter pretty much anyone else in the philosophy of science, including scientific realists).
Hmm. Fields of science concerned with evolution? Paleontology. Molecular biology. Genetics. Evolutionary psychology. A quick search of scientific journals on one database reveals 29 current journals with the word 'evolution' in the title. And obviously that is not anywhere near all of them (it is only English language and not all will have the word 'evolution' in the title).
What the hell does evolution have to do with medicine? Medicine is mostly applications of work done in sciences like biology, biochemistry, etc. I fail to see why evolution should be studied by medicine.
1) Evolution is not a theory about how life arose (as you say 'out of a chaotic pool of meaningless chemicals'. It is a theory about how life has changed and adapted over time. It is totally agnostic as to how life arose.
2) How is anything that I said anti-religious? I said that all of those religious beliefs are perfectly legitimate as religious beliefs, just not to conflate them with science. I find it ironic that you consider this anti-religious when Christian philosophers spent a large part of the middle ages arguing that trying to prove the existence of God was futile, because the whole point of belief in God was faith, and to try to subvert this would defeat the purpose. If anything, it's more pro-religion to keep it isolated from science and declare it has independent legitimacy.
Mate, the theory of evolution is one of the best confirmed scientific theories to date. Genetic mutation is observed continually (e.g. bacterial mutations, etc). There is a massive amount of fossil data, laboratory experimentation, etc, to confirm evolution.
That said, anyone who thinks that a scientific theory can ever be 'proved' obviously has a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientific enterprise. Scientific theories can be well confirmed (unless you're a Popperian), they can be falsified, but they can never, ever be proved. Only analytic truths (truths by definition, like maths) can ever be proved.
Some of the best confirmed scientific theories ever have eventually been superseded. Newtonian physics is a good example. So is the Ptolemaic theory, which was actually extremely empirically adequate, beyond even the empirical adequacy of the Galilean theory, which eventually prevailed out of considerations of simplicity (Ptolemy's theory required too many epicycles).
We can expect that our best confirmed theories today, including natural selection and evolution, may eventually be superseded. This is the basis on which anyone who actually understands science approaches it.
But what science does is commit to the best research programmes on offer at the moment, i.e. the ones that are best confirmed up to the moment. There is an absolute mountain of evidence supporting the theory of evolution and the subtheory of natural selection. One day these theories may be disconfirmed and superseded. But for the moment, they are the best we have. That's science. Live with it.
There is nothing wrong with believing that a higher power, an intelligent being, or whatever, guided the process of evolution, or designed life on Earth, etc etc. It is a perfectly legitimate religious belief.
Just as it is a perfectly legitimate religious belief that the son of God appeared on Earth and died on the cross, and a perfectly legitimate religious belief that Mohammed ascended to heaven from a rock, and a perfectly legitimate religious belief that the world is supported by a (invisible) turtle.
However none of these are scientific theories, and none of them ever can be. The reason is that they cannot be tested, they cannot be confirmed or falsified. You can always point at anything and say 'Wow, that's incredible--it must have been designed by God'. Science does not work that way. For something to be a scientific theory, it needs to be useable in scientific practice. Religious belief is not.
I do not challenge the legitimacy of your religious beliefs. But they are in a totally different domain from evolutionary theory, which is a scientific theory. Evolutionary theory must be evaluated on the basis of scientific standards (peer review, independent testing, attempts to falsify, etc), while religious ideas must be evaluated on the basis of religious standards (faith, direct spiritual experience, etc). Do not conflate the two and everyone will be happy.
They think the mere fact that an embryo has the potential to become a human being gives it moral value, makes it "worthy of being saved." This is because they know human beings have moral value, and so conflate "a thing with potential to be something of moral value" with "a thing that has moral value."
If this premise were correct (i.e. that they think this) then your argument would be fine. But it is not correct. Regardless of any rhetoric they use, their basic belief is not an ethical one, but a religious one: i.e. that what is 'worth saving' is any living soul, and that the soul enters the physical body at conception and leaves it on death.
Ethically, their side and your side are in agreement, that is you both agree that a human life has moral value, but they define a human life as being a living soul, and you define it as being a conscious human entity. There is no ethical disagreement here.
The disagreement is at best metaphysical, but more likely it is theological. In other words, if you want to change their views, you have to change their view of what a human life is, and to do that would require changing their religious belief, not their ethical arguments, or even their definition of what it is to be conscious (because consciousness does not enter into it for them).
As someone who has studied plenty of philosophy, I would say this is a perfect example of why ethical philosophy is quite useless. Rational argument can persuade people that there are inconsistencies in their ethical, religious, or other beliefs, and it can persuade them that if they want a certain thing, then they should do such and such a thing to get it, or then they must logically want another thing, but it cannot persuade people that they should want this or that to begin with.
In this case, the real question at issue is whether there is a soul, etc--and while philosophy can make plenty of arguments about nonduality and so forth, religion has the power to persuade people to abandon all rationality, even the law of noncontradiction if need be. Especially Americans.
The character of Don Quixote is a classic symbol of the most noble human values--self-sacrifice, duty, heroism, perseverance against incredible odds. Rather than being seen as someone hopelessly fighting the inevitable, the literary and cultural significane of Don Quixote for Western culture has been as a symbol of inspiring greatness. After all, the most noble kind of heroism in the classic European ideal of chivalry is the kind that fights on in spite of all the odds.
A second reason why the ESA probably chose this name is that Don Quixote is considered by many to be the greatest work of literature ever produced by a Western author, certainly it is among the greatest works of European culture. Because the European institutions seek to promote European cultural heritage, and Don Quixote is a symbol of that heritage, it makes sense that the ESA would have chosen it.
Finally I suspect it was done with some humour in mind. After all, this can be seen as a somewhat quixotic mission--to crash a tiny spacecraft into a giant asteroid in an attempt to deflect its course. A heroic mission against great odds.
It seems a quite appropriate, and appropriately humble name to me.
While the UK has plenty of crime problems, I'm not sure the statistics are that straightforward.
Particularly the rape statistic is often a function of incidence of reporting rapes as for example there probably are less rapes reported in the American Bible Belt because of prevailing social standards (a wild guess). Also since most rape that occurs is date rape, there's also the question of whether it's realistic to expect that women would carry guns on dates and therefore reduce the incidence of rape. Of course it is perfectly possible that that statistic is telling but I am not sure it's so simple.
As for car theft, most people here have never even heard of 'carjacking'--car theft happens mostly when the owner is not around, so it would make no difference if the owner had a gun or not.
As for assaults, unfortunately the UK has a problem with some younger people who don't have much to do with their time literally assaulting people for fun or because they're drunk, or both. This is a big social problem that needs to be addressed at its cultural and economic roots.
Now with assaults and burglary, I will grant you that the fear of guns probably does play a role in reducing these in the US. But that does not mean that it is worth it.
Without going into detail on the issue of why there is so much assault in the UK, suffice it to say that it is part of something wider which also includes random vandalism, recent binge drinking, and other things labelled 'anti-social behaviour'--and even if you could scare people into not assaulting others outright, this problem would manifest itself in some other way. It has to be dealt with at the roots, not simply by attacking symptoms.
And regardless of that, there is a hidden cost to introducing guns. That is that the general fear level does go up. If there are guns generally available, that means I don't just have to fear that that group of drunken 17 year olds are going to punch me and steal my phone, I have to fear that they are going to shoot me dead. You could say that I could carry a gun in defence, but what's to stop them simply shooting me in the head before I could even draw a gun? And since most people in the UK find guns repulsive, most people would not carry them in self-defence anyway.
Plus there's the problem of police officers having guns. If police officers have guns, then you get police officers shooting people without a trial, which in many countries where police do have guns, amounts to victimising people in poor communities whose family cannot afford to do anything about it. 'Curbside justice' is what I believe American police call it.
I don't know if you're aware of the Menezes incident a couple of months ago in London--a huge national scandal because an innocent man was shot by police. It was a scandal because people value the rule of law, they value justice, they value the idea that you get a fair trial, and even if you are convicted, that your life is sacrosanct. Give police guns and innocent people as well have much more reason to be afraid. Just ask how British tourists outside the UK often feel in many countries when they see police walking around with guns--it does not make them feel safer in general, quite the opposite.
Uses considered legitimate for guns, like hunting, are generally accomodated by countries that ban guns. For example, here in the UK, it is perfectly legal to own a gun for hunting purposes, but it is highly regulated to make sure that it is for hunting purposes. Among other things, you have to belong to a gun club, go through lots of safety training to get a license, undergo a background check, police have to come to your house to inspect your gun cabinet to make sure it is well locked so that no children can get into it etc, and the only guns you can have are hunting rifles, not handguns etc.
Which of course, if your purpose is to hunt, then you should have no problem with these restrictions. I of course do not oppose people having guns under such tightly regulated circumstances for such a specific purpose.
As for people 'needing to kill people', it is true that occasionally people get attacked and the only way they have to defend themselves is to kill (though this does not happen often to the average person!). But this kind of event is pretty rare for people in most countries (except for a few, like South Africa or the parts of the United States). To say that we should all be running around with killing devices just in case we get lethally attacked is nonsense. Particularly when those who are much more likely to find a use for their gun are those who are going to do it in a way that is not in self-defence.
If you compare UK crime statistics with US crime statistics you will see that in 1999 the UK had 62 murders with firearms while the US had 8259 murders with firearms. Given that the UK population is roughly 56 million and US population is roughly 300 million, it doesn't take much maths to show that in the UK compared to the US, gun crime is practically nonexistent.
You will see if you look at Home Office statistics that there were upwards of 10,000 firearms related crimes in the last year. Most of these had to do with possession, not actual use. While the amount of guns in the UK has increased, it is infintesimal compared to the US, as is the amount of gun crime.
That is why when someone is murdered with a gun in the UK, it is huge national news, while in the US, it barely makes the local papers (I have lived in both countries).
As for the moral issues behind killing someone: I would say the US is quite exceptional in thinking that it is morally OK to kill someone in defence of property. This is a concept that is unconscionable in pretty much every country in the world except for America. I will not, however, attempt to convince you that human life is worth more than any property, regardless of whether that human tries to steal property. It is up to you whether you want to make that judgement; suffice it to say that the majority of societies in the world have banned guns partly because they don't see the force in that part of the argument.
As for killing in defence of life--of course most people see this as morally justifiable. But most people also do not end up in situations where they ever must do such a thing, and the chances of someone ending up in this situation, and having bought a gun, are much lower than the chances of someone who buys a gun then using it to commit a crime.
But that is really beside the point. Because it is invalid to say that the purpose of guns is to defend your own life and property. You could say that the purpose of an IRA bomb was to fight for Irish Republicanism. But that is not what the bomb does, that is just your aim that lies behind your actions. The immediate action at hand is killing, and that is an action that most people find unacceptable.
The distinction is roughly analagous to the distinction made in the Geneva conventions between military targets, as legitimate, and civilan targets, as illegitimate. Military installations are considered legitimate targets because their primary purpose is to carry out military activity. Civilian infrastructure is not considered legitimate because while things like power plants and hospitals may indirectly help military activity, that is not their primary purpose.
Likewise, while mobile phones, rucksacks, and bandanas all have a primary purpose which has nothing to do with killing people, a gun is a tool designed for the sole purpose of killing people. While all of those objects can be used to assist in killing people, that is not their primary purpose; guns, however, are designed for only one purpose, and there is therefore a qualitative difference.
Of course, all physical objects could in some way be used to assist in killing people. But we cannot ban all physical objects. Why? Because most of them serve in some way to enrich our lives, in a way that has nothing to do with killing. Obviously if safety was our only priority, we would live in padded rooms. But the argument does not apply to things like guns, bombs, mortars, etc, because they do not have a secondary use--they only have one use, which is to kill people. Therefore unless we think that people need to be enabled to more easily kill people, there is no reason for people to have them.
Yes it's true that 'people kill people'. Guns help people to kill people, in the same way that shovels help people to dig. Of course, gloves also help people to dig, and sometimes help people to kill people--but they have lots of other uses as well. If you want to prevent people digging, you don't outlaw anything that could possibly help them dig, you simply outlaw the things that most obviously only have the single use that is to help them dig--like shovels. Clearly most people want to prevent other people killing--so the most obvious thing to do is to outlaw things that have no other purpose than to help people kill.
While most people who have used CDE just think of it as a rather clunky mid-late-90s desktop interface, if you know anything about its capabilities you see the story of a huge missed opportunity.
Specifically, CDE had the potential to put an entirely different desktop model forward that could have driven sales by UNIX companies. It combined the benefits of the X Window System with a distributed object model to create a user interface for the average user that was completely abstracted away from the computer--whether PC, workstation, or whatever. Instead, the user simply sees applications and files, and doesn't care about where they are running or stored. You can have 5 applications running on 5 different computers all on the same desktop, with seamless multimedia drag and drop between them--and never know they are running on different platforms, from different vendors, on different parts of your network.
That means that CDE could have made it possible for a desktop model to be pushed that was based around heterogenous computing resources and a combination of X terminals and desktop machines--a cheaper, more maintainable, more flexible model than the 'PC on every desktop' model. It allows for an interim solution between mainframes and PCs--that is, to have a flexible distribution of computing power (say, office apps running on your local workgroup machine, browser running on your X terminal, more compute-intensive apps running on a server, etc).
It's clear that the UNIX companies poured a huge amount of money into developing CDE and then completely wasted the effort, maybe because by the time it was done it was too late--Win95 had already taken over. But it seems to me the people engineering CDE had a lot more insight than the people paying for it. They seem to have seen that it was actually possible to create a superior desktop model based on UNIX and X, but this was never marketed to anyone.
If UNIX vendors in the mid-90s had realised what they had created, they could have sold full 'desktop solutions' to companies, rather than simply accepting that PCs had taken over and therefore leaving the desktop to a PC-based operating system--i.e. Windows.
But as you say, they only wanted to sell big iron--maybe a good decision for short run bottom line, but a huge mistake for long run success.
Leeching off of technology that hasn't been invented yet reaps the benefits of work paid for by whomever goes first. I call it a technologically-oriented game of chicken.
Isn't this more like a prisoner's dilemma, since it's a free-rider problem? 'Chicken' is a coordination game, where the difficulty is to make sure that both sides pick the right weakly dominant strategy (i.e. both swerving to the right).
Oh I've been studying too much neoclassical economics. Someone shoot me.
But isn't it actually faster to type words that involve multiple fingers than the same finger? If you are touch typing at a reasonable speed (at least say 80-100wpm), then hitting a key 3 times with the same finger is much slower than hitting 3 keys with 3 different fingers, because when one finger is hitting the key, the next finger can be on its way down, so you get 'hit-hit-hit' rather than 'hit-raise-hit-raise-hit'. So a word that uses multiple fingers should be much easier if you're a decent typist.
(we can maybe guess that maybe this means that AOL users have not learned how to type properly)
As for underscores, they're really quite easy to type once you get used to it because you learn where the - key is and hit it just as quickly as any other. You could argue that it would be better to name variables like 'ThisIsAVariable' (Microsoft style), but then you are hitting the same number of keys--still hitting the shift key and another key at the same time--so it doesn't save any time unless you are not accustomed to the finger positioning of the - key (which you will be if you use it often enough).
'Since when? I'm getting plain tired of this ever-expanding and ever-fuzzier list of "fallacies".'
the american heritage dictionary says that a 'fallacy' is (among other things) a 'false notion' or 'incorrectness of reasoning or belief; erroneousness'. i did not say that it was a logical fallacy.
what i was saying was not on the level of logic but on the level of social scientific methodology: you simply cannot say that because many individuals were disposed to behave in a certain way on an individual level, that therefore macro events will look as if the whole aggregate were a big individual acting in that way. for example, the case of unintended consequences, or 'crowd behaviour' (used to be called 'mass psychology'), or the behaviour of a corporation.
maybe everyone in a corporation has a similar motive to make money, but can we extrapolate that the corporation is therefore going to try to make money? not if some people in that corporation have secretly invested in the competitor. etc etc, there are loads of possible examples.
what i called a fallacy was the previous poster saying that, because we know that japanese soldiers just keep fighting (and he gave the example of survivors fighting on for decades), we can therefore say that the japanese empire *as a whole* would keep on fighting. this is a fallacy--i.e. erroneous reasoning. *it may have been a facilitating factor*, but it cannot be seen as the sole causal factor, nor can it be seen as the only causal factor, and the burden of proof is on the person doing the explaining to show what the link is between cause and effect.
I think a contributing factor was that the whole of the French defensive system (most famously the Maginot line) was designed, after the first world war, without expecting air attacks. The whole of the German 'blitzkrieg' strategy was based on starting with concerted air bombardment, and therefore flew right over the French defenses.
French tanks may have been superior, but the German strategy was based on a combined air/ground war, while France was not anticipating the air aspect.
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Maybe it's not that people wear tin foil hats because they are paranoid, but that they turn paranoid after wearing these tin foil hats. After all, anyone who believes much of what the US government has been saying for the last few years is bound to be so paranoid they're living in a bunker by now.
Do you have any specific examples of representative French figures, like politicians, celebrities, or whatever, saying that their social policies were superior to any other country's? Do you have any survey data showing that average French people think that their social policies are superior to those of other countries? Do you have any examples of films, magazines, or popular culture from France that claim that French social policies are superior to those of other countries?
No, I didn't think so, you're just a jingoistic hick.
And the Bible advocates stoning to death children who disobey their parents, conquest of any people who are not God's 'chosen people' if it is necessary to hold onto their birthright, and plenty of raping and pillaging too. That's because they were both written in civilisations that were vastly different to the ones that currently exist. The fact that there's a tiny minority of Muslims (who have risen to some prominence in some countries) who would like to go back to that kind of society does not say anything about Islam in general, particularly what it means to the majority (who don't get much press coverage).
I understand that it was intended to be a joke, however the only possible way I can conceive of it being funny is if it was actually taking the piss out of the people who respond to any criticism of Bush by saying 'Oh yeah, EVERYTHING's Bush's fault!' as if they could dismiss it by just lumping their opponents all into the same category.
There is NOTHING funny about this idiotic 'If you're not with us you're against us' mentality.
Sorry, but when was the last time 'the French' constantly 'trumpeted' the superiority of their social policies?
Are you referring to the thousands of French movies that constantly talk about how the French way of life is superior, the movies that the French try to push down everyone's throats by lobbying against cultural protectionism at UNESCO? Or are you referring to the way that the French treasury virtually controls IMF policy making in an attempt to force the 'Paris consensus' of social policies on every country in the developing world? Or perhaps the way they immediately write off any country that has different values and social approach to their own as 'socialistic', 'old Europe', and so on?
Oh WAIT sorry that's America doing all those things, not France! But I guess that's ok since everyone knows that America is paradise on Earth and everyone else is just jealous!
When was the last time Chirac blamed his country's social problems on Bush? When was the last time Chirac was even really at odds with Bush over anything other than the Iraq war and possibly WTO trade rulings?
How can you be so blindly jingoistic that as soon as a country disagrees with ONE policy of your government, you automatically decide that they are evil?
Land is a very special kind of thing--good, useful land is in strictly limited supply, and all other economic activity depends on it. It is a very real, very necessary thing that is expensive because the kind of land needed by each particular economic activity is quite scarce (for example, the particular strip of land needed to build a road, or fertile land to grow food)
This, however, is just some bits of code created by programmers working in an office somewhere. They can, and will, create almost infinitely more. It is not scarce except that it is artificially made scarce by programmers.
I think the confusion here comes from the fact that land is the metaphor being used here, when what is really for sale is a 'game object', which is the same as if I created a big online game of marbles, and I decided to make a few really pretty marbles, and then people who played the game started selling them to each other for lots of money. It is exactly the same, it's just something some programmer made and can make infinitely more of. And in this case it's called 'virtual property' or whatever, but it's no different.
I mention genetic mutation because you say things about scientists trying to create new kinds of organisms, which of course they have successfully done. If, however, your comment about 'putting chemicals in a petri dish' was intended to suggest that evolutionary theory has anything to do with the origins of life, then of course you are completely wrong, it has nothing to do with that. Evolutionary theory does not refer to how life came about, only how it evolves, hence the name.
The main evidence which confirms evolutionary theory is the fossil record. That is why the main people who continue to collect evidence to test the claims of evolutionary theory are paleontologists.
However, evolutionary theory is also confirmed by what happens with genetic mutations we see around us, because they are cases of what evolutionary theory predicts. For example, malaria has mutated to become resistant to chloroquine, and this is precisely what evolutionary theory predicts: that organisms evolve to become more suited to their environment. Because this is in line with the predictions of evolutionary theory, it is confirming evidence.
And how do we go about testing a theory? By testing its empirical consequences. If the theory of evolution predicts that we will find such-and-such kinds of fossils, and we do, then it is confirmed, if we find something radically contradicting its predictions, then it is falsified. And of course, all of our dating methods are based on other theories as well.
But this goes for all of science. Astronomy could not exist without optical theory, because we only believe what we see on the other end of our telescope because we believe in optical theory. Microbiology also depends on optical theory--we have to trust our microscopes. Observations in physics are highly theory-laden. For example, how do we know it is really electrons we see in our cloud chamber?
I'm sorry my friend, but it appears you are completely ignorant as to science or methodology. I recommend you read up on your philosophy too.
I can't believe I'm even bothering to respond to this.
The commonly accepted definition of the word 'proof' since Kant's Critique of Pure Reason rests on analytic truths, rather than synthetic truths. If you reject this definition of 'proof', then I'm not sure what distinction you make between 'prove' and 'confirm'/'demonstrate'--which are commonly accepted in science and philosophy of science as completely different concepts.
I don't think you know anything about the definition of 'fact' as accepted by the scientific community today. Some scientists are scientific realists, i.e. they believe in the approximate truth of theoretical postulates. But this has nothing to do with 'proof'. It has to do with believing there is a legitimate epistemic grounding of the truth of theoretical entities in empirical observations.
Acceptance of a research programme in science does not mean acceptance of the truth of the theoretical entities it postulates. It only means belief that the research programme will be fruitful in the future. Again, see Popper, van Fraassen, Cartwright, Lakatos, Laudan, Feyerabend, et al.
What the hell does evolution have to do with 'an increase of genetic material'? I don't even know what you mean--do you mean a growth in the number of genes or what? That has nothing to do with the theory of evolution, which (roughly) states that over long periods of time, generations of organisms change their physical form, adapting to their changing environment. And it has nothing to do with the theory of natural selection, which is a mechanism that is supposed to explain evolution by suggesting that it takes place by random genetic mutation coupled with 'survival of the fittest'. Neither one of these requires 'an increase in genetic material'.
Genetics is being confirmed every day. A large proportion of food crops in the US (soya beans, tomatoes, etc) are today products of successful genetic modification. The mapping of the human genome has managed to isolate genes associated with certain disorders--hereditary disorders, I might add, that often arise through genetic mutation, i.e. evolution of sorts.
And I'm sorry if you're unfamiliar with the work of the scientific community, but there are literally thousands of biochemists, paleontologists, etc, who work on matters related to evolutionary theory every day.
Sorry, e=m(c^2) is not a fact, it's a theoretical claim made by Einstein's theory. The two are completely different things. Scientific theories are an attempt to systematise empirical observations in a way that produces reliable predictions. The laws and theoretical entities they postulate are not facts, they are not intended to be facts, they are theories. I refer you to Bas van Fraassen or Nancy Cartwright (or for that matter pretty much anyone else in the philosophy of science, including scientific realists).
Hmm. Fields of science concerned with evolution? Paleontology. Molecular biology. Genetics. Evolutionary psychology. A quick search of scientific journals on one database reveals 29 current journals with the word 'evolution' in the title. And obviously that is not anywhere near all of them (it is only English language and not all will have the word 'evolution' in the title).
What the hell does evolution have to do with medicine? Medicine is mostly applications of work done in sciences like biology, biochemistry, etc. I fail to see why evolution should be studied by medicine.
PS:
1) Evolution is not a theory about how life arose (as you say 'out of a chaotic pool of meaningless chemicals'. It is a theory about how life has changed and adapted over time. It is totally agnostic as to how life arose.
2) How is anything that I said anti-religious? I said that all of those religious beliefs are perfectly legitimate as religious beliefs, just not to conflate them with science. I find it ironic that you consider this anti-religious when Christian philosophers spent a large part of the middle ages arguing that trying to prove the existence of God was futile, because the whole point of belief in God was faith, and to try to subvert this would defeat the purpose. If anything, it's more pro-religion to keep it isolated from science and declare it has independent legitimacy.
Mate, the theory of evolution is one of the best confirmed scientific theories to date. Genetic mutation is observed continually (e.g. bacterial mutations, etc). There is a massive amount of fossil data, laboratory experimentation, etc, to confirm evolution.
That said, anyone who thinks that a scientific theory can ever be 'proved' obviously has a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientific enterprise. Scientific theories can be well confirmed (unless you're a Popperian), they can be falsified, but they can never, ever be proved. Only analytic truths (truths by definition, like maths) can ever be proved.
Some of the best confirmed scientific theories ever have eventually been superseded. Newtonian physics is a good example. So is the Ptolemaic theory, which was actually extremely empirically adequate, beyond even the empirical adequacy of the Galilean theory, which eventually prevailed out of considerations of simplicity (Ptolemy's theory required too many epicycles).
We can expect that our best confirmed theories today, including natural selection and evolution, may eventually be superseded. This is the basis on which anyone who actually understands science approaches it.
But what science does is commit to the best research programmes on offer at the moment, i.e. the ones that are best confirmed up to the moment. There is an absolute mountain of evidence supporting the theory of evolution and the subtheory of natural selection. One day these theories may be disconfirmed and superseded. But for the moment, they are the best we have. That's science. Live with it.
Just as it is a perfectly legitimate religious belief that the son of God appeared on Earth and died on the cross, and a perfectly legitimate religious belief that Mohammed ascended to heaven from a rock, and a perfectly legitimate religious belief that the world is supported by a (invisible) turtle.
However none of these are scientific theories, and none of them ever can be. The reason is that they cannot be tested, they cannot be confirmed or falsified. You can always point at anything and say 'Wow, that's incredible--it must have been designed by God'. Science does not work that way. For something to be a scientific theory, it needs to be useable in scientific practice. Religious belief is not.
I do not challenge the legitimacy of your religious beliefs. But they are in a totally different domain from evolutionary theory, which is a scientific theory. Evolutionary theory must be evaluated on the basis of scientific standards (peer review, independent testing, attempts to falsify, etc), while religious ideas must be evaluated on the basis of religious standards (faith, direct spiritual experience, etc). Do not conflate the two and everyone will be happy.
If this premise were correct (i.e. that they think this) then your argument would be fine. But it is not correct. Regardless of any rhetoric they use, their basic belief is not an ethical one, but a religious one: i.e. that what is 'worth saving' is any living soul, and that the soul enters the physical body at conception and leaves it on death.
Ethically, their side and your side are in agreement, that is you both agree that a human life has moral value, but they define a human life as being a living soul, and you define it as being a conscious human entity. There is no ethical disagreement here.
The disagreement is at best metaphysical, but more likely it is theological. In other words, if you want to change their views, you have to change their view of what a human life is, and to do that would require changing their religious belief, not their ethical arguments, or even their definition of what it is to be conscious (because consciousness does not enter into it for them).
As someone who has studied plenty of philosophy, I would say this is a perfect example of why ethical philosophy is quite useless. Rational argument can persuade people that there are inconsistencies in their ethical, religious, or other beliefs, and it can persuade them that if they want a certain thing, then they should do such and such a thing to get it, or then they must logically want another thing, but it cannot persuade people that they should want this or that to begin with.
In this case, the real question at issue is whether there is a soul, etc--and while philosophy can make plenty of arguments about nonduality and so forth, religion has the power to persuade people to abandon all rationality, even the law of noncontradiction if need be. Especially Americans.
The character of Don Quixote is a classic symbol of the most noble human values--self-sacrifice, duty, heroism, perseverance against incredible odds. Rather than being seen as someone hopelessly fighting the inevitable, the literary and cultural significane of Don Quixote for Western culture has been as a symbol of inspiring greatness. After all, the most noble kind of heroism in the classic European ideal of chivalry is the kind that fights on in spite of all the odds.
A second reason why the ESA probably chose this name is that Don Quixote is considered by many to be the greatest work of literature ever produced by a Western author, certainly it is among the greatest works of European culture. Because the European institutions seek to promote European cultural heritage, and Don Quixote is a symbol of that heritage, it makes sense that the ESA would have chosen it.
Finally I suspect it was done with some humour in mind. After all, this can be seen as a somewhat quixotic mission--to crash a tiny spacecraft into a giant asteroid in an attempt to deflect its course. A heroic mission against great odds.
It seems a quite appropriate, and appropriately humble name to me.
Particularly the rape statistic is often a function of incidence of reporting rapes as for example there probably are less rapes reported in the American Bible Belt because of prevailing social standards (a wild guess). Also since most rape that occurs is date rape, there's also the question of whether it's realistic to expect that women would carry guns on dates and therefore reduce the incidence of rape. Of course it is perfectly possible that that statistic is telling but I am not sure it's so simple.
As for car theft, most people here have never even heard of 'carjacking'--car theft happens mostly when the owner is not around, so it would make no difference if the owner had a gun or not.
As for assaults, unfortunately the UK has a problem with some younger people who don't have much to do with their time literally assaulting people for fun or because they're drunk, or both. This is a big social problem that needs to be addressed at its cultural and economic roots.
Now with assaults and burglary, I will grant you that the fear of guns probably does play a role in reducing these in the US. But that does not mean that it is worth it.
Without going into detail on the issue of why there is so much assault in the UK, suffice it to say that it is part of something wider which also includes random vandalism, recent binge drinking, and other things labelled 'anti-social behaviour'--and even if you could scare people into not assaulting others outright, this problem would manifest itself in some other way. It has to be dealt with at the roots, not simply by attacking symptoms.
And regardless of that, there is a hidden cost to introducing guns. That is that the general fear level does go up. If there are guns generally available, that means I don't just have to fear that that group of drunken 17 year olds are going to punch me and steal my phone, I have to fear that they are going to shoot me dead. You could say that I could carry a gun in defence, but what's to stop them simply shooting me in the head before I could even draw a gun? And since most people in the UK find guns repulsive, most people would not carry them in self-defence anyway.
Plus there's the problem of police officers having guns. If police officers have guns, then you get police officers shooting people without a trial, which in many countries where police do have guns, amounts to victimising people in poor communities whose family cannot afford to do anything about it. 'Curbside justice' is what I believe American police call it.
I don't know if you're aware of the Menezes incident a couple of months ago in London--a huge national scandal because an innocent man was shot by police. It was a scandal because people value the rule of law, they value justice, they value the idea that you get a fair trial, and even if you are convicted, that your life is sacrosanct. Give police guns and innocent people as well have much more reason to be afraid. Just ask how British tourists outside the UK often feel in many countries when they see police walking around with guns--it does not make them feel safer in general, quite the opposite.
Which of course, if your purpose is to hunt, then you should have no problem with these restrictions. I of course do not oppose people having guns under such tightly regulated circumstances for such a specific purpose.
As for people 'needing to kill people', it is true that occasionally people get attacked and the only way they have to defend themselves is to kill (though this does not happen often to the average person!). But this kind of event is pretty rare for people in most countries (except for a few, like South Africa or the parts of the United States). To say that we should all be running around with killing devices just in case we get lethally attacked is nonsense. Particularly when those who are much more likely to find a use for their gun are those who are going to do it in a way that is not in self-defence.
You will see if you look at Home Office statistics that there were upwards of 10,000 firearms related crimes in the last year. Most of these had to do with possession, not actual use. While the amount of guns in the UK has increased, it is infintesimal compared to the US, as is the amount of gun crime.
That is why when someone is murdered with a gun in the UK, it is huge national news, while in the US, it barely makes the local papers (I have lived in both countries).
As for the moral issues behind killing someone: I would say the US is quite exceptional in thinking that it is morally OK to kill someone in defence of property. This is a concept that is unconscionable in pretty much every country in the world except for America. I will not, however, attempt to convince you that human life is worth more than any property, regardless of whether that human tries to steal property. It is up to you whether you want to make that judgement; suffice it to say that the majority of societies in the world have banned guns partly because they don't see the force in that part of the argument.
As for killing in defence of life--of course most people see this as morally justifiable. But most people also do not end up in situations where they ever must do such a thing, and the chances of someone ending up in this situation, and having bought a gun, are much lower than the chances of someone who buys a gun then using it to commit a crime.
But that is really beside the point. Because it is invalid to say that the purpose of guns is to defend your own life and property. You could say that the purpose of an IRA bomb was to fight for Irish Republicanism. But that is not what the bomb does, that is just your aim that lies behind your actions. The immediate action at hand is killing, and that is an action that most people find unacceptable.
No, it's a completely different argument.
The distinction is roughly analagous to the distinction made in the Geneva conventions between military targets, as legitimate, and civilan targets, as illegitimate. Military installations are considered legitimate targets because their primary purpose is to carry out military activity. Civilian infrastructure is not considered legitimate because while things like power plants and hospitals may indirectly help military activity, that is not their primary purpose.
Likewise, while mobile phones, rucksacks, and bandanas all have a primary purpose which has nothing to do with killing people, a gun is a tool designed for the sole purpose of killing people. While all of those objects can be used to assist in killing people, that is not their primary purpose; guns, however, are designed for only one purpose, and there is therefore a qualitative difference.
Of course, all physical objects could in some way be used to assist in killing people. But we cannot ban all physical objects. Why? Because most of them serve in some way to enrich our lives, in a way that has nothing to do with killing. Obviously if safety was our only priority, we would live in padded rooms. But the argument does not apply to things like guns, bombs, mortars, etc, because they do not have a secondary use--they only have one use, which is to kill people. Therefore unless we think that people need to be enabled to more easily kill people, there is no reason for people to have them.
Yes it's true that 'people kill people'. Guns help people to kill people, in the same way that shovels help people to dig. Of course, gloves also help people to dig, and sometimes help people to kill people--but they have lots of other uses as well. If you want to prevent people digging, you don't outlaw anything that could possibly help them dig, you simply outlaw the things that most obviously only have the single use that is to help them dig--like shovels. Clearly most people want to prevent other people killing--so the most obvious thing to do is to outlaw things that have no other purpose than to help people kill.
So no, it is not the same argument at all.
While most people who have used CDE just think of it as a rather clunky mid-late-90s desktop interface, if you know anything about its capabilities you see the story of a huge missed opportunity.
Specifically, CDE had the potential to put an entirely different desktop model forward that could have driven sales by UNIX companies. It combined the benefits of the X Window System with a distributed object model to create a user interface for the average user that was completely abstracted away from the computer--whether PC, workstation, or whatever. Instead, the user simply sees applications and files, and doesn't care about where they are running or stored. You can have 5 applications running on 5 different computers all on the same desktop, with seamless multimedia drag and drop between them--and never know they are running on different platforms, from different vendors, on different parts of your network.
That means that CDE could have made it possible for a desktop model to be pushed that was based around heterogenous computing resources and a combination of X terminals and desktop machines--a cheaper, more maintainable, more flexible model than the 'PC on every desktop' model. It allows for an interim solution between mainframes and PCs--that is, to have a flexible distribution of computing power (say, office apps running on your local workgroup machine, browser running on your X terminal, more compute-intensive apps running on a server, etc).
It's clear that the UNIX companies poured a huge amount of money into developing CDE and then completely wasted the effort, maybe because by the time it was done it was too late--Win95 had already taken over. But it seems to me the people engineering CDE had a lot more insight than the people paying for it. They seem to have seen that it was actually possible to create a superior desktop model based on UNIX and X, but this was never marketed to anyone.
If UNIX vendors in the mid-90s had realised what they had created, they could have sold full 'desktop solutions' to companies, rather than simply accepting that PCs had taken over and therefore leaving the desktop to a PC-based operating system--i.e. Windows.
But as you say, they only wanted to sell big iron--maybe a good decision for short run bottom line, but a huge mistake for long run success.
Isn't this more like a prisoner's dilemma, since it's a free-rider problem? 'Chicken' is a coordination game, where the difficulty is to make sure that both sides pick the right weakly dominant strategy (i.e. both swerving to the right).
Oh I've been studying too much neoclassical economics. Someone shoot me.
But isn't it actually faster to type words that involve multiple fingers than the same finger? If you are touch typing at a reasonable speed (at least say 80-100wpm), then hitting a key 3 times with the same finger is much slower than hitting 3 keys with 3 different fingers, because when one finger is hitting the key, the next finger can be on its way down, so you get 'hit-hit-hit' rather than 'hit-raise-hit-raise-hit'. So a word that uses multiple fingers should be much easier if you're a decent typist.
(we can maybe guess that maybe this means that AOL users have not learned how to type properly)
As for underscores, they're really quite easy to type once you get used to it because you learn where the - key is and hit it just as quickly as any other. You could argue that it would be better to name variables like 'ThisIsAVariable' (Microsoft style), but then you are hitting the same number of keys--still hitting the shift key and another key at the same time--so it doesn't save any time unless you are not accustomed to the finger positioning of the - key (which you will be if you use it often enough).
'Since when? I'm getting plain tired of this ever-expanding and ever-fuzzier list of "fallacies".'
the american heritage dictionary says that a 'fallacy' is (among other things) a 'false notion' or 'incorrectness of reasoning or belief; erroneousness'. i did not say that it was a logical fallacy.
what i was saying was not on the level of logic but on the level of social scientific methodology: you simply cannot say that because many individuals were disposed to behave in a certain way on an individual level, that therefore macro events will look as if the whole aggregate were a big individual acting in that way. for example, the case of unintended consequences, or 'crowd behaviour' (used to be called 'mass psychology'), or the behaviour of a corporation.
maybe everyone in a corporation has a similar motive to make money, but can we extrapolate that the corporation is therefore going to try to make money? not if some people in that corporation have secretly invested in the competitor. etc etc, there are loads of possible examples.
what i called a fallacy was the previous poster saying that, because we know that japanese soldiers just keep fighting (and he gave the example of survivors fighting on for decades), we can therefore say that the japanese empire *as a whole* would keep on fighting. this is a fallacy--i.e. erroneous reasoning. *it may have been a facilitating factor*, but it cannot be seen as the sole causal factor, nor can it be seen as the only causal factor, and the burden of proof is on the person doing the explaining to show what the link is between cause and effect.
I think a contributing factor was that the whole of the French defensive system (most famously the Maginot line) was designed, after the first world war, without expecting air attacks. The whole of the German 'blitzkrieg' strategy was based on starting with concerted air bombardment, and therefore flew right over the French defenses.
French tanks may have been superior, but the German strategy was based on a combined air/ground war, while France was not anticipating the air aspect.